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Utah Assembly Passes Resolution Denying Climate Change
cowtamer writes "The Utah State Assembly has passed a resolution decrying climate change alarmists and urging '...the United States Environmental Protection Agency to immediately halt its carbon dioxide reduction policies and programs and withdraw its "Endangerment Finding" and related regulations until a full and independent investigation of climate data and global warming science can be substantiated.' Here is the full text of H.J.R 12." The resolution has no force of law. The Guardian article includes juicy tidbits from its original, far more colorful, version.
I am assuming you're referring to Phil Jones statement and obviously, you did not bother to actually understand the context of what he was trying to say http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=141
And WHEREAS the questionability of the said data has been questioned (and debunked thoroughly) and
WHEREAS using 12 years of data is a flaw in itself, especially given that 1998 was an El-Nino year, and WHEREAS the last decade was the hottest on record in any case and
WHEREAS that old-wives' tale was debunked recently and
WHEREAS that was one study that actually used flawed data and didn't even bother to speculate on the physics of how CFCs could affect temperatures in the first place and
WHEREAS said decline in temperatures was addressed above and
WHEREAS a committee appointed for that purpose found no evidence against one researcher, none of the charges against the other researchers was ever proven, and effort involved in faking such a massive amount of data would make it impossible in any case and
WHEREAS the paper under consideration was published by lowering the standards of a peer reviewed journal so that it would get in and several editors resigned from that journal for that reason and
WHEREAS this clause only lays down the fact which is unquestioned and was the original purpose of IPCC and
WHEREAS the rate of change is what matters in the first place, and the existence of a "Little Ice Age" has yet to be proven globally and
WHEREAS that one is simply a strawman argument and
It would also have to be a very far sighted researcher to created biased data back in the 50s. There would have to be an incredibly massive conspiracy to skew the data decades before the theories were postulated.
Or, you could change the data retroactively:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/05/goddard_nasa_thermometer/
Climate change (and I mean that in the broadest sense, be it global warming or the onset of an ice age) is never a simple "everywhere gets a little bit warmer" or "everywhere gets a little bit dryer". Some places change in one way, some in another. The UK had the coldest January in 25 years, but the global average temperature in January was the highest since records began. Some places will have droughts, some places will have more snow, but it's still impossible to predict with any accuracy what will happen in any one place at any one time. That doesn't mean we should throw in the towel and say "it's impossible to be certain, so lets give up".
Ah a couple of articles from The Register, also known as the IT World's official climate denier news site.
The Register has zero credibility when it comes to climate science because it has spent the last few years creating countless articles, many of which are full of not just inaccuracies, but sometimes outright lies. I'm sure they have the odd good point in there, but it's impossible to tell the agenda based propaganda from the valid arguments, which is actually quite ironic when that's their argument against professional climate research.
Really, you might as well have just linked to the pope's official blog in a discussion about whether god exists as evidence that he does. If The Register is the best source you can find, then you simply do not have a real source. I'm not exactly pro-AGW theory- I'm somewhat undecided, becoming more skeptical, but any counter evidence has to be a bit more solid than something coming from The Register or the likes of Climate Audit which those articles use as their sources.
> can there be any good argument against greater energy efficiency?
Quite possibly, yes, locally.
For example, my water heater (not that old, not that new) is about 85% efficient. It's expected to have a useful life of another 10 years or so. I could get that up to 90% or so by getting a brand-new high-efficiency one. My net energy savings would be on the order of $50 a year at most, which works out to $500 over those ten years. A new water heater costs more than $500.
So the right thing to do in this case is to keep using the old heater for those 10 years. Note that this also avoids the energy use of _producing_ an extra water heater, so it's less of a loss to others than it would appear at first glance. It's clearly a win for me personally.
Now obviously this calculation depends on the price of energy, the price of water heaters, and the efficiency gains to be had. The last of these starts hitting diminishing returns quickly once what you have is anything resembling non-crappy; for example it's hard to reduce your energy usage by 2x if you're already 60% efficient.... Much easier to do if you're 10% efficient, of course.
Here is the list of scientific organizations (national academies of sciences etc) which agree with the theory of global warming: list (Global warming in the sense of: predominantly caused by humans and transforming the environmental conditions on Earth.)
On the other hand, here is the list of scientific organizations which disagree list
Yeah, the latter list is empty. There are a just five organizations which don't make a clear statement supporting all aspects of global warming, but don't oppose it either. There will never be more scientific agreement on any issue. That doesn't prove it's correct - just because it's the overwhelming consensus opinion of the scientific community doesn't mean it's necessarily right, but it's as clear an indication of the scientific opinion as it can possibly be.
If you can't make a decision based on that, you'll not make a decision based on more research.
No, some of us just remember the same crap in the 70s about how the world would be in a new ice age by now.
Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate is the only peer reviewed paper I am aware of that said anything about an ice age. So that makes 1 paper for GC and thousands of papers for GW. Are you aware of any other peer reviewed papers supporting GC? I don't have access to the articles that cite this one to see if they make the same kind of claims, however the abstracts do not.
We also remember very good science being ripped up because the data was falsefied or poorly collected.
Extraordinary statements require extraordinary proof. I am curious as to what you are attempting to reference.
When you're a sheep, I don't respect your opinion.
Insulting your readers is truly the sign of a towering intellect.
Skeptics I have time for. Convince a skeptic, and you'll have won an actual battle.
Consider me skeptical.
E pluribus unum
I did find an interesting study of the papers written by climate scientists between 1965 and 1979. Seven articles written in that time frame predicted global cooling, forty four predicted global warming and twenty were neutral. It seems the media at the time, not the scientists, were predicting a new ice age.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/03/the-global-cooling-mole/
But that's just it, this is part the problem with the whole anti-Global Warming crowd. They keep repeating this line, until people like you repeat it too:
"Give us the programs and data so any high school science student can run the programs and get your results, then let "real" programmers look over the code for stupid mistakes, and real scientists check the data for stupid errors, then we might be on the way to science. All we have right now is "The dog ate my homework"."
Yet the data is available, and always has been, here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/
Sure the CRU's model isn't available but so what?- I believe others are available. The data is there for you to come up with your own conclusions, how many people would even understand the CRU's modelling system that aren't climate scientists themselves and hence part of the so-called conspiracy anyway?
The data is there, I'm just waiting for someone to do an objective study on it to show something contrary to the professional climatologists conclusion from it, yet all we get is this repeating of the myth that the data isn't available. Some data isn't, but most of it is- enough to be able to do peer review and conduct your own counter-studies.
If there was anything coming out of the denier crowd that was useful then great, they might have a stronger case, but right now? They are for the most part just making shit up and using half-stories that ignore the all important context.