@Thucy,

"key words: 'they're not climate scientists'"

Those would be key words if I were citing them as evidence against AGW. But since I explicitly said otherwise, and myself pointed out their field in order to make clear I wasn't doing so, they're only key words for calling into question your own reading comprehension.

Yes, they're not climate scientists -- but that almost no relevance for the effectiveness of their existence in rebutting the claim that denying AGW is analogous to denying the holocaust. There are virtually no serious historians around who deny the holocaust, whether or not their area of study is the twentieth century or Germany. Denying AGW among scientists a little outside of, well, the field of AGW, on the other hand, is surprisingly common.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but round here Climate Change (a nifty re-branding of Global Warming) often seems to cite the phrase "<insert warming incident> since records began" and the fine print is that "records began" in the last 40/60/80/100 years. Statistically that's even less significant than the pimple on my butt.
And yet, any discussion of this is howled down.

Next they'll be denying us the right to expose the truth that vaccinations cause autism in children.

@YJ - Dont' want to get in to what with me? You asked why someone would support AWG even if it was wrong - and I gave the simple, obvious answer: Pragmatism. Achieving political/social-engineering objective • Objectives through non-political means – hold the climate gun to the world’s head and tell them they’ll all die unless they comply to x,y,z…(Oh, and keep your cushy job whiloe you at it – the one with no reasonable expectation of success). There isn’t anything to discuss – it’s a viable explanation, and to disprove it requires you to prove a negative, thus we sit at an impasse.

Nah, I just know where this road leads. Here there be serpents.

No impasse, you win :)

The infamous Gore-Mann-Jones Hockey Stick Graph has a time axis is of the order of a thousand years. It must be pointed out that this representation is largely NOT based on direct temperature measurement, but rather proxy data. Chief amongst these is that of the tree-ring record. There are many problems with these data; e.g., sample selection - over how much of the Earth do trees actually grow? Although for now it is salient to point out recent (decadal) tree-ring evidence directly contradicts the physically measured temperature record. Climate scientists themselves have a name for this; they call it - "the divergence". The question that likely springs to mind to any reasonable scientist or layman is if we currently have a divergence between the tree-ring and temperature record then how reliable is the tree ring data as a proxy for past temperatures? Why, for example, does the historically well documented Medieval Warm Period or subsequent Little Ice Age not feature in the largely horizontal Hockey Stick Graph's base-line? If current temperatures are not unprecedented then how can we be sure what the principal driver(s) is? Indeed, in the geological record (even on a very short millennial scale), the ice core data, for example, would suggest that there is nothing exceptional about current temperatures.

I also have concerns about unalloyed computational modelling which has been used as a predictive tool. Most of these models actually ignore, for example, the clouds as an input – maybe this should tell us all we need to know on that front. I have rattled on about this here in the past so maybe I shouldn't repeat myself excessively now.

My view in summary is then yes CO2 is indeed a greenhouse gas. However, given the complexity of the as yet poorly understood climatic/weather system, to say its heightened anthropocentrically derived input to the atmosphere will necessarily raise GMST (global mean surface temperature) is undeniably simplistic, perhaps to the point of being wrong. Finally there is nothing wrong with scepticism that is how knowledge, particularly in the sciences, advances. The record shows that every certainty is eventually overturned and that critical thinking, observation and experimentation are all that ultimately counts. As for consensus - that is for politicians, not scientists.

@YJ – Abondon all hope all ye you passeth down this road, for hereupon you will find truth…

Yes, but CO2 has more effects. Also, even if they are not uniquely responsible for what is happening in the global climate, they are quite likely a significant part, and the global climate is pretty dangerous these days. Rising water levels, more dangerous tropical storms, more frequent and dangerous flooding... Even if CO2 itself is a minor actor in the story, reducing our footprint on the world can help.

Even if...even if....we don't know....blah blah blah...we.faked data...

BUT IT'S TRUE BECAUSE WE SAY SO....and you're all gonna dieeeeeeeeee!

Can I have my funding now?

Phil...CO2 is a LAGGING.indicator of temperature change...not a cause.

The question of finance driving research, to the possible exclusion of good science, is a valid one on several levels. For example, I have spoken to climatologists who realise that their gross understanding of the Global system is inadequate and yet they are undertaking more and more fine-detailed (on a geographical scale) work as a result of them following the funding. The explanation is simple - governments are keen to find out what is supposidly going to happen on their patch.

Fulhamish - I say it's a little more base than that...government are keen to tell their voters what the voters want to hear. Since the government has been telling us for the last 15-20 years with very loud voices that we are all going to die from global warming, they disdain the volume of egg on their faces that they would receive wee it suddenly discovered that what they were funding was wrong....because that would cost them votes.

So the politicians keep funding the chaps that keep giving them the answers they want to hear so they can keep telling the voters they will die if they vote for the other guy (who won't fund the bogus research).

The chaps getting the funding keep telling everyone they will die if they don't keep getting their funding, even though none of their dire warnings ever come through (we just need more funding...we'll figure out why we are always wrong after just a few dollars more...)

fullhamish - thank you for pointing out your ignorance on all things scientific. It makes it easier to disregard you. Consensus is exactly what scientists want to achieve. To provide proof so overwhelming that the most skeptical (which all scientists should be) have no choice to acknowledge that it is overwhelmingly likely.

