RealClimate continues to impress me. In a recent post they pose the question of what would a CSI-style forensic analysis for the case of global warming look like? They point out how ridiculous a defense attorney (defending the humans accused of contributing to Global Warming) would appear while trying to argue such a case in court:
A rather more specious comment heard often (including at this hearing) is that 'if it was warmer before, then the current warming must be natural' or alternatively 'if you can't explain all of the past changes, how can you explain anything now?'. First of all, there are many periods in Earth history that are unequivocally accepted to be warmer than the present - the Pliocene (3 million years ago), the Eocene (50 million years ago) and the mid-Cretaceous (100 million years ago) for instance. Less clearly, the Eemian interglacial period or the Early Holocene may have been slightly warmer than today. Thus, if that logic were appropriate, no-one should bother worrying about climate change until sea levels start to approach mid-Cretaceous levels (about 100m above today's level!).
However, the logic is fatally flawed. It is akin to a defense lawyer arguing that their client can't possibly have committed a particular murder because other murders have happened in the past that were nothing to do with them. That would get short shrift in a courtroom, and the analgous point gets short shrift in the scientific community too. Of course, it is possible that our suspect was involved in previous murders too - but obviously the further back you go, the harder it is to pin it on them. And clearly, there will be past murders where they have a clear alibi.
We could be seeing a prelude to the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case on Global Warming.
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PE wrote "We could be seeing a prelude to the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case on Global Warming."
The MSNBC article stated "They argue that the Environmental Protection Agency is obligated to limit carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles under the federal Clean Air Act because as the primary “greenhouse” gas causing a warming of the earth, carbon dioxide is a pollutant."
It frustrates me to no end why something has to be a pollutant to be harmful. I can't think of a clearer example than people dying from sitting in their running car parked inside a closed garage. The EPAs job should be to protect the environment against anything and everything that harms it, pollutant or not. We need to get off the pollutant rhetoric.
A great example
That's a great example of how to argue with a skeptic.