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Losing the Public Debate On Global Warming
Hugh Pickens writes "Dr. James Hansen, director of the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who first made warnings about climate change in the 1980s, says that public skepticism about the threat of man-made climate change has increased despite the growing scientific consensus. He says that without public support, it will be impossible to make the changes he and his colleagues believe need to occur to protect future generations from the effects of climate change. 'The science has become stronger and stronger over the past five years while the public perception is has gone in completely the other direction. That is not an accident,' says Hansen. 'There is a very concerted effort by people who would prefer to see business to continue as usual. They have been winning the public debate with the help of tremendous resources.' Hansen's comments come as recent surveys have revealed that public support for tackling climate change has declined dramatically in recent years. A recent BBC poll found that 25% of British adults did not think global warming is happening and over a third said many claims about environmental threats are 'exaggerated,' compared to 24 per cent in 2000. Dr. Benny Peiser, director of skeptical think tank The Global Warming Policy Foundation, says it's time to stop exaggerating the impact of global warming and accept the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change. 'James Hensen has been making predictions about climate change since the 1980s. When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up.'"
When we have a nontrivial portion of the population who does not believe that humanity resulted from evolution by natural selection, and that the universe is less than ten thousand years old, did we really expect people to accept science that something bad is going to happen if they do not change their behavior?
Our failure to insist on scientific literacy rates as high as written-word literacy rates is going to be something that comes back to bite us, I'm afraid. I'm not sure there is anything to be done for the problem now, except educate as well as we can.
Maybe we can have some scientists say that a god revealed to them that it dislikes the smell of vehicle exhaust and is angrily heating up the planet as a result. Unfortunately, I'm only half-kidding.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Once the sky falls enough for a piece to hit you in the head, then it's too late to prevent its complete collapse. So do we want to prevent it from falling, or not?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If you're going to take on an issue that strikes fear in the blood-pumps (not hearts) of multi-trillion dollar industries, they are going to spend some of those trillions trying to paint you a fool in the eyes of the public.
Anyone who thought it would be easy wasn't getting into the fight with their eyes open. All you have to do is look at the way medical cannabis is legal in many states, while the DEA continues to claim there is no medical use for cannabis to realize that going up against the status quo is, at best, "frustrating."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
But shouldn't we be concerned that NASA's interest in Global warming is going to get in the way of their Primary Mission of Muslim Outreach"...
Without taking a position whether or not global warming is caused by human activities:
- There is a complete industry now that exists by the grace of the belief that GW is man-made and we can do something about it. This is business having an interest in governments and public believing we should reduce CO2 emissions.
- Being a GW denier is silly. However try taking the position that GW is not entirely man-made, or that GW will not be as damaging as to justify billions of investments. You will get attacked almost in the way blasphemists were attacked in the middle ages. You are a non-believer, and you should go along with the "common believe" and "consensus", what we all think. How dare you disagree? But science is not consensus based. One experiment is all it takes to create new insights, models, theories.
I feel frustrated by governments taking GW as an excuse to raise taxes and increase influence on everyones personal life whenever they can. For instance, banning the light bulb - just how stupid is that?
My karma ran over your dogma
This is a common misconception. We don't need to change our lifestyles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions signifcantly. We can simply get energy from other sources and improve energy efficiency. Individuals changing their lifestyles won't be nearly as effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions than policies that promote using less fossil fuels and less energy.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
We need a strong fundamental shift in our lifestyles - stop eating meat - stop driving everywhere - stop flying in planes, stop consuming useless shit. No one - even global warming believers - seems to be willing to do this.
I know a few people who do that.
Personally I don't. I don't believe the answer is for a few people with the highest integrity to take action, whilst the majority don't do anything.
There has to be systematic solutions, such that everyone changes. The market always wants to go in the direction of more consumption, so those solutions have to come from governments' mandates.
It's either that or wait till the environment does turn to shit and non-sustainable resources are exhausted. And let nature put an and to it.
