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Yes, i do realize the FCC says you have to give SOME time away to public interest to get a broadcast license, but not equal time.

The George Marshall Institute, (an anti-environmentalists, pro-tobacco think-tank), threatened networks and newspapers with legal action over the fairness doctrine, the spirit of which is that public media is a public resource, and that both sides of debates should always be present.

This was back in the commie-Reagan era. There were real communist threats back then. Reagan wanted to build the absurdly expensive and naive strategic defense initiative, aka "Star Wars", and pretty much every scientist in America said it was a stupid waste of money and could never work. And even if it did, then the Soviets would be forced to respond with some other ridiculously expensive piece of technology. (The Soviets saw Star Wars as a complete joke.)

So... how to do silence a consensus of scientists? Well, the tobacco industry had been doing just that for 30 years by then. Get a few true ideological believers: (e.g., Frederick Seitz) and make a whole lot of noise, and if the newspapers/tv don't play along: sue them with deep corporate pockets.

This worked. Mass media started to give false balance to an industry funded effort to rape the tax payer of trillions of dollars on a stupid missile defense system that had no chance of working.

Then Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine (giving birth to right-wing radio), the Soviet empire collapsed, and the ideological believers moved on to other targets. Specifically: fighting regulations on passive smoking, acid rain, and the ozone whole... and of course climate change. In all cases the tactic was exactly the same, and this very small coterie was/is massively funded in spreading "doubt". You can read a ridiculous amount of grizzly details in Merchants of Doubt.

The point is that we create society however we want, and the load whining of creationists is just part of the game.

You don't have to read very far into icecap.us to realize these guys are a fraud. The http://icecap.us/index.php/go/faqs-and-myths is filled with strawman arguments like these:

# CO2 is a pollutant.

(Who claimed it was a pollutant?)

# CO2 is the most important greenhouse gas.

(Who claimed it was?)

# The greenhouse effect is a bad thing.

The greenhouse effect is necessary for life on earth as we know it, were it not for the greenhouse effect, temperatures on Earth would be about 60 degrees F (33C) colder than they are at present. The global warming discussions center on the claims that human enhancement of the greenhouse will raise temperatures, and that these will be large compared with natural variations. (http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/ and Sherwood B. Idso, Craig D. Idso and Keith E. Idso, "The Specter of Species Extinction: Will Global Warming Decimate Earth's Biosphere?,
http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/150.pdf)

# Modeling the earth's climate is nearly an exact science.

(Who claimed it was?)

# Summers will be extremely hot and dry.

(Who claimed it was? Some people prefer to call this effect 'climate change', because the effect on the climate is unknown).

Put a cap on the emissions that industry can output, then create a market where companies can trade the right to pollute. Cap and Trade.

The big question is, what is this Change going to do to the US economy?

1. Create asymmetry between US industry and global industry for future growth. Why should I build my factory in the USA and go through the regulations when it just became more profitable to build it overseas?
2. Existing price structures are scrambled. Estimates from the power industry say that once you add in the costs of Cap-and-trade, this will make Coal more expensive than Natural Gas fuel, completely flipping the fuel makeups of almost all electricity production markets. Since Coal is used as fuel for about half of the energy production in the US, this will be disasterous to the wholesale markets. Since corporations always pass costs down to consumers, expect to see your retail electric bills go up by 5-15%, or an average of $700-1400 per family per year.
3. Who exactly is benefitting here? Estimates are that about $50 to $300 billion is getting ready to change hands, with the government running the auction for the "rights" to pollute. It essentially puts extra costs on industry that uses polluting fuels, and the claims are that some of the money will become subsidies to cleaner/greener energy producers. Since zero-emission technology is currently 3x as expensive as fossil based technologies, there will not be any savings to the public, hense the comparisons to a "tax" for the public.

While all of cap-and-trade appears very poorly thought out, Pres. Obama actually fully intended this to happen, as interviewed almost a year ago. So, hold on to your wallet, change is coming...

