What Climate Wars Did To Science

[saevel25]

32 minutes ago, newtogolf said:

Pushing a carbon tax on individuals when there aren't cost effective and equitable alternative power solutions just translates to a tax hike.  A key revenue source for Tesla is selling emissions credits to other car manufacturers so they can continue to build gas guzzlers without the penalties.  Our government is using tax payer money to fund Tesla because they are developing eco friendly cars but Tesla doesn't really care about the environment given they are in turn selling emissions credits to those who are producing less efficient, less eco friendly cars, it's hypocritical.

Yet if you make those emission levels low enough then even those they sell to have to lower their emissions even though they are buying some from Tesla. 

Lets say the current level is at 80 (an arbitrary number). Now you could say that all 100 businesses have to lower the emissions to 8. You could say that you want to lower the current level to 60 in 10 years. Given people time to innovate or figure out how to buy credits. 

This way you can have a business who, lets say already at 3, can sell their 3 to someone who is at 9. Either way you are averaging 6. 

The math still works, and it is actually more business friendly because it encompasses a wider range. 
 

[boogielicious]

1 hour ago, saevel25 said:

Yet if you make those emission levels low enough then even those they sell to have to lower their emissions even though they are buying some from Tesla. 

Lets say the current level is at 80 (an arbitrary number). Now you could say that all 100 businesses have to lower the emissions to 8. You could say that you want to lower the current level to 60 in 10 years. Given people time to innovate or figure out how to buy credits. 

This way you can have a business who, lets say already at 3, can sell their 3 to someone who is at 9. Either way you are averaging 6. 

The math still works, and it is actually more business friendly because it encompasses a wider range. 
 

Good point. That is why I think it has to be approached collaboratively. 

[iacas]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/the-siege-of-miami

Quote

 

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sea levels could rise by more than three feet by the end of this century. The United States Army Corps of Engineers projects that they could rise by as much as five feet; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts up to six and a half feet. According to Wanless, all these projections are probably low. In his office, Wanless keeps a jar of meltwater he collected from the Greenland ice sheet. He likes to point out that there is plenty more where that came from.

“Many geologists, we’re looking at the possibility of a ten-to-thirty-foot range by the end of the century,” he told me.

 

 

Quote

The amount of water on the planet is fixed (and has been for billions of years). Its distribution, however, is subject to all sorts of rearrangements. In the coldest part of the last ice age, about twenty thousand years ago, so much water was tied up in ice sheets that sea levels were almost four hundred feet lower than they are today. At that point, Miami Beach, instead of being an island, was fifteen miles from the Atlantic Coast. Sarasota was a hundred miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, and the outline of the Sunshine State looked less like a skinny finger than like a plump heel.

 

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At the opposite end of the earth, two groups of researchers—one from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and the other from the University of Washington—concluded last year that a segment of the West Antarctic ice sheet has gone into “irreversible decline.” The segment, known as the Amundsen Sea sector, contains enough water to raise global sea levels by four feet, and its melting could destabilize other parts of the ice sheet, which hold enough ice to add ten more feet. While the “decline” could take centuries, it’s also possible that it could be accomplished a lot sooner. NASA is already planning for the day when parts of the Kennedy Space Center, on Florida’s Cape Canaveral, will be underwater.

 

[saevel25]

If the water rises 5-6 FT then Myrtle Beach is done, as well as Ocean City and Atlantic City.

http://ss2.climatecentral.org/#10/37.1800/-122.2462?show=satellite&projections=0-RCP85-SLR&level=6&unit=feet&pois=hide

New Orleans is screwed. They will be underwater. 

 

[jamo]

1 hour ago, saevel25 said:

New Orleans is screwed. They will be underwater. 

I mean, naturally it already is, right? Without the levees keeping the water out, it would be.

[JonMA1]

 

Quote

 

On December 28, 2015 at 11:05 PM, JonMA1 said:

A bit off-topic, but... Do you think humans are capable of making the changes necessary to positively affect the climate?

We've already made noticeable, quantifiably positive changes to the ozone layer when it was identified that CFCs were negatively impacting it. Every single country on Earth signed that treaty. 

I hope you don't mind me moving our posts to this discussion @jamo.

I'm all for changing what we can, and I don't mean to be so negative. I read up on the Montreal Protocol and the measurable gains are impressive as you stated. International proposals and agreements that attack the problems with reasonable, long-term goals just seems like a common-sense approach to me.

