By the way, “consensus” is not exactly synonymous with “unanimity” although the difference is not always easy to explain. Here is Wikipedia’s explanation of consensus.
Are these “self-serving crooks” any more self-serving than the established industries and power structures that would have to adapt to a new paradigm if people actually demanded dramatic change with regards to pollution?
I personally happen to believe that, in general, they are less self-serving, as more of the people who support the research affirming anthropomorphic climate change have less of a vested financial interest in supporting their positions than do the people who choose to claim that the evidence is inconclusive and thus should be ignored or written off.
As has been pointed out, it appears that you don’t actually understand what a “consensus” means. (Hint: it doesn’t mean unanimous.) And the IPCC is only one of several different organizations that have arrived at a similar consensus on global warming. Once again, if you want to get a sense of the real consensus among climatologists on global warming, browsing some of the climate journals will give you a much better idea of that than right-wing blogs do.
People like this will be insisting that global warming is alarmist fantasy while they are chowing down on soylent green.
HB
No ,John, that’s the amount of Warming in the last 50 years. Which is not the same thing at all as overall change caused by Anthropogenic sources. There’s more than 50 years and there’s lots more to overall climate change than just warming.
There are numerous things that would change my mind, the simplest being document warming that that cannot be accounted for by natural causes.
The “panel composed of 2000 scientists” was carefully selected and orchestrated to give the appearance of consensus. Note that at one point, Lindzen himself was one of the “2000 scientists.”
Anyway, these sorts of alarmist “the sky is falling” type claims are always suspect.
Indeed.
Same thing. Plus power and prestige.
How often does an ad hoc committee conclude that the problem it has been charged to investigate is not much of a problem and therefore the committee should be disbanded?
How often does an ad hoc committee conclude that the problem it has been charged to investigate is serious and urgent and further investigation is necessary?
Ok, how about you define “consensus” for everyone?
– Paul Ehrlich in 1968.
Pointing out that someone else was wrong about something else supports your argument in what way?
Another thing that would convince me is if the global warming proponents made a number of specific, unusual, testable predictions that turned out to be correct. For example, “there will be an average of 10 level 5 hurricanes per year for the next 5 years”
They’ve done this with ever-increasing certainty. However, if you are demanding 100% certainty, you are never going to get it…There isn’t 100% certainty about anything in science.
Well, if there were trying to carefully select the panel to give the appearance of consensus, it was pretty stupid to include Lindzen since his general views on the subject have been well-known for years. In fact, that Lindzen was chosen as a lead author for the IPCC and that he was chosen as part of the panel for the NAS report in 2001 shows how both organizations were going out of their way to incorporate a broad range of views. Because to be honest, if you want to include a climate skeptic with any sort of respectable publication record in the field, the list is pretty damn short. I can only think of a few others (e.g., Roy Spencer, John Christy, and Roger Pielke Sr.) and none of them has views as extreme as Lindzen’s.
Does anyone remember the title of the August 6 pdb?
That is, of course, quite thoroughly documented in the IPCC report.
By definition 1, the IPCC report is a consensus. By definition 2, there is a strong consensus among climate scientists that anthropogenic global warming is a fact.
And in fact that is the claim being asserted by the consensus of climatologists; it’s not inviolate at this point, but they have eliminated the bulk of natural impulses as being sufficient, alone or in combination, of explaining the rapidity of temperature increase in the past five decades.
Climatology is not meteorology; climatologists don’t (and meteorologists can’t) make specific predictions about local weather patterns years, or even months, into the future. This isn’t just a lack of knowledge, this is a property of a complex, nonlinear system. You don’t seem to understand enough on this topic to even make an intelligible arguement.
Stranger
Actually, it would be essentially impossible to select a group of 2000 credentialed climate scientists, at random or any other way, who would come to any other conclusion than what’s in the IPCC report - that anthropogenic global warming at this point is a near certainty. To get any other result, you would have to select your scientists very carefully indeed, and there would be only a handful of them.
Perhaps, but they are not always wrong.
I love it when global warming critics trot out the old “But Scientists said, back in the seventies, that we were heading into an ice age! If they were wrong then, then surely they’re wrong now!”
Of course, it’s been shown repeatedly that only a handful of over-reported scientists actually claimed this, but the critics never seem to want to acknowledge that…
And anyway- let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a bunch of scientists actually had claimed that the world was going to freeze. Well, now it’s very obviously quite the opposite. Wouldn’t that imply that we humans had changed the course of the climate?
I mean, seriously- what the heck are the global warming critics actually trying to say? Either the scientists back then were wrong (and we know more now), or they were right (and humans averted an ice age through anthropogenic global warming). Either way, the world’s getting hotter, and maybe, just maybe, we should start doing something about it.
See, now, this is one of the most stupid arguments I’ve ever seen. Apparently, you don’t understand the way science works.
I guarantee you- if some scientist were to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that global warming is caused by some natural phenomenon (rather than by all the CO2 we’re pumping out) he’d be lauded as a hero. He’d have absolutely no trouble getting his funding, and every one of his peers would know his name. He’d go down in history.
Scientists LIVE to be the one guy who shatters the “common wisdom”.
Saying that there’s a shadowy, evil organization who for some reason wants to destroy the world economy in the name of averting a global disaster is just plain loony. Do you really picture the IPCC twirling its mustache while it sends its goons to buy off reputable scientists with buttloads of cash?
The IPCC is doing all of this because they believe that the world’s headed for disaster, not because they stand to make tons of cash off of preventing it.