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Nuclear vs wind
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Merrick
Merrick
2148 posts

climate change
Nov 04, 2005, 15:13
"To stick my nose into someone elses discussion (again) "

hey, it's a public forum - anyone with a point to make should come on in!

"I understand your need to present Climate Change as incontravertable (sp?) fact to support your beliefs"

not at all - I'm not interested in picking a position and then defending it even when it's demonstrably untrue. I'm interested in getting to the truth of matters. I presume that none of us are right about everything, and I want to find the stuff I'm wrong about and leave it behind.

"Although I suspect you will argue the point, climate change is not even close to being an 'established fact'."

I will indeed argue the point.

There is not absolute consensus on this, but that is true of any scientific fact. There are qualified doctors who dispute the role of saturated fat in heart disease or a link between smoking and cancer.

But when you have 98% of doctors saying it and the point conceded by the vested interests who suffer for it like burger chains and tobacco corporations, it's safe to call it a fact.

To say that climate change is not an established fact is to disagree with all but 1 or 2 percent of climatologists.

Which of the following do you dispute?

- The atmosphere contains carbon dioxide

- Atmospheric carbon dioxide influences global temperatures

- Human use of fossil fuels has led to a net emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere

- The addition of that carbon dioxide to the atmosphere increases the influence on temperatures

I'm genuinely intersted as to which of those elementary facts of physics you would contest.

In the words of the government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, giving evidence to the House of Lords last year, ' The scientific community has reached a consensus. I do not believe that amongst the scientists there is a discussion as to whether global warming is due to anthropogenic effects. It is man-made and it is essentially fossil fuel burning, increased methane production… and so on.'

I do still occasionally come across debates about whether it's happening. My favourite has been a Radio Four one between 'eminent scientists'; one of them a climatologist, one an astronomer. No prizes for guessing which one was arguing against climate change.

"Other research reveals that this reduction has been taking place at a consistent rate for 400 years."

can you give us a source for this? I have only seen data that say polar icecaps are melting at increasing rates, that annual winter freezes come later and leave earlier.

If you want to dispute the use of the word 'fact', then can you concede that the way that the evidence mounts, that a small minority of climatologists dispute it shold make us take it seriously as a possibility.

That being so, the grave nature of the threat should move us to a precautionary stance, especially when there are other compelling reasons for the same action.

When there is hard fact that the age of cheap and plentiful oil is going to be over within a couple of decades, we need to be looking at ways of living after that. Given the lack of any replacement fuels, it means scaling back our oil consumption.

Our huge dependency on it means this is an enormous long-term task that will affect a large proportion of our activities. This in itself is enough of a reason to be backing away from the fossil consumption.
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Re: Nuclear vs wind (Rolling Ronnie)		 Replies:
Re: climate change (Rolling Ronnie)
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