Quote from: Edsan;225368And since we are speaking about all the correct predictions that the power of science granted us: where's our damn moonbases and flying cars?

According to Larry Niven:

   The wealth (as in flying cars) predicted by Heinlein and his followers (including myself) was another matter. It all went to welfare programs.

Quote from: jhkim;225126I concur that there is a lot of nonsense thrown about regarding global warming.  However, this claim also seems pretty bogus.  Deming -- himself a conservative activist -- claims that an unnamed "major researcher" sent him an email saying some things. Seriously, am I really supposed to take "some guy claims he got an email" and on the basis of this dismiss the leading scientific results within a field?

The reason I believe it are (A) it accurately describes what happened in terms of a change in the model (Mann's reconstructions flattened the MWP and LIA), (B) they MWP was perhaps the most compelling argument against alarmism over Global Warming so there was a motive, and (C) Mann and others have made their data and methods less than transparent if not opaque, suggesting they have something to hide.  You can choose to dismiss Deming if you want but you should note that the Wikipedia bios of people skeptical of global warming could have been written by The Nation or MoveOn.org.

Quote from: jhkim;225126Scientists can have biases and be wrong, but that doesn't mean that just because someone claims he got an email that we should dismiss the field.  If you're going to claim that the leading researchers are actually denying the Medieval Warm Period, a better bit of evidence might be a named researcher publicly saying such.  As far as I've seen, they haven't.

I think there could be legitimate motives for that.  Many people treat email as a private conversation.  That was certainly the social norm on the Usenet for years.  But I can understand why that might make you skeptical of the claims.

Quote from: jhkim;225126Now, there are some genuine criticisms, like McIntyre and McKitrick, or the "Ad Hoc Committee" report by Edward J. Wegman, David W. Scott, and Yasmin H. Said.  I don't find them particularly convincing, nor do the paleoclimatology community.  The Ad Hoc Committee report itself says "paleoclimatology community has not recognized the validity of the MM05 papers and has tended dismiss their results as being developed by biased amateurs" and proceeds to criticize the practices of the community, which as far as I can see are standard for scientific circles.

Do you think scientists should make their data open to critics so that they can challenge and reproduce their work?  How about of major public policies hinge on the work?

Quote from: John Morrow;225366You forgot the predictions about overpopulation and mass starvation.

Maybe you haven't noticed the skyrocketing cost of food, and ensuing riots around the globe.

But your argument seems to be that scientists have been wrong in the past, so they have no credibility. Talk about poisoning the well.

Quote from: Haffrung;225412Maybe you haven't noticed the skyrocketing cost of food, and ensuing riots around the globe.

But your argument seems to be that scientists have been wrong in the past, so they have no credibility. Talk about poisoning the well.

That is pretty much the entirety of the argument, in the general case, from what I have seen.

Quote from: Haffrung;225412Maybe you haven't noticed the skyrocketing cost of food, and ensuing riots around the globe.

Not nearly as dire as predicted, nor are they caused by the reasons predicted.

Quote from: Haffrung;225412But your argument seems to be that scientists have been wrong in the past, so they have no credibility. Talk about poisoning the well.

Not at all.  I believe that scientists have been wrong in the past so that warrants caution before making major changes based on their recommendatoins, particularly when the science in question is based on substantial unknowns, makes predictions about the future that have never been tested, and are tied to a political agenda.  Salesmen who insist that customers must buy now, who will seem to say anything to close a sale, and who get touchy when you start to read the fine print should make one particularly cautious.  The same is true of scientists for the same reason.

Quote from: John Morrow;225364OK.  So enumerate the variety of problems, the sorts of problems they cause, and how common these problems are.  My original complaint as that the modern environmentalist movement has an inability to distinguish between degrees and types of harm and here you are purposely refusing to address issues of degrees and types of harm opting, instead, for "a stand in argument for a variety of problems caused by careless pollution emissions".  Of course you don't define "careless", either.

For fuck's sake, I am tired of your demands for a preponderance of evidence that would choke a Supreme Court hearing.  If you are claiming some vague 'inability to distinguish', then you are to provide the evidence.  You get to enumerate the instances where 'the inability to distinguish degrees and types' is clearly evident, or you can stop making that unsupported claim.

