Slashdot Mirror
Losing the Public Debate On Global Warming
Hugh Pickens writes "Dr. James Hansen, director of the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who first made warnings about climate change in the 1980s, says that public skepticism about the threat of man-made climate change has increased despite the growing scientific consensus. He says that without public support, it will be impossible to make the changes he and his colleagues believe need to occur to protect future generations from the effects of climate change. 'The science has become stronger and stronger over the past five years while the public perception is has gone in completely the other direction. That is not an accident,' says Hansen. 'There is a very concerted effort by people who would prefer to see business to continue as usual. They have been winning the public debate with the help of tremendous resources.' Hansen's comments come as recent surveys have revealed that public support for tackling climate change has declined dramatically in recent years. A recent BBC poll found that 25% of British adults did not think global warming is happening and over a third said many claims about environmental threats are 'exaggerated,' compared to 24 per cent in 2000. Dr. Benny Peiser, director of skeptical think tank The Global Warming Policy Foundation, says it's time to stop exaggerating the impact of global warming and accept the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change. 'James Hensen has been making predictions about climate change since the 1980s. When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up.'"
He just won't shut up about the sky falling, and it annoys everyone else. It doesn't matter if the sky really is falling. Until a piece hits you in a head, it's just a greater and greater annoyance to hear about it.
When we have a nontrivial portion of the population who does not believe that humanity resulted from evolution by natural selection, and that the universe is less than ten thousand years old, did we really expect people to accept science that something bad is going to happen if they do not change their behavior?
Our failure to insist on scientific literacy rates as high as written-word literacy rates is going to be something that comes back to bite us, I'm afraid. I'm not sure there is anything to be done for the problem now, except educate as well as we can.
Maybe we can have some scientists say that a god revealed to them that it dislikes the smell of vehicle exhaust and is angrily heating up the planet as a result. Unfortunately, I'm only half-kidding.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
What I mean is... even among people who strongly believe in the scientific consensus - very few do a damn thing that makes a damn difference to greenhouse gas emissions.
Simply driving a smaller car and using the latest buzz-marketed green tech isn't even close to good enough - and in many cases, like hybrid cars - is totally counterproductive and gives the illusion of progress where there really is none.
We need a strong fundamental shift in our lifestyles - stop eating meat - stop driving everywhere - stop flying in planes, stop consuming useless shit. No one - even global warming believers - seems to be willing to do this.
I've run across people with a Ph.D. in Physics say to me "I would need to see more data on this," after I showed them a map comparing the disappearance of fish population in coastal water from 1900 to 2000. Where they conservative - yes. Religious - yes. However those two in themselves are not necessarily a qualifier for dismissing a scientific finding. It still made me sad to realize that if a person with a scientific degree can be "skeptical" about potential environmental and climate changes (never mind global warming), then what is an average citizen going to think after watching Fox News or CNN. I suppose "think" is an overstatement.
I need to learn to proofread - it's "I've run across a person..." and "Were they..." plus a question mark..
Hansen needs to resign. He is abusing his post at NASA and tainting the agency with his political activism. His problem is that NASA gives him a platform, and he feels that he can't give it up because he will lose his voice with the press. He is exactly the type of scientist that the public despises. Scientists that I know obsess with finding out why their theory/science/findings are wrong. They want to be proven wrong. Hansen comes off as a nut job and does not possess the skepticism that makes a good scientist. Almost everyone sees right through his charade.
The fact that most climate science is not peer-reviewed causes folks like me to just toss it all to the side. Back in the Kyoto talks, we were TOLD that if no action was taken, then the point of no return was something like 2007. Well? Based on that "science", nothing we do can help anyway. Your Prius just makes your farts smell like roses, according to "science".
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
If you're going to take on an issue that strikes fear in the blood-pumps (not hearts) of multi-trillion dollar industries, they are going to spend some of those trillions trying to paint you a fool in the eyes of the public.
Anyone who thought it would be easy wasn't getting into the fight with their eyes open. All you have to do is look at the way medical cannabis is legal in many states, while the DEA continues to claim there is no medical use for cannabis to realize that going up against the status quo is, at best, "frustrating."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
But shouldn't we be concerned that NASA's interest in Global warming is going to get in the way of their Primary Mission of Muslim Outreach"...
Without taking a position whether or not global warming is caused by human activities:
- There is a complete industry now that exists by the grace of the belief that GW is man-made and we can do something about it. This is business having an interest in governments and public believing we should reduce CO2 emissions.
- Being a GW denier is silly. However try taking the position that GW is not entirely man-made, or that GW will not be as damaging as to justify billions of investments. You will get attacked almost in the way blasphemists were attacked in the middle ages. You are a non-believer, and you should go along with the "common believe" and "consensus", what we all think. How dare you disagree? But science is not consensus based. One experiment is all it takes to create new insights, models, theories.
I feel frustrated by governments taking GW as an excuse to raise taxes and increase influence on everyones personal life whenever they can. For instance, banning the light bulb - just how stupid is that?
My karma ran over your dogma
Remember the FUD when Tobacco advertising kept claiming that it was safe when we knew it wasn't?
Where are those guys now? Chances are you'll find they (and their apprentices) are hired by oil companies now to promote denial of climate change.
Problem is, they've gotten better at spreading FUD over the years. I have a problem calling anything 'evil', but if anything can be called evil, these guys
and those that hire them are really good prospects.
I will just leave this here. We are all Going to die.
Propaganda works.
I had the misfortune at dinner last night of sitting next to a table of obvious Fox News addicts, and hearing them compete to see who could get in the most talking points.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"They have been winning the public debate with the help of tremendous resources"
Really? What resources? Apart from chump change at Heartland Institute, nobody can demonstrate these "tremendous resources". Think about it: Greenpeace and WWF alone have hundreds of millions of dollars a year to spend, and they leave a massive footprint. They have offices around the world, armies of unpaid volunteers, dedicated law offices and public relations firms - but somehow we're supposed to believe that a shadowy conspiracy that leaves no footprint is massively outspending the alarmists? This is grassy knoll stuff.
Why doesn't Hansen look inwards and ask if he and his supporters are really do a) have the correct analysis of the data b) have a winning strategy (e.g. declaring that there's a consensus and then heaping ad hominem attacks on their critics). And while I'm ranting, what self-respecting scientist (or slashdot reader) ever thought that consensus was relevant to science? Many of the greatest scientists in history overturned the consensus of their times (and were persecuted for doing so). Consensus is a political idea, and defending an idea because it has the backing of some real or imagined consensus is anti-science.
Concerted? Well funded?
Hansen is delusional. It's the complete opposite of the actual truth, as readily shown by leaks and public income data. His own, for example.
It isn't global warming science that many object to, it's that almost every 'solution' proposed seems to be a call for more redistribution and for people to scale back their lifestyles.
People need to believe the scientists don't care about politics, economics, ideology, and the political factionalism that is inherent in human societies. They have to be like monks that go off to their mountain top, make their quiet calculations, and are otherwise detached from the rest of the world.
Whenever a scientist attaches himself to the right or left or some larger political coalition it immediately taints everything they've done.
Had they made clear point from the start of NOT taking sides and simply making their case things would have worked out differently. Had they scrupuliously avoided their work being used as a weapon against either side or for either side things would be different.
But they didn't do any of that. Al Gore largely launched this movement and they helped him. They allowed themselves to be used as pawns in the political games of large political factions that honestly don't care about the environment. Neither the right nor left actually cares. They both care about power. If you told the democrats to throw the whole AGW argument under the bus BUT they'd get power they'd throw it under the bus in a heartbeat. And if you told the republicans that they'd get power if they just embraced AGW they'd do that in a heart beat.
Neither side cares. The democrats saw political advantage and the republicans saw a political threat. They responded to the issue in those terms. Nothing more or less. Period.
As AGW is a largely frustrated political movement being so tainted by partisan politics it's political backers are going to start abandoning it. It's not a viable weapon anymore. Doubtless many will still say they support it but it won't be a rallying cry or a center piece of any agenda. It's burned up.
Honestly, I would suggest the scientists back up and try again... this time as scientists and not as activists. Talk to both sides. Involve them both in the process equally. Make a point of taking no sides. If EITHER side tries to use you, distance yourself from them immediately and make it clear that you don't have an affiliation. Don't speak at political functions. Don't offer any support for either side.
You will not get everything you want. But you'll get something and you won't trigger a knee jerk political rejection.
And it goes without saying... Al Gore needs to be pilloried out of the movement. He's a polarizing influence which is the opposite of what you want.
Or you can keep doing what you're doing and encounter increasingly entrenched political positions that are increasingly effective at shutting down your objectives. That's how politics work. Just stay out of it. Stick to science.
I'm not even going to get into the science or the models. That's a whole other argument. From a straight forward PR perspective your ONLY authority in this matter is as men of science. And to maintain that you must remain objective. Take sides and that's gone... and with it any authority.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
This article followed up on an op ed in New Scientist by Mann awhile bit, is starting to get ridiculous and smell of hypocrisy. The majority of the people who do not agree with the conclusions of AWG are not a part of a conspiracy, nor have most even been influenced by a conspiracy to believe such.
While the opposite is true for those who do believe in AWG, since the government and media pushes environmental efforts on television and other media big time (movies, internet, etc.), from recycling to thinking "green" or demonizing others not in-line with the think-speak.
Yet, there are these continuing charges that those who do not believe are conspiring against the movement?
I just don't see it. The media and government helps out the AWG camp to a much greater degree than any opposition could possibly do in hiding.
It's like Gaddafi or Assad calling their opponents terrorists to garner support, while the rebels are being bombarded by an armament hundreds of times greater.
IMHO the science is a minor part of it with regards to the public. It's the fact that there is a perception that certain ideologies have seized upon GW as a free ticket to further their agendas of limiting economic and public activity and increasing the interference and power of government within our lives. The natural reaction of the competing ideology is to discredit the basis of this power grab.
Economically, with the general decline the G20 is experiencing, as the most advanced nations they would bear the brunt of this new philosophy of "sustainability", which would be suicide for them.
Politically, specifically in America, there's a reason progressives embrace GW and conservatives do not. It provides a cover for some of their longest desired goals. Further centralization of government, extreme enviromentalism, and anti-capitalism.
Science is just a patsy for both sides in this argument.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
That one event should've been more convincing than 1,000 studies from the likes of the UN and NASA. But I guess people are saying, let's wait for a couple more of those, then we'll reevaluate, until then it's drill baby drill oh baby drill.
Of course, what's really happening is that people now know the closely guarded secret, that Global Warming is caused by the lack of Pirates in modern times: Link to Forbes article
Manage that the Darwin Awards give mankind one special prize each time one of such denialist articles get published
The media have become as much a problem for serious debate as an enabler for that debate to happen.
They have added credence to otherwise unsubstantiated claims due to the claim of "balanced" approach to the issue which has resulted in a 'us vs. them' philosophy in so many issues in which proper scientific, evidential analysis is brought along side speculative, unsubstantiated and biased arguments and presented as equivalent when that is not the case.
This has happened in so many facets of current debates, and is not necessarily restricted to the lowest-common denominator type media outlets that truly there appears to be no hope that proper researched, independently verified fact can be brought to the public without a major injection of cash and a carefully planned advertising campaign accompanying it. Because where there is opposition, with all their clear bias, certain parts of the media will ignore it to give them a microphone, whether willing or not to voice their opposition no matter the weight and validity of their arguments.
Science has always battled the incumbents. In the past it was the religious leaders where the questions of how were being answered quicker than the clergy could justify. Today, science is besieged by not only the religious, but by those with the political and monetary will to preserve a status quo that may well spell hardship on future generations.
Climate change is one such area of science where those who are doing the actual work can have their findings drowned out by anyone who has a microphone and a name.
In the past there have been many environmentalist predictions of doom scenarios, such as food shortages predicted by the club of Rome, air pollution, acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer. Though they were real problems, they have also been more or less solved now because they were acted upon. In hindsight, these things were all not as irreversible as environmentalisms make them seem. Now that we have a new topic, people no longer buy that part and are less alerted. The environmentalists in turn make their stories more and more dramatic to attract attention, leading to the point where thay are no longer believed at all by a large fraction of the population.
Also, although it is fairly clear by now that the climate is heating at least to some extent, there really isn't all that much proof that this is caused by human activities. Correlation is not causation. To prove a causal link seems very difficult, if not impossible, but is needed to convince policy makers.
How appropriate... captcha is 'starving'.
Facts are true whether I choose to believe in them are not. That's the message that needs to be hammered into the public sphere by the scientists - evidence proves it's happening. Whether the global warming, climate change, or what have you is man-made is the only thing really still in dispute among serious scientific circles, and the majority consensus among the researchers actively involved in studying it is that it is anthropogenic in nature.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
But if that were the case why is it that alternatives to those solutions are not given but, more often instead, it is argued that anthropogenic global warming is not happening in the first place?
At least the former tactic I can respect. People who deny all scientific evidence because it disagrees with their worldview I cannot.
Happy people make bad consumers.
