Quote from piezoe:
It's unfortunate this business has gotten all twisted up with politics. We know precisely how it happened: Democrat Gore, who had a fascination with science, had his interest piqued when many years ago (1980's) Hanson let slip -- it was a highly visible forum-- that he thought man made climate change was possible, etc. Then, as the meteorologists and physicists began lining up, we got more data, and even more conjecture. Sure enough, temperature correlated with Anthro. CO2. [It is curious to note that there doesn't seem to be any documentation of a simple, but now obvious question being asked at this point, viz. "Is the temperature going up because we are we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere, or is the CO2 going up because the temperature is going up?" If anyone did ask, I would guess it would have been Lindzen, who never really bought into Hanson's hypothesis from the get-go. Frankly, it didn't seem important to ask that question, because at the time it was just assumed that the rise in CO2 was due to fossil fuel use, since the amount of increase in atmospheric CO2 was about what we estimated we were dumping into the air. Very few considered that the amount of CO2 dumped into the air by Mother Nature might be a couple of orders greater than what we humans were dumping, thus making our contribution almost negligible, and maybe it was just a coincidence that the rise in CO2 was more or less matching what came from fossil fuels after allowing for massive natural sinking of CO2 as well. In the beginning we did a very poor job of allowing for both natural sourcing and sinking. We were, as humans, very anthropomorphic centered! Then too, we didn't have a good quantitative handle on the relative contributions to surface temperature of water, CO2, oceans and Sun. We way underestimated waters contribution relative to CO2 -- we also underestimated Cow flatulence.
Regardless, before we could begin to nail any of this essential data down, before we had the satellites in place to help us collect the data we needed, the media picked up the story and we were off to the races. Then new models appeared and got tweaked to agree with the more recent data which was extrapolated to predict rather dire consequences -- coastlines inundated, polar bears with heat stroke; Moosejaw would be paradise and Guayaquil uninhabitable. Then came the C-13 data, the smoking gun. Many of the holdouts, but certainly not everyone, not already on the bandwagon couldn't wait to jump aboard. Peer pressure is a powerful force. No one likes to hear, "I told you so!" The coal and oil companies, however, were decidedly unhappy. Not only were they not aboard, they went out of their way to identify, support, goad, and exploit the dwindling number of naysayers, some of them quite prominent, indeed, in the meteorologist and atmospheric physics communities.
And that's how we got to lefties and righties -- though this issue does not belong in either the media nor the political ring. Why? Because we are not done with the science. Modeling the atmosphere, and doing it well, is a very, very difficult task. Consequently no one has done it well yet, at least if they have we couldn't tell. We won't know until we can go forward in time. Anyone, allowed enough parameters, can model the known past, but what's important is modeling the future, and unlike the stock market, future climate can in principle be modeled, though we can't know the values of the dependent variables until we know the future value of the independent variables. And first we had better figure out what these variables are!
Furthermore we are just now getting a good handle on the relative amounts of total sinking and sourcing for CO2, and we are finally beginning to amass enough satellite data and enough surface measurements to begin to get a handle on the overall picture. Now we know the Anthro CO2 is far from the only source of C-13 dilution in the atmosphere. There is orders of magnitude more dilution coming from natural sourcing of CO2. We hadn't recognized that in 2000. And now it seems the ice core data, upon which so much reliance was made, may have been incorrectly interpreted.
Of course the gainsayers were always there, but the ones from the energy industry could not be trusted to be impartial, nor could their political supporters. Then you had the maverick meteorologists. They were mostly guessing based on what they considered to be common sense. Results from their own models were just as inadequate as those from the protagonists. Though common sense is welcome most everywhere, it holds no cache in the world of science, where only falsifiable and testable hypotheses get attention.
The bottom line is that it was far, far too early for bandwagon-ing! With the media, not known for understatement, and Democrat Al Gore on one side, and the Energy Industry and their paid Republican sycophants on the other, we had the ingredients for the perfect political storm. When Gore and the democrats were able to garner the approbation of the Swedish Academy, and wide grins from the Goldman Sachs boardroom, as huge profits from carbon credits trading was being savored, the bandwagon began to roll right over the naysayers. Bump, bump, bump, it went. Ouch, ouch, ouch, cried the naysayers, but fewer and fewer were listening to their cries.
Frankly it is all a big mess, and a perfect example of how not to do science. We all just need to take a deep breath, pretend none of this has happened, and wait for those who know something about the atmosphere and climate to figure it out -- the other scientists should button their lips. In the meantime, there is no data to suggest we need to be in a hurry to figure out whether anthropomorphic CO2 is a threat to our planet, and if so, what best to do about it. We are currently in a period of essentially constant integrated global temperature, though CO2 is still rising.
If we can possibly restrain ourselves we should avoid using the language of politics to discuss global warming. The Earth can't tell the difference between Left, Right, Democrat, Republican, Tea Party, Independent or Libertarian CO2. It is all the same to Mother Earth.