Ray, when you dig more deeply into the sources that you are fond of quoting and find out that they have direct links to organizations funded by the Koch brothers who are strongly against any scientific efforts to understand global warming, I might take your posts a little more seriously.
Your kidding, Alan. Right? Did you miss the link to the references at the foot of the following article I linked to?
https://stanford.edu/~moore/Boon_To_Man.htmlThere are about 80 or so references to a broad range of studies by various universities and institutes. I could list them all at the foot of this post, but it would take up too much space. That's why we have links, so I'll list just a few of those studies selected at random.
Of course, many of those studies are not necessarily freely available. You might have to pay to view the full text.
All I ever see are quotes from way outside the mainstream climatology community from you. the only true statement I've seen from you is that global warming is complex. Of this we are in agreement and nothing else.
Climate is not only very, very complex but the times scales involved before a significant and continuous trend becomes clear, are greater than the life-span of a human. Look at any graph of the estimated, fluctuating global temperatures over the past few millennia and you'll see that they spike up and down from decade to decade and century to century. However, certain over all trends are noticeable, such as the 3 periods of cooling followed by warming during the past 3,000 years. Do you dispute the existence of these periods, Alan? Five of these six phases of either cooling or warming can reasonably have nothing to do with human emissions of CO2, because they occurred before the industrial revolution. Do you accept this, Alan?
Such a situation of complexity and long time scales does not lend itself to the application of the rigorous processes of the scientific methodology for future predictions. Isn't that obvious? An analogy would be the complexity of human biology. New drugs and medicines always have to be tested under controlled conditions before they are considered to be effective and reasonably safe. The tests might begin with mice which have a very short lifespan so the results appear quickly, then monkeys with a longer life span, and finally humans with an even longer lifespan.
Unfortunately, it can take many years for the side effects to emerge. Mistakes are often made, and sometimes only years down the track do the harmful side effects become apparent. Don't you agree?
Now imagine if the pharmaceutical industry were to produce a drug which had not been tested through the usual processes, and they were to declare that certain computer models had indicated that the drug should be completely safe without any long-term harmful side effects, and that there was a 97% consensus among the researchers that the computer models were accurate. Would you take the drug, Alan, confident that the computer models must be correct, because there was a so-called, unscientifically verifiable, 97% consensus?
I'm often amazed at the gullibility of people who believe in the 97% consensus figure. Don't people understand that all organizations require a degree of conformity to the ethos or ideology of the organization that employs them?
AGW alarmists so often use the argument, if a scientist is associated with the fossil fuel industry in any way, then whatever he says on AGW issues must be biased.
Do people not understand that the government funded climate research centres in many countries around the globe were not set up to do an impartial study on the causes of climate changes, but were set up as a result of a scare about the influence of greenhouse gasses such as CO2 and Methane. Without that scare being maintained, funding would either cease completely or be reduced significantly. All the climatologists in these research centres have a personal interest in maintaining the scare.
We know what happens to whistle-blowers. They tend to get into serious trouble and suffer a ruined reputation. Only a few are prepared to take the risk and sacrifice their career in the interests of truth.
That applies to all institutions with an agenda, whether Banking, Car Manufacturing, Coal Mining, or the Catholic Church, and so on. Government-funded Climate Research Centres are no exception. The 'Climate-gate' email leaks corroborate this, and the 'Hockey Stick Graph' is one of the most glaring examples of this bias.
What is disturbing for the thinking person, is that the 'Hockey Stick' debacle might be just the tip of the iceberg.
Now you might wonder in what way might I be biased. Do I have shares in the fossil fuel industries? No I don't. I don't have shares in any industry, and I'm retired from all employment. But I do have a solar panel on the roof of my house, which I bought because the subsidies were so generous, especially the feed-in tariff to the grid which is more than double the value of the average price I pay for the electricity I use directly from the grid, when the sun ain't shining.
When I travel overseas for a couple of months to take photos and experience other cultures, my solar panels are generating huge credits. When I return to Australia, my electricity bill for the next quarter is usually in credit, and that credit continues for another quarter or more, depending on how long I was away.
