An Expensive Urban Legend
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
About.com describes an “urban legend” as an apocryphal (of questionable authenticity), secondhand story, told as true and just plausible enough to be believed, about some horrific…series of events….it’s likely to be framed as a cautionary tale. Whether factual or not, an urban legend is meant to be believed. In lieu of evidence, however, the teller of an urban legend is apt to rely on skillful storytelling and reference to putatively trustworthy sources.
I contend that the belief in human-caused global warming as a dangerous event, either now or in the future, has most of the characteristics of an urban legend. Like other urban legends, it is based upon an element of truth. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose concentration in the atmosphere is increasing, and since greenhouse gases warm the lower atmosphere, more CO2 can be expected, at least theoretically, to result in some level of warming.
But skillful storytelling has elevated the danger from a theoretical one to one of near-certainty. The actual scientific basis for the plausible hypothesis that humans could be responsible for most recent warming is contained in the cautious scientific language of many scientific papers. Unfortunately, most of the uncertainties and caveats are then minimized with artfully designed prose contained in the Summary for Policymakers (SP) portion of the report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This Summary was clearly meant to instill maximum alarm from a minimum amount of direct evidence.
Next, politicians seized upon the SP, further simplifying and extrapolating its claims to the level of a “climate crisis”. Other politicians embellished the tale even more by claiming they “saw” global warming in Greenland as if it was a sighting of Sasquatch, or that they felt it when they fly in airplanes.
Just as the tales of marauding colonies of alligators living in New York City sewers are based upon some kernel of truth, so too is the science behind anthropogenic global warming. But there is a big difference between reports of people finding pet alligators that have escaped their owners, versus city workers having their limbs torn off by roving colonies of subterranean monsters.
In the case of global warming, the “putatively trustworthy sources” would be the consensus of the world’s scientists. The scientific consensus, after all, says that global warming is…is what? Is happening? Is severe? Is manmade? Is going to burn the Earth up if we do not act? It turns out that those who claim consensus either do not explicitly state what that consensus is about, or they make up something that supports their preconceived notions.
If the consensus is that the presence of humans on Earth has some influence on the climate system, then I would have to even include myself in that consensus. After all, the same thing can be said of the presence of trees on Earth, and hopefully we have at least the same rights as trees do. But too often the consensus is some vague, fill-in-the-blank, implied assumption where the definition of “climate change” includes the phrase “humans are evil”.
It is a peculiar development that scientific truth is now decided through voting. A relatively recent survey of climate scientists who do climate research found that 97.4% agreed that humans have a “significant” effect on climate. But the way the survey question was phrased borders on meaninglessness. To a scientist, “significant” often means non-zero. The survey results would have been quite different if the question was, “Do you believe that natural cycles in the climate system have been sufficiently researched to exclude them as a potential cause of most of our recent warming?”
And it is also a good bet that 100% of those scientists surveyed were funded by the government only after they submitted research proposals which implicitly or explicitly stated they believed in anthropogenic global warming to begin with. If you submit a research proposal to look for alternative explanations for global warming (say, natural climate cycles), it is virtually guaranteed you will not get funded. Is it any wonder that scientists who are required to accept the current scientific orthodoxy in order to receive continued funding, then later agree with that orthodoxy when surveyed? Well, duh.
In my experience, the public has the mistaken impression that a lot of climate research has gone into the search for alternative explanations for warming. They are astounded when I tell them that virtually no research has been performed into the possibility that warming is just part of a natural cycle generated within the climate system itself.
Too often the consensus is implied to be that global warming is so serious that we must do something now in the form of public policy to avert global catastrophe. What? You don’t believe that there are alligators in New York City sewer system? How can you be so unconcerned about the welfare of city workers that have to risk their lives by going down there every day? What are you, some kind of Holocaust-denying, Neanderthal flat-Earther?
It makes complete sense that in this modern era of scientific advances and inventions that we would so readily embrace a compelling tale of global catastrophe resulting from our own excesses. It’s not a new genre of storytelling, of course, as there were many B-movies in the 1950s whose horror themes were influenced by scientists’ development of the atomic bomb.
Our modern equivalent is the 2004 movie, “Day After Tomorrow”, in which all kinds of physically impossible climatic events occur in a matter of days. In one scene, super-cold stratospheric air descends to the Earth’s surface, instantly freezing everything in its path. The meteorological truth, however, is just the opposite. If you were to bring stratospheric air down to the surface, heating by compression would make it warmer than the surrounding air, not colder.
