White House issues new dire climate report: Scientists: Extreme weather will worsen if pollutants aren't curbed

[one...two...tree 2,762]

The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change

Naomi Oreskes

The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme, IPCC's purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature (3). In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" [p. 21 in (4)].

IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise" [p. 1 in (5)]. The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: "The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue" [p. 3 in (5)].

Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8).

The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies' members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9).

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point.

This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.

The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.

Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

Edited June 18, 2009 by Col. 'Bat' Guano

[The_Dude 1,142]

run to the hills and have HOPE son!! don't stop believing, and keep wearing ur sunglasses at night!! it doesn't let u see here comes the sun!! it's a bad moon rising! and only the reps can see that!! now go back cryin to proud mary, and she'll teach u to walk the line! son son

An Iron Maiden quote..... this thread is complete.

[pedroh 21]

run to the hills and have HOPE son!! don't stop believing, and keep wearing ur sunglasses at night!! it doesn't let u see here comes the sun!! it's a bad moon rising! and only the reps can see that!! now go back cryin to proud mary, and she'll teach u to walk the line! son son

An Iron Maiden quote..... this thread is complete.

u got one of the quotes

[NickD 203]

Don't know if I can go along with global warming, but sure can go along with climate changing. Here it is almost July and still running my furnace!

Who's to blame is the major question, somebody has to be blamed. While it's true that one gallon of gasoline really fouls up 90 pounds of the air we need to survive, and this was well known for years, not a damn thing was done about it. Any attempts in the 70's and 80's for alternate energy sources was killed by our congress. And our vehicle's still waste over 85% of the energy we put into them, EPA really also hasn't done a damn thing to improve this.

Any small company that makes attempts or has made a attempts is killed by our laws, we no longer can innovate, but have to take orders from the EPA. So if this is a people problem, not caused by the people, but that very tiny group of people that pretends to represent us. More than likely, their cure for these problems will be to tax us even further.

Really don't mean to sound pessimistic, but has been that way for the last 30 years, and if you want to get elected, have to be a very good BSer.

[The_Dude 1,142]

run to the hills and have HOPE son!! don't stop believing, and keep wearing ur sunglasses at night!! it doesn't let u see here comes the sun!! it's a bad moon rising! and only the reps can see that!! now go back cryin to proud mary, and she'll teach u to walk the line! son son

An Iron Maiden quote..... this thread is complete.

u got one of the quotes

Oh I got them all, I just love Maiden in the morning

[pedroh 21]

hell yea

[GaryC 7]

“‘Unequivocal’ ‘Consensus’ on ‘GlobalWarming’”

by Christopher Monckton | May 22, 2009

The Claim

In midMay, 2009, David Fahrenthold, a staff writer for the Washington Post, wrote: “Climate skeptics might well feel like polar bears on a shrinking ice floe. Scientists around the globe have rejected their main arguments which the climate isn't clearly warming, that humans aren't responsible for it, or that the whole thing doesn't amount to a problem. Public opinion has also shifted and even Exxon Mobil talks about greenhouse gases.” The article admits that “doubt is not dead”, and that a growing number of Republican congressmen and party leaders have spoken out against the alarmist view. Michael S. Steele, the Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele is quoted as having said that the planet is cooling, not warming. However, Mr. Fahrenhold concludes that scepticism is “at the margins, but trying to get back in the fight”, even though “most scientists now say there is a consensus about climate change: It is ‘unequivocal,’ concluded a United Nations report in 2007. It found that recent temperatures were about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit higher than a century ago and that most of this is ‘very likely’ due to manmade greenhouse gases.”

The Truth

Science is not, repeat not, done by “consensus”, though politics is. The IPCC process, which aims at and then falsely claims “consensus”, is an explicitly political process, and not a scientific one. Two and a half thousand years ago, Aristotle codified the most egregious and commonplace of logical fallacies – arguments that were by their very nature so irrational that no sound conclusion could be drawn from them. One of these arguments is the argumentum ad populum, “headcount fallacy”, by which a claim of “consensus” is said to prove, but does not in fact prove, a given proposition.

Furthermore, the “consensus” they are so fond of clinging to is not merely imagined but imaginary. The IPCC’s conclusion that it is 90% likely that human activities caused most of the warming of the past century is not only unscientific, in that it is not possible to place a quantitative estimate on such a proposition, but is also by no means universally shared among the scientific community. In fact, the crucial chapter of the IPCC’s 2007 report, attributing most of the warming that ended in 1998 to anthropogenic influences, was written by just 53 people, not all of them climate scientists. More than half of the comments made on the chapter by some 60 official IPCC reviewers were negative and demanded changes, but the IPCC merely overruled them – and then tried to conceal the reviewers’ comments, burying them in a library that was closed for renovation, until a Freedom of Information Act request was filed and the truth emerged. The decision to include the conclusion that it was 90% certain that humans caused most of the past halfcentury’s warming was not reached by scientists at all. It was taken by a show of hands at a meeting of the political representatives of governments at the IPCC.

snip........

