"So why not prevent future problems by enforcing regulations that will ultimately benefit us?"
Quote from the UN's Own "Agenda 21": "Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level."
This is going to benefit you? How? Give us your plan. I would like to see your rational plan. I am not for having my grandchildren forced into slavery, just to be safe. Do you really think that is rational?
Quote by Tom McElmurry, meteorologist, former tornado forecaster in Severe Weather Service: “Governmental officials are currently casting trillions down huge rat hole to solve a problem which doesn’t exist....Packs of rats wait in that [rat] hole to reap trillions coming down it to fill advocates pockets....The money we are about to spend on drastically reducing carbon dioxide will line the pockets of the environmentalists....some politicians are standing in line to fill their pockets with kick back money for large grants to the environmental experts....In case you haven’t noticed, it is an expanding profit-making industry, growing in proportion to the horror warnings by government officials and former vice-presidents.”
Realize just who is getting rich and powerful from this obvious scam. You see a lot of snake oil was sold just on that same basis. "IT CAN'T HURT." and "BETTER TO BE SAFE THAN SORRY."
The precautionary principle is not very sensible for various reasons:
As Roy Spencer pointed out recently, it is like shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre when there is no fire.
Surely that is a classic example of the precautionary principle in action? If you yell Fire and then everyone will get out of the dangerous place and so they will not be trapped. In reality, you also need to consider the unnecessary disruption to people's lives and the possibility of people being injured or worse as they rush for the fire exits.
Some people say it is like an insurance policy and ask if you have house insurance. Well, I could insure your home for, say, $1,000,000. If you so much as scratch the paint I would pay out. Only one claim per year would be considered. What is not to like? By the way, the premium will be $2,000,000 per month, payable in advance. You may think this is silly but how much will it cost to implement the precautionary principle? If you don't know think again about why this sounds silly.
As Ian is suggesting, how many other problems should we be considering when using the precautionary principle? Martian invasion? Asteroid hit? Moon leaving orbit and messing with the tides? Earth spltting in half down the mid-Atlantic ridge? Ants taking over the world? All the people in China jumping up at the same time?
How many trillions should we spend on each one? What are the most likely problems? Are there any problems that already exist that it would be better to spend the money on?
Climate Change has been happening for 4.5 billion years. The last couple of hundred is no different as far as I can tell. Global Warming is what happens between spells of Global Cooling. That has happened since the world began as well.
It is not even as warm now as the previous highs. Look at the Minoan Warming period in the graph. We still have a way to go. It isn't even as warm as the average over the last 10,000 years. The alarmists like to claim that their opponents cherry-pick timescales. Then they always choose a timescale that occurs in that last little up-tick at the right hand end of the graph.
The harm is cost. And by that I mean if people are forced to buy new clean technology that is not yet developed enough to be cheap when there are dirty old technologies that are cheap, it is the same as taking money from people. If you are poor that is possibly the difference between being homeless and having a home. If you are middle class it is possible the difference between sending your children to college or sending them to work right after high school.
Lucky for us clean technology will likely become cheap enough soon enough. Solar panels for example are already cheap enough, and the amount of solar electricity generated in the USA is doubling every 2 years. It is now half a percent of total, and doubling every 2 years would mean in 14 years it could generate over 50% of our electricity. In other words we have reached a tipping point on solar power. You may not notice it yet (just like most people don't notice climate change yet), but we have.
I think that is a very bad argument that should not be made by anyone interested in preventing climate change.
If it were false it would be foolish to spend money on what are fairly extreme measures to prevent it. While we will be moving away from fossil fuels over the next couple hundred years, but the process would be greatly sped up if we were actively trying to do anything about climate change (which we're not).
Reducing, reusing and recycling are valuable things to do anyway, but they will not be the primary means of preventing climate change. That's more about moving away from coal-fired power plants.
As for cutting down on 4x4 cars, the emphasis should not be on changing people's lifestyles, but changing what results from them. If you go around telling people they need to change how they live, you're not going to make any progress.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. They cannot prove CO2 is causing the warming, that warming is causing bad weather, that X is the right amount of CO2, that reducing the amount of CO2 to X will have a positive effect, or that the negative effects of the proposed "solution" will be out weighed by the benefits.
Its all about the economy and politics, if everything anti-climate change was banned tomorrow, hundreds of thousands of companies would go bankrupt, stock shares would plummet and to put it all into sense everybody would blame the government sometimes causing riots / looting etc.
All in all in the short term it would devastate the world. And I think that the world should slowly implement more efficient and money making ways of stopping global warming.
And I completely agree with you, in the best case scenario we as a race could have just diverted a forthcoming apocalyptic future if we stop climate change. And in the worst case scenario climate change could just be a lie, or a misinterpretation or something beyond human control but so what? We would live in a more efficient, cleaner and most importantly healthier society if we adapted our ways to suit climate change even if climate change was just a myth!
