sandy_mcd wrote:The point is that the vast majority of the scientific community (in more or less related fields) accept global warming and an anthropogenic component. (There certainly is a handful of prominent exceptions.) I base this on skimming journals such as Nature and Science and talking to research scientists. Where do you get the idea that there is major disagreement (among scientists)?August wrote:The point is that there is no consensus right now, with both sides of the argument quoting respected scientists.
The 17,000 scientists that signed the Oregon Project petition, the survey of 530 climatologists in 27 countries done by Professor Dennis Bray of Germany's GKSS National Research Centre, the 10,000 scientists who co-signed the letter from Frederick Seitz, former president of the NAS who stated that the premises of the Kyoto treaty were false, and the 100 climate scientists who signed the Leipzig Declaration. If you want to call them a "handful", then go right ahead.
But since I have now been accused of "being blind in the face of the preponderance of evidence", been relegated to believing in YEC since I don't want to believe in global warming, and all of my previous arguments ignored, I will no longer contribute on the thread. I can do without direct or hidden ad-hominems, and persistent and fallacious appeals to the majority, while not directly addressing the merits of the arguments presented.
For the benefit of the neutral reader, I will summarize my position, and then let the Al Gore disciples get on with their little love-fest.
1. There is no consensus in scientific circles on either global warming, or the role humans play in global climate change, as my information above demonstrates.
2. The most consistently reliable methods (satellite and radiosonde) of measuring global temperature trends show no warming on a global scale. The "preponderance of evidence" shows that some places are getting warmer, others are cooling down. Urban land-based measuring stations are overrepresented in the studies that claim global temperature rises, while two-thirds of the earths surface, covered in water, is grossly under-represented.
3. The UN's IPCC report, Climate Change 1995, widely quoted as authoritative, also here, is hardly credible. Numerous changes were made to the report after peer-review, prior to publishing, to make the report agree with political pressures of the time.
4. Computer models, called general circulation models, that supposedly tries to predict climatic change, and forms the basis for alarmist calls, was never intended to predict anything. They were designed to aid in the understanding of atmospheric physics, and has proven unreliable in the area of prediction.
I have previously, on another thread about the same topic, shown many sources for the above.
