- That ditch is full of trash. According to denialist logic, we should toss our trash into that ditch.
- People will always rob banks. According to denialist logic, we should all rob banks.
Of course China would have to do its part if we are to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But, what would be a more likely way of convincing them?
Lead by example? or
Have a urinating contest with them?
And I find it funny that so many skeptics claim to believe in God and yet want to use China as an excuse not to change their habits. When I face my maker, I doubt that He would be pleased if I were to use China as an excuse for my inaction.
Raisin Caine
Who said anything about starving yourself?
And who said anything about taking money away from education or feeding the poor?
Let us take your example and make raising taxes as 'X'. Raising taxes will not completely solve any environmental problem so let us just raise taxes. That makes real sense!
You greenies are like a bunch of monkeys with a football. A lot of movement to the ball but nothing is realistically happening that will benefit mankind.
You have to realize that if you sweep the dirt under the carpet, you are not really cleaning the house. You are just putting the dirt out of sight. IT IS STILL THERE IN YOUR HOUSE!
Then there is always the basic fact to your logic that you seem to disregard. CO2, which is considered a greenhouse gas, has never been proven to be detrimental to the Earth. In fact, quite the opposite. It has been proven that is does not control the temperature, a fact that you seem to ignore. But you still go on howling 'CALAMITY!' and ignoring real science, wanting to put people in jail for driving their car or cooking on a gas stove or even performing agriculture. Let us face it, your side is filled with power hungry kooks who have fed the populace with lie after lie and yet you want to reap the benefits of seemingly being honest.
PROVE THAT CO2 IS DETRIMENTAL TO THE EARTH FIRST. You haven't done even that small task and yet you want a full scale clamp down on honest individuals who are just trying to raise families and make their fellowman's life easier.
I would think following the IPCC science would be a good start for warmers. There are models that tell us what are the effects of various policies. If China is not reducing emissions, then emissions will not be reduced. Even know, global emissions are increasing despite substantial drops in the US and Europe.
It depends on the type of problem.
If it were a problem where 100 people were at risk of losing their lives and a partial solution would save 50 of them then we should go for it.
On the other hand, if your home is in danger of being flooded to a depth of two feet and you can reduce that to half by remortgaging then it is probably not worth it. It will cost the same to fix anyway.
It depends on the effect of the partial "solution". Lets say we can reduce our CO2 output, but it will cost the economy 1 trillion dollars a year over the next 10 years. Let's assume that is all additional expense over and above what our normal cost for electricity will be. Is it worth it?
The answer is dependent on many factors, including the perceived threat of AGW. But one thing it is also dependent upon is what this action will do globally. If low CO2 emitting solutions are perceived to be extremely expensive by the Chinese and Indians, they will likely not move towards these type of solutions. So a costly partial solution may have a more negative impact that no solution at all. Not to mention the fact that that money could be well spent in other areas.
The facts that the warmers do not like is that we have already put in place what we need to start a reduction. We are already down to 1995 CO2 emission levels with other problems like acid rain a thing of the past for the US. Solar cells are coming down in cost and soon it will be cost efficient to place solar panels on your house. Further we are requiring increase in fuel economy for car manufacturers. This will see a steady decline in CO2 emissions in the US. This is while China's economy is growing, ours is not growing and China is building a new coal power plant once a week.
The only way to proceed that is going to help China and India reduce their CO2 output is by making alternative power sources truly cost efficient. Otherwise it s a cost-risk analysis.
So, what is the risk??? Right now, I have only seen evidence of a 0.8 degree per century LINEAR increase. The is why I have proposed the solutions I have. They have the effect of overall bring down the cost of power in the US.
Hey Dook,
You and your Holocaust denier crap. You just further inform people of how unscientific some Warmers can be.
Climate Realist,
I doubt my maker would understand me starving myself because some people are starving in other locations either. Helping out is fine. Making a pretense of helping out, when you are not is just stupid.
Noah,
Do the right thing? How much money do what want to take away from education, feeding the poor, etc.??? LOL, your holier-than thou attitude is just as bad as the people you ridicule.
Edit:
Ahhh, so you do want to raise taxes. NO. You will never get my vote for your idiotically pathetic plans. You want to make everything cost more and think China will jsut follow along??? LOL, you will just show China that your alternatives are so bad that they HAVE to cost more. Way to tank our economy while increasing CO2 output. Get the vasoline ready, because people are ignorant enough to give the gov't more power to "service" us.
In everything it is best to calculate the cost of action compared to the benefits, spending trillions and losing jobs and damaging the economy without be able to reduce CO2 is just plain stupid
The U.S. has a balance of payments deficit 379billion, China for the first time has not got a surplus, but it is not in debt either
My EX wife once told our then 8 year old that "When the other person gets mad, you have won the argument." She used the most illogical and nonfactual ones to easily get me mad.
