Freeze up coming,

[blackpowder]

There is a good argument that not investing in low carbon technology will be bad for the economy as well. There are lots of jobs and investment happening in clean tech and renewables. We will still be producing and using oil and gas in the next decades even as we adopt more electric, hybrid and hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles and renewables. It will be a transition not an abrupt change.

We also have to calculate the economic costs of global warming and increasing sea levels. Droughts, floods, huge changes that have a bill attached. So there are economic implications if we do little.

Fools are those who are resistant to change when it is obvious that continuing along a path that is not sustainable, will lead to severe problems. The science is not negotiable.

Sorry for this repost/paste stuff.
Actually, Chuck writes rather well, and his response is crafted in a neutral fashion with little between the lines. Not lawyer material but definetly politician grade.

Seems we can at least agree that the timeline is debatable. Both on the science and the economics.

I cant help but think of the Lada and the Ford when I think of 'legislated progress'.

[seabass]

Climate always changes. The planet was supposedly warming for the last 30 years but I can vividly remember 1992 and 2004 being cold as hell because some volcanoes erupted. Shows that the sun and planet earth control the weather not us. But we gotta pay.

[HITTGrapevine]

You beat us, but snowing like hell now, 2" and counting....

where are u located fjlip?

[fjlip]

where are u located fjlip?

N of Wadena, you?

[chuckChuck]

Climate always changes. The planet was supposedly warming for the last 30 years but I can vividly remember 1992 and 2004 being cold as hell because some volcanoes erupted. Shows that the sun and planet earth control the weather not us. But we gotta pay.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-warm-period.htm
Climate's changed before
Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. (Richard Lindzen)

Greenhouse gasses – mainly CO2, but also methane – were involved in most of the climate changes in Earth’s past. When they were reduced, the global climate became colder. When they were increased, the global climate became warmer. When CO2 levels jumped rapidly, the global warming that resulted was highly disruptive and sometimes caused mass extinctions. Humans today are emitting prodigious quantities of CO2, at a rate faster than even the most destructive climate changes in earth's past.
Abrupt vs slow change.

Life flourished in the Eocene, the Cretaceous and other times of high CO2 in the atmosphere because the greenhouse gasses were in balance with the carbon in the oceans and the weathering of rocks. Life, ocean chemistry, and atmospheric gasses had millions of years to adjust to those levels.

But there have been several times in Earth’s past when Earth's temperature jumped abruptly, in much the same way as they are doing today. Those times were caused by large and rapid greenhouse gas emissions, just like humans are causing today.

Those abrupt global warming events were almost always highly destructive for life, causing mass extinctions such as at the end of the Permian, Triassic, or even mid-Cambrian periods. The symptoms from those events (a big, rapid jump in global temperatures, rising sea levels, and ocean acidification) are all happening today with human-caused climate change.

So yes, the climate has changed before humans, and in most cases scientists know why. In all cases we see the same association between CO2 levels and global temperatures. And past examples of rapid carbon emissions (just like today) were generally highly destructive to life on Earth.

Basic rebuttal written by howardlee