"Global warming is real and humans are responsbile"

wexandproud

there was a guy on george hook yesterday from the pro side who when questioned about riseing temperatures, had to concede that we mmmm sort of overestimated the temperature rise and when asked about something else, mmmmm we sort of overestimated that aswell. this is a guy who was adament he was right and we were supposed to believe him. also he said they worked with met eireann, i mean fcuk me they cant tell the weather 3 or 4 days in advance

kneemos

wexandproud wrote: »

there was a guy on george hook yesterday from the pro side who when questioned about riseing temperatures, had to concede that we mmmm sort of overestimated the temperature rise and when asked about something else, mmmmm we sort of overestimated that aswell. this is a guy who was adament he was right and we were supposed to believe him. also he said they worked with met eireann, i mean fcuk me they cant tell the weather 3 or 4 days in advance

That guy is a professor apparently.
He was on before with Michael Graham and he sounded like an unruly teenager.Tantrums were had.

CiDeRmAn

I do find the sceptic side of the climate change issue to be, essentially, anti science.
The larger body of statistics worldwide indicate that global warming is real. It is having a real, deleterious effect on the world around us, right now.
The issue then is, are we to blame.
Certainly there have been periods of warming and cooling in the planets history, these have been caused by any number of natural phenomena. One of these has been the effect of increased vulcanism. This results in large amounts of CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere, changing the degree that it traps heat.
I don't think anyone is going to dispute that that actually happened.
So now, here we are.
For the part century we are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, essentially an artificial volcanic source, and having the same effect.

The weight of scientific opinion is behind this.
A more responsible approach to what we pollute the world with would be prudent, even if global warming didn't exist.

CiDeRmAn

kneemos wrote: »

That guy is a professor apparently.
He was on before with Michael Graham and he sounded like an unruly teenager.Tantrums were had.

Graham is a nasty little right wing fear monger, a wanker as our president put it. Let him get get back to his tea baggers.

kneemos

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

I do find the sceptic side of the climate change issue to be, essentially, anti science.
The larger body of statistics worldwide indicate that global warming is real. It is having a real, deleterious effect on itthe world around us, right now.
The issue then is, are we to blame.
Certainly there have been periods of warming and cooling in the planets history, these have been caused by any number of natural phenomena. One of these has been the effect of increased vulcanism. This results in large amounts of CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere, changing the degree that it traps heat.
I don't think anyone is going to dispute that that actually happened.
So now, here we are.
For the part century we are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, essentially an artificial volcanic source, and having the same effect.

The weight of scientific opinion is behind this.
A more responsible approach to what we pollute the world with would be prudent, even if global warming didn't exist.

They have ruined their cause by scaremongering.
Why they would do such a thing I don't know.Perhaps self interest.

CiDeRmAn

If a large portion of the planets population seems resolute in it's desire to increase the amount of pollutants being produced, the US, China, developing nations world wide, and you see where the atmospheric models are going to lead us, some urgency is understamdable.

I have a relation who has travelled in and around the Arctic and Antarctic, from his perspective the changes to these regions are undeniable, with ancient ice sheets being eroded and broken away.

I don't think there is much to be gained, economically, with a sensible approach to atmospheric pollutants in particular, this is why so many groups are unwilling to accept it.
Medium and Long term gain has never been humans strong point.
The consequences of global warming, even at the lower end of expectations, are dire, and thats just the effects we can predict.
Then we get on to the Gulf Streams trajectory being diverted by the influx of cold water, if that's the case we'll wish we had global warming.

kneemos

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

If a large portion of the planets population seems resolute in it's desire to increase the amount of pollutants being produced, the US, China, developing nations world wide, and you see where the atmospheric models are going to lead us, some urgency is understamdable.




I have a relation who has travelled in and around the Arctic and Antarctic, from his perspective the changes to these regions are undeniable, with ancient ice sheets being eroded and broken away.

