Les Jones

"Must be all those Republican Martians driving their gas-hogging SUVs on Mars."

Heh.

Those were very damn nearly my exact words upon hearing this yesterday. :-)

I wish I could take this sort of thing as a joke, but many of the people dismissing climate change these days lack the rudimentary mathematical and scientific skills to recognize the difference between the vast data set on our climate and a tiny sprinkle of data points from Mars. When you cater to the stupid, you don't need evidence and reasoning, just a good punch line, and I'm guessing this silliness will soon become part of the anti-science lore.

Les, you should know better than to cite a poorly described three-year trend without historical context as evidence for pinning warming trends on solar cycles. If someone suggested this year's hurricane season proves global warming has caused more hurricanes, you would be all over them, rightly so, for their statistical naivety.

If it's a joke, leave it as a joke. If you're going to link it to solar-induced warming, you need to explain why insignificant trends are good enough for you when they move the way you want, while far stronger trends can be dismissed when they move the other way. Are you going to be a scientist or a speculator?

I said "If Earth and Mars are both heating up ... this may be additional evidence for solar-induced warming." How many conditional statements do you want?

And, hey, I don't dispute that the Earth has gotten warmer over the last century. It has. I do dispute the cause of that warming. I'm not convinced it's anthropogenic.

It's odd how the word "if" doesn't make your post linking an anecdotal data fragment to a scientific debate disappear. It just absolves you of responsibility for that post, apparently. Similarly, your fiegned uncertainty over the role of human activity in warming the Earth does not make a century's worth of air pollution disappear from the atmosphere. It's just a way to avoid responsibility.

"air pollution"

That's just begging the question. CO2 isn't air pollution unless it's causing global warming, and that's the whole question.

I said "a century's worth of air pollution." Why are you trying to limit the conversation to only CO2?

Can you say inside what bounds of CO2 concentration and concentrations of other compounds we run no risk of climate disruption? Can you prove that our alterations to atmospheric composition will have no adverse effect?

Nope, but I also can't prove that petting the cat doesn't cause global warming. Guess I better stop petting the cat.

I'm not asking you to prove a negative. I'm asking you to act like a scientist. Can you prove that our climate is stable relative to man's impact? Can you prove that solar cycles have caused the observed warming patterns?

It is possible to have too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, right? It is possible to have too little, right?

"Can you prove that solar cycles have caused the observed warming patterns?"

Nope. It's just a theory. Likewise, you can't prove elevated CO2 is causing global warming. We really won't know for sure what's causing the warming until the Earth stops warming and cools down.

"It is possible to have too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, right? It is possible to have too little, right?"

For some extreme values (all animals die at one end, and all plants die at the other), but in between who knows? I don't want to restructure our economy and world on a theory.

We won't know for sure what's causing warming until it stops? Where did you come up with that? Never mind, it's not important.

You don't know whether air pollution can be indefinitely absorbed by the atmosphere, and neither do I. Atmospheric modelling is obviously far superior in 2005 than it was in 1975, if not from the advances in knowledge and monitoring, then from the sheer computational power. You can pretend like the guys with physics degrees and supercomputers out in Oak Ridge are full of shit if it's too hard for you to stay informed.

Restructuring our economy so that we generate less air pollution means reducing asthma, lung disease, developmental problems. EPA estimates that every dollar spent cleaning the air saves twenty dollars in future health care costs. Cleaner air also means cleaner rain and cleaner water, healthier fish and forests, and better views. Restructuring the economy means investment and innovation. Most likely, a Kyoto-compliant restructuring would grow the stock market.

The restructured economy will actually be stronger because of the investment and because it will be more efficient and healthier. Do you think Katie wants us to invest in cleaner technologies? If you're not worried about her growing up to face stronger storms, longer droughts, and rising seas, shouldn't you at least want cleaner air for her to breathe?

It's not like we'd be screwing with a free market economy. We're talking about the auto industry and energy industries. We pay for all the highways and driving regulations, half the research, impose steel tariffs and import restrictions to keep them competitive with overseas manufacturers. We lease drilling and mining rights at a loss, subsidize electrification, share clean-up costs and risks, and make expensive foreign policy choices for them. These are already highly regulated industries in desperate need of modernization.

The risk of climate change is only part of the reason why investing in cleaner air is a good idea.

Fully implementing Kyoto wouldn't stop global warming. It would only delay it by a decade or two.

"Do you think Katie wants us to invest in cleaner technologies? If you're not worried about her growing up to face stronger storms, longer droughts, and rising seas, shouldn't you at least want cleaner air for her to breathe?"

The air is already getting cleaner under current guidelines. Would I like it to be a little cleaner? Sure, depending on how much it costs and whether that would actually make us healthier. I'm not willing to pay more and more to make the air cleaner and cleaner to some arbitrary standard, just like there's only so much I'm willing to pay for household cleanliness, or car safety, or a lot of other things. There are diminishing returns for the investment.

Fully implementing Kyoto wouldn't stop global warming. It would only delay it by a decade or two.

Whoa. Where did this certainty about the interaction between air pollution and climate change come from? I thought you had no idea whether human-induced warming existed, but all of a sudden you are predicting the impact of a particular emissions reduction goal. That's kinda weird.

Did you buy a supercomputer and perfect the climate-modelling difference equations over the weekend?

I'm taking the climate modelers at their own word in this case. Even the people who are convinced of the greenhouse gas theory of global warming don't think Kyoto will stop same.