Global Warming

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This is a tricky area, how do we determine the truth when science can't? The consensus is that yes, people are causing the issue. Yet history claims this naturally occurs. Climate science is one of those fields that attracts activists which come in with a natural bias. All scientists within the field are not in agreement and new research is never ending.

Activists come to conclusions without proper research, they set out to 'prove' human activity is the main leading cause, in something as complicating as global warming, incorrect conclusions are common. Is global warming occurring? Yes. Are humans the sole reason, an obvious no. So the real question is, how much impact do humans have on global warming? The difficult question that is not so easy to answer yet so many people tend to think otherwise....

-Global warming controversy
The global warming controversy is an ongoing dispute about the effects of humans on global climate and about what policies should be implemented to avoid possible undesirable effects of climate change.

The current scientific consensus on climate change is that recent warming indicates a fairly stable long-term trend, that the trend is largely human-caused, and that serious damage may result at some future date if steps are not taken to halt the trend.

Mainstream scientific organizations worldwide (Royal Society, American Geophysical Union, Joint Science Academies, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, American Meteorological Society, and American Association for the Advancement of Science) concur with the assessment that most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the human-caused increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.

However, there is also a small but vocal number of scientists in climate and climate-related fields that disagree with the consensus view.

Role of 'natural factors' on recent climate change underestimated, research shows
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 105613.htm

Volcanoes cause climate gas concentrations to vary
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 085337.htm

Freezing in record lows? You may doubt global warming
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 151744.htm

Parsing natural climate variability from human-caused climate change
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 150358.htm


I will say this though, it's better to be safe than sorry.
The dirty side of the free market. I have witnessed suppression of technology, scientists do come up with solutions, what happens is the patents are bought up by big corporations, then these corporations sit on the technology so they can maximize profits on the existing technology in use. I have read about solar technology for about 20 years now and have repeatedly seen more advanced solar panels being developed yet they never seem to make it to the market.

it's unlikely to impossible to get 100% undoubtable proof in any science that deals with with so many factors.
Just like with tobacco, it can't be proven 100% that it causes cancer- in the sense that, if you have a cancer, you can't prove exactly what caused it. You can only show that an overwhelming number of people who smoke get lung cancer. The tobacco industry used this defense for decades.

when in ecuador a village sued an oil company, because the oily sludge they had pumped up was seeping into the drinking water, and the villagers got cancers of all sorts and disfigured babies and so on, the oil company demanded the villagers prove which of the innumerable different molecules actually caused the cancer. The judge reacted wisely, and put the burden of proof on the oil company, with the reasoning that there are some hydrocarbons that are known to be toxic, and given the nature of the pollution, they need to prove their hydrocarbons are not toxic.
that is, the judge assumed the villagers theory to be likely, and demanded the oil company disprove it by proving their rival theory to be right. - that's what a scientist would have to do, to disprove a widely accepted theory that explains something. The judge introduced the scientific method into the court room. that was pretty new, and somewhat outrageous.
in a way, it can be read as a case of guilty until progen innocent. But that would be discarding the incredibly high likelihood in a case that cannot be solved with 100% certainty, but only ever 99%.

every other decade, scientists have given a state-of-the-science proof that sunlight makes co2 wiggle faster, heating up the molecules around them.
humans are dumping an awful lot of co2 into the atmosphere.

given what's at stake, it is, in my humble opinion, on the anthropogenic climate change deniers to prove, with 100% (or at least 99%) certainty, that their rival theories are right.

Not sure who is arguing that its 100% human created, I certainly would say that's not true as with most things there are multiple factors, humans are just one factor. I mean humans or no humans the climate does go through changes, that is true enough.

Trouble is humans are creating more Co2 and methane than the atmosphere can handle while maintaining livable conditions for humans/animals at least how I understand it on a basic level. Seems there is enough science to at least imply we should reduce the gasses we are putting into the atmosphere to reduce human contributions to global warming. Plus its not healthy to breath...less crap in the atmosphere also means less smog.

But I will agree the changes occuring may very well not be 100% human created, even so we should reduce our contributions.

