2 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
Most of your response shows obvious bias from my pov. Your claims seem rooted in your own personal experience.
I don't disagree about some of your points being factors to some degree and I especially agree with this
And by making an enemy of half the nation, left-wing political activists encourage those individuals to dig in their heels and deny harder, which only makes popular action all the more difficult.
The world's climate scientists disagree with you on the anthrogenic element of climate change.
You are probably right that some people are a bit too quick to blame weather fluctuations on climate change but I am fairly ignorant on the specifics of this part.
Comment by [deleted] at 26/01/2020 at 17:35 UTC*
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
you're in a philosophy discussion forum. Bias goes with the territory.
When I give my opinion, it's going to be my opinion, which is my bias. Telling me that my bias is biased is literally the most worthless possible response to my statement.
I am ignorant of the absolute specifics but I know for a fact based on my studies that the planet has been warmer in the past than it is right now.
The real skeptic debate isn't the presence or absence of warming or even of AGW. It's a debate between positive feedback and negative feedback theories regarding the anthropogenic component.
To whit, do environmental factors accelerate or mitigate the warming
Based on what I think I know about cloud albedo feedback, I favor negative feedback theory -- that the natural forces will adjust and form a new equilibrium. As warming increases, it seems logical to me that additional moisture in the air, additional cloud cover, and a resultant reduction in solar energy absorbed will mitigate the surface warming over time. Of course that doesn't mean we can go hog wild with no regard for environmental damage, just that the forces involved will seek a new equilibrium, and as long as we don't screw things up too bad, will eventually find one. And it will probably be one that humans can survive in.
The positive feedback theory is effectively a downward spiral where any failure now guarantees apocalypse later, like films like Day After Tomorrow, and I tend to believe that given what we know about natural warming and cooling patterns from the geological record and other sources, if that was the case the environment wouldn't have existed as a biological community for milions of years. The pressure we're placing on the environment is unprecedented, but it seems to me that if things were going to fly off the handle it would have already done so during the era between the 1670s and 1960s when we weren't really caring how much environmental damage we did.