That isn't really what I asked, but I guess we are just talking past eachother. The conclusory statements and metaphors about the state of the knowlege are fine, but it just seems to me that folks who are so very sure of the condition could explain the factual basis for the conviction. I don't consider "it's true because all the researchers are working on something else now" to be a satisfying basis for belief, even if the conclusion is correct. It could well be that the researchers have established all the protocols to collect and analyze the data relevant to anthropogenic (great word) warming and future data collection can be turned over to a very small group for continuing study.

 

Mike's comment about the jury metaphor and Dr. Cloud's comment about PhDs now picking topics like "how much warmer( and wetter or drier), when, where, what implications are there for the biosphere" instead of "is global warmer real?"
show that most scientists already believe global warmer is a proven theory.

Just look in a large university catalogue. Even the undergraduate degrees will reflect the assumption that people interested in study of the environment or the oceans or the atmosphere have moved beyond the question of is global warming real to the questions of how do we deal with the changes and problems and solutions we can find.

Many of you have kids in college know. Check out their catalogues and see what the new generation of scientists can choose to study.

 

I think it's more of a hypothesis than a theory. I don't it's been proven or it would be a scientific fact.

I would also note that a lot of the same people who are yelling within the academic community have their own axe to grind, both political and economic. One has to keep those free government grants flowing and justify their existence you know.

An interesting thread might be what "scientific facts" have been discredited over the years. There's lots and lots of those as our understanding improves. How about dinosaurs are cold blooded lizards as an easy example.

There's a little latin quote "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" . Time will tell whether or not it's applicable.

fltsfshr

 

Its interesting to me how many of us accept the theory based on what the experts are doing, rather than an actual understanding of the science. I see this as a pretty big issue. The implications are staggering. Yet folks can't really explain why it is true.

 

Just adding this thread with a link to a Google Question. Go to the page and click on the first link after the heading and you will get a paper from 2001 that questions global warming. Click on the second link and you will get a critique of the paper as well as a critique of a John Stossel TV report. The google question page indicates that while the critique questions the motives of the authors, the qualifications of those who signed the petition, etc, there is no significant challenge of the points made in the paper.

It is unrebutted papers like this that make me continue to search for answers and explanations. I have seen this long term data in other reports and papers. Perhaps some of the advocates of the global warming theory can direct me to a substantive critique of the data, assumptions and conclusions in this paper.

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=363384

 

As technology gets more complex, the ability of the average person (or even brighter than average person) to understand the concepts gets more and more difficult.

I used to try to understand the concepts of everything I was interested in. I gave up on that quite a few years ago.

One thing that helps is reading magazines that bridge the gap between the experts and the lay person. Scientific American, Discovery, and Nature are a few that come to mind.

 

It seems to me one has to acknowledge the earth is getting warmer, at least in my lifetime. Winters are milder and summer is longer - at least where I live.

I also realize that man has existed and even thrived in climates much cooler and much warmer than now.

I just don't understand how one can make a case either way as to the continuation of this trend or the long term effects, good or bad. The earth is just too complex a system to predict with any certainty what will or won't happen. We will ultimately have to adapt to whatever conditions result, as humans have throughout their short but interesting history.

 

I have no references to provide, however, I seem to remember a lot of flap by scientists during the late 60s and 1970s regarding climatic cooling. Perhaps this is less an issue of natural climatic cycles, than the measurable impact caused by human consumption and environmental excess?

 

Interesting stuff on this topic of late.

Let me introduce another dynamic which I believe plays a large role in this "debate".

Few, if any of us, who are trying to come to grips with this phenomenon will experience significant quality of life degradation from the effects from global warming before we die. This is a variation on a theme which, I believe affects many public policy issues before our nation today.

Notwithstanding the risk of introducing confounding concepts and thereby spreading the discussion to other topics (which I do not want to do), I think it is worthwhile to consider the notion that "where someone stands on an issue is directly related to where that person sits" or more directly, people don't jump on a bandwagon until they realize it might be the only way out of a bad situation.

OK, enough of the metaphors. What I am getting at is simply that it is not at all a surprise to me that there appears to be a debate across the general population because most of us have more immediate things to focus on. Finding comfort in popular debate and making Chicken Little references offers significantly more comfort and solace over a matter that we know in our heart won't hurt us during our lifetime than accepting the notion that there is a problem and that we all need to change our public policies and way of doing business now in service of protecting people who are not yet alive.

Dangers from global warming are, in some ways, the 21st century version of the dangers from smoking. How many years of losing 1/2 million people a year to effects from smoking did it take before people finally gave up trying to "defend" smoking (back then, the argument was that there was no "evidence" of causal relationship between smoking and croaking)?

When I used to meet with tobacco officials in the early 80's, I would ask them what they thought the general public's reaction would be if all 500 thousand people who were scheduled to die next year from smoking effects decided to get together and go to Detroit and die on the same day. I wondered how they might plan to "spin" that event. Having their victims die one at a time and spread over the entire country was much to their advantage in the public opinion debate.

The closer we get to "real effects" the less debate we will see. There might be a corollary here for smokers going to Detroit, but it escapes me at the moment.

If there is one axiom that can be applied to the "public" part of public policy, it's the plain fact that where people stand on an issue depends on where they sit (oh, is there an echo in here?)

 

The smoking analogy is actually a pretty good one. Several years ago, newspaper columnist John Leo, not an individual whom you'd call a flaming left-wing radical, compared the climate contrarians to the tobacco company apologists. He done his own research, in the sense of relevant literature reviews and so on, and he'd concluded the debate was over -- several years ago. And things have only become more conclusvive since.

Another metaphor for this is the one about the frog: you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, and he won't like it all; but if you put him in cold water and heat it up, he'll adapt and eventurally cook without hardly noticing. It's probably not true, but it's colorful. HPH