Note, that in writing down this post, you haven’t brought forth any objective argument to justify your skepticism. Your argument that because people have agendas, you should be skeptical could be ok if the goal is to get objective information, not form a reactionary opinions.
A strong scientific consensus over this topic is not the result of some political agenda but of the scientific method. One of the central parts of it, is that any claim must be falsifiable through experiment. When anyone comes with a claim, others will try to reproduce or falsify it. Depending on the results the claim is either rejected or used in further research. With vasts of experiments explaining the effect or verifying the effect to better explain what was previously known, a consensus is formed. Politicians are only involved when it comes to appropriating public funding for research. That doesn’t corrupt the research itself, but hinders it if research can’t be done. When industry funds it though, then it does degrade the research very often (see tobacco industry in the 1920s-1980s, the food industry until today, or oil&gas industry which have known about the effects for at least the 1970s through their own research and have not published it).
For some more factual things you can read up on:
That CO2 gets warmer when subjected to light is known since the 1850s when Eunice Foote did experiments with water vapor and CO2 and made this observation and roughly quantified it.
John Tyndall did incorporate this effect into a first, very rudimentary, climate model of the atmosphere in 1862. The global temperature projections of that model for 1950 aren’t perfect, but still astonishingly precise.
Planck in 1900 formulated the Planck Postulate as part of his work concerning black body radiation. Quantization he thought of as a mathematical quirk. Einstein a few years later proposed that the energy of light or photons to be more precise is itself quantized. Einstein got his Nobel Prize in 1923 adopting this to not only explain the Plack Postulate (radiation) but also the photoelectric effect, i.e. that a molecule such as CO2 can absorb energy from the electromagnetic radiation interacting with it.
The scientific community was not convinced of the anthropogenic nature of the warming of the climate until in 1957 Roger Revelle and Hans Suess use the C14-method to show that the ratio of C-isotopes in the atmosphere is shifting towards those of fossil fuels. Since then more measurements have been done using this method to date things and reconstruct atmospheric composition (e.g. through ice-coring).
Since then technology such as satellites have improved the overall quality of measurements. And all of them show a clear tendency. With more computational power climate models have become more powerful and the projections are very good. The differences to measurements, when they happen are usually underestimating because the models are conservatively developed. You can refer to the IPCC reports which show you the data pretty clearly. If you want, then look at data from your local weather station, if it existed over 100 years ago, but even if only 50 years and you’ll probably see a difference even locally. Do that for all stations in the world and you can see a clear trend.
These are only a fraction of topics which anybody can read up on to form an informed decision, rather than opposing something just because it is consensus.
Yeah, it’s called an opinion. I used to have the opinion that global warming was a serious concern. After learning more and more life experiences, my opinion has changed.
The only fact I claimed is that politicians have political agendas, and that is a fact. Some politicians promote that the earth is getting warmer, some say that it isn’t, but if it comes from a politician, it comes from an agenda.
I appreciate that you came with some scientific facts, surely. And you’re right I brought forth no objective argument, it was subjective. Maybe I should have started my comment with “IMO”. I assumed everyone would catch on to that since I was relating my own personal experience with the topic.
Note, that in writing down this post, you haven’t brought forth any objective argument to justify your skepticism. Your argument that because people have agendas, you should be skeptical could be ok if the goal is to get objective information, not form a reactionary opinions.
A strong scientific consensus over this topic is not the result of some political agenda but of the scientific method. One of the central parts of it, is that any claim must be falsifiable through experiment. When anyone comes with a claim, others will try to reproduce or falsify it. Depending on the results the claim is either rejected or used in further research. With vasts of experiments explaining the effect or verifying the effect to better explain what was previously known, a consensus is formed. Politicians are only involved when it comes to appropriating public funding for research. That doesn’t corrupt the research itself, but hinders it if research can’t be done. When industry funds it though, then it does degrade the research very often (see tobacco industry in the 1920s-1980s, the food industry until today, or oil&gas industry which have known about the effects for at least the 1970s through their own research and have not published it).
For some more factual things you can read up on:
That CO2 gets warmer when subjected to light is known since the 1850s when Eunice Foote did experiments with water vapor and CO2 and made this observation and roughly quantified it.
John Tyndall did incorporate this effect into a first, very rudimentary, climate model of the atmosphere in 1862. The global temperature projections of that model for 1950 aren’t perfect, but still astonishingly precise.
Planck in 1900 formulated the Planck Postulate as part of his work concerning black body radiation. Quantization he thought of as a mathematical quirk. Einstein a few years later proposed that the energy of light or photons to be more precise is itself quantized. Einstein got his Nobel Prize in 1923 adopting this to not only explain the Plack Postulate (radiation) but also the photoelectric effect, i.e. that a molecule such as CO2 can absorb energy from the electromagnetic radiation interacting with it.
The scientific community was not convinced of the anthropogenic nature of the warming of the climate until in 1957 Roger Revelle and Hans Suess use the C14-method to show that the ratio of C-isotopes in the atmosphere is shifting towards those of fossil fuels. Since then more measurements have been done using this method to date things and reconstruct atmospheric composition (e.g. through ice-coring).
Since then technology such as satellites have improved the overall quality of measurements. And all of them show a clear tendency. With more computational power climate models have become more powerful and the projections are very good. The differences to measurements, when they happen are usually underestimating because the models are conservatively developed. You can refer to the IPCC reports which show you the data pretty clearly. If you want, then look at data from your local weather station, if it existed over 100 years ago, but even if only 50 years and you’ll probably see a difference even locally. Do that for all stations in the world and you can see a clear trend.
These are only a fraction of topics which anybody can read up on to form an informed decision, rather than opposing something just because it is consensus.
edit: A word.
Yeah, it’s called an opinion. I used to have the opinion that global warming was a serious concern. After learning more and more life experiences, my opinion has changed.
The only fact I claimed is that politicians have political agendas, and that is a fact. Some politicians promote that the earth is getting warmer, some say that it isn’t, but if it comes from a politician, it comes from an agenda.
I appreciate that you came with some scientific facts, surely. And you’re right I brought forth no objective argument, it was subjective. Maybe I should have started my comment with “IMO”. I assumed everyone would catch on to that since I was relating my own personal experience with the topic.