So a bunch of climate-change skeptics hit the Wunderground comments section when Dr. Jeff Masters put up a blog post with the new release of figures regarding peer reviewed thesis agreeing that climate change is manmade. 97% of papers submitted so far agree that climate change is man-made, which makes the Fox 'fair and balanced' 50/50 propaganda a sick joke. Uppity skeptics started an attack, which a chap named Xyrus2000 smacked down with wonderful precision. Worth repeating here.
Quote:
Quoting trumpman84:
This isn't new information and the results aren't surprising.
1) Papers which write dissenting opinions on climate change do not pass the peer review process and, therefore, would not show up in this study. (Also, papers supporting the consensus with questionable research, and unsubstantiated findings and conclusions have passed the peer review process and would show up on this study).
Absolutely false. You have no concept of what the peer review process actually involves. First, papers do not begin with opinions. The begin with a hypothesis. The scientist the tries to disprove the hypothesis through various means, which MUST be published before the paper has any hope of getting passed the editors, let alone be distributed to reviewers. The methodologies outlined in the paper must be reproducible in order for reviewers to check the results in the paper. The data must also be provided to the reviewers.
There are very limited funds when it comes to science, and competition is extremely fierce. Papers do not get rubber stamped or immediately rejected. In fact, it is extremely detrimental to the reviewing scientists if they did. If you think about it for a second, you'll figure out why. Every paper cites one or more other papers. If scientists just started outright rubber stamping papers, then there is a very good likelihood that their paper will end up citing either directly or indirectly. When that happens, and it turns out the rubber-stamped paper was a fraud, then suddenly it is their reputation on the line. Once your reputation in scientific circles becomes tarnished you're pretty much finished.
2) Studies which will/will likely support the consensus are much more likely to receive funding. AGW is a popular and sexy topic right now in politics and science and is, therefore, more likely to get funded than a funding request from a known skeptic on the 'Effect of ocean cycles on Global Temperatures.'
Absolutely false. Grants are not awarded based on popular opinion, but on the merits of the proposed research itself. A board of scientists review the proposals against the existing body of science and determine which proposals are most likely to provide the most useful results (whether the proposed hypothesis holds or not). If there is a very strong body of science supporting a particular theory and you want funding for contrarian research, you better make sure your proposal is very strong (you wouldn't believe the number of nonsense proposals that reviewers throw out, think "Perpetual Motion Research"). This is true in any branch of science, not just climate science.
Also, numerous papers are published by Ph. D students who do not receive grant money.
3) Scientists who identify as 'climate scientists' and, therefore, would write papers about the climate are already convinced that the null hyptothesis is that humans are warming the planet. Therefore, anything they find during their study that does not explicitly refute that assumption is evidence of human induced climate change. Example:
Findings: We observed a 10% reduction in marine life diversiy in this section of ocean over the past 20 years. This section of ocean has also warmed by 1 degree in the same time period.
Conclusion: Human induced climate change has caused a 10% reduction in marine life diversity for the section of ocean studied. Further warming of 2 degrees by the year 2100 could cause an additional 20% reduction in marine life diversity.
Absolutely false. Look into how real scientific research is done. Again, a paper described as you laid out would be lucky to make it through the editors, let alone a peer review. If such nonsense were so easy to pass there would be a lot more than just 4000 papers and almost all of them would be as scientifically useless as Anthony Watt's website.
The scientific method isn't about proving what you think. It's about disproving what you think. If you exhaust all methods to disprove your hypothesis and it still stands AND a group of experts in your field also try and fail to do so, then it can be established as a theory.
If what you say is true, you could just write any sort of BS paper and get it published just by agreeing with the consensus. Good luck with that.
4) If the science supporting global warming is so obvious and so robust, why do we continue to do subsequent studies trying to convince people that there is a scientific consensus?
You really don't understand why scientists do research, do you?
Climate scientists study the climate. Global warming is just ONE SINGLE FACET of climate science. In fact, one could go so far as to say that global warming is simply one result produced from the study of the climate system. Climate research is MUCH larger than just global warming.
Th climate system is comprised of many components. At a high level, you have things like the oceans, the land, orbital dynamics, and the atmosphere. Within those you have things like radiative transfer, thermohaline ciruclations, and carbon cycles. And even within those you have aerosols, atmospheric chemistry, etc. In fact, there is no climate scientist that is an expert in ALL of climate science; they usually specialize in an area of the climate. You can spend a lifetime just studying one part of the climate system.
And from all those studies (the earliest ones goes back to the early 19th century) one byproduct of the research is that higher concentrations of GHG's warm the planet. And from recent research, we know we have been the ones doing it.
Trying to get all the advanced physics, chemistry, and scientific research into a little 5 minute digestable chunk for the masses is not really what scientists are interested in. They do not have the time, money, or a billion dollar PR machine to do so. Nor is it even possible. If you want to know about the science, the results, and what it means, then read the papers or go on summary sites like Real Climate or Skeptical Science. Or you can rely on the experts, which you do every day for numerous other activities.
I am a skeptic and even I know that a majority of those claiming to be climate scientists agree with the consensus. However, as a skeptic. I don't want to take the word of others - I want something I can look at -- that I can understand.
You're making ridiculous demands. You want something you can understand but you don't want to make the effort to actually educate yourself to understand what is already out there. That's like you saying that you think Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is false simply because you can't understand the mathematics that went into the 200 page proof.
The data is online. The results are online in one form or another. If you really want to dive into it then you're going to have to pony up for for the journal articles (or go to your local college university where they may have them for free). But no one is going to spoon feed you the results. Again, scientists don't have the time or the funding to put everything into layman's terms. The closest thing you're going to get to that is the IPCC reports.
