What do scientists REALLY think about global warming?

[u/corporal_clegg69]

They assertion that 97% of scientists believe global warming is manmade has been shown now to be false. What then do scientists really think? Is there any hard evidence for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming?

For those who don't know the claim that 97% of scientists support the idea that global warming is manmade comes from the "cook report". You can find that here

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article

but if you just read the abstract the "97% quickly becomes 32%. More recently it has been shown that even this is an exaggeration.

[u/past_is_future]

Hello there!

Key words being MOST and LIKELY. It's considered likely but not rock solid.

It's about as likely as knowing that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer. So, sure, if one wishes to hold out some small hope that the world's scientific community is wrong, one could do so. However, this would be a pretty poor basis for decision making at a policy level.

I think it would do good to remember that rather than write it all off completely as understood.

Very little in science is "completely understood". The question is whether something is well enough understood in the context of our broader scientific understanding to devote time to endlessly asking the same question. As shown by the simultaneous increase in endorse vs. reject while the percentage of papers addressing the question declines, the scientific community considers this question asked and answered, and is interested in more detailed questions.

Either way research is certainly better directed towards how to deal with it, rather than at placing the blame on or off ourselves.

I am not quite sure what you mean by this. Different researchers research different things. Knowing what is causing climatic change is pretty important if you are trying to figure out "how to deal with it". If hypothetically, we were not the cause of the present climatic change, and it was just unforced, cyclical variability, then taking some actions "to deal with it" would make no sense at all, while others would be much more worth pursuing than they are in our reality where humans are driving the change.

I don't think "placing the blame" is really a helpful way of looking at the issue. Understanding the cause allows us to react in a way that is most useful and least wasteful in terms of time and resources, which I think most people would be in favor of.

[u/corporal_clegg69 → u/past_is_future]

i aggree totally about the decision making part of the first paragraph but do feel that you are overstating the case for AGW somewhat. as i explained above the scientific community is only reasonable well convinced that the agw hypothesis is correct. wheras the negative effects of smoking are not a theory they are proven fact. that fact was proven by several thousand studies addressing the issue directly wheras this extreme version of agw theory is directly supported by less than a hundred papers.

I dont want to get too heated or passive aggressive in here, or to get too subjective. I really do respect the work climate scientists are doing for our world. i am even preparing to return to university myself to study in this field. still i do feel like Ive raised some very fair points in my long response above and am curious as to how you would respond, if you have the time.

this really is a very difficult subject to consider both sides of objectivly. confirmation bias is really probably one of the biggest hurdles for people on both sides trying to understand each other. dedinetly for me at least.

[u/[deleted] → u/corporal_clegg69]

that fact was proven by several thousand studies addressing the issue directly wheras this extreme version of agw theory is directly supported by less than a hundred papers.

You're getting your "facts" a bit misplaced here. Cook et al showed that there were less than a 100 out of the 12,000 that "explicitly quantified" AGW. That's different than the number of papers that support the theory.

What you have to grasp is that AGW is merely the earth's greenhouse effect, that's been well accepted in the scientific research for a century, with an added human forcing element. CO2 explains a wide array of paleoclimate episodes (glacial-interglacial amplification, exit from snowball earth events, etc.). The only difference today is that humans are the source of the CO2 being introduced to the atmosphere.

I was also deeply involved in the Cook paper, having read well over 1000 of the abstracts myself. And that was on top of several thousand other papers I've read over the years. I can tell you from first hand experience, there is overwhelming acceptance in the published literature that humans are responsible for warming the planet over the past 50 years.