Agreed, global warming could be happening anyway, but what's most profitable for those involved? People will scream until their faces turn blue that anybody who doubts global warming is doing it for money (as the OP did), but when it's pointed out that all the money right now is to be gained by verifying climate change they take it in stride. Conflicts of interest are conflicts of interest, and when it come to climate change, the reports I've seen accuse the oil companies and those with vested interests of giving hundreds of millions of dollars whereas those trying to prove climate change are spending roughly 10x that amount according to this report.

This issue is too heated for good, solid science to come out of it. The issue's too politicized for confidence and the science too uncertain to know what's going to happen anyway. Without being able to verify everything myself, I feel that doubt and skepticism are the only rational reactions to be had.

For starters, more information will be forthcoming. Some of the CPUs from China have different designs then what they should (hello intel). In addition, extra circuitry has been found in bioses flash ram. The scary part is that China is not gearing up to improve their economy or even for defense. They are using this to plan an attack. For you naysayers, think of the articles that have shown up here about the laser trying to blind one of our sats; Another that blew out our sats. What use is that? It is only of use if you wish to deny the opposition the ability to attack BACK. It does not help you if the attack is underway. IOW, if we launch first, by the time that China could react, our missiles would already know what, where, when, etc. The current Chinese leaders are STILL the same that they were 50 years ago; they believe that power is done via a gun. Mao once said that he would acquire the nuke even if it killed 1/2 of china. But what is china doing now with all the pollution? Killing them in the interest of moving fast enough to build up a military capable of taking on USA. In addition, they are trying hard to appease EU in hopes that they will stay out of this. Hopefully, EU learned their lessons about appeasing such leaders. It will never work.

Sure. He's the guy who once said: "It is scientifically inconceivable that after changing forests into cities, turning millions of acres into irrigated farmland, putting massive quantities of soot and dust into the air, and putting extra greenhouse gases into the air, that the natural course of climate has not changed in some way" and discovered this warming trend in satellite-measured surface temperatures, over the same period that the Earth's total insolation (the energy incoming from the Sun) has been decreasing.

Yes, I saw that very same Wikipedia article. But did you also read just a little further and see where he said, "I showed some evidence that humans are causing warming in the surface measurements that we have but it is not the greenhouse relation"? Christy's an interesting guy. He actually does agree that humans are influencing the climate. What he doesn't agree with is the hand-wringing alarmism that grips advocates of AGW. You know the sort ... the kind that continues to use words like "denier" even after they've been caught with their hands in the duplicitous cookie jar? His colleague, Roy Spencer, on the other hand is probably more of what you'd like to call a "denier". They've put together a really great presentation on the subject that's worth your attention.

I'm sure there are long-term measurements coming from other sources, but I never see them in discussions about climate. Who don't you go look up what you're looking for? Why are you still paying more attention to debates among laypeople than to the scientific evidence? If you want to know what's actually going on, then go to the primary research - on your own, instead of when asked to do so. If you just want to keep trying to score points in internet debates, you'll keep on doing what you've been doing, I guess.

So I take it you weren't able to find other long-term studies of CO2 levels than the side of a single volcano either? Okay, then I'm gonna go out on a limb here and call bullshit and bet you that the CO2 levels in the middle of Iowa haven't shown the same increase that the side of an active volcano has. It's just a hunch, mind you, but while I'm willing to concede there probably has been some increase, it's almost certainly less.

Sure, but it just highlights the disparity between the press releases and the actual research. The research you've linked to doesn't actually dispute any aspect of any climate model that shows warming; but put it in the hands of the deniers, and suddenly it's the source of a hundred press releases and interviews saying "there's no scientific consensus on global warming." You know, like you just did. Have you even read the article? I went and looked it up in my campus library. Did you just read the abstract?

I sure did, but I'm puzzled by your interpretation of the article, because Christy et al say in it:

...While many investigators have found that these two cloud effects mostly cancel in their influence on the tropical ocean-atmosphere system's heat budget, any imbalance between these two large terms could significantly feed back on global warming. This makes accurate convective and cloud parameterizations in General Circulation Models (GCMs) critical for improving confidence in those model's predictions of future warming...

