Talking to you is hopeless. You have already made up your mind and you prefer to be clueless and ignorant. Fine, be clueless and ignorant.
Okay, we can cut down on the name-calling and insulting, please.
North Pole ice completely vanishes this year?
- Thread starter TheMasterOfOrion
- Start date
Okay, we can cut down on the name-calling and insulting, please.
i was just quitting both of these conversations.
i'm being played, and i'm done playing.
edit;
http://trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=66964
i'm being played, and i'm done playing.
edit;
http://trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=66964
Last edited:
And ... how much has it risen since, say ... 1934? Just to see what happens when you're not the one picking start and end points.
Nor does the scientific consensus determine the future.
I haven't been saying that the scientific consensus is wrong, just that I'm not convinced it's right. I don't believe that we know for certain what the global climate is going to be like in 100 years.
I don't think my lack of conviction is unreasonable given the complex nature of Earth's climate.
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On that vein, I'd argue that the most beneficial and most important aspect of the global warming scare is the impetus on at least trying to understand climate and climate change. Until now, research on that has been extremely lax, even and especially considering the resources available. Even before supercomputing, we did have good, solid climate data and good, solid thermodynamics, and we might have made a head start in understanding how various factors such as mankind's little endeavors affect the climate.
It doesn't matter much what the climate is like in the near or midterm future: mankind will have to adapt to all sorts of stuff, and climate change will be just one more challenge there. Predictions might help, especially if they hit the mark, but they aren't absolutely necessary. Simply understanding the underlying mechanisms is one of the two important things here.
But the other is the very act of, for the first time, trying to come to grips with mankind's effects on the nature. We've never done that before. We don't know what we don't know about it. We don't have any idea of what to do to affect things one way or another. Accepting that sort of impotence is contrary to human nature, no matter whether we're talking about the inability to kick up major industries that pollute the globe as a side product (we've remedied that already), or the inability to regulate the level of pollution to our personal satisfaction (the issue at hand now).
Ultimately, we need to study climate change (and, as an initial axiom or at least initial hypothesis, accept climate change) because we need the sense of being in control. And some day we may need the control for the sake of our survival, too - that part just isn't necessarily quite as crucial as some may claim, but this doesn't matter.
Timo Saloniemi
It doesn't matter much what the climate is like in the near or midterm future: mankind will have to adapt to all sorts of stuff, and climate change will be just one more challenge there. Predictions might help, especially if they hit the mark, but they aren't absolutely necessary. Simply understanding the underlying mechanisms is one of the two important things here.
But the other is the very act of, for the first time, trying to come to grips with mankind's effects on the nature. We've never done that before. We don't know what we don't know about it. We don't have any idea of what to do to affect things one way or another. Accepting that sort of impotence is contrary to human nature, no matter whether we're talking about the inability to kick up major industries that pollute the globe as a side product (we've remedied that already), or the inability to regulate the level of pollution to our personal satisfaction (the issue at hand now).
Ultimately, we need to study climate change (and, as an initial axiom or at least initial hypothesis, accept climate change) because we need the sense of being in control. And some day we may need the control for the sake of our survival, too - that part just isn't necessarily quite as crucial as some may claim, but this doesn't matter.
Timo Saloniemi
The scientific consensus is the best we know. It may not convince you, but that means nothing.
There are wars today because of climate change. Be that change man-made or natural does not matter - people fight and die because of it, and there is little help.
It's not important to know how the world will be in a hundred years. Nobody "knows" that. But what we know today is that with more changes (guaranteed to come), the potential for war, famine and diseases in many parts of the world, especially poor parts, will go through the roof.
There is no way to discuss that away, and no way to deny the responsibilies.
The problem with someone predicting the ice melting from the Arctic is that if it demonstrably doesn't happen as looks like the story this year, the backlash throws out the baby with the bathwater. Therefore the whole concept of climate change comes under suspicion when in fact it was only a rather iffy prediction which was suspect.