But based on what some have written, long-term changes won't do. While I admittedly am unfamiliar (actually a dumb-ass) with the science involved in both the causes and cures, I do observe people. Even the most ardent for change will do very little in the way of making giant personal lifestyle changes. It's much easier just to blame others.

I am fortunate enough to have been able to buy a car that gets almost 40mpg, and limit the use of my truck to when it's necessary. In my situation, that's the best I'm going to do as far as transportation and it's more than many folks are able do.

As for energy consumption, I use a wood stove as the main heating source, a wood pellet stove as a secondary, and an electric boiler system as the third. I've added insulation, and use CFL or LED lights. Again, that's as good as it's going to get.

I'm not sure what impact the company I work for has on the climate, but even if they don't put off harmful emissions, it's a safe bet they do business with other companies which do. In any case, I can't afford to be selective with employers. It's sometimes easy to call for industrial change - as long as it doesn't effect our personal income.

I suspect many first-world people are willing to make similar changes, but unwilling to live without whatever comfort they can afford. We can tell ourselves we're making a difference while criticizing corporations for not doing enough - even though we likely do business with or continue buying products from most of them. In the end, how much are our efforts alleviating the problem?

In my mind, science and technology may have to play the biggest role in making sizable transitions (I think a big part of the reduction in CFC's was DuPont coming up with an alternative to Freon???). I suppose governments will have to continue to take part in funding research or offering incentives for businesses and individuals. Even then, I wonder if there are just too many people on the planet.

As others have posted, if climate change is as imminent as some claim, maybe it's time we look towards dealing with the results.

 

[newtogolf]

While Obama claims this is a global effort, it's clear China has their own thoughts about the importance of Climate change:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/12/world/asia/chinas-emissions-pledges-are-undercut-by-boom-in-coal-projects-abroad.html?_r=0

Quote

Altogether, Chinese engineering firms have built or signed contracts to build 14 coal-fired plants along the Vietnamese coast over the past five years, most of them with the help of loans from the government’s China Export-Import Bank.

The building spree here is hardly unique. Since 2010, Chinese state enterprises have finished, begun building or formally announced plans to build at least 92 coal-fired power plants in 27 countries, according to a review of public documents by The New York Times.

A separate study by the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative found that China had invested as much as $38 billion in coal-fired power plants overseas through 2014 and had announced plans for another $72 billion worth of projects, about half of that in firm commitments.

So while we're putting coal mining businesses and people out of work like Peabody, China and India are ramping up their coal-fired power plants.

[Fourputt]

I'm not going to get into the discussion, as I have my own opinions with no real knowledge in the field, but I was just wondering if any of you have read Michael Crichton's "State of Fear"?  I'm about 2/3 of the way through and it is eye-opening.  I tend to be skeptical about some of the things that others panic over, and this book reads a lot more like non-fiction than it does like a novel, with a lot of actual footnotes and references for the data presented about global climate change.  The "action" gets a little bit overdone at times, but I find the science quite interesting.

[dkolo]

6 hours ago, Fourputt said:

I'm not going to get into the discussion, as I have my own opinions with no real knowledge in the field, but I was just wondering if any of you have read Michael Crichton's "State of Fear"?  I'm about 2/3 of the way through and it is eye-opening.  I tend to be skeptical about some of the things that others panic over, and this book reads a lot more like non-fiction than it does like a novel, with a lot of actual footnotes and references for the data presented about global climate change.  The "action" gets a little bit overdone at times, but I find the science quite interesting.

I haven't but a couple of things: it's over 10 years old, so any research it cites is even older than that, and it's been heavily criticized by smarter people than me for being factually inaccurate. My impression from that criticism is that it was to science what The DaVinci Code was to history. 

[acerimusdux]

On 11/30/2015 at 4:04 PM, RandallT said:

1. Very few people question "climate change." Climate change has always happened. Frankly, it's a dumb question that is intended to mock the "other side." It attempts to make them look foolish, and you should look foolish if you deny that climate is changing. 

Let me say again (has been said many times on the thread): the serious scientific challenge to the supposed consensus opinion is not that climate change is occurring or not, it is that the human component is not yet leading us to imminent peril.

First off, the overwhelming scientific consensus now, as reflected in the last IPCC report, is that there is a 95-100% chance that the dominant cause of the warming observed since 1950 is anthropogenic. So while that was a much debated matter in the middle of the twentieth century, by now, it's getting to where it's near to a certainty.

