Wait, they have a candy drawer??!

*promote

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Tuesday, August 5th, 2014 2:33pm PDT - promote requested by RedSky.

Like so many things it seems... no amount of rational thought or discussion... no matter how accurately or clearly the facts are presented... there are so many people who for any number of reasons will never accept or even be willing to discuss this topic. They either play for the other 'team' or they vested interest in pretending the issue doesn't exist. It just seems like you'd have as much success if he turned around and started to speak to his chair.

One of the results of a warming ocean is melting glaciers and ice caps. That is the addition of fresh water to a salt water system. There is more saltwater than freshwater in the world. One of the properties of salt water is that it conveys heat better than fresh water. The hot-water baseboard heater you use to heat your home would actually be more efficient if it used salt water. We don't use salt water in heaters because salt actually corrodes the metal pipes faster. What does this have to do with climate change? As you dilute the salt water that transfers heat from the warm equatorial waters of the world to the cooler waters in temperate zones, it gets less good at transferring that heat. This change happens very slowly to the perception of short lived mammals like us. In geologic terms, this is how we get to the next ice age.

You know the system is fucked when in order for needed change to happen one lobbying group has to out-lobby another...

I'd argue the sure sign that our system is fucked in the US is that facts don't matter in legislative issues.

Also, in this case it's more lobbying group vs thoroughly vetted evidence.

Legitimate Senate Study? Conspiracy Theory? Fact? Both?

I just don't understand how you can think that the power to influence public debate through politics and the media of pro green energy groups can compare to that of the size and influence of the old energy sector.

Green energy is a cottage industry compared to old energy. The power of environmentalists and even a few activist minded billionaires would pale to the spending power and incentive to act of old energy companies.

Surely if you're concerned about money muddying the debate, the first group you would focus on is the ones with disproportionately more money?

Also your arguments I've seen previously echo the tobacco / lung cancer debate. Aren't you concerned you're being duped by these supposedly authoritative blogs?

Agreed.

What I was trying to say, perhaps clumsily, was that I think for legislature to accept the evidence an industry with an interest in reacting to said evidence (the insurance industry, for instance) would have to lobby more than the industry with an interest in ingnoring said evidence.

It's the cancer of Corporations before People shit thats gotten hold of in a lot of industrialized nations, and especially the US.

@Trancecoach Lets take a HUGE leap and say everything in that article is 100% true...

6 of 7 !!!!

http://fortune.com/global500/bp-6/?iid=G500_lp_toprr

How do you reconcile that with the fact that 6 of the worlds 7 most profitable companies are energy corps? TRILLIONS of revenue and hundreds of billions in profit, to say nothing of the track record for that particular industry, and yet THEY are the victims of some 'eco-friendly' conspiracy....

Just a few headlines from that 'source'

Group Claims 80% of U.S. Population Growth Is From Immigration

Globalists Push EU-style “Union” for Middle East

University Fires Scientist After Discovery Challenges Dinosaur Theory

That last one was my favorite... his 'theory' was thousands of years old... not millions.

Hi Notarobot, your argument is unfortunately based on a very common misunderstanding of the chemistry of water and salt.

I can assure you that it is an established scientific fact that pure water has the highest heat capacity per unit of its mass compared to any water solutions. The less water there is in a water solution, the less heat capacity that solution has. This is because the temperature of pure water is more proportional to the amount of energy contained within it, which is due to the flexibility of its molecular structure. The more salt you add to water, the less structural flexibility (i.e. purity) there is to distribute and contain energy as the temperature increases. To put it another way, the salt molecules weigh down and restrict the water molecules from moving as freely, which is why salt water has a higher boiling point.

So in fact the more fresh water that is introduced to the oceans, the higher heat capacity and heat conduction there will be.

Furthermore, you grossly oversimplify the problem of climate change by assuming the only change that matters is immediately perceptible to "mammals like us". One of the biggest issues is that even slight variations in temperature can drastically change entire marine ecosystems. If enough ecosystems collapse, it will cause a chain reaction that will be very, very difficult to manage, let alone recover from. Also, even slight variations in salinity can drastically change ocean currents, which in turn affects not just marine ecosystems, but weather patterns throughout the world as well.

I can tell you're an intelligent person, so I hope you'll take me seriously when I say that it's very, very important for all intelligent people to be as diligent as possible when referring to the scientific causes and effects of climate change. Advocate whatever position you'd like as to how we should go about things, but please do your best to validate the information you're using to do so.

