Climate Change Denial: Why?

a reply to: Masterjaden

AGW is backed by sound science.

To proclaim 'IT'S A RELIGION!' tells me that you have bought into some serious B$.

But go ahead and remain ignorant.

a reply to: TheRedneck

Straight from the NASA paper about CO2 and increased plant growth:

The gas, which traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere, has been increasing since the industrial age due to the burning of oil, gas, coal and wood for energy and is continuing to reach concentrations not seen in at least 500,000 years. The impacts of climate change include global warming, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and sea ice as well as more severe weather events.

You agree that more CO2 is causing faster plant growth, but refuse to accept the part of the paper above?

Are you really trying to call me intellectually dishonest?

a reply to: jrod

No, I am saying that the warnings issued are either unknown conditions or repeats of previously failed predictions. Compared to the positive claims, which have supporting evidence, these concerns are unsupported in the paper.

I am also not calling you intellectually dishonest, I am called the contributing scientist to whom the quote was attributed to intellectually dishonest. He uses rhetoric to attempt to minimalize the results of the experiments.

I am not attacking you; I am explaining why your interpretation is inaccurate.

TheRedneck

a reply to: TheRedneck

I draw a line between politics and political opinion

Which is perfectly understandable for various reasons, but it isn't that clear after all, is it? I've mentioned human rights, which could be placed on both sides with regards to your differenciation. Don't you think science has moral obligations? Where do you see those rights with regards to the line you draw?
Just think about Goethes Faust or Dürrenmatts The Physicians for example, the issue is probably as old as science herself.

Just a quick reply with a new link, the whole site in Edinburgh is down. Odd... Here you go!

Not the greenhouse gases, but their contribution to the warming roughly tenfolded:

During the first half of the century, greenhouse gases and natural forcings cause warming trends of ∼0.2–0.3 K/century...
Over the last half of the century, greenhouse gases warm the climate at a rate of 1.7 ± 0.43 K/century,

0.2 -> 2.13 app.

First lines, mate. We need you right there!

a reply to: TheRedneck

Very well...sorry for the misunderstanding.

I haven't seen any studies about phytoplankton and the rising CO2. Being a water person and fisherman, this is important.

More phytoplankton should be a good thing for our fish too, even if we have to seed the phytoplankton.

a reply to: PublicOpinion

you do realize what plus or minus means right? That means it could be as high as 2.13 or as low as 1.27.. which is an error rate of ~30% which means it's practically useless.

Jaden

a reply to: jrod

REALLY???Please cite the sound science...oh BTW, you can't include anything based on IPCC which leaked emails have shown that they are corrupt and only care about showing results that they want to show and you have to include studies that include raw data, not contrived adjusted data which again are attempts at following the religious adherence to dogma as opposed to sound scientific reasoning...lol...

You people are pathetic...

Jaden

a reply to: jrod

I see nothing wrong with any of those. All of the above are good for the planet and none of them will happen at a catastrophic rate. We have plenty of time to adapt.

a reply to: PublicOpinion

You do realize the warming is logarithmic right?

originally posted by: BuzzyWigs
a reply to: TheRedneck

Clean the oceans and seed the phytoplankton, providing positive social benefits to everyone, with massive public support, so we can temporarily wait on enacting carbon dioxide regulations?

I say the latter. There is massive public agreement. There is much more mature scientific research and certainty. The same mature science indicates both problems will be solved in the near term. And I believe the final cost will be less.

Sounds like a plan to me.

The massive public agreement is what I also agree with.

Somehow readers are conflating flat out "denial" of it happening (which it is), disregard for pollution (which is horrible), and assumptions that they will be out of work and out of transportation if something is done about it.

I did not say - nor do I promote - anything about hurting people in the meanwhile. The coal trains are still running. The oil refineries are still operating. Fracking is still going on, however....and deep ocean drilling.

I understand the USA has more oil reserves (both in and out of ground) than its current "suppliers" - so why are we importing?

