No climate shenanigans today. Just some great Tom Waits news.

Mr Waits was closing his Glitter and Doom tour in Atlanta on July 5th. This I had known for a while from a very special press conference.

So on July 5th I was lucky enough to be in the beautiful Fox Theater for the event, together with a few thousand fans very stoked to be the A in Pehdtsckjmba.

http://www.publicimagephotography.com/

I hear today from a friend that the concert was recorded in integrality on NPR, and can be accessed here . As Phil Gallo said it felt very much like “a reunion of oddballs, crackpots and believers telling their stories through a series of wheezes, harrumphs and shouts”. It is fantastic to be able to share it.

Its greatness will speak for itself, but here are some very preceptive reviews to delve into it, as well as a setlist and videos here and here.

Enjoy !

I would like to tell you today about 2 renowned Texas oil billionaires who have recently taken public stances to move away from fossil fuels, oil in particular.

The first is T Boone Pickens Jr, a legendary oil man, who recently lauched the so-called Pickens plan, an initiative to free the US from foreign oil imports. His plan is focused on wind, solar and natural gas, the latter being scarcely carbon-free - and clearly that’s not his concern. There’s nothing revolutionary in the technologies he is advocating - but his business model and PR seem to push the envelope. An interesting fact is that he has heavily contributed to George W Bush’s campaigns, so can scarcely be accused of being a communist, like the Marietta nitwits I was mentioning in the previous post.

The second is Matthew Simmons, also a leader in the oil industry. Simmons is a pundit on Peak Oil, which he believes was reached some time in 2005. You can read more about his conversion here, and look at his very informative speeches here. I heard about Simmons in an interview in GOOD Magazine, which makes clear that he is also a confessed Republican, and one not too concerned about the urgency of global warming.

Power quote :

“If we don’t create a solution to the enormous potential gap between our inherent demand for energy, and the availability of energy we will have the nastiest and last war we’ll ever fight. I mean a literal war.”

As a potential solution, Simmons is advocating an unlikely alchemy : Oil to Seawater. He is spearheading the Ocean Energy Institute, which aims at assessing the electricity generation potential of ocean currents. A little science here from yours truly : if you can make wind turbines, you can make water turbines. There are plenty of steady currents in the ocean, whose power dwarf almost anything we can think of. Cyclical currents like those due to tides have also been recognized for a long time (tidal mills were used by the Romans), albeit never developed to a significant extent. As a French kid, I heard about tidal energy generation  because of a pilot project started in our oil-poor land  in the 60’s on the La Rance river. Given that there are only 2 other plants like this in the world, the principle can hardly be said to have gone viral, but it could be because the field of ocean power generation is still in its infancy. Interesting readers can learn about tidal power here.

The oceans, due to their inertia, are an inherently more steady source of mechanical energy than the atmosphere for us humans. So the upside is that ocean power is much more predictable than wind power. The downside, has every seaman will tell you, is that the ocean eats everything : seawater is extremely corrosive, hence sea-worthy equipment is very expensive.  There is still much that we don’t know about the feasibility and scalability of ocean energy generation for our power-hungry civilization,  and I will be extremely keen on seeing what Simmon’s institute comes up with. It is especially interesting to be looking above the low-hanging fruits and trying to tap into the ~3.7 TW of gravitational potential energy that the Moon and the Sun give to our fluid envelopes, ocean and atmosphere [source].

I think both examples are remarkable in that neither man is remotely close to a Greenie Hippie, yet has understood the economic and national security implications of the current oil crisis. As entrepreneurs, they are wasting no time in finding solutions, because their is tremendous economic incentive to do so. Since they have a few horses in the race, it would be easy to claim that they are merely advertising their latests investments, but I believe the story runs deeper.

I hope it gives food for thought to everyone, irrespective of political leanings.

El Niño

PS : Since i am not an expert on peak oil, and for the sake of offering a balanced outlook, I hereby refer readers to this excellent blog on Peak Oil.

