Climate Change Pays a Visit to the Caribbean and Coral Reefs Suffer? Do you believe t

[DandyDon]

That said, I do take anything that I read in The Guardian with a serious grain of salt. By far the most left wing of all the left wing newspapers in the UK. I am perfectly willing to accept that Caribbean reefs are in peril, but I'd really like to read an independent report rather than from a pressure group calling itself "Climate Change".

Would National Geographic qualify as a trusted source? Caribbean Coral Reefs Mostly Dead, IUCN Says – News Watch

It does amaze me that some don't accept Global Warming as fact, and that industrialism has played a major roll in it.

 

[boulderjohn]

A little more than two decades ago (I don't remember the exact year), I vividly recall the local Denver news station I follow making a huge deal about the fact that the Denver area had had such a scorching summer, shattering the old record with 52 days with highs above 90° F. What could be going on that our high altitude city had had so many hot days?

Well, that number soon became routine, and the record crept up, reaching a high of 61 days over 90°. This year is a little different. Today's high is predicted to be 93°, and I believe that will be our 73rd day above 90°. That's more than a 40% increase over what was a record shattering statistic only a couple of decades ago.

Only a few months ago, a noted climate change denier totally changed his mind: Climate-Change Skeptic Changes His Mind | Sci-Tech Today Here is an excerpt:

"Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming," UC Relevant Products/Services Berkeley astrophysics Professor Richard A. Muller wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times.

"Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause," he wrote.

"The average temperature of the Earth's land has risen by 2 1/2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1 1/2 degrees over the most recent 50 years," wrote Muller, who founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project to debunk unsupported global-warming claims.

"Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases."

He said he and his colleagues "were not expecting this, but as scientists, it is our duty to let the evidence change our minds."

He called his new stance "a total turnaround."

His research was funded with $150,000 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, which, along with its libertarian petrochemical billionaire founder, has historically backed groups that deny climate change.​

 

[Mike]

James Lovelock, the godfather of global warming acknowledged he had been unduly “alarmist” about climate change.

Lovelock’s invention of the electron capture detector in 1957 first enabled scientists to measure CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and other pollutants in the atmosphere, leading, in many ways, to the birth of the modern environmental movement.

Having observed that global temperatures since the turn of the millennium have not gone up in the way computer-based climate models predicted, Lovelock acknowledged, “the problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. It’s now clear the doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al Gore’s) were incorrect.

He responds to attacks on his revised views by noting that, unlike many climate scientists who fear a loss of government funding if they admit error, as a freelance scientist, he’s never been afraid to revise his theories in the face of new evidence.

 

[azscubadude]

Here is another link to a short story I read yesterday on exactly the same thing.

Coral grief - The Daily

 

[Bonuss]

My brief take on the climate change "debate" that "it is simply a natural phenomena" and "man is causing it all" is that I don't give a rats az WHY, but I think we should do whatever we can economically feasibly do to preserve the things we hold dear.

As I say to a good friend..., "OK it's natural... whata you gonna do, evolve into a scorpion!?"

It seems stupid to argue "WHY", and do nothing.

Bob in CO

 

[mstevens]

Why do some people think that a valid argument is to call you "dumb"?

I have no idea. It's certainly never a convincing argument.

Calling a person "dumb", though, is quite different from saying a statement is dumb.

Smart people say dumb things all the time. Dumb people say smart things sometimes.

Surely, nobody can disagree with the premise that some statements are dumb?

 

[boulderjohn]

Surely, nobody can disagree with the premise that some statements are dumb?

While, yes, a statement can be dumb, characterizing a statement as such does no good in an intelligent argument because it has no meaningful content of its own. When teaching logic and argument, I used to tell my students that when someone says something like that, it usually means they don't know how to attack the position with facts and logic and must instead resort to ridicule. It's really a form of bullying. The more common method of dong the same thing is to support a point by saying "It's obvious," a comment that usually indicates that the speaker cannot begin to support the belief intelligently.

 

[cvchief]

The more common method of dong the same thing is to support a point by saying "It's obvious," a comment that usually indicates that the speaker cannot begin to support the belief intelligently.

I think, absent statistics to prove it, you overreach. What you say could be true, but I would counter people say stupid things sometime. People sometimes don't respond politely and patiently to things that are stupid. I have been accused of (and NEVER convicted) occasionally being less than polite and patient when correcting a stupid statement. In the end I wasn't wrong but I could have been more gentle in being right....


I would say that your use and description of "obviously" as a way to judge veracity is a 'false generalization' meant to pull attention from the actual statement and the need to weight the actual argument.

Do I get an "A" in logic and rhetoric or do you only give "B" to the argumentative students, Prof. John?

I might go with a mild form of bullying though....

 

[boulderjohn]

I would say that your use and description of "obviously" as a way to judge veracity is a 'false generalization' meant to pull attention from the actual statement and the need to weight the actual argument.

Notice that I used the qualifier "usually" in my description, thus freeing myself from a false generalization charge.

There has nothing that has frustrated me more over years of argument to ask someone to explain the rationale for some belief only to have the person say "it's obvious," and then not be able to say in any way why it is so obvious.

On the other hand, I have indeed encounter people saying things that are downright ridiculous, things that really are indeed obvious. Those are cases in which the amount of factual evidence at your disposal to refute the claim is so overwhelmingly enormous that you feel helpless to respond. You know that the person must have already encountered the evidence to the contrary before and chosen to ignore it. Such a person cannot be dissuaded, no matter what you say, so you might as well not waste your breath. In those arguments, the fallacy involved is often one of the various forms of the appeal to ignorance.

 

[mstevens]

when someone says something like that, it usually means they don't know how to attack the position with facts and logic

It could mean that. Alternatively, it could mean that the person saying it does not believe that facts or logic of any sort are going to be sufficiently convincing to the audience. It could also serve the purpose of pointing out the absurd. In this context "absurd" and "dumb" are near-synonyms.

I could have constructed a more-detailed argument to support my premise that claims that the climate is changing are not primarily made by those who secretly believe that is untrue ("lies") or that the primary reason for making such claims is specifically in hopes of crippling the US economy.

However, I think it was simply a dumb statement and said so. Why? Because it beggars my belief that anyone could actually really-truly hold a belief that a vast conspiracy of scientists a) have a goal of hobbling the US economy (and, presumably, only the US economy) in the first place, b) believe that climate change claims represent an effective way of hobbling the US economy (as opposed to, say, building a giant evil death ray and aiming it at Wall Street), and c) do not believe that climate change is occurring yet publicly claim that it is.

Given that I don't believe that such a statement would have been made honestly by a rational person, arguing the point based on facts that have already been rejected using logical tools that appear unavailable to the maker of the statement strikes me as being about as useful as try to refute a statement such as "the claim that cats are mammals and that chocolate is toxic to them is a lie meant to hobble the Belgian chocolate industry" through a process of ratiocination.