Jack Klompus, Diabase, and especially Zoolander, please read:
From Scientific American, November 30th, 2009
Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense
On November 18, with the United Nations Global Warming Conference in Copenhagen fast approaching, U.S. Senator James R. Inhofe (R-Okla.) took the floor of the Senate and proclaimed 2009 to be "The Year of the Skeptic." Had the senator's speech marked a new commitment to dispassionate, rational inquiry, a respect for scientific thought and a well-grounded doubt in ghosts, astrology, creationism and homeopathy, it might have been cause for cheer. But Inhofe had a more narrow definition of skeptic in mind: he meant "standing up and exposing the science, the costs and the hysteria behind global warming alarmism."
Within the community of scientists and others concerned about anthropogenic climate change, those whom Inhofe calls skeptics are more commonly termed contrarians, naysayers and denialists. Not everyone who questions climate change science fits that description, of course—some people are genuinely unaware of the facts or honestly disagree about their interpretation. What distinguishes the true naysayers is an unwavering dedication to denying the need for action on the problem, often with weak and long-disproved arguments about supposed weaknesses in the science behind global warming.
What follows is only a partial list of the contrarians' bad arguments and some brief rebuttals of them.
"I've spent four decades studying global climate change and as a scientist I am appalled at [NYT's Paul] Krugman's cavalier shrugging off the Hadley email scandal as 'just the way scientists talk among themselves.' That's like saying it's alright for politicians to be corrupt because that's the way they are."
"Legitimate scientists do not doctor data, delete data they don't like, hide data they don't want seen, hijack the peer review process, personally attack other scientists whose views differ from theirs, send fraudulent data to the IPCC that is used to perpetuate the greatest hoax in the history of science, provide false data to further legislation on climate change that will result in huge profits for corrupt lobbyists and politicians, and tell outright lies about scientific data."
Farwest - read the comments to the article, which isnt scientific at all, fact is all those claims are not settled. Claim #1 being the biggest that a gas thats only .04% of the atmospheren, that a .002% variation can do so much damage, is asanine. Other gases refelct energy to and are in much greater abundance;
1. The narrow, biased and unscientific perspective presented in your article causes me to continue to lose respect for your magazine'sscientific credibility and objectivity. For an accurate scientific analysis of the global warming issue, I refer you to Idso and Singer's Climate Change Reconsidered.The key questions regarding the current warming trend are 1) how much is mankind contributing to it and 2) what are its expected consequences. Since the earth was warmer during the Holocene Maximum and Medieval Warming Period, the consequences appear to be beneficial on the whole. Since man's contribution to the current trend is minor (hard to even discern), there's not much we can do about it. The costs of non-CO2 based energy sources are at least double those of fossil fuel. Therefore, instead of mandating the conversion to these alternatives at this time, we should continue to invest in R&D to bring the costs down while wisely and conservatively using our remaining fossil fuel resources.
2. "The costs of non-CO2 based energy sources are at least double those of fossil fuel."
What is your source on this? This disagrees with everything I've read.
"Therefore, instead of mandating the conversion to these alternatives at this time,..."
There's no mandate. The idea of cap and trade is to force polluters to internalize the costs of their emissions, so that they choose to pollute only when the profits justify the harm to the environment
3. I think I speak for many of your readers in saying that climate science is extremely difficult to understand, so we need to be able to trust the scientists engaged to do so. The recent 'climategate' scandal suggests that some of the leading scientists in the field, with strong influence throughout the rest of the field including the IPCC, have deleted data, adjusted remaining data to fit their theories, adjusted their models to create the answers they wanted, prevented access to their data by people who disagree with them, and tried to prevent access to both the IPCC and scientific journals by those who disagree. I have no bias either way, and am neither a believer or a skeptic. I want to know the truth, but if these claims are true, and they appear to be, I can no longer trust the climate science community to provide it, and certainly won't believe any conclusions that are based on data handled by that discredited community.
Thanks, Jack. A number of the comments are by one poster, jercarobrien1, who (as another commentator points out) is already debunked by the article itself! And I'd say the majority of the comments only give support to the points the article makes.
As one commentator so wisely says: "The wonderful thing about conspiracies is that those who seek to refute them, regardless of the logic or strength of their argument, are seen by the conspiracy theorists as being an integral part of that conspiracy. Thus, any argument posed to a climate skeptic will fall on deaf ears.
The scientific community needs to simply ignore these people, and the media needs to learn to do likewise. "
Matthew Yglesias brings up a great point: climate change skeptics like James Inhofe and the Cato Institue promote the idea of an enormous conspiracy by climate change scientists. But what they haven't explained is what's the purpose of this conspiracy? What's the motive? Why are governments across Europe and Asia curbing their emissions and trying actively to deal with this problem, if it does not exist?
Further, what is the motive for scientists to make up a conspiracy? There seems to be no motive there.
Yglesias: "It shouldn’t take a genius to note that opposition to the scientific consensus is extremely concentrated among political movements with strong ties to the coal and oil industry. You can easily see where the upside is for them in getting this wrong. But adopting the view that the IPCC is correct really is “inconvenient” from a political point of view. Indeed, even political leaders who accept the basic outline of this climate consensus rarely actually argue in favor of reductions that are sufficiently sweeping to meet IPCC guidelines specifically because doing so is so politically problematic. This just isn’t a “good issue” to take on. But it happens to be a real problem and so, reluctantly, leaders around the world are trying to take it on. "
The conspiracy? If you have 2 scientists with 2 different hypothesis they naturally want to compete to see whose correct. They devise experiments and tests to prove each wrong or right. Scientists are akin to architects in that they just want a patron.
