Quote Originally Posted by Witton Park View Post
HI Anthony,


On the 30 years issue, the IPCC was set up 35 years ago. At that time climate science was mostly physics led. Now physicists that raise concerns about the level of scaremongering are told to shut up, you aren't a specialist.... etc.
The climatologists seem to forget that much of what they do would be impossible but for physicists, on which most of their work is built.

You even qualify your "absolutely certain" comment.

There's nothing absolutely certain. We have IPCC opinions ranging from negligible anthropogenic warming around 1C or less to 8C or higher by the end of the century.
That doesn't mean there aren't learned and qualified folk lower down the spectrum, just that their opinions are deemed not worthy of consideration and it does have the effect of lifting the average consensus, if you remove the bottom 10% from calculation.
You make a rather strange implication that climate science is no longer led by physicists. Climatology is essentially a sub-discipline within physics; it's all based on physical principles like thermodynamics and hydrodynamics.

The uncertainty about the warming by the end of the century is mainly because of the uncertainty about what humans will do by the end of the century. What I was mainly thinking about in my earlier post was the warming that has already happened (a little over 1 degree C since 1850): the physicists have shown that this would be completely impossible without including the effects of human activities.