Procedural Texture: Isn't it great when non-scientists draw upon scientific data to disregard scientific conclusions?

Please explain the scientific conclusions being disregarded. Specifically, can you name 3 predictions made by Global Warming Theory which have been verified?

Sometimes the consequences of bad science can be serious. In a 2000 issue of Nature Medicine magazine, four international scientists observed that "in less than two decades, spraying of houses with DDT reduced Sri Lanka's malaria burden from 2.8 million cases and 7,000 deaths [in 1948] to 17 cases and no deaths" in 1963. Then came Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring," invigorating environmentalism and leading to outright bans of DDT in some countries. When Sri Lanka ended the use of DDT in 1968, instead of 17 malaria cases it had 480,000.

treecologist: OMFG, this guy is a farking retard. He is associating climate scientists with malaria deaths in Africa. How do the editors let him get away with this shiat? Oh, right, it's the Wall Street Journal.

Was the push to ban DDT not lead by "environmentalists?"

I guess we should overlook environmental effects of DDT like bioaccumulation, biomagnification, and the development of mosquito resistance to DDT.

Sure, we can do that while we're overlooking the fact that banning DDT caused more deaths than it ever did while actively being used. Malaria deaths way up - the replacements were not as effective as DDT. Deaths way up among the guys spraying - they'd never handled truly toxic pesticides before the DDT ban. Actions like the ban have costs, and it's our goddamn duty to ensure that the cost is outweighed by the benefit before imposing that cost.

We should ignore the fact that there was never an international ban on DDT use.

No, there was just a freeze on foreign aid for countries that didn't impose the ban. Don't be a pedantic jackass.

And, most importantly, let's overlook the fact that du Pont Chemical Co made lot's of money selling DDT!

Is it a crime to make money? Specifically, was it more of a crime for Du Pont to make money selling the product, or for the haters *to kill people* by banning it?

pjc51: Ermm... global mean temperatures will increase,

Measured how? Ground temperatures have been rising since the end of the Little Ice Age (they fell after the Medieval Warm Period, before that they rose). This is an observation, not a prediction, and it precedes the presumed cause.
More interestingly, Global Warming Theory did make a testable prediction: The atmosphere would warm several degrees, and this would drive an increase in ground temperatures. Hasn't happened - atmospheric warming has been negligible, far outpaced by ground temp increases *in urban heat islands*. Ground temps in areas well separated from urban heat islands have actually fallen over the last 150 years.

summer arctic sea ice cover will reduce

Arctic sea ice cover in the summer has been reducing for 6000 years. There has been a slight increase in the rate of reduction in recent years (or just better measurements - we really don't have good measurements before the advent of nuclear subs and satellite imagery), but not enough data to attribute the delta of change to any particular cause. In some areas the ice is expanding, in some areas it's retracting, and the cycle long predates industrialization. But, please, feel free to find any solid predictions of the magnitude of the delta which were accurate, and which also correctly predicted the *thickening* of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

and sea levels will rise?

Sea levels are at about their lowest historical level. They have nowhere to go but up - this is not a prediction so much as an observation, and there's no data to correlate the changes to anthropic causes.

[image from upload.wikimedia.org too old to be available]

[image from upload.wikimedia.org too old to be available]

pjc51: No but the conflict of interests kind of rules out the possibility of this article being considered objective.

Fair enough - but taken to its logical conclusion, that attitude means that no writing on the subject can be considered objective, since the researchers are not grant-blind.

treecologist: Sorry you missed my point, but apparently, you are the kind of person he was writing for anyway.

The kind who insist on cost-benefit analysis, or the kind who insists that we not fark up yet another system by trying to overly manage something we don't understand?

Just so we're on the same page, a few points about where I'm coming from:
1) Man has a tangible effect on weather and climate. This is the 90% claim of the IPCC, and I have a hard time believing 10% take the opposing view.
2) We do not fully understand that effect.
3) Climate change has been a constant in the history of the Earth - there is no such thing as "preserving" the climate. The best we can hope to do is manage it, and we do not have enough knowledge to do that with full confidence of the results.
4) Pollution reduction and energy efficiency are worthy goals in their own right, and completely separate topics from the Climate Change discussion.
5) A theory which makes no confirmed predictions and which claims every observation is validation is not science, it is a branch of Creationism.
6) All actions must be evaluated on a cost-benefit basis prior to enactment.

treecologist: Hmm, whether a pesticide directly causes human deaths is only one way of quantifying the damage it causes. Don't you think that ecosystem damage caused by DDT indirectly affects human health? Don't you know that in many places the effectivness of DDT declined precipitously because of resistance? Don't you know that environmentalists don't set policy in the U.S., much less Sri Lanka? Don't you know that although its use was banned in 1972, it was manufactured in the US until 1985? Don't you know that there are pesticides which can be used to control mosquitoes which are much less persistent?

Apparently the answer to all of the above questions is, "no".

