Wonderland Road Widening 4 to 6 lanes

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by TallerIsBetter

Molson Export wrote....


#47
Posted Aug 27, 2021, 11:16 AM


Quote:

>I take great issue with people trying to soft peddle the grave impact of climate change, simply to suit their own selfish interests.

And I take great issue with people assuming selfish intent rather than being motivated by scientific honesty and integrity.


> I do research on climate change, among other topics. I work with scientists who have spent decades researching the many effects that ACC is having on our ecology, from warming oceans, to bleaching coral reefs, from rising sea levels to retreating glaciers, from migrating species to mass extinctions. It is not an exaggerated threat in the slightest. It is not some distant prospect. It is the most grave threat facing humanity and the ecology. The consequences of of a business-as-usual approach will be devastating, ecologically, socially, and economically.

And, if you are honest, you'll acknowledge there is great deal of bad science going on in the ACC space, with a lot of funding that is up for grabs if you can even loosely tie your specialty to AGW. Again, if you look beyond the Summary For Policy Makers, you know there is nowhere near the pants/world on fire in the real peer reviewed work that is truly open to unbiased review. And you'll acknowledge that it is very hard to honestly and conclusively untangle Anthropogenic drivers from Natural drivers. And that adaptation has to be a factor, because even if you TACKLE CLIMATE CHANGE! (meaning AGW), there will always be Natural Climate drivers (that we are not even close to understanding).

>I understand the science. I hold a PhD and an MSc, and I have been a Professor at Western for 16 years.

Lol, so, of course, the solution is... Socialism!! Predictable.

I too have hefty cred but I'm not trotting it out in full sanctimonious glory. And I prefer to focus on discerning good science from bad, and on proportional solutions that balance good stewardship and harm reduction where it actually makes a difference with not destroying the economy with Degrowth.

What the hell are you talking about, tallerbetter? You have erroneously pigeon-holed me into some preconceived notion of an Academic. And your conclusions based on a cursory read of the climate change literature couldn't be more wrong. You really think that your layperson perspective, utterly lacking credible support, is more persuasive than the studies done by those that have spent decades researching the phenomenon from hundreds of different angles?

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

While it is undoubtedly true that there are natural cycles and variations in global climate, those like you who insist that current warming is purely natural — or even mostly natural — have two challenges.

First, you need to identify the mechanism behind this alleged natural cycle. Absent a forcing of some sort, there will be no change in global energy balance. The balance is changing, so natural or otherwise, we need to find this mysterious cause.

Second, you need to come up with an explanation for why a 35% increase in the second most important greenhouse gas does not affect the global temperature. Theory predicts temperature will rise given an enhanced greenhouse effect, so how or why is it not happening?

The mainstream climate science community has provided a well-developed, internally consistent theory that accounts for the effects we are now observing. It provides explanations and makes predictions. Where is the skeptic community’s model or theory whereby CO2 does not affect the temperature? Where is the evidence of some other natural forcing, like the Milankovich cycles that controlled the ice ages (a fine historical example of a dramatic and regular climate cycle that can be read in the ice core records taken both in Greenland and in the Antarctic)?



Is this graph a candidate for explaining today’s warming? A naive reading of this cycle indicates we should be experiencing a cooling trend now — and indeed we were gradually cooling over the length of the pre-industrial Holocene, around .5C averaged over 8,000 years.

Not only is the direction of the change wrong, but compare the speed of those fluctuations to today’s changes. Leaving aside the descents into glaciation, which were much more gradual, the sudden (geologically speaking) jumps up in temperature every ~100,000 years represent a rate of change roughly ten times slower what we are currently witnessing.

So could current changes be part of a natural cycle? Well, no natural cause has been identified. There is no climatological theory in which CO2 does not drive temperature. And natural cycle precedents do not exhibit the same extreme changes we’re now witnessing.

In other words, you are wrong. Contemporary climate change is mostly the result of human activities.

I won't waste anymore time discussing anything with you.