Slashdot Mirror
Global Warming Dissenters Suppressed?
sycodon writes "Global Warming has become more than just a scientific issue and has been portrayed as nothing less than the End of the World by some. However, despite all the hoopla from Hollywood, Politicians and Science Bureaucrats, there is another side, but it's being suppressed according to Richard Lindzen, an Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT. From the article: 'Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.'"
And in other news, people who don't like certain viewpoints tend to supress those viewpoints...
...whether your a nazi in disguise as a neo-con or a tree hugging liberal college enviro-hippy.
Because the world's climate scientists have so much to gain by tricking people into driving more fuel efficient cars.
...long live the white nigger?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
And why is it that Intelligent Design isn't tought in schools? It's a big conspiracy, I tell ya. Look at the eye, man! We're talking like scientist, so we should be accepted like scientists, right?
Sig
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars
OK, we all know about the butterfly affect (if not, hand in your geek card)
Now, what if we are looking at the problem in slightly the wrong way.
How about in the last 100 or so years mankind has built more large structures on the face of the earth and diverted the wind (due to butterfly wing -> hurricane thinking...) into different places than usual.
What if the problem wasn't just the fuel burning we use to heat the building, but the size and location of the building itself that was the problem?
Most of us have stood between 2 manmade skyscrapers and been blown off our feet, that wind pattern has to directly affect the weather patterns in another part of the world. Theres no need to pore over detailed chemical tables or discuss possible scenarios, we each affect the climate simply by being here.
Theres my "none conformist" view on global climate change take it as you like.
liqbase
It's a highly politicized topic. One can easily trace the links: global warming/industrialization/fossil fuels/automobiles/SUVs/selfish conservatives. Or maybe it's global warming/savetheearth/treehuggers/anti-social liberals.
An objective scientist doing his job has no place in the arena by any of its participants no more than Socrates' objective criticisms of the Greeks were welcomed. In the end, they would rather force the hemlock than hear the truth....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Slashdot's financial situation has become more than just a mess and has been portrayed as nothing less than the End of the World by some. However, despite all the hoopla from Zonk, Malda and Scuttle Monkey, there is another side, but it's being suppressed according to various Slashdot denizens. From the article: 'Slashbots who dissent from the alarmism have seen their karma disappear, their posts derided, and themselves libeled as Evangelicals, Republicans, or worse. Consequently, lies about Slashdot's impending death gain credence even when they fly in the face of the truth that supposedly is their basis.'
Anyone notice how when everyone was saying global warming was seven or eight years ago, Slashdot was all for the Kyoto protocol. And now that the tide of scientific consensus is overwhelmingly saying that global warming exists and is a real problem, Slashdot is now saying it's fake?
Hint: Just because something is unpopular doesn't make it right. This is why people dislike nerds.
Some will say that the report from Iron Mountain was a hoax, but at times, some of the co-authors have said that it was real. Read it and you'll understand this whole thing about global warming :-)
Then it occurred to me that we do have such a thing. Thank heavens for science fiction -- otherwise all the energy channeled into arguing about whether Kirk is better than Piccard would be pouring into real science, as well.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Yeah, I only read stories from sources I agree with!
Who cares if the person writing it is a Professor of Athmospheric Science at MIT? What does he know!
Let me guess... you always write "Faux News" too, don't you?
They just did... if you would have had the patience to read 5 sentances of the summary you would have realized that : To summarize even further, "Those that arent alarmists are supressed"
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
This is why it's important not to have State control over funding; anything unacceptable - which is of course entirely orthagonal to truth or falsehood - naturally, to a lesser or greater extent, tends to be suppressed.
Did you know Winston Churchill wasn't permitted to speak on the BBC (the State telecoms monopoly of the day ) between 1933 and 1939 because his views on Nazi Germany were considered too extreme?
The State is created by free men to protect liberty and freedom. The problem we face is when the State becomes a monster and threatens the very liberty and freedom it was created to protect.
The State inherently holds political power; to give the State economic power is to provide it with a forceful means to implement its own ends. This is one of the reasons why its so vital to keep the State out of economic activity; because of the danger of the abuse of that economic power.
Not to say that makes him wrong, but something to keep in mind. Here is his wikipedia article. (Although, by the time you read this, it will probably have been changed by this post's childerens' authors....)
Yeah, and from a Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT! How dare they publish such a hack from a lousy institution like that! I'm sure they're due to lose their accreditation any day now.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
People claiming there isn't global warming going on are labeled (not libeled) industry stooges and hacks because they indeed are such. Global warming is about as solid a theory as the Earth going around the Sun. Carbon-emitting industry does throw plenty of money to trumpet what it wants. Put the two together and you'll find hacks willing to trade what's left of their integrity for some money. Politicians do it all the time. I'm actually surprised that so few scientists are willing to bite.
From an "Alfred P. Sloan" professor. Take a look at the Board of Trustees of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It's basically "Who's Who" of People Who Want This Talk of Global Warming to Go Away.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
First we hear the science supporting global warming is being suppressed, now we hear that science opposing global warming is being suppressed. The only clear conclusion is to get politics out of science, but I don't think anyone's ever succeeded at that in its entire history.
The article tells the truth that there is dissent around whether global warming will cause more storms, which is very debatable. But it implies with that the falsehood that global warming does not pose a significant risk to the future in many ways. Climate change is more than weather. I'm not saying there isn't hype about global warming on both sides, but this article is not really that helpful in understanding the broad issues involved. The discussion needs to be very broad, because that is the scope of the problem. Increased global temperatures have many effects...
Currently hooked on AMP
It is really sad when someone who doesn't agree with the rest of the world faces these kinds of problems -- I think it directly has to do with the politics of science. With more and more scientific studies paid for out of public dollars, of course you're going to see more and more scientists come up with the alarming issues that raise the most money.
It also goes to show that you'll find dissent creates outcasts. This is no different when anything else becomes public policy -- try speaking out about the inept public school teachers you find more often, or the low-IQ workers at the DMV, or anyone else on the dole.
Global warming is more myth than science. Much of it comes from socialist desires to control large corporations -- "why not make cars more fuel efficient?" Well, you end up making them less safe in collisions, too. "Why not curtail smokestacks?" Because other countries won't, and you'll lose jobs on top of jobs (this is already evident).
I'm not surprised in the least by this. It is harder and harder to find anti-global warming facts not because there aren't any, but because people who know the facts are afraid to bring them to light.
I don't care either way. I directly finance all the environmental causes I believe in through www.perc.org and that's the way we should be dealing with it. Drop the federal and public-taxpayer funded grants and let each individual focus on what they believe in. Instead of crying that the sky is falling at some lame protest, go work those hours at Starbucks and donate the money to the scientific research company of your choice.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182378&cid=150 76075
Anyone who figures out the (tax) money, can figure out what the truth is in the climate debate.
I tend to believe this guy.
The global temp started increasing alarmingly only after 80's due to cleaner air supported by green house gases.
But, as per the storm counts - http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=140, there is an increase of stronger storms, from 1920 onwards.
Even though this doesnt prove anything, it actually puts a seed of doubt in my mind. I used to believe (without any doubt) that increased temp is causing stronger storms et al. But I do have my doubts now.
Also I do not know if some localized temp changes caused these storms too...
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
Eh? I thought it was the environmentalists that were getting their grants pulled by industry and government folks... So the other guys are getting it too? So, should we not believe either of them then?
Not surprising - any orthodoxy, consciously or not, tends to have an accepted view, and dissenters can make their opinions known at their own peril.
...all of the top level government officials right now have an interest in stopping research that shows that global warming is not increasing..... oh wait.
And, of course, noone is trying to stop scientists from speaking out about the dangers of global warming.... oh wait.....
I'm confused about what the WSJ is doing publishing this and why people don't realize that there are extremes on both ends of this and that there are people with vested interest in any policy change that happens at that large of a scale?
This doofus sounds like he's bitter about missing out on a grant or something.
Has anyone else read this? :-)
I think it's beginning to sound more and more pertinent...
The first major city lost to global warming is in the USA, but the USA government still doesn't believe in global warming. Sounds to me like the people who don't believe in it are still winning. Which city is next I wonder?
If you're not driving the biggest car possible with the lowest MPG possible, you're unpatriotic and disrespectful of those who have given their lives that we may be free to pursue our gas guzzling lifestyle.
Maureen Jambor, executive management consultant and part time mom, put it much more eloquently than I ever could.
Suffice it to say, if you care about global warming, the terrorists have already won.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Wait... what? It seems that some sort of huge political conspiracy would need some sort of purpose. In a capitalist economy it generally would revolve around... well... power or money. So who stands to gain by creating a false scare of global warming? Yeah... pretty much no one. Who stands to lose? Automobile manufacturers, Petroleum Companies, maybe even Drug Companies (what, you think chemicals they create are always disposed of properly and affect nothing?). Yeah, three of the largest industries in the world. Sounds like the wolf is pointing the finger.
Let's have General Motors and Exxon pay the Association of Petroleum Geologists to do the research.
Then the Truthiness will Come Out.
help help I'm being suppressed!
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Alarmism sells. I think there is a natural bias towards things that might threaten us. The research is naturally sexier.
The other reason is the sorry state of American politics and the 2-party duopoly. All ideas are shoehorned into either the Republican or Democratic worldview. There is no middle ground. No reasoned or principled stand that would allow grey areas. You are either a friend of mother earth or an evil global capitalist. Ideas and facts that don't fit into the simplistic views are attacked as being from the "enemy." As a libertarian, who hasn't voted for a major party in years, I am attacked on individual positions as a bleeding-heart liberal by Republicans I know, or simply advocating Republicans talking points by my liberal friends. They can't understand principled positions that don't fit into their 2-party battle, and simply assume I'm with the opposition. Seems some scientists also act that way. Probably more reason to get science funding separate from political processes.
It's shocking, I know. The same thing is going on to suppress Creationist research. In fact, just last year, my thesis on UFO probing was rejected, and I was subjected to ridicule by my peers. Unfair!
Except that Copernicus was threatened by the Establishment for presenting a radical idea.
Now we have the Establishment embracing radical ideas wholesale and threatening anyone who dares dissent.
Huh.
What?
Case in point....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
No, I question the credibility and the timing of these claims, and I find it disgraceful of MIT to be associated with what appears to be little more than a political stunt. Note I said "appears". There may well be some basis to the claims, but the timing and nature of their presentation destroys all of that. If you want to be taken seriously, you can't come across as a spoiled brat whose toy - possibly NASA - has been taken away from you.
The claims against Global Warming may or may not have any validity. That isn't being discussed, so I'm not going to address that here. What I am going to address is efforts to turn the debate into propoganda - by whatever side. Whether you're talking about the Swift Veterans For Toothfairies, or some other totally political movement, is also unimportant. Reality cares not one whit for opinion polls or campaign financing. If the climate is shot, it's shot, and all the PR in the world won't change that. If it isn't, it isn't, and again PR isn't worth a damn.
Politics has no business meddling in the affairs of science. The reverse is not true, as science has the knowledge necessary to define politics. But politicians should learn their place - they are the servants of the public and the slaves of the forces of nature. Allowing politics to control anything is the ultimate recipe for disaster.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Richard Lindzen is a well known Greenhouse denier. Don't suppress him or the other deniers - just read more about their Greenhouse denial industry, and the Greenhouse producers they cover for. Will you be surprised when you learn how their network is funded by polluters and petrofuel corporations?
--
make install -not war
To rip off political commentator George Will (who said something similar but about a different subject), what should be a science issue with political ramnifications has become a political issue with science ramnifications.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
People who disagree with global warming are just blowing hot air. If we don't suppress them, this hot air is going to contribute to global warming.
I am 100% on the side of the global warming crowd. The way I see it, if global warming does happen, I will be able to score points by telling everyone "I told you so." If it doesn't happen, I can claim that I saved the planet.
The majority opinion isn't always right, this is true.... but anyone who has seen anything at all about, say, receding glaciers link to photo compares (there are several of these sites from the USGS and other associated government groups on the web) knows that something is happening, just not what the consequences of it will be....
to remember hearing this before. He has a point. How can we say its global warming when its only a 1 degree raise? It would seem like we need to find out more. I really liked the question in another reply that pointed out what if its not the fules but maybe the placement of buildings? Maybe we have somehow changed the air flow on earth enough to be moving the temperature zones around?
I think that pretty much everyone agrees that global warming is a real threat. The only problem is that everyone is working the deal all crabbed. They need to stop selling people on the problem, and start selling them on the answer. Everyone knows it's a problem. It's not a question of if, but when it will be a calamity. Fine, people know that, and people understand that. However, nobody tells them what to do about it other than to stop doing what you're doing now. The guy who modified his Prius to get 180 miles per gallon has come up with an answer. OK, somebody show people how they can implement that. That's a good solution that doesn't require major government backing (especially under the current "administration"), and doesn't require the auto industry to get involved (although if they are smart, they would). A smart group of investors can push this forward instead. The cost is maybe a couple thousand dollars to the user, and viola! They save the environment and keep some money in their pocket long term. People can't see past next week in most cases, so stop telling them in ten years that something bad is gonna happen, and start selling them on solutions that make sense now, and will divert a disaster later.
Because teenage pranks are fun when you're about to die!
The WSJ fully acknowledges the utility of the middle class!
Who else is going to stoke the Emperor Ming's radium furnaces?
1990: R.Linzen publishes commentary on the "we know all there is to know about the earth, the atmosphere and global warming" attitude of his colleages.
2006: R.Linzen publishes similair piece in the WSJ, with updates!!!11!
Now, I could see how this would be an very interesting and topical story during the Clinton years, but Bush has been in power how long again?
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
I equate the invective with a fervently held belief that the invectors doubt can withstand criticism.
Global warming is a fairly simple concept. It most likely has been occuring over the past century, but definitely withing historical norms and probably withing historical rates-of-change. The cause is much less provable. Some people blame CO2 (especially anthropogenic), when it is almost certainly an effect (ever open a warm soda?).
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=021706G0 1/18/not-as-bad-as-we-thought/#more-134
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/
Of the 15 different findings that were released and covered by the press on December 7, 2005 about global warming, 14 of them were reporting that things were "worse than we thought" and only one of them concluded that things weren't going to be as bad as originally forecast. Given an unbiased prediction, there should be a 50-50 chance that things turned out either worse or better than expected. Under such a scenario, there is only a 1-in-2,000 chance that 14 things out of 15 would be worse. But that's what happened. So, either the original forecasts were not unbiased, a rare event did indeed occur, or, more likely, the interpretation and reporting went a bit over the top--that is, the press (and to some degree the researchers themselves) only like to hype the more extreme results.
You get headlines and grants by claiming San Diego will be underwater by the year 2100. You get ignored and better be paid by NASA or a tenured by a college if you mention increased snow accumulations in the Antarctic.
Good satire is the kind that doesn't club you in the face. Thanks.
I'm pretty sure the Post Office, which ran the telephone system back then, didn't ban Churchill from anything. As for the BBC, I can't find a reference to anything about Churchill not being allowed to speak upon it, so without further information, I'm going to chalk this down to typical pseudo-libertarian misleading given the term could mean "He was considered irrelevent to politics back then and thus never got airtime", or it could mean "Neville Chamberlain personally called up Reith, and told him if the BBC ever gave Churchill airtime, he'd personally revoke their charter."
I'm guessing the former explanation is more likely, knowing the historic spirit of independence of the BBC.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
>Hmmm. I think I will wait for the cold hand of reason to come along....
Reason? In this debate? Hope you brought a lunch; you're in for a bit of a wait.
New Orleans was definitely the first victim of global warming. Hurricaines never happened in the Gulf before all those selfish white people started driving SUVs.
I'm getting tired of the science community saying 'MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY!' constantly. Hating on conservatives because of your prejudice against all of them being texas-cowboy retards who drive giant trucks. It's pathetic that a community who is constantly speaking out against people who exclude them for having different views has to exclude other people, and ridicule them, just because they believe in something different then you do. Creationism is a completely valid viewpoint, and so is evolution. They're both *possible*. I've always thought the internet was a place where you could get away from people being judgemental, conservative or liberal, believer in global warming or not. It isn't fair for people like me who are christians to be told that they're outright wrong.
And remember, just because some people treat you like assholes doesn't mean you have to be assholes to everyone else.
Notice his dissent is not having to do with the occurrence of higher global temperatures (or at least temperature changes in general), but with the interpretation of such changes. Very few debates regarding global warming are about the scientific data, but rather the interpretation: will there be more or less extreme weather? are humans the cause of the change? have we changed the system outside its natural range of variability? how will temperature change affect species diversity?
I think the author has a valid point that alternative interpretations of the causes and effects of global climate change need to be addressed and taken into account when forming policy. Climate change models are imperfect and fallable, and even if most current models agree, they are based on similar assumptions that may greatly influence their outcome, so alternative models and views need to be considered.
the cold hard truth is that science is a very lopsided mistress, and when you have 99.9 percent of all climatologists saying that extreme temperature variations are very likely to have a very high probability of accellerating (what you call Global Warming), the 0.1 percent who disagree because they get their funding from Exxon-Mobil get their feelings hurt.
