>So to me the question is not so much “do humans cause global warming” as “can humans stabilize the climate by changing their behaviour”?

But in order to answer that question, we need to determine how much of the effect is due to human action, or more specifically, how much can we alter things by changing human action. If human contributions only contribute a negligible amount to climate change features, then is it worth drastically changing our behaviour, lifestyle, and economic system to have marginal if not insignificant effects on the climate change? That is the question being asked by the AGW skeptics.

By “expert opinion” I assume you are referring to the huge majority of peer reviewed work on the topic which shows that the climate is indeed changing. Why does the increasing volume of evidence and statistics not count as “hard science” in this situation? This whole topic seems to be constantly turned into a “debate” and framed as just “opinion” as if the peer reviewed work of many government meterologists and university researchers was equivalent to the views of television pundits.

Unfortunately, we will probaly never find one. We have so-called “smoking guns” for anthropogenic global warming itself (a climate phenomenon), but as far as regional climate and short term weather are concerned, the atmosphere is too chaotic for us to separate out all the “natural” variables and noise and show a one-on-one relationship betwen human activity and the phenomenon in question. And, well, even if there was a way to do it, there would always be a degree of uncertainty that certain individuals with, um, questionable motives could exploit. The best we can do is build up the theory and use observations to validate the theory whenever we can. The atmosphere will not sound bells and whistles when the theory gets it right, either.

There will always be uncertainty, with uncertainty increasing as the phenomena in question become smaller and shorter-lived, and I think people are just going to have to learn to deal with risk management instead of expecting everything important to be carved in stone.

I’ve said it before, I will say it again. “Don’t hate the player… hate the game”…. and “don’t shoot the messenger”.

Have a good one!

-Mike Janitch

Hello? Hello? Is this the Religious Channel? Go forth, ye Sinners, repent and the land of milk and honey will be yours!

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Seriously, your question leads to more questions…can humans affect climate in any significant way? who knows? and how can we find out? for example, is there anything that has actually _changed_ in the past 10, 50 or 100 years or so? (And by “change” I mean “change”, not just “more of the same”)

And so we are back to square one. As written in this week’s Economist’s special report on Climate Change, it remains a matter of expert opinion and politics, not “hard science”.

That letter by the Royal Society sounds more futile by the minute…

Careful also with thinking that “attempting to stabilize things in such a way as to sustain humans is a good plan for humans”. Well, it does depend on what attempts are made. There’s no point to risk cures worse than the problem we are trying to solve

Whether or not the effects are man-made, surely attempting to stabilize things in such a way as to sustain humans is a good plan for humans? Why do we need a smoking gun to confiorm that humans are the cause? Does it even seem reasonable in a vastly dynamic system like this to point, in principle, at a single thing and say that is the proximate cause? This is about maintenance and not about locating and eliminating the proximate cause, as though finding out whose fault it is would solve it.

So to me the question is not so much “do humans cause global warming” as “can humans stabilize the climate by changing their behaviour”?