I never said "we know everything at this point." I said that we had a workable scientific theory that hasn't had any credible new evidence against it produced in quite some time. I stand by that statement, and the article you pasted (
from the Washington Post) backs that statement up. There is a lot here, but let's break it down.
The article wrote:If the climate change activists were off by 1 billion tons of emissions just from coal use from one country and that’s data they used to contrive the models that “prove” the “settled science” of man-made global warming, what else are they wrong about?
It isn't logical at all that
underestimating the amount of emissions is somehow an argument
against climate change. If anything, it would mean that the current models were overly optimistic, because they didn't take those emissions into account. The
source article article even says as much: "The finding could complicate the already difficult efforts to limit global warming," but the quote-mined version leaves that out. Another thing mentioned by the source NYT article that is left out of your quoted version is that climate scientists get their estimates of the total amount of CO2 in the air from direct measurements, so models derived from those measurements are not affected by this revelation at all. So, while this may count as new evidence of something, it's pretty clear that it's new evidence that is either not that relevant to climate models or confirms the existing scientific consensus.
It's also important to note that 'They were wrong about this one thing, so what else are they wrong about? Probably everything!' isn't an actual scientific argument at all because it doesn't provide any of its own evidence. It
is, however, the kind of thing you hear a lot of from creationists and other disreputable pseudoscience types.
The article wrote: By the count of researcher Marcia Wyatt in a widely circulated presentation, the U.S. government’s published temperature data for the years 1880-2010 has been tinkered with sixteen times in the past three years.
Again, this is quote-mined. As
the source noted, "Presumably the hunt will now be on among House Republicans for evidence that NOAA scientists selected only those rejiggerings that would make the pause disappear. Good luck with that. Not only are the adjustments, corrections and interpolations eye-glazing—ground temperatures must be tweaked to offset growing urbanization, polar temperatures for the fact that we don’t have measurement data for long periods of history, etc." The US government's published temperature data is far from the only set of data out there, too, so it's myopic to focus too closely on it. However, it
is important, and it's probably fair to say the current science has got it wrong about some details, and it's also probably fair to say a certain amount of political motivation seeps in there, as the article also notes. Still, as before, none of this invalidates the entire theory-- and the article acknowledges that, too. Climate models are complicated and built on a lot of sources, so to act like this is some sort of a smoking gun and the entire scientific consensus is now shot to pieces is as alarmist (if not quite a bit more alarmist) as anything AGW proponents are accused of doing.
The article wrote:According to NOAA data, the amount of total CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere is approximately three one-hundredths of 1 percent, or .0003 percent of the total atmosphere. And the man-made contribution to that total amount of CO2 is only .0004 of that number — bear with me; yes, they will be talking about only four one-hundredths of that three one-hundredths of a percent in Paris.
This one is worse than the previous two because quoting tiny numbers out of context and saying they don't matter just because they seem tiny is too nonsensical to even rise to being called bad science. I mean, first of all, they meant to say 0.03% and not 0.0003%, but what's two orders of magnitude when the number still looks
so tiny, right? I guess an atmospheric concentration of cyanide of 0.01% would be nothing to worry about because it's such a tiny number, too, right? No, actually, it'd probably kill you pretty quickly.
So, there you have it: a lot of media hype, but very little actual science, and none of it any new evidence. However, to go through it all did take me a decent amount of time. I feel it was important to do so in order to back up my assertion, but I'd ask you not waste your time formulating an elaborate counter-argument or digging up any further articles if you're expecting much of a response because I won't be doing that again, at least not for a long time. You can take this as me retreating back into the realm of dogma and closed-mindedness, but, I assure you, that's not the case. Rather, I am resting my case because it has been made; I put forth the assertion that there was no new evidence of value and you countered with your supposed evidence-- and it all crumbled. It was all rather easily refuted, often by quotes from the very same article that were ignored, a little digging around Wikipedia, or, in the most laughable case, with sixth grade mathematics. And that's just me, with no scientific training in climatology at all. Imagine how credible climate scientists must feel when seeing these old canards.
I will leave you with
this list of many other popular arguments that have been thoroughly debunked but nonetheless keep appearing in the media, in hopes it may be useful.