Aloha.
After a long absence, I am back blogging for a minute. Essentially, I have refrained from participating in the blogosphere, in favor of the postdoctoral research I am actually employed for, writing a book on week-ends, and visiting family in Europe. I have also looked at Climate Audit a few times, only to be shocked that the herd of barking dogs has gotten way out of hand to be worthy of my time. Until the next idiocy calls for a spanking…

I was tempted to blog a few weeks ago about an utterly gruesome article that was the front page of a newspaper I would be reluctant to wipe my bottoms with, The sunday paper. The front page touted “Is Gore wrong ?”, while the story was largely about a tiny rally of anti-AGW nuts still stuck in 50’s McCarthyist rhetorics. Essentially, trying to curb greenhouse emissions was a “socialist” move, and the wackos celebrated their inalienable right to use to incandescent light bulbs by flying a hot air balloon : swift, to say the least. The offensive part wasn’t so much the tone of the article, which actually also gives space to the pro-AGW side (albeit not to its most credible defender, IMHP) ; the offensive part indeed was the editorial spin of the front page headline, insidiously suggesting that all of the climate crisis is bogus because of an insignificant event that gathered a few misguided armchair skeptics.

I clearly have a long way to go on the road to climate communication, because just re-reading this article heated my blood a tad too high, and made me wish I had a few nitwit ballooners around, just to strangle them à la Bart Simpson. That is why I stayed silent then. Yet, the Sunday Paper mishap did not go unnoticed, and a moderate commentary of it can be found here. I would certainly have been way more incisive, but preferred to calm down in the face of some obvious facts :

1. Anger never solves anything.
2. Too few people read the Sunday Paper for this to be of importance.

So I waited until something more positive came along, which happened just a few days ago.

On July 17, the inevitable Al Gore delivered an inspiring address at D.A.R. Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C, hosted by the WE campaign. Gore challenged U.S. policymakers, entrepreneurs, and ordinary citizens to change their entire approach to energy use. He proposed that the U.S. produce all of its electricity using carbon-free energy sources by 2018.

To those afflicted by the Gore Derangement Syndrome : this will be extremely offensive material. To others, I think it gives an excellent example of a forward step out of the triple crisis we are currently in : economic, energetic, environmental.

Power quote :

“We are borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian gulf, to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change”.

Since nothing seems to happen these days without McCain’s or Obama’s commentary, no one should be surprised that they reacted to it ; what’s more surprising is that they agreed about it. McCain apparently said, “If the vice president says it’s doable, I believe it’s doable.” [Source: Associated Press]. Obama’s praise was even higher.

As I have said before, I am not here to endorse a party, but I am pleased that both presidential candidates can hear the voice of reason. It makes me hopeful that this is not a lost cause, whichever the outcome of the November election.

It remains to be seen how many key players do get on board. I surely hope not too many of them are flying hot air balloons instead of getting busy, because that would be grounds for practicing slingshot in Marietta, GA.

Aloha,

it’s has been a while… I have been traveling relentlessly (New York, Paris, London, Los Angeles, Vienna) and haven’t found much time for blogging. I have a few posts on the back burner, which need more research (what doesn’t, really ?).

Of course I don’t have any more time today, but I just remembered this student paper on El Niño, sent by a friend some time ago. (see gif file)

I have no idea where it came from and could not trace it back, but I could not resist posting it. I hope “Jeremy” won’t mind that his prose gets to the WWW - it is utterly priceless . It is given here just for laughs, to find at least some comfort amidst the current food crisis.

To those who think journalists can be overzealous in their climate alarmism, beware of the next generation !

I thought I would share some opening remarks of MIT president’s Susan Hockfield, given last week at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

With all the fossil fuel denialism out there, it’s sometimes good to remember that some world science leaders have their priorities straight : free access to knowledge, research in renewable (and scalable) energy, efficiency and sustainable development.

