01-22-2016, 08:35 AM
|
#487
|
Franchise Player
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: In my office, at the Ministry of Awesome!
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
Something tells me we wouldn't mesh well to begin with, regardless of this particular issue.
I knew this was the reaction that I would get from some.
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.
This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read?
Do you honestly think there is any sort of equivalence between predicting the outcome of 1 random event, and making long term predictions based on validated scientific principles and statistics?
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?
First of all, even if you were correct that other warm periods were caused by things like solar activity and changing ocean currents (the currents don't even make sense, ocean currents are a result of temperature differences, not a cause of them), that doesn't change the fact that humans are increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and that CO2 is responsible for at least some of the warming (I'm being generous here). To say that just because there are other factors causing change, means we shouldn't focus on the ones we can affect is ridiculous.
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.
Scientific opinion changing isn't a reason to discount it. That's exactly how science is supposed to work. When new data becomes available that challenges the current theory, you need to consider how it changes what you believe to be true. If that wasn't how science worked, the sun would still be rotating around the earth.
And saying that global cooling was a concern in the 70's is such a ridiculous argument.There was no where near the level of data, evidence and agreement between reputable sources that there is today.
|
You're trying to make yourself out to be this voice of reason, but when you say things like "Global warming is a joke" and then use pretty spurious and or outright incorrect arguments to try to prove how level minded you are, it becomes pretty clear that you aren't nearly as level headed or rational as you claim to be.
__________________
THE SHANTZ WILL RISE AGAIN.
 <-----Check the Badge bitches. You want some Awesome, you come to me!
|
|
|