No, indeed you can't believe everything that's published about Climate Change, because lots of it has no scientific basis or is a wrong interpretation of actually published reports by scientists. The blogosphere is rampant of inaccurate, deliberately false, or biased reports of what scientists actually publish (and is yet to be peer reviewed).
Very true, and that applies to both of the broad positions on climate change, such as 'alarmism' about the dangers of rising CO2 levels, at one extreme, and denial that current levels of CO2 have any effect at all in warming the climate, at the other extreme.
According to my own experiences, most skeptical laypersons who are interested in the subject, and most scientists in all fields with whom I've had conversations on the subject, are of the view that it is very plausible and understandable that mankind in general, taking into account his total, combined activities on the planet, must be having some effect on the climate.
Such activities include massive deforestation for agricultural purposes, significant clearing of land in order to build thousands of cities and suburbs, millions of kilometers of black, tar-covered roads which absorb significant heat (ever placed your hand on a tar-sealed road at midday?), thousands of airports with large buildings and concrete runways several kilometers long, thousands of golf courses and huge areas of neatly-trimmed lawns (adding up all the individual lawns and nature strips in the suburbs, which, in their natural state, would be covered with forests), significant areas of land stripped of their vegetation for open-cut mining purposes, not only for coal, but for many types of minerals and metals which are essential in a modern civilization.
The increase in demand for Lithium, not only due to the proliferation of mobile devices with built-in Lithium batteries, but also due to the storage requirements for alternative energy supplies and batteries to propel electric cars, is causing increasing environmental pollution and water scarcity, especially in poor countries where most of the Lithium reserves exist.
https://www.foeeurope.org/sites/default/files/publications/13_factsheet-lithium-gb.pdf"The extraction of lithium has significant environmental and social impacts, especially due to water pollution and depletion.
In addition, toxic chemicals are needed to process lithium. The release of such chemicals through leaching, spills or air emissions can harm communities, ecosystems and food production. Moreover, lithium extraction inevitably harms the soil and also causes air contamination."This is just one example of the negative consequences of the drive towards renewable energy supplies.
Part of the nature of the general hoax about AGW, is the attribution of this combined effect on the climate, from mankind's total activities, to the one main cause of rising CO2 levels.
Those of you who are familiar with the subject will have heard of the Urban Heat Island effect. As populations expand and cities grow, thermometers located at airports and other areas close to the city, show exaggerated temperature rises which are greater than the temperature rises in other areas far from the cities. These anomalies have to be taken into consideration when assessing global temperature rises.
What is more difficult to take into consideration is the effect of deforestation and changes in land use
regardless of any warming effect from CO2. We can argue about the amount of CO2 increases that have resulted from deforestation, and alarmists can argue that mature forests have no net absorption of CO2 (which is probably
not true, according to some studies I've read), but it seems there are very few studies which try to assess the proportion of our current change in climate which is due to the widespread change in land use,
separate from any influence that changes in atmospheric CO2 might have. Such is the fixation on CO2.
For those who are seriously interested, try wading through the following scholarly article.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/87e8/421d08a7482b6ec2bccbf028d7f49fa6939a.pdfBelow are some extracts from the conclusions.
"These results also suggest that teleconnection patterns due to anthropogenic land cover changes which have already occurred, are capable of affecting the temperature and precipitation distributions worldwide and may have already done so. Such effects are traditionally unaccounted for in global climate trend analyses (e.g.,North and Stevens 1998) but growing evidence indicates that these effects may have to be accounted for in climate change monitoring reports (e.g., Pielke et al.1998a, b and references therein) necessitating further examination of their scope and signifcance.
These patterns of recently warming surface temperatures over Northern Hemisphere land areas, resulting solely from dynamical atmospheric shifts, have been difficult to associate convincingly with global CO2 warming (e.g., Plantico et al. 1990; Jones 1988; Hurrell 1996) and our results suggest that global land cover change may already have had an important and measurable effect on the observed global climate state."Did some former US president declare that the 'science is settled'?