What, then, is the scientific “consensus”? The answer is that no one knows, because no one has polled every scientist. However, a survey conducted by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine – the largest of its kind conducted to date – found more than 31,000 scientists, with B.Sc, M.Sc, or Ph.D qualifications, who signed a declaration that they did not consider the anthropogenic contribution to “global warming” to be significant enough to be dangerous.

Even the IPCC’s scientists cannot be regarded as having unanimously supported the conclusions of the 2007 assessment report. This is because each subchapter was written by as few as one or two scientists (if they were scientists at all: a number of subchapters, even in the scientific part of the IPCC’s report, were written by environmental campaigners with no particular scientific qualifications in the fields they were writing about). The subchapters were reviewed and coordinated

by the lead authors of the There is, therefore, no sound or scientific basis for the notion, peddled by theWashington Post, that there is a scientific consensus” to the effect that anthropogenic global warming” has occurred, is occurring, will occur, or, even if eventually it does occur, will be significant enough to be dangerous. chapters, who, however, concentrated exclusively on their own chapters. The notion that “2,500 scientists” personally agreed with every word of the IPCC’s

document is nonsense. Indeed, even after the scientific chapters had been finalized, signed off by the scientists and environmental campaigners, and submitted to the IPCC, its bureaucrats tampered with the draft immediately before publication, so that it is not possible to know which parts of the draft were written by scientists, which by environmental campaigners, and which by bureaucrats with no particular knowledge of the climate. For instance, the IPCC’s bureaucracy, at the last minute, inserted into the Summary for Policymakers a table of observed contributions to sealevel rise that had not been included in the scientists’ final draft (or in any previous draft, for that matter). However, the bureaucrats’ subterfuge was identified when it became clear that the table of figures had been tampered with so thatt the contributions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to sealevel rise were overstated tenfold. This overstatement was achieved by the simple expedient of moving four decimal points rightward by one decimal place. However, the bureaucrats – presumably intending to lend some support to Al Gore’s fantasies about sealevel rise – failed to adjust the totals at the foot of the table, so that it did not add up to within a factor of two of the correct answer. This error exposed the breaucrats’ manipulation and the IPCC was forced to make a furtive and humiliating correction on its website just days after its supposedly “scientific” report had been published. There is, therefore, no sound or scientific basis for the notion, peddled by the Washington Post, that there is a scientific “consensus” to the effect that anthropogenic “global warming” has occurred, is occurring, will occur, or, even if eventually it does occur, will be significant enough to be dangerous.

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/s...5%2022%2009.pdf

[mawilson 2,133]

Hotter summers, shorter winters, more intense storms, deepening droughts and melting glaciers add up to one clear conclusion, scientists said Tuesday:

Earth's climate is already changing, and the effects will grow worse if the threat is ignored.

Worse? Change is not always bad. I love shorter winters and hotter summers.

[nowhereman 1]

“‘Unequivocal’ ‘Consensus’ on ‘GlobalWarming’”

by Christopher Monckton | May 22, 2009

The Claim

In midMay, 2009, David Fahrenthold, a staff writer for the Washington Post, wrote: “Climate skeptics might well feel like polar bears on a shrinking ice floe. Scientists around the globe have rejected their main arguments which the climate isn't clearly warming, that humans aren't responsible for it, or that the whole thing doesn't amount to a problem. Public opinion has also shifted and even Exxon Mobil talks about greenhouse gases.” The article admits that “doubt is not dead”, and that a growing number of Republican congressmen and party leaders have spoken out against the alarmist view. Michael S. Steele, the Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele is quoted as having said that the planet is cooling, not warming. However, Mr. Fahrenhold concludes that scepticism is “at the margins, but trying to get back in the fight”, even though “most scientists now say there is a consensus about climate change: It is ‘unequivocal,’ concluded a United Nations report in 2007. It found that recent temperatures were about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit higher than a century ago and that most of this is ‘very likely’ due to manmade greenhouse gases.”

