The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #158712   Message #3756078
Posted By: Stu
06-Dec-15 - 07:14 AM
Thread Name: BS: Climate Change ain't rocket science
Subject: RE: BS: Climate Change ain't rocket science
"This does not happen? And I'm the denier? Look to yourselves."

But what is happening now is not part of those cycles. We are familiar with them from the fossil record (I saw a spectacular sequence of beds in a quarry in Virginia that were the result of the long-term cyclicality of wet/dry periods) and they're well understood.

Although we are still trying to understand the effects of climate change on the planet's systems (for example oceans are massively complex and by nature hard to study) the foundation that underpins current climate and oceanography work is strong and the science robust; it makes no odds to the scientists studying it whether anthropogenic climate change is occurring or not, but they're found it is and have been looking beyond that for a while. My own university has deployed autonomous pelagic drones to collect data from the North Atlantic and these aren't looking for evidence of anthropogenic climate change, they're part of an effort to understand the effect it's having now.

I think we'll find one day that climate denial is a sociological issue similar to creationism or flat-earthers, and people's desire to believe in such causes is exploited in a similar way by the actions of those with a vested interest (in climate change's case the hydrocarbon industry, in creationisms case religious literalists). They don't look at and assess the science, they simply believe and you can't argue with them. More often than not, they know very little of the subject they are discussing. It's ever been thus.