The models right now come across incomplete at best, so spending trillions on that risks destroying a lot of health, wealth, happiness that those resources could be deployed to instead. If there's global warming, what's the extent of it? How much is caused by humans? What are the pros and cons of climate change? And so on. These questions aren't answered, and there's recommendations for trillions of dollars of resources
My first thought (speaking as a scientist myself) was that ofcourse these models are incomplete. Climate change is difficult. Hell, predicting the weather with any degree of accuracy 7 days out is difficult. To put together a cohesive document spanning hundreds (thousands?) of scientists and have them all agree with its contents seems like an almost impossible task for me to envision. I have trouble agreeing with my own co-workers sometimes and we work on the same funded project!
The argument about spending the money elsewhere is complete bull. Have you ever applied for government grants... lets say from the NSF? The money is always globally appropriated and the grants are always applicable to many fields. You don't get funded based on opinion. You get funded over a 30-40 page proposal that you clearly state your objectives and what you will use the money for. Then you are put through a thorough vetting process where the granters look at ALL the proposals being made (undoubtedly there are hundreds) and choose the one that meets their criteria the best. They also look at the track record of each of the groups based on prior research and the like. On some governmental projects, they'll even tell you certain objectives that you propose which they will not fund.
People make the same point about stem cell research and it drives me crazy.
There is always benefits to funding basic scientific research. Just look at the output from Fermilab and CERN over the last 20 years--MRIs and the Internet most notably.
But getting back to the climate change models. These are enormous problems to tackle. They have supercomputers chugging on data 24-7. Just envision trying to track cloud formation to see if there is a pattern in storms-- you've got to find some way to measure all that and then you have to compute it to form a predictive model. I'm almost certain there will be missing or omitted data. Science is not clean.
My first thought (speaking as a scientist myself) was that ofcourse these models are incomplete. Climate change is difficult. Hell, predicting the weather with any degree of accuracy 7 days out is difficult. To put together a cohesive document spanning hundreds (thousands?) of scientists and have them all agree with its contents seems like an almost impossible task for me to envision. I have trouble agreeing with my own co-workers sometimes and we work on the same funded project!
The argument about spending the money elsewhere is complete bull. Have you ever applied for government grants... lets say from the NSF? The money is always globally appropriated and the grants are always applicable to many fields. You don't get funded based on opinion. You get funded over a 30-40 page proposal that you clearly state your objectives and what you will use the money for. Then you are put through a thorough vetting process where the granters look at ALL the proposals being made (undoubtedly there are hundreds) and choose the one that meets their criteria the best. They also look at the track record of each of the groups based on prior research and the like. On some governmental projects, they'll even tell you certain objectives that you propose which they will not fund.
People make the same point about stem cell research and it drives me crazy.
There is always benefits to funding basic scientific research. Just look at the output from Fermilab and CERN over the last 20 years--MRIs and the Internet most notably.
But getting back to the climate change models. These are enormous problems to tackle. They have supercomputers chugging on data 24-7. Just envision trying to track cloud formation to see if there is a pattern in storms-- you've got to find some way to measure all that and then you have to compute it to form a predictive model. I'm almost certain there will be missing or omitted data. Science is not clean.