Comment by conductr
6 days ago
> Is climate change man-made?
When having the climate change conversation with deniers I roll it back to; is the climate warming? They almost always[0] agree it is and we agree it’s evidenced. So now we’ve agreed on a fact and have common ground to advance the conversation. Then I can make my case that if we know the climate is warming then we have a responsibility/necessity to reduce our contribution to it and should likely invest in finding ways to reverse it. Because even if we are not the cause, we have a lot at stake.
[0] in rare case they can’t agree to this, I usually ask them if they’ve encountered a source for that and then ultimately implore them to at least read something on the topic before forming their opinion about it, there’s plenty of data available I won’t push them down any path that may be seen untrustworthy or politically misaligned with their beliefs, I just leave it alone there because it’s usually quite obvious they’re parroting the talking points of some pundit without doing any research themselves. As the article mentioned, this argument would just become an ego war more than anything.
i disagree that it' warming, so where do you start with me? I'm not being coy, i 100% believe that all of the warming detected is strictly down to poor placement of sensors and incorrect assumptions thereof in the resultant data. So what we will end up arguing about, if we get past that particularity of my thoughts, is about models. And i hate arguing about models.
edit: i think probably the cities are getting "warmer" but that's not climate change that's city change. In that cities are growing, generally, with more stuff paved over. We need to plant more trees and have less concrete/asphalt in cities if we want to reverse this trend. also less people, but that's not going to happen anytime soon.
Thought I addressed this in my original comment but to make it clear, this is typically where I choose to withdraw from any debate. This is where I would typically take the advice in the article.
I don’t want to convince anyone the data is there and believable or even that even lacking any structured data or scientific method it just seems like a sensible explanation of actual witnessed events. How does polar and glacier ice disappear in such a short time if the climate is not warming? Why are there so many habitats exhibiting “heat stress” that is seen impacting plants/animals/etc? All far away from the concrete heat sinks you mention.
> Why are there so many habitats exhibiting “heat stress” that is seen impacting plants/animals/etc? All far away from the concrete heat sinks you mention.
offhand, if you're looking for heat stress because your funding was granted so you can find heat stress, you're probably going to find heat stress.
My issue is with models. there are models that disagree with the models that the ICCC is using, and models that disagree with both. Are we exiting a global mini ice age? are we about to enter another more severe ice age? the past 50-60 years has been tedious to try and track which way the climate is going.
but i'm sure this time we're all correct!
Do you doubt that greenhouse gases being emitted into the atmosphere have gone up since humans started burning fossil fuels, and do you doubt the physics of how they trap solar radiation? Do you doubt that climate scientists know how to put sensors in the oceans, in rural areas and released in weather balloons along with satellites to measure temperatures across the planet year by year? Or that they can extract ice cores to measure trapped atmospheric gas from thousands of years ago? That sort of thing.
> in rural areas
how many? how many with long records?
hint:
it's less than 10
hint 2:
there's less than 3 in the northern hemisphere in rural areas.