Now, we know:
a. Global warming (accelerated rapid change) is happening now;
b. Global warming (arc) is speeding up, tenfold in just the last five years; and
c. Anyone with their heads still stuck in the sounds will be ten feet under water within ten years.
For those of you saying "yes, but it might get colder", you're absolutely correct. If the gulf stream shifts down, which can happen in a period shorter than ten years (and has), then England and France will probably freeze and the North Sea will be very very cold even in summer. New York Harbor could ice over quickly.
That's what global warming (accelerated rapid change) is: fast, increasingly violent, oscillations of the global temperature patterns until it (possibly) settles into a different state.
It might be a new ice age. It might be a period where California is 10 degrees warmer (centigrade, that's 22 degrees Fahrenheit) than it is now.
But if you live in a coastal area - and almost all of Florida is exactly that - it's not going to be fun.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
First off, it's not professional to call peers "alarmists", especially if you want respect from them. Scientists are usually if anything very reserved about stating an opinion, so I'm highly skeptical of scientists willing to immediately and simply label a broad class of their peers as "alarmists". It might explain why these guys are getting their funding yanked and such. Second, just like "Darwinism" isn't a theory but proven fact- global warming, the fact that humans are causing it, and that we had better do something very quickly or we'll be fucked- is all widely accepted. We have decades of research and evidence, like glacial "records" going back more than long enough to show the planet has never seen anything like us humans, climate-wise. Or evidence that on September 11th, when the FAA grounded planes across the country, the weather patterns changed dramatically.
It's widely accepted that pretending we're not having a massive effect on our planet's climate is the exact opposite of "alarmism"- it's sticking your head in the sand and hoping the lion's gone away.
We have an administration which forbids government scientists from speaking with press, and requires all climate-related press releases to be routed directly through the whitehouse, where they are absolutely gutted? (really. 60 minutes got photocopies of the press releases and reports, after they'd been scribbled all over by white house staff.)
So in one corner, we have a bunch of disgruntled scientists claiming they're being marginalized for taking an unpopular view. And on the other hand, we have scientists being gagged and censored by the Bush administration for presenting valid evidence that the climate is seriously fucked up.
Yeah, I'm really going to loose sleep over the head-in-the-sand people getting to be "unpopular"...
Please help metamoderate.
Here's an interesting question to consider: Back before all this crap science started up, what motivated the first people to discover that Global Warming might have existed, and what motivated the first person to deny it?
"Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes." I really hated that sentence in the beginning of the article. Many gov'ts have signed the Kyoto agreement, and many reputable scientists have urged us to lower CO2 emissions. While I admit there is always a chance that so many people were wrong, it is still retarded to think it's better to take a "wait and see" approach. We need to lower CO2 levels now and then see if it helps, not wait until it is too late.
Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.
I don't lose sleep knowing corporate advocates are being suppressed. I wish every corporate advocate would drown in a lake of their own vomit actually.
As far as legitimate scientists being falsely labelled as corporate stooges, there's really no justification for claiming that global warming isn't a sound theory. Flatly dismissing the impact of human polutants on global warming is like driving the Titanic into icebergs because some tool labelled her 'unsinkable'.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml= /opinion/2006/04/09/do0907.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/0 4/09/ixworld.html
Have you heard about the study mentioned here that claims the Earth hasn't warmed up one bit since 1998 or so.
How much would you have heard about a study that concluded that Earth warmed up a whole degree in the past 7 or 8 years?
You know the answer to that, don't you?
Instead of rebutting the facts of their science, climatogogists that don't hold global warming alarmist views are critisized for their funding. Where else is a climatologist supposed to get funding if they don't stand with the majority on this?
Real believers in global warming should welcome contrary views and science as an opportunity to refute those views and strengthen their own. Instead it's an attack against how they are funded.
it's like pretending that the Flying Spaghetti Monster, instead of being the all-powerful invisible being he is, created man in his own image.
I mean think about it, we don't even look like a plate of spaghetti, our heads don't look like meatballs, obviously we weren't created in His image.
And just as obviously, Global Warming is all a result of the severe lack of Pirates today.
Now, wake up and smell the lack of Pirates. Get crackin, matey!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...So wait...an article from the Wall Street Journal Op/Ed page is complaining that people should be more objective and less biased?
Misleading article. Why is Slashdot moronic enough to elevate this trolling to worthy-of-discussion status?
You just proved the point of the article. If you find yourself claiming a "99.9%" consensus on ->*ANY*- topic, you might want to at least consider the possibility that you might be wrong, and what you think you know might be a house of cards. Even Einstein fell victim to that, so there's no shame.
There's a biology professor at a top university in USA that claims that HIV doesn't cause AIDS and he's being suppressed as well.
Just because they have tenure somewhere doesn't change the fact that these extreme naysayers are fucking wackos.
This kind of thing has proven to be an effective way to publically obsficate the truth value of ideas that are otherwise conspicuously the case. Just get someone funded by the right wing, with a title, to claim that real science is being supperssed and a handful of real scientists are being labeled industry stooges by Godless commies infesting universities and environmental movements. There's an awful lot of static in the air surrounding rather simple issues.
but let's be clear, the fact that hurricanes now have many times more than ten times the energy, due to global warming, which created the very storm surge that blew out the dikes, had nothing to do with global warming.
I'm sorry, but if I take a cup and heat it up with ten times the energy I used before to cause a few bubbles, I'm not going to be surprised when it bubbles like roiling boil this time.
You can deny that's global warming, you can blame it on our insane policy of stopping silt from flooding the wetlands and urban areas that used to receive it, you can even ignore the loss of wetlands due to construction and changes in permitting also caused by Bush, but it's still the global warming that sank NOLA.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
How do you lose funding if you're an industry stooge? Wouldn't the industry fund you?
TANSTAAFL
Wow, he got money 11 years ago? I'm sure that's completely relevant to the current situation!
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Because people have been griping about all the trolling for the opposing viewpoint when the same or similar article is posted three times in a week. Yeah....sorry,...counter viewpoint. OMG...TROLL!!!
t ml
Yes, yes,...anyone who does not worship your sacred god of global warming and accept mankind's sins as the cause is a wicked wicked troll.
Mind you, I am still waiting for those alarmists to explain what is causing the global warming on Mars as well?
"...And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress."
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/newsroom/20050920a.h
then come back and we can talk about reality, not political hype.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Try to make a point that is in any way questioning of the global warming theory, or even make a statement to the effect that it is not a man made phenomenon but a natural cycle, watch the /. hoardes mod you down and make sure fewer people read your opinion.
...but average global intelligence certainly appears to be falling, if pHatidic is any indication. Or did Slashdot acquire MIT while I wasn't looking?
If you don't trust Lindzen, you can run your own global climate model at home and check the outputs yourself!
EdGCM is a NASA GCM that has been ported to run on Mac and Windows, and given a GUI interface. Want to turn the sun down by 2% or add some CO2? Just point and click and drag. Then, hit play, wait a day or two, and you'll have your own GCM outputs, complete with a visualization utility to view them with.
Space and Computers.
The only thing keeping the planet cool right now are chemtrails.
You just gotta luv the "Weather Modification Act".
We were discussing an article whose claim was "These scientists are denied funding, skewing the debate."
Parent post said, this information is not accurate; these supposed pariah scientists are quite well-compensated for their research.
This post says parent post does not rebut the science, but engages in ad hominem attacks. Then it says, "Real believers in global warming should welcome contrary views and science as an opportunity to refute those views and strengthen their own. Instead it's an attack against how they are funded."
Of course, all of this was a discussion on funding, and discussing the science is (strangely) an attempt to distract from the issue actually at hand. Real opponents of global warming should welcome contrary views and science as an opportunity to refuse those views and strengthen their own. Instead it's an attack against how they are funded. (In this case, against their government funding.)
I have been noticing that it is often several degrees warmer in August than it is in January. I think this global warming thing needs to be analyzed further to determine if a pattern emerges...
It'd be funny if it wasn't so sad that someone's life was that pathetic.
What planet did YOU come from? 95+% of the people who walk THIS planet are pathetic and lead pathetic lives. Slashdot readership is no exception. Whether they admit it or not, the average human finds great satisfaction in knowing others suffer more than they, and are very envious of anyone who is happier than they are. The only reason they 'act' anything resembling civilized is because someone is watching them.
Combine this natual tendency with the anonymity of mod points and I'm surprise there are not MORE mod stalkers.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
I know you're joking, but you touch on a potentially parallel example.
The science strongly favors evolution. But because some in the religious crowd raise such a stink over it (thinking it is incompatible with ID), it has caused a lot of the non-religeous to go to the other extreme and therefore claim evolution is absolutely correct and unflawed, mainly just to spite the ID people. [I know I'm generalizing/stereotyping here.]
But what that does is to essentially eliminate any possibility for any actual scientific debate. What if there is another theory that could explain the evidence scientifically and in no way relies on ID or any non-scientific philosophy. In the current environment, that kind of science can't occur because the field has been posioned by the anti-ID protesters, such that any non-evolution theories won't be tolerated, even if they are firmly based in science too.
Its the same here. Global warming may have a lot of scientific evidence, but other theories can not be raised because it's being used politically to counter viewpoints considered non-scientific (or by anti-industrial extremists as an excuse for their agendas); and thus the acceptance of other scientifically-based views is also prohibited.
The worst thing a "scientist" can do is think he is right, just because others exist that are definitely wrong. You both can be wrong.
Did you know that according to a study funded by Microsoft that Microsoft Windows is the fastest, cheapist server operating system on the planet??? Funny that...
Is this like some Christians complaining that they are being persecuted in the United States?
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
And why is it that Intelligent Design isn't tought in schools? It's a big conspiracy, I tell ya. Look at the eye, man! We're talking like scientist, so we should be accepted like scientists, right?
Because they'd have to give equal time to Pastafarianism, the concept that the Flying Spaghetti Monster made us as a joke, not in His image, since His Noodlynous is both invisible and resembles a large flying plate of spaghetti with meatballs.
Remember, the reason for Global Warming is our severe lack of Pirates.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It'd be funny if it wasn't so sad that someone's life was that pathetic.
Stick around here long enough and you'll see that around 90% of those around here demonstrate in various ways that they have lives that pathetic.
Your stupid straw man version of what I said does not improve your case. OpinionJournal publishes crazy misleading shite on virtually every subject it discusses, not just global warning. It is a thoroughly discredited source for all save devoted right wing kooks.
... They can't exist in the same room at the same time.
There isn't a lot of grant money for people who propose that the world is flat, or that gravity doesn't exist either. But I'm hardly going to lose any sleep over the fact (unless, of course, I fall off the edge of the Earth and float away -- that might cause me to lose some sleep for a little while).
Yaz.
Please Mr. Rhetoric, explain to me the cause for the global warming currently transpiring on Mars.
That's obviously caused by the decrease in Ice Pirates on Mars, as any good Pastafarian can show you.
Remember, it's not a face, it's a mountain that has irregular shapes that resemble a face at certain angles.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That is not all bad; for example, Europe's eugenics policies, built on deference to scientific opinion, were far more destructive than those of the Americans.
In this case, however "pore over" is correct.
See here
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Between the Bush Administration supressing scientists that warn about global warming, and the scientific community suppressing those that dissent, you would think that you wouldn't hear anything about it at all. But, other than maybe the evolution/intelligent design debate, it is currently the single biggest scientific news story around.
Didn't RTFA
I swear PowerPoint is going to be the downfall of higher education in western society.
If both sides are so stifled, why the heck do they both get so much press time?
I smell a conspiracy and both sides are in it together ;-)
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
I couldn't help but make the correlation to the term fanboi.
"I don't care what you have to say about Global Warming, you're just a stupid industry Fanboi."
There is no serious debate regarding global warming. There is some disagreement about the particulars, but broad consensus that it is happening. Linking to this kind of disingenuous crap is not terribly useful.
I ask because most Republican pundits and politicians seem utterly incapable of making an argument without dipping into the pot of logical fallacies, in your case the red herring. Obviously, Earth's climate has undergone radical changes in the past. The problem of global warming today is that the aforementioned 99.9% of scientists agree that yes, it is happening, and becuase of human actions. So whatever happens on Mars is bat-shit irrelevant to what's happening here.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006 /02/richard-lindzens-hol-testimony/
"Global Warming has become more than just a scientific issue and has been portrayed as nothing less than the End of the World by some."
Oh shit, where's Quade when you need him to turn on the damn reactor!
If you permit all parties to conduct research, then there will be pro-green, pro-oil and indeed neutral parties, all conducting research.
Not in anything approaching equal proportion nor in proportion to where the truth lies. Pro-green and neutral parties have far, far less funding than pro-fossil parties in a purely free market funding system. The truth is frequently inconvenient to those with money. Look where we'd be today if we relied purely on private interests to fund research on asbestos, PCBs, and smoking. Monsanto new how toxic PCBs were for years and hid the research while publicly trumpeting their safety.
Heck, just look at the state of antibiotic research. There's been a long period without significant investment in a life saving drug that will immediately be rationed and used as little as possible to avoid spreading resistance. There's little profit in it despite the fact that it would save lives, so there's little funding in it.
One naturally considers the source of research when considering what is being argued.
Of course! People do that all the time when considering research on smoking, global warming, and creationism vs. evolution, right? Right? *crickets chirp* Right?
In many cases, industry and openly partisan research primarily exists to back up the dialogue of pundits that "there's no scientific consensus." Few people actually consider the source of the research they use to back their political views instead accepting biased results as fact because their confirm their own worldview. This is known as confirmation bias, and a lot parties exploit it to keep the truth from being known.
I would rather have an open field for all comers than the State imposing its invisible foot upon those who offer unacceptable views.
There is a difference between stifling dissent and funding what would not have been funded otherwise. The State has a valuable utility in funding discovery of truths that the market provides an incentive to hide. Pollution research, public health research, and pure, non-applied science are fields provide public benefit but are either harmful or uninteresting to market leaders focused entirely on their quarterly profit.
Sometimes, you have to admit, the invisible hand is a pimp slap.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The parent was correct, read his words carefully - he says because I used pore correctly the other mistakes would be considered just a warning.
I made quite a few shocking mistakes in that posting but thankfully I was still able to convey what I meant.
liqbase
Yes, but how much funding is out there for scientists who wish to make contrary claims *without* the funding from fossil fuel interests, thereby avoiding automatical dismissal from people such as yourself?
This is a lot like the backlash against Intrelligent Design. Of course, ID should not be taught in science class because it is not a scientific theory, and consists entirely of "Oh yeah? How do you explain that? But the very mention of ID should not be banned. Let students discuss it, even in science class, and learn why it is not scientific, instead of polarizing two groups solely on belief--scientific or religious.
Suppressing global warming naysayers does not help the cause of global warming evangelists; it merely polarizes the issue based on belief: those who believe in human-influenced global warming on one side, and those who believe it's 'just a natural cycle' on the other. In both cases, science loses.
The theory of evolution is not an incontrovertible fact; nor is the theory that humans are having a significant effect on Earth's climate. Both are theories that best fit the facts as we know them.
But while denial of the theory of evolution isn't causing any immediate problems, denial of humanity's role in climate change, and the resulting lack of action, could have very serious consequences if sea level rises as much as predicted. Say goodbye to a billion people (who live in low-lying coastal areas), and a significant fraction of Earth's photosynthetic capability (from blue-green algae, which will be wiped out by greatly increased sedimentation as coastal areas flood.)
Imagine the New Orleans disaster... everywhere.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Gee, you don't suppose the Wall Street Journal is pro-industry and anti-regulation do you? No conflict of interest there. [/sarcasm]
Par for the course.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I don't hold what I would consider to be a current informed opinion on global warming. The last time I looked closely at the science for myself (about 10 years ago) the models being used were garbage (ie, non-falsifiable).
About 13 years ago I remember having a discussion with a professor of atmospheric science, who even then (early 90s) was complaining that it was becoming almost impossible to do real science in the field because you had to take money from one side or the other, and if your research didn't match the results they wanted, forget future funding... I imagine it's even worse now.
Time to start metamoderating.
Please help metamoderate.
I'd mod you down because I don't like your viewpoints. Its a joke, but it happens all the time on certain issues on Slashdot.
God spoke to me.
Real believers in global warming should welcome contrary views and science as an opportunity to refute those views and strengthen their own. Instead it's an attack against how they are funded.
Are you saying we should ignore the fact that they are paid by people who make billions from the status quo when they come up with reasons to prolong the status quo?
