Global Warming Debate

[Ingwe]

I think that's really what's happening at all scales. The more powerful humanity gets, the more good they could do for themselves in the short term for individuals, but the more damage they do to the entire ecosystem as time goes on. No matter what buttons are pressed, disaster is guaranteed. Humanity will most likely not survive this century, be it from the climate problems, or more likely from religious wars - wars designed to defend some indestructible God which sounds far beyond idiocy to begin with, or perhaps from some unperceived threat. A meteor or something like that probably won't be our end, whether we survive this century or not.

By 200 years from now, technologies will exist that will prevent us from our own extinction - by a meteor perhaps. But nothing will stop the solar cycle from being our true doom. Although the sun will become unstable, it already has begun, humanity will not be able to survive anymore than the next 10 million years I'd imagine. Over long periods of time, we will not even be able to adapt to the sort of changes that are in store.

And in 250 million years, when Pangaea Ultima is expected to form, the climate and oxygen levels will fluctuate wildly, dooming us (if we're here) to either leave the planet and find another home, or accept annihilation. The way the Earth's changed in just the last 100 years, I don't know if I want to be around for longer than another 200 or 300 years. But I know that my kids will grow up in a generation worse than my own now. It doesn't seem there's anything that will stop this next generation from being anything short of the worst nightmare since the middle ages.

But I'm generally a pessimist about everything, because history teaches a cold lesson wrapped in an even colder truth - that although my life may be great, there are more people suffering out there than not. I don't know, that's a bit hard to accept without doing something about it. But I hope this time that humanity can figure out a better way of aleviating suffering than going to war just to thin out our numbers all over again. I look to the days when people can accomplish great tasks without having to increase the body count in the process.

[inked]

uh-oh. WARNING! NON-FITTING DATA POINTS.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ef=online-news


Talk about paradigm fragmentation...................

[Ingwe]

Sounds almost like the newscasters who say coffee's good one day and then they say it's going to blow up the universe the next, but then the next day they say that it cures cancer.

[inked]

EGADS! It never stops.....................

Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature...ticle10866.htm

Global Cooling Chills Summer 2009
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q...JkNTU2Nzk5NWI=

Report: Antarctic Ice Growing, Not Shrinking
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,517035,00.html

Antarctic sea ice increasing: study
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2...23/2550456.htm


30,000 Scientists Rejecting Anthropomorphic Global Warming Hypothesis
http://whatthecrap.wordpress.com/200...ng-hypothesis/


BUT THE LA TIMES IS REPORTING .... http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...65,print.story

and for 2 geologists brief critiques see here in comments......
http://www.kendallharmon.net/t19/ind...5166/#comments

I particularly like the references to geologic time scales and their contextualizations of the Arctic like Louisiana, myself.

[Count Comfect]

There are significant differences between Antarctic ice (which is centered on land, and many miles deep) and Arctic sea ice. The latter will (and is) definitely shrink as the climate changes. The former, located as I mentioned on land and surrounded by open ocean, rather than centered on open ocean and surrounded by (warmer) land, is a much more complicated case and need not shrink with the first stages of climate change. I believe there are actually some warm currents towards the south (think the opposite of the Gulf Stream in the northern hemisphere) that may be disrupted and actually chill Antarctica first. But the most important point is that Antarctic ice unlike Arctic ice is not a first-level indicator of climate change.

And the random variation in individual data points for a year need not indicate a change in overall trend, just like the exceptionally hot year of 1998 did not mean that all the ice sheets melted overnight. As for the 30,000 scientists...read your own links. 30,000 people with a science degree from a university does not make 30,000 scientists. I know plenty of people with degrees in science fields who never planned to go on into science; nor does a "science" degree imply any familiarity with climate change science. I don't recall discussing that topic in relativity physics, for example.

[inked]

Hmmm, when the data don't fit the hypothesis, the hypothesis is supposed to change, isn't it?

global warming =>global cooling=>man-made climate change=>climate change=global warming

science degrees don't equal scientists is verifiable, just look at all the fetishists insisting on global warming when the data don't fit!

