Can any global warming skeptics provide some sort of evidence?

Question

It seems like every global warming skeptic around here makes completely bizarre and incorrect claims with absolutely nothing to support them. We've got people slandering James Hansen with no evidence, we've got people claiming that climate scientists can't agree on the causes of global warming, others who claim they agree it's due to the Sun, etc. etc.

We've got people claiming then Sun is responsible for global warming and then citing papers that say it's responsible for a maximum of 30% of the recent warming. At least that's some scientific evidence, but it doesn't support their arguments.

We've got people claiming that the stratosphere is warming when it's in the middle of an obvious long-term cooling trend. Again, at least it's using scientific data, but that's the closest we get to an argument with valid evidence to support it.

Can any global warming skeptics please make an argument and support it with valid scientific data? I want to argue science, not opinion.

c.barla - you could have just said 'no'.

jim m - geothermal energy is completely negligible. The Sun provides something like 99.997% of our heat with geothermal enegy providing the other 0.003%.

drwho - not only was every single one of your links from a right-wing media site rather than a scientific one, but none of the links even worked!

Still waiting for any evidence...

Salomon, let's go through your book authors.

Michaels and Lomborg do not dispute anthropogenic global warming, they simply argue that the effects will not be as bad as predicted. Lomborg is a political scientist.

Here is a quote from Bailey in 2005, after he reversed his views:

"Details like sea level rise will continue to be debated by researchers, but if the debate over whether or not humanity is contributing to global warming wasn't over before, it is now.... as the new IPCC Summary makes clear, climate change Pollyannaism is no longer looking very tenable."

Singer and Avery claim that climate is related most closely to sunspots, which is simply not true:

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/600px-Temp-sunspot-co2.svg.png

That's oh-for-4.

jim z - I don't know how many times I have to quote that Milankovitch Cycles Wikipedia entry before you get the point:

"An often-cited 1980 study by Imbrie and Imbrie determined that 'Ignoring anthropogenic and other possible sources of variation acting at frequencies higher than one cycle per 19,000 years, this model predicts that the long-term cooling trend which began some 6,000 years ago will continue for the next 23,000 years.'"

Answer 1

I see that Amancalledchuda is attempting to claim that the stratosphere hasn't cooled and that it has warmed by linking to a website showing that the stratosphere has actually cooled.

Chuda provides us with this link:

http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html#figures

And claims that "1) The stratosphere is above where CO2 ‘lives’ in the atmosphere. If increasing levels of CO2 are absorbing more and more reflected infra red radiation (i.e. heat) then this infra red radiation is not reaching (and warming) the stratosphere. If less and less heat (infra red radiation) reaches the stratosphere, then the stratosphere should get colder.

For the last decade or more, CO2 has continued to rise, but the stratosphere has not cooled. (See the final graph on this page… .......Thus, the stratosphere is behaving as if CO2 were not causing any warming."

You should pay attention to which RSS product you are talking about. TLS is RSS's code for the stratospheric retrieval, and if you look at figure 6, on the website you've shown us, you can see that figure 6 shows resounding cooling. This is exactly in line with predictions. You ought to make a correction on this point.

For more information regarding the equatorial troposphere discrepancy you should look at the report which investigates this:

http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/sap1-1-final-execsum.pdf

Based on that report, from scientists (and not Monckton), I'm not sure it's OK to make the claim that "the atmosphere is behaving as if greenhouse gasses were not causing warming."

Thank you for now realising that the MSU isn't much use for comparisons to Hansen's model. However, you've linked to Monckton's critique of Hansen's model which seems pretty bizarre to me i.e. he presents a graph that appears to show matching model and observational trends when discussing scenarios B and C. He's also used NCDC, which seems to be fairly selective given that there are other datasets out there. Curious too that he completely neglects to either consider the trends (remember my points regarding this in theother threads) or what the real forcings were. For an honest and comprehensive comparison between data and models you should look at the real climate comparison here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansens-1988-projections/

Take a look, you should see that if you consider both the error estimates upon the observational trends and upon the model error estimates then they do match up, even if you use the surface+ocean and met stations data (the former is similar to NCDC). You can also see that the real forcings lie somewhere between B and C, which is something Monckton fails to even consider.

