Obama Bankrupting Coal Industry and more...Follow

You do realize that the bonobos have gay monkey sex all the time and humans are not unique in bisexual fornication? Dolphins too. Mother nature can't be wrong!

What scientific approach did you take that led you to that belief?

Either you accept science that humans are animals, or you reject science and say we're better than animals.

Science says we're animals that just happen to reason. We're the naked apes. We share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees.

Because we can reason, we are also no longer beholden to our baser animal instincts and can free ourselves from biological urges. Like the urge to reproduce. I don't have it. I'm terrified of children. I'd like to be sterilized but my insurance says I have to wait until I'm 30, so I'm waiting. Does this mean I don't like sex? No, it just means I can mentally separate sex and reproduction, because I'm a reasoning human animal.

Without taking his side on the whole issue, he's correct that he didn't mention religion. Cat assumed that his argument can't be true because by being a conservative he must be a fundamentalist Christian who believes that the Earth is only 4k years old or something. Um...


But if you want science, how about the science that measures temperature and CO2 levels over the last 2/3rds of a million years, showing that while they are correlated, temperature vector changes occur *before* corresponding CO2 changes, not after. Meaning that there's nothing in the historical record from ice core samples to suggest that increasing CO2 will raise the temperature in the atmosphere. It's backwards. It's exactly like me arguing that since the ground gets wet when it rains that I can make it rain by soaking the ground with water.

Furthermore, the greenhouse gas model involves a set of things happening in a set order. First, the gasses gather in the atmosphere. Then those gases trap escaping heat at that level of the atmosphere. As time goes buy this buildup of relative heat travels downward gradually heating the entire surface by heating the air first. It's similar to the difference between a convection air oven versus a radiated heat oven. In the former, we expect the air to heat first and then the surfaces. In the later, the surfaces heat up first and then the air, right? But the temperature change over the period we've been measuring air temps show a larger relative delta at the surface and *not* in the air. Meaning that it's the surface of the earth that's warming and that's causing the air to heat up, not the other way around. This is not consistent with a greenhouse gas model.


It is, however, very consistent with an "increased sunspot" model, or with a number of ground effect models (more cement and asphalt covering the ground and less vegetation today than a century ago for example).


There are so many holes in the global warming model that it's really pretty laughable. It's only taken seriously because there is so much political value to be had by pushing it. Take the politics away and no one would pay much attention to it.


But hey! It's a lot easier to just assume we're all religious nuts than actually address the issue at hand, isn't it!

Edited, Nov 3rd 2008 8:29pm by gbaji

oops dubble

Edited, Nov 4th 2008 4:37am by paulsol

While I'm sure that sounded clever in your own head, it clearly misses the whole issue.

Just because people make choices you don't agree with doesn't mean that they aren't using reason to arrive there. One can actually make a strong argument that the sort of abstract thought process required to have "faith" in a religious context can only occur in a higher species like Man. The very fact that there's no direct correlation between religious actions and real world results kinda goes the other direction from what you were arguing.

If we all operate only based on what benefits us directly the most, then we're being the most like animals. It's only when we do things that aren't clearly connected that we prove we are more. Can an animal have faith? Interesting question isn't it?


But that's enough bad philosophy for one day... ;)

Great. Now explain why that matters without a starting assumption that high CO2 levels cause high temperatures. Remember. That same 650k year core sample data shows that CO2 vector changes occurred *after* temperature vector changes pretty consistently across the entire time span, meaning that while temperature change may cause CO2 change, there's no evidence to say that the opposite occurs.


So what does it mean? Plants will grow better?

You know, I always thought that conjecture was the first step in the scientific method, not the basis for conclusions.

Oh noez, new coal plants that are destroying the environment will be taxed to hell.

Let me cry for them.

Maybe if we put all this pressure on fossil fuel companies, we'll actually be independent of oil and coal someday.

But yea, who wants that.