I am sorry about the novel, I truly am. This just ignited a bunch of things I've been thinking about recently.
Quote:
|
You may feel outside the "orange-purple" debate by pointing out exaggerations on both sides, but that just leaves you supporting "team purple's" policies, whatever you say about their rhetoric.
|
Team Orange had a hard-on for
policies years before there was any scientific consensus of any nature. At one point the science was just a twinkle in Mr. Gore's professor's eye. A consensus of a handful. Team Orange policies beat consensus by a decade.
When the science agreed it was like a perfect storm. We have gotten it right, they cheered, and said it meant they were smarter than their dumb enemies who picked the wrong side.
Meanwhile the science continues on. New information bombards us. It's fascinating.
The elephant in the room is the pause. For the last 18 years there has been, statistically speaking, no global warming; despite an ever-increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Science tells us that now a majority of the CO2 mankind has added to the atmosphere has happened since this pause began. The relationship between carbon and temperature is not so simple. (It also tells us the Team Purple theory that increased CO2 levels are due to ocean outgassing is wrong.)
Science has reacted to this with an increasing number of theories. Many of these theories have already been proven wrong, and new theories advanced. There's little consensus on the reason. (The recent paper suggesting that it doesn't exist has met with skepticism.)
Does this mean that CO2 doesn't increase warming? Does it deny all the science that has happened already? NO! - but it will eventually result in a new scientific consensus.
For example, the new consensus
might be that there is a limit to the amount that CO2 can actually increase global temperature, and perhaps we've hit that limit.
We'll probably know a lot more by this time next year. El Nino should create new temp records, and after that, the temperature will fall, as it has with historical El Ninos. Will it fall to "pause" levels? Or not fall so much, because the ocean has coughed up a lot of missing heat? That will be great information for science.
Shouldn't any policy wait for this new data and the new consensuses that result? That would be really amazingly pro-science.