Quote:
Originally Posted by HappyMartin
I have no expertise regards climate change at all. I think that I am still entitled to an opinion since I live here
You do not have to be an expert to notice that the planet is starting to look like it has been taken care of by a pack of angry trolls.
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You make an excellent point too, HappyMartin, and I agree that being conservative about natural resources is just good stewardship (I
was a Boy Scout after all
). It just seems to me that the scientific evidence is still coming in, and we should let it do so before we do things that might totally cripple our civilization -- particularly when there's an excellent chance that we might do things that make whatever the situation really is worse! (as has happened before with other things)
I also think I was probably not as clear as I might have been about what I was getting at. I'm not trying to discount the opinions of everyone but experts, not at all. I just like to have an idea of
how informed and considered a given opinion is as I consider it, that's all.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, however they form it. However I'm not
obligated to
listen to every person's opinion, nor to give a crack-head's opinion the weight I would an expert in whatever matter. I like to give informed, considered opinions a bit more weight than that of, say ... some Hollywood celebrity that can't seem to stay sober long enough to check out of rehab (increasingly I feel only pity for the entire Hollywood establishment), or even that of the "average guy" who is just going by what they've read in the headlines, or (shudder) the
New York Times.
Your own "non-expert" opinion, for instance, sounds relatively informed by your direct observations, and your presentation of it suggests that it's fairly
considered too. I do realize that it's necessarily fairly limited in scope because you can't go around carefully observing the whole world because you have to find a way to feed yourself.
I also don't mean to suggest we should wait for scientific
certainty -- there's not likely to be any such thing on this matter for a long, long time.
I just see that the "majority" of scientific opinion that has weighed in already contains the same folks that were saying thirty years ago that we were headed for an ice age -- I can't help it, that makes me a bit skeptical.
The "minority" scientific opinion (a
growing minority, nearly as I can tell) on the other side of the issue hasn't been studying the matter for that long, and it takes time to gather genuine scientific grade evidence. I'd just like to see what they come up with before we make any civilization crippling moves, that's all.
