Earth Temperature Close To One Million Year High

papasmerf

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shack said:
Sort of like the junk science of Einstein. Many of his theories couldn't be proved because the technology had not yet been invented to do so. Once the technology was available his detractors were silenced. Some of it took nearly 100 years to "prove". However his theories were "realities" even before they could be proved.

Seriously though, if you consider how many radical ideas throughout history that scientists first brought forth and were considered bunk or heresy (the Earth revolves around the sun) why do you dismiss rational evidence by scientists with no or relatively little personal agenda (as opposed to big business/oil lobbyists/politicians) out of hand. Every single one of us benefits immeasurably every single day from the theories of scientists that were initially considered bunk.

Look at it this way, from a downside perspective.

If you are correct that this theory is bunk but we go ahead and implement changes based on the current scientific evidence what's the worst that happens? Money is lost.

Conversely, if the theory is correct, but we neglect to take measures which may help what's the worst that can happen? Millions of lives lost, entire cities submerged, extinction of thousands of species and untold dollars more lost than the previous scenario.

If we take the perspective that we cannot say with anything close to 100% certainty that either theory is correct, does it not make sense to take the approach where the downside is much less risky?
20 years ago, wasn't Chicken-Little Gore telling us we had 10 years to fix this? Just this past year he used the same mantra. Chicken-Little Gore is one of the reasons I do not embrace this. He was wrong 20 years ago and is still wrong.
 

shack

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papasmerf said:
20 years ago, wasn't Chicken-Little Gore telling us we had 10 years to fix this? Just this past year he used the same mantra. Chicken-Little Gore is one of the reasons I do not embrace this. He was wrong 20 years ago and is still wrong.
Superbly reasoned response. I was hoping to have a rational discussion based on logical thinking but I guess I'm barking up the wrong tree.
 
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Away from here.
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papasmerf said:
Don I acknowledge the fact that many people of science feel the earth is headed twards a cataclysmic end, resulting from heat.

However I subscribe to this being a natural cycle. I also note that there are indications that the earth was once covered by ice and that seems to have passed. This seems to suggest that the earth has been involved in a warming trend for centuries. Even before the dastardly automobiles and factories ever existed.

I suggest those who belive that banning autos will solve this. Sell theirs and walk or ride a horse. Untill such time suitable replacements comes about.
Of course it's a "natural cycle"--it's just that humans may not be around to see the end part of the "cycle". :rolleyes:
 

slowpoke

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I recently watched a documentary by David Attenborough on this topic. He was very convincing in his argument that we have moved beyond the natural variations in temperature. He also had a few scientists on who claim Bush has been trying to suppress this information from reaching us.

http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/globalwarming.html

GLOBAL WARMING WEEK
ON CBC NEWSWORLD
Sunday September 24, 2006 - Saturday September 30, 2006
Starting Sunday September 24, CBC Newsworld takes an in-depth look at global warming. Is our planet in danger and what can we do now to reverse the damage?

Join us for a series of selected documentaries:

THE PASSIONATE EYE SHOWCASE
THE TRUTH ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING: PART 1
Sunday September 24 at 10pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld
Of the hottest years on record, nine out of ten have occurred since
1990. As we travell lthe world with him, Attenborough illustrates how thousands of plant and animal species are already on life support.
Hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves and forest fires are happening with more regularity and intensity than ever before. And in a matter of decades, some coastal communities could be entirely under water. All because of global warming.

Sir David Attenborough draws on his life-long insights into our planet and presents his personal take on climate change by returning to the locations of some of his past productions and discovered the effect that climate change has had on them.


READ MORE

THE PASSIONATE EYE SHOWCASE
BUSH'S CLIMATE OF FEAR
Sunday September 24 at 11pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld
Some of America's leading climate scientists claim that they have been censored and gagged by the U.S. administration. The scientists claim that when Bush came to power in 2000 his administration selected advice which argued that global warming was not a result of human activities and that the phenomenon could be natural.