I don't think there is much to be gained, economically, with a sensible approach to atmospheric pollutants in particular, this is why so many groups are unwilling to accept it.
Medium and Long term gain has never been humans strong point.
The consequences of global warming, even at the lower end of expectations, are dire, and thats just the effects we can predict.
Then we get on to the Gulf Streams trajectory being diverted by the influx of cold water, if that's the case we'll wish we had global warming.

Fair enough.You won't be surprised when people don't believe you then.

CiDeRmAn

kneemos wrote: »

Fair enough.You won't be surprised when people don't believe you then.

Why?

kneemos

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Why?

It's the urgency and exaggeration in the message that has lost you public support.Though no doubt Governments will continue to impose carbon taxes.

Rubeter

kneemos wrote: »

They have ruined their cause by scaremongering.
Why they would do such a thing I don't know.Perhaps self interest.

Oh so you would believe them if they said it's happening but no need to worry.
That's not a very intelligent reason whether to believe something or not (actually it's a stupid one), Personally I make my choice based on the evidence given.

karma_

kneemos wrote: »

It's the urgency and exaggeration in the message that has lost you public support.Though no doubt Governments will continue to impose carbon taxes.

It's greedy men protecting vested interests who have muddied the waters on this issue, unfortunately there is no shortage of complete arsehóles who believe them.

kneemos

Rubeter wrote: »

Oh so you would believe them if they said it's happening but no need to worry.
That's not a very intelligent reason whether to believe something or not (actually it's a stupid one), Personally I make my choice based on the evidence given.

Better chance of being believed if you don't tell lies.

karma_

kneemos wrote: »

Better chance of being believed if you don't tell lies.

Do you even see teh irony in this?

kneemos

karma_ wrote: »

Do you even see teh irony in this?

No.

Rubeter

kneemos wrote: »

No.

You would believe them if they lied and said it was grand.

karma_

kneemos wrote: »

No.

That sums it up then so.

Going Forward

kneemos wrote: »

They have ruined their cause by scaremongering.
Why they would do such a thing I don't know.Perhaps self interest.

The greening.

And I feel the need to pay more carbon taxes as atonement.

Akrasia

kneemos wrote: »

It's the urgency and exaggeration in the message that has lost you public support.Though no doubt Governments will continue to impose carbon taxes.

If you go to the hospital with symptoms of Leukemia and you are assessed by a consultant oncologist and he tells you that you do have Leukemia and that it's very serious and you have to go on radiation therapy and chemotherapy straight away to stand any chance of survival, would you ignore him because he was being alarmist?

Would you ignore him because he works for a private hospital that charges insurance companies for medical treatment?

Lets say you go for a second opinion in a different hospital with a different oncologist and the same diagnosis is given but there is a slight variation and slightly different prognosis is given, but the treatment is still the same and it is still described as a very serious condition that requires immediate treatment

Would you ignore both diagnosis because there was a slight difference even though the message is the same?

Would you ignore the diagnosis because 'the human body is too complex, we don't understand everything about it, maybe the illness is caused by something else that will go away by itself'?

Would you ignore both doctors because they are both doctors and they all have a vested interest in diagnosing illness (if nobody was sick, there would be no need for doctors)

Lets say you get a third opinion, this time, not from an Oncologist, but from an 'Alternative medicine practice'
They look at your lifestyle 'holistically' and diagnose that you have an illness, but it's caused by 'toxins' in your body that are 'blocking your life force'.It's no big deal, you'll be fine and you can cure the illness by simply taking an 'all natural' detox product every day. The detox won't have any side effects unlike all the nasty chemicals which the hospital doctors are trying to give you.

What would you do?

Who would you believe?

Would you give all 3 opinions equal weight?

Lets ignore the third option for a moment, just sticking to Oncologists, would you think it's a good idea to keep getting more and more 'second opinions' until you finally find one doctor who tells you you don't have cancer and then ignore all the other diagnosis and decide not to take any treatment?

Does your emotional response to the message have any impact on which diagnosis is correct?

Does the cost of the treatment have any impact on which diagnosis is correct?

Because there is some disagreement between all 3 diagnosis, does this mean that none of them can be trusted, or all of them have to be given equal weight?


