On 9/14/2012 11:10 AM, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 9/14/2012 1:10 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 9/14/2012 6:10 AM, Stephen P. King wrote:
The "evidence" has strong indications of being manipulated for the purpose of a
political agenda.
It is certainly cherry-picked by minions of the fossil fuel industry.
I would agree with you if the fossil fuel industry was the only party guilty of "cherry
picking"! You can read for yourself in the Climate-gate email dump many examples of
discussions of cherry-picking by climate alarmists.
You've been misled by GW deniers. There's no evidence in the emails of cherry picking -
as has been confirmed by several independent review committees.
I like Richard Muller's ongoing commentaries <http://muller.lbl.gov/> on the entire
issue because I have a close personal friend that knows him personally. It is clear that
there is global warming, but its "cause" is not completely clear.
Cause is seldom a single thing; what's important is which factors are within our control.
Muller is one of the founders of BerkleyEarth. He was critical of the data that showed
global warming, but after leading an extensive re-evaluation of all the data using
comprehensive statistics the group concluded:
"Berkeley Earth has just released analysis of land-surface temperature records going back
250 years, about 100 years further than previous studies. The analysis shows that global
warming is real, and the best explanation of the temperature trend is a combination of
volcanoes and CO2."
And there's no real debate about where the CO2 comes from. It's easy to calculate how
much is produced by burning fossil fuel.
We can only offer conjectures and to jump to the comclusion that "humans are causing it"
are premature. I think that we should keep science seperate from state policy unless
there is clear and incontrovertible evidence. Too many "do-gooders" have influenced
state policy and to the eventual harm of mass numbers of humans, example the banning of
DDT because of the emotional appeal of a book. It can be proven that this ban has causes
hundred of thousands of humans to die needlessly to malaria.
The way that the sensors are distributed and their data is weighed is the subject of a
lot of controversy
Which has been addressed by direct comparison of different sensors. Of course the
fossil fuel industry doesn't have to prove anything, they just create fake controversy
and take advantage of the provisional nature of all science.
I am no desire to be an apologist for any industry. I am interested in the purity of
science.
We do not have models that are accurate enough to even accurately retrodict the
variation in temperatures so why are we trusting them in their predictions?.
Because whatever other factors there are it is straightforward to predict that
increasing atmospheric CO2 will increase temperatures, something already calculated by
Arrhenius in 1890. Burning fossil fuel releases CO2 into the atmosphere. The
concentration of CO2 is increasing proportionately. Measured temperatures are increasing.
All I will say is that our climate is not so simple that we can generate a faithful
model based on what you wrote here alone. Complex systems cannot be expected to have
simple models.
Of course not. Just the CO2 added would produce only a 0.8C temperature rise. The
problem is there are several positive feed backs: water vapor, methane emission, reduced
albedo,... If you want to wait till we have a perfect model, you are essentially deciding
it's not a problem. It's not a scientific problem. Science can always wait. Science
never needs to make a decision and it's theories are always provisional. Life however
requires decisions; which means decisions based on imperfect information.
Brent
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