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How ExxonMobil Funded Global Warming Skeptics
Erik Moeller writes "According to a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, oil company ExxonMobil 'has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.' The report compares the tactics employed by the oil giant to those used by the tobacco industry in previous decades, and identifies key individuals who have worked on both campaigns. Would a 'global warming controversy' exist without the millions of dollars spent by fossil fuel companies to discredit scientific conclusions?"
Big business lobbies to protect its interests!
All the flames that are about to be posted...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
why don't the tobacco companies merge with the oil companies then if they're so similar. Then you just know eventually someone will make a careless mistake and BOOM! That'll kill two very evil birds with one stone :-)
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
...and I have been for years. Where do I sign up to get my check from Exxon?
ExxonMobil's Response to a Report by the Union of Concerned Scientists ExxonMobil believes the Union of Concerned Scientists' paper is deeply offensive and wrong. ExxonMobil engages in public policy discussions by encouraging serious inquiry, analysis, the sharing of information and transparency. Our support of scientific research on climate change is made public on our web site and it includes more than 40 peer reviewed papers authored by ExxonMobil scientists, and our participation on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and numerous related scientific bodies. While there is more to learn on climate science, what is clear today is that greenhouse gas emissions are one of the factors that contribute to climate change, and that the use of fossil fuels is a major source of these emissions. With regard to contributions that ExxonMobil provides to various public policy organizations, our support is transparent and appears on our web site. The support extends to a fairly broad array of organizations that research significant domestic and foreign policy issues and promote discussion on issues of direct relevance to the company. These groups range from the Brookings Institution to the American Enterprise Institute and from the Council on Foreign Relations to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. As these organizations are independent of their corporate sponsors and are tax-exempt, we don't control their views and messages, and they do not speak on our behalf. In many cases and with respect to the full range of policy positions taken by these organizations, we find some of them persuasive and enlightening, and some not. We annually review our support of tax-exempt organizations and make appropriate adjustments. In addition, we publish the complete list of such organizations on our web site - and we update this list once per year. Supporting scientific and public policy research leads to better informed and more open discussion of options to address such a serious, global issue as climate change. http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/Newsroom/NewsR eleases/corp_nr_mr_climate.asp
They provide me with an income. I'm happy with them. But this doesn't I agree with all their policies. I just fix their computers!
Future ruler of a small Asian-Pacific island
The UCS, which has it's own agenda and pushes it at every opportunity, is upset because someone on the opposite side wants their view heard as well? To bad.
The UCS no more wants open debate over issues than any other special interest - they want to frame all discussion so their viewpoint prevails; since only +they+ have the right answer.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
because the "Union of Concerned Scientists" sounds really non-biased.
I'm willing to accept that bias. Until we find Earth v2.0, we should be much more careful with Earth v1.0.
Blar.
$16 million over a 7 year period is nothing, especially for a company that regularly posts profits in the $30 billion dollar range. And none of this matters unless someone actually reports on the "findings" and "analysis" of ExxonMobile's "specialists." If anything, the media is responsible for creating the image of some debate about global warming (even though a huge scientific consensus exists).
They have. Slowdown of the North Atlantic Current, increases in global average temperatures, melting of glaciers, raising of ocean levels (and no, they were not expected to be in the multiple yard levels) have all been inline with the median models.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Rush Limbaugh told me that the only reason that it's not snowing in winter anymore in the northern sections of the U.S. is because of the number of cows we farm and the carbon moronoxide they expude from their butts. Cow farts != global warming folks! And besides, even if global warming is happening (which it isn't) there's a lot of benefits: The southern U.S. will become a tropical paradise. The mid U.S. will be able to produce different crops. And even the Canadians will benefit in that they won't have those savage winters anymore. Any concerns about coastal areas flooding can be put to rest as the army corp of engineers will be able to build very efficient and effective dams and breakwalls for most normal situations. Besides, floodwaters can easily be pumped out back to the ocean to lower the local water level. So stop all this worrying. There is no global warming. Rush told me so and I believe him. Megadittos!!!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
It's too bad that you got a mod or two as "troll" instead of "funny", but that itself should have been expected because you're absolutely correct with respect to what's about to happen. The inflammatory (no pun intended) nature of the article summary itself just begs for the whole damned thing to be marked as "troll" or "flamebait".
