by Nathan Natas 92 Replies latest jw friends
Good point bohm - the 'secret' problem of climate change is the heat energy imbalance transferring to the ocean. Ocean acidification is one very serious manifestation of this.
Needless to say this is not a major denier talking point. They prefer to focus on things like "Its cold this winter where I live - I can see snow from my house"
Nathan meet facts, facts meet Nathan.
Tumbleweeds, crickets and silence when questions expose ideology.
As usual the denier echochamber only echoes, never creates.
For those who are researching alternative views on this subject, please visit Monkton's site at http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/
I thought Lord Monkton's views had been completely discredited?
jiyuu2 - welcome to JWN - please stick around and keep posting.
Those who are genuinely interested in finding out the truth about this subject should do their own research
Can I suggest avoiding tabloid newspapers like the Daily Mail if you are serious about doing your own research.
please allow others to think for themselves and to look at evidence from different experts in the field.
No problem there - 98% of climate scientists agree that human caused climate change is real and is happening now. Ideological media sources like the Daily Mail will cheerfully present information from the 2% of climate scientists who have alternative views as if it was the only show in town. Put another way - every time you read an article or two quoting a climate scientist who disagrees with his mainstream colleagues, you had better read another 98 articles written by mainstream scientists, just to make sure you are being proportionate.
surely it is better to refer (ie sources) to what climatologists and other professionals who have spent many years studying the subject have said.
again I have to question why you think cutting and pasting from the Daily Mail is a good idea given your otherwise well though out position
I would also be wary of those who receive funding from certain organizations with an agenda, because there may be a conflict of interest.
Any particular examples you care to share of conflict of interest tarnishing the work of published climate scientists?
For those who are researching alternative views on this subject, please visit Monkton's site at http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/
BizzyBee is quite correct. Monckton is a journalist working for an Exxon-funded right wing think tank, and his contribution to the global warming debate is not scientifically significant, and has in fact been thoroughly debunked point by point.
Rather than just lamely replying "I don't think so" jiyuu2 - why not do some of the serious research you talked about on Monckton, his other wacky ideas and his sponsors.
Start here:
http://www.desmogblog.com/christopher-monckton
And then invest about an hour listening and watching as a climate scientist with 80 published peer reviewed papers to his name discusses Monckton's 'points' one by one. (Monckton incidentally does not even have 1 published paper to his name)
http://www.stthomas.edu/engineering/jpabraham/
Let us know how you got on.
besty -- i dont really know a lot about the science behind climate change, or the data. i just trust the scientists and keep in mind that the only time i really tried to check a claim (the "darwin" anomaly) it turned out to be a quite dishonest claim.
What i dont get is that the "it might be a natural variation in some mechanism we dont really understand that cause the change, at any rate im not convinced"-crowd is so laid back about the whole thing. Even if we give this as a possibility - and lets be generous and say its 50% true - what if they are wrong? how high do the chances of a human caused mass extinction have to be before we really try to do something about it?
I bet if "the government" was putting some stuff into a nearby river and they was "quite sure" all those dying fish was just "natural variation" and again "reasonably sure" it would only kill fish and not your kids, it would be a different story.
bohm
I get the "I'm not intellectually equipped to understand this or I don't care about this so I believe whatever <insert preferred media outlet> tells me"
I get the "I strongly suspect this is all natural variation so I'm content to stop thinking about it"
I get the "Even if we are causing this we can't/won't do anything about it"
The ones I don't get are those who attempt to rationalize their underlying ideology by cherry-picking and quote-mining from the 2% of climate scientists that propose a tiny minority position. That just doesn't make sense from a lay perspective. They are intellectually equipped to research and understand the facts and yet for what seems to me irrational reasons they find comfort in a 2% view.
They wouldn't do this for vital personal healthcare choices or casually at the casino, and yet they do it for climate change.
The ones I find intensely irritating are those that refuse to respond when their ideology is confronted with facts. They create an echochamber of denial and then scurry back into the shadows when sunlight disinfects their nonsense. See Nathan on this page as an example - he has seen fit to post subsequently on other threads but hasn't been back to defend his position on this thread, because he can't. His dirty work is done.
We have birds falling from the sky by the thousands. Fish kills in rivers and Chesapeak.
Extreme cold.
Must be global warming.
We have birds falling from the sky by the thousands. Fish kills in rivers and Chesapeak.
Extreme cold.
Must be global warming.
It well could be.
The truth I got from that article was that not all climate scientists agree with that global warming is going to be a huge problem that others have predicted. Also of interest was that we may actually be facing such a thing as global cooling.
To say we may soon be facing global cooling overlooks a simple physical reality - the land and atmosphere are a tiny fraction of the planet's climate. Global warming is global. The entire planet is accumulating heat due to an energy imbalance, with the vast majority of that imbalance being absorbed by the deep ocean. Land and air surface temperature measures are important but reveal only a small fraction of the issue. If you understand CO2 to be a greenhouse gas then you need to explain why the earth would not warm with increasing CO2 concentrations.
Okay, so please give me sources to show that indeed 98% of climate scientists agree this way.
Doran (2009) presents evidence for 97.4% that accept the mainstream view.
Well, since I'm not a climatologist and was simply trying to expose folk to the view of an actual climatologist, and since I don't seem to have had much success in creating clickable links, and since I know that some people don't want to trudge through long articles, I thought I would paste some highlights.
Why pick a climatologist with a viewpoint in the 2.6% minority, without any disclaimer to that effect?
Anyway, what am I to think when I read that "According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007"?
The first thing I would think is let me go to the NSIDC website to see what they, as the primary source, say about Artic ice. Let me be sure I am not reading a cherry-picked datapoint - why 2007? why summer ice? why quote the area of ice and not the age or the volume? Was 2007 perhaps a record low point in a longer term downward trend, and we have since seen a 26% recovery in a downward trend? What is the NSIDC stated position on climate change? Thats what I would think.
Yes. Dr Viner who is head of the "British Council programme with an annual £10 million budget that raises awareness of global warming among young people abroad."
This is not proof of conflict, just a statement. Describe the specifics of conflict of interest as you see it. The British Council is a charity with a £708m budget, £10m of which is devoted to educating people on climate change as 97.4% of scientists understand it. I don't see a problem appointing a published climate scientist to lead this effort - do you think a tabloid journalist is better qualified?
When you say his contribution has been "thoroughly debunked point by point" are you simply broadcasting a statement, or is there real evidence of this by means of sources?
Asked and answered - see second link I already posted.
If I could offer my 0.02 on critical thinking on this subject it would be:
1 - What am I reading? Is it written by a climate scientist, a journalist or an 'expert'? If it is any form of media be very suspicious.
2 - How do I get to the primary source of 3rd party quotes? Is it accurate? Is it in context? What does the author of the quote say about his own work?
3 - How do any datapoints fit into the context of the bigger picture? Consider climate to be measured in decadal periods, not years. Single year datapoints are next to useless, and things like '2007-2010' highly selective. Are there are other related datapoints that add value - eg ice volume as well as ice area.
4 - How does the field of enquiry (eg satellite measurements of Artic sea ice) relate to other similar fields? eg Antartic ice. How does the field of enquiry compare to direct observations of the same part of the earth? What are the locals saying about changing conditions?
5 - Is there an alternate view to that which I am reading? Where has the scientific majority position settled on this?