I think its an exercise in group hallucination fed off of funding because no matter what the results it must be true that global warming is happening, in lovely pre-Copernican insistence on aristotlean categories, eh?

[Count Comfect]

The key thing to note is that it's not about one data point; it's from large datasets that you make extrapolations. So saying "2009 is cold! Therefore there is no global warming!" is no more legitimate than it would have been to say "1998 is hot! Therefore, the ice caps will melt by 2010!" But the larger datasets still point to global warming on a significant scale.

Also, the data does point to anthropogenic contributions being a significant factor; but the more important point is that even if this is also a natural cycle, we need to do our best to dampen its effect. Who cares (to a certain extent at least) if it's not all our fault (and probably, it is not all our fault)? We still should reduce our emissions and our contribution so that it is lessened, because otherwise we're still screwed. It's like saying "that guy is going to shoot me, and it's not my fault that he's pulling the trigger, so I won't take cover."

[Coffeehouse]

Originally Posted by inked

Hmmm, when the data don't fit the hypothesis, the hypothesis is supposed to change, isn't it?

global warming =>global cooling=>man-made climate change=>climate change=global warming

science degrees don't equal scientists is verifiable, just look at all the fetishists insisting on global warming when the data don't fit!

I think its an exercise in group hallucination fed off of funding because no matter what the results it must be true that global warming is happening, in lovely pre-Copernican insistence on aristotlean categories, eh?

Inked, what amazes me, really, is the level that you're at. I mean these types of arguments are the kind I hear from half-drunk people (who just want to annoy) at 02am on a friday night... You're proving again and again that really you possess very little concrete knowledge on this issue. Instead you're spouting a few tired lines portraying the issue as if scientists across the globe just hopped from one hypothesis to another, willy-nilly. But that's not it.

What is happening is that the level of information and broad scientific inquiry has many-many-many-doubled over the years. Scientists know a lot more about the Earth's climate systems and they have more reliable (both actual field equipment and electronic data collecting) instruments that give them the possibility of analyzing the Earth's climate in a way that was inconceivable as short ago as the beginning of the 1990s.

And just to be clear, as early as the first part of the 1980s signs (accumulating data across the globe) were that our Earth's natural environment was showing troubling reactions to the increasing CO2-emissions and pollution (this is when the word sustainable development also began appearing). The trend has reinforced itself over the years and grown extraordinarily strong the last few years (2003, 2004 seems to have been a point of acceleration).

Originally Posted by Count Comfect

Who cares (to a certain extent at least) if it's not all our fault (and probably, it is not all our fault)? We still should reduce our emissions and our contribution so that it is lessened, because otherwise we're still screwed.

Very good point!

[inked]

You do realize of course that sustainable development means we need to stop consuming so much of the earth's resources in the developed world and downgrade as well as preventing the developing world from developing and doing off, oh, say 5/6 of the current population, to dampen the process at work?

Space mirrors, anyone? Because the CO2 contribution from 5 billion or so human corpses ought to be smidge much, unless Soylent Green and natural cold can store 'em for later usage by the surviving elite (who probably ought to be hunter-gatherers, right?).

On the other hand, SHOULD we dampen any natural process like global warming? Isn't that just as unnatural as CO2 emissions by anthropogenic means by another name?

[GrayMouser]

Originally Posted by inked

You do realize of course that sustainable development means we need to stop consuming so much of the earth's resources in the developed world and downgrade as well as preventing the developing world from developing and doing off, oh, say 5/6 of the current population, to dampen the process at work?

Space mirrors, anyone? Because the CO2 contribution from 5 billion or so human corpses ought to be smidge much, unless Soylent Green and natural cold can store 'em for later usage by the surviving elite (who probably ought to be hunter-gatherers, right?).

On the other hand, SHOULD we dampen any natural process like global warming? Isn't that just as unnatural as CO2 emissions by anthropogenic means by another name?

I think you misclicked here, inked.

Didn't you mean to post this in the "What fantasy world would you live in?" thread?

[inked]

GM, in your #345 this matter came up. Since this is the COVER story for NEWSWEEK, I thought I'd get your opinion. See: http://www.newsweek.com/id/215291/output/print THE CASE FOR KILLING GRANNY.