Now you have vested interests like Soros backed RealClimate.org pushing the hype as well as Al Gore, both men stand to make enormous profits off the transfer of carbon based production to 3rd world locations.
Is it any wonder which horse they back? Oil and coal do likewise for the opposition. The real tragedy is that the science is not settled and it appears is ignorant of the truth, which is supposed to be it's mission.
But the more immediate concern should be COP15 and it's defeat. America will essentially be saying we give up manufacturing.
I would like to point out that the C02 debate is a bit short sighted.
A lot of people tend to be forgetting the other and much more exotic chemicals modern man has been releasing into the atmosphere.
Hell, we seem to be doing a good job of introducing brand new and synthetic compounds never before seen in the natural world. Some of these have the potential to cause radical transformations in the parts per billion concentrations.
For some of them, there is no meaningful historical comparison-- simply put, there's no absolute way to determine whether or not they are benign or not.
Welcome to the world of phospines, fluorocarbons, polyphosphates, pentafluorides, chloroethylene et cetera.
What sets my alarm bells ringing is the overt politicization of scientific endeavour to the detriment of genuine debate.
I repeat again: anyone who says that a particular scientific issue is settled and beyond scrutiny or debate is a liar - no matter what side they are on.
And we have this consistent line trotted out that it is somehow 'anti-science' to question science? It it only me that sees the danger and ignorance in this approach?
But here's my problem: the climate change "skeptic" community has been so completely funded and co-opted by petroleum money that it's impossible to take seriously.
Many of the researchers who initially seemed to have solid evidence against climate change were shown to be funded by Big Petroleum. How can we possibly believe anything they say, when the outcomes of their research is already paid for by an industry that serves to benefit from doubt about climate change?
Farwest - in addition to oil companies you forgot Boeing and their bombers, Motorola and their Isreali connections, Bush for being Bush, Cheney, Reagen, Haliburton, Sir Han Sir Han, Rush, Hanity, Beck, Palin, Ken Star, Newt, Northrup Gruman, the entire military industrial complex, and anyone else co-opting scientific discussion.
farwest1, here's how you can discriminate between either side (despite whatever influences, funding, and politicization are put to bear):
The quality of the science
It is now discovered that the people charged with delivering the necessary scientific input on this issue to the IPCC have engaged in some seriously flawed process and methodology - that not only undermines the science, but also the credibility and moral high ground of the pro-AGW community.
In my previous post on Climategate I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back.
The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering. And, as Christopher Booker argues, this scandal is not at the margins of the politicised IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] process. It is not tangential to the policy prescriptions emanating from what David Henderson called the environmental policy milieu [subscription required]. It goes to the core of that process.
[...]
Remember that this is not an academic exercise. We contemplate outlays of trillions of dollars to fix this supposed problem. Can I read these emails and feel that the scientists involved deserve to be trusted? No, I cannot. These people are willing to subvert the very methods--notably, peer review--that underwrite the integrity of their discipline. Is this really business as usual in science these days? If it is, we should demand higher standards--at least whenever "the science" calls for a wholesale transformation of the world economy. And maybe some independent oversight to go along with the higher standards.
I'm still somewhat confused so perhaps I shouldn't chime in here. But, can someone explain to me the impact of the emails being exposed and the science (behind climate change and human influence) somehow losing credibility from all this?
Does that mean we should cancel the steps toward making cars/trucks/transportation in general more fuel efficient?
Or cancel the creation of alternative sources of energy and the infrastructure to support it?
Does that mean we should cancel the development of advocacy, education, and policy towards more sensitivity to the environment, like within our own field?
Does it discredit the visible increase in pollution in our natural environment and decrease in biological diversity?
My thoughts after the exposure was: Jesus, why aren't these e-mails better secured? And then I thought maybe these scientists/researchers should do a better job a staying more objective, and the diligence towards the truth should be the priority.
But really, regardless of who's making money, hasn't this new attention to our environment brought on some beneficial changes? Are you pretending that prior to all this attention, there was no sugar-coating, card-stacking, and distraction from the truth on both sides? There is clearly some deceit and outside influence on both sides, but really what would you prefer: poison coated in sugar, or being tricked to take the medicine?
Slabartfast, you are absoluteluty correct. However with the upcomming COP15 treaty next week America stands to get punished for emitting such CO2 and 3rd world countrys are going to be given credit passes for the development of industry while America and the west in general is capped or even limited. Essentially we are going to accelerate the deindustrialization of the west.
So I ask you to honestly look at this and say is this a good idea? Would a trust a CO2 belching smoke stack in Chicago regulated by EPA and properly scrubbed or a smoke stack in Dhaka belching raw unfiltered waste into the air with $1 / day workers inside. Seriously, who do you think this is going to benefit?
Well, you know... if we went back to boutique businesses and smaller department stores on properly maintained and furnished city streets and people actually paid the 3 to 4 extra dollars for their items to increase labor costs, globalization would be an issue.
Also, if food and beverage manufacturers went back to a more regional model rather than gross centralization, trip numbers would be greatly reduced.
So, that whole "globalization" argument is pretty flimsy.
In fact, they should be applying carbon taxes to any factory that operates purely on the more expensive electricity or produces energy from waste on site.
Because, you know, that would force industry to go electrical and it would centralize carbon production.
The real big losers in this scheme is the petrochemical industry that makes tremendous amounts of off gases from manufacture and the coal industry for essentially selling carbon.
And that's another paradigm shift right there, we don't have the investment capital or a full maturation on investments from previous power production facilities to move forward.
