Posted on 08/11/2006 10:49:56 AM PDT by cogitator
Just because people disagree with me at Frdoesn't mean I give in. No respetable Freeper does. You appear to have been around here long enough to know that.
The is no legitimate debate about whether the climate is changing. Temperatures have risen over the last century and they are still rising. Denying this is to deny completely convincing scientific and observational evidence. To say "well it was perty darn cold this winter where I live" is to show complete ignorance of the issue.
The only real issue is whether humans are contributing to climate change to such an extent that we need to alter the behaviour to prevent the change from becoming too extreme.
It is a good debate. At FR those who say "no" are in the majority. In the real world, they are vastly outnumbered and losing quickly as policy takes shape and changes are made.
Dismissing CO2 as too small a portion of total greenhouse gasses is to misunderstand that we are talking about an issue of balance. If you have a balance scale and alter the balance by one percent, the scale will tip. That is the correct analogy, although the earth also has feedback mechanisms to bring itself back into balance. The time scales of these mechanisms, however are usually different from human time horizons. Talking about warming on Mars is absurd sophistry and true junk science.
In pure political terms, people see their weather changing. They see an inefficient use of resources. They see people getting fat because they live unnaturally. Something seems out of whack and politicians(at the moment on led by the left, but increasingly not) backed by scientists are giving them a cause for the change which they can effect.
By dropping the ball on the issue, the right is giving the left a huge chance to implement unnecessarily expensive and command and control solutions that will do untold harm and probably be less effective than a conservative solution.
Yes, this will be expensive, but it wil primarily be expensive for the big CO2 emitters which happen to currently be the richest and most powerful companies and individuals in the world. When they have to begin paying start-ups for clean energy and products, it will cost them money. If the US sits on its hands too long and continues to let the Germans and Japanese race ahead, the money will go to companies from those countries. Or, America can develop the technology and export it.
So there you go. Whether you accept the science or not, the momentum is such that it makes sense to propose legitimate solutions to reducing CO2 output. If it concurently reduces reliance on foreign oil, so much the better for security.
There's a lot of hockey stick mentality in that statement. But Greenland's temperatures http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/greenland_temp.html are much more a function of the jet stream (NAO) than any worldwide increase and are just now catching up to the 1930's.
The ONLY reason this is so is because the climate is constantly changing. Whether those changes represent a long-term trend is an entirely different story.
Witness the numerous and sensationalist articles from the 80's claiming the Earth was headed into a new Ice Age..
The fact is that a) no one knows the reasons for any current trend with any certainty and b) no one knows how long the current trend will continue. More research is needed before extremely difficult and expensive decisions are made.
Waiting isn't such a bad option, since our overall store of science and engineering knowledge is increasing exponentially right now. Odds are we'll have a much better solution available by the time we figure all this out than we do now.
Maybe Ice looks Green in the right light.
The information is available. Significant factors such as solar flare fluctuations, rotating hot spots in the earth's core, modulations in earth orbit, molecule exchanges (co2 in particular) between the ocean and atmosphere, volcanic activity (land and oceanic), etc. all have been cited as having effects on climate change. You just have to look for it. The only power that the global warming and "caused by human activity" theory has is the conventional wisdom created by the MSM and radical groups that live off the funding that it self-perpetuates.
touche
I'm not claiming Greenland did not have a warm period. I am stating the origin of the name.
" "A three-to-four degree increase of the temperature on Greenland from 1920 to 1930, and the increase recorded since 1995 has sped up the ice melt," he said."
Documenting that things changed in the past doesn't refute that there are changes happening now, and the concern is that the changes are happening more rapidly.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.