Anthony Watts is a TV weatherman, not a climate scientist. I wouldn’t go to a barber for brain surgery.
RE Watts, see:
You can look up most of the debunked denialist industry talking points here:
skepticalscience.com/
At the very least it is good to get the other side of their talking points, then use one’s own unbiased smarts to figure out which points hold the most weight.
I don’t want to get into a war of authorities, but you must know there is ample evidence that recycling is not cost effective and often (depending on what is recycled) uses more energy that it saves. but is something that people like, when they feel like they have to do something and that makes it politically desirable and untouchable.
re electric cars. you do know that coal/ natural gas, petroleum fired plants account for about 70% of the electricity in the US, right?
REDUCE is the first and most important principle…and part of this can be accomplished by buying things that last. Then REUSE, the 2nd most important principle.
RECYCLE comes in last of these three, and I agree it does cost us a bit in time, effort, and travel. And some things are not as worth it to recycle as others. Recycling glass, for instance, does not save much if any energy (I read somewhere it saves 5% energy, and eslewhere it loses 5% energy). However recycling aluminum saves from 85% to 95% of energy over mining bauxite (say, in the Amazon rainforest, harming the rainforest), then shipping and processing it. Other materials are somewhere between glass and aluminum.
RE electric cars, we drive ours on 100% wind-generated electricity (to be 45% solar-electricity when we install panels on our roof). However, I knew people in an EV conversion club up north, and their sources say the energy use and pollution if from fossil-fuel-generated electricity for EVs is about 2/3 that of an ICE car.
The really biggy is to REDUCE car driving by moving closer to work (next home buy), running multiple errands, turn off engine in drive-thrus, and “hypermile” (which also saves on breaks), buy a more efficient car (next car buy) – you can make sure it is efficient & less polluting by checking
epa.gov/greenvehicles/Index.do;jsessionid=FCb9RSrFZphb8cDGpJpytdQSfbv0nhG1NcHV11TcvhblPxKgJ5hc!657080056, and safe by checking
safercar.gov/Safety+Ratings.
One can also reduce energy use & pollution by buying more efficient appliances and caulking windows, etc.
There are 1000s of things to do that save $$ AND help reduce environmental harm – one can just do the things they can and that make sense and cents to them. And money saved from those measures could be plowed into measures that may cost a bit, if one is not financially strapped.
so I’m still waiting for an explanation of how naturally occurring cycles - some of which did lead to extinction events - are caused by humans. if you care to address this, try explaining the climate swing in the early 14th century that resulted in mass famines in Europe. then there are the cycles that are demonstrably not caused by humans that are magnitudes worse than this: ice ages, P–Tr extinction event (or any of the dozen major extinction events), or even change on a lesser degree, like the pluvial lake-marsh-playa cycle here in the southwest.
As mentioned several factors can cause warming, and several other factors can cause mass extinctions (aside from warming).
Just because there are these other causal factors, it does not follow that our human industrial GHG emissions could not possibly have such an impact.
It’s good to get some basics on climate change. Here is a place with links to start:
realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/start-here/
Some info about logical fallacies can also help…esp red herrings, strawmen; it’s also good to bone up on “cherry-picking.”
And it is important to note that science requires high confidence (usually 95%) before making claims – scientists cannot be the boy who called wolf when there was no wolf; while the virtue of prudence requires that Christians strive to avoid serious harms well before we ever reach 95% confidence that some harms are on the way – we cannot afford to be the villagers who slept and got eaten by the wolf when there really was a wolf, and we should not put other people’s lives at risk, waiting until we are 95% or 99% confident harms are upon us, esp since tipping points could put us in irreversible harms, or very long lasting harms.
Again, prudence requires us, even if we have serious doubts, to at least do the things that have no net cost, save us money, and that we can afford. See the U.S. Bishops’ statement, “Global Climate Change: A Plea for Dialogue, Prudence, and the Common Good,” at
usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/environment/global-climate-change-a-plea-for-dialogue-prudence-and-the-common-good.cfm
The bishops didn’t exhibit an extremely high level of information and knowledge about climate change in that 2001 statement (for instance, they did not know AGW had been happening since around the 70s, and had been already causing harms and deaths), but they did know enough about the requirements of prudence to call for us not to wait, but do the needful now.
