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Climate Contrarians Seek Leadership of House Science Committee
An article at Ars examines three members of the U.S. House of Representatives who are seeking chairmanship of its Committee on Space, Science, and Technology. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) said in an interview, "My analysis is that in the global warming debate, we won. There were a lot of scientists who were just going along with the flow on the idea that mankind was causing a change in the world's climate. I think that after 10 years of debate, we can show that that there are hundreds if not thousands of scientists who have come over to being skeptics, and I don't know anyone [who was a skeptic] who became a believer in global warming." James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) has a similar record of opposing climate change, as does Lamar Smith (R-TX). Relatedly, Phil Plait, a.k.a. The Bad Astronomer, has posted an article highlighting how U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), a member of the Senate's Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, has declined to answer a question about how old the Earth is, calling it "one of the great mysteries."
I don't know anyone [who was a skeptic] who became a believer in global warming.
You mean like Richard Muller who quite famously denounced anthropogenic global warming only to come to the same conclusion by his own means? Yeah, that opinion piece by him opens with "Call me a converted skeptic."
Oh, I get it, after it turns out that his research didn't back up your "beliefs", he must never have been a skeptic to begin with, right? Or perhaps when you made that statement you meant that you just don't know Richard Muller personally?
Political word games have always been such a pain in the ass.
But you are right that while peer reviewed journals move one way, the population moves the other:
The most striking result is the increase in the proportion of Americans who express strong doubt or rejection of the reality of global warming through their free associations. In 2003, only 7% of Americans provided “naysayer” images (e.g., “hoax,” or “no such thing”) when asked what thought or image first came to mind when they heard the term “global warming.” By 2010, however, 23% of Americans provided “naysayer” images.
My work here is dung.
Agreed.
"Look at all the skeptical scientists (that we retained as hied shills)! CLEARLY our side of the debate has won! (Nevermind that the basis of the global climate change scenario is firmly rooted in uncontested scientific principles and repeatedly documented characteristics of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and methane gasses. We assert that because humans are magical, that humans can release all of those gasses that they want, and NEVER release enough into the atmosphere to upset anything at all! Sure, we are releasing it faster than nature can re-sequester it, and the effects are sustained and cumulative, but damnit, a volcanic eruption spews out more "greenhouse gasses" in a few hours than mankind does in a year! Nevermind that volcanic eruptions are not a constant and growing emission source like human activities; and therefor our comparison is lopsided and specious-- don't think too much about that, it's our story, and we're sticking to it! No, those aren't the icebergs you are looking for! Move along!)
Admittedly, that *is* a rather shameless strawman I just thrashed, but the likeness of that scarecrow to the real thing was alarming.
Seriously, is this woman simply delusional, or does shw think she can bribe the weather when shit comes apart at the seams?
At all other times in the planet's history when there have been periods of warming, it's taken orders of magnitude longer than the current period. The difference? This time is post industrial revolution and the wide-spread burning of fossil fuels. How do we know? Ice cores. But don't let the actual facts get in the way of your skepticism.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Back in the 1980's, the [so-called] Moral Majority spent a lot of time stealthily taking over local school boards. By stealthily, I mean they concealed their true colors, while running, then used their winning of elections to argue that they had a mandate to undermine the teaching of science and critical thinking in public schools. The fact that people can be elected to Congress and make such fatuous statements with a straight face makes me think that they -- in a certain sense -- did "win": these Congresspeople are the children of that age. It's sad, of course, that people think that "winning" means one has the right to determine the conceptual course of the nation's children -- regardless of actual facts.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
It's interesting to see how fragmented the anti-science people are.
That 23% of people who express doubt, are actually a bunch of different doubters. People who think it's not happening and lah-lah-lah (fingers in ears).
People who believe it IS happening but its natural.
People who believe it's man-made , but there's nothing we can do about it.
If you watch Fox (it's the only US news I see on my cable), they can't keep their story consistent between which of these they are. I suspect all they really care about is that you use fossil fuels as wastefully as possible at as high a price as possible. Whenever energy efficiency comes up, they're all screaming 'unAmerican' as if anyone would be against doing the same thing for less money!?
