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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (18592)	12/19/2007 2:09:45 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36927

Again no straw man. Here I'm not just finding some argument to oppose, I'm directly arguing against the point you raised. Its not only not a straw man argument, its the exact opposite of the definition of a straw man argument. You worded it to be a strawman, perhaps without knowing. It is easy to understand how to compare 10K vs. 4.5B, but it is not easy to compare sea-level rise if you start from zero and want to talk about magnitude of correct predictions. If you had placed some bounds on the sea-level change so it was not about zero it would have been different. Otherwise, you can get ratios of many orders of magnitude, even though one is only talking about 0.5m change. Perhaps you don't understand the difference?? That isn't really true, and even if there was no certainty at all, it wouldn't make my post an example of a straw man argument. If it isn't really true, please provide a credible link that claims the sea-level is going down. You have just provided an excellent example of how you argue like a creationist. In many ways the conference had political pressure to paint a more dire future. I'm making a statement about the net pressure, not "many ways". Could you clarify what you mean? Of course there were competing pressures but I see the following: 1) Scientists are by nature cautious about predictions. They get kudos for being proven correct, not incorrect. They will be considered correct if things change at least as much or MORE than they predict. They will be considered wrong if things come in weaker than predicted. 2) The models are not good at things like "tipping" points. "Tipping" points are likely to be positive feedback not negative feedback. Therefore the models underestimate radical non-linear effects. 3) There was very well publicized political pressure to tone down the conclusions. To argue that the net political pressure was for more dire conclusions is nonsense. Against the above, what you have to offer is that: 1) Scientists might get more funding for research if the report is more dire, hence they biased it to get more funding. Sorry, I don't think so.