:Big Al Gore sigh:
I suppose if I were you, Chief, I would just give up. But I’m not, so I won’t.
As I’ve pointed out in other threads about Gore, no politician (including Gore) has suggested individuals cut back on their quality of life as a solution to curtailing Global Warming. I don’t know why people seem to think otherwise.
Here’s a composite (from various lefty politicians, including Gore) on what all legislation they propose. None of them suggest all of these items:
- Move to alternate energy sources both on the national infrastructure and portable motor front. Develop oil-independence.
- New coal energy plants need to capture CO2 emissions.
- Design buildings that are more energy efficient, retrofit older buildings as possible.
- Increase the energy efficiency requirements of new electronics. (E.g. try to phase out incandescent lights.)
- Update the national power grid to be more efficient.
- Work with developing nations to get them on the newest, cleanest technologies as they come up.
I personally don’t see walking or planting trees on that list.
In such a hypothetical, space travel will also likely take several giant leaps forward in a very short time, leading to a sharp reduction in population as people start bailing out, which gets to the end goal you wanted in reducing the population, right?
No - because AGW is a no-brainer.
The basic problem with your position is that almost any debate will attract people using bad arguments to both sides. Unless you form a rational view that those bad arguments are all one side has, then the fact that some people on one side are using those bad arguments is not probative for or against either side.
There are any number of references given in (particularly) the first page of this thread to data and wide ranging studies, all of which suggest AGW is real. You are ignoring that and instead choose to conclude based on certain weak arguments proposed by certain posters who accept AGW that their entire position must be doubtful.
This implies either an unwillingness or an inability to get to grips with the other, data and logic based arguments being put forward in favour of AGW.
Chief Pedant, your position is similarly weak. You point out that people can support causes due to hysteria, and to a need to get behind popular trends. This is not in doubt, but the problem is that people can also support causes due to facts and logic. And furthermore, if they are supporting that cause rationally and logically and their cause is being stymied by people who are refusing to hear reason or consider pertinent facts, and if the cause is important, people supporting the logical and rational cause will get tetchy and arrogant. This tetchiness and arrogance could appear to be because the cause is only supported by hysteria and trendiness, even if it isn’t.
In short, your meta-analysis of the position based on assumptions derived from the behaviour of those who accept AGW is not probative because the analysis is incapable of distinguishing between behaviour based on hysteria and trendiness, and behaviour based on being right.
The only way to arrive at a position on AGW is to get to grips with the data and logic, and you refuse to do so.
Ironically, while you accuse those who believe there is AGW to be politically motivated, a review of this thread is interesting. The supporters have produced a mix of weak arguments and (numerous) cites and references to scientific studies and data with which you will not engage. Instead, you challenge the behaviour of the supporters. Sounds to me like you are the one being political.
You know that saying “nothing will change my mind” amounts to losing the debate, right?
Yet I recently started a thread asking AGW alarmists what would evidence cause them to change their minds, and got essentially the same response from your camp.
So perhaps I can put it t you: what evidence could I collect that would cause you to change your mind?
Bear in mind here that we are not disputing the observations that temperature has been trending upwards for >150 years and that CO2 levels have been rising in a predictable exponential pattern for >600 years. So what evidence could I present that would convince you that this is not a continuation of a purely natural trend that began >150 years ago?
I don’t belong to any camp.
You got that response from some people who accept AGW. I am not silly enough to think that there are not doofuses on either side of the debate. I am quite sure there are. I already said as much. You clearly don’t understand the fundamental point of my last post. I would be contemptuous of any person on any side of any debate who said nothing would change their mind.
I said I had made up my mind where?
My understanding (which is weak) is that the consensus of opinion of those who have studied the issue and are qualified to do so is that there is AGW. I haven’t studied the issue myself sufficient to know. My last post was on the highly unconvincing nature of some previous posters arguments.
Fair enough.
Apparently I didn’t 't understand the fundamental point of your last post. But it’s all your fault by not making it clearly enough.
Yeah, next time he should write it out with crayon using Big Bird type pictures to help it along?
His post was rather elegant. How one could miss the obvious central theme to it confounds me.
I agree that it’s not an anti-AGW argument to simply say that other great causes not based on science were wrong.
Just to be clear, I do not pretend a scientific opinion one way or the other about how severe a problem AGW will turn out to be. I do think there are two sides to it, though. Frankly, my reluctance to present the anti-AGW here is based on an unwillingness to make the commitment to stay in a thread and argue point by point within a thread that will go on forever.
I am making the observation that what has taken the notion from its core progenitors to the mainstream Great Cause it is today is human psychology. It is not, for instance, a result of analyzing all possible Great Problems.
