| > But that is not a valid response: in any decade we know more than in decades before that. Why does the inevitable increase in accumulated knowledge imply that it doesn't make sense to base decisions on the current state of that knowledge? It sounds like you haven't thought this argument through. Repeated, rapid fluctuations in the scientific opinion or lack of broad consensus would be warning signs, but neither of those are present. > So: has anyone crunched the numbers? Yes! That's what scientists do for a living. They publish detailed records of their data-->conclusion inference process, high-level scientific summaries of those individual results (reviews), and higher-level nonscientific summaries of their cause/impact/mitigation conclusions (IPCC reports). Thousands of them sign statements saying that their individual contributions weren't misrepresented in the high level reports, and then individual members of the community go forth and represent that consensus to the media and to politicians. And then people like you notice that their soundbytes don't constitute a formal inference process and use this fact to argue that the scientists don't know what they're talking about. Of course, you're too damn lazy to dig through their painstakingly constructed pyramid of results and see for yourself, so you have to keep your feet firmly planted in "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge" territory to keep up the argument. This should tell you something. > Plants grow better in higher CO2 concentrations. Do you really think this escaped the notice of thousands of specialists with millenia of accumulated experience? Answer: it didn't. Here's the latest report I've seen addressing this issue. There have been plenty of other reports answering permutations of this question, but they weren't published last week in Science, so I'd have to use google scholar to find them. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6183/508.abstract > I'd like to make rather sure that we know what we're doing. "Doing nothing" is doing something -- something that the only people in a position to make credible predictions regarding the effects of what we're doing are awfully worried about. > dropping a nuke to trigger a volcano would lower global temperatures. We know this. You seem far more confident in your ability to predict the climactic effects of a nuke in a volcano than in the scientific community's ability to predict what happens when we dump an insane amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. Why? A child could tell you why the volcano would be a bad idea. I'm quite certain you've not given this nearly as much honest thought as you think you have. |