Climate Change

[I Think]

nibs in whose pockets have you.

Just me pension mate.
It's kinda like being a teenager, 'cept you don't have to behave yerself to get yer allowance.

[Glacier]

If you read and understood the posts above about Spencer, you would not support him as credible.
He obviously has his hand and mind in fossil fuel pockets.

I read the link. This is one side of the story, but as he and others have said, you have to put food on the table, and since you have a hard time getting government funding when you come out of the climate closet, you have to find non-governmental sources of funding.

The climate is changing, but the question is how much can be attributed to humans, and what will the consequences be?

[highway001]

Going of topic about who funded it...that is on topic. If I posted an article saying Posiden King of the Sea says climate change is not man made because he asked a turtle I hope you'd call me out that perhaps I should look elsewhere for my data.

Ok...1 article on your question, here are 12 all peer reviewed, science based:

[1] IPCC, 2007: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M.Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. Note that IPCC uses the following terms to indicate the assessed likelihood, using expert judgement, of an outcome or a result: Virtually certain > 99% probability of occurrence, Extremely likely >95%, Very likely > 90%, and Likely > 66%.

[2] Forster, P., V. Ramaswamy, P. Artaxo, T. Berntsen, R. Betts, D.W. Fahey, J. Haywood, J. Lean, D.C. Lowe, G. Myhre, J. Nganga, R. Prinn, G. Raga, M. Schulz and R. Van Dorland. 2007. Changes in Atmospheric Constituents and in Radiative Forcing. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M.Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

[3] Bowen, G.J., J. B. West, B. H. Vaugh n, T. E. Dawson, J. R. Ehleringer, M. L. Fogel, K. Hobson, J. Hoogewerff , C. Kendall, C.-T. Lai, C. C. Miller, D. Noone, H. Sch warc z, and C. J. Still. 2009. Isoscapes to Address Large-Scale Earth Science Challenges EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, 90:109-116.

[4] Alley, R.B., T. Berntsen, N.L. Bindoff, Z. Chen, A. Chidthaisong, P. Friedlingstein, J.M. Gregory, G.C. Hegerl, M. Heimann, B. Hewitson, B.J. Hoskins, F.Joos, J. Jouzel, V. Kattsov, U. Lohmann, M. Manning, T. Matsuno, M. Molina, Neville Nicholls, Jonathan Overpeck, D. Qin, G. Raga, V. Ramaswamy, J. Ren, M. Rusticucci, S. Solomon, R. Somerville, T. F. Stocker, P.A. Stott, R.J. Stouffer, P. Whetton, R.A. Wood, D. Wratt. 2007. Summary for Policy Makers In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M.Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

[5] Hansen, J., L. Nazarenko, R. Ruedy, M. Sato, J. Willis, A. Del Genio, D. Koch, A. Lacis, K. Lo, S. Menon, T. Novakov, J. Perlwitz, G. Russell, G.A. Schmidt, and N. Tausnev. 2005. Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications. Science 308:1431-1435.

[6Hegerl, G.C., F. W. Zwiers, P. Braconnot, N.P. Gillett, Y. Luo, J.A. Marengo Orsini, N. Nicholls, J.E. Penner and P.A. Stott. 2007. Understanding and Attributing Climate Change. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

[7] Santer, B.D., M. F. Wehner, M. L. Wigley, R. Sausen, G. A. Meehl, K. E. Taylor, C. Ammann, J. Arblaster, W. M. Washington, J. S. Boyle, W. Brüggemann. 2003. Contributions of anthropogenic and natural forcing to recent tropopause height changes. Science, 301: 479–483.

[8] Santer, B.D., P. W. Thorne, L. Haimberger, K. E. Taylor, T. M. L. Wigley, J. R. Lanzante, S. Solomon, M. Free, P. J. Gleckler, P. D. Jones, T. R. Karl, S. A. Klein, C. Mears, D. Nychka, G. A. Schmidt, S. C. Sherwood, and F. J. Wentz. 2008. Consistency of modeled and observed temperature trends in the tropical troposphere. International Journal of Climatology, DOI: 10.1002/joc.1756

[9] Keeling, R.F., S.C. Piper, A.F. Bollenbacher and J.S. Walker. 2008. Atmospheric CO2 records from sites in the SIO air sampling network. In Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tenn., U.S.A.

