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97% of Climate Science Papers Agree Global Warming Is Man-made
An anonymous reader writes "A meta-study published yesterday looked at over 12,000 peer-reviewed papers on climate science that appeared in journals between 1991 and 2011. The papers were evaluated and categorized by how they implicitly or explicitly endorsed humans as a contributing cause of global warming. The meta-study found that an overwhelming 97.1% of the papers that took a stance endorsed human-cause global warming. They also asked the 1,200 of the scientists involved in the research to self-evaluate their own studies, with nearly identical results. In the interest of transparency, the meta-study results were published in an open access journal, and the researchers set up a website so that anybody can check their results. From the article: '... a memo from communications strategist Frank Luntz leaked in 2002 advised Republicans, "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate." This campaign has been successful. A 2012 poll from U.S. Pew Research Center found less than half of Americans thought scientists agreed humans were causing global warming. The media has assisted in this public misconception, with most climate stories "balanced" with a "skeptic" perspective. However, this results in making the 2–3% seem like 50%. In trying to achieve "balance," the media has actually created a very unbalanced perception of reality. As a result, people believe scientists are still split about what's causing global warming, and therefore there is not nearly enough public support or motivation to solve the problem.'"
Too bad the scientific method is no match for the stick-your-fingers-in-your-ears-and-yell-la-la-la-la-la method.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
But saying that 97% of climate science papers agree on it does not validate it.
Without regard to whether or not anthropogenic climate change is real: Which papers get published are largely a function of who's on the editorial board of each publication. If those boards are stacked with people holding a particular position, they tend to publish only papers which agree with that position.
That's an extremely biased viewpoint.
I know for a fact that 11,500 of those so-called "peer-reviewed papers" were paid for by Big Tree.
I am not commenting on Global warming.
I am wondering if the bias in publications plays any role in these numbers. Any idea how hard it is to publish something that goes against standard scientific thought in any field?
I think they mean 97% of scientists agree that some amount of global warming is caused by mankind.The amount that is caused by humans may be some or even most, but I don't think anyone could argue that it is ALL caused by mankind.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
They might all agree but I read this climatescienceskeptic blog which gives a whole bunch of really obvious ideas about why its natural or not happening at all like the solar output or volcanos which I'm pretty sure that all the scientists are too dumb to have realised happen so I'm going to go with the blog.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The problem is that science . . . as a scholarly field as opposed to the practice of science . . . has no way to deal with the idea that a significant percentage of our leaders are in willful denial of the sound science. The reality of the research is defeated by their ideology.
This is not new (ask Gallileo) but it is new for the U.S.
I think we're just fucked.
...that reject AGW than there are that blame humans for most (>50%) of agw.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/on-the-consensus/
"The only time an abstract is rated as saying how much humans contribute to global warming is if it mentions:
that human activity is a dominant influence or has caused most of recent climate change (>50%).
If we use the system’s search feature for abstracts that meet this requirement, we get 65 results. That is 65, out of the 12,000+ examined abstracts. Not only is that value incredibly small, it is smaller than another value listed in the paper:
Reject AGW 0.7% (78)
Remembering AGW stands for anthropogenic global warming, or global warming caused by humans, take a minute to let that sink in. This study done by John Cook and others, praised by the President of the United States, found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it."
Boy, warmists are really bad at math!
If you go against the consensus you are anti-science!
What you say is definitively true. But that is not the point of the article, the point is to verify that the vast majority of experts believes (base don their study) that global warming is man made. Yet everybody you talk to tends to say to "experts are still debating". Well, with these numbers they are not still debating, they are pretty much convinced.
Yet, they might be wrong. But policies have to be made based on experts opinion. And that opinion is not properly represented in the media.
Strawman argument: no one is saying the studies are valid because there's a consensus about it. They're valid based on the science IN those studies. What the consensus means is that we are idiots to not invest in trying to avoid it. Perhaps it would have been foolish to start heavily taxing coal and oil back in the 70's or 80's, as climate change may have proven to be a false hypothesis, but now it's foolish not to. Or at least extraordinarily selfish and short-sighted.
Actually according to them, only 32.6% "of climate science papers agree on it":
We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. source
Right, you can never validate a hypothesis in science. You can only fail to falsify it. In other words, no one can seem to come up with another good explanation for the warming we've observed, so we've failed to falsify the idea that it's due to carbon dioxide emissions, a hypothesis first proposed in 1896. That doesn't mean it's the truth, but I sure know which way I'd bet!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
"Appeal to authority" isn't always a problem. It can be a problem when the "authorities" aren't actually subject matter experts, and it's a fallacy when applied in deductive reasoning (not inductive, however).
