I watched one movies that said that global climate change is totally real, it's cause by humans, backed by all the data, and will bring about disasterour consequences if left unchecked.
I watched another movie that said that global climate change is totally real, it has nothing to do with humans, is backed by all the data, and will have virtually no disasterous consequences if left unchecked. It went even further and said that the supression of development in poor, African nations in the name of stopping man-made global climate change will, in fact, be tantamount to condemning millions to death from starvation, exposure, diseases and so on.
So...which is it?
I would absolutely say that it's the former. Unquestionably.
Okay GR, let's try this. What evidence did the movies give you? The one with the evidence is the one you should go with.
It's stupid to say it's a matter of opinion because there are some movies out there that say otherwise. Who cares about movies? Follow the evidence!
Quote:Okay GR, let's try this. What evidence did the movies give you? The one with the evidence is the one you should go with.
Uh...both of them had evidence. Al Gore had his charts and graphs and the guys in the other movie had their charts and graphs.
Now which one is right?
I always hate it when science gets so politicized that it's hard to know what to believe. I do believe in anthropogenic climate change, though, simply because it's the consensus of geologists. If the experts say it's true, and I don't want to spend the time to research it exhaustively to form my own opinion (and even then, it's not like I'm educated in the field), I figure it's a safe enough belief.
Also, I'm curious, what's the rebuttal to the fact that temperature has climbed exponentially since the industrial revolution?
Okay GR, tell me, what was this other movie and what was it's evidence?
Also, are you seriously saying that you are one of those people who say "they had a chart, that's evidence"? Forming an opinion on something like global warming isn't easy, and it does take looking into the existing research. One need not actually do the experiments themselves and it's enough to find the results of experiments posted online.
Here's the very first thing to get out of the way. Global warming is not caused by the sun. The sun's temp is pretty stable, and we get closer and further by a few thousand miles year round. Sun spots are "cooler" only relative to the tempurature of the other parts of the sun, and they are caused by the swirling chaotic nature of the sun's magnetic field (it is chaotic because the different regions of the sun as it rotates actually rotate at different speeds, which is to say if you look at it, the middle is actually spinning so much faster it drags the poles around it, like a fast current next to a slow one).
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/...r-induced/
As he points out, if it was induced by the sun, Mercury would have an incredibly greater amount of warming, and Pluto's would be so small we wouldn't notice it. Remember, light diminishes by the square of the distance.
That out of the way, here's one more thing to keep in mind. Global warming is bad whether it's caused by us or not. Nature worship is just plain stupid.
Oh, here's another important point. Local weather does not represent total climate. There are going to be some unusually cold winters in a few cities and a few unusually hot summers in some others. Taken alone, none of that is evidence for or against global warming. The important thing is trends taken globally. Which is to say, take the average weather for all places we can measure and stretch that over time. Is there a common average trend to warming? I'm sure you've seen enough charts to show that, yes, there is a trend towards warming.
(As an aside, philosophically arguing that selfishness can never destroy the earth because that denies the heroism of man is outright retarded. I shouldn't have to explain why. I have actually heard this argument before. I honestly don't know why they thought it was a reasonable argument. Basically ANY claim on scientific truth based on philosophical arguments tend to be moronic.)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...085036.htm
http://www.wmo.ch/pages/index_en.html
Here are some places to start.
Quote:Also, I'm curious, what's the rebuttal to the fact that temperature has climbed exponentially since the industrial revolution?
How about this one: What caused the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Warming Period? Those certainly weren't caused by man-made Co2 emissions.
The evidence provided in the movies stated that Co2 was actually tied to temperature change, but in the exact opposite of the way that most people say. As in, an increase in temperature leads to in increase in Co2 emissions, but with an 800 year lag. The changes in the temperature were attributed to fluctuations in solar activity, both of which showed a high degree of connection when plotted over hundreds of years.
It also points out that temperature was increasing a lot during the pre-WWII era, when industrial production was still relatively young, but actually dropped slightly during the post war era when industrial production was ramped up.
