Global warming is not man made. That's the main thing they're lying about. We just make it happen much, much faster.
Maybe there is some nuance I'm missing in what you're saying, but "warming" is an intrinsically relative term; time-span being implied. Semantics aside, I don't believe there is a practical difference between
causing global warming and causing global warming to accelerate substantially.
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In general, two points stick out for me: the political vs scientific aspect of the warming issue and the paradox created by the quest for absolute certainty.
The "Quest for Absolute Certainty" concept is something we examine on the Command and Staff course I'm taking right now. Although it's a military course, I think the concept is relevant here. The basic premise is that the risk posed by uncertainty has to be balanced against the risk that delaying a decision will render that decision irrelevant. A key principle is that some risks must be accepted, planned for and mitigated against rather than eliminated outright. Failure to accept uncertainty results in paralysis, which results in defeat.
From what I understand of this issue (I'm not a scientist), there is certainty that climate is changing. That's not a biggie, climate has always been changing. There is virtual certainty that climate is changing at an unusually fast rate. There is a high degree of certainty (90% sayeth this politically sensitive panel of scientists) that it's caused by mankind burning of fossil fuels. Certainty decreases as they start getting into predicting the specific consequences, but even cautious predictions are warning of dramatic effects.
Keep in mind that understanding the past has got to be a little easier than predicting the future regardless of what you're talking about. So certainty about the future is not absolute. Unless some of you are planning to transcend into a higher dimension, it never will be. Certainty about the past is higher, but ultimately limited by our abilities as well. 100% certainty in the context of this issue is literally impossible to achieve.
So what do we do? Waiting for 100% certainty will guarantee one thing: if what they are saying is true it will be far too late to actually deal with it. At what point exactly do we stop and say "n% is good enough for me, let's do something to save our asses!"?
To me, the degree of certainty right now makes me believe direct action to dramatically reduce fossil fuel is justified. Even if they are totally wrong on the science side, the "secondary" effects reducing our dependency on a finite energy source and reducing the air pollution in our urban centres have enough of a positive effect economically in the long run to justify the short-term economic challenges. But I digress.
Mixing science and politics is just about as fun as mixing science and religion but for this particular issue, neither can be ignored. Without science, we cannot determine whether the climate is actually changing, if it is, what the causes are, nor do with have any way to predict the consequences or how to avoid or mitigate them. As explained above, even with science, absolute certainty about these elements is virtually impossible.
You could have all the scientific certainty in the world but without political will, nothing actually gets done. It's politicians that hold the public purse strings, not scientists. Political will, at least in the Western World, is generated by those with an agenda subjecting the masses to endless, mostly nauseating, rhetoric and propaganda.
Manufacture a fake crisis or deny a real crisis as it suits; aggressively characterize anyone that doesn't support you as immoral, stupid, traitorous, biased and ironically, self-serving. It's the same story over and over again. Despite what anyone says, this pattern is not the exclusive domain of any particular political group; they ALL do it (or at least the ones that are successful do).
Our job is to try to shift through all the crap for the odd nugget of meaningful truth despite having the odds stacked against us and through the democratic process, try to influence an appropriate political decision. It sucks but what other alternatives do we have? Again, scientists don't make policy, politicians do.
It always amazes me the ease at which any given party is able to select completely disparate logic from one issue to the next. For example, consider: Is the production of massive amounts of "green-house" gases leading to catastrophic climate change? Versus: Does Saddam Hussian have sufficient stockpiles WMD to represent a catastrophic threat?
To me, the questions have many similarities. First, there is an inevitable degree of uncertainty in answering either question decisively. Second, there is a substantial degree of intolerance to the consequences of answering the question incorrectly. Third, depending on the answer, the resulting policy response is either a relatively massive undertaking or pretty much nothing at all; i.e. not likely to end up with a middle of the road solution.
By my way of thinking, a rational individual would approach each problem in a consistent fashion. Someone with a "conservative" (i.e. true meaning of the word) mindset would be cautious about taking any significant actions without reducing the uncertainty to as close to zero as possible. Someone with a more "liberal" (i.e. again, true sense of the word) mindset might be tolerant of a higher degree of uncertainty in favour of being proactive.
Yet the reality of the situation contradicts that. It seems to me that there is somewhat of a correlation between supporting a preemptive invasion of Iraq despite less than 100% certainty (about whether he had WMD and what the consequences of taking/not-taking action would be) and not supporting interventions to reduce green-house gas emissions without incontrovertible proof that a total disaster is imminent. The reverse also seems true.
So what's up? IMHO the political groups involved in the issue are motivated by self-interest dominantly. The so-called "arguments" for or against are strictly rationalizations meant to persuade. They have little or nothing to do with why they have taken that position, so logical consistency is irrelevant. The political "debate" is largely between those that make lots of money producing green-house gases and those that see the issue simply as an opportunity to acquire political power. The fact they we may or may not be on the verge of wiping ourselves out is, at best, a secondary consideration.
There really isn't that much of a scientific debate on the broader questions. Granted, the devil is in the details. I think it's important to remember that although impartiality is key in science, scientists are human beings just like the rest of us and aren't totally immune to bias and influence. That being said, when the majority of the scientific community is standing up and saying they are 90% certain we have a problem, and that problem appears to lead to catastrophic consequences, I think it's too risky to just dismiss them.
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Just my $0.02.
