| | It appears that my opinion on the existence of anthropogenic climate change, and the harm thereof, differs from that of the previous posters
Since CO2 *IS* a greenhouse gas, and we certainly ARE making alot of it, I do not put it outside the realm of possibility that a man made global warming effect is occurring. However it is extremely difficult to find reliable data given the cultural, scientific, philosophical and religious bias that exists in favor of global warming.
If it is occurring, it was caused by environmental alarmism which promulgated utterly irrational fears about nuclear power, which is the point of my post.
If it is occurring, it really doesn't matter, because it is the price we pay for industrial civilization. Some 50,000 people die in the US every year from traffic accidents, these would be completely avoided if we lowered speed limits to 5mph, yet we do not - why? Because we feel the benefits from higher speeds outweigh the cost of increased risks.
If you think AGW is a serious threat, I would like to know how you classify the other threats civilization faces, such as a caldera volcano eruption, an asteroid impact, a nearby supernovae, a rogue planet creating a gravitational destabilization, a global viral pandemic, a nuclear terrorist attack, runaway artificial intelligence, runaway nanotechnology, genetically engineered viruses, artificial genetically engineered life forms, etc. etc.
I am a board member of the Lifeboat Foundation, whose explicit goal is to identify all existential threats humanity faces as then to establish coherent strategies to attempt to mitigate the risks from those. We have over 500 scientists and intellectuals on our advisory boards, an informal poll which attempted to rank the threats we face in order of priority listed "Global Warming" as SECOND TO LAST. LAST was "turning off the simulation"
If you pretend to concern yourself with threats civilizations face, then you should be damn well aware of ALL the threats and be able to intelligently rank them, and defend your ranking system. You should also have an answer to the Fermi paradox and be able to coherently defend your answer.
Take, for example, a caldera volcano eruption. These are not your typical volcanos. These volcanos are holes in the earths crust where the magma of the outer mantle bulges through, the earth's continental plates drift past these spots but the spots never move. The last time one erupted was in Indonesia about 70,000 years ago, and at that same time the human population experienced a significant bottleneck which saw the entire population reduced to a few thousand adults. That volcanic eruption almost wiped out humanity. These volcanic eruptions are thousands to millions of times stronger than the largest typical volcanos.
Yellowstone national park is one of these, it has erupted like clockwork every 600,000 years for a few tens of millions of years, leaving a pockmark of scars across the US continental plate as it moves past the hot spot. The last time it erupted was 660,000 years ago, it is long over due. Maybe it's dead, maybe it's about to blow. We have no idea.
The last time Yellowstone erupted it covered almost all of America in a meter of Ash. I ask you to imagine what that would do to the US if it happened tomorrow, and then what that would do to the global economy. Consider the US supplies about 1/2 of the worlds food supply and about 2/3rds of it's grain supply.
There are 3 or 4 for these volcanos under continental land masses that have scars proving their existence. It is reasonable that the same distributions of these exists under continental plates that are buried under water, unfortunately they do not leave any evidence. Imagine one erupting, displacing about a thousand cubic miles of material, underwater, and consider the ensuing tsunami would hit every coastal city with hundreds of feet of water across half the globe.
Oh, but we need to cap carbon emissions!
In order to combat all the threats humanity faces we need rapid and massive economic and industrial growth. In order to combat global warming we need rapid and massive industrial curtailment. So of all the problems we face, only ONE demands abandoning technology and industry, and global warming is NOT even a civilization threat. A few feet of water rise WILL NOT end human civilization.
Furthermore, even IPCC estimates suggest only a few feet of water level rise in about one hundred years. The Kyoto protocol would cost some 100 trillion dollars and achieve only a 1 - 2 degree temperature decrease. Meanwhile, allegedly, 400 million people will be displaced by a water level rise of the 80cms the IPCC suggests. To prevent global warming all together (not just slow it) some thing akin to 5 to 10x the Koyoto level restrictions are necessary, which of course amounts to 500 trillion to one quadrillion dollars. For this price, you could give every single individual displaced by water level rise one million dollars to find a new home.
Global Warming might be a real issue, but the point is that it is irrelevant in the face of poverty, disease, malaria, murderous dictatorships, and the overwhelming standard of living increase the even rudimentary industrialization enables.
The "funny picture" is from www.surfacestations.org, which is a volunteer site that is auditing the surface temperature monitors. A disturbingly large number of them are placed next to artificial man made heat sources, such as exhaust vents on air conditioners or in the case above literally within five feet of a trash burning barrel. The few monitors which are well placed show temperature declines, the majority of monitors show temperature increases.
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