Scientists Threatened For "Climate Denial" 1165
Forrest Kyle writes "A former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg has received multiple death threats for questioning the extent to which human activities are driving global warming. '"Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened," said the professor. "I can tolerate being called a skeptic because all scientists should be skeptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal." Richard Lindzen, the professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology [...] recently claimed: "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labelled as industry stooges. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science."'"
This really begs the question... (Score:5, Insightful)
nail -- meet hammer! (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile in the real world (Score:2, Insightful)
But that's the practical side of it.
Ignore the hurricanes, tsunamis flooding Bangladesh, and the loss of island nations worldwide, if you must. But don't call your "belief" science.
Science Should Always Be Up For Debate (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:5, Insightful)
The shock, hostility and downright hatred you will come across will very quickly render claims of death threats highly believable. Is this guy a jerk? Maybe. Is his science on-par? I have no clue. But, there is no denying the fact that this has become such an emotionally charged issue that climatology is probably the hardest field to do real science in today. I really wish we could de-politicize the whole process, but I fear that we would have had to start slowing this train about a decade ago in order to accomplish that feat.
Flat Earth Society (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Meanwhile in the real world (Score:5, Insightful)
Scientists like this guy aren't denying that we are undergoing a climate change but they do disagree about the underlying cause of the change which is something they are perfectly entitled to do.
Having watched the documentary mentioned in the article I have some sympathy with the viewpoint that this whole issue has been hijacked by a number of pressure groups and political associations which is leading to an overly emotional and hysterical treatment of the entire issue.
Personally I am in two minds on the subject, I see a lot of people saying the case is comprehensively proven who want to decide what action we should now take and also a lot of people saying that the case isn't yet proven and there are a number of scientific arguments which still need to be overcome.
What I would like is for the hysteria and the political posturing to stop and instead promote a more balanced approach to considering the scientific arguments.
Even if global warming is largely due to human activities I don't believe and I have not seen any evidence to support the view that the effects are going to be anywhere near as catastrophic as is made out in various news reports and in the media, e.g. huge tidal waves towering over the Thames Barrier and destroying the City of London seem to me to be based more on a need for sensastional television than anything else.
Re:Earth IS warming, the WHY is almost unimportant (Score:3, Insightful)
If your house is on fire because your fuel oil tank is leaking and shorting out an electric line, water is probably a very bad solution, at least until you've turned off the power and done something to contain the oil.
They can hardly complain about (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Meanwhile in the real world (Score:5, Insightful)
You just shot down your own argument.
Hurricanes: Wasn't this last hurricane season supposed to be the worst in history due to global warming. How did that work out?
Tsunamis: Are you saying that earthquakes are caused by global warming? Please! Stop blaming everything on GW. It just makes you look (more) stupid.
Loss of nation states: Name one nation that is now underwater.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think any true climatologists have such a dim view - but the media does, and Al Gore does, and a large community of activists do. And those activists have the same mindset of those who murder doctors at abortion clinics, or assault people wearing fur coats.
How are you going to have any sort of open discourse or intelligent discussion, or any sort of pursuit of the "truth" with such people involved?
Believing something other than "mainstream science" these days has some nasty consequences. Science has sort of replaced religion to a lot of people, and people vehemently defend Darwin like a religious fundy would defend the Bible.
I wonder if there are any true-life Galilleo's out there, muzzled and silent, who's name won't be known for centuries, when they're proven right?
They do agree its anthropogenic (Score:2, Insightful)
Problem is not the dissent... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flat Earth Society (Score:5, Insightful)
When they stop making testable, correct, non-trivial predictions?
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:5, Insightful)
Do Not Forget the REAL Debate Among the Scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
Like many others areas of the world/media,
All I hope for is that the scientific process can be saved from the media in the future when issues like this come up. By that I mean issues that demand action based on conclusive scientific evidence of a problem. We could all certainly be wrong about global warming and if you do not at least concede that, then you too, are contributing to the fall of one of, if not the most important advancement of our modern society, the scientific process. (Sanitation puts up a good fight for #1
Re:Science Should Always Be Up For Debate (Score:2, Insightful)
And forgive me if I don't take the skepticism over global warming seriously from the same crowd that believes people can rise from the dead and that while the massive scientific proof behind global warming is ludicrous and unreasonable, they're pretty sure that lesbians cause natural disasters.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:4, Insightful)
Responses are criticizing the wrong thing (Score:5, Insightful)
The argument is whether the global warming that we see in hard data is caused by humans. There's a correlation between rising CO2 and rising temperature, but as any Pastafarian can tell you, correlation does not equal causation. That's what people should be arguing about. We KNOW temperatures are increasing, what we don't know (and it's one of those things that might be impossible to prove, as so many things are in science) is whether these increases are caused by us. If they are, then we might possiblly be able to reverse them given reductions in CO2 output and carbon sequestering. If they aren't, then rising CO2 probably isn't helping and should still be reversed, and we might also look into other solutions for it.
