"Cap and Trade"

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[quote="Master_Pedant"] Nevertheless, Obama (and left-progressive activists) have the opportunity to push through a massive Green Works Administration program which would simultaneously deal with anthropogenic climate change and depression. [quote]
I've been criticizing the ability of a "Green Works Administration program" to deal with the economic downturn though. If it takes too long to implement(as in finally going into the economy by the middle of Obama's term) then it will not benefit the economy in all likelihood. Thus the dual-purpose thing is just rhetoric, but nonsense beyond that.

Google is a friend, ya know...Google, peer reviewed global warming skeptics and see what you get but you'all already know that right?

The implication of your statement is clearly ambiguous.

I thought it was pretty obvious that there are some here that have never read a peer reviewed paper by the skeptics of Global Warming. And, I am pointing out that many of the same people that like to push the "denier" tag are very capable of reading such scientific work but have chosen not to.



Example

Oh, that's what you meant - ok, really had no clue. So I typed "peer reviewed global warming skeptic" into Google, and pressed the "I feel lucky" button. The page it took me to had links to various papers about 1,500 year climate cycles or 15,000 year ocean cycles - but these do not directly contradict the idea of anthropogenic climate change. I suggest that these were presented in a way that is either quite naive, or intended to deceive.

Many of the papers cited were related to the statistical precision or degree of uncertainty for a particular model - to the average person, it might call the whole idea into question, but that is just normal science. And even if one doesn't buy into the models, that doesn't negate the core phenomenon that is being modeled ... I can't model my wife's response to what I say with high precision, but I do know that she responds, and if I don't think about her response, I am usually worse off.

There were some papers on that page that apparently are legitimate peer reviewed papers that directly call into question one or more aspects of global warming, even a few that challenged the theory outright, but very few.

But at what point does something become a settled question? There are still people publishing peer reviewed articles that claim that autism is caused by the mercury in vaccines. Does that make it an open question - some people say A, some people say B, so we can't really say for sure? No. At some point, we can say that the evidence for one side is great enough that the opposing view should be heavily discounted, or abandoned altogether.

So I go back to Google; not using the "I feel lucky" button gives a list of many different pages, some of which include the wikipedia page which notes:

So that is not unanimity, but it seems that a large majority of qualified scientists do in fact believe that CO2 and methane and CFCs increase heat trapping, and that human activity is increasing these gasses, and that climate is being changed as a result. There certainly are legitimate debates as to how much change is due to natural variation vs. human activity, what the climate will be like in 25 or 100 years, and what action should be taken. But at this time, I think most scientists have subscribed to the idea that anthropogenic global warming is a reality.

So, peer reviewed papers debunking aspects of the global warming science really do exist.

“In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers ‘what if’ projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios,” Trenberth wrote in journal Nature’s blog on June 4, 2007. He also admitted that the climate models have major shortcomings because “they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess." LINK

"In August 2007, the UK Met Office was finally forced to concede the obvious: global warming has stopped. (LINK) The UK Met Office acknowledged the flat lining of global temperatures, but in an apparent attempt to keep stoking man-made climate alarm, the Met Office is now promoting more unproven dire computer model projections of the future. They now claim climate computer models predict “global warming will begin in earnest in 2009” because greenhouse emissions will then overtake natural climate variability." LINK

The only aspect of this debate that is settled for me is that politicians have meddled with the scientific process in order to push an agenda that will increase taxes more than any other increase in our history, while the same politicians find it too inconvenient to even procure extra money from their pork spending, to upgrade temperature reading sites, so that they meet the standards set by the government itself!

Pass Cap & Trade and it will do nothing about CO2 emissions.

The bloggist you quoted is too fond of listening to themselves talk, and the result is blather.

How do you want to classify this statement: "If I drain the bank account, then my wife will be rather pissed!" .... clearly it is a predictive scenario, based on a contingency. It is not the same as saying that at 5:42 p.m. tonight, my wife will be pissed. But if we know that I am going to make a rather large withdraw, that statement does predict certain consequences. The cheap sophistry in those arguments is embarrassing.




This is simply ridiculous. And it doesn't agree with what the Met office itself says:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/p ... 0923c.html

When one looks at the temperature graphs, at various points, it may level off or even dip ... climate change involves the long term trend; there is a strong trend of increase.




The debate on global warming is really not that different from the debate on evolution:

So now we are talking about evolution.

I give up, Monty. This is SOP I guess. After x number of global warming posts, evolution has to be thrown into the mix.

We really should be asking when something is 'decided' and when it is an open question, don't you think?

If 13% of 'scientists' don't believe in evolution, and 17% of those same 'scientists' don't believe in anthropogenic warming, then maybe that says something? If we assume that there is a 90% overlap between the two types of deniers, then those pseudoscientists can be subtracted out, suggesting that approximately 95% of actual factual scientists believe in anthropogenic warming.

And there are just too many loose ends that don't add up in the 'skeptic' posts you put up - from the idea that the UK Meteorology office thinks that the planet is cooling (they don't) to the distinction between 'predictions' and scenarios that predict .... not quality arguments.