Even though it is true that a significant majority of scientists who study climate change agree that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that will cause warming, the real debate still rages on in regards to the feedback effect that CO2 actually has in influencing the rate of warming. When you frame the question on the issue of 'does CO2 cause global warming', the answer is a unanimous 'yes'. When you frame the question in terms of the actual issue- 'will CO2 warming cause a feedback effect that will lead to the destruction of life on earth', the answer is anything but unanimous.
Proof is for mathematics and liquor. Science provides the best explanation based on current data, and there best explanation at the moment is that CO2 emissions from manmade sources are a major cause of observed climate change.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Absolutely not true.
A huge swath of that 3% was dealing with non-climate change matters, and didn't take climate change into account for their results. I think what I've heard is that when it comes to peer-reviewed articles explicitly opposed to AGW, there was just one in the past decade. Out of tens of thousands.
Of course there are sheningans abound. To start with, I'm pretty sure that at least 97% of all scientific papers aren't about global warming, greenhouse gases, or atmospheric science at all.
Like the cat food advert, this should probably say " 97% of all scientific papers which expressed a preference..."
Most Americans have a shaky understanding of cause and effect, courtesy of years of public education where feelings trump facts, opinions trump research, ineptitude trumps ability, and equal outcomes trump equal opportunity. As a result, other than saying "stop global warming", nobody really cares - they assume that "someone" will fix it, and that someone is probably "the government". You'll hear things like "global warming is bad, but I need a minivan to drive my 4 kids (which I _chose_ to have) to soccer" or "they should just tax rich people" or "blame China". Nobody wants to be the guy who actually sacrifies anything.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
So whatever the majority of scientists say is canon, and if you go against it, you're being heretical. If you're being heretical, then you float, which means you're made of wood, and therefore, are a witch. BURN the witch!!
I can't disagree ... witches are a renewable resource
Let's not kid ourselves, we are not naive here. The whole point of this article is to tell people that the experts are not debating and are in fact in a consensus on this issue (check the reply above you http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3760341&cid=43752173 ). My point is, I wouldn't care if it was the opposite, I would still believe it because it is based on sound science.
the point is to verify that the vast majority of experts believes (base don their study) that global warming is man made.
Is entirely man-made or man contributed to it? Those are two very different statements. If we only contribute that suggests that it's going to happen no matter what we do, the best we could hope for is to delay the inevitable. Given the history of the planet, I think this is the more likely scenario and we would be better off spending our energy figuring out how, as a species, to survive it when it inevitably happens.
If Rush Limbaugh is saying that you should judge a what man really believes by his actions and not his empty rhetoric, then he's right.
I thought that being a good scientist meant looking at facts objectively instead of fitting the facts to your predisposed feelings. I guess that must be the "old white guy" science that has fortunately been superseded by collective groupthink.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Here's the way I see it. Scientists are like any other professionals. The ones that are doing top level research are the elites of their field. Some deniers will say that it is just everyone just covering each other when you get 97% consensus. At their level, you don't win grants and Nobel prizes by proving something everyone else has proven. You get them by discovering something no one else has found before. Scientists are arrogant and opinionated as much as your professional athlete, top notch lawyer, whatever. If you've ever attended meetings, discussions can delve into nasty fights reminiscent of British parliament debates. If 97% of them agree on something, then the science is probably sound.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
"Appeal to authority" isn't always a problem. It can be a problem when the "authorities" aren't actually subject matter experts
Precisely
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Secondly, they don't all believe in the same god.
Thirdly, they don't have any evidence of their god being real.
Indeed in all ways noted, the deniers (such as yourself) are more like the priests.
97% of deniers believe AGW is a fraud.
They don't believe in the same reason for that being true. And they have no evidence of their personal belief in their stated reason for it being a fraud.
Science doesn't have a way to deal with the idea that a large number of scientist agree on something that is wrong either. As a scientist working in a different field, I assure you it is very hard to publish anything on the unpopular view point. No matter how much data you have.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Unfortunately, voting is not science. 99% of scientist used to say that "the Earth was flat", that "the Earth was the center of the Universe", that... All proved wrong.