I am not setting up Mr Gore as a straw-man or pretending that his grasp of the situation is accurate and that therefore an attack on Mr Gore discredits real scientists. I am making the observation if the Pope sends Crusaders to save the world from damnation while the Pope is knocking up the neighbor’s wife and ignoring the starving children down the street, what you have is a Great Cause and enthusiasm for Great Solutions that belies any claim to have actually personally embraced the truth of your positions. And when the Crusaders ignore or excuse personal behaviour–of their own or their thought leaders–while embracing Grand Solutions for All, I’m underwhelmed by the depth of their conviction.
I have no axe to grind here. I’d like to know where the world is really going to go with this because I’d like to know where to invest. I’m not on any crusade to talk anyone out of AGW. I do worry that it will fizzle out and unravel just as I’ve taken long positions in key areas that depend on that enthusiasm and belief to be robust and persistent. I don’t see that right now.
I admit to substantial skepticism that science, news media and thought leaders are not also equally affected by the same human psychology. There were folks who took Overpopulation, Oil Shortages, Y2K–on and on throughout history–and ran with them as Great Causes, seeing monsters from shadows and extrapolating extremes from a small dataset of facts. What they missed were unknown feedback loops. What they missed were all the stories that never got reported because they didn’t fit the Great Cause Paradigm. What they missed were avenues of research never pursued because there was no point in funding blind alleys.
We’ve been wrong over and over again predicting the end of the world as we know it. It’s part of our human nature to embrace great causes and get behind great solutions.
When I see the masses–and the thought leaders–betting their personal financial farm on specific AGW predictions, I’ll begin to believe they are not secret agnostics simply sucked up into the hysteria and feel-good of a Great Cause. When I see AGW’ers fight overpopulation with the same enthusiam, I’ll begin to believe they are looking at world with a cold analytic eye toward preserving this earth and its remaining people instead of just following the Cause du Jour.
In the interim I’m left with where to put my own money. Carbon Credits, windmill blades and shorting coal are perfectly OK with me but they are good only until the Great Cause fades away…unless AGW is as real and as emergent as its ardent supporters think. If it is that real, I can just short everything, because we are all sinning every day consuming our way into a fiery oblivion.
If we are unwilling to change our personal lifestyles Right Now and in a really drastic way, and we instead just float around defending AGW in the abstract and Grand Solutions down the road, I’d argue my parallel between AGW belief and Religion is even tighter. It’s the same psychology. The same defensiveness when our belief is attacked accompanied by the same persistent personal sinning in the face of touting Sin’s Evils.
I’m not saying “Nothing will change my mind”. I’m saying I need something that isn’t purely scientific theorising or just random statistics. I need to see things happening. Otherwise, I just see a lot of parallels between Global Warming and The Cold War. Except, as far as I know, people aren’t building Fallout Shelters in anticipation of whatever Bad Things Global Warming is supposed to be responsible for.
It would seem that you don’t fully grasp what a scientific theory is. Nor does it seem that you grasp what statistics is. Essentially, what you’ve said is that you want a good story in lieu of actual data.
No, he’s saying that he needs to be able to see things (ie make observations) that match (ie correlate with) what he has been told to expect (ie the predictions) from AGW (ie the the hypothesis) and he won’t be convinced until he can. Now read that again carefully: He won’t be convinced until he can make observations that correlate with the predictions of AGW.
It would seem that someone here doesn’t fully grasp what a scientific theory is, or how science works, and it ain’t the Aussie.
Essentially, what you’ve said is that you don’t require actual observations that match the predictions of the hypothesis.
You don’t get it. You’re just re-asserting the same thing without demonstrating any understanding of, or ability to overcome, the point I make.
You are not making an observation, you are making an assumption. You are simply dogmatically assuming that the notion has been taken from its core progenitors to a mainstream great cause by psychology when that *could *equally as well have occurred as a consequence of a lot of people reviewing the evidence (or trusting correctly those qualified to review the evidence) and coming to a rational fact based conclusion. You’ve presented no evidence or rationale by which you have decided between these possibilities.
You’ve got nothing, and you’re taking the debate nowhere, and you won’t do so till you get to grips with the science.
Which isn’t at all what you said before. What you said before was:
Not only have you now changed your position on what might convince you, but you make no sense since even if you saw something happening how would that convince you that it wasn’t part of the planet’s natural heating/cooling cycle?
It could well be that there are going to be phenomena that happen on a scale too large and subtle (in terms of time and geography and gradation) for one to be able to see things happening directly, and which can only be discovered and understood through broad study of disparate evidence, assisted measurement and statistics. If you decide you aren’t going to accept any such phenomena then so be it, but your decision to be blind isn’t going to convince me not to use my eyes.
