What is your personal climate change belief history?

[Ottawa Mike]

I started about 2000 when I first became aware of the "hockey stick" graph. That along with reports of the earth getting hotter, I believed this was a problem that needed addressing.

So I began investigating and I would say that within a year, I started to change my mind. Over the course of the next few years, the two key problems I had was the refusal of Michael Mann to release his data or his methodology and rationale for the graph. The other was the general attitude towards other scientists who either disagreed with CO2 warming in general or had other theories. I had never witnessed that before. I had also never seen scientists resigning because their views or work was suppressed or misrepresented. I became skeptical and remain even more so today. In fact, I'm more concerned with a coming cool period that is not going to good for anybody. I hope I'm wrong.

So what kind of path did you follow to get to where you are today as far as what you think about man-made global warming?

 

[Dawei]

When An Inconvenient Truth came out, I can remember not having the slightest interest in seeing it. A movie by a person who I viewed to be little more than a failed politician just didn't strike me as particularly scientific.

But as the media came out with a lot of AGW stories in response to the film, I became curious and bought a book on it. I read The Weather Makers in 2006, and since then I've been rather passionate about the issue. I've since read more books, but without a doubt I've learned most of what I know from the facts and opinions on this contentious little forum.

I was never a skeptic, but being on YA has made me less alarmist. That, I think, has helped me become better able to read alternative scientific arguments more unbiasedly, which is always good. It's a shame (for the skeptics) that most of the valid scientific arguments they could make are hardly ever heard, drowned out by the sea of garbage that the deniers ceaselessly spew.

 

[pegminer]

I have always had an interest in weather. I was originally trained in physics and geology and worked for many years as a physicist (doing geology on the weekends). While working I took correspondence courses in meteorology, then was in an online master's program in atmospheric science, taking courses in atmospheric radiation, thermodynamics and numerical weather prediction (among others). I was president of the local chapter of the American Meteorological Society. Finally I decided to go back to school to pursue a doctorate in climate science. I have always been very skeptical of people that said the climate was changing. I think most people have very short and inaccurate memories for such things. When I started on the doctorate I had not made up my mind about AGW, but the evidence was enormous. I'm still pretty skeptical of the hockey stick graph, but it's such a small piece of the overwhelming evidence that I don't think it's crucial. The physics is clear and virtually inescapable. The models still have numerous places where they need to be fixed, but there is a lot of truth in them.

I'm still skeptical of the connection between hurricane strength and warming. I think that people that take the "wait and see" attitude are making an enormous bet with the planet's future.

I saw "An Inconvenient Truth," but thought that it was too much about Al Gore, and it also glossed over some of the details. In that sense it is ineffective rhetorically, because it would not win over people that disliked Gore, and the people that did like him probably agreed anyway.

It's the science that matters, done by real scientists and published in real journals--not the puffery of John Coleman or Anthony Watt or Lord Monckton. There are skeptical scientists, such as Roger Pielke, William Gray, and Richard Lindzen. If the science of AGW is faulty it will come out, but so far the evidence is not there.