bascule

All evidence to date says they do, and no one has made an argument to the contrary in a peer-reviewed paper. Those who think natural forcings dominate have not been able to make a scientific argument for their case. Why is that? "Some people" are not a credible source. Paper after countless paper cooroborates that anthropogenic forcings dominate. Your position rests on doubting the conclusions of the climate science community, and you do it, as far as I can tell, because you don't understand how the scientific process operates. No, science isn't a democracy. If you can't advance a scientific argument which survives the peer review process, your opinion is worthless. That's the nature of falsifiability. If someone presents evidence which undermines your position, you have to change it. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't believe the conclusions that science comes up with just because they can be potentially falsified. ALL science is potentially falsifiable. By your logic, we should ignore all conclusions that science has come up with to date, because it's potentially falsifiable. Yes, for some reason, the majority of news stories question anthropogenic forcings driving global warming (or even that global warming is happening), yet none of the scientific literature questions it, it all corroborates anthropogenic forcings being predominant. Why is this? It seems to me like everyone who disagrees with anthropogenic forcings being dominant are people who haven't submitted their ideas to the peer review process. My personal opinion, having worked with a number of climate scientists for years, is that they would look on you as being horribly underinformed and having a rather poor knowledge of climate science. I think they'd find it cute that you don't know what a first order climate forcing IS yet you're trying to argue as to the state of our scientific knowledge about them.

All you "global warming skeptics" who are irrationally attacking the conclusions of the climate science community should read this article. The conclusions of this article make a substantially better argument against global warming alarmism than attacking the credibility of the climate science community. http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008626

Unlike you I'm not asking for proof. If there were an argument to be made that natural forcings are the primary driver of climate change, wouldn't it stand to reason that at least one climate scientist would have advanced it? I've heard the name of dozens of alleged "climate skeptics" dropped here, and all they seems like they want to do is malign the rest of the climate science community. They don't want to attempt to advance the other hypothesis scientifically. Why is that?

SkepticLance, when have I ever said that there isn't uncertainty in individual climate models? Like I said before, I helped people deploy and use climate models for the past 5 years. I saw our model greatly improve wtih the addition of GEMTM. This is also the pattern you're seening: the quality of climate modelling has gone up dramatically in recent history. Climate scientists along with other physicists and chemists are producing reusable modules which can be shared among different models, such as the Earth Systems Modeling framework and General Energy and Mass Transfer Model. But when you look at the hockey stick reconstruction, what you see are similar results for 12 different GCMs. The average trend produced by them agrees with empirical temperature measurements for the past 150 years. As our ability to model improves, we're only seeing further confirmation that anthropogenic effects are driving climate change.

It seems like the global warming naysayers have a very distorted view of what science actually is, and lack a basic understanding of scientific terms like "hypothesis" and "theory". They seem unwilling to accept any sort of uncertainty, and suggest information which can't be demonstrated experimentally is inherently unscientific. Yes, it's a theory. Science typically doesn't "prove" things within the context of a formal logic system (and really, I can't think of when science has ever done that... proofs are something mathematicians can do inside the rigors of an environment consisting only of formal logic) Yes, there is a degree of uncertainty. Could they be wrong? Of course they could. However, all evidence amassed to date has been enough to outweigh any sort of scientific argument to the contrary. You seem to like highlingting any part of the paper that deals with uncertainty. There will always be uncertainty. Yet you seem to completely be ignoring the rest of the paper: This paper argues that anthropogenic forcings are dominant. I'm still waiting for anyone to produce any peer-reviewed scientific paper arguing that natural forcings are dominant.

Sounds like you have seasonally affective disorder. I do too. I generally get more depressed in the winter, stop exercising, and generally put on a bit of weight. The summer rolls around, I'm physically active again, and feel great compared to the winter.

That would be Boulder

You clearly have the scientific concepts of "hypothesis" and "theory" confused. And furthermore, you're attempting to argue with a scientist about them. If you wish, you can caveat that statement with "All evidence collected to date has lead the overwhelming majority of the scientific community to the conclusion that..."

Looking at this: http://www.savetheinternet.com/=senatetally An interesting pattern emerges. One Republican is for net neutrality. Every other Republican that has declared a position is against net neutrality. All Democrats who have declared a position are for net neutrality. I never realized this was an issue that would divide itself so evenly across party lines...

Not proof, but I've linked several papers which conclude that anthropogenic forcings are predominant. There is no scientific case for the other side. Why is this? It's been claimed this is the result of groupthink within the scientific community. However you and others have written other books and other sources which attempt to argue the opposite outside of the realm of peer-reviewed scientific literature. It seems like there's no lack of people wanting to make the argument. The difference is that none of these arguments can survive the peer review process. Why is this? I'm willing to agree there's a degree of uncertantiy as to the specific nature of the forcings affecting the climate system, and that what I've been linking are estimates. However, why does all scientific estimation show that anthropogenic forcings are predominant? Why is there no scientific paper arguing the opposite? Why doesn't Michaels have a paper arguing this position, for example?

