Come for the post - stay for the comments
An excellent post from
Charlie Martin at PJ Tattler but be sure to scroll through the comments for the dialog:
Reasons to be a Global Warming Skeptic
(I ended up writing this as a lengthy answer to someone on Google+ — might as well let the world see it.)
Here’s what I’ve said so far:“There are few skeptics (I can’t think of any, and I’ve been reporting on this for two solid years and an interested bystander for several years before that) who don’t believe there has been significant warming since the Little Ice Age, or that humans contribute to it, or that additional CO2 or other greenhouse gases aren’t probably part of that contribution.”
Unless one is arguing that humans are the only cause of global warming — in which case i’d have to point to that big glowing thing in the sky during the daytime — what I said explicitly includes a human contribution and even a greenhouse gas contribution.
Now, the IPCC AR4 model is rather stronger than that: it insists that anthropogenic, greenhouse-gas forced warming is the dominant — so dominant that it leads the unthoughtful to turn it into “only” — cause of global warming. For conciseness, call that the AGW model. Reasons I don’t find that hypotheses convincing include:
Charlie goes down a list of seven line items one of which is this little gem:
(4) The predictions of further warming are necessarily based on models. Now, it happens I did my PhD work on Federally funded modeling, from which I developed the NBSR Law (named after the group for which I worked): All modeling efforts will inevitably converge on the result most likely to lead to further funding.
Be sure to read the 60+ comments -- posts like this and ones at
Watts Up With That are attracting some industry heavyweights and the give and take is well reasoned and makes for fascinating reading. Very decent signal to noise ratio.
Posted by DaveH at August 31, 2011 11:05 AM