parallel wrote:Tom,
You seem to be assuming that Dr. Levi is either incompetent or untrustworthy.
He maybe, but I have no reason to think so and prefer to start by giving the benefit of the doubt.
When you look at a lot of published papers, supposedly peer reviewed, you see they don't even look at the data most of the time. Climate science is (in)famous for this. But many people just take their word for it. Why do you consider this a special case? Because you don't think cold fusion exists?
It is about priors.
Cold fusion does not fit into any experimentally supported framework. Not just the Coulomb barrier, but that all the other stuff you'd expect is not observed. The experimental data for it (incl Rossi) is fragmentary and incoherent. (I'm including W-L - which has its own issues and is also not consistent with Rossi befor/after isotopic ratio experimental results).
Put that with the extreme difficulty of finding any theory to get over Couomb Barrier and that is a very high improbability.
To make any CF likely you need some combination of cast-iron experimental evidence & plausible theory (if you had a plausible theory the experimental evidence could be less strong).
Rossi fraudulent is
much more likely than CF. And his actions are inconsistent with him being sensible and having what he claims.
GW is different. The "theory" is in no way improbable. We know CO2 causes GW and has v significantly increased. We know there are feedbacks. What the overall feedback factor is, and hence whether we expect 0.2, 0.5, 1, 2C warming for current CO2 levels is incredibly complex. Whether the current models are good enough to predict this is also complex, whether the historical data is good enough to support this prediction is similarly complex.
the point is that it is not one theory, it is a whole load of different theories and assumptions. Some obvious physics. Some more flakey. each of which is supported by different things. And then the models, using all this, have their own issues.
Evaluating this is really difficult. You and the blogs and cherry-picked papers you like to read are I expect neither unbiassed nor sufficiently expert to do this.
But suppose there is no merit to the models. Then we just don't know whether feedbacks are positive, or how much, so the fact of significant AGW, though in no way proven, would not be inherently unlikely - as would be the fact of CF.
