“Truth? You can't handle the truth!”

[TordelBack]

That's a good piece in itself, but hasn't the crazy train already moved on from climate change denial? The nutjobbery seems to now be in the form of (1) it's getting warmer but it's nothing to do with us, look how warm it was when the dinosaurs were farting about, and they did okay; and my personal pet hate (2) it's getting warmer but why is that a bad thing for us?  Look at all the crops we'll be able to grow in Canada! Look at how it's only poor and overpopulated areas that will suffer, and let's face it they have it coming.

[Hawkmumbler]

Climate change denniers often have to reach for the most far fetched diversions in order to try and make their arguments seem reasonable.

[IndigoPrime]

I don't possess a telly, so I don't know how accurate this is. Still, it makes me wonder if certain individuals could be 'persuaded' to shoot a president, eliminate a dissident or simply carry a 'harmless' rucksack into a public place...

I knew a hypnotist at college. He tried to hypnotise me. I was genuinely interested, as a means to potentially deal with my tinnitus. (I'd tried everything else.) He pronounced I was basically impossible to hypnotise, because people who can be must let go. But additionally, he noted that you never do anything while hypnotised that you wouldn't otherwise do. It's not about commands so much as suggestion and giving in to that. So the notion you could somehow arm a terrorist through hypnotism is hogwash. (As for those TV shows, quite a lot of smoke and mirrors, I suspect, in the same way David Copperfield never actually make the Statue of Liberty disappear.)

(2) it's getting warmer but why is that a bad thing for us?  Look at all the crops we'll be able to grow in Canada! Look at how it's only poor and overpopulated areas that will suffer, and let's face it they have it coming.

Good job most major cities aren't on the coast and— Oh.

What gets me right now is all the morons going: Look, it's snowing! Global warming is clearly a hoax! GOP! GOP! This helpfully ignores the Arctic now seeing temperatures as high as freezing, in the middle of winter, polar vortexes flinging horrible weather south, Siberia seeing record highs in winter, and so on. Western Europe won't fare well from this either, if it changes the seas too much. If the Gulf Stream packs in to any extent, the UK will suddenly realise how far north it actually is (while Boris Johnson continues to guffaw about GLOBAL WARMING—HAH!).

[TordelBack]

You're right, of course, there are still people who see a cold day and figure it's all a hoax, but I do think in the main even the most dedicated hockey-stick crew have moved on to acknowledging it's happening, but denying the human role and/or the fact that it's a bad thing. See up-thread for the supposed self-regulating benefits of carbon dioxide.

[IndigoPrime]

This sums things up beautifully for me:



Even if it turns out we can't do anything, green energy is broadly better. The UK is also well-placed to capitalise on this. We're reasonably light rich (it's notable that many anti-solar people ignore the niggling issue that they don't need blazing sunlight—just light), have strong tides and are wind rich. If we fully took advantage, we could dramatically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and wouldn't be begging the Chinese to fund a French nuclear power station.

[The Legendary Shark]

The fact is that we can't do anything about climate change - it's as natural a phenomenon as continental drift or solar output. Earth's climate has been in a constant state of change forever, as studies of the Eamian and Holocene periods show. Climate change is not a problem - it's a fact of planetary life.

The problem is the alarmism over carbon dioxide and the political conflation of CO2 and pollution. Again, CO2 is not a problem, on the whole, but pollution is. We can, and indeed must, do more to eliminate pollution than to eliminate carbon dioxide.

In the foreword to the Global Warming Policy Foundation's Report 18, Carbon Dioxide, The Good News, Freeman Dyson writes,

"Indur Goklany has done a careful job, collecting and documenting the evidence that
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does far more good than harm. To any unpreju-
diced person reading this account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic
effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously
beneficial, that the possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been
greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage.

"I consider myself an unprejudiced person and to me these facts are obvious. But
the same facts are not obvious to the majority of scientists and politicians who con-
sider carbon dioxide to be evil and dangerous. The people who are supposed to be
experts and who claim to understand the science are precisely the people who are
blind to the evidence. Those of my scientific colleagues who believe the prevailing
dogma about carbon dioxide will not find Goklany's evidence convincing. I hope that
a few of them will make the effort to examine the evidence in detail and see how
it contradicts the prevailing dogma, but I know that the majority will remain blind.
That is to me the central mystery of climate science. It is not a scientific mystery but a
human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is
blind to obvious facts?"

The false dichotomy pitting "climate believers" against "climate deniers" is a blatant political ploy, designed to reduce a highly complex issue to simplistic straw-man arguments. In the end it is entirely possible that a firm causal link between CO2 levels and rising temperatures might be found, but I doubt that. It would mean discovering a process that goes against current basic scientific principles which is, of course, possible but, I think, unlikely.