[10] Walker W., Parrington, J.R. and F. Feiner. 1989. Nuclides and Isotopes, Fourteenth Edition, General Electric Company. San Jose, CA.

[11] Clark, I.D. and P. Fritz. 1997. Environmental Isotopes in Hydrogeology. CRC Press Lewis Publishers, New York.

[12] Keeling, C. D., T. P. Whorf, M. Wahlen, and J. van der Plicht 1995, Interannual extremes in the rate of rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1980, Nature, 375, 666–670.

And some notes incase you don't want to bother reading all of them (they are a little dry). Excuse the copy paste but check out below for the full article:

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/sc ... Q9_IRmDTqA

We all know that warming—and cooling—has happened in the past, and long before humans were around. Many factors (called “climate drivers”) can influence Earth’s climate—such as changes in the sun’s intensity and volcanic eruptions, as well as heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.

So how do scientists know that today’s warming is primarily caused by humans putting too much carbon in the atmosphere when we burn coal, oil, and gas or cut down forests?

There are human fingerprints on carbon overload. When humans burn coal, oil and gas (fossil fuels) to generate electricity or drive our cars, carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, where it traps heat. A carbon molecule that comes from fossil fuels and deforestation is “lighter” than the combined signal of those from other sources. As scientists measure the “weight” of carbon in the atmosphere over time they see a clear increase in the lighter molecules from fossil fuel and deforestation sources that correspond closely to the known trend in emissions.[2,3]
Natural changes alone can’t explain the temperature changes we’ve seen. For a computer model to accurately project the future climate, scientists must first ensure that it accurately reproduces observed temperature changes. When the models include only recorded natural climate drivers—such as the sun’s intensity—the models cannot accurately reproduce the observed warming of the past half century. When human-induced climate drivers are also included in the models, then they accurately capture recent temperature increases in the atmosphere and in the oceans.[4,5,6] When all the natural and human-induced climate drivers are compared to one another, the dramatic accumulation of carbon from human sources is by far the largest climate change driver over the past half century.
Lower-level atmosphere—which contains the carbon load—is expanding. The boundary between the lower atmosphere (troposphere) and the higher atmosphere (stratosphere) has shifted upward in recent decades. See the ozone FAQ for a figure illustrating the layers of the atmosphere.[6,7,8] This boundary has likely changed because heat-trapping gases accumulate in the lower atmosphere and that atmospheric layer expands as it heats up (much like warming the air in a balloon). And because less heat is escaping into the higher atmosphere, it is likely cooling. This differential would not occur if the sun was the sole climate driver, as solar changes would warm both atmospheric layers, and certainly would not have warmed one while cooling the other.

[Glacier]

Well I commend you for getting back on topic. As Nobel laureate Mikey Mann says, "Satellites have measured no increase in solar output in the past half century, meaning it "isn't even remotely credible to argue that solar output can be responsible for the anomalous warming of recent decades."

Here is the problem with that assertion. The 20th century warming began BEFORE the first satellites were launched. The mid 20th century cooling was caused by ocean cycles. How could satellites possibly have measured any change in solar output, when the change occurred in the 1800s? http://judithcurry.com/2014/08/21/cause ... tic-ocean/

The warming in the last half of the 20th century - is the same as the warming in the first half of the 20th century. Apparently Mann doesn't understand that if you leave the element on - the pot continues to heat.

[highway001]

Ok sure.

Here is where we have a multi page argument over facts I know I don't full understand. I end up finding articles to back my points and you do the same.

I take it neither of us are climate scientists or in a related field...due correct me if I'm assuming to much.

So rather than throwing data at one another here's WHY I believe. Every major scientific community says its true. Not lone voices or outliers...there will always be voices who disagree that's good science. But every organization tied to science based research agrees. That to me out weights the lone voices. Here is NASAs partial list...North American centric.

