The US Navy has investigated all things weather and climate since the days of John Paul Jones. NOTHING that bears on winds, currents, hydrometers, temperatures, humidity and cloud cover escapes the Naval Weather Service. Ships at sea and air operations are totally dependent on the science, data and physics of the oceans, the atmosphere, ice and the temperature range for all naval operations from the equator to the poles.

The effect of climate change on the political situation on every continent bears on the current and future possibilities of war at sea. The research done by the scientists at the Naval Post Graduate at Monterey, California bears out the research done by all other scientific climate study organizations. Our planet has increased the CO2 content of our atmosphere by 114ppm in the last less than 200 years by burning an ever increasing amount of fossil fuels. The 'greenhouse effect' is real, measurable and has already changed the world's climate. While there are political, economic and social implications involved, some that impact established organizations in a negative way, the facts as to why this is happening and effects that can be anticipated are not some 'communist' plot. When the US Navy says we have a problem, you better believe that we do.

Start here. This is the first published scientific paper on the topic. That was 1956

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.11...

After that, you have about 20,000 more scientific papers to read. You'll have to buy subscriptions to about 8 journals because the full papers are behind pay walls.

Three options:

1. Read all the research and test every single study (this is not possible in one lifetime. Real scientists depend on other credible research and share knowledge)

2. Learn and understand what credible scientists know. The best sources for that are the statements from the science academies.

3. Rant in ignorance. Say stupid things that make no sense.

I choose 2.

You choose 3.

No. That's ridiculous.

There is a difference between being informed and being an expert. If you have a certain medical condition, for example, you will read up on it, you will ask questions, you will try to understand as much as you can about what it is affecting you. But at the end of the day, it'll be medical staff who assess you. You will place your trust in the hands of the lab technicians performing analysis of your blood work, the radiologists taking your scans, the medical physicists preparing your contrast agents, the medical device manufacturers and engineers who built the equipment to scan you or your blood, the ventilators, cardio-resus kits, the dialysis machines, etc. You will place your trust in the pharmaceutical companies, in the doctor's knowledge of the side effects of the medication you'll take, and the nursing staff to monitor and update their observations. You will also place your trust in the surgical instrument manufacturers, in the surgeons themselves and so on.

The point is, you may be informed about your condition, but you cannot possibly be informed on all aspects of your potential treatment. That's the difference between being 'informed' and being an 'expert' in a specific field.

I, like you, can be informed. But that is not the same as being an expert. And placing our trust in people who have specific knowledge in areas that we lack is not laziness. It is a fundamental fact of the society we now live in. It's been a fundamental fact for several centuries now.

I listen to the climatologists because I think they are the best people we have to make assessments about the climate. I listen to the IPCC because it is an international organisation contributed to by thousands of scientists from every corner of the planet. If you don't think that is true, then I have a very hard time understanding that viewpoint. I can't imagine who else I should be listening to. It doesn't make me a sheep to listen to people who are trained in areas I'm not. That's what we call 'being sensible' rather than 'being a paranoid delusional conspiracy theory nutjob who'll listen to anyone who argues what they wanted to believe in the first place'.

The same Al Gore who CREATED THE INTERNET is the same guy who is spewing forth that 97% of the scientist believe there is global warming and then when that proved false from a scientist in England using faulty algorithms on global warming, Al Gore change his tune to climate change in order to sell his millions in carbon credits that he is pushing. Why should we trust a non-scientist blowhard about climate change when all Al Gore knows about climate change could be put into a thimble. When politicians want to tax the air worldwide, hold you wallet tightly because the politicians are about to tax you to death on the air you breathe whether it has CO2 levels or not that are elevated by mankind. Volcanoes and the Sun apparently are second fiddle to Al Gore's slogan that Mankind is the problem so buy my carbon credits will you please to make me rich.

