4 ms·

Global warming / climate change controversy

2 points by datashovel 12y ago

informatimago 12y ago
The problems are: 1- the IPCC is a governmental (political) entity, not a scientific entity. 2- there have been proofs of scientific "misconduct" from scientists employed by the IPCC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_co... 3- alternative _scientific_ voices (researchers, articles) are silenced, instead of being evaluated on scientific value (this is similar to medical research financed by pharmaceutic corporations: you only finance research allowing capitalistic exploitation, and obtain only those results). 4- the "solutions" enacted are essentially political and economic, geostrategic and economic advantages to some countries to the depends of other countries, in a very suspicious pattern. (carbon taxes, "polution credits", disindustrialization, unemployment, etc). If it was really a scientific problem there would be a scientific or technological solution, and it would affect equally everybody. 5- scientifically, the use of artificial models, that are both incomplete, and ad-hoc (similar to the old orbital model using innumerous epicycles to refine an artificial model), is also highly suspiscious. 6- even if there is in realitity a global warming, and even if it is produced mainly from human activity, is this really a bad thing? In the historic times, everytime the climate has been warmer, things have been better agriculturally, economically and culturally. And the climate HAS been much warmer several times in the past 2500 years.
- datashovel 12y ago
  #1-5 appear to be orthogonal to the issue at hand. http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ From a "earth will always be habitable by humans" perspective, #6 may be a valid point. On a "cosmic scale", however, this is far from a certainty. To give a little perspective, light travels at approximately 5,865,696,000,000 miles per year. The hubble telescope apparently has seen things in space up to around 10-15 billion light years away. So this means that hubble telescope has seen things as far as 8.7985x10^22 miles away from earth. And to this day we have yet to observe real evidence that intelligent life exists beyond this planet, so we have no strong evidence that there is even a single place in the universe besides earth that humans could possibly exist. Now, recent evidence suggests that there are hundreds of thousands of earth-like planets even within our own galaxy, which is great news, but we don't know with certainty if they would be habitable on a similar scale like earth is for humans. So, for the time being, I think a safe perspective is to assume that this is "all we got". And we just don't know what the real implications would be for humans should the earth start changing too dramatically. Perhaps what would happen is earth simply becomes uninhabitable by humans and wipes us into extinction. The universe seems to be very unassuming, but at the same time evidence suggests that it's also unforgiving, as we don't know just how rare we are and just how special the circumstances need to be in order to sustain intelligent life.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

2 points by datashovel 12y ago

The problems are: 1- the IPCC is a governmental (political) entity, not a scientific entity. 2- there have been proofs of scientific "misconduct" from scientists employed by the IPCC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_co... 3- alternative _scientific_ voices (researchers, articles) are silenced, instead of being evaluated on scientific value (this is similar to medical research financed by pharmaceutic corporations: you only finance research allowing capitalistic exploitation, and obtain only those results). 4- the "solutions" enacted are essentially political and economic, geostrategic and economic advantages to some countries to the depends of other countries, in a very suspicious pattern. (carbon taxes, "polution credits", disindustrialization, unemployment, etc). If it was really a scientific problem there would be a scientific or technological solution, and it would affect equally everybody. 5- scientifically, the use of artificial models, that are both incomplete, and ad-hoc (similar to the old orbital model using innumerous epicycles to refine an artificial model), is also highly suspiscious. 6- even if there is in realitity a global warming, and even if it is produced mainly from human activity, is this really a bad thing? In the historic times, everytime the climate has been warmer, things have been better agriculturally, economically and culturally. And the climate HAS been much warmer several times in the past 2500 years.

datashovel 12y ago
#1-5 appear to be orthogonal to the issue at hand. http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ From a "earth will always be habitable by humans" perspective, #6 may be a valid point. On a "cosmic scale", however, this is far from a certainty. To give a little perspective, light travels at approximately 5,865,696,000,000 miles per year. The hubble telescope apparently has seen things in space up to around 10-15 billion light years away. So this means that hubble telescope has seen things as far as 8.7985x10^22 miles away from earth. And to this day we have yet to observe real evidence that intelligent life exists beyond this planet, so we have no strong evidence that there is even a single place in the universe besides earth that humans could possibly exist. Now, recent evidence suggests that there are hundreds of thousands of earth-like planets even within our own galaxy, which is great news, but we don't know with certainty if they would be habitable on a similar scale like earth is for humans. So, for the time being, I think a safe perspective is to assume that this is "all we got". And we just don't know what the real implications would be for humans should the earth start changing too dramatically. Perhaps what would happen is earth simply becomes uninhabitable by humans and wipes us into extinction. The universe seems to be very unassuming, but at the same time evidence suggests that it's also unforgiving, as we don't know just how rare we are and just how special the circumstances need to be in order to sustain intelligent life.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]