Man Made Global Warming. A Religous Topic?

Originally posted by marg6043
Now we know that in earth history a warming period is the warning of an ice age.

Oddly enough

Forecast is for more snow in polar regions, less for the rest of us

which is exactly what is needed to precipate an ice age. Though the snow does need to fall in the right regions, and not melt in summer. We're a long, long way from an ice age at the moment. But when they announce that the Baffin Ice caps are rapidly advancing again, and have exceeded their LIA extent, we ought perhaps start worrying (assuming by then we have discovered a way to live for 10s of thousands of years)

Originally posted by AndyMayhew
If anything, I would say that refusal to accept that human activities are affecting the climate to the detriment of man (and other life) is akin to religious belief.

Religion accords as supernatural explanation for observed phenomena, without need for proof. AGW is the opposite - an explanation based on scientific analysis, without preconception (whatever some may want you to think). And open always to falsification (indeed, science is all about trying to falsify what we current think to be true: the very opposite of religion).

And it's perhaps no coincidence that many of the most vocal 'deniers' - and their financial supporters - hold strong Christian religious views (I'm not aware it's the same with followers of other religions, though I may be wrong).

How ironic, your own words and admission is what causes your side to lose. You mentioned that any priniciple is always subject to it, did you also know, any theory is suppossed to have its falsification criteria mentioned oht front, zo it can be used to destroy it if it is found wanting? Well what are global warmings falsification criteria, and how can they be followed if every time anything happens it is proof of AGW? You know what I am talking about, " it is very warm in one part of the world this year see it is proof, it was a little cold in this region, see proof" lol, the entire theory of global warming has neve once followd the scientific method, if it had, there wouldnt be an entire historical rexord deleted so we can now onky used the falsified data, as that is a huge no no, can delete your source materi, or we wouldnt hage models as a proof without source code, so they can be examined to see if they are being manipulated, which we dont have, and just like when einstein had to publish his falsification criteria with his theiry, so t coukd be used to destroy it ifnit was true, they woukd have done the same, which they havent, in fact, to this day there is still going on 30 years now not been issued any of the such.

Want me to go on, or do you want to keep some self respect?

reply to post by AndyMayhew


I agree, what is happening right now, is a littler bit of clima change with a big propaganda hype that is going to kill us all.

Still we are long away from feeling any of the change for a few generations to come.

Hopefully the next advances in technology will ensure a proper care of to limit extinctions, that is if the elite in power by then feels that only certain groups within the population deserve to be protected while the rest deserve to die.

Al Gore is the key to all of this, he alone is the one that is profitting from all of this. Where do you think GOREtex comes from....His company.

Carbon credits are a joke, why is it that you have a Landfill that is buring Methane and it could be used to make electricity but for some reason the power company's don't want to purchase such power. Carbon Credits has nothing to do with climate change or any else except MONEY.

MONEY is the root of all evil, we all need it but we don't care how we get it so lets make a Enviormental issue about anything and everything as scare the **it out of everyone that is worried about the planet and make some money.

Really the climate is changing? I live in a Northern State and I can tell you one thing for sure.....Hell has not arrived but Old Man winter is hanging on.

reply to post by Ghost147

You know, to give some credit to the idea of Man contributing, I think there are two areas that could be true.

#1. Deforestation World Wide. I think it's gone so far beyond the needs of sustenance for local people to clear land that it's crossed into outright criminal. Co2 is very good for plants. It's their Oxygen, after all and that is a point I wish was covered at least in passing while some make these gases out to be the horror of horrors. Only to our particular form of life, to be really pragmatic. lol.... The zinger is, we're building Co2, at least in part, because we've toasted off the Co2 scrubbers and Oxygen generators our planet came with (the vast forests from Russia to South America to North America and more). In many cases, toasted is a literal thing in deliberate burn offs. That would make for uncomfy things asked of people who don't want the questions though, IMO.

#2. Ocean Pollution This is my biggest concern, frankly...and NO ONE is bothering to address it that I really hear in the public eye. Not high profile people, anyway.

My largest concern here is the mass of garbage starting to have impact on the currents and patterns that actually do seem to run the climate engine of Earth. Some other things suggest a layer of plastic particles in the first few feet of ocean water as chronic pollution all over. Could that eventually effect current direction and speeds? Ice ages may hinge on that.....but imagine the titanic battles and who it would have to be with to change THAT factor.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


Very good points wrabbit, star for you sir.

I think somthing that also gets overlooked in this is a very important factor, anyone know what the minimum consetration co2 that plants need to live is?

It is around 280 ppm, we are barely above this threshold right now. Which is why ohr plants are so small compared to the dino days, their co2 consentration was thousands of times higher than ours at present, notice anything funny about that? Like it was one of the earths longest stabke periods of climate in its history, and obviously no out of control warming occured, as they lived quite well, and we are here today, minus the promise burning waste land a mere 100 ppm is suppossed to cause. Lol, then why didnt it happen then? And why didnt it go all out of control even though it was thousands of times higher for many millions of years?

