As I said yesterday, you may not insult other posters anywhere on the Straight Dope Message Board except the BBQ Pit.
This is a warning for insults. Earn enough warning and you will no longer be allowed to post here. Please control yourself in the future.
And everyone, please knock off the insults, constructs and other accusations. If you must do so, you know where The BBQ Pit is.
You do realize, I hope, that a thing (in this case Climate Change) can have more than one cause, right? It’s no mystery that water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas, but the effects we are talking about are not that large, and with CO2 being the second largest contributor, it’s not so difficult to understand the science behind the effect of increased CO2 in the atmosphere. But let’s not allow facts to get in the way of political orthodoxy!
I want to hear what hemoglobin has to do with global warming.
Global Warming is the hemoglobin of little minds.
We do, and it’s well past time that both this thread and this thread should be moved there.
Nomination for Post of the Month.
Everything you said is wrong.
Climate change IS blamed exclusively on carbon dioxide, and anthropogenic carbon dioxide at that. So you were wrong there.
It is indeed a “mystery” that water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas, at least to the overwhelming majority.
What “effects” could you possibly be talking about? Global warmists are spreading fear with outrageous, outlandish predictions of global catastrophe, such as mass extinctions, flooding, and excessive farting at parties. These promised “effects” are indeed “that large.” That is why warmers are so intent on controlling everyone, and transferring wealth from the United States to socialist hellholes everywhere.
It is indeed quite difficult to understand the science. You trivialize the matter as if you were some kind of authority.
The person to whom I directed the challenge waxed condescending on things “sciency.”
Since he pretended to be “sciency” himself, let’s see him show it to the forum.
Let’s see him discuss water in verifiable scientific terms. So far, nothing.
“Sciency” far transcends mere water. Let’s talk the “sciency” of biochemistry. So many people pretend to be well versed in “sciency” but very few really are. That I have to explain to you that hemoglobin has nothing to do with global warming, and everything to do with “sciency” should be illustrative. Unfortunately all you people want to do is mock, ridicule, and spin. Fifty to one. Let’s play your game, shall we?
All right, global warming is fact, fact, fact. So let’s all stop taking vacations, by airplane, car, train, and boat. Stay at home for two weeks. Global warming, global warming.
No more travel to conferences. Videoconference instead.
No more sports activities. Too much travel and burning fossil fuel, which is the greatest evil known to man, right?
Close all entertainment venues, movies, restaurants. Save the animals. Lead the way, don’t just preach it.
Cut your use of fossil fuels 80%, as mandated by the glorious powers of global warming that be. Actually the 80% figure is misleading. It is 80% of 1990 levels, years into the future, when our population will be much higher, and cuts must necessarily be much greater.
After the world has been plunged into lasting depression, then we will all be the better for it, you betcha. I’ll wait for all of you to go first.
See, and I thought you said you were aware when people were mocking you. Your flailing is obvious (hence my comment) and desperate. You’re not bringing anything this board hasn’t seen a thousand times over on this issue. Go sit in the corner with the 9/11 Truthers and the Sovereign Citizens.
Mister Moderator, you have failed to issue ONE SINGLE WARNING to anyone harassing and ridiculing anything and everything I say. Not one!
Mace would have all here believe he is a big mind, no doubt. Clever little one-liners substitute for facts and “sciency.” It’s no wonder this place is so close-minded. Anyone disturbing the giggly status quo is harassed to death, until they leave.
At this point it seems like the issue of AGW has been debated to death (well apparently not…) more than any other issue on this board. You think it would be possible to just have a bot loaded with responses to the common fallacies and let it handle the questions? I mean I am impressed with the way people argue but it’s been a while since anything new came out on either side.
Or maybe just a function on the forum that notifies anyone who tries to post about the issue that it has already been resolved (several times…) and giving the poster a few links to some of the better and more thorough conversations. Seems like a waste of time and intelligence to keep debating the issue with the same type of people who pop up over and over to spout the same fallacies over and over and who (always) refuse to change their minds or critically examine their own facts.
The only thing I am interested in is HOW the person in question was tricked into his/her opinion. Do they have a vested interest, or did they fall for some conspiracy theory or marketing or what? Is it an emotional thing, a religious thing…? Sooner or later we’re going to have to assume that there’s something psychological at work here.
No, he is not, water vapor is there already, the increase in CO2 creates a feedback that also increases the water vapor and the energy and material that comes down harder when storms come along. CO2 increases thanks to human activities and so the earth warms up.
Nope, this is once again just a boilerplate denier point. scientists are already aware of it, the problem is that water vapor is not that is driving the current increase in temperature.
