100 Reasons Why Climate Change Is Natural - Daily Mail

Abu Lahab's picture

 

1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.

2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.

4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.

5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.
 

6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.

7) The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.  

8 ) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.

9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists – in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” - suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming

10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.

11) Politicians and activiists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago

12) Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds

13) Peter Lilley MP said last month that “fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our Government and our political class—predominantly—are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world”.

14) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions

15) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity”

16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.

17) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.

18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control

19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.

20) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 degrees C per century - within natural rates

21) Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland says the earth’s temperature has more to do with cloud cover and water vapor than CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

22) There is strong evidence from solar studies which suggests that the Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades

23) It is myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries

24) It is a falsehood that the earth’s poles are warming because that is natural variation and while the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder

25) The IPCC claims climate driven “impacts on biodiversity are significant and of key relevance” but those claims are simply not supported by scientific research

26) The IPCC threat of climate change to the world’s species does not make sense as wild species are at least one million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles

27) Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets.

28) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels are our best hope of raising crop yields to feed an ever-growing population

29) The biggest climate change ever experienced on earth took place around 700 million years ago

30) The slight increase in temperature which has been observed since 1900 is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles

31) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels of some so-called “greenhouse gases” may be contributing to higher oxygen levels and global cooling, not warming

32) Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures

33) Today’s CO2 concentration of around 385 ppm is very low compared to most of the earth’s history – we actually live in a carbon-deficient atmosphere

34) It is a myth that CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas because greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume, and CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere

35) It is a myth that computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming because computer models can be made to “verify” anything

36) There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes

37) One statement deleted from a UN report in 1996 stated that “none of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases”

38) The world “warmed” by 0.07 +/- 0.07 degrees C from 1999 to 2008, not the 0.20 degrees C expected by the IPCC

39) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says “it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense” but there has been no increase in the intensity or frequency of tropical cyclones globally

40) Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be shown not only to have a negligible effect on the Earth’s many ecosystems, but in some cases to be a positive help to many organisms

41) Researchers who compare and contrast climate change impact on civilizations found warm periods are beneficial to mankind and cold periods harmful

42) The Met Office asserts we are in the hottest decade since records began but this is precisely what the world should expect if the climate is cyclical

43) Rising CO2 levels increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests

44) The historical increase in the air’s CO2 content has improved human nutrition by raising crop yields during the past 150 years

45) The increase of the air’s CO2 content has probably helped lengthen human lifespans since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

46) The IPCC alleges that “climate change currently contributes to the global burden of disease and premature deaths” but the evidence shows that higher temperatures and rising CO2 levels has helped global populations

47) In May of 2004, the Russian Academy of Sciences published a report concluding that the Kyoto Protocol has no scientific grounding at all.

48) The “Climate-gate” scandal pointed to a expensive public campaign of disinformation and the denigration of scientists who opposed the belief that CO2 emissions were causing climate change
 
49) The head of Britain’s climate change watchdog has predicted households will need to spend up to £15,000 on a full energy efficiency makeover if the Government is to meet its ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions.

50) Wind power is unlikely to be the answer to our energy needs. The wind power industry argues that there are “no direct subsidies” but it involves a total subsidy of as much as £60 per MWh which falls directly on electricity consumers. This burden will grow in line with attempts to achieve Wind power targets, according to a recent OFGEM report.
 
51) Wind farms are not an efficient way to produce energy. The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) accepts a figure of 75 per cent back-up power is required.
 
52) Global temperatures are below the low end of IPCC predictions not at “at the top end of IPCC estimates”
 
53) Climate alarmists have raised the concern over acidification of the oceans but Tom Segalstad from Oslo University in Norway , and others, have noted that the composition of ocean water – including CO2, calcium, and water – can act as a buffering agent in the acidification of the oceans.
 
