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Posted By: Chuck Bower In Response To: Clarity please... (rummer1973)
Date: Thursday, 24 April 2008, at 9:31 p.m.
I answer as much as I can now. Then I'll need to dig a little deeper so it will take a while.
...What is your field of expertise?
Well, if you put it THAT way I'm not sure I have one. :) My undergraduate degree is BS with math major, physics minor, chemistry subminor. My MS is in (general) physics. My PhD is astrophysics, specifically cosmic ray physics (the old name, today called "particle astrophysics"). My research has been in both astrophysics (charged particle, X-ray, and recently some visible and infrared instrumentation) and neutrino physics (of naturally occurring sources and artificial sources = accelerator beams).
If not climate issues, then how involved are you with scientists that are involved in that field?
None. Atmospheric scientists come from meteorology/geology and from planetary science (a branch of astronomy which involves the study of the planets in our solar system). Also contributing study for evidence of GW are biologists.
The point is that none of us needs to be an expert in a field in order to understand it at a moderate level. That is the purpose of the 'popular' literature (such as the previously mentioned Scientific American magazine as well as many books written by researchers for public consumption). In general we can apply principles we've learned in other areas of study (even backgammon!) to weigh the evidence and arguments.
"And as far as humans contributing to it (in the past, present, and future) there is little doubt about that, either." - Chuck Bower
This statement seems to point the finger solely at humankind. Is this your intent? If so, do you actually believe that humans are solely responsible? 90% responsible? 50%?
I don't see how you've arrived at this conclusion ("solely mankind"). I said "contributing". In the previously mentioned Scientific American article there is a series of graphs which show the results of (turns out to be a unanimous concensus) of many models showing the temperature changes with and without the CO2 injected in the last ~150 years from human industrialization.
(BTW, if I'm going to go to the trouble of digging deeper to answer your questions, the least the rest of you can do is to actually read that article. I may have said the wrong month previously -- it is the August 2007 edition, starting on page 64: The physical science behind climate change by: Collins, William; Colman, Robert; Haywood, James; Manning, Martin R.; Mote, Philip.)
OK, now it's time for me to catch the bus. More later....
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