Or you could just say that I’d prefer to see the actual effects of Global Warming with my own two eyes, and not just go “OK, scientists say the world’s temperature is up .062 degrees since 1937. Better get the SPF 1,000+ sunscreen ready.”
Now, if I turn on the news in a few years and they reveal that the Ross Ice Shelf has melted and most of Fiji is now under three feet of water, then I’ll be first in line to admit I was wrong about Global Warming. But until then, I shall remain skeptical about the whole thing.
Again, who ever recommended changing our lifestyles? It rather belies your statement that you aren’t setting up a straw man when…you’re setting up a straw man.
The problem here is equating AGW with CAGW (This last term is mostly a creation of the deniers), as has been mentioned before the catastrophic part of it is enhanced by the skeptics in a misguided effort to discredit the science that supports plain AGW.
Remaining skeptical is always helpful. This is especially true in science. Indeed, science is an enterprise built on being skeptical of crackpot ideas. And one should always keep an open mind, but not to such an extent that one’s brains fall out.
So, now I turn to the rest of your post. You have changed your assertions. Earlier, your assertion was that you don’t trust theories, or statistics. Ok. My response was that you prefer a good story to actual data.
Now, you assert that you don’t want to take scientists’ word on the matter. Fair enough. I don’t either. Indeed, no scientist whom I’ve met has written an article for publication which has as its source data “trust me, I’m a scientist”. This simply isn’t how good science works, your implications notwithstanding.
They collect data. They analyze the data. They let the evidence (data) drive the conversation between scientist qua scientist and the conclusions. You, on the other hand, instead of garnering a working understanding of how science works, studying the relevant fields, learning higher orders of mathematics (and statistics too I guess) and then looking at the data to evaluate if it comports with the conclusion drawn therefrom prefer to handwave it away until, well, until something cooky happens.
So, go study mathematics, learn some fundamental science then look at the data and see if it supports the claims of the scientists. Until you have that working understanding, then you’re not in a position to really make an informed decision one way or another. So, you’re left with kind of trusting either scientists speaking on science matters, or non-scientists speaking on science matters.
I’m a curious guy, for instance, when I want to find out more on the law, I talk with a lawyer about legal matters. When I want to know about medicine, I talk to medical doctors about medical issues. I don’t consult the high school student who, while a great story teller, has no substantial skill at either law or in medicine.
The same holds true with science which is outside of my areas of knowledge. But even while I’m not a person with the relevant expertise in climatology, I am more than fully capable of reading the data and seeing if it supports a claim made by scientists who are experts in the field. And when I’m in doubt, I either go learn more on the topic, or I defer to the judgment of people whose very lives are spent in devotion to solving the particular issue at hand. Now, I don’t take it on blind faith that they’re right. I do, however, consider it persuasive that the entire body of scientists in the relevant field are of the mindset that x phenomenon does occur; that the only debate they’re having is simply by which mechanism(s) x thing happen(s).
Like with evolution, gravity, germ theory, and all other great models of good science, in this subject there is no credible debate that it happens. The debate is over how it happens. One would think that if the theory is so utterly in crisis as to be rejected wholesale, why then are thousands of scientists so fervently insisting that it happens? You’d think in the last hundred years, if the theory is wrong, someone would have put forth at least one definitive rebuttal. That such a rebuttal isn’t yet extant, to my mind, counsels much.
But, I suppose your system is more comforting since it’s essentially “I won’t believe it based on data, science and mathematics. What I really need is to see the ruination of all, then I’ll believe it.” While it’s always great to look back on events that have happened and say, “Yup, that happened.”, it simply is naive to suggest that based on past knowledge, we can’t make good approximations of likely tomorrows. While it’s true that extrapolations are necessarily less certain than interpolations, that isn’t to say that extrapolations are meaningless and we must therefore wait until such time as we can make an interpolation to consider that something might be amiss.
FWIW, a few years ago I took a trip to see some glaciers for myself. The most important bits of information I took from my observations were:
-glacial retreat is nothing new. It has been going on for about 12,000 years.
-glacial retreat (at least where I was) has accelerated in an marked way in the last century or so, and seems to be accelerating still.
So. There is a very old natural process going on that accounts for glacial retreat. I could be convinced that the acceleration in modern times is due to some natural ‘tipping point’ or other phenomenon. But, since this acceleration correlates so well to the rise in atmospheric greenhouse gasses, AGW seems to be the appropriate explanation.
You could say I’m still a little dubious about AGW, but I’m definitely more dubious of the other side.