Thread: More global warming shown to be false!

Well...as for scientists...there are those who have opposing views but the only ones who get *air time* are the ones who follow the popular theories being pushed...which I feel are really as much about raising taxes on fuels, and in general getting more government control over the populace as they are about any *fact*. Which is why it is still a theory. Do I believe in good stewardship?
Yes I do. Do I think the things being pushed are the answer? No, I don't. I'm not even convinced that *we* can do much about changing the climate. Just ask the dinosaurs. Not to mention, the ice caps on Mars are melting too....I guess too many SUV's up there huh?
Fact is, they don't KNOW what is happening, or more specifically, why it is happening. As a total, our impact is much smaller than we give ourselves credit for. Some of the things they are classifying as "greenhouse gases" are actually beneficial and required for life on the planet-plants breathe Carbon Dioxide the same way we breathe air. Still, if they can make it "scary" and raise more taxes on common people until only the Al Gores of the world can afford cars and jet planes....
I'm rambling. I guess what I'm saying, I believe in stewardship, not regulation by a bunch of politicians who've sided with one sect or other of scientists at the exclusion of any who disagree. These are the same people who used to behead scientists who suggested the world was round, or thought it preposterous that people would fly.

Originally Posted by kerryman71

You're correct in the fact that there are no news channels
that pretty much tell it like it is without their agenda being
thrown in there, but I believe Fox is a little over the top. I
watched it for several years and finally got sick of the obvious
one sided view that their news came from. The others do lean
left, but I believe Fox doesn't just lean right, they lean FAR right.

Like someone said, take some information from one source and
some information from another source and you probably have
a better idea than if you just believe one source alone.

John

I agree with your last statement. As to your first statement, I should point out that FOX news, for all their unpopularity with other networks, has *so far* not to my knowledge been caught at falsifying information (CBS, NBC) and yet nobody hears accusations about *THOSE* networks being untrustworthy anymore....
Fact is, once a person is preconditioned to news slanted one direction or the other, he takes much of it as a foregone conclusion and begins to lose the ability to see the *possibility* that the opposite way of thinking could also be right.
Hence we get people willing to claim the current U.S. president is barely smart enough to tie his own shoes, then in the same paragraph accuse him of duping the leaders of most of the free world into going to war for devices that he somehow invented and (I guess) even convinced Saddam to claim he possessed.
Which is it?
Just because one side agrees with one's personal leanings does not make it always right-but it will *feel* that way. I could listen to public radio (incidentally I don't think I heard a single Bush ad there but lots for Kerry the last time up...could be my timing...) and because my leanings are more to the right (I'm not completely a conservative, more of a nationalist, I guess) I tend to listen to some of the things broadcast as if they were broadcast by the People's Republic Army....which, if we wanted to get into who actually funds who...
Anyway I've heard that suggestion about Fox before, and it's annoying and unfounded. Just because all the other networks take up the policy of encouraging the bashing of the country they broadcast to, doesn't make them any more correct than the *one* that does not.

Sorry for the rant
John P.

Originally Posted by JohnP

Sorry for the rant
John P.

Are you kidding? your "rant" was perfectly wonderful!!

. . . diminutive words will suffice?

RalphS

The dinosaurs were pretty successful for 200 million years on a warmer earth. If global warming is true, and I believe we are not sure yet, I welcome it. I don't live next to the ocean.

bj

I despair of the state of science education in this country.

Of course you can find "scientists" who dispute not only the fact of global warming but also the causal explanation that it is due to increase in carbon dioxide, just like you can find "scientists" that dispute that smoking cigarettes increases your risk of getting cancer, emphysema and other cardio-pulmonary diseases, or "scientists" that dispute the fact of evolution and the theory that natural selection is the main explanation of that evolution. When I say "most scientists," I mean that quite literally. When the vast majority of scientist who are studying the same set of phenomena agree on something, especially when that includes Nobel Laureates, you should pay attention. Scientists are a lot like the rest of you: they're stubborn and independent, and they don't like to accept another scientist's idea unless they've got good reasons and almost no other choice.

