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Climategate's Final Days
The Bad Astronomer writes "Climategate may be on its way out. An investigatory committee at Pennsylvania State University has formally cleared climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann of any scientific misconduct. Mann was central in the so-called Climategate scandal, where illegally leaked emails were purported to indicate examples of scientists trying to cover up any lack of global warming in their data. This finding by the committee (PDF) is another in a series of independent investigations that have all concluded that no misconduct has occurred."
Climategate's Final Days
Bullshit. If you think this means it's over, you're not familiar with the debate.
Immediately following Climategate Nature released an editorial saying no controversy found in the e-mails. That didn't seem to matter at all.
The more respected global warming papers have been published and accepted in peer reviewed journals. Point out any global warming denialist papers that have done the same. I think the most you'll find are papers that suggest global change could result in positive things in some areas. I don't know of any saying that climate change is not happening.
Your fundamental problem in arguing with a person who denies global warming is that they use erroneous logic. They find one uncertainty or minor flaw in a study and suddenly volumes of studies -- even those unrelated -- can be thrown out and dismissed. If it isn't in Mann's research, if it isn't in the East Anglian e-mails, it's somewhere else. You just have to face that logic and move on past them. Oh, and for future articles, Bad Astronomer, using cute otter lolcats to fire back at your opponents isn't exactly the hallmark of a logically sound debate. It's little more than an ad hominem attack.
If you think this is the 'final days' of this mess, you are sadly mistaken. Not until first world countries find it hard to get by will the majority of them step up and realize it. The election of Virginia State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli shows you got a whole state who would like to sweep this inconvenience under the rug and want you to stop trying to hinder their economy with your "research and science."
My work here is dung.
Maybe they were holding it wrong?
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
One can never satisfy a conspiracy theorist.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
... of course those stuffy liberal academic types at Penn St. cleared him. They're liberals! They're protecting their own!
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Creationists, climate change deniers, the tobacco industry ... they all use the same arguments. You can go through The Fine Art of Baloney Detection and find the examples right to hand.
At least the tobacco industry has mostly given up claiming smoking isn't bad for you. Now their shills are working for the climate change deniers. Yes, it's the same shills.
RationalWiki (unfinished) comparative example: A comparative guide to science denial.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I seem to recall that
1.there were emails clearly indicating that they were politically involved, ie they'd exagerate to scare people. Hardly a scientific attitude
2.there was some pretty perverted data analysis to get to "expected results"
There's no denying there are climate changes going around. But
1.calling it man-made is complete speculation at the current point(yes it is, there's correlation at best, no proof of causality)
2.calling it warming is kind of fucked up since it's warming in some places, and cooling in others
3.no proof either that anything we do can change anything about it.
Oh and there is a non negligible part of the climate scientific community that *disagrees* with how things are being presented.
How about they study pollution and find a way to stop the billions of tonnes of garbage that still get dumped into our landfills and seas every year? Won't pollution and deforestation will kill and harm us a whole lot more than a few simple degree changes in our atmosphere?
I'm sorry, but isn't getting sick with dieases like cancer from a contaminated environment deserving more funding for research than climate research? Why are they getting all that attention and research dollars? Are we being played into fools to keep on looking up at the sky at the weather instead of the ground we're standing on and the quality of air we breath?
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
As far as the lay public is concerned, the damage has already been done. They were already convinced that these were a bunch of self-serving interests promoting their cause, and the leaked emails affirmed it for them.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
You article author says this about himself:
"Since Day 1 of this I have been calling it a non-event, a manufactured controversy by global warming denialists trying to make enough noise to drown out any real talk on this topic. "
Hardly an unbiased observer. I, for one, really hope that there isn't anything to 'ClimateGate' but if you've read anything about it at all, you know that the problem wasn't the emails, but in the leaked data sets and source code. The emails show typical petty human behaviour. The data and source code suggest the possibility of cherry picking of data, and mathematical modeling to reach a predetermined conclusion. That is what worries me, but I admit I don't have the expertise to make a determination on my own.
