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Originally Posted by Undertoad
Team Orange had a hard-on for policies years before there was any scientific consensus of any nature. At one point the science was just a twinkle in Mr. Gore's professor's eye. A consensus of a handful. Team Orange policies beat consensus by a decade.
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If you're talking about anti-pollution policies, there are many more reasons to combat pollution than global warming. Easier ones to display, as well - sludge dripping from pipes and barrels being dumped are more photogenic than invisible CO2. The toxins and radiation in coal ash are a better sell than CO2 as pollution, since any high school student knows that CO2 is what plants crave. The weight of the science on global warming has pulled the environmentalists away from other arguments. In fact, it has started to create some ambivalence on nuclear power, which the pre-global-warming "team orange" would have been almost unanimously against.
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The elephant in the room is the pause. For the last 18 years there has been, statistically speaking, no global warming; despite an ever-increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. ... (The recent paper suggesting that it doesn't exist has met with skepticism.)
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The temperature graph has been a ratcheting zigzag, and has plenty of downturns. So far, they have all led to the next ratchet. Sure, maybe this one's different. Maybe we've hit the maximum CO2 contribution. But if a 18 year trend is an elephant, a hundred year trend is a whale.
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Originally Posted by Undertoad
The debate in science, as you know, happens constantly and permanently.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Undertoad
Shouldn't any policy wait for this new data and the new consensuses that result? That would be really amazingly pro-science.
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"Delay policies until all the data is in" means "do nothing forever". The data is never all in. Chances are, little
will be done before then, so we'll get that data anyway, though.
And if 2016 does come in hotter than '98, it won't be the first to do so (even if 2015 doesn't). 2005, 2013, 2010, and 2014 (in order of increasing temperature) already have.