What's new

Serious quesiton for people who deny human involvement in climate change/global warming

This is a sloppy comment. Human activities may contribute to the rate of climate change, and the rate of climate change might be higher now than is "normal" but Humans are not the sole cause of climate change.

Humans are not the sole cause of climate change but we are the cause of global warming. There is a common misconception that we know that we are causing warming because of temperature readings at weather stations and we reverse engineer from there. That's not how it works at all. It's actually done in reverse.

We know how much energy we are transferring into the atmosphere and we know how much warming that should cause. This much is indisputable as it is a matter of well understood chemistry to calculate. Now that we have calculated the warming caused by man we look at the temperature data. If the warming is higher than our calculation than natural processes and or feedback loops are causing the warming beyond our calculation. If the warming is less than our calculation than natural mitigation(ocean absorption of Co2) and or natural processes that cause cooling are causing the difference.

The good news for humans is that thus far at least the readings have been less than our calculated effect meaning that the earth has mitigated some of our emissions and maybe that the earth would be cooling without them. The bad news for humans is that the earth is warming albeit less than our emissions would cause acting alone.

This all means that although human activities are not the sole cause of climate change we are the cause of the warming trend.
 
well the messengers are hypocrites!

If the standard for addressing an important public policy issue were that advocates for a particular position were complete free of any hypocrisy, then we'd do absolutely nothing.

Hypocrisy is as common a human trait as intestinal gas, and it cuts across the spectrum.

Someone who would intentionally allow a potentially very bad outcome to occur just because some people who advocate addressing the outcome are hypocrites is not very bright and is a highly irrational person.
 
This is how the prime minister goes to work daily.
17035d1334174486-pal-v-flying-car-makes-its-first-flight-rutte.jpeg


this is how he goes home after work
7555bfce88b2fd84b5ec7dc2f6122718-1413639557.jpg



this is how obama arives for a 15 minute speech
article-2589438-1C9075F500000578-873_634x360.jpg



it is not that the right doesn't "believe" in global warming or climate change. they think its none of the governments Business to institute a carbon tax. while the president travels like that. the president is not a king/noble/ royalty he is a man SERVING the people.
thats what the right thinks.
 
There is no doubt that human activity is having an impact on the climate. There is a lot of doubt about what impact it is ultimately having (hence the need to change the title of this movement from "global warming" to "climate change"). There is no doubt that Western efforts can have anything more than a fractional impact on this situation (China's increase in pollution is many times more than our largest proposed decrease, and they are just one of many third world countries in the process of industrializing), and there is also no doubt that a single natural event such as a major volcanic eruption could have a massively greater impact on this situation than anything humans are currently doing.

Given all of this, most of the people on the opposite side of this issue from HH are actually against climate change legislation. They are not necessarily denying that humans cause climate change (though some of them who refuse to look at the data are). But those who are willing to look at the data also know that we do not have the power to stop this trend. We hardly even have the poser to impact it. Instead, climate change legislation is being used by the left as an opportunity to control and tax, even though the greatest proponents admit that their impact on climate change will be minimal. In short, the reason many people are against this legislation has nothing to do with the belief that humans have no impact on the environment.

To those who support climate change legislation, how many scientists can you find who claim that the politicians plan to reverse this trend will work? The answer is a resounding zero. There is not a single respected scientist on this entire planet who will make a claim anywhere close to that, yet the proponents of climate change continually talk and act like that is what is at stake here. What a joke!

So, is this information a reason to do nothing? No. Recycling, turning off lights, eliminating unnecessary automobile trips, etc. is undoubtedly a good thing.

But is this information a reason not to destroy entire sectors of the economy? Yes.

I look forward to seeing a sane proponent of this legislation take on the points Mellow made in post #27. Unfortunately, I have a feeling I'll be waiting forever.
 
I find the climate change movement so full of hubris that they are not worth taking seriously. Thinking humanity could possibly control or even have a meaningful influence on astronomical phenomena is retarded. The main reason to push for global warming reduction is for the side benefits of reducing toxic air pollutants that we actually can have an effect on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt6rRNANSgI
 
People fight against the notion of human caused global warming, or a significant role of humans in global warming, for both scientific and political reasons. Included are conspiracy theorists who will no longer trust Science as an institution regardless of the conclusions/warnings rendered by science. Science is as much distrusted as Big Government. And there are the more serious warriors in the battle, with front lines like oil drilling in the Arctic. Those front line battles are fought by attorney's, politicians, citizen groups, lobbyists for the energy giants.

People making good $$ off the very substance, fossil fuels, fingered as a leading cause of human generated global warming, have no incentive to acknowledge any such detrimental role in climate change, or even acknowledge the very existence of human caused global warming. Since many others feel dependence on fossil fuels is indeed feeding into climate change and helping to drive global warming, a political/cultural civil war has enveloped our body politic.

I'm not a "climate scientist", and I am not in a position to know where the truth lies without deferring to experts. And like lawyers where the stakes are high, both sides have credentialed scientists on their side to convince me yay or nay.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the energy wars have become a part of he more generalized civil war infecting our politics and national dialogue on way too many issues. I thought the Vietnam Era was divisive. Now it seems like nothing compared to the era of 24/7 cable news cycle and it's ability to demonize one side or the other and help make America more and more divided against itself.....
 
Come on. You've seen the charts. You know the science. GW lobby is pretty much every expert who studies the climate, and they're in agreement that the evidence clearly suggests human culpability. As for the second argument, surely it conflicts with the first. If climate change is a good thing, why try and deny human involvement? That's like Neo-Nazis who deny the holocaust, then rant about how the Jews should be wiped out. Not that I'm comparing you to Neo-Nazis. lol

I think climate change will be very disruptive to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. It's easy to sit here in the comfort of the developed world and talk about the opportunity presented by change (I even sometimes have the same impulse). But then one has to think of all of those Bangladeshis whose homes will be flooded and who will have no where to go. We should really be thinking about how to mitigate and manage the disruption.

Not the Jews as a people, but the Israeli Government could go to hell as far as I'm concerned.
 
Back
Top