Just like suburbanism, we've built a system that we are completely and utterly dependent on with little to no interchangbility in sight. Not just the car argument but because we'd lose too much money changing everything too quickly.
even insurance companies, known for not wanting to change the status quo - are realizing the cost of doing nothing will be in the hundreds of trillions of dollars.
Global temperatures have already risen by at least 0.7 degrees Celsius. Global warming above 2-3 degrees in the second half of the century is likely unless extremely radical and determined efforts towards deep cuts in emissions are put in place before 2015.
The melting of the Greenland (GIS) and the West Antarctic Ice Shield (WAIS) could lead to a Tipping Point scenario, possibly a sea level rise of up to 0.5 meters by 2050. This is estimated to increase the value of assets at threat in all 136 global port mega-cities by more than 28 trillion US dollars.
On the North-eastern coast of the USA and due to a localized anomaly, the sea level could rise up to 0.65 meters, increasing the asset exposure from 1.350 to about 7.400 billion US dollars.
The South Western Part of the USA, namely California, is likely to be
affected by droughts and levels of aridity similar to the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. The annual damages caused by wildfires could be tenfold compared to today's costs and could reach up to 2.5 billion US dollars per year by 2050 increasing to up to 14 billion by 2085.
the notion that cutting emissions = job losses is asinine. America stands to get punished for emitting such CO2
only in an america devoid of intelligence and innovation is this true.
germany's already cut emissions close to kyoto and they aren't seeing manufacturing jobs being whisked away. yes, employment is down, but that's across the board. the 3rd & 4th quarters have seen an uptick in DE manufacturing sectors.
RWE, germany's #2 energy producer is taking steps to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% - and proposing innovative steps to rach 1/3 renewawbles by 2020. it can do this without hurting their bottom line.
ironically you picked bangladesh - a country with a relatively small GDP that's setting aside billions to deal with rising sea levels. they're aware and seeing direct impacts of climate shift: increased flooding, prolonged tsunami season - and they're being fairly proactive for an exrtemely poor nation. they've also gone into partnership with denmark on ways to reduce CO2 emissions.
damn those crazy danes and their backwards thinking...
Can anyone put a historical perspective on this? For example, when pasteurization was first suggested, or when Ignaz Semmelwies suggested that hand washing could limit bacterial infections, or even when bacteria was first discovered - were these proposals fought with this much vigor? Or alternatively, when doctors suggested cigarettes to help pregnant women not gain too much weight - who fought against that idea?
How are we likely to view this debate in 25 or 100 years?
LB your making the incredible leap in logic that this is even a debate worthy of such comparison. There was no profit motive to be had in taxing the violently ill unlike the air.
Come to Chicago, you can help us change the world.
you'd rather have algeria's 1.2% debt to GDP ratio? wow...
However, there is really no single "danger" level for having too much external debt as a percentage of GDP, and this depends much more on the country's economic context. If a country has seen a rise in its debt compared to GDP during a good economic expansion, this means something is really wrong and policies will have to change, Bivens says.
zorita: These words do not mean that I think anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. On the contrary, it is a question which we have to be very well aware of.
dropping like flies? hardly. you can be critical of the scientists and their process, but that doesn't invalidate the work of thousands of other scientists.
The closest analogue for me, in a funny way, is the tobacco lobby versus humanity's right to live healthily.
The tobacco lobby tried to discredit the science showing that their products were causing grevious harm. See Operation Berkshire. They tried to discredit the scientists practicing it. They had money and the support of corrupt politicians (oddly, from the same party that the climate change deniers are from. )
This is why I don't trust the skeptics. They're in the pocket of big business and have the support of the same party that always supports big business as it screws the little guy over. Why would I trust anything they tell be about science, when they've so often used "bad science" as a pretext for screwing people over, as with tobacco, as with the Superfund act that removed toxic waste from communities, etc, etc. ?
Investigate further, and you find out that the OISM is supported by the conservative think-tank the Heartland Institute, which is funded in part by ExxonMobil.
Incidentally, I have two relatives with Ph.Ds in chemistry, much like the many chemists in the petition. Want to know who they work for? Petroleum companies. Want to know how they feel about global warming? I'll let you guess.
For what it's worth, they're not impartial scientists, they're paid by an oil company.
from 2006 party split on Tobaccco money Dems $9,864,918.
Repubs: $18,938,926
Seems both parties have some explaining to do on that one
And again you fail to get the real core of the issue here - your sovereignty. Its fine and well if the USA adopts it's own policy but it's a tragedy to give away the farm to the UN's climate panel. Do you realize that by making carbon a precious element those who have it now will become immensely rich and powerful, like Excelon or Con Edison, or even friggn Enron? You will not be able to build a factory for your new invention, hell its already dam near impossible to do that. You realize the bulk of our industries not fundamental to location will be relocated to places with no restrictions so we will "even out" the global "village"?
Get out of the moralist quagmire and please try to see this for what it is.
Action? YES but on our terms. Thats why you elect YOUR leaders.
i'm intimately aware of the OISM funding. the web of deceit via heartland runs deep in denier bank accounts.
adopting UN policy isn't a giveaway, jack. we're not giving up our sovereignty. you should really take off the tin hat and stop listening to rush. moralist quagmire? that's hilarious. if we set the tone for Cop15, it IS on our terms. if nothing will be done without the US ratifying, WE hold all the marbles. and frankly, that's why i've voted for my leaders - to lead us wrt global warming, social equity, etc.
