...on climate change? Apparently not.

Senator Al Gore implied in "Earth in the Balance" that there was a scientific consensus.

Now, with his Assault on Reason (n.b. I am not referring to his book), he insists that there is one.

Me? I'll put my money on humanity's rapidly improving mastery of matter and energy. You societal control-freaks can strut and preen to your heart's content. You may want to improve your marksmanship skills, though. They might come in handy.

Mike Griffin apparently thinks not, and he's catching grief for it by Keith Cowling who evidently thinks there is a consensus.

There wont be a consensus, as there never will be a worldwide consensus on basically anything.
But this is an article that every one talking about climate change simply must read
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19426041.100-the-7-biggest-myths-about-climate-change.html

down to earth, no bullshit dissection of oft-repeated myths and half-truths.

Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.

- Mark Twain

...and they never will.

- Me

Gotta love you Rand, you crack me up.

So you quote an article quoting a 15 year old study and don't look for other data points? Fantastic. I can see why blogs are going to take over the news...

I haven't bothered too much, but somebody on Wikipedia did collect a good list of the current state of play: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

I'll post this again, because I can :)

Here's a partial list.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=927b9303-802a-23ad-494b-dccb00b51a12&Region_id=&Issue_id=

Though my work deals only periphally with climate, experience with "dark energy" shows that scientific consensus is an oxymoron.

kert,

That New Scientist article is the best bit of arm waving, half truths and general bs I've seen in a while in a subject well noted for all of these.
New Scientist long ago lost any objectivity on the subject.
After some study, right now I lean towards the solar cycle hypotheses. We'll actually have an experimental test in the next 20 to 25 years as the predictions of the solar hypothesis are greatly different from the CO2 warming hypothesis.
If you want to find out about just some of the many problems with the CO2 theories go to climateaudit.org and look up the "divergence problem". There is also a hilarious thread on the surface temperature record.

Gotta love anyone who would use Wiki as a source for anything, much less debate on climate change.

Dave, you don't crack me up; you just make me shake my head. Any moron can post anything they want on Wiki (and it appears any can quote from that rag of a page).

Daveon stopped reading beyond the second paragraph?

It will be interesting to see if the IPCC ever gets that list out during the next half year.

Actually according to this rather catchy music video global warming is not just a prediction anymore, ITS TRUE!.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8bYAZzOFlc&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ejalopnik%2Ecom%2F%3FrefId%3D264581

"there never will be a worldwide consensus on basically anything."
Posted by kert at June 4, 2007 07:26 AM

I think we can all concede that chocolate and peanut butter go together. Oh, and that the SUN WILL KILL US ALL!.

Hoax! Thirty years ago the big eco-scare was Global Cooling. Remember? Besides that, if there really is scientific consensus then what are they saying is the optimal temperature, the target temp that the world should stay at? Yeah, good luck with that.

I'm not opposed to conservation, pollution controls, etc., I'm just opposed to the Grimm tale and mis-use of science the eco-politicians are using to scam it. It's giving science a bad rep.

"The glaciers are melting! We're all doomed!"

I read a scientific report a while ago that stated while the glaciers are melting on one side of the antarctic, they are growing on the other side. Only half of that report fits the eco-agenda.

Unfortunately, The National Post has all the credibility of Fox News in Canada. This article is a straight propaganda piece that falls apart under any examination - which the Post is counting on readers not to do.

Bacchus, that argument is quite obselete. Whatever hysteria occured in the 70's over "global cooling" is equivalent in magnitude to one of those food cancer scares (food X causes/cures some obscure cancer Y). That is, some scientists came up with the global cooling idea and the media caught it for a while. A flash in the pan.

In comparison, global warming is vastly different in how society has responded to it. First, there is more than a decade of international political effort devoted to declare global warming a problem, to organize a "scientific concensus", and to correct it. Second, major countries are responding to this including some level of voluntary reduction in carbon emissions and the establishment of carbon emission markets. There's a great deal of public support for these efforts. People are taking seriously some pretty far out mitigation efforts. For example, when someone proposed deliberately pumping sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, a number of alt.space businesses came up with ways to do that. Alternatives to fossil fuels are being heavily researched and funded with public dollars. Finally, major changes are occuring to such things as the global food supply (for example, ethanol subsidies in the US) as a result of the response to global warming.