Look, the whole idea that any company or organization would attempt to skew any studies to their own viewpoint is universal. Enviornmentalists are always looking to make surveys/studies support their viewpoint. Corporations are always looking to make surveys/studies support their viewpoint. Skeptics are always looking to make surveys/studies support their viewpoint. Conspiracy theorists are always looking to make surveys/studies support their viewpoint. Anyone with any kind of agenda is always looking to make surveys/studies support his viewpoint. But in this case it's "big oil" { insert doom-and-gloom music here }, so therefore their attempts to skew results are somehow more evil than other groups doing it? What a complete and utter crock.
The question of "Would a 'global warming controversy' exist without the millions of dollars spent by fossil fuel companies to discredit scientific conclusions?" is infuriating by itself. Hell, yes there would be a controversy for numerous reasons that have been stated time and time and time again, not the least of which is that without indisputable proof, which I still don't believe we have, there will always be room for skepticism. Honestly, the whole notion that skepticism is unhealthy, as that last line suggests, is an abhorrent idea in itself.
Yeah, yeah, mod me down for actually contesting a Slashdot article and for being somewhat of a global warming skeptic. I have karma to burn, but that doesn't make what I've said any less valid.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
The average American is confused enough as it is.
Look, it's simple: all of the authorities and powers-that-be could have been in total agreement for the last 2 decades, warning people about global warming in every available media outlet and it wouldn't have mattered because Joe Sixpack doesn't give a shit. And politicians won't force people to do the right thing, because that doesn't get you elected.
Unless it unavoidably and directly impacts the price of beer or his ability to watch his favorite TV show, Joe wouldn't care if his SUV ran on mulched babies. "Scrubs" has it right: people are bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling. And global warming is Somebody Else's Problem.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Global warming shouldn't even enter into it. The whole "global warming debate" is a smokescreen blown from both sides to avoid asking the really tricky, really pertinent questions, namely: "Global warming aside, is spewing fossil fuel byproducts into the atmosphere bad for the environment in general?" (Yes.) "Is a complete and total reliance on nonrenewable fossil fuels and pigheadedly refusing to look into alternative energy sources because they aren't where the money is a bad plan?" (Yes.) "What are our next steps?" (We don't know.) So people bitch and moan about global warming because it's a nice, round cornered, warm and fuzzy topic that any idiot can get his head around, as opposed to the intricate economic and political machinations behind the energy (read: fossil fuel) trade as a whole. It's just like hippies whining about recycling saving trees when the real issue is so much more complex than that. They just ignore the rest of it because it doesn't make a good tagline and it's harder for the average public-school-educated-Joe to understand. And things that the average public-school-educated-Joe has a hard time understanding make him change the channel, which is bad for support and bad for business.
Environmentalist groups lobby to protect their interests!
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Because the scientific communty would still shun any scientist that questions the present assumptions. Now take away funding from those voices that dare to question and we would has even less understanding than we have today.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
Prediction and observation.
Currently, we're observing that the planet is warming up. That is a simple fact. No scientific dispute.
To this observation, you can match models, to explain why the warming occurs. That is the theory. No scientific dispute exist about the theory either, that the warming is caused by human activities, specifically because of the burning of fossil fuels.
No reasonable human being can argue about the observation and if you want to argue about the theory, to explain the reason of the warming, you need to satisfy the scientific scrutiny.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
What is their agenda? I'm not that familiar with it, so I'm interested to know where they deviate from widely accepted science?
Another poster mentioned their global warming FAQ, but I read it and thought that most of what I read was pretty uncontroversial among qualified climate scientists (apart from a few counter-views, which almost always seem to be oil-funded).
Given that you assert UCS is a special interest, how do they profit from acceptance of their assertions? It's obvious how oil companies profit directly from the rejection of a theory of human-generated climate change.
