It’s very amusing
“I don’t see what all those environmentalists are worried about,” sneers your Great Uncle Joe. “Carbon dioxide is harmless, and great for plants!”
Okay. Take a deep breath. If you’re not careful, comments like this can result in dinner-table screaming matches. Luckily, we have a secret weapon: A flowchart that will help you calmly slay even the most outlandish and annoying of climate-denying arguments:
You’ll have to go over to Mother Jones to see the whole amusing thing at full size. What? You don’t want to? Well, I have a smaller size version below the fold
I’d LOVE for any Warmist to attempt to win an argument with me using this claptrap. Consensus is not science. It’s politics. The earth has warmed a whopping .28F since 1990. There has been no warming over the last 16 years (see Andrew Bolt for more on this insignificant warming using the Warmists favorite sources). And, really, nothing from this scientifically shows that the current warm period, which started around the mid-1800’s, is anything but mostly natural.
Wendy McElroy calls this “how to lose a climate argument, and offers some excellent points
- You assume your conclusion. Granting that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, there is little evidence that man’s CO2 emissions are the dominant force in global temperature. For the last 17 years, CO2 has risen but temperature has remained flat, which suggests that some other influence is stronger than CO2. Also, “too much” warming is a judgment call — there is no scientific basis for how much is too much. Sea level isn’t rising any faster than it used to. The ocean isn’t becoming acid; at most, it’s becoming slightly less alkaline, and that change is well with natural variation from place to place. The scientific evidence is that there is no linkage between CO2 emissions and extreme weather, even the IPCC has admitted as much in their recent SREX report. And no one has named a single species that has gone extinct due to global warming.
- Wrong. First, the 97% figure comes from just 77 scientists in a survey of over 3100 scientists. The survey-takers threw out over 3000 responses to get the result they wanted. Second, the survey did not ask whether climate change is “driven” by humans; it asked if human activity is a “significant contributing factor” in changing global temperature. “Significant” might be a 10% effect; and that activity might be deforestation or agriculture, rather than CO2 emissions.
Make sure to read her entire essay. Quite frankly, a couple warmists at work tried these arguments with me last week, and it took everything I had to not obliterate them with facts.
