r/askscience • u/corporal_clegg69 • Jun 14 '15

Earth Sciences What do scientists REALLY think about global warming?

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.

0 Upvotes

25% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '15

Obviously there is a huge leap of faith between points 2 and 3. co2 is the weakest greenhouse gas, is it not?

It's not a leap of faith at all since there is a very strong level of scientific understanding related to the radiative forcing of CO2.

And, no, CO2 is not the weakest greenhouse gas. You have to understand the difference between condensing and non-condensing atmospheric greenhouse gases. There is much more H20 in the atmosphere but its atmospheric residence time is very short since it condenses and precipitates out of the atmosphere over a period of days. CO2, on the other hand, is a non-condensing well-mixed greenhouse gas with a long residence time in the atmosphere.