The broad consensus of climate researchers in favor of the CO2 human forced global warming climate model is intimidating for outsiders. Take a look at the Wikipedia articles on global warming, climate models, and the temperature record. Recitation of evidence! Spectacular display of mathematics! Impressive jargon! Graphs with lines and colors! How could anyone, who is not a scientist working professionally with the models and evidence, have any doubt about the conclusions of climate researchers?
Here are two philosophical stances to support scepticism.
First, despite the great complexity, the multiple streams of evidence, the sophisticated mathematics, and the complex computer models, the models are simplistic renditions of the earth and its climate. In terms of the unimaginably huge number of phenomena of physical change exhibited by the earth and its climate, there are only a few threads of evidence. For comparison, try to imagine a single model, or several models of human anatomy, physiology, health, and disease. With that in mind, notice that since the mid-twentieth century, both obesity and asthma have increased steadily in the populations of the industrialized, urbanized societies. What has caused the increases in obesity and asthma? Is it the increased use of vacines for childhood diseases? Or the increased consumption of corn sugars in industrially processed foods? There are intriguing correlations on graphs between data on obesity and sugar consumption, but we don't yet have genetic/metabolic/physiological mechanisms linking them.
Scientists are continually discovering new phenomena, new connections between phenomena, and re-evaluating old assumptions about causal links between phenomena. In the past several years, support for the anthropogenic global warming thesis has been revised by new studies of the artic warming cycles, the Atlantic current, and weather cycles, such as El Niño and La Niña.
Two, climate science is a science conceived and practiced within the context of political policy. That is not to say that climate science is simply political knowledge; but it is to say that climate science is influenced by political interest. We see that influence easily in the wounded cries of climate scientists who respond to criticism with concern that IPCC findings and recommendations might have be changed if challenges to the anthropogenic global warming thesis are verified. Science is ideologically influenced by political interest. Some sciences are more removed than others from political influence, but climate science is hardly removed at all. This political interest must be assumed to be behind a great deal of the consensus among climate scientists, almost none of whom are familiar with all fields of the science and who must trust their colleagues' findings and conclusions.
Update. March 12, 2008. Correlated bias in twenty climate models discovered in application to North America data. (Thanks to The Astute Blogger.) The authors conclude:
"Based on our analysis, many AOGCM models, especially those developed by the same parent organizations, have highly correlated biases and thus the effective number of “independent” AOGCM models are much less than the actual number of models. This lets us form subgroups of models that share “common” features and to find better strategy in combining the informations from different model outputs rather than taking a naive average. We also demonstrated that the performance of AOGCM models on the mean temperature state has little relationship with its performance in reproducing the observed spatial temperature trend. This conflicts with a standard assumption used to interpret different AOGCM projections of future climate. Our results suggest the need for better model validation procedures that are multivariate. (Mikyoung Jun, Reto Knutti and Doug Nychka, "Spatial Analysis to Quantify Numerical Model Bias and Dependence: How Many Climate Models Are There?" Texas A&M.)
Update. April 18, 2008. Patrick Michaels, senior fellow in envioronmental studies at the Cato Institute and professor of environmental sciences at University of Virginia, finds apparent bias in the major records of global warming since the 1970s, including the way in which the data series have been revised so as to increase the apparent warming. Corrections remove much of the putative warming. "Our Climate Numbers Are a Big Old Mess", Wall Street Journal, Friday, April 18, 2008, A17.
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