But if a theory lacks predictive value, it should be carefully re-examined. A few years ago, we were being told by some climatologists and Gore that hurricanes like Katrina were going to become the norm and that the 2006 hurricane season would bring worse storms. This came as a bit of a surprise to folks who actually study hurricanes, but their objections didn't find much support in television and print. When the 2006 bubble burst and no hurricanes like Katrina materialized, alarmists pointed out that it was a fluke and that 2007 would put us back on track. As in 2006, those who questioned this prediction were lumped into the "denier" camp and ignored. But then 2007 came and went with nothing like Katrina.
This happens again and again. We're told by the fear mongers that temperatures are going to keep getting hotter and hotter ... but for the moment the global temperature has stabilized and may even be cooling. We're told that a given drought is caused by global warming, then a flood, then a cold snap. "Global Warming" as an alarmist and political agenda seems to be utterly unfalsifiable. But in science, a theory must have predictive value. There must be criteria that, if found in recorded data, disproves the initial hypothesis and sends researchers back to their initial premises to start over. If I held out a hammer, let it go, and the damned thing failed to fall or fell up without the presence another force, the theory of gravity would be doomed. If I kept dumping energy into the thrust of a rocket and it accelerated to and past the speed of light, Special Relativity would become a footnote in scientific history. But with global warming, even a downward trend in global temperatures somehow becomes accepted as being mankind's fault.
I have no objections to studying climate change as a science -- the climate varies on large and small scales and the mechanisms of this change remain largely shrouded, but I think the politics of environmental activists, modern luddites, and people opposed to western economic and industrial growth have found in anthropogenic climate change the perfect storm for their various agendas.
And please, BCI, don't preach to me about a "consensus" ... that's politics, too. True, it does tell us something about what most scientists in a given field believe, but it does nothing to tell us the truth. There was a consensus against plate tectonics that took sixty years to go away. A consensus that believed in the Piltdown Man that set anthropology back for thirty years. All a consensus does is provide an excuse to condemn anyone who dares challenge dogma to an intellectual ghetto where their objections and criticisms don't have to be heard.
I suspect the science of climate change has been contaminated by very loud, powerful people. Al Gore wants us to buy carbon credits (which he just happens to have a financial interest in), and puts on terrifying spectacles which exaggerate the facts and misrepresent data. Environmental activist groups such as Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Sierra Club use it as an opportunity to scare up more donations and lobby for legislation that advances Green ideology. Third world countries, represented through political aliances in the United Nations, finally find a club useful in beating down Western progress and industry, and give themselves more influence on the world stage. Western politicians see an opportunity to scare the public into paying more taxes to fight global warming and broker deals that give government more control over the private sector. Even climatologists, who -- as Timo noted above -- were underfunded and occupied a bit of a scientific backwater until very recently, now find themselves the rock stars of the scientific community ....
If it's so easy to dismiss the arguments of the oil industry because it's in their financial interests to raise objections to anthropogenic climate change ("Exxon Propaganda"), why the hell isn't the reverse true? All of the players I listed above have compelling financial and political interests in furthering "Global Warming". An interest that makes silencing objections just as much a priority as it was to the tobacco industry to undermine criticism of their practices forty years ago. So climatologists who don't support anthropogenic global warming are labelled "nutcases". People who question the dogma are called "deniers". Heidi Cullen of the Weather Channel wanted meteorologists who didn't tow the line stripped of their credentials.
Does that sound like science? It isn't. It's politics. It's the voice of an advancing ideology that doesn't tolerate dissent. And it has poisoned climatology research specifically, and science as a whole.
No it hasn't. It's risen .4 C.
Actually, the exact amount isn't really known. Some temperature measurement devices were not installed properly, placed incorrectly (at least one next to a heater), or data processed incorrectly, as I once heard.
It was not predicted that it WOULD happen, it was predicted that it MIGHT.
People seize on this and distort it into a straw man argument. Easy to do
if you are arguing from ignorance, impossible to pull off if theres anybody around whos been paying real attention.