These are not predictions, what scientists are reporting are observations.
[QUOTE] The Alarming Science Behind Climate Change's Increasingly Wild Weather" featuring top climate researcher Jennifer Francis. [/QUOTE]The most likely outcome is that the observed effects (outside ice loss and droughts too) will increase more over time if not much is done to control emissions.
There is no need to, the Internet has made possible what the character played by Woody Allen in Annie Hall can do by producing an expert to show a person that he/she does not know what its talking about.
So I have Jennifer Frances (and many other scientists in line, many Republican and conservative) that worked with Judah Cohen with new models that predict more accurately the conditions in the northern hemisphere.You have only denier propaganda.
Keep going, Ren, you’ve almost got Bingo! 
Carbon dioxide is a contributor. Many things contribute. Think of it as your body weight. Your meals are a the primary contributor to maintaining your body weight. The 600 calorie mocha you drink 5 days a week is why your weight is going up 4 pounds a month. (A small contributor can make a large difference over time)
No, it isn’t.
Extinctions and flooding are something that will happen with sea-level rise. There are people who over-state the possible outcomes, but that in no way suggests that there are no negative outcomes possible.
Your understanding of the issue, is roughly on par with your understanding of economics, I see.
What is the mechanism of the wealth transfer? Which “socialist hellholes” are we transferring that money to? You are regurgitating nonsense.
The vast majority of experts agree that climate change is real.
Also, wanna respond to my previous post?
I’m just going to say a few words here and that’s it. Renaissance Man, if you had bothered to inform yourself about the quantity and quality of climate science discussions that have occurred on this board in recent years, you would have realized that a great many aspects of the subject have already been covered in detail and in a substantial amount of scientific depth. You can use board search or you can use Google to find them.
There have been many such climate change discussions on this board, and many of them are long. I’ve participated in most of them and sometimes devoted significant time to them. I’d be happy to engage in further discussions with anyone who has an actual point to make. You don’t. The amount of time I’m going to devote to you ends here. Your OP is pointless and does nothing except reveal a complete lack of subject knowledge. Which is why jokes have been the predominant response.
John, I may be misinterpreting your point, but the fact is that water vapor as an atmospheric gas has a very significant greenhouse effect, a fact that skeptics use to falsely portray it as more important than CO2. The reality is that this form of water vapor is directly proportional to temperature and dependent only on temperature, and so is strictly a feedback of CO2 induced temperature rise; it acts to roughly double the effect of incremental CO2. For this reason water vapor is never considered a climate forcing in the context of anthropogenic forcings, but simply one of many feedbacks, like albedo changes from ice melt. Unlike CO2 which is a primary climate driver, water vapor is pure feedback and so is completely irrelevant in climate change mitigation discussions. Water vapor in the stratosphere from CH4 oxidation is genuinely a forcing, but that’s a very very minor component of anthropogenic forcings.
That reminds me of another often-confused point, sea level rise: It is important to remember that the predicted rise of sea level caused by AGW is based not only on addition to the oceans of the volume of water now frozen at the poles, but also on the expansion of the volume of the liquid water now in the oceans – if that water warms, it expands, it takes up more volume, and the sea levels rise.
I think if you went to the wikipedia link provided it should be clear. Simply a list of what are considered greenhouse gases. That’s all.
Within a few years “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Snowfall will be “a very rare and exciting event.”- Dr. David Viner, senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, interviewed by the UK Independent, March 20, 2000.
“[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots…[By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers.” Michael Oppenheimer, published in “Dead Heat,” St. Martin’s Press, 1990.
“By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” - Life magazine, January 1970.
“By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” - Paul Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971.
“In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” - Paul Ehrlich, speech during Earth Day, 1970.
Confessions of a Computer Modeler by Robert J. Caprara
Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2014
After earning a master’s degree in environmental engineering in 1982, I spent most of the next 10 years building large-scale environmental computer models. ////
When I presented the results to the EPA official in charge, he said that I should go back and “sharpen my pencil.” I did. I reviewed assumptions, tweaked coefficients and recalibrated data. But when I reran everything the numbers didn’t change much. At our next meeting he told me to run the numbers again.
After three iterations I finally blurted out, “What number are you looking for?” He didn’t miss a beat: He told me that he needed to show $2 billion of benefits to get the program renewed. I finally turned enough knobs to get the answer he wanted, and everyone was happy.
Hundreds more comments and critiques like these could be posted, but they would all be dismissed by the rest of you with a giggly comment or two. Not “sciency,” but giggles.
“Climate forcings,” oh please. Clever wordplay is not “sciency.”