cafeamericainmag.com
There has been a lot of CW discussion on climate change. This is an article written by someone that used to strongly believe in anthropogenic global warming and then looked at all the evidence before arriving at a different conclusion. The articles goes through what they did.
I thought a top-level submission would be more interesting as climate change is such a hot button topic and it would be good to have a top-level spot to discuss it for now. I have informed the author of this submission; they said they will drop by and engage with the comments here!
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
For EM, straight-line propagation was a null hypothesis. Practical experiments rejected it, so the theory had to adapt. Science worked as intended.
For medicine, it’s a little trickier, because the category is defined by passing RCTs. The null hypothesis for any given treatment is that it doesn’t work; only those which can reject that are allowed into the category. Then anything which gets counted as effective must have some practical experiments behind it.
Flat Earthers object to the null hypothesis of, uh, Round Earth. In 2018, there was a documentary going around where one of them set up a practical experiment. Predictably for the rest of us, he failed to reject the hypothesis.
What’s the null hypothesis for climate skepticism?
The situation is different from EM or medicine because skeptics are unable to provide practical evidence of their own. After all, they’ve got all the same constraints as the IPCC—preexisting data, lack of a control group—but with less funding and less experience. Until they can move up a level and cite a practical experiment, they’re going to be stuck with the same kind of arguments as their opponents.
The flat earth documentary was fascinating because the guy actually proved the Earth was round in his experiment. Then they had to explain away their results and pretend it didn't happen.
Re: climate science, I think the situation is the same as with medicine. The default assumption on medicine is a new thing doesn't work. So you have to positively prove it. Only then can your intervention be recommended. For climate policy, it should be the same. You want to impose new taxes, de-industrialize (which industrialization has massively benefited humanity), ban synthetic fertilizer (which synthetic fertilizers are responsible for vast amounts of our food production), degrow the economy, etc? Then you have to actually prove, definitively, there is an issue, and that your policy would work.
This is not the state of affairs today. Today it's just presumed that the climate alarmists are right. If you question it they say "the science is settled" and smear you as a "denier" (which grew out of the "Holocaust denier" term). They've flipped the burden of proof in the public and policy sphere. But that's not how science is done. The person proposing the theory is the one that needs to prove it. It's not up to others to falsify it.
That being said I'm working on an experiment that could actually definitively falsify the GHE. Will see how it goes!
Out of curiosity, what's the experiment?
Essentially a repeat of Wood's 1909 experiment (http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/wood_rw.1909.html), except actually measuring the solar insolation and the backradiation with a pyranometer and pyrgeometer, respectively. Then experimentally measuring heat losses due to conduction and convection. Finally seeing if these add-up as they should on the different setups (IR-opaque glass vs IR-transparent rock salt). So we'll see definitively whether added backradiation causes warming or not.
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