Climate Change Discussion [Split from Election 2008 Thread]

[troutman]

Originally Posted by burn_this_city

The planet has been warming since the last Ice age. Its common knowledge that has not been debunked. To say its 100% our fault is hilarious.

[Resolute 14]

Originally Posted by Ronald Pagan

See Bagor's post.

You mean the one where he said "No. You will rarely in fact never get scientists saying 100%."?

[Ronald Pagan]

I guess people have a problem understanding the 'forcing' argument. We are responsible for forcing.

[Resolute 14]

Do I need to post the Citation Needed image again?

[dobbles]

i love how you guys all like to jump on ronald, but not provide a counter argument of your own.

you fault the guy for using the 100% statistic, but i would be willing to bet that had he used any other number this would have happened:

ronald: its 99% sure that humans are causing climate change
dumb poster: yeah well then that means there is still a 1% chance its something else. lets all drive suvs around because humans can do whatever they want and not suffer any consequences

sorry for my over the topness, but we've all been through this type of discussion before... one side presents data, logic, and reasoning. the other presents insults, innuendo, straw man arguments, and lots of other fun stuff!

[Resolute 14]

I fault him for using an obviously false exaggeration. Coupled with his lectures on how real scientists do things, it comes off disingenous. Last I checked, real scientists don't pull numbers out of their asses and try to pass them off as fact.

His opinion that man bears responsibility is valid.

His opinion that man is 100% responsible is not.

[dobbles]

yeah, i see what you are saying. but really its just semantics. its attacking his words instead of his idea in order to make him look unreliable. personally i agree that most scientists would stray away from the 100% quote because most scientists realize that things can change and that absolutes are few and far between. but, IMO i think ronald was just trying to convey that in the scientific community there is no doubt that humans are causing these problems. yet no one has been able to argue that either a)scientists are NOT in agreement that man is causing climate change or b)climate change is being caused by other factors. instead, all we get are people tearing down ronald for stating his opinion in not the smartest way. its why internet discussion are rarely worthwhile; people can't discuss the issues.

[octothorp]

I took Palin's comment to mean something very different than what people on here seem to be saying. I heard her say that she didn't want to argue about the causes; nothing about how understanding the causes was unimportant, just that it wasn't a useful area to debate (although it's also possible that she simply hadn't been prepped for talking about causes of climate change).

She went on to talk about how important it was to prevent climate change by reducing emissions, which seems to me to be an admission that greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for climate change.

I think that most scientists would say that if we're in agreement that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the way to minimize climate change, then there's no need to argue about causes, since they've already been implicitly agreed upon.

[Ronald Pagan]

We are. Forcing is climate change outside of natural cycles. What else could cause it? Volcanos, changes to the Earth's orbit, and solar intensity.

The correlation statistics indicate highly significant detection of
solar irradiance forcing in the NH series during the ‘Maunder Minimum’ of solar activity from the mid-seventeenth to early eighteenth century which corresponds to an especially cold period. In turn, the steady increase in solar irradiance from the
early nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century coincides with the general warming over the period, showing peak correlation during the mid-nineteenth century. The regression against solar irradiance indicates a sensitivity to changes in the ‘solar constant’ of,0.1 KW-1m-2, which is consistent with recent model based
studies42. Greenhouse forcing, on the other hand, shows no sign of significance until a large positive correlation sharply emerges as the moving window slides into the twentieth century. The partial correlation with CO2 indeed dominates over that of solar irradiance for the most recent 200-year interval, as increases in temperature and CO2 simultaneously accelerate through to the end of 1995, while solar irradiance levels off after the mid-twentieth century. It is reasonable to infer that greenhouse-gas forcing is now the dominant external forcing of the climate system. Explosive volcanism exhibit the expected marginally significant negative correlation with temperature during much of 1610–1995 period, most pronounced in the 200-year window centred near 1830 which includes the most explosive volcanic events.

http://iri.columbia.edu/~goddard/EESC_W4400/CC/mann_etal_1998.pdf

So to say that GHGs are 100% responsible for warming is in fact true because solar intensity has decreased from the mid-century mark and volcanoes serve to cool.

[Resolute 14]

Except that even your bolded quote only says "dominant", not "sole". So you have yet to actually show that it is true that we are 100% responsible.

[Ronald Pagan]

Oh come off it, if I concede that 100% isn't true can we actually talk about this issue instead of the insignificant semantics?