You have made nearly boundless claims so far.  Time for you to start backing them up.  You have provided zero evidence that, for example, the economy would be utterly devastated if green initiatives would be undertaken.  You have provided zero evidence that a BS in Math is equivalent to a Ph.D in Climatology.  In fact, you have made unsupported assertations the entire time, while simultaneously demanding the most stringent evidence from the other side.

The merest implication that there is a lack of 100% certainty in environmentalism isn't enough.  You get to demonstrate how the formulas for calculating temperatures is wrong.  Or demonstrate that the ice core data is invalid.  Or provde some solid refutation of any single point from an independant climatologist.  Anything.  You want to set a certain standard?  Fine, you get to meet that standard.

QuoteWhere it makes sense, yes it will.  Where it doesn't, you'll get things like Kyoto which don't do very much and which a lot of countries simply don't comply with.

Was it perhaps because the US stalled and complained until the protocol was rendered useless, then refused to ratify anyway?

QuoteOf course not.  But the pollution that's created the problem has already been stopped and I already said I agree with that.

Really?  Stopped?  Completely?

So, the figures in the report that were calculated after 1999?  I mean, the report encompasses 1979-2005.  What about the last six years of the report?

Oh, wait, fuck it.  You just admitted that pollution emission caused cancer rates above national average in New Jersey among children.

QuoteDo you seriously want to argue that a blog is the equivalent of a mainstream local newspaper owned by Gannett?

You just don't seem to get it.  I didn't cite a blog, I cited official findings by the state of New Jersey.  You cited an article written by the 'health writer' for the local news agency.  Hmmm...  '...owned by Gannett' sounds suspiciously like an appeal to authourity.  It can't be, though, because you have spend long, long posts railing against that.

QuoteYes, but how much of that small difference has to do with pollution and how much if it has to do with demographics or regional diet differences or other causes?

Seriously?  Diet?  Are you suggesting that Twinkies are more of a causal factor than industrial waste?

QuoteSure.  And the difference from the average is around 1 in 100,000, give or take a bit.  And if we replaced every power plant in the state with a windmill, how much would that drop?

From industrial pollutants?  I dunno, it might drop to 0 in 100,000.

QuoteIt depends.  Remember my point about "degrees and types of harm"?  Why are they getting cancer?  What can we do about it?  What are the other costs of doing something about it?  And before you tell me that the life of a child has infinite value, we could reduce the number of automobile deaths to next to nothing if we required passenger cars to be build like NASCAR race cars with roll cages, 5-point seat belts, self-sealing fuel tanks, and required all automobile passengers to wear helmets and flame retardant suits.  Of course nobody but the very wealthy would be able to afford a car, but they'd be safe when they drove anywhere.

Ah, yes, back to your standard tactic.  Implying that environmentally concerned people only want the perfect solution.  It's not true, no matter how many times you try to make it so.

QuoteIt's clear that you have an interest in muddying the degrees and types of harm from environmental hazards which is why I'd like to see you address a single point to some depth.

Well, I have refuted all of your points to some depth, does that count?

But here, just because you asked nicely.  Well, you didn't, really, you just made your childish demands again.  Either way, here:

QuoteCarbon dioxide is supposed to be a problem because it acts as a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.

No, more specfic, please.  Tautologies won't help you now.  I thought you took a course in climatology?

Here, this is the burgeoning problem:  CO2  is an acidic oxide: in an aqueous solution, litmus turns from blue to pink.  That means higher concentrations will turn water acidic.  Making it, among other things, not potable.  Deadly to life in the oceans.  Greater CO2 in the air reacts with the oceans and other bodies of water.  The ocean has an enormous capacity to sequester carbon dioxide.  The bad part is, the ocean has an enormous capacity to sequester carbon dioxide.

Remember that acid rain stuff?  Too much CO2 in the atmosphere combining with water and...   Industrial pollutants.   In fact:

Quote from: Wiki Acid Rain articleThe term "acid rain" is commonly used to mean the deposition of acidic components in rain, snow, fog, dew, or dry particles. The more accurate term is "acid precipitation." Distilled water, which contains no carbon dioxide, has a neutral pH of 7. Liquids with a pH less than 7 are acidic, and those with a pH greater than 7 are basic. "Clean" or unpolluted rain is slightly acidic, its pH being about 5.6, because carbon dioxide and water in the air react together to form carbonic acid, a weak acid.

