America is doing NOTHING to help counter climate change.

In fact, a big chunk of your media, and all of your Republicans, seem to want to speed it up – apparently out of spite.

But that change is coming, whatever you say…the facts keep on keepin’ on.

http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

This shows up in mining, in the Tundra, Glaciology and archaeology.

@Brainspore

The hat stays on: Unless harm can be irrefutably demonstrated, there is no impetus (and no legitimate authorization) for increasing controls. I can’t personally argue the reality of the phenomenon because I am wise enough to know that I cannot possibly have enough relevant, reliable data to take a position. I am also wise enough to know that nobody else really can at this point either. My take on it is that efficiency is something we should always strive for regardless of whether or not failing to do so harms the environment. It’s just common sense – if we *can* have 100mpg cars, why shouldn’t we pursue such endeavors?

Part of me suspects that a lot of the hype surrounding the ambiguous science behind it is just a fire lit under the asses of industry as a countermeasure against stagnation in efficiency.

back to anon:

“if global warming is a conspiracy for government control, why do governments fight so hard against doing anything about it? ”

… all i see are HOV lane stickers, tax breaks for ZEVs and hybrids, higher energy taxes, carbon credits, and government and media going on about a million ways to be greener. I’m not sure where you get the idea that the government is against the green movement.

@anon #147

“In 1993, the EPA announced that second-hand smoke was “responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths each year in nonsmoking adults,” and that it ” impairs the respiratory health of hundreds of thousands of people.” In a 1994 pamphlet the EPA said that the eleven studies it based its decision on were not by themselves conclusive, and that they collectively assigned second-hand smoke a risk factor of 1.19. (For reference, a risk factor below 3.0 is too small for action by the EPA. or for publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example.)

Furthermore, since there was no statistical association at the 95% confidence limits, the EPA lowered the limit to 90%. They then classified second-hand smoke as a Group-A Carcinogen.

This was openly fraudulent science, but it formed the basis for bans on smoking in restaurants, offices, and airports. California banned public smoking in 1995. Soon, no claim was too extreme. By 1998, the Christian Science Monitor was saying that “Second-hand smoke is the nation’s third-leading preventable cause of death.” The American Cancer Society announced that 53,000 people died each year of second-hand smoke. The evidence for this claim is nonexistent.

In 1998, a Federal judge held that the EPA had acted improperly, had “committed to a conclusion before research had begun”, and had “disregarded information and made findings on selective information.”

…Meanwhile, ever-larger studies failed to confirm any association. A large, seven-country WHO study in 1998 found no association. Nor have well-controlled subsequent studies, to my knowledge. Yet we now read, for example, that second-hand smoke is a cause of breast cancer. At this point you can say pretty much anything you want about second-hand smoke.” -Michael Crichton

As I said, what to do about it
… if it does turn out to be the case, I think that all the then-living descendants of today’s wealthy oil families, and who yet at that time continue to hold their wealth, ought to be the first to pay, by the taxation of their wealth, for the costs of whatever change then needs to be instituted.

o_0 Really? You’re going to pull anecdotal data to bolster your cause? It is as absurd as people who point out to record snow levels or low temps as proof against warming.

I agree, but I understand why they get brought up – there is a serious problem of shifting standards. It’s fair to reject single data points as anecdotal, but then you find people who insist models require too many assumptions and won’t trust the statistical analysis.

Then some people complain about how individual studies are just one perspective, and when they’re corrected they complain about how science doesn’t run by majority opinion.

These sorts of scattered objections are why things are brought up that by themselves really aren’t good evidence. But of course, by complaining about this I’m proving that I’m biased against deniers, and so everything I say can be ignored as mere politics.

Well – I assume you are still speaking metaphorically, as our elevated levels are ~380 parts per MILLION. A very small slice of air. I’m not saying that this can’t effect temperature, just that even with the giant increase it is a very small amount.

This is hardly a metaphor. Nitrogen oxides rarely reach hundreds of parts per million, but still obviously discolor air. And in fact the absorption from carbon dioxide is easily comparable, just not in the visible part of the spectrum. If we could see infrared we wouldn’t notice much, but I think we’d notice.

This is of course why global warming happens in the first place. With our small amounts of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane, the Earth is about 15 degrees warmer than the equilibrium temperature for a planet with our albedo. I have yet to see anyone explain how changing those amounts could not change the climate by a degree or two.

Which is to say, that speaking as an experienced pot, I’ve never seen blacker kettles!

Except it wasn’t:
http://live.psu.edu/fullimg/userpics/10026/Final_Investigation_Report.pdf
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/06/national-academies-synthesis-report/

It seems to me you are basing your conclusions on invalid assumptions.

I can’t personally argue the reality of the phenomenon because I am wise enough to know that I cannot possibly have enough relevant, reliable data to take a position. I am also wise enough to know that nobody else really can at this point either.

Humility to denialism in one short sentence.

Sometimes it is good to remember precisely whose rotten advice or leadership directed the course to disaster.

Fool.

You have a very different perspective on the American public at large … and rural Americans in particular … than I do.

I’ve met people who changed their minds when presented clear, unbiased evidence. I’ve met rural Americans who recognized immediately the connection between climate changes they’d seen themselves, and the science.

I’m not from Kentucky, specifically, but, in general, this is my family you’re insulting. I think we can talk about climate change without resorting to stereotypes and “my people are better than your people” ridiculousness. In fact, we should. Because, frankly, these kind of attitudes are one of the reasons why otherwise reasonable people choose to ignore scientific evidence. Would you want to join forces with the folks calling you a stupid yokel?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UNXv6IUhC4

Pardon the terrible music.

