I interpreted the line of yours I quoted to be a statement discrediting ex post facto behavior in general (not specifically criminal). If they are charging him criminally then yes you're hopefully right.
That said, there are exceptions that permit ex post facto law in the case of US Administrative Law. If I recall, he was working for the state of California. Not sure if that could affect his case or not, but I wouldn't' rule it out without doing some legal research.
While I agree that what's happening to him is likely unjust, I would like to point out something...
However, he cannot be prosecuted on the basis of actions he took at the time he had permission to take them.
I have to call bullshit here. Ex post facto laws are explicitly unconstitutional but that doesn't prevent government from passing laws which have ex post facto effects. To anyone who claims that there isn't a distinction, I must say that you obviously are not a lawyer. A good example is CERCLA: The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. If you dumped hazardous waste somewhere 50 years ago, hazardous waste which at the time was legal to dump where you dumped it, when you dumped it, you are NOT protected from legal action by the government. You WILL be held financially responsible for getting that mess cleaned up. Now in the case of CERCLA, I'd say that while it's harsh, it's necessary & justifiable. (Probably not so much so with the prosecution's case against Terry Childs).
You're citing an 1980 article from "Aramco World Magazine" to introduce a bunk story on par with lost-city-of-atlantis myths. It's not even a peer reviewed journal. It's a magazine. You're giving these Piri Reis maps much more credit than they deserve. You say they
closely resemble an ice-free Antarctica
but from what I just read the maps didn't even have a waterway between Antarctica and South America. An ice free antarctica should have a *huge* friggin' waterway there.
If these maps are correct, and there was no ice in the 1500's... how were these ice cores found?
They aren't correct. See above.
We have ice cores that we know go back more than 400,000 years. Give the guys who date these cores some credit. To me this iceless-antarctica idea just looks like a retired old historian/cartographer pushing a crackpot hypothesis. Yes, Antarctica wasn't always covered in ice, but that was millions of years ago.
No. Assuming the resesarch is all legit & valid (I don't feel like carefully reading their methods right now), this still isn't relevant to Global Climate Change because this didn't affect climate.
You've got short term weather. Then you've got the average/trend of weather over very long periods of time, which is the climate. A 3 year (eyeballing it from the graph) spike in nitrogen oxide concentrations isn't considered climate. An effect on Earth, yes it appears that way, but not one that yields biological consequences. That burst vanished as quickly as it appeared. This sorta of stuff isn't even close to causing mass extinctions or new selection pressures.
Besides, the CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions correlating pretty nicely with with the effects we're seeing, I'm not aware of any spikes in the temperature record that we need gamma ray bursts to explain.
H2O can be lethal in high enough concentrations too.
I understand the point you're trying to make, but citing death-by-water doesn't jive with me as that sort of lethality is more of the physical kind than chemical/toxilogical. It's like saying lead bullets are poisonous because when they tear through your torso you may die. You gotta be right for the right reason, and I get your intended point, I just think you could have picked a better argument there. But it's not a big deal I guess.
It is my understanding that the developing world stopped using thimerosal in most childhood vaccines about 10 years ago.
Technically any vaccines on shelves that had thimerosal in it were still okay'd for use, but they just didn't want any more to be made. But yeah, close enough.
If it was a significant contributing factor in autism, wouldn't we have seen a statistically significant drop in the autism rates by now? Oh shit -- we have seen a drop.
First off, the study is new to me, and after finding the original research cited by the website you linked I went straight to the end of the literature. Right before the "References" section there's a section saying:
"Potential conflict of interest: David Geier has been a consultant in vaccine/biologic cases before the no-fault National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) and in civil litigation. Dr. Mark Geier has been an expert witness and a consultant in vaccine/biologic cases before the no-fault NVICP and in civil litigation"
Now this in of itself doesn't discount their research. I'm not suggesting that. But please realize that a "potential conflict of interest" isn't worth ignoring either. It would certainly help your point if you could find more research along the same lines.
With regard to the actual research itself, well, I don't study medicine or human anatomy (not my field), so I'm less certain than I'd like to be in judging whether their statistical significance is legit. At a glance it looks like to me like the last scatter plots should plateau rather than sharply going downward (as his linear regression is plotted), but maybe its legit. His charts are incidents of autism against time. While that thing that looks like a peak two years after they discontinued the thimerosal seems to make his case, does the upslope support it as well? Does the thimerosal-vaccination rate increases in a way that correlates to incidents of autism? (I don't see that in the study). Surely if what they suggest is the case, there would be evidence in a vaccination-rate versus incidents of autism comparison. I feel like these guys had blinders on by only comparing things with respect to time.
You need the consensus of the scientific/medical community to prove thimerosal is harmful. The Institute of Medicine has officially concluded that there wasn't enough evidence to warrant blaming thimerosal for the autism incidents. That doesn't help, but I'm curious. How much peer-reviewed scientific literature can you dig up that corroborates this research?
I can't object to the part where they state
additional research should be undertaken concerning the effects of mercury exposure, particularly from TCVs
. More research certainly doesn't hurt (kinda goes without saying).
This is a tech forum. So I'm continuously disappointed (although not surprised anymore) that that so many here fail to understand that Science as a whole is not binary. Never has been and never will be because this world doesn't behave in such a convenient manner. Maybe since this website caters to the tech crowd coupled with the fact that (for the most part) computer science is a rare field where things are "relatively" (compared to the rest of science) cut and dry. There aren't as many mysteries in a field centered around well-understood and mass-manufactured machines. Don't assume that technology, programming and computer science are a reflection of how Science is, because it isn't.
On top of that, judges don't marry themselves to the scientific method because methods like that can hurt people too. Statistical correlation can be sufficient evidence to a judge or agency administrator. They strongly prefer cause-and-effect science, but they're not gonna allow something that's obviously toxic to get into people's food just because not enough researchers have had had enough time to study it because it's brand spanking new. Laws should be flexible enough to be interpreted, but rigid enough to remain true to the spirit of their intended purpose. The administrator's or judge's job is keeping people safe using the laws afforded to him. Being Science's bitch isn't in the job description.
**busts out a 2-inch thick Environmental Law book**
Environmental Regulation: Law, Science, and Policy By Percival, Schroeder, Miller, and Leape (fifth edition)
Chapter 3: Preventing Harm in the Face of Uncertainty
Page 176: Ethyl Corp. v. EPA: The short version is that some dudes want to keep putting lead in gasoline, but the EPA wants to stop them. It eventually goes to court. EPA eventually wins.
