| Locknuts said: Appealing to an authority is fine. As long as that authority isn't a politician. They are authorities on their own agendas. Likewise, the media seem to sway quite strongly either one way or another, all the while looking for the most dramatic scenarios they can find to get viewership. They are certainly not authorities. I appeal to authority that shows data, like climate scientists and their actual peer reviewed work. The IPCC certainly have their faults, but there is truly a huge amount of data in their reports and they are improving with each one. So I don't have too much of a problem with the IPCC as an authority, but they are not nearly as alarmist as some would have me believe. For example they're natural disaster experts find no links between AGW and extreme weather events. As others have pointed out, the scientific consenus is almost fraudulent. It includes works by Richard Lindzen and I believe Roy Spencer, who are known sceptics. Regardless, a consensus is a very unscientific way of 'proving' something. It only takes 1 paper to prove 100 wrong. Speaking of which, I am yet to find anything definitive on this 'tipping point'. It seems like more of an hypothesis. One which seems very difficult to test. Do you have any papers on the tipping point that come up with anything substantial? I would actually be very interested to read it (I'm not being a smart arse, I really would like to read it to educate myself). |
I would never recommend taking anything a politician or a lay person said about anything unless their source was an expert.
While it's true that 1 paper can dismantle 100 others, no such papers have accomplished this feat on this topic so a consensus is important on the papers which do exist.
I've not encountered anything definitive on the tipping point scenario, and I do not expect to. It's unknown territory and that is exactly why there is so much anxiety about what could occur. It's a concern because we lack the knowledge to predict the outcome.
