Oil prices crash

[Simon_Jester]

Whatever did happen to all of the "End Of The World As We Know It!" folks who were proclaiming we were on the cusp of a global apocalypse just a few years back? I read back through the various gloom and doom and $150/oil barrel threads, and I don't recognize a lot of those names, so I can only assume these are people who've since left the board. Did they actually go live off the grid, as some were (loudly) saying they were going to? Or did they just grow up a bit and move on to other, less dramatic, things?

1) Some of them are still here.
2) A lot of them don't post nearly as often as they did. Peak Oil-ism reached its high point about five years ago. People who were then in college are now out of college and working their asses off.
3) Others no longer post at all, in at least one case because they no longer feel that the board presents a tolerant political climate for their (admittedly eccentric) views. Some people who feel this are still around but post a lot less; reasons (2) and (3) can interlock.
4) So far as I know, most of the people who posted such material have in fact either:
4a) Changed their minds, or
4b) Postponed their conclusions.

See, a lot of the doom-gloom "Peak Oil is The End of the World" is simply predicated on the following:

A) Oil supplies are finite

This is obviously true.

B) Sooner or later, we will run out of new sources of oil that are economical at the current price point.

This is obviously true, strictly speaking, because of (A).

C) When this happens, the price will go up until supply can be profitably expanded to meet demand.

This is also a self-evident truth; it's basic supply and demand economics.

D) Because of (A), sooner or later this will no longer be possible.

Again, self-evident truth.

E) When this happens, the price will stop rising to match the price of production. Instead, prices will be set by a 'bidding war.'

This is also basic supply and demand economics. As an analogy, when five men are starving for lack of bread, and there are only four loaves for sale, the price of bread increases until one of the men literally cannot pay and goes off to eat some grass instead. As a result of which...

F) During the bidding war, the price will increase rapidly until the lowest bidders for oil are priced out of the market.

Note that this is fundamentally different from price spikes caused by speculation.

Speculators cause price spikes by going like this: "I have enough supply to meet demand, but I'm not selling it at this price. I'm sitting on this oil because I expect to make more money selling it next week." Running out of oil causes a price spike because of "I literally can't pump out enough oil to supply everyone who's offering to buy at the current price, even if I wanted to. I might as well make some more money off this while the getting's good, so I will jack up my prices to $200 a barrel and invest the money in alternative extraction methods that are profitable only at or near $200 a barrel."

There's a difference. Then we move on to:

G) A spike in the price of oil which does not go back down (i.e. not a speculation bubble) will have a severe, disruptive effect on society.

Experience tells us that this is almost certainly true to some extent, ever since the 1973 oil crisis (or, for that matter, the collapse of German oil supplies in WWII). Exactly how much disruption will occur is hard to predict.

If you're pessimistic about the ability of modern societies to cohere in the face of adversity, then you'll take "severe disruptive effect" and translate it as "society falls apart, sheer chaos, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!"
____________________________

So that's the shape of the "peak oil we're fucked" crisis. To turn it into a true doom and gloom scenario you make pessimistic assumptions about (G).

Now, oil getting temporarily cheaper does not prevent this crisis. It postpones this crisis. Basically what happens is that the 'bidding war' phase in parts (E) and (F) suddenly gets cut short by the introduction of a new method of extracting oil (say, undersea drilling, or fracking). It turns out that oil companies have a lot of backup plans in place for avoiding the problem of running out of oil abruptly, so whenever it looks like the price point is going to stay permanently 'too high' they can break out a backup plan. They say "holy shit, oil is $100 a barrel, this fracking idea we've been playing with since the '70s is suddenly going to be profitable!" and the price goes back down a little.

This has repeatedly postponed the effects discussed. It also makes them less abrupt, because we're less likely to be plunged rapidly from $100 a barrel "business as usual" conditions to $200 a barrel "bidding war" conditions in a hurry. Instead the process tends to stop temporarily whenever the price point makes a fundamentally different type of oil production economical.

If we are quite fortunate, this process will repeatedly kick in in the future, smoothing out the sharp transition from "business as usual" to "bidding war over scarce resources," allowing us to take our time and figure out how to adapt our economy to the problem of oil scarcity. If we are not fortunate, well, we still get major social disruption with or without fracking. At most, the fracking postpones the problem by another decade or two.

