That I find interesting. Unless there's an unpersuaded audience looking in, we regulars here are just indulging ourselves. mhaze
et al are coming
from their convictions, and nothing will change that. Responding to them is an intellectual exercise (nothing wrong with that) but won't change anything. I'm convinced of AGW by what I see as good reasons.
As an agnostic, in the middle ground, what is it in the arguments that leans you towards anti-AGW and away from AGW? A rough-cut of your impressions - and I promise I won't leap at your throat
. Or even try to convert you.
The conviction stuff is old hat, and at the other end is Joe Prole, just as predictable. It's the middle ground that's interesting.
Sadly, it'll have to be a rough cut... as I've lamented before, I don't really have enough time to follow this stuff as closely as I'd like.
Some basic things which I believe, just as a foundation:
1. The Earth has, in the past few decades and very likely quite awhile before that, been warming.
2. Humans do contribute a fair amount of exhaust of various sorts to the atmosphere. That we definitely know ^_^
3. Pollution is a bad thing in general... it's been shown to cause problems on a local level so it's not all that hard to believe that it could have some effect on a global scale.
4. In terms of CO2 and it's effects, although I would generally agree that it might be warming the atmosphere to a certain extent, I think it really ends up being a rather trivial amount of warmth added to the natural cycles.
And of course, regardless of if AGW is true or not, anything we do to reduce bad emissions that cause things like smog is generally a good thing. But doing it specifically in the name of AGW bugs the heck out of me because I don't think AGW has a solid enough foundation. If I'm going to do something, I'd rather do it for a known true reason rather than some potentially trumped up, politicized, notion.
So, on to the arguments that make me lean towards Anti-AGW:
1. In all honestly, just the way some of the AGW camp behave is almost an argument against them. I'm not talking about the people on the forum here, but the scientists and the scientific climate involved in the discussion. Regardless of what you might think of McIntyre (for example) he has pointed out some fairly major things that are wrong with the data and methodology that is used. The fact that getting scientists to release the information for how their conclusions were reached seems to be a bit like pulling teeth (I'm specifically referencing Hansen & Mann, et al. here) one has to wonder.
In general, I find that if someone is trying so desperately to hide things that there is something to be hidden. It's just not scientific to do things that way... the whole point of the peer review process is to be open enough so other people can attempt to come up with the same results and it seems like in a lot of instances this just isn't happening.
When things like that happen, I instantly become suspicious.
3. Although I'd like to believe that our scientific world is a Dawkin-ish world in which science can do no wrong and the methodology of science will always result in factual data, I realize that this isn't how things are. There is a very depressing amount of groupthink and extortionism in the scientific community in that if you disagree with something mainstream, you are often ridiculed without thought. The same things happen with many branches of academia and science: Disagree with the professor and get bad grades, agree and get good grades. Hmm, I wonder which one I'm going to do?
There are certainly enough stories of people who aren't Anti-AGW but still do small things like pose just a little skepticism being run out of a job. It almost gives a near religious aura to the AGW camp in that if you don't agree completely, you are completely wrong and sinful. Anytime something reaches something like that religious aura, reason and logic tend to fly out the window, which makes me suspicious.
3. Feedbacks:
This is probably one of the more important ones, as the first two are only appeals to the people surrounding the issue and the nature of humanity for groupthink and "sideism"
At this point the issue seems to go something like this: CO2 is a forcing GHG that causes a bunch of positive feedback that (in some extreme cases) leads to a tipping point of some horrible catastrophes.
But that doesn't really make much sense. I believe it was mhaze that posted a link to this awhile ago:
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2007/07/table-of-conten.html
To me, the discussion of feedbacks in there seems completely logical. In general, a system with so many positive feedbacks as to cause the problems that the AGW people are concerned about would be a fundamentally unstable system. Considering that the Earth has been around for several billion years and has probably encountered a fair number of massive climate altering events from outside (asteroids smashing into the earth anyone? Yellow Stone Volcano erupting?) and has managed to stabilize the climate again, it makes far more sense that there are a lot more negative feedbacks than the positive ones.
Also, the discussion of the gradual tapering of CO2's effect on temperature in that link is pretty interesting too.
4. Natural variance
A lot of AGW people seem to come at the problem from the stance that the world would stay exactly the same in terms of climate had humans never existed. The climate has been continually changing since the Earth formed and (barring some giant climate control system) will very likely always be changing until it's engulfed by the expanding sun.
Even if humans do have an effect on temperature, my thought is that it would probably just be a small amount riding on top of the natural changes. I think that many of us agree that the little ice age existed so naturally we would have warmed up since then.
Ok.. I have more fodder I could put out, but this is already going significantly longer that I anticipated.
I do suggest reading the link above... I found it to be a fairly level headed discussion of issues involving the critique of AGW.
