It seems that even the Koch brothers can't make the reality of climate change go away by just throwing money at it. I'll bet they're absolutely furious that a study they funded to try to disprove climate change has come back with unequivocal results that temperatures are indeed rising. From the AP: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...EPTIC?SITE=KMOV&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT Is there really any doubt anymore that most of the denial of climate change is simply coming from the Koch's trying to avoid responsibility for the pollution their businesses create?
It was so windy here the other day, it almost blew possum outta his tree house... IPCC: Climate impact risk set to increase 18 November 2011 - There has been uncertainty over the link between extreme weather events and climate change
Red Herring. This issue isn't whether climate changes: nearly all understand that. The question is what degree of involvement Man has in that, and establishing that the ramifications are bad.
Humans didn't cause it. But the pollution we have caused, through greenhouse gases, has accelerated it. Normally, the types of changes that we are seeing would have taken several million years. But, because of the huge amount of greenhouse gases that we have added, it would take only 10 to 15 thousands instead
To what degree, and how impactful is human pollution compared to pollution created by Mother Nature herself? These are the questions.
The only natural event that causes the amount of greenhouse gases to cause this type of acceleration is a Super Vocanic eruption. The last eruption of that sort occured 100 thousand years ago and would have no effect on the current cycle. It did start the little ice age though
Most do now. After decades of ignorant people whining: "It's not getting warmer blah, blah, blah...urban heat island blah, blah, blah...it stopped in 1998 blah, blah, blah...hockey stick is fake blah, blah, blah..." Even the most stupid of them have moved on to: "OK - it IS getting warmer - but the massive amounts of CO2 we spew have nothing to do with it...blah, blah, blah... or: Yeah - that's the sort of thing. You must have got the memo. Why don't you try keeping up with the published science of the past 3 decades?
Sorry, but the deniers fail on that count as badly as denying that climate change is real. There simply is no scientific dispute that human activities are largely responsible for the warming we're seeing, the evidence for that is about as overwhelming as the evidence that the warming is real. Don't believe me? Ask the American Association for the Advancement of Science - about the most prestigious and well respected professional scientific organization in the world. http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2007/0218am_statement.shtml As for if the ramifications are bad... Was Hurricane Katrina a bad thing? Was the tornado outbreak this past April - the most severe outbreak on record - a bad thing? Was the 2010 Russian heatwave that killed 700 people a bad thing? Was the drought that helped ignite the conflict in Darfur a bad thing?
Have noticed the grass mowin' season has gotten longer over the past 30 years... US to get earlier springs: scientists Fri, Oct 16, 2015 - Scientists said spring is coming much earlier in the US, with plants projected to bud three weeks earlier by the end of the century because of climate change.
Granny says, "Dat's right - we all gonna die... GAO: Climate Change Could Cause More: Cardiovascular Disease in Northwest, Allergies on Great Plains, Drownings in Midwest November 6, 2015 Climate-related risks to public health in the United States could include a rise in cardiovascular disease in the Northwest, more allergies in Great Plains states, and an increase in drownings in the Midwest, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
Global warming alarmists are truly a collection of simpletons. The fact is that the .01%ers are the ones behind the whole global warming scam. You see Einstein, automation not only kills jobs, left to its own devices, it kills profits for the wealthy. When automation makes it possible for small business to make products and services faster, cheaper, and better, that is deflationary. The music industry has seen revenues fall in half as digital technology ate its way through the sector. A $14 billion industry is now a $7 billion industry. Profits and payroll taxes collected from the industry have plummeted. So much for the fantasy that technology always creates more jobs than it destroys. The only way for the .01%ers to keep profits fat for themselves is to monopolize all manufacturing and business. What better way to monopolize the entire work environment than to ban all carbon production without a government issued license? We will call the monopolization a "carbon tax" and convince the morons that the world is going to end unless we control all the ability to make money and concentrate it at the top of the food chain. Fools deserve to be starving peasants. It is just comforting to know I will not be one of them.
The debate is not on the rising temp but the cause. We are working our way out of an ice age so of course temps are going to rise.
You forgot the part where the .01%ers are working with the Grey aliens to suppress humanity's technological progress so the aliens can perform massive biological experiments on whole populations. Climate denial is full of tinfoiler conspiracy theories, but that absolutely takes the cake for the most paranoid one I've heard. You see, Dirac, technological advances that increase productivity tend to work toward concentrating wealth at the top. If you go from needing 100 workers to produce x widgets to only needing 10, that reduces the demand for labor (especially unskilled labor) which tends to depress wages. Okay, it's more complicated than that, but the impact of huge increases in productivity on social institutions is a few dozen doctoral dissertations worth of conversation. The bottom line is that labor costs go down and the corporate class can keep more of the profits for themselves. The notion that technology is bad for the super wealthy is completely bonkers. Your argument boils down to: 1) Create climate change hoax 2) Impose carbon tax to wreck the economy. 3) A miracle occurs. 4) PROFITS!!!! The observed amount of CO2 increase in the atmosphere is only a portion of the amount of carbon we know we're emitting. Isotopic studies demonstrate that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere comes from fossil fuels. The greenhouse properties of CO2 can be demonstrated in any undergrad physics lab. CO2 is the only viable explanation for the observed temperature increase. So no, the debate is not on what's causing the warming. It's about people who are obsessed with Al Gore insisting that anything connected to him must be part of an evil plot.