The Earth has cycled between hot and cold for its entire existence, and we don't know why. It might be life, it might be the planet's internal processes, it might be the Maunder Minimum.
Anyone denying that the planet is heating is living with their head up their butt. Anyone denying that the heating is caused by humans is simply skeptical, and has good reason to be. Anyone convinced that the warming of the planet is caused by humans is too credulous and should always remember that science is falsifiable and therefore can never be certain.
Re:Earth IS warming, the WHY is almost unimportant (Score:5, Insightful)
What most people fundamentally miss, is concern at the current _extremely rapid_ climate change (it's not questioned that the climate is always changing for various reasons) is not concern about "saving the planet" by saving ourselves. Concern about whether humans are causing rapid climate change (which there are now mountains of evidence in favour of) is _self interest_. The Sun has another five or six billion years of main sequence, and if we act like bacteria in a petri dish - living in an unsustainable manner until either the environment no longer favours our species, or that the resources are used up - in that period of time, the Earth will shrug it off. 100 million years is nothing to the Earth.
We are the first species who can actually predict the course of our actions, and actually stop the disaster from happening in the first place. Concern about this very rapid climate change is all about preserving our technological society. We only have one shot at at - the easy to get at resources are all now gone, so if this society collapses, there cannot be another industrial revolution (at least, not for 100 million years or so).
So the choice is: live sustainably and save ourselves, or don't live sustainably, and doom civilization. The Earth doesn't care either way, the Earth will just shrug us off in what is the short term for the planet - if we doom ourselves, in a couple of hundred million years you'll have to dig for fossils to even tell that humans even existed.
It's clear that we both need to adapt _AND_ we need to find a way to live sustainably. Even if it turns out to be entirely false that human emissions are the main factor in the rapidly changing climate (which is unlikely), resource exhaustion is still a future problem that must be tackled. Living sustainably will solve both problems, and it doesn't mean we all go back to an Edwardian lifestyle either if we engage our brains (and sadly, as a species, we act no more intelligently than bacteria on a petri dish). I think ultimately, if our society survives it'll be luck rather than good planning (luck - as in resources become increasingly scarce at a slow enough rate that the market can force the move to alternatives, at a speed which won't cause economic collapse).
throwing some surplus karma on the fire (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They do agree its anthropogenic (Score:5, Insightful)
Grant money.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:2, Insightful)
What if gravity where to stop working?
What if
PS: Balancing green house gasses would do little harm to the US economy. We might go from spending ~3% of are GDP on fossil fuel to ~6% on renewable energy but over the long term it's a minor change.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:4, Insightful)
More to the point, the scientific community was not claiming that harsh winters of 1976-1977 were evidence of global cooling.
Right, because Lindzen doesn't get any (Score:3, Insightful)
Does he? Oh, yeah. He gets grant money from the NSF, NASA, and the DOE. Yeah, no grant money there.
You get grant money for doing novel research - not for toeing the line. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never applied for a grant.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:4, Insightful)
And it's the height of willful ignorance to not understand that the human impact on climate is caused by solar radiation -- it's the human effect on the impact of that solar radiation that leads to anthropogenic climate change.
Are people still comparing pop sci global cooling [realclimate.org] with real sci global warming?
Immaterial. The impact of global warming is still significant to mankind, in the midst of that 'blip'. The point you make is equivalent to saying that I shouldn't be concerned if my home is burning to the ground because I'm only one of several billion humans -- hogwash. To me, that home is important, just as to mankind, global warming is important, despite our insignificance in the big picture of the universe.
Get your head out of the sand, please. The Earth is not a sentient being, it is not some mystical entity that 'does what it wants' -- it is a collection of all the things on and in it, including us. And to think that we are not part of the Earth system, to think that we have no influence on global phenomena, is to deny human existence.
Re:Earth IS warming, the WHY is almost unimportant (Score:3, Insightful)
What strikes me, though, is that going to renewable forms of energy and curbing our appetite for fossil fuels are, regardless of climate, good things. We are contributing billions of dollars into unfriendly and unstable states in a region that has demonstrated itself not exactly to be a good friend to the West. Though we've gotten better in this part of the world, we're still dumping a lot of crap into the ecosphere.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:5, Insightful)
Read this piece by Dr. Mike Hulme [bbc.co.uk], director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research:
Don't panic.