Her address can be found here in RealVideo format. (< 15 min)

OK, I have to admit this is a pretty eccentric idea . It occurred to me around New Year’s time. Please read this as entertainment, not science - or at best, entertaining science. I assume the esteemed reader to be familiar with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle .

These days, even small-time lawyers are using the concept - as we were reminded by the Coen brothers in the magnificently quirky “The Man who wasn’t there” :

Forgetting the Coen twist, the uncertainty principle states that there is a fundamental limit to the accuracy with which you can jointly determine the position () and the momentum () of a particle in quantum world. Which one can write :

wherein is the root mean square operator and is the familiar Planck’s constant.

This has pretty deep philosophical implications because it means that we must abandon utopias of ever knowing those quantities simultaneously with arbitrary accuracy. Most sobering is that it is a direct consequence of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics.

It occurred to me the other day while having a shower (which is a well-known fountain of ideas), that one could formalize a similar principle in climatology. Indeed, the basic curse of paleoclimatology is that the farther back in time you try to estimate temperatures, the more uncertain they become. We think we know last year’s globally average temperature pretty well (say within 0.05 C ). Last decade might have similar or even lower uncertainties because of the central limit theorem knocking down some measurement errors for you… but try going back 100 years and the measurement error and sampling bias become so large you’ll be lucky to have an accuracy of 0.5 C. And that is during a period broadly known in the field as “instrumental”, that is to say the one over which we have a reasonable number of physical measurements of temperature. As you can see on the following graph from Brohan et al, 2006, this uncertainty grows back in time rather quickly already.

Before about 1850 A.D., we no longer have enough direct measurements, so we have to rely instead on proxy indicators. All of them (corals, tree rings, ice cores, sediments, documentary evidence) have their pros and cons, but even if they can give a surprisingly coherent view of past climates, they are necessarily approximate. Hence, go back 1000 years and arguably, we don’t know this within 0.7 C, perhaps even 1 C (this is a very controversial number and I’d be surprised if no one picks up on it… With wacky ideas come rather loose numbers that one should not take too literally). Go back 10,000 years and a degree C or two might be all that you could hope for. And so on and so forth : the more time elapses and eons pass by, the more water flows under bridges, the more overprinted, worn and tired is the geologic record - and so grows the uncertainty in the estimated temperature.

Say you are trying to estimate said temperature, , over some period (or equivalently, the frequency ). The longer the period (i.e., the smaller the frequency), the more uncertain the estimate, so one could write something of the form :

.

Which is pretty naive and assumes an inverse relationship between the two variables, and is by no means a “universal” constant. More generally one could write :

where the subscript denotes a reference period (say, the last decade), and and are a positive constants, whose precise values are as yet undetermined. So one could play games with that and try to estimate them from a linear fit in log-log space… I’m not sure they would mean much, but who knows ? Perhaps one day we’ll have enough reliable data to be able to characterize this and it won’t seem so quirky. In any case, it’s now pretty far from Heisenberg, who must be shifting in his grave and the mere idea that I am using is august name for such silliness. Nevertheless, it is an uncertainty principle of sorts. And for no more fundamental reason that the degradation of geological records over time, which I guess one could view as a broad consequence of disequilibrium thermodynamics. But only loosely so, because bioturbation holds a large part of the blame, and darned if we have a consistent theory of living organisms that’s grounded in statistical mechanics. But I digresss.

In my defense, I would like to declare that this nonsense was scribbled on a piece of paper while leaning on a garbage can outside the Metropolitan Avenue subway station in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Which we all know to be home to some pretty crazy stuff.

Now here’s the truly insane part of the story. The next day was my adoptive bigger sister’s birthday. ( If you happen to live far from home, I highly recommend you adopt, or get adopted by, a bigger sister. It’s loads of fun, especially when they have the same linguistic schizophrenia as yours). I was working from the Columbia University library that day, and decided to drop by to bring her a gift (she lives around the corner). I had no sooner entered her building and stepped into the elevator that a white-haired gentleman nimbly entering the lobby asked me to hold the doors. I happily obliged, and he promptly jumped into the cage a few seconds afterwards, with a mischievous smile on his face.

