DarkBrandon01 said:
StrickAggie06 said:
DarkBrandon01 said:
and 100,000 other scientists believe in man made climate change. this means nothing. when you burn fossil fuels that energy has to go somewhere, it just doesn't disappear. it is the ONLY explanation. there are no other natural factors that account for the rapid increase of greenhouse gases.
Scientists of what? The majority of articles I read that claim that "the vast majority of scientists" believe in significant man made climate change are climate scientists. As mentioned in my first post, climate scientists aren't actual scientists, plus OF COURSE climate scientists are going to believe their own studies.
Occasionally, some theoretical physicists throw their names into the mix. Unfortunately, their insights are often misguided, as they don't deal with large quantitative data sets, and don't consider the statistical flaws present in climate data. I've found they are particularly susceptible to having "tunnel vision" and just blindly believing studies put out by academics in other fields. But how many non-physics STEM researchers with backgrounds in big data and advanced statistics do you see speak out regularly? I rarely see engineers, biologists, or chemists loudly banging the climate change drum.
And did you not read my post at all, or just not understand it? Increases in greenhouse gasses don't automatically cause an equally corresponding temperature increase, and how we've measured them has changed over time. Again, correlation doesn't equal causation. If greenhouse gasses go up 30%, how much does the temp increase? You can point to the correlation all you want, but without an actual controlled study (which I'm not convinced is possible even with a a very complex artificial microclimate), you simply can't prove that one causes the other. And that "rapid" increase in greenhouse gasses uses ice core data as its early data points. As previously mentioned, ice cores are extremely unreliable for producing accurate data. There's also inconsistencies with the sites for data collection. You're taking early data from ice cores located at the poles vs newer data points located closer to civilization where CO2 emissions will be higher. This creates a significant positive bias in the trend.
Also, calling CO2 a greenhouse gas is disingenuous at best. CO2 encourages plant growth, which in turn reduces atmospheric CO2 levels. The Earth is essentially a living breathing organism, and like all organisms it strives for balance (homeostasis). CO2 levels also naturally increase as the Earth warms, so how much of that rise is due to the cyclic warming period we are? How does it correlate to the number of volcanic eruptions each year, which dump FAR more CO2 in the atmosphere than all of humanity does in an entire year?
Finally, you are still looking at a very very limited data set in historical terms. You simply can't claim unequivocally that greenhouse gas levels are at an all time high due to mankind and the sole driving factor of temp increases, without being able to accurately and comprehensively compare them to prehistoric times. Doing so violates the core mission of science.
Finally, any scientist that claims their findings are absolute facts is a fraud. Every climate report I've read does this. Actual scientists know there is ALWAYS uncertainty in the results, even with a 99%+ confidence interval. Valid publications use words like "could, might, plausible, etc" to describe their results, not definitive terms.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying that man made climate change is 100% not real. My point is that we don't have the data to say one way or another. It's logical that humanity has had SOME effect on the climate. But how much? It could be a lot or it could be negligible. Should we really declare an emergency and bankrupt the country for a complete unknown, when it wouldn't make a significant difference anyway? There are positive, effective ways to move us away from fossil fuels, but the government refuses to pursue them.
This is the most confidently incorrect reply I have seen on this website. Ice core data only measures co2 levels before the 1950s. Since 1950 we have just used the regular atmosphere to collect data, and we can see that c02 is rising unprecedently with no natural events that can explain it.
Also, c02 is 100% a greenhouse gas. No one ever said greenhouse gases were bad for the environment. The balance of gases can be thrown off due to human activity and that is a bad thing.
Also, the reason engineers, biologists, and chemists don't speak on climate change is because they are engineers, biologists, and chemists. Being an expert in one field doesn't mean you can hope over and be an expert in another field.
Also, just because we cant fully understand the climate doesn't mean we cant draw conclusions on what is going on. We have evidence and we see patterns. Denying climate change is like looking at the correlation between smokers and lung cancer and coming to the conclusion that smokers are just getting unlucky since we don't know which factor caused the cancer to form.
So your "100,000 other scientists that believe in man made climate change" are all just climatologists hanging out in their highly politicized echo chamber then? You are also unbelievably incorrect that an expert in one field can't be an expert in others. I'm an expert in several. In the case of climate, any scientist or engineer with experience in mathematical modeling, big data analytics, and advanced statistics absolutely has a valid opinion to share here. As outlined in my original post several pages back, climate modeling suffers from very high error variance in the data, so anyone with half a brain with that expertise can tell you how statistically laughable climate models are.
Secondly, if you actually possessed reading comprehension, you would have noticed that I said ice cores are used for EARLY data points. As in pre-1950s. I specifically explained in my original comments (which I'm assuming you didn't read), that the early CO2 data that climate scientists love to use to get that nice hockey stick graph they love so much is unreliable. Without a control study to determine what % of atmospheric CO2 is captured in ice cores at their time of freezing, if/how that measurement changes as ice layers compact, and how exactly they correlate to global average CO2 levels over time, the early ice core data simply can't be normalized correctly or assessed proper error tolerances. The result is that the pre-1950s CO2 data is almost certainly lower than it should be.
And no one is "denying climate change". The climate changes literally every day. What rational people question is to what degree if any man has negatively contributed to those changes. As multiple people have pointed out, yet you choose to ignore, is that natural events such as wildfires, volcanoes, and sub-sea vents contribute vast quantities of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. A single volcanic eruption releases more CO2 than man does in a year.
Finally, I highly recommend that you go watch the video that that was posted and I replied to a few pages back of a former government climate scientist explaining all of this in detail. You might actually learn something.
