What is the AGW Scientific Consensus?

Discussion in 'Political Opinions & Beliefs' started by Golem, Aug 5, 2022.

  1. Golem

    Golem Well-Known Member Donor

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    I feel like I'm repeating over and over the same things. So I'd thought I should start this thread and point anybody who is not quite grasping what "AGW Scientific Consensus" means.

    I'll try to put it in as simple terms as I can, and attempt to define my terms as thoroughtly as possible.

    The scientific consensus (defined below) is simply this: that there is an abnormal increase in the Earth's surface temperature. And that increase is caused mainly by human activity.

    That's it! No more. No less. The scientific consensus is NOT that you should by a Tesla, or that you should change your light bulbs. All of which is great advice, but "advice" is outside the realm of science, and wanders into the realm of technologists and politicians.

    So the NAME of this consensus is Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW for short) which means:

    Anthropogenic: The roots of which literally translates to "Generated by Man"
    Global: Meaning "the whole planet". Not just a region of the planet.
    Warming: Meaning the AVERAGE global (see above) temperature is increasing.

    Abnormally: Refers to everything that is not a normal known natural event. Like El Niño and La Niña events, Solar flares, cosmic rays, volcanic activity, natural green-house gas emissions ... all of them are considerations that are known by climate scientists (nothing more childish than the argument "but scientists don't know about solar flares"... or similar). They learn to account for them in the first few lessons in their career. Once you "normalize" the temperature readings to account for those, what we have is what is due to human activity. And even when a study demonstrates that this or that event might have more influence than expected, none ever come close to taking over the place of human activity. Green house gases produced by humans are unique isotopes and can be identified directly. So this also helps verify that the measurements are accurate.

    Scientific Consensus: Means that a large enough majority of STUDIES (not opinions or articles) published in peer-reviewed publications (meaning that they are reputable magazines that do everything that is humanly possible, including hiring other scientists (peer-reviewers) to make sure that the conclusions of a study are a direct consequence of the processes and data used to test them.

    Peer-review: This is the final and completely unavoidable part of the Scientific Method. The conclusion is not considered "science" (even if it were absolutely accurate) unless it undergoes peer-review and is then published. The publication hires scientists who check the methods used, and to make sure that the conclusion is a direct unavoidable consequence of the data and methods used. Publishing is also necessary in science, because the conclusion is then evaluated by the readers (typically other scientists and students) in what is called "post-publication peer review". It is a HUGE deal in science if a reader finds a flaw in the study that the peer-reviewers and the editor didn't spot. The reader earns big credits in the scientific community, and often the editor and/or peer-reviewers are fired. After some time, and when the studies prove to be useful to other scientists, peer-reviewed studies usually become part of an index, like the ISI (International Scientific Index) database. But are removed if they become obsolete, or if post-publication reviewers detect errors.

    The AGW scientific consensus: In the case of AGW the number of peer-reviewed studies that support AGW is so huge (many thousands) that the number of peer-reviewed studies (most of which were published before 2000) that negate AGW is completely negligible in comparison. Most indicate the scientific consensus was established.

    The consensus was established in science in the early 2000s, and made available to the public after a ground breaking Meta-Analysis of studies in the ISI database was published in Science Magazine in 2005
    https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/109519/documents/HHRG-116-II13-20190522-SD005.pdf

    My position is very comfortable. It relies on the premise that the Scientific Method WORKS. I don't have to bother with physics and chemistry and graphs because I have thousands of peer reviewed studies that make my case for me. Most of them referenced in the IPCC website (https://www.ipcc.ch/). On the other hand, arguments that state that the Scientific Method DOES NOT work can be debated (it's certainly not perfect). Those who hold this last position deny science and, for that reason, are properly considered "science denialists". It's not an insult. They are simply people who honestly question that science works. If you're one of those, just admit it, and we can discuss whether or not there is a better method.

    All other objections to the scientific consensus are pseudo-science. It's easy to find websites that take charts and data out of context. Sometimes publishing graphs and data from studies about REGIONAL climate changes as if they were Global (remember the G in AGW) Or taking small periods of cooling of 5 or 6 years (typical of El Niño and La Niña natural EVENTS) as if they defied AGW, which refers to long term changes. Or articles and opinions published by scientists, most of which have been PAID to write something... anything... that can be used to deny the scientific consensus.
    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/feb/02/frontpagenews.climatechange

    Easy money!

    Playing the "I'm a climate expert too" game: I am not a climate expert. And neither are YOU. So I stopped playing this game a long time ago. I (and you) can understand the conclusion of these studies. But if you tell me that you understand the science that led to that conclusion, we all know you're just playing a juvenile game. And this includes taking graphs and data out of the context of the study. Graphs and data are not the study. They are simply referenced used by the study. The conclusion is the only part that is debatable in a peer-reviewed study. So if you have anything to argue quote (ie. transcribe verbatim, word by word, what the conclusion says) the conclusion of a peer-reviewed study, and provide a LINK so we can verify what you're saying.
     