I’m sure it is just coincidence that “Day After Tomorrow” was directed by Roland Emmerich, who also directed the 2006 movie “Independence Day,” in which an alien invasion nearly exterminates humanity. After all, what’s the difference? Aliens purposely killing off humans, or humans accidentally killing off humans? Either way, we all die.
But a global warming catastrophe is so much more believable. After all, climate change does happen, right? So why not claim that ALL climate change is now the result of human activity? And while we are at it, let’s re-write climate history so that we get rid of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice age, with a new ingenious hockey stick-shaped reconstruction of past temperatures that makes it look like climate never changed until the 20th Century? How cool would that be?
The IPCC thought it was way cool…until it was debunked, after which it was quietly downgraded in the IPCC reports from the poster child for anthropogenic global warming, to one possible interpretation of past climate.
And let’s even go further and suppose that the climate system is so precariously balanced that our injection of a little bit of that evil plant food, carbon dioxide, pushes our world over the edge, past all kinds of imaginary tipping points, with the Greenland ice sheet melting away, and swarms of earthquakes being the price of our indiscretions.
In December, hundreds of bureaucrats from around the world will once again assemble, this time in Copenhagen, in their attempts to forge a new international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. And as has been the case with every other UN meeting of its type, the participants simply assume that the urban legend is true. Indeed, these politicians and governmental representatives need it to be true. Their careers and political power now depend upon it.
And the fact that they hold their meetings in all of the best tourist destinations in the world, enjoying the finest exotic foods, suggests that they do not expect to ever have to be personally inconvenienced by whatever restrictions they try to impose on the rest of humanity.
If you present these people with evidence that the global warming crisis might well be a false alarm, you are rewarded with hostility and insults, rather than expressions of relief. The same can be said for most lay believers of the urban legend. I say “most” because I once encountered a true believer who said he hoped my research into the possibility that climate change is mostly natural will eventually be proved correct.
Unfortunately, just as we are irresistibly drawn to disasters – either real ones on the evening news, or ones we pay to watch in movie theaters – the urban legend of a climate crisis will persist, being believed by those whose politics and worldviews depend upon it. Only when they finally realize what a new treaty will cost them in loss of freedoms and standard of living will those who oppose our continuing use of carbon-based energy begin to lose their religion.
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Sorry…I left out the link to the discussion of the Douglass paper: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/
Joseph says:
What do you mean that the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation is of no concern? The only way that heat energy can be communicated away from the earth-atmosphere system is via radiation according to the S-B Equation. Yes, some of the heat that gets to the upper atmosphere gets there due to process of evaporation and subsequent condensation. (See here for a diagram of the earth’s energy budget: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/bna/educate/earth_rad_budget_kiehl_trenberth_big.gif ) However, that energy (or a portion thereof) is then radiated out into space.
The evaporation and condensation only ends up changing the energy budget for the earth system as a whole to the extent that it affects the temperature structure of the atmosphere. (And indirectly to the extent that it forms clouds, which can reflect sunlight and absorb and subsequently emit IR radiation and transports water vapor up into the upper troposphere where it acts as a greenhouse gas.)
For the tropics, that temperature structure is expected to be determined essentially by the moist adiabatic lapse rate, which means that (due to the condensation of water vapor) the temperature in the upper troposphere in the tropics warms more than at the surface does. This is indeed a negative feedback for the surface temperature rise since it means that the surface temperature does not have to rise as much as the temperature in the upper troposphere must rise in order to restore radiative balance. It is included in all of the climate models where it “takes back” part of the temperature rise due to the water vapor feedback. [In fact, since much the same convective physics controls both the (positive) water vapor feedback and the (negative) lapse rate feedback, the models with a higher magnitude for one feedback tend to have a higher magnitude for the other, so that the sum of the two feedbacks varies less from model-to-model than each of the feedbacks individually.]
This makes no sense at all. Substances emit electromagnetic radiation simply by virtue of being at a non-zero temperature. We often talk of there being absorption and re-emission but the “re-emission event” is completely unrelated to the absorption event, with the only relation being that it is the absorption events that are of course playing a role in determining the temperature. The radiative emission occurs simply due to the temperature. See the discussion here by an emeritus professor of meteorology who is sort of stickler when it comes to using terminology correctly: http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadGreenhouse.html I had thought he was a little too militant but now that I see the sort of confusions that you are making, I am beginning to understand his militancy on being precise about this stuff.