Please consider this and answer these questions honestly.

loveisdivine

I'm sure a lot of posters have seen this before, but whenever I see debates about climate change this is always the first thing that springs to mind.

cnocbui

steddyeddy wrote: »

Good scientific comeback. I'm guessing the scientific accuracy in this thread is going to be off the scale!

You want 'science' do you?

Would you like to describe the scientific method for everyone, then I'll be glad to point out a tiny little problem with the IPCCs position.

Oh, and 'Climate Change' isn't a hypothesis, it's an observation.

Akrasia

cnocbui wrote: »

You want 'science' do you?

Would you like to describe the scientific method for everyone, then I'll be glad to point out a tiny little problem with the IPCCs position.

Oh, and 'Climate Change' isn't a hypothesis, it's an observation.

The observation that the global average temperature is warming is explained by the hypothesis that humans are emitting greenhouse gasses that are altering the composition of our atmosphere and trapping excess heat from the Sun that would otherwise be radiated into space.

This hypothesis has been confirmed by experimentation, observation and by applying the laws of physics

That animal species change over time is an observation that is explained by the hypothesis that genes are selected by the process of natural selection and adaptation.

kneemos

Akrasia wrote: »

If you go to the hospital with symptoms of Leukemia and you are assessed by a consultant oncologist and he tells you that you do have Leukemia and that it's very serious and you have to go on radiation therapy and chemotherapy straight away to stand any chance of survival, would you ignore him because he was being alarmist?

Would you ignore him because he works for a private hospital that charges insurance companies for medical treatment?

Lets say you go for a second opinion in a different hospital with a different oncologist and the same diagnosis is given but there is a slight variation and slightly different prognosis is given, but the treatment is still the same and it is still described as a very serious condition that requires immediate treatment

Would you ignore both diagnosis because there was a slight difference even though the message is the same?

Would you ignore the diagnosis because 'the human body is too complex, we don't understand everything about it, maybe the illness is caused by something else that will go away by itself'?

Would you ignore both doctors because they are both doctors and they all have a vested interest in diagnosing illness (if nobody was sick, there would be no need for doctors)

Lets say you get a third opinion, this time, not from an Oncologist, but from an 'Alternative medicine practice'
They look at your lifestyle 'holistically' and diagnose that you have an illness, but it's caused by 'toxins' in your body that are 'blocking your life force'.It's no big deal, you'll be fine and you can cure the illness by simply taking an 'all natural' detox product every day. The detox won't have any side effects unlike all the nasty chemicals which the hospital doctors are trying to give you.

What would you do?

Who would you believe?

Would you give all 3 opinions equal weight?

Lets ignore the third option for a moment, just sticking to Oncologists, would you think it's a good idea to keep getting more and more 'second opinions' until you finally find one doctor who tells you you don't have cancer and then ignore all the other diagnosis and decide not to take any treatment?

Does your emotional response to the message have any impact on which diagnosis is correct?

Does the cost of the treatment have any impact on which diagnosis is correct?

Because there is some disagreement between all 3 diagnosis, does this mean that none of them can be trusted, or all of them have to be given equal weight?


Please consider this and answer these questions honestly.

I made a comment previously about all the analogies that run throughout this thread for some reason.
I don't think we know nearly enough yet to go making the radical cutbacks the greens would like to see.

Akrasia

Analogy is an excellent way of getting a point across in a clear manner. If I start using false analogies, feel free to call me or anyone else on it, but argument using analogy is a perfectly legitimate communication method.

We don't know nearly enough yet about cancer either, but when you have a cancer diagnosis, it's serious enough that we're willing to deliberately poison ourselves in the hope that we will kill the cancer before we die of the poison.

We have a climate diagnosis based on the limited data we have available and it says that if we don't act now, there is a very high probability (over 95%) that we will cause global temperatures to keep increasing beyond levels that will have drastic consequences on the habitability of our biosphere.

The Diagnosis is agreed by 97% of all the experts in the field.

What you're doing is looking for contrarian opinion so you can continue burying your head in the sand, meanwhile the problem gets worse and worse.
Just like a cancer, there is a point that we will reach where it becomes incurable.

