Arguing about the cause of global warming is like standing on the railroad tracks arguing whether the train is your fault. We see the train, and it ain't stoppin'.
Grass grows over mountain inside of 200 years. Film at 11.
Forgive me for not panicking, but somehow I missed the comparison with other planets and 10,000,000 year graphics that put this in perspective.
Oh. That's right. We have no other examples of complex ecosystems to draw on, and scant little data to draw conclusions with on with our current climate.
"...scant little data to draw conclusions with on with our current climate"
Yeah, I guess the scientists just forgot to put data in the IPCC reports, and the tens of thousands of peer-reviewed articles on the subject that came before them.
Your argument needs updating. It's no longer IPCC consensus vs. internet loudmouth crackpots. It's IPCC consensus vs. the consensus of a large and growing number of scientists, armed with some peer-reviewed papers themselves. "Shut up, the IPCC knows what it's doing and nobody disagrees with it" has lost what validity it may have had.
I'm not sure your conclusion follows from your premise. For instance, it could be the case that global warming is caused entirely by increased sun activity, but that concerted human effort to decrease atmospheric greenhouse gasses could still cool the earth off. Combinatorily, I see 7 possibilities combining global warming (exists/doesn't), and is (entirely/partially/not at all) anthropogenic, and (can/cannot) be ameliorated by human effort.
I've never quite understood this argument. If humans are causing and/or worsening global warming, then understanding how we're doing this will let us know what we can do to mitigate it.
AC is one example of mitigation that is independent of cause.
I think it's important to compare the cost of preventing global worming vs dealing with global worming. I suspect that finding a cheep alternative to Coal power plants and internal combustion cars is going to be the cheapest long term solution, but there are a wide range of options. In the end CO2 can only have a finite impact on global worming so the question becomes what trade offs are worth it.
PS: When other options become cheaper then stopping becomes "free".
If anything this article makes me more convinced global warming is a real problem, not less. It has the tone of an infomercial, and they seem to have had to dig very deep to find people to quote.
It doesn't convince me either way, but it does bother me that it's been a long time since I've heard anything other than "scientist counts" for and against, rather than actual evidence.
Forget the scientist counts -- a lot of doctors went to their graves denouncing Pasteur as a quack. What's the actual evidence for and against? What's the CO2 count lately? Is that number significant? Have ocean levels risen? Where? How much? Etc.
The financial crisis is pretty complex too but there have been many insightful and detailed essays written about it.
The sudden CO2 increase is consistent with the quantity of CO2 output from human sources.
It is not hard to understand what is happening. I work for the British Antarctic Survey and my girlfriend is an atmospheric chemist. Many of my friends are climate change or environmental scientists. Let me tell you there is as near to complete agreement about what is happening as it is possible to have in science.
Of course it is possible to find some people who disagree. It would be unhealthy if you couldn't. Science works because of debate.
The post is pretty awful, but what really got me was the claim that because 650 is a bigger number than 52 more people are sceptical than support the IPCC. That is laughable:
> Most would agree that they appear to be correlated.
Everyone agrees they're correlated. Not everyone notices the warming precedes the increases.
> I work for the British Antarctic Survey and my girlfriend is an atmospheric chemist. Many of my friends are climate change or environmental scientists. Let me tell you
You have to admit you and your associates have certain interests at stake...
I agree, in previous natural cycles it did. Increased temperatures (due to orbital effect) lead to increased CO2, which increased temperatures further, releasing more CO2. A positive feedback mechanism.
The problem is that man-made atmospheric CO2 has upset that natural balance (CO2 is now significantly higher than it has been in the last 400,000 years - see second graph). Will that increase global temperatures? Scientists think so, and there is some evidence it is already happening. If so, the results are likely to be very serious indeed. Should we wait to find out?
So you mean John Q. Public is as qualified to speak about science as people who spend several years of their life learning about all the necessary background in their field of study, and then spend the rest of their lives contributing original research in that field? Or are the latter merely charlatans and frauds?
That's the ultimate way of dismissing anything, just attack the very concept of credibility. It's downright idiotic to say there's no such thing as a scientist. That's like saying there's no such thing as a dentist.
Sure, there's some semantic considerations, and the word means different things to different people and may sometimes be used incorrectly, but there is a such thing as a scientist.
Knowing that someone is a dentist tells you little. They could be a good one or a bad one. They could have not practiced in a long time. It doesn't mean "dentist" is not a word. Scientist is a rather general one, but still means anyone to whom it is rightfully applied is many orders of magnitude more likely to have intelligent feedback on global warming than the general populace.
The term exists to delineate between a subset of the general populace and the rest. Just like dentist. Dentists are the subset of the population that you see when your tooth aches, and scientists (especially a few specializations) are the ones you ask when you want to know why the glaciers are melting.
When someone say scientists agree on global warming, its like saying dentists agree on the causes of cavities. It's useful because it's talking about people in the know who are more apt to make such conclusions.
That's why you apologists try to demean the term. If nobody is a scientist then nobody has any more valid opinion than yours.
> say scientists agree on global warming, its like saying dentists agree on the causes of cavities
Not even close. I really hope you can stop and think about this analogy and see how both the professional labels and the questions differ dramatically.
> If nobody is a scientist then nobody has any more valid opinion than yours
Nobody is a "scientist" because there's no such thing. There are etymologists and geologists and chemists and so on, just as there are plumbers and linguists, each qualified in their domains. As best I can tell all that unifies the "scientific professions" is that the paychecks are mostly from academia, because the work isn't commercially viable. That's not a slight at all, it's just to throw light on how ridiculous the distinction is. Any high IQ job involves problem solving and theory.