It isn't global warming science that many object to, it's that almost every 'solution' proposed seems to be a call for more redistribution and for people to scale back their lifestyles.
The problem really is chicken little.
I've tried to explain this to people "in the movement" and they just get livid. Because the environmentalists have spent so much time focusing on AGW/carbon, other issues which are much more obvious and easy to rally people on have been ignored.
The problem with the apocalyptic arguments are that people tune them out the same way they tune out fundamentalists Christian apocalypses. The AGW fundamentalists come off the same way.
The real shame is that while they've been preaching, real issues are being ignored. Mountain top mining goes on. Coal ash fallout continues. The irony is that if they addressed these real and obvious concerns about which few disagree, then carbon emissions would be reduced as a side effect.
Another thing is that the AGW apocalypse isn't as bad as the Christian one unless we go Venus. I don't think any scientists are suggesting that. I always imagine a couple guys in the Bay Area 20,000 years ago. One turns to another and says, "hey, put out that fire. If you don't the world will heat up and the whole valley will flood". Well, Hello... 20,000 years later we have "save the bay". Save the Bay??? That's the paleo-native American apocalypse. We should be filling it back in.
I always remember this one argument I got into with a guy at a coffee shop. I never got to explain why I thought it was wrong for the movement to focus on AGW. He just flew into a rage. That's not science. That's religion.
IMHO the science is a minor part of it with regards to the public. It's the fact that there is a perception that certain ideologies have seized upon GW as a free ticket to further their agendas of limiting economic and public activity and increasing the interference and power of government within our lives. The natural reaction of the competing ideology is to discredit the basis of this power grab.
Economically, with the general decline the G20 is experiencing, as the most advanced nations they would bear the brunt of this new philosophy of "sustainability", which would be suicide for them.
Politically, specifically in America, there's a reason progressives embrace GW and conservatives do not. It provides a cover for some of their longest desired goals. Further centralization of government, extreme enviromentalism, and anti-capitalism.
Science is just a patsy for both sides in this argument.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
But if that were the case why is it that alternatives to those solutions are not given but, more often instead, it is argued that anthropogenic global warming is not happening in the first place?
At least the former tactic I can respect. People who deny all scientific evidence because it disagrees with their worldview I cannot.
Happy people make bad consumers.
'James Hensen has been making predictions about climate change since the 1980s. When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up.'
In other news, Hansen's 30-year-old global temperature predictions close to spot-on
I agree, failing to protect our future from death is far less important than profits now.
Back in the Kyoto talks, we were TOLD that if no action was taken, then the point of no return was something like 2007. Well? Based on that "science", nothing we do can help anyway.
We get predictions like that all the time. If there's anything we learned from the climategate emails, it's that a lot of the scientists working on this problem are not working in good faith.
The solution, I think, is to work on things that will help us anyway, even if AGW turns out to not be a problem. For example, improving electric car technology will be good for America, whether AGW is a big ball of hype, or whether it's real. Same with fusion electricity. We can work on those things.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There's $4 billion available without raising taxes: the oil and natural gas subsidies.
Dilbert RSS feed
In parts of the U.S., it's already significantly cheaper to use solar power than fossil fuels. What is most needed at this point, at least in the U.S., is a more flexible, lower resistance power grid so that solar power from a sunny day in Texas can adequately make up for the bleak midwinter in Oregon. This is useful whether we move to "green" power or not.
The bigger problem is China and other early industrial nations. As long as new nations transition from agrarian economies to industrial economies using coal as their primary means of power production, no amount of regulation in modern countries is going to improve things; it will only keep them from getting worse at an ever-accelerating pace.
What we need to solve this is a ban on U.S. and European companies building coal-based plants in other countries—make it as hard as possible for developing nations to get their start using coal and as easy as possible for them to get their start using more modern power production.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Humans eat meat. Our teeth and intenstines are the evidence.
Naturalistic fallacy. Just because we evolved to eat meat doesn't mean we have to eat meat, or even that we should.