Thats only true because again, republicans and exxon propagandists and oil apologists reify such predictions and recast them in absolute terms.
Welcome to 2008. How many bad storms have we had this season?
No serious climatologists said that every year would be equal or that the next year would be worse, only that over the long term, things would be getting worse. Theres good reason to guess that tens or hundreds of thousands of people died by way of Ike. The actual figure is being kept as low as possible on purpose.
calling us fear mongers is propagandistic and ad hominem. I'm not selling fear, I'm telling truth. Deniers are peddling ignorance, bunk anti science,
and all for what? To justify the continued use of oil when for every single reason across the board switchting to geothermal and solar power is the better option.
No, global temperatures are NOT cooling, again, thats just cooked up nonsense that is easy to say, hard to fact check, and easy to believe if
you want to.
No, no real scientists are saying such storms or floods are causd by global warming, only that they are worse in theory than they otherwise would have been.
The predictive power of the theory holds rather well if we include current events.
Your desire to stop the clock at 2007 is thus rendered itself telling and somewhat amusing.
And since we have seen a whole batch of storms this season.
the theory DOES have predictive value.
An interesting point, but merely a hamster wheel of a process. The theory does predict what is happening and what has happened.
There is no downward trend, and your metaphor is merely a straw man argument.
On this we can agree, but the point is still moot if global warming is in fact real.
Nobody is more annoyed by assorted forms of human groupthink than I.
However, all such situations are not created equally. Denial of global warming is rapidly approaching the same credibility as denial of the force of gravity.
No, in fact Al Gores assorted warnings are actually well within the hyper conservative end of such predictions. Hes been very careful about that, to the chagrin of many environmentalist groups who think he should have used hyperbole just to drive the point home and overwhelm the noise and nonsense.
Theres nothing mis represented in Al Gores presentation unless you mean
that his estimates and predictions are too conservative.
Maybe he has his own vested interests. Still moot. Carbon trading is a lame idea and always has been.
Calling it a "scare up" is just a petty invalidation. It feels nice and warm to the belly, but it has as much substance as the assorted popping wall street bubbles.
Theres nothing about dooming humanity to die off that is progressive
and nothing about our addiction to oil which is either. Real progress means converting over to geothermal power. And not just for reasons of global warming, but simply because of cost/ benefit analysis and straight up
efficiency. Geothermal power means drilling one time and having power FOREVER. all oil wells will eventually run out sooner or later.
For the same cost as the republican offshore oil drilling proposal, we could solve all of our problems in a real way with geothermal power.
The real regressives are the apologists and the propagandists of exxon and
the republicans.
Again, you keep harping on the idea that this is just a fear based scare tactic, which is ludicrous. The fact of the matter is global warming is real,
we are causing it, and the solution to the problem incidentally solves a whole host of other problems.
Thats not fear mongering or scaring. The reverse is true. Placating people and invalidating global warming is irrresponsible, evil, and could end up contributing to the deaths of millions of people, or even life on earth as we know it ending.
Because the sceince says global warming is a fact, and that ought to be the end of it.
irrelevant and moot.
what a remarkable reversal. This is exactly the opposite. We are addicted
to oil just like some people are addicted to cigarattes. The cig companies sponsored a billion dollar misinformation campaign and eventually lost. The oil companies are sponoring a trillion dollar misinformation campaign, and thanks to people like you, they are winning.
For good reason. things don't fall up. Science fact figured this out beyond a shadow of a doubt by the mid 1980s. Thanks to denialists and propaganda artists, the nonsense constinues and we are running out of time.
Gambling with the survival of the human species based on ignorant misinformation feuled skepticism is insane.
We had 40 years of dissent, and tolerated and tolerated and tolerated. Now its time to act responsibly to save humanity and our planet.
It seems there's plenty of "ad hominem" to go around.
