Ok. Against my better judgement, I’ll bite anyway. I know you don’t give a hoot about my opinion, but you shouldn’t have asked for one if you didn’t want to hear it.
Change is happening. It is the rate of change that concerns scientists. Many of the changes can be traced to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution when we began putting a lot of crap into the air and water. Are our activities spurring on this rapid rate of change? I’m not sure either. Maybe yes, maybe not(even though the evidence looks pretty compelling), but the changes are happening nonetheless and if we don’t prepare for them, we will be truly screwed.
We don’t need to make marine engines more fuel efficient and clean? Would you like to go back to coal as a fuel source, perchance? I for one like clean air and clean water. Cleaner, more fuel efficient engines may not stop the sea from rising (and in certain parts of the world, it IS rising), but it will improve the lives of millions by giving them a better quality of life. My other job is in EMS. Ever see someone struggle with asthma or COPD? Air pollution shortens lives and ends others. So if you don’t care about the Marshalese, surely you care about those close to you.
An article of concern from a few days ago: the Gulf stream circulation is slowing down to a crawl. That, and rising water temps will probably wreak more havoc on the Atlantic fishing grounds. Ask the guys who fish the Gulf of Maine how things have changed over the last 15-20 years. Cod have fled north for cooler water. Do cod have a political agenda?
I never said I don’t give a hoot about your opinion. I am always glad to hear other opinions. I welcome yours.
You say “Change is happening”. Agreed and yes, we should prepare for more. You’re not sure that “putting a lot of crap in the air” is spurring on this change. Welcome to the crux of the debate. I don’t want crap in the air either, but CO2 isn’t crap. It’s colourless (not as depicted in that standard photo in gCaptain atop every article on marine emissions), odourless, tasteless and an essential for all life on earth. But CO2 somehow gets lumped in with the black smoke coming out of that funnel as an eeeevil thing. Try living without it.
I don’t know what EMS is but I’m an asthma sufferer. I had a close friend who died aboard as captain of her ship from asthma. But you aren’t describing the supposed causes of global warming. You are describing dirty particulate and chemical crap. Can we both agree we want that cleaned out of the air? I’ve done time in submarines. The air contained far higher levels of CO2 in the thousands of ppm than normal. No problem. CO2 isn’t a pollutant.
I think we can also agree that cod don’t have any collective agenda, let alone political. But there you go again describing change as if it’s been caused by us. Has it? It must be some fantastic power we have to slow the Gulf Stream. Where’s the control knob? I could link to pages and pages of links of evils supposedly caused by global warming in studies. Oh ok, I will. http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
But you haven’t proved anything. You just want to believe. I reiterate my challenge to anyone. Prove this wrong.
The Midieval Warm Period occurred from 950 to 1250. Thought to be the result of decreased volcanic activity, increased solar flares, and changes in ocean circulation.
This was followed by the Little Ice Age roughly from 1300 to 1850. Thought to be the result increased volcanic activity, decreased solar flares, changes in ocean circulation, decreases in population, and other factors.
As I understand it, temps today are similar to back in the Midieval Warm Period.
Some think that the world population was about 700 million before the Middle Ages, and 370 million after the Black Death in 1350 going into the Little Ice Age. In 1800 world population was about 1.5 billion. The fastest population growth was between 1955 and 1975. World population today is about 7.6 billion. World population is forecast to be somewhere between 7 billion and 18 billion in the year 2100.
The point is: powerful forces of nature, and the size of the human population, cause significant changes in the climate. It rather arrogant for humans to think that they can overcome the forces of nature to control climate change. At least not without drastic population controls. Even then, it’s doubtful.
Yes especially when there is only theory why the the earths temp and gas composition has changed over the last 10,000 years.
Maybe the gulf stream started and unfroze the UK and then the ice cap receded from the USA and back to Canada?
Maybe the gulfstream will slow or stop so the ice will come back, so the UK will be a new market for skidoos?
The point about CO2 is that it’s colo[[u]rless in the visible spectrum, but black in the infrared spectrum. That’s what makes it a greenhouse gas – solar energy in the visible spectrum passes through it and strikes the earth, which degrades it and re-radiates it as infrared which is blocked from leaving by the various greenhouse gases.
Oh, and I do understand the greenhouse effect. It works in greenhouses. The point is to determine what the human contribution is to the perfectly natural, pre-existing greenhouse effect and then decide if that is dangerous or not. I say not.
