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Scientific Literacy vs. Concern Over Climate Change
New submitter gmfeier writes "An interesting study reported in Nature Climate Change indicates that concern over climate change did not correlate with scientific literacy nearly as much as with cultural polarization. Quoting: 'For ordinary citizens, the reward for acquiring greater scientific knowledge and more reliable technical-reasoning capacities is a greater facility to discover and use—or explain away—evidence relating to their groups’ positions. Even if cultural cognition serves the personal interests of individuals, this form of reasoning can have a highly negative impact on collective decision making. What guides individual risk perception, on this account, is not the truth of those beliefs but rather their congruence with individuals’ cultural commitments. As a result, if beliefs about a societal risk such as climate change come to bear meanings congenial to some cultural outlooks but hostile to others, individuals motivated to adopt culturally congruent risk perceptions will fail to converge, or at least fail to converge as rapidly as they should, on scientific information essential to their common interests in health and prosperity. Although it is effectively costless for any individual to form a perception of climate-change risk that is wrong but culturally congenial, it is very harmful to collective welfare for individuals in aggregate to form beliefs this way.'"
I'm pretty well educated, and all that jargon gave even me a fucking headache. Here is a much better summary, FTFA:
A US government-funded survey has found that Americans with higher levels of scientific and mathematical knowledge are more sceptical regarding the dangers of climate change than their more poorly educated fellow citizens. . . .
According to the [authors], this is not because the idea of imminent carbon-driven catastrophe is perhaps a bit scientifically suspect. Rather it is because people classed as "egalitarian communitarians" (roughly speaking, left-wingers) are always highly concerned about climate change, and become slightly more so as they acquire more science and numeracy. Unfortunately, however, "hierarchical individualists" (basically, right-wingers) are quite concerned about climate change when they're ignorant: but if they have any scientific, mathematic or technical education this causes them to become strongly sceptical.
And here's a news-flash for whoever wrote that summary: Terms like "Culturally congruent risk perception" have no obvious meaning for the general reader. Field-specific jargon is just annoying to everyone who doesn't happen to be in your field (i.e., almost everyone else on the planet).
And could you say "culturally" a few more dozen times in your next summary? It really makes you sound smart, and not full of shit at all.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Or, to put it in more naive terms, people are idiots and democracy is doomed to failure.
I don't know who said it (Richard Feynman, maybe?) , but:
If you can't say it in small words, you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Clearly a man who lacks culturally congruent risk perception.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Inconceivable, you must ingeminate.
You can't handle the truth.
It just magically appeared. I am no more fond of it than you are.
The problem is not scientific literacy, bur that you need to be an expert in several fields.
Claims are made from both sides with explanations and theories beyond what most laymen can understand, beyond what even those with a basic scientific literacy can understand.
I consider myself scientifically literate to a basic level and generally have no problem reading studies or extracts to get a basic idea on an issue. The whole climate change thing is impossible though. People make specific claims about carbons, how they bond in the atmosphere, half-lives, tree rings, ice, sea levels...
There is too much stuff being quoted and claimed from both sides, often seemingly backed up.
What we need is a nice, easy summary page, summarizing all the relevant studies so far, and what they imply or mean when it comes to climate page. AN overall summary taking every study into account, giving a good indication, meaning to oppose it is to go against peer reviewed studies or to speculate without a firm basis.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
And exactly one of "Gay Marriage, Abortion, Climate Change, Conservative/Liberal" is a physics problem subject to rigorous empirical validation independent of human opinion.
What guides individual risk perception, on this account, is not the truth of those beliefs but rather their congruence with individuals’ cultural commitments.
Here's the fail. What is this "truth" they're measuring against?
Something like F=ma seems to correlate with education, not so much with culture. I would hazard a guess that indicates F=ma is a scientific topic.
Something like Jesus is the son of god and belief in him results in your salvation seems to correlate much higher with culture than with education. For example even the dumbest redneck from Texas and some scientist from Texas might agree, but a highly educated scientist from TX might disagree with a highly educated scientist from Japan from a non-christian Japanese family. I would hazard a guess that indicates Jesus's parentage is a non-scientific topic.