When I was younger I considered myself something of an amateur myrmecologist. I voraciously consumed anything I could read about ants. Everything I read described the use of chemical signaling (i.e. pheremones) in order for ants to guide themselves around the world. I can definitely see this being used in conjunction with pheremones, but this is the primary mechanism by which ants guide themselves. They leave different types of pheremone trails as they walk which signal different messages (i.e. home is this way, food is this way, etc)

Read the Hansen paper. And I'm still waiting for any recent, peer-reviewed scientific papers arguing that natural forcings are predominant

I'm gonna do a write-in here and say strong artificial intelligence

Nice red herring. Nobody's arguing any of that. The issue at hand has been whether anthropogenic forcings are predominant in driving climate change. Every time this comes up your response has been to pull a red herring and try to argue some other issues. I'm not going to fall for it, sorry. Now what's your argument against Hansen's paper, which is essentially the smoking gun of anthropogenically-forced climate change? And for that matter, do you have any argument against the IPCC's assessment of the forcings driving our climate system other than that they're calculated from empirical data? How exactly do you expect them to DIRECTLY measure the relative strength of forcings affecting something as large as THE ENTIRE EARTH? It sounds to me like you have no real criticisms of their methodology, other than that their results are calculated from empirical data rather than being observed directly. Would you criticize the entire standard model for being calculated instead of empirically derived? Should we expect direct observations of quarks, the strong force, and the weak force before we accept they exist? How about gravity? How about General Relativity?

I live in a mountain town which isn't too far from a bustling metropolis. We're nestled among some beautiful, ideallic mountain scenery. It's a little microcosm of Europe inside America, where the population does look upon most of America as being backwards and clinging to outmoded ideas. Needless to say, you don't see many Bush supporters here. Everyone here is very health conscious. Organic food is definitely in around here, and there's been a lot of work to keep big box stores out. The only ones who are here have massive sections for organic food. All of the restaurants here cater to vegetarians and vegans, the latter of which have a huge population here due to the prevolence of Buddhism. While I personally think Buddhists are defeatists who love to rant about how horrible our modern, consumption-driven culture is as they too consume at the teat of the military-industrial complex, I certainly relate to them much better than I do Christians.

One model was wrong, therefore all models are wrong! Q.E.D! Also, the Hansen paper uses satellite measurements.

Caloric restriction has been shown to be one of the single most effective approaches to increasing lifespan. The theory, as I understand it, is the more calories you consume, the more free radicals are produced by your mitochondria, and the more genetic damage occurs, bringing about early cell death, or cancers. Vegan diets are typically much lower in calories. I'm personally a fish eater, but have been considering going vegetarian due to concerns with mercury poisoning. As an Immortalist, I'm interested in taking whatever steps I can to extend my lifespan in the short term until radical, nanotechnologically-based life extension technologies become available. Fortunately, I'm young enough that I think radical life extension technologies will be developed before I've aged too much. I can't say the same for other prominent immortalists like Kurzweil, who's in his late 50's.

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showpost.php?p=285407&postcount=29

This is pretty scary considering I was just in New York and just went through that tunnel

Please RTFA instead of pulling stuff out of your ass. These systems recognize thought patterns in the motor cortex. They don't tap into your internal monologue. You train your brain to generate the patterns these systems are designed to recognize. Once again, you don't get it. You've trained your motor cortex to spell out words through your fingers, have you not? The process becomes automatic through repetition. This is no different, except for that you are no longer limited by physical motion of your fingers.

All right, I think I'm done again. This is just going around and around in circles of me providing papers and our gaggle of skeptics ignoring it, as well as me asking for any recent peer-reviewed paper published in a major journal which argues that natural forcings are predominant, and our gaggle of skeptics failing to provide any such papers. As far as I'm concerned this argument isn't going anywhere.

oldtobor, your argument would only be applicable to timescales below a Planck time. Since Planck time only affects objects at a Planck length (the distance light can travel in a Planck time) it wouldn't be possible for the transitions you posit to take place in the given timescale (i.e. a butterfly becoming a star becoming a computer) since these objects are several orders of maginitude larger than a Planck length. Scientific, physical theories make predictions about causality which have been upheld in countless scientific experiments and have not yet been disproven. Perhaps the most notable of these are special and general relativity. These theories make statements about causal relationships which have been tested empirically and shown to be correct. Your claims would posit a universe that is inherently acausal (i.e. miraculous) but countless scientific experiments do not find the universe to operate in such a manner.

As for me, I'll continue to look upon technology as the universal panacea

The timescales involved since the cultural revolution have allowed for only a handful of mutated genes to sweep through the population. It took 6 million years for hominids to evolve into modern humans, while modern human culture has only existed for 100,000. If you ask me, humans are 'evolving' substantially faster via technology than we are through biology. Nanotechnology will give us the ability to completely reconstruct our bodies at the molecular level. I expect my biological systems, with limited longevity and not tuned to operation in modern human society, to be displaced with nanotechnologically-installed equivalents which perform leaps and bounds better. Kurzweil talks about a number of theorized replacement systems. One of these is a replacement circulatory system which doesn't need a central pump and thus a central point of failure, but instead distributes the process of blood circulation throughout the entire system. When we talk about retooling the body's internal operation, that's when we really begin talking about transhumanity.