http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm

By about 600 - 1000 year lag time... which is about 800

Am I allowed to say that whether or not climate change is actually happening, I don't think that putting tons of pollutants, garbage, and other crap into the ground, sea, and atmosphere is a very good idea?

Totally. It is another thing that obscures the debate, as is true in a lot of debates. It is the danger of absolutes. Sometimes people associate the idea that global warming doesn't exist with people who don't care about the environment. There are a lot of people doing a lot of good for the environment and industry just by making their waste management more efficient, and in the long run we will do nothing but benefit from conservation. But to use people wanting to do good as a vehicle for a charged debate worth millions of dollars - well those people are doing nothing more than taking advantage of peoples' feelings and beliefs. And to me that is somewhat despicable.

It's formally called the Escalation of Commitment, and it is a huge problem in all industries.

So what if I haven't worked in a lab? Your ad hominem won't get you anywhere.

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It's impossible to reason with people who don't know how to reason, apparently. If all you have is semantics and logical fallacies to present, then I'm just wasting my time here. I expected better from you Kaias, but apparently even you won't accept the truth.

Remind us what the truth is again? I am a bit confused at your response.

That global warming denialism is a serious threat that undermines what science is and what it stands for. And shouldn't be confused with skepticism. Because it's not.

I think you're talking about apples and Kaias is talking about oranges. I'm sure you understand my analogy. Kaias is saying there are people who are skeptical about global warming based on reasons, scientific or otherwise, not just some sort of illogical denial. Science itself cannot be undermined, and stands for nothing. Science is a tool that we use to help us understand the world around us, just like a hammer or a screwdriver. Look to the hand of the man who wields it for the purpose or agenda, but you can't destroy what science stands for any more than you can destroy a hammer. Sure you can make them both useless, mangle them up and stuff, but a hammer that doesnt do its job right isnt a very good tool, and science done incorrectly isn't very good either.

As "pure" as science may be, it is implemented by men, and as such is subject to all of our flaws and follies. We can't just go out and "do science." You need tangible physical things, other people to work with, tools to do the job, ect, and a lot of science is done by firms which have some use for the results, incorporating their agenda into the process, taking science and making it a very "dirty" process. That's why your never working in a lab is important, what you've said leads us to believe you've been sheltered away from the sorts of impurities that idealistic science doesn't have.

I don't think denying the theory of global warming is any sort of threat to our progress as a race, if thats what you mean. It's the way its done; out of blind ignorance, or based on some reasoning. Social conventions can make a lot of people deny global warming out of blind ignorance, but it can also make people who have accepted global warming as fact criticize skeptics out of the same ignorance.

Then why do you insist on confusing them? I've never denied global warming in this thread, nor have I said what I believe, because it wasn't relevant to my point.

But if you want to know: I haven't done enough research for me to take a stance one way or the other. Everything is very muddied from sensationalism, politicization, agendas and 'cult cargoism'. The truth, I'm sure, is out there, but everytime it is discussed people put their egos on the line. So when I see something like this:
I immediately discard it. Dogmatism like that is completely useless for anyone trying to divine the truth.

You seem to be frustrated sacrieur. Calm down. Ponder what your "opponents" are saying. If you read, most of the people are simply saying there's no way to know the truth without wading through biased and muddied research, plagued by political influence. Nobody worth reading has said whether it's definitively true or false.

Sax was just trolling us all for april fools day, no worries tikels

Obvious troll is not so obvious?

Apparently. Happy April.

The sad part, however, is that some scientists are this frustrated over the topic.

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Like all jokes, mine certainly had some truth.

Global warming is a fact. That is, an observable occurrence measured and recording. The average global temperature of the Earth is warming.


The theory then, is that we are responsible for an unprecedented amount of warming. It wasn't before long before a scientific consensus was reached and the focus shifted from figuring out the cause to extrapolating what may happen, and indeed, what is already happening. Steps are already being taken by the community to attempt to reverse the effect.

Of course, you could deny all of this and as you put it TiKels, "If you read, most of the people are simply saying there's no way to know the truth without wading through biased and muddied research, plagued by political influence." And it's true, there are very large egos in research, confirmation bias, and various other things that do plague science. Milikan was a very regrettable occurrence, but one we can learn from.

Fortunately, in science the peer review process weeds out a lot of this. Results that cannot be reproduced are observed with due suspicion. Science journals, and especially prestigious ones like Nature simply make it horribly difficult to present bad science. This isn't to say that there isn't fraud and bias in science, but that the effects are rather mitigated from what one may expect in other fields, and even more importantly, being wrong in science is okay, as long as you admit you were wrong and not try to cover it all up and the like (like that neutrino result thing).

