Come along, gentlemen, calmly and without barbs is the way to discuss things with people who are not real-world friends face-to-face with you in a convivial location.
All involved at this point know that they're not going to convince the other of the rightness of their point of view and whilst 'setting the world to rights' around the table in the pub can be vastly entertaining, the internet equivalent is nowhere near as satisfying.
To be blunt, I fear that those who do not believe that the rise in average global temperatures is a real phenomenon are 'whistling in the graveyard'. It's an observed and recorded phenomenon and gainsaying the thermometer does not get us anywhere.
Neither does having a go at someone who speaks out just because they are not as pure as Jesus (and we even nailed Him to a tree). Al Gore does not need the money he makes from his activism on this issue - that's why the profits from his DVD "An Inconvenient Truth" went to charity not into his pocket. If the best his detractors can do is point the finger at his 'carbon footprint' then they have no argument of substance worth debating (lack of effective counter-points ever being the driving force behind such tangential attacks).
Saying that human input to this effect is arguable carries more water. The mechanisms involved are complex and imperfectly understood, as has been covered already.
However, certain things are given, regardless of less than solid web-links referred to earlier. One of these is that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses (including water vapour by the way) increase the amount of energy trapped in a system heated by radiated energy - that's why one of the major ways considered of terraforming Mars is to essentially build automated Smog Factories there.
So trying to counter-argue that industrialised societies waste products are not having an effect is interest-group sophistry at best. Yes, volcanoes, sub-oceanic rift activity and sundry other natural events also have a very great impact but that's not an excuse to make things worse when we can do something about our input.
Likewise, the argument that cow-farts have a greater impact that car emissions is a near-true but misleading statement to make. Agriculture is a big component of the total mass of greenhouse gases created, that's undeniable. The 'but' (or should that be 'butt'?) in this paragraph tho' is that there is not a lot we can do about that as long as we like to have burgers with our chips. We can reduce the amount of fossil fuel expenditure that goes into food production and transport but, without a huge number of very large corks, we can't do much about the byproducts of bovine digestion.
Of course, we have to be careful about what we do in well-intentioned changes in our behaviour. It has been estimated that the smog and atmospheric particulates reduction that has happened in recent decades has actually made the global warming problem worse. Whilst it had the benefit of improving ground-level atmospheric conditions and reducing the 'soot' fallout on vulnerable habitats, it also cleared the upper atmosphere (over time) allowing more radiant energy to penetrate. Swings and roundabouts and Mephistophlean deals with the Devil seem to be our lot
.
At the end of the day {it goes dark :lol:} I personally believe that the juggernaut is rolling now and it's actually too late to stop the consequences of our actions in destabalising a dynamically balanced system.
Getting emissions under control and improving energy-efficiency has good effects besides it's climatological impact, so it's still worth doing, as is the related research into non-fossil fuel energy (tho' the 'burning food' solutions are a travesty of their very own). The lag effect in the climate system means tho' that by the time you see a problem developing the momentum is already strong for a tipping point incident.
Earth's history is full of these sudden reversals of trends and I am still more than half convinced that the sudden warming we are seeing now will be followed by an equally sudden cooling. It's happened before and it'll happen again, even when, as we technically are, the planet is in an Ice Age.
I always end my serious posts on this issue by referring to the Magnetic Polar Shift that is under way. As a species that is absolutely nothing we can do about that and we can even be virtuous and say that nothing we have done has affected it. The by-products of this inevitable inversion are very bad tho' and rival the worst case scenario's of temperature change. Without reliable power modern society cannot function and with the advent of near-quantum-state electronics the pole shift becomes even more devastating to our technology and energy and transport systems. That doesn't even approach the problems a global cancer and mutation epidemic will cause.
Hot-House or Ice-Age matters not in the face of this. We fry one way or the other.
All involved at this point know that they're not going to convince the other of the rightness of their point of view and whilst 'setting the world to rights' around the table in the pub can be vastly entertaining, the internet equivalent is nowhere near as satisfying.
To be blunt, I fear that those who do not believe that the rise in average global temperatures is a real phenomenon are 'whistling in the graveyard'. It's an observed and recorded phenomenon and gainsaying the thermometer does not get us anywhere.
Neither does having a go at someone who speaks out just because they are not as pure as Jesus (and we even nailed Him to a tree). Al Gore does not need the money he makes from his activism on this issue - that's why the profits from his DVD "An Inconvenient Truth" went to charity not into his pocket. If the best his detractors can do is point the finger at his 'carbon footprint' then they have no argument of substance worth debating (lack of effective counter-points ever being the driving force behind such tangential attacks).
Saying that human input to this effect is arguable carries more water. The mechanisms involved are complex and imperfectly understood, as has been covered already.
However, certain things are given, regardless of less than solid web-links referred to earlier. One of these is that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses (including water vapour by the way) increase the amount of energy trapped in a system heated by radiated energy - that's why one of the major ways considered of terraforming Mars is to essentially build automated Smog Factories there.
So trying to counter-argue that industrialised societies waste products are not having an effect is interest-group sophistry at best. Yes, volcanoes, sub-oceanic rift activity and sundry other natural events also have a very great impact but that's not an excuse to make things worse when we can do something about our input.
Likewise, the argument that cow-farts have a greater impact that car emissions is a near-true but misleading statement to make. Agriculture is a big component of the total mass of greenhouse gases created, that's undeniable. The 'but' (or should that be 'butt'?) in this paragraph tho' is that there is not a lot we can do about that as long as we like to have burgers with our chips. We can reduce the amount of fossil fuel expenditure that goes into food production and transport but, without a huge number of very large corks, we can't do much about the byproducts of bovine digestion.
Of course, we have to be careful about what we do in well-intentioned changes in our behaviour. It has been estimated that the smog and atmospheric particulates reduction that has happened in recent decades has actually made the global warming problem worse. Whilst it had the benefit of improving ground-level atmospheric conditions and reducing the 'soot' fallout on vulnerable habitats, it also cleared the upper atmosphere (over time) allowing more radiant energy to penetrate. Swings and roundabouts and Mephistophlean deals with the Devil seem to be our lot
.At the end of the day {it goes dark :lol:} I personally believe that the juggernaut is rolling now and it's actually too late to stop the consequences of our actions in destabalising a dynamically balanced system.
Getting emissions under control and improving energy-efficiency has good effects besides it's climatological impact, so it's still worth doing, as is the related research into non-fossil fuel energy (tho' the 'burning food' solutions are a travesty of their very own). The lag effect in the climate system means tho' that by the time you see a problem developing the momentum is already strong for a tipping point incident.
Earth's history is full of these sudden reversals of trends and I am still more than half convinced that the sudden warming we are seeing now will be followed by an equally sudden cooling. It's happened before and it'll happen again, even when, as we technically are, the planet is in an Ice Age.
I always end my serious posts on this issue by referring to the Magnetic Polar Shift that is under way. As a species that is absolutely nothing we can do about that and we can even be virtuous and say that nothing we have done has affected it. The by-products of this inevitable inversion are very bad tho' and rival the worst case scenario's of temperature change. Without reliable power modern society cannot function and with the advent of near-quantum-state electronics the pole shift becomes even more devastating to our technology and energy and transport systems. That doesn't even approach the problems a global cancer and mutation epidemic will cause.
Hot-House or Ice-Age matters not in the face of this. We fry one way or the other.
