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By the way, the hypothesis of political scare scientists in the seventies was that pollution would block out sunlight and an ice age would follow. First, I want my ice age, then we can talk about global warming. Which I will bet that after shivering for a century, most of us would be screaming for it to arrive.
As I understand it, that scare was caused by the massive quantities of particulate matter and sulphur that was being pumped into the atmosphere by old coal power plant designs and dirty vehicle engines. Coal plants have since been retrofitted with electrostatic precipitators and most of the larger ones also have chemical scrubbers (at least they have in the civilized world) and the majority of vehicles now run vastly cleaner than those in the 70's. If it was actually going to happen, a global ice age was prevented when humans changed their behavior.
On a related note, adding particulate reflectors to the upper atmosphere is one suggested solution to counteract the effects of global warming. Arguably, removing the precipitators and scrubbers from coal plants could solve the global warming problem... except we'd all die earlier from breathing in all the ash.
Back to the original debate topic. If the 1 scientist has legitimate peer-reviewed and repeatable data to back his conclusion and refute the other claims, then there is no consensus. If the 1 scientist is paid by the coal and oil industries to publish bad data and keep politicians from costing them money, then the 1 isn't a true scientist and you have consensus.
When I was a child some 60 years ago the severity of the New England winters and short growing season allowed farmers to grow Apples but not Peaches. My neighbor in southern New Hampshire now grows Georgia peaches in his orchard. I think this is adequate data to support the idea of local, and by extension, global warming.
I don't believe that of 9137 scientists, only 1 disputes global warming. I know there is 1 at MIT and 1 at Princeton who don't believe it. If I'm not mistaken, that's 2. I know that in the original IPCC report on global warming, 1993 I think it was, most of the purported scientists who endorsed it were nothing of the kind. They were economists, psychologists, people of that sort.
Just because you know 2 scientists who dispute it does not mean they were included in this study. I do believe there are more than 9,138 scientists in the world that have conferred on Global Climate Change.
I just want to highlight this illuminating infographic by James Powell in which, based on more than 2000 peer-reviewed publications, he counts the number of authors from November, 2012 to December, 2013 who explicitly deny global warming (that is, who propose a fundamentally different reason for temperature rise than anthropogenic CO2).The number is exactly one.
That was debunked.
The operand is "who explicitly deny global warming."
And what "peer-reviewed publications" were consulted?
A knowledge-aid approach for designing high-performance buildings
A Materials Life Cycle Assessment of a Net-Zero Energy Building
A new static lighting concentrator with optical coupler
A Reflection on Moral Distress in Nursing Together With a Current Application of the Concept
Aflatoxins in home produced cereals?
An Ant Colony Algorithm for efficient ship routing
College students' understanding of atmospheric ozone formation
Creation of Carbon Credits by Water Saving
Energy efficient residential house wall system
Environmental comparison of draught animal and tractor power
Game theory approach in decisional process of energy management for industrial sector
Heavy metal resistant anaerobic bacterial strains from brewery digester sludge
Plutonium Transport in the Environment
What caused the long duration of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum?
Who has become more open to nuclear power because of climate change?
Why ban the sale of cigarettes? The case for abolition
Just because someone mentions AGW in a peer-reviewed publication does not mean they support it.
For the record, politics is based on consensus, but science is based on empircal data and experiments that can be replicated.
Crick and Watson were able to construct an experiment simulating the conditions on Earth at the time amino acids were though to have formed and/or combined that could be reproduced by others, and yet no one can design an experiment to prove global warming?
Scientifically, not politically....
Mircea
I don't really have anything to add to the quoted post. I just thought it was worth reposting because its the only one that picked up on the semantics of the original article.
The premise of the article is really pretty silly and pointless. No one is emphatically certain about any of this stuff. That's why we're debating what should be done about it.
Even the biggest coal loving conservatives agree that we should be careful with our planet, resources and atmosphere. Cutting pollution and emissions = good. Really nothing to debate there.
The real question is how much money we want to throw at this issue and to whom or what we want to throw it. If we reduced our emissions to zero tomorrow (and destroyed our economy and civilization in the process) would it make enough of a difference to matter?
Given the uncertainty of the specifics, that's a pretty good question. I bet those same scientists would give you 9137 different answers to that.
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