54) The UN’s IPCC computer models of human-caused global warming predict the emergence of a “hotspot” in the upper troposphere over the tropics.  Former researcher in the Australian Department of Climate Change, David Evans, said there is no evidence of such a hotspot

55) The argument that climate change is a of result of global warming caused by human activity is the argument of flat Earthers.  
 
56) The manner in which US President Barack Obama sidestepped Congress to order emission cuts shows how undemocratic and irrational the entire international decision-making process has become with regards to emission-target setting.
 
57) William Kininmonth, a former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation, wrote “the likely extent of global temperature rise from a doubling of CO2 is less than 1C. Such warming is well within the envelope of variation experienced during the past 10,000 years and insignificant in the context of glacial cycles during the past million years, when Earth has been predominantly very cold and covered by extensive ice sheets.”
 
58) Canada has shown the world targets derived from the existing Kyoto commitments were always unrealistic and did not work for the country.
 
59) In the lead up to the Copenhagen summit, David Davis MP said of previous climate summits, at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997 that many had promised greater cuts, but “neither happened”, but we are continuing along the same lines.

60) The UK ’s environmental policy has a long-term price tag of about £55 billion, before taking into account the impact on its economic growth. 
 
61) The UN’s panel on climate change warned that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035. J. Graham Cogley a professor at Ontario Trent University, claims this inaccurate stating the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.
 
62) Under existing Kyoto obligations the EU has attempted to claim success, while actually increasing emissions by 13 per cent, according to Lord Lawson. In addition the EU has pursued this scheme by purchasing “offsets” from countries such as China paying them billions of dollars to destroy atmospheric pollutants, such as CFC-23, which were manufactured purely in order to be destroyed.
 
63) It is claimed that the average global temperature was relatively unchanging in pre-industrial times but sky-rocketed since 1900, and will increase by several degrees more over the next 100 years according to Penn State University researcher Michael Mann. There is no convincing empirical evidence that past climate was unchanging, nor that 20th century changes in average global temperature were unusual or unnatural.
 
64) Michael Mann of Penn State University has actually shown that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did in fact exist, which contrasts with his earlier work which produced the “hockey stick graph” which showed a constant temperature over the past thousand years or so followed by a recent dramatic upturn.
 
65) The globe’s current approach to climate change in which major industrialised countries agree to nonsensical targets for their CO2 emissions by a given date, as it has been under the Kyoto system, is very expensive.
 
66) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures when looking at the history of the Earth’s temperature. 
 
67) Global temperatures have not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years and have actually been falling for nine years. The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed a scientific team had expressed dismay at the fact global warming was contrary to their predictions and admitted their inability to explain it was “a travesty”.
 
68) The IPCC predicts that a warmer planet will lead to more extreme weather, including drought, flooding, storms, snow, and wildfires. But over the last century, during which the IPCC claims the world experienced more rapid warming than any time in the past two millennia, the world did not experience significantly greater trends in any of these extreme weather events.
 
69) In explaining the average temperature standstill we are currently experiencing, the Met Office Hadley Centre ran a series of computer climate predictions and found in many of the computer runs there were decade-long standstills but none for 15 years – so it expects global warming to resume swiftly.

70) Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote: “The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the Earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope.  Such hysteria (over global warming) simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth.”
 
71) Despite the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s status as the flagship of the fight against climate change it has been a failure.
 
72) The first phase of the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which ran from 2005 to 2007 was a failure. Huge over-allocation of permits to pollute led to a collapse in the price of carbon from €33 to just €0.20 per tonne meaning the system did not reduce emissions at all. 
 
73) The EU trading scheme, to manage carbon emissions has completely failed and actually allows European businesses to duck out of making their emissions reductions at home by offsetting, which means paying for cuts to be made overseas instead.
 
74) To date “cap and trade” carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions.
 
