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Is Climate Change the New Evolution?
sciencehabit writes "Is climate change education the new evolution, threatened in U.S. school districts and state education standards by well-organized interest groups? A growing number of education advocates believe so, and yesterday, the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, which fights the teaching of creationism, announced that it's going to take on climate change denial as well."
Damn that chorus of 'true believers' - aka, 97% of the worlds scientists:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/06/scientists-overwhelmingly-believe-in-man-made-climate-change/1
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-01-19/world/eco.globalwarmingsurvey_1_global-warming-climate-science-human-activity?_s=PM:WORLD
Check your premises.
See, this is the problem with this debate.
Your "side" never publishes facts, just conjecture that will support your view [1]. Yet, your "side" is always claiming to be scientific in approach, and claiming that those who accept the evidence at hand it is happening are somehow the ones who are faith based in their outlook.
However, here's a more in depth picture. That 97%: it's climatologists. The other article was incorrect, as the general scientific community at large is only 90%.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/01/97_of_active_climatologists_ag.php
[1] Conflating weather with climate doesn't count.
Check your premises.
That's simply not true. The ancient Greeks knew the earth wasn't flat. Hell, Eratosthenes (of Sieve fame) calculated the circumference of the earth to within a few percent, and that was around 200 BC.
However, we do seem to be approaching the point where 97% of people will believe any kind of shit you tell them as long as they agree with your conclusions.
So what? At one time in history 97% of the world's scientists thought the world was flat.
Bull. There has never been a time at which anyone we would call a scientist today believed the Earth was flat. Aristotle is generally viewed as formalizing and promoting the Scientific Method in the West in 300 BC and the spherical Earth was already accepted at that time. Only people who deny the obvious, attack those who disagree and try to rewrite children's textbooks claimed the Earth was flat.
1 - History. I'm a student of history. I became a skeptic when they tried to erase the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.
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And I give a shit just how a student of history misunderstands atmospheric physics because WHY again?
2 - Statistics/Data Analysis. M&M made Michael Mann's Hockey Stick look like a total fraud.
And I give a shit just how a student of history misunderstands atmospheric physics AND statistics because WHY again?
3 - Physics. Most serious skeptics will grant that CO2 absorbs energy at one important wavelength. They will grant as much as 1.4 degrees warming for a doubling of CO2. The thing they won't grant is the feedback necessary to get dangerous warming.
And I give a shit just how a student of history misunderstands the relative importance of isolated "facts" in physics he scrapped off some denier's site online because WHY again?
4 - Instrumentation. Anthony Watts has demonstrated the pathetic state of some of our temperature records.
Anthony Watts is a non-scientist, college drop out full blown, outed fraud: http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2009/07/29/204427/the-video-that-anthony-watts-does-not-want-you-to-see-the-sinclair-climate-denial-crock-of-the-week/
It goes on. There are other mechanisms that can explain the late 20th century warming. If you want to seriously talk about skeptics, you really should study them a bit more.
How do scientists funded by climate deniers fit with your point 3?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/a-skeptical-physicist-ends-up-confirming-climate-data/2011/10/20/gIQA6viC1L_blog.html
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But, glaciers and snow packs are shrinking, have been shrinking, for the last 50-100 years. Hard to argue that this isn't the case.
Actually they have been shrinking since the LIA, Little Ice Age, but that was well before anthropogentic CO2.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The IPCC never argued that the Sun has no influence on the average temperature of the planet. That's just a strawman. Solar output has been captured in detail by satellites since the late 1970's and there is no evidence that is has changed enough to cause the change in temperatures we've seen. Further evidence that the Sun is not the cause of global warming is the fact that while the troposphere has warmed the stratosphere has cooled. That is a signature of greenhouse gas warming. If the Sun was causing the warming the stratosphere would warm right along with the troposphere.