Re:More denial crapola on slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
It's statements like this that drives home how much global warming is a political agenda. It's totally unacceptable for scientists to have locked believes in a theory. They are supposed to constantly question, experiment and update their theories. After 2-3 decades they are only now somewhat certain that the Earth is in a heating tread. There is debate on the causes, and it may take another 2-3 decades to even start answering them. There are alot of folks that just want to say humans caused it now we should fix it. That may or may not be true. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that we need more study.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:4, Insightful)
The shock, hostility and downright hatred you will come across will very quickly render claims of death threats highly believable.
There are extremists on both sides, who, unsurprisingly, are among the most vocal. Just look at the anti-AGW types who start screaming about dirty hippie globaloney-worshipping libtard Gorebots the instant the word "warming" leaves one's mouth.
It is, however, way over-politicized to the extent that none of the real scientific debates accurately trickle down to the public.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't have to buy anything, just walk up to a representative sample of people who think that global warming is anthropogenic and say, "actually I think it's probably just a natural cycle." [...] The shock, hostility and downright hatred you will come across will very quickly render claims of death threats highly believable.
You'd get the same reaction if you said, "I think homosexuality is a conscious choice." Is it really? I'm not sure, but I know that it's in the best interest of religious conservatives for people to think so, and I know that religious conservatives vastly outnumber those with the means and motive to find out how orientation is determined. Therefore, when someone starts a conversation this way, I tend to start with the assumption that they're fundamentalists.
I agree that it's a shame as far as getting real science done is concerned, but I wouldn't assume that the shocked and outraged parties aren't open minded. They're just acting like hyper-vigilant spam filters that send the occasional legitimate email to the junk drawer in order to successfully filter through mountians of garbage. If you want to convince them that you'll argue on an adult level, the burden of proof is unfortunately on you.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on what was done about it, but I can't help thinking "better safe than sorry." When our greatgrandchildren look back on this time 100 years from now, I'd rather them laugh at our paranoia (or whatever you might call incorrect and alarmist views on climate change) than lament our complacency.
That said, I don't think it is worth any kind of violent revolution or some such. That woudl certainly be something to lament.
-matthew
Re:They do agree its anthropogenic (Score:3, Insightful)
Then they discovered that 'Whoops
Or eggs. Remember the butter/margarine debate?? 'Don't eat butter, it's bad for you. Eat margarine instead' followed by 'Whoops
Our scientists don't have a very good track record in predicting what will happen in complex systems when things change. Decreasing mercury and lead pollution was a good idea, dropping CO2 emissions is also a good idea.
Just step back a minute, breathe, and do what is sane. I heard some groups demanding a 80% reduction in CO2 emissions in 25 years.
Oh well...the democrats (along with the Hollywood bleeding hearts) are back in the US, I'm sure there will be plenty of overreaction to make up for the under reaction for the last 8 years.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Science Should Always Be Up For Debate (Score:4, Insightful)
Fact: CO2 absorbs IR radiation from sun producing greenhouse effect.
Fact: H2O vapor and methane also produce greenhouse effect to greater degree than CO2.
Fact: Average temperature of Earth has been increasing in last 25 years.
Fact: CO2 level in atmosphere has been increasing during same period.
Fact: Humans produce CO2 by burning fossil fuels (and exhaling)
In order to prove hypothesis, we must deal with the following assumptions:
Assumption 1: Solar radiation has remained constant OR warming cannot be completely explained
by changes in solar radiation
Assumption 2: Atmospheric water content has remained constant or warming cannot be completely explained by changes in atmospheric water content.
Assumption 3: Ditto for methane
Assumption 4: Bulk of increased CO2 level cannot be accounted for by natural CO2 releases
Once the assumptions are dealt with, we must also show that why temperature increases on other planets and temperature changes during the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age are irrelevant.
So yes, CO2 aborbs IR. But no, the case is not closed.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:5, Insightful)
We won't have get to the point where it will really matter, Peak Oil will come and we won't HAVE anything to burn to create greenhouse gases.
Not that it would matter, when billions starve and get shot, bombed and nuked in the energy wars.
(perhaps I'm just kidding, perhaps not).
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:runaway global warming: debunked? (Score:3, Insightful)
Human beings are neither dinasoars nor plants- we can't take the added CO2 concentration. So this is entirely irrelevant to keeping the earth's atmosphere in a state where human beings can survive.