Smokey says:
This was reported by who? You, who claim to be a “skeptic” don’t have any skepticism about those numbers?!?! You really must be about the most gullible “skeptic” on the planet! For one thing, what does “scientists and organizations studying AGW have received more than $50 billion in funding” mean? What about the NASA satellites that Roy Spencer among others use in their research? Is that counted all in the AGW column or is some of it apportioned to the “skeptical of AGW” column and how was that apportioning done?
Mr. Shore,
You have still failed to explain why the IPCC is credible, when it is not a scientific organization.
You have still not reconciled your demand that skeptics only publish in scientific journals, while AGW promoters are free to do as they please in the public square.
An additional point you may want to address is why you would persist in sending people to AGW propaganda sites that demean skeptics?
Hunter,
I did not say that the AGW signal was not above the natural variation, I just said that we can’t tell and probably never will be able to tell. It’s a silly non-experiment in general. We cannot see “now” without the conditions of “now”. (although the AGW crowd would tell you that we can with the use of models.)
“In fact I remember ‘we’ (scientists) were by the end of the nineteeneighties just waiting until global warming would rise to significant levels. It duly did.”
A coin was flipped the other day. I predicted it would come up heads. It duly did.
Thanks Ken Gregory, very interesting support for natural variation.
I’m not sure I buy this though:
“The data is telling us the CO2 is displacing water vapour as a greenhouse gas, and that the laws of physics place a limit on the total effective amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
I don’t think trace amounts of CO2 are driving specific humidity. It seems much more likely temperature is driving this, as this explains why Earth’s temperature has been extremely stable over long periods. I thought I had seen this same observation explained that way before.
Ken Gregory says:
I believe that the long-term trends in this humidity data from radiosondes are believed to be unreliable due to changing instrumentation and other issues. And, they are in stark contrast to the data from satellites, which shows the specific humidity and the temperature to be positively-correlated (such that relative humidity remains pretty close to constant on average) for both the shorter-term fluctuations and the longer-term trends. See here http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;310/5749/841 , or see here http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/323/5917/1020 for a review with other references.
The satellite data also seems much more reasonable as it is hard to come up with reasons why the correlation of upper tropospheric water vapor with temperature would go the opposite way on the multidecadal timescales as it goes on the annual timescales (as the radiosonde data seems to suggest) given that the convective effects controlling this are on much shorter timescales than both of these. And, as TallDave noted, it is hard to understand a mechanism for how changes in CO2 levels would drive changes in water vapor levels directly, as you seem to suggest.
Really? So, if your radiosonde data is to be believed and is representative of the drop in water vapor at the atmospheric levels important for the greenhouse effect, that would imply that we have had changes in water vapor between 1948 and 2008 that would be the equivalent of something like 5 or 6 halvings of the CO2 levels (e.g., dropping the CO2 levels by something like a factor of 50). Wouldn’t you expect that to result in one heck of a cooling, in contrast to what we have seen…or do you think that the temperature is somehow so insensitive to either that it doesn’t matter?
Frankly, I think the problem is that BOTH the data that you show is wrong and that your claim that a 3% change in water vapor has the same radiative effect as a 100% change in CO2 levels is wrong.
Joel Shore, the only way we can be sure Man is changing the climate is if we can know that we have understood, measured and discounted everything else that could be doing it.
You claim to have a PhD in physics, so please state that in your opinion Man understands all the influences on climate so well that anomalies can ONLY be ascribed to Man.
If you will not state that climate is that well understood then you have no rational basis for supporting alarmism.
If you claim to be a physicist then I may demand that you are rational, in my opinion at least.
Stefan and Rereke Whakaaro,
One of the characteristics of the Green worldview that can be limiting is pointed out by Jenny Wade in her excellent book “Changes of Mind … a Holonomic Theory of the Evolution of Consciousness”.
She calls Green “Affiliative Consciousness”, and points out that differences and conflict are seen as threatening at this level, that being needed and harmonious relationships with others are a core motivation, and that the correct option for action for a Green is the consensus of one’s peer group.
So that is the barrier … and the challenge … for Green scientists.
Sandy: The only way to know something for sure is by deductive proof within a closed logical system. Science is observing the real world, which is not alas a closed logical system, and we can’t ever know anything for sure. I don’t know for sure that the sun will rise tomorrow…although I think given what we think we understand about the laws of physics, and particularly celestial mechanics, the smart money would be betting on it.
