More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims
epw.senate.gov
epw.senate.gov
http://www.nrmsc.usgs.gov/files/norock/research/glacier_anim...
The debate is moot. Time to concern ourselves with stepping out of the way.
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".
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.
But by all means, it must be disaster on its way.
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.
If global warming is happening for whatever non-man-made-CO2 reason, spending ridiculous amounts of money cutting carbon won't help us.
Since that's the preferred public policy option these days, it's pretty relevant arguing over the cause.
*sponsored by the committee for strong syllogisms
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.
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 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.
Not Even Wrong. Go here, and have your fill:
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/index.htm
Furthermore, from the site:
"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.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/6/63/200611...
Most would agree that they appear to be correlated.
This shows a close up of the increase in CO2 since the industrial revolution (time axis reversed from other plot):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png
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:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Clim...
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...
> Scientists think so
The word "scientist" needs to be banned. There is no such thing as a special class of people called "scientists."
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.
> 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.
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.
"Scientist" is a meaningless word. Knowing that someone is called a scientist tells you absolutely nothing about their qualifications.
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.
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.
You don't think there are experts in science?
You're somewhat right about 'dentist' as 'scientist' is more akin to doctor, but that doesn't make your overall argument any less silly.
I'm officially going to give up on you now though, it's clear I won't learn anything from this. You can have the last belligerent word.
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.
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.
(Sounds like we need another Project Steve:
The explanation is really that simple.
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.