A partial List:

Association for the Advancement of Science
"The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society." (2006)


American Chemical Society
"Comprehensive scientific assessments of our current and potential future climates clearly indicate that climate change is real, largely attributable to emissions from human activities, and potentially a very serious problem." (2004)

American Geophysical Union
"Human‐induced climate change requires urgent action. Humanity is the major influence on the global climate change observed over the past 50 years. Rapid societal responses can significantly lessen negative outcomes." (Adopted 2003, revised and reaffirmed 2007, 2012, 2013)

American Medical Association
"Our AMA ... supports the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth assessment report and concurs with the scientific consensus that the Earth is undergoing adverse global climate change and that anthropogenic contributions are significant." (2013)

American Meteorological Society
"It is clear from extensive scientific evidence that the dominant cause of the rapid change in climate of the past half century is human-induced increases in the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2), chlorofluorocarbons, methane, and nitrous oxide." (2012)

American Physical Society
"The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now." (2007)

The Geological Society of America
"The Geological Society of America (GSA) concurs with assessments by the National Academies of Science (2005), the National Research Council (2006), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) that global climate has warmed and that human activities (mainly greenhouse‐gas emissions) account for most of the warming since the middle 1900s." (2006; revised 2010)9

International academies: Joint statement
"Climate change is real. There will always be uncertainty in understanding a system as complex as the world’s climate. However there is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring. The evidence comes from direct measurements of rising surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures and from phenomena such as increases in average global sea levels, retreating glaciers, and changes to many physical and biological systems. It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities (IPCC 2001)." (2005, 11 international science academies

U.S. National Academy of Sciences
"The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify taking steps to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere." (2005)

U.S. Global Change Research Program
"The global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases. Human 'fingerprints' also have been identified in many other aspects of the climate system, including changes in ocean heat content, precipitation, atmospheric moisture, and Arctic sea ice." (2009, 13 U.S. government departments and agencies)

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.”

“Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely* due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentraion

List of worldwide scientific organizations
The following page lists the nearly 200 worldwide scientific organizations that hold the position that climate change has been caused by human action.

http://opr.ca.gov/s_listoforganizations.php


What major scientific bodies are arguing the other side?

[Glacier]

You do not need to be a climate scientist to understand the climate, just like you don't need to be an Islamic scholar to understand Islam or an economist to understand economics. Anyone can become well educated on any issue and topic if they take the time.

The reason you have no organizations rejecting AGW is because anyone who does would be in jeopardy of losing their funding. Note: that's an opinion, not a fact. If you want a fact, it would be that the 97% consensus study was bogus.

Anyway, allow me to summarize my last post in more basic terms. You and Michael Mann assert that the current warming cannot be captured by the sun alone. This is a laughable assertion on many levels, but the most glaring reason is that the satellites that measure solar output have only been around for 50 or so years. Now, the warming continues even the though solar output remains constant. Why is that you ask? Well, did you know that the day continues to warm even as the solar output from the sun wanes in the afternoon? The climate works the same way.

Here is the other thing, the IPCC claims that human caused emissions did not start warming the planet until the 1950s, and yet the warming in the first half is no less in magnitude than the warming in the second half. The reason for this is not entirely clear. Anyone who tells you that they can accurately and precisely predict what the climate is going to do in the next 10 or 50 years is a Charlatan. The reason they can't predict is that they still do not fully understand how much each warming and cooling mechanism contributes to the entire system.

[Ub2]

I've read a lot of articles and watched many videos on climate change. This one, In my view is the most encompassing, easy to understand explanation of how we got to this impasse.

It obviously corroborates many of the findings of other posters on this topic.

If you dare . . . watch it.

[I Think]

At the recent scandal-plagued Heartland climate conference, Don Easterbrook gave a presentation in which he discussed his previous predictions of global cooling. Given the inaccuracy of those predictions after just one decade, we were surprised to learn that Easterbrook had highlighted them in his talk, going as far as to claim that his global cooling projectons have thus far been more accurate than the global warming projections in the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (TAR).