Along comes "concern over climate change" and there is a wishy washy hand wringy that based on observation its getting a non-scientific response from the general public. You can almost see the literary dancing to avoid suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the PC orthodoxy about the dangers of climate change is, in fact, non-scientific?
Now please don't jump all over me assuming I think humans have no effect or climate change could never matter. I am well aware its occurring. However,
1) I don't think its very important relative to other more pressing concerns. Seriously, it just isn't that important.
2) I think there is nothing to do anyway. We've burned at least a majority of the EROEI positive carbon fuels and nothing really bad has happened. Twice not much is still not much. The closely related semi-permanent economic decline we've been experiencing for a few decades, and will continue to experience, will "naturally" take care of the rest. The TLDR is SUVs don't matter not because we passed enviro laws, but because they'll never be affordable to the masses again. By the time the next credit bubble comes around, maybe 70 years or so, we'll be waaaaay past peak oil, etc, it just won't matter anymore.
3) There are bigger natural climate changes that we need an advanced industrialized civilization to fight
4) I hate being FUDed so reflexively that I'll fight against the side using FUD, in this case the orthodox climate panic-ers.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Anyway, skimming the paper lends neither support for nor contradicts the evidence that humans have caused and are causing the climate to change. It only addresses the likely belief systems of people in their peer groups and how that information can be used to communicate effectively with those groups:
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I've always felt the argument to curb greenhouse gases has been ill-stated. While there are some who still deny global warming is happening, the primary debate between the left and right seems to distill down to whether it is man-made (left) or cyclical (right).
It seems to me the better argument from the left would be: is polluting the air good for you or not? The answer is obviously, no, it's not good for you. So regardless of whether it causes global warming, we should always be striving for less pollutants and cleaner air in much the same way we strive for safer cars. I suppose the global warming aspect helps push the immediacy of the need for change vs. the cost of that change, but so much time, effort, and money has been wasted on both sides arguing the merits of man-made global warming, I wonder if this was the most effective road to go down.
No one is ever going to say how much it would suck if the air near factories or major metropolitan areas smelled as clean and fresh as the air in rural Vermont.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
my entire life, all I can say is:
what a waste of time.
No one wants to know the truth.
No one wants to know what reality actually is.
Everyone wants to live in a bubble that confirms what they already believe.
Someone please kill me.
What is wrong with this damn comment system, someone please fix this sack of crap.
The first paragraph of the letter (after the abstract) almost perfectly identifies the problem, although the authors, being social "scientists", predictably fail to understand the implication: "As members of the public do not know what scientists know, or think the way scientists think, they predictably fail to take climate change as seriously as scientists believe they should."
The same is true of climate change, diet, exercise, privacy, foreign policy, gas mileage, law, and so forth: The general public does not take any of these issues as seriously as specialists in those fields think they should. This is not because the specialists are right, though; it is because the specialists devote their careers to those areas, and as a result have a distorted view of how much concern the average citizen should dedicate to the specialist's area of expertise. If I was as concerned about everything as experts thought I should be, I would spend all day worrying and no time getting anything done. Considering that dynamic (which often results in "rational ignorance" by average citizens), it is not at surprising that individuals look to peer groups or ideological leaders for cues on complicated issues.
(I suspect the authors also have an ideological bone to pick, based on the breakdowns they chose -- why focus on "hierarchical individualists" versus "egalitarian communitarians", and mention the hierarchy/egalitarianism and individualist/communitarian axis results in passing? How many other proxies did they look at before settling on those, and why did they reject other possible proxies? These social scientists might be unduly concerned with their narrative and as a result not take methodology as seriously as statisticians think they should [wink, wink -- I know that social scientists tend to take post-hoc analytic methodology more seriously than many domains because they are short on testably predictive hypotheses].)
The scientific theory of human caused global warming is that the prime or exclusive cause of the observed warming over the past 100 years, outside of known cycles, is CO2 emissions from humans. Ok, no problem. That is a theory that can be looked at and evaluated, though you are correct it is quite complex to evaluate it.