Some people just shoot out bogus ideas, as if landing the most blows wins.
In contrast, as a practicing engineer, I knew the purpose of a scientific argument is to find the truth.
If we all landed on a brand new planet, would we string miles of telephone lines or would we go directly to cell phones? Would we set up massive coal burning power generating plants or would we move directly to solar and wind to the greatest extent possible? Would we establish massive flood irrigation systems or would we install drip irrigation? Would we bulldoze coastal swamps and sand dunes away that we now know prevent massive flooding during large scale storms due to storm surge? Would we fill the atmosphere with toxic gases and heavy metals and dump toxic chemicals into our drinking water and would we actually 'pave Paradise and put up a parking lot'? No we wouldn't. Why? Because we actually know better!
China is already a toxic wasteland. Even they know it, yet the morons running that country are spending billions on a bigger armed force. Our morons are doing the same thing and the oil and coal mafias are rubbing their hands in the anticipation of greater profits because their propaganda works... there's no money for change, but plenty of money for new tanks and ships. Entrenched interests run by lunatics are killing the world we live in. The temperature hasn't risen! Of course not...the added heat index has gone to warm sea water and melt ice. Didn't these deniers EVER take 6th grade science? Heat moves from warm to cold. Of course that's science from actual scientists, not bull #$%^ from some right wing radio dummy.
Conclusion: Doing the right thing is never the wrong thing. We need to get rid of the entire GOP/Tea/Fox/Jesus freak party, put a gun to the head of the oil and coal mafias and take charge of reality. Time is running out. Doing nothing isn't a option.
False Dilemma fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilem...
You are absolutely right, taking the right action is or should never be dependant on what anyone else does. However, most of us don't believe you are right about the problem much less that your solution would solve the problem you think exist.
First problem is that you must prove there is a problem. There is no real world evidence that humanity is causing AGW. None. It's nothing more than some concocted theory on paper.
I ask you this: If capitalist western societies are polluting the world less than developing industrialized communist and socialist societies then why are you AGW cultists attacking the less polluting capitalist societies rather than the most polluting socialist societies? I know the answer. It's not because developed capitalist societies pollute less it's because they are capitalist societies.
In several fields, I have seen arguments made that boil down to "X will not completely solve the problem, so we shouldn't do X". For example, variations of "China's emitting more greenhouse gasses than the US, so the US cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions won't solve global warming by itself, so we shouldn't do it"
Does anyone besides me see the massive flaw in that argument? What's the best way to explain to people making this kind of argument that they're wrong? Any other thoughts?
When dealing with people who are more interested in arguing against something than observing basic honesty, using basic common sense, or learning the first thing about the subject, it is at best a waste of time to wonder about what the "best way" might be to "explain" to them that there are "massive flaws" in one of their arguing points, especially if they have hundreds of them (so many that by the time they contradict themselves, even they themselves have forgotten the prior contradictory "reasoning.")
It was different 30-40 years ago, when there was still room for skepticism on the basic reality and seriously negative risks of global climate change change. Deniers of the fundamental science now are not skeptics, none of them ever will be without abandoning denial. They are not people groping for arguments, they are people who have been duped, willingly or subconsciously, knowingly or out of ignorance, by a massive campaign of anti-science disinformation to which half of the U.S. Congress has found it politically and financially convenient to adhere. Or they are actively and consciously seeking to become part of that campaign.
I used to wonder why historians are almost never willing to debate Holocaust deniers. That denial is more widespread than most people realize. It is easily found all over Yahoo Answers, for instance. There are tons of websites now devoted to it. Of course, it is rife with illogic, sleight of hand trickery, dishonesty and silly ignorance copying silly ignorance. But, in a more public forum, what nearly always happens is that the deniers are either ignored, or shunned, or denounced and exposed as deniers. Almost no one takes them time to really examine their "arguments" point by point, although there a few such rebuttals (weaker analogs to skepticalscience.org). I used to think, isn't refusing to debate the Holocaust deniers, banning their speakers from college campuses, etc., liable to support their claim of being "censored" by an Zionist conspiracy? I now realize that when dealing with hard-cord denial, denunciation is more important than arguing point by point, because, even most bystanders aren't really interested in a detailed point by point analysis. They just want to know, who's right in the end. The more than both deniers and non-deniers accept the deniers' framing of the situation, as a "debate" where "all voices deserve to heard," the more the bystanders are encouraged to think that the truth lies in the middle somewhere.
If your gobs of "surveys" here show anything, they show what most would have guessed anyway: that very few posts here at YA involve people with minds that aren't already basically made up.
I could see a potential value in this question if it were framed as "what's the best way to explain to non-deniers the flaw in the following argument."?
If we proposed to remove government control and taxes as the solution, alarmists would be screaming bloody murder. That indicates to me that they aren't really serious about AGW. They are only serious about socialism.
X= **** math
