Is The Sun Causing The Current Climate Change?

[Tim Smith]

I find the no sun effect idea a little hard to take, it is after all the the major heat we have.

Why would they think the sun doesnt affect the plant?

I know the numbers they are looking at say the sun has no effect, but you have to be a idiot the believe that, lol

No one said the sun didn't have an effect. What is said is that during the time the temperatures have gone up during the recent warm up, the variation in the sun's energy wasn't going up with it. So something else has to be responsible for causing that recent increase.

[Tim Smith]

I try to stay out of these conversations. That being said, the question that follows is not a stab at anyone, anything, or to be taken personally or politically. We are constantly updating our technology and admitting that yesterday's technology is not accurate. How can we really trust the information that has been recorded 100 years ago, and compare it to the information we collect now? When doing science experiments you need to keep all items consistent, except for controls. I am not sure we are comparing apples to apples.

The problem is that there are so many overlapping and agreeing approaches to these data that there's almost no chance the broad outlines are wrong. Even the scientific "critics" don't disagree completely with the concepts. They merely disagree on the degrees.

Sea level rise could be between 0.25 m and 1.75 m over the next hundred years, but there's no one who actually studies this stuff who believes it's going down.

[Jerry Rapp]

did the sun cause the last few hundred climate changes since before Christ? Why did the dinosaurs become extinct? When was the last ice age? Did the sun cause it?

[Tim Smith]

I brought this point up a while back....both data collection and interpretation are totally subjective.

Only if you don't understand them.

Statistics and methodology wring almost all of the subjectivity out of these things.

[Tim Smith]

Climate changes are a natural part of this old world. If man has an effect I think it is minimal. I would like the current crop of politically biased scientists to concentrate on our real trouble spots. Clean water and clean air should be our focus. We could get a groundswell of support for a clean enironment. When we take our eye of the ball for political reasons and try a feel good approach of moving all carbon production to China and India so that we can pretend we love the environment we hurt real efforts to control pollution.

We all have lots to learn about how our climate works. In the mean time I would like to see everyone work together on our real sources of pollution.

Why do you assume man has no effect on climate? If we move enough material into the atmosphere, it's perfectly reasonable for us to affect climate. Volcanoes affect climate. Mount Pinatubo dropped temperatures like a rock in 1992. Humans have similar (and in some cases much more) amounts of material into the atmosphere.

And why do you assume scientist's results come from political bias? Biased against what? Oil? Coal? You might as well say they're biased against wheat (gluten, you know) and beef (saturated fat!).

And how does ignoring greenhouse gasses get you a groundswell of environmental support for anything?

And by the way, China has agreed it needs to cap greenhouse emissions. And just about all the utilities and major corporations are preparing for further effects of climate change. Is this because they're far more gullible than us?

[Mitch f]

Only if you don't understand them.

Statistics and methodology wring almost all of the subjectivity out of these things.

Tim, I understand where you're coming from.....but I have seen too many cases where the methodology is so bad that statistics can't overcome the result. FWIW, I'm not disagreeing with you. Perhaps it's different in your field. Not trying to be sarcastic here but there is an article on the internet that says NOAA scientists knowingly falsified temperature readings, have you heard this? And is this true?

[Tim Smith]

Tim, I understand where you're coming from.....but I have seen too many cases where the methodology is so bad that statistics can't overcome the result. FWIW, I'm not disagreeing with you. Perhaps it's different in your field. Not trying to be sarcastic here but there is an article on the internet that says NOAA scientists knowingly falsified temperature readings, have you heard this? And is this true?

I haven't heard of any NOAA scientists falsifying temperature data. I can imagine there are plenty of people who would like to accuse them of that. If you could cite your source, that could help sort that out.

And by the way, there's a big difference between "falsifying data" (i.e. lying) and methodological problems. Most methodological limitations are known and accounted for. It's pretty rare that something just turns out to be completely unreliable.

Edit:

Here's the article. Look at the content and the claims all along the margins of this article and ask yourself how credible this is. If you think you're being poisoned by contrails and bigfoot is the Nephilim and you think everything done by anyone in the world is a conspiracy to ruin your life as apparently the authors of this website do, then sure. You should believe what these people are saying.

http://www.naturalnews.com/045808_global_warming_fraud_data_manipulation_noaa.html

[Al Agnew]

1. If you follow the money, wouldn't you suspect there is just as much money or more in a so-called scientist taking money from an oil or coal company to come up with "science" that says human induced climate change isn't happening, as a so-called scientist taking government grant money to say it is? Not to mention, I'm pretty sure the government grant money doesn't come with an overt or implied mandate that they toe the climate change line.

2. In a related note, I really shake my head at the notion that every one of the 97+ percent of scientists in fields relevant to climate change who agree with at least the broad outlines of human induced climate change are either incompetent or dishonest, while every one of the less than 3% on the other side are all competent and honest. Human nature being what it is, I would suspect that a similar percentage in each camp is incompetent or dishonest, which still leaves 97% of honest and competent scientists on the human induced climate change side.

