If global warming went 'on trial', could deniers do better than John Christy?

They'd have Lindzen and Gray to call on also. I'm not sure Gray would help their case, though. Despite a very distinguished career he just gives the impression of being out of touch these days. I haven't seen Lindzen in action so I can't judge how effective he'd be, but having an endowed chair at M.I.T. will certainly impress non-scientists. The problem with people like Christy and Chris Landsea is that they actually believe in AGW.

Unfortunately for the AGW non-believers, the pro-AGW side has many more people to draw on and with guys like Jeff Severinghaus, Ralph Keeling, Kerry Emanuel, Kevin Trenberth, Susan Solomon, and Michael Oppenheimer it's hard to see how the deniers would have a chance. These people are smart

EDIT: jim z, could you be more specific about what you didn't like about my answer? I wasn't making a scientific argument to begin with, so saying it's without scientific merit is irrelevant. What I said was: it's a lot easier to find scientists (with expert qualifications, that is) that support AGW than to find ones that don't believe in it. There really is no disputing that. Then I said that I don't think William Gray is that in touch with the latest science. I've seen him speak several times and I wasn't "wowed." He gave a talk that immediately followed mine at a meeting last year, and he was the only I saw using hand-drawn transparencies! That doesn't make him wrong, but it may make him less rhetorically effective, which is important in a trial. The people that I did mention ARE quite rhetorically effective, and would trounce most average speakers.

I don't think anything I said was at all "leftist," I was just answering the question. If you were handicapping a football game between a bunch of liberal NFL players and conservative Pop Warner kids, and you said that the NFL players would crush the kids, would that make you leftist too?

Without knowing what Dr. Christy said about water vapor, it's hard to know if the deniers could do better. It sounds like Christy conceded a lot of key points.

My experience with expert witnesses is that they are extremely unpredictable. You go over their testimony with them several times before trial, and yet when they get on the stand, everything they say is qualified and caveated to the point it all boils down to about nothing.

You can go through the transcript line by line, and what they said in lines 1 to 15 is taken back or qualified into a nullity in lines 130 to 145, and what they said in lines 45 to 60 is caveated into nihil in lines 235 to 250.

When you're done with the analysis every part of the transcript cancels out some other part and the net residue and remainder is a big fat bowl of zero.

They do take up a lot of Court time though, and they enjoy being on the stand, and they like to put a lot of biographical detail into how they got to be so smart and expert.

For that reason, panels of scientists are a better source of good science than are Courts. Most judges are science ninnies. So even if they do their very best, it's a little like brain surgery with a wooden spoon.

Heisenberg talked about the idea that the event is changed by the process of observing it. So if we put the electron on the witness stand and ask it how it became such a fast electron, it gives and unreliable answer --- well it's the same with expert witnesses.

You gotta hope that by giving them an answer, even one they don't like they will pay attention. Sadly they seem to have very little to say (offering evidence that indeed winter is colder than summer and refering to the south pole and the antarctic as if they are different places) so they are compenstating by saying it loudly and as often as possible. Keep trying, but don't waiste too much effort, it may not be worth trying to convince some people. BTW, I do like the link where the girl who was picked as the best responce basically told the asker that he was an idoit and then said she felt dirty being associated with his question.

You are kidding right? Instead of using a judges thoughts about what someone says, how about you just post what the person has said. here is Christy's statement (summary) to the House Ways and Means Committee.

http://waysandmeans.house.gov/media/pdf/111/ctest....

From now on, maybe you should refrain from using hear say, and just go to the source. Or would that have ruined your little set up question

peg, blob, and gib gave predictable answers, leftist, biased and without scientific merit.

I wonder if you really believe that there has been harmful warming that has been unprecedented or if you simply spread that misinformation because you believe in a political agenda that very very few support because that agenda has been tried and it failed. It is very hard to tell. Clearly, some people don't learn from history, human or natural.

Here is what Christy actually thinks:

Christy is actually the environmental lobby's worst nightmare - an accomplished climate scientist with no ties to Big Oil who has produced reams and reams of data that undermine arguments that the earth's atmosphere is warming at an unusual rate and question whether the remedies being talked about in Congress will actually do any good.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/14/magazines/fortune/...