Since being fortunate requires (among other things) that the government adopt some fairly sensible policies toward R&D, urban planning and other areas where we will need to have the right solutions in place to cope with oil scarcity before that scarcity hits... well. That contributes to pessimism, especially in the English-speaking countries whose governments have done little in the way of competent long range planning in the past few decades.
_______________________________

Side note: the social disruptions in (G) do not occur at peak oil; peak oil is simply the moment at which new reserves are being found at a rate lower than the rate at which old reserves are consumed. However, it will still occur eventually, because if you keep not finding new reserves, sooner or later your old reserves will be insufficient to meet demand.

[Esquire]

Don't get me wrong. I am not asking for people to perform perfect modeling for all of time past and future. But I at least expected there to be as much substance for this as was for say relativity before it was experimentally proven.

There is massively more support for climate change than there was for "relativity before it was experimentally proven;" that's what experimentally proven means. We* can look back over decades of measurements and observe that average temperatures are up, unusual weather events (massive snowstorms, etc.) are up, there's way more chemicals and such in the atmosphere than there should be, the ozone layer is going fast, and none of those trends are likely to reverse themselves. It's when you** start trying to make predictions more specific than that, i.e. "Global mean temperature will rise one degree per decade," or something, that the predictions start falling apart because, as Broomstick said, weather modelling is incredibly complex. That old saw about a butterfly flapping its wings and setting off a hurricane is actually true, or nearly so; there are too many variables to predict even next week's weather accurately, let alone the next century's.

However, and I can't stress this enough, scientists know that. The sources, and even the margins of error are broadly familiar to us, and we can take them into account before saying things. That's why respectable scientists hedge so much; the example statement "if current trends continue and no drastic action is taken, we expect atmospheric CO2 levels to rise by 20% (+/- 3%) with a likely rise in temperature of half a degree" contains no less than five qualifiers to control for everything from an unusually-good year for trees boosting CO2 absorption to the U.S. government passing stringent emissions-control measures in a fit of late-onset sanity. Climate science is absolutely better founded than the "God works in mysterious ways" argument you quoted, because, again, the trends are there where we can see and check them and the limits of scientific predictions are readily defined.

*Here meaning climate scientists, not me personally.

**Here meaning people generally, not you personally.

[Sky Captain]

I think part of the problem about accurately predicting climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions is because in the past there have been drastic climate changes without any human industrial activities around, think for example the beginning and end of the last Ice Age - climate changes caused by natural factors. So we know the Earth climate system is capable of producing rapid climate change on its own without artificial CO 2 emissions.

Now the climate is also changing but is there actually a hard evidence that this change unlike similar changes in the past is caused purely by human activities instead of some yet unknown natural phenomena which just happen to coincide with increased human CO2 emissions. Or possibly natural climate change that is also mixing with climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions and stopping one will not stop the other.

[LaCroix]

The same old argument... It might not stop the other things that might be going on, but it will make things less bad, which is a good thing in my book.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I suspect the issue with people not accepting the scientific consensus lies in the word "accurate." For scientists "we can't accurately predict this" can mean "we know it is happenning and almost certainly will continue. We can even give you a timeframe and a range of possible effects, but we can't say for certain which outcome will occur and exactly when."

But skeptics and the scientifically-ignorant public hear "we can't accurately predict this" and think "they can't say for sure what will happen."

[mr friendly guy]

The chart posted in the OP looks like a 36% drop in the price.

The Bank of America Merrill Lynch said that for every 10 percent fall in the price of oil China's GDP growth would be boosted by around 0.15 percentage points, lower consumer inflation by around 0.25 percentage points and would improve the current account balance by 0.2 percent of GDP.

Oil prices, which have lost a third of their value since June, hit fresh four-year lows on Thursday after the OPEC producer club decided not to cut output despite a huge oversupply in the world market.

According to Merrill Lynch, it will boost Chinese growth by almost half a percentage point if prices stay this way. If the glut is supposed to target Russia, then I expect it to stay this way for say a year or something.

