Is global warming a scam?

Let me think own your logic is flawed until you back it by some respected climate specialists.

I's quite simple: if it's never happened before we have no idea where it will end up. Why are you finding that difficult to understand?

This is clearly what some proponents of AGW want people to think. A statement like:


Is designed to create FUD.

If it would be quite simple there would not be such a debate to start with, and you would have no problem in finding tons of specialists backing your words.

I'm not the one making claims designed to create fear.

Gotta go fill up my car with 3world food(I only use gas with biofuel added cause I'm proud to know that for every 100km I drive 1 kid starved in the 3world, thats reality).

inconvient truth

You are claiming the mainstream climate scientists' claim that we have not reached yet the point of no return is baseless, and to prove that you use simple generic logic and zero of climate expertise. Personally I find it unconvincing and will keep siding with the aforementioned specialists in this respect.

Judge rules on "Inconvient truth"

This just goes to show both sides have an agenda.

Fight night
presented by your tax dollars
Big Oil and Global Warming
slug it out on your tv.

Entrance fee:trust us your paying already

Isn't the issue that in the past, the USA, Europe and the developed world used to act fairly quickly to limit man's effect on the environment: CFCs, particulates, sulphides, nitric oxides etc all tackled through multilateral treaties.

But the rise of the oil companies in allegiance with the US right has ended competely the US cooperation meaning that perfectly sensible treaties relating to greenhouse gases have been holed in the water.

And so the world in general gets bogged down in fruitless scientific discussions that most don't fully understand. Which is exactly what the oil right wnts. Anything to muddy the waters and obscure real criticism of how the oil right is behaving.

Is it right that the world should act to limit output of greenhouse gases? In the end you do not have to believe in human generated climate change to see that as probably a good thing.

In one year, there will be a different regime in the White House and whatever the outcome, the incumbent is likely to be less in the thrall of the oil right. Even in the republican party environmental issues are climbing up the agenda. The defeat of the oil right feels tangible and it wouldn't surprise me if a substantive treaty follows.

And then all this fruitless argument will be a thing of the past.

Amen

Gosh darn... it ends up being yet another religion thread, eh?

By the way folks... it's snowing here pretty hard at the moment... shall I take a photo and post it or will y'all just believe me this time that we do still get snow once in a while

P.S. Can ya hurry up with the global warming, please? I'd like to be able to sit outside on my terrace without wearing my sheepskin coat.

according to today's Guardian NASA scientists are saying now that climate change targets are not radical enough and that the world must make MASSIVE reducztions in CO2 output.

Aren't those the guys that faked the moon landing?

Is global warming a scam?

Yes.
It is purely common sense actually.
If anything is averaged, it becomes inaccurate.
While some places on earth got colder, the others got hotter.
Some people needed a job.
Find a tactic to make people fear!
There is really no truth in it.

report on the effects of Global warming, sorry Global cooling, sorry Climate Change in todays Scotsman

tsk, crazy, did you even read the article befopre posting it?

0.74 degrees in a century! Shit! Just think by 2500 we might be 3.5 degrees warmer !

LOL, try reading the comments on the article BTC.

laugh all you want but even a small increase in temeperature will melt our icecaps, as is beginning to happen, and with all that ice released the sea will rise 75m - which would swamp glasgow and you (hopefully)

so dj, you admit that global warming is not a scam then... since it is actually occurring?

Which is it, is it not happening or is it not a big deal?

These are two conflicting opinions, and you appear to hold both.

Try to keep up TFL. I don't deny that our climate is changing - the Earths climate has changed many, many times before,However I'm sceptical about...

- whether or not we're responsible
- if we are, whether or not we can reverse the damage.

- The FACTS that are being presented as irrefutable only to see them quashed
- The taxes being imposed on the general citizens as opposed to the real culprits (Car/Aircraft manufacturers, etc)

but do you accept that man can act to limit or end temperature increases by changinbg the way we behave?

No, I don't accept this as a given. What we are seeing, might just be a natural course for our earth to take. Are you denying it's made this journey before? And was man responsible then too?

I would be interested to know where you are getting this figure of 75m from. The IPCC report, the best known proponent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, in its worst case scenario predicts a seal level rise of between 26 centimetres to 59 centimetres over the next century. This would certainly not be sufficient to submerge Glasgow, anyway haven't you ever heard of the Netherlands?

Not being a scientist I (like many other poeple) have to take the word of our various elected governemnts on this.

I however will take it seriouly when they do.

Trying to control emitions by tax etc is not a serious way to go about it. People will just pay more for what they do. This is about cash only.

When they get serious and start to implement stuff that will help (eg, no fuel tax on proven emitions neutral technologies etc) to persuade pepple to swap over I will then I will take it a little more urgently.

A question I came accross last year on the net was 'would you pay more for a carbob neutral, environmentaly friendly car?'..

Most popular posted answer 'Why should I pay more, if its that urgent why isn't the car subsidized by the governemnt so its cheaper?'...

