Cold sun rising

Really? Is that why theories are constantly being overturned, changed and/or altered because it's right?

Sorry, but history shows that in the long run scientific consensus has usually been wrong.

Cite, and remember I expect a show showing a majority.

Which doesn't answer my question.

Most likely to be right.....So basically you guess and go with whatever the majority are saying in the hopes they actually know what they are talking about.

Indeed I suspect most scientists do the same thing and thus unless they have actually researched it for themselves they just jump on whatever the current bandwagon happens to be.

Very strong?

Is that based on your deep understanding of climatology?

So shall we simply assert that in your OPINION you think this is the case even though by your own admission you have no basis in which to support any such assertion?

In short, you first tell me it's a matter of faith, and then you turn around and tell me you are strong in your faith. BFD.

In the contrary, it's the perfect thing to say, since you are asserting that this commonly held belief should be accepted because according to you chances are very strong they are right, even though you admit you have no basis to make such a claim.

Yea, and yet they can't predict what it's going to do. Every projection has been wildly off, and NONE of their theories account for the hiatus in the trend. Indeed, their models don't allow for ANY reduction in temperature, yet we know such an event is going to occur. They are doing little more than plotting a trend and asserting what this trend will be in the future even though they have very little idea of what's driving the trend. A grade school kid could do as well and probably with as good an accuracy.

Nor do I have any reason to believe the 95% are correct. For all we know the

95% are utterly wrong and only the 5% really know what they are talking about. After all, if the majority were almost always right we wouldn't have to continually keep rewriting our understanding of how things work in reality. Yet, we continue to do so, and will continue to do so.

I don't have to understand the subject. If someone says that at this point in the future conditions will be X, then it's easy for me to determine if they know what they are talking about by checking to see if the conditions at that time are what they claimed they would be. If they aren't, then they didn't understand what was going on as much as they claimed they did, if they even understood it at all.

Prediction after Prediction after Prediction have all been wrong. Only when you can predict what will actually happen do you really understand a process. They clearly do not. As such, I see no reason to give their predictions any particular importance, or even credence.

You seem to think otherwise because a bunch of them keep saying the other guy is right in a big science circle jerk.

Heck, take their 'models' plug in known historic data to say the mid 20th century, and none of them can accurately predict what the climate is doing now.

Yes really. Otherwise it would be quite a bit hotter than it currently is, but it's not.

Really? So they are utterly ignoring the history of global temperatures changes?

Strange when you claim they know what they are talking about, but don't even know the past or see the global cycles their own science states have occurred.

Sure....right.....ocean levels have gone up....and they have gone down....drastic changes in the weather have occurred...so what?

Really? So you're saying the whole field of paleoclimatology is bogus.

Careful there because that whole field forms the very basis for climatology, and I wouldn't want you to tell us that climatology is bogus as well. Particularly when you just told us they were so right.

If I don't, then neither do you.

Nope, because I don't claim to know what I'm talking about or making predictions about which theory or group are strongly likely to be correct. If we assume that what we know of paleoclimatology is at all correct, then a sharp decline in global temperatures are in our immediate future, speaking in the sense of geological time scales. Which of the current global warming models will produce ANY result but an infinitely increasing trend line? So what's it to be? Do we give climatologists credit for knowing what happened in the past, or shall we assert that knowledge of the past is irrelevant in predicting the climate's future?

Actually a lot of scientists believed it for a long time. Granted the common man continued to believe it long after that scientific consensus no longer existed, but exist it did.

I note your inability to even contest the rest of my examples.

The funny thing is, you probably actually believe that.

Follow the money leads two places. To what you call the deniers and equally to the academics developing and supporting theories.

Taking your 97% for discussion, what is the ratio of supporters that get government funding to critics that don't get government support? What is the total dollars funding from government vs. industry?

You way very well just be making the case that government has bought more scientists than industry has. ** Science is not a way to get rich; scientists can be bought cheap, particularly academic research scientists that need to fund this years program or lose their status at the school.

Let's also recognize academic politics too. If a university gets lots of grants to study GW, any scientist at that university almost has to support it if he wants to keep his job. Even if he privately questions it. It's certainly not a good career move to pipe up that the head of the department is full of BS.

A scientist that wants to come out in public and deny GW has to have their own rather deep source of independent funding if they don't take from government nor industry. Not many of them exist.

** In any case, industry isn't getting much for its' money. Every year the economy and conservation see less energy consumed. Every year more renewable sources come on line. I don't see big oil ever getting back to the commanding role they once had.

There are three possibilities:

1. The earth is presently colder than the global ideal for living things in general.
2. The earth is presently at the precise global ideal for living things in general.
3. The earth is presently hotter than the global ideal for living things in general.

I have yet to see any rational argument for #2 or #3 being true. If there is any consensus in the here and now, it is a consensus not about scientifically proven facts or truth, but about SWAG ("Scientific" Wild Ass Guesses). Concensus about an unproven hypothesis proves nothing.

Global temperature is cyclical. It always has been and always will be. In civilized history the earth has been both hotter and colder than it is now, and it will be both hotter and colder in the future. I have yet to see any proposal for a consensus, much less actual consensus, on what would be the global ideal for living things. No one is even attempting to put forth a rational argument for what the global ideal would be. Until then, everyone is just pissing in the wind.

Indeed. The global climate is cyclical due to natural forces. To label the current global climate the "ideal" is just plain silly, nothing scientific to that notion at all.

Reducing pollution is a worthy goal independently of any issues about global climate. But most of the hoopla is about CO2. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

But the consensus in the 4th century BC was that the earth was flat. It was only a few that believed the earth was spherical. If you learned that most greeks in the 4th century believed the earth was a sphere, then you had a poor school.

