Yeah, why bother trying to back up your argument with evidence when you just know someone is going to disagree with it, no matter how right you are? That'd be crazy!
It's much more effective to pay for campaign contributions, think tanks, lobbyists and PR firms to promote your interests, instead of trying to prove those interests aren't damaging the pesky old earth.
Yeah, because such evidence is available. How exactly you compare "global funding by all governments" vs "global funding by private industries." You can make a guess one way or the other, but don't try to pretend you have evidence either unless you have a mountain-high stack of invoices marked "climate research" on your desk..
The EPA have been given too much power by a President who would rather accomplish his aims without soiling himself with open debate and/or the possibility of defeat. I'm glad the People's house has moved to curb the EPA's power/mandate.
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If you want to know how much you can trust the predictive power of climate scientists, all you have to do is look back at the great Global cooling fiasco.
There was no global cooling fiasco. The vast majority of the science in the 70's predicted warming, not cooling.
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Originally Posted by Flame Of Liberty
To say that current science has the ability to construct credible models (with understanding of all variables that come into play) with any kind of predictive power 50-100 years into the future is well...crazy.
They can take historical data and run it through the models and see if it predicts the later past data. They can take events like volcano eruptions and make predictions based on their models about changes in temperature and then measure them to see if they are right. Predictions over the last decade of warming have come in low, it warmed more than projected.
Models aren't perfect of course, they're models. The only way to model something perfectly is to have that thing.
However to say that science can't construct predictive models is just wrong, because they have. You have to be able to to put someone on the moon.
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Originally Posted by Flame Of Liberty
Climate science is where the funding is. There's boatloads of money to be made in the save the planet hysteria, and climatologists want to eat as well. Simple as that.
Climate science funding has been on the decline and is small compared to other areas of research. Climatologists don't make much. I had a great article on this "funding" fallacy but I can't find it. I'll keep looking.
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Originally Posted by Flame Of Liberty
As for clima-science, how exactly their experiments could be conducted under the same conditions? How do you recreate "state of the climate" 1000 years ago? 10 000 years ago? Climate is not static and any "scientific" models must be simplified because the reality is just too complex and variables are not fully understood.
There's a big difference between not fully understood and not understood at all.
You don't need a lab experiment to do science, entire branches of science study things that you can't bring into a lab. Astronomy, cosmology, geology, anthropology, sociology, etc..
Not being able to recreate the life of a star in the lab does make it more difficult to isolate for variables or what have you, but that doesn't make the endeavor of science impossible.
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Originally Posted by Flame Of Liberty
The problem is that these simplified models simply do not have any predictive or explanatory power
Except they do, because they use them to predict the past and the future.
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Originally Posted by Flame Of Liberty
so all the can do is hand pick random data from the past and draw random curves 100 years into the future. The trend is "up" so we'll keep drawing an upward curve until something happens that will dramatically change the trend but no one has any idea if and when and how will this something happen...
Sure I could see how you would not think climate science had merit if that's how they did things, but it isn't. The research gives details as to what conditions are related to what changes, what the knowns are and what the unknowns are and what impact the unknowns might have.
The real science looks nothing like one reads in newspapers and on websites.
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Yeah, because such evidence is available. How exactly you compare "global funding by all governments" vs "global funding by private industries." You can make a guess one way or the other, but don't try to pretend you have evidence either unless you have a mountain-high stack of invoices marked "climate research" on your desk..
What's your point? That somehow there's a global government cabal keen on funding the climatechange myth?
Words escape me to explain how stupid this is.
If I must, as a former civil servant, I can undeniably tell you that "governments" are made up of regular old educated people. They're civil servants that go to serve in some way the public interest. In Canada, these Governments met with scientists, reviewed the research of their own funded scientists and reviewed the research of all independent scientists and came to the ordinary, uncontroversial opinion that this is a real phenomenon and it's a huge problem.
There was no X-Files guy with a cigarette instructing us to fabricate briefing notes to develop this elaborate hoax. There were no fake conferences of leading thinkers and analysts to discuss these issues. There were no vested interests trying to push this agenda.
Now conversely, there were alot of people outside of government telling us to ignore the problem, telling us that it would be economically suicidal to do anything about it, and telling us that there would be hell to pay if we acknolwedged it. That was private industry who saw things to lose.
Sadly, you're just a shill for that opinion. Any reasonably minded person can go and look up the independent research and analysis and conclude that this is happening. If you can't then you should explain yourself as to why in a way that is convincing.
That was the failing in this post. A global government conspiracy is not only unconvincing, it's downright insulting to regular peoples' intelligence.
I don't beleive in heart attacks.
I beleive that people die with pain in their chests, but I don't accept that 'medical scientists' really understand why.
