• Hello, please take a minute to check out our awesome content, contributed by the wonderful members of our community. We hope you'll add your own thoughts and opinions by making a free account!

Learning Global Warming facts and fiction

Status
Not open for further replies.
GaWx said:
Thanks. So, when looking at “extent” graphs for both periods (apples to apples), they, indeed, do match up well. However, I still wonder if “volume” was as low as it is now during 1920-40. Isn’t volume arguably the most important variable?
Click to expand...

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find any volume graphs that go back past 1979. I assume either the reconstruction of that data would be near impossible to do or it’s not something that researchers have looked at closely. The ice extent is not the best metric for sure but it at least does show the cyclical nature of the ice extent and that current levels were seen back in the 1920-40 period. Interestingly enough, if you read old newspaper articles from the 1920-40 period you will see they had the same concern of all the ice melting in the Arctic; yet as we know it recovered nicely from 1940-1980. I expect we will see a similar cycle with the current decline showing signs of recovery/stabilization. Now we just need to watch and see if we start seeing some gains consistently, a process that will take 10+ years to figure out.
 
Climate_Change_Attribution.png
 
Let's try and keep the posts friendly in here. I know it's a divisive subject and there are claims from all sides that can be posted here, but there is no need to start being sarcastic and harsh about it. If you can't post something that isn't passive aggressive, don't post at all.
 
if he can post nonsense like saying 'climategate' is real.. then he deserves contempt.. it's a falsehood. Anything else he has to say after that is suspect.
 
whamby said:
by proponents of AGW you mean 97% of Climate Scientists on Earth? Oh wait, that number's wrong too, because, blah blah blah... wait, I know, 'climategate' scandal.. yeah, that's it! Everything you say after 'climategate' is simply suspect. https://skepticalscience.com/Climategate-CRU-emails-hacked.htm
Click to expand...
You should know that that 97% figure was based on an internet poll with no controls whatsoever. You could vote as many times as you like and the vast majority who were asked to respond were already AGW adherents. I challenge you to find a scientifically designed truly representative poll which shows anything of the sort. Please post it here if you find one and show the breakdown of which science disciplines are represented in the numbers by percentage.
 
whamby said:
ha, that was unfriendly? jeez, get a grip..
Click to expand...
Maybe you should get a grip. This isn't some presidential debate where you can shout comments like "He has small hands" or "He's an orange!".
whamby said:
if he can post nonsense like saying 'climategate' is real.. then he deserves contempt.. it's a falsehood. Anything else he has to say after that is suspect.
Click to expand...
He can say what he wants whether it's right or wrong. Nobody deserves passive aggressive comments here. Notice the word "Nobody". You can refute it with as many as thousands of words or as few as one. If you find everything I'm saying as some offensive statement or you can't see how your comments came off maybe you should step away from the site until you can post something in a different manner.
 
ForsythSnow said:
Maybe you should get a grip. This isn't some presidential debate where you can shout comments like "He has small hands" or "He's an orange!".

He can say what he wants whether it's right or wrong. Nobody deserves passive aggressive comments here. Notice the word "Nobody". You can refute it with as many as thousands of words or as few as one. If you find everything I'm saying as some offensive statement or you can't see how your comments came off maybe you should step away from the site until you can post something in a different manner.
Click to expand...
fine, I'll attempt to be nicer... :)
 
MichaelJ said:
You should know that that 97% figure was based on an internet poll with no controls whatsoever. You could vote as many times as you like and the vast majority who were asked to respond were already AGW adherents. I challenge you to find a scientifically designed truly representative poll which shows anything of the sort. Please post it here if you find one and show the breakdown of which science disciplines are represented in the numbers by percentage.
Click to expand...
who are some reputable climate change deniers, ones with atmospheric science, climatology, PHDs? Other than Fred Singer, who I'm familiar with...
 
MichaelJ said:
You should know that that 97% figure was based on an internet poll with no controls whatsoever. You could vote as many times as you like and the vast majority who were asked to respond were already AGW adherents. I challenge you to find a scientifically designed truly representative poll which shows anything of the sort. Please post it here if you find one and show the breakdown of which science disciplines are represented in the numbers by percentage.
Click to expand...
"A 2013 study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters analyzed 11,944 abstracts from papers published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature between 1991 and 2011, identified by searching the ISI Web of Science citation index engine for the text strings "global climate change" or "global warming". The authors found that 3974 of the abstracts expressed a position on anthropogenic global warming, and that 97.1% of those endorsed the consensus that humans are causing global warming. "
 
whamby said:
who are some reputable climate change deniers, ones with atmospheric science, climatology, PHDs? Other than Fred Singer, who I'm familiar with...
Click to expand...
Is this a serious question? If it is, I will provide one tomorrow for you because I have another project to finish tonight
 
MichaelJ said:
Also please don't post these type graphs with no attribution footnotes. Snowlover at leasts shows where the figures and graphics come from, that is how real science is done
Click to expand...
Robert A. Rohde
 
whamby said:
by proponents of AGW you mean 97% of Climate Scientists on Earth? Oh wait, that number's wrong too, because, blah blah blah... wait, I know, 'climategate' scandal.. yeah, that's it! Everything you say after 'climategate' is simply suspect. https://skepticalscience.com/Climategate-CRU-emails-hacked.htm
Click to expand...

