The Conflict of Climate Change

I recently watched An Inconvenient Truth (AIT) with a couple of friends. While the content and overall conclusions were nothing very surprising to me, the vehement opposition from one of my friends was. He has been reading a book: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming. Apparently this book points out several 'deceptions' within the movie and then, because of these, basically calls into question the validity of the conclusions. In particular two items were quoted as being misleading:

• The analysis of 928 scientific papers and the conclusion that not one of them disagreed with the idea the man made greenhouse gases (GHG) are a primary cause of global warming and climate change.
• The 'hockey stick' charts showing a marked uptrend in CO2 levels and global temperatures. This was flagged saying that the data was massaged

In discussing things further with my friend I began to see the furor that this topic can evoke. I took the approach that I needed to validate the data before I could confidently comment.

928 papers: I found the original essay by Naomi Oreskes called BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER:The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change . In this essay, Oreskes attempts to quantify the amount of dissent regarding climate change within the scientific community. She does so by analyzing 10% of the peer reviewed articles published between 1993-2003. The analysis she conducted was to classify each paper into 3 basic groups: "supporting the climate change consensus", "rejecting the climate change consensus", or "not applicable". The results were ~75% supported, 0% rejected, and ~25% NA. This seems to be the source of the quote within AIT.

While I can see how people can argue that quoting this number could be called unfair - because in reality there probably are some peer reviewed articles that disagree with the consensus, I can't understand how individuals can hold this up like a beacon of justice and pronounce: "Gore is lying to us!!!" From my layman's understanding of this survey and the methodology used, Oreskes really seemed to prove her point that there is not a significant split within the scientific community - that the majority of scientists seem to support the idea of climate change caused by GHG. For some reason, some have seized upon this as a smoking gun of corruption and deception.

CO2 and Global Temperature: For my next bit of research I went looking for the ice core data. I found a great site out there called Trends. From there I was able to download the original ice core data for both temperatuire and CO2 levels, suck them into Excel and BAM! I had the same charts shown in AIT. No smoothing, no magic, just data.

The Conflict
The real interesting thing was that, regardless of the data that I found, I stirred up one heck of hornets nest by trying to prove/disprove my friend's accusations and to have a discussion. The flamewar began and the attacks were fierce and personal. The funny thing is, they claws really came out after I tried to call attention to the use of emotional language and it's ability to cause conflict. Imagine that causing conflict when trying to talk about not causing conflict. One really interesting thing that I found was an paper about the conflict surrounding this topic: http://www.uvm.edu/~shali/Climate%20Conflicts.pdf This paper was interesting to me because it talks about how everyone has a horse in this race and they behave accordingly. The paper talks about the "time critical" nature of some people's beliefs. If these people truly believe based on whatever data they have, that ACC is occurring, then they must do everything they can to get us to act and act quickly. If you step back and look at it, that makes sense. Now, if you violently don't agree, then you naturally are going to act and act quickly doing everything you can to stop them including labeling them deceptive alarmists in order to defeat their case.

But in the end, this has turned into one heck of a flame war. I encourage you to post your thoughts, theories, and data and I promise not to roast you... too bad! ;)