Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Greenpeace.org nominated for Webby-Awards

Don, you sure can be annoying sometimes. I posted the link to Crichton's talk without comment precisely because I didn't have the time nor inclinitation to track down and evaluate much of the details he gave, but did find his main point of great interest and relevance. (Jonathan did a good job on why above.) You need not ascribe stupidity nor foolishness to me because of that.

Talli, if you were actually as smart as you seem to like to think you are you'd be less obtusely condescending and snide. At least Don tries to stick in substantial helpings of real facts and relevant argument.

I'm not a scientist, nor do I play one on TV, so just one point: My understanding is that it's a known scientific fact, not open to any reasonable doubt whatesoever, proven via many indepent tree ring studies and correlated with various other temperature records, that over recorded history, the climate used to be both substantially warmer and substantially colder than it is now. If as far as we know a warmer climate didn't cause disaster during the "medieval climate optimum" - and we know it didn't - then a similarly warmer climate now probably isn't going to cause disaster either.

Seems to me we basically don't know squat about how the climate really works right now. And since this is one of various fairly serious risks to the human civilization and species, we should learn, fast. But deciding what your answers are going to be before you do the science generally doesn't help.

We need more honest science, less politicization of science. Crackpots are generally not a problem, their results are unreproducable and thus shown to be worthless. Ignoring whether or not there are any results at all to try to reproduce, that's a problem! That's what happens when scientists prostitute their scientific integrity to further political ends, and that is of real concern.

Patrick is correct, the "global warming" movement is a farce and has been for a long time. The various gloom and doom models have all been junk. None of them could correctly reproduce any known period of climactic history given the initial conditions, so why the heck would you think they can accurately predict the future? On the real world side, yeah, things seem to have gotten warmer this century. So what? Far as anybody can tell we're still a lot cooler than other periods in the historical record. (Then add in all the rest of the arguments, accusations of junk science, etc., etc.)

Isn't it interesting though, that some folks above whose smarts I otherwise respect seem convinced of just the opposite? Of course none of us can read everything and at least partly by necesssity, we do filter our own inputs in ways keeping with our current internal models...

Try to keep that in mind folks, I do try to remind myself. I strongly doubt that any of us, even, [cough], myself are the "enlightened ones" who achieved all their most opinions and beliefs solely through calm, unbiased, rational analysis, unlike the many other blind sheep around them. Sorry, far as I know, the human animal just ain't built that way.

(Of course I personally just happened to lucky enough to be indoctrinated the right way... [grin] Possibly a pernicious by-product of the particular reading I did as a kid...)

There is real, empirical, verifiable truth in the world, and science is our means to determine it. But doing so is hard. Spin, lies, and accusations of heresy are all easier - and must be avoided and guarded against, preferably a whole lot better than they seem to be right now.