AN ASSAULT ON SCIENCE

But some highly qualified climatologists argue along these lines, as I understand them:

1. Assume the temperature rises due to some factor in climate variability.
2. Higher temperatures will result in increased water evaporation.
3. Water itself is the primary "greenhouse gas," so that will result in an increased amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
4. But, at the same time, more clouds will be formed.
5. Cloud have a cooling effect because they reflect solar rays so that some of them never reach earth.
6. This will more than offset the increased greenhouse gas, and, in turn, contribute to temperatures getting lower again.

I want to address this point by point and show your errors.

Heh, Parry, I'm not going to try to argue the "correct" science with you. Find some other kneejerk ideologue, like yourself, if that's what you're looking for.

We don't know" does not translate to "There's no cause for concern."

Agree?

Instead, we try to predict what the temperature would be without the CO2 we have emitted. If it's warmer than that now, then that's a pretty good sign. Surely Moore knows that?

He actually claims that man could be "saving" the climate as opposed to harming it. Too little CO2 and every living thing dies.

It might actually make things WORSE in the long run. No one seems to be able to say, IPCC claims of "settled science" notwithstanding.

But a forester told me that under normal circumstances, the average stand of pines will burn every 20 years

Later their graphs were altered to "flatten out" the warm period.

Six hundred years ago, the world was warm. Or maybe it wasn’t. What’s the truth? Beware. This question has recently been elevated from a mere scientific quandary to one of the hot (or cold) issues of modern politics. Argue in favor of the wrong answer and you risk being branded a liberal alarmist or a conservative Neanderthal. Or you might lose your job.

Six editors recently resigned from the journal Climate Research because of this issue. Their crime: publishing the article “Proxy Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1,000 Years,” by W. Soon and S. Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics....the Soon and Baliunas situation different is that their paper attracted enormous attention. And that’s because it threw doubt on the hockey stick.

Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate. I would love to believe that the results of Mann et al. are correct, and that the last few years have been the warmest in a millennium.

Love to believe? My own words make me shudder. They trigger my scientist’s instinct for caution. When a conclusion is attractive, I am tempted to lower my standards, to do shoddy work. When the conclusions are attractive, we must be extra cautious. The public debate does not make that easy.

Would be neat to see some actual science refuting him.

I think most people know that the "hockey stick" graph has since been thoroughly discredited.

“Disputes between men pertinaciously obstinate in their principles are the most irksome. The same blind adherence to their own arguments is to be expected in both; the same contempt of their antagonists; and the same passionate vehemence in enforcing sophistry and falsehood, and as reasoning is not the source from whence either disputant derives his tenets, it is in vain to expect that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.”

Professor James Hansen, a leading climate scientist has denounced the Paris climate change agreement as a “fraud” - saying there is "no action, just promises." [Hansen claimed that] "the talks that culminated in a deal on Saturday were just “worthless words."

He said: “It’s just b******t for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”

If a group of senators gets its way, any commitments President Obama makes at the Paris climate summit will be put to a congressional test. If given the opportunity, the Republican-led Senate would almost undoubtedly reject such a deal.

President Obama doesn’t plan to give it the chance. Whatever agreement emerges from Paris, he has no intention of submitting it to the Senate for ratification as a treaty. The administration argues that any agreement does not bind the United States to a course of action.

There are disadvantages to that approach: a new president could back away from the Obama climate plan. A treaty would bind all future presidents to comply with it.

“Every state controls whether that state is a party to a binding agreement, and in each case, that state’s intent controls,” said Michael Glennon, a professor of international law at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee counsel. “The key word is intent: If the U.S. doesn’t intend to enter into a binding agreement and makes that intent explicit, then there will be no binding agreement that obliges the United States to do anything as a matter of law.”

“The bottom line is it’s not going to be a treaty,” Bledsoe said. “The United States is not going to agree to anything that requires Senate confirmation. And that’s that.”

Americans Believe in Science, Just Not Its Findings
What's behind the "debate" over issues like climate change and vaccination? Can evidence change people's minds?

A new report by the Pew Research Center found that 79 percent of the 2,000 adults surveyed think science has “made life easier for most people.” Seventy-one percent think that investment in science ultimately pays off.

But on certain hot-button scientific topics of our day, Pew found wide gaps between what the public believes, and what scientists believe. You can probably guess which ones.

Genetically modified foods: 88 percent of scientists say they’re "generally safe" to eat; 37 percent of the public agrees.

Vaccines: 86 percent of scientists believe they should be required in childhood, compared to 68 percent of the public.

Climate change: 94 percent of scientists say it’s a “very serious" or "somewhat serious" problem; 65 percent of the public agrees. 87 percent of scientists blame humans; 50 percent of the public does too.

Evolution: 98 percent of scientists say they believe humans evolved over time, compared to 65 percent of the public.

There were also large disparities on issues like whether it’s safe to eat foods grown with pesticides (scientists: 68 percent; public: 28 percent), and whether the world’s growing population will be a problem (scientists: 82 percent; public: 59 percent).
...

I guess people see what they want to see.

I pointed out his use of an ad populum fallacy.

Parados has addressed his claims point by point

he indulged in name-calling

Layman is the only one actually trying to forward a scientific discussion. Everyone else just seems to want to throw insults...