Sorry to say, but your reactions are really proving my original premise rather than refuting it - the defensive, flock behavior,
Sorry to say, but your reactions are what I have been talking about as being anti-science.
In the first place, the Oregon petition is not what you think it is. It is NOT a refutation of AGW. It was never intended to be, nor has any of the signatories ever claimed otherwise. You might say it is the epitome of science. The signatories do not deny that there has been warming. But they also say that it is neither unprecedented nor proven to be caused by man. Which is the truth. So it can hardly be called anything but a statement of science. You are free to argue with that, but you do lack the data to even begin to form a valid rebuttal. It does not exist.
is the warming caused by man? As I stated in my previous post, we do not know. And until we get a testable hypothesis in place AND disprove the null hypothesis (neither of which has been done), we will never know. Science is not guess work. There is a rigid and widely accepted methodology to the process. Step 1 is to disprove the null hypothesis. Even Trenberth admits this has not been done.
And fortunately neither do "97% of Climate Scientists". As I also showed in my previous post, that figure is completely bogus (think of it as nothing more than a staged figure). The survey went out to 10,257 scientists. There were people who work with one or more parts of climate science, and hence why they were chosen. Of those 10,257, 3,146 responded (http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf). Now for a scientific study, that would mean the results would reflect a 69.4% "no answer or no opinion" category. Instead those results were discarded. Indeed of the 3,146 respondents, all but 77 were then again thrown out. That is not science. That is forcing a conclusion. You develop the survey, then send it out to a random population. Since they excluded all but 77, the population was no longer random. The fix was in. You might as well put a poll on the internet asking if the earth is flat, and then cull only the responses that fit your predetermined agenda. That may make you feel better, but it is not science.
Climate change is indeed observable and to a degree measurable. But that is only part of the AGW meme. Climate has always changed, and will continue to change as long as the planet has a climate. So talking about "climate change" is like talking about where the sun rises. It is a red herring. However, we know for a fact that in the last 120 years, the earth has warmed (even by the most liberal of measurements - i.e. not adjusting for UHI) by a mere .8 degrees Celsius. Considering that the planet was in the throws of what is commonly referred to as the Little Ice Age 160 years, ago, that is not unprecedented. Emerging from an ice age one would expect the planet to warm, and it has not disappointed us.
Some want to claim that the current warming is unprecedented. But historical evidence does not support that conclusion. Indeed, the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) that occurred about 950AD to 1300AD was much warmer as evidenced by vikings farming Greenland in what is currently permafrost. They did not have the technology to farm it back then. Now some argue it was not global, but 637 independent, peer reviewed studies, show that it was indeed global. Even Ice cores from Antarctica (http://www.c3headlines.com/2010/03/was-southern-hemisphere-warmer-during-medieval-period-peruvian-ice-core-confirms-higher-temps-in-past.html) and other southern hemisphere glaciers support that. It was global.
What caused this idea to surface was Mann, Bradley, Hughes, et. al. 1998 (MBH1998). Yet that study, since debunked, was based on a statistically insignificant number of samples of tree rings (12) in one part of the globe. How can 12 trees refute 637 other peer review studies? We are still wondering about that. Indeed, when the Hockey Stick was resurrected in 2012, it was quickly debunked. Although peer reviewed, the paper - AFTER review - was shown to be critically flawed. http://suyts.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/the-hockey-stick-resurrected-by-marcott-et-al-2012/
Now has anyone proven that man is NOT responsible for any of the temperature increases? No, because that is not science. You cannot disprove idle conjecture. And since the null hypothesis has not been disproven, nor a testable hypothesis advanced, that is all it is at this point. Yes, man can be responsible for some, or all of it. The truth is that we just do not know.
And that is the scientific answer. You state belief a lot. And you magnanimously allow that not all have to "believe". Belief is not for science. Belief is for religion. Science is the questioning of established prejudices (like phlogiston). Is fire an element? At one time, "97%" of scientists swore it was. Now only fantasy game role players think that.
Which brings me to my final point. The magic of the 97%. It is a term that has popped up in many bogus studies (most recently in the Cook/Nuccitelli one). Why 97%? Human nature. No one is going to believe you if you say 100% (see the incredulity of the poll numbers reporting 100% of blacks back Obama). All you have to do is find a single person and that proves 100% is bogus. But 97%? Science cannot claim ownership of the magic number. Actually marketing came up with it first (97% satisfaction rate for GEICO insurance, or what ever brand you want to buy). They determined that 97% was believable since if you were not satisfied, or knew a couple of people that were not, then that was ok. There are always some sour apples. But they were only sour apples, not a reflection of any wrongdoing on the part of the company. So the meme of 97% was born. And as I indicated in my previous post, even Cook & Nuccitelli got the math wrong on their bogus study to force it to 97% (the math worked out to 98%). So when you see that magic number, you can be a willing dupe to the advertising industry, or it can set off alarm bells that the number was backed into in order to convince everyone that "4 legs good, 2 legs better".
