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srid  7mo ago (cafeamericainmag.com)   Edited 7mo ago   4108 thread views

The Vacuity of Climate Science

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!

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I think that's a great edit because it makes the non-sequitur in the final paragraph very clear.

What non-sequitur? Lets say we know that air in glass greenhouse is 2ºC warmer than the outside air. And we had two competing hypothesis for this phenomenon: florb effect and hothouse effect. So we constructed plastic greenhouse that does not absorb as much IR radiation and saw that the temperature in the greenhouse was also 2ºC higher thus proving that IR absorption does not play any significant role in greenhouse effect whole it would be in line with florb effect given that the only thing needed is to prevent convection with no role given to IR.

What did I not get?

I think the nonsequitor is the assumption that whatever dynamic is happening in a green house must be the same dynamic that is happening on a planetary scale atmosphere. Its possible that one effect dominates over another in different contexts, or is just not applicable.

Maybe, why we should think they would not be the same: the "hot house effect" relies on a comparison between temperatures inside vs outside, where outside, convection tends to draw away heat. But on a planetary scale, "outside the greenhouse" is mostly just the vacuum of space where convection doesn't occur.

It is not "whatever dynamic", it is the greenhouse/florb phenomenon as opposed to hothouse phenomenon using the language of the discussion. If you have IR absorbent glass that captures almost 100% of IR light, it should be the best case scenario for the florb effect. It is weird to me to handwave it away as some logical flaw without specifying why.

Also non sequitur should be a general flaw in the logic of the argument, I did not see it used in the context that some experiment/model does not correctly approximate the reality because of some specific or even unknown physical variable they did not take into account - it should be shown using the logic of the argument itself. Additionally if that was the case, then the Climate Models would be the ultimate non sequitur in this discussion given the complexity of modeling the climate.

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