Ok stop disputing (man's effect on) climate change

Smellyman2

know1 wrote:

Good question. I'm not sure I understand enough of it to offer an opinion.

Crikey! Yet you dismiss it?

sourdough

know1 wrote:

Good question. I'm not sure I understand enough of it to offer an opinion.

Thanks for being honest . Don't you think that this is fundamental to even understanding the mechanism behind climate change? Sorta like disagreeing with evolution without understanding natural selection.

I have yet to find a scientist (climate change skeptics included) who have disputed that the greenhouse effect does exists. What I don't understand is how you can accept the greenhouse effect AND the fact that the carbon composition of teh atmosphere has increased greatly since industrialization (records of atmospheric carbon records have been traced as far back as 650000 years ago through ice core samples) and still not make the obvious connection that there is a positive correlation. Compounding the effect is that much of the tropical rainforests have been deforested which keep carbon levels in balance.

monkey spanker

scientists can't even predict if we're going to have a dry winter, or a snowy one. but we are supposed to put our economy on hold because they think in 90 years the ocean may be 7 inches deeper? the bigger question is, what will the alarmists hang onto next? the population explosion didn't wipe us out. the ice age didn't get us. the hole in the ozone layer caused by hair spray didn't kill us off. AIDS didn't wipe out large portions of our country like they told us. acid rain didn't get us...........

the same people that tell us not to worry about islamic terrorism, tell us to worry about everything else. its almost enough to make you think they may have an agenda.

sourdough

monkey spanker wrote:

scientists can't even predict if we're going to have a dry winter, or a snowy one. but we are supposed to put our economy on hold because they think in 90 years the ocean may be 7 inches deeper? the bigger question is, what will the alarmists hang onto next? the population explosion didn't wipe us out. the ice age didn't get us. the hole in the ozone layer caused by hair spray didn't kill us off. AIDS didn't wipe out large portions of our country like they told us. acid rain didn't get us...........

the same people that tell us not to worry about islamic terrorism, tell us to worry about everything else. its almost enough to make you think they may have an agenda.

There is a very big difference between "climate" and "weather". Predicting a trend vs a specific event or season is very different. I don't think the concensus in the scientific community has been so high nor has there been as much public scrutiny than any of the examples you mentioned.

As for the ozone layer, it is a perfect example of how humans have demonstrated their ability to cause massive destruction in the composition of the atmosphere and also a great example of how humans have come to create solution which has been successful.

fanch75

sourdough wrote:

No one here disputes that there has been climatic changes in the past w/o the help of humans, but never has it been this abrupt of a shift. Also, unlike in previous instances there has not been such a dramatic change in atmospheric composition due to a pollutant. (Yes, I know CO2 is natural, but it can be classified as a pollutant if there is an overabundance of it where it becomes damaging).

Do you accept the science behind the greehouse effect?

What does "there has never been this abrupt of a shift." How much of today's greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is caused by CO2 (and of that, how much of that CO2 was caused by man?)?

Of course I do accept the science behind the greenhouse effect. Without it, there'd be no living inhabitants on the earth b/c it'd be too cold. Venus is one example of way too much greenhouse effect, our moon is an example of no greenhouse effect.

Do you accept that ice ages, periods of heating & cooling, droughts & floods, all occured in the past (and therefore before mankind's industrial endeavors)?

acoustic guy

Too me it makes sense to say that we are to blame for the melting but my father in law who is a really intellingent guy makes some good points about how people forget that the last Ice Age ended about ten thousand years ago which is not that long ago when you are talking about the earths life span.
The earth goes thru changes, some more drastic then others.
With that said i do believe we need to start to really make some serious changes in how we live our life.

fanch75

There was a mini ice-age in the 1300's, I believe. The ice melted then too, in a relative short-time compared to the lifetime of the earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

searchlightsoul

The whole nature of science is to continually question and test theories. It's quality control. The UN report stated that it was 'very likely' that humans are responsible for much of global climate change but even then it remains a correlation and open to criticism because there are many other variables which affect climate. Simply because most scientist in a field support it does not change its ability to be falsified or altered.

sourdough

The "mini-iceage" wasn't really an ice age. There was no large scale glaciation and the global temperature was not dramatically colder. Funny it ended in 1850 about 100 years after some sort of revolution happened... Some sorta industrial revolution.... This was preceeded by a very good couple of years which were very warm in Northern Europe. Right around the time of the Crusades, grapes were grown in England, however despite regional or local temperatures being warmer and cooler during these periods, the global temperature has not deviated nearly as much the amount of warming that we have seen over the last decade or two.

