Interesting how such garbage passes for science these days. A counterexample to the bizarre claim that species can only adapt to climate changes of a mere 1C per million years is that a number of species have already adapted to the presence of the human automobile such as insects and spiders, weeds with seeds, and carrion eating birds. The story grudgingly mentions these counterexamples in passing as "invasive species" and "pests".
Another thing to consider is that a species can achieve an average temperature change of 1C by a move of roughly 200 meters in vertical distance or a move of 300 km north or south. That's not hard to do in a century even for plants or slow moving animals like snails.
Third, we see temperature change rates far in excess of 1C per million years due to the Ice Age. Yet there are living things in places which were covered by ice only 10k years ago. These organisms didn't adapt by living under a km of ice and then adapting to the present environment. They adapted by being elsewhere and moving in after the ice retreated. Temperature changes far in excess of 1C per million years were readily adapted to via mobility not just as a theoretical possibility as allowed by the previous paragraph.
Fourth, there's no mention of number of generations. Organisms don't all live to the same age and breed at the same point in time. Species with faster breeding cycles will adapt faster, all else being equal. A more adequate measure of adaptability to temperature change would be temperature change per generation, not per unit time.
Finally, how would these researchers know what the temperature range was past recent human history? Paleoclimate, the study of climate before the era of modern instrumentation is a notorious, making-shit-up area of climatology.
I think people like you should be held liable for your statements.
I take it, Mr. Anonymous that you don't hold yourself to the same standard.
Just like yelling "fire" in a crowd and inciting a riot that ends up getting people trampled, your comments could result in inaction which most definitely will result in human loss of life and property.
It's not just like that. First, "yelling fire" is a case of knowingly uttering a false statement. If you yelled "fire" because there actually was a fire and you were sincerely trying to warn people, then you are immune to indemnity.
Second, yelling "fire" is a case of causing panic. That would be in line with the approach of climate alarmism not climate denialism. After all, what panic is caused when I claim, sincerely or not, that we probably shouldn't act on climate concerns because we don't know for sure? OTOH, if I say that "climate change will make the planet uninhabitable within the next few hundred years" that sounds a lot more likely to me to cause panic. Or claiming that species can't adapt at a "approximately the speed of AGW divided by 10,000". Sounds a lot more scary.
"Climate change" was a heritage foundation focus group identified term to make the phenomenon seem less scary to average americans.
Where's the evidence for this claim?
and scientists picked it up because things like changing ocean currents would actually cool some(very regional) places, and it was deemed more accurate.
Not on a scientific basis. "Anthropogenic global warming" describes both an effect and a cause of that effect. Climate change merely is a change in climate (subject to some nuance as described below) without any attribution of the phenomena or a model to which to attribute the phenomena.
Modify the first label to "anthropogenic global warming with ocean acidification" and you describe virtually all uses of the term, "climate change".
And what does "change" mean to a system which is always changing? For example, a number of well known behaviors such as solar activity, ocean current oscillations, and orbital/planetary rotation dynamics are by their nature changing. What climate change is considered climate change?
From what I gather, even in honest efforts, the attempt here is to classify changes in climate in two categories, ongoing patterns and changes due to fundamental alteration of the inputs to the climate dynamical system such as non-pattern changes in solar output or human generated CO2 in the atmosphere. The latter is termed "climate change".
The problem at this level with this is that most uses of "climate change" don't distinguish between pattern and fundamental change because they can't. Sometimes they don't actually see any evidence of climate change, yet still make the unwarranted attribution.
Further, why does using a far vaguer label become more scientifically appropriate just because a global model has a moderately unintuitive outcome such as regional cooling? Global warming doesn't stop being global warming just because there are cases of regional cooling.
We could fix this problem easily with barely any significant change to our style of life.
Because ponies. Just because you want something doesn't mean it magically becomes a good thing to get, especially for everyone else.
