If climate change is real, is it a sin to do nothing about it?

lynnvinc · #4 Feb 22, '12, 8:05 pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by rdscheirer

Why is it the first "global warming" alarmist happened to be the same NASA "scientist" that led the call in the late 1970's about the coming Ice Age.

Only a very small handful of scientists were speculating that an Ice Age would be starting -- it seemed there had been a cooling trend in decade leading up to the 70s, but later data showed that climate had not been cooling. There was also several other issues being discussed -- such as nuclear winter and the cooling affect of aerosols (often emitted when GHGs are emitted). The vast majority of climate scientists in the 70s were predicting warming, not cooling. However, it seems the media went hog-wild with the cooling story.

Since then science as advanced, along with better data and computer power. I seriously doubt any of the scientists predicting cooling in the 70s are predicting it now.

See: http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-...s-in-1970s.htm

The innuendo that Dr. James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist you seem to refer to, made any cooling trend or ice age predictions is totally false. It was a scientist named Rasool, using Hansen's computer model and inputting an unrealistic 8-fold increase in aerosols, who predicted it; not Hansen. See http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=11

When you want to impugn the reputation of a person, it's important to get the facts straight...and also not judge his/her 40 year old claims by today's scientific evidence/data and standards in science.

I'll also try not to make false claims about denialists. I think in this thread I've come to understand and respect their sincerity in not accepting anthropogenic climate change; they are not all or even mostly evil shills of the fossil fuel industry, but truly sincere and concerned that mitigating climate change (or passing laws that strive to encourage people to mitigate) will in some way be harmful. ((I just think those laws would be ineffective in reducing ACC.....assuming they ever get passed or come up for legislative consideration. The only thing that will work is if enough people & businesses actually start reducing their GHG emissions.))