Re:Oversensitive much? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This really begs the question... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:3, Insightful)
Some Dissenting Scientists from IPCC's Own Report (Score:5, Insightful)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=900556679
The movie was produced by the BBC4 and is titled "The Great Global Warming Swindle." It shows an honest, reasoned response to the Global Warming Scare on a point-by-point basis from scientists and at least one journalist. The scientists all have credentials out the whazoo and are recognized leaders and contributors in their respective fields. A few of them have their names on the IPCC report (the report the Warmingistas always cite) and one has even sued to have his name taken off the document.
Particularly chilling (no pun intended) is the part that shows how the IPCC policy-wonks have redacted the IPCC report to remove comments from the scientists that explicitly state there is no proveable link between man-made CO2 and global warming.
As a technical person, I have always suspected the "consensus" results "proving" man-made Global Warming have been primarily a political scam. For one thing, science rarely (if ever) deals in absolutes, and complex models always deal in probabilities rather than yes/no answers. Further, as an undergraduate engineer, I spent plenty of time in college science labs doing experiments to acquaint myself with the scientific method. Working in simple straight-forward conditions:
- Indoor lab,
- Properly calibrated equipment,
- One simple, universally-accepted equation,
- One single variable,
we (me and all the other undergraduates) never got an exact match between the equations and the real world. There was always a fudge-factor. This experience has taught me that anyone who thinks scientists can model the entire world and get every equation and every theoretical assumption correct (down to a degree Celcius with no fudge-factor) is either ignorant or just a shill. They have the kind of faith that would put any religious bigot to shame.Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Science Should Always Be Up For Debate (Score:3, Insightful)
If we want to alter the course of global warming, it is necessary to do so through factors we can actually control. "Banning dihydrogen monoxide" is not a realistic solution even if it did work.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:3, Insightful)
If they didn't have the pitchforks and torches out before, that should just about do it.
Peak Oil Won't Stop Coal (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:5, Insightful)
I know you pulled those figures out of your hat, but let's consider. If the cost of energy increases by 25%, that means the cost of everything increases by 10-25% (depending on what fraction of a widget is labor versus what fraction is materials). Everything.
You're ignoring costs to them of "doing something" (Score:3, Insightful)
How about them cursing you for having trashed the economy so their standard of living is far below that of your time - and no resources are available for solving whatever the REAL problems of their day are - while instituting a global totalitarian repression to accomplish the "better safe" goals?
Kyoto alone talks about cutting the global economy by about a third for an "improvement" predicted (even by its advocates) to be too small to measure.
What good is insurance if you spend so much on it that you have nothing left to live on? Don't you think you need to actually do enough research to have some confidence in the results before instituting such costly measures?
Don't you think you should at LEAST get the models working to the point that they actually track the historic record of global temperature before taking draconian measures based on their predictions of the future?
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:2, Insightful)
Atheist: But I don't believe that to be true.
Christian fundamentalist: That doesn't matter. Hell is SO BAD that you should worship Jesus just in case. Better to be safe than sorry.
Atheist: I'll take my chances.
Christian fundamentalist: Well, I'll lobby the government to make you go to Church every Sunday, for your own good, because there so many of us that believe that Jesus is our savior, that it must be true.
Notice anything familiar?
WHY is entirely *important* (Score:3, Insightful)
It does if you mean to change it.
Put aside the whole "consensus" crap for a moment and think about this. Assume for sake of discussion the following:
1) Earth is warming
2) Mankind has had zero impact on it
If you wish to make an impact, you have a large hurdle in that you've not been able to make any despite believing you have. If the warming is entirely natural, then all the changes you thought we had made to the climate did not happen and all of your science, models, theories about how to stop it are completely incorrect (as if they are now) and useful only as a list of "well this didn't make a difference". Useful, yes but not in the frame of making things different. You'd have a roughly equal chance of making it worse if you could impact it at all.
Furthermore, if it is entirely natural, or that man's impact is statistically and demonstrably zero in effect, then where we should focus our efforts in coping with the natural cycle is in adjusting ourselves to the new climate.
It also matters what the cause is in another area. If Mankind didn't cause it, then the political and moral force of a lot of environmental regulations are dropped in the crapper. It is one of the reasons I've been advocating making changes for reasons that have nothing to do with GW. There are plenty of non-GW caused changes we should be making that we do not. By tying nearly the whole of emissions control, fuel economy, and so forth to anthropogenic GW, the entire foundation could and would fall like a house of cards if/when it is determined that lo and behold we humans didn't do it. It's a dangerous position to build upon. Particularly since the anthropogenic part is not fully finished and certain. No, consensus does not mean correctness. As mentioned elsewhere, scientists have in the majority been completely wrong before.
