Vici wrote:
I quit the Mormon religion years ago. I'm a liberal, an environmentalist, and I engage in oral sex with my spouse. ;)
But I think human-caused climate change is the biggest hoax perpetrated on humans since the age of enlightenment began to pry open the eyelids of western civilization. And I also think that it is going to implode before long. More and more reputable scientists are becoming willing to be branded "heretics" for taking a stand against the myth. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see a rebound effect in the coming decade, where it will suddenly become more "fashionable" to be a "rebel" against the GW juggernaut than to permit oneself to get caught up in the hype.
On what basis? What is your training?? As long as most serious earth scientists agree on the reality of climate change on the role of human beings, it is irrational for a nonexpert to just decide it is a hoax. Hey maybe evolution and the germ theory of disease are hoaxes too! They have desenters too for pete sake.
Kudos to Vici, she's (he's) got it exactly right. Too bad Fort and the others here (Scratch actually asked me an intelligent question on the subject) don't really want to discuss the evidence on its merits, but would rather engage in the usual ad hominem circumstantial agruments regarding "big oil" and "rebid right wingers" somehow having something to do with the merits of the evidence per se.
Indeed, nobody here, including our new intellectual poseur Fort, who would rather play at being an "intellectual" than wade into the meat and potatoes of the evidence, has as yet even attempted a point for point analysis of the scientific evidence for AGW so that a point/counterpoint debate can even begin.
As to the response to vici:
On what basis? What is your training??
Irrelevant, unless we're discussing highly arcane techinical concepts. The descriptinve understanding of AGW is accessible to anyone with average intelligence.
As long as most serious earth scientists agree on the reality of climate change on the role of human beings, it is irrational for a nonexpert to just decide it is a hoax
This is a flat footed falsehood. Shall we now enter into a discussion of "rabid left wing propaganda", because that is exactly what this is. There is no possible chance of supporting this claim within the professional literature. Most earth scientists do indeed believe the climate is changing (and the pointing of this out by the author of this response demonstrates how little that person actually knows about the subject), and most are of the opinion that humans may have something to do with it. This of course, means absulutely nothing at face value, as scientists making vastly speculative guesses about the causes of things within unimaginably complex physical systems in lieu of substantive empirical evidence may be no better that that of non-sciientists. Further, the professional literature is full of uncertainly about the cause of AGW as well as numerous proposals for completely natural causes. Those who are skeptical of AGW are still a minority (but not for long, I think) but are as competant as those who believe in it and many are eminant in the filed of climate science and related fields.
The attempt to equate sketicism about AGW, which at best is based on nothing more than the barest threads of circumstantial evidence, is easily refuted with counter evidence from measurements and observations in nature and at worst almost completely founded upon computer climate models, which, it needs to be said, aren't evidence of anything actually going on in nature, with holocaust denial or knowledge or germs as vetors of human disease is itself more than adaquate demonstration of the hysterical and desperate nature of both the need to believe and the need to preserve belief in AGW.
Vici is also correct about the coming backlash, although I think its on its way sooner than she anticipates. A couple more years of the Gestapo mentality among ideologues both within and without the scientific establsihment, in the media, and the continuing corruption of the science of Climatology by government money, where we now have perople calling for serious skeptics of AGW to be ostracized from the sceintific community, considered as being guilty of actionable crimes against humanity, and of being shills for "big oil" , while the hubris enveloped ideological fanatics at the well heeled and vetted environmental lobbies and foundations are to be considered morally and intellectually pure as driven snow, and the backlash will be in full swing.
This is coming one way or another in any case, driven by the plain dearth of empirical evidence for the theory. The GCMs have pretty much worn out their welcome, as people are realizing they were never meant to by anything other than mental excercises, not serious predictive models of reality.
As to Fort, I've been studying this issue for upwards of 15 years now, and after looking at the evidence on both sides of the issue, with a primary focus on the empirics of the subject, the overwhelming predonderence of the evidence suggests that AGW is nonesense, no different from the global cooling scam of just 30 years ago, promoted by many of the same peopel and groups with the same agenda. AGW is a political tool of cultural struggle grounded in ideology, not science.
If you'd actually like to discuss, point for point, the evidence, go ahead. I'd like to see you make the attempt.