OK you man-made climate change gurus, educate me...

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Please tell me the fundamentals of your belief system...
And how much have you personally studied the subject yourself?
Or are you solely influence by a personality or personalities you respect?
Are you simply aligning yourself with the position of your political...errr...alignment?

The most interesting question in the man-made climate change debate to me is: What is the premise for those who believe?
For example, what percentage of climate change is man-made?
Surely there are other factors such as solar flares, volcanic eruptions, deforestation, etc...
And how is it possible that climate fluctuations have happened pre-industrialisation?

Before one can have a considered opinion, one must apply critical thinking, surely...

P.S. I am not a man-made climate change skeptic...(don't you dare use the term 'denier' or you will simply discredit your objectivity...It's like calling someone a racist or Nazi...)
But how can one have a hard and fast opinion if people are loosey goosey with the premise?

P.P.S. This not a discussion necessarily...
If you guys want a debate and/or pull each other's hair out, be my guest...
Cat fights are fun, Leonard Hofstadter...

I hope said guru(s) points out the positives of climate change too.

That would increase credibility!

We have climatologists for precisely the same reason we have cardiologists; nobody can be an expert at everything. 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real, and that it is caused by human activity. That is a stronger consensus 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 American Petroleum Institute.
It's every bit as settled science as natural selection of the species. There is no "climate change controversy", other than that confabulated by fossil fuel industries and promoted by K Street and their bought-and-paid for whores in Congress.
Personally, I respect education and intelligence and value expertise, and deeply regret that we live in a society where any idiot with an iPhone can post a fact-free flat-earth theory to YouTube hand have millions of followers who have neither the knowledge, common sense, or even inclination to discern fact from fiction. I'll believe prima facie the opinion of 97% of the world's experts on anything over that of some poorly educated low-information dolt on the Internet any day of the week. As for what you believe, it doesn't matter what I say; if you won't believe NASA or the National Academy of Sciences (et al.), you certainly won't believe me, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to educate or entertain fools.

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Isaac Asimov

whenever I read an argument like volcanoes and solar flares, I google for what exactly the argument is - because "what about solar flares" is just nothing. Then I look out for credible authorities, like studies and scientific results, to see what they have to say about the topic. I gather information and yeah, at some point I have to pick what I'd rather believe, and I go with what appears the most authoritative source, because I don't have access or skills to the facilities to super-compute my own results.
If I really don't understand something, I ask my meteorologist friend to explain the issue to me.

btw.: I would consider deforestation anthropogenic - and include it into the list of causes.
The idea that any change in climate is man made is a strawman so stupid it hurts. There have been some significant contributions by way of human activity, and that's what I'm worrying about and concerned with, and I'm assuming that's what climate change "believers" are worrying about.
looking at thawing permafrost and methane emissions from that -well, you can't call methane in permafrost man-made. And no human is actually actively thawing the no-longer-so-perma-permafrost. However there are natural things triggered by man made things, and so on. complexity. and humans are pushing some factors of a complex system that is not perfectly understood, which looks to be not awfully smart.



fun fact: there was a global cooling around 1600 - after the Americas were "discovered", and the Europeans brought their smallpox and guns, wiping out tens of millions of people. That resulted in massive reforestation of the American continents, and a dip in atmospheric co2. - because atmospheric composition is a goldilocks thing.

I see regular environmental damage a greater threat.

Like water pollution.

The climate change crowd seems to drown out these concerns.

Did you seriously just imply you think deforestation isnt man-made??

I mean, regardless of its impact on climate change Deforestation is a whole nother problem in and of itself!

"you" as in "me"?
Or "you" as in "one"?...


So you are saying that it is *only* human activity which is influencing climate change?

There are programs and people I listen to on both sides of the argument...
There are people (in the media) I have a great deal of respect for in general...
They are rational, intelligent, excel in critical thinking and have displayed a passion for objectivity...
Am I a fanboy, a groupie?
No...
But I do sit up and listen and use my own critical thinking skills to dissect their arguments...




Yep, you caught me out...
How nice of you to do so...
I was hoping my lack of concentration would have gone unnoticed...

But the reason I made that error was because I had a different context in mind...
And that context was: The generation of man made carbon dioxide...
So technically I was sort of right, (with my implicit context in mind), but in the bigger picture, not so much as Borat would say...



