Assume man can directly influence climate change. I give you a remote control to pick the exact temperature you want for Earth. What temperature do you pick?
It's not a strawman. If we're convinced, and upset, about man controlling climate change, there has to be some idea of what is the "right" temperature and climate. If we've made it warmer than 200 years ago, is that bad? Should we make it colder?
I would say the temperature such that the oceans stop rising and the poles stop melting. The temperature that the midwest stops losing mass amounts of crops. If you wanted a specific number, I couldn't tell you, because it fluxuates.
If you look at the 2/3 of the abstracts that don't take a position on AGW, then the 66% consensus would be... what exactly? What a very odd spin these guys put on their unscientific survey of articles allowed to be published due to bias in their favor.
Ah thank you! Finally someone read it and spoke on the topic at hand. I did find it a little expected. But there were some interesting numbers still that only 0.7% rejected human cause.
It is strange. But I think they may have been trying to say "Climate change is happening" We don't want to preach why it is happening. Here is data.
For the record, I don't think climate change will destroy the world. It will just severely damage Human economy.
No opinion on AGW, though. That means none of their observations indicate Man is any source of any warming observed.
That's the point. Nobody knows what that temperature is. Yet somehow you think we should start changing the temperature because it isn't currently the "right" one.
TNR is a left wing mag. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113533/global-warming-hiatus-where-did-heat-go But in a political environment where vast swathes of the American right reject even the premise of global warming—and where prominent right-wing pols suggest it’s an enormous fraud—this inconvenient news could easily lead to still more acrimony over the subject. Especially since scientists themselves aren’t entirely sure what the evidence means. If scientific models can’t project the last 15 years, what does that mean for their projections of the next 100? More at the link
More from TNR Nonetheless, the combination of imperfect data, overlapping explanations, and continued uncertainty mean that scientists cannot discount the possibility that they have overestimated the climate’s “sensitivity” to additional greenhouse gas emissions. For Held, the last 10 to 15 years “make it more plausible that the size of climate response to greenhouse gas increase is on the lower side of what models have been projecting over the last 10 or 20 years rather than over the high side.” Held is not alone. In the end, the so-called scientific consensus on global warming doesn’t look like much like consensus when scientists are struggling to explain the intricacies of the earth’s climate system, or uttering the word “uncertainty” with striking regularity. Nowhere is there more uncertainty than in the clouds. “It’s like cancer,” Held said, referring to the “many, many problems” posed by the many kinds of clouds, each with their own special properties that might reflect or trap more or less of the sun’s heat. Some progress has been made on clouds, especially with cirrus clouds.
I also can't tell you what color pants you're wearing. But that doesn't mean everyone in the world is ignorant on the subject. There are Blazerboy pant experts. I trust them to give me the right color.
Where has anyone said that humankind is controlling the temperature? Having an effect on something does not mean control.
But enough ice has only recently melted to allow passage in to the North West passage and the fjords of Western Greenland where the Vikings traveled and settled over a thousand years ago. Is that a bad thing?