Even the little ice age was a small blip on the map compared to what we are experiencing now. Scientists concur that the increase in temperature is too high and too rapid to be explained by natural factors alone.

Jeanwah

monkey spanker wrote:

scientists can't even predict if we're going to have a dry winter, or a snowy one. but we are supposed to put our economy on hold because they think in 90 years the ocean may be 7 inches deeper? the bigger question is, what will the alarmists hang onto next? the population explosion didn't wipe us out. the ice age didn't get us. the hole in the ozone layer caused by hair spray didn't kill us off. AIDS didn't wipe out large portions of our country like they told us. acid rain didn't get us...........

the same people that tell us not to worry about islamic terrorism, tell us to worry about everything else. its almost enough to make you think they may have an agenda.

Meteorologists can, and do predict seasonal weather conditions. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong. Only Mother Nature and atmospheric conditions really determine outcomes and tends to be unpredictable. Like Sourdough said, climate and weather are two different things. Because it's unpredictable, there are going to be two opposing sides to the issue, but to just completely denounce the idea of taking care of our planet and trying to make living conditions better, for the sake of our children, is unexcusable.

Population explosion...we are going to knock out our natural resources one day. Aerosol cans from hair spray were banned, what-, 15-20 years ago. An example of us taking responsibility of our ozone. AIDS still is prevelant, and a problem, especially in poor countries in Africa. With awareness, people have become more responsible for their actions and needle use. Acid rain has killed almost half of the many mountain lakes in the Adirondack Mtns. in NY State. There are no fish in these lakes. It has been proved that this has been caused by industry in the Ohio Valley with the jet stream carrying the pollutants over to the East. Bush was aware of this but did not enforce a guideline for corporations' CO2 output. This is a direct result of not being responsible for our emissions.

And the whole Ice Age thing...it was 18,000 years ago, there were no indusrialization, let alone humans back then. So, cyclically speaking, sure we can have another Ice Age...but we sure won't survive one!

searchlightsoul

sourdough wrote:

Thanks for being honest . Don't you think that this is fundamental to even understanding the mechanism behind climate change? Sorta like disagreeing with evolution without understanding natural selection.

I have yet to find a scientist (climate change skeptics included) who have disputed that the greenhouse effect does exists. What I don't understand is how you can accept the greenhouse effect AND the fact that the carbon composition of teh atmosphere has increased greatly since industrialization (records of atmospheric carbon records have been traced as far back as 650000 years ago through ice core samples) and still not make the obvious connection that there is a positive correlation. Compounding the effect is that much of the tropical rainforests have been deforested which keep carbon levels in balance.

You have no way of knowing whether other factors have a more significant influence than CO2. In the past when the greenhouse effect has been in full force like during the age of the dinosaurs the climate was much more uniform and less variable than today. Based on historical evidence warming the atmosphere will not produce the super storms all the media loves to flog.

JamMastaE

first of all,anyone who knows anything about the U.N. knows they are not to be trusted.if you have this image of a peace keeping,pro human rights organization you are dead wrong.this global warming scam is about $.they want a global tax and thats how they are going to dupe you into it.also strict environmental laws will be established merely as a land grabbing tool,not to "save the planet".and just as many if not more world scientists oppose the global warming theory.

also...


Eight Reasons to End the Scam

Concern over “global warming” is overblown and misdirected. What follows are eight reasons why we should pull the plug on this scam before it destroys billions of dollars of wealth and millions of jobs.

