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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.
WHEREAS, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a blend of government officials and scientists, does no independent climate research but relies on global climate researchers;
What do you propose to collect independent data from 1950 to 2010? Time travel? Of course you have to rely on global climate researchers.
I more than understand their concerns with cap and trade but some of these premise statements are a bit off track:
WHEREAS, the recently completed Copenhagen climate change summit resulted in little agreement, especially among growing CO2-emitting nations like China and India, and calls on the United States to pay billions of dollars to developing countries to reduce CO2 emissions at a time when the United States' national debt will exceed $12 trillion;
So what the state of Utah is saying is that since no one else is taking this seriously, we shouldn't have to? I agree that it will hurt us economically and competitively with other nations but you have to look at what scientific evidence we have before you mire this in those sorts of things.
WHEREAS, according to the World Health Organization, 1.6 billion people do not have adequate food and clean water; and WHEREAS, global governance related to global warming and reduction of CO2 would ultimately lock billions of human beings into long-term poverty:
Funny that absent from their "concerns" of foreign citizens is the statement that "increasing temperatures will increase drought and famine in equatorial developing nations resulting in starvation and displacement." Third world peoples will be the first to feel the effects of climate change while people like me in the United States will hear about this on the news. We have the resources and means to deal with the beginnings of it, they don't. Their governments will have bigger problems than debt and slowed economic development.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Legislature of the state of Utah urges 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 H. [ the ] .H climate data H. [ conspiracy ] .H and global warming science can be substantiated.
A "full and independent investigation" is exactly what the EPA tried to do. Problem is that everyone is on the planet. Good luck finding sentient beings to do an 'independent investigation' of our planet. Anyone else has a stake in this one way or the other because they live here.
My work here is dung.
How many times have we seen this sort of argument as contained in TFA:
It accused those seeking action on climate change of riding a "gravy train" and their efforts would "ultimately lock billions of human beings into long-term poverty".
So in other words, they accuse the climate change scientists of of acting in their own financial interests by being alarmists and then also complain about how doing something about the problem will adversely affect the financial interests of the skeptics. It is a massive double standard!
They claim that scientists toe the climate change line to get grants, and yet can you imagine how much definitive proof against man-made climate change would be worth to businesses? Any scientist who was in it for the money could name their price (or at least, their wife could name her price to be a consultant to industry).
The problem with this debate is that one side has to prove their claims, while the other side just needs to create doubt by using unsubstantiated and even sometimes completely discredited claims. In this case, claiming that the other side is on the "gravy train" isn't supported by any evidence at all, and yet there is no way to disprove it either. In all the leaked emails regarding this, where was the shred of evidence that anybody was trying to rort taxpayers money?
urging the United States Environmental Protection Agency to immediately halt its carbon dioxide reduction policies and programs
Um...whether you think global warming is bullshit or not, why would you want to halt carbon dioxide reduction policies? I mean, modify them, sure...but why completely halt them? Global warming being real or not, there is no denying that we as a species pump way too much crap into our atmosphere. Regardless of how much this affects our planet, you can't honestly tell me that it's a GOOD thing...
People always seem to follow one extreme ("We're ruining our planet!") or the other ("We aren't doing anything to the planet!") when it comes to global warming. What's up with that? Why is it so hard to find people with a realistic point of view ("We pollute too much, but we aren't dooming ourselves.")
Living With a Nerd
Each day, the United States falls behind a little bit more.
Cutting-edge research these days happens in Europe and Asia, where religion is put in its place, and education is paramount. Even if global warming is a political sham and most of the "scientific" evidence has been fabricated, as it very well may be, at least it has spurned research into solar and wind technologies, for instance.
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
They should do the same with gravity. Instandly they will have flying cars.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
While the science around climate change deserves scrutiny and probing, this probing should probably be done by scientists, not legislators. The last time I checked, the scientific method didn't include debate, Robert's Rules of Order or passage by majority. Freeman Dyson makes some interesting points against climate change in this NY Times Article. If you agree with him or not, at least he's engaging in scentific skepticism over uninformed legislation.