    H2O (l) + CO2 (g) ? H2CO3 (aq)

Carbonic acid then can ionize in water forming low concentrations of hydronium ions:

    2H2O (l) + H2CO3 (aq) ⇌ CO32− (aq) + 2H3O+(aq)

[/b]The extra acidity in rain comes from the reaction of primary air pollutants, primarily sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides, with water in the air to form strong acids (like sulfuric and nitric acid). The main sources of these pollutants are vehicles and industrial and power-generating plants.[/b]

To save you some time, yes those are qWiki cites.  I know, I know, your sources are pure as the driven snow, mine are dirty liberal commie propaganda.  You've said it so many times now, I think you were more interested in maligning Democrats than talking about environmental issues.

The first bolded part shows that carbon dioxide in water forms carbonic acid.  Clearly, the more carbon dioxide and the more water to react, the more carbonic acid.  And there is an awful lot of water in the ocean.  So, what do you think more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is going to do?  And hey, did you notice how that nitrogen dioxide map I linked to earlier is relevant now?  Science is kinda like that, you need to correlate all kinds of data.

At any rate, the second bolded passage mentions acid rain being caused by industrial processes, and that has been known for some time.  I am not sure why the other pollution issues are so difficult to attribute to human causes.

QuoteI didn't say that "environmentalists directly invented and implemented MTBE"

But you did imply it in a vain attempt to impugn 'environmentalism'.

Quote(I'm staring to think that you have a love for straw men that dare not speak it's name),

Sayeth the king thereof.

QuoteI said they were "responsible for adding MBTE to gasoline" because without the EPA regulations that mandated oxygenated fuel, they wouldn't have been putting MTBE in gas which actually contributed to poison seeping into ground water.

Ok, you are getting there, why do you think it was added in the first place?

QuoteAnd my one course in Medieval history (I actually had many overall) and one class in Climatology combined with various readings on paleoclimates and history gave me reason to be skeptical of global warming claims and the sudden disappearance of the Medieval Warm Period.

Oh, now it is many courses in Medieval History.  Much better.

You spend all this time saying, essentially, 'scientists change their minds', then you are surprised when they revise data ("disappearance of the Medieval Warming Period") after a more thorough investigation by scentists across a variety of fields?  And you didn't notice the fact that it really didn't 'disappear', as you claim?

Medieval Warm Period
Holy Moses!  RealCimate admits it exists!  Everything else on the site must be lies!

No, wait, they never denied it existed.  What they demonstrate is that it may not have been more than regional, and in any case, was only a very small event that would not have affected global averages to any significant degree:

Quotehttp://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=11#myth2]MYTH #2: Regional proxy evidence of warm or anomalous (wet or dry) conditions[/url].  Remember your ongoing complaints about 'degree and type'?

No, I think we have really found the heart of your problem.  You approach science exactly backwards.  You are trying to prove your pet theory with whatever data you can find.  Mr Sagan would be very disappointed with you.

QuoteThat I can read and think and understand mathematics means that I can read the claim and counter claims and assess their validity.  And my experience debating issues with people that have something to hide or who are lying gives me some pretty good experience in spotting when claims that something has been "thoroughly discredited" or "absolutely proven" are a bunch of baloney.  That you were unhappy about Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit being applied to your arguments, for example, is telling.

Have you applied it to your own?  Because you have some pretty flimsy evidence.  For example, above, you don't seem to understand why scientists are concerned about carbon dioxide.  Except the in the vaguest of tautological terms found in any broadsheet.  I mean, do you know how CO2 is sequestered by the environment?  You seem to have a very nebulous grasp on general scientific procedures and some of the basics of environmental science.  Are you sure you want to keep falling back on your Medieval History course(s) to promote your claims over scientists and doctors with years of experience in their field?  For example, do you have any concerns over the Large Hadron Collider that is going online soon?  Any views regarding exo-planets?  I mean, you say I have some thing to hide, or are lying, but all you have to offer are transparent 'counter-claims' with nothing but a course in climatology and extensive Medieval History studies to back you up.

No, in fact, you are desperately grasping at the tiniest of threads hoping to unravel whole arguments.  You are 'teaching the controversy' in the exact same manner as Intelligent Design/Creationism proponents, and you demonstrate the same shocking lack of sense regarding science.

Please, continue to rail against the scientific community.  You make my arguments far more convincingly than I ever could.

QuoteSo you don't feel any need to be honest or show personal integrity regardless of what other people are doing?

