Much as I'd like to jump on this bandwagon, there are still something like 30 different indicators that show fairly rapid change in the global climate profile over the past 30 years. Making this the basis for a counterargument would be like a creationist saying "but C-14 isn't consistent!" True statement in the correct context, but massively misleading.
My primary concern with the way the global warming thing is playing out is that we're not going to get people out of poverty without industrializing them, and we're not going to industrialize them without polluting. People with life expectancies less than 40 can't really wait until 2050 for us to get the pollution thing figured out so that we can let them start actually producing things on an industrial scale. All the shrill screaming and lack of genuine discourse on both sides of this issue may have economic effects here, but it has life-threatening effects other places.
I'm kind of a fan of realclimate.org on this subject--they're good about dotting i's and crossing t's when it comes to explaining what various refutation attempts do well, do poorly, and just flat out fail to understand. If this has legs, I would expect them to address it within the next couple days (though they haven't updated much lately, dang it.)
As far as the "producing enough food to feed us all" meme, that hasn't been a problem in a *very* *long* *time*. There's fairly strong evidence that pretty much every famine in the past 500 years has predominantly political causes. The problem is in distributing food, not producing it. Distributing food is very, very hard compared to producing it.
no subject
My primary concern with the way the global warming thing is playing out is that we're not going to get people out of poverty without industrializing them, and we're not going to industrialize them without polluting. People with life expectancies less than 40 can't really wait until 2050 for us to get the pollution thing figured out so that we can let them start actually producing things on an industrial scale. All the shrill screaming and lack of genuine discourse on both sides of this issue may have economic effects here, but it has life-threatening effects other places.
I'm kind of a fan of realclimate.org on this subject--they're good about dotting i's and crossing t's when it comes to explaining what various refutation attempts do well, do poorly, and just flat out fail to understand. If this has legs, I would expect them to address it within the next couple days (though they haven't updated much lately, dang it.)
As far as the "producing enough food to feed us all" meme, that hasn't been a problem in a *very* *long* *time*. There's fairly strong evidence that pretty much every famine in the past 500 years has predominantly political causes. The problem is in distributing food, not producing it. Distributing food is very, very hard compared to producing it.