So much money! That $16 million, over 7 years, divided by 43 groups, comes to the amazingly huge sum of $53,000 per year per group. Why, with that king of money, they could probably pay the salary of 1 person!
My God! They could take over the world with an army like that!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Doesn't take a rocket scientist
But apparently it takes a bored IT guy on slashdot to correct an international consortium of climatologists.
Maybe you ought to take a course in the statistical analysis of experimental data, and when you have a grasp of how scientists analyze data to construct theories that explain observations, they often take many things into account, you can rejoin the discussion.
Or, the short version: THE FACT THAT THE SOLAR RADIATION HAS INCREASED HAS BEEN ACCOUNTED FOR.
Good day!
Absolutely.
Regarding the effect of solar forcing, check out the wikipedia article. It's got good links to studies that have shown that solar forcing only accounts for about 25% of the recorded increase in global temperatures.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
"That'll kill two very evil birds with one stone"
you may be kidding around when you say that but what really scares me is there are people around here that believe "BIG OIL" is evil.
oil is what allows all of our current technology. ask a chemist what we'd have(or not have) without oil and the companies that provide it at a reasonable price. i for one really do welcome our big oil overlords with open loving arms.
Here is the wikipedia on Union of Concerned Scientists. They are basically ideological twins of Greenpeace - hard-line peace activists and hard-line environmentalist. All the standard left-wing stuff. The main difference between the two are their tactics - UCS cloaks itself in scientific respectability and issues whitepapers while Greenpeace pulls protest stunts to gain publicity. The other difference is that UCS tolerates nuclear energy while Greenpeace is totally opposed to it. UCS is based in the "People's Republic of Cambridge"
The Royal Society recently issued a fairly unprecedented public warning to Exxon to stop perverting science in the name of $$$. I'm sure the UCS are a very worthy body, but the Royal Society are somewhat more prestigious and authoritative (what with having been founded by Newton, Boyle and Hooke, amongst others, being the oldest such learned body in the world, and still representing the elite (in a good way) of UK science. Exxon ("Esso" here in the UK) are still, as the Greenpeace campaign from 5 years ago pointed out, "#1 Global Warming Villain".
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
From the other, more pressing issues that we should be dealing with. For example:
I could go on...
Anyway, Global Warming fanatics always bring up the negative aspects that it could produce, but not necessarily that it will. Indeed, anyone who is going to make 100 or 1000 year predictions on a few decades of data is foolish. We simply don't know. Regardless, does anyone ever bring up the possible benefits of global warming?
And these are just a few. The real question shouldn't be "is GW happening?", but, "Is it a bad thing?". It could be that preventing global warming would leave us with a worldwide shortage of food a few centuries from now. How are you going to feed 10 billion people?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Golly, I hadn't realised that an "International Consortium of Climatologists" (ICC) had made their verdict. How dare he doubt such an august group! I never took a course in the "statistical analysis of experimental data", but if I agree with the ICC, I imagine no coursework is required. We should only hold the skeptics of global warming to impractically high academic standards. Also, that's quite an achievement by the ICC (accounting for the increase in solar radiation in such a complex system as the earth's atmosphere) - what I can't grasp is how they can model that so definitively but can't go ahead and give me the weather forcast more than a week out. Or maybe they're not sharing their supercomputer with the meteorologists, the selfish prigs.
Or, the short, all-caps version: WHAT HAS MORE IMPACT ON CLIMATE, OUR ACTIVITIES THAT PALE IN COMPARISON TO A SINGLE VOLCANIC ERUPTION, OR THAT MONSTROUS HYDROGEN BOMB WE CALL THE SUN THAT SUPPLIES ALL THE ENERGY THAT THE EARTH RECIEVES?
Ok, that wasn't all that short, but surely I get credit for the all-caps, right? I mean, it's a good strategy in a discussion, because after all, who can disagree with ALL CAPS?
