Anthropogenic Global Warming poll

[Pennsylvania]

Please vote if you would like your opinion to be counted. If you wish to share your vote, you may do so. If you would like to actually debate AGW, please do so in another thread.

 

[Pennsylvania]

bump for additional votes

 

[Mini-Me]

I voted no. I am in no position to say with certainty that nothing of the sort is happening, but I absolutely do not accept the AGW theory as it is currently being peddled.

 

[BenIsForRon]

This issue could be the downfall of the liberty movement.

Can anyone name a single member of faculty in climate or some other physical science at any major university that believes AGW is a hoax?

 

[dannno]

Can anyone name a single member of faculty in climate or some other physical science at any major university that believes AGW is a hoax?

Carbon Dioxide irrelevant in climate debate says MIT Scientist

http://www.examiner.com/civil-right...-irrelevant-climate-debate-says-mit-scientist

His work is also peer-reviewed.

 

[wormyguy]

I believe the "GW" part, but I'm very dubious about the "A" part.

 

[dannno]

Robert M. Carter is a Research Professor at James Cook University (Queensland) and the University of Adelaide (South Australia). He is a palaeontologist, stratigrapher, marine geologist and environmental scientist with more than thirty years professional experience.

Copenhagen and Global Warming: Ten Facts and Ten Myths on Climate Change

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16467

 

[dannno]

If you would like to actually debate AGW, please do so in another thread.

If you want to keep the thread bumped, there may as well be a debate goin on..

 

[Mini-Me]

This issue could be the downfall of the liberty movement.

Can anyone name a single member of faculty in climate or some other physical science at any major university that believes AGW is a hoax?

Downfall of the liberty movement? Don't be so melodramatic. Besides, it cannot possibly be our downfall in the political sense, considering half of Americans are skeptical about AGW, and the trend over recent years has been towards increasing skepticism. Even ZippyJuan no longer believes in the AGW theory, and he's probably the most mainstream dude on the forum. If you're worried about the political climate, you should probably be a whole lot more concerned about pretty much every single other issue associated with the liberty movement. Anyway, Pennsylvania asked for debate to be left for another thread, but I'll justify my position:

I'm not well-versed on climate science, but becoming so would be almost pointless unless I specialized in it, since there is so much disagreement among experts within the field itself (regardless of how much the entrenched establishment wants to belittle and deny their intellectual opposition). However, I am a lot more well-versed in recognizing corruption and black-balling. It is also obvious to me when an issue is being politically driven rather than scientifically driven, and that is very much the case here. The whole "scientific consensus" meme and malicious discrediting of dissenters as "deniers" is a gigantic red flag for me. The deliberately deceptive and sensationalist marketing is concerning (polar bears stranded on tiny hunks of ice, for instance), and the shift from "global warming" to "climate change" essentially concedes that AGW proponents are hellbent on blaming human activity for any change in temperature one way or another. It's also clear where the money is: AGW proponents cite corruption of skeptics through millions of dollars from energy companies, but they gloss over the multi-TRILLION dollar gravy train behind studies that push the AGW theory. The funding is not even comparable between the two sides. Liberals are smart to mistrust energy companies, but they blind themselves to the selfish incentives that people other than energy companies have, and they also blind themselves to the possibility that the millions from energy companies are a smokescreen in the first place. I mean, where did the cap and trade plan come from? Oh, yeah...ENRON. Part of their short-sightedness comes from the mistaken assumption that large corporations are universally afraid of regulations, when regulations are really what shield them from competition.

Is the Earth warming? Maybe. Some arctic glaciers are melting, but that doesn't tell the whole story when antarctic glaciers are accumulating ice. We know from Climategate that raw temperature data has been withheld, manipulated, cherry-picked, and even fabricated to mesh with the AGW theory. We know from the 70's that climate hysteria used to focus on global cooling. We know we've been coming out of the "Little Ice Age" anyway, even if only certain areas of the world have warmed at all, while others have cooled. We even know that warming in those areas has stopped that certain areas of the world. On top of that, I've read about recent data that has emerged that is more reliable than the proxy measurements AGW is [supposedly] based on, and this data is even less consistent with the AGW theory. All told, "warming" in general isn't exactly conclusive, and hysterical rants about precipitous global warming are especially overblown.