The problem then comes when it is demanded that you not only accept that, but you accept that the only thing to do about it is to massively reduce CO2 emissions and to do that we need things like cap and trade and so on. If you disagree with any of that you are a "denalist" and "anti-science". They try to act as though the politics and policy of a solution are part and parcel to the theory.
Not even close. You can believe that the theory is correct and disagree with the proposed solution for any number of reasons. However question any part and people want to claim you are anti-science. It really does get like a religious argument: "You accept everything we say or your are the enemy."
If political leanings sway your view the more you know about the science involved, then obviously the subject under discussion is not really a science.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, you're not biased at all.
CO2 absolutely IS "pollution", in a sense: our atmosphere is supposed to be a balance of various gases: O2, CO2, N2, and some other trace gases. The ratios of those gases is important for life and for maintaining our ecosystem. More CO2 means hotter temperatures due to the greenhouse effect, just like too little O2 means we have trouble breathing. So while CO2 isn't a "toxin" as long as the air you're breathing has the right amount of O2, too much of it causes problems. The question is: how much is too much?
The thing that's really annoying, however, about some of the environmentalists, is their cries for power plants to emit less CO2. I got a petition just like this a couple days ago. Do these people not understand basic chemistry? While too much CO2 is obviously a bad thing, they're talking like you just need to add some "scrubbers" to a power plant and they'll take out the CO2!! Did these people never take a chemistry class in college, or know anything at all about combustion? You can't reduce CO2 output without basically shutting the plant down, and no one is going to accept shutting down all the power plants, or reducing their output and having to put up with rolling blackouts. More nuclear power, however, would allow us to use less fossil-fuel-generated power, but these same people are all against nuclear power too (there's a Slashdot stories a couple stories down from this one today about this).
What??!?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The reason being, CO2 is NOT POLLUTION.
Our metabolism produces CO2 as a waste product which we expel from our bodies. Same thing with urine. And while you can drink a little bit of urine and be fine (just look at Bear Grylls), and you can breath a little CO2 and be fine, it's clearly crazy to say that emitting CO2 into the atmosphere is not pollution. What if I peed in a drinking water cistern that feeds your neighborhood? It's only a little, it won't hurt you, therefore it's not pollution. According to you.
The more scientifically informed you are, the less likely you are to believe that human CO2 emissions are going to cause unprecedented, catastrophic global warming.
The less scientifically informed you are, the more likely you are to believe that the past 60+ years of climate change has been mostly driven by human CO2 emissions, and that continued CO2 emissions will cause catastrophic global warming.
The talk about preconceived cultural bias goes for *both* sides - assuming that what we have is a large group of uninformed people who happened on the *right* answer, without actually being as well informed as those who assert the opposite answer, is a stretch, to say the least.
In that case are you also willing to admit that oxygen and nitrogen are also pollutants? I don't think most 'deniers' are claiming that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist or that enough CO2 will not create it. If you could show that we had increased CO2 to say 5% of the atmosphere I would find AGW to be a lot more plausible. The part about going from TRACE_AMOUNT to 2x TRACE_AMOUNT is just not all that persuasive of an argument that we are about to become Venus. The less than 1 degree increase over more than a century is kind of lacking in persuasive power as well.
BTW, you are 100% correct about nuclear power. If all AGW enthusiasts want is for the whole planet to convert to a French level of nuclear power I'd be in favor of it. Short of a new power source being invented, it's going to have to happen anyway. Fossil fuels will not last forever. Certainly not at current prices. I think we'll be lucky if we get another quarter century out of oil and another 50-75 years out of coal. I'm not sure about natural gas or propane except that that cannot last forever either. With nuclear fission we'll have centuries more of high-tech life before we finally have to come up with something brand new or revert to a near pre-industrial society relying only on hydro, wind, and solar.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Wait, wait: you're knowledgeable and informed about the science and you still don't agree with us on climate change?! You must be a Republican ...