Chuda then claims that there has been no trend in temperature in the last 5 years. This is yet another bizarre claim with no basis in fact. If you want to convince me, or others, it would help if you actually linked to the data you're talking about. Try this:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig_E.lrg.gif

or this:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.C.lrg.gif

or this:

http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/lsst.jpg

you can see that your claim has no basis in fact. If you draw a trend line through the data then you get a clear warming trend continuing through the most recent 5 years. The only way you can arrive at your claim is to play "disingenous baseline games", or, in other words to cherry pick a start point such as 1998 or 2005 (i.e. warm years) and then look it's cooler now. I made it explicitly clear in other threads that it's not scientifically sound to do this, and you agreed, and yet you still make this unsupportable claim.

CO2 isn't rising that much quicker now than it has done in at least the last 20 years. This may change, but it hasn't yet:

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

To answer Dana's question, yes, they can provide evidence of a sort but it tends not to be scientific evidence and more likely sourced from some think tank or right wing policy group e.g. CEI, SPPI etc. See the examples in Chuda's post above, 3 links, two of which are to SPPI, and the remaining one is to a genuine scientific source, but it was apparently accidentally mispresented because it wasn't thoroughly investigated.

Answer 2

Not a chance!
When you mention "science" you mean, like Physics or Chemistry with equations and a history of growth and solving problems, the kind of stuff "skeptics", as you kindly put it, know nothing about.
You see, it is all personal. It is as if someone told you something bad about a dear and close relative, of course you would not believe whatever is said, neither would I.
During WWII, many saldiers bet their lives that their sacrifice would turn the war around and their side would win. That was true for soldiers of BOTH sides. Such stubborn conviction helps win wars. Remember, Global Warming implies our grandchildren will be in an Earth hotter than the ovens in Auschwitz! Nobody would want to believe that horrible idea, not willfully and they are supposed to learn science to come to believe that? Who is crazy, anyway?

We all are reluctant to accept change or accept there is something we do not know. For over a century, people said they believe Columbus sailed across the Atlantic to PROVE the Earth was round. In fact, in his library he had a book based on translations of an Egyptian book with the radius, in cubits, of the Earth's circumference.
Ops, I almost forgot, Egyptian Geodesy, Science of Earth dimensions, was more accurate than anyone had even as late as 1950 -believe it or not, has to do with satellites. Of course, our Geodesy is now superior to that of Ancient Egyptians.
Yet, all people I have met tell me that they learnt in high school that people thought the earth flat and that is why Columbus sailed "the ocean blue". They will not accept this is false. A sense of superiority? I don't know.
But, it is clearly a question for psychologists. Do they want to prove they are important because they know something is true that great scientists consider false? I don't know.

Suppose they went along with scientists, would they have something to say? Would anybody pay attention to what they would say? I don't know and I also don't know what would they say in positive terms. What do they believe is True?
Which is, I take it, your question. If they were to say something they believe is a true fact proves there is NO Global Warming, the explanation could start, but first we must have a common truth and we don't.

A second requirement is "reasonableness". They could say "I don't know" over and over and over, regardless what they hear. Yes, I am convinced it is a question for psychologists, not for Earth Scientists. But, it is being addressed. The pseudo-explanations I mentioned here, I read them somewhere else. Where? I don't remember.

Answer 3

Bob said:
"How do we know it's not a Milankovic cycle now? Simple. They occur regularly every 100,000 years or so, and the last one ended the last serious Ice Age 20,000 years ago. We're not due for another 80,000 years."