'James Hensen has been making predictions about climate change since the 1980s. When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up.'
In other news, Hansen's 30-year-old global temperature predictions close to spot-on
Luckily al gore can save us from both
12,000 years ago there was a mile of ice where I live. A few weeks ago it was 28C(normally about 5C this time of the year). So yes there is climate change. But every year the Hurricane people have said that there would be X hurricanes this year; yet nearly every year they were very wrong. Often they got it exactly wrong as to big years and quiet years. So I am leery of any predictions that go far into the future when we can all agree that weathermen's (climatologists) predictions are basically a joke.
Also in the 1970s these same climatologists were claiming that the ice age was right around the corner.
I am absolutely not equipped to say that they are right or wrong. What I will say is that they are often wrong about what is going to happen tomorrow. So I place zero value of what they say will happen years into the future. I will buy their analysis of the past, the science of making a history of what happened is getting better and better. The why.... not so much.
If I were a government official making plans I would plan for 3 scenarios. It gets warmer, it gets colder, it stays the same.
Good news for personal and economic freedom.
Sounds to me some bureaucrat is just upset his taxpayer-funded job might not be as secure as it once was.
Maybe climate change is real; maybe it isn't. Maybe if governments didn't spend billions of our own dollars trying to convince us that it is, in an effort to justify policies giving them more control over our lives, growing their bureaucracies, taking our money, regulating our businesses and private lives, and so on, there wouldn't be so much political push-back trying to "deny" global warming. Maybe if the government didn't use climate change to victimize people, those victims wouldn't be trying to defend themselves.
If you politicize something, you can always expect the truth to fall by the wayside. The progressives, technocrats, and other assorted socialists in government started this. Now they're upset the other side of the political battle they started is winning.
Good.
Liberty in your lifetime
Dr. Hansen's arguments are failing because they are weak arguments. I am a physics guy who has dug into lots of good and bad data. It all looked good at the start, but some of it didn't hold up. The more you look into the data of Dr. Hansen and his associates, the more you realize how hinky it is. Yes, they have found things, but no, they don't have a solid case that we are the cause of the Earth warming, or that anything is getting out of control. - Roberto
Back in the day the consensus was:
The Earth was FLAT
The Earth was CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE
The Earth was CREATED BY $DEITY
I believe in God, but it does not mean that I don't accept evolution, or science.
But since a 'consensus' is not scientific law, it's at best a hypothesis.
And wouldn't these 'scientists' get a better bang for the buck if they gave all their funding to FUSION research instead of whoring it for the 'best guess' Atmospheric research' that has been proven wrong.. in BIG WAYS many times before?
Assuming for the sake of argument that global war ... uh, climate change is happening and it's entirely caused by human activity, the solutions the CC evangelizers (I get to call them that because other posters are using the equally loaded term, 'deniers') are proposing are more onerous and liberty-infringing than necessary. There are a number of proposals that would use technology to cool the earth, and cheaply, rather than demand such a drastic change in lifestyle and consumption that third-worlders would never attain the state of developed nations. The fact that CC enthusiasts dismiss that type of solution out of hand in favor of transforming and controlling essentially all human activity tells me that this is about more than climate change. It's about power and the shaping of society into the form the CC hypers want.
And if you want to see some "denying" in action, watch this get modded down.
You've illustrated the issue perfectly. Your point, a map showing fish population differences over time is just that. Any researcher's first question is going to be "Why?", so what's the cause? It is in no way obvious from that statement. Of course they're going to be skeptical, that's the very deffinition of science. If you call yourself a scientist and aren't skeptical you aren't a scientist.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
There is slow climate change but the degree to which human production of CO2 is a tiny and negligent factor.
The two far larger scale problems to "global warming" is natural Methane discharge into the atmosphere, and deforestation.
Methane is 25x as powerful of a "greenhouse gas" and is entering the atmosphere at an uncontrolled rate more than 10x the volume as CO2 from all sources. Methane alone has sufficient scale and greenhouse efficacy to cause a self-feeding runaway "global warming". Here's a link with an obvious visual map:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
Scroll down to atmospheric methane.
Deforestation has been occurring for centuries and has already been identified as an actual cause of climate change in England, for example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation
Which says in part, "From 1100 to 1500 AD, significant deforestation took place in Western Europe as a result of the expanding human population. The large-scale building of wooden sailing ships by European (coastal) naval owners since the 15th century for exploration, colonisation, slave trade–and other trade on the high seas consumed many forest resources. Piracy also contributed to the over harvesting of forests, as in Spain. This led to a weakening of the domestic economy after Columbus' discovery of America, as the economy became dependent on colonial activities (plundering, mining, cattle, plantations, trade, etc.)"
Methane is discharged as waste at oil rigs since there is no economical way to capture, store and transport it from remote areas. Needs fixin'.
That said, each and every effort to address CO2 is counterproductive to people and business and is more often a means for governments to collect taxes and fines, not solve a real problem. Real problems are of course ignored in full.
JJ
Bob: How long will it take us to hit the groud if we don't open our chutes?
George: 2 minutes.
Bob: Your math is off. 3 minutes.
John: Since you two can't agree, gravity must not exist.
that bloated whale carcass, Al Gore, is it any surprise GW doesn't get taken seriously?
Many scientists supporting mostly natural GW have had their careers sabotaged and their character called into question. Damned with your blasphemous data, the pro man-made-GW scientists say. Horrible, horrible science of the consensus. Also, Gore has done far more to damage the GW cause than he has helped. I have read countless articles and posts that bash him constantly, accuse him of twisting GW for his own gain (carbon credit trading) and furthering his political standing as well others and being bold faced corrupt. Sad, sad, sad.
That is exactly what needs to happen. Talk to them on their level.
The reason the average person does not believe them is simple the people pushing that mankind is the sole cause of global warming don't act like it is true.
We hear all this stuff about not flying and they have these huge parties/conventions all over the world in really nice fancy places, alot of the people coming via private planes.
You can see all the huge houses owned by the people pushing it.
Heck even countries are not acting like it is true, look at all the countries dropping low emission power generation in place of coal based plants.
Is unpopular decisions that are going to be very expensive. We can't just sit back can cry over the expenses and hope the problem goes away, we can no afford to NOT fix the problems.
Instead we see NIMBY's stopping just about every technology that can help us out, coming up with stupid excuses as to why they are not the ones being idiotic. Sure, some of the tested technologies are not paying themselves back as much as we could have hoped, but they are still better than no action, as even a failed experiment yields useful information.
Instead of building sustainable energy, the ones wanting to build have to waste their time in courts fighting ignorants over conjecture and details such as "will it spoil my view from my bedroom window in the morning".
Instead of building CO2 neutral power, we are decommissioning existing power plants, with the only alternative being coal or gas, which is NOT CO2 neutral. True, some of the decommissioned plants were unsafe, but not all are. But the easily scared population want them gone, just because one have a mishap in Japan after being exposed to forces in excess of five times the expected worst case scenario. People forget the fact that most nuclear power plants are NOT in the risk zones of quakes that bad.
Instead of looking into alternatives. people flatly say no when they hear some buzzwords. That is the damage the "green" movements have done to the efforts to get GREEN energy.
Most will comment about how stupid others are for not believing in climate change issues...but how many of you are actively trying to make a change for yourself? I bet the majority still drive a gas powered car (instead of diesel or electric), waste and fail to recycle regularly, leave lights on instead of trying to minimize electrical/gas use. Everything these scientists talk about begins with the average person, everyone keeps waiting for the governments to make the change while most /.'ers will wait and curse the average person. Start acknowledging your own shortcomings before shooting off about others.
Science with an agenda is rarely good science. So I don't trust the scientific backers of global warming. Again and again, it has been demonstrated that whenever politics gets involved in the scientific process, the result is that the scientists find exactly what they're being paid to look for. For that matter, I don't trust climate change skeptics either. Having had a good friend who was a NASA physicist working on Global Warming, I've seen how they do the modeling in some detail and I'm utterly unimpressed. (My friend, who was lead investigator for his particular project, privately told me he didn't really "buy it" either, but bureaucratic pressures required him to back it.)
To Global Warming, we can add: dietary cholesterol as the primary causal agent in coronary artery disease, eugenics (Nazi and American), and setting PI=3. These errors don't come from science, nor religion but from money and power, which corrupt everything.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
A coal plant in my county is going to close in the next year or so. The owners have found it not worth the trouble to install components to meet the call for increasing air standards. The county is largely kept alive now by coal mining, marcellus shale drilling and tourism. An ethanol plant went up in the same county as that coal plant. Barely lasted a year before going under.
My county has an average house hold income in the ballpark of two people working minimum wage even with coal mining and natural gas. You tell people around here that we need to take action concerning global warming and you are telling them you want the economic life blood of this county to be cut off. Over the years between changing economic conditions and inept local politicians we've lost everything but the natural gas and coal. Now we are losing one of the biggest local consumers of our coal.
"I'm a physics guy" is a resounding recommendation, of course I'll believe you over what all the climate scientists who are devoting all their time to the subject have to say.
I've looked at some of the data too, and while there are mistakes made in their prognoses over time, the trend is inescapable. Unless we do something now, the world is truly fucked for the foreseeable future.
http://www.carbonmap.org/#Emissions
I can help with that bit of ignorance. ;) But either way, the US definitely should work harder to reduce emissions.
...that thing makes me wonder if that behavior isnt some sort of failsafe in case we develope in a way we can cause too great harm to life itself.
yes humans will be gone in 50 years but most other species will survive and do far better without people.
Anyway im anyway some kind of Misanthrope so i wont stop the fools from being foolish. Its just a bit sad thats all.
you try to "hide the decline", and commit corporate espionage.
For years, the environmentalists have believed that it was necessary to exaggerate.
If they said "Here is a problem we should try to solve", they believed they would be ignored.
So instead they scream "THIS PROBLEM THREATENS OUR SURVIVAL!!! WE NEED TO SOLVE IT NOW!!!!".
After years of hearing this, the public recalibrates their bullshit sensors.
And yes, I consider myself an environmentalist. I just wish the rest of us were more honest.
The problem is that even if there is a popular consensus in the developed countries to reduce CO2 emissions it will never fly in the developing world. The political issues associated with controlling CO2 emissions in the developing world totally dwarf the current issues in the developed nations.
Freeman Dyson's solution is not often discussed. And his solution doesn't require any social engineering or any redistribution of wealth.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
"When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up."
Citation needed. When you are engaging in skeptical analysis, you need to show your work. If the majority of scientists agree, but you have found that they are wrong, you need to show the empirical evidence. Which predictions have you falsified? Using what data?
How about a spot check of your work? Let's see if we can tell whether your way is to use science or subterfuge.
Venice Skepticism: You reference a prediction that observed increases in the rate and severity of floods in Venice will abate over coming years, but do not provide empirical evidence that it has been abating. The paper you reference says on the first page that predicting changes in storm surge levels is inherently uncertain. It provides no significant empirical events that could be a cause for a reversal of the current trend, and relies on a new way of modelling the problem which has not been empirically tested. There is empirical evidence that it has been increasing, as well as empirically tested models that predict the flooding will continue. A claim that the current trend will reverse without empirical evidence -- with nothing more than an untested model that gives the answer you want -- is not science.
Greenland Sea Level Rise: You claim to refute the observation that the accelerating breakup of Greenland's ice sheet may lead to increased sea levels by showing evidence that the sea levels have not risen yet. The fact that levels have not risen in the past does not contradict the prediction that they will rise in the future if the Greenland ice continues to break up.
Those are the first two stories on your "False Alarms" page, not cherry-picked, just the first two. They are completely without rational or scientific merit. They are exactly the sort of thing TFA claims are at the heart of global warming criticism. I love rational skepticism -- but based on the first two examples on your own website, I can reach no other conclusion than that you are a shining example of intentional disinformation with a shoddy veneer of scientific inquiry.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Fine, we are terra forming our own planet. We still don't know what that means. Just make the studies public so people can read them.
And you scientists that claim to believe and care, why are you still driving SUVs, using a/c, flying everywhere instead of telecommuting, and living in huge houses (I'm talking to you Al Gore). When we start seeing scientists protesting regularly, then we'll take this as seriously as they do. But they don't take it seriously yet wonder why the non experts don't either.
...One could argue, even less than symbolic, it could be counter productive. Breaking Western economies only drives all the production to less environmentally friendly areas of the world.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I myself is pretty sure about the environment getting a touch of human hand. However the movie "The Great Global Warming Swindle" is a must-watch for seeing both sides of this debate. This is no "bogus" movie. It simply shows that the sun might be the 99% of climate change and human maybe less than 1%.
From Wikipedia: "The programme's publicity materials assert that man-made global warming is "a lie" and "the biggest scam of modern times."
The film stars over 12 professors from well known universities. This movie is an important view of the climate change.
Article on Wikipedia
Watch it on Youtube.
This is not for disturbing debate. It's simply providing another view which was shocking to me.
