Astral Piper said:

There is no credible scientific evidence that human activity has had any effect on climactic change whatsoever. Yet various pundits, politicians, media and celebrity personalities have pronounced this as "established science" and beyond debate.

THAT is the problem.

I realize that people see churning smoke erupting from trucks and buses, or pictures of stagnant air enveloping entire cities in China, and they extrapolate that to mean the demise of all life as we know it.

Yet there is no evidence to support this at all.

But, as in the aforementioned article from the Financial Times, various governmental agencies and NGOs are demanding the reallocation of resources to address a "problem." People are being told that their lifestyles are complicit in killing the environment, and that to ignore calls for radically modifying the entire economies of the nations which comprise the modern industrialized is bordering on criminal collusion. Absolute nonsense.

The standard of living we have in the modern world today is directly tied to the modern market economies of the powerhouses of our globe - namely The United States and several large nations in Europe. That standard of living has extended human lifespan while at the same time increasing the quality of our lives UNIVERSALLY - both in the modern industrialized world and in those nations still in the developmental stages of their respective economies.

One radical environmentalist in the 1960s declared that anecdotal evidence showed that DDT was responsible for numerous birth defects and genetic damage. This message was celebrated by a sympathetic media and gained momentum, leading to eventual legislation that banned the production and use of one of the most effective weapons in the fight against mosquitoes (and the malarial disease they transmit) - subsequently, MILLIONS of lives in Africa have been lost to that nefarious disease when they could possibly have been saved.

This is the result of people's inability to see beyond their own political predilections, and their desire to pronounce scientific proofs without the benefit of actual hard empirical evidence.

So while you are trying to find "middle ground" in an area that is being propounded ceaselessly by a complicit media, some of us refuse to acknowledge the pseudo-science and mindless nonsense spouting from the peanut gallery.

The real root of this problem is ignorance. So many people today who believe they are educated really display the same proclivity for repeating slogans and neologisms that are based in their own fantasies simply because these "fit" with their preconceptions.

Many people seem to have reached a point where their "book learning" has far exceeded their ability to think critically.

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Visionary Tools said:

It's simple enough. The scaremongering is to condition people that further development and use of coal, oil and gas power stations is evil. This means that third world and developing nations will be kept impoverished, so their little exploited resources can be mined more cheaply.

Global warming has become a campaign to keep poor countries poor so we can live in cheap luxury. No one dares advertise the fact that climate on all planets in the solar system is heating up! We're warmer today because the sun is more active. We can no more change that than make water run uphill.

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mr_kite said:

The rainforests form a precious cooling band around the equator, and they contain 50% of life on earth yet cover an area of only 7% of the planet's surface. Every year an area the size of the UK is destroyed.

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Quote:

Fact: Covering less than 2 percent of the Earth's total surface area, the world's rainforests are home to 50 percent of the Earth's plants and animals.

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rexmundi said:

Saying that modern market economies and human activity has increased the standard of living universally and had no negative impact on the planet is utter nonsense. The rest is just detail, like Ockham, we must recognize bullshit for what it is.

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Kamin said:

The predictions for global warming are supposed to be like...a tenth of a degree per decade or something minute like that. I find it hard to believe that somehow, even though the earth has been around for billions of years, that people believe evidence from such a small fraction of the worlds history, could be used to claim such predictions. That is like me going and interviewing a single person on their beliefs, and claiming that it is a valid sample of the rest of the earth's population.

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Quote:

A 2004 article by geologist and historian of science Naomi Oreskes summarized a study of the scientific literature on climate change.[29] The essay concluded that there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. The author analyzed 928 abstracts of papers from refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, listed with the keywords "global climate change". Oreskes divided the abstracts into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. 75% of the abstracts were placed in the first three categories, thus either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, thus taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change; none of the abstracts disagreed with the consensus position, which the author found to be "remarkable". According to the report, "authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point."

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Kamin said:

The predictions for global warming are supposed to be like...a tenth of a degree per decade or something minute like that. I find it hard to believe that somehow, even though the earth has been around for billions of years, that people believe evidence from such a small fraction of the worlds history, could be used to claim such predictions. That is like me going and interviewing a single person on their beliefs, and claiming that it is a valid sample of the rest of the earth's population.
On the other hand, there is no harm in trying to cause less pollution and advancing technology to rely less on oil and coal etc.
But the current 'crisis' mode that is going on now is overboard.

Wow, what a revival.

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ApJunkie said:

What I don't understand is all these people who get so worked up over the possibility that Global Warming is just a hoax.
Even if it is, who gives a fuck? Does it really bother you that much to try to make less of an impact on the planet? We're not the only animals here you know.

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