I reluctantly bring up this topic. I’m tired of moderating the blog, even though it has no new posts for a record number of days.
Several other popular climate bloggers and even some climate scientists have made the point that those who don’t understand the second law of thermodynamics are somehow “damaging to the ’cause’ of skepticism”. This whole line of argument smacks of motive to me, and motive is the antithesis of scientific skepticism. Why readers of those blogs quietly put up with that, is beyond me.
Therefore, by nature, I must reject the argument.
My rejection is not due to the fact that the flat stupidity of the second law argument doesn’t have a deleterious affect on public impression of those of us labeled in international media as skeptics or deniers, but rather because anyone who understands anything about physics can spot the crack-pottery of those individuals who reject thermodynamics. Our public disagreement of the magnitude, danger and response to anthropogenic global warming is between those who understand physics and math, and nobody else. On both sides, professional scientists know the difference between the dogs and the puppies and the puppies are yapping too much.
These pretenders who have stepped in with this nonsense about back radiation being a violation of the second law, are just people who know some words and have motives. Not an equation to their credit, yet thermodynamics is overturned.
Claiming to overturn human understanding without equations, is different from the bystanders of the population which don’t have the background to understand thermodynamic reality.
If AGW is as severe as the IPCC repeately states, I am completely certain that most readers here want to know the truth. Then the discussion could shift to proper responses. Right now, nothing, and I mean really NOTHING, indicates that AGW is anything but moderate or even beneficial. Readers are welcome to disagree with that as well. For those extremist environmental types who believe everything humans do is automatic poison, beware, there is a middle ground. Change is not always bad, although in the US we know now that change we can believe in, is pretty clearly bad.
I am literally pissed off that this blog has been shut down by a person/people with a motivation. Even if they believe their nonsense, that is nothing but a lack of self-realization of their own crack-pottery. If they had a lick of courtesy, they would allow us to continue discussing actual science freely and agree to take their useless nonsense elsewhere rather than spam a science blog for months.
In case you one of those who reads about the non-existence of back-radiation and are wondering which is right, basic thermodynamics is not in question anywhere in science. Not one bit. The absoluteness of this statement does NOT contradict proper skepticism.
Some things are known.
For instance, we can all agree, by definition, in an Earthly frame of reference, down is down and up is up.
Were that not correct, the words down and up would have different meaning.
I’m tired, the second law backradiation bullshit needs to go away until a proper mathematical foundation supports it. Those who claim it is ‘damaging’ to the cause, need to consider how similar their proclamations sound to the proprietors of Real Climate and climategate. The scientific discussion is not with the public, although that is a good place to make points, the scientific discussion is with scientists, of all fields.
And on that front, true skepticism is unquestionably taking a firm foothold.