Any land owner will choose having a pile of dirt worth hundreds of millions of dollars over letting it become "near worthless" (only a few millions of dollars) by virtue of it being too dirty to dig up and burn. If I could spend 10% of that appraised value for a team of marketers, hucksters, and economists-as-environmentalists, then the math is very very simple. I'm saying it's more on the consumer end where that calculus fails, as no one put a gun to our heads to buy SUVs and giant ass trucks with low utility. No king decreed, "waste is good" and that wasting more is a status symbol. We decided comfort and convenience is a better way to live than taking a few seconds to give a ****.
fwiw you may appreciate reading Briggs's account of his own career. This is possibly relevant for two topics: the first is that Briggs would disagree here with the claim that climate models are reliable/good/accurate. The second is that Briggs provides a nice example where (I infer) his ongoing and persistent tendency to engage in free speech (including non-climate-discipline-related topics) has prevented him from working in the field for which he trained. That makes his biography relevant for our discussion in the CHE/academic freedom thread. How I Became A Renegade Scientist https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/42175/
Actually much of our infrastructure both physical and political has been geared to reduce the choices to not use fossil fuels. The most famous example is the LA Street Car system which was one of the best in the World in the first half of the 20th Century. GM bought the street car line and dismantled it while also using political leverage to build freeways. That meant that Angelenos had few options but to drive if they wanted to get around. Similar thigns happened in Minneapolis and many other cities. It's easy to look at how we live and say this is a product of people choosing convenience. That's only because most of us have grown up this way and are used to it. We don't realize that there were many deliberate choices that were made so that most of US living is in the single family detached house in a urban and suburban areas where you need to drive more.
I'll take a look. Briggs is certainly entitled to his opinion but many scientist disagree and as the link I posted shows that Climate Models actually have been accurate within the predicted ranges. Also shouldn't Briggs as a professer not be an activist on other issues? OK I read the piece and it doesn't really put much factual evidence. Countering climate models it reads as more a memoir of personal grievance than anything scientific.
Yeah, so what? People will still drive cars until they can't, and it's communism if you don't have the right to buy the most expensive or largest vehicle to one-up your neighbor and everyone else driving the highway. Is it a conspiracy that we are primed to consume, to throw out out-of-season clothes or upgrade resource intensive difficult-to-recycle/repair smartphones every other year? Restaurants and grocers overstock with "A-Grade" food to give the appearance of bounty, then trash up to a third of it while it's still fresh. The scale of this excess and wastes numerically diminishes anyone's decision to become vegetarian or vegan. Is that nefarious "mental programming" or a society so disinterested about their actions because doing so would put them a peg down unless they broadcast on social media of their "deliberate downgrades"?
Yes that is what current culture is. Doesn't mean we can't look to ways to change. Technologically we've seen energy efficiency greatly improve. Buying an electric car is now a status symbol. IN my own field in the last 30 years the trend has been to build "Pedestrian Orientated" neighborhoods. (you can blame people like myself for the faux town centers going up in suburbs). Change is never easy but as much as there were deliberate choices to get us here there can be deliberate choices to develop in a different direction. Also this isn't some woke socialism. There is a lot of money involved in new technology and new development.
I never claimed otherwise. Back to the original point, people who are willing to take the easy way out will definitely latch onto the status quo which is enough for vested interests to continue to sandbag a "debate" (driven by growing scientific consensus) that picked up steam in the 90s of the last millennium. You can eat all the bugs you want, but if 1/3 to 1/2 are fine eating their red pill steak, then "it is what it is" will be a concession you'll have to repeat often. It's pretty much a race for the youth of our country to take back what they'd presumably inherit in a decade or two.
