Have AGW proponents put all their eggs into one basket?

Baccheus, this is one of the few times I will most likely have the pleasure of agreeing with you. Very good answer. I brought up this question many months ago and this "environmental" issue if proven wrong that Man's involvement does not cause warming or climate change then I agree, the entire library of blogger's and politicians past comments, including environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the NRDC to name a few will lose much of their credibility and may just in fact fold.

One answerer noted the other environmental issues, and yes AGW is an environmental issue, eg alar, acid rain, etc. has not come to fruition and they have based their predictions on over exaggerations on the effects on our planet and/or to people; but in some respects such issues as acid rain did occur, but in a relatively minor degrees. Some issues have been outright lies, some they jumped the gun and caused people damage prior to understanding the entire issue, eg spotted owl, silicone implants, and now the FEMA trailer issue to name a few.

The most feedback will be to the politicians who have changed the lifestyles of people and their wealth and whatever and will have to take the responsibility of their past actions. Most likely they just will fade into the woodwork and the people will never hear of them again as has happened in the so many other issues of the past.

Science journals will continue, but will be revamping and updating their process and improving the process of peer review. Many of you laughed at a colleague of mine and his scientific partner, two epidemiologists who conducted the largest study ever on second hand smoke and found little to no relationship to cancer caused by the association today. Now their study showed 40 years ago, that may not have been the conclusion. Today, in their study it did not predict any carcinogenic effects. They were nailed by one activist in the scientific community, also a scientist, but not in the field of epidemiology and he slandered this duo until no tomorrow because he was so against second hand smoking and smoking in general and the anti-smoking campaign that he went to this degree to discredit his scientific fellows, Interesting, the authors of the study were also against smoking but reported the truth of their observations, in otherwords, the scientific way. The relationship showed a 1.03 relationship with a standard deviation of .05 which in the epidemiology world means it has little significance.

Skepticism means sit back and observe, but not to jump to conclusions and cause people harm which is what is being done by the radicalism of politicians who are over reacting to a natural phenomenon. A bill was introduced in California to repeal AB32 or California's answer to a climate bill. In a meeting yesterday, both democrats and republicans blamed the governor (Arnold) for possibly over reacting on this bill and other issues as they finally realized the economic damage it is causing. I was there folks and asked a lot of questions and got straight answers and was extremely surprised at the democrats in California reactions. They are beginning to understand that some of this just might be wrong and elections are coming up and they are now in danger of losing their seat as, like other environmental issues, people are losing interest in this one, AGW, and *&^& is hitting the fan at the political level. As some politicians used this issue to gain popularity and acceptance, now they are distancing themselves from it as the public loses its interest in the subject. It is how all environmental issues have gone and developed and died in the past and this one is no different other than like Mike says, it is all over the internet.

Good question and I hope some will learn from it and learn that so far, environmentalists are batting about zero on their crystal ball. Science isn't advanced enough to understand what is going on yet or predict with any reasonably certainty that something will happen. Observe and approach the methods of this science with cautious optimism and learn and adjust rather than destroy the fabric of the civilization.

With any heated debate there'll continually be people on the two part who're a procedures too harsh. purely from what i've got seen it style of feels the proponents are slightly greater reasonable than the deniers, because of the fact that oftentimes to disclaim it you had to first flow out of your thank you to locate info to disclaim it, because of the fact the thought has help between maximum individuals (practically not one of the undemanding media shops as we talk deny AGW). Taking this into consideration, there develop into oftentimes some underlying element, some emotional force, to lead them to opt to develop into deniers in the 1st place. certainly, those people could then be somewhat greater passionate appropriate to the problem. of direction that's no longer genuine for each individual and that i'd desire to checklist a minimum of a few skeptics right here on YA who're certainly reasonable. And sure, there are uneducated, emotion-pushed extremists on the proponent part besides (the type that truly do hate business progression, experience that AGW will make the international explode in a fireball, and could be incredibly satisfied to be certain the human species vanish altogether.) I hate those people as much as I hate the uneducated skeptics.

Unfortunately the point that would be missed if that did end up happening is that approximately 99% of the so-called 'skeptics' out there will have been wrong as well. Say for instance there is some completely unpredicted negative feedback out there that stifles significant warming. What will that mean for the people who ran around swearing that AGW did not exist because it was just the sun, or just urban heat island, etc.? They will have been just as wrong as the proponents.