Ok, so let me translate:  "All my sources are clearly shills for industry, and lying through their teeth, but you are too!"

QuoteThat's not exactly what I said.  But I guess expecting anything but a straw man from you is too much, so let's see if we can work with this...

Don't strain yourself.

QuoteLet me give you a counter example and see if you find it compelling:

I don't, but let's continue anyway.  Bearing in mind that my scenario asks you to justify your position, which you haven't.

Quote1) The environment is on the verge of failure and if we don't act now, it will be ruined leading to all sorts of human disasters.
2) Oil executives want to lead a comfortable life.

So do you think it follow that oil executives wouldn't possibly ruin the environment?

What's an oil executive's interest in destroying the environment?  What's anyone's interest in destroying the environment?

Your own #2.  Their companies make literally tens of billions of dollars.  Their salaries are in the tens of millions, and retirement packages in the hundreds of millions.  They can easily afford to live in places that don't suffer from pollution problems.  I am not hearing plans in the news for Rex Tillerson (ExxonMobil) to move into the industrial section of Jersey City.  People, for the most part, are rather self-centered and short-term thinkers.  Mr Tillerson undoubtedly leads a very comfortable life now, as do his children and grandchildren.  Hence, the scenario for the oil executive is fulfilled.  With absolutely no regard for #1, they have accomplished #2.

Now, why are scientists trying to destroy their means of income?

Quote from: John Morrow;225423Not at all.  I believe that scientists have been wrong in the past so that warrants caution before making major changes based on their recommendatoins, particularly when the science in question is based on substantial unknowns, makes predictions about the future that have never been tested, and are tied to a political agenda.  Salesmen who insist that customers must buy now, who will seem to say anything to close a sale, and who get touchy when you start to read the fine print should make one particularly cautious.  The same is true of scientists for the same reason.

Ah.  Scientists are the same as salesmen.

Perfect.

Quote from: Edsan;225354Really? You mean those scary "global dimming" predictions from the 70's and the new Ice Age scares?

Now that you mention it, it is a bit chilly today.

'Global Dimming' was a footnote in a scientific paper.  The "predictions" were made entirely by the media.

Quote from: John Morrow;225352More complicated and expensive things don't necessarily pay for themselves and when they do, they tend to get adopted without government regulation to enforce the adoption.

Like OSHA?  Like 8hr workdays?  Like minimum wages?  Like not having 8yr olds work in mines?

Examples of where the government was literally forced to step in and enact regulations are rather moot, however.  You admitted above that in New Jersey alone, industry spewed noxious fumes and dumped poisonous chemicals in the groundwater with no concern for people's health over the course of 25years, causing thousands of childhood cancers.

QuoteOK.  Fair enough.  I have absolutely no problem with that as a goal.  I simply don't assume that carbon dioxide emission, in particular, are terribly harmful.

Ah, you assume.  That is great science.

QuoteIf you look at that map and know anything about the population and land use of New Jersey, you'll notice a few things that suggest that the cancer rate doesn't have to do with any one thing.  Most of the red spots are rural and shore counties that aren't hotspots of either industry or power generation.  In fact, that whole band along the coast are in counties that people visit from all over the region for a vacation and fresh air.  Hudson County, on the other hand, which is a heavily polluted area along the Hudson River, is one of the low rate areas.

"Downstream pollution".

QuoteIf you find it so easy to recognize excluded middle arguments, then why do you keep making them?

no u

QuoteThe guy who is ranting about capitalism and the oil industry doesn't believe in "conspiracy theories"?

I was actually stating that instituting actual capitalism in this country would be helpful.  I think you have a reading comprehension problem, as well.

QuoteWhen I was younger and more naive, I expected all sorts of integrity from academics in general and scientists in particular that I no longer expect.  Of course people with impressive post-graduate degrees never, never, never commit fraud or get falsified data published in peer reviewed journals or win awards.

But the people you continually cite are above all that?  They wouldn't dare falsify data and have impeccable integrity?

QuoteI thought the United States was having the worst economy since The Great Depression.  Now you tell me about all the new industry and job creation that's happening because of a transition to different energy sources.  So which is it?  And if you are talking about a transition that hasn't even started yet, how are you sure it's going to create new industries and jobs that offset the ones that are lost?

