Stop worrying about harming our habitat (since we are not actually harming the environment, we are the environment) and focus on the things that make us unique as a species - invention, problem-solving and cognition. The answer to whatever simulacrum of the apocalypse the environmentalists are threatening us with is not an ascetic lifestyle that slows the momentum of our technological advancement. Fear is not a good stimulus.

Maybe not good stimulus but perfect instrument of control...

The major issue with the old Pianka-argument is which half of humanity gets the axe? I don't see anyone who advocates global genocide as a means to save the planet volunteering themselves or their friends and families.

Taka you are seriously frwaking awesome! Finally someone who understands what science is about. For some weird reason people think scientists are all in this conspiracy to get a ton of money or gain power. Scientists aren't all old men siting in a circle plotting to write a bunch of phony papers about whatever can get them money. This is best seen in the process in getting your research published in a journal. Lets say I write a paper on Unicorns and Their Effect on the Vegetation in Northern California's Redwood Forest, I wrote this paper in 2000 and sent it to The Journal of Ecology. Well when that journal gets it they then send it to other scientists in my field, who then read it and check my data, methods, or basically my whole research process. They then pick the thing apart and send it back to me. This goes on and on until finally the paper is seen as correct. This whole process might take years.

I really hate getting into arguments with people who aren't into science because they usually don't understand that you can't just publish what you want or make up data. In the science world this will get you outcasted. I love how people still claim that those hacked emails prove that global warming is a farce. Nothing is going to happen to those scientist because if you actually read all the emails, instead of the quotes picked out, they did nothing wrong. "Trick" is a readily used word in the scientific and math community. Hell, anyone who has gone to college or taking college science or math classes has heard that term used at least once. I also suggest that anyone who wants to know more about science should look at the other videos potholer45 has, especially the scientific method one.

I do not wanna say so many words.
So, Global warming is the result of Humanity's fucking dealings. So, if Humanity will be destroyed - Ok. That will be right.

Now we are starting to hear more and more - even in massmedia - that maybe there wont be warming, but "freezing", due to low Sun activity...

Written by Ellrohir on 19.12.2009 at 12:13

Well the biggest advantage of this is, that noone can predict future...so if climate would go wrong in next years, you can say "see? we have warned you"...and if wouldnt, then you can still claim "see? we have stopped it at time, praise us!"...GW is a wonderful bet - you cannot loose...

I agree. Personally I don't believe in GW. I admit that I am not a specialist, and my belief could be mistaken. I haven't witnessed any proof of GW, nor have I seen any verified data that points directly to it. The environment is important, but I'm not so sure I'm willing to accept GW. Besides, it's been colder in my area these past few years than it ever has been earlier in my life (other than the 93 blizzard).

Written by Ellrohir on 12.02.2010 at 11:47

Now we are starting to hear more and more - even in massmedia - that maybe there wont be warming, but "freezing", due to low Sun activity...

We are most probable in the end of an inter-glaciar period. It has lasted more or less 10 000 years. Pretty much for such a period, the latest inter-glaciar only lasted half as much.

LOL at people thinking that the increased snowstroms lately means that Global Warming isn't happen. It just shows how much you don't know about the weather. Drastic weather changes are a cause of global warming.

Just hire Immortal, they'll cover the world in freezing ice-winds of glacial frost.....problem solved

Written by BitterCOld on 19.12.2009 at 18:44

Taka, you can opt to believe it. i can opt to disbelieve it.

if you choose to take on faith a "consensus" based upon the findings of a group of people that opted to discredit anyone whose research runs counter to their own, well, that's your call.

have fun with your new religion.

Dude, Bill Nye the Science Guy says climate change exists, so of course it's true

Climate change has always been there...there seems to be a lot of denial going around...

Wow. It goes to show that even metalheads who tend to be critical thinkers are buying this crazy conspiracy-theory propaganda off of a few loonies that probably never bothered to actually understand what the hell they are talking about. All this while accusing the actual scientists of being either gullible sheep or evil devils trying to cash in on "climate panic".
What. The. Fuck.

Does anyone still remember when the debate hadn't reached the broad public? No one talked about conspiracies or lies, it was all about the science. Which does not mean there weren't any disagreements, but disagreements that were based around facts and where resolved via research and not by rhetorically kicking the other side in the nuts. Which is happening now, as the attention of the public has attracted a lot of paranoid fools who sadly know their way around demagogy. The media picked this up as they felt they had a duty of reporting "the other side" as well and because it makes better news to report "brave man outcast by science community for spreading blasphemy" than "scientist expresses doubt about minor detail in climate model".