- “Piso cuatro, por favor “, he said with a distinguished Spanglish accent.

- “Si señor”, I replied, and pushed button 4.

He looked at me from top to bottom and asked in a spotless New England English (I must have looked really freaky) :

- “Are you a physicist ?”

- “Almost”, I replied, “I’m a geophysicist”.

- “Ah well, I am a physicist”, he went on. “And I recently had a very interesting epiphany about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.”

Before I could pick up my jaw from the floor, Mr Heisenberg Jr had disappeared into the depths of the 4th floor, only perceptible through the rustling of his raincoat as his walked down the corridor. And so it was decided that even though my Heisenberg idea might not pass into posterity past breakfast, it should at least be worthy of a little post.

It is only a few days into this new year : a perfectly opportune moment to celebrate its inception. And to wish all my dear readers (the whole half dozen of them) a great coming year.

This one started on blissfully auspicious terms for me, so i’ll stick to one wish : see Tom Waits live sometime soon. Because, as much a this blog is about climate, let’s face it : there are more important things in life - like Tom Waits.

I am now in New York, and how fitting is it i stumbled upon this interview today ?

in which one can hear what instantly became my favorite NYC quote :

Q : Tom, how would you describe New York City ?
A : Well, it’s like being on a ship, you know. And the water is on fire…

I have a direct view on the Empire State Mast as we speak, looking down on the sea of freakers that is Union Square, and i have to say he’s damn right. As always.

Anyway, more to the point of this blog, which is named after a song from the master : i have taken up to documenting Mr Waits’ meteorological musings. I engage all the Tom Waits fans around here (i know there are a few) to pop in and point out all those that have escaped my attention.

So far i counted :

- Blue Skies [The Early Years] (1971)

- Diamonds on my windshield [The heart of Saturday night] (1974)

- Shiver me timbers [The heart of Saturday night] (1974)

(thanks to Scotopia)

- Emotional Weather Report [Nighthawks at the diner] (1975)

- Rain dogs [Rain Dogs] (1985)

- Cold Cold Ground [Frank's Wild Years] (1987)

- Strange Weather [Big Time] (1988)

- A Little Rain [ Bone Machine] (1992)

- November [The Black Rider] (1993)

- There’s only Alice [Alice] (2002)
(thanks to ICE for pointing it out)

- Make it Rain [Real Gone] (2004)

So I wish you all a great 2008. Listen to Tom Waits, keep the carbon footprint low, do good whenever you can and the world will be a better place.

Salut tout le monde,

As anyone in this field who is lucky enough to have travel funds, i am now enjoying a very exciting weeks at AGU, or for those not in the jargon, at the annual Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

If you’ve watched RealClimate and ClimateAudit in the past view days, you’ve seen that sharing notes about various sessions seems a popular hobby.

I will refrain from this here ; being notoriously hard to please, there are only a few talks each day that i would deem post-worthy anyway - though i have to say i have already heard many a good talk this year. It is a refreshing change from last year, when somehow i always made bad enough choices to fall into a deeply soporific session.

So… it is EXCITING. The San Francisco weather, usually gray and gloomy at this time of the year, has been nothing short of G-O-R-G-E-O-U-S, and everyone i meet seems in an infectiously happy mood. I start knowing my way around SF a little better each year, staying with a friend in the Mission and Bernal Heights districts, and their abundance of great little cafés and restaurants…. and… bums, which seem to be a great SF specialty.

Monday morning i was rather startled when a homeless-looking guy started talking to me in the cheap coffee place where i was getting breakfast. I never refuse conversation no matter how busy, so while i was flagging AGU sessions in the meeting book, i was distractedly answering his questions. He asked if i was “one of them dot com guys”, but when i said i was a climate scientist, his eyes started to twinkle and he started to talk about tree-rings for the next 15 minutes.

