[RMiller]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

Those are all exceptions, not the rule.

There will always a few exceptional amateurs that are competent enough in professional fields to do acceptable (or even amazing work, like Dean Kamen or your example of Henry Ford), but the vast majority of amateur people wouldn't even pass basic proficiency standards in specialized professional fields. That's why the average annual incomes of people with Bachelor degrees is higher than those without, and those with Master degrees is higher yet, with PhDs topping the charts. There will always be outliers, but this in general is the rule.

I think we agree here. I was just making the point that "There are definitely some "amateurs" out there who have opinions that should be valued."

Originally Posted by artdutra04

But in the 50s - 70s, the data at the time was showing that the Earth's temperature had stabilized. The decision at the time made sense that the Earth may have been entering a cooling phase. But since the late 1800s however, the temperature has generally "skyrocketed" in terms of the rate of the temperature increase in reference to the nominal fluctuations during the past two thousand years. 84% of scientists [source] agree with the findings that this recent upsurge since the "Little Ice Age" has been propelled to increase faster and to higher levels because of human activity than it would have otherwise occurred naturally.

If there was ever an educational course that singlehandedly changed my life, I would give the honors to statistics. Without statistics, localized variations like that might look like a trend. But sometimes we get "weird" results that point more to the randomness of noise in data than actual trends. An example of this can be said about rolling a pair of dice three times and getting doubles each time (sending you directly to Jail without passing Go in Monopoly!). The odds of this happening are small (1/216), but does it mean the dice are loaded or inaccurate? No, it just means your sample size is too small to be conclusive.

Localized trends (over a few years) can be affected by a number of localized environmental factors. Some factors we know about - such as the case of the Mount Tambora volcano eruption in 1815 causing the Year Without a Summer in 1816 - but others we don't. In general, predicting short term weather and climate variations is much harder than predicting long term ones since more variables come into play in the short term. In the long term, the short term variations are smoothed out (very similar to the Law of Large Numbers), making longer term predictions a lot easier.

Here is the thing, I can produce graphs that show a much different picture (than the graphs that I removed so as not to increase the length, see your post if others are interested). I won't but they are in some of the previous links. The reason they are different is because we really do not have accurate measurements as we look back in time. For instance, there is evidence of warm times in northern Europe at multiple times (Viking settlements in Greenland that are only now being revealed, vineyards in England) in the past. Does this disprove any of the graphs? Nope, but it is worth pausing and considering.

You are correct that using only seven years back by itself would not be enough to throw out an idea for global warming. I was more stating it because it is something not reported.

The way I see it, the temperature since the late 1800's (and early 1800's) has been increasing at a rate of about 1 degree F per century. This is curious that it has been increasing for about 200 years, before the significant increase in carbon dioxide levels (which is only gone up significantly over about the last 50 years), don't you think?

In addition, the way the globe was expected to warm is simply not the case if it was caused by carbon dioxide. Is that conclusive to throw out all man made global warming theories? No, but it should cause a pause to think (and actually report this - that was one of the links, the missing hotspot). (Money, politics, science?)

Originally Posted by artdutra04

As you pointed out, there is a lot of oil left. But we use petroleum for more than just making our cars go and supplying power plants. Fertilizer, plastics, lubricants, and many more various hydrocarbon-based products all depend on various byproducts of the oil distillation process. When the price of oil goes up, all those prices go up as well, resulting in very volatile pricing. And real economic growth does not like volatile pricing - that's why you see so many companies with price guarantees to sell anything for their competitors price if it's cheaper. This isn't to save you money, it's because stable pricing leads to higher profit margins for them.

Switching from oil to more stable sources of sustainable or renewable energy (non-corn* ethanol, biodiesel, nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, etc) results in steadier prices (e.g. wind is always free!), which results in more stable economic growth and higher profit margins for industry. Thus, weening ourselves off oil is a smart and sensible long-term goal both economically and environmentally. The problem is the short term - volatile pricing can lead to massive short term profits for shareholders and executives then lead to a period of minimal profits at best or massive red ink at worst, as the financial industry is in now. These people are more interested in sticking around for five years, getting rich, and leaving the company rather than sitting in for 20, 30, even 40 years at the company and guiding it down the path of long term, stable, moderately-high profits.

* Corn is actually a pretty poor source of ethanol. Plants like plain prairie grass yield much higher returns, while not driving up the food and livestock feed prices for everyone else.

Yep, you are correct, we use oil for LOTS of things. You probably can't go five minutes in a normal day without touching something that started as oil. To be blunt about volatility, prices are also volatile to some extent. In your list of energy, ethanol and biodiesel are dependent on the amount of crop. Wind depends on if there is wind and can never be a primary source of energy. In addition, the infrastructure cost is rather high. Same goes for solar, though putting it in the right spots general can result in a fair amount of consistency. That said, it is rather expensive to build and maintain. Hydro is great, but it comes with its own downsides for wildlife. I personally think we should transition to nuclear, but there are all kinds of political issues. I don't know enough about geothermal.

Regarding corn, it is another money and politics issue. Corn is about as bad as it gets for ethanol production, but the government won't inhibits/prohibits the use of sugar cane for instance. However, green algae blows everything else out of the water by orders of magnitude in oil/acre yields. In addition, it can be used in places not suitable for any crops. The technology is getting close as well.

I won't get into much on the economy other than to say, in my opinion, it was preventable if the government had done its job in the last twenty years and that the worst is still ahead of us.