Until now all these so called rebels came up with to refute the established scientific theories was littered with incoherent nitpicking, misinterpretation of data, logical fallacies and factually false statements. Most of the arguments boil down to "we cannot understand xy therefore our proposition must be true" or worse, are not in fact arguments but thinly veiled defamation to make each and every scientist look like an extreme Eco-communist. Or something like that.

A minority of scientist do in fact argue against certain points in what's is currently the consensus (hence the usage "consensus" not "gospel") but their findings (which are often provocative to incite serious debate) are usually shamelessly exaggerated and taken at face value by people who simply refuse to change their stance on the issue. Cherry picking isn't science either. Citing one guy at NASA who thought solar activity plays a too small role in current models does not win case against the model or even against the whole field of climate science. Arguing it does only reveals a staggering ignorance about the scientific method, peer review, probability and statistics and the logical background behind scientific reasoning. One does not even need any expertise on the subject to see that a hot summer(=weather) has no direct connection with average temperature (=climate) or that the glaciers in the alps are in fact melting. Attacking a theory based on things you learned off Discovery-channel is not science, you need a little more than that to formulate a valid argument. Else timecube would be cutting edge physics.
If you fail to consider these easy definitions and observations in your alternative theory, that theory is useless and completely wrong.

There actually is no notable other side to the "debate" on whether or not anthropic global warming is actually happening.
Opinion or believe does simply not apply here, only facts do. Which science has produced in abundance and which all fit into the big picture of man-made global temperature increase. Not a single piece of evidence clearly and unambiguously contradicts this theory so far. Of course many have tried to argue in that direction but so far everything has been dismantled. Sadly creating bullshit is much easier than properly dismissing it. And one can always resort to commonplaces if you run out of nonsense. Just look at Taka's essay on the last page and the blunt, evasive answer. Claiming evil forces would prevent the truth from being known is simply pathetic. Like the Industry manufacturing renewables has the money or the influence to buy or silence 90% of the scientists.

All of the above apply to other conspiracy theories and faith based believe systems as well, in a more or less drastic form. Just look at the tactics of creationists, moon landing deniers, Islamic extremists or extreme political movements. Yes, complete denial of climate change requires you to ignore facts and make untestable or fallacious assumptions. It is not science or thinking out of the box but a sign of narrow mindedness and unwillingness to inform oneself about the issue at hand. Everyone that tries to dismiss a piece of scientific work as a religion or a conspiracy by means of faith or conspiracy theories is a first class hypocrite.

So please don't complain if your point of view is torn apart. No serious scientist would consider that as a personal insult. Only bigots would do that.

Written by akatana on 19.12.2009 at 14:34

...

i'm sorry to have simply skipped over your post in the previous page, now i see that my views were extremely flawed. as the guy above this post says, i remember when the debate wasn't as heated and there wasn't this huge "panic" around the world. i actually remember that for a while i hadn't heard any counter-arguments to the general consensus of global warming, only in the last 2 years did these begin to pop up. seeing your post, and the incredibly flawed and childish arguments the other guys here have("i choose to not believe it", "it happens naturally", "arizona has had its mildest summer ever", "30000 scientists deny global warming" - LOL good news i am a scientist!!) made me think.

i deleted my post in which i disagreed with the whole global warming thing. what truly made me rethink my stance was BitterCOld's post, which was some kind of reductio ad absurdum as to what my mentality was up to this point.

So you are now suddenly for Global Warming? because you dont like the way how we are denying it

Written by Ellrohir on 10.03.2010 at 12:32

So you are now suddenly for Global Warming? because you dont like the way how we are denying it

yeah, i was ignorant, but i realized what i was doing and stopped. basically i was in a "well, everyone is going crazy over it so they must be wrong" kinda mindset.

but the fact is, you people who deny the effects of man-made global warming are not bringing anything real to this discussion, BitterCOld says he opts to not believe it(which is pretty much the most basic expression of ignorance), Viggo said a few pages earlier that "such things happen naturally" which is an extremely vague argument, and you brought up the 1997 scientists petition which is basically full of shit.

meanwhile Taka puts walls upon walls of text of peer-reviewed science journals and shit like that which simply get the silent treatment.

if you want surveys, check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change#Surveys_of_scientists_and_scientific_literature go from the bottom of the section up and you will see a dramatic rise in the opinion that climate change is occurring and that it is caused by human intervention.

