Global Warming Debate

[STARWINDY]

Being an optimist, I can only say that i think that this warming is taking to long. I currently live 5 blocks from the BArnegat BAy and am tired of fueling up the Hummer to trek down to the boat. With the existing home sales slumping...what better ROI than having the Bay meet up to my property. After watching that Al Gore Sci-Fi feature I installed cleats on my deck!!

Todd

[camaraderie]

Because even if it is 100% inevitable "natural" climate change, I somehow doubt that the response should be "OK, then I'll just keep building coal plants and driving SUVs until we cook".

I'm having trouble following your last statement. If what we are doing does not affect the climate...then there is no reason to change what we're doing on a CLIMATE based theory.
Now...I can argue against dirty coal plants and gas guzzling SUV's on several other fronts:
1. Unhealthy pollution.
2. Funding of Islamic terrorism.
3. Balance of payments/national security
4. Inperative to develope alternates to a limited resource
5. etc.

The point of this thread is to discuss if man-made global warming is or is not a fact ...not to discuss what else we might like to change in the world.

[Dewey Benson]

As to the following:

Cruicial info? Why sir should I bother? You have made up your mind. You cannot affect my mind without seeking scientific concensus with the general scientific community through soilid repeatable results of appropriate experimentation.

Much of what you say is a green vs god knows what. The validity of a premise has little to do with the effectiveness and or lack thereof of proposed cures to a possible situation.

Hit and run is appropriate here. Try this cute little principle; KISS (Keep it simple!)

Laters!
Dewey

Originally Posted by RAGNAR

Dewey Benson:



There's crucial info in that story. How about you tell me what specific issue you have with what aspect of my on the spot “presentation”?

This interaction wasn't meant as a stand-alone argument – even the child in question knew that. All I wanted to do was point out that at his young age, this child had already set a course for himself without questioning the arguments offered to him by people who should be protecting him from the arbitrary.

BTW: As I've posted elsewhere, no one has yet to replicate a fluid whose thermodynamics are affected by as tiny a component as CO2 is in the atmosphere – irrespective of that tiny component's thermal proerties.



It's a shame that all you do is hit and run – you make it easy to assume that this is all your capable of.



As I wrote in the post you quote but obviously won't spend time on, the burden of proof is on the Greens. I also wrote down what I'd consider a time-worthy argument – in form if not in substance.

Given how much money and mind-hours have been spent on this issue, to say nothing of how many careers and teaching institutions have been adversely affected buy this BS, you'd think there be at least the beginnings of an argument that meets my commonly accepted standards.

Why would it be that all these people can site is consensus?

(As one observant mind put it recently: scientific consensus is what you get when you don't have scientific fact.)



Even if the data you site shows a warming trend in that part of the world, what would that prove Re, 1) the planet warming up, 2) that this warming is bad, 3) that there's anything man can do about it, 4) that man's effrots at improving his life are responsible for it, 5) that people alive today should squander their standard of living in the name of what they owe to those of five, ten, fifteen generations from now?



Who contradicted this?

I will say that the Greens' arguments are so off the wall that one need not have a mastery of scientific method to, with some confidence, dismiss their claims until the Greens, on the affirmative on their non-issue, come up with a better argument -- or at least and argument



If this were true, how would you know it's true, as the statement is self-refuting? Or are you, like so many on the Plato/Augustine/Kant axis declaring yourself to have some sort of special, supernatural ability, or access to a being with such powers?

Man has freewill. One of the options his freewill imposes on him is to think or not think. The existence of that option, however, does not make error his natural state.



Again, if this were true, how would you know it's true?



Again, if this were an actual attribute of the human experience, how would you be able to ID this and declare it objectively true?

As a crucial aside, I point out that emotions are directly linked to thinking. The field of psychology, showing signs of recuperating form its nihilist orgies of the 20th Century, is starting to return to this incredibly obvious view.

Emotions are the way Man experiences every thought, standard, and method of integrating these “things,” that he has consciously accepted as true at one point. The reason emotions need to be checked is because we can, unwillingly, integrate erroneous ideas into our subconscious.



But how does a being that isn't rational and/or always rationalizing, come up with and use a methodology that corrects these inherent traits?

The fact is that all the Scientific Method can do is provide reliable data in a certain context.

What that data means, how it's to be integrated with other data, contexts and arguments, etc., is the realm of Logic. Hate to tell you, but Logic, qua Logic, has been out of fashion for the better part of a century's worth of western history.

It is absent in the current culture, in academia, in the theoretical sciences, and, more and more, in the applied sciences. (Note the glee with which “1+1=2” has been challenged on this board by an practicing chemist in order to leave room for a [conveniently] customized definition of “faith.”.)

Finally, this current anti-Reason mindset the West has embraced, brought to us by a philosopher who was eager to make room for religion (Kant), is not a human characteristic. It is simply one of the options his freewill affords him.

This perspective, that man is inherently flawed, has been with us for some time. Original Sin is one example; Eastern traditions another; Freud declaring Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps the greatest man ever, to be depraved because of this greatness, is The example of how this mindset defines the 20th Century.

If Man were depraved, the Ancient World, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the USA, the rise in everyone's standard of living for the better part of a century, indeed, all things that are the glory of mankind, could never come about. Further, you couldn't hold your viewpoint, as declaring Man incapable of Reason refutes all statements, including the statement that man can know nothing.

I say, enough with this barbaric tradition and the Sky Is Falling mindset it triggers. Let the Greens, the decedents of a long line of Man and Life hatters, prove their point by the simple, millennia old standards of what constitutes proof.

[camaraderie]

Well...to lighten up for a moment I present the following! This letter is NOT a fake...I looked at the AK gazette online archives AND did a whitepages.com search for the letter writer and both are real...published on 4/16 if you want to look for yourself!! Unbelieveable!!!!

dst.jpg

[ReverendMike]

As a newly minted 'Show-me-state-er', all i can say is:

What do you expect from someone from Arkansas?

(It's not as much fun as the Boston-New York rivalry, but it's all i've got to play with now )

[denby]

There are allot of people out there that scare me, Connie is one of them. Maybe the Hot Springs fried her brain

[sailaway21]

Mr. Benson would apparently have us believe that the global climate change debate is all about politics. And I would agree with him. The last thing he really wants to talk about is the science behind global warming, or lack thereof. When a scientist, particularly a government funded scientist, is cornered he begins spouting ideas about the methodology of the scientific method, and implying that non-scientists, pick the number of letters after the name to be qualified, cannot understand the science. "The science is settled." Reality is that most scientific concepts are fairly simple and make intuitive sense-once you have ALL the facts in front of you. Absent all of the data, most science will appear confusing. Once again, there is almost never "settled" science and good scientists usually state their ideas with a, "we think...." as a preface.

Camaraderie seems to be the only one to bring anything new to the table, in this latest heat wave. Thanks for the link.

So if the debate, as currently constituted, is not about science it must be about politics. That would explain the Ann Coulter jab. Ann, for all her abrasiveness, does seem to strike a nerve amoungst our liberal brethern. At the end of the day I think it has something to do with her being smarter than you, taller than you, better looking than you, all delivered with light speed wit. The gal's a tough nut. Regardless of one's position on Ann, and speculation as to where she might be packing a gun, the politics of the issue were originated on the left. Politics is what you do when you can't get the majority of the American people to agree with your latest idea. We don't really need those people's hearts and minds on this issue, we'll settle for their money. You need politics to get that done. Money is the issue, because the government is going to need alot of it to pay the unemployment benefits when the left's policies are implemented. That will seem like chump change compared to what the government will have already have subsidized industry for investing in renewable, non-functional, energy generation. Without getting too long-winded, the money transfer will mostly be a cathartic wealth export to the third world. Liberals will feel much better when we are all back on the same economic footing. The dirty old west will have to shutter industry and stop exploiting the poor masses of the third world. That's pretty much the game plan for progress on global warming. Who's going to feed the third world once the west's technological advantage is eliminated is just something we'll have to finesse.

I don't get in too much of a lather about these one-worlders but I do wish they could do it in Brussels or Strasbourg, or wherever the EU is sitting this week. Let's face it, the euro-sophiste is much better equipped to listen to dog caw-caw than your Nebraskan farmer. The euro can keep a straight face while saying, "Yes, I know you're serious." After a, "are you serious?" the Nebraskan can't help but smile. But then, maybe the euro-weenie knows something we don't. By the time the wealth transfer starts in earnest, the EU will be a third world nation and in line for American monies. I'm pretty sure that, by that time, it won't be the EU anymore, more likely the MU for Muslim Union.

[Valiente]

Originally Posted by camaraderie

Because even if it is 100% inevitable "natural" climate change, I somehow doubt that the response should be "OK, then I'll just keep building coal plants and driving SUVs until we cook".

I'm having trouble following your last statement. If what we are doing does not affect the climate...then there is no reason to change what we're doing on a CLIMATE based theory.

Well, there is that breathing thing we do.

Now...I can argue against dirty coal plants and gas guzzling SUV's on several other fronts:
1. Unhealthy pollution.
2. Funding of Islamic terrorism.
3. Balance of payments/national security
4. Inperative to develope alternates to a limited resource
5. etc.

The point of this thread is to discuss if man-made global warming is or is not a fact ...not to discuss what else we might like to change in the world.

Well, something's going wonky, and our production of certain gases due to industrial activities, electrical generation, transport etc. is the variable we know is different from previous ages. I suppose the question is whether there is a natural component (solar variation, methane bubbles from the ocean, etc.) to what we can easily estimate, being the cause and all.

I also believe that global warming is intimately tied to what else we might like to change in the world, if only because a warmer world will present a great number of hard choices.

My province announced a ban on incandescent lightbulbs today in favour of compact flourescents. I agree in principle that standard bulbs produce too little light and too much heat for too much power: my power bill reflects this. But CF lights have their own problems: namely, the fact that they are toxic waste due to the mercury content...they can't go into the recycling stream here, (nor should they, as should not the more familiar tube florescent lights).

My boat (to bring this thread even fractionally back to boating) has a mixture of LEDs and AlpenGlow 5 and 9 watt lights. They are durable and give a nice light. That decision is driven by power concerns. If we paid what Japan and Europe paid, all this would change more rapidly.

Who caught the NOVA special on solar power last Tuesday? Interesting stuff.

[tigerregis]

That programme ran against Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. ergo, nobody.

[denby]

For the last 20 years or so Mars has warmed up, it is about 156 million miles from the sun. The Earth is about 93 million miles from the sun. So tell me how we are warming Mars Could it be the sun doing this

Dennis