What the "entire scientific community" has NOT reached consensus on is the cause. To say that man can have that dramatic an effect on a natural global process would be arrogant and perhaps even blasphemous.
Consensus doesn't mean they are right.
For example, The entire medical community reached a consensus in the 60's that fat was bad. For over 30 years we have follwed the medical communities advice and now have epidemic levels of obesity, heart disease, cancer and diabetes. However one man, Dr. Atkins has been teaching people how to lose weight by doing the opposite of the medical community's recommendations. Eat fat and cut carbs. And the number of people who have tried it and say it works are now in the millions. And the medical community is finally starting to study his methods and acknowledge that Atkins gets results. If the medical community can be that wrong, can't the scientific community?
There are too many variables in the ecosystem to successfully model with any certainty. You need a record of successful predictions to have any confidence in the model. The scientific community is way too premature in issuing warnings off their models without sufficient confirmations. The scientific community is also incented to issue warnings to get additional funding for more studies. Therefore all warnings should be viewed with a high degree of scepticism.
I disagree. You can go right now and search google and find experts with opposing opinions.
Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Warning! Disruptor alert...Here's how your "consensus" is manufactured. BTW I generally discount anyone who starts a sentence with "I don't even bother to debate........" as someone who is in possession of no facts.
These are some of the same "scientists" who also reached a concsus about 20 years ago, that the earth was headed for another ice age, also caused by the interference of mankind.
The govt funding ran out on that theory, so they just reversed the area of research, and conned the taxpayers into funding more vague, non-conclusive, factless research. They are no closer to being right now, than they were then.
Um, hello. 19,200 scientists disagree.
It is my opinion that the observed increases in the surface temperature are almost entirely due to changes in the sun.
Most of the scientists who accept a correlation between anthropogenic carbon and increased surface temperature do so on the basis of computer models that they did not write and do not understand. To anyone but the authors, the programs are simply black boxes.
I myself have written a computer model of a planetary atmosphere, and have extensive experience in the Monte Carlo simulation of much simpler physical systems. On the basis of that experience, and on the basis of my review of the results of several models that are quoted in the literature, I can tell you that I would not trust the accuracy of any such model at the level of detail claimed.
Furthermore, bias can creep into simulation results in ways that are difficult to guard against. I'll give you an example. One thing I'm working on right now is a simulation package for subatomic particle detectors called calorimeters, which measure the energies of incident particles. The code has all the physics correct, I'm pretty sure, but there are parameters that need to be tuned. We tune the parameters by knowing the "right answers" ahead of time, and twiddling the parameter values so that the output "looks right". In this case, we didn't have any real data to compare to, so we used the output of another simulation package. We tuned the parameters until the output looked right, but didn't realize for some time that the other package didn't handle a certain physics process that we included in ours. As a result, had to choose somewhat silly parameters to get "the right answer" (which it turned out was the wrong answer for our package). The lesson is that with any such system, it can be very difficult to adjust the parameters in an unbiased way, even if you get all the science right.
It would be a frightening development if the entire scientific community reached consensus on anything as that would mean they had stop searching for answers to the virtually infinite questions that arise during investigation.
What needs to be avoided is a major political shift based on short-term changes in the climate.
If we rid the world of carbon-based lifeforms and allowed the planet to return to its former lifeless self then who would measure the gain?
Not true.
File this under: Things that Dan Rather will never tell you. Go HERE and look for the Oregon Petition. Far more scientists have flatly rejected the man-made global warming theory than have accepted it. There is not even agreement that temps have increased over the last 50 years and some evidence that they have in fact fallen.
Not true.
File this under: Things that Dan Rather will never tell you. Go HERE and look for the Oregon Petition. Far more scientists have flatly rejected the man-made global warming theory than have accepted it. There is not even agreement that temps have increased over the last 50 years and some evidence that they have in fact fallen.