(not that I don't - I'm just pointing out the reasoning flaw)
Dilbert RSS feed
For years, the environmentalists have believed that it was necessary to exaggerate.
If they said "Here is a problem we should try to solve", they believed they would be ignored.
So instead they scream "THIS PROBLEM THREATENS OUR SURVIVAL!!! WE NEED TO SOLVE IT NOW!!!!".
After years of hearing this, the public recalibrates their bullshit sensors.
And yes, I consider myself an environmentalist. I just wish the rest of us were more honest.
This is simply not true. The economy has faulted because of massive fraud in the banking sector. Thanks to deregulatory policies of Larry Summers, Paul Ruben, and Alan Greenspan, we have no paper-trail to bring changes, since bankers were no longer required to underwrite loans. We had people printing money for themselves, and the greed got so intense, that the entire banking system is in jeopardy.
All of this has nothing to do with investing in renewable technologies -- or including the price of pollution into burning CO2. It can be phased in gently over 20 years.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Four Billion dollars? (Evil laugh).
That's nothing! Absolutely nothing.
(Maniac Laughter).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up."
Citation needed. When you are engaging in skeptical analysis, you need to show your work. If the majority of scientists agree, but you have found that they are wrong, you need to show the empirical evidence. Which predictions have you falsified? Using what data?
How about a spot check of your work? Let's see if we can tell whether your way is to use science or subterfuge.
Venice Skepticism: You reference a prediction that observed increases in the rate and severity of floods in Venice will abate over coming years, but do not provide empirical evidence that it has been abating. The paper you reference says on the first page that predicting changes in storm surge levels is inherently uncertain. It provides no significant empirical events that could be a cause for a reversal of the current trend, and relies on a new way of modelling the problem which has not been empirically tested. There is empirical evidence that it has been increasing, as well as empirically tested models that predict the flooding will continue. A claim that the current trend will reverse without empirical evidence -- with nothing more than an untested model that gives the answer you want -- is not science.
Greenland Sea Level Rise: You claim to refute the observation that the accelerating breakup of Greenland's ice sheet may lead to increased sea levels by showing evidence that the sea levels have not risen yet. The fact that levels have not risen in the past does not contradict the prediction that they will rise in the future if the Greenland ice continues to break up.
Those are the first two stories on your "False Alarms" page, not cherry-picked, just the first two. They are completely without rational or scientific merit. They are exactly the sort of thing TFA claims are at the heart of global warming criticism. I love rational skepticism -- but based on the first two examples on your own website, I can reach no other conclusion than that you are a shining example of intentional disinformation with a shoddy veneer of scientific inquiry.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
...One could argue, even less than symbolic, it could be counter productive. Breaking Western economies only drives all the production to less environmentally friendly areas of the world.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
You have totally mischaracterised the debate. Most scientists aren't shouting about the end of the world -- but /some/ scientists are shouting about doing /something/ to mitigate against future risk. If there is a 10% chance of CAGW, and that can be reduced to 5% by investing 1% of resources now, then that is simply common sense. Heck, we spend 5% on the military budget.
/may/ get worse at an exponential rate (say 10% chance), and lead to serious suffering -- even in the USA.
But we cannot even talk about risk and risk-management, because as soon as you bring up the topic, "skeptics" accuse you of predicting the end of the world. This is just bullsh*t. Everyone has to feel the are right on whatever issue, even when they have to make up complete bulls*t.
As for AGW being "chicken-little", it is entirely plausible that there will be no ice-caps in 500 years time. It normally takes 10x that long or more for an ice-age to end. In just the next few decades, we will be hit in the wallet by insurance companies, who are already starting to factor in the costs of increased extreme weather events. The effects
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
$4 billion is 0.0003% of our national economy.
Yeah, fuck the poor who rely on petroleum based agriculture for survival! Don't they know that the poor who are too lazy to move a few hundred yards a decade might drown maybe someday!?
The economy is hardly working as is. Add regulation to reach a 20% reduction in CO2 and we break its back.
