You’re my kind of neighbor! 
The trouble is, Jim, is that you seem to be saying “wait.” We can’t afford to do that any more. It is not an option. Even if there were only a 50% chance of science being right (which there isn’t - we’re getting asymptotically-close to 100%), it would be immoral not to act as if it were true. There may be no second bite at this particular apple.
Oh please stop moralising in this thread!
Who’s moralising! It’s all just opinions, Hans.
That’s right. It’s always easy (and cheap) for obstructionists to move the goalposts. First the study is objectionable because it lacks peer review. Faced with evidence of ample review, it’s objectionable until the entire scientific community reaches error-free consensus. Given that, it’s objectionable until the broad intellectual community removes any trace of policy-directed motivation. Given that, it’s objectionable until the social policy debate is no longer “highly charged”. At which point you’re up to your neck in crisis, fingers still planted firmly in your ears. La la la la …
I don’t see anything obstructionist in jim stone’s post. Ideas have been floated about with the idea to block out some of the sun’s rays by creating a sunshade on orbit to stop climate change. Pumping CO2 into the ground has also been mentioned. Most if not all non-harmful behavior changes have more than one reason to encourage. We are burning a non-renewable commodity. If global warming is a reason for changing your habits, then you have not been paying attention. We are lucky that we now know how to make plastic from corn. Peak oil production has passed.
My opinion, jim stone is looking for information, I respect this. Any motivations other than that seem contrary to his history of posting.
But I am no mind reader, jim stone can speak for himself.
You’re not supposed to see it. Well-executed obfustication is supposed to seem transparent. 
Nah, I’m not into obfuscating. As far as I can tell, Global Warming is real, human activities are
making at the least a significant contribution and we ought to address them. I haven’t studied this
stuff well enough to be certain of anything, but obviously there is near consensus that it’s true
and, until I learn otherwise, that’s good enough for me.
That the temperature will go up nearly 8 degrees F in 50 years is another matter. As I write this
I will bet the ranch that climatologists who believe global warming is real are slicing
and dicing the study, the methodology, the statistics, the modeling, running the input again
to see if they get the same results, because they are not yet satisfied the study works.
Not because they positively disbelieve it does but because a paper being read at
a conference is insufficient for its being accepted by the scientific community.
It needs to be pressed on and criticized first. Does it withstand critical scrutiny?
If the scientific community takes this question seriously, so should we.
It’s just a point about rationality. The argument ‘A study has been published
that maintains
that X, Y, Z, therefore X, Y, Z’ is a bad one. The conclusion
doesn’t follow. It is a cognitive error to swallow X, Y, and Z hook, line and sinker
on this basis. In a general way, many scientific studies do not survive
criticism, including studies done by competent people.
That’s why a study’s publication is insufficient for the conclusion
to be accepted by the scientific community.
Nobody says:
‘This got published so it’s true.’ What publication (by competent people) gets you
is this: the study is interesting and worth considering.
If someone says ‘I view this study with
concern’ that’s fine with me. But one does want to
keep the critical flame burning. If you are going to
be credulous, you will spend the rest of your
life shocked.
Suppose, though, that I’m writing this post for bad reasons.
What I’ve just written (‘The publication of a scientific
study in climatology is insufficient reason to accept
its conclusion’) could still be true.
I am officially out of shock. Not to worry there.
The climatologist’s forecast study does not say that global temperature will rise by 4 degrees C.
It says it may happen with some likelihood, if current trends of using fossil fuels continue unchecked.
At least that’s what I understood it to mean from reading the article.
And such temperature rise may already happen as early as 2060, earlier than previously thought.
Maybe that should not be shocking. But two days later I read this article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8283909.stm
Greenhouse gas emissions created by Britons are probably twice as bad as figures suggest, says the government’s new chief energy scientist.
Professor David MacKay told the BBC that reductions in carbon dioxide emissions since 1990 are “an illusion”.
“Our energy footprint has decreased over the last few decades and that’s largely because we’ve exported our industry,” he said.
“Other countries make stuff for us so we have naughty, naughty China and India out of control with rising emissions but it’s because they are making our stuff for us now,” he said.
“It’s been estimated by Dieter Helm from the University of Oxford that roughly half of our energy footprint actually lives overseas so our true footprint is twice as big as it looks on paper.”
A study from the Stockholm Environment Institute estimated when embedded emissions are taken into account, the average UK resident pollutes 15 tonnes a year - almost five times more than the average Chinese person at 3.1 tonnes a year
So by all account and looking at what people buy it is business as usual, and politicians talk as usual.
I am living at sea level. Personally I don’t need to worry, since I will be probably dead when sea level rise has an effect on this place. But the younger ones and the kids will have to face it. Or so I think, and wouldn’t it be nice to be wrong! I do watch a steady erosion of the coast line here, and the pace has accelerated in the last five years. How would I know if this is an effect of changing climate? I have no idea. But the pictures from the melting arctic, and from melting glaciers in many parts of the world, tell a very strong story.
