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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.'"
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.
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.