by The Nothing Man 37 Replies latest jw friends
Lots of people believe in it. If you don't then you are a 'denier' (apostate).
It's difficult to know the truth because there is TONS of conflicting 'evidence'.
Do I believe in Global warming? Yes. Do I believe it's man's fault? No. As has already been said - Mars is also warming up (and one or two Viking landers can't be making that much of a difference!).
I believe we should spend money on adapting to 'climate change', rather than, Canute-like, trying to stop it.
I believe in climate change, but there is way too much political nonsense involved in "global warming". It does seem like we are controlled by fear in one way or another. I am just too tired to be afraid of everything anymore.
So are you a believer or not
I dont know what to believe on that topic.
Like all topics, I say follow the money trail, who is standing to gain by diceminating the information.
Then the information may be tainted or distorted by the peanut gallery.
I dont know if there is global warming or not. But I do know that certain religious groups would take the scriptures ,for example ,God made the earth to stand forever, they would take that to discredit any information or data that supported global warming.
Basically you have the creatitonist vs. the evolutionist on this issue.
Then to be fair the scientist who are being funded by some international corportation by their support of the college would be putting forth their datta supporting global warming so the international corporation could profit by the knee jerk reaction.
I think we have all lived long enough to see that data can be interpreted pro or con. There's 2 sides two every coin, the ying and the yang. You cant have Jehober without Louis Cipher.
Global pollution and reduction of species due to vast deforestation of ancient forests is undeniable!
The issues these rise should prompt changes in human activities but seem imposed upon everyone by large scale organisations racking up big numbers on computer screens to show how swapping nature for numbers on bank hard drives is a great game to play!
WTwizard
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jul/05/climatechange.climatechange
Apparently according to scientists, rather than some cheap tv program, the sun isn't to blame for global warming.
As to your second 'theory' (or wild speculation as it is otherwise known) firstly our solar system has always been part of the Milky Way. Taking a wild guess at what you are referring to there is a dwarf galaxy sagittarius that is at right angles to our own milky way galaxy and is intersecting it. This has nothing to do with our solar system and despite some sci-fi reporting you may have read does not affect us. In the link you might be interested to note that article notes how difficult it is to see because it is hidden by the galactic core. i.e. It is the opposite side of the galaxy.
Now how is this causing global warming? ...exactly?
http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/sag-deg.htm
Loubelle,
binary sun/star by millions
What?! Please do explain what you mean?
The nothing man
And what abouot the core temp of Jupiter and Saturn? Those planets are further away from the sun, but they are heating up as well.
Really? I presume you have some evidence of this? I could only find a scientific article talking about a rise in the atmospheric temperature of Saturn and nothing on rises in core temperatures. Presumably you are implying that there is some unknown mechanism that is heating up the whole of the solar system?
As Terry pointed out, the data is what it is, the fact is that global temperatures are increasing. That fact does not mean, as some here have implied, that the seasons disappear or that snow stops falling. It means what it says, globally, AVERAGE temperature figures are increasing, by degrees. Global warming as a phenomemon does not mean that you can expect to go swimming in lake michigan next winter. Personally I don't think I can tell if the temperature is different if it only changes by a degree or two. If I experience a cool wet summer or a cold winter does not tell me anything about what the global average temperature is.
Are we responsible is not the question we should be asking, can we survive it and can we do anything to stabilize the effect are the pertinent questions. Whilst some people think we can sit back and do nothing, personally that is not a gamble I want to make.
The REAL inconvenient truth: Zealotry over global warming could damage our Earth far more than climate change
By NIGEL LAWSON 5th April 2008 Daily Mail
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=557374&in_page_id=1770>
Over the past half-century, we have become used to planetary scares. In the late Sixties, we were told of a population explosion that would lead to global starvation.
Then, a little later, we were warned the world was running out of natural resources. By the Seventies, when global temperatures began to dip, many eminent scientists warned us that we faced a new Ice Age.
