If global warming is natural, how long will it last for and what are the consequences? In the programme there seemed to be a genral feeling that nobody should worry and all will be well...not so! Natural or man-made global warming has dire consequences for those in fragile ecosystems such as Africa. In fact ask an Australian farmer whether all is OK. To me it is criminally negligent to suggest that there is no problem - adaptation strategies are surely needed whether it is man-made or not!
If the science behind the natural global warming theory is sound then surely forward predictions can be made about global tempertaures in a similar way to which the IPCC are making prediction based on AGW.
If the Earth warms up, naturally or not, some will benefit and others will suffer. Nobody will be unaffected and this message of "don't panic" cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged.
hmmm? Read this it seems to me that now the Carbon Footprint fraud is being exposed that a Plan B is now evolving were the goal posts are now being moved again by the radical environmentlaists. Rather than admit they made fools of themselves with the whole Human C02 Emissions they are trying to look for a get out of jail card. This "well it's happening anyways!" strategy seems to be their emerging tactic.
Personally, I think we should start caring about the starving, dying and diseased in Africa NOW and not because of some future natural disaster which may or may not happened.
I think we should get off Oil and go Nuclear as it's the only effective way to stop seeing endless dead bodies in the Middle East in and around oil fields. I do not care about the welfare of Polar Bears.
I think we should invest more heaviliy in public transport because the roads are packed with traffic and people deserve a choice of a good rail service or driving to work. Not being stuck with one or the other.
But in the main I think we should under no circumstances suddenly go nuts and wreck our economy and standard of living for some imaginary phantom which we can either do very little about, or may not happen or be in anyway serious.
Oh, and put all these radical environmentalist on a spaceship and aim them at Mars.
Pandamania, all you are doing is you are exposing you're obvious ignorance of this subject.
Why is it foolish to accept the conclusions of 1000s of scientists?
Secondly, if you wish to discuss moved goal-posts, I like many people have always accepted man-made climate change. Whereas, the so-called "sceptics" first argued climate-change wasn't happening at all. When the evidence was overwhelming, they then changed the goal-posts and argued it wasn't man-made.
Since the majority of scientists are worried about CO2 emission causing death at least on the scale of World War 2, maybe worse, then we need to tackle CO2 emissions, unless sceptical scientists can prove without doubt that CO2 emissions isn't the cause. The sceptics thus far have failed to do this.
I do agree that we should be taking measures today to tackle problems. Moreover, iniatives that save energy and improve energy security save both money and reduce reliance on energy imports - I don't think that its possible to argue against such measures. Fossil fuels, particularly oil, are finite (unless you can wait 3 million years or so for them to refresh) so we should be conserving them for valuable uses rather than burning them in cars.
However, I don't see anything wrong with looking to the future to see what else is on the horizon. For the record, I trust in the science of global warming and I am a scientist (chemist). My main point is that man-made or not the Earth is getting warmer (measurably so) and that in itself requires action - either in terms of reducing the warming or adapting to it.
One of my worries is that there is a common line (if you believe in AGW) that states we need to take action by 2050 - if we work to a typical UK model then this means we'll probably start doing something about it be 2049! The Earth is a system that is slow to warm up and equally as slow to cool down (as history as shown). Therefore inaction now means a committment to a warmer Earth for a long time to come.
If the science behind the natural global warming theory is sound then surely forward predictions can be made about global tempertaures in a similar way to which the IPCC are making prediction based on AGW.
Conveniently, the cosmic rayers predict that the "effect" will switch off soon, though they'll have something else lined up instead by then.
More relevantly, and less sarcastically, their theory does not put forward any predictions at all, other than for low-level cloud cover. They've made a vague claim for predictions of antarctic temperatures, but other than that it is all hot air - so to speak, whereas conventional theory is correctly predicting many details of where the changes take place (eg troposphere warms, but stratosphere actually cools because the CO2 below it insulates it from the warmth of the earth.)
I'm easy either way the temperature goes. Living as I do at about 500 ft altittude in the Scottish Highlands.
If the Earth warms and sea levels rise I'm fairly hopeful we'll survive. Certainly tourism will benefit with a longer summer and we'll have a better growing season for local agriculture.
If the Earth cools, well it's nothing we haven't been used too and the Winter sports industry will boom.
Aberdeen has literally miles and miles of golden sand beaches, lovely!!
The global warming scare is much ado about nothing. There has been a problem manufactured where none exists. The greenies want the total destruction of modern civilization by taxing us back to the stone age. It won't happen, however. Mankind has a way of waking up to these frauds. Truth is truth, no matter how some try to cloud it.
Do you include 1000s of scientist as "trying to cloud" the truth?
