The proportion of Americans who think that the earth is warming due to human activites is somewhere in the range of 50%. Are you really trying to suggest that there's no real debate because millions are being paid by the oil industry to dispute the effects of fossil fuels?
Maybe you're trying to insinuate that only scientists - certain scientists at that, are qualified to debate the topic. Is this where we get the wiki link to studies showing that the small proportion of scientists who receive their funding to study anthropogenic climate change belive that climate change is anthropogenic?
Well, first of all, in a scientific discussion the public's opinion is not particularly important. Although this does bring up an interesting point: While obviously not funded by the oil industry, the America public does have a bit of a stake in this. People are resistant to the idea that their way of life is harmful to our future. Next, this may shock you, but people who do research on climate might actually be the best qualified to comment on changes in climate. I know skeptics like to trot out that "30,000 scientists sign petition opposing AGW," but you'll have to forgive me for not really caring what a guy with a bachelor's in metallurgy thinks about climate science.
Still, kudos on the attempted straw man. It's the scientific skeptics who are getting the oil funding, not the American public.
But really, none of that is important. The science is important. Skeptics always attempt to confuse the issue with politics and made-up scandal. Rather than addressing the science, you've just hedged your bets by making an insinuation that climate scientists are paid to do climate science, and therefore can't be trusted. That's not an argument, that's plugging your ears and saying "LALALA CANT HEAR YOU." You've just pre-judged the discussion as being already won because the other side doesn't have credibility, and yet you use the word "debate."
Every time an interesting skeptic's
scientific argument comes up, I read it thoroughly. I'm very interested in the topic and have a pretty insatiable curiosity. The next thing I do is poke around google looking for someone to respond to that skeptic's arguments.
Every single time I manage to find a pretty handy and thorough debunking. Most of the time, the skeptic's flaws are a result of straight up misrepresentation of findings of actual scientists. My personal favorite is the film "The Great Global Warming Swindle," where they took scientist's words out of context so as to mean the exact opposite of their intent, terminated a graph of solar energy at 1980 because after that year the data clearly deviates from the point they were trying to make, and even straight up
falsified data on a temperature chart and falsely attributes the chart to NASA.
Other times, it's a mistake. One guy ran a very complex and well-done calculation that showed mankind's contribution to global warming was .5%, based on CO2 emissions and their relative strength in climate forcing. Two glaring errors were made: He ignored an entire half of nature's carbon cycle, where every year plants across the globe absorb CO2 from the atmosphere in order to grow, and he also made some ocean CO2 circulation calculations that would only hold true if the ocean was already saturated. (it's not)
Others engage in what I call "flak," throwing up accusations that point towards uncertainty but never actually addressing the impact of that uncertainty. Anthony Watts is a rather prominent skeptic. He ran a project where people went around photographing temperature stations in an attempt to prove that the stations are unreliable and therefore the temperature record is unreliable. It's true that there are quite a few stations out there that don't meet the established standards, as urban sprawl or new construction do change over time. What he didn't bother to tell you is that even if you use
only the stations that
his team labeled as "good" or "best," and re-run the temperature chart, you get an identical chart.
Then there's the cherry-pickers. If you've ever heard "global warming stopped in 1995," you're a victim of this. First, this is based on the Daily
FMail misrepresenting a quote made by a scientist, but it's also blatant cherry picking. Since 1995 was a particularly warm year, if you pick a time-span from 1995 to ~2005 (I forget exactly which year) you get "no statistically significant warming." This doesn't mean no warming, in fact in the very next sentence of the interview that Daily Mail "quoted," the scientist states that the warming was .12C per decade during that period. "Not statistically significant" means that you can't establish a warming trend at the 95% confidence level because it's a short timeframe and global average temperture is a "noisy" signal. (temperature varies from year to year, longer periods are needed to smooth these variations and establish an actual trend) Another great cherry-pick is saying that "1934 was the hottest year on record!" Well, yes, in the United States it was. The US compromises only 2% of the planet, though. Globally, the hottest years on record have all occurred in the last decade. 2010 looks to be breaking the record yet again.
To suggest that scientists are unreliable because they're paid to do science is ludicrous. If that's the logic you're going to use, you're going to have to be skeptical of literally everything any scientist has ever said. Also, don't watch television. Everyone you see on it is paid to say what they're saying.
You can't counter science with politics. Reality does not have a liberal bias.
I wrote a post on some of the basic science behind the theory, but nobody reads the environment forum so I'm going to blatantly plug my own writing here.
http://www.debatepolitics.com/envir...-some-basic-empirical-evidence-favor-agw.html