It doesn't.  Not with this little wood-duck...

I think I've worked out the true science behind this 30 pages ... [yes, I know...it took me long enough]...

The pro-AGW people cite numerous sources [with or without agendas] on the net supporting their argument.

The anti-AGW people cite numerous sources [with or without agendas] on the net supporting their argument.

He who has the most wins.

The science behind it all is in the counting of websites....

Well, considering we're most likely committed to a degree of warming already, it is going to be the next generation's problem.  We all know the reality is the world is not going to change overnight -- I'm pretty happy that new technologies are being explored, even if they are not cost effective yet.  If GW really kicks in where water or temperature rise becomes undeniable to the majority of the regular folks in the world, there should be enough social/political will to get off fossil fuel.  I have suggested next gen nuclear power, but different regions may have different solutions.  If GW doesn't move as fast as predicted, it means humanity has more time to advance technologically before we are "forced" to act.  The more time we have, the more innovative solutions we can come up with to either survive, or even reign in global warming.  Who knows what technologies we'll have in 50-100 years.  I think at some point we'll have power options that will be cheaper than going after fossil fuels, especially when you factor in the costs of environmental disruption via strip mining / fracking / oil spills, etc.

In the meantime, people should manage their personal carbon footprint in accordance with their conscience, and it wouldn't hurt to promote the sciences.  As for the real zealots, they won't be happy that change won't happen fast enough because nothing happens at the speed with which they can make demands on the internet.

Just for the record, there are a LOT of reasonable AGW supporters who are heavily in favor of nuclear power.  There are people in this thread who are pretty negative on any idea, but they don't speak for all of us.

This is really the point. I have no issue with reasoned approaches to accomplish alternative fuel sources regardless of the AGW debate.

Basically, I can buy into Lomborg's approach regardless of my research of the science because it makes sense either way. However, if your a Ken I just have a hard time taking you seriously.

So they've created much of our climate history using tree rings but can't get them to agree with our current climate, no big deal.  It's a smear campaign!

Oh right, they were cherry picked tree rings(well, tree ring...), and then violated the law by ignoring legal requests for their information so the people suspicious of these odd results they were getting could figure out why.

But hey, this is the IPCC we're talking about.  Keith Briffa couldn't possibly be exploiting his position to push a political agenda!  I'm just not a climate scientist so I can't understand the complexity behind shrinking the data set down to ten trees and including one that showed an 8 degree climb to make them fit the altered station data...

Funny stuff, if you take that one tree out, the other 9 trees say it was hotter in the 30's, so did the full data set.  But that would mean global warming is a crock of shit, so I can understand why they'd shrink the set down far enough that the solitary outlier could skew the graph enough to pretend otherwise.

After all, when this goes south they get to ask if you'd like fries with that, and McDonalds might not hire them either.

It's exactly the same with people who deny evolution. They will focus on some little data subset, misunderstand the science, and inflate it into some kind of imaginary rebuttal of the theory of evolution as a whole. Or repeat crank blog post of same. I don't think in the case of global warming it's "if you're not a climate scientist then stfu" but I do think it helps to have an understanding of the scientific method and of peer review and of research in general. Otherwise you have very little idea what you are talking about or why a scientific consensus is meaningful. In scientific research, the entire point is to smash dogma. If you do that, you get the cover of various magazines. In order to do that though you have to run the gauntlet of everything that's come before. Scientific inquiry is pretty ruthlessly self-correcting and self-critical. That's what peer review is all about. That's why a consensus is so meaningful in this case. The idea that AGW is all a conspiracy that includes every single scientific and academic body in every country in the world? I shouldn't even need to explain what that is...

So, if "everyone" was in agreement that AGW was real, what to do about it is the obvious next step but since certain segments of society are hell-bent on obfuscating and delaying and seeding doubt, it makes it much harder to have that conversation as a society. Arguing and disagreeing on the proposed methods of mitigation and adaptation is fine and healthy - but the proposed methods being unpalatable or untenable should not be mistaken as some kind of evidence that AGW is not real.

