I put it in GD not because it *deserves *to be debated, but because it *will *be debated, based on recent board history. And I wasn’t wrong, was I?
You’ll notice I’ve been silent since the OP. It’s because, honestly and truly, I don’t know jack about this. My father, whom I respect immensely as a thinking person, up until at least a year ago was still in the “global warming is real, but we don’t really know how much it’s due to people and how much is just the natural warming/cooling cycles of the Earth” camp. I haven’t been able to talk to him since this report came out, so I don’t know if he’s changed his mind. This, I should point out, didn’t stop him one bit from Doing Something about it. He bought a hybrid car and installed enough solar panels on his new barn to power his property and sell a bit back to the electric company. He reduces, reuses and recycles and doesn’t club baby seals. Is my daddy going to solve the problem all on his own? Hell no. But he’s the one who taught me that the reasons why are irrelevant, except as they relate to the possible solutions, and that thinking persons can disagree and still work together to fix things. I’ve leaned towards the anthropogenic hypothesis, but without any real education to back it up, and I’ve tried to remain open to other ideas.
Thank you, Sam Stone, for an excellent post. I feel like I learned a lot from it. I’m not sure what else I personally can do, but I am putting in fluorescent bulbs and we rarely eat beef. Every bit helps, right?
Or do they say, “Hmm… back in the 1970s scientists said that we were heading for an ice age; that doesn’t seem to have happenned. How can we trust what they’re saying now?”
Nope. In my experience, they don’t ask why they should trust the scientists now, they say they don’t trust the scientists now. They’ve already made up their minds, and are just looking for reasons to maintain that belief. Of course, this completely sidesteps the fact that there was never a consensus, and the the global cooling hysteria was manufactured by journalists looking for a story.
As for Lomborg, I must confess that I’d never heard of him before you brought him up. Some cursory reading, however, seems to imply that the charges brought against him could have been valid. Or are you saying that he was singled out strictly because he disagreed with the AGW Cabal?
'Cause, that’s not what I’m seeing. It seems to me that his book was found to be “scientifically dishonest”, but that Lomborg wasn’t found guilty because of his lack of experience in that particular field, and that other scientific organizations disagreed with that finding.
Got any other examples of the sort of censorship you’re accusing the AGW Cabal of?
Is Lomborg an anthropogenic-climate-change skeptic? I can find nothing about that here. (Nor can I find anything justifying your attribution of a “bad reputation” to the “pro-AGW” lobby.)
I don’t know if this point has been brought up in the debate yet in regards to statement “B” and I don’t profess to have the answer but I still think it is debate worthy:
Since it’s concluded that man has contributed to the warming, presumably throughout the 20th century, how much of this damage was done early on compared to the latter part of the century?
While factories and cars have multiplied in numbers many time over throughout the century, early cars and factories had absolutely no restrictions on their emmisions. Major industrial cities skies were constantly black from pollution. Vehicles were anything but clean burning or fuel efficient. Emmision controls? What’s that?
So while the blame goes on humanity for the warming, exactly when was the most damage done? I think people have the perception that it just kept getting worse and worse well into the 1980s and 90s and we need to do something now.
Is there any debaters out there that challenge this and say the bulk of the damage occured much earlier on and actually improved at the end of the century?
(1) Unfortunately, the greenhouse gas in emissions from burning fossil fuels are not the “dirty” products from incomplete combustion that cause tradition pollution. Rather, they are CO2, which is a product of perfect combusion and is thus not reduced by making the emissions “cleaner” in the tradition sense.
(2) In fact, the traditional pollutants are believed to have had an overall cooling effect that to date may have counteracted some of the warming from greenhouse gases. [Sulfate aerosols, in particular, cause cooling. Black carbon soot causes warming…but probably not enough to counteract the cooling effects of the sulfate aerosols.]
(3) It is the warming in the last ~35 years that cannot be accounted for by natural causes…so the evidence is that it is this part that we are most responsible for. The models imply this too.
I don’t know, but that is a question that is appropriate for debate. Some of us are going to take one position on it, and some will take another that’s diametrically opposed, but it can be debated. Most questions fall into that category in some way, but then there are some that don’t.
For a recent snapshot of his position, he’s discussed responses to the IPCC report on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site. He lays into journalists in general, unnamed scientists and Al Gore, together with a jab at the IPCC’s director, but on the report itself:
More generally, his stance in recent years has been more about the relative seriousness of the consequencies compared to other issues facing us than arguing over the science.
More pertinently, his summing up in the chapter on the subject (p317) starts:
In 2001 it was part of his purpose to minimise the significance of manmade warming, but he was already accepting that it was occuring to some degree.
As has been repeatedly emphasised in this and endless other threads, science doesn’t pretend to deal in absolute certainties. Any scientist would have included some such caveat in that sentence.
