Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Treason of the intellectuals, with Peter Boghossian" video.

  1. Re: taking "scientists" seriously who insist on global warming hysteria: It also doesn't help that in 1990, the BBC released a program (now available on YouTube) with the otherwise excellent James Burke, saying how global temperatures would have risen 10-25 degrees Fahrenheit by 2020. Despite the fact that our remediation strategy has been comically inadequate (at least, according to the "scientific consensus"), temperatures have done no such thing. Estimates of temperature rises have gone down by an order of magnitude. I'm less inclined to "trust the scientists" than I am inclined to think that if our current strategy continues, we ought to see similar drop in temperature estimates over the next 30 years as well.
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  2. Peter, it's not that global warming skeptics don't trust academics necessarily (though we don't, mostly because they insist on things they can't know); it's probably more important that we don't trust computer models. There are limits to what a computer can model, among them being systems of nonlinear differential equations. This is why we can't predict the weather, or the behavior of even a single tiny convection cell. It is mathematically impossible to do so. It's called "chaos". The problem is that we're being asked to trust a computer model consisting of not just one convection cell, but hundreds or even thousands of convection cells. People claim that climate is simpler than the weather, but when we're talking about models like this, it's really not. Climate seen one way (determining average temperature) is simple enough*. But if you look at weather one way (determining average rainfall) it's simple too. Just because we can calculate average rainfall doesn't mean we can predict it. Just because we can calculate average temperature doesn't mean we can predict that, either. * It's actually not all that simple to calculate average temperatures. There are things like the urban heat island effect, and the fact that for most of the globe our temperature baseline is either quite rough or quite short (or both.)
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