Do global warming "skeptics" honestly see us as a benign species?

Great Debates
361

My apologies, I was not aware how broad the “no accusations of lying” rule is.

What I should have said is this:

Septimus, there seems to be no basis at all for your apparent claim that during there Pleistocene time period there were other major influences on CO2 levels besides temperature.

You certainly haven’t provided one – you haven’t even identified these claimed other major influences, which should only take a few keystrokes.

Even if there were, I still don’t see how it would follow that one could infer positive feedback from a lockstep pattern. You certainly haven’t offered a coherent explanation.

Your argument is full of holes and it’s not my responsibility to fill them even if I could.

362

The only victory I see here is only from ignorance coming from avoiding cites and resources, somehow there is a mantra among many contrarians that claims that somehow it is impossible for common people to find what the experts are talking about, and that it can not be identified or reported. In general, the changes in planetary orbit and ocean currents caused an increase in CO2, and more evidence of that came recently.

https://www2.bc.edu/jeremy-shakun/FAQ.html

Even Skeptical Science reported that, not being aware of it shows ignorance, and that is excusable, many like me could not be aware of that research until recently, but that is why resources like Skeptical Science are there, the links to the research are there with evidence to show what other forces influenced the accumulation of CO2 in those days, and how then it amplified the warming. What it is bad is to **now **know that and never modify the flawed theories one has that allows a contrarian to ignore research, to recommend inaction and to allow a contrarian to continue to insult others.

What it is disturbing is that it is not really reasonable to expect that CO2 has reformed from its past behavior, current, and future generations will not appreciate how slow we are reacting to what we should be doing regarding our emissions.

On Edit:

[QUOTE=brazil84]
Your argument is full of holes and it’s not my responsibility to fill them even if I could.
[/QUOTE]

Actually it is part of the responsibility of the ones minimizing the effects of our dumping of global warming gases into the atmosphere to show evidence that we should not worry about that.

363

I’m still pondering the questions posed in the OP

364

The argument presented by the OP seems to be as follows:

  1. Global warming “skeptics” contend that it is impossible for mankind to have a significant impact on the environment and that therefore recent warming cannot be the result of mankind’s activities.

  2. But there are other areas in which mankind has clearly had a significant deleterious impact on the environment.

  3. Therefore the skeptics are wrong.

I don’t know if claim (2) is correct or not, but the biggest flaw in the argument is the assumption that the skeptical position is based on the premise that it is impossible for mankind to have a significant effect on the enviornment.

I personally believe that recent warming is probably due in large part to natural causes (and partly due to mankind’s activities). But this is not based on the straw(?)-assumption put forth by the OP.

365

I think mankind has some horrible effects on many parts of the planet. My skepticism about alarmists claims has nothing to do with my beliefs however.

366

For example, when I see scare tactics and lies in an article, my skeptic sense is even more enraged because of how such idiocy makes all real concerns about our environment seem to be coming from kooks, and easily dismissed.

Climate change is slowly but steadily cooking the world’s oceans

Really? You have to use “Hiroshima bombs” to explain your claim?

And “cooking the world’s ocean”? What the fuck are you smoking.

367

Meanwhile, the actual metric of heat/energy in the oceans shows no increase, much less a drastic one.

http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3gl/from:2000

The alarmists has now reached the point of absurdity.

368

No, what you continue to do there is what is absurd. Stop cherry picking, even woodforthress.org is telling you to avoid misleading yourself by using short timelines.

http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1800

http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1800

369

And therein we have the essence of the whole problem with this particular topic of debate. That somehow “personal beliefs” have value in this domain, as if climate change were some sort of religious movement and physics a mere matter of faith, and that belief alone is its own self-validation.

This is a subject on which almost everyone professes an opinion. If one were to represent it in terms of set theory, the set of those with professed opinions is very large, but the set of those with strong factual scientific knowledge of the subject is a very small subset of that, a tiny little circle within a huge one that seethes with unsubstantiated empty “beliefs”.