Sunshine and openness is only way to ever end this debate over global warming. All research, results, and data sets should be publicly available. Is that really too much to ask?
Necron69
News at 11.
Hardly an independent panel. And really, they did say he was incorrect to not have real statisticians working on the results - which invalidates much of the published work.
You can say he was cleared, but that's only of purposeful intent to mislead - what the report is basically dancing around is that he misled through poor application of scientific principals. And isn't that what really matters here, that the scientific method is carefully applied instead of fitting data to a pre-concieved conclusion?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The VA State Attorney General still has his own investigation (which TFA mentions) which is supposed to root out Mann's monetary fraud when he was at UVa. Yet this is the same AG who claims his own anti-Healthcare lawsuit against the Federal government won't cost the state more than the $350 filing fee. Somehow I don't think that he gets the irony of this situation.
And yes I do realize that this comment is more fitting for Craigslist than /.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The story in The Sunday Times of London that kicked all this off has been fully retracted with several uses of the phrase "We apologise." The German newspaper that reported that the IPCC erred in its assessment of climate impact in Africa also retracted that story.
Speaking as a journalist, the most damning phrase I see in The Times' retraction is this one (boldfaced emphasis mine):
So what really happened there? It sounds suspiciously like somebody high up at The Times or News Corporation didn't like the point of view presented and changed it to fit his or her own worldview, facts be damned.
Prevent Windows piracy. Use Linux instead.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
The earth has been both hotter and cooler than it is now.
That is correct... but irrelevant to the question.
Anthropogenic global warming is not instead of natural variations-- it is in addition to natural variations. Natural variations don't suddenly vanish now that we add carbon dioxide to the air.
...I'm all for taking better care of the planet, but the global warming nuts haven't really provided much evidence and they're the ones making the allegations.
The way I see things, if you make a bunch of claims, the burden of proof is ON YOU... not the people you're speaking to.
By "global warming nuts," you apparently mean "the scientists who actually study the problem."
By "the burden of proof is on you" you apparently mean "...to prove the correctness of scientific results to people who aren't willing to take any effort to look at the actual science, but will believe any criticism with no skepticism whatsoever."
There is a lot of science... this is not made up. (And it dates to way before Al Gore, who's not a scientist.) Have you actually read, for a start, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Working Group I Report on Physical Science Basis of Climate Science? What? No? Because you already read in a blog somewhere that it's a hoax, so you don't need to read it?
So, uh, if you won't actually read the evidence, how can any possible amount of evidence convince you?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Mann gets millions from NSF and Penn State doesn't want that to stop. What a shock they exonerated him! Once again, the scientific community shows that when it all comes down to feasting on taxpayer money, they don't let the truth get in the way. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704541004575010931344004278.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
So?
Ok, good...
Citation needed. And the conclusion doesn't follow. Just because birds ocassionally shit into the pool, and kids ocassionally pee into it doesn't mean you can empty a septic tank into it, then claim that the former two things mean it's not your fault it's a cesspool now.
Good quote, but doesn't favour your position. It's precisely what worries me. The planet will keep on existing, life will survive and even thrive in the most poisonous environments. But just because some bacteria can live in such conditions doesn't mean I can, or even if I can find a way it doesn't mean it's going to be pleasant. And I'd rather have a pleasant life.
People on the right (not necessarily applying that label to you, mind) seem really hung up on the question of whether human action is causing global warming (those that are able to get past arguing over whether it's even happening, that is).
I'm not as interested in that question, frankly. The way I look at it is this: every single homo sapien that lives or has ever lived has been on this one planet. As far as we've been able to tell, homo sapiens is the only "intelligent" life that's ever evolved anywhere, certainly in local space. I'm of the mind that that's fairly important and worth preserving. And this planet is the only one we know of that can support homo sapien life on some of it's surface some of the time, and even then we're on a climactic knife-edge. A little bit of change in any direction and we have reasonable concerns that the whole semi-stable equilibrium we're in will skew off wildly. It looks like that's what happened on Mars, and there's no reason to assume it can't happen here.
