But a lot of people do not now live a tolerable life.
Why did the earth cool down for 300 or so years during the little ice age?
Anybody can learn basic understanding about the factors and processes that affect climate and also the facts. Most people do not have the time or interest needed for it and therefore depend on information someone else tells. They have less competence to recognize false or misleading claims.
People who have some understanding of the matters through their profession, including experts of many other fields than physical chemistry, can grasp the problems and the complicated relations between the factors affecting the climate with less effort than others and can also recognize false claims more easily.
Based on this, if the list of names includes mainly people who are not experts of any related field, there are reasons to suspect that most are acting based on potentially misleading information someone else has told them, without understanding much about the processes and facts about climate change themselves. This is an assumption but a realistic one.
If someone is a self-made expert, that can be demonstrated through what that person can tell. In a list of names, that kind of knowledge is not visible but it becomes visible in discussion forums like this one.
One of the worldās top climate scientists is Richard Linden. Endowed chairs at Chicago, Harvard, MIT.
Put ā¦ Linden Climate ā¦ into your browser and enjoy the show.
The automatic spell programs made a mess.
Is is LINDZENā¦
Put LINDZEN CLIMATE into the browser. Or, for a completely different person, try JUDITH CURRY
And when you have to carefully search for the one or two credentialed scientists somewhere who do say some things youāve been wanting to hear, forcing you to ignore what the 90%+ majority find to be credible - that also is very revealing about your position and your posture towards actual evidence.
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Science is not done by voting. Look at the debates about plate tectonics. Or about the extinction of the dinosaurs. As Galileo is disputably reported to have said, āand yet it still movesā!!!
That explains how you came up with the earth being 60% water, I guess. Good science? Nah. You would definitely be in a minority!
Actually, it is the other way aroundā¦read a lot of different ideas and see which ideas best fit the facts. The dinosaur argument is an example. The starting data are a thin layer of rock dating back 66 million years that has an increase in Iridium concentrations. That is the āfactā. Then one group notes 66 My is in the same time frame as the extinction of the dinosaurs. And CONCLUDES that there must have been some āinfusionā of iridium into the atmosphere from a BIG meteorite and CONNECTS that to the extinction of the dinosaurs. THAT group are good sales people and persuade many people that is the correct CONCLUSION. Along comes Gerta Keller and observes that, in the same 66 My time frame, there were extensive volcanic emissions coming from Deccan Flat volcanos. She CONCLUDES that it was the volcanic emissions, also known to be enriched in iridium, that brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs. ā¦So, do we vote?
We have, and the results are clear. 60%, Ā±.
But speaking of volcanoes, global warming might be moot and the least of our problems for several years if we have a volcanic winter, which is certainly a possibility.
Perhaps that is what happened when Joseph was running Egypt. A series of Tambora-size volcanos over a 5-year period. In a dream, God tipped Joseph off about the upcoming volcanos and made Joseph famous. 60 or 70% water, more than half, enough to keep pumping lots of vapor into the atmosphere especially better the tropic of Cancer and tropical of Capricorn.
The earth is, seriously?
And look up what causes it.
Maybe it was from the move āWater World.ā Havenāt seen it yet.
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The good news for climate scientists is that the data on cooling aloft do more than confirm the accuracy of the models that identify surface warming as human-made.
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Thanks for the info. I searched for Lindzen. What I found were mostly outdated claims that were shown to be wrong. For example, āone can see no warming since 1997ā (comment 22.2.2012) - anybody who have followed the climate statistics until the year 2023 knows that warming has continued. There were details people did not fully realize 10-15 years ago, like how the oceans suck more heat than predicted and thereby slowed the rise in air temperatures.
Counterarguments given during those days were not especially strong but later trends have shown that those criticizing Lindzen were right.
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I searched also the name Judith Curry. There is a wikipedia article about her that shows how influential her claims have been in US politics.
There has been claims that her economic connections to oil companies and other industry using fossil fuels have affected her comments. Maybe we should anyway look what she claims without putting too much weight to those claims.
