Climate change: The moment I became a climate skeptic

[dan_bgblue]

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/06/30/climate-change-moment-became-climate-skeptic/?intcmp=obnetwork

[KeithKSR]

Way too many climate scientists take a non-scientific approach to climate change. Theories are established and tested by trying to disprove them. With the climate those scientists seek to silence those that have contrary evidence.

There have been repeated reports that temperature averages are being manipulated to insure that warming appears to take place.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/06/23/Global-warming-Fabricated-by-NASA-and-NOAA

[CitizenBBN]

One item got my attention. It said: “Projections based on the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios suggest warming over the 21st Century at a more rapid rate than that experienced for at least the last 10,000 years.”

I called the professor, one of the authors of the report, for a clarification (he remains nameless because we were off the record). “If global warming is caused by man-made emissions,” I asked, “what accounts for the world warming to this same level 10,000 years ago?”

Bingo. Smart lad.

There are a number of those in these "reports", and they all beg the same question. If it's EVER been warmer than it is now, with all this man made warming, how can we conclude this current warming (if there is one) is due to man? Clearly warm and cold periods are by definition a natural cycle that occurs with or without human existence, so how are they scientifically separating causality between natural phenomenon and man made contributions?

How much is our contribution? can the trend be reversed by us changing our contribution? BTW that is NOT a scientific given, there are many cases where we find that once on a path that changing behavior to some small degree (i.e. the US going green but china churning out coal plants like rabbits) doesn't have any impact of any significance on the course or outcome.

that of course is if it is even getting warmer. It's now STILL not as warm as the 1930s, despite massive industrialization of the planet since that time, so all the industrial output from the 1930s till now combined didn't fully offset the post depression era cooling. That's a lot of "greenhouse gases" put out there by mankind for us to not even fully offset a small cooling cycle.

Like that story said, this is like the nutrition stuff where eggs are good for you ( the 70s), bad for you (the great cholesterol scare) then may be good for you again. or butter, which we now think is about 200x better for you than the hydrogenated crap that was absolutely better for you than butter all those years. the scale is different, but the groupthink and lack of scientific objectivity and skepticism is the same. Self anointed "experts" who call themselves scientists but create any questioning of their position with disdain and personal insult.

My fav is still how the initial theorists about the dinosaur extinction being due to a meteor were absolutely shunned as lunatics as crazy as any Area 51 conspiracy theorist. It was considered utter nonsense, and is now seen as absolute fact. Just in my lifetime we've completely changed our theory on the biggest variable in evolution theory, but somehow these warming models that have been wrong for 15 years running must still be treated as the gospel.

It's funny how much bad science becomes a religion, based on faith and belief and simply shunning or excommunicating those who challenge doctrine. somewhere Galileo is saying "I feel your pain" to the few willing to question the current politically very valuable doctrine of warming.

[CitizenBBN]

FWIW I have no doubt man probably has some level of effect, but what that effect is and how much it changes global climate is a huge question. The 8 bazillion pound gorilla that really pulls the strings is the sun, and it's not clear how our contribution really compares versus these natural cycles.

I have SEVERE doubts that castrating the US economy will have any appreciable impact on the Earth's climate cycles, as we are an increasingly small percentage of the output and unless we just ban cars and electricity we will experience great pains to get a very modest decrease in output unless we all agree to go nuclear.

Mostly I just see a huge amount of bad science. Leaps of faith, treating research like doctrine, hypothesis as laws of nature, and I see a massive self interested government machine funding all this research then using the convenient results to justify levels of intrusion and planning that would have made the corporatist fascists of the 30s reach orgasm.

[KeithKSR]

There are some scientists that see the correlation between CO2 and temps as one in which the temps rise, then the CO2 rises as a result.