Well...everyone has right for his own opinion...

the main problem i have with GW theory is that it does not allow other opinions...

Written by Ellrohir on 10.03.2010 at 14:44

the main problem i have with GW theory is that it does not allow other opinions...

that is wrong.. as in many groups of people sharing the same opinion, the fundamentalists are the ones who won't allow ANY other opinion. like the ones who came up with the phrase "Hopenhagen". the same way many hardcore Christians discredit any other religion or the same way radical political figures discredit other political views.

the majority of the science community should be willing to lend an ear to alternative hypotheses in case we don't have solid proof, after all, authority should be questioned. but the way i see it(yeah, it's all subject to points of view, but there are insightful points and ignorant points) we already have solid proof of the human-made GW, so i think we should move on to the next level, dealing with the problem, what should we do to stop it?

No we dont have any solid proof...we have more or less THEORIES of it...theories based on about 300 years of measuring and couple of hundred years of observations

it like taking some mathematical statement "for every x is valid someting", count it for x = 1, x = 2, ... x=100 and then say "great, it works for first 100 x, it is crystal clear now that it works for all x"...this is not how mathematical proofs work...

Written by Ellrohir on 10.03.2010 at 16:04

No we dont have any solid proof...we have more or less THEORIES of it...theories based on about 300 years of measuring and couple of hundred years of observations

then how do you explain that we know that the ice ages occurred?

This is actually quite simple - when you find in France a rock, that originally comes from Sweden (which is quite easy to proof by detail analysis of the two rocks), how many other explanations for that (apart from Obelix delivered it here) than a moving glacier brought it here? glacier melt down later, but the rock remained...i dont need any temperature measuring for that...and such "erratic blocks" are quite common around Europe...

but nice you mentioned it...ice ages occurred...and ended...and occurred...and ended...all without humans and their filthy CO2...how come?

Written by Ellrohir on 10.03.2010 at 21:52

This is actually quite simple - when you find in France a rock, that originally comes from Sweden (which is quite easy to proof by detail analysis of the two rocks), how many other explanations for that (apart from Obelix delivered it here) than a moving glacier brought it here? glacier melt down later, but the rock remained...i dont need any temperature measuring for that...and such "erratic blocks" are quite common around Europe...

lol i didn't expect this response, and it is reasonable enough so i myself can't discredit it. but (far FAR more important than glaciers moving rocks with them and the logical answer to the question) there is a whole field of science called Paleoclimatology which deals with analyzing the climate in the past. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology

as for why the ice ages occurred, there's a million causes for that, it could be a meteor impact which sent tons of dust in the atmosphere, earth's axis tilting, whatever.
since we're talking about ice ages though, you might argue that the Little Ice Age's end in 1850 or so pretty much blows the lid on the global warming phenomena. someone made this point a few pages back.

but check out the first graph on this page: http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison_png that is a graph of the average temperature over the past 2000 years, but let's just say that only data from 1000 AD onward is accurate enough(with 5-6 studies covering that time zone), zero represents the "normal" earth temperature. each of those lines is a scientific study listed right there on the page. see how they spike as they reach the year 2000 even far higher than figures from years previous to the little ice age? what is your explanation for that? there's pretty much only 3 answers possible:

1.it happens naturally - possible, but highly unlikely. why have they been pretty consistent during the last mini ice age and the period before that only to spike up very dramatically during the past 100 years?
2.i don't know
3.because of man-induced global warming

keep in mind that in 1000 AD, when the "Medieval Warm Period" took place, Greenland's southern coast was pretty much, well, green with grass and vegetation. the Vikings took advantage of the ice-less oceans and started the colony named Vinland in the north of Newfoundland. Newfoundland has a very hostile climate, and Greenland is anything but green now. if those things happened during that time-frame with the average temperature at approximately -0.2 degrees, and now it's at almost + 0.4 after rising very quickly for the past decades then what's gonna await for us now?

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record_png this is a more detailed graph for the past 100 years or so where you can clearly see how the average temperature has risen to.

Yes...graphs are nice things...colorful lines and a bunch of numbers...

i know one too...

Written by Ellrohir on 10.03.2010 at 23:01

Yes...graphs are nice things...colorful lines and a bunch of numbers...

i know one too...

so nothing on my other points? what would be your answer to my question?
and what am i supposed to learn from that graph? from it i can see the following:

-CO2 levels have been increasing constantly over the past few years(which we all (should) know, against the wishes of oil giants around the world)
-2 lines who go up and down on a BIANNUAL BASIS. that is absolutely NOT relevant for studying large-scale climate change.
you know what's the problem with the lines going up and down?(i could just say "omg look, the climate is so unstable, proof once again for GW!!"), but it's because when viewed on a 6-month basis, the temperatures are subject to seasons.
you have to get data for the whole year, or better yet, for more than one year. one really hot summer followed by a cold winter doesn't mean anything for the whole world's climate and whether it is changing or not.

actually, you can see that after the big fall of 1998 they begin to rise slowly yet again, to approximately an average of 0.3(keep in mind i'm talking about the blue line which would better support the lack of global warming), which is 0.5 degrees(which is a lot more than you might imagine) higher than pretty much no glaciers going around in northeast Canada and southern Greenland's glaciers melting... i won't even get into what the pink line says. from what i can tell it's something like "cut the crap Ellrohir, stop throwing useless graphs and look at the damn facts".

Written by Ellrohir on 10.03.2010 at 16:04

No we dont have any solid proof...we have more or less THEORIES of it...theories based on about 300 years of measuring and couple of hundred years of observations

it like taking some mathematical statement "for every x is valid someting", count it for x = 1, x = 2, ... x=100 and then say "great, it works for first 100 x, it is crystal clear now that it works for all x"...this is not how mathematical proofs work...

Theories is the best you are going to get with science. There is no absolute proof, only falsifiable statements. If you arrange them in a consistent way which stands up against the test of reality you have a valid theory from which you hopefully can derive new implications which again need to be measured to support (not proof) the theory. But its not getting better from there, you have reached the top and there is no way you are ever going to completely be sure about what you found out.
The mathematical analogy doesn't apply here, because in mathematics you have fundamental axioms and strict rules to derive new statements. Which can only be true or false. Yet you neither have fundamental truths in the physical world, there is always the chance of a new discovery screwing the established "truth" nor is an obsolete theory completely wrong. Newtons theory of gravity, while "wrong" at relativistic speeds and energys still beautifully works for most applications and any engineer at Nasa would be rather insane to use General Relativity for a trip to Mars as you wouldn't even notice the difference between relativistic and classical calculations at that speed.

And the graph is pretty confusing as you cannot reduce long term changes to an in climate terms rather short period of time and also it does not have an average temperature curve to compensate for short term changes.

All graphs are pretty confusing, that was what i wanted to show...it is just the game of numbers...

btw what have you against the graph which shows, that althought the CO2 concentration is rising, the temperatures are not responding to it? it breaks your theory, eh? so you would rather show other graphs, that dont...cool

Yes...you need to learn...until you understand that we are right, then it will be ok...until then you are stoopid

Written by Ellrohir on 14.03.2010 at 16:12

All graphs are pretty confusing, that was what i wanted to show...it is just the game of numbers...

btw what have you against the graph which shows, that althought the CO2 concentration is rising, the temperatures are not responding to it? it breaks your theory, eh? so you would rather show other graphs, that dont...cool

No, usually graphs are the opposite of confusing, they present raw data in a way that can be better grasped and interpreted by humans. But the data needs to be complete, the scales and the range of data must be sensible and most importantly there needs to be some connection between the plotted values. For example this



Does not make any sense whatsoever.
Your example does make sense but there are a few problems. It seems to originate from this and seems only to be cited by blogs and other private websites.
First this is not the global average temperature but two very distinct data sets. The guys that recorded one of them actually have a few graphs of their own, that somehow show a rather different trend link. NASA's datasets tell a diffrent story too link.

This is mainly because they are plotted on a wider scale, 5 year average being typical for temperature plots regarding climate and they use regression to produce something more readable than squiggly lines. A few dents in global average temperature are to be expected but neatly line up in the overall trend.





To answer to your last post, nobody was calling you stupid, pointing out your arguments don't hold any water is not a personal attack.

Politicians of my country are strong supporters of GW theory, i surely dont have my opinions thanks to them

Written by akatana on 14.03.2010 at 17:30

If on the other hand, you want to talk about it by presenting scientific papers and results, than you are more than welcomed to. But I doubt you will find something like that graph in a peer-reviewed journal.

Have you read anything about Milutin Milankovitch cycles? I used to think that global warming or climatic change was man caused, but after reviewing paleoclimatological articles(since i'm studying archaeology it's a basic thing) I was more convinced that this is natural AND man made. The problem is how much of it is natural and how much of it is man made?
I'm gonna bring more articles(written stuff obviously not crap from the internet) after I revise the things I have from past cycles. So you can read and see that it's not only man made.