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Global Warming Dissenters Suppressed?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the come-see-the-violence-inherent-in-the-system dept.

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.'"

35 of 928 comments (clear)

  1. Global Flamebait Stories Increase Slash Revenue? by Anonymous+Crowhead · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.'

  2. Freedom and Liberty by Toby+The+Economist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Freedom and Liberty by pHatidic · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What would the state have to gain by promoting global warming? Is everyone on Slashdot insane?

    2. Re:Freedom and Liberty by SuperBanana · · Score: 5, Informative
      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?

      Did you know that the Bush administration has barred climate researchers working for the government from speaking directly to the press? And that press releases, statements, or publicly released research on any climate matter must pass through the White House first, where they are essentially rewritten?

      Maybe you should tune into 60 minutes more often.

      ---Piltz worked under the Clinton and Bush administrations. Each year, he helped write a report to Congress called "Our Changing Planet." Piltz says he is responsible for editing the report and sending a review draft to the White House.

      Asked what happens, Piltz says: "It comes back with a large number of edits, handwritten on the hard copy by the chief-of-staff of the Council on Environmental Quality." Asked who the chief of staff is, Piltz says, "Phil Cooney." Piltz says Cooney is not a scientist. "He's a lawyer. He was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, before going into the White House," he says.

      Cooney, the former oil industry lobbyist, became chief-of-staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Piltz says Cooney edited climate reports in his own hand. In one report, a line that said earth is undergoing rapid change becomes "may be undergoing change." "Uncertainty" becomes "significant remaining uncertainty." One line that says energy production contributes to warming was just crossed out.

      "He was obviously passing it through a political screen," says Piltz. "He would put in the word potential or may or weaken or delete text that had to do with the likely consequence of climate change, pump up uncertainty language throughout." ----

      --
      Please help metamoderate.
    3. Re:Freedom and Liberty by Jerf · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What would the state have to gain by promoting global warming? Is everyone on Slashdot insane?

      Wha? You can't see any political reason to get people all riled up and in an irrational panic?

      It's possible to overdo the cynicism, but you need to bulk up.

      In actuality, "the state" is too broad a classification. There are many forces in play here. There are people who genuinely believe the worst-case scenarios, and are just trying to help. There are people who see the worst-case scenarios as an opportunity to increase their power; you'll find some of these people in the EPA, or driving anything where "environmentalism" and "money" collide. There are people who may or may not care about global warming per se, but see it as the perfect tool to block industry, because they believe industrialization is instrinsically evil. (These people can be identified by asking them whether they'd support the use of a perfectly clean power source that enables us all to use ten times the power; there are people who will say "no" to this, because they really do think we should all go back to living as "noble savages".)

      Also, for every accusation leveled at a global warming skeptic impugning the person, there is a corresponding motive on the global warming side. For instance, "you're in the pocket of the oil companies" corresponds to the anti-industrialists above, who will fight industry in any form.

      And that's not even a complete list.

      The issue has become extremely politicized, and I personally am not at all confident the science has survived the process. Science may be impersonal and rational, but the actual scientists are all political animals themselves and not immune to any of this, or even especially resistant.

    4. Re:Freedom and Liberty by Stradivarius · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not so much the state as an entity that gains, it's the individual people who are in positions of state power. And since these folks are often either politicians, or political appointees, they have lots at stake. If they, or their political allies, get proven wrong on an issue, it may affect their chances of future employment/prestige/election/etc. If they support research that undermines their political party's message (or their party's special interest group allies), they may be seen as "caving in" to the "enemy" and won't get the same campaign contributions.

      Especially in Washington these days, every issue is a seen not as an opportunity to find the truth or fix a problem but as a club with which to attack the opposition. So if some research looks more likely to be compatible with one's views than others, guess which is more likely to be funded?

      It's not just global warming - it's any issue. The science is simply another weapon in the political arsenal, to be discarded when it's inconvenient.

  3. Political science by vanyel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Political science by penguin-collective · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The science supporting global warming is suppressed by the politicians.

      The science opposing global warming is "suppressed" by peer review in prestigious journals.

      You can easily figure out from that one where the scientific community stands on the issue.

      (Note that his complaint isn't even that these people can't publish their work at all, it's that it's hard to publish these results in the most prestigious journals. That's kind of like saying that your human rights are being violated because Britney Spears refuses to date you.)

  4. Re:Right by stupidfoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, they just have $1.7 Billion in funding to fight over, in the US alone.

    RTFA

  5. Blowing Hot Air by yintercept · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Blowing Hot Air by eric76 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Blowing Hot Air by Billly+Gates · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    3. Re:Blowing Hot Air by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

      Full story here There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998.

