On Mar 24, 2:26 pm, "ooznb" wrote:
March 24 2009

Lee Mossel happens to believe in human-caused global warming.

It's just that he doesn't think it matters:

Man's contribution looks to have only "sped up" the earth's natural cycles by a few
decades.

Obviously, a "few decades" are significant to the earth's current human population but not
in terms of impacting the earth's climate history.


OK ... and policy is supposed to be significant to

a) Earth's current population?

or

b) every life forms that has existed during the last 3.5 billion
years?

Here's is the fundamental and repeated problem with the "big picture"
fallacy put by the naysayers. We humans are interested in the people
alive today and their heirs into the foreseeable future. The dead are
not our concern. The last 3.5 billion years, though very interesting
are not within our power to change. Rational policy is made primarily
for the living and those we presume will live during our lifetimes or
the lifetimes of those we may meet. It's the legacy question.

If this speeding up process began with the first burning of petroleum 150 years ago, man's
activities have affected 0.000003% of the earth's history; 0.0065% of man's history; and
1.5% of the time since the end of the last ice age .


We don't care about the last ice age. We don't even care that much
about the ancient Romans or the the mediaeval Chinese or the
frontiersmen in the new world. It's interesting but not something
around which we can base policy.

If all of man's "contribution" were to cease immediately, the net effect, measured in
geologic time, on the earth's natural warming and cooling cycles would not be measurable.


Of course it's measurable. he just measured it as a few decades. Let's
accept his hypothesis purely for argument's sake, though I suspect the
"few decades" is more like 6 or 7 decades. A few decades is a measure
that is meaningful to people who on average only live 8 or 9 and
perhaps have a working life of 4 or 5.

Earth's a big boy.

We can't hurt him.


But we can hurt ourselves. Tim Blair finally puts his finger on the
sheer reckless stupidity of the naysayer position by turning the
spotlight on the logical inference from the repeated references to
geological history.

With friends like that, the naysayers don't need more enemies.

Fran