A cancer starts off as one problem, one part of one system in our body runs out of control, and then it goes metastatic. It spreads and infects other systems. Global warming is going to infect all of the systems on our planet.

KyussBishop

kneemos wrote: »

I made a comment previously about all the analogies that run throughout this thread for some reason.
I don't think we know nearly enough yet to go making the radical cutbacks the greens would like to see.

See, while the reasons to disagree with this post should be obvious to most (i.e. the need to do something about impending climate change), it actually touches on the most important issue in the whole debate: Economics.

Unfortunately, that's such a rhetoric/crap/pseudoscience filled topic, that most people are bored by mere mention of it, and the rest are sensibly wary enough to stay away; however, it is the single most important topic, for resolving human caused climate change.

We are in an economic system, run in such a way as to depend upon permanent economic growth, and economic growth as it is currently defined (roughly) means increasing pollution as well (because we aren't going to develop any good enough climate-saving energy tech anytime soon - we only have a few small pieces of that overall puzzle).

So, environmentalists already immediately lose the discussion: Due to the way economics is taught and run, slowing/halting growth is called cutting-back (even though it is just arresting growth so as to not make the problem worse), and in the current economic system it's neither a solution or sustainable economically (trying to arrest growth just accelerates the occurrance of economic crisis, at which stage the 'green' reforms are reversed as economically impractical).


To actually begin to make any real changes, environmentalists need to learn about making economies not depend on permanent growth, which means learning about the difference between debt-based money (requires permanent growth), and non-debt-based money (which can be used to form a steady-state economy, that does not require permanent growth).

This is a debate that so few people know about, with supporters of non-debt-based money having such a hard time gaining political notability (they are as far down as you can get on the overton window - you even get trolled to death by the 'free market' types when you bring it up on boards, and it is heavily limited from discussion on Politics - to the point that there is a serious chilling effect on the topic); it is a debate that has progressed so little, and is so suppressed because of the controversy it generates, that it is probably decades away from the point where it may actually happen.

Until that is resolved, there will be no lasting solution put in place to arrest climate change (just things that paper-over the bigger problem - things worth doing anyway, sure, but not good enough); I'm personally convinced, that it is not possible in an economic system that depends upon permanent growth (there will be no technological 'magic-bullet' to fix it in time either).

Akrasia

And Just for clarity, I'm not saying that cancer is the same as global warming, I am analysing the deniers attitude towards receiving the bad news of a cancer diagnosis.

None of the arguments you are using for rejecting the climate change hypothesis would stand if you replace global climate change with personal cancer diagnosis.

Akrasia

KyussBishop wrote: »

See, while the reasons to disagree with this post should be obvious to most (i.e. the need to do something about impending climate change), it actually touches on the most important issue in the whole debate: Economics.

Unfortunately, that's such a rhetoric/crap/pseudoscience filled topic, that most people are bored by mere mention of it, and the rest are sensibly wary enough to stay away; however, it is the single most important topic, for resolving human caused climate change.

We are in an economic system, run in such a way as to depend upon permanent economic growth, and economic growth as it is currently defined (roughly) means increasing pollution as well (because we aren't going to develop any good enough climate-saving energy tech anytime soon - we only have a few small pieces of that overall puzzle).

So, environmentalists already immediately lose the discussion: Due to the way economics is taught and run, slowing/halting growth is called cutting-back (even though it is just arresting growth so as to not make the problem worse), and in the current economic system it's neither a solution or sustainable economically (trying to arrest growth just accelerates the occurrance of economic crisis, at which stage the 'green' reforms are reversed as economically impractical).


To actually begin to make any real changes, environmentalists need to learn about making economies not depend on permanent growth, which means learning about the difference between debt-based money (requires permanent growth), and non-debt-based money (which can be used to form a steady-state economy, that does not require permanent growth).

