Has your position on global climate change matured since you first took interest in the topic?

Question

A little background, please, on where your interest started, what you've learned, and whether your interest has diminished, or your resolve grown.

If you have a favorite site, feel free to share it but express why you prefer the site over all others.

Answer 1

Well as I have always tried to live what they call today green my interest was triggered by the flap in the 70s about the coming ice age and how if we did not cut our consumption of fossil fuels we were going to drive the world into a new and more terrible ice age. Well I am a bit of a nut on history, especially societal history and am very familiar with the natural history of climate change over the last 5 thousand years. I am also extremely familiar with a similar flap in the 1920s about a new and coming ice age that flipped in the mid 30s to a the world is burning up theme very much like the AGW/climate change flap of the current era.

This fore knowledge of previous pogroms of this sort prepared me for the flip from cooling concern to warming panic as actually has happened. Also because it has still not reached the high temps of the 1930s and is showing signs of cooling off again I find the rhetoric of the AGW promoters to be deliberately aimed at creating a public panic kind of like when somebody yells fire in a crowded theater to generate income for the local hospital he owns and the ambulance service he owns. The graph that was first published to make the AGW point and later used by Al Gore as his major piece of proof is what really caused me to change from interested and slightly skeptical to full fledged denial of all of their assertions.

Even before the study group in Canada found out where and how the program that produced the graph was in error I knew the graph did not reflect the real world in any way. Since high school I have studied graphs derived from glacial ice cores and Lake Bottom sediment cores as wee tree rings and public records going back more than 5 thousand years. This hockey stick graph did not reflect any of the very well known and documented climate variations of the last 5 thousand years and more it did not reflect those of the last two hundred that are very well documented.

So it is my personal feeling that any widely published and touted graph that is this false must be some part of a major financial and/or political scam. Looking around I found that Al Gore is a major stock holder in a oil company and that while he was vice president he got this and other oil companies drilling rights on land that was well known to have huge amounts of oil under it but had for almost a hundred years been held in reserve for the Navy. So it became clear to me that this is only another game to make the oil companies richer and more powerful than they already were. The whole precept of AGW is just another fast money game like the others they play .

Answer 2

people like Bill Mollison already made me aware of a lot of things over 15 years ago,

In the beginning i had the notion that if we as Humans co operated ,we could actually change things for the better .

However as time goes on i realize more and more ,that those who are in the position to make the biggest changes are the biggest offenders .

with Agendas far removed from the well being of either the planet or the people ,

And only a small section of humanity cares enough or is prepared to behave more reasonably with what we got .

So my personal enthusiasm for my own behavior has increased with knowledge .but my hopes for solutions coming from the public at large is dying ,

I know millions of people are into saving the future for Humanity ,but many more billions live for themselves and for today only.

It is as if everyone is hoping for Niburu to show up in 2012

But i am grateful that i live in interesting times and I dont want to miss the end of the world ,it is what is driving me on .

so I want to stay alive as long as possible and what i do is all about going into the future

But my body is maturing unreasonably

Answer 3

Yes and no.

I have always been an environmentalist keenly sensitive to and aware of the changes man has wrought on the world.

I watched the stream near my house slowly die over a period of 25 years.  It went from a nice spring fed stream when I was four to a gouged out, dried up drainage ditch that only flows when it rains.  I can explain in detail exactly how and why this happened.  I watched it happen.  It was the direct result of uncontrolled development – the desire for short term solutions (ease, gain, profit) over long term realities (sustainability is ultimately our only option).

As far as global warming, when I first saw the Mauna Loa graph in the mid seventies one glance was all it took.  

I immediately thought:  

The immovable object – Physics (CO2's role in balancing the climate) meets the irresistible force – Humanity (fossil fuels are the foundation of and the very reason for our modern civilization).

So I would say that my position began as idealism - how could we be so stupid as to allow this to happen, surely we will come together and solve this.

It progressed to morbid cynicism and depression.  Believe me, you have no idea how many people in the world today sincerely believe that we are beyond redemption - and gave up a long time ago.

Today I hope I have the maturity to accept that the universe is progressing as it should.  That if we muster the courage to solve this we will solve it, and if we don’t we will be handed our fate and removed to make room for the next iteration.

Not good or bad, just what is.  If we work to solve this we deserve our rewards.  If we remain arrogant we deserve our fate.

So I’m resigned to my fate.  All I can do is say look – here is the evidence.  Accept it or not, just remember I told you so and don’t come looking to me for a handout when things get really bad.

So I’m still sad and pessimistic about this overriding concern, but it doesn’t effect me totally any more. Kind of like having chronic pain but resolving to live your life as you would anyway.

So I gave in to my wife and made two beautiful children.  They will learn to adapt as we all have, past and present.  And I’ll keep on advocating for the environment.  And I’ll hedge my bets and keep building the infrastructure I know they’ll need to stay a step ahead.

And when you come knocking on my door, I honestly don't know what I'll do.  The idealist knows that we are all in this together, there is nowhere that any of us can run and hide.  The cynic will tell you to go starve, you deserve your fate.  The realist will say sorry, here is a scrap and a cup of water, I have to protect my own.

What's the next step in our evolution Amy?

My favorite site is wherever I am, to look up in awe.

Answer 4

Yes.  I used to be a big time AGW believer.  I no longer think humans (1) have much control over the greenhouse effect, and (2) are causing a climate crisis.

350 W/m2 (nature) vs. 1.6 W/m2 (human). Humans don't control the climate.

Answer 5

Amy I used to think you were open minded, but after reading some of your answers this morning, I know longer think that way. So I believe what you really are asking with the word "matured" is if we believe humans are contributing to climate change.

If that's what you're asking my answer is no, I haven't changed my mind about what causes the global climate to heat up and cool down. But I have realized in order to rule out CO2 as a contributing factor we need to reduce the the human contribution of CO2, since that's the only thing we can influence right now.

Answer 6

Matured - - - - evolved?    Somewhat.

I could be us.    That hasn't been proven.    Some of the exaggeration, the hyperbole, that makes me want to buy into the "greatest hoax" rhetoric but I struggle not to.    The revision of history, dressing up as polar bears, insisting that the predictions have been "spot on" when they've been anything but, the insistence that the inability to prove it's something else can be equated with proof that it isn't anything else, the rhetoric about XOM paying $19MM in total for research that says government should leave the oil industry alone when governments spend tens of billions every year for research that says that government shouldn't leave the oil industry alone.......    Those really invite skeptics to become cynics.

There is a brook next to my grandfather's house.    It feeds a lake.    The brook is still there as it was when I was growing up.   The lake is still there too.   You could skate on it reliably in the 1970s, most of the winter.   Now, some winters it's frozen solid, some it's not.    But the lake itself was formed when a glacier half a mile thick melted.

As for "I told you so" - - even if it does turn out to be us, why do the people and groups responsible for stopping the construction of nuclear power plants in the 1970s - plants that emit no CO2 at all - have the right to say "I told you so?"    It's because of the lack of a nuclear option that we built all those gas fired plants in the 1980s and coal fired plants in the 1990s and 2000s.

Participating in these discussion has not changed my ultimate position and it has, if anything, made me more skeptical.    We have a self-styled expert citing his own articles and basically referring to everyone as stupid, unscientific "deniers" leading the pro-AGW charge, and I suspect that he does his cause more harm than good.

Citing "realclimate" is not a whole lot more credible.

I just haven't seen anything that justifies the declaration of victory ("the debate is over") or the confidence that is exhibited here and elsewhere on this issue.