Climate Change Bill

Discussion in 'Political Discussions' started by Ian Anderson, Dec 18, 2009.

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  1. Ian Anderson

    Ian Anderson Active Member

    This offer was made in Copenhagen today by the USA:

    An announcement by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that the United States would contribute to a climate change fund amounting to $100 billion a year by 2020
    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091218/ap_on_sc/climate

    I can't see this amount being approved by Congress anytime soon considering the economy, national debt, and other pressing financial needs.


    [Edit: I meant "Bill" as in "payment due", not as a piece of legislation.]
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 18, 2009
  2. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    I thought that you were talking about me! :D

    Don't worry, Ian. By the time 2020 comes around, $100 billion will be worth about $5 in todays's dollars. We are headed for hyper-inflation and a currency collapse, I fear, when the trillions-large deficit-spending credit-bubble ultimately bursts.

    Turning to global-warming, I'm not sure what I believe any more. My predominant attitude is skepticism.

    Until recently, I was reasonably sure that the world really is getting warmer. Since 'Climategate', I'm less confident. The changes are small and hidden in lots of stochastic noise. And since temperature records have only been kept for maybe 150 years, long-term changes have to be indirectly estimated. Historians have a pretty good idea that temperatures were relatively warm in the high-medieval period, that they cooled for several centuries (impacting European crop yields), then rose once again. So while climate changes obviously do occur (and are occurring right now) I'm less sure that there's a longer-term direction to it. Some pretty arcane statistical analyses are called for, and along with them many opportunities to bias the results.

    Assuming that global-warming is a real phenomenon, I'm less sure that we have any real understanding of what drives it. Looking further back in the Earth's long history, there have been ice-ages in which the polar ice-caps extended south of the great lakes. There have also been extremely warm periods in which the Earth apparently didn't have any polar ice caps at all. Those are global temperature changes that totally dwarf today's 'global warming' phenomenon, and they all occurred with no input from human beings at all, who either hadn't evolved yet or were still in the paleolithic old-stone-age. We may be overestimating our own importance in all of this.

    And if we assume both that global warming is real and that it's human-caused, I'm still uncertain whether we have a handle on the right way to address it. It's just too convenient how this world-wide global-warming concern arose around the same time that faith in communism was imploding and the academic activist/evangelists were looking around for a new cause to beat the drum for. It's suspicious how nicely it fits into the traditional neo-romantic and slightly medieval-nostalgiac social-critique that hates urban industrialization while idealizing village life and craft industries. I still have the suspicion that global-warming is just a familiar social-change agenda wearing new pseudo-science drag.

    That's why 'Climategate' is so tremendously significant. I'm not a scientist. I don't have access to the climatologists' mysterious data-sets. I'm unprepared to follow all the statistical hi-jinks. With me, it's all just another argument from authority. The scientists are effectively a priesthood in white coats, not unlike the priesthood in ecclesiastical vestments. In both cases they are announcing a purported saving truth and laymen like myself are told that we have to trust their authority, believe what they tell us and change our whole lives accordingly. Just believe what's published in the peer-reviewed scriptures!

    So when we find that the raw data upon which the analyses are based hasn't been made available, and when we find the peer-review process is being used to exclude dissent and journals publishing heretical papers being threatened with boycotts and blacklisting, the whole glorious cultural edifice of scientific authority among laymen starts to teeter and wobble.

    It begins to look like the Mighty Scientific Wizard of Oz... just ignore the activists over there frantically pulling e-mail levers from behind the curtain.
     
  3. Ian Anderson

    Ian Anderson Active Member

    There is no doubt that the earth is warming but what percentage is nature and what percent man made I doubt if anyone knows. We are at the end of the last ice age.As a amateur astronomer and amateur glaciologist I am familiar with the Milankovitch cycle and some related hypotheses.

    Regarding peer reviews I find a similar stance on the origin of the universe - the "big bang" gang don't want to hear about alternative hypotheses such as the plasma universe being promoted by some astrophysicists.

    My daughter-in-law, who is in the natural sciences research field, tells me it is perfectly normal for scientists to keep their data under wraps until it is published, then the data is usually made available for anybody to look at. Otherwise someone can jump in and use your hard earned data to publish their own paper.

    On a tangent: my pet peeve is the media who keep saying "the glaciers are melting." Of course they are and they always have done. What they should be talking about is glaciers receding because of lack of snowfall (I have visited glaciers in New Zealand that are currently advancing and ironically due to the drought in Australia.)
     
  4. imalcolm

    imalcolm New Member

    I'm not a fan of the "Big Bang" myself. I've done a bit of reading on redshift from authors like Halton Arp and Geoffrey Burbidge. I've also investigated plasma cosmology, but I'm not convinced that they have the whole picture either.

    It is true that the folks who are heavily invested in the Big Bang will try to shut out any dissenting voices, just as we see with global warming.
     

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