|
|
|
|
#51
05/12/2007, 12:08 AM
|
|||
|
|||
|
The point I was trying to make earlier is this. Society needs a unifying idea to rally behind. There need to be clearly defined boundaries of what constitutes a good person and a bad person. This is important so that people can gauge if they are a good person or not. In our modern age, we have outlawed many of the forms this used to take place in because it was outright horrible in the manner in which it was arranged. Outright racism, sexism and bigotry was used to make people feel good about themselves. The same zealot mentality that drives Arabs to commit martyrdom causes people to focus on the enviroment around them and look for what is wrong with it and who can be blamed. End result on a personal level is a feeling of self satisfaction for doing what they felt is a noble act and causing suffering for others who do not share their passion. No matter how noble a cause is, you cannot force it on another person or feel anger that they do not agree with your point of view. These are personal perceptions of how things are, relating to each individual. What rings true for one person could seem silly or pointless to another. There is a reason our society outlawed racism, stoped sexism and punishes bigotry. Those things do hurt others. And there is a reason these things still occur everyday. It makes a person feel better about themself, by forcing their viewpoint on someone else.
I want to say, that I do not harbor any such feelings for others but I see and hear it all the time. And I become just as bad when I dont say anything to stop it. Global Warming is as real as you want it to be. Ignoring it will not stop things from getting worse, and raging against it will not make it any better. The science behind Global Warming has always been suspect and not fully trusted. There are large ommisions that foster distrust of its integiry. The real danger it points at is the business sector and the horrible methods people use to gather wealth. It lays the blame at individuals who knew little of the damage being done on their behalf. And it is presided over by a disorganized array of individuals and groups that really dont seem any different than the businesses they bemoan. It is based on a premise that there is somehow a way to undo the damage thats been done to our world. Otherwise, why bring it up at all except for to torture us with the knowlege of our own imminent doom? I dont have an answer, I am just tired of people acting like its my fault.
__________________
I ain't there yet, but I'm getting better everyday. |
|
#52
05/14/2007, 02:31 AM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
Fighting global warming can in fact help it. Ignoring it will make it worse. The science behind AGW is not suspect. Maybe if you have some issues regarding it you can ask here and someone can attept to help you understand. What large ommisions do you speak of? The business sector is large and diverse. There are many causing harm and many now trying to reduce their impact on the planet. Personally I believe the business sector is only partly to blame, however they are certainly part of the solution. I don't quite know what you don't get about the solution. Its easy, reduce carbon emmisions. It is not something that cannot be solved. That is why it needs to be brought up. There is a solution. I am not having a go at you so please do not take this the wrong way, but I am trying to understand how you have come to your understanding of the issue. And lastly a bit of a rant, people have to understand, that this is not a case of AGW being a small issue. It is not just about a few species that face extinction. People will die. And not just a few. |
|
#53
05/14/2007, 07:39 AM
|
||||
|
||||
|
Quote:
Quote:
To me, this "everything counts" state of mind is at the heart of "the American Dream". Many (yes not all) Americans take their right to vote very very seriously. Your vote is one within hundreds of millions - yet you take it seriously. So why then do we not agree that our contributions (negative or positive) to the earth are important or measurable? Well, many people do and are doing something about it, big or small. I agree that you shouldn't guilt people into doing something. It's hard to say what is good or bad - this obviously is a debate far beyond the scope of this forum (IMO). Quote:
Quote:
Lets think back to smoking cigarettes....... If our grandmothers or mothers come down with a smoking related disease such as (god forbid) lung cancer, we show sympathy because they truly did not know the dangers of smoking when they started (though it's pretty obvious it can't be good for you, sort of like burning oh so much fossil fuel). Yet, we show much less compassion when a 30 year old comes down with the same disease because they knew when they started that smoking would likely lead to lung cancer. I think the GW related social issues we are seeing today is very much the same. You say that yourself and others are sick of being blamed for things you did not know were harmful. That's fine, but when will we give up the excuses and put down the proverbial cigarette?
__________________
Still fighting entropy. |
|
#54
05/14/2007, 11:20 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Also, there are ways to undo damage to the environment, it's done all the time. Don't be so defeatist. No one is blaming you personally, but I do blame those that speak out against important issues in ignorance. Asking questions is good, being skeptical is fine, even being ignorant is ok most of the time, but trying to persuade others on a subject by lying or through ignorance is a problem. But, many people are ignorant of their own ignorance, so what can we do?