3. I'll repeat my favorite answer to those who say that climate has always changed and past changes were not due to human factors so the present change can't be due to human factors, either:

There's a body lying in the street. The poor guy had a history of heart disease, but there's a bullet hole in his head. Do you automatically assume he died of heart failure because of that history and because people have always died of heart failure, or do you think that just maybe the bullet hole in his head had something to do with it?

Just because we know climate changed in the past due to whatever "natural" causes, unless and until we can come up with definitive natural causes for the present climate change, we HAVE to look at human activities that we KNOW can cause warming as being the probably culprits.

I hold out very little hope that, IF climate change is real, will continue to worsen, and is human induced through fossil fuel combustion and other human causes, that humans will do a darned thing about it until it's far too late to escape many of the effects. There are simply too many people who don't want to think they are part of the problem, and too many vested interests in continued burning of fossil fuels.

[jeb]

1. If you follow the money, wouldn't you suspect there is just as much money or more in a so-called scientist taking money from an oil or coal company to come up with "science" that says human induced climate change isn't happening, as a so-called scientist taking government grant money to say it is? Not to mention, I'm pretty sure the government grant money doesn't come with an overt or implied mandate that they toe the climate change line.

2. In a related note, I really shake my head at the notion that every one of the 97+ percent of scientists in fields relevant to climate change who agree with at least the broad outlines of human induced climate change are either incompetent or dishonest, while every one of the less than 3% on the other side are all competent and honest. Human nature being what it is, I would suspect that a similar percentage in each camp is incompetent or dishonest, which still leaves 97% of honest and competent scientists on the human induced climate change side.

Taking your first two points together, if 97% are scientific evangalist of the AGW theory, it is blindly obvious where the money is. So following the money will lead you to the bias, I'm sure. Also interesting to note that 95% of the models from these 97% of scientist are grossly wrong.

3. I'll repeat my favorite answer to those who say that climate has always changed and past changes were not due to human factors so the present change can't be due to human factors, either:

There's a body lying in the street. The poor guy had a history of heart disease, but there's a bullet hole in his head. Do you automatically assume he died of heart failure because of that history and because people have always died of heart failure, or do you think that just maybe the bullet hole in his head had something to do with it?

Not a very good arguement. The bullet hole is a fact, not an unproven theory. It would be like the body was lying there on the street with no bullet hole, but a scientist had built a model saying it could have been a bullet that killed him, so we should invest a lot of time and money to find out why it's not there.

I'm all for research into this infantile branch of science. But basing policy and running our economy into the ground to fight this boogey man is kind of hard to justify, given how inaccurate the science has been so far. As other posters have mentioned, the harder we make it on folks to do business here, the more we ship this pollution off to other countries that have far less pollution controls that we did even 10-20+ years ago. Not to mention the harm it does to our country by shipping those jobs away.

[Tim Smith]

Taking your first two points together, if 97% are scientific evangalist of the AGW theory, it is blindly obvious where the money is. So following the money will lead you to the bias, I'm sure. Also interesting to note that 95% of the models from these 97% of scientist are grossly wrong.

Not a very good arguement. The bullet hole is a fact, not an unproven theory. It would be like the body was lying there on the street with no bullet hole, but a scientist had built a model saying it could have been a bullet that killed him, so we should invest a lot of time and money to find out why it's not there.

I'm all for research into this infantile branch of science. But basing policy and running our economy into the ground to fight this boogey man is kind of hard to justify, given how inaccurate the science has been so far. As other posters have mentioned, the harder we make it on folks to do business here, the more we ship this pollution off to other countries that have far less pollution controls that we did even 10-20+ years ago. Not to mention the harm it does to our country by shipping those jobs away.

Actually the denialist community will go to great pains to point out the consensus number is somewhere closer to 80-95%. Apparently some people find this tremendously important so let's make that adjustment on behalf of your side of the argument (and to be even more clear, the level of acceptance varies among fields, but is highest in the group that spends the most time on this issue).

But the bias argument isn't valid. The same number of scientists will be standing there getting the same amount of money to study other topics if that were what was needed. Biologists have plenty to do. Engineers have plenty to do. The fact is those communities have chosen to work on climate change because climate change is an important problem.

Let's also point out that by your logic, Jeb, that most of the murder convictions in the US would be immediately overturned. You're demanding two different levels of evidence for 2 very important questions.

And again, the concerns about climate change are specifically about their long term effects on the economy. Everyone agrees the economy needs to be protected while dealing with climate change. That's why companies based on the profit motive are investing money to prepare for this. Unless there is a runaway scenario (which seems unlikely to be but could happen), we'll be able to hunker down and muddle through. The problem is the misery that will be associated with that. If current projections are correct, HALF of the GDP of Caribbean nations will be devoted to protecting and recovering from effects of climate change. What a miserable life that would be spending all your time rebuilding from the last storm and trying to avoid getting chewed up in the next one. That's not the future I want to give to my kids.