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The studies by Jarowski and Beck are simply absurd. And I'm not sure how the rest relates to the points I make.

It is Dr. Jaworowski and he has only been involved with ice core studies for over 40 years.

Your comments indicate your overall approach to investigating this issue. It is very telling how you respond when contradictory evidence is presented to you.

Edited by ~Sophia~
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If I may hijack just a little, I think the problem with the debate is that it can only ever end up like this.

Green Guy: Check out all my charts and science and shit. We are clearly about to kill off our own entire species and probably ruin the only known life-supporting planet in the solar system. We need to change things fast, and since god can't be trusted we're putting the government in charge.

Skeptical Guy: I see your charts and science and shit and raise you this new set of charts and science and shit that totally disproves your conclusions. You just want to tax us all into socialism and guilt us into voluntarily devolving into vegetarian cavemen.

Green Guy: Dude, it doesn't matter, if we don't do something we're ALL GONNA DIE!!!! Plus you're reading the charts wrong.

Skeptical Guy: You're reading your charts wrong and also any scientist who believes that isn't a real scientist. There's no reason to panic, especially since if we do things your way we're definitely all screwed.

Green Guy: Your scientists aren't real scientists. Ours are. You're crazy and we're ALL GONNA DIE!!!!

Skeptical Guy: Nope you're crazy.

Green Guy and Skeptical Guy: Nope you are. Pepsi jinx!

Me: So ... no matter whose story I listen to, they both end up with my life or at least the human condition getting really a whole lot worse. The only question that I have any reason to ask - that is, the only fact I really need in order to continue to make rational decisions in my own self interest - is, "am I in a situation where there is a risk to my life (or other values) that I can act to avoid or prevent?" There are a range of possible answers:

10. Yes. Clearly this specific bad thing is going to happen if I don't do x, so I'd better do x.

5. Possibly. There is (indisputable/strong/weak/imaginary) evidence that event "a" may happen within my lifetime, which (may/will probably/definitely will) raise the risk of terrible thing "b" and/or "c" happening which would harm me (fatally/physically/economically/etc.). Therefore I should take steps d, e and f to make sure that I am prepared for all reasonably foreseeable emergencies.

1. No. Either the evidence is not compelling at all (I don't think GW quite fits in this category, this is more like "if I go to Australia I might fall of the earth from being upside down" territory) or there is no possibility of me personally being at risk. There is no threat and therefore no reason to take action.

I don't know anything about the science behind it and, mysticism aside, I don't see anything in either argument that logically leads me to reject or accept it. The evidence in front of me is a lot of scary predictions coupled with the observable facts that Atlantic Canada is really, really bloody cold for six months out of twelve so if it gets too hot for you you could probably just move here, and that you can't rely on the weather network to tell you if it's going to rain on the weekend, much less if a new ice age will have ended the human species 650 years from now.

So I conclude that the most reasonable course of action for most people who aren't environmental scientists and therefore can't have access to (or understand) first hand evidence, is to continue to expand my reasoning and innovation skills and be prepared for emergencies. There's no bloody reason to panic and certainly no reason for governments to get all tax happy!

Of course then I have to wonder, since it seems like such a non-issue, who exactly is benefiting from all this panic and throwing around of tax dollars??

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1. No. Either the evidence is not compelling at all (I don't think GW quite fits in this category, this is more like "if I go to Australia I might fall of the earth from being upside down" territory) or there is no possibility of me personally being at risk. There is no threat and therefore no reason to take action.

But that is exactly the case. The climate is changing - it has always been. What is disputed is the human contribution and the evidence for that is not conclusive. In light of that, just like you said - there is no reason to take action, to demand changes, call for sacrifices. The burden of proof is on the one making a positive claim.

Some years from now our children will call this not the time of GW but the time of Global Deception.

We can not stop global cooling nor global warming. What we however can do is to deal with it, mitigate its effects on our lives. That is however not the focus - truth is not the focus.

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But that is exactly the case. The climate is changing - it has always been. What is disputed is the human contribution and the evidence for that is not conclusive. In light of that, just like you said - there is no reason to take action, to demand changes, call for sacrifices. The burden of proof is on the one making a positive claim.

Some years from now our children will call this not the time of GW but the time of Global Deception.

We can not stop global cooling nor global warming. What we however can do is to deal with it, mitigate its effects on our lives. That is however not the focus - truth is not the focus.

That may be, but my point is that as a layperson who can't help but hear all kinds of stuff about global warming, I don't have any reason to simply dismiss it out of hand, either. I agree that I have no reason to take any specific action, but it seems to be worth keeping an eye on. In a few years I guess either things will be really different or really not different at all, and either the technology will have developed enough to give me some evidence I can understand and evaluate or we'll still be looking at a lot of conflated line graphs. I guess you could call me a principled agnostic on the global warming issue - but eventually I will settle on one side or the other, when I either have more information or it becomes clear to me that the whole thing is bunk.

It's fine to say that they have the burden of proof, but really that's a minor technicality if what they're saying happens to be true and we all are in fact going to die if we don't do something about it. Whichever position you take if you think you're right then surely you can come up with some better way of convincing me than a bunch of lame charts that apparently you have to be Joseph Smith to be able to read correctly. If that's all you've got right now, then go come up with something better and show us all in a few months.