1. Most scientists do not believe human activities threaten to disrupt the Earth’s climate. More than 17,000 scientists have signed a petition circulated by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine saying, in part, “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” (Go to http://www.oism.org for the complete petition and names of signers.) Surveys of climatologists show similar skepticism.

2. Our most reliable sources of temperature data show no global warming trend. Satellite readings of temperatures in the lower troposphere (an area scientists predict would immediately reflect any global warming) show no warming since readings began 23 years ago. These readings are accurate to within 0.01ºC, and are consistent with data from weather balloons. Only land-based temperature stations show a warming trend, and these stations do not cover the entire globe, are often contaminated by heat generated by nearby urban development, and are subject to human error.

3. Global climate computer models are too crude to predict future climate changes. All predictions of global warming are based on computer models, not historical data. In order to get their models to produce predictions that are close to their designers’ expectations, modelers resort to “flux adjustments” that can be 25 times larger than the effect of doubling carbon dioxide concentrations, the supposed trigger for global warming. Richard A. Kerr, a writer for Science, says “climate modelers have been ‘cheating’ for so long it’s almost become respectable.”

4. The IPCC did not prove that human activities are causing global warming. Alarmists frequently quote the executive summaries of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations organization, to support their predictions. But here is what the IPCC’s latest report, Climate Change 2001, actually says about predicting the future climate: “The Earth’s atmosphere-ocean dynamics is chaotic: its evolution is sensitive to small perturbations in initial conditions. This sensitivity limits our ability to predict the detailed evolution of weather; inevitable errors and uncertainties in the starting conditions of a weather forecast amplify through the forecast. As well as uncertainty in initial conditions, such predictions are also degraded by errors and uncertainties in our ability to represent accurately the significant climate processes.”

5. A modest amount of global warming, should it occur, would be beneficial to the natural world and to human civilization. Temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period (roughly 800 to 1200 AD), which allowed the Vikings to settle presently inhospitable Greenland, were higher than even the worst-case scenario reported by the IPCC. The period from about 5000-3000 BC, known as the “climatic optimum,” was even warmer and marked “a time when mankind began to build its first civilizations,” observe James Plummer and Frances B. Smith in a study for Consumer Alert. “There is good reason to believe that a warmer climate would have a similar effect on the health and welfare of our own far more advanced and adaptable civilization today.”

6. Efforts to quickly reduce human greenhouse gas emissions would be costly and would not stop Earth’s climate from changing. Reducing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to 7 percent below 1990’s levels by the year 2012--the target set by the Kyoto Protocol--would require higher energy taxes and regulations causing the nation to lose 2.4 million jobs and $300 billion in annual economic output. Average household income nationwide would fall by $2,700, and state tax revenues would decline by $93.1 billion due to less taxable earned income and sales, and lower property values. Full implementation of the Kyoto Protocol by all participating nations would reduce global temperature in the year 2100 by a mere 0.14 degrees Celsius.

7. Efforts by state governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are even more expensive and threaten to bust state budgets. After raising their spending with reckless abandon during the 1990s, states now face a cumulative projected deficit of more than $90 billion. Incredibly, most states nevertheless persist in backing unnecessary and expensive greenhouse gas reduction programs. New Jersey, for example, collects $358 million a year in utility taxes to fund greenhouse gas reduction programs. Such programs will have no impact on global greenhouse gas emissions. All they do is destroy jobs and waste money.

8. The best strategy to pursue is “no regrets.” The alternative to demands for immediate action to “stop global warming” is not to do nothing. The best strategy is to invest in atmospheric research now and in reducing emissions sometime in the future if the science becomes more compelling. In the meantime, investments should be made to reduce emissions only when such investments make economic sense in their own right.

This strategy is called “no regrets,” and it is roughly what the Bush administration has been doing. The U.S. spends more on global warming research each year than the entire rest of the world combined, and American businesses are leading the way in demonstrating new technologies for reducing and sequestering greenhouse gas emissions.