Taking all that in mind, until we have a way to live and thrive off-planet, we absolutely have to do what we can to keep this planet healthy, where healthy is defined as "able to support a large human population". If Earth winds up looking like Mars, knowing the planet is just going through a normal geological cycle that we didn't cause is not much comfort. Not that there will be any complex life anywhere in the Sol system to mourn us.
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That's because that's not what the debate is about. The Earth's climate is ALWAYS changing, as everyone well knows. Examining ice cores, fossils, geologic record, etc, prove that the Earth's climate is never steady and has always been changing. In fact, it has been both much warmer and much colder than today at various times in history.
The people you bash as "deniers" are actually not denying climate change, but are instead debating the following points that you seem to be ignoring. They argue that:
So you are right that the debate isn't over, but not for the reasons you describe. The debate will continue because people like you don't understand what the debate is about (you seem to think it's about whether or not climate change is happening), and because people like you are making a crisis out of nothing. If man-made global warming is happening, is that a crisis? It may be, if it can be proven that human activity is truly the primary cause. But is climate change in and of itself a crisis? Given that it always changes back and forth, I would say definitely not. Should we shut down our economies and destroy our industry just because the climate is changing, just like it always has? Definitely not! It's just something life has to adapt to. But as long as people like you continue to stick their heads in the sand and scream that change that always happens is "a crisis", and as long as you refuse to see what the debate is actually about, then people like me will keep fighting to educate you.
Main Point: We don't argue that climate change isn't happening, and if that's what you think the debate is about then you are completely wrong.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I cannot tell you how much I hate this line of argument. "People who believe X must therefore believe Y. We all know Y is a crock; therefore people who believe X believe crocks; therefore X is a crock." It's completely illogical, and at least two argumentative fallacies into the bargain.
As far as CAGW goes, there is a fundamental chain of proofs that have to occur before it can be taken as reasonably proven. These start with the claim that the Earth is warming and end with the claim that therefore catastrophe will result. (Well, and more frequently these then pass on from that to claims that if we undertake to destroy the economy in a particular way, the catastrophe will be prevented or attenuated.) The very first claim, that the Earth is warming, is actually suspect because of instrumentation problems, but is likely true as we have been coming out of the Little Ice Age that ended in about 1850. That this warming, if indeed it exists, is unprecedented, is almost certainly false. The CAGW claims just get shakier from there.
Now, I have no problem with the thought that CAGW might be true, and that if so we should act. However, it is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far, the CAGW proponents have not provided us with even ordinary evidence, particularly given that all of their predictions to date (that is, those whose end dates have already passed) have been dramatically wrong, that much of their evidence has been irreproducible (and thus, in a scientific sense, not evidence at all) and that their obvious bad will and career politics (as exhibited in the climategate emails) is of the kind that tends to suppress contrary evidence even if it is stronger than the "consensus" view pushed by the CAGW proponents.
In other words, CAGW may be true, but it is not obviously true, has not been shown to be reasonably likely to be true, and is as likely to be utterly false. And on this basis, the CAGW proponents wish to destroy the world's economy, immiserating hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
It's weird how people think they can add to a debate with experts while being absolute non-experts themselves.
It's even more weird how some people claim you must be an "expert" in something in the days when anyone can educate themselves in anything if they chose to apply themselves seriously enough.
In this golden age of education where a degree in one subject does not necessarily mean you know more about a subject than someone who simply has been studying it longer than you, it seems rather quant to complain about lack of credentials.
After all, many people arguing against the mainstream AGW ideas were people with greater statistical understanding than the supposed "experts" (and that is part of what the study concluded as well, that they had a poor grasp of real statistics - something the rest of us were trying to tell you after looking at the code released along with the emails).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I never understood why it's so hard to find other people who don't subscribe to one extreme or the other when it comes to climate change.
