Please allow me to take one more bite at this apple.
I thought of an even simpler way to explain the
situation. I assume everybody on this list understands,
but you may be called upon to explain it to third
parties, so a streamlined argument has some value.
Suppose you are the manager of a baseball team (or a
fantasy baseball team). One of your baseball players
has an on-base-percentage (OBP) of .400. Seemingly
there are two problems with that:
a) In some naïve sense, .400 is not a very encouraging
number. It means that more often than not, when the
guy goes to the plate, he will do the wrong thing.
He will make an out. In reality, though, .400 is an
exceptionally good OBP. In any case, let's set this
point aside and focus on the following:
b)) Horribile_dictu, .400 is only a statistical average.
You do not know what will actually happen when the
player goes to the plate. In other words, the future
outcome is not "settled".
The thing that cracks me up when people say that "climate
science is not settled" is the implicit (or sometimes explicit)
follow-on statements:
"Climate science is not settled,
and therefore all analysis must cease,
and therefore we must take no action."
By way of analogy, suppose somebody said that OBP is only
a statistical average, there therefore all analysis must
cease. That's just ridiculous. In reality, numbers like
that are the /starting point/ for tremendous amounts of
analysis. There's a famous book on the subject: _Moneyball_
... and a movie of the same name.
Further suppose that somebody said that since the future
outcome is not entirely "settled" we must take no action;
we cannot put the player into the lineup at all. That's
even more ridiculous. As a manager (and as a player), you
have to play the odds.
As a third layer of ridiculousness, why is it that some
people think that physical-education majors are smart
enough to play the odds, but physics majors are not????
I mean, seriously, the first semester of high-school physics
is more-or-less completely deterministic ... but more than
half of all of physics since 1898 has been statistical. By
that I mean to include thermodynamics and also quantum
mechanics (which grew directly out of thermodynamics).
In science, engineering, business, and everyday life,
people continually make decisions based on less-than-perfect
data. You wouldn't be able to get dressed in the morning
if you didn't know how to do this. It is beyond ludicrous
to suggest that climate science must play by different rules,
i.e. that all analysis must cease because there is noise in
the data.
Deception is an important part of warfare. We should expect
one deception after another as the carbon wars unfold. For
more about carbon wars, see next message.