Global warming - ostriches in the sand while the earth dies.

MAJ (Join to see), my respect for you just dropped a notch. If you insist on bringing back up another topic that should die a horrible death like the ones about LTs saluting, the least you can do is be civil. If you want to debate theories, possible outcomes and such, by all means. Your comment to SGT Richard H. was out of line and typical of these type of discussions on the open internet.

I would expect better from a fellow professional soldier.

BTW, anything that follows the words "with all due respect" usually isn't.

"I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. 
"Let's be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
"There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period. "I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way. ."
~ Michael Crichton

Sir, the problem with most global warming theory is that it's based on "temperatures on record". Temperature records have only been keep for about 130 years, which in the grand scheme of the earth is tiny. For every scientist saying that global warming is a new thing there's another one saying that this is just another cycle out of thousands of years of cycles. If you're old enough, you'll probably recall that the scientific craze of the early-mid 70's was that we were spiraling into another ice age, and it was based on basically the same size snapshot as the current warming theory is. Below is a graphic showing what I'm talking about. There are literally hundreds of them out there to support both sides of the debate, but I picked this one because it's pretty easy to read at a glance and matches what I've seen from scores of sites. I'm not necessarily saying that it's definitive, but then neither is most of the climate science out there.

Ostriches don't bury their heads in the sand.
http://www.ostriches.org/factor.html

Global Warming is a real concern and we can mitigate some of the damage, it's far to late to stop it. That wasn't an option though, so I selected the closest response.

It is this opinion of scientific matters, that by one instance a whole study is invalidated, that brings those with motives of subterfuge to their goals. An oversimplification of the matter of global warming does not disprove it but rather illustrates the increased changes to the globe as a whole. Warmer weather creates higher levels of moisture in the air which moves slower, this in turn leads to cold air becoming stagnant and when snow does come there is greater amounts of it. It can be confusing to see such abundance of cold weather, but short periods of cold do not over shadow an universal increase of temperatures. If an opinion that one day of cold means there is no global change then it would follow the same individual must believe that they never need to eat again for immediately after breakfast they are not hungry.
Furthermore, it the argument is made that with record cold disproves global warming, then how is it not proven by record heat the other half of the year? The past 3 years have had every state in the Union break one summer month's record high. Water shortages have increased and irrigation has been diminishing its impact.
Trends are made from greater than one data point, and when one disagrees with the overall hypothesis this is what makes it based in reality. Be aware of opinion overshadowing fact and rhetoric being held as truth.

So, while I don't have time to find a good Meme, I do have a thought. I remember back in the 70's when I was in grade school how we were so worried we were heading for an ice age. Global Cooling. They were going to seed the clouds with ash to keep the heat in. 15 years later, the pendulum went the other way.

Now "they" use "Global Climate Change" instead. WTH??? Yes, the global climate DOES change! It has to do more with volcano's and sunspots than what we do.

It's all a crock to get more money from us.

On the idea of Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC), I really don't care if there is climate change or not. More to follow on this.
But, I do not believe that there is any effect that man is having on it for a number of reasons.
1. The idea of science is to have a discussion on the subject at hand; shutting down people that don't agree with you by calling them stupid or not capable of understanding science is just plain not consistent with scientific debate. The whole idea of calling us "deniers" came about to connect us to holocaust deniers and put the idea into low information persons inclined to buy into ACC that we support the deaths of millions. Plain and simple, it is to compare us to Nazis and convince people we want a new holocaust carried out by climate change. The vitriolic hatred man-made global warming/climate change believers show towards skeptics is astounding.
2. Everything they cry about always starts out as "unprecedented" and then turns out to be precedented.
3. They started out with global cooling. When that didn't pan out they changed to global warming. Supporters didn't have a problem with the 180 degree switch. When the global warming thing didn't happen like they screamed and hollered it would, they switched to a Cover Your Ass position of "anything and everything that might or could happen is caused by man made CO2". They really seem to be saying "even though we have been completely wrong up to now, that is proof we are correct now". WTF? Still, supporters have no problem with that.
4. When someone skeptical points out that a winter or summer was cooler than normal, the true believers on TV laugh at them and call them stupid and point out that one season or even a year is not sufficient to disprove ACC, BUT... get one EF-5 tornado that hits a metro area or an extra hurricane and the same people are all over TV pointing out how that is proof of climate change.
5. Cherry picking. Skeptics are accused of cherry picking data, however believers have recently begun to deny that there was ever a Little Ice Age starting in the middle ages. 700 years of documented, historical fact and they just plain say it didn't happen. Of course, the temp changes that appear to have accompanied the Little Ice Age refute their claims that man made CO2 is the only possible way for temp to change so rapidly. For this to be true, there would have had to have been an associated reduction in man made CO2 levels at the beginning of the Little Ice Age and of course there wasn't.

Why don't I care? Same people worried about ACC are the ones that are now worried about world overpopulation. Attempts to slow population growth haven't worked anywhere, the only way we're gonna reduce it would be to commence with a depopulation campaign, by which I mean actually killing off "unwanted" or "undesirable" people.
This Earth can sustain A LOT more people than it has (I'd prefer smaller populations too, but..) and global warming will likely result in increased food production, so...
Who gives a rat's ass?
You know, unless you want to participate in eradication attempts.

I gotta say I agree with SGT Richard H. on this topic, and no, I don't smoke dope or have my head in the sand. For all the scientists who cry the sky is falling on global warming, there are others who say poppycock. I could post links, but they all say the same thing: what I just said.