Entirely not what I said.  You said adopting greener technologies will utterly devastate the economy.  I made no claims as to the widespread adoption of greener technologies.  I am pretty sure that a greater adoption of these technologies will offset losses in other industries.  But we aren't nearly to the point where these technologies are being created on a large scale.  At best, we are seeing the beginning of it.

QuoteScientific American doesn't have any political axes to grind. :rolleyes:

My irony meter just broke.

QuoteAh, the deflecting non-answer.  That's traditional when a person is caught talking nonsense but isn't big enough to admit it.

It just broke again.

Wow, that is a lot of reading.

I think I am about done participating in Mr Morrow's propaganda platform.  While it has been entertaining, I do have other things to attend to.  I will chime in to answer legitimate questions to the best of my ability, but it will probably be references to web sites.

Quote from: John Morrow;225371The reason I believe it are (A) it accurately describes what happened in terms of a change in the model (Mann's reconstructions flattened the MWP and LIA), (B) they MWP was perhaps the most compelling argument against alarmism over Global Warming so there was a motive, and (C) Mann and others have made their data and methods less than transparent if not opaque, suggesting they have something to hide.  You can choose to dismiss Deming if you want but you should note that the Wikipedia bios of people skeptical of global warming could have been written by The Nation or MoveOn.org.

It is standard within scientific circles to present your results rather than your raw data.  As a physicist, none of my experiments released our raw data to the public -- and as far as I know it is standard throughout the sciences.  (We shared some but not all of our code.)  

As for motivation, it sounds like you're delving into conspiracy theories here.  Yes, it is possible that any given scientific result is the result of a conspiracy among the top researchers to come up with a result.  On the other hand, it seems to me that the simpler explanation is that their results are what they actually found.  I have not seen anything to at all impugn the integrity of the research.  

The Ad Hoc Committee paper had a bunch of criticisms, but for the most part they were critical of current scientific process in general.  For example, they claimed some errors in statistics handling in the paper and recommended that the scientists should have worked with the Statistics Department of their university in data handling.  While that is not an unreasonable suggestion, many scientific papers have statistics errors and almost no one goes to another department to tell them how to handle their data.  Note that I can easily believe that there are errors in the 1998 paper, errors are not the same as bias.  

It also criticized the process of peer review, noting that the community of reviewers were almost all people who knew each other and who often had worked together in the past.  That's how peer review works.  There are problems with it, but there are also problems with having amateurs or people from other fields judge your work.  

It's true that Mann's 1998 paper presents a different picture than in, say, the 1990 IPCC Assessment report.  You could hypothesize that this is because the 1990 report is the real truth and Mann conspired to try to hide the truth.  However, I don't accept that any of the 1990, 1980, or 1970 pictures are the real truth.  Our scientific understanding is always revising our picture, and generally getting better.  I expect that the 1990 report is also different from reports from 1980.  That's how things work.  

Quote from: John Morrow;225371Do you think scientists should make their data open to critics so that they can challenge and reproduce their work?  How about of major public policies hinge on the work?

Opening data is a tricky thing.  In general, I think research should be done by specialists in the field.  I love wikipedia and the blogosphere, but I don't think that a horde of politically-motivated amateurs combing over the data is going to improve our understanding of any science.  Relative to physics, I particularly get annoyed at a lot of amateur claims regarding nuclear physics -- which itself has many political implications.  I would rather that we fund research to get more specialized experts working on the problem.  

That said, I do think that ideally scientists should be more free with their data.  However, here's the problem.  The truth is, scientists constantly make mistakes.  I've seen a few pretty egregious ones in my research time, and tons of little ones in how research gets done.  However, my observation is that scientists are more respected if they keep their data and their mistakes closed.  When someone opens their data, they get tons of criticism and little praise.  We need to change that attitude, which has a lot to do with the whole structure of academia.

I'm going to stop replying to the parts of you're comments that are nothing other than little yappy dog barking.  It should be a great time saver since that's much of what you write.  If the yapping makes you feel better, by all means carry on.

Quote from: StormBringer;225444Was it perhaps because the US stalled and complained until the protocol was rendered useless, then refused to ratify anyway?

The US Senate was never going to ratify the treaty and even if Kyoto had been ratified and followed to the letter and the science upon which it was based played out as claimed, it's net impact on global warming would have been negligible.  And almost nobody is going to sign on board a treaty that takes a substantially bigger bite out of carbon dioxide emissions.