The cause of global warming is all theory, not fact. In science, theories must be falsifiable in order to stand a chance at validity. Where is the falsifiability of AGW? How does one prove humans did not cause GW? How does one prove that solar forcing, or orbital changes, or any other "natural" causes were no the source, at that a combination of them?
In truth, we can't without experimentation. Models do not count. They are not proven accurate enough to even be considered as experimentation. This problem is taking hold in more places than climatology. Models and other computer simulations are not a valid substitute for confirmational experiments. So how does one conduct actual experiments? The same way we always have. But it does require more than hiring a programmer to make a program that takes your inputs and spits out an output according to a list of algorithms.
It means building environments and validating the theories that make up the portions of the whole. It means taking these and integrating the portions into larger experiments. Yes, that means bigger laboratories and more "hard thought". But hey isn't this supposed to be important enough to justify that? If you can't build it up, you can't say you truly understand it.
There has yet to be a single GW model that has been demonstrated to accurately model the past climate changes, let alone today's alleged ones. As such no model on climate today is valid evidence of anything other than programming and money being spent. Today's climate models are no more valid than a Simcity or Civlizations game is.
I've been researching climate effects for a couple decades with the express desire to create a warming climate condition. The first model I played with was in the 1980's. The model can output pretty much what you want it to. Any halfway decent programmer knows that. They area gross simplification built upon a chosen set of rules. All of them. ANyone that tries to tell you otherwise is ignorant of the sheer complexity of our climate. Even small scale climates are non-trivial. If you want to make your model accurate you need to have a repeatable
Re:runaway global warming: debunked? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think what bothers me the most about this whole debate is all the people that are looking for the cause of climate change, as if there can be only one. Some scientists predict that the average temperature will increase by 2 degrees (estimated for the sake of argument), and people start making claims about what's causing the increase of 2 degrees. It seems like nobody is considering the possibility that there's some factor causing an increase of 0.2 degrees, some other factor causing an increase of 0.1 degrees, maybe some feedback caused by the combination of the two causing an additional increase of 0.1 degrees, etc. Climate is a complex system, and if humans are having an impact on it, there's still nothing that says humans have to be the only thing having an impact.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:1, Insightful)
I agree.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:3, Insightful)
Fossil fuel energy costs are ~3% of the US GDP so a 25% increase in those energy costs would increase everything by
Granted I have not run the numbers in a few years but converting all of the US electricity generation would to non CO2 sources would create a 30 - 65% premium over existing costs depending on location. See: http://www.stirlingenergy.com/solar_overview.htm [stirlingenergy.com] for a good example of such systems.
Solar hot water heaters save money for most of the continental US. Granted not so much in Alaska.
The only real issues is Cars / Jet's but there is enough of a buffer from heating and electric costs that even at 2.5x gas prices your only talking about 2x net energy costs. (Note your price at the pump is only about 50% raw fuel costs so (2.5x
PS: In time there will be no fossil fuel's left anywhere in the world so doing nothing is not really an option. Those economies' that are prepared for ever increasing costs of fossil fuels will do better in the long run.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope. You're describing an issue of individual freedom. The global warming debate is about how to regulate the commons, not imposing on an individual's freedom.
Re:Legates and his article (Score:2, Insightful)
Now I don't know what kind of fancy science is involved in your degrees, given that I've but a humble MS in mechanical engineering (and only really specializing in the thermal/fluid sciences at that) but in engineering we try not to go from "clear evidence of human influences" to "complete agreement that it is primarily anthropogenic in nature".
Why did I mention that article? Because it's one of Legate's many papers which disputes the claim that the evidence is anywhere close to overwhelming. Legates does not insist that the climate is not warming, nor does he insist that humans cannot be causing it. He simply disputes the idea that the jury is out. A longtime friend of mine is a climatology Ph.D student who works with Legates. He stays current with climatology literature out of necessity, and the state of the peer reviewed literature is nowhere near where you seem to think it is.
And I neither know nor care why junkscience would host it, since I'm not particularly fond of herring. Especially red ones.
Re:They do agree its anthropogenic (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll name one: Lindzen, your own cite [opinionjournal.com]. This is one of the things that bugs me about these arguments: "it is primarily anthropogenic in nature" and "there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system" are simply not the same. That humans are having some influence on the warming trend that is going on should be news enough. It's this apparent need to "alarmize" it beyond the science that's got so many of us annoyed.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it did cross my mind, but after more thought, I came to the conclusion that it isn't relevant because climate change affects all of us. You going to hell or not does not affect anyone but you. It simply doesn't make any sense to legislate belief. It makes a lot of sense, however, to regulate human environmental impact. And in fact, such regulations have shown to be very successful in the past. Seriously, have you ever been to a county/city that has little or no environmental regulation? It is appalling.
