re: #392 Charles

I haven’t reached any firm conclusions on it, partly because the whole thing is so freaking politicized that it’s not easy to determine who is trustworthy and who isn’t.

It’s very important in this discussion to avoid any “appeals to authority.” Because almost every person involved has a political agenda. The only rational course of action is to look at the raw data yourself and draw your own conclusions.

(And even that is somewhat problematic, because even the raw data can be slanted, and is generally very incomplete.)

I’ve done exactly that — tried to look at the raw data for climate variation, and tried to assess it to the best of my limited scientific capabilities. I set aside anyone else’s “conclusions” or projections.

And my assessment was:

The temperature of the earth is constantly going up and down, and has been for the last 4 billion years. Up, down, up, down, up, down. The variations in the past were MUCH more wild and extreme than they are these days. The variations we’re talking about these days are absolutely trivial. And the same thing holds true for ocean levels.

For example, in the fairly recent past, sea levels were at one point 300 FEET [yes, feet] higher than they are today, such that the California Central Valley was an inland sea, etc. And subsequent to that, sea levels were hundreds of feet lower than they are now, such that it was possible for humans and animals to walk from Russia to Alaska, since Asia and North America were actually a single connected continent.

And yet, here we are fretting about, literally, centimeters of ocean level variations. (Or, as in that pdf you linked to, millimeter-scale changes per year.)

It’s completely absurd just on the face of it. When the oceans rose 300 feet, the planet survived, animals thrived, the fish had a bit more room to swim around in. When the oceans fell 300 feet, the planet survived, the animals thrived, the reptiles had a bit more land to crawl around on. IT WAS NOT A CATASTROPHE EITHER WAY. And yet, in the most wild alarmist projections, they’re talking about sea levels rising 5 feet in the next 500 or 1000 years or so. That’s never going to come to pass, considering the data we now have, but even if it did — so what? So the oceans will have risen by 5 feet in 3000 AD. A couple of streets in Miami and San Diego will be flooded. The coastline of Bangladesh will be shorter. But none of that will be perceptible over the span of anyone’s lifetime. The oceans, even in a worst-case scenario, will inch in, inch by inch, over centuries.

Now, this same principle can be applied to all aspects of the global warming debate. Just try to look at the data yourself and judge for yourself, aside from any politics, and ignoring any “appeals to authority” or any ad hominem arguments; and you’ll almost certainly come to the same conclusion as as I did, namely that the entire topic is blown wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy out of proportion; that any changes thay may happen will be fairly minor and of unknown significance, and that it’s nothing but a big political football filled with hot air.