You still haven’t provided any proof of your claims that the climatologists who say that AGW exists are motivated by their politics and not their research. What’s so hard about it if it’s true?

All the “counters” made on the BBC argument are easily refuted as they don’t have supporting evidence or are deflected criticisms. I am a computer analyst by trade and can make a computer climate model do whatever I want it to and to think that using biased and incomplete data coupled with poorly understood systems can predict the future much less 50 to 100 years from now just shows how computer illiterate the general public is.

You’ve decided it’s not true and the only people you listen to are those who agree with your viewpoint.

More fiction. Good going, “champ.”

I say, we continue to find out what’s happening, and avoid doing anything swift and stupid, which may upset you, but it doesn’t upset me. I’m hardly avoiding environmental issues — I raised the subject of acid rain already, and have addressed air pollution, which is already known to be harmful. I’m not sorry, nor should I be, if you ignore these altogether.

Adaptation is becoming a necessity, but so is thinking long range. I wouldn’t want to spend all the money on adaptation, because those are only temporary patches. Adaptation can also lead to complacency, a dangerous and money-wasting state of mind.

I don’t share your relaxed view in terms of hundreds of years. The permafrost peat bogs of the Arctic are very close to melting now, and when they do, they will release big quantities of methane into the air and the water. That could have catastrophic consequences.
There is urgency involced here that can’t be pooh-poohed away.

What we should be doing is developing joint venture projects with China and India to deal with emissions and alternate energy projects. Global warming is global, not defined by borders.

A lot of this can also be approached from an environmental standpoint and healh costs due to pollution.

While some complain about the fear inducing element in global warming alerts, the same, and more, is ture when it comes to thosw who use costs as a reason to fo nothing.
We will go broke if we attempt anything!
For one thing, we are paying now for the costs of pollution induced health problems. lack of planning re land usage, wetlands preservation and on and on.
It’s not like not doing anything is free. We are bleeding money right now.

For another, there is money to be made from the new technologies, once you get over the R+D stage.
Invest now, save and make money later.

As I said, it’s not an overnight projuct . It will be a long process of trial and error. If we are to see progess, however, we have to start now.

Rather, this is going to be more like a pot of boiling water, it will slowly reach a higher temperature over a couple hundred years, and events like droughts will go from once every 50 years to once every 20-40, and hurricances will probably become fewer, but more intense; in essence nothing different in kind from what we have now. Hence why I don;t necessarily believe that reducing carbon will be the major portion of the way to go (as adaptation will probably be the route we understand most: Build higher sea walls, and concentrate food growth in areas that are going to be given longer growing seasons by the warmer climate, et al).

Of course, this could be because the engineer in me sees the fact that we’ll stop putting a lot of carbon in the atmosphere as peak oil hits us, and after about another 300 years when coal runs out, and maybe 500 after other petro sources are exhausted. Scarcity will increase cost, and cost will reduce consumption on it’s own, in other words, and the tech solutions to fix it are still in developement (unless you’re onboard with me for a massive increase in nuclear power, for which we have something like 100 times as much over what we have in oil, and we can do today, unlike solar). On the other hand, we have the technology to solve a lot of the adaptation issues now, and we can deal with those through somewhat predictable outlays.

You have a point about how some people react.
Obciously, logic will never convince some people, because much of the resistance is not based on logic.
The subject is urgent, however, since there is no magic bullet for a solution. To counteract man’s afffect on global warming and the environment
it will take a long process. All the more important to take the first steps ASAP.

What people may not like to hear is sometimes the exact thing they should hear. When the house is on fire, you don’t to waste time singing lullabies to soothe the occupants. You want to yell ‘fire’ to alert them, whether they like the sound of your voice or not.
In that vein, I wouldn’t waste time on the incorrigles.
Let them catch up when they’re ready. All that is needed is a critical mass of those who understand and strong leadership.

Spme people just don’t get what science is all about, and they will refuse to get it, because they just ‘know’. No reasonable analysis, no science, no proof would ever be good enough, because they have a belief, and that’s as far as their thinking can go.
Odd how what the believe and know always fits so well with what’s most comfortable for them.
So much easier to do nothing, you know, so much more comfortable.