So, we have evidence that environmental regulations work without seriously hurting the economy in the long term... and evidence that humans are impacting the global climate. Seems like a fairly obvious call for action if I've ever seen one. Not that we should just stop researching climate change, of course.
-matthew
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:3, Insightful)
Stopping the use of fossil fuels will not remove CO2 from the atmosphere and it would no doubt take quite a while for the extra we've put in the atmosphere to be removed through natural mechanisms.
I do understand what you're saying and I've thought it sometimes myself. I just don't think it's all that expectable that reducing our usage of fossil fuels would end up worse for us as against keeping on going the way we are.
I really don't buy it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:He's not alone (Score:5, Insightful)
If increasing CO2 levels cause increased global temperatures, then the historical record would show that the CO2 levels increased before the temperature rise. But the temperature rises actually occurred prior to the CO2 rise; making the claim that an effect is due to a cause that happened after the effect makes you look like an idiot. If the CO2 level changes mimic the temperature changes from 800 years earlier -- but not the current temperature changes -- over the measurement period, then it doesn't matter that the lag is 0.1% of the measurement range, then the CO2 level changes are not a cause of the temperature changes.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, there is where most people live. That means, it's where most people have everything they own. They may be able to escape, our economy, not.
Yes, that's right. A rise in sea levels of 10cm would be very close to noise in the tidal fluctuation. It does mean that storm surges that didn't used to affect your beachfront-house might. It does mean that storm drains in some cities might be in trouble during storms. That's the extent of the concern. But just watch the news and they'll sing you any sort of dire prediction you like!
Places like New Orleans and Amsterdam are in more trouble, though. Such places actually exist BELOW the water line, and constantly run the risk of flooding. They WILL be flooded someday, and a 10cm rise in oceans certainly puts them in greater immediate risk, so there's your imminent danger model. Just be clear that you're talking about specific problems, not "most people."
Give me a single piece of evidence that says that increasing the temperature (but not solar power) increases the fertility of land (I can give you several examples of the contrary). Permanently frozen lands excluded.
There are plenty of areas in the northern parts of North America, Asia and parts of Europe that aren't suitable for growing most crops because of the mean temperature, not the fertility of the land. When the temperatures go up, those areas WILL be suitable for growing (are now for heartier crops).
I'm horribly ignorant of the fertility of the colder regions of South America, so I can't tell you anything about that.
There is also the huge climate change, that will probably obsolet a lot of our housing investiment and take a lot of people lifes, the increase on wet of places that already have problems with it (that will probably be the most affected), and possible problems with the atmosphere (more tornadoes) and sea currents. Not to talk about the disruption that is already happenning at sea life.
I don't think it is a good idea to gamble on that.
Re:I really don't buy it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You're ignoring costs to them of "doing somethi (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You're ignoring costs to them of "doing somethi (Score:5, Insightful)
i find this notion fascinating -- I can't think of any other situation in which funneling research and development into more efficient and automated technology has resulted in anything other than economic progress. The entire western world is built on replacing the cheap, easy and obvious method of doing things with expensive but vastly more scalable and efficient technology.
Outlawing child labor didn't result in an energy or manufacturing crisis, it resulted in a more educated society while causing all the industries that relied on child labor to invest in better tools that wound up being MORE effective and profitable.
All that environmental concerns accomplish is to change the economic incentives so that the market has the motivation to cover the startup costs of technologies we know will be more productive in the long run anyways. Building more efficient and cleaner power plants and vehicles is a great idea that we know will benefit all aspects of the economy and society. So why not make it profitable for the market to move to that stage sooner rather than later?
GW skeptics: think it through (Score:3, Insightful)
Can you think of *any* other benefits to reducing consumption of fossil fuels?
- conservation is cheaper than consumption
- reduce energy imports as a component of our trade imbalance
- reduce money going to states known to support terrorism either officially or unofficially
- provide incentives for alternative energy technology and production by American companies
- reduce air pollution
Is any (or all of them together) of those goals worth pursuing in its own right? Is there really any reason at all to be against reduction of dependence on fossil fuel energy *if you aren't in the fossil fuel industry*?
Re:Believe it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Climate Change Skeptics (Score:3, Insightful)
I seem to recall there was a time when the Round Earthers were the "nutjobs".
