IMHO yes, if for the next ten years we get temperatures close to the 70’s or the 80’s that would do. Provided that we do not get “lucky” and super volcanoes act up.
In fact, the analogy is an extremely good one and your attempt to turn it around is weak. In both the case of evolution and climate change, you have essentially all the major reputable scientific bodies (the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the analogous academies in all the other G8+5 nations, AAAS, the councils of various professional societies, etc., etc.) saying one thing and then only a small coterie of scientists in the field (and a much larger coterie of non-scientists or people who call themselves scientists and engineers but are in other fields…and mainly not research scientists) disagreeing. In both cases, the peer-reviewed literature is overwhelmingly pointing in one direction (although there is quantitatively more uncertainty in climate change on some issues than in evolutionary theory) and in both cases you have the small number of scientists and non-scientists arguing for the minority view claiming that they are being discriminated against. In fact, having participated so much in the debates regarding climate change, the movie Expelled felt like deja-vu for me.
As it turns out, even one of the main scientific proponents of the “skeptic” view on climate change has endorsed intelligent design as being at least as scientifically valid a theory as evolution. And, while I admit that the crazy views of one proponent doesn’t speak to all of them, in this case, the proponent Roy Spencer is really one of only a handful of reasonably well-published and prestigious climate scientists who are in the “skeptic” camp. In fact, he seems to be about the only one who is coming up with any sort of creative hypothesis to justify a low climate sensitivity at the moment.
Sage Rat and others have already responded to this, but here is more about the history of this petition from Bob Park (a physicist who founded the American Physical Society’s Office of Public Affairs and wrote the book “Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud”):
(Park writes this column mainly for his fellow physicists, which is why he said “We all got a petition card in the mail…”.) And, by the way, Bob Park calls them as he sees them and is just as hard on those on the Left when they push for funding for alternative medicine and such.
The Other Waldo Pepper: What you seem to be getting at in your Socratic dialog is the notion that AGW is not falsifiable. This is not so. In fact, it has already passed many tests…and spent a long time in the “scientific wilderness” as a hypothesis because of various objections to it for which evidence could not be determined one way or the other. (See here for a nice historical account.)
For example, when it was first proposed (around 1900), a lot of scientists believed that the oceans would simply absorb the CO2 as fast as we produced it and that hence the levels would not rise. It wasn’t until the measurements by Keeling starting in the late 1950s and, around the same time, Roger Revelle worked out the chemistry of the buffering reactions that occur in the oceans that it was understood that CO2 was and would accumulate in the atmosphere.
There were also a lot of people who believed that the radiative absorption due to CO2 would saturate…and it wasn’t until the spectral lines were more accurately determined and it was understood what would happen in the wings of those lines and also higher up in the atmosphere that it was determined that the saturation would not occur but rather that the radiative effects would depend approximately logarithmically on the concentration.
More recently, there were arguments that the water vapor feedback might not operate as predicted by the models…and it is only over the last decade that satellite measurements have confirmed that the moistening in the atmosphere is occurring to roughly the degree that the models predict.
Another test were satellite measurements that seemed to show that the troposphere above the surface was not warming even while the surface measurements showed warming. However, subsequently, various errors were found in the satellite data analysis (such as failure to account for the decay of the satellite orbit) and that combined with a longer data record eventually resolved the discrepancy between the satellite and surface record on a global scale. (There is still some discrepancy in the tropics, depending on whose analysis of the satellite record you believe, but there has been some progress made on resolving this too.)
The point here is that there are lots of tests of various aspects of AGW. However, it must also be realized that once a theory becomes accepted as a theory, it has lots of different lines of evidence supporting it, so one piece of data that seems to contradict it is not going to falsify it. Rather, it will cause scientists to look harder at the data and at the theory and try to resolve the conflict (as they did with the satellite data).
I sometimes find that those who do not like AGW want it to be treated special in the sense that the minute one has some data that seems puzzling within the context of the theory, then we should dismiss the theory. This is extremely naive.
Global warming is assuredly happening. I choose not to believe some of the reasons. I think human behavior (Bjork!) is certainly a factor, but not the only one, and not the primary factor, either. Cite away, I don’t care. Weather, climate, atmosphere and other conditions predate our ability to project with any level of reliable accuracy with the small sample number of years we have to work with.