And that 20% reduction would only be symbolic anyway.
Speaking of chicken little and hyperbole in the debate.
Our economy and its energy usage is just like the obese person who goes into a restaurant and order 3 low calorie dinners for themselves.
We're running around trying to fix the symptoms when the airline industry, for one, has been solving the problem for decades.
To save fuel costs, they buy more efficient engines and streamline their operations - as much as they can - and as a result, they use less fuel; which has a side effect of lower pollution and other emissions AND they become a bit more profitable.
So, as we become more "green" we will use less fossil fuels - expensive fuels (and we're not even talking about the health and environmental costs) which will - get this - lessen the economic drag on the economy.
By being more fuel efficient and "green" it will actually boost the economy.
Or since folks like comparing the China; they are reaping what they sow because now, with the environmental devastation of their economic polices, they are experiencing some god awful things (obscene healthcare burdens for example) that will harm their economy.
Whether climate change is occurring is properly the domain of science. Here, I think Hansen is on relatively solid footing. Pretty much all the important policymakers have signed on to the fact climate change is occurring -- as David Brin pointed out a few days ago, when the US Navy is updating its warplans to account for the Northern Passage being open, it's hard to argue that climate change _isn't_ being taken seriously by the establishment.
However, what we should do about climate change is not a scientific question. How much will CO2 mitigation cost -- not just in terms of direct and indirect monetary damages, but in terms of human life lost? Economic growth (a large part of which is driven by the availability of cheap power) has historically been the most reliable tool for improving the human condition. Without power, life is nasty, brutish and short. If CO2 mitigation mechanisms like the sort Hansen advocates were to be adopted worldwide, what would the butcher's bill be? That's an economics problem, and Hansen is not an economist. If the climatology community is going to scream at people, "well, you're no climatologist, so you're only invited to this discussion if you agree with us!", then the economics community is entirely within its rights to tell climatologists to STFU about economic choices.
Then there's the geopolitical angle. Let's say Hansen gets his worldwide controls on CO2. Let's also say that China, currently the world's leading CO2 producer, says "no, our poor deserve a better life and we need economic growth in order to provide it, if we stop building power plants we'll have a civil war and millions will die, so fuck you, we're going to continue to build one new coal-fired power plant each week." What does the rest of the world do then -- invade China to shut down their power plants? The rest of the world can't do nothing: if it lets China slide, then the next thing you know India says, "yeah, we're in the same boat, screw you guys" and the entire thing falls apart. How do you build a geopolitical framework for enforcement of such a system? Hansen is a climatologist -- he's not Henry Kissinger.
Hansen has won the scientific argument. He's losing the economics argument and the geopolitical arguments -- and deservedly so. He's neither an economist nor a diplomat, after all.
Note to the climate change looneytunes who are about to leap down my throat: I'M AGREEING WITH YOU, DAMN IT. The only thing I'm saying is that this is a big stinking problem with a whole lot of dimensions, most of which the climatology community is completely unqualified to talk intelligently about; and within the realm that it _is_ qualified to talk about it, the climatology community has already substantially won that argument.
The focus on how global warming is being caused has been detrimental. Its pretty deep stuff for a business major to know. You have to understand band gap orbitals to verify CO2 does indeed absorb various IR bands. Actually computing wavelengths from the orbitals filled is on the upper edge of what might be in highschool chemistry, I was not exposed until college chem. Then there is the statistics necessary to interpret temperature readings. Even engineering stat in college wasn't entirely sufficient, though most college statistics courses would be (engineering stat was dumbed down). There is no accepted water/cloud model yet even among the experts.
Trying to walk everyone through this so they are willing to act is hopeless. The cause is only of secondary importance in any case. If this was in fact a natural trend and it was harmful, we should still act and/or adapt in precisely the same ways for precisely the same reasons.