The point is that you can't compare the current situation to the global cooling controversy in the 70's. It's far larger and they've already dotted the i's and crossed the t's. For example, they claim the IPCC demonstrates scientific concensus. There are decades of additional climate research. It's not just a few scientists with crazy ideas combined with a slow news day.

Karl, it's still a hoax because the science is politically driven ("more than a decade of international political effort devoted to declare global warming a problem"). That's not science science. How do you know for certain that the earth is in danger of becoming too warm? What is the optimal world temperature?

My sympathies are with the Deniers because I always like to bet on the underdog and a lot of people in the pro-AGW crowd are arrogant and pompous, but I think a person has to be careful going full-tilt into endorsing some of the anti-AGW work. As I said, these are my sympathies, but the reality of AGW has a life of its own apart from how I feel about the people involved.

Consider Zbigniew Jaworowski, the ice core man. It would make a compelling narrative that ice cores are a flawed measure, that CO2 (as well as temperature) had ups and downs through the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, to the modern era. But what if the ice core mainstream has done its homework and knows how to handle ice bubbles and ice is a valid closed system? One ends up like Duane Gish trying to argue the flaws of radioactive dating.

It doesn't help that the Larouche people are lining up behind Dr. Jaworowski. Yes, I all know about argument from authority and credentials and tainting someone by the company one keeps. First it is the Reverend Moon, then it is the Oil Companies, and now Lyndon Larouche, who has his own motives. Just because Lyndon Larouche is gung ho about fusion energy doesn't mean fusion research is tainted.

But in high school, I was in the model rocket club where the school Principal of Student Affairs was the faculty sponser. Perhaps it was a good thing that the head disciplinarian (in his words) was leading the model rocket club given the mischief with fireworks fuses and mismatched rocket engines to payloads we were up to, although he gave us remarkable lattitude on the "engineering aspects" of things. I was often in his office (for club business, not for getting in trouble), and he had a sign "Fly with the crows, get shot with the crows."

Being young and naive to the ways of the world, I had to ask him what the sign meant. He told me that I was not the sort of person to see the inside of his office apart from Model Club, but that the sort of person brought in here would argue "I wasn't smoking, I was just in the bathroom with Billy who was smoking" to which one would point to the sign "Fly with the crows, get shot with the crows." In other words, actually committing an offense or associating with known offenders is one of those distinctions without a difference.

I would have to do a lot more research to determine if Dr. Jaworowski is one of the crows or is only associating with crows -- if you are opposing scientific orthodoxy, sometimes you get your funding or publication forumn from known crows. Also, I see on pro-AGW Web sites posters hyperventilating about how hanging out with the Larouchies makes the man damaged goods, but the pro-AGW folks also have their own crow friends.

Hey, the moron on Wiki had done a bunch of work to save me the googling effort.

Funny thing is, I was on a panel at a conference a couple of years back with some guys who were privy to the data the IPCC are now sharing, and they were saying that actually, looking at the stuff they weren't prepared to publically show yet, things were even worse.

Karl, it's still a hoax because the science is politically driven

No. If global warming were false, it'd be a hoax. My concern here is that you seem to ignore how science works.

People come up with a lot of scientific theories. Most of these don't work. Just because a failed theory of the past got an unusual degree of media exposure doesn't say anything in itself about the accuracy of current theories, unless someone is still peddling that old theory.

What we have is something with some degree of truth being heavily hyped by opportunists. The global cooling fad never got as far as global warming has. Nor did it ever have the same level of scientific evidence that global warming currently has.

It bothers me that anything with a great deal of political interference is automatically assumed to be false. How can one show reasonably facts about global warming (pro and con) if the response is to ignore it merely because there's powerful and influential parties with a great deal at stake? My take is along the lines of Phillip K. Dick: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

The existence (or nonexistence) and degree of global warming as well as its causes are objective facts which we can determine even in a highly political environment. And they don't change just because motivated mouthbreathers advocate one side or the other.

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