"Where a statute is a precautionary measure, the evidence difficult to come by, uncertain, or conflicting because it is on the frontiers of scientific knowledge the regulations designed to protect the public health, and the decision that of an expert administrator, we will not demand rigorous step-by-step proof of cause and effect. Such proof may be impossible to obtain if the precautionary purpose of the statute is to be served. Of course we are not suggesting that the Administrator has the power to act on hunches or wild guesses.... [H]is conclusions must be rationally justified....However, we do hold that in such cases the Administrator may assess risks. He must take account of available facts, of course, but his inquiry does not end there. The administrator may apply his expertise to draw conclusions from suspected, but not completely substantiated, relationships between facts, from trends among facts, from theoretical projections from imperfect data, from probative preliminary data not yet certifiable as "fact," and the like. We believe that a conclusion so drawn-a risk assessment-may, if rational, form the basis for health-related regulations under the "will endanger" language of Section 211.
Limiting false positives is the guiding principle of criminal law. The objective is to limit the chance of a false conviction....A principal reason for this is that liberty is a primary good, i.e., a good for the deprivation of which there is no adequate compensation. The asymmetrical results achieved by the criminal justice system are intentional and follow from the exceptional value placed on liberty... The costs of false negatives and false positives are asymmetrical for environmental risk [that is, the feared harm greatly exceeds the benefits of the risky activity] as well, but the asymmetry is in reverse order. For environmental risk, the asymmetrically high cost arises from a false negative: in criminal law from a false positive. Similarly, just as a primary good, liberty is an important concern in criminal law, so another primary good, health is an important concern in environmental risk m
Mercury is toxic as a pure element, in some inorganic forms, and especially organic forms. It's usually just a case of how toxic it is, which varies between reasonably safe (an amalgam with another metal) to horrifyingly shit-your-pants-scary organic forms (a drop or two of dimethylmercury on your hand will kill you, even if you're wearing gloves).
Make no mistake about it, thimerosal is a toxic form of mercury. (read the wikipedia article you linked on it, or an MSDS safety sheet for the compound). Think about it. The entire reason they put it in vaccines was to prevent the vaccine from becoming contaminated by infectious microorganisms. It makes living things stop living. Its toxicity is the only thing that makes it useful.
The question isn't whether or not it is toxic (it obviously is).
It's whether or not thimerosal at concentrations which are used in vaccines was a contributing factor to autism (a very different question). Currently it appears pretty certain that it wasn't a cause. (But don't get comfortable with that conclusion until medical researchers finally identified the specific mechanic(s) that causes autism as this is an extremely puzzling disease to understand).
To avoid unpullig wires, couldn't you just just cut the garden-hose open down its length, wrap it around the wires, then glue/tape the hose shut? (I'm not familiar with the subject, so I'm merely speculating).
When your pretty graph goes back "millions" of years, then you might have a point, but 400k out of 3.5 billion years, this is about as useful as grabbing a handful of random people from a barney the dinosaur concert and using them to stereotype the other 6.5 billion people on the planet.
You overestimate how far back you have to go to realize the rate of increasing CO2 is a problem (not so much the level of CO2 as much as the speed at which we get there). The fossil fuels come from ancient organic matter that's formed and been sequestered underground over many millions of years. It happened very very slowly. Humans have taken millions of years worth of coal and oil, and reintroduced all that ancient carbon back into the biosphere. We'll have returned all that ancient carbon into the environment within a mere couple hundred years. That's pretty damn abrupt in geologic time scales, and a shift in carbon levels will have never occurred that quickly before. And yes while CO2 concentrations for millions of years ago are interesting (such data has been reconstructed for the Phanerozoic at least, that I know of) it describes a vastly different world. The more you shuffle the continents to where they used to be, the less like our world it is. A focus on the more recent half-million years is warranted over the last 500 million. For example, we want to know what melting glaciers will to THIS Earth's albedo, not the Triassic Earth.
Also, your CO2 graph is not the same as many others available in your average google search.
Cite them. I'm willing to bet they're simply in different units, use a different range or scale, or may even use a different proxy for CO2 concentrations than ice cores. Keep in mind, that graph was compiled from multiple sources of data (sources of data correspond to the color of the line). You don't need to use an ice core to tell you what the temperature was 20 years ago.
I don't disagree that humans are spewing shit in to the atmosphere, and common sense says this can't be good, but as others have pointed out, there is a whole lot more to this climate change than just CO2.
We also put out lots of methane and other greenhouse gases besides CO2 actually. CO2 just happens to be the primary cause of the warming because we put out so much more of it than other gasses.
A great way to figure out bias from unscientific agendas is to see who funds them. It's actually easier than you may think.
For example: If a guy cites research that says "mercury levels in tuna aren't above normal and are perfectly safe" you can bet that something like the United States Tuna Foundation (which represents industry interests) will show up in their "acknowledgements" section of the paper.
There is a trap here, however. To be published in a peer reviewed journal, your peers have to agree to it
No.
They don't evaluate what is published based on the conclusions of the research. They evaluate it based on the entire paper. If your methods are sound, regardless of wether or not your conclusion is status quo, it can be published. If they reject it, they tell the author why, and "I don't like the results" won't be a good enough reason to get rejected by every single journal you could attempt to publish in. Scientists are actually pretty used to new ideas which are contrary to the norm. (remember plate tectonics, sun-centric-solar-systems, evolution, general relativity, quantum mechanics?)
The ice core data is legit. You're not a climatologist. You're not a paleoclimatologist. They did their homework. Don't pretend that you somehow know more than they do unless you've got your own data and methods to publish.
At least twice in history, CO2 levels have shot up higher than they are today[...]
Not within the last 400,000 years covered by that chart it didn't. Before then, many millions upon millions of years ago it has, but that Earth is a very different Earth. You don't want Paleozoic CO2 levels imposed upon present day ecosystems in less time that it could have occurred naturally. It's bad in terms of evolution. Even IF CO2 didn't cause warming, it will cause other problems (ocean acidification, and many plants will likely have difficulty retaining water as elevated CO2 can cause the pores in the leaves to transpire more). Evolution works, but only so quickly.
CO2 levels have shot up higher than they are today, in very short periods of time.
Not in as-short periods of time as we've had present CO2 shoot up. The slope of that line is higher than any slope elsewhere. If you don't believe me, you can download CO2 concentrations from several places, throw them all into a spreadsheet, and calculate the delta-CO2 ppm. All the data is publicly available as txt files.
Something that isn't clear, is whether CO2 levels preceded temperature increases, or the other way around.
