Quote:
Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard
Questions are good, but a couple of papers do not change the accepted science
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GCC is real, and it largely caused by humans burning a few million years worth of carbon fuel in ~150 years. If you want to join the scientific debate, fine.
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Sorry Neil and I don't want to start an argument but those of us who are neither believers or skeptics find this kind of language from one side or the other very closed and not open to any kind of debate.
There IS a debate to be had here, the science is not settled - I refuse to believe Monbiot, someone who compares people who do not have his beliefs to Holocaust deniers - jeesh.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard
But if you simply do not want to believe that the scientists are correct -- then you need to decide why you don't also disbelieve the theory of gravity, or atomic structure, relativity, plate tectonics, etc. The scientific process is the same for all of these. They are all based on the data, and they are all the accepted scientific theory.
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Gravity - things fall to the ground, planets orbit suns, moons orbit planets - all in a way that proves the theory. You predict it with the theory and confirm it with real observations.
Atomic Structure - Torness power station is just 25 miles from where I sit. It seems like a big investment in a unproven theory.
Relativity - Some observations have proven aspects of it such as quasars and background radiation, but it is still a theory so far and someone may come up with another explanation which also fits. Still a theory.
Plate Tectonics - I find earthquakes and volcanos pretty convincing. Faults are examined and watched to predict quakes all over the world.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard
If one of 'em is wrong, then they all are wrong.
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Sorry, no.
AGW does not come close to those theories and should not be linked. For AGW to be proven the scientists have to prove 3 things
1. We are living in a period of warming not seen before
2. That warming is caused by greenhouse gasses
3. The gasses we contribute are accelerating the effect
The problem is that after 35 years of this theory being around and all the research associated with it even part 1 of this theory has no convincing evidence. The paper I linked to (and there have been quite a few others) suggests that both the data used and the methods offer little in the way of proof.
For those not reading it, basically they analysed the methods used in temperature reconstruction going back to 1000AD. It is this research that allows headlines like the temperatures now are higher than history. It also produced the famous (or should that be infamous) Hockey Stick.
It turns out that the data can be seen as flawed - some proxies are unreliable due to external factors not temp related or local environmental conditions and disturbances. On top of this the methods used to analyse the data are also questionable. They are not standard methods used in the science of statistics, and the environmental scientists using them are not experts in those methods anyway.
The most damning conclusion was that if the researchers used random red-noise through the model it came close to replicating the actual results. Random data !
As I tapped above I'm not a skeptic or a believer but there is still need for an open debate. The emails leaked from CRU seem to suggest that the scientists don't want that debate, the reasoning seems unclear. You also seem to think the debate on that aspect is closed. Not for me I'm afraid.
I have a kid and I want the world to be livable when he's grown up. I'm willing to do what I can to conserve resources, recycle when I can and polute as little as possible but AGW still remains unconvincing to me.
Sorry - that was longer than I intended.