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
The real issue is that even if everyone agreed on global warming, we haven't the foggiest realistic solution. All we can do is pray for photovoltaics to follow Moores law for another decade, or a breakthrough in fusion. That's why people prefer to argue whether there is a problem, rather than admit that they're powerless.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
Few CAGW *facts* have been offered. Many relevant facts, analyses and proposals contrary to CAGW have been deliberately altered, hidden, ignored, or attacked politically.
The study suggests CAGW appeals to someone drinking too long at the communitarian-socialist well, or simply doesn't have a strong enough hard, experimental science background (or ability) to recognize computerized, politicized drivel when served whole with prebaked results. Or snookered by politicians with a D in the science-for-poets-&-pols class (I'm thinking of you, Al with a 488 on Math I, hahahaha). Again, the study correlated CAGW supporters with two groups: communitarians and ignorant individualists.
I understood the writeup very well. It goes directly to the heart of the debate, for me at least.
The global climate change issue has morphed from a brief global cooling 'scare', to global warming debate, and now global climate 'change'. During these changing arguments, I've become convinced of these beliefs:
1- Many parties have ulterior or hiden motives. These vary from wanting to advance their cultural or political policies to wanting to prevail in a factual or scientific debate, and others. I also have an ulterior motive in this debate, and of course I see mine as honest and true, and of course just as I assume everyone else does.
2- All parties seem prepared to use whatever eivdence supports their motives, and discredit the rest. Just as the writeup would suggest.
3- This is not new, and is (I propose) evident beyond contradiction to anyone who engages in minimal critical analysis of the issue. If it wasn't evident to you earlier, you are not paying attention, or not trying very hard at all.
4- Many parties purposefully either fabricate or embellish the evidence they present to make their case. Some do so despite knowing of contrary evidence, and some simply refuse to consider any other evidence at all.
5- Many who make their eivdence fit the argument have good intentions, and seem genuinely to not understand why others, seeing this, tend to mistrust their argument entirely.
Early on, when 'cooling' became 'warming', I started asking why this was so important. And one of the first things I learned was that many who joined the debate and believed that warming was occurring, and that it was man-caused, and could 'only' be solved by reducing our impact on the planet, was that they already wanted us to 'reduce our impact' on the planet, and this was the latest and hopefully (for them) conclusive argument . Scientists rarely like to admit mistakes (neither do I) so many climatologists are engaged in futher analysis of their data to make it fit when reality doesn't quite match with their predictions. Looking at the work done to adjust, normalize, and clean up this data to make it fit leaves me, in particular distrustful of their process.
Now we read some articles on ice melt, , and I'm left wondering how this could have occurred 14,000 years ago before industrialization, and if it could be happening now for those reasons, and nothing we can do would stop it. And the article I linked to doesn't explain much at all. And then this article blames fresh water consumption. We fix this by what, reducing population? Or just becoming more efficient users? Population growth wipes out all but the most aggressive and costly conservation, and then only if we ignore the developing world.
So this dovetails nicely into the anti-capitalist/industrial/consumer movement's goals, and the anti-population growth movement similarly will love this. Basically, they love anything bad for me. I'm just part of the 98% in America trying to get along, doing infinitely better than 90% of the rest of the world. I have a roof to sleep under, and something to keep me off the ground when I do - that makes me better off then most of the world. Add in my access to safe drinking water, and I probably do better than 95% or more of the world. My big complaint is how thick my steaks are.
So I do come to the debate with a very strong 'prove it!' attitude, and when the climate change proponents/worriers are so often aligned with the movements to take from me as much as they can, I rationally (if not logically) react with caution. Actually, skepticism, tainted with outright rejection. these groups can make no scientific argument - they are not motiviated by science.
And the scientists are largely so invested in protecting their reputations that I consider their arguments self-serving at best.
If warming is real, and we can stop it, I'm also conce
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
You are discussing the costs of reducing CO2 emissions, and you're right, the costs are potentially very high.
The only way it makes sense to make a major societal commitment like cutting CO2 emissions is through a cost-benefit analysis. In the interest of disclosure I am one of the tree-huggers who thinks CO2 emissions are a clear and urgent problem. I think you and I can none the less agree that a cost-benefit analysis is the rational way to make a decision on whether to shut down power plants (and switch to windmills or nuclear plants) or not.