This is the best treatment of Hansen's 1998 predictions that I have seen. It discusses Hansen's forecasts of emissions and temperature back in '88 (this was testimony before Congress; Pat Michaels and Michael Crichton have since lied quite bluntly about this testimony only by talking about scenario A, which is not relevant given actual CO2 emissions).
The verdict: Not perfect, but pretty damn good.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
This is one of the problems of society we face. Our forefathers faced slavery, absolutism, war and others, we are facing litigation and the question of which status corporations should have.
A corporation is in many ways worse than an insane king. For one, you can't wait for it to die of old age. Two, it the king at least could only be in one place at the same time. He had limited resources. Once he started distributing responsibilities, you could hope to change the bureaucracy instead.
However, we face the same problem those French Revolution peasants did: First, we have to realize that we are the people, that corporations live and die by our decree. That if we are united, there's nothing they can do except maybe cause some casualties.
We've got to realize that before they've taken all the power away from us. As long as elections are bought and manipulated and full of fraud and bullshit, but at least it's still we who vote and the manipulations can't bend a clear majority.
And we've got to realize that "we" means all the lazy, stupid, couch-potato, daily-soap-watching, beer-drinking idiots, too.
The last is why I don't have much hope.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Where's the article about the tree huggers funding pro global warming research? Since it's functionaly identical everyone should be up in arms about that too.
I find being offended by me offensive.
Woah, hold on there a minute.
"both sides have lied", so the truth must be "somewhere in the middle?"
That's the logical fallacy that Fox News uses all the time.
A quick example should illustrate the fallacy:
Billy: There's a cake here!
Bobby: I want it!
Billy: Why don't we split it 50/50?
Bobby: No! mine!
Their Mom: I've heard both of your extreme viewpoints, so we'll need to compromise. Bobby gets 75%, Billy gets 25%.
Saying that both sides "have lied" and so "the truth is somewhere in between" somehow puts paid industry propagandists on the same credibility level as professional climate research scientists. (And does a great disservice to science, I think.) There is a fair amount of difference in the professional opinion of a corporate shill who is paid to spout the company line, and someone who has spent the majority of their life studying something.
If only they'd used the $16 million to recruit more pirates, they'd have done a lot more to reduce Global Warming. More pirates = Less Global Warming. I thought everyone knew that by now! We simply have to have more pirates.
And more cowbell would be nice too.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Should read:
The fact that the solar radiation has increased has been accounted for and blamed on Americans driving SUVs and George Bush.
And blame the Chinese pollution problem on America too because they should all be in cold, damp, and dark huts with no jobs and no food to feed themselves. That is until they find that fish that grants wishes then we can all have rainbows and Skittles.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Livestock methane - which has higher AGW impact than C02 due to longevity - is a large component of yearly greenhouse emissions, as reported here
If there were skeptics, on ANY topic, who is going to FUND them except if you have a stake in it? For any viewpoint in any issue, ONLY the people that stand to lose if the issue goes the other way will fund research supporting them. Thus saying that big oil is funding most of the research that contradicts "prevailing opinion" makes 100% sense. Do you actually expect the Sierra Club to fund a study who's goal is skepticism?
This comes from confusing cause & effect. The studies don't come out a certain way because the group funding them dictates that it should, but only because the only ones LOOKING for an opposite outcome are those with something to lose. A very slight difference, but it's still critical to understanding it. The first is straight-out lying. The 2nd can happen with the most honest of intentions. I'm not saying that's the case here, but to dismiss it automatically as the 1st just means your mind is made up without even looking at what evidence may exist.
Ok, the environmentalists are right. I have finally found the proof.
Open Source Alternatives
Subway sponsors the American Heart Association and in return, Subway's food is now endorsed by the AHA as heart healthy. I hope to see the USC bring Jared and his cronies down!
Their Mom: I've heard both of your extreme viewpoints, so we'll need to compromise. Bobby gets 75%, Billy gets 25%.
But that's not fair to Bobby. Bobby should get it ALL.
If Mom weren't biased in favor of Billy's socialist "75-25" plan, Bobby would be getting 87.5% at the very least.