I saw a program a while ago with an interesting scenario of global warming ,�climate change�, that it could lead to an ice age in northern Europe, warmer temperatures leading to the polar ice melting giving the sea a greater surface area, and for northern Europe the gulf stream moving further west and so on ,more rain ( tropical rain) giving more cloud cover lack of sunshine thus cooling and so on ,they had a computer model which when the above changes along with other changes at the equator were taken into the equation showed the ice could reach northern Spain in as little as 30 years ,� The Day After Tomorrow� Roland Emmerich is loosely based on this theory but obviously in Hollywood it happens over night
(It’s snowing in Frankfurt)

Good points here, it's worth noting that in the UK, the POWERSHIFT scheme was abandonned in 2006, even today most people are unaware that LPG has far less emissions, is better for your engine and works out around half the price of petrol per litre.

If car emissions were really a problem why aren't the governments of the world pushing this with incentives? What about the electric car? Had we improved the technology from the 80s we would have an almost perfect car now. I know the electricity needs to be generated for these cars, but it could come from "greener" sources.

Why take it seriously when all it is, is a money-generating scheme. A tax !

from the NASA paper quoted in the Guardian article I posted above.

The gas with the most important greenhouse effect is Water vapour, yet you never hear of it in Global Warming debates. Why? because it is absolutely impossible to predict what effect more water vapour will have. More of it may lead to reduced radiation from the earth, thus having a positive effect on the global average temperatures, but it is also likely to lead to more clouds, which would shield the earth from incoming radiation of the sun, leading to lower temperatures? all this is without taking into account the numerous feedback effects.
For example would warmer temperatures and more water vapour lead to a greener earth, that would use more CO2, thereby reducing temperature?

The mechanisms of global warming are not very well understood and at least in its more popular understanding suffers from a gross oversimplification and doomsday scenarios, which require the faithful to suspend disbelief, and acquire a belief in simple solutions.

If instead of less CO2 we were talking less water vapour, then we wouldn't be able to use hydrogen based energy, because that would cause a rise in THE green house gas- water vapour.

What is there in the IPCC report is also that CO2 by itself cannot cause more than a 1.5 degree C rise in temperatures, because the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the lesser its additional impact. Therefore, the IPCC estimates are based on rise in CO2 being followed by multiple positive feedback effects which multiply and increase this impact. The seal level rise (remember Waterworld) which was earlier one of the central scare factors of the 3rd report of the IPCC has now been reduced and by the next one will probably be given a quiet burial. The evidence linking the rise of sea levels with increased generation of CO2 by human activities is nearly non-existent.

from the article

Exactly, if ALL the ice in the world were melted, IF the CO2 levels were the only effect on global average temperatures, IF...

To give you some perspective, sea levels have risen 130 metres since the peak of the last ice age, in 18, 000 years

EDIT: with 20 cm of this rise happening since the industrial revolution, and the total rise over the last 8,000 years being around 4 metres

Because incentives, and subsidies as the poster you quoted, are the exact opposite way to go about it.

The free market is extremely good at perusing alternatives, and it should be allowed to do so. However, if the government subsidizes one solution, it is basically the government picking a winner. Governments are notoriously bad at this sort of thing.

Furthermore, subsidizing environmentally friendly cars will only be made up by taxes in other areas, so why should someone who doesn’t drive at all pay for your car?

The better solution is to tax what they want to limit. Governments don’t care exactly which environmentally sound solution is chosen, let the free market do that. They tax gasoline and carbon emissions in order to make all alternatives economically feasible at an earlier time. Taxes are better for three primary reasons

1) They provide an economic pressure towards alternatives, but don’t have the government mandate which one, letting the freee market do what it does best
2) They only are focused against those who actually perform the action to be discouraged (as opposed to subsidies, which as I showed, tax everyone to benefit a specific group)
3) They allow people who still need to use the specific resource, do so, by simply passing on the cost to consumers… this again lets the free market decide if the service or industry is required at the new higher prices.

Basically, the reason they tax is because it provides an overall economic pressure in a desired direction instead of a direct government mandate… which is always much more ham fisted.

You're kind of missing the point TFL, in not creating economically viable incentives that are enviromentally acceptable, the government is forcing the majority of us in to using the very resources it alledgedly doesn't want us to.

Carbon taxing doesn't work anyway, most of the Scandinavian countries have had Carbon Tax since the 90's, and it has had a negligible effect on emissions. In Norway, emissions have actually increased by 43% per capita.
Reduction of Co2 emissions should be enforced physically. That means enacting laws to cut the number of non biofuel or LPG cars on the roads, which would mean eventually making petrol and diesel cars illegal. (Who needs a car that can do 240 mph anyway?). Countries that show no willingness to adopt greener methods of energy production (carbon capture for example), should be subject to trade embargos.
In other words drastic action is needed NOW!

No, you are missing my point.

There already are environmentally acceptable alternatives. The problem is that they are more expensive than the regular dirty methods. By taxing the dirty methods, they are making the environmentally acceptable alternatives more competitive in price.

We are talking about the same thing: making it less expensive to do the "clean" methods than the "dirty" ones.