Even if it does end up being something simple like the sun, only a small fraction of the skeptical scientists out there believe that today. Everyone else--the cosmic ray guys, the AMO guys, the PDO guys--they'll all have been dead wrong.

Of course, that won't stop those who were making even the most uneducated arguments from feeling good about themselves and how "right" they were.

I agree with Dana. This is first a question of science rather than politics or environmentalism. The science is deemed to be on very solid ground based as it is on first principle physics for the direct impact of atmospheric CO2 and the other greenhouse gases. The question of feedbacks to the warming due to this radiative forcing is more problematical, but very likely to be positive giving an equilibrium climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 and overall CO2 equivalency in the range of 2C to 4.5C.

We know for a fact that climate is sensitive to perturbation as evidenced by the range in temperature between ice age and interglacial climates.

We have direct evidence for an enhanced greenhouse effect.

There is a great series of articles over at Skeptical Science written by John Cook, backed by peer-reviewed studies, that details how it is we are so confident that man induced greenhouse gases are causing a warmer climate. Check it out.

As for putting all the eggs in one basket, that is the point of doing science...to gather evidence about our world and thus to come to reasoned conclusions based on that evidence. Climate science has reached a conclusion and has made the results available to policy makers. What we do with it is up to us!

In one sense, yes, because if it turns out that greenhouse gases do not "trap" as much outgoing infrared radiation, or energy, as previously calculated, then this will cause us to rethink much of what we know about modern physics.

I do have one issue with what you said concerning the supposed "global cooling scare" of the 1970's -- People who keep referring to this, again and again, are either misinformed or liars. That Global cooling was predicted in the 1970s is completely inaccurate. A survey of the scientific literature of this time shows that global warming, not global cooling, dominated scientists understanding on the subject of inadvertent climate change during the 1970's.[1]

See, your problem is that you view global warming as an "environmentalist" issue, which is the problem for most people who view it as a political rather than scientific issue.

AGW is science. If the theory is wrong, then our understanding of physics is wrong. If people want to blame "environmentalists" for listening to climate scientists, then that's unfortunate.

On the flip side, what happens when deniers are wrong? What happens if you succeed in preventing us from sufficiently reducing our GHG emissions, the planet warms several degrees, and various feedbacks are triggered. Now deserts are expanding, the US experiences another dust bowl, there are food and water shortages worldwide, etc.

You probably don't care, because you'll probably be dead by the time the sh*t hits the fan. But that will be the end of the Republican Party, if they succeed in allowing the climate to change catastrophically. There's nowhere to hide - their votes are on the record. A couple of Republican senators will probably vote for cap and trade, but most will oppose it. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket.

It would not be the death knell for "proponents", it would be so for all science. If it turns out that the scientific journals, which are the means by which scientists exchange learning, have been making all this up, it is the death knell for all of science, the end of advancement of civilization. If the journals are corrupt, then there is no advancement in curing cancer or other disease, no advancement in food production, or physics, or anything All science advances through the journals and has throughout the industrial revolution. If that part of the scientific process is lost we are screwed far beyond the flooding of a few cities.

For those who've paid attention and have good memories, every environmentalist driven scary story has come up short: Global cooling, Three Mile Island, alar, the Iraq oil-field fires, global warming, acid rain, etc.

Every solution they've ever advocated and made headway with was a boondoggle.

This will just be the best documented case. Even for all their failures, they still seem to have too many followers. I think it's the attraction to the "I care" mantra.

Obviously not.

Conservatives were wrong when they opposed the American revolution. Conservatives were wrong when they supported slavery. Conservatives were wrong when they opposed Social Security. Conservatives were wrong when they supported Jim Crow. Conservatives were wrong when they said tax cuts would lower the deficit. Conservatives were wrong when they said that deregulating derivatives would be good for the economy.

Yet in spite of this unmitigated record of failure stretching back for two centuries, some people still think conservatives are smart. So past success or failure apparently has nothing to do with political support.

Yes.

If they stopped believing in Satan, then their "science" would become more realistic.

How is global warming real without a mention of an Antichrist?

Tell me that "climatologists." TELL ME THAT!!!