…says an international council of scientists. link
Well, I’ve always been a “yep, things are warming; nope, we don’t know it’s us doing it” gal, but I guess I’ll eat my share of crow.*
They’re supposed to come out with recommendations for response later this year, but for now say that even if we control our pollution, we’ve done the damage already: “hotter temperatures and rises in sea level will “continue for centuries” no matter how much humans control their pollution.”
Woo-hoo! Beachfront property in Kansas! :smack:
*Although I suspect others may not, so I’m posting in GD. If it doesn’t turn out to be a debate this time around, I’m sure someone’ll move it to MPSIMS.
Colour me vastly skeptical (in the proper sense). Anthropogenic Global Warming seems to be the new religion. Look at the way dissenters are treated. I read the BBC article and it contains a bit of a stinker
Makes you wonder. Read the linked articles too and think about the crudeness of the much-vaunted modelling.
The weathermen can’t predict the weather next week, let alone next year.
I don’t see how humans can be failing to have an effect, but is it a significant effect?
And someone, please remind me of the dire predictions made in 2005, and how was the 2006 hurricane season in America?
Alternatively, here’s another one: if global warming is down to humans, then is it actually beneficial? The end of the Little Ice Age and the start of the Industrial Revolution are remarkably coincident. If we were to stop polluting, would we bring on an ice age?
Are you conservative? I ask because it seems like global warming skeptics have a political position they are supporting. Climatology is a hard science, it doesn’t attract bleeding hearts necessarily. Why do you suppose over 90% come down on one side of the discussion? Why is it so hard to believe that humans don’t have a big effect?
When 90+% of scientists come down on one side of an issue, I tend to side with the majority.
Is your skepticism (be honest) based on politics or science?
P.S. The hurricane predictions are that in the future, hurricanes will be more intense. This got twisted in the media to “We’re going to have Katrina reruns every other week”. That wasn’t what was said.
Rather than “mistreating dissenters,” they actually adopted the more conservative approach precisely because the process is not well known. Many climate scientists are objecting to this aspect of the report because it doesn’t go far enough. In respect to this report, those who think the effects of sea level rise will be more extreme are the “dissenters” whose opinions are being excluded.
**Quartz, ** I think this kind of selective and biased reading is symptomatic of your whole attitude to the subject. The rest of your post seems to be based on pure ignorance rather than on “skepticism,” as you call it.
Nice start there, attacking the poster. For the record, my politics are my own.
As I said, AGW seems to be the new religion; everyone expects the AGW-Inquisition. I’ve tried to debate it here before and found that the others were not interested in honest debate. I’m disappointed to see that this still seems to be the case.
If you’re interested in honest debate, why didn’t you answer my honest question? Is your skepticism of global warming a political stance or are you convinced by the science?
Wait. I thought it said that the report was 90% certain that humans were the cause of global warming, not that 90% of scientests think that humans are the cause. Or did I miss a something?
Do you actually believe scientists were saying “we will have Katrina-like storms hitting the US every year from now on?” If so, please find me some scientists who said that. I heard that global warming put as at greater risk for these storms and would make the weather more erratic, which is different.
I’ve seen people say this before, but I think it’s a sarcastic comment and not a real argument. Whatever the consensus is on global warming, change would be unwelcome and inconvenient, so I suspect people and politicians around here will keep dicking around instead of making changes.
WhyNot: As for “we’ve done the damage already”, think of it this way: The climate change is caused by additional greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Unless we can actually remove those gases, the climate change won’t go away. As it is, of course, we continue to add to those gases at an alarming rate.
I think ACC (Anthropogenic Climate Change) is going to be a huge issue in the 2008 presidential election. The war in Iraq (assuming it’s still going on) will be the biggest issue, most likely, but ACC will be close behind.
Your initial reading was correct. I’m not sure what that reference was to. All of the scientists on the panel had to agree with every word in the report, not just 90% of them, so I assume that figure is referring to something other than the report.
In fact, the paragraph you ignored was directly relevant to this assertion. Your reading comprehension is abysmal if you think I was ignoring the part that you bolded, because I directly referred to it in my post. THE REPORT DELIBERATELY DID NOT INCLUDE THE “EFFECTS OF A PROCESS WHICH SCIENTISTS DO NOT UNDERSTAND WELL.” To spell it out for you once again, it accepted the position of the “dissenters” (by which I assume you mean those who do not believe in the more extreme effects); it excluded the more extreme possibilities.
Quartz, you provided a link which directly contradicted your own implication of bias on the part of the authors of the report. Your misreading of this demonstrates your own extreme bias on the issue. You have no credibility on this issue.
A few notes and caveats. First, no one reputable is saying that *all *the current global warming is due to human activity. It is just that now it “is very likely that it is not due to known natural causes alone”. We still do not know to what extent humans are causing global warming, we are coming out of the Little Ice Age, and part of the increase is due to natural causes. I, for one, concede 100% that humans are part of the problem. I don’t think we are the largest part, however. No one knows.
Next the predictions for sea level rises are by the year 2100. The increase will be slow and gradual, and you won’t suddenly see beach houses under water. But it could cause levies to fail, so pressure needs to be put on Politicians to make sure they are updated, we don’t need another Katrina disaster.
For those predicting catastrophy, note that prior the the Little Ice Age (say around 1000AD) things were warmer then that they predict it will be in the near future. Times were actually pretty good then, crops florished, and so forth. The Earth won’t be devastated.
Dudes *will *have to move out of the areas in the USA where hurricanes are already bad- they will get worse. We have to stop paying for those homes by FEMA, a home owner should only get one bite of the hurricane disaster apple.
The problem is really more that the change is coming too damn fast, and much of the too damn fast is our fault.
Wait, that statistic can’t be true. The Bush administration’s “One Percent Doctrine” declared that they would take immediate pre-emptive action against anything that offered even a one percent chance of being a threat to Americans.
Or did that only apply to things they could shoot at?
Hmm. I suppose it’s progress if we’ve moving on from the hyping of the small minority of dissenters to complaints that there are too many experts agreeing for them to be convincing.
Hell, you won’t get any argument out of me, Sam. Nuclear power is the obvious solution and it frustrates me how people stand against it. Even with the engineering problem of waste containment I’d rather have that than more fossil fuel power plants. Call me silly, I just happen to live in one of the more polluted regions of the Ohio Valley and particulates drive me batty.