The statistic simply shows that a large number of climate scientists believe man contributes in some way to the warming we have seen in recent years (due to CO2 increases). It does not indicate if they are right or wrong; it’s a simple metric used to add weight to the “AGW is entirely man-made and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong” view. Here’s some good info on it from Dr. Roy Spencer...

And that is one of the (many) problems with the Cook literature review study. It only established that there is widespread consensus that humans contribute to (not even dominate) global warming, a position that the vast majority of climate "skeptics" agree with - including myself. I do not know of any climate skeptic researchers who claim that humans have no influence on the climate system. The existence of trees has an influence on the climate system, and it is entirely reasonable to assume that humans do as well.

The most pertinent questions really are: just how much warming is occurring? (not as much as predicted); how much of that warming is being caused by humans? (we don't really know); is modest warming a bad thing? (maybe not); and is there anything we can do about it anyway? (not without a new energy technology).

Regarding just how wrong scientific consensus can be, I like to use the example of peptic ulcers. With millions of sufferers being treated over the last century by doctors, you would think we would know what causes them. Until relatively recently it was assumed that eating spicy food or stress caused them. But two Australian doctors, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, had a theory that they were caused by bacteria, a fringe idea that led to them being shunned and ridiculed at conferences.

Yet they were correct, and were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in medicine for their work. One can only imagine the thousands of published medical papers that simply assumed that ulcers were caused by stress or spicy food. Would it have been 97 percent? Or even more? I don't know. Yet they were all wrong.

Now, if the physical cause of millions of peptic ulcers went undiscovered for so many years, isn't it possible that there are natural causes of climate change? Climate change is a relatively young science. Computerized climate models do a reasonably good job of replicating the average behavior of the climate system, but have been almost worthless for forecasting climate change. They have not even been able to hindcast (let alone forecast) the warming rate of the past 30-50 years, generally overstating that warming by about a factor of two.

The extreme popularity and success of the 97 percent meme tells us something about the global warming debate and how it is received. People gravitate toward simple ways to support and defend their preconceived beliefs. Global warming is one of those issues that the believer holds onto with an almost religious fervor. As a scientist I learned long ago that there is no point wanting this or that theory to be correct. Mother Nature really doesn't care what you believe. Instead, I just follow the evidence and generally assume that whatever is developed as an explanation is most likely going to be proved wrong eventually ... as is the case with most published science.
https://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/03/the_myth_of_the_97_percent_glo.html
Click to expand...

Further information on how the 97% statistic is incredibly misleading and the author of the report you cited was intentionally misleading with this statistic.

But even a quick scan of the paper reveals that this is not the case. Cook is able to demonstrate only that a relative handful endorse “the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.” Cook calls this “explicit endorsement with quantification” (quantification meaning 50 percent or more). The problem is, only a small percentage of the papers fall into this category; Cook does not say what percentage, but when the study was publicly challenged by economist David Friedman, one observer calculated that only 1.6 percent explicitly stated that man-made greenhouse gases caused at least 50 percent of global warming.

Where did most of the 97 percent come from, then? Cook had created a category called “explicit endorsement without quantification”—that is, papers in which the author, by Cook’s admission, did not say whether 1 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent of the warming was caused by man. He had also created a category called “implicit endorsement,” for papers that imply (but don’t say) that there is some man-made global warming and don’t quantify it. In other words, he created two categories that he labeled as endorsing a view that they most certainly didn’t.

The 97 percent claim is a deliberate misrepresentation designed to intimidate the public—and numerous scientists whose papers were classified by Cook protested:

“Cook survey included 10 of my 122 eligible papers. 5/10 were rated incorrectly. 4/5 were rated as endorse rather than neutral.”

—Dr. Richard Tol

“That is not an accurate representation of my paper . . .”

—Dr. Craig Idso

“Nope . . . it is not an accurate representation.”

—Dr. Nir Shaviv

“Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument . . .”

—Dr. Nicola Scafetta

Think about how many times you hear that 97 percent or some similar figure thrown around. It’s based on crude manipulation propagated by people whose ideological agenda it serves. It is a license to intimidate.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/01/06/97-of-climate-scientists-agree-is-100-wrong/
Click to expand...

