Why does al gore say scientists agree on man made global warming when they don't agree?
Answer:
If you're judging scientific consensus by what you read in the popular press, you've got the wrong sources. You can only judge scientific consensus by reading scientific journals. And the consensus in scientific circles is very strong that GW exists and humans are the primary cause.
Here's one example:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/fu...
And here are a lot more ...
Peter A. Stott, S. F. B. Tett, G. S. Jones, M. R. Allen, J. F. B. Mitchell, G. J. Jenkins (2000). External Control of 20th Century Temperature by Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings. Science 290(5499):2133-2137. "More than 80% of observed multidecadal-scale global mean temperature variations and more than 60% of 10- to 50-year land temperature variations are due to changes in external forcings."
Francis W. Zwiers and Andrew J. Weaver (2000). The Causes of 20th Century Warming. Science 290(5499):2081-2083. "The agreement between observed and simulated temperature variations strongly suggests that forcing from anthropogenic activities, moderated by variations in solar and volcanic forcing, has been the main driver of climate change during the past century."
Tim P. Barnett, David W. Pierce, Reiner Schnur (2001). Detection of Anthropogenic Climate Change in the World's Oceans. Science 292(5515):270-274. "Application of optimal detection methodology shows that the model-produced signals are indistinguishable from the observations at the 0.05 confidence level. Further, the chances of either the anthropogenic or observed signals being produced by the [model] as a result of natural, internal forcing alone are less than 5%."
T. M. L. Wigley, R. L. Smith, B. D. Santer (1998) Anthropogenic Influence on the Autocorrelation Structure of Hemispheric-Mean Temperatures. Science 282(5394):1676-1679. "Solar forcing alone cannot reconcile the differences in autocorrelation structure between observations and model control-run data."
Stephen H. Schneider (1994). Detecting Climatic Change Signals: Are There Any "Fingerprints"? Science 263(5145):341-347. "an 80 to 90 percent heuristic likelihood that the 20th-century 0.5 ± 0.2°C warming trend is not a wholly natural climatic fluctuation"
T.P. Barnett, D.W. Pierce, K.M. AchutaRao, P.J. Gleckler, B.D. Santer, J.M. Gregory, W.M. Washington (2005). Penetration of Human-Induced Warming into the World's Oceans. Science 309(5732):284-287. "A warming signal has penetrated into the world's oceans over the past 40 years. The signal is complex, with a vertical structure that varies widely by ocean; it cannot be explained by natural internal climate variability or solar and volcanic forcing, but is well simulated by two anthropogenically forced climate models. We conclude that it is of human origin, a conclusion robust to observational sampling and model differences."
K.Y. Vinnikov, A. Robock, R.J. Stouffer, J.E. Walsh, C.L. Parkinson, D.J. Cavalieri, J.F.B. Mitchell, D. Garrett, V.F. Zakharov (1999). Global Warming and Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Extent. Science 286(5446):1934-1937. "...the probability of the observed trends resulting from natural climate variability...is less than 2 percent for the 1978-98 sea ice trends and less than 0.1 percent for the 1953-98 sea ice trends."
Thomas J. Crowley (2000). Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years. Science 289(5477):270-277. "The combination of a unique level of temperature increase in the late 20th century and improved constraints on the role of natural variability provides further evidence that the greenhouse effect has already established itself above the level of natural variability in the climate system."
P. A. Stott (2003) Attribution of regional-scale temperature changes to anthropogenic and natural causes. Geophysical Research Letters, 30(14):1728-1731. "The warming effects of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations have been detected in all the regions examined, including North America and Europe."
D. M. H. Sexton, D. P. Rowell, C. K. Folland, D. J. Karoly (2001). Detection of anthropogenic climate change using an atmospheric GCM. Climate Dynamics 17(9):669-685. "We have adapted two well-used detection techniques, pattern correlations and fingerprints, and both show that near-decadal changes in the patterns of zonal mean upper air temperature are well simulated, and that it is highly unlikely that the observed changes could be accounted for by sea surface temperature variations and internal variability alone."
