As Climate Change debate wages on, scientists turn to Hollywood for help / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com

Politicians and the public question global climate change evidence, so scientists look to Hollywood and websites for a new voice. Lights, camera, science!

Climate warming created farming

Wondrously, the ice disappeared. The earth’s climate warmed more than 10 degrees C. Chicago, for example, shifted from mile-thick glacier to sunny Corn Belt. That’s certainly climate change in my book. And since the big ice sheets have been gone, the earth’s climate has indeed been relatively stable.

Mostly, the temperatures over the last ten millennia have ranged up and down about 2–4 degrees C at the latitude of Paris or Washington. The major variations have been the moderate 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycles documented in the ice layers and seabed sediments. Our Modern Warming is apparently the sixth such warming cycle in 10,000 years. The warmest of the recent warming cycles began 9,000 years ago, and was 2.5 degrees warmer than today.

Two Centuries of Precipitation and Drought Data from Seoul, Korea

In viewing the results depicted above, it is obvious that the only major multi-year deviation from long-term normalcy is the decadal-scale decrease in precipitation and ensuing drought, which phenomena each achieved their most extreme values (low in the case of precipitation, high in the case of drought) in the vicinity of AD 1900. Hence, it would appear -- in fact, it is very clear -- that the significant post-Little Ice Age warming of the planet had essentially no effect at all on the long-term histories of either precipitation or drought at Seoul, Korea, which observation adds to the growing body of such findings from all around the world, as may be seen from perusing the materials we have archived under the headings of Weather Extremes (Drought and Precipitation) in our Subject Index.

Experts exaggerate risks

In other words, we can't predict tsunamis, but we are going to keep doing so, regardless.

For this, we need experts? Why not train a monkey instead to hit the tsunami alarm whenever there's an earthquake anywhere near an ocean. It would cost only a few bananas and the results would be the same.

The ascendancy of dubious expertise goes beyond tsunamis to doomsday science in general. Experts exaggerate risk all the time and rarely are held to account.

When to Doubt a Scientific ‘Consensus’ — The American, A Magazine of Ideas

Anyone who has studied the history of science knows that scientists are not immune to the non-rational dynamics of the herd.
...
A scientific consensus should be based on scientific evidence. But a consensus is not itself the evidence. And with really well-established scientific theories, you never hear about consensus. No one talks about the consensus that the planets orbit the sun, that the hydrogen molecule is lighter than the oxygen molecule, that salt is sodium chloride, that light travels about 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum, that bacteria sometimes cause illness, or that blood carries oxygen to our organs. The very fact that we hear so much about a consensus on catastrophic, human-induced climate change is perhaps enough by itself to justify suspicion.

To adapt that old legal aphorism, when you’ve got decisive scientific evidence on your side, you argue the evidence. When you’ve got great arguments, you make the arguments. When you don’t have decisive evidence or great arguments, you claim consensus.