75) In the United States , the cap-and-trade is an approach designed to control carbon emissions and will impose huge costs upon American citizens via a carbon tax on all goods and services produced in the United States. The average family of four can expect to pay an additional $1700, or £1,043, more each year. It is predicted that the United States will lose more than 2 million jobs as the result of cap-and-trade schemes. 
 
76) Dr Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has indicated that out of the 21 climate models tracked by the IPCC the differences in warming exhibited by those models is mostly the result of different strengths of positive cloud feedback – and that increasing CO2 is insufficient to explain global-average warming in the last 50 to 100 years.
 
77) Why should politicians devote our scarce resources in a globally competitive world to a false and ill-defined problem, while ignoring the real problems the entire planet faces, such as: poverty, hunger, disease or terrorism.
 
78) A proper analysis of ice core records from the past 650,000 years demonstrates that temperature increases have come before, and not resulted from, increases in CO2 by hundreds of years.
 
79) Since the cause of global warming is mostly natural, then there is in actual fact very little we can do about it. (We are still not able to control the sun).
 
80) A substantial number of the panel of 2,500 climate scientists on the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change, which created a statement on scientific unanimity on climate change and man-made global warming, were found to have serious concerns.
 
81) The UK’s Met Office has been forced this year to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by revelations about the data.
 
82)  Politicians and activists push for renewable energy sources such as wind turbines under the rhetoric of climate change, but it is essentially about money – under the system of Renewable Obligations. Much of the money is paid for by consumers in electricity bills. It amounts to £1 billion a year.
 
83) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.  
 
84) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase science for political purposes.
 
85) Ice-core data clearly show that temperatures change centuries before concentrations of atmospheric CO2 change. Thus, there appears to be little evidence for insisting that changes in concentrations of CO2 are the cause of past temperature and climate change.
 
86) There are no experimentally verified processes explaining how CO2 concentrations can fall in a few centuries without falling temperatures – in fact it is changing temperatures which cause changes in CO2 concentrations, which is consistent with experiments that show CO2 is the atmospheric gas most readily absorbed by water.
 
87) The Government’s Renewable Energy Strategy contains a massive increase in electricity generation by wind power costing around £4 billion a year over the next twenty years. The benefits will be only £4 to £5 billion overall (not per annum). So costs will outnumber benefits by a range of between eleven and seventeen times.
 
88) Whilst CO2 levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout history, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years.
 
89) It is a myth that CO2 is a pollutant, because nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere and human beings could not live in 100% nitrogen either: CO2 is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is and CO2 is essential to life.

90) Politicians and climate activists make claims to rising sea levels but certain members in the IPCC chose an area to measure in Hong Kong that is subsiding. They used the record reading of 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level.
 
91) The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998.
 
92) If one factors in non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).
 
93) US President Barack Obama pledged to cut emissions by 2050 to equal those of 1910 when there were 92 million Americans. In 2050, there will be 420 million Americans, so Obama’s promise means that emissions per head will be approximately what they were in 1875. It simply will not happen.
 
94) The European Union has already agreed to cut emissions by 20 percent to 2020, compared with 1990 levels, and is willing to increase the target to 30 percent. However, these are unachievable and the EU has already massively failed with its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), as EU emissions actually rose by 0.8 percent from 2005 to 2006 and are known to be well above the Kyoto goal.
 
95) Australia has stated it wants to slash greenhouse emissions by up to 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2020, but the pledges were so unpopular that the country’s Senate has voted against the carbon trading Bill, and the Opposition’s Party leader has now been ousted by a climate change sceptic.
 
96) Canada plans to reduce emissions by 20 percent compared with 2006 levels by 2020, representing approximately a 3 percent cut from 1990 levels but it simultaneously defends its Alberta tar sands emissions and its record as one of the world’s highest per-capita emissions setters.
 
97) India plans to reduce the ratio of emissions to production by 20-25 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2020, but all Government officials insist that since India has to grow for its development and poverty alleviation, it has to emit, because the economy is driven by carbon.
 
