OK, sorry for the HIV derail. Carry on.

It's ok, it's the same story over and over.

Unfortunately there is a large section of our society who:

1) Are not very bright

2) Hate people that are (MDs, PhDs)

3) (1) + (2) makes them very susceptible to propaganda which

4) Right wingers take advantage of to gain power

As much as I find right wing politics distasteful, you'll find that this pattern happens on the left as well, particularly with anti-vaccination and anti-fluoride people, although they certainly don't have the influence in American politics that the global warming deniers do. The anti-vaccine movement is much more influential in Europe, particularly in Sweden, where starting in the early 1980s, we see cases of pertussis (whooping cough) start to skyrocket due to a decrease in the use of the DPT vaccine, influenced by the anti-vaccine movement.

Yeah the whole vaccine=autism thing seems like a bunch of anecdotal scaremongering, which unfortunately is also potentially dangerous if it catches on.

I don't know about Europe, but here in the states there was a big right-wing anti-H1N1 vaccine push going on in the fall. As usual the Daily Show had a good juxtaposition, I believe it was Glen Beck wondering out loud whether the H1N1 vaccine was going to kill us all and then a few days later he was complaining about shortages of the same vaccine.

+1

Ideology is the enemy of science.

Pretty important FYP

i didnt vaccinate myself. not that i care about side-effects, I just figured that spending 2h on getting a shot wouldn't increase my life expectancy more than just going out for a walk those two hours.

-----

my reasoning on CO2. CO2 is the gas of life. if we double the concentration of C02 in the air, plants will grow ~70% faster which means 70% more food to starving people. say the earth has x tons of carbon, i wouldn't prefer more of it stored in oil-fields, i would prefer it in the air. if temperature should change i think we should prefer it a few degrees warmer on average. history tells us that when it was warmer the nativity was higher and society improved faster-


if the earth gets to hot we can always cheaply geo-engineer it. the cost of lowering the temperature back to 1800-levels even with IPCC most pessimistic numbers would be less than Gore spend on his movie. much cheaper than COP15. dont understand the hate on geoengineering, imo it's just because it doesnt give politicians enough power.

flame away!

How about your statements not supported by observation?

does that count as flaming?

Here's an idea: let's have 100% CO2 atmosphere...plants would just grow faster...amirite?

edit: ytf did I even dignify his post w/ an answer? It's one of the worst ITT. If it were so cheap to fix global warming, we'd have done it by now.

Geo-engineering is great, let's just throw iron in the ocean, long live eutrophication.

which one?

it sure isnt any argument.

let's not be silly just because I have a different viewpoint, if I am so wrong enlighten me.

humans die with 100% CO2, 1% is toxic for us. if you saw Avatar, Pandora has 20% that's why the humans had to wear masks and why they had so much vegetation. earth had higher c CO2 before, when dinosaurs walked the earth.

because most people are unconfortable with the solutions. but we have already geoengineered the earth by releasing CO2.

or sulfur aerosols in the stratosphere.

As it has been said thousands of times over and over again, the problem with global warming was never the fact that the planet is getting warmer per se, it is the speed at which the change takes place. Yeah, there would be no problem whatsoever if it took place over a million years. In the scale of human lifetime though? It will completely screw over our current land use much quicker than we might be able to adjust and risk a complete economic disaster.

How about there being probably 1 million different consequences to any such large-scale geoengineering attempt that we can't possibly foresee at the moment and will likely turn out much worse than the problem they would solve? You make it sound like global scale engineering of temperatures is a fully developed technology that has been used successfully many-many times, instead of a speculative theory that has never been tested. WTF, seriously?

And we knew in perfect detail what was going to happen, amirite?

Ah, the good old conspiracy theory. Why did I even make this post.

it's not fully developed but we have experience with it. it's basically just a engineered controlled volcanic eruption which we've had plenty of to study and we know the effects quite well. it would increase our output of sulphur 1%.

you mean 0.75±0.18° in 100years during a period where the number of sunspots has doubled.

alright just a few EXTREMELY layman thoughts/questions on the matter.

even though i would agree with the concept of man made global warming, just because it seems SO inherently correct that to deny it is seriously ******ed imo, i have a tough time taking all the science reports that get shoved down our throats seriously on account of political agendas, funding, and the like. this has led to a willful ignorance in the matter since id rather not waste my time looking at every single study published on the subject and break it down piece by piece.

-are we accelerating it to the point where it WONT be reversable with output decreases? i.e. are we approaching the tipping point where the earths never ending "self correction" if you will, can not fix things?
-if yes, is there any consensus on when that tipping point would come based on current output rates and increases of such rates, and how we could identify it? because to tell you the truth, all of this 1 degree change nonsense isnt making me run for the hills. especially taking into account the exponential nature of technology development i fail to lose any sleep at night worrying about our inability to deal with this.

also, if that thing about the antarctic ice melting summer 2014 (which would imo meet the tipping point requirement, but again i have no clue on the issue) turns out to be correct, surely we would be royally f**ked by that point right?

edit: i realize the questions were discussed itt but unless i missed it no links were provided about such specific things, if anyone could point me in the correct direction would be great ty

Please define "consensus"... because by most rational people's standards, there has been consensus for decades...but a number of (irrational) people are still holding out hope that it's all a big conspiracy.

ok, what has the consensus for decades determined wrt a tipping point? are you saying that for decades theyve believed we already passed the point of no return?

I think the problem is that you are thinking in terms of one gigantic tipping point. But in climate there are just a series of smaller, unpredictable tipping points. For example, at what temperature will methane hydrates begin to melt and outgas into the atmosphere. Or, at what point will the ocean's ability to uptake CO2 begin to diminish?

In terms of "point of no return," there is no returning to the Earth's previous average, but most of the discussion in the scientific literature (and especially negotiations like Copenhagen) is keeping the global temp rise to under 2 degrees C. This is almost certainly still possible.

But even if it isn't, there is no evidence for a huge tipping point ahead, so that cutting emissions will always have some effect, and deep cuts in emissions will have large effects, including avoiding the worst of the warming. (That is, for each degree C temp is raised, the effects are worse for civilization.)

Why are you thinking in yes-or-no categories? It's not like it's "either we'll be totally screwed or we'll be totally fine". It's the question of how screwed will we be. More CO2 ~> more warming ~> more screwed. Less CO2 ~> less warming ~> less screwed.