Surely there must be something more compelling than "An Inconvenient Truth" on the matter?
See also http://www.skepticalscience.com/its-not-us-intermediate.htm and http://www.skepticalscience.com/its-not-us-advanced.htm depending on the level of discussion you like.
How do human CO2 emissions compare to natural CO2 emissions? http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natur... is also related
The whole site is rather good. You can pull up your objection and erad the discussion: http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
[1] This is a hobby of mine, many friends of friends seem to work in the coal mining industry and therefore need the cognitive dissonance of climate change denial (not skepticism you will note, denial) in order to operate.
However, when the position taken up by one side is "There is no room for skepticism about what my model predicts will happen in the future!" and the position taken up by the other side is "There is some room for skepticism about what that model says will happen in the future" then the no-skepticism side has already lost.
If only these folks would phrase it as a balance-of-probabilities issue rather than an absolute-certainty issue then they'd have me on their side. But as it is, I'm forced to side with the skeptical side.
Nothing could be worse for science than to try to make "skepticism" a dirty word.
It is remarkably similar to the evolution "debate". The theory of evolution fits all the evidence seen and makes predictions that can be tested successfully.
I accept the theory of evolution and I'm not sceptical about it. However, if a new theory came along that explained things even better I'd be happy to accept that change. The fact I'm prepared to change doesn't make me sceptical.
It's the same with climate change. If a new theory came along that explained the climate behaviour better than what we have now then I'll accept that.
There is a point where balance-of-probabilities becomes so strongly weighed one way that you end up in a discussion more about the nature of "a fact".
Realistically your scepticism is probably better reserved for things like predictions of the details of what climate change will mean. There isn't consensus about that yet (beyond "not good"), and the range of predictions is quite striking.
Can you show me an instance of someone espousing this position?
http://www.mediaite.com/online/al-gore-compares-climate-chan...
i grew up in the conservative midwest and was exposed to near lethal doses of rush limbaugh as a child. it took me FOREVER to consider that maybe global warming was real, becuase i was only hearing about it from people who were clearly motivated more by political concerns than anything else, and who insulted me for daring to disagree.
i have a BS in physics, and although this in no way makes me qualified to assert climatologists are wrong, it does give me more insight into the situation than someone with no such background. i grew tired of trying to explain concepts like the physical mechanisms of heat transfer, emission / absorption spectra (which are ostensibly at the root of anthropogenic warming), the statistical mechanics definition of temperature, the idea that the atmosphere has layers, &c &c, to people who had no idea what i was talking about, and clearly didn't care. they always gave me the "pascal's wager" argument: that it didn't matter of the science was wrong, because on the chance it was right, we're fucked.
i'm still not sure how i feel about global warming, but i do know this: if you want to convince people that they are wrong about something, telling them they are racist morons probably isn't going to do the trick.
In the interest of burning karma, let's change the subject to the interesting topic of near lethal doses of politics (as in potential loss of life). My colleagues get firebombed in their homes from morons on the leftist side of the political spectrum. In a similar manner to the filth that you linked, they are riled up by demagogues that lie and misrepresent in any way to smear their target. These followers are not bright, but they want to feel as if they are enlightened and as if the world is crazy. They just want to belong. They want to believe fervently in something. Believe that they're fighting the good fight. You can tell they're getting riled up when there's an increase in graffiti that says things like "Humans Suck" at the bus stops, or if there are fliers in scruffy coffee houses listing biology professors' home addresses. Fortunately these losers are as terrible at firebombing as they are at reaching a larger audience. In Southern California they don't even make the news due at the behest of the University. In Northern California, there's a local news article, the scientists hold a 15 minute vigil at 5:30pm and share encouraging words, then head back to their labs to squeeze in one more DNA purification or to feed the cell cultures, and the terrorism has had zero lasting effect, other than some terrified kids that crawled out the rope ladder in their room because the front door was on fire, and some FBI guys that get to sit in cars on the street for the next couple months. These aren't the "enviros" that cut power lines, harass gold miners, or tree sit, but they are friends with them. Perhaps if they had grown up in the conservative west and weren't incompetent, their terrorism would cause permanent damage to life.
It doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum they come from, those who deliberately misrepresent the truth and pander to the most base and violent instincts, those who are driven by ideology rather than observation and reason, are poisoning the intellectual well. They can't be ignored, as they are more dangerous when they can play their dirty tricks in the dark, but they can't be encouraged. Very frustrating. What's the solution? I have absolutely no idea.