That’s why i do this job : even destitute people care about our climate more than their own (considerable) problems.

Anyway, not any encounter here is that ghetto - far from it. In fact, the sociology of this meeting is deeply fascinating. Being somewhat plugged in with the Lamont mafia , it lead me to a beer with the CalTech mafia , joined by prominent members of the the Harvard mafia and the WHOI mafia.

The field is quite small, everyone is of rather pleasant (and sometimes, downright excellent) company, and schmoozing is an integral part of science. It would be silly to deny it, so let’s enjoy it : when the beer pitchers circulate that fast around a table of climate scientists, ideas flow just as fast as the bubbles.

It is always very funny to see who is going to lunch with whom, and just as importantly , who is NOT going to lunch with so-and-so, because they are big shots who irked one another 55 years ago and no one will step down from their distant pedestals. It’s quite amusing and i imagine it is like this in every field. The one thing that may be increasingly characteristic of AGU is the amount of press people - and politically-charged talks, like that given by Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger III.

That one was sure to disappoint : there is nothing more saddening than to see a good brain develop intricate excuses for the irrational behavior of his hierarchical superiors. Marburger is obviously a very intelligent man, and his command of the many facets of the climate challenge seems as complete as can judge it. Nevertheless, he spent his address distilling some political speech to tame the science, before explicitly refusing to address some pointed political questions when they got a little too hard to handle.

Lame.

Far from the usual mafias, and at the risk of displeasing certain mainstream scientists, i went for lunch with Steve McIntyre yesterday. After a past few weeks of throwing hand grenades at each other from behind electronic sandbags (i.e. blogs), it was very pleasant to talk eye-to-eye and shoot the breeze.

I can’t help but thinking that a lot of the bitterness in our sour climate debates would be eased out with a proper lunch… But maybe i am being too French again.

All right, time to go !

Sorry if i’ve been behind comments lately : found that this morning to my surprise, that there were 8 unmoderated, week-old comments, and i apologize for the delay in posting. Blogger sucks (if you needed a reminder ;-).

hi all, sorry for lagging behind in the responses to comments.
i had a much-needed reflective Thanksgiving break. And tried to do some actual work, instead of just yacking.
And then when i opened the Pandora box again, there were plenty of comments from my good friend Anonymous, from that guy Anonymous, and also from that really obnoxious goon called Anonymous.

So i started composing a structured reply to be posted as comment, and then blogspot complained that i was using too much HTML code, so that’s it : blogspot, you officially suck. I can’t reply to comments inline, it’s a nightmare to moderate them, they look like crap compared to any WordPress blog, i can’t require guests to leave an email address so that snipers stay home, and we can’t even geek out in LaTeX.

So blogspot, you can kiss my French ass goodbye. In just a few days this blog will move to a new address, because enough is enough.

In the meanwhile here are a few answers…

Cheers !
Julien

Francois O :

i am sorry you took those words personally… if you re-read my response to your comment, you will see a “their”, not a “your” : a reflection of my limited experience in reading/talking to certain obscurantists. I never implied you were one.
I did make the mistake of imparting you some political motives. It is an error, because i don’t know them, as you point out. I was just a little annoyed that we climate scientists are always accused of political bias by virtue of being academics, (which in my experience is largely liberal). Can we stop this, everyone ?

Call me naive, but I do believe than my political opinion do not obscure and distort my scientific judgement, or at least much less than MIT’s Richard Lindzen’s when he states “AGW can’t be a real threat because that would require us to live like cavemen” (video interview for an exhibit at La Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie). Yet, oddly enough, i haven’t seen a good skeptic get on his back. But perhaps there is one - does anyone know ?

Yes, i am ready to face the consequences of a world economy based mostly on non-fossil resources . Does it mean i will suspend my scientific training to blindly accept any alarmism ? No, and i am offended when such collusion is made.

But you’re right, François, i shouldn’t be guilty of the same sin of collusion.

