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>>the same people moving the goal posts Perhaps, but I see this from the pro-climate-change side, too. First it was a "coming ice age" (1970s) then it was Al G
by jackhack 8y ago
>>the same people moving the goal posts
Perhaps, but I see this from the pro-climate-change side, too. First it was a "coming ice age" (1970s) then it was Al Gore banging the "global warming" drums (1990s), now it's simply "climate change" (either/or) -- "heads I win, tails you lose." It's intellectually dishonest.
There is a very important reason to inquire as to whether mankind is the cause of global-warming, or merely an observer. If man is the cause, then perhaps there is a chance to prevent it; we might ask what action might one take. If man is merely the observer (e.g. the sun is to blame) then our odds are infinitesimally small for having any positive effect whatsoever, and quite large for having unintended consequences.
It is not "denial" to ask for evidence, untainted by politics or opinion or data clouded by curve fitting and backwards adjustments to "compensate" for who-knows-what but always in a way that predicts gloom and doom and fosters continued grant money. That raises suspicion of any open-minded person and especially the cynical.
Personally, the groupthink hysteria surrounding this "settled science" alarms me much more than the .5 degree C/century temperature increase observed. I have lived long enough to remember the panic about the world starving to death in the 60s, the coming ice age predicted in the 70s, and recall scientists literally laughing about the idea of bacteria being responsible for ulcers, high-fat diets being "deadly", cholesterol and salt is bad for you, etc. Trends change and science moves ahead, often not hand-in-hand.
finally, you should drop the ugly "denier" label. lumping in those who ask for evidence for global temperature change with those who deny the occurrence of the holocaust is sickening and has no place in reasonable discourse.
(edit:fixed typos, and formatting)
- polotics 8y agoYour strawmen are getting pretty dry in the heat. Some guys' misconceptions from the seventies have nothing to do with today's real science. I recommend you check out the realclimate website.
- kaybe 8y agoThe sun is not to blame for almost all of it (just a tiny little bit). This is quite easy to figure out since we have data on the sun and Earth's orbit and the relationship is simple.
- jackhack 8y agoSo then what caused the prior ice ages and following warming spells, spanning hundreds of millions of years? Or were things different that time around?
- poooogles 8y agoMilankovitch cycles combined with other geological events (think Lake Agassiz flooding into the Ocean) are what domainate natural climate variability.
- kaybe 8y agoWe don't really know yet. It seems to be connected with the sun and CO2 variation, but it is not clear what drives that variation. Today we drive the variation, and into regions that haven't been seen for a looong time, so things are indeed different. It's interesting that the collapse of an ice age seems to happen very fast, within a few hundreds of years, so fast changes are definitely possible. (It's good to research this since an ice age would suck majorly for us too - and we have suppressed the next one by now.)
- sethrin 8y agoThe "coming ice age" was a creation of Newsweek. There was some scientific speculation about whether cooling from particulates would offset CO2-induced warming. Theories of climate change were first proposed in the early 19th Century, in order to explain the evidence for Ice Ages. The first theory of CO2-induced climate change (Arrhenius 1896) was actually discussing that. Global warming describes a subset of recent climate change. Note the date above. AGW is older and better-established than Relativity. It's a relatively straightforward consequence of the heat physics of gases, which was first worked out in the 1860s, and can be trivially replicated in your basement. It was also, as it happens, completely disproved for about fifty years, and the overturning of its disproofs was notable for none of the political infighting surrounding the issue today. The skeptic might wonder what the difference is, and why the people complaining of bad science don't have better science to present. We've only been studying the issue for a dozen decades or so, and surely the previous disproofs would be a start? P.S. That you can create a semantic link between the concepts of "holocaust denier" and "AGW denier" does not mean that those two things are commonly treated as being morally equivalent: non sequitur.
- ThomPete 8y agoThere is a big difference between what is speculated and what is demonstrated. You can't take a local experiment and apply the findings to larger systems without a lot of uncertainty.
- sethrin 8y agoDo you know, I'm not quite sure what you might mean specifically. Why don't you describe what exactly the problems are with describing the behavior of CO2 at the top-of-atmosphere. What energy transfer mechanism do you think is being missed?
- ThomPete 8y agoTop of atmosphere is not the only part of the ecosystem that's the point.