READ MORE
 

slowpoke

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Meister said:
Why don't all the experts skip the doomsday analysis and come out with what they really want to advocate:
- Impose super expensive environmental laws aimed at green house gases
- Make it incredibly expensive (not viable) to manufacture in North America

Resulting in:
- Moving manufacturing to Asia
- Creating huge numbers of low paying useless jobs in NA
- Loosing most economic power and wealth to Asia

Unless China, Russia, India and other powerhouses will come on board I would do nothing. Maybe I should be worried that my children will have to endure an average temperature of -8 as opposed to -10 in January, but I am more worried that all that will be left for them to do is moving merchandise we are all buying from Asia.
You make it sound like this is a left wing political ploy instead of an inconvenient but still crucial environmental imperative. This isn't about left or right or even politics. This isn't about jobs and competitiveness either. It is about preserving our habitat for our long-term survival. Big picture, it doesn't really matter which country starts first to curb emissions. The US alone emits 25% of the world's greenhouse gas but has a much smaller percentage of the world's population. Canada is producing a great deal of greenhouse gas with our oil sands. So, morally, we are not in any position to be dictating to the rest of the world what to do. We emit much more than our share and we are the most wealthy countries so it wouldn't quite kill us to step up to the plate.

And yes, you should be worried about your children - very worried. Oh wait, you refuse to worry about them unless the Russians and Chinese worry about them at the same time. Brilliant!!
 

Mcluhan

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slowpoke said:
And yes, you should be worried about your children - very worried. Oh wait, you refuse to worry about them unless the Russians and Chinese worry about them at the same time. Brilliant!!
Sigh.. it's kinda like two people sitting in a leaking boat at sea. One refuses to bail, so the other one to spite his lazy mate, refuses to bail also.
 

Meister

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The world is not coming to an end in 20, 30 or 50 or 500 years. I have no complaints about installing windfarms, adding luxury taxes on gas guzzlers, investing in modern public transportation.... But, I do have a problem with China getting a free for all on energy, pollution, cheap labour and burning oodles of gallons of diesel to ship their crap to us over here. We are all heading towards low paying jobs because we are all just consuming and not producing.

If you want to do something good for the environment how about this:

Stop wasting resources by shipping every fucking piece of raw material and finished good half way around the world just because you save 8 cents in doing so and start producing it again in North America under controlled conditions and regionally. The amount of fuel you would save would be astronomical.

Regarding my kids despising me for my attitude. Trust me if you are unemployed you don't give a crap about the average temperature. It is very easy for some people who have cushy government or teaching jobs to complain, but you may want to think about how all this service industry and ultimately standard of living is supported. I would like to hear your economic model on that one.
 

slowpoke

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Meister said:
The world is not coming to an end in 20, 30 or 50 or 500 years. I have no complaints about installing windfarms, adding luxury taxes on gas guzzlers, investing in modern public transportation.... But, I do have a problem with China getting a free for all on energy, pollution, cheap labour and burning oodles of gallons of diesel to ship their crap to us over here. We are all heading towards low paying jobs because we are all just consuming and not producing.

If you want to do something good for the environment how about this:

Stop wasting resources by shipping every fucking piece of raw material and finished good half way around the world just because you save 8 cents in doing so and start producing it again in North America under controlled conditions and regionally. The amount of fuel you would save would be astronomical.

Regarding my kids despising me for my attitude. Trust me if you are unemployed you don't give a crap about the average temperature. It is very easy for some people who have cushy government or teaching jobs to complain, but you may want to think about how all this service industry and ultimately standard of living is supported. I would like to hear your economic model on that one.
I guess it all depends what you mean by "the world is not coming to an end". I see no reason why this planet will vanish anytime soon but it is entirely up for grabs whether we'll have much land above water or many people still surviving. That includes your kids and mine. You're on thin ice (pun intended) when you make scientific predictions 30 to 500 years out. Maybe you know something we don't. Like how all those scientists must be dead wrong with their concerns about melting glaciers etc. I never said your kids would despise you for your attitude. I was thinking more along the lines of what hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans. That's about the most likely model IMHO.
 

Mcluhan

New member
It's an interesting debate. I see points scored on both sides. Meister, your point about the job is well taken, but in some ways its a folly too (a human one), my point being we have to trend away from the "me first" attitude. How we will do this, I have no clue. Imagine if the Pope for example were the head of some philosophy that practiced an Ecological form of spiritualism, such as the natives of north America, before we devastated their culture with booze and guns. I'd be instantly in favour of replacing the mullahs with Algonquin Shamans.

We have lost our relationship with Mother Nature. We do not respect her, she in turn will ultimately destroy us, for what we are doing to the planet.