Of course you should be viewing the increase in oil prices as a blessing.  With oil being so incredibly expensive, suddenly all sorts of alternative technologies become economically viable.  Rather than mandate expensive alternatives, the alternatives are becoming cost effective on their own.

Quote from: StormBringer;225444Oh, wait, fuck it.  You just admitted that pollution emission caused cancer rates above national average in New Jersey among children.

The cancer cluster in Toms River may very well be caused by pollution and the source of that pollution has stopped (the plant that caused it is closed).  If you look at the overall childhood cancer rates and maps in New Jersey, it is not clear that the overall higher rate is caused by generic levels pollution because some of the lowest rates of childhood cancer are in some of the most polluted and industrial parts of the state while some of the highest rates are along tloghe shore, where there is substantially less industry, and least populated and rural parts of the state.  Could specific pollutants be a factor?  Of course, that is why the EPA rates substances by how carcinogenic they are.  

Maybe pesticides used on orchards contributes to the childhood cancer rate in a rural area and maybe pollutants travelling up the coast from other states is polluting the seashore communities and increasing the childhood cancer rate there, but that doesn't explain why other counties that are heavily polluted have rates below the state average, which wouldn't make much sense if general levels of pollution were the predominant cause of childhood cancer.  My point, as it's been from the beginning, is that you are refusing to make any distinctions, treating all pollutants as equally toxic and harmful.

Quote from: StormBringer;225444You just don't seem to get it.  I didn't cite a b, I cited official findings by the state of New Jersey.  You cited an article written by the 'health writer' for the local news agency.

As you've already pointed out, the article doesn't disagree with the official findings so what's your point here other than looking for something to argue about?

Quote from: StormBringer;225444Seriously?  Diet?  Are you suggesting that Twinkies are more of a causal factor than industrial waste?

Twinkies and industrial waste?  No.  General diet and general pollution?  Yes, I'm saying it's potentially a big causal factor.

As scientific research progresses, the evidence that dietary patterns, foods, nutrients, and other dietary constituents are closely associated with the risk for several types of cancer becomes more compelling. And while it is not yet possible to provide quantitative estimates of the overall risks, it has been estimated that 35 percent of cancer deaths may be related to dietary factors (Doll and Peto, 1981).

Other things are also factors, including genetics, exposure to radiation, exposure to toxins that parents inadvertantly bring home from their places of employment, household chemicals, and so on.

Quote from: StormBringer;225444From industrial pollutants?  I dunno, it might drop to 0 in 100,000.

It might.  And it might not.  It depends on whether the pollution is the cause of the problem.

Quote from: StormBringer;225444Here, this is the burgeoning problem:  CO2  is an acidic oxide: in an aqueous solution, litmus turns from blue to pink.  That means higher concentrations will turn water acidic.  Making it, among other things, not potable.

"Not potable"?  Are you serious?  You do know what soda water and Perrier is, right?  What are the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations that would be need to make water non-potable?

Quote from: StormBringer;225444Deadly to life in the oceans.  Greater CO2 in the air reacts with the oceans and other bodies of water.  The ocean has an enormous capacity to sequester carbon dioxide.  The bad part is, the ocean has an enormous capacity to sequester carbon dioxide.

Much of the carbon in those fossil fuels originally came from the atmosphere and, in the past, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations may have been ten or more times what they are now.  Do you have any evidence that the oceans absorbed deadly amounts of carbon dioxide during those earlier periods?  

For much of the Earth's history, it had no ice cap.  For part if it's history, it may have been completely (or nearly completely) covered in ice.  It's had carbon dioxide levels many times higher than they are today and oxygen levels about 150% of what they are today.  There have been glaciers and interglacial periods.  There have been supervolcanoes, asteroid collisions, and a time when much of Siberia was erupting with lava.  If none of that threw the Earth unrecoverably out of balance or killed off the oceans in the past, what makes you think it's going to happen now?

Quote from: StormBringer;225444Remember that acid rain stuff?  Too much CO2 in the atmosphere combining with water and...   Industrial pollutants.

You give me a Wikipedia article that says, "'Clean' or unpolluted rain is slightly acidic, its pH being about 5.6, because carbon dioxide and water in the air react together to form carbonic acid, a weak acid."  In other words, that's natural and normal.  It then says, "The extra acidity in rain comes from the reaction of primary air pollutants, primarily sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides, with water in the air to form strong acids (like sulfuric and nitric acid)."  You'll notice that the carbon dioxide isn't involved in the "extra acidity", so it doesn't demonstrate any sort of linkage at all.

