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

To: neolib who wrote (18795)	12/21/2007 6:59:12 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36921

Talk about a straw man! What do you think those using the argument are trying to say? I think it is very clear they are saying that since CO2 lags temps in the historical record, CO2 is not the likely cause of any observed warming now, hence humans are not the cause of the current warming trend which is "natural" in some other way. If you seriously think they are saying something else, please do enlighten me. Notice the difference between. "AGW can not be true", and "CO2 is not the likely cause of any observed warming now". There is a large difference between those two arguments. "Can not be true", and "Is not likely true" are very different things. Someone arguing the later is not arguing the former. In addition not everyone raising that point is even arguing the later, they may rather be making a more mild claim along the lines of "CO2 may not be the cause of any recent warming", or "We can't conclusively (or even with a very high degree of confidence) state that the coming years and decades will be warmer than today due primarily to human emission of CO2." You tend to lump something like "We can't conclusively (or even with a very high degree of confidence) state that the coming years and decades will be warmer than today due primarily to human emission of CO2." along with "The earth is not warming" and call both "global warming denialists", or "bashers". Its possible that for certain audiences you may received rhetorical benefit from such tactics, but they aren't reasonable, and will often get the same thing in return. (Lumping people who see CO2 as pushing temperatures upward and who worry about the consequences, with people who say thing like ""We have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin." Even if you dont't care about being reasonable, and moving the discussion forward in a productive or interesting manner, at the very least you should draw the distinctions as part of a "know your enemy" effort. Not understanding the distinctions, or acting like they don't exist or aren't important isn't a good idea.