Vermont?? Isn't that where Judge Edward Cashman sentenced a man who raped a young girl for four years to a measly 60 days in prison?

I'd say that there is a serious problem with the court system there.... wouldn't you?

Once again, just because the courts agree that increased green house gas concentrations are likely causes for climate change this still doesn't proof that it is the root cause. Even in your question you state that green house gases has an impact towards a warming rate.

To me this seems like there is no good proof that man is causing the climate change. Even the IPCC says that over the last fifty years most of the observed warming is likely to have been due to increase in GHG concentrations. This statement doesn't say that it causes increasing temperatures, it just may be.

Actually, the science behind global warming has been on trial for many decades. If it were not happening, that would be very easy to demonstrate, and we'd all be talking about something else right now.

Unfortunately, hundreds of scientific papers have survived peer review and have been published in major scientific journals documenting the warming and its effects, yet not a single paper has survived peer review to discredit global warming or cast even a sliver of doubt.

I can't imagine what evidence people who express "skepticism" think they are basing their entirely unjustified position on. Anyone care to enlighten us?

Come on people. we've been asking this for years and not one of you has provided a single shred of peer-reviewed evidence. Here's your chance again... make the count 1000+ papers to 1 and show us that one scientific study, published in a peer-reviewed paper in a reputable scientific journal that casts doubt on whether or not the warming is occuring. Even one!

I arrived on Yahoo Answers years ago as a skeptic (a real one... skeptical of all positions on the topic until I had evidence to support them), and I'm still looking for that shred of evidence that might justify doubt in global warming or its likely disasterous outcome.

Unfortunately everything I see points to the negative effects arriving sooner rather than later, especially due to the success corporations have had in crafting global agreements which will be absolutely pointless and ineffective at reducing global CO2 (or pursuing black soot carbon reductions as an even faster and more effective short term strategy).

The current goal of global govenrments seems to be to protect those safe havens that coprorations have established to be able to continue to emit massive and growing quantities of CO2 and other pollutants in developing nations. Remember this has all been well known for decades; one of the major drivers for globalization, and moving jobs and economic growth to developing nations, has been to concentrate growth in those protected pollution-spewing nations that now account for the majority of global emissions, yet are exempt from all current and proposed future controls.

Yet the now-unemployed and poor in developed nations are expected to pay for the global response while a few corporate executives get (even more) filthy rich off of their continued destruction of the entire planet's ability to support life?

Screw that; corporations and politicians are choosing this path now with full knowledge of the inevitable consequences. They should all be hung for crimes against humanity. In fact, I'd be very surprised if within a few decades they are not tried, convicted and sentanced to death for these crimes, much like many genocidal fascists were following World War II.

Look it up. Fasciscm = corporatism, and who has the power in today's world, if not global corporations? We won the war, but lost the battle for control, even when mankind's own survival is at stake.

Even the people who advocate global treaties and cap and trade "CO2 reductions", while developing countries grow emissions in an uncontrolled fashion, are accomplices in the tragedy that is assured for our future while these issue remain unaddressed.

Slamming "deniers" is nothing to pat yourself on the back about while remaining in denial yourself about where global CO2 concentrations are going under all current and proposed treaties that leave out China and India.

It doesn't matter if deniers lose, as is likely to be the case. What matters to deniers is that they provide to the public the false impression that there is genuine scientific debate on some of the key issues that are "debated" mainly in political circles. If done at the national level (as opposed to the trial you cite here), it will serve that purpose.

Although being under oath probably kept Christy's statements more reasonable than is typical, I'm sure deniers won't have trouble finding those not averse to lying or spinning under oath. If a judge sticks with peer-reviewed science and is objective, it will be difficult for deniers, nonetheless.

EDIT

Jim z says "Here is what Christy actually thinks:"

So Christy lies under oath and tells the truth while not under oath? Everything is backwards in the world of deniers.

Denier? That is pathetic coming from someone that denies reality to push his baseless leftist propaganda. It warmed about half a degree last century. So what if most of it was from CO2. That is about a quarter of a degree. From that we are supposed to accept mindless chicken little pronouncements of doom form deluded leftist politicians like Gore. Talk about someone that denies reality and lives in a fantasy world.