I don’t think you understood my point. I was (like Dyson) meaning to say that this is an interesting question that deserves to be looked at with an open mind.
The scientific method is not what you claim it to be. It is not having an opinion and refusing to be budged. That’s dogma. Its more like: what’s a clever way that I can investigate my question and let the data speak for themselves. You and the (typical) “warmists” are neither exemplifying the spirit of the thing.
In that case it was a bit disingenuous to refer to CO2 as colorless in a slighting way, since the effect of interest depends upon its varying transmission at different wavelengths.
I’m sorry to say that the scientific method is exactly what I say.
I agree the issue might be interesting for scientists to look at with an open mind, and some actually do. But until dangerous human caused global warming is provably separated from natural climate change, the null hypothesis remains the established science ie climate change is natural and we are experiencing variations within the normal boundaries.
I’m not refusing to budge. I am perfectly open to being proved wrong, but I have to be proved wrong scientifically, not just because lots of scientists or bloggers have a hypothesis (which they do).
And in science, there’s no “spirit of the thing”. There’s just data, facts, evidence and truth. No agenda. No politics. No vibe. No emotion.
I’m not a scientist, so I’m not investigating anything. I’m simply regurgitating the views of established scientists and they can disagree. The end result for me is that we should stop worrying abut it and stop trying to change the world’s temperature by expensive and futile methods which harm the present day poor and suffering in this world. Ask a destitute peasant farmer scratching out a living on a dusty patch of dirt somewhere what he would rather have, food and shelter today or a slightly cooler climate in 80 years.
Perhaps you could explain your version of the scientific method.
Um, I was simply stating a fact. Google it. CO2 is a colourless gas.
Yes, it is a greenhouse gas. So what? The question here is not whether CO2 is colourless or a greenhouse gas. It is whether humans cause dangerous global warming and the topic started by poking holes in the Marshall Islanders bitching that the nasty world was drowning their islands by causing the seas to rise. Seas rise naturally and have been doing so for centuries. Coral atolls rise naturally too.
We are trying to isolate and quantify the bits caused by humans and so far we can’t distinguish any difference from the normal natural variability.
Wasn’t trying to “prove” anything, Jug. I work for a science agency. I could post reams of information here. What difference would it make to you? You already have your opinion (and I might add, that’s all you have, having posted no data of your own), and I have mine.
Which is where the disagreement comes in. You seem to be saying “you can’t prove it, so we should treat it as false”. That could be likened to saying “you can’t prove that person X was exposed to tetanus, therefor person X need not be vaccinated against tetanus”.
Science is a human activity and is subject to all the human failings, including hubris. And it’s possible for a scientific consensus to be rapidly reversed, as in the case of plate tectonics. That reversal process seems to be aided by old scientists dying off.
The question of “have humans contributed in a major way to present climate trends” informs the question “can humans have a practical effect in reducing such a trend”. We won’t ever have an absolute answer to either one – but science never provides absolute answers to anything.
Other questions include “how undesirable is such a trend in terms of human survival” and “how much is it worth to attempt to change it” and “to what extent are we stewards of the earth and what duty do we have to our descendants” and “what defines a good man, or a good culture, or a good species, or good itself”. I don’t have answers to any of these things. All I can do is try to help keep the arguments fair.
Yes! Exactly. You’ve got it. By golly you’ve got it. Well almost … we should treat it as unproven, unverified, uncertain, etc.
Stop it with the tetanus rubbish. That’s irrelevant. The question I’m asking is scientific. If scientists can’t prove it, it’s not part of accepted science. It may be an hypothesis or a theory but it needs proof or it’s not science. I suspect the human global warming myth is group think. It’s not science.
Einstein’s view of group-think was summarised in this comment:
“In order to be a member of a flock of sheep, one must, above all, be a sheep oneself!”
Most importantly, Einstein would have paid close attention to how well the establishment theory of global warming agreed with experiment. He famously stated:
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right. A single experiment can prove me wrong.”
I’ve cited a single experiment that proves the theory of human global warming wrong above, but they won’t accept what Einstein gladly accepted.
On your final two paragraphs, I agree totally. Chalk that one up.
No, I’m sorry. The theory is the absolute pinnacle of science, beyond which it does not purport to go. It is a best-available attempt to reconcile the evidence and give a systematic explanation for it. It is never absolute, but rather always and forever subject to improvement or complete abandonment as better explanations or new evidence are found.
