Massive Government Report Says Climate Is Warming and Humans Are the Cause

Re:Massive Government Report Says Climate Is Warming and Hum... by yters on Friday November 03, 2017 @06:30PM (#15622609)

If the case for global warming was so compelling and the driving force of our time, I'd expect there to be a fairly direct way to explain it and easily debunk common counters, and perhaps put it up on a cheap webpage like deniers do.

For example, the two crucial points I'd like to see addressed are:

1. what percentage of the greenhouse effect is directly attributable to humans, and

2. if this is a very small percentage why should I believe humans have a big impact on the global climate?

If the evidence is so good, the problem is so important, and the dedicated resources are so great, I'd expect proponents to go out of their way to communicate clearly and graciously to deniers like myself, since from a PR perspective browbeating with unclear evidence tends to have the opposite effect on skeptics.

Not that I'm entitled to such treatment, I have a duty to investigate the evidence as best as I can, yet my own investigations have led me to the opposite conclusion.

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Re:Massive Government Report Says Climate Is Warming and Hum... by heurist on Friday November 03, 2017 @07:42PM (#15623004)

Complex problems are not always simple to explain. I sell data about complex social systems and I've found that when my customers are finally deciding whether to buy or not, only very rarely do they want to look at numbers. They want the story and solutions. They want the product. A marketing team that tries to get Americans to remember specific figures about climate change is not going to be effective. There are ways to do it - Gore's Inconvenient Truth did a good job of visualizing global warming in a way that made sense and could be plainly understood without a scientific background.

Also, scientists are not marketers. They might present at technical conferences, maybe TED, or other occasional larger venues, but for the most part they hunt for funding, do their research and publish in academic journals full of jargon and abstract formulas. They're not trained to reach the public. Some nonprofits seem to be picking up the marketing torch but that's only started in the last decade or two and the result has been massive pushback by climate change deniers. Strategies for concisely expressing the issue are still being worked out.

Personally, I would love to spend a few weeks reading major reports on climate change so I could better understand the precise scope of contemporary research and help provide some of these answers to you and others who are skeptical (or talk myself out of it if need be). My life isn't there yet, though. I know very few people who have that capacity and interest.

Here are some resources along the lines of what you were asking for:

https://skepticalscience.com/Debunking-Handbook-now-freely-a...

https://grist.org/series/skeptics/

https://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

https://xkcd.com/1732/

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/climate_law_inst...

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0804/0804.1126.pdf

https://robertscribbler.com/2016/12/19/solar-now-produces-a-...

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/22/how-much-doe...

http://www.nber.org/papers/w19080

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