Certainly the last thing we should be doing is burning the plastic recycling, I hear since China has not been wanting to accept so much waste...a bunch is being burnt rather than any efforts for this country to handle its own freaking trash. Hell even if it could be proven such a thing would not contribute to global warming...does anyone really want those fumes floating around in the air?

There is a thing called bio-diesel which is much cleaner than traditional diesel fuel, its not totally emissions free but its much cleaner...and its made out of waste oil from cooking(what the hell else are you going to do with that crap). Something such as switching from diesel fuel to bio diesel for semi trucks, and diesel pick up trucks would be a good step towards cleaning up the air.

Of course not so sure the oil companies like that idea...

funny thing: over here, in europe, plastics are being burned and it's considered recycling, because the energy is being used. We do however use modern incinerators, and filters, so only co2 escapes into the environment, making plastic bags into just an intermediary step between oil and energy - instead of just burning the oil for the energy staright away.
which makes it all a tiny bit more complicated, conceptually, when thinking about how to reduce pollution.
at least, with your old incinerators, it's obvious what to do... ^-^

I wouldn't call them deniers, they are called scientists that don't blindly jump to conclusions...

It's a little different than 'does cigarette smoke cause lung cancer'. The point, and why it matters, is to figure out how human activity contributes. We are much smaller than the average thinks, if you look at satellite imagery you will notice that most land does not contain people, cities and highways. Without a clear conclusion, we could be worrying about something that we may barely have an impact on. Natural sources also produce CO2. What's mostly been studied to date is human activity, not natural activity. How do we determine how much CO2 we put in the atmosphere verses how much CO2 is naturally put in the atmosphere? Also, as discovered in one of these papers, it's much more complicating than how much CO2 exists in the atmosphere. CO2 levels are rising from both natural sources and human activity, the planet is not heating up in relation to CO2 levels. I would say more so, people that are jumping to conclusions without even studying natural sources or even understanding what exactly causes global warming, are the deniers of scientific understandings. That's ultimately how they keep making predictions that never seem to come true. That's not science, that's the work of an activist. Real scientists aren't so quit to jump to conclusions with something they are aware isn't fully understood. Cigarettes have been proved to cause cancer by the way, they cause mutations in RNA, when you accumulate so many it can lead to the development of cancer cells.

But I do agree, regardless, pollution is obviously not a good thing, but also consider a volcano, it straight up dumps chemicals into the atmosphere at a rate much faster than human activity....



As I was saying, yes, pollution is bad and needs to be reduced. One of the aspects I purely hate about the free market is the ability to suppress technology, I don't think that is right in any kind of way. It honestly should be illegal, they should find out a way to fix that because I'm tired of seeing it happen. I remember reading an article over 18 years ago about new solar cells developed that have a conversion rate that is around 65% efficient and the cells are cheap to manufacture, yet I think the cells in use today are very expensive and have a conversion rate of about 30-40% efficient.

I asked a scientist once, why is this technology not being used, his reply was, we create the technology, it's up to you(the people) to use it. Something needs to be done about that and it sickens me that you will never hear about that kind of stuff in our politics. Another kool, very old(18years ago) thing is an alloy that converts thermal energy back into electrical energy at a rate of about 70-80% efficient, I'm not sure how cheap or expensive it was to make, but I also haven't heard anything about that in forever. Nor glass in its metallic state, glass stronger than any known metal that bends instead of fracturing. All this s**t comes out then vanishes. I got kinda side tracked, but yea. Pollution is bad and needs to be reduced for various reasons, even if it's impact on climate change is very small.

This "difficult question" is easy to answer. 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real, and that it is caused by human activity.. That is a stronger concensus than the notion that smoking tobacco causes lung cancer. Like the tobacco industry, many of the 3% of scientists who are professional climate change denialists are funded by corporations and their lobbyists like Koch Industries, Exxon/Mobil, and the Americal Petroleum Institute.
It's every bit as settled science as natural selection of the species. There is no "global warming controversy" other than that confabulated by fossil fuel industries and promoted by their bought-and-paid for whores in Congress.