If so, here we go, solar radiation and a changing orbit may have some small, insignificant effect on climate forcing.

[You Need a Thneed]

Glacier melting has not increased in speed at all since records started being kept. That's since 1840. A lot of fossil feul burning was being done in Western Alberta in the 1840s..

The earth is warming up, I don't think that's in any doubt. I have NEVER ONCE read anything conclusive saying that humans are totally responsible. We know that the results of fossil fuel burning COULD have an effect on it. We know that the earth has changed temperatures many times before, long before humans could have had anything to do with it. We know how much a volcano or other such thing can change the temperature of the globe (eg. Mount Tambora).

In my opinion, we are naive if we think that humanity can have a significant effect on the climate of the earth. Now, I'm not for polluting the earth at all, I think we desperately need to come up with cleaner ways of doing things, but only because we need to be good stewards of our planet, not because we need to save the climate. The climate will change, regardless of what we do.

[Resolute 14]

Just a little lesson in reality: exaggeration for effect rarely produces the intended effect. Usually it just serves to trivialize the argument of the exaggerator. Especially since you changed your argument midstream from "we are completely responsible for climate change" to "we are completely responsible for climate change forcing."

As far as the issue goes, not many people are saying that we don't need to do anything. But a lot of people are saying that "OMG! EVERYBODY PANIC!! DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING, NOW!" is not a wise course. i.e.: Dion's Green Scam. (incidentally, I'm noticing that the very few Liberal signs that are finally going up don't have the Green Shift logo that the ones that went up immediately do)

[MelBridgeman]

Since when was science void of debate....
oh the arrogance!

[Ronald Pagan]

Just a little lesson in reality: exaggeration for effect rarely produces the intended effect. Usually it just serves to trivialize the argument of the exaggerator. Especially since you changed your argument midstream from "we are completely responsible for climate change" to "we are completely responsible for climate change forcing."

I didn't change my argument at all. Climate change, the way that we were talking about it, was about our effects on the climate, or unnatural rates of change. We are responsible for that as I have demonstrated.

I didn't exaggerate either. We are responsible for unnatural rates of climate change or climate forcing.

What's the problem?

[Ronald Pagan]

Originally Posted by MelBridgeman

Since when was science void of debate....
oh the arrogance!

Nobody's saying it is.

Show me some science that refutes the theory that humans are changing the climate and then we can debate it.

Trust me, I would like nothing more than for some credible findings to emerge that we are having no effects on the climate. Scientists are trying to do this every time they test the anthropogenic climate change theory.

[MelBridgeman]

Originally Posted by Ronald Pagan

Nobody's saying it is.

Show me some science that refutes the theory that humans are changing the climate and then we can debate it.

Trust me, I would like nothing more than for some credible findings to emerge that we are having no effects on the climate. Scientists are trying to do this every time they test the anthropogenic climate change theory.

The Clovis Conundrum - read up on this, well give some insight on how the science community conducts it's business...keep in mind that scientist are humans and contain the same traits as you and I....

[Bend it like Bourgeois]

Originally Posted by Ronald Pagan

Nobody's saying it is.

Show me some science that refutes the theory that humans are changing the climate and then we can debate it.

Trust me, I would like nothing more than for some credible findings to emerge that we are having no effects on the climate. Scientists are trying to do this every time they test the anthropogenic climate change theory.

That seems weird.

So if scientists were actively trying to disprove the idea that a sasquatch exists, but as yet could not, would that mean a sasquatch must exist?

I don't think it works that way.

[Jetsfan]

I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel last month about the sun. As the sun ages it heats up. They stated that a billion years from now the average temperature on Earth will be 135 Celcius. In fact, the average temperatures of all the planets in the solar system have been increasing in the last 100 years because of the increased output of the sun.

Did any one here notice how originally this heating of the planet was called global warming but is now referred to as climate change because there are places on the this planet where cooling is occuring?

This whole thing is a massive left-wing conspiracy to control our lives and impose a socialist agenda.

[Ronald Pagan]

Originally Posted by Bend it like Bourgeois

That seems weird.

So if scientists were actively trying to disprove the idea that a sasquatch exists, but as yet could not, would that mean a sasquatch must exist?

I don't think it works that way.

Scientists are trying to prove that the extra carbon dioxide emissions in our atmosphere have no effect on warming.

Your Sasquatch example doesn't hold.