Obviously the majority of Utah's Assembly has no idea how science works, as it takes a majority to pass an obviously useless law. It's too bad that method doesn't work or the Utah State Assembly could go ahead and legislate the Higgs-Boson into existence right there in the chambers. I think this problem is a symptom of our terrible science education in our schools. Perhaps they could go ahead and legislate some scientific thinking into themselves while they're redefining physics.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
I say we let Texas invade Utah, then let them both secede.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Here
That's because you need more than 15 years to get statistically significant figures.
People have trouble comprehending anything that takes longer than 20 years to prove, that's the problem. Innate flaw in our psychological makeup.
....for carrying out questionable science.
The effect of the recent IPCC Glacier mis-statements and the University of East Anglia 'mistakes' is to give people who would 'like it to not be so' to have a grain of sand around which to crystallize.
I make no claim as to if climate change is upon us or not, but it is ESSENTIAL that the science is revisited and made rock solid (or completely disproven)....in the meantime we have to progress on a path of caution -- which effectively means continuing to reduce carbon emissions IN CASE they are causing the problem...putting our collective fingers in our ears and singing la-lala-la isn't going to solve anything.
Jeez, politicians have enough difficulty making sensible decisions already, we're not exactly helping by not giving them accurate information on which to make those decisions, are we???
Ladies and gentlemen of the supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider: this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now, think about that. That does not make sense!
Why would a Wookiee -- an eight foot tall Wookiee -- want to live on Endor with a bunch of two foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense!
But more importantly, you have to ask yourself: what does that have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense!
Look at me, I'm a lawyer defending a major state, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense. None of this makes sense.
And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation... does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense.
If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must deny climate change! The defense rests.
For those of you too occupied to RTFA, the crossed out terms are enlightening: 'conspiracy' (twice), 'flawed', 'tricks', 'gravy train'.
Such emotive language doesn't help their cause when opponents could just as easily frame "denialists" with such terms.
Utah Assembly confirms that water is not wet anymore.
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
I'd say you need to go back to right around 1990 to find the correct data... as is insinuated by graphs like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b0/AverageTvsNumberofStations.jpg.
Incidentallty since around that time global warming really became a political issue and a lot of money was thrown at the problem. It's not that hard to imagine that some people will cherry-pick or fudge some data to get a better grant after that...
My rule with dubious science is: 'Follow the money', if anyone has a lot of financial gain with one outcome and their results just happen to be that outcome I call bullshit... Al Gore has financial gains, Al Gore is talking bullshit about global warming... there is no simpeler way of putting it.
That's because you need more than 15 years to get statistically significant figures.
You do realize you're just making that up? And that if the past 15 years showed marginally significant warming you'd be trumpeting it as "proof" that GW/CC was a "fact"? This is what bugs scientists about the AGW crowd: you use quite different standards for confirming and disconfirming evidence. The anti-AGW crowd do the same thing. I've been on both sides of the fence as I've learned more about the evidence, and neither is a particularly comfortable place for a scientist, as one gets continually pushed by anti-scientific individuals who introduce absolute irrelevancies, like the dangers to the ecology or the economy if their preferred belief happens to be true.
One useful way of determining you are dealing the an anti-scientist is that they mix introduce claims about the effects of GW/CC (or carbon dioxide reduction policies) as if they were arguments for or against GW/CC. As soon as someone does that, you know they aren't interested in science, but in politics and power.
With regard to Phil Jones' statement: an estimated rate of 0.13 C per decade would lead one to expect 0.2 C in 15 years. Instead, the rate is statistically equivalent to zero. That's interesting, but a more interesting question is: what is the highest rate that the observed trend is consistent with?
If it is higher than 0.13 C then the models are not in trouble. If it is not, then the models are.
But you cannot say at the same time that an observed rate that is consistent with the models over 15 years is confirmatory, and that an observed rate that is inconsistent with the models over 15 years is not disconfirmatory.