However, to make this claim, Easterbrook had to distort the IPCC's actual model projections, claiming:

"In fact the IPCC predicted in the year 2000 that we would be experiencing 1 degree increase in temperature between the year 2000 and 2010."

As Skeptical Science readers are undoubtedly aware, and as we will show in greater detail below, this assertion is an outright falsehood.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You can read for yourself the full article exposing Easterbrook's honesty or ??????????


http://www.skepticalscience.com/don-eas ... ality.html

[rustled]

I was able to watch most of the Easterbrook video before being interrupted, and in doing my due diligence while listening I found your link to the Skeptical Science article. The SS story takes issue with one of Easterbrook's graphs, just as many have taken issue with Mann's infamous hockey stick graph, and rightly so (on both counts, not just the one!)

However, much of what Easterbrook said was quite valid, and some of it was helpful, including his explanation of

• how someone arrived at the "97% of scientists"
• that climate science is not in fact a recognized science
• that most of what the media reports as climate science is a simply unproven (or worse, disproven) theories presented as fact, but not based on proper scientific practice (which, incidentally, has always included a very healthy component of skepticism)
• that the fearmongering is causing us to focus our resources away from things we actually can control
  and more.

I'll be doing my due diligence on the rest of what he suggests before accepting it because I am, at heart, a skeptic (especially when it comes to overblown theories which, if widely accepted, will make some people rich and a whole lot of people poorer despite the utter improbability of them "fixing" anything. Easterbrook's claims won't make anyone rich and won't induce panic that'll cause economic meltdown while forcing our well-intentioned "solutions" on the most impoverished of the world and keeping them impoverished. So clearly I'll need to set aside my predisposition to believe him over the "sky is falling" crowd. Fortunately, I don't approach this topic thinking it's all or nothing, black or white, one side's right and the other's wrong.)

By the way, you might want to check into Easterbrook's debunker in this case, the one who pinpointed the problem in Easterbrook's graph. Here's what one of the commenters said at the bottom of the SS story:

Finally, I dislike linking to WUWT or to Tisdale as both are woefully wrong as a general rule. As when I investigated the issue, I found he had uncovered the deception, I am compelled to give him due credit. That should in no way be taken as an endorsement of any of his other views.

Have a look at Tisdale's record, and you'll see what he/she means by this.

Clearly, the scientists are not in agreement on the subject of what's causing climate change, whether or not it's catastrophic, and (most importantly) whether or not we should take extreme measures to counteract it.

It falls to us to keep an open mind and a clear head.

[highway001]

I found this article really interesting. You are free to skip it as it's on the longer side. Written in Scientific America last summer. Talk about how this issue is no longer scientific but highly ethical and political Think you'll enjoy it to Glacier...it's thought provoking.

Academic disputes are different from bar fights. At a House hearing last month, someone suggested to Sarah Green she meet Richard Tol, a climate change economist who had attacked her research moments before in front of a panel of lawmakers. Green declined politely, with a wry smile.
Tol, a professor of economics at Britain's University of Sussex, had no idea Green was in the hearing room. The two have never met, although they have been tussling in obscure journals.

The point of contention is a peer-reviewed study published last year by Green, a chemistry professor at Michigan Technological University; John Cook, a research fellow at the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in Australia; and 10 other scientists who blog under the collective name of Skeptical Science. The scientists examined 4,014 abstracts on climate change and found 97.2 percent of the papers assumed humans play a role in global warming (ClimateWire, May 16, 2013).
That statement quickly got boiled down in the popular media to a much simpler message: that 97 percent of scientists believe climate change is caused by humans. President Obama tweeted the 97 percent consensus. Comedian John Oliver did a segment on it that went viral on the Internet.

Predictably, climate change skeptics challenged the study. The Skeptical Science group fended off their attacks. Then fame beckoned. The paper has been downloaded more than 200,000 times, making it among the most popular scientific studies of 2013.