If you research scientific opinion worldwide, check well-established scientific bodies world-wide, they have all come to the opinion that CO2 emissions are causing dangerous climate change.
On the other hand, if you don't research opinion, just read what you want to read, watch what you want to watch, then you will deduce the "truth" as you see it.
I don't think that anyone is suggesting being taxed back to the stone age. If I remember rightly the Stern report (economics of climate change) suggested that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere could be stabilised (at up to 550ppm) for the equivalent of 1% (or so) of global GDP. Someone help me with my maths but I thinks thats about $600 billion a year. Sounds a lot, but put this in the context of advertising where annually $1 tillion (1000 billion) is spent. I would, however, advocate that the money be ring-fenced for climate change related activities (rather than used to prop up things like the NHS).
Now I'm not suggesting that anyone enjoys paying taxes - but ask yourself the question - what if the scientists are right.
Originally posted by Robbie Writer: Do you include 1000s of scientist as "trying to cloud" the truth?
for every scientist in your '1000' groups there are 4 or 5 on the other side in the fence, who disagree that is, so, there...your number is...just a number... ________________________________________________ On the other hand, if you don't research opinion, just read what you want to read, watch what you want to watch, then you will deduce the "truth" as you see it.
funny that this comes from those (AGW hoards) who shut themselves permanently off to any dissenting viewpoint or voice out there, while preaching relentlessly their own 'truth'. But then, hey, they are the 'truthers' lol :-)
Scientists are actually their own worst critics. As a scientist when you have an idea or you think you can explain some observation (a hypothesis) you do all you can to disprove it (as does the rest of the scietific community). If it stands up to scutiny then you use it as the working theory until (if this happens)something else comes along to blow it out of the water.
I attended the IPCC 4th assessment report discussion meeting at the Royal Society and I can assure you that scientists are examining every counter theory to global warming very seriously. So far no other theory explains what we are currently and what we expect to observe in terms of global warming. That doesn't mean that its a conspiricy to deface all other theories, it just means that to make sense of it all you need to include man-made greenhouse gases. Something in the future may occur to blow AGW out of the water, but right now its the leading theory.
Again I ask the question - what if the scientists are right?
funny that this comes from those (AGW hoards) who shut themselves permanently off to any dissenting viewpoint or voice out there, while preaching relentlessly their own 'truth'. But then, hey, they are the 'truthers' lol :-)
Funny? Check the forums and you will find that I have called for a head-2-head debate between pro and anti-AGW. I have acknowledged that scepticism is good.
I really, really like dissent. More of it. What I don't like is propaganda like the GGWS documentary.
Your personal argument, like many on the anti-AGW side is that the problem is manufactured for political reasons.
This is palpable nonsense for the simple reason the scientists have been reporting on global warming way, way before the politicians got involved. Therefore, your argument would require the premise that these scientists were acting for political reasons independently. The majority of climatologists in fact. Which is massively conspiratorial.
Robbie, as usual you have got the argument wrong way around. The sceptics are not saying that the problem of global warming has been manufactured for political reasons, but that the politicians are taking advantage of a natural phenomenon (global warming) by blaming human activity (that a strand of literature advocates) and dishonestly trying to convince the public that the problem of global warming can be fixed by taxes!
Originally posted by phlipper: The global warming scare is much ado about nothing. There has been a problem manufactured where none exists. The greenies want the total destruction of modern civilization by taxing us back to the stone age. It won't happen, however. Mankind has a way of waking up to these frauds. Truth is truth, no matter how some try to cloud it.
It seems to be rooted mainly in English speaking secular democracies. Like the are filling the void left by collaspe of christianity - when you think about it not much difference than the Book of Revelations as in "we are going to be judged for our evil ways"
Here in Ireland a country which was a factory for religious nuts both catholic and protestant for much of the 20th Century and where christianity has nose-dived in recent years, the whole "Human C02 is the Cause" carry on seems to have replaced the catholic church for a lot of middle-class people.
I think these Endtime psychological social guilt tips are worth a lot of study - more so than Global Warming. You can draw a line right back to the 1950's and there has been one "Repent, or we're knackered!" scare from decade to the next. This is just the latest.
There are a lot of people who even if they are educated get very caught up in peer pressure and wanting to fit in and I suspect this is all that's keeping this Carbon Footprint cult still going.
I suspect we'll get a major break-away group of top scientists soon who'll be brave enough to stand up against this farce. It'll happen very shortly too I suspect. Who knows, this could be a watershed in terms of these crackpot scares being inflicted on us by the usual basket cases looking for anyway they can in order to fulfill their deep-rooted psychological need to control the rest us rather than deal with their own personal demons.
Originally posted by dania004: [QUOTE]Originally posted by Mubbers:
Aberdeen has literally miles and miles of golden sand beaches, lovely!!
