BF2S Forums A Letter to the Editor Regarding Climate Change

"So, why do otherwise completely rational people become so irrational regarding climate change?"

Most of the deniers in my experience are pretty irrational in my experience. IE creationist, Obama is a muslim types.

I am of the opinion that in order to debunk, disprove and/or discredit scientists, the theories, and the science behind anthropogenic global warming you must demonstrate an understanding of the science and the procedures implemented in the experiments.

This.

I consider myself a skeptic by nature but freely admit that I don't completely understand the science behind the debate.  So, why do otherwise completely rational people become so irrational regarding climate change?

The basics are well rooted in very fundamental physics and chemistry, they aren't hard to understand

Why is the debate regarding climate change shifted from science to Al Gore and carbon credits?

I've been asking this question for years

Can anyone here demonstrate an understanding of the science enough to put together a comprehensive argument against what these scientists are saying?

I'd really like to hear it.

Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.

Absolutely critical and absolutely forgotten. It has nothing to do with global warming per se in that the temperature rising by a few degrees will almost no affect on the pH of the ocean - and all things being equal a rise in temperature would see a very small change in alkalinity. But all things are not equal and increasing the concentration of the substance is by far the best way to increase the concentration of it in solution.

Last edited by Spark (2010-05-24 18:06:25)

Interesting thread Ken. Last week I heard a rather interesting interview about climate/geo engineering and climate change on the radio.. I'll try to dig it up..

edit: Here we go - http://www.abc.net.au/rn/futuretense/st … 873626.htm You can click to see the transcript, which might be a bit easier than listening to the entire thing

Lecture to go to so I'll be responding in longer detail later but that's one of the more reasonable posts on this topic I've seen for a while, kudos.

mcminty wrote:

While the fundamental climate change science has been properly established, politicians and others in a position to drive large scale change are still arguing about those very facts. None of them want to take the first real step, as to do so would be costly and thus politically unpopular (seeing as a vast majority of people are unwilling to undertake actions that have an immediate cost yet only realise a benefit in the future..) Just look at Kyoto and Copenhagen. Talk-fests, with no real outcome.

Umm yeah, they're politicians, they talk for a living. Did you really expect there to be some world changing outcome from Kyoto or Copenhagen? Don't be naive.

There is no 'first step' to take. There are no real solutions so talk is all they can and will do to placate the wacky enviros. Even if oil was never discovered, the internal combustion engine never perfected and electricity never harnessed, we'd still be looking at exactly the same issue anyway. There are 6.5 billion or so people on this planet and they all require heat in their homes and hot food in their bellies. Before the things I mentioned, we cut down trees or dug coal from the ground in order to survive. If anything, oil has saved us from entirely destroying the planet via deforestation.

So, carry on with the sky is falling talk, continue wringing your hands and saying that someone should do something to fix the problem, continue driving to work in your car, heating your food with electricity or gas. The world will eventually change and we'll just have to learn to adapt.

Last edited by JohnG@lt (2010-05-24 19:15:50)

cool thread bros.

tbh, thorium reactors are the answer to the energy crisis, that and electric cars.

Admittedly, I sometimes wonder if global warming is a good thing.  The disturbingly nihilistic nature of our species often makes it seem like maybe Agent Smith from the Matrix was right.

Maybe we really are a virus and global warming is part of the solution by helping to eliminate us in the long run.

We tend to be an irrational species in general.  While it is our intellect that separates us from other species, we don't truly differ from other animals until we gain the refinement that education and civilized culture allows for.  This is why it's often so hard for us to reason with the remote regions of hellholes like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Naturally, coming to terms with a complex topic like climate change is difficult for the uneducated and the intellectually challenged.  The same goes for evolution or the Big Bang.

JohnG@lt wrote:

ghettoperson wrote:

"So, why do otherwise completely rational people become so irrational regarding climate change?"

Most of the deniers in my experience are pretty irrational in my experience. IE creationist, Obama is a muslim types.

I'm not a 'denier', I just don't like any of the solutions that have been put forth. Drastically changing our lifestyle and abandoning fossil fuel use would require a replacement by another product that has the low cost, efficiency and ease of use that combustion provides us. The current 'green energy' solutions are no solution at all. They can be used as supplemental sources of power, sure, but they're too unreliable to bear the full load. Nuclear is what we have and it scares the bejeezus out of people because they think Hiroshima would occur in their backyard.

The other primary solution that has been put forward is carbon credits and carbon taxes. These fail for two reasons. One, they would require the entire world to be on board. If even one country reneged on the idea it would profit handsomely as industries flocked to do business within it's borders. Because we'll never get every country to sign on without the constant threat of armed invasion or armed embargoes, it's realistically off the table. The second reason is that the way they have been put forth, they would be nothing more than another commodities market, this one entirely artificial. I don't really have a high opinion of people who play the stock market for a living, they aren't contributing anything, middlemen hardly ever do, so creating another exchange for them to play on doesn't excite me in the slightest.

