Wasn't an Ice Age declared in the 80's? 

Not to my recollection, but then I was extremely young in the 80s.  I am fairly sure that in the 70s they were talking about global cooling instead of global warming though.

If you're going to argue against someone, at least make sure you read to the end of their or you end up embarrasing yourself, seeing as I already addressed that in the very next sentance.

No, they don't need to obtain 100% proof. Or even 99%. You seem to be arguing that being say 75% confident of something and acting on that basis is bad (sorry, "very very wrong"), since if you're 75% confident you haven't proved that outcome, you've simply made it the most likely. By requiring ridiculously high burdens of proof you delay action, and make things far worse than if you actually started to entertain the possibility.

To give you a simple idea, lets say you think there's a 75% chance that man has a significant impact on global warming, and that failure to take x actions will cost $100bn more, while there's a 25% chance that actually the impact is negligable. Now lets say that taking x actions will cost $25 bn. Should you consider taking such actions, or should you bury your head in the sand and demand pretty much irrefutable proof beyond any possible doubt whatsoever that human activities have a significant impact on global warming? Oh and if you're really really scepital of man contributing towards global warming, then make that a 10% chance, and just change the $25 bn cost to $2.5 bn, and yet again you can show that it would be the best outcome to act in such circumstances. You see this with insurance+security all the time - there's a small likelihood of a particular outcome occurring, but if it does occur you stand to lose big time, and hence it might be worth spending some money to reduce that likelihood, meaning you can expect to save money overall (although in the case of insurance you wouldn't expect to save money, but would still likely expect to benefit overall if risk averse)

I read your entire response before I made that comment and I still stand by it.  While you are correct that we don't need 100% proof that man has an impact on global warming we do need a proponderance of evidence to suggest that we are having an impact and that this isn't just a normal cycle.  The problem is that we don't have that proponderance of evidence.  There are plenty of scientists out there that disagree with man-made global warming and they have mountains of evidence to back them up, you simply can't ignore that because you want to "save the planet".

Look I am not saying that we shouldn't be taking steps to lessen our impact on the environment, we definitely should but we need to do so within reason.  There is no reason to legislate carbon caps on businesses when we don't have enough evidence to suggest that their carbon is escalating global warming.  Yes we should be researching solar power and wind power and other forms of "clean" energy but we can't mandate that companies start using this extremely expensive technology since it may end up putting them out of business.  If we can make solar, wind, etc. power more efficent and cheaper then businesses will naturally migrate to those forms of power.

Yes we should be looking to "cleaner" forms of travel but that doesn't mean we should be legislating high fuel effiency guidelines on auto makers if implementing them make the cars unaffordable.  What good is a fleet of cars that get 50 mpg if no one can actually buy them because the cheapest among them costs 50 grand?  You also need to look at the damage to the environment from getting the raw materials all the way through final production of the vehicle.  The batteries used in electric cars are made from some pretty nasty metals and chemicals that are in some cases damaging to the environment just to create (especially the old nickle-hydride ones).  Then there is the matter of what do you do with the batteries when they are dead?  You can't just throw them out in the trash they are technically hazardous materials.  You need to look at the total environmental impact from beginning to end to assess the environmental impact and what we are being sold is just the environmental impact of the cars when they are being driven around.

You simply can't say that man is having an impact on global warming so the car companies need to make hybrid only cars and everyone needs to drive one instead of their gas guzzling cars and suvs.  (keep in mind that the you there is not directed at you specifically but is directed at most global warming activists).  We need to attack this issue rationally and it just seems that most global warming activists just want immediate rash action which is a recipe for disaster.

Yes, in Economics they are called Type I and Type II errors.  Basically, doing nothing is a type I error.  Doing something that is wrong is a Type II error and much more severe.

Global warming isnt about the destruction of man.  its about the seas rising and causing total chaos in nations around the globe causing war famine and desease. 