At least the way politics is practiced today. It would be a calamity for politicians if a majority of the electorate could critically think about what candidates say.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100022226/agw-i-refute-it-thus-central-england-temperatures-1659-to-2009/
That the globe is warming is not in question. Why, and whether it's a problem we must address, is another matter.
The economy is hardly working as is. Add regulation to reach a 20% reduction in CO2 and we break its back.
And that 20% reduction would only be symbolic anyway.
Speaking of chicken little and hyperbole in the debate.
Our economy and its energy usage is just like the obese person who goes into a restaurant and order 3 low calorie dinners for themselves.
We're running around trying to fix the symptoms when the airline industry, for one, has been solving the problem for decades.
To save fuel costs, they buy more efficient engines and streamline their operations - as much as they can - and as a result, they use less fuel; which has a side effect of lower pollution and other emissions AND they become a bit more profitable.
So, as we become more "green" we will use less fossil fuels - expensive fuels (and we're not even talking about the health and environmental costs) which will - get this - lessen the economic drag on the economy.
By being more fuel efficient and "green" it will actually boost the economy.
Or since folks like comparing the China; they are reaping what they sow because now, with the environmental devastation of their economic polices, they are experiencing some god awful things (obscene healthcare burdens for example) that will harm their economy.
There are people on slashdot that think GW is a myth invented by Al Gore to cash in alternative energy proposals, do I need to say more?
There is a very concerted effort by people who would prefer to see business to continue as usual.
Yeah, a vast right wing conspiracy. No, actually, quite a few billion people would like to get on with their lives and don't want an elite telling them how they should live. So sorry, Mr. Hanson, but we don't allow hissy fits here.
There are two kinds of uncertainties in models. A primary uncertainty is whether we have chosen the correct set of processes to model. The second uncertainty is whether we model selected processes precisely enough.
With the second uncertainty a computer technology could help. We should run the models not in a 32- or 64- or 128-bit precision, but in an interval arithmetic, where each quantity is represented as [lower bound, upper bound] pair, or even better in a "triplex arithmetic" proposed by Prof. Nickel in 1970s - [lower bound, standard result, upper bound] which makes it easy to compare model runs with older models. As an example, on a binary machine, 1/10 would be represented as [1,1]/[10,10] = [0.0999,0.1001] because of rounding errors.
On today's computers the implementation of interval arithmetic with its required rounding up and down is extremely slow - slow enough to be completely impractical. But it should be relatively easy to design an interval arithmetic floating-point processor. It would only cost millions, not trillions.
It's not surprising that people are becoming skeptical of GW. If you rewind 10-15 years they where saying the Statue of Liberty would be underwater by now. There would be palm tree's growing in Alaska. The equator would be on fire.. etc. Well none of that stuff has happened.
I don't deny climate change at all. But the way our governments are going about the issue is totally flawed. They over regulate everything to death in the US/EU pushing industry to places like China and India where there is zero regulation. That gizmo is still going to get built. Is it going to be built in a clean US/EU factory or in China where they just dump the waste in to the river? Its all the same planet.
Any effort to regulate emissions is pointless unless its adapted across the board by all the major nations. Until then it just looks like another shady way for some governments to control and tax their people.
I have to return some videotapes...
You are completely wrong. There is no serious suggestion of an eco-fascist dictatorship. This fascism you talk of is a projection of your own mind. Anti-eco-fascists are terrified about having a conversation about mitigation policies, and often insist that there is no problem. If you actually /listened/ to what people are actually /saying/, (as opposed to the self-serving interpretations where people who disagree with you are fascists), then you will understand that people want to have a policy debate on the best things to do about the problem.
What if the tax is revenue neutral? As in, carbon is taxed, and the revenue is returned as rebates? That's what was proposed in Australia. Would that mitigate your concerns?
Didn't think so.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Whether climate change is occurring is properly the domain of science. Here, I think Hansen is on relatively solid footing. Pretty much all the important policymakers have signed on to the fact climate change is occurring -- as David Brin pointed out a few days ago, when the US Navy is updating its warplans to account for the Northern Passage being open, it's hard to argue that climate change _isn't_ being taken seriously by the establishment.
However, what we should do about climate change is not a scientific question. How much will CO2 mitigation cost -- not just in terms of direct and indirect monetary damages, but in terms of human life lost? Economic growth (a large part of which is driven by the availability of cheap power) has historically been the most reliable tool for improving the human condition. Without power, life is nasty, brutish and short. If CO2 mitigation mechanisms like the sort Hansen advocates were to be adopted worldwide, what would the butcher's bill be? That's an economics problem, and Hansen is not an economist. If the climatology community is going to scream at people, "well, you're no climatologist, so you're only invited to this discussion if you agree with us!", then the economics community is entirely within its rights to tell climatologists to STFU about economic choices.
Then there's the geopolitical angle. Let's say Hansen gets his worldwide controls on CO2. Let's also say that China, currently the world's leading CO2 producer, says "no, our poor deserve a better life and we need economic growth in order to provide it, if we stop building power plants we'll have a civil war and millions will die, so fuck you, we're going to continue to build one new coal-fired power plant each week." What does the rest of the world do then -- invade China to shut down their power plants? The rest of the world can't do nothing: if it lets China slide, then the next thing you know India says, "yeah, we're in the same boat, screw you guys" and the entire thing falls apart. How do you build a geopolitical framework for enforcement of such a system? Hansen is a climatologist -- he's not Henry Kissinger.
Hansen has won the scientific argument. He's losing the economics argument and the geopolitical arguments -- and deservedly so. He's neither an economist nor a diplomat, after all.
Note to the climate change looneytunes who are about to leap down my throat: I'M AGREEING WITH YOU, DAMN IT. The only thing I'm saying is that this is a big stinking problem with a whole lot of dimensions, most of which the climatology community is completely unqualified to talk intelligently about; and within the realm that it _is_ qualified to talk about it, the climatology community has already substantially won that argument.
Freaking morons who like nuclear don't take into account the amount of radioactive waste, decomissioning of the reactor, and the amount of uranium mining tailings that contaminate construction materials.
The more people actually know about nuclear, the less worried they are about it. The people who know the most -- nuclear engineers -- are pretty good a math, and can do the sums you are talking about.
Can you? or did you just read about how the numbers look bad, and trusted some 3rd party source, who probably trusted some other 3rd party source, etc.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The focus on how global warming is being caused has been detrimental. Its pretty deep stuff for a business major to know. You have to understand band gap orbitals to verify CO2 does indeed absorb various IR bands. Actually computing wavelengths from the orbitals filled is on the upper edge of what might be in highschool chemistry, I was not exposed until college chem. Then there is the statistics necessary to interpret temperature readings. Even engineering stat in college wasn't entirely sufficient, though most college statistics courses would be (engineering stat was dumbed down). There is no accepted water/cloud model yet even among the experts.
Trying to walk everyone through this so they are willing to act is hopeless. The cause is only of secondary importance in any case. If this was in fact a natural trend and it was harmful, we should still act and/or adapt in precisely the same ways for precisely the same reasons.
Presenting the consequences, good and bad, in a non-melodramatic way on a region by region basis for the entire world is the first step. It answers "Why should *I* change?" Water levels rising will harm many, but its not sufficient to convince many others. It is hard for a Welsh farmer who anticipates being able to start a vineyard, to be convinced by NYC turning into Venice. Give the farmer the whole picture for their region.
The second step is to present all the options for climate control and their relative effectiveness both alone and in concert. Reducing CO2/methane emissions is the most natural approach, but there are many others like sequestration, albedo engineering, and counter agents. One that comes up a lot is aerosolized SO2. Thus side effects of these other approaches should also be discussed.
We as a society will likely make the wrong choice, but right now many are making the choice without any knowledge of the consequences apart from climate horror movies, or any knowledge of the tools we have to counter these consequences apart from some vague idea we should drive less or use a different sort of light bulb.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
A number of historians have written about this topic, and what history says isn't encouraging.
Quite a lot has been written about the history of the "Fertile Crescent", whose core area was what we now call Syria and Iraq. 3000 years ago, it was a a fertile area, semi-arid but covered with forests and farmland. Now most photos you see from anywhere in the area show a rocky, plant-free landscape. The change is generally attributed to salination that was the result of irrigation projects that started about 8000 years ago, but reached their peak extent maybe 3000 years ago. Historians have said that there is a lot of evidence that the people then (farmers and hydro engineers) understood the problem of soil salinification, and understood that the solution is over-watering to leach out the salts. The problem was that, in the short term (of a human life span ;-), it was more profitable to use the limited water supply on the maximal crop area. So salts slowly accumulated, and eventually the farming died out because nothing would grow there any more. This process has been documented in other areas, but this is one area in which we know that the people continued maximizing their short-term profit even though they knew of the long-term disaster that would result.
Actually, it seems that the problems there aren't as serious as they look. Back in the 1970s and 80s, an interesting series of experiments were conducted: The researchers leased plots of land of 1 to 2 square-km, built goat-proof fences around them, then sat back and watched. This was done across the southwest-Asian "desert" area, roughly from Syria to Pakistan. The results were that a year later, every such experimental plot of land had turned into "grassland" (or prairie if you prefer). The conclusion was that the entire southwest-Asian desert is artificial. If we would remove the grazing animals from the area for one year, it would all revert to grasslands. Then the grazing animals could be brought back, since the land would support them. As long as the population of grazers was then kept low enough, the area could become several orders of magnitude more productive than it is now. But the result has been to ignore this. There's no way you can get the governments or the farmers in that area to cooperate with such a project, when it requires taking the land out of production for a year.
In both of these cases, the general population may not have understood the issue. The local technical experts (including the farmers) did and do. But their short-term interests have always been to maximize this year's profit, partly because if they don't do that, they'll be bankrupt and out of business. So the ongoing disaster continues.
The "global warming" issue is pretty much the same story. We've documented the process for centuries, and have detailed information for the last half-century showing conclusively that the changes are primarily due to human activity. But the people who run our economies have the usual interest in short-term profit, partly because if they don't behave this way, they'll lose to the others who go with the short term.
Anyway, history says that we probably won't do much about the issue, even though we have enough information to know how to do so. And, since the evidence says that the recent warming is mostly due to human activity, we can say that we now have the ability to control our climate if we wish. But we can only do this on a rather large scale, and we know pretty well that humanity won't organize on the scale that it takes to actually carry out such projects.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
"Back in the Kyoto talks, we were TOLD that if no action was taken, then the point of no return was something like 2007.
Citation needed.
My odds are 1000000-1 that this statement was never made. Scientists speak in very measured language -- what people like you call weasel words. "Likely, probably, uncertainty, somewhat unlikely", etc. If you open the IPCC reports, at the very beginning, you will see statistical bars for the definitions of these words.
No scientist talks the way you have characterised -- but I am sure that someone like you will read your statement, and it will become implicit proof for them that scientists are alarmists. This is are rumours go on and on forever.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
There may be an almost consensus that climate change is happening, but there is far from a consensus that it is caused by man's actions or inactions.
This is simply untrue. We are 90% certain that warming is anthropogenic, and furthermore, 97% of climate scientists support that figure.
You obviously formed this opinion by reading someones blog, or something like that. Climate change is the most well studied phenomenon in the history of the world. Go read what actual scientists have to say on the issue.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Unless we do something now, the world is truly fucked for the foreseeable future.
That's a nice, scientific term. What sort of fucked up future are you predicting? Methane poisoning? More beaches? Runaway Venus effect?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
These types of issues are war, and arguments are soldiers. To deny a weak, illogical argument that supports your cause is seen as treachery.
This is a fundamental feature of the human mind, and its interaction with other human minds. This is why no logical discourse on this subject will ever be possible.
I never claimed I were a scientist, so I have some freedom in the choice of how I phrase my sentences.
The climate change is a fact, the overall temperature of the globe is rising. CO2 content of the globe is rising, though not as fast as it should considering how much we pump out into the atmosphere, so something is retaining it. That is not necessarily a good thing though.
CO2 is a green house gas, and its increase is affecting the heat retention of the atmosphere, ask the developers of the US Air Force heat seeking missiles, they have to take this increase into account when they make their targeting systems I've been told.
So anyone telling you that CO2 is not responsible for the temperature increase of the globe is lying. It may not be the only factor, indeed it is unlikely it is, bit it is not helping us.
No one has come up with anything credible that GW is happening either. Score so far; 0-0.
This is simply not true. Go read the IPCC report.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
If AGW was true, and the science backs it up as claimed, why am I reading a story every other day about an AGW supporter being caught lying? If the evidence is so full proof and undeniable, why are they forgaing memos to back up their claims. Al Gore's movie is filled with nothing but provable lies. I remember reading by 2005 there would be no snow in the UK. By 2031 the Hymilians would have no ice. Pictures of polar bears drowning because of ice caps melting. All lies.
At one point I decided to look into it myself. I found out that ALL CLIMATE RESEARCH came from one lab in the UK called the CRU. NASA does some, other groups do some, but the CRU in England is the only place that had ALL data to do research with, and they deleted their data instead of sharing it from FOI requests. Phil Jones, the top scientist for the CRU at the time, said after 20 years of him being the only one with all the global climate data was unable to prove the Earth was warming. This is significant because he also admitted to manipulating the data to prove his theory as well and it still didn't. All other, and I mean ALL other, climate research starts off with the research from the CRU (that is not debatable).
