re: News: AlgaeTec showcase facility visit fr...
Goodness gracious, open your eyes!
The times when the planet is warmest are the times it is lovely, fertile, alive, comfortable. When it's colder it's a far less hospitable planet. Obviously if you want to cherry pick your locations on the planet you can find exceptions, but on the whole, a warmer planet is a more productive and alive one. Is there more life at the equator or the poles? Take a walk from the south coast of Australia to the north coast and see how much more alive, fertile and productive the place is. There are plenty of people who will say that global warming is a good thing (though yes, they're far outnumbered by the people who say it's bad, although then again, most of them are so blind that they believe the climate isn't supposed to change at all).
Models which are reliable? Heh heh heh. Take a look at science history and see how accurate their predictions of high confidence turn out to be. One thing scientists are notoriously awful with is overconfidence in their predictions. Science tends to be great in terms of identifying facts, but shocking in terms of predictions. This is something they even teach you about as a science student!
Dazed: You say I'm a champion of the don't worry about it brigade! Wow! You flatter me, but it's strange that you say I'm in the don't worry about it camp when I also expect civilisation to end or be severely beaten around within my natural lifetime. You clearly don't understand global climate if you think that the warmer times in prehistory have been so severe that civilisation would be impossible! Goodness, they are the lovely times. The really horrible times are the cold ones, and if we manage to avoid them by keeping the place warm we're doing ourselves a massive favour (looking at the natural climate patterns we're due for a really horrible, nasty cold spell which would make your worst case scenario of global warming look beautiful). It's utterly peculiar that you think that natural climate change is severe enough to make civilisation unworkable! So you think that without human influence, the natural cycles are that hostile? Crikey! We're all doomed anyway! Of course, the times I'm talking about were nothing in terms of making civilisation impossible or even all that difficult, and as extreme as they were it was fairly recent.
...and I'm being asked for proof that in the last few hundreds of millions of years there has been greater rates of climate change than at present? You seriously must be kidding me. We've seen an obsolutely negligible little bit of climate change in the last 200 years. Even in the previous one or two thousand years we had comparable rates of climate change, and you're suggesting that the planet could have been no less stable than that through its entire previous few hundreds of millions of years? Honestly, that's literally as ridiculous as suggesting at 10am that since the temperature had risen three degrees since 9am that it will continue to rise three degrees per hour and we're all going to be dead some time tomorrow. The whole climate change argument is exactly like that. The entire period of human history is the tiniest little blip of time, and that's all we've directly observed. It's like trying to learn about the yearly cycle of seasons by looking at the information you gathered in a few seconds of a single day. Sure, you're going to see a trend, but it could just be that a cloud came over or the sun came up or the wind changed from easterly to northerly. If you waited a few hours you'd see a clear trend, but if you waited a few more hours you'd see a reversal. If you waited a full day you might guess it was a cycle. If you waited a few days you'd notice there was definitely a 24 hour cycle and then you'd notice a trend (either to warmer or cooler) which would very likely have nothing to do with the time in the yearly cycle. Waiting a few months you'd notice an obvious overall trend, and you wouldn't work out that it was a cycle for most of a year. It's just amazing how severely misunderstood this topic is. If you are capable of believing that the climate has never changed at a faster rate than at some period in the last two hundred years I'd like to sell you some magic beans.
Oh, and the 'smoking gun' figure (was it necessary to condescendingly suggest I wouldn't be able to understand it without your help?). My goodness, if your evidence is so weak that you're going to use a figure based on all of *two* data points as your smoking gun... well, what can you say? That is cherry picking results at its absolute finest. It's as ridiculous as me taking two individual temperature readings, seeing a difference and assuming the same rate of change over time will continue. Two data references and that's your smoking gun. Are you serious? Two reference points? You haven't even begun to establish a trend over that period, let alone gained information you could possibly use to extrapolate anything from, or even anything which says anything about cause and effect. You identified some differences between 1970 and 1996. Oh no, let's all run away. What if in 2001 the readings were reversing a little? What if in 2006 they were reversing more? What if in 2011 they were constant? What if what if? We just don't know, and two reference points alone are useless, surely you know that.
Okay, so while your figure itself is meaningless, yep, what you're trying to say about it (or at least, what the article and the articles it refers to claim) is that there is evidence that the planet has a greenhouse effect. Well slap me silly and call me Daisy. We've all known for a long time. That was known before I was born. This figure says something qualitative but nothing functionally quantitative, so basically, it says nothing new and nothing useful, it's just a cute figure. Greenhouse gas levels have well and truly exceeded current levels naturally many times over hundreds of millions of years and the planet is still here thriving with life. There are many stabilising mechanisms which keep things within certain levels. If things warm up we get various effects which eventually cool the planet and the planet cools down again. If we cool the planet it can retain more heat and we warm up again. If carbon dioxide levels increase we get a higher absorbion of it from plants and algae (heh, algae, sort of topical here) and other aquatic vegetation and levels decrease. The doomsday models and predictions are the ones that get the funding and publicity. If your newspaper says we might have a small problem and mine says there's going to be a catastrophe mine will be the one that sells. If we say everything will be fine in terms of weather, an earthquake or whatever and it isn't we can be in lots of trouble (we saw a big case of that recently) but if we say 'prepare for the worst' and everything is fine we're okay. If you actually research this stuff properly rather than just blindly following what the media and internets tell you, it's usually clear that the climate change 'scientists' are just peddling their story to get more funding for their labs and to gain publicity. Many believe that their stories are possible and no doubt many of them are as alarmed as they say others should be, but the story is not being told realistically or objectively.
I agree that this topic is probably beyond the scope of AEB, but you can't ask me questions about it without expecting answers, and it's odd to say we shouldn't discuss it then discuss it yourself and ask me to continue :P
Repeatedly here (and everywhere!) we get the tired old "But what if? What if you're wrong? What if climate change is going to kill us? If climate change doesn't kill us but we do something anyway it won't hurt, but if it is going to kill us and we do nothing we all die" and many similar arguments which are not at all objective ways to find fact. They're perhaps reasons to take out insurance, but not reasons to believe something is true. However, if you're right and climate change is going to kill us unless we do something, well, climate change is going to kill us, because our absolute best efforts now would be a tiny drop in the bucket, so you'd better hope I'm right!
AEB Price at posting:
25.0¢ Sentiment: Sell Disclosure: Not Held
