What I learned from this little thread.
For a few months I have uncomfortably courted with acceptance of the zeitgeist about global warming just so we could fit in and so I could get along with the greens etc. on the war.
I really wanted to believe, and be again born again Green. It would probably really help our acceptance in San Francisco if we all did.
But it's like trying a jew catholic. I just can't do it. without a full frontal lobotomy.
The crux of the greenhouse arguement is the evidence from microbubbles. From the article posted before, and others variations of around 50 ppm in the area of 220 and 275 ppm were highly correlated with warming and cooling epochs over the last few hundred thousand years. If this theory is true, we are already doomed to Waterworld, because we are already well over 650 and climbing and it takes time for the earth's processes to sequester the CO2. Many of the cooling and heating events over the last few hundred thousand years were quite rapid. From the data it is very difficult to see if the CO2 rises and falls preceeded , were concurrent, or followed the temperature changes. If the greenhouse theory really is true, we all should move to Reno ASAP.
The other troubling issue around the global warming theory is my perception that the scientific method, and the scientific objectivism is largely absent in the discussion. The earths climate is an immensely complex black box with uncountable variables contributing to it,. Prominent among is solar output, a discipline that barely knows the past present and future behavior of solar energy output and it's variations over time and cycles. The earth's orbit is clearly a factor and was thought in the seventies to be the primary driver of climate change. The earths orbit around the sun is elliptical and has various cycles of different duration. Volcunism varies wildly in it's activity in unknown cycles contributing to large variations in atmospheric and underwater chemistry of various gasses and particulates. Meteors also play a role. Cycles of ocean currents, and accidents of weather. All of nature rests on quantum mechanics which is based on chanch. Experiments are difficult to perform because we don't have a multitudde of earths to test hypothesis on. Thus climatology is largely a big black box overseen it's semi scientific wizards, the climatoligists. The closest system to science in its complexity and unpredictability is economics, a field fraught with savants posing as experts using multivariate analysis to show what they want when they want to. Another unknowable at this time is theworkings of any particular human's mind. Humans remain at least partly unpredictable. Weather remains unpredictable a few days or weeks or months out in many areas of the earth., even if intensely studied.
The whole history of science is ripe with instances where orthodoxies were widely held, and those who dared to dissent were persecuted. Every morning the sun rose in the east and set in the west. It was obvious to everyone , including experts such as Aristotle and the keeperss of the astronomical observations, that the sun crevolved the earth. Galileo said no. Who waas he to question what everyone could see and every expert for a thousand years confirmed. They burned him ion the stake. His last words. We still revolve.
the lesson of Galileo is is repeated in any decent institution of learning tto warn thenext generation of the dangers of orthodoxy and the value of dissent.
Please read my previous comments about the expression of evolution as the central dogma of modern biology. Also please see my discussion of correlation not necessarily being causation.
There are many decent, honest , hard working,climatolists. Some are more subject to the human fraility of succuming to the perks of preistdom than others.
The certainity of the dogma that carbon emissions are and will cause global warming belies the proper scientific skepticism, especially in such an incredably complex and untestable system as the entire planets climate.
the arguement of the true believers is that the planet is too important to risk, despite the uncertainty of the knowledge. this arguement was used by political climatologists in the seventies to advance dire predictions if particulates pollution was not cleaned up. Maybe they were correct. Maybe , the best policy is to turn off all the scrubbers. I don't know. and the point is neither do they. they can theorize, and gather data. But they have lost much credability by making absolutist policy perscriptions based on the authority of superior knowledge in a field that by it's nature is still pregnant with questions and mysteries.
Libertarians are skeptical of authority, and detest elitism and coercion by the elites on everybody else. For that reason , before we sign on to a system that requires coercion on a world wide scale to force people into smaller , more expensive, or lower performing cars, or slow, smelly public transit, or tofutti, or hot sleeping in the summer and shivering in the winter, or boondoggle trade offs between food and fuel, ...
we want to see... Where's theBeef?