So between the lying, and the falsification of the source data that everyone has to use, and refusals to comply with FOI requests, it just looks like a scam. I don't see how AWG supporters can support it when they have failed to look into it on their own at all. When I did it was a fairly obvious trail of deceit and lies all the way up.
It's just that a bunch od spoiled, self-centered individuals (the same ones that created the current economic problems in the first place) would rather damn the rest of the planet to decades if not hundreds of years of misery just so that they can continue to line their pockets. People like you sound just like my children when they were about four. Able to do nothing but take, and then throw all sorts of temper tantrums when asked to clean up after themselves, and if that doesn't work, blatant lying and dishonesty. My kids eventually grew up. Why your parents never saw to it that you did, I'll never know.
Only a fool thinks that linear or exponential trends continue forever.
"The sun did it!" is standard denier lore.
Anybody with half an eduction knows that
1. The sun's output varies by about 0.1% over its 11 year cycle
2. The long term change (once the 11 year cycle is averaged out) is several orders of magnitude less (so low that it's hard to measure.)
thegodmovie.com - watch it
If you read Merchants of Doubt, you will see a hideously long paper trail of extensive resources that have been put into the anti-environmental campaign. It is all sourced and documented.
What you say is simply not true.
The fossil-fuel industry outspends greenpeace 10-1 on lobbying and advertising in the USA. That is not a level playing field.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Yes, people will publisch these studies...They are propaganda.
Alternatives have been suggested. Problem is, AGW believers apparently don't believe in AGW enough to follow those suggestions.
For example:
Everyone who believes that climate change is caused entirely by man should stop breeding. Clearly, reducing the population will have the biggest effect on carbon emissions.
If AGW is real, reducing the population will reduce carbon emissions, and our climate change problems are solved.
If AGW is not real, well, at least we will have bred out people who are susceptible to bullshit.
It's win-win, but not even die-hard AGW believers are willing to go through with it. If they're not serious about AGW, why should U be?
Other suggestions have been along the lines of doing things which will benefit us even if AGW turns out to be bunk, such as widespread adoption of electric cars or developing viable alternative energies like fusion; solutions which AGW believers are never willing to acknowledge (you might even say they're willing to DENY these options exist). But I'm quite fond of the previous solution.
If our entire economic model is based on growth where are we going to end up? There's no way to fix this without completely changing our way of life.
My odds are 1000000-1 that this statement was never made. Scientists speak in very measured language
The statement was probably made by a politician, a movie star spokesperson or some other advocate. Then it got into the press. Sadly, the actual scientists don't make it into the press so much.
Although grossly misstated, there is a nugget of truth hidden deep within the point the GP was trying to make. What the GP should have said is that when the politicians get involved the public becomes mistrustful. Basically the public did not become skeptical about climate change until one political party adopted the issue for campaigning purposes, inevitably exaggerating things as politicians often do, and then regrettably the real scientists get unfairly tainted with the politics and skepticism.
If climate change had never been adopted as a *political* issue the public would probably be far more concerned.
Nuclear at least creates the baseline power cheaply.... and if American law wasn't stuck in the 60s you wouldn't have so much nuclear fuel sitting around that you could reuse over and over again rather than calling it waste. Power is balanced every day, every hour, every minute it's being used. Baseline power fills in the majority of the need, and the brief peaks and fluctuations in the power need to be filled in with power that can be ramped up quickly like gas, or coal fired plants. That's why power companies are switching to smart meters, to help update the system so it can be managed better. The issue with wind is for all the windmills deliver only peak power, not baseline power. So there needs to be a power plant (Coal or Gas) that can be fired up at a moments notice to fill in when the wind dies and demand is still present. So the windmills look nice but they have a dirty smokestack hiding behind them.
ok, here's the key question. You said the earth was going to be fucked. No one doubts that CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing, but the result of that is crucial. When you say the earth is going to be fucked, what exactly do you mean?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Our immediate legacy to the next generation is a ever-growing trillion dollar national debt, and yet scientists delude themselves that we will concern ourselves with our environmental legacy to some future generation we will never even know.
Only a fool thinks we can upset the atmosphere this much and not get an adverse reaction.
Even *if* there is stable tendency towards global warming and *if* it is man made, you cannot change anything. China alone will start, IIRC, 700+ coal power plants by 2020 or 2025. The data is from the Nat Geo magazine. Sure, China will decomission some coal power plants in the meantime, but overall it will increase CO2 emissions in such a way that Western CO2 savings will make no real difference whatsoever. Even if the West halts its industry to zero, the overall tendency will be man made CO2 increase. And you cannot do ANYTHING. You cannot stop China and India. You cannot force them to submit to the green religion. You certainly can lose the competition ... and that's the most you can achieve by self imposing restrictions and guilt.
I AM NOT TAKING SIDES.
1. People look back and see that the claims (at least in media) have been over the top. According to Kyoto we are past the point of no return. So why bother.
2. (and more important) people are far more concerned right now about the here and now. Real unemployment over 10%. Devalue of money. Price of gas, food, housing, clothing and everything else people need. People are far more concerned with kitchen table issues right now. People are worried about the here and now not about 50 years from now or even 3 years from now.
Two Analogies.
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." -- John Adams.
Right now we are back at the level of politics and war. (Not the most perfect analogy but it will do for now.) And the GW folks wants people to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, and the rest. Just not going to happen.
OR to place this on the Maslow pyramid. People are worried about food, water, shelter (basic needs) for the future and for now or at least the safety needs. And the GW people want self-actualization or at least the esteem needs. Just not going to happen.
-- A computer without Windoze is like a choclate cake without mustard
I should rephrase it. The Earth as we know it is fucked.
The planet as a whole will survive, but the ecosystem is being upset, and while the climatologists are debating the extend of the change, they are unanimous in their conclusions that change is happening.
Weather is getting more severe, and that is what we'll see more of. For instance, More severe storms, rainfall, drought. Take Spain. Most of the central part of the country, while it has always been hot, is starting to show signs of growing desertification. The direct consequence of climate change, be it rain or drought, is a stressing of out fresh water supplies, as well as loss of fertile land to grow crops, though the greatest threat to supplying the world population right now is not from the climate, but war and population growth.
To quote George Carlin: "The planet's fine, the planet isn't going anywhere. The people are f**ked!"
Sure. deny reality if you like, debate the science, argue it just isn't happening because that would be inconvenient and mean facing that we might be responsible for our actions....
I say lets get cracking on this, and then we'll see what happens in a 100 years time. If it turns out that climate change was a problem, then we've fixed it...and if it wasn't true...oh hey we'll have created a better cleaner world for no reason !
That's a wager I'd take.
But of course, if we do nothing... then we're pretty much over as a civilisation and we'll deserve it.
How much? 300ppm (0.03%) difference from pre-industrial levels isn't that much on the face of it. And again, you assume a linear or exponential trend.
Well, at least you're expressing yourself more clearly now. That's an improvement.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The USA did not only outsource some of its economy to China, it outsourced a great deal of US pollution to China; also as a result it externalized the pollution costs from the business model to lower prices at a higher long term cost to the Chinese (who are largely doing it to themselves but we are not free from blame, our corporations could self-regulate the pollution they always claim they would do here if we removed government regulations... it proves how little self restraint they actually have.)
The dysfunctional political AND ECONOMIC situation we are in today really does not lend credibility to the so called experts who thrive in our dysfunction; meanwhile the ones who had the best grasp of the mess we are in continue to be marginalized - and they are just as "qualified" -- I have no problem when Hansen's ideas, I find them to be every bit as realistic as the alternatives being proposed (many of which are not strong enough to fix anything which is why Hansen needs to be involved because the areas overlap.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I think the claim is a little mis-stated. Almost everybody in the USA agrees that the climate is changing, but there are lots of disagreements about cause and effect, and many more about solutions.
Let's say that the proposed solution is for everyone to pay more taxes and reduce their lifestyle. Suppose we declare a "War on Climate Change" the way we have for the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty. All we would have to do is accept a World Government along the line of North Korea's to ensure that the goals are met. (Almost nobody disagrees that North Korea is contributing less to global warming and pollution than, say, South Korea.) Should Dr. Hansen be the guy in charge?
I like R. Buckminster Fuller's conjecture that solutions to problems must be attractive. Make a solution to a problem that is economically and aesthetically more attractive than the lesser solution and people will have no problem adapting.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
ther are three ways to deal with a problem caused by excess consumption
1) reduce consumption, especially unnecessary consumption, "scaling back lifestyle"
2) deliberate global depopulation
3) ignore the problem and hope technology and the invisible penis of the free market fix the problem before we have a large scale unintentional global depopulation
you can't get around it, and i don't know about you but the thought of deliberately killing billions of people or standing by and doing nothing while billions die is unpalatable to me, it's an entirely solvable problem but it does mean scaling back wastes of resources and doing what can be done to improve the stability of destitute populations because destitute populations have much higher birth rates. also do what can be done to reduce birth rates all around without coercion.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Seriously. What if: global climate change /is/ natural? Wouldn't this be "winning" the debate?
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
You know for a group of supposed smart folks, you guys sure are drinking an awful lot of koolaid. Global warming, climate change or whatever it is convenient to call it now is just a money grab. You think politicians care about anything but bootlicking and lining their own pockets? Its all about new taxes and more wealth moving to the top of the pyramid. If we as a people really wanted to do something beneficial for the environment we would replace Uranium based nuke plants with Thorium based. That would be a start. Then maybe we could stop spraying glyophosphate and fertilizer on everything, shut down coal fired plants, and focus on maybe some kind of energy grid NOT based on 1950s technology. Carbon? Ha, what a joke. I'd like to see all the trees and plants get together as a political movement and try to ban 'excess' oxygen as it would make about as much sense.
If all the energy: political, intellectual and capital were put toward modernizing and implementing nuclear power, we would be well on the way towards rendering all of this crap moot.
We could tell the Mideast to fuck off, we wouldn't have to be drilling in deep waters, we probably could get away without fracking, energy prices would stabilize and probably go down, etc. etc.
Instead, one side is essentially advocating we live in caves and eat nuts and twigs and the other side is telling them to fuck off and die.
Stupid, useless waste of time.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
This is not true, although many scientists believe it. The idea of falsification was thoroughly debunked by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions half a century ago, now one of the most widely cited scholarly works. Kuhn is the originator of the term "paradigm shift."
Science is consensus based. We imagine that science compares theory with evidence, adjusting the theory to account for evidence that contradicts it. But in the final instance it is not and can never be objective: scientists must agree on what counts as good evidence, and there is no objective or scientific way to do that. It can only be done through communication and consensus. Kuhn writes, "Scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all" (p. 210).
Thus scientists are notoriously poor at communicating their research to the public - because being a scientist means only respecting the scientific views of other scientists. Some people react emotionally to the tone of science, feeling that scientists talk down to them as ignorant outsiders. Guess what? They do - because we are. I can accept that: as someone with some measure of expertise in a few areas, I can appreciate the years of study and experience required to develop expertise in others.
But where does this leave us? Is science simply a game of popularity and politics? Of course not. Science works, it works very well - and it works by consensus. This does not undermine the claims of climate science: it underlines consensus-based science as the best method we've got. To deny the importance of consensus is to throw the baby out with the bath water. If you reject the consensus of scientists about climate change, your only recourse is to appeal to some other consensus. I'll take the consensus the scientists, thank you very much.
[*] Quotes from Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2nd ed, University of Chicago Press, 1970.
When you live in a northern country, with an miserable climate, global warming actually sounds like an improvement.
One dimension people here fail to talk about at all is that there are very evil groups in favor of global warming 'solutions' that generate a tremendous backlash.
First off, there's the many decades if not hundreds of years old movement by the wealthy elite for global domination. There are families in power right now with lineages sometimes tracing back to feudal times who control a tremendous amount of wealth and power. These people have always been in search of more power and sought to dominate the world whether in times of the British empire and east india company, by funding the German Nazi or doing it through economic means and central banks.
These people have always sought to pervert environmental movements in a way that proposed solutions always centralize power in their hands. They are the UN Agenda 21 people, they are the world bankers, the Bilderberg crowd, the economic hitmen, the pro-EU and pan american movement people. They've been pushing the Global Warming agenda since inception and maybe even before the scientists were involved with entities like the club of Rome.
There's tremendous backlash against them because everything they push is geared towards less Freedom, centralization of power and police state. The 'carbon tax' is a major push by them also, primarily as a way to gain control over the lives of as many people as possible. Where the carbon taxes are already in place, they're the ones writing the rules and reaping the profits in trading.
Then there's the elites who are in favor of depopulation. The two groups have lots of crossover on Green issues and Eugenics attacks. While the Global government people push for totalitarianism, the depopulation elites just want less people. Ideally they would like the population cut by 90%. They're always drawing up plans for this and announcing it publicly, the press and general public just don't pay any attention. Those people love global warming because it gives them their reasons to institute depopulation measures. They love carbon taxes because they know the more you tax carbon and energy the more population drops.
