You beat me to it =P

For absolute clarity I've added links to your post so he can read about those fallacies mentioned.

My bottom line for this debate is very simple - Within a given context a statement is either true or it is false - it cannot be both (excepting quantum mechanics).  Who wrote, said, thought, or conceived of an idea first and who repeats that idea subsequently has absolutely no bearing on its legitimacy. If an idea is false - prove it.  Not with general evidence, but with specific targeted evidence backed up by your own specific targeted arguments. 

If I'm wrong I will not accept being simply declared so, I want someone to explain to me specifically how and why I'm wrong so that I can have that information going forward - anything less would be resigning myself to ignorance. To do anything else would go against my sense of intellectual curiosity and is blatantly unscientific. If I'm wrong I want to see how and why I'm wrong.

As for your dig at the election of Bush, I'd say this is symptomatic of what I mentioned earlier in the thread about your being incapable of engaging on the merits of the issue.  George Bush has nothing to do with whether AGW is real or not - the argument you're attempting to make is "you were wrong before and thus you are wrong now".  A patently absurd argument to be sure, particularly considering I'm not much of a fan of Bush myself.  But where it becomes truly, and quite laughably, absurd is that Bush believed in AGW as you do.

India, China, and recently Austrailia have shown that they have no plans to engage in the economic suicide that you and other alarmist call "preventing global warming".  The assessments that I've continually seen are that the US and Europe alone have a negligible impact without near unanimous support from the major industrialized, and even some un-industrialized, nations.  What have you seen that makes you think that A) India and China will reverse position -OR- B) that anything could be done without their support?

Puh-lease.

You're the one who posted vids and links without being able to expound on them with your own comments.  You're the one who lacks knowledge on the substance of this issue. 

I've spent over three years reading on this issue and forming my own opinion.  If anyone got their view on this issue from a talking points memo or a party placard its you.  This is classic projection bias.

The debate about whether it is happening or not is over imo, I think enough substantial evidence exists to prove it is happening. The true debate lies in 'to what extent is it happening?'. The problem is that not many reliable quantifiable means of measuring it exist. The man made effects could range from the very minimal and unnoticeable to the outright severe, the truth is we don't know because we haven't measured it to be satisfyingly accurate*.

Sadly though people believe the worst case predictions instantly due to the media and politicians using the worst case scenario predictions for personal gain. I mean if Joe Public saw two headlines one saying "WE WILL ALL BE DEAD IN 10 YEARS" or "In 100 years the cardigan industry may suffer slightly", which would he buy? The former of course. So the scientific truth is often distorted to the worst case scenario.

What I would propose as a solution would to increase scientific spending by 0.5%GDP (doubling Britain's scientific current paltry 0.5%GDP funding) to focus on producing more accurate models determining plausible outcomes and solutions to problems. In other words, invest now so we are prepared for the future, be it major or minor extent. Because if it does happen to a major extent and we are unprepared because we didn't invest you will be staring at a bill much larger than 0.5% of your countries GDP.

By the way my official stance, I think man made pollutants do not contribute much towards climate change but I also see it the amount as still questionable.


*Refer to my earlier post about when I was doing my bachelors of science and came across a chemical that is 17,500 times more potent than CO2 and not taken into consideration often.

No, I think your sugar coating it a bit.

Things we know without a doubt.

1. Pollution is bad for the environment, more of it obviously makes it worse.

2. Fossil fuels are limited, they are not finite.

3. Use of fossil fuels cause pollution.

4. The creation of new technology (i.e. what would help us leave fossil fuels) costs money in R&D, physical change, regardless if we do it now or in 50 years, it will still cost money.

5. Sooner we clean something, the less damage has occured.

So, with those simple facts, it only makes sense to start now. Create the technologies now that may very well carry US into the next 50 years of economical and technological dominance.

No offence to my non American VGCers, but fuck that if I want them to be the world leaders in any technology market. We have the capacity and the need to create better batteries, cleaner electricity, etc. Why not build a better car body that would eventually cost less to produce, retain its original shape after a crash, and never corrode?

Sometimes I think the conservative view on the world wants us to return to the Dark Ages. Let's hunt witches!!!

These far off things you don't want are already in existence. We can right now put caps on our coal electric plants to prevent nearly any pollution. MIT just created a battery that could run a car 300mi and fully recharge in less than 5 minutes. We have filters to remove all contamination for waste water, i.e. toilets. We have LED lights that are just as bright as any other lightbulb, yet, use a tiny fraction of the energy and last nearly forever.

Why not make these changes now? Like anything costs will come down when mass produced and we will be building a higher tech market which we can dominate.

Just focusing on the models for a sec:

Models are not evidence - they are a tool for re-focusing experiments.  Science is about emperical evidence not theorized/invented evidence.  This is principle is foundational to the scientific method.  A model can be legitimately used to further the understanding of a theory - but not to confirm it outright.  Only data and experimentation are valid forms of evidence/proof for a theory. As you point out here science information is routinely abused - and models are currently abused as propaganda to a level that is far beyond any similar abuse that I'm aware of - I'm pretty sure it is the worst in the history of man actually.

