Except as a lawyer though isn't part of your job to form informed opinions on fields that you aren't expert on. Also as a lawyer when presenting a case and relying on expert testimony don't you have to give further weight to the consensus viewpoint? The principles behind global warming aren't that hard to understand and there is a plethora of information about it that has been posted even here on D & D.
no. not at all. i get paid to argue a side. i hire experts to provide expert testimony. the jury or the judge decides. the principles aren't that hard to understand? then why do such smart people come up with such different conclusions? we can't figure out what our climate is gonna give us tomorrow in a specific location. the smartest we have working in climatology and meterology told us last year we'd be bombarded with major hurricanes. the oil market went nuts off those reports. guess what happened. the idea that we can forecast out and say what's gonna happen with any certainty 100 years from now, is silly to me. now, i'm not saying we can't look at trends...and i'm not saying we can't attempt to guard against the worse...or that we shouldn't do that. in fact, i've said over and over again that i view cleaning up the environment as a bit of a spiritual issue to me. it's stewardship of creation, in my view. we should be cleaning up the environment for the sake of cleaning up the environment. as for consensus...i don't know. you say 90% of climatolgists would say we have man-made warming and that it's a really bad thing. i have no idea how to verify that.
I would point out that people can not say with any real accuracy whether it will rain next week or not, but they can say that on the average year we will have more rain more in the Amazon than the Sahara, or that El Nino will increase weather activity. Nobody makes precise predictions, but the greater patterns can be fairly well determined. If I said it will be warmer in Maine this summer than next winter, would that be a miracle of prognostication? I don't believe any credible scientist make predictions about an increase in hurricanes last summer as an effect of global warming. In fact, the year before (when there were more) all I heard was 'this can not be directly linked to global warming', at least from real scientists. The atmosphere is being altered by human emissions. If you alter the composition of the atmosphere so that it retains a greater percentage of the input radiation, the climate will be affected, mostly through greater temperatures. The effects of greater temperatures can possibly be expressed in many ways, but most all of them are detrimental to people. That is the crux of the argument of global warming. People are not making exact predictions, but examining possible ways that it can be expressed. Nobody has ever argued that they can predict that we will receive 8.7324 more hurricanes this year or anything like that. If this seems like a false distinction to you, the best way I saw it expressed, better that I am able to express was by reading Chaos. The book isn't about global warming, but about 1/3 to 1/2 of the book involves tracking the history of meteorology. It explains my point much better than I can without being a polemic one way or the other on the subject.