You agreed that "the climate varies on large and small scales and the mechanisms of this change remain largely shrouded", so I don't understand why you're so offended by the doubts of some people.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
http://www.sustainability.ie/warmingdenial.html
http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2006/05/02/PaidtoDenyGlobalWarming/
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/exxon-still-pumping-out-lies
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them on the thread. I would consider it a personal favor to have a conversation with a sane person regarding such details on the thread, and that would make it much easier to refrain from negative comments which might be interpreted as being against any one person in particular.
Thanks again for your work as moderator.
sincerely
pan
http://www.sustainability.ie/warmingdenial.html
http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2006/05/02/PaidtoDenyGlobalWarming/
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/exxon-still-pumping-out-lies
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them on the thread. I would consider it a personal favor to have a conversation with a sane person regarding such details on the thread, and that would make it much easier to refrain from negative comments which might be interpreted as being against any one person in particular.
Thanks again for your work as moderator.
sincerely
pan
I loathe "fisking"; it easily becomes a tool to overwhelm a discussion rather than participate in it -- especially in the hands of we who are verbose. Rather than addressing the central thesis in my post, you've chosen instead to break it up into a series of unrelated bits and render it unrecognizable. I don't have the apparently limitless devotion you have for this subject, Prometheuspan, but I can at least touch on a few points.
You should take a look at this chart courtesy of the National Hurricane Center which lists the number of hurricanes to strike the U.S. since the nineteenth century. What kind of a trend do you see there? I don't see any gloom and doom there, do you? Do you honestly expect 2008 to even equal 2005 in intensity, let alone surpass it?
Honestly, Prometheuspan, I'm sure there are people who refuse to believe in the possibility of human-caused global warming. I'm willing to look at them and say, okay, regard their input with skepticism. But to paint everyone who merely questions the dogma with the same "denier" brush is infuriating.
Oil has, at present more energy storage by volume than any other solution we know of. It is easy to get, easy to transport, easy to store, and easy to get power from. And it's sitting underground in huge (though presumably shrinking) quantities. There's a damned good reason for it to be the primary means of powering human civilization for all of the twentieth century. Geothermal is much harder to get at except in a few geologically infrequent areas, and much harder to transport or store. You're right about solar-- it's a great idea with a bright future [nudge nudge] but there are efficiency limitations to overcome and costs of manufacture. Plus, it doesn't work when the Sun isn't up. Yes, there are workarounds, and the efficiency of solar cells has been rising, but the high-efficiency cells are too expensive for the average consumer to put on his or her roof. Believe me, I've looked into it repeatedly over the last decade, but at my latitude, it still doesn't pay for itself until after any photocell installation I've put in begins to age and lose efficiency.
Which brings me to your favorite villain: Exxon. They aren't in the business of selling oil, they're in the business of making money. Right now, they make it by selling oil in an industry dominated by unfriendly cartels and nationalized oil companies. If there was a better, more profitable alternative, they'd be all over it like a fat kid on a jelly donut. When photovoltaics begins to sell well, I promise you, there will be a division of Exxon trying to get a piece of the pie. Don't believe me? Look this over.They've been keeping their fingers in that pie for decades
And let's not leave the Russians out of this.
That said, I'm not a hard-core "denier" [grimaces]. I think it's pretty clear the long-term trend is, at least until the last few years, that the world has been getting warmer at a pretty steady rate. The trouble is, that rate appears to go back more than fifty or so years. It goes back about one hundred and fifty years. Most of the warming we've seen might very well be natural. I doubt humans have been blameless, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit if human contributions have been greatly exaggerated. CO2 is definitely rising as well, but given that the ice records show CO2 increases after warming, that CO2 might not have an exclusively anthropogenic source. It just might be escaping from permafrost that has been thawing since before the twentieth century. And as sea temperatures rise, more CO2 is released ... but remember, those sea temperatures might be falling ... it'll be fun to keep an eye on CO2 levels over the next ten years.
