Fear / Loathing / Reality

[FunkyDexter]

NOBODY HAS EVER SERIOUSLY BELIEVED THE EARTH WAS FLAT!!!! Sorry to shout but, honestly, this is a myth. The ancient Babylonians knew it was round and the ancient greeks (namely Pythagoras) even calculated it's circumference. Nobody thought it was flat in the dark or medievel ages either and by the renaissance we were happily sailing round it. And the church has never claimed it was flat either, although they did claim that the sun and planets revolved around us. The only people who've ever claimed it was flat are the flat earth society and they're just idiots who wish they had something useful to say. As an example of how science can be wrong it holds no more water than a sieve.

No scientist ever received a lucrative government grant for saying "everything is fine."

No, but plenty have recieved hefty pay-checks from vested interests. I've never seen any figures on it but I feel pretty confident in saying that, as a scientist, you would stand to make considerably more money denying global warming than you would by advocating it. Oil companies would be queueing up to give you grants.

Please site sources for your information. 90% ???

I used to see the 90% figure quoted on wikipoedia. It's not there any more because it's been replaced by this:-

With the release of the revised statement[88] by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 2007, no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate change

so that's 100% of creditable bodies then. OK, so Wikipoedia's not the best source but there's plenty of references you can check from there if you wish.

Also, a word on scientists. Scientists, in the main, do not consider themselves to be the authorities on anything. They don't tell us what to do, they don't set policy and they don't generally view themselves as Gods. Instead they just report the facts as they see them and leave the rest of that stuff to the politicans. Usually politics lags behind science as politicians have to sell change to their electorate and it's notable that politics is still lagging behind on climate change - scientists are recommending measures far more pronounced than those you'll hear advicated by politicians at present. Yes, scientists can, like everyone else, be susseptible to corruption and may tailor their results to fit the views of one interest or another but this is actually quite rare and also exists on both sides of the debate.

cyclical

Yes, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a scientist on either side of the fence who disagreed with that. That's not, and never has been, the point of the debate though. What's at debate is whether man is significantly affecting that cycle. If we are (which I'm inclined to believe given the overwhelming scientific consencus) then it's a pretty safe bet that that's a bad thing. We can't be sure of that, no, but common sense should tell you that changing the enviroment in which we evolved and are therefore genetically suited to, is probably not going to turn out too well for us.

Does that mean that we shouldn't be preparing for a future where the natural cycle of temperatures impacts on us? No. We should be preparing flood defences, storm defences and all the like. But does it mean that we should blithely go on as we are, consuming energy and pumping out pollutants at a rate utterly unprecendented in all of human history? Equally, that's a big No, I'm afraid. The difference is that the sort of measures we should be preparing against an ice age future can be defered because those affects are going to be felt slowly. The measures we should be traking to minimise our impact on the environment, on the other hand, should be taken now because the damage is being done now.