    Last edited: Aug 5, 2022
  2. Lee Atwater

    Lee Atwater Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Those that ignorantly cite the Earth's previous natural cycles of heating and cooling, rises and declines in the level of CO2, somehow manage to forget a novel event in the Earth's history. The billions of tons of greenhouse gases being emitted by man burning fossil fuels.
     
  3. drluggit

    drluggit Well-Known Member

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    I will remind the OP that the study of record here, Cook et al produced this result.
    (Cook et al. 2013) found that over 97% of the papers taking a position on the subject agreed with the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of the project, the scientist authors were emailed and rated over 2,000 of their own papers. Once again, over 97% of the papers taking a position on the cause of global warming agreed that humans are causing it.

    Which is simply a characterization of a set of climate peer reviewed studies, and notably, only refers to those papers, out of the 12000 or so evaluated that took a position one way or the other. Of those 12000 peer reviewed studies, less than 20% of those studies chose to have a position noted as a part of the abstract of the study which was the ONLY thing the Cook Studies reviewed. So, less than 20% of the total studies reviewed took a stand, of which Cook declares that 97% of those had a position.

    The astounding misrepresentation of this from the OP and other posters, over the years, represents a manufactured curated view of a small segment of the arena of study. Cook et al has been examined, and found at best, misleading, and at worst, an example of agenda driven propaganda. The OP sure got suckered.

    I suppose, had you asked say the Catholic church, in 1300 AD, the church would have you flayed for suggesting the world is round. Of course, that wasn't the position of the church, and clearly, AGW is it's own church these days, and they have their own inquisitors.
     
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  4. Melb_muser

    Melb_muser Well-Known Member Donor

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    Yes, you would think that the accumulation of an extra million, million tons into the atmosphere, of a gas that is known to absorb heat might make a bit of a difference to the planet, but the sharp conservative mind seems to mysteriously glaze over at that point.
     
    Last edited: Aug 5, 2022
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  5. drluggit

    drluggit Well-Known Member

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    The real data is that man produces ~3-5% of total CO2 release into the atmosphere. What makes that more impactful than the 95-97% of total CO2 released naturally?

    When you appeal to an emotion, the data doesn't get a chance to speak for itself. It's a fallacy then to argue that you know a causality without expressing the output in relationship to the actual full data record.

    And, at the same time, natural CO2 release naturally is growing. It is also growing faster than Human output is. These are the facts. Why do you ignore them?
     
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  6. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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    Let us begin the deconstruction by disposing of the claim of consensus.
    Aliens Cause Global Warming
    Thursday, January 31st, 2019
    By Michael Crichton
    Caltech Michelin Lecture January 17, 2003

    ". . . I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.

    Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

    Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

    There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period. . . . "
     
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  7. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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    Next we turn to the AGW hypothesis itself, to document its failure.
    The anthropogenic global warming (AGW) paradigm has dominated climate science in recent decades, certainly since about 1995. See Bernie Lewin, Searching for the Catastrophe Signal. In a nutshell, the AGW paradigm holds that greenhouse gases are the vastly predominant driver of climate change in our time. The paradigm has however failed its test, as we shall see. I recently re-read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, within which the following passage is found (p.144, University of Chicago Press, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition):

    "In so far as he is engaged in normal science, the research worker is a solver of puzzles, not a tester of paradigms. . . . Therefore, paradigm-testing occurs only after persistent failure to solve a noteworthy puzzle has given rise to crisis. And even then it occurs only after the sense of crisis has evoked an alternate candidate for paradigm."

    The noteworthy puzzle is the specification of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), and the failure to solve it presents the crisis of the AGW paradigm. Professor Nir Shaviv put it well.

    Climate debate at the Cambridge Union - a 10 minute summary of the main problems with the standard alarmist polemic

    "The most important question in climate science is climate sensitivity, by how much will the average global temperature increase if you say double the amount of CO2. Oddly enough, the range quoted by the IPCC, which is 1.5 to 4.5°C per CO2 doubling was set, are you ready for this, in a federal committee in 1979! (Google the Charney report). All the IPCC scientific reports from 1990 to 2013 state that the range is the same. The only exception is the penultimate report which stated it is 2 to 4.5. The reason they returned to the 1.5 to 4.5 range is because there was virtually no global warming since 2000 (the so called “hiatus”), which is embarrassingly inconsistent with a large climate sensitivity. What’s more embarrassing is that over almost 4 decades of research and billions of dollars (and pounds) invested in climate research we don’t know the answer to the most important question any better? This is simply amazing I think."