After reading it, my question for you is would it be better for global warming to sequester the nutrients in these dilapidated non-useful antiquarians and keep them out of the carbon cycle OR should they be recycled a la SOYLENT GREEN? Which would be better for the global climate? And, justify your answer in carbon offsets either way.

Enjoy!

[GrayMouser]

Originally Posted by inked

GM, in your #345 this matter came up. Since this is the COVER story for NEWSWEEK, I thought I'd get your opinion. See: http://www.newsweek.com/id/215291/output/print THE CASE FOR KILLING GRANNY.

After reading it, my question for you is would it be better for global warming to sequester the nutrients in these dilapidated non-useful antiquarians and keep them out of the carbon cycle OR should they be recycled a la SOYLENT GREEN? Which would be better for the global climate? And, justify your answer in carbon offsets either way.

Enjoy!

IT'S PEOPLE

Definitely not- too stringy and gamey.

And what with global warming and all, we won't be able to follow the traditional approach and shove them out on ice floes, and the vultures are all dropping dead due to chemicals fed to cattle, so sky burial is out.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...es-491756.html

I think the burlap bag burial with a sapling planted on top for carbon offsets is probably the best approach, turning Forest Lawn into Forest Forest.


Seriously, though, this is a problem for any kind of health care system, public or private, as the article points out. In a public system treatment is going to have to be rationed in some way, just as it is in a private system.

Private medicine of course rations by ability to pay. As Jesus said on the Sermon on the Mount, "blessed are the poor, for they shall go home and die and stop taking up space people with money could use".

[inked]

GM, was this guy a BAD guy or a GOOD guy?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...676924044.html

After all, without him plenty of people could have starved to death and maybe saved the planet?

And, by the by, the same authority you quote on healthcare by interpolation, actually said, "the poor you have with you always" - not as an object of derision but as on object (in context) for disciples to care for extravagantly - not necesssarily the government. Unless you think all governments should be Christian?

[GrayMouser]

Originally Posted by inked

GM, was this guy a BAD guy or a GOOD guy?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...676924044.html

After all, without him plenty of people could have starved to death and maybe saved the planet?

A very great man, saved far more people than all the Mother Theresas and Mahatma Gandhis put together.

And of course the people in the rich countries have contributed far more to damaging the planet than the people in the poor countries- up till now, anyway.

Don't get me confused with the Luddites of the environmental movement. I'm a great believer in progress through technology, and even when "The Population Bomb " and other apocalyptic works were prophesying Doom I was (fairly) optimistic- I put it down to a solid grounding in Golden Age science-fiction.

I've lived in Africa in the 70s and China in the 80s, so believe me, I've seen the effects of poverty and the wonders of progress- or regress in the case of Africa. Now I live in a country that went from below-Africa standards of poverty to middle-class prosperity in 50 years thanks to industrial development.

I'm all in favour of genetically-modified crops and think nuclear power is going to be necessary for the near future.

That's why I think it's essential for us to face up to GW and start applying technological efforts to mitigate its effects.

Switching to electric cars is a tech fix, installing solar and wind power is a tech fix, mass transit is a tech fix, conservation through insulation is a tech fix- and that and more is going to be needed to pull us through.

Global warming is going to affect the poor far more than it does the rich- 600 million people in the river basins of Asia rely on glacier melt from the Himalayas for survival- when all that water flows down as run-off instead of melting slowly over a growing season there's going to be problems not even Dr. Borlaug could solve.


PS- going to stop any further posting on US health care in this thread, unless someone wants to open a new one.

[inked]

We all know how absolutely reliable the BBC is, now don't we? Have they junped the shark?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm


Well the ABC has, get those shovels out and start digging.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle6872027.ece

Going green!
Going green!
Grow the peas and fruit and beans!
Restore Britain to villainy!
Soylent green!
Soylent green!
For the import failure hunger
Soylent green!

Where is Monty Python when one needs him?

[GrayMouser]

Some other opinions of the BBC article...

I have Hank to "thank" for pointing me towards http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8299079.stm, which was presumably written to prove that the BBC is no longer sane or indeed terribly interested in reality.

