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If you agree because someone says so, that's just another form of ignorance. If you really wish to know the shit, you find the facts science has provided. Ther

• gnaritas 11y ago
  > If you agree because someone says so, that's just another form of ignorance. No it isn't, it's not possible to educate yourself to the depth required on a great many things without becoming a professional in the field and while that's cool for those that want to; it's utter arrogance and ignorance to ignore the entire scientific community as a laymen and pretend you know better. Quite simply, if you are not a climate scientist, you're talking out of your ass. The people educated enough in the evidence to have the rational debate, have already had it, the intelligent debate is over and the conclusions have been publicized. The only people still debating are the few scientists in the extreme minority (which is fine), and the utterly ignorant (i.e. the public).
  • vlehto 11y ago
    You have to be philosophist with a degree and specialization in philosophy of science to consistently make that argument. Are you?
    • gnaritas 11y ago
      No I don't, nor does my argument imply that since I didn't say it applies to everything but to a great many things. Everyone can use logic, but not all topics are matters of logic, climate science is not; it's a matter of evidence and correctly understanding the totality of the evidence requires one to be a climate scientist.
      • vlehto 11y ago
        The evidence clearly points that: 1. CO2 causes the greenhouse effect. This can be replicated in aquarium. It's a fact. 2. Burnind fossil fuels creates CO2 as material does not disappear. Carbon included. 3. CO2 is not absorbed by oceans. It goes to atmosphere. Measurable fact, documented by Mauna Loa observatory since 1956. 4. The change in radiation balance shows in significant ways. As is shown by change in glacier mass balance. Again measurable fact, easily understandable by layman. It is not hard so far. We have human made climate change there. Now if we go into the "what will happen and how much?" territory, 99% of climate scientist agree that we don't really know. There are educated guesses with freakishly huge error bars. If we compare this to "should smoking be banned", nobody speaks about 99% of doctors. "Is flyin safe?" and you don't hear about 99% of engineers. This "99% of climate scientists" stuff makes the whole business sound like it's matter of opinnion.
        • gd1 11y ago
          1. F=ma, Newton's second law, can be replicated easily. It's a fact. 2. If I kick this soccer ball right here, applying a force, it will accelerate away from me. It's a fact. 3. Look, it has accelerated away from me, it's a measurable fact! ...a short time later... 4. Oh, I was standing at the bottom of a hill, so the ball just rolled back to my feet. Do you understand? We are discussing an insanely complex system, with feedback loops everywhere, and a scant (at best) 100 years of quality data on a planet 4 billion years old. There is nothing simple about this. The physics of the radiation balance isn't in question, but for all we know it may be dwarfed by negative feedbacks. They are forced to fallback on computer models for a reason. Nobody talks about 99% of doctors and smoking, because we can empirically test this. Hundreds of millions of people have smoked, and we have observed the effects. The smoking/cancer analogy always makes me smile, because it is actually a very good one. Let's turn it around. The physics of how smoking causes cancer is pretty solid. We know about toxins and carcinogens, etc. But let's say I hand you a single human being, and I ask you, "if he smokes for the next 40 years, will he get cancer?". We don't have a freaking clue. The human body - the feedback of the immune system defences, nutrition, genetics - are beyond our power to model. Science is hopelessly unable to answer that question. And ponder this for a moment - we have 6 billion potential test subjects to work with! We have one earth. This is the state of climate science. The biosphere/atmosphere/oceans/etc. are every bit as complex as a single human body, and we have only one patient to study, and data for maybe 0.0000025 of the patient's lifetime. But, I hear you say, "shouldn't we be cautious then? Shouldn't we quit just in case?". And fair enough, we probably should be cautious. But the counterpoint to that is that fossil fuel usage isn't a nicotine hit. It doesn't deliver us a few moments of pleasure in return for the risk of cancer. It fuels our entire industrial civilization. So the risk/reward calculation looks quite a bit different, doesn't it? In one case, we have the potential risk confirmed by the empirical evidence of a test set of hundreds of million of smokers, and the potential reward being a nicotine hit. In the other, we have no way of testing the theorized risk outside of models, and the reward is the energy to power our entire civilization. So yeah, it is an analogy that always makes me laugh a little.