Oh not at all. It's quite clear. You just don't know what you're talking about. It's also abundantly clear you don't study climatology, environmental science or physics. You are actually entertaining the idea that the Earth first retains more heat than normal, THEN the heat-trapping gases follow. Please explain the physics that would allow for such a thing to be remotely plausible.
It is indisputable that our fossil fuels account for the increase in CO2, as the correlation with the industrial revolution is damning. We also know that CO2 is opaque to thermal radiation. We can take a thermal camera, put it behind a glass container of CO2, and not see heat through the camera. I'm pretty sure we've never magically seen thermal radiation get blocked by a tank of warming air, then seen the CO2 concentration in that air spike as a result. Admittedly, I could be wrong since magic, sorcery, and thermodynamic witchcraft aren't fields I research in.
And, no, solar activity has NOT been dismantled. It HAS been cast into disrepute by the "consensus". But, popular opinion does not make science.
Nobody here suggested popular opinion made the science. The popular opinion of the scientific community makes the science (as established through years of peer-reviewed published literature). That's how science works. If you've got a more scientific approach to global warming than those people did, by all means, enlighten us.
"75 of 77 climate scientists who are active publishers on climate change said yes." Re-read that sentence. Read it again, carefully. One more time, please. Can you see now, that only certain select scientists are being held forth as an example of some "consensus"?
You do realize that there can be lots of people who earned a degree studying climate & meteorology, then moved on to be weatherman (or something) and stopped giving a crap about scientific research, right? Well, that's why you just ask the scientists are are publishing. Research and publishing go hand in hand. They're the ones that'll know the most. Did you major in any field of science? Because if so, you should have known that. Anyway, you appear to have not read the article you yourself cited.
In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change [...] Of these specialists, 96.2 % answered "risen" to question 1 and 97.4% answered yes to question 2.
The bold part there should have been a clue for you. Scientists who actively publish are doing real scientific research. If you're doing scientific research on something, you're gonna know more about that something than people who don't.
Ice core data tells us what the CO2 concentrations used to be. We can reconstruct atmospheric conditions for hundreds of thousands of years into the past. Lets consult the ice core data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png
Gee... looks like the CO2 started to shoot up during the industrial revolution. I'm pretty sure industrial revolutions are man-made things, but double check me on that just to be sure. While Earth has had CO2/temperature/etc fluctuate throughout history, the recent rate of CO2 concentration has increased at a clearly unnatural rate. And this "it's caused by the sun" argument was been thoroughly dismantled. The solar-variance explanation predicts a warming of the stratosphere. Global warming predicts a cooling of the stratosphere. Guess what? The stratosphere has been cooling.
How much peer-reviewed scientific literature do you see published per year that contradicts the anthropogenic global-warming explanation?
Nobody likes walking away from a fight they're tired of dealing with, so when they try to, they often try to assert their themselves on their way out, as you did with a self-congratulatory assertion of my argument's invalidity. If you don't start off your presence in the discussion by flaming people you disagree with, such things won't be necessary to do in the future.
My original argument (on post #26661837) was that mercury in CFL's are a real problem, as thogard originally pointed out. Just because he's wrong about what type they put into the CFL-blub doesn't change that microorganisms turn elemental mercury into methylmercury and it eventually gets into the fish.
Nobody likes it when their cherry-picked, industry-funded citation gets rebutted, so you reacted by playing it off as a change of subject. Please realize that criticizing a citation used as a supporting evidence is nothing unordinary, and in fact, should be expected if the citation is from a questionable source. Don't pretend like you wouldn't have called me out if I had cited a questionable study written by a bunch of wannabe researchers from greenpeace. You would have, and you'd have been right for it too.
Now if you're continue to react as predictably as you have thus far, you'll respond with yet another angry last word. Go ahead, I won't respond again. I can lace my arguments with angry disrespectful indignation just as easily as you can, but it doesn't actually further the collective understanding of the risks associated with mercury contamination.
Here's is a source I'm posting for you to read. I'm offering this document to you because I found it genuinely informative, interesting, and appears to be a pretty comprehensive read on the entire subject of mercury toxicity. I'm not "throwing" this document at you to assert who's right/wrong (and to prove it I'm not going to quote its contents publicly). http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp46.pdf It's a huge document (sorry), so I suggest text-searching for keywords to navigate it, like stuff we've been talking about (sources, toxicity, fluorescent, etc) but text-searches won't work on some of the data tables (i.e. pg 393, table 5-4) which are some of the most informative parts. The parts that aren't actually text-searchable are best located via the table of contents.
"Tuna sampling and analysis was organized and paid for by the USTF (United States Tuna Foundation)"... They happen to be the guys who's job it is to whine when the FDA does its job by telling women to avoid types of fish which are known to have higher concentrations of methylmercury (like tunas): http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~acrobat/hgstak58.pdf "Based on a United States Tuna Foundation (USTF) and National Fisheries Institute (NFI) joint evaluation on methylmercury in fish advisories, we believe it is premature to adopt the Environmental Protection Agencyâ(TM)s (EPA) reference dose (RfD) as a basis for consumer advice".
Yeah, they sound like a great source of unbiased scientific funding eh?
Is it any surprise that they chose to do their research off of Hawaii, when "Environments that are known to favor the production of methylmercury include certain types of wetlands, dilute low-pH lakes in Northeast and Northcentral United States, parts of the Florida Everglades, newly flooded reservoirs, and coastal wetlands, particularly along the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Ocean, and San Francisco Bay." (http://www.usgs.gov/themes/factsheet/146-00/) Notice Hawaii wasn't in there. Using exceptions to prove rules isn't usually a sound idea.
Sorry, mercury in marine fish does not come from coal fired power plants [cosis.net], or for that matter almost any other human activity (except in special cases like Minimata).
Freshwater contamination by Hg is solely a result of improperly dumped industrial liquid waste.
Any reason you're trying to omit marine considerations when you selected the word "freshwater"? I mean, that is where we get our tuna isn't it? Not to mention most of the other contaminated fish.
You've just made a shameless attempt to take me out of context so I'm going to make it harder for you to get away with. When I said
"It really doesn't matter what type of mercury is in those bulbs."
it was in the context of suggesting any mercury in bulbs is dangerous. So countering it with the tidbit about dimethylmercury-is-super-lethal is merely an attempt at misdirecting my stance on the issues. I never suggested that any form of mercury in those CFL bulbs would be safe. By the way, you're flat out wrong about its lethal dose of dimethylmercury (it's about 0.001 ml). Being inaccurate by several orders of magnitude hopefully isn't indicative of how much you know about toxicity and the previous topic of environmental contamination to which you responded to (thogard's post). A single drop of the stuff can penetrate latex gloves and kill you (as was in the famous case with Professor Karen Wetterhahn).
your claim that "All forms of it that get into the environment do eventually turn into the very type that hurts us most." is equally stupid.
