Where known each individual’s affiliation is also cited.

http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/

I hope my mistakes can be smoothed over by your intelligent interpretations.

Cheers,

No name calling and no rock throwing (respecting the latter I tend to pick them up and examine them closely if the appear interesting).

First off, have you heard of Godwin’s law? I suggest you look it up on wikipedia, although there are probably other sources that are a little more reliable. I would also suggest that you lookup eugenics at the same source. The very first sentence in the entry is: “Eugenics is the study and practice of selective breeding applied to humans, with the aim applied to humans, with the aim of improving the species.”

Second you make a claim about all the scientists that disagree with the concensus opinion not being on the payroll of corporate polluters. You then cite Michael Crichton? While Mr. Crichton did obtain an MD from Harvard he also subscribed to some, shall we say, dubious beliefs. Yet you do not cite a single climate science source for your assertion.

You further claim that only climatologists are qualified to form a “valid and valuable opinion” about whether humans are causing climate change. You then proceed to depricate climatologists with veiled allusions to the science being “new” and in its infancy. This implies to the reader that they are really not qualified. You further mix opinion and the term “scientific conclusion” and draw what I think is a poor analogy between other “scientists” (your quotes in this case) forming a scientific conclusion and a dermatologist diagnosing a brain tumor. If I were a dermatologist consulting with a patient who had a skin rash and that patient suddenly had a siezure would I be wrong to refer them to a neurologist is they had no history of epilepsy?

By the same token, climatology like so many contemporary sciences is not a single thing. In broad terms you could say it is an amalgam of scientific disciplines with the general view of trying to reconstruct past climate since virtually all climate has been in the past. Should there then be no relevancy for glaciologists to making a contrubution to climatology (ice cores form the single longest and most consistent record of past climate going back well over 600,000 years)? Climatology is much older than nuclear physics, does that mean that it might be wrong about how nuclear weapons work? Genetics was unknown until it was re-discovered in the 1920s, less than a hundred years ago, does that mean that we can’t use it to identify new strain of influenza virus?

I want to take a little time to address your personal disclaimer you second paragraph as well because it seems to me to be a little disingenuous. Let’s think about whether or not humans might be a likely cause of climate change with the single assumption that a significant amount of the change climatologists are measuring is due to increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In the US the average carbon each of us causes to be emitted into the atmosphere is 20 tonnes per year. So for 300 million people that would equate to 6 billion tonnes. China has recently surpassed the US in terms of total carbon emissions, so between the US and China alone that is more than 12 billion tonnes per yer. The per capita emissions for the Chinese would be about 6 tonnes per person, so lets take the average of those two numbers 13 tonnes per person for the remaining 5 billion people in the world assuming that Europe and Russia and India and Brazil are somewhat above the average and that most of subshahran Africa and less developed countries in Asia and S. American are a little less, in fact lets just arbitrarily lop off 3 tonnes per capita to make the maths easy and say that the remainder of the global population contributes on average just 10 tonnes per capita. So our grand total is minimally, 62 billion tonnes of carbon added to the atmosphere per year by humans.

Now you might say, well carbon is recycled, plants use CO2 to grow. True, and in the past, before humans began to exploit fossil sources of carbon for fuel, there probably existed an overal dynamic equilibrium with respect to carbon, that is to say, for every tonne of carbon liberated into the atmosphere by the burning of wood, a tonne of carbon was temporarily sequestered in new wood grown. But what we are now burning has been sequestered for millions of years. Moreover, the vast tracts of the earth’s tropics that were blanketed with vast rain forests have been reduced to a few relatively small islands. At the present time, just in N. America, the huge arboreal forests of pine and other conifers are being devastated by bark beetles that survive in ever increasing numbers from year to year to infest and kill more trees because they are not frozen to death during the winters.

So every year we add enormous quantities of carbon that have been sequestered from the atmosphere and at the same time reduce by leaps and bounds the elements in the biosphere that can mitigate the presence of that newly liberated carbon in the atmosphere. You claim you are not qualified to form an opinion. I think you mean you are not qualified to form a scientific conclusion. But perhaps, just perhaps, this little thought process I just outlined will broaden and enhance you view of whether you can indeed form an opinion.

I have to confess your last paragraph is tempting, as a scientist, but also as a person who has spent most of his life living and working in “developing nations”, it is pretty rich to here anyone in the US claiming a concern for their future. Do you have any idea what the gross national product of Liberia is for instance? Sierra Leone? Angola? Peru? In almost every case you could find of a “developing nation” it is less than the cost of maintaining a single brigade of soldiers in Iraq or Afgahnistan for ONE DAY. Moreover you conflate the nebulous term environmentalists with climatologists. Which are you speaking about? They are not the same. It is certainly not true that all environmentalists are climatologists and it is most likely not true that all climatologists are environmentalists, after all, science is a demanding mistress. So your final two pronouncements strike me as not only disingenuous but perhaps even dishonest. After all, we are currently witnessing an epic political campaign to nullify any substantive change in the cost of health care in the US to preserve a for profit system that the remainder of the “developed world” has long since rejected. The evidence that a socially responsible health care system is much cheaper, and much more useful to the people it serves is irrefutable. Yet we have politicians who use spurious rationales such as you present here who are fighting tooth and nail to prevent any change being implmented that might lessen the profits of a few egregiously predatory corporations. So in my humble opinion your expressed fear of legislation that won’t do anything to mitigate or halt climate change is really a complaint about the people who agree with you, that the climate science is too “new” and the climate scientists, are not really in general agreement, for it is they who are prepared and well provided to obstruct and delay any movement towards a positive solution.
And that is exactly what they have done, and will do.