Quote:As he points out, if it was induced by the sun, Mercury would have an incredibly greater amount of warming, and Pluto's would be so small we wouldn't notice it. Remember, light diminishes by the square of the distance.
I think a poster on that page made a good point: We don't even know enough about how our own planets works, so it might not be the best of ideas to use what we can tell from other planets as a basis for action.
Quote:I do believe in anthropogenic climate change, though, simply because it's the consensus of geologists.
Well, that's the problem isn't? Does consensus on a subject make it so? What's important to figure out is WHY is their a consesus. And, of course, is there really a consesus.
Which is the whole problem with this issue no matter how you look at. It's obvious that a lot of money is now flowing into global climate research which, in turn, is providing a lot of jobs and a lot funding for a lot of people. It's not hard to imagine that some people might be turning a blind eye to a few facts here and there to make sure that money doesn't dry up any time soon.
Get together a huge group of scientists from every different field, have them look over all the data, and then tell us what it says. That would probably go a long way it make things clearer.
The other movies was "The Great Global Warming Swindle", by the way.
So you are arguing from ignorance at this point?
The fact is, we know enough about how light spreads from the sun to state outright that if the sun was causing it, we'd notice it's effect to differing levels on other planets. What are you saying about how other planets work exactly?
Also, we DO know a lot about how things work on Earth. The problem with weather forcasting is it's chaotic by nature, so that's not enough. In order to predict the weather at a distance with any accuracy we need to know so much about the starting conditions (to the speed of individual molecules) that it makes it practically impossible. Now, on Jupiter things are simpler. It's nothing but swirling gas and some heat. We can actually predict the weather there rather well.
Are you honestly attempting to argue that we can't with any reliability say that LIGHT DISSIPATES WITH THE SQUARE OF THE DISTANCE?
Quote:The fact is, we know enough about how light spreads from the sun to state outright that if the sun was causing it, we'd notice it's effect to differing levels on other planets. What are you saying about how other planets work exactly?
Well, they're not all the same size for one thing. Some of them have atmospheres and some don't, with varying degrees of atmospheric pressure. Some of them are gas giants. It seems to me that make comparisons isn't exactly as easy as "Well, Mercury's getting hotter, so the temperature on Earth will probably rise a bit too".
But anyway, I'm not a scientist here, so I can't go find the raw data myself and make sense of it. There's the guy at badastronomy saying one thing and scientists in a movie saying something else. If even scientists who have studied something for years can't agree, how am I supposed to know which is "the truth"?
Sacred Jellybean Wrote:Also, I'm curious, what's the rebuttal to the fact that temperature has climbed exponentially since the industrial revolution?
Evasion, lies, bad science, and lots of money from oil and gas industries, pretty much...
("More carbon doesn't make the earth warmer! That's just a myth!" ... does that even deserve refutation?)
So everyone who disagrees is a dirty, filthy liar who takes oil money and hates the enviroment?
Well, hates the environment at least.
Really, the scientific evidence is extremely, extremely strong and utterly convincing. The reality is also obvious from simply looking around... so the world just happened to start warming at just the exact right time for the industrial revolution to warm things up? The cold snap around the late 1700s vanished with no cause, then now things are just happening to warm, human action unnecessary?
While the world is obviously a very, very complex system, the idea that human action, on the massive, massive scale it occurs on, has nothing to do with that is simply absurd, and things like An Inconvenient Truth show that very well.
I mean... it shouldn't even really matter. We know that pollution is polluting the environment and makes the world worse for us to live in. Shouldn't that alone be enough for us to want to get rid of as much of it as possible? American air quality is being ruined by clouds of pollution floating halfway around the world from China, and Northeastern US air quality is being ruined by clouds of pollution floating in from Midwestern coal-burning power plants! Considering things like that, or all the evidence of environmental destruction... aside from extremely, extremely short-sighted reasons (like, say, virtually all Republican policies of the past ... many ... decades...), it's hard to see how people could be opposed.
But money talks, of course, and it talks loudly, so people that like money (and are afraid of change, because as green industries show money and helping the environment are not always things that are impossible to rectify with eachother) dislike doing anything significant to slow global warming or help the environment.