What scares me is how so many posts (and the scientific community) froth at the mouth like rabid dogs at anyone who is skeptical. So a couple of colleagues disagree...C'est la vie. [wikipedia.org]
Re:NOT "A former professor of climatology" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah. Because everyone has that option. My fossil fuel consumption is a direct function of my commute. Mass transit is not an option, because I'd also need a bike, and it'd be stolen almost immediately near the mass transit station. My energy consumption is relatively fixed. I have enough to run a laptop most of the time, and a bit extra for basic cooling and heating.
Are you going to tell everyone with outdate consumer utilities (radio, television, refrigerator, etc.) to fuck off and buy newer, more efficient models? Even if they cannot afford them? Will you volunteer to sacrifice from your lifestyle to bring everyone else up to par? So much for universal health care and cheaper higher-level education, eh?
You act like people are wantonly wasting energy left and right, with careless abandon. The real story is far grimmer. But when your only agenda is political tongue-lashing and grabs for yet more governmental power, I guess you can afford to discard reality. Americans are all so wasteful! Nevermind our industrialization is decreasing, and nevermind that global measures like Kyoto conveniently ignore countries like China that are rapidly becoming major impacts on the global ecological stage.
Help us, Lars T. You're our only hope.
Re:runaway global warming: debunked? (Score:3, Insightful)
The only reason we know about these super plumes is that plant life took -millions- of years to balance out the increased CO2 with O2.
We're talking about plumes of C02 entering the atmosphere at a rate mankind couldn't even think of approaching, and doing it for hundreds, if not thousands, of years at a time.
We have very little temporal granularity when we start talking about the far distant past. Hell, man, we don't have a lot of granularity for shit much past the 1700's (and for weather, the mid-late 1800's). Extrapolating climatic models when ~150 years of -hard-, -observed- data should be scaring the fuck out of ANY scientist involved in this entire debate. Yes, we have evidence of what the climate in certain parts of the world was kinda-sorta like upwards of 800k years ago, but we're still talking, what, not quite 2 -hundredths- of a percent of the time the planet has been around. In fact,we HAVE to rely on the fossil record because the ice sheets, even on Antarctica are, at most, 40 million years old. We're talking about a time, here, that's millions of years BEFORE the ice sheets began to form.
150 years isn't even a blink in the eye of what true climate change is about - it might be the start of the synaptic signal telling the eye to blink.
With that said - yes, the climate does appear to be changing. How much affect has man had on it, though, is the question. Frankly, I don't think we're affecting it nearly as much (nor as little) as either side would like us to believe. We ARE having some affect, I will not disagree here, but I do not think that we should jump into 'solutions' like Kyoto without -really- thinking hard about the effect it will have on the global economy for a very, very minimal "gain", that might not even exist in the first place.
Way to prove the author's point slashdot. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Meanwhile in the real world (Score:3, Insightful)
Once again, if we are considering embarking on a programme which will effect a global change it seems to me that it is better to make sure we understand both the impact and the risks associated with either making those changes or not. Please explain what the problem is with this approach ?
I am not arguing that global warming does not exist, neither is the scientist in the article and neither were any of the scientists taking part in the documentary mentioned in the article. We need to understand what is driving this change, how its likely to play out and the risks associated with it and we do not need to be pressured into premature and ill considered actions which may have negative impacts elsewhere.
I think in general it's a good idea to take action yourself to live more efficiently, energy saving light bulbs, riding or cycling to work etc but these are actions we can take which are not going to have a impact elsewhere. What we need to be careful about is larger scale reactions which people suggest our governments should be taking.
As I said I'm not ignoring anything whereas you seem to be ignoring everything you hear which you don't agree with.
Every reason TO change, no reason not to. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not a crap shoot.
The current global warming trend is caused by human activity, primarily the use of fossil fuels. That is an absolute fact. It's about as well established as Newtonian physics at this point.
And even if it weren't, what about acid raid, air pollution, the asthma epidemic, ground water contamination, oil spills, species destruction, etc. All problems caused by fossil fuels. Are you going to claim that acid rain doesn't exist? That air pollution hasn't caused an epidemic of asthma and other breathing problems?
There are plenty of great reasons to reduce or eliminate use of fossil fuels besides global warming.
for example, a warmer planet will enliven a great deal of otherwise useless tundra.
Have you thought this through even a little bit? Have you considered what would happen to tropical areas (they're turning into deserts)? Or the devastation this will cause to global coastlines (where most people live)? The destruction of habitat that would lead to a (bigger) mass extinction? Climatological shifts tend to be what causes massive extinctions. If that's what we're seeing here it doesn't bode well for the future of the human race. Many people don't seem to grasp how closely the world is to the edge of mass starvation.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't an argument, it's an absence of logic with an appeal to emotion.
