Which is the best policy for climate change, that of deniers or believers?

Those numbers sound about right from what I have read.

Nearly all agree man has a warming influence. The issues are how much, what can be done about it and the ability to forecast changes. AGW has been oversold to the general public.

 

Yes it has been and one has to wonder why. I think the way Obamacare was shoved down our throats and the Covid hype are in the same class. Again, who benefits? Not us.

 

I think people are largely motivated by fear. The planet IS warming, that is not in question. My earth science teacher told me in the 1980's that we were still coming out of the ice age, and we would warm. Man has obviously expedited that. To which degree that is, is largely irrelevant. It's happening. The earth is warming.

What to do about it is largely in question. The main question is why do we let ourselves be ruled by fear. It's Trump's major "they are coming for you," platform. The left responds to fear in certain ways; the right, in different ways.

We are all fearful; it's just the "what" of our fears that guides our politics.

 

You'll need to source that claim.







.

 

If mankind is causing it, then something can be done about it, or at least we should try. The argument that 'no one knows for sure this or that' and throwing up your arms which is only fogging the landscape is not a merit worthy counter argument to doing nothing about it.

 

It is more complicated that that. Man warms our environment. The environment in turn radiates it out to space. The earth reaches a balance. The radiation coming in and the radiation going out become equal. It does not just continually get warmer.

 

That is true, the power radiated into space follows the Stefan-Boltzmann law of black body radiation, which increases with the fourth power of the temperature. Thus, when increased atmospheric [CO2] reduces heat radiation into space, the temperature of the earth increases, leading to increased black body radiation, thus reaching a new steady state. However, that steady state is at higher temperature than it was before the CO2 increase.

It would be important that people actually have a rudimentary understanding of the physical principles before passing political judgement on this issue, but there is probably a slim chance that this will happen.

 

With twenty years as an Air Force Meteorologist, I have more than a rudimentary understanding. Probably more than 99% of the people on this forum.

 

I wasn't directing that at you, because I obviously agreed with your previous post.

Now, as a meteorologist, you then surely agree with the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas? Plus, the fact that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are on the path of almost doubling in as little as a century?

 

However, if you look at the long range patterns, they tend to duplicate. We have nothing that has not been seen many times.

Since about 2005, the CO2 production in the US has been dropping. We are back down to where we were in the early 1990s.

 

That is the professed theory and often the case. However, any analysis of the current global warming debate or of numerous examples in history show that disagreements among scientists often degenerate into religious-like dogmatic and antagonistic personal attacks. Five thousand scientists defend their integrity you say? Would anyone expect anything different? Are these the same scientists who adamantly denigrate and belittle the likes of top tier climate scientists Lindzen, Christy, Spencer, and Curry as being near sinful and criminal?

 

I agree that many scientists religiously push their beliefs because they believe they would be saving millions of lives. However, their science does not unassailably tell them the same thing.

 

Seems about the same percentage of scientists who strongly poo-pooed Alfred Wegener's theory of plate tectonics in the first half of the 20th century.

 

The equations and sheer amount of data needed is indeed complicated, but the general idea is easy enough for a child understand. The greenhouse effect is like a blanket. It slows the dissipation of heat to the extent that the land and oceans retain it for a longer period of time, hence the warming.

 

But it reaches and equilibrium point until something changes. Any child should understand that. Think about your heating unit in your house. The house does not just keep warming up. It reaches an equilibrium point where the amount of heat in equals the amount of heat out. The CO2 production in the US has been reduced dramatically since about 2005.and is back down into the early 1990 levels.

 

Yes, but that equilibrium point has not been reached, and where we are right now is dangerous. Your heater/house analogy needs some tweaking. The heater is the source (the sun and earth's core), the house is the earth, and the greenhouse effect is the house's insulation. The insulated house will reach and maintain a higher temperature than the uninsulated house.

 

It's a steady state, btw, NOT an equilibrium. Equilibrium requires that there is no energy dissipation. This is not the case here. Sorry to be pedantic.

 

How do you know it has not reached an equilibrium point already? The earth is in natural warming cycle from the ice age.

 

equilibrium: "a state in which a process and its reverse are occurring at equal rates so that no overall change is taking place."
"a situation in which supply and demand are matched and prices stable."

Equilibrium in this case means that in equals out. Heat in equals heat out.

