Slashdot Mirror
Consensus on Global Warming
FredFnord writes "Well, here's an interesting one: the fine folks at Science Magazine have done an analysis of the last ten years' published scientific articles (articles from crank or non-peer-reviewed publications were not counted) on the subject of global climate change. The results themselves are interesting, but the most remarkable part was that, of the 928 papers they found, 75% accepted that global warming was caused by human activities, either explicitly or implicitly. 25% made no mention either way. And not a single paper asserted otherwise." JamesBell submits this article by a geologist which suggests that the Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger.
The official EPA Global Warming website is located at: www.epa.gov/globalwarming/
And the US supports the principles of Kyoto, but does NOT support the exemption of countries termed "developing", like China.
You mean the treaty that Clinton wouldn't even submit for ratification by the Senate? And about which the Senate passed a resolution 95-0 stating that they would not ratify if it was submitted?
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
The Bush Administration rejects the Kyoto protocols, whether for good reasons or not, and then refuses to do anything else about global warming.
Bullshit.
14 Nations to Participate in Plan to Reduce Methane
This is largely driven by the US and it includes India and China. It'll have the same greenhouse effect as removing 7% of US fleet of cars from the road and it costs next to nothing.
Just because Bush doesn't sign up to a program with name recognition, doesn't mean the US government isn't doing anything.
Blaze a trail to the New World
The 95-0 vote was in 1997. In a 2003 vote on emissions reductions, the vote was 55-43. Attitudes are changing.
Furthermore, a major objection to Kyoto was that it does not require emissions reductions from third-world countries. However, the major third-world producer of CO2-- China-- has been steadily reducing it's emissions anyway. So that argument isn't so compelling anymore. (Then again, they're at 1/8 the US level per capita anyway...)
The world-averaged temperature could remain unchanged by cooling some regions and warming others, and both things could be difficult in terms of crop adjustment, etc. And there is a lot of concern about water as well as heat; think drought.
The expanded phrase also includes the "climate of weather", i.e. the slowly varying statistics of the quickly varying fields. For example, we ask whether the weather would be more stormy in the future.
I've never heard it said that climate change is a euphemism ... to folks like me who work in this field, it's a more encompassing phrase.
Bush didn't "pull out of" anything. Why YOUR revisionist history, Anonymous Coward?
The US is a Kyoto signatory, but "On June 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was to be negotiated, the U.S. Senate passed by a 95-0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". Disregarding the Senate Resolution, on November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Aware of the Senate's view of the protocol, the Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol for ratification."
All of this happened under Clinton.
So, sorry, but your bullshit post is just that.
Again, we are too quick to assume that any change will result in massive job loss, and so we don't make the effort to find ways to reduce emissions without significantly impacting the economy. We can encourage corporations to change over time through tax incentives, and phased-in mandates. There is no reason at all to say the only way to do this is to mandate unrealistic things, that's just a scare tactic to keep anything from being done. Most corporations will not modernize by themselves, or at least will do so only very slowly. Through the use of tax credits and other incentives, including phased-in mandates, we can push corporations to modernize earlier, which will put them on cleaner and, usually, more efficient modern equipment, which would represent a net gain for the economy in terms of productivity.
The "pollution credit" system is a way to encourage companies that are in a position to modernize now to do so, and a way to encourage companies that are not in such a position to get in that position as early as possible. Maybe Kyoto implemented it poorly, but the idea is still sound as far as a method of reducing overall emissions without unduly hurting the economy, and in fact improving the economy over the long run.
Mod parent down, it's ridiculous. The United States is a largest per capita generator of greenhouse gases by an enormous margin...to the extent that even though China has 4x as many people as the U.S., they still have lower total emissions. According to the International Energy Agency, per capita carbon emissions in North America (includes Mexico and Canada, and the U.S.) were 4.7 tons in 1997; in China the per capita emissions were 0.73 tons. No, that's not a typo, in North America we generate 4.7 tons of carbon emissions per person, per year.
