Thread: More than 31,000 scientists don't buy it!!

Originally Posted by Bruno

Given Bush's trach record at integrity and honesty, Global Warming has to be a lie.

A little more fuel to the fire:

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Testing The Waters

(JMS you'll like this one)

The whole global warming bit reminds me of a story about me! I was about 22 years old and I owned a 74 Volvo. one day the oil light came on so I checked the oil only to discover that I had plenty! I had the car towed to the auto hobby shop on the Navy base here in San Diego where I was determined to fix the problem by changing the oil pump. Every one that I talked to also believed the oil pump was the culprit!
I removed the oil pan and anything else in my way, whether it needed to be removed or not! Damned if I was going to let anything get in my way of fixing the problem!
I replaced the pump and reassembled the engine. I started the car only to find that the oil light was still lit! At this point I started thinking sensibly instead of so stubbornly and head strong! I took a look at the electrical system and found a short that was causing the problem all along! My engine and oil pump were working as designed!
The point is, we don't know enough about how the world and atmosphere work to draw the conclusions that the global warming crowd is drawing! Its a little like seeing a little puff of smoke in a crowded theatre, yelling fire, and after everyone had evacuated and trampled two or three people into the ground , killing them, you discover it was only the man in front of you smoking a cigarette! At this point there is always likely to be some idiot who will say "It's to bad about the deaths, but considering that it could have been a real fire it was necessary!

Originally Posted by JMS

The point is, we don't know enough about how the world and atmosphere work to draw the conclusions . . .

That was very true 10 or 15 years ago. In fact you can go through the old journal articles from the mid-1990s and follow the debate as it unfolded. For example: www.sciencemag.org.

Now the issue of whether or not the observed warming is anthropogenic has been settled amongst scientists. Cutting edge research is on things like marine organisms' response to ocean acidification, and reducing the resolution of climate models' preditions from century scale to decade scale.

It is a very complex issue; it might as well be rocket science. Thus it is very difficult for the lay person to access, and very easy for organized think tanks to obfuscate.

To anyone wanting to develop a full appreciation of just how it is that scientists know what they claim to, I would recommend the folowing.
www.realclimate.org -- a blog site put up by climate scientists.
www.aip.org/history/climate -- The Discovery of Global Warming. This book gives a very good history of the science behind global warming, and is an invaluable resource for fully understanding the hows and whys of climate science. The entire book is online, with updates after its last hardcopy publishing.

It is a daunting task to get up to speed on climate science, but it is well within the reach of the dedicated. It doesn't take you long to start realizing how utterly and totally full of baloney the likes of Crichton, Singer, Avery, and Lundzen are. (Do thoroughly check all references they give.) Their dishonesty is startling.

Scott

beezaur, you rock my world with your brilliance.

Originally Posted by beezaur

www.realclimate.org -- a blog site put up by climate scientists.

Careful, though. There is a politics of science, just like everything else, and I can't name a field of science that doesn't do what it can to highlight its own importance. Global warming is the best thing that's happened to environmental science, ever, and you probably won't see its impact minimized on a site like that.

Try to follow the debate at Science or Nature--you'll probably get a less biased view.

Yes, I am hesitant to recommend a blog site. It is tough to get good, accessible information. Realclimate is on my short list of reliable sites.

There is a guy who writes for Science, Richard Kerr. He writes articles that are kind of summaries of the research reports. A good way to follow the history of scientific research is to do a search at Science of "greenhouse" with Kerr as the author. Then you can go to the research reports to get the in-depth stuff. Some (or all?) of Science's older articles are free to all.

I was really impressed by the Discovery of Global Warming book/site. The essays (chapters) give a good glimpse into how science actually works. Here is from their essay on aerosols and global cooling:

Haze from small particles surely affected climate, but how? Old speculations about the effects of smoke from volcanoes were brought to mind in the 1960s, when urban smog became a major research topic. Some tentative evidence suggested that aerosols emitted by human industry and agriculture could change the weather. A few scientists exclaimed that smoke and dust from human activities would cause a dangerous global cooling. Or would pollution warm the atmosphere? Theory and data were far too feeble to answer the question, and few people even tried to address it. Among these few, the uncertainties fueled vigorous debates, in particular over how adding aerosols might change the planet's cloud cover. Finally, in the late 1970s, powerful computers got to work on the stupefyingly complex calculations, helped by data from volcanic eruptions. It became clear that overall, human production of aerosols was cooling the atmosphere. Pollution was significantly delaying, and concealing, the coming of greenhouse effect warming.

Source: Aerosols: Volcanoes, Dust, Clouds and Climate

It's really not as bad as I maybe made it seem. It takes some digging, but I think anyone who has an interest can get a very good understanding of this stuff.

Scott

This is a direct affront to Al Gore. Its insult to his mental giant! This is heresy!

Gore is just a politician who happens to have a passion for global warming. He didn't come up with anything himself.

Scott

Originally Posted by beezaur

Gore is just a politician who happens to have a passion for global warming. He didn't come up with anything himself.

Scott

He sure is making a load off of global warming though!