Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

Steve-What do the experts have to say on cheap flight tickets?

spendius wrote:

Steve-What do the experts have to say on cheap flight tickets?

Depends on which experts. Economists think its a good thing. Enviromentalists think its a bad thing. I dont give a damn really. Why should I? Why should the moral weight fall on my shoulders, I was only going to Lidll to buy bananas anyway. In any case, if it was really bad it wouldnt be allowed would it?

strictly yes but if you stuff em down the front of the trousers, they are practically undetectable.

With Katrina as the precedent, Gore shows them. And he explains that as glaciers melt, sea levels will rise, eventually flooding land from Florida to Shanghai, Holland to India. In Calcutta and Bangladesh, he says, 60 million people would be displaced. In Manhattan, Ground Zero would be ground no longer. The site of the World Trade Centre would be under water. More gasps.

The range of emotions this prompts begins with shock, then anger - directed by Gore at those corporate interests that, with their political servants, have sought to keep this inconvenient truth from the public, especially in the United States. The stand-out case is that of Philip Cooney, a former lobbyist for the US oil industry, who wound up - despite no scientific training - as chief of staff of the White House's environment office. From that perch, he set about rewriting papers by government scientists, turning firm conclusions into doubtful possibilities. He literally got out his pen and changed "is" to "may". He was caught and left the Bush administration - taking a job at ExxonMobil the next day.

But Cooney is just an unusually blatant example of what is an ongoing campaign by Big Oil to cast doubt over climate change, much as Big Tobacco did over the dangers of smoking. The oil companies fund spurious pressure groups which, in turn, persuade the media to cast global warming as a matter of debate. The reality, notes Gore, is that of 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on the topic in the last decade, the percentage that express doubt over the cause of global warming is zero.[/i]

strictly yes but if you stuff em down the front of the trousers, they are practically undetectable.

Quote:

The oil companies fund spurious pressure groups which, in turn, persuade the media to cast global warming as a matter of debate. The reality, notes Gore, is that of 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on the topic in the last decade, the percentage that express doubt over the cause of global warming is zero.

my italics

Oreskes claims to have analysed 928 abstracts she found listed on the ISI database using the keywords "climate change". However, a search on the ISI database using the keywords "climate change" for the years 1993 - 2003 reveals that almost 12,000 papers were published during the decade in question (2). What happened to the countless research papers that show that global temperatures were similar or even higher during the Holocene Climate Optimum and the Medieval Warm Period when atmospheric CO2 levels were much lower than today; that solar variability is a key driver of recent climate change, and that climate modelling is highly uncertain?

These objections were put to Oreskes by science writer David Appell. On 15 December 2004, she admitted that there was indeed a serious mistake in her Science essay. According to Oreskes, her study was not based on the keywords "climate change," but on "global climate change" (3). Her use of three keywords instead of two reduced the list of peer reviewed publications by one order of magnitude (on the UK's ISI databank the keyword search "global climate change" comes up with 1247 documents). Since the results looked questionable, I decided to replicate the Oreskes study.....

The results of my analysis contradict Oreskes' findings and essentially falsify her study: Of all 1117 abstracts, only 13 (or 1%) explicitly endorse the 'consensus view'.

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Plus more than 250 media in English language outsite Europe (including all major US papers) :wink:

(Out of nearly 300 printed newspapers worldwide I've access to, more than 200 report it - the rest are Sunday papers and weekly periodicals )

- The law of consensus : "At times of high scientific controversy, the consensus is always wrong."

That has to be the stupidest made up "law" I have ever seen. If there is a consensus then where is the scientific controversy?

If anything the lay consensus is we don't need to do anything drastic about global warming. We aren't. Your law would point to that consensus being wrong. Your law (if it exists) defeats your argument miniBernard.

I am not "solidly on the side of the general consensus", I am merely observing what the general consensus is.

BTW Consensus <> unanimity.

1 a : general agreement : UNANIMITY <the consensus of their opinion, based on reports...from the border -- John Hersey>

Steve 41oo wrote:

I am not "solidly on the side of the general consensus", I am merely observing what the general consensus is.

There's a general consensus now? Something must have happened while I was neglecting this thread.

Main Entry: con·sen·sus
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): -es
Etymology: Latin, from consensus, past participle of consentire to feel together, agree -- more at CONSENT
1 a : harmony, cooperation, or sympathy especially in different parts of an organism b : group solidarity in sentiment and belief <a kind of unspoken consensus ... appeared -- Henry Dicks> <broad group consensus, as manifested in the folkways, mores, and other institutional usages -- H.A.Bloch>
2 a : general agreement : UNANIMITY, ACCORD <the consensus of their opinion, based on reports that had drifted back from the border -- John Hersey> b : collective opinion : the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned <in the consensus of a number of critics -- Current Biography>
3 : a formal statement of religious belief : CONFESSION

Thomas wrote:

Steve 41oo wrote:

I am not "solidly on the side of the general consensus", I am merely observing what the general consensus is.

There's a general consensus now? Something must have happened while I was neglecting this thread.

Yes there is. I summarised what it was, and gave its history. Dissenters disagree with it, but they dont deny it exists, otherwise there would be nothing to dissent from[/i].

Frankly, since I think certainty should be a very big deal for any scientist, I think it is healthy that there is no consensus and that the debate continues...

Foxfyre wrote:

Frankly, since I think certainty should be a very big deal for any scientist, I think it is healthy that there is no consensus and that the debate continues...

...until hell freezes. Again you give the impression of not understanding how science works. Do you really think applied scientists present their papers as "certainty"? Does the phrase "margin of error" or "probability range" mean nothing to you?)

I think you have swallowed the subtle disinformation of Big Oil who like nothing better than to highlight dissent from the consensus so they can pretend no consensus exists. It does and a few posts back I summarised what it was and it's provenance.

(There is a similar tactic used by creationists. They jump on any argument within evolution to try and pull down Darwinian evolution itself. They fail of course. The problem is that the interested lay-person cant see the dirty trick).

Steve 41oo wrote:

Thomas wrote:

Steve 41oo wrote:

I am not "solidly on the side of the general consensus", I am merely observing what the general consensus is.

There's a general consensus now? Something must have happened while I was neglecting this thread.

Yes there is. I summarised what it was, and gave its history. Dissenters disagree with it, but they dont deny it exists, otherwise there would be nothing to dissent from[/i].

It might be beneficial for both sides to render more precisely the word "consensus" by specifying what scientist are consenting to. Taking my own advice, I hereby contend the following three points:

(1) There is a consensus among meteorologists that global warming has happened, that most warming during recent decades was manmade, and that the globe will continue to warm in the future.

(2) There is no consensus among reputable meteorologists on how much it will warm in the future. The range goes from people like MIT's Lindzen, who predicts about 1°C for the next century, to people like NASA's Hansen, who predict up to 6°C.

(3) Given the range of global warming scenarios expected by meteorologists, there is no consensus among reputable economists about the consequences on human well-being. In particular, there is no consensus it will diminish human welfare in industrialized nations at all. Nor is there a consensus among them whether it diminishes worldwide human welfare enough to make its prevention a policy priority.