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4.10 If Global Warming is Wrong Than Why do So Many Scientists Say it is Right?
There are really two questions here. The first is how many scientists say it's right? The second is how important is the scientific consensus? Plenty of scientists have been wrong or engaged in fraud. Galileo contradicted the scientific consensus of geocentricism (the earth being at the center of the universe with the sun revolving around it, Wegener contradicted the scientific consensus that continents can't move. Today we know they float on a liquid mantle of molten rock and that they do move. Einstein contradicted the scientific consensus of Newtonian physics. Pythagorus challenged the consensus that the earth is flat. Francesco Redi challenged the belief in spontaneous generation which was the idea that life could arise from non-living matter like flies or mice appearing where food was.
Just because there is a consensus that something is true, doesn't mean it is true. Just because someone we consider an expert says something is true doesn't mean it's true. Galileo Galilei spoke from experience when he said "In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual". Tony Heller's web site quotes the famous physicist Dr. Feynman who said "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts". Albert Einstein said "Unthinking respect for authority, is the greatest enemy of truth". If something doesn't make sense to us, we shouldn't assume it's true because an expert or teacher said it is.
100 scientists wrote a document saying that Einstein's theories were wrong. I would argue that the atom bomb is a very strong argument that Einstein was right. Facts are more important than consensus. Tony Heller discusses this briefly in the video below.
What about former president Obama and others who gave a speech in which he said that 97% of scientists agree about global warming? Obama got that from a paper published by a scientist named John Cook who says he reviewed 12000 papers on global warming and that 97% of scientists agree that dangerous man made global warming is heating up the planet. People who hear that think Wow, that's a lot of scientists, it must be true. Few people take the trouble to read John Cook's paper to see how he drew that conclusion. Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer did read his paper and wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal. They wrote:
Mr. Cook's work was quickly debunked. In Science and Education in August 2013, for example, David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found "only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse" the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shaviv and Nils-Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work.
Of the various petitions on global warming circulated for signatures by scientists, the one by the Petition Project, a group of physicists and physical chemists based in La Jolla, Calif., has by far the most signatures—more than 31,000 (more than 9,000 with a Ph.D.)... The petition states that "there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of . . . carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."
John Cook looked to see how some authors answered two questions:
1) Is carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas?
2) Have human activities warmed the planet?
The paper's authors answered yes to both questions. I believe that global warming alarmism is nonsense and I would answer yes to those questions. Where scientists differ is on the question of how much have human activities warmed the planet. Also John Cook made it sound that 97% of scientists said there was dangerous global warming but that is not true. In the video below Tony Heller was asked in the senate about the 97% consensus. Here is what he had to say.
In the video below Obama says that 97% of all scientists agree that man is causing global warming and that "we have to act".
Before acting and spending lots of our money Obama should have asked, do 97% of scientists agree that man contributes significantly to global warming and do they all think that global warming is a bad thing. He should have asked how expensive would it be for us to stop using fossil fuels and how much would stopping the use of fossil fuels affect the earth's temperature? Scientists at the Heritage foundation calculated that complete elimination of all fossil fuels in the US immediately would only restrict any increase in world temperature by less than one-tenth of one degree Celsius by 2050, and by less than one-fifth of one degree Celsius by 2100. Their calculation overestimates the impact of complete elimination of fossil fuels in the U.S. because if the United States stops using fuels then manufacturing jobs will go to China which uses coal and produces more carbon dioxide and other pollutants than when the U.S. manufactures those goods.
Anthony Watts has a web site called Watts Up with That that he writes is the world's most viewed web site on climate change. On one of the pages in his web site he listed 97 papers that refute the 97% consensus on global warming. So there is a consensus or at least 97 scientists that the 97% consensus is wrong.
In fact there are more than that. Led by a Nobel Prize laureate, more than 1,100 scientists and scholars have signed a document declaring climate science is based more on personal beliefs and political agendas than sound, rigorous science. The World Climate Declaration states climate science "should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific." One of the lead authors of the declaration, atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen, has called the current climate narrative "absurd." Yet relentless propaganda from grant-dependent academics and agenda-driven journalists has generated a widely accepted narrative that the science is "settled."
Carbon dioxide "is essential to all life on Earth," the declaration says. "Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth; additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yield of crops worldwide." There is no statistical evidence, the signatories say, "that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and such-like natural disasters, or making them more frequent." "There is no climate emergency. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050."
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People who don't believe that global warming is a serious threat are being censored.
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