octathlon wrote: Alex123 wrote:If an explanation is sufficient to explain something (such as climate change), there is no need to complicate it further. If nature by itself could change climate as it did, it is not required that some new external cause plays any or significant part in changing the climate.
I disagree with that. Using the smoking analogy, "people have been getting cancer and cardiovascular disease all along, so therefore smoking is not a factor" is not valid logic.
Your analogue is not perfect. There are different kinds of cancers, and cardiovascular disease can also be due to numerous factors.
When it comes to "temperature rise/fall" - it was occuring for billions of years without humans. So humans are NOT required for drastic temperature rises and falls. And neither are humans the only required cause for extinction of life.
In the past 540 million years there have been five major events when over 50% of animal species died. . Whether humans exist or not, bad stuff will occur.
Considering the past kind of climate- today's climate isn't extreme by a long shot. If past climate change occured without humans, then human influence is NOT required to explain climate change.
octathlon wrote:Those aren't the effects of GW that we are worrying about, but more extreme weather events (stronger storms, increased flooding, increased periods of drought), rise of sea level affecting coastal cities where most people live, etc. etc. It will still get plenty cold in winter at your house.
Weather cataclysms, mass die offs, hot/cold weather, happened dozens/hundreds of millions years ago. This is samsara. Bad stuff happens.
Some scientists suggest that 99% of documented species that were on Earth, have extinct. This is bad, but this is life.
Over 99% of documented species are now extinct...
Since life began on Earth, several major mass extinctions have significantly exceeded the background extinction rate. The most recent, Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, which occurred approximately 65.5 million years ago (Ma), was a large-scale mass extinction of animal and plant species in a geologically short period of time. In the past 540 million years there have been five major events when over 50% of animal species died. There probably were mass extinctions in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons, but before the Phanerozoic there were no animals with hard body parts to leave a significant fossil record.
Estimates of the number of major mass extinctions in the last 540 million years range from as few as five to more than twenty. These differences stem from the threshold chosen for describing an extinction event as "major", and the data chosen to measure past diversity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_extinction" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
So Extreme weather, extreme die-offs, extreme cataclysms have occured before humans, millions of years ago. IMHO, the climate change will happen even if humans were to completely disappear off the planet. I don't believe that this AGW scare should be used to justify additional taxation, additional technological restrictions, etc.