I mean I agree that quantity of opinion does not necessarily reflect quality of opinion, but there's a certain rebellious streak in the deniers which seems to equate paucity of opinion with brilliance.

Also, who are these people denying climate change? And how do they manage to maintain a faculty position with a publishing rate of only slightly over 1 paper a year?

_________________
Tactics yes, Tact no...

There is way more consensus on global warming than man-made global warming. The former is quite easier to measure, and harder to dispute. You just take many temperatures and you can only go wrong on the compilation of them or calculation. Its basis is observation.

But Climate change or global warming itself is not a reason to do anything. Before the 70´s there was global cooling, and it wasnt such a major deal.(The video I posted contains a short footage by a metheorologist or the sort, that says that increasing C02 emissions might reverse the cooling process. That is, as a solution.)

The debate heats up because it points to C02 and some of the biggest companies in the world (car, oil industries). Blaming C02 is a model, not a verifiable truth. You cant really make a mirror-earth with non-polluting fuels and see that it doesnt have global warming.
And you cant also easily falsify it, without interpretation of data. In the awful truth, Al Gore makes a chart that roughly matches C02 levels in the atmosphere with registered temperatures showing correlation. In the Global Warming swindle, they say those charts exist as Gore showed them, but that they are separated by a large span of time (like 100 years or more, cant recall).
I guess that is the kind of statement a lay man could check out, as those charts should be accesible. But the Nobel prize has been already awarded, and the Global Warming Swindle was shunned, regardless of that fact.

So the cause is surely debatible.

Then you have the consequences , which are incredibly difficult to measure or predict. Even if the top meteorologist or climate scientist in the world told me to my face that 1 degree would cause x and y and z, I wouldnt put my hand in the fire for the statement. Weather is the origin of the Chaos Theory. It is too unpredictable.
I can believe that things will change. Thats easy to believe. And for the better ? hardly, because even if there are more fields and more spaces to farm, as a society we are quite adverse to change and that is costly.
In the Global Warming Swindle they do mention that centuries ago , England use to have vineyards that are impossible to today´s weather.
A case for it being better can be made, because it is just as fickle and speculative as a case to make it worse.

As it stands to me i see:

There is a climate change.
There is a predominant agendable model to explain that change.
The consequences of the climate change are unknown.

The debate has created a moral rule or ethical conduct, that the middle class as I see it looks badly upon people not "caring for the environment".

Another thing i dont like about this whole climate ordeal is that suddenly, a huge monetary and political decision is driven(alledgedly) by the scientific community.
As a society we make almsot no choices listening to our scientists, and why is this one all the sudden so important?
I resent the process of decision as well. If we are going to do what the scientific community suggests, we would have to change everything. From eliminating sugar-sodas that have proven to cause obsesity, to restrict cattle to grow more grain, to a million different things.

Hey, im all up to devise a society that makes decisions closer to science than to democracy, making decisions on what we know rather what we guess collectively. But we are not on that system or decided to make it that way for this subject as a community. So i dont like to be told "we have to do this this way, the scientist told us so, and the scientist speak truth"

A quick note on this graph posted by golem7: It is labelled wrong. The 24 papers do not "reject glocal warming", they "reject man-made global warming". The other 13,926 papers all conclude that global warming is man-made. The 24 mostly suggest other causes of warming.

See previous post.

I admit to not knowing all 13,950 papers (in fact, I'm familiar with only a fraction of the total I suspect), but figures like this always give me suspicion. Unless it's a review paper, I struggle to believe that there are that many papers assessing "whether climate change / global warming" is man-made. I would have thought most of the papers would have been looking at a specific aspect in a specific situation based on specific data?

If that is the case, it's really poor science simply to play the numbers games. Quantity of collected data / quality of collected data / quality of the analysis of the collected data all come in to play on every single paper, and on top of that there will be a large number of papers that simply can't be compared against each other piece for piece.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a climate change denialist at all, I just dislike poor science / poorly presented science on either side of any debate.

Topazg, you are yourself someone who has an inclination to contradict received consensus by saying "but there's one paper that says..." (I recall you saying that about either homeopathy or vaccines.) But I assume you understand well enough that scientific research is probabilistic; getting weird results in one out of 20 or 1 out of 1000 projects is proof that you're doing science right, not proof that the consensus is wrong. Either (1) knowing the number of contrarian papers and also the total pool of research those papers have appeared in are both useful, or (2) neither is useful and people shouldn't obstinately draw attention to the minority report in the first case.

I contest this strongly, I have not contradicted received consensus in this way. It would be very silly to do this

One more time: Statistics proves nothing.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Re: References

_________________
Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

All right, I apologize. In all of l19's tangled (and sometimes frankly strange) discussions of oddball scientific views, I've conflated your views with those of someone much sillier.

Hey, that leaves a LOT of people

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Heh, it's no problem, it's easily done.

This has me worried about the future of this thread.

_________________
Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

I'll help with that. I can and will talk about this for as long as anybody wants. This is a personal and professional passion for me after all!
New article today from the USGS.
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.as ... s_releases

For anyone interested: Stern (of the Stern Report) has officially admitted that the last six years have shown his 2006 report to be over-optimistic.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... ange-davos

Gave me a good chuckle:

Personnally i am rather in the camp of the believers in man made global warning... BUT unfortunaltly i feel like the whole discussion is moot. I am 95% convinved that global warning is man made; but 99.99% convinved that nothing of impact will be done.
Our politic systems (in the US and Europe, and also in less democratic countries like China)just cannot accept to lose something today to win something when the current leader will not only not be in power, but be dead.

I also noticed a coincidence:

It seems to me that sceptics are more vocal these days/years in the media, and at the same time you can find articles explaining that the US will become the first oil producer during the 21st century, due to tight oil exploitation.
To me, now that there is hope to sever the dependency of the US toward oil producing countries, spending less fuel just lost its appeal for a lot of lobbies and nothing will change. At all. Except maybe the authorization to drill for oil in alaska.

So there is no chance of the US doing anything, China will not endanger its growth either, so who cares what France,Germany or finland do ? its irrelevant (I am not saying that Europe will actually do something, just that even if they do it is pointless).

I had a longer post that was eaten on a Firefow crash so i ll stop here,
but in short, i am not sure of the exact causes, or consequences of the global warning, but to me its happening and its not stoppable.
Currently established systems are geared toward immediate profit and cannot made those painful decisions (and revolutions arent better in my opinion )

on a lighter note,
a flash game that represents my opinion on politics and oil industry: (its rather funny too if maaaybe a tiny bit cynical)
http://www.molleindustria.org/en/oiligarchy/

_________________
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

Civilization is built like that. It's based on short-term exploitation, industrialization just makes it worse. It won't change until it absolutely has to.

Civilization was built by people with a long term outlook. Consider Egyptian pyramids and Roman aqueducts. Even today Japanese lacquerware is made to last for centuries. Short term exploitation is modern, and largely Western.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

This short of a term, yes. Surprisingly recent, too, last 100 years or so. But for the most part it's still just acceleration and intesification of the basic urge that drives civilization onwards - growth, conquest, control, destructive use of the landbase.