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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (7375)	4/20/2009 5:03:03 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 86356

That's why looking MERELY at a few symptoms is not sufficient. It's like seeing someone cough and then asserting they have pneumonia. They very well might have it, but you have to collect more data and observe other symptoms. [Sigh.] The reason the IPCC was set up back in the 80s was that CO2 levels were clearly going up, and the planet seemed to be warming. Some people were certain that it was happening, but most scientists were still skpetical. However, the basic theory seemed sound, there were increasing numbers of empirical observations that were consistent with the theory, and the long range implications seem worrisome enough that it was decided that a systematic global attempt to understand what was going on was deemed important. They don't just look "at a few symptoms." they look at a wide range of events, from warming river and ocean water to variations in bird migrations to melting and calving glaciers to numerous phenology studies to melting permafrost and bleached coral reefs. And more. Huge numbers of scientists and even non-scientists have been mobilized around the world to help with this effort. The IPCC reviewers are just going over all those different threads of evidence that accumulates every four years, and making it public. That really is the point. It is the people who still deny it is happening who debunk a particular item, and ignore the totality of the picture, as well as deny the fundamental fact that increases in GHGs will lead to increased temperatures. They go through all sorts of contortions to pretend that something that was established in labs in 1859, and has been worked out mathematically over the years simply doesn't apply in the real world. Honestly, this is absurd. I'm not going to convince you or the other deniers on this thread, you're not going to convince me, we just talk right past each other. And it wouldn't even really matter if someone did get convinced on this thread.