Why do people claim global warming isn't real or mostly man made, when even skeptics don't say that?

Question

As the temperature has risen, and the data clearly shows that man made greenhouse gases are mostly responsible, most global warming skeptics have abandoned the ideas that;

Global warming isn't real.

It's just a natural cycle.

The Sun is the cause.

Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Bjorn Lomberg, and George Bush are all examples of prominent skeptics who now acknowledge the basic facts.

They all think it's less of a problem than the large majority of scientists think, and I disagree with that. But none of them takes the extreme positions of the deniers.

Yet the extreme positions of denial are still advanced here.

Is it time for those who claim the extreme versions of denial (the big three are above) to be relegated to the same place as those who think the Earth is 6000 years old or that we didn't land men on the moon?

Is it time for the debate to be focused on what we should do about it? World leaders seem to agree on that.

jim z - George Bush has liberal tendancies? What about these guys? Liberal tendancies?

"Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich challenged fellow conservatives to stop resisting scientific evidence of global warming"

"Pat Robertson (very conservative Christian leader) 'It is getting hotter and the ice caps are melting and there is a build up of carbon dioxide in the air. We really need to do something on fossil fuels.”

Tomcat - read your own cite. It doesn't show cooling, it shows warming.

"Decadal Trends - A warming of + 0.199 °C for the northern hemisphere
and a `warming' of + 0.057 °C for the southern hemisphere."

And it's not a very scientific site, making a big deal of an ambiguous mark on a wall, as if it somehow outweighs years of carefully measured sea level data.

Do you honestly think it's a reliable, unbiased source?

Finally, your argument absolutely requires that thousands of climatologists are idiots or knaves. I don't think so.

truthsfifth - Data. It's not warmer than it was 1000 years ago. Ten peer reviewed studies.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison_png

Greenhouse gases are the major cause:

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution.png

1000 pages of data, with hundreds of references to the literature:

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html
summarized at:
http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf

It may not be good enough for you, but it's good enough for 99% of the scientists in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

"There's a better scientific consensus on this [climate change] than on any issue I know. At this point, you really can't find intelligent, quantitative arguments to make it go away."

Jerry Mahlman, NOAA

And pretty much all the world's leaders agree.

That's good enough for me.

Answer 1

There are nearly as many reasons as there are people. Overall I think it can be broken down into a few categories:

1. Religious beliefs: We are insignificant (which is somewhat true of individuals, but not of 6 billion individuals), therefore it must be God's will.

2. Exposure: "The squeeky wheel syndrome", ie that group which pays for the most access to the media gets heard the most

3. Misguided scepticism: They aren't sure who to trust so they believe who they feel is most trustworthy. Usually a well presented and marketted "host" rather than an expert on the topic.

4. Lack of context: Because they do not have a`strong science background people do not understand the context of what is being said. Similar to TV show ads where clips are taken out of context and strung together to present a specific idea. Without knowing what it means in the overall picture people reach the wrong conclusion, but they DO reach the conclusion the biased presenter wants to get across.

5. Epistemology: The Philosophical study of Truth states that there are two components: Raw information (Knowledge) and acceeptance (Belief). Without both the information is dismissed.

You should do a little background work on Epistemology and memes (pronounced meems). Memes is a word used to describe widely accepted beliefs. What is most frightening to me about memes are they are indiscriminant, and it takes generations to edit them out of the collective psyche. We don't have generations to establish the truth of Global Warming. While we decide the processes involved, whatever you believe them to be, are continuing at an accelerating rate.

Do we have to watch it to its conclusion before we can believe it? Or is our culture capable of acting in their own self interest before it happens? Keep your fingers crossed.

Answer 2

I don't believe there is anyone that doesn't believe global warming is happening. Its more that the actual cause is the question. We all agree that pollution is bad and that oil is finite. The available options are disturbing. Electric cars, complete changes to our lives and lifestyles, years of valuable technology and engineering is just disregarded and replaced without need. Instead of using existing technology and enhancing it for modern and pollution free use, wasted effort is going in a completely different direction from what it could and should have gone. There is also some considerable disagreement within the scientific communities as to the actual cause of the warming. Just as many believe that it is a natural cycle of the earth as don't. No-one debates the effects of pollution. It should be dealt with and quickly, however many of the other measures are completely out of line. Any internal combustion engine can be made to run completely pollution free. Any electric grid can be enhanced to produce twice the power at half the cost. Any building can be heated and cooled from the earth at virtually no cost and with little effort. We are not losing our fresh water, it is just changing form and not being regatherd. Any salt water can be made fresh. Any farming type can be enhanced, completely naturally, to give twice or three times the present yeild. Yet the direction we are being driven to seems to be taking us all away from the simple answers and to a new techno reality where we will all have to conform and give up a large portion of our independence and our freedom of movement that we have come to expect and rely on. That is the problem. Water pollution can be treated naturally and reused as potable water. Its cheaper than the high tech mechanically and chemically treated way. Most air pollution can be stopped without costing industry everything they have and taking vehicles off the road. When the imput is stopped the air can be eventually cleaned by methods as simple as planting trees. The answers are there and have been for a long time. Its the methods of change that cause the protests and the types of change that upset people, and rightfully so. As an example: My completely unmodified 1953 Cadillac will easily pass a strict emissions test. Yet my neighbours 1 year old vehicle will not, without a bit of work. What does that say to the average person. How much money have we been forced to spend on equipment and technology that means nothing? How far up the chain does it go? How far can people be driven without biting back? We are not just followers. We are here to express both the diverse and obvious ideas and breakthroughs. Every point of view has merrit. Its up to us to decide what is best, and what to believe. A little research goes a long way.

