Global Warming: Fact or Fiction?

[Aractus]

Here is the question that bugs me about global warming or especially when it is called climate change. How do we knowthat it is man made? Or even that man has contributed enough that a change in our behavior will make a major difference? Since major climate change proponents have been caught lying in the past, how can I be assured this isn't something people are manipulating for their own benefit?

They've not been caught lying about the accepted science. They've been caught in climategate, they've been caught with other "badly" done studies, etc, but that doesn't mean that the accepted science itself is bad science. The problem is that while the science is accepted, to work out what kind of effect the greenhouse has on the atmosphere you have to do computer modelling, and then from that you have to do further modelling for climate change. What they all do (NASA, et all) is plug in the variables and see what the result is - and with the right variables they can explain 20th century climate change by how the so-called enhanced greenhouse gasses have changed.

The problem is that while the science is accepted, the results are not - and the computer modelling (depending on the studies done by whomever at different times) produces fluctuating results, however they find CO2 to be the biggest contributor followed by Methane followed by particulates (sometimes these are reversed) followed by CFC's/trace GHG's.

What's really interesting is that we call Ozone a greenhouse gas when actually it doesn't help to warm surface temperature (except perhaps in smog), the greenhouse layer itself absorbs some of the UV radiation that would otherwise be absorbed at surface level.

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I never debate the issue with people who do not know what an urban heat island is. If cities expand and get more near the thermometer locations local measurements will not reflect long term global trends. Perhaps researchers have accounted for this.

Well then you don't know how the thermometer measurements are taken then since the measurements are normalized for use taking into account their locations. Any meteorologist would tell you that. For the UHIE to matter in regards to climate-change trends then it would mean systematically deliberately tampering with hundreds of independent whether station data across the globe.

Ergo, a person does not need to know a thing about the UHIE to be able to grasp climate change.

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uhm, ok. Because you said with climategate you couldn't trust IPCC, so I looked that up, that was an accusation that they covered up evidence.

No, it proved that sceptical scientists were bullied, etc, and proved an inherent bias among top climatologists. This bias is the main reason I'm not convinced that anthropogenic emissions alone can account for climate change. If you are a pro-global-warming climate scientist it is easier for you to get funding for your work. For the sceptics, they're paid less and given far less opportunity to pursue their studies (they can't get them backed by beneficiaries as well as the pro-global-warming camp can). And thus, consequently, of course there are much less of them in the field doing studies. It would be easier for any of them to simply give up on disproving climate science and say "hey I want to prove climate science more instead".

Imagine this - the oil companies decide to be a beneficiary to climate scientists... could you imagine the uproar if they dared to give funding to studies run by sceptics?

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Plugged the data into SPSS myself (note that I did 1998-2012 as 2013 is as yet incomplete and the data doesn't exist for december)



Was about to concede the point, but being the good science penguin that I am, rather than just eyeballing the graph and going "yeah theres some warming going on thar", I ran Pearson's correlation:

N: 180 (months)
r = .133
significance = .075

P > .05
Therefore not significant
:3

So yes, quite happy Trend-line schmend-schmine

I'm an SPSS newb though, so chances are I've done something horribly wrong (P < .05).

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Yep, the period 1998-2012 tells us nothing about the climate trend - we could still be warming, but those 14 years do not tell us anything useful about the longer-term trend.