Cool!
It's a battle of the windbags!

...you know I'm j/king.....I hope....

___________________
"...End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path...one that we all must take.
The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all change to silver glass...and then you see it...
...white shores...and beyond...the far green country under a swift sunrise."

quote:

Originally posted by occrider When the world's leading climatologists have 90% confidence with respect to the affects of global warming there's not much room to dance around on.

I trust that I am not the only one to have noticed that nearly all the scientists that have opined global warming is not a result of or materially contributed to by human activity have specialties in unrelated fields. Really, an astrophysicist rulling out human activity as the cause of global warming is tantamount to a neurologist opining on the cause of one's arthritis.

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Originally posted by RickyM you're just a shit version of Moral Hazard. At least he knows what he's talking about.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN lol, i love it when moral feels the need to lay the smack down

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Originally posted by Fir3start3r Cool! It's a battle of the windbags! ...you know I'm j/king.....I hope....

I don't have the stamina or concentration to keep up.

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Originally posted by Fir3start3r What I don't understand is what is the appearance of the U.N.'s 180° about-face. Not too long ago (read a couple months ago) they were blaming cows and flatulence in this >THIS U.N. REPORT<

The methane emissions from human and livestock waste is a contributing factor in the increase of greenhouse gasses, just like soccer moms driving Ford Excusrions to take little Cindy to school 4 blocks away is. Neither is the most glaring case of avoidable greenhouse gas emissions, but they both contribute in their own way. I don't believe anyone ever stated that "cow farts" were the only cause of a rise in greenhouse gasses.

But you cannot deny that without a human impetus, the cattle population on earth would be a tiny tiny fraction of what it is today. Thus cattle farming on the scale it is done today would be the reason, and thusly it could be extrapolated as being a human caused phenomenon.



MrS

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Click the sig to see MrSquirrel

-"Reality" is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.

It's amazing how using the right words will make an argument that much more convincing....