This statement caught me by surprise...



Personally speaking, it seems difficult to believe that other factors, beyond human causation, aren't part of the climate change equation...




Presumably, not so fun for the people involved...

the word "influencing" is misplaced here. -No, it is not only human activity that is causing changes in climate, the climate is influenced by innumerable factors.
But *only* human activity is the causal factor of the current heating of the atmosphere which is causing the mass extinction event we're whitnessing at the moment.

many factors go into climate, but the causal factor for this particular event of global heating is anthropogenic.
there are a lot of other factors, like ocean acidification - global heatings evil twin brother that threatens to turn the oceans into deadzones.
if the globe heated on dry land only, you could survive, if you are a billionaire with a bunker in alaska or so.
ocean acidification and the collapse of marine ecosystems is severly problematic, though.
that, and the breakdown of the gulf stream.

also: here's what a geographer is teaching at University college London about what co2 levels in the atmosphere mean:

Confirmation bias tends to do that...
It tends to overlook other relevant information...

Some people have difficulty with complexity...<shrug>
Silly hoomans...
The world is, after all, simple...
For simple people...

I have heard in the media, that a person in a position of authority(?) claimed that man-made climate change would destroy humanity in as little as 12 years...
If you believe that, I think man-made climate change takes precedence...
I don't...

People who sprout such alarmist, dare I say, nonsense do their cause enormous damage, as has been seen in the past...

That *has to be* a given...surely...



So you don't believe solar flares, (etc), as an example, have an influence on heating the earth, ok...

By "extinction event", are you referring to humanity?
I don't feel particularly extinct, ATM...
<Pauline Hanson enters the room> Please explain...

Solar flares are new to me - I've come across the argumebt of sun spots, which of course do affect climate, but the current sun spot situation should actually lead to lower temperatures. So, at least sun spots are not the causal factor. I'll google solar flares later.

Regarding extinction: no, not humans. Everything else, though.
Google "6th extinction" and read.
If it doesn't depress you, you don't understand the implications.

I am unaware of any political alignments which hold climate change as one of their positions. It's a scientific rather than political question.

I have personally studied the subject considerably:

1) Schools in this country teach the greenhouse effect in both science and geography lessons.
2) A-Level Chemistry teaches about the physical chemistry of radiative forcing. You can perform experiments which collaborate some of the underlying principles.
3) I then studied modern environmental issues in some classes at university. This included considerable study of the arguments for and against climate change, including detailed investigation of the data.
4) As part of my biology degree, I learned about the effects that climate change is having on the biological world.
5) After graduation, I have taken up a job which exposes me to the hard face of climate science.

Based on this, I know:

1) the Earth is kept warm by greenhouse gases trapping the sun's heat
2) combustion of fossil fuels has dramatically increased the greenhouse effect
3) as 1) and 2) would predict, the Earth is warming up more than would be expected without those effects

Is that really a more interesting question than "what is the premise for those who don't believe?"

I mean, it's obvious why people believe in something that has overwhelming evidence. Nobody ever asks why people believe that Josef Stalin is really dead or that ultraviolet light exists. The much more interesting question, at least to me, is why some people don't believe.

Deforestation is a man-made phenomenon and is indeed contributing to climate change.

Natural changes in radiative forcing (including volcanoes (which incidentally tend to make things colder rather than hotter) and solar changes) are responsible for around 2% of the change in radiative forcing since 1750. Source: page 44 of the synthesis of the AR5 of the IPCC.


I do believe you've answered your own question there! Nobody - nobody - denies that climate can change naturally. However, the current change is unusually rapid and being driven largely by human activities.


A "denier" is the objective way to describe someone who denies that climate change is man-made. Calling them a "sceptic" falsely implies that they are basing their position on scientific scepticism i.e. that they base their beliefs upon systematic scientific investigation of the empirical information. You shouldn't be afraid to call Hitler a Nazi, Trump a racist, or Ridley a denier.

yeah. I still insist on listening to Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a physicist reasearching climate for 20something years now, rather than Mr. Epstein, who's not a physicist, and not researching climate, but is earning money by running a for-profit think tank and a member of the Cato institute, meaning he's friends with the Koch brothers.

Pick reliable sources, not pure propaganda, please, and find an actual researcher who's been in the field for some decades.