Well if that's true, why is there very little known about natural sources that contribute? Why is CO2, the main focus of their research as to what causes global warming not matching up with what is actually occurring, the big pause, CO2 on the rise yet warming isn't. When scientists know a great deal about something they can make predictions that come true, so far that hasn't occurred. The controversy is they don't actually understand what makes the planet warm up and so far they have done very little research into natural sources and other gasses, kinda a big part in understanding global warming wouldn't you think? I mean, it's not as if it has happened many times in the past without human sources of CO2, not to count that even CO2 levels have risen in the past without humans, so I would say it would help to know what other gasses contribute, their sources and the natural sources of CO2 versus the human added CO2. Do you happen to have any links to share that insists they already understand all of this and have proof detailing how much CO2 is produced by nature versus human activity as well as explaining why temperature is not rising while CO2 gasses are?

(from Wikipedia: Sea Surface Temperature)

Having a couple of severe winters where you happen to live doesn't mean that the average global temperature is not rising. Just because you live on land doesn't mean that rising ocean temperatures won't affect you. This is why climate scientists prefer the term "climate change" to "global warming" - because the local effects can be apparently paradoxical depending upon how weather patterns and ocean currents might be shifted. That there are natural variations to climate is hardly news to climate scientists, it is by comparison with evidence for prehistoric changes that more recent shifts were noted as being anomalous.

If that is true then why do some scientists who even agree with the consensus dispute that the planet is gradually heating up? It's what I've heard, I haven't confirmed it. Where did the terminology 'the pause' come from. And that still leaves a lot of unanswered questions that I mentioned. But to narrow down one at a time, is this chart widely agreed upon? Also, the graph looks hectic until you notice that it's saying, at its highest level of spiking it has risen less than 1 degree in 40 years.

Then why are you placing such a high burden of proof on everyone else?


If a block of ice is at -0.5C, how much does the temperature have to rise before it will melt?

Because I'm not the one insisting I have proof that the planet is heating up because of human activity. While there are a lot of scientists that insist this is true, they know very little to actually confirm it, they haven't even studied natural sources, other factors which drive global warming or climate change. I have been looking for the proof, doing so I have discovered that not much is even known about how natural factors drive climate change. It existed before man, so you would think that natural factors matter, would you not? So if you don't fully understand climate change and the involved factors that cause it to change, how can you logically come to the conclusion that it's currently being driven by human activity? That doesn't seem like a leap to you?

-Many scientists have told me in the past, anyone serious about understanding science doesn't use wikipedia as a source. I'm not trying to battle the idea, I'm trying to learn about how these conclusions have been drawn and how these conclusions can be made without even understanding natural factors. It's obvious that not much is understood when the consensus constantly makes predictions that don't even come close to what actually occurs.

That's one of the fishy things I see in climate science, those who present evidence to go against the consensus which make clusters of incorrect predictions, are labeled as 'climate-change due to human activity' deniers which is actually the reverse of how science normally goes. That seems more like political method instead of scientific method. Scientists usually appreciate skepticism. How I have heard it is normally done is you come up with a hypothesis, then you try your hardest to prove that hypothesis is incorrect, attacking it from all angles, as you fail over and over to prove that hypothesis incorrect, you eventually come to the conclusion that it must be correct being you can't prove it to be incorrect. It seems to me the exact opposite is being carried out, else they would have a lot more information regarding natural sources of greenhouse gasses and identifying what those gasses are and what roles they play and how they effect climate change. Instead, they set out to prove CO2 is the major gas which causes global warming, then the data has been proved to not match that hypothesis and they run with it anyway, casting incorrect predictions while others are proving that CO2 levels is not directly linked to the warming of the planet, it is only one factor out of many unexplored factors. Then to add, they haven't even researched natural sources of CO2? Natural sorces of methane releases? You are not supposed to jump to conclusions and make predictions that don't occur, you are supposed to accept criticism rather than label them deniers. You are supposed to attempt to prove your theory wrong, not set in to prove it right.

