Why peoples don't believe in Global Warming...

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And that applies to you as well.

Of course. No one, at this juncture, has a robust theory of climate. The most that anyone has come up with are statistical models with lots of adjustable parameters. That way one can produce any desired conclusion from any input data. In short, they are worthless as scientific theories or hypotheses.

So far no one has proven or even presented a serious case that global warming (which is happening) is the result of human activity. It might be, it might not be.

ruveyn

I do not base my wanting to clean up the environment on Global Warming. I remember visiting the California coast when I was a kid and finding oil covered seagulls on the beach. I remember them dusting the beaches with DDT. My hometown used the local river as the city dump. We used to draw pictures in the factory soot the covered our homes and cars.

When my dad changed the oil on his car, he would dump in in the gutter.. or toss his empty pack of smokes out the car window.

We were and still are some nasty people. We need to learn to clean up after ourselves and that includes clean air. It's sad our attempts to make a healthy environment to live in send our jobs overseas where they could care less if the water is drinkable... and if you want clean air, they have shops you can buy it in.

And so your defense of doing nothing to slow the melting of the polar ice caps or prevent shoving tons of gasses into the atmosphere that are known to increase the heat of the Earth is to do nothing and twiddle your thumbs because you are ignorant and hope that huge death and destruction is not on the way because we refused to act. No doubt you and I will be dead before the huge possible impact really hits and you can grin about all those Muslims you voiced so much hate about will suffer terrible agonies when the worst arrives. But all your Jewish friends will die as well as will your precious grandchildren. I worry about my grandchildren.

As do I. I do not see that giving power to government hacks acting on a less then sound theory and gaining control of the the lives of the people is going to help my grandchildren one bit. I am not going to deliver my grandchildren in to squalor or slavery. At least, not willingly.

The Chicken Little Brigade at IPCC is asking us to take an oath of poverty on a poor basis. I refuse. I want to see some real scientific evidence first.

ruveyn

You could take things into your own hands. Nobody said the government has to get involved.

That's what the swimmers on the shore said when they spotted the first wave of the tsunami coming over the horizon.

Most of the discussion I've seen on the Internet about global warming has very little to do with science and everything to do with belief (on both sides of the debate). People mostly just seem to pick the view that goes with their pre-existing ideology: Liberals believe in global warming while conservatives and libertarians are usually skeptical. Science that supports anthropogenic global warming just provides the imprimatur of impartial science to policies liberals and environmentalists would seek anyway; any science that casts doubt on AGW allows conservatives to dismiss the main argument environmentalists have been making, and so they feel this is sufficient to lift existing regulations against pollutants and damage to the environment (because all these regulations are after all a cost to business).

It's amazing that a person's belief or denial of AGW can be ascertained with high confidence just by knowing which political groups they identify with. In liberal circles, our media inform us about how a scientific consensus has formed around AGW and usually provides a very, very basic explanation of the mechanisms of AGW; they will often show that funding for skeptical research comes from oil companies and such Right-leaning media, on the other hand, have been howling about "Climate-gate," the harm regulations do to business, and how things like cap-and-trade are socialist policies that would destroy our freedom. Right-leaning sources usually argue that Earth's climate has shifted naturally for thousands of years, and we have no evidence that the cause now is humans. Given that most people can't do the science themselves or interpret the data and methods critically and knowledgeably, most people simply trust whichever sources they are already predisposed to trust.

AGW and pollution are 2 separate issues. One can care about the environment but not believe in AGW. In fact if you think about it, AGW diverted limited resources that can be put into much better use protecting the environment. Afterall, CO2 is hardly a serious pollutant, hardly a serious greenhouse gas, basically hardly anything and yet those warmist wanted you to believe it is the deadliest compound on earth.

I remembered a few years ago when I argued with my uncle that the science regrading AGW is hardly settled. His first reply is not about science at all, he said "Oh, you are a republican!"