I'm not a "real believer", I believe it because there's a general concensus in the scientific community, because as far as I understand it it holds true (the more you release greenhouse gasses, the more greenhouse effect you get, makes sense), AND because the people who deny it tend to be paid by those who stand to loose money from policy changes: Those people are not credible sources, it's like taking a defense lawyer's word that his client is innoncent. DUH, he's PAID to say that!
You can't take the sky from me...
It is suppose to warm up. We're living in a period between glaciation.
Do you really really want to turn the hands of time back to the point that the ocean levels drop 100 meters and have a kilometer of ice on Toronto?
Jeeez... It looks like 99.9% of the population slept through geology.
>
wganz
If one does not accept that it is proven that human actions are causing terrestrial climate change it is reasonable to consider that Martian climate change might be due to the same cause - quite possibly an increase in the output from the Sun. If the Sun gets hotter the planets receive more heat. Solar output is known to fluctuate - this may be the cause of climate change. Human activity may be the cause of global warming but Martian warming appears to be a counter-indicator for that.
Not a red herring at all.
who dissent from the alarmism have seen their karma disappear, their posts derided, and themselves libeled as Evangelicals, Republicans, or worse
Wait... what's worse than a Republican?
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
Hello all:
Just a quick comment here. We must be very careful to separate the science and the people who study science. The formal should be evaluated as objectively as possible, but the formal you can choose to like or dislike based on their personalities. If the dissenters are getting suppressed then that's a human/subjectivity problem. It should not be allowed in the scientific community. Do not let the fact that the pro-global warming side suspress dissenters lead you to discredit the global warming model... Doing so would be Ad hominem.
When I was reading the article, I get a distinct feeling that the global warming model has been too quickly classified as, and I quote, "junk science". Yes, some actual data do not fit the model, but I would call that model incomplete, not junk.
Cheers.
B. Pascal.
Whoah, hold on. Every time a conservative cause gets criticized the same fucking argument gets repeated. "You're attacking my credibility and not my facts." Its bullshit misdirection at its worst. The logic is that since person A makes attacks the credibility of the speaker rather than providing a factual rebuttal that no factual rebuttals exist. If both funding and accuracy are open to attack, then an attack on either is perfectly valid. On a /. post you are not going to get into the level of factual nitpicking needed to support a factual rebuttal so the funding issue is the better choice. An climatology journal would not accept as scientific proof a paper based on criticism of funding.
Global warming is fast becoming what evolution is today. The scientific discussion is not yea or nay but how, when and why. If the critics all happen to be funded by industry lobbies the question is whether or not their existence is to debate science or present a particular viewpoint to the masses. Note the terminology "alarmist" and its negative connotation. The fact is that funding presupposes that you will be answering a question, such as what impact if any does __ have on CO2 levels. If you already have your answer and need money to find a factual basis for it then maybe funding isn't appropriate.
I'm not saying the parent post is pushing an agenda or engaging in this kind of behaviour. It is repeating an oft used defense albeit in a more reasonable manner than the zealots.
I'm getting tired of the science community saying 'MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY!' constantly.
Too fucking bad! Tired of gravity being 9.8m/s2 too or the Earth revolving around the Sun? There's scientific knowledge, which adheres to a specific set of criteria and not-scientific knowledge, which is what doesn't adhere to that criteria. Either adhere to the criteria or hit the highway, that's how science works. Change that and it's not science.
Hating on conservatives because of your prejudice against all of them being texas-cowboy retards who drive giant trucks. It's pathetic that a community who is constantly speaking out against people who exclude them for having different views has to exclude other people, and ridicule them, just because they believe in something different then you do.
It's the conservatives doing the hating. You can't seem to get it through your thick fucking skulls that science has criteria and that your beliefs don't meet those criteria. No one is hatin on you for holding unscientific beliefs, we're hating on you for demanding that your clearly and demonstrably unscientific beliefs be categorized as scientific. You don't fucking make the rules here, logic does.
Creationism is a completely valid viewpoint, and so is evolution.
No creationism isn't; stop repeating this ignorance. Creationism is no more falsifiable than the question of God's existence. Evolution is falsifiable and has survived falsification thus far. Evolution is science, creationism is metaphysical. Creationism is NOT a valid scientific viewpoint, no matter how much you wish and wish.
They're both *possible*.
Not as scientific knowledge. Science does not consider creationism because it fails the first criteria of science, it is not falsifiable. Science will never consider creationism or the existence of God until someone has a falsifiable conjecture. But don't hold your breath, humanity hasn't come up with one yet, and it appears as if we aren't likely to ever.
I've always thought the internet was a place where you could get away from people being judgemental, conservative or liberal, believer in global warming or not.
Are you kidding? Since when have you been able to go on the internet and demand that 2 + 2 = 5 over and over again, no matter how many times it's patiently explained that 2 + 2 = 4 and not get flamed for it?!
If you have a valid logical criticism, then go ahead, but just repeating this ignorance is flameworthy. You should expect derision to follow you wherever you try to trot out half-baked, illogical assertions and the participants know better.
It isn't fair for people like me who are christians to be told that they're outright wrong.
It is fucking fair, you're more than "outright wrong"! There is no objective way for you to not be wrong, but perhaps I missed the part of your comment where you refute Tarski and then falsify falsificationism. And don't hide from objective criticism behind your religious views, I consider your belief in creationism to be heresy. The Christian view of the creation stories (that's right, stories as in there are 2 different ones in Genesis), were written as "my God is more powerful than your God" stories. This has been repeatedly confirmed by Talmudic scholars and is the standard understanding among Jews. Any attempt to claim that the story is literal is blasphemy and therefore heretical.
Your views aren't Christian, they're relativist and nihilist. To honestly conjecture that science is the same thing as a religious view, you've let your brain fall out of your head. It belies a belief that objective knowledge does not exist. Well this nihilistic viewpoint is objectively wrong. This goes for the idiot mods who gave this rubbish points too.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
The only people who care about global warming are those who stand to make money or reputations from it - just like every other issue.
With the march of technology, global warming will be a non-issue in several decades.
This is just a rehash of the crap being spewed about "population bombs" in the 1970's. By now, the whole world was supposed to be starving with half a billion dying every year. Never happened. The solution proposed by Ehrlich was kill off 80 percent of the population in order to prevent ten percent from starving - brilliant...
Fucking morons. Concentrate your efforts on nanotech and fuck climate change.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
No, that's not quite right. The problem is that their theories and data are ignored because funding is slashed, and they must resort to gaining funding from intrests which are not neutral. This brings their research into question, and they are easily dismissed.
This cycle perpetuates itself, and we only end up hearing half of the story.
I'm not even sure how many articles I have seen talking about how the poor guys at NASA are being suppressed, and every time people have thought it was a worthy topic of discussion, and sworn up and down that anyone who had issue with global warming theories was obviously some corporate stooge who didn't know anything about science.
/. saying that anyone who disagrees with the majority opinion is suppressed, and suddenly this is a shameful example of people clouding the scientific issues with politics, and is not worthy of discussion.
Now there is an article about someone more qualified to discuss the topic than anyone on
Great! Oh, and by the way, I love how he is a corporate stooge too. Of course, since he has the opinion we always attribute to corporate stooges, he must be a corporate stooge, since only a corporate stooge would hold corporate stooge opinions! He can't be a reputable scientist, because all reputable scientists agree that global warming is a huge problem, and caused by our SUVs. Of course what do you expect from some hack working at some technical college in the middle of nowhere anyway? Everybody knows that all the most important climate research happens in New York and L.A. Why I heard Susan Sarandon and Al Franken giving their latests findings on TV just the other day, and they didn't even mention this guy, and they are names I know.
'nuff said!
I agree with your post. One article should be taken with a grain of salt.
However, there is much evidence to suggest that global warming is bad science; the scientific equivalent of a fad. If you have been paying attention, you will have found that many respected scientists have expressed a variation of the following:
1) Global warming is bad science.
2) I only say this, I don't write about it, because I like my funding and my job.
There has been a serious fight over the initial data that started the whole ball rolling, and the primary difference between the two camps is that the anti global warming people don't receive funding, promotion, or positive media coverage.
There is a massive bias, and it is affecting the science done at the root - the opposing view is simply being starved of man hours.
To make my point in another way, if I gave a scientist a large amount of random data, he would find within that data a poem that is a letter perfect copy of a poem by David Frost. However, by finding that poem, he would not have proved the existence of David Frost. Without specifying just how hard he was looking, and without specifying the probability that a random result would provide data to match his hypothesis, he is doing bad science. He should allow himself to be biased by reality, and the only way to do that is weigh all sides against reality. Finding something that one is looking for is a very weak result.
BTW, I take "global warming" to mean the rough idea that man is causing a catastrophic rise in the temperature of the earth, through known mechanisms involving fossil fuel and CO2. It does not mean "the world is getting warmer". On the other hand proving that the world is getting cooler is sufficient to invalidate global warming.
Now, maybe global warming is real. Unfortunately, we don't know because of all the bad science in this area. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and I have seen precious little unrebuttable proof that was actually relevant. In my judgement, global warming is an untested hypothesis, because the environment in which it grew is so uncritical as to be worthless. Similarly, many of the current findings make an implicit assumptions that previous findings prove some aspect of global warming, and yet claim to provide further evidence of its existance. It's a huge self-referential circular mess.
---
In other news, perpetual motion proponents are also being viciously suppressed.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Therefore, the poster you are attempting to discredit is quite right. The issue is not necessarily the funding of Lindzen, but the issues he raises that is there is no longer a healthy or balanced debate (the scientific ideal) on the global warming issues, and that they've been co-opted by special interests and that is the "if it bleeds ... it leads" in the newspaper parlance.
I hate sigs (especially yours which is a waste of my bandwidth)
You missed one of the points.
If 1) non-alarmist scientists can't funding from academia and 2) these same scientist's findings are being dismissed by others because their funding is cooperate they have created a catch 22 for anyone who disagrees.
It's not about not getting funding. It's not about being called an industry stooge. It's about BOTH of these things happening in concert to make a serious scientific debate appear to be a clash between science and cooperate interests.
There is also a feedback system there, people aren't stupid. If only alarmist scientists get funded, anyone who wants funding will be alarmist.
If this is indeed happening it has powerful implications for the validity of the science being done and casts valid doubt as to the truth of the claims being made.
We all know science is corruptible and this is precisely the way you go about corrupting it.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
He actually agrees with all of them.
The only thing he disagrees with is whether this is caused by civilization.
Now, in the last IPCC report (THE source for the scientific consensus, at least of the one attacked by Lindzen in this article), it is said that human activities are "likely" the cause of global warming. Not "certainly", but "likely". Even on an earth that is getting hot, I can't see how this is suppressing the view that humans may not be the cause of global warming.
In fact, the only thing he is attacking with any substance are the casual, frequently overheard claims that the recent increase in storms, tornados etc. is caused by global warming. Well, that's a straw-man as far as I am concerned. I have never heard this a scientific claim, just as an informal "could well be" answer e.g. by meteorologist in reply to question by journalists.
If an industry funds research it must be false? What about agencies perpetuating their own existance by delivering research which supports their existance? Your link is exactly what the issue is all about. Just as much as their is a "Greenhouse Denial Industry" there is a "Greenhouse support at all cost industry". Neither side is completely wrong, just some sides are much more virulent at denouncing the other.
Considering the track record of some of the Global Warming advocates and their actions I have a hard time believing every new definition they create. Seems that anything that isn't normal is a sign of proof to them. No hiding the fact than an elephant is in the room, his name is doubt and attempts to will him away only harm the facts that do exist.
Too many people on both sides, claiming to be scientist, are nothing more than the equivalent of relgious whackos. All who fail to believe are wrong and must be justly punished. Of course we know which side puts nails in trees, releases dangerous animals in attempt to free them, or torches businesses don't we. If the point is so obvious then why the need for extreme and irrational action?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I think it's important for us to figure out what parts of Global Warming are real and what parts aren't, but seriously, shouldn't we be more concerned with preparing ourselves for *anything*? Maybe my grandkids will live in a desert planet, maybe they'll live in an ice planet. Either way, let's be prepared. Oh, and let's do what we can to not dink with the environment. Not so that we stop polluting or anything, but because research like that can lead to developments useful for other facets of technology. Unless we talk about *that*, all this Global Warming flamewar is just a public wanking session.
Right, let's teach the debate.
So, I'm afraid that I'm not receiving adequate government research dollars for my proposal on demonstrating that babies are delivered by storks.
As far as I can tell, any of the arguments used to defend anti-Global-Warming scientists can apply equally well to my babies-come-from-storks argument. Saying that the discussion isn't "balanced" and that we need to "teach the debate" or "show both sides" is what you say when you don't have arguments that are strong enough to convince your opponents in debate.
I'd like to keep an open mind on the issue of climate change, but the proponents of no-climate-crisis have failed to convince me, or pretty much anyone else. I'm not sure why we should continue to fund them. Saying that they're not getting their fair say isn't much of an argument.
The current measurable increase in average air temperature and in Sea Surface Temperature(SST) is primarily attributable to normal climate cycles that the Earth has been going thtough for centuries, millenia even.
While increase in greenhouse gasses do increase temperature in the microcosm, the Earth has systems to counteract that inherent in it's design(Oh Noes, I said design!!!). Between the fact that plants convert CO2 to Oxygen more quickly when CO2 levels are higher and that Ocean Currents regulate the ocean as well as environmental temperature I cannot see how human kind could possibly be directly affecting temperature in any way that should cause concern.
As others have pointed out, the big concern should be in limiting particulate pollution especially the kind that can cause cancer and threaten life both of air breathing mammals and creatures of the Sea(Read: mercury). These things are important to limit and protecting the environment is important to us all. However, Global Warming as scientists put it does not exist.
Nobody expects the Inquisition.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
1.) The earth's average temperature is higher when averaged over the last 1, 5, 10 million years. Cooling is the anomoly. The earth should be in a warming phase starting with the end of the last ice age 10K years ago.
/. has any room to judge.
2.) More people should equal more heat, especially when concentrated in environmentally damaging megacities. This might be offset by the loss of other biomass due to the environmental destruction required to keep the megacities humming.
3.) The earth is a carbon-based system. All organisms release carbon when they die and many release it as a byproduct while alive. Every energy source large enough to be useful, except for nuclear, releases carbon at some point.
4.) The solution is massive depopulation combined with limiting large sections of the planet to pre-industrial lifestyles.
FWIW, computers/technology manufacturing is one of the most environmentally damaging technologies pound for pound in the world. So no one on
Lindzen gets his papers rejected by Science and Nature, has a bunch of grants not come through, and then whines about having his views being "suppressed". Well, if we take those criteria, 99% of all scientists are being "suppressed" because that's the rule rather than the exception.
I applaud Nature and Science in "suppressing" people like Lindzen--they simply don't have anything to say that I care about anymore, and I suspect that's true for the majority of readers of those journals. As far as I'm concerned, reducing CO2 emissions has so many other economic, political, and environmental benefits that this is simply not an interesting debate anymore; arguments like Lindzen's should be relegated to obscure journals.
Its a great example of a conflict of interest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest
... is irrelevant to this discussion.
y cle.html ) as a prime example of what happens when we begin looking more closely at these problems. Many scientists are tossing out potential hypotheses in a science that is very difficult to easily test these hypotheses properly. There's a rush to put out results of any type by the P-or-P philosophy... easiest is verification of previous results in a slightly different regime.
;) Cooler heads will prevail eventually.
There is something that he points out (in a roundabout way) that needs to be said: There is a lot of bad science going on in this debate. Both sides.
Now, granted, I'm a lowly Ph.D. student in Atmospheric Sciences studying hurricanes... what would I know about this, right? (Yes, that's slightly sarcastic.)
"Science" and "Nature" are hack journals nowadays. The only reason that one publishes in those is for publicity. Pure and simple. I haven't seen an article pertaining to atmospheric science come through there that I haven't been able to poke significant holes in for years now. (I speak mainly for atmospheric science articles in those journals. Other articles may be fine... I don't know.)
The real science happens in the less-public journals. And, believe it or not, the actual science always leads to more questions than answers. There are details that aren't covered in science news coverage that are vital to making valid conclusions in these issues. But, the nature of the "publish-or-perish" funding makes careful science difficult to do.
So, we're left with more questions than answers. Look at Dr. Denning's carbon cycle findings ( http://biocycle.atmos.colostate.edu/globalcarbonc
I'm not claiming that the scientists in this debate are bad scientists... I'm claiming that they're getting caught up in a problem that is so incredibly complex that we're far from having a more-than-cursory handle on. A lot of this is pioneering work... and even pioneers in sciences can get things wrong or not understand everything (how many refinements of Einstein's relativity theory have there been in the last couple decades, for example?).
It's not just about politics or philosophy or science or anything like that. It's seeing the maturation of a whole discipline of science. Lindzen is completely right in claiming that alarmists may be taking things too far. Lindzen is completely right in claiming that there are politics involved here. He may be off-base in a number of points, but cooler heads will prevail eventually. This is an exciting time to watch all this... it's like our generation's relativity (20's and 30's) or nuclear chemistry (late-40's to 60's).
