And They're Off! The Democratic Candidates for 2020

[Florestan]

the Left tries to use warming as a hook to justify all its pet ideals.

Climate change has been hijacked by the Left as a way to force its ideas on everyone else.

My thoughts exactly and to your wellspotted examples I can add the following points, taken form the Platform of the US Youth Climate strike Movement:

Respect and follow all treaties with First Nation communities and protect the food sovereignty and intellectual property of First Nations, as well as ensuring appropriate, culturally competent training programs for tribal colleges and collaborations between tribal and state colleges to provide education for the green economy.

Invest in education and training for inmates regarding renewable careers, and invest grassroots transformative justice to move away from the unjust prison system and the school-to-prison-pipeline, and outlaw private prisons and the forced labor of prison inmates.

Protect and enforce land and sovereign rights of tribal nations; honor and protect treaty rights, and free prior and informed consent for Indigenous nations, in keeping with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;

Remove entrenched racial, regional, ability, and gender-based barriers to income and wealth; create a public bank to finance a transition for the benefit of all Americans.

Respect Indigenous women, Indigenous queer and trans women, women of color, and queer and trans people of color and protect them from assault, sexual violence, and trafficking

Acknowledge the term "climate refugee" and welcome all climate refugees including; war refugees, communal/gang violence refugees, and natural disaster refugees.

Work together with other wealthy nations to be prepared to welcome climate refugees and provide safety and accommodation for them in international solidarity.

(rtwt here: https://www.youthclimatestrikeus.org/platform)

None of the above has got anything to do with climate change.

[Florestan]

And I would imagine the walls between various fields of scientific inquiry are more blurred or overlapping than you allow, making practitioners of one field more than capable of analyzing the data and sources of another.

What do you make of this, then?

https://clintel.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ED-brochureversieNWA4.pdf

Scroll down for a full list of signatories.

[Madiel]

I thought you were a lawyer and your area of expertise is legislation drafting.

Must I only have one degree and only fit in one box?

I'm certainly not claiming that climate science is my area of expertise. I'm only stating that I have a Bachelor of Science.

[Madiel]

1) the scientific evidence supporting the idea that human actions have more than a marginal effect on warming climate is much weaker than proponents claim, and (corollary) human actions will only have a marginal effect on impeding warming.

So can you clarify which part of the idea, exactly, you do not support?

Do you not support that carbon dioxide and some other gases have 'greenhouse', heat-trapping properties?

Do you not support that the level of carbon dioxide is increasing?

Do you support that the level is increasing, but not support that human activity is the cause of this?

Or do you not support that increasing levels of carbon dioxide will have an impact on climates?

[Madiel]

Query: do you know how many of 1100 scientists in that link Simon posted are actually climate scientists? If you want to emphasize qualifications, shouldn't you weed out scientists in other fields.

If you had actually read what I said, instead of what you think I said, you would see that my point was not to require people to be experts but that it helps to have sufficient grounding to understand what the experts are saying.

And my point was not to talk about people who accept what the experts are saying, but people who think they know better than the experts.

[Madiel]

What do you make of this, then?

https://clintel.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ED-brochureversieNWA4.pdf

Scroll down for a full list of signatories.

I can see at least 4 things in that little pamphlet that, to the best of my knowledge, are either misleading oversimplifications or simply wrong.

To pick one of the easiest ones: saying that carbon dioxide is beneficial and not a pollutant is a bit like saying that arsenic can't possibly be a poison because it's an essential trace element. Or that an excess of oxygen or water can't kill you just like a lack of oxygen or water can.

It is quite clearly possible to have too much of a 'good' thing.

[Madiel]

As to increasing crop yields, on its own it's strictly true but a major oversimplification of the different effects that will occur.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-does-rising-co2-benefit-plants1/

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-study-rising-carbon-dioxide-levels-will-help-and-hurt-crops

https://theconversation.com/will-rising-carbon-dioxide-levels-really-boost-plant-growth-95265

[Florestan]

Must I only have one degree and only fit in one box?

Of course not. I just remembered that you said several times you were a lawyer and your daily job was to draft law proposals.

I'm certainly not claiming that climate science is my area of expertise.

Nor did I infer that.

I'm only stating that I have a Bachelor of Science.

Fwiw, I have a M. Sc. in Mechanical Engineering, meaning I'm no more an expert in climate science than you are.

[71 dB]

That doesn't mean they are genuinely knowledgeable,

If climate scientists are not genuinely knowledgeable then I guess nobody is.

[Madiel]

Fwiw, I have a M. Sc. in Mechanical Engineering, meaning I'm no more an expert in climate science than you are.

Always struggled to understand engineering myself. I once did a sort of personality assessment related to professions, and engineering-related professions were pretty much bottom of the list. Along with jobs in sales. I think the issue is that I tend to be a highly theoretical and abstract person and engineering is all about the practical application of science.

At my university science and engineering were distinct degrees but with quite a few subjects in common. Then the engineers would go away and do mysterious engineery things.

[Florestan]

Always struggled to understand engineering myself. I once did a sort of personality assessment related to professions, and engineering-related professions were pretty much bottom of the list. Along with jobs in sales. I think the issue is that I tend to be a highly theoretical and abstract person and engineering is all about the practical application of science.

At my university science and engineering were distinct degrees but with quite a few subjects in common. Then the engineers would go away and do mysterious engineery things.

I can certainly relate to that. After finishing my M. SC. I went to The Netherlands for a Ph. D. in Applied Mathematics (actually, I went there because my girlfriend of the time back then was doing her own Ph. D. in The Netherlands and taking that position was an excellent oppoortunity for us to be together ). Problem is, I did not fit in that mathematically-minded department at all. All they were thinking about, and interested in, was coming up with a set of difficult equations to which sophisticated numerical methods could be applied; they disregarded completely the physics or chemistry behind them and frankly I suspect they didn't even properly understood them. I remember a brainstorming meeting in which they literally quarreled for almost an hour --- and didn't settle the matter --- over which term(s) in the mathematical expression of the 1st Law of Thermodynamics should be wriiten to the left and which to the right of the equal sign.



I was watching the whole scene and coulldn't believe my eyes. I became increasinlgy impatient and annoyed and I could hardly refrain myself from standing up and shouting "Dammit, gentlemen, just write the effing equation as everybody else who is not a mathematician in this department has been writing it for 150 years now and let's go home because it's getting late and I don't know about you but I am hungry and need a drink!"

After a year or so, I quit, for several reasons, but one of them was that I didn't belong there intellectually. They literally lived in a mathematical bubble.

[Madiel]

Who would have more terms on the left than the right? That's just weird. 

[Florestan]

Who would have more terms on the left than the right? That's just weird. 

Weird is an understatement. It was simply insane.

I don't remember the arguments each of them made for their own version of the equation but they all had to do with whether this or that form was more suitable for the application of this or that numerical method.  For them the real world phenomena were just a pretext for their intellectual play with equations.

But apart from that, I have fond memories of my stay in Eindhoven, not least because I discovered Brilliant Classics (whose discs and boxsets were back then sold in a chain of drugstores called Kruidvat. I was probably the only customer not buying anything else beside CDs.  )

[Madiel]

Drugstores in the Netherlands... for a few milliseconds that gives me, as a person not from North America who doesn't use that word, a completely different mental picture from the one you intended. 

Bedtime here. Night.

[Florestan]

Drugstores in the Netherlands... for a few milliseconds that gives me, as a person not from North America who doesn't use that word, a completely different mental picture from the one you intended. 

The legal drugs proper are sold and consummed in so-called coffee houses. I suppose this, too, is not what you mentally picture when hearing the name. 

Bedtime here. Night.

Good night, sleep well, have sweet dreams.

[drogulus]

     The fact that not all scientists are experts on climate change has no relevance. If they support climate experts it's because they know what the consensus means, that human activity causes climate change and the questions that arise about the pace of change are internal to the science and not questions resolved by political operatives and lobbyists.

      The grotesque fallacy here is that what activists say about climate science changes what the science itself says. If a Big Brained lefty says something about rising sea levels, the science behind it is retrospectively Big lefty Brained.

      If this is a good way to delegitimate science why not apply it to science more generally? Why not decide that every consensus that is politically troublesome is tainted, like for example the case of relativity which was deemed to be "Jewish physics" by political experts in Germany.

      Bad Science and Aryan Physics | Galileo, Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard

      I give not one shit about how "not that bad" hostility to science is now. The point is the weaponization of base level hostility to inquiry and expertise.

[drogulus]

What do you make of the science behind this?

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/sea-level-rise-may-not-become-catastrophic-until-after-2100/579478/

     It's too early to form a conclusion. That's what the article says. Consider also that the mechanism discussed represents one way sea level rise could accelerate.

     

     This is without the theory the article discusses.

[Florestan]

     It's too early to form a conclusion. That's what the article says.

It says:

A Terrifying Sea-Level Prediction Now Looks Far Less Likely

and

Other researchers find this possible future somewhat fantastic. "We, as European modelers, are slightly more skeptical of the marine-cliff idea," Frank Pattyn, a glaciologist at the Free University of Brussels, told me. "It has not been observed, not at such a scale."

and

"Nobody's debating that sea-level rise is happening. It's back to how much, how fast," Helen Amanda Fricker, a glaciologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told me. Even the most optimistic scientists have recently increased their low-end estimates, she said. "It's healthy to have this debate."

I agree, it's healthy to have this debate, and many others. But "debate" is rather the opposite oif "consensus".

[drogulus]

It says:

A Terrifying Sea-Level Prediction Now Looks Far Less Likely

     Yes, that's what I said. "Far less likely" refers to a recent prediction, not the estimates of sea level rise based on well confirmed mechanisms like the chart shows, which comes from 2017.

     Europeans who are skeptical about the recent prediction are not questioning the consensus. They are firmly within it. I said before that estimates of sea level rise and other effects are internal to the science and the consensus that has built up over decades of research.

[Florestan]

     Yes, that's what I said. "Far less likely" refers to a recent prediction, not the estimates of sea level rise based on well confirmed mechanisms like the chart shows, which comes from 2017.

I think you read a different article than the one I linked to. Here are the first four paragraphs, just in case. I underlined the relevant points.

One of the scariest scenarios for near-term, disastrous sea-level rise may be off the table for now, according to a new study previewed at a recent scientific conference.

Two years ago, the glaciologists Robert DeConto and David Pollard rocked their field with a paper arguing that several massive glaciers in Antarctica were much more unstable than previously thought. Those key glaciers—which include Thwaites Glacier and Pine Island Glacier, both in the frigid continent's west—could increase global sea levels by more than three feet by 2100, the paper warned. Such a rise could destroy the homes of more than 150 million people worldwide.

They are now revisiting those results. In new work, conducted with three other prominent glaciologists, DeConto and Pollard have lowered some of their worst-case projections for the 21st century. Antarctica may only contribute about a foot of sea-level rise by 2100, they now say. This finding, reached after the team improved their own ice model, is much closer to projections made by other glaciologists.

It is a reassuring constraint placed on one of the most alarming scientific hypotheses advanced this decade. The press had described DeConto and Pollard's original work as an "ice apocalypse" spawned by a "doomsday glacier." Now their worst-case skyrocketing sea-level scenario seems extremely unlikely, at least within our own lifetimes.

     Europeans who are skeptical about the recent prediction are not questioning the consensus. They are firmly within it. I said before that estimates of sea level rise and other effects are internal to the science and the consensus that has built up over decades of research.

The article says in plain English that there is no consensus about "how much and how fast" the sea level rises, in other words that there is no consensus about catastrophical sea level rising --- which is what many of the Left think to be the case. Actually, the whole article is about a catastrophic prediction being discarded by the very scientists who made it in the first place.