I sincerely hope you’re not referring to your stipulations upthread that we can’t really know everything about climate, and that therefore we shouldn’t try to draw any conclusions based on the science we do understand. Because that is rank denialism.
I said nothing of the short. I said there are limitation to the accuracy of our long-term predictions, and that we have to factor that in. That’s all.
“Nothing of the short”? Trying to figure out if there’s a Freudian slip in there somewhere…
Nothing he posts is ever an argument. But back in the real world
This is a fairy tale that a lot of people believe. We want it to be that way. A world where that isn’t how things work is a bit frightening. We like to think that when evidence of how dangerous some nano particles can be is published, everybody working on nano particles is onboard with it. Everyone starts to test their new material carefully and that everybody is being careful to make sure there are no hidden dangers from new things. Nothing is farther from the truth.
But it’s not the simplistic view you try and paint. That’s rhetoric, not science. In fact, many researchers publish research and data that directly counters the consensus view, but you can be sure there is no mass movement of every researcher stopping their thing to change what they do. Far from it. The most common behavior is to dismiss it, say it isn’t true, or ignore it. Or to debunk it. Nothing in science ever goes in a simplistic way.
(from a different thread)
Once again we see this fairy tale view of how the world works. It’s never worked like that. And trying to paint the entire thing as complete black and white opposites is as unscientific as it gets. The scientific issues are complicated, numerous and novel as well.
What does that even mean? What coffin? It’s like there is this simplistic view of things that can be easily and finally closed. Nothing more to be said about it.
The science is settled. That sort of nonsense rhetoric is insane at a deep level.
It really does seem like a religious sort of belief, where “global warming” has replaced “God’s will” as a simple and final conclusion.
“Global warming is happening” is the simplistic viewpoint, and the solution is to get everyone to believe in it. Anyone who finds evidence that the climate isn’t changing as predicted is viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility.
Same thing for the other side. In this simplistic Universe anyone who is keeping the modern world running by providing fuels is evil, and completely against global warming. It’s not like that. The world isn’t some simple black and white drama with simple characters with simple scripts they follow.
No matter how much we want to believe this.
The lack of science that comes from the contrarians will get that result. Of course ignoring what happened with the misrepresentation from CO2Science only shows that what you have no interest on figuring out who’s sources are valid or good.
We had a discussion before about that, as wolfpup showed FX just misunderstands and ignores that the scientists based their research and citations from papers that support what the consensus says, what usually happens (as in the CO2science paper) we get researchers at the cutting edge of the science and they are getting interesting results that are not really against the main idea about human released global warming gases warming the planet.
There are no easy pickings as another researcher found recently when looking for papers that contradict the main view (only one last year) so contrarians resort to cherry pick and distort what the researchers in most the papers they cite conclude.
I haven’t read the thread, so maybe this has been mentioned already … but it’s spewing out their blow-hole on CNN Live that destroys people’s careers, not any research they’ve done.
So, yeah, you did not read the thread. But go ahead and let others know how the argument from ignorance fallacy does work.
I don’t know if you are being serious with #3 or not. But there have been countless times where large numbers of “scientists” have deliberately ignored valid data which refutes a given theory. Heretics, though correct, were burned, tortured, maimed… Spanish Inquisition… Dark Ages… Galileo… etc. The Spanish Inquisition comes most to the forefront of my mind. In college, I had a history professor who was from Spain and taught the Inquisition as though it was no big deal.
Anyway. Is it so wrong to walk to a store thats three blocks away instead of driving? I mean, when you consider everything, animals (including humans) cannot respirate CO2, so whether its causing global warming or not, it may be beneficial to reduce output.
Ryan Andrew Barone
www.ryanandrewbarone.com
These people were not scientists.
The big problem here is that a huge chunk of history is ignored to make a point that is not based on reality.
The history of the discovery of how global warming gases work shows that we already passed the Galileo phase more than 60 years ago, People like Calendar were ridiculed in the 40s for noticing that nature would not deal with the Gigatons of carbon that we were releasing into the atmosphere. Thing is that the consensus then was that how CO2 captured infrared radiation was understood and that nature was absorbing the human made CO2. Then people like Plass and others showed the things that CO2 actually does to heat at different layers in the atmosphere and how nature was not really keeping up with the human released CO2 and other gases the consensus then changed, but it took a while.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm
The few contrarian scientists are constantly getting it wrong nowadays with their alternative ways to show that this issue will not generate problems. What I advise you and the ones that use the galileo gambit is to realize that we are way pass that one and we are further into the game. People like Calendar had to wait for confirmation from people like Plass and then more research and scientists brought evidence that convinced virtually all scientific organizations that this issue can not be ignored.
What’s the difference between AGW and Holocost denial?
Hang on, Galileo’s detractors had hard scientific evidence backing their position? Hard scientific evidence that was made up of the vast majority of published research in the field? Wow, I had no idea!