Time for Common Sense

The global warming scare has enabled environmental advocacy groups to raise billions of dollars in contributions and government grants. It has given politicians (from Al Gore down) opportunities to pose as prophets of doom and slayers of evil corporations. And it has given bureaucrats at all levels of government, from the United Nations to city councils, powers that threaten our jobs and individual liberty.

It is time for common sense to return to the debate over protecting the environment. An excellent first step would be to end the “global warming” scam.

Jeanwah

JamMastaE wrote:

first of all,anyone who knows anything about the U.N. knows they are not to be trusted.if you have this image of a peace keeping,pro human rights organization you are dead wrong.this global warming scam is about $.they want a global tax and thats how they are going to dupe you into it.also strict environmental laws will be established merely as a land grabbing tool,not to "save the planet".and just as many if not more world scientists oppose the global warming theory.

also...


Eight Reasons to End the Scam

And what biased website did you get this from?

Boy, just as we're making way to non-politicize the issue comes another political angle from right field. What I find so funny about your 8 Reasons, is the part the American gov't spends so much money on it. Bush is absolutely not in favor of any global warming studies, let alone, ANYthing to do with the environment. There's no issue to this...if you care about our children's world, you'll take care of it.

JamMastaE

Jeanwah wrote:

And what biased website did you get this from?

Boy, just as we're making way to non-politicize the issue comes another political angle from right field. What I find so funny about your 8 Reasons, is the part the American gov't spends so much money on it. Bush is absolutely not in favor of any global warming studies, let alone, ANYthing to do with the environment. There's no issue to this...if you care about our children's world, you'll take care of it.

it's funny how the uninformed love being stuck in a political para dime.when will you learn this shit is like wrestling! fake opposition but sharing the same intentions! and you stuck in the middle completely controlled.

sourdough

JamMastaE wrote:

1. Most scientists do not believe human activities threaten to disrupt the Earth’s climate. More than 17,000 scientists have signed a petition circulated by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine saying, in part, “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” (Go to http://www.oism.org for the complete petition and names of signers.) Surveys of climatologists show similar skepticism.

Can you find a single peer reviewed paper from a credible scientific journal that discredits climate change? Where are all these skeptics and their proof? I have only seen people post websites and new/media articles, but there is an absense of authentic and legitimate scientific literature which denies its existance and relationship with human activity. Find me a peer reviewed article or one in a scientific journal and this would have credibility

JamMastaE wrote:

2. Our most reliable sources of temperature data show no global warming trend. Satellite readings of temperatures in the lower troposphere (an area scientists predict would immediately reflect any global warming) show no warming since readings began 23 years ago. These readings are accurate to within 0.01ºC, and are consistent with data from weather balloons. Only land-based temperature stations show a warming trend, and these stations do not cover the entire globe, are often contaminated by heat generated by nearby urban development, and are subject to human error.

And tree ring analysis, and pollen samples and ice core samples which date back as far as 650 000 years ago and contain oxygen isotopes which can tell us almost the precise tempertare and also the CO2 content in the atmosphere. Tree rings in ancient trees give us very accurate ideas of temperture due to the size of rings indicating longer/shorter growing seasons all correlated with temperature and pollen samples which have shown us what has grown where and when which sheds much insight on what land temperature has shown.

JamMastaE wrote:

3. Global climate computer models are too crude to predict future climate changes. All predictions of global warming are based on computer models, not historical data. In order to get their models to produce predictions that are close to their designers’ expectations, modelers resort to “flux adjustments” that can be 25 times larger than the effect of doubling carbon dioxide concentrations, the supposed trigger for global warming. Richard A. Kerr, a writer for Science, says “climate modelers have been ‘cheating’ for so long it’s almost become respectable.”

You are right. There is not one clear concensus which is why climatologists have offered a range of different scenarios but all of them include warming. Its like saying that we can't predict that if you smoke you'll die from cancer at 75 but we know that you are doing your body damage.

