Is it not safer to be wrong on reacting as if the threat of global warming is real? If the science really is wrong, as the 16 say, then all that happened was we spent a lot of money and time needlessly, and maybe we get some new technology out of it. If we chose to ignore the climate crisis and argue about whether or not it is real for ever and do nothing we could make our species extinct. Seems like an obvious choice to me, go extinction! If we can't make the right choice on this issue we should move aside and let the next dominant animal rule the world. Roaches, it's your time!
I think you're correct in pointing out that it's not a clear-cut question. That's partly because it's not one single question. As I perceive it, it breaks down to four questions, each with an increasing level of disagreement: A: Humans are pumping lots of CO2 into the atmosphere. B: Global temperatures are rising. C: Item A is causing Item B. D: Rising Global Temperatures will have disastrous effects, such as shutting down the Atlantic Conveyor.
I don't think there's much disagreement about Item A, but there's a lot more disagreement about Item D. I'm pleased to see that these scientists seem to be mostly questioning item D only.
As for me personally, I have little doubt about items A-C, but I'm still undecided about item D. I certainly don't see much of anything positive about rising global temperatures, and I personally think its a technologico-economic growth opportunity to combat it, but I'm not certain that the future consequences are as dire as Northern Europe freezing over.
You folks are defeating yourself by questioning the obvious. The ice fields are melting back, and have been for around 200 years. The globe is warming. Much of the historic data is not particularly reliable, of course, and even the modern data suffers from a mixture of effects from local but protracted changes such as heat island effects, deforestation, and the like. But the CO2 greenhouse driving function is clearly there, like it or not. It is just physics. The rest of the question is what other effects, natural and manmade, are amelorating/enhancing this. In fact you may note that the effects of CO2 and airborn particulates may be a major balance in avoiding the much larger greenhouse originally predicted for the CO2 increase alone. And including all the effects of water vapor/clouds/rain/ocean and fresh water surfaces, absorption and sequestration of CO2, man that is a dificult whole world calculation. Tripply dificult when you attempt to get from local weather to global and back again. Water world anyone???
Again you are putting words in my mouth. My use of the term "contraception" implies all methods, including pharmaceutical, barrier, spermicidal, anti-implantation, etc. The overarching idea is that since population is driving the environmental destruction, the logical first line of action is population control. Also, any method to prevent pregnancy, including the methods you cite, is "contracepting" (to use your term), and I don't know about divorce rates as a function of methods used, but I suspect that is far more dependent on socio-economic issues than upon method used (e.g. the method used may depend stronbly on socio-economic status, thus tainting the statistics).
I don't much care about method so long as the method is effective, reliable and usable by a particular population. Education is also critical. The biggest threat to families is poverty (which, for example, forces husbands to work hundreds of miles from their families in parts of Africa), food and water shortages (which forces refugeeism), and wars, not divorce (which seems to be a largely Western concept). Children suffer far more if their developing brains and bodies are malnourished and developmental milestones are missed than if one of their parents is absent.
If you search for effectiveness of Sympto-thermal, Billings Ovulation or Creighton methods of natural family planning, you'll find large peer-reviewed studes that confirm effectiveness rates in the 98 to 99+ percentage range. Calendar rhythm was obsolete many years ago yet critics still quote its poor effectiveness as the only example of NFP. Concerning family destruction, the divorce rate among NFP users is a few percent, versus the high percentage of the general public (most of which is contracepting). The sexual frequency (per cycle) of NFP users was found to be the same as contraceptors. And there are many contraceptive side effects, like breast cancer, heart attack, right down to weight gain.
The choice is not between contraceptives and starvation, any more than your choices of computer operating system are only Windows and Mac. You can use something open source, safe, effective, and inexpensive, but nobody has heard of it. I like both NFP and Linux!
I was not suggesting abortion as a solution to overpopulation. I was suggesting education and making contraceptive technologies available (there are many non-pharmeceutical methods available).There is no reliable "natural" birth control method unless you count sterility caused by infectious disease or accident. The "rhythm method" is statistically guaranteed to fail about once every 6 months (which is why they call people who use this method "parents") and abstenance is not realistic.
As to your assertion about destructiveness to families, what can be more destructive to a family than having more mouths than the parents (and environment) can possibly feed? Already there are refugee crises in many parts of the world because people cannot raise enough crops locally, so they move to where they think they can. The problem is that virtuall all the arable land in the world is already being cultivated (with the limiting factor often being water supply), so refugees strain the local food and water supply where they move, leading to wars. That sounds pretty destructive to me.
We can control population with contraception or we can let it control itself with starvation and war. The former seems by far the most intelligent and humane way (and least destructive to families) to me.
The third world does not need contraception and abortion, which is destructive to families and makes them dependent on pharmaceuticals. There are several methods of natural family planning which are safe and highly effective. Yes, effective, despite the lies told by the drug/abortion cartel. The money they save could be used for clean water and prenatal care.
"Only a handful of experts really understand this complex problem." Really? Am I the only one to notice PhDs are wrong from time to time? Many years ago an EE prof spent an hour explaining why sat dishes could be no smaller than 5 meters in diameter due mainly to thermal noise in the transistors. The Chairman of the Fed Reserve a few years back explained why a housing collapse could never occur. Dr Langly explained in 1903 why manned heavier than air craft could never be build without a huge change in technology only proved to be wrong by a couple of non experts a few months later. Endless evidence abounds the expert opinions can not be trusted, yet so many treat their utterings as coming from God himself. My own non PhD opinion means little except for the people whose lives can end suddenly if I screwup in an equipment design in an airplane. In short any claim of expertise in any field should be taken with a very large grain of salt. No exceptions anywhere.
I'm not suggesting that the bottle experiment is an exact replication of atmospheric events, only that it shows a positive temperature coefficient. Re the plants, no one suggests that plants do well without CO2, but in this case it was about increases of CO2, and it showed that plant did really well, so well in fact that they had enough energy to spare hat they made poisons. Researchers also found that at the CO2 levels that will be apparent. In 40 years wheat may not have enough protein to be used imaging bread. So wit protein in our food dropping and sugar increasing (yes plant make more sugars in a high CO2 environment ) we can look towards getting fatter. It will make easier to sit back in our arm chairs and say it isn't happening.
This is one more area where a bunch of people who have another agenda are playing with data to make it fir their conclusions. It does seem that quite a few of the temperature recording stations fail to meet the basic standard for location away from things that woud affect the temperature measurement. So it is fairly clear that without good data it is hard to draw correct conclusions. That sad reality has been verified in industry a few times. And how much should data be manipulated? "Windowing" and "binning" and other techniquestend to force the fit somewhat, and they are probably dependant upon the desired results, as well. My point is that good data does not need to be manipulated: just plot all of the points and see what the graoh looks like. A wide band can certainly indicate a trend, although it will have trouble producing high resolution results.
Has anybody considered that perhaps global warming causes more carbon dioxide to be produced? If the "green house gasses reflect heat back to the earth, do they also reflect incident heat from outside the earth's atmosphere? Andis it possible that the trend in sunspot activity being different this past cycle could indicate that the sun is putting out more energy? How long have scientists been able to measure the incident energy to 0.1% accuracy? And have they been measuring it at all?
There are a whole lot of hard questions that must be adequately answered before we should accept that we must surrender our way of life.
Of course it is always a good idea to be efficient in our energy useage, and always right to avoid polluting the place, and it is always good to conserve resources. But I don't want to live in a cave and eat rocks, so there needs to be some compromise.
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