Climate Change must be tackled NOW

Climate change is something that depasses our ego's, overshadows the natural frontiers that separate us. Climate change is an international menace, constitutes the ultimate challenge for all of us. We have to fight it, my dear fellow -- that's all I'm saying.

I'm merely advising the pseudosceptic anti-environmentalists that putting wealth before health is an extremely dangerous attitude, one that could drag public opinion and motivation towards even more ecological passivism. Life is about more than maintaining the status quo of some energy corporations. The Essos and Shells of the corporate community ask us to understand their need for profit. Impossible, they're the ones who should adapt: the harm their trade inflicts upon the near-future climate is unavoidable if they don't.

This is OUR planet, this is the place where I would like to bring up children. However, I would like them to know this natural world as I knew it -- not as a devastated pale wreck missing frozen poles, out of a stable atmosphere, with regionally collapsing biotopes.

The link that started this thread holds the solution, and it should be fought for daily. Whether it be through public education, through support for clean energy technologies, through ecological activism, and so on. If one could ever recognize a civic duty, this is it.

wolf's statement; "Their scepticism about climate change stems from economical rather than scientific views." The only problem with your statement is that there are as many "scientists" that say other wise. Your "economical rather than scientific" is a straw man statement. You just can't make a blanket statement without providing support for it. c.i.

The conservative scientists are outnumbered by far, their opinions are not recognized by international institutions such as the United Nations, the European Union, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, nor by the Environmental Protection Agency. Skeptical scientists like the Bjorn Lomborg character have been intensely rebuked.

You could indeed say that science is always subjectively colored. But with regards to climate change, skeptics are a tiny minority.

Skeptics are a tiny minority only in a convention of slavish adherents of the contemporary environmentalist orthodoxy. In the larger worlds of nations, people, and the political world in this country, they are a large majority.

Wolf has failed utterly to engage the substance of any of the reasoned objections to his beliefs offered by Thomas, myself, and others. Instead he retreats to the supposed authority of this single issue orthodoxy. It is a pity he won't think for himself.

george

Your indictment of wolf in the last post is unfair and inaccurate. He has offered links above to institutions who can't reasonable be termed 'slavish adherents to orthodoxy'.

Within the scientific community, skeptics of climate change/global warming are a minority...and their numbers have been shrinking over the last two decades as new verifying information accumulates. That, of course, doesn't ensure the majority of the scientific community is correct simply because they constitute a majority of opinion, but it is simply incorrect to suggest this majority doesn't exist.

The human responsibility for climate change is not a belief, it's a scientific fact, by far the most corroborated scientific fact in modern meteorogical research.
It's stunning how skeptics arrogantly demand respect for concrete data, yet simultaneously refuse to acknowledge when proof presented to them doesn't run along with their conservative vision of the world.

Wolf,

You didn't present any proof - only a recitation of the predigested conclusions of other advocates. You did not attempt to answer the reasoned and scientifically well-founded objections presented here by Thomas, myself, and others, either in your own words or in the links you offered us.

Several of us attempted to break the question down into particular elements - the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; the tendency to atmospheric warming that will result; the dynamics of the carbon cycle; the many preexisting heating and cooling trends in the geological record; the questions relating to the assertion that the greenhouse effect will either continue or dominate other trends; the potential for monotone, continuous warming; the magnitude of the benefits/injuries that may result; the relative merits of them and the cost of correcting the problem - to facilitate a more reasoned discussion of the issue in all its complexity. You ignored it all, and now you retreat behind the propaganda of environmentalist advocates and accuse us of a lack of science. Remarkable !

george, You touched on one of the major problems by asserting "cost of correcting the problem." It extends far beyond that, IMHO. How will the world population change over to non-CO2 producing vehicles and other power generation plants? That's a monumental task of the highest order, and I don't see many governments or individuals sacrificing their lifestyles to do it. c.i.

Cicerone,

Good question. You have noted the complexity inherent in the matter, and generally ignored by environmentalist zealots.

I note that over the last two centuries the environmental impact of human industrial production, per unit of that production, has by any rational measure, decreased dramatically. We have every reason to assume that it will continue to decrease - even without any coercive action by external authority. The basic combustion processes we use to exploit energy sources have been made far more efficient, operating at higher temperatures, with cleaner fuels and much more efficient production processes than ever before, yielding more goods for more people and with lower environmental cost. Moreover new,cleaner technologies have emerged and are emerging - nuclear power among them.

It is clear that modern comforts and liberal political/economic systems have very quickly arrested population growth in countries in which they have thrived. Moreover this transformation has happened very quickly on an historical time scale. The populations of Japan and the nations of Western Europe are falling at a rather dramatic rate. In the United States, only immigration has delayed that phenomenon.

Together these reliable observations give us a basis on which to optimistically deal with the underlying problem.

The coercive and authoritarian remedies generally proposed by the environmentalist zealots threaten to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. They could thwart progress and, through enforced rationing, increase the perceived value of the very things they attempt to diminish.

I also note the irrational element in the various remedies so often proposed by these groups. Why do they oppose emission free nuclear power? Do they really believe that solar and wind power could ever amount to more than 20% of our needs? Where do the advocates of a world powered by hydrogen assume we will get the free hydrogen, without first burning coal and other fuels to get it? Etc.

So, what are you proposing, george?

wolf, It's not so much what george is able to propose. All the propositions have already been made. The question becomes, how do you implement the beginning of this change to save the ecology of this planet? As we can see, Kyoto was a failure. What will it take for the world community to embrace the environmentalist's orthodoxy? That is the road that must be traversed first of all. c.i.

Here's one battle you need to fight; this president is planning to give small businesses a tax break if they purchase SUV's that costs over $50,000. If you can prevent this from happening, you would have gotton a small start on your many battles to come. c.i.

Show me that provision in the tax code. (Please.)

What's "stunning" is how you make statements like this, ad nauseum, pretending that your view is the only view on the issue. Calling this rapidly unraveling theory a "scientific fact" is like calling Monica Lewinsky a "babe". Just thinking it is so doesn't make it so.

Get to the punch line, c.i. Anyway, what business has a need for a SUV in that class. I did work for one company (oil field service) that legitimately used a Ford Explorer and a Jeep Cherokee.

Scrat, No tax code yet, but here's an article that shows that the amount of write off will actually be $75,000 under Bush's tax plan.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0121-05.htm
c.i.

Even your biased source notes that this is a "capital equipment deduction"--not a special targeted tax break for SUV buyers, as so many claim (either through ignorance or intent). If a business buys ANY equipment, including a vehicle, they can take the deduction.

It's pretty sad that ultra-liberals (not you, CI, I mean those who are reporting this "news") are so desperate to attack Bush and the right on any and every issue that they resort to nonsense like this. It is of course, almost as bad that so many swallow whole the predigested pap that these buffoons churn out.

If I spend capital from my business on equipment--including equipment I can drive--I would be eligible for this deduction. Period.

What silliness.

Quoting Commondreams.com falls in the same category as quoting NewsMax.com...

Perhaps, though I believe the guidelines for this forum suggest that simply casting aside information solely because of the source is not "cricket".

And FWIW, the information CI provided is available from a lot of more legitimate sources.

I know what you mean, but I tend to regard Commondreams.org as an ULTRA left information site in the same vein many liberals see NewsMax as an ULTRA right information site.