__________________
The Sand People are easily startled, but they will soon be back, and in greater numbers. All statements have been peer reviewed. |
|
#55
05/19/2007, 06:56 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
I guess if im going to keep going to ocrakoke nc for vacation im going to have to take up scuba diving. But on the up side my house in Richmond va could be beach front property.
|
|
#56
05/22/2007, 07:42 AM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
With a leader like yours I would hate to be an american at this moment in time. You have a massive thing like GW,and all he can do is say "well I'd rather protect economic growth,and yeah lets send more troops to iraq" what a reatard! and to think he is the most powerfull man on the planet! It's a disgrace. Our leader isnt much better. But at least hes trying to get you guys on board. But as usual Bush doesnt want to know. It's a very very sad state of afairs. |
|
#57
05/22/2007, 11:53 AM
|
|||
|
|||
|
While it can be hard to keep the politics out of Global Warming Discussions, the [ua] requires us to keep politics out discussions on Reef Central. Please keep this mind.
__________________
Bill "LOL, well I have no brain apparently. " - dc (Debi) |
|
#58
05/29/2007, 07:48 AM
|
|||
|
|||
|
This topic is very interesting.
has anyone seen this video? http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...62022478442170 I would love to read comments about it from some of you. |
|
#59
05/29/2007, 01:07 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
That video has been discussed before a couple of times. Some people think that the video is good, other people read. I fall in the reading camp.
__________________
The Sand People are easily startled, but they will soon be back, and in greater numbers. All statements have been peer reviewed. |
|
#60
05/29/2007, 02:39 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
|
|
#62
05/30/2007, 06:28 AM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
|
|
#63
05/30/2007, 08:25 AM
|
|||
|
|||
|
A disgrace Rossini?
I now know that one of the scientists from the video regrets having participated and that the information he provided was taken out of context. I also know that editorial liberties are taken by many journalists. It is unpopular at this time to support any theory that diminishes the impact of mankind’s contribution to climate change. Many scientists do though, despite the monetary and political benefits of supporting the Al Gore/David Suzuki position. The video presents some interesting information about the Earths temperature and the correlation to industrialization and other events that may or may not have influence on it. It is not possible that some of the theories presented have merit? We do not have all the answers. Climate models are still unable to predict the weather next week and obviously need further refinement. Is it not worth exploring all possibilities as we reduce man made CO2 emissions? |
|
#64
05/30/2007, 01:01 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
Quote:
__________________
The Sand People are easily startled, but they will soon be back, and in greater numbers. All statements have been peer reviewed. |
|
#65
06/01/2007, 03:06 AM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
|
|
#66
06/15/2007, 08:55 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Bottom line Humans didnt start "Global Warming" and we won't do anything to stop it. Nature is way bigger than you and I. Remember how old earth is and how cycles work. The land on earth used to be one big land mass. If humans were around then we would not have stoped the continents from moving apart. We won't stop the earth from cooling or warming either. I remember back in the 70's and 80's when scientist thought the earth was cooling. Oh wait now it's warming? Global Warming is nothing but a political tool. Ways for liberals to push for new ideas that will make them money. How many recorded ice ages have there been without factories or cars?
|
|
#67
06/15/2007, 10:13 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
 . I guess the debate is over, good job.
__________________
The Sand People are easily startled, but they will soon be back, and in greater numbers. All statements have been peer reviewed. |
|
#68
06/27/2007, 08:25 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
The real problem is too many people in the world. 6+billion. When China and India dominate the world economic order....lookout. To blame George Bush is merely sticking your head in the sand. Just one more thing the world wants to pin on a man that has been in power less than 7 years. Not even George is that powerful. If the world is to save itself from ourselves... we'll need to decrease our population. You can't keep one tang in a 20 gallon tank.... for long.
__________________
Dewey 75 Gallon DT 29 Gallon sump PC Lighting 2 ocellaris sm. Hippo Tang Coral Beauty Cleaner wrasse Cleaner Shrimp Blood Shrimp Pistol Shrimp Serpent Star Turbo and nassarius snails |
|
#69
06/27/2007, 09:14 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Shhhh...you're supposed to ignore the elephant in the room. Overpopulation is the ugly truth, but we still need to learn how to conserve and live with nature in a little more harmony. As far a GWB goes, he hasn't even been mentioned in this thread, but I agree with what you said.