What'll it take to convince people, the polar ice caps melting?
A Black Falcon Wrote:I mean... it shouldn't even really matter. We know that pollution is polluting the environment and makes the world worse for us to live in. Shouldn't that alone be enough for us to want to get rid of as much of it as possible? American air quality is being ruined by clouds of pollution floating halfway around the world from China, and Northeastern US air quality is being ruined by clouds of pollution floating in from Midwestern coal-burning power plants! Considering things like that, or all the evidence of environmental destruction... aside from extremely, extremely short-sighted reasons (like, say, virtually all Republican policies of the past ... many ... decades...), it's hard to see how people could be opposed.
I think this is the key point of the global warming debate. Even if people argue that we aren't the cause of global warming the efforts to stop global warming are efforts to curb pollution, and that can't do anything but help the environment. I hate a lot of the scare tactics that global warming advocates use, but I do agree that we are probably the cause and we should be working to reduce pollution as much as we can.
DMiller Wrote:I think this is the key point of the global warming debate. Even if people argue that we aren't the cause of global warming the efforts to stop global warming are efforts to curb pollution, and that can't do anything but help the environment. I hate a lot of the scare tactics that global warming advocates use, but I do agree that we are probably the cause and we should be working to reduce pollution as much as we can.
Eh, if some kinds of scare tactics work, it'd be worth it... the alternative, which seems increasingly likely as we continue to not do enough, is so, SO horrible... we need to do more. People need to realize the problem, and we need government action to cut emissions... and work towards cutting them in other countries as well, of course.
Great Rumbler Wrote:![[Image: hq-graphcopy2_800.jpg]](http://www.venganza.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/hq-graphcopy2_800.jpg)
~Claps at the vagrant misuse of Microsoft Excel* ![[Image: biggrin.gif]](http://www.tcforums.com/ubb/biggrin.gif)
I really can't stand all of those ads from oil companies about how much they are doing to "help the environment". It's so, so obvious that what they are doing is the exact opposite of that, but they make all these ads about how great their environmental policies are, how they're helping a transition to getting rid of gas, etc, etc... it's all lies...
Every time I read ABF's posts on global warming and oil companies and all that, the only thing I can think of is Captain Planet.
Man, I wish we had Brian's picture, so we could photoshop his head on Captain Planet's body. :D
Yeah, that would be bro awesome.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/opinion/28fri3.html
How could anyone read something like this and not think that there is a desperately huge problem that we need to be doing an incredible amount of work to fix, right now, but aren't?
Quote:Editorial
Broken Ice in Antarctica
Winter is coming to Antarctica, and that may be the only thing that keeps another of its major ice shelves from collapsing. On Tuesday, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey announced that there had been an enormous fracture on the edge of the Wilkins ice shelf, which started breaking last month.
That province of ice, a body of permanent floating ice about the size of Connecticut, lies on the western edge of the Antarctic Peninsula, the part of the continent regarded as most vulnerable to climate change. Scientists flew over the break — itself covering some 160 square miles — and what they saw is remarkable: huge, geometrically fractured slabs of ice and, among them, the rubble of a catastrophic breach. A great swath of the ice shelf is being held in place by a thin band of ice.
What matters isn’t just the scale of this breakout. Changes in wind patterns and water temperatures related to global warming have begun to erode the ice sheets of western Antarctica at a faster rate than previously detected, and the total collapse of the Wilkins ice shelf is now within the realm of possibility.
It also comes as a reminder that the warming of Earth’s surface is occurring much faster at the poles than it is in more temperate regions. It is easy to think of ice as somehow temporary, but scientists say that the Wilkins ice shelf may have been in place for at least several hundred years.
Nothing dramatizes the urgency of global warming quite like a fracture of this scale. There is nothing to be done about a collapsing polar ice sheet except to witness it. It may be too late to stop the warming decay at the boundaries of Antarctic ice, yet there is everything to be done. Humans can radically change the way they live and do business, knowing that it is the one chance to find a possible limit to radical change in the natural world around us.