So far, the current efforts to restructure energy infrastructure to cause less global warming have resulted in a doubling of certain types of energy in parts of Europe. For example, petroleum prices have more or less doubled over the US prices in Europe. Similarly, residential electricity prices in Germany (note that Germany and Denmark, both with heavily subsidized, high share "green" power generation, have electricity pricing on par with small island nations), a hotbed of anti-AGW activity have doubled over their more conservative neighbors. That's a lot of losers out there.
and the losers will be big oil/coal companies
In today's world, we have unprecedented efforts to curb global warming and... record oil industry profits. Something's wrong with the model, Jim.
I see a lot of losers in Europe and not many losers in Exxon, for example. Maybe things don't work like you think they work.
Meanwhile, they tell themselves a story about how CO2 isn't a pollutant, and doing anything would be communism, and therefore morally wrong.
While there's another equally valid story about how CO2 is a "pollutant", is set to cause vast harm in the hazy, not-so-distant future which never seems to come around, and anyone who thinks differently holds primitive, chest-beating beliefs that should be mocked.
To be equivalent I would have to have said that Exxon's product was completely fraudulent, their fuels don't really work and they are engaged in a massive conspiracy to cover up the fact that their fuels do not actually combust and drive internal combustion engines in the way that Exxon claims they do. Instead, everybody who uses Exxon fuel has been paid off and everybody employed by Exxon has been paid off so that Exxon can sell something other than petroleum to an unsuspecting public, for some reason not specified.
To be equivalent we need several additions things. First, an honest admission from you that Exxon might under those circumstances actually be pulling off this fraud not merely an implicit assumption that they can't possibly do so. There's no equivalence without recognizing the fundamental conflict of interest and the capability to carry off the fraud in question.
Second, Exxon would be funding virtually all scientific research into the efficacy of its fuels.
Third, the people who "use" Exxon's products have a huge financial incentive to go along with the fraud. Who are the corresponding parties who "use" climate change? They are the many parties (including most climate scientists BTW) who obtain funding or profit merely because climate change is seen by the public of the world as a serious threat. The very revenue streams that fund these customers of climate change, fund the researchers who are allegedly impartially evaluating the extent and risks of particular forms of climate change.
My view is that kind of money (such as 34 billion euros per year) buys a lot of climate change research with plenty to spare.
The greenhouse effect is something that causes the earth to retain heat.
The greenhouse effect is a important consequence of those dynamics that cause Earth to retain heat (see its definition, I'm not making this up). It's not the dynamics themselves. And it happens to not be climate change only in the case where its "contributing factors" happen to be in "balance". So are the greenhouse effect's contributing factors in balance today?
I wager you would say no. That consistent, long term warming, which is the greenhouse effect, in today's imbalanced world is a change of the world's climate just by itself, not even counting the effects it spurs in turn. The greenhouse effect is climate change.
You clearly perceive yourself to be right because you don't understand what you're talking about, so aren't even aware of how your statements are false. I don't think it will be worth discussing any farther until you consider the very basic inaccuracy of your statements.
Follow your own advice. You have yet to state a reason why you think I'm wrong.
To elaborate on my point in my first paragraph above, you conflate the causes of the greenhouse effect with the effect itself. The retention of heat is the greenhouse effect not the dynamics of the Earth-Sun system that lead to that retention of heat. Similarly, the current warming of the Earth due to the energy imbalance in this system is the greenhouse effect not the factors that lead to that imbalance.
The greenhouse effect is climate change. Sure, it's not the only climate change and it is reasonable to expect climate changes to cause further climate changes. But when someone uses the term, "climate change" these days, stuff like the greenhouse effect is what they are referring to. I personally prefer something like anthropogenic global warming since it more accurately describes the climate change that is being discussed (outside of ocean acidification) and the human contribution to that climate change.
Why is it that I'm the one getting called out on the dichotomy and not the person who actually made the false dichotomy in the first place? I even quoted the problem statement in question.
Six problems not three. Sure, the human race can concern itself with a lot more than six problems and those problems don't actually need to exist in order to be bothered with. But there's this thing called trade offs. One can't optimally solve all these problems at the same time. Resources expended on combating global warming can't be used to alleviate poverty or address desertification.
And some of the proposed solutions to global warming are in themselves rather destructive, such as the radical restructuring of the world's energy infrastructure or the replacement of considerable food production with biofuel production (without regard to the value of the biofuels produced).
