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Old 22-09-2014, 01:53 PM
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Dave2042 (Dave)
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Join Date: Feb 2010
Location: Newtown, Sydney, Australia
Posts: 164
Here's my two cents' worth, as someone with a Physics degree, followed by a long commercial career (finance).

I see two problems with the so-called debate.

The first is that much of the 'debate' focuses on stuff that is known to be complex and messy, and relates to how heat flows around inside the climate system rather than the aggregate flows in and out of the system. We argue about how long it will take for the ice caps to melt, or about whether some regions will get colder rather than hotter, and non-scientists get the mistaken impression that this reflects uncertainty in the basic proposition of global warming. The fact is, the greenhouse effect, plus historical fossil fuel consumption makes the basic proposition (that the system's getting hotter because of us) 100% certain. The details (how long, regionality etc) are still uncertain and being researched, but that has nothing to do with the basics. To be fair, I don't think scientists make this point clearly or often enough.

The second problem is that most non-scientists (and sadly some scientists) do not seem to appreciate the fact that science now (since Newton) is an integrated body of knowledge. I see a lot of stuff where people seem to feel that if they can just 'disprove' some empirical observations, then the whole thing is wrong. In fact, that's not how science is structured any more. At rock bottom, science is really just 3 theories (General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Statistical Mechanics), which have been tested in 'normal' conditions so well they are certain. Everything else is really just an approximation or limiting case of these. The uncertain bits left are extreme stuff like what goes on inside a black hole. The ulitmate test of this is, of course, technology. If you think there is something wrong with SM and QR, then why does your fridge work? If you think there is something wrong with GR, why does your satnav work? Of course, complicated things (like weather) are difficult to model in practice, but basic stuff like the greenhouse effect and fossil fuels producing CO2 is simply not open for debate, not out of closed-mindedness, but just because it's fully understood, and if we are wrong about it then every piece of technology we have must be running off magic.

As commented earlier, the only real debate is about what to do. Of course that's economics, politics and ethics, which are really complicated. Maybe the answer is to do nothing, but pretending it's not happening is just silly.
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