I think Jon Stewart said it best: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-december-14-2009/world-of-warmcraft

Quote: Original post by Eelco
Can you show me 'papers supporting climate change'? I wouldnt know where to find them.

There are lots of papers dealing with small pieces of the puzzle; they generally tend to seem genuine. Genuine, and unexciting.

So, as expected, you make claims about the science being inadequate, but don't anything beyond vagaries to offer..?

If you actually want to move beyond your continued vague criticisms, I've got a couple of papers [like these: 1 2 or 3 or 4] which you're more than welcome to shoot full of holes.

Quote: Original post by Eelco
Then there is a report like the IPCC, which tries to tie all this together. Since they dont seem to explain how they jump to their conclusion...

lol. How disingenuous.

The IPCC assessments are heavily cited. Largely the IPCC reports serve to condense whatever conclusions they find repeated throughout the existing research.

Quote: Original post by Eelco
....of 'were X% sure AGW is happening', im not really sure how to 'debunk' it.

You can feign ignorance if you like, but it's certainly not any sort of mystery that you can debunk their conclusions, by debunking the various scientists whose conclusions have been incorporated into the IPCC report.


Toss a dart at the pages of citations filling the IPCC WGI report, and show us where that bit of research went wrong.


A big one you can set your aim at is:
Boucher, O., and J. Haywood, 2001: On summing the components
of radiative forcing of climate change. Clim. Dyn., 18, 297–302. (I have one of their more recent papers, if you want to rebut that instead...)




Show us that armchair theorizing really does trump actual expertise. Go!

[Edited by - HostileExpanse on December 16, 2009 3:03:42 PM]

Quote: Original post by WazzatMan
I think Jon Stewart said it best: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-december-14-2009/world-of-warmcraft

I like how he, too, pointed out the ridiculousness of some big-money "pocket protector" lobby. :-D

Quote: Original post by Momoko_Fan

Quote: The survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who see solid evidence that global temperatures are rising. According to the survey, conducted between Sept. 30 and Oct. 4 among 1,500 adults reached on cell phones and landlines, fewer respondents also see global warming as a very serious problem; 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008.

The survey also points to a decline in the proportion of Americans who say global temperatures are rising as a result of human activity. Just 36% say that currently, down from 47% last year.

source

well done, that is certainly the stupidest post I've read all year, which is quite a feat since its decemeber

edit - 36% shit thats less than the percentage of americans that believe that god created the earth a few thousand years ago!!
Well I suppose if a presidential candidate (palin) claims that humans lived alongside dinosaurs this all shouldnt be surprising

Quote: Original post by BerwynIrish

Quote: Original post by Eelco
The incentive towards debunking is grossly overstated. If I owned any oil, I wouldnt be too worried about people not buying it. Dreaming up fancy ways of how people are going to do without it and actually doing without it are very different things.

Regardless of how you would manage the oil industry, the oil industry in the real world is spending tons of money to discredit AGW. All for their altruistic concern for the state of scientific knowledge, I'm sure.

A few millions here and there; the overall level of concern doesnt seem to high. Peanuts compared to the amount of money spent on propaganda by the other side.

Quote: Original post by Kaze
Part of the probelm I have is it seems like anti global warming is adopting a lot of creationist tactics, namely:
a: claims to have scientific proof
b: if pressed for proof start mud slinging
c: if called out on mud slinging claim their dogmatic for dismissing your proof

I really would like to hear alternate scientific theorys for global temperature trends but of the the ones I've already heard they either have flaws I can spot or it seems like very little effort was put into followup's with research or experimentation.

Well stated. In short, purveyors of junk science parading as debunkers of junk science. For example, Inhofe and his "truth squad" with opening guest Lord Monckton and Hitler's Youth [1], [2], [3], [4]. They lack solid alternative theories because they aren't scientists, they're public relations operatives spreading pollution for the international oil and coal industries whom they represent.



And now for debunking the debunkers...

Climategate, global warming, and the tree rings divergence problem

Quote:
Much discussion of the Climategate e-mails has centered on "tricking" tree ring data that may not confirm global warming. What's the divergence of data all about and does it really confirm cooling instead of warming?
...
Here's the issue: In recent decades, some — although not all — trees have stopped responding positively to higher temperatures. How do we know? For the past 150 years, we've been measuring temperatures directly with various instruments. And, indeed, trees seem to follow temperatures faithfully, growing more during warm years and less during cold, until around 50 years ago. Then, even as scientific instruments continued to register rising temperatures, some trees started growing less.

If you were to go solely by these tree rings — and if you were looking at just ring density and width — you'd erroneously conclude that temperatures were falling when, in fact, they were rising. That's why scientists sometimes omit tree-ring data from recent decades in favor of the more accurate instrumental data.
...
Scientists have several possible explanations for this divergence, none of them mutually exclusive, and all of which — drought, global dimming, ozone holes — fault human activity for the slowing growth rate of some trees. In other words, scientists generally take the divergence as further evidence that humans are changing Earth's climate and that the warming is stressing various life forms — including trees in environments that are already extreme.
...
It's also worth noting that the phenomenon is hardly a secret. It's been discussed at length in the scientific literature for at least 15 years — basically, since scientists first recognized it. Here's a 1995 article from the journal Science, one of many.

It's also discussed in Chapter 6 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's most recent report, pages 472-473.

Here's another more recent, and more thorough, review of the phenomenon [PDF].
...
All of this does raise another question, of course. Given the divergence of some tree-ring records from observed temperature during the past 50 years, how do we know that when we interpret growth patterns from deeper in the past, we're not actually seeing drought or abrupt warming similar to today's –- that is, how do we know divergence is only a recent phenomenon?

