If someone is skeptical of data, that’s one thing, but when a person begins to rely on graphs that have been clearly selected or modified to show trends that are statistically meaningless, relies on hobbyists and bloggers as their cites, etc. then that’s ceased to be skepticism.
I know that your contention is that climate scientists have falsified the majority of their data as a way of following the money, which is a fairly rational claim compared to the general sort of conspiracy theories that Al Gore has been running the show since 1960 or that climate scientists secretly want humanity back living in caves, but outside of making your claim in a very heart-felt and anecdotal way, you’ve failed to provide any actual surveys or evidence to suggest that this is a real worry.
Like I’ve pointed out in the past, a significant number of climate scientists are employed by private industry–who are quite probably against proving climate change. A significant research organization in the US is the EPA which has been run by Republicans for almost its entire history–who would again probably be against proving climate change. The number of scientists who feel like their work has been affected by politicization has been polled, and while higher than other areas of research is still not a majority, and given that half are employed by business and a lot by Republicans, there’s no guarantee that that force applied was in majority to prove climate change. The rate at which people actually do falsify data as compared with how many are being pushed by their managers in a particular direction is known, and it’s only a small percentage, so we’re talking a minority of a minority already. And even if some percentage are falsifying data, at any given moment, several different groups are studying the same thing and releasing their results, so others aren’t reliant on a single data source. And lastly, the same equipment and techniques are often used for other projects than climate change. It seems unlikely that a machine which is being used to study the climate during the dinosaurs age has a special Climate Change button that makes it go into falsified data mode.
This doesn’t deny that maybe you’ve felt pressure or that you’ve seen places where pressure could be applied. But there’s no evidence that it’s actually a worry.
Once you buy into the line that “The debate is over” … well, the debate is over. Once Hitler is mentioned in a thread (as per the holocaust reference in the second sentence of the OP), the thread is supposed to be over.
If you choose to go beyond that, you can discover (through your own research … that seems to be the only thing that works) that there are two camps of scientists with views on climate change. There are scientists who earn their living, get their grants, etc., promoting climate change, and there are scientists who don’t depend on the climate change promoters for income.
Those scientists who don’t depend on the climate change promoters for their livelihood tend to have the opinion that the current climate fluctuations are either completely normal or that there is simply not enough evidence to make a call either way on such a complex issue.
The debate is over for the true believers simply because they are true believers, (mis)lead by a power and money hungry group using scare tactics to promote personal agendas.
The ‘skeptics’ get short shrift simply because there isn’t any money in telling people the earth has been much warmer throughout most of its existence and in the geological time-frame we are just barely coming out of the last ice age … and what happens over the course of a few years just plain don’t mean a thing.
“Some winters are warmer than others” doesn’t sell books or movie and lecture tickets, and it doesn’t make for ‘good’ TV to flash it madly with a Breaking News graphic.
Which is itself a patently ridiculous claim, given that there’s a heck of a lot more money to be gained by denying global warming than there is by acknowledging it. Fossil fuels are big business, and it’s a business that would be significantly hurt by acknowledgement of global warming. The fact that there are so many scientists finding evidence for global warming despite the funding situation pointing the opposite direction should be a pretty good indicator that they’re saying it because it’s true. Heck, even some fossil fuel companies have come on board: Why on Earth would they say that global warming were true if it wasn’t?
Oil companies are spending millions of dollars researching alternative forms of energy and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tell you about it.
And don’t forget the sublte touch of calling themselves energy companies instead of oil companies. It’s not like they’ve spent a hundred years and billions of dollars building the infrastructure to deliver oil … I’m mean, c’mon, if you think about it, those commercials should be making you puke.
Every time it snows in upstate New York, I hear from a pen pal there who scoffs at the whole idea of global warming since he has to shovel snow sometimes.
That’s because they see the writing on the wall. Don’t think they didn’t go down fighting (and, a few, especially in the coal industry are still fighting). They opposed the scientific consensus on global warming until the point where it became so untenable to do this that they began to jump ship, starting with the breakup of the Global Climate Coalition in the late 1990s.