But it does show that you don't actually have 77%-23%, you have a more fragmented 77%-10%-10%-2%
Senator Barack Obama in 2008:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/11/rubio_and_obama_and_the_age_of_earth_politicians_hedge_about_whether_universe.html
These guys are politicians. Part of being a politician is to not annoy anyone who might vote for you, unless you have a really good reason. Privately, both Rubio and Obama might well believe the science is settled and that the literal word of the Bible is just wrong... but why would they say so? Why not just give a non-answer that annoys the fewest number of people?
So, is it stupid and wrong when Rubio does it, but okay when Obama does it? If you have that kind of double standard, then shame on you.
Hi. Nice to meet you, Dana. I go by the name Sarten X, often represented with a hyphen.
When The global warming concerns were first being voiced, I was skeptical. Surely humans' influence couldn't be that severe? Then I started learning. I learned about how CO2 traps heat. I learned how human CO2 production has been increasing exponentially. I learned how small shifts in ocean temperatures put far more moisture into the air, producing more severe storms.
I learned too much to doubt. Even if half my knowledge turns out to be wrong, the other half still leads to the same conclusion: Our society is royally screwed because of global warming, and we're making it worse every day.
I hope I'm wrong. I hope that we've been terribly mistaken in our analysis. I hope the solar system drifts into a previously-unknown dust cloud, and the greenhouse gasses save us. Hope, though, will not explain to my great-grandchildren why they can't leave the tunnels during storm season.
At this point, I am still skeptical of many of the claims. A world covered in poison ivy by 2015? I doubt that. The east coast of the United States submerged in a decade? Probably not. Regardless of what preposterous scare-tactic forecasts are made, there is still too much evidence for me to ignore. Though the outcome is uncertain, the trend is clear. We, as the current dominant species on this planet, should do what we can to reduce the approaching threat of a warming planet. We should strive to make our pollution as harmless as we can, and keep our industrial processes as flexible as we can to allow future change if similar problems are discovered. We should have been more cautious in our designs over the past century, and we may not even have another century to live if we do not change our ways now.
I am Sarten X. I was a skeptic of global warming, and I now support the efforts to fight it.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
If the choice is between having an iDevice and cheap transportation, and having a world outside that I don't need an environment suit to survive in, I will take the latter one.
Unfortunately, that's not the choice most people are confronted with. Instead the choice is (1) have cheap tech, transportation, be able to waste resources, etc. NOW, or (2) have a world where your grandchildren or great-grandchildren might have to wear environmental suits many years from now.
I think the general pattern of the debt crisis, people unwilling to plan for paying their mortgage next month, let alone planning for retirement or grandchildren, gives a general sense of where most people's priorities are. "If it makes my life easier or just more fun today, I'll worry about that other stuff later..." even if that othet stuff means complete financial ruin or disaster.
If people are willing to gamble in these ridiculous ways with their futures just to buy the slightly larger sunmer house, you really think they're motivated to worry about the quality of people's lives a century in the future? A lot of people say stuff like how they don't want to ruin things for their kids or grandkids, but few of them seem to really do much about it other than buying a more energy efficient light bulb or recycling a tin can.
Serious failure of Occams razor going on here AC.
Lets take three things we know;-
1) You say climate change is happening. Well we agree on that. Lets put that into "Known knowns".
2) We know CO2 significantly traps infra red radiation. This was known since the 1800s when researchers first started putting alarm bells out about climate change after Fourier first demonstrated CO2s effect on IR spectrum light in the laboratory.
3) And we are putting staggering amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Something in the range of 35000 teragrams per year.
Yet.
4) You dont think humans are responsible for most of the climate change.
The question I ask then, is what mechanism are you proposing that is stopping physics from doing its thing here.
This is the thing the "Humans are not having an effect" people seem to miss here. Thats a huge claim which breaks a tonne of very old and very established physics, and for the "we are not causing climate change" thing to be true, novel physics needs to be proposed to provide a mechanism that causes CO2 to stop absorbing IR light.
