The report clearly states that the consensus view is that most (ie, > 50%) of the observed warming is due to human causes, not “natural” causes. So we do have a pretty good idea what that % is, even if we don’t know the precise figure. The other line you quoted is not inconsistent with that statement.
I don’t know what you are expecting the scientists to say: We have now determined that 86.53% of the climate change since the mid 20th century was caused by human activity.
I read the whole report. I seriously doubt that everyone is reading it incorrectly except for you.
Perhaps you’d consider addressing the facts presented therein? You know, like the one of the southern hemisphere not having warmed? Your response is another demonstration of how akin to religious fanaticism the AGW movement is.
I don’t have any beef with the SDMB posters who believe that Global Warming is down to us and that we can and should do anything about it.
I simply have a criminal brain and can smell charlatans and financial frauds, and am certain that the whole issue is being hijacked by a bunch of self serving crooks.
To be honest, I am tempted to clamber on the band wagon myself.
I am also fascinated exactly how to go about collating the views of over 2000 scientists.
(I must warn you that I looked into the system by which the views of UK stockbroker analysts were collated - and found it hard to keep a straight face)
As has been explained to you before, with little effect, science is inductive and not deductive so there is no way to prove anything in science. (Sometimes you can prove certain things about a mathematical model that is said to represent a physical system…but you can’t prove that it actually represents the physical system.)
What science deals in is the accumulation of evidence. People who have a strong bias against what the evidence is saying will never be satisfied, as we witness also in regards to the debates over evolution.
However there are different levels of ‘induction’.
If I drop a ball, from a defined height, and it hits the ground at the same speed regardless of how many times I drop it and regardless of where I am, then I am permitted to introduce a ‘theorum’.
This GW stuff sounds to me like someone yelling the ‘aircraft is about to crash, give me your wallet’
You probably don’t understand Carbon Cap Trading - it is the best con since the South Sea Bubble (which was a good con - as it appeared benign).
No, that’s not a “theorem”. A theorem is a statement deduced from axioms, which must be true, logically, if the axioms are true. As has already been pointed out, you are confusing the deductive reasoning of logic with the inductive reasoning used in experimental science.
When you drop a ball repeatedly, and you see the same thing happen, you inductively assume that the same thing will happen the next time. You have created a mathematical model to predict what will happen in the future.
Only if you are predisposed to think so in the first place.
Carbon Emissions Trading is one proposed way to deal with ACC, but not the only way. But you’re going to have to do more than state your opinion in this forum. What makes CET a “con”?
Of course, since you read the BBC article to say the exact opposite of what it actually said (evidently twice), and also misread my post referring to it, I doubt that it will actually convince you. No further demonstration of how completely blinkered you are on the issue is really necessary.
Colibri has already summarised the method well in both this thread and the other one. The details of the specific procedure (a pdf) are published. (And finding them requires no more curiosity than clicking on the first return from a Google search on “IPCC procedure”.)
For a less formal explanation of the procedures, Spencer Weart - who as an historian of science is especially interested in the social aspects of the process - has discussed the writing of the previous reports as part of his The Discovery of Global Warming.
Furthermore, outside of climate research, there are examples where it has long since become entirely routine for specific papers to be signed by hundreds of people. The procedure, at least in particle physics, is for drafts to be generated, then endlessly circulated within a collaboration as everybody reviews the drafts and sticks their oar in. If need be, people are stuck in a big room to argue things through.
It’s a social process, but results like the detection of the top quark are, if anything, regarded as more convincing because 450 people were involved in writing the paper. Not least because what tends to get flattened out along the way are the more extreme views, including attempts to claim more than the data can justify.
In my college philosophy class, I remember reading the example of the poor chicken who learns the limits of inductive reasoning too late: Having learned that when the farmer comes, he’ll get food, his hypothesis based on inductive reasoning works great until the day the farmer comes to chop his head off instead!
That there was any sort of scientific consensus on an imminent new ice age in the 1970s is a myth. There was a general understanding that we were in an interglacial period that, at the time, some scientists thought was “overdue” to end over the next several thousand years (although opinion on that has shifted and many scientists now believe that this interglacial would have lasted on the order of 40,000 years longer even without human interference in the climate), and there was a recognition that we were emitting both greenhouse gases that would have a warming effect and other pollutants such as sulfate aerosols that would have a cooling effect. There were a few poorly-written articles in the popular press (most notably one in Newsweek) but the U.S. National Academy of Sciences report on climate from the mid 1970s clearly concluded that it was premature to predict which of the various natural and human factors acting on the climate would predominate and that more research was needed. In contrast now, the NAS has joined the analogous academies of 10 other major nations [PDF file] last year in stating clearly that the time has come for action:
And, similarly, the recognition that certain chemicals that we produced such as CFCs were destroying the ozone layer led to the Montreal Protocol and subsequent agreements to phase out these chemicals. As Squink has noted, the ozone hole is still an issue but we caught the problem in its fairly early stages and the ozone layer is now stabilizing and is expected to recover over the next 50 years or so. The scientists who discovered the mechanism by which these chemicals destroy the ozone layer were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995.
Yes, that is the article I am referring to in my simultaneous posting. If you want to use this to claim that we shouldn’t rely on the popular press for our scientific knowledge, I don’t think you would get too much disagreement here.
However, if you want to use this to claim that there was a similar consensus in the scientific community on this idea of imminent cooling as there is today on global warming (or, by the way, anywhere near as many articles on the subject in the popular press, for whatever that is worth), then you will get quite a bit of disagreement from us.
Here’s my line again “…other lines say that they really have no idea what % of overall change is caused by Anthropogenic change.” The fact that they believe that more that 50% of the warming in the last 50 years is caused by human causes does not make my line wrong. For two reasons:
“overall change” is not the same as “warming during the last 50 years”. There is much to that report other than Global warming and more to that report other than trends over the last 50 years.
What “self-serving crooks”? And how would they make money off this?