: : Not quite. As I replied to your assertion in the Anything Else room that the Greenhouse Effect was a scare story whipped up by politicians, I have fairly good data backing my belief; can you provide similar data to back yours?: Yes, I can but don't have the time. I work full-time, go to school full-time and tutor.
Well then, give me a journal citation; my old University library still alows me in to have a read every now and then. But preferably from one of the reputable physical journals like the Journal of Geophysical Research or a general paper like Nature. Articles from "science-lite" magazines like Scientific American or New Scientist will also do; they usually refer to the original article they are covering.
Alternatively, give me Web Sites, like that produced by the Centre for Atmospheric Science at Cambridge University or the NOAA Climate Diagnostics Centre (CDC)
I will of course scrutinize them fairly carefully, as well as passing them to colleagues and university friends working in the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for their peer review...
: : For example, to quote Myers and Kent in their 1995 paper, the estimated cost of defending low-lying coastal regions against rising sea levels in the next 50 years is estimated at 17.5 to 20 trillion US dollars. That's just one of the effects of global warming; there are others such as the spread of vector-borne diseases like malaria and trypsomaniasis, the failure of crops due to changing weather patterns, etc.
: I'm too busy to look up the exact source but the main onus of any global warming occurs in northern climes, during winter nights. Let's say jumping from a mean of 0 to 10F. Quite a statistical jump but irrelevant given its location.
If I might cite the EDF's response to this question:
"Warming over the past century has occurred both during the day and at night, but night-time warming has been the greater of the two. The buildup of the haze of particles from combustion discussed above has probably contributed to this asymmetric warming. But as warming continues, the tendency toward night-time warming is expected to diminish, in part because the slow heating of the oceans causes a uniform atmospheric warming over time. In any event, night-time warming would be experienced by society and ecosystems differently than daytime warming, but may be no less problematic. For example, the northward spread of certain infectious diseases is currently limited by cold night-time temperatures."
It's far from irrelevant.
And should you think that the EDF is a suspect source, here and here are two articles from The Lancet (a medical journal of worldwide repute) dealing with the subject.
: Additionally, several economists and ecologist have predicted an economic boom due to better grain and produce production in these northern areas.
Again, to quote the EDF;
"Under the controlled conditions which occur in a greenhouse with ample water and fertilizer, plants grow more rapidly in an atmosphere enriched by CO2. The extent that this effect carries over into natural systems like forests is unknown. Some plants, potentially including weeds, may benefit while others may not. The consequence for forests and other ecosystems is uncertain, but it is unlikely to counteract the adverse impacts of a rapid climate change."
(i.e. weeds grow just as effectively in a greenhouse. In addition, weeds are generally weeds due to their hardy nature and adaptability; or they wouldn't be so widespread. So if you raised the temperatures, it is likely that hardy and adaptable plants (weeds) would have a headstart over the frailer food crops. In addition, it has been shown that Novartis's pesticide-resistant genetically-modified gene-sequence can travel from food grasses to wild grasses.
What do you see as the inevitable result to the planet of a boost in the explosive growth of pesticide-tolerant weeds?)
: Further, isotope measurements of animal remains seem pretty conclusive that earth has been much warmer in the very recent (evolutionarily speaking) past.
And colder as well. Look what happened to the mammoths. During recorded history, however, the mean temperature hasn't varied more than 1 degree Centigrade. The average temperature rise due to man-made greenhouse gases could be as much as 3.5 C, according to the IPCC; localized rises could be much higher.
: : As I'm pointing out, all human language is emotive.
: But by attempting to gain common understanding we can rise above pure emotion and engage in dialog. Calling people evil (I must apologize here, Lark and several others, excluding you, have done this) does not even remotely attempt this.
We can never truly rise above emotion; we are not robots. In fact, I see computers mimicking emotions long before I see humans successfully discarding theirs.
: : Your words were "Well Gideon, while all you "no compromise" lefties are whining about how we need socialism and taht nothing good ever comes out of a free-market society..."
: Yes, and most here have directly said 'no compromise'. This means that unless the world gets better under their 'system' they don't want it to get better at all. I, on the other hand seek to improve the world by advocating abolishing the IMF which is directly related to your first post.
The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO are a rather unsubtle attempt to try and impose the ideas of free-market capitalism on the non-Western world; countries are offered carrots in the shape of loans if they liberalize their markets (i.e. open them up to Western countries) and threatened with sticks (trade wars over bananas and blocking foreign investments) if they don't dance the WTO's tune.
It is worth noting that the current trade war between the US and the EU was started by Chiquita's lobbying of the President; for Chiquita to succeed in their objectives would actually be harmful to the US; in that the Carribean islands producing bananas depend on their crop; without that, the economies concerned will fail and the people are highly likely to turn to the drug trade (as it's very profitable).
(Ah well, that's by the by; if it comes to a full-blown trade war, both the EU and the US will suffer, but the winner is likely to be the more efficient runner in import/export terms and resource usage and the US is already heading for an all-time record trade gap this year; it would be interesting to see the effect on the collective US psyche to see the US defeated in a trade war; even if this is mere speculation at the present time.)