Emphasis mine. They go on to say in the conclusion that

During the composite oscillation's rainy, tropospheric warming phase, the longwave flux anomalies unexpectedly transitioned from warming to cooling, behavior which was traced to a decrease in ice cloud coverage. This decrease in ice cloud coverage is nominally supportive of Lindzen's "infrared iris" hypothesis. While the time scales addressed here are short and not necessarily indicative of climate time scales, it must be remembered that all moist con

There are two facts that no one disputes. The first is that the Earth's climate is in a dynamic equilibrium that is capable of excursions of civilization-ending magnitude. We have ice ages, local droughts lasting a thousand years, little ice ages, and so on. Any of of these could ruin our whole millennium. The second is that we are giving this dynamically stable system a wack with a hammer in the form of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the past two hundred years, which is equivalent to increasing the brightness of the sun by about one percent. This is a comparable change to the difference between an ice age and an interglacial.

The idea is simply that we can ignore all the details and simply focus on the fact that the Earth's climate is dynamically stable and we are giving it a push. And I don't care about the polar bears or any other charismatic megafauna. All I care about is global civilization and the economy it depends on.

So far, so good. But when digging a little deeper into the 1% figure I used in the argument, I've found even this may over-state the case.

According to an article on the George C. Marshall Institute website whose intent is to suggest that global climate change is a non-issue the effect of doubling CO2 is to add about 4 W/m**2 to Earth's energy budget. This was the source of the original 1% figure, because Earth's average insolation is about 340 W/m**2. But the actual figure due to all anthropogenic gasses added to the atmosphere between 1750 and 2000 from the IPCC is about 2.5 W/m**2. So I've already over-stated the case.

The next question is: is it true that past catastrophic climate variations were due to changes as small as 1% in total insolation?

It is surprisingly hard to find clear statements of effects in terms of insolation variation, which seems to me to be the common currency of global climate change. In most engineering problems we want to focus in outputs rather than inputs because the two may be largely unrelated to each other due to supervening factors. But on this planet we obey the law of conservation of energy, so we know if the inputs change, effects must follow regardless of the source of those inputs.

Deniers of anthropogenic global climate change usually focus on non-human influences, like the Milankovitch cycles and volcanoes. But Milankovitch cycles are almost entirely about the relative insolation of the northern and southern hemispheres, which may vary by 10% or more over a a cycle, rather than changes in total insolation, which changes by less than 1%. Volcanoes produce cooling rather than warming, and are short-term, but the Mount Pinatubo erruption in 1992 produced prompt global cooling of about 0.5 C and was associated with a change in reflected light of about 7 W/m**2. This is good news, in one sense, as it means we have some elbow room, but it also means that we shouldn't keep dumping stuff into the atmosphere as if it's never going to matter. It will, and before the current century is out if we aren't careful.

One rational approach to this would be similar to that of earthquake risk reduction, where the goal is to ensure that the next house built will always be more earthquake resistant than the previous one. If we take the same approach to energy production and use we should be able to find a reasonable balance between the real risk on the one hand of ruining our grandchildren's millenium by inducing economically catastrophic

Who's offering the $10,000 for the report proving global warming is our fault?

There are billions of dollars being spent on studies to show that global warming is our fault. http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/289.pdf While the study does conclude that "Additional work is needed to explore the individual relationships between individual funders and particular recipients", it does say that "A cursory glimpse of the list of recipients of those private funds reveals that the vast majority are spent by groups favoring restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions"

While that does not mean that all of these studies showing the effects of global warming are false, it does show that they are just as financially motivated. Only about $50 million is spent each year by private foundations for research by universities and non-profits, but those funds are quite important to the bottom lines of those universities.

When you are paid by a company called "Green Earth" (fictional company I think) to research global warming, you can be pretty sure that they will stop that funding if you keep saying that global warming is not a problem and we should start drilling for oil in Alaska.

But it sure the hell does mean they're financially motivated. Here's what should happen: Exxon should hire scientists to research this. If the report comes up against global warming, the scientists get $10,000 grand and stay employed. If the report comes up proving global warming is our fault, the scientists get $10,000 and stay employed.