    Meanwhile, research to specify ECS has pushed the likely range lower.

    [​IMG]Recent CO2 Climate Sensitivity Estimates Continue Trending Towards Zero

    By Kenneth Richard on 16. October 2017
    Updated: The Shrinking CO2 Climate Sensitivity A recently highlighted paper published by atmospheric scientists Scafetta et al., (2017) featured a graph (above) documenting post-2000 trends in the published estimates of the Earth’s climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 concentrations (from 280 parts per million to 560 ppm). The trajectory for the published estimates of transient climate response […]
     
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  8. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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    And next we present the emerging alternative paradigm. Note the link to Shaviv and Ziskin 2012.
    As Kuhn requires, has an "alternate candidate for paradigm" been presented? Yes. Professor Shaviv:

    My experience at the German Bundestag's Environment Committee in a pre-COP24 discussion


    [​IMG]"This is the contribution to the radiative forcing from different components, as summarized in the IPCC AR5. As you can see, it is claimed that the solar contribution is minute (tiny gray bar). In reality, we can use the oceans to quantify the solar forcing, and see that it was probably larger than the CO2 contribution (large light brown bar). Any attempt to explain the 20th century warming should therefore include this large forcing. When doing so, one finds that the sun contributed more than half of the warming, and climate has to be relatively insensitive. How much? Only 1 to 1.5°C per CO2 doubling, as opposed to the IPCC range of 1.5 to 4.5. This implies that without doing anything special, future warming will be around another 1 degree over the 21st century, meeting the Copenhagen and Paris goals.The fact that the temperature over the past 20 years has risen significantly less than IPCC models, should raise a red flag that something is wrong with the standard picture. . . .


    Having said that, it is possible to actually model the climate system while including the heat capacity, namely diffusion of heat into and out of the oceans, and include the solar and anthropogenic forcings and find out that by introducing the the solar forcing, one can get a much better fit to the 20th century warming, in which the climate sensitivity is much smaller. (Typically 1°C per CO2 doubling compared with the IPCC's canonical range of 1.5 to 4.5°C per CO2 doubling). You can read about it here: Ziskin, S. & Shaviv, N. J., Quantifying the role of solar radiative forcing over the 20th century, Advances in Space Research 50 (2012) 762–776. The low climate sensitivity one obtains this way is actually consistent with other empirical determinations, for example, the lack of any correlation between CO2 variations over the past half billion years and temperature variations."
     
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  9. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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    AGW advocates' argument on behalf of their claimed "consensus" has more of a religious than a scientific foundation.

    I have long been intrigued by the incongruity of anthropogenic global warming's surprisingly thin evidence base and the adamancy of its advocates. Their use of the term "denier" to describe those skeptical of AGW suggests a state of mind outside that commonly associated with scientific inquiry. I was recently struck by a juxtaposition which may explain (at least in part) this phenomenon.

    One side is a book I first encountered fifty years ago, The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn. The other is a new (2017) book, Searching for the Catastrophe Signal by Bernie Lewin. There is a long tradition of millenarian thought in western civilization, and it's not surprising that chiliastic yearning has survived the decline in formal religious practice in the 20th and 21st centuries. This may be the key to understanding the psychology of AGW advocacy. Replace the biblical "end times" with a postulated hothouse Earth and present a millennium of renewable, carbon-free energy sources, and it all fits together pretty snugly.

    Nothing but absolute faith in the righteousness of their cause can really explain the maneuvers of AGW advocates in the early IPCC. Even more to the point is their continuing pride in those maneuvers -- several of them are among Lewin's most important sources.

    The Pursuit of the Millennium - Norman Cohn - Oxford University Press[/h]https://global.oup.com/academic/.../the-pursuit-of-the-millennium-9780195004564
    May 15, 1970 - The end of the millennium has always held the world in fear of earthquakes, plague, and the catastrophic destruction of the world. At the dawn ...

    Searching for the Catastrophe Signal: The Origins of ... - Google Books[/h]https://books.google.com/books/about/Searching_for_the_Catastrophe_Signal.html?id...
    Nov 21, 2017 - The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - the IPCC - is the global authority on climate science and behind some of the most important ...
     
  10. Melb_muser

    Melb_muser Well-Known Member Donor

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    A more meaningful gauge is the change in proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere. Since most of the other gasses are transparent to heat it's a big difference.

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Aug 5, 2022
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  11. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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    And now there is a growing body of research challenging the AGW consensus. An example:

    On November 3, 2021, the scientific journal Climate published a paper on solar influence on climate. The paper by solar researcher Dr. Frank Stefani from the Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf is entitled: “Solar and Anthropogenic Influences on Climate: A Regression Analysis and Tentative Predictions” and concludes that the influence of CO2 on the development of global temperatures from 1860 until today was only about half as large as the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assumed.

