So you've changed your objection from "the models don't work at all".

Good. Models aren't going to be perfect ever, but they're very useful for investigating systems like the climate.

Your objection has become: "The message is one of doom"

This is a common pitfall in thinking. It's called the argument from final consequences. It turns out that the quality of science is not determined by what the final consequences are, but by the rigor and reproducibility of the work.

I think you've got something of a false dichotomy fallacy going on there.

Science communication is increasingly considered an aspect of science. It's not a required aspect of science, but it is an allowable and increasingly encouraged aspect of science.

So when you try to convince people to understand science, that is science.

When the increased necessity for communicating that science is because people are communication anti-science for political reasons, that can affect how you communicate science, but it doesn't affect that what you are doing is science.

Mann mentions the implication that we need to reduce emissions only to describe the misinformation out there. :

What Mann is doing is communicating science. The reason that you're mistaking it for politics is because there are voices trying to miscommunicate science that need to be understood by the public to understand the science.

I think that he has a clear scientific goal, he wants people to understand climate science.
A consequence of that understanding is an understanding of the need to reduce greenhouse emissions, but lots of science has policy consequences. Epidemiology shows that we should vaccinate. Physics shows that we should put the front doors of buildings on the ground floor. It's only political if you enter the discussion of how to do it.

I see someone is upset with science.
Can you show me on the doll where the science touched you?

Science progresses. It is already known that the climate models will improve with improved resolution.

Astronomer's don't know what makes up 90% of the universe. Go attack them for extracting funds for a few more years so you don't look like a climate change denier.

It is pretty unusual for a Mining consultant with no higher degree and an economist to be able to publish in a peer reviewed scientific journal. Was it highly regarded?

It's even more unusual for such a publication to thoroughly debunk a scientific paper that has been corroborated over a dozen times.

Are you certain that that's a correct description of what happened?

The scientific press seemed to be reporting the opposite:
Academy affirms hockey-stick graph.

Mann is communicating science. The fact that for this aspect of science there are PR groups funded to miscommunication the science affects how the science has to be communicated.

That doesn't make him a political strategist. For that he would need some political end. (And the public understanding of science isn't political, unless you're Boko Haram or Inhofe.)

I clearly misunderstood your point. Sorry for that.

CO2 causes damage to the environment because of its action as a greenhouse gas, and by causing acidification of the oceans.
Things that causes undesirable effects in the environment are called pollutants, so most people would count CO2 as a pollutant.
What I'm not understanding is:
(1) On what basis do you claim that "However CO2 doesn't play a role in [keeping air and water quality good]"?
(2) What is creating CO2 by breathing an example of?

The hockey stick was a reconstruction of past temperatures.

You are quite mistaken in your belief that it made predictions.

Who is making up these claims about something that doesn't exist. MBH 1998 did not study future temperatures. It will not fail, because it has been corroborated by over a dozen more recent studies, with more data.

(But since you're here, the world is warming:

2014 was the hottest year on record Global temperatures hit new high with no boost from El Niño.)

He doesn't have a model that does prediction. If he did in 1998 we would do prediction with one of today's models, as we have made advances in the past 17 years. Interpreting some proxies does require modelling, but that information doesn't allow what you wrote to make sense.

Do you mean that you don't think that current temperatures aren't showing a rise?

Because they do.

You seem to think that MBH 1998 made predictions. What they did was a reconstruction of past temperatures. As you can see from the paper.

I'm not aware of work by any of the authors of MBH that look at energy balance. Dr Trenberth is an important researcher in that field.
This Nature news article might be as good a place as any to start reading about that. Note that 2014 was the hottest year on record when you read the end: “You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.

If you mean why haven't the oceans changed temperature before, or ice melted, then the answer is that they have.

I suspect that you're over-counting if you think that "a lot" of people think a lower solar activity, and particularly the current very weak solar cycle would cause a warming.

But there are other reasons why it is obviously not the sun.
The current warming is greater at night and winter, in line with greenhouse warming, but the opposite of what you would expect from solar activity, as the sun warms things when it is shining.
The current warming is accompanied by a cooling of the stratosphere, an obvious consequence of trapping the heat below, but impossible to explain with solar activity.
The spatial distribution of the warming, being greater at the poles and less at the tropics, also aligns better with the greenhouse effect than the sun.

I know that rainfall requires evaporation or transpiration, so it will generally be heavier in a warmer world. This is not generally true on a regional scale, where changes to wind patterns have a dominating effect on precipitation.

A navigable Arctic is of some economic benefit. But there are many economic disbenefits, that greatly outweigh the benefits plus the cost of moving to a low carbon economy.

There's nothing pseudo about the effects of the vast majority of vaccines.

The anti-vaxers claim that vaccines cause a whole stack of problems, particularly autism. That claim is provably bullshit.

It has been corroborated by a metric shitload of papers.

So, to the best of our knowledge, it is quite correct.

Which periods are these?

There have been no periods of time for which the Proxies from MBH 1998 were available that had 20 times as much CO2.

Your claim is that not a pollutant because we create it by breathing?

I don't follow that logic. What is it about breathing that requires the things created by it not to be pollutants? No, it wasn't. It was essentially asking for a cap on greenhouse emissions.

If the work is corroborated, then the rise that he showed is quite correct.

Your claims of screwy statistical methods and selective sampling are therefore complete bollocks too.

You'd hope this was true, but I see the anti-vax movement and religious extremism both gaining momentum. And consumer protection against "alternative medicine" as we're forced to call heath fraud nowadays, was much stronger in the 40s.

I hope and trust that Mann is right in this case, but the denialist movement has fucked us all.