It's not so long ago that the Earth-centric model of the universe was imposed by the "elites" in order to help them maintain their grip on power. As a species, we have not evolved beyond that yet, no matter how intelligent and sophisticated we believe ourselves to be.

[Hawkmumbler]

Once again Sharky, it's not a question of weather climate change is real or not it's a question of rate and carbon emissions have shot up in the last decade alone, the radical increase in climate change cann't be a coincidence.

Plus, ya know. We've kind of ruined the Ozone layer.

[Theblazeuk]

Climate change is inevitable. However the pace and severity of climate change appears to be affected by the pollution of human activity, and steps could be taken to prevent or mitigate it.

Everything else is just sophistry.

Oh and whilst heliocentrism is on topic This whole B.O.B thing is hilarious. Flat Earth! In a world with GPS. Hilarious.

[IndigoPrime]

Plus, ya know. We've kind of ruined the Ozone layer.

I'm sure he'll be along in a minute to state that either that's a hoax by someone or other, or that the Ozone layer in fact ended up 50 times as powerful when we were flinging CFCs into the atmosphere with merry abandon.

[Modern Panther]

The Global Warming Policy Foundation is a lobbying group which appears to act for mining organizations. 

They are the Elites

[TordelBack]

Freeman Dyson is a truly brilliant man, but he's in his 90s now and is a quantum physicist, nuclear physicist and astronomer, not a biologist or climatologist. He worked in the RAF during WWII, he was a contemporary of Feynman: are his carefully-chosen words really the definitive modern statement on the subject?  Or are we cherry-picking here?

[Dandontdare]

The fact is that we can't do anything about climate change - it's as natural a phenomenon as continental drift or solar output. Earth's climate has been in a constant state of change forever, as studies of the Eamian and Holocene periods show. Climate change is not a problem - it's a fact of planetary life.

Shit my house is on fire. Now I don't know whether it's because of the petrol I'm storing in the living room, houses without petrol burn down all the time, and nobody has been able to show me any definite proof that it's conected. Therefore I refuse to use this bucket of water or listen to the Fire Brigade (what do they know about fire?) Let me just stash a few more jerry cans in the lounge though before it gets too hot....

[TordelBack]

And that really is the point.

Yes climate change is an inevitable and ongoing part of life, as is my death,  the death of everyone I love, the sun, and the visible universe itself. But I don't want any of those things to happen next Tuesday, and I'd hate to risk wilfully hastening any of those things if I could avoid it.  Lots of very smart people (almost all of them) who have spent a lot of time studying and thinking about this say this is what we are doing with our climate at present.

[Tjm86]

Shit my house is on fire. Now I don't know whether it's because of the petrol I'm storing in the living room, houses without petrol burn down all the time, and nobody has been able to show me any definite proof that it's conected. Therefore I refuse to use this bucket of water or listen to the Fire Brigade (what do they know about fire?) Let me just stash a few more jerry cans in the lounge though before it gets too hot....

If it be a petrol fire I would strongly recommend against throwing that bucket of water on it.  Unless you are into interesting pyrotechnics.

[The Legendary Shark]

It's good that Hawkie mentions the ozone layer. The "hole" (which isn't really a hole but a thinning) in 2015 was the fourth largest on record, peaking at 28.2 million square kilometers (10.9 million square miles), an area larger than the continent of North America. Since the Montreal Protocol in 1989, there has been a significant drop in CFC use around the world. However, some of the replacement gases are thousands of times more powerful agents of radiative forcing than carbon dioxide over the short and medium term. (If indeed radiative forcing and not atmospheric mass/pressure/gravity drive climate change.)

I believe we can do something about pollution but I don't believe we can do anything about climate change, except prepare. I don't believe the Earth is flat (where did that come from?)

Indigoprime - nope. See above.

MP - maybe so. But then, the IPCC is a governmental organisation set up, funded, overseen and backed by the "elites."

Tordels, at what age does a person's opinion cease to be valid? I, personally, would be more inclined to believe a 93 year old Freeman Dyson than David Cameron, who is only 49.

DDD, that analogy would only be valid if you didn't know what was in the jerry cans before the fire started. Besides, you don't put out a petrol fire with water. You use either foam or, er, CO2...

Tordels, lots of very smart people also disagree.

I don't claim to know "the truth" about what drives climate change, nor do I claim to have any answers. What I do know is that our climate is an ancient and dynamic system which changes all the time and that to pin all that complexity and change one one specific and entirely natural gas seems to me to be grossly simplistic and dangerous. Continue to study CO2 by all means, but not at the exclusion and derision of all else.