Now "imminent peril", that part I suppose is still subjective, and might be debated.  But there does seem to be an emerging scientific consensus as well that we are likely at the beginning of a "mass extinction event", defined as a period in which 75% of species die out in a geologically short period of time. But that could take thousands of years.

For a quick summary of the history though, I think it's been understood for over a century now that:

a> Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere

b> Carbon dioxide will absorb radiation, and if put into the atmosphere, could cause warming.

Thus the main objections in the early twentieth century, to the theory that human use of fossil fuels would thus cause warming, were that:

A> it was possible that the additional CO2 being put into the atmosphere was being absorbed elsewhere, especially in the oceans.

B> it was believed that CO2 absorbed radiation in the same spectrum as water vapor, and that this spectrum might already be so saturated that adding more absorption there might not make a difference (i.e., all radiation in this frequency was already being absorbed).

These objections basically fell apart in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1970s, there was convincing evidence that CO2 absorbed infrared radiation at around the 15 micron wavelength that is not absorbed by water vapor, and that the oceans were not absorbing additional CO2 anywhere near fast enough to make much difference. At this point, scientists were having trouble coming up with any good reasons why all that CO2 wouldn't cause warming, and a consensus was emerging that global warming could be a serious threat.

The real nail in the coffin though came with the ice core data in the 1980s. This showed pretty convincingly that:

1. CO2 concentrations were significantly higher than at any time in the hundreds of thousands of years of ice core data; so the CO2 humans had added wasn't being absorbed, it was all still out there.

2. There was a really tight correlation between temperature and CO2 concentrations; it is obvious that CO2 radiative forcing does occur, it's not blocked by water vapor or anything else.

There's a lot more than that, and a ton of science that has been done in the last 3 decades that has confirmed and reinforced all this, and given a much more in depth understanding of how much of it works.

But by the first IPCC report in 1990, there was already a pretty strong consensus on the basic fact that human emissions of greenhouse gasses (especially CO2) was causing and would continue to cause warming. Isn't that much at least, pretty much "settled" by now?

 

On 11/30/2015 at 4:04 PM, RandallT said:

Here are some graphs that speak to me, for example. If any are flat out wrong, let me know!

Yeah, the last one at least looks flat out wrong to me. And coming from a climate denial site (wattsup...), and I'm not clear what the source is supposed to be. The first one just looks like it's cutting off the last few hundred (or maybe even a couple million) years. If I go to the link cited, I see something else:

http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm

There, you can see that "today" is not so historically low anymore, actually the warmest since maybe the mid-tertiary? And a pretty sudden spike, at that.

The Sea level ones look OK, but just because there was 100+ meters of sea level rise over 10,000 years when the glaciers melted, doesn't mean that a 3 meter rise in the next century would be a small thing,

But anyway, I have to ask, did it occur to you that a Petrophysicist might not be the most reliable source to consult on climate change?  I'll stick to answering the points raised, just want to make sure you're aware of the source.

On 11/30/2015 at 4:04 PM, RandallT said:

On a grand scheme, scientists haven't proven to my satisfaction why, say 1000ppm, means destruction of our planet.  We've been up well over 1000ppm in the past.

Well, I don't know that anyone is predicting destruction of the planet. Just the extinction of some of the species currently living on it (possibly including even humans). But surely the planet will go on.

On 11/30/2015 at 4:04 PM, RandallT said:

I sure don't think of the Jurassic period as being difficult for sustaining life (2000+ppm CO2).

Yes, but the dominant animal life were reptiles.

On 11/30/2015 at 4:04 PM, RandallT said:

Also the planet has been much hotter and cooler than now (a range of 15c)- without human intervention. We are at fairly low temps and CO2 concentrations historically.

Here's the thing. We are seeing possibly the highest CO2 levels that there have been in the last 20 million years. That maybe doesn't seem like a lot when you look at levels going back 600 million years. But humans have only been around less than 200,000 years. Primates have been around about 55 million years, but were small and squirrel like. Monkeys evolved just over 30 million years ago, when the climate wasn't that much different from today.

