re: Remember the walrus epidemic that was reported as evidence of Global Warming?

You're making this a political issue when it's increasingly becoming a common sense issue.

The hockey stick graph was a fraud, Climategate 1 and 2 happened, the ocean won't become acidic as long as there are rocks in it, walruses didn't migrate because of thinning ice, and there aren't 97% of scientists of any stripe anymore (if there ever were in the first place) who will put their careers on the line in support of an assertion we have no conclusive evidence for and which has been shown to be laced with systematic fraud.

This isn't even political anymore. Your homeboy Obama thinks natural gas is America's future. Why are you still holding the bag?

I believe your posts has been peer reviewed, the outcome is clear you are hysterical.

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I cited Forbes.

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You cited the Heartland Institute's Forbes blog.

Citing "Forbes" has meant pretty much nothing since they went to a syndication model a few years back. I can cite Peter Gleick, Mindy Lubber, and James Conca as "Forbes." But I'm really citing the Pacific Institute, the Investor Network on Climate Risk, and ... James Conca.

(Conca rules, though, as he is a very pro-nuke guy. I still wouldn't cite him as "Forbes," though.)

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But you would agree that any number that includes Idso as an AGW proponent would be fairly dismissed as inaccurate, wouldn't you?

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Oh the 97% study is awful, this is true. And I didn't catch this walrus story when it came out, but it appears to also be bad evidence, with the caveat that I haven't checked the citations in the Crockford article myself.

But I also don't think the evidence for AGW comes from a survey or a sob story about walruses.

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Where does it come from? IPCC? Observational studies over 150 years? Ice core samples?

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It doesn't come from the IPCC, but I think on the whole AR5 does a decent job summarizing the various lines of evidence, which include both of the last two.

E.O. Wilson popularized a term called "consilience" for when independent lines of evidence converge on a single unifying conclusion. When I was a skeptic, I tended to view this sort of thing as a battle and articles as ammunition. But when you dive into the primary literature, there's a definite contrast in how the evidence is structured. The mainstream evidence has consilience. The theoretical physics, the proxies, the records, all tell a consistent story. There are some zones of uncertainty and plenty of filling-in to be done, but it's pretty clear.

The skeptic literature has no consilience. It's just madly driving wedges into any zone of uncertainty, without worrying about whether those wedges are mutually contradictory. Skydragon "CO2 not a GHG" writers and lukewarmer "CO2 GHG fx are mild" writers and conspiracist "All data is faked" writers, with no coherent story beyond whatever is tactically necessary in that paragraph to weaken AGW.

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What should CO2 concentrations be, and with what average surface temperature should that correlate? And how much will it cost in dollars and lives to get there?

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Like this. This isn't an "I'm seeking to understand the science" question, it's an "I want to win" question. It's a wedge designed to get someone talking about uncertainties and gradients and economic trade-offs. Then the tactic is either an argument from ridicule equating uncertainty with ideologically motivated ignorance, an equivocation of uncertainty within a "less than" range with uncertainty including a "zero or greater than" range, or if the debater is particularly unscrupulous, both.

If someone diagnosed as prediabetic goes to the doctor, and asks "what should my weight be? with what fasting blood sugar will that correlate? how many push-ups and how many fewer Oreos will it take to get there?" the doctor can, maybe, give a broad range for the first two. Beyond that, they won't be able to offer numerical specifics beyond a prescription to up the output and cut the input.

And yet, we do not respond with "well, if you can't give specifics, you're obviously just winging it while presupposing I have to lose weight because of Big Diet." Or with "look, if you're so uncertain about that, isn't it possible my ideal weight could be this, right now? or even heavier?"

Because the human body is complex, and it's very possible to have a good enough understanding of the cause and effect and the countervailing trends of various systems, without being able to say, with certainty, exactly how much of X leads to measurement Y, or what the absolute optimal everything is beyond a band of confidence. That's how complex systems with lots of fluids work. And you know what else is a complex system with lots of fluids? The atmosphere.

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It's a religion and not political.

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True. If the argument is policy then the following must all be true in order to implement policy changes:

1. The earth must be warming.
2. It must be caused by man.
3. It must be really really bad.
4. Any policy change must be able to stop it.

If just ONE of those criteria is not provable then policy on warming is illogical.

Warmers gotta go 4 for 4 or they strike out.