Rather than that, you're better off with something like RC: A warming pause?.

Why they write "And our climate models did not forecast it" when what they really mean is "climate models did forecast this but we paid no attention and / or were too stupid to understand, and still are" is... well, entirely obvious when I think about it :-)

http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2009/1...bal_warmin.php

Anyone who insists upon arguing that the climate has cooled since 1998 is misrepresenting, either deliberately or through ignorance, what the temperature records say about the subject. That the BBC should descend to that level is most surprising, and disappointing.

http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoub.../et_tu_bbc.php

Anyway, how is this "jumping the shark"? Did you mean "jumping ship"?

And shouldn't this be in the global warming thread?

[Coffeehouse]

This thread I created to stay clear of the pseudo-scientific hodgepodge and half-truths that permeated the Global Warming thread, by focusing on the solutions not fringe-view denial.

In any case, the BBC article is poor journalism put on display in a usually very factually-centred news organization. The author has done himself a great disfavour by doing sloppy research.

Here's a rebuttal by one of the commentators (a certain DavidCOG) in the journalist's blog:

"This article is atrocious. The author has evidently been picking over denier blogs for his 'science'. It is stuffed full of factual errors, distortion of the science, cherry picking, ignorance of trend analysis and continual false equivalence between the opinion of unnamed 'sceptics' and peer-reviewed, credible climate science.

Here are just some of the errors and distortions in this piece:

1. warmest year on record = 2005, not 1998 - and you don't establish a trend by picking the last high point - due to an extremely strong El Niño - and drawing a line from there. By that method we'd have been in a 'cooling trend' about a dozen times in the past century - when the clear trend is really *up*.

2. warmest ocean temps on record = 2009 (90% of global warming goes in to the oceans) - why is that not mentioned? Is the author ignorant of this very well-known and significant event?

3. "...the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures." - that's wrong - see above - and the 10 warmest years on record all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008. It shouldn't take a genius to realise the significance of that in determining a long-term trend.

4. "...our climate models did not forecast it..." - nonsense. Combined model accuracy is very good - http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...lling-science/

5. "Climate change sceptics, ... say they saw it coming." - 'sceptics' say a lot of things. Most of them aren't true. And if you dredge enough Denier blogs you can find just about any hypothesis.

6. "During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly. Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing." - even though incontrovertible evidence shows that solar output was decreasing while temperatures were rising. He's not quoting 'sceptics', he's quoting scientific illiterates.

7. "...one solar scientist Piers Corbyn ... disagrees." - he's not a 'solar scientist', he's an eccentric weatherman who has a 'secret formula' to predict future weather - and his predictions have an accuracy similar to random guesses - but that doesn't stop him trying to sell them to anyone who is gullible enough to buy them.

8. "According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated." - this is not new science! Does the author think that we just realised that ocean temperature has a relationship to atmospheric temperature?! Incredible.

9. "Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along." - they argue that *anything* that appears to cast doubt on any part of the science proves that they have been right all along. It doesn't make any difference if it is true or supported by science or even if it was known and accepted all along.

10. The comments re. Mojib Latif are Denier spin - Birth of a climate crock - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khikoh3sJg8 explains it

11. "The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly. ... Sceptics disagree." - the same trick over and over - attempt to suggest that there is serious debate, when in fact it is scientists on one side, wingnuts on the other.

12. "One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over.*" - Note the language - first it's "for sure" and then "it seems" that the debate is "far from over". The reality is that there is **no** credible scientific debate about the reality of global warming - there hasn't been for many years.


Basically, this article is built on a false equivalence that climate scientists say one thing and some (unnamed) climate 'sceptics' say another - so the argument must be equally balanced! Let's teach the controversy! It's the exact tactic used by creationists to create 'controversy' where none exists.

I'd say this journo is a Denier who is trying to inject doubt where there is none and distort the science to make it appear there is legitimate debate over what is happening. There is not. There is no credible scientific debate about whether anthropogenic climate change is real - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scienti...climate_change.

The only legitimate, credible debate in climate science now is "How bad? How fast?"

