[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Too many posts to comment on portions individually. I'll just add that there is something between "facts" and "opinions/beliefs" called "theory" or perhaps "hypothesis." We include all the best facts we can find in our working hypotheses, and adjust them as new facts come to light and are tested and validated. My current working hypothesis, based on my reading of scientific evidence, is that human-induced climate change is real and is a problem. (Yes, I've looked at the sunspot theory. I don't find it compelling, and neither do many other scientists who've also looked at the available evidence.) Regarding projections, no one can know the future, but one of the main goals of science is to attempt valid predictions. Models can be tested, validated, and improved. It makes sense to build the best models we can and to try to act appropriately based on their predictions, knowing that we may have to change the models as new facts come to light.

Susan Sontag once commented that science was the practice of disproving theories. You see a set of facts, and you propose a theory that explains the relationship between those facts and posits a cause. Accepted theories are those which have stood up to repeated attempts to prove them false.

As for global warming, it think it's clear there is a warming trend. The question is the cause and what we may do to address it. My feeling is that we are are seeing the results of long term cycles over which we have little control.

Human history and development begins in a time when the Earth was just coming out of a period of glaciation, and the trend was warmer. In prehistoric times when the dinosaurs roamed, there was a period when the entire Earth was tropical. Then things got cooler.

While human activity certainly adds to the warming trend, it's doubtful it created it. At the time the glaciers began to retreat, there weren't human beings to do anything to cause or add to it.

So the big questions are "How much is human activity affecting the trend?" and "How much impact can our efforts have in reducing or reversing it?"

For the first, I don't know. For the second, I'm all in favor of efforts to reduce pollution and greenhouse gasses, simply on principle, but I don't see those efforts stopping or reversing the trend. The best I think we can hope for is to slow the rate of change, and give ourselves more time to adapt to the changes.

Meanwhile, we are left with the question of what actions to take now. I'm repeating myself, but given the obvious tendency most people have to base their decisions on personal costs, e.g. the cost of solar panels vs. the cost of purchased energy generated by coal or nuclear plants, if the long-term costs of generating power by various means are not passed on to the consumer, consumers will continue to make decisions with long-term detrimental effects for short-term reasons. None of the power generation vendors are going to be the first to include the costs of pollution mitigation and cleanup in their consumer prices, because that would create a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace. Again, this is where government regulation is appropriate.

It's been done in the past, through political pressure. I'm old enough to dimly recall when coal was a far more widely used source of power, and houses had coal cellars to hold the fuel used in their furnaces. Factories and power generating facilities pumped enormous amounts of junk into the atmosphere produced by burning coal. Few houses still use coal these days, and other places that burn it are required to install scrubbers to filter the particulate matter before exhausting it to the atmosphere. Cities like Pittsburgh are far nicer places to live than they once were.

Whether the true costs of power generation get passed on tends to vary by locality. There are electrical utilities that are explicitly for-profit that do so, yet offer rates competitive with other utilities in the industry.

Of course, it's much more fun to rail on about how others are trying to deny one's personal liberties than to address whether government regulation should enforce the free market by requiring all costs to be included in a consumer commodity.

Well, it's much more in line with the underlying beliefs of the folks who rail like that. Complaints about undermining personal liberty and vitriolic comments about greedy corporations strike me as stemming from the same source: an underlying assumption that can be stated as "I am a powerless individual being oppressed by large organizations for their own benefit".

If you don't take it personally and feel it's all about you, it becomes easier to explore alternatives. But as mentioned up thread, once people have a worldview, the primary goal is to defend it. Suggestions that implicitly challenge that worldview will get nowhere.
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Dennis