Just a couple of things I ponder on everytime this subject comes up.

reply to post by Ghost147


When I saw the title of this thread I thought "ah geez, not another preachy ATS rant about the supposed 'religion' of global warming"...

Instead I found an insightful, well thought-out post about the very revealing hypocrisy of such projection-bias laced statements. So nice work OP

Anyway, I completely agree with your assessment and I think if you want proof you need to look no further than numerous posts here on ATS. Usually the ones making these bold claims about the "global warming religion" do it with an extremely zealot-like authority of their own. They don't necessarily have to be religious themselves, but usually they are very obviously biased ideologically and politically. Either way, to me it's a very telling sign of their insecurity over something they clearly don't understand, that also happens to clash with their core belief system.


...
Now - as for where this behaviour comes from - I think it's very deliberately manipulated and planted in their psyche. You basically nailed the reason why right here:

Another interesting fact is that all my fellow employees (but one) litter to an extreme, and they all over-use the objects around them (small things like too much dish soap, keeping the water running, wasting material at work, using far too much paper towel to clean up a small mess, and so on).

Think about all the people in this world who make money off this mentality of excess, overconsumption and waste. It's simple math that Palmolive and Bounty are going to have higher profits the more dish soap and paper towels everyone uses. This is something I've written about on ATS before in this thread: You have all gotten in bed with the enemy.

There's also some great videos that sum up the motivations behind this conspiracy (because that's exactly what it is) here:



Or if you can find the full version - a movie called Pyramids of Waste: The Lightbulb Conspiracy (all about the very related topic of planned obsolescence):




So that's why you'll find the most vocal critics of the so-called global warming "religion" are these extreme right wing radicals who espouse all things free-market and worship unabashed capitalism rah rah rah.


I have studied the global warming issue (both the science and the politics) extensively, and I find these ideologues are always the ones leading the charge about what a supposed "religion" the whole thing is. They constantly write articles about it that appear on their blogs or make their way into financial magazines like Forbes or The Wall Street Journal. These shills have manipulated public discourse over global warming since the beginning, and if you want more insight on that, Kali74 just started a GREAT thread on it here: Deny No More.


Now as to why so many religious people follow this lead - well, for one thing they usually have "conservative" values that line up with these right wing extremists anyway, and two - hate to say it, but these people are the target market because of their proven track record for subscribing to convenient ideological indoctrination and showing a distinct inability to think for themselves. They also love subscribing to easy answers to complicated questions that I'll explain further below...

reply to post by Ghost147


I want to touch on a few other things because your thread has highlighted many great points.

A perfect example of how much the neocon/fundamentalist right wing has manipulated the public discussion on global warming is very apparent in some of the replies to this very thread.

Case in point - the meme that "they" used to call it global warming but then switched to "climate change" in order to better sell the hoax. The truth about this is that the science has always used the term climate change. I wrote about this before here: Can We At Least Get One Thing Straight About Climate Change?

But that's not all - because the reason why there was a deliberate switch from global warming to climate change in the public lexicon was indeed for political reasons. However it was implemented by the Bush Administration, specifically by their "language strategist" Frank Luntz - who suggested it because it helped make the whole thing sound more natural and less threatening than the term global warming.

Again I have written about this on ATS several times. I really recommend looking through this post here, as it includes video links of Frank Luntz bragging about how he came up with the idea, and also another poignant video that really hammers home just how stupid and ironic it is for self-proclaimed "skeptics" to use this meme as an example of what a supposed hoax global warming is.

All they are doing in the end is showing off how much they themselves are getting brainwashed and completely played for (useful) fools in this debate.

Finally - this:

Another incident would be in the documentary Jesus Camp, where a parent was quizzing their child on Global Warming and asked "why is global warming not real" and the child responded "because they say that it's only changing by half a degree, or one degree, and it's so small that it wouldn't make any difference".

This is another oft-repeated argument against AGW: that it's not a big deal, and man is "arrogant" for thinking we can affect something as huge as the entire planet's climate.

The first thing people need to understand about this is how utterly ignorant it is. It's along the same lines of thinking that the Earth must be flat, and anyone is just arrogant to think otherwise because we'd fall off the side if it weren't. We are affecting the climate. There is no doubt or ambiguity here. This is not based on controversial science or unproven computer models. It is based on basic, axiomatic physics that have been well understood for almost 200 years now. CO2 is a proven greenhouse gas - no ifs, ands or buts about it. This stuff is very easy to confirm at home even:







So all the people who constantly try to deflect this discussion to natural cycles are doing just that - deflecting. Yes, natural cycles do happen - but none of that changes what we KNOW about how our own emissions can also affect the climate.

