97% of all scientists are not saying that humans are a critical threat to the quality of our climate. That was either a lie or a misunderstanding. 97% of all climate scientists are saying that humans to varying degrees DO impact the quality of our climate. They do not agree on how much. A large majority (way over 50%) do still believe that humans are moderately to severely impacting the environment.
Who determines who is a "climate scientist"? In departments controlled by people who have bought into the mantra that humans are controlling the climate, even if only for research grant money, what scientist will survive their dissertation review to get their PhD? If you don't arbitrarily draw the line of who is a "scientist" at the PhD, but include those who stopped at a Master's Degree, or even who have a Bachelor's degree and decades of experience, those who are claimed to be 'climate scientists' will generally be those who subscribe to the orthodoxy of those who approve the papers (because supposedly if you aren't published in a peer review journal, you haven't done good research), people who review those papers aren't going to approve something which will refute their own claims. Of course, approved papers (by those who claim AGW is real) are approved by those who believe AGW is real, and they cite each other's conclusions promiscuously, thereby gaining "credibility" for the number of citations. The problem is that those who do good work who are not passed through peer review because they do not agree with the orthodoxy neither are published nor are their works cited. Thereby, the metrics by which 'climate scientists' gain 'credibility' are under the control of those who harbor similar beliefs.
In short, and especially since claiming consensus, it has become an echo chamber, with the heretics summarily dismissed.
While dominant thoughts have often dominated scientific discourse, and then been later refuted, this is the first time that such an intense profit motive can be ascribed to those who are the purveyors of such thought. Sure, the whole prestige thingy has always been present, university professorships and tenure have been in the balance before over disagreements in scientific orthodoxy, but never before have trillions of dollars of public and private money depended on the actions taken by governments over something which may very well not even be happening. Significant debates which range(d) from whether evolution or creation was the genesis of humanity, whether the continental margins were the result of geosynclinal theory or plate tectonics, whether impacts of cosmic objects killed the dinosaurs, and even over the metabolic rates of those now extinct creatures, were pursued in the literature with vigor, even to the point of fistfights in the aisles at conventions, but settled without the expenditure of enormous funding at government demands--because any time tax money is used to subsidize an industry based on scientific conclusions, the government demands those funds from us all.
When that science enters into the profit arena, when government policy picks the winners and losers through subsidies or punitive taxation, then it affects everyone.
The much proclaimed sea level rises have not occurred. The assertion that there would be more and more severe storms has not happened. Instead, sea level is stable, Ice packs are within historical variation and not showing any trend of disappearing any time soon (there are more polar bears than ever), and severe storms, while very well televised, are actually down. Only the dollar value of the properties built in the path of those storms has gone up, enabling the assertion that "this one was the worst ever" giving rise to graphs of destruction which appear to escalate, but which follow increased population and inflation in the real estate market. The $2000 cottages destroyed by Hurricane Hazel pale on the 'big bucks' meter to one beach house on Cape Hatteras. Again, the destruction noted is more a factor of human settlement in areas previously inhabited (if at all) by people who made their living fishing, crabbing, clamming, and oystering, rather than people who now want to live in 4000 square foot homes and see sunrise/sets over the water. Even the value of the boats destroyed has gone up, because of the price and nature of those craft. So, it is easy to claim things are getting worse, even when they really aren't, partly because of the utter absence of historical perspective, now that these areas are populated more heavily than ever by people who build much more expensive homes surrounded by expensive toys.
Three people stood to gain significant shares of a market in carbon credits if they could only get a law passed requiring them. This wasn't done for the sake of humanity, but to make trillions --yes,
trillions of dollars.
Those people: George Soros, Maurice Strong, and Al Gore. I guess Al's 100 million from the inconvenient proselytizing just wasn't enough. Had the US Government required carbon credits, he was going to make Bill Gates look like a poor boy. It didn't happen (thank God).
As for the geologists I know after 40 years in the field (which goes back to the days when the next Ice Age was the boogeyman in the climate closet), none of them have expressed the belief that humans are a significant climate changing factor. You can argue that human emissions have
some effect (like .000002% or whatever, as opposed to
absolutely no effect) on climate, but ultimately, it is insignificant compared to solar and volcanic activity.