[mr friendly guy]

@Simon Jester

Just like to add one more factor you didn't touch on with oil supplies. There is also the fact that coal reserves and production aren't peaking yet. A few countries notably the PRC uses intense coal gasification to help meet their oil needs. The process is water intensive and has its own environmental challenges, and won't help much with climate change.

I think you're right when you say all these factors help give our economies time to adapt, with the aim for low carbon economy. My view on what will be the mainstay for supplying our energy needs in the future is well known and I don't need to restate it again.

[General Brock]

Whatever did happen to all of the "End Of The World As We Know It!" folks who were proclaiming we were on the cusp of a global apocalypse just a few years back? I read back through the various gloom and doom and $150/oil barrel threads, and I don't recognize a lot of those names, so I can only assume these are people who've since left the board. Did they actually go live off the grid, as some were (loudly) saying they were going to? Or did they just grow up a bit and move on to other, less dramatic, things?

...A bit of both? Fracking and tar sands are already bottom-of-the-barrel sources.

The free world as some of us knew it, has all but ended. The survival of some version of the petrodollar and U.S. petrodollar-based economies is where its at now.

Of course, at the consumer level, all that matters is driving a bit cheaper and maybe stuff gets to market a bit cheaper, as the transition to more renewable energy and a stable post-petrol economy continues to evolve.

[General Brock]

More like, warmer climates are relocating to the people!

(Yes, I know climate change is more complicated that simply "warmer", but increased hydrocarbon consumption will affect that as well.)

Not nearly quickly enough from where I'm shivering at, although quickly would probably have strings attached...

[Simon_Jester]

@Simon Jester

Just like to add one more factor you didn't touch on with oil supplies. There is also the fact that coal reserves and production aren't peaking yet. A few countries notably the PRC uses intense coal gasification to help meet their oil needs. The process is water intensive and has its own environmental challenges, and won't help much with climate change.

I think you're right when you say all these factors help give our economies time to adapt, with the aim for low carbon economy. My view on what will be the mainstay for supplying our energy needs in the future is well known and I don't need to restate it again.

Well.

The hopeful interpretation is that the emergence of bottom-of-barrel sources of oil will repeatedly act to cushion the permanent price shocks created by "bidding war" conditions when the oil supply becomes too restricted. And that this will buy us enough time, used properly, to allow us to transition to an economy that can function in a scarce-oil regime.

[Also that climate change won't proceed to a point where advanced life in the developed world becomes unsustainable (and/or is countered by desperate geoengineering).]

The not-so-hopeful interpretation is that at some point there will be a major price shock which is not effectually cushioned by a new class of oil reserves becoming available... at which point we're boned.

I try to remain neutral on which viewpoint is correct.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

A couple of years ago when fracking started being discussed WRT to natural gas and started being used in oil production, I heard a few people on NPR throw around the figure that the surplus would last about 10 years. Assuming that's true and you start counting from the beginning of 2015, we have until 2025 before gas becomes seriously expensive again. I'm no auto engineer, but we've all noticed the dramatic increase in auto efficiency in the last decade, and it doesn't seem to have plateaued yet. My 2015 Honda Fit gets 33 in the city and 41 on the highway, up from 27 / 33 on the previous 2013 model, and it's not even a hybrid. Factor in economies of scale in production and better tech for electric and hybrid cars, the fact that we could run a significant percentage of vehicles on natural gas if incentivized to build the necessary infrastructure, and the possibility that hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles might become cost-effective in that time frame, and it starts seeming far-fetched that we'll hit some horrible Peak Oil scenario that forces sudden and drastic societal changes, especially if the paper mache that central banks have been using to paper over the deeply rotted global financial system doesn't hold and we find ourselves back in recession (which drives down demand for energy).

[Purple]

I suspect the issue with people not accepting the scientific consensus lies in the word "accurate." For scientists "we can't accurately predict this" can mean "we know it is happenning and almost certainly will continue. We can even give you a timeframe and a range of possible effects, but we can't say for certain which outcome will occur and exactly when."

But skeptics and the scientifically-ignorant public hear "we can't accurately predict this" and think "they can't say for sure what will happen."

