Don -

I think our disagreements are clear. Much of it is your distrust of scientists.

Btw I am a geophysicist, much more at home with physics, systems, dynamics and models than, for example, Bob Carter, geologist. You are right there are no “specialist” climate scientists, because it is too broad a field for that. Not all scientists remain narrowly specialised. Some (me, James Hansen) broaden a great deal through their career. Just like you, Don.

However the following comment reveals, I think, a fundamental misunderstanding of science:
"And models are never evidence of anything — they are exercises in playing with hypotheses and data."

Models are a formalised expression of hypotheses, so that implications of the hypothesis can be deduced, and compared with observations. Models in that sense can be qualitative or quantitative, and back-of-envelope or supercomputer. Science actually does nothing more than 'play with hypotheses'. Science compares the implications of hypotheses with observations. If the hypothesis compares well with what we observe, we may call it a theory.

You ask for "evidence, data, or observations that make such a hypothesis more than possible", but what do you mean? If you want "proof", science is not about proof, like mathematics and logic are about proof. Science is only ever about a theory that is a useful guide to how the world behaves. Newton's theory was improved on by Einstein, but Newton's theory is still very useful in its appropriate domain. It is not sensible to call Newton's theory "disproven", nor Einstein’s “proven”, those terms do not apply. Einstein also may be improved upon.

The situation regarding climate is (in my evaluation) that some of the key observations are accounted for reasonably by existing hypotheses and models. In other words those hypotheses and models are useful guides to the world as we observe it. Science can meet no qualitatively higher standard. It can only, we hope, provide quantitatively more accurate and more comprehensive correspondence with observations. But it will still be "just" hypotheses and models.

So it seems you are requiring climate science to satisfy an impossible standard.

odo,

I can discuss the science, and often do, and I can also discuss the nature of the debate about the science, and sometimes do that too. A straightforward distinction. No need for your self-righteous misinterpretations, incorrect extrapolations, and condemnations.

I won't wear your label "environmental activist" because I don't fit all the connotations you attribute with that label, but what is the point of having views about how the world might be run if one is not prepared to advocate change? You do, I think. And if my view is that we are destroying our life support system, then I will certainly argue we should change our habits and stop destroying it. Common sense and sanity, I'd call it.

Geoff you zig and zag backwards and forwards when it suits you, you're confused so others you communicate to become confused as to your direction.

If you cannot seperate the AGW science from your desire to save the world, you can't ever send a clear message or defend the science because it is obvious you are using the science to forward your personal agenda .. just like Hansen et al.

"what is the point of having views about how the world might be run if one is not prepared to advocate change"

Exactly my point, and you use Climate Science to do it, as it appears to others with such a stated intention that you would be suspect of manipulating or be tempted to manipulate science to achieve your personal goals.

In fact now that you have stated the above, you should remove yourself from all future AGW/CC posts and discussion as you have a compromised viewpoint and a conflict of interests.

Its taken a while to drag it out of you but I am horrified to discover this in a scientist.

This is exactly what skeptics are concerned abuot, that it is not about the science, as qanda states, but about politics and ideology being the goal with AGW just the tool to achieve it.

For Geoff Davies:

Your use of 'confirmation' bothers me, too. I don't think that hypotheses are 'confirmed'. Rather, observations are consistent with them or not consistent. If they are not consistent then the hypotheses need some revision. One argumentative slide which I have read elsewhere (and you use a version of it above) is that the increased warming (if that has in fact occurred) confirms the AGW hypothesis. But it doesn't, because such warming is also consistent with the older view that the planet is recovering from the Little Ice Age. Even if there be faster warming (which the observations don't support), that wouldn't confirm AGW either, because there have been periods of apparently faster warming in the past too, when AGW isn't said to have applied.

You seem to suggest that I ask for impossibly high standards. If that is so, which I don't accept, then you would have to admit that what some 'upholders' have been asking for are extraordinary measures, at least in terms of human history in the last 200 years. But in fact I only ask that you do better than stating that 'some of the key observations are accounted for reasonably by existing hypotheses and models'. That is a weak version of the IPCC's claims about certainty, and it is not clear what you mean by 'accounted for'. I have already argued, I think correctly, that the models used are built on assumptions whose validity has not been tested, are coarse-grained spatially, and did not predict the present period of stasis. If you can show that there was indeed a model that did that, one could only say that if you have a model that can predict anything, then it predicts nothing.

I think that this passage of ours here sets out reasonably well why there are agnostics and sceptics, who love the planet as much as you do, have no ties to big oil or any other interest, and try to get to the truth in all this.

Geoff Davies, you tell us that science compares the implications of hypotheses with observations. Right with you so far.

But where does it say they should be compared with the results of "averaged", "smoothed", "corrected", & in fact concocted observations? What's more all this done to some secret formula, the secret formula, like scriptures in the past, not for the eyse of mere mortals

Where does it say science should be propergated by half truth & outright lie, as by CSIRO, & the BOM recently?

Mate, it's all over, even if you lot are right, you've blown it with too many lies, & by being far too cute with it.

Start again, keep it simple, & keep it totally open. Do that & you should be rehabilitated by about, say, 2100AD.

Geoff, you should read what you said about science, then ask yourself why you fail to apply it.

Models only assist understanding, and should never be used for conclusions or predictions.

When there is no scientific basis for the assertion of human induced global warming, you consider that too high a standard is required, of science, to produce such proof.

You are, in effect, advocating that the weazel worded “very likely”, of the IPCC should be accepted.

Lower the standard so that nonsense from liars and swindlers like Gore and the UN be accepted?

What about accepting the word of sensible, objective people, that this attempted fraud should not be tolerated?

Forget the science, if it cannot supply the answers, but do not seek to lower the standards of science. Even the strictures, which presently apply in science, are ineffective to prevent fraud, as the East Anglia gang have demonstrated, in peer reviewing each other’s pseudo science, and dishonestly manipulating data.

The fact is that the answers have been supplied, but the swindlers do not like them. Human emissions have no significance in global warming.

Legislation to enforce purchase of spurious carbon credits (there is no other kind), is a license to parasites to swindle the Western world.