You realize the bulk of our industries not fundamental to location will be relocated to places with no restrictions so we will "even out" the global "village"?
and exactly how is this any different from today? cutting CO2 emissions doesn't change what's been going on for the last 30 years, jack. open your friggin eyes.
'friggin enron' can't make money. they've been defunct since '01.
"However with the upcomming COP15 treaty next week America stands to get punished for emitting such CO2 and 3rd world countrys are going to be given credit passes for the development of industry while America and the west in general is capped or even limited. Essentially we are going to accelerate the deindustrialization of the west."
Frankly, I don't know enough about this COP15 treaty to hold a decent conversation. When I have time I'll look into it and maybe then I'll have a good response. I'm not sure about the details of exactly how it works, who it effects, how it effects change, whether its legally binding with literal punishment/reward.
Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change "consensus."
To read some of the press accounts of these gifts—amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon's 2008 profits of $45 billion—you might think you'd hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.
Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.
But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them.
Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.
Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?
Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.
And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.
Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.
Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.
None of these outfits are per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.
Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU's temperature database: "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"
This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.
How can anyone believe in such outright corruption?
As for someone above asking why the government would promote a scam, well that should be pretty obvious. They want to reduce the population of 'useless eaters' and also gain more control of our lives.
The drive to reduce population is evident everywhere, the dramatic rise in cancer (which is man made), aids (again arrived from nowhere 40years ago, evidently man made), vaccinations which kill, GM food which kills, man made disasters such as kartina, the breakup of family life, the destruction of the economy (meaning affording childrens is very difficult, or at best limited).
Its about time people started waking up.
You have seen so much corruption in your lives, from unjust wars (Nam, Korea, Gulf1, gulf2), you have seen government staged terror attacks (911etc), one corrupt politician after another (Clintion a liar and profiteer, Bush a draft dodger and liar whos old man is mates with the binlids), You have seen your economy being wiped out and all industry being moved overseas, you have seen the implementation of orwells police state and most never question a thing.
You all jumped on the obama bandwagon only to see him as a fraud and liar. Didn't he promise peace and to remove the troops? Yet only last night i see he and brown have promised thousands more troops to be deployed.
You have all been had and this climate agenda is the biggest scam of them all.
And someone above mentioned that oil companies are funding the so called 'skeptics'. Absolute rubbish.
The gas and energy companies along with the bankers have bankrolled the green movement throughout and are betting on the creation of a long term global monopoly.
I know this is completely, radically off topic, but since climate change skepticism tends toward the far right, I thought I'd put it here: Charles Johnson, the conservative blogger at Little Green Footballs, and owner of Pajamas Media, has officially resigned from the Right. Here are his reasons, and they're brilliant and spot-on:
1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)
2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)
3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)
4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)
5. Support for homophobic bigotry (see: Sarah Palin, Dobson, the entire religious right, etc.)
6. Support for anti-government lunacy (see: tea parties, militias, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc.)
7. Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.)
8. A right-wing blogosphere that is almost universally dominated by raging hate speech (see: Hot Air, Free Republic, Ace of Spades, etc.)
9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.)
10. Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source)
And much, much more. The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff.
In addition to the debate concerning the anthro-warming a new development in the formation of hydrocarbon science is gaining momentum. The theory is Hydrocarbons are formed in molten mantle below the crust of the planet and leaked to the surface pockets so as to be a continualy formative cycle of creation. It is theory with history but not the methods to test until now. Read here http://www.geologytimes.com/research/Hydrocarbons_in_the_deep_Earth.asp
"So how do models with high sensitivity manage to simulate the currently small response to a forcing that is almost as large as a doubling of CO2? Jeff Kiehl notes in a 2007 article from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the models use another quantity that the IPCC lists as poorly known (namely aerosols) to arbitrarily cancel as much greenhouse warming as needed to match the data, with each model choosing a different degree of cancellation according to the sensitivity of that model.
What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree"
"Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.
What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences—physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering—came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences"
Climate Change Emails Hacked
Jack Klompus, Diabase, and especially Zoolander, please read:
From Scientific American, November 30th, 2009
Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense
On November 18, with the United Nations Global Warming Conference in Copenhagen fast approaching, U.S. Senator James R. Inhofe (R-Okla.) took the floor of the Senate and proclaimed 2009 to be "The Year of the Skeptic." Had the senator's speech marked a new commitment to dispassionate, rational inquiry, a respect for scientific thought and a well-grounded doubt in ghosts, astrology, creationism and homeopathy, it might have been cause for cheer. But Inhofe had a more narrow definition of skeptic in mind: he meant "standing up and exposing the science, the costs and the hysteria behind global warming alarmism."
Within the community of scientists and others concerned about anthropogenic climate change, those whom Inhofe calls skeptics are more commonly termed contrarians, naysayers and denialists. Not everyone who questions climate change science fits that description, of course—some people are genuinely unaware of the facts or honestly disagree about their interpretation. What distinguishes the true naysayers is an unwavering dedication to denying the need for action on the problem, often with weak and long-disproved arguments about supposed weaknesses in the science behind global warming.
What follows is only a partial list of the contrarians' bad arguments and some brief rebuttals of them.
continue
Geologist Dr. Don Easterbrook - November 29, 2009
"I've spent four decades studying global climate change and as a scientist I am appalled at [NYT's Paul] Krugman's cavalier shrugging off the Hadley email scandal as 'just the way scientists talk among themselves.' That's like saying it's alright for politicians to be corrupt because that's the way they are."
"Legitimate scientists do not doctor data, delete data they don't like, hide data they don't want seen, hijack the peer review process, personally attack other scientists whose views differ from theirs, send fraudulent data to the IPCC that is used to perpetuate the greatest hoax in the history of science, provide false data to further legislation on climate change that will result in huge profits for corrupt lobbyists and politicians, and tell outright lies about scientific data."