It's not good enough to say:
-The Earth has warmed
-CO2 has risen
-CO2 causes a greenhouse effect
-Humans burn fossil fuels which emit CO2
Therefore, humans are causing an increase in atmospheric CO2 which is warming and will continue to warm the climate. A warming Earth will lead to a multitude of positive feedbacks which will result in catastrophy.
In my opinion, there are too many logical leaps in that simple statement.
And if it were any Joe Sixpack on the street telling you that, then you'd have a case. But that isn't what's happening. Experts in the field of research are saying this (minus the catastrophe part), backed by huge amounts of peer reviewed research and data.
You can chose not to listen to the experts. People do that all the time. How many people do you know still eat deep fried bacon burgers and smoke 3 packs a day despite knowing the health issues that it will can cause? But not listening to the experts certainly won't magically make them not develop heart disease, lung cancer, etc. Just because you don't like what the experts in a field are saying doesn't mean they are wrong, especially if said experts have a mountain of research to back up what they're telling you.
-What are all the possible reasons the Earth may have warmed?
There are five possible reasons:
1. Change in orbital dynamics. This happens on cycles of many thousands of years. These days we have high precision measurements of axial tilt and orbital positioning. These are not influencing global temperatures. In fact, we should be cooling.
2. Increase in solar output. We have numerous satellites keeping track of solar output.There have been no abnormal increases in solar output over the solar cycles. In fact, it has been a little weaker than normal this cycle.
3. Increase in GHG's. Ever since the days of Fourier it's been known that the only thing keeping our planet from being an ice ball is the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And right now we are at the highest CO2 concentration that the planet has had in a few million years. More greenhouse gases, the more and longer the planet can retain heat. The result is obvious.
4. Massive global geological activity. This isn't something we would miss. And really, warming would be the least of our concerns in this case.
5. Some combination of the above. The only one that is currently present is number 3.
Do we even know them all, much less studied them in depth?
Yes. At the simplest level, you can consider the Earth as a blackbody with a layer of heat trapping gases. The Earth itself does not produce an appreciable amount of heat. So in order to warm the planet, the Earth either needs to receive more heat or it needs to trap more heat. Since solar activity is not on some rampant rise, we know it is something that has changed on the planet that is retaining heat. And wouldn't you know there just so happens to be a rather large increase in GHG's in our atmosphere.
Why has CO2 risen?
Fossil fuel combustion. We burn billions of tons of oil and coal, sequestered carbon that hasn't been part of the active carbon cycle for millions of years.
Could there be other reasons?
If global volcanic activity increased by a couple orders of magnitude, then yes. However, CO2 would be the least of our worries.
Can you prove with certainty that humans are responsible for all of the CO2 increase?
Yep. Carbon from the natural cycle has a certain isotopic ratio of radioactive carbon (aka carbon-14). This is the same carbon isotope the use in carbon dating. Carbon that does not come from the natural cycle is depleted of carbon-14 (it's been buried a long time) and is almost entirely made up of carbon-13. Isotopic measurements of the CO2 in show and rather large change in the isotopic ratio. There is A LOT more carbon-13, indicating the source comes from fossil fuels.
Does the CO2 greenhouse effect observed in small scale experience work the same way in a large, complex system such as the Earth?
It would be breaking some pretty serious laws of physics and chemistry if it didn't. The ability for a compound to absorb heat doesn't change just because you put it in a bigger box.
If it does, how can you know for sure what the amplitude of such of an effect is?
Because scientists have been studying it for going on 200 years now. With modern supercomputers, they've managed to nail down a pretty good range of what the response will be.
What are the effects of the diminishing returns of increased CO2 (each doubling produces less warming overall).
Really irrelevant when it comes to global warming. The first doubling (to 560 ppm) is going to cause numerous problems as it is. If there is a second doubling (1020ppm) things are going to get mighty unpleasant. Of course, that doesn't account for the looming positive feedback cycles (melting methane clathrates and permafrost dumping even more GHG's into the atmosphere.
How do we know the effect and direction of all the climate feedbacks?
Fundamentally, physics. These days, the physics is placed inside massively parallel computer models, however it is still just physics.
Since runaway positive feedbacks are necessary for the climate models to reach >1-2 degrees of warming, this is very important.
Incorrect. The models do not require runaway positive feedbacks for temperature increases. The models can accurately recreate the current temperature record without them. In fact, it would be very difficult to create a runaway positive feedback on Earth. We just don't have the conditions to create them (in another billion years or so we will). You can check the IPCC reports on this.
How do we know the known feedbacks will work as expected, even with temperatures higher than current?
Because the Earth doesn't suddenly violate conservation of energy because it wants to. More to the point. People much smarter than you have been studying aspects like this for some time know. Google is your friend.
How many feedbacks are there that we don't know a lot about?
If they exist, they would be few. Most of the lesser known feedbacks would result in additional POSITIVE feedbacks.
What about the feedbacks we don't know anything about?
Like what, for example? Do you think there is some big negative feedback hiding in the mantle of the Earth somewhere? Your creating magical fairies here.
You can prove all day that the Earth has warmed, that CO2 is going up and that humans emit CO2. What I need, to be comfortable with the concept, is more to tie it all together.
Then stop wasting time making posts like this and actually do some research. There are numerous resources online for you to get up to speed with the current science (which you seems to know nothing about or you wouldn't have asked most of your questions). These resources are free. If you want more in depth knowledge, then there are numerous well reviewed text books on the subject. There's nothing hidden or mysterious going on here. Do a few google searches. Do some searches for climate science books on Amazon. Enroll in some physics an math courses so you can understand what you're reading. The questions you are asking are pretty basic and are already answered in the existing literature and research.
You are not going to magically get answers to your questions. You're going to need to put some effort into it. Just like any other field of study you want to ask intelligent questions of.
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if I was in charge then I'd be having words with him.