Instead of discussing current data and nitpicking about a few percent more or less, or about how a trend over a period of 10 years is significant or not, you could also look at (ancient) history, 200 millions years ago when intense volcanism introduced a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere. It took the volcanoes many thousands of years to reach a level of about 4000 ppm from a baseline of about 2,000 ppm. It could have taken as long as 100,000 years of intermittent periods of volcanism to reach catastrophic levels, that's not certain. This volcanism ultimately lead to one of the greatest extinction events in the history of the earth. It wasn't a single, huge blast that wiped out life on earth... it was a fairly steady build-up of gases that caused temperatures to skyrocket in the end. Some speculate a disastrous event involving methane hydrates were involved, but that's speculation and in any case, could happen again. In any case, the underlying cause was a fairly slow (by our standards) buildup of greenhous gases.

Currently, humans introduce CO2 into the atmosphere at an even faster rate, we're producing over 100x more CO2 than all volcanoes on earth, so that would be the equivalent of hundreds to thousands of volcanoes, every year again.

http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/volcanoes-co2-people-emissions-climate-110627.htm

So... doesn't THAT tell you anything?

It tells me that such levels of production of CO2 couldn't be absorbed by the earth in the past, and nothing is much different now, it's highly doubtful such a production rate of CO2 can be absorbed today. Actually there are some studies that about half of the CO2 is currently absorbed by the (top layers of the) ocean, but that sink is also finite and its capacity to absorb excess levels of CO2 will become less over time.

Well... critics have a point when they say that temperature rise has halted for about 15 years.

But imo it's too soon to tell if this is really statistically significant compared to the longer (fairly reliable) data of the past 50 years, or the more historical data of 150 years in the past.

Imho it'll take a while before things really become noticeable. So far there was an increase of less than 1 degree celcius (on average), that's hard to notice. In 50 years time the statistics will be more significant and maybe the effects will become more noticeable than right now.

However, what I don't get about them, is that the deniers completely ignore evidence from the ancient past, and they ignore the sheer quantities of carbon dioxide that are produced every year. I mean... it's mind-boggling and hard to understand, but if you just look at the numbers, it's really a lot... and they don't want to do an extrapolation of carbon build-up in the future and what that means for our future.

And their excuse is ... you cannot extrapolate because we don't know what's going on yet. Well... we do have a lot of numbers on it already and it's crystal clear to me that we're heading for a disaster. They say the numbers aren't reliable... well, that's always the case, we work with the knowledge we have at the moment.

Or maybe they're bad at math. I don't know.

Or maybe they cannot imagine that nature is pretty slow at storing carbon. And that the coals we are digging up, which took nature millions of years to accumulate, are now injected back into the atmosphere at a very, very high rate. Far higher than any time in the past. It is hard to understanding how incredibly slow such a geological process is... it works at an enormous scale, sure (at a scale of the whole earth), but actually absorbing and burying hundreds of billions of tons of carbon... well that just takes a very long time.

But reality is, some people only wake up when they cannot deny things anymore. That is human nature. You see it in politics. In corporations... people who are responsible are often in complete denial about problems, and only admit them at the last moment when denying is no longer possible. And people who are not responsible, they don't care, they have no responsibility and do not need to think about things. So what do they do ... the thing that is easiest: do nothing as long as possible.

But well... it's also pretty clear to me that it'll take decades, maybe even 100 years, before things are going to get a lot hotter, maybe by that time people will take action. I would prefer if they did that now. It's a shame generations will face the additional task of having to clean up the extra mess that we've made in those 100 years and they will have 100 years less time to change the economy.

Deniers sometimes also gamble that by that time, the problem has already disappeared by itself because of cheap solar panels, or because of nuclear fusion. But it's a long stretch to say that those technologies will be much cheapier by that time than they are now... that's a big gamble.

For example, the cost of a solar panel comes from the cost of its raw materials and the machinery and labor that's required to build them... why would those become cheaper?

For example nuclear fusion... it's not guaranteed that nuclear fusion will ever work. If it works, maybe the installations that are required will be so costly, that it'll be an extremely expensive source of energy. Maybe it'll take more than 100 years before that technology has matured, maybe even longer.

Will future generations have the same (or better) capacity to deal with the problem as we have? If temperatures rise in the next 100 years, that will affect agriculture, which will require a costly relocation of plants. If storms and droughts become more extreme over the next 100 years, more resources will be needed to repair for damages and crop losses.