But the latest scare, global warming, has engaged the political and opinion-forming classes to a greater extent than any of these.
The readiness to embrace this fashionable belief has led the present Labour Government, enthusiastically supported by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, to commit itself to a policy of drastically cutting back carbon dioxide emissions - at huge cost to the British economy and to the living standards not merely of this generation, but of our children’s generation, too.
That is why I have written a book about the subject.
Now, I readily admit that I am not a scientist; but then neither are the vast majority of those who espouse the currently fashionable madness. Moreover, most of those scientists who speak with such certainty about global warming and climate change are not climate scientists, or Earth scientists of any kind, and thus have no special knowledge to contribute.
Those who have to take the key decisions aren’t scientists either. They are politicians who, having listened cto the opinions of relevant scientists and having studied the evidence, must reach the best decisions they can - just as I did when I was Energy Secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s first government in the early Eighties.
But science is only part of the story. Even if the climate scientists can tell us what is happening, and why they think it is happening, they cannot tell us what governments should be doing about it. For this, we also need an understanding of the economics: of what the economic consequences of any warming might be, and, if there is a problem, the best way of dealing with it.
First, then, what is happening? Given that nowadays pretty well every adverse development in the natural world is automatically attributed to global warming, perhaps the most surprising fact about it is that it is not, in fact, happening at all. The truth is that there has so far been no recorded global warming at all this century.
The world’s temperature rose about half a degree centigrade during the last quarter of the 20th century; but even the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research - part of Britain’s Met Office and a citadel of the current global warming orthodoxy - has now conceded that recorded temperature figures for the first seven years of the 21st century reveal there has been a standstill.
The centre now officially expects global warming to resume at some point between 2009 and 2014.
Maybe it will. But the fact that the present lull was not predicted by any of the complex computer models upon which the global warming orthodoxy relies is clear evidence that the science of what determines the world’s temperature is distinctly uncertain and far from “settled”.
Genuine climate scientists admit that Earth’s climate is determined by hugely complex systems, and reliable prediction is impossible.
That does not mean, of course, that we know nothing. We know that the planet is made habitable only thanks to the warmth we receive from the rays of the sun. Most of this heat bounces back into space; but some of it is trapped by the so-called greenhouse gases which exist in the Earth’s atmosphere. If it were not for that, our planet would be far too cold for man to survive.
The most important greenhouse gas is water vapour, including water suspended in clouds. Rather a long way behind, the second most important is carbon dioxide.
The vast bulk of the carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is natural - that is, nothing to do with man. But there is no doubt that ever since the Industrial Revolution in the latter part of the 19th century, man has added greatly to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide by burning carbon - first in the form of coal, and subsequently in the form of oil and gas, too.
So it is reasonable to suppose that, other things being equal, this will have warmed the planet, and that further man-made carbon dioxide emissions will warm it still further.
But in the first place, other things are very far from equal. And in the second place, even if they were, there is no agreement among reputable climate scientists over how much this contributed to the modest late-20th century warming of the planet, and thus may be expected to do so in future.
It is striking that during the 21st century, carbon dioxide emissions have been growing faster than ever - thanks in particular to the rapid growth of the Chinese economy - yet there has been no further global warming at all.
Carbon dioxide, like water vapour and oxygen, is not only completely harmless but is an essential element in our life support system.
Not only do we exhale carbon dioxide every time we breathe (indeed, an important cause of the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is simply the huge increase in the world’s population), but plants need to absorb carbon dioxide in order to survive. Without carbon dioxide, there would be no plant life on the planet. And without plant life, there would be no human life either.
While climate scientists disagree about how much further warming continued carbon dioxide emissions might cause, there is an established majority view.
This is articulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an offshoot of the United Nations, whose view is that ‘most’ of the modest (0.5 per cent) late-20th century warming was “very likely” caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions.