Lol....I remember Reagan prattling on about how trees were the biggest polluters on the planet. Some idiots never learn.
Massive crop failure on a global scale vulnerable to climate change... Global food systems vulnerable to climate change Wednesday 6th January, 2016 -- Massive crop failure on a global scale could be a reality if food systems aren't better protected from climate change. See also: Climate Change Is Certain But You Can't Predict the Future January 7, 2016 | When asked Thursday about federal data showing that fossil fuels will provide about 80 percent of the world’s energy needs through 2040 and that U.S. carbon emissions are at the lowest they’ve been in decades, the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator said that it’s impossible to predict the future.
wrong. Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the 90,s and up so much pollution it dropped th global temperature about 4 degrees fur 3 years and that was one single event out of thousands happening at any given moment. Humans could never match what nature does even if we wanted to.
So because nature can cause far more devastation that means that human caused destruction is of no concern? That's rather like arguing that because volcanoes and asteroid strikes can and have produced explosions many orders of magnitude worse than the largest nuclear bomb ever created that nuclear war is nothing to worry about. "Natural" does not mean "harmless." For example, consider the Great Dying. The end Permian mass extinction 252 million years ago is, by far, the most catastrophic extinction we know of in the history of Earth. The Great Dying makes the extinction of the dinosaurs look mild by comparison. As far as we can tell, complex multicellular life was almost completely wiped out. There's still a lot of uncertainty about what caused it, but the leading candidate is the Siberian Traps. Massive flood basalt eruptions on a scale unparalleled since covered an area of Siberia about the size of the continental US in several hundred meters of lava. The release of massive amounts of CO2 and other gasses caused by the eruptions led to sudden dramatic world wide climate change. Do you think that because the Great Dying was (presumably) a natural event that we should be unconcerned about the possibility of causing even a much smaller event of the same kind?
Indeed, they can. But the global climate system is not a scaled up version of an undergrad physics lab, so interpolating the results from small scale CO2 experiments into climate models of the entire earth is just silly. Catastrophic warming scenarios don't rely on CO2 because its forcing is logarithmic. The conventional warming models hinge on feedback mechanisms in the global climate system which are assumed to be positive. But if those feedback mechanisms are actually negative, then the conventional warming models breakdown entirely and CO2's influence on warming becomes negligible. And there is much debate about whether the global climate system's feedbacks are a net positive or a net negative. Basic systems analysis would suggest they are negative, which is the case for all stable systems. But the entire AGW religion relies on unscientific orthodoxy and dogma which attempts to stifle debate and uses unscientific terms like "indisputable" and "cased closed" to brow beat skeptics into submission. I'm sorry, but who made you the boss of what the debate is? I'm pretty sure debate is inherent to science and that virtually anything is debatable as long as it is falsifiable or testable. Granted, there are some silly objections to AGW, but that doesn't mean they are all silly. There are serious scientists and intellectuals who have questioned the conventional wisdom of AGW. The authority to regulate CO2 emissions is a totalitarian power that would allow the state to interfere in every human activity down to the minutest detail, so it's only rational to be skeptical of politicians who are crusading in favor of such a power. The scary thing is that some people are all-too-willing to hand this draconian regulatory power over to the political class. I can't imagine why anyone would think that is a good idea.
Virtually the entire scientific community globally understands and agrees that the rate of climate change is being forced by human cultural/industrial/agricutural activities … Yes, I know that there are still a few holdouts here and there who think that the Earth is a flat disc on a stack of turtles ("all the way down") … *shrug*
*Sigh* Ethereal, when I say that the debate is not about whether warming is occurring nor is the debate about what is causing the warming, those statements are descriptive not prescriptive. Of course I'm not the boss of anything, really. I am not demanding that these things not be debated, I am simply observing that no reasonable arguments against those broad conclusions are currently on the table, and there haven't been for quite some time. Climate deniers (and no, they are not skeptics) can make word salad from technical terms they clearly don't understand all they want. They can cherry pick data and make spurious objections all they want. They can out and out lie all they want. None of that will change the simple fact that the broad conclusions about the climate are known with a great deal of certainty and all of the objections that are being raised at this time are silly. Your argument about the power to regulate CO2 being oppressive is so vague that it could be used with equal validity (or lack thereof) for any governmental power of any sort. The power to regulate money could be used in a totalitarian way - that doesn't mean that any regulation of money is inherently oppressive. The power to regulate street traffic could be taken as the power to control every step you take outside your own home. The power to regulate sewage treatment could be phrased as power over the most basic biological functions of any human. And so on and so on.