I'm not arguing one way or the other on global warming but rather that having agreement is not a good metric.
By the way, I'm not a global warming skeptic. In fact, I'm pro-warming, it's better than the alternative of global cooling!
And yet, the planet seem to persistently refuse to get warmer...
Despite what all the measurements say. It's amazing what a deceiving bastard the planet is. I say we kill it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
And why don't more people on this thread realize this? Everyone is saying "97% of scientists agree" when really, 2/3 of scientists didn't even take a position!
In other news, only a minority of physics papers agree that conservation of energy is real. The rest don't even mention it.
I find your lack of understanding of the philosophy and method of science disturbing.
In science, one can very rarely, if ever, "prove it irrefutably". One makes hypotheses to explain observations. The hypotheses must make testable predictions. The longer an hypothesis stands against scrutiny, and the more its predictions are verified, and the more new evidence is discovered which fits into the hypothesis, the more accepted it is considered.
Also, you say "else the first scientist to come along with better proof than yours will knock the whole house of cards down". My ignorant friend, this is exactly what science is. Exactly. If this were not the case it would not be science. At some point an accepted hypothesis becomes Theory, which is to say that if some contradictory observation were to be verified, it would necessitate a world-view-changing paradigm shift. Think, for example, of the revolution from Newtonian physics to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics; an important thing to note is that the previous Theory was not even disproved - only its boundaries of accurate description of reality more rigorously defined.
That 97% of the body of published climate science finds in favour of the man-made global warming hypothesis, but none of the 3% against has yet managed to present verified disproof means it is only those ignorant of science that would disagree simply on the grounds of personal comfort.
That's absolute poppycock. Anyone who knows geometry (I assume all competent scientists do) and investigates the situation will quickly determine the Earth is round.
The Pythaogoreans speculated the Earth was round in the 6th century BC, and Eratosthenes proved it and came up with a pretty accurate measure of it's diameter in the 3rd century BC. He even devised a system of longtitude and latitude.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth
WHAT DO THEY TEACH IN SCHOOL THESE DAYS?
The idea that scientists though the Earth was flat in the 1800s is the most ridiculous thing I have read on slashdot, I have a 5 digit ID!!!
On the other hand if 97% of climate science papers would agree on climate change NOT happening, this would be it. Case closed. Nobody would ever talk about it again.
But saying that 97% of climate science papers agree on it does not validate it.
The article does not say that. What it says is that 97% that take a stance, take a pro-human-cause stance. But nowhere does it say what percentage take a stance.
... there's really no scientific consensus about this. It's entirely irresponsible to report this as though it were an unchallenged fact. We need a more "fair and balanced" approach to the topic. We really need to hear from experts from the Flat Earth Society to provide a counter point.
http://theflatearthsociety.org/
What about a situation in which 97.1% of people studying something come to a particular conclusion, while the 2.9% don't actually produce any evidence but merely claim that the evidence of the 97.1% is insufficient, while many of them just happen to be on the payroll of people who have a major financial interest in the conclusion in question not being true?
Because this is basically what the conversation looks like right now:
97.1%: "Foo points to this conclusion."
2.9%: "No, that's not enough evidence. What about Bar?"
97.1%: "We spent a couple of years looking at Bar, and that points to the same conclusion."
2.9%: "Well, but what about Foobar?"
97.1%: "After another couple of years of study, we know that Foobar points to the same conclusion."
2.9%: "Well, but what about Baz?"
This will continue until the consequences of the conclusion cause major disruptions to the status quo.
And I should point out that there's no real relationship between the beliefs of scientists and the beliefs of the general public, while there is a relationship between the beliefs of scientists and actually proven scientific truth. For instance, approximately 100% of biologists believe that the Theory of Evolution is basically right, while only 54% of the American public agrees with them.
I am officially gone from
The ancient greeks knew that the earth was round. They even had a pretty good estimate of its radius, and the distance to the sun.
Why is it MAN made? Why not WOMAN made?
I see more women driving the largest SUV possible. MY wife spends far more time in the bathroom running tons of electrical devices.
Help fight the Sexism in climate science!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Conversely, discounting the majority of scientific finding because it does not match what a particular group wants does not mean they are right. It does however mean that they have to provide better models then the majority.
Put another way, in science, the majority usually IS right, and there is a well established method for showing otherwise. Thus using majority opinion as an indicator of correctness, while not infallible, is generally pretty good. If nothing else the probability of 3% allowing political belief to influence their conclusions is greater then 97% doing so.