And if the growth of such emissions continues unabated, their ‘best guess’ is that in 100 years’ time, the planet will be somewhere between 1.8 and 4 per cent warmer than it is today, with a mid-point of a shade under 3 per cent. (Incidentally, this was published before the early 21st century warming standstill was officially acknowledged, so was not taken into account.)
Alistair Darling told us in his recent Budget speech that this would have “catastrophic economic and social consequences”. But that is just alarmist poppycock.
Let’s look at just two of the alleged “catastrophic” consequences of global warming: the threat to food production, leading to mass starvation; and the threat to human health, leading to disease and death.
So far as food production is concerned, it is not clear why a warmer climate would be a problem at all. Even the IPCC concedes that for a warming of anything up to 3 per cent, “globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase”. Yes: increase.
As to health, in its most recent report, the IPCC found only one outcome which they ranked as “virtually certain” to happen - and that was “reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure”.
This echoes a study done by our own Department of Health which predicted that by the 2050s, the UK would suffer an increase in heat-related deaths by 2,000 a year, and a decrease in cold-related mortality of 20,000 deaths a year - something that ministers have been curiously silent about.
The IPCC systematically exaggerates the likely adverse effects of any warming that might occur because estimates of the likely impact of the global warming it projects for the next 100 years are explicitly based on two assumptions, both of them absurd.
The first is that while the developed world can adapt to warming, the developing world cannot.
The second is that even in the developed world, the capacity to adapt is constrained by the limits of existing technology. In other words, there will be no technological development over the next 100 years.
So far as the first of these two assumptions is concerned, if necessary, the developed world will focus its overseas aid on ensuring that the developing countries acquire the required ability to adapt. The second is, of course, ludicrous - notably in the case of food production, where, with the development of bio-engineering and genetic modification, the world is currently in the early stages of a genuine revolution in agricultural technology.
All in all, given that global warming produces benefits as well as costs, it is far from clear that the currently projected warming, far from being “catastrophic”, will do any net harm at all.
To which it will be replied that while that may be so for the world as a whole, the people in the developing world will indeed suffer.
But the greatest curse of the developing world is mass poverty, and the malnutrition, disease and unnecessary death that poverty brings. To impede their escape from poverty by denying them the benefits of cheap carbon-based energy would damage them far more than global warming ever could.
Nonetheless, on the basis of its deeply flawed assumptions, the IPCC predicts that if the warming is as much as 4 degrees centigrade by the end of this century, then the economic cost would be a cut of between 1 per cent and 5 per cent of what world output (GDP) would otherwise have been - with the developed world suffering much less, and the developing world much more than this.
But supposing the developing world suffers as much as a 10 per cent loss of GDP from what it would have been in 100 years’ time.
That means that by the year 2100, people in the developing world, instead of being some 9.5 times better off than they are today, will be ‘only’ 8.5 times better off (which, incidentally, will still leave them better off than people in the developed world today). And, remember, all this is on the basis of the IPCC’s own grotesquely inflated estimate of the likely damage from further warming.
So the fundamental question is: how big a sacrifice should the present generation make now in the hope of avoiding this?
The cost of the drastic reduction in carbon dioxide emissions which we are told is necessary would be huge. The Government has introduced legislation to force us to cut emissions by between 60 per cent and 80 per cent by 2050, and Tony Blair, as self-appointed head of a group of “experts”, last month declared that “emissions in the richer countries will have to fall close to zero”.
One thing is clear: the “feelgood” measures so popular among some sections of the middle classes, from driving a hybrid car and having a wind turbine on one’s roof to not leaving the television set on standby, are trivial to the point of total irrelevance. What would be required is for all transport to be 100 per cent electric, and all electricity to be generated by nuclear power.
To cut back carbon dioxide emissions on the scale the present Labour Government (supported by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats) is demanding would require a fundamental restructuring of the economy, involving a rise in the cost of energy dwarfing anything we have seen so far.