You can't have a discussion about Global Warming without looking at the powerful geo-political factions that are in favor of royally fucking up life for everyone else to their benefit by using subverting Global Warming agendas to their particular causes. At least bring them into the discussions, inform yourselves and consider the draconian tactics and evil motivations involved because it's a major reason for the backlash.
Both groups are a major reason for why the military industrial complex gets to kill so many brown people and why people in the developed world pay slavery level tax rates. In the US, you could pretty much phase out the income tax and IRS completely just by cutting all non-essential military spending and keeping only true defense spending.
Liberty.
This is the part where the logic fails for me. It's a form of self-hatred to assume that everything that comes of Man's impact on the environment is necessarily unnatural and therefore bad. "Man is causing warming, therefore it must be stopped!" Setting aside for the moment the proof of the assertion, the logical progression requires proof too.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Once those in control of the climate science debate gained domination of their little corner of acadamia they began to consolidate their position by being abusive toward dissent until they had a core group within which they could shape the academic discourse and control peer review and publication. They had won.
Now of course they go out to sell their strategy to the wider world and they just can't act like courteous, rational folk. They are still in "drive out the heretics" mode who believe they can just tell the world what to believe and how to act based on their authority as the high priests of climate. And that doesn't go over well with the rest of us. You have to sell it until you get enough of a base of consensus in the wider population that you have control in the larger population and can move back into consolidation mode and begin driving out the heretics again.
It's about messaging. To become the tyrant you must first stroke the public with your velvet glove until they are docile and accepting. Then you unglove the iron fist. Not the other way around.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The statement was probably made by a politician, a movie star spokesperson or some other advocate.
The statement was almost certainly the imagination of some denier. That is what I find whenever you look for sources. That is why a citation is necessary, and further, that the citation is actually examined.
I would be grateful if *any* scientist show *any* prof "that global warming is real and man-made". I haven't seen any the latest 30 years I have been interested in - and followed - climate science. (BTW, correlation is not causation. Or You maybe beleive mens toilets causes prostate cancer.)
Mundus Vult Decipi
Good scientists welcome opposition.
There is opposition, and then there is harassment. This is definitely the later. Furthermore, there is no intellectual opposition to AGW, just a bunch of uninformed shouting. It is /exactly/ like the intelligent design debate.
""Dr. James Hansen, director of the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who first made warnings about climate change in the 1980s, says that public skepticism about the threat of man-made climate change has increased despite the growing scientific consensus. He says that without public support, it will be impossible to make the changes he and his colleagues believe need to occur to protect future generations from the effects of climate change."
Hansen has been known to lie. But you don't need to believe him to know all pollution is bad.
What's worse is blind emphasis on carbon. Look at Fukushima and the Gulf and tell me carbon is the planets biggest worry.
Need Mercedes parts ?
that strikes fear in the blood-pumps (not hearts) of multi-trillion dollar industries
Now now, Cheney finally got a heart transplant.
Not to be a grammar nazi, but I think in Cheney's case it should be called an implant.
How about instead of cutting back OUR lifestyle, we cut back everyone ELSE's lifestyle. Maybe that's the real hidden agenda they have.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Had the amount of CO2 risen by 300 ppm since pre-industrial revolution, it would be more than a doubling.
The Earth average CO2 concentration is about 392 ppm at the moment, compared to about 280 ppm pre-industrialization, and it is rising about 2.2% per year over the past decades. It looks like it were about 310 ppm around beginning of the 1960's
Increase in ppm per year:
1960 0.54
1965 1.02
1970 1.06
1975 1.13
1980 1.73
1985 1.25
1990 1.19
1995 1.99
2000 1.62
2005 2.52
2010 2.42
2011 1.88
Source NOAA (http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/) and Wikipedia.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere)
Climate scientists are a fraud because the went for decades making wild claims that simply did not match reality. Couple that with an attempted socialistic takeover of the world economy and you have the greatest example of scientific malpractice in history. Hansen should be executed.
an ill wind that blows no good
Really, blame science and scientists. There are FAR, FAR more serious problems to worry about than CO2. Why are we jumping on the bandwagon of excessive CO2 emissions, while ignoring a lot more immediate and deadly dangers?
When there are "scientific" opinions released in the wake of Fukushima that radiation is good for you...
When dosages of "permissible" radiation are adjusted to be significantly higher...
When each industrial heavy pollutant is counteracted with "scientific" studies that the pollutant is not proven to cause damage, and it's all in people's heads who are out to get the corporation...
When our water supply is "medicated" because of countless drug prescriptions that seep back into the water supply...
When "science" is attempting to regulate emissions of private vehicles, but completely ignores pollution from commercial shipping...
When "science" says we need to install fart bags into cows, stop eating meat, but doesn't give a hoot about hundreds of tons of antibiotics that are fed into livestock (and which propagate into our bodies)...
When "science" lobbies to remove labeling of GMO foods... (think about this one: for whose benefit is it?)
Who, then, trusts this "science"? People are not as dumb as you think, and science hasn't made a good name for itself. Science, as used by politicians and corporations, is becoming more and more clear as a lie, as propaganda to manipulate people's thinking, however not for the altruistic intentions, but for the benefit of a few.
I want unbiased science, one that doesn't call for a solution from provider X where billions of dollars will be channeled.
Hansen's 1981 paper can be read here. Figure 6 contains future projections which estimated that we would experience about half a degree Celsius of warming by 2012. Compare to NASA's temperature record here. We have warmed about half a degree since Hansen's paper. In other words, Hansen couldn't have been more accurate.
So the real question is this: Why do climate 'skeptics' like Dr. Benny Peiser always make shit up? Peiser's objections aren't even legitimate unresolved scientific questions but just blatant falsehoods that anybody using google could disprove in 5 minutes. Answer: Peiser's only goal is to fool people who are too stupid or too lazy to look shit up for themselves.
Here is why I find myself questioning the AGW hypothesis.
1. It's an incredibly complex chaotic system. From what I have read, the models used are not physics models of reality, but rather have a high level of abstraction. This is not something simple and demonstrable like gravity. The models used are similar to financial models that try to predict financial outcomes based on past events, but don't really know everything that is going on in the market, or the atmosphere. I am not a climatologist, but the couple studies I have read usually have significant caveats about how the model is simplified, or how this that or the other factor was considered insignificant and not modeled. The models are continuously tuned. If a model back in 1999 said it should be xx degrees hotter in 2011, but it was wrong, the model is simply tweaked to give better results and therefore "improved."
2. Al Gore and over the top alarmism didn't do the cause any good. Some of the admitted exaggerated claims reduce the overall credibility of all AGW proponents.
3. I'm a pilot. I pay a lot of attention to the weather. While weather prediction on the short scale (days) is very good, it still has a high level of error. Prediction over about a week or so is not good for much more than trends, and over a couple of weeks it is almost useless. I am skeptical that it can be predicted decades in the future.
4. Finally, and most significantly - I question the motives of the AGW activists as they (mostly) do not propose useful solutions. If more AGW proponents vigorously pushed for solutions that might actually work, they would have considerably more credibility to me. If they were really worried about the climate, why are they not out pushing for more nukes and radical increases in hydroelectric? I know some climatologists (like Hansen) are nuclear proponents, but they tend to get downed out by the rest who simply say we have to stop emitting CO2 without a viable alternative. Wind, Solar, etc. are not viable, as much as people may wish they were. If they really believed runaway climate change was a huge danger to the planet, they would accept the environmental risks and damage of things like nuclear and hydroelectric power, but instead AGW crowd seems (to me) to largely consist of the same people who are anti-nuke and are encouraging the destruction of the hydroelectric power we have to save fish.
My conclusion is, they don't believe it themselves.
First, you have to prove it was mankind and is harmful. Let me toss some facts:
Recent melting glaciers in BC contain trees only 7600 years old. This means the ice isn't long time permanent. Be you creationist or evolutionist man survived and multiplied well 7600 years ago with a warmer climate. Most of the antarctic and arctic ice is recent ice as in less than 10,000 years old. Human species evolved when it was warmer.
Mars polar caps, Io ice melts, my SUT did it? Hm, prove it. There is a stellar component and tax-me-more eco freaks ignore the obvious. Ignore sunspots and stellar activities? Come now. Seelctive science is generally junk science.
Hey, I will not even argue warming exists!!! But is it bad to have say NWT turn into farm-able and livable land? Or ferns to grow again on the north slope of Alaska?
Let me ask, why does eco junk science always talk of gloom and doom for tax bucks? Yep, it is about the money for most eco freaks, it isn't about empirical unbiased opens science at all. Just political BSing the outlook for fear taxes today. 99% of what we are fed in the media is political jousting in the ruse of science, about money, taxes and power. Pretty hard to sort it out too.
People are getting sick of the BS and shutting down. Be it right or wrong.
I'm a physics guy too. You're making an unjustified appeal to your own authority, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
I think many people are in willful denial. Deep down they think it's true, but they don't want to accept the consequential changes in their lifestyle that we need to do anything about it. The easiest way to square the two contradictory positions is to deny that climate change is a problem.
It is an all too normal human reaction.
It's about incentive. The public at large loses money if they support changes to slow down global warming. Scientists gain money through being funded to research it. As long as these incentives are the most important in the minds of these two sets of people, this argument will persist.
First of all, chicken eggs from the supermarket do not have embryos in them. That would be fucking disgusting and I wouldn't eat one, let alone "bucketfuls".
50% of all abortions are performed before 8 weeks (and 98% are performed before 20 weeks). Want to see what an 8-week-old embryo looks like?
http://www.babycenter.com/fetal-development-images-8-weeks
Size: 0.63 inch/1.6 cm
Weight: 0.04 ounce/1 gram
Calling that a baby is a major fucking stretch.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
You seemingly obvious solution (1) is of course why AGW alarmists are not trusted by so many. Who exactly decides what "unnecessary" consumption is? To a poor family in Haiti or rural China, even poor US families engage in unnecessary consumption. The underlying premise of option 1) is a radical reduction in living standards for industrialized nations, and preventing the improvement of living standards for the rest. This is preposterously unrealistic without imposing draconian controls. This, for me, is why I have a hard time taking the AGW threat seriously. If the AGW alarmists believe their own story, then why don't they propose solutions that actually have a realistic chance of being implemented? Are they two stupid to understand that a radical reduction in global living standards will never work politically? This seems unlikely. So do they believe it themselves? Or do they simply have another agenda and AGW fits nicely into it.
Why not push for more engineering solutions? The Global Warming crowd HATES engineering solutions, just like they hate nukes and hydroelectric power, because that would mean that people wouldn't need to cut "unnecessary" consumption, which means the government would not need to define what is and is not necessary.
says Hansen. 'There is a very concerted effort by people who would prefer to see business to continue as usual. They have been winning the public debate with the help of tremendous resources.'
Ha! That's laughable. 99% of the money in the AGW debate is money extracted unwillingly from the public and used on the side of Hansen. Hansen himself uses tax payer money to advance his agenda.
Now people have divided into entrenched camps with little hope of changing minds no matter the evidence. Go back in time and say nothing. Now look at today. 12 years of record temperatures and ice melt. Record droughts, tornadoes and four feet of hail. Some areas that normally have white winters are getting very little snow. If no one had said anything people would be demanding answers. By telling people it's their lifestyles causing it they have decided the climate scientists are trying to take away the things that are causing the warming so are the enemy with some hidden agenda. Just look at American's reaction to food and healthy lifestyles. People are attacked for being too thin but being overweight is sacred. If you wonder why Americans are opposed to climate science try to take away junk food and make them exercise. There would be a revolt. People aren't hearing the climate is warm as in changing, they are hearing you want to take away my SUV and live on less heating and cooling and electrical conveniences. Some people are throwing a fit over incandescent light blubs claiming there's a ban when in truth they simply set efficiency standards and the companies are working of efficient incandescents, which saves them money but they are still mad. The real problem with climate change is they found it was caused by things like CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. Translated, fossil fuels, meat production and fertilizers in modern farming. Or in plain language cars and electricity, burgers and McNuggets, and cheap bread and corn. People hear you want to take those things away or make them more expensive so the simplest solution is find another cause. Suddenly natural variations in climate looks really attractive.
The biggest problem with all of this is that there have been scandals involving global warming, scams, and outrageous exaggerations. I grew up with the connotation that global warming would make us unable to go outside without proper "space suit" gear since the atmosphere would have been completely destroyed by the year 2002. This was something our liberal teachers would strongly support and tell us to not pollute, and so forth but when you grow up with these exaggerations, of course you're not going to trust anything involving that subject, especially when locally nothing has changed. The temperature where I've lived have all gotten somewhat cooler, but stayed generally the same. I understand that in some places of the world, the temperature is hotter, and from what NASA claims, the world average has gotten warmer.