Still, I do agree with the notion of responsible “stewardship” of the Earth. Waste as little as practical. Pollute as little as possible. But not at the expense of other priorities. I'm worried about the alarmism over AGW harming the world's economy (it's already in bad shape). More advanced technology and wealth are the keys to combating human damage to the planet. The more progress is delayed, the longer we're going to be harming the planet.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go see Dr. McCoy and see if he has anything for a ... headache.
I was waiting for this. For one thing, the 2008 hurricane season isn't quite over yet, and I refuse to predict the season before it's over. But to address your question directly, how do you choose to categorize "bad storms"? By my count, only two storms have struck the U.S. as hurricanes, and the most damaging, Ike, was a category 2 hurricane when it hit. It did do quite a lot of damage, but that's typical when 100+ mph winds hit, and is more a function of the path the hurricane took, rather than any uncharacteristic severity. Ike and Gustav did do significant damage in the Caribbean, striking islands with Cat 4 intensity, but that isn't atypical, either. Thus far, the 2008 hurricane season has been more active than normal ... but as I said, the season isn't over yet, and could get worse ... but as summer fades, season intensity tends to diminish with it, so I'd be surprised if the worst hasn't already passed.
You should take a look at this chart courtesy of the National Hurricane Center which lists the number of hurricanes to strike the U.S. since the nineteenth century. What kind of a trend do you see there? I don't see any gloom and doom there, do you? Do you honestly expect 2008 to even equal 2005 in intensity, let alone surpass it?
You see? You spent so much time breaking down my post into out-of-context pieces that you completely missed my overall point. I'm really not talking about serious climatologists (even if your argument comes across as a bit of an example of "no true Scotsman" logic). I'm talking about the alarmists who run about like so many Chicken Littles. About the opportunists who are cashing in on the fear. And about a growing political movement that seeks to chain another yoke to citizens and even talk them into paying for it with convenient "carbon taxes". I'm talking about the raving loons who really seem to think this is the end of the world in spite of geological records indicating there's nothing unusual about the current temperatures nor the rate at which they've changed.
Bull. The largest number I've seen for U.S. fatalities from Ike is 55. Not 550,000, not 55,000, not even 550, just 55. You really think "hundreds of thousands" of people in a country of four hundred million could die in a heavily-reported storm and no one would notice? Wouldn't there be YouTube videos at the very least of the vast piles of corpses? Or did Exxon bulldoze over them already? What's that? You were talking about more than just the U.S.? Ohhhh! I'm so sorry. But then again, it only hit Cuba, and guess what? They had zero fatalities. But then we know how well Cuban and U.S. administrations get along, so they must have colluded on hiding the corpses there. C'mon, we're living in a country where an overzealous cop busting a bicyclist on trumped-up charges gets his walking papers after the whole incident made it to YouTube two days later. Conspiracies can and do happen, but on nowhere near the scale you're trying to sucker me on.
THERE! See that word "deniers"? That's you shutting down critical thinking and an open mind, and ignoring input that might provide useful contrast. That word from the alarmist edge of the global warming community has an interesting history. It was used to deliberately compare global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers in an act of backwards Godwinism. An effort to say, under the table, "Gee, these people remind me of Nazis!" That kind of a slur, along with comparing them to Creationists and flat-earthers, is a rhetorical cheap-shot with no purpose other than to tell people "Don't listen to that crowd over there. They're crazy." And for someone as brilliant as you keep telling us you are, that's a trick that's a bit beneath you.
Honestly, Prometheuspan, I'm sure there are people who refuse to believe in the possibility of human-caused global warming. I'm willing to look at them and say, okay, regard their input with skepticism. But to paint everyone who merely questions the dogma with the same "denier" brush is infuriating.
