| elprincipe said: First paragraph: The key word in your analysis is "if." My main point is we don't know for sure. It's hard to say to people you're going to lose jobs and/or income in a major way because we think this might be happening. And I disagree with the assessment we won't know until it's too late. A lot of people will tell you it's already too late, so let's get the science right and not listen to the "do something now even though we don't have all the information" types. Second paragraph: CO2 has already increased a lot in the atmosphere; this is not a "risk," it is a fact. If what has been said is 100% true, people's lives are already in grave danger because of this and cutting back emissions to 1990 levels is not going to change that in any meaningful way.
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You suggest that people's lives are already in danger and cutting back emissions is not going to change that. So we should just continue to increase our emissions and make things worse? I'm sorry, but that's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. Yes, the CO2 that we've put into the atmosphere over the last few hundred years is going to stay there for quite a while, and we can't suck it all back into the ground and undo the damage. That doesn't mean we should continue to pump even more CO2 into the atmosphere which will also stay up there for hundreds of years and increase the size of the problem. This line of reasoning is completely ridiculous.
As far as "we don't know for sure," we as human beings, as scientists, will never, in the entire timespan of mankind's existence, know anything for sure. See my earlier post regarding gravity, evolution, etc. All we can do is produce data which support our theories as best we can. The data for AGW are available. The "theory" is very well-supported. Do we know for sure? No. Is there an overwhelming amount of data to support our theory? Yes! We have the information, we have the science right. How much longer do you think we should wait? How many degrees of warming is acceptable? Should we wait and see if the warming trend continues for the next 10 years? 25? 50? 100? When do we decide to stop waiting and do something about it?