This piece of 'journalism' is a disgraceful misrepresentation of the state of climate science. The BBC should pull it - and the author. Move him back to weather presenting, because he is clearly not capable of writing about climate science.

[Alcuin]

I am always concerned that there is something terribly wrong with an idea when its proponents:

1. demand unreasoning acquiescence;
2. vilify their opponents rather than debate their positions;
3. try by every means to silence their opposition;
4. the principal proponents are the recipients of vast sums of government largess dependent upon public acceptance of that idea; and
5. the principal proponents are altering laws and creating regulations to enrich themselves.

Yesterday was 14 October 2009 in the United States. It is quite cold across this country today: Missoula, Montana, has just reported record cold temperatures for this time of year; State College, Pennsylvania, is extremely cold; Chicago is the coldest it’s been in 82 years; and the cold weather is moving east. One of my friends in New Jersey told me it was snowing at his home today.

There are no sunspots right now: we are at a solar minimum. There certainly appears to be a correlation between sunspot cycle length and temperature here on earth. And all the earth’s surface heat, save some volcanism which is too small at this stage in the planet’s lifecycle to heat the whole place, comes from the sun. (Click the picture to go to its source.)

Now, what makes more sense: the idea something people did heated the earth’s surface? Or that the sun is doing something interesting? This is the all-time great tech support question: If your computer won’t start, did you check to see if it’s plugged in? Look at the mechanism: all our heat is coming from the sun. Before blaming people for something, check the power source.


This is a link to an article from Newsweek, April 28, 1975. In it one of the climate experts remarks,

To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading.

Well, that’s probably true, because a lot of laymen are running scared like a herd of cattle: a technique our ancestors used in the Paleolithic period to hunt them by chasing them off a cliff. The expert cited in this piece is lobbying for government intervention to stop global cooling.

Many years ago, when I was a freshman in college, I met a girl who had written for the college newspaper who had taken a job as an editor at some horrible check-out newspaper that featured headlines like, “Lyndon Johnson was an alien from Mars!� and that sort of thing. I asked her if she were embarrassed about what she did, and she said no. She said that publicists sometimes even called them and asked that this or that person be accused of being or associating with aliens or ghosts or somesuch. Then she surprised me by telling me that her publication, which had been in business since the 1920s (and remains in business today), kept old articles it had printed and regularly recycled them, changing the names of the celebrities and various details of the story to update them for republication: it looked like a new story, but it was really a tall tale that had been around for twenty or fifty years.

Now, consider the first and last sentences of the last paragraph of the Newsweek article:

Climatologists are pessimistic that policy leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the change, or even to allay its effects. … The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climate change once the results become grim reality.

Here’s an article from Time magazine, Monday, June 24, 1974. Same subject, same conclusion. Last two sentences in the article:

University of Toronto Climatologist Kenneth Hare, a former president of the Royal Meteorological Society, believes that the continuing drought and the recent failure of the Russian harvest gave the world a grim premonition of what might happen. Warns Hare: “I don’t believe that the world’s present population is sustainable if there are more than three years like 1972 in a row.�

You have to congratulate Time for being honest enough to leave this on their website. Not everybody on the Global Warming bandwagon is so honest. The New York Times has apparently restricted or removed its famous story from May 21, 1975, “Scientists Ask Why World Climate Is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead�; however, there are still copies of it on the web . It begins,

The world’s climate is changing. Of that scientists are firmly convinced. But in what direction and why are the subjects of deepening debate.

That certainly sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The next paragraph continues,

There are specialists who say that a new ice age is underway...

This New York Times article isn’t trash – A. M. Rosenthal and Punch Sulzberger fired reporters who slanted stories – and it gives a pretty good overview of the thinking of the day. A lot of serious people, led by reputable scientists who were acknowledged leaders in climatology and meteorology, really believed we were going to go into ice age.

Here’s a weblog, “The 1970’s Ice Age lie, co-starring George Will and James Inhofe�, that declares that climate change

…Deniers are not confused or mistaken, they are outright lying.

