Al Gore nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

One week's winter temperatures during an arctic blast tell us nothing about trends, amigo. Trends are what the global warming issue is all about--where we've been and where we're going, not where we are. Check again for last summer and you'll find even more record highs.

 

No. you're not. Not if you've read any of the other global warming threads. I've debated the matter at length in at least four threads. I have very good reasons for believing what I do and they don't have anything to do with what the media writes or what the government wants.

In fact my field does not. My funding comes mostly from state and industry sources with about 15% federal funding and they are not "handouts". Research proposals are very competitive and research grants are earned. But say it did come from the feds. . . where is your evidence that the government is trying to tell me what results to find? Are you serious? The Bush administration is funding scientists and telling them to support global warming? Just like your last contention that academia tells scientists what to say, this is just wrong and you can't prove it.

You keep trying to use political arguments to counter scientific ones and it just doesn't fly. You try to use the media as an excuse, too. Or the UN, as if scientists give a damn about the UN. You object to the politics of global warming and that is fine, I object to some of them, too.

The mistake is trying to fight the politics you disapprove of by denying the scientific basis underlying them instead of the politics themselves. Global warming is a fact, human contributions are a fact. If you think Kyoto is bad policy or the UN is a bad vehicle, then I can agree with you. They are both full of political flaws that you could point out. But denying the scientific facts in trying to counter these environmental political policies is doomed to failure. I do not defend environmental activists here . . . I defend environmental science.

I don't have to "look around". I've been immersed in it for decades. The media has squat to do with scientific opinion, they just desseminate it, sometimes carelessly, but the cart still goes before the horse. Try to understand, there are alarmist media out there and alarmist politicians like Gore. I doesn't mean that the data is wrong or the interpretations are wrong, they are not. I just means that people on both sides of the issue are carrying on a social or political fight. The scientific fight is no contest.

You understand little about how scientific research operates, amigo. This is a preposterous statement.

That ain't the issue. The issue is that we have greatly increased the human contribution to the warming cycle we are in right now.

This is quite untrue. You haven't even looked.

My opinion is that anyone who tries to make a scientific issue using political arguments cannot possibly be convincing.

 

At its proper scale, yes. Specific locations can have anomalous specific temperatures seasonally. But we are talking about global temperatures over the last few millenia . . . and the next.

We occasionally have colder winters or warmer summers. The graph of global temperature is not a smooth line, it fluctuates annually. But the global warming trend that is at issue is the upward movement of the median global temperature since human agriculture changed the natural ecosystem and the drammatic increase since the dawn of the industrial revolution 150 years ago.

 

This is fine by me. The politics must be argued separately from the science. But I think you also deny that science has raised an environmental issue that needs addressing. To logically argue that the best solution is to do nothing is fine, but it must be argued to be convincing.

 

This is not entirely true. Comparison of two different earths using analogy would be a classic method of scientific inquiry, but far from the only one. Analogues are not available in many scientific issues. Fortunately inductive and deductive reasoning principles provide other valid scientific philosphies. The principal of uniformitarianism is most applicable to global studies because we know a great deal about the history of the planet.

Uniformitarianism is the assumption that the natural processes operating in the past are the same as those that can be observed operating in the present. Its methodological significance is frequently summarized in the statement: "The present is the key to the past."

Uniformitarianism, though often treated as a single idea, is in fact a family of four related propositions. Stephen Jay Gould characterized them as:
1) Uniformity of law;
2) Uniformity of kind;
3) Uniformity of degree; and
4) Uniformity of result.

I won't go into it further, but you might find this topic interesting when you have the time.