98) The Leipzig Declaration in 1996, was signed by 110 scientists who said: “We – along with many of our fellow citizens – are apprehensive about the climate treaty conference scheduled for Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997” and “based on all the evidence available to us, we cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes and calls for hasty actions.”
 
99) A US Oregon Petition Project stated “We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of CO2, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
 
100) A report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change concluded “We find no support for the IPCC’s claim that climate observations during the twentieth century are either unprecedented or provide evidence of an anthropogenic effect on climate.” 
 

I approve of this list.

How can not believing in something that is backed up with no empirical evidence be less scientific than believing in something that not only has no empirical evidence but actually goes against the laws of the universe and in many cases actually contradicts itself? - Ricky Gervais

Atheistextremist's picture

It's more complicated than this

 

"95) Australia has stated it wants to slash greenhouse emissions by up to 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2020, but the pledges were so unpopular that the country’s Senate has voted against the carbon trading Bill, and the Opposition’s Party leader has now been ousted by a climate change sceptic."

 

The CTS is now a political football and the opposition refuses to ratify the Aust government's scheme in order to avoid appearing weak. The former opposition leader was simply looking for moral high ground given his leadership had failed. Too little, too late. From my reading, most the CTS in Oz constitutes an offset, with farmers encouraged to avoid clearing or to alter land use to exploit the vast size of the country (it's only slightly smaller than the USA) in order to offset the relatively small emissions plume. There's no plan to reduce actual emissions here at all.

However, if the population could collectively press a button or if there was a referendum on the issue, I think most people would embrace environmental responsibility and sustainable land use rather than rape and pillage of natural resources. Fact is here, same as everywhere, the power to do something rests in the hands of the minority and they give not a single fuck what people think. Witness the sand dune ecosystem at Kurnell, the largest on a coastline of nearly 5000km. It was destroyed to mix cement and the holes left behind filled with toxic landfill. And all this right over the road from the Towra Point nature reserve. It's still going on right now. Laughable.

Even local council was powerless to stop the destruction despite one of the most-signed petitions in the history of Sydney in their hands.

The only way to really look after land is buy it and look after it yourself. Governments are universally populated by fuckwits. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck

BobSpence's picture

 Even at a quick glance,

 Even at a quick glance, there is a lot of nonsense in that list. I think it can safely be ignored.

Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality

"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris

The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me

From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology

Vastet's picture

1) Wrong. 2) Fallacy. A

1) Wrong.
2) Fallacy. A million volcanoes erupting a billion years ago has nothing to do with climate today.

I'm not even going to waste my time reading the rest, when the first two are so wrong.

Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.

Thomathy's picture

BobSpence1 wrote:  Even at

BobSpence1 wrote:

 Even at a quick glance, there is a lot of nonsense in that list. I think it can safely be ignored.

Further to that, we can see that the denialists are essentially basing their belief on ignorance and at best sketchy conspiracy.

The Amazing James Randi has even joined the denialists, but has the self respect to know that he's basing his belief on ignorance.

James Randi wrote:
I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may be valid. I base this on my admittedly rudimentary knowledge of the facts about planet Earth. This ball of hot rock and salt water spins on its axis and rotates about the Sun with the expected regularity, though we're aware that lunar tides, solar wind, galactic space dust and geomagnetic storms have cooled the planet by about one centigrade degree in the past 150 years. The myriad of influences that act upon Earth are so many and so variable -- though not capricious -- that I believe we simply cannot formulate an equation into which we enter variables and come up with an answer. A living planet will continually belch, vibrate, fracture, and crumble a bit, and thus defeat an accurate equation. Please note that this my amateur opinion, based on probably insufficient data.

