Humans generally think and react based on the more primitive but dominant emotional sectors of the brain. An example is how fear and greed drive stock trading.
When applied to CO2-based global warming, many people emotionally want CO2 to be the cause of global warming because this conforms with their belief that the human species should conserve resources, stop the spread of urban sprawl, discourage private autos and encourage public transit.
Thus, it is quite possible that climate science has been “directed” towards CO2 as the main cause because of the strong, emotive desire for it to be so by those who awarded grants and performed peer reviews.
Some of the “pre-frontal cortex” facts are:
1) CO2 is a rather minor, rare component of the atmosphere comprising only 3.8 out of every 10,000 molecules.
2) The “greenhouse gas” physical properties of CO2 by themselves cannot cause runaway, devastating global warming. Rather the climate models must incorporate “positive feedbacks”. They model that the increase in CO2 drives increased humidity and cloud cover which ultimately drives the runaway AGW. These positive feedbacks are controversial in the scientific community, are not fully understood and may be offset by negative feedbacks that also are not well understood.
Other variables might play a greater role in climate change than peer reviewed and accepted studies to date have allowed to be determined.
An example is Urban Heat Island effects – Dense urban areas are much hotter than rural areas. This can have two effects on climate science. First, increased global urbanization will play a direct role in global warming from heat radiated off of buildings, asphalt, lack of vegetation, etc. Secondly, many of the land based temperature gages that originally were in rural locations just outside of the urban areas now are located within them due to expanding urbanization over the years. Thus they give false readings of increased temperatures unless they are adjusted and the adjustments are subject to scientific judgment and manipulation.
It is a basic desire of most environmentalists and urban planners to promote dense urban development. Thus there would be cognitive dissonance if a scientific studies were to conclude that urban areas are a significant contributor to global warming. Thus scientists whose work reached this conclusion would most likely never see a second round of grant funding.
Other variables that may have been under-researched/emphasized include solar radiation cycles, solar wind, global land use patterns e.g. forests converted to agriculture, ocean cycles, etc.
Also, many skeptics believe that the consequences of global warming have been portrayed only in the negative. What is not revealed they feel are the increases in food production, the health benefits to the elderly and infirmed from less cold climate and the ability for man and animals to adapt and migrate as temperatures slowly change.
So, all we ask is that you look at climate change with an objective eye and reach your own conclusions after reviewing both sides of the issue rather than accepting the conventional wisdom of a science that potentially has been corrupted by well meaning but nevertheless scientifically dishonest individuals.
I would encourage you to at least read the article by Professor Lindzen from MIT. He is a distinguished professor whose comments you will be more likely to accept than those of bloggers.
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