See how tedious fisking can be? [wink]
Oil has, at present more energy storage by volume than any other solution we know of. It is easy to get, easy to transport, easy to store, and easy to get power from. And it's sitting underground in huge (though presumably shrinking) quantities. There's a damned good reason for it to be the primary means of powering human civilization for all of the twentieth century. Geothermal is much harder to get at except in a few geologically infrequent areas, and much harder to transport or store. You're right about solar-- it's a great idea with a bright future [nudge nudge] but there are efficiency limitations to overcome and costs of manufacture. Plus, it doesn't work when the Sun isn't up. Yes, there are workarounds, and the efficiency of solar cells has been rising, but the high-efficiency cells are too expensive for the average consumer to put on his or her roof. Believe me, I've looked into it repeatedly over the last decade, but at my latitude, it still doesn't pay for itself until after any photocell installation I've put in begins to age and lose efficiency.
Which brings me to your favorite villain: Exxon. They aren't in the business of selling oil, they're in the business of making money. Right now, they make it by selling oil in an industry dominated by unfriendly cartels and nationalized oil companies. If there was a better, more profitable alternative, they'd be all over it like a fat kid on a jelly donut. When photovoltaics begins to sell well, I promise you, there will be a division of Exxon trying to get a piece of the pie. Don't believe me? Look this over.They've been keeping their fingers in that pie for decades
Oh. Then what's been going on since 1998?
And let's not leave the Russians out of this.
I think there is room to debate this. Not only do the two links directly above cast some doubt on the situation, but the oceans are cooling. And none of those models so fashionable at BIC's beloved IPCC predict that. Again, when a model (or hypothesis) doesn't match the observed data, you throw it out and start over.
That said, I'm not a hard-core "denier" [grimaces]. I think it's pretty clear the long-term trend is, at least until the last few years, that the world has been getting warmer at a pretty steady rate. The trouble is, that rate appears to go back more than fifty or so years. It goes back about one hundred and fifty years. Most of the warming we've seen might very well be natural. I doubt humans have been blameless, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit if human contributions have been greatly exaggerated. CO2 is definitely rising as well, but given that the ice records show CO2 increases after warming, that CO2 might not have an exclusively anthropogenic source. It just might be escaping from permafrost that has been thawing since before the twentieth century. And as sea temperatures rise, more CO2 is released ... but remember, those sea temperatures might be falling ... it'll be fun to keep an eye on CO2 levels over the next ten years.
Oh, I beg to differ, there's an embarrassment of exaggerations.
As I said, the oil companies are more than willing to sell you anything you will buy. When folks are more interested in flower power, they'll sell pansies. But let me ask you this as a thought experiment: if global warming wasn't real, don't you think it'd be smart for them to publish information contradicting any suggestion that it was? Whether they say global warming is real or not has no more relevance to the truth than if Greenpeace does.
I really don't know where you get the notion that we're doomed from this. Do you honestly believe the planet will get too hot for anything to survive? Not even the worst case IPCC reports lend any credence to this view. Besides, the planet has warmed more and faster and cooled more and faster than the changes we're seeing right now.
Still, I do agree with the notion of responsible “stewardship” of the Earth. Waste as little as practical. Pollute as little as possible. But not at the expense of other priorities. I'm worried about the alarmism over AGW harming the world's economy (it's already in bad shape). More advanced technology and wealth are the keys to combating human damage to the planet. The more progress is delayed, the longer we're going to be harming the planet.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go see Dr. McCoy and see if he has anything for a ... headache.
Quote from that article: the cooling is "not significant", and probably caused by the melting Antartic ice breaking up into the ocean. Another interesting allusion from the article is that sea level is rising more than what can be accounted for so far.
From the beginning, the use of technology was the cause of Global Warming. More technology will always be part of the problem.
^The great thinkers on past ice ages tell us there's been at least 10 times in the past when the earth was covered in ice. Now since mans ascension into technology starting with smelting iron oar there's been no ice coverings...but yeah it did get real cold when that volcano cooked off in the early middle ages. imo a better argument can be made for mans mankind technological presence 'preventing' another ice age... ...just say'en when I was growing up there was serious talk of another ice age returning in near future, now it's global warming. Political trash and their useful dupes will always conspire to create some looming crises so you can look to them for guidance provided of course they haven't already bought your vote with entitlements.
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