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Quora Post  by Skip Morrow, Republican, June 5 2018 [LINK] 

1. How do you convince someone that climate change is happening? I can tell you how I was convinced. I used to be a denier. I thought “the climate’s changed before. It’ll change again. This is probably just another cycle.” Yeah, the republican party line. But part of me had my doubts. One day I decided to do a little research. I started thinking, “you know, I have my theory (mentioned above). It’s a pretty popular theory as there are a lot of other people that were saying the same thing. By now, there must be a rebuttal to that theory, and I’d like to see it.”
2. I didn’t have to search far. Of course climate scientists are aware of the fact that the climate has changed before. I mean, seriously?? Sure enough, there’s a very good explanation. Yes, the climate has changed before. But the problem with this time is that the RATE AT WHICH THE TEMPERATURE IS INCREASING. The temperature is increasing much, much faster than scientists have ever seen before.
3. Which brought me to my second concern. How could scientists be so sure about the temperatures hundreds and thousands of years ago? Do we really trust Ezekiel the farmer/scientist and his temperature recordings?
4. Again, this is easily researched. One of the main ways we have been able to determine the temperatures of past years is from ice cores in the arctic. They also can look at different sediment layers in the geology and indirectly assess the temperatures. OK, but how can they be sure? Just like, how can we be sure about the composition of a star millions of light years away? I mean, how can I trust one scientist here, but not the other. It turns out the climate scientists are using the same scientific methods that have cured polio, figured out lead was poisonous, and figured out the composition of far away stars.
5. So then I started reading more and more. I read a lot of the IPCC reports. And then a friend of mine said “you know that there are authors of the report that now deny climate change” and would send me links to some crazy blog with some so-called expert making some analysis using papers published by the same authors that seem to suggest climate change isn’t real (I don’t remember the specifics, sorry!). Anyway, I emailed the paper authors and asked them if the claims in the blog were true. Yeah, I emailed the actual scientists. And they replied. I couldn’t believe it either. And of course the blogs were twisting the facts and completely misleading. Since then I have emailed several authors when I didn’t understand something and they almost always respond.
6. I have now come to the realization that yeah, there is such overwhelming evidence that climate change is real, that to deny it today is tantamount to saying vaccinations don’t work and the moon landings didn’t happen. You have to bury your head really, really deep in the sand to say it isn’t happening. The very idea that the climate ISN’T warming, is way, way out there. And yes, humans are responsible for this. We are causing it. And we can fix it.
7. Finally, the last concern I had was that this seemed to be a political issue. It seemed that all of the republicans thought it was a hoax (not true literally, but that’s how it seemed). And all democrats thought it was a big problem. So what about all of the scientists? Were they all democrats? But then I started realizing, these scientists? They were from all over the world. How could all scientists from all over the world give a damn about American politics? The suggestion that the scientists were motivated by politics just didn’t make sense.
8. Since then I have taken a liking to reading published scientific papers on climate change. We often say that 97 percent of scientists agree on climate change. I think it’s even higher. I haven’t seen one paper in google scholar that suggests the world is cooling.
9. So, here’s a tl;dr summary: If a blog post suggests climate change isn’t real, and doesn’t at least post links to the scientific papers that back up the claim, then the blog post is worthless. The same scientific method that we trust every year to vaccinate our bodies against the flu, is being used to study the climate. Either you trust it or you don’t. I do.
10. Climate change is not political. The science doesn’t care what party you align with. Facts are facts. Finally, any so-called evidence or counterpoint suggesting that climate change isn’t real has already been addressed. Look it up. Don’t just repeat what you heard.