Any rational decision should take into account the benefit versus the cost, as well as the risk involved of making things worse inadvertently. Advocating any and all action without any cost/benefit analysis is irresponsible.
Unfortunately this kind of rational analysis seems to be in short supply, which is why my eyes glaze over when I hear the words "climate change," because what usually follows is some vapid emotional appeal with plenty of whining and few viable alternative solutions offered.
The biggest question I have is, what's the goal here? Is it to save human lives? There are far more effective ways than driving an electric car to do that. Saying "millions may starve" doesn't really impress me when millions starve today already. Why not fix that problem, which definitely exists, rather than one that might not be a problem at all?
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously!
Have they *really* done a proper study comparing how much land will be rendered inarable as compared to how much more land will become arable? Have they factored in how easy it is for entire human populations to shift if there's an economic reason to move?
Or have they just figured out what might happen to certain parts of land we currently use, and then scream the sky will fall?
Have you ever looked at the 100 kiloyear cycle, where 10,000 years ago all of Canada was under a kilometer of ice? Ever heard of the Canadian Breadbasket? The massive wheat fields of western Canada? To be honest if human activity PREVENTS and BREAKS the 100 kiloyear cycle, I"M ALL FOR IT. I don't want to see all of Canada and all of Northern Europe and Russia covered with a 1km thick ice shield in 50,000 years. Do you?
You know damn well everyone is merely afraid of "change". OOooooh evil evil change. God forbid the millions of people who live in Bangladesh should have to move. Oh wait, really we should already be moving them, considering how many die EVERY SINGLE FUCKING YEAR from flooding. So why haven't they been moved yet? OH WAIT - it's because there are political borders and the people in Western Canada and the Central USA would never ever ever let them in (repeat with every single other country in the entire fucking world.
Maybe the first thing we should do is figure out how to get rid of:
a) economic and social inequity
b) removing political borders that prevent people from moving to nicer places where the weather is perfect for all of us all year round - as opposed to having to live in Bangladesh or Canada -- Yes fucking Canada! It's fucking cold here 75% of the time! Who the hell in their right mind would settle here unless they were being persecuted or fleeing poverty or searching for riches or cheap land in an agrarian world of the late 1800's?
We're all modern now - there's no reason we can't all move down to and settle the northern fringes of South America where it's 15 deg C or more above all fricking year. Maybe we'll come up and vacation in Canada in July and August when it's 25/30/35 deg C here.
Re:I Don't Buy It (Score:3, Insightful)
From what I have been following recently, I think you are right on the money.
It is like noticing 2 tire tracks on a path and noticing they are never more than 1 foot apart and concluding that what ever made the tracks had small wheels that are no more than 1 foot apart. Then assumptions are made regarding what direction they tarveled and such.
When you look at the SAME data with the knowledge of a bicycle, you know the rear tire always points directly at the front tire. You also know the front tire is a fixed distance from the rear tire. Using that data, you can prove the distance is more that a foot apart between the tires by finding the distance the track of the rear wheel directly points to part of the path of the front wheel. Then you can with high accuracy tell which way the bicycle went as only one direction has the rear wheel pointing at the front wheel track at a fixed distance.
The Inconvienent truth film pointed out quite well the track of the CO2 and the temprature is related, but the film ignored the fact temprature led the CO2 level, not followed it.
A rise in temprature causes less CO2 to remain dissolved in the ocean. A drop in temprature causes more CO2 to be dissolved in the ocean.
Another thing the film does is totaly ignore other indicators. Take a look at the history of the Mars polar ice cap. Hmm our polar ice cap follows the exact same pattern. Who on Mars is screwing up their weather? Maybe there is another factor and the political machine simply chooses to ignore the facts.
Oh, Am I blowing smoke or is there data?
It is here;
For CO2 and temprature records;
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=900556679
For Polar Ice and Mars;
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/0
A google search will bring up solar cycles in relation to Earth and Mars cycles for those who want the facts instead of the politics of the day.
Enough with the plants and C02 (Score:3, Insightful)
Second, there is no causative correlation between biomass and biodiversity. Biomass increases in a single organism lifetime--you can grow a whole forest in 30 years. But they'll all be the same trees you planted. Biodiversity requires long periods of time to develop. If you're concerned about biodiversity, the only way to preserve it is to protect old ecosystems. Once again CO2 does nothing to help that.