I don't deny either.

Denying would be saying that they're not happening.  For that, I would need to provide compelling evidence to support that and there isn't any evidence that I find compelling to indicate that the world isn't warming or that man is definitely not causing it.

Interesting discussion. I didn't think there was much debate about if global warming was happening, according to the temperature reads which I know contains some errors, so much as what was the cause of it.  But let's say, for the sake of argument, that we don't know if global warming is happening, our response should be what then, throw as much polluntants into the air and shrug at species struggling to survive and just say well we didn't do it?

Forget the political chest puffing about global warming and let's focus on more general ideals like pollution is not a good thing so creating less of it is good, and maybe it would be nice if some of the animals and other wildelife we see now is still available for viewing longer after we are gone. As for science, well I've experience enough science first hand and through study to know it's not a a perfect endeavor.

Hell there are an endless list of scienctific "facts" that have been disproved in the end, and in general, we're still better off (as a whole) with what the field has gotten right than what they've messed up on.

I tend to take the better safe than sorry approach.

My new house I'm building uses geothermal. 100% LED lights, foam insulation throughout, and a 20KW solar array.

But that's a personal choice.

I don't think the government should get into forcing people to pay money based on what it believes is "best for them". That's not the role of government imo.

Well I understand your point, and sort of share it, but I sort of don't. The government sometimes has to step in and force people to do what is best or we would see more rivers combusting, and salmon on the west coast would be completely depleted. We wouldn't have national forests, select cutting would just be snickered at still, we'd have segregation and discrimination in the work place, because let's face it, if you are paying someone less than their due, someone else is getting more. The government has a role in guiding society to the best course of action. It doesn't have to be heavy handed in all cases, but in some cases, it needs to be firmer. I live in a valley where the air quality is crap and occasionally dangerous. We can't have industries in this valley that over pollute, guess who makes sure they don't locate here, our local government. Yes, it sucks because jobs are hard to come by, especially right now, I am sure people would love vote to bring them in and then a handful of decades later, get amnesia and forget it was our fault and not the government's that our lungs are in peril and we're dying and our kids all have asthma.

The problem with the whole global warming debate is it's too political. It had to become political to get anyone but some scientist to get involved in it, but then the talking heads needed to walk away and they didn't. Now that people are more aware of the enviroment on a global scale, I don't think it has to be such a political puff piece anymore. I don't care what side of the political spectrum someone stands on, most people aren't going to giggle at the idea of polar bears starving to death.

If the science is wrong, then it is wrong. If we were only allowed to talk about and work with scientific data that is 100% correct all the time for forever, then we wouldn't have so many things we have right now, even omitting the "accidental" discoveries. Seriously though, look around and get used to what we know today as being wrong tomorrow. Facts are disproven all the time. The fact that there is a so called "hoax" in a political arena is certainly not a big surprise to me. Show me a political hot topic, and I will show you a dozen liars on each side of the debate and all the holes in their supporting data too because facts can be written and derived in a way that prove your point instead of the more organic less fun to read studies that let the data tell the tale.

Sorry, horse shit, the lot of it.

Rivers combusting is bullshit first of all, it's an exceedingly rare capability and unrelated to industrialization entirely.  The Cuyahoga catching fire was first recorded by white man in 1868.  Yes, that's before the industrial revolution.  Moral of the story?  Don't dump shit in slow moving water.  It took Uncle fucking Sam over a century to actually do something about it.  If enough animals lived there, the same problem would exist.  Swamp fires are, after all, a natural event.

The Salmon on the west coast is being endangered by federal regulations that make it impossible for Alaska to stop people in other states from running Atlantic salmon farms in the bleeding ocean, where the tasteless and more agressive fish escape and compete for food.  Eventually, they'll probably end up wiping them out as more and more escape, no more good salmon despite the efforts of the local government in Alaska.  If you've noticed, the rest of the areas already have a distinct lack of Salmon despite government rescuing them.  The reason being Uncle hasn't actually done anything at all to protect the salmon from fishermen.

The national forests die from bug infestations and burn down instead of being cut down.  If the Tongas ever goes up during a drought, it will be the largest fire in recorded history, and probably sterlize the top soil.  Vastly more damage the economical logging could manage.  Most wood products are also produced on tree farms, it's more economical.  By controlled planting you can create straighter, more consistent timber of higher value in specific varieties.  Logging a forest results in mostly substandard wood.

Segregation and discrimination in the work place were already solved in the north before Uncle stepped on the south over it.  What is the current state of things?  Black people axe you questions and can't get hired because they can't speak english...  They really did a world of good with affirmative action, didn't they?  It's every KKK members dream, have them be ignorant, ill equiped, culturally bankrupt, second class citizens all because it's wrong to teach diction and rob them of their culture.  Meanwhile, you can't get shit done in government agencies because race and gender norming leads to idiots being hired more often than in the private sector.