What I do agree is that emotions may intermingle in discussions about potentially controversial topics in science. Emotional negative attitudes are harmful in any scientific debate. If someone presents criticism, we should evaluate the interpretations based on facts, not emotions.
Curry admits that warming happens but claims that the rise is slower than predicted. She accepts that anthropogenic carbon pollution causes warming but claims that it is uncertain how much warming can be attributed to human-driven causes. She also acknowledges that there is the potential for a catastrophic outcome to the climate crisis, but points to uncertainties in climate modeling, citing natural climate variation, and claims that these factors outweigh calls by climate scientists for urgent action.
This kind of attitude, admitting that climate is warming and carbon pollution is causing warming but at the same time denying that these changes demand rapid actions or that the worst scenarios are likely to happen, is called āneo-skepticismā.
With a rapid search, I did not find any hard facts supporting her opinions. Her criticism focuses mainly on potential weaknesses in the climate models, claims that the rise in temperatures and sea levels have been slower than predicted, and a need to investigate the climate and related questions more before any major actions are demanded.
My impression is that she is thinking that the worst scenarios will not happen and therefore we should not put much weight to those scenarios. What she does not tell is that what has happened has followed the predicted trajectories, suggesting that if nothing is done, those worst scenarios will happen.
I hope that the worst scenarios will not happen but the reason is that people are putting more effort to āgreenā options because of the need to act. It happens because of the urgent need for actions, not independent of it. Solar, wind and other renewable options have been developed to the point that these are now the cheapest ways to produce electricity. That will slow down the rise in temperatures because it is not profitable to invest in fossil fuels anymore. There is just the critical question of how long it will take before the use of fossil fuels have dropped dramatically.
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This thread is becoming a rambling conversation on the philosophy of science 
.
Science is indeed done by consensus among experts (voting in a sense). That is how personal biases get weeded out over time.
The dinosaur extinction is a case in point. The asteroid/comet impact was first proposed by Walter Alvarez in the 1980ās. At that time he had a good case, but it was controversial.
I quote from Dr. Steve Brusatteās book āThe Rise and Fall of the Dinosaursā page 328ff:
Big debates in science - particularly those that spill out of the specialist journals and into the public eye - always attract skeptics. These dissenters couldnāt argue that there was no asteroid - the discovery of the Chicxulub crater made such a claim foolish. Instead, they contended that the asteroid was wrongly accused, an innocent bystander that just so happened to smash into the YucatĆ”n when the dinosaurs and the many other things that died out at the end of the Cretaceous - the flying pterosaurs and sea-living reptiles, the coiled ammonites, the big and diverse foram communities in the ocean, and many others - were already on their way out.
Fast forward to the 2010āsā¦
There was so much new evidence from fossils, statistics, and computer modelling that Richard Butler and I figured the time had come to synthesize it. We came up with something of a dangerous idea: perhaps we could recruit a crack team of dinosaur experts to sit down, discuss everything we currently know about the dinosaur extinction, and try to come to a consensus on why we thought the dinosaurs died out. Paleontologists had been arguing for decades on this topic, and in fact it was dinosaur workers who were some of the most ardent skeptics of the asteroid hypothesis in the 1980ās. We thought our subversive little plot might end in a deadlock or, worse, in a shouting match, but quite the opposite happened. Our team came to an agreement.
I wish everything would be as easy to solve. That wish is not realistic. Dinosaur extinction is in a way a āsafeā topic because it does not threaten anybody else than the fame of a few dinosaur experts - who cares?
Topics that demand action, changes in my lifestyle, or claims that seem to threaten the structure of my belief system hit the emotions and then we are in troubles. Climate change is a hot topic because someone dares to say that my lifestyle should change - get out of my property!
One problem is that those attending this kind of expert meetings are a very small group. Most of us are not involved and there is plenty of space for poorly informed opinions and misunderstandings. I donāt like what they claim, so they must be wrong - is this a conspiracy?
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