When the fundamental question of "warming" is so inconclusive, it's downright absurd that AGW proponents are hell-bent on blaming man-made CO2 emissions for it. Many scientists believe that solar cycles are and always have been the dominating factor behind climate changes on Earth, and this explanation is apparently becoming more and more consistent with the data the more we learn about these cycles.

Is it possible they're wrong? Of course. I'm not in denial over the idea that human activity can harm our living environment: It certainly can. In particular, we have been shown to pollute our waterways with industrial waste and short-sighted sewage management, and landfills tend to have spillover effects that make them unsustainable in the long-term (along with simple space constraints). Nuclear weapons, nuclear "meltdowns," and depleted uranium have also screwed up the environment in certain areas of the world.

We could be experiencing man-made global warming after all, but jumping to that conclusion is not helping anyone. Rushing to legislate all kinds of "save the Earth" regulations is totally premature, unnecessary, and dangerous. It will further destroy our economy, and it will further consolidate wealth in the hands of the elite. I forget who it is at the UN who openly stated a desire to roll back the industrial revolution for the "sake of the Earth," but that's what extensive regulations will gradually accomplish, to the detriment of all. The industrial revolution is responsible for mankind's emergence from ubiquitous poverty, and returning to pre-industrial society means returning to poverty and serfdom...a state of being which I'm sure would make our rulers quite happy. Accepting the political agenda of the AGW proponents will result in incalculable suffering, and for what? It may not even be necessary, and it seems right now that it most likely isn't. For that matter, deliberately taking action to reshape the direction of the Earth's climate may only make the climate worse, when there's so much dissent over the direction it's heading in the first place.

Now, is "climate change" happening? Of course it is. Climate change has been happening on a constant basis since the beginning of this planet. It is nothing new. Is it specifically going towards warming? I don't know [and you probably don't either ]. Are we the cause? Probably not, but if so, what then?

Regardless of any of the above, the FUNDAMENTAL assumption - and the most absurd assumption of all - that AGW proponents make is this: The climate we have right now is the optimal climate. It's the best climate we've ever had, and it's the best climate we could ever hope to have, so we need to ensure it continues, come hell or high-water. Now, what kind of stupidity is that? Greenland is not called Greenland because it's supposed to be covered in ice. It's called Greenland because it used to be green! We know approximately when the glaciers covered the damn thing, because the Vikings wrote about the new ice caps and used them as navigational markers. Some of the glaciers have melted to reveal old, mature forests underneath. Others have revealed man-made waterways from old Viking settlements and abandoned silver mines they intended to return to...but couldn't, because after winter came one year, the snow and ice never went away. Why on Earth are we so determined to ensure all of this arable land remains under ice? Is it because of the polar bears? Polar bears are among the meanest animals on the face of the Earth, and we shouldn't be shedding tears for them. Or are we seriously that afraid of the ocean levels rising such that we gradually have to move away from coastal cities? If we can get a livable Greenland back, then screw the coastal cities! Besides, it's not like one day some huge tidal wave is going to come and permanently take out a metropolis anyway, and "if only we had taken steps to prevent that." Sure, hurricanes happen, but long-term ocean levels rise and fall over matters of years, decades, centuries, etc., not minutes. We may or may not be in some kind of long-term warming trend (inconclusive), and our activities may or may not be the dominant causal factor (unlikely), but even if both are the case, the idea that it's necessarily a bad thing we must avoid is a truly short-sighted "glass is half empty" perspective on the matter.

For the record, I should mention that I am not exactly bullheaded on this subject. I went from skeptical, to swallowing AGW theory a few years back, back to skeptical again. In other words, I have changed my opinion TWICE to accommodate new data. How many times have you changed yours? How fair of a chance have you given dissenting scientists to change your mind? How has Climategate affected your perceptions of research in the field? What about the recent letter by Dr. Harold Lewis? He may "only" be a physicist, but that's no reason to dismiss his view on the politics involved. There's a lot more to this issue than the media-led "scientific consensus."

...okay, I think I'm done ranting for the moment, after I get a pet peeve off my chest: This whole "reduce your carbon emissions to be green" marketing meme is totally backwards. If you want to be GREEN, and if you care about GREEN things like plants, then you want to emit as much carbon dioxide as possible, because it's how plants breathe! They love carbon dioxide, and they love warmth, and they absolutely hate both vegetarians and the cold.

 

[Dripping Rain]

i dunno what it is
but ill look into it. thanks for teachin me somwthin new dude