There is nothing wrong with funding a study with a particular purpose in mind. The problem only comes when they falsify data to prove something that is false. Very little research would be done in this country if no one was allowed to have an agenda.

That is why all studies need to be peer reviewed. Almost anyone doing research on anything has an agenda, and it usually is money. If I am trying to invent a more efficient solar cell, I have an agenda to sell those solar cells for money. But first I need to prove that it works to other scientists (or more specifically to investors).

ExxonMobil is not doing anything wrong by offerring $10,000 for research. They will be doing something wrong if they find someone willing to fabricate information. I have no love for Exxon, and I am pretty sure they would do that if needed. That would be news worthy, but this story is not. It is just FUD from the global warming crowd.

--

We need the local, state, and Federal governments to be able to help a bit and allow us the ability to help -- especially for those of us that really want to.

This is not about freedom of thought, but about a supposed scientist who has been shown to be incompetent and who has used fraud to defend his discredited research.

Steve McIntyre, discussing how he came to debunk the IPCC hockey-stick graph:
http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/188.pdf*
"N ext, Mann relies heavily on tree-ring data and he calculates principal
components for six regions using 300 sites. There is a listing of the
sites at the Nature Supplementary Information. I organized that list and
figured out how to download source data from the World Data Center for
Palaeoclimatology, which is funded by the U.S. government. I would like to
comment that this is a tremendous archive and should be supported. I had
nothing but excellent service from them and it is extremely important that
there be this type of public archive of data. Collating these 300 series was
a pretty big job. I carried out a PC calculation. The results were completely
different from Mann's. In fact, Mann's results were literally impossible;
they didn't explain enough variance in these calculations. There was
again something mysteriously wrong with this and I was really quite puzzled
by it. I went back to look at the data to see if I had somehow goofed in collating
the data. I had a sinking feeling, after doing this for a couple of
weeks, that maybe I had put the data in the wrong year and as a result, eve9
everything was a little bit at cross-purposes. I checked to see what years his
data started. Mostly it started in odd years, 1999 and 1949, not the even
years we like to start with. I thought I must have inserted the data wrong,
so then I went back to the original email where I obtained the data. Lo and
behold, the same problem was there. I hadn't collated it wrong. Whatever
it was, was also in the original data. So I wrote back to Scott Rutherford
who provided the data, and pointed this out to him. He said that he didn't
know what the problem was, as it was before his time. I wrote to Mann
and sent him back the whole data set and said, Look, is this the right data
set? He said he was too busy to respond to this or any other inquiry." ....

"In total, these are the kinds of problems we found: truncated
sources, arbitrary plugging of data, use of obsolete data, geographical mislabeling.
Here is one that is rather fun: There is a data series that was inserted
for a grid box for precipitation near Boston and the data actually
came from Paris, France. This was just a crazy goof."

Steve McIntyre, discussing how he came to debunk the IPCC hockey-stick graph:
http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/188.pdf*
"N ext, Mann relies heavily on tree-ring data and he calculates principal
components for six regions using 300 sites. There is a listing of the
sites at the Nature Supplementary Information. I organized that list and
figured out how to download source data from the World Data Center for
Palaeoclimatology, which is funded by the U.S. government. I would like to
comment that this is a tremendous archive and should be supported. I had
nothing but excellent service from them and it is extremely important that
there be this type of public archive of data. Collating these 300 series was
a pretty big job. I carried out a PC calculation. The results were completely
different from Mann's. In fact, Mann's results were literally impossible;
they didn't explain enough variance in these calculations. There was
again something mysteriously wrong with this and I was really quite puzzled
by it. I went back to look at the data to see if I had somehow goofed in collating
the data. I had a sinking feeling, after doing this for a couple of
weeks, that maybe I had put the data in the wrong year and as a result, eve9
everything was a little bit at cross-purposes. I checked to see what years his
data started. Mostly it started in odd years, 1999 and 1949, not the even
years we like to start with. I thought I must have inserted the data wrong,
so then I went back to the original email where I obtained the data. Lo and
behold, the same problem was there. I hadn't collated it wrong. Whatever
it was, was also in the original data. So I wrote back to Scott Rutherford
who provided the data, and pointed this out to him. He said that he didn't
know what the problem was, as it was before his time. I wrote to Mann
and sent him back the whole data set and said, Look, is this the right data
set? He said he was too busy to respond to this or any other inquiry." ....