Unfortunately we're at a stage in the debate where people who should know better are still claiming that the cost of the other side's recommended approach is infinite. That's disingenuous and no way to make policy decisions.
So yes, shutting down fossil-fueled power plants would be costly. It may none the less be worth doing. Likewise, doing nothing will anger tree-huggers like myself and undoubtedly will have certain costs (disruption of agriculture, rising sea level, mass extinction of wildlife) but it may be the economically rational choice.
I'd like to see more talk about costs and benefits and less talk to the effect, "I dislike the implications of what you're recommending therefore your analysis is wrong."
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Okay, here it is. In and around 1800, CO2 was about 0.028% of the Earth's atmosphere. It is currently around 0.0395%. This data comes from the ice core from Law Dome, Antarctica and current observation.
Have you ever played with a scale? The old-timey ones with the scale on one side and the counter-weights on the other? It doesn't take much to cause a huge imbalance, and if you are going to argue that the world is a little more robust than that, I would refer you to the 150 acres per minute of rainforest lost, the 30 mile per year that the Sahara desert's border is moving south, and the more than 700 documented animals that humanity has caused to go extinct (since the 1600s). CO2 is one facet in a larger, we-are-changing-the-whole-of-the-earth problem.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
And water isn't poisonous either ... unless you drink too much of it.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Yes, because 'all or nothing' is a totally valid world view and a good response to a 'everything in moderation' post. You are a true idiot.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
150 acres per minute = 78,624,000 in a year
The Amazon Rainforest covers over a billion acres
1 billion/78,624,000.00 = approximately 12 years.
Considering they have been logging at this rate for several decades, I'd say your hyperbole factor is running quite high.
This is just amazing to me. They are literally saying that educating people about global warming will increase their skepticism, and therefore actually transmitting sound scientific information would be bad.
That's not how I read what they're saying. They aren't saying "bad". They're saying "if you give them ONLY the facts, it won't help." You then strawman that into "they want to stop giving us the facts and just give us propaganda".
Persuasive writing is all about knowing your audience. If throwing pure facts at your audience bores them, you need more than just facts. This means "in addition to facts", not "in replace of facts".
:(){
See that's the problem of if I can't see it, its not happening. Or worse, if I don't understand it, its not a problem. There are a million things that depend on precise balance and happen in infinitesimal quantities. NO2 happens in the junctions of your synapses in mind numbingly small quantities and lasts as NO2 for only nanoseconds. However, without that happening you cease to function. 1 pound of botulina toxic properly distributed is enough to kill the entire human population several times. You haven't the foggiest clue which species or processes are critical to the continued function of our ecosphere, how can you begin to measure what is or isn't significant without understanding that living things have indirect and profound impacts and implications.
Our planet functions on virtually countless feedback cycles, so when something over here shifts another system over there picks up the slack and tends to recenter the system. Increase the heat, more clouds and earth reflects more sunlight. Up to a point. Once you exceed the normal capacity for the "Global System" to absorb more energy/ CO2/ heavy metals/ plastic... whatever, then old systems breakdown and subtle but significant shifts begin to make themselves evident as fundamental perturbations in the existing system.
The change in carbonate vs carbonic acid in the ocean is telling (and making life for carbonaceous shelled sea life growingly more difficult.) The loss of glaciers and polar marine ice while possibly enhancing navigation, is already having significant impact both in rising sea levels and changes in ocean salinity. In fact a recent report suggests that as much as 40% of the increased sea level and reduced salinity is directly attributable to human enterprises over the last 2 centuries.