Also, there are some other somewhat sudden spikes in that 600 million year history, but they may also have been associated with mass extinction events. Of the five previous known mass extinction events, the first, the  Ordovician-Silurian, about 439 million years ago, coincides with the first large warming spike on that graph. The second, the Late Devonian, about 364 million years ago, may have been associated with the cooling that occurred near the end of the Devonian. The third, about 251 million years ago, the Permian-Triassic, the worst in the history of the earth, followed that sharp rise in temperatures near the end of the Permian.

So maybe knowing this has happened before isn't necessarily that encouraging.

[Fourputt]

7 hours ago, dkolo said:

I haven't but a couple of things: it's over 10 years old, so any research it cites is even older than that, and it's been heavily criticized by smarter people than me for being factually inaccurate. My impression from that criticism is that it was to science what The DaVinci Code was to history. 

The DaVinci Code was based on supposition and myth.  Crichton quotes and references actual studies, temperature records from as early as the 1820's to 1990, satellite sea level measurements, far more accurate than land based measurements.  As I said, I'm not trying to do the research, but I'm guessing that a lot of the critics were the same ones who are blowing the global warming horns, so of course they are going to knock anything that leans toward the other side of the fence.  That is, in fact the major theme of the book, that trying to convert doomsayers is like trying to convert a religious fanatic.  You can't get past their fundamental belief that they are right, so any data that refutes it must simply be wrong.

One of the interesting concepts that he mentions is the theory of experimental bias.  When a group goes into an experiment with a preconceived idea of the expectations, the results almost always seem to match the expectations, whereas the same experiment done as a blind almost always has a different result.  This means that if the group running the project already believes that mankind is a major contributor to climate change, then that's what their results will show.  If they are already skeptical then that will skew their results in a different direction.  I'm not sure how one can take reliably collected data and make it say something that it doesn't, but that is the idea behind the theory.  

[iacas]

1 hour ago, Fourputt said:

The DaVinci Code was based on supposition and myth.

Rick, just as you did when you were posting in the gun thread with your ridiculous claims about your friends using automatic weapons to hunt and other stuff, you can't jump into a thread, post something (nonsense or not), and claim "I'm not going to get into the discussion". It's bullshit. Engage in the discussion or don't. If you do post, man up, and own what you say.

I haven't read the book so I can't actually comment, but I did look up some reviews. Crichton is a novelist, and yes, he did some research, it appears, but he's far from being an expert, and he's still going to use dramatic license to do with things as he pleases. Including (from here):

Quote

Crichton informs us, "A large high-pressure mass was beginning to rotate, forming the ragged beginnings of a hurricane." This is false, a hurricane forms from a large mass of LOW pressure.

If you can't even get basic things like that right, it casts serious aspersions on the rest of what you have to say. The review has, toward the end, this:

Quote

Many more flawed or misleading presentations of Global Warming science exist in the book, including those on Arctic sea ice thinning, correction of land-based temperature measurements for the urban heat island effect, satellite vs. ground-based measurements of Earth's warming, and controversies over sea level rise estimates. I will spare the reader additional details.

Basically… I don't trust a novelist to add to this discussion anything worthwhile, nor would I those who are basing their opinions on something having read the novelist's novel.

And… That's something I'd consider true regardless of which "side" it represents.

1 hour ago, Fourputt said:

That is, in fact the major theme of the book, that trying to convert doomsayers is like trying to convert a religious fanatic.  You can't get past their fundamental belief that they are right, so any data that refutes it must simply be wrong.

One of the interesting concepts that he mentions is the theory of experimental bias.  When a group goes into an experiment with a preconceived idea of the expectations, the results almost always seem to match the expectations, whereas the same experiment done as a blind almost always has a different result.

I think a good number of real-world working climate scientists would take major issue with those statements.

[Fourputt]

58 minutes ago, iacas said:

Rick, just as you did when you were posting in the gun thread with your ridiculous claims about your friends using automatic weapons to hunt and other stuff, you can't jump into a thread, post something (nonsense or not), and claim "I'm not going to get into the discussion". It's bullshit. Engage in the discussion or don't. If you do post, man up, and own what you say.

I haven't read the book so I can't actually comment, but I did look up some reviews. Crichton is a novelist, and yes, he did some research, it appears, but he's far from being an expert, and he's still going to use dramatic license to do with things as he pleases. Including (from here):

If you can't even get basic things like that right, it casts serious aspersions on the rest of what you have to say. The review has, toward the end, this:

Basically… I don't trust a novelist to add to this discussion anything worthwhile, nor would I those who are basing their opinions on something having read the novelist's novel.

