Climate Change? (Believers -vs- Deniers)?

Let me reject the term "believer";I *am persuaded* that AGW is real and serious because of the evidence (see below). I would rather not think this, just as I would rather not think that I'm going to die sometime, but that's how it is.

I used to think differently, until the early 1990s, when for various reasons I went into the question more deeply.

I reconsidered the matter at the end of last year, when press reports gave the impression that serious faults had been discovered in the science. But when I went into that, I found myself agreeing with what NATURE, the world's leading science journal, had to say about the matter (below)

The facts: There is an outstanding summary of the situation in December 18 SCIENCE, free download

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/326/596...

That’s … sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/326/5960/1646

Presidential Address:

Reflections On: Our Planet and Its Life, Origins, and Futures

James J. McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard University

An outstanding, well-referenced, review of the situation. It’s all there; history of the global warming concept, role of solar fluctuations, the actual temperature record with ranking of years, the extent to which predictions since 1995 have been justified and indeed amplified by events.

And where that's taking us.

Climategate: For a scientific appraisal of the “hoax” claim, see

Nature 462, 545 (3 December 2009) | doi:10.1038/462545a; Published online 2 December 2009

http://www.nature.com/

nature/journal/v462/

n7273/full/462545a.html

which uses words like “paranoid” and “laughable” for the hoax claim, or says they would be except for the political use that would be made of them. How true.

It's good you have an open mind. I'll admit I've insulted before without realizing it was an insult and when I did I felt bad.

Denier:

For Global Warming (Climate Change) there is no actual proof. All the records and data surrounding it have been tampered with, there forth no help to us because they are not accurate. E-mails were hacked and they were scientists e-mailing back and forth laughing about what a joke Global Warming (Climate Change) is. That's what really got me denying. Then once Global Warming was proven fraud Al Gore (and some other people) would not give up because they were getting rich from all this. So they made up Climate Change so whatever happened in the world could fall under that category of Climate Change.

My opinion is that part of your support for your belief in man made global warming has nothing at all to do with it. You stated that the Earth cannot sustain the resources we are consuming and cannot cope with the pollution we are putting out. This has nothing to do with global warming.

If those two issues you mentioned need addressing then they should be directly addressed with specific policies. I suppose your thought may be that well, CO2 reduction policy would also meet those problems as well (e.g. secondary effect).

However, any policy where the secondary effect is good but the primary effect is not, is not a good policy. Keep that in mind. It's also not a good idea to implement policies that makes us "feel good" or "seem like we are doing something".

They're's only two sides to the debate, science and the denial lobby made up shills and lunatics.

Significant human caused warming is just a fairytale. It is the latest in a very long list of things that will kill us. You are listening to political spin spread by activists pretending to be scientists. That consensus nonsense is a complete fabrication put together as political spin. That isn't how science works. Scientists don't take a poll. I know that is hard to believe but it is true. Their "science" is truly pathetic. As a scientist, it is annoying to me that political propaganda is passed off as science. The other things you mention don't have anything to do with if it is warming significantly. In a rational world, you don't believe in something because is makes you feel good. Believing propaganda means you don't take the proper action to solve actual problems. This is just a left wing political movement plain and simple.

Global climate is a dynamic process, and as such, is always in a state of change, with or without humans. So the climate is always either getting warmer, colder, wetter or drier.

The critical question is how much do human carbon emissions contribute to global temperatures.

A meteorologist colleague explained it to me this way.

The contribution of human carbon emissions to global temperatures lie in the second place of decimals of a degree centigrade. They may reinforce natural warming, or mitigate natural cooling, by some fraction of a degree, bu they are not the principal forcing agent in our climate

The consensus view is not historically the correct one, when it comes to scientific theories and their explanation of how the world works. AGW has been proven wrong, it's time to find another explanation for the warming, or lack of.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/179718-Beryllium...

hey Pegminer:

How many papers did Edison publish?

was he a researcher?

was he a scientist?

.

.

Denier: I base my belief on the fact that for 12,000 years, the global temperature has done nothing but fluctuate. I look at ice core samples from around the world and fail to be impressed by this latest fluctuation in temperatures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Tempera...

While man and his pollution may play some small role in the temperature rise, I doubt the veracity of the future catastrophic warming claims. The seas rising by 60 meters or more is just ridiculous. There is not enough land ice on the Earth to raise the sea level that much. Sea borne ice will contract as it melts away, actually lowering sea levels. The hydrosphere covers 71% of the Earth's surface and is approximately 310 million cubic miles in volume.

For over 25 years I have listened to AGW prognosticators make wilder and wilder claims. I am still waiting for any to happen. This is what brought me over to the skeptics side. At 17, I knew AGW was real, at 38 I'm still waiting for catastrophe.

The UN's IPCC is a political organization, with political goals. I have the antiquated American ideal of mistrusting every politician, I don't care about party affiliation. The IPCC is the clearinghouse for all AGW information. It takes every opportunity to assume the worst, as demonstrated recently by British journalists. When all scientists are relying on this panel for relevant information, it becomes all too easy to skew opinion.

I tend to look at the sun and the oceans as the drivers of this climate. It's true, sunspot activity has more or less leveled off. But what happens to a pot of water when you put it on the stove at medium heat? Eventually, enough BTU's will be added to the water to cause it to boil. And so it is with the Sun and the oceans.

There is also so much we do not understand yet. For instance, Daangard-Oeschger and Bond events. They both follow 1500 year cycles, and we are right inline for another Bond event. The past two years of cold weather on the Atlantic coast would seem to support this event.

http://rivernet.ncsu.edu/courselocker/PaleoClimate...

