Monday, August 9, 2010

Silke Beck in Das Parlament

Unter dem Titel Vertrauen geschmolzen? Zur Glaubwürdigkeit der Klimaforschung hat Silke Beck eine interessante Analyse veröffentlicht in der Beilage "Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte" der Zeitschrift Parlament.

5 comments:

  1. So much lamenting. Tears are not going to solve the problem.
    In America we would say: "It's the science, stupid!".
    I wonder when the big IPCC scientists are going to wake up and discover that there's a whole lot more to climate than 50molecules of CO2 per million.

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  2. P Gosselin, don't get me wrong, but your skeptical comment sounds somehow sexist to me. While the author Silke Beck presents arguments, your answer goes like this:

    'So much lamenting. Tears are not going to solve the problem.
    In America we would say: "It's the science, stupid!".'

    Not exactly an argument. More of male dominance behavior. Maybe sexist skeptics should be called skexists? -:)

    der frauenbeauftragte der klimazwiebel

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  3. It's the politics, stupid!

    Mrs. Beck points out several times that science must not determinate climate politics. In other words, whether or not climate change is scientifically proven, whether a danger is real or not, climate politics must continue to impliment action against it. In this perverted point of view, the political aims are more important that the real need of politics.

    "Nicht zuletzt erweist sich die in der Diskussion vorherrschende Vorstellung, dass die Klimapolitik in der Wissenschaft entschieden wird, als empirisch falsch und politisch riskant. Sie kann zum Stillstand der Klimapolitik führen."

    O my god, if climate change was proven not to be true, climate politics could come to an end!

    Of course uncertainty remains on both sides, even if scpetics are most likely to say that there is CERTAINTY about antropogenic gw NOT to be true.

    However, Mrs. Beck claims that the process having led to the (beginnig of) prove of gw by IPCC in a large number of reports would not have been necessary if there had been no sceptics; the scientific progress achieved by IPCC is belittled to necessary political contradiction of sceptics in order to pursue action which would have taken place even if no further research had been accomplished. She even seems to deplore that scientific uncertainties could not just simply remain, "evidence" having never had any importance for self-justified climate politics as they were in the beginning of the 90s:

    "Die politische Diskussion, wie unter Bedingungen wissenschaftlicher Unsicherheit gehandelt werden soll, wurde als eine wissenschaftliche Kontroverse um die Evidenz des anthropogenen Klimawandels ausgetragen."

    Politics with scientific impact, such as climate politics,that disrespect the principle of empirism (whether results such as IPCC's are in it's favor or not) will not only lack of credibility, their rationalism becomes dictatorship.

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  4. Eine schöne Diskussion des "linearen Modells", seiner Limitierung und unerwünschten Folgen präsentiert Silke Beck in Regional Environmental Change unter dem Titel: "Moving beyond the linear model of expertise? IPCC and the test of adaptation."
    Siehe: http://www.springerlink.com/content/u8w6t118221h0t2j/

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  5. Ed:

    Please start two threads for discussion. One on your paper with Frank, Esper, and Wilson. The other for McShane and Wyner.

    And if you need to hold fire on MW because you are a reviewer or commenter (I hope you are), that is fine, we can discuss without you.

    P.s. There is a tiny connection between the two papers. In that one of the early criticism of MW is that Lasso is more appropriate for finding good proxies among a set of bad than for dealing with a tiny signal within all bad proxies. however, if Lasso did not find this, does it not repudiate your idea of going with expert selected good proxies? this does not validate the "signal searching" methods of the Mannian proxyhopper either, nescessarily.

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