But nobody cares if it gets warmer by 1 or 4 degrees. It's not unbearable and we don't see the repercussions of this. Yeah, so we'll feel slightly warmer, but in some ways it could be a good thing like during winter right? Well, logically that's how most people process things, they don't understand how this will negatively affect crops, or whatever. The ice caps melting have been claimed to be the cause of "global warming", but more recent studies have shown that it's natural and humans had no bearing on any of this.
I'll keep this as short as I can by finishing it off with politics. Does anyone here actually believe a word that the president says? Likely not. And our current presidential administration is purposely raising gas prices as well as pushing energy efficient vehicles out the door, but it's failing and very few people are willing to spend an extra $20-$40k on a hybrid or electric vehicle when they are barely making it by already. It's poor timing, full of scandals, a lot of conspiracies, and so many predictions that were wrong to begin with that are making people not believe in global warming, or at least believe it's exaggerated. Personally, I think it's not even our fault that the earth is experiencing all of these changes. There's the solar maximus, there's the gradual polar shifts (which will take a ridiculously long time), and there's the ice age that ended about 10,000 years ago. There are cycles that earth goes through, and while I do understand the science behind pollution, it's hard to conceive how we're capable of causing global warming, especially when the ozone is ridiculously high from where we do our everyday things, so there's a lot more to cover / damage. We have little to no oil remaining, which means that in the next 100-150 years, we'll need to have alternate solutions, and judging in the past 100-150 years, it won't be a problem even if we continue how we are today.
The two party system is what makes the United States so successful actually. It focuses political resources and efforts on ONE problem at a time (which ALWAYS has two sides, hence the two parties). What the United States is going through right now politically is something MUCH more fundamental than simply two groups fighting over something. The issue we have at the forefront of politics right now is SIMPLE: Should religion control politics and economic decisions or not. Simply put: RELIGION or NO RELIGION? THAT is the issue that maps directly to the two party system. And THAT issue maps to a hidden latent issue that all societies have dealt with: intellectual slavery (repressing people economically by simply denying them the education and the resources they need to educate themselves). Intellectual slavery applies to many minorities right now (but also, the lower-middle class in general) in the United States. Religion for many people in the United States is a DIRECT implementation of intellectual slavery. It's just a means of controlling and pacifying the people. This issue of RELIGION or NO RELIGION is center stage right now. ALL the other issues are secondary. And, yes, the outcome (if positive, which IMO means no religion) it will be quite destructive. But it will also be simultaneously much more constructive. And, hence, looking at the big picture, again IMO, it will be very constructive. I believe our system has proven itself in the past, and will continue to prove itself. Are we going through an epic power struggle right now? Certainly. Will we make it through? No doubt.
But what if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?.
Says enough, really.
There are two separate issues WRT climate change.
A science based question given 'x' action what is the likely 'y' global or regional outcome.
A political question given 'y' global outcome what if anything should be done about it.
Scientists need to shut their pie holes NEVER suggesting a course of action based on the outcome of their models.
People doing the climate work should not be the same people calculating the consequences.
People calculating consequences must never suggest a course of action or make suggestions to fix the problem.
Scientists have no place or duty to play politician and spout off about what ought to be done. Encrouching on politicians, sigs, rumor mill and associated quackeries turf is a loosing proposition for science.
Politicians, sigs and the popular circus whos only qualifications are having stayed at a holidy inn express need to be ignored or called to task when they object to a model without a substantive showing. They need to put up or shut up.
By disconnecting the issues science becomes a pointed lightning rod rather than a blunt one.
So the real question is if the climate change we are seeing is solely caused by human activities, specifically CO2 emissions. So far the science that i have seen has at best said maybe. Even more significant on the topic of societal change is the question "If we stopped putting out CO2 today would the climate return to where we think it should be?" And clearly the answer to that is nobody knows. A lot of people would really like to believe the answer is yes, but the basis for their assurances are weak and often motivated by other issues.
We do know that the climate is bound to change. We also know that the appearance of stability for the last 400 years or so is nothing to judge things on. The climate was different before 1600 and it is likely to be different in the future.
How much can we control it? We do know that putting CO2 into the atmosphere is one thing we can control and it appears it could be significant. But we have zero control over all of the other inputs. One troubling scenario that has come up time and time again since the 1960s is the idea that if the solar input to our climate were to decrease slightly the only thing that might keep much of the planet habitable would be increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
We do know that nobody on the planet feels strongly enough to take direct action on this issue and that is troubling in and of itself. If there was a group of people that went around shutting down coal-fired power plants in the name of reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere that would be an interesting data point. I'm not saying it would be effective or that it would be a good thing - but just the fact that nobody is doing it means nobody feels strongly enough on the matter to stake their lives, fortunes and sacred honor (as I believe the phrasing goes) on it.
Most of the "real solutions" that people have been talking about are going to have a huge impact of the standard of living, if not the very lives of people in the Western world. Nobody in any governmental body has seriously taken steps toward a "real solution" so far. The small steps that have been taken are either meaningless - Kyoto, for example - or are immediately balanced out by negative measures. Carbon credits, for example, are an exercise in mental masterbation that will in the end benefit only a few that should not be deriving any benefit from this at all.
Just for discussion purposes, some real solutions might be:
I guess I would say right now the side effects of a "real solution" are so incredibly drastic that they rival the supposed problems caused by doing nothing. And nothing short of these things are likely to do anything at all.
That's what the paper by Jakobsson et. al. referenced by the parent said.
The issue is whether that contradicts the theory that the world has been warming up since the 19th century largely due to human activity.
Finding a place that was warmer a thousand years ago does not falsify the theory.
That's because the politicians pushing AGW don't care about it. They just want social engineering. The politicians denying AGW don't care either. They just are opposing those social engineers.
Yes, the problem with Dyson's approach is that it doesn't take into account the biological consequences to ecosystems, which will be at least as disruptive as global warming.
Until someone figures out how to convince a person who claims the earth is 4000 years old that we need to do something about our carbon footprint, we're screwed.
They don't respond to _rational_ argumentation, so they are sure as hell not going to listen to a smart ass in a Prius claiming we're all DOOOOOOOOOOMED.
I sure don't know what the common ground is. Anyone?
Science is not mathematics. Insisting on 'proof', however you want to define that in physics, for an extremely complex system like the climate is moronic and shows you don't know how science works, how scientific concensus is reached, and what it means for a theory to accepted as being confirmed.
Furthermore, as I've said here long ago and on my website sind ca. 2005 when I saw the inane arguments from nutjobs here in NL (e.g. a group called Groene rekenkamer, T. Richel, Simon Rozendaal who spouts his moronic garbage in the magazine Elsevier (from a-hole publisher Elsevier), even if not the scientific branch, they're related)), that considering it not-happening even if there is a small chance is so stupid, that it's beyond belief. Such people who don't care think like this: "Sure life might become extint in lots of places, but that's not my problem, I want to drive a city-tractor! (aka SUV)"
Sorry, what has religion to do with this article?
Oh, yeah. Wikipedia is nice and all but since this is a question about geology and energy, let's ask the relevant government agencies, shall we?
This document from USGS shows 550 GWe potential. The science has improved a bit since then. And of course the US was generating 247 GWe of hydroelectric in 2007. Nobody is proposing we get rid of that (well, nobody who's going to get anywhere).
So that's 3/4ths of total power generation needs as baseload power. More than we need until the science improves some more, without cracking a single atom or burning a single gram of hydrocarbon fuel to produce electricity. There is every reason to believe that as we develop enhanced geothermal systems we will improve on the science and efficiency. And the geothermal resources are special in that they're highly dynamic: they can compensate for production changes or outages in non-baseload power like wind and solar in ways that nuclear cannot.
Of course exploiting these resources requires investment, as other energy production technologies do. But enhanced geothermal generation costs less even than nuclear just to get started per GWe, and there aren't the trailing costs and risks. It requires less water than the other methods also. It's geographically distributed, so transmission costs and losses can be lessened. It's a closed loop, so it's as environmentally friendly as it can get. It's no danger to birds or lizards.
Incidentally the EGS hardware can be adapted to capture industrial waste heat also.
I should mention that searching for excess geothermal heat in the near term isn't even necessary. It is quite often found incidental to ongoing oil and natural gas exploration. We know where more than enough resources are to keep engineers busy for a good long time.
This energy transfer from the deep earth to the atmosphere has been going on since the planet was formed. What is proposed is that we stop wasting it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Sure, change is a fact of life. ...is climate change bad.
But the question is...
Cooling, which is what we're scheduled for, is very bad as it results in loss of land area and extinctions.
Warming, on the other hand, is very good as it gives us more land area and increases species diversification.
People are just sticks in the mud. They don't like change. They built their cities along the shore lines and feel aggrieved that the waves are rising higher.
Reality check: climate change happens. It has been cycling back and forth for hundreds of millions, even billions of years.
All this discussion of Climate Change and Global Warming misses out on the REAL PROBLEM: pollution. Toxic chemicals, trash, GMOs, that sort of thing. People are using climate change as a diversion from the real issues.
Sad.
Thanks for the movie link.
Time says man shall pass.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Page last updated at 12:02 GMT, Sunday, 7 February 2010
And the data is November 2009 vs February 2010. A 3 - 4 month gap, from more than 2 years ago.
Perhaps the results were relevant at the time, but today they tell us nothing about the current perceptions are or in which direction they're heading. Frankly, such a huge shift in such a short time makes it tempting to conclude it's yet more evidence that polls are a load of shit, though there's plenty of reasons for thinking that.
Anyway, the topic is irrelevant. What matters is a) what is happening? and b) can we do anything about it? I don't follow why all these "climate change is man made" arguments seem to come across like the important thing is blame is being applied. There's this hole fucking debate about whether climate change was caused by man in the past, when all that matters is what man can do in the future to reduce the risks.
Unfortunately, we don't live in a world of rationalism, but in one of greed. Our scientists were right to sound the alarm and draw people's attention to the problem at hand, but it's simplistic to think that simply stating the obvious was ever going to solve anything. Fossil fuel has been a free lunch for our civilization for over 250 years, so we're not just going to give it up for any problems it might cause many years from now -- we're far too short-sighted for that.
The only way out is develop cheaper and more efficient alternatives as quickly as possible. Luckily, the rising prices of fossil fuels are also helping to push consumers towards these new technologies, but the sooner they become the more desirable solution for everyone the better.
Businesses make predictions like that all the time. We were once told that if the government forbade corporations from making ketchup out of rotten tomatoes and red paint that the ketchup business would collapse and there would be no one left making ketchup. These chicken little claims from neofeudalists come out so frequently that one wonders why anyone takes them seriously anymore.
'James Hensen has been making predictions about climate change since the 1980s. When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up.'
The question for US citizens is this: Do you want Dr. James Hansen to negociate with the IRS on how much money YOU owe the government?
Global warming is being sold as a single package: the assertion it has gotten warmer, that this warming is due to CO2 emissions, the prediction that it will get a lot warmer due to feedback mechanisms in the future, the idea that significant warming will have catastrophic consequences, and that we can and must intervene. If you don't accept all propositions, you are branded as unscientific and a luddite. In fact, there is firm evidence only for the first proposition, namely that global average temperatures have increased. The other propositions are increasingly based on guesses and opinion.
Don't believe me? Take a look at the IPCC report and actually read the conclusions. The language in the report clearly uses high uncertainties for most of the predictions. Furthermore, if you look at the report, you'll find that the effects of "catastrophic global warming" as described in the report can be remediated according to the IPCC report itself, and that such remediation may be cheaper than limiting fossil fuel use right now.
So, "global warming" isn't one issue, it's a lot of different issues and arguments. And the arguments for aggressive policies are simply not that strong yet. Furthermore, if you look at actual political consequences, no country or politician, not even those taking the most aggressive stances for action on global warming, have been willing and able to push through the painful policies that this would entail. Global warming right now is just being used as an excuse to push through policies with nobody actually addressing it. There is enormous hypocrisy on the part of advocates for action on climate change.
Check out the Puntang Obama-san had tonight at http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/ Click number 10.
Pity pity. Looks like Obama was using the Secreat Service and US Army to secure his Puntang in Colombia.
Yes indeed. Pity pity for the Secreat Service 11-Best and US Army GiJo's to hang for the mixup.
Well, after all they signed a contract. So there.
LoL
If the climate was going to change in a way that was bad for humans, but for natural reasons. We would still need to adapt to the change, or lessen it if possible. If the climate changes because we changed it, we still need to adapt to the change or lessen it if possible.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
I understand evolution both as a theory and the evidence for it. I can and have run experiments that reproduce it. That's why I believe it.
I understand a significant chunk of classical and quantum physics because I understand the math and actually have run experiments to reproduce the results in high school and college. I've generated interference patterns, detected the photoelectric effect, measured quantum noise, measured the charge-to-mass ratio of electrons, etc. That's why I believe those parts of physics.
I understand the theories people have about God and creationism, as they are spelled out in the Bible and in Christian dogma of various denominations. I haven't seen any evidence for the existence of God, for creationism, or for intelligent design, and any experiments I have tried to run myself (prayer, statistics, etc.) have failed. That's why I don't believe in God and why I am an atheist.
