I read the scientific papers.
Have you read any one this whole climate change issue and if so what do you think?
Have you actually read the NASA report, or have you only relied on a summary produced by some group with its own agenda? In this case you don’t have to rely on summarizers since you can read the original report:
I have thought that also, Mikekle. At least we have not nuked the planet yet. We could have done that . But the internal combustion engine does seem pretty archaic in this world of amazing technology. We hold in our hands devices that were not even science fiction a few decades ago. But as for caring about the future, we as a species are still pretty much living day to day without thought for the future. How can people still smoke knowing cancer and COPD are likely outcomes? Instant gratification over future possibilities.
My opinion is that mankind has a significant impact on the environment, that is quite trivial to recognize through scientific evidence. However, the speculations about the climate change are still speculations based on reasonable assumptions and models. In science it is not uncommon to make a posteriori reasonable explantions and those theories must be tested to see if they are falsifiable or not. Again I am expressing an opnion but the models that I have seen are either too generic to be tested or they do not pass the test. As a scientist I do not accept the man made global warming theory and I think that at this point is mainly a political band wagon. However, I still think that I have a moral responsibility of stewarship and that includes controlling our impact on the environment. I encourage you to look in the Gaia hypotesis and the Medea hypothesis just to get an idea of what initially reasonable assumptions and data can lead to.
Change in global ice coverage took place millions of years before evil man existed. I believe in God and His plan. He put us here to inhabit the earth, dominion over it and all the creatures. I trust Him, and Him alone. We are not alien to this planet, He made it for us.
I am not sure when it became more political than scientific. I do recall Carter putting solar panels on the white house roof and Reagan taking them down. Our impact on the earth, other than nuclear, is slow. Still, there are not many rivers we would care to swim in or eat fish from and some cities best not to breath in. I am a bit familiar with Gaia hypothesis but Medea is new to me. Quite disturbing from a theological perspective.
I don’t have any beef with you over what may be the appropriate level of environmental regulation. I just don’t like to see misrepresented facts used to support those views, which was the only point of my posting.
Yes, we went through the snowball earth phase and several ice ages to where we are now as part of the natural history of earth (if you accept that. Some are skeptical of science and prefer to stick with a 6 day creation and young earth). I have been most pursuaded by the time lapse photography of glaciel melting, tons and tons of ice melting in months. And by the ice core samples containing bubbles of frozed atmosphere from thousands of years ago. There does seem to be a correlation between CO2 and tempurature. Is there a natural non human reason for that CO2 rise?
Professor Wieslaw Maslowski said in 2007 that by 2013 summer in the Arctic would be ‘ice free’
nzherald.co.nz/environment/news/article.cfm?c_id=39&objectid=10569629&pnum=0
quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/08/ian-plimer
This is the true bottom line. We are dealing with Divine Providence and the moral obligation of stewardship. Are we like the rich man of today’s Gospel, the one that did not do anything, or are we like Lazarus where we cannot do anything? Maybe, we can do something and choose to do what is right without loosing confident hope in the Divine Providence when things do not go the way we think they should go.
What about the 1st reading:
And I have no beef with you. Both sides have their fair share of fact abuse, and truth abuse. We can argue ice data all day, it won’t change the truth, fluctuation in ice has always naturally taken place and will continue long after me and you are gone. To use that for either sides political agenda is wrong, mostly because it causes confusion and distrust.
The plans of natural law, especially rights of people of God to provide for their families. We have laws that take the interest of creatures over rights of humans to carry out God’s law, Natural Law.
I say I despise regulations which directly affect the well being of people and their ability to live by God’s Natural Law. Too many things take precedence over the dignity of the lives of human beings. You mention several that are no brainers; and to bring them up in this discussion is at best silly and at worst an attempt to diminish my contribution to this topic. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say, silly.
Michael, are Christiano’s words not in line with the Prophet Amos? I think they are. I don’t think anyone is promoting complacency or inaction. I do not believe anyone here says we cannot do anything so let turn back to the days of complacency which brought us air we could not breath and water we could not drink.
There is no dispute about that. Looking backwards in time everyone agrees that there have been huge fluctuations that have nothing to do with human activity. And some of those fluctuations have been quite sudden, due to natural catastrophic events, like volcanoes. The dispute is over the degree of variations and the extent to which these variations can be affected by human activity. I will concede that speculation over what will happen is still speculation, whether done by scientists or by lay persons. Although I tend to trust speculations of people who have spent a lifetime studying a subject over my own speculations based on limited knowledge. My only objection was to the spread of misinformation that is easily verifiable by anyone, such as the objective content of a NASA report that was misrepresented by several people in this thread, the idea that “NASA is Stumped over Record Ice In Anarctica”.
Well, I can agree with that too. But how is concern over global warming threatening those particular plans?
Yes, that problem has nothing to do with global warming. But it is an example of how human activity (capturing the Mississippi) to benefit one group of people has negative consequences on other groups of people. Unfortunately government listens to the group with the most money, and justice is hard to come by. Just out of curiosity, how would one go about “uncapturing” the Mississippi? Break down levies? It is sad to see how much damage Katrina did, partly because the engineering of the Mississippi destroyed much of the wetland barriers that would have harmlessly absorbed most of the surge. I and no fan of endless “studies” either.
No, I did not try to discount your contribution, only define it better. (Although I must apologize for using such sarcasm in that posting. It was totally uncalled for. I tried to edit it after some time, but the time limit for editing had expired.) So you are only against the bad regulations, not all environmental regulations. I can agree with that too.
I think they made a mistake by trying to describe CO2 as a pollutant. It is, after all, a natural and necessary part of our atmosphere. But even natural things have their proper proportion. So the real discussion should have been limited to what is the safe range for this proportion of CO2. Then the discussion would have been more scientific and less political.
Great question that deserves a careful answer. That answer is that we absolutely MUST continue to strive to manage the tension between development and environmental impacts and we must do so casting a skeptical eye on self serving claims on both sides of the tension.
We do agree on many items here.