Let me repeat what I said before--I don't want to turn this thread into another argument about climate change. If you (Robert) really want to discuss it, I will discuss it with you in PMs. Therefore, this will be my last post on the current various flooding events around the world w/r/t climate change.
Watts--the guy you are quoting in your post--does one of his favorite things in that post, effectively saying, "Oh, look, there have been flooding events before--even worse than these--so how can these be linked to CC? And look, Australia's floods are caused by La Nina, not CC. Well, Brazil's floods aren't caused by La Nina, and actually Sri Lanka usually gets drier during La Nina, but nevermind that. There has been flooding in both places plenty of times before, so how can CC be the cause of it this time?"
Do I really have to tell you how idiotic this is? Like duh, all of these places have had terrible floods before. Now some people may say that CC "causes" this flood or that flood or this drought or that drought but the truth is that this is not speaking correctly. There is an important sense in which CC does not "cause" anything. I think that a better way to put it, perhaps, is that CC is just a label given to a whole confluence of conditions that will happen with increasing regularity as more and more CO2 gets put into the atmosphere. Yeah, sure, floods happen in all sorts of conditions in all sorts of places. Hell, there was flooding in what is now the Sahara Desert 6000 years ago--but so what?
The deal is this--either you accept that CO2 molecules absorb heat, and therefore the more CO2 molecules that are in the atmosphere the hotter the earth will get since some of the heat that used to escape into space remains in the atmosphere, or you don't. If you accept that this happens, all sorts of things follow from it, including the melting mountain glaciers, the melting glaciers in Greenland, the calving glaciers in Antarctica and parts of the Arctic, the changes in bird migration and habitat patterns, the changes in species distribution to higher altitudes and latitudes (as well as things like more beetles living through warmer winters, so larger populations in the spring are around to kill off the forests in northwest North America, in both Canada and the US), the melting permafrost, and, yes, more extreme weather events. Among other things. Foundations of buildings in parts of Alaska are collapsing because the ground under them is melting. Suddenly, it is becoming possible to explore the Arctic due to the warmer weather, and the first noises about just who owns what land up there are being made. Do you really want to argue about this? Pointing out that extreme weather events have happened in the past, as Watts frequently does, is completely irrelevant to what is going on. What matters more is the frequency and the magnitude of those events. The averages matter too, but the averages can be difficult to substantiate. Things like the ones I listed above are easier to document--are the glaciers receding or disappearing or not? Are the migration patterns or distribution patterns changing or not? Are there buildings collapsing? Is the permafrost melting? Is it easier for ships to sail in the Arctic or not, and for longer periods of time during the year? Are there, to name another one, tropical diseases appearing in places that they never have appeared in before or not?
You can have the last word. I know that people who deny CC have a standard rebuttal to the above, and I have heard it before, which is why I no longer participate on those threads. It gets boring to read the same things over and over again, have the same people (Lord Mockton (lol), Pielke, Solomon, Watts, the guy at MIT who is virtually the only scientist at MIT who accepts that what he is saying is right, Crichton, and then the guy in Romania is it? and in Russia? who are always labeled the "foremost experts on xxx in the world" by Watts et al, and then you find out that they complete cranks) quoted over and over.
And mind you, the fact that wattshisname[sic] is the only scientist at MIT to think what he does doesn't mean necessarily that he is wrong. Agassiz was virtually the only guy to think that ice ages existed for about 10-20 years, and Wegener was the only guy to believe in continental drift for a long time as well. But science has been through this. The whole thing has been talked through for decades now, experiments have been done, theories posed, discarded, refined, challenged and tested. Is everything perfect? Hardly. Do they still make mistakes? Sure. But the general outlines seem pretty well founded. If you want to know the history, go here:
aip.org
There are lots of good essays on this site, both thorough and well written by a physicist who understands the science and who can explain to lay people like me. If you really want to debate the whole thing, you should really take it up with him. He is the expert, and can tell you both the science and how we arrived at our current understanding of the dynamics of climate. |
