If U do not understnd the energy dynamics of the planet Earth's atmosphere,what makes U qualified to dismiss

Question

the qualified expert opinion of the 3000 scientists of the UN IPCC who HAVE CONCLUDED GLOBAL WARMING IS CAUSED BY THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT OF CO2 BUILD-UP BY HUMAN FOSSIL FUEL CONSUMPTION(COAL, OIL, AND BIOFUELS FROM CORN, SUGAR CANE & SWITHGRASS)?

What exactly qualifies you, personally, to disagree with the consensus on the contribution of human activities to increases in CO2 ? Mere opinion by assertion is not enough although you definitly always have the democratic right to hold and defend you opinon.

James E. Hansen (born March 29, 1941 in Denison, Iowa) heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies[1] in New York City, a part of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Earth Sciences Division.[2] He is also currently an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. Hansen is best known for his research in the field of climatology and his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue. He is also noted for publishing "an alternative scenario" for global warming which states that in the past few decades the warming effect produced by increased CO2 has been largely offset by the cooling effect of aerosols also produced in burning fossil fuels, and that most of the net warming so far is due to trace greenhouse gases other than CO2.[3]

He has been a critic of both the Clinton and current Bush Administration's stances on climate change. [4]

I attended his evening public lecture at the Howard Baker Institute at Rice U 3 yrs ago and the evidence he presented on rising temperatures was incontovertible as far as I, an MIT graduate in ChemEng could determine. Frankly as a person educated by several MIT Institute professors, I am fed up with inferior minds questioning the data and conclusions of the best scientific minds on the planet. Hansen, who have spent a lifetime gathering the data from ice core samples from melting tropical glacieres like Mt. Kilimanjaro and polar glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica should not be dismissed by armchair scientists paid to dispute the data by Car, Oil , Coal and now biofuels producers.

Some one asked:"did you miss where James Hansen said this "Warming in recent decades has been driven mainly by non-CO2 greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as chlorofluorocarbons, CH4, and N2O, not by the products of fossil fuel burning,"?(sic) The room was full of other scientists and grad students & many Q&A's And there was disagreement on the relative contributions of different factors but all agreed a tipping point was near and all the triggers were tied to human activities having an impact on the energy balances of the atmosphere , hydrosphere and vegetation habiats of the Earth the tundras & taigas of the Northern Hemisphere and the tropical forests of the Southern Hemisphere(Amazon,West and South Africa and SE Asia) With the supercomputers of today, the software models just keep getting better and predictively more reliable.

Exact timing is difficult to ascertain, but the possible likely scenarios are less so.

Answer 1

I do understand the 'energy dynamics' and I don't dismiss global warming.

You'll find that overwhelmingly the people who do understand the workings of our atmosphere and climate agree that humans are contributing to global warming. Hence, within the scientific community there is almost unanimous agreement.

There are questions about our exact role and just how it has and will impact on our climate but the notion that we are contribution to global warming was effectively sealed years ago.

Answer 2

Qualified expert opinions should be challenged.

Who funded the research.
What was its scope.
Do the scientists conducting it have known affiliations to industry or a political party.
How credible is the data.
How much certainty to the scientists ascribe to their theories, what are the margins of error.
What does the research explain, what does it predict.
How long has the theory been tested. How deeply. What are the known flaws. How serious are they.

You don't need to be qualified to ask those questions, but it does help if you want meaningful answers to them. Science has not been immunized against error, and in the softer areas like climate modeling, new ideas are integrated all the time.

If one is to challenge the consensus, then the above are good pointers of how to do it, but they are not the province of sound bites. It involved serious time and effort, reading papers, and learning about what really is being said. And those who have actually undertaken such an effort usually join the consensus.

Skepticism is a little different though, from the media pantomime show of "Oh yes it is....Oh no it's not".

Almost all the global warming deniers are doing so on the basis of politics and disinformation, in my unscientific yet almost certainly true...opinion.

Answer 3

I think it is important for people to form opinion otherwise politicians would not care. The science behind these reports is most often funded by the government and is often criticised by the government. For example scientists in Australia who work for the government have been calling for more money to investigate climate change and when they found evidence of climate change the government dismissed it. In America the white house edited the scientific reports on fossil fuel caused climate change. People believe in some pretty strange things and who is to say who is right or wrong but the most logical, rigorous, robust and tested data/research suggests human driven climate change. Science is not about making things up. Its about investigating problems. Stop bagging science all you science bashers because science has been responsible fore most of the advances that has enabled us to live fortunate, healthy and fossil fuel hungry lives.

To the guy above
Scientists will never say that something is 100% for sure because it is impossibel to do so. The ability for science to accept change is integral to the field and people who dont know science should realise that often their is a confidence interval that they have to meet to accept or reject a hypothsis. For example and mor often than not this interval is 95%. Just because their is a chance its not happening or that their is some error doesnt mean they are wronge. If they were not using appropriate and contemporary investigation meathods their work would go unpublished because it would not stand up to scrutenty by the peer review system.

Answer 4

because I as a scientist(who does understand the earths energy dynamics) myself find the report ridiculus and that the evidence points to Global warming being natural, almost no one denies it is happening but we are not the cause.
not to mention that almost every scientist involved in writing that report ASKED TO HAVE THEIR NAME REMOVED FROM IT(though some of their requests were denied so their names are still on it) the remaining names (which make up the majority on the report) are of people involved with the report who have NO SCIENTIFIC BACKROUND. because it was not in agreement with their research and because they were ignored during the writing phase of the report. and the fact that none of the editions of the IPCC have EVER been submitted for peer review and most peer review articles say that global warming is natural. Name one climatologist you have actually heard say global warming is caused by humans.
you're right we should listen to the scientists NOT the politicians, and NOT what the politicans claim the scientists are saying. unfortuneately many scientist who speak out have their jobs threatened by politicans who want to support Global warming, so they must (and do) go thru scientic forums which unfortunately the public is largely unaware of. by the way there is NEVER a unanimus scientific consesus on ANYTHING, one of the closest things scientist are to being unanimus on is that global warming is naturally caused and that the IPCC is an insult to the scientific community.
did you miss where James Hansen said this "Warming in recent decades has been driven mainly by non-CO2 greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as chlorofluorocarbons, CH4, and N2O, not by the products of fossil fuel burning,"

Answer 5

Just as the dismissive people, you are confused. The IPCC doesn't have 3000 scientists on staff. They have accepted the data of three thousand scientists from around the world.

Other than that, you don't have a question to begin with, you have an assertion that you want people to support.

Answer 6

Pardon me for watching alot of science shows on dish network but when the "qualified expert opinions" get their chance at a sound bite they always seem to insert a lot of "if's" "Possible that's" and "we just don't know's" Then there is the dinosaur experts still arguing about which came first the chicken or the egg. You would ask me to elevate science to the status of perfection and not to be questioned and that just isn't science. After all alot of discovery and knowledge in scientific endeavor has been done by people who weren't qualifed experts in the field.

Answer 7

It doesn't. As I discuss in this question:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=As6MMc8lLk5ZrMSOAhywS77sy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20071012113950AAbTf6b

People think they're qualified to dismiss the scientific consensus based solely on a fraction of the available scientific data and their "common sense". This never ceases to amaze me.