This statement is remarkable. I lived through the 1970s. I remember reading the articles, watching the television shows, and listening to the politicians of the day: they were all scared about a “new ice age.� When I was a teenager, global cooling was as controversial as global warming is today. The trendy, “in� people were all afraid of global cooling. That anyone would deny this, especially in the face of the vast number of articles and publications from that period that are readily available online, not to mention in local libraries all across the United States and presumably around the world, I can only interpret either outright dishonesty or stunning gullibility, though there might be some other reason I cannot fathom.

When people come about with strange notions – “The earth is flat,� or “Neil Armstrong never landed on the moon,� – we laugh them off because we can afford to: The truth will out. If someone denies that London or New York City exists, we simply shake our heads and laugh at them: again, The truth will out.

We know the earth is not flat because many people – some folks participating in Entmoot and reading this posting – have circumnavigated it. The testimony not only of astronauts, cosmonauts, and hundreds of thousands of men and women who worked in the American and Soviet manned space programs, but of objects retrieved from the lunar surface, demonstrate the fact of lunar exploration. I have been to both London and New York: I testify that they are real places.

Catastrophic global warming clearly does not fall into this category. If catastrophic man-made global warming were truly indisputable, its proponents would not need to attack each and every person who disagrees with them as if they were heretics or infidels.

I have an extensive background in science and engineering. Engineering, which makes stuff, is quite different from science, even though the two are intimately intertwined.

If I build a bridge or a building, or I construct a machine, I have a thing, a physical accomplishment, to which all of us can refer. Scientific theory should be able to deliver a useful prediction, and I may use it to engineer a result; but even if scientific theory predicts something, that doesn’t make it true: the classic example of a faulty theory that, at least to a limited extent, made practical predictions is that of Ptolemy, who accurately predicted the positions of the planets and accounted for retrograde motion – but as we see it, Ptolemy was dead wrong about what how the planets moved, even though his theory predicted where they’d be with considerable accuracy. And the result was phenomenally bad, even though you could predict planetary positions with tremendous accuracy: poor Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for daring to dispute Ptolemy. Aristotle believed that

a flat piece of iron or lead is able to float on the water while objects which are smaller but round or elongated, such as a needle, would sink.

That Archimedes discovered the correct reason was no defense and broadly denied, particularly by well-educated people until the seventeenth century: Galileo’s troubles with the Inquisition may have begun not with his heliocentric view of the universe, but his public rejection of Aristotle’s facile explanation of why some things float and others sink.

Lest you think this merely an historical argument, let me remind you of two notions overturned in my lifetime. Continental drift was put forward by Alfred Wegener in 1912. Wikipedia calls Wegener “a German scientist, geologist, and meteorologist�, but in his own lifetime, he was a professional meteorologist, and he died in Greenland studying arctic atmospherics and climate. Wegener is today regarded as one of the leading thinkers in geology in the twentieth century, but the Wikipedia editor is re-writing history: Wegener’s theory was derided in his lifetime, and he was ridiculed by the experts: after all, how could continents move? Continental drift was not broadly accepted scientific theory until the 1960s and 1970s.

When men landed on the moon, theories about how the moon was formed abounded. It wasn’t until supercomputers came along that the giant impact hypothesis was seriously considered as the leading contender in the past 15 years; and even now, there are serious scientists who doubt it. For all anybody really knows, they could be right: neither you nor I was there when the moon was formed.

I happen to believe in string theory. A lot of serious physicists do not: right now, it’s a theory you can’t test. And in science, if you can’t test a theory, it isn’t science: it’s philosophy: it’s belief.

What “science� believes – what the public perceives as “scientific consensus,� something all too often divorced from the real consensus belief of practitioners, which may in turn be far removed from the beliefs of theoreticians – is changing all the time. A great example of this, only one step removed to my own field, is the belief in “structured products� in finance – things like mortgage-backed securities (MBS), asset-backed securities (ABS), and collateralized debt obligations (CDO). I’ve distrusted them for decades: but the people who “knew� they worked believed – and brooked no dispute. And we can all see how well that turned out.

