Every time I go to investigate specific issues, it appears that there are credible people that disagree with the "settled science".
Let me be clear, I'm not arguing the actual point, I'm just trying to explain to you how hard it is for somebody who really does want to know the truth to actually find it. For every person that says one thing, I find another one that makes an equally compelling argument that it is the opposite. I just don't know who to believe.
Take the "global warming pause" problem. I did a Google search and started reading some of the results, and on the first page I came across this apparently well respected scientist who doesn't agree with the consensus. What criteria am I to use to disregard his opinion in favor of someone else's who appears to me to be equally qualified?
Here's the relevant parts:
The claim that the pause has been caused by heat is going into the deep ocean below 700 m is speculative and relies on models undergoing many data adjustments. That speculation is contradicted by two major issues.
First the Argo data has definitively shown the upper 300 meters have cooled slightly since 2003 (Read Xue 2011) and the consensus among oceanographers is that it is in the upper 100 meters that most of the heat is exchanged with the atmosphere.
Second is it defies known physics. IPCC expert Dr. Hans von Storch said in a recent interview "there is evidence that the oceans have absorbed more heat than we initially calculated. Temperatures at depths greater than 700 meters (2,300 feet) appear to have increased more than ever before. The only unfortunate thing is that our simulations failed to predict this effect." He went on to lament “If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.”
“There are two conceivable explanations — and neither is very pleasant for us. The first possibility is that less global warming is occurring than expected because greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have less of an effect than we have assumed. This wouldn’t mean that there is no man-made greenhouse effect, but simply that our effect on climate events is not as great as we have believed. The other possibility is that, in our simulations, we have underestimated how much the climate fluctuates owing to natural causes.”
The Dr. von Storch interview can be seen in its entirety at Stampf, O. and Traufetter , G. (2013) Spiegel International, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-hans-von...