One word - Kyoto.
Next!
What do you think ? Whitewash or shutting the gate after the horse has bolted ? Can anyone really take any given commitments to reduce emissions seriously given the heavy vested interests of the fossil fuel industry ? Are there still any naysayers left who think climate change is just a load of hokum ?
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
Its a load of lies.
Fossil fuels = money. Money brings power. Power in with the fossil fuels industry means nothing really changes. Knowing humans we will probably wait until the planet is at the brink of collapse before we really get our act together.
Funny - the planet coped fine before my Range Rover started belching C02 all over.
In fact, there was more C02 in the atmosphere during the last Ice Age than there is now.
To deny climate change is silly. It changes all the time. Always has done, always will.
To claim man made C02 is causing climate change - well, there's no evidence for that.
And to think we can control the planet's temperature/climate with higher taxes - is ludicrous.
All of this is demonstrably true. We are in an interglacial period; that ice at the poles, the clue is in the name, we are still in the ice age. At some point it will all melt, it's down to orbital mechanics. At some point, the ice at the poles will again entend halfway down Europe, also a fact.
However, should we be be looking at deforestation, water pollution, overpopulation? Of course. But it;s never discussed, it's all about CO2 emissions which won't achieve a damned thing.
As long as Aberdeen warms up a bit I'm fine with it.
Three facts for you.
1) CO2 is a green house gas. You can prove this with 2 bottles of soda water and 2 thermometers.
2) The concentration of atmospheric CO2 is increasing. Kids have been measuring this for decades in Chemistry class.
3) If you insulate your house and keep the heating on the temperature goes up. Basic thermodynamics.
Which one is false?
I'm not denying CO2 is a green house gas.
Not all CO2 in the atmosphere is manmade.
Maybe (and I'm no scientist) our chaotic non-linear global climate system is more complicated than a greenhouse and 2 bottles of soda
It seems the kid's 'believer' model predictions continue to be wrong. We're kidding ourselves if we think we can control global temperature with higher taxation.
Again - there was A LOT MORE CO2 in the atmosphere during the last Ice Age.
I think 'climate change' is green-weirdo nonsense. Forsure, there are many scientists that seem to prove otherwise, but history seems to suggest temperatures have risen and fallen over the years, long before man 'contributed'.
I agree with the 'over-population' issue though - easy to say the solution but not exacly easy to implement!!
I wonder how many private planes and large lioms are used for these conferences to take place?.........
Well, I am a scientist (physicist) and there are no known deviations to the physics behind the basic mechanism I described. True, the planet's climate is vastly more complicated than a soda bottle which is why the detailed effects of climate change are so tricky to predict, but the underlying mechanism is as dependable as gravity. In so much as it is possible to state anything as fact, man made climate change is fact.
Well, that's me convinced.
There you go: http://www.informath.org/Contest1000.htm
Fill your boots.
The science is settled, and being a scientist you won't have any problems winning the prize.
Let us know how you get on.
Interesting how deniers have absolutely nothing to bring to the argument by way of evidence or logic, just sarcasm and derision. Oh well, c'est la vie.
Last edited by Groundrush; 11th December 2015 at 11:40.
As a scientist you'll know it's going to be remarkably difficult for me to provide evidence that something that isn't happening, isn't happening.
So I leave it to the experts to show us all for sure that man made CO2 is causing global warming/climate change.
We keep being told "the science is settled" so presumably it must be easy to demonstrate.
Good luck with the $100,000.00 prize.
I gave you 3 facts. All you have to do to sink AGW once and for all is to prove one false. There's even a prize in it for you. A real one.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/
Touche.
I'm not a scientist and I didn't disagree with the facts you presented. Those facts alone categorically don't prove human causality. Why ignore that when it seems to be the crux of the matter?
This is what worries me (given the absence of evidence):
Originally Posted by Groundrush
what i dont get about the arguments about climate change and whether it is caused by man or part of a natural cycle is that these arguments tend to focus on global warming. what I'm more concerned about is the seeming increase in extreme weather events and , as a gardener, the wealth of global anecdotal evidence about the 'mixing up' of seasons. for example: it is now mid december and i currently have roses and ox eye daisies flowering in my garden. i also tend to travel quite a bit, and wherever in the world i have spoken to people who habitually grow things, whether for themselves or for a living , often say the same sort of things, namely that the reliability of the natural seasonal cycles in their particular region that they knew as kids or in their youth, and that according to local historic sources were fairly reliable for previous generations are pretty messed up and have been increasingly so over the past few years.
