Why do believers think that science backs up global warming 100%?

Question

When i ask my questions on global warming i keep comming up with answers from believers who tend to keep comming up with the same words again and again: Science, all, beyond doubt, fact, proven, scientists, and major scientific groups.

There was never any big debate to prove AGW was real or not, and not all scientists agree with AGW. Yet believers often refer to it as the 100% gospel of truth/fact when they argue against us skeptics.

WHY? WHY DO THEY DO THIS?

Answer 1

It's not 100%.  But it's 99%.  And you shouldn't take my word for it (or anyone else's word here).  I'll prove it.  The proof is mostly in the links, it's WAY too much for a Yahoo answer.

This is science and what counts is the data, not people's intuition.

"I wasn’t convinced by a person or any interest group—it was the data that got me. I was utterly convinced of this connection between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change. And I was convinced that if we didn’t do something about this, we would be in deep trouble.”

Vice Admiral Richard H. Truly, USN (Ret.)

Former NASA Administrator, Shuttle Astronaut

Here are two summaries of the mountain of peer reviewed data that convinced Admiral Truly and the vast majority of the scientific community, short and long.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Ima...

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report....

summarized at:

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report...

There's a lot less controversy about this is the real world than there is on Yahoo answers:

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/a...

And vastly less controversy in the scientific community than you might guess from the few skeptics talked about here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_...

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/fu...

EVERY major scientific organization has issued an official statement that this is real, and mostly caused by us.  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.

Good websites for more info:

http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/f101.a...

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/sci...

http://www.realclimate.org

"climate science from climate scientists"

http://environment.newscientist.com/chan...

The real question here is why "skeptics" think anyone should listen to their word, or that of clearly political websites, instead of all the scientific proof.

Answer 2

For the same reason that people believe in gravity or that water is wet I guess.   There is no question about it.   You can say water is dry if you like, but you would be wrong.   Just because you want want water to be dry, it won't be.   Twist some facts, ignore others, come up with your own definition of wet, hire your own "experts",....   whatever you want, water will still be wet.

Answer 3

The AIR we breathe has a absolute pressure of one bar pressure which we call as barometric pressure which is found to be 1.032 Kilogram on a area of one square centimeter!

Just on one square meter we have the air pressure of 10,000 Kilos which is 10 Tons of force!

The standard AIR has a density of 1.2 kilogram for one cubic meter of volume at mean sea level condition!

So, for the area of one square meter to give a absolute pressure of 10 tons we find the AIR quantity acting on this surface area as 8333 Cubic meters of volume!

For one square kilometer of area we have one million square meters in conversion making the air acting with force of 10 Million tons which shows the AIR quantity to be 8333 million Cubic meters of volume! This equals to 8.333 Billion Cubic meters of AIR!

The Earth has a total surface area of 510 million square kilometers! So, the total force of AIR on Earth is equal to

510 million X 10 Million Tons! This means 5,100 Million Million tons which is 5,100 X 1000 X Billion Tons! This can be said finally as 5,100 TRILLION TONS!

The Volume of the total air acting on Earth surface can be find out as 8.333 Billion Cubic meters X 510 Million which would be 42,50,000 TRILLION CUBIC METERS! This can be said as 4,250 MILLION CUBIC KILOMETERS OF AIR!

BY THE ABOVE, WE CAN UNDERSTAND THAT EVEN TO RAISE THE CARBON CONTENT BY ONE PERCENT IN WEIGHT MEASURE WE NEED TO SEND EMISSION OF 51 TRILLION TONS OF CARBON TO THE ATMOSPHERE! BUT WE ARE HARDLY SENDING LESS THAN A BILLION TONS OF CARBONIC EMISSION TO THE ATMOSPHERE, ANNUALLY BY ALL OF OUR FUELS BURNING IN THE CARS,FACTORIES, ENGINES, POWER BOILERS, ETC!

Hence, even to see a RING OF CARBON IN THE AIR we need to adulterate one percent of AIR quantity which means 51 Trillion tons which may take just another 51,000 YEARS AT THE CURRENT LEVEL OF AIR POLLUTION!

Even if we could do a better estimate, we definitely don't have to worry for the next TEN THOUSAND YEARS! In the meantime in next three centuries the complete reserve of OIL, COAL and other fossil fuels would have exhausted and man could have invented all new sources of energy which would also be pollution free to keep the world safe for million of years for humanity to survive!

The climatic change, the floods world over, polar ice melt and the sea water rise and many more cannot be attributed purely to the air pollution and the carbon emission and all about the cosmic effect of solar radiation, weakening of our atmosphere, Earth's rotational and solar orbital change, the decline of Earth's tilt on Equator and many more aspects have not been seriously studied to access the impact on the natural calamities! However we need to agree on the solid and fluid suspended particulate matter (SPM) in the AIR does create the health hazards and in this angle the issue needs to be addressed more to combat all its effects on humanity!

Answer 4

I tend to think it is happening and most scientists agree, because of what I read in journals like Nature, Geophysical Research letters, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, and Science.

I find nothing even remotely convincing about information from web sites called newsbusters, wattsupwiththat and numerous other sites that are little more than blogs and petitions that are complete fiction. And attempts to muddy the waters with rubbish about Mars, Jupiter and even Pluto when it is fact (sorry) that SOHO and the satellites before it, that have been monitoring the Sun for 30 years have observed no increase in output, that would account for the warming over that same period..

Having worked in a climate science group for ~20 years I know the reality of the "consensus" and it very strong and whether you like the phrases or not it is a 'fact' that all the 'major scientific groups' support AGW and most are groups who elect their boards each year or 2 and if they didn't agree with AGW they would have voted in those that represented their views.

Answer 5

Johan,

No-one is saying that CO2 will not raise tempertures, it is just how much and weather it will be harmful.  

Do we have a net negative feedback, or a net positive feedback?  Until you can answer this I will not take you as credible.  

According to the IPCC we have warmed .6 deg C +/-.2 deg C.  Of this .2-.3 is pre 1940 where carbon would have small effect.  

From 6.3/4.4*ln(385/285)= about .43 deg C

At each extreme we have .3 deg C natual and .4 deg C total temperature change.  We see that we should have a .73 degree change instead see .4 we have a negative feedback  of .33 deg. C last centure or about 40%

The other extreme is .2 deg C natural and .8 degree total.  For this to balance we would need a positive feedback of .17 deg C or about 21 %.

Answer 6

Because 99 34/100% rounds up.  :)

A little more seriously, in a democracy, a 51% vote can make you president.

Answer 7

They do this because GW is deeply important to them personally.  There are various reasons for this but I suspect it is because they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves, and don't have anything else that makes them feel the way GW does.

With science you are supposed to be disinterested.  If GW's were somehow convinced that GW is a scam, it would devastate them.  Most scientists would simply shrug and move on.

Answer 8

The way science works is this- people come up with hypotheses that are tested by experiment, data and predictions. The successful hypotheses become theories. When someone comes up with a contraversial theory such as anthropogenic global warming, it is attacked on all sides in every imaginable way by people who doubt it or seek to prove that it is false. After decades of these battles, the theory of anthropogenic global warming has not only survived, but has come out even stronger. There will be no stronger attacks than the one it already had to get through to gain the concensus of the world's best and brightest. So to say that there is no debate on the issue is absolutely absurd.

Answer 9

I think most of the "believers," as you call us, don't say AGW has been proved 100%, just like all the other accepted theories out there. The only reason there is a big resistance to the theory is the affects of implementing counter measures to the predicted outcomes of AGW. People don't want change and have an unwarrented fear of a mythical government control machine at work. Moving to a carbon-lite or carbon-neutral society is beneficial and lucrative. But people are afraid of change. You don't see people up in arms because of the theory of star formation. Why not? Because, it doesn't affect them in any way. But, tell someone what they do is bad for the environment, some will rebel and put up a defence of their actions. After all, how can something that feels so good be so bad. If you have to justify your actions by your feelings, your not being objective.

