And is it even happening? People say so many different things. Even scientists seem to disagree.
What’s this “global warming” you speak of? I thought it was called “global climate change”? Lol.
Based on my analysis, global warming appears to be one huge scam.
Summarizing the issues:
- Does carbon dioxide really cause global warming? Is global warming due to an increase in solar output?
- Is global warming harmful? It leads to longer growing seasons in temperate regions.
- Even if you believe “Carbon dioxide causes global warming” and “Global warming is harmful!”, I disagree with “The solution is more power for the State!”
“New York and Chicago have both recently had their coldest June in generations. If they had had their hottest month, it would have been trumpeted from the media 24/7 by “global warming” zealots. But the average surface temperature of the earth has not changed in more than a decade, according to the Cato Institute.”
Dr Sowell is so quotable!
fsk, your post has a lot of good points. I think note of clarification should be that Antarctica used to be warmer because it was physically further north and in a more temperate region long ago, not necessarily that the south pole was warm enough to support plant life.
You make a great observation about the long-term nature of multiple local and astronomical trends affecting climate change. There are a lot of long term cyclical events that impact the climate like earths tilt combined with elliptical orbit, the wobble of the earth’s axis and not to mention the Sun’s varying solar output. Definitely a complex interraction.
It seems to me that at this point anthropogenic global warming/climate change does not live up to the standards that most generally accepted scientific theories maintain. I found an older post by Lilburne that puts it in perspective:
There is certainly a lot of observed data that appears to be correlated with human activity, but there have yet to be any claims or predictions of global warming that are testable by experimentation and reproduce repeatable and consistent data. Climate modeling is so big and complex, I don’t think we even have the technical ability (yet) to properly setup, let alone test the model. There has yet to be any definitive test that proves that sans human activity, today’s climate would be different than it is now.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Just look at the molecule.
Yeah, and do you know where most of it comes? From the ocean! Let’s fine the fishes now [H]
Humans produce CO2. Should the state stop them from doing so?
water is a greenhouse gas.
Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide!!!
It’s making the earth hotter.
IMHO, Global Warming/Global Climate Change is real and is happening.
Now this begs the question if it is man made or not, which I happen to think it has a huge anthropogenic component.
However, regardless if you believe that GW/GCC is man made or not, the worst thing to do is let government attempt to solve the problem of GW/GCC. The market needs to find its own solutions.
The question is not a scientific one. We can probably safely say that an increase in global CO2 will cause an increase in temperature. There’s no way to know how much or what the threshold is.
Regardless if it is or not, the solution stays the same.
Private property.
And you know this how? Because it suddenly feels warmer than usual? Despite what the crooks like Al Gore tells you, even the scientists don’t have consensus.
Even if it’s really becoming warmer, the last time it happened was during the Middle Ages, it didn’t flood any continents and it actually made the society more prosperous by extening the agricultural season.
There were not emissions during the Middle Ages. Even now anthropogenic CO2 is less than 1%. If our planet was so fragile indeed, we’d all had been dead by now.
I agree. The problem is, that even the “green” energy that the environmentalists promote - like solar and wind energy - also have their own problems with polution and waste. But they wouldn’t tell you about it. Now, the enemy is oil and coals - incidentally, the very bloodline of our industrial civlization. It’s the hugest scam of our time.
Send all the environmentalists to Antarctica to help the penguins survive the global warming. I think there’s enoough room to fit all of them.
Indeed it is. That fact alone doesn’t translate to significant warming due to human causes, though many fearmongers wish it did. Even the IPCC scenario involving CO2 alone shows minimal warming. All the catastrophic predictions are based on model runs that assume long term positive feedbacks which are a stupid thing to assume in a chaotic system which has tended toward stability long term.
Could you or somebody else elaborate? It seems to me that it would be rather difficult to tell who released what c02 and all seems very hazy in general.
Incorrect. There is no consensus on man made gobal climate change despite Al Gore’s protestations to the contrary. No scientist in his right mind denies that the climate is changing, has changed, and always will change. Sometimes to extremes.
The amount emitted isn’t necessarily the issue, even the IPCC admits that. The problem is acceleration and what happens when the environment tries to deal with the usual amount plus the excess.
No argument there. People have milked this for all it’s worth. However there is and always will be a new crop of people coming up through the sciences who haven’t hung their careers on AGW theory being true. I think this will make a big difference, especially as people re evaluate things like past temperature/climate reconstructions and the proxies they use and the solar influence on climate. Those seem to be the biggest areas of weakness in AGW theory and where people are more likely to break from the pack as they become less personally and professionally invested in the theory being true.
I any event, I’m sure anyone and everyone who is skeptical of man made climate change has at one time bought gas for their car, so they’re obviously shills for Big Oil.
I’ll believe in global warming when Al Gore downsizes to a 2000 sq ft split-level, U2 goes acoustic, and celebrities stop buying beachfront homes.
There is no doubt that the average temperatures have gone up over the last century:
There is no doubt that the average temperatures have gone up significantly recently with respect to the last two millenia.
The problem is not green energy per se, but that government is getting on the green energy bandwagon. Any form of energy will have its disadvantages, regardless if “green” or not. If green energy is truly viable, it needs to work itself out in the marketplace. However, regulations on both the green side and the dirty side of energy hinder true competition to occur.
While we disagree on whether there is GW/GCC/AGW or whatever you want to call it, that is not the scam. The scam is that government can solve that problem, and all problems.