Is Global Warming a Hoax?
Out of context: Reply #32
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- lowimpakt0
I was amazed today that the Telegraph (UK right tabloid) published this.
"Do we want to ignore climate change and risk losing all this?
................So if the sceptics’ main standard-bearers effectively agree with environmentalists over the basic science, what on earth is all the fuss about? What is the basis for all the over-excited claims that global warming is a “hoax”, a “scam”, or the greatest scientific scandal ever? Can so much heat have ever been generated where there is actually so much enlightened agreement? Yet there is still plenty to debate, and here I must make a confession – I only quoted part of Dr Peiser’s sentence above. He went on: “What is uncertain is the magnitude and timescale of the effect.”
Again, he is right – and almost everyone would agree. Indeed, the controversy surrounding the latest IPCC report – such as its gross error in predicting the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers, and whether global warming is increasing the number of storms, floods and droughts – concerns this, not the essential science.
So, despite the often vitriolic debate, there is much common ground. All but the extremists on either side agree that the planet is warming and that humanity is at least partly responsible – and that we don’t know how big its contribution is, or what the effects will be
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So we are clearly embroiled in the wrong argument. We should be debating not scientific certainty, but risk – or, more precisely, to what level of risk we are prepared to take with the futures of our children and grandchildren.
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The IPCC concludes – on the basis of a vast number of peer-reviewed studies, and despite the occasional mistake – that there is a 90 per cent chance that dangerous climate change will take place unless we take radical action to combat it. But let’s say it is wildly wrong. Should we accept a 50 per cent, 10 per cent or one per cent chance?
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