"In total, these are the kinds of problems we found: truncated
sources, arbitrary plugging of data, use of obsolete data, geographical mislabeling.
Here is one that is rather fun: There is a data series that was inserted
for a grid box for precipitation near Boston and the data actually
came from Paris, France. This was just a crazy goof."

Sounds like a lambasting to me. Also sounds like Mann is an asshole, and his realclimate.org site confirms it. Mann just spins and blows smoke and never responds in any relavant way to the massive evidence presented that he is incompetent in both science and mathematics.

"Rather, there is an equibrium between young trees that are storing carbon and old dying trees that release the carbon as they are broken down."

assuming static growth yes this is true. However growth in North America is increasing at an amazing rate. By definition this means that it is sequestering more Carbon. Increased growth is not just in area, but also in the quality and rate of growth in existing plant life.

In fact one of the key suppositions in Mann's proxy data was that warm climate was indicated by larger (wider) tree rings. And that this was not only indicative of greater warmth, but also increased CO2, in other words Mann grants that a warmer climate with more CO2 increases plant growth, i.e. is good.

"Do you have a reference for that?" shallow search: Possible aerosol cloud effects now range from no effect to a near total masking of the alleged manmade greenhouse effect Consumer Alert, a 501 (c)(3) organization

DOE: ."We show that GHG signal uncertainties are associated with errors in simulating the current climate in uncoupled and coupled climate models, the possible omission of relevant feedbacks..."

cloud effects "statement on feedbacks omits an important assumption about the largest positive feedback in the models considered in IPCC 1995--that water vapor in the upper troposphere is assumed to amplify the warming from the minor greenhouse gases.(17) Both theoretical (18) and observational (19) research suggest that this assumption is flawed. Indeed, the feedback may be negative."

Another consequence is that one cannot even calculate the temperature of the Earth without models that accurately reproduce the motions of the atmosphere."Indeed, present models have large errors here--on the order of 50 percent. Not surprisingly, those models are unable to calculate correctly either the present average temperature of the Earth or the temperature ranges from the equator to the poles. Rather, the models are adjusted or "tuned'' to get those quantities approximately right. "

You can find sideline references in many articles, but there are few direct articles because it is such a politically heated subject.

"what was it? 2 to 7 degrees C over the next 100 years?"

Yes it was, and a review of the high end models. Namely HadCM2, CGCM1, ECHAM4/OPCY3, GFDL and HadCM3. the spread of these for the next 100 Years was 2 to 7 degrees C. More importantly the same models show these same models showed warming of 1.5 degrees C in the 20th century. The 20 the century being over we have this data. These same models were off by 300% (actual warming in the 20th century North America), actual NA warming was approx 0.5 Degrees C. The majority of which occurred before 1940, and the majority of industrially produced CO2.

Agreed the debate is about how much, and how much of it is influenced by man (anthropogenic). More importantly the second debate is whether this is a bad thing or not. Fortunately we have real data for this. i.e. Life has flourished in all previous warm climates, and reduced during global cold climate. Cold climate increases fossil fuel usage, and is much more dangerous to animals, plants, and humans. While warm climates reduce fossil fuel usage, is beneficial to animals plants and humans. The only exception is Deserts. But of course that effect is due to the lack of moisture, not temperature.

Though an interesting effect is that we see the majority of day time temperature highs in desert while areas on equvalent latitudes, with large plant growth and water see much less warming. Showing that the thermal inertia of water has a dramatic effect.

As an MBA student, I tend to agree. But only because I found arguments like those presented by Bjorn Lomborg and Stephen McInthyre compelling.

Here is an interesting discussion given by the Alfred P. Sloan professor of Atmospheric Sciences Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Massachusetts Institute of Technology...Richard S. Lindzen entitled: CLIMATE ALARM - Where Does it Come From?

