we have all been 'had' re global warming

[howmuchdidyousay]

To think its the biggest conspiracy theory of all time ?

Going back to fivesets's post about the role of O2 in warming, here's an extract from an essay about climate scepticism by Chris Goodall:

'Where Ian Plimer and Christopher Booker write of CO2 being a very minor global warming gas, climate scientists say that it contributes a significant fraction of the greenhouse effect. Standard science suggests that a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels will by itself add about 1.2 degrees to global temperatures. And mainstream science also differs from the sceptics by predicting that this figure will be amplified, not damped, by positive feedbacks. For example, as temperature rises, the atmosphere will typically hold more water vapour. Since water vapour is a greenhouse gas, it will add to the warming effect. Scientists typically say that doubling CO2 above the pre-industrial level will add between 2 and 3 degrees to average temperatures. Others are far more pessimistic, saying that the rise may be nearer 6 degrees, i.e. bringing temperatures to a level that would make life impossible over much of the world's surface.

Conventional science therefore says both CO2 is more important and that increases in atmospheric concentrations will produce amplifying effects that make temperature increases much larger. Rather than assuming that rises in global temperatures will eventually stabilise due to natural braking processes, the majority view of the world's scientists is that at some point temperature increases become strongly self-reinforcing. For example, the melting of the northern Tundra may trigger rotting of the decayed plant matter that will be exposed to air once the ice has gone, resulting in the emission of large volumes of methane, a gas with much greater warming effect than CO2, although with a shorter residence time in the atmosphere. The results could be truly catastrophic. The sceptics reply by saying that this didn't happen in the past and so probably won't happen in the future. They are wrong to be so confident: paleo-climatic evidence shows that temperatures have jerked upwards sharply in the past, possibly because of methane burps arising from the melting of the organic matter currently trapped in permafrost.'

Cat, I understand what you're saying (I think). But this is NOT about personalities - it's about the science. Upon which approaching 100 per cent of climate change scientists are in agreement. Yes, there are one or two mavericks, but they get an entirely disproportionate amount of attention. I'm not a scientist either, but if 99 per cent of climate scientists line up on one side of this issue and 1 per cent line up on the other, why on earth would you ('you' in general) choose to believe the 1 per cent?

Well BA, I think if you read a few of the early reports on the various sites, over and over people have been saying "Hold on , is this for real"

And if you also cehck around I think you'll see that Phil JOnes has acknowledged the emails are genuine.

I can remember in the 70s the new being all about how only 5 years more oil left.
You can't fool all of the people all of the time!

PW - this story is certainly going to be about anything but the science I believe.

99%/1% is one of those bandied about figures which are not scientifically based.

As you have just said, this is about who gets what "attention", which is I think a good way of thinking about it.

I would love to stay on this thread but I am being summoned out grr

I must say, I hope that Jones and his colleagues address the material that's been made public as quickly and fully as possible - their head-in-the-sand morally outraged position, understandable though it is, would be disastrous (in terms of the succour it would give to the sceptics) if they maintained it for long.

Cat, you're right that the public debate as it stands is about anything but science - that's the why the sceptics (who, sweetly, imagine themselves to be fearless campaigners in the face of overwhelming disapproval) are actually in an overwhelming majority in terms of public opinion.

But it should be about the science. That's the only way the argument will be won.

Couple of books for anyone who may be interested in exploring the issue further, or indeed challenging their own preconceptions.

(1) The Hot Topic: How to tackle global warming and still keep the lights on. Sir David King and Gabrielle Walker

Easier read of the two (and the cheaper)covers the science of the issue extremely well.

(2) Blueprint for a safer planet. How to manage climate change and create a new era of progress and prosperity.
Lord Nichola Stern

Drawn from the Stern Report on the Economics of Climate Change so has an obvious focus in that direction but highly enlightening.

Pls. link to where Jones admits that emails were correctly quoted and what the heck they referred to?

YABU, do you honestly think we can all go about merrily consuming this planets natural resources and polluting it to hell and there not be any consequences?
FIL works in the MOD/ aerospace industry to do with reducing carbon emmisions. Our current carbon emmisions are way above ant that have been previously seem and still rising, cyclical yes, but we've now gone way way way past the highest levels ever seen.
DS1 is applying to Uni's now to do Geology, a huge amount of that now is looking at climate change and what can be done to (not stop it, it's too late now) but see how we can cope with the changes it will bring.
I'm pretty sure everyone up in Cumbria is concerned how climate change has affected their area atm.
Sorry to rant but I feel very passionately about this, is everyone took it seriosly and made a few small changes it would help.
"Every raindrop raises the ocean!"

Linden (sorry to fisk, is not meant agressively ):

'Your quote is talking about 'probability' not actual concrete facts.' - that's how science works, surely? A scientific theory becomes increasingly plausible (or not, as the case may be). At some point its level of probability is such that in the public's mind it is established as a 'fact'. Science isn't arithmetic; it's not possible to posit any scientific theory with the same level of certainty as, say, 1+1=2.

On the Antarctic, I did have a look, as you advised, and I found this from the New Scientist:

'There is no doubt that the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts out from the mainland of Antarctica towards South America, has warmed significantly. A 2002 study, however, concluded that between 1966 and 2000 the continent's interior cooled.

