Originally posted by: Jeff7
Originally posted by: Krazy4Real
Global warming does not exist.
Put a globe in your oven and say that.
Originally posted by: SampSon
Scientists in the 19th century were convinced that the vast majority of the universe's secrets have been figured out and only extremely minor details remained. Amazing how wrong they were, but how amazingly SMUG they were in being wrong.
The reality is that scientists, and humans for that matter, don't know sh!t. We can't explain the huge gap in the fossil record, can't agree on earth's history, we havn't explored a fraction of the oceans, have a rough understanding of human pysiology, don't fully understand what exists between the earth's mantle and core, and on and on and on ....etc.
Humans are pompous, egotistical, self-centered pieces of barely evolved flesh. Sure we always strive to learn more, but as soon as we being to learn something we immediately rush to state something as ABSOLUTE FACT. Then in the following years we learn more and then revise our "facts". :roll:
It would be really great if science stopped being a sociopolitical circle jerk and actually about learning.
So what do you suggest we do? Go as if everything we know is totally baseless and unusable? Newtonian physics was "right" for a long time. Now we know that it only applies to things on Earth, or applications where the small error introduced by relativity is not a problem. If you throw a ball upward with a certain speed, and you want to know how fast it will hit the ground 1m below where it was thrown, Newtonian physics works just fine. Relativity won't do much of anything at those speeds. If you're tuning a GPS satellite orbiting at high speed, suddenly relativity is a big deal.
I'd like it too if it wasn't a "sociopolitical circle jerk," but science will and should wind its way into politics at some point in time. We have laws regarding sanitation, and laws regarding building safety. That's legislation courtesy of science.
Global warming? It seems like something's happening to Earth's temperature. The global average is increasing. Models indicate that this could cause numerous problems. Granted, these are models. Models are an approximation of reality. They're the best we can do, which is all that we can ever do. In time, our "best" hopefully improves. But the fact is, we can't wait until we are at the absolute best to take action. Medical science for example, relied on what we regard as archaic methods, which may have done more harm than good. Fact is, bleeding the bad blood out of someone may have been the best they could do at the time. Eventually, the idea of pathogens came around, and it was discovered that it wasn't evil spirits causing disease, but tiny organisms. I'd imagine that this discovery made its way into the political system, for the beginnings of good sanitary codes.
Resource depletion is another issue intertwined with climate change. Burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide that nature effectively locked away millions of years ago. There is also a finite amount of oil, coal, and natural gas. That simply can't be argued mathematically - Earth's volume is finite, thus it cannot contain an infinite supply of anything. The question is, when do we run out, or more accurately, when will the cost of extraction become too great to be economically viable? I think it's a good idea to play it safe, rather than just plow on ahead consuming like crazy, and then only when we finally realize, "Hey, there really isn't a whole lot left to dig up," it's going to be a really rough transition to alternate energy sources. If we make the transition gradually, starting now, it'll be more like going up a long ramp as it's built, rather than slamming into a cliff and having to quickly build something expensive with which to scale it.
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