JamMastaE wrote:

4. The IPCC did not prove that human activities are causing global warming. Alarmists frequently quote the executive summaries of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations organization, to support their predictions. But here is what the IPCC’s latest report, Climate Change 2001, actually says about predicting the future climate: “The Earth’s atmosphere-ocean dynamics is chaotic: its evolution is sensitive to small perturbations in initial conditions. This sensitivity limits our ability to predict the detailed evolution of weather; inevitable errors and uncertainties in the starting conditions of a weather forecast amplify through the forecast. As well as uncertainty in initial conditions, such predictions are also degraded by errors and uncertainties in our ability to represent accurately the significant climate processes.”

see above about ranges and outcomes...

JamMastaE wrote:

5. A modest amount of global warming, should it occur, would be beneficial to the natural world and to human civilization. Temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period (roughly 800 to 1200 AD), which allowed the Vikings to settle presently inhospitable Greenland, were higher than even the worst-case scenario reported by the IPCC. The period from about 5000-3000 BC, known as the “climatic optimum,” was even warmer and marked “a time when mankind began to build its first civilizations,” observe James Plummer and Frances B. Smith in a study for Consumer Alert. “There is good reason to believe that a warmer climate would have a similar effect on the health and welfare of our own far more advanced and adaptable civilization today.”

Again, regional warming trends, not global temperature increase. During that time the global temperatures had a very modest spike, not anywhere nearly as severe as what we are seeing now. What we are experiencing now has been determined that it is too fast and to severe for natural causes to cause it. I concede some places will benefit from a warmer climate, but other places would be much worse off. Ie. incrased drought in Africa, mass flooding in Bangladesh and SE Asia, increased extreme weather events...

JamMastaE wrote:

6. Efforts to quickly reduce human greenhouse gas emissions would be costly and would not stop Earth’s climate from changing. Reducing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to 7 percent below 1990’s levels by the year 2012--the target set by the Kyoto Protocol--would require higher energy taxes and regulations causing the nation to lose 2.4 million jobs and $300 billion in annual economic output. Average household income nationwide would fall by $2,700, and state tax revenues would decline by $93.1 billion due to less taxable earned income and sales, and lower property values. Full implementation of the Kyoto Protocol by all participating nations would reduce global temperature in the year 2100 by a mere 0.14 degrees Celsius.

What is the cost of not doing anything? How much would more extreme weather cost us? How many more deaths in Africa due to increased drought? how about flooded towns and cities. This is very short sighted. We have resonded to crisis' before and made the proper adjustments. Yes it is grim. If we did not put out anymore GHG tomorrow, we still would see climate change for another 60 years or so before the atmosphere could fall back into balance, but that does not absolve us from resonsibility for fixing our mistakes.

JamMastaE wrote:

7. Efforts by state governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are even more expensive and threaten to bust state budgets. After raising their spending with reckless abandon during the 1990s, states now face a cumulative projected deficit of more than $90 billion. Incredibly, most states nevertheless persist in backing unnecessary and expensive greenhouse gas reduction programs. New Jersey, for example, collects $358 million a year in utility taxes to fund greenhouse gas reduction programs. Such programs will have no impact on global greenhouse gas emissions. All they do is destroy jobs and waste money.

Care to describe the program? Its hard to analyze anything by just saying a program didn't work. What program? What was its design? I don't have a lot to go by...

JamMastaE wrote:

8. The best strategy to pursue is “no regrets.” The alternative to demands for immediate action to “stop global warming” is not to do nothing. The best strategy is to invest in atmospheric research now and in reducing emissions sometime in the future if the science becomes more compelling. In the meantime, investments should be made to reduce emissions only when such investments make economic sense in their own right.

This strategy is called “no regrets,” and it is roughly what the Bush administration has been doing. The U.S. spends more on global warming research each year than the entire rest of the world combined, and American businesses are leading the way in demonstrating new technologies for reducing and sequestering greenhouse gas emissions.

No regrets??? Oops we've fucked something up but oh well. no regrets? How much stronger does the science need to get? Over 90% of the top climatologists have made it clear that humans are responsible. There is tons of scientific literature out there yet none that disputes human induced climate change. The signs are all around us!

I'm afraid this one is no scam.