‘The results show a “best estimate” that 4C (measured from pre-industrial times) will be reached by 2070, with a possibility that it will come as early as 2060.’ These probability estimates are what I had in mind; thanks for clarifying this. Shifting to probability estimates doesn’t change the point. Probability calculations need to stand up
to critical scrutiny before they are accepted by scientists. Often enough they don’t.
About Prof. Helm.
I’ve never seen pollution and automobile emissions at the level that I’ve seen them in the Third World. If you haven’t been there,
it’s hard to imagine what places like Calcutta and Bangkok are like. Third world economies
are struggling to move up and they consider the cost of pollution control prohibitive,
even crippling. Dirty production is a lot cheaper than clean. And we are talking about a major
segment of the human population.
Here’s an argument, for what it’s worth.
Central to controlling emissions is getting third world economies to do it (not that we shouldn’t
do it ourselves). Countries need to be able to afford to do it. Till then they will see it as in their interest not
to do it, and governments (especially elected ones) will plump for economic growth
over emission control. Realistically they will not effectively clean up production
and auto emissions till they can afford to.
The best hope of their affording emission control in industry and autos is for their economies
to grow. The best hope of that is the production of autos, etc for consumers
in the first world. If we were to cut this demand (as Prof. Helm seems to feel we
should), not only would people in these
countries suffer horribly, but the countries would not be able to afford
emission control. And they will go on producing what they can for export
and for their own (huge) populations. So in the long run there would be more pollution, not less.
There may be no short-term real solution. Our cutting consumption drastically
may (along with other awful effects for the third world) postpone
lasting solutions. Again, this is not at all the suggestion that we shouldn’t
clean up our production and auto emissions, etc. But drastically curtailing
consumption of clean autos, say, that will be produced in dirty places
may backfire.
I call bunk on the whole topic.
The models predicting this doom and gloom failed to predict this recent decade of temperature decrease.
And the believer in global warming like to point out the ice shelves in Antarctica shrinking, while ignoring that only one side shrank, while the other side grew. Or that their models failed to find over 200,000 square miles of ice that satellite images proved existed.
Suspect data, being processed by scientists with a political agenda is bad for science.
Ten years is not within the scope of long-term climate predictions. Every report I’ve seen that has been tailored for public consumption (and I don’t mean dumbed-down) has cautioned against jumping to conclusions from shorter-term anomalies, whether individual weather events or full years. Even in the UK we have predictions that, in the medium term, we can expect one year in three to yield a summer heatwave of the kind we had in 2003. That’s still two years in three with crap summers.
Which is believed to have been caused by higher temperatures causing increased snowfall.
Warming doesn&t mean that everything gets colder.
The world’s weather system is far more complicated than that.
Mukade
And now for something completely different…
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/24/hiding-evidence-of-global-cooling/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/20/climate-sceptics-hackers-leaked-emails
And to show that Republicans aren’t the only paranoid ones out there:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4929149,00.html
"Meanwhile, East Anglia’s Jones suggests that the timing of the theft means it was intended to cause maximum embarrassment ahead of the Copenhagen talks.
“One has to wonder if it is a coincidence that this e-mail correspondence has been stolen and published at this time. This may be a concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change in the run-up to the Copenhagen talks,” he told the Guardian.
The post deletion clock is ticking…
Pick one and see if it works for you.
Three cheers for a healthy skepticism, doubly so for positions you want to be true.
Four cheers for unhealthy cynicism, and doubly so for messengers you want to be wrong. Huzzah!
Tick, tock …
So, what is the difference between healthy skepticism and unhealthy cynicism? The skeptic agrees with you; the cynic does not? 
It does appear that these scientists covered up potentially embarrassing data. That’s a shame, especially if their overall point is correct–they have really destroyed their own credibility. If the case is as ironclad as they claim, you have to wonder why they would bother. To keep the ignorant masses from asking the wrong questions that might lead to our doom? To keep the funding coming? To advance an ideological agenda of some sort?
Viva healthy skepticism and its cuter cousin, open-mindedness! The two go hand-in-hand.
FWIW, Mrs. Badger and I have been taking considerable steps toward simplifying our lives and reducing our carbon (and pesticide, and petroleum, and human rights, and so on) footprint for many reasons. And if global warming is really going to happen, our riding bikes to work, buying local beef, and growing our own organic eggs and veggies is not going to slow it down one iota.
Tom
edited to tone it down and maybe preserve an interesting thread a bit longer. Geez, sucked into another CF political debate. I should know better. Time to up my meds and/or take a nap.
Aren’t eggplants a veggie too?
Global warming is a bit like belief or not in God (don’t worry, mods 
). There cannot be certainty on one side or the other. What you can’t deny is that there is an awful lot of very persuasive evidence to suggest that it is happening and that most of that evidence is in the form of thoroughly peer-reviewed science. The “evidence” against is rarely as rigorous. Don’t take my word for this, go and look it up. The bottom line is that we can’t afford to do just nothing in the hope that it’s all a myth. Whether or not we believe it, we now have to act as though it’s real. If the whole world takes stern measures to cut carbon emissions and live in “greener” ways, and we still find that global warming happens, well we were wrong but begod we did a lot of good in finding out we were wrong.