I don't actually know much about medical silence but I assume most people that get into medical science are just there for the easiest buck and don't really understand/care when they're wrong.
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Originally Posted by calgaryred
I don't believe in global warming, and there are many that don't
Statements like this just drive me nuts.
You can't believe or not believe in a scientific theory.
You can choose to accept conclusions based on data, but there is no such thing as "Believing" in global warming.
My own stance is that climatechange is an undisbutable fact. The climate on this planet has been in a state of change for the last 4.5 billion years. What impact humans have had on the rate of change, is debatable, and not something I've seen enough evidence about to draw any sort of reliable conclusions.
That being said, tying to limit our impact on the environment is something that we should strive to do regardless, as a reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions is directly linked to our reduction in the use of non-renewable fossil fuels, and probably to an overall increase in our own health.
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Not that I always agree with lobbying, but Koch Industries does have a pretty good foot print in Alberta. Not surprising that they would try to lobby the government.
So to wind the story down, a climate "skeptic" (skeptic in this instance as the truest sense of the word - a guy who really has to see it before he believes it) in Richard Muller of Berkeley - a physicist who is critical of the excesses of climate scientists and who brings a fresh set of eyes without the layers of history and acrimony on this file - is paid by Koch Industries to have a look at the key sticking points of climate science in its current form.
Prior to releasing his findings, a number of climate deniers (not skeptics) smugly announce that they will defer to his judgement, almost knowingly waiting for one of "their guys" to come and denounce the science something they had been waiting for. Anthony Watts whom I sure many yokels in this thread read regularly said that he was “prepared to accept whatever result Muller produced, even if it proves my premise wrong.” That is of course, until he was actually proven wrong, when Watts then regressed saying that Muller was “a man driven by a very serious agenda.”
What a sad joke.
What Muller found was that the main assumptions around medieval warming, the three key historical climate datasets were in fact correct.
So what next? Just flat out lying is left? I guess it would be so becoming.
Overall, the takeaway from Dr Muller’s presentation of his team’s data is that, in the words of one climate scientist, a “Koch-brothers-funded study confirms the previous temperature reconstructions.” Dr Muller says the team will now be looking into a number of other effects, including the bias that the “urban heat island” effect—cities are warmer than surrounding countryside—might have. The question of good versus bad location is linked to this (a good site can become bad as a city sprawls over it) and so is the issue of which records you choose to use (long records, preferred by earlier reconstructions, may be more prone to changing urbanisation around them). But there is more to the problem, and Dr Muller hopes to look into it further, as well as into issues that might arise from the times of day at which observations are made, stations moving from one place to another, and changes in the instrumentation used.
The Berkeley work, especially after it is published and disseminated in full, may increase the acceptance of the reality of global warming among people who have so far managed to maintain a comforting and sometimes self-serving feeling that maybe the people who deny that anything is going on are actually right. It doesn’t in itself show how much of the warming is due to human activity. Dr Muller, in a somewhat cavalier way, chose to suggest that about half of what had been seen since 1900 was. Other scientists would put the proportion higher.
There is a very simple children's science project you can do that simulates the effects of greenhouse gases and global climatechange.
If you build 2 closed systems, say glass enclosures sealed with tape. You have one with normal concentrations of atmospheric gases and then in the other you increase the level of greenhouse gases. Expose them both to sunlight for the same amount of time then remove them. The enclosue with more greenhouse gases will keep its temperature longer.
The greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere have to go somewhere... they just don't disappear. Overall, the concentrations only change slightly, but even slight changes in temperature averages over long periods can damage ecosystems that are tuned to very specific changes.
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The greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere have to go somewhere... they just don't disappear. Overall, the concentrations only change slightly, but even slight changes in temperature averages over long periods can damage ecosystems that are tuned to very specific changes.
I want to try this out now with respective concentrations of the earth's atmosphere now with and without human emitted CO2.
...If only I had the time.
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It doesn’t in itself show how much of the warming is due to human activity.
There is no doubt with respect to the existence of climatechange (to me anyhow)...to what degree humans have affected the climate is the bigger question.
Not sure what the 1% represents. About 750 gigatons of CO2 move through the carbon cycle each year, humans contribute about 30 gigatons of CO2. A small number compared to the total, however there's no sink to offset all that contribution, so most of what we put into the atmosphere stays there, adding up year over year.
Water vapor is a very powerful GHG, but because it goes into and out of the atmosphere quickly it's an amplifier rather than a primary driver. EDIT: The amount of moisture in the air is directly related to the temperature. CO2 increases, which warms the air, which allows it to retain more moisture, amplifying the effect of CO2; a positive feedback loop.
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