Who are you most likely to believe when it comes to the issue of climate change?
Information on the contentious issues of global warming and climate change come from many sources, but which ones are you most likely to trust to provide you with fair and impartial information.
Here’s some suggestions…
TV, newspapers, radio
Internet blogs and forums
Scientific journals and websites
Teachers
Politicians
Scientists
Friends
I’m not ready to support a theory unless I’ve checked it for myself. When I started hearing about global warming as a problem, the first thing I checked was Keeling’s data, and the methodology used to get it. His experiment design, attention to detail, and accuracy are awesome. The next thing was to see if the CO2 was coming from fossil fuel. That was a lot slipperier because a lot of commercial estimates needed to be amalgamated and data was much less complete back in the 80′s, but it was possible to see that fossil fuel sources were larger than what remained in the air and nothing else came close. Newer data is much easier to acquire. I was already familiar with the general theory of greenhouse gas forcing but refreshed my memory with general reading and a check of the quantum physics involved – pretty easy for CO2 as it’s used in industrial lasers.
At this point I knew that CO2 had increased and was continuing to increase, that the primary forcing was fossil fuel consumption, and that it could be expected to increase the heat trapping of Earth’ s atmosphere.
The next question was "Is it enough to matter?"
It was pretty obvious to me at the time (mid-80′s) that there wasn’t good enough temperature data to tackle the question directly. The atmospheric system was also known to be complicated, with feedbacks going every which way and nobody with a good handle on quantifying them without a lot more data. I decided to look at the system from the outside and see what could be learned from there. Earth is a ball in space, heated from one side by the sun, and radiating in all directions. There’s enough solar and orbital data to show that solar input isn’t varying enough to affect trends for the next century or so. The unheated parts radiate enough to get freezing cold, on a yearly cycle at the poles graduating to a daily cycle at equatorial mountaintops. The (inside-out) analogy that occurred to me was of a house with a furnace going, icicles hanging from the eaves, and partially frosted windows. You can see net heating and cooling by what happens to the icicles and the frostlines on the windows. I therefore decide to look at where the meltlines were trending on earth.
Since then, I’ve seen long-stable Antarctic ice shelves collapse, Arctic sea ice decrease dramatically, and high-altitude glaciers disappear at an ever-increasing rate.
I realize that temperature effects lag heat retention – it takes a while to warm up an oven. I realize that CO2 levels continue to increase. I further realize that there are some major positive feedbacks as ice extent decreases allowing more radiation to be absorbed.
All of this leads me to believe that the experts aren’t deceiving themselves, and until I see a long-term reversal in the observables, the facts say that warming is occurring and accelerating faster than they predicted. I’ll accept their predictions until the observables (and I don’t mean short-term variability of small areas) prove them wrong.
As to the observables – I’ll get notification of them from the internet or other news sources, but will always check the journals for what the people who actually did the observations actually said. Increasingly, I can also look at the satellite data and pictures for myself.
Heinlein said it best – "What are the facts? Again and again and again, what are the facts?"
I’d go with scientific journals and websites.
i would likely believe in the documentaries prepared on this concerned topic because they r prepared with da guidance of researchers & environment experts
I’d believe my own common sense. Iceland volcano shuts down europes airports. Has L.A. ever closed due to smog? Global warming is BS.
Why, that’s easy. Believe the self-serving propaganda put out by the fossil fuel industry. Ever so much better than those refereed science journals that call for us to change our comfortable, mindless way of life.
Observational data and a priori reasoning.
The supposedly correct answer is "science journals and websites", but they do not seem to do a very good job. They often underestimate the global warming. I’m sure the "scientists" are very proud of themselves for not being "alarmists", but they *are* incompetent goofballs. The situation is so sick that it is considered "good" to be getting wrong answers if they fall on the side of the unscrupulous people pressuring the scientists. It is like referees at a hockey game siding with the home team, thinking that by leaning towards the side of the home team they are being fair.