Your rant about "theory" bespeaks a typical ignorance of the meaning of the term. General Relativity, which explains the gravitational behavior of massive objects, is "merely" a theory, and Natural Selection, which explains the occurrence of evolution, is likewise just a theory. That there is gravity, and that evolution is occurring and has occurred are facts. Facts are things that no rational person can dispute, though, in themselves, they may be rather difficult to observe. For instance, it is a fact that Jupiter has several moons, though you wouldn't be aware of that fact unless you had a telescope.

A theory is an explanation of why the facts are the way they are. A good scientific theory is always possibly wrong. In other words, there is always some observation that can be made that, if the results of that observation turn out otherwise, that theory would be shown to be false. Bad theories include Freud's theory of psychology, and M-theory, because they are so constructed that either they cannot possibly be false, in which case they're not telling us much, or that no observation can be made which might potentially show them to be false. A good theory will also make a prediction about what we will observe that other theories do not. Strictly speaking, if two theories make exactly the same predictions about what we will observe, they are the same theory.

Theories always begin as a hypothesis. A hypothesis is an explanation of facts whose predictions have not yet been tested. A hypothesis only becomes a theory once those predictions it makes that can be tested, have been tested and not falsified. A scientific theory is much, much stronger than any mere guess about what is going on. There are reasons to believe it beyond the mere fact that it matches the previous data, or that it looks pretty.

Dinosaurs were not the cause of their own extinction, a lucky asteroid was, and anyway, dinosaurs are not extinct. The modern Chordate class Aves are all direct descendants of Therapsid dinosaurs, a clade which includes Tyrannosaurus Rex and those lovely little Velociraptors. (Which, incidentally, were only about the size of a turkey, now, Utahraptors, on the other hand, were much like those Velociraptors in that movie).

While I admire a healthy skepticism and ability to think critically, a big part of this is knowing when to drop the skepticism. Any belief, and any explanation can be doubted if you are sincerely committed to not believing it. The key is that your skepticism must be grounded in reasons, and that you are able to meet the powerful reasons others give for their belief with equally or more powerful reasons of your own.

Some good points there Kantian, and while I don't disagree with a lot of what you say, I'd guess you'd say I have a different take on some things.

Yes, scientists and academics are a lot like everyone else - they're just people, after all. Maybe I'm jaded, and perhaps I've only got Australian and UK experience with this and it's different in the US. But funding is hard to come by. Attracting students (ie money) to your institution is more and more difficult. I've sat on university committees whose sole purpose is to decide what course content should be offered so as to attract more students (as opposed to deciding what course content would equip students with the best "skills set"). Once we get the students in, then of course we do our best to equip them thoroughly, but it is often within a fairly limited scope. Some of the more 'elite' institutions I've been involved with don't necessarily have this issue to the same extent (which is maybe why they are elite), but not every scientist or academic is produced from these institutions. I too despair at the state of science education in my country.

Then there's the issue of publication bias, and the search for the Holy Significant P-Value, no matter what the data is trying to say. I've been there and I've seen it - I've declined to be named as co-author on papers because of it. It's happened to me in every job or consultancy I've ever undertaken. It's human nature - 3 years of research, hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding....no-one wants to turn around at the end of that and say "Hey, guess what? Didn't work, nothing's there despite what I wrote in my funding application. But thanks for the money. Hope you'll give me some more next time I ask....". Careers and reputations are under a lot of pressure.

Practical science is down and dirty - it's political, it's personal, and it's cut-throat. But it's also highly stimulating, exhilarating, exciting, and rewarding.

Hypotheses can be used to generate theory too. That's the basic underlying principle of observation studies and data mining. I see it a lot in the social and medical sciences.

But anyway, I believe I have some good reasons for being skeptical about a lot of things, not just Man-Made Global Warming. At the risk of showing myself as a complete philosophical moron and hopelessly naive ( ) I guess I have a Foucaultian view.

(Please don't flame me too badly )

James.

I agree with what jms said, co2 is great for plant life and plant life is good for us. as I've heard before, one volcano spits out more smoke and gas than mankind could come up with in its entire history. another thing, if a politician, especially a politician from birth is backing it, take ye heed, watch and pray!! As far as news channels are concerned there arent any. What we're given is from the corporations that own the media, it divides the people and once people are divided they are easily conquered. These corporations have bought up the government. Its no longer ours, notice that with every election there is less and less real differences in the politians other than rhetoric?