Furthermore, there are other things we understand with very good certainty thanks to the math and physics alone. For example we know that the Earth's greenhouse effect naturally makes the planet 33 °C warmer than it should be: Step by step proof here

This is despite the fact that all greenhouse gases make up less than 1% of the Earth's total atmosphere.

We also know from basic mathematical models that doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (which we are well on pace for) would raise the overall temperature by another 1.2 °C: Idealized greenhouse model

Now for those people who think this is not a big deal - I like to remind them it's the entire Earth's average temperature. Think about how much energy it requires just to raise the temperature inside your house by one degree Celsius (~2 degrees Fahrenheit). Now extrapolate that to the whole planet! What this actually adds up to is an extra 2,000,000,000,000,000 (2 QUADRILLION) Watts of energy. That trapped energy now becomes available for storms, hurricanes, melting ice, etc.


But that's not all - because that's only the energy we're getting directly from our emissions. As we warm the planet, we also set off numerous natural feedback mechanisms like increased water vapour, lowered albedo from melting ice, further GHG release due to thawing permafrost, etc, that only spawns even more warming.


This is where the science gets a little more murky, since it's all so interconnected and complicated - but the consensus on this is we stand to face a total warming somewhere between 1.5 to 4.5 °C. It's also the consensus that 2 °C is the cutoff point before climate change starts carrying significant consequences.

However - even that projection is based on the idea that we will ultimately curb our emissions. Currently those emissions are only getting worse and worse on a global scale, and under this scenario we stand to shoot past even our worst case projections. If that happens, then we are venturing into extremely dangerous waters - thresholds where the damage we do becomes largely irreversible and climate change feedbacks take on a life of their own that leave the entire planet largely uninhabitable. Here is a great video that touches on just how bad it could get:




So to play this all off as not a big deal is incredibly lazy, simple-minded, and downright utterly foolish.

But this is once again exactly how the shills and disinformers operate here. They constantly seek out lazy, simple-minded people and tell them the science is very complicated, so that makes the scientists "arrogant" for thinking they could figure any of it out. They then simultaneously feed these same people all sorts of easy alternative answers like "climate change is natural", "it's the Sun", "we're too insignificant to affect anything" and placate them with constant reassurance that they should just keep shopping and using as much dish soap and paper towels as possible.

Personally, I believe the 'religion' of man made global warming is the epitome of Hubris with a capital H

Global warming is not a religion and it's ridiculous to say so. Furthermore there's nothing arrogant at all about believing it, but it is extremely annoying to hear this retarded argument repeated again and again by people who believe everything they hear on talk radio (Rush invented this about 20 years ago) and aren't smart enough to think of their own argument against it.

reply to post by Ghost147


I say I'm nominally religious, which generally is a calculated stab at being vague. More directly I've grown less & less willing to publically discuss my preferred religion or religion in general.

-- Qualifier -- I have & inevidably will in the future weigh in on a religious topic, as this reply demonstrates. What I primarily aim at is to avoid imputing greater or less metaphysical value to particular religious content & beliefs. It's true that I'm not always successful at this, yet my refined understanding of subjective value over the years has basically purged me of religious dogmaticism. Not belief per se, nor my unwillingness to be railroaded & enjoined to the dictates of relgious dogmaticism: in spite of all the differences that exist in thoughts & physiology among individuals, the aggregation of individuals to social organization tends toward harmony versus violence. Unlike, say, the philosophy of conceptualism whose modern advocates gratuitiously extend the conceptual sense meaning of universality, I do not subscribe to the metaphysical viewpoint that civilization or society exists out there in a universal sense independent of individuals.

The point or emphasis about universality is germane to my viewpoints about AGW & whether the phenomenon is a religious topic. But let me add first that what follows may qualify as a straw man. To clarify the potential straw man I want to be understood as saying that no, I don't think that AGW fits within the traditional conception of religious belief. On the other hand the climate is an existential property of the world; moreover, religious belief does to varying degrees shape opinions about individual actions. Concomitantly scientific and non scientific beliefs of varying merit shape opinions about individual actions. Both groups (in this case I mean the scientific & non scientific, neglecting altogether the religion component) have their zealots who advance a dogmatic viewpoint about how society ought to function with respect to AGW. AGW is not even requisite for a dogmatic opinion about how society ought to function.

So I take the viewpoint that AGW is not a religious topic. In that same vein I also take the viewpoint that universal dogmaticism is not a credible substitute either. These sorts of AGW advocates might as well ostensively claim that civilization is god--it's their implication so far as I'm concerned. Furthermore, to what extent does human effort contribute to globale warming/climate change? Why should I endorse social policy that will reduce my access to energy? I mean this implication of access to energy is not minor, nor is it one that the AGW advocates are prone to elaborate. If they do happen to mention restriction to energy it is to avoid catastrophe. Well, just how certain is this catastrophe?