CO2 is in fact toxic, but not in the quantities one is likely to see on an earth that isn't in catastrophic environmental meltdown. I don't see such a meltdown happening in my lifetime of that of my grand children's. However there is a potential avalanche of greenhouse gases soon coming where the warming caused by CO2 triggers a sudden explosion of methane from decaying permafrost in the high latitudes and potential release of massive methane ice seeps in the ocean. Its all tied together. Its a little like someone saying I need some wire while driving a truck, and having your passenger go under the dashboard and cut you some. You might get away with that for a little while, but sooner or later something really nasty will happen. Why would anyone, keep cutting. Its silly. There's no need. The only folks who would truly suffer are the incredibly rich executives at companies that sell us our fossil fuel fix (and by the way the warnings of jobs are coming from the folks who I would suggest are far more worried about their golden parachutes and fat campaign contributions.) Let's simply make the move to saner energy sources, by all means nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, add OTECs, Tidal hydro generation, new hydrogen technologies. Nobody can tell me that it would be more difficult to build a sustainable energy economy than to send a man to the moon 1960. We actually have sufficient technology to resolve our own problem today, all we lack is the leadership and will to implement it.
Clearly you understand neither carbon nor ocean salinity. Human beings have in fact decreased the overall salinity of the ocean and raised the sea level as well as dramatically increased the CO2 levels in the ocean as carbonic acid. We can measure those things. CO2 occurs naturally in the atmosphere. If by human enterprise and the act of burning materials with carbon in them, you dramatically increase the CO2 in the atmosphere, you have polluted the atmosphere by definition. When human activities produce byproducts that impact the normal function of an environmental process or ecology, that is called pollutions. Even if the stuff you're polluting with may have value in say Scotland becoming a wine growing region. It's going to promote wildfires in say someplace like Minnesota and other places that aren't typically noted for wildfire, and worse promote the conversion of global rainforests into desserts. I can take perfectly good clean water. Put it where it will cause an environmental disaster, lets say in some fragile but vital dessert habitat. I've now made that habitat great for old men in golf shoes and lounge singers, but I've destroyed the natural habitat that was already there, and that could be called pollution. It depends on who wins, who loses, and who's getting paid. When Los Angeles sucked the Owen's Valley dry in the early 1900s. L.A. would say they were building a dream. The farmers in the Owens Valley who were wiped off the map would describe it as a nightmare.
Using you salt example, If I dump a billion tons of salt into the San Fransisco bay, the way California agriculture interests did when they tried to flush the salt out of the central valley from years of indiscriminate irrigation, then salt would become a pollutant. By the way, it had tragic consequences killing millions of birds and other local animals as well as ruining a number of estuaries along the Sacramento Delta, essential for fish reproduction. That pollution had profound economic and environmental impact. We addressed that by improving irrigation techniques and preventing the dumping of contaminated salt water into our lakes and waterways.
We need to manage CO2 in exactly the same way (and yes, that includes removing it from industrial exhausts.) The good news, is that a lot of bright folks see industrial exhaust as a gold mine for the production of biofuels. See, cloud has silver lining... just bring adequate technology to the party.
The simplest answer is that people who learn more about how science works question the AGW agenda which early on stopped being science.
If you RTFA, the effect was only observed in right-wingers. Left-wingers become more concerned about AGW as they get educated, not less.
I'm sure you would be willing to write that off as a clear indication that left-wingers are inherently brain-damaged and are therefore unable to apply their education correctly. Just for that occasion, the study also asked a different question with "reversed polarity" - i.e. a touchy topic for left-wingers to which they tend to react very emotionally and negatively. Namely, nuclear power. And here's the thing: while uneducated left-wingers were highly negative towards it, higher education level was correlated to stronger acceptance of nuclear power among left-wingers.
TL;DR version: educated left-wingers are more willing to veer off from the "party line" on touchy topics than educated right-wingers.
I think you are making the article's point for it. You seem so determined to believe that anthropogenic CO2 is not a problem that you have descended to the point of trying to redefine the meaning of the word "pollution" in order to maintain cognitive harmony. A waste product of an industrial process (power generation), which is emitted into the environment, is pollution. Plain and simple. It doesn't matter if it's harmful only at massive levels, or whether we are releasing harmful quantities of it. A few atoms of arsenic aren't harmful either, but I doubt you'd try to argue that releasing small quantities of arsenic is not pollution.
He didn't limit that to just the Amazon.
The part about going from TRACE_AMOUNT to 2x TRACE_AMOUNT is just not all that persuasive of an argument that we are about to become Venus.
Well, a TRACE_AMOUNT of botox is cosmetic, but 2x TRACE_AMOUNT is lethal. I mean, who would have thought!