Since the elimination of smog generating emissions in areas where human populations are dense enough to create those clouds, since cleaning up sewage and chemical effluent in rivers and estuaries, and the reduction in particulate emissions in those jurisdictions where they contributed to
localized weather effects like smog or acid rain, human effects on
weather have been vastly reduced. But weather is the transient and temporary phenomenon, climate encompasses the summation of all weather everywhere on the planet, over time.
But time gives perspective, and the one thing the global warmists aren't talking about is time. The graph, showing glacial periods and warmer interludes over the past 640 thousand years (all time when, arguably, humans have been present) has been posted, showing ice ages and warming periods in what sure look like cycles to my eye. Those cycles, of course, occurred without the benefit of advanced technology, billions of people using 'fossil' fuels, SUVs, traffic jams, smokestack industry, or any of the other boogeymen which have been pointed to as the driving force behind AGW. Note, that CO2 follows temperature. Want to know why? Take a carbonated beverage out of the fridge. Open it, and put a balloon over the neck of the bottle. As the beverage warms, the ability of CO2 to dissolve in the water decreases. Just as the CO2 will be released from your beverage, making the balloon stand up, so the oceans will give up their dissolved CO2 as the ice sheets melt off of the continents and the oceans warm. HINT: if the globe is warming, CO2 will continue to rise, due to this phenomenon--whether or not humans are involved, just as it has done in the past. No humans were there to stop that process, the temperature went up and the Earth burned. Oh Wait. It didn't. instead, as part of the overall cycle, the process reversed, without human help and the temperatures cooled.
We simply don't have enough data in the past twenty or 50 or 200 years to assert that we are the creators, sustainers, or even contributors to this cycle. It has occurred in the past without significant human input.
Occam's Razor would say that the simplest solution to the question of why the globe warms is that it is a natural cycle, generally unaffected by humans. Just as it has been for hundreds of thousands of years.
What is further ignored by those pimping this nonsense is that 70% of the earth's surface is water, and unoccupied by humans on a regular basis. In fact, humans actually occupy less than 1% of the surface of the Earth. That's where people are deriving their anecdotal data from, so if there is a drought in Southern California (which, historically, have generally occurred with regularity) it is only big news because there are a lot of people there. If it snows in Nunavit, AK, big whoop, who cares, because that, too, is normal, but there aren't enough people there who see that as something unusual or inconvenient--after all they've lived with that for generations, unlike most Californians. Perception is one of the weapons used against the gullible masses to promote the idea (in midsummer) that the world is going to turn into a cinder, and the lack of generational experience in that area (an artifact of our 'mobile society, as opposed to extended families living in the same area for generations as was happening a century ago) contributes to the void of knowledge that allows people to be convinced that weather patterns are abnormal, when in fact they follow natural cycles, including a roughly 33 year solar cycle.
Even so, after having spent a career of examining samples taken from boreholes going up to three miles down into the Earth, representing hundreds of miles of rock, and dating back to times well before most biological activity is apparent on the planet, very little of that time reflected in those rocks was time when the surface of the planet was even remotely 'friendly' to human occupation. Examination of outcrops of rocks which have been faulted, folded, and exposed at the surface, dated back to 2.4 billion years old, indicate that as well. Much of that time, vast areas of the North American Continent, for instance, were either covered with seawater, or were evaporating seas which left salt deposits ranging from hundreds to thousands of feet thick. Other times, there was extensive volcanic activity, and still others, deserts. We truly live in a remarkable age where humans can live on and make use of more of the planet than at any time in that history, partly because we have only been knocking about for a couple million of those 4.6 billion years or so the planet has been in existence (using the geological time scale as an accepted scientific metric, with all considerations for Genesis aside). If that is the yardstick, we've been here less than the width of one of the marker lines on it.
You seem to think as those who are making a living, collecting six figure salaries on the basis of making their particular small field relevant in the eyes of the average teevee watcher, ensuring they have an echo chamber in the literature and in research by controlling the peer review process, funded by those with a vested economic interest (directly or indirectly), conducted by those with a vested economic interest (grant money, prestige, professorships, tenure, publications, awards--complete with a big check and which bring other grants), that the 'research' is free of the stain of falsehood.