I don't think the AGW advocates are winning the argument. Despite this they continue to push for reforms that constrain individuals, and I posit this is so because the interest that AGW seeks is further control at the top of the vertical structure. An article over at Project Synicate entitled "Europe's Green Recovery" is an example of this, where the outcome of the author's recommendation reduces to (as I've posted in another thread) "increasing costs." There are other questionable aspects related to the article, but what strikes out most is that costs must be increased to supposedly reign in something called "genuine economic recovery." I got the impression that the author might believe climate change was the cause of the global economic downturn. The author didn't state that, but nor did the author remark anywhere about causation. Rather, the author effectively begs the question by asserting that "genuine economic recovery" is tied to the Green movement. It's awesome propoganda that is just as dogmatic as some people in the religious community are guilty of promoting. The fine-tuned difference, however, is that religion seeks to save individuals whereas the Green movement seek to save civilization. Both demand control & sacrifice. I mean the parallels are, I think, funny.

reply to post by CB328


Personally I find all the hubris comes from the so-called skeptics - who constantly assume that just because they themselves don't understand anything about the science, that means it must be wrong.

But it's just yet another example of the massive projection bias that underlies this entire debate:

- The people who scream the most about alarmism are usually the loudest, most hyperbolic voices you'll hear.
- The ones who claim it's all politicized make their case with ridiculous political talking points spoonfed to them from the other side.
- The ones who tell you to follow the money are usually obsessed with money/consumerism and can't see a lick of how much money there is in actually denying global warming.
- The ones who call it nothing but a religion tend to be the most insulated and devoutly dedicated to maintaining their core beliefs through a system willful ignorance and denial.

reply to post by marg6043

ah, ya beat me to it

and since you mentioned FL, i'll mention LA and why'o why did/are we re-building New Orleans, which sits below sea level ????

i'm not against re-building, don't be mistaken.
however, we're rebuilding below sea level when an unexpected, extreme rise is ... due ? pending ? inevitable ???
really

do i believe climate change is occuring ?
absolutely, that tends to happen when the poles migrate
and considering the current movement encompasses a greater distance at a more rapid speed than previously recorded, it makes sense.

can't comment on the 'religious' aspect as i am not.
are the changes Earth endures felt on a spiritual level ??
i tend to believe so, yes.

Originally posted by CB328

Personally, I believe the 'religion' of man made global warming is the epitome of Hubris with a capital H

Global warming is not a religion and it's ridiculous to say so. Furthermore there's nothing arrogant at all about believing it, but it is extremely annoying to hear this retarded argument repeated again and again by people who believe everything they hear on talk radio (Rush invented this about 20 years ago) and aren't smart enough to think of their own argument against it.

Well, that is one opinion on the matter. Although, I'd love to hear the justification you find in supporting the idea that man's actions in less than 100 years of behavior have measurably damaged and changed the weather patterns of the entire planet.

The cause and effect is as much Faith in computer models and simulations as anything for repeatable experiments or conclusive science. In fact, it's almost entirely based in computer modeling and that modeling has a real poor track record for accuracy over time,....on much of anything so far. The Faith side of it is why I agree with people saying it's as much a religion as anything.

The problem with simulations and models are that while computers are infallible to how they process the data they are fed, they are only as accurate as the data being fed in was to begin with. We have Emails in the public domain now, showing Climate scientists massaging and fudging numbers in the common interest of end result. That's only the most public, not unique case of such meddling with data or creative reading to fit a pre-determined outcome far more than letting science determine the course.

What we DO have though, in scientific certainty, are cycles of warming and cooling. Not just desert and ice age cycles, but far more subtle cycles within those larger ones. The current drought conditions experienced in the U.S., for example, have been seen before. The Dust Bowl years of the 1930's matched the current drought prediction maps to a disturbing degree of overlap. Science shows that pattern going back many cycles before that too. We, as a species, have seen conditions like we have now, many times before. We'll see it many times again....judging by historic patterns.

So, that is why I lean to natural cycles for Global climate and planetary weather patterns while also agreeing that local and regional pollution is sickening and obscene. There doesn't NEED to be a global threat to act locally, IMO.

reply to post by mc_squared


Ok I have had enough of you guys, lets see one of you disprove a thing I wrote then, since your all so smart and even though I have a natural affinity for math and science, which I used in the military and majored in in college, you wanna try to claim I dont understand science. Lol your all stupid.

Bring it on, refute one thing I wrote, you cant though, as they are all known truths. Your idiocy astounds even me, and I dont expect as sinlge intelligent thing from the mouth of any AGW supporter.

So suprise me, refute what I wrote, which obviously flies directly in the faxe of your beloved religion.

Cmon, lets see it, please allow me to embarrass you right here and now, right in front of all of the ATS commujity.