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Hm... let me try my own plea to authority. Neil uses it so much, so there must be some credibility associated with it.
Consensus? What consensus?
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Oreskes (2004) said she had analyzed "928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords 'climate change'." She concluded that 75% of the papers either explicitly or implicitly accepted the "consensus" view; 25% took no position, being concerned with palaeoclimate rather than today’s climate; and "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position...."
Dr. Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, conducted a search of the peer-reviewed literature on the ISI Web of Science database between 1993 and 2003. He found not 928 but more than 12,000 papers mentioning the phrase "climate change". ... According to Dr. Peiser, fewer than one-third of the papers analyzed by Oreskes either explicitly or implicitly endorsed the "consensus", contrary to Oreskes’ assertion that the figure was 75%. In addition, 44 abstracts focused on the natural as opposed to anthropogenic causes of climate change, and did not include any direct or indirect link or reference to human actitivies, carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions, let alone anthropogenic forcing of recent climate change. More than half of the abstracts did not mention anthropogenic climate change at all and could not, therefore, reasonably be held to have commented either way upon the "consensus" as defined by Oreskes.
Cao et al. (2005) point out that, without the ability to quantify variations in the terrestrial carbon sink both regionally and over time, climate projections are unreliable –
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To predict global climate change and to implement the Kyoto Protocol for stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases concentrations require quantifying spatio-temporal variations in the terrestrial carbon sink accurately. During the past decade multi-scale ecological experiment and observation networks have been established using various new technologies (e.g. controlled environmental facilities, eddy covariance techniques and quantitative remote sensing), and have obtained a large amount of data about terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle. However, uncertainties in the magnitude and spatio-temporal variations of the terrestrial carbon sink and in understanding the underlying mechanisms have not been reduced significantly.
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Gerhard (2004), discussing the conflict between observation, theory, and politics, says –
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Debate over whether human activity causes Earth climate change obscures the immensity of the dynamic systems that create and maintain climate on the planet. Anthropocentric debate leads people to believe that they can alter these planetary dynamic systems to prevent what they perceive as negative climate impacts on human civilization. Although politicians offer simplistic remedies, such as the Kyoto Protocol, global climate continues to change naturally.
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Leiserowitz (2005) reports –
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results from a national study (2003) that examined the risk perceptions and connotative meanings of global warming in the American mind and found that Americans perceived climate change as a moderate risk that will predominantly impact geographically and temporally distant people and places. This research also identified several distinct interpretive communities, including naysayers and alarmists, with widely divergent perceptions of climate change risks. Thus, ‘dangerous’ climate change is a concept contested not only among scientists and policymakers, but among the American public as well.
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Lai et al. (2005) offer an entirely new hypothesis to explain recent warming of the climate –
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The impacts of global warming on the environment, economy and society are presently receiving much attention by the international community. However, the extent to which anthropogenic factors are the main cause of global warming, is still being debated. … This research invokes some new concepts: (i) certain biochemical processes which strongly interact with geophysical processes in climate system: (ii) a hypothesis that internal processes in the oceans rather than in the atmosphere are at the center of global warming; (iii) chemical energy stored in biochemical processes call significantly affect ocean dynamics and therefore the climate system. Based on those concepts, we propose a new hypothesis for global warming.
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Moser (2005) explores the assessment of rising sea levels and in state-level managerial and policy responses to climate change impacts such as sea-level rise in three US states –
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Uncertainties in the human dimensions of global change deeply affect the assessment and responses to climate change impacts such as sea-level rise.
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Shaviv (2006) considers the cosmic-ray forcing posited by Svensmark et al. (2006), and concludes that, if the effect is real, natural climate variability rather than anthropogenic enhancement of the greenhouse effect has contributed more than half of the warming over the past century –
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The cosmic-ray forcing / climate link … implies that the increased solar luminosity and reduced cosmic-ray forcing over the previous century should have contributed a warming of ~0.47K, while the rest should be mainly attributed to anthropogenic causes.
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Zhen-Shan and Xian (2007) say that CO2 forcing contributes less to temperature change than natural climate variability, that the anthropogenic enhancement of the greenhouse effect –
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Could have been excessively exaggerated” … Therefore, if CO2 concentration remains constant at present, the CO2 greenhouse effect will be deficient in counterchecking the natural cooling of global climate in the following 20 years. Even though the CO2 greenhouse effect on global climate change is unsuspicious, it could have been excessively exaggerated. It is high time to re-consider the trend of global climate changes.
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Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard
So, what will it take for you to acknowledge the fact that we have rapid global climate change?
When the Arctic is ice free in the late summer?
When the Greenland largely melts into the ocean, raising the ocean level many feet?
When all the "perma-frost" melts and releases a torrent of methane?
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...yawn...
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Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard
When California and the southwest USA runs out of water?
When we have the hottest decade, after the hottest decade, after the hottest decade?
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The hottest year recorded in recent history was 1934. That implies all subsequent years were COOLER than 1934. ("NASA's ground-based temperature records for the past 120 years -- which have been the basis for most of the claims that global warming is happening at an unprecedented rate, almost entirely due to human actions -- have now been corrected to show that much of the warming occurred before CO2 emissions and concentrations began to rise significantly.")
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Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard
What if all those "crazy" IPCC scientists were right, and by the time that you decide to swallow your pride, we have already passed the critical threshold and we are having millions of climate refugees -- people, like you and me, having to leave their homes?
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You mean, all of those lock-step consensus types, like the ones I showed above? And how will a worst-case estimate rise of 5 cm over 100 years cause me to leave my home here in Ohio?
Stop with the emotional pleas, already, Neil! I can't do emotional like you can. |