I don't understand global warming. I don't have the data, I can't run the numerical models, I can't reproduce it in experiments, and I don't understand the assumptions that go into the models. I don't understand the basis of economic predictions people make about global warming. And it's not for a lack of trying: I have looked at the original literature as well as the IPCC reports. That's why I don't believe it, in the sense that I haven't seen enough evidence to believe it is true. As far as I'm concerned, global warming may be true or it may not be, and I am not willing to make vast changes to my life based on scientific hypotheses that I don't understand.
That is what science and scientific literacy mean: you believe a scientific theory if you understand it and if you get reproducible evidence for it. Evidence means either lots of independent experiments that test the theory, or something that I can reproduce myself. You don't believe it because someone with a lot of credentials tells you its true, or because massaging the data on a single data set eventually yields agreement with some theory.
So, if you want to convince me that action on global warming is needed, you need to come up with a model and supporting evidence that is simple enough and strong enough that it convinces me. Until you do, the scientifically literate stance is to continue to consider global warming an interesting but unproven hypothesis.
also as a result it externalized the pollution costs
For China.
who are largely doing it to themselves but we are not free from blame, our corporations could self-regulate the pollution they always claim they would do here if we removed government regulations... it proves how little self restraint they actually have.
Except you still have to explain why the industry is in China instead of the developed world. "Lack of self-restraint" doesn't explain that. But higher costs of production do.
Look at your Bible: the Christian God ordered human sacrifice, slaughter of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. And various churches tell you that the pronouncements of their officials come from God. So, put two and two together and you arrive at "God commanded us to kill ______, just like he did a few thousand years ago."
The New Testament is an inconsistent portrayal of Jesus. The all loving kind of Jesus is the picture that's preached a lot today. But there is also Jesus as the Jewish apocalyptic preacher who didn't give a damn about the gentiles and didn't give a damn about what people did to each other as long as they worshiped God before the apocalypse (which was supposedly only a few years away).
Isn't it interesting how there was a story about astroturfing on Slashdot just the other day, and now we get to see it in action? It's fascinating!
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It's just too bad that you are so gullible that you actually swallowed the lies in that movie, and without even checking the claims! The movie is so full of misinformation that only someone who is either ignorant or completely dishonest will promote it to anyone else.
And that list of "professors"? Piers Corbyn the failed weather forecaster? Roy Spencer the CREATIONIST? Seriously?! Did you even look at the list you just linked to?
The movie is pure garbage. It's nothing but a propaganda piece full of lies and misinformation. And you fell for it, hook line and sinker.
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He is obviously not a physics guy. He's just another astroturfer who will say anything to deceive people on behalf of his employer.
Clever signature text goes here.
Time for an analogy to illustrate why I think your argument is worthless:There are no accurate models of airflow over the entire range of conditions experienced by an aircraft yet we've been flying the things for over a century. The models we have are good enough to get the job done in most cases and wind tunnels fill the gaps even today.
"Accurate" is realitive and in reality most predictions based on models have a margin of error. We really need better education in schools to get that message across to people so they have some defence against the bullshit PR that the above poster and many others are taken in by.
What do you think Mr/Mrs Joe Smith cares about right now? Money, comfort, monkey servants - or - some potential (not my views, what they're thinking) problems 10, 20, 30 years down the road? Why do so few people backup their systems? Why do so many people neglect changing their oil in their cars?
See where I'm going here? They don't care as long as they are comfy -now-
It also would have helped if all the politicians didn't try to make it into sound bites and personal agendas (looking at you, Gore). Not saying that trying to get the ideas out were bad, but it all came off as political whoring, which always make the public so receptive.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
....I'd re-title this "Winning the Debate on Global Warming".
Given that the evidence for this theory is tenuous at best and all.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Who gave you permission to speak on behalf of the "global warming crowd"? Your conspiracy theories and blatant lies and dishonesty just means that you are another demagogue who rejects the science because it conflicts with your ideology.
Clever signature text goes here.
NASA has been high jacked from its spiritual mission of exploring the solar system using guys with short hair strapped into high velocity adrenalin sleds while utilizing cutting edge technology that may or may not work. Nobody gives a rats ass about global warming, it was all a scam to raise grant money. Beer is proof God loves us. Good day.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
What you seem to be saying is that the NOAA is able to predict the weather. Ha ha ha ha. That is a good one but lets look at the facts that you say I got so wrong.
Think-Tank Says Trained Chimp Can Predict Hurricanes Better Than NOAA And Puts it to the Test
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/18/think-tank-says-trained-chimp-can-predict-hurricanes-better-than-noaa%E2%80%A6-and-puts-it-to-the-test/
I like that you picked years that NOAA got sort of right. 2005 they said it was going to be a light year with around 7 and there were around 15. Plus I just checked your numbers on 2008 it was 7-10 not your 6-9. They still got it right but your numbers were wrong. Also these are the August forecasts. Also you need to break down their numbers a bit more. They don't just pick the number as there is an fairly consistent number of hurricanes each year with ups and downs from things like el nino. So lets look at 2007 where you say they were one off. Their detailed prediction was:
"NOAA's forecast called for seven to nine hurricanes, three to five major hurricanes, and 13-16 named storms."
There were six hurricanes during the season, only two of which were classified as major. And even then the last one Karen was a squeaker it came in on the last day or so and many argued wasn't even a hurricane.
Here is a wiki article on global cooling and ice age predictions in the 70's that you say I made up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
And here is a good one from the 70s proving my point of who really knows:
"The National Science Board's Patterns and Perspectives in Environmental Science report of 1972 discussed the cyclical behavior of climate, and the understanding at the time that the planet was entering a phase of cooling after a warm period. "Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end, to be followed by a long period of considerably colder temperatures leading into the next glacial age some 20,000 years from now."[26] But it also continued; "However, it is possible, or even likely, that human interference has already altered the environment so much that the climatic pattern of the near future will follow a different path."
It then goes on to talk about Time and Newsweek articles blah blahing about going into an ice age.
Here is where I get anxious about claims of man made global warming. I really believe that we need to cut way back on fossil fuels for a wide variety of great reasons ranging from their sources, pollution, to the costs. I don't particularly like power companies and would love if every house could go off the grid. I would love an electric car with a decent range and a battery that wouldn't end up being a pain. I see energy independence as a something that would strengthen most societies. So taking the flakiest of these beliefs I am still more certain of the benefits from less reliance on fossil fuels from dubious countries than I am as to the possible global warming reduction benefits. But my real anxiety comes from the worry that if it turns out that man made global warming is a crock of crap that many otherwise respectable organizations will loose huge amounts of credibility. NASA, New Scientist, Scientific American, etc will all have huge amounts of egg on their faces after their relentless and largely one sided support on this issue. This is not good in a time when teaching evolution in schools is not just debated but often prevented through legislation. But again, I don't debate that at least my part of the world is warmer and quite possibly the whole thing. But this whole issue is one of religion and no longer science. People who are religious about man made global warming grab every bit of supporting evidence and hold up like a religious tome and call
Just another way to attack America because communists want to make everyone poor.
I've never been able to understand how some people manage to reconcile belief in the Christian God with guns and military.
You mean the guy who went around literally whipping peddlers because they were selling stuff in his temple?
Not to mention telling his disciples to buy swords (the "assault weapons of choice" of the day), selling their clothing if necessary to raise the money.
The grandfather poster is confused because he doesn't understand the theology.
Starting with the commandment commonly mistranslated as "Thou shalt not kill". It used a different word and would be more correctly rendered as "Thou shalt not commit the crime of murder." It explicitly did not cover a lot of things, including the use of deadly force in self-defence, defence of home and family, executions, and war. (Jesus' "turn the other cheek" prescription, and when to apply it, is a separate issue.)
If you want a better understanding, start by looking up the "just war" doctrine. Meanwhile, don't hallucinate nonexistent hypocrisy by projecting the misunderstandings you've been taught onto others' behavior.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"If you rewind 10-15 years they where saying the Statue of Liberty would be underwater by now."
I think YOU said that in your OWN MIND, then dismissed yourself as a fringe loon.
"Any effort to regulate emissions is pointless unless its adapted across the board by all the major nations"
CO2 comes from burning trapped carbon, i.e. oil, gas etc. Oil and gas are imported from depleted reserves at huge cost.
The fix is to come up with new clean energy sources. China will face the same oil crunch the rest of the world does, only they will be behind in the clean energy race.
The fix for both the economy and the CO2 problem and the oil problem is the same: invest in new energy sources.
I don't think it should take something like climate change to realise we shouldn't be treating the earth like crap. We share this planet with 7 billion other people, and millions of other species. We shouldn't need an excuse like climate change to realise "Hey, maybe pumping millions of ton's of carbon and methane into the air isn't a smart idea". And this doesn't just apply to greenhouse gasses, we should respect our environment in every way, and not pollute it to hell.
But with a full education you also know that the scientists who study solar influences on all do not claim the single value of TSI to describe those influences. Thus, your standard reply of "0.1%" and cycle vs long term becomes quite irrelevant.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2011GL050702.shtml
And even small values can cause great changes if those values aggregate over time:
http://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/apr/article/view/14754
it's in my head
What's your point? If the sun's output had any effect on the recent warming we'd know it. It doesn't.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
My point is that you should read more scientific papers :) There are many scientists who do claim that the sun's output has had an effect on the recent warming.
http://www.mpg.de/495993/pressRelease20041028
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/solarcycle-primer.html
it's in my head
Weather is getting more severe
Not according to science.
The bar chart below indicates there has been little trend in the frequency of the strongest tornadoes over the past 55 years.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/severeweather/tornadoes.html
Several studies show that the anomalous long-lasting Russian heat wave in summer 2010, linked to a long-persistent blocking high, appears as a result of natural atmospheric variability.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/MWR-D-11-00249.1
The problem is actually one of age of man :) We remember about 50-60 years back, and claim that changes during that time are unnatural (since they're different from what we remember). However, when it comes to rainfall the cycles are simply longer. These graphs from Australia are telling:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/rerain.shtml
it's in my head
The whole thing is moot. The predictions of global calamity are based on computer models which have not even been able to prove the last 10 years of our past weather. Hansen and his friends have been dishonest with the public on the issue of consensus. The hockey stick has been shown to be a farce. The UN IPCC is run by a self serving railroad engineer who is profiting from the whole issue. ( much like Gore). Hansen should be fired because of conflicts of interest which NASA has not had the nuts to call him on.
Also, for Hansen to claim that anti AGW people are being massively funded is a sham. Billions of tax payer dollars fund the AGW "studies", supported by publicly funded universities.
Slashdotters as a group are smart, literate, and highly educated. That places them at risk of being intellectually co-opted by this
systemic nonsense know as AGW. MiniHillFarmer
AGW is a scientific theory (like evolution and gravity), not just a hypothesis. It is obvious that you are "questioning" (denying) a scientific theory because you don't like it.
You are also deeply ignorant. You think predicting the weather is like predicting climate trends. Wow.
Clever signature text goes here.
Seriously?! Did you even look at the list you just linked to?
The movie is pure garbage. It's nothing but a propaganda piece full of lies and misinformation. And you fell for it, hook line and sinker.
^ This comment is irrelevant and contains no real information. Please stick more to the discussion rather than bashing it by kindergarten-comments like "pure garbage", "lies" etc.
"Plants need CO2" so more reducing CO2 output is obviously a waste of money.
in other words
Humans need water, so the life preserver requirement on cruise ships is a waste of money. Bats need mosquitoes so it's time to end anti-dumping laws. Lice need hair so quit applying crab killer to your groin area.
Not necessarily. He talks about trees, but it's the principle that matters: using plants to fix carbon. If it's done to corn (for example), it would act to enrich the top soil and not be any more disruptive than the actual planting of corn. But even if it's done with trees, it wouldn't be any more disruptive than all the harvesting we do.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Really? All of the proposed "solutions" to global warming with which I'm familiar call not for any redistribution of wealth or changes in lifestyles, but instead for huge infusions of capital into new industries or businesses. Alternative energy development, global climate adjustment (ie: atmospheric/oceanic seeding), smart grid (and smart appliance) deployment, etc.
Sorry, wrong study. I should have linked Doran 2009. Skeptics have responded to these two studies by saying they are flawed (of course). If you are interested you should read the studies, spot check the references, read what skeptics and scientists have to say on the issue.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Total fertility rates of native born citizens in first world countries are all slightly lower than 2 per couple.
All we have to do is warm up the neutron bombs and carpet bomb the third world.
Problem solved.
(this comment is humor; this note included as an act of kindness for the humor-impaired).
Naturalistic fallacy. Just because we evolved to eat meat doesn't mean we have to eat meat, or even that we should.
(not that I don't - I'm just pointing out the reasoning flaw)
Yes it does. It is a scientific fact humans need to eat meet. It is part of our diet. Vegans suffer massive health problems because if their diet.
