yossarian wrote:
xtremereign wrote:
Five pages and you still haven't sorted this out! For shame!
I looked into this about a year ago for a discussion on this message board. I reviewed every single climate change paper in Science, Nature and Scientific American for one year prior. Not a single paper claimed humans were not warming the climate. It is only a question of degree.
Um. That's what I've been saying for 5 pages as well. Just wanted to point that out. My whole point has not been that "global warming" does not exist, but that what we have not done is determined the actual degree to which human factors are causing it, or whether it's actually harmful in the long run at all.
Joph makes a big deal of finding individual inconsistencies on one side of the issue and extrapolating them into huge fallacies, but none of that counters this main point. And it's somewhat important, since "his side" is the one trying to force legistlative changes to "fight global warming". If we can't actually measure the effect that human activity is having on the earth as a whole, how on earth can we decide what levels of activity are "ok"?
The answer is that we can't. My issue (and I'd wager most of the global warming critics) is not about debunking "global warming" as a whole, but questioning the validity of insisting on taking specific actions as a response to it. It's not the science we have a problem with (although there are faults on both sides in this issue), it's with the politics. That's where you have government bodies setting policies and restrictions based on the science, and where those policies often bear little or no relevance to the actual science itself.
That's the disconnect I've been trying to get people to see for 5 pages now. The problem is when policies are enacted in reponse to the science. As I've stated over and over. We can measure the CO2 contribution of human activities. We can show that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We can even derive models that proove that greenhouse gasses like CO2 contribute to warming temperatures. And we can measure that temperatures have gone up in the last century. What we absolutely cannot show is to what degree the CO2 emissions (and other effects as well) have actually *caused* that warming trend. We can't show that this warming trend is not natural all by itself. Our understanding of the entire climatological picuture is so limited that proposing specific political action on the basis of what we know is akin to a doctor ordering an expensive surgical proceedure on a patient when all he knows is that the patient might be sick.
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There is no scientific debate.
Well. There's *some* scientific debate. But it's typically over some relatively minute points of contention that I'd wager none of us are qualified to really debate anyway. The big debate is political. The problem most people seem to have on this issue is that they assume that the science proscribes a course of action in this case. It absolutely does not. It only lays out the things that are occuring. Once you go from measuring things to suggesting a course of action, you're doing something beyond just the science.
We have no science that tells us that if we reduced CO2 emissions by 30% globally that this would have *any* change in global temperatures over the next century. None. Zip. Zero. Nada. And that's the problem here. We can guess that it might. But it might not. The world goes through warm and cold cycles. It does this without any influence from us humans. We simply do not have the data to know how much impact our actions are having in the larger sense of longer term climate change.
So while we don't know what climate effect that change would have, we *do* know what sort economic effect it will have. And we know it'll be negative. Heavily negative in this case. As I've stated over and over. The question we should be answering isn't "does global warming exist", but "will taking action X be worth the cost"? Remember, we're not actually concerned we'll "break" the planet. It can recover from environmental extremes far wider then we could survive as a species. We're really looking at the impact on the human species. Are we hurt more in the long run by implementing changes, or by not implementing changes? And that's a question that the science does not give us an answer to.
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Right wing nut jobs have had great success denying reality: being gay is a choice, evolution doesn't occur, the Earth is 10,000 years old, tax cuts don't cause deficits, there was a connection between Sadam and bin Laden, etc.
I'll repeat an argument I've made over and over on this forum. The fact that you can find some people who have poor reasons for doing something does not invalidate the thing they are saying.
The fact that some people think global warming is a crock because the bible tells them so, does not mean that global warming is *not* a crock. It just means that their reason is flawed. You have to debate the *best* counterargument, not the weakest. Same issue to some degree with Joph's tirade. He does a great job finding individual things that don't add up, but ignore all the stuff that isn't refutable. Don't get me wrong. I completely agree that there's just as much of this on "my side" of this debate. But it bothers me to no end when folks will continually do nothing but point out the single inconsistencies on the other side, while refusing to acknowledge that there are just as many inconsistencies on theirs. Joph jumped from source to source listing off single fallacies, but didn't take the bigger picture into account.
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The American population is very willing to listen to what they want to hear. And they really don't want to hear that driving their 12 mile/gallon SUV is actually harming anyone.
Ergo, there is a political discussion.
Yup. Which is what I've been saying from day one. The problem is that some people seem to want to place greater weight in it being a "scientific issue", and that the politics does not matter. Note that to Smash and Joph and others, the fact that oil companies support members of congress critical of Global Warming, this automatically invalidates their views in their minds. But that argument starts with the assumption that the oil companies are "evil" and anything they say and do is wrong.
We see this sort of biased "logic" all the time. If an idea is endorsed by a pro-gay group, it's ok, but the opposing political agenda supported by a religious group is automaticall "wrong". Hmmmm... Methinks that both groups have an equal right to representation. At least that's my understanding of how our political process works. To automatically condemn something because the people you disagree with support it is a somewhat irrelevant argument. It's equivalent to saying "They're wrong because I don't agree with them!".
And that's pretty **** poor logic. And in this case, silly logic as well. The same people who would love to saddle the oil and industrial companies with greater and greater restrictions will likely be the first to complain when it costs 5 bucks a gallon to put gas in their cars, and their power bill doubles, and all their consumer goods get more expensive. But that's the "politics" of this. You're making a choice to demand change that may or may not help the environment, but *will* hurt the economy. I don't think it's wrong for those in the affected businesses to have a say in this. Because you know that they'll be the ones blamed by the consumers down the line.
Edited, Dec 8th 2006 6:58pm by gbaji