It seems to me that a rational view of AGW doesn’t require that everyone become a subject matter expert – it only requires that people apply common-sense distinctions to discriminate between credible sources and obvious bullshit, such as reputable scientific journals and legitimate academic and government websites on one hand, versus Internet blogs and websites that either have known industry affiliations or have uncredited origins. The difference is usually stunningly obvious. Does any sane rational person actually believe that the Heartland Institute or SPPI are scientific organizations, or that WUWT has the slightest shred of scientific credibility? Or that actual scientific organizations express unanimity on the key points of AGW because climate scientists are engaged in a secret international conspiracy?

370

Straw pups

371

Meanwhile your false or misleading pontifications have never left the realm of absurdity. Honestly, everything I have ever seen you post on this topic is either flat-out wrong or, if correct, is incorrectly used to “prove” a false premise in support of denialism.

It is categorically false to claim that sea surface temperatures are a reliable metric of ocean heat content. That they are not has been known for a very long time and is responsible for important climate phenomena induced by circulation changes and has been the basis of a great deal of research. For example:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50382/abstract

372

Academic discourse should always be conducted with the aim of reaching either a mutual conclusion or a mutual agreement on differences that cannot be resolved based on facts in evidence.

The weight of argument that has been presented in this thread in favor of the anthropomorphic global warming hypothesis and its easily foreseeable dire consequences should persuade any rational reader to conclude that further discourse on this topic serves no purpose.

373

Perhaps, like me, they are skeptical that AGW ranks particularly high among all the insults to Gaia that you mention (and many more you do not).

In a word, we humans are going to consume the earth, one way or another, and AGW is a relatively trivial concern from an environmental perspective. Indeed, one of the most bizarre contradictions of AGW alarmism is that alarmists simultaneously care about environmentalism and the human race. You can have one or the other, but not both. If AGW catastrophes do scale us back as a species, that’s a terrific thing for environmentalism in the long run since we are by far the most destructive and invasive species.

Our numbers are growing, and by most estimates we’ll at minimum increase by another 50%. That’s a pretty heavy load on an already over-taxed ecosystem, and what’s worse is that most projections of population-leveling do so by making an argument that economic prosperity is what promotes population control. Economic prosperity needs energy. Lots of it. More than we can produce with fossil fuels and green alternatives combined. There’s nothing sacred about fossil fuels. What’s sacred is a personal right to maximal comfort, and right now fossil fuels enable that the most cheaply. (And yes; money is sacred to those who have it when those who don’t would like to take it.)

There’s a catch22 for the alarmist message. If AGW is horrible for the survival of people, it’s great for the earth’s long-term ecosystem because people are horrible for the ecosystem in many ways beyond managing to roast it. Solve AGW tonight and we’re still going to eat up the oceans, plow under the forests and pave over the prairies.

On the other hand, if AGW isn’t that bad for people but mostly bad because it hurts the earth, the track record of putting the earth first is not very good. The only time we’ve done that on any scale is when the environmental consequence accrues directly to our back yard. Bummer about that smog in Beijing, but I need new stuff and I really like living well.

Which particular consequence of AGW do you find so alarming or significant in comparison with, say, our consumption of the ocean to feed ourselves?

374

…

What is clear in that you are describing the problem. And more of the problem. And no solution that is actually good because you do not care about what will happen to a lot of the people that is affected or that will die, not what an environmentalist would propose.

And there is really no contradiction on what experts or environmentalists recommend. What really happens is that most environmentalists that recommend family planning continue to the condemned by the opponents of environmentalism.

What “alarmists” do is to also to point at population control as one of the elements of how to control the issue, but in the short run the bad effects that we will have to deal with will be less of a problem for our children and future generations if we make a concerted effort to control not only our emissions and waste, but our population. It is a big difference to the option offered here to just continue with business as usual.

375

Thank you for that. (the entire post, not just the first line)

Something I thought of while reading your post the second time, sort of startled me, as it’s so obvious in retrospect.