Farwest - read the comments to the article, which isnt scientific at all, fact is all those claims are not settled. Claim #1 being the biggest that a gas thats only .04% of the atmospheren, that a .002% variation can do so much damage, is asanine. Other gases refelct energy to and are in much greater abundance;
1. The narrow, biased and unscientific perspective presented in your article causes me to continue to lose respect for your magazine'sscientific credibility and objectivity. For an accurate scientific analysis of the global warming issue, I refer you to Idso and Singer's Climate Change Reconsidered.The key questions regarding the current warming trend are 1) how much is mankind contributing to it and 2) what are its expected consequences. Since the earth was warmer during the Holocene Maximum and Medieval Warming Period, the consequences appear to be beneficial on the whole. Since man's contribution to the current trend is minor (hard to even discern), there's not much we can do about it. The costs of non-CO2 based energy sources are at least double those of fossil fuel. Therefore, instead of mandating the conversion to these alternatives at this time, we should continue to invest in R&D to bring the costs down while wisely and conservatively using our remaining fossil fuel resources.
2. "The costs of non-CO2 based energy sources are at least double those of fossil fuel."
What is your source on this? This disagrees with everything I've read.
"Therefore, instead of mandating the conversion to these alternatives at this time,..."
There's no mandate. The idea of cap and trade is to force polluters to internalize the costs of their emissions, so that they choose to pollute only when the profits justify the harm to the environment
3. I think I speak for many of your readers in saying that climate science is extremely difficult to understand, so we need to be able to trust the scientists engaged to do so. The recent 'climategate' scandal suggests that some of the leading scientists in the field, with strong influence throughout the rest of the field including the IPCC, have deleted data, adjusted remaining data to fit their theories, adjusted their models to create the answers they wanted, prevented access to their data by people who disagree with them, and tried to prevent access to both the IPCC and scientific journals by those who disagree. I have no bias either way, and am neither a believer or a skeptic. I want to know the truth, but if these claims are true, and they appear to be, I can no longer trust the climate science community to provide it, and certainly won't believe any conclusions that are based on data handled by that discredited community.
They keep going....
Thanks, Jack. A number of the comments are by one poster, jercarobrien1, who (as another commentator points out) is already debunked by the article itself! And I'd say the majority of the comments only give support to the points the article makes.
As one commentator so wisely says: "The wonderful thing about conspiracies is that those who seek to refute them, regardless of the logic or strength of their argument, are seen by the conspiracy theorists as being an integral part of that conspiracy. Thus, any argument posed to a climate skeptic will fall on deaf ears.
The scientific community needs to simply ignore these people, and the media needs to learn to do likewise. "
for the record
i'm with the "skeptics" bring on the oceans and kevin coster is so hot.
Matthew Yglesias brings up a great point: climate change skeptics like James Inhofe and the Cato Institue promote the idea of an enormous conspiracy by climate change scientists. But what they haven't explained is what's the purpose of this conspiracy? What's the motive? Why are governments across Europe and Asia curbing their emissions and trying actively to deal with this problem, if it does not exist?
Further, what is the motive for scientists to make up a conspiracy? There seems to be no motive there.
Yglesias: "It shouldn’t take a genius to note that opposition to the scientific consensus is extremely concentrated among political movements with strong ties to the coal and oil industry. You can easily see where the upside is for them in getting this wrong. But adopting the view that the IPCC is correct really is “inconvenient” from a political point of view. Indeed, even political leaders who accept the basic outline of this climate consensus rarely actually argue in favor of reductions that are sufficiently sweeping to meet IPCC guidelines specifically because doing so is so politically problematic. This just isn’t a “good issue” to take on. But it happens to be a real problem and so, reluctantly, leaders around the world are trying to take it on. "
The conspiracy? If you have 2 scientists with 2 different hypothesis they naturally want to compete to see whose correct. They devise experiments and tests to prove each wrong or right. Scientists are akin to architects in that they just want a patron.
Now you have vested interests like Soros backed RealClimate.org pushing the hype as well as Al Gore, both men stand to make enormous profits off the transfer of carbon based production to 3rd world locations.
Is it any wonder which horse they back? Oil and coal do likewise for the opposition. The real tragedy is that the science is not settled and it appears is ignorant of the truth, which is supposed to be it's mission.
But the more immediate concern should be COP15 and it's defeat. America will essentially be saying we give up manufacturing.
I would like to point out that the C02 debate is a bit short sighted.
A lot of people tend to be forgetting the other and much more exotic chemicals modern man has been releasing into the atmosphere.
Hell, we seem to be doing a good job of introducing brand new and synthetic compounds never before seen in the natural world. Some of these have the potential to cause radical transformations in the parts per billion concentrations.
For some of them, there is no meaningful historical comparison-- simply put, there's no absolute way to determine whether or not they are benign or not.
Welcome to the world of phospines, fluorocarbons, polyphosphates, pentafluorides, chloroethylene et cetera.
Can I get a wha wha for bromine pentafluoride and tetrachloroethylene!
I dont particularly care about conspiracies.
What sets my alarm bells ringing is the overt politicization of scientific endeavour to the detriment of genuine debate.
I repeat again: anyone who says that a particular scientific issue is settled and beyond scrutiny or debate is a liar - no matter what side they are on.
And we have this consistent line trotted out that it is somehow 'anti-science' to question science? It it only me that sees the danger and ignorance in this approach?
I agree with diabase's last comment.
