If the science on climate change is settled, why contrinue to spend money on it?

Well, let's spend money on studying the dangers of liberalism. It's much more dangerous than global warming.

Ironically, those seeking to cut funding on climate research are always the ones claiming the "science isn't settled" on the core consensus on human-induced global warming, which clearly includes House Republicans ($1 trillion spent on Iraq is no problem but a few billion a year on climate science research offends them). They also are most against spending money on solutions.

Here's a good read...

"The phrase “the science is settled” is associated almost 100% with contrarian comments on climate and is usually a paraphrase of what ‘some scientists’ are supposed to have said. The reality is that it depends very much on what you are talking about and I have never heard any scientist say this in any general context – at a recent meeting I was at, someone claimed that this had been said by the participants and he was roundly shouted down by the assembled experts.

The reason why no scientist has said this is because they know full well that knowledge about science is not binary – science isn’t either settled or not settled. This is a false and misleading dichotomy. Instead, we know things with varying degrees of confidence – for instance, conservation of energy is pretty well accepted, as is the theory of gravity (despite continuing interest in what happens at very small scales or very high energies) , while the exact nature of dark matter is still unclear. The forced binary distinction implicit in the phrase is designed to misleadingly relegate anything about which there is still uncertainty to the category of completely unknown. i.e. that since we don’t know everything, we know nothing.

In the climate field, there are a number of issues which are no longer subject to fundamental debate in the community. The existence of the greenhouse effect, the increase in CO2 (and other GHGs) over the last hundred years and its human cause, and the fact the planet warmed significantly over the 20th Century are not much in doubt. IPCC described these factors as ‘virtually certain’ or ‘unequivocal’. The attribution of the warming over the last 50 years to human activity is also pretty well established – that is ‘highly likely’ and the anticipation that further warming will continue as CO2 levels continue to rise is a well supported conclusion. To the extent that anyone has said that the scientific debate is over, this is what they are referring to. In answer to colloquial questions like “Is anthropogenic warming real?”, the answer is yes with high confidence.

But no scientists would be scientists if they thought there was nothing left to find out. Think of the science as a large building, with foundations reaching back to the 19th Century and a whole edifice of knowledge built upon them. "

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009...

We have very good confidence that a doubling of CO2 will lead to 2+ C of global warming.

This means that pretty much all recent global warming is human caused and there will be significantly more.

There are still significant uncertainties about what this means for regional climate changes. Knowing the change in the mean state doesn't tell you much about the weather: changes in storm tracks will affect rainfall. Changes in the variance of weather affects crop output, heat waves etc. We know it will probably be pretty disastrous on current course, but we don't know, for example, which bits of the country are worth defending with sea walls. Where we should build extra water storage, which nations will need to be evacuated in the long run etc.

The science is settled in a broad sense. But there's still doubt about how much will happen, when, what the various side effects will be, and so forth. As well as, of course, the question of what if anything can be done about it, and the more we know about exactly what is going on, the more we can do something useful to fix it.

For the same reason we continue to study cosmology.even though we know where the planets and sun are.

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edit --

We don't know all the answers to climate either, and no one has ever made the claim that we did. Just like cosmology, not knowing everything about climate does not mean we know nothing.

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Peter J --

Why not spend it on studying the social pathologies of the Bible Belt?

America’s Bible Belt is also:

America’s Divorce Belt;

America’s Homicide Belt;

America’s HIV Belt;

America’s Chlamydia Belt;

America’s Gonorrhea Belt;

America’s Syphilis Belt;

America’s Teen Pregnancy Belt;

America’s Illiteracy Belt; and

America’s Uneducated Belt;

http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html

http://www.livescience.com/culture/090601-religion...

http://www.livescience.com/culture/090916-religion...

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=1...

http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?t=248743

Great idea!

We can also save money if we stop spending on studying cellular biology because the cell theory is settled.

We can also save money if we stop spending on studying evolution in biology because the theory of evolution is settled.

We can also save money if we stop spending on studying earthquakes because the theory of plate tectonics is settled.

We can also save money if we stop spending on studying disease causing bacteria because the germ theory of disease is settled.

In fact we could just stop all spending on science right now. You may get a special prize from the Heritage Foundation for this great idea. I will nominate you.