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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday August 29 2015, @04:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-just-need-a-test-world-to-play-around-with dept.

From The Guardian

Those who reject the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming often invoke Galileo as an example of when the scientific minority overturned the majority view. In reality, climate contrarians have almost nothing in common with Galileo, whose conclusions were based on empirical scientific evidence, supported by many scientific contemporaries, and persecuted by the religious-political establishment. Nevertheless, there's a slim chance that the 2–3% minority is correct and the 97% climate consensus is wrong.

To evaluate that possibility, a new paper published in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology examines a selection of contrarian climate science research and attempts to replicate their results.

Alas the results weren't good for that 3%...

Cherry picking was the most common characteristic they shared. We found that many contrarian research papers omitted important contextual information or ignored key data that did not fit the research conclusions.

The article also notes,

..there is no cohesive, consistent alternative theory to human-caused global warming. Some blame global warming on the sun, others on orbital cycles of other planets, others on ocean cycles, and so on. There is a 97% expert consensus on a cohesive theory that's overwhelmingly supported by the scientific evidence, but the 2–3% of papers that reject that consensus are all over the map, even contradicting each other. The one thing they seem to have in common is methodological flaws like cherry picking, curve fitting, ignoring inconvenient data, and disregarding known physics.

Link to published paper


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Saturday August 29 2015, @11:15AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 29 2015, @11:15AM (#229398) Journal
    Even if we used all the power we generated to heat the Earth, we would still contribute something like 1 part in 10,000 of the heating alleged to be due to human-produced greenhouse gases. The loss of power is easily quantifiable BTW. According to the US Energy Information Administration, 6% of power [eia.gov] in the US is lost due to transmission and distribution. This includes energy losses from electricity absorbed by the Earth.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @11:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @11:51PM (#230530)

    ...and the other 94% is lost when it reaches its intended load.

    Generally, the power used by Earthlings stays on Earth, with the exceptions of space lasers, and whatnot. Which part of the Earth gets heated probably doesn't matter much, holistically, unless we are starting to discuss how the temperature change affects the absorption of the sun's energy.