Frankly its usually best to argue your points by citing evidence that supports them. There is a reason they make you cite things when you write a college paper.

I don't mean this as a personal attack or anything, because obvious we're on a forum and no one wants to cite everything they say, but as 13ball pointed out your assertion about CO2 compared to water vapor is pretty far off base. There is a lot more water vapor in the atmosphere than CO2, however this does not mean that the effect of CO2 is meaningless. Sure CO2 makes up only about .038% of the atmosphere, but it used to be .025%...thats a 40% increase in 150 years. In a interconnected ecosystem, increasing the concentration of anything by 40% can definitely have a significant impact.

This is also not a scientific analysis and it doesn't prove that CO2 is a significant GHG (though there is plenty of evidence to speak to that). I just see this argument about how much more water vapor there is than CO2 a lot, and want to point out that the the deduction people generally make (that CO2 is insignificant compared to water vapor) does not logically follow from the argument.

c02 has a logarithmic relationship to air temperature not a linear one.

Translation - you need to pump more and more and more c02 into the atmosphere to keep that elevated co2 temp constant.

And the disastrous results if true.... longer growing seasons!!!

What I am saying is a typical MMGW alarmist will almost certainly say well 98% of peer reviewed scientists say MMGW is or is going to be a disaster. and then they'll say I am on the side of the scientists. blah blah blah.

Now why does more then half the population think its ********, when almost all the scientists say its real (at least the ones that aren't shut out of the PR process)? Why is MMGW last out of I think 21 or 22 key issues of importance?

Everyone argues about all these gases and percentages and sound all smart when talking about it, yet most people think it is a bunch of crap. I woke up this morning and it was about as cold in Chicago as it was when I woke up and went to kindergarten 25 years ago. Right next to lake Michigan, which used to be a glacier. How on earth did a glacier melt creating a gigantic lake when there were no cars around when it happened?

Marshall Islands might disappear? I wonder if that is the first island or land mass that has ever been engulfed by water before. hmmm

Yes but the fact that its a roughly logarithmic relationship doesn't affect the point of anything I said. The argument that CO2 can be ignored because there is so much less of it than there is water vapor is completely invalid.

So I guess you're a firm believer in that God played a significant role in human evolutionary development

And agree that in Korea fans are lethal weapons

And believe that it is indeed possible to put two of every animal on the planet in a giant boat and sail around for 40 days.

We should probably also arrange a mass public vote to finally put scientific debates over Unified Field Theory to rest once and for all. There are also some biological transport mechanisms that I would be interested to hear the public's opinion on and while were at it we might as well knock off the remaining six Millennium math problems.

Appealing to public opinion in matters of science is one of the stranger suggestions I've ever heard.

I'm so tired of hearing anecdotal evidence as if its some concrete proof one way or the other on this issue.

Winters used to be cold in Chicago, winters are still cold in Chicago. This is a breakthrough discovery that researchers who devote their lives to understanding our climate must have glossed over. Consider publishing your findings in Nature or Science at the first opportunity.

Shockingly enough, science can answer this question and the answer does not disprove AGW.

Also just to clarify, the point of my posts is mostly to point out how logically invalid many of the arguments against the existence of AGW are.

I'm am not well versed in climate science and do not feel qualified to weigh in strongly either way on this issue. I'm generally content to agree with what I find to a be a large body of scientific evidence that supports the hypothesis that humans are affecting our climate through the addition of GHGs to our atmosphere. Though I would not able to answer confidently if you asked me to quantify the extent of our impact. I definitely support continuing research in this field and trying to understand what's going on better before we make any rash decisions or changes. However I also believe that its possible to reduce our emissions some without too much expense, and that this is not necessarily a bad thing to be doing for lots of other reasons. So in that sense I am in favor of some mitigation efforts including perhaps a small carbon tax or some other means of pricing the externalities of polluting into the market.

Personally I do not give a **** how we got here or not. Could possibly be more boring of a subject to me then the gay marriage debate. I am living my life and having a good time.

My point was I find it absolutely hilarious that "98% of peer reviewed scientists" think MMGW is some horrible thing we must curb (btw even funnier to think we can curb the climate and what it is going to do) YET more then 50% of the public thinks it is ********. Don't those number differences make you wonder? Almost every "scientist" agrees with it, but more then 50% of the population thinks its ********.

Now if the number was more like 60% of scientists believe in MMGW as the destructor of all destructors and 40% don't and then more then half the population didn't believe in it. That would make a little more sense to me numbers wise. Which is what it probably is percentage wise if all the scientists bringing in contradictory evidence were not shut up by the state.

But the fact that it is 98% is laughable. I mean even if I was one of those east anglia scientists papering over and fudging the numbers. I would at least make the scam number of 98% of peer reviewed scientists more believable.... and shoot for something like even 85 or 90%. but 98%!?!?! come on, what a bunch of bulllllllshit.

Yes, numbers like that make me wonder wtf is wrong with people

How many non 19 year olds did you see al gore talking to in inconvenient truth?

Also...I don't think that man has zero impact. But it surely isn't going to override what nature is going to do anyway.

And... I think man has been doing a magnificent job of curbing gases going up into the atmosphere. Just imagine how many pigs, cows, and sheep are slaughtered yearly for food consumption. If we were all vegetarians think of how much more methane there would be up in the sky.

" I'm generally content to agree with what I find to a be a large body of scientific evidence that supports the hypothesis that humans are affecting our climate through the addition of GHGs to our atmosphere. "


what body of evidence? There is evidence that the temperature has increased over the last century, just like in the past. There is also evidence that man made c02 has increased a great deal over the past 100 years. There is no evidence that proves that these two things correlate.