In order for Man to not be significantly changing the climate, it would have to be true both that some cause that we haven’t identified is doing it AND that the radiative forcing that we know that we are producing due to increasing greenhouse gases is somehow not doing it.
For the former to be the case, we have to come up with potential candidates for which there is good evidence that they could be the cause…i.e., they have to have the right temporal variation, one has to have a plausible physical mechanism, and one has to show that the fingerprints of the observed change (such as warming of the troposphere and cooling of the stratosphere) match that which such a mechanism would predict.
For the latter to be the case, there have to be large negative feedbacks in the climate system that are counteracting the known forcings and positive feedbacks. The hypothesis that such negative feedbacks are occurring enjoys little theoretical or empirical support and, in fact, makes it rather difficult to explain various things that our current understanding of the net feedback being positive does explain, such as the Ice Age – interglacial cycles and the climate response to the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. So, like for the rising of the sun, we may not be able to rigorously prove that Man is significantly changing the climate but the smart money would be betting on it…and indeed is betting on it.
Joel Shore “Unfortunately, the “skeptic movement” as a whole seems to expend most of their energy taking their case directly to the policymakers and the public and publishing in less serious journals…or journals well outside the climate science area of expertise, using arguments that have most often been thoroughly debunked in the scientific realm, rather than trying to prevail on their scientific colleagues…And this alone is, to me, a bad sign. (There is nothing wrong with discussing science directly with the public and policymakers but that should not be your primary approach.)”
Hmmm…the same could be said about your side, Joel.
Again…the burden of proof is on you. Show forth the evidence that a trace gas in the atmosphere is causing runaway warming.
Show it. Prove it. Where is it??
This is not a hard proposition. Either you can prove your theory with OBSERVED evidence….or not.
Second question, though, if the “Skeptic” movement is so unimportant to you (and you certainly have Copenhagen, the UKMet, and Obama on your side so YOU are a majority)….then why are you expending so much time and energy here???
Get back to work and research and stop spending so much time on this blog.
You are obviously bright, and the world needs you, but not to spend hours arguing that which you can not (and still not have been able to) prove.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Joel Shore to Smokey: “This was reported by who? You, who claim to be a “skeptic” don’t have any skepticism about those numbers?!?!
STRAWMAN ALERT
You really must be about the most gullible “skeptic” on the planet!
AD HOMINEM ALERT
For one thing, what does “scientists and organizations studying AGW have received more than $50 billion in funding” mean?
NON SEQUITUR ALERT
What about the NASA satellites that Roy Spencer among others use in their research? Is that counted all in the AGW column or is some of it apportioned to the “skeptical of AGW” column and how was that apportioning done?”
FALLACY OF AMBIGUITY ALERT (Either “Division” or “Composition” or both!)
Your logic is very flawed Joel.
Your resolution, like the GCMs is very coarse.
No wonder the scientific world is in trouble today.
Folks….this is not a scientific dilemma at this point….it is a psychological one.
A specific human malady: Too much ego precludes ones ability to admit wrong.
Then when it forms itself as science and then policy….then, voila!: You have the IPCC.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Joel Shore (16:52:43) : I’ll prepare a comprehensive reply after work tomorrow. Check in 24 hours.
It can never be said that WattsUpWithThat blocks all contrary comments!!
sagi,
Aha, thanks for the reference.
Plus when Green becomes threatened or trapped (the “gamma” step in SD):
“When Green confronts the barriers, it will descend into a rigid, holier-than-thou, politically correct stance, arrogantly questioning everybody else’s motives.”
I feel like I’ve seen quite a lot of this out there. When someone is called a “denier” it is because Green is actually feeling threatened?
I was glancing at George Monbiot’s website yesterday. It seems he started out working on African issues, investigating the suffering of African victims, and his more recent work seems (to me at least), to be about how the poor in Africa suffer due to the Western multinationals’ contribution to climate change. It reminds me of the film, ‘The Constant Gardener”.
What I’m wondering is how Monbiot has taken issue with other environmentalists, particularly those who are focussing on population as the main problem: The Optimum Population Trust, David Attenborough, Jonathon Porritt, Paul Ehrlich. Monbiot at one point seems to have accused the founder of the Ecologist magazine of being some sort of extreme right fascist.
