The Summit starts.
Has the hacking/leaking of all those mails made any difference?
Some pro-Summit people are saying that it must have been done ‘deliberately’ to try to mess up the Summit. By … sinister music … the Russians?
Yet that argument makes sense only if it assumes that the material was in fact damaging in some way, in which case the fact that it was revealed surely is a good thing anyway?
The current unknown in climate science is not each detailed part of it. Certainly, I’m (for what zero amount my opinion is worth) happy with what each of those groupuscules is coming up with as the pointillist detail of their specialty. The current unknown is how it all fits together: specifically, what is climate sensitivity?
What is the sum of all of these different interactions….which is the important thing we want to know in trying to work out how bad (or how trivial) it’s all going to be.
And that working is indeed being done by a very small group. At most some hundreds and the influential people seem to be well under one hundred in number. Even if it’s not conspiracy here, certainly it’s possible to have groupthink…as we’ve seen at CRU.
The vast show continues.
But it looks safe to bet that US Senators will be very cautious about agreeing any new treaty with tough articles like this one plonked on their desk.
It looks closely at the scientific proof problems involved in two big areas:
- proving that the earth is warming now
- and proving that this is something different from normal cycles of earlier pre-industrialised warming, especially those in the recent past (ie the past thousand years or so)
If the numbers are uncertain and ambiguous, how best to make the case to ‘prove’ nasty man-made climate change?
Play up current warming – and play down earlier warming. Which means massaging some complex figures.
But how to measure earlier warming anyway?
Welcome to the mysterious world of proxy data.
Bottom Line?
It may be that the world is warming in a new (and mainly bad) way because of man-made or man-caused emissions, even though we can not prove it conclusively. If so, it is much better to focus hard on being less wasteful and adapt as we go, rather than than lunge into incredibly expensive and even oppressive new schemes based on ‘evidence’ we would not accept when eg agreeing that a new drug might safely be marketed.
How best to incentivise all that?
An issue for economists, not climate scientists.
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