And Please 

THERE IS NO DEBATE WITH SCIENTISTS!!!!! Stop telling that lie.   Sure there are a few that are hold outs.  But the only scholarly journal they get an article in is fox news. 

In the 70s there were a few that thought the world was ready for an ice age yes.  but that wasnt the TOTAL CONCENSUS in the scientific community.  And they didnt have the evidence of rapidly upped CO2 levels. 

And as an aside, its not cars that make global warming, its cows.  Lots and lots of cows putting methane into our atmoshere.  thats why the problem will never be solved.  Death or happy meal? You know what the world will choose.

also El-duderino:

 The more CO2 the less the suns energy is ejected into space.  We started getting huge CO2 levels in the 1800s.  What happend then?  oh yeah the industrial revolution.  This is beyond debate.  look at the planet venus for an example of this.

You just contradicted yourself.  If this is about the seas rising, causing total chaos in nations which cause war, famine and disease then it is about the destruction of man and NOT the destruction of the planet.  I guarantee you the earth will survive whatever we throw at it, even a nuclear holocaust, man may not survive but the earth will.

You are the one lieing here.  There are some very reputable scientists that disagree with global warming, the founder of the weather channel for one.  He was fired because he disagreed with global warming, and continues to disagree with it to this day.  There is definitely debate amongst scientists on this topic, the media likes to make it seem like there isn't because global warming gets ratings.

One way that CO2 is removed from the atmosphere is precipitation.  Increased precipitation would drop the atmospheric CO2 which would also facilitate a global cooling cycle.  It's not like the CO2 goes up there and stays there forever.  This is NOT beyond debate.  No matter what you say there are many that don't buy the whole man-made global warming and while they exist debate will be necessary and helpful to progressing our society. 

As I've said before, just because I, and many others, don't buy man-made global warming doesn't mean that I am against doing things to lessen our impact on the environment.  The problem is that a lot of those technologies simply aren't ready for mass production yet.

"in economics"? thats a very narrow view, its basic statistics and is used everywhere.

It also always depends on the context if a Type I error is worse or better than a Type II error; saying that one is more severe than another is false. Given that the null hypothesis can be made either as "It is true that" and also as "It is not true that" saying one is worse than another can't be said at all as a Type I error becomes as Type II error depending on your null hypothesis. Usually the null hypothesis is a negation of something though.

Lets take the example of someone having potentially cancer and getting tested

null hypothesis would be : he has no cancer. (and if we take the environment it would be "there is no global warming")

1) the test says "he has cancer" while he has not. That is a false positive - an type I error. (if you take the environment instead it would be "test says there is manmade warming while in reality there is not")

2) the test says "he doesn't have cancer" while in reality he has. That is a false negative - an type II error. (if you take the environment instead it would be "test says there is no man-made warming while in reality there is")

You surely agree that in this Situations the Type II error is more harming.

If a Type I or II error is more problematic often also depends on the viewpoint

null hypothesis : "He didn't kill the girl" (lets assume its a trial)

1) judge decides "he did kill the girl" while in reality he didn't. That would totally suck for him but for the society its just 1 more guy in prison.

2) judge decides "he didn't kill the girl" while in reality he did kill the girl. That would be a great danger for the society but it would be great for the murderer.

 (and if the null-hypothesis had been "he killed the girl" it would be just the other way around 1) would be a type II error and 2) would be a type I error)

Yes they were.  Time made it their feature of 1975.  I think the nudnicks corrected that problem TOO well.

You are lying.  There is a great debate.  Granted most think we have global warming, but a vocal and growing minority refute that hypothesis.  It would do you well to drop the hystrionics and read more.

SOrry, I have a degree in econ, not Stats (although Econ requires a lot of Stats).  It could very well be in many disciplines.  And the common theme then seems to be, if you dont know what you are doing, dont do it!

