As a resident of Idaho, which will be one of the last places in the states to go the next time God decides to flood the tub, I find your casual dismissal of huge swaths of land containing densely-populated and long-established cities to be quite charming!
I don’t think there is any serious debate that we are in an interglacial period, and that the trend is still towards warming. The debate seems to hinge on the exact mechanism for the warming, and whether humans are fully, partially, or incidental contributors to that warming. That’s the ‘science’ part of the debate. Then it branches out from there into ‘what should we do about it’, which, to my mind, isn’t really science at all. Such as this:
IOW, the ‘debate’ is over, and the ‘real’ question is how do we fix it. The problem is, that’s NOT the scientific aspect of the debate. That’s the agenda laden political aspect…IMHO. And THAT is where things get ugly between the GW faithful and the deniers. The REAL scientists (on either side) aren’t really involved in this part, at least not the one’s I’m acquainted with (except at cocktail parties, where it’s often fun to speculate and BS).
-XT
You’re not at all alarmed that every single glacier in Idaho has melted in the last decade!?!
http://voices.idahostatesman.com/2008/08/20/rockybarker/idahos_last_glacier_apparently_disappears
Well, okay, there was only one to begin with, and it might not have been a glacier at all, but still.
Well, it didn’t flood us, so why should I care? 
This is a highly disingenous number. Thousands of scientists contributed to the IPCC reports only in that many of them contributed in their area of expertise. So if a scientist is an expert in soil chemistry, and some part of an analysis of the effects of warming refers to his paper on soil chemistry, suddenly he’s listed as one of the thousands of scientists who ‘support’ global warming, even if he’s never been asked for his personal opinion on the subject.
There have been a number of cases where scientists have actively worked to have their names removed from the list of thousands because they don’t support the global warming conclusions, but the IPCC has refused.
In any other field, this would be true. In climate study, not so much. Scientists who oppose the AGW consensus are labeled as ‘deniers’, subject to attack, actively prevented from being published in peer review journals, and their funding can be at risk. There’s a lot of “keep your head down” among such people. Nonetheless, there are various lists floating around containing the names of hundreds of scientists willing to say that they do not agree with the consensus view.
The other part of this is that journals that publish ‘denier’ papers have come under attack from the AGW scientists. Several editors have been pressured to resign because they refused to keep anti-AGW papers out of the journals. The hacked CRU E-mails show that there is a concerted effort by a core group of AGW scientists to manipulate the peer-review process in their favor. For one thing, the ‘peers’ that review the paper are generally only people who already agree with the core conclusions. You won’t see Richard Lindzen being asked to peer-review Michael Mann’s next paper.
But that’s unscientific. Skeptics are exactly the people who should be peer-reviewing papers. But in the global warming community, there are no honest skeptics - only ‘deniers’. There’s the truth, then there’s the unscientific people who ‘deny’ the truth. You know, like professors of Climate Science at major universities who just don’t happen to agree with the consensus view.
It’s not damned silly if the theory isn’t falsifiable. How do you disprove man-made global warming? You can certainly study certain claimed effects and write papers calling them into question, and there are many such papers. Some are acknowledged in the IPCC reports and contribute to their stated uncertainties, and some are not.
For instance, you might like to read this, a peer reviewed paper that did NOT make it into the IPCC report:
Unresolved issues with the assessment of multidecadal global land surface temperature trends, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol 112, 2007. This paper calls into question the reliability of the basic temperature data sets used by the main global warming simulations.
The predictions being made are not falsifiable, other than to wait and see if they come true. Right now, global temperature is not tracking the predictions made from these models, but the variation is so large in the earth’s climate that we can’t say current temperatures are falsifying the models since they are still in the range of variability. If we want to test the models more thoroughly, we should wait until we are sure variance isn’t a problem. That could take another ten or twenty years. Are you advocating that?
Also, it’s pretty hard to try to reproduce results when they come from computer simulations and the authors won’t release the source code to other scientists, and when the raw data they used is no longer available because it was accidentally destroyed, leaving only the data that has already been ‘corrected’ and ‘smoothed’ and ‘gridded’ and otherwise manipulated in ways that are not documented.
Do you have any evidence that mega-corporations are behind anti-AGW science? Because the opposite looks to be the case to me. One of the biggest corporations in the world, General Electric, is one of the lead drivers of the green movement. Of course, they make windmills, industrial hardware needed to convert manufacturing to new power systems, and nuclear power plants. Are YOU a stooge for GE? Why are you willing to carry water for an multinational conglomerate? Have you no shame?
Wouldn’t that imply that many of the supporters are people who like big government and support global warming because they know it will give more power to the government?
No; it only implies the hard-core libertarians think that.
