Debate: Present day, is it more important to focus on fixing the economy or the environment?
Side: the environment first

First: Dr. Takeda Kunihiko is an engineer. If you wanted to see a doctor about your eye, would you go to a gynecologist?I would ask you to tell me why Kunihiko thinks that CO2 emissions are not responsible for our current warming, but I already know that answer so I'll just address it here.For millions of years, solar activity has been controlling temperatures on Earth and even now, the sun controls how high the mercury goes. - Dr. Takeda KunihikoThis argument is fallacious for many reasons:When talking about this in my previous argument I mentioned Milankovitch factors, but did not explain what they were. Allow me to do so now: the earth experiences long term changes in it's orbit having to do with 1) orbital shape (eccentricity) 2) axial tilt (obliquity) 3) Procession (axial rotation) and 4) Orbital inclination. These changes occur independently and periodically. They each individually have relatively little effect on the earth's climate, and often their effects cancel each other out. Once about every hundred thousand years, however, these effects come together to create a global warming or global cooling event. This pattern was first noticed by Milutin Milanković, a serbian cicil engineer and mathematician. By looking back at global temperatures from the past couple hundred thousand years, and comparing them to these cycles, Milanković was able to determine that these ice ages coincided perfectly with when all of these factors lined up (which is about once every hundred thousand years).Therefore by determining when these factors will line up again we can determine when the next global cooling/warming will occur. Look at this graph for a visual of how we can predict these events: Milankovitch cycles. The next is not supposed to occur for about 20 - 30 thousand years.None of this of course has anything to do with solar output, as Dr. Takeda Kunihiko suggested.These Milankovitch factors, however, cannot completely account for the dramatic spikes in temperature. Take a look at this graph. Here you can see both the rises in temperature, and the levels of CO2, which correspond over the last 400,000 years. Correlation, however does not imply causation, and in fact in this case the rising CO2 is not what caused the initial temperature increase. As I already said, the initial spark for the temperature change was the long term changes in orbit. There are other forces at work however that amplify these climate changes.One such example of this is polar ice. As the earth warms there is less ice. This means that less sunlight is reflected, and more is absorbed and radiated into heat. This means more ice melts, which there is more heating which means there is less ice which means there is more heating, and so on. This is known as a positive reenforcement system.Another positive reenforcement system that contributes to the warming is greenhouse gasses. As I said, CO2 does not originally cause the temperature to increase, however, once the temperature does begin to increase oceans and soil heat up, releasing greenhouse gasses (CO2 and CH4). Through the greenhouse effect these gasses amplify the initial warming, which releases more greenhouse gasses. In this way, temperature and CO2 emissions feed off each other.Once again, this has nothing to do with the sun. In fact, for the past 100 years (the time in which the majority of our current warming has occurred) the sun has been on a steady 11 year cycle. Don't take my word for it; look at this graph.So is it that Dr. Takeda Kunihiko is simply unaware of these facts, or that he is intentionally misleading people. I would like to hope the former but I suspect the latter.I mean really, how could the sun have any effect on the temperature when it's been relatively constant for the past hundred years? Kunihiko is filled with what scientists refer to as bullshit (it's a pretty technical term, if you want I'll explain it to you).you act as if [1] the amount of that we expel really are enough to automatically create warming. [2] That somehow trees and plants stop doing their job. [3]That, in fact, us humans are doing more than nature has EVER done in natural history.1. In only "act" like the amount of CO2 is causing warming because CO2 does cause warming (basic physics which I can explain to you if you don't understand it), and right now there is over 380 ppm of CO2 in our atmosphere. In addition, humans having been pumping out tons of greenhouse gasses, so unless you can tell me another source from which the CO2 is coming from then we can only conclude that humans are what has caused both the increased CO2 and the warming.2. I never said trees and plants have stopped doing their job, however the deforestation that has occurred from industrialization is undeniably significant, and is an ongoing process. Less trees mean less CO2 gets converted into O2. In addition, there is more CO2 in the air. In essence what you expect is for less trees to deal with more carbon, and the environment not to change. This logic is just plain silly.3. As I have shown you with some of my graphs, the CO2 levels have not been much higher then 300 ppm in about a million years, and right now they're at 380 million. In addition "nature" is a vague term. Could you be more specific about what specific parts of nature you are referring to that could be causing these changes.To this last point let me add that during each of the warming events I showed you (the ones associated with CO2), each one corresponded to a major extinction event in the fossil record. This means that natural or not, our current warming is likely to have similar results. Regardless of whether it's natural or not, shouldn't we try and stop this from happening? Tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis are all natural, but wouldn't you stop them if you had the power? Just something to think about.