On Monday, June 4, 2018 at 3:12:00 PM UTC-6, Paul Schlyter wrote:

In article ,
says...

I claim the current consensus is biased and those who fawn over it are
likewise biased,

It indeed is ... biased towards the truth.

I disagree.

Do you prefer some other kind of bias?

I would prefer that AGW advocates not try to shut down research that might
affect their agenda in a contrary way. Example: attempting to stop CERN
from doing the CLOUD experiment.

even to the point of denigrating skeptics

Skeptics are of course ok. Deniers are not ok.

In your not-so-humble opinion.

with claiming that "overstatement" is not bias. It CERTAINLY is since
they're concocting a false argument. This is baloney. It's also ad
hominem rather than to the discussion.

And this is how AGW advocates tell the truth?

You seem to have missed my earlier point that water vapor is a red
herring; it may contribute more to the greenhouse effect directly than
carbon dioxide, but it's an effect, not a cause.

I think I answered it, but I'm not sure. It's not necessarily an effect.
Certainly, air can hold more water vapor if its warmer, so IF CO2 causes
an increase in temperature, there will be more greenhouse effect than
what comes directly from the CO2. For some reason, however, this effect
is less than what the climate models predict.

On what do you base this claim? Cherry-picking empiical data? Something
else?

http://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/modtran/

Play around with it. A doubling of the CO2 level from 400 ppm to 800 ppm
results in about a 1% decrease in the outgoing IR flux, or about 3 W/m^2.
Reduce the level from 400 to 200 ppm increases the outgoing IR flux by about
1%, or about 2.7 W/m^2. Going from 200 to 400 ppm results in a decrease of
2.7 W/m^2 whereas going from 400 to 800 ppm results in a decrease of about
3 W/m^2. As I understand it, IPCC climate models assume a linear effect,
whereas MODTRAN shows it to be quite nonlinear.

3 W/m^2 is equivalent to the variation in the solar constant and earth's
albedo variation, so doubling the CO2 level, which won't happen for 200
years at the present rate of increase, is almost in the noise.

The fact that most of the "climate skeptics" among scientists have
turned out to be in the pay of oil companies, though, is indicative.

And "climate scientists" work for governments, which they rely on for
their paychecks.

Which makes them much more unbiased than if they get their paycheck from
some private company with a business agenda. You do recognize that
researchers are humans too which must make their living somehow, don't
you? Give one example of making your living in a way which makes you more
unbiased than if you get your salary from the government.

I worked most of my career on gov't contracts so you bet I was biased.

If dissenting views have trouble getting published in orthodox peer-
reviewed venues, that usually says something about the quality of the
work involved;

Or it says something about the bias of the "peers."

Precisely that argument is used by flat earth activists....

That's bull****. Don't mention that crap again or this discussion is over.

So you don't like peer review. With what would you like to replace it? No
review at all?

Peer review is usually okay, but there are problems when it's controlled
by one faction.

I could has easily accuse a "conspiracy" of preventing chemical journals
from publishing papers on the chemical (as opposed to nuclear)
transmutation of lead into gold.

The true sciences are much more "settled" than climate change is. We know
A LOT about the energies of the nucleus versus electron energy levels.
There are no "big problems" hanging out there in chemistry, and there are
few in physics.

"Most" is one thing. "Nearly all" is another.

Funny, I know a few PhDs in science ranging from physicists to soil
scientist who claim AGW is bunk and politically motivated. I know none
who are AGW advocates. So my own "survey" is in stark contrast to the
claims bandied about by the advocates.

How many of those are climate researchers?

Physicists are used to simple problems where fundamental effects are
researched. In addition, physicists are used to systems they can perform
experiments on. They are not used to very complex systems like the Earth
with its atmosphere and its climate. which they can only observe, not
experiment on.

Exactly my point. If you can't do experiments or give accurate
predictions then it's not a true science.

So what is being suggested is a radical re-orientation of our society
towards less dependency on energy and less energy use. This would
downgrade heavy industry, and thus impact the military defense
capabilities of the United States of America.

Indeed, but there are other consequences. Anthropologist Carleton Coon
pointed out that civilization itself is determined by converting
available energy into social structure, so less dependence on energy
means a debasing of society.

Furthermore, the developing countries are where the increasing CO2
emissions will be coming from, so it is pointless to harm the USA
in a fanatic process of self-immolation.

Yep -- "harm the USA" -- that's the main preoccupation of climate deniers.
They think it's better to make our civilisation collapse than to
"harm the USA". But they'll shoot themselves in the foot, since a
collapse of our civilisation **also** will "harm the USA"....

If the US collapses the world will be thrown into chaos, so your argument
is baloney. You seem to be a George Soros sycophant.

Doing something about it, in the way we're generally told to, actually
is the alternative that seems to have genuinely devastating
consequences, while it's the risk of doing nothing that's small.

Exactly. I'm not saying to do nothing, but I am saying to take it slow,
improve the climate models, gather more data and move incrementally
toward reducing greenhouse gases (but not water vapor :-)

If you were an extraterrestial, observing the Earth from space, you could
argue like that. But you are a human living on Earth and whatever happens
here will affect you too. The situation here on Earth is a bit more
urgent than you realize. Waiting a century or so (which would be required
to meet your demands) is very likely waiting too long...

As I have demonstrated, you are dead wrong about that.