James Hansen, though, really does have a great track record.
I would much rather go with Gore than the IPCC, and it is funny that many of the "scientists" on this board would not, thinking they are being scientific by robotically repeating the usual canned stuff about peer review, scientific qualifications, etc.; ignoring the EMPIRICAL evidence. The "scientists" on this board do not seem to value experimental evidence siding with Gore.
It of course is possible that Gore is just being lucky, but I doubt it. I’ve pointed out before that the IPCC calculates sea level rise by looking only at thermal expansion of the oceans, ignoring melting ice and falling ice from the land, the main causes. If Newton had tried to calculate the Earth’s orbit by including the gravitational effects of Mars and Venus on the Earth, but not the Sun, how would that have turned out??? While the IPCC scientists can be proud of themselves for not being "alarmists", they are spineless goofballs.
And as I keep noting, the recent rise in temperatures is not within the range one could expect from models. Even a cursory look indicates something has gone wild. But the IPCC is afraid to be "alarmists", and those non-Deniers here who lack the mathematical intuition to know that that you do not need long periods of data, and who pride themselves on not deviating from what the authorities say, ignore it.
Empirically Gore has done much better than the IPCC, and as an actual scientist, I will go with the empirical data on this one.
I go with the science I see before me and draw my own conclusions. I work as a non-degreed oilfield geologist. from what I have seen we have been coming out of an ice age some15,000 years ago. Of course there is some warming.
The controversy is that some want to say that recent drastic change is of human origin. The problem is that our record about weather paterns go back only 200 or so years. Some of these changes are cyclic and occure over thousands of years.
I believe that while we have contributed lots of CO2 the planet has ways of dealing with it. CO2 depletes ozone and so we end up with more lightening storms. Well, lightening creats ozone. So where does that leave us.
As for more frequent drastic events such as all the earthquakes and volcanic activity, consider this.
The middle of our planet is mostly molten liquid rock. We have tides as a result of the moon’s gravitational pull. A few years ago we had a planetary alignment, all the planets in our solar system lined up in a row. In the same year we had El Nino.
That whole thing with all the ancient calenders is based on our solar system crossing the galactic plane. Don’t you think we will experience some strong gravitational forces in doing that. I do. If our planet gets stretched a little the crust fractures a little these fractures result in the tectonic plates shifting allowing for greater fractures to occure this allows more magma to come closer to the surface this can increase the temperature of the planet. Only now we are talking about a cycle that repeats itself every 65 thousand years. Again, our records only go back about 200.
Working in the oilfield I can tell you there is no substance we subject the planet to that did not come from the planet. We are still learning how to use what we have.
TV, newspapers, radio that is scientifically proven by pro scientist B)
I get my information from the scientific literature, and if i don’t i always check the source of the info. However, i understand why this is sometime not an option for those outside academia.
PS
LOL at Meadow’s response. If you really trusted the data there is no way you could come up with the ramblings and misrepresentations you come up with on a daily basis. Either that or you have not a single idea how to analyze data properly.
1) Peer-reviewed scientific studies.
2) Climate scientists, particularly if they’re discussing peer-reviewed studies.
3) Scientific articles, as long as they’re from an informed source like Science Daily, particularly if they’re discussing peer-reviewed studies.
Ultimately the primary source of information needs to come from peer-reviewed science, or some reliable data set like GISTEMP, NSIDC, etc. The further removed the information is from the original scientific literature, the less reliable it is. Often I’ll go read the peer-reviewed study for myself after reading about it in a newspaper article.
Blogs, TV, etc. are highly unreliable and I don’t trust anything they say without checking it for myself.
This Credibility Spectrum is quite good.
http://climatesight.org/2010/04/25/a-better-credibility-spectrum/
Scientific journals and websites.
Not, as one eloquent answer here states when translated, cherry-picked data and foregone conclusions.