Yellow starts to look at the whole system and from a Green perspective this can look elitist and even fascist. And yet, if we’re actually to tackle environmental problems, it does warrant stepping back and looking at systems of systems (at least to begin with, but as Ken Wilber observed, systems theorists are mostly focussed on the external Web of Life, the material planetary systems, but generally ignore all the internal stuff about psychology and culture, so their “system theory” is not really holistic, for it leaves out half the picture, it leaves out the fact that most of the world’s cultures don’t care about global environmental issues).
Let’s say from a Yellow perspective, the world’s problem, given current levels of technology, is mainly population—and what we need are fewer people, preferably fewer big families, which tends to be the poor. Meanwhile from a Green perspective, the poor are the biggest victims, and what we need to do is to protect them, help them to rise out of poverty, but without adding additional resource depletion. That means the rich need to send their wealth to the poor. In this scenario, the African poor win, but in the other, they lose even more. Where’s the consensus on that?
But I’m not sure really that from a Yellow perspective, population is the core problem—I’m not sure where the Optimum Population Trust is coming from, do you have a sense about this? I’m finding it hard to distinguish between Nature’s order (Yellow?) and a One True Order (Blue?). Maybe OPT is a sort of authoritarian answer to environmental problems, or maybe it is simply Yellow’s best assessment at the present time…? It confuses me when they all have upper class British accents. When the Duke of Edinburgh says he’d like to reincarnate as a virus to wipe out human overpopulation, that conservation is a “hard headed” business, what meme is that?
I guess what I’m wondering is what will happen to Green consensus as more people get involved with proposing actual solutions. Green can spot and reject any Orange solution as “just more selfish multinationals protecting their interests”. But what is Green going to make of Blue solutions and early Yellow solutions?
It will be hard to maintain consensus when people like Monbiot are calling other environmentalists “fascists”.
Joel,
Thanks for your links. I had a quick look at the one you say is the best. Unfortunately I find it to be very weak on substance and loose on facts. I was especially interested to see how the author can claim that evidence for AGW exists. What he offers usual old strawman argument: the earth has warmed, CO2 has increased, CO2 is a greenhouse gas, therefore humans have caused the warming. Nobody is denying that CO2 doesn’t have some warming effect, but the controversy is over how much and to what extent in the future.
Then there was a section that attempts to show that warming is still continuing even though it isn’t. He quotes a paper by Schukman which purports to show that OHC has been rising in contradiction to all other papers. Even Hansen doesn’t try and deny these empirical facts. For example, Cazanave has shown that the steric component of sea level rise has dropped substantially since 2003 indicating no warming. This was verified by correlating three datasets, namely Argo, Grace and satellite altimetry. Roger Pielke has also written that the lack of accumulated joules in the oceans now amounts to about 10 * 10^22 joules. These are joules of energy that should have accumulated according to the AGW hypothesis but isn’t there.
I gave up reading at that point. If you want to comment on individual research I would be happy to read your opinions, but I’m not impressed by people that just point to propaganda sites filled with junk science and smoke and mirrors.
“All this means rethinking the very nature of the world economy It claims to be geared to ‘sustainable development’ but there is precious little that is sustainable about it, and very deep changes are required if we are to have any future on this planet.” — Edward Goldsmith
“During much of the nearly 20 years I lived in rural Cornwall I had no car (though I cheated and took taxis). I had no central heating, no freezer, and I used a composting toilet. Now, I am afraid, I am once more a city slicker. However, it was an experiment in the right direction.” — Edward Goldsmith
This has some relevance also to the other thread, “eat the dog”, where the Vales have for decades been working on “autonomous” housing that can stay off grid. I think “eat the dog” was just a way to draw attention.
When I was a student I once said to my tutor, Robert Vale, “I do believe that the environment is the only issue architects should be focussed on”.
Since then, climate change entered the mainstream consciousness, but this is something that I’ve never felt right about—if people were truly serious about climate change, about sustainability, about humanity’s survival—if climate change was really as urgent as the IPCC and scientists say it is, then we would be enacting extraordinary measures—we would re-architect civilisation—and we would not wait for the agreement of those who hadn’t got the memo.
I really don’t understand—we are all perfectly capable of living without a fridge (my grandma did her whole life)—why we continue to ponce around saving plastic bags and trying to figure out what brand of shiny new electric car to buy. You don’t need a car. You don’t need a fridge. You don’t need any of that. And you certainly don’t need two kids.
This fundamental disconnect with reality is what troubles me more about climate change, far more than any “denialist” anti-science.