The word "skeptic" comes from a Greek work, "skepsis", which refers to looking at something and examining it. Skepticism is that the person from Missouri does when they say "show me".
A skeptic isn't a denier. A denier says the scientests are making it all up to curry favor with government grant issuers, you know, the rabid environmentalist Bush administration. A skeptic asks how big the error bars are on the temperature measurements and finds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record. A skeptic asks how a huge computer model of a system which is incompletely defined can ever be validated (and finds annoyingly little in the popular literature). A skeptic asks whether increased solar output could account for the changes and finds out that nights are getting warmer and the upper atmosphere is getting colder, both of which point to heat getting trapped in the lower atmosphere.
A skeptic refuses to be rushed into policy choices. A skeptic asks the question Bjorn Lomborg has been exploring, whether it's better to mitigate the results of climate change than to uproot the foundations of the world economy trying to prevent it.
Skepticism clarifies issues, astroturf campaigns and phony think tanks obscure issues.
Look at it this way: Bill Clinton, in the eleventh hour of his presidency, buried the Kyoto treaty--and admission from Kyoto supporters suggest the reduction of CO2 may only slow global warming by the tiniest fraction of a degree. So assuming everyone was on the same page--that is, assuming we all knew that Global Warming was a fact, and further assuming we all knew that Global Warming was entirely caused by human activities--the real political battle over control of how (or if) we can solve this problem would be under way.
The fact that opponents to the idea that Global Warming is real or is as big a problem as presented--and those who believe in Global Warming but who believe it is not entirely (or largly) mankind's fault--have received funding from the oil companies does not take away from the fact that "solving" the problem of manmade Global Warming is a big political undertaking. And anything that is this big political undertaking will inevitably be a big political mess involving trillions of dollars and lots of opportunities for lying, cheating and stealing. (To think otherwise is to think all of our politicians are as pure and clean as the wind-driven snow. Hah!)
I mean, even though we now have proved the Tobacco Companies falsified clear evidence and used tactics to falsify scientific evidence--evidence that has a much more solid basis in double-blind studies on smokers than Global Warmings evidence of computer models and tree ring studies--we still haven't solved the problem of smoking. People still smoke like chimineys, and the evil Tobacco Companies are still selling cigarettes like crazy.
So even though we have reached a solid consensus that smoking kills you and it's all the fault of the Tobacco Companies--they are still in business. And a good friend of mine died of lung cancer at the age of 41 just last year, caused by smoking.
Can you please offer some real-life experience that backs up any of those assertions? Note: what you read on Free Republic does not count as experience.
I have a degree in physical oceanography, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that you are wrong on this as the deniers i the lies bought from them. The whole time I was in graduate school, I held the point of view that anthropogenic effects could not be separated from natural variability. While people didn't agree with me, I was never disparaged, and nobody even thought of trying to link my work to that. At the time, there were a lot of challenges to be made to important conclusions like Mann's, and modelling was much less well developed. There are still important uncertainties, but the open scientific process has worked, and it has confirmed the findings about anthropogenic climate change. I have been obligated to change my point of view by the increasing body of evidence here.
There is no controversy. There is no doubt. There are some claims which are not fully supported - e.g., how exactly anthropenic warming will affect hurricane formation is not clear, but the most of the basic physical mechanisms are pretty well undertand (if not the second order problems like interaction between wind shear and sea surface temperature), but when they are made and answered within the context of scientific debate (e.g. Kerry Emmanuel's paper), they have tended to confirm the magnitude of risks. Part of the reason scientists are pissed and have begun publishing reports like this is that they resent the endless meddling in the process by these oil-funded "think tanks".
