Well, I’d normally go with the game show host, but now that they’ve shut down HAARP, I’ll have to take an anti-fluoride pill and think about it…
Do you think those scientists can keep up the deception, the one where they have faked the infrared spectrum of CO2 for 200 years?
Was there an actual idiot game show host who inspired this “chart-like” chart?
Who should we believe on climate change? I’m going with the scientists.
Who will most people believe? Whoever has an answer that supports their confirmation bias.
Exactly what I thought!
Right before Pat Sajack made his infamous post, he said something on Twitter to the effect of, “Sometimes it’s fun to poke a stick in a hornet’s nest just to watch them buzz,”. I think he chose a lot of loaded keywords to make the trolliest Twitter post he could think of, on purpose. I doubt he actually believes the stupid words coming out of his mouth.
Pat Sajak posted this on Twitter the other day: “I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends.”
He now says it was “just parody”.
Thank you 
Oh come on - Sajak has been right on thousands of other subjects.
Or people could inform themselves and make an intelligent damn decision on their own.
Climate change? Yes – the earth has been warming since the last ice age.
Are humans mostly responsible for recent warming? Not 97% agree, just 52% from that survey. And note the “mostly” responsible.
Have humans contributed to warming? Likely. Are humans the primary cause? Look to the sun. Climate has never been static, so climate change is normal.
Oh, this is a fun game! Let’s play!
“Have humans contributed to particulate pollution? Likely. Are humans the primary cause? Look to the physics of combustion. Shit burns all the time, so extremely high levels of particulate pollution are normal.”
“Have humans contributed to antibiotic resistance? Likely. Are humans the primary cause? Look to evolution. Bacteria evolve all the time, so increased and dangerous antibiotic resistance is normal.”
“mostly responsible” - Why, yes, mostly responsible, just like the earth is mostly responsible for our gravity. There are other gravitational attractions, but the ones we are most closely associated with are from the earth.
The 97% number is actually too low. Of all the literature about AGW in the last year, some 3000 + articles, only 2 cast any doubt.
And climate scientists haven’t claimed that man is the only cause of warming, nor have they argued that the earth does not warm naturally. The argument is and has been that man has accelerated warming beyond what the earth would normally do and that this accelerated warming is the problem.
So, would you care to debate what the science actually says or the strawmen that deniers put up so that they can knock them down and pretend they’re thinking?
What a silly article.
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It is not remotely disputing the fact that 97% of scientists believe in Athropogenic Global Warming. Instead it surveyed members of the American Meteorological Society – who, according to Wikipedia are “professionals, professors, students, and weather enthusiasts”.
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The article even cites an earlier study the surveyed meteorologists and found 83% of them agreed with AGW. It didn’t ask why the numbers were different this time around (maybe because this study was surveying “students and weather enthusiasts…?”).
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There are many more scientists that study climate than meteorologists. Most meteorologists are not scientists, in that they produce no research. So again, the study shows absolutely nothing about the scientific community.
Helpful hint for Holly: If you’re backing up your argument with a link to Watts Up With That, you’ve already lost.
Not only that, but deniers are disproportionately represented within the meteorology community, usually by broadcast meteorologists. It’s a source of consternation for those of us within the community who are more research-oriented.
First up, I’m a climate change skeptic. That is because I’m skeptical about everything, I mostly believe in much of what I read about climate, but if presented with a coherent argument and evidence, I’d drop the idea in the mental trashcan that hold the (since disproved) Law of Conservation of Parity, “Active Oxygen”, (doesn’t exist either) and the non-quantum “laws” of cause and effect I learned as a child.
I am a scientist, not in any way an eminent one, but to me that is a discipline and a set of rules by which we try to work out the nature of the universe (if it really exists) and thus I will not believe anything of any kind ever that is “true because a lot of people believe it”.
Even if 100% of people who are called “climate change scientists” (in itself a badly defined term and seemingly more a reflection of the political views of a writer than an objective state), I would not believe in Climate Change the way Christians believe in Christ, Moslems believe in Allah or so many believe in the literal truth of holy books, or the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Part of my being a scientist is that I’ve tried to understand some of its history and one of the clearest patterns has been that just because a lot of people believe in something like flatness of the world, that germs were just the imaginings of over-excitable europeans or as Lord Kelvin (as in the unit of temperature) and nearly all 19th century physicists that the Sun could not be more than a few million years old because no energy source could power it that long, that doesn’t mean it is true.
Every time some well meaning fool says “it must be true because a lot of people I agree with, agree with me”, or fudges scientific data to get a result that makes them feel good about themselves in front of their peers, then we damage science itself.
You are, of course fundamentally right. And I trust that "what you read’ means a mix of the fundamental physics of the greenhouse effect, the amount of fossil fuels humans are and have been burning, and a mix of popular and profession climate science literature. So as a scientist, if not a climate scientist, you may be in a good position to make a reasonably accurate judgment.
Most humans are not. If you know nothing of physics, chemistry, biology, and geology; if you lack an intuitive grasp of the relevant size and time scales of the relevant phenomena; if you get your information mainly from journalists who are also not scientists - then you absolutely should not try to think for yourself on this kind of issue unless you are willing to spend years learning the requisite background material. Agreeing this the consensus of professionals will let you be right vastly more often. And you should do this habitually outside fields where you lack expertise that others have,because you don’t know what and how much you don’t know.
I’d like to buy a clue.
This makes sense, but there’s a limit. I am a reasonably well educated and curious person, but I’m not ever going to be a climate science expert. I’ve got a dabbler’s knowledge of the (very) basics of atmospheric science and I have an understanding of the general theory of global warming’s causes and effects. But at some point I have to step away and leave it to the people who study this. I don’t have a way to make a determination about the rightness or wrongness of a specific theory beyond whether it seems to hold together internally and makes sense given what I see of the world. Anthropogenic global warming fits those two criteria, and the fact that there seems to be a broad and deep scientific consensus on the matter seals the deal for me at least until I see some convincing counter evidence.
Do people get burned by relying too heavily on experts? Absolutely, and you cited some great examples. But for most people there’s not really another option. It would be good if we could all take the time and energy (and had whatever innate talent was necessary) to become experts on everything, or at least on important issues, but we can’t.
EDIT: Looks like @AnthonyC beat me to it.
It was “parody” in the sense that he was sarcastically using a straw-man version of what he perceives the climate change rhetoric to be like; it’s clear from his other sarcastic tweets that he doesn’t accept climate change and was using his tweets to attack people who do.
In sum: Christ, what an asshole.
