Wow that anecdotal evidence sure is convincing.
Bourgeois_Rage Wrote:Wow that anecdotal evidence sure is convincing.
Anecdotal evidence was good enough last year when the record numbers and ferocity of tropical storms and hurricanes was cited as evidence of global warming.
In any case the world has warmed and cooled before many times. CO2 has spiked before. Greenland - the name alone speaks volumes. Antarctica used to be temperate. The land I stand on used to be undersea. Things change. When things changed 10,000 years ago, or 2,000,000 years ago, or even 1000 years ago, it was no big deal. Animals, humans, plants, all adapted. But now we have Seattle and San Francisco and Miami to worry about, and corn growers in Iowa and ranchers in Texas. Humans have not plannned for global change, and now we need to stop the process. We, not the Earth, need to maintain the same levels, without change.
The snapshot of the last 200 hundred years or so is not the baseline, nor will the Earth always remain at any "baseline". Change is the constant. Humans are the ones who need the Earth to stay at the averages of the last 100 years or so. Too much heating, coastal cities are flooded. Too much cooling, they are no longer on the coast. Either way, growing seasons change and energy needs change. Humans need to interrupt the normal cooling/heating cycles of the Earth to maintain their status quo. The Earth will be OK - maybe we won't.
OptimisticOwl Wrote:Anecdotal evidence was good enough last year when the record numbers and ferocity of tropical storms and hurricanes was cited as evidence of global warming.
Yeah the media really hyped that up. It seems like whenever there is flooding, or snow or a heat wave people are jumping up and down about climate change. That is totally the wrong way to go about it. The real science is done over the long term. That's the stuff people should be citing, not snow in Buffalo.
Bourgeois_Rage Wrote:The real science is done over the long term.
The problem of course is in defing the meaning of long term. I think in geophysical terms 200-300 years is an eyeblink. That is why I referred to it as a snapshot in my earlier post. If we had the weather data for the years 900-1200 AD or 550-250 BC we would have very different pictures of what would constitute "normal" weather.
Well sure they should use the long term. But I think if data says that over the last 100-200 years it is getting warmer, I think some people need to admit that it is getting warmer over the last 100-200 years.
Because we don't have temperature readings we have to go back and look at ice cores and tree rings. Then you can infer what the climate was like a lot longer ago. Compare those to current readings and you can estimate more details about what it may have been like. Do this enough and you start to see patterns.
To just throw one's hands up into the air and say, "We'll never know, why try?" is not the right mentality. Then to point at NY and say, "Lookie, snow!" does not mean that all of the people working on this issue are dead wrong. Frankly doing such things is intellectually dishonest.
Year to year we're going to see a wide variety of temperatures and weather. Anyone that has looked at graphs of the data will see that each year it goes up and down a lot. You really need to look at trend lines to see the whole story.
Link
Here's a nifty site with all sorts of graphs, but I think they need a better host. I'm not sure about their sources, but they have different graphs from thousands of years ago on a variety of related global temperature data.
Bourgeois_Rage Wrote:Well sure they should use the long term. But I think if data says that over the last 100-200 years it is getting warmer, I think some people need to admit that it is getting warmer over the last 100-200 years.
Because we don't have temperature readings we have to go back and look at ice cores and tree rings. Then you can infer what the climate was like a lot longer ago. Compare those to current readings and you can estimate more details about what it may have been like. Do this enough and you start to see patterns.
To just throw one's hands up into the air and say, "We'll never know, why try?" is not the right mentality. Then to point at NY and say, "Lookie, snow!" does not mean that all of the people working on this issue are dead wrong. Frankly doing such things is intellectually dishonest.
You're absolutely right. But it's EQUALLY DISHONEST to say, "We want there to be global warming, so we'll only show you the data that support it."
And there is plenty of evidence to say that's what's been done for nigh on 2 decades.
I'm interested in the real answer, but I'm not going to believe in a scenario straight out of the
The Twilight Zone because someone wants to call it "science".
Quote:You're absolutely right. But it's EQUALLY DISHONEST to say, "We want there to be global warming, so we'll only show you the data that support it."
Hmm, I'm not saying that I want global warming. Confirmation bias is certainly a threat in any statistical evaluation. I would agree that both sides are certainly capable of fooling even themselves with the statistics, and it is dishonest of some "green groups" to skew data and paint doomsdays scenerios to rile up the public. That does not justify doing the same in return.
Quote:And there is plenty of evidence to say that's what's been done for nigh on 2 decades.
Can you point me in the direction of some of the scientific evidence against global warming. I've looked for a few and I've been disappointed by them. One website was claiming that climate forcings were causing warming. They then cited a NOAA site that was saying that climate forcings are the cause, but when you go to that site, they explicitly say that climate forcings are not responsible. Most will acknowledge that they may play are part, but most say it takes more than just forcing to account for the observations.
Bourgeois_Rage Wrote:Well sure they should use the long term. But I think if data says that over the last 100-200 years it is getting warmer, I think some people need to admit that it is getting warmer over the last 100-200 years.
To just throw one's hands up into the air and say, "We'll never know, why try?" is not the right mentality.
If by "some people", you meant me, I think you have misunderstood what I am saying. Throwing up the hands, ditto.
Perhaps the data for the last 200 (or 10 or 623, or 1,237) years shows a warming ( or cooling, depending on the term chosen) trend. That is not neccesarily a bad thing - for the Earth. Whatever it is, it has happened before, many times. Warming/cooling over short/long periods of time seems to be normal for this rock. Warming or cooling does have great implications for the human population as we have set up as if there would never be change. We grow corn in Iowa and oranges in California because that is what the recent weather has indicated for those areas. Those might not be the choices we would have made 10,000 years ago or 1,000 years from now. If now we enter a perfectly normal cooling period, making those crops impractical for those regions, that is our problem, but it is not a crisis for the Earth, any more than it was when this happened 10,000 years ago. If we now enter a perfectly normal warming period and the sea level rises putting valuable coastal property at risk, that is once again a problem for humans, especially real estate investor humans, but it is not neccesarily a problem of the Earth, any more than it was 1000 years when Greenland was green.
So is global warming real? Probably, possibly, maybe. Is global cooling real? If not now, it will be, again, someday. Are they problems for mankind? Yes, any change from the status quo is a problem for humans. Are they problems for the Earth? Not in my opinion. So if we are to make global warming a crisis, let's be sure to define for whom it is a crisis and why. Then make your adjustments to the situation. I think building seawalls will in the long run be a more productitive response than restricting smoking.
Long term for a human might be 5 years, or a couple of decades. Long term for the Earth might be thousands or millions of years. Or thousands of millions.
I say screw it! Lets just let the pollution flow into the air until we find out for sure if it is really true. Of course, by then it may be too late. But the good Doctor says who the **** cares, Ill be long gone. I am all that matters.
RobertN Wrote:I say screw it! Lets just let the pollution flow into the air until we find out for sure if it is really true. Of course, by then it may be too late. But the good Doctor says who the **** cares, Ill be long gone. I am all that matters.
Yes, you can stir the pot by making accusatory and inflammatory statements, however you offer nothing toward a solution. That is why your puffed up piety confuses me so. In fact, I'll generalize and say that is what I consistently see from the political left.
If you were smart enough to provide answers, maybe you'd get the respect you so desparately crave.