Presenting the consequences, good and bad, in a non-melodramatic way on a region by region basis for the entire world is the first step. It answers "Why should *I* change?" Water levels rising will harm many, but its not sufficient to convince many others. It is hard for a Welsh farmer who anticipates being able to start a vineyard, to be convinced by NYC turning into Venice. Give the farmer the whole picture for their region.
The second step is to present all the options for climate control and their relative effectiveness both alone and in concert. Reducing CO2/methane emissions is the most natural approach, but there are many others like sequestration, albedo engineering, and counter agents. One that comes up a lot is aerosolized SO2. Thus side effects of these other approaches should also be discussed.
We as a society will likely make the wrong choice, but right now many are making the choice without any knowledge of the consequences apart from climate horror movies, or any knowledge of the tools we have to counter these consequences apart from some vague idea we should drive less or use a different sort of light bulb.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
A number of historians have written about this topic, and what history says isn't encouraging.
Quite a lot has been written about the history of the "Fertile Crescent", whose core area was what we now call Syria and Iraq. 3000 years ago, it was a a fertile area, semi-arid but covered with forests and farmland. Now most photos you see from anywhere in the area show a rocky, plant-free landscape. The change is generally attributed to salination that was the result of irrigation projects that started about 8000 years ago, but reached their peak extent maybe 3000 years ago. Historians have said that there is a lot of evidence that the people then (farmers and hydro engineers) understood the problem of soil salinification, and understood that the solution is over-watering to leach out the salts. The problem was that, in the short term (of a human life span ;-), it was more profitable to use the limited water supply on the maximal crop area. So salts slowly accumulated, and eventually the farming died out because nothing would grow there any more. This process has been documented in other areas, but this is one area in which we know that the people continued maximizing their short-term profit even though they knew of the long-term disaster that would result.
Actually, it seems that the problems there aren't as serious as they look. Back in the 1970s and 80s, an interesting series of experiments were conducted: The researchers leased plots of land of 1 to 2 square-km, built goat-proof fences around them, then sat back and watched. This was done across the southwest-Asian "desert" area, roughly from Syria to Pakistan. The results were that a year later, every such experimental plot of land had turned into "grassland" (or prairie if you prefer). The conclusion was that the entire southwest-Asian desert is artificial. If we would remove the grazing animals from the area for one year, it would all revert to grasslands. Then the grazing animals could be brought back, since the land would support them. As long as the population of grazers was then kept low enough, the area could become several orders of magnitude more productive than it is now. But the result has been to ignore this. There's no way you can get the governments or the farmers in that area to cooperate with such a project, when it requires taking the land out of production for a year.
In both of these cases, the general population may not have understood the issue. The local technical experts (including the farmers) did and do. But their short-term interests have always been to maximize this year's profit, partly because if they don't do that, they'll be bankrupt and out of business. So the ongoing disaster continues.
The "global warming" issue is pretty much the same story. We've documented the process for centuries, and have detailed information for the last half-century showing conclusively that the changes are primarily due to human activity. But the people who run our economies have the usual interest in short-term profit, partly because if they don't behave this way, they'll lose to the others who go with the short term.
Anyway, history says that we probably won't do much about the issue, even though we have enough information to know how to do so. And, since the evidence says that the recent warming is mostly due to human activity, we can say that we now have the ability to control our climate if we wish. But we can only do this on a rather large scale, and we know pretty well that humanity won't organize on the scale that it takes to actually carry out such projects.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
So... an entire field of scientists doing their utmost to produce the most accurate models of climate change, with ever-improving accuracy and consensus on their work are being politically manipulated? They are _all_ blindly stupid or complicit? That appears to be what you're saying.
The only reason the science is being contested is the same reason evolution is: because some people have agendas that don't care about facts.
Would you like a slice of toast?
There may be an almost consensus that climate change is happening, but there is far from a consensus that it is caused by man's actions or inactions.
This is simply untrue. We are 90% certain that warming is anthropogenic, and furthermore, 97% of climate scientists support that figure.