I believe you misunderstand the fallacy. Credentials are important for a reason: for the same reason we don't let just anyone set out a shingle and perform surgery, having a means of identifying people with specific knowledge is helpful in deciding whether that person is likely to be providing information of value. No one says that means the person in question cannot be wrong, and anyone who uses credentialism to deny the possibility of error is indeed committing a fallacy. But simply saying that someone is more likely to know what they're talking about because they have the background to demonstrate knowledge of a certain field is NOT a fallacy. Ironically, you yourself prove why listening to people who are not subject matter experts is potentially a bad idea by citing incorrect information about global warming, which I suspect you garnered by refusing to listen to those who know what they're talking about.
Kythe
You mean Rush Limbaugh, the talk show guy who has said that there is no such thing as drug addiction but went to rehab for prescription pills? The same guy that has gone on and on about Christian ideals of marriage but has been divorced himself three times? I think the word here is "hypocrit". The same guy who made fun of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson ticks and called Sandra Fluke a whore because she testified before Congress on contraception. The word here is "asshole". Why should we listen to an asshole hypocrit.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
97% of Climate Science Papers Agree Global Warming Is Man-made
Slashdot: news for nerds, stuff that's obvious.
If RIGHT, can you do anything about it with 7 billion people in the world, most of which don't care!
Some skeptics like Richard Muller didn't dispute the climate change's basic premise. He just didn't think there was enough evidence to draw a conclusion. With more evidence (including some he gathered himself), he has reversed his position.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
97.1% of the abstracts that take a stance on AGW endorse it. Abstracts that don't take a stance either way don't provide any relevant data here.
I think the word you're lookinh for is Anthropogenic, Anthropomorphism is something else entirely. The rest of your point isn't even worth refuting. If you want a massive grant to prove global warming isn't real, pop into your nearest Shell or BP office, you'll come out with stuffed with cash!
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
97% of scientists agree that global warming has the best and strongest proof. Now what?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Yes, a lot of climatologists agree that there is a modest increase in global temperatures.
That in no way qualifies them to make statements or predictions about economics, agriculture, land use, or politics, and they certainly have no right to dictate to the rest of us how we make tradeoffs between current and future consumption.
Anecdotes that you read someplace on the interwebs do not qualify as evidence.
there was no situation like that. The people who didn't get published had no facts to support them, and then whined that there was some sort of conspiracy against them.
You know what? they also won't run critiques saying gravity isn't real either.
" I'm saying that our ability to judge the severity and impact is hindered by this stupid 'silence the opposition' attitude."
And you are wrong.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
On what issue? That global average temperatures have been going up, to some (perhaps modest) degree due to human activity? Sure. But that agreement doesn't translate into anything meaningful conclusion.
Trouble is that AGW activists falsely portray this minor point of agreement as if there was widespread agreement on their predictions, scenarios, or proposed actions.
I think you might be on to something. For example, it's basically impossible for those studying the Stork Theory of Reproduction to gain any government funding. Same problem with those looking into the Green Cheese Theory of The Moon. Obviously this mere fact invalidates biology and cosmology.
The problem is that science . . . as a scholarly field as opposed to the practice of science . . . has no way to deal with the idea that a significant percentage of our leaders are in willful denial of the sound science. The reality of the research is defeated by their ideology.
Mathematics as a scholarly field has no way to deal with the fact that idiots exist in this world either. Should we abolish logic and proofs, and just prove by consensus?
Like, "Euler thought this statement was true... who dares opine against him?"
You know what, this kind of thinking held back scientific progress for a while, when they thought Aristotle (and the community consensus) was infallible.
Don't quote me on this.
Most scientists after 500 BC believed the earth was spherical based on empirical evidence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth#Classical_Greece
"After the 5th century BC, no Greek writer of repute thought the world was anything but round."
Hell, Eratosthenes, in 240BC, got the diameter approximately right at ~25,000 miles.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Read the actual paper. It doesn't say that 97% of scientists agree on something. The article misinterpreted it the paper, and the Slashdot summary followed the article.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What the consensus means is that we are idiots to not invest in trying to avoid it.
Wait, what?
Let's assume it is unquestionably true that AGW is true. Why does it follow that we should invest in trying to avoid it?
