Lemon & stageleft on AGW, Climate Change or Whatever They're Calling it Today

Stageleft and I always have always had, at least on his side, intelligent blogbates on issues being tossed back and forth in the public forum and fora. My place almost almost from the right and his almost always from the wrong.
Haven't had a good one for a while, except in the comments section of a recent post by, Reid, our correspondent from "Right from Alberta", in which he was bitching about a blizzard in Alberta caused by Ontarians.
But I digress...
Here's Stagie's and my (slightly editted) back and forth on the current climate dialectic:

stageleft said...
You are obviously being punished for voting Conservative.... it's 18 deg and sunny here :-)
anonymous: the appropriate phrase, regardless of what the media chooses to focus on, is "climate change" - some places will warm, others.... well ;-)

Lemon said...
Stagie - you are an expert at rhetoric, so I expect a little tongue in cheek here.
Thing is - the climate always has and always will change - we're currently in the middle of a 15 year cooling period after a 15 year warming period.
Gore and his gang would blame a sparrow hitting an illuminated window on global warming / climate change. Though, or course, millions of more birds are getting killed by AGW - the dammed windmills put up to prevent one more climate catastrophe.
And isnt just LIVING in Alberta punishment enough??


stageleft said...
Of course the climate has always changed, the new element in the equation is us, whether or not we are pushing it, and how we may best mitigate and/or survive it.
There are alarmists and extremists on both sides, I like to think I'm somewhere in the middle - and I have no doubt that there is some really nasty sh*t coming down the pipes if we don't mend our ways. Possibly not really nasty until after I'm dining with the ancestors and my grand kids have to deal with it, but since I'm sorta more than a bit attached to the little folk my concern is just as real.
The earth will always seek to achieve balance, and in the grand scheme of things we're an irritant that is causing an imbalance.

Lemon said...
Stagie you and I were both born with NB BS detectors, and we both know (I think) that there is a far greater chance of our blowing ourselves to smithereens or poisoning ourselves with one virus or another than burning or freezing to death.
I have never lived through a time in almost 50 years when we haven't had some terrible Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads: the nuclear bomb clock set at 11:55 pm, global cooling, Islamism, AIDS and the bird flu, global warming/cooling/climate ambiance.
The road to bucks and fame (and hippie chicks) is to scare the livin bejeezus out of people.
And almost all of the noise about this (and all the other looming disasters) comes not someone or some group who actually knows the event for a fact, but at best speculators and at worse media.
And we simply cannot act to protect outselves or our species against every eventuality. Or, we would just have stayed in the same caves our surviving ancestors lived in 10,000 years ago. After all there were all those huge long toothed predators out there, lets stay here and starve rather than be eaten.
But instead we banded together, slew the sabertooth, and built cities to protect us.
The human cost by starvation (as one example) of the course of action as prescribed by the Econuts is guaranteed. But the cost of whatever form of climate change is speculative.
Our species have thrived in terrible climatic upheavals in the past, using only bearskins and spears.
Feels like winter here in NB this week.

stageleft said...
You're probably right about there being a greater possibility of some nut bar country with nuclear weapons starting the big one that comes really close to making us extinct (I figure it will either be the US or Israel that pulls the nuclear trigger first btw).... and I've never bought into the "The Day After Tomorrow" scenario however I have little doubt that there are large climactic changes coming down the pipes, and that we will do far less than "thrive" on them unless we are a lot smarter and more adaptive than I happen think we are.
As I said in the other comments thread, the earth will always seek to achieve a balance - right now we are creating an imbalance, and, one way or another, we will be corrected.
We may not be able to protect ourselves from every possible eventuality but, IMO, it makes sense to look at the bigger, and what is to me anyway, common sense picture and do what we can to mitigate that which we can as opposed to trying to ride out 'come what may' on our supposed ingenuity and adaptability... ymmv of course, I an cautioning prudence and advocating common sense.-- aren't they supposed to be conservative values?

Lemon said...
We may well be creating an imbalance (or at least contributing to it, but whence the tipping point. The most negative "forecasts" by the IPCC (and a lot of IPCC scientists have said they never provided a forecast, the politicians did) are for a very minimal level of effect, that will hardly be noticed (and they have decreased the effect in the last 3 releases. It's the Gores and Sukukis that are predicting mass disaster - and their bias is obvious.
I think just as the ecosystem will work to restore a balance so will mankind (but not by starving millions to death and refusing the right for undeveloped countries to leave the stone age). Surely, if we are so all powerful to destroy the planet (which we are not), then to carry forward the logic, we must be powerful enough to adapt to or correct the imbalance.
As far as concervative values - I think everyone has their own collection of values that fit their personal definitions.