Is global warming even happening?
Is man-made CO2 causing it?
Will reducing man-made CO2 help?
Is the best way to mitigate this to stop emitting CO2, to research green tech, nuclear or to look into measures allowing us to live in a hotter world? And why? How is "best" defined?
Then you'll need impartical referees. When side D claims that no recent study shows that X is true, and side G says there is, who's right? What exhibits are allowed, and how?
But never the less, this form of debate exists and thrives, it's called peer-reviewed journals. Too bad that the climate debate is too much in a hurry to use them.
Even in the case where one side is clearly correct, I think its position can only be strengthened in the public eye if its arguments are compared to the best opposing arguments. Only if people assume the opposite can I see a good case for one sided propaganda, but I don't know of a good reason to assume this.
But we've just seen a couple of guys debate the next four year of one country in a very public way. It took them a year, not to reach any kind of common ground, much less agreement, but to get to the point where a few pct.pts. likes one guy better than the other. This was even made easy by pre-defining that there will only be two sides to the debate.
The climate debate discusses the future, not of one country, but of the entire earth, and if we end up on the side of the "alarmists", we're not trying again in 4 years - this is a 20-50 year plan.
So, yes, I agree with you, but my pragmatic practical side (the one that will not be allowed in a brainstorm session) argues that it's just not practical.
"Looking after yourself means everyone is looked after." Now beat me.
Why would the temperature today be the best for the people? Is there something about the current temperature, or is it just any kind of change from the current temp would cause so much chaos as to outweigh any benefits?
I guess if you wanted what was best for people, you'd want the temp that had the most arable land, right?
In general, a warmer climate is good for us. We're at a geological-historical climate high right now, and it comes with lots of available farm land and pleasant temperatures. Raising it yet further, beyond anything human beings have experienced previously, is projected to bring some good things (Canada will be a huge farm!) and some bad things (malaria will spread its range massively, large increase in hurricanes). Raising it rapidly, however, gets us lots of the latter immediately, and the benefits if any emerge much more slowly.
So should we really be afraid of global warming? On the balance, I think a controlled, intentional warming might be a good idea, although I have no idea who would have the authority to say so or execute on it. Is the current out-of-control, unintended warming dangerous? Almost certainly.
So there is this number, concept, or metric, called "climate". What is it? Debatable. Let's say it's average overall global temperature -- just for simplicity's sake. It's okay now, and it's always changing and that's okay too. We just need it to change at a slower rate than it is now.
How can we measure the change in an unknown/non-standard metric? Sure -- anecdotally, we can observe things like less sea ice in the Arctic, or the decrease in ice coverage around Antarctica, but correlation and causality are completely different things. We just kind of "connect the dots" to join up global climate change and observations. So there's a number out there, in the void, and it's bad enough now, but at the current rate it is changing it's going to be awful soon unless we act now.
Ignoring the details (which are murky, at least to me), we're still left with a version of the argument which says that "who are we to determine (or heck, measure for that matter) how fast the climate should change?" People in Canada and Russia have a lot of new farmland that could be put to use, the sooner the better.
I'm still not sure global warming beats the coming ice age. I am sure that the global climate is not something that we have anywhere near understanding or mastery over. But its an interesting discussion anyway.
- I don't really understand this whole "global warming" thing.
- Even climatologists, who do claim to at least understand global warming, don't have complete understanding of or mastery over the global environment.
- So despite the fact we are probably causing extremely rapid, geologically exceptional warming to levels not seen since before the dawn of mankind, we should do nothing. Climatologists who believe this warming will have large negative effects far outweighing the positive are wrong, or at least not certain enough to be right that we should act.
Implicitly this seems to be saying "One should only act with complete mastery, after achieving total understanding of the situation". That seems like it an overly heavy burden of proof to me, much heavier than you'd normally require of a claim. In fact, it would be completely paralyzing to require this level of proof in the general case, because almost never do we achieve either mastery or true understanding.
The argument I was examining was "who are we to decide?" I think it was answered nicely.
To respond:
Science is not about "a good feeling" about something. It is about mastery. Constructing a model that can be tested. I mean, just think about it -- when I drop a hammer, I can tell you each second how far away it is going to be, its velocity, and its momentum. It's complete mastery to our degree to measure. That's science.
I object to scientists becoming social activists, no matter what the cause. Social activism involves fear mongering, public opinion manipulation, politics, and "messages" instead of information. Science involves none of this, and if scientists continue to confuse their jobs and their art with others, then science will become cheap and politicized even more than it is today. We'll have "conservative" scientists and "liberal" scientists and each group will have the usual internet echo chambers to talk into. It's already heading that way.
As far as the chicken little, "why risk it?" argument, I'd refer you to Occam. We can either believe that the climate will continue along some course and the associated ecosystems will adapt as they always have or we can start adding all of these variable like sea level or ice cover and then draw some alarming conclusions. I like to KISS.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/ipccprocessillusion....
Also, the 20-page "executive summary" is voted on, line by line, by politicians, who (as politicians do) have every other motive than actually objectively figuring out the truth. We have politicians deciding which science is right. If that's not BS, I don't know what is.
While we can argue about the process behind the IPCC reports, your link smells of paranoia to me. For one, those politicians voting include reps from the oil-producing Gulf states and to think that they would be predisposed to wanting the finding to be that oil is bad seems far-fetched to me. I'm sure the representatives for the U.S. government wasn't exactly pushing to acknowledge global warming either.
Besides, I must argue with the basic premise of your comment. The politicians are the ones who get things done, and in the end they, just like everyone else, will have to choose what conclusions to draw from the science. Given that the IPCC is at least made up by an assembly of scientists who are trying to synthesize and summarize a whole body of research for those politicians, I think that's about as good a process as one can imagine. It's certainly better than deciding, apparently on their own, that the science on global warming is inconclusive like a certain outgoing US administration appears to have done.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9082151
But whether even that helps is another question.