I'm not saying it's unequivocally a bad idea to do so, but given that you're using the term "invest", you probably know you have the cost of investment and the expected payout. How could you intelligently invest in something if you don't even have these figured out?
I haven't heard of any solid data suggesting what the actual cost and benefits are, beyond the "sky is falling" arguments, which I don't think is what the 97% consensus is about. Besides, the point of "you're not a climate research scientist" goes both ways. On what grounds are scientists credible in making economic and policy changes without consulting actual economists and policy makers?
Don't quote me on this.
Anthropomorphic global warming. Hee hee.
"Oh yeah, baby. I'm going to warm you up real good. I'm getting all up in your temperate climates and turning them into deserts. Yeah, you like that? Let me put on some Barry White. Now let's melt those glaciers off your top."
Taxes out how we pay for civilization.
If we want wide scale action, then taxes will be part of it, if for nothing else then as an incentive.
Taxes are not good or bad, no matter what people say. They are how we pay for things. We can discuss if the things we pay for have merit..sadly most people aren't really qualified to have the discussion.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If man had something to do with it, and our activity is essentially increasing exponentially with new humans being born all the time (and China kicking industrial action into high gear), then wouldn't the impact on climate also be exponential?
No, actually. CO2 concentrations increase temperature logarithmicly, so while population is increasing at a decreasing exponential rate (expected to hit 0% growth this century), the higher the concentration of CO2 goes, the less warming each addition ppm actualy contributes.
Human activity has been increasing, yet the whole warming thing STALLED 17 years ago.
You math is off, the warming trend is flat if (and only if) you take start from the fall of 1997, and that's 16 years currently. However, that's a cherry-picked start date and there are problems with choosing your data to make a particular point. more generally,you can always draw flat trend lines on noisy data regardless of whether the overall trend is up, down or constant.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Actually, one scientist already destroyed this whole 'overwhelming numbers agree' argument.
Short version: It does not matter how many or what percentage of a given group agrees with a politically-charged position. What does matter is who is actually right. Anyone trying to make an argument based on majorities is doing so from a failing position. Don't just agree with each other - prove it irrefutably, else the first scientist to come along with better proof than yours will knock the whole house of cards down.
DENIER!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Some skeptics like Richard Muller didn't dispute the climate change's basic premise. He just didn't think there was enough evidence to draw a conclusion. With more evidence (including some he gathered himself), he has reversed his position.
Wrong, it was not a "reversal". His position never really changed.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Gravity is not the best example. The reason is that we really DON'T understand gravity very well. We know that there is a force that we call gravity that causes objects to attract. However we don't have a solid idea how it actually works. We can't get it to unify with the other forces, there are indications that our best theory on it (general relativity) is incomplete and so on.
The FACT of gravity, that objects attract or on a more human scale that shit falls down. We observe this all the time, there's not really a question that there is this force. However the THEORY of gravity, meaning the explanation for what it is and how it works, is something that is not solid.
Now one can of course argue this to global warming as well. There is the fact that average global temperature has been rising, outside of known cycles. There is then the theory as to why, in particular that the primary or exclusive cause is increased atmospheric CO2 levels due to human emissions. One can accept the fact but argue the theory.
Just saying, maybe pick a better example.
I imagine the end of said volcanism toward the end of the period, combined with the fact that Gondwana had up and wandered down to the South Pole might've had something to do with it...
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
Easy. The earth's temperature is controlled by more than carbon. The sun's output, the amount volcanic ash and gases, positions of the continents. So how do we know that the global warming is caused by carbon dioxide. Easy. It is caused by CO2 and all the other things. How do we know this? We have physicists and chemists who we pay to study it. They are generally quite effective at producing verifiable results. When all the other things are equal, and you raise CO2, then it being a heat trapping gas, the laws of thermodynamics say we get an increase in temperature.
Ah, but who says the other things are being constant? No one. They change too, but they can also change in a direction we'd rather they didn't. So all in all, we're left with controlling the things we can control and hoping for the Flying Spaghetti Monster to control the rest.
You on the other hand are feeling lucky....huh....punk?
No, in 1490 the Church knew the Earth was round. The fact is that any educated person from the 3rd century BC on in Europe knew the Earth was round. In 1477 the Vatican commissioned two globes for the new Vatican library.
Not true. By the 1490s, it had already been pretty well established that the earth was round. It was the uneducated masses and official church dogma that this was not true, and this created a climate where openly saying the earth was round was not exactly a safe position to take.
