Silvaire wrote:
I don’t personally find a slow, steady average temperature rise of between 0.5 and 1.0 degree C (in total) over the last 130 years ‘alarming’
That’s perfectly fine and understandable. No-one would expect you to.
Luckily we have scientists who can scrutinise data and come to the consensus conclusion that:
A world in which warming reaches 4°C above pre-industrial levels, would be one of unprecedented heat waves, severe drought, and major floods in many regions, with serious impacts on human systems, ecosystems, and associated services.
I think that’s likely nonsense, given that none of those things have started to date, and if they have the extremely long time scale has allowed people to adapt. The thing that allows them to adapt easily is wealth, which is very much a function of adequate energy supply. I also note that the clear trend in wealthier countries is that people are moving to areas where it is warmer, improving their lives in doing so.
Well, that’s certainly put my mind at rest 
I try to focus my mind on reality, all the issues in play, not a single issue and the prediction of the end of the world, as religions so often do.
Silvaire wrote:
I try to focus my mind on reality
Okaaay, whereas climatologists focus their minds on…. unreality?
Silvaire wrote:
the clear trend in wealthier countries is that people are moving to areas where it is warmer, improving their lives in doing so.
Comedy gold. Reminds me of Trump during the winter snap: “Scientists talking about climate change?! But it’s freezing!”
There are certain topics that always seem to tail off into polarised views, and worse, which is a shame.
It must be better to stick with the science and debate what we know, or at least think we know.
It is a little like aircraft accidents – we love coming up with all sorts of theories, but ultimately all that matters is the evidence, and how we interpret the evidence.
As to now, it seems to me the evidence is the Earth is warming, we know our by products cause heat to be retained in the atmospehere, and so it is reasonable to conclude we are influencing warming. Why would you scientifically argue otherwise?
I am still looking for the evidence that previous periods of cooling (and warming) have been long affairs as I would have thought the geological record should give us a reasonably accurate insight?
DavidJ wrote:
Okaaay, whereas climatologists focus their minds on…. unreality?
I have spent my whole professional career working with PhD level scientists, now with them reporting to me on technical matters. None of them have ever been, or subsequently have risen into a position of making strategic decisions considering wide ranging factors outside their own field. They are almost always advisors.
In this case, the people who are making policy under the advisement of climatologists are politicians with gigantic agendas including but not limited to: growing funding and expanding the role of government, assuring energy security in countries that import most of their energy, increasing tax paying population to pay debt being passed on, limiting personal freedom and so on. Some of those are negative, some positive but I do not for one moment think that European policy with the climate change label is in actuality focused on that issue. The use and hysterical publicity of that particular issue is in my view a matter of convenience, it aligns well with religious methods that have proven effective in influencing the behavior large numbers of people forever, and it ‘works’.
It will take hundreds of years for the current trend of temperature change to have any meaningful effect on man, the Gore style tipping point argument is money driven speculation. In hundreds of years many other things will also change, man made or otherwise. The actual responsible policy job is to predict how all those factors will interact, and the reality is that we have very limited ability to either predict or control the entirety of the problem, or have much affect on individual components like very, very slow global atmospheric temperature rise that has been the reality since data became available 100-150 years ago (or take you pick).
For me, for the reasons I have said, the evidence would suggest we are contributing to climate change. It seems to me there is very sound evidence that both the effect of acidification and warming is casuing immeasurable changes to tropical reef systems. I have dived on reefs in the last few years in Australia, the West Indies and Indonesia and I have seen the damage. In a sense, I grew up on reefs in the WI’s. Seen with your own eyes the changes are massive. Now the reefs might adapt. We know with previous periods of warming they have. Perhaps we do not know if the warming is quicker than previously, they can adapt fast enough, but it seems to me during the transition there will be a huge loss of this particular ecosystem as new reefs will take a very long time to establish. It may be one isolated example, that might not be important or have much meaning to many people, but I think we should be concerned about this loss.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
It must be better to stick with the science and debate what we know
Fuji_Abound wrote:
ultimately all that matters is the evidence
Fuji_Abound wrote:
Why would you scientifically argue otherwise?
Thanks Fuji. There’s a good section on Wiki about ice age transition speeds.
Silvaire wrote:
The use and hysterical publicity of that particular issue is in my view a matter of convenience, it aligns well with religious methods that have proven effective in influencing the behavior large numbers of people forever
I think what is much more convenient is to try and distract from the overwhelming weight of evidence on every side and to pretend that man-made climate change and it’s effects are of no concern.
Silvaire wrote:
It will take hundreds of years for the current trend of temperature change to have any meaningful effect on man,
No. It is already happening. Today. Here and now, due to rises in sea levels alone. Ask anyone who lives in the Maldives.
We can have interesting discussions about carbon offsetting, and it’s merits or otherwise, and even population growth (which is more of a useful get-out-of-jail card than a genuine policy, IMHO). But I’m unable to argue with climate deniers, in the same way as I’m unable to argue with my mouse mat, or a grapefruit.
DavidJ wrote:
But I’m unable to argue with climate deniers, in the same way as I’m unable to argue with my mouse mat, or a grapefruit.
The NASA data does not indicate to me that the rate of temperature or sea level change is well correlated to the very rapid increases in human energy consumption during the 20th century. Since about 1910 temperature increase seems to have bounced along at a similar upward rate per year regardless of man’s exponentially increasing use of energy.
Do you think man’s effect in increasing sea level by burning fossil fuels was as strong in 1890 as it is today, given similar annual sea level increases over that period to today? I see a slight acceleration, not more.
Would you say somebody who thinks this NASA data is both real and not alarming in relation to other human issues is a “climate denier” or would you give them another name? Sinner, perhaps? 