Because people are inherently unsatisfied with the answer "we don't know, and cannot know".
And at the higher levels, because trillions of dollars are at stake going either direction. It pushes the rhetoric and arguments to one side or the other - by necessity, since the tendency is for each side to engage in greater and greater bombast until those of us in the middle have a hard time being heard as neutral without being cast to one side or the other, because all people know is either extreme.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's not a conspiracy theory. It's an orthogonality problem. If you have a Medieval Warming Period (MWP) -- then temperatures *aren't* unprecedented and become mathematically decoupled from CO2. Mann's "Hockeystick" graph erased the MWP -- problem is, the approach is worthless, and while Mann may believe it (again not conspiracy theory), it isn't true. Thus we still have the MWP (and the RWP, the Minoan, and the Holocene optimum) -- all of which were warmer than today and none of which had AGW contributions.
Also irrelevant, I'm afraid.
Apparently somebody once used the word "unprecedented," and the deniers used that as a lever to say "Well, if we can just attack that one word, which we will do by defining the word "unprecedented" the way we choose to and then show that the current curve isn't unprecedented, then we have debunked all of global warming! If one single word used by a popularizer can be attacked, the whole of the science is wrong!"
The anthropogenic global warming, basically, says that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse effect gas, and that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is exactly like any other greenhouse effect gas, and adding more of it to the atmosphere increases the greenhouse effect. The actual effect, by the way, is remarkably small-- all of the carbon dioxide humans have added to the atmosphere to date has increased the average temperature by 0.6 plus or minus 0.3 degrees K, which (since that average temperature of the Earth is around 300K) corresponds to a change of about two tenths of one percent. This is relatively simple physics, known for over a century, and which has been calculated in numerical detail since the mid 1970s. There really is no real scientific controversy here-- it has been addressed, in detail, by all that scientific work that the deniers want to ignore.
In short, saying that there has been periods of climate warming that weren't caused by anthropogenic effects doesn't really disprove anything. Sure. Anthropogenic warming is an added effect, not the only effect.
A challenge to the geeks at slashdot -- read "HARRY_README.txt". If you believe a single thing that comes out of CRU after that, I've got a bridge to sell.
Well, first I do need to note that the climate scientists at CRU are not the only scientists who study climate, and not even the most important ones-- they just happen to be the ones who were unlucky enough to have computer accounts that were broken into by cybercriminals.
If you are giving a challenge to "geeks at slashdot," then let me give a challenge to deniers: read the Working Group Report on the Physical Science Basis of Climate Science. Reading this will not actually stop you from being a denier-- denialisim is political in nature, and has nothing to do with scientific results. However, it will at least mean that you might start being a denialist that uses arguments which actually deal with the science, instead of the ignorance about science that I usually hear from deniers.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
No, scientists are not required to publish emails, letters, phone calls etc. They are supposed to publish papers. /. reader can clarify and elaborate, if they so wish.
Those papers should be peer reviewed to ensure that the science in the paper is sound (not necessarily *right* - a published theory may later be proven wrong).
The letters in question were hacked from a mail server and released by the hackers.
I am not a scientist, I am sure some other
Have you actually read, for a start, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Working Group I Report on Physical Science Basis of Climate Science?
Yes. Have YOU looked into the problems with said report? Because science doesn't stop with one report . Science means other people get to question your results, your assumptions, and your methods.
Science means other people get to ask exactly how you arrived at a conclusion and you tell them so they can reproduce your results or raise issues with your methods. Yet what the emails revealed, was that even in the face of FOI requests the "scientists" would not release data or methods - and after looking at the actual computer modeling code also leaked, you can understand why. Because the "scientists" over time, became less interested in the actual science than in proving a conclusion they had reached, at any cost.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
On a 'science' website - this gets modded 'Insightful'? Scientists are a little clique of conspiracists set on imposing their politics and energy ethics on the poor old USA.
Wow. Good luck with the future, you've clearly lost your minds.
Here's a starting point for you.