Finally, these bigger problems in themselves can undermine attempts to fight global warming and other environmental issues. China currently is the fastest growing generator of CO2 responsible for at least half of the global growth in CO2 production in recent years. They do so because growing their country and improving the well being of their citizens is more important to them than the effects of global warming.
Massive oil subsidies are one way that many corrupt governments stay in power. And of course, we wouldn't have a global warming problem in the first place without overpopulation.
I think it's reasonable to ask that we set priorities with the worst problems addressed first as best we can.
In that context, the Greenhouse Effect is, in fact, a cause.
I've already explained my side adequately. Keep in mind also that the global warming from the greenhouse effect is a climate change and is the one most often referred to when someone rhetorically uses the term, "climate change".
I don't know what the previous poster intended, but that indicates to me that there actually wasn't any incentive by anyone with power to seriously question the ozone depletion theory. If it turns out that ozone destruction by man-made CFCs weren't really a problem (and that the ozone hole is just as big as it was prior to human civilization), then we just made a costly restructuring of our world for little reason.
For me, the big warning sign here as with "climate change" is that serious observation of the problem is extremely recent. We have only acquired the technology to study in detail the ozone layer and its depletion roughly forty years ago. We don't know what's normal in the absence of human activity.
"Backpeddle"? "beating your head"? These aren't my problems in this thread.
All that trolling aside, your entire premise is a false dichotomy: you suggest that an event can either be a cause or an effect; not both.
The false dichotomy isn't mine. From the original post:
The problem with that is that "the greenhouse effect" is a *cause*, but "climate change" is a *result* -- they're two different things.
But greenhouse effect is the most significant part of "climate change". One can't make that neat distinction between cause and result as you note and one way to rebut the above argument is to note that the greenhouse effect is by definition a result or consequence.
Realistically, the problem with a name change is that politics more than anything else -- calling it by yet another name will make the conspiracy theorists think that you're trying to hide or obfuscate something (the link talks about Benghazi, but the ideas apply to climate change too), and while that's not true, the end result is still that it overall causes people to take the problem less seriously. I think we should stick with "climate change".
I disagree for two reasons. First, something like anthropogenic global warming is far more descriptive. Note that all the discussion of "climate change" is about global warming. It's not about the other ways humanity can change its environment such as desertification.
That leads to scientifically perverse rhetoric like blaming the recent Syrian drought on a variety of things and "climate change" as well. The very first thing they mentioned in that article was "combined with the mismanagement of natural resources by [Syrian President Bashar] Assad, who subsidized water-intensive crops like wheat and cotton farming and promoted bad irrigation techniques". Those things induce substantial massive climate change in their own right, such as record-breaking droughts. So their use of the term, climate change in this case doesn't actually include the obvious profound climate changing effects of resource mismanagement. So what does "climate change" refer to, if it doesn't actually refer to climate change?
Second, this really is about propaganda. I think the whole point of the use of vague phrases like "climate change" or the more alarming, "climate disruption" is to enable a lot of confirmation bias such as happened with the "extreme weather" of last winter in the northern hemisphere. The next odd or destructive weather story can now be woven rhetorically into the "climate change" narrative.
warming of the surface and lower atmosphere of a planet (as Earth or Venus) that is caused by conversion of solar radiation into heat in a process involving selective transmission of short wave solar radiation by the atmosphere, its absorption by the planet's surface, and reradiation as infrared which is absorbed and partly reradiated back to the surface by atmospheric gases
We see from the description of global warming that the second definition actually is the appropriate one to use.
And yes, I'm going to lecture you on the relevancy of your previous post. This whole argument could have been rendered irrelevant by you understanding the words in question.
So you have anything to contribute? I'll name three more bigger problems than AGW, poverty, corruption, and overpopulation. Maybe you should spend less time being concerned about "concern trolls" and more time using that stump on the top of your shoulders.
Half a billion people roughly. But going by your reasoning, there's only $34 dollars of Exxon profit per person in the EU, three days parking and all that. That must mean that $34 billion per year is not a lot of money, amirite? Why is it that a lot of money is a lot of money when it is earned by Exxon, but not when it comes from the EU?