At the U.N.'s Climate Change Conference, Nuclear Power Is Finally Getting Some Respect The bigger problem now is that outmoded regulations stand in the way of deployment. https://reason.com/2022/11/17/at-th...uclear-power-is-finally-getting-some-respect/
The gold standard in science is if your theory can make predictions about things that otherwise would not be expected. For example, when Einstein came up with the Theory of General Relativity, people thought it was ridiculous. He understood that people would think that, as he was essentially saying gravity isn't a force and objects don't fall towards the earth but the ground is accelerating up to the object that is in "free fall". So he made a prediction, that stars would bend light - light that has no mass and therefore can not be affected by a gravitational force. And that turned out to be exactly right and was the smoking gun. In climate science, the models didn't just predict warming, they predicted a very specific type of warming would occur, that it would primarily be nighttime temperatures, and that it would occur in particular parts of the atmosphere. And that has turned out to be highly accurate and why objective scientists view climate change as essentially settled science. But for guys like Briggs here, when you work for a conservative lobbying group, you have a lot of incentive to be a climate skeptic. I would not classify him as a scientist as being objective is the core of any kind of science. I will say this - the media does a terrible job of reporting on science - they sensationalize it and often get it entirely wrong. But in those articles you posted, the headline often isn't what the article is saying. Some editor makes the headline more clickbaity to get views, but ends up creating a misleading implication. And to @rocketsjudoka point - a lot of the comparisons are made versus time periods that are not consistent. It's entirely possible that the SW was warming faster during one period whereas it was the NE in another. Or if you are comparing their warming to how that region warmed in the past.
Briggs actually has two degrees in climate science and a third if you count the dissertation in statistics. I would be cautious in automatically assuming that because he works for/with a "conservative lobbying group" that his conclusions are automatically unsound. Treat his arguments on the merits and leave the ad hominems to another day
That's not an ad hominem but an objective acknowledgement that you can't be a scientist if you are paid to have a particular outcome, no matter how many degrees you have. And I did address those articles so not sure what the issue is here.
It most certainly is an ad hominem if you're suggesting that "because he works for x he is unreliable/untruthful/dishonest/biased." That's like the dictionary definition of ad hominem
If a "scientist" that works for a solar panel company is writing articles critical of nuclear power, they are not credible. That's what I am saying. Briggs in no longer credible as he has a very clear political agenda and is compromised.
Objectivity is the heart and soul of science. I've had the pleasure of having to listen to a lot of pharma scientists talk about there drugs and show how amazing it is and why it's safe to later on see how incredibly delusional they were because of the pressure to take that position from their employer. Part of the attack you've made in the past about climate scientists is that they are biased because they need climate science to be true to justify their research - which would be a far more spurious ad hominem attack by your own definition. But c'mon - this guy works for a political lobbying group that is anti-climate science. How can you consider him objective at all?
On climate science he is quite good. I have met him and heard him speak. I know people who went to graduate school with him and know people in that department. I do not agree nor do I sympathize with his interests and writing on religion and sexual politics. I believe it is for those latter topics--and his willingness if not eagerness to discuss and argue his positions--that he has never been able to hold or earn a tenure-stream position in academia. Honestly if you read his bio blurb for his dissertation you would think he's had a sort of academic death wish all along. I believe he is constitutionally a curmudgeon at heart. So to me it is not surprising that after 30 years he scrapes together his living with fees/funds that come from groups that are sympathetic to his work in climate science and on climate modeling. I think his intellectual positions came first; the "conservative lobbying group" money came after the fact. To me that funding is no indictment of the positions he has held all along--positions that are shared by people who remain in the department he trained in. People make similar criticisms about people like Judy Curry and Roger Pielke Jr., and I consider them to be equally reliable on many topics related to the subjects they were trained in. Are they 100% reliable? No, but then again nobody is. That's why context matters and the specific arguments anyone wants to make need to be evaluated as arguments on the merits. That's what academic scholarship is supposed to be about.
When did he start working for the lobbying group? He is one of the authors of this paper: "Why models run hot: result from an irreducibly simple climate model" in 2015. There was no conflict-of-interest declaration. We now know his simple model is much less accurate than the models he attacked as "hot". https://skepticalscience.com/monckton-2015-overturned-by-richardson-2015.html https://www.theguardian.com/environ...laying-impending-global-warming-is-overturned A new paper just published in Science Bulletin by Mark Richardson, Zeke Hausfather, Dana Nuccitelli, Ken Rice, and John Abraham shows that mainstream climate models simulate global temperature observations much better than the “irreducibly simple climate model” of Christopher Monckton, Willie Soon, David Legates, and William Briggs.
Well the thing is, I don't know him. And just as he is skeptical of the media and climate science, I have the right to be skeptical of him given where he gets his money and the fact that his model has been far less accurate than the ones he is criticizing. Part of academic scholarship is demonstrating objectivity and some of the stuff he does to me falls short. I wasn't always convinced that climate change was inevitable but my position changed as the science supporting it became far stronger. Thus far I have yet to see a single argument that makes a compelling point that climate change is not man made and is not inevitable.
