Comments on: Are Scientists Overestimating — or Underestimating — Climate Change, Part III

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 06 May 2009 01:12:23 +0000

@Aaron:
That all too true. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

@Frank:
No kidding. I just watched a YT video claiming CO2 was life and didn’t raise temperatures in the slightest.
And you’re totally right. I once had to do a school project on the history of the earth, and there were 10,000-100,000 year gaps in between the periods.

By: Frank

Frank — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:06:45 +0000

I’d like to add that I’m not always so passionate; only when millions will die and we lose 70-90% of life on Earth. I’m sorry if I don’t get as excited seeing George W. Bush hit a good drive.

By: Frank

Frank — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:00:55 +0000

I am utterly awe-shocked that David D, Gary Chambers and other denialists are even capable of sentience. I wonder whether these people have ever picked up a science book, worked the process out, or questioned their white-suit ‘Praise the Lord!’ pastors. If you continue with your perpetual psuedo-science and psycho-babble, you will cause people to DIE, you will cause all that is alive to die; how can you not grasp this concept? The geological records of the end-Permian era (the greatest mass-extinction the earth has ever seen) shows the events happened over at least 10,000 years. This epoch’s mass extinction is already happening: the Holocene Extinction event- and it’s happening over a few centuries. The rapidity of the loss of Earth’s biodiversity is unprecedented, due to human development. We are having a larger effect than tectonic processes, you can bet your ass on it.

I think it imperative to pursue the dramatic portrayal of what we already know to the public (they like a bit of drama) and Government intervention may be necessary at this time. More scientists need to be blunt, bold and fearless in getting the truth out there…

By: kiwichick

kiwichick — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 02:26:25 +0000

We face 3 major problems

#3: Climate change
#2: Resource depletion;oil,gas,copper,gallium,rhondium

but the over whelming cause is
#1:Out of control human population growth

We need to discourage human reproduction

By: Jeff

Jeff — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:45:52 +0000

I have been debating denailists on a forum for about 6 months now. Its interesting to me because as I really delve into the science, it weakens their arguments and even people with more advanced degrees that mine, go to rhetoric. Good science is the denialist weakness. But the interesting thing is this rhetoric appeals to people who may not understand the science.

By: Gary Chambers

Gary Chambers — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:40:07 +0000

Thinking out Loud
(Gores Fools)
This old earth has been through this warming cycle hundreds of times since its birth. There were no humans around most of the times when it turned from the freezing ice age to the hot steaming grounds of volcanic heat. There were no automobiles spewing greenhouse gases, but there were millions of prehistoric animals producing large amounts of greenhouse gases. This planet was like a giant greenhouse several times throughout history. We never were sure what happened to the dinosaurs, but we know they weren’t smart enough to protect their selves from the ice age, falling meteoroids or a pandemic virus. We do know that we are smarter than animals and we humans can adapt to any climate on this earth and probably could adapt to a lot of other planets in our solar system. The humans who are not so smart are the ones who listen to a character on a soapbox carrying a sign and yelling that the end of the world is coming. This fool thinks we can change the climate of this vast earth like changing a flat tire. I cannot believe that this man was awarded the Noble prize for his prediction of doom. I guess he didn’t read the same science fiction books that I read when I was a boy.
Most everything I read is no longer fiction. Man has turned all those Jules Verne stories into reality. Any thing a man has imagined and dreamed about seems too eventually become reality, because man has a knack for invention. I can remember the books I read back in the 1950’s about the cities in the future covered with large glass bubbles and men and women traveling from planet to planet.
Man has not developed the God like powers to change a natural evolving climate.
A smart man swims with the current.
Jules Verne should have got the Nobel Prize, not a fool that has filled his Ship with fools.
GC

By: exusian

exusian — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 20:50:03 +0000

Re David D.: For a self-descried “scientist” you sure use a lot of off-the-shelf denier rhetoric and precious little–zero, actually–science in your comment.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 17:22:02 +0000

I am appalled that “Science” is now afraid of being called “alarmist.” There was a time when raising the alarm was seen a good thing – it allowed your group to survive. If you raised the alarm in time, you city could put out the fire before the fire engulfed the city. A few false alarms are the price we pay for staying alive.

More folks should spend some time fighting fires. It is amazing how fast a fire can explode out of control. Fighting fires reminds us that we must catch problems early on. Someone must raise the alarm as soon as possible. Better to raise the alarm on a little fire that can be put out in half a minute with a bucket of water, than let the fire grow into a firestorm that consumes the countryside and destroys whole communities. Right now global warming is our “FIRE”, and it is time to raise the alarm.

If people act as the alarm raised, then there will be less of a long term problem. That does not mean that it was a false alarm, that means that it was a good alarm, people took action, and survived. That is what raising the alarm is all about. Raise the alarm on global warming.

By: Timothy Chase

Timothy Chase — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:03:00 +0000

The longer we wait to do something about climate change, the worse it will get and the more likely that it will lead to government intervention on a larger scale – this is something which I would most certainly agree with. But depending upon the severity of the crisis and the potential for a severe economic crisis, the more likely that people will be willing to give up their liberties in exchange for the promises of any demagogue who promises to do something – however unrealistic. Furthermore, a free society which preserves the independence of the scientific enterprise and preserves economic freedom will be more likely to react rationally than a demagogue who has no genuine interest in trying to deal with severe climate change or the resulting economic crisis, but who is far more likely to be intent upon simply maintaining power.

And make no mistake – if we are talking about droughts on the scale of what is projected under BAU in formerly good farmlands (e.g., with the US no longer able to grow wheat in the lower 48) and rising sea-levels due resulting from the nonlinearity of the response of glaciers Greenland and the West Antarctic Peninsula being in the neighborhood of several meters with so much of humanity living near the coastlines (roughly half of humanity lives within 100 km of the coastlines), there will be a severe and prolonged economic crisis.

At that point, the crisis will be much more severe and prolonged than it needs to be, we will have far less resources with which to respond and we will be less able to respond rationally with what little resources we will have. And we aren’t simply speaking of one nation of many who will be experiencing a severe reduction in their resources. It is already believed that reductions in resources due to climate change is making war more likely – as in the case of Somalia. For those who genuine care about the freedom of future generations and the conditions under which they live, it is imperative that we start doing something about climate change now.

By: Hank Roberts

Hank Roberts — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:48:49 +0000

Joe makes a good point in his third piece:
“It would also be a great irony if conservative Denyers — who are blocking serious mitigation today because they don’t like (a certain kind of) government intervention in our lives — ended up forcing the country into far more government intervention in the near future.”

Ha. And a far greater irony if these folks are being used by those happy to have already begun imposing an iron-gauntlet government — they will need a permanent state of crisis as an excuse to maintain and extend the interventionist government we’re wrestling with now, eh?

Permanent war, permanent Cheney?