"get into the environment" implies we're talking about anthropogenic mercury (you can't "get into" something you're already in). The rising concentrations of mercury wouldn't be getting into fish and us if we we didn't have industrial applications for it which lead to us taking it out of places where it has previously existed undisturbed. It's kinda like this: Sometimes asbestos tiles (the harmful type of asbestoes) can actually be better left in a building rather than trying to rip it out, as the process of removal will create more floating particulates than if you had left it. You're muddying the difference between cycled contaminants and sequestered/bound contaminants. Mercury in cinnabar that's left alone isn't going to raise mercury levels in fish/humans. Digging it up for light bulbs does. That said, it's the lesser of two evils since coal power plants put out so much mercury that CFL's longer lifespans and greater efficiency offset their inherent mercury content.
most metallic mercury "entering the environment" (where do you think it came from? mars?) is not converted to organometallic form.
Why do you think that its specifically fish contaminating us? That's the only reason we're have rising human [Hg] concentrations. It's because of the aquatic microorganisms converting it to methylmercury. The process is actually well understood.
it's oxidized to HgO which is insoluble and largely inert.
I pulled up the chemical hazard sheets and looked up HgO. It has the following chemical warnings: R26/27/28: Very toxic by inhalation, in contact with skin and if swallowed. R33: Danger of cumulative effects R39/24/25: Toxic: danger of very serious irreversible effects in contact with skin and if swallowed S61: Avoid release to the environment.
Oh yeah, sounds REALLY inert me! I suppose you're okay with that stuff getting into your family's water supply then?
Inorganic mercury in the environment (wether it's by burning coal at power plants or from light bulbs) eventually reaches soils, which get wet with water, and as most of the water on land eventually does, washes into aquatic systems (water cycle).
Microorganisms in the aquatic environment then convert it to methylmercury (what he was talking about).
After that, it's the same old story you already know: Aquatic system is contaminated so the mercury (actually methylmercury) bioaccumulates its way up the food chain until it gets to the humans who eat the fish. The higher up the food chain the carnivore is, the more toxic their exposure is. This should be of personal concern to you if you are a whale, shark, big fish (like tuna) or human.
It really doesn't matter what type of mercury is in those bulbs.
All forms of it that get into the environment do eventually turn into the very type that hurts us most.
These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least 30 scientific societies and academies of science,[6] including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.[7][8][9]
While a small minority have voiced disagreement with these findings,[10] the overwhelming majority of scientists working on climate change agree with the IPCC's main conclusions.[11][12]
And honestly, I was being lazy and just quoting Wikipedia which hardly took any effort. Now imagine if you weren't being stubbornly predisposed in your opinion how easily you could have affirmed the scientific community's consensus yourself instead of wasting my time.
The best way to realize how strong the consensus is, is by looking at all the peer-reviewed literature published in scientific journals each year and tally up how many are dealing with global warming related studies and how many (if any) are attempting to contest global warming.
Honestly, I know you are wrong. (yes, I do study environmental science).
I'm gonna have to very strongly disagree with your first two sentences because it's full of all sorts of wrong. (nothing to contest in the rest of your post though).
The bleaching is due to heat and pollution stresses that aren't obviously related to CO2. It's happening, but that's a separate problem.
1) Heat damages coral. Heat is elevated by global warming. Global warming is caused by excess CO2. I'm comfortable saying that looks like it's obviously related. 2) CO2 is the very cause of oceanic acidification!
"Ocean acidification is the name given to the ongoing decrease in the pH of the Earth's oceans, caused by their uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
"The narrow niche that coral occupies, and the stony corals' reliance on calcium carbonate deposition, means they are very susceptible to changes in water pH. Ocean acidification, caused by dissolution of carbon dioxide in the water that lowers pH, is currently occurring in the surface waters of the world's oceans due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Lowered pH reduces the ability of corals to produce calcium carbonate skeletons, and at the extreme, results in the dissolution of those skeletons entirely."
You sound like a reasonable person, so I'm guessing you simply never had a reason to study the issue, and worked off what you considered reasonable assumptions. Yeah, it happens. This also highlights the unfortunate fact that environmental scientists need to do more to educate the public, not just on what to do & what not to do, but the science explaining why.
Hardly analogous to the current situation given that the scientific community is pretty much all in agreement on the issue. Telling a scientist that global warming is a hoax is like telling them evolution is a hoax.
The current problem scientists have had with the media is convincing them to not talk about the issue in an overly "even handed" approach, as the large body of evidence & literature doesn't warrant giving both views equal weight anymore. Much of the perceived disagreement of scientists is manufactured by journalist who don't know jack about science, much less, how to do a good job reporting on it. Also, the current media nowadays is biased toward sensationalism, and to many of them global warming is merely a topic they can use to facilitate debate, which improves tv ratings.
At this point most of the real disagreement among scientists is only concerning the specific details on how climate change will affect specific regions, how severely, and how quickly. On average temps may be warmer, but how the net warmth is distributed is projected to change, and with it precipitation patterns. Even worse, there's the risk of the global thermohaline current slowing/stopping, which would definitely have poor consequences.
Ice core data's CO2 concentrations have actually provided a much stronger correlation with temperature than any solar activity has. (It amazes me when people think the scientific community would have overlooked such things). If in fact our temperature were being more strongly influenced by the sun than by CO2, then the stratosphere should be become warmer when the rest of the atmosphere warms too (a very testable prediction of the solar activity idea). As it happens, the stratosphere has gotten cooler, while the temperatures on a global average have been warming.
Attributing global warming & climate change to just solar activity is wishful thinking.
I assume you really meant to type two different pH levels when you said "minute change from pH8 to pH8", because 8 to 8 is not a change.
Assuming that's true, even if your pH only changes by -+1, it's a big deal because the scale is logarithmic.
Also, what you accuse of being a myth is a widely observed problem in the ocean. Corals ARE bleaching in very large numbers. How you can contest something as simple as that shows how little you've looked into the issue. Just because you don't like a fact doesn't mean you can ignore it.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you tried doing this yet?
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool FALSE
I interpreted the line of yours I quoted to be a statement discrediting ex post facto behavior in general (not specifically criminal). If they are charging him criminally then yes you're hopefully right.
That said, there are exceptions that permit ex post facto law in the case of US Administrative Law. If I recall, he was working for the state of California. Not sure if that could affect his case or not, but I wouldn't' rule it out without doing some legal research.