Not if you care about science, anyway.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
It's not just the mining though, it's the Power usage too. From this site (which seems to be a pro-coal lobbyists group website, but the numbers are similar to other sites) says that 90% of Utah's power comes from coal.
Utah's Lawmakers are cheap, corrupt beings. Here is a story about a legislator pusing for a nuclear power plant that he has a direct stake in. Hell, they even built an Office in the Capitol building for Lobbyists.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
Assuming for a moment you did not take those numbers out of your posterior, nature before the industrial revolution was at equilibrium, meaning it pumped out 600 and pumped back in 600 (e.g. plant growth). Then, human activities with 29 Gtons would tip that balance and accumulate CO2 in the atmosphere, which cannot be absorbed by nature (whose capacity is 600, not 629).
Ultimately, it is because an inordinate amount of carbon was extracted from the earth as coal and oil, way faster that the geological scale that would have occurred in nature.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
It kinda confirms (one of) my worst fears about the human race, namely that it sees the laws of reality as something political, right up into the echelons of power.
I've mentioned it before on /., but I was once on an international standardisation committee on which somebody questioned the statement that pure Poisson processes were ergodic. Rather than get somebody to check a textbook or do some maths, the (American) chair demanded that it be put to a vote. At least some Americans seem to be so devoted to democracy that it has become a religion, and they can't cope with the idea that reality might not be democratically decided.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
You can't confirm or falsify anything with a sample of one observation that lies outside a 95% confidence interval. What we need is repeated predictions and observations. If 19 out of 20 observations are within the 95% confidence interval, that's very good confirmation of the prediction. The fact that such big news is being made from just one observation that lies just outside the 95% confidence interval suggests that previous observations did fall within the confidence interval.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
As a Texan, I have been alarmed at the recent increase of the rate of retardedness coming out of my state. Let me be the first to say: I'm glad that this ridiculous news wasn't out of Texas this time. Thank God.
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.
I'm genuinely curious - can you give me an example of scientists who predicted, in the '70s, that we'd be in an ice age by 2010?
There are some factors you're apparently unaware of. The long-term trend over many decades is roughly 0.15C or so, but on the scale of a particular decade, roughly 4 main variables influence warming: CO2 excess, El Nino cycles, solar radiance, and aerosol cooling (volcanoes, say). Over the last 12 years we've had, in combination, a decrease in El Nino heating from a record 1998 (which is why many "skeptics" pick this year as a starting point) as well as a cooling cycle in solar radiation. They both operate on roughly the same timescale. Underneath that, the CO2 excess from humans contributes a fairly constant 0.2C per decade of warmth, which is why the last decade and a half have shown roughly flat temperature increases instead of the expected cooling. If you look at the temperature plots, you can see this "wiggle" happening on a regular basis. We'd then expect, over the next decade, to have rapidly increasing temperatures as all the warming factors are positive, then probably a flat profile after that. The long-term trend, as shown in the plots, is still rising.
Leave it to the politicians to 'prove a negative' simply by virtue of not understanding the subject matter completely. Which begs the question, should we then have a 'licensing system' to 'steer the Government', similar to driving a car? One that requires the comprehension of things like the laws of physics? Oh wait, never mind, the Government would be responsible for administering that program too...
Down here in Texas we don't use no high falutin' government assemblage, we use horse sense. The horses tell us it's cold out, so there can't be no climate change.
Damn liberal elitists.
Everyone has ulterior motives.
The people doing the Global Warming science are based in universities and want to continue to receive funding.
The people doing anti-Global Warming work are based in Energy companies and want to continue to make record profits.
Which one do you think is more likely to color your results?
It takes a great State like Utah to stand out amidst such gleaming examples. I must admit that South Carolina was looking pretty impressive, with the registry of subversives, but if the registration comes with a frame-able certificate, it might be a moneymaker! http://rawstory.com/2010/02/south-carolinas-subversive-activities-registration-act-force/ Texas can hold it's own though. Since the Texas Pledge of Allegiance does not say much more than that Texas is indivisible, it is a spectacular example. Considering that Texas is the only State that actually is divisible.