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You're Getting Warmer … The new statistical rhetoric of climate change. By Daniel Engber Posted Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2007, at 5:44 PM ET Global warming must be on a hot streak. Just a few months ago we watched polar bears drowning on the melting Arctic ice. In Washington, D.C., the cherry trees bloomed in January, and—wait, was Heaven boiling over?—the president himself warned Congress about the "serious challenge of climate change." But the biggest score came last Friday: A report from the United Nations' blue-ribbon international panel of climatologists declared global warming an "unequivocal" fact, "very likely" caused by human activity. This upgrades the panel's previous assessment from 2001, which tagged our poor behavior as the "likely" culprit. The words are selected to correspond to precise numerical assessments of our guilt. Six years ago, the authors calculated a 66 percent chance that we were behind the recent warming trend; today they peg it at more than 90 percent. (At one point, they proposed going as high as 99 percent.) This quantification of doubt is relatively new. For years, climate-change scientists relied on verbal expressions of chance instead of statistical ranges: Effects were "probable" or "possible"; they "could" or "might" be true. As a result, their language of uncertainty was easy to misinterpret, politicians threw up their hands, and skeptics seized on ambiguous phrases to argue that the science of climate change was based more on estimation than fact. But 10 years' worth of new data have emboldened the researchers, and now they've replaced their hazy equivocations with percentage values. This shift in rhetoric—at base, from words to numbers—has made their conclusions more comprehensible and compelling. It's also made them less honest. The change in strategy began when Richard Moss and Stephen Schneider—a pair of researchers dubbed the "uncertainty cops" by their peers—urged the U.N. panel of climate scientists to fortify their language with hard numbers. The mapping of phrases to percentages, they argued, would make it easier for policy-makers to apply the science and harder for skeptics to spin it. A footnote in the new report explains how their ideas have been applied: If the report says something is "virtually certain," it means there's a 99 percent chance that it's true."Very likely" refers to any probability between 90 percent and 99 percent, "more likely than not" refers to a chance greater than 50 percent, and "unlikely" is somewhere between 10 percent and 33 percent. (Click here for a PDF of Moss and Schneider's recommendations.) The new system makes it easier for policy-makers to think about global warming in terms of betting odds. You might determine the value of a card game by weighing the chance of winning against the potential payoff. Likewise, the politician can figure the risk of a global disaster by multiplying the chance of its occurrence by its potential costs. It might not be worth our time, for example, to hedge against the tiny possibility of a giant asteroid hitting the Earth, even though its effects would surely be catastrophic. (In gambling terms, betting on a deep impact would be like buying a lottery ticket.) Global warming, on the other hand, seems like a much safer bet. From a policy perspective, this sounds like a great idea. But when Moss and Schneider first made their recommendations, many members of the climate-change panel were justifiably reluctant to go along. As scientists, they'd been trained to draw statistical conclusions from a repeated experiment, and use percentages to describe their certainty about the results. But that kind of analysis doesn't work for global warming. You can't roll the Earth the way you can a pair of dice, testing it over and over again and tabulating up the results. At best, climate scientists can look at how the Earth changes over time and build simplified computer models to be tested in the lab. Those models may be excellent facsimiles of the real thing, and they may provide important, believable evidence for climate change. But the stats that come out of them—the percentages, the confidence intervals—don't apply directly to the real thing. That's why the climatologists had been using vague language about probability—they didn't feel they could draw on the rigorous language of percentages to describe what were essentially subjective judgments. At issue was our intuitive distinction between two kinds of probability, which might be described as "statistical" and "subjective." We might say, in the statistical sense, that the chance of rolling snake eyes on a pair of dice is about 3 percent; subjective probabilities, by contrast, come into play whenever we make a personal judgment based on available evidence. On Sunday morning I used my marginal knowledge of football to determine that the Bears would win the Super Bowl. Jurors use courtroom testimony to decide how likely it is that a defendant is guilty of a crime. And climatologists use scientific evidence to decide how likely it is that we're heating up the Earth. We haven't always been hung up on distinguishing between statistical judgments of chance and subjective ones. In the 18th century, magistrates were expected to assess the probability of a defendant's guilt by calculating the sum of the testimony against him. Meanwhile, a tribunal that convicted by a 2-to-1 margin could be taken to imply that the verdict had a 67 percent chance of being correct. The elements of probability weren't teased apart until 1837, when Siméon-Denis Poisson divided it into the dual concepts of statistical frequency (called "chance") and subjective judgment (sometimes referred to as "raison de croire"). Poisson's distinction has persisted, more or less, until today. In general, we use numbers and percentages when we're talking about statistical probability, and we use phrases like "doubtful" or "almost certain" when we're talking about subjective judgments. That doesn't mean you can't quantify belief. In fact, most of us have a pretty consistent intuition about how the language of uncertainty relates to numerical values. According to a famous study from 1990, if you ask people to translate the phrase likely or probable into a percentage, most will give a number between 63 percent and 78 percent. Very likely yields a rating of 80 percent to 90 percent. Something that's certain is 98 percent or 99 percent. But further research revealed that these meanings are stable only when the words are presented without context. In a report on climate change, by contrast, there's no reliable way to know if one policy-maker will ascribe the same percentage to the word likely as another. That's where the uncertainty cops come in. They tell the scientists to turn their opinions—as the best-informed experts in the world—into numbers. The process of mapping judgments to percentages has two immediate benefits. First, there's no ambiguity of meaning; politicians and journalists aren't left to make their own judgments about the state of the science on climate change. Second, a consistent use of terms makes it possible to see the uptick in scientific confidence from one report to the next; since 2001, we've gone from "likely" to "very likely," and from 66 percent to 90 percent. But the new rhetoric of uncertainty has another effect—one that provides less clarity instead of more. By tagging subjective judgments with percent values, the climatologists erode the long-standing distinction between chance and raison de croire. As we read the report, we're likely to assume that a number represents a degree of statistical certainty, rather than an expert's confidence in his or her opinion. We're misled by our traditional understanding of percentages and their scientific meaning. The uncertainty cops argue that in the face of global warming—and the spin campaign to discredit it—we must do whatever it takes to boost the credibility of the experts. If the public is more inclined to believe in percentages, then the experts should give them percentages. It's a reasonable argument and one that could help us to address the precipitous rise in greenhouse-gas emissions. But we have to acknowledge that the new headline-grabbing rhetoric of climate change has elements of propaganda. However valid its conclusions, the report toys with our intuitions about science—that a number is more precise than a word, that a statistic is more accurate than a belief. ---------------------------------------- sidebar A scientist might, for example, collect data from a pair of dice by rolling them over and over again in the lab. The results would form a frequency distribution; given enough data, it's possible to draw conclusions about which numbers are most likely to come up.

>>Source<<

___________________
"...End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path...one that we all must take.
The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all change to silver glass...and then you see it...
...white shores...and beyond...the far green country under a swift sunrise."

quote:

Originally posted by josh4

Though CO2 is very important for life, at the same time, we must must stop cutting down trees, damage to the environment - thats the MAIN (forgot this word :EDITed) source of C02 emissions in my opinion, not urban/industrial CO2 emissions. Destruction of environment is whats screwing up weather patterns, part of a huge ecological catastrophe. Cutting emissions will NOT stop this growth of CO2 ... Environment will continue to suffer. And carbon cycle will continue to take a beating. How are emissions cuts going to stop the damage? How? Using magic wand? I know time will prove my point ... I am certain ... when the world temperatures will start declining after 2015 or sooner, then we'll be talking. And by then idiots who fell for global warming will not believe anymore in any environmental talk, and environment, as always will continue to suffer.

