Because there’s $100 Trillion worth of fossil fuel underground that some guys would really rather sell before they’d ever start considering the ramifications of burning said fuel.
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Nonfer -
Three things:
(1) Adler is a well-known guy who studies and writes on environmental policy issues from a libertarian perspective. Everything you pointed out is consistent with that.
(2) The author of the original study AGREES with Adler wrt to Guardian article, as pointed out in the comment after mine.
(3) Your response is a perfect example of the highly unscientific attitude many progressives unthinkingly display when writing about these kinds of things. It’s a perfect example of the Genetic Fallacy, and does nothing to help actually illuminate the issue at hand. All you say is “It’s interesting…” Well, what’s so interesting about it? What exactly are you trying to say?
lllll AJ
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Except for the energy burned by the process, and except for burning the energy produced, both of which do produce greenhouse gasses unless you can find some better way to conduct those activities.
Which is what the folks concerned about climate change are asking people to think about.
(Of course we shouldn’t actually need climate change as a justification for investing heavily in more sustainable energy sources and more efficient use of energy and lower pollution generally, and accomplishing those would go a long way toward addressing the climate concerns. So in the end it really shouldn’t matter whether you believe in anthropogenic climate change or not. But people are sloppy about thinking about middle-term effects that may happen to someone else, and presenting them with the possibility of something shorter-term that may happen to them has been a good tool for making the issues more concrete.)
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i ask you the same thing about your comment calling me “unscientific”. lots of "scientists
couldn’t hit the barn if it was sitting under their own ass.
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Right. Movie stereotype is the best argument you could come up with?
I’ll grant that many scientists are specialists, and that some subset are narrowfocused to the point where they wouldn’t notice a barn unless it was relevant to their work, and/or do not have whatever experience/coordination is required to “hit a barn”. That says less than nothing about their competence in their own fields. What it does say is, again, you’ve run out of arguments and are resorting to throwing poo.
This does not strengthen your position.
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ok. climate change focuses on CO2. ozone arguments focused on O3 previously. pollution is much more diverse than just hydrocarbons, but even i know they get heavier than that. why is the weight (of the molecules in question) important with regard to heat retention? because heavier molecules are going to trap more heat.
why won’t politicians or politically motivated people be interested in the facts? because they are scum.
take for example that idiot who wrote that article from a lawyer’s position with regards to their funding and expenditures. about all he managed to do was open the door for inquiry to any of his clients and known associates for tax fraud. the idiot is a history major with a law degree and a ‘specialty’ in environmental law. i repeat, not a scientist. he also might get in trouble with his bar over confidentiality both in that article and (if it is an indicator of a pattern of carelessness) pretty much anything else he’s written (and made public).
as to not being able to keep up with you in an argument… . why would i waste my time. don’t think i’ll write back.
We HAVE nearly a century of decent data: plug it into the model, set the date to 1970, and run it, then compare it to actual results.
Nah, why bother?
We HAVE a week’s worth of decent data. Pull up http://weather.com look at the past week’s weather. Look at the the next week’s forecast. Make a graph and draw a line (up or down). Boom. Done.
That’s not even true for retaining heat, but of course it doesn’t matter since heat doesn’t escape directly into space either way. What can escape is infrared radiation, that’s what greenhouse gases partly absorb, and that absorption depends on how molecules can vibrate not weight. Confusing these things means entirely missing why people might think carbon dioxide is important.
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Y’know, that’s an interesting point. I don’t consider this an argument. I consider it a discussion with the goal of reaching the best possible understanding of the best available data – both about the science and about the humans.
I really don’t expect to convince deniers, especially those who have made a strong emotional investment in their position, I want to understand what their objections are and what those objections are based on. Ideally I’d like to help them understand why some of those objections are unconvincing to the rest of us (which might help them improve their arguments, and/or might change their minds), but if they aren’t interested in that feedback there isn’t much I can do about it.
As far as I can tell (and I’m not an expert either), global warming is pretty unarguable at this point. But there’s room for debate at the edges about exactly how much and how fast, how it will interact with other global systems from icecaps to gulf stream to whatever, and what percentage of it is anthropogenic (not that the answer to that last strongly affects how we should be responding).
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Unfortunately, that is a big part of the equation for some people. If Goddidit, or people did it (unconsciously) in furtherance of God’s divine path toward Armegeddon, then it’s actually a good thing. And if it’s part of some natural – oh, excuse me, I mean God-given – cycle of life, then again we shouldn’t be trying to fix it. That’s why there are so many people claiming that it’s not a man-made problem.
I’m certainly not sure we know enough to “fix” it. (It’s bad practice to experiment with serious large-scale terraforming when you don’t have a backup planet…) I’m pretty sure we know enough to reduce how much we contribute to breaking it.
I’m good with that.
That doesn’t make any sense. Howard Zinn considered himself a socialist and often criticized liberals. Just because many Americans say stupid things doesn’t mean we should repeat them. Polls show large numbers of Americans believe in Biblical creation, the “great flood” story, and the imminent second coming of Christ, but sane reasonable people do not pretend these things are true. Millions of Nazis called themselves socialists, but their whole ideology opposed proletarian internationalism and their primary task (before even eliminating Jews) was the suppression of the communist, social democratic, and labor movements. The Nazis were not socialists. Contemporary US leftists are not neo-liberals. (Sorry about the Godwin).
Now, one could argue that the classical liberal tradition (Adam Smith, Wilhelm Von Humboldt, the older JS Mill) was proto-socialist, and that the New Deal, despite rescuing capitalism, was a positive development for the left, but that liberal tradition is dead. The only liberalism that remains in the US is the liberalism of Hayek.
I suspect that depends on how you define liberal and what threshhold you set for it. I consider myself liberal-to-socialist, lowercase in both cases, and I’m not dead yet. Not delighted, but not dead.
“One step forward, two steps back: Thus we make the revolution.” – V. I. Lenin
sheet versus quilt, or maybe t-shirt versus parka, one is going to provide more insulation. thank you for the link, i hadn’t seen that list. oh, and thank you for using another pseudo-science word: ‘greenhouse’.
just to add a kind of friendly discussion: http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/vocs.html
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