Those who are getting up in arms about all this... settle down. Seriously. Your hyperventilations are only speeding up the global warming process!
-Jellisky
If I could receive the kind of money that Richard Lindzen gets from the Western Fuels Association, OPEC, and other organizations with a vested interest in oil consumption, I might be a global warming skeptic, too. I'm sure I could figure out some way of explaining the loss of glaciers in South America, Europe, North America and the Himalayas, the shrinking of the Arctic icecap, the Greenland ice fields, the collapse Antarctic ice shelves, the slowdown of Atlantic conveyor belt, the imminent disappearance under water of Pacific and Indian Ocean island groups, not to mention the wacky weather. I could discount the fact that ice cores indicate that the world hasn't experienced a warming trend like the present one in more than half a million years. I might have a little more trouble discounting a 2 million year time frame which will be available soon from more recent core sampling but with enough money, I'm sure I could figure out a way to set myself up in a the most comfortable place to settle myself and watch the consequences. If I smoked cigarettes the Mr. Lindzen does, I could count on not surviving long enough for it to be a problem anyway. I could get lots of good cigars fromt that other industry that has so proven itself to have our interests at heart. What the heck, I'll do it..., Mobil Exxon? BP? Shell? Any takers? I'm available.
Of my exhaust with no catalytic converters..... Yeah, someone else can take one for the environment, not me. The next volcanic eruption will erase any gains we made this year in cutting emissions down anyway. Its all about money. And THATS the bottom line.
The earth has supposedly been warming over some period of very, very recent history. So with over 4 billion years of weather, we humans in our infinite wisdom are choosing about 100 years of data and trying to extrapolate where the earth is heading.
Let's face it, religious zealots have been calling for the End of the World since the beginning of time and now Scientific zealots are getting into the act.
What's really funny is that when I was a kid the real weather scare was the coming Ice Age. What happen to those Ice Age zealots anyway? Probably driven underground by the latest "Sky is Falling" group known as the Global Warming evangelists.
I'm so sick of the press reporting on predictions of idiots from idiot scientists to idiot psychics as if they were fact and then never following up when most of these nutballs are wrong.
I guess the press doesn't want to report on the failings of these wackjobs since the press was the ones who gave them credence in the first damn place.
We had Y2K in our industry and look how many billions were spent on something that we all knew was a bunch of BS. Many people post rationalized that the reason nothing bad happened was because something was done. But these people were part of the problem and don't want to admit to their bosses that huge amounts of money didn't need to be spent. And if you don't believe me, just look at the countries that didn't spend the money we did. No doomsday for them even though very little was done.
Global warming is going to follow the same stupid path. Tomorrow there will be a new threat and billions will be spent on that problem, meanwhile we'll be paying $10.00 / gallon for gas and no one will be solving the real problems.
You don't get much more suppressed than the views of NASA:
- change/mg18925403.900-us-agencies-accused-of-muzzl ing-climate-experts.html
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate
But as long as I have to de-plane whenever there is the slightest threat of a terrorist attack on a plane or someone misses a security checkpoint, I'm going to demand that we "de-plane" when there is any indication whatsoever that life on Earth could end. It sort of makes sense that we error on the side of safety since there are tipping points in this debate- meaning that everyone acknowledges that should the whistleblowers be correct, there is a point of no return.
Michael Crichton State of Fear - a very good read, brings up a LOT of interesting issues and problems with the whole "VERY ALARMING GLOBAL WARMING"
Yes that's right.
I'm firmly against evolution based on my own scientific research. And so every arguement I put forward gets scored a zero or close as the slashdot moderators don't like any other arguement.
Perhaps we should move slashdot to China!
I think at this point, we can pretty much end most funding for climate change research.
The reason is that even if, as Lindzen claims, the preponderance of the evidence were against man-made global warming or serious climate change, that would still be too risky given the potential for billions of lives lost. We could only continue emissions growth if we knew beyond a reasonable doubt that it was safe to do so, and climate change research is not going to achieve that kind of certainty over the next several decades no matter how much money we pump into it.
Give that reducing carbon emissions actually is likely to stimulate economic activity, reduce other pollution, and make nations less dependent on the Middle East, reducing carbon emissions now seems like a no brainer.
I think Bush Senior put it even better, in 1993 at the world climate change summit:
"The American Way of Life is not negotiable"
(I just threw up a little in my mouth)
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Moreover, there are three separate questions:
I don't have answers, and serious scientists are very cautious too. Good data is too scarse, and too much money is involved for rational debate.
Most debates on the subject don't even acknowledge the existence of these separate questions, so how can they even be constructive? Both sides end up yelling at each other, but they aren't talking about the same thing.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Let's take another heavily-politicized scientific issue. HIV and AIDs. AIDs was a political hot-button of near-Biblical proportions from day one, with a cure being promised as being just around the corner. With terrible rapidity HIV was identified as the root cause of the disease, and vast funds and resources have been expended in an effort to find a cure for "HIV disease." So far as publicly funded research is concerned, those scientists who are beholden to the bureaucrats in charge of that money are not as free as one would like.
... and not all researchers are in agreement here. What do you suppose happens to those that don't go with the flow? I'm just an engineer so my opinion on the reality of AIDS or global warming is irrelevant ... but I am trying to demonstrate how politics and science have become inextricably intermingled in the U.S. research establishment. In the immortal words of Richard Ballinger Seaton: "this is veree ungood." I am disturbed by this: our understanding of such important aspects of our lives and our world cannot move forward when those tasked with that advancement are not allowed to dissent. What, then, is the point? In such an environment, whatever results are obtained are of little scientific consequence and have no legitimate value in determining public policy. So far as I'm concerned, a President suppressing politically-inconvenient research should be an impeachable offense. There is a certain cost in human lives that must be paid for such actions.
So now, suppose you were a scientist whose research did not support the conclusion that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS. Billions upon billions of dollars are riding on that assumption
Decisions regarding both AIDS and global warming have enormous implications for whichever way we jump, and in both cases the science frequently takes a back seat to the politics. You would think (just because the consequences of making an error in judgment or policy are so severe) that those in charge would want the best information possible at their disposal. That would, of course, mean good science unfettered by political shackles of any sort. But our imperious leaders (all of them, and I don't just mean the U.S.) are more interested in using the respect our populations have for science to bolster their own credibility, and further their own agendas. Where we figure in all that is yet to be determined.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Can you provide any particular reason why the climate of a planet so sharply different in very important ways is now suddenly a viable means of looking at our own planet? Please be as specific as possible.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
One of the better sources for an objective opinion may be the insurance industry. More specifically, a good place to search would be the area of insurance risk securitization, or catastrophe bonds (cat bonds).
The investment bankers and insurers involved may not always be correct in their projections, but they have a vested business interest in creating the best numerical risk models for any given outcome being insured for. In this case, you might want to check out the published info and analyses for cat bonds related directly or indirectly to global warming.
The weak side of this source is that, ultimately, those structuring the cat bonds need to rely on the data of research scientists. Using some amount of critical analysis and due diligence, the investment bankers will then filter through the data. It is my understanding that one of the world experts on hurricane risk models is a particular NYC investment banker who works on cat bonds.
If the main investment banking group structuring the bond has a reputation for bad models, the amount of business coming their way will decrease. The reinsurance industry may have even more accurate information, but that information may not be as easily accessible to the public.
Two Republicans.
Okay, so you've arbitrarily decided to dismiss this man's credentials, and then you make some vague implication about "mucking around with the variables" without telling us what variables have been mucked around with. Then you sum it up by bringing into question whether the past can predict the future. Are you in denial, or what?
"He only studies the deep past!" Are there scientists who specialize in the "deep future" we should be consulting instead? How does one become qualified to discuss what will happen in the future--buy a crystal ball? How silly. "past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results." No predictions are, but studying the patterns of the past educates you about the likelihood of the future. You're dismissing the numbers on really shaky logic here.
The record shows what the record shows. Global temperatures have not risen since 1998. I guess we're going to dismiss it now because it doesn't fit nicely with the "consensus science" the mainstream media is currently peddling to the folks. Frankly, I'm shocked this submission made it to the front page of Slashdot, which is usually a storing house for asteroid collision scares and global warming propaganda. I'll place them on the shelf beside the "second ice age" predictions of the 70s that never happened.
Slashdot mods have been doing this for quite some time. Pro-environmentalists get modded up, dissenters often seem to be ignored if they are lucky.
Yes, you should ignore that. We're not talking politics, we're talking science. Scientific findings should always be permitted to be analyzed and supported or refuted on their own merits, irregardless of who delivers them. Ignoring research simply because you don't like the messenger is unscientific, ignorant, and narrow minded.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Yes, you should ignore it. Just as you should ignore the climatologist that finds evidence of global warming but recieves copius grants from environmental protection groups. You can presume the causation as a conflict of interest but it's easily refutable in the science of the persons arguement. Disprove their facts and leave the ad hominem attacks out of it.
Yes, but it's probably irrelevant to the question of global climate change. The butterfly effect says that an arbitrarily small change in state (such as the wind from a butterfly flapping or not flapping a wing) can result in arbitrarily large separations within the system's normal state space over time. Climate change equates to a shift of the normal state space. While a butterfly flap may change (in a hypothetical season with hurricanes Augustine through Vincent) whether Betty or Helga makes the first US landfall, and how big each of the storms is, but is unlikely to change whether or not hurricane watchers will be forced to use the Japanese Kanji (after they finish the Greek alphabet) in order to make it throught the season.
Yes, the final camel straw may be some damned butterfly, but it's just as likely to be from hitting it with a swatter.
What if the problem wasn't just the fuel burning we use to heat the building, but the size and location of the building itself that was the problem? Most of us have stood between 2 manmade skyscrapers and been blown off our feet, that wind pattern has to directly affect the weather patterns in another part of the world
Have an effect on, yes; cause a state space shift in, no.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Carbon trading helps to minimize the cost of reducing global warming, compared to other schemes for reducing CO2 emmissions. So while it's a more efficient way of doing it, It doesn't even come close to eliminating the cost/impact.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Thanks for showing that the Global Warming deniers can't count (or can't read).
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Since the start of 2006 I have read two seperate stories about mass coral reef bleaching in both the southern hemisphere [great barrier reef] and the northern hemisphere [florida costal region]. This bleaching ultimately leads to the death of coral; the believe it has been caused by slight increases in the tempature of the ocean.
I am no climatologist, but I would guess that coral reefs are kinda like caneries...slight alterations to the environment causes bad things. Oh well!
In case you missed it, the point wasn't that his science is wrong because he gets money from the oil industry, it's that his claim that he can't do science because he can't get funding is wrong.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
The catch is that by the time it is proven beyond any doubt, the worst predictions may have occurred. It seems foolish to do nothing until it's too late, especially because the risk is so great and the cost is so minor.
Despite the shrill hype, there remains no reason to believe any part of the global warming debate. The science that there is scattered, and the producers of that science, given their political affiliations, are wide open to ad-hominen attack. To rephrase slightly, I, as a skeptic, have no way of assessing the completeness with which the earth has been measured, and, that only undermines those claims.
There is much discussion of a "mountain of scientific evidence", but where is it actually? To actually build a complete picture of global warming requires a fair amount of research in and of itself, and, even worse, most of the papers on global warming are being published in journals whose subscriptions run thousands of dollars of year. It is no wonder that someone might be skeptical about global warming, simply because you have to pay so much to see the "proof". I went to try and find out, for example, what the CO2 emissions from the midatlantic ridge are. Are there any? What's the proof, what experiment did they do? What about gigantic limestone formations? Anything there? What's the impact of Mt. Everest on the climate? Any papers? Or what is the CO2 consumption per acre of a tropical rain forest, or of a North American forest? Or a superhighway? Finding any of this information is impossible and the best Google gives you is a bunch of fanboy environmental sites that make statements as to each but often have no indications as to how they were measured. The information is simply not there, and, that, more than anything else, leads me to believe that so much of global warming is not only made up, its being made up by people with a vested interest in screwing my life up and wrecking the United States.
Unfortunately, I think the perception of political bias in the scientific community cannot be overcome at all, because it is partially true, and, any global warming policy is going to be the result of an intensive power struggle. However, the notion of science in global warming can be overcome by a brute force gathering of all of the global warming measurements into a single, giant project plan that is organized in a format that is believable, reproducable, in a standardized, McFormat, and is properly edited to separate speculation of the scientist from the actual experimental results.
Specifically, the earth needs to be divided up into hundreds of climate zones, if not thousands, and the results of those zones must be placed online, and in a consistent format. Each zone would have with it a characterization of the zone's gross chemistry, steps to establish CO2 content, and, what other zones that CO2 propogates into. Each zone, in other words, will have the total CO2 emitted or consumed, per a standardized unit of measure, say, cubic miles for atmosphere, square miles for various surface types, and some sort of a square mile by a rectangular depth range for both ocean and ground. In the cases of the ocean, the sea might be divided into 300 meter depths, and the same for the atmosphere. Finally, the frequency with which each zone occurs should be identified, and a total made. Thus, we could exactly know that, yes, the superhighway zones are producing xyz tons of CO2 per year, because here's the calculated emissions based on gasoline consumed, and furthermore, there are no other hidden zones producing CO2.
The point is ultimately that global warming is NOT a human CO2 production problem, it is a planetwide CO2 management problem. The goal is to balance the CO2 in the atmosphere to a level that is geopolitically advantageous to the United States and her allies, however, we cannot do that without an understanding as to how to do that. It might turn out, for example, that there's some goofy thing going on on the bottom of the ocean, in the midatlantic ridge, in a bacteria living in rocks a mile underground, that we simply do not know about, and efforts to control the climate by reducing CO2 production are a waste of time. I think what we really need to learn is to how to sink CO2 better, and, understanding how CO2 works, planet wide, and in a consistent way, provides the best overall tool for policy makers, skeptics, and advocates, to understand climate management on the same page.
This is my sig.
Then again, I just glanced at it.
We are seeing some parts of the world heating up quite a bit and we are seeing much more extreme weather. We are also seeing a rise in frequency of these extreme weather events (floodings, storms, droughts...).
What I think is vital is to understand how the mechanisms leading to these x-weather events work. What I also think is important is that this collection of knowledge happens fast.
Oh yeah and that mr. Lindzen creates the impression that there is some big conspiracy of the UN and peer review publications to secure public funds for alarmist researchers does not make him look very sane. That and the "[how can] a 1-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes"-BS.
And to all the "Less public funding"-ravers in this thread a quote from the article: M. Lindzen is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science... - This means he is payed by private funds, right? ;-)
To me, this should be a case for *more* publicly funded research
Code is Speech. No to Censorship.
That's the real problem of global warming arguments. I would like to assemble a Bill of Materials of Carbon Dioxide Uptake and Production for the planet. On each item on this bill, I would like to have the experiment that establishes CO2 levels, step by step, so that anyone could do it, assuming that they have access to high sky rockets, ocean research vessels, submarines, 3km drill heads, or even portable gas spectrometers. Then, I could tally up, quite easily, all the sources of carbon dioxide, and see that a comprehensive case has been made. But, until that time, I think all we really have in the academic community is a bunch of fundraising baby birds all chirping for some funds.
This is my sig.
I don't really know if the current Global Warming is a man made effect or not. But given some of the consequences of Global Warming shouldn't we be.
A. Preparing for a global climatic change
Should we rebuild New Orleans a couple of times or wait for a change in the weather. To many people are pointing to changes in the weather to totally ignore the potential consequences. If we are talking about a 10,000 year cycle, we don't have the data to say how bad hurricanes and such will be. We don't know exactly how high the oceans will rise? (This could take another 3 years before they understand the stability of the Arctic ice shelfs).
Micheal Crichton pointed out that glaciers seem to be advancing at a higher rate in his book. Did he ever consider that some of this data may be skewed by "the glaciers are moving faster because the ice is melting faster".
I guess my gut feeling went to the side of the Global Warming nuts when President Bush said there wasn't enough evidence to support one side or the other. This pretty much convinced me that there was a problem, since he hasn't gotten anything else correct.
I'm pretty sure that that site is completely satirical in nature.
Check out the other articles.
On the Mac Mini: So is the mini a maxi value? For me, clearly, no. When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware--none of which are available for the Mac platform--it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time. But will Apple's famous marketing team be able to sell the the emperor an invisible computer anyway and turn the mini into a maxi hit? That's the question that remains to be answered.
On the threat of small vehicles: Let me start by saying that something has been bothering me on the freeway lately. Actually, it's been bothering me on the city streets, too. And in the parking lot. These things seem to be multiplying like rats, appearing everywhere, getting in the way, making driving difficult. I'm talking specifically about that modern urban blight professional mothers like myself have to deal with every single day -- small cars taking up the road.
On Bush's last budget cuts: Enter President Bush's bold new budget proposal, which will cut the administration's staggering budget deficit from $427 billion for the current fiscal year down to a much more reasonable $390 billion for 2006. "We're asking for Congress to cut and/or reduce 150 different programs," Bush told reporters yesterday. Many of the programs that will face cuts are useless to average Americans, such as grants for vocational education and community development, or obsolete relics of the 1800s, like the subsidies paid to American farmers. Seriously, who farms anymore? Last time I checked, we're in 2005, and people get their food from the grocery store. If there still were such a thing as American farmers, I highly doubt all those heartland states would have voted Republican.
The temperature is markedly warmer than last month. The snow is all gone. Everything is turning... GREEN!
On a more serious note, how long of a time period have we been observing the increasing average temperature? I have always been skeptical of global warming because all the people I have talked to that have been around for the last 50 years or so have not noticed any kind of an increase in temperatures. Just 10 years ago or so, we had a very cold and very long winter. I remember it was approx -40 degrees farenheit during Christmas week and it didn't get above 0 for around 2 weeks.
I was wondering if the slashdot community could give me some good opinions/links from both sides of this debate. Thanks.
Slashdot shouldn't link to opinionjournal.com ever again without a serious qualification of where the article is coming from. The same goes for any other source, I wouldn't mind seeing a qualification on (obviously liberal) Daily Kos links even though I read and enjoy that site every day. And, hell, c|net is so uneven in its reporting and features lobbyists often enough that half of the news.com links need a warning too.
Metamods -- please mod the flamebait mod on parent UNFAIR.
What I'm really calling for is a climate wikki. Scientists would enter zones that they did research on, and fill in a form indicating the inputs to that zone of various chemicals, such as CO2, and the outputs, such as, well CO2. Determing how zones interacted is important, but, right now, just getting a basically tally of the zones of the earth, in a consistent format, seems like it would be exceedingly useful, in particular, for those that want to build data driven climate models with the latest experimentally verified data. I would like to, for example, be able to have a chart of the earth, click on a pixel, and say, here's how you get the CO2 output for the zone. If I clicked on the ocean, the instructions might be, take a bucket, put in water, put into CO2 machine, but of course, introduce all the complications of samples at various altitudes and depths.
This is my sig.
The problem with his global warming book was that all the "pro-global-warming" types were steel-jawed action heroes and and the "anti-global warming" types were simpering pussies. That kind of BS rhetoric doesn't help anymore than equally absurd about how great global warming will be because you'll be able to grow bananas in Alaska and hurricanes will give us an endless construction boom on the Gulf Coast.Especially since Crichton's book was actually well-footnoted and contained quite a bit of supplemental material.
Academic fascism is a real problem in some schools. In the humanities I know a few people that have been kicked out of school for not having sufficient purity of thought, and it's creeping into physics and engineering. Doubleplus notgood!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Are you sure it's a satire site? Did you read the building a linux system for grandma article? Seems pretty close to somethings I've read time and again on slashdot.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Since, according to him, only the panicky global warming hand-wavers get funding, you've only proven exactly what he said in TFA: research that disputes global warming theory is dismissed out of hand as shill science. The proper response would be to dismantle his assertion that people who go against global warming theory have their funding cut, or better yet, look at and repeat his experiments showing the data he produced is wrong.
Now, your turn: Will you be surprised when you discover an order of magnitude more CO2 is contributed to the atmosphere by soil organic matter decomposition than the burning of ALL fossil fuels combined? Ask yourself how fossil fuels got there in the first place. Now, what happens when you don't put your CO2 away after you play with it? Don't blame cars, blame farmers. But you can't really blame farmers, when the politicians are spending $1.7 billion a year on global warming research and jack squat on no till farming. So... ultimately, it's the fault of politicians who allocate funds to global warming research instead of no till farming equipment and research. And of course that's followed by the only logical conclusion: Those who elected them are at fault. That appears to include you. Therefore, increased level of CO2 in the atmosphere is your fault. :-) Oh, but wait!! That doesn't fit with your global warming theory, therefore it's simply rubbish! Obviously the work of some oil industry shill over at montana.edu. Looks at teh computar modelz!!1
Science is supposed to be falsifiable. Don't agree with the conclusions of his work? Repeat it and prove him wrong. Read any debate on Intelligent Design on Slashdot and the detractors of ID immediately point out that ID is junk science because it is not falsifiable. Global warming is as much junk science as ID. Only it's worse; Global warming is generally accepted junk science. Whenever someone points out that there are serious problems with global warming theory, that information is ignored, shouted down, and disputed with the holy order of indisputable computer models. The response of anyone interested in the truth is to look at the data, repeat the experiments, and either verify it or prove it to be inaccurate. Global warmers are obviously NOT interested in the truth. They're too busy getting fat off that $1.7 billion in government funds. More panic equals more money. So who did you say was shilling for easy money again?
You mean just like people who challenge the global warming hysteria on slashdot. Hopefully now global warming can take its place next to DDT, killer bees, and acid rain on the list of scientific catastrophies that never materialized.
an ill wind that blows no good
The day-to-night variation has decreased. This is known to happen because of cloud cover. It doesn't count as warming or cooling.
As post-9/11 flight ban demonstrated, aircraft are a major cause of clouds. Air traffic has generally been on the rise.
I think, unforunately, that just most scientists are just like normal people. Science is and always has been about questioning everything that we know, and always asking why. Unfortunately, when people come along with a different viewpoint, people don't have an open mind about it, and they tend to think that what they know is absolute, and it couldn't be any different. ...And that is why every few hundred years, there is a scientific revolution, because everything that everyone has been suppressing becomes too overwhelming to suppress any longer.
When you're on a spaceship with no escape pods you should give high priority to understanding the life support system.
I'm pretty sure that's satire.
...and the list goes on. If that site isn't satire, I'd give up a year salary.
Cue the off-topic but interesting discussion of how evolutionary dissenters are suppressed.
Heheheheh. It's so dead pan, I guess it's hard to tell. =) Admit it, though. You know people like that!
PS: Did you check out the "gay toddler" articles? The linux vs. windows article? Choice stuff!
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Yes. It's all *very* dead pan. Makes for great satire, that's for sure. And doubly so, especially with the Linux article you linked to, it's pretty truthful, really, combined with the dry wit of it makes it believable.
1998 was an El Nino year, a new record high year, and at that time stood out as an anomalously hot year.
We are now seeing years with temperatres near or at that anomaly as the standard.
In other words, we have seen a steady climb in temperatures, with an anomalous peak in 1998. If we pick that standout year as the starting point, and 2005 as the end point we get no trend. But this is ONLY true if we cherry pick that ONE single year, 1998, as the starting point.
Look at a long term trend, as in LOOK AT THE GRAPH, and we see a steady climb with variation. This dishonest attempt to hide the trend by picking extremes in the year-to-year variation as the ends of a selected time period, is just one example of the kinds of dishonesty too often thrown at this issue.
1. There is no God.
2. There is no such thing as global warming.
3. Humanity is completely unimportant.
Does anyone understand physics anymore? Does anyone out there understand what a light-year really means? What a million years really means??
It's not the stupidity that bothers me... it's the willful ignorance.
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
"CRICHTON, (John) Michael. American. Born in Chicago, Illinois, October 23, 1942. Educated at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, A.B. (summa cum laude) 1964 (Phi Beta Kappa). Henry Russell Shaw Travelling Fellow, 1964-65. Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at Cambridge University, England, 1965. Graduated Harvard Medical School, M.D. 1969; post-doctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, La Jolla, California 1969-1970. Visiting Writer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1988. "
:"Always interested in computers, Crichton ran a software company, FilmTrack, which developed computer programs for motion picture production in the 1980s; for this pioneering work he won an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Technical Achievement Award in 1995. His film Westworld was the first feature film to employ computer-generated special effects, back in 1973. "
y .html
also
found this at
http://www.crichton-official.com/aboutmc/biograph
It appears he is a scientist as well as a writer.
The article you link to misrepresents the statistics. They have deliberately chosen 1998 as their starting point, because it was an abnormally hot year, i.e. a statistical outlier, and then noted that no year has been hotter since 1998. But they have ignored that the trend in global temperature has continued to rise since then.
In terms of the overall global warming debate, these are the facts:
fact 1 The mean global temperature has increased by almost 1 degree celsius in the last 100 years. And the global temperature is clearly trending up.
fact 2 Since the industrial revolution, human activity has significantly altered the composition of the atmosphere. "Green house gases" have dramatically increased. Carbon dioxide has increased by 30%, methane by 230% and nitrous oxide by 20%. The increasing rate of emissions has accerelated their growth in recent years.
Other studies (of ice cores and tree xylon rings) point to the current rise in tempartures as being more rapid than anything else that has occured in the last 1000 years. This contradicts people who argue that the current phenomenon is just part of a natural long term climate cycle.
We have sound scientific theories explaining how greenhouse gases retain heat in the atmosphere. (The extreme case of a greenhouse atmosphere being Venus.) There are many models projecting that the temperature will continue to increase as a result of the greenhouse gases.
That said, everyone recognises that it is an extremely complex system. For example, small variations on the sun can have a large impact on the Earth's temperature. It has not been proven that human activity has caused global warming. However, it does seem highly probable that human activity is at least contributing to global warming. Furthermore, we are significantly changing the atmosphere. That is going to change the system, although the exact nature of these changes is hard to predict.
Reference document: http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/spm22-01.pdf
4. All we have is each other...
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
Actually, the Flying Spaghetti Monster created these in his own image. He only put us humans (and midgits) here to cause the global warming that enables these creatures to be fruitful and multiply. Ask any marinara biologist.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
The residence time of water vapor in th atmopshere is on the order of weeks. It equilibrates very rapidly; this means taht it RESPONDS to other forcing drivers of global temperature as part of the feedback process.
CO2 has a residence time several ordrs of magnitude longer, its persistence makes it a forcing, a driver, not a feedback.
Raising CO2 slightly increases temps, which increases the water capacity fo the atmopshere, and (this is almost certain now) increases water in the atmosphere, which amplifies teh warming effect of the CO2. Th siprocess in included in every model of global climate dynamics; it is NOT ignored. But including it in the driving, forcing players i nclimate change is wrong, becasue it responds to temps in part of teh feedback loop, it does not drive changes.
No the catch is if there is really man-made globalwarming bring doom on us all, it was too late a century ago. If we're just making a natural trend a smidgen worst we have a chance and we can't be sure if there is a trend because of all the bad science being done to scarf up grant money.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Yes - like we can trust CBS either!
*rolling eyes*
Libertas in infinitum
Only the most adaptive survive. Global warming is nothing compared to large scale climate changes of the past. If people are threatened by GW perhaps people do not deserve to live on this planet...
I've been reading /. since I was a teenager and have learned a lot here.
When discussing anything like this issue I have learned a favorite phrase from others here which you touched on, but didn't quite say it.
"Correlation |= causation"
If more people understood this, the world would be a better place.
Libertas in infinitum
Our 650,000+ years of ice core data, and thousands of years of proxy data, and hundreds of years of measurement data, couled with growing physical understanding of the process involved, are not sufficient to determine if warming is happening on this planet.
But three years of poorly uunderstood changes in ice cap size on mars is definitive evidence of solar-system wide warming, which disproves anthropogenic warming on earth..
Sheesh, people. Think!!!!
many experts were sure that we were going to have a new ice age only 30 years ago.
They were probably right, but the ice age was forestalled by global warming. Maybe we'd all be living in igloos if it weren't for our contribution to greenhouse gases...
Within the last year or so Scientific American published an article by some climate scientists who came up with a model which says exactly that. (I'll relate the impression I got of what they were saying...)
Jist of it is that three orbital issues (axial precession vs. elipticity of the earth's orbit is one, I don't recall the other two - or if they were even explicitly called out in the popularized article) combine to produce a complicated function that compares very well with the global temperature as extimated by recent research (such as ice core sampling). It tracks ice ages and the like VERY closely - right up to the start of agriculture.
Agriculture started at the top of a nice, smooth, inflection. According to the model the temperature should have started curving down gradually. About now it should be a couple degrees C below the peak and the cooling accellerating.
Instead it held dead level right up to the start of the industrial age, creating a wedge of increasing deviation from the expected cooling. Then it started to climb a bit. Adding estimates of the greenhouse increases from carbon emissions, for the period where we have the info, seems to track the deviation pretty well. So from that you can assume it's JUST three orbital elements and human excess CO2 emission and make a predictive model.
What happens next depends on the assumed burn rate of sequestered carbon - mainly from fossil fuels. And fossil fuels eventually run out, so it also depends on the assumed amount of exonomically-extractable fossil fuels. Plugging in a couple guesses they came up with a graph where the temperature humps up to about two degrees C ABOVE the start-of-agriculture level, about 400 years out, then curves down over the next couple hundred years to pretty much rejoin the ice age curve we've been avoiding for the last several thousand.
"We return you to your ice age, which is already in progress."
Assuming their model is even roughly accurate:
- Changing the burn rate trades height of the hump for length of time the ice age is held off.
- Finding a whole bunch more fossil fuel than expected might help hold things off longer - or let you peak out a little higher.
- But eventually the fossil fuels run out and then it's all over.
So if you make sufficiently drastic cuts in carbon emission - like by creating an economic depression that would be closer to the medieval period than the relatively puny '30s, and you might eliminate the hump entirely and stretch out the level plain for, say, another couple hundred years. But then it's ice age time again - and you lost your chance to do anything about it.
The only way to avoid an ice age, within probably less than another thousand years, is to find a way to deliberately create MORE global warming by something more sustainable than burning fossil carbon.
Eisenhower warned us about a "military-industrial complex". It will be interesting to see what this "government-researcher complex" has to say about these folks' work. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That's because Aliens cause global warming.
s _quote04.html
Excellent speech. Please read.
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeche
I'm part of the precipitate.
The idea that humans can significantly damage this planet is the utmost in anthropomorphic arrogance. We might kill ourselves off; but there will be life in bewildering and ever changing variety here afterwards, regardless.
Everyone who demands major changes in the social, technological, and philisophical makeup of the world as we know it in order to avert $disater_of_the_week needs to get over themselves.
All I can say is that here where I live (Buenos Aires, Argentina), winter hasn't showed up in the last 5 or 6 years.
I'm 36 now, and I remember that in my school days (more than 20 years ago), I used to put my gloves on, my scarf and a thick coat just to ride my bike to school. Early in the morning the grass was covered by hoarfrost. Now it doesn't happen anymore. The line between summer and winter is blurring more an more every year, although I feel that summers are harder than ever.
I have no doubt. Glowal warming is hapening. And it's getting worst.
i'm a scientific kind of guy.
i think from any scientific perspective it's obvious that:
1. human activity is quite measurable in the climate
2. the last 100 years have seen climactic change unpresaged by the previous 1000.
now i think that these two items *probably* have a cause/effect relationship,
but since i'm a scientific kind of guy, i don't rule out the possibility that they don't.
- the geological record certainly shows that sometimes, the climate just changes.
so i read this article hoping to find a well-written case against such a cause/effect relationship.
but all i saw was shoddily written pap.
in any event,
the larger issue here is not what's causing all the glaciers in the world to melt,
but what to do about it.
doc ocelot
f9w295302@sneakemail.com
Thanks, whoever modded this as off-topic :)
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
You go to the doctor and he runs some tests. The tests show some possible problems. Nothing is certain. The doctor then asks you about your behavior. He then says that if you change your lifestyle you can reduce the chances of long term problems. Again, there is no absolute assurance. Do you continue getting drunk and eating junk food and getting too little sleep and no exercise or do you change your behavior? Just how stupid and self destructive are you?
In this case, it's not just about you, it about everyone alive today and all future generations. Do you want to risk it? Are you willing to take the word of an oil company? Do you accept medical advice about smoking from a tobacco company?
Bush and Cheney were both in the oil business, and current US energy policy comes directly from the bottom line of the oil/energy international cartels. Bush holds hands with his Saudi buddy, "Bandar Bush". Slashdot readers pretend to be rational independent thinkers, but when it comes to so called "free enterprise" they often seem to have the rational skills of a 4 year old: "GIMME CANDY NOW".
We should push to have the scientologist views on evolution in the schools along with evolution and ID.
Crazy stuff, google for details. Humans evolved from clams. The world was created 16 Trillion years ago. Great stuff.
Thetans and more, gotta love thos scientologists.
It's called consensus of science. Just like you can't point to one lung cancer sufferer and say smoking killed that person, it's pretty darn likely. There is a correlation. You can say one weather event is tied to global warming, but there is a correlation.
Did you know that nogginthenog is a mother fucking retard? Funny that...
Not to thread jack but Peak Oil has far more evidence for it and will have a more immediate (next 10 to 15 years) catastrophic impact and may have already happened according to some experts however it hardly gets as much press as Global Warming does.
I almost suspect that Global Warming is a euphamistic way for countries to talk about peak oil. One other thing is that China, India, and Russia ignore the whole Global Warming issue. Too them it doesn't matter and since our whole industrial base will be in China and India soon, short of invading those two countries and sending them back to the post-industrial age, there's not much we can do about it. In fact, I almost don't even care about global warming because I know that everywhere, when the rubber actually hits the road and it's reduce carbon emissions by reducing standards of living people will always balk. Talk is cheap, republicans are easy to bash but this all really doesn't matter in the end.
He might have a point, but it doesn't matter: Whether or not "environmentalism" may be a "religious tendency" in man has nothing to do with whether or not global warming actually exists. Even if we were believing it for all the wrong reasons it could still be true, and its truth value isn't even remotely connected to whether or not we believe it or why we do.
Yeah except it IS on topic. You see, this is not a christian vs. non-christian issue. Pretty much all major scientists in the field accept that global warming is a FACT. There may be other things we haven't figured out, such as how much of an impact we're having, but we KNOW that the ice caps are melting at accelerated rates, we KNOW that temperatures show an upward trend.
Regarding the christian vs. non-christian thing, I am not a christian, not a bible literalist, but I *do* try to follow the teachings of christ. If you truly believe the bible should be taken literally, then you believe the world is flat and the moon emits light. There is nothing wrong with saying that these things are demonstrably FALSE, because they ARE. It is not an issue of faith conflicting with science, it's really an issue of people not properly holding up their end of the stewardship of the earth. If you really want to talk about the genesis account of creating, let's talk about how we are to be stewards of the world we have.
2+2 will never equal 7, even if the bible said it does (like how it says pi = 3). Saying that these things are wrong should not lessen faith, it should make us realize that we are learning more about the universe in which we live.
It has nothing to do with christian vs. non-christian. The OP said "It isn't fair for people like me who are christians to be told that they're outright wrong."
That's bullshit. If you're wrong, you're wrong. It has nothing to do with your faith.
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
In case you missed it, the point wasn't that his science is wrong because he gets money from the oil industry, it's that his claim that he can't do science because he can't get funding is wrong.
Is receiving money form a corporation to push their agenda the same thing as receiving money to objectively study a question? Granted, if there was any easy answer that could prove the global warming theories wrong they probably would have found I doubt their job was really to do science. I suspect it was more to do PR work.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Being a novelist and being right are not mutually exclusive.
...and hang him.
Accusing Richard Lindzen of being an Exxon-Mobil shill is nothing more or less than the truth. He's also working for a "news source" called TechCentralStation, which is the creation of a lobbying organization called DCI Group. Get the details here.
He's whining because he's been outed and whatever reputation he had as a scientist has been deservedly destroyed.
If he wants a job educating students, perhaps Oral Roberts University will hire him. Or maybe Lindzen's reputation is so screwed that even they'd stay clear of him.
Tech Public Policy stuff
All energy ends up as heat, if the universe is in thermodynamic equilibrium.
All that aerobraking is heating up the Martian atmosphere.
Hint: StarTrek is fiction. The warp drive (as of 2006) is imaginary, not a realistic source of transportation. The "Mr. Fusion" device is imaginary, not a reliable source of electric power. Microsoft's claims of adequate security are imaginary.
Unfortunately, the consensus of real scientists not on the ExxonMobil payroll are that global warming is for real. It's a shame you aren't smart enough to tell the difference between the bloviation of Exxon PR people from what's going on in the real world.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, Isaac Asimov obtained his PhD in biochemistry when he was about 28.
... and I approve this message
To those who think this is over-the-top, please remember that I'm from England - the country that brought you Oxford University in 800 AD, and Cambridge in 1100 AD, where there is a natural cultural antipathy towards those sordid enough to bring politics into academia.
You also have to bear in mind that I hold the VERY passionate belief that academics can only be free to study when their study has no hidden agenda, no political motivation and no political reward. I believe utterly that any educational facility where these are not adhered to utterly are doomed to drag their subjects into disrepute and their students into quagmires.
A title - such as that of "professor" - is NOT an excuse, it is a responsibility. To deliberately flout that responsibility in a vainglorious effort to pursue money or influence in political circles is sordid and contemptible.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Put into simple terms, a rise of N degrees between two points in time tells you next to nothing about what happens over any other interval. A small rise in temperature one day may trigger off a series of events which lead to a massive plunge in temperature the next. A tiny drop in temperature may, likewise, lead to temperatures soaring a short time later.
(Chaos mathematicians refer to this as sensitivity to initial conditions and often talk in terms of Lorenz Waterwheels and African butterflies. What they really mean is that predictions are extremely hard and usually wrong, and that the consequences can be sudden, violent and unexpected in nature, but there again, they might not, and you probably won't know in advance which it's going to be.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Wonderful group you share your opinion with regarding Crichton
It is sad how many people actually believe that Crichton writes with a foundation of solid scientific evidence. It is obscene the manner in which distorted facts get bootstrapped into the datastream by faux public policy organizations.
It is pitiful that the State of Oklahoma offered compelling anecdotal evidence indicating the fallaciousness of intelligent design when they elected Jimmy Inhofe to the Senate.
Inhofe is to a very large degree responsible for Crichton's elevation into the upper level of global warming debate. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, he held a hearing on September 28, 2005 titled "The Role of Science in Environmental Policy-Making", and gave Crichton top-billing as the first speaker.
The last speaker of the hearing was David B. Sandalow, The Brookings Institute's Environmental Scholar, who had previously published a harsh critique of Crichton's environmental views in January, 2006. The Brookings Institute's synopsis of it reads:
Inhofe himself is compelling evidence of American Conservatism's continuing decline. The Sourcewatch Article about Inhofe states that:
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
These debates, reports and research are really missing the point.
We know something is going on, a lot of the evidence suggests carbon dioxide is responsible.
Even if it not the main culpret it is mostly likey having an effect and most importantly it is one of the few things we can change.
We cannot change the output of the sun. So lets stop dicking around and do something before it is too late. We might have a measurable effect on what happens in the next 50-100 years.
BTW I live in Ireland and it is already cold and miserable enough here without the gulf stream shutting down..
Pab
The problem isn't obtaining funding. The problem is that these people are trying to waste public money answering questions we already know the answer to. Since Global Climate Change is an established fact, the kinds of questions doubters ask would waste public money for the most part. So when the scientific budget is portioned out, less goes into that pot. Heck my research isn't considered very practical (string theory in 2D, not exactly very useful in the immediate term), so I have less funding opertunities.
Your grant proposal is assesed on merit. These scientists obviously submitted grant proposals that were not good enough if they got refused. If they are not getting published then the research was not good enough. You can guess that apriori because many of their grant proposals were not good enough.
Funding councils have to give funding based on specific criteria. Those scientists who doubt Global Climate Change are not meeting those criteria. The scientific community is hardly likely to be enthralled by a less note worthy study (which it probably was if it was refused funding by the funding councils) it isn't going to be enthralled whoever funds it.
The bottom line is that the evidence is in, and the science has been done. Global Climate Change is happening and man is play a part in that Change. We now need to find out why and what we can do about it.
Science is about doubt until we have the facts. Not doubt after we have them. We wouldn't run a study to find out a basic question about if evolution is happening or not now. The same goes for Global Climate Change.
(sarcasm)
(meta-sarcasm)
Why kill all the Jewish people now when we don't know conclusively, definitely, and exactly how their presence in the gene pool is resulting in inferior humans? How do we really know that Jews are universally evil? Needs more study. The jury is still out.
(/meta-sarcasm)
(/sarcasm)
Godwin aside, I don't think the comparison of your use of alarmism to promote amature-hour climatology to the use of alarmism to promote amature-hour eugenics is an entirely unfair one. The point is that it's "leap before you look" people like you that generally end up doing things that, in hindsight, humanity is massively ashamed of, not the cautious people that wait for certainty before messing with hugely complicated systems beyond their understanding.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
1) If noticing that ice melts when the temperature rises above freezing makes me a Nazi, then... oh screw it, you're just an idiot. You really are a nutcase if you bring up the Nazis and eugenics just because someone pointed out we can deduce from melting ice that temperature has risen. I'm getting a very black-helicopter, New-World-Order vibe from the connections you've made. Is that you, Randy Weaver?
2) You misspelled amateur, Einstein.
"... 99.9 percent of all climatologists ..."
That's a mighty big, spiky number, son. Did it hurt much when you were pulling it out of your ass?
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
Alluded to in the article, an interesting paper on how the IPCC results are not reproducible: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/NAS.M&M. pdf
is that this can go on forever. say the alarmist are right, and we recognize global warming and decided to do something about it. after the planet is saved (or start to cool down), the non-believers in GW will just say "see, what we told ya, nothing to worry about". so, where they right? the the alarmist will argue on past data how the trend was GW and they saved the planet.
Goverment discredits itself by "promoting a specific viewpoint" regardless if its true/false.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Scientists know more then goverment officials,and they should be able to voice their opinions.
As for global warming,you don't have climate models for centuries lying around.pollution is harmful regardless.
And its ironic to promote global warming while ignoring Kyoto accords.
" In June 2005, State Department papers showed the administration thanking Exxon executives for the company's "active involvement" in helping to determine climate change policy, including the US stance on Kyoto. Input from the business lobby group Global Climate Coalition was also a factor. Guardian"
8(
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
that we'd have astroturfers doing metamod these days.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I was under the impression that slashdot did not edit posts?
My post on this subject has been removed. Very interesting.
Espscially as it expressed a dissenting view with real scientific backup.
What a complete load of crap. Slashdot has a very extreme bias now. There is no way the original site admins are still in control, either that or they have been brainwashed.
Fucking bastards.
for some reason i haven't had mod points for a LONG time, so i can't actually counter the troll mod, but for what it's worth i thought your post was funny :-)
I am an anti-global warming proponent, but I also believe that we should find alternative sources of fuel that do not pollute the air that we breathe. The cleaner our air the healthier we become.
...the people are fucked.
l anet-is-fine.php
http://www.chaparyan.com/2005/04/george-carlins-p
The earth has supposedly been warming over some period of very, very recent history. So with over 4 billion years of weather, we humans in our infinite wisdom are choosing about 100 years of data and trying to extrapolate where the earth is heading.
Actually, try 650 000 years of data.
Let's face it, religious zealots have been calling for the End of the World since the beginning of time and now Scientific zealots are getting into the act.
Yes... the little difference is that the scientists have science to back these claims. You know, facts and those things.
What's really funny is that when I was a kid the real weather scare was the coming Ice Age. What happen to those Ice Age zealots anyway?
A nice debunking of this claim in all its permutations is available here.
I'm so sick of the press reporting on predictions of idiots from idiot scientists to idiot psychics as if they were fact and then never following up when most of these nutballs are wrong.
Could you show us some proof that they are wrong please? Haven't you considered that a possible reason you don't see any debunking "follow up" reports is no a conspiracy, but rather that no one manages to prove them wrong?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
"The Iris hypothesis was published by Richard Lindzen and co-authors in the March 2001 issue of Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society."
Of course...it's from a NASA news release about some observations that counter the Iris effect.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Also, the Wall Street Journal opinion section is not exactly the place to go to find genuine scientific analysis.
I found the Wall Street Journal opinion section to be a very disturbing piece at times. For some reason or another they are very agenda driven.
I am a proper scientist, and studied atmospheric chemistry at university. My opinion of Real Climate is they are heavily biased and ignore a lot of good science that suggests either global warming isn't happening or that it isn't man-made.
I read Crichton's book, I agree it wasn't well written, I also read the debunk at Real Climate. They ignored all his good points, namely that nobody knows why global warming is happening or if it is happening (truth, even if you seem to disbelieve this).
The facts are that we don't know what is going on, nor what we should do, all the good evidence is not easily conclusive. However most scientists in the field and outside it agree that global-warming probably is happening and that we should stop filling the atmosphere with crap to try and stop it.
In my experience, very few scientists can discuss their field in a scientific, non-biased fashion. Take Real-Climate with a pinch of salt dude.
There seems to be an inordinate emphasis to maintain the climatologically status quo. I propose restoring the climate to its pristine condition. All of the great carbon sinks-- Oil, Coal, even Limestone were derived from natural carbon dioxide originating in the Earth's primordial atmosphere. If we continue to combust these unnatural forms of carbon compounds, we might hope to restore the atmosphere and global environment to their pristine condition of approximately 3.5 billion years ago. Barbecuers rejoice in achieving good eats through responsible Carbon Dioxide restoration.
BBQ promotes Global Warming
Bottom line.. Even if global warming isn't a reality, that is no excuse to act irresponsibly with our manufacture and use of products.
I work with geologists, glaciologists, climatologists, and meteorologists all days, and there are several signs that warming is occuring- the most convincing being the melt of tropical glaciers, of which all of them are melting."
= 26&objectid=3504064
h tml
m l/content/factsheets/oldreports/glaciers2.html
No, they're not. And yours is a perfect example of why this subject is so divisive. If you genuinely are a grad student in atmospheric sciences, then you'd know that not all glaciers are melting.
So, either you're lying or you're a poor student. Either way, you're wrong.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF16/1678.
http://archive.greenpeace.org/climate/arctic99/ht
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
"What would the state have to gain by promoting global warming?"
And control over your choices.
How did you get modded up?
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
Rather retired, it was his underlings that got fired.
It would have made a much stronger statement if they had fired him, but they didn't.
From wiki
"the controversy has been dubbed by some as "Memogate" and "Rathergate." Following an independent investigation commissioned by CBS, CBS fired story producer Mary Mapes and asked three other producers connected with the story to resign. It is unclear whether or not Rather's retirement was directly caused by this incident, although many believe that he had to step down a year earlier than planned."
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
The floods in central Europe broke records lasting hundreds of years. Repeatedly in 1998,1999, 2002 and now 2006. Just try searching for floods in Central Europe. Or prehaps for heavy snowfall this year. Or perhaps about the wild-fires in recent years. No. Never happened. In your basement.
How do you correlate floods and heavy snowfall (last year it was snow drought in Europe) with an increase of atmospheric CO2 of a few parts per million? Total madness. Flood damage occurs in Europe like in the US because people live in flood zones. Rivers flood. Shock! What calamity to you blame the floods 100's of years ago, the Ottomans? Think clearly!
an ill wind that blows no good
"Glaciers and ice shelfs are melting. Everywhere. Now."
m l/content/factsheets/oldreports/glaciers2.html
D =3504064&thesection=news&thesubsection=general
h tml
Nope.
http://archive.greenpeace.org/climate/arctic99/ht
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyI
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF16/1678.
I appreciate how attached you are to your opinions. Now, stop making up facts to support them, like ALL glaciers are melting NOW, and we can talk.
But you won't. You're too attached to what you think to bother with what the facts are.
And that first link? It's from Greenpeace. Question their bias, please. I could use a good laugh.
They're not ALL melting. Educate yourself.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
Yes, you should ignore that. We're not talking politics, we're talking science.
One does not exclude the other. Science isn't above being manipulated for political reasons.
Ignoring research simply because you don't like the messenger is unscientific, ignorant, and narrow minded.
Accepting research blindly no matter who delivers it is unscientific, ignorant and narrow minded.
Again: The tobacco companies were FULL of research proving their poisons were harmless. They had also done research that proved they were deadly, but they COVERED THOSE UP. When there are millions, or billions of dollars in play, it's FREAKIN RETARDED to just assume that the people in the lab coats are all equally just and honest.
You can't take the sky from me...
If we end up spending $10/gal on gasoline it won't be because of climate. It'll be because of shortage. If anything acting on the current climate changes will reduce the usage of gasoline, delaying such a steep price.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
"Trying to argue that we shouldn't be concerned about industrial greenhouse gasses because carbon dioxide variations occur naturally is a bit like arguing we shouldn't be concerned about arson because fires occur naturally in the wild."
That's a poor analogy. A better analogy would be "Trying to argue that we shouldn't be concerned about industrial greenhouse gasses because carbon dioxide variations occur naturally is a bit like arguing we shouldn't be concerned about a smoker flicking a match into the Towering Inferno."
Richard Lindzen is a paid consultant for coal and oil interests. And he's not even willing to put his money where his mouth is.
Seriously, every time I hear some "distinguished professor" spouting facts that seem a little too convenient to be true, I go to Sourcewatch.
The pursuit of knowledge should be the ultimate goal and if we are a democracy we should be able to ask for that. Why is everything about taking sides? Why can't scientists entertain both idea's, rather than it being a debate about who is right or who is wrong. There would be a lot less fake science if profit motive could be removed from funders. We are losing at science and our government is making it worste by prioritizing war, which is good for military technology but bad for sustainable living. I'm so anoid about this being a debate about wether global warming is happening. it should be a debate about how the earth works. And for those of us who dream of traveling to other solar systems it is more about planetary anthropology than making long term predictions. For instance if we started to really understand different indicators, and what they might allude we may be able to test teraforming ideas. If our planet is ultimately doomed, do we have time to try to teraform rather than mass killings? We need to deal with the population but there has got to be another way then repressive China or mass killings. And assuming the poles will be the only thing uninhabitable doesn't it make a hell of a lota sense to phocus money on energy effitiancy and the sciences than short term oil gains. Because hopefully from good science we could learn to terraform. Mars is like a giant play ground that could be next. Well just a thought,
It is NOT being accepting to give all viewpoints equal weight. If you told me that gravity was created by invisible gnomes pouring out anti-wedgies that held me down to earth by the seat of my pants, I'd have no problem telling you that you're an idiot for believing it.
So, in other words, it's "accepting" to reject some things?
One [evolution] is way more possible than the other [creationism]. I'll take the one that has a mountain of verifiable scientific evidence, thanks.
To me, "verifiable scientific evidence" is that which comes from forming a hypothesis, experimenting, and then drawing a conclusion. What about evolution is testable? The best tests I have seen are being done by a scientist who has strains of bacteria that he can breed up to 24K generations in a short time. (I read his papers in "Nature".) He can actually see how each strain of bacteria adapts to stress by testing them. He's noticed how different strains will adapt in different and unpredictable ways.
Outside of that, all parts of evolutionary theory are, at best, guesswork. No testing is possible. Therefore, there is no "mountain of verifiable scientific evidence" because the theories cannot be verified through experimentation. I don't think that much of what evolutionary theory is qualifies as science. Before you get all upset, please accept that denying the science in evolutionary theory does not imply that "creationism is true" (and I admit that is the tactic employed by the fundies). Believing in creationism necessitates many, many more leaps of faith and will never, EVER be science.
If you think that 2+2=7 I am not being an asshole by telling you that you're misinformed. Also, life isn't fair. Welcome to reality.
I detest this "informed / misinformed" business that has become so popular among the Left nowadays. Why not just say "wrong"? Does it come from some belief that most everyone is a stupid sheep just waiting for some more enlightened individual to "inform" them what the Truth(tm) is?
At least it's not as pompous as "nuanced". I've started using that as a verb -- as in, "Ew, you just nuanced all over your shirt!"
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
No idea how much truth there really is in that sentiment, but, it is worth pointing out that TFA is hardly from an unbiased source itself - one might event say, The mouthpiece of pretty much everyone who stands to lose most immediately should warming-from-pollution turn out to be true. Further, Dr. Lindzen is, in fact, a member of the same group he accuses of fueling the controversy for personal gain - as someone both more senior than the average climate researcher and as someone on the opposite side of the alleged controvery, it isn't much of a stretch to wonder if he himself is feeling the pinch. Just sayin'...
Global Warming can be a significant concern to Europe and the British Isles in particular, since it can result in a significantly colder climate, and the formation of glaciers.
It works like this.
The warmer weather begins to melt the ice and snow covering Greenland. The resulting melt-off is dumped into the North Atlantic, where it reduces the salinity of the seawater. This forces the Gulf Stream to run deeper underwater than is normal, depriving England and Europe of its warmth. Take a look at a map sometime and see how far north these places are.
Thousands of years ago, a similar melt-off happened in the North Atlantic, and within 70 years created one of the last ice ages. When it happens, it happens relatively quickly.
The world is getting warmer. That much is clear, but whether mankind has the ability to influence temperatures one way or the other on a planetary scale (short of something like a nuclear war), I don't believe is quite as certain. We need more study and less rhetoric before we can say for sure what's happening and what we can do about it (if anything).
That having been said, however, it would be prudent for us as a species not to make matters worse. To use a computer analogy, you may feel safe from malware because you run a Mac or Linux, but it's still a good idea to avoid being stupid or careless. Just in case.
This is where the politicians in Washington remind me of my 13-year-old son. Unless he is facing an immediate and certain crisis, he won't do a thing. Tell him he can mitigate a future crisis by taking simple measures, and he acts like you're some kind of nut for worrying about something that hasn't happened yet.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
It is of little import whether an increase in the mean global temperatures is caused by man made greenhouse gases, natural cyclical events, or a combination of the two. What matters is that the Earth is indeed warming up. Few still argue that it is not.
Within the variation of possible temperatures which could occur on Earth, there is a very small subset of temperature in which human life is possible, which is within a slightly larger subset of temperatures necessary for sustaining higher life forms. It is in the best interests of the future, if we take take the issue of climate change seriously, and there is little harm if we over compensate for the warming trend.
Often, the Contemporary Conservatives and their crony capitalist financial supporters, have attempted to portray greenies, environmental issues and solutions, as being anti-free market, and socialistic. If you believe that our current economic system is a free-market, you are being neoconnived. Corporations receive favorable legislation from the politicians whom they aided financially to get elected. This is quid quo pro protectionism, it is the rapine and defilement of Adam Smith. It is not a free and open process.
The fact that many of the previously proffered plans to mitigate greenhouse gases tilt leftwards in the political bipolarity is that the left-sided have been the ones to seek solutions, while libertarian and true free market conservative policy wonks have not directed their thoughts towards free market solutions.
Neither side of our binary challenged polity has honestly looked at what should have been a bright beacon leading the way: the example of BP, lead by their CEO, Sir John Browne.
In 1997, Browne stunned his alma mater, Stanford Graduate School of Business, when he stated that he was going to make BP green:
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
I don't care whether people caused it or not but the fact is the climate IS changing and it isn't moving slowly. The last couple of years in the midwest it's been increasingly apparent. It's not that it's getting hotter per say but the seasons are starting to equalize here. For instance, we only had 3-4 days of snow all winter this year and only needed to use the air conditioner for roughly a week all summer last year. It's getting cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. This trend has continued getting worse for the last few years since about 2001 when I first really began paying closer attention.
Hm, I'm pretty familiar with the lumber industry putting nails in trees - and clearcutting them. Driving dangerous animals into residential areas - and building residential areas in animal habitats. And torching homes and businesses in mismanaged "wild" fires. I'm not so clear on which point is "obvious", or what is this "extreme and irrational action" you mention.
Government agencies can perpetuate their own existence by publishing research on either side of an issue. I'd like to see some proof of a government agency publishing fake research promoting the Greenhouse warnings to perpetuate its own existence. Because we're all familiar with industry doing that to deny the Greenhouse. And we're now familiar with the government suppressing Greenhouse warnings to protect their industry bribers^Wsponsors.
BTW, "virulent" doesn't mean what you apparently think it means. But it's a good word to literally describe the Greenhouse we're building for ourselves.
--
make install -not war
If the grants are comming from the government than it sets off a paranoid alarm. What if the powers that be need to believe in global warming so they can attempt their mass kill off of certain sections of the global populace. I am kinda anoid about the global warming is comming people. I think it is fair to say wether we are making a great impact that there is going to be a cause and effect nature on the planet from our actions and it doesn't mater which side your on. What matters is strong evidance of how the planets actualy works. Where are the agnostics of science, the neutral folk who chose to believe that either possibility is likely to be true. If we made our arguments this way anyone reading your paper would grow smarter reading it, in theory, by the very act of obsorbing thinking patterns. To truely grasp climate, takes a hell of a lot of veriables, I think I am in with Richard Feynman, we must entertain and doubt all ideas equaly to be truely balanced scientists. Why do we always in america have to bias our searches with an opinion? Why do people need to feel right in order to comfort themselves? What happened to the want to understand, rather than just knowing. I think regardless wether we can prove global warming I think it is safe to say that humans are having more of an impact on the earth than any other species and so we should look for evidance of our actions in oreder to take resposibility for the earth, because if you get to that point in evolution where your collective intelligence has gotten so good at servival that the irony is you are also the greatest threat to your own survival, then it is time for you to be the curator of the earth. I'm sorta jumping topic but not really. Some social Darwinists think that war is darwinian. I would argue pre bombs that was true. But bombs are indicrimanate, where fighting with guns or preferably pre guns, the strongest, quickest, smartest fighters survived. That was much more Darwinian. How does this fit into the weather. Well when we prioritize war, we have to deprioritise other things, like the war. I think the wealthy elite sorta see Global warming as a nifty way to deal with poor people since rich people tend to move to the high lands. Through this deprioritation we cut money from schools. Which doesn't help global warming research or sutainable technologies. And the big boats that carry the Jets consume thousands of gallons of oil a day. War is wasteful, there are better ways of dealing not only with population control but with resources. We could have invested into America's streangths rather than de-evolving into our weaknesses, basicaly our addiction to oil and our willingness to defend Isreal from iran which is probobly just about oil as well. Bottom line, war is doing nothing for the global warming problem assuming it exists. And regardless of who is right and who is wrong on the weather debate, sustainable technologies will make the standard of living go up, because of less smog, better factory conditions, cleaner energy plants (so nicer to look at), longer lasting batteries that take less time to charge (which will be nice for my computer), we could cut down less tree's by actualy trying to make everything digital, although there still needs to be libraries with books because the digital madium is virtual and so therefore books stand the chance of more easily being wipped out, where with book burning you have to find the damn books. I am sure there are many details I am missing about the quality of life factors. I do not think we live in a true democracy anymore, I think america hase de-evolved in to a depitistic state. Se still have our freedom of speach. But if we don't keep our eyes wide open it could be taken away by self rightious dellusional people by force and chaos. Regime change! Michael
Yep... 6 Billion People are having no effect on the planet.
So what happens when a population of animals exceeds the ability of the environment to sustain it?
Picking apart articles on accepted science based on relatively recent research is not really that damning, or even very difficult. That's the difference between current research and accepted science.
It took global warming a long time to become accepted science. It too was once derided and laughed at as a sham, but became accepted science after a significant corpus of research as well as continued trends gave it greater credence.
As you point out, you can pick apart both pro-GW and anti-GW scientific studies (especially ones that are glossed down a bit so that people who are not in that particularly narrow pigeonhole of scientific study -- e.g. readers of general science mags -- can have some understanding of it; even the fairly accessible summary of Denning's research is a bit dazzling at first) based on specific research cases. This isn't surprising; there's got to be a fair amount of cutting-edge research, both current and relatively recent, that has not yet made it through the elastic wall of accepted science.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
The author of this piece clearly has a bone to pick with those who have gotten funding. he freely admits that one of his most recent papers was "discredited" by a major journal. I think that the major motivation of this piece is to vent his frustration and it clearly shows his bias on the issue.
I do agree that the current US administration breeds an environment of alarmism that seems to have taken over...well...EVERYTHING.
However, the author states three "truths":
1. the global temperature has increased by one degree since the 1900's.
2. global CO2 levels have increased by 30%.
3. increasing CO2 levels should add to global warming in the future.
As an atmospheric scientist, at MIT no less, he should know that that type of a chemical shift in the atmosphere is significant. In fact, the last ice age was brought about by a shift of only 2-3 degrees (F).
There are extremes in this argument, as with any that involve extreme amounts of money (scientific funding & oil revenues alike). There are those who truly believe that there is reason for alarm. There are also those who believe that global warming is not happening.
And of course, there are people on both sides of the issue whose opinions are driven by greed. Such is human nature.
This does not, however, allow us to discredit the fact that those three truths are still true and real facts, and something to be dealt with.
Whether or not you believe that those changes are the result of human activity, they are atmospheric shifts that will undoubtedly cause global changes in our lifetime.
The point is not to fight about it; the point is to find a solution, or at least some sort of amelioration. THAT is why the global community is talking about how to fix the problem and not whethere or not it's happening.
The thing that gets me about the global warming debate is that the economic cost and risk about the same no matter what, but if we DO something about global warming, we at least get some technological and poliitical benefits. Even assuming that Global warming is a natural trend, it'shappening. Regardless of whether it's "caused" by human or natural factors, we can certainly reduce our "unnatural" contributions to greenhouse gasses to an extent that will reduce the impact of any "natural" warming trend.
If we take action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, we get 1) new and/or improved technologies to improve energy efficiency and reduce fossil fuel consumption 2) Better public transportation (at least in the US). Both of these leave us better prepared for when the oil runs out and reduce our interdependence with Islamic fundamentalists that happen to own oil.
Another reason to wean ourselves off of fossil fuel is if we burn all the fossil fuels in coal, oil and natural gas, the CO2 content of the atmosphere will be so high it will kill most vertebrate life on the planet. This is a longer trend (200 years+/-), but it's still within a historic, rather than a geologic time period.
If we don't do anything about global warming, we (in the US) have a choice either to build a levee around the entire East Coast of the US from Galveston to Miami to Portland Maine, plus much of the west coast as well. The east coast levee would destroy the Gulf Coast Bayous, Everglades national park and hundreds of square miles of property and wetlands. If we do nothing about the levee the ocean should take about 50-100 years to cover thousands of square miles of residential, commercial and industrial real-estate valued in the trillions of dollars. So exactly how is this a lower cost than taking action about global warming? And given current budget levels, how long do you think it would take to build such a levee?
Other countries around the world all have the same problem.
The cost is extreme no matter how we go, but the social and economic benefit is much greater if we act proactively. Of course, it may already be too late. The ice cap melts in Greenland and Antarctica have already accelerated twice as fast as expected.
We are the 198 proof..
If it turns out that there's a problem, you've got to rduce the NET emissions, while still maintaining output. Ideally, you also want to equal or increase profits in the proces. This should not be a problem, because you have to pay for the waste you generate (even if it's nothing more advanced than maintaining a venting system). It is not profitable to create pollution. Nobody pays you to do that. The more useful work you can do, then, with the same resources, the more money you will make.
And this is where I differ from the political hacks. A CORRECT solution won't ruin the economy, it'll bolster it. The R&D alone would inject vast amounts of money into the system, and the improved productivity that could potentially result would sustain those profits for a long time.
Now, if it turns out that there's no problem at all, then the above solution is even better, as it improves the scalability of everything out there. Better scalability means greater resiliance against economic downturns, faster reaction to changing requirements, greater profitability, cheaper products and greater availability.
The R&D would need to be Government-funded, but as I'm expecting it to result in a massive upswing in the economy, they'd get paid back very rapidly through the taxes it would bring in. Were the Government to go to each of the key industries and offer substantial contracts to invent whole new replacement processes and mechanisms for key polluters, we could be seeing returns within a few years.
This approach is similar to President Bush's advocacy of letting industry deal with the problem, but it is much more aggressive and it provides industry with both means and motivation. You can't get solutions by wishing for them, but you CAN get solutions by both paying for them and pushing for them.
As for the research into global warming, you are correct that we have insufficient data. We do need much more data, we also need much better computer simulations, and we therefore need much better computers to run those simulations on. Because of the chaotic nature of the system, no amount of data will be "sufficient", but we do nonetheless need far more than we have. (We have next to no information for the south pole, for example, where air flows are demonstrably 100% different from the assumptions made in most simulations.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
And violent movies and games cause murderers, while pornography causes rapists, and premarital sex causes broken homes and STDs. It can't be proven yet, but it would be foolish to wait for absolute proof before banning these things. After all, it wouldn't kill you to go without movies, games, porn, or sex now would it?
I hear this argument all the time that we need to change our way of life because the "predictions" might be true. It is absurd. Is global warming really that much different than any other religion? I will fight to the death anyone that tries to impose their will on my life without proof as to the necessity, NO MATTER WHAT THE POSSIBLE CONSEQUENCES ARE.
now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.
http://iceagenow.com/
I won't clam that this source is somehow authoratative but the claims can be checked. The claims are that indeed many glaciers, including those near where glaciers are supposedly becoming extinct, are GROWING! What makes a glacier grow? More snow is the argument. Artic is melting? Sure the Northern most tip is but down further South they are having to continuosly build new research stations because old ones are getting buried!
Perhaps not something that will change your mind but certainly some interesting counterpoints to the belief that suddenly everything is getting too hot - and facts you can doublecheck complete with refrences. Funny thing the other day - someone mentioned global warming to me and how the seas were rising blah blah. So I asked this person how much they thought the seas had risen based on all that they had read - "Several feet at least" was the response. I then pointed out that a relatives home I'm aware of is less than 18inches above sea level and is within a block of the beach - and has been for my entire life. It has NEVER been flooded, despite multiple hurricanes passing over this year, and is apparently in no immediete danger. They got real quiet after that.
The general public is being spooked by the press. The sky is falling! I'm still not quite convinced but will certainly be happy to cut back on emissions to a reaosnable degree - makes sens to me.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I totally agree, the irony that Florida will disappear 90 percent beneath the waves by 2040 whilst the oil rigs off Texas are impacted by the increased hurricanes and storm surges is fairly ironic. Oh, and I remember playing with horseshoe crabs off Galveston TX when I was a boy (born in Lackland AFB San Antonio, TX - and at ten spent a year in Arlington TX).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
See, we created this huge stockpile of ice in Nevada, in a place designated as Area 51, and we're bringing ice stolen from the poles with the help of heavy-lift airships we disguised as UFOs. Now we let the planet warm up and soon, our ice stockpile will be worth BILLIONS! Muhahahahaha!!!
