Abandoning rational discussion on climate change

[DrEvil]

It's the rich and powerful taking advantage any way they can - business as usual. And you can be sure that for any place that is of interest to them, and that has any kind of risk of extreme weather, there's a plan or a small army of specialists ready and waiting, and on occasion - when they think they can get away with it - they might help things along with some well placed matches, but that's a long way away from massive weather manipulation operations on a global scale.

It's a matter of scale: some shenanigans here and there, sure. Start a fire here, delay the warning there, buy the people in charge so the aftermath goes in their favor, etc. The problem is the people chanting "everywhere all the time with magic tech". That's just stupid, and it distracts from the real problem: rich assholes taking advantage of a real issue. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of the theories originated with these people, the same way oil companies spent decades spreading doubt and bullshit through various fronts as a delaying tactic.

Lasers and spooky tech are more exciting than zoning laws, campaign contributions and endless bureaucracy. These fuckers thrive on the latter, because they know it's mind-numbingly boring for most people, same as finance and their bullshit language.

[Belligerent Savant]

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Brief drive-by to drop this here...

Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki
@MatthewWielicki

This is likely to make a lot of my former colleagues mad, but here it goes…

A significant portion of the climate science literature is nothing more than stamp collecting. By that, I mean papers that identify some tiny new “signal,” often at resolutions far above what we have in the geologic record, and then frame it as a profound discovery. A half-degree wiggle in a proxy, a minor regional anomaly in a model, or a statistical artifact dressed up as “unprecedented change”... all carefully packaged as if it tells us something decisive about global climate trajectories.

The problem isn’t just that these findings are trivial in scale compared to natural variability; it’s that they’re presented as if they overturn the past or foretell the future. When your entire record of reliable temperature measurements spans less than two centuries, and your proxies stretch back in ways riddled with uncertainty, claiming “new normals” from slivers of data is more performance than science.

Even worse, these small increments get immediately funneled into the climate-industrial complex: NGOs craft alarmist press releases, journalists inflate the uncertainty into headlines of doom, and policymakers cite the work as justification for sweeping regulations. Meanwhile, the actual uncertainties, caveats, and data limitations are buried in the supplementary material... if they’re mentioned at all.

In geology, we learned to respect the scale of Earth’s history. We worked with incomplete records, huge uncertainties, and often contradictory signals. The humility that comes from that perspective seems to have been stripped out of modern climate science. What’s left in too many cases is a conveyor belt of incremental papers, optimized for funding renewals and media attention, but divorced from the kind of hard-nosed skepticism that defines real science.

So yes, I know this will irritate my former colleagues. But if climate science is to regain credibility, it has to break its addiction to dressing up trivialities as existential threats.

Otherwise, we’re not doing science... we’re doing marketing.

https://x.com/MatthewWielicki/status/19 ... 4910298606