The Truth

Science is not, repeat not, done by “consensus”, though politics is. The IPCC process, which aims at and then falsely claims “consensus”, is an explicitly political process, and not a scientific one. Two and a half thousand years ago, Aristotle codified the most egregious and commonplace of logical fallacies – arguments that were by their very nature so irrational that no sound conclusion could be drawn from them. One of these arguments is the argumentum ad populum, “headcount fallacy”, by which a claim of “consensus” is said to prove, but does not in fact prove, a given proposition.

Furthermore, the “consensus” they are so fond of clinging to is not merely imagined but imaginary. The IPCC’s conclusion that it is 90% likely that human activities caused most of the warming of the past century is not only unscientific, in that it is not possible to place a quantitative estimate on such a proposition, but is also by no means universally shared among the scientific community. In fact, the crucial chapter of the IPCC’s 2007 report, attributing most of the warming that ended in 1998 to anthropogenic influences, was written by just 53 people, not all of them climate scientists. More than half of the comments made on the chapter by some 60 official IPCC reviewers were negative and demanded changes, but the IPCC merely overruled them – and then tried to conceal the reviewers’ comments, burying them in a library that was closed for renovation, until a Freedom of Information Act request was filed and the truth emerged. The decision to include the conclusion that it was 90% certain that humans caused most of the past halfcentury’s warming was not reached by scientists at all. It was taken by a show of hands at a meeting of the political representatives of governments at the IPCC.

snip........

What, then, is the scientific “consensus”? The answer is that no one knows, because no one has polled every scientist. However, a survey conducted by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine – the largest of its kind conducted to date – found more than 31,000 scientists, with B.Sc, M.Sc, or Ph.D qualifications, who signed a declaration that they did not consider the anthropogenic contribution to “global warming” to be significant enough to be dangerous.

Even the IPCC’s scientists cannot be regarded as having unanimously supported the conclusions of the 2007 assessment report. This is because each subchapter was written by as few as one or two scientists (if they were scientists at all: a number of subchapters, even in the scientific part of the IPCC’s report, were written by environmental campaigners with no particular scientific qualifications in the fields they were writing about). The subchapters were reviewed and coordinated

by the lead authors of the There is, therefore, no sound or scientific basis for the notion, peddled by theWashington Post, that there is a scientific consensus” to the effect that anthropogenic global warming” has occurred, is occurring, will occur, or, even if eventually it does occur, will be significant enough to be dangerous. chapters, who, however, concentrated exclusively on their own chapters. The notion that “2,500 scientists” personally agreed with every word of the IPCC’s

document is nonsense. Indeed, even after the scientific chapters had been finalized, signed off by the scientists and environmental campaigners, and submitted to the IPCC, its bureaucrats tampered with the draft immediately before publication, so that it is not possible to know which parts of the draft were written by scientists, which by environmental campaigners, and which by bureaucrats with no particular knowledge of the climate. For instance, the IPCC’s bureaucracy, at the last minute, inserted into the Summary for Policymakers a table of observed contributions to sealevel rise that had not been included in the scientists’ final draft (or in any previous draft, for that matter). However, the bureaucrats’ subterfuge was identified when it became clear that the table of figures had been tampered with so thatt the contributions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to sealevel rise were overstated tenfold. This overstatement was achieved by the simple expedient of moving four decimal points rightward by one decimal place. However, the bureaucrats – presumably intending to lend some support to Al Gore’s fantasies about sealevel rise – failed to adjust the totals at the foot of the table, so that it did not add up to within a factor of two of the correct answer. This error exposed the breaucrats’ manipulation and the IPCC was forced to make a furtive and humiliating correction on its website just days after its supposedly “scientific” report had been published. There is, therefore, no sound or scientific basis for the notion, peddled by the Washington Post, that there is a scientific “consensus” to the effect that anthropogenic “global warming” has occurred, is occurring, will occur, or, even if eventually it does occur, will be significant enough to be dangerous.

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/s...5%2022%2009.pdf

Interesting debate, but it is an issue you can't afford to be wrong about... as Pike said if you mess with the CO2 balance in the air there is bound to be negative consequences at some point. I'd say go ahead & drive forward with cleaner energy sources, even if GW has been blown out of proportion.

[GaryC 7]

Interesting debate, but it is an issue you can't afford to be wrong about... as Pike said if you mess with the CO2 balance in the air there is bound to be negative consequences at some point. I'd say go ahead & drive forward with cleaner energy sources, even if GW has been blown out of proportion.

Sure, go ahead with getting rid of fossil fuels, just don't cripple us with this stupid "cap and trade" scam. As I have just shown the consensus at the UN is a political one, not a scientific one. I hope Steven will read and understand this. I invite him to research it on his own if he doesn't trust my source. The truth is out there if he just wants to see it.