I just couldn't let this go unanswered. This is utter nonsense. We have been coming out of a glacial period for somewhere around 10,000 years. It has been warming since then. We are nearing the time when we will slowly proceed into another glacial period unless we are saved by our CO2 emissions (just kidding). Seriously, we are nearing that period. I am a geological engineer so reading graphs is pretty simple to me. In the bottom graph on the attached link, remember that now is to the left and past is to the right. In addition, 1000 K is a million. It clearly shows that we are in a trend of warming and are nearing the top of the peak. We will then begin a much slower trend of cooling according to the pattern.

Answer 4

The most simple, the most obvious, and the most convincing arguement against the co2 forcing theory is that scientists cannot predict the weather for tomorrow.

This proves that their weather prediction models do not account for all factors.

It proves that their models will only work when they know the outcome. For example, I can develop a computer program that will predict the numbers up until the last draw, but I can't predict what the new numbers will be.

Answer 5

"Be glad to. As soon as you explain to me how the last Ice Age ended."

OK. The last Ice Age ended when cycles of increased solar radiation (Milankovich cycles) caused warming on Earth.

Milutin Milankovic, "Canon of Insolation and the Ice Age Problem" is the recognized work.

How do we know it's not a Milankovic cycle now? Simple. They occur regularly every 100,000 years or so, and the last one ended the last serious Ice Age 20,000 years ago. We're not due for another 80,000 years.

Even more simple. The cycles do not cause warming mysteriously. They increase solar radiation in an easily measurable way. That's not happening:

"Recent oppositely directed trends in solar
climate forcings and the global mean surface
air temperature", Lockwood and Frolich (2007), Proc. R. Soc. A
doi:10.1098/rspa.2007.1880

http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/proceedings_a/rspa20071880.pdf

News article at:

http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0711-sun.html

Your turn.

EDIT - jim z. Look at your own graph, ALL of it. It proves the opposite. We've passed the peak and should be headed down. 2 of 3 Milankovic factors are headed down. The key line is "solar forcing". And it's headed down. As this paper shows:

"Recent oppositely directed trends in solar
climate forcings and the global mean surface
air temperature", Lockwood and Frolich (2007), Proc. R. Soc. A
doi:10.1098/rspa.2007.1880

http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/proceedings_a/rspa20071880.pdf

News article at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6290228.stm

Answer 6

No need for it, skeptics follow the evidence and the evidence is that global warming is happening and that we are causing it through release of CO2.

Anyone who doesn't accept that evidence is not a skeptic and should not ever be called one.

Answer 7

Watching tv is simpler but I enjoy reading literature more

Answer 8

while reading a written book, you're stimulating your brain. You increase your reading and literacy skills and you in the process, become more literate. Despite having today's modern tools, you need to be in a position to read still.
While watching t.v. can be good fun, it isn't doing anything to your brain.

Answer 9

Only an opinion here. Sorry! Yeah, I have concern. So I just want to say GREED on the part of giants (oil or whatever) is the problem and we know they're rich enough to buy the best lawyers and PR people to make "us" think all is well. The media will report anything. The green-peace movement, for example, has received detrimental coverage on their activities while the sly ones keep doing what they do - getting richer by the minute.

Answer 10

ONCE AGAIN, YOU DID NOT READ THE BOOKS, YOU READ REVIEWS ON THEM BY ALARMISTS LIKE YOU!

THERE IS NO END TO YOUR PATRONAZING AND CONDESCENDING ATTITUDE. MORONS LIKE YOU ONLY DESERVE TO BE IGNORED!

As soon as you finish reading the following 4 books, which provide ample evidence against the man-made global warming fanaticism and hysteria. I have provided plenty of evidence and information, but you only care to listen to yourself.

Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years by Dennis T. Avery and S. Fred Singer (Paperback - Feb 1, 2007)

Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media by Patrick J. Michaels

Global Warming and Other Eco Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death, Ronald Bailey (Hardcover)

The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World by Bjorn Lomborg

I suggest people stop wasting their time answering your pointless, arrogant and idiotic questions to feed your overinflated ego, and find Yahoo users who are honestly trying to find out the truth about man-made global warming and climate change, which you could never provide. Your pointless and argumentative questions are a waste of time to everyone involved.