This is untrue on many many levels:
1. The Earth was established quite conclusively as round and had been measured to within about 1000km by about 250 BCE. The Flat Earth Theory was not even considered remotely seriously by the 1490's.
2. The church dogma and common knowledge at the time was not that the Earth was flat, but that the spherical Earth was the center of the universe, and that the moon, planets, sun, and stars moved around it (the church dogma was that God made them move the way they appeared to move). That's what Galileo got in trouble for challenging, not the Flat Earth Theory.
3. The reason you're thinking that some people thought the world was flat in the 1490's is that Washington Irving made up the story over 300 years later to make Christopher Columbus seem more heroic than he really was, and history textbooks have been repeating the lie ever since. The real story is that the Earth was known to be much larger than Columbus was claiming in his sales pitch, so when smart monarchs consulted their scholars (or their own learning) they had every reason to believe Columbus was either a charlatan or an idiot, and turned him down. The only reason Columbus discovered anything was the fairly weak Spanish monarchy's desperation for a way around the Middle East and sheer dumb luck.
I am officially gone from
It seems to me that you have labeled this as a fallacy known as "appeal to belief" incorrectly. The 97% are not just anybody, but are papers from peer reviewed journals. These are authorities. The argument in this case is an appeal to authority, but it is not a fallacious appeal because in this case, the ones claiming to be authorities in fact are so qualified.
The study is just another case in point demonstrating the strong consensus among climate scientists that AGW is real.
Observed reality: carbon dioxide levels increased from 315 ppm in 1960 to 400 ppm today.
The second null hypothesis is: During history, surface temperatures change within well known limits, thus today's average surface temperatures are not unpreceeded. Wellknown long term phenomenons like glaciers should thus be on levels we know from the history books.
Observed reality: Glaciers in Europe are at their lowest level ever, pointing to stronger melting than ever in history.
The third null hypothesis is: Global Earth temperatures are not dominated by the green house effect, but by other effects like the amount of energy it gets from the sun.
Observed reality: The surface temperature of the Earth, given its albedo and the amount of energy it gets from the sun, should be around 270 K, in fact it is more close to 290 K.
Call me a denier for asking a question.
A new game. Few or none of the people here are doing that.
If 400ppm CO2 is causing global warming, then can someone please explain to me how the Earth's climate was cooler during the late Ordovician period [geocraft.com] when CO2 was about 4400ppm?
See here.
The answer to the puzzle you ask about was unknown for quite some time. It was one of the legitimate objections to the AGW theory. However, serious scientists looked for an answer rather than dismissing it. I've been following the AGW debate for 10-15 years. I wasn't convinced up until about 10 years ago, because there were many serious questions. One by one though most of the serious objections have been explained. That isn't proof (proof doesn't exist in science anyway) but there is a clear trajectory, which seems like a good way to bet. I'll take it on faith that you asked that question in all seriousness. However there are denialists who keep raising the same objections year after year, and most of them were legitimate objections at one time, but they ignore the explanations that have since been found for them.
It's getting boring you know?
"Short version: It does not matter how many or what percentage of a given group agrees with a politically-charged position. What does matter is who is actually right. Anyone trying to make an argument based on majorities is doing so from a failing position. Don't just agree with each other - prove it irrefutably, else the first scientist to come along with better proof than yours will knock the whole house of cards down."
I should remind you what your position for last 4 years have been about GW?
"There are lot of scientists (almost half) who disagree with this notion that this is global climate change is somehow related to man actions, so suck it, we won't change our life style."
So this is now invalidated.
For actual truth - you *don't* care. Because you have already made up your mind. You have to justify arguing against it, therefore you look to find more and more even laughable arguments against it. For me - I can accept that we can discover that situation is much more complex than we thought. Man made gases sure make impact, but how it plays out in atmosphere - we don't know fully.
And there's problem. For such large scale things you can't get full 100% understanding of things - or you can, when it's already too late to change anything. You have to make a chance. Now, you can do it solely on the faith like you guys like to do it. It rarely ends up right, but people tend to do that, so I can relate with that. People don't like idea that their current way of living can cause serious backslash. Because hey, living good is great, right? In fact, no scientist, no environmentalist are saying wishing to have good life is bad. However it really depends what that means. Can we do better with power waste? Yes, we can. Power resources? There's tons of them, and some of them are much cleaner than fossil fuels. Why avoid unpleasant truth?
