I have had an inclining to get up to speed on GHG science and the actual debate about GHG’s affect on global warming for some time now. I recall a friend of mine in a environmental policy class stating that its hard, as a student, with little specific knowledge of the science to understand the details behind GHG science in a manner that allows him to judged if its true or not.

Just take a quick look at a website devoted to the science of temperature monitoring and temperature data analysis. (http://www.climateaudit.org/) This stuff gets complicated very quickly. That’s why we tend, as a society to look at the experts, to try to ascertain what the consensus is about a certain subject.

With GHG it appears to be fairly straightforward. There are tons of scientist, politicians, and personalities telling us that humans are killing our planet quickly and that if something isn’t done there will be massive societal problems. For me its hard to weight the evidence. Some of the arguments I have heard form the various perspectives are compelling. For now I haven’t come to a decisive decision, as I hope to read more on the subject, but it seems that there is some contention on to what degree the changes in temperature are atmospheric versus land, man-made or natural cycles, and the degree that temperature changes will negatively affect our livelihood. There is much more uncertainty in the professional climate studies subculture than leaders, politicians, and personalities want us to think.

I do think that an effective GHG cap-and-trade program will increase costs in the U.S. suppressing manufacturing even further and negatively affecting our disposable income and thus most peoples standard of living (at least perceived standard of living, which is all that matters). This is my professional economist perspective, from reading several studies and analysis by various economist and think-tanks. So I suggest we weigh some of the uncertainties about GHG science with some of the known costs of reducing emissions. The conversation is too often heated with groups and individuals biases and ignores the uncertainty of the science and risks of limiting emissions.

I did find an interesting petition, signed by 31,478 American scientists, including 9,029 with PhDs, stating that the science which backs the claims of greenhouse gas legislation is flawed. (See for yourself)

My buddy Kenny pointed me to a good link on the discussion surrounding global warming. Still a lot of opinion (he mentioned that climataudit.org, “is a crap pseudoscience blog. It’s use is only to reaffirm what people want to believe, using the guise of doubt.”)

ARS Technica

A good quote from the discussion:

[Global Warming trends is] not an easy demonstration to make, at least in the forward looking sense (the backward looking version is just a bunch of dull, daily temperature readings, albeit lots of them in lots of places — the forward predictions are models). I’d say demonstrating evolution is actually easier. There’s hard rock geology behind it. Most of those who aren’t persuaded don’t want to be.

Global warming, however, is all about extracting a pretty small signal (the increasing average temperature) out of a whole bunch of noise (day to day fluctuations, actual natural changes that are always going on, etc.).

Unless you’re a specialist reading the literature, you’re basically going to end up taking this one on trust.