It's been an unusually warm and dry November here in Oregon -- and the Pacific Northwest. Naturally this doesn't prove global warming is happening, but it's one more experiential piece of evidence.
Yet just as there still are people around who deny the Holocaust, global climate change skeptics continue to spout their anti-reality rhetoric.
Periodically I get comments from them on one of my climate change posts, such as "Global warming doubters deserve to be scorned."
Now, I appreciate the time and effort put in by the most recent commenter. And I dutifully took a look at the links he shared. However, I'm not impressed by what a few scientists say when their opinions go against the grain of the general scientific consensus.
This quotation from an article by Michael Shermer in Skeptic magazine is germane to my point:
Within all these fallacies of thinking about both evolution and the Holocaust, there is an assumption by the creationists and the revisionists that if they can just find one tiny crack in the structure the entire edifice will come tumbling down.
This is the fundamental flaw in their reasoning. The Holocaust was not a single event. The Holocaust was 10,000 events in 10,000 places, and is proved by 10,000 bits of data that converge to one conclusion.
Ditto with anthropogenic (human caused) global climate change.
On conservative talk radio I regularly hear blather from scientifically illiterate hosts about how it's been the coldest winter in some place since whenever, or how this or that glacier is growing rather than receding.
Big deal. This doesn't change the fact that the overwhelming majority of climate change scientists agree that the Earth is warming, and humans have a lot to do with it.
Check out "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change" in the highly-respected journal, Science.
Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.
The above-mentioned commenter sent along a link to a ridiculous petition project. It claims that 31,072 American scientists have signed the climate-change denying petition, including 9,021 with Ph.Ds.
Whoopee.
So a bunch of people who aren't experts in climatology disagree with the real experts. I'm sure it'd be possible to find an equal number of Ph.Ds who don't believe in evolution. Further, the qualifications for signing the petition are pretty darn loose.
Signatories are approved for inclusion in the Petition Project list if they have obtained formal educational degrees at the level of Bachelor of Science or higher in appropriate scientific fields. The petition has been circulated only in the United States.
So a B.S. in chemistry earns you the right to spread your B.S. about a subject you know next to nothing about. Most appropriate.
If you've got doubts about whether anthropogenic global climate change is happening, get the facts from genuine experts. Like those who run the RealClimate web site, whose tag line is "climate science from climate scientists."
Look over some of the posts, such as "Mind the gap." You'll learn about the complexities of climate change science, which get glossed over by the simplistic global warming deniers.
I was amused by the lead paragraph in one of the It isn't happening! web sites.
In early September, I began noticing a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming. Actually, it was more like a string of guest columns and long letters to the editor since it is hard for skeptical scientists to get published in the cabal of climate journals now controlled by the Great Sanhedrin of the environmental movement.
Oh, poor things. They can't get their pseudo-science through the peer-review standards that guard against garbage being published in reputable scientific journals.
This makes my point for me. Real climate change scientists agree that global warming is happening. Fake ones have a different opinion.
Hmmmmm. Should I go with real or fake? I choose real, because reality is preferable to illusion.
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