With that said, to say we understand all of this beyond question, and how it all fits together, is hubris beyond belief. During long periods the earth was covered with glaciers — where I am sitting now, on the 14th floor of a building in Manhattan, was under ice. No one can truly explain, with absolute precision, the cycles that caused those ice ages and no one, it is clear, can predict when we will see one again.

That is to say: There is nothing inconsistent in accepting the science of global warming, on the one hand, yet being skeptical of its more alarmist predictions, on the other. Bengoshi

I’m not saying ANY of these are conspiracies for more government control…

And Fox News never “says” anything, it just brings up some interesting coincidences.

Hmmm, you’re right, I should think about this.

Ah yes, it’s the oil and electricity companies who make hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue every quarter from our consumption of nonrenewable energy, and who stand to lose all this if we transition to something else.

I would like these guys to investigate the, “money and power is fueling the climate change lies!” myth. Do people like rebdav honestly think that scientists get to spend their grant money on Porsches? Do they honestly think that whatever “shadowy cartel” wants climate change to be real is more powerful than the energy industries who want things to stay as they are? It’s fucking ridiculous.

I absolutely agree. And so does Hadfield. Watch is video series.

Of course, it’s also important to point out that you don’t need the crazy, alarmist predictions to make global climate change something we need to mitigate. There’s plenty of more-easily-provable impacts that are much less summer blockbuster-ready, but are still a very bad thing for people.

Time will tell, all right.
And as change always does, some will be affected more by it than others, for a while.

The fact that the changes in some climatic systems are not as insensible as they once were through the revolution of the generations is singular enough!

I agree that once renewables will be producing a significant percentage of world energy, the companies will form an identically self-serving and greedy corporate pressure group. But we are not there yet.

If someone has in mind that global warming is a myth, then it doesn’t really matter that the evidence against it is weak sauce. I’ve seen people willing to ignore vast problems with anti-climate change science, while pouncing on the “sexing up the data” micro scandal as evidence that even global warming proponents don’t believe their own lies.

You’re right that a scientist who wants to save the earth but doesn’t believe in AGW could work on another threat. This may very well happen. But then, the only people left working on AGW are those who believe strongly in AGW. That was sort of my point, really: the field doesn’t accept skeptics very well at all. But I might be misunderstanding your argument…

Well, as was pointed earlier in this thread, temperature hasn’t risen in a statistically significant way in the last 15 years (I don’t think statisticians lend much weight to “almost statistically significant”). The models I’ve seen in the past didn’t predict this flattening of the temperature curve. It’s not hard to just claim that a 100 years trend will keep on going in the same direction for the next decade — that doesn’t prove that a model is right.

What will it take for me to trust the climate scientists? More openness (with data and such), less politics and fewer call to authority (when somebody says something along the line of “trust the scientists, you’re less smart than they are so don’t try to analyze the data yourself”, my BS meter starts ringing).

http://climateprogress.org/2010/10/18/noaa-2010-hottest-year-on-record-zambia-national-all-time-record/

The idea that a single proponent of the man-made climate change theory the has ever at any time proposed anything based on statistical computer models is a “Straw Man” argument: making up an easily overturned argument that you pretend your opponent has made in order to discredit him and to turn attention away from the argument that he’s actually making. The latter is often done because, as is the case here, you don’t have any counters to the actual argument.

Climate change arguments are based on physical chemistry. We know that increases in CO2 atmospheric content, like the very large ones we’ve been experiencing lately, cause increases in heat retention. We know that other factors could also cause similar increases but we also know that none of these factors are changing nor are they likely to. In fact one of the major ones, the recent drop in solar output, has been working to cool us off: so we’ve lucked out for as long as that wobble continues.

To test that theory you get us it to predict something and then test for that something. The “something” should be a “yes or no” kind of thing in order to provide a “falsifiability ” test. Something that can’t be proven false, if only via a thought experiment, is not a scientific theory. Climate change denials fall into this category because the proponents never provide any test by which the denials could be disproved. In the case of Climate Change the prediction is of monotonic increases in global temperature moving averages. This has been observed and nothing has been credibly proposed to otherwise explain this. The degree of change that has been observed immediately threatens the lives of hundreds of millions of people. No mechanism has been proposed by which the rate of increase of temperature will decrease if we don’t act to decrease CO2 levels. All computer models of climate change have predicted lower rates of climate change than what has been already observed: a failure in these models true – but not in a reassuring way.

You don’t need much accuracy to determine trends in stochastic systems. There’s little difference between approximately dead and precisely dead.

CO2 levels do give me pause, but I have to wonder if there have been other spikes in past histories.

Except for the brief period when the Martians colonised Antarctica there have been no previous spikes in CO2 molecules tightly bound to industrial solvent molecules such as car engine anti-knock additives.

I would like to see more efforts focused on how we are going to adapt large populations to these changes

An excellent idea! The first thing to deal with is the imminent collapse of both the world’s rice and wheat crops. In the case of rice every degree by which the minimum overnight temperate increases past about 25 C causes an exponentially decreasing crop yield. We are already seeing the start of this. 2 billion people get over 60% of their, already inadequate, caloric input from rice. Replacing that should be a snap compared to dealing with lower quarterly profits for oil companies – which is about all that’s economically at stake in this issue. We have at least a couple of years to do this in.

Were CO2 a visible gas to our eyes, rather than the transparent one that it is, we’d have noticed that the “fog” had been markedly thickening up for some decades already.