JamMastaE

zack de la rocha "fear is ya,fear is ya,fear is your only god"

you wanna know what is really killing the planet and is going to get worse?DEPLETED URANIUM MUNITIONS!!! they have been using them since gulf war one and have used them much more in Iraq!! it takes 5 billion years to break down in the environment!!!!!!!meaning Iraq is fucked for eternity!!!!death by a host of nasty ways results from d.u. poisoning.not to mention the bizarre birth defects like kids being born with no legs & arms.plus our soldiers are breathing it in and bringing it home on their gear to their families(gulf war syndrome anyone?)and finally the winds of the planet blow it all around for everyone to enjoy!

sourdough

JamMastaE wrote:

zack de la rocha "fear is ya,fear is ya,fear is your only god"

you wanna know what is really killing the planet and is going to get worse?DEPLETED URANIUM MUNITIONS!!! they have been using them since gulf war one and have used them much more in Iraq!! it takes 5 billion years to break down in the environment!!!!!!!meaning Iraq is fucked for eternity!!!!death by a host of nasty ways results from d.u. poisoning.not to mention the bizarre birth defects like kids being born with no legs & arms.plus our soldiers are breathing it in and bringing it home on their gear to their families(gulf war syndrome anyone?)and finally the winds of the planet blow it all around for everyone to enjoy!

No I'm not scared. AHHH THE SUN IS OUT!!!! but there is a time when we can recognize a problem and then work towards a solution. If you find fault in anything I've said then we can discuss it. Do you understand the science or did you just cut and paste?

JamMastaE

sourdough wrote:

No I'm not scared. AHHH THE SUN IS OUT!!!! but there is a time when we can recognize a problem and then work towards a solution. If you find fault in anything I've said then we can discuss it. Do you understand the science or did you just cut and paste?

both.

Albert Einstein : "the true genius is the man who realizes he knows nothing"

is it getting hotter?yes

is it man or natural cycle? no one knows 100%

study the science and it leans toward natural cycle.

who controls the world that controls the media that controls your point of view?

sourdough

JamMastaE wrote:

both.

Albert Einstein : "the true genius is the man who realizes he knows nothing"

is it getting hotter?yes

is it man or natural cycle? no one knows 100%

study the science and it leans toward natural cycle.

who controls the world that controls the media that controls your point of view?

No, study the science, and you won't find a natural cycle that has been this abrupt nor this severe.

Do you accept the science behind the greenhouse effect? I am always asking this question, but it seems that many do not really understand it which is fundamental to understanding the problem.

I don't give two shits about media. I don't even have a tv, but I am someone who has studied climate at the university level. My degree is in environmental geography and I'm married to an ecologist so its not like I'm just following a bandwagon of celebrities and newspaper clippings.

If you want to hold a position on climate change, that is fantastic. But is it informed? Where have you found fault in any of my counter-arguments?

Kann

JamMastaE wrote:

first of all,anyone who knows anything about the U.N. knows they are not to be trusted.if you have this image of a peace keeping,pro human rights organization you are dead wrong.this global warming scam is about $.they want a global tax and thats how they are going to dupe you into it.also strict environmental laws will be established merely as a land grabbing tool,not to "save the planet".and just as many if not more world scientists oppose the global warming theory.

To whom will it profit? Why? And what about other instances of the UN such as UNHCR (for refugees), UNICEF (for children), UNAIDS (against aids), FAO (for food)?

JamMastaE wrote:

it's funny how the uninformed love being stuck in a political para dime.when will you learn this shit is like wrestling! fake opposition but sharing the same intentions! and you stuck in the middle completely controlled.

That's a nice analogy, but a wrong one. While in wrestling people are just watchers, in the real life both sides actually act on our lives. And sometimes do good things for us.

sourdough wrote:

I concede some places will benefit from a warmer climate, but other places would be much worse off. Ie. incrased drought in Africa, mass flooding in Bangladesh and SE Asia, increased extreme weather events...

Yes, I think it's the worse argument against global warming : "well I enjoy warmer weather". I'm sure you do but people trying to have crops in Ethiopia don't.