But here's my problem: the climate change "skeptic" community has been so completely funded and co-opted by petroleum money that it's impossible to take seriously.
Many of the researchers who initially seemed to have solid evidence against climate change were shown to be funded by Big Petroleum. How can we possibly believe anything they say, when the outcomes of their research is already paid for by an industry that serves to benefit from doubt about climate change?
Farwest - in addition to oil companies you forgot Boeing and their bombers, Motorola and their Isreali connections, Bush for being Bush, Cheney, Reagen, Haliburton, Sir Han Sir Han, Rush, Hanity, Beck, Palin, Ken Star, Newt, Northrup Gruman, the entire military industrial complex, and anyone else co-opting scientific discussion.
farwest1, here's how you can discriminate between either side (despite whatever influences, funding, and politicization are put to bear):
The quality of the science
It is now discovered that the people charged with delivering the necessary scientific input on this issue to the IPCC have engaged in some seriously flawed process and methodology - that not only undermines the science, but also the credibility and moral high ground of the pro-AGW community.
So, where to now?
Clive Crook writing in The Atlantic:
In my previous post on Climategate I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back.
The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering. And, as Christopher Booker argues, this scandal is not at the margins of the politicised IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] process. It is not tangential to the policy prescriptions emanating from what David Henderson called the environmental policy milieu [subscription required]. It goes to the core of that process.
[...]
Remember that this is not an academic exercise. We contemplate outlays of trillions of dollars to fix this supposed problem. Can I read these emails and feel that the scientists involved deserve to be trusted? No, I cannot. These people are willing to subvert the very methods--notably, peer review--that underwrite the integrity of their discipline. Is this really business as usual in science these days? If it is, we should demand higher standards--at least whenever "the science" calls for a wholesale transformation of the world economy. And maybe some independent oversight to go along with the higher standards.
I'm still somewhat confused so perhaps I shouldn't chime in here. But, can someone explain to me the impact of the emails being exposed and the science (behind climate change and human influence) somehow losing credibility from all this?
Does that mean we should cancel the steps toward making cars/trucks/transportation in general more fuel efficient?
Or cancel the creation of alternative sources of energy and the infrastructure to support it?
Does that mean we should cancel the development of advocacy, education, and policy towards more sensitivity to the environment, like within our own field?
Does it discredit the visible increase in pollution in our natural environment and decrease in biological diversity?
My thoughts after the exposure was: Jesus, why aren't these e-mails better secured? And then I thought maybe these scientists/researchers should do a better job a staying more objective, and the diligence towards the truth should be the priority.
But really, regardless of who's making money, hasn't this new attention to our environment brought on some beneficial changes? Are you pretending that prior to all this attention, there was no sugar-coating, card-stacking, and distraction from the truth on both sides? There is clearly some deceit and outside influence on both sides, but really what would you prefer: poison coated in sugar, or being tricked to take the medicine?
Slabartfast, you are absoluteluty correct. However with the upcomming COP15 treaty next week America stands to get punished for emitting such CO2 and 3rd world countrys are going to be given credit passes for the development of industry while America and the west in general is capped or even limited. Essentially we are going to accelerate the deindustrialization of the west.
So I ask you to honestly look at this and say is this a good idea? Would a trust a CO2 belching smoke stack in Chicago regulated by EPA and properly scrubbed or a smoke stack in Dhaka belching raw unfiltered waste into the air with $1 / day workers inside. Seriously, who do you think this is going to benefit?
Well, you know... if we went back to boutique businesses and smaller department stores on properly maintained and furnished city streets and people actually paid the 3 to 4 extra dollars for their items to increase labor costs, globalization would be an issue.
Also, if food and beverage manufacturers went back to a more regional model rather than gross centralization, trip numbers would be greatly reduced.
So, that whole "globalization" argument is pretty flimsy.
In fact, they should be applying carbon taxes to any factory that operates purely on the more expensive electricity or produces energy from waste on site.
Because, you know, that would force industry to go electrical and it would centralize carbon production.
The real big losers in this scheme is the petrochemical industry that makes tremendous amounts of off gases from manufacture and the coal industry for essentially selling carbon.
And that's another paradigm shift right there, we don't have the investment capital or a full maturation on investments from previous power production facilities to move forward.
Just like suburbanism, we've built a system that we are completely and utterly dependent on with little to no interchangbility in sight. Not just the car argument but because we'd lose too much money changing everything too quickly.
Ive always found it odd that Al Gore comes from the heart of Coal Country.
even insurance companies, known for not wanting to change the status quo - are realizing the cost of doing nothing will be in the hundreds of trillions of dollars.
via allianz
Global temperatures have already risen by at least 0.7 degrees Celsius. Global warming above 2-3 degrees in the second half of the century is likely unless extremely radical and determined efforts towards deep cuts in emissions are put in place before 2015.
The melting of the Greenland (GIS) and the West Antarctic Ice Shield (WAIS) could lead to a Tipping Point scenario, possibly a sea level rise of up to 0.5 meters by 2050. This is estimated to increase the value of assets at threat in all 136 global port mega-cities by more than 28 trillion US dollars.
On the North-eastern coast of the USA and due to a localized anomaly, the sea level could rise up to 0.65 meters, increasing the asset exposure from 1.350 to about 7.400 billion US dollars.
The South Western Part of the USA, namely California, is likely to be
affected by droughts and levels of aridity similar to the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. The annual damages caused by wildfires could be tenfold compared to today's costs and could reach up to 2.5 billion US dollars per year by 2050 increasing to up to 14 billion by 2085.
the notion that cutting emissions = job losses is asinine.
