Smart people, to paraphrase Wolfman, think we need to stop wasting time and stop smoking so damned many cigarettes. And still the cemeteries fill with people like you.
Morgan - when science debates devolve to throwing around insults, it's pretty obvious science has left the debate. It's usually also an indicator of when the person throwing the insults has no other options available.
I'm taking the fact that you're resorting to calling me unintelligent, is an indication that you do not have knowledge of a study that has determined how effective CO2 is at altering global temperatures (without using historical data)?
Canuck you seem to making an argument, to paraphrase, something like this.
You claim that cigarette smoking causes cancer but I can clearly demonstrate times in the past when people have died from cancer who didn't smoke. And people have smoked and not died of cancer. And not a single scientist can definitively say the exact mechanism by which any cancer is formed much less the mechanism by which cigarette smoke causes cancer.
Well besides the little complication that, that hundreds, if not thousands, of studies have conclusively proved a link between smoking and cancer, or the fact that there is no possible way that cancer rates can be the causation factor for smoking - your analogy is completely improper.
You're trying to compare understanding an occurrence in millions of examples - where there can be endless combinations of causation factors (due to millions of cancer cases), with understanding the reasons behind a single system response(global warming), which can have only one set of causation factors. Don't you see a little issue with that?
How important is it to you to be right while watching the planet get warmer and people dying?
It's not about me being right. I don't have some self need to prove myself superior to others by either "being right", or insulting other's intelligence. My concern is misplaced resources, and the 5-8 million people that are dying each and every year, from preventable causes. I'll repeat these deaths aren't what "might" happen, they are happening right now. These are 5-8 million people, and millions of others who fall sick, who desperately need development within their countries. Whether you like it or not - higher standard of living = longer life expectancy = development = fossil fuel use.
My other concern is science. What happens when the earth doesn't rise the 4 degrees predicted? What happens when food production doesn't sink like a stone? What happens when oceans don't rise 10 feet? What happens when malaria doesn't strike us all dead? What happens when deserts don't take over the earth? What happens when floods and pestilence don't take over? I'll tell you what will happen, the general public will forever lose faith in science. The public will no longer see science as objective, they will see it as something that is able to be influenced, and even guided, by a political agenda.
A critical component of the scientific method is supposed to be debate. One of the first things that made me start researching global warming, was the complete intolerance of differing opinions. It was the first sign, to me, that global warming has left the realm of science, and into the realm of ideologies. I'm sorry to say DA Morgan, you exemplify this - anybody who offers up a contrarian opinion, you attack. That, Sir, is not science.
Because of the gusto at which contrarians are attacked with, I'm starting to believe more and more that global warming is more about anti-capitalist, anti-globalization agendas than science itself.