__________________
The Sand People are easily startled, but they will soon be back, and in greater numbers. All statements have been peer reviewed. |
|
#70
06/29/2007, 06:00 AM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Peer Review, Publication in Top Journals, Scientific Consensus, and So Forth
May 7, 2007 Robert Higgs In following the discussion of global warming and related issues in the press and the blogosphere, I have been struck repeatedly by the assumption or expression of certain beliefs that strike me as highly problematical. Many writers who are not scientists themselves are trading on the prestige of science and the authority of scientists. Reference to “peer-reviewed research” and to an alleged “scientific consensus” are regarded as veritable knock-out blows by many commentators. Yet many of those who make such references appear to me to be more or less ignorant of how science as a form of knowledge-seeking and scientists as individual professionals operate, especially nowadays, when national governments¯most notably the U.S. government¯play such an overwhelming role in financing scientific research and hence in determining which scientists rise to the top and which fall by the wayside. I do not pretend to have expertise in climatology or any of the related physical sciences, so nothing I might say about strictly climatological or related physical-scientific matters deserves any weight. However, I have thirty-nine years of professional experience¯twenty-six as a university professor, including fifteen at a major research university, and then thirteen as a researcher, writer, and editor¯in close contact with scientists of various sorts, including some in the biological and physical sciences and many in the social sciences and demography. I have served as a peer reviewer for more than thirty professional journals and as a reviewer of research proposals for the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and a number of large private foundations. I was the principal investigator of a major NSF-funded research project in the field of demography. So, I think I know something about how the system works. It does not work as outsiders seem to think. Peer review, on which lay people place great weight, varies from being an important control, where the editors and the referees are competent and responsible, to being a complete farce, where they are not. As a rule, not surprisingly, the process operates somewhere in the middle, being more than a joke but less than the nearly flawless system of Olympian scrutiny that outsiders imagine it to be. Any journal editor who desires, for whatever reason, to reject a submission can easily do so by choosing referees he knows full well will knock it down; likewise, he can easily obtain favorable referee reports. As I have always counseled young people whose work was rejected, seemingly on improper or insufficient grounds, the system is a crap shoot. Personal vendettas, ideological conflicts, professional jealousies, methodological disagreements, sheer self-promotion, and a great deal of plain incompetence and irresponsibility are no strangers to the scientific world; indeed, that world is rife with these all-too-human attributes. In no event can peer review ensure that research is correct in its procedures or its conclusions. The history of every science is a chronicle of one mistake after another. In some sciences these mistakes are largely weeded out in the course of time; in others they persist for extended periods; and in some sciences, such as economics, actual scientific retrogression may continue for generations under the misguided (but self-serving) belief that it is really progress. At any given time, consensus may exist about all sorts of matters in a particular science. In retrospect, however, that consensus is often seen to have been mistaken. As recently as the mid-1970s, for example, a scientific consensus existed among climatologists and scientists in related fields that the earth was about to enter a new ice age. Drastic proposals were made, such as exploding hydrogen bombs over the polar icecaps (to melt them) or damming the Bering Strait (to prevent cold Arctic water from entering the Pacific Ocean), to avert this impending disaster. Well-reputed scientists, not just uninformed wackos, made such proposals. How quickly we forget. Researchers who employ unorthodox methods or theoretical frameworks have great difficulty under modern conditions in getting their findings published in the “best” journals or, at times, in any scientific journal. Scientific innovators or creative eccentrics always strike the great mass of practitioners as nut cases¯until their findings become impossible to deny, which often occurs only after one generation’s professional ring-masters have died off. Science is an odd undertaking: everybody strives to make the next breakthrough, yet when someone does, he is often greeted as if he were carrying the ebola virus. Too many people have too much invested in the reigning ideas; for those people an acknowledgment of their own idea’s bankruptcy is tantamount to an admission that they have wasted their lives. Often, perhaps to avoid cognitive dissonance, they never admit that their ideas were wrong. Most important, as a rule, in science as elsewhere, to get along, you must go along. Research worlds, in their upper reaches, are pretty small. Leading researchers know all the major players and what everybody else is doing. They attend the same conferences, belong to the same societies, send their grad students to be postdocs in the other people’s labs, review one another’s work for the NSF, NIH, or other government funding organizations, and so forth. If you do not belong to this tight fraternity, it will prove very, very difficult for you to gain a hearing for your work, to publish in a “top” journal, to acquire a government grant, to receive an invitation to participate in a scientific-conference panel discussion, or to place your grad students in decent positions. The whole setup is tremendously incestuous; the interconnections are numerous, tight, and close. In this context, a bright young person needs to display cleverness in applying the prevailing orthodoxy, but it behooves him not to rock the boat by challenging anything fundamental or dear to the hearts of those who constitute the review committees for the NSF, NIH, and other funding organizations. Modern biological