On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Yes i am Crazy, just love dealing with egotistical scientists who have a
> > bone to pick, or an ego to scratch.
>
> Climate Science is a lot like Tobacco Science:
>
> 1) They describe complex systems with thousands of causes and
> thousands of effects.
>
> 2) The exact cause-and-effect mechanisms are not always known,
> and there are random factors, too. ("Uncle Ed smoked a pack
> every day, and he lived to the ripe old age of 99." -- many
> others didn't.)
>
>
That's what the climate change deniers want you to think. It's not true.
We know damn well that carbon dioxide blocks long wave infrared radiation.
We know that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising. We know
that the increase in CO2 comes from burning fossil fuels. We know that the
earth is absorbing more energy than it's radiating away. What's more, we
know all of these things from multiple independent methods, and the analysis
has been done by many different independent people.
There are no serious scientists working in climate that disagree with that.
(There are some kooks, but you can find kooks in biology that don't believe
AIDS is caused by HIV. The existence of crazy people is not an argument.
And, of course, their are monied interests paying people to tell lies.)
Global warming is real, man caused, and it's going to cause problems.
Just what those problems, and their magnitudes, will be is not yet clear.
While we have good numbers for the amount of excess heat the earth absorbs,
we don't have a good understanding of where it's all going. So we don't
know how fast sea level will rise (faster than than the IPCC reports say,
though, even their "worst case"). We don't know what happens to ocean
circulation (which drives much weather). We don't have a full understanding
of how all the various feedbacks to radiative forcing behave together.
But those are pretty minor problems -- they're very much akin to saying "My
house is on fire. I don't know if it will burn down in 10 mintues or two
hours, so I'll wait until the fire gets going to call the fire department".
We don't know just how bad it's going to be, nor how long it will take to
get that bad. We can be damn sure it's going to be bad enough.
> \Any reasonable expert would claim a high likelihood that both
> cimate change and cancer from smoking are real, not certainty.
>
>
No. It's quite reasonable to make the claim that climate change is certain,
that it's caused by man burning fossil fuels, and it's happening now.
--
David Scheidt
[email protected]
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