      Well, that position is not without its critics. There is evidence to suggest that the way the data was collected was not adjusted for changes in the technology they used to gather it, and when it was collected -- specifically, how the heat-shielding to rule out the effects of sunlight warming has been improved over time without that being factored into the analysis.

      This blog gives a nice summary of what happened, as well as a bunch of relevant links. (The author is an astrophysicist, so he's not without some ability to read science papers and follow the math.)

      From this article:
      Dr Sherwood argues that it is not. In particular, changes in radiosonde design intended to reduce the original problem of over-heating have not always been accommodated by reductions in the correction factors for more recently collected data. Those data have thus been over-corrected, reducing the apparent temperature below the actual temperature.

      Dr Sherwood and his colleagues hit on a ruse to test this idea. Because weather stations around the world release their balloons simultaneously, some of the measurements are taken in daylight and some in darkness. By comparing the raw data, the team was able to identify a trend: recorded night-time temperatures in the troposphere (night being the ultimate form of shade) have indeed risen. It is only daytime temperatures that seem to have dropped. Previous work, which has concentrated on average values, failed to highlight this distinction, which seems to have been caused by over-correction of the daytime figures.


      In short, since the heat shielding on the measuring devices became more effective, the daytime measurements were skewed downward, while the nighttime readings showed a warming trend.

      So if the improved technology skews the data, you need to look a little harder at the way the data was generated.

      This issue is by no means settled, but what you cite is one possible interpretation which may not fully fit the inherent issues in the way the data was collected.

      Cheers.
      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    4. Re:Blowing Hot Air by toby34a · · Score: 5, Interesting

      More hot air... It's hilarious, as a grad student in the atmospheric sciences, how compartmentalized this beleif is. 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. I know this because I've examined the satellite photography myself, and modeled the glacial decline. This gets the geologists and glaciologists into the mix. The climate databases almost always show a climatological rise, so the climatologists are in on it. However, teh real-time meteorologists really don't think it's occuring- and if you think that they don't know what's going on, these are the people that are forecasting your weather all day. Go figure...

    5. Re:Blowing Hot Air by Moofie · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well, that's easy. Didn't Napster come out somewhere around 1998? More pirates, less global warming. Duh!

      --
      Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
    6. Re:Blowing Hot Air by Arcane_Rhino · · Score: 5, Funny

      If he didn't, it is the only thing Bush hasn't increased funding for.

    7. Re:Blowing Hot Air by killjoe · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yes we should stop listening to scientists and start listening to novelists instead. I was especially impressed by how Chrighton was able to demolish all evidence for global warming by calling environmentalism a religion. That sealed it for me.

      --
      evil is as evil does
    8. Re:Blowing Hot Air by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 5, Informative

      I dont know... in my opinion, Real Climate has a pretty hard bias, and I've read more than once that they simply delete posts that they don't like/can't address.

      RC is one resource for forming an opinion- but they seem a bit like using the Catholic Church as reference for deciding if Christ existed or not.

      Facts are... Mars and other objects in the solar system are warming up too, there is correlation between the arms of the galaxy and past climate fluctuation, the climate -has- been hotter and colder than it is now without our doing anything and .... many experts were sure that we were going to have a new ice age only 30 years ago. Not all experts- and not all experts believe in global warming either.

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    9. Re:Blowing Hot Air by budgenator · · Score: 4, Funny

      Right you are the bloody heretic deserves to have his ass perched on a pike! Imagine the audacity of someone who studies events spanning millions of years of history projecting trends into the future. It's not like the last 4 or 5 iceage- hothouse cycles might have any clues about what's really happening

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
  6. Lindzen apparently has no trouble securing funding by stonedown · · Score: 5, Informative
    According to a 1995 Harper's Magazine article, Lindzen had no trouble securing funding from fossil fuel interests.
    Lindzen, for his part, charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels, and a speech he wrote, entitled "Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus," was underwritten by OPEC.
    Also, the Wall Street Journal opinion section is not exactly the place to go to find genuine scientific analysis. It's a propaganda mill for the same business interests which support Richard Lindzen. There is plenty of money for scientists willing to speak on behalf of big business, despite Lindzen's contrary and alarmist claims. It takes a special kind of courage to speak out on behalf of the downtrodden coal and oil industries.
  7. Re:Anyone notice somthing by ktappe · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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?
    No, Slashdot is merely reporting that one single individual's opinion column is saying global warming is fake. Slashdot is not a source, it is an amalgamation of sources. In this particular case, the source appears to be biased, as the author cites only three data points for his claim, one of which occurred 14 years ago and another which he himself wrote. As a result, I personally am taking this article with a serious grain of salt.

