Numbah 1: Is it happening at all?
Numbah 2: What is the mechanism?
Numbah 3: Do human activities make a notable contribution?
Numbah 4: What will the result be?
Numbah 5: What can, and should, be done about it?

Warmenists answer very simply: (1) Yes definitely, (2) Carbon dioxide, (3) Yes, CO2 emissions from industry, (4) Disaster for everybody, (5) Eliminate industrial and personal CO2 emissions. Even a little looking into it reveals that the reality is a good bit less simple. More nuanced, if you like.

ONE: Warming apparently has occurred, but the data is crap. In particular, the surface stations from which actual temperature data is derived are poorly managed, and many are of questionable quality. Furthermore, even those show a retreat from warming in the last ten years (since 1998).

TWO: It is not at all clear that CO2 is the culprit. Warming has been observed unambiguously on two other planets (Mars and Jupiter) and effects seen on three others can be most simply interpreted as due to warming. Satellite data doesn’t support the hypothesis, nor do deep-ocean data or measurements of the tropical atmosphere. That last seems obscure but is not. In a greenhouse the glass gets warm, too, both from solar radiation and from reradiation from inside. The atmosphere would do the same thing if the greenhouse effect were in operation. It does not, conclusively. Furthermore, recent results have called the accuracy of the “trapped air in ice cores” measurements into question. CO2 dissolves in water; that may not have been fully accounted for, and if it was not, the entire quantity of CO2 in preindustrial times may have been understated by as much as 50 percent!

THREE: The entire contribution of CO2 to the greenhouse effect is less than 5% of the total (the remainder comes mostly from water vapor, although methane and a few other trace gases weigh in around the half-percent level).The total contribution of human activity to the CO2 level is well under ten percent — half a percent of the total, and the US contribution is around twenty percent of that, one tenth of one percent of the total greenhouse gas. Eliminating all human activity would make a barely-visible dent in CO2. Dumping everything in the US into the Marianas Trench would not make any significant difference.

FOUR: Disaster scenarios fall into two categories: the “tipping point” hypothesis, which is supposed to turn the Earth into Venus, and sad stories about polar bear extinctions and flooding of seacoast cities. The “tipping point” hypothesis is pure bunkum. It depended on a simplifying assumption in the math — an infinitely tall atmosphere — that turns out to be invalid, as the principal investigator advocating it now agrees. (This should have been apparent all along. CO2 concentrations in the past have been much greater than now, and no “tipping” occurred. We are, after all, here.) The others are almost equally foolish, because they assume disaster for everybody. I cannot imagine that the farmers of Siberia or Canada would object to a longer growing season (and more CO2, which favors plant growth.)

FIVE: Look back at THREE. Eliminating the entire human race and all its works would make less than one percent difference in the greenhouse effect. To suppose that anything less would be effective, no matter how drastic, is fatuous.

There is more, especially as regards Point Four, but those who know and understand little about science do have one thing they can do. When someone shows you a graph of temperature over time, look for a substantial “bump” around the year 1000 (and at roughly thousand-year intervals back into the past, if the graph goes that far) and a severe “dip” around 1600-1800 (and, again, similar effects at intervals of a millenium). If they don’t show, the graph is simply an example of the maxim “figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.” Mann (he of the “hockey stick”) is a liar.

Regards,
Ric

Nice assertion there. I duly notice the lack of supporting information. I can also play this game:

There’s a 25.67% chance that, due to the near-unanimous resistance of flat-earth lefties and environmentalists to any action to end Iran’s nuclear weapons development, that a catastrophe will happen that will have drastic negative impacts on the human race as a whole.

And since my percentage is bigger, it is now declared imperative that we drop every other human endeavor to conquer Iran and ensure their nuclear program shall not continue.

My goodness, you are familiar with this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager), right?

Believing in something “to be sure” is a bottomless pit and ultimately ethically ridiculous — you’ll end up believing in everything. And the religious parallel is just too obvious.

In fact, AGW is very much like any other conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theorists believe the world is knowable, controllable. The problem is, the wrong people are in control. All we need to do to make heaven on earth is to get those wrong people out and get the right people in.

Conspiracy theories are for people who can’t handle the truth that the world is not knowable, not controllable. And Al Gore is here to make those people feel better, feel smarter, feel superior, just like they’ve always wanted.

She has a theory that makes sense with global warming. That is humans, in general, would rather feel guilty than powerless.

If humans are causing global warming (I don’t believe so) then we can repent, take our penance, and then move on. If we’re not causing it, then we are powerless to halt it (we are).

Point being, they’ve always had wildfires in California.

The global warming business strikes me as a new flavor of old-fashioned millennialism – only for scientists/atheists rather than Christians. The difference is, Christians believe that the Apocalypse is outside their control and unstoppable while the secular people believe that human beings are the cause and that they can stop it through their own efforts. So you have a God-centered Apocalypse and a man-centered Apocalypse – but an Apocalypse nevertheless. Maybe human beings have some basic psychological need for or fear of the End Time.

I admire your cautious approach to this issue.

The problem here is that the exact propostition under discussion is never defined. The rhetoric thrown around is aimed at multiple ill-defined propositions, including:

1) the earth is warming
2) the earth is warming due to human activity
3) the warming is a crisis
4) we need to “do something about it”

If you dissent from any of these, the propagandists pretend that you dissented to #1, which leads to “flat earth” charges. The propagandists never allow for (even non-subtle) distinctions because then they lose the argument.

Here is the big lie in the AGW story: that we can “do something about it”. According to the narrative, CO2 began to rise in the late 1800s. In other words, the ability of the earth to accept the excess CO2 was exceeded, therefore it began to build up in the atmosphere. So, to “do something” about AGW, the release rate of CO2 would have to return to pre-late 1800s levels. Anything short of this will continue to lead to a build-up, and therefore continue warming, albeit at a slower rate.

It is simply not plausible that the 21st century world, with 5X the number of people living at much higher standards of living than the 19th century could dream of, will return to that level of CO2 production. It can’t be done with increases in efficiency or increases in conservation. Those don’t get you anywhere close.

So, even if the AGW story is true, which I highly doubt, the only rational approach is to adapt.