Global warming is a crockFollow

Actually, he sorta does. A year or two ago, I read a write-up someone had done on a conversation he'd had with the president of a major motor company (don't recall which) about how slow his company was being to introduce more fuel-efficient vehicles to the market. The president's response was that according to the Bible, the earth is only around 10,000 years old rather than billions of years old as scientists claim. Therefore, all scientific data regarding global warming and the depletion of fossil fuels were completely worthless, as the scientists couldn't even get the age of the earth right, their claims being so clearly contradicted by the Bible.

Some evangelicals are even going so far as to claim that global warming is part of the impending Rapture, which they say is a GOOD thing, at least for those who are "saved."

So, people are using the BIBLE to rationalize--even celebrate--the crisis presented by global warming. The mind boggles.





Edited, Dec 7th 2006 7:48pm by Ambrya

But hey. What do they know?

That oil companies pay better than Universities?

Well, if you were to flip the Bell Curve along the x-axis.

That argument goes both ways Smash. I could just as easily say that the "OMG Global Warming!" crowd is influenced by funding for research into Global Warming.

Only if you wanted to be widely accepted as functionally retarded. But, yes, you could say it.

No, they're just in denial of simple scientific things like supply and demand, or cause and effect. These are the government morons who think you can cure world poverty by turning everyone $1 bill into a $1,000,000 bill.

Not really, since we all know man co-existed with dinosaurs.

empty post

Edited, Dec 7th 2006 11:27pm by Jophiel

You keep bringing up the same point. I'm sure that's accomplished something.

Back to the increasingly funny site that Gbaji linked to, we have a report stating that global warming stopped in 1998 and it hasn't gotten any warmer since. Someone should tell that to the American Meteorological Society who wrote, regarding the global temperatures in 2005,Bolding is, again, mine.

I'll grant you this though... the article saying that the effects of global warming probably won't be as instantly dramatic as "The Day After Tomorrow"? I agree with it. I'm willing to set aside my beliefs on the subject and admit that it's very unlikely that some poor scientist will have to out-run a cold front to save his trapped son. I'm meeting you halfway here, Gbaji.

Oh, hell.. one more. This is actually kind of fun.So says the guy heading the US Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. A guy whose top two campaign contributors were the Oil & Gas industry ($315,000) and the Electric Utilities industry ($192,000); as much as the next five contributing industries combined. You can throw another sixty-three grand onto the pile from automobile companies if you'd like.

Following the money sure can be educational, huh?

Edited, Dec 8th 2006 1:05am by Jophiel

Another thing about the whole funding issue.

The question you have to ask, is "who stands to benefit/lose from this?"

It's quite easy to see how the threat of global warming is harmful to corporations such as Exxon. They stand to lose a lot of money. It's also very easy to see why other corporations would want to maintani the status quo we have today, and would hence fund research that negates or refutes the evidence of man-made global warming.

What is harder to decipher though, is how governments will profit from "funding research into global warming"? Why should they push the global warming agenda?

And that's much harder to answer in my opinion. They won't reap the benefits, since they'll be gone by the time we reap any. They won't face the consequences of global warming, for the same reason (they'll be gone by then). And taking action to preevnt global warming costs government money, slows down the economy, even if jsut a little, and all this for benefits they won't get credit for.

So this whole issue of funding makes a lot more sense in one direction (Exxon) than in the other (governments).

I don't really know who stands to profit from global warming, or from taking measures to prevent global warming. Companies that invest in renewable energy? Scientists that could just as easily write essays about how global warming is not man-made, and would get paid much better for it? Hippies?

I don't know. I can't see many.

I'm sure that, according to Gbaji, the "scare" of global warming is all about Democrats staying in power and redistributing corporate wealth in a grand scheme. It's one giant conspiracy rivaling that of the Illuminati.

My poking around this morning found some information on Roger A. Pielke who is listed in Inhofe's list of scientists who refute global warming. I found Pielke interesting because he resigned from the IPCC because of his disagreement with their assessments. But, while this might sound like quite the blow for global warming believers, it's really not as much as people like Inhofe would have you believe.

Pielke is still a believer in global warmingHis disagreements with the IPCC layed with their focus on CO2 emissions. Pielke believes that a significant portion of global warming can be attributed to land-use changes (deforestation, urban paving, etc -- there's your blacktop, Kao) and wanted more focus from the IPCC in that direction. Pielke has no argument that the earth is warming nor that the change is anthropogenic; he simply believes that we need to concentrate on the other human factors in global warming as well as the CO2 aspect.

Of course, that's not how Senator Inhofe frames him. That certainly was an enlightening link though, Gbaji. I know a lot more now about the global warming data is being manipulated by politics and, for that, I thank you for opening all of our eyes just a little bit.

Five pages and you still haven't sorted this out! For shame!

I hate those guys. They record the voices inside my head.