You might want to let the UN know about these much safer, just as effective pesticides - DDT is the keystone of WHO's new anti-malaria initiative. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2006/pr50/en/index.html

What pjc51 said. The tired, old "environmentalists = communists" claim is a bullshiat attempt at baiting me. I am all for capitalism and profit.

I know this is a difficult concept, but try reading the farking thread, and then get back to me and tell me who brought up the funding issue in the first place? Tell me, did I make a claim that "environmentalists = communists" or was I specifically responding to the claim that du Pont must be biased because they made a profit on the product? And while you're on your holier than thou crusade about capitalism, DDT, etc, keep in mind that one of the reasons DDT was such a widespread and popular pesticide is that it was *profitable*. All of the available alternatives were more toxic, less effective, or *cost prohibitive*.

lolmao666: No, sea levels aren't at their lowest levels, you know why? Because before, North America was under hundreds of meters of ICE. So the oceans were logically below the current level.

Look at the graphs I posted and see if this helps clarify the point. I posted both for this reason. Sea levels are rising slowly *for a non-glacial period*. Now, they've been rising for 20,000 years or so, since the last glacial episode in fact, so they're higher that at any other point in the last 20,000 years, but the rate of growth is very low compared to the bulk of that period, and extremely low compared to other known rates of change. Basically, sea level is either going to be rising or falling at any given time, and falling would be Very Bad^(tm) as it would indicate a glacial episode. So, yeah, sea level is rising. It's been doing so for 20,000 years. It's rising slower now than for most of that period. "Predicting" that sea level is going to rise is not a prediction, it's an observation that we are not entering a glacial episode. You want to make a prediction, give me a projected delta in sea-level change, preferably tied to various external factors. No such prediction has been made and/or verified.

keloyd: Warming in the Upper Northwest predates, therefore is not caused by humanity.

Well, keep in mind humanity was there *during the last glacial episode*.

"No such prediction has been made and/or verified"

Dubya's_Coke_Dealer: Oh! It's like God! Not verified! Therfore, God doesn't exist either! Thanks for the proof!

Umm, no problem. What the hell are you talking about?

/atheist

Dubya's_Coke_Dealer: You may want to check CNN for an interesting article:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/02/20/global.warming.pact.reut/index.html

Ah, good for them. That's fantastic.

LedZeppelinRule: I'm not going to bother debating your points there - urban heat islands, thickening ice caps - these things are easily explained if you care to look into them. Mostly, I'm continuously miffed by people who show graphs of mean temperature or sea level over hundreds of millions of years as if to indicate, "Hey, the planet does this all the time, it's no big deal." You seem to be ignoring the fact that for most of the times shown in your chart, the planet was freaking inhospitable to humans.

I'm not ignoring that fact - I'm highlighting that *change is the natural state* and therefore indicative of nothing. I didn't post the graph to make the statement that change isn't a big deal. I posted it because sea level rising was a posited prediction of GW Theory, and yet we can clearly see that the sea level has been rising for the last 20,000 years, and the current rate of rise is historically low. That's kinda like me predicting that the sun will come up tomorrow, but not saying what time, and linking the "event" to the number of cel phone towers in downtown Houston.

There is undeniable evidence that the planet is currently accelerating towards inhospitable conditions again, man-made or not. It won't take much of a climate shift to completely wreck the global economy. Don't you think that, whatever the cause, we should be looking for a way to slow it down?

Well, putting aside that most warming has been a net benefit, yes, we should be looking for a way to effectively manage the environment. And the first step in that is really understanding the issue. Don't do to the Earth's environment what we did to Yellowstone National Park - action without comprehension is a sure-fire recipe for disaster.

keloyd: Before disease from europe killed off 90-99% of the locals, Indian slash-and-burn forest fires was killing off almost as much trees as modern forestry and agriculture by some estimates I can't remember right now, maybe the author Charles Mann.

Alston Chase: In a Dark Wood: The Fight over Forests and the Myths of Nature

Robert B. Edgerton: Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony

Shepard Krech: The Ecological Indian: Myth and History

I posted it because sea level rising was a posited prediction of GW Theory, and yet we can clearly see that the sea level has been rising for the last 20,000 years, and the current rate of rise is historically low.

pjc51: But what's really important is the rate of rise, which is much greater currently than the long term trend over the last 6kYa or so.

Did you even read my comment before you responded? The current rate of rise is historically low. You can see this from the graph. And no GW proponent accurately predicted the rate of rise.

The sea level has risen ~130 meters in the last 18,000 years. That's an average rate of 7 1/4 mm per year. The current rate is 3 mm per year, less than half the average rate. The rate of rise was even lower during the Little Ice Age, but you're not drawing a correlative picture between CO2 and sea level by noting that.

[Disclaimer - these are global average values which are subject to some measurement error and variation. Some measuring stations show a slightly greater rise (up to 7mm/year), some actually show a sea-level decline (Tuvalu, for example), not all tidal gauge stations are the same quality, and some of the measure may be due to erosion. Satellite measurements of sea level show a constant 3 mm/yr rise over their (short) period of use]