Quote from: StormBringer;225444The first bolded part shows that carbon dioxide in water forms carbonic acid.  Clearly, the more carbon dioxide and the more water to react, the more carbonic acid.  And there is an awful lot of water in the ocean.  So, what do you think more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is going to do?

You do understand what "saturation" is, right?  Some researchers are already claiming that the oceans around Antarctica are already saturated with carbon dioxide and are absorbing less of it as a result.  And if global warming really is happening, warmer water holds less carbon dioxide.

Here is a study that created carbonated water with a 3.4 pH by putting room temperature water under 95% carbon dioxide (carbon dioxide is 0.03% of normal air) at 50 psi (normal atmospheric pressure is 14.7 psi).  So just how high to you expect atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to get?

Quote from: StormBringer;225444And hey, did you notice how that nitrogen dioxide map I linked to earlier is relevant now?  Science is kinda like that, you need to correlate all kinds of data.

Yes, I've noticed how you are again trying to confuse different types of substances to pretend that one causes problems caused by the other.  Carbon dioxide is not nitrogen dioxide nor sulphur dioxide.

Quote from: StormBringer;225444At any rate, the second bolded passage mentions acid rain being caused by industrial processes, and that has been known for some time.  I am not sure why the other pollution issues are so difficult to attribute to human causes.

Yes, it's talking about nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, not carbon dioxide, no matter how hard you try to pretend that one is the same as the other.  Proving one is a problem does not automatically prove that the other is a problem.

Quote from: StormBringer;225444But you did imply it in a vain attempt to impugn 'environmentalism'.

I did it to impugn slipshod environmental policies that don't fully consider the consequences.  The MTBE was put in gasoline because the EPA mandated oxygenatedfuel for environmental reasons (primarily smog control).  It's hardly the only example of something being implemented for one environmental reason causing a different unexpected environmental problem.  Should I talk about the windmills that kill large endangered raptors?  Recycling that uses more energy than it saves?  The millions of Third World children who have died of malaria because of the blanket DDT ban?  (You do care about little Third World children dying from malaria as much as you care about American and European children dying of cancer, right?)

Quote from: StormBringer;225444You spend all this time saying, essentially, 'scientists change their minds', then you are surprised when they revise data ("disappearance of the Medieval Warming Period") after a more thorough investigation by scentists across a variety of fields?  And you didn't notice the fact that it really didn't 'disappear', as you claim?

As a global period where temperatures were warmer than they are today, it has disappeared as far as they are concerned and they say as much.  Here, let me translate RealClimate.org's language for you.  When they say that the term's "utility of the term [...] has been questioned in the literature," what they are saying that they don't think the label is meaningful or useful.  So what RealClimate.org is saying is that people talk about it and use the term but they question it's utility for "describing regional climate changes in past centuries" which is of course the whole point of the term.

Quote from: StormBringer;225444No, wait, they never denied it existed.  What they demonstrate is that it may not have been more than regional, and in any case, was only a very small event that would not have affected global averages to any significant degree:

In other words, it didn't really exist in any meaningful way.

Quote from: StormBringer;225444Your own #2.  Their companies make literally tens of billions of dollars.  Their salaries are in the tens of millions, and retirement packages in the hundreds of millions.  They can easily afford to live in places that don't suffer from pollution problems.  I am not hearing plans in the news for Rex Tillerson (ExxonMobil) to move into the industrial section of Jersey City.

I thought the claim was that global warming was, well, "global", right?  And where exactly are they going to hide from dead oceans and unpotable water?  So you are telling me that I can avoid the global catastrophe as long as I stay in suburban New Jersey?  Wow, I was worried there for a moment.

Quote from: StormBringer;225444Now, why are scientists trying to destroy their means of income?

Because, like Rex Tillerson, they don't believe they will be impacted by the costs of their ideas because unlike Rex Tillerson and others, they are not business people or economists.  Because academics are somewhat insulated from the economy (college tuition is rising well in excess of inflation).  And of course they may actually believe that man-made global warming is a threat to all life on the planet, in which case damaging the economy might seem like an acceptable trade-off.

Quote from: StormBringer;225445Ah.  Scientists are the same as salesmen.