For starters, how many papers were rejected from the peer review process is almost entirely irrelevant. The peer review process is in place for a reason, and the reason is to ensure that bad science (not politically unpleasant conclusions) are not published in major journals. Unless you have a strong reason to believe that most peer reviewers have a strong personal stake in suppressing legitimate research because they don't like the conclusions, then this objection is bunk. We aren't talking about a 60-40 split on a controversial subject -- no papers that contradicted human involvement in global warming made it through the process. What possible benefit would it be to any of those reviewers to suppress opposing opinions? They have no personal stake one way or the other, except arguably their reputations, and that presupposes that there is not a single scientist that has done enough legitimate research to be a peer reviewer and yet still thinks global warming isn't a human issue (or at most, no more than a handful) -- a strong argument for thinking global warming is a significant issue, as far as I'm concerned.
You also rant about how these papers are only published because people don't want to lose funding by being perceived as anti-environment. It seems fairly evident that the current government establishment would be most served by producing strong evidence that global warming is not a serious issue -- so why would it be more politically safe to contradict the notion that things are okay, and question the status quo? If people wanted "safe" conclusions to ensure their funding, they would be saying that global warming is no big deal. Furthermore, you seem to be implying that no funding exists for the production of honest results. Again, this isn't a 60-40 split -- if anyone, even a single person, has ever received funding to do legitimate research on this subject, and has come up with findings against human involvement, it has not been able to make it through a peer review, which probably means that it used questionable methods or was otherwise flawed. Peer reviewers are not as politically motivated as you seem to suppose.
How can a survey of peer reviewed journals be a valid source of data when people are afraid to publish "the wrong results"?
A valid question, but one that is entirely irrelevant until you have shown that this fear actually exists.
I am the man with no sig!
Not really. But even if you found some funding (probably from a corp) to do some research in a 'forbidden' direction, try getting your conclusions published in a peer reviewed journal. Won't happen.
It won't get published for reasons such as poor methodology, maths etc. Not because you view is 'forbidden' or not politically correct. You are simply suffering under a conspiracy theory view of Science if you believe otherwise. In fact, while perhaps not in Science, oil-industry funded research, and some not funded by the oil industry, which argues against the consensus of climate change, has been published. It's rare, true, but this rarity is because the bulk of the evidence points in the opposite direction, not because of some grand conspiracy aimed at ensuring funding for climatic research.
> What's controversial about this issue? By asking that question it is clear no rational discourse is possible with you, you too are a religious zealot.
I'm neither religious, not a zealot, and it's called a rhetorical question. I'm asking (as should be clear from the rest of the passage), "where does the controversy here come from?" My point is that there is little scientifc controversy. The controversy is largely injected at the political level.
Hopefully others reading this thread are less invested in the theory to reject all discussion out of hand on the issue.
Again, I'm not going to reject out of hand any discussion based on evidence and a scientific understanding of that evidence out of hand. Quite the opposite, I genuinely hope that we are all wrong! I hope to wake up tomorrow and that it was all a bad dream, a mass delusions of the world scientific community caused by some faulty maths somewhere down the line. And you know why I hope this? It's because, at our current state of knowledge, the conclusion that we are headed for a very nasty time climatically is ineluctable and because I have children. But I'm not going to stick my head in the sand on this one.
[I]f one is politically aware, one notices that the loudest voices in the Global Warming crowd also want to dismantle Western Civilivation
I consider myself fairly politically aware, but I'm quite unable to see how shifting from oil to uranium amounts to a dismantling of Western Civilization. Perhaps you can clear that one up for me? Again the opposite is true, it's through technological advance alone that we are going to beat this one. We have to move away from this C19th energy source.
Since I don't feel like finding another post to attach this to, here's a response to a couple of other points:
1) Forget the whole theory that global warming is simply an artifact of urban heat islands. We fixed that particular problem with the data in the early 1990s. The urban heat island effect is without a doubt the best-understood phenomenon in climatology, and even with the effects removed climate is still warming.
2) Sunspot activity doesn't explain most of the climate change story either. It's part of the story, but definitely not all of it. If you want to check out a paper on the subject, I suggest the following (I know its a few years old, but the findings haven't changed subsantially since this paper):
Cedric Bertrand, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, Potential Role of Solar Variability as an Agent for Climate Change, Climatic Change, Volume 43, Issue 2, October 1999, Pages 387 - 411
note: I'm not telling you to believe the paper. Just to read it. If you understand enough about what's going on to do so, please feel free to poke holes in it. That's part of science.