I have been reading both sides of the issue for years. I haven't bought it.
Time will tell.
Reading is fun
Confessions of a climate change denier
As time goes on, I believe less and less that humans have caused us to reach the verge of a climate change tipping point. I used to believe in global warming but here's the thing; I keep reading articles written by pro climate change authors and it's becoming clearer and clearer from the data that the certainty they ascribe to an anthropogenic climate change tipping point is more uncertain than ever. We are now in the period the climate change scientists call the pause. The “pause” is the term global warming adherents use to describe the past 18 to 26 years in which actual global temperatures haven't risen to the levels predicted by their models by a sizable margin.
As more former climate change believers begin to doubt, the warmists are relying more on a shrill narrative than on science to convince the rest of the world that manmade climate change is real. Now year after year as the actual data which contradicts the warmist models piles up, the only thing still predictably rising is the virulent rhetoric the warmist truthers are using to desperately cling to their crumbling narrative.
Take for example the words of Phil Plait who in May 2014 wrote for Slate magazine, “The scientific argument about the existence of climate change itself is long since over. The evidence is in, and it’s real. To deny that is as fundamentally wrong as denying the Earth is round.” Well, the conclusion that the earth is round isn't based upon statistical models that have a 20-year track record of inaccuracies.
During the same 20-year period in which climate models continued to miss the mark and create more uncertainty, the International Panel on Climate Control (IPPC) continued to increase the certainty of their own estimates regarding the accuracy of their conclusions.
The IPPC went from putting no numerical assessment on their accuracy ten years ago to a 66 percent chance that climate change is anthropogenic five years ago until today where they conclude there is a greater than 90 percent chance that global warming is manmade. That means the correlation coefficient between the inaccuracies of their models and the self-proclaimed accuracy of their conclusions is high indeed.
Based upon that very high level of correlation, we can project that if an additional 20 years of data which doesn't conform with their models occurs then the IPCC will be 99.99 percent certain that global warming is manmade.
It's not that I don’t believe the physics of carbon dioxide and other naturally occurring or manmade greenhouse gases which trap heat, or that the climate is constantly changing. The more I read about humans being the primary reason the climate has changed and that such change is nearing the tipping point, the less I believe those making the arguments. In the past several months I have read several dozen articles by climate change scientists published in various media and posted on blogs and other websites. The problem is their arguments are: one, more rhetoric and less science; two, highly alarmist despite contradictory results; and three, they purposefully understate the economic cost of their proposed solutions.
A typical argument you read from a warmist truther is “I am a scientist, and several thousand other scientists agree with me; therefore I am right and you are wrong” despite contradictory data. Where is the science in that? If these same scientists could offer a reasonable explanation as to why the actual data doesn’t conform to their models it would be a lot more convincing; not that they haven't tried. The latest theory to explain the “pause” is that all the missing heat is trapped in the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean but not in any of the other oceans. This recent theory is based on a single study with a relatively small sample size and single network of data gathering instruments.
Many warmists hastily conclude this single small study of the Atlantic Ocean is proof global warming is real after all; never mind earlier they claimed that they originally came to the conclusion that global warming was real only after examining tens of thousands of data points being run over and over again through hundreds of models, over many many years.
Never mind the actual surface temperature results don't conform to these models predictions; never mind more accurate studies have shown the polar bear population is thriving, never mind that they predicted polar ice caps would be gone by 2015.
I suppose all of that global warming rhetoric would be benign except based on that rhetoric in the coming months and years we will all be forced to pay thousands of dollars and have a reduced standard of living to offset the effects of a problem that is by the day becoming more uncertain.
The earth after all is most definitely round and no amount of shrill rhetoric will make it otherwise.