The problem the denialists have is not bias, it is that they are trying to challenge an increasingly established body of science with loopier and loopier ideas. This is similiar to the small but active community of denialists who claim that cold fusion is being suppressed - they more evidence thatemerges against it, the more they turn to whiny claims of bias of crazy counterarguments. Trying to make improbable criticisms stick is never a good strategy for funding. Any responsible grant administrator will consider the question of, say, the meaning of correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature as an approximately closed question. There are of course caveats and valid criticisms to any particular paper using those correlations, but the basic science is considered fairly well established. It might be nice if there was so much funding just lying around that the correlation could be subjected to nearly endless testing, but it can't. It's had its day in scientific debate, and barring some truly innovative method or a new framework that raises new concerns, the question is settled. The denialists have provided none of this (barring Lindzen's loony IRIS theory), yet they continue to whine and moan about how their lack of good ideas and unwillingness to accepted results of good work is not in fact petty obstinacy (or more likely outright bought loyalty), but is some kind of noble keeper of the flame movement. That's self-flattering bullshit, and an insult to serious scientists everywhere. Climate science has a healthy scientific process - like anything else, it could probably use improvement in some areas. But to suggest that the whole field of climate science is fundamentally unsound is breathtakingly arrogant and small-minded.
So until you have something real to the conversation, do us the favor of keeping your unfounded slander in your mom's basement next to your teddy bear and anime girlfriend.
Well the Chinese government is now pro actively trying to counter the threat of climate change. Government reports are saying this is a real threat that must be countered immediately. Can the same be said for this administration? I'm not saying that America is to blame for everything, but your straw man argument claiming that because some people blame everything on America it must not be true doesn't fly either.
I guess the part of this argument that defies logic for me is the part where the pro-fossil fuel lobby, the conservative pundits, who reliably will come down on whatever side the rich guys do, the scientists who get paid by the oil companies (along with the mopes who listen to right-wing radio), and folks like some of the jackasses we hear from sometime, all try to deny the fact that *PAUSE* it's probably not a good idea to dump toxic shit into the atmosphere, ground and oceans and NOT EXPECT SOMETHING BAD TO HAPPEN.
It's like there's this big argument over whether the huge chunks of arctic ice that are melting and breaking off into the ocean are because of billions of cars and factories spewing poison into the air or because of, I don't know, SUNSPOT ACTIVITY. It's like the house is on fire, but the 7 year olds (oil companies and the other turds listed above) are blaming the 5 year olds (the Sun, the Trees, or Jehovah) for starting the fire, and while everybody watches in amazement at this exciting argument THE EFFING HOUSE BURNS DOWN.
Instead of all this abrogation of responsibility for ignoring the warning of environmentalists, and trying to blame someone, anyone, else, and instead of all the pseudo science about how its the fault of cow farts that the rising ocean temperatures are causing the ice shelf to break apart, wouldn't it be a little bit better if that energy was spent figuring on what we're going to do when the ocean levels and temperatures keep rising?
I really blame the lawyers for the oil companies for all of this because they're probably telling their bosses "if you admit that burning fossil fuels is screwing up the environment, then you're going to be held responsible and that means M.O.N.E.Y., so no matter what, blame it on something else. Deny, deny, deny."
OK, fine. But whilst all this finger pointing is going on, while the President has some bright boy with an Associates Degree from a community college in Communications telling Climatologists how they should edit their research, there is a reasonably large pile of dung heading for those rotor blades. Mightn't we take a look at that for a moment so maybe, just maybe we can GET OUT OUR UMBRELLAS for the coming shitstorm?
You are welcome on my lawn.
You don't know jack about science. Scientists get published precisely by questioning present assumptions. But the questions themselves have to be rigorous. Virtually every breakthrough in science was made by someone questioning present assumptions. We've had a long string of major and minor breakthroughs over the last several centuries. The global warming/climate change hypothesis was itself a major challenge to the present assumptions back in 1988, when the first major papers suggesting it got into the journals.
The assumption that Exxon favors - that humankind can't change the climate, because it's just too big for little us to make any difference about - was the prevailing assumption back before all the pioneering work in global warming/climate change was done. You cannot get published by challenging the notion that the world is spheroid by claiming that, no, it's flat. But if you could come up with a plausible model of how the apparent world is really a cross-section of a hyperdimensional whatnot, that's might well see print. Science goes forward, not back. Exxon is claiming the equivalent of that the world is flat.