There is this myth, this belief, that “mankind” is consuming the world, the land, the oceans, the creatures of the planet. That “we” are a disease, a plague upon the earth, that we destroy and consume and pretty much are “evil”. I know this because I lived most of my life under that myth.

It was actually the global warming hysteria that changed my mind, after looking into the matters, especially the doomsday prophecies and the hand wringing and moaning, done by people living quite well from fossil fuels. Who at the same moment demand we stop, while having another deep drink of some oil or natural gas.

It’s not just coal and oil that produce CO2, it’s cement and steel, it’s fertilizers and food, it’s clothing and shelter, it’s transportation and protection from dangers.

But we also mine phosphate, and take nitrogen from the air (using fossil fuels to do so), and transport these essential elements to grow food. Lots of food. More food than the planet would ever produce with out us. In fact, the excess food, what is thrown out is enough to feed a population of vermin beyond anything nature would ever produce. Which is why there are more falcons in big cities than anywhere else on earth. In fact, because of our fantastic methods of producing food, there is a huge population of animals living near human populations, that could not live with out us.

Then there are all the animals we grow. Once again, more cattle and sheep and horses and pigs and dogs and cats and so on than the earth has ever seen. It’s not just people that we grow food for, build shelters, keep warm and produce medicines. The number of chickens being fed and raised dwarfs the population of the people on the planet.

While it’s viewed as horrific, the palm oil forests around the world is beyond belief. and those oily palm fruits are nutrition. Same for cotton, and many other plants. Mankind produces. We don’t starve the natural world, we plow it under to make more food. Or burn it. In any case, mankind produces.

I’m not making a claim, but in the real world, the natural world, my property would produce and feed very little. The soil is barren sand, the trees and shrubs barely would feed a few squirrels, a raccoon every other week. Maybe.

But with fuels, fertilizers and human effort, it’s an abundant (however small) little piece of paradise, with a biodiversity of amazing depth. The phosphate mined and the nitrogen fixed by fossil fuels, and the mixing and transport of both, enable it to thrive, and reach a sustaining level where the trees themselves are enriching the soil, capturing CO2 from the air.

Same for most everything you eat. It’s because of fuel. Unless you live like the Amish, or in the remote third world, you would starve with out fossil fuels.

I don’t think anyone really likes the destruction and pollution from fossil fuels, but they sure do like the lifestyle it enables.

376

Oh, and before GIGO floods the topic like a BP oil leak, in regards to the oceans and lakes and streams and ponds, we also breed fish and stock those sources of food and pleasure. We )mankind) can raise so many little baby fish (fry) that we can do what nature would not. Re-supply entire fish stock to a water source. It’s done all the time.

We (us, people) are not only destroyers, we are stewards of our world. Well, some of us are. We want it to be better, not worse. We want abundance and goodness, not death and pollution. In essence the people worried about catastrophic warming are worried about our planet. It’s not wrong to be concerned.

Not at all.

377

The problem with having a train of thought with no support is that one item can derail all when there is evidence that one important part of a rant is not the whole picture, or that it is changing.

https://www.amshaafrica.org/projects-and-clients/current-projects/solar-pump-project.html

378

Regarding your insults here, one has to be countered more: I already pointed out that it is not proper to claim that I or environmentalists or other experts don’t care about the people.

379

I assume that by “anthropomorphic global warming hypothesis,” you are mean “global warming caused by humans.”

If so, dire consequences are certainly NOT easily foreseeable. In the past there have been many instances natural warming without dire consequences. For example, the Earth’s emergence from the Little Ice Age.

A rational reader would ask for the evidence and argument that global warming caused by humans necessarily entails dire consequences.

380

There is no point to continuing to make this discussion personal. Knock it off.

And you need to get a grip and not overreact to every post you take as an “insult.”

Both of you take your personal troubles to The BBQ Pit.

[ /Moderating ]