And vast warming releases CO2
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.
MMGW is not a real theory until it has a negative case.
All scientific theories *must* have a negative case, that is, describing something, anything, that would show the theory is incorrect. But that is something the MMGW advocates *refuse* to present.
You want to test the theory of gravity, so you hold a ball a few feet above the floor and let it go. Typically it will fall, thus generally supporting the theory of gravity. However, you have a negative case, that if it does *not* fall, then the experiment, for some reason, is not working.
But as far as the MMGW advocates are concerned *everything* proves MMGW. Hot, cold, up, down, darkness, light, etc., etc. They will never say what would show that MMGW is *not* happening.
This has put them in the untenable position of not just modifying data to fit their theory, but modifying data so much that it has reached the “night is in fact day” point.
No credibility left, so like the Soviet science fraud Trofim Lysenko, all they can do is threaten and coerce the real scientists. Even kill them if you can. But there is no future in that, because there are far too many legitimate scientists for it to last very long, so unless they can get the law changed and quickly, the whole scam is likely to burn out.
Well, I'll go another direction and express great concern about... genetic engineering.
I suspect it has a greater potential for widespread disruption of life from (as occurs from so much of our brainiacs' efforts) unintended consequences.
>So because there isn’t, as they claim, a sufficient alternate theory, their poorly sculpted and botched theory has to be right by default? That’s not scientific.<
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
— Karl Popper
Comprehensively. Cook et al. Anybody who writes a paper quoting the Cook paper obviously knows nothing about the climate warming debate and should be ignored.
Michael Shermer doesn't get it... there's also no cohesive alternative theory to explain rabbits jumping backwards... OTHER THAN THAT IT'S NOT HAPPENING.
And vast warming releases CO2
It is a scientific fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases can cause warming.
But the minuscule volume of CO2 emissions are NOT the cause of global warming. The so-called "science" that claims to show that is nonsense. CO2 rise occurs after global warming as warmer oceans release the dissolved gases into the atmosphere.
The absolute dominate greenhouse gas by many orders of magnitude is water vapor.
If the current rise in CO2 comes from volcanoes (or more invisibly from subduction zones and underwater volcanoes) then we still have to explain why that is happening now coincidentally with manmade CO2. I’ll address CO2 causing warming in my next reply.
CO2 rise occurs after global warming as warmer oceans release the dissolved gases into the atmosphere.
That's true, and that happens. But the amount does not add up. The entire, mostly natural warming for the last 100 years was about 1C. That would release enough CO2 from the oceans to raise the concentration about 5 to 10 ppm. Instead we get 20-25 pm every decade, way more than expected. As I just pointed out another possibility is natural releases from the earth's crust and mantle, but that requires the explanation of why now and not in the last 20k years of very good records (ice core, stomata, and sediments). A third possibility is the biosphere releasing more CO2 which is definitely true and part of the rise associated with "fossil fuel burning" even though it is not. But it does not account for the majority of the observed rise.
Shermer does not know the basics of the scientific method. For a theory to be falsified there is no requirement at all for an alternative theory. And AGW models have been falsified repeatedly. Moreover there are numerous alternative theories, number one among them being the climate is sinusoidal and guys like Shermer should thank GAIA that they are living in an interglacial.
"The debate is over."
Pretty much - the childish "I am right, you are wrong; I win, you lose" is not a debate. If one side declares their opinions / "projections" as incontrovertible "facts" and/or one of two sides doesn't engage in the "debate," because they are "right" and the other side is "wrong" (and is declared a "denier") then there is no debate possible.
"Climate change is real,"
True, and has always been true. The same cannot be said of Global Warming - witness the major and mini cooling (Ice Ages) and warming periods. If the climate never changed (i.e., remained constant) even the notion of climate wouldn't exist.
"... it is caused by human activity,"
Patently false, because dramatic and/or drastic changes in climate existed for much longer than the alleged ability of humans to radically affect climate. If anything, relatively recent man-made technologies greatly increased the ability of humans to adapt to effects of naturally ever-changing climate, and even provide the conditions that saved many species of animal kingdom from extinction.
Even most non-alarmist environmentalists, including "The Skeptical Environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg, admit that "cutting too much CO2 would be very costly" and that warming climate over last several centuries has been and, if continues, would be greatly beneficial for agriculture, eradicating or containing many epidemic diseases and increasing economic activity and thus survivability and prosperity of people in most parts of the world.