: : Exactly who is introducing non-reasoned emotion into the debate here, Joel?
: No one. I'm being sarcastic, not emotional.
And when was sarcasm not emotion?
: It wasn't ridiculous. Come join the libertarians (for lack of a better category) and help us abolish the IMF.
I've already joined the anarchists (I don't mean the anarcho-capitalists a lá Ayn Rand) as I have an equal distrust of both large government and large enterprise; collectivism on a local, human scale is the only practical way I think would work.
: : If you cannot explode it,
: I agree with it. But most here don't want a solution unless it include a solution to all the other problems in the world, simultaneously.
I'd contend that putting financial profit ahead of social and environmental impact is one of the major factors causing these problems; a root cause is not hard to deduce from those premises.
To which, you might respond that it is "human nature" to act the same way as we always have done before; I'd respond that it's "evolution" to act differently; moreover, as the environmental indicators show, a little evolution on our part is long overdue. We need to grow up as a species.
: Well, let's see. The IMF, a gov't driven entity, introduces artificial supports to malinvestment. This malinvestment hurts the people of Indonesia. It's pretty easy to see waht should be done; abolish the IMF.
The IMF is driven by corporate interests; the same corporate interests that dictate to governments. If this idea sounds so ridiculous, ask yourself if I have the President's ear in the same way that Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch do; and if not, why not?
I would contend that the WTO, the IMF and the OECD are in reality geared towards extraction of wealth and primary resources (raw materials) from the Third World and the direction of those profits to industries in the First World; in addition, the emphasis is on buying these resources as cheaply as possible from the Third World and selling them as expensively as possible in the West.
If this seems odd, compare conditions at a Nigerian oil well and a Texan one, or at De Beers diamond mines in South Africa and similar mines in Australia; when Third World governments have tried to pass legislation enforcing workers health and safety, their most vociferous opponents have been foreign investors opposed to the rise in cost of production.
The Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) was just the latest initiative along these lines; it would have given multinationals a free hand with regard to their employee working conditions, as well as giving multinationals a forum in which to sue governments if they thought the governments were reducing their (the company's) profits. Furthermore, any foreign investment in a Third World country would be conditional on their accepting the terms of the MAI; such an agreement would basically read as follows;
"Here's some money, you can have it as long as you don't try and tell us what to do in our factories on your soil. If you do anything we think will reduce our profits, we're going to sue you."
: : to overconsume our natural resources with no thought for the long-term effects and that the extant evidence shows this to be a Bad Thing, ecologically speaking.
: And will be abated by what? Centralized, beaueaucratic action?
No. Solutions imposed from above don't work. I think it can only be abated by thorough education as to our responsibilities to the planet.
Too many people will litter in the belief that someone else will pick it up; some people actually claim to create jobs for litter-pickers and thus be doing good by littering. It's irresponsible enough to do it as an individual; we are doing it as a species.
: Much of what you say has some validity. But it's the utter corruption in those countries causing it.
Every country is causing it. If you look at the EPA's records, you will see that the vast majority of successful prosecutions for toxic outfall pollution come from corporate buildings; companies that produce organometallic compounds and are unwilling to reduce their profits by following the law. All of the major chemical companies like DuPont have been fined for violations like these; nearly all of them have re-offended.
: : Can you give me a convincing causal link that disproves my assertion?
: Actually, yes. Almost all 20th century global warming occurred before 1950.
Wrong. No other way I can put it, really. Would you care to furnish me with a graph of climate variation that supports that claim?
: The vast majority of industrial output has occurred during the last two-thirds of the century. Additionally, there's been a lot of buzz lately regarding the relation between mean global temps and the sunspot cycle which creates massive fluctuations in solar energy.
Uh-uh. The Copenhagen team who originally suggested that did have some flaws in their methodology; it was accepted that the level of solar activity had *some* influence, but not as much as they originally predicted. The reason that you've heard about it is that the Global Climate Coalition (really the oil industry's pet scientists) leapt on it as manna from heaven and proclaimed the oil industry to be totally guiltless of any wrongdoing.
: : (oh, by the way, while solar and volcanic activity *are* factors in mean surface temperature, the latest models suggest that they have been outweighed by human-produced sources over the last 50 years)
: Depends on the source.
The Hadley Research Laboratories, as attached to the UK Meteorological Office; who ran one of the most accurate models of climate ever done last November, including solar and volcanic factors at the levels observed and made the conclusion I quoted.
: : Do you have any standpoint you can verify with logic?
: Logic is about infering the nature of statements; do they make hypothetical assertions or no, etc. My assertion that politicians have personal incentives to hype issues regarless of their validity is a logical assertion. The subject of the debate is whether this assertion is correct.
In actual fact, I think that if Gore actually made an accurate statement about the state of the environment, he'd be laughed at by the public, accused of hysteria and irresponsibility by the Republicans and the oil companies would queue up in line to fund his opponents.
I think that we need people to be put back in responsibility of their own lives; and their duties to the planet as a whole. I don't see that happening with monolithic structures of any sort, whether big government or big business.
While we have big business, though, it is necessary to use big government to keep it under control; for either of the structures on their own is extremely dangerous.
Gideon.
