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

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (25107)	9/3/2009 2:00:29 AM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

Vinter, there is scientific consensus about The Greenhouse Effect, aka Global Warming, aka Climate Change. But it's not on all points. The Science is agreed on lots of things, such as that coal contains carbon which when made hot in the presence of oxygen there is carbon dioxide formed with lots of extra heat released. Phlogiston scientists disagree with that process, but most scientists these days disagree with the phlogiston theory which was popular and was The Science back in the day. Phlogiston Denialists were burned at the stake for heresy against The Science and The Consensus. Where the Denialists and the Soothsayers part company is on what the climate will actually do in response to the increase in CO2 from starvation homeopathic amounts to something that the plants are starting to enjoy [280 parts per million to 390 parts per million]. Carbon Dioxide is even called a pollutant by some people. On the same basis, water and oxygen are also pollutants. The use of the word "pollutant" shows their dishonesty. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant in any reasonable sense of the word. Water is a pollutant too if a river overflows its banks and runs into somebody's basement, but people tend not to use the word "pollutant" because pollutant is for things which have no redeeming merit and are best avoided altogether. Soothsayers have climate models. Models are just theories on how Earth's climate works. The models are necessarily inaccurate because they can't possibly represent the absurdly complex climate and weather of Earth, especially because there are plant, ice, animal, sediment, volcanic and other feedback loops which all interact. Then there is the small matter of Sol's output which my prediction was most accurate about - the sun experts have now caught up with me [almost]. They basically have little idea about what's going on and what's going to happen other than very approximately. From my quarter century of reading about it, observing and thinking, it looks to me that up to 500 ppm, CO2 is a solution rather than a problem. Even 1000 ppm might not matter. But even 400 ppm is enough to make us think about what it means and figure out whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. It's not necessarily bad that people make things different from how nature had things before people got uppity. There is a common false belief that nature was in some kind of balance and there is even some belief that that supposed balance is Gaia expressing love for life. Anthropomorphism regarding animals doesn't make a lot of sense, but anthropomorphism regarding rocks, CO2, sediments, and plate tectonics is absurd. So, there are some scientific principles for you. No vibrations there, other than in the plate tectonics. Mqurice