Also, getting to this number of 98 percent. I am pretty sure any logical person understands that that is not the percentage of scientists who believe that the current warming trend is driven solely, or even primarily by MMGW. Again, the scientific community is very divided on this issue, not debatable

Edit: Obviously man made global warming exists (in some negligible amount) because c02 is a greenhouse gas, not debating that.. debating on whether it drives climate change or is in any way shape or form some sort of signifigant contributor.

True... and if it was just left at that, then that would be fine.

The problem I have is ******* politicians latching onto that and saying we have to change our way of life and pay more in taxes for something that is basically a non-issue. Just another scam to empty the pockets of Americans and make gov't even bigger.

Did we not already learn our lesson with ethanol? How many more scams do we need to unveil before we realize that politicians don't give a flying **** about the planet being greener and they only care about green benjamins.

Mr. Obama would tell you buying an electric car from the car company that he owns is a wonderful investment in the future of our greener society. Now, if he were an idiot, and didn't realize that plugging your car into an electricity socket means we have to burn more coal, well then, I would believe what he says about wanting us to be more green. But something tells me he does know that he does know more electricity = more burning of coal.

Either a truly sick level or you need help.

Being on the side of scientists concerning a scientific questions seems quite reasonable.

You are a perfect example of why people disagree with scientists. You use anecdotal evidence and out of context facts in incoherent ways. And there are a lot of people who don't want AGW to be true and so look for any excuse to deny it. Also, Rush Limbaugh tells a good portion of them it's a scam.
Perfect illustration of my previous point: anecdotal evidence and improper reasoning.

Your house might burn down? I wonder if that's the first structure that has ever been engulfed by fire before. hmmm?

Comfirmed gimmick account

Explain.

There are currently 1.3+ billion cattle, 16+ billion chickens and 1 billion+ pigs in the world at any given time (2003 data). Do you think this number would be higher or lower if we were all vegetarians and didn't raise animals to eat?

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm

Read it. Seriously, at least give some of the summary sections a try, there's a lot of information in there. If you still want to argue specific points that the IPCC raises thats fine, but its silly to just say there is no evidence out there and leave it at that.

The evidence supporting AGW is much more indepth than simply a correlation between increasing temperatures and CO2 concentrations over the last 100 years. There are quite literally thousands of academic articles addressing climate change science published in well respected journals. Those can be pretty technical and hard to wade through however so the IPCC report is a good place to start for a solid overview.

My POINT was it is just a taaaaaad suspect that 98% of scientists believe in it. ANd shutting out the rest of the climate skeptics out of the peer review process. That is all the evidence I need to know it is bull ****. The state is shutting people out who want to bring in contradictory evidence. I mean what else do you need to know? They are fudging the numbers and keeping climate skeptics out of the debate. Why the **** would they do this if they are so sure with their own data? You can say c02 this and I can say the sun and water vapor that until we are blue in the face and get no where. But when people and the state want to shut up and silence the contradictory evidence, well... then its bull ****.


Well if I lived in California and my house burned down from forest fires. I would at least know it is not from global warming. And I would know that it is from the pacific ocean cooling bringing dryer air over cali

yes... explain?

.

Respectfully I think this belongs in the conspiracy thread.

Also just to point out, you can definitely agree and still oppose state involvement mitigation efforts. This is probably a viewpoint that a lot of people around here subscribe to. A scientific belief in AGW does not necessarily imply a desire to trust politicians to implement mitigation programs. These are very separate issues that get conflated all the time in these debates and discussions.

You can't seperate them, because the debate is not about whether any amount of AGW exists. It's very obvious to even the fiercest skeptics with a brain, that manmade GHG does add some amount of warming to the atmosphere. But it might be 1/100 of the natural flux and be totally inconsequential and merely noise, or it might be much bigger than the natural flux and require a mitigation strategy. That's the debate. Warmers say it is much bigger than natural flux, i.e. the amount temps would rise without humans. Skeptics/Deniers say it is inconsequential in comparison.

Yes but the question of how large the AGW effect is still a primarily scientific one. Translating that information into an appropriate response is primarily political.

Do you think that all those animals were running free and breeding to huge numbers in controlled envrionments out of their own accord?

Conspiracy no, tribalism yes...

This might be hard to believe but scientists are...<drumroll>...People.
And people have egos and sometimes engage in pettiness with their rivals in their fields.
And if a fellow scientists wants to publish research which discredits THEIR research then we start seeing turf wars and the perversion of the peer review process...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...ws-peer-review
Scientific tribalism is a common phenom whether it is stem cell research or the "hockey team" conspirng to blackball a publisher because they accepted some sceptic papers they did not approve of. The above link sums up this scientific tribalism quite nicely.

And when some scientists ignored the CRU hockey team and found other scientists to peer review their research we get a conspiracy by Michael Mann to change the peer review process.
Stephen McIntyre who tore up Michael Mann's Bristle Cone Pine research went through hell to get the data and code from Michael Mann. And he still didn't get all the data/methodology but he got enough to reverse engineer Mann's "peer reviewed" work and thoughly trash the work of this previously unknown PhD student who achieved fame with his hockey stick graph. The moral of the story is that an amateur mathematician trumps the work of an unscrupulous PhD student who was dying for IPCC fame.
http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/21/c...eping-siberia/
Here is the money quote which sums up why some scientists get so defensive about the peer review process.
Here is a clear conflict of interest. Michael Mann's research was being attack as garbage and Mann contacted his fellow "hockey team" members to boycott certain publishers.
Mann's Bristle Cone Pine study made Mann famous and having two Havard astrophysicists publish a paper which discredited Mann's work was evidently too much for Mann to stomach. Conspiracy? maybe. Tribalism...definately.