Top-10 Ways to tell a Global Warming doubter probably hasn't done any research?

Question

I'll start the list:

1) They criticize (or just mention) Al Gore

2)

Answer 1

Was such a list compiled for the 'Ice-Age-is-a-Coming' deniers of the 1970's??!!  Oops.....Guess I shouldn't have mentioned that here....I forgot....that 'Ice-Age-Thingy' didn't happen....did it!?

Whoa....those were some quick thumbs...nice retort!

And the AGW folks are quick to claim that the 1970's 'Ice Age' didn't happen because....all of a sudden.... Man did something to stop it in its tracks......Sheesh!!  

Okay....Em....your "peer-reviewed" publication shows conclusively that Man did something in the course of 2 or 3 years that brought the Ice Age to a screeching halt???  I'll read a link on that one!!!  AND you want a "peer-reviewed" publication to back up what I stated??!!  In other words, I need to find a group of scientists to publish a report that  the 1970's Ice Age scare was a  not a figment of someone's imagination???...... WOW!!

Answer 2

1,000,000) Believes in a multitude of conspiracy theories and use these as proof against global warming as a valid scientific theory.

Answer 3

Top reason why proponents of the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory on this site are hypocrites:  

1.  They're using a computer.

Actions speak louder than words.  If AGW is such a threat, stop wasting time and electricity on the internet.  Why don't you actually get up and ride a bus to your state capital?  Maybe start demanding change?  I guarantee you that sitting here on this forum and yelling at someone is not going to save the planet.  You people know better than that don't you?

Poking fun at another persons questioning of a scientific theory is not mature.  It is absolutely "Un-American" too.  Granted, your side has been verbally attacked before, but some side has to be the mature one.  Some of the reasons people have listed as "Ways to tell an AGW doubter hasn't done any research" are actually legitimate questions or statements asked or said by the "doubters" side.

This confirms my point that neither side is interested in getting to the bottom of the science.  They're just interested in bickering.

P.S.  I doubt AGW, and I have researched and I always will be researching.  I have not been convinced yet.  I will not list my reasons for doubting here because some slick wilson will put it on their list no matter how good my reasons happen to be.  Farewell.

Answer 4

Geez, I think the list is pretty close to complete. I'll add,

*is a frequent listener to talk radio and Fox news

*is a fundamentalist Christian

*Thinks that everyone else is crazy or dumb but themselves

After reading the post above me I have to add another-

*Attacks the alarmist media as if sensationalism of AGW  is evidence that it doesn't really exist at all.

Answer 5

2) are not able to give a source

3) refer to websites copying themselves in an endless loop

4) present old theories already proven wrong as "new evidence"

5) claims a list of "scientists"  where most people graduate in non scientific fields

6) come from their political conclusion (stated first) to very shabby science

7) presents arguments contradicting themselves

8) presents facts which are illogical

9) uses general phrases "it is commonly accepted.."

10) is confused with terminologies

11) is confused with units

12) does not present figures

13) use a small part of an article taken out of context while the  main article (complete) would contradict them

14) states a political think tank as a "reliable source"

15) uses links from Sen. Inhofe webpage

16) takes different points of view according to the hour of the day (alternatively skeptics of various points but no consistent claims)

17) uses very old articles (1995)

18) copies 1 to 1 the content of an email or website

19) uses pre-industrial situations to predict whether man can have or not an impact on the climate

20) has no concept of time scales

21) has no concept of global scales

22) does not understand some concepts

23) refers to things he does not understand (e.g. mathematic modelling and simulations)

-) refers to Al Gore jets or his house

-) pretends that any advancemenent toward clean technologies will put us back to the stone age

Answer 6

You miss the point - the reason they doubt is becasue they HAVE done the research

Answer 7

Top 10 ways to know Global Warming is alot about nothing

1.  Any warming is claimed to be harmful when in reality a 5 year old child knows better (at least one that hasn't been propagandized to).

2. claim that warming nights are a bad thing

3. Claim that waming winter temps are a bad thing

4 claim that melting glaciers is necessarily a bad thing

5 claim that a couple inches of rise in sea level is going to wipe us off the earth

6. Claim that the earth is heating up so obviously we are all going to die (assuming the ocean doesn't drown us first).

7. Claim that all warming is human-caused (or even most) as if they know everything about climate

8. Claim all cooling is human-caused.

9.  Claim that if we only sacrifice a little bit and listen to them that we will survive, maybe but it is going to be close.

10. Claim that AGW is about science when clearly it is about politics.  Yes, I know so admiral and McCain have swallowed the Kool-Aid as well.

I should have made it a top 40 list.

Answer 8

"Silencing Science" published by the Cato Institute, has some interesting stories about Al Gore and about the IPCC report of 1995. Even probably dated, just like "the True State of the Planet" (sorry can't remember the editor), some professional experience with numerical simulations of complex physical systems, may make you weary of proselytizing.

Contrary to what Nickel Johann said in a previous question, GW knowledge is not up there next to gravity. NASA sends deep space probes that reach Saturn with an error of miles, if that much, but the weather man is unable to say for sure if it will rain in ten days.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?...

Answer 9

1) Criticizes (or just mentions) Al Gore.

2) Claims that as many or more scientists doubt AGW as agree with it.

3) Asks a simple question like "If humans are causing global warming, what made the planet come out of the last ice age?" and pretends it's a compelling argument.  In other words 'if I can't answer this question, obviously nobody can.'

4) Claims the current warming is part of a 'natural cycle' and doesn't know what causes natural cycles.

5) Claims the current warming is due to the Sun even though no scientific study has come to this conclusion.

6) "Global warming has stalled."

7) Makes a political remark (i.e. communist, liberal, etc.).

8) Makes a conspiracy remark (i.e. it's just the UN trying to take over the world).  Or my personal favorite, "follow the money".

9) Thinks scientists haven't considered the fact that climate has changed in the past, or that Mars is warming.

10) Thinks the greenhouse effect is unproven or that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will not increase the greenhouse effect even though Venus is hotter than Mercury.

11) Thinks that one volcanic eruption emits more CO2 than humans have in 5,000 years.

12) "It's snowing in Vermont in the middle of winter.  Where's global warming?!"

13) Can't answer a simple scientific question (i.e. how is the observed increase in greenhouse gases not causing warming?).

14) Cites JunkScience, Fox News, right-wing blog, Inhofe's site, etc.

15) Makes absurd claims with zero citations.

16) Blames global warming on water vapor, cow farts, beer/soda carbonation, etc.

17) Is named after a gelatinous substance, awarded himself an honorary doctorate, and rigged the voting system in order to gain some semblance of credibility despite being guilty of most of the items on this list.

18) "Models are just guesses" or "we can't predict the future".

19) "Soon they're going to tax us for breathing!"

20) Cites one outlying study and claims it disproves dozens of others which are in agreement.

21) Cites one scientist who has ignored the data and contradicted thousands of others.

22) "Warmer is better".

23) "More CO2 is good for plants".

24) "Blah blah blah Kool-Aid".

25) "They predicted global cooling/an ice age in the 1970s".

26) "They can't even predict the weather right for next week".

27) "The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and we only have good data for 50/100 years".

28) "Scientific consensus has been wrong before" or "the scientific consensus used to be that the Earth was flat!"

29) "The MWP was hotter" or "blah blah hockey stick".

30) The simple fact that they still doubt the AGW theory.

Answer 10

Strange that a good amount of items given can be valid for both sides.

Answer 11

1) Any mention of Al Gore.

2) No credible links.  They offer opinions on every topic, sometimes links to seriously biased sources (example above... nice), but rarely if ever a link to NASA, NOAA, or a scientific paper.

3) They answer every question with "Its just natural cycles" as if that were some sort of magic, and natural cycles did not need to have a cause.

4) They resort to name-calling: believers, warmies, greenies, idiots, etc.

5) Rather than restrict political party references to factual items, they throw out political stereotypes about people who hold a certain view: "libs", "liberal media," as if global climate had a political party.

6) They confuse weather with global climate.  They confuse understanding global climate trends with weather forecasting.

7) They make an ad hominem attack on the source of the research (or the poster of the question), instead of providing alternate research that they feel better supports their view.

8) They grossly misrepresent the findings of an article or paper (for example making the leap that one potential hot spot under a small corner of Greenland disproves all global warming research).

9) The response includes references to Bob or Dana (not that Bob or Dana are doing anything more than informing... it bugs the heck out of some people to feel outgunned or outsmarted).

10) They complain about the word "consensus," as if the word did not imply that alternate theories were considered or as if the IPCC process did not include and consider skeptics such as Gray, Lindzen, McKitrick, et al.  They were considered, the consensus was reached.  Get over it.  Skeptics currently have their fifth opportunity to provide better scientific evidence in time for the next IPCC report in 3 years.

11) They offer wild conspiracy theories instead of simply providing the evidence that global warming isn't true (if it were simply a conspiracy) or evidence that the physics of greenhouse gas warming have been magically suspended if the current warming wasn't due to human injection of carbon-based gasses into the atmosphere.  Global warming science is labeled "fear-mongering," which ironically overlooks that claiming that there is a global conspiracy is the only clear fear-mongering present.

12) They fail to understand (or even try to understand) the significance of warm nights (less radiation to space can occur through a more effective greenhouse gas atmosphere.  Remember the heat extremes on the moon?).

13) They use any variation of the glib "why is warming so bad?" line, which fails to consider the results of past warming on earth (extinction of most species on the planet; look up the Permian Triassic Extinction).