Not all scientists.  Just the ones who behave like salesmen.

Quote from: StormBringer;225455Like OSHA?  Like 8hr workdays?  Like minimum wages?  Like not having 8yr olds work in mines?

All of those were designed to address very clear and obvious problems, though I might argue that the harm done by the minimum wage may not offset the benefits and the 8 hour workday has largely been undermined by exempt employment.

Quote from: StormBringer;225455Examples of where the government was literally forced to step in and enact regulations are rather moot, however.  You admitted above that in New Jersey alone, industry spewed noxious fumes and dumped poisonous chemicals in the groundwater with no concern for people's health over the course of 25years, causing thousands of childhood cancers.

My argument was not and is not that environmentalism is bad.  My argument was and is that blind environmentalism that can't make a distinction between largely harmful and largely harmless problem is bad.  Many environmental issues operate on a 95%/5% split where you can solve 95% of the problem for 5% of the cost and the remaining 5% of the problem for the remaining 95% of the cost.  Thus spending a modest amount of money to reduce things like arsenic in drinking water may be money well spent but spending a great deal of money to remove a remaining trace amount that has negligible health effects might not be.

Quote from: StormBringer;225455Ah, you assume.  That is great science.

No, I don't assume.  You are right.  Assuming is bad science.

Quote from: StormBringer;225455"Downstream pollution".

The counties in question are not in the same watershed as the industrial north of the state (the north is separated from the south by the Raritan River, which empties into the Raritan Bay), the shore currents run from South to North (courtesy of the Gulf Stream), and the winds in the shore counties often blow in from the ocean.  So if it's downsteam polution, it's likely coming from outside of the state.

Quote from: StormBringer;225455But the people you continually cite are above all that?  They wouldn't dare falsify data and have impeccable integrity?

Oh, they've made mistakes and I'm sure you are aware of that (the infamous radians and degrees confusion).  And Steve McIntyre was quite critical of Craig Loehle paper on the global nature of the Medieval Warm Period even though he should have liked the conclusions, because Loehle made some mistakes.  That's why transparency is important.  So that people can validate the science and find mistakes.

I'm not asking you to just believe me or trust them.  Read both sides and make up your mind, not simply what one side says about the others.  Scientists have historically embraced skepticism and get themselves in trouble when they abandon it.

Quote from: StormBringer;225455Entirely not what I said.  You said adopting greener technologies will utterly devastate the economy.  I made no claims as to the widespread adoption of greener technologies.  I am pretty sure that a greater adoption of these technologies will offset losses in other industries.  But we aren't nearly to the point where these technologies are being created on a large scale.  At best, we are seeing the beginning of it.

Not simply adopting greener technology.  How much would carbon dioxide emissions have to be reduced to stop global warming according to the RealClimate.org folks?  And don't they argue that if we don't do it right now ("Act Now!") all sorts of horrible things will happen.

Quote from: John Morrow;225595You give me a Wikipedia article that says, "'Clean' or unpolluted rain is slightly acidic, its pH being about 5.6, because carbon dioxide and water in the air react together to form carbonic acid, a weak acid."  In other words, that's natural and normal.  It then says, "The extra acidity in rain comes from the reaction of primary air pollutants, primarily sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides, with water in the air to form strong acids (like sulfuric and nitric acid)."  You'll notice that the carbon dioxide isn't involved in the "extra acidity", so it doesn't demonstrate any sort of linkage at all.

Actually, the point was that the carbon dioxide is rather important in the reaction.

Let's take another look:

H2O (l) + CO2 (g) ? H2CO3 (aq)

Carbonic acid then can ionize in water forming low concentrations of hydronium ions:

    2H2O (l) + H2CO3 (aq) ⇌ CO32− (aq) + 2H3O+(aq)

The extra acidity in rain comes from the reaction of primary air pollutants, primarily sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides, with water in the air to form strong acids (like sulfuric and nitric acid). The main sources of these pollutants are vehicles and industrial and power-generating plants.

Honestly, you fail to grasp this simple bit here, omitting the important section that explains "Carbonic acid then can ionize in water forming low concentrations of hydronium ions", completely misunderstand that the 'extra acidity' is caused by the pollutants reacting with the already slightly acidic water, then wholly fail to comprehend that more carbon dioxide means more carbonic acid in any setting whatsoever.

And you want to your views on environmental science to be taken seriously?