I welcome further research of course, but I think some additional safeguards to the peer review process as well as new requirements on sharing data and methodologies aught to be realized as well. I can think of many examples of "proof" in this area that were never repeated and data that was never shared or even deleted outright to avoid FOIRs. This is a highly contentious issue and the more thoroughly we can ensure the validity of our results the better off we will be - and thats true no matter what you believe right now. 

Ironically, I feel the same way about liberals sometimes with the fervor they push environmental agendas to the extreme. ELF and ALF being prime examples of this.

But regardless of the extremes there is common ground among the rational voices to be found of course - the question is whether people are willing to agree to disagree on the principle behind a change in order to realize the change. Whatever the position you hold we know there are sizeable groups of both citizens and scientists (within their respective groups) that don't buy into AGW theory.  I don't bring this up to make the case that because there are so many they must be right - nothing of the sort.  I bring this up because in order to find common ground and move forward between two groups we need to first respect that others can have an opposing view based out of legitimate reasoning and with equal levels of legitimate concern as you know yourself to have.

Without that basis we aren't going anywhere, and I'll freely admit it is something I continue to work at myself.

PS - I disagree with you on #2.  I'm pretty sure fossil fuels are in fact finite   The Laws of Entropy can be a real bitch LOL.

The relationship between the temperature increases and greenhouse gasses in the greenhouse effect is logarithmic in nature, meaning exponential growth in greenhouse gas levels translates to linear growth in temperature. While we don't know what the relationship would be on a global scale, the relationship between CO2 and temperature in lab experiments is that you have to double CO2 levels to increase temperature by 1 degree.

Being that fossil fuels are a very limited resource, what is the likelyhood we could increase the temperature of the earth through burning fossil fuels before demand pushes the price of this resource beyond the cost of alternative energy sources.

Beyond that, R&D takes time and (in a similar fashion to how 9 women can't have a child in 1 month) you can't make a breakthrough happen by throwing more money at it.

To answer your question with a few points:

• Currently most environmentalist believe we are past 'peak' on every source of hydrocarbons available to us.
• All of the hydrocarbon usage to date has not yet produced a doubling, in fact we've seen little more than 1/3rd of a doubling in atmospheric C02. 
• If we are at peak for hydrocarbons then at the very least we've used half of the earth's reserves (assuming we continue to mine/drill far past cost effectiveness), but in the more likely case that we move on to the next most cost effective source we are talking about the 1/3rd of a doubling we've seen already being about 2/3rds of the overall effect we will see.
• Worthy of note is that not all of the 1/3rd of a doubling is hydrocarbon usage as methane from cows and numerous other non-hydrocarbon sources are factored in but as negligible percentages.

In total I doubt we even have the resources present on the globe to incur even a single doubling of our current atmospheric C02 through anthropogenic means (which by the total range of theories 1 doubling would produce a 0.8C to 6C increase in temperature). 

In total we would need to release 4 times as much C02 as was released from the beginning of the industrial revolution through to today (not all of which can be blamed on mankind) to incur a single doubling.  That is a cold, hard, and indisputable fact.

@highwaystar,

On why other gases with more greenhouse potential are not talked about it is because they are such a negligible part of our atmosphere. Even C02 is miniscule, anyone can do the calculations with the ppm value.  At ~384ppm we just divide 384 by 1,000,000.  It comes out to 0.0384% of the atmosphere.  And C02 is the most abundant greenhouse gas, aside from water vapor, in the atmosphere.  After C02 it is methane at 1745ppb...thats parts per billion or 0.00017% of the atmosphere. Next is nitrous oxide at 0.0000314% of the atmosphere.

Of these gases, C02 has a radiative forcing of 1.46W/m² , methane is 0.48W/m², nitrous oxide is 0.15W/m² .  Radiative forcing, for the benefit of those not sure, is basically how much heat the gas is capable of trapping.  It's really net irradiance which can be positive and negative but for our purposes it is essentially trapped heat.

Beyond that we get into CFCs which are measured in parts per trillion and have radiative forcings ~0.05W/m² , with some exceptions peaking at 0.17W/m² .  But in total nothing comes close to the impact of carbon dioxide (excepting water vapor which is strictly more impactful) - which itself has an impact of debateable significance.

So you’re telling me, that if I tried to make a handheld device that would listen to the radio, and last 24 hours on a single battery charge, it would not cost much more to make that device today, as it would have in 1959?

Today, to make that would cost fewer than 100 dollars. To make that device in 1959, it would take years of time and billions of dollars in technology advancements to get there.

Solving a technology problem long before it’s a problem is vastly more expensive.

I think his point was that it only costs you less now because someone made it in the past, which is true, if it were a new technology, you would have to file patents and do lots of research, as its not, you avoid much of the expense, also, if the radio did not already exist, why would companies try and find cheaper ways of making them or more advanced types of radios?