Well, your contention is that every one of them is corrupt.
I missed that. Good thing we have you to do my thinking and talking for me.
For a 150 years, form Fourier, Tyndal, Arrhenius all the way to the present. Every scientist - every physicist, chemist, biologist. This does seem hard to accept.
Or that your reasoning is deeply flawed and irrelevant to any discussion we might have on the subject. I find that more likely. Note that every scientist you mention above didn't actually do any work with today's multidimensional climate simulations. Arrhenius, the only one who actually did a relatively modern climate model, worked with a primitive one-dimensional radiative model.
And it is laughable to suggest that these historical scientists have something to do with today's consistent bias in predictive models towards exaggerating the effects of AGW (especially given that the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration is in addition generally somewhat worse than predicted by those models). All those scientists with those erroneous models are funded by the entities spending all those dollars and euros per head, not by Exxon.
Personally, I think Exxon and similar businesses are profiting immensely from the current level of climate alarmism. But perhaps a business making only a measly $34 billion a year (it's less than $5 per person globally!) just can't afford decent propaganda.
From the outside, it's very difficult to tell the difference between these two approaches, at least until years after it ceases to matter. But they are different.
It's a huge, blatantly obvious difference once you include the human tendency to make virtuous that which benefits yourself or furthers your interests.
(I have seen no evidence of conspiracies to promote phlogiston chemistry, for instance.)
But I have seen evidence of a conspiracy (well more of a blatant abuse of government power than anything remotely covert) to promote Lysenkoism. High stakes change the game.
In related news, Exxon Mobile made 34 billion dollars of profits last year. Koch Industries had $115B in revenue and unknown profits.
And the EU is dumping 30 billion euros every year through 2020 on explicit climate change related spending. That's a lot of money too.
Further, do we actually have any evidence that the current climate change hubbub is not profitable for Exxon or the Koch brothers? Record profits in the face of growing climate change efforts doesn't strike me as a sign that they're going to do poorly under the new regime. It's just been assumed that they won't do well. Maybe we should look at this evidence.
Yeah, those college professors will step on their mother's neck to keep that 48 thousand bucks a year coming.
They get more than that. They get staff, power, prestige, and easy living. And more than $48k per year, if they can rope a big grant. And you know what? College professors are human. I bet you can find some that are of that less noble, mother-trodding sort.
Because when someone speaks of "climate change" or "climate disruption", they're speaking of anthropogenic global warming, not the more profound effects we have on our environment like desertification, habitat destruction, or pollution.
One has to skip over a bunch of bigger human problems to obsess over climate change.
The only questions should be "How bad is it?", and I might agree with you that there's enough money on the table for all parties that it has to be taken with a grain of salt, and a realization that most of us would rather perish than go back to living in caves.
In light of what I just mentioned, I think a related question to ask is "How bad is it compared to our other problems?"
If they're supporting nuclear then they aren't environmentalists.
And do you have a reason for saying this?
Yes, the plants have a different design and they don't have the same level of risk. But they still have a certain lifetime and then you don't know what the fuck to do with the tons of contaminated metal and concrete.
You could always make them part of the next plant or just stick them in a hole in the ground. Ground water pollution especially from low grade contaminated material like this is ridiculously overrated.
The real elephant in the room is conservation, but addicts don't want to give up their fix.
The problem with this thoughtless suggestion is that we are all energy "addicts" because we need to be in order to survive and actually do things. We are just as much air addicts or food addicts. There's always someone out there who thinks the world never has realized that energy consumption has a cost to the consumer and that it would be possible to reduce that cost by consuming less energy. The world keeps consuming energy because there are better things to do out there than merely consume less energy.
The simple goal should be to spew as little as possible, regardless of the potential issues.
More benefit for the cost might not be as simple a goal, but it works better in the long run. If "spew as little as possible" means a less shiny future (which I think is the case for the developed world which has eliminated most of the externalities of pollution IMHO), then that's a pretty nasty tradeoff.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting how such garbage passes for science these days. A counterexample to the bizarre claim that species can only adapt to climate changes of a mere 1C per million years is that a number of species have already adapted to the presence of the human automobile such as insects and spiders, weeds with seeds, and carrion eating birds. The story grudgingly mentions these counterexamples in passing as "invasive species" and "pests".