You’ve decided it’s not true and the only people you listen to are those who agree with your viewpoint. You strongly resemble the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to marching in lockstep because in fact it is you who are doing that with the section of the political right represented so well by Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma among others. You have to claim that the scientists who disagree with you are just like you, all politics and no science or betray the essential weakness of your stand on the issue. But no matter how many times you make the claim it doesn’t make it true. And yes, there is in fact consensus in the scientific community concerning the existence of AGW, just not some of the details. And like the creationists who try and misrepresent the scientific consensus by saying that disagreement among biologists about details means that they don’t agree about evolution, your misrepresentations will not change the fact that there really is consensus among the overwhelming majority of scientists concerning the broad view that AGW does exist.

In the end, the books overlap most in their embrace of the idea that the human influence on climate requires a concerted response, but that the rhetoric of catastrophe is unlikely to motivate that response.

Few people would argue that having a cleaner world is bad, but many are concerned that a blind rush could put us in a worse situation than GW may put us. Doubting the accuracy and objectivity of those espousing what most times are political beliefs is far from crazy and the rabid attacks afterwards just solidify opposition.

I know what you mean about the potentially personal relevance of some of this, but stuff like that goes on already, and it seems difficult to get people to care anyways.

The easiest, most effective solution is usually the one that will appeal to the most. In this case, that will mean most of the fix will be adaptation, with a little prevention.

In the end, apathy often trumps activism.

Argument and debate are fine, but every now and then people need to examine their reasons for believing or disbelieving in a phenomenon.

In this case the burden falls much more heavily on the “believers,” particularly when they discredit themselves by engaging in ridiculous hype (”cooking the planet”) and being even sillier (or have darker motives) in pursuing what at the very least are questionable “solutions” to the “crisis.”

This is like acid rain, but much broader in scope and worse.

Where is your proof other than the fact that you simply refuse to consider the possibility that they might be right?

There’s where you sink especially quickly, this time. I’m simply not blindly rushing in lockstep with the global warming “consensus” (actually, not one), much less rushing stupidly in “crisis” mode to push questionable and even crazy “solutions” to such, even if I’m subject to surly loser attacks as a result. *sigh*

The hard part isn’t going to be the deniers, it’s going to be the people like me who read the reports and go “yeah, but this looks pretty adaptable to me”.

But what about decades of droughts in some places and floods in others is pretty adaptable? Would you feel so comfortable about it if you lost your home to the floods or your livelihood in agriculture to a lengthy drought? What about the likelihood of political instability in countries suffering from these effects providing a breeding ground for terrorists? What about the shortages of fresh water supplies that we are already heading towards because of warming’s effect on mountain snowpacks?

The truth is that it is entirely possible that things could fall on the better side of the climate models, possibly because of something that has not been accounted for in the models because the researchers just don’t know something. But it is equally likely that things could be worse. There are factors that are not included in the models because they admit that there is not enough data to adequately model the potential effects they might have. These include the methane being released by the thawing of Siberian tundra and the (hopefully) much less likely event of the release of even more methane into the atmosphere by the melting of methane clathrates in the ocean. And if it is possible that there is something they don’t know that would make things better then it is just as likely that some unknown factor could worsen things.

You still don’t get it.

Yes, I do. The Bush “editors” are far from the largest group that mixes politics with science; the members of the scientific community themselves (and publishers of scientific periodicals) mix politics with science.

scientific principles don’t care about

… their abuse. That they’re abused is the far more important issue here.

You still don’t get it. Science is a discipline, it isn’t governed by partisan politics. If you need surgery, do you quiz your surgeon on his politics before determining his fitness to operate? Your airline pilot before flying? Are you concerned about the political provenance of your microwave, your automobile, or the medication you take? Somehow I don’t think so. Again, scientific principles don’t care about Al Gore, George Bush, or Slim PIckens either. Mathematics, physics, and chemistry, etc. are Apolitical.

The point being missed here has to do with the politicization of science.

Academia has been one place long overrun by leftist politics.