In an e-mail, Rob Wilson, a tree ring scientist at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, and a coauthor on above-cited review, responds to this question: "[D]o not forget that tree-rings are not the only proxy source of past climatic information. If the divergence issue had been relevant in the past, we would see the TR [tree ring] data divergence from other proxy records (e.g. lake sediment, ice cores etc). We do not see this and on the whole all the multi-proxy records agree. Current evidence points to the fact that the divergence phenomenon is a phenomenon of the recent period."
...

The deniers have been assaulting the "hockey stick" for some time now (This is NOT a Hockey Stick). I think it's telling that the hacked emails belonged to the scientists involved with the research that led to the hockey stick. In concentrating on the hockey stick, the critics are trying to pick at what they perceive to be a weak spot, and in doing so, they draw focus away from a larger body of evidence. It is a public relations sleight of hand. ClimateSpin: Using the Stolen Emails to Cripple Policy.

On the subject of "cherry picking" has anyone else seen this?

Hockey stick observed in NOAA ice core data

I'll not link the entirety for fair use reasons so please check out the link, but here's an example of the "hockey stick" as seen from the perspective of the holocene as a whole.

Quote:
From the perspective of the Holocene as a whole, our current hockeystick is beginning to look pretty dinky. By far the possibility I would worry about, if I were the worrying sort, would be the return to an ice age — since interglacials, over the past half million years or so, have tended to last only 10,000 years or so. And Ice ages are not conducive to agriculture.

I especially like this part because it mirrors my own position.

Quote: Does this mean that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas? No.

Does it mean that it isn’t warming? No.

Does it mean that we shouldn’t develop clean, efficient technology that gets its energy elsewhere than burning fossil fuels? Of course not. We should do all those things for many reasons — but there’s plenty of time to do them the right way, by developing nanotech. (There’s plenty of money, too, but it’s all going to climate science at the moment. ) And that will be a very good thing to have done if we do fall back into an ice age, believe me.

For climate science it means that the Hockey Team climatologists’ insistence that human-emitted CO2 is the only thing that could account for the recent warming trend is probably poppycock.

Is only looking at the last 500 years any less cherry picking than the last 8 years in this context?

Quote: Original post by HostileExpanse
YOU can't even describe your solution! ;o)

I didn't even know I HAD a solution [smile]
I'm just self assured that outlawing global warming won't be a winning formula.

Quote:
If you have some sort of free-market solution, why withhold such enlightenment from us? I see that you've decided, for now, to toss around rhetoric and indignation at LessBread instead of making more academic responses. Perhaps you missed my post on the previous page, but I'll clarify that I'm interested in details of any solutions you may want to share with us; earlier, you implied that you may have some....

I do think reforming tort law to include pollution instead of unnaturally exempting it via the EPA(which is what makes it an externality) is a winning idea. I don't believe it's a silver bullet but it wouldn't hurt a bit.

It's actually a very similar solution to cap and trade except instead of the government selling licenses to pollute the victims of the pollution would net a monetary gain if they were aggressed against via pollution.

It's a tort based monetization idea versus a top down centralized solution. I've always found the former superior to the later no matter your politics.

As for my discourse with Less, I doubt he found me particularly indignant. That's how we communicate.

Additionally if we're going to do any type of subvention(sorry Less) I'd much rather see it in the form of a tax credit instead of a government check. It's simply a superior form of market meddling.

Quote: Original post by Dreddnafious Maelstrom

Quote: Does it mean that we shouldn’t develop clean, efficient technology that gets its energy elsewhere than burning fossil fuels? Of course not. We should do all those things for many reasons — but there’s plenty of time to do them the right way, by developing nanotech. (There’s plenty of money, too, but it’s all going to climate science at the moment. )

I'm curious about this - exactly how much money are we spending on climate science? The negative opinions seem to suggest it's a metric shirtload, but how much could it be? A lot of the weather readings would be done for multiple purposes (like general meteorology and record keeping), so I'm figuring most of the expense would be the salaries of the climate scientists, their equipment (a whole bunch of computers) and extremely specific climate science reading like taking ice cores. What else is there? Are there climate science-only satellites?

I'm asking because I did a quick Google search, and some of the figures being bandied around were around US$2 billion. In comparison, the figures for nanotech research in 2004 for the year were around US$8.6 billion, so I don't think diverting climate science entirely into nanotech would be an earth-shattering increase.

Quote: Original post by Trapper Zoid

Quote: Original post by Dreddnafious Maelstrom

Quote: Does it mean that we shouldn’t develop clean, efficient technology that gets its energy elsewhere than burning fossil fuels? Of course not. We should do all those things for many reasons — but there’s plenty of time to do them the right way, by developing nanotech. (There’s plenty of money, too, but it’s all going to climate science at the moment. )

I'm curious about this - exactly how much money are we spending on climate science? The negative opinions seem to suggest it's a metric shirtload, but how much could it be? A lot of the weather readings would be done for multiple purposes (like general meteorology and record keeping), so I'm figuring most of the expense would be the salaries of the climate scientists, their equipment (a whole bunch of computers) and extremely specific climate science reading like taking ice cores. What else is there? Are there climate science-only satellites?

I'm asking because I did a quick Google search, and some of the figures being bandied around were around US$2 billion. In comparison, the figures for nanotech research in 2004 for the year were around US$8.6 billion, so I don't think diverting climate science entirely into nanotech would be an earth-shattering increase.

Did you isolate government spending or include public and private? I assume he is referring to public spending since private spending isn't legislated by and large(yet?)