Adam - I've always noticed it, and I've always said that if they had something fresh and compelling to add to the debate, they would post it. But, they don't have anything and that's why we see so many off-the-wall questions that are not meant to stimulate the mind but to confuse it. That is their only objective. The more they confuse people the more time it takes for people to realize action is necessary.

Answer 10

For them it does.  If a study comes out to counter what they already believe, then they attack the study, the scientist, or even the building he works from.

To them "real" scientist can only believe in AGW.  If you don't "believe" then you aren't a real scientist.

Answer 11

99% for and 1% skeptical ... belief or data doesn't make much difference, those are overwhelming odds.  

99% learning and doing and succeeding in life, 1% arguing for a disappearing way of life.  I wonder if the dinosaurs roared in protest at their impending extinction, too.

Instead of believing qualified people you choose to follow the advice of people who slap Dr. in front of a fake name and pretend to be knowledgeable.  Hard to argue with people who "believe" that type of nonsense.

Answer 12

There are moderate believers in global warming who welcome information and discussion, then there are the extremists who, in the same way religious extremists do, battle everything that disputes their left-leaning comfort zone.  Due to some form of fascist brainwashing, data and facts on this topic are, to them, unimportant.  They seem to have a strong desire to be controlled by others, and have their life's choices predetermined.

Why do they do this you ask?  Because it is part of the leftist thinking doctrine.  Limiting freedom and having the state decide what's best appeals to them.

Answer 13

I think it's the paradigm they operate in.  People don't lie about environmental disasters.  The proof must be there and the more we look for proof, the more proof we will find.  

Anything that doesn't support AGW (like actually measuring the absorbtion properties of CO2) must be flawed.

For me the question is why do believers think science backs up AGW at all?

Answer 14

Science doesn't work in debates.  For the record, there have been debates on the subject, but they didn't prove anything either way.  Global warming is not some political issue that you can convince people about in a debate - it's science.  That's why we tell you to look at the scientific evidence.  For example:

http://greenhome.huddler.com/wiki/global...

Honestly, there is no debate anymore in the scientific community as to what's causing the current warming.  Everyone knows it.  Sure there are laypeople who listen to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and think it's all a scam, but in the scientific community, the debate about the cause is over.  For proof, see the 'Consensus' section here:

http://greenhome.huddler.com/wiki/global...

Answer 15

In doubt if anyone has said that anything is 100% proven.

What we do say is that a majority of:

- non-aligned, globally recognised experts in climatology agree on the overall issues of GW;

- respectable and credible global organisations (e.g. UN, WMO) with expertise in global warming agree on the overall issues of GW;

- the empirical evidence (easily verified by individuals) is so overwhelmingly supportive of the GW theory that any intelligent, scientific-minded individual with an open mind would come to the same conclusion

Slightly off topic, am I the only one who is noticing a tendency for the AGWs becoming increasingly hysterical in their questions and quoting a lot of unattributed "statements" from GWers (that look as if they are made up)?

Answer 16

Because it does, as well as any other accepted scientific theory.

Why, why do woefully ignorant people post the same nonsense over and over?  Why do they do this?

Answer 17

WHY???

Maybe because no scientific evidence has been given by skeptics that the additional CO2 in our atmosphere will not have a greenhouse effect just like the one which was already there from pre-industrial level.

Answer 18

You answered your question when you used the term "believers".  Believers in Global Warming have a religious fervor to their beliefs.  That will not change their opinion, despite what the facts say.  They have faith in their beliefs and they will not waver.  They will believe anything that their cult leader, Al Gore tells them to believe.

Answer 19

no its to enslave you watch> Global warming threat (pre)arranged 1961?

Answer 20

Gee, we'd much prefer to argue with you on the scientific evidence. But you don't have any scientific evidence. All you've got are websites run by politicians and political interest groups.

So if you want to argue science, go ahead. We're waiting.

[crickets]