The point about Venus is crass. The earth's climate is different. CO2 has historically been a feedback (that produces more feedbacks), and now it is a forcing that produces the same feedbacks. The question of climate sensitivity to CO2 is an empirical one. I will take real journal publications (some of which I have read) over your gut-reaction ALL-CAPS reasoning.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Salt in the sea is pollution of the worlds oceans.
If you increased the salt concentration in the sea, you will kill everything. The question is how much. That is an empirical question, and has nothing to do with politics.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Because there aren't any rainforests outside the Amazon, right?
The right's resistance to climate change is largely motivated by the fact that a lot of the proposed solutions entail things that some elements on the left wanted to do anyway.
Then why don't they just accept the science and propose their own solutions? Cap and trade was a market based right wing idea originally but now that the left says "Ok, we'll do cap and trade" they say, "Oh no, it's a left wing plot to take over the world". It's hard to hit a moving target.
On a per molecule basis there isn't much CO2 in our atmosphere compared to everything else. But the primary components of our atmosphere, Nitrogen and Oxygen, are not greenhouse gases. The second most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is CO2. CO2 is directly responsible for 25% of the greenhouse effect and the CO2's contribution to warming also indirectly adds to the greenhouse effect by increasing the amount of water vapor in the air. Without our CO2, the earth would literally be a ball of ice. Tt doesn't matter if CO2 is a "trace amount" in absolute terms because ALL greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are in trace amounts.
If I may be permitted to make an analogy:
There's a certain chemical, (6aR,9R)- N,N- diethyl- 7-methyl- 4,6,6a,7,8,9- hexahydroindolo- [4,3-fg] quinoline- 9-carboxamide, which some claim produces hallucinations and other related physical and psychological effects in large mammals.
Others claim that the amount of this toxin ingested - a few micrograms - is insufficient to make any difference to such large mammals that usually weigh upto 100 kilos and beyond.
Think of EVERY SINGLE medicine or drug in the world! Your dosage is usually in exactly the same ratio to your body mass as CO2 in the atmosphere - that is to say, it's in parts per million. Yet, they produce powerful, often fast-acting effects in the body.
The climate system is similarly complex. A "small" change in one of its components can produce powerful, fast-acting feedbacks. I think that should be fairly obvious!
The point is that a change in composition of 0.01% is actually quite high for CO2. What you should be looking at is the amount of forcing it introduces into the system per unit of change, not how big or small the change is. Take a look here. Your intuition is irrelevant. Model and actual results matter.
Joking aside, too much of anything in the environment is pollution. Increasing the water content in, say, a brackish water swamp or backwater would make difficult conditions for certain life-forms that require a particular salinity to survive. Stuff like shellfish, certain fish, etc. which are eaten by birds. If the salinity is too high, the eggs don't hatch, and the birds are left without food. Ecosystem collapse due to DHMO pollution!
What's the "problem"? We are a successful species and we have been changing the environment for many thousands of years. Of course, sometimes we screw up, but "changing-the-whole-of-the-earth" is not by itself a problem. And if you think that only started in the 1600's, you're naive. Even in 1600, there were almost no "natural" ecosystems left on any continent that had humans on it.
The point is that a change in composition of 0.01% is actually quite high for CO2
it is "obviously" not as the supposed "huge increase" in CO2 levels has led to very little actual warming for the climate overall.
The fears of some kind of runaway reaction have been totally debunked.
As for the climate getting slowly warmer, as a species we would be very lucky if that is actually the case - but it's too soon to tell, people are trying to use year to year swings to guess what the climate will be like 100 years hence, and so far utterly botched even a simple five or ten year prediction. When those start getting even close, I will listen to the people who have actually come up with decent models for what is happening.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The biggest problem with the AGW crowd is their continued insistence that the west reduce their CO2 emissions as if everyone else will simply follow suit. This is of course absurd on the face of it. More importantly according to their own models, even if ALL CO2 emissions stopped the warming would continue for at least another 3/4 of a century and would not reverse on its own. You would think that they would be screaming for massive amounts of research primarily into carbon sequestration first as well as nuclear energy along with beamed microwave power. The latter two more than allowing for massively reduced reliance on coal and oil. Instead all their solutions oddly enough demand more government interference at a lower standard of living. All of them.