Of course, it's always easy to sell the public on the old, previously-prevailing assumptions that science, with its constant practice of challenging assumptions, has moved beyond. The stuff is still latent in the cultural background. So there are a whole lot of people in the public who can be sold on the notions that the world is 4000 years old, flat, and not subject to human-triggered climate change. But that's public relations and ignorance, not science - and it's no failure of science to not take this sort of "challenge" seriously.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Kevin Vranes from the University of Colorado at Bolder has this to say
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archi ves/climate_change/001030so_what_happened_at_.html
"..."
"I will grant that talking to the people I did at AGU represents a small fraction of all the attendees. I will grant that there is no way to know whether my averaging of attitudes in the climsci world, as sensed by talking with a few people over a few days, scales up to represent the true feelings of the collective. But I will tell you what I found, and what I felt, and whether you think it might represent the current attitude of climsci world is up to you."
"To sum the state of climsci world in one word, as I see it right now, it is this: tension."
"..."
"What I see is something that I am having a hard time labeling, but that I might call either a "hangover" or a "sophomore slump" or "buyers remorse." None fit perfectly, but perhaps the combination does. I speak for (my interpretation) of the collective: {We tried for years - decades - to get them to listen to us about climate change. To do that we had to ramp up our rhetoric. We had to figure out ways to tone down our natural skepticism (we are scientists, after all) in order to put on a united face. We knew it would mean pushing the science harder than it should be. We knew it would mean allowing the boundary-pushers on the "it's happening" side free reign while stifling the boundary-pushers on the other side. But knowing the science, we knew the stakes to humanity were high and that the opposition to the truth would be fierce, so we knew we had to dig in. But now they are listening. Now they do believe us. Now they say they're ready to take action. And now we're wondering if we didn't create a monster. We're wondering if they realize how uncertain our projections of future climate are. We wonder if we've oversold the science. We're wondering what happened to our community, that individuals caveat even the most minor questionings of barely-proven climate change evidence, lest they be tagged as "skeptics." We're wondering if we've let our alarm at the problem trickle to the public sphere, missing all the caveats in translation that we have internalized. And we're wondering if we've let some of our scientists take the science too far, promise too much knowledge, and promote more certainty in ourselves than is warranted.}"
"..."
"None of this is to say that the risk of climate change is being questioned or downplayed by our community; it's not. It is to say that I think some people feel that we've created a monster by limiting the ability of people in our community to question results that say "climate change is right here!" It is to say that a number of climsci people I heard from are not comfortable enough with the science to want our community to push to outsiders an idea that we have fully or even adequately bounded the risk. I heard from a few people a sentiment that we need to stop making assumptions and decisions for decision-makers; that we need to give decision-makers only the unvarnished truth with realistic bounds on our uncertainty, and trust that the decision-makers will know what to do with it. These feelings came of frustration that many of us are downplaying uncertainties for fear of not being listened to."
"..."
"I realize that many of you will disagree with the notion that we are overplaying our hand, or are not giving full voice to our uncertainties. I'm not sure the answer to this question myself. But I write all this because I sense a sea change in attitudes amongst climsci people that I know as good scientists without agendas. These are solid scientists, and some told me in no uncertain terms that we are not giving full voice to uncertainties; others implied as much. Therein lies the tension. Where we go from here
This is the best part of the debate. Someone like me (a liberal, as it turns out, but that really doesn't matter) announces that they think the politics of science have gotten out of hand, and we're immediately told, "what you read on Free Republic does not count as experience" (as if I read any such publication, but hey it makes for a great straw-man) and the vauge "loopier and loopier ideas" concept, which isn't even a refutation.
As for real-world examples... it began long ago. For example, the primary author of "Sun, Weather, And Climate" (1978 NASA special publication), John R. Herman was subsequently shunned by his peers as, during the early 80s, the data from that book was used as a counter-point in the greenhouse gas debate.