Look, any appeals to “scientific consensus” had damn well better occur during or after the age of enlightenment. Because before the 1700s, there wasn’t really such a thing as science. You had a handful of people applying the scientific method in various fields. What happened to Galileo is simply not comparable. Galileo wasn’t censored due to his views going against a scientific majority - he was censored due to his views going against religious dogma. Of course, the reason you reach to Galileo is because science has a notoriously good track record of not silencing dissenting voices - especially not those with anything meaningful to contribute. Rather, those who dissent and back their dissent up with real evidence get catapulted to the forefront of their division. Sure, I’d very much like it if Duesburg and his ilk disappeared off the face of the planet, but that’s because their views are not scientific, are not supported by the evidence, and are not harmless. Indeed, every example I’ve seen so far either appeals to someone like Galileo from prescientific times, or appeals to some “maverick” pseudoscientist who in reality is shunned due to their hypothesis being crap.
How are the papers you linked to not consistent with the consensus view? Who is dismissing these papers? Cite?
Form the abstracts:
Also, it wasn’t just Galileo’s science that got him into trouble. It was largely his big mouth. He could be confrontational and sometimes rubbed people the wrong way. When you rubbed the pope the wrong way back then (insert poor taste joke here), things don’t go well for you.
His contemporaries Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler had fewer problems with suggesting the earth might not have been the center of the universe. Kepler did have some problems with religion in his work but only because he was a Lutheran (with Calvinist sympathies) working for the Holy Roman Emperor, not because of the actual work he did. Of course, it does help when your work is more mathematical and nearly indecipherable to the lay person, unlike Galileo’s.
On another forum somebody stated, and they were serious, that the theory could be falsified if the global temperature cooled, but they wouldn’t state over what time period. So if arctic ice increased (but not Antarctic sea ice), and glaciers got larger (but only small alpine glaciers), and the sea level started dropping, that would disprove global warming. But with no time period defined.
Anyone agree with this?
I’d suggest there are other things that might cause sea levels to drop. Sea level declines, by themselves, wouldn’t tell us enough about global temperatures.
But, otherwise, kinda, yeah. If global average temperatures decline as dramatically as, over the past fifty years, they’ve climbed, that would suggest that the Global Warming phase has ended and something else is now going on.
There isn’t much that anyone can do to “falsify” the observed data, of temperature rise over the last few decades. The best anyone could do would be to collect new data (indirectly, most likely.) Someone might come up with a way to infer temperatures from recent river sediment, for instance. But all that would do is widen the uncertainty. Nothing is going to do away with the temperature records of the last few decades.
What an odd post. You jump from asserting, (without a single citation to any actual evidence), that “large numbers” of scientists have ignored valid data “countless times,” to a weird list of claims about religious actions, (that display errors of fact along with being anachronistic).
Heretics were, indeed, burned, tortured, and maimed. Heretics were persecuted for religious beliefs, not scientific expressions. There are only two examples that are claimed for that scenario and only one of them comes close to being accurate. Galileo’s case comes close, although it is complicated by the fact that neither of his trials actually pointed to a religious belief that was taught by the church, the second trial was prompted by his own intransigence, (and further marred by what appears to have been a forged letter), and he was actually wrong in his claims regarding proofs of his opinions.
Giordano Bruno is even less a martyr of science. He did engage in some scientific speculation, but what got him thrown out of every school at which he taught and abandoned by every patron whom he could cajole into supporting him was the abrasive way he attacked anyone who did not bow down and honor his thoughts. And even then, he was never attacked for his “science,” ultimately being executed because, as an ordained priest, he attacked various religious teachings regarding the Eucharist.
You appear to have swallowed the propaganda surrounding the Spanish Inquisition without actually learning any of its history. The Spanish Inquisition was, indeed, a very horrible phenomenon that was used to persecute Jews and Muslims, (and those suspected of not “sincerely” converting to Christianity), for a decade or two after the completion of the Reconquista. After that, it tended to trail off, although it remained as an English bogeyman story in England for many years, eventually becoming a staple of anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic rhetoric. Your instructor was correct; you should have paid more attention to him. Scholars who have actually examined the trials of the Spanish Inquisition have noted that once the anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim period had passed, the actual convictions for heresy were no more numerous in Spain than they were in Catholic France or Italy or Protestant England or Switzerland or the various other Catholic or Protestant regions such as Bavaria or Prussia. And they certainly were not directed at “scientists.” The Inquisition and its Protestant equivalents were not good things, but alluding to the “Spanish Inquisition” in a discussion of attacks on science is just silly.
As to the Dark Ages, (a name applied by Renaissance people to the earlier period to pretend how much more “enlightened” they were), they were not as dark as the Renaissance promoters portrayed them. They were, pretty much, the natural result of having a major empire collapse without any successor state ready to replace it. How that has a bearing on scientists ignoring facts, I have no idea, but including it in your list demonstrates a serious ignorance of history, supplanted by popular stories that are without foundation.
Except that there hasn’t been a rise for the last few decades. And certainly people can try to change the presented data to make it seem like there has been some drastic warming for the last two decades. Even when there hasn’t been.
However, I think that the real meaning of “global warming” as it pertains to the debate is not “the Earth is getting hotter”, but “Humans are making the Earth hotter”. And that’s not something that is easy to falsify - where would you get your control group? Is there an uninhabited Earth out there in a parallel universe that is subject to the same orbital quirks, geologic movements, etc. as our own world that we can compare with ours to see whether the temperature increases that we are seeing are really due to human actions as opposed to natural phenomenon related to natural outgassing from the planet’s core, changes in solar radiation, decay of naturally-occurring radioactive materials, etc.