Global Warming & Climate Change Discussion

[qubit]

That's the newspaper headline, anyway. (See the latest update below for the proper context of this sentence)

So, could the "global warming" crisis just be one big scandal?

From what I've read, the earth is actually due an ice age anytime now, which would kinda put a spanner in the works of the global warming advocates. Oh dear.

I'm not completely sure, but I'm leaning towards scandal. There's just too much power, politics and money corrupting the science with something like this. Looks like all those who suspected that the "global warming" crisis of the last 20+ years was just a scam to foist higher taxes and "green" policies aka austerity on everyone, may just be right.

Have a read and let us know what you think.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarming/11395516/The-fiddling-with-temperature-data-is-the-biggest-science-scandal-ever.html


UPDATE 18SEP17

I'm no longer leaning towards scam given the evidence all around me. See my full explanation here.


UPDATE 31JAN21

The thread title has since been changed by a mod, so my first sentence now doesn't make sense. To understand it, the thread title was initially the same as the article that I linked to: "The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever". In other words, it's the newspaper saying this, not me. Alas, that story is now behind a paywall, too.

Nowadays, I'm fully in the camp that global warming, is man made, as the evidence is overwhelming. Going by geological records, we're actually due another little ice age, yet the climate is doing the exact opposite.

 

[R-T-B]

I have pretty much no doubt that dumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere as we have been doing forces an acceleration to the next ice age. It accelerates warming which will eventually lead to massive arctic ice sheet melting that will screw up the global sea currents that prevent another ice age. That's pretty much the whole concept of "global warming" (more acurately described as "climate change") in a nutshell, and it's pretty well founded in base concept, temperature fiddling or not.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

I have doubted the man made global warming theory for years.

We are mere inconsiderate specks, the sun spits its fun at us daily and has a much greater influence on our weather.

I think we are naiive in thinking that a global instant ban on fossil fuels would change anything, whether in the short or long term.
Its all bollocks dreamt up by the Greens to lever a bit of political influence and tv time.

The damage, if there is any, has been done.

 

[qubit]

Caps, you're agreeing with me. I find this unacceptable.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Me too, we will have to agree to agree this time ..... grrrrrrr.........

 

[erocker]

It doesn't matter. Seriously, people can whine and moan about it one way or the other and it accomplishes absolutely nothing. Anything done by political leaders on the subject tends to be financial or political in nature. Again, nothing accomplished. Until we're either all burning to a crisp or freezing our butts off, nothing substancial will be done about it.

I'll just sit over here and wait for nature to rain down the apocalypse.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

ah thats better......just chucked a few big lumps of coal on the fire. I would burn wood but my ancestors burned it all about 400 years ago.

Nice and toasty now.

The rise in sea levels is a worry for low lying areas though especially those that are centres of wealth..i mean population. I live on a hill about 50 metres above a tidal estuary so rising sea levels dont bother me.

They can beat their chests all they like but have you seen the shit going on in China and India with regards air pollution?

Theres some good stuff on youtube about the Dutch efforts to keep back the tides.

Whatever the truth or the longterm reality or consequences, man will adapt.
One decent sized Coronal Mass Ejection in our direction will screw us beyond comprehension anyway.

 

[R-T-B]

Man will adapt, and so will life in general for that matter. Just won't be what we're familiar with today by any means.

 

[Easy Rhino]

I think that the Earth is warming thanks to us humans but not by nearly the amount some scientists state. The best we can probably do is recycle, make sure we aren't dumping tons of crap into our atmosphere and keep the water supply clean. Anything else is just political mumbo jumbo.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I think it's irrelevant. We could/should do a lot better about how we produce energy and we should take the highroad regardless of what impact, if any, there is on the planet. For example, we should be shutting down all of the coal power plants and replacing them with nuclear. Also, build more mass transit in cities like LA and get serious about finding a solution to long distance travel without burning thousands of gallons of fuel.

 

[Arctucas]

Definitely a... well, not a scandal, more like a conspiracy to defraud us of our money and freedom.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Since we started farming we have sculpted the earth to suit us and we don't suit ice ages so I say calm down but Still do all we can cos runaway warming would be no better than a ice age. Obv

 

[twilyth]

I don't really see how creating a myth of human created climate change benefits anyone. I think carbon exchanges are a scam that only benefits big institutional investors like Goldman Sachs, but they have many other ways of raping and pillaging that they don't need to go that particular route. Pretty much the same thing goes for any other conspiracy angle you can think of.

There does seem to be a correlation between atmospheric gases like CO2 and methane and global climate. However the models used to predict the effect of these gases seem to be woefully imprecise. In particular, they seem to be able yet to take into account things like the biological response of plants to changes in the mix of gases, increase in cloud cover, changes in ocean currents, etc.

And because weather is such a chaotic system, even small imperfections in modeling might have huge impacts in terms of predictions being inaccurate.

That said, we seem to have been in a warming cycle for at least a few decades now so I think we at least have to be open to the possibility that continuing to pump billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere could have some undesirable effect.

 

[LightningJR]

95%+ of scientists agree global warming is accelerated greatly by humans. I tend to trust scientists over most since they peer review their research and they usually do their work out of raw curiosity.. I mean without scientists where would the world be? Every advancement is because of them, we couldn't even have this conversation without them. If one thinks about this objectively it is quite clear.

"defraud us of our money and freedom" is probably the most hilarious thing I have read in a while. When people live in such a small bubble and think of only themselves this is how they feel.


I am saddened that we may not be able to change the future much though.

 

[THE_EGG]

I've always thought that 'global warming' is real just not as bad as most people make it out to be. I remember seeing on TV a documentary about ice ages and so on and that because the Earth - although appears to have a circular orbit around the Sun - slowly gains speed over many years and is slingshotted away slowly from the Sun as it overcomes a fraction of a the Suns gravity year by year only to come back closer to the Sun once it loses speed, again year by year. This happens over a VERY long time and apparently coincides with the ice ages. The documentary also claimed that we were exiting the closest orbit phase atm and are heading back further away meaning an ice age should be coming in the very distant future.

Do I think emissions caused by human activity contribute to 'global warming'? Yes BUT a lot less than what most people would think. I think the pollution is more of an issue to our health (e.g. see Beijing, Shanghai or Los Angeles) rather than the Earth's health. I know there was a conspiracy theory that this whole 'Global Warming' thing became really big over the past 20 years because there hasn't been any large scale wars or political issues to accelerate technology (e.g. space race between USA and USSR, Cold War, Vietnam War etc). The 'global warming' theory was claimed to be exploited to accelerate technology as it put fear into the general public just as a war would. This meant we would continue advancing as a society without the need for wars.

 

[a111087]

christopher booker is a proponent of "intelligent design".... might as well print that article and wipe your ass with it

 

[silkstone]

I'll just leave this here: http://arstechnica.com/staff/2015/02/temperature-data-is-not-the-biggest-scientific-scandal-ever/

 

[RCoon]

While I categorically disagree with that article (it's written by Chris Booker for Christ's sake!), the government has nothing to gain from a scandal like that. The damage is done, and the population of the earth will continue to burn fossil fuels until the earth is asunder. It is not a scandal, granted the data is probably woefully inaccurate, but the correlations exist regardless. No matter how accurate the data is, if we told countries to shut down the oil fields or the earth will burn alive tomorrow, they'd ramp up production to make as much money as possible beforehand so they could spend it.

 

[W1zzard]

95%+ of scientists agree global warming is accelerated greatly by humans.

It actually is 99.5% (year 2008 data, probably higher now). Only good post in this thread though

In case anyone cares about science:
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/unfccc/sbsta40/SB40_research_dialogue_hezel_wgI.pdf

"NVIDIA lied about GTX 970, the silicon and microchip industry profits do not exist, you have been mislead. It's a doomed industry, just made up to benefit bankers and investors."

 

[Frick]

I honestly don't see the problems people are having with green tech, or that what we do have consequences. Stand behind an old diesel Peugout a few minutes and then make up your mind if it's bad for you and nature or not. Or go to Shanghai during exhaust peak and acknowledge that it'll go on. If mankind dissapeared tomorrow the globe would heal quickly, but we won't so it won't. There's a new AMD GPU on the horizon, we need those rare earth metals damnit, damn the consequences!

It actually is 99.5% (year 2008 data, probably higher now). Only good post in this thread though

In case anyone cares about science:
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/unfccc/sbsta40/SB40_research_dialogue_hezel_wgI.pdf

They've all been bought by hookers and meth.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

There's a new AMD GPU on the horizon, we need those rare earth metals damnit, damn the consequences!

This is what Newscientist wrote about a year ago about the Sun, Man and global warming.

i dont think they are politicised. I think its a well respected publication though, its worth a 90 sec read.

http://www.newscientist.com/article...owest-low-in-four-centuries.html#.VNsm9fmsWSo

And one it links too about what can be done.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24261-world-wont-cool-without-geoengineering-warns-report.html

 

[bnjohanson]

I have pretty much no doubt that dumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere as we have been doing forces an acceleration to the next ice age. It accelerates warming which will eventually lead to massive arctic ice sheet melting that will screw up the global sea currents that prevent another ice age. That's pretty much the whole concept of "global warming" (more acurately described as "climate change") in a nutshell, and it's pretty well founded in base concept, temperature fiddling or not.

As has been the case many thousands of times before in this planet's history and prior to man, the industrial revolution, and cow farts ever existed...

 

[metalslaw]

I think we will see some climate change over the next 100 years. In terms of it being catastrophic, we don't really know.

The facts are that we are pumping the air full of co2 while deforesting the world. And that won't really stop until we start running out of non-renewable resources. When that happens, most of the problem ceases to exist.

In terms of the earth's health. It will recover regardless (over time). For us humans though, I think we will suffer more at the point when we run out of fossil fuels, then by how the climate changes over the next 20 or so years.

 

[Xzibit]

"The arrogance of mankind is thinking nature is under our control.."

 

[rtwjunkie]

Tge one crucial fact all the 50% of scientists (it's not 95%) who think climate change is manmade is that the Earth constantly has warmed up and cooled down and we are in one of those warming trends, that had humans been really technically savvy 200 years ago would have been predicted.

How much hubris do we need to have to think the world revolves around us? The sun, Earth's tilt, volcanoes, and slightly varying distances from the sun are what affect our climate more than anything else.