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Old 16-12-2009, 12:37 PM
echinosum echinosum is offline
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First recorded activity by GardenBanter: Feb 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Granity View Post
Science is about coming up with a theory, publishing it along with all the data used, and letting other people try and find faults in your work, If they can then the theory may well fall, if they can't then it stands, for now. this procedure has not been followed in this case, hence my scepticism.
Indeed, so why don't you look at the science then? This emails controversy is only in a small corner affecting only an unclear argument about the natural variability in the climate. It doesn't even matter very much, the science doesn't rely on it. The science showing that CO2 warms the atmosphere goes back 150 years and is really very simple and well-established, before emails even existed, so it has nothing to do with the climate-gate emails. The climatic feedbacks are more complicated - but that's the argument about whether it will be 2 degrees or 6 degrees.

I don't really care whether you have been duped by some PR or not, I don't rest my argument on that point. I rest my argument on the well-established un-email-affected science, which you have not addressed. Once you get the hang of how CO2 warms the atmosphere (much in the same way as putting a jumper on warms you, in fact), and the magnitude of the effect, and how strongly established in science it is, it becomes apparent that "there is no AGW" is really a very extraordinary claim, it requires some rather amazing things to be true, that somehow the climate can cancel out the effect.