Yes intellectually lazy. Frequently, many people who are wedded to the political green solutions are not interested in hearing the critiques, such as they invented a hockey stick with shaky methodology including upside down charts. That it won't warm as much as they claim from models. Even that US cuts in CO2 emissions are irrelevant as the developing world controls the majority of emissions.

Now John Kerry said that if you are intellectually lay, you get stuck in Iraq.

Now here he is going around as Secretary of State declaring global warming to be the biggest problem, and right now he is stuck in Iraq.

WOW! Look at the "faith" in human intelligence! "The world is definitely flat?" Again?

All that they have been saying is true Sage!

Where's that list again?

The one with all of the apocalyptic happenings from "environmental-activist-science" teachers?

Where is the formula that calculates CO2 warming at 0.7C because of a 40% increase of atmospheric CO2 levels?

Where are they coming together to develop that formula (except in their own opinion classes)?

Climate science politicians? Global Warming politicians? Population control politicians? Liberals? Socialists?, Communists? Are they all the same?

YES (IMHO)!!!

We've let the science community run amok in our media outlets for far too long. The science is protected under a law that isn't actually named, but also hides behind National Academies and specialists who go un-named.

We deal with being verbally "dumbed down" by those who adhere to many "theories" yet to be proven.

It seems that now we are dealing with new Gods of science who rule the intelligence community through climate science.

Does any other science try and control politics in the way climate science does? Medical science maybe?

The idiocy of science managing any "meaningful idea" based on what they "really" know is exactly why scientists ("the people who study things") do what they do and specialists actually do the work.

In short, scientists are made up of "people with opinions on what they have observed". Nothing else!!!

Unlike pegminer, I acknowledge that scientists can be wrong, even a lot of them, even most of them and even sometimes all of them. Sometimes a lot of them are slightly wrong (Millikan's oil drop experiment) and sometimes the vast majority are spectacularly wrong (stress causes ulcers). As a matter of fact, scientists are wrong most of the time. That's why they continue to research and study and try to get closer to being right.

I predict we are close to the day when it will become clear that most climate scientists have been spectacularly wrong and while human are causing some warming (and CO2 has a climate sensitivity lower than 3C), warming would not be that much of a problem. But much more importantly, that natural forcings are by far the most dominant and we are actually heading towards global cooling which will be a real problem.

And even though I'm not a scientist, I could be wrong about that, perhaps even spectacularly wrong. At least I don't go around calling people stupid. Because when you are spectacularly wrong, that makes you even more stupid.

The problem is, is that it is all secondhand information, even reading scientific textbooks as pegminer says is no guarantee of the truth.

All I know is as long as there is debate, with many prominent scientists opposing AGW then the science is not settled, there are still many questions to be answered.

Gary F. You are so arrogant, you know nothing about me, yes I have been in correspondence with scientists, in fact I was once invited to vist Bangladesh by M.G.Hussain Bsc director of Bangladesh fisheries in conjunction with an aquaponic project, unfortunately I had to decline as my wife was suffering with stage 4 cancer.

Most people who are interested in science do find out for themselves. I have pointed many in here to just the resources where they can find out for themselves located at http://www.coursera.org but they refuse to take it because they believe it is all part of the great conspiracy.

A person should always 'find out for themselves' when interested in a subject or a subject affects them. If I had Parkinson's disease I would want to find out all I could about it before accepting what my doctors were telling me. I'd remember, though, that sources do matter. I wouldn't go to a blog of an eccentric individual to learn that if I took this type of herb it would cure me. I would look into what the actual science said.

Your statement concerning the Earth cooling for over a decade is false and you have been told this many times. You need to weed out the short term variation to get the long term trend. The Earth consists of more than just the lower troposphere, as the data you get this from shows, and more than the surface, which measurements of surface temperatures show. You need to also include the oceans and so on. If you start from 1998 your data will show that short term variation not the long term trend. Especially as 1997/98 was the year of the most intense El Nino on record. If you take a shorter time period your data will show more short term variation probably related to the ENSO and associated PDO. You continue to fail to understand this yet you believe others are intellectually lazy.