Indeed, just because one side thinks an increase in government is always bad means that an increase in government is always good. It could very well be that those favoring more regulations w/r/t environmental emissions believe that one should, all other things being equal, have less government, but feel that it is apprpriate in this situation.
So you think you can simply call my number of “thousands” disingenuous ? As in “Lacking in frankness, candor or sincerity”??
In that case, I call your unspecified "number of cases where scientists have actively worked to have their names removed from the list of thousands "
Disingenuous in the extreme.
So, the IPCC failed to cite and include all papers. Many papers are cited. No one cites everything.
I have read that report. I read it not long after it was published. I also read a number of papers, and letters which responded to it. You didn’t cite those reports. No one cites everything.
The problem of climate measurement is fundamentally new science. Consensus is hard to come by. That doesn’t mean that the majority of researchers are wrong, it means that more research will need to be done. But the political climate we live in makes it unlikely that a brand new surface based infrastructure for recording weather information will be installed soon. Nor is the existing surface based system the only information source being used. Comparisons between these records, and other instrumental methods show strong correlations. The differences pointed out in the paper you cited are not overwhelming evidence against AGW, they are a valid, but unimplementable suggestion that new instrument systems are needed. Don’t hold your breath on that, though.
No. But neither am I advocating doing nothing at all about human activities that influence the environment, and climate until absolute proof is obtained. Are you advocating that? The evidence is not just one report, or one type of observation. The climate is an extraordinarily complex system, and our ability to predict it is entirely inadequate for providing proof beyond any argument. It won’t be, unless the entire ice mass of the planet disappears. Should we wait?
I am not a big fan of computer simulations, I think they are prone to observational bias at every level. But, we have no other models to observe.
Oh wait, we do. History. No glaciers in places where there used to be glaciers, shrinking ice masses at both poles, the Northwest Passage exists, now. The Northeast Passage exists now. The layers of non radioactive ice (deposited before 1945) no longer exist on any mountain glacier in the world. The Baltimore Sleigh company went out of business, because no one ever takes a sleigh across the Chesapeake Bay anymore. The location and dates of Yukon Ice breakups has moved north, and been earlier steadily for decades. Hundreds of historic examples exist. Satellite data also supports the observation that climate change is more rapid, and increasing more rapidly than long term historic trends due to being in an interglacial period could reasonably explain.
Finding a dozen mistakes in a thousand facts is not unlikely. Marching along with your economic and political allies because of such thinking is unfortunately no less likely. Scientists are paid by the tobacco companies to publish papers displaying errors in the science that says tobacco causes cancer. Coal companies pay a lot of folks to do research on climate. All the reports they publish support the contention that coal doesn’t cause global warming. They don’t publish many of them, though. No one cites everything.
Tris
For contrary views, here are the web pages of some prominent scientists who take a contrarian view towards global warming:
Dr. Roy Spencer, former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
Dr. John Christy, Professor of Atmospheric Science, IPCC 2007 contributor and IPCC 2001 lead author
This guy is no lightweight, as you can see from his resume. On his web site, he helpfully provides links to PDFs of some of his peer-reviewed papers, such as:
A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions, International Journal of Climatology, 2007.
The abstract is particularly interesting:
Hey Triskademus, there’s some testability and falsification for you.
I could list more, but you could just go look up the web sites of the numerous Ph.D’s who signed their names to this letter in 2007:
If you want to have an interesting afternoon of reading, google the scientists on the list, go to their home pages, and look up their publications. Many of them reprint their publications there in PDF format, which gets you around the gating problem of the various journals they were published in, where papers are not available to non-subscribers. These are generally peer-reviewed papers. There are hundreds of them, calling into question many of the foundational aspects of the current global warming consensus. If you want to dig deeper, you can look up the web sites of the various papers’ co-authors, and find even more.
What you’ll find is that the consensus view is not necessarily what it seems. The IPCC reports are actually pretty good, if you skip the politically-biased ‘summary for policy makers’ and go read the actual scientific conclusions. You’ll find a hell of a lot more uncertainty and claims of a much more modest nature than you’ll find in the general media or reproduced by global warming hysterics. I posted some of those conclusions in another thread, which appears to have killed it.
Basically, the IPCC’s ‘best estimates’ for the various scenarios they looked at range from 1.8° C to 4° C This translates into sea level rises of perhaps 180mm to 590mm, some of which would happen even if man wasn’t emitting any CO2 at all. But the uncertainty around these estimates is very high - and generally left out of the summary report. The actual scientific chapters explain the source of all the unknowns. And there are a lot of them. For example, in the section on feedback from cloud cover, they admit that the mechanisms are pretty much a mystery, while acknowledging that they are an important factor.
The problem is that these effects are modest enough, and uncertain enough, that it’s hard to get political traction for them. So as you move farther away from the real science and more politicians and fuzzy-science types (political science, economics, sociology, etc) add their bits to it, it sounds more and more extreme - to the point where people like Lindzen and Christy, who were the actual lead authors of their respective chapters of the report, have had to distance themselves from the conclusions drawn from them.
The IPCC report excluded a lot of peer-reviewed literature that cast even more uncertainty on the conclusions, but the pro-AGW side does not care about that. But when a university in Australia releases a paper on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, saying that global temperatures could rise by 7° C causing catastrophe, that’s instantly accepted as ‘scientific’ and becomes part of the consensus.
This whole issue is just a little more complicated than “scientists and the truth, vs deniers and big oil.”
Say, Sam, who are these people, anyway? If they are as pervasive as you suggest, shouldn’t you be able to point them out to us? Like a post from somebody along the lines of…
“Boy, do I love me some big government! I don’t care, monarchist, socialist, capitalist, nihilist, just as long as its big, big, BIG! When I look to the north and see the great, soft, fleshy mounds of sweet, sweet government that Canada’s got, I just get goosebumps all over! Mmmm, mmmmm, good!..”
Is it the love that dare not speak its name? None of them will admit it, but you know who they are, those lovers of big government? Is it merely a coincidence that they are almost always aligned with causes you find disagreeable?
Here’s some more history for you: Vikings had dairy farms in Greenland. They’re slowly being uncovered as the glaciers that engulfed them retreat.
It’s no surprise that the Earth has been warmer in the past and colder in the past. It proves nothing, other than that Earth’s temperature is somewhat variable. There are ice ages, and warm periods. In between the long-term cycles, there are other cycles of varying length. Cannon were dragged across ice-covered rivers in New England in the Revolutionary War. You haven’t been able to do that since the mid-1800’s, long before man started significantly contributing to atmospheric CO2. The Earth is currently in a warming period. If mankind had never existed, the earth would currently still warm up by about a degree in the next century.
Citing these simple facts as proof of man-made global warming is ridiculous.
Yes, and just about everyone agrees that man-made CO2 is warming the planet to some degree. That’s not where the disagreement lies. The disagreement lies in just how much of an effect man is having, how sensitive the climate is to CO2 increases, what effects a warmer planet will have on the earth’s ecosystem and human economies, how the oceans will react, what long-term feedback mechanisms exist and whether they are positive or negative, etc. But these areas are much harder for AGW proponents to defend, so they tend to do what you just did - retreat to the basic conclusions no one seriously disagrees with, then claim that either you don’t believe that, which makes you an unscientific ‘denier’, or you must accept the whole IPCC/Copenhagen/Kyoto/Bali clambake and logically agree to sweeping changes to the worlds political systems and economies. There’s a huge excluded middle, but you’d rather keep the debate out of there, because it gets a lot muddier in that particular sandpit.
No. There are a myriad of ways to give government more power. Government supporters don’t need to latch onto any one proposal and hang on. However, for hard-core libertarians there is no solution to AGW (if we assume it is true) that doesn’t require intervention–they must be resigned to bigger government if they are to accept AGW as a problem. To a degree AGW reveals a flaw in hard-core libertarianism.
In other words you trust the very very small slice of climate scientists who believe what you want to believe and ignore the vast majority of them who don’t.
The letter you linked appears to have a list of random people who may or may not have hard science PhDs and may or may not have any kind of real expertise about climate science. Could I ask you to tell me how many of them have published work in climate science? I’d like to know the actual amount of weight the list carries, because it seems like you’re tossing it out as chaff to support goggle vomit post. Or otherwise can I ask you to retract that list as evidence for anything other than a gaggle of people who agree with you?
You are far underestimating group think mentality.
Global warming was found on mars and other planets / moons something that is almost always dismissed by AGW supporters.
And why is global warming ‘bad’?
How is it acceptance of a scientific theory is ‘cool’ but when said scientific observation is condemned as it might be false it is deemed ‘less than scientific’?
There are proponents in this very thread that decry those who doubt global warming (and the many reasons to do so when it comes to what causes it) as scientific buffoons.
It makes me laugh. I guess it just goes to prove that any thought that doesn’t follow the sheeple’s logic is condemned. This saddens me from this board of ignorance fighters.
I would always bow to your expertise on mindless group-think.
You misunderstand. The Earth goes through natural cycles of heating and cooling. We’re heating faster than we should be. If your body temperature ranges from 95 to 98 degrees throughout the day and a fever pushes you from 96 to 98 it still means you’re sick.
Because of rising ocean levels, altered crop growth, and the richest cities on Earth being coastal.
I cannot think of a scientifically valid objection raised on this board. If not completely unscientific, they are based on deliberate lies and/or misconstruals. Meanwhile, in a completely hypocritical way, they expect the scientists to admit that one or two examples from teh warmerz invalidates decades of research.