Report has 'smoking gun' on climate

From the AP via Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:

Human-caused global warming is here — visible in the air, water and melting ice — and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week.

"The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. "The evidence ... is compelling."

Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist and study co-author, went even further: "This isn't a smoking gun; climate is a batallion of intergalactic smoking missiles."

Click here for the rest.

Over Christmas, a conservative friend of mine hit me with the latest right-wing attempt at global warming denial: a majority of scientists may believe in man made global warming, but not a majority of climatologists. Well, I suppose that's a move in the right direction--the last piece of misinformation on the subject he was feeding me was complete denial of the scientific consenus on "climate change." Anyway, his comment disturbed me and made me want to find some quick info on the consenus issue.

Wikipedia is always handy:

A small minority of climate scientists and scientists in related fields have expressed opposition to the scientific consensus on global warming.

Click here for more.

My bet is that, if I had another debate with my conservative pal and confronted him with the Wikipedia article, he would then attack Wikipedia itself as being unreliable, which it sometimes is. Of course, a study done by the science magazine Nature back in 2005 found Wikipedia's science articles to be approximately as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Of course, a few months later the Encyclopedia Britannica fired back, asserting that the Nature study was deeply flawed. Jesus!

You know, when the global warming flat-earthers have to resort to epistemological arguments to make their case, then they're probably on the ropes, anyway. Unfortunately, most Americans can't hang long in an argument about the nature of knowledge itself, so I expect the controversy to continue for some years to come. Not even this latest round of studies is going to change that.

I'd better start thinking about moving to higher ground and boning up on survivalism.

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