[Slava]

Originally Posted by Tinordi

I would never trust my money to a money manager who believed in conspiracy theories and dismissed decades of scientific research. Stunning you would admit that Slava.

Something tells me we wouldn't mesh well to begin with, regardless of this particular issue.

Originally Posted by rubecube

Yikes.

I knew this was the reaction that I would get from some.

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

This is the kind of flippant dismissal that has turned the global warming issue into just another black and white partisan litmus test. It shall not be discussed is no way to treat any serious issue. Especially a science issue. The whole point of science is to relentlessly challenge every theory. Here are some perfectly rational questions that are worth asking regarding global warming.

1) How accurate are the models we're using to assess global temperature changes and projections?

2) To what degree are man-made activities responsible for any warming, and what other factors could be at play?

3) What is the range of effects that increases and decreases to carbon emissions are likely to have on climate?

4) How practical are alternatives to carbon-based energy sources in supplying the energy requirements of the planet?

Unfortunately, dogmatic zealots use 'the science is settled' to stifle debate. You have the Gaia religionists, who idealize pre-industrial living and who crave certainty and piety just as surely as any fundamentalist Christian. And you have anti-capitalist activists, for whom a theory that justifies ratcheting down global industry and taxing trade is a godsend. These groups make up some of the most passionate advocates for reducing carbon emissions, and neither is known for being especially literate in science, or for being open to empiricism or nuance.

So I chuckle when the issue is framed as a science vs ignorance debate. Last time I checked there was a tremendous amount of overlap between the anti-vax crowd and global-warming activists.

The science is settled on very few scientific theories, especially not ones as complex and difficult to assess as global climate.

I think that I should've pointed out that its not that I don't believe the planet is warming. It might be. I just dispute the idea that its man causing it. Frankly there are so many factors that lead to it, we have zero idea whether its us causing the warming. I also find the "science denier" angle amusing. I have been hearing for decades now. The Kyoto protocol is about 19 years old, and before that we had the UN framework which was from 1992. Is there credible evidence that over those 25 years that we have experienced global warming? Is there any evidence that its been caused by man? Those were the two original premises of the UN framework.

I find the current carbon discussion troublesome for two main reasons (three if you count the fact that you can't have an adult discussion on it without being labelled as ignorant, or a pure knuckle dragging science denier!):

1. These issues are based on projections that go out 50 years. Frankly humans and our forecasting skill is tedious at best. We think we have things figured out, but in reality things tend to wind up very differently. So maybe the planet warms, maybe it doesn't. We are a society so bad at predicting things that we can bet on the outcome of hockey games (which a lot of us on here think we are experts) and the odds are against us...yet we can apparently predict the future temperatures for the planet five decades away? I'm sure that's completely accurate.

2. Is the warming man-made? We all know (thank you science!) that the earth has warmed and cooled before. We might have watched "An Inconvenient Truth" with Al Gore and saw the graph that looks like a hockey stick and fell for the "we've never seen this kind of temperature change before" kind of line. The thing is we might not have seen it directly, but its not the first time in the history of the planet. We know there was a "mini ice-age" in the middle of the last century or so. We also know that this was sandwiched between a couple of warmer periods. Were those warm periods because of increased carbon in the atmosphere? Seems unlikely. Most of that warming is attributed to things like solar activity, changing ocean currents and other things that man simply cannot control at this point. How much of the changes we perceive today are due to those factors?

So, long story short (and in the wrong thread), I just think that there are more questions than answers. There are theories that aren't even close to proven. If that makes me some kind of "science-denier" in your eyes, that's your issue. I just think that since we as a world really began having this discussion the global temperature has increased something minimal like 0.14-0.2 degrees? (The science seems in dispute for these things), but as far as I can see we've seen a 1.2 degree increase over the past 140 years. That doesn't mean that we are going to rise forever. Maybe this is a good place to remind everyone that in the 70's science was concerned about global cooling. There is a significant division here.