Why Climate Skeptics Are Wrong
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
After going to University in the '70s when global cooling was a concern, and after seeing Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", I undertook a journey: I was willing to be persuaded either way. I read pro and con media, and followed the links to their cited scientific articles. The evidence is overwhelming, as the Scientific American article says. But many intelligent people don't "believe" in global warming. This by itself is a hideously dangerous and perplexing problem.
What I am trying to get at is: the income tax, for example, exists so that governments can finance their operations. A heavy tax on cigarettes, on the other hand, is meant to change the population's behavior - to push smokers to quit. The extra revenue is useful but not the main point of the legislation. The goal is to reduce the number of smokers.
Such as it would be with a carbon tax. As someone thoroughly concerned with the state of our habitat, I would be thrilled to see a carbon tax here in the US - even if the politicians took the extra money raised by the tax and burned it. The point of a carbon tax is to reduce carbon emissions; raised monies are a secondary benefit.
I would love to be proven a fool, but where you see an eagerness to tax I see a lack of free market solutions for tragedies of the commons such as the atmosphere.
Because the is the most cost effective and simplest solution. It has a proven track record with the Montreal protocol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
I'm certainly not wedded to the idea, but there doesn't seem to be any other viable options on the table.
The difficulty is you need to do this in a coordinated way otherwise you just end up shifting your carbon intensive industries overseas. This is why reaching a global agreement is so important.
The R&D thing is a red herring, business will respond to the economic situation it finds itself in.
One solution. While a small footprint, it is bigger than the comment section combined (assuming we aren't millionaires with private jets and yachts). When politicians and celebrities promote enacting a carbon tax that reduces our economic activity, while having a negligible effect on them.
If you have a single path of research that leads to a conclusion then you have a valid but relatively weak conclusion. But if you have five separate paths of research all leading to the same conclusion then you have a much stronger case. The article claims there are many such independent paths to the mainstream conclusions on climate change. It also concludes that the skeptics do not have even a single path of research that leads to position of the skeptics.
It is like evolution. You can conclude evolution from just comparative biology. But you can also get the same conclusion from genetics. They are independent of each other as research paths but give the same answer. That increases confidence in the conclusion.
Useful to send to others, though.
Happy to agree with AGW but this is NOT what climate denial is about.
This is why this article is fake.
What global warming is about, not the religious babble in articles like this, is how bad is it? and how bad is dealing with it?
Then as a scientist and logical person go down the best route.
And the evidence to me is clear, the best route is to not deal with it. Hence we once again start a religious war in threads like this.
How to deal with these religious wars is unclear, but if you want to really help the world, solving this would be an amazing start.
A large part of the population will always be religious, be it about the gods or GMO's or Global warming. How does one solve these issues? This is really where it's at.
Your characterisation of the controversy as religious is interesting to me. We would both probably apply the adjective "religious" to firmly held beliefs that are unsupported by the facts, but would disagree as to the facts. And we would both not apply the "religious" adjective to ourselves.
The Paris Accord, by itself, cannot do nearly enough to avert disaster, but it was the best that could be done diplomatically (especially in the light of US domestic politics). As such, it's better than nothing. No question that the whole subject has become very toxic and politically polarised, and that people have hair-trigger responses that sometimes misfire.
Clearly the massive non-sequitur in the statement below is super interesting obfuscation: the article states that global warming is real, so how can you call it fake if you agree that it is real?
(quote) "Happy to agree with AGW but this is NOT what climate denial is about. This is why this article is fake." (end quote)
As I understand it this sleight of words is used just for the confusion, trying to get readers into fast-thinking less rational mode.
Then the money shot, delivered with no analysis, no model, and crucially, no evidence:
(quote) "And the evidence to me is clear, the best route is to not deal with it." (end quote)
We are not talking about climate warming, but its direct consequence which is climate disruption, a few degrees warming leading to much higher likelihood of extreme weather events, this has not been news since at least Katrina and the california drought & fires.
Not dealing with it is not an option when your house is burning. Implictly there is the hope that somebody else's house or lake gets hit, but for the US it's no dice, there are massive fragilities everywhere. (Jersey, NYC subway, ...)
Carbon gets gigantic subsidies, not just direct but also in military budgetting for oil supply protection.
Please go to www.realclimate.org
I don't doubt that there is a shit-ton of political trolling, which degrades discourse even if it does not persuade.