That's because you need more than 15 years to get statistically significant figures.
I think you said that poorly.
There is no sharp cut-off as to the interval size you need to be able to achieve significance. Furthermore, the *meaning* of significance is confusing when we talk about a single interval's importance in falsifying a hypothesis about the distribution of a random variable (global average temperatures)
Imagine we play a game of coin toss with a coin I provide. I take heads, you take tails. We play four rounds, and heads comes up every time. You, naturally, suspect I'm cheating. Then our friend Dr. Jones points out that four sequential heads does not meet the 95% standard for statistical significance. You need no more greater probability for an event than p(1/20), but we only have a p(1/16) event here.
What the deniers are doing with Dr. Jones remarks is like saying, "Four heads in a row is not a statistically significant result, which PROVES the coin is fair."
In any case, *random sampling* is integral to the very notion of statistical significance. In a sequence of trials of a random variable, you can *always* choose an interval that makes the point you want to make: increase/no change/decrease. And technically, your interval *will* be significantly increasing or decreasing as you like.
So basically significance or non-significance of any single sample of a random sequence doesn't prove or disprove anything, if the sample is small and the chooser gets to pick the size of the interval.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Everyone has a lot to gain, so I will in fact call anything anyone claims without backing up those claims with any evidence bullshit...
The scientists have provided copious data and arguments backing up their claims. Yet you and others like you continue to call "bullshit". So I ask you: do you have data and arguments to the contrary?
How's this: what would it take to convince you that AGW is real? What reasonable measurement, achievable in the next few years, would you require to believe that the predictions are accurate?
By the way, so far, I see you using works like "hostage" and "silence opposition", which sounds to me more like you're doing quite a bit of fear-mongering yourself.
Of course, the vast majority of scientists are trying to deceive us. The oil companies are right, but they don't have enough money to fight the global coalition of evil scientists. We all know environmentalists are extremely wealthy and they will buy the scientific community to say whatever fits their evil, hidden agenda. Of course, nobody knows what's this "agenda" we're talking about but that doesn't matter. It's evil.
The poor oil companies don't have a chance.
Apparently neither did the committee, but it didn't stop them having an opinion about it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think it's more that Utah is sitting on a whole metric assload of coal.
No sig today...
That's because they're in VANCOUVER. Vancouver sees on average MAYBE a bit more snow than Seattle, on their lucky years. Only an idiot would host the winter games in Seattle and expect plenty of snow, but because you've crossed the border into Canadia they magically expect Vancouver to be covered in the white shit.
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
Wow, between this resolution and one state legislator's proposal to eliminate 12th grade, these idiots make even Arizona look like a bastion of scholarship.
Climate science is about the long haul. 15 years is a drop in the bucket. The Earth has been continuously warming, there is no doubt about that.
Once we actually have climate science, it wil be about the long haul. Right now we have a bunch of power hungry nutjobs with political power dangling grant money in front of people claiming to be scientists. The Earth has not been continuosly warming. If it were even at 1 degree C per century, then the entire planet would have been a frozen snowball (- 30 C average temperature) a mere 6000 years ago. It would have been at near absolute zero less than 30K years ago. It would be kind of hard on T-Rex to get around and even if he did, he'd break his teeth on the hard frozen flesh of his prey.
So let's lose the "continuously warming" and "no doubt about it" nonsense. The reason Phil Jones et al have got to be considered discredited is becasue they ignored incovenient data. He and the folks at the CRU and Hansen at NASA set themselves out as theoreticians and promptly cherry picked the data they would use to support their "theory". A scientific theory is not like a legal/political theory. A scientific theory has to account for all the data - if it does not it is not much of a theory. It is certainly not sufficient to justify the political chicanery that is happening as a result.