While I agree that what's happening to him is likely unjust, I would like to point out something...
However, he cannot be prosecuted on the basis of actions he took at the time he had permission to take them.
I have to call bullshit here. Ex post facto laws are explicitly unconstitutional but that doesn't prevent government from passing laws which have ex post facto effects. To anyone who claims that there isn't a distinction, I must say that you obviously are not a lawyer. A good example is CERCLA: The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. If you dumped hazardous waste somewhere 50 years ago, hazardous waste which at the time was legal to dump where you dumped it, when you dumped it, you are NOT protected from legal action by the government. You WILL be held financially responsible for getting that mess cleaned up. Now in the case of CERCLA, I'd say that while it's harsh, it's necessary & justifiable. (Probably not so much so with the prosecution's case against Terry Childs).
You're citing an 1980 article from "Aramco World Magazine" to introduce a bunk story on par with lost-city-of-atlantis myths. It's not even a peer reviewed journal. It's a magazine. You're giving these Piri Reis maps much more credit than they deserve. You say they
closely resemble an ice-free Antarctica
but from what I just read the maps didn't even have a waterway between Antarctica and South America. An ice free antarctica should have a *huge* friggin' waterway there.
If these maps are correct, and there was no ice in the 1500's... how were these ice cores found?
They aren't correct. See above.
We have ice cores that we know go back more than 400,000 years. Give the guys who date these cores some credit. To me this iceless-antarctica idea just looks like a retired old historian/cartographer pushing a crackpot hypothesis. Yes, Antarctica wasn't always covered in ice, but that was millions of years ago.
No. Assuming the resesarch is all legit & valid (I don't feel like carefully reading their methods right now), this still isn't relevant to Global Climate Change because this didn't affect climate.
You've got short term weather. Then you've got the average/trend of weather over very long periods of time, which is the climate. A 3 year (eyeballing it from the graph) spike in nitrogen oxide concentrations isn't considered climate. An effect on Earth, yes it appears that way, but not one that yields biological consequences. That burst vanished as quickly as it appeared. This sorta of stuff isn't even close to causing mass extinctions or new selection pressures.
Besides, the CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions correlating pretty nicely with with the effects we're seeing, I'm not aware of any spikes in the temperature record that we need gamma ray bursts to explain.
H2O can be lethal in high enough concentrations too.
I understand the point you're trying to make, but citing death-by-water doesn't jive with me as that sort of lethality is more of the physical kind than chemical/toxilogical. It's like saying lead bullets are poisonous because when they tear through your torso you may die. You gotta be right for the right reason, and I get your intended point, I just think you could have picked a better argument there. But it's not a big deal I guess.
It is my understanding that the developing world stopped using thimerosal in most childhood vaccines about 10 years ago.
Technically any vaccines on shelves that had thimerosal in it were still okay'd for use, but they just didn't want any more to be made. But yeah, close enough.
If it was a significant contributing factor in autism, wouldn't we have seen a statistically significant drop in the autism rates by now? Oh shit -- we have seen a drop.
First off, the study is new to me, and after finding the original research cited by the website you linked I went straight to the end of the literature. Right before the "References" section there's a section saying:
"Potential conflict of interest: David Geier has been a consultant in vaccine/biologic cases before the no-fault National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) and in civil litigation. Dr. Mark Geier has been an expert witness and a consultant in vaccine/biologic cases before the no-fault NVICP and in civil litigation"
Now this in of itself doesn't discount their research. I'm not suggesting that. But please realize that a "potential conflict of interest" isn't worth ignoring either. It would certainly help your point if you could find more research along the same lines.
With regard to the actual research itself, well, I don't study medicine or human anatomy (not my field), so I'm less certain than I'd like to be in judging whether their statistical significance is legit. At a glance it looks like to me like the last scatter plots should plateau rather than sharply going downward (as his linear regression is plotted), but maybe its legit. His charts are incidents of autism against time. While that thing that looks like a peak two years after they discontinued the thimerosal seems to make his case, does the upslope support it as well? Does the thimerosal-vaccination rate increases in a way that correlates to incidents of autism? (I don't see that in the study). Surely if what they suggest is the case, there would be evidence in a vaccination-rate versus incidents of autism comparison. I feel like these guys had blinders on by only comparing things with respect to time.
You need the consensus of the scientific/medical community to prove thimerosal is harmful. The Institute of Medicine has officially concluded that there wasn't enough evidence to warrant blaming thimerosal for the autism incidents. That doesn't help, but I'm curious. How much peer-reviewed scientific literature can you dig up that corroborates this research?
I can't object to the part where they state
additional research should be undertaken concerning the effects of mercury exposure, particularly from TCVs
. More research certainly doesn't hurt (kinda goes without saying).
This is a tech forum. So I'm continuously disappointed (although not surprised anymore) that that so many here fail to understand that Science as a whole is not binary. Never has been and never will be because this world doesn't behave in such a convenient manner. Maybe since this website caters to the tech crowd coupled with the fact that (for the most part) computer science is a rare field where things are "relatively" (compared to the rest of science) cut and dry. There aren't as many mysteries in a field centered around well-understood and mass-manufactured machines. Don't assume that technology, programming and computer science are a reflection of how Science is, because it isn't.
On top of that, judges don't marry themselves to the scientific method because methods like that can hurt people too. Statistical correlation can be sufficient evidence to a judge or agency administrator. They strongly prefer cause-and-effect science, but they're not gonna allow something that's obviously toxic to get into people's food just because not enough researchers have had had enough time to study it because it's brand spanking new. Laws should be flexible enough to be interpreted, but rigid enough to remain true to the spirit of their intended purpose. The administrator's or judge's job is keeping people safe using the laws afforded to him. Being Science's bitch isn't in the job description.
**busts out a 2-inch thick Environmental Law book**
Environmental Regulation: Law, Science, and Policy
By Percival, Schroeder, Miller, and Leape
(fifth edition)
Chapter 3: Preventing Harm in the Face of Uncertainty
Page 176: Ethyl Corp. v. EPA:
The short version is that some dudes want to keep putting lead in gasoline, but the EPA wants to stop them. It eventually goes to court. EPA eventually wins.
"Where a statute is a precautionary measure, the evidence difficult to come by, uncertain, or conflicting because it is on the frontiers of scientific knowledge the regulations designed to protect the public health, and the decision that of an expert administrator, we will not demand rigorous step-by-step proof of cause and effect. Such proof may be impossible to obtain if the precautionary purpose of the statute is to be served. Of course we are not suggesting that the Administrator has the power to act on hunches or wild guesses.... [H]is conclusions must be rationally justified....However, we do hold that in such cases the Administrator may assess risks. He must take account of available facts, of course, but his inquiry does not end there. The administrator may apply his expertise to draw conclusions from suspected, but not completely substantiated, relationships between facts, from trends among facts, from theoretical projections from imperfect data, from probative preliminary data not yet certifiable as "fact," and the like. We believe that a conclusion so drawn-a risk assessment-may, if rational, form the basis for health-related regulations under the "will endanger" language of Section 211.