I was with him until the end where he said "time is on our side"....sorry, but time actually ran out to 'fix' this issue decades ago. Now the best we could hope for is to mitigate the damage and not continue to exacerbate the effects by adding more CO2 and other green house gasses. Once the ocean warms enough to melt the methyl hydrates, the oceans catch fire (warming them even more) and the methane both destroys the air and starts the super green house effect, sending us on the death spiral towards a Venus like atmosphere. It's getting really close, people. In some places it's already happening. Put your fire suits and gas masks on.

The scientific community *knows* that climate change is real. The scientific community is made up of individual researchers at universities all over the world, anyone who practices good science and adheres to the scientific method is in no doubt about what the research points to. You can't buy the global scientific community, there are too many of "us" (i guess) that are all absolutely anal about good scientific practice. You could buy one or two, you could buy a small group, but the only thing that changes the opinion of the global scientific community is hard scientific reasoning.

I can't speak for where you live, but if you were to walk into my university's physics department tomorrow and ask any lecturer or professor about climate change, they'd tell you that, and the same goes for just about any university in the UK, holland and france i imagine, if not more like germany and so on. Anyone who has spent any amount of time comparing graphs and looking for statistical anomalies will tell you that there is a god damn big and unwieldy peak sticking up on the temperature/time graph right about where we started mass producing greenhouse gases, and the only new influence into the equation was us, because the old peaks are flat compared to this one. This is happening on a HUMAN timescale, not on a geological one.

We're seeing ocean floor methane bubbling up to the surface that we haven't seen before due to the heating of the ocean, and only this week the scientist who studied it tweeted flat out that if even a fraction of that methane is released into the atmosphere... "we're fucked."

It's pretty damn serious, but i'm not telling you that you need to pay huge taxes or fees to green companies or anything, and no scientist ever will. The agendas that politicians take up in the name of science should not stop you from accepting the science, and there are simple, good common sense things you can do to make a small difference that would cumulate to something big if we all did them. The only reason governments haven't been investing more into green energy is because they are relentlessly lobbied by the hugely wealthy and powerful and corrupt energy firms.

What is more likely?

This is what I don't get. The climate deniers constantly claim that climate change is "ideologically driven" without ever specifying what the gain is.

Let's assume that we do actually live in bizzaro world and that the whole AGW thing is a complete hoax. Somehow 97% of all climate scientists have secreted colluded and messed with the data to create a public alarm over this.

To what end? Have you met any climate scientists? Hint: they're not the ones flying around in private jets. Honestly, if I was a climate scientist and I was going to perpetrate some kind of global fraud, I'd at least want some profit out of it.

Climate change sucks. It is a massive pain in the arse, and no one wants to deal with it. But it's real, it's a thing and we just have to suck it up and deal with it. David Mitchell sums it up nicely. How we deal with it I have no idea.

@dannym3141
http://tinyurl.com/ccjmsq7

My understanding, and I am not a scientist, has been that the oceans are most responsible for conveying heat from warmer equatorial regions towards cooler polar regions.

If diluting the ocean's waters makes those currents *better* at transferring heat, then would the heating of the polar regions accelerate as freshwater is added to the oceans and salinity is diluted? If this was the case why would warm periods between ice ages ever stop short of melting polar ice caps completely? And what causes ice ages to come and go?

I'll try....
In short, yes, slightly they would (and have) accelerated.
This stops sometimes because equilibrium is reached, there's only so much heat being added to 'transfer'. Also, at times it HAS melted the ice caps completely.
Climate change causes ice ages to come and go. There are many reasons for climate change historically, usually tied to the makeup of the atmosphere, which naturally changes in 'cycles' (when not interfered with un-naturally). From my understanding, most have been caused, at least in part, by volcanic activity on a scale never seen in human history. The really scary part to me is, even without these volcanic events, we've raised the CO2 level faster than they seem to have raised due to natural forces in the past. The climate is now playing catch up with the atmosphere.

Newtboy said it well; ice ages come and go due to numerous factors, but one of the most important factors is how much of the atmosphere is composed of carbon dioxide and methane.

Indeed, there have been interglacial periods where the earth was largely void of ice and had the much higher sea levels to match. At one point global temperatures were about as high as is expected to occur in the next century or two.

The difference between then and now is that life and the ecological chemistry of earth had millions of years to adapt before those periods reached their height in most cases. I say in most cases because there have been periods where climate change occurred faster than before and severely disrupted ecological stability or simply caused mass extinctions. Climate change has always happened, but the reason why current climate change is so worrying is because it is happening faster than ever before and because there is a massive amount of data to back it up.