Global Warming for Dummies

So we started with “Great conspiracy to prevent people from learning the truth” to “Meh, it was just an example, of a recommended review BTW, once again it is only one item to notice and the book is amusing.”, aka my exact point.

Well, gigo’s favourite site has not one but twocartoons mocking sceptics, one book showing an ostrich wiht its heas in the sand, titles like “The Latest Denialist Plea for Climate Change Inaction”…so please, don’t give no “tone” talk.
He won something, are you saying it’s false?

Not in climate science. I’ve studied logic in both philosophy and computer science. Climate Science is analog not digital mathematics.

New theories don’t make old data go away. Newtonian physics wasn’t destroyed by Einstein, it was refined.

And why isn’t science democratic? They don’t vote by ballot based on preference. They vote by peer-review and repeating experiments. The vast, vast majority of scientists in the field, who are much, much, better than you at assessing the information, are in agreement.

So whatever new theories come in the future, it will have to account for all the information we currently have. And the information we currently have paints a strong picture of a warming world.

It would be profoundly silly to assume what is the current state of understanding of the scientific world is wrong, because hey, it might change someday!

Someday we might find out that eating lead is good for you, that doesn’t me we should do it now.

The article was updated in 2011.

You quote an alarmist newspaper article from the The Guardian and you give people hell for using the Daily Mail. Here is the actual data.

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1960

One thing you need to learn about C02. Every year is a record year.

No; I didn’t say that. I dismissed the site when I saw the silly cartoon and the self-important nonsensical writing.

But since you ask politely, I “researched” “Weblog awards”.

[QUOTE=bloggie.es]
In the vast universe of blogs, only a select few can be named the best. And that decision is now up to you. …
Who will your vote go to?..
E-mail addresses are required to vote. You must use your own address and confirm the verification e-mail…
200 randomly selected voters receive an invitation to choose the finalists from a list of the most-nominated weblogs in ten random categories…
Winners are announced and the Weblog of the Year receives a prize of 2,012 US cents (US$20.12)…
[/QUOTE]

I prefer the criteria used by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for its Nobel Prizes. Perhaps you prefer bloggie.es as more “democratic.” To each his own.

As useless ones go…

Good thing I was not concentrating on the cartoon characters, oops, I forgot Monckton.

Anyhow, this is mostly an issue of who should one trust, and Skeptical Science has this reply to one of the links made by the OP:

Of course, then what do the experts are saying?

Is it OK to dismiss website due to cartoons? Most alarmist one have cartoons too.

[QUOTE]

Sure it’s ueselss, it’s your own cite, the smoking gun on the (metaphorical) thought-police.
As usual you cites go from earth shattering –> good –> Ok –> meh –> useless, by your own admission.

Good thing I wasn’t aswering to you.
You’re still hung up on Monckton? Do I have to show how you were wrong again? haven’t you suffered enough?

When they misrepresent (the magical changing chart - sceptics don’t view it like that) so much and ad hominem (the he’s a denialist or a member of a denialist group obsession, poisoning the well right at the beginning) so much it doesn’t say “science” it says “whoohoo, we teh kuhl”

The guy is right about “let us hope we listen carefully to the experts and not the unsubstantiated opinions of those that are not.”
He is surprisingly misleading saying “submits some climate “sceptics” to peer-review and finds them wanting”, he din’t submit anything, submit meaning he tried to get them published". He doesn’t mention which sceptics he searched for.
And then (I give it toMr. Hoegh-Guldberg that he allows fully disenting opinions on his site, that’s good science) Sr. Walter Starck creams him despite his later responses.

The sycophants are full of ad hominems.

Seems unlikely. Cite?

But I’d still appreciate hearing an answer to my implicit question. I’ll make it explicit:

When you see an anti-Gore cartoon at a webpage (or hear that “Al Gore is a hypocrite” from a person) does that make you more or less likely to value the opinion expressed at the site, or by the person?

The question is sincere, and I would like to hear an answer. (I know that if I somehow got caught up in the scientific debate about water-vapor feedback, and decided that AGW wasn’t going to happen, I’d still continue to believe the lambasting of Al Gore is buffoonish.)

Well thank you again for showing all how unreliable you are at checking information,

Even there you are not correct, Walter Starck gets creamed.

Besides getting a devastating responce from the author, others are not impressed at all.

If I need to see if their is a statistical correlation in collected data I can ask a statistician to determine that. I don’t need to understand statistics, and the statistician doesn’t need to understand what the data points are. As a matter of fact, it’s better science if the statistician doesn’t know what they are. The heart of understanding is the relationships between factors to determine cause. That is the logic.

Peer review is a reflective process in science. Science isn’t democratic. When Einstein was the only person who thought relativity explained gravity (he probably wasn’t the only one, lets pretend he was), everyone else was wrong, and they were an overwhelming majority. Einstein proved his case. He didn’t do it through a vote.

