BPSDB After babbling on with a number of factoids about global population, the land surface area of Texas and so on, the ‘Tennessee Conservative Watch (TCW)” asks “Considering that the earth’s atmosphere extends 50 miles up from the surface, how can anyone with half a brain think that humans can do anything to change the atmosphere much less the earth’s climate?”
What the TCW has done is parrot one variation of the popular “common sense” arguments that climate change Deniers like to use. They all include some form of “common sense tells you” coupled with some completely irrelevant, misleading factoids. They are based on an appeal to ‘use your brain’, so let’s try that and see what happens.
“Mankind occupies less than 4 tenths of 1 percent of the surface of the earth.” TCW
Common sense tells you that:
Here, try this logic with any housemates you may have: ‘I occupy less than 4 tenths of 1 percent of the surface of this house/apartment, how can anyone with half a brain think that I can do anything to change the amount of dirt and mess?’ Think that might work? I doubt it, even if your housemates have only half a brain.
It isn’t just the physical space you physically occupy that matters, it’s how much of the space that you use. Our actual use of the Earths’ land surface is 83%, and we have brought the oceans to the point of collapse even without climate change.
Common sense tells you that:
There are many examples that we all know of where very small amounts of something can have a huge effect. A typical bullet weighs about 250 gms, less than 2 tenths of 1 percent of your body weight, but it can still kill you.
That is because of the kinetic energy the bullet picks up when fired and then transfers to your body in the form of damage. Sort of like the way CO2 picks up thermal (heat) energy and then reradiates (transfers) it, some back to the Earth.
Of course if you were to eat the lead bullet in powder form it would take 30 times less to kill you. Let’s not even start to talk about radioactive substances where amounts so tiny they can hardly be seen with the naked eye are deadly.
A non-lethal experiment would be to powder just 1 gm of a magnet and blow it into your computer (something no one with any common sense would ever actually do) and see if that makes any difference .
Or take 250 gms of water (about 1/4 qt), a perfectly natural substance that makes up 60% of your healthy body, and that is essential to life; just like CO2. If you poured the water into your lungs and kept it down you would choke to death; a good example of how an abundant, natural, necessary substance can be lethal when there is a little too much in the wrong place.
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Greenfyre's 
I like the house cleaning analogy.
The house is not getting dirtier.
The house is getting dirtier, but there is no evidence that any dirt comes from human activity, only natural causes.
Dirt is good for you – it is plant food.
Dirt is just a conspiracy for all those cleaning companies wanting to make money.
I am not cleaning until my roommate China cleans up.
It is too late to do anything about the dirt.
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I’m reminded of comedian Marcus Brigstocke yet again:
Yeah, the “China ain’t doing it, I ain’t doin’ it neither” argument never really resonated with me.
I’d personally love to see if anyone’s looked through Cold-War-era American opinion pieces and see if there was a change in thinking. “Those Reds aren’t disarming, so we shouldn’t either” seems to be in direct contradiction to “Holy crap, Sputnik! We need to catch up!”, yet both are similar in that they judge the merit of an idea solely on the grounds of a rival’s implementing it.
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Professor Andrew Pitman, in the ABC debunking of TGGWS said:
“The idea that the amount of something is proportional to its effect is clearly silly. For instance if I injected you with a little Ebola virus, that’s a tiny tiny amount of something but it would have an immense impact on you. And you would die. So the amount of something is not in any way proportional to how big an impact it might have and CO2 is the same.”
Here’s my favorite experiment to counter common sense. It needs 1 brain, 200g of water, and 200µg of lysergic acid diethylamide.
Common sense: “390ppm CO2 can’t have any effect”
Me: “OK, then you might do the following experiment: Put 200µg LSD in a glass with 200g of water. That’s 1ppm LSD. You sure will swallow that. Report back what you have seen.”
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