Another thing to consider is that a species can achieve an average temperature change of 1C by a move of roughly 200 meters in vertical distance or a move of 300 km north or south. That's not hard to do in a century even for plants or slow moving animals like snails.
Third, we see temperature change rates far in excess of 1C per million years due to the Ice Age. Yet there are living things in places which were covered by ice only 10k years ago. These organisms didn't adapt by living under a km of ice and then adapting to the present environment. They adapted by being elsewhere and moving in after the ice retreated. Temperature changes far in excess of 1C per million years were readily adapted to via mobility not just as a theoretical possibility as allowed by the previous paragraph.
Fourth, there's no mention of number of generations. Organisms don't all live to the same age and breed at the same point in time. Species with faster breeding cycles will adapt faster, all else being equal. A more adequate measure of adaptability to temperature change would be temperature change per generation, not per unit time.
Finally, how would these researchers know what the temperature range was past recent human history? Paleoclimate, the study of climate before the era of modern instrumentation is a notorious, making-shit-up area of climatology.
I think people like you should be held liable for your statements.
I take it, Mr. Anonymous that you don't hold yourself to the same standard.
Just like yelling "fire" in a crowd and inciting a riot that ends up getting people trampled, your comments could result in inaction which most definitely will result in human loss of life and property.
It's not just like that. First, "yelling fire" is a case of knowingly uttering a false statement. If you yelled "fire" because there actually was a fire and you were sincerely trying to warn people, then you are immune to indemnity.
Second, yelling "fire" is a case of causing panic. That would be in line with the approach of climate alarmism not climate denialism. After all, what panic is caused when I claim, sincerely or not, that we probably shouldn't act on climate concerns because we don't know for sure? OTOH, if I say that "climate change will make the planet uninhabitable within the next few hundred years" that sounds a lot more likely to me to cause panic. Or claiming that species can't adapt at a "approximately the speed of AGW divided by 10,000". Sounds a lot more scary.
"Climate change" was a heritage foundation focus group identified term to make the phenomenon seem less scary to average americans.
Where's the evidence for this claim?
and scientists picked it up because things like changing ocean currents would actually cool some(very regional) places, and it was deemed more accurate.
Not on a scientific basis. "Anthropogenic global warming" describes both an effect and a cause of that effect. Climate change merely is a change in climate (subject to some nuance as described below) without any attribution of the phenomena or a model to which to attribute the phenomena.
Modify the first label to "anthropogenic global warming with ocean acidification" and you describe virtually all uses of the term, "climate change".
And what does "change" mean to a system which is always changing? For example, a number of well known behaviors such as solar activity, ocean current oscillations, and orbital/planetary rotation dynamics are by their nature changing. What climate change is considered climate change?
From what I gather, even in honest efforts, the attempt here is to classify changes in climate in two categories, ongoing patterns and changes due to fundamental alteration of the inputs to the climate dynamical system such as non-pattern changes in solar output or human generated CO2 in the atmosphere. The latter is termed "climate change".
The problem at this level with this is that most uses of "climate change" don't distinguish between pattern and fundamental change because they can't. Sometimes they don't actually see any evidence of climate change, yet still make the unwarranted attribution.
Further, why does using a far vaguer label become more scientifically appropriate just because a global model has a moderately unintuitive outcome such as regional cooling? Global warming doesn't stop being global warming just because there are cases of regional cooling.
We could fix this problem easily with barely any significant change to our style of life.
Because ponies. Just because you want something doesn't mean it magically becomes a good thing to get, especially for everyone else.
So far, the current efforts to restructure energy infrastructure to cause less global warming have resulted in a doubling of certain types of energy in parts of Europe. For example, petroleum prices have more or less doubled over the US prices in Europe. Similarly, residential electricity prices in Germany (note that Germany and Denmark, both with heavily subsidized, high share "green" power generation, have electricity pricing on par with small island nations), a hotbed of anti-AGW activity have doubled over their more conservative neighbors. That's a lot of losers out there.
and the losers will be big oil/coal companies
In today's world, we have unprecedented efforts to curb global warming and... record oil industry profits. Something's wrong with the model, Jim.
