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Is Scientific Consensus a Threat to Democracy?
chance_encounter writes "President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus has published an article in the Financial Times in which he seems to equate the current global warming debate with totalitarian thought control: 'The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced ... The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.' At the end of the article he proposes several suggestions to improve the global climate debate, including this point: 'Let us resist the politicization of science and oppose the term "scientific consensus," which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority.'"
President Bill Clinton refused to forward the protocol to Congress for ratification. Vice President Al Gore wanted language including developing nations in the accords, and when the language was not added he withdrew his support for the treaty. Only after President Bush was elected did Mr. Gore call for total adoption of the Kyoto treaty as it is. Before we lob accusations about what "Shrub" has or has not done, we should consider why we are in this situation. In the 90's, Vice President Al Gore knew that the most risky source of an increase in emissions came from developing nations, not "USians." That and the crippling restrictions on US business were all the justification he needed to kill the treaty in the United States. He was right.
FairTax baby!
Just because someone modded you up, I thought I'd pull up the first page of results of a quick google search. Lokiee there....
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Really? How old are you? I remember Rush Limbaugh, for one, making exactly those comments in the early 90's. To wit, he brought up these new satellite results that were able to measure the effect of the full moon on temperatures and then claimed that it was funny that with such sophisticated techniques they still weren't able to measure global warming. There were plenty of ditto-heads who took that statement and ran with it.
Why don't you do a little personal research on the Mann Hockey Stick? Try to go to sites that cover actual science and not just politics though, okay? Also avoid sites that admit to being junkscience.
Please provide the book title and such a quote. Also, don't confuse "a climatologist from the 1970s" with "the climatologists of the 1970s". A lot of people who bring up "global cooling" seem to do that. (I do see, however, that you were good enough to qualify that only "some" were claiming that.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
No, all the serious scientific organizations.
/ 5702/1686?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT= &author1=oreskes&searchid=1103210845409_5389&store d_search=&FIRSTINDEX=0&fdate=10/1/1995&tdate=12/31 /2004
Really.
All of them.
Seriously, for real.
Yes.
All of them.
No, really.
It's true.
Did the message get through, yet? Look, here's a scientific study of the fact that all climate scientists agree that global warming is real and man-made:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/306
Believe it yet?
It's true.
You have produced yet another set of statements without proof that this has anything to do with man-made global warming. Sea-levelss have been rising for more than 10,000 years and somehow you've just noticed?
In any case,
a) living on a delta is a great way to see the sea rising relative to the land, but the sea-level has hardly changed while those deltas continue to sink. Ask the Mayor of New Orleans. If the deltas are not replenished then you get severe coastal erosion and deltaic islands sink into the water.
b) Tuvalu's problems are entirely caused not by rising sea-levels (because there isn't any) but by overpopulation and overextraction of water making the wells become brackish.
Here's what the scientists say:
"The historical record from 1978 through 1999 indicated a sea level rise of 0.07 mm per year." and
"The historical record (from Tuvalu) shows no visual evidence of any acceleration in sea level trends."
So the sea-level rise is just barely measureable and shows no acceleration due to global warming, man-made or otherwise.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
The debunkers (and I assume you're referring to McIntyre and McKitrick) have not been debunked. Every criticism of the Hockey Stick that they made has been upheld.
From what I can read it seems like the reverse is true. The only valid criticism M&M made was a methodological issue that, when corrected, had no effect on the outcome of the model.
There are more than a dozen climate reconstructions that uphold the original "Hockey Stick", and to my knowledge, M&M have offered no objections to any of them. For a "debunked model" it's been featured prominently in materials as recent as the IPCC TAR Summary for Policymakers, so the scientific consensus clearly has not come down on the side of M&M's objections.
Because those fakers are still writing on RealClimate.
It's really easy to toss around ad hominem attacks like they mean something in science, but that seems to be all the climate change deniers really have to offer.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
We had an el nino last year which tends to reduce the number and severity of hurricanes.
Or so this "they" guy says...read it on the intartubes
The deal with hurricanes isn't so much they are stronger or more of them as hundreds or thousands of years ago as much as we have much better news reporting and data keeping now and even moreso, hoo-mannz have been on a coastal area expensive building spree for the past few decades in the US, so when hurricanes *do* strike, it causes a lot more damage. Example, a little cottage I used to live it on the beach in florida, back when that was still possible at ridiculous cheap joe construction worker wage levels is now a big high rise. Where a few people used to live (and I went through a hurricane there actually) and a structure worth x-dollars might have been damaged, (it wasn't, 'cane that didn't hit directly but was sure *exciting* for yours truly)now a lot more people and x times 500 (whatever, big number) dollars worth of stuff is there that could be damaged. I don't know a technical term for it, but the event impact potential threshold is now way higher than it used to be, given the same exact size hurricane.
The media has got all the issues completely wrong. By melting the ice caps (and permafrost, which is much greater in volume), sea level rise of only about 15m would ensure - which is nothing compared to the regular, cyclic 100-300m sea level changes from plate techtonics (ridge spreading rate changes, hotspots) which occur over 10^5 to 10^7 year cycles. What we do need to worry about is the release of the methane held in permafrost - high levels of methane (although there were other causes) resulted in the Permian/Triassic extinction event, wiping out 50% of animal life. As for CO2 levels being 'normal', if one looks at the past CO2 levels from sediment isotopes, it's very clear that the current level is about 5 times the level of all previous cyclic highs. It is completely abnormal.
puts ("Python r0cks\n");