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Originally Posted by Poptech  |
The title of this list says: "Supporting Skeptism". It is always good to be skeptical, that argument goes both ways. There is not actually any need to provide additional reasons to be skeptical. One should be so in the first place.
And the first link in that list I opened does nothing but make the point that it is difficult to make climate predictions. So would that mean that if we were blind, we didn't have to be cautious? Apparently the attitude is that in spite of this happening (for example) :
A Warming Arctic: Greenland's Ice Sheet Melting Faster than Ever - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
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Greenland's Ice Sheet Melting Faster than Ever")
we should wait and see until something is proven beyond any doubt, beyond any reason to be skeptical? Again, there are always reasons to be skeptical, so then it will be too late. Because that will never happen.
The second link I opened (actually the first in the list) spends its time making points like this:
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Data from numerous sites give the impression that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a real climatic episode (see reviews in Loehle, 2006; Soon and Baliunas, 2003 and below), but reconstructions from tree-ring data do not show this episode very well.
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and then
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Until these and other issues are resolved, it is reasonable to ask whether a reconstruction without tree ring data might produce a different result than those produced in past studies.
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That's even a hypothetical.
Although 2 out of 450 is obviously a small sample, so far it doesn't seem that Sen. Kerry missed anything actually relevant to politicians who need to decide what to do now. Perhaps both articles can make contributions to the scientific study. Perhaps. However, neither of them appears to provide an even remotely substantial reason against the assertion that CO2 reduction is the right thing to do to keep a climate change from happening, or to show that this would not be necessary. The best I can tell, the scientific data is now such that the burden of proof goes to those who, for some reason, do not want us to reduce CO2 (if that is the intention?). (And even if, smog and air pollution would be obvious and obviously significantly harmful.)
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