hmmm, those numbers are quite interesting. One thing that would have been interesting is what the water vapor numbers are with both sides of the argument.

_________________
Devil

Build a man a fire, and he's warm for the night.
Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.

Seems like a rather silly thing to even point out in the video that there was a cooling phase in the 50's/60's when industry was rising significantly. Well, duh, but that's not taking into account the fact that it could also be a part of the natural cycle - that is to say, if we had NOT released all that additionial CO2, the cooling trend there may have been much more significant. No one is suggesting that CO2 is the end-all be-all of warming, but they ARE saying that it disrupts the natural cycle and has the potential to increase it to beyond bearable human levels.

It's irresponsible to point to that one cooling period and suggest that somehow disproves any kind of relationship between CO2 and warming. CO2 is only part of the factor, but significant enough that we've seen a rather obvious warming trend with only a slight hiccup likely caused by a natural cooling that would have gone significantly further without intervention.

Water vapor is kind of a silly argument as well. Water vapor obviously traps more heat, but it having a large impact does not negate the argument that even a small change in greenhouse gases could throw the natural cycles off balance. It could even be a change in an even LESS abundant greenhouse gas than CO2.

If we should have learned anything during our time on this planet, it should be that we live in a particularly delicate natural balance, and there are countless little things that - if thrown off just a little, from Earth's rotational axis to the electromagnetic field to the composition of dirt - makes life here unsustainable.

And let's not forget the scale we're talking about here. CO2 composing "ONLY" a small percentage more of the atmosphere is a pretty large swath of space. Also consider the fact that we don't need a large percentage of the atmosphere to be filled with greenhouse gases in order for greenhouse gases to have a very, very large effect.

The "DEMAND DEBATE" title in that video kind of cracks me up too. For some odd reason, I haven't heard them clamoring for much debate on whether the Sun rotates around the Earth.

....not recently, at least.

Thats because everybody knows the the sun rotates around the earth, as it is the center of the universe

_________________
Devil

Build a man a fire, and he's warm for the night.
Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.

I stumbled upon an interesting paper in my reading tonight - might be of interest to Devil, Elessar and others who have commented on the consensus (or lack thereof) of the scientific community about climate change.

The author surveyed the 928 scientific papers published between 1993 and 2003 with "climate change" as a keyword. She found that 75% agreed that climate change was anthropogenic, 25% commented on the methodologies of climate modeling but were agnostic as to the nature of climate change, and

The paper also talks about various other means of establishing a consensus, all of which point to overwhelming support of the IPCC position.

The article's called "BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," published in Science in 2004. Link: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/f ... /5702/1686

There are some interesting (reviewed/refereed) discussions among experts linked at the bottom of the page. Enjoy.

Unsurprising. Global warming deniers have assembled an army of pseudoscientists to back up their claims - almost none of whom actually do scientific research and actually, you know, write scientific papers using real data. At the very least it's extremely rare to see, and for good reason.

Perhaps we should be thankful that given the unfortunate global warming circumstance, we can always find a bit of comic relief when someone CLEVERLY points out that we had a record low temperature in Podunk this year.

"Denier" have done no study?

read the paper I posted in this thread:
http://www.lanysboard.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5858

Will you donkeys just stop focusing on the "denial" aspects (which really aren't in question) and more on the response. I think THIS is the area where there really is, and needs to continue to be, true debate. There's a metric fuckton of bad science in that area that the "hippies" (see how clever that is) are just eating up.

Ya, I was just responding (belatedly) to the bolded part of your comment a while back. I already sort of addressed the rest a few posts back when I mentioned that the carbon cap-and-trade systems I consider effective (and the ones that are under serious political discussion) aren't markets between individuals, but between power plants. Do you still think such systems are idiotic?

And krby: The article I cited was published in '04; yours was written in '08. I think the author's point still stands, though - 1 in 929 is still a pretty small fraction. Any comments on that?