This has already been accomplished re: AGW within the circles that matter (not you, for instance).

Please provide the names and credentials of the wealth of climate scientists you have spoken to personally. I'd love to inquire with them directly.

Consensus....does not exist...

Consensus is an interesting thing, because apparently, despite one's scientific background, in order for their dissenting opinion to count against the consensus, one must be a part of the club. But the cub is *notoriously* vigilant about not letting any diseenters in the front door to muddy up their perfectly formed circle jerk...

"We're diverse!" they yelled
"NO you're not. You're all WHITE!"
"Well of course...only white's are allowed!"

OK, so here is how it works. Government morons (most of our politicians) get this idea in their head put there by some whack job who wants funding. They then throw money at it and many scientists start taking the money.

Those scientists know which side their bread is buttered on and deliver the results the government morons want because the scientists want more money.

The sheeple believe the results because their elected morons tell them they should and start to panic.

Government morons use the "sheeple panic" as a means of making money through taxing the sheeple and the corporations they have convinced the sheeple are doing this big bad thing which is then passed on, in part, to the scientists with the government morons finding other uses for some of it.

Solution - stop having the government fund science or at least taking the funding decisions out of the government morons' hands.

@krellin: this is true, if the "club" includes only climatologists. Why would you want anybody else's input?

@draugnar: government funding is a huge and important part of science. Research done under government grants is considered far more trustworthy than research done under the funding of oil companies or tobacco companies with a huge financial interest.

Government research funding is only allocated by politicians, not distributed. The distribution is done by a board of scientific professionals - experts in the field. The government has no further say in what results are printed after the money is granted. Having worked under industrial funding, I am more aware than most of the implications of private funding on results.

This clip from Niel De Grass Tyson should help alleviate any doubts that government funding for scientific research is just a left wing moneygrab.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7Q8UvJ1wvk

@YJ - I never mentioned anything about private funding and for good reason. They are just as likely to be seeking a specific result, if not more so. But you can't tell me with a straight face that there is no politics involved in who gets what government grant money.

my question is still why they (the politicians) would want to support global warming research when they now it isn't true. wouldn't they get a lot more money (krellin's main explanation why the politicians do this from what i gathered) if they support anti-global warming research AND collect money from various car manufacturers, plantation operators ect? just wondering.

@Draug

Who's going to fund research if not government or industry?

What kasimax and abge said is basically my joint response as well.

Yellowjacket it is a shame that you resort to insult as an answer to my post.

On consensus, however, I am reminded of the advice given to Max Planck by his PhD supervisor the Munich physics professor von Jolly in 1874- "in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes."

Planck went on to open up the field of quantum theory and win the Nobel Prize for physics in 1918 - so much for consensus.

@abge - That's why I said a less political means of distribution is needed. IT should n't be that the government sets aside X dollars for Climate Research and Y dollars for AIDS research. It should be that the government gives a panel of scientists from many disciplines, including physics, chemistry, medicine, climatology, etc., Z dollars - the total budget - and the committee of non-political scientists review applications and distribute grants accordingly. Right now there are several committees depending on the subject of the research, not just one, and the politicians decide which *subject* gets the most grant money.

Sorry for the insult, but reading things like that really get under my skin.

Re: your Planck quote - do not mistake a desire for consensus as absolute certainty that a thing is true, or a closemindedness towards new results. There is a current consensus among scientists that gravity is a force caused by the attraction mass has for other mass. The theory has been validated and vetted and found to hold up extremely well. But with the emergence of new data a paradigm shift could very well occur.

The same can be said of AGW. Climatologists aren't close minded against climate change deniers. It's just that the deniers are unable to counter the vast and favorable body of data supporting AGW. As it becomes more and more clear, there is increasingly less reason to remain skeptical.


Since you chose not to respond, am I correct then in concluding that you have never spoken to a climatologist personally, and that your quote that, "their gross understanding of the Global system is inadequate" is wholly fabricated?

"The politicians decide which *subject* gets the most grant money."

So you often don't like the way politicians allocate funds. This sounds like a far more general problem than just scientific research, Draugnar. Still, the model you propose is interesting.

@Draug

I don't think what you said is accurate. For instance, the NSF, which accounts for a decent chunk of research, is given a budget and then awards grants based on merit. I don't think they're told how to spend it. The same goes for the NIH.

NIH = National Institute of Health. They are *going* to spend it on medical research as that is their charter, is it not? The NSF is a little more open, but even they have predesignated funding categories, http://www.nsf.gov/funding/azindex.jsp

OK, but "health" is a huge field. You seriously want one organization for *all* science, medicine, and technology? I doubt that would help anything.

The categories for funded you listed were created by the NSF for researchers, exactly as you said you wanted.

Yes. A panel made up of experts from hundreds of disciplines. It can have subcommittees that validate grants and recommend approval to the full committee.

No, I don't want categories. I want each grant request considered on its merit. Or for there to be an "open" category that research hat doesn't fit their mold could apply under.