Limiting false positives is the guiding principle of criminal law. The objective is to limit the chance of a false conviction....A principal reason for this is that liberty is a primary good, i.e., a good for the deprivation of which there is no adequate compensation. The asymmetrical results achieved by the criminal justice system are intentional and follow from the exceptional value placed on liberty...
The costs of false negatives and false positives are asymmetrical for environmental risk [that is, the feared harm greatly exceeds the benefits of the risky activity] as well, but the asymmetry is in reverse order. For environmental risk, the asymmetrically high cost arises from a false negative: in criminal law from a false positive. Similarly, just as a primary good, liberty is an important concern in criminal law, so another primary good, health is an important concern in environmental risk m
Mercury is toxic as a pure element, in some inorganic forms, and especially organic forms. It's usually just a case of how toxic it is, which varies between reasonably safe (an amalgam with another metal) to horrifyingly shit-your-pants-scary organic forms (a drop or two of dimethylmercury on your hand will kill you, even if you're wearing gloves).
Make no mistake about it, thimerosal is a toxic form of mercury. (read the wikipedia article you linked on it, or an MSDS safety sheet for the compound). Think about it. The entire reason they put it in vaccines was to prevent the vaccine from becoming contaminated by infectious microorganisms. It makes living things stop living. Its toxicity is the only thing that makes it useful.
The question isn't whether or not it is toxic (it obviously is).
It's whether or not thimerosal at concentrations which are used in vaccines was a contributing factor to autism (a very different question). Currently it appears pretty certain that it wasn't a cause. (But don't get comfortable with that conclusion until medical researchers finally identified the specific mechanic(s) that causes autism as this is an extremely puzzling disease to understand).
To avoid unpullig wires, couldn't you just just cut the garden-hose open down its length, wrap it around the wires, then glue/tape the hose shut? (I'm not familiar with the subject, so I'm merely speculating).
When your pretty graph goes back "millions" of years, then you might have a point, but 400k out of 3.5 billion years, this is about as useful as grabbing a handful of random people from a barney the dinosaur concert and using them to stereotype the other 6.5 billion people on the planet.
You overestimate how far back you have to go to realize the rate of increasing CO2 is a problem (not so much the level of CO2 as much as the speed at which we get there). The fossil fuels come from ancient organic matter that's formed and been sequestered underground over many millions of years. It happened very very slowly. Humans have taken millions of years worth of coal and oil, and reintroduced all that ancient carbon back into the biosphere. We'll have returned all that ancient carbon into the environment within a mere couple hundred years. That's pretty damn abrupt in geologic time scales, and a shift in carbon levels will have never occurred that quickly before.
And yes while CO2 concentrations for millions of years ago are interesting (such data has been reconstructed for the Phanerozoic at least, that I know of) it describes a vastly different world. The more you shuffle the continents to where they used to be, the less like our world it is. A focus on the more recent half-million years is warranted over the last 500 million. For example, we want to know what melting glaciers will to THIS Earth's albedo, not the Triassic Earth.
Also, your CO2 graph is not the same as many others available in your average google search.
Cite them. I'm willing to bet they're simply in different units, use a different range or scale, or may even use a different proxy for CO2 concentrations than ice cores. Keep in mind, that graph was compiled from multiple sources of data (sources of data correspond to the color of the line). You don't need to use an ice core to tell you what the temperature was 20 years ago.
I don't disagree that humans are spewing shit in to the atmosphere, and common sense says this can't be good, but as others have pointed out, there is a whole lot more to this climate change than just CO2.
We also put out lots of methane and other greenhouse gases besides CO2 actually. CO2 just happens to be the primary cause of the warming because we put out so much more of it than other gasses.
A great way to figure out bias from unscientific agendas is to see who funds them. It's actually easier than you may think.
For example: If a guy cites research that says "mercury levels in tuna aren't above normal and are perfectly safe" you can bet that something like the United States Tuna Foundation (which represents industry interests) will show up in their "acknowledgements" section of the paper.
There is a trap here, however. To be published in a peer reviewed journal, your peers have to agree to it
No.
They don't evaluate what is published based on the conclusions of the research. They evaluate it based on the entire paper. If your methods are sound, regardless of wether or not your conclusion is status quo, it can be published. If they reject it, they tell the author why, and "I don't like the results" won't be a good enough reason to get rejected by every single journal you could attempt to publish in. Scientists are actually pretty used to new ideas which are contrary to the norm. (remember plate tectonics, sun-centric-solar-systems, evolution, general relativity, quantum mechanics?)
You may wish to double check those ice core data.
The ice core data is legit. You're not a climatologist. You're not a paleoclimatologist. They did their homework. Don't pretend that you somehow know more than they do unless you've got your own data and methods to publish.
At least twice in history, CO2 levels have shot up higher than they are today[...]
Not within the last 400,000 years covered by that chart it didn't. Before then, many millions upon millions of years ago it has, but that Earth is a very different Earth. You don't want Paleozoic CO2 levels imposed upon present day ecosystems in less time that it could have occurred naturally. It's bad in terms of evolution. Even IF CO2 didn't cause warming, it will cause other problems (ocean acidification, and many plants will likely have difficulty retaining water as elevated CO2 can cause the pores in the leaves to transpire more). Evolution works, but only so quickly.
CO2 levels have shot up higher than they are today, in very short periods of time.
Not in as-short periods of time as we've had present CO2 shoot up. The slope of that line is higher than any slope elsewhere. If you don't believe me, you can download CO2 concentrations from several places, throw them all into a spreadsheet, and calculate the delta-CO2 ppm. All the data is publicly available as txt files.
Something that isn't clear, is whether CO2 levels preceded temperature increases, or the other way around.
Oh not at all. It's quite clear. You just don't know what you're talking about. It's also abundantly clear you don't study climatology, environmental science or physics. You are actually entertaining the idea that the Earth first retains more heat than normal, THEN the heat-trapping gases follow. Please explain the physics that would allow for such a thing to be remotely plausible.
