Happy Save Humanity Day!

OmniScience wrote:

Science Chic wrote: and don’t we deserve one whole day free from the non-stop disinformation of the anti-science crowd?

And who would that be? Anyone who disagrees with their agenda? Anyone who can think clearly enough to see that all of the Cap & Trade and carbon trading schemes are nothing more than scams?

You'd have to ask Joe Romm who he considers anti-science. I don't myself, I consider those like the Kochs, Richard Lindzen, those at the American Petroleum Institute and Heritage Foundation, who continue to obfuscate the science and resist reducing fossil fuel use and switching to renewable energy as greedy, short-sighted, and selfish. They aren't anti-science, they know full well what's going on and why, they just don't care - they will protect their status quo, bottom-line, outdated business and damn the consequences.

I've said before that cap-and-trade and carbon trading are useless wastes of time. Get rid of government subsidies for oil - they don't need 'em, they aren't start-up companies anymore, make the product fully and directly attributable to actual free market costs, and/or institute a carbon tax on it as it comes out of the ground to cover the cost of the damage it's causing that hasn't been factored into its price.

Interactive: Short-Lived Pollutants and Sea Level Rise
Cutting Short-Lived Climate Pollutants Slows Rising Seas
by Climate Central
Published: April 14th, 2013

The article, "Mitigation of short-lived climate pollutants slows sea level rise", by Hu et al., is a collaboration between scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Climate Central, and examines how much the rate and amount of global sea level rise can be reduced by cutting emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and four short-lived climate pollutants (SLCP) — methane, tropospheric ozone, hydrofluorocarbons, and black carbon — by mid-century (2050) and in the long term (2100). These results are compared to a "Business As Usual" scenario and to mitigating CO2 only.

The interactive shows the number of the population that benefits from action.

I've broken it down before, but here it is again:
[list=5:14x6p5kl]● Fact: burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases.
● Fact: greenhouse gases have been measured in the atmosphere and ocean directly for over the last 60 years and they have only been increasing.
● Fact: greenhouse gases (CO2 particularly) cause atmospheric warming and acidification of oceans.
● Fact: all of those previous facts are not disputed by contrarians.
● Fact: current climate change is mostly driven by human-causes, and only somewhat attributable to natural causes. [/ol]

Until it is proven with multiple independent investigations that either:
[list=5:14x6p5kl]a.) burning fossil fuels does NOT release greenhouse gases
b.) greenhouse gas concentrations are NOT increasing in the atmosphere or ocean
c.) greenhouse gases do NOT cause atmospheric warming or ocean acidification
d.) thawing of the permafrost will NOT add billions of tons of carbon to the atmosphere
e.) warming of the atmosphere will NOT cause glaciers to melt and subsequent seas levels to rise and flood our coastlines[/ol]

then I have no valid reason not to accept the current evidence that has been repeatedly verified over the last 40+ years by thousands of scientists who can't possibly have all been paid off - there's not enough money in the world. Prove them wrong, change my mind. That's my challenge, and until such time as that happens, the evidence points to the fact that we are putting more energy into a system that will come back to seriusly bite us in the ass if we don't stop.

You can debate the semantics of "it won't be that bad", "they're just alarmists", "environmentalists don't care if they'll destroy the economy", and say that the drought the southwest is experiencing (that the climatologists predicted) will go away and wait and see. Or you can say that the increase in the number of extreme weather events (that climatologists predicted) is temporary and wait and see, or that the increase in wildfires is fine because it's the people's fault for living in high-risk areas and it's the government's job to save us and rebuild, but you can't argue that the atmosphere is not warming and it's not directly caused by us, and life won't get worse if we continue business-as-usual.