Hope this helped. :)
So you want to spend even more money? We've already poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the man-made Global Warming scam over the past 30 years and all we've got for that money so is a bunch of climate models that are totally wrong.
How long do Warmists get to prove their theory? Do they need another 30 years? Maybe another 100 years ---- how long? Why have all their predictions been wrong?
Do you have no mercy on the taxpayer? Do you have no concept of the good that could have been done with all of that money? Warmists have been screeching for more than 30 years that the global is going to warm out of control, but what is ACTUALLY happening?
The world is COOLING --- even with CO2 levels the highest they have been for thousands of years (according to Warmists). http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut...
Do you want to continue to scare little kids into sleepless nights for a HOAX?
Frank, wake up and smell the coffee, there is no man-made Global Warming.
Top climate scientists say there is no man-made Global Warming.
The Great Global Warming Swindle
Because it is expensive. The measures lead to higher energy bills and less jobs.
Also, it leads to less quality of life. People like 4x4 cars, and you wish to take them away.
Because the costs of unnecessary action are very high.
Hmm I don't know if this man is a good man or a mass murderer, we better execute him just in case.
You need to evaluate,
1 do we have a problem
2 what solutions are available
3 what probability are that the solutions will work
4 what will be the cost
5 what will be the benefits
Nobody has done that because it is all about politics not the climate
Being safe involves shifting away from fossil fuels, and this, if done, would cost fossil fuel companies trillions of dollars in future revenues. So they help people lie about the science, to pretend that climate change is no problem, and they fund politicians who repeat those lies and vote against doing anything.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/opinio...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-mckib...
U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 2010:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record...
“Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpine...
“Choices made now about carbon dioxide emissions reductions will affect climate change impacts experienced not just over the next few decades but also in coming centuries and millennia…Because CO2 in the atmosphere is long lived, it can effectively lock the Earth and future generations into a range of impacts, some of which could become very severe.”
“The Academy membership is composed of approximately 2,100 members and 380 foreign associates, of whom nearly 200 have won Nobel Prizes. Members and foreign associates of the Academy are elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research; election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a scientist or engineer.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_...
http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/...
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/timel...
http://www.amazon.com/Rough-Climate-Chan...
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument...
I don't understand why, regardless of whether one believes man is contributing towards the global climate change or not, anyone would refute safety measures that are ultimately going to be beneficial for our planet. There are two possibilities:
1) Climate change and global warming IS taking place. In which case we should definitely be taking global measures to reduce the process and sustain our planet for as long a period as possible.
2) Climate change and global warming ISN'T taking place. Regardless of whether or not it is happening at *this* moment in time, it WILL happen. So why not prevent future problems by enforcing regulations that will ultimately benefit us? Why would anyone be against reducing, reusing and recycling? Or preventing gas emissions by cutting down on 4x4 cars? Is it simply a matter of greed and an incapability to compromise?
If I had an ingrown toenail I could take some measures to cure it.
However, if I had any doubt about those measures, I could simply amputate my leg because it's better safe than sorry.
You cant stop the climate . Try something small like waves
on a lake or stopping the wind from blowing .
It's already too late to stop global warming. With the amount of CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere, it would keep warming at an accelerated rate for at least the next 5000 years, even if we stopped polluting today. All that's left is damage control; moving people out of threatened areas, fortifying our infrastructure for extreme weather, and trying to stop things from getting bad any faster. Doing those things would require changing how we get energy and food, and a lot of corporations would lose money.
There can be no harm in taking precautions to prevent AGW. To prevent AGW, we need to do exactly what we will need to do when we run out of oil; develop new energy sources.
People resist AGW and its solutions for two reasons.
1. People are afraid that they will not be able to heat or light their homes, even though all these things can be done with clean energy.
2. There is the propaganda campaign fueled with resource industry money.
Humans are less than 200000 years from being apes, very few have yet evolved the ability to see before they existed or to understand that life will continue after they are gone. It is up to those who have evolved the ability to understand what has happened to try to turn this ship around.
Climate change is a fact. However countries and corporations are too interested in the amount of money they are receiving to enforce any laws or regulations. There's also the rich oil tycoons who are too interested for their own lives then the future of the planet. Nothing is ever going to happen until there is none left.
I know. I keep telling people we should spend trillions on defending against the Martian invasion. I mean, what's it going to hurt if we spend trillions and the Martians don't invade? Besides a few collapsed economies, high taxes on the poor and middle class, entrenched poverty, less money to spend on infrastructure and the like, I can't really think of anything that bad. But if the Martians do invade, we'll be ready. So really, it's a win/win to spend trillions defending against the Martians.
Because oil companies bought congress and measures to stop global warming cut into their profits