Dan

The flat earth is a poor example of the popular consensus being dead wrong. Better ones are the Sun rotating around the Earth, Earth, Air, Fire and Water as the four elements, heat being a physical substance, bleeding as a cure for disease, Nature abhors a vacuum, and the trajectory of a projectile is a straight line until it suddenly falls. Let's please avoid arousing Bishop Ussher's numerous supporters.

Some more recent examples are N-Rays, the Aether, and Radium as a miracle cure. When I studied Earth Science in the 50's it had no clue what raised mountain ranges. The textbook's explanation was that the weight of deep ocean trench sediments forced up coastal ranges like the Andes.

-jsw

He's Mormon, so that's a real possibility.

No.

You don't know the meaning of forgery.

You're a f****it.

It doesn't matter, Winston. The whole issue is a red herring, because surveys of climate scientists around the world, including in oil-exporting countries where the government would NOT be supportive of global-warming research, produce roughly the same results.

It's just a diversionary tactic by the deniers.

How much would it cost to buy you? Would you lie about your research if you wanted some funding, and preferred the government to the Koch brothers as a source?

Red herring.

Red herring. Show some evidence that it's happening, and you'll have something. Without it, not.

If you want to be a cynic about this, a scientist with credentials who denies global warming will have no trouble attracting energy-industry funding. The fact is that there is more government funding to universities than funding from dark sources funding denial. But, per scientist, the funding is MUCH greater for each denier.

It's like David Brock when he was a right-wing journalist/hit-man. After he wrote _The Real Anita Hill_ and cooked up stories about the Clintons, he was driving around Washington in a 500-series M-B. The money came from Scaife. It was less than the money spent by liberal think-tanks, but those writers didn't drive six-figure M-Bs.

If you want to make the big money, find an issue that the oil- and coal companies want to promote.

Probably true, but they're fighting like crazy to keep alternative-energy projects created on a huge scale, so they can gain ownership and keep control. Their enemy is rooftop solar.

The not-so-funny thing is that it's true. Crackpot scientists very rarely turn out to be right.

Go with the odds, or you're likely to crap out.

Cite.

You first.

Oh, never mind:

You didn't pose any legitimate question.

Yes.

Unless you have any valid *science*-based reason to question the scientific findings of those who say global warming is a) real, and b) anthropogenic, then the rational conclusion, for the time being, is to go with the consensus view.

Here's what we know about you specifically:

1. you can't do climate science, nor read the scientific literature
2. you don't know anyone who can
3. you don't do any other kind of science
4. your opposition is based 100% on reactive ideology

That's how science works.

It's monumentally stupid, and shows that you're only blabbering based on ideology, *not* any knowledge.

They don't claim to be able to predict perfectly. No model does.

You do, unless you pretend to any knowledge in the field yourself, which we know you don't have.

You need to understand how science works, and you don't.

No, not really.

In the next 500 years? Yes, really. No one says it's likely.

Not in your lifetime, and not in the next several centuries.

No, he isn't.

He didn't say he did, but you are pretending you *do*. But you don't. You're just reacting out of far-right ideology, as always.

Bullshit. You pretend to know enough to critique science, but you don't.

Cite.

We'll just snip the rest of the bullshit, because *none* of the science is making any claims as to what is "ideal". The science says that:

1. global warming is happening - it is
2. it is caused by human activity - it is

Any discussion as to what is "ideal" is a political and social discussion, not scientific, and the global warming science doesn't get into that.

Like all the others, your ignorant belief that global warming is a "hoax" is based 100% on your ideology, not on any science.

You have no valid reason to think it's not true.

Like all the other deniers here, your denial is based 100% on ideology and 0% on science, as well as 0% on any understanding of how science works.

been burning in the last 50 years can have no effect in bumping up the Earth's average temperature on top of its natural cycles.

They aren't. Show us some examples.

Nope.

I went through that about five years ago here, showing 14 coal companies that supported most of the published deniers. When I did that, the crackpots (like you) just shut up and went away.

You aren't worth the trouble to do it again, Scout.

What in the hell was your question? "...blindly a side somehow"?? Speak English, and we'll try again.

That's pretty much it. And, on scientific subjects, it's almost always right.

Real scientists read and keep up with the research.

Yeah.

It's based on my experience with the products of science.

It's not an opinion. It's a matter of statistical probability. The whole thing, for non-experts like us, is either stochastic (if you're rational) or a matter of opinion (if you're not). For you, it appears to be an opinion. For me, it's a matter of statistical probabilities.

No faith is involved. Experience and probabilities are involved.

I said nothing of the sort.

Whenever we get into one of these discussions, you quickly start putting words in my mouth. You just crossed over that line, so lets stop here and keep it simple:

The situation is that neither of us knows enough about climate science to decide the science itself. But we know that 95%, or 97%, or whatever of real climate scientists agree that the climate is warming and that the primary reason is anthropogenic.

Now, based on my experience in life, with the outcomes of scientific research, I'll go along with the 97%. That's a simple matter of statistical likelihood. There is no "faith" involved. It's all based on experience with other conclusions by large majorities of scientists.

You appear to think that the other 3% are just as likely to be right. The question for you is, what rational basis do you have for that belief?

What makes you think that's true? You snipped out Chris's post:

"When I was in school, we learned that back then the consensus (scientists paid by government) was that the Earth was flat. Why they didn't try to reach India by way of Atlantic Ocean."

Chris was talking about the consensus among "scientists," not fishmongers. And how do you know what fishmongers in the 4th century BC believed?

Cites?