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God demands emissions?
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Merrick
Merrick
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Re: Climate Change - Oi Merrick, refs needed
May 08, 2006, 14:44
As Jim says, the evidence is incontrovertible. I don't know of any credible sceptics at all. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pulled together thousands of climate scientists to reach consensus on what's happening. Over 98% of them agree with the IPCC's assessment that climate change is real, here and human-induced.

If anyone denies climate change, they're effectively saying 'Just under 2% of climatologists can't be wrong!'.

Five years ago the IPCC regarded it as beyond argument:

"The amount of carbon dioxide, for example, has increased by more than 30% since pre-industrial times and is still increasing at an unprecedented rate of on average 0.4% per year, mainly due to the combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation. We know that this increase is anthropogenic because the changing isotopic composition of the atmospheric CO2 betrays the fossil origin of the increase."
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/044.htm

So many of the folks who've denied it due to vested interests have had to admit it.

Only last month, the US government issued a report saying there is 'clear evidence' that climate change is caused by humans, that the atmospheric changes of the last 50 years 'cannot be explained by natural processes alone'.
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/default.htm

In February, the UK government hosted a conference called Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, getting scientific experts to address what the key urgent issues are, where the 'tipping points' for crisis will occur, and what we can do to avert them. The fact of climate change wasn't even on the table.

Check my blog post from the time for more about it and links
http://bristlingbadger.blogspot.com/2006/03/pouring-cold-water-on-our-future.html

When - increasingly rarely - you get a believer vs denier debate they're often called 'eminent scientists' or somesuch. The beleivers tend to be climatologists, the deniers rarely so. It's like asking a doctor of medicine and a doctor of nuclear physics to debate surgical techniques.

'The Fossil Fools', George Monbiot's piece about deniers, covers why denial is nonsense in characteristic concise and eloquent fashion.

His piece makes this simple suggestion:

"If ever you meet one of these people, I suggest you ask them the following questions:
1. Does the atmosphere contain carbon dioxide?
2. Does atmospheric carbon dioxide influence global temperatures?
3. Will that influence be enhanced by the addition of more carbon dioxide?
4. Have human activities led to a net emission of carbon dioxide?
It would be interesting to discover at which point they answer no – at which point, in other words, they choose to part company with basic physics."
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/04/27/the-fossil-fools/

Denial is a perfectly understandable response to appalling news. It's normal. But we have to get over it. We are not doomed, there is a lot we can do to avert the worst effects of climate change. But we have to act decisively, radically and swiftly.
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Climate Change - Oi Merrick, refs needed (grufty jim)		 Replies:
Re: Climate Change - Oi Merrick, refs needed (Merrick)
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