I believe that I'm drawing my skepticism from a much broader and deeper study of the subject of "Climate Change" than you are. As well as a better understanding of basic human nature in regards to delusional thinking and the power of incentives to warp an individual's perceptions. I may not be a "climate scientist", but I'm well versed on the pro/con arguments, I pay attention to scientific developments in many, many fields, and am very good at both critical thinking, and the application of logic to a problem.
For the sake of a healthy debate, stop implying you’re somehow better than me. Instead, why don’t you proof your critical thinking by showing me some good arguments. So far, it’s been a little dry.
I do not completely reject the notion of catastrophic man-made climate change as impossible, as that would be foolish. But it's going to take some very solid proof, that I can verify myself, to make be believe that man can and should try to make a change to a climatic system that we don't understand completely. History is full of nonsense that groups of people used to believe in. Try reading the book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions & The Madness of Crowds." as a primer.
You, on the other hand, have "chosen" to believe in what can best be called an introductory understanding of the subject. That is a statement of faith. Faith leads to dogma, and neither has a place in science. Which must deal only with theories that can be either proven or disproven.
If I do nothing else but shine a light on your actual lack of scientific reasoning, I'll consider my work here to be done. Scientific truth does not care one bit about how popular a theory is. If you're counting votes instead of replicated experimental results, then you are engaging in politics or religion. NOT science.
I just care for science, so if you can disprove any I’m interested. Many of the climate change denial arguments are based on a distrust of the government and whatnot, that’s not very scientific either.
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But let's go through them anyway...
1) Many scientists have been taking core/vegetation samples and trying to build tables of data. But that's just data. Data itself doesn't draw its own conclusions. Humans do that.
Ever worked in business where you were preparing slide shows for corporate shareholder meetings? I have. It's amazing how much the "official" numbers can be played with. Give the accounting and executive teams 4 hours, and you'll see four VERY different pictures of the company's financial health emerge... All of which are technically "true". It's all about massaging the data to fit a narrative.
Given the polarization of "Climate Change" by the true believers, and the financial rewards involved for towing the party line, I can't imagine that there would be any less playing with the numbers than I saw with the fortune 500 companies that I once worked for.[/QUOTE]
If we want to talk science, but you question all research on climate which includes several fields of study, how can I come up with an answer that satisfies you? You want “very solid proof, that I can verify myself”, yet the evidence for past climate comes from lake sediments, ocean sediment cores, fossil pollen, ice cores, loess, glaciers, tree ring width, speleothems, boreholes and Instrumental measurements to name a few that I found somewhere. I would have to change my field of study to verify all of that.
To me, the fact that all those data points come up with consistent information is satisfying, but you argue that any data can be manipulated given the right incentives. Have we already reached an impasse or can you show me a study that draws opposite conclusions from the same data regarding past climate?
I once read a report on continental subduction from a science station in South America. In an otherwise boring paragraph near the end, they noted that the measured movement vectors had been "inverted" during the study. Inverted! Do you know that that means? A vector is a mathematical representation of motion. If they inverted their measurements, then it means that the fault they were studying wasn't subducting. It was diverging.
That would be heresy to the established theories of plate tectonics for that region, but guess what? It would fall in line with recent US Navy data that seafloor samples collected closer to that fault were geologically newer than those collected further away. So their data was being played with to fit an accepted "scientific" narrative, and plate tectonics doesn't have anywhere near the level of political or monetary interest as "Climate Change.”
Interesting. To go from subducting plate tectonics to diverging by simply inverting measurements doesn’t seem very scientific to me either. Wouldn’t this be extremely obvious to anyone with basic high school knowledge? I would like to see the report myself if you can find it.
Answer: No, the climate is not changing faster than it ever has before. For proof of that, simply consider the wooly mammoths in Siberia that were somehow flash-frozen in the middle of eating lush grass. They were preserved so well that WWII prisoners in Siberia were able to eat their meat when they found them under the permafrost.
What does that, I wonder? The sun turning off for a few minutes? Some rogue celestial body getting between us and the sun? A polar shift? Alien teenagers on bender? Dunno. But it should give pause to anyone who thinks they know everything there is to know about the world's climate.
You’re talking about the Yukagir mammoth? You don’t seem to understand how a mammoth can stay well-preserved in the permafrost. Either that, or you found something I’m not aware of. Finding a mammoth as well-preserved like this example rarely happens, not something you would expect if the cause were a rapid change in climate. These animals died in such cold conditions that they froze completely instead of decaying like they would normally. Information about his last meal was discovered, but hardly tells us it suddenly died while eating. But again, maybe you have information that I don’t.
These mammoths are found in melting permafrost, a sign that climate is changing.
2) Again... You don't know.