That's like saying "doctor" is a magic word. There are all sorts of doctors. Heart Surgeons, pediatricians, ER doctors. They all specialize in very different things.
But they all have a very strong base level of training in medicine. You could ask a psychiatrist about your back problem, and while he's clearly not an orthopedic surgeon, he can probably give you useful feedback. And if he put a little time into research, he could tell you a lot. That's because he's highly trained to do so.
It's the same with scientists. Sure someone with a PhD in physics might not be as knowledgeable about global warming as a geologist. But they're still pretty capable of figuring out, especially with a little effort. Their opinion is considerably more useful than a lay person, which is why people are fascinated with their thoughts on the topic of global warming.
To a certain extent I have to agree with you that doctor IS another magic word. It's a title of prestige that doesn't necessarily carry a lot of meaning.
> You could ask a psychiatrist about your back problem, and while he's clearly not an orthopedic surgeon, he can probably give you useful feedback.
This is flat out untrue. Most doctors do not know very much outside their specialties. Many do not even know the state of the art within their specialty. I have professional experience in dealing with this through the pharmaceutical industry. For a huge chunk of medical problems an intelligent person is going to do betterl consulting the CDMT and merck manuals than by going to a randomly picked doctor.
> PhD in physics ... geologist
What about a sociologist or a working industry economist? Plenty of modeling and stat experience. How about one of those high falutin research farmers? He's probably just as smart, too.
Again, who said anything about lay people? You're attacking a strawman.
I was making a little tangential one-off point and this whole discussion is in fact moot, because "scientists" do not in fact agree on the issue of global warming.
Few lay people understand what the merck manuals says. Understanding statistics is one of many basic requirements for understanding science and medicine that most people lack. Another is a basic understanding of logic etc.
Data is available (good links below, thanks) -- I don't agree that people "can't handle it". We are told a fair amount about the mechanics of coffee metabolization, stem cell theory of cancer, etc on CNN.
But climatology in the press tends to be arguing over credentials and motives and scientist counts. That's not science.
I get the sense that there are lots of strange and alarming things happening but no solid theory of causation... we're still at the "preponderance of evidence" stage. That's fine with me, that how it goes, but it's taboo to say so, which is not fine with me at all.
That's because step 1 of the "skeptics" is to impugn the motives and credentials of those who believe in global warming. It's the same exact tactics used by creationists.
They can't argue scientifically, because the vast majority of climatologists, geologists, and scientists of other persuasions believe the Earth is warming and we're at fault. So they attack scientists in general, pointing out every time one has been wrong (global cooling is popular, though that was never a widely held theory) and the scientists are forced to defend their credentials.
That's why we hear that side of the argument so much. Not because scientists don't want to debate the data, but because their primary opposition (and one with serious political clout) isn't interested in data.
And also it's a good sound bite. Literally every major scientific body endorses man made global warming. You have to admit, that sounds pretty impressive and overwhelming. Doesn't make them right, but does make for easy to digest TV viewing.
Have to disagree. The finance/economics comparison is quite apt. There are reams of data and high quality dispassionate financial analysis online. The climate stuff is nothing but press releases.
The data is NOT readily available. The papers cited in the press releases are not online for free. And even if they were, they're obfuscated such that anyone with a life needs some second hand analysis to form an understanding. You really don't see that sort of analysis.
"Hard copies of the Summaries for Policymakers, Technical Summaries, Synthesis Reports and Technical Papers in English and in other UN languages, and CD-ROMs of the full reports, can be obtained FREE OF CHARGE from the IPCC Secretariat."
As for your second point -- that the reports are hard to understand -- then with all due respect, I would suggest that if you can't understand the reports, you aren't qualified to have a dissenting opinion on the matter.
Ok, I'll go download one of these here technical papers. "Implications of Proposed CO2 Limitations." Let's jump down to pg23, picked at random. Here we have a multi page discussion of models that are NOT published anywhere for free. You have to go buy them as far as I can tell.
This was my whole point. These IPCC papers are huge collections of commentary with footnotes, not actual research.
> that the reports are hard to understand
The reports are not hard to understand at face value. They are hard to meaningfully understand. A statement of cash flows for most corporations can be basically explained in ten minutes. It doesn't mean anything without analysis, however. You need industry context and commentary along with it. If you just read a company's annual report and look at the page with the statement of cash flows on it you're not going to know shit. These IPCC papers are VERY MUCH like glossy annual public company reports, even aesthetically. They are nothing like the writing that leads to real understanding of economics or the finances of individual companies.
BTW: Why would anyone take an organization with "intergovernmental" in its name seriously? Treating government releases as your first source in any other field is a pretty surefire way to fail.
It does have the design of a web page trying to sell me Viagra... in 1999. However, the few people they quoted looked like their credentials were reasonably legit ("award-winning" is meaningless. However, many had degrees in the right fields, and had worked for legitimate organizations).
I don't know what the credentials of the whole 400 looks like, though. It is interesting that when supporters of climate change alarm have petitions like this, it is considered a faux pas to question its validity. You are accused of being anti-science if you do. I suppose that is what the "politicization of science" means in practice.
The point is to challenge the idea that the "science is settled", and that you are a quack/heretic/flat-earther if you disagree.
"Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly.As a scientist I remain skeptical."
Whoopty fricken' do, you're "skeptical", now how about you actually go out and do some 'science' and prove some people wrong. Simply writing a letter about how you're skeptical does nothing, solves nothing and is just a distraction.
http://www.nrmsc.usgs.gov/files/norock/research/glacier_anim...
The debate is moot. Time to concern ourselves with stepping out of the way.