However, you want the government to provide subsidies... which I say is a bad way to go because it both unfairly chooses a "winner" and causes everyone else to be taxed to subsidize the activities of a specific group.

I assume you mean increase ?

There is no winner TFL, if the AGW scientists are right we're all doomed, how about varying incentives on EVERYTHING that produces less emissions, a sort of sliding scale. Only when it becomes attractive will the populace stop taking the "easy" option. An LPG conversion costs between 1.5K and 2K, unless you are covering 15K miles a year, the installation won't justify the saving. Now if the installation was subsidised by means of no road tax for the first 5 years (Similar to the Two year rule the Germans used to have on Euro4 engines - no tax in first 2 years) - that would be an incentive to get the majority away from dirty fuels. Either they want to take the threat seriously or they don't. personally I think it's all about revenue-generating than anything else.

before you both go to deep into the car tax thing look here

http://www.sightline.org/research/energy/r...ir_travel_aug04

"For instance, one airplane taking off and landing from JFK airport in the mid-1990s would produce as much nitrogen oxides as a car driven 26500 miles. "

Because, again, governments are terrible at this sort of thing. A blanket policy of check writing is ripe for abuse and corruption. Every horse seller could then sign up for a carbon savings subsidy.

It also doesn’t solve the problem of the general population is paying money to people who choose to drive. Why should someone who takes the train and chooses not to have a car pay for someone who does?


… at current tax rates. So if taxes on gasoline were increased, you could start to justify it at a lower mileage.

Again, we’re basically describing the same thing, I’m just trying to point out how taxes are a much more elegant and less intrusive method of allowing the government to pressure the free market without disrupting it through direct involvement.

That's really impressive then, because planes carry a lot more people then cars. Sounds like a much more efficient use of resources to me.

Quite.

roll your eyes all you want. I am right. Are your figures on a per passenger basis? If not, then I am right... having 200 people fly is much more efficient than having 200 people drive to a destination.

Aah but giving the 200 people LPG cars and using a 1970s plane might have a different outcome, would all depend on if it was european or african, and the size of the coconut.

especially, London to New York

good point !

tfl Read the article then comment

Sorry... I read the part you chose to quote... and it makes absolutely no sense. You are making two radically different comparisons:

An engine under the heavy strain of rapid acceleration/deceleration against a constantly running engine... all not adjusted on a per passenger basis.

From what I've seen of modern planes, on a per passenger adjusted basis they use less energy than an automobile.

You still haven't read the article have you

It might shock you to learn I'm not terribly interested in wasting my time right now reading an article. Maybe I will later, but my point stands... if you're going to summarize an article, bring out it's most salient point instead of a meaningless fact designed to impress idiots who don't think about it too hard.

I'll add: the relationship between car and plane fuel consumption isn't terribly interesting to me anyway, as I was merely arguing in favor of taxes as a system of economic incentives, and not saying any particular mode of transportation should be singled out for taxation.

I agree that normaly the free market would be the best place for this stuff to work itself out.

However as long as the oil companies can make a lot of cash on petrol we will always have it around. At present there is no real alternative as the oil companies don't seem to be putting a great deal of effort into it and most petrol station are either owned by or supplied exclusiinvly by an oil company.

If climate change is going to kill us all/make our lives more difficult etc then I would ask governemnts to not leave me at the mercy of the free market (and the few companines making lots of cash, to much to just let it go) and start getting involved.

Involved in a more constructive way than going on about the problem and using it to raise tax.

They could, if it that urgent, drop fuel tax on all proven eco-friendly fuels. This does not favour one over the other, it just makes them cheaper than petrol.

The actualy price of the alternative fuel will decide who goes for it and who doesn't.

However, governements have proven themselves over and over again to be unable to give up the cash.

Its about time our 'leaders' did what that word suggests, get involved and start helping us help ourselves instead of just leeching cash off us when we don't play along (or in this case, when we do).

Given a free hand I think the free market could bring about the kind of alternatives that may help. However is it realy a free market? The supermarket environment is very competative, yet there has still been price fixing.

There are a few very large multi-national companies dominating the petrol industry, they do not have any incentive with regards to alternative fuels unless they can replace the profit from petrol with profit from alternative fuels.

They will only do so when people swap to said fuels and this will only happen when the fuels and the cars that use them are cheaper.

Taxing more will not work quickly, if I have a petrol car the tax on petrol has to up a lot to justify me buying a whole new car to use alternative fuel.

As there are millions of petrol (also diesel) users any massive increase in price would cause a lot of problems and mean a lot election.

At some point governments are going to have to get involved and get the price of the alternative fuels dropped.

Perhaps they are all just hoping it will be next governement that has to do it?

See, you haven't!

EDIT: I hope I have managed to bring out the "most salient point instead of a meaningless fact designed to impress idiots who don't think about it too hard".

I think I've said 3 times now that I haven't ... way to catch on. I was specifically commenting on the quote you chose to post to this forum. I specifically said it was a meaningless statistic. Unless your article says "everything makkadman (or timezoner) writes is useless drivel" I don't see how reading the article will change that.

Neither the quote nor the article was posted by me. Next time reading what you reply to, might help