It just irritates me when someone states “X is stupid/ignorant/ foolish/et ceteras” without giving any back-up as to why, as it strikes me as a big kid version of “nuh-uh!” If you’re just saying he’s stupid for not citing his sources and backing up his information, rather than for the actual information presented, you don’t need to cite the source above, true, but you should instead be criticizing his lack of proper arguing skills. He could be quite intelligent and just not very communicative. So, unless you point out why what he’s actually arguing is stupid, you don’t point out that he’s stupid, only that he’s terrible at expressing himself.
Okay, things that include “facts” and have a bibliography of websites aren’t necessarily trustworthy. There’s a lot of “facts” on the internet, and if even half of them were true, I’d have a much larger penis right now.
True. Most people put out false facts to better help themselves. Just like certain people pay scientists to do ciertain and have the results be what they say they are. That could also be the case with global warming. Of course it is kind of hard to fake the melting of the polar ice caps. But of course you never know…
Yes, it is very hard to fake the melting of the polar ice caps. It is also not very profitable, for anyone. Denying this and the causation of it is pretty easy, since most people aren’t intelligent or involved enough to question the bullshit served to them on a silver platter, and will give one quite a bit of profit, as one can use cost-effective, but environmentally dire policies and disproprtionately increase prices as the resources become scarce. The only profit arguing global warming coudl give would be making people actually pay the few extra dollars for organic solutions, which organic corporations wouldn’t spend the extra money on to require them to cost more to make a profit, theoretically, unless they were absolutely batshit crazy or actually believed they were helping something. While it is not impossible for some shadowy, environmentalist racket to backing the global warming argument with falsified data, it’s much less logical for them to do so, as it has much less profit. Unless you consider the continued survival of the human race, along with most other species, because of a cleaner world to be a profit. Then I guess they’ve got quite a lot to profit.
Technically, Boltgun is correct. I was at the Museum of Natural History in Washington last weekend, and one of the exhibits had a chart of the global temperature over the course of the past couple hundred million years. The average global temperature at the left end of the chart was around 90 degrees F, and proceeded only noticeably downward over time until the current, where average global temperature is somewhere in the 60s.
HOWEVER, since the industrial revolution, the average global temperature has increased at an unprecedented rate, so while it is possible, and even likely, that global temperatures would rise without human involvement, it would not being doing so at nearly the speed.
What? Didn’t this chart show ice ages? This cyclical argument is nonsense anyway. Just because something happened before for unknown reasons doesn’t mean it is cyclical, and it doesn’t mean that the same thing can’t happen for other reasons.
Let’s say that every winter for the past three winters you’ve gotten the flu. It is not true that you necessarily get the flu every winter, it is not true that you can only get the flu in the winter, and it is not true that having flu-like symptoms in the winter means that the disease you have is the flu.
And Boltgun’s argument that people are spending money on biased research to try to show that global warming is actually happening? What kind of crazy conspiracy theory is that? Industries save money by not having to reduce emission levels, so it is in their interests to fund biased research. Are you saying politicians are funding biased research showing that global warming is happening in order to be elected? Wouldn’t they have an easier time being elected by siding with industries that can fund their campaigns?
To address Demigod’s claim, the whole point to the global warming argument isn’t that its impossible for temperature to cycle around the world but that it is impossible for it to cycle at the speed it has been increasing. It has therefore broken the natural cycle. The increase in global temperature is also timed to the beginning of the industrial revolution and is directly related to the production of greenhouse gases.
There was once a time when no one would believe CFCs could damage the ozone layer. Then we found a gigantic fucking hole over the antarctic. Does history repeat itself?
As a sidenote, you don’t think that a federal institution like the one you went to (I assume it is Federal) is not providing you with inaccurate information? It has been shown time and time again that the Bush administration has muzzled the voices of the scientists that didn’t provide the public with the information they wanted people to hear. An example is found here http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/science/earth/29climate.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Good point Rast. I just hope that we aren’t already past the point of no return - so much damage has been done to the environment.
The Big Oil is salivating at the prospect of ice-free Arctic. According to U.S. Geological Survey estimates, there could be up to 25 percent of the world’s undiscovered reserves of oil and natural gas north of the Arctic Circle. Interestingly enough, a 2004 report on oil supplies prepared by the US office of petroleum reserves stated that world oil reserves are being depleted three times as fast as they are being discovered.
Considering that the worldwide oil demand is expected to increase by more than 50 percent over the next 25 years, all the major players want/need to jump on the Arctic oil bandwagon. BP, Shell, and Norway’s Statoil are already in the neighborhood (Barents, Beaufort); and I expect that Rosneft and Gazprom will join them shortly.