It is indisputable that our fossil fuels account for the increase in CO2, as the correlation with the industrial revolution is damning. We also know that CO2 is opaque to thermal radiation. We can take a thermal camera, put it behind a glass container of CO2, and not see heat through the camera. I'm pretty sure we've never magically seen thermal radiation get blocked by a tank of warming air, then seen the CO2 concentration in that air spike as a result. Admittedly, I could be wrong since magic, sorcery, and thermodynamic witchcraft aren't fields I research in.
And, no, solar activity has NOT been dismantled. It HAS been cast into disrepute by the "consensus". But, popular opinion does not make science.
Nobody here suggested popular opinion made the science.
The popular opinion of the scientific community makes the science (as established through years of peer-reviewed published literature). That's how science works. If you've got a more scientific approach to global warming than those people did, by all means, enlighten us.
"75 of 77 climate scientists who are active publishers on climate change said yes." Re-read that sentence. Read it again, carefully. One more time, please. Can you see now, that only certain select scientists are being held forth as an example of some "consensus"?
You do realize that there can be lots of people who earned a degree studying climate & meteorology, then moved on to be weatherman (or something) and stopped giving a crap about scientific research, right? Well, that's why you just ask the scientists are are publishing. Research and publishing go hand in hand. They're the ones that'll know the most. Did you major in any field of science? Because if so, you should have known that. Anyway, you appear to have not read the article you yourself cited.
In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change [...] Of these specialists, 96.2 % answered "risen" to question 1 and 97.4% answered yes to question 2.
The bold part there should have been a clue for you. Scientists who actively publish are doing real scientific research. If you're doing scientific research on something, you're gonna know more about that something than people who don't.
Ice core data tells us what the CO2 concentrations used to be. We can reconstruct atmospheric conditions for hundreds of thousands of years into the past. Lets consult the ice core data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png
Gee... looks like the CO2 started to shoot up during the industrial revolution. I'm pretty sure industrial revolutions are man-made things, but double check me on that just to be sure. While Earth has had CO2/temperature/etc fluctuate throughout history, the recent rate of CO2 concentration has increased at a clearly unnatural rate. And this "it's caused by the sun" argument was been thoroughly dismantled. The solar-variance explanation predicts a warming of the stratosphere. Global warming predicts a cooling of the stratosphere. Guess what? The stratosphere has been cooling.
How much peer-reviewed scientific literature do you see published per year that contradicts the anthropogenic global-warming explanation?
Nobody likes walking away from a fight they're tired of dealing with, so when they try to, they often try to assert their themselves on their way out, as you did with a self-congratulatory assertion of my argument's invalidity. If you don't start off your presence in the discussion by flaming people you disagree with, such things won't be necessary to do in the future.
My original argument (on post #26661837) was that mercury in CFL's are a real problem, as thogard originally pointed out. Just because he's wrong about what type they put into the CFL-blub doesn't change that microorganisms turn elemental mercury into methylmercury and it eventually gets into the fish.
Nobody likes it when their cherry-picked, industry-funded citation gets rebutted, so you reacted by playing it off as a change of subject. Please realize that criticizing a citation used as a supporting evidence is nothing unordinary, and in fact, should be expected if the citation is from a questionable source. Don't pretend like you wouldn't have called me out if I had cited a questionable study written by a bunch of wannabe researchers from greenpeace. You would have, and you'd have been right for it too.
Now if you're continue to react as predictably as you have thus far, you'll respond with yet another angry last word. Go ahead, I won't respond again. I can lace my arguments with angry disrespectful indignation just as easily as you can, but it doesn't actually further the collective understanding of the risks associated with mercury contamination.
Here's is a source I'm posting for you to read. I'm offering this document to you because I found it genuinely informative, interesting, and appears to be a pretty comprehensive read on the entire subject of mercury toxicity. I'm not "throwing" this document at you to assert who's right/wrong (and to prove it I'm not going to quote its contents publicly).
http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp46.pdf
It's a huge document (sorry), so I suggest text-searching for keywords to navigate it, like stuff we've been talking about (sources, toxicity, fluorescent, etc) but text-searches won't work on some of the data tables (i.e. pg 393, table 5-4) which are some of the most informative parts. The parts that aren't actually text-searchable are best located via the table of contents.
If you're gonna link scientific literature, try to at least link the full article so people can see who funded their research. I'll do it for you: http://www.geosc.psu.edu/~kkeller/Kraepiel_est_03.pdf
"Tuna sampling and analysis was organized and paid for by the USTF (United States Tuna Foundation)"... They happen to be the guys who's job it is to whine when the FDA does its job by telling women to avoid types of fish which are known to have higher concentrations of methylmercury (like tunas): http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~acrobat/hgstak58.pdf
"Based on a United States Tuna Foundation (USTF) and National Fisheries Institute (NFI) joint evaluation on methylmercury in fish advisories, we believe it is premature to adopt the Environmental Protection Agencyâ(TM)s (EPA) reference dose (RfD) as a basis for consumer advice".
Yeah, they sound like a great source of unbiased scientific funding eh?
Is it any surprise that they chose to do their research off of Hawaii, when "Environments that are known to favor the production of methylmercury include certain types of wetlands, dilute low-pH lakes in Northeast and Northcentral United States, parts of the Florida Everglades, newly flooded reservoirs, and coastal wetlands, particularly along the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Ocean, and San Francisco Bay." (http://www.usgs.gov/themes/factsheet/146-00/)
Notice Hawaii wasn't in there. Using exceptions to prove rules isn't usually a sound idea.
Sorry, mercury in marine fish does not come from coal fired power plants [cosis.net], or for that matter almost any other human activity (except in special cases like Minimata).
Ice core data disagrees with you: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Mercury_fremont_ice_core.png
Freshwater contamination by Hg is solely a result of improperly dumped industrial liquid waste.
Any reason you're trying to omit marine considerations when you selected the word "freshwater"? I mean, that is where we get our tuna isn't it? Not to mention most of the other contaminated fish.
You've just made a shameless attempt to take me out of context so I'm going to make it harder for you to get away with. When I said
"It really doesn't matter what type of mercury is in those bulbs."
it was in the context of suggesting any mercury in bulbs is dangerous. So countering it with the tidbit about dimethylmercury-is-super-lethal is merely an attempt at misdirecting my stance on the issues. I never suggested that any form of mercury in those CFL bulbs would be safe.
By the way, you're flat out wrong about its lethal dose of dimethylmercury (it's about 0.001 ml). Being inaccurate by several orders of magnitude hopefully isn't indicative of how much you know about toxicity and the previous topic of environmental contamination to which you responded to (thogard's post). A single drop of the stuff can penetrate latex gloves and kill you (as was in the famous case with Professor Karen Wetterhahn).
your claim that "All forms of it that get into the environment do eventually turn into the very type that hurts us most." is equally stupid.