Answer 3

It's a mental problem. To big to get your head around.

If you accept that it's caused by us, you have to accept that humans are affecting the world in a negative way. If you accept that humans are affecting the world and it's not good, you have to look at what we are doing that's bad.

If you are honest with yourself, you can see that it's the way we've constructed our civilization. Everything is dependent on fossil fuels. You come to the conclusion that it really is a big problem and it means big changes for the way we live, our political systems, everything.

If you are uneducated or lacking enough intelligence it doesn't even occur to you that there is a problem.

If you are somewhat intelligent but still too ignorant and dogmatic, a little subconscious voice tells you where this is heading, but you can't accept that. It means that your world view has been incorrect; you would have to discard your beliefs and start over. That is too painful and difficult so you make a wall in your mind to block it out; we can invent any sort of rationalization to justify the old worldview. This is a very common pathology in the modern world.

If you are somewhat intelligent, somewhat educated and somewhat open-minded and have some strength and integrity - you face up to it and begin to think about what you can do, what can be done.

I think the best thing we can do is educate people in a fair, unbiased, thoughtful and gentle way; which, by the way, you are doing a great job.

Answer 4

Jim z - give me a break. For starters, political affiliation has nothing to do with science. Secondly, if you really think that Bush and Lindzen have liberal tendencies, your political views must border on fascism.

Lindzen is more of the opinion that while CO2 could theoretically contribute to global warming (in fact he's said that is should have caused more global warming than we're seeing), "the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved".

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008597

Christy on climate change:

"It is scientifically inconceivable that after changing forests into cities, turning millions of acres into irrigated farmland, putting massive quantities of soot and dust into the air, and putting extra greenhouse gases into the air, that the natural course of climate has not changed in some way."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/12/18/MNGNV3PH9D1.DTL&type=printable

Christy has also said that while he supports the AGU declaration, and is convinced that human activities are a cause of the global warming that has been measured, he is "still a strong critic of scientists who make catastrophic predictions of huge increases in global temperatures and tremendous rises in sea levels."

http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/415.pdf

Lomborg is a political scientist, so I don't particularly care about his opinions regarding global warming. He doesn't deny that we're causing it, he just think we'll be able to adapt to the consequences.

Bush has admitted that humans are the primary cause of global warming since 2005.

Christy and Lindzen are the most relevant examples, being scientists. Neither disputes that humans are at least a partial cause of the current global warming. Lindzen is the more skeptical of the two. Of course, he's also skeptical that smoking causes lung cancer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen#Views_on_health_risks_of_passive_smoking

Answer 5

If you look through the last 100 years and identify anything that has been very harmful to the population, whilst making a hell of a lot of money for people, you'll see it's the same demographic arguing against global warming being man made who also argued that lead, CFCs and DDT were harmless, the same folk who were against checking Chinese products for harmful material, the same people who argued back in the 70s that global warming didn't exist at all, and so on. Repetition repetition repetition, history repeats itself, folk forget, and it all starts again next time something else comes along.

Answer 6

"the data clearly shows that man made greenhouse gases are mostly responsible,"

What data would that be? Every time I ask for it you folks say you can't provide it, then a few weeks after I've stopped posting questions demanding proof in the Environment section, you folks crawl back out of the corners and start posting that it's proven.

I'm sick of this - nothing is proven. It's warmer than it was 100 years ago. It's NOT warmer than it was 1000 years ago. And 1000 years ago, atmospheric CO2 levels were lower than they are today. Scientists have NOT proven that it's us - they've been unable to prove that it's primarily something else. That's NOT the same thing.

Answer 7

Science should be objective. Facts should be self evident regardless of the people who have their opinion on the subject.

We can prove gravity, electricity, and other complex functions like these regardless of the person. Only "global warming" requires a consensus, an opinion of others, a group vote on science. However this isn't objective science, it's subjective science.

Science that is subject to the opinions, monetary gain, peer pressure, social status is not real science, but politics. And politics isn't real science.

For all it's worth, no one can tell you if it will be warmer or colder a year from now, 2 years from now or even 5 years from now and show their work to how they came to their conclusion. They have just as much of a chance if they flipped a coin or gave the dice a roll.

Answer 8

They all have liberal tendencies. Lomberg has taken the position that even if he allows manmade global warming to be true, there is very little that can be done substantively to reduce any affects so trying to waste resources on solving a relatively minor problem doesn't make sense to him. You quote Lomberg and then ignore his point. He would rather spend the money on things that would be more useful.

Answer 9

Richard Lindzen think it's mostly natural cycle.

Ha ha, religious people like Pat Robertson are naturally attracted to unscientific ideaslike global warming.

Answer 10

Regardless of how large the consensus is, the atmospheric data does not support global warming in the southern hemisphere, nor does it support it in the Northern hemisphere, why can't you see through the deception?

Why is the atmosphere cooling Bob? Did Co2 levels drop over the last 3 years, or has solar activity?

http://www.john-daly.com/nh-sh.htm

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