Now this is sensible, every conservatives dream.  For those of you that think the Republicans in congress are conservatives and have no idea what I'm talking about, just keep reading and be quiet.  Local government handling a local issue.  You live in a valley with less than adequate air flow, if you build a bunch of power plants, you'll kill yourselves.  The EPA on the other hand forces Anchorage to add pollutants to the water just so they can take them out, because there aren't enough pollutants to meet the requirements.  The water is clean enough to be consumed straight from the source.  Local control is a wonderful thing.  You can fuck up your own city and it's all your fault.  If someone else fucks up your own city, you can't do anything about it.  It's the entire purpose of a limited federal government in the United States, that thing we used to have.

Having a world organization telling people what they can and cannot do, which is the obvious goal of the current nonsense, is the exact opposite of your local issue that was solved locally.  Even if the disaster scenario happens, it will be worse with the "help" than it would without it, just as the EPA and other national regulatory bodies have caused far more harm than good here in the US.

Among many points, precisely.

But I think nuclear energy's relative risks are overrated.  Consider France, and the fact that it (nuclear energy production, not France ) can be scaled to power a submarine or aircraft carrier.  I'm actually surprised that the potential for smaller-scale widely-distributed nuclear energy production hasn't gained some interest.  I don't know what the cost/megawatt threshold would have to be to make it viable, admittedly.

On a related note, it's hard for me to take AGW alarmists seriously when arguably the best currently available option, accelerating nuclear power development, is off the table.  Instead we're going to tax cow farts?

While I agree with the risk assessment as stated, for nuclear power to be a viable option someone is going to have to build and maintain reactors in Africa, the MiddleEast, South America.  I have reasonable faith that the French, Americans, and even us Canadians can safely run the system, I have less that reactors in "third-world countries" will be safely run.  And from the Canadian experience, nuclear power is rather expensive to run and the cost isn't much different based on size of the reactor, without hard data I can safely say the cost/megawatt definitely decreases with larger reactors.  Also from the local experience, downtimes can be significant with any maintenance due to the required safety protocols.

That kind of eloquence deserves karmic reward

So the alternative to burning naturally processed biomass is to use biomass that hasn't been naturally processed.......

While biomass has a lot of potential, if the AGW theory is correct you are not fixing the problem, you are creating a large amount of CO2 in converting biomass to energy (granted while much of the carbon is from atmospheric CO2, not all is)

If AGW theory is not correct biomass is a great alternative.

Wow Mumble, something we agree on...

So how come the greenies don't want to have more nuclear plants?  what is their real aim....

"How do I know whom to Believe?" is an interesting question.

Do you accept the basic assumption that Peer Review of data/experiments helps hedge against personal bias and mistakes?

If not, then you don't know whom to believe - in virtually *any* field of study. Including whether the Earth is Flat.

If you do accept it, do you have evidence of particular corruption of this concept (Systemic corruption, not, say, 20 emails evincing frustration from a hacked database containing gigabytes of data.) in the climate change field.

At the end of the day, no one has managed to successfully level such a charge. Since I accept Peer Review, and I see no evidence of corruption of that process, and actual review of the experiments reveals no issues with the data, then the next step is - does the hypothesis presented successfully predict (Within some margin for error x%) the results of new experiments. And it has.

The next step is - has an alternative hypothesis with testable predictions to distinguish it from the AGW hypothesis been presented. Alternate Hypothesis? Oh plenty of those. But those that give testable predictions have not hewn to the data, and the rest have not given predictions you can test.

So, you ask for "bulletproof evidence (int he mould of "Earth is not flat" evidence)" - but the fact is the counter-arguments are remarkably similar to the "Flat-Earth" Arguments. You should read them - they argue that there are these ways in which science has misunderstood the data, the data is more complex than it first appears, and that there are massive conspiracies of government and private organizations that are economically entrenched in the false "Spherical Earth" Paradigm.

Bluntly, if you don't accept the Anthropomorphic Global Warming Hypothesis as 'bullet-proof', I don't see that you have any grounds on the terms you are judging it for saying the argument is closed on the "Flat Earth Hypothesis".

The logic is identical. You can choose to accept the principles of science, or you can choose not to, or you can choose to be inconsistent and accept them when it suits you and ignore them when it turns out you don't like the results. Frankly I respect the first, have a a degree of humor towards the second, and neither for the third. But you need to decide which you are going with.

Jonnan

There is a lot of good science in climatology. Sometimes you get bad science, or scientist who 'fix' their results. They get found out sooner or later, when the model they've create breaks down.

I haven't read through the documents - there are apparently a lot of them - so I can't make a quality assessment on these particular scientists. It is incorrect to assume that all climate science is bad because of this group. The topic itself if far larger than they are, and likely has many other reputable scientists who are not fixing data.

YES. Its called climate change, overall higher temperatures but also more extreme. Cmon dont pretend you  didnt know this already.