No doubt we could afford this hardship if it made sense. But does it? The UK accounts for only 2 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Even if the entire European Union adopted this policy, that accounts for only 15 per cent of global emissions.
By contrast, China - which has already overtaken the U.S. as the biggest single emitter - has said that there is no way it will agree to a cap on its carbon dioxide emissions for the foreseeable future. And India has said precisely the same.
Both of them point out that it was the industrialised West, not they, that caused the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations during the last century, and that it is now their turn to catch up.
Also, that their emissions per head of population, although rising fast, are still well below those of the U.S. and Europe; and that their overriding priority is - quite rightly - the fastest possible rate of economic growth, and thus the most rapid emancipation of their people from poverty. One good reason why there will not be any effective global agreement.
So the chief consequence of decarbonising here, and making energy much more expensive, would simply be to accelerate the exodus of industry from the UK and Europe to China and elsewhere in the developing world - with, as a result, little or no reduction in overall global emissions.
And even if there were a global agreement to cut drastically carbon dioxide emissions, the economic cost of doing so would far exceed any benefit.
So does all this mean that we should do nothing about global warming? Well, not quite. (Although doing nothing is better than doing something stupid.)
We do need to monitor as accurately as we can what is happening to temperatures across the globe, and we do need to assist the developing countries to adapt to a warmer temperature, should (one day) the need arise.
It makes sense, too, to invest in research in the hoped-for technology of generating electricity using commercial carbon capture (so that carbon dioxide emissions might be “captured” before they can escape into the atmosphere) and also, as the U.S. is already doing, in the technology of geoengineering to cool the planet artificially.
But that is about the size of it. This is not the easiest message to get across - not least because the issues surrounding global warming are so often discussed in terms of belief rather than reason.
There may be a political explanation for this. With the collapse of Marxism and, to all intents and purposes, of other forms of socialism too, those who dislike capitalism and its foremost exemplar, the United States, with equal passion, have been obliged to find a new creed.
For many of them, green is the new red. And those who wish to order us how to run our lives, faced with the uncomfortable evidence that economic prosperity is more likely to be achieved by less government intervention rather than more, naturally welcome the emergence of a new licence to intrude, to interfere, to tax and to regulate: all in the great cause of saving the planet from the alleged horrors of global warming.
But there is something much more fundamental at work. I suspect that it is no accident that it is in Europe that eco-fundamentalism in general and global warming absolutism in particular has found its most fertile soil. For it is Europe that has become the most secular society in the world, where the traditional religions have the weakest hold.
Yet people still feel the need for the comfort and higher values that religion can provide; and it is the quasi-religion of green alarmism, of which the global warming issue is the most striking example, which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as little short of sacrilege.
Does all this matter? Up to a point, no.
Unbelievers should not be dismissive of the comfort that ‘religion’ can bring. If people feel better when they drive a hybrid car or ride a bicycle to work, and like to parade their virtue in this way, then so be it.
Nonetheless, the new and unattractively intolerant religion of eco-fundamentalism and global warming presents real dangers. The most obvious is that the governments of Europe may get so carried away by their own rhetoric as to impose measures that do serious harm to their economies. That is a particular danger at the present time in the UK.
Another danger is that even if the governments do not go too far and damage their own economies, they may still cause great damage to the developing world by engaging in what might be termed green protectionism. The movement to make us feel guilty about buying overseas produce because of the “food miles” involved is just one example of this.
And France’s President Sarkozy is currently urging the European Union to impose trade barriers against those countries that are not prepared to limit their carbon dioxide emissions.
t should not need pointing out that a lurch into protectionism, and a rolling back of globalisation, would do far more damage to the world economy - and in particular to living standards in the developing countries - than could conceivably result from the projected continuation of global warming.
But even if this danger can be averted, it is clear that the would-be saviours of the planet are, in practice, the enemies of poverty reduction in the developing world.