I disagree.  In this case the type I is more harming.  You see if a patient has cancer and is misdiagnosed as not having it then they may end up dying before their time which is tragic.  However if you diagnose someone with cancer and they don't have it you are subjecting that patient to a potential lifetime of painful and oftentimes risky treatments.  Chemo for instance essentially kills your immune system.  What if you then contract a fatal illness that you would not have otherwise gotten if the test had been done correctly.  You could potentially be damning someone to a shortened lifespan when they could have lived a long and virtually illness free life.

Now you might argue that by missing the cancer you are killing the patient earlier than they otherwise would have, and while that may be true having cancer generally shortens your lifespan anyway and the treatments are merely a way of slightly extending your lifespan.  Yes sometime the cancer goes into remission but it can sometimes come back stronger than before.

Carbon caps (if done via a permit system) can be a very efficient way of reducing emission levels if done right though, since it allows companies to trade with each other allowing the most efficient companies to sell their permits to the least efficient ones, keeping emissions the same (at the cap), but being far more efficient/productive than a set cap for everyone. Meanwhile I wouldn't advocate banning anything that pollutes the environment anyway, unless the pollution is so massive that a ban would prove the most efficient method of reducing it's use. Far better to impose a tax roughly equal to the damage you expect such emissions to cause (and if there's uncertainty about that damage, you factor that into setting the level of taxes) which produces the most efficient outcome if done right. Similarly I wouldn't support forcing companies to use 'clean' technology. I would however be open to considering subsidies for such clean technologies (although I'd probably favour the tax route rather than the subsidy route, since the arguments for the tax are stronger in efficiency terms).

No (to the last part that is). Although a common example given in statistics(+economics) for type 1+2 errors is crime (letting a criminal go free, and letting an innocent get wrongly convicted), and it is often thought in such a situation that the type 2 error is worse than the type 1, that doesn't mean all type 2 errors are more severe (in fact whether something is a type 1 or 2 error shouldn't really have an impact on which is the more severe, since it depends on the example/errors in question).

True it is debatable (against your reasoning though is the issue that you touched on that if you don't treat cancer early on the chances of successful treatment if detected later can be much lower, so it could go either way), but substitute cancer with a disease that is fatal if not treated, and for which the treatments have only minor side affects (but which are effective at treating the disease), and you get the desired result.

Just because a few crackpots make a few claims does not mean there is debate.  Take the weather channel guy, he gets fired not because hes a brave voice of opposition but because the idea is laughable within the weather predicting community. 

When 90+ persent of scientists tell me something.  I trust them. 

If 5 doctors told you you had cancer and one said maybe not.  You should probably start kemo.

This is true.  It is a general rule.  But given the lack of information, it usually is true.  You are dealing with unkowns, so you have to mitigate the damage.  And to do that, generally, a type I error is the least destructive.

IN the case of global warming, we would have to assume that we can do anything about it.  And then if we did, and we did not have global warming (just a normal cycle), we would then not only upset that cycle, but do greater harm to the environment of man (the earth will abide) than if we do nothing.

Right now, we dont know what is happening, what is causing it, or if it is natural or not.  Putting aluminum foil on mountains to reflect the heat back into space (a proposal even if it sounds stupid), would do more damage than not putting the tin foil hat on the tops of the world.

First, 90+ percent do not tell you anything.  Second, there is great reason to fear when the "truthsayers" fear "crackpots".  It means they do not have the strength of their convictions, so must silence dissent.  I dont fear crackpots.  I fear know-it-alls that in fact know nothing.  You have stated no facts, just exagerated opinions, and yet no one is silencing you.  For the reason, that you can voice opposition where there is debate, without fear of reprisal except from luddites.

They dont fear them.   if a person that wanted to teach that the earth was flat and didnt get hired in the geography department at a college its not because they are being silenced for fear of their great ideas.  its because they are and idiot.

Then why fire them?  You dont fire people for their view, unless you fear the views.  I feel sorry for your 1984.  That is all the GW movement is.