No person in their right mind would read the quote in the linked article and think that Al Gore called climate skeptics racists. A person in their right mind would think that Al Gore was using the largest cultural shift in recent history to illustrate his prediction of another cultural shift, in Al Gore's typically goofy and easily mocked fashion. But frame the quote in the way you did, and a person is already too riled up to read it in their right mind. And maybe they don't want to be in their right mind, maybe they want to feel justified in the contempt for the political Other. It's a perfectly human reaction to circle the wagons when under attack. And thus is perfectly rational human instinct subverted to the detriment of all.
But back to my question, is there any climate scientists that has said that there's no need for scientific questioning of their models? Because the impression I'm getting is climate science is fraudulent because of Al Gore. Just like when he invented the Internet, that Al Gore is getting too big for his britches. And he doesn't have Vint Cerf to bail him out this time.
Edit: sorry if this came across as rude, I didn't mean to. I didn't understand your point, and then just started riffing on the great idea of a lethal dose of Rush Limbaugh.
If you want those exact words then it'll probably take me a while to dig up. If you want something functionally equivalent go watch Al Gore's movie.
But the position of the other side here is not that there is room for skepticism, it's that industry should not be disrupted for any reason, and that any amount of money necessary should be thrown at funding research that is guaranteed to cast doubt on the idea of global warming. Maybe that's not your position, but it's sure as hell the position of the sources of most of the money that's spent doing "skeptical climate research" and lobbying against emissions reductions (which, btw, are in all likelihood an extremely good idea even if AGW is not true, based on all the arguments that environmentalists used to focus on before debate was shifted exclusively to AGW, which IMO is rather the red herring here...).
I'd have a lot more sympathy for these guys if they weren't largely allied (and I'm using "allied" rather loosely, half the time it's actually the same groups) with the fucktards that spend millions every year funding "research" aimed at convincing the public that evolution is a myth. When you throw in with morons, you lose credibility, and the anti-AGW crowd correlates too damn close for comfort with the anti-evolution crowd, so I just don't care what they have to say, or what their researchers have done.
And I'll admit: that's despite the fact that I actually have some real scientific concerns about the degree to which AGW has been proven, and I'm not 100% convinced (though I'm absolutely convinced that just about any of the measures that people suggest to fight global warming are more than justified on other grounds). If it wasn't for the bad rep of the primary forces behind the anti-AGW PR campaigns, I'd probably be far more skeptical here, but the fact is, I've seen these guys play really dirty in a field that I know very well (evolution), and that leaves a terrible taste. They're so seriously wrong on evolution, and I see exactly the same psychological tactics used against AGW (how often have you heard complaints about little more than the scientific establishment "suppressing the truth" re: global warming?), so I take it as a pretty strong Bayesian signal that unless I know a lot about the field, I'm probably best off betting against these dudes by default.
The problem is in the phrasing of the question. Questions like "are global average temperatures increasing on a decade-to-decade timescale?" and "is climate change at least partly due to human activity?" are very different questions to "is the observed change in climate due primarily to anthropogenic factors?" and "to what extent is this likely to be a problem in the future" and "is it time to agree to [random policy proposal X that might help to cut CO_2 emissions slightly]?" -- but all these questions are treated as if they're the same question.
I'm so glad I work in an area of science where politics rarely intrudes.
Yes. See page 3 of http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/2009/bams-s...
"is climate change at least partly due to human activity?" "is the observed change in climate due primarily to anthropogenic factors?"
These might be different questions but the answer is the same. Yes. See http://www.skepticalscience.com/its-not-us-advanced.htm, in particular these quotes:
The late-twentieth-century warming can only be reproduced in the model with anthropogenic forcing (mainly GHGs), while the early twentieth-century warming is mainly caused by natural forcing in the model (mainly solar).
Our results show significant anthropogenic warming trends in all the continental regions analyzed.
I don't believe that there is consensus around how bad a problem this will be in the future (beyond "bad").
If you're implying that the great majority of published climate science research is literally plagiarized, then that's an extraordinary claim and I'd like to see your extraordinary evidence.
But I'm guessing you mean something else -- e.g., that most papers (in that or any other field) aren't startlingly creative, or that most papers make some use of other earlier research rather than doing anything from scratch. In that case you owe us an explanation of why it's a problem.
Do you know of thousands of "independent", "original" articles supporting general relativity or the Standard Model or particle physics or evolution or, well, anything?
(I think "dependent", "unoriginal" work is vital, both for scientific progress and for providing evidence. Consider: One paper introduces a brilliant new idea and provides some experimental support for it. Ten other papers explore its theoretical consequence. Ten more report on experiments done using the ideas in the original paper and those ten successors, getting results consistent with the theory. If the research in those papers is sensibly chosen and competently done, we now have much more evidence for the original brilliant idea than after the first paper, even though that's the only "original" one.)