Wow, I'm so humbled. Liberals are soooo smart. Which requires greater faith in the unseen and unknowable, manmade global warming or intelligent design? Or for that matter, the idea that humans evolved out of primordial slop? I guess if you can believe that, global warming is a snap.
I'll leave it to you bible-thumping, flag-wrapping, gun-toting intellectuals to explain it to me. Anything less would be unpatriotic of me.
Not really too great a leap of faith, unless you stop exhaling, driving a car, heating your home and so on.
Well I suppose if you reject all the intermediate steps that one by one build the support for a theory, then yes, it's just as valid to believe in ID. Personally, as a Lutheran, there's no reason why God couldn't have evolved mankind. But that's not science, and that's not based on evidence, that's just my belief. I wouldn't want to have my beliefs taught in schools.
OK big Dave. This article by Weart (from Discovery of Global Warming) gives a pretty good history of CO2 studies over a considerable time span (1820âs to present). I have agreed with you that man has played some role. (By the way, it is because of my experience in meteorology that it would be common sense to believe pollution must have some type of atmospheric issues.) Anthropogenic warming would be supported in the later stages of this writing. You may have already read it. It looks at the back and forth of the debate over history. http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm My questions are as follows. Do you believe Americans are putting more or less CO2 in the atmosphere then say, 10, 20, or 50 years ago? Do you believe that it has been proven that CO2 changes alone will have the greenhouse effects the worst case scenarioâs paint? I believe the true debate is not the increased CO2, but what the true effect will be. This getâs back to my question regarding the amount of collected data to determine prehistoric CO2 levels accurately over millions of years. And the big question. If Americans agree to go along with reasonable measures, how do we get China and other emerging polluters on board, as they are much more concerned about their economies than pollution? Do you support the Kyoto treaty and cap and trade measures? or Do you support free market incentives to solve the issue over severe government restrictions? The last question is what I was really looking for when I entered this thread. Back at you.
Liberals get to feel smart, that is the big reward in being liberal. That and being agressive.... They control the venue for scientific debate and when they are not in that venue they appeal to the experts that are... Appeal to experts is an invalid argument, philosophy 101 would tell us that if we listened... Now if one simply drops the pretenses and looks around one can find all sorts of things that contradict what the experts are saying and one can find other plausable explanations for warming of the earth, like the increase in the number of undersea volcanoes... http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/06/arctic_ice_melt_mat_be_due_to.html
wjk, Thanks for posting that. I thought this passage was interesting............ After 1988 TOP OF PAGE =>after88 During the 1990s, further ice core measurements indicated that during past glacial periods, temperature changes had preceded CO2 changes by several centuries. Was it necessary to give up the simple hypothesis that had attracted scientists ever since Tyndall in the 19th century â that changes in CO2 were a simple and direct cause of ice ages? Some scientists doubted that dates could be measured so precisely, but most of the evidence pointed to a time lag.(54) This confused many people. If changes in CO2 lagged behind changes in temperature (and likewise for methane, another greenhouse gas measured in the ice cores), didnât that contradict the greenhouse theory of global warming? But in fact the lag was not good news. It seemed that rises or falls in carbon dioxide levels had not initiated the glacial cycles.In fact most scientists had long since abandoned that hypothesis. In the 1960s, painstaking studies had shown that subtle shifts in our planet's orbit around the Sun (called "Milankovitch cycles") set the timing of ice ages. The amount of sunlight that fell in a given latitude and season varied predictably over millenia, altering how long snow ands sea ice lingered in the spring, which crucially affected how much sunlight the surface absorbed. The fact that carbon dioxide levels lagged behind the orbital effect should have been no surprise, since a change in the temperature would change the gas level. For one thing, warmer oceans would evaporate out more gas. For another, as Arctic tundra warmed up it would likewise emit CO2 and methane. The ice cores now showed, as theorists had predicted since the 19th century, that a powerful feedback cycle was amplifying the effect of the cyclical changes in sunlight. Even a small change in the gas level would bring further changes in the global heat balance, which would in turn alter the gas level, which... and so forth. This suggested how tiny shifts in the Earthâs orbit had set the timing of the enormous swings of glacial cycles.
Check out this theory http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2088 with this info http://www.epa.gov/methane/ and it's probably a safe bet there was some warming back then. The article states it wouldn't be a killing greenhouse effect, though. Still just a theory.
Wow, so much wrongness in such a small paragraph. Look, I can't correct all of your groups' misconceptions, but first off and most importantly, it's not "appeal to experts" the logical fallacy is "appeal to authority" and secondly, it's not always a fallacy just as long as its a valid authority. For example, consulting a petition of dentists and meteorologists as an authority on climatology would be wrong and a fallacy. One other thing, glaciation and the causes of glaciation are different from human global climate change, the causes are different (CO2 molecules absorb infra red radiation) and therefore it has almost no relevance to the topic at hand.
Some? The average car puts out something like 40 tons of CO2 in its lifespan. A ton of CO2 is a very, very large volume of CO2. There are millions and millions of cars. Thanks, I'll have to read it at some point. No idea, I assume more but my beliefs aren't relevant to the conversation at hand. Over what time frame? Because if you look at a long enough time frame, then yes. CO2 keeps building up, and that's been proven beyond doubt, and CO2 molecules absorb infra red radiation. There have been a variety of ways found to determine CO2 levels, although no one has found it necessary to determine them over "millions" of years. Tree rings, ice cores and so on can go back thousands of years. Leading by example was the way we used to do it. People want to be on the cutting edge, getting the newest fanciest thing, such as a hydrogen car. Now? We don't lead by example, we look at other countries and whine that they have to do something too, even though the threat is reduced by our actions even if we were to act alone. Interestingly, it was a Republican idea -- back when the party wasn't a catastrophe. Free market solution to trading carbon. Kyoto is a market solution. The only reason that the Republicans are currently opposing their own market solution is due to oil interests, something which you and I both know that action to wean off oil will be required eventually. We can defer it a bit, but we have to diversify energy supplies from oil eventually.