More damagingly, he added in an email to Mann with the subject line "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL": "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is!
This has, rightly, become one of the most famous of the emails. And for once, it means what it seems to mean"
Or, you could just try using google.
Funny how we have to keep re-posting links to the actual emails when all you have to do is claim it's all a lie and a fantasy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Having seen both of the papers in question, I can tell you that they wouldn't pass muster as undergraduate term papers at Podunk U.
The fact that those papers somehow made it into reputable journals is the real scandal.
Just for the record, $500 K over 5 years is pretty small change for research, overall. That won't even hire a post-doc once you take out the overhead.
In which case, all you have to show is that (a) one of those papers was a serious scientific article, and (b) it wasn't in fact published. IIRC, both of those papers were published, although I don't remember where. I have no idea whether they were serious scientific papers or prejudiced hack jobs.
If an authority in a field says that a certain paper is nonsense, it's wise to consider the possibility that it actually is.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Wait, who have you ever heard say that humans are the only thing affecting climate?
Anyone who has ever said that expensive changes in industry will result in significant change in global warming. So, basically any policy maker, and pretty much every single person at those AGW global summits.
Really? Please cite one that has actually said that. They may say that humans are making a very significant impact on the climate, but they don't say that we're the only thing affecting it.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Okay, if I were to follow the money as you'd suggest, I'd wind up at the front door of Big Oil. Thanks. Now I know what drives the denier camp.
Have you read the IPCC working group reports? They cover that chain of proofs pretty well.
If you have and you still don't think that global climate change has been proven, what level of evidence would it take to prove it to you? After all, you use the quotation that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; what level of evidence would you consider to be extraordinary for the theory of global climate change?
Honestly though, I'm not certain I'll get a reasonable answer from you. The two links you provided are pretty tangential to your point. Don't like the US surface station data? Well, the European and Japanese surface station data shows the same trends. Don't like any surface station data? Well, the satellite data shows the same trends. Hell, even the decrease in average bird sizes over the last 46 years is indicative of an upward trend in average temperature. Even data from studies that are entirely unrelated to climate science show indications of increasing average temperatures! How is that not extraordinary?
We put out a lot more CO2 than the earth itself does,
Actually, it's not even close.
We put about 5% of the carbon into the atmosphere, but that 5% is enough to tip the balance and cause CO2 levels to rise, because the biosphere cannot absorb it.
From the PDF...
On and about November 22, 2009, The Pennsylvania State University began to receive
numerous communications (emails, phone calls and letters) accusing Dr. Michael E,
Mann of having engaged in acts, beginning in approximately 1998, that included
manipulating data, destroying records and colluding to hamper the progress of scientific
discourse around the issue of anthropogenic global warming, These accusations were
based on perceptions of the content of the emails stolen from a server at the Climatic
Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Great Britain as widely reported,
Given the sheer volume of the communications to Penn State, the similarity of their
content and the variety of sources, which included University alumni, federal and state
politicians, and others, many of whom had had no relationship with Pel1l1 State, Dr. Eva J.
Pell, then Senior Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School, was
asked to examine the matter. The reason for having Dr. Pell examine the matter was that
the accusations, when placed in an academic context, could be construed as allegations of
research misconduct, which would constitute a violation of Penn State policy,
Scientific hijinks!?!?! Somebody get me Penn State on the phone, NOW!!
You'd think they might have mentioned that he worked there. But maybe that only amuses me...
This still doesn't change the fact that the AGW argument is supported by insufficient evidence and flawed computer models. Much of North America and Europe used to be covered in glaciers, and they were gone before man existed. GW was happening long before fossil fuels were dug out of the ground.
There's actual hard evidence of this. AGW is a scam to guilt people into spending money on "Green" technology utilizing a naturally occurring phenomena that was already in full swing before man existed.