Lately, the Skeptical Science researchers have been battling a rear guard attack from within the climate science community itself. Some social scientists, political scientists, climate change communicators—and Tol—question whether informing people of a scientific consensus serves any purpose.

To them, climate change is no longer a debate over science. The latest surveys show that 89 percent of Democrats, 79 percent of independents and 70 percent of Republicans already believe global warming is happening and is at least partly caused by human actions.

Rather, the climate debate is now ethical and political; it comes down to what Americans are willing to do today to address a problem that will largely affect their grandchildren. In this realm of moral choice, the 97 percent consensus can be polarizing, said Dan Kahan, a professor of psychology at Yale University.

He brandishes as proof a video by the group Organizing for Action (OFA), which was once Obama's re-election campaign. The implicit message is that the people who disagree with 97 percent of scientists must be very stupid, Kahan said.

"We live in a world where the people who make the videos like the OFA one have attached a meaning to this argument—97 percent of scientists [believe in human-caused global warming]," he said. "It's a bumper sticker, and it says "f#@k you" on it."

A road paved with good intentions and footnotes
Cook, 42, began Skeptical Science (SkS) in 2007 as a database of peer-reviewed studies rebutting climate skeptics. Since then, SkS has grown into one of the most highly trafficked blogs on climate science. Its content is used in classrooms, textbooks, public lectures and documentaries.

There's no doubt that Cook regards climate change as a moral issue.
"As a father, I realized that we are handing over a world to our children that is worse than the world we were given," he said over the phone from Brisbane, Australia. "And as a Christian, I saw climate change as a social justice issue."

Propelled by that burden, as well as the more real-world needs of his Ph.D. thesis, Cook immersed himself in climate communication. He wanted to help effect climate action, which has been spectacularly hard to achieve even as world leaders have met and disbanded at successive United Nations meetings over the past two decades. In the U.S., Republicans have blocked any sort of climate progress.

Cook thinks that politicians are not acting because the public is not pressuring them enough. If people realize that the majority of scientists agree on human-caused climate change, they will absorb that knowledge like empty vessels and become more convinced of the threat, he said. They will then be more amenable to picking up their phones and calling their legislators.

"If the public think that climate scientists agree about what is causing global warming, then the public thinks we need to act on it," he said. "If the public thinks scientists disagree, then we might as well wait until the scientists work it out before we do anything about it."
The idea is not new; several studies over the past 10 years have found a scientific consensus on climate change. Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, in 2004 found that 75 percent of published studies supported anthropogenic global warming. Since then, six other studies have been published with widespread media attention.
And yet, the chain of events Cook mentioned, where people hear of the scientific consensus and call their lawmakers, has not happened. In fact, consensus messaging over the past decade has not convinced any more or any fewer Americans to believe in global warming.

Cook thinks the failure is partly because the consensus studies were not publicized enough. Another reason, he believes, is that American minds have been poisoned by climate contrarians like Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist under President George W. Bush, who advised skeptics to create an illusion of scientific discord and challenge established climate scientists. Such messaging has made people think the scientific consensus is much lower than it is in reality, Cook said. He calls this phenomenon the "consensus gap."

'Closing that consensus gap'
So, in 2011, Cook decided to do one more consensus study and promote the heck out of it. He collected 11,944 papers from the ISI Web of Science database that contained the words "global warming" or "global climate change." He and 11 Skeptical Science volunteers went through the abstracts and coded the authors' positions on anthropogenic global warming. Cook set it up as a video game, almost, where five abstracts would pop up on screen and the volunteers would code them and then hit "go." Then five more would pop up.
Green, the professor from Michigan Technological University, was the most prolific and coded about half the abstracts.

"It was winter in Michigan so I'd just come home and do them, and my husband was out of town, sometimes I'd do 50, sometimes I'd do five, sometimes I'd do more," she said, sipping on iced hibiscus tea on a muggy day in Washington, D.C.

