You don't need to. Everybody on your side of the aisle has been spouting nothing else for the last couple of years. Fortunately, the discovery of the CRU fraud has shown "beyond reasonable doubt" that the science is indeed quite unsettled.
"No. It just seems to me that Dyson is stating opinions about the state of a scientific field he by his own admission doesn't know much about.
What Dyson said was that he didn't know what the CURRENT STATE of the field was. You chose to ignore the fact that Dyson HAD done work in global climate modelling. His statment was that is in depth knowledge of the current SOTA is stale, not that he "didn't know much about it".
"I was involved in climate studies seriously about 30 years ago. That’s how I got interested. There was an outfit called the Institute for Energy Analysis at Oak Ridge. I visited Oak Ridge many times, and worked with those people, and I thought they were excellent. And the beauty of it was that it was multi-disciplinary. There were experts not just on hydrodynamics of the atmosphere, which of course is important, but also experts on vegetation, on soil, on trees, and so it was sort of half biological and half physics. And I felt that was a very good balance.
"Thirty years ago, there was a sort of a political split between the Oak Ridge community, which included biology, and people who were doing these fluid dynamics models, which don’t include biology. They got the lion’s share of money and attention. And since then, this group of pure modeling experts has become dominant."
"I got out of the field then. I didn’t like the way it was going. It left me with a bad taste."
"Part 1: The NAS report evaluating paleoclimate reconstructions indicated that there is no way to quantitatively make your first statement above."
Nice weasel-word..."quantitatively". Perhaps not, but we can certainly know it qualitativly from the historical record, both archealogical and written.
"Part 2: After this year, the only year not in the Top 10 warmest since the 1880s will be 1998. (And that includes last year, 2008, with a potent La Nina operating.) This entire decade has been warmer than the 1990s, and the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s. That's how you evaluate climate change, not with year-to-year connect-the-dots plots of interannual variability."
So what?? The question is not whether the globe is warmer than 1880, it is whether it has been warmer in recent history, and the answer is yes. See above-referenced Medieval Warm periods.
"Your last sentence: there will never be something that everyone can agree on in a predictive science."
Special relativity.
When you've done science as long as I have, you begin to recognize the symptoms of people who don't have a case, and global warming fits the bill completely. The constantly-escalating doomsday scenarios from models, one ever higher than the next, is a tactic of desperation, and reeks of propaganda.
I'm not "everybody". Never have been. Some things are pretty certain in climate science. Other things aren't. One of the things that is settled is that mankind's activities are having an effect on climate. One of the main reasons is increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. You may not believe that; please keep reading before responding to this.
What Dyson said was that he didn't know what the CURRENT STATE of the field was. You chose to ignore the fact that Dyson HAD done work in global climate modelling. His statment was that is in depth knowledge of the current SOTA is stale, not that he "didn't know much about it".
"I was involved in climate studies seriously about 30 years ago."
What kind of computers were they running climate models on 30 years ago?
Nice weasel-word..."quantitatively". Perhaps not, but we can certainly know it qualitativly from the historical record, both archealogical and written.
Not weaseling, just being accurate. Qualitatively, all that can be said about the MWP is that was warmer during that period (~900 AD to ~1300 AD) than during a few centuries before then and especially a few centuries after. You can't compare to the 20th century and say "it was warmer". All you can say is "it was warm then, and it's warm now".
So what?? The question is not whether the globe is warmer than 1880, it is whether it has been warmer in recent history, and the answer is yes. See above-referenced Medieval Warm periods.
It's warmer now than any time in the instrumental record -- mankind had a part in causing that. Mankind had a very minimal part in causing the MWP (maybe a small contribution from land-use change, and that's debatable). The issue on the table is what should be done about what's causing the warming now.
Special relativity is not what I meant by a predictive science. I meant a science that is partly in the business of making forecasts. So maybe I should have said a forecasting science.
When you've done science as long as I have, you begin to recognize the symptoms of people who don't have a case, and global warming fits the bill completely. The constantly-escalating doomsday scenarios from models, one ever higher than the next, is a tactic of desperation, and reeks of propaganda.
Or better models. ;-)
Would you mind, just for my own understanding, placing yourself on this five-point scale?
1. The world is not currently warming and will not in the future due to increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2.
2. The current warming is not caused at all by increasing atmospheric CO2 and related positive feedbacks.
3. The current warming is partly caused by increasing atmospheric CO2 and related positive feedbacks.
4. The current warming is mostly caused by increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and related positive feedbacks, but it won't be a problem for humanity during this century.
5. The current warming is mostly caused by increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and related positive feedbacks, and it could begin causing significant problems for humanity during the 21st century.
(I know you're not a 5, but I had to define the full scale.)
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve... The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
From: Newsweek: The Cooling World (April 28, 1975)
The science was settled in 1975.
Meet the new alarmists, same as the old alarmists.