If it's only been there for several hundred years, doesn't that seem to suggest that at point there was a huge chunk of ice there that broke off off floated away at least once already?
What I don't understand is, even if manmade pollutants are the primary cause of climate change, why this is construed as to be dangerous and damaging and evil. This ignores the fact that climate change, irregardless of this particular instance, has been naturally-occurring ever since the oceans formed enough water to absorb most of the CO2 from the atmosphere (which itself was mostly comprised of carbon dioxide some three zillion weeks ago). There have been countless instances of climate shift in the four billion-odd years that Earth has hosted enough water to form what we recognize as climactic patterns, and no shortage of catastrophes that have likely caused major and abrupt alterations in these patterns. And yet, we have the hubris and self-loathing to honestly believe that the Hummer, hideous, wasteful behemoth that it is, may be one of the man-made things that 'destroys the planet'.
Life will go on, no matter what happens to ice shelfs (which are, geologically, not all that old anyway... Antarctica wasn't always down where it is) and the air and so forth. We might make messes, but we're not going to destroy the earth. That won't happen for another billion years or so, when the sun's nuclear fuel peters out and it expands, evaporating the oceans and turning the whole planet into a hot, waterless hellhole that resembles Mississippi.
And somehow, someone will blame the Republicans for that.
Weltall Wrote:What I don't understand is, even if manmade pollutants are the primary cause of climate change, why this is construed as to be dangerous and damaging and evil. This ignores the fact that climate change, irregardless of this particular instance, has been naturally-occurring ever since the oceans formed enough water to absorb most of the CO2 from the atmosphere (which itself was mostly comprised of carbon dioxide some three zillion weeks ago). There have been countless instances of climate shift in the four billion-odd years that Earth has hosted enough water to form what we recognize as climactic patterns, and no shortage of catastrophes that have likely caused major and abrupt alterations in these patterns. And yet, we have the hubris and self-loathing to honestly believe that the Hummer, hideous, wasteful behemoth that it is, may be one of the man-made things that 'destroys the planet'.
Natural climate change occurs, no one is arguing that. The problem people have is that humans are facilitating this change. Climate change has been demonstrated to have increased abruptly, most likely due to human consumption of fossil fuels. We have to strike a proper balance between convenience and conservation. I don't think we'll destroy the earth, but we'll still make things uncomfortable as hell in the mean time. Just because we don't have the capacity to destroy the earth is no excuse to freely pollute without analyzing the consequences.
So, Weltall and GR, you'd be fine with sea levels 500 feet higher than they are now (like they were during the age of the Dinosaurs), so much CO2 in the air that things die, causing a massive extinction of life (such as happened several times during periods of massive vulcanization), etc?
Except this time, 100% caused by humans, who could have done something to avoid it?
Hmm, why does this make no sense... I wonder...
I'm not stating that I would like any such thing, nor should we strive towards or allow it to happen. I'm merely commenting on how such disaster speak is almost certainly not grounded in reality, especially any talk indicating that climate change will bring about mass extinctions a la those which typically demarcate the shift from one geological period to the next (mesozoic to tertiary, for example, which saw dinosaurs take a hike). To a tee, such extinctions are believed to have been caused by abrupt disasters. The Yucatan impact is one widely-accepted cause for the Cretaceous extinction that killed the dinos, and if the story is correct, it was a meteorite some eleven miles wide, throwing millions of tons of debris into the air, poisoning the atmosphere and creating a state not unlike what we call nuclear winter.
The point is, climate change, even if you believe the worst, will not occur so quickly that life in general will find a way to adapt and survive it with a (relative) lack of fuss. My point also is that I don't see what is gained by spreading such mistruth. If you make people believe that apocalypse is imminent, you're going to make a lot of them believe that there's nothing we can do to stop it. The most beneficial way to overcome what may happen is to be realistic about the consequences, to neither be panicky nor ignorant. The likely consequences of climate change are enough to worry about without adding end-of-the-world scenarios from the B-movie archives to the mix.