It may help to explain why most "scientists" agree in this topic.
http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/264.pdf

"The idea that we should always be "balanced" when it comes to arguments of political import leads to a lot of bullshit getting consideration it doesn't deserve. Global warming deniers at this point are in the same class as creationists, Holocaust-deniers, and flat-earthers"

.....oh, dearie me, and I always thought I was a balanced person. Now I am put into the same corner as (sigh) holocaust deniers.
let me recap: there is at least one person (me) thinking that at the basis of science there is at least a modicum of methods, like Occam's razor, .
Now, the raw data are before our very eyes, and I do not dispute them; but, dear Sir, I dispute their extrapolations in the future, on the grounds that all these so called models do not explain great climate changes of the past, like the maunders minimum and the other variations of temperature in historical times in which the Impact of human activity was, by today's standards, negligible.
Now, I can understand the primeval impulse of Man, in the face of things that hurt him and that he doesn't comprehend, to atone and offer sacrifices; after all, we are but a few generations removed from ancestors that made human sacrifices to appease the weather.I do not understand the same behaviour in people that follow a scientific site, in which the ability to deliver balanced reasoning and correct behaviour is defined as "Kharma".

So who is wrong, or lying: the person who says that today's model are inadequate and require further study, or the person that in the face of exogenous events says :"It is all my fault" and self mutilates, in an unselfish sacrifice to blind and deaf Gods?

As I said, further study is worthwhile. But remember, in science, it is the true scientist that tries to prove himself wrong. No opposition is required.

It was the consensus of the "intelligence community" in 2001 that Iraq had WMDs. Not so. Read the 9/11 Report or check out Fahrenheit 911

Sterling writes "OK" soft-scifi cyberpunk books that require no in-depth knowledge of science of mathematics, but whenever he opens his mouth about real issues, he puts his foot in it, even as he proclaims on his fuzzy-headed Viridian site "I am a futurist!, so I know what I talking about." (Futurists have about zero credibility in predicting anything)

Sterling's ideas about the stock market show he lacks even *basic* ECON 101 knowledge. For starters, if anyone had a super-giga computer that could predict the stock market, other super-giga computers would have to take the predictions of the every other giga-computer into account.

Giga-computers can no more predict the combined result of all other traders using giga-computers than a computer can predict whether or not, in general, an algorithm will halt. And this ignores the other confounding issues, like human fallibility, greed, random events, and impect information.

For an analysis of the real world, stay away from Sterling. Peter Huber has made a much better analogy of market volatility based on the laws of physics.

Volatility and the Laws of Physics Quoting Huber: Financial instability isn't going to abate, it's going to get worse--for companies, industries and nations. That conclusion, I modestly submit, derives from the laws of physics. Nonetheless, the diversified investor who can stomach financial turbulence will prosper as never before.

Fact number one: liquidity. The wired PC and the Web behind it have made it very easy and cheap to move wealth around. Interfaces between investors and global markets have been reduced to clicks on a screen. Brokerage fees have fallen 90% recently, and they're going to fall 90% more. To put it in terms of physics, the viscosity is being removed from the financial system. Yesterday's financial molasses now flows like water.

Fact number two: momentum. More wealth is moving ever faster through the global financial pipeline. This is partly because many political and regulatory impediments have been eliminated, and partly because--recent troubles notwithstanding--there is more wealth to move.

As viscosity falls and momentum rises, fluid flows make a transition from stable to unstable. Water in your kitchen faucet transitions from laminar to turbulent when you twist the tap all the way open. Same with all fluids that move through, over or around pipes, ducts, propellers and wings. Waves, oscillations and shocks all multiply when more mass flows faster with less friction. Honey trickles slowly and quietly; fast-flowing water and air often babble, moan, whistle and shriek. Circuit breakers and rules that limit program trading are the financial regulators' misguided attempt to put baffles and mufflers back into pipes that have lost all the old kind of friction.

By the way, Huber makes clear arguments that destroy the naive environmentalism (ala Viridians) that most greens subscribe, of course, no green would dare read this: http://www.marshall.org/huberroundtable .htm.