Grendel wrote on Feb 24^th, 2009 at 6:04am:


Well if you want to go there, any money spent on anything that's unproven is a waste of money.

Grendel - you need to stop buying food. There is absolutely no proof that it does not contain poisons   Keep eating that stuff and it could kill you. Now before you write DWMT or something equally inspiring, it's a very similar argument to yours and it's almost as ridiculous as yours.

On this issue you are full of it, grendel, when muso tried to explain the science, YOU, ran away from the debate.

He bent over backwards trying to take you through it, but it would have negated your ability to pretend that all the opinions as equally valid, so you scarpered.

In this life, you're never going to find the silver bullet of proof for anything.

You probably didn't understand my analogy. It's about risk. The riskiest thing you probably do in life is to take the car out. If you smoke, then I stand corrected. That's even higher in terms of the propensity to kill you.

Doing nothing as far as climate change is concerned carried with it a far higher risk than addressing the issue.

Every single climate scientist except maybe a lunatic fringe that I could count on the fingers of my hands understands the threat that faces the world.

Last year we were talking about the rising CO2 levels. I mentioned that the global CO2 content had reached a figure of 385ppm. Well the latest figure is 387ppm, and it continues to rise.

As time goes on, we'll see ocean acidification increase. That is something that has been observed. The icon of Australian tourism, the Great Barrier Reef is on the chopping block, and there is not a lot we can do about that. We'll continue to see more extreme weather events. It stands to reason. Of course you can't attribute any one event to climate change, but you can attribute patterns of change.

That's the thing about climate change. It's a lot like smoking. The effect is statistical. You could say that your grandmother lived until she was 85 and she smoked like a train, but it wouldn't alter the fact that statistically she would have had a greater chance of dying because of smoking related ailments, such as cardiovascular disease or lung cancer.

If a smoker gets lung cancer, can I prove that the smoker got it as a result of their habit? No. It doesn't work that way. It's all a question of risk. That's why Governments put Health warnings on cigarette packets.

With Climate Change,  it's also a question of risk. You can demonstrate that it will cause harm if we continue to burn fossil fuels, but can we prove categorically what will happen in 20 years time? Of course not. A lot depends on what we do between now and then.

Grendel wrote on Feb 25^th, 2009 at 6:39pm:


The sun is obviously the primary driver of climate on this planet. However the evidence we have is that the changes in temperature and CO2 up until around the beginning of the industrial era were relatively mild compared to what has happened recently.

The heat is still coming from the sun, but it's caused by changes in the Earth's atmosphere that increase the amount of heat that is absorbed, and an overall reduction in reflected heat.

It is not a subtle effect either, with CO2 levels increasing by around 33% since 1950. The rate of change is something like 10,000 times greater than anything that has been measured in the past 2 million years at least. Sure, the climate changed in a relatively predictable manner prior to man, but the last 50 years is totally off the wall.

Basically the effect coincides with a period in which we have been pumping CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an incredible and unprecedented rate. Blind Freddy can see that this must have an effect.

The conclusion that the increase in CO2 and the warming effect that has been observed is due to the burning of fossil fuels and other sources is inevitable.

No other serious contenders have been put forward. Cosmic Rays have been dismissed through subsequent research. Volcanoes have an overall cooling effect. They emit carbon dioxide, but only around 1/100 of that emitted by industrialised nations.

We have a pretty good handle on the accounting for greenhouse gases too. It stands to reason, since every tonne of fossil carbon that is burnt had to be paid for by somebody.

Even being a conspironaut Greenie - I'm still sitting on the fence with man made climate change, but we do have to change our lifestyle for many reasons.  Pollution is one, which is going to kill us off quicker than anything - not only destroying the land which we need to grow crops, but our marine life as well.  Without these resources staying healthy into the future we'll have nothing.

Why do we have to degradate everything we touch, especially when we have the resources to do it in a much cleaner way.  Jim Profit actually made some good points in one of this threads...


Either we do nothing, and there is no problem. Hooray! The rightwing pundits were correct! The economy's doing better, progress regins supreme!

Either we do something, and there was no problem. This sucks! We're going through another depression, in debt up to our eyeballs... But nothing we havn't dealt with before...

Either we do nothing, and we're wrong. And there is noone around to say I told you so. Either they're all dead, or too busy trying desperately to survive. Life as we know it ends. Technology is crippled, nations are forgotten, panic and death run rampant. The horrors of economic recesscion look like a trip to Vegas compared to this!

Either we do something, and we're right. And it sucks. We have barely anything. But atleast we're alive... Cause we prepared...

Quote:
------Grendel

It is fruitless when you paste an argument, and Muso, refutes it, and demonstrates the expert opinion that refutes it, and you then accuse him of shooting the messenger.

You are being totally obtuse on this subject, by virulently clinging on to discredited theories, and highly questionable "experts", all the while claiming that there is a large group of expert climatologists, who dissent from the man made climate change position, a spurious claim, without any evidence to support it, yet you use that as the basis for claiming your denialism is rational, but still withdraw from any actual debate about specifics provided to you by muso.

mozzaok wrote on Feb 26^th, 2009 at 8:25am:


In a nutshell, yes - and it wouldn't matter what facts I provided. He'd still remain like King Canute sitting on his throne on the intertidal zone with water swirling around his hair and the barely discernable tones of his voice bubbling underwater "You can prove nothing!"