The thing is, the science is quite solid.  I'll say again that as creationists or IDers in the face of evolutionary science do not represent a legitimate opposition to it, climate change deniers don't represent a legitimate opposition to climate change science.  The evidence just doesn't stack up on the side of the deniers.  A list of 100 'reasons' why climate change is natural doesn't address the virtual mountains of evidence that indicate an anthropogenic source to the current pattern of climate change.  In fact, it's irrelevant to point out that climate change is natural.  It happens to be so that the best evidence there is of climate change patterns over the millennia show that humans are the source of a rather abrupt change in those patterns presently.  Thus have the scientists involved in the research of climate change arrived at the current consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change.

Vastet wrote:
2) Fallacy. A million volcanoes erupting a billion years ago has nothing to do with climate today.
Well, that's not a fallacy nor are you fully correct.  It is, however, irrelevant to the current science.  The point remains that the current pattern of climate change is  to the best of our knowledge anthropogenic.

I would very much like to see deniers take the data collected thus far and show that it in fact contradicts the current consensus.  I would very much like to see an alternative, viable theory developed by the deniers to explain the evidence.  I would like the same of creationists and IDers, because at least then they'd not just be idiots squawking contrarian ideologies from positions of ignorance.  So, if current climate change is not anthropogenic, show the proof and not (fallacious) loaded questions that don't address the science like:

100 Reasons Why Climate Change Is Natural - Daily Mail wrote:
77) Why should politicians devote our scarce resources in a globally competitive world to a false and ill-defined problem, while ignoring the real problems the entire planet faces, such as: poverty, hunger, disease or terrorism.

(I'd be ashamed if I frequented this site, called myself rational and approved of a list containing many such examples of fallacies that fail to address the science.)

BigUniverse wrote,

"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."

Answers in Gene Simmons's picture

OK I actually did wade

OK I actually did wade through that. I can say that it is not total shit. Just mostly too problematic.

 

For example, several points take the form of:

 

Professor X, a scientist at Y university said...

 

Well, the fact is that it is the job of scientists to say stuff. Hopefully based on evidence. Sometimes they even get it right. However, I would also note that on the cutting edge of science, the chance of making statements that will later be shown not to hold up is fairly great.

 

In these cases, we only have a name and a university to go with. No date or context is provided which would allow us to check the statements out. Perhaps they are 20 years old and just don't reflect current thinking. Perhaps they are more recent but based on incomplete evidence. In either case, the statements may well be valid given the context, if such can be determined. Of course, that doesn't tell us a whole lot even then.

 

In any case, there are also 3 or 4 mentions of the “climate gate” emails. Now I could write a few paragraphs on why those need to be taken lightly at best. If there were no better reason to doubt what is flitting around the internet, there are about 160mb of raw text in there and it has been, what, a couple of weeks?

 

Now that material is out there and I am sure that it is or will be reviewed by people who know how to read it properly. Bloggers, for the most part, are not those people.

 

Still, I find it to be rather dubious that we are asked to believe what some scientists may have said (without attribution) and yet we are asked to discount the work of scientists where a context may be clearly obtained in due course.

NoMoreCrazyPeople wrote:
Never ever did I say enything about free, I said "free."

=

Vastet's picture

"Well, that's not a fallacy

"Well, that's not a fallacy nor are you fully correct."

I disagree. Using the combined 4.5 billion years of geologic history to argue against a few thousand years is fallacious. A volcano doesn't spit shit out and then watch it hover in the atmosphere for all time. Nor does one erupt in constant fashion, let alone increasing frequency. Dust resettles, carbon is soaked up by oceans and plants, and the effects fade.
While in brevity I inaccurately claimed that volcanoes billions of years ago have no effect at all on climate today, I'm really not very far off either. I'm not going to re-look up the rate at which carbon is disposed of, but there isn't a single particle in the atmosphere which was thrown up a billion years ago and has never settled to Earth or been ejected into space.

Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.

