You are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

0
0

[–] SixBarns ago 

Do you think your expectations are reasonable though? If you're asking for a real life example outside of the lab, you're talking about performing an experiment... on the whole Earth. I mean sure, if we had an exact duplicate Earth that we could use, that would be great. Turn back the clocks a few hundred years, tell everyone on Earth #2 to stay away from coal and oil, and we can just do whatever we want on Earth #1. Go back and measure the temperature. Easy. Of course that's a joke, but I mention it because otherwise... the thing that would convince you of anthropogenic climate change is the very thing that supporters of the idea are already proposing to do - limit CO2 emissions. You can't limit CO2 levels on a local scale, so it would necessarily have to be at the global level. But you don't actually want that because it's just a tool to keep us in control? That's not an argument from science.

For me it's simple - just disprove any of the major points of the theory with actual science. No arguments from incredulity - e.g., the Earth is so big, so there's no possible way we could affect it; we just don't understand how the Earth/climate work; etc. I'm going to greatly simplify climate change for the sake of argument, but there are two big ideas that you could attack. First, that humans activities are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Measure what's produced when you burn fossil fuels - maybe you won't find any CO2? Maybe it's absorbed by some global carbon sink? Do some analysis of the global carbon cycle and show that the extra CO2 we have now is significantly different than what you'd expect from burning x amount of fossil fuels. Second, show that the greenhouse effect is nonsense. You could do that in a lab in about an hour - show that these gases don't absorb IR rays, or that absorbing IR radiation doesn't increase temperature. All very simple, reasonable things.