But as long as we keep counting white swans, they are all we will ever see.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

CO2's basic physics. It transmits visible light freely, but blocks some infrared light (heat). In the atmosphere that means it MUST cause warming, letting sunlight down, and blocking some of the heat from going back up.

The temperature record is backed by a vast amount of independent evidence that we're warming. Melting Arctic ice, earlier Springs, sea levels rising, species migrations, etc. It COULDN'T possibly be faked.

We know it can't be the Sun. We measure solar radiation, and it's DECREASING (slightly). We also warm more at night than during the day, and more in winter than summer. All consistent with CO2 warming, and contradictory to the Sun warming us.

I am an Outdoors Person and a Nature Lover because I used to do a lot of Camping, Hiking and Backpacking which kept me close to the Natural aspects of our planet. In the late '80s I had listened to what the Climate Change folks of the time were crying as Global Cooling due to CO2. This was in response to the temporary cooling spell from the '40s to the '70s.

The late '70s proved not to cooperate and a warming trend began...soon after there was a cry of Global Warming which led through to the late '90s.

Post-2000, the data being used for Global Cooling / Warming was scrutinized in much more detail and it was found that the 'Heat Island' effect was creating false readings while Satellite-based temperatures did not corroborate terrestrial-based measurements even to this day. This gave rise to the cry of Climate Change to replace the Global Cooling / Warming movement.

Again, the Global Temperatures would not cooperate and a general cooling cycle began to appear. Hmmm, sounds like a periodic temperature cycle is beginning to emerge. I find the need to use the AGW-100year prediction to eliminate statistical variation laughable. No other scientific / medical field requires a 100years...sounds like they just want the skeptics of the time to die of old age so people in the future won't be able to verify the specifics of their claims.

Working in a High-Tech Industry and dealing with Statistical Data and Modeling on a regular basis I came to find serious problems with the claims of the Believers and moved to becoming as you call it, a Denier who believes in Real Green Causes. I, unlike those who claim to be Green actually recycle, am not wasteful in my food purchases and think of the most efficient way to run my errands in a given location to minimize excessive driving.

One of the main arguments that Climate Change enthusiasts like to claim is that Sea Level rise is swallowing up shorelines around the world. There has been no actual recorded event taking place.

If you follow the so-called documentaries, which includes 'An Inconvenient Truth', they claim that Glacier Melt is causing Sea Levels to rise and in the movie mentioned previously they claim specifically that the Greenland Ice Sheet represents 20ft of Sea Level rise. If you watched the represented Ice Sheet shrinking in size, you would realize that there was a loss of greater than 25%. In other so-called Documentaries, the claim is the North American Ice Sheet represents 25ft of Sea Level rise and saw something similar in loss.

What is important in noting, which was previously stated, is that there has been no documented loss of shoreline around the world. If we keep the math simple at 20% loss...then Greenland would produce 4ft of Sea Level rise and North America would produce 5ft of Sea Level rise, which we should be able to see now, in the present. That's a minimum of 9ft of Sea Level rise that we should be able to see today even before Thermal Expansion of Sea Water is even calculated.

This leads me to the discussion of Pacific Atolls, with one in particular...Kingman Reef (url #1). Kingman Reef has a documented elevation of less than 1meter, which roughly equates to 3ft. At this point you need to ask yourself, how is it that a Pacific Atoll whose elevation is 3ft can maintain that in the face of 9ft of Sea Level rise? Many of these Atolls were chartered by Captain Cook in the late 1700s if you need to understand how long these elevations have been maintained through documentation. You can look at url #2 if you wish to look at other Pacific Atolls, which is not a complete listing.

If you move on to other issues involving AGW, or Climate Change, Water Vapor is the most abundant and powerful of the Greenhouse Gases present on the planet (url #3. Without it, temperatures on the planet would be significantly lower and not be able to sustain life as we know it.

When constituent Green Houses Gases are ever mentioned, I have yet to see Water Vapor included. Why exclude the largest contributor? Natural and consistent, I think not...I can tell you that the Humidity Level in Denver / Albuquerque is far less than it is in Houston / Miami. Need Global Evidence? Try comparing Bangkok Humidity to Baghdad any time of the year and beyond.

Science relies heavily upon published works which are open to Peer Review. Unfortunately, we see little published works in the Public Domain and I have not ever seen a published article which covers the entire Global Warming argument. Newspaper Articles and Movies are not Published Peer-Reviewed Documentation. Why are the proponents so secretive on a subject that impacts us all?

We now know with the 'Climate-Gate' scandal(url #4), that contradicting data was being kept from the community at large.

'Glacier-Gate' (url #5) has highlighted serious errors in the AR4 report and the claim that the Himalayan Glacier will vanish by 2035 will eventually be retracted.

'Amazon-Gate' (url #6), highlights the use of non-peer reviewed material and in some cases non-scientific articles not even related to Climate Studies.

'Africa-Gate' (url #7), doesn't even bother with using supportive data to reinforce it's claims.

For now, I'd be happy to have anyone who supports the AGW / Global Cooling / Climate Change camp to guarantee and prove that the Kingman Reef is a minimum of 6ft below Sea Level.

believer, how can you possibly deny all these evidence, the hurricanes, floods and droughts.

and i believe that human are partially responsible for sure, even if its not intentionally.

out of the 20 hottest years, 19 of them occurred since 1980,and 3 of the hottest years ever happened in the passed 10 years. are u waiting until half the world goes under water and then u start opening your eyes?!!!