Quote from: JA37 on December 08, 2011, 03:29:19 PM

Quote from: MoonShadow on December 08, 2011, 01:36:45 PM

There is a clear indication that the climate is trending warmer, and has been since the end of the 'little ice age'. There is also a clear indication that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. There is not a clear connection between the two. The environment is a very complex system and the concentration of CO2 a very small part of it. Both the climate and the level of atmospheric CO2 are in constant flux over millienia, but the CO2 concentration tends to be a lagging indicator; implying that the increases of CO2 in the atmosphere are an effect of a warming global climate, not a cause. Although it's certainly possible that CO2 is, itself, a feedback loop. There is no indication, nor any logical reason to assume, that even a tripling of the amount of carbon in the air would result in a catastrophic degree of climate change. Even a 4 degree global change would take at least a century to materialize.

The only references to this are publications that don't exactly have the highest academic credibility. Is there any serious research going into this? I have a feeling that most researchers are quite honest and if there was something going on we'd see more peer reviewed papers about it.

This is pretty much what all the serious research and academic publications say, it's the media and the political class that turns these research papers into something that they are not. There are very few academics (in the fields that are relevent to the topic) that will state that either the Earth is not warming as a whole or that necessarily means that such warming will continue in the future. The exceptions are provablely biased by political ideologies. Honest scientists can't reliablely predict the weather 20 days from now, and they will be the frist to say that the long term climate models (all of them) are based upon many assumptions about how certain varirables affect the outcome or even what those variables' values are with any precision.

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Does it really matter if it takes a century to materialize? You're not really that egocentric that you're willing to screw your children and grandchildren for the comfort of driving a SUV today, are you?

Yes, it does. If it takes three generations for the worst case scenario (+4 degrees C) that the models predict to occur, it can hardly be considered a catastrophe can it? IT's not like humanity ats a whole won't have time to adapt to a (potential) 1.2 meter high rise in the ocean's median level. Even the worst of the poor could walk away from such areas long before that. Nearly every sandy beach in the world would be under low tide, but that's only a catastrophe to sunbathers and surfers.

And I don't own an SUV. I've ridden a 21 speed bicycle to work 250+ days per year to work since May 2nd, 2008. I'm doing my part, but for my health and my checkbook. What are you doing?