You obviously formed this opinion by reading someones blog, or something like that. Climate change is the most well studied phenomenon in the history of the world. Go read what actual scientists have to say on the issue.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It's not the scientists who have framed the debate in this way. It's the politicians. As soon as it became a political discussion, it created an "us versus them" mentality between the Democrats and the Republicans. At that point, any hope of actually improving things through sane, well-reasoned legislation went out the window because neither party is capable of even remotely sane or reasonable discussion of any issue.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Actually, my knowledge of Greenland circa 1000AD is personal: In my undergrad days, I helped process samples from a Geology expedition to Greenland by two of my professors. Amongst the samples I cataloged were wood and tree branch sections, pulled out of the ice, and carbon-dated to ~990-1020 AD. Kind of hard to grow trees on the icecap. . . .
No one has come up with anything credible that GW is happening either. Score so far; 0-0.
This is simply not true. Go read the IPCC report.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Good scientists welcome opposition. They see their critics as their most useful commentators, because they help them find holes in their logic. They understand Richard Feynman's principles of good science. Good scientists are more interested in finding out what is true, and not so interested in pushing their own viewpoint. When someone disagrees with them, they ask for the data. Good scientists don't cheer when a researcher with an opposing viewpoint dies.
If scientists don't do this, they are not acting in good faith. When scientists don't act in good faith, you must look at their data, not their opinions.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you read Merchants of Doubt, you will see a hideously long paper trail of extensive resources that have been put into the anti-environmental campaign. It is all sourced and documented.
What you say is simply not true.
The fossil-fuel industry outspends greenpeace 10-1 on lobbying and advertising in the USA. That is not a level playing field.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
2.) should we go dicking with things we don't have complete knowledge and control over. ..)
What, so digging up billions of tons of hydrocarbons and releasing them into the atmosphere isn't dicking around with things we don't have complete knowledge and control over?
Since when has scientific consensus, or any kind of consensus of anybody's opinion been equivalent to truth? Study the history of science, or even just plain history of humanity. The majority scientific opinion once upon a time was that the earth was flat, everything could be made out of the 4 elements of air water Earth and fire. etc. etc.... If all the erroneous ideas of times past and of today were collected into a book, it would likely be one of the thickest books ever published.
The Earth has been much warmer and much colder, long before humans started driving SUVs and flying airplanes, thereby burning large quantities of oil. This is indeed a chicken little manifestation that does not exist except in the minds of those who have an agenda of more government control. Personally I am waiting for some warmer, drier spring weather here in Oregon.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
"What he's saying is that with the US economy in the state it's in now, it's a choice of certain economic collapse and widespread death, starvation, & suffering..."
Why is it that the USA can seemingly find enough money for a recent war in the Middle East, or a recent war out in Asia, or even spending billions and billions on a new security agency, but spending a similar amount of money on something different would cause "certain economic collapse and widespread death, starvation & suffering".
Not that I think a similar amount of money would or should be spent, just pointing out the ridiculousness of that claim.
We aren't talking major sacrifices. Not at all. We just need to get our asses in gear and build either renewable or nuclear power stations to replace the existing power plants, which in most of the world are up for replacement anyway. At the same time we need to get fuel efficiency of transport up, and we need to get rid of the worst ways of getting fossil fuel (which have a fairly bad energy balance anway), such as brown coal and tar sand.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Sorry; the data says it HAS BEEN a cycle. It was warm in Roman times; it was cold in the Middle Ages. It was warm in the 9th-12th centuries - warm enough for the Vikings to find grape vines in "Vinland", which we now know was Labrador. Then it got cold in the 1300s, enough to freeze the Greenland coastline so that the Vikings couldn't get back into their former homes. In 1776, the Hudson River froze so solidly that General Washington's troops dragged cannons across the ice.
In the mid-1800's, it started to get warm again. The Hudson no longer freezes, and in Hans Christian Andersen's neighborhood, you can no longer ice-skate. The trend, at the moment, is upward. But the historical record gives us pretty clear hints that the upward trend probably won't continue. And even the IPCC data indicates that there has been NO temperature increase in the last 10 years, even though the mathematical models said there SHOULD HAVE BEEN an increase. They were even writing emails to each other about how to "hide the decline" in the temperature data, because the DATA didn't agree with the MODEL.