America stands to get punished for emitting such CO2
only in an america devoid of intelligence and innovation is this true.
germany's already cut emissions close to kyoto and they aren't seeing manufacturing jobs being whisked away. yes, employment is down, but that's across the board. the 3rd & 4th quarters have seen an uptick in DE manufacturing sectors.
RWE, germany's #2 energy producer is taking steps to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% - and proposing innovative steps to rach 1/3 renewawbles by 2020. it can do this without hurting their bottom line.
ironically you picked bangladesh - a country with a relatively small GDP that's setting aside billions to deal with rising sea levels. they're aware and seeing direct impacts of climate shift: increased flooding, prolonged tsunami season - and they're being fairly proactive for an exrtemely poor nation. they've also gone into partnership with denmark on ways to reduce CO2 emissions.
damn those crazy danes and their backwards thinking...
Oh, this Germany? http://www.cnbc.com/id/30308959?slide=8 the one ranked 14th on debtor nations list?
Another IPCC climate scientist is giving them up (contributor author to IPCC AR4): Eduardo Zorita
His article: "Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process".
'http://coast.gkss.de/staff/zorita/'
They are dropping like flies Holz - how do you explain that? Peer Pressure?
Can anyone put a historical perspective on this? For example, when pasteurization was first suggested, or when Ignaz Semmelwies suggested that hand washing could limit bacterial infections, or even when bacteria was first discovered - were these proposals fought with this much vigor? Or alternatively, when doctors suggested cigarettes to help pregnant women not gain too much weight - who fought against that idea?
How are we likely to view this debate in 25 or 100 years?
LB your making the incredible leap in logic that this is even a debate worthy of such comparison. There was no profit motive to be had in taxing the violently ill unlike the air.
Come to Chicago, you can help us change the world.
http://www.wearechangechicago.com/algore.html
you'd rather have algeria's 1.2% debt to GDP ratio? wow...
However, there is really no single "danger" level for having too much external debt as a percentage of GDP, and this depends much more on the country's economic context. If a country has seen a rise in its debt compared to GDP during a good economic expansion, this means something is really wrong and policies will have to change, Bivens says.
zorita:
These words do not mean that I think anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. On the contrary, it is a question which we have to be very well aware of.
dropping like flies? hardly. you can be critical of the scientists and their process, but that doesn't invalidate the work of thousands of other scientists.
ah yes. we are change. the petition of 31,000 'scientists', which are mostly limbaugh-loving doctors and HVAC engineers. christ.
Jack, that's exactly what I'm asking. Dismissive often?
The closest analogue for me, in a funny way, is the tobacco lobby versus humanity's right to live healthily.
The tobacco lobby tried to discredit the science showing that their products were causing grevious harm. See Operation Berkshire. They tried to discredit the scientists practicing it. They had money and the support of corrupt politicians (oddly, from the same party that the climate change deniers are from. )
This is why I don't trust the skeptics. They're in the pocket of big business and have the support of the same party that always supports big business as it screws the little guy over. Why would I trust anything they tell be about science, when they've so often used "bad science" as a pretext for screwing people over, as with tobacco, as with the Superfund act that removed toxic waste from communities, etc, etc. ?
Incidentally, holz, the petition signed by 31,000 "scientists" was started by something called the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
Investigate further, and you find out that the OISM is supported by the conservative think-tank the Heartland Institute, which is funded in part by ExxonMobil.
Incidentally, I have two relatives with Ph.Ds in chemistry, much like the many chemists in the petition. Want to know who they work for? Petroleum companies. Want to know how they feel about global warming? I'll let you guess.
For what it's worth, they're not impartial scientists, they're paid by an oil company.
from 2006 party split on Tobaccco money Dems $9,864,918.
Repubs: $18,938,926
Seems both parties have some explaining to do on that one
And again you fail to get the real core of the issue here - your sovereignty. Its fine and well if the USA adopts it's own policy but it's a tragedy to give away the farm to the UN's climate panel. Do you realize that by making carbon a precious element those who have it now will become immensely rich and powerful, like Excelon or Con Edison, or even friggn Enron? You will not be able to build a factory for your new invention, hell its already dam near impossible to do that. You realize the bulk of our industries not fundamental to location will be relocated to places with no restrictions so we will "even out" the global "village"?
Get out of the moralist quagmire and please try to see this for what it is.
Action? YES but on our terms. Thats why you elect YOUR leaders.
So your PHD relatives cant think for themselves because they create new products for mankind through science?
farwest,
i'm intimately aware of the OISM funding. the web of deceit via heartland runs deep in denier bank accounts.
adopting UN policy isn't a giveaway, jack. we're not giving up our sovereignty. you should really take off the tin hat and stop listening to rush. moralist quagmire? that's hilarious. if we set the tone for Cop15, it IS on our terms. if nothing will be done without the US ratifying, WE hold all the marbles. and frankly, that's why i've voted for my leaders - to lead us wrt global warming, social equity, etc.
You realize the bulk of our industries not fundamental to location will be relocated to places with no restrictions so we will "even out" the global "village"?
and exactly how is this any different from today? cutting CO2 emissions doesn't change what's been going on for the last 30 years, jack. open your friggin eyes.
'friggin enron' can't make money. they've been defunct since '01.
"However with the upcomming COP15 treaty next week America stands to get punished for emitting such CO2 and 3rd world countrys are going to be given credit passes for the development of industry while America and the west in general is capped or even limited. Essentially we are going to accelerate the deindustrialization of the west."