Book now to avoid disappointment [/QUOTE ___________________________________________
:-) if only the water/ocean went a few degrees up I'd give up Spain and Italy for Abderdeen :-)
You've missed another important point about global warming - it's not an even warning of 2-6 degrees round the world. Some places will get hotter some will get colder. One of the scary theories is that if a big enough chunck of antartica or Greenland breaks off, the gulfstream will stop and ten years after that Nothern France upwards will be under 20feet of permanent ice. It happened before when the last ice age retreated and the ice in the great lakes melted into the atlantic. At least you'll be able to drive direct onto the continent!
That's why a lot of people are starting to refer to it as climate chaos instead of global warming - so that people get the point.
Originally posted by dania004: [QUOTE]Originally posted by Mubbers:
Aberdeen has literally miles and miles of golden sand beaches, lovely!!
Book now to avoid disappointment [/QUOTE ___________________________________________
:-) if only the water/ocean went a few degrees up I'd give up Spain and Italy for Abderdeen :-)
You've missed another important point about global warming - it's not an even warning of 2-6 degrees round the world. Some places will get hotter some will get colder. One of the scary theories is that if a big enough chunck of antartica or Greenland breaks off, the gulfstream will stop and ten years after that Nothern France upwards will be under 20feet of permanent ice. It happened before when the last ice age retreated and the ice in the great lakes melted into the atlantic. At least you'll be able to drive direct onto the continent!
That's why a lot of people are starting to refer to it as climate chaos instead of global warming - so that people get the point.
_______________________________________________ Black n Green, you really misreprsented what i said. I was saying in all honesty - that I would choose Aberdeen over Spain or Italy for holidays, only that you cannot take a bath in the ocean there, and pretty much nowhere in the UK, while you can in Spain and Italy. Now, who's lost his sense of humour due to the interent or not? :-)
Why is it foolish to accept the conclusions of 1000s of scientists?
Partly because we are presented with documentaries almost on a daily basis about scientific concensus that turned out to be wrong.
Only a few years back, it was general concensus that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Now we find that there's increasing evidence that that was not the cause ( or at least not the only one ).
If you'd asked for concensus 10 years ago, every last cosmologist would have said the expansion of the universe will gradually slow down over time. Now we find that the expansion is speeding up !
Concensus 20 years ago argued that the moons of Jupiter were boring rocky/icy worlds where little happened. Now we find that one of them is the most activelely volcanic body in the solar system and another is considered a potential candidate for life.
And so on.......I could cite loads of examples. But every one represents a situation where new evidence forced a change of consensus....and it's something particularly prevalent in areas where Donald Rumsfelds ' unknown unknowns ' exist....and climate science is just such an area.
So it's hardly any great surprise that a lot of people see scientists changing their minds on a lot of issues and wonder how long it will be before they change their minds on this one.
Only a few years back, it was general concensus that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Now we find that there's increasing evidence that that was not the cause ( or at least not the only one ).
If you'd asked for concensus 10 years ago, every last cosmologist would have said the expansion of the universe will gradually slow down over time. Now we find that the expansion is speeding up !
Concensus 20 years ago argued that the moons of Jupiter were boring rocky/icy worlds where little happened. Now we find that one of them is the most activelely volcanic body in the solar system and another is considered a potential candidate for life.
quote:
Partly because we are presented with documentaries almost on a daily basis about scientific concensus that turned out to be wrong.
Only a few years back, it was general concensus that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Now we find that there's increasing evidence that that was not the cause ( or at least not the only one ).
If you'd asked for concensus 10 years ago, every last cosmologist would have said the expansion of the universe will gradually slow down over time. Now we find that the expansion is speeding up !
Concensus 20 years ago argued that the moons of Jupiter were boring rocky/icy worlds where little happened. Now we find that one of them is the most activelely volcanic body in the solar system and another is considered a potential candidate for life.
None of your examples have been under the degree of scrutiny that climate change theory has had, and none has had the level of consensus.
I'm pretty sure that the evidence for the dinosaur theory is reasonably new (20-30 years?). I bet it never had the level of consensus belief. General relativity has always had a "universal constant" in that for a while people assumed was zero. But even while the consensus of the bing bang theorists might have agreed this assumption, there were plenty of scientists who didn't believe in the big bang. I don't know enough about your third example.
GW theory has been around for over 100 years, under detailed scientific and political scrutiny for over 30 years and, with a huge resource being thrown at it, it has been a remarkably stable theory.
I realise that this post has turned into another arguement about whether AGW is true or not. Can I remind everyone that the original post asked the question - if the current warming is natural, what are the consequences and what should we be doing about it.