As cited early, “climategate” revealed through emails and exchanges that leading scientists were in fact manipulating data and actively working to suppress alternative viewpoints. Here’s some data cited with multiple sources indicating the problems.

Olson, 2018 Opinion polls and other research show a public that frequently perceives climate science and associated AGW threats as complicated, uncertain and temporally and spatially distant (Anghelcev et al., 2015; Bennett et al., 2016; Gordon et al., 2011). Thus climate scientists, celebrities, public policymakers and other AGW social marketers face a daunting task in convincing a lackadaisical and often skeptical public to support AGW mitigating behaviors and policies. The difficulty of this marketing assignment has also led to the utilization of ethically questionable tactics that hype the severity, immediacy and certainty of AGW threats (O’Neil and Nicholson-Cole, 2009; Rogers, 1975; Rosenberg et al., 2010).
For example, the past 25 years have witnessed a large number of greatly exaggerated predictions regarding the speed and scope of temperature increases and AGW dangers from a variety of AGW “endorsers,” which have fortunately proven to be false alarms (Bastasch, 2015; Grundmann, 2011; Michaels, 2008; Newman, 2014). Another ethically questionable example is provided by the Climategate scandal involving members of the climate science community and their attempts to increase public certainty regarding the methods and predictions of “mainstream” climate models by blocking the publication of research not supportive of the AGW paradigm (Curry, 2014; Grundmann, 2011).
Click to expand...

While several leading studies suggested Mann and other scientists in “climategate” did no wrong, others disagree. The skeptical science article referenced conveniently left out that data and failed to analyze any data that might indicate there was actual wrongdoing or at the very least some questionable/unethical things going on. Here is some additional info.
“Today, Mann defends himself by saying his university has looked into the e-mails and decided that he had not suppressed data at any time. However, an inquiry conducted by the British parliament came to a very different conclusion. "The leaked e-mails appear to show a culture of non-disclosure at CRU and instances where information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure," the House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee announced in its findings on March 31.
http://www.spiegel.de/international...-global-warming-was-compromised-a-695301.html
Click to expand...

Going further, do you accept this email exchange as ethical or not? Is the intentional suppression of alternative views going to promote or hinder scientific advancement?
It is pretty clear that thee skeptics here have staged a bit of a coup, even in the
presence of a number of reasonable folks on the editorial board (Whetton, Goodess, ...). My
guess is that Von Storch is actually with them (frankly, he's an odd individual, and I'm
not sure he isn't himself somewhat of a skeptic himself), and without Von Storch on their
side, they would have a very forceful personality promoting their new vision.
There have been several papers by Pat Michaels, as well as the Soon & Baliunas paper, that
couldn't get published in a reputable journal.
This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the
"peer-reviewed literature". Obviously, they found a solution to that--take over a journal!
So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board...
Click to expand...

Phil Jones sent an email to Michael Mann (commonly cited, hockey stick graph guy) citing he would delete/destroy the CRU station data if ever requested under the FOIA. Here is what one of the leaked emails he sent said, dated February 2, 2005: “The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone.” Conveniently, four years later, when the FOIA was requested this data was “lost or destroyed.” It’s almost as if they are trying to hide something...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/13/cru_missing/

These are just two examples of many that climategate revealed. Do you not have a problem with leading scientists acting to suppress alternative views or failing to be transparent with data and then destroying/hiding it when transparency is requested? I don’t know about you... but these two examples (and many others, read the emails for yourself to see) are anti-science, unethical and a MAJOR PROBLEM to me.
 
Last edited:
This is probably a minor point, but does 97% of "man contributing to GW" papers equal 97% of scientists saying man contributes? What about multiple papers from one scientist? What if a handful of scientists on the "man contributing" side wrote numerous papers? Could that be enough to skew the % up much? Maybe it is really only 90% or even 80% of scientists that wrote the 97% of papers.
 
Maybe it's really 0% and AGW is a hoax or something.. maybe.. who knows... *rolls eyes*
 
Last edited:
whamby said:
if he can post nonsense like saying 'climategate' is real.. then he deserves contempt.. it's a falsehood. Anything else he has to say after that is suspect.
Click to expand...

Read my post above, you’ll find some interesting info in it if you read through all the data points and articles cited. The “climategate” is a reference to the leaked emails in 2009 and also 2011. Some of them did in fact reveal some serious ethical issues and while some sites and studies cleared them of wrongdoing, others expressed concern or questioned the ethics involved as well. I have read through entire email chains that are publicly available and while many are no issue whatsoever, there are some concerning things as well contained within the full context of them too. If you want links to the full email exchanges, specifically the ones that raise some serious questions, I will be more than happy to provide them so you can read them for yourself and make a conclusion. If one is truly open-minded, they will be willing to examine and consider all data whether it agrees or conflicts with their currently held view :)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top