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That may be, but my point is that as a layperson who can't help but hear all kinds of stuff about global warming, I don't have any reason to simply dismiss it out of hand, either. I agree that I have no reason to take any specific action, but it seems to be worth keeping an eye on.

I understand that. Problem is people are calling for drastic measures today before the issue has been settled. Current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources. Attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate. This is serious.

It's fine to say that they have the burden of proof, but really that's a minor technicality if what they're saying happens to be true and we all are in fact going to die if we don't do something about it.

This is entrataining the arbitrary. What if it is not? (From how things are looking right now the chances of it being true are small. We just don't have that kind of scope of influence on our planet).

This is not a minor technicality for the reasons I mentioned above.

Dr. Timothy Ball placed it in prospective:

(Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, Former Professor Of Climatology, University of Winnipeg)

"Attributing global climate change to human CO2 production is akin to trying to diagnose an automotive problem by ignoring the engine (analogous to the Sun in the climate system) and the transmission (water vapour) and instead focusing entirely, not on one nut on a rear wheel, which would be analogous to total CO2, but on one thread on that nut, which represents the human contribution."

Whichever position you take if you think you're right then surely you can come up with some better way of convincing me than a bunch of lame charts that apparently you have to be Joseph Smith to be able to read correctly. If that's all you've got right now, then go come up with something better and show us all in a few months.

The relevant information may not be very interesting to look at. The key point is that you have to look at things at a much bigger scope time wise than past 100 years. I am afraid that you can't escape looking at charts.

I think Dr. Carter has done a good job breaking things into layman terms. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcIto a 4 part presentation if you are interested.

This is not the first time I am debating this issue. At this point I don't have the drive aside from pointing out that someone is making a false claim to explain the issue in detail.

Edited by ~Sophia~
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Thanks Sophia, I'm checking out the videos you linked to and they're really helpful. I basically take your position anyway - that there's no reason to take action. Global warming theory might be a set of arbitrary claims and then of course nothing should be done, but it seems like a lot of people are genuinely convinced so I don't think it should just be dismissed altogether and even if the data is being misused, that doesn't necessarily make it an arbitrary claim. I don't think we should do anything about it until they can come up with better evidence, and even then I don't think it would warrant large-scale government intervention. So I agree that the burden of proof is on the guys making the claim.

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From http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/world/eu...ref=todayspaper

Fears of a sharp worldwide economic slowdown are threatening a hard-won European plan on climate change that European leaders hoped would set an example for the rest of the world.

At a rancorous summit meeting this week of the European Union’s heads of state, several Eastern European countries and Italy said they might no longer be able to afford to slash greenhouse gas emissions as envisioned under a broad plan agreed upon last year and would need some concessions from other countries in the bloc.

YEA!!! :lol: I love it when people realize this crap isn't feasible.

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Based on what information did you conclude that the other data is "dominated by local pollutions"? Please provide your evidence.

beckgraphzj0.gif

1) Co2 measurements are sensitive to local pollution of all kinds. Here is a link to a summary of the Beck study that gives the location of the measurements; there are loads of metropolitans.

2) The ice core contains atmospheric air bubbles from the most remote place on earth, thus the air in those bubbles are not polluted by local sources and they therfore record the wellmixed concentration of CO2. Why doesn't the CO2 swings show up in those air bubbles? The location Mauna Loa is specifically choosen to avoid local pollution. Why are there no swings in this data, and why does the Mauna Loa readings correlate with the ice core data? Isn't it reasonable to assume that this is because they measure the same thing, the well mixed value of CO2 concentration which contains no wild swings`?

3) In absolute terms, the swings represent huge amounts of CO2 which would leave all kinds of traces which have not been observed. What would account for this massive emission of CO2, and where did it all go?

This is more than enough to discredit the Beck graph as junk.

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After watching 'Doomsday Called Off' and climate-skeptic's introduction to positive and negative feedbacks, I may argue that the first thing at making the debate about climate change is to understand that the climate is not that easy to control. It is a system that tends to maintain it's properties.

For example, if the global temperature rises, it produces more evaporation in the oceans.

Ocean evaporation increases the amount of clouds in the atmosphere.

Clouds not only reflect some of the heat radiated into the atmosphere, but produces snowfall at the sub antarctic areas, that increases the amount of white cover in the world that also has the heat reflecting properties.

So, if the global temperature increases, the atmosphere does everything to put it back. That's something as Newton's Law of Inertia, but here 'climate' is instead of 'body'.

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Earth has a natural balance and we can't live like we don't do anything to it. We must act as we are a part of it, not the other way around.

This statement hardly makes sense.

If birth regulations would exist in whole world, the problem wouldn't be so big.

This is disgusting. Do you not even value your own existence? Meanwhile, you'll want to identify the "problem" and define "big". Then you will want to demonstrate how controlling population would make this "problem" small. Plus, I'd like you to account for the loss of problem-solving minds that may not exist as a result of this disgusting set of regulations.

If in the future people woun't turn into greedy bastards who think about only their welfare and screw how their children and grandchildren will live, then there clearly isn't any good future for humankind.

Nonsense. Without such "greedy bastards" you might not even have the computer you have used to post this drivel.

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