If you're talking about yourself, yes, I believe you're intellectually lazy. Clearly you have no expertise at all in the field of climate. Even worse than knowing nothing, you believe things that are demonstrably wrong.

When was the last time you read a physics text, an atmospheric science text, or a statistics text? If you have done none of those things, and yet reject the work of scientists, you are not just intellectually lazy, but you're also stupid.

EDIT: Why don't I see Sagebrush's quote from Folland anywhere but denial websites? And the funny thing is, the denial websites don't agree on the wording! Clearly it is taken out of context, but my guess would be that what he was saying was the warnings are not about the warming seen so far (the "data" of the quote), but the potential warming seen in the models. No "denial" of the importance of data, but simply a statement that it is the future warming that we're worried about.

Of course, this is just a guess, since we are never shown the full quote--that might change the message completely.

What is wrong with finding out for yourself? What is wrong in not letting other individuals think for you?

I saw this in an answer to my question, "the way I see it is, credible scientists maintain a problem exists, thats good enough for me."

"Hey, Dr. Smith said that this snake oil would cure this. He's a Doctor, he should know. That's good enough for me!"

Science is... big. I have a Bachelor's degree in biology, and it only qualifies me to more or less skim the surface of the topic. I know more than the average person about biology (particularly botany and ecology), but I couldn't tell you much more than the average complete layman about, say, the mating habits of butterflies, or human anatomy, or the genetic causes of cancer. And biology is just one field, I could tell you even less about physics, chemistry, geology, and so on.

The days of "Renaissance men" are pretty much over. *No one* can be an expert in everything, because there's just way too much knowledge out there. So, for the most part, except for things in our own field, we have to trust those who are experts. Not because we're intellectually lazy, but because we can't know all the things. It's just not humanly possible.

That doesn't mean you should just blindly accept the word of anyone with a PhD. There is a role for your own judgement if you don't want to be intellectually lazy. But it's in appropriately evaluating *what* experts to listen to, and in keeping your mind open to the possibility that you're wrong. It's figuring out if the expert you're listening to is fooling herself because she's ignoring half the evidence, or lying because he's being paid by someone who wants what he says to be true, or so on. It's figuring out if the person who disagrees with the consensus is a groundbreaker, or just doing bad science. And so on.

edit:

" No where near 97% of the scientists of the world or the US conform to the AGW theory."

And where do you get that information from?

"Quote by Noel Brown, UN official: "Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of "eco-refugees," threatening political chaos.""

And are UN officials climate scientists?

"Back in the 70s many of these same scientists were predicting the doom and gloom of an imminent Ice Age caused by CO2."

No, the predicted ice age was because of particulate and sulfate pollution, not CO2. It was global dimming, which we mostly fixed. And which (from a different source, rising economies in Asia) is part of why the last decade or so has not warmed as much as most models predicted.

"The Earth has cooled for over a decade."

Cherrypicking. Random-walk your bookend years, in both directions, and you'll see both warming and cooling over that approximate time period. All that shows is that short term trends aren't worth the electrons they're printed on.

By the by, if you want to respond to an individual person, you can do so as a comment under their post, and save your (limited) updates for more general notes.

Not as much as the person who never learns the meanings of climate, science, global, or skepticism.

Oh, wait a minute. You said "lazy" - I thought you said "stupid."

My bad.

====

edit –

>>Update 4: Peggy: The Earth has cooled for over a decade. <<

>>To a true scientist, the data DOES matter. Too bad you didn't know that. Now you do. <<

Since you were one of “true” scientists who continually referenced Phil Jones “not statistically significant” comment, I assume you can scientifically demonstrate that your cooling claim is true by showing that temperatures “over a decade” are statistically significantly different from the preceding warm period.

In the meantime – while you gather your scientific evidence – we’ll just go with the existing observational evidence defining you are a scientifically illiterate liar.

=====

edit --

>>Yet you will have to agree that the CO2 level has increased during this same time. I don't need a journal or a scientist to tell me that CO2 does not control the temperature based on what the Earth tells me.<<

What you need is a medical examination to find out if there is a physical reason that your brain never developed the ability for conceptual thought.

=====

Kano ---

>>The problem is, is that it is all secondhand information, even reading scientific textbooks as pegminer

says is no guarantee of the truth. <<

That’s insane. Everyone cannot do everything themselves.

It is also a lie. Neither you nor any other Denier here has any problem with second-hand information (which also happens to be all that you have) or in using second-hand information to sit in God-like judgment of scientists you do not know, agencies you know nothing about, and research that you do not understand.

The point of pegminer’s suggestion was that before you can understand the science of something, you need to learn something about science – which contrary to your claims, you know absolutely nothing about. You do not even understand why the stupid graphs of the last 17 years that you constantly reference are not scientific evidence – and even then, they do not show or mean what scientifically illiterate Deniers claim they mean.

That is not opinion – it is a fact. In the eyes and brains of Deniers, scientific graphics might as well be Rorschach inkblots. Denier interpretations of scientific graphics say nothing about science, but they say a lot about the subjective feelings and beliefs that drive Denier psychology and behavior.

>> All I know is as long as there is debate, with many prominent scientists opposing AGW<<

You do not KNOW that. It is secondhand information from explicitly biased sources. You do not know any scientists, you have not spoken to any scientists, you have never been to a scientific conference or any public meeting of scientists, you do not read anything scientists write, and you do not listen to the scientists here.

The “debate” you KNOW about does not exist in the real world. So, if you do not even know that, it is safe to conclude that you also do not know anything about the science.

Most people lack the time, the intelligence, and/or the education to evaluate, say, the climate models.

Similarly, they get their car fixed and their health maintained by experts that know more then they do.

We can't all be experts in everything. We check around a bit for some evidence on just whom to believe. It is a safe bet on AGW when 97% of the specialist in AGW conclude that it is real. You are correct, The 97% is of CLIMATE SCIENTISTS. The other scientists are not experts in that field, and so can bring along their own biases to their conclusion.

No - when you have an illness, disease or broken bone, you go to a doctor. The solution they provide is based on having spent their life studying medicine. Does following a doctor's recommendation make you lazy or just make sense. What is the right thing to do.

I wentt to college at night while working full-time, received a bachelor;s degree & graduated with a 3.73 GPA,

I majored in computer science, when I investigate a problem, I utilize all of my education, without pride or prejudice, in order to arrive at that correct solution. I bring the best minds I can find & employ trust that they are truly trying to help me.

Since I am not a scientist. I will listen to the smartest people in their field and when 97% of those who have dedicated their lives & reputations to the study, I tend to agree based upon the same principles.

I found out for myself, It took me weeks of work, based on a graduate-level education in math and physical sciences and using real-world physical and production data. It's real. I didn't need near as much work to figure out your claim of "analysis" is bogus.

I agree with the idea that people should not just take the word of someone on something without checking other sources. But I object to you saying it only about global warming. If you has said, "If anyone accepts *a proposition...", then I would have no problem. But since you said, "If anyone accepts Global Warming..." it clearly shows you have no problem with people accepting the opinion of a person with a degree; you only have a problem with global warming.

However, if you do not yourself obtain the same qualifications as the degreed individual or cadre of individuals and hold your opinion as more qualified then you are being foolish as well as being intellectually lazy.

The sheep are just too gullible to lead their own flock so they follow the others, so to speak.

Of course.

dude this goes with anything.

I don't trust the media!!

Bunch of idiots are the people who believe everything they hear

Mostly it is all about money and control. Investigate what "cap and trade" is. Who profits? Who loses? Who dictates?

I trust you not at all

adassasda