Posted on 12/06/2015 1:40:40 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Climate skepticism is just bad science: "There is no cohesive, consistent alternative theory to human-caused global warming"
At some point in the history of all scientific theories, only a minority of scientists-or even just one-supported them, before evidence accumulated to the point of general acceptance. The Copernican model, germ theory, the vaccination principle, evolutionary theory, plate tectonics and the big bang theory were all once heretical ideas that became consensus science. How did this happen?
An answer may be found in what 19th-century philosopher of science William Whewell called a 'consilience of inductions." For a theory to be accepted, Whewell argued, it must be based on more than one induction-or a single generalization drawn from specific facts. It must have multiple inductions that converge on one another, independently but in conjunction. "Accordingly the cases in which inductions from classes of facts altogether different have thus jumped together," he wrote in his 1840 book The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, "belong only to the best established theories which the history of science contains." Call it a "convergence of evidence."
Consensus science is a phrase often heard today in conjunction with anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Is there a consensus on AGW? There is. The tens of thousands of scientists who belong to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Medical Association, the American Meteorological Society, the American Physical Society, the Geological Society of America, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and, most notably, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change all concur that AGW is in fact real. Why?
It is not because of the sheer number of scientists. After all, science is not conducted by poll. As Albert Einstein said in response to a 1931 book skeptical of relativity theory entitled 100 Authors against Einstein, "Why 100? If I were wrong, one would have been enough." The answer is that there is a convergence of evidence from multiple lines of inquiry-pollen, tree rings, ice cores, corals, glacial and polar ice-cap melt, sea-level rise, ecological shifts, carbon dioxide increases, the unprecedented rate of temperature increase-that all converge to a singular conclusion. AGW doubters point to the occasional anomaly in a particular data set, as if one incongruity gainsays all the other lines of evidence. But that is not how consilience science works. For AGW skeptics to overturn the consensus, they would need to find flaws with all the lines of supportive evidence and show a consistent convergence of evidence toward a different theory that explains the data. (Creationists have the same problem overturning evolutionary theory.) This they have not done.
A 2013 study published in Environmental Research Letters by Australian researchers John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli and their colleagues examined 11,944 climate paper abstracts published from 1991 to 2011. Of those papers that stated a position on AGW, about 97 percent concluded that climate change is real and caused by humans. What about the remaining 3 percent or so of studies? What if they're right? In a 2015 paper published in Theoretical and Applied Climatology, Rasmus Benestad of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Nuccitelli and their colleagues examined the 3 percent and found "a number of methodological flaws and a pattern of common mistakes." That is, instead of the 3 percent of papers converging to a better explanation than that provided by the 97 percent, they failed to converge to anything.
"There is no cohesive, consistent alternative theory to human-caused global warming," Nuccitelli concluded in an August 25, 2015, commentary in the Guardian. "Some blame global warming on the sun, others on orbital cycles of other planets, others on ocean cycles, and so on. There is a 97% expert consensus on a cohesive theory that's overwhelmingly supported by the scientific evidence, but the 2-3% of papers that reject that consensus are all over the map, even contradicting each other. The one thing they seem to have in common is methodological flaws like cherry picking, curve fitting, ignoring inconvenient data, and disregarding known physics." For example, one skeptical paper attributed climate change to lunar or solar cycles, but to make these models work for the 4,000-year period that the authors considered, they had to throw out 6,000 years' worth of earlier data.
Such practices are deceptive and fail to further climate science when exposed by skeptical scrutiny, an integral element to the scientific process.
Here’s the alternative SET OF FACTS:
The Earth’s average surface temperature has fluctuated tremendously, from much warmer than it is now to much colder than it is now. It has been warm enough to grow palm trees above the Arctic Circle. It has been cold enough to bury 2/3 of the Northern Hemisphere under two miles of ice.
The reason for these enormous fluctuations is uncertain. One thing that IS certain is that the activities of the human population cannot possibly account for it.
I do not need an hypothesis, alternate or otherwise, to explain these FACTS.