Not hard to agree with this statement

JohnG@lt wrote:

So, I say to the scientists working on climate change that now that they've proved their theory to a certain extent, perhaps they should work on something more worthwhile, like viable solutions. We don't have massive armies of self important people confirming for us that the sun is going to rise every day so now it's time for them to redeploy their energies as well.

I have my doubts that the same scientists working on the climate change theory are capable of working on the solution, their fields of expertise is more narrow now then only a few years ago ...

Think this is a job for scientists engaged by technology companies, carbon cleaning tech is a priority in many Norwegian industrial companies and I bet many US companies have asigned people to this also ... carbon cleaning tech that works will yield these companies astronomical amounts of money ...

Diesel_dyk wrote:

The article has nothing we haven't heard before. it basically says, "we've been saying this for a while, we've managed to convince a lot of people to believe this, so it should be accepted as fact... why won't you accept it as fact... what's wrong with you.... you are killing the earth... we should tax you out of your hummer and make you cry when you pay your electric bill."

Its just a cry to rally the enviro base. I expect more propaganda as the we approach the fight on cap and trade.

Here's a video apparently not everyone agrees with the models and the mathematics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fvsnqehjq0


Galt... good points... let's see them come up with some real world solutions... or we could just wait 10 or 15 years more to see how accurate these models really are... but of course lots of these scientists will be reitred before they are proven wrong.... now that's convenient.


The only thing that can be done is to work to prevent the wall street privateers from piggy backing on this popcorn science and that's why the real debate is over cap and trade. BTW you guys do know that we are still coming out of the last ice age, right? Glaciers advance, glaciers retreat, the ground it still rebounding from compression and the climate is still adjusting.

Just so that you are aware, most of what you have said is just rubbish.

The truly vast majority of all scientists (i.e. one or two that aren't commonly considered to be top of their fields) are 95% sure that the proposed view of recent and future climate change is happening.

Many of the scientists involved in current research into climate change aren't old, they won't have retired in the next 10-15 years. Its just that the big names in science who are generally used as they are well respected within the community are getting on. Most of the research being done at my uni in this field is being done by people generally in their 20s-40s so they won't have retired by then.

The points about the ice age (by the way, we're not coming out of it. we are still in it jus in an interglacial period of it) also just don't stand up against climate records, yes interglacial periods are warm but no they do not increase in warmth so rapidly and in this short a time.

If you wish to actually debate the science then feel free to revive the thread on it.

@ Galt, many scientists just excel in the testing and hypothesis area of science rather than the solutions side of science. It will most likely be a few years till newly trained scientist (hopefully my generation of scientists) will be ready to actually tackle the problem of creating solutions.

Though renewables are for many nations in my own opinion a valid option, they would just require truly enormous changes to power generation networks and how everything we know works. (we would have to move to a hydrogen economy due to the intermittance of power generation so we would have to literally ship stored energy around in blocks at times). However if the world was to do this then the economic super powers of the world could well change, the middle east would still be massively powerful but mostly from the export of hydrogen from solar cells or some other form of solar energy. North Africa would also become a massively worthwhile region, I believe I read that it is calculated that you could power the entire world based on the energy you would get from covering the sahara in solar cells, obviously not feasible but it shows my point.

Just as an aside

The reason why you generally don't get deniers who understand the background science to it (as it was said earlier, its simple enough) is because once you do understand the background science to it you can't deny it.


EDIT after seeing Varegg's post:

Those are all very true points, the vast majority of progress when it comes to solutions and technologies will only occur when big businesses such as oil/gas companies realise that could potentially make even more money by creating solutions. Then the developments will come flying.

Last edited by Noobeater (2010-05-25 06:25:24)

Dilbert, nuking the world would only make climate change worse.

Trotskygrad wrote:

Dilbert, nuking the world would only make climate change worse.

Hardly. It'd get much colder.

DBBrinson1 wrote:

These guys were exposed as frauds.

Who are "these guys"?  Please don't tell me you think that literally every scientist working on climatological studies is now a fraud by default....


To respond to the topic, there is little doubt warming is occurring, and there is little doubt that humans contribute to it...that said, I don't necessarily believe that we are the only source of warming, nor do I necessarily think that we've somehow reached some point of no return and that our planet will be ruined in 100 years, as some extremists seem to believe.

More pertinent questions at this point include: 1) How much does our contribution, as a whole, affect the overall warming pattern, 2) How do we decrease said contribution without negatively affecting standards of living in the short term. 

Unfortunately, as the system stands today, we need politicians intimately involved in this process.