I'm sorry, I'll respond from now on only when spoken to directly. My bad. Stephen, I don't care what a majority of scientists or mainstream publishers or whatever have concluded, just as I'm sure Jed doesn't care how many think CF is bunk, in terms that situation having any bearing on the nature of the evidence or the conclusions he has come to regarding the evidence. They can all be wrong, and in the case of CF we're pretty certain they are, so there's your proof that a consensus does not necessarily mean much.
There is significant evidence pointing away from the warming cause being related to the "huge" (what, 4 tenths of a percent is it?) CO2 output we're responsible for. In addition, computer models used to support it as a cause are inherently flawed in a way that matters critically to the use of such models to tell us anything useful about its contribution in the real world. Additionally, we do not have the understanding needed to steer the car back where we want it if in fact it's going off the road, whether or not we caused it to go off the road in the first place. Heck, we don't even know if where we want it to go is the "right" place anyway. It may seem right for us, sure, but... ? Our time and treasure, as I've pointed out before, should not be wasted trying to comandeer that over which we have no effective control, and instead should be directed towards planning for just being off-road for a while. Trying to mitigate climate changes with light bulbs and stuff is the experiment we need to scale back on. But alternative energy? Great idea under any circumstance for many reasons, chief among them *real* deadly pollution (ask Jed how many die from lung disease from ICEs every year) and political reasons of course. CO2 reduction along for the ride? Hey, if it makes you happy then I'm happy. But there's no scientific evidence for it deserving a significant place on the list, and I object stongly to it being hijacked by unprincipled hacks like Al Gore as a means to consolidate their own wealth and political power. - Rick -----Original Message----- From: Stephen A. Lawrence [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, September 05, 2008 10:59 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Vo]:Sunspotless Rick Monteverde wrote: > Never said there was no warming, I said we didn't do it and that we're > not capable of doing anything practical to change it. > > Stephen, add your name to the list of those who choose to ignore the > actual content of my posts Was I responding directly to you? Don't think so. I was commenting on a point Jed had mentioned. In any case, from what I've read, the "experts", while not 100% certain of the cause, are in near-universal agreement that it is *very* *likely* that the cause is anthropogenic greenhouse gases. One reason for concluding this, which doesn't take a sophisticated model to understand or reason about, is that anthropogenic atmospheric CO2 has been skyrocketing in parallel with the global temperature, which is, as they say, 'highly suggestive'. If you don't agree with those statements, then I don't know where you get your news but it's not the same science rags I see. >From what I've read it's also the case that the long term climate on Earth is highly unstable, according to the geological record. We've benefited from a relatively stable period which has lasted a good while now. Injecting a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere -- which, again, I hope you admit humans have been doing -- could conceivably destabilize things rather badly, sending the global climate into a Superball mode, which is unlikely to be good for humans, animals, coral reefs, or just about anybody else. In the general science community I don't think anything I just said can be considered "controversial" or even "doubtful". And even if you think the probability that the current changes are human-generated is smaller than the numbers I've seen bandied about -- which, IIRC, range from ~65% to ~90% -- it's hard for me to understand how you can feel that efforts to reduce the extremely high rate at which we're dumping CO2 into the atmosphere can be misguided. As someone put it, we're conducting an experiment in terraforming on an enormous scale and if the results don't work out well we're going to be in trouble. Perhaps we should scale back the pace of the "experiment", eh?