On the issue of health and disease, the author points out that even in disease-prone Africa, the rise in the incidence of disease from climate change will be 3% at most, and that even this estimate is probably "exaggerated." He emphasizes an irony with upbeat implications: Rapid economic growth is central for scenarios producing global warming, but with higher incomes resulting from that growth, disease is manageable and will be managed."
- Bjorn LomborgPeople may, at best and at great expense, marginally affect the local climate environment and — as most organic physicists and biologists know — it would not be due to increased emitted amounts of CO2 / carbon dioxide, which has been proven not to affect climate but which is a byproduct and is necessary for the carbon-based life on planet Earth (UN climate change body suffers mammoth European carbon fraud - FR, posts #1, #14, 2015 September 08)
"... and it is already causing profound disturbances all over America and all over the world,"
Whatever one's definition of "profound disturbances" may be, this is sheer idiocy devoid of any facts, and ignoring all the provable facts to the contrary. But by the standard of "I said it, therefore it is true and anyone who doesn't echo this is the denier", then all that can be said is "that'll do pig, that'll do"...
"If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine." - Jim Barksdale
Climate alarmism is just bad science: there is no cohesive, consistent evidentiary support of the human-caused global warming hypothesis.
And I did not read beyond this sentence, since the author clearly understands so little about the subject he is writing about.
In science, you have a hypothesis and a null hypothesis. You cannot ever have a hypothesis without an opposing null hypothesis. Thus, if the hypothesis is that there is human-caused global warming due to carbon dioxide, you must be able to define a set of testable hypotheses and their corresponding null hypotheses. For example, you would hypothesize that global temperature is a direct function of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air. The null hypothesis would be that carbon dioxide has negligible, if any, effect on global temperature. As far as I can tell, no one has ever experimentally demonstrated either the hypothesis or its null.
I do believe that for thousands of years in many languages it has been known as “weather” ... Seasons have been documented for many thousands of years.
To call him "clear thinking" is itself a supreme act of Christian charity. The man is a second-rater, a "science writer" and "philosopher of science" who failed to become a scientist himself.
Humans are destroying the planet because, because, because how could it not be so!
Alarmism, of course, is necessary to advance political goals and personal enrichment opportunities, otherwise the whole "scientific" issue would not exist. The "cap-and-trade" system and "green loans" to Solyndra, A123 and other bankrupt "green" companies, as well as "carbon credits" (which are currently the only source of profitability at companies like Tesla) can only be accomplished through corrupt government vehicles based on nakedly fraudulent "science" and alarmism.
How else can they justify and sell something like EPA's upcoming draconian Clean Power Plan if not for "the sky is falling" tactics?
Yet if anybody looks into the supposed "benefits" of such plan, which can only be accomplished at great present and future cost to "regular folks" they will find this (from Carbon Dioxide Reduction Policies Are Destructive And Immoral - IBD, by Roger Bezdek and Paul Driessen, 2015 December 04):
What's being discussed in Paris would have similarly minimal effects. But it would let unelected, unaccountable activists and bureaucrats decide which industries, companies, workers and families win the Climate Hustle game — and which ones lose. ..... < snip > ..... Earth's climate changes regularly, but recent trends and events are in line with historic experience, and many scientists believe the sun and other powerful natural forces may soon usher in a new era of colder temperatures. Fossil fuels facilitated successive industrial revolutions and enabled billions to live better than royalty did a century ago, average incomes to increase elevenfold, and average global life expectancy to climb from less than 30 in 1870 to 71 today. Carbon and hydrocarbon energy still provide 81% of world energy, and support $70 trillion per year in world GDP. They will supply 75%-80% of global energy for decades to come, studies by the Energy Information Administration, International Energy Agency and others forecast. More than 2,400 coal-fired power plants are under construction or planned around the world. China and India will not consider reducing GHG emissions until 2030. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will continue to climb, greening the planet and spurring faster crop, forest and grassland growth. ..... < snip > ..... Because there is a strong causal relationship between GDP and fossil energy consumption, eliminating that much energy would reduce 2050 world per capita GDP to less than what Americans "enjoyed" in 1830! Modern technologies would still exist, but few would be able to afford them. < snip > ..... The EPA's own analyses suggest that its fully implemented Clean Power Plan would bring an undetectable, irrelevant reduction of perhaps 0.05°F in average global temperatures 85 years from now — assuming that carbon dioxide actually does drive climate change.
No wonder that in every poll the "climate change" is at or near the bottom of the list of issues concerning regular people, while it's at the top of the list and requiring "immediate action" among politicians.
“And there was evening, and there was morning the first day.”
Not a SOLAR morning. No sun yet.
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