 

Science tells them that the surface temperature of the Earth is increasing. That this increase is caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases. And that this will produce an increase in catastrophic events. This has a "High Degree of Certainty" (same level as quantum theory, gravitational theory, Laws of thermodynamics, ... and so on) which is the highest degree possible that science can produce. The nature and extent of the catastrophic events cannot be established with any degree of certainty. But it can be established that the nature will be in the form of increased hurricanes, more droughts (and consequences such as more forest fires), increase in ocean tide levels (and all the consequences that produces), more plagues, ... etc.

Unassailably, this is what Science has been telling scientists for decades. And many of the expected consequences have come to fruition sooner than expected. That they will inevitably get worse. But that how much worse it gets depends on what actions we take from this moment forward.

This is what science unassailably tells everybody. Scientists and non-scientists.

 

Not even close to true. If you ask scientists about the laws of thermodynamics they will be nearly 100% agreement unless you get into some completely off the wall side issues. There is no such consensus about global warming.

What it does not tell you is the cause.

 

How can you, someone who claims to be an 'Air Force Meterologist sit there and tell me that scientists who would actually
conduct a study with a predetermined conclusion,would do this and cherry pick in order to convince a gullible public? If anyone would give scientists the benefit of the doubt, I should think it would be you. If anyone would be all over this site, which goes into your counter arguments, one by one, iwww.skepticalscience.com it would be you. and you are debating this with PFers? And you, who profess to be an expert on climate science ( but, is a meteorolgist and expert on climate science? I don't know, you tell me ). are debating this with PFers here on this site ? I find that amazing, if you are who you claim to be.


You are suggesting that some scientists would conduct an easily challenged, blatantly obvious unscientific, study. If they did, they would be called on it and ridiculed, don't you think?

Now, I'm not saying in the annals of history some scientists haven't been so foolish no doubt some have, but that doesn't even seem logical to me here because we are dealing with seven studies, and all the authors of those studies have banded together and wrote another paper dealing with your objection ( link provided, read on )


These are the big studies conducted with the percentages of scientists that accept AGW/ACC Each circle credits the author of the study. More comments below the graphic,



Authors of the above seven climate consensus studies — including Naomi Oreskes, Peter Doran, William Anderegg, Bart Verheggen, Ed Maibach, J. Stuart Carlton, and John Cook —
co-authored a paper that should settle this question once and for all.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002


The two key conclusions from the paper are:

1) Depending on exactly how you measure the expert consensus, it’s somewhere between 90% and 100% that agree humans are responsible for climate change, with most of our studies finding 97% consensus among publishing climate scientists.

2) The greater the climate expertise among those surveyed, the higher the consensus on human-caused global warming.

This graph below shows the level of scientific agreement on human-caused global warming versus the level of scientific expertise in climate science, across a range of studies. So, we can see that the more expert on the subject someone is, the more they are likely to accept AGW/ACC



If you are a meteorologist, why don't you go over to www.skepticalscience.com and see if you can counter any of the claims he makes.
He's done an inventory of every argument skeptics have made on line that he could find, and addressed each and every one, far better than I could have done.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php?f=percentage

 

Economists use equilibrium in the wrong way. At equilibrium, the entropy has reached a maximum, so no further energy flow is possible. Essentially, when things are at equilibrium, they are dead.

This is different than the steady state, in the example of heat flow between earth and the surroundings. Here, the rates of heat in and heat out are also identical, so T doesn't change, but energy flows through the system constantly, i.e. entropy is being increased. It is a very important disctinction.

A human body, for example, does not change it's weight over the short term, if mass of O2, food and water in = mass of excrements and CO2 out. Yet, energy is dissipated all the time during the process, thus, the human body is at steady state, not at equilibrium. it only is at equilibrium after death.

 

Just ask yourself one simple question. Why would they try to determine what the majority of a large group thinks by doing anything but the direct method? Simply ask them. The reason being they would not get the answer they are looking for using that method.

Scientists are just people. They are not gods. They all have their biases. They are political just like any other group. They will also pursue paths which benefit them the most.

 

I provided you definitions. You might not like them, but that is what they are.

It does make a bit of difference anyway. I don't care what you call it. Eventually, the heat in equals the heat out. You can call it sausages for all I care.