Writer misunderstands how science works

By Letter to the Editor on December 30, 2019.

Re: “Climate change ‘science’ is just politics,” Dec. 11

The letter from Lynn Thacker showed a misunderstanding of climate science, and made claims that are simply wrong.

I’ll ignore the writer’s polemics and conspiracy theories, which have no basis in fact. But his claims about the Mann et al “hockey stick” are uninformed. He seems unaware that many findings have confirmed the hockey stick by now, by many different mathematical techniques, and it is accepted as consensus science. The Canadian researchers McIntyre and McKitrick were, to put it plainly, wrong. Just this summer the PAGES 2k Consortium, consisting of several dozen researchers around the world, again analyzed the data, this time using seven different mathematical techniques. All confirmed Mann et al’s result.

This isn’t surprising. There have been sharp hockey sticks in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, in atmospheric methane, and in nitrous oxide, the three major gases that result from man’s burning of fossil fuels. These imply, via very basic physics, that a hockey stick is the expected shape of the temperature curve over the last 1,000 years.

Neither Mann nor any other scientists were caught deleting or hiding any data. The letter writer is badly misinformed on this count.

Finally, about Thacker’s claim that “‘consensus’ has little meaning in science.” This reflects a significant misunderstanding of how science works. Scientists work at the edge, researching the latest questions in their field. Everything behind them is consensus science. NASA used consensus science to go to the Moon and back. We all rely on consensus science when we try to start out cars in the morning. Every computer in front of us is built on consensus science – we don’t expect that one day we’ll wake up and our computers won’t turn on because the laws of physics were overthrown the night before.

David Appell

Keizer, Ore.

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