Well I can only speak for my self but I don't really care about having an accurate long term prediction. I'd be perfectly happy if someone was to come out and say "Here is the math. The math all checks out. The formula is complete and shows how everything works." That alone would be decent enough for me. Now if they were also to throw in "Here are a few short term experiments that prove it." I'd be perfectly happy to allow them to say "We just can't ever collect enough data to reliably predict long term stuff with it." You know, like every other thing in science. I don't expect physicists to tell me where my atoms are going to be two days before the heat death of the universe either. But I do expect to see E = mC2 and not E = m??C?.

[LaCroix]

I suspect the issue with people not accepting the scientific consensus lies in the word "accurate." For scientists "we can't accurately predict this" can mean "we know it is happenning and almost certainly will continue. We can even give you a timeframe and a range of possible effects, but we can't say for certain which outcome will occur and exactly when."

But skeptics and the scientifically-ignorant public hear "we can't accurately predict this" and think "they can't say for sure what will happen."

Well I can only speak for my self but I don't really care about having an accurate long term prediction. I'd be perfectly happy if someone was to come out and say "Here is the math. The math all checks out. The formula is complete and shows how everything works." That alone would be decent enough for me. Now if they were also to throw in "Here are a few short term experiments that prove it." I'd be perfectly happy to allow them to say "We just can't ever collect enough data to reliably predict long term stuff with it." You know, like every other thing in science. I don't expect physicists to tell me where my atoms are going to be two days before the heat death of the universe either. But I do expect to see E = mC2 and not E = m??C?.

As soon as you provide the scientists with a net of weather stations that completely encompasses every square foot of the whole earth and provides them with future data, a seismic sensor net that is equally dense and capable, a complete database of all objects floating around in space, regardless of their size, an accurate plan of all emissions people are going to produce (with time, place and direction the exhaust pipe is pointing), complete schedules of all movement on this planet, and a complete schedule of solar radiation per square foot for the needed time-frame, they will certainly be able to give you the formula you want.

The .txt file containing the formula will be only a couple gigabyte in size, so they might be able to hand it over to you on a USB stick...

[Raw Shark]

More like, warmer climates are relocating to the people!

(Yes, I know climate change is more complicated that simply "warmer", but increased hydrocarbon consumption will affect that as well.)

Not nearly quickly enough from where I'm shivering at, although quickly would probably have strings attached...

FIREFIGHTER: The house is on fire! You have to get out!

GUY WITH HIS HEAD IN THE FRIDGE: But I feel cold! I know without even looking that you're totally full of shit.

If you don't like cold weather, why live in Canada? Is it really worth destroying entire ecosystems to ensure that you won't need a jacket?

[Purple]

I suspect the issue with people not accepting the scientific consensus lies in the word "accurate." For scientists "we can't accurately predict this" can mean "we know it is happenning and almost certainly will continue. We can even give you a timeframe and a range of possible effects, but we can't say for certain which outcome will occur and exactly when."

But skeptics and the scientifically-ignorant public hear "we can't accurately predict this" and think "they can't say for sure what will happen."

Well I can only speak for my self but I don't really care about having an accurate long term prediction. I'd be perfectly happy if someone was to come out and say "Here is the math. The math all checks out. The formula is complete and shows how everything works." That alone would be decent enough for me. Now if they were also to throw in "Here are a few short term experiments that prove it." I'd be perfectly happy to allow them to say "We just can't ever collect enough data to reliably predict long term stuff with it." You know, like every other thing in science. I don't expect physicists to tell me where my atoms are going to be two days before the heat death of the universe either. But I do expect to see E = mC2 and not E = m??C?.

As soon as you provide the scientists with a net of weather stations that completely encompasses every square foot of the whole earth and provides them with future data, a seismic sensor net that is equally dense and capable, a complete database of all objects floating around in space, regardless of their size, an accurate plan of all emissions people are going to produce (with time, place and direction the exhaust pipe is pointing), complete schedules of all movement on this planet, and a complete schedule of solar radiation per square foot for the needed time-frame, they will certainly be able to give you the formula you want.

The .txt file containing the formula will be only a couple gigabyte in size, so they might be able to hand it over to you on a USB stick...

So in other words the theory it self is so complex that we will newer be able to properly formulate it to begin with? Call me crazy but if I tried to use such a thing in a debating thread here would I not get shouted off as an idiot wanker?

