[Thor]

Originally Posted by Slava

Well suffice it to say that this is where you and I disagree. I read the report posted by troutman (which I read but didn't dissect entirely). I think that some pieces of that are questionable in how they're presented, and I don't think that is just stalling for the sake of stalling.

I just have the opinion that to entirely turn the economy on its head with no debate or questioning along the way would be just plain irresponsible. I don't think that is an anti-science point of view either. In reality its the heart of science to question things and examine them.

But its not necessary to turn the economy on its head. What we are talking about is a new deal level of commitment from the government and a leadership role in being aggressive in research and technology which will lead to breakthroughs in helping us combat the damage. Its not an either or proposition, and the few nations that are doing great things like Germany are doing so without harm to their economy, quite often the opposite; plus they will position themselves to be in the leadership of future technology.

a) how much of that change is natural cycle that we have seen and verified over the millions of years of the earths existence, and how much is attributable to man? I think that both sides agree that the planet has warmed and cooled over the millennia, and we haven't always had the polar ice caps on earth.

We can't be sure how much is natural, and how much of it is man made. What the issue is not % of which is because of us, but at the speed of the change. Natural cycles take a long time and that gives the ecosystem and species time to slowly adapt, natural cycles will self correct easier and the earth has many triggers in climate which are part of this complex cycle.

The issue is we know now with the hockey stick example that the speed is disturbingly fast, and increasing. The term runaway heating is an excellent way of putting it, we are starting a small snowball at the top of a slope and its starting to become something we can't stop at this point, but hopefully start to slow its growth so to speak.

The key with the past warm periods and cold periods is the time frames it took for those to occur, naturally. What we are seeing now is light speed compared to slow changing climate, and that is frightening.

b) if the changes we see today are as a result of the greater natural cycles of the planet, is there much we can do about this? Are we at the point of peeing on a forest fire?

Quite a bit actually, I honestly think technology will be the savior for us, to help us clean up the mess and create new ways to create energy, pollute less and clean up the messes we've already made.

There was a terrific article many years ago (I will try to find) about the need for us to terraform and engineer the earth to sustain the billions we have and will have in the future living on earth. To stop that natural cycle of warming and cooling to ice age. We will have to have a Goldie locks zone of temperatures which will be controlled by man, using technology to monitor and keep us at a constant.

Right now we are "peeing on a forest fire" you are not wrong to make that point. However we have to start, and speed up our battle against this warming in order to avoid a disastrous next 500 years. Little changes help, but we have to deal with the big issues first, energy obviously being huge, our farming is another big one, this will happen but it will take time.

c) this is one that I will just get flamed for, but I'm genuinely curious and not trying to be obtuse. So how do we know that the cause of the increase in temperatures is due to carbon emissions? Carbon dioxide only makes up a miniscule percentage of the atmosphere (0.04%?), and the graphs in all of these reports love to show how emissions have increased...but temperatures don't seem to have increased along with the emissions?

Its minuscule but its impact is huge on earth's temperature. Small changes have significant impact, its well understood and we have a long historical understanding of the impact it has as a green house gas. The carbon cycle is massive, the earth recycles huge amounts of co2, that balance started to change 200 years ago and we've seen the tiny change in co2 in the atmosphere cause the warming we see now, and as I mentioned before the speed of it is the thing that is very alarming.

In general though when I see these dire projections and they're decades in the future it looks like a lot of extrapolation. Given how poor people are at forecasting and considering how many factors we have to model and predict here it seems almost impossible that someone is going to be accurate.

We don't know as much as we think we do; we're basing these projections on a very small sample of roughly 100 years of observations.

We do actually know way more than 100 years, we can look back 100,000s of years with ice cores, we know about ice ages and warm periods throughout millions of years thanks to samples we've studied.

In general, the dire predictions that people seem to love to throw out there do as much damage to getting things done as anything else; we heard about how acid rain was going to kill all of our lakes, then the Amazon rainforest was going to be cut down completely. (Both deforestation an protection of water are absolutely critical in my personal opinion, but both have really fallen off the radar). Then we had the hole in the ozone layer and we were all going to be cancerous and a whole host of problems were going to happen. Interestingly though that problem is solved I guess, or at least it doesn't seem to be a concern, and in the report from troutman above it cites ozone as a GHG, so who knows what to do with that! I feel like we've been hearing about rising seas for years now, and same with the polar ice cap melting. I'm sure that if you were to go back you would see predictions that are dire and were supposed to happen by the year 2000, or 2010.

But we can't just discard the data because some of the past predictions on other issues were not bang on, don't forget that sheer massive amount of data, observation and what we've learned in the last 10-20 years.

Anyway, I hope this comes across as intended, and that is genuinely curious and interested as opposed to argumentative. I guess I just think its an incredibly complex issue and taking a hardliner position one way or the other seems very difficult to say the least.

You are one of the good ones, with a genuine curiosity and not refusing to consider the question, so let me do some digging for stuff I think you need to read or even better watch on youtube, some terrific stuff that will help answer all these questions.