From: J. Andrew Rogers (andrew@ceruleansystems.com)
Date: Fri Nov 25 2005 - 13:13:40 MST
On Nov 25, 2005, at 10:41 AM, Martin Striz wrote:
> On 11/24/05, J. Andrew Rogers <andrew@ceruleansystems.com> wrote:
>> A common misconception fostered because it is useful to some
>> ideological factions. When global temps rise, CO2 levels tend to
>> rise, not the other way around.
>
> Ah, yes, the grand conspiracy of the cabal known as the entire
> scientific community. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
> (that bastion of political ideology), a body which collates published,
> peer-reviewed data from hundreds of papers, representing the findings
> of thousands of scientists, has deteremined that humans are
> contributing significantly to the global climate changes that we are
> facing. But Mr. Rogers knows better.
Where did I state that humans are not contributing to climate change
or that elevated CO2 levels do not contribute to atmospheric
warming? Oh yes, that's right, I did not.
There are so many shining examples of poor reasoning and
rationalization when it comes to the topic of global warming that it
is appalling, though that is true with most topics. You are just
adding to that noise, by parroting dogma rather than, say,
downloading the Vostok data. The Vostok data shows a strong
correlation between CO2 and temperature, but does not strongly
establish causality and there are well-established mechanisms in
science for the causal link to go both ways.
Far more is attributed to the scientific community by ideologues on
this matter than is actually claimed by the scientific community for
the most part. Are CO2 levels a valid and significant mechanism for
driving climate change? Certainly. Are CO2 levels the primary
mechanism of climate change on earth? Doubtful given the evidence,
though it likely contributes. Conflating the first case with the
second or correlation with causation is a serious failure of most
people's understanding of this topic. Unless, of course, the topic
of interest is CO2 levels rather than climate change -- a distinction
with a real difference.
It is ironic that these failure modes are essentially identical to
the failures in reasoning of the Creationist/Intelligent Design
crowd, except that the shoe is on the other foot. Careful reasoning
is frequently only useful when it supports a position one already
agrees with.
J. Andrew Rogers
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