Last edited by seikopath; 11th December 2015 at 12:20.
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss man-made climate change; while it's quite true that nature varies the climate without human help, the critical point is that human activity can and almost certainly does make a critical negative difference.
I do share the expressed pessimism about the likelihood of dealing with it, however.
Doesn't matter if you believe it or not. What matters is whether the world's leaders at the summit do. And they're looking more likely to try and do something this time. The destabilising effect of weather extremes due to warmer wetter air is now being taken a bit more seriously.
Regardless of whether you believe in man-made or not why not think of it a different way: is pollution and waste a good thing? CO2 is a greenhouse gas so why not reduce it as much as we can?
The argument between deniers/believers has long been a redundant one in my eyes. The science is very very strong, but will never be strong enough to definitively prove the case to everybody's satisfaction as some people are not rationally enough to accept something "on the balance of probabilities" and are inherently sceptical of scientific endeavours as a whole.
I find it quite arrogant that climate change discussions are immediately quashed by those who quote 'facts' and have an unshakable belief that it's man made. I'll make my own mind up thank you.
Since it will suit scientists who are given funding to research this stuff and also '1st World Countries' to state that it's true... Now we've made it so to speak.
Personally I think it probably is the case, and there's little doubt that man is not currently looking after this planet as well as we should. But there's no point losing sleep over it, since countries like China and India have a population of 2.5bn between them and in 2013 China produced 18m passenger cars alone!
Remember when the World was flat and anyone who thought otherwise was an idiot?
There's huge sums of money to be made out of the climate change argument so I'll remain sceptical. But like I said, we should be doing more to protect the planet anyway.
Unless we have a fully qualified climate change scientist on the forum all of the 'facts' in this thread will be secondhand, probably of the Internet and definitely coming from people with an agenda. Just bear that in mind!
The science is settled. I don't even understand why you're trying to persuade me.
Apart from the fact there's no visible human causal signal in any global climate data. Causality should be established before we let our glorious leaders spend our taxes.
Thing is, if I'm wrong it doesn't really matter does it?
But if the believers are wrong (or deliberately misleading) that puts a very different slant on it all.
You see, to me, (a regular non-scientist climate expert) none of this looks settled or proven. And the believer model predictions don't seem to be accurate.
How many more incorrect predictions (based on believer models) do people need to see before more start questioning the settled science? Surely something's not right? :
“By 2010 global temperatures will have increased by 5 degrees C”
“By 2010 there will be 50 million climate refugees in the world”
"By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people"
"More heat waves, no snow in the winter"
“Most of the great environmental struggles will be either won or lost in the 1990s and by the next century it will be too late”
"Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide [USA] two degrees by 2010”
"A general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000.”
"Arctic ice…is currently on track to melt sometime in 2008.”
(list shamelessly stolen from elsewhere).
None of this is about science anymore. Is politics and control. Follow the money.
And I am not for a second saying MMGW will never be proven.
And I am not saying that humans don't need to waste less resources (or be smarter in their use) and breed less.
But believers trumpeting "man made CO2 is warming the planet/changing the climate" looks (currently) at best a little far fetched. it's a TINY TRACE GAS in our atmosphere. A trace gas that was at much higher levels during the last Ice Age when the world was....erm..... cooler.
I found this page to be interesting.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/3...-and-ice-ages/
The climate has forever changed, and there’s absolutely no direct correlation to temperature through CO2 levels.
Watch, learn, and understand the whole reason behind the religious zealotry.
https://youtu.be/lmsWXgM1jNo?t=12m39s – watch it all if you’ve more than 3 minutes to spare.
Meh.
Christopher Monkton is barmy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ...n_of_Brenchley
And there was me thinking that the various Islam-related threads were about as mental as it gets round here. I was wrong.
How did all the delegates get to the conference, what is wrong with teleconferencing? What is the environmental effect of bombing Arabs and successive campaigns, Iraq, Libya, Syria etc etc, then there is development and the industrial revolution in China,India and the Russian block counties.
No one that matters is committed to doing anything about our environmental impact unless there is money in it.
I once knew this guy who was an academic and a rising star at the climatic research unit at the uea. I was talking to him in the pub about climate change one time and asked him his thoughts on the issue. " I love climate change man , " he said " it's going to make me rich !"
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
I assume this is a facetious answer Dave?
If it's not then your mate clearly wasn't as bright as he (or you) think he was. Don't know many academics who are "rich". If I wanted wealth I'd be on the other side of the argument - industry and fossil fuels are where the cash is at.
As somebody else in the thread said earlier (completely failing to understand their own argument) - "follow the money" 螺
My 2p.