RESPONSE TO {Quora Post  of Skip Morrow, Republican}

1. The issue is not whether “climate change is happening“. The issue is whether the climate change that we know is happening is human caused in the way described by climate scientists and whether it can be moderated with climate action in the way that climate scientists have proposed.
2. Climate science holds that changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration since pre-industrial times are due to fossil fuel emissions of the industrial economy. This attribution is supported by a strong correlation between emissions and atmospheric CO2 concentration in the time series of the source data and it serves as its first critical step in the proposed anthropogenic global warming (AGW) causation process. As such, it sits at the very foundation of AGW theory because AGW is not possible without this relationship. The correlation between emissions and atmospheric composition serves as the evidence in climate science that atmospheric CO2 concentration is responsive to fossil fuel emissions at an annual time scale.
3. However, correlation between  x and y in time series data derives not only from responsiveness of y to x at the time scale of interest but also from shared long term trends. These two very different effects must be separated by detrending both time series because shared trends tell us nothing about responsiveness. When the trend effect is removed only the responsiveness of y to x remains. However, when the emissions and atmospheric composition time series are detrended, the correlation is not found in the detrended series. This result of detrended correlation analysis implies that the correlation seen in the source data derives from shared trends and not from responsiveness at an annual time scale. Details of this test are presented in a related post  [LINK] . The result of detrended correlation analysis implies that we do not have evidence that fossil fuel emissions cause changes in atmospheric composition in a measurable way; and without that relationship there can be no Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) because of the absence of evidence of human cause.
4. Atmospheric Scientist Murry Salby had claimed in public presentations that the uncertainty in the carbon cycle of much larger flows of CO2 is such that the much smaller flows from fossil fuel emissions can’t be detected. He was criticized for not providing statistical evidence of the claimed irrelevance of fossil fuel emissions. That evidence is now available online at this link [LINK] .
5. Skip Morrow, however, proposes an alternative proof of human cause that would put the “A” back into “AGW”. He writes that “the climate has changed before but never before at the RATE AT WHICH THE TEMPERATURE IS INCREASING this time around. He writes that “the temperature is increasing much, much faster than scientists have ever seen before” and proposes that the proof of human cause is that the rate of change seen in the current warming event is unprecedented and therefore it can’t be natural. This argument is also used by climate scientists although not quite as explicitly as Skip Morrow has done. However, the argument contains a logical flaw because it is based on the illogical assumption that otherwise natural events with unprecedented intensity can’t be natural. For example, the Valdivia earthquake of 1960 and the Mount Tambora volcanic eruption of 1815 were the most powerful on record. Does that mean they were therefore not natural? Also, if the current warming is the most intense on record, the second most intense warming must have occurred at some time in the past before the current warming and at that time it must have generated a rate of warming that was unprecedented. Therefore, should that also be described as unnatural and in need of a human cause explanation? It should also be considered that when climate scientists say that the current warming is “unprecedented”, the past to which it is being compared is constrained to two thousand years or less. This is because there are plenty of more extreme climate events recorded by paleo climatology in the distant past as for example in the Eemian interglacial [LINK] .
6. Mr Morrow also presents an argument based on the appeal to authority fallacy which states that since scientists can measure the composition of a star millions of light years away “by using the scientific method” and since scientists can cure polio by using the scientific method, then therefore, the assessments of the causes and effects of AGW by climate scientists must be correct because they are also scientists using the scientific method. The big flaw in this logical fallacy is that scientists also make mistakes. For example, scientists using the scientific method had “found” the substance called ether that was invisible and otherwise undetectable except for the fact that it filled the universe and transmitted electromagnetic waves and gravitational waves. It was also scientists using the scientific method that discovered that the earth was expanding because that explained the movement of continents. Finally, the argument that since scientist in cosmology and medicine were right about certain things, it must be true that climate scientists are also right about human caused global warming, is a logical fallacy. For example, scientists studying Eugenics using the scientific method, turned out to be wrong.
7. Also, as described above, the failure of climate scientists to check the responsiveness of one time series to changes in another time series with detrended correlation analysis shows that climate scientists are not infallible and that they can make mistakes. Consider also the use of the correlation between the cumulative values of time series data by climate scientists. The so called “Transient Climate Response to Cumulative Emissions” or TCRE plays a key role in climate science and it serves as the foundational mechanism used to construct and track the critical climate action procedure of “carbon budgets”. Yet, this whole line of research in climate science is flawed because the correlations between cumulative values that are used to construct the details of AGW theory and climate action methods are spurious. The implication is that the TCRE, an important climate science parameter, is an illusory statistic [LINK] . The idea that scientists are always right because they are scientists is wrong.

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