Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemmy
Its not science when you don't understand the entire mechanism that causes climate change - its simply deciding who's guesswork you like the most.
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Modelling is not "guesswork".
Mind you, the models are not perfect, but they take into account many more factors and feedback mechanisms than you think they do. And with each refinement of the models, each added factor or feeback loop, the answer is still the same. The world is getting/going-to-get warmer.
I used to be a skeptic. Then I read up on the science. Then I became skeptical of which factors and forcings were most important. So I read some more.
And the more I read, the more apparent it became that the elephant in the room... millions of years worth of stored carbon, released through the combustion of hundreds of billions of tons of hydrocarbon fuels... our biosphere simply can't clear that out of the air and water fast enough to prevent it from affecting the climate.
Climate change is real. Global average temperature change (despite what "climategate" conspiracy theorists will lead you to believe - the discussion on correction factors for orbital decay by politicians who don't understand what correction factors are for is particularly amusing) is real. The shifting of global weather systems, causing unusually hot and cold weather is real.
Can we actually do anything about it? The math says no. But mitigation is still worth trying.
The argument, in the end, should be about what we can/should do about climatic shifts.
Instead, we're still stuck at the level where we're debating whether our ice cream is melting or not.