Honest debate?

I belong to a small minority.  I have not yet declared my official position on global climate change.  I should re-phrase that: my position on man-made global climate change.  It gets me yelled at a lot.  This strikes me as odd.  I haven’t declared my position on man-made global volcanism, tectonic subduction, or polar shift either, but those issues don’t get me yelled at.  I guess I’m an easy target because I’m a skeptic.  Wait, wait… before you start yelling- I didn’t say I was convinced against it.  I’m still reading.

Part of the problem is my interest in previous ice ages.  When did they start, when did we come out of them; how did they start, how did we begin to emerge out of them?  Since earth’s most recent ice age things have been warming.  This warming was accompanied by a corresponding rise in sea level as ice sheets melted.  The effects were immense.  Much of what we see in our terrain today is the result of glaciation and melt.  The Great Lakes, for instance, were created from glacial scour and pooling.

  

 LAND MASS ABOUT 12,000 YEARS AGO

About 15,000 years ago the glaciers began to retreat and some 10,000 years ago the big melt started slowing.  About 7,000 years later coastal wetlands began to form.  So, in very rough terms our current sea levels were attained in the last 3,000 years or so.  I guess to some, that was what the temperature and sea levels were supposed to be all along.

We made it!  … now, to keep it that way. 

None of that means that modern man is not the cause of a lot of potential havoc.  We’re the culprit for a great deal of harm to our planet.  It’s just that both sides of the argument are immovable and deaf to any dissent.  It’s unfortunate because public policy is based on this information.  I’d like to take this information seriously, but there are a lot of fallacious arguments, and some past predictions just didn’t pan out.  About seven years ago, Al Gore told us that all sea ice would be gone by 2013.  Also notable:

• Within a few years children just aren’t going to know what snow is.  Snowfall will be a very rare and exciting event.  ~Dr. David Viner, senior climate research scientist.  March, 2000.
• The world will be eleven degrees colder by the year 2000.  ~Kenneth Watt, in Earth Day, 1970.

There’s a lot of compelling physical evidence that what we’re doing to our planet is grossly damaging.  On the other hand, a lot of government funding is directed at science that achieves the right results.  How am I as a non-scientist to know what to think?

In 2005 Science magazine warned that we could anticipate a catastrophic trend towards more frequent and intense hurricanes as a direct result of man’s impacts on our planet.  Some hurricane researchers agreed and some hurricane researchers disagreed. 

Whichever viewpoint that I select as being the more compelling will earn me a label from one camp or the other, and assuredly- more yelling.