However, because I'm getting a benefit from my solar panels, does not mean that I will therefore jump on the bandwagon of AGW alarmism.
The truth is more important, and I don't have a job to lose by exposing it. Okay?
Here are just a few of the 80 or so references that you appear to have missed in my links.
Are you still an AGW alarmist, Alan?
Baliunas,Sallie and Robert Jastrow [1993]. "Evidence on the Climate Impact of Solar Variations," Energy, 18(12): 1285-1295.
Boserup, Ester. [1981]. Population and Technological Change: A Study of Long-Term Trends, Chicago: University of Chicago.
Broccoli, Anthony J. [1994]. "Learning from Past Climates," Nature, 371 (22 September): 282.
Carpenter, R. [1966]. Discontinuity in Greek Civilization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cline, William R. [1992]. The Economics of Global Warming, Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics.
Cohen, Mark Nathan. [1989]. Health and the Rise of Civilization, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine [1991]. Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming, Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Cook, Edward, Trevor Bird, Mike Peterson, Mike Barbetti, Brendan Buckley, Rosanne D'Arrigo, Roger Francey, and Pieter Tans. [1991]. "Climatic Changes in Tasmania Inferred from a 1089-Year Tree Ring Chronology of Huon Pine," Science, 253 (13 September): 1266-1268.
Crowley, Thomas J. [1983]. "The Geologic Record of Climate Change," Review Geophys. Space Phys. 21: 828-877.
Crowley, Thomas J. [1990]. "Are there any Satisfactory Geologic Analogs for a Future Greenhouse Warming?" Journal of Climate, 3, American Meteorological Society, (November): 1282-1292.
Crowley, Thomas. J. [1993]. "Use and Misuse of the Geologic "Analogs" Concept," in Global Changes in the Perspective of the Past, J.A. Eddy and H. Oeschger, eds, Chapter 3, pp. 17-27.
Crowley, Thomas J. and Gerald North, [1991]. Paleoclimatology, New York: Oxford University Press
Fairbridge, R. W. [1984]. "The Nile Floods as a Global Climatic/Solar Proxy," in N. -A. [sic] Mörner & W. Karlén, eds. Climatic Changes on a Yearly to Millennial Basis: Geological, Historical and Instrumental Records, Boston: Dordrecht, pp. 181-190.
Lamb, Hubert H. [1977]. Climatic History and the Future, Princeton: Princeton University Press, Vol. 2 1985.
Kutzbach, J. E. and T. Webb III [1993]. "Conceptual Basis for Understanding Late-Quaternary Climates," in Global Climates since the Last Glacial Maximum, H.E. Wright, Jr., J. E. Kutzbach, T. Webb III, W. F. Ruddiman, F. A. Street-Perrott, and P. J. Bartlein, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Ch 2, pp. 5-11.
Alayne Street-Perrott, Vera Markgraf, John E. Kutzbach, Patrick J. Bartlein, H.E. Wright, Jr., and Warren L. Prell [1993]. "Climatic Changes during the Past 18,000 Years: Regional Syntheses, Mechanisms, and Causes," in Global Climates since the Last Glacial Maximum, H.E. Wright, Jr., J. E. Kutzbach, T. Webb III, W. F. Ruddiman, F. A. Street-Perrott, and P. J. Bartlein, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Chp 19, pp. 514-535.
Morley, Joseph J. and Beth A. Dworetzky [1993]. "Holocene Temperature Patterns in the South Atlantic, Southern, and Pacific Oceans," in Global Climates since the Last Glacial Maximum, H.E. Wright, Jr., J. E. Kutzbach, T. Webb III, W. F. Ruddiman, F. A. Street-Perrott, and P. J. Bartlein, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Chp 6, pp.125-135.
Stine, Scott [1994]. "Extreme and Persistent Drought in California and Patagonia during Mediaeval Time," Nature, 369 (June 16): 546-549.