If there are 2x more people at that time than there are now, will that mean that it'll be easier to tackle the climate warming, or will it be harder? Maybe it'll be harder, because so many people will require at least 2x more resources than we use now. Resources will become more expensive, meaning that solar panels will become more expensive. Maybe poverty becomes so widespread, that there is simply no money or interest left to handle other problems.

Oh but wait... I said I'd stop... I'd better stop posting.

Tim Ball - an actual climate scientist? Hahaha....

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tim_Ball

Very likely, meaning a 99% chance. There is almost no data that contradicts our influence on climate. Those data that do contradict, can most likely be discarded as noise or as faulty measurements.

That's how science handles uncertainties... it's almost never certain because there's always a contridicting measurement somewhere for whatever reason.

Now if you choose to cling to that 1% noise, and claim that the other 99% is garbage, then you've got some really, really twisted idea about what science is all about.

 [ok and this really really is my last post here]

Actually, it is you who is pushing the bullcrap.

Who is Tim Ball? Answer that for me, please. And I hope that somewhere in your answer, you will point out his credentials to state there is something wrong with the current model of Global warming (you know, that he is a professor of science and/or that he has published academic papers on the subject...you know, dumb things like that that will actually give his words credibility). If you can't provide a reasonable answer, then why did YOU bring him up in the first place?

If you can't answer the question, then I turn your WHOLE post back on you (substituting "thumpers" for "deniers").

"are you serious? but I guess the AGW thumpers are used to pushing bullshit ...  "

In edit-Since you made a point of mentioning this, can you give me a hand? Did you go to the University of Winnipeg's website? Did you see the link for the Department of Climatology, where Dr Ball claims to be a professor of Climatology (And not GEOGRAPHY, which is what he APPARENTLY has his PhD in. Finding his CV seems to be very difficult)? I didn't, despite going to the University's site index here http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/a-z-index/index.html . Here is the link to the Dept of Geography http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/index/geography-index . I found that easily enough. Can you please share the correct link with me so we both can see how qualified he is to speak about this subject? I mean...how can you hide a whole department dedicated to studying the climate? Why is the University hiding this department. I must be blind or it must be a conspiracy. Thanks.

HAHAHAHAHA . I have to laugh.

If you had paid attention, I did exactly that. Today. TWICE! .

I don't have to disprove anything from the esteemed Professor of GEOGRAPHY Dr Bell. People much smarter than I could ever hope to be have already done that (by proposing a model that he cannot overturn). In addition, you went back to tactic school, right? I NEVER claimed to be an expert. SO it is not up to me to disprove him.

My position is that I have looked through the information presented to me. Both for and against. One side has credible scientists who have proposed a model that supports AGW to the extent that their position represents the dominant theory on the issue. While the model continues to be refined, the general tenets are agreed upon. The other side has proposed alternatives that have not proven to be the basis for a suitable model of the climate. And THAT is the point. The deniers have NO MODEL! NOTHING! Just picking at the edges, looking for flaws, instead of proposing a better solution.

You argument is childish and ridiculous. It is the equivalent of my siding with Dr Nobel Prize in Medicine and you siding with Dr Quack when it comes to the best way to manage a medical problem and when I point out Dr Quack's lack of credentials and expertise, your defense is "You can't prove Dr Quack is wrong". No I can't nor do I have to because Dr Nobel Prize in Medicine has done that already.

Yes...someone is holding to the see no evil, hear no evil philosophy. You saw him this morning when you looked in the mirror.

I'll just wait for you to post the next lone wolf/one-off/outlier study. I just hope it will be from a real scientist next time though.

More on who Tim Ball is:

http://www.desmogblog.com/dr-tim-ball-the-lie-that-just-wont-die

http://www.desmogblog.com/weaver-sues-tim-ball-libel

QFT:

"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just endured an unprecedented process of vetting and peer-review to produce a document, the veracity of which has been double-checked and endorsed by thousands of the best scientists in the world. It must be soul-destroying to see a long-retired geographer who rarely published during his colourless academic career and who never conducted any research in atmospheric science dismiss that effort without a shred of evidence or a hint of good conscience."

So, Oregon Report, Volcanos, Tim Ball, the weather in rural Oklahoma in the summer of 2003, hacked emails, polar ice not shrinking as fast as 2012, what's next in the zombie meme parade?

Maybe myfist0, you'd like to explain in your own words what it is you think Tim Ball has proven?