I see a lot of losers in Europe and not many losers in Exxon, for example. Maybe things don't work like you think they work.
Meanwhile, they tell themselves a story about how CO2 isn't a pollutant, and doing anything would be communism, and therefore morally wrong.
While there's another equally valid story about how CO2 is a "pollutant", is set to cause vast harm in the hazy, not-so-distant future which never seems to come around, and anyone who thinks differently holds primitive, chest-beating beliefs that should be mocked.
To be equivalent I would have to have said that Exxon's product was completely fraudulent, their fuels don't really work and they are engaged in a massive conspiracy to cover up the fact that their fuels do not actually combust and drive internal combustion engines in the way that Exxon claims they do. Instead, everybody who uses Exxon fuel has been paid off and everybody employed by Exxon has been paid off so that Exxon can sell something other than petroleum to an unsuspecting public, for some reason not specified.
To be equivalent we need several additions things. First, an honest admission from you that Exxon might under those circumstances actually be pulling off this fraud not merely an implicit assumption that they can't possibly do so. There's no equivalence without recognizing the fundamental conflict of interest and the capability to carry off the fraud in question.
Second, Exxon would be funding virtually all scientific research into the efficacy of its fuels.
Third, the people who "use" Exxon's products have a huge financial incentive to go along with the fraud. Who are the corresponding parties who "use" climate change? They are the many parties (including most climate scientists BTW) who obtain funding or profit merely because climate change is seen by the public of the world as a serious threat. The very revenue streams that fund these customers of climate change, fund the researchers who are allegedly impartially evaluating the extent and risks of particular forms of climate change.
My view is that kind of money (such as 34 billion euros per year) buys a lot of climate change research with plenty to spare.
The greenhouse effect is something that causes the earth to retain heat.
The greenhouse effect is a important consequence of those dynamics that cause Earth to retain heat (see its definition, I'm not making this up). It's not the dynamics themselves. And it happens to not be climate change only in the case where its "contributing factors" happen to be in "balance". So are the greenhouse effect's contributing factors in balance today?
I wager you would say no. That consistent, long term warming, which is the greenhouse effect, in today's imbalanced world is a change of the world's climate just by itself, not even counting the effects it spurs in turn. The greenhouse effect is climate change.
You clearly perceive yourself to be right because you don't understand what you're talking about, so aren't even aware of how your statements are false. I don't think it will be worth discussing any farther until you consider the very basic inaccuracy of your statements.
Follow your own advice. You have yet to state a reason why you think I'm wrong.
To elaborate on my point in my first paragraph above, you conflate the causes of the greenhouse effect with the effect itself. The retention of heat is the greenhouse effect not the dynamics of the Earth-Sun system that lead to that retention of heat. Similarly, the current warming of the Earth due to the energy imbalance in this system is the greenhouse effect not the factors that lead to that imbalance.
The greenhouse effect is climate change. Sure, it's not the only climate change and it is reasonable to expect climate changes to cause further climate changes. But when someone uses the term, "climate change" these days, stuff like the greenhouse effect is what they are referring to. I personally prefer something like anthropogenic global warming since it more accurately describes the climate change that is being discussed (outside of ocean acidification) and the human contribution to that climate change.
Why is it that I'm the one getting called out on the dichotomy and not the person who actually made the false dichotomy in the first place? I even quoted the problem statement in question.
Six problems not three. Sure, the human race can concern itself with a lot more than six problems and those problems don't actually need to exist in order to be bothered with. But there's this thing called trade offs. One can't optimally solve all these problems at the same time. Resources expended on combating global warming can't be used to alleviate poverty or address desertification.
And some of the proposed solutions to global warming are in themselves rather destructive, such as the radical restructuring of the world's energy infrastructure or the replacement of considerable food production with biofuel production (without regard to the value of the biofuels produced).
Finally, these bigger problems in themselves can undermine attempts to fight global warming and other environmental issues. China currently is the fastest growing generator of CO2 responsible for at least half of the global growth in CO2 production in recent years. They do so because growing their country and improving the well being of their citizens is more important to them than the effects of global warming.
