In regards to the Lefty thing, I’ll note that the EPA endorses the science of AGW. The EPA was founded by a Republican, a strong majority of the heads of it have been republicans, and all of the ones who are still about agree that the agency is doing good science on the topic.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10913795
Republicans who understand the science and know the people actually involved in the research are convinced.
Well, appearences can be decieving…
This is the sort of claim I take issue with. If that were true, one would expect threads on the topic to generate simple straightforward explanations of the matter. Yet that’s never what we get. Instead we get crap like this. If we’re really lucky, we might have a few people who avoid fallacious arguments and simply allude to non-specific evidence, but anything better than that is too much to hope for.
I don’t think the analogy between one fallacious argument and another, is invalidated by the availability of evidence which is not taken into consideration in either one.
In case you didn’t know, Pascal’s wager is not an argument for acting like a Christian. It is an argument for belief in god. I was referring to similar fallacious logic used to support AGW claims, not arguments in favour of emissions reduction.
It is not Christianity’s denial of scientific facts which makes Pascal’s wager invalid. Sorry, you fail at logic.
Not that this is what I have attempted to argue above, but I feel compelled to point out that Christianity is supported by “philosophical evidence” which has everything in common with “scientific consensus” in that there is no such thing. 
I’m basically in agreement with Sam Stone here, though I lean politically left. The whole thing feels a little more hysterical than seems warranted, but I do think we need to be looking at alternative energy sources for lots of other reasons, so it doesn’t really bother me.
I’ve been looking at the chart posskb posted, though, and I have a question. I should probably know the answer already, I’m sure it’s basic, but bear with me, please.
There is an obvious pattern, there, with spikes in temperature followed by long cooling periods. We’re at a spike right now. Why do we not expect a plunge into another cooling period? I see that the current spike is longer than the others, but why do we think this old cycle is broken? Again, sorry if this is common knowledge.
That consensus there is better supported than the so called “philosophical evidence” for Christianity. 
Basically, CO2 will overpower the potential cooling.
Because we are apparently heating the world past the limit of that cycle’s stability. Climate is only metastable; enough change will break the old pattern, and the climate will settle into a new one.
No; Pascal’s wager is an argument for belief in a specific Christian sect, although it can’t specify which one. That’s one of it’s flaws; all of the mutually exclusive One True Faiths that it provides no means of choosing between. And what you were doing is throwing out a bad analogy to try to discredit AGW supporters.
It’s not just Christianity’s denial of scientific facts which makes Pascal’s wager invalid.
Christianity isn’t supported by anything but the writings of primitives and self indulgent delusions. It’s baseless garbage believed in only by fools. It has no evidence; AGW does.
Science, which you sneer at, has a history of getting at the facts. Religion, including Christianity, has a history of being relentlessly wrong. There’s no comparison between the two.
Yup… hysteria.
Seen right here.
I never denied AGW. I just pointed out some bad logic, and said it’s enough to make me doubt. I never said it disproves anything. But the kneejerk reaction has overpowered the logical faculties of certain people here.
GIGObuster:
I never said there wasn’t a consensus. I said there is no such thing as scientific consensus. I also never said that philosophical evidence was supported by anything. Quite the opposite in fact.
Der Trihs:
I was not “throwing out a bad analogy to try to discredit AGW supporters”, that is your hysteria talking again. I had no intention to discredit AGW supporters, I only intended to do what I did, which was make an apt analogy to draw attention to flawed logic. You have absolutely no reason to assume I had ulterior motives. I also have never sneered at science as you say I do, nor have I (in this thread anyway) compared it to Christianity.
Those spikes are something like 20,000 years in length, taking something less than 10,000 years to climb and then fall 9 degrees. Say that “something less than 10,000 years” is 4000 years. That’s an average of 0.00225C change a year. At the moment, our best data is that the average global temperature has climbed 1C due to greenhouse gases since 1950, and looks to be heading up at about that angle for the immediate future. That’s a change of 0.02C per year. Given 4000 years at that, we’d be looking at an 80 degree temperature change, not a 9 degree change. I think you’d have to agree that for as impressive as the spikes in your graph are, they don’t quite compete with that. Even if you assume that the walls in those spikes are only 1000 years in duration, at the current pace that would be a 20 degree temperature rise.
Looking at, for instance, the last 65 million years of temperature change we can say that the Earth can change it’s temperature plus or minus 20C sheerly via natural factors. But ultimately that isn’t any sort of evidence that humans can’t cause equal changes nor that we aren’t.
As I said in my first post, we predicted an occurrence like we are seeing, it follows our understanding of the physical properties of planetary atmospheres, and the natural causes explaining our historic climate changes like your spikes or the Paleocene-Eocene peak don’t explain what we are currently seeing. Solar output right now, for instance, is equivalent to that of the 1200s (PDF, p. 477), and yet we are approximately 0.6C higher in temperature than the 1200s.