The Keystone pipeline would create a few temporary jobs, and a lot of environmental destruction. Can't we try an alternative instead of building newer oil-moving tech?

I think we can. Yes, lots of people are out of work in the 'rust belt', and many auto plants are closed. TONS of jobs are being outsourced even still - to Mexico, and overseas.

I think we need to learn to get along with what we have available to us without importing anything. We can do it! The rest of the world needs our farm products, so we have that going for us, too.
We COULD be sustainable without foreign trade. Most just don't want to - because PROFIT.

As far as I can tell, that is. But I am no expert on economics. I never have been. I am however, VERY GOOD at balancing a budget, making do with what materials I have on hand, and shopping carefully for what I need. Especially second hand and home-made/home-grown things, and reclaimed/repurposed things.

The "consumer society" is a huge part of the problem. In my opinion.


Thank you.

That's the post I was thinking about. It might look like I'm talking to Buzzy now, but actually I'd rather like to address the more scientific minded guys, who probably disagree with her statement. Yes, it's YOU I'm talking about.

This society has a mere materialistic approach to the world by now, which is precisely the root of the problem.

For positivism, which has assumed the judicial office of enlightened reason, to speculate about intelligible worlds is no longer merely forbidden but senseless prattle. Positivism—fortunately for it—does not need to be atheistic, since objectified thought cannot even pose the question of the existence of God. The positivist censor turns a blind eye to official worship, as a special, knowledge-free zone of social activity, just as willingly as to art—but never to denial, even when it has a claim to be knowledge. For the scientific temper, any deviation of thought from the business of manipulating the actual, any stepping outside the jurisdiction of existence, is no less senseless and self-destructive than it would be for the magician to step outside the magic circle drawn for his incantation; and in both cases violation of the taboo carries a heavy price for the offender.

en.wikiquote.org...

TheRedneck would've stepped away from the project he was working on in case the lead scientist would've done something similar. There are specific taboos and the positivism mentioned acts like a censor, forbidding any step outside of this legitimized process of results-oriented and 'clean' thinking.

Have a well presented article on top of that, in my opinion one of the best books I ever happened to stumble upon.

Leading on from the theory of negative dialectics, Dialectic of Enlightenment argues that enlightenment values themselves are not automatically progressive and that the potentially liberating process of the unfolding of human freedom, as Hegel and indeed Marx posited it, is undermined by our enslavement within the totality of capitalist social relations.

Their view is that fascism, Stalinism and consumer capitalism all produced the widespread socialisation of the means of production and the corporatisation of the economy, with a central role for the state. This convergence had done away with the worst excesses of class exploitation and replaced it with a sort of social complicity between the classes undergirded by recourse to mythologies and ideological control.

This control is exercised not only through direct repression but through the apparently non-ideological aspects of our everyday lives, in particular the ways in which modernity encourages us to fulfil and pursue our desires rather than have them crushed and controlled. Here, de Sade is brought in along with Nietzsche to demonstrate how modernity and the Enlightenment have brought about the transvaluation of all values and undermined all traditions. Marx also noted that in capitalism "all that is solid melts into air". What is often misunderstood on this point is that the Frankfurt School were not the cause of the apparent breakdown of social values but were drawing attention to the way in which capitalism was ineluctably smashing up the old certainties. At the same time as making us enjoy the experience as an extension of our libido we also feel guilty about and transfer the blame for it onto anyone but ourselves.

The Frankfurt school, part 3: Dialectic of Enlightenment

It's a rather heavy topic and it goes probably a few steps too far to come across like an easy solution, which it obviously isn't. But I think a paradigm change egarding our approach to the world is the only chance we've got.

We'll always find some plants using more CO2 than imagined and thus there will allways be some sort of debate ragarding the details of any theory. We might already know that CO2 warms the planet, but we're also nearly certain that there are offsetting factors as well, some of them just might have to be invented first.
Our brains are wired this way, simply because we believe to be in charge due to our scientific approach to the world. Hence most of us are confident to find a solution and they're using climate change as a business opportunity. Which is rather natural, given the overall positivism in all different parts of our society.



