Thread: Climate Change and our Land of Fire, Flood and Drought.

Originally Posted by 101RRS

Ya gotta love denialists

Like creationists?

Main problem with climate change alarmists is that they've turned it into the new religion!
They won't hear any comments to the contrary, no matter the comment.
Just won't have a bar of any other conversation other than we're destroying the climate, end of story.

Once you shut down debate like that, it's not longer science, it's a belief system .. ie. a religion. No amount of data to the contrary will change the mind of a religious person.

Sound familiar?

(to be sure here too, I'm neither a believer nor a denier. I'm more along the lines of I've watched enough so far to see that this is a new religion in the making, and care 0 for it all)

One massive issue with climate science junkies is the possibility that the scientists could be wrong.
Note there that I said COULD be wrong. But of course the current science can't be wrong .. no scientist of a particular time was ever eventually proven to be wrong .. ever .. never!
Nope, all those early scientists from the 15th to the 20th century .. all right, no questions about it.

We only hear now about the ones that were eventually proven to be right, but never really remember those that were eventually proven to be wrong.

So, should be noted that for a hypothesis to be proven right, it has to be 100% right .. not just correct to a very high degree.

Even the great Einstein has yet to be proven 100% right with his theories, if his theories were all 100% right, then we'd already have a grand unified theory of everything.
So .. what we currently consider to be science .. may very well be proven by a future society to be 100% BS of the highest order.

Another major failing of the human condition .. we just have this insatiable need to be right all the time, and in doing so blindly dismiss any comment that doesn't conform to the current thinking as noise.

it should also be noted that the greatest advancements in knowledge came from the question asked .. "are you sure about that" or similarly .. I'm not so sure that other person is 100% fully correct in their hypothesis.

ie. we would never have got to the moon, nor have functioning satellite systems as they currently work, if Einstein hadn't questioned the great Isaac Newtons' science about the motions of universal bodies.
And back then, I'm fairly sure that those scientists were pretty much dead set 101% sure that Newton was right with his science too!

Only thing that is pretty much a dead cert about the future, is that in 500 years time that civilisation will be reading up on their historical records thinking how could those idiots of 500 years ago have been so stupid about their understanding of science.
Just like we look back and read up on what science was 500 years ago.

the nail has been hit on the head. thanks AK

Originally Posted by Eevo

the nail has been hit on the head. thanks AK

All I can see are the multitude of dents all around the nail!

Originally Posted by V8Ian

I wonder if the good folk who feel compelled to glue themselves to roads, have given up their consumption of beer, sparkling wine, coke and other carbonated drinks.

The CO2 in these drinks is totally renewable, as whatever is given off in consumption is then re-absorbed when the next batch of drinks are made.

Not all CO2 is bad, just too much CO2, like drinking water, in moderation, good, but too much can lead to death, like alcohol poisoning.

Geez, there's some rampant irrational denialism coming out in this thread. It would be funny if it wasn't so misguided.
For example, why are our ocean levels at the highest they have been in 200,000 years? Because the Earth is warming. When did most of that warming happen? During the last 20,000 years, when humans were around.
Of course the Earth has cycles. The point is all the real climate scientists (who actually understand climate science) are agreed that humans are accelerating the rate of change.
The growth in human population is the variable factor contributing to the warming. Humans have become a selfish plague on the Earth. We are contributing to our own decline.
Diseases and famines exaggerated by human greed and rapaciousness will probably curb human population growth. As temperatures rise deadly diseases can breed in new areas, killing more people. Human stupidity, such as refusing to vaccinate, is already seeing a revival of whooping cough and other horrible diseases. Combine that with crop failures causing famines and extreme droughts causing water wars and the situation could get a lot worse, unless we wake up and face reality.
If not, the survivors may have to abandon a wasteland Earth and take to the stars.

Likely to be self correcting - like the anaerobic early bacteria that produced oxygen as a waste product - and eventually were virtually wiped out by the changing atmosphere.

Originally Posted by DiscoMick

Geez, there's some rampant irrational denialism coming out in this thread

Denialism vs Skepticism

"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

Originally Posted by 101RRS

Ya gotta love denialists

Neither the strawman logical fallacy, nor the ad hominem "head in the sand" or "denialist" labels/comments, help the doomsday destination arguments. Not in this forum, nor in any other.

Seems to me that the folks being labelled as "head in the sand", "denialists":
- are actually acknowledging how the climate and sea levels have changed in the eons past and continue to do so to this day. (Sensible! Specially given we HAVE data about how things HAVE changed over the eons)
- are simply saying that extrapolation from the data we have on past climate change and sea levels: could be dubious.

Seems the people in here (and outside) who may be branded as willfully ignorant denialists with heads in the sand - are the more sensible. Just my opinion. Why?:

- Sensible people realise that extrapolation is pretty safe if you have a dataset that has a relatively predictable trend, relatively constant trend.
- Sensible people also realise that where there is serious variability, volatility, in documented past movements - extrapolation can be little more than just a shot in the dark.
- Sensible people also realise that timeframes are important with regards to extrapolation from past data.
e.g. if you were embarking on a drive from your home to a distant location and for lack of other information attempted to calculate the altitude at your destination based on your absolute knowledge of the gradient of your driveway... well... folly. nuff said.

There is so much we do not know about our planet. In just the past week headlines have been published, words to the effect: "We have gotten it wrong all this time - Atlantic currents and how they are key to climate change" Or how about "Subterranean magma plumes the reason for losses of ice at the poles - we got it wrong, greenhouse gasses not to blame"