This is a debate that so few people know about, with supporters of non-debt-based money having such a hard time gaining political notability (they are as far down as you can get on the overton window - you even get trolled to death by the 'free market' types when you bring it up on boards, and it is heavily limited from discussion on Politics - to the point that there is a serious chilling effect on the topic); it is a debate that has progressed so little, and is so suppressed because of the controversy it generates, that it is probably decades away from the point where it may actually happen.

Until that is resolved, there will be no lasting solution put in place to arrest climate change (just things that paper-over the bigger problem - things worth doing anyway, sure, but not good enough); I'm personally convinced, that it is not possible in an economic system that depends upon permanent growth (there will be no technological 'magic-bullet' to fix it in time either).

One interesting quirk of the economic system is that economic growth includes destructive activities.

What I mean is, if a house burns down, that's not an econmic loss, it's an opportunity to build a new house and this is counted as economic growth.

We have the opportunity to tear down the old oil based infrastructure and build a 21st century energy infrastructure that will serve us far better, and this will look good on the economic growth statistics

The main barrier is that it would involve a Monitary policy to allow us to inflate away all the debts incurred under the oil regime so we can 'borrow' more to make the investment in our own future.

To 99.99% of the worlds population, this would not have any impact on thier wealth. However, it would impact the current oligarchy and those who are directly invested in the current extractive energy technologies. It is these people who the 'climate change skeptics' are fighting for, not the 99.999% of the rest of us.

It's crazy that the keyboard warriers worried about paying a little bit in extra carbon taxes are really fighting the war on behalf of Saudi and Russian oil Oligarchs

cnocbui

Akrasia wrote: »

The observation that the global is warming is explained by the hypothesis that humans are emitting greenhouse gasses that are altering the composition of our atmosphere and trapping excess heat from the Sun that would otherwise be radiated into space.

This hypothesis has been confirmed by experimentation, observation and by applying the laws of physics

That animal species change over time is an observation that is explained by the hypothesis that genes are selected by the process of natural selection and adaptation.

But the earth has not been warming for the last 16 years even though CO2 levels have been rising continuously, therefore the hypothesis that rising CO2 levels cause warming of the atmosphere and the Earth has not been supported.

If the predictions arising from a hypothesis are not supported by actual observations, the hypothesis should be rejected.

FootShooter

cnocbui wrote: »

But the earth has not been warming for the last 16 years even though CO2 levels have been rising continuously, therefore the hypothesis that rising CO2 levels cause warming of the atmosphere and the Earth has not been supported.

If the predictions arising from a hypothesis are not supported by actual observations, the hypothesis should be rejected.

So wrong.

Air temperature rise has slowed down, it has not stopped warming entirely. It has just gone down to 0.05C per decade between 1998-2012. In comparison it was 0.12C per decade for the entirety of 1950-2012.
2000-2010 was the warmest decade ever recorded. Meanwhile the temperature of the ocean from 0-2000m has warmed increasingly. The ocean absorbs 93% of excess heat anyway.
http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/temps.jpg?

The temperature rise is not a linear trend, it's influenced by a range of short-term variations. The standard in climate science is therefore to look at nothing less than 30 year periods to deduce any sort of long term trend, to filter out the noise of short-term climate variability.
Short-term climate variability includes El Nino/La nina phenomenas. La Nina leads to colder temperatures, and since 1998 there have been 8 La Nina events, which is way more than usual.

wexandproud

reall shows the attitude of some people on boards that when they are having a discussion and somebody strongly dissagrees with them so they refer to them as "keyboard warriors", while they themselves are on here argueing their point as well.

also just because someone does not agree with the cause of "global warming" or "climate change" as they now call it, does not make them a sceptic or anti science, its just that they choose to believe different scientific information.
regarding the analogy of cancer [not very nice by the way]. there is nobody denying climate change [ cancer as you say] what they are differing about is what caused it

Rubeter

wexandproud wrote: »

also just because someone does not agree with the cause of "global warming" or "climate change" as they now call it, does not make them a sceptic or anti science, its just that they choose to believe different scientific information.
regarding the analogy of cancer [not very nice by the way]. there is nobody denying climate change [ cancer as you say] what they are differing about is what caused it

What scientific information would that be? and from who?