{"id":11696,"date":"2012-07-30T09:28:19","date_gmt":"2012-07-30T14:28:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=11696"},"modified":"2012-07-30T09:28:19","modified_gmt":"2012-07-30T14:28:19","slug":"ex-sceptic-says-climate-change-is-down-to-humans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2012\/07\/30\/ex-sceptic-says-climate-change-is-down-to-humans\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex-sceptic says climate change is down to humans"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The BBC has the story <a title=\"The BBC srticle\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/science-environment-19047501\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Ex-sceptic says climate change is down to humans<\/strong><\/a>. The following quote has a certain ironic synchronicity with a conversation that a friend and I have been having.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The team argues that the good correspondence between the new temperature record and historical data on CO2 emissions suggests human activity is &#8220;the most straightforward explanation&#8221; for the warming.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I am not a climate change denier, and I am not disagreeing with the finding of these scientists, however I must point out that though &#8216;human activity is &#8220;the most straightforward explanation&#8221; for the warming&#8217;, being the most straightforward does not prove it is the correct explanation.<\/p>\n<p>The strength of their conclusion depends on how rigorous and thorough the scientists were in testing a large universe of other possible explanations.\u00a0\u00a0 From this article, we have no idea how this study stacks up under that criterion.<\/p>\n<p>As an engineer, the way that I think it would be proper to proceed on trying to ameliorate the effects of global climate change would be to always ask &#8220;If we are wrong about climate change, what would be the effect of the proposed policy change?&#8221;\u00a0 If you can honestly say that the new policy were a good one and a cost effective one even if we are wrong about global climate change, then you have a policy change that you can feel very comfortable about proposing.<\/p>\n<p>Even if humans are not the major cause of climate change, it would still make sense to lessen our impact on the problem so as not to make a natural phenomenon even worse.\u00a0 In times of drought, we try to conserve water even though humans are not the cause of the drought.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The BBC has the story Ex-sceptic says climate change is down to humans. The following quote has a certain ironic synchronicity with a conversation that a friend and I have been having. The team argues that the good correspondence between the new temperature record and historical data on CO2 emissions suggests human activity is &#8220;the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11696","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11696"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11698,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11696\/revisions\/11698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}