We're beyond mere error when data sets and models are not released so the models and conclusions drawn using them can be examined, when data are 'adjusted' to conform to the preconceived conclusions rather than the conclusion altered to conform to the evidence.
That isn't even good science, but add the profit motive--which goes far beyond the 'scientists' to the firms manufacturing the 'alternatives' which are heavily subsidized with taxapayer money (or, frankly, debt), to the politicians handing out money to companies like
Solyndra, and the potential for corruption is huge.
As a scientist, the projects I have worked on are a matter of public record. After 6 months, the data are released (by law), the samples are on file with the state, the logs of those wellbores can be downloaded for a $175 fee--which grants access to information on ALL of the oil wells ever drilled in North Dakota (over 20,000)--the data is that complete in this state. That's 70 years of data, right there for anyone who wants to to look at. Not just 'peer review', but open to examination by anyone. It doesn't get tossed out, hidden on some inaccessible hard drive, stuffed in boxes in a moldy basement (there's a state core library with slabs from every core taken and recovered, with samples from every well). It's all there. Disagree? the data are there, make your case. That is how science works, and repeatability is essential to verifying experimental results. So, simply enough, given the same raw data and methods, other scientists should get the same results. It should ba all open to examination, not just in the cloisters of academia, but to all.
Yet "climate scientists" have yet to release the raw data they used to come to conclusions being used to hamper the abilities of humans to manufacture, produce energy, transport themselves and their goods, things which intimately affect the life of all but a very few Americans, and frankly, the rest of the world.
IF the emissions of humans were such a concern, why are the Chinese allowed to pollute far beyond the levels of the Americans? Why is the onus of 'cleaning up the planet' placed on the backs of 330,000,000 of the 6,500,000,000 people here? What, dung fires, wood fires, the third world's primitive and uncontrolled emissions have no effect? While the electricity generated in the US is and has been subject to the moving target emissions standards which leave little more than steam coming out of smokestacks, even for coal fired plants? Where we may have a lot of vehicles, most are subject to some form of emissions inspection, and those which aren't are generally still encumbered with the equipment to alter and reduce their emissions, whether it is fully functioning to spec or not?
If the very globe s in peril, explain to me why those who have already absorbed the incredible expense of all these measures are expected to bear the further burden of paying extra for further measures when the billions of people elsewhere in the world can pollute with impunity? We are not the biggest polluters, we just have the deepest pockets.
As for Carbon Dioxide, well, there have been times in the history of this planet where the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was multiples of what it is today. All without human input.
Let's suppose, even for a second, that there is a "runaway greenhouse effect" like the panic mongers have repeatedly asserted (even though it has failed to materialize, even with 'adjusted' temperature data).
Which scenario makes the survival of humans more likely?
We revert to primitive means, living 'in harmony with nature' (actually, an archaeological fallacy, as anyone who has researched a buffalo jump knows) and hope for the best as we slowly cook and move north to eat sun baked caribou and polar bear.
Or we retain our full technological capability, our ability to move goods, mine resources, and have the means to adapt to the change in climate.
Now tweak that just a little to align with the solar minimum we appear to be in, and tell me whether we'd survive a global cooling best with the technology, or by divesting ourselves of it.
You see, despite local changes, humans overall have been most prolific, most 'enlightened', and made more progress during warmer climates than cold ones. Crops do better, (there is a lot of potentially arable land well north of where crops can not survive survive the current early and long winters yet to be exploited). Change the climate, and the whole planet will not become uninhabitable, but if it did, where would humanity's hope for survival lay? In the very resource extraction and technological industries that will be most suppressed by trying to stop a phenomenon which has been extrapolated from natural cycles, but does not exist to the extent which is being claimed for prestige and profit.
It's political, it's big bucks, but it isn't fair nor good for America, nor humanity. When the KGB put out seed money to international 'environmental' organizations during the Cold War to hamper Western Industry, it was the best investment they ever made.
What really affects climate, bottom line, is solar input. That is cyclical, as past data demonstrate.
I'd be more worried about the effects of the current solar minimum than human activity.