Any solar observatory these days sees this. They either talk about other topics, or only publish data that fails to contradict the "facts" as accepted by the current consensus. Violating that has one observatory mentioned in the congressional floor debate record as, "an enemy of the planet," I kid you not.
There's also a great article about the modern implications of the "climate of fear" surrounding climate research, but of course, you can't listen to Richard Lindzen because he takes money from those people... but of course, that's self-perpetuating because anyone who speaks up in Lindzen's defense is branded with the same iron, and must seek funding elsewhere... which further invalidates their voice.
I'm not saying that CO2 doesn't cause babies to cry and angels to lose their wings, I'm just saying that there's no way to extract meaningful information from the "consensus" of a community that's scared for their jobs about saying the wrong thing. I would consider Bill Gates a national, even international hero if he invested a large chunk of the Gates Foundation money in funding the best research that tried to assail current climate theory on all fronts. Not because that theory is bad, but because I want to see the research done and done well, so that we really get to find out what the hell is going on on planet Earth.
Let me ask you this: if you did research that suggested that, for example, ground-cover water vapor from irrigation had a strong hand to play in surface warming (that's arm-waving, but it's an example for sake of argument), do you think that you would continue to get funding? Would you be called an "enemy of the planet?" Would you have to go looking to oil companies to support further research and pretty much guarantee that no one listened to you? What if some republican picked up your work and started waving it around, taking it out of context and saying that fossile fuel is as safe as houses because of what you said? Would the community circle around you and defend your reputation from such gross misuse of your work, or would you just find yourself too "controvercial" to continue to work in the field?
We know the answer to these questions because it's been played out for nearly 30 years. You would be asking Slashdot, "what's a good tech job?"
Look, those people who went to the Antarctic to get ice core samples didn't go there to prove anything. They went there because they wanted ice core samples. They showed the data. It showed trends. It showed that CO2 hasn't been as high as it is today for the past 300,000 years. If it had shown that CO2 was higher in the past than today, then they would have published that data, and it would have formed a solid basis for refuting the claim that humans are contributing unnatural levels of CO2 to the atmosphere. However that was not the case.
And that's regardless of whether the people who did that study believed in anthropogenic global warming or not! Science doesn't work that way. A scientist may have a belief, but their science demands evidence.
Famous example: Michelson and Morely set out to prove the existence of the luminiferous aether. They conducted their experiment and got... nothing. They tried it again and got... nothing. They tried it at high altitudes. They tried it at low altitudes. They tried it in the southern hemisphere and the north. They hypothesized aether-dragging effects and tried to account for them and got... nothing. No matter what they did they got nothing, and that's the result they reported, and no matter whether they still believed in it or not they could not draw a scientific conclusion that it existed. They didn't have to go LOOKING for the conclusion opposite of their own, it came to them through normal scientific rigor.
By the way, in doing so, they turned scientific belief on its head, guaranteed their own position in the history books, and opened the doors for other explanations, the one that passed scientific muster being Einsteins's.
You don't fund scepticism. You fund science. You conduct experiments. The result of that experiment is your scientific evidence, whether it supports your theory or refutes it. That's the way science works.
The enemies of Democracy are
Bravo.
Well the Chinese government is now pro actively trying to counter the threat of climate change
They certainly are. They're building and opening coal-fired power stations at the rate of one per week. They have also said they will never sign Kyoto or any successor economic vice. Which means that as soon as 2009, China will overtake the US in carbon emissions.
Never mind.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
China needs to open coal plants. They can't open much else. What they -are- doing, is using the best available technologies, like Doosan Babcock boilers, to try to *reduce* emissions from those coal plants, and they have no choice but to continue to do so until a cleaner, efficient, financially viable power source becomes available.
Which means that as soon as 2009, China will overtake the US in carbon emissions.
About damn time they did. They are a few more people, after all.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The weather around here has certainly been disconcerting, I'm in South Eastern Michigan, it's raining in January which isn't unusual, but what is unusual is I'm seeing Earthworms! That means the ground is unfrozen which is very strange this time of year. Even so this is weather not climate, climate is averages over decades, centuries and millenniums.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds