| akuma587 said: It's better to err on the side of being safe than sorry. Every time environmentalists come up with some "new scam," many people claim it is unfounded. Think the DDT debacle, holes in the ozone layer, species going extinct, etc. A lot of people claimed that environmentalists were just "making it all up." I'm all for scientific evaluation of a problem, but simply because we can't make a scientific model for something doesn't mean it isn't happening. We still don't have a model that completely explains how gravity works, and only had a rudimentary understanding of it until this century. Does that mean we just made gravity up since scientists couldn't make a model that fully explained it? No, that is a completely ludicrous argument. I'm not saying global warming is 100% fact or anything, but some people dismiss it far too hastily. |
Close. We may not have a perfect model for how gravity does what it does, but the current model can predict perfectly (i.e. more accurately than our ability to measure deviance) what gravitational behavior will be for a system of objects. Climate science doesn't even come close to gravity when it comes to precision of the model.
I'd say that personally I'm more of a skeptic, especially as the past several years have failed to continue the upward climb for temperatures.
The measured relationship between temperature and CO2 levels in the atmosphere is correlative. but people want to draw causal conclusions from them which is unwise. That may be the case, but it could also easily be the other way. Seawater contains loads of dissolved CO2, and how much it can dissolve varies inversely with temperature. This means that when temperatures rise oceans can't contain as much dissolved CO2, and the excess is released. Just one plausible scenario.