Volcanoes, ice ages, meteor strikes…lots of shit has happened to the Earth over it’s roughly 4 billion years or so of existence. How is it possible to be able to compare what was going on millions of years ago to now? It just isn’t possible. Computer modeling has it’s limitations.
I just cannot comprehend how science can truly come to conclusions about the cyclical nature of the Earth and it’s climate in such a short span where measuring instruments and such are only fairly recent developments. The Earth has been here a long, long time.
To be fair, I truly believe humans and their industrial activity have taken a massive toll and is certainly a problem, but I find it extremely dubious to be able to measure the impact of a species that’s what, 25,000 years old or so against a 4 billion year old planet.
Figure that we’ve taken 4 billion years worth of accumulated crude oil and moved it from the upper mantle of the Earth and into the atmosphere in a period of ~80 years.
No, I liked GIGO’s latest answer just fine. And, for what it’s worth, I liked the prior one as well; I just wanted a more general answer on top of it, and one got supplied. I’m not asking questions in hopes of showing that AGW isn’t falsifiable; I’m asking questions because I genuinely want to know what folks think would falsify it.
My whole point in asking the first time around was to highlight what I disliked about the original post: if someone points to current glacial activity as an indication, I simply want to know whether they’ll grant that the opposite activity will count as the opposite indication. If someone says a short-term cooling establishes nothing about long-term trends, then I want to know what that person thinks will establish a long-term cooling trend.
I believe it is falsifiable. I want to know what other folks think would falsify it.
And that’s what I’m talking about. I don’t mind you telling me that some such data would be insufficient to dismiss the theory; I merely want you to go one step further, and mention how much such data would be sufficient to dismiss the theory. Could anything happen next year to call it into question? Could anything happen over the next decade?
I’m not asking because I assume you’ll say nothing could falsify it. I’m asking because I assume you can supply a fine test for what’s to come, and I’m extremely interested in hearing it.
I don’t think it takes that long for crude oil to be produced naturally. However, I agree…oil is the bull in the china shop right now, and rightly so. We can and should do everything we can to reduce and/or eliminate carbon emissions because we know they aren’t helpful to our atmosphere. But neither are gigantic volcanic eruptions, etc, and we cannot help those.
I still maintain that global warming is somewhat overblown in terms of humanity’s contribution to it. There are so many other factors involved like atmospheric irregularities, ocean currents, volcanic activity, naturally occurring wildfires, etc that it gives me pause.
But like cow farts, volcanoes have been a more or less consistent factor through history. There hasn’t suddenly been a spike in output. We don’t need to help or hinder volcanoes or cows, just the stuff that is new. Overall your position sounds very head in the sand. I’d rather know what’s coming and then decide I don’t care.
(And I’ll note that I don’t personally think that climate change can be stopped nor that it’s worth making the changes proposed for the sake of climate change. We should be as clean and efficient as we can, but that’s because you always want to do that, especially when oil dependency is an issue of global unrest.)
The impression I get is that the contribution by humans is continuously minimized by doubters, but they do it with very little evidence.
Yes, except that volcanic eruptions emit magnitudes of order more crap into the atmosphere per eruption than the entire existence of bovine farts combined.
I also agree with your assessment re: oil. It’d be nice to figure out a nice, clean alternative that every nation can enjoy freely without the constant bickering and warfare associated with a finite resource that everyone is falling all over themselves to appropriate.
I still believe that the jury is out regarding the significance of human impact. I agree that it does have an impact, in that we are prolific polluters of not just the atmosphere but the planet itself and it’s waters, but how much is “our fault” and how much is “natural occurence” and/or some type of climactic cycle that the Earth just happens to go through every so often (measured in tens of thousands of years) is still a viable debate.
Volcano emissions fall back out of the sky in about 3 years. And like I said, it’s always been doing that, so I’m not sure how it’s relevant at all. Your argument is similar to looking at a submarine, which takes on water to be able to change its buoyancy, and then saying that it should be alright to poke holes in the side. Well…no, not really. The one is part of the system and is actually good because it keeps the system where we like it. The other one is really never good, especially if its unmanaged, even though the rate of flow might be significantly less per minute than the buoyancy pumps pump for the brief time that they are on.