[Peikko 1,575]

Oh dear. My guess is that the article was not read in its entirety.

First, I think that man is having a very marked effect on his environment. We are, as a species, having a profound and visibly dramatic effect on our environment. We began changing our landscape the minute we learned how to farm. The more land that is put into farming, the more impact we have on our planet. We then started mining and extracting chemicals. We have concentrated those chemicals and created new compounds not found in nature and ones that are difficult to disperse back into the environment without having a negative impact on that environment. All this has been happening over an extremely short time span (in environmental terms). We are also consuming resources that have taken millenia to create in a period of less than 500 years with no thought as to the real consequences of consuming them in this fashion.

Scientists are noticing these environmental impacts and while some of them are difficult to see, others are all too visible, the acidification of the oceans being a notable example.

While it is not conclusive that these changes are having a more global impact on our environment, it's not fanciful to suggest that they are, particularly when there is evidence that changes are occurring. What is significant about these changes is the time frame over which they are occurring. Species can and will adapt to subtle shifts in balance, subtle changes in temperature but they do not react well to these chronologically massive shifts in the core temperature which produce swift environmental changes leaving species no time to adapt to them.

It is easy to pretend that man can't have a lasting impact on the earth but that is terribly naive in my opinion.

Edited June 18, 2009 by Madame Cleo

[웃 910]

Hotter summers, shorter winters, more intense storms, deepening droughts and melting glaciers add up to one clear conclusion, scientists said Tuesday:

Earth's climate is already changing, and the effects will grow worse if the threat is ignored.

Worse? Change is not always bad. I love shorter winters and hotter summers.

If we are going to get shorter winters and hotter summers then I'm all for it!

Edited June 18, 2009 by Confucian

[GaryC 7]

Oh dear. My guess is that the article was not read in its entirety.

First, I think that man is having a very marked effect on his environment. We are, as a species, having a profound and visibly dramatic effect on our environment. We began changing our landscape the minute we learned how to farm. The more land that is put into farming, the more impact we have on our planet. We then started mining and extracting chemicals. We have concentrated those chemicals and created new compounds not found in nature and ones that are difficult to disperse back into the environment without having a negative impact on that environment. All this has been happening over an extremely short time span (in environmental terms). We are also consuming resources that have taken millenia to create in a period of less than 500 years with no thought as to the real consequences of consuming them in this fashion.

Scientists are noticing these environmental impacts and while some of them are difficult to see, others are all too visible, the acidification of the oceans being a notable example.

While it is not conclusive that these changes are having a more global impact on our environment, it's not fanciful to suggest that they are, particularly when there is evidence that changes are occurring. What is significant about these changes is the time frame over which they are occurring. Species can and will adapt to subtle shifts in balance, subtle changes in temperature but they do not react well to these chronologically massive shifts in the core temperature which produce swift environmental changes leaving species no time to adapt to them.

It is easy to pretend that man can't have a lasting impact on the earth but that is terribly naive in my opinion.

Sure we can change our enviroment. We can pollute the water, we can cut down trees and we can foul the air. No argument there. My one and only issue is the idea that CO2 emitted by man can warm the planet. The planets atmosphere is a huge thing. The amount of CO2 we emitt is a small fraction of the CO2 that is naturally put into the atmosphere by nature. The changes that we are seeing are a result of natural forces rather than our intervention. Man is guilty of a great many things but not this one.

[Peikko 1,575]

I guess where we differ is in the idea that we should as a global community strive to achieve a sustainable balance of human presence and activity. What seems to happen though is it is all left to 'market forces' as if somehow that works to some ultimate good for the planet. The influence of 'market forces' is to make us believe that an ever increasing global population is a good thing. I can't find one other person on VJ that believes that we would do well to attempt as a species to curtail our growth and strive to achieve a level of presence that is easily sustainable. I admit, freely that what I am asking people to consider is an extremely sensitive subject, procreation being one of our fundamental rights but I live in hope that as a species we will learn to see that if we can find a way to gradually decrease the population to a level that is easily sustained by the planetary resources that lead to a standard of living that is comfortable and enjoyable for all, not the privileged few, then somehow we will, as a species have learned to live with our planet.

I understand that this is a radical view point and difficult to reconcile with inalienable human rights but I am sort of leaning to the conclusion that this is the only method of ensuring that as a species we don't have a rapid and tragic battle over dwindling resources.

[mawilson 2,133]

I guess where we differ is in the idea that we should as a global community strive to achieve a sustainable balance of human presence and activity.

As soon as you figure out a way to stop the breeding (short of global sterilization.)