I try not to flame others, but hyperbole does get under my skin a bit.

I will be the first to admit that academia is as political as anything else, but in my experience, it's even more petty and vindictively personal as the worst high school. Right now, there's a heck of a political battle going in on fundamental physics between the string theorists and the quantum loop theorists. Nobody wants the other guy to have the good idea first, so if they do, it has to be cut down. The only exceptions are if they can find a way to riff off the other guy's ideas. The difference is that there are methods for deciding political disagreements between camps, and the political battle usually only lasts as long as it takes for the evidence to come in. In the meantime, it's game on, with all the spurious and wasteful activities you mention.

As for climate scientists who accept the fact of global warming and who believe in the theory of mankind's release of CO2 as the cause being the most popular, I suppose that's a matter of perspective. Whenever the topic comes on the news channels I get, there's always the "scientist" blathering on about how all the evidence isn't in yet, or that there's an alternative interpretation, or that Mars' ice caps are melting, or whatever. But when I look in the international and peer-reviewed journals on climate science, they are dominated far more by supporting evidence and arguments for man-made global warming than any other explanation. That's not to say that those alternatives aren't there, but when they're offered or hypothesized, the authors often come back in a year or two saying that their initial conclusions were proved wrong (and giving evidence of this) and that they have not yet been able to rule out man-made global warming.

In the end scientific theories are accepted by rigorous application of Sherlock Holmes' principle, that "when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter improbable, must be the truth." All other possible causes of global warming have been shown to not be sufficient to explain it, no matter what is thought of, from volcanic activity, to increased solar activity, to a decrease in cosmic ray impacts in the atmosphere, and on down the line. And that the globe is warming is a fact that has been repeatedly verified by multiple independent researchers in many different nations which have vastly different political goals. At a certain point, you just have to accept that it's happening and that we're the cause, or you're gonna have to start supposing that magical leprechauns are getting into the thermometers and screwing them up, or that the cause of the warming is God's wrath.

We might disagree about what can be done about, but that shouldn't prevent us from agreeing that it's occurring and that man is the cause. Personally, I don't think there's anything we can do about it. When pushed out of equilibrium, nature has a way of finding a new equilibrium with a quickening vengeance. But I do support other measures that just make good practical sense for other reasons. For example, I believe that a tax should be imposed on vehicles that get less than the average gas mileage equal to the percentage less than that average that they get. So if you buy a car that gets 15 miles to the gallon and the national average is 20 miles per gallon, you have to pay a 20% tax on that purchase. I also believe you should get a subsidy or grant if you buy a car that gets more than the national average, so if you buy a car that gets 25 miles per gallon, you get a 20% cut in the price. Or, if you like, we can cut the subsidy in half and give the rest to domestic car makers to keep production in the US and help them develop those more fuel efficient cars. I also believe we should mandate that cars be made biofuel ready in a certain amount of time so we can keep from giving over a billion dollars a year to countries that support international terrorism.

No, Fox news doesn't exaggerate the news their stories are just written, edited and shipped to them straight from the White House.

Unfortunately if someone doesn't wish to believe in Global warming all the facts in the world wil not change their opinion. If someone fires a 50 cal at me from 2 miles off and I stand there demanding absolute proof by the time I get it, it will be too late. When our members in Florida are under 6 feet of water we will all get the proof we need won't we?

The fact is our atmosphere is a very thin layer. All the gases we produce along with what is produced by nature has to go somewhere. It just doesn't disappear. The ability of the ecosystem to metabolize it has a limit. We already know volcanic eruptions have had major effects for short periods altering the weather.

We already know volcanic eruptions have had major effects for short periods altering the weather.

Thank you for making this point. The major difference between volcanoes and human activity (and yes, some volcanic eruptions do release more toxic and greenhouse gasses than the entirety of human activity, until recently) is that volcanoes dump all that stuff at once. Natural environmental cycles put much of that stuff back in the ground before it has a chance to really muck stuff up. Humans let it out slooowly and accelerate their emissions, so its effects have time to accumulate.