[Pretzel Logic]

I haven't read all your posts here. I don't know when I'll have time. I can say that we mostly agree. The one thing I've got a strong opinion on is that the greenhouse gas effect is real. More greenhouse gases = warmer planet. Venus and Mors are the two extreme ends of the spectrum here. It seems you agree that greenhouse gases warm the planet. Hooray for CONSENSUS! Where we disagree is in our willingness to take what most experts say is the case as the base case. You think we should keep an open mind until all the facts are in. Laissez faire on emissions until we know if there's a problem. I think we should prepare for the potential problem now and if it turns out it's not as big a problem, well, that's fine. It's a better outcome than doing nothing and the problem is as big or bigger than the scientists guessed. I'm all for libertarian when the market knows how to price goods and services. I don't think the market knows how to price carbon emissions, so let's legislate to minimize the potentially bad problem before it gets here. That's all. I'd rather I'm wrong than that I'm right about the problem, but either way prevention seems wise to me. Please tell me why this is a bad idea.

I believe you're a reasonable and intelligent person, and I think your heart is in the right place.

Let me draw an analogy: If I'm out at the movies, and someone I trust tells me my house is on fire, I'm going to leave ASAP and rush home to see if I can prevent disaster. That's what any reasonable person would do. But if I get home and discover the whole thing was a lie... well, that doesn't reflect on me personally in any way, it only reflects on the person who lied to me.

I think climate extremists have a LOT of well-intentioned people "rushing home to put out fires" that simply never existed in the first place.

Let's start with "Mors vs. Venus." Some climate extremists have led the public to believe that Venus is hot because of CO2 -- this is an outright misrepresentation. Venus is hot because its atmosphere is under extreme pressure and is 100 times thicker than the atmosphere of Earth! (I don't care WHAT gas you make an atmosphere out of, if it's 100x thicker, it's going to insulate better!)

As a result of this thicker atmosphere, surface pressures on Venus are 90x what they are on earth -- and as everyone knows: If you compress gas, it heats up (Ideal Gas Law: PV = nRT. Because gases are not perfectly compressible, Volume does not decrease linearly with increased Pressure, so Temperature must increase as Pressure increases in order to keep the Ideal Gas Law in balance.).

Anyway, the factoid below isn't even from a climate site, it's from an astronomy site:

Why is Venus So Hot? Venus is so hot because it is surrounded by a very thick atmosphere which is about 100 times more massive than our atmosphere here on Earth.

http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/ask/3...nus-so-hot-

So the "CO2 = hot Venus" myth is just one more lie in a long string of lies pushed by climate extremists.



To get to the meat of your question: the main reason I feel it's a bad idea is because government regulation of energy and manufacturing crush the economy, and many of the proposed ideas, such as "carbon credits" for individuals, are downright Orwellian. If man-made global warming was truly a real crisis, then the proposed fascist state might at least be merited. But I don't think "bad problem" is even a real potential. Here are some of the reasons why:

The climate alarmists have created very misleading scenarios, and their "worst case" outcomes rely on all sorts of fabricated feedback loops (within their models) in order to generate anything even approaching "bad problems" (their feedback loops go something like this: man-made CO2 warms the atmosphere 0.7 degrees in the next 50 years. That causes something else, which causes something else, which causes something else, which causes something else and BOOM! temperature is up 3 degrees and BOOM! that causes something else which causes something else -- etc., ad infinitum -- and THEN, BOOM! finally, we have our "bad problem"). After all those hypothesis, all they release to the public is the final "dire outcome of man's CO2 addiction." They don't tell people how much utter crap they had to feed the model in order to arrive there.

The models themselves are really somewhat ludicrous, given our limited understanding of climate. And recent empirical evidence keeps literally proving those models to be dead wrong -- which is why many scientists who previously backed the IPCC are withdrawing their support (see James Lovelock and Richard Toll in prior posts -- two of many).

So, most importantly, the models put forth by the IPCC, et al, have, to date, failed to accurately predict temperature (in other words, they haven't stood the simple test of "accurate theory = accurate predictions," so we know the current theories are just wrong.).

In short: One thing we DO know for certain is that the models saying "bad problem" are flat-out "bad models."