See? Data. As the stockbrokers tell us, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results", but Jim Hansen wants us to bet the entire economy that the 2,000 year cyclical behavior will suddenly jump up and never come down again. I didn't believe that when the gold bugs wanted me to buy gold, and I didn't believe the "It can only go higher!" assurances that the local realtors were giving me in 2005. And I don't believe it now from the Warmies.
There are natural cycles DOES NOT MEAN THAT all variations are thus accountable.
This... is kind of the problem here.
First, we have natural climate variation.
Second, we have possible anthropogenic climate variation.
We know the former happens. This is pretty much a given. So to see whether the latter is significant, we *have* to analyse both. That's what climate scientists do; it's a basic and obvious step.
The conclusions they have come to, as a massive consensus, is that AGW is very much real and significant, and cannot be explained away by natural means. ... and then people like you come along and say, hey now, all you smart scientists, what about natural climate change?! I bet you weren't smart enough to think of that!!!!!
Would you like a slice of toast?
The temperature change over the last 30-50 years is of comparable magnitude to the shift from the medieval warm period to the little ice age (the two greatest temperature extremes of the last 2000 years), a change that took more than 10 times as long to occur. Perhaps if you look further back you can find natural cycles that match the volatility of the current one, but the examples given above certainly don't cut it.
There hasn't been an increase in the last 10 years primarily because of a particularly strong la nina. Short term cyclical events generally have a greater magnitude than the overall warming trend. If you take ~11 year moving averages to hide the known cyclical variations, the warming trend is very much still there.
"Hide the decline" refers to the fact that temperatures inferred from tree ring sizes in the last couple decades haven't matched actual temperature readings (possibly because of other human influence on tree growth). When presenting tree ring data, they replace very recent data with actual temps, usually using a different color or something to indicate that it has been swapped out.
There are legitimate criticisms of the AGW argument, but you haven't put forth any of them. <ad hominem> This clearly indicates that you don't seek the truth, just the promotion of a personal agenda. That or you're not very smart, and it's usually wrong to attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. </ad hominem>
Before I do anything else, I want to address this:
"If the problem is CO2 being released into the atmosphere, then why don't they support nuclear power?"
Who are 'they', exactly? Climate scientists just tell us about what the climate is doing, and what we are doing to it. I don't think it's quite within their remit to support anything.
Would you like a slice of toast?
While I'm not the original poster you are debating with here, I will concede that there may be some influence on the part of activities of mankind upon the global environment.
What I don't buy is the significance of that influence, or that the current situation is so dire that if we don't destroy all technology and go back to a hunter-gatherer society with a 99% reduction in world wide human population that we are doomed to extinction. It is the politics that are involved here and trying to decide where that line is between doing one thing that is insanely stupid like mass genocide and the other which is completely ignoring the impact of environmental pollution and thinking it should be our god given right to consume every resource to its utmost potential for greater profits and not giving a damn about how it impacts the planet.
There must be some point in between to make a balance. Attempts to try and control pollution of all forms have largely been successful in most 1st world countries, where environmental damage has been reversed and living more in harmony with this world has been demonstrated as a proven fact. The Hudson River in NYC is returning to a state where things can now live in that river again, you can breathe air in downtown Pittsburgh, and air quality in Los Angeles hasn't really become much worse than it was when I was just a little kid. Those are just a few examples I can point to where there have been some successes on something larger than just the efforts of one person and involve whole communities making a difference because they have made a difference.
Given that there have been some tremendous successes in raising environmental consciousness, where does the line get drawn in terms of what action need to take place? It is wrong to say that some measures suggested to "control carbon emissions" simply aren't going to work? Is there a serious discussion on some of those sequestration systems about what harmful effects they may cause for future generations? Is there a reason we must act and do something rash right now without holding a measured public debate over the real issues involved? Is the world really going to end in a decade if those rash actions are not done right now?