And… That's something I'd consider true regardless of which "side" it represents.

I think a good number of real-world working climate scientists would take major issue with those statements.

The only references I've made to the book were from the data that he correlated with footnotes to actual studies.  I haven't referenced any of his editorial statements in the fictional side of the work.  I fully acknowledge that he could easily cherry pick that data and I have no information to confirm or deny it, nor I would imagine has anyone else here without a large volume of research focused on just that.  

All I'm really saying is that there still a significant and reputable viewpoint that human interaction to this point has had very little to do with global climate change.  The reason being  that real measured data has been too spotty and too recent in origin to be convincing to me.  Ice cores can give a fairly broad overview, but they often can't point to specific causes.  They can tell what occurred but not always why.

[iacas]

Just now, Fourputt said:

The only references I've made to the book were from the data that he correlated with footnotes to actual studies.  I haven't referenced any of his editorial statements in the fictional side of the work.  I fully acknowledge that he could easily cherry pick that data and I have no information to confirm or deny it, nor I would imagine has anyone else here without a large volume of research focused on just that.  All I'm really saying is that this still a significant and reputable viewpoint that human interaction to this point has had very little to do with global climate change.

You're also saying - and correct me if I'm wrong - that reading a novel and what he said about the little bits of old research he cited makes up the bulk of your knowledge on the subject. Yes? Did you read any of the things he cited, or did you just read the citations in the context of a work of fiction?

[Fourputt]

3 minutes ago, iacas said:

You're also saying - and correct me if I'm wrong - that reading a novel and what he said about the little bits of old research he cited makes up the bulk of your knowledge on the subject. Yes? Did you read any of the things he cited, or did you just read the citations in the context of a work of fiction?

No I didn't research it because I'm not actually all that concerned about it.  I don't buy into the theory (and that's all it is, a theory).

[iacas]

1 minute ago, Fourputt said:

No I didn't research it because I'm not actually all that concerned about it.  I don't buy into the theory (and that's all it is, a theory).

Okay, then here, perhaps you'll appreciate this. It's a little bit of research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Fear#Criticism_from_scientific_community

Quote

This novel received criticism from climate scientists,[1][6][24] science journalists[7][25] and environmental groups[26][27] for inaccuracies and misleading information. Sixteen of 18 U.S. climate scientists interviewed by Knight Ridder said the author was bending scientific data and distorting research.[6]

Several scientists whose research had been referenced in the novel stated that Crichton had distorted it in the novel. Peter Doran, leading author of the Nature paper,[28] wrote in the New York Timesstating that

"... our results have been misused as 'evidence' against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel 'State of Fear'"[24]

Myles Allen, Head of the Climate Dynamics Group, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, wrote in Nature in 2005, "Michael Crichton’s latest blockbuster, State of Fear, is also on the theme of global warming and is,...likely to mislead the unwary....Although this is a work of fiction, Crichton's use of footnotes and appendices is clearly intended to give an impression of scientific authority."[1]

The American Geophysical Union, consisting of over 50,000 members from over 135 countries, states in their newspaper Eos in 2006, "We have seen from encounters with the public how the political use of State of Fear has changed public perception of scientists, especially researchers in global warming, toward suspicion and hostility."[29]

James E. Hansen, former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies at the time, wrote "He (Michael Crichton) doesn’t seem to have the foggiest notion about the science that he writes about."[4] Jeffrey Masters, Chief meteorologist for Weather Underground, writes: "Crichton presents an error-filled and distorted version of the Global Warming science, favoring views of the handful of contrarians that attack the consensus science of the IPCC."[2]

The Union of Concerned Scientists devote a section of their website to what they describe as misconceptions readers may take away from the book.[27]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/state-of-fear-not-so-hot.html?_r=0

Quote

Kenner cites study after study but Drake, the scheming NERF leader, is allowed no evidence. "Just trust me, it's happening," Drake says of global warming. "Count on it." There are, of course, thousands of scientific studies that raise disturbing questions about climate change and the human role in its cause. To claim that it's a hoax is every novelist's right.

(The NY Times review focuses mostly on the book as a novel).

http://grist.org/article/schmidt-fear/

Quote

 

Even more troubling is some misleading commentary regarding climate-science pioneer (and my boss) James Hansen’s testimony to Congress in 1988. “Dr. Hansen overestimated [global warming] by 300 percent,” says our hero Kenner.