So the new religion of global warming, however convenient it may be to the politicians, is not as harmless as it may appear. Indeed, the more one examines it, the more it resembles a Da Vinci Code of environmentalism. It is a great story, and a phenomenal bestseller. It contains a grain of truth - and a mountain of nonsense.
And that nonsense could be very damaging indeed.
We appear to have entered a new age of unreason, which threatens to be as economically harmful as it is profoundly disquieting. It is from this, above all, that we really do need to save the planet.
• AN Appeal To Reason: A Cool Look At Global Warming by Nigel Lawson is published by Duckworth on April 10 at £9.99. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206.
I accept that humans are altering the global climate. See Global warming.
It is regrettable that this issue has been seen as a threat by powerful economic interests and their paid pundits, like Nigel Lawson (from Gordy's post). I swear Nigel could be a writer for the Watchtower Society if he decided to become a Witness. The fact that nothing concrete has been done to address the stated causes of anthropogenic climate change shows that many of the leaders of the world are against the idea of Global Warming and want you to be against it too. All they have to do is mention "Carbon Taxes," then everyone who hates taxes will look for reasons to be against Global Warming, and they know it. Nothing in this world ever gets done unless there is a profit to be made somehow. There is no profit to be made by altering industrial scale farming or curtailing fossil fuel usage, prime causes of climate change. The economy simply has to grow lest trillions of dollars in the financial system, bets on the future growth of the world economy, evaporate.
Anyway, all I'm interested in is the science, and the politicians can go to hell. I expect we will continue with "business as usual." Whether ultimately accepted as a fact in the public discourse or not, nothing will ever be done to curb anthropogenic climate change because we are incapable of changing our civilization from the top down. Period.
However, eventually, human influence on the biosphere will lessen due to resource limits and the effects of pollution. So-called "greenhouse gases" are but one form of pollution. They come from the very fuels we have built our civilization on. As these fuels deplete, we will be forced to power down.
Dave
If it gets warmer, that's Climate Change.
If it gets cooler, that's Climate Change too.
If it floods, that's Climate Change.
If you have drought, that's also Climate Change.
Hard not to accept it with that reasoning. There is another way to look at this. Find out who is promoting the idea. Look at their lifestyle and business interests. If they truly thought emitting carbon would cause a catastrophic disaster, then would they not cut back their consumption to austere levels? After all, the future is at stake. If they live extravagantly, it gives lie to their claims that such a lifestyle causes the harm that they claim it does.
"Climate, (from Ancient Greek klima) is commonly defined as the weather averaged over a long period of time." - definition of Climate on Wikipedia.
The study of Anthropogenic climate change is a scientific attempt to understand the effects of human activities on the long term global climate.
A multitude of people from different areas of expertise talk about Global Warming. I'm sure many of them are quite well off financially. Do they have to take vows of poverty to get people's attention? If everyone who "believes in" Global Warming went off the grid tomorrow, what would prevent the rest of humanity from consuming resources and creating pollution?
What we have with Anthropogenic climate change is a classic example of theTragedy of the Commons with respects to fossil fuels and atmospheric pollution. Given the nature of current human political and financial systems, I see no effective resolution of this commons dilemma in our lifetimes.
Carbon taxes won't be effective in curbing "greenhouse gas" emissions. If you don't like carbon taxes, wouldn't it be better to fight the tax directly than to demonize the science behind Anthropogenic climate change itself?
If you hate Al Gore, then just hate him, but don't hate the science behind Anthropogenic climate change.
Of course, the science of Anthropogenic climate change itself doesn't actually do anything to avert Global Warming, but it is an easy target for those with a political agenda, both those who would deny it and those who would take advantage of it.
Dave
Was it human activities that brought on the midieval iceage? Was it human activities that brought the earth out of it? Was it humans that gave us a cooler then average winter this year?
Why does every calamity have to be humans fault?