and physical science is, overwhelmingly, government-funded science. If your work, for whatever reason, does not appeal to the relevant funding agency’s bureaucrats and academic review committees, you can forget about getting any money to carry out your proposal. Recall the human frailties I mentioned previously; they apply just as much in the funding context as in the publication context. Indeed, these two contexts are themselves tightly linked: if you don’t get funding, you’ll never produce publishable work, and if you don’t land good publications, you won’t continue to receive funding. When your research implies a “need” for drastic government action to avert a looming disaster or to allay some dire existing problem, government bureaucrats and legislators (can you say “earmarks”?) are more likely to approve it. If the managers at the NSF, NIH, and other government funding agencies gave great amounts of money to scientists whose research implies that no disaster looms or no dire problem now exists or even that although a problem exists, no currently feasible government policy can do anything to solve it without creating greater problems in the process, members of Congress would be much less inclined to throw money at the agency, with all the consequences that an appropriations cutback implies for bureaucratic thriving. No one has to explain all these things to the parties involved; they are not idiots, and they understand how the wheels are greased in their tight little worlds. Finally, we need to develop a much keener sense of what a scientist is qualified to talk about and what he is not qualified to talk about. Climatologists, for example, are qualified to talk about the science of climatology (though subject to all the intrusions upon pure science I have already mentioned). They are not qualified to say, however, that “we must act now” by imposing government “solutions” of some imagined sort. They are not professionally knowledgeable about what degree of risk is better or worse for people to take; only the individuals who bear the risk can make that decision, because it’s a matter of personal preference, not a matter of science. Climatologists know nothing about cost/benefit cosiderations; indeed, most mainstream economists themselves are fundamentally misguided about such matters (adopting, for example, procedures and assumptions about the aggregation of individual valuations that lack a sound scientific basis). Climate scientists are the best qualified people to talk about climate science, but they have no qualifications to talk about public policy, law, or individual values, rates of time preference, and degrees of risk aversion. In talking about desirable government action, they give the impression that they are either fools or charlatans, but they keep talking¯worst of all, talking to doomsday-seeking journalists¯nevertheless. In this connection, we might well bear in mind that the United Nations (and its committees and the bureaus it oversees) is no more a scientifc organization than the U.S. Congress (and its committees and the bureaus it oversees). When decisions and pronouncements come forth from these political organizations, it makes sense to treat them as essentially political in origin and purpose. Politicians aren’t dumb, either¯vicious, yes, but not dumb. One thing they know above everything else is how to stampede masses of people into approving or accepting ill-advised government actions that cost the people dearly in both their standard of living and their liberties in the long run. |
|
#71
06/29/2007, 10:36 AM
|
|||
|
|||
|
This article doesn't say anything new. Same package, different wrapping.
Having said that, I'll agree with the author on some of this, but so what? So it's difficult to get some views published in top tier journals, that doesn't mean the evidence isn't still out there for all people to read. There is no evidence to refute man's affect on global warming. There are other factors, yes, but those get published in top tier journals all the time. You'll also notice the author never says that the current view on global warming in false, he just doesn't agree with how the situation is being handled.
__________________
The Sand People are easily startled, but they will soon be back, and in greater numbers. All statements have been peer reviewed. |
|
#72
06/29/2007, 09:59 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
 To be honest, I seldom share my viewpoint that the solar impact on GW is much more vast than that of anthropogenic sources, for fear of being made a pariah. I believe that we should reduce CO2 emissions, consumption, and the "disposable lifestyle" that so many Americans have adopted. To me, it's simply common sense. It is a case of the using the same means to accomplish different ends: Some will do it to "stop global warming"; I do it because it's "common sense". Good discussion!
__________________
Scott |
|
#73
06/30/2007, 01:10 AM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
__________________
The Sand People are easily startled, but they will soon be back, and in greater numbers. All statements have been peer reviewed. |
|
#75
06/30/2007, 07:35 AM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
Please note that this is merely a guess on my part: I would bet that if you were to ask ten people (who feel that GW is a major problem) what the number one cause of GW is, nine of them would respond "human CO2 emissions". We never hear too much about solar impact or water vapor/clouds on the nightly news. Somewhat related, I have trouble wrapping my head around this: The deep ocean is the main CO2 "sink" for the planet. Since cooler liquids dissolve gases more readily (and to a greater extent) than warmer liquids, don't warming oceans exacerbate the release of CO2 into the atmosphere? In my limited Google searching, I've not found a reliable source to tell me if increased atmospheric CO2 levels precede global temperature increases or vice versa. (I'd prefer sources other than Al Gore or the YouTube video posted earlier in the thread.) I do find it interesting that even though I believe in and practice many of the same things that "global warming activists" promote, they still try to convince me that my thoughts on GW are incorrect.  That is why I try to stay away from these discussions.
__________________
Scott |
| Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
| Display Modes | |
|
|
Linear Mode