Oh, nonsense. No one here is displaying “hysteria”.
Given that the anti-AGW side of the debate is all about “ulterior motives” it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that anyone arguing against it has them. At this point, the great majority of opposition to acceptance of the existence of AGW is from people who desire to deny reality; the serious scientific debate is over. It’s ideology, theology, greed and/or ignorance that drives the anti-AGW crowd.
Yes, you did.
Hysteria != “arguments you disagree with”. Well, unless you’ve got a definition of hysteria I’ve never seen before.
You get crap like this, because people like you are taking issue with the basic science. You aren’t even attempting to argue against the physics, in fact you lopped that part of the quote off. Instead, your just vaguely taking taking issue with this “sort of claim”. The physics is rock solid. I tend to beleive that we need to start emphasizing the basic science, so that people can understand where it comes from. If you cover a lightbulb with a blanket would you blame the resulting temperature increase on the power company? AGW isn’t some left wing issue that cropped up recently, it’s well over 100 years old, and all scientists have been doing is debating the specifics since.
I’m with Sam Stone on this: there is probably something to it, but not as much as the political activists prefer to claim. That said, I would take environmentalists more seriously if their policy preferences actually showed that they cared about global warming, rather than simply supporting feel-good back-to-nature policies. They do not want to study “unnatural” solutions such as nuclear energy and geoengineering; they’d much rather prefer making everyone else cut back on energy consumption, which conveniently fits with their cultural preferences. Thus I characterize much of environmentalism as a cultural entity making a power grab, rather than a group genuinely concerned about ecological cost-benefit optimization.
Obama dealt a huge blow to the future development of nuclear energy by nixing Yucca Mountain, as shown in the Science in Society blog:
So, let me get this straight: if Obama makes a poor decision about nuke waste disposal, that proves the cupidity of the environmental movement? And therefore, if the environmentalists believe the consensus of science on this issue, then that consensus must be wrong, because environmentalists are dumb, and anything they believe must therefore be wrong.
I don’t think that quite works.
I’m entirely uninterested in debating AGW itself; the reaction of ardent supporters is, on average, inseparable in kind from the reaction of religious believers assuring the world that God is Real and the proof is all around us.
I am not talking about the science itself; I’m talking about the type of reaction and the way it’s expressed that speaks to me of Great Cause and Hysteria.
The hypocrisy of it bothers me too. As an example, controlling and reducing the World Population is a leftie politically Incorrect cause, on average. So you get this huge passion for AGW, but minimal interest in reducing the population of the world, even though a second grader could tell you that the single most important factor in Anthropogenic anything is how many anthros there are generating whatever the problem is. We got most of the developing world hard on our developed heels hoping to catch up, and a population that nobody thinks will level off before it’s 50% bigger, and cause-wise we focus on reducing CO2–an unlikely event–instead of reducing peeps making it (and about to make more).
Sumpin’ just don’t set right.
Well, yes. I imagine if there was a not-insignificant portion of the populace who denied that 2 + 2 = 4, the supporters of the Four Theory would begin to get juuuust a little strident.
Gosh, I just don’t know why killing off a chunk of the world population would be an unfavorable solution. :dubious:
I always thought that birth control was more of a lefty topic than a righty one. It’s interesting that you have found the opposite.
Well, if he’s implying that it’s lefties speaking out against abstinence-only education who are against controlling the world population (because that’s the only thing I can think of regarding birth control that’s a Right thing), then he’s unclear that the reason there’s not much interest in it is because it’s not an effective means to an end, not because lefties don’t want that particular end in the first place.
Absurd claim. The differences among the carbon footprint is staggering. Stemming the birth rate of the third world would have a much smaller effect than just killing off 1/100th of many rich westerners. Besides, most liberal support birth control in both the first and thrid worlds, and see the raising the living standard of poor people as best way to reduce birth rates.
That is one reason we need green technologies and policy: raising third world living standards will increase the impact on the environment unless we find alternatives to how we do things now.
Your flat-out denial does not amount to a refutation.
Restating your irrational assumption as a ‘given’ and then saying it makes the assumption reasonable, is a circular argument at best.
Aside from your continued unwarranted assigning of motives, you are also assigning a position to me which I haven’t taken. I have no “opposition to acceptance of the existence of AGW” but you are too blinded by emotion to see this. More hysteria.
Sigh…
WHERE?
A rational person wouldn’t have made this mistake. Did you really think I would post any statement beginning with “I have not…” without checking to make sure I actually have not?
It is not mere disagreement which leads me to characterize the behaviour of some in this thread as hysterical.
No I am not. If that’s what I took issue with, that’s what I would have quoted.
No shit, Sherlock.
sigh
Okay, let’s see some examples of the hysteria you say you’re seeing in this thread.
While you’re at it, you can explain why “hysteria” on either side (assuming you can spot any) means that AGW isn’t a valid theory.