    As a reminder, the IPCC concludes that 98% of the warming ( 1.07 degrees out of 1.09 degrees) is human-induced. According to Stefani’s analysis, the solar influence accounts for 30-70%.
     
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  12. drluggit

    drluggit Well-Known Member

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    Ok, so man is responsible for 3-5% of that graph. It was the paint of the post you ignored...
     
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  13. Lucifer

    Lucifer Well-Known Member

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    Yeah, this is the part I find funny, in a pathetic sort of way.

    I certainly cannot deny other posters' skepticism, but why do they insist on arguing their position on a forum where 99.9999% of those reading their rebuttals also are not climate scientists? Could it possibly be because they are not climate scientists either? That seems like an easy fight to me in a forum where one can claim they are anything.

    So these posters who claim to know the science is wrong either need to divulge their research and provide their published and peer-reviewed studies, or just shut the ef up! I'm tired of armchair Einsteins who hide behind the comfort blanket of anonymity to proclaim bullshit and prop up their flimsy egos.
     
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  14. Melb_muser

    Melb_muser Well-Known Member Donor

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    It looked like an opinion post to me.
     
  15. Golem

    Golem Well-Known Member Donor

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    The peer-reviewed study meta-analysis I'm referring to was more like 100%. However, 97% is good enough to establish a consensus.

    It's just how science works. As I say on the OP, it's not perfect. And you can use the fact that it's not perfect to deny that it works at all. But it's the best we can do.
     
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  16. Melb_muser

    Melb_muser Well-Known Member Donor

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    A proposition that is decimated by the data. Already took care of that in the thread that disappeared. It's the only argument that is important.
     
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  17. Golem

    Golem Well-Known Member Donor

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    For reference. Just in case somebody doesn't know, Michael Crichton was one of the greatest Science Fiction writers of the 20th Century who died in 2008. He held a university degree which, I believe, was in Biology. I guess he used his knowledge on the topic to write my personal favorite "The Andromeda Strain". He's probably most well-known outside the SF buff community for having written Jurassic Park. He's a journalist and a Science Fiction author. Not a scientist or an epistemologist. But great if you're looking for some of the best SF out there.

    Many great Science Fiction writers draw on pseudoscience to write their novels. And a few actually end up believing it.
     
    Last edited: Aug 5, 2022
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  18. Doofenshmirtz

    Doofenshmirtz Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    This feigned concern for the planet is not fooling anyone. Are you a Vegan?
     
  19. drluggit

    drluggit Well-Known Member

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    Hmm.. cite it then. Cook is the study of record. I produced it. I provided the contextual methodology. You assert you know better. Put up. Feel free.
     
  20. Golem

    Golem Well-Known Member Donor

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    Please do not forget to read the part of the OP that starts with

    Playing the "I'm a climate expert too" game

    Caution: Not reading that part can lead people to believe and actually REPEAT nonsense they read on long-time ago DEBUNKED pseudoscience webpages like notrickszone...
    http://www.politicalforum.com/index...limate-change-pseudoscience-somewhere.602214/

    ...known for manipulating data, altering graphs that are found in real studies, and eclecticism (cherry-picking part of the content of a study to state that it concludes something it DOESN'T)

    Careful. Don't fall for it
    Oops! Too late!
     
    Last edited: Aug 5, 2022
  21. drluggit

    drluggit Well-Known Member

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    It appears you might need to re cite the study that you believe undermines the observation provided. You word on it doesn't seem credible.
     
  22. Golem

    Golem Well-Known Member Donor

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    Read the OP. The link is in the part that starts with "The AGW scientific consensus"
     
  23. drluggit

    drluggit Well-Known Member

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    So, let me get this straight here. You aren't a cliamate scientist, and yet you claim that you have the authority on these forums to dictate what is settled science? LMAO... Take your own advice then. You're already guilty of manipulating data, I called you on it. Feel free to attempt a rebuttal here, but your own method seems super fragile.
     
  24. drluggit

    drluggit Well-Known Member

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    Pull the quote. Feel free to take your time.
     
  25. drluggit

    drluggit Well-Known Member

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    This is the pull from the section of the OP you assert has the link:



    You'll notice there isn't a single hyperlink to be found in wall of text that is just the assertion from yet another copy paste exercise.

    If you are referring to this link:
    https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/109519/documents/HHRG-116-II13-20190522-SD005.pdf

    It doesn't contain the actual citation of the study that you're looking for which, again is the Cook et al. Try again.
     
    Last edited: Aug 5, 2022

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