One specific crap from volcanoes we are worrying about is CO2; so, volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans?—Not even close …
How do the gases emitted by volcanic eruptions “fall out of the sky”? Sure, particulate matter eventually resolves itself after being belched into the stratosphere, but CO2 and other gases from volcanoes are magically exempt from how the same types of emissions are generated by human beings?
I don’t follow.
And FWIW, again, I am NOT arguing against the human impact of pollution, because let’s call it what it is, global warming is caused by pollution, and the human race starting with the Industrial Revolution and going forward after that has a remarkably bad record of conservation in that regard.
To me, the question is still “how much impact do we have versus otherwise naturally occurring events/cycles that the Earth periodically experiences?”
I don’t think science has adequately answered that question. There’s too many dissenting opinions and not enough data because we’re trying to compare the relative “now” to the hypothetical “then” and we don’t have anything other than maybe ice cores to explain the conditions of the “then”.
Where?
No, really, those who still think it is a viable debate are mostly blogessors :), Serious researchers and professors of the subject have reached a consensus; now, what to to about it? Or what the ultimate effects will be? THAT is a viable debate.
Volcanic eruptions do not emit much CO2 (can’t even see major eruptions in the rise in CO2 levels) and the other things they emit (aerosols) cause cooling. In order to have much of a cooling effect, the eruption has to be large enough so that the aerosols get injected into the stratosphere where they can actually persist for several months rather than getting quickly rained out (as they do in the troposphere). I believe that eruptions at low latitudes also have more of an effect than ones at higher latitudes.
The last major eruption that qualified as a significant climate event was the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 and the study of that has helped confirm aspects of climate models, in particular the water vapor feedback. Note also that Jim Hansen and co-authors made a prediction right after the eruption of what its effect would be that turned out to be fairly accurate (see here, esp. Fig. 12(a)).
[On geological timescales, volcanic eruptions have been important sources of CO2 but this is presumably because they weren’t being dwarfed by our very large and rapid influx of CO2 into the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning and also perhaps because there were periods with more volcanic activity.]
Noone said climate science is easy but there are many ingenuous ways to come up with tests of various ideas and models, with the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo being one example of a nice experiment that was handed to us by nature.
As to there being “too many dissenting opinions”, most of the dissenting opinions are just repetition of debunked talking points. There are some legitimate sources of uncertainty but there is a lot more exaggeration of uncertainty and confusion of issues that are really well-settled for political purposes. The fact is that it will always be possible to manufacture the appearance of dissent when the issues involved are sufficiently controversial, as they are for things like evolution, AGW, the link of smoking and cancer, etc. (And, by the way, some of the people involved in AGW-“skepticism”, like JunkScience.com guy Steve Milloy are actually refugees from the smoking issue.) The fact is that even most of the fossil fuel companies have accepted the scientific consensus and the diehards that remain often have positions that make Exxon-Mobil look like environmental extremists by comparison!
Sooooo…we’re fucked is what you’re saying?
Look guys, I am no expert on this subject by any means, and I try to formulate an opinion based solely on what I have read.
I am not saying global warming doesn’t exist, I think it’s been clearly proven that it does.
I am merely wondering at HOW scientists have come to the conclusions they have, when you have to factor in that the ability to measure emissions and such was only available recently and the Earth has a long history of climactic change, for a variety of reasons (as far as we can conclude, even that isn’t set in stone).
How do we rectify a conclusion based on decades of research against 4 billion years of ongoing changes, many of which involved climactic changes, ice ages, dinosaurs, etc, etc, etc?
I want to know how the scientific method is being applied here to better understand the topic. We humans have a relatively short footprint in the Earth’s millenia-old history, but by what I am reading, a HUGE impact on it’s climate development due to industry and it’s excesses. Please, I am honestly trying to understand the resolving of this issue.
Mt Pinatubo isn’t enough. What else are we going by to honestly (without political agenda) scientifically examine the Earth back then, versus now?
Good estimates are that we will add 3 degrees Celsius or more to the global temperature by 2100 if nothing is done.
If something is done by 2025 (And it seems to me that nothing much will be done until 2025, by then guys like Inhoffe will be out of the picture) we could keep the increase under 2 degrees, and even less if we act sooner.