This is one reason why I advocate questioning presuppositions here. Because it takes a WHOLE LOT of unproven and unsubstantiated presuppositions on the part of the IPCC's climate scientists to even begin to fabricate a "bad scenario." None of the data appears to support that "bad scenario," and the models have already, quite literally, been proven wrong. Why are we even listening to them anymore?

There is so much I want to write here, but let's just start with putting things in perspective in regards to CO2. First, most climate extremists use misleading graphs like the one below to make it seem like CO2 is "skyrocketing out of control":

   

The above is just DISHONEST plotting, because the y-axis starts at 290. This trick is one (of several) used by the AGP crowd to turn their graphs into "hockey sticks." If we plot the y-axis at zero, we get a much more truthful (but less alarming) graph:

   

It helps to keep things in perspective regarding just what a tiny component of our atmosphere CO2 is. This video below illustrates CO2's place in the atmosphere visually (with grains of rice):

But the biggest issue I have is that every recent discovery keeps illustrating how LITTLE science knows about ANYTHING AT ALL in this debate.

The quote below is from an article about volcanology, though it touches lightly on the implications for climatology. It outlines how, in only the past two decades, science has grown to realize that it was previously underestimating the amount of CO2 vented by volcanoes by a factor of SIX. To me, this just underscores how little we really know (as did the Cloud study). As a result of the endless "whoops, we didn't know that! Or that! Or that!" being a very consistent theme, it stands to reason that the constant stream of dire predictions emerging from the IPCC should carry about as much weight as a homeless man wearing a placard that asserts: "THE END IS NEAR!"

Both the IPCC and the homeless man are equally alarmist, and both lack any concrete evidence whatsoever to justify their dire predictions. The only fundamental difference is that the IPCC (more correctly: its ilk) want to control the entire world based on their unsubstantiated claim that "The end is near!"

In 1992, it was thought that volcanic degassing released something like 100 million tons of CO2 each year. Around the turn of the millennium, this figure was getting closer to 200. The most recent estimate, released this February, comes from a team led by Mike Burton, of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology – and it’s just shy of 600 million tons. It caps a staggering trend: A six-fold increase in just two decades.

These inflating figures, I hasten to add, don't mean that our planet is suddenly venting more CO2.

Humanity certainly is; but any changes to the volcanic background level would occur over generations, not years. The rise we’re seeing now, therefore, must have been there all along: As scientific progress is widening our perspective, the daunting outline of how little we really know about volcanoes is beginning to loom large.

http://www.livescience.com/40451-volcani...ering.html

The sheer staggering amount of "what we just don't know or understand yet" is why I'm bothered by the overall "we have all the answers" attitude projected by the AGP leadership, and absolutely disgusted by their attempts to label and silence "deniers." EVERYONE who does a modicum of research into this issue should be doubting that climatologists could possibly have ANY SOLID ANSWERS AT ALL. Climatology is still trying to learn how to crawl, but it can't even do that yet.

So it goes without saying that it definitely can't walk yet, and it certainly can't run.

So my bottom line is this: Which of these do you want to hang our future on?

1. "Saving the planet" based on science that is still in its infancy whose dire predictions have repeatedly ended up dead wrong -- leading even many of its OWN scientists who were previously "doomsayers" to back-pedal, or entirely reverse, their previously-alarmist stances.

-- or --

2. "Saving the world" based on trying to protect our individual and economic freedoms from those in power who want to control our every move. Freedoms, I might add, that HAVE been tested and proven to make the world a better place.

Which is safer? And which is truly more dangerous to humankind?

Which is proven? And which is constantly being proved wrong?

Which one encourages open discourse, innovation, and discovery? And which one mocks and silences the opposition, and keeps trying to push us closer to fascism?

Which one should scare us more? Which one is the REAL threat to our future?

If we're going to err on the side of caution, shouldn't we be trying to protect that which has been PROVEN to make the world better?

Isn't handing over our children's future to a new, struggling, and decidedly inaccurate, science actually radical and potentially disasterously irresponsible, as opposed to cautious?

You and I both want to protect things for future generations. But what actually NEEDS protection in this debate..?