Seeing the environmental forest

This is a response to those who try to claim that global warming won't be so bad.  The gist of their argument is that since life thrived in the Mesozoic when CO 2 was ~2400 ppmv and temperatures 8ºC warmer, climate change today isn't anything to be worried about.  Unfortunately, this argument ignores some very basic facts about biology and physics.  Here is some of what they're ignoring. 1) First, thanks to those individuals for accidentally confirming the relationship between CO 2 and global temperature, as well as modern estimates of climate sensitivity.  At modern solar radiation levels and with climate sensitivity at 0.809 W/m 2 , the equilibrium climate model predicts that with CO 2 at 2400 ppmv, global temperatures would rise by 9.3ºC above pre-industrial temperatures.  Factor in a weaker sun back in the Mesozoic and you get the 8ºC rise experienced from 2400 ppmv CO 2 back then ( Royer 2006 ).  Got to love it when those who dismiss science scor...

Listening to the public discourse in the US, one cannot help but think that basic science education in this country has failed.  Oh, sure, we have good science teachers (and bad), and textbooks filled with knowledge, but as a nation we have utterly failed to grasp the most fundamental lessons of science.  And I think that reflects poorly on scientists and science educators (myself included). The first lesson we have failed to impart is that people must know scientific facts.  "Fact" in science means data as revealed through experiments and observations.  In essence, we have failed to teach the data.  It's much easier and faster to present the theories as in the textbook with a few supporting facts, especially given the limited time to cover any one topic in most general education science courses.  And for most topics (i.e. sliding filament theory of muscle contraction, optimal foraging theory, germ theory, general theory of relativity, etc), that is suffi...

One of the common misconceptions about science is the nature of scientific theories.  Much of the confusion stems from the word "theory" having two very different definitions.  Among non-scientists, a theory is a guess, possibly an educated guess based on some facts, but a guess nonetheless.  It's little more than an opinion and less than a known fact (itself is usually taken to mean the unchanging truth) on the hierarchy of truth.  Skeptics often dismiss climate change and evolution with statements like "Human-caused global warming is just a theory, not a fact" or "Evolution is just a theory."  Those statements reveal that the person stating or writing them are using the non-scientific definition. In science, "fact" and "theory" have very different meanings from their nonscientific definitions.  "Facts" are data, discovered and verified via repeated observations and experiments to the point where it's ridiculous t...