Aggravating Alarmists

Clearly, somebody is in the school of let's just keep saying it's so no matter what:

Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.

There is no immense pile of evidence; there is an immense pile of dreck. The only thing I can think of that may not be compromised is the data we've got from satellites- and we haven't had satellites for very long. Most of the temperature assumptions derived from tree ring data, which is the sort of stuff one needs in order to show anything resembling a long term trend, have come into question because of unacceptable manipulation. Land based temperature gathering stations have also been shown to have a catalog of errors, stemming both from instrument placement and questionable assumptions made in processing the data.

In many cases the original raw data is gone, unavailable for others who would like to do that all important scientific work of replicating results. This means, for all practical purposes, that what we have here is an immense pile of magic tricks rather than scientific studies.

And then there's the simulations. Climate science is by no means alone in falling ill to this disease. People think we can successfully model various natural processes, but as the number of variables increases, the models become impossible- and researchers tend to finesse the project until they see a picture confirming their own impressions. The problem is, even assuming the computers can handle all the variables, people have to input and correctly weigh the variables. In the case of climate, this may be outside of human capability. In general, there will need to be an across the board retesting in many fields- even much of what people have been doing in genetics!

So, when I hear the calls of 'overwhelming evidence' I immediately think, where? Come on, when they say 'science' what exactly are they appealing to? Do they have a study in mind? Obviously, the IPCC report is no longer part of the mountain; how much of this stuff needs to be disproved before you admit there's no mountain? How long before you get a bit meeker, stop trying to enforce policy politically, and actually help us do real climate science so we can find out what reality is like? It would be nice to know what's actually going on, rather than be jacked around by political forces.

I know the answer is probably never. And I know I'm repeating myself, somehow wishing that it wouldn't be like this, that somehow somebody would read this and think, 'yeah, they built this movement on faulty reasoning the first place, so it doesn't matter how big the pile is.'