Climate Change Politics

the science is not settled.

Massive amounts of plastic deposited, mixed with the co in our oceans ! as plastics dissolve in co, what can we expect?acid oceans?

There are naturally many unknowns out there, and some areas with more controversy than others. However, I think you can also run the risk of overstating the amount of scientific equipoise out there too.

---------- Post added 12-31-2009 at 02:31 PM ----------

Well, no, actually, as far as I understand it... One thing about plastics is that they do not dissolve in water. They may dissolve in various hydrocarbon solvents, but they will not in the ocean. If you read the fascinating book The World Without Us, there is a chapter about this. The enormous deposits of plastic in the ocean are getting battered and eroded to smaller and smaller pieces of -- plastic. They are eaten and incorporated by all sorts of marine life, and who knows what the result will be.

As of yet, to my knowledge, there is no microorganism that can metabolize plastic -- but there will be. It's just too rich a hydrocarbon resource. This is one of the holy grails of industrial microbiology, to engineer a bacterium that can metabolize plastic.

But plastic itself doesn't dissolve in water. And even if it did, it would not necessarily be acidic, because the basic monomer in plastics is methane (CH4).

we can take alook at what they have been doing.
Keith Briffa has turned out to be a big player even though he's "small potatoes" as a researcher.
His work was used to confirm that everything ties together.
It probably all boils down to what 3 trees said earlier and 12 trees said now.

What is the real point you are trying to make in all of this? Just for once lay your cards on the table.

Prime Minister Saufatu Sapo'aga told the United Nations last year that the global-warming threat is no different from "a slow and insidious form of terrorism against us." Independent scientists also offer a grim forecast. "Because of its location and physical nature, Tuvalu is particularly susceptible to the adverse impacts of climate change and in particular rising sea level,"
Read more: Will Tuvalu Disappear Beneath the Sea? | Travel | Smithsonian Magazine

my point is that the science is not settled, it's very much questionable.

I just assumed, obviously wrongly, that the Co2 in the oceans might just be dissolving the plastics causing this acidic reaction....

The acids that form from this process Aedes, could they be dissolving the plastics? sorry but my education never prepared me for such debates.

Some things are more questionable than others. That the globe is currently warming, at least on a century-by-century and decade-by-decade level, is not all that questionable. Whether it's historically aberrant is more questionable. And whether it's attributable in whole or in part to human activity is yet more questionable. But science is about case-building in the end, isn't it? That's what research is for.

Climate change wouldn't be the subject of much public debate if it didn't come down to policy questions. There are plenty of academic paradigms that don't get any sort of public attention. But there are a lot of interests at stake in this, and lots of implications. Even if the worst of the predictions are true, it's absolutely impossible to know if the current state of being is at all reversible.

So the trickiest part is for policymakers -- how do we decide what to do? How perfect does the science need to be before we put policies into effect?

Good science is too slow and too narrowly focused to determine urgent policy. The lack of legal enforcement of environmental standards isn't a failing of science, it's a failing of common sense among legislators and their easy corruptibility.

I think that there is ample rationale to limit carbon emissions without invoking climate change. It's one of many reasons -- but isn't there economic, geopolitical, environmental, and medical benefit to this anyway?

Till we have a general agreement on the fact that we have a problem then the will to actually be serious in our reaction is not going to be there.

Memester, let's pull some primary articles and critique the actual science, rather than making emotional generalizations about science in general. Pick one.

Pick one that they have given the methodology and data for

Show the list to pick from.

This was published one week ago in Nature.

Access : The velocity of climate change : Nature

Here are the methods:

Access : The velocity of climate change : Nature

There's no "list"... I just put search terms into a database for the scientific literature. I used medline, because it includes some general science journals like Nature and Science, but there are other search engines.



Edit -- I just happened upon this very nice review -- I know one of the authors personally, his daughter is a good friend of my brother. I like review materials because their reference sections are a goldmine of primary literature.

Access : A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems : Nature