Frankly, I don't know enough about this COP15 treaty to hold a decent conversation. When I have time I'll look into it and maybe then I'll have a good response. I'm not sure about the details of exactly how it works, who it effects, how it effects change, whether its legally binding with literal punishment/reward.
jack,
was the clean air act of 1990 a failure?
why are repubs so anti-cap and trade, when it was ronald reagan's baby? ah, hypocrites...
the Cop15 treaty hasn't been distributed, they're still running a few draft circulations, i believe.
Climategate: Follow the Money
Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change "consensus."
To read some of the press accounts of these gifts—amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon's 2008 profits of $45 billion—you might think you'd hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.
Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.
But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them.
Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.
Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?
Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.
And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.
Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.
Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.
None of these outfits are per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.
Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU's temperature database: "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"
This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703939404574566124250205490.html
Scientists covering their tracks:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
How can anyone believe in such outright corruption?
As for someone above asking why the government would promote a scam, well that should be pretty obvious. They want to reduce the population of 'useless eaters' and also gain more control of our lives.
From the horses mouth: http://www.vrom.nl/pagina.html?id=44692
The drive to reduce population is evident everywhere, the dramatic rise in cancer (which is man made), aids (again arrived from nowhere 40years ago, evidently man made), vaccinations which kill, GM food which kills, man made disasters such as kartina, the breakup of family life, the destruction of the economy (meaning affording childrens is very difficult, or at best limited).
Its about time people started waking up.
You have seen so much corruption in your lives, from unjust wars (Nam, Korea, Gulf1, gulf2), you have seen government staged terror attacks (911etc), one corrupt politician after another (Clintion a liar and profiteer, Bush a draft dodger and liar whos old man is mates with the binlids), You have seen your economy being wiped out and all industry being moved overseas, you have seen the implementation of orwells police state and most never question a thing.
You all jumped on the obama bandwagon only to see him as a fraud and liar. Didn't he promise peace and to remove the troops? Yet only last night i see he and brown have promised thousands more troops to be deployed.
You have all been had and this climate agenda is the biggest scam of them all.
And someone above mentioned that oil companies are funding the so called 'skeptics'. Absolute rubbish.
The gas and energy companies along with the bankers have bankrolled the green movement throughout and are betting on the creation of a long term global monopoly.
http://www.grist.org/article/griscom-little5/
/facepalm
zoolander. are you crazy. the government did not "make" cancer, AIDS, or hurrican katrina. christ.
when you make ludicrous statements like that people just ignore the rest of your opinions/arguments, regardless of how compelling they might be.
I know this is completely, radically off topic, but since climate change skepticism tends toward the far right, I thought I'd put it here: Charles Johnson, the conservative blogger at Little Green Footballs, and owner of Pajamas Media, has officially resigned from the Right. Here are his reasons, and they're brilliant and spot-on:
1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)
2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)
3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)
4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)
5. Support for homophobic bigotry (see: Sarah Palin, Dobson, the entire religious right, etc.)
6. Support for anti-government lunacy (see: tea parties, militias, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc.)
7. Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.)
8. A right-wing blogosphere that is almost universally dominated by raging hate speech (see: Hot Air, Free Republic, Ace of Spades, etc.)
9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.)
10. Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source)
And much, much more. The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff.
I won’t be going over the cliff with them.
So skeptics are now right wing sociopaths to? Is this the same pajamas media guy that had this headline?
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/viscount-monckton-on-global-warminggate-they-are-criminals-pjm-exclusive/
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/hacker-releases-data-implicating-cru-in-global-warming-fraud/
No, I don't think skeptics are sociopaths, though most skeptics are on the right.
However, I also don't think the conspiracy-theory tendencies of the right that Charles Johnson listed above are unrelated to that skepticism.
finally, a computer scientist explains the leaked code.
much ado about nothing.
The gagging of scientists no on the gravy train...
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/climate-expert-clive-spash-heavied-by-csiro-management/story-e6frg8gf-1225793717744
. part of the problem is the basis of the paper and how it fits within the CSIRO charter. he might be working at the wrong agency.
In addition to the debate concerning the anthro-warming a new development in the formation of hydrocarbon science is gaining momentum. The theory is Hydrocarbons are formed in molten mantle below the crust of the planet and leaked to the surface pockets so as to be a continualy formative cycle of creation. It is theory with history but not the methods to test until now. Read here http://www.geologytimes.com/research/Hydrocarbons_in_the_deep_Earth.asp
hahahhahahahahahahhaha, have we really resorted to abiogenic oil production (seep oil)?
When did this forum start to get overrun with jackasses (other than me)?
A couple of interesting articles:
The Climate Science Isn't Settled
Mr. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html?mod=WSJ_hp_us_mostpop_read
excerpt:
"So how do models with high sensitivity manage to simulate the currently small response to a forcing that is almost as large as a doubling of CO2? Jeff Kiehl notes in a 2007 article from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the models use another quantity that the IPCC lists as poorly known (namely aerosols) to arbitrarily cancel as much greenhouse warming as needed to match the data, with each model choosing a different degree of cancellation according to the sensitivity of that model.
What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree"
and:
Climategate: Science Is Dying
Daniel Henninger
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574572091993737848.html
"Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.
What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences—physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering—came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences"
I'm sorry, but does it really take a bunch of scientists to see that we're fucking this place up and should consider changing our ways?
No LB but it doesnt, but a bunch of scientists shouldnt be telling us how to spend $14 Trillion dollars either.
Money, like water, seeks its own level. If the CCFE (Future price of Carbon) is an indicator on where the smart money is betting, Carbon is done.
http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/
second tab on the graph
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