Massive oil subsidies are one way that many corrupt governments stay in power. And of course, we wouldn't have a global warming problem in the first place without overpopulation.
I think it's reasonable to ask that we set priorities with the worst problems addressed first as best we can.
In that context, the Greenhouse Effect is, in fact, a cause.
I've already explained my side adequately. Keep in mind also that the global warming from the greenhouse effect is a climate change and is the one most often referred to when someone rhetorically uses the term, "climate change".
I don't know what the previous poster intended, but that indicates to me that there actually wasn't any incentive by anyone with power to seriously question the ozone depletion theory. If it turns out that ozone destruction by man-made CFCs weren't really a problem (and that the ozone hole is just as big as it was prior to human civilization), then we just made a costly restructuring of our world for little reason.
For me, the big warning sign here as with "climate change" is that serious observation of the problem is extremely recent. We have only acquired the technology to study in detail the ozone layer and its depletion roughly forty years ago. We don't know what's normal in the absence of human activity.
The problem with that is that "the greenhouse effect" is a *cause*, but "climate change" is a *result* -- they're two different things.
You're lecturing the wrong person.
All that trolling aside, your entire premise is a false dichotomy: you suggest that an event can either be a cause or an effect; not both.
The false dichotomy isn't mine. From the original post:
The problem with that is that "the greenhouse effect" is a *cause*, but "climate change" is a *result* -- they're two different things.
But greenhouse effect is the most significant part of "climate change". One can't make that neat distinction between cause and result as you note and one way to rebut the above argument is to note that the greenhouse effect is by definition a result or consequence.
Realistically, the problem with a name change is that politics more than anything else -- calling it by yet another name will make the conspiracy theorists think that you're trying to hide or obfuscate something (the link talks about Benghazi, but the ideas apply to climate change too), and while that's not true, the end result is still that it overall causes people to take the problem less seriously. I think we should stick with "climate change".
I disagree for two reasons. First, something like anthropogenic global warming is far more descriptive. Note that all the discussion of "climate change" is about global warming. It's not about the other ways humanity can change its environment such as desertification.
That leads to scientifically perverse rhetoric like blaming the recent Syrian drought on a variety of things and "climate change" as well. The very first thing they mentioned in that article was "combined with the mismanagement of natural resources by [Syrian President Bashar] Assad, who subsidized water-intensive crops like wheat and cotton farming and promoted bad irrigation techniques". Those things induce substantial massive climate change in their own right, such as record-breaking droughts. So their use of the term, climate change in this case doesn't actually include the obvious profound climate changing effects of resource mismanagement. So what does "climate change" refer to, if it doesn't actually refer to climate change?
Second, this really is about propaganda. I think the whole point of the use of vague phrases like "climate change" or the more alarming, "climate disruption" is to enable a lot of confirmation bias such as happened with the "extreme weather" of last winter in the northern hemisphere. The next odd or destructive weather story can now be woven rhetorically into the "climate change" narrative.
You just argued a definition that is wholly unrelated to climatology
What is the greenhouse effect?
warming of the surface and lower atmosphere of a planet (as Earth or Venus) that is caused by conversion of solar radiation into heat in a process involving selective transmission of short wave solar radiation by the atmosphere, its absorption by the planet's surface, and reradiation as infrared which is absorbed and partly reradiated back to the surface by atmospheric gases
We see from the description of global warming that the second definition actually is the appropriate one to use.
And yes, I'm going to lecture you on the relevancy of your previous post. This whole argument could have been rendered irrelevant by you understanding the words in question.
There isn't anything here relevant to the thread. You are wasting your time with your alleged "can of worms".
20% of 960GEUR is 192GEUR, not 30GEUR.
Over a six year period. Annually, it's 34 billion euro per year.
But that is spending on "emissions mitigation and climate adaptation actions", not science.
I didn't say otherwise.
So you have anything to contribute? I'll name three more bigger problems than AGW, poverty, corruption, and overpopulation. Maybe you should spend less time being concerned about "concern trolls" and more time using that stump on the top of your shoulders.