Hansen’s testimony did indeed spread awareness of global warming, but not because he exaggerated the problem by 300 percent. In a paper published soon after that testimony, Hansen and colleagues presented three model simulations, each following a different scenario for the growth in CO2 and other trace gases and forcings. Scenario A had exponentially increasing CO2, scenario B had a more modest business-as-usual assumption, and scenario C had no further increase in CO2 after the year 2000. Both B and C assumed a large volcanic eruption in 1995.

Rightly, the authors did not assume they knew what path CO2 emissions would take, and presented a spectrum of possibilities. The scenario that turned out to be closest to the real path of forcings growth was scenario B, with the difference that Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, not 1995. The temperature change for the ’90s predicted under this scenario was very close to the actual 0.11 degree-Celsius change observed.

So, given a good estimate of the forcings, the model did a reasonable job. In fact, in his congressional testimony Hansen only showed results from scenario B, and stated clearly that it was the most probable scenario.

The claim of a “300 percent” error comes from noted climate skeptic Patrick Michaels, who in testimony before Congress in 1998 deleted scenarios B and C from the chart he used in order to give the impression that the models were unreliable. Thus a significant success for climate modeling was presented as a complete failure — a willful distortion that Crichton adopts uncritically.

…

In summary, I am disappointed, not least because while researching his book, Crichton visited our lab at the NASA Goddard Institute and discussed some of these issues with me and a few of my colleagues. I suppose we didn’t do a very good job of explaining matters. Judging from his bibliography, the rather dry prose of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did not stir his senses quite like some of the racier contrarian texts. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Crichton picked fiction over fact.

 

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/solutions/fight-misinformation/crichton-thriller-state-of.html#.VolgyTayW5A

Too much to quote.

---

So, @Fourputt, it appears your opinion on this is based almost entirely on reading a misleading novel.

Cool. No pun intended.

I appreciate your knowledge of many areas, particularly on the Rules as it relates to the on-topic areas of this site, but suffice to say guns and climate change aren't among the areas in which you're strongest? Might I suggest a "read and learn" approach, which I willingly take on many, many topics. So climate change isn't in your wheelhouse… Okay.

[Fourputt]

38 minutes ago, iacas said:

Okay, then here, perhaps you'll appreciate this. It's a little bit of research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Fear#Criticism_from_scientific_community

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/state-of-fear-not-so-hot.html?_r=0

(The NY Times review focuses mostly on the book as a novel).

http://grist.org/article/schmidt-fear/

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/solutions/fight-misinformation/crichton-thriller-state-of.html#.VolgyTayW5A

Too much to quote.

---

So, @Fourputt, it appears your opinion on this is based almost entirely on reading a misleading novel.

Cool. No pun intended.

I appreciate your knowledge of many areas, particularly on the Rules as it relates to the on-topic areas of this site, but suffice to say guns and climate change aren't among the areas in which you're strongest? Might I suggest a "read and learn" approach, which I willingly take on many, many topics. So climate change isn't in your wheelhouse… Okay.

My opinion was formed long before I started reading the book.  I only brought it up because I happened to be reading it at the same time that I first saw this thread.  I didn't even know what the book was about five days ago.  

Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to taking reasonable measures to move away from spewing excessive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere - what we put out certainly can't help anything.  I just don't subscribe to the theory that we are heading down the road to catastrophe.  The fact that evidence is being gathered and measures are being taken by some to mitigate such emissions tells me that we are working in the right direction.  That said, we can talk all we want, but until other countries (like China) take it more seriously we are mostly wasting our time.

[dkolo]

51 minutes ago, Fourputt said:

No I didn't research it because I'm not actually all that concerned about it.  I don't buy into the theory (and that's all it is, a theory).

Dismissing it as "just a theory" misunderstands the meaning of the word as used in academic science. It doesn't mean "hypothesis" or "hunch" the way we use it in daily life. It means a broadly-accepted framework for explaining a phenomenon based on the facts collected. Theory in this context is a reflection of solid understanding of the mechanisms at play. It means that the explanation fits the existing fact set and offers predictive value by being testable, both of which are true about the theory of man-made global warming. Gravity is a theory. Evolution is a theory. And the only time those theories come into question is when I keep missing the same putt on the wrong side of the 6th hole at Sunken Meadow Red.