Item — HN Reader

I don't want to see environmental catastrophe any more than you do so why haven't you convinced me?

Because as ever I'm offered a litany of highly questionable statements supposedly adding up to something so obvious that only an idiot could fail to recognize it but when as here, I (proxy 'I' at least) ask to look at the data, I get Dr. Phil Jones from the UK Met Office saying

"We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"

As a doctoral student impressed by Karl Popper's views on science I thought the idea was indeed to try to discover any flaws in theories and the data supposedly supporting them with the goal of making genuine progress in understanding the world.

And of course trillions of dollars are linked to the veracity of that and analogous data. This is indeed a scandal.

2 comments

Are you actually willing to be convinced?

Yes, if this Dr. Phil Jones said that, it's totally against everything science stands for.

But it says absolutely nothing about all the other sources of data that confirm the existence of global warming.

Are there really trillions of dollars at stake?

I find absolutely no reason to believe any set of arm-waved statistics. And estimates of global growth decades into the future, from industry groups that can barely predict the fluctuations of their own business from one year to the next are at least as dubious as the most questionable of direct evidence for and against anthropogenic climate change.

> Are there really trillions of dollars at stake?

One way or the other, yes. Either trillions in avoidable costs due to rising seas, high power bills due to air conditioning, rebuilding infrastructure wiped by superstorms, etc, or trillions in avoidable costs due to legislating carbon scrubbing and energy rationing.

The stakes are very high. We'll see how it shakes out.