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Tuesday, November 01, 2011

We All Agree

Scientists continue to be surprised at the "denialism" of "non-scientists" regarding global warming: "I am surprised at the way some of the scientific findings have been rejected in an unscientific manner."

I'm surprised they're surprised (why are they such slow learners?), but I've given it some thought and I've formulated the problem in a way we can all agree:
The world has warmed by some amount, human activity is responsible for some part of that warming, human emissions are responsible for some portion of the human related warming, human emissions of CO2 in particular are responsible for part of the warming due to human emissions in general, and since humans will continue to release CO2 into the atmosphere and there is some amount of warming "in the pipeline", some amount of warming will occur in the future.
Without assigning specific numbers to each bit, this view does not in any way contradict the "scientific consensus". In fact, this covers everybody from those who deny any sort of warming (just fill in zeros for everything) all the way to the most rabid warmenist who is certain that the seas will rise 100 meters and boil us all to death.

Isn't it wonderful that we can all agree? Oh sure, the devil's in the details, and we still have to argue about those pesky percentages and amounts of warming. But the other fun thing is that if you ask any two scientists to independently pick numbers, they'll most likely pick somewhat different numbers.

Therefore, we have an overall general agreement of everybody and a specific consensus of nobody. Perfect! Science can progress once again.

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