Last edited by Crimadella on 02 Mar 2019, 6:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's simply untrue to say that scientists "don't study natural sources". If you read the IPCC's reports, for example, they break down not only the extent of warming we have seen, but also how that warming has come about - the radiative forcing effects of various gases, changes in albedo, changes in land use, natural emissions of gases, changes in solar forcing, natural cycles like El Nino, and so forth.

It's also untrue to claim that climate scientists say that global warming has "paused". Sceptical politicians used to like to say this six or seven years ago because 2012 was about as hot as 1997. But 1997 was the second-hottest year on record at the time (behind only 2005), at the peak of both an El Nino and another cycle. The only way you could argue for a "pause" was if you deliberately cherry-picked 1997 as your base year and completely ignored both the short-term fluctuations and the long-term trend.

Since then, off the top of my head I think every year has been hotter than 1997 and every year except one has been hotter than 2005.

There are a few biochemists who think we were created by God 4,000 years ago. Nonetheless, science clearly shows we have evolved over millions of years and share common ancestry with all known life on Earth. Some people disagreeing doesn't change the facts. Similarly with climate change, there is an overwhelming degree of evidence which has been meticulously compiled by extremely dedicated scientists. Even people who have a vested interest to argue against it - such as governments and oil companies - now overwhelmingly accept the facts of climate change, including that human emissions of greenhouse gases from the combustion of fossil fuels are responsible for the majority of the warming we have experienced.

Now here's the reasonable doubt:

- How much hotter will it be in 10 years?
- How much hotter will it be in 100 years?
- At what point will natural systems be tipped into "runaway cycles" where positive feedback loops take climate change out of our hands?
- Exactly what will the impact be on the natural world?
- Exactly what will the impact be on humans?
- How quickly do we need to change our behaviour in order to stop this?
- How should we best achieve this?

For all of those questions, science can give us very good answers, with an awful lot of evidence to back those answers up, but there remains a degree of uncertainty about the finer details.

For example, we know that in ten years time the world will be hotter on average, but perhaps 2029 will be a particularly cool year (perhaps only as hot as 2005?), and we cannot say whether things will be 0.01 degrees hotter on average or 0.1. We can say that a certain species will have its range dramatically constricted, but we cannot say that it will have gone extinct. We can say that another species will be temporally mismatched with its food source, but we cannot say that it will have gone extinct. We can say that 80-90% of coral reefs will be gone by 2100 under business-as-usual emissions scenarios, but we cannot say that 81.7% will including this reef. We can say that 50-80% of Indians will be at greater risk of drought, but not that in 2094 a drought will kill 1,400,006 people in Gujarat.

When we talk about scientists disagreeing, they're not disagreeing on the fundamentals, even on "what portion is man made?" - they're disagreeing on the level of confidence we can have about the extent of ranges on fine details.

Well, I can accept an answer like that, I need to read and learn more. So I will continue searching for articles. I'm trying to separate fact from fiction, I dislike when politics tries to discuss science. I just don't understand why people set out to prove the opposite are labeled deniers, for doing things like looking at volcano's to see how they contribute. That just sounds fishy to me, but I will read more, I don't mind learning about this stuff, I love science.

@Crimadella
I was snarky and I shouldn't have been, you did nothing to deserve it. I guess I've gotten cynical about how politicised these debates can get, and jumped to conclusions. It's saddens me that so few people have the curiosity about what the scientists actually get up to, which I now realise inspired your question.

I think you do have a good point - we're often presented with the conclusions of the scientists' research, but not the details of what the evidence is, or how it all fits together. Ironically, I was trying to make a lame attempt at encouraging you to answer a few of your own questions; exactly what you've just said you're already keen to do! But even if a bit of encouragement were necessary, it wasn't a very nice way to do it.

My sincere apologies.

And I totally agree with you - scepticism should be at the heart of science.

There really is considerable and corroborated evidence for climate change...and that some of it is man-caused.

The droughts and famines in the Sahel and Sahara in Africa have been going on since way before industrialization. It’s a part of the natural climatic scene. The natives know that.