"get into the environment" implies we're talking about anthropogenic mercury (you can't "get into" something you're already in). The rising concentrations of mercury wouldn't be getting into fish and us if we we didn't have industrial applications for it which lead to us taking it out of places where it has previously existed undisturbed. It's kinda like this: Sometimes asbestos tiles (the harmful type of asbestoes) can actually be better left in a building rather than trying to rip it out, as the process of removal will create more floating particulates than if you had left it. You're muddying the difference between cycled contaminants and sequestered/bound contaminants. Mercury in cinnabar that's left alone isn't going to raise mercury levels in fish/humans. Digging it up for light bulbs does. That said, it's the lesser of two evils since coal power plants put out so much mercury that CFL's longer lifespans and greater efficiency offset their inherent mercury content.
most metallic mercury "entering the environment" (where do you think it came from? mars?) is not converted to organometallic form.
Why do you think that its specifically fish contaminating us? That's the only reason we're have rising human [Hg] concentrations. It's because of the aquatic microorganisms converting it to methylmercury. The process is actually well understood.
it's oxidized to HgO which is insoluble and largely inert.
I pulled up the chemical hazard sheets and looked up HgO.
It has the following chemical warnings:
R26/27/28: Very toxic by inhalation, in contact with skin and if swallowed.
R33: Danger of cumulative effects
R39/24/25: Toxic: danger of very serious irreversible effects in contact with skin and if swallowed
S61: Avoid release to the environment.
Oh yeah, sounds REALLY inert me! I suppose you're okay with that stuff getting into your family's water supply then?
Inorganic mercury in the environment (wether it's by burning coal at power plants or from light bulbs) eventually reaches soils, which get wet with water, and as most of the water on land eventually does, washes into aquatic systems (water cycle).
Microorganisms in the aquatic environment then convert it to methylmercury (what he was talking about).
After that, it's the same old story you already know: Aquatic system is contaminated so the mercury (actually methylmercury) bioaccumulates its way up the food chain until it gets to the humans who eat the fish. The higher up the food chain the carnivore is, the more toxic their exposure is. This should be of personal concern to you if you are a whale, shark, big fish (like tuna) or human.
It really doesn't matter what type of mercury is in those bulbs.
All forms of it that get into the environment do eventually turn into the very type that hurts us most.
These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least 30 scientific societies and academies of science,[6] including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.[7][8][9]
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming)
7) http://royalsociety.org/displaypagedoc.asp?id=13619
8) http://royalsociety.org/displaypagedoc.asp?id=20742
9) http://www.pik-potsdam.de/aktuelles/archiv/aktuelle/dateien/G8_Academies%20Declaration.pdf
While a small minority have voiced disagreement with these findings,[10] the overwhelming majority of scientists working on climate change agree with the IPCC's main conclusions.[11][12]
10) http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=164002
11) http://royalsociety.org/downloaddoc.asp?id=1630
12) http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686
And honestly, I was being lazy and just quoting Wikipedia which hardly took any effort. Now imagine if you weren't being stubbornly predisposed in your opinion how easily you could have affirmed the scientific community's consensus yourself instead of wasting my time.
The best way to realize how strong the consensus is, is by looking at all the peer-reviewed literature published in scientific journals each year and tally up how many are dealing with global warming related studies and how many (if any) are attempting to contest global warming.
Honestly, I know you are wrong.
(yes, I do study environmental science).
I'm gonna have to very strongly disagree with your first two sentences because it's full of all sorts of wrong. (nothing to contest in the rest of your post though).
The bleaching is due to heat and pollution stresses that aren't obviously related to CO2. It's happening, but that's a separate problem.
1) Heat damages coral. Heat is elevated by global warming. Global warming is caused by excess CO2. I'm comfortable saying that looks like it's obviously related.
2) CO2 is the very cause of oceanic acidification!
"Ocean acidification is the name given to the ongoing decrease in the pH of the Earth's oceans, caused by their uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
"The narrow niche that coral occupies, and the stony corals' reliance on calcium carbonate deposition, means they are very susceptible to changes in water pH. Ocean acidification, caused by dissolution of carbon dioxide in the water that lowers pH, is currently occurring in the surface waters of the world's oceans due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Lowered pH reduces the ability of corals to produce calcium carbonate skeletons, and at the extreme, results in the dissolution of those skeletons entirely."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral
You sound like a reasonable person, so I'm guessing you simply never had a reason to study the issue, and worked off what you considered reasonable assumptions. Yeah, it happens. This also highlights the unfortunate fact that environmental scientists need to do more to educate the public, not just on what to do & what not to do, but the science explaining why.
Hardly analogous to the current situation given that the scientific community is pretty much all in agreement on the issue. Telling a scientist that global warming is a hoax is like telling them evolution is a hoax.
The current problem scientists have had with the media is convincing them to not talk about the issue in an overly "even handed" approach, as the large body of evidence & literature doesn't warrant giving both views equal weight anymore. Much of the perceived disagreement of scientists is manufactured by journalist who don't know jack about science, much less, how to do a good job reporting on it. Also, the current media nowadays is biased toward sensationalism, and to many of them global warming is merely a topic they can use to facilitate debate, which improves tv ratings.
At this point most of the real disagreement among scientists is only concerning the specific details on how climate change will affect specific regions, how severely, and how quickly. On average temps may be warmer, but how the net warmth is distributed is projected to change, and with it precipitation patterns. Even worse, there's the risk of the global thermohaline current slowing/stopping, which would definitely have poor consequences.
Ice core data's CO2 concentrations have actually provided a much stronger correlation with temperature than any solar activity has. (It amazes me when people think the scientific community would have overlooked such things). If in fact our temperature were being more strongly influenced by the sun than by CO2, then the stratosphere should be become warmer when the rest of the atmosphere warms too (a very testable prediction of the solar activity idea). As it happens, the stratosphere has gotten cooler, while the temperatures on a global average have been warming.
Attributing global warming & climate change to just solar activity is wishful thinking.
I assume you really meant to type two different pH levels when you said "minute change from pH8 to pH8", because 8 to 8 is not a change.
Assuming that's true, even if your pH only changes by -+1, it's a big deal because the scale is logarithmic.
Also, what you accuse of being a myth is a widely observed problem in the ocean. Corals ARE bleaching in very large numbers. How you can contest something as simple as that shows how little you've looked into the issue. Just because you don't like a fact doesn't mean you can ignore it.
Nothing has come full circle, as this idea hasn't been confirmed by rigorous experimentation.