Green and her colleagues found 4,014 papers that endorsed global warming, rejected global warming or explicitly stated they did not hold a position on it. Of these papers, 97.2 percent endorsed the "consensus" that global warming is human caused.

Once results were in, Cook put together a publicity strategy.
"There's no point in doing scientific research if you are not looking to publicize it," he said. "A part of what we were doing was closing that consensus gap, and the consensus gap is delaying climate action. We wanted it to have a tangible impact."
He published the study in the open access journal Environmental Research Letters. The co-authors released press releases through their universities to media in the U.S., United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. They publicized findings through Twitter and Facebook. And a public relations firm, SJI Associates, volunteered to design a website.

The blowback began soon enough from the climate skeptic community. Soon after came challenges from the scientific community. Tol, the economics professor at the University of Sussex, was among the most vehement.
What is a consensus?
Tol attacked the Cook study partly because of his personality. He takes to controversy like a fly to a jam sandwich. Most scientists preface comments about the latest Tol controversy with some variation of, "I actually like Tol."
Tol dislikes, in principle, the idea of a consensus. After all, the point of science is to challenge accepted wisdom and refine it, a process that runs somewhat counter to the idea of a consensus.
"I'm a hopeless romantic for the Enlightenment: I'd rather convince people with arguments than with an appeal to authority or consensus," Tol said via email.
One of the problems with Cook's appeal to authority is this: So far, no one has quantified the consensus among natural scientists on global warming. In fact, it cannot be done easily, said Jon Krosnick, a social psychologist at Stanford University who has been studying communication strategies for decades.
While the Cook study may quantify the views expressed in published literature, it does not establish the beliefs of any defined group of scientists, Krosnick said.
"How do you determine who qualifies to be surveyed and who doesn't qualify?" he asked. "Personally, I haven't seen anyone accomplish that yet."
The response has led to some head scratching by Cook and his colleagues.
"I expected the criticism from climate deniers because they've been attacking the consensus for 20 years," Cook said. "I'm a bit disappointed that scientists who accept the consensus and who are trying to work towards climate action are criticizing this method of communication because the reason why we did it was based on a lot of social science research."
In a laboratory experiment, scientists interviewed 90 people in Perth, Australia, and asked them to estimate the scientific consensus on global warming. The subjects said that only 70 percent of scientists agreed on climate change. The scientists then informed the subjects that the consensus was closer to 97 percent.
Upon receiving that information, some people more strongly believed in climate change.
How big is the middle?
So, what kinds of people are receptive to the message? People in the middle, ones who are uncertain in their beliefs, Cook said.
There is just one problem with this theory: The middle is sparsely populated.
Just 26 percent of Americans who believe in climate change are in it, said Krosnick, who computed the statistics for ClimateWire. And just 10 percent of Americans who disbelieve in climate change may switch sides and become believers, he said.
Kahan of Yale University disagreed with Cook that people, even in the middle, will change their minds when exposed to consensus messaging. In fact, most people are already broadly aware of the scientific consensus on climate change, he said.
To prove this point, Kahan tested Republicans and Democrats on their scientific knowledge of global warming. He found that an overwhelming majority of both Republicans and Democrats know scientists believe CO2 causes global temperatures to rise. They also know that scientists believe that human-caused global warming leads to coastal flooding, rising temperatures and other ill effects.
And yet, when questioned outright, even highly educated Republicans underestimated the scientific consensus on climate change.
Kahan thinks this is because the question "What do scientists believe?" no longer measures people's climate knowledge. Rather, it indicates their ideology and worldview. The conflation is due to inflammatory advertising using the 97 percent consensus message that has politicized the message.
"I don't think it is conceivable that people who are highest in science literacy know less about climate change than other people," he said. "They know more. If you measure that, you would find that out. But instead, if you want to measure who they are, you will find out who they are."
That is why, outside laboratory conditions, the consensus message has not worked over the past decade, Kahan said.

A new question arises: 'So what?'
Even assuming the consensus message does work, it will not necessarily lead to climate action by policymakers, said Mike Hulme, professor of climate and culture at King's College London.