So... What about the levels of methane in the atmosphere over time? You do know that methane traps the sun's heat at 84 TIMES the rate of carbon dioxide, right?
Actually yes, I do know about methane. It’s actually 86 times in a 20-year period fo 34 in 100-year period if you want to be more precise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential
Is anyone measuring that? No, since "Carbon" is the apocalypse buzzword that gets studies funded, and methane is extracted, distributed, and politically protected by big businesses. But it leaks out of every oil well, especially those that are "fracked". It also leaks out of every system of gas piping to residential homes. If man IS warming the planet, then methane will be doing at least as much of the work as carbon dioxide.
That is simply not true. Atmospheric methane is also being measured and monitored and the conclusions drawn from the levels of methane of the past 800,000 years correlate with the CO2 levels, saying they drastically increased during the Industrial Revolution. Maybe it’s mentioned less often than CO2, but are we just talking headlines here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane
Have you even heard of the solar cycle?
As a matter of fact I have. Again, you don’t have to be so condescending. It’s not like I could or wanted to name every single argument in one post.
The eleven year period where the sun's heat output waxes and wains by a small, but significant amount? They're correlated to levels of sun-spot activity, and sun-spots are believed to be "holes" in the sun's corona created by magnetic fields. But magnetic fields require electric currents to form, and both electricity and magnetism have been completely ignored in cosmology for over a century now. So we actually know jack-all about how the sun actually works, and can't expect it to any more steady-state than the earth.
You mean astrophysics I assume. We can measure solar radiation and atmospheric temperatures while observing sun spot activity. I’d have to do some more research, but I’ve found this article on the SORCE satellite:
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/solarcycle-sorce.html
You probably also don't know about the "Little Ice Age" that Europe suffered from 1645 to 1715. Which just so happened to coincide with a solar event called the "Maunder Minimum". When sunspots were extremely rare.
Yes, I know about the Little Ice Age. We’re talking coder-than-average winters in Europe and North America, not a real ice age or anything global. There were second-to-none sunspot observations, but the “Ice Age” started earlier. Also a fifth-warmest winter was recorded during that time in England. Some research points to volcanic activity as a cause. I’d say it’s likely, but not proof of the correlation between the temperatures and sunspots. The data from the SORCE satellite is more interesting.
3) Again... You're only looking for carbon dioxide sources. While ignoring solar activity, and the role of methane.
See above. So you agree on what I stated about the CO2 then?
4) Thank you for the elementary school story of global warming. Based, as it is, on looking at Venus, and assuming that it was once Earth-like (which we have no rational basis to believe).
Again, you don't know all of the potential warming factors. Nor, evidently, have you ever worked with computer simulations. Which are only as accurate as the data you feed into them. Don't like the result? Then you trial-and-error your way to the result you want.
So I assume you have better story that defies all established theories about climate? You’re basically stating that we know nothing about climate, because what we know is not accurate. Provide me with real examples.
But tell me... If we DO know pretty much everything about the Earth's climate... Then why are weather forecasts still so inaccurate? Seems like those expert computer models should be able to give us 99% weather accuracy out to at least a decade if we're going to make compulsory, life-altering decisions based on them. No?
The weather forecasts, of course. Because weather is the same thing as climate! Give me a break. Arguments like these make your story very weak.
5) The problem isn't overpopulation, so much as how much of that population is unproductive.
There is NO sustainable level of human population that wouldn't see us reduced to the technological and social level of the middle ages. And then we'd just be waiting for a bad ice age, or a large meteor, to wipe us out.
The technological civilization that we enjoy, and which will be the only thing that spreads us to other planets in this solar system, requires a large population. Why? Because we need people to specialize in particular technologies and their sub-branches. A society of subsistence farmers has no way of supporting an expert in rocket engine fuel pump fittings. Or microchip architecture. So for our species to spread, we need a productive society of people specialized in what they do.
What we don't need is people who are being paid not to work.
Not sure what you’re getting at. Your original question was about “That man is capable of significantly reducing these emissions without a massive reduction in world population.”.
Okay, so you’re saying a big population provides us with great technological advancements. Fine, but I was talking about the biocapacity of the earth which a large enough population can exceed. Mainly due to technology by the way. Emptying fossil fuel reserves and minerals, that’s our main problem (aside from all of that causing climate change). The solution would be to engage in a circular economy and use renewable energy for example.
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I’m willing to be openminded about any actual scientific evidence that defy current climate studies and I assume that there is some. So far though, I’ve found my own arguments (the ones I found) to be stronger and you haven’t really provided me with any evidence other than vaguely related stories and the ever-returning argument that the government can’t be trusted (which by the way is also an argument for a flat-earth, not that I would accuse you of agreeing with that). If you don’t trust any scientific studies, than we’ve reached that impasse I guess.
