hot shoe 1 wrote:
So Julian, how would you address the scenario posted above?
Ok, you didn't catch that I was lampooning your scenario.
I caught it, but since you didn't address it, I asked it again. You're the owner of the building, and responsibile for its upkeep. The fault may be due to design, it may be due to lack of upkeep. You were warned it's a problem. Do you do nothing and let it collapse, then blame the designer?
"Another point people are trying to make you just posted,The scientists dont know the mechanisms of change so they just assume its us.That is my whole thing with this climate change stuff.(Was called global warming but they change it)they dont know if its us doing it or not.So if they dont know for SURE they should not call it a FACT."Marcus -- they're looking at data that's stored in the earth's records for 600 million years (and more). You see drastic changes that have never been present in 600 million years, and these changes are occurring in the hundred years that man has been industrialized.
If you were throwing a dart at a dartboard, the odds that this is random coincidence would be like hitting a 1 square inch target painted onto a surface 600,000,000 square inches. So imagine a square white board 200 feet on each side. Paint a red square 1 inch on a side, and place it somewhere on the board. Fly a plane 10,000 feet overhead, and drop a dart from the plane. See how many times it hits the white board, and how many times it hits the 1-inch-wide red target.
You don't have to understand the mechanism to see that the odds of these changes being random are very, very, very slim. You can see the effect (heating), and you look at the things that are clearly different today (extreme global concentrations of CO2, mass extrinction of amphibians -- which have been around 3 times longer than the dinosaurs, and many, many other occurrences, such as sudden changes in oceanic chemistry, etc). You test possible solutions, you see if there are correlations.
The data is neutral. The entire world has concluded from the exact same mountains of data available to the federal government that we have a serious problem -- regardless of whether we understand the mechanism or not.
When you're driving 60 mph and one of your tire explodes, does it matter if it was a tire design flaw or if you hit something sharp? First, you handle the issue at hand (or you crash). Assuming you survive, you try to find the root cause so it doesn't repeat itself. The data points very strongly to a man-made issue -- if you were in Vegas, the math says you wouldn't bet against it. As a mechanic, if a machine behaves oddly, you look for likely causes. You tackle what appears to be the most likely cause first. The global system is showing freakish occurrences that haven't appeared in 600 million years, the consequences of which are hard to predict -- but many of the possible outcomes are pretty bad. We are already seeing food production decreasing, and fresh water supplies are drying up. If there was even a 1% chance that you couldn't get food or water, would you do something? The data points to a 90% probability that food and water availability will change drastically in the next few decades. Why ignore it? No logic, no math, no science, no faith, no common sense supports ignoring it.
And for the record -- it was the Bush Administration that refused to call it global warming, so they coined the term 'global climate change'. The administration refused to discuss this topic with the press if they referred to it as 'global warming'.