A. Walter, C.D. Schönwiese (2002). Attribution and Detection of anthropogenic Climate Change using a Backpropagation Neural Network. Meteorologische Zeitschrift 11(5):335-343. "BPN succeeds with the detection of anthropogenic induced climate change on a high significance level."
Peter A. Stott, Gareth S. Jones, and John F. B. Mitchell (2003). Do Models Underestimate the Solar Contribution to Recent Climate Change? Journal of Climate 16(24):4079-4093. "...the results confirm previous analyses showing that greenhouse gas increases explain most of the global warming observed in the second half of the twentieth century."
I've got dozens more that won't fit here in this answer. But the bottom line is that Gore is completely correct about the scientific consensus.
If you mention closed mindedness aim your questions at the right wing wackos first.
You see, there are a small amount of scientists that do not believe that global warming is real. However, this small number of researchers get an inordinate amount of media attention, and a lot of the articles are recycled or are just non-scientists take on the actual scientific studies. The vast majority of researchers are not only in agreement, but are totally convinced that some really bad sheeit is about to go down.
Because Al is a politician. What he says does not need to make sense or even be the truth.
Cos he's an ignorant idiot
Well if every scientists say global warming is a threat, then you should believe it also, and you should not question the science.
Do not speak blasphemy.
Al Gore is a prophet.
The great floods will destroy you unless you heed Al Gore's warnings.
I don't care what Al Gore says, I care what scientists say. And, because of the scientific data, the vast majority of scientists do agree that global warming is real and mostly caused by us. There always are a few (noisy) skeptics. Proof here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/scientific_...
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/fu...
The bottom line:
"The fact that the community overwhelmingly supports the consensus is seen by picking up any copy of Journal of Climate or similar, going to any scientific meeting, or simply going to talk to scientists (the ones at your local university or federal lab). I challenge you, if you think there is some un-reported division, show me the hundreds of abstracts that support your view - you won't be able to. You can argue whether the consensus is correct, or what it really implies, but you can't credibly argue it doesn't exist."
Dr. James Baker - NOAA
But they do agree. The agree very strongly. You can't even imagine how strongly the majority of climate scientists agree. It may appear otherwise to the unaided eye, but this is simply due to a very small, and very, very vocal minority of political hacks and opinionated bloggers. There really is an almost total unanimity among scientists on this issue.
As an aside, you mention that for every story you read on climate change, you read another debunking it. Which may or may not be true. But have you noticed that every single paper 'debunking' climate change use the =exact= same tired arguments contrarians have been spewing for decades? And did you further notice that for every one of your 'debunking' stories, there are fifty more stories, often many years old, debunking the debunkers? Yet oddly, not a single one of the refutations has ever been challenged by the deniers and contrarians.
Quite simply there is a consensus. There are a few scientists who disagree with it, many of whom happen to be funded by Exxon-Mobile, but the vast majority of climate scientists agree that humans are the primary cause of global warming. Here's why I say that:
In 2004 an article in Science magazine discussed a study by Prof. Naomi Oreskes in which she surveyed 928 scientific journal articles that matched the search [global climate change] at the ISI Web of Science. Of these, according to Oreskes, 75% agreed with the consensus view (either implicitly or explicitly), 25% took no stand one way or the other, and none rejected the consensus.
Benny Peiser attempted to replicate the study, and found 34 articles that "reject or doubt" the consensus view--that is, 3% rather than the 0% that Oreskes found in her sample. Only 1 of those papers actually rejected the consensus, and it was an editorial, not a research paper.
Another guy did a similar small study of 25 papers to verify the claims, and found 20% explicitly endorsed, 84% explicitly or implicitly endorsed, 16% were neutral, and none rejected the consensus position.
Since no research papers rejected the 'consensus', how is that not a consensus?
money and power, not to hard to figure it out
The answers post by the user, for information only, FunQA.com does not guarantee the right.
More Questions and Answers: