Global Warming is Too Hot to Handle

Davea0511 formatting or no, I suspect your post makes little sense as you seem to be caught up in climate alarmism. OK let's go with the concept that we're not capable of giving an opinion on whether climate change is natural or manmade. Let's just examine the question of whether we can really stop it. That answer should be an obvious "NO". I see some very sensible posts here, Kinetic gets a nod for that, and I see some ridiculous ones even though there are a few good points towards the end - I'm talking about Brad Arnold here. The problem with the whole global warming alarmism bit is that it's just another attempt to deify man - man does not have the power to terraform planets yet - sorry to let you down in that respect but it's true.

Davea0511 - No politician has to "hatch" the scheme (if it is true). Something like this just kinda happens. Politicians have a tendicy to latch onto subjects that get people worked up, so they can get votes. It happens all the time with the debates over violence in videogames. Politicians choose something that most people know nothing about, then play it up like it is a huge problem, just so they can get people to vote. Of course, this isn't saying that all GW is is politicians *cough*Al Gore*cough* trying to get attention, but that no politician has to be "clever" enough to come up with it.

Boy this text editor sucks. IT removed all my formating and the above post makes no sense now.

>The term "Global Warming' is >nothing more than a political >term used to control >individual's behavior, slow >the U.S. economy, introduce >higher taxation. -Kinetic I don't know what's funnier ... the paranoid people who think we're killing the planet or the paranoid people who think those who are paranoid about the planet are really liars trying to control others through fear. I do however know which group sounds a lot more pathetic: it's is the latter of the two. I see no motive to "control people" through Global Warming "fear tactics". I simply can't imagine any politician being so clever as to hatch such a scheme - besides there are much better ways to win public opinion. Personally I don't care if it's true. Prudence is the best policy if we're talking about the future of the world, and even if the arguments against GW were better I still say let's not gamble with the future of the planet. Incidentally, Coyte, I'm a republican and I resent your comments. We're not so one dimensional.

Where I am typing this from used to sit a one mile thick sheet of ice. It melted into Lake Agassi then into the Great Lakes and none of this occurred because a drive a pick-em-up-truck. The ice on Antarctica has been growing. The ice on Greenland is thicker today than 30 years ago. One large volcanic eruption like what occurred in the 1800's on mount Krakatoa brought Global Cooling, misery, death and the potato famine. How naive it is to believe that humans can control the earth's temperature. We are only responsible for about 2% of CO2 on the planet. The Sun is burning hotter today than 30 years ago. The earth has "rings of fire" that constantly belch smoke and heat from volcanoes. The term "Global Warming' is nothing more than a political term used to control individual's behavior, slow the U.S. economy, introduce higher taxation. The earth would heat and cool regardless of humans. Even Mars is known to have an increased global temperature. Global cooling would have devistating results on my local community. Bring on 'Global Warming', please like alGore promised, please.

Not qualified to us your opinion on global warming, huh? How about your opinion on the IPCC scientific process that declared over a 90% confidence that global warming was happening, and it was mainly caused by mankind's greenhouse gas emissions? How about elementary particle physics, which proves how powerful CO2 is as a greenhouse gas? Or how about the paleoclimatological evidence linking CO2 levels and temperature levels in the past? It escapes me how you can so mistake the concept of objectivity as to avoid having a scientific opinion on global warming-it isn't even a close call. How about the adverse effects of tabacco smoke-do you have an opinion on that even though you aren't a medical doctor? How about the danger of driving without a seatbelt-do you have an opinion on that dispite that fact you aren't a crash dummy?

read my wiki and google terms for "polar cities" in the future, say year 2500, re glo war, and my blog here climatechange3000.blogspot.com and comments pro and con THINK!

Here is a rebuttal to the Oreskes article mentioned above. motls.blogspot.com/2005/05/oreskes-study-errata.html

But there is a third option. Manmade or not GW is almost always presented as being a very bad thing. Says who. Warmer is wetter. It's been warmer in the past, and there were no mass extinctions, deserts bloomed, and civilization blossomed. Stopping GW (even if remotely possible) might merely be dooming sub-saharan Africa to yet more generations of unspeakable hardship, even as the promise of the return of the rains seemed about to happen.

This article made a great case to me why there is such a fierce debate over topics like Global Climate Change, Peak Oil and others. Ignore the politics the message makes sense to me. jfoman's hypothesis is that what we believe depends on who we trust as our, authority figures. Why They Don't Get It by jforman Sun Dec 10, 2006 at 09:45:03 AM PST Have you ever wondered why Republicans will cling to a belief despite seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Consider, for example, a recent debate with a die-hard Republican friend of mine. I have great respect for him as a human being, but I was amazed when he claimed that global warming was the product of mass hysteria among academics and liberals. After some digging I produced Naomi Oreskes’s essay in Science Magazine that unambiguously lays out the scientific consensus on the anthropogenic nature of climate change. His response? He was totally unmoved. In my frustration, I wondered – how can he possibly continue to cling to his beliefs despite having no real counter-argument to sound reasoning and evidence? The answer, I found, is that his authority structure is simply very, very different from mine. My realization came as I read through an amazing (if somewhat opaque) book by Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth. I read this book before entering graduate school in molecular biology because it deals with the social historical aspects of one of the first modern institutions of science – The Royal Society, with a focus on Robert Boyle – and what it means for something to be true in a scientific, but also broader, sense. One of the aims of the book is to debunk a major tenet of modern science – that knowledge comes only from experimentation and first-hand knowledge. This theory of knowledge exists in contrast to that of the pre-modern era, where knowledge was not personally acquired by rather passed from elder to initiate. As Shapin puts it, in the modern age If we are heard to say that we know something on the basis of trust, we are understood to say that we do not possess genuine knowledge at all. (16) The irony, he points out, is that modern scientists can personally vouch for the truth of an impossibly small amount of knowledge. Take myself, for example. I "know" that our genes are encoded in polymers of deoxyribonucleic acids (or DNA) – for any gene, there will be a specific sequence of DNA that is transcribed into RNA by an enzyme named RNA polymerase, and this RNA will then be translated into a protein by a ribosome. But do I really know these "facts," seeing as how I have never personally even verified the structure of DNA despite working with it every day? Shapin explains that all knowledge, even scientific knowledge, is a communal good: What counts for any community as true knowledge is a collective good and a collective accomplishment. (5) When you think about it, it would be absurd for society to work in any other way. Individuals would be forced to rediscover the entire corpus of knowledge de novo. The computer programmer couldn’t be content being told how his program physically works. In order to "know" why his algorithm performs the function he thinks it does, he would be forced to build the computer himself – he would have to mine the ore, fabricate the plastic, and piece it all together himself to truly understand why his computer code works the way it does. But societies don’t work like that. We have authority structures and a communal body of knowledge (that is to some degree mutable) so that individuals can make a more efficient contribution to the whole. Shapin explains these authority structures as follows: Accordingly, in order for that knowledge to be effectively accessible to an individual—for an individual to have it—there needs to be some kind of moral bond between the individual and other members of the community. The word I propose to use to express this moral bond is trust. (7) Thus, Shapin explains that knowledge is not objective. It has a moral character, even for the supposedly most objective of all communities, the scientific community. My knowledge of DNA is grounded in the trust that I have in my textbooks. When I perform work in the laboratory, I trust that a microscope works as I have been told. I trust that the cells I am looking at have the components that my professor has taught me. What does all of this have to do with the 50 state strategy? Everything. The distribution of trust is therefore coextensive with the community, and its boundaries are the community’s boundaries. (36) We only believe the members of our knowledge-community. We believe Science Magazine. We believe Keith Olbermann. We believe Kos. We believe the New York Times editorial board. We believe these authorities because they are part of our community. We’ll debate with them and sometimes disagree with them. But we trust them enough to faithfully engage in this debate. To illustrate this point – how many people who are reading this diary right now believe in anthropogenic global warming? Probably almost all. And how many of us have first-hand knowledge of its existence? Probably almost none. And yet we believe in it because people we trust say it exists. We trust Naomi Oreskes and Al Gore to report on the beliefs of the scientific community. And we believe that scientific community. My Republican friend? He does not trust Science Magazine. He believes most university professors have a liberal bias, and cannot therefore be fully trusted. He trusts the Washington Post editorial board. He trusts (recently powerless, thank God) Senator Inhofe. This is why he will never be persuaded by the information that persuaded me. It isn’t part of his knowledge-community. It isn’t trustworthy. As another illustration, consider Seymour Hersh’s report that Iran is not anywhere near acquiring nuclear weapons. The response among liberals was undoubtedly to believe the story and to believe that President Bush was once again twisting the truth to coerce us into another needless, criminal war. Conservatives, however, saw the report differently (brought to you by Red State): I don't believe anything Seymour Hersh writes. I am more convinced every day... That Hersh just makes this up...that there are, in fact, in his stories, no leaks. Hopefully I have helped you see more starkly what we are up against. Providing facts and evidence, even a mountain of it, isn’t good enough as long as the authorities of the other side are telling another story -- be it by providing a different perspective or by outright lying. So what is there to do to recruit these people away from Limbaugh et al.? To be honest I’m not entirely sure, and I hope you all can develop these answers together with me. But to start, we need to understand the importance of getting them to trust us -- they need to see that we share the same hopes and conc