Are AGW "Skeptics" in good company?

Question

The Danish National Space Center (Denmark's NASA) states

"Changes in the Sun contribute to climate change. Solar activity has been exceptionally high in the 20th century compared to the last 400 years and possibly compared to the past 8,000 years"

http://www.spacecenter.dk/research/sun-climate/other/global-warming

NASA's Earth Observatory web site (link down) states that the Sun is responsible for half of all warming, and natural causes contribute to overall warming, then man last.

Scientist in Russia see the Sun as the cause of all global warming, and the increased co2 being the result, not cause of increased temperatures

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20070115/59078992.html

Does anyone believe that the Danish Space Agency thinks the Earth is only 6,000 years old, or NASA believes in creationism?

Or do you think that we don't have enough information to say what will happen 6 weeks, 6 months, or 6 years from now?

How can anyone "know" what will happen in 100 years?

Answer 1

Actually, the world famous Danish Space Center doesn't dispute human influence, only how much. Excerpt from their FAQ...

"Why is the climate changing?

Climate is subject to influences by both natural and human forces, including greenhouse gases, aerosols, solar activity, and land use change. The climate system is extremely complex and any estimate of the human contribution to climate change is very uncertain."

Also, NASA states UP TO half, which means no more than. BTW the sun IS a natural cause! Man is between 50% and 95%, according to NASA's Earth Observatory, which is offline until at least the end of the week.

The problem with you Jello is you try to stitch all these little pieces of information together from many different organizations to fit your beliefs on a given day.

Answer 2

i think u just kinda answered your own question didnt you? science said the earth was not the center and the govnt said it was. point science. science said evolution the govnt said god. point science. science said plate techtonics govnt said no. point science. i mean theres millions. science cant get everything right but as far as histories concerned science is blowing govnts and political systems out. the numbers dont lie. and since they've been watching the sun for  a long long time now its not just a guess. its an educated theory based on logic and science. saying its the sun and not us sounds like a copout. which were famous for doing.

Answer 3

Well, "skeptics" include me, the best company you can have.  Your guys can tag along, too.

Answer 4

The public is led to believe that global warming is a myth by a very sophisticated and well funded effort underway to convince people of that.  It is very similar to the campaign used by the tobacco industry in the past:

http://www.nowpublic.com/whos_paid_to_de...

You can call tobacco lobbyists good company if you like.

If the Russian published his theory in a peer-reviewed paper, you could have a paper to counteract the ones that agree with the consensus:

http://norvig.com/oreskes.html

The consensus was quantified in a Science study by Prof. Naomi Oreskes (Dec. 2004) in which she surveyed 928 scientific journal articles that matched the search [global climate change] at the ISI Web of Science. Of these, according to Oreskes, 75% agreed with the consensus view (either implicitly or explicitly), 25% took no stand one way or the other, and none rejected the consensus.

Here's more good company, scientific organizations who all say that we're causing the warming and that we have reason to be concerned:

NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

National Academy of Sciences (NAS)

State of the Canadian Cryosphere (SOCC)

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Royal Society of the United Kingdom (RS)

American Geophysical Union (AGU)

American Institute of Physics (AIP)

National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

American Meteorological Society (AMS)

Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS)

Academia Brasiliera de Ciências (Bazil)

Royal Society of Canada

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Academié des Sciences (France)

Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany)

Indian National Science Academy

Accademia dei Lincei (Italy)

Science Council of Japan

Russian Academy of Sciences

Royal Society (United Kingdom)

National Academy of Sciences (United States of America)

Australian Academy of Sciences

Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts

Caribbean Academy of Sciences

Indonesian Academy of Sciences

Royal Irish Academy

Academy of Sciences Malaysia

Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) alone has 50,000 members... apparently you think that you know something that they don't?

So if your single Russian is a scientist, did he publish his theory in a peer-reviewed journal?  The article you referenced doesn't mention one.

Answer 5

Bob, you just showed how little you know about this subject.  They are 99% sure that lack of sunspots led to the Little Ice Age we are still coming out of.  Realclimate.org is not a valid site.  Completely biased and ran by geoscientists and by your argument, geoscientists are not qualified to discuss climate.  Plus most of them has "climatologists by training".  No qualified educational background.

Should I cut and paste some arguments too?

Answer 6

No, they're not.  This is yet another question which lists a few "skeptics", with long discredited theories, and then claims that thousands of climatologists are idiots or liars.

The Sun has been conclusively ruled out as a source of recent global warming.

"Recent oppositely directed trends in solar

climate forcings and the global mean surface

air temperature", Lockwood and Frolich (2007), Proc. R. Soc. A

doi:10.1098/rspa.2007.1880

http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/pro...

News article at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6290228.st...

"cosmoclimatology" is a hoax.  Sunspots don't affect the Earth's temperature in any significant way:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/arc...

Note that even the Danish Prime Minister doesn't accept that particular conclusion of the "Danish Space Agency" (which is simply a few guys at a university, not a major organization).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...

The NASA site you refer to is old, and NASA is now among all the major scientific organizations which say that global warming is mostly caused by us.

So, no, the "skeptics" are not in good company.   Global warming scientists are.

The National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Physics, the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Association, etc.

EVERY major scientific organization says global warming is real, and mostly caused by us.  The bottom line:

"The fact that the community overwhelmingly supports the consensus is evidenced by picking up any copy of Journal of Climate or similar, any scientific program at the meetings, or simply going to talk to scientists. I challenge you, if you think there is some un-reported division, show me the hundreds of abstracts that support your view - you won't be able to. You can argue whether the consensus is correct, or what it really implies, but you can't credibly argue it doesn't exist."

NASA's Gavin Schmidt

EDIT - You bring up an excellent example in geocentrism.

Once Galileo brought in the data (phases of Venus) there was a strong scientific consensus that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

It was ignorant "skeptics" who ignored data and science, who continued to maintain that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and persecuted Galileo.  

The parallels between the scientific consensus brought about by Galileo, and the scientific consensus about global warming brought about by thousands of climatologists are clear.

Answer 7

Jello.... you've probably already seen this ...... the list of signatories is impressive.  So yes, we skeptics are in good company.

Exerpts from Dec. 13th letter to the Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations on the UN Climate conference in Bali:

Re: UN climate conference taking the World in entirely the wrong direction

It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables. We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.

The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years.

The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by ¬government ¬representatives. The great ¬majority of IPCC contributors and ¬reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts.

In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is "settled," significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming. But because IPCC working groups were generally instructed (see http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/wg1_ti... to consider work published only through May, 2005, these important findings are not included in their reports; i.e., the IPCC assessment reports are already materially outdated.

Edit:  Well....I can see by the number of 'thumbs-down' that I made a valid point!!

Answer 8

I don't think either of the first 2 groups (certainly not NASA) or the one Russian scientist dispute the fact that solar irradiance has not increased over the past several decades.  Therefore I don't see why you conclude that the Danish National Space Center or NASA are AGW skeptics.  NASA certainly isn't.  As for the lone Russian scientist who has no data to support his conclusions - no, I don't think one scientist with zero data makes "good company".

Answer 9

The left loves their conspiracy theories.  You will notice that their pet theory AGW that is going to kill us all (unless we put them in charge) is being attacked by the great right wing cabal, tobacco and big oil.  The left seeks to demonize industry it doesn't approve of and blame it on everything.  I don't like tobacco, but it is amuzing to me that they attempt to link tobacco with global warming.  I suppose pretty soon they will accuse those who are skeptical of AGW of promoting cancer.  If you can't win an argument, smear your opponents.