Robert Vale said, when he grows old, and his children ask him, “Dad, what did you do to save the world?”, Robert said he wants to be able to answer them.
And just to follow up, I can understand most people here don’t believe climate change is man made, and consequently you’re not about to give up your fridge or your car.
But what I don’t understand is the people like Joel, who have thought about it and figure that the science has got it right.
Joel,
what have you given up?
Nevermind Joel, what has Al Gore given up?
Sorry I shouldn’t pick on anyone in particular, it is just a wider issue: how do you save the world when most of the world isn’t interested in the measures needed to do so?
“Edward Goldsmith shows how Indira Gandhi has betrayed the Gandhiism of the Mahatma in pursuing India’s industrialisation and urbanisation”
http://www.edwardgoldsmith.com/page266.html
That article was published 24 years ago. Goldsmith was calling for small sustainable communities, inspired by the leadership and example of one India’s greatest historical figures. And yet? What did we get instead? Bollywood?
Anyone who’s serious about stopping climate change, needs to worry more about the psychology of people than about the technicalities of what is and isn’t a valid statistical trend.
Joel, this is why earlier I asked you, would you accept governments taking advice and basing policy on the findings of developmental psychology? Just as you are happy to have government base policy on the findings of climatologists?
Serious question.
Oops, 34 years ago.
Vincent says:
I guess your statement here that “the steric component of sea level rise has dropped substantially” is technically correct but is subject to misinterpretation. Cazanave et al ( http://penoflight.com/climatebuzz/Docs/SeaLevelRise2008.pdf ) are NOT saying that steric component of the sea level has itself dropped but rather that the rate of rise has been much less rapid over the 5-year period than it had been over the previous ten years. Also, their errorbars are such that the rise is statistically-significant so it is not that there is “no warming” of the ocean but rather that there is less. Furthermore, during those 5 years, the sea level rise due to melting of land ice has been greater, so that the total sea level rise has been only a little less than it had been before (2.5 +/- 0.4 mm/yr for 2003-2008 vs 3.1 +/- 0.4 mm/yr for 1993-2003).
At any rate, I don’t think anyone expects there not to be fluctuations in the ocean heat content over relatively short periods…and there seems to have been in the past. The increase should be a bit steadier than that for the atmospheric temperature, which climate models predict can go through periods of 10 to 15 years with a negative trend even under monotonically increasing forcings ( http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/csi/images/GRL2009_ClimateWarming.pdf ), but I’m not sure how much steadier.
Then, you must spend a lot time here not being impressed with the folks who constantly link to graphs produced by ICECAP, junkscience.com, and the like.
Anyway, you asked, “What are the “arguments that have most often been thoroughly debunked in the scientific realm?” so I provided a link to a cite that takes on many of the arguments put forward by “skeptics”. I admit that some arguments that skeptics put forward are better than others…and I think that understanding the variations that occur in the rise of ocean heat content is at least a legitimate area where further research is needed. But if you want a list of some of the worst arguments, I would say that in general they are the ones involving long-settled issues such as whether we are responsible for the rise in CO2 since the beginning of the industrial revolution, whether we know the basic radiative forcing effects due to a rise in CO2 (e.g., the claim that “it’s saturated”), the notion that the fact that climate change has occurred in the past somehow means that we are not responsible for the current change, and the notion that the greenhouse effect violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. The notion that a negative or flat trend in global temperatures of about a decade or less is sufficient to conclude that the models are wrong or that AGW is falsified would also qualify. There are probably many others but those are some of the big ones that come to mind.
Stefan says:
I won’t claim that I am a saint but I have done various things to try to reduce my carbon footprint. I own a Prius. I live in a neighborhood where a lot of services that I need are available within walking or biking distance and I use foot or bicycle for a significant fraction of my trips; when I do use my car, I try to combine trips to places that are in the same vicinity rather than making separate trips. I own a small house and I pay a surcharge on my utility bill in order to have the utility add a certain quantity of wind energy to the electricity grid. I have installed CFLs in most fixtures and installed a low-flow shower head. I also try to keep the thermostat down during heating season (although I get a little pushback from my girlfriend on that one). Our house does have an air conditioning unit but we hardly use that at all. I try to buy at least some of our produce at a local farmer’s market (that I almost always get to by bike).
“In fact I remember ‘we’ (scientists) were by the end of the nineteen eighties just waiting until global warming would rise to significant levels. It duly did.”
That isn’t responsive to the claim that the PDO hadn’t been discovered in the 1980s.