I drive a small fuel efficient car, use CFL's and generally do what all the granola munching, tree hugging liberal rabid AGW alarmists do. Mainly because pollution is dirty, it stinks, and burning a lot of gas is a waste of money. Those are all good enough reasons to me. I don't need Al Gore to make up a reason for me to do it.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
They didn't challenge the credibility of a scientist. To do that, they would do the difficult work of producing incongruous reproducible scientific results.
Instead, they did the easy thing, which was to illegally hack into a computer system and leak private, misleading emails to a conspiracy-minded population of kooks ready to take individual words or phrases far out of context to reinforce their preconceived notions.
But, like you said, if they had "challenged the credibility of a scientist or his research", then that would be fine.
I don't deny the Earth has shown some slight warming, warming which brings us nowhere near the levels that Earth has successfully endured in the past. I have concerns with CO2 being named as the scapegoat. I take issue with models being called science. Models are part of the hypothesis. Every other field of science requires a testable, and repeatable experiments. It's what makes science great, because it can weed out free energy nuts that power their cars with cold fusion and water. Evolution, for a long time, really was a hypothesis that fit the facts. It needed DNA to tie it all together and really put the last nail in the Creationist coffin. It appears that climate science is exempt from this requirement (a test of what the model concludes) before calling conclusions facts. The problem with the Warmers is that when a question is asked, the debate that follows is usually just a bunch of name calling. Two things separate science from religion. Science assumes a lack of knowledge or that the knowledge we currently have is incorrect. Religion assumes it is right. Science wants to be challenged by anyone, where religion demands it be challenged by no one. When you deny anyone's right to ask "why?", then you are spewing dogma.
CO2 is rising, no doubt about that. My issue is that it only makes up about .04% of the atmosphere. Venus and Mars both have vastly higher amounts of CO2 compared to us (~95%). One planet is scorching hot, and the other is very cold (with some tolerably warm spots for our future explorers). Venus is fairly convincingly attributed to the Greenhouse Effect. Mars has an atmospheric CO2 content that by volume and mass is greater than Earths. Why is Mars not hot? Why does the greenhouse effect not slip out of control there? The odds of IR radiation striking a CO2 molecule on the way up on Earth is extremely small. If this weren't true, IR pictures of fields and cities would be blurred by the scattering caused by CO2. Increasing CO2 from .04% to .05% still keeps those odds extremely small. If it is absorbed, the CO2 with kick out a another IR photon, the whole idea of the Greenhouse Effect. To anything in the atmosphere, most directions lead to space. For me to accept a model, it must apply to Mars and Venus equally, without modifying constants. Yes that means the must account for all the variations, from deflection from our magnetic field of higher energy particles to atmospheric density to distance from the Sun. Without these factors, people are taking variables and assuming constants out of them. If you take a model for Earth and plug in all the same factors for Mars or any other planet into it, but are stuck with "we don't have that variable in this model" then your model is incomplete and inaccurate. That model should work anywhere, like all other physics does. If you want to convince me you've pegged the source of a less than %1 difference in temperature, then you better account for all these variables much wider than %1 difference.
The Sun is the primary sources of heat on Earth, far outpacing every other source. Are there any direct recordings (not by tree ring proxy) of variations in luminosity over the same period of time? We are kept warm by it at 150 million kilometers away. Think of the vast amount of energy that has to be releasing to do that. Even slight variations would affect us. The Earth is a very good black body, like the other planets. By the math for black body radiation, the Earth is emitting around 10% more heat that it gets from the Sun, due to geothermal heat.
I am seriously concerned that real ecological issues like pollution and conservation of resources have been hijacked by the invisible, marketable demon of CO2.
Anyone who has ever said that expensive changes in industry will result in significant change in global warming.
Really? So by saying that changing human industry will affect global warming, that implies that only human industry affects global warming?
Hey, my solution that includes HCL and H2SO4 is too acidic! I claim that if I decrease the amount of HCL, it will be less acidic. Ergo I am implying that H2SO4 does not affect the pH of the solution.
Wow. Pojut complained about people at the two extremes, but what about people who think only the two extremes exist?
