Quote:
Originally Posted by Azred
I don't care about the Heartland Group or their political leanings whatsoever because they are not the ones who did the research. NASA did the research and I don't think any rational person could claim that that organization engages in "junk science".
On this topic I have raised these points for the past several years:
1) alarmists overestimate our ability to impact global climate. According to the reports and predictions that were coming out 20 years ago, by now there should be no ice in the Arctic and the oceans should have risen at least a foot...neither of which has happened. Also, the predictions typically claimed 0.1 degree rise in average temperature each year...which also has not happened. Finally, when one large volcanic eruption can alter global temperatures by an average of 2 degrees then our importance is clearly minimized.
2) climate science does not follow the Scientific Method because a) there is no "control" Earth containing no human begins against which to measure experimental results, b) the studies begin with the same flawed premise of "human beings are disrupting global climate" rather than reaching conclusions afterwards--this is backwards.
3) alarmists want to enact legislation based on their faulty findings because they think the United States is the only country hurting the planet. I would like to see them try to go force carbon dioxide emissions on China--that would be funny.
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Whoah whoah whoah. Take some time to write something well thought out and not written in the heat of passion. It leads to a much more healthy debate.
1. Which reports/papers are you referring to when you say "they got it wrong 20 years ago!"? Specific examples are necessary so we can thoroughly examine them and what they have to say, and indeed figure out whether in fact they got it wrong, or were taken out of context. Don't just respond with "you know... the reports!" What reports? Who said this? It's highly misleading to make a blanket statement like that (which might not even be true).
2. So because we do not have a separate planet, identical to earth (except no humans), climate science isn't a science? That is a really bad argument, one that doesn't make much sense. Your other point, scientists "assume" human impact going in and shape data to match their conclusion, is also by and large not true. You do realize that science is sort of culmulative; it builds off of the work done by other individuals. The whole field of climate change has been building off of research that has been done for the past 160 years or so.
Let's try to start at the beginning. 1827, Fourier. He notices something funky; if the Earth is only warmed by solar radiation (the sun!), the planet (given it's size and distance from the Sun) should be much colder. He devises a bunch of experiments involving paned vases, and suggests the possibility that gases are responsible for maintaining heat on the planet.
Several others are inspired by Fourier's work, most notably Arrhenius. He thinks "could gases explain why the earth can retain its heat? What about specific gases, do they have different heat retaining properties?" He eventually derives numbers for both Carbon Dioxide and Water Vapor, and in fact postulates increases in carbon dioxide could lead to a "warming" of the earth. Probably the first guy to make such a bold prediction (and is turning out to be right).
Others continue to take the work of Arrhenius in different directions. Some come up with their own numbers for CO2, H2O, others use the ideas Arrhenius presented to explain the geologic past of the earth.
Most notably, Callendar in the late 1930's tried to estimate the amount of CO2 that had been released into the atmosphere since the industrial era, and used Arrhenius's numbers to calculate the hypothetical increase in temperature. Big leap forward in terms of direction.
At the same time (1900-1950 or so) there was a lot of interest in the role of CO2 diffusing into the oceans. How much diffusion can occur, how much of a sink do the oceans play. A lot of individuals rejected the idea of temperature increases solely because they thought the oceans would uptake most of the carbon.
Now we are in the 50's. Technology and scientific instruementation is getting better. The whole idea of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the role it plays with regards to climate has been around for 50+ years, with lots of rich discussion. It is still something to make a career out of because with every paper, there are more questions, more unknowns. Scientists are able to better replicate what happens to CO2 emissions. With a better understanding of the chemistry, scientists agree the oceans aren't capable of uptaking all the carbon, and it could lead to problems.
So here we are in the 1960's. Going back nearly 130 years ago, when Fourier first postulated the notion of a "greenhouse effect", the snowballing based on that one idea has led scientists to say "CO2 might be a problem." This is based off of the many calculations by different individuals of how well each gas (mainly CO2, H2O) retains heat, and by the understanding of how CO2 diffuses into the oceans.
I'm going to stop here because the story gets much more thorough and longer, but you can see the general idea. One idea blossomed into a whole field to study. Individuals weren't going in with conclusions and trying to match data to them. Instead they noticed discrepancies based on the given level of knowledge and tried to address those discrepancies. This in turn leads to more discrepancies to be addressed which lead to more discrepancies... you get the idea. You will also notice that all of these contributing individuals had to devise experiments to properly answer the question they had. All of these individuals followed the scientific method to a T, complete with controls and such.
I have advocated that fundementally, what makes the scientific method so important/useful is replicability. The ability to take someone else's work, and generate the same or similiar results. All of the advances up to the 60's were also based on this replicability, it had to be otherwise everyone would have achieved vastly different results and conclusions. The fact that to that point, people were reaching similiar values tells you that they are accurately matching reality.
3. You do touch upon a good point, underneath a huge ramble. The policy side of the argument is much more complicated than the science. I shy away from policy decisions and politics because it is so mucked up with different idealogies. I can understand the hostility towards legislation that tries to curb CO2 emissions, because it ultimately becomes a question of "economic growth vs. the environment". Most people do not want to hear "we're going to weaken our economy deliberately."