You know that even Fox News pundits have admitted that global climate change could be caused by humans? They have this "But what we can do about it? China, Inda, etc." line, but still, they at least out of denial line. That's start - for changing things and attitude.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
What you say is true however this study covers papers from the past 22 years since 1991. Given the controversy around the subject the fact that no one has been able to come up with a serious challenge to the dominant paradigm in climate science in all that time is telling. Any scientist who was able to come up with something that overturned current climate science would certainly cement their reputation in the annals of history.
. . . well, to be fair, the same contingent of "geniuses" took us to war in Iraq based on a "1% chance" that Saddam Hussein had WMD. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"Vote for us, or coastal cities will get flooded, there will be mass starvation and wars, bankers will rob you blind, and gunmen will kill your children in mass shootings!"
Yup, the politics of fear is our problem.
Let's start with Arrhenius over 100 years ago. The falsifiable claim is that burning fossil fuels will raise the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and cause warming. We have observed the warming. Had we not, it would have falsified the hypothesis. Surely you've been following this over the years and this is all old news.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
You fail to understand many things.
Most importantly, you fail to understand the idea of "increased variance." The predictions of global warming period is not that it will get hotter all the time; or that it will get cooler all the time; but that there will be an increased frequency of oscillations between cooling and warming at rates not previously observed. It is this oscillation, this switching back and forth between heating and cooling too rapidly, that is the evidence for the global warming hypothesis (same goes for tornado strength). This is called "scatter."
Second, you fail to understand that "testable predictions" means reproducing past events. Global climate models cannot reproduce the temperature record for the past without including man-made heating during the industrial revolution. These same models, when run into the future, predict increased scatter and increasing mean temperature, with a scatter level that's high and a mean increase that's slow.
These two points continually have been mis-explained to the public, and the advocates for policy change to reverse climate change have failed miserably at getting these points through to the public---hence your post.
Please include any time when they stated a falsifiable claim.
They claim that global warming is man-made. This is a falsifiable claim: with enough understanding of the climate you can either find an alternative mechanism which is the cause of the heating or you can understand the man-made mechanism in enough detail that there is no room for doubt. This is not at all easy but there is no requirement that things be easily falsifiable.
So, if it gets hotter, it's global warming, if it gets colder, it's global warming. In the end, there's no way to prove it wrong. By your own definition, that's not science.
The climate is a complex beast and disturbing it can easily cause local cooling even if the overall global trend is to warm up. For example if the melting Greenland ice cap dumps enough fresh water into the Atlantic to disrupt the Gulf Stream then northern Europe will get a LOT colder. If there are reasonable, verifiable mechanisms for local then it is not unreasonable to have local cooling caused by global heating.
If you want to attack this survey then there are far better way to do it: which journals did they use and are they reputable? were the search criteria biased in any way and were control samples using a random selection of articles without the initial selection bias checked for a consistent result? Even if the survey was completely unbiased in every way can you really draw any sensible conclusions from numbers of papers?
As a scientist what I truly find really objectionable though is that this is science! You should make up your mind based on evidence not on what other people's opinions are: this is not some popularity contest! Personally I think the evidence for global warming is overwhelming and it is highly likely that humans are some or all of the reason behind it but don't believe me: I could easily be wrong! Listen to what the evidence is and make up your own mind.
I don't think you've been listening hard if you haven't heard of the Sterm Review. It's 700 pages long and doesn't refer to the sky falling at all. I keep seeing references to "sky is falling" arguments, but I haven't heard of any. Could you point me to one?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
That would have all been interesting, if it had happened. Too bad for the fossil fuel industry that it really didn't.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I was totally with you until you said:
--snip--
That 97% think that man is causing climate change does not mean that it is right. It simply means it is the best theory that fits the observations
--snip--
This is only a statistic about published papers. The statistic might say more about which models are most considered for publication than which models best fit the observations.
A better study might look at the scrutiny applied to these 97% vs the *rejected* papers that disagreed with the 97%.
Again, all we have here is a statistic about paper publishing.
They might as well have scanned over the "common" media (TV, newspapers, etc) and generated similar statistics.
You cannot do these type of studies and from these data conclude what the "best" theory is. You can only say what is the most popular. Well, most popular *published*.
