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ORIGINAL: HamOnWholeWheat
Scientists are not arguing that warming is unprecedented. I’ve never read any paper that said “the climate has never had a warming period before”. To say that scientists are making that claim is to build a straw man, which this thread has dutifully beat the s4!t out of.
The science community is arguing that warming secondary to human action is unprecedented. Just like the magnitude of cooling following Krakatoa’s eruption in the 19th century was relatively unprecedented (at least in recent history). Citing examples of previous warming when human action was not present do not prove or disprove the anthropogenic argument. It just states another example of what we already knew: the climate is pretty volatile over geologic time. Lots of things affect the climate, everyone agrees with that point. That doesn’t mean man’s impact isn’t significantly contributing to THIS warming trend.
To use examples of previous non-anthropogenic warming periods as proof that man’s actions are not currently responsible shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the science. Therefore, citing a warm period in the dark ages as proof against manmade climate change now is embarassing to read.
I agree, we do need more data points. More importantly though, we need to understand the data points we have, and not misinterpret them 2/2 bias.
Reading the article helps.
Without the ‘unprecedented’ moniker (and some have indeed made that claim, including Phil Jones himself), there is absolutely NO proof that warming is unusual. None. Zero.
Without an unprecedented change, all you have is two independent ‘facts’…one, that CO2 is increasing, and second, maybe we have a warming trend (although even that is now questioned). Let us, for sake of argument, argue that there is a warming trend. Then, to prove a correlation outside of baseline variability, you must have another factor that shows that this is unusual. That is why many climatologists have, in fact, said the increase in temps was unprecedented. Climatologists, including the UN IPCC, have made that charge over and over again. Dr. Pauchuri, head of the IPCC, made that charge as late as LAST WEEK.
I have NO PROOF that there is not anthropogenic warming. That would be proving a negative. However, the burden of proof, IMHO, is on the scientists. I believe that the question of global warming is unanswered…that is where I stand, and frankly, I see no science to change my belief that we don’t have enough evidence one way or another.
I go back to my argument: this is the wrong discussion politically. We should be moving quickly to alternate fuels and less carbon emissions for the myriad of reasons I presented before. The global warming issue has become an albatross. There are much better and more substantial reasons to change our energy dependence in the short run.