Thomathy's picture

Vastet wrote:"Well, that's

My intention, Vastet, as you might have guessed, wasn't to get into an argument with you about the effects of volcanic eruptions through the history of Earth (which are irrelevant to the point on anthropogenic climate change); I was just pointing out that it's neither a fallacy nor were you fully correct and you're explanation of what happens to the stuff volcanoes spew isn't fully correct either.  In fact, the only relevant point about the volcanoes is that the stuff they've spewed was absorbed by plants and made into oil and gases which we are now sequestering from the Earth, something that's actually a major factor in anthropogenic climate change rather than a detraction.  I'm sure we can be in agreement on that.

BigUniverse wrote,

"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."

Abu Lahab's picture

,.,.,.,.

Any time I can casually post something and have people 'chat' I feel a sense of achievement.

Yay me!

 

This blog thingy is awesome!

 

Thanks RR

How can not believing in something that is backed up with no empirical evidence be less scientific than believing in something that not only has no empirical evidence but actually goes against the laws of the universe and in many cases actually contradicts itself? - Ricky Gervais

Vastet's picture

"I was just pointing out

"I was just pointing out that it's neither a fallacy nor were you fully correct and you're explanation of what happens to the stuff volcanoes spew isn't fully correct either."

And yet it was a fallacy, and I was no more wrong than I already admitted.

"you're explanation of what happens to the stuff volcanoes spew isn't fully correct either."

It was accurate enough for someone not writing a dissertation on the subject. Volcanoes that erupted a billion years ago are not directly affecting the atmosphere today. Period.

"In fact, the only relevant point about the volcanoes is that the stuff they've spewed wasabsorbed by plants and made into oil and gases which we are now sequestering from the Earth, something that's actually a major factor in anthropogenic climate change rather than a detraction.  I'm sure we can be in agreement on that."

Certainly.

Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.

Vastet's picture

I'll add this, as I stumbled

I'll add this, as I stumbled across it while looking for a previous article I posted:

http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/sapient/all_things_environmental/8238

Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.

Thomathy's picture

Vastet wrote:Volcanoes that

Vastet wrote:
Volcanoes that erupted a billion years ago are not directly affecting the atmosphere today. Period.
This is categorically a different statement (a straw man) from the one made by you earlier ("A million volcanoes erupting a billion years ago has nothing to do with climate today." ) which I had addressed and with which address you finally agreed. Further, it didn't require a dissertation for me to state what you finally agreed with:

"In fact, the only relevant point about the volcanoes is that the stuff they've spewed wasabsorbed by plants and made into oil and gases which we are now sequestering from the Earth, something that's actually a major factor in anthropogenic climate change rather than a detraction. I'm sure we can be in agreement on that."

You might take this as bait to post a response but, please, refrain. I don't really want to see you back-pedalling from that last statement to try to reconcile it with how you agreed with me and with your original statement.  Besides which, I don't really care, it just irks me that you're actually arguing while you agree and that you went on to make a completely different statement from the one you made earlier.

BigUniverse wrote,

"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."

Vastet's picture

"This is categorically a

"This is categorically a different statement (a straw man) from the one made by you earlier ("A million volcanoes erupting a billion years ago has nothing to do with climate today." ) which I had addressed and with which address you finally agreed."

You're implying that it took awhile to get me to agree that I should have changed one word, when I did so immediately. You started an argument based in semantics, and suggested I was categorically wrong when I wasn't, I simply should have said little instead of nothing.

I also don't get how you think I reargued the same point which I acknowledged already was wrong, and didn't reargue. That one point was ALL I had wrong, and it was only wrong because the original argument wasn't worth spending more time on than I had already. By continuing this pointless semantic attack you're simply wasting both of our time.

Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.

Thomathy's picture

Vastet wrote:"This is

It's not a semantic attack.  It's not an attack at all.  I mentioned that you were not fully correct.  You weren't.  That ought to have been the end of it.  For me it is.  And please, for the love of it don't respond to this post.  You didn't even have to to the last one.  I'm hoping we can drop this.  Because it is a waste of time, whatever it is.

BigUniverse wrote,

"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."