The sad part of all this is that the climate change issue serves to further strengthen the unshakeable faith conservatives have in the conservative media, which tells them that the warming is all a lie and so on.
Meanwhile the conservative media is really just corporate PR and therefore totally unreliable.
I don't watch conservative media and I wouldn't classify myself as a conservative, but I'm uncertain about global warming too. We have trouble predicting the weather in general, and trying to predict long-term weather patterns is even harder, especially since we don't have any proven models. And then to place the place primarily on humans has me very skeptical.
Are we killing all the fish in the world? Yes.
Are we extincting a lot of animals? Yes.
Are we consuming a lot of resources? Maybe - depends on your definition of consume.
So, we definitely make a huge impact, but I haven't seen clear evidence that our CO2 emissions are heating up the planet.
Fine, I am not going to tell you what to think or what to believe. It seems to me that we are in a warming phase, what with the ice melting in many places around the world and all.
In my opinion, the media isn't anything near to 100% trustworthy. The conservative media takes advantage of the failings of the Lame Stream Media to encourage the Ditto Heads to trust only the conservative media, which as I have pointed out is far less accurate and reliable than the regular kind.
I do believe the Earth has been warming. But, it's been doing that for 20,000 years since the last ice age (with a slight pause for the little ice age between 1550 and 1850). So, I differentiate Global Warming from warming globally. Do I think that humans contribute? Well, I believe so. But, believe is different than scientific evidence. Do I feel that we're a major contributor? That's where even my belief ends because I do not have a way to guess about that.
The claim that CO2 emissions means that the Earth's temperature is going to rise is a very simplistic view. While CO2 temperatures do seem to historically match up with temperatures in core samples there is no way to say that's there a causative effect. It could just be correlation. The models all presume it's causative though, when it could be that there's an underlying reaction that raises temperatures and creates CO2 simultaneously so that the two are normally increased as the same rate as each other.
And I'm not excluding CO2 as a green house gas, but the atmosphere has many other chemicals in it that are also. Some of the gasses in the atmosphere trap heat (absorb and radiate) and some reflect heat. Water vapor is a good example of a very powerful green house gas that is many times more potent than CO2. It's also important to note that CO2 only comprises .039% of the atmosphere (by volume), whereas water vapor is much, much higher (as high as 4% in some parts of the atmosphere).
So it's very difficult to know how the complicated and layered mixture of our atmosphere is affected by inputs from our chemical releases, our deforestation, our farming (both land and sea) and from solar input. It's a gigantic differential equation and sadly we don't know the interrelations of the variables or even what all the variables are.
I've looked at the scientific evidence so far and I'm not convinced. And saying, "well, you'll be convinced when we destroy the Earth" has the same impact on me when a religious person tries to debate and says, "well, tell God you're an Atheist when you're in Hell." If we're going to make a large scale change to our habits based on an unverified belief then we could end up doing a lot more harm than if we continued uninhibited.
It seems reasonable to me to suspect that greenhouse gases are related to global warming, but the climate is very complex as you have pointed out.
I think that since the supply of fossil fuels is finite, it makes good sense to explore alternative sources of energy. I think the US should lead the world in energy technology. Furthermore I can't think of a good reason to continue to buy Arab Oil, as steamed likes to say, or even American sources of fossil fuel if we can find alternatives.
Well, the problem is that it's very hard to direct an economy without hurting it. And sadly petroleum is a very cheap energy source. As the price of petroleum goes up though it will definitely drive us to other fuel sources. I'm very excited about the solar tower they're going to make in Arizona though. I don't see any good alternatives though for fueling cars. Batteries are terribly inefficient and ultra-capacitors are very dangerous (and awesome!).
Maude_Lynne
Is the government caving to oil interests? Nah, that would be - what? crazy? business as usual?