I believe this point is being missed in this entire climate change debate. There is no voting in science votes only count in politics. This is how to identify the scientist from the politian.

Thus the debate at present is not about science but on if we should bet and act on conjecture. When it become a matter of science the answer will be much more clear and sides will be taken but the facts will be science not thoughts and the direction of action will be plain regardless of the side one takes.

A nuclear explosion is science, if and when to use it is politics. This was not the problem until the bomb became science. Prior, it was a matter of if such a bomb could do what conjecture said it could? Then science proved it and there was no longer any doubt. We still have the politcal problem though.

I suggest this is where the climate debate is headed. My vote is that we get the science right first and then react according to our politics. If we allow politics to drive true science we will end up with a replica of the “science” of economics or worse still Polictical “science”. I doubt there is a need to vote on veracity of this fact. I guess it must be science then?

QED

Jack

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

It lists the US as 7794.8 KG oil equivalent per year. 5% of that is 389.74.
Bangladesh, Benin, Ivory Coast, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritria, Ethiopia, Haiti, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, and Yemen are the 12
countries listed as conusming less than 5% of US energy. Somalia is not listed. The 95% for the US was estimated off the top of my head based on an estimate of the US consuming 4 times average per capita energy, having
5% of the world’s population, and the fact that the goal of global warming initiatives is to cut back emissions 80% of 1990 levels. My guestimate of
95% for the US may well have been UNDERESTIMATED once the fact that my calculaiton was an off the top of my head calculation, and that 1990 world energy production rather than 2003 world energy production would be the base.

Most of you have never seen the countries listed above, but I’ll bet a significant portion have visited Mexico. Mexico consumes over 3 3/4 tiems the amount of energy we’d have to cut back, and Mexico is not exactly a paradise overflowing with energy.-

The recent warming coincided with a grand solar maximum, a run of powerful El Nino events within a positive (warming) Pacific Decadal Oscillation and a poleward shift in all the main air circulation systems.

All those factors have been going into reverse since 2000 with first a pause in warming and now a cooling.

In view of recent developments the AGW hypothesis is becoming less convincing by the day.

I certainly don’t argue that the LIA and MWP were driven by CO2 (although it MAY have had an impact on the LIA). Clearly climate change can be caused by loads of things….but when we can rule out solar and other influences, and see enormous increases in GHG the attribution is clear.

Your view on why we haven’t seen large warming so far in response to GHG forcing is well put. However, there are clear lags in the climate system…and sensitivity is an equilibrium response not a transient one…it will take time. At the moment we are in early May and it’s cold here. By early August (same solar forcing) it will be much warmer here….there are lags at the seasonal level too. the point about sensitivity is that we can’t have big climate changes in response to relatively modest forcings (LIA, MWP etc) without sensitivity being high. Same goes for LGM. Don’t forget sceptics want both a global LIA and MWP and low sensitivity! I can’t square this circle.

Back to work!

Drat, just when I think I’ve got a reasonable pro-AGW to talk with, he’s got to go back to work.

I proposed that everyone approaches new issues from their particular world-view (liberal, conservative, libertarian, etc.) and that this colors their initial response. Most people seem incapable o altering their initial opinions in the face of well reasoned arguments. There is a point, however, at which even the most reluctant will come over to the “correct” side (we’re not there yet regarding AGW). I don’t see how this makes AGW skeptics unusually “anti-science”. Liberals have the same problems when the science goes against them. I did an experiment over at Deltoid regarding Economics and Minimum Wage laws. Liberals and Conservatives promptly switched sides; with conservatives referring to the “consensus” and quoting peer-reviewed literature and liberals denying that there was a consensus and quoting papers outside the mainstream. There was even an article by an Economics professor that talked about how much trouble he had publishing against the consensus and how he was made to feel like an outcast by his academic peers.

Just to define our terms: most every skeptic I’ve read agrees that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that the Greenhouse theory is correct and that humans have, no doubt, contributed to Global Warming. The debate is over the magnitude of the effect. There really needs to be a better term CAGW (Catastrophic AGW)?

I’m not sure what your point regarding smoking and CFCs was. I’m not sure what free markets and regulation have to do with smoking. I haven’t spent much time with the CFC issue, but once enough people were convinced that CFCs were having a negative effect, this is an “external cost” and market based solutions were available and regulation is certainly a valid option. Certainly skeptics have been proven right on several issues such as alar, breast implants and “crack babies”. I suspect that if you kept score, skeptics have made the right call more than their fair share of the time.

As to “Climate Sensitivity”, we are talking about the standard definition of climate sensitivity as the effect on global temperature caused by a doubling of CO2 right? I’m not sure how this relates to the MWP or LIA. Are you saying that the ONLY way that climate changes is due to CO2? And that since there were, at most, small changes to CO2 during these times that there must be a high climate sensitivity? I don’t think that skeptics believe that the MWP and LIA were caused by changes in CO2 concentration. I would think that there are other processes that effect climate than CO2 and that they might be responsible for these events.

We are about 43% of the way to a doubling of CO2 from 270 ppm to 540 ppm. At this point, we should have seen approximately half of the warming caused by the increase in CO2. Yet, the temperature has only increased by about 0.6 C. Even attributing ALL of the warming to CO2 (ignoring the distinct possibility that a significant amount of the increase in due to uncorrected UH1 effects), that gives a climate sensitivity of approx. 1.2 C. All I’ve heard in response is “aerosols” or “the heat is in the pipeline”. It seems straight-forward, we have seen an increase in CO2, we have a temperature record, where’s the evidence of a 3 to 5 C climate sensitivity?

You mentioned that. in order to displace AGW, skeptics need to come up with a better theory than AGW. Skeptics are not necessarily interested in knowing what the best theory is. As far as I’m concerned, AGW may well be the leader in the clubhouse. The issue isn’t “what theory is best”, it’s “are we certain enough of CAGW that it is worth suffering the known consequences of drastically reducing CO2″. This is the point of the debate, not “who’s got the best theory”.

I gave a link to the data. You’d need to define ‘developed’ to answer your question but you can find the emissions per capita per GDP data at the link I gave.