As to your last point about developing nations clawing their way out of poverty, I think you should look first at international finance, and the world bank. Did the razing of the tropical hardwood forest in Liberia make every Liberian rich? Has the rampant exploitation of mineral resources in Peru raised or lowered the overall standard of living? Is the ecosystem of Ecquador better or worse for the largess visited upon them by Chevron?

I have not called you a single name, nor tossed a single rock in your direction, though I have rolled a few formidable boulders up to your door for you to push against with the weak and inconsistent arguments you made in your post. I hope you will think about what I have said here, I hope others will think about it as well, but I am not overly optimistic.

Kindest regards,

Some “not-so-fun” facts about our little fishbowl called “Earth:”

–Two thousand years ago, only an estimated 231 million humans inhabited the earth

–In 2002, the estimated human population was 6.2 Billion.

http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=7

–Two thousand years ago, there were no cars or other vehicles.

–Today, there are an estimated 600,000,000 cars in operation in the world….NOT counting trucks, buses etc….and another 50 million plus cars projected to be built in 2009 alone.
http://www.worldometers.info/cars/

–Countless industries around the world are now spewing CO2 and a myriad of other substances into our air and water, especially since the Industrial Revolution.

No way around it…..that’s a pretty big “footprint” made by a single species of animals on this planet in the last 2K years ( particularly in the last 100-150 years).

I personally have no idea whether or not humans are to blame for climate change — nor am I qualified to form a valid or valuable opinion on the subject. The truth is that there are very few people who are qualified, and those people are Climatologists. This discipline is relatively new and really in its infancy in terms of understanding about exactly how, why and when climate shifts occur (it’s extremely complicated, from what I’ve read). Other “scientists” outside of the field of Climatology are no more qualified to form a scientific conclusion about Global Warming than a Dermatologist is to diagnose a brain tumor. Yet, they are part of the concensus.

Regardless of what or who is to blame for the climate change, protecting the environment from known pollutants certainly makes sense. But I seriously worry that the religious fervor of many environmentalists (those who would label me not as a “skeptic” but as a “Denier”) will lead to legislation that 1) Won’t do anything to mitigate or halt Climate Change, and 2) Will decimate the potential of developing nations to claw their way out of poverty.

(Please keep all name-calling and rock-throwing to a minimum.)

Great parable!

Simpletons.

2. The “fish-slapping dance” is one of my all-time favorites.

3. Only scientific illiterates dispute the general global warming trend. I don’t even think Inhofe (who is, himself, scientifically illiterate) disputes the trend. What the more-or-less-reputable skeptics dispute is the extent to which human activity contributes to the warming trend. There is little doubt that humanity has driven a very rapid (in geological terms) increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. However, establishing a cause and effect relationship between this increase in CO2 and global warming requires the use of fairly complex computer models. At about this point, the argument goes beyond the scope of “common sense”. The average citizen (even the scientifically literate average citizen) has to rely on the conclusions of the folks who spend their lives investigating the matter. Personally, I am confident that the overall conclusions of the IPCC are authentic — that is, that they represent the consensus of the thousands of participating scientists. I am, to be honest, somewhat less confident of the accuracy of their model predictions, because I have some experience with computer models. On the other hand, the least pessimistic prediction scenario is still bad news (and, BTW, when I express uncertainty about the IPCC models, that also means I think there’s a chance reality could be worse than “worst case”). I believe the Precautionary Principle is unavoidably appropriate here.

4. This “climategate” fooferaw is really unfortunate. The Ostrich Theory folks have, up until now, scored most of their points by highlighting short-term discrepancies between predictions and measurements. They’ve accompanied this with a preposterous narrative about an international conspiracy of climate scientists who promote the false global warming story in order to get government funding. (This is preposterous because the total funding directed to the 2,000 or so IPCC contributors is probably less than the combined annual compensation of the CEO’s of the top five oil companies). Unfortunately, while most of the emails are innocuous or debunkable, there are a few that appear to relate to trying to shape the public debate. These are going to be blown way out of context.

5. I don’t blame the folks at CRU for being concerned about public opinion; but damn, they’re supposed to be smart. Why the heck were they discussing stuff like this on email?

6. As a coda, just imagine what will surface if the AK state government ever manages to provide ex-GINO Palin’s emails. Either “verrry interesting”, or 100% redaction.