This thing just sounds less and less credible the more you talk about it. It basically sounds like those appeals to god where people just say "Oh god has a plan but it's too complex for us mortals to understand. But we know the answer. Yes we do."

[Eternal_Freedom]

That happens anyway.

On a serious note, it's not just one theory or formula, it's many different ones that combine to produce the end predictions.

Also, your "I don't care about accurate predictions but do want to see E=mc2 and not E=m??c2" rather neatly proves my point. If we could show you the exact, complete formula then we could give you a completely accurate prediction (to the same accuracy as the initial data anyway). So you actaully represent exactly the kind of people I was describing.

[Purple]

That happens anyway.

On a serious note, it's not just one theory or formula, it's many different ones that combine to produce the end predictions.

Also, your "I don't care about accurate predictions but do want to see E=mc2 and not E=m??c2" rather neatly proves my point. If we could show you the exact, complete formula then we could give you a completely accurate prediction (to the same accuracy as the initial data anyway). So you actaully represent exactly the kind of people I was describing.

It was a bloody metaphor. That should be obvious. I don't expect an actual formula that you can just plug everything into. But the way you make it sound is as if we can't even formulate a remotely plausible model that does no basically translate as: CO2 + Human Doing Stuff + Black Box = Climate Change. That's why I placed the question marks. They were a reference to the black box.

And from what I understand of science any theory that contains a Black Box is flawed.

[LaCroix]

That happens anyway.

On a serious note, it's not just one theory or formula, it's many different ones that combine to produce the end predictions.

Also, your "I don't care about accurate predictions but do want to see E=mc2 and not E=m??c2" rather neatly proves my point. If we could show you the exact, complete formula then we could give you a completely accurate prediction (to the same accuracy as the initial data anyway). So you actaully represent exactly the kind of people I was describing.

It was a bloody metaphor. That should be obvious. I don't expect an actual formula that you can just plug everything into. But the way you make it sound is as if we can't even formulate a remotely plausible model that does no basically translate as: CO2 + Human Doing Stuff + Black Box = Climate Change. That's why I placed the question marks. They were a reference to the black box.

And from what I understand of science any theory that contains a Black Box is flawed.

You seem to forget that that's exactly what scientists did - they found the correlations in CO2(and other stuff) and weather, and predicted that the mean average global temperature would rise, and that weather patterns would get more extreme.

It happened, and everybody is just harping about the fact that the temperature did rise less than they predicted. Which is because the fucking atmosphere is pretty damn big and other things are happening to it, as well... They then refined their formula (for example including the global dimmind due to fine dust), got their predictions closer to the actual values, and people are still harping about their prediction from XX years ago, and how that one was wrong and their new prediction is still not 100% right, and therefore all climate science is bogus.

To make an analogy - it is completely impossible to predict the exact spot (to a sqare mm) where a bullet shot by a random person will hit a target after a 1000 yards flight on a windy day.
Would you say it is reasonable to use this to claim that 'ballistics' contains a black box in their equations, is flawed and should not be trusted?

Hint: 'Can be tested' in a theory usually means 'in a laboratory, with control over random factors' - you just can't get this kind of reliability in a theory about something as unpredictable as the entire global atmosphere...

[Purple]

You seem to forget that that's exactly what scientists did - they found the correlations in CO2(and other stuff) and weather, and predicted that the mean average global temperature would rise, and that weather patterns would get more extreme.

I am not forgetting. I know absolutely nothing about this subject aside from what has been said on this thread so far. Up until we started this discussion the only thing I had to go by was what people say on TV. Which just takes the whole climate change thing for granted as a fact (like say gravity). So up until I started this discussion I took it for granted as well.

It happened, and everybody is just harping about the fact that the temperature did rise less than they predicted. Which is because the fucking atmosphere is pretty damn big and other things are happening to it, as well...

As I said before, don't confuse me with "everyone". I am not in any camp with this. I just genuinely don't have a clue. And what you are saying here is basically making me less and less convinced.

They then refined their formula (for example including the global dimmind due to fine dust), got their predictions closer to the actual values, and people are still harping about their prediction from XX years ago, and how that one was wrong and their new prediction is still not 100% right, and therefore all climate science is bogus.

