Why peoples don't believe in Global Warming...

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I thought ruveyn was saying that he'll let it cost him something if he believes in it.

Looking at it again, I think you're right, that is a fair interpretation of the first quote. I think my original interpretation fits the second quote better.

I admit that ruveyn is not generally the best example for the attitude I describe, only the best fit in this thread. Elsewhere I have seen very a clear statement from someone who says he will only believe there is global warming if it will not cost him any money. The widespread theory that global warming is a socialist conspiracy to extend government control fits into that.

The phenomenon is not limited to global warming. There are always some people who will reject any argument that would cost them something if they accepted the argument and took action according to their consciences. Rejecting the argument lets them avoid costly action while still keeping their consciences clear. Another example (though without monetary cost): When people say they reject evolution because if we believe we are animals we will behave like animals, they not only misunderstand evolution, they admit choosing their beliefs based on what they want to be true, not based on evidence. That admission is more common in the evolution debate than the climate change debate, but I am not sure it means the motive is less common in the climate change debate. I have seen so many rants about increased tax that I suspect the cost of taking action it is an important part of many people's motivation for their doubt.

To answer the OP; The reason I'm agnostic on whether global warming exists or not is because there's nothing I can directly see, hear, feel, taste or smell that indicates it. The only place global warming exists for me is in the media and I don't tend to believe what comes through the media.

What bores me is people who believe in "global warming" or Saddam's "Weapons of mass destruction" or "9/11" or "Iran's nukes" are thought to be idiots.

I am so far beyond those things that even debating them seems like going back in time.

But I forget that half my fellow citizens are on the left side of the I.Q. bell curve and dumber than a box of rocks.

This is the first indication I have ever had that there is a group of people who do not believe in the 9/11 event.

Really? You've never heard the 9/11 conspiracies?

since mankind has evolved in an extremely war, episode of the earth we should really be worried of the next ice age.... and not if that time will come, but when.

There's very good reason to believe that the anthropogenic component is strong:

http://residualanalysis.blogspot.com/20 ... ng-is.html

The title is strongly worded, but rightly so.

Basically, if you take a time series for global temperatures and for human-emitted CO2 (from 1850 on), remove the trends (that is, do a third-order polynomial fit and subtract it from each data point) then the residuals line up to a ridiculously high level of confidence.

It's a simple analysis, but the conclusion is pretty robust.




Though your intent seems to be to cast general doubt on the conclusions of the science (as if scientists never considered the degree of uncertainty they have in their conclusions), this much is true, and it's one reason that lots of people espouse taking precautions and not dithering the actual inputs too carelessly.

Wow, that's lucky for them.

Yes, I've heard several conspiracy claims about the event. Just not the particular one that it never happened. To be fair, I have heard of wilder conspiracies than that.

I am talking about chaotic dynamic systems. My criticism does not extend to quantum physics which is linear and smooth. Look the the Schroedinger Equation. It solutions are smooth.

You do not comprehend chaotic dynamics, do you? Long term predictions for a chaotic system are impossible because they would require infinite precision for the initial or boundary conditions.

ruveyn

My intent is to tell you there is no climate science. There are only climate models and they all have many parameters that can be fiddled to produce whatever conclusion is politically convenient. When climate "science" becomes real science, like quantum physics, then tell us about the dire predictions.

ruveyn

I'm open to the idea, but on the fence about what to do about it. The way that it's been portrayed is definitely a turn off, just the way that I'm wired means that if someone insists I believe something or I'm an idiot, my first thought is that they don't want me to actually think too hard about bit. I recall someone here who I haven't seen in a while having a similar problem with the way Proposition 8 in California was promoted, though he had nothing personally against gays he resented being told that unless he voted against this bill he was a raging homophobic redneck at best. If I recall, he ended up voting for the measure out of pure spite at what he saw as threats and manipulation by the anti-Prop 8 groups, and I can draw definite parallels to the way that global warming is often debated; either you're for it or your an ignorant bible thumper, etc etc. I think I'd be much more amenable to the idea if the hysteria was dialed back a notch or two, the evidence was presented clearly and without spin, and I was asked to form my own opinion rather than being told what all the "smart" people think.

I'm well aware that QM is a linear theory (though it has plenty of computationally intractable problems of its own once you get more than a couple interacting particles). But why even bring this topic up? It isn't very relevant here.



Systems can be chaotic on one scale and exhibit regularities on others. Daily vs. monthly temperature variations are an obvious example (one is much easier to predict than another). In that case, it's because you have a large forcing effect on top of the chaotic variation.

Even when you don't understand everything about a system, and even when its exact state is sensitive to initial conditions, you can often find empirical regularities in it. This brings me to my next point. We have found such a regularity, and that was the main point of my post, which you didn't address.

The analysis I linked to that shows pretty definitively that there's a significant anthropogenic component to global warming. It works even if the actual processes involved were a total black box (not actually the case, but never mind). When the residuals of two time series line up so nicely (and they do in this case), you can infer that either one thing is causing the other, or some common cause is linked to them both. In this case, the time series in question are yearly global temperature averages and yearly estimates of human-emitted CO2 with variations in the former preceding corresponding variations in the latter.

What makes the residuals of these curves line up the way they do?

The regularity is an artifact of the model, not of the underlying physical processes. And what makes the curves line up? The IPCC researcher lines them up to produce the desired result.

ruveyn

You didn't read the article, did you? There weren't any climate models involved. This was a simple analysis comparing detrended time series. That's it.