No, they get short thrift for the same reason that those who are “skeptics” on evolution get short thrift, namely that their arguments have not carried the day in the scientific literature. And, what do your arguments about what has been true on geologic timescales have to do with whether or not humans are responsible for the warming that is occurring now and is expected to accelerate? The difference between pseudoscience and real science is that pseudoscience makes statements like, “The climate has been warmer in the past before humans were around to drive their SUVs, therefore the current warming is just part of a natural cycle.” Real science looks at the climate change that has occurred throughout the earth’s history and uses it to understand, among other things, how sensitive the climate system is likely to be to the well-understood radiative forcing we are producing by increasing CO2 levels.
Urgent Breaking News: The oil companies have given up. They have gone down. Civilian Defense Corps prepares plan to handle massive riots expected in bicycle shops as major oil shortage looms. Your children may be in danger. Stay tuned (for a six second clip of three guys with signs at the end of the show.)
As to evolution, poor analogy. There are those who look at the science and understand that it is correct (I can put my hand on On the Origin of Species by taking three steps from my desk.) and there are those who, for whatever reason, choose to believe something different. It is the same with GW/CC; there are those who read the science and understand that climate fluctuations are the normal state of the planet, and then there are those who choose to believe something different.
The key word is “believe.” The word implies accepting without proof, e.g., leprechauns, the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, etc.
People don’t believe in evolution, they look at the data and understand that it is correct. Some believe in creationism; they make up their own data or believe what someone else has told them without evidence.
Some people look at the climate data over the course of millions of years and understand that decade long fluctuations mean nothing in the overall scheme of things. Other people insist the long-term is meaningless and look at only 10 years of that data and believe it means something, yet those same people yell about cherry picking (and change the name of their cause) when presented with contradictory data for the next 10 years. They believe in global warming.
Global climate is much too complex a system to make short-term predictions based on short-term data. If you feel a need to believe something, believe that … or believe the guy in the Gucci shoes on the forklift has your best interests at heart.
97% of active climatologists agree that human activity is causing global warming
You have it backwards, the evidence is there to arrive to the conclusion that humans are the ones causing and/or enhancing the current warming. It is the contrarians who believe that there is no AGW with very little evidence.
:rolleyes:
You have then not paid any attention, it is the deniers who prefer to use short term data to deny that there has been any warming. (A classic one is the one were they say that warming has stopped since 1998)
No, that happens on both sides. My cite is the OP.
How long would a trend like that need to persist for it to become relevant, I wonder? If not ten years, twenty? If not twenty, a hundred? When, exactly, would short-term become long-term?
Nice link. A truly stunning example. Wow. 75 out of the 77 scientists they chose to survey confirmed their point of view. It even says it’s a science blog. All real official looking and everything.
I don’t want to get banned for repeating the same question – but, as you’ve just helpfully emphasized, you’re not the OP. So instead of explaining why any cooling since '98 is irrelevant, please, by all means, tell me what would be relevant: what hypothetical evidence, in years to come, could falsify the concept of global warming?
I agree with the other doper, the contrarians are more like creationists, in that they always come back with “evidence” that was discredited hundreds of times before.
I can’t say anything about GIGO’s survey, but the petition you’ve linked to isn’t restricted to climate scientists. The credentials they require to sign the petition make it open to approximately 20 million people, if I recall correctly. 15/100ths of 1% isn’t all that impressive for a petition.
A contributing editor to the website RealClimate.org, “Gavin A. Schmidt is a climatologist and climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).”
More recently it was pointed by many contrarians that the water vapor feedback of CO2 was not real or not a big issue, and that therefore the projections of the scientists were not correct.
So if next year is no warmer than this one, and ditto for the year after that, and ditto for the year after that, and ditto for the decade after that, and ditto for the decade after that, and then it actually gets a lot colder in the decade after that – are we still supposed to stand around saying, whoa, hey, let’s stick with this “global warming” conclusion until 2050 rolls around and kicks off a relevant timeframe, eh?
The current problem is that none of the last 10 years have gone back to levels that were seen in the 70’s for example. The best one can say is that natural causes are preventing the warming from going up nowadays, but AGW is not stopping. We should have seen then a continuous cooling to past levels, instead it remains hotter than the 70s or the 80s. I have seen on global warming graphs periods of stability that go for more than 15 years; unfortunately, after those periods, instead of going down the warming shows up again.