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Whenever you go and buy something, you are affecting someone somewhere, be it environment, a person, or a community - you're making a statement with what you buy. So make it a smart choice ... Its a big picture

Last edited by Magnetonium on Feb-08-2007 at 02:21

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Originally posted by Magnetonium Though CO2 is very important for life, at the same time, we must must stop cutting down trees, damage to the environment - thats the sources of C02 emissions in my opinion, not urban/industrial CO2 emissions. Destruction of environment is whats screwing up weather patterns, part of a huge ecological catastrophe. Cutting emissions will NOT stop this growth of CO2 ... Environment will continue to suffer. And carbon cycle will continue to take a beating. How are emissions cuts going to stop the damage? How? Using magic wand? I know time will prove my point ... I am certain ... when the world temperatures will start declining after 2015 or sooner, then we'll be talking. And by then idiots who fell for global warming will not believe anymore in any environmental talk, and environment, as always will continue to suffer.

I love it! The billions of tons of CO2 that we put into the atmosphere that comes from fossil fuels have nothing to do with it! We just cut down too many trees! I wonder if you really think that these scientists don't take into account all the different environmental changes we have subjected the earth to in their models. I mean, there just scientists with many years of experience, what would they know that Tom Hartmann or whatever his name is, the psychotherapist, doesnt know!

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Poetry>Byron//Blog>TheMean

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Orbax At that point you kind of crossed the rubicon and you might as well lay siege to Rome

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Originally posted by venomX I love it! The billions of tons of CO2 that we put into the atmosphere that comes from fossil fuels have nothing to do with it! We just cut down too many trees! I wonder if you really think that these scientists don't take into account all the different environmental changes we have subjected the earth to in their models. I mean, there just scientists with many years of experience, what would they know that Tom Hartmann or whatever his name is, the psychotherapist, doesnt know!

You dont know what Hartmann writes about, even wikipedia says he's global warming expert (am I supporting global warming???)

I actually made a mistake in my previous post. I meant to say that most of CO2 released is through environmental damage, not through emissions - but both release CO2, no denial in that. I think that destabilization of natural carbon cycle from damage to the environment is the biggest culprit, which will not stop when we cut down emissions.

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Whenever you go and buy something, you are affecting someone somewhere, be it environment, a person, or a community - you're making a statement with what you buy. So make it a smart choice ... Its a big picture

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Originally posted by Magnetonium You dont know what Hartmann writes about, even wikipedia says he's global warming expert (am I supporting global warming???) I actually made a mistake in my previous post. I meant to say that most of CO2 released is through environmental damage, not through emissions - but both release CO2, no denial in that. I think that destabilization of natural carbon cycle from damage to the environment is the biggest culprit, which will not stop when we cut down emissions.

Obviously there needs to be a comprehensive solution. It is silly that you think most of us are not aware that cutting down emissions is not the only thing that needs to get done, but it is one of the things, and a very important one at that. It is also a start. You seem to ignore the complexities of initiating and coordinating movements of this magnitude that affect so many interests and doing it on a worlwide scale. It is almost impossible to tackle everything at the same time. Space exists so that everything doesnt happen to just one person, and time exists so that everything doesnt happen at the same moment.

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Poetry>Byron//Blog>TheMean

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Orbax At that point you kind of crossed the rubicon and you might as well lay siege to Rome

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Originally posted by venomX Obviously there needs to be a comprehensive solution. It is silly that you think most of us are not aware that cutting down emissions is not the only thing that needs to get done, but it is one of the things, and a very important one at that. It is also a start. You seem to ignore the complexities of initiating and coordinating movements of this magnitude that affect so many interests and doing it on a worlwide scale. It is almost impossible to tackle everything at the same time. Space exists so that everything doesnt happen to just one person, and time exists so that everything doesnt happen at the same moment.

Taking humans out of equation will solve all of Earth's problems. We are in the way. Earth has existed in equilibrium, co-existence and mutual benefit until some humans, who used to be part of this cycle, developed methods to control, destroy and manipulate nature, breaking the cycle, as David Suzuki points out in Sacred Cycle. WE are the problem, and we should immediately halt destruction. We've been talking and talking and talking while nothing''s being done and now we've figured out how easy it is to ignore the environmental problems if we pretend that emissions are the main problem. And the rest is history. Even the natives can clearly see how dumb we are. Great legacy for the future generations ...

___________________
Whenever you go and buy something, you are affecting someone somewhere, be it environment, a person, or a community - you're making a statement with what you buy. So make it a smart choice ... Its a big picture