Arguing over the "science" of "global warming" or "global cooling" is mostly naval grazing compared to the very real policy issues about how to deal with environmental damage in general. Those trying to "prove global warming" in many ways really don't care if there is environmental damage and in some ways even helps their cause if that damage increases so they can have larger research budgets to "fight global warming".
It is very revealing that so-called "skeptics" of global warming reject the results of studies carried out by multiple different laboratories, using a wide variety of different analytical methods and many different types of data collected from around the globe, but uncritically accept as fact conclusions based upon 3rd hand accounts of agricultural practices in one small region of Europe. Summary and citations of the actual science can be found here
It is by the way, absolutely false that there has been "NO" temperature increase in the past 10 years. In fact, analysis of the data shows a clear upward trend over the past 10 years. The question is whether the increase satisfies the technical criterion of "statistical significance" -- which means showing that there is less than a 5% probability that an apparent increase of that magnitude could occur by random statistical variations. This is a particularly stupid argument, because statistical analysis of climate models (as well as weather trends) indicates that 10 years is too short an interval to reliably detect the predicted global warming trend even if it is real. (Although if you correct for known natural sources of climate "noise," it turns out that it is significant after all. So while we cannot prove that global warming did not end 10 years -- or 10 seconds -- ago, this is not evidence that it has stopped.
Completely false. See here for a list of some of the confirmed falsifiable predictions of climate theory. And that includes the big one: predicting global warming before it was evident in the temperature record.
Citation needed. Please provide IPCC report references for the consensus climate science predictions that supposedly have not come true
Oh please. The USA is one of the richest nations in the world. I'm in the poorest 20% of or so of Americans in a so-called recession and I still have luxuries like internet and a place of my own that most of the world would kill for. Forecasting widespread famine and death because you can't afford your netflix subscription is ludicrously stupid.
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The question is whether the increase satisfies the technical criterion of "statistical significance"
You don't think that this sort of remark ... might be part of the reason global warming has such a bad rep. Let's run you through a basic application of statistical science here.
When we make a measurement, you're essentially placing a sensor in a noisy environment. If we make the wrong assumption that the noise is random (this is wrong, but hopefully close enough. Yes, hopefully). So you take many measurements and use a number of techniques to fix this data, including several that are essentially fraud (I can see the guy at this station wasn't taking his medicine these days, let's just drop that data - type of "fixing"). Then you test a hypothesis against that data. This does not result in "a warming trend" or "a cooling trend" it results in 2 numbers : chance that the temperature has risen -> p, chance that the temperature has not risen -> !p (hey sue me, slashdot does not implement latex and I'm not about to look up the correct UTF symbol for not). You might also calculate a value "q", the chance that the temperature has dropped. And this also gives you !q.
What may amaze you is that p > !p AND q > !q. So we're dealing with a guess here. The convention is that unless p > 95%, we don't say temperature has risen. For most data sets, p 50%).
Note that even this 95% is a concession of the scientific world to statistical sciences, and there's a huge problem with statistical sciences. By contrast, the canonical example of an exact science, physics, only considers a measurement reasonable when it passes a significance of six sigma (which is 99.9999998027% certain). That is *NOT* enough to declare something the truth within physics, the only thing that is enough for that is a mathematically consistent theory that passes repeatable experiments (and even then it usually takes 10 years or more).
Read that link. Think about the fact that climate science is in fact much more limited in what it can experiment with than medical science. Experiments are impossible. Today's data is unreliable to the point where ~10% of the data points are flat-out wrong before correction. Data going back thousands of years is used, and nobody really knows it's reliability (and the tree ring issue certainly seems to suggest a lot of factors we don't know are at play here) ...
So can you please understand that if it's not statistically significant, it didn't happen. Credibility is a huge problem already, please don't screw it by being wrong 50% of the time. No, not even if you mean well.
You're not helping.