No, they don't. If anything vegans are more healthy because they actually tend to pay attention to what they eat. I suppose it would be possible for a highly ignorant vegan to give themselves health problems with malnutrition, but most don't. Most omnivorous americans, however, do suffer massive health problems because their diet contains too much fat, salt, sugar, and protein, but not enough vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.
Now, I'm definitely not advocating veganism. I think they're being pretty silly, especially the ones who actually believe that eating meat is unnatural (sadly there's more than a few). It is possible (and even ideal) to have a healthy diet that includes some meat. But the amount of meat that most americans eat is unhealthy and unsustainable.
Knowledge != Intelligence
"They have been winning the public debate with the help of tremendous resources."
Yeah. The truth.
Many alarmists feel that this issue is so vital and so urgent, they have cherry-picked data, betrayed the scientific method, and engaged in political grandstanding in an attempt to sway people. Whether or not you believe in AGW, it is unwise to distort the truth to achieve your goals, because, as we have seen, you are no longer credible whether you present the truth or not.
Michael Mann hid the decline. He and his brethren can whine all they want, but it is not skeptics who destroyed their credibility but themselves.
This is a consequence of having a stupid implementation of democracy wherein the main qualification for voting is age without regard for accountability, fundamental values are being imposed on the entire population via a simple majority rather than a strong consensus, and the first amendment rights of corporations are protected so as to allow them to decide who wins elections via massive campaign contributions. Over time, in the guise of progress, our system has become idiotic to the point that significant decisions about our future cannot be effectively considered.
Government regulation and international treaties won't fix the problem. In fact, it is one of the causes of skepticism. What science has PROVEN is that man effects the climate in a global fashion. This isn't the part people have a problem with. What science continues to be quite sketchy on is the extent. This IS the part people have a problem with.
The GW science is suspect simply because so many people's jobs have come to rely on it. This is true with all science, but with the GW mega-industry there seems to be a historically large number of people clinging to their seats on the gravy chain, at least in my opinion.
Give it up - for crying out loud. It doesn't matter how many resources to throw at this thing, you will lose. People are smart enough to know when they are being fleeced. When you lived 60 years, you can begin to see the trends. For example, people who believe the "alarmists" - that global warming is some thing we caused and contribute to - are the same people who are more likely to believe that Barak Obama is a legitimate president. They, like the alarmists, don't bother to do the research. They haven't actually taken apart the fake birth certificate for themselves to see the manufactured elements. And the alarmists haven't looked at the science to realize that plant food (CO2) rises 800 years after the ocean warms from sun spot activity. The whole thing is a natural terrestrial phenomenon. Live with it. It was only when the money grubbing liberals sat scheming in their cave one day and decided to engineer a way to pillage the wealth owned by the west. You cannot measurably affect what is happening. All you can do it let some liberal nig-nog tax your pocket, in a green way, so that you'll feel warm and fuzzy about it. I'm here to tell you that ITS NOT IN THE CARDS. If you keep it up, you're heading to war or revolution. More likely the latter.
None of these claims any effect of solar variability on recent climate change.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
It isn't global warming science that many object to, it's that almost every 'solution' proposed seems to be a call for more redistribution and for people to scale back their lifestyles.
Yes. And your point would be..., what? That we should just continue with business as usual and expect different results?
didn't give a damn about the gentiles
So you don't know about the 70 weeks prophesy in Daniel. At the end of the seventy weeks (490 years) the Gospel would be taken to the Gentiles.
It's not content free. Scientists don't live in a black and white world. It is very precise. It's asking the scientist if they think climate change has a significant anthropogentic contribution. Can't get more straight-forward then that. How would you phrase the question?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I think that it is certainly true that early statisticians did not anticipate the extent to which their methods might be misused by dishonest people to deceive the public. If they had, they probably would have made a better choice of jargon than the term "statistical significance," because in common parlance "significance" is almost synonymous with "importance," whereas it's usage in statistics comes closer to "reliability." Certainly, no honest scientist would ever make a statement like "there is no statistically significant global warming," because it misleadingly suggests that absence of evidence (for global warming over a particular time scale) is evidence of absence. An honest scientist, if trying to argue that there was no warming, would state confidence limits on the trend. Why wasn't that done here? Because if you state confidence limits on the temperature trend over that time period, it turns out to be equally consistent with no warming and with warming even greater than climate theory predicts.
Wrong! But unless you have actually studied statistics, it is easy to get this sort of mistaken notion, particularly when there are well-funded parties working actively to promote this sort of misunderstanding because it serves their own financial or political purposes.
A proper statistical trend analysis will result in a best estimate of the trend (which may be warming or cooling) given the available data, as well as confidence limits on that trend--a measure of how much the estimated trend would be expected to vary if that observation could be repeated (i.e. if you had a population of earths with a similar climate trend but with different weather, each of which could be identically sampled over the same time period using the same methodology). The measurements do not yield a probability that the temperature has risen and a probability that the temperature has not risen--they yield an estimate of how likely repeat measurements are to differ from the current measurement by a particular amount.
If 19 times out of 20, repeat measurements would be expected to yield a trend greater than zero, then as a kind of shorthand, statisticians say that the trend is "significantly" greater than zero (this is equivalent to saying that the 95% confidence limits on the trend do not include zero). But if that is not the case (let's say if repeat measurements would be expected to yield a trend greater than zero only 18 times out of 20), this is not evidence that there is no warming--it merely indicates that the data is not adequate to resolve the question.
Some types of studies in physics require multiple comparisons. Look at it this way: a probability of 1 in 20 of a conclusion being in error due to chance is pretty good if you are only measuring one thing. If you are doing a thousand measurements, however, that means 50 false positives. If even one false positive is enough to lead to a false conclusion on a matter of import then you need to set a more stringent criterion for statistical significance--like, in this case, 6 standard deviations. However, there is a downside to setting such a stringent criterion. When you minimize
It is good to have people be skeptics. Science is not infallible. Governments are not to be trusted. People see that vocal proponents like Gore and Moore have an agenda of making themselves big money with their publicity-seeking claims. The man-made crowd has done this to themselves and to their own cause.
I don't think most of you see the problem with the 'denialist' position. The propagation of Climate Change Denial is a Crime Against Humanity.
If their "free speech and freedom of opinion" results in horrific death and disruption on a scale never imagined before then their "free speech and freedom of opinion" will be curtailed for the good of humanity and in fact its exercise under certain circumstances will be deemed criminal and it will be deemed criminal ex post facto and they won't like that any more than the Nazis liked it at Nuremburg.
Essentially they're shouting "no fire" in a crowded theater on that is on fire. In the future, when the ravages of climate change are actually playing out and the people who are young today are looking to assign culpability they're REALLY not going to give a 5h1t what you *really believed*.
We're not all at fault. It isn't a societal problem. It's a problem with that section of the population who are deniers.
Murdoch is a mass murderer. Beck is a mass murder. Limbaugh is a mass murderer. Lord Mockton is a mass murderer. The Koch brothers are mass murderers. The American Petroleum Institute are mass murders. ExxonMobil are mass murderers. The American Enterprise Institute are mass murderers.
I call on my government and the government of all nations and peoples to use the powers granted to them during war time to neutralize these and other denialists who represent and clear and present danger to the United States of America, the U.K. and all other nations and people, using whatever means is necessary.
If you cant make the connection then you are not worth my time.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
1. Even if global warming has been caused by human behavior, it is unclear that it can be undone.
2. For the "West" to try to tackle global warming without the full and equal support of the developing world (china and india, especially) is impossible.
So, maybe the public has a right to be skeptical about the solutions, if not the underlying existence.
So the planet is heating up. Assume that it is caused by man's activities. This is self correcting. If man destroys the environment, it becomes more and more difficult for the planet to support the lifestyle of man. There will be wars and massive bloodshed just like the history of mankind when farming was really hard to do. Wars kill people, less people, less damage to the environment, less climate change, a new equilibrium. We don't actually need governments or scientists, new taxes or punitive laws.
When we have a nontrivial portion of the population who does not believe that humanity originated from divine roots, and that the universe was not organized by a higher power in His own due time, did we really expect people to accept doctrine that something bad is going to happen if they do not change their behavior?
This argument goes both ways. You shouldn't always assume that your opinions are the correct ones.
Please name me the climate model that showed in advance that the temperature would stay level for 12+ years like it has? There isn't one. If accurate observations of reality and your model don't agree then your model is WRONG.
Consensus is a political process NOT science! Please aquaint yourselves with the scientific method:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
The reason the "humans are causing global warming" side is losing is because they are WRONG. They can not prove their theory that CO2 is the dominant driver of climate and rely on defective computer models. Check out www.climateaudit.org and www.wattsupwiththat.com for some interesting reading.
Poe's Law - parody of extremism is hard to distinguish form actual extremism
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
If you cant make the connection then you are not worth my time.
That's never been my problem.
Is the elephant int he room.
Good luck with your band-aids.
any changes made by man won't matter in the long run.
Meanwhile, people are trying to ban light bulbs, keep me from getting a decent shower (those damn plugs you have to pull out of your shower head), and prevent me from buying a working toilet.
FUN FACT: Everyone in the United States could leave their water taps running 24/7 and not a single mountain stream would dry out because of it.
I think there are many, many things that money would be better spent on (like paying down our runaway national debt) than on trying to prevent or slow down global warming. The earth has warmed up in the past and gotten cool again. The cycles of the life of a planet. If money has to be spent, let it be to put freon back in air conditioners and make them more effective.
There is a case study of this aired on the Australian ABC show Australian Story on the 5th of March. [http://www.abc.net.au/austory/specials/halfamillionacres/default.htm]
Removing grazing animals from the land saw the land return to its former glory, far healthier grasses, ecosystem, soil erosion mitigated.
Get real, its a money grab, anyone who posts on here who believes the religious fairy tale needs to turn off the the electronic environment killing device they used to post and put up or shut up. Here comes the Easter Bunny to you warmers!
Another article advocating MMGW on slashdot? Its getting old and boring....
The Republicans are happy to push anti-evolution to get the religious right-winger demographic involved in their party, voting and giving money. But the real payoff is getting people to doubt climate change science, because that's important to their corporate sponsors, who don't want Congress making laws that would interfere with their businesses.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Word salad that doesn't mean anything. Problem X leads to Problems A, B and C and we can try to prevent that from happening (or not) with J, I and K.
It has.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas and decreased arctic ice mean less light will be reflected back into space. It's not that complicated.
It's already had catastrophic consequences. Pacific island nations are literally disappearing under the sea. Hotter, more humid weather means more and stronger storms.
And now the filibustering, with a side order of victim complex. This also isn't that hard: replace fossil fuel power sources with green energy while reducing energy use overall. None of this will require that we go back to living in caves or melting under the summer son.
Mass transit over highway sprawl. Better home insulation. A trillion dollars from the annual war budget would put up a lot of solar panels and wind farms. Geothermal. Small-scale hydro power.
If you are engaging in knee-jerk denialism for the sake of knee-jerk denialism or because Fox said so, then you are an unscientific luddite. The objections to AGW aren't based on science, they're based on appeals to self-centered egos stoked by the fossil fuel industry.
... from the Ãrst year on.
When I saw that bit of weirdness, I hit my Back button, and sure enough, the preview showed "... from the first year on." So this is a clear case of something, probably some clever text-munging routine in the SlashCode, that decided that the 'f' should really be an 'i' with an umlaut. Slashdot has been doing some strange things lately ...
Let's see what happens to this chunk of text ...
Hmmm ... Now the preview shows an 'A' with a tilde, while showing the 'i'-umlaut in the entry box. Sigh ...
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Examples? And how about conservatives that hyperventilate while exaggerating the costs of climate change mitigation? And if anything, the rate of climate change has been underestimated by the IPCC.
Driving a Prius is cheaper than driving an F-150. Running your air conditioner on high is pretty expensive when faced with a 100+ degree heat wave that lasts weeks or even months. Paying a higher price for food because of a widespread drought or widespread flooding can get expensive.
Energy costs money. Saving energy thus means...saving money.
Energy costs money. Saving energy means saving money.
Even if you are a self-centered tool who insists on using an F-150 as a single passenger vehicle in a metro area with busing and subways, you would still want the populace as a whole to reduce it's energy consumption.
Because the price of gas would fall.
Father Coughlin was Roman Catholic; it doesn't get any more "Christian" than that.
Yeah, right.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the no true Scottsman logical fallacy!
Yeah, right.
What about a nice infographic to make you go, "Hmmm...."
Yeah, right.
None of the BIble-based religions and denominations even agree to what that passage refers to. Nor do I see anything positive in that passage. In the Old Testament, whenever God sent a message to the gentiles, the gentiles got killed in large numbers.
They loose the public debate, because they allow religious zealots on their side. Kick out all the zealots, and maybe the they won't loose. Until then, they deserve to loose. Science cannot be won by zealots. Let me give you a case in point: http://politics.slashdot.org/story/12/04/25/1325241/gaia-scientist-admits-mispredicting-rate-of-climate-change?sdsrc=popbyskidbtmprev in case you are uneducated.