"Even if one takes the Cook et al. study at face value then how does a scientific consensus of 97.1 percent make policy-making about climate change any easier?" he wrote in an upcoming book on the consensus that he shared with ClimateWire.

A majority of Americans already believe in climate change and support climate policy, but this has not budged the political needle. Hulme argues that climate policy—and indeed, action on popular initiatives like gun control or immigration—requires more than just broad public support. It requires getting people with different worldviews and perspectives on climate change together at the government level to consider solutions, he wrote.
In the political theater, people with different visions for the future should be able to discuss policy without polarizing messages, he wrote. In other words, dissent is welcome.
As for Cook of the SkS group, he roughly agrees with Hulme that people ought to be working on solutions to the climate problem. But he thinks that attacks by credible scientists on the consensus can act as a roadblock on the path toward action.
In fact, the most challenging week for the SkS group was when Tol challenged its paper on Capitol Hill, Cook said. After that hearing, Republican lawmakers issued a press release saying the Cook paper had been "debunked."
"[Tol] has even said there is no doubt in his mind that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus, so everyone is a little bit amused by the fact that he agrees with our results and yet he has been attacking our research," he said

[highway001]

Yikes...sorry that was even longer than I thought. Still a good read if you have a few minutes.

[rustled]

Yikes...sorry that was even longer than I thought. Still a good read if you have a few minutes.

It was long!

There's no doubt that Cook regards climate change as a moral issue.
"As a father, I realized that we are handing over a world to our children that is worse than the world we were given," he said over the phone from Brisbane, Australia. "And as a Christian, I saw climate change as a social justice issue."

Propelled by that burden, as well as the more real-world needs of his Ph.D. thesis, Cook immersed himself in climate communication. He wanted to help effect climate action, which has been spectacularly hard to achieve even as world leaders have met and disbanded at successive United Nations meetings over the past two decades. In the U.S., Republicans have blocked any sort of climate progress.

Cook thinks that politicians are not acting because the public is not pressuring them enough. If people realize that the majority of scientists agree on human-caused climate change, they will absorb that knowledge like empty vessels and become more convinced of the threat, he said. They will then be more amenable to picking up their phones and calling their legislators.

"If the public think that climate scientists agree about what is causing global warming, then the public thinks we need to act on it," he said. "If the public thinks scientists disagree, then we might as well wait until the scientists work it out before we do anything about it."

Therein lies the problem. Did he even consider the morality of manipulating data to suit his foregone conclusions? No siree. Because to him, and to people like him, the end justifies the means. Their end is to force governments to do something about climate change. Building the myth of "consensus" and "settled science" was done to serve that end goal.

That's not science. That's politics. He's a political activist. Cloaking himself as the arbiter of morality does nothing whatsoever for his credibility as a scientist.

While true scientists believe in facts and the scientific method, Cook believes in doing whatever it takes to convince people (empty vessels, he calls us!) to call their legislatures and get us moving in the direction he's decided (morally and politically, but not scientifically) that we need to go.

And he wonders why so many of us aren't convinced he any different from any other kind of religious fanatic.

[dudlee]

CliMate Change is the new left contro money network scheme . Just think aout it , it's true , Climate does change , if it didn't we'd be living on a moon or asteroid ?

Smoke Pot , and stand up for Climate Change . Oh and let's let the two WORST IMMITERS make their own deal which allows them to create more polution to 2030 and then praise them for it


TOTAL EFFING mORONS , just look at Burnaby mnt , they protest test drill to make sure it's safe , by spitting and abusing women reporters and *bleep* in the park and damaging it . And Kinder Morgan , the bad guys pay to clean up the Envirotards mess afterwards

[I Think]

We only have one place to live, too bad you don't care about it.

[rustled]

We only have one place to live, too bad you don't care about it.

You wouldn't truly maintain that "not being in full agreement with your position on climate change" constitutes "proof of not caring". As I recall, George W. Bush was ridiculed for taking the same kind of "if you're not with us you're against us" stance. That's shallow reasoning indeed, and I know you're capable of better.