Wrong just plain wrong.  The guy was fired simply because he didn't buy the whole man-made global warming argument, and he was fired when even less was known about global warming.  He was fired because his views didn't jive with what the owners of the stations wanted to portray dispite the fact that he was one of the best meterologists they had on staff.  You see he used to also do a lot of the hurricane forecasting, and he was generally within one or two hurricanes of being on target for the year.  Since his departure their accuracy has been horrible.  They have had to "revise" their predictions numerous times just so they don't appear to be idiots.  Take the year after Katrina, they had predicted another horrible year for hurricanes and it turned out to be a relatively mild year.

It depends on what the specialty of those doctors are.  If 5 dentists tell me I have cancer in the pancrease and one oncologist tells me I don't, I'm going to side with the oncologist.

GW is a joke. I think its nothing more than a scare tatic. Is the earth warming? maybe.... but a few hundred years of records compaired to how old the earth is... mmmhh whatever.

Im all for going gren...hey thats great. BUT...and this is a big BUT

Make the stuff affordable before you force it on people. Me like many others struggle every winter if not in the summer because of high energy prices... and now you want to mess that up by giving me unreliable sources of energy that will cost even MORE to power.

Gonna tax me because I drive an older car? give me a car then that runs on bio fuel then. I cant afford it.

All this is gonna do is hurt the low income people and also affect the middle class.... if you can afford the green stuff then by all means go and get it...but to force me who cant afford it and then penalize me for not being able to do it is just...backwards

Public transport+bicycles are typically cheaper than a car, so if you can't afford to 'upgrade' to a green car, then downgrade to a green non-car. If you're too far away from work for those alternatives to be viable, then move closer.

Scientists generally agree that the earth is warming. They also generally agree that there is a fairly high likelihood a significant amount of the warming is due to greenhouse gases. Hence it is logical that if you can cut greenhouse gases at no cost to anyone, you should. From that you have the straightforward result that you will want to cut greenhouse gases up to the point where the cost is too high for the expected benefit (the probability of the cuts being effective and the saving that would then produce against the probability that they wouldn't be effective and the cost of the unneccessary cuts).

See that is one thing that all of your people say "move closer"

So

To do that

I have to screw up my life and the family setting for my kids. Yeah thats wonderful. Who give a hoot about my kids therapy... I mean its all for GREEN!

O and saving up the extra 1500 on top of paying normal bills! yep i got that under my bed!

Public trasportation? yeah  a cab that runs only in town!

Bike 30 miles a day? You do it first and we will talk okay

As you can see not everything can fit into your "perfect world" What looks good on paper well... is just that

Not true.  Key words being 'fairly high likelihood' and 'significant.'  Even if one grants the 'fairly high likelihood' part, which is uncertain at best, it still falls short of 'significant.'

Based on the false premise above.

Right, so everyone else should suffer because you decided to buy a house miles away from your job without any decent public transport links, and then decided to buy a polluting vehicle. I mean it couldn't possibly be your own fault for forcing yourself into that method of transportation now, could it?

When I'm looking for a house, the distance of it to my work is a significant factor. If I go for one further away it's cheaper, but it also limits my transport options. So if I do go for one that's further away, and benefit from getting a nicer house for the price I pay, I deserve to then lose out if cars are taxed appropriately for the damage they cause. In some ways it's the same as if I didn't purchase insurance for my home and it got burgled - I didn't pay insurance, meaning all the time I wasn't burgled I benefited by having more money than the person who did. Then I get burgled, and I end up worse off. Would you support a nice big cash handout to the burgled-non-insured person? I mean it's really screwed up that persons life to lose all their possessions and not have any money to replace them with.

Increase taxes on cars and public transport is made more viable (due to the increased demand for it). It may not be possible for every remote village everywhere, but for the major metropolitan areas it becomes much better.

Depends on what significance measure you use. Anyway you don't even need those. If there's no negative impact (other than the actual costs involved) of cutting emmissions, and there's a possible positive impact, you could have a very low likelihood, and a 'small/not that significant' impact, and then 'it is logical that if you can cut greenhouse gases at no cost to anyone, you should.'