Yep, that's a great demonstration of a conservative making a fact free assertion in an attempt to paint an opponent as having inconsistent views.
Here's the problem though: we pretty much know (as far as anything can be known) that AGW is real. So it's pretty fair to point out that AGW deniers are ignoring anything that doesn't fit the narrative that they're wrong, because, well, if they weren't ignoring them, they'd not have the views they have.
"Warmers", however, or "people who follow the scientific method, and those who respect the results of those who follow the scientific method" to use a fairer description, may or may not be "ignoring anything that doesn't fit their narrative" but there's no way to tell. You see, if someone comes along and says "Aha! AGW is a ridiculous liberal myth! You see, MARS IS WARMING UP!" then, actually, one of two things may happen.
The first is that the person concerned about AGW might ignore it in the way you say. However, by happy chance, the person is still right, just as he or she'd be right if they were told "The sky's BROWN!!" and, instead of looking up to check, they rolled their eyes and walked on.
The second is that the person concerned might look into it, and come to the conclusion that the fact is interesting, but not pertinent. These latter people who look into things and check to see if they do falsify a theory are called "scientists". They often write up their results too, sometimes in a way that means the non-scientists can understand it.
That's how it works. So, while it's safe to say that ALL AGW deniers ignore anything that doesn't fit their narrative, it's demonstrably false to say that ALL of those concerned about AGW ignore anything that doesn't fit their narrative. In fact, sites like RealClimate.org prove pretty conclusively that they do, actually, investigate what AGW deniers claim. The problem is... virtually nothing the AGW Denial community has proves the AGW theory wrong, which is why it's such a solid theory.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
There is a very simple time-saving metric which allows you do discover whether someone knows what they are talking about, or are living in fantasy-land making stuff up.
If discussing CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) there is a superior metric for this.
Simply ask the climate alarmist you're talking to if he or she supports vastly increased nuclear power generation, along with a reduction in fossil fuel power generation. If not, it's "fantasy-land" time.
Either the problem is severe enough to warrant the only workable solution, or it's not a real concern. Simple enough.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Many scientific papers include dire predictions with a target date that has come and gone. A few examples of hundreds.
... eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age." Kenneth E.F. Watt, in "Earth Day," 1970.
... If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971.
1. Within a few years "children just aren't going to know what snow is." Snowfall will be "a very rare and exciting event." Dr. David Viner, senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, interviewed by the UK Independent, March 20, 2000.
"[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots[By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers." Michael Oppenheimer, published in "Dead Heat," St. Martin's Press, 1990.
"Arctic specialist Bernt Balchen says a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000." Christian Science Monitor, June 8, 1972.
"Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010."
"By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half." Life magazine, January 1970.
"If present trends continue, the world will be
"By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people
"In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish." Ehrlich, speech during Earth Day, 1970
4/2012: IQALUIT, NUNAVUT—Nunavut says a new survey shows Canada’s polar bear population hasn’t significantly declined in the last seven years as predicted and that the iconic mammal has not been hurt by climate change. An aerial survey done in August by the Nunavut government, in response to pressure from Inuit, estimated the western Hudson Bay bear population at around 1,000. That’s about the same number of bears found in a more detailed study done in 2004. That study, which physically tagged the bears, predicted the number would decline to about 650 by 2011.
I am not disputing that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. I am disputing that there is evidence that an increase of 0.01% has a noticeable effect on the temperature of the planet's atmosphere. In theory it should make a very slight difference, but the evidence that it actually has is pretty shaky. There is also no direct evidence that the entire 0.01% increase has been caused by humanity's use of combustion. No doubt combustion adds some amount of CO2 to the atmosphere, but determining the amount even to within an order of magnitude is close to impossible. The best anyone can do is a total guess. That we are producing enough for reverse terraforming seems implausible to me. It's certainly possible, but it must be proven and it has not been.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.