Scientific conclusions are supposed to be wrong until new theory is proven (if there is such new theory). Science should be based on the best known data, not the possibilities in the future. You do not assume the current theory is wrong, you assume the new one is, until it has been proven with a strength that overrides prior theory.

IMHO, the causes and results of global climate change haven’t been proven to that strength yet. Please prove me wrong. I am not a denier. I am a skeptic for the purpose of requiring rigorous proof.

I was actually in favor of global warming until I found out that the increase was only going to be about four degrees. I don’t even know if it was four degrees F or C, although I guess that makes a difference.

I guess that sucks if you’re an iceberg and your current temp is 31F, but hey, if you melt, then you melt.

But I’m against pollution, because who wouldn’t be?

It’s too bad it’s not all as simple and obvious as the pooping-in-the-well example. Clearly, people can affect the climate, anyone knows that who’s walked through a parking lot on a summer day.

But I’m not convinced that four degrees is going to lead to disaster. Things change, the earth endures, people adapt.

My problem with the AGW people is that they don’t want me to drive my car. But they want to drive THEIR cars.

Ah, then you have to look at history, which oddly enough if where I do have most of my experience like Naomi Oreskes.

To begin with, the theory has more than 100 years of being created, dismissed by erroneous assumptions and mistakes in early experiments and then confirmed and accepted by most around the 50’s-70’s and even more evidence was found to support it in the last decade.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm

Like the geologists against Wegener and his continental drift many physicists pointed out very good counterpoints to Arrhenius and the theory was mostly seen as a curiosity, but the critics, as it is usually the case, were making several blunders then.

Are you certain enough that we all should follow your example or continue doing what we were doing before we were ever aware of this “possible” problem?

Now you’ve made a good start. I’ll read these thing later this evening. Don’t know what they prove, but it looks like reasonable background information.

Four degrees might not sound like much and may even sound nice on a cold winter day. But there is a very big difference between the globe simply warming by four degrees (and more likely than not more if current trends in emissions continue and if/when aerosols are reduced); it is well known that weather patterns are pretty sensitive to even small temperature changes (many scientists are starting to explicitly state that recent extreme weather is being exacerbated by warming). In fact, a recent paper that was used by skeptics to claim that warming was overestimated just makes things worse if it is correct- since it concludes that weather patterns are more sensitive than thought to temperature changes (thus the reduced warming for the same changes).

Here is one such example of how even a small amount of warming can have a big impact:

In other words, there is a critical temperature above which crop yields decrease dramatically (some other studies have found that other crops are even more sensitive and yields have already fallen with the warming so far, from what they would have been otherwise).

Ahem, you really need to check the MIT link made before, as for not worrying about a 4 degree increase:

http://news.discovery.com/earth/climate-change-four-degrees.html

I find it difficult to believe that other crops will not fare better, and some parts of the earth will become more fertile, and that we cannot breed plants that are well suited to the changed environment. If this is all you’ve got, it ain’t much to worry about. But I don’t think crops are the major concern.

I have to mention that I linked to the index there by mistake, the chapter that has the quotes on CO2 is here:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

What? He checked a couple of names? Why those names?
Still, misleading headline and suspect methodology.

Nope, he starts with ad hominems about people’s professions (Uve is a biologist, by the way).
reply 1) He isn’t published in the right magazines. Content-free
Reply 2) He, oops, omits “dangerous” and makes it a completely changes the meaning.
Reply 3) when he says “And as long as it is peer-reviewed, and it represents the consensus, then I’m happy to write well backed up and documented statements” he commits a scientific sin, he has to represent the consensus. No science will ever get done if you aim for consensus.
Reply 4) Stupid (for both) Climategate fight.
Reply 5) Again he says that if it isn’t consensus, it’s not good.
Reply 6) Although there is a body of evidence of climate change, it doesn’t point to catastrophe or the social change that is demanded,
Fail.

What professions “count”? Economist (Head IPCC)? B.A.? Masters Governance and Public Policy? B.A. and PhD in Buisness? (Top people at Uve’s Center)

Latest reports point to the recent crop loss in Russia were caused or made worse thanks to the current temperature increase.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/10/18/1101766108.abstract

Now why should we had worried about that change?

This time one could say we were lucky in the sense that the Arab Spring was one of the results, but it was lucky in the sense that the shortages left exposed to all the unfairness of the dictatorships, the fear here is that if that happens again, and the chances are increasing, it could happen in worse levels so even the more advanced nations could get less desirable changes in their governments.

Another thing to consider is that it is not simple nor cheap or easy to predict the timing of the changes, a timing that will be needed to be prepare to cultivate in different locations with better conditions in a warming world, because before the climate stabilizes in the new patterns that will come, a lot of crops will be lost because during a transition there could not be a good grasp of when the correct times will come before it stabilizes. Unfortunately, many nations will not look nicely to all those people moving to those better locations.