Um. That's what I've been saying for 5 pages as well. Just wanted to point that out. My whole point has not been that "global warming" does not exist, but that what we have not done is determined the actual degree to which human factors are causing it, or whether it's actually harmful in the long run at all.

Joph makes a big deal of finding individual inconsistencies on one side of the issue and extrapolating them into huge fallacies, but none of that counters this main point. And it's somewhat important, since "his side" is the one trying to force legistlative changes to "fight global warming". If we can't actually measure the effect that human activity is having on the earth as a whole, how on earth can we decide what levels of activity are "ok"?

The answer is that we can't. My issue (and I'd wager most of the global warming critics) is not about debunking "global warming" as a whole, but questioning the validity of insisting on taking specific actions as a response to it. It's not the science we have a problem with (although there are faults on both sides in this issue), it's with the politics. That's where you have government bodies setting policies and restrictions based on the science, and where those policies often bear little or no relevance to the actual science itself.


That's the disconnect I've been trying to get people to see for 5 pages now. The problem is when policies are enacted in reponse to the science. As I've stated over and over. We can measure the CO2 contribution of human activities. We can show that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We can even derive models that proove that greenhouse gasses like CO2 contribute to warming temperatures. And we can measure that temperatures have gone up in the last century. What we absolutely cannot show is to what degree the CO2 emissions (and other effects as well) have actually *caused* that warming trend. We can't show that this warming trend is not natural all by itself. Our understanding of the entire climatological picuture is so limited that proposing specific political action on the basis of what we know is akin to a doctor ordering an expensive surgical proceedure on a patient when all he knows is that the patient might be sick.



Well. There's *some* scientific debate. But it's typically over some relatively minute points of contention that I'd wager none of us are qualified to really debate anyway. The big debate is political. The problem most people seem to have on this issue is that they assume that the science proscribes a course of action in this case. It absolutely does not. It only lays out the things that are occuring. Once you go from measuring things to suggesting a course of action, you're doing something beyond just the science.

We have no science that tells us that if we reduced CO2 emissions by 30% globally that this would have *any* change in global temperatures over the next century. None. Zip. Zero. Nada. And that's the problem here. We can guess that it might. But it might not. The world goes through warm and cold cycles. It does this without any influence from us humans. We simply do not have the data to know how much impact our actions are having in the larger sense of longer term climate change.

So while we don't know what climate effect that change would have, we *do* know what sort economic effect it will have. And we know it'll be negative. Heavily negative in this case. As I've stated over and over. The question we should be answering isn't "does global warming exist", but "will taking action X be worth the cost"? Remember, we're not actually concerned we'll "break" the planet. It can recover from environmental extremes far wider then we could survive as a species. We're really looking at the impact on the human species. Are we hurt more in the long run by implementing changes, or by not implementing changes? And that's a question that the science does not give us an answer to.



I'll repeat an argument I've made over and over on this forum. The fact that you can find some people who have poor reasons for doing something does not invalidate the thing they are saying.

The fact that some people think global warming is a crock because the bible tells them so, does not mean that global warming is *not* a crock. It just means that their reason is flawed. You have to debate the *best* counterargument, not the weakest. Same issue to some degree with Joph's tirade. He does a great job finding individual things that don't add up, but ignore all the stuff that isn't refutable. Don't get me wrong. I completely agree that there's just as much of this on "my side" of this debate. But it bothers me to no end when folks will continually do nothing but point out the single inconsistencies on the other side, while refusing to acknowledge that there are just as many inconsistencies on theirs. Joph jumped from source to source listing off single fallacies, but didn't take the bigger picture into account.




Yup. Which is what I've been saying from day one. The problem is that some people seem to want to place greater weight in it being a "scientific issue", and that the politics does not matter. Note that to Smash and Joph and others, the fact that oil companies support members of congress critical of Global Warming, this automatically invalidates their views in their minds. But that argument starts with the assumption that the oil companies are "evil" and anything they say and do is wrong.

We see this sort of biased "logic" all the time. If an idea is endorsed by a pro-gay group, it's ok, but the opposing political agenda supported by a religious group is automaticall "wrong". Hmmmm... Methinks that both groups have an equal right to representation. At least that's my understanding of how our political process works. To automatically condemn something because the people you disagree with support it is a somewhat irrelevant argument. It's equivalent to saying "They're wrong because I don't agree with them!".

And that's pretty **** poor logic. And in this case, silly logic as well. The same people who would love to saddle the oil and industrial companies with greater and greater restrictions will likely be the first to complain when it costs 5 bucks a gallon to put gas in their cars, and their power bill doubles, and all their consumer goods get more expensive. But that's the "politics" of this. You're making a choice to demand change that may or may not help the environment, but *will* hurt the economy. I don't think it's wrong for those in the affected businesses to have a say in this. Because you know that they'll be the ones blamed by the consumers down the line.

Edited, Dec 8th 2006 6:58pm by gbaji