Whether it’s about global warming, how the government should spend money, how you count votes, or who should be dogcatcher, be suspicious of anybody who

• demands unreasoning acquiescence;
• vilifies his opponents rather than debate their positions;
• tries by every means to silence his opposition;
• receives vast sums of government money only as long as the public accepts what he propounds; and
• seeks to alter laws and regulations to enrich himself at others’ expense.

This is just like the structured debt securities: Don’t let some guy with a string of letters at the end of his name and impressive titles at the beginning scare you into believing something that just so-happens to make him a lot of money!

Now, if you still choose to believe in catastrophic man-made global warming, that’s your belief. It isn’t mine. I’m all for reducing emissions, being clean, going green, and trying to leave a decent place for my children’s children’s children to live – think ahead to the seventh generation if you can. I even know some projects I think must be funded that will accomplish these purposes. But I don’t buy into catastrophic man-made global warming.

What I have to say is the next paragraph is accurate whether you believe in God or not. If you choose to not believe in God, consider it textual analysis, and humor me.

In the Torah, God sends the ten plagues upon the Egyptians, parts the water, and feeds the people with manna. In the Gospels, Jesus fulfills the prophecies, heals the sick, and raises the dead. If God thinks it’s important to prove His position, Man should prove his, too.

Now, you can disagree with me. You can even think I’m foolish. But please have the common decency to respect my right to disagree.

And do yourself a favor: look at the other side of the argument. Don’t just “pass over it�: look at it. Read what they’re saying. Use your own mind. Weigh the evidence. Think for yourself.

[Coffeehouse]

The problem Alcuin, is that not a shred of counter-evidence was proposed in that post as an argument against the, no not theory, but reality of anthropogenic global warming. So until you present actual evidence that challenges the data of anno 2009, instead tracking down old articles in the archives of Time on 'global cooling' to show some seeming parallel to today, there's really not much to debate.

That's the problem isn't it. The one's who whole-heartedly pronounce their skepticism seem to lack the substance when actual questions are asked. What do they know that the vastness of today's scientists don't know? What secret information about corruption by, f.ex., the Norwegian scientists operating in Svalbard, do these skeptics possess? And last but not least, why is the mass of evidence piling up every single day, and why is the consensus strengthening, not weakening... is there something you know Alcuin which scientists around the world don't know or have failed to understand? Does that secret lie buried in Time articles from the 1970s or isolated temperature lows?

Alcuin, anthropogenic global warming isn't controversial, it is very much happening. There is a difference then between denying, the act of which you seem to be engaging in, and questioning, which implies healthy scepticism based on ACTUAL lack of evidence, which isn't the case for global warming.

[Count Comfect]

Alcuin,

I think you're confusing "demanding unreasonable acquiescence" and "demanding evidence, and insisting that without evidence people shut up." And why do you assume that we haven't read the arguments in the other direction? That's what most of this thread is, people responding to those very arguments. You have the right to disagree, of course; but remember the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts."

Further: comparing financial instruments to climate science is rather insulting to the scientists; the financial sector is famous for not paying attention to the past history of success or failure of various financial instruments, precisely the opposite of revising scientific hypotheses in light of evidence (see the boom/bust cycle since at least the S&L debacle in the late 1980s...it's all about screwing up credit, even the most recent one). The very willingness of science to revise in the light of evidence is the whole reason you can find those quotes from the 1970s; and much like the facts that I write this post on a computer the size of my stomach, instead of the room I'm in; that I post it onto a world-wide Internet connecting millions of such computers; and that I post it without feeding programmed punch cards into the machine that malfunction if a literal bug gets into them, a lot has changed since the 1970s, especially in our ability calculate and compute trends out of masses of data using computers like this one (or better, actually) . Heck, in my lifetime, which I will admit is much shorter than that, we've gone from 64k computers to breaking the terabyte. So let's remember that data analysis is immensely better then than it was; and we have a lot more evidence, since we've also massively expanded data collection in that same time.

Additionally, I think you're simply in error about the idea that science funding for climate science is increased by the scientific consensus on global warming. Contested science is actually by far the easiest science to get grants for, because people want to fund the establishment of consensus; if everyone roughly agrees, it's actually a lot harder to get the government/various non-profit funders to cut the checks.