14) They compare people with a different understanding of the topic to children.  (Why educate yourself when insults are so much easier?)

Answer 12

2) think scientists pocket grant money

3) refer only to lower 48 US temperatures

4) thinks proxy data is accurate only if it dates back more than 250 million years.

5) thinks emissions rate and atmospheric concentration are the same thing

6) makes a statement about rover emissions on mars

7) thinks michael crichton books are scientific literature

8) every argument they use can be located in "The Great Global Warming Swindle"

Answer 13

2)  Does not know what a peer reviewed journal is.

3)  Thinks a blog is scientific evidence

Answer 14

The big problem with using the ice age theory to try and prove that AGW is a myth is that according to the 'natural cycles' that deniers love so much, we SHOULD have been going into an ice age. However, we didn't... almost as if....something was overriding these cycles and.....warming the planet? But what could that be?

"all of a sudden?" You mean the systematic result of releasing all the greenhouse gases stored in  the carboniferous? Whether you agree or not, my source is a PEER REVIEWED SCIENTIFIC PAPER (Ruddiman, Scientific American 292, 2005) what is yours? Debate is a good thing, but you need to at least present some substantiating evidence.

Science is an open and democratic system with a lot of debate. Have you studied global climate or earth systems for years? If not, do you know anyone who has who shares your opinion?

If I have a cough, I'll listen to my doctor about what causes it, even though he cannot guarantee to me that what he thinks is 100% accurate, he went to medical school and has a good idea how my body works. I will not listen to a random tramp in the street shouting that it's because the devil drank my spit. Nor will I listen to someone that read on a website coughs are normal and no-one can ever be sure what causes them and we should just ignore it because doctors are all in a worldwide liberal conspiracy led by Al Gore.

Answer 15

They say "The vast majority of......" blah blah blah.

Just like the Greenshirts do.

Answer 16

How about we have seen this all before?  We've already done our research.  We've lived through countless false scares, many of them generated by self-possessed doom-sayers with an agenda.  And they all turned out to be greatly exaggerated if not downright false.  

How about we actually stayed awake during science class?  No one with an ounce of scientific knowledge states that the science is in, that we know all the facts.  We've studied the climate of the earth and don't see current popular theories at all grounded in that knowledge.

How about some of us have advanced educations and have been exposed to modeling and simulation or dynamic systems.  We don't have to go to a website to know that climate models are highly suspect.  We've already seen how hard it is to model systems that are orders of magnitude less complex than the atmosphere.  

How about we don't accept the politics that global warming comes wrapped in.  Politicians are constantly trying to scare us into giving them more power.  We've come to learn that politicians lie, that everything  they say is a lie.  The sycophants that surround them lie.  Their entire existence is based on deceit.  They cannot be trusted.

Answer 17

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Henry Louis Mencken (1880- 1956 )

Global Carbon Tax

Over 100 Prominent Scientists Challenge UN Move For Global Carbon Tax

Experts dismiss agenda as "futile," bureaucratic scheme that will increase human suffering

Paul Joseph WatsonPrison PlanetFriday, December 14, 2007   

The UN has officially announced what the fearmongering about man-made global warming has been designed to justify all along - a global carbon tax which will do nothing to reduce carbon emissions but everything to feed the trough of world government. Over one hundred prominent scientists signed a letter dismissing the move as a futile bureaucratic scheme which will diminish prosperity and increase human suffering.

Following a discussion entitled “A Global CO2 Tax," a UN panel yesterday urged the adoption of “a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations,” to impose a tax on plant food (CO2).

Othmar Schwank, one of the participants, said that the U.S. and other wealthy nations need to “contribute significantly more to this global fund." He also added, “It is very essential to tax coal.”

The bounty from this $40 billion dollars a year windfall will go straight into the coffers of a UN controlled "Multilateral Adaptation Fund". What we see unfolding in Bali is one of the major final stepping stones on the road to a complete globalist stranglehold on reducing the living standards of everyone in the industrialized world, and a scheme to prevent the third world from ever lifting itself out of poverty.

Seven years ago former French President Jacques Chirac said the UN’s Kyoto Protocol represented "the first component of an authentic global governance." The imminent agreement arising out of the Bali summit will be one of the final nails in the coffin aimed at decimating the middle class and the right of free people to strive for prosperity and happiness without laboring under suffocating serfdom imposed by unelected elitists.

As MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen warned earlier this year, "Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat's dream. If you control carbon, you control life."

Lindzen is one of over 100 prominent scientists who have signed a letter slamming the UN move as a futile bureaucratic scheme, pointing out the results of a recent study in the International Journal of Climatology which concludes that climate change over the past thirty years is largely a result of solar activity and that attempts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are irrelevant.

Answer 18

They know what they are talking about????

And they know Gores a bold face liar.   Hows that?