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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.'"
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.
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.
Yeah, they just have $1.7 Billion in funding to fight over, in the US alone.
RTFA
-Kurt
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
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.
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.
This is hardly the position of MIT as an institution. It is a single MIT professor's opinion.
Are you suggesting that it is disgraceful for MIT to employ professors who don't blindly parrot the majority opinion on scientific and political issues?
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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?
What a cesspool of nonsense. The first city lost to global warming? I'm pretty sure it was lost to a hurricane. Do you have proof that global warming causes hurricanes? Did you read the article where he goes on to describe the HUGE debate in the science community about whether global warming would produce STRONGER or WEAKER hurricanes? There is no consensus that hurricanes are getting stronger because of global warming. You are literally making that up.
Next you go ont to say "Sounds to me like people who don't believe in it are still winning". Guess what, genius... he states.. repeatedly... the earth is WARMING. He "believes" in global warming as much as I believe in your ability to read (and your ability to choose not to). What he argues is the effect it will have on the climate, and it's actual cause.
Real scientists don't make dumb statements implying that global warming caused Katrina. That's idiot-babble. No real scientists that I know of declare that global warming doesn't exist. For the 927th time in the history of this topic on slashdot, I have to correct some ignoramus who is modded up to +5 because he doesn't understand the scientific debate between the existence and the cause of global warming. And lets not even pretend that science can hope to predict the effect of global warming in the long-term future.
It is people precisely like you that make it so easy for right-wing to keep parrading out the same strawman and striking them down. You are arguing with people who haven't existed in 20 years. Get your facts straight, read the articles, and then think for at least 45 seconds about what you want to say before parroting this same tired old tripe that is easily refuted. It's ridiculous.
Jesus Tapdancing Christ.
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.)
My main opposition to the Republicans on this is that they vigorously oppose any research designed to try to determine whether or not there is a problem.
There really isn't any doubt that the Earth has warmed up over the last 25 years. There is also no doubt that some of the basic parameters of our climatological system have changed.
We need to find out how much of the global warming that we have seen is due to our activities. It might be 10%. It might be 90%. We just don't know. It might even be 100% natural.
We need to determine how far the warming will go. At what point will it slow down or even reverse itself? It really doesn't matter at all whether or not we are the cause.
We need to find out whether or not we can slow it down or even stop it as well as how to do that.
Finally, we need to determine, based on the other factors, whether or not we should even try to slow it down or stop it. The benefits of global warming, up to a reasonable point, may outweigh the downside.
There's a general rule of thumb about scientific claims. When a researcher goes through abnormal channels, like going directly to the press, the alarm bells should ring. When a researcher starts tacitly or directly invoking conspiracy theories, even more alarms should go off.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Keep in mind a sign of global warming is cooler temperates in teh UK where the article was posted due to cold freshwater obstructing the gulf stream.
Infact the mini ice age was the result of this and the gulf stream died down for several centuries during the late middle ages.
The gulf stream has slowed down by as much as %30 which would certainly explain the temperature decrease in western europe and that is quite serious
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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.
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or they could be politically motivated. I wonder how many of the global warming supporters are to the political left?
I dunno. How many global-warming ignorers are on the right?
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