This study was promptly seized upon as proof that the world is not warming, even though a single example of localised cooling proves no such thing, as the lead author of the 2002 study has tried to point out.

A more recent and more comprehensive study has concluded that in fact Antarctica warmed by 0.5 °C between 1957 and 2006, with especially strong warming in West Antarctica.'

Cat - wrt your point about the proportion of climate change scientists who believe that global warming is real and is anthropogenic: a Jan 2009 survey by the American Geophysical Union asked 3,146 scientists those questions. Of the overall sample, 90 per cent agreed that global warming was real, and 82 per cent agreed that it was anthropogenic.

When the sample was narrowed to just climate scientists, that proportion agreeing that global warming is anthropogenic rose to 97.4 per cent. Professor Peter Doran, who conducted the study, commented on this figure:

'"They're the ones who study and publish on climate science. So I guess the take-home message is, the more you know about the field of climate science, the more you're likely to believe in global warming and humankind's contribution to it."

Doran and Kendall Zimmerman conclude that "the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes." The challenge now, they write, is how to effectively communicate this to policy makers and to a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate among scientists.' (From the press release, my emphasis.)

Funnily enough, within the survey the only group not to show a majority believing in the reality of anthropogenic global warming were petroleum geologists! Conspiracy, anyone? Get your lovely fresh conspiracy cakes here...

BA here's the link

62 meg of data leaked by the way, so early days for people to make sense of the contents

fiveisanawfullybignumber - we are NOT consuming the earths resources. Just because we 3 tonnes of iron ore into 1.5 tonnes of 4 x 4 vehicle does not mean the metal is consumed. It is transformed but never destroyed. We need to recycle if it is economically feasible but if not just dig up some more iron ore.

We are not uisng up the world energy resource. There are trillions of tonnes of coal, oil ad gas under the earth crust its just a question of how much it costs to dig it up and every year that cost gets smaller as technology advances. There are 50 ultra large ssupertankers of crude oil sitting off the south coat of the UK right now with no destination. That is over 15 million tonnes of oil sitting there waiting for someone to buy it. That does not suggest a shortage to me.

"we are NOT consuming the earths resources"

What about all the coal and oil we've burnt? Surely that's been consumed. Whether there are trillions of tonnes still available or not, didn't there use to be a trillion more?

The total energy content of the earth is not beng consumed though as we recieve energy form the sun evry day. The carbon released from burning coal, gas, oil is beng recycled by being taken up by plants and other organisms and then rotted down and laid down as new coal, oil and gas deposits.

The natural gas available in the world is literally limitless as it is quickly produced by rotting vegetation. We could make natural gas from our rubish and sewage and animal manure if we really wanted to but it is just too costly at the moment. Instead we just dig it out of the ground as it is cheaper. Indeed, natural gas is still so worthless that in many oil fields around the world it is reated as an annoying dangerous waste product and flared off straight into the atmosphere!

cat, I think we are at cross-purposes here. You're quite right that the public is far more interested in personalities and possible scandals than it is in the science.* But that's not how it should be.

*Summarised pithily in a recent post on the LibCon website: 'CO2 absorbs long-wave IR radiation (easily provable by lab experiments, predicted and explained by QM), the Earth receives heat from the Sun at short wavelengths and re-emits it at longer wavelengths (Stefan-Boltzman Law), therefore increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere shifts the net radiation balance (First Law of Thermodynamics), and results in warming. QED. Then we can calculate the expected changes in tropospheric and stratospheric temperatures, compare them to reality, and find that we?re pretty damn close. What is there to debate? You want to argue that there?s some magical feedback which exactly counteracts the anthropogenic CO2 forcing, and there?s some magical forcing which exactly duplicates the expected result of the anthropogenic CO2 forcing, and that both of these magical factors (a) started exactly at the time we started emitting significant amounts of CO2, and (b) exactly keep pace with our CO2 emissions, but which aren?t actually caused by those emissions? That?s a very non-parsimonious position, and it?s you who would need to present some evidence in favour of it.'

And I think we should be careful before dubbing Jones a 'bent scientist', not least because I imagine he's on the phone to his lawyers quite a lot this weekend. He has said: 'The word 'trick' was used here colloquially, as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward.'

PW - yes I am absolutely clear where you are coming from ie rightly or wrongly the science is what the argumnet should be about.

However, I genuinely feel that our human world is made of infinite shades of grey. There is no way of escaping the grey/human element of science by preferring black and white. In the comments to the Guardian piece you linked to, someonre refers to the leak story as follows:

"a couple of guys were so besotted by their view of things that they tried to make it 'real' by adjustings things to fit. Not something totally unknown in academia - remember the South Korean guy and cloning recently or Cyril Burt and his twin studies?"

Now that is real narrative. It's humans, shades of grey. Science is not a story because it is essentially black and white and dull. Stories are grey and intersting.

So, then why has climate cahnge fallen out of the black&white science box into the grey human interst box, right here right now? Who gains by moving away from evidence to narrative?

I am really not clear on that question at all yet,and I'm awaiting developments before Copenhagen.

And looking at your post just now," bent scientists" refers to the Cyril BUrts and SOuth KOrean cloners of this world who we "know we don't like" as they have been debunked.