Is the climate changing? Yes, it is always in a state if change.
Is mankind the cause? Unlikely, but we are not helping.
Is using Solar and wind power the solution? No as it is too unreliable, and the environmental damage in producing the plant is not sustainable.
Only viable solution? Reduced demand for energy and/or reduce the population, both of which will never happen.
I'm not an expert far from it, but always found it interesting that the Greenpeace Founder quit because 'militants' were forcing an agenda that was not supported by evidence.
He actually stated the world was cooling !!!
Anyway here's a link from NASA in 2014 that shows satellite images indicating that the ice seas around Antarctica are getting bigger and that would support the 'cooling' arguement.
http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum
Now this 'melts' my head, surely if the earth is getting warmer, why in the Antarctic ice getting bigger and spreading ?
Again I've no clue how it works so I won't be able to counter argue anything here, but the earth isn't flat !
I think everyone is skirting around the main issue.
We have too many humans on the planet settling in areas where we were never ment to be.
The answer?
Well I would start with a cull of mankind. Anyone who steals, rapes or kills would be first to go.
2nd get rid of those who won't contribute to society. We surely can't continue stealing off those who work to provide for those who won't.
3rd look at forced euthanasia for those who can't contribute to society.
Why is it mankind is the only species on the planet where it's not "survival of the fittest" instead the fittest support the weaker ones instead of letting them be taken by the wolves?
Follow this plan and that would eradicate 50% of mankind thus lower energy needs, lower food consumption, less co2 being produced and allowing the planet to recover.
Allow land like Africa, South America and Australia to be taken back by nature but with an emergency refuge set up there ready for next ice age then the 50% of mankind settles in yhe northern hemisphere.
Regardless of whether climate change is natural, man made or a combination of the two, it's obvious we can do more to look after this planet and the talks in Paris are at least a step in the right direction . As others have touched on, I think overpopulation is just as big an issue and if that's not addressed, climate change will be a side issue.
Whether or not you buy the idea of manmade global warming doesn't really matter.
Whether or not it's happening doesn't really matter.
All that will come out of Paris (like Kyoto) will be more taxes and controls to attempt to appease the weather gods.
And the weather and the climate will carry on doing what it's doing.
Why?
Because if the sky really IS falling, then dicking about with taxing everyone more is going to solve very little. The only thing that would change anything - from all I've read - is a huge change in living styles and standards the like of which would bring down most governments if they suggested it.
Not sure about that, Mark. Carbon reduction is one of the highest priorities within every corporate these days. Why? Because of the commercial risk they face if they ignore it.
Ultimately, it's business and industry that will effect change, not the individual. And governments, of course, by way of legislation.
My good friend and long time rowing buddy (every Sunday morning for the last 25 yrs or so) is a lot more intelligent than I am. He holds PhDs. in econometrics and medieval (European) history. He told me that during his history study he had read book in Florence, written by monks about growing grapes for wine at the south facing slopes of the sea dykes in the northern part of The Netherlands: Groningen and Frysland (see the map).
In other words: during the middle ages, temps were a lot higher than today...
Menno
I found this interesting map that connects the UK with its cousins in Holland: Saxons and Frisians. To give you an idea where Groningen and Friesland are located: in the middle segment of the blue part on the map.
That's all correct but it doesn't even begin to tell half the story.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas and acts as an insulator both ways; it's a balancing act and your argument doesn't take account of all the facts or all the variables.
To put it in terms familiar to you I'll use an analogy.
1. A fall of over 10ft can kill
2. Planes can fly at over 30,000ft
3 fall out of a plane and you'll die.
Clearly 1 and 2 are facts but 3 doesn't necessarily follow!
I'm not saying that global warming isn't happening or that it's not man made but your argument doesn't prove it is.
Incorrect.
There are no known deviations from the laws of thermodynamics. None. If you can find one then the AGW hypothesis is sunk, and I'll happily admit you are right and personally submit your name to the Nobel prize panel for consideration. I'd even bet that you'd win it too.
The argument is as solid as gravity. All the rest of the considerable research into AGW is merely finding out how big the effect is and what the consequences are.
Now if you want to suggest that there is some magic mechanism (the equivalent of a falling aviators snowy pine forest) that means the laws of physics don't apply to this planet, then have at it. I would be very interested to hear what it is.
Regarding your analogy, here's some reading for you: http://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459
(This was a joke article to highlight the stupidity of insisting on trialing theories which are pretty much self-evident)
Last edited by Groundrush; 12th December 2015 at 21:56.