In far as political bias on this particular issue goes, that small graphic is disturbingly correct. There is far more political push to deny that we're causing global warming than scientists can or will admit. Remember those hacked emails? They were reviewed and there was nothing fishy in them at all. Nothing to illustrate a global conspiracy across climatologists. Which, I should admit, is a pretty extraordinary claim and should require extraordinary evidence before it is given any credibility at all.

I wouldn't say that big oil are all conspiring, but I would be lying and wrong if I said they weren't interested in protecting their profits. And they do have a very obscene amount of money. By direct logic, if the world began putting strict consumption standards on coal, oil, etc., then these oil and coal companies would have the most to lose because consumption would decrease. Groups like the Heartland Institute are very clearly anti-science, and do distort facts and actively use social engineering. The reasons may be as varied as protecting personal profit to opposing additional governmental control, but the opposition is there in a rather remarkable level of force.

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I don't necessarily care whether you believe the scientific consensus or not, but keep in mind a lot of what you're going to hear about this topic really needs to be traced back to the original resource or sources and see what's actually the case. If there is any topic that needs copious amounts of fact checking it's this one. Oh, and I wouldn't pay any credit to sensationalist movies such as An Inconvenient Truth or The Global Warming Swindle. They both got an absurd amount of facts wrong.

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The irony of this entire thread is that I suspect the whole thing is just one big joke played by Kame.

Damn...

There was plenty that was "fishy" in them. Nothing that said they are making up the warming trend, no. There were instances of them discussing methods of purposely skewing results to make them misleading, conspiring to keep research that brought their position into question out of peer reviewed journals, and trying to manipulate public records laws to keep their data private. This isn't even including their hilarious posthumous jokes about a skeptic who had died, and similarly appalling commentary.

The investigation only found that there was no information to bring into question the actual phenomenon of global warming, the data supporting the warming trend, or the theory itself being believed by the researchers involved. In fact, of the leaked documents I've read, they seemed to prove the climatologists involved sincerely believe in their research. Considering some of the outright horrible things that were said, it's clear they were being entirely candid, so if they thought it was bullshit it seems likely they would have indicated as much.

There were multiple investigations done, and while there wasn't proof of serious scientific misconduct, there was plenty of evidence that they had been conducting themselves less than ethically. At least one of the investigations specifically criticized the deceitful and shameful behavior demonstrated. They also found the method that had been used to skew data representations, which was technically using a correct method but was purposeful misrepresented to convey the wrong information.

The person at the heart of all of it is Phil Jones. There were others doing and saying questionable things, but he was the one who had misrepresented data and told others how to do it, and the one telling other scientists that he and his supporters would support their research if they helped stop skeptic research from seeing a fair review.

His behavior isn't contained to just that information, either. In a completely different incident he was involved in, he sent the following email.


It's not just that he wants to be underhanded himself, but he was intent on trying to get other people to behave the same way.

CRU has been involved in other scandals and unethical behavior as well. At this point you can tell how smart a climatologist is by how much space they've put between themselves and CRU. I remember at one point, even one of the guys at CRU who had suggested a method of forcefully biasing the peer review process (getting an editor fired that was letting valid skeptic research through), was later (sometime after the emails were leaked) found to be disagreeing with a new plan to make a purposely inaccurate warming model done by only using sources that agreed with the desired projection.

CRU is a joke, and their unethical behavior is a large part of why people are skeptical to varying degrees about the subject matter. Citing them as part of your argument is not going to do anything but make your argument more questionable. Their raw data may be accurate, but all their behavior surrounding it has made them impossible to trust.

I think Roger Pielke Jr. said it pretty well. "The e-mails don’t at all change the fundamental tenets of the science, but they changed the notion that people could blindly trust one authoritative group, when it turns out they’re just like everybody else."

about global warming, lets see the atmosphere folks. Is made up of 70 percent nitrogen N2. then we have the greenhous gasses like cO2 (heavier molecular weight then N2 slightly more polar) then we have h2O (less molecular wiehgt then N2 but much more polar, in fact so much it forms oceans under N2). then we have on the upper atmosphere what is called O3 az ozone, much haevier then N2 and it is non polar. Now this molecules are made up of more atoms then N2, and the absorption spectra is usually larger for longer molecules (expecially if they are polar), are more prone to absorb many at many kind of wavelength, hence more energy uptake, so they might rise. Now calculate the fucking absorbption energy uptake, purify the gas, and then repeat the key experiments checking its absorption spectran. that is the scientific method (maybe tell it to others to repeat).