You and many, many other people, are not merely ignorant about the finer points of greenhouse effects. On the contrary, you are all too willing to jump into a d

You and many, many other people, are not merely ignorant about the finer points of greenhouse effects. On the contrary, you are all too willing to jump into a discussion about the finer points of greenhouse effects -- a subject which you admittedly are ignorant about -- with counter-arguments based only on a quick gut feeling or guess on your part, and which have already been answered in the conversation that you're jumping into. Please understand, I'm not just singling you out here; this is an observable and strange pattern of behavior in many different social gatherings, including HN. Instead of coming up with a question about what you had read, and then doing even a few minutes' diligence to see if there was an answer, you stopped after coming up with the question and pronounced that it "didn't seem like a water tight argument at all". The flaw in thinking that causes that kind of behavior surely carries over into other aspects of your life and career, so it is a big deal to your life. And furthermore, your children likely learn first by your example. If you think that way, your children are more likely to also, and that's going to have a negative impact on their lives. If nothing else, it will destroy their curiosity, and curiosity is something that should be revered on a forum like HN: it is one of the greatest drivers of human inventiveness and ingenuity. And ignorance does kill. There are numerous other countries where the example is so blatantly stark that it shouldn't even need citing. In Uganda, for one example, simple water quality improvements would save numerous lives every year [1]. But there's ignorance, and there's willful ignorance, willful ignorance being the more evil of the two. It disregards and dismisses the efforts of those that would advance human society and promote peace. It values its "gut feelings" over research, study, and experimentation. It believes that its "freedoms" are being trampled every time its environment changes, with no acknowledgement of history or context, and no forward thinking for the future. Those things are a big deal, and they do kill people. [1]: An in-the-field look at some of the water quality problems in Uganda: http://gondauganda.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html http://gondauganda.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html