There are a billion people in the EU.
Half a billion people roughly. But going by your reasoning, there's only $34 dollars of Exxon profit per person in the EU, three days parking and all that. That must mean that $34 billion per year is not a lot of money, amirite? Why is it that a lot of money is a lot of money when it is earned by Exxon, but not when it comes from the EU?
Well, your contention is that every one of them is corrupt.
I missed that. Good thing we have you to do my thinking and talking for me.
For a 150 years, form Fourier, Tyndal, Arrhenius all the way to the present. Every scientist - every physicist, chemist, biologist. This does seem hard to accept.
Or that your reasoning is deeply flawed and irrelevant to any discussion we might have on the subject. I find that more likely. Note that every scientist you mention above didn't actually do any work with today's multidimensional climate simulations. Arrhenius, the only one who actually did a relatively modern climate model, worked with a primitive one-dimensional radiative model.
And it is laughable to suggest that these historical scientists have something to do with today's consistent bias in predictive models towards exaggerating the effects of AGW (especially given that the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration is in addition generally somewhat worse than predicted by those models). All those scientists with those erroneous models are funded by the entities spending all those dollars and euros per head, not by Exxon.
Personally, I think Exxon and similar businesses are profiting immensely from the current level of climate alarmism. But perhaps a business making only a measly $34 billion a year (it's less than $5 per person globally!) just can't afford decent propaganda.
From the outside, it's very difficult to tell the difference between these two approaches, at least until years after it ceases to matter. But they are different.
It's a huge, blatantly obvious difference once you include the human tendency to make virtuous that which benefits yourself or furthers your interests.
(I have seen no evidence of conspiracies to promote phlogiston chemistry, for instance.)
But I have seen evidence of a conspiracy (well more of a blatant abuse of government power than anything remotely covert) to promote Lysenkoism. High stakes change the game.
In related news, Exxon Mobile made 34 billion dollars of profits last year. Koch Industries had $115B in revenue and unknown profits.
And the EU is dumping 30 billion euros every year through 2020 on explicit climate change related spending. That's a lot of money too.
Further, do we actually have any evidence that the current climate change hubbub is not profitable for Exxon or the Koch brothers? Record profits in the face of growing climate change efforts doesn't strike me as a sign that they're going to do poorly under the new regime. It's just been assumed that they won't do well. Maybe we should look at this evidence.
Yeah, those college professors will step on their mother's neck to keep that 48 thousand bucks a year coming.
They get more than that. They get staff, power, prestige, and easy living. And more than $48k per year, if they can rope a big grant. And you know what? College professors are human. I bet you can find some that are of that less noble, mother-trodding sort.
One has to skip over a bunch of bigger human problems to obsess over climate change.
The only questions should be "How bad is it?", and I might agree with you that there's enough money on the table for all parties that it has to be taken with a grain of salt, and a realization that most of us would rather perish than go back to living in caves.
In light of what I just mentioned, I think a related question to ask is "How bad is it compared to our other problems?"
If they're supporting nuclear then they aren't environmentalists.
And do you have a reason for saying this?
Yes, the plants have a different design and they don't have the same level of risk. But they still have a certain lifetime and then you don't know what the fuck to do with the tons of contaminated metal and concrete.
You could always make them part of the next plant or just stick them in a hole in the ground. Ground water pollution especially from low grade contaminated material like this is ridiculously overrated.
The real elephant in the room is conservation, but addicts don't want to give up their fix.
The problem with this thoughtless suggestion is that we are all energy "addicts" because we need to be in order to survive and actually do things. We are just as much air addicts or food addicts. There's always someone out there who thinks the world never has realized that energy consumption has a cost to the consumer and that it would be possible to reduce that cost by consuming less energy. The world keeps consuming energy because there are better things to do out there than merely consume less energy.
Pollution.
The simple goal should be to spew as little as possible, regardless of the potential issues.
More benefit for the cost might not be as simple a goal, but it works better in the long run. If "spew as little as possible" means a less shiny future (which I think is the case for the developed world which has eliminated most of the externalities of pollution IMHO), then that's a pretty nasty tradeoff.