If you have ever been to Queen Charlotte Islands, you will know instantly what I am getting at. Mother Nature is a force, and you can feel her intelligence there. I can tell you, she is not happy.

As for allowing all our manufacturing to slip away to China, and then support it lock, stock and barrel over our obsession with the profit motive, its very short sited IMHO. Globalisation is fine on paper, but wait until the scrap over energy begins. The rules will change. And the skill sets that we have lost in this country, the same ones being learned, transfered to china, may lead to regret one day. The same applies to farming. Hundreds of generations of technology is being lost here due to 'modernization'. It's not healthy. I have cousins that still farm because they love it, but if they had no 'service industry' income, as the first job, they could not continue. And there is no one to replace them. When they are gone, the lifestyle is gone with them. Rural Mexico is reeling from this very thing. They no longer produce corn, it's shipped in from the US in containers... problem is, they have little money to buy it, at the rural level. And there are no jobs.
 

woolf

East end Hobbiest
The "loss of jobs" argument is a false one ... and so is the "jobs heading off to China" argument as well, when used in any debate about energy and global warming.

Building a new economy based on renewable and clean sources will create jobs, and if Canada is a world leader in creating that kind of technology, then people will come to Canada looking to hire that expertise ... and I don't care how many Chinese there are, we will never have to worry about it being cheaper to pay Chinese worker to blow on our wind turbines than letting our own Canadian wind do the work.

What we have before us with all this global warming, pollution, etc is the greatest opportunity that man may ever have had to build an economy based on clean renewable and eventually nearly free energy ... I don't see the argument against such an venture.

As for not liking that the Chinese get a break while we have to cut back ... the west has been given the "break" when it comes to polluting for over a century; now we are pissed that the rest of the world wants to enjoy some of the cheap energy (cheap because we never had to pay the true costs for using polluting energy) that we enjoyed to give us an economical advantage?

I don't want China to pollute the way we were allowed to pollute, but I think that it is at least partially our responsibility to come up with a way for them to have energy that doesn't pollute. Otherwise how can we sit there at the table, after stuffing our face full of food, and then tell the newly arrived and starving Chinese that they're going to have to take it easy on the remaining food because we were gluttons and there's only a little bit left, and they have to share it "fairly" with us fat pigs .... buuuurrrrpppp!
 

frasier

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In your head
Who is volunteering to put a 100 foot windmill in to their backyard?
 

Asterix

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Seemingly lost in all this is that "mother nature" doesn't give a rip about humans, and is not angry, pleased or indifferent to what we do. It is entirely a human invention to attempt to personify the rest of the world. The world is simply reacting to changes that have been set in motion, and unfortunately for us, changes that aren't going to be turned around anytime soon.
 

papasmerf

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DonQuixote said:
Let me understand your reasoning.

You don't buy into the alleged global warming and
its possible consequences because ......

AL GORE IS THE
SPOKESMAN FOR
THAT THEORY!


If your reasoning is based on Gore's position I
strongly suggest you review the recently published
scientific literature on this issue.
No Don

I don't buy into the theiry because it is just that. As I posted earlier others in the scientific community do not buy into it either.

Al Gore is just an example of people who latch on to a cause and scream the virtures of it. Yet the facts they yell are flawed.
 

lenharper

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papasmerf said:
No Don

As I posted earlier others in the scientific community do not buy into it either.
Well, those guys who used to work for the cigarette companies had to go somewhere didn't they?
 

papasmerf

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lenharper said:
Well, those guys who used to work for the cigarette companies had to go somewhere didn't they?
I would be interested in who you mean and in their verifiable background you speak of
 

papasmerf

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Don,

Wouldn't the idea of keeping an open mind work well for all on this issue?
 

lenharper

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papasmerf said:
I would be interested in who you mean and in their verifiable background you speak of
It's so hard to tell if you are thickheaded or just a provocatuer.
 

papasmerf

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lenharper said:
It's so hard to tell if you are thickheaded or just a provocatuer.
I just hate it when people are so blinded by their hate that they sling crap like you did.
 
Must have been the caveman drawings they saw to know what it was 1 million years ago ;)
 

papasmerf

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DonQuixote said:
Absolutely. But, there hasn't been much info
out there that the cycle we're in is typical of
the normal fluctuations.
There are few people vocal when they see no problem. They tend to review the theory and either accept it of dismiss it. Most who dismiss it seldom get into a debate over things they dismiss.
 
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