Note that I consider the promoters of "climate change" aka global warming to be discredited. That is the people invloved have been corrupted and their opinions should not be considered in serious policy discussions. We need some real scientists that can come up with a useable (ie capable of predicting) theory - and not one that denies the Medival Warm Period in order to fit the data into a hickey stick curve. We will know we have such a theory when it can be tested by its ability to "predict" temperature/climate trends for any given 500 year period. I expect it to be able take into account the effects of cloud cover and solar activity as well as volcanic activity (all items beyond the capability of the current "models" that are being used by the corrupted climate charlatans. We have other "sciences" that ignore data because the theory says something else "should" happen. They are also generally heavily involved in politics and have degenerated into arguments about what data should be looked at much like lawyers try to get evidence disallowed in a court case.
Go read up on the history of Einstein's General Relativity. He didn't come up with a theory that said that graivity bends light. He came up with a theory that predicted how much light would bend and suggested experiments to gather data that would support or refute his theory. And when the first experimental data came back it did not match his predictions. He revised his theory accordingly - he did not revise the data.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
I think by the 80's they were pretty certain that the cooling effect wasn't sufficient to overwhelm the warming, and since then, for the past four decades, we've had increasing certainty in warming.
And here's another rebuttal.
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/
You do realise you made that up, don't you?
You can work it out yourself (this was done in 1934, by the way):
Take the climate record.
Find the RMS error to a line fit.
This is your annual error. It is about +/- 0.5C.
Each year you add more data, if there is no trend, you reduce your error of estimation of the mean by a factor of sqrt(N).
Each year the underlying trend if AGW models are right is about 0.02C increase.
Each year you gain more of the trend that underlies the climate. It goes up each year by a factor (N).
Work out where 0.5/sqrt(N) > 25.
N>> 625 ** 1/3
N>> 8 years
16 years leaves you within 2 standard deviations. There's a 90% chance your answer is not real, just happenstance.
24 years leaves you within 3 standard deviations. There's a 95% chance your answer is not real, just happenstance.
30 years means your answer is better than 95% chance of being genuine.
If you want greater certainty, you must use more years.
PS the last 15 years shows 0.12C per decade warming trend (though not above the significance level: therefore the upper bound is over 0.25C per decade. Hence it's entirely possible [if less than 50-50] that the predicted warming of 0.17C per decade has been seen in 15 years).
There hasn't been statistically significant cooling nor staying-the-same either. In other words there was no statistically significant climate at all. Not until you go back to 1994 or so. Guess what...
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Sorry I can't find a link, but I know of which he speaks. In the late 70s Time, and IIRC Newsweek and several other of the big magazines of the day were running this story about how we were headed into another ice age. There were several scientists at the time just beginning to study ice cores and were claiming we appeared to be headed straight into another major cooling period, hence another ice age.
IIRC these guys got lots of grants, did more ice core drillings, and then quietly dropped off the radar. look up "Time 70s ice age prediction" and maybe you'll have better luck, as my Google Fu doth suckth. Correction, it was Newsweek and here is a PDF of the 1975 issue. Hey, maybe my Google Fu is getting better!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
NO SHIT, THE CLIMATE CHANGES.
So what's it doing now, eh? What's the climate going to be like in 50 years? 100 years? 200 years? How can we affect that? How are we already affecting it? That's the question, innit? "Climate change" as an issue refers more to "what factor does man's activities play", than "Hey, it's warmer this century than last". Man's activities being of particular interest because it is the factor in climate that we can change. If you'll pardon the expression, stating the obvious, "the climate changes" merely clouds the issue.
But here's the major problem: the data is being massaged. ...we're not willing to use real data.
Of course the data is being massaged. You wouldn't understand it at all if it wasn't massaged. Best case, you would draw incorrect conclusions.
The argument is from "whose massaging is correct", not "ZOMG! It's being massaged!" Real data? You yourself decry the use of real data because it has to be interpreted to be understood.
Nature is not and has never been in equilibrium. The world is constantly changing.
At a vastly slower rate than with human intervention. Sea life can adjust for a 2 degree temperature swing over a few thousand years. In a hundred? Not so much.
Another fact that you conveniently leave out is that large, natural swings in climate tend to result in mass extinctions.