Skepticalscience says it is a myth. I find it a bit ironic that they give no reasons as to why this is a myth.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php?a=308

It would seem to me that they would want it to be not falsifiable to give themselves so more wiggle room. If it is falsifiable, they certainly have done a poor job demonstrating it. They predict warming and it fails to warm. The draw and redraw lines in the sand and create one model after another.

They simply utter the mantra, CO2 is a GHG and therefore it must be causing the warming and ignore the fact that there is so much more complexity than just CO2. It is almost sad when people who seem to be interested in science get so certain of things that they allow no room for healthy skepticism.

The irony is that the statement 'Global warming is falsifiable' is in itself not falsifiable.

The fact is you can't falsify anything the IPCC says with experimental data. We are starting to see how this works in practice. We've seen global surface temperatures plateau for 15 years, so Global Warming theory says that it's very likely that we had significant natural cooling over the last 15 years and the Earth would have cooled significantly if it weren't for CO2 emissions.

Hypothetically, if the climate cools over the next 20 years, then the Global Warming theory just says it's very likely would have cooled significantly more if it wasn't for CO2 emissions, but it very likely would have cooled significantly less if we emitted more CO2.

The IPCC doesn't seem to mind being very certain that past warming was caused by human activity. Conveniently certainty about the past doesn't translate into confidence in predicting the future.

First according teh scientific defnitions of words like "theory" Glaobal warming is NOT a thery. Its somewhere between a thesis and a hypothesis.

Next the only way for it to not be "falsifiable" is if it is a known fact. i.e. A grain of wheat come from a wheat plant. that is a known fact. Theories, if this qualified as a theory is NOT a fact. Scientific LAWS are facts.

Even Scientific LAWS however can be falsifiable to some degree. Take the law of gravity for example. the law of gravity was originall stated as an atteaction of one mass to another mass. Point of fact we now know of more than 14 other factors, variable, that are a part of what we commonly call gravity. Magentic fiedls, electric fields are just two. Mass is one. There are at least 11 more.

So is it a myth that global Warming theory isn't falsifiable? Only to those with minimal scientific education. For those of us with a scientific education we see it as a lie, not a myth.

The first thing you need to know about skepticalscience is that it is neither.

The blank page is intriguing. One supposes that they can't think of anything that would contradict the theory - or if they can, they would not want to publish it.

CO2 and Global Warming makes me think of a murder case. Person A has a gun. Person B died of gunshot wounds therefore A killed B.

We could prove A's innocence by showing that bullets can't kill. The scientists will be able to tell you all about explosives, high speed chemical reactions, spin, precession, trajectories, shock waves, times of flight, energy absorption, kinetic energy etc. So they know that bullets can kill.

If you ask a scientist, convinced of A's guilt, about alternatives he will tell you that he cannot think of any other possibility. All the research is being done on either guns and their ability to kill or exactly how dead B is.

On the other hand, a good defence lawyer would want to know whether it was A's gun that killed B, whether A was in the vicinity when B was killed, whether A was holding the murder weapon at the time, whether A was still alive at the time, whether B was still alive at the time etc.

Well let's look at two of the most prominent statements of global warming theory by the IPCC:

"Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C (high confidence), extremely unlikely less than 1°C (high confidence), and very unlikely greater than 6°C (medium confidence)."

"It is extremely likely more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together."

So let's say that skeptics are correct (mainstream skeptics not "Skydragons", etc.). Climate sensitivity is found to be 1.3C and the increase in global average surface temperature from 1951-2010 is 22% due to anthropogenic forcings. Does that falsify the above statements? No, it was just "unlikely".

The interesting part is that the second statement indicates anthropogenic forcings include "other" which is land use, urbanization, industrialization, etc. Yet they don't indicate how much is "other" and how much is CO2. And yet the policy proposals assume a reduction in CO2 is going to be effective to halting warming which is predicted by models based on the first statement.

That all adds up to supporting strong CO2 reductions being based on a "just in case" point of view. To support that, you'd certainly in my mind need a lot of other reasons to go down such a road. In other words, even if CO2 reductions didn't affect temperatures greatly, "this other stuff" that happened as a positive is reason enough.

Overall, it's such a weak argument that you have to really be married to that "other stuff" to strong supporter. Although many probably don't know that's the actual scope of the argument and just think reducing CO2 will "save" us from disastrous temperature rises and sea level increases and hurricanes and droughts, etc.

My gosh, couldn't they have just left it out of the list, as part of their secret website, until someone else fills in with a proper response later? Instead they put in what is clearly a placeholder. It would have been funny if the placesetter had put in Beginner Intermediate and Advanced responses.

I wonder if they have put in a response to upside-down graphs.

The theory is falsifiable, but the scientists involved won't accept falsification. Colder temperatures are consistent with global warming. Lack of warming is consistent with global warming. Less snow is proof of global warming. More snow is consistent with global warming. That the models have failed should be obvious, but instead they run a spaghetti graph of all models and say the models are successful, because temperatures are within the bounds of all of them, even though no individual model does well at all. Shouldn't they instead look at the best performing models, and say this is the best representation? If they did that, they would be forced to lower their estimates of warming.

Why would you NOT consider if falsifiable? Let's see, you could falsify by showing that carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas, you could produce a more complete and accurate computer model and show that warming does not occur, you could wait a sufficient amount of time and show that the rise in temperature does not match predictions and the difference is outside of natural variation--those are three different ways of falsifying it.

It is not falsified by looking over such a short time period that natural variation can swamp any expected rise in temperature and saying "Aha! It is not warming".

Perhaps you are familiar with the concept of signal-to-noise ratio. I sometimes work on nuclear magnetic resonance, and in those experiments if you look at the results from any single experiment, you will not see any signal, because the noise is many times larger than the signal, but that does not mean it is not there. If you wait long enough so the experiment can be run many thousands of times, you will see the signal grow out of the noise--but you have to wait. Just because a theory cannot be falsified by observations on a time scale of your liking does not mean that it cannot be falsified.

EDIT for Sagebrush: You should publish your great work somewhere. Your scientific arguments are clearly irrefutable. Perhaps the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine has an appropriate journal.

Peggy: "Why would you NOT consider if falsifiable?"

The earth's temperature has undeniably gone down for over a decade. At the same time the CO2 level has increased.

"Perhaps you are familiar with the concept of signal-to-noise ratio."

Yes I am quite familiar with that. So you should know the concept of CO2 to temperature rise ratio. There isn't any. None that's ever been proven. If there is, it is only in yours and Al Gore's mind and Al Gore's crooked chart. Just take a look at your answer. Don't you feel foolish?

In answer to the question. As stated above, those two indisputable facts prove that AGW is falsified.

They use the name "Skeptical Science" to perpetuate their cause. They don't need a reason, because of their claim to skeptic fame.

The simple fact that the mid-troposphere isn't warming at an alarming rate should give them pause and reconfigure their climate models, but there is still hope. When temperatures fall out of their projected trend, they may find another excuse, but credibility will then become an issue. That's what happens when a premise is wrong to start with. We should thank Margaret Thatcher for her quest for energy security for Great Britain. I will.

Thanks Margo! :-)

Additionally :

Global Warming is said to be the rise above the established normal global average temperature, but that (global average) temperature changes from year to year. In the case of 2007-08 (global average temperature) there was a drop from 2007 to 2008 of 0.7C. The global average temperature had dipped to just about 0.2C above the established normal temperature which meant that we were only about 0.2C from being at the established normal temperature. Since it was still above the established average temperature it is considered a warm year even though the global average temperature dropped 0.7C during that 1 year time period. Natural variability? Of course!