I don't really care about predictions being off if they are still within a reasonable statistical range. I want to know if there actually is a plausibly sounding model for how these things work.

To make an analogy - it is completely impossible to predict the exact spot (to a sqare mm) where a bullet shot by a random person will hit a target after a 1000 yards flight on a windy day.

But it is plausible to reasonably explain the motion of said bullet as it travels. You can explain how it accelerates (and describe the chemical reactions responsible for it), how it is effected by rifling (if any), how it is effected by drag, gravity and wind whilst in flight ect. So even if you can't perfectly calculate the end result you do have an understanding of the system and can say "this is how a bullet behaves in flight".

Would you say it is reasonable to use this to claim that 'ballistics' contains a black box in their equations, is flawed and should not be trusted?

Don't be silly. Of course you can't produce perfectly accurate results from an uncontrolled experiment with random variables effecting the system. The only thing that matters is understanding the system well enough to produce them under controlled conditions with the randomness removed or accounted for by statistics.

Hint: 'Can be tested' in a theory usually means 'in a laboratory, with control over random factors' -

I know what it means and quite honestly that's fine for me. If they can produce a model that would under simplified laboratory result yield consistent data that's perfectly fine. That's how science works after all. It's the commonly accepted standard for scientific theories is it not? Why would anyone demand anything more?

you just can't get this kind of reliability in a theory about something as unpredictable as the entire global atmosphere...

And this is where you lose me. The way you make your argument you basically dismiss actual scientific standards of testing a theory. All you do is strawman me and say that I want to test it under completely unscientific conditions and than claim that because this theory can't be tested under said completely uncontrolled conditions it must be true. You make it sound as if I am asking for anything more than the accepted standard for any scientific theory ever and than claim that because said request (that you have imagined) can not be fulfilled (well duh) I can newer be satisfied and your theory must be true.

Well frankly I expected better from people here. You turned me into a skeptic.

[Covenant]

I think you have an unrealistic expectation for the data here, and underestimate the immense volume of data that would need to be gathered in order to create a simple and elegant solution (E-MC2) to what is essentially a number of systems working independently. So in essence you are asking for more than the accepted standard. If you want to claim skepticism despite the evidence, merely because the prediction model is shoddy, then you are behaving somewhat foolishly. We have a great degree of correlative data which strongly supports a human-assisted (even if someone were to dispute human caused) climate shift, even if the results of that eventual shift (global desert or global arctic or something in between) are beyond out ability to estimate, and even if short-term results of that are also difficult to accurately predict. This is not unexpected though, as climate and weather are heavily related, and yet weather is a massively chaotic system even if climate is not (and has been performing basically in line with predictions).

However, we have made broad estimates about things like polar ice cap reduction, high-energy weather patterns, and the effect on biomes that have turned out to be testable, verified, and accurate. Among climate-debating people one handy example is the Wine industry. Wine needs special circumstances to flourish, because the grapes (of many types!) need lots of special climate conditions to produce the incredibly complex mix of textures, flavors, and chemicals that go into the final product. You can look at where good wine CAN be grown versus where it cannot be grown as a tell-tale aspect of a mobile climate. There are other factors, like sea ice and ice-caps and glaciers, which can also be experimentally verified by anyone.

So once a climate shift is verified (human-caused or not) you have to look at the factors related to the shift in order to figure out why. Because so much of this is incredibly complex (what is the relation to sub-surface complex gas concentrations to sea pressure/temperature and the heat of the air/climate? How much does ice or water vapor act as an effective reflector vs act as a temperature regulator which retains heat? etc etc...) it is hard to make the same verifiable results for the whole thing. That is the Grand Unified Theory of Climate Shift, essentially. It is not beyond our grasp but we would need massive investment into climate science (like how CERN is required to verify aspects of physics) which have been, and continue to be, considered controversial by everyone but the scientific community. The scientific community, by the way, is functionally uniform in support for these factors, so the question should really be "yes, and..." not "but is it real?"

So even if you are unsure about to what degree human impact has pushed the climate into the state it is headed, one cannot honestly say a scientific standard has not been met, nor that experimental data has not been gathered which supports the assumptions made by climate scientists. Do not claim to be a skeptic, but it would be fair to say you are unsure about the causation between human effort and climate shift.

That is a saner fallback position, and then allows people to engage you with the repeatedly-documented correlative data, rather than trying to explain to you why you are taking an unscientific stand on scientific standards.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Purple, seriously, are you trolling or something? What in the almighty fuck are you even talking about? Are you going to become a Creationist now, too, because we don't have a closed-form mathematical expression of evolution? It's almost unbelievably moronic to dismiss a huge and well-developed field of scientific research just because the models admit a certain degree of uncertainty.

You keep appealing to an "accepted standard for scientific theories", but your posts in this thread make it sound like you wouldn't understand a scientific theory if it belted you upside the head. Come on, man, I know you are smarter than this idiocy. Hell, the logic you are using in this thread can be used to dismiss just about every modern field of science.

[Eternal_Freedom]

More to the point, you freely admit to knowing nothing on the subject besides what you heard on TV and what you read in this thread. Has it occurred to you that not all of us (or even some of us) are climate scientists who could explain this fully? Hell, I'm an astronomer, I have only a cursory understanding of the material, but I do understand the scientific method and what is meant by "theory" and "proof" and "accurate prediction." You apparently don't.

So, you've decided to become a skeptic because people who aren't climate scientists can't explain it to you sufficiently to meet an "accepted standard" that isn't actually an accepted standard? Sensible.

Additionally, scientists understand that there are some things we cannot verify experimentally because we simpyl can't run experiments large enough. For instance, we cannot experimentally prove the theories relating to cosmic expansion, because we can't create a universe and study it for billions of years. Likewise, we can't create a new Earth and observe that either. We can only simulate, using the best data available, and as accurately as the models and data and resources allow. So we observe the universe and create theories to explain observed facts, and if new evidence emerges that conradicts the theory, we adjust them or replace them.

[Purple]

More to the point, you freely admit to knowing nothing on the subject besides what you heard on TV and what you read in this thread. Has it occurred to you that not all of us (or even some of us) are climate scientists who could explain this fully?

And I newer demanded any of you explain anything to me. All I asked was some assurance that someone, anyone in the scientific community actually can explain it. And I'd be happy to walk away with that. But instead all you people keep saying is how you can't explain it so it must be true. It's not like I am demanding an unreasonable standard for the explanation either. I am just using the most basic method of critical thinking that says that a theory for which you can't provide an experiment that confirms or denies it is a rather faulty one.

That is the Grand Unified Theory of Climate Shift, essentially. It is not beyond our grasp but we would need massive investment into climate science (like how CERN is required to verify aspects of physics) which have been, and continue to be, considered controversial by everyone but the scientific community.

This is the first explanation in this thread that actually makes any sense at all. Everyone else was basically saying that it could not be done no matter what.

That is a saner fallback position, and then allows people to engage you with the repeatedly-documented correlative data, rather than trying to explain to you why you are taking an unscientific stand on scientific standards.

That's the thing. Not only has no one here actually provided any data but I did not even ask for it. I would be perfectly content do accept that someone in the scientific community could actually provide me with said data as a positive reply.


Instead all I get is attacked for daring to ask a honest question and use basic critical thinking. I basically did not expect such a response from this forum of all places.

[Purple]

Missed the bloody edit window. I hate that blasted thing.

Additionally, scientists understand that there are some things we cannot verify experimentally because we simpyl can't run experiments large enough. For instance, we cannot experimentally prove the theories relating to cosmic expansion, because we can't create a universe and study it for billions of years. Likewise, we can't create a new Earth and observe that either. We can only simulate, using the best data available, and as accurately as the models and data and resources allow. So we observe the universe and create theories to explain observed facts, and if new evidence emerges that conradicts the theory, we adjust them or replace them.

And that's fine. That's how it works. All I asked was for some confirmation that we can apply the same principals to this question and do so successfully. I am not demanding some magical perfect answer for everything. Just a confirmation that there is actual science happening behind this rather than what amounts to "we don't know how or why it's happening but it is." Which is the impression I got from some people here.

[Eternal_Freedom]

We can. And, to the best of our knowledge, we have done so.

Incidentally, where are you getting this "we can't prove it so it must be true" stuff from? All we've said is that we cannot predict the outcome with 100% certainty because the problem is just too damn big.