99.996% of Castanetters agree: Global warming is false

[Glacier]

There are 249643 members on Castanet, but only 10 of them are still insisting that the Borg Climate Doomsday Harold Camping Rapturist Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is real.

Yes, yes, I know you can't just determine consensus by counting papers or posts. Therefore, I've made a poll.

[atenbacon]

120,217 of those users are me, I keep forgetting my passwords... Saying that though, it doesn't skew your results seeing as I do think Global warming is false.

[ForestfortheTrees]

Now that's what I call a "representative sample." 15 out of how many?? Nice try :)

[StraitTalk]

So I'll come out and say it. I don't like this poll, and I feel it reinforces the entire problem behind the debate, ie. people thinking they know the answer and refusing to be open-minded on the topic.

If you can sit there and tell me, honestly, that you know it's one way or the other, then you should probably write a paper. Point being, you don't know. Your uncle with an IQ of 167 doesn't know. Al Gore doesn't know. Bill Nye doesn't know. The scientific community as a whole doesn't know. All we know is we've got a very large puzzle with a lot of pieces missing and two people shouting over each other on where the remaining pieces should go all the while there may be an avoidable global issue going on. Maybe.

So, as much as I hate beating a dead horse, perhaps we should all just try to be more environmentally responsible. On a side-note, I just read that the State of Texas powered a third of the state on Wind Power recently which is kind of neat since they seem to be one of the few establishments that has done it without hemorrhaging money.

Perhaps we should find out what we all agree on, and start there.

[alfred2]

no

[LoneWolf_53]

Looks much closer to a 50/50 split to me.

[NAB]

Seems to me that it is not whether or not climate change exists, is coming, or even if humans play a part in causing it,.... but rather whether we should continue expending VAST amounts of money and resources in the current direction of trying to control or stop it.

Edit to add: I see it much like immunity to disease and vaccinations. Natural exposure in small doses, and resulting adaptation of our species over time, in the long term would confer much better results. Besides, in the long term, our species should be more concerned about global cooling than global warming IMO. But then, we (as a species) will probably run out of what is needed to support us and our continued growth long before global warming or cooling starts to take any significant toll.

Nab

[Omnitheo]

The beauty of science is that it doesn't matter if people believe it or not in order for it to be true. I'd hazard a guess that most of the castanetter's aren't climatologists or even PhD holders. The general scientific consensus by those who study this however is that climate change is very real. Notice how I say "Climate Change" as opposed to the outdated "global warming". Climate change presents itself in numerous ways, including droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, snow storms, hail storms etc. Certainly these things all occur naturally, however we are seeing an increase in "freak weather" where more and more atypical events are occurring.

Climatologists, biologists, geologists, meteorologists, NASA scientists, oceanologists. Many different branches of science which normally work independently of eachother are all coming to the same conclusions. Climate Change is very real.

You'll certainly find scientists who debate climate change, but these are a extremely small minority. About the same percentage as other fact denying scientists such as those who reject evolution or publish false papers about vaccines or get paid by corporations to say whatever they are told.

[rustled]

On a side-note, I just read that the State of Texas powered a third of the state on Wind Power recently which is kind of neat since they seem to be one of the few establishments that has done it without hemorrhaging money.

Wind farms are a pretty environmentally destructive energy source, and cradle-to-grave they don't appear to be at all efficient in terms of electrical generation. I truly hope this fad goes by the wayside before we see a bunch of them springing up around here, but it does seem people would rather believe that there's something terrible happening and that "we" really must "do something" to stop it... I wish we'd get back to looking for practical, common sense solutions.

[Omnitheo]

Amusingly, The most efficient, and least environmentally destructive form of energy production we have is Nuclear Power. Go figure.

[rustled]

So if we had taken all the resources that we've poured into marginal or failed "green" energy solutions, and instead dedicated those same resources to developing nuclear power facilities, the Mojave would still be a desert, the poor who rely on corn as a food source would be better off, the poor in the places where they manufacture the parts for our wind farms wouldn't be as polluted, and those forests in the eastern US wouldn't have been turned into pellets...and maybe we'd be that much closer to relying less on fossil fuels.

[GordonH]

Amusingly, The most efficient, and least environmentally destructive form of energy production we have is Nuclear Power. Go figure.

Except for huge hazard of storing used rods, unless we do as former USSR did and dump them in Arctic ocean.

Also Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and on going Fukushima

[rustled]

Except for huge hazard of storing used rods, unless we do as former USSR did and dump them in Arctic ocean.

Also Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and on going Fukushima

My point exactly. Instead of tilting at windmills, we could have been looking for solutions to the problems associated with nuclear power.

[Glacier]

Amusingly, The most efficient, and least environmentally destructive form of energy production we have is Nuclear Power. Go figure.

And yet the supporters of the doomsday rapturist CAGW theory continue to demand nuclear power be shut down, which has lead to the restarting of coal power plants in place of them. Go figure.

As for the poll, I'm actually quite surprised by the results. I figured that about 50% would pick option 4, but I thought that the other 50% would be more evenly spread among the first 3 options. Interesting stuff.

[Omnitheo]

Except for huge hazard of storing used rods, unless we do as former USSR did and dump them in Arctic ocean.

Also Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and on going Fukushima

actually combined the storage for all the nuclear power in the US in a year would take up less than a football field, with all but a tenth being rendered inert within a hundred years. This is all easily contained with no increase in background radiation. Compared of course to the massive amounts of carbon dioxide and pollutants we pump into the atmosphere every day.

Thousands of deaths a year can be contributed to fossil fuels. Please tell me how many deaths were caused by Three Mile Island? Fukushima? Even Chernobyl only had fewer than 50 directly contributed deaths, and these were all cleanup workers who were onsite at ground zero immediately after and not wearing the proper protective gear. Either way, we have the technology and knowledge to create reactors which could not suffer from any of the same accidents as before.

In 1975 when the Banqiao Dam in China failed, it killed over 170,000 people. Did we stop building hydro-electric dams? No we just got better at it and learned from the mistakes.