Sieg Heil, eh?
Have some fun with my pointed sticks, light 'em up now!

a reply to: Masterjaden

Practically useless?

Data is data and my statement still holds some water, as you just explained. Talk away!

a reply to: PublicOpinion

Any time you have an error rate in the double digits, relying on it to allow for meaningful conclusions becomes precarious at best...

Jaden

a reply to: raymundoko

Care to explain why you think that's important with regards to the cited results?

a reply to: Masterjaden

We're constantly narrowing down our rate of error. But it's your goddamnd right to think meaningful conclusions are not to be drawn from this study, for any reason you want.

I don't even take that argument serious, it's redundant at best. Go ahead and show me a comparable simulation with a smaller margin of error, I doubt you'll find any.

a reply to: Masterjaden

I've linked plenty of scientific material that shows we can tangibly show an increase caused by fossil fuel burning alone. That only makes up 5% of the increase in co2 and even that small amount causes warming. We directly cause the slight warming. Increased population is suspected to be a small chunk, but the biggest chunk of all? Animal Agriculture

These are all things that we have proven with science through direct observation, not models

a reply to: PublicOpinion

So you don't know what logarithmic means?

Logarithm

In mathematics, the logarithm is the inverse operation to exponentiation. That means the logarithm of a number is the exponent to which another fixed value, the base, must be raised to produce that number. In simple cases the logarithm counts repeated multiplication

In other words, yes, we've seen significant warming with the increase of co2 we've had so far. You can't say "see, we will keep warming this fast" as it is scientifically proven the warming is logarithmic. We won't see significant increases for another few hundred PPM. The difference between 280-400 PPM is like the difference between 400 and 640 PPM, and then 640-1120, and then 1120-2080.

You can't use the warming we see already and apply it to slight increases, even in the 10's or hundred of ppm's and think it will follow that same trend. Look at the stabilization charts I linked previously. The difference between 550 PPM and 1000 PPM from a temperature perspective is NOMINAL.

Edit: What us modern humans have done is found the earth in a state of hypothermia. It's as if we found a man in the snow as blue as can be and covering him with the blanket, then when he starts to warm up we think "wait, his temperature was 93 when we found him, and now we've got him to 96, we need to remove the blanket and put him in an ice bath to get his temperature back down to where we found him" as if that was the "normal".

a reply to: raymundoko

You're probably spot on, we could simply ignore all other aerosols and blaim cowsh!t only. One of the problems in this debate is the focus on CO2 only, me thinks.

You think the cited model isn't conclusive with observed data or did I just get you wrong?

a reply to: PublicOpinion

Obviously you got me wrong, as you have a lot so far. Like I said though, emotionally charged people will always be emotionally charged. They lack reason and comprehension when their emotions dim their wit.

How you did not see that I was showing that co2 is rising because of humans, and that we can track it is beyond me. I showed the biggest contributor to co2 from a human perspective was animal agriculture. It's not the only problem, I was simply showing that we can actually track our output of co2 to a pretty reasonable extent. There are also plenty of natural factors that are also increasing co2, but we choose not to discuss those typically.

a reply to: raymundoko

I've asked why logarithmic affects the cited results I referred to, this is a climate-change topic and not a math competition. So you don't know what a result means?

Simple question, wasn't it? Now you've got one more to ignore away.

a reply to: PublicOpinion

You seem highly confused. I was pointing out that you can't take numbers from the last half century and apply them to the next half century, as you did in context. You replied to someone who doesn't see it as a big deal going forward, and you used the past to apply your view.

You cannot use a model that uses hard data from the past and apply it to the future in the way you are inferring. The warming is logarithmic, which means it slows down as co2 increases. I answered your question simply I thought.

Edit: Again, the stabilization charts I provided (from the IPCC) show that warming levels off hard at 550, 750 and 1000 PPM, with the difference between 750 and 1000 being nominal. You are approaching this from a predisposed catastrophic mind set, when catastrophic climate change has been all but thoroughly debunked.