You said that climate is a chaotic dynamical system. As I'm sure you know, such systems are incredibly sensitive to minute changes in initial conditions. If we are currently at an unstable fixed point, then what would you expect to occur following a perturbation towards higher concentrations of CO2?

When the ancestors of today's algae first developed photosynthesis, the corrosive oxygen they released into the atmosphere resulted in a mass extinction. Later, when massive land plants dominated the world, they consumed so much CO2 that the greenhouse effect was nullified and an ice age resulted. We have already seen in Earth's history that other species have caused drastic changes in the atmosphere, resulting in extreme ecological impacts. Is it so far-fetched to believe that we can do as much damage as algae?

You make my point. Since our predictions are non-linearly related to measurement of boundary conditions and initial conditions, long term prediction is impossible without infinite precision which can never be had.

That is why our weather forecasts are no good more than ten days out or so. Even if you allow for a window of averaging to get climate the underlying processes still cannot be predicted indefinitely far out.

In short, climate science (such as it is) is much less robust than the physics of elementary particles and fields. I will not risk what little prosperity or comfort I have in this world on any science less precise than quantum electrodynamics. When the climate "scientists" come up with something as good as quantum field theory or the standard model of particles and fields, then maybe I will listen to them.

In the mean time we can still proceed to break ourselves of the filthy oil habit. There are many more cogent reasons for cutting back on the burning of hydro-carbons than the bogus models that the IPCC is pushing. We should not let our material welfare depend on doings in a very unstable part of the world. We should be proceeding full speed to build 500-1000 fast breeder reactors in the next ten years to generate our electricity. This will do two things: (1) help clean up the air we breath and (2) let the Arabs swim in their oil and drown. We won't have to worry about the Middle East once we are energy independent.

ruveyn

Since Vermont is on the point of suing it's leaky old reactor for radioactive pollution and no commercial insurance company feels comfortable to insure any reactor on the horrendous potential damage on a disaster and since every reactor now under construction (as in Finland) has hair raising cost over runs and no guarantee of safe operation, the long reluctance to build the damned things seems very solidly founded.

See http://www.counterpunch.org/wasserman02242010.html

If you're not sastisfied with the proofs gathered so far, then you're never be sastisfied.


We're not talking about the reality fundements and pure mathematics here, we're talking about extremely complex and dynamics systems and the reactions of living beings made of billions of cells made of billions of atoms.
So far the models have made good predictions, if isn't for being too conservative on the predictions. If you want really want something perfect, we will need to know everythings about geological, atmospherical and biologicals phenomenom, which we can't.
we better bet with what we got.

1. Reactors have about a 30 years safe lifetime. They should be decomissioned after 30 years because the metal structure of the containment becomes brittle.

2. The newer reactors are much better and much safer.

3. The reactors can be sited far from populated areas so the liability is lowered.

In the mean time, Congress can pass a law limiting the damages in torts to encourage the building of reactors. For all the touted danger of double containment reactors the only bad scene was Three Mile Island in which no radioactive substance ever was emitted outside the containment. TMI was nothing like Chernobyl which had no double containment and was run by commissars boozed up on Vodka most of the time. Chernobyl is what happens when operation by aparachiks and bullyoks is permitted. The commie thugs running Chernobyl that night were technically unqualified. At that time the Soviet Union was governed by thugs and cronies, not qualified people.

In any case fission generators do not produce carbon dioxide and other pollutants and fast breeder reactors use their "waste" to produce more fissionable fuel. So there is on balance much less waste from fast breeders than with the older light water models.

In any case waste need not be kept on site. It can be shipped out and dumped in the deepest part of the ocean. My recommendation is using the Mariana Trench which is 36,000 feet under water as a dump site. Once dumped there, completely safe for humans and can be forgotten for millions of years.
ruveyn

Global warming is indeed happening, and many people are indeed blinded by politics. I would go so far as to say that the only realistic solution to the climate problem is for people to start taking personal responsibility for the things they do in their daily lives; legislation is a useless tool if the majority of people are apathetic or ignorant of their own part in the ecosystem.