So why am I telling you? Because nanobots sprayed by chemtrails are invading your body as we speak. They'll soon settle in your brain, and you too will feel this irresistible urge to enlist and go kill peaceful civilians in random foreign countries, with the rest of the brainwashed zombies. You'll see, you will *love* Big Brother instead of fearing it. Did I mention "muhahaha"?
As for your pertinent remark about attacking Iran, you reached the wrong department. I'll transfer your call to the International Zionist Conspiracy, they'll, er, handle your case.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
That is exactly what the Y2K crackpots did 6 years ago -- claim credit for saving the world after all the ludicrous Y2K disaster predictions failed to materialize. I say this in spite of being more inclined to accept global warming claims.
Because the number one factor in warming in both cases is the sun. And it could point to a possible affect and parallel trend. Second, because there is so much dismissal of any facts that put into question the global warming theorum that it acts a very good reflection of the lack of science involved.
If science were involved instead of rhetoric and dogma, people would weigh and consider. There'd be some who would say, "that's interesting...we definitely need to look into that possibility".
Hey, what if we're all worried about global warming and totally missing a change in the sun. That could be way way way worse than global warming. Now, I'm not saying I think such is happening. But heck, if we're going to claim science we need to consider such possibilities, we also need to expand the scope historically. A 150 yr, 2,000 yr or 10,000 yr reference is not adequate in this sort of analysis. And needs to be take in a much greater scope.
I just think a lot of the arguments I've heard for global warming are very foolish, poor science, and more rhetoric...and the abuse against anyone who disagrees is excessive. And if it proves to be false, it will only be harder to win over the minds of people in the future. Don't think so....realize one of the major reasons of doubt is that we were told we were heading toward an ice age and everything was getting colder a few decades ago. Now, the same records are interpreted differently and we're told that was all wrong it's the opposite problem.
And people are just sick of the fearism of this crap.
All that said, the difference between a 20mpg and 50mpg vehicle is going to make very little difference overall. Damning everyone who drives an SUV with insults only hurts the cause and makes all of the people crying such rhetoric look like ignorant arrogant assholes.
The irony I am an avid supporter of hybrids, fuel cells, and advanced technologies because regardless of global warming I believe we need to reduce pollution, toxicity, and waste and increase efficiency while minimalizing environmental impact. I just think scaring people with poor and misleading data is not of any benefit.
In short, you don't have any particular reason. Yes, the sun is involved in both systems, but then again water is involved in both biochemistry and rivers, but you don't find hydrologists and molecular biologists duplicating each other's play books. The climates of Mars and Earth are sure to have a good many similarities, but the atmospheric composition, the geography and the nature of water on both planets pretty much suggests that there will be some very wild differences that make any one-to-one extrapolations meaningless.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I posted facts, in the most insulting way I could come up with because you junk science fanatics who think that ExxonMobil PR people have the same standing as people who do science for a living irritate me the same way Creationists do.
Are you a Creationist as well? Of course, I know that you aren't going to be convinced by facts about either evolution or global warming, and you aren't going to check out any facts I or anyone else will post, so I might as well have fun with this.
You're whining about facts because you are incapable of refuting them, just like the "scientist" on ExxonMobil's payroll. Is google your friend? Check this out for yourself if you know how... it's easily verifiable. Just google on:
"Richard Lindzen" ExxonMobil funding
Not that you actually will.
Where does this leave you? In the same moral position as the ex-scientist who forfeited his standing in the science community because public relations pays better. But with a lot less money, because you have no personal credibility to sell out to an oil company.
Go play with your Windows XP box. You're obviously gullible enough to believe MS claims about Windows security.
Tech Public Policy stuff
The catch is that by the time it is proven beyond any doubt, the worst predictions may have occurred. It seems foolish to do nothing until it's too late, especially because the risk is so great and the cost is so minor.
*snort* Riiiiight, the cost is minor.
So far, global warming "solutions" I have seen fall into three categories:
1) They completely destroy the economies of a random selection of first world countries, and might make a tiny difference to the temperature of the planet one century from now.
2) They result in the deaths of millions of third world inhabitants due to starvation or exposure, and might make a tiny difference to the temperature of the planet one century from now.
3) They do some weaker variation of (1) and/or (2), but make no measurable difference to any temperatures anywhere, ever.
Seeing as there are studies out there that show we may actually enter into an ice age in the next few decades, and they are just as believable (if not more so) as any of the global warming work I have seen, maybe we should rush outside and burn things just in case?
---
I think Crighton had something salient to say about "consensus":
I'
"So remember the new number: 0118-999-88199-9119-725...3"
You say it is a "fact" that Mars is warming up. Can you be more specific? What's the heating rate? Can you direct me to the data?
You read that they "simply delete" posts? can you be more specific, please?
What about these other objects in the solar system. Do they have names? What is their rate of heating? Are these data published in the scientific literature?
Denialism is a funny thing. People deny that global warming is occurring. Yet the same people who deny GW probably believe the weather reports from NOAA, put out by some of the same scientists who tell us global warming is real (predicting the weather is not the same as predicting climate change, BTW). But the basic principles, the underlying science is the same. I'm a scientist (PhD, physics), I've examined the evidence, and I believe global warming is real. Spread the word. RealClimate is an excellent source of information. Conflating RC with the Catholic Church is ridiculous in the extreme. They have almost nothing in common. Learn about how science is done. A good reference on this topic is the book "Why People Believe Weird Things." They should have a copy at your local library or bookstore.
We ignore Global Climate Change at our own peril. Perhaps our children and their children will curse our stupidity and arrogance. Perhaps millions upon millions will suffer needlessly. We're perfoming the biggest experiment in history, and we're living in the laboratory. Denialists tell us not to worry, just keep turning the key in that SUV. That's irresponsible and just plain stupid, IMHO. Good luck, Humanity!
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller
We had Y2K in our industry and look how many billions were spent on something that we all knew was a bunch of BS. Many people post rationalized that the reason nothing bad happened was because something was done. But these people were part of the problem and don't want to admit to their bosses that huge amounts of money didn't need to be spent. And if you don't believe me, just look at the countries that didn't spend the money we did. No doomsday for them even though very little was done.
Gotta disagree with you there that it was "total BS". It was not. Now, maybe there were some places where people used the Y2K issue to get funding for projects that had nothing to do with it. But I know of software that used to use 2-digit years. What mattered was how software handled the "overflow" to the year "00". If it thought of it as the year "2000", then everything was peachy. There may come a day when that software needs to be updated, because of the year 2100, because some places just elected to keep their dates as two digits, where "00" was "2000".
There were some companies that were in the clear years ago. Banks are an example. They had to start using 4-digit years decades ago, because they had to deal with 30-year mortgages and the like.
I agree that Y2K was overhyped, but there was some truth to the notion that it was a crisis. It just depended on which company/institution had the most legacy software that was still critical to their operation. The fact that nothing happened (though famously Blockbuster Video had some MASSIVE overdue charges show up ;) ), IS attributable to the fact that something was done. I heard a computer expert who's been in the business for decades (can't remember the name. As I recall he's the guy who came up with the CTRL-ALT-Delete sequence for rebooting the PC) describe Y2K as one of the few times in history when we had a totally preventable crisis, because it was associated with a date that we all knew was coming. He said that after the year 2000 passes, some software engineers would get calls from people, and the media asking them if, since nothing happened, whether it was all just a hoax. He said, "Perish the thought!" He also described how Y2K software engineers were being overworked, and he predicted that in 1999/2000 that a lot of them would burn out and change jobs, or leave the profession altogether.
"So remember the new number: 0118-999-88199-9119-725...3"
I followed up with a link showing that soil organic matter decomposition exceeds the CO2 output of ALL fossil fuels combined. In fact, it shows that CO2 released by soil organic matter decomposition exceeds emissions of CO2 from ALL OTHER SOURCES combined. You continue to maintain steadfastly that mankind is at fault for increasing atmospheric CO2 levels. Sure, I can see that, and I just painted a big red target on what you SHOULD focus on if that concerns you. You also maintain this atmospheric CO2 increase is solely responsible for the average global increase in temperatures. I am not convinced.
However, if you are, and it really bothers you so much, why don't you DO something about it? Why don't you go after the 800 lb. gorilla instead of the small fish that is fossil fuel? It's an easier target. A 10% decrease in CO2 emissions caused by soil organic matter decomposition would be the equivalent of ceasing use of ALL FOSSIL FUELS. Go for the jugular if you're so damned convinced. And yet... you don't. When confronted with the facts, you simply whine and rail on about oil. That gets really old. Especially considering that if you don't do something about soil erosion/oxidation soon, you aren't going to have any arable land left to grow the food you eat. Your waterworld scenario is pure fantasy. Failure of civilization due to poor farming practices is established historical fact. Learn from history or repeat it. Change the world over to no till farming and in the process you will: preserve our farmland for future generations, reduce CO2 to pre-industrial levels, and do it all without laying a finger on fossil fuels. What's not to like? Oh, thats right... it doesn't fit with the holy order of Global Warming's war on fossil fuels. Ignore all scientific fact in the jihad on oil. Besides, if you actually did reduce CO2, you might just have a little egg on your face should mean global temperatures continue to increase or fail to drop back...
I dont think "funny" is quite appropriate.. but at the worst I'd say "off-topic", not troll.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Whoa whoa whoa! :o
I completely agree with you on the crisis maximation but please don't drag Y2K into it. I don't know about Africa, Asia, Oceania, or South America but I can speak for Europe and North America. Now I would like to add that less developed economies are far less dependent on the kind of systems the Y2K problem really affected seriously, but I don't know the details of any such country and what was or wasn't done there although I know there were some programs adressing the issue as a sort of aid.
Now I don't know what you or others here did if working with the Y2K problem but anyone worth their pay were doing regression testing of any and all components, making subsystems work together. It's not like it was a mindless gamble, it was fairly easy to set the clocks and check for which systems delivered wrong results. A lot of systems did, no I don't care about your pc or home computer, I care about the nuclear reactors, the chemical plants, the steel plants, the air traffic control, the assembly lines, oil refineries, military systems, hospitals, sewer systems, electrical grids, water lines, gas lines, financial centers, tons and tons of circuitry and trust me there was a lot that had to be changed. What's even worse there was a lot of supposedly Y2K-compliant replacements that didn't stand up to the testing afterwards either and had to be changed again. A few rare times it had to be done even after the third test which of course meant running a fourth test to verify the system. Going back to the same chemical plant for a fourth time after three shutdowns and startups (of the whole plant mind you, sometimes had to be done that way to be safe) with each shutdown taking days (some industrial plants could take longer) really puts a strain on you because you realize that you can't afford to have to do this everywhere if neccessary.
Yes there was a fair amount of noise-to-signal regarding Y2K to the ordinary civilian, and an incredible amount of self-censorship by governments and the serious press. I will never ever trust media to give me news again even though I'm thankful they kept quiet because it wouldn't have helped anything if they spoke up about the real details.
I'm sick of hearing people saying it was some kind of hoax! To those involved it was frustrating and at times severely depressing, because we knew what would happen if we didn't get most of it fixed. Do you know how delicate timing is required in many chemical reactions? What the worst case effects are if things gets seriously out of whack? I personally know people among those working on this that got severe post-stress reactions during the spring of 2000.
But yes of course there were some fears that some people raised that luckily did not come to pass. Cascading timing errors of non-local origin wasn't the issue it could have been, errors hidden in ladder (somewhat similar to code libraries) programming weren't as bad as they could have been.
Almost all critical work was done under confidentiality agreements and I guess that's why a lot isn't known to the general public. That's somewhat disillusionary to me because I think people should know, it was a historical moment in some respects and now clueless people are just joking about it, thinking it was fake. Hopefully the companies will release the material themselves in a decade or so because there's a lot of unsung heroes out there in my opinon. Even more importantly the Y2K problem is a very important historical lesson on a grand scale about unforseen consequences of technology.
It was hard on those who worked seriously on the problem, hard for their families, and at least for me the time around september was the worst because it all begun to really sink in, especially the feeling of having too little time and there was a slight feeling of panic from some government coordinators which didn't exactly help. After that it became a weird sort of fatalism, you just kept working as much as possible and that was it. Some of the aforemen
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=17977
/ mars_snow_011206-2.html ...
...
was the easiest example to find of reporting on the nasa report.
I'm not familiar with heartland.org so here is another...
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem
From the article:
Global warming on Mars?
The odd shapes -- circular pits, ridges and mounds -- were first photographed in 1999. Since then, the features have eroded away by up to 50 percent.
The pits are growing, the ridges between them shrinking...
The newly observed melting, if it is part of a trend, could pump enough carbon dioxide
---
Listen- I voted against Bush both times. I think we are in a global warming cycle. I do -not- agree that humans are the main cause of this global warming cycle.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
January 19 2038 isn't fake either, you have any idea how much old metal is running?
I think I know what you're talking about here. In a project I was on developing Unix server software, pre-2000, we implemented Y2K-compliant code so there would be no problems. A customer did ask if there was a possibility of running into problems later. I investigated the issue, and answered "yes", because many of the time values we were using within the software were based on a 32-bit time code which represented all of the seconds since 1970. The problem with it that I saw is 'round about 2030 (it might've been 2038--it was a long time ago when I did this), this 32-bit value overflows. I'm not sure what it would do then, go back to zero (1970)?
I discussed this with our VP. of Engineering and he wasn't alarmed about it. He figured that by then everyone would be using wider bus architectures (64 bit, 128 bit, etc.), and that the values from the time functions we were using would expand accordingly. As a policy we released the source code for each project to each of our clients. He said that because of this, they could just recompile the software when they upgraded their hardware architecture, thereby fixing the problem, since the memory allocated for integers would expand to the new bus size (the hope being that it would be 64- or 128-bit by then instead of 32-bit).
It sounds like you're dealing with embedded systems, which I imagine don't get upgraded as often as PCs and servers.
"So remember the new number: 0118-999-88199-9119-725...3"
(The example I gave - 10% reduction in pollution, but with a 50% reduction in work done - would be a good example of an illusary improvement. We may have achieved the magic number, but only by almost doubling the overall pollution.)
Some things could be done. Car millage is currently based on a tiny random sample, and I believe it's only an arithmetic average (mean value), not a minimum or even the average by other measures (median and mode) and is a fixed value according to the car's class. If this is the path to be followed, a minimum (or variance) and a median should be specified as well. Because cars are NOT uniformly travelling at 55mph along perfectly smooth roads, you want to know the efficiency under a wide range of conditions, and you want to define what is within acceptable limits under all of those conditions.
This is NOT the work of politicians - this is an area for experts in mechanical engineering, chemistry, physics and perhaps even civil engineering (since we'd want to know how the variables we're operating in change over time). However committees rarely design anything useful, so they should be required to actually produce proofs of concept that can achieve what they claim is achievable, within the constraints of what they claim is required to achieve it.
Politicians should then be handed a document outlining what is typically achieved (which should be the minimum standards) and what could be realistically achieved (which should be the standards at which manufacturers would be rewarded somehow). The politicians should be limited to signing off on the work of those who know what they're doing.
Practical examples and demonstration implementations should make for laws that corporations would WANT to follow, because if their competitors do so before them, their competitors will take away their business.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There are two kinds of people in this world, those who cannot grasp the concept of an analogy and they are like really stupid people.
Excelent point. There is an article that you might want to read that speaks of people trying to pass hypothesis like theories, when they don't have much more than equations or few data.
The author doesn't clam such hypothesis are false, just that they shouldn't be accepted as a given truth. He speaks of things like nuclear winter and SETI.
Aliens Cause Global Warming
My worst enemy gave me a copy of Windows for Christmas.
Technocrats and intellectual elites are a Bad Idea, but utilizing the intellectual resources as far as possible for the benefit of the country is a Good Idea. My suggestion - almost a jury pool of advisors - is probably not the best option anyone can come up with, but it would seem better than the fiasco we have at present.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"As far as I can tell, any of the arguments used to defend anti-Global-Warming scientists can apply equally well to my babies-come-from-storks argument."
How can a scientist be "anti-" anything? Isn't the goal of science to construct theories and then seek to assail them from all angles to demonstrate their resistance to disproof? To say, "OK, now we're going to accept the prior evidence and continue forward," is to dispose of the scientific method which constantly works to disprove or revise existing theory.
As far as your stork theory... well, if you're an accomplished biologist who has some reasonable defense of that theory, then I think it should be investigated. What's more — and this is key — others should not only be allowed, but funded and encouraged to attempt to disprove your theory. Welcome to the scientific method.
Science is like a sculpture. You don't create something without chipping away at what is established. Einstein could not have done his work if he had been branded an "anti-Newtonian scientist" and cut off from any source of funding. To do this returns us to the time when the church established "truth" and punished anyone who questioned it.