What I would like to know is, how does the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis account for these KNOWN FACTS?
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,†and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,†and the darkness he called “night.†And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.†7 So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the vault “sky.†And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.
9 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.†And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground “land,†and the gathered waters he called “seas.†And God saw that it was good.
11 Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.†And it was so. 12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.
14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.†And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.
20 And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.†21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.†23 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.
24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.†And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.â€
27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.â€
29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.†And it was so.
31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
“Rubbish”
How can you say “rubbish” when a brilliant, intellectual, really-really smart, Progressive, political genius is telling you these things?
/SARC/
IMHO
EVIL is the correct adjective. Lying to the populace and stealing their money is EVIL.
Salon thinks it is.
Yes there is. It’s just that no one has even looked into it.
SIMPLE: 99% or more of the earth’s heat COMES FROM THE SUN! Whatever part man’s contribution is is insignificant.
My son has degrees in Math, Computer Science and Physics (and Greek), so that is my qualification for knowing.
Why hasn’t someone simply calculated all the heat received by the earth from the sun in a year and compared that to man’s contribution? Oh - they add the bogeyman of CO2’s “greenhouse effect” to explain their numbers......
AGW? Yet another name for this stupidity.
That cook paper that keeps getting cited has been discredited...
The Michael Shermer’s of the world do not want the truth. They do not seek the truth.
They want to be right, justified, on the high ground of morality. It is Kool-Aid drinkers like him that usher in the bloody tyrants of the world. And when the idiots are clearly shown that they were lied to, they will slay the messenger.
They throw the term denier around, while the AGW crowd denies the pause and the Medieval warming period...
A conspiracy theory: Millions of parents independently and without coordination, go out and color eggs and purchase chocolates and hide them on Holy Saturday, so that their children can find them on Easter Morning. Preposterous!
Democrats are far more likely to believe in horoscopes and be anti-vaxxers. The more scientific and technical training one has, the more likely one is to be a Republican. The professorate are Democrats because that’s were they get their corn pone from, iow, they are rent-seekers.
Two possible sources are warming oceans and volcanism. If the warming oceans are creating the current CO2, then they would have to warming much more and much faster (50 times faster). If volcanism, then there is an explanation needed: why now? Interestingly there have been spurts of CO2 in the last 20k years, but about 1/2 the current rise, and they stopped. The current one is not stopping. We have 20k years of pretty decent (annual resolution) ice core and leaf stomata and sediment records to back that up.
True but very slowly. If the ocean temperature rises 1C per century then CO2 rises 5-10 ppm over the same time period. We get 2-3 ppm rise per year. That is clearly not from warming oceans or natural methane breakdown or anything like that.
It's a scientific consensus that CO2 causes warming. There is no consensus about our warming or the amount of warming or future warming. There might be solar cooling in the near future thanks to the upcoming low solar cycle. In my opinion the PTB are aware of this and want to push their agenda now because of that.
Ozone is broken down mainly by solar ultraviolet which increased greatly in the 20th century causing the ozone hole. The recovery is basically because solar activity has decreased a lot since the 90's. The CFC's are also a factor but catalytic. They will affect the rate of breakdown.
The human created CO2 is probably a factor in some of the recent warming. There is no consensus on how much of it (versus solar and long term cycles) nor the future. One thing is fairly certain, there are many negative forcing and feedbacks that are not explored and could bite us hard were it not for manmade CO2.
There is no doubt whatsoever that at this point in geological time manmade CO2 is good thing.
Manmade CO2 is a relatively uncontroversial claim. CO2 traps heat, basic physics. But from those two theories we cannot determine the amount in reality due to earth system (mainly weather) complexity and cannot predict anything.
There is not enough science behind AGW to have a need for any theory, pro or con.
Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is based solely on software models, none of which have been validated against real-world observations. Instead, they massage the inputs until they get the desired outcome.
There is no rational reason to believe their is a “hockey stick” inflection point in the Earth’s temperature response graph.
So, for the author to use lack of a counter-theory as evidence of truth for their non-existent theory is a flat out lie.
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