Hi Thomas,
yes, I believe in the scientific consensus on AGW, just as I believe in the scientific consensus that says that obesity and high cholesterol creates a higher probability of heart disease and just as I believe that vaccines have reduced the incidence of polio, mumps, measles, and many other diseases.
There is a difference between believing in the consensus among the masses, many of whom are undereducated, versus believing in the consensus among scientists across many disciplines. Scientists are fallible, but by and large they follow the scientific method and publish peer reviewed papers that show results that are reproducible.
I could relitigate this with you, but honestly, I did that for years on these threads and produced volumes of reports and stats on it and had plenty of ad hominem abuse heaped on me as a result. That debate, I'm thoroughly tired of.
I will say this. In the back of my mind, I've always wondered one thing. Although I absolutely believe that humans are accelerating global warming, I also believe that the sun's activity plays a huge role in our warming and cooling that has and does counteract the warming effect, if not the other damaging impacts of AGW (like asthma deaths in major cities from pollution, like in Beijing, and the mass die off of corals around the world from the acidification of our oceans from over absorption of CO2). I also believe that the levels of GH gases that we are producing are not a problem for the Earth to handle in geologic time scales. The real problem is the speed with which AGW is changing the climate. The speed and how it is accelerating is too fast for the flora and fauna to adapt, so it is killing off species. Can the Earth renew itself? Absolutely yes, over long time periods that could include the extinction of man. For example, what was going on during the Carboniferous era 360 million years ago? They had levels far higher than we do today and flora and fauna proliferated in that hot house. The increase in oxygen production created gigantic fauna and incredible diversity, but the Earth survived and thrived.
So my bottom line is not so much that the Earth won't survive what we're doing to it, but that maybe we humans won't survive what we're doing to it as the flora and fauna that we rely on for our food supplies get disrupted. Even if we do survive, and I do have great faith in the human animal's ability to adapt, the short term problem is the enormous amount of capital and lives on the coastal areas that will be lost due to increasingly erratic and unpredictable climate events from AGW effects.
Last thing. I do like statistics and charts and you provided some information that I find interesting. But was it really necessary to begin your post with ad hominem attacks? That's an amateur's ploy. The rest of your post was interesting, after you got that part out of your system. |
