Climate Change must be tackled NOW

Scrat, I hope you are right and global warming is just a myth of most scientists but in this case I trust the scientists more than you. ;-)

btw. I don't ignore the existence of alternative engine cars but the point I made is that they have not established yet.

Owi - If you did a little research you would find that a lot of scientists disagree with the alarmists, and that number is growing as flaws in computer models become too glaring to hide and new data continues to show that the past few years have seen cooling rather than warming. I'm not disagreeing with "the scientists", I'm agreeing with a lot of them, but disagreeing with others.

owi, Just a little insight into science and scientists. They make mistakes like everybody else on this planet. The problem with the science of 'global warming' is that scientists do not have enough climatic history to determine if this is cyclical or actual one time occurance. Some scientists claim this world of ours is over 200 million years old. Most scientists are making their claims from a very small sample of those 200 million years. From my point of view, that's still too small a sample. c.i.

200 million? I thought it was 4.5 billion years old?

Scrat - What else - but the global warming - caused/s the rising sea level?

200 million 4.5 billion; what's the difference - for us? We're lucky if we see 100. c.i.

What's the difference?

We should all listen to Scrat, as he knows a lot about the Ice Age. Rumor has it that he invented popcorn too!

I can't wait for the sequel!



"Where, oh where has my acorn gone?
Oh where, oh where can it be?"

Just what the hell is that beast, Scrat?

That is Scrat. Scrat is that.

(Scrat is from the computer animated movie, "ICE AGE".)

As it happens, this is exactly the rhetoric I got to hear in mid 1999, when all my colleagues were extremely nervous about the "Y2K bug", and I tried to calm down some of their hysteria. Remember Y2K? The reason I bring it up is that you cannot safely assume that scares are real just because a lot of talking heads on TV debate them. You are therefore stuck with the possibility that global warming is basically just another Y2K. Given this possibility, why is it "highly irresponsible" for people to try and debunk it? They may well do us a big favor!


On the other hand, there's a limited amount of oil in the ground, and humankind can't burn more than all of it. This puts a strict limit on how bad global warming can get in the very long run. I wonder why environmental activists never mention the fact, because they tend to be the same people who keep telling us that we will run out of resources, and the sky will fall upon us because of that.


Good point, but if you trust the scientists, you might as well be consequent about it. Few scientists deny that global warming is real, but most of them also find that any likely amount of global warming will be non-catastrophic. The high end of the IPCC range estimates (up to 12 °F in the 21st century) was deliberately designed to yield a worst-case estimate, and the IPCC explicitly declines to estimate the likelyhood of these scenarios. As I said in response to wolf, their latest best guess is 5°F from 2000 to 2100, which is tolerable.


Global warming may well cause sea levels to rise, but note just how little of a rise climatologists are actually predicting. In the case of the IPCC, their prediction is about ten inches from 2000 to 2100, which is real but far from catastrophic. Can you see the recurring theme here?

-- Thomas

Thomas,

I believe it would be more accurate to state that scientists generally accept that greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere, however, we lack sufficient evidence to conclude that sustained global warming is occurring or will occur as a result.

As you have already noted, there is a complex of factors that influence the carbon cycle, some providing positive and some negative direct feedback. Moreover secondary and tertiary effects can themselves further alter this dynamic. We have every reason to expect that the global system will reach another quasi equilibrium with perhaps altered balances in the carbon cycle.

The global atmosphere is an exceedingly complex, non-linear system. We know from the geological record it has already undergone warming and cooling cycles that are very large compared to what is alleged due to greenhouse gases. Further, such chaotic systems tend to be unpredictable but self-regulating and intolerant of monotone trends.

You have already noted the effect of transport phenomena and their ability to support opposite trends in different regions.

With all this in mind, it is a great leap to conclude that global warming will occur as a result of the increased release of greenhouse gases, or, as you have pointed out, that if it occurs it will be worth fixing. This is simply true, Wolf's categorical statements to the contrary notwithstanding.

It is also curious to consider just where all the alarmist advocates of warming believe they will find all that free hydrogen with which to operate all those fuel cells. Free hydrogen does not occur in quantity in nature. We get it by burning coal to produce electrical power with which we break up water into its constituent gases, hydrogen and oxygen.

That "beast" is a very confused one. LOL c.i.

A bushy tailed, sabre toothed rat! Maybe not so confused, though.

Sabre-toothed squirrel, thank you very much. :wink:

Strictly speaking this is true. The scientific community rarely reaches a 100% unanimous consensus on any subject like this, and it would be strange and suspicious if global warming was an exception. But as someone who has studied with a lot of meteorologists, my impression is that the mere existence of global warming is quite uncontroversial as scientific debates go. This impression is confirmed by what I read in Science and Nature, the most reputable scientific journals. I never found any article there that claimed that CO2 emissions don't cause sustained global warming. Even those meteorologists who are skeptical about the evidence still think CO2 is the most plausible explanation for the 1-2 °F of global warming we have seen since the 19th century.

My point is that the big controversy is outside the scientific community, not inside it. The IPCC's best shot at a forecast is not sufficiently different from the predictions of "carefree meteorologists" like Patrick Michaels to be worth talking about. There's even quite widespread agreement among meteorologists that the IPCC's 11°F of 21st century warming make sense as a worst case scenario if you don't mind the probabililty. The great controversy in public opinion arises not because of dissent within the scientific community, but because environmental activists have taken the community's worst case scenario and spun it as if it was its actual prediction. This is simply dishonest.

Putting all this together, I believe the best line of attack against global warming hysteria shouldn't be directed at the science of it. It should be against the dishonest political activism that claims to be built on the science, but really has nothing to do with it.

-- Thomas

Thomas, imagine following 2 scenarios:

a)
We stop/constrict CO2 emission as we think it has quite much effect on global warming. In 100 years it will turn out that we were not right and that CO2 emission had no/hardly impact on global warming.

b)
We don't do anything against CO2 emission as we think it has nearly no effect on global warming. In 100 years it will turn out that we were not right. The world has become a much hotter place and we could have done something against it.

I think we should not risk scenario b) as the earth - at least in my opinion - is worth not to take the risk of destroying it. Therefore in this case hysteria (following worst case scenarios) makes more sense to me than belittlement(following least case scenarios).

Thomas - This is the second time I've encountered you arguing that the science of an issue is settled when it quite clearly is not. If I choose only to give credence to certain sources and certain scientists then I can proclaim the either position is 100% proven. I choose to look at the data from both camps, and come to the conclusion that the question is far from settled and that plans to take action are premature and based on politics, not hard science.

You look at the opposing information and have chosen which one you think is correct. I look at the same information and recognize that I don't know enough to choose.