Oh please, have you read realclimate lately? The sneer factor over there is off the charts, and they religiously excise nearly all dissenting comments.

As for cheap shots, those same “prominent climate scientists” routinely use the term septic or denialist (with its deliberate holocaust denialist association) to describe anyone who questions their authority. Some of us doing the questioning are very well-qualified indeed. Needless to say, such an attitude from supposedly professional scientists has very much hardened opinions against them.

As i said before, i believe the denialist term is fully justified when applied to people who bury their head in the ground against an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence. That said, RC may well censor too harshly.

Incidentally, I tend to censor posts by “anonymous” , because it’s too darn easy to be a sniper. But yours were interesting comments, so i left them in.

In particular, it reminds me of watching my own sneer factor. The problem is that blogs in general are also meant to be somewhat entertaining to keep the audience on their toes, so there is a tendency to joke about “the other side” in ways unimaginable in a science paper. As another ‘anonymous’ said, “how many people read blogs that aren’t amusing?”

More accessible and less dry than science prose, but also not as professional. You can’t have everything….

non-anon said…

you should be fighting hardest against the realclimate scientists. These guys are (almost to a man/woman) pushing a negative growth, nature over humanity political agenda, and they are using AGW alarmism to do so. They truck no criticism, nor any questioning of their authority, just like the catholic church of yore.

I think the most useful fight consists in showing a “third way” where a most balanced view is advocated and practiced. I never pretended to be the epitome of objectivity, but i can only hope that after a long enough observational period, you and other readers will place me somewhere in between extremes.

Anonymous said…

Steve McIntyre is pretty tedious. He’s been picked apart numerous times and he keeps coming.

Like a zombie.

It’s pretty amazing that he has been able to take a single peer-reviewed study and parlay it into so much attention.

How McIntyre Got Famous

Skeptics Get a Journal

But that’s what you get from the internets…..

Hey now ! This is not a blog to vent cheap shots at either side.

I deeply respect Steve McIntyre’s talent for digging through datasets, his mutinous perseverance, his incredible diligence at addressing topical climate issues (one wonders when he sleeps !), and as a dude who likes writing (can you tell ?), i respect his writing style very much. Also, he really impressed me by going to collect some date out of his own free-time and funds - that is light-years beyond what the armchair skeptic would do, and shows a genuine thirst for answering the questions, which is very commendable.

A quick browse through his posts will convince you that he’s contributed much more to climatology than a GRL article (which, as Huybers showed, has its own problems).

So while it is no measure of scientific quality than to be highly held by the editorial board of the WSJ (talk about bias !!!!) and Sen Joe Barton, i suspect the situation would be very different if “mainstream climatology” (to which i now belong…) had given him the attention he deserves, instead of constantly dismissing his comments.

Of course, it would help if he chose the “normal” avenues of science, with a slightly less offensive tone, but that’s a style i personally enjoy. It’s not for the weak at heart… neither is this blog, obviously

Anonymous said…

What is going to happen if the earth cools as CO2 continues to rise? Science needs a champion, now.

Oh, brave Anonymous, i see a role for a luminary like you in our fast warming world !

I really appreciate your comments as you seem to know the issues quite well, but again, this is not a McIntyre-bashing blog. I think the best test of whether he’s right and wrong, and on which topics, will come from the harsh light of confrontation (with gloves on). But this requires paleoclimatologists to engage in a fair debate with him - one whose rules are not dictacted by ClimateAudit , RealClimate, or yours truly of course.

I really want to invite him to speak at Georgia Tech and see if he has anything of substance to say, and can convey it in a clear manner. This might pave the way for a more fruitful discussion. I’ll keep you posted…

Gianni, as i have said, data availability is absolutely fundamental to the progress of this field. I never asked for a “pass”, just a little more understanding, because i think few fields feature datasets that require so much personal time, effort and contact with the elements. I may be wrong. Anyone has examples ?