The enemies of Democracy are
These start with the claim that the Earth is warming and end with the claim that therefore catastrophe will result. (Well, and more frequently these then pass on from that to claims that if we undertake to destroy the economy in a particular way, the catastrophe will be prevented or attenuated.)
I like how you accuse one group of alarmism, and then go on immediately to blithely dismiss all manner of regulation as attempts "to destroy the economy". In other words, you start with the claim that some people are trying to regulate, "and end with the claim that therefore catastrophe will result." I'd say impending wholesale destruction of an economy is an extraordinary claim, and like you say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So where's your evidence that environmentalists are trying to destroy the economy? Where's your evidence that environmental regulations will even come close to destroying the economy if passed?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
That is to say, you can't bring up monetary incentives as proof of accuracy without noting that there's a lot of money going both ways - which is true in the meta-sense of the global warming debate. There are literally trillions of dollars, not to mention the very notion of who controls industry, at stake in this discussion.
You have a very novel definition of "a lot" then. There are trillions of dollars on one side (the carbon industry), and low tens of millions on the other.
No one gets rich doing science.
Regardless of which side you fall on, read the pdf and then ask yourself if you feel the investigation methodology was satisfactory.
The investigation into Mann was essentially "we read the emails and didn't find a statement like 'I committed fraud'", and then we interviewed the guy, and he said he didn't do it. Ergo, he must be innocent, right?
Can you imagine if we ran criminal courts the same way?
The investigations were a worthless waste of everyone's time. Because of the lack of diligence, not only fail to resolve the dispute, but tend to have the opposite effect. A non-thorough investigation always looks like a cover-up.
I am not stating or even implying that there was any effort to cover up wrongdoing, and I am not saying that Mann did anything wrong. I am saying that you cannot reasonably conclude either point due to the methodology of the investigation.
As I said, read it yourself and draw your own conclusion. I know I'm going to be modded down and ridiculed for even failing to accept the results of the investigation as gospel; draw your own conclusions about people who behave that way.
It is well known that Al gore has invested in carbon credit and other green-energy related companies.
Great! Somebody needs to. That said, it seems like you're coming from a libertarian/laissez-faire capitalism viewpoint, but you have some problem with Al Gore investing in and profiting from companies that are moving the ball forward on sustainable technology? I'm a left liberal (shocking, I know) and I don't see a bit of a problem with Al Gore or anybody else profiting by supporting businesses that serve such an enormous benefit to society.
You want to help the environment at all costs. Even if it means lying to the public.
I expressed myself very poorly if I left anyone with the impression that I support or advocate lying to the public. I want to see the true, unvarnished results of all climate studies become common knowledge so we can all make educated policy/electoral decisions.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
I actually laid out a fairly long chain of proof that would be needed, and why, in a previous thread that I'm too lazy to go search for. The response was basically, "We don't approve of the proof you require, and it will therefore not be forthcoming." So let's just stick with something very basic. I would like to see a climate model that correctly "predicts" the past, given real input data, and from current data correctly predicts the climate ten years out. We've been seeing these model predictions from some 15 years now, and none of them have ever proven close to accurate. If we can get a good model that predicts the past and the future in a reasonable way, I'll become interested in looking at the other evidence in more depth. Clearly, that will take some time to resolve, but considering the time that it took to resolve the existence of black holes or other novel theories, it seems like a very small time indeed to wait until we can predict 10 years in the future, before assuming we can predict a hundred.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
I just go to say it.
I was hearing some other doomsday scenario and recently googled a bit around a kind of volcanic event. Oh, it was associated with Obama's oil spill.
About 70k years ago there was a big volcanic event in Indonesia. Seems it pretty well covered the planet in ash. Estimates of surviving human population range from 5k to 15k.
A near extinction event for humans.
Tell me about how your doomsday scenario is in fact an actual human extinction event coming on in the next 200 years.
You seem to be a fine example of what the "deniers" complain about around fearmongering. Hmm, troll? Worse?