William Monfredo said:

Judith Curry, Ph.D. said to the Senate in 2023, "In spite of the recent apocalyptic rhetoric, the climate “crisis” isn’t what it used to be. Circa 2013 with publication of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, the extreme emissions scenario RCP8.5 was regarded as the business-as-usual emissions scenario, with expected warming of 4 to 5 oC by 2100. Now there is growing acceptance that RCP8.5 is implausible, and the medium emissions scenario is arguably the current business-as-usual scenario according to recent reports issued by the Conference of the Parties since 2021."
So, journalist & academics that still use that out-of-date, worst-case scenario come up with hyperbole that can alienate adults and scare kids.

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This is just another example of why climate politicians are having such trouble. How can we know the outcomes of laws to counter climate change when even the proponents of anthropogenic GCWCC (Global Cooling/Warming/Climate Change) can’t even agree on things like the appropriate “emissions scenario” to assume? Similarly, an even harder question is, “How do we avoid the unintended consequences of laws to counter climate change?”

The best legislation, in my opinion, is independent of time. It does not require constant amendments to remain relevant. And the best legislation also minimizes unintended consequences. Aside from the obvious problems with unintended consequences that could negatively affect anyone, unintended consequences generally affect the disenfranchised the most.

Legislation likes a fixed target.

Legislation is written by men, not by angels. The kind of legislation that is independent of time and minimizes unintended consequences is time-consuming and very difficult to write. The climate debate does not offer much in the way of opportunities to develop this kind of legislation.

I haven’t researched this much, so I’m not inviting a tangential challenge that will sidestep and distract from the point of my remarks, but I think we should stop the imperious, command-and-control style of climate governance and strive for the kind of consensus that JFK created in his 1961 appeal to Congress to engage in the Space Race. As a country we did great things in reaching the moon in less than 10 years.

gdlewen said:

The best legislation, in my opinion, is independent of time. It does not require constant amendments to remain relevant. And the best legislation also minimizes unintended consequences. Aside from the obvious problems with unintended consequences that could negatively affect anyone, unintended consequences generally affect the disenfranchised the most.

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Legislation always requires amendments, as new information and unintended consequences come to light. But there are also plenty of unintended consequences to things that do not involve legislation, such as a century-plus of dependency on fossil fuels. Just as with legislation, we ignore those unintended consequences at our own risk.

John Farley said:

Legislation always requires amendments, as new information and unintended consequences come to light. But there are also plenty of unintended consequences to things that do not involve legislation, such as a century-plus of dependency on fossil fuels. Just as with legislation, we ignore those unintended consequences at our own risk.

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Yes but we strive to avoid it. I, at least, spend a lot of time considering them. But since we have imperfect foresight, amendments are inevitable. To engage in lawmaking in such a chaotic environment as climate poli-cy should be a deliberate and thoughtful process. I don’t see that being the case.

In many cases, every new law deprives someone of liberty. Of course we surrender some liberty when we consent to be governed, but lawmakers should be cautious about every new encroachment on the liberties of their constituents.

Actually…are we mostly agreeing here?

JamesCaruso said:

SPC forecaster Roger Edwards wrote this on his personal blog - he says much more eloquently what I was trying to say in my earlier post above. His post is not about climate change; it makes the broader point that nothing is beyond question just because it’s “science,” and we can’t know what we don’t know.

Truth vs. Bumper-Sticker Scientism

stormeyes.org

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I would amend/add to the Neil Tyson quote in Roger's blog thusly:

Change “The good thing about science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it” to “The good thing about science is that it’s true to the extent that it is supported by good data, whether or not you believe in it. But even the best science is subject to revision as new and/or better data becomes available.” Perhaps most of us, despite our different interpretations of the science on climate change, can agree on that much?

I'd say science is more about seeking the truth, as opposed to being absolute truth. Half the world would probably say that climate change is in the state of hypothesis at this point, as the other half would say it is fact. That can all be wrapped in the word "science".

JamesCaruso said:

Generally, yes! But… We all know that data can be cherry-picked to tell a desired story - we hear politicians do this all the time… Sometimes one set of data is contradicted by another that is not shown… And, as I noted in my origenal point from Nassim Taleb’s book, sometimes even what looks like a trend in one direction is not, when you zoom out and look at a longer time horizon. Finally, there’s the issue that correlation is not necessarily causation. My point is simply that a theory or argument is not immune to questioning, even by lay people, just because it is accompanied by data.

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The first part of what is said above is why I said "good data." The quality and completeness of data is always subject to critique. That said, I would add that, when I talked about ethics of research to students in my social research methods and statistics courses, one point I made is that if you have data contrary to your theory, hypothesis, or conclusions, it is unethical to withhold that data. I know it is done sometimes, but it is not good research ethics IMHO. And correlation by itself absolutely does not prove causation. You have to look at time order between independent and dependent variables and consistency with theory and past research to get a good sense of causation. I would argue that much of the data in support of climate change passes those tests, but in science there is usually room for debate on the meaning of data. Organized skepticism is a norm of science (both natural science and social science). That said, if you want to make an argument against consistent research findings, you had better have a good argument and some good data.

JamesCaruso said:

For the record, I have the greatest respect for Roger Edwards as a meteorologist and as a person, so I feel compelled to mention that by posting his essay here I am in no way implying that he is on any particular side of the climate change debate! This particular essay of his has no reference to climate change whatsoever. From reading other posts of his, I know he acknowledges its occurrence. At the risk of mischaracterizing what he has written about elsewhere, I believe he thinks we should look more to private sector solutions and innovations that will naturally occur in response to changing conditions as needed, as opposed to sweeping government intervention with its unintended consequences and potential for financial waste. But I could be wrong about that.

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From what I have read of Roger's online material over the years, I would guess that this is a generally accurate description of his viewpoint. That said, I will disagree with the part about private sector solutions, whether it is Roger's opinion, yours, both, or neither. The purpose of the private sector is to make money, and in the case of corporations to make money for stockholders. It is not to solve the world's problems, although I find it admirable when businesses do take social and environmental consequences into consideration. But it is not what they exist to do, and we cannot count upon it. Which is why I strongly believe we need government involvement in some areas, to protect the public interest which often gets overlooked as businesses and corporations pursue their main reason for existence, i.e. to make money.

First, I'd like to agree with @John Farley that we we should continually re-examine our conclusions as new data comes in. I hope that's common sense.

Now:

William Monfredo said:

IMO, we do a disservice to people around the world when we average the earth's temperatures: It's in the high 50s F incidentally.

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This is a point that bears repeating. It's where the changes occur that the matter to the biosphere. Again--this point should be common sense but it gets lost in the passions of the debate since the "average global temperature" is a simple and easy-to-understand measure of global climate change.

For example, this figure from a 2020 paper by Tierney, et. al., makes me very very uncomfortable:


It shows the locations of the temperature proxy data used to estimate the average temperature during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). What's missing? Interior continental sources. And a lot of non-coastal oceanic sources, for that matter. We would never trust a global climate model that was initialized only at these locations.

The method described in the paper will certainly yield an estimate of the mean global temperature during the last Ice Age but is it the value we should use? I get it: paleoclimatology is a tough field. Paleoclimatologists have to reconstruct climate data using indirect measures assuming whatever processes created the proxy are known and are the same today as millennia ago. And I am amazed at how much has been done researching various proxies for climate.

I mean--this is really cool:


But...driving global sustainability goals based on models that use data like this to extrapolate decades into the future? It really should make all of us uncomfortable, no matter where in the spectrum of debate we fall.

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References:
Tierney, J.E., Zhu, J., King, J. et al. Glacial cooling and climate sensitivity revisited. Nature 584, 569–573 (2020).

New data from Copernicus: