Before we go any further, know that I am the proud owner a Prius. I don't believe a word that comes out of Al Gore's mouth, but I do believe in gas prices
Also, I don't want to get on the bad side of the Great Architect of Universe Sandbox. So please don't take personal offense at anything I say. I'm just trying to live up to the title of this thread.
I don't understand why you don't think we have the power to damage the Earth. We do and we are.
Have you reviewed the evidence?
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
All I see there is evidence that the climate is changing, which is a no-brainer. It always has, for billions of years before people came along, and it always will, at least up to when the Sun bloats up and eats Earth, billions of years after peoiple are gone. Are we agreed so far? Good
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OK, next. The earth has gone through EXTREME climate changes, many times, before we came along. I'm talking from zero ice caps to the "snowball Earth" scenario, not to mention things like countless relatively benign (in comparison) ice ages. All of these climate regimes were far more significant than anything going on in the entire span of recorded history, yet somehow the Earth not only got itself into them, it also managed to get itself out of them, all without any human intervention on either side of the change. No human activity caused them, and no human activity corrected them. Are we agreed on that?
If you agree with those 2 statements, then the necessary corrolary is that you must accept that there are 100% natural forces at work around us with the oft-proven ability to take Earth's climate back and forth from 1 end of the thermometer to the other any time they feel like it, whether people exist or not. IOW, these 100% natural forces are far more powerful than even Al Gore's worst-case humanocentric propoganda, meaning that everything we do in either direction is by definition insignificant. There's no getting around that.
So, sure, I'll buy that humans have an effect on climate; so does every other living thing. But it seems quite obvious that in comparison to all the 100% natural forces, which we don't yet fully comprehend, much less can assign a measurable value to, that nothing we do can possibly have any significant effect. And even if we really DO have a significant effect, there's no way at present to tell.
The use of ethanol was promoted and encouraged by the huge farm corporations and lobbing groups, not climate scientists.
At the time, the climatologists were all for ethanol and from what I can tell, most still are. The falacy of ethanol was pointed out by legit scientists, when they could get a word in edgewise. You know, folks with an understanding of thermodynamics, refining, industry, and other tangible, measurable things. But note that despite this, ethanol hasn't gone away, because the government isn't going to give up the control its taken. Why? Because ethanol wasn't the acutal goal. Government control over that much more of the nation's economy was.
That's why we still have ethanol, even though anybody with 1/2 a brain knows it's counterproductive to the very reasons given for enshrining it. Doesn't that bother you?
Just because someone uses the fear of climate change to encourage a bad or immoral idea doesn't mean that human caused climate change isn't true.
Just because a climatologist says humans cause climate change doesn't make it true, either. In fact, it's rather more likely to be false, given the state of climatology.
And there is almost no doubt among climate scientists that the Earth will warm, on average, at least one additional degree Celsius, even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases today.
They know what side their bread's buttered on. As far as I can tell, the so-called "scientific consensus" about human-caused climate change is unique to climatologitsts. Meanwhile, most real scientists are ranged against them. They just don't get much press due to the media being on the same side as the politicians, and even when they make themselves heard, they're laughed off without any debate bacause they're heretics to the Holy Scientific Consensus.
I said above that we don't know what all in the 100% natural world affects climate, and for those forces we do know about, we don't fully understand how they work or the magnitude of their effects. For instance, NOBODY KNOWS what caused any of the ice ages, or what caused and ended "Snowball Earth", or the various times like the Cretaceous when things were quite the opposite. Sure, there are many theories, but nothing definite at all.
Think about what this means from the standpoint of true science. Because of all these unknowns, there is NO SUCH THING as an accurate climate model, because none of them contain all the factors involved. And even climatologists admit that none of their computer simulations can replicate all the known points in Earth's historical climates at various times, because they can't figure out what caused them in real life.
Now, in any legitimate field of science, this would be totally unacceptable. It's the exact equivalent of a so-called "theory" failing to explain all existing observations. In legit scientific fields, such so-called "theories" are laughed out of court. In the immortal words of Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli, such theories are so bad that they "aren't even wrong". Before a theory can even be wrong, it first has to explain all observations so far. Only this gives it any chance of predicting future observations, and it's only in failing in its predictions that a theory becomes wrong. This is the fate of most theories so is the expected outcome--oh well, it was a good try; back to the chalkboard. Being wrong is a badge of honor, because the theory was good enough to get that far.
But current climate models can't get that far because they can't even explain the past. As such, they're not real theories in the scientific sense and are utterly worthless from a truly scientific POV.
Compare climatology to physics and cosmology. Newton's laws worked perfectly well in the conditions of their day, explaining all past observations and correctly predicting all new ones out to the limits of observational capabilities. But as we learned to see farther and measure things more precisely, we found that Newton was "wrong" (in the Pauli sense). So then there was Einstein, and after nearly 100 years he's apparently "wrong", too, but we haven't yet figured out the next "right" thing. But the important point is, in their day, both Newton and Einstein were "right", accounting for all past observations and all future ones we could make at the time.
Climatology is backwards to this. Whereas the real scientific theories were at least "right" until finer observations showed their flaws, climatology can't even explain the observations we already have. Climatology is thus like trying to apply Newton to an Einsteinian data set. Or, to be more accurate, it's like applying Ptolomey rather than Newton, given the Medieval humanocentric perspective of climatology. Therefore, no legit scientist, let alone a layman, can use these so-called climate theories to make any scientifically meaningful statement about how much humanity is affecting climate, or even if we are at all. IMHO, you should be shocked, dismayed, and frightened that so many people take such unscientific garbage so seriously. I know I am.
Climatologists are not inherently political and most of them are disgusted by the politicization of their field. You should be careful not to conflate their scientific claims from the claims of politicians who have been bought and paid for by corporations.
And you should be careful of blaming everything on corporations, most of whom are suffering mightily under the tyranny of "green" legislation and are flat against it. Climatology is a political tool, pure and simple. Always has been, always will be.
What is now climatology began in the Cold War as the Soviet-fostered environmental movement. The whole thing was a scheme to get the Western countries to destroy their own economies. But the "green" movement went viral and so outlived the Soviet Union, and is today perpetuated by other wannabe tyrants who seek government control over all sectors of the economy.
The goal of the left has always been the same--sell a majority of the people a line of BS that will cause them to give up all their rights and freedoms to government control. All that's changed over time has been the line of BS used. With communism never having had a big appeal over here and discredited by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the left cast about for a new brand of snake oil and hit on the "green" thing. This is brilliant, really, because 1) it can masquerade as a non-political issue affecting everybody equally regardless of ideology, and 2) it can be made to look credible by proper media management, because most people don't know anything about real science so can't refute the allegations of climatologists. And that's why I fear it.
An important thing to note is that there is no job for a climatologist in the private sector for the simple reason that nobody makes business decisions or vacation plans based on what the weather might be doing decades or centuries down the road. Thus, like most other unproductive people, all climatologists work for the government; climatology itself wouldn't even exist without the government. Sure, some climatologists might get paychecks from private firms or universities, but they're all funded by the government directly or leftist lobby groups. Do you honestly think there's any chance that this money didn't come with strings attached? Of course there isn't, any more than federal highway funds give states carte blanche on using them. No climatologist is given a blank check and told to find out what's really happening. Instead, they're told to find evidence of human impact on climate while ignoring everything else. So, climatologists know they have to say what their political sponsors want to hear or they'll be out on the street.
Now, I'm not at all accusing every climatologist of being a willing political shill. I'm sure there are quite a few, a least in the lower ranks, who don't realize what's going on, perhaps because they're the naive, left-indoctrinated, corporation-hating type drawn to the field in the 1st place. But even if they do figure it out and are appalled, they're not in position to do anything about it, and their dissents are either drowned out by the so-called "scientific consensus" or result in their termination.
There's no way this will ever change, either, because the whole field depends entirely on politically targeted funding and will for the foreseeable future. Thus. climatology will always be a collection of politically motivated, apocalyptic prophecies based on "not even wrong" theories derived from cherry-picked data. The only way this will change is if private industry gets into terraforming planets. Then there will be a good business reason to study long-term climate change in an unbiased manner, and that will finally turn climatology into a legit science. But it won't happen here on Earth.