Now this :

Nobody would care about the antics of paleoclimatologist if it were not for the fact that many of them want to change society back into some sort of hunter gather community. Sorry, forget about the hunter bit, we probably would not be allowed to eat the animals anyway!

I am sorry to say, this is plain and aggressive ignorance. First, most paleoclimatologists stay quite clear of advocating policy choices. Please show me a study that would demonstrate the opposite. Second, i do believe there is a middle ground between industrialism gone wrong and pre-history. It’s called progress. It’s not a middle-ground, actually, it’s a different dimension altogether. You could try reading this for a more informed perspective.

Thirdly, as far a vegetarianism is concerned, you should probably read what an obscure physicist called Albert E. had to say about it…

El Niño

I apologise for setting such a bad example to ‘the youth’ by posting anonymously, but of course this does not in any way effect what I said, which was that the integrity of an argument can be evaluated by the way in which it is formulated and expressed. Only sound, fallacy free, arguments are likely to persuade AGW sceptics to join the ranks of the orthodox. And sceptics do have to be persuaded, they are unlikely to be coerced by name calling, abuse, or peer pressure.

True. Yet, if i am risking by public persona in the arena, i think you should show the same elementary courage.

In your response, you have impugned my courage, suggested that I am a corrupter of the young and managed to work in the ‘flat earther’ insult too. Then, as if one fallacy (ad hominem attack) was not enough, you cite ‘the expertise of ~450 authors’ of the IPCC, a blatant appeal to authority. Unfortunately you have not addressed the substance of my comment, which is a pity because I would have been interested to hear your views.

Well, yeah, i was poking a little hard because i do despise snipers. I have re-read your comment and still do not find matter there to address - except that i am arrogant. Are you asking for explanations ? Do you want to see a copy of my French passport No, seriously, if you want me to address something in particular, please rephrase it and i will do my best to address it. As it stands I have not gotten your point.

You say :
In the real world, outside academia, it is frequently necessary to act on matters of importance without having expert knowledge. And knowledge does not confer infallibility on anyone; not even climate scientists.

In my opinion, an “expert” is only as good as their ability to convey their knowledge. So let me re-try again to convey my view : while climate orthodoxy does sometimes does a poor job of recognizing holes in their own arguments, it is a VERY different thing from the pure disinformation campaign run by some skeptics.

No, we don’t know everything about the Earth’s climate. And we should certainly be more humble about it. But we know enough to say that physical and biological systems on Earth are undergoing enormous changes , that these changes are mostly caused by human activities ; at current per-capita emission rates, future anthropogenic global warming is thus a real and serious threat, and a wide spectrum of climate and economical models concur to show if we do nothing the consequences will likely be disastrous for our way of life and our children’s. That’s my appeal to ‘authority’.

One cannot always act with ‘expert’ and complete knowledge, but wouldn’t you agree that good decision-makers do refer to experts before taking action ? Because the issue is so huge, there are many experts worldwide - and the fact that they can reach a consensus is pretty powerful thing, methinks.

One can search for balance on political issues all their life - that is all fine. But this is science, and their comes point where the frenetic quest for ‘an informed opinion’ turns from healthy skepticism to blind denial. We may not agree on the location of that boundary, so i would be curious to hear where you place it.

What we, as a global community, choose to do as a response to AGW is (or should be !) a matter of debate : and that’s where economics and politics enter. But the basic tenets of the science are hard to dispute unless one wants to step pretty far out of the realm of logic. Is this a point you want to discuss ?

Perhaps i was excessive in saying that ‘most’ of the Opposition is made of obscurantists. I would be thrilled to see proof that they are made of rational, healthy skeptics who simply have not been put in presence of the overwhelming mound of evidence. But i am reminded every day of how many obscurantists there are in the media, and i don’t think i could ever fight them hard enough - there is indeed too much at stake.
Perhaps i should change strategy, though, and your comment will encourage me to think about it.

What would it take to convince YOU, dear Anonymous ?

PS : i did not get the Eli Rabbett joke . Call me silly.