    -Kurt

    --
    "We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
  8. Intelligent Design all over again by SuperBanana · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    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.
  9. Re:Suppression does happen. by avalys · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    --
    This space intentionally left blank.
  10. Re:None conformist by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 4, Informative

    By the way, am I the only one to see the irony with the negative mod points about my take on global warming in a topic about Global Warming dissenters being unfairly moderated...

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper
  11. Re:Other way round, surely by lbrandy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  12. Re:Lindzen apparently has no trouble securing fund by HoneyBeeSpace · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  13. Re:Lindzen apparently has no trouble securing fund by disappear · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.)

  14. Re:What a bunch of carp by PortHaven · · Score: 4, Informative

    Please Mr. Rhetoric, explain to me the cause for the global warming currently transpiring on Mars.

    "...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.ht ml

  15. Re:Greenhouse Denial Industry by ajs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We were saying about labeling people as corporate stooges?

    Here's the way it works:

    1. You say "hey, this thing is more complex than we thought, let's try to understand it"
    2. Your are labeled an "enemy of the planet" by those who review grant money
    3. You get no further funding
    4. You go to the sources that WILL fund your research
    5. Because you are now backed by evil corporations your are branded a stooge
    6. Your peers ignore your data and input

    Isn't it great how we're not surpressing anyone's research?

    PS: "enemy of the planet" is a direct quote from those reviewing funding for a friend of mine who was in solar astrophysics at the time. His lab had dared to propose a model by which the sun could power observed warming.

  16. Re:The politics of science by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  17. Whatever boat you happen to be in... by jellisky · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... is irrelevant to this discussion.

    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/globalcarboncy 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.

    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! ;) Cooler heads will prevail eventually.

    -Jellisky

    1. Re:Whatever boat you happen to be in... by jellisky · · Score: 4, Interesting

      In addendum, I may add that a lot of the holes are typically significant issues with the data sources themselves. A non-trivial amount of the data that is used in various parts of climate research (and other atmospheric disciplines) is, well, not very good for the purpose that it is being used in. Data that is only good to +/- 10 units is being used to show trends of +/- 1 or 2 units over the entire timeline, for example. And little of that error problem is being addressed by the authors of the work... for various reasons. But, it's often the best data they have to work with.

      There IS some quality data out there, but a lot of it just is not that great. And much of the really great data hasn't been accumulated long enough to really show long-term trends, since it has only been collected in the last 10-20 years. A lot of the issues in the field of climate are just being brought up and handled. That's why I said that it's an exciting time to be watching this field closely. Climatologists are just beginning to get some clout and truly innovative and solid ideas in the last couple decades. It's a field that is maturing literally in front of our eyes. In about a decade or two, we should have a lot more understanding as to how the climate system is working. And a lot of that will just come from the better data that will have some time to accumulate. And from some incredible ideas and great minds.

      Read up on many science history books... you'll see the parallel sort of issues between the growth of current climate change science and other sciences as they began to mature. This is a rough, rough period with a lot of conflicting ideas, philosophies, and beliefs. But, it's exciting to watch and be a part of! Eventually, we'll understand what's happening better. Until then, enjoy the ride! I know I am. :-D

      -Jellisky

  18. Global warming based on statistical ridiculousness by cscalfani · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  19. Do they even talk about the same thing? by SysKoll · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Agreed.

    Moreover, there are three separate questions:

    1. Is the planet becoming warmer? A tough question, knowing that calorimetry is the most delicate kind of physical measurement. What do you measure, when, for how long? Methods and opinions differ. Magic satellites giving you a single figure for easy comparison are wishful thinking. You need a data interpretation method, and that's where opinions and tempers flare.
    2. Is it a long-term trend? Also a tough question. Historical data is sparse and sometimes dubious. Not to mention that the methods and instruments have changed. For instance, the Albany, NY weather bureau reports average temperatures decreasing since the start of the century. Does that prove anything? Is this a fluke?
    3. Is the observed change man-made?Again, a difficult question. It's not like you can run a parallele experiment on a second Earth devoid of mankind, although some people are planning it. Earth went through extreme temperature swings before the first ape showed up. The Deep Core ice-sampling project showed variations of about 7C (14F) in less than a century, several times over the last 200,000 years or so. That's huge. More over, the sun activity is not a constant. Sun activity variations wiped out the Maya (see "Solar Forcing of Drought Frequency in the Maya Lowlands" and google for more.). Astronomers think that the Mars icecap hasn't grown up as large in the last Martian winter as compared to pictures sent by the Viking probes: If that's true, it's not because of human activity. Then of course there is the well-known CO2 effect. How do we separate the natural and man-made causes? What's predominent?

    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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  20. Re:Right by Tony · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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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