So, the fact that both Tornadic activity in the United States and Cyclonic Activity globally are at 50 year lows all point to this "increased activity". Somewhere you have failed to notice that your claims must be backed up with data. Also, you have failed to explain why the actual global temperatures over the last 30 years have come in below the lowest predicted warming of all the models used by the IPCC, yet they continue to increase the predicted response. The last IPCC report posited a 3.0 degreeC/century rise in temperature, while actual data points at 1.2 degrees C/century or lower.
I work in computer science, and there's a name for a model which cannot predict, it's called "broken" or "incomplete". The fact that you now wish to make multi-trillion dollar, economy-wrecking, and real-life endangering decisions based on computer models that still can't agree with each other, much less the facts, is frightening beyond belief.
The amazing thing to me is that the same crowd that doesn't trust a banana with an extra gene inserted through a science evolved through 60 years of study, or grown with a fertilizer used for 80 years without a downside, are completely willing to take steps that will result in starvation, civil wars, and economic catastrophe over an increase of 0.012% of a particularly harmless gas in the atmosphere, which is required for life on Earth. A gas which, during the most life-bearing phase of the earth's history, was almost 20 times as abundant. All of which is based on computer programs developed by non-computer programmer programmers, over the course of a few months, which are less than accurate in the short term, and whose predictions are wildly inaccurate over the long term.
Not to mention, if tree-rings are such great thermometers, why has the dendrochronological record not been updated since the 1980's? Surely in the billions being funneled to climate research, someone can pay some grad students $10 an hour to go get some tree cores with a hand-drill every weekend?
Most of these climate scientists wouldn't know the climate it if rained on them.
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Arrhenius stated only that CO2 acted to absorb heat (long-wave infra-red radiation for the nitpickers). He posited that if you added CO2 to the atmosphere the heat would increase. What Arrhenius didn't know, or didn't fully grasp, is that at 280ppm, the atmospheric CO2 already absorbs 97% of all incoming long-wave infra-red radiation. Doubling the CO2 to 560ppm, would not make it absorb 194% of the radiation, it would make it absorb about 99% of the incoming radiation. Since CO2 accounts for approximately 4-7 degrees C of the Earth's warming (there's arguments on the exact figure) that would be an increase of about 0.08 to 0.14 degrees C. Now, there are some factors that add to that (re-radiation, tropospheric concentration and re-reflection of albedo infra-red, etc) that could make that as much as 1 degree C of surface warming. But that's it.
Adding twice the CO2 doesn't mean twice the temperature. And the feedback mechanisms are neutral to negative. They must be, or the 7000ppm CO2 of the carboniferous period would have resulted in Earth looking like a ball of molten rock.
Now, let's get back to the real point.
Climate scientists continue to make statements like, "We can expect more Katrina's every year!" Yet the U.S. is now in its longest cycle without a major hurricane landing since records began being kept in the 1930's. "We can expect more tornados to ravage cities across the U.S.!", yet tornadic activity across the U.S. is at a 50 year low. Total thunderstorms are average at best, and while there is some evidence of slightly stronger convection cells, there's a certain bias in the fact that we never before had satellites capable of sampling and quantifying such activity in seconds rather than days.
In short, the evidence all points the other way.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm no shill for gas or oil or coal. I'd rather see all of it go away. Give me clean, safe, cheap, plentiful nuclear power every day of the week over all of that. Preferably LFTR designs spread out like candy all over the country. I'd love fusion too, but like my Grandfather who was promised to see it "within his lifetime" and died in 1988, I'm not holding my breath on that one.
Solar power is a joke, with its rare earths and sulfur-hexafluoride washes doing a dozen times more damage to the environment then they'll ever recover in a lifetime. We've already tapped 95% or more of the hydropower on Earth, and I doubt the birds will live through putting up enough windmills to power a typical city, much less the planet. Not to mention, that has it's own problems. Wind Power Potential Overestimated
Your point, "We've seen warming" ignores the one great thing about climate change -- the climate is a complex system -- it is always changing. It is a vast, living, breathing system taking in all life on earth, all changes in the sun, all chemistry in the oceans, every wave, every sunbeam, every butterfly flapping its wings. It must be constantly changing. We are looking at a tiny sliver of it and saying, "Oh no, we're all doomed!" We act as if we want the climate never to change, not one iota, not one jot.
The climate never changes on Venus, on Mercury, on Mars... They all have one thing in common. They're dead worlds.
Give me a changing climate any day over that.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.