I should note some caution here. If a mechanism is proposed, a LOT of things break. Huge amounts of our knowledge of chemistry , astronomy (absorbsion lines, etc) , and so on are dependent on our understanding of how gasses absorb light, and we'd be throwing out perhaps entire fields of science, because holy crap have we got a lot of things wrong? All that stuff we learned from staring at black lines on rainbows shitting out of our telesopes? Wrong wrong wrong. All the whacky stuff we've learned bouncing light through gasses in laboratories? Wrong wrong wrong. Chemistry wrong, physics wrong, astronomy wrong, biology wrong, its exaustive.
To wit;- Big claims require big evidence.
And I'm not seeing that evidence, instead I'm seeing frauds like "lord" monkton, a guy whos entire scientific/mathematical education was finishing highschool, being paraded around by right-wing think tanks as a "renowned mathematician". I'm seeing incredibly detailed frame ups of researchers involving multiple right-wing thinktanks pushing campaigns of deliberate misrepresentation of peoples emails. I'm seeing polls of scientists, in such dead-on fields as "political science" and "marketing" denouncing basic observational physics and not a single damn qualified climate scientist in sight.
I'm actually not seeing shit. Theres almost no legitimate reason left to doubt climate change and our role in it anymore. Its happening, its real. That debate ended 150 years ago in Fouriers laboratory.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
BTW, I don't believe in global warming. Facts just show that it is happening.
At all other times in the planet's history when there have been periods of warming, it's taken orders of magnitude longer than the current period.
No.
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html
How do we know? Ice cores.
No.
http://www.climate.unibe.ch/~stocker/papers/bereiter09grl.pdf
it's in my head
I agree with what he says, "I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says.".
However this is not what he (and his accomplices) actually mean.
Despite what the words say, the underlying intention is radically different.
- not "parents should be able to teach..." but "schools must be forced to teach"
- and not just teach, but with every word imply ABSOLUTELY equal standing with science (eg Intelligent Design, which is nothing more than christian creationism with SCIENCE branded all over it)
And, of course, the WORST part of their hypocrisy is that they want THEIR religion mandatorily taught everywhere, but not any OTHER religion.
You want the worldview of your religion taught in schools, sure - GO AHEAD - as long as EVERY other religion also gains equal airtime and equal status.
For Example:
- Hindus
- Buddhists
- Mormons
- Zoroastrians
- and yes, even Scientologists.
It's called having a secret agenda and they're doing the same thing with Global Warming.
The entire "debate" has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with MONEY.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Rock and minerals are mosly recycled by our active planet. The oldest rock is 4.03 billion years old (gniess from NW Canada), and oldest mineral is 4.3 billion years (zircon crystals from west australia). But neither tells us the age of the Earth. That is done by assumption from meteorites and moon rocks.....true age of Earth is honestly a mystery.
Actually there's a reason for most of the rock being not much over 4 billion years old. I think it was around 4.5 billion years that Earth was impacted by a body that was maybe as big as Mars. It's what caused the Moon to form. Most of the surface went back to being molten for a few hundred million years so the oldest rock was after that impact. In truth it's hard to give an exact date because it cooled for so many years that it's hard to given a specific date when you can call it a planet. The material collected and solidified over hundreds of millions of years then it was still hot for hundreds of millions of years and once it became liveable there was the impact event. There's even a debate if life evolved twice on earth both before and after the impact.
By that reasoning almost everything is a mystery because very little can be isolated to perfect accuracy and precision. Consider, "how long does it take you to bake chocolate chip cookies?" "Well," I reply, "it's a mystery: last time it took 14 minutes plus or minus approximately 20 seconds, so I can't say."
Things we know are, outside the bounds of mathematics and pure logic, generally known only within reasonable bounds. If the earth is 4,540 million years old, a senator needn't stumble over the +/- 10 million error bars. What he means is that the age of the Earth is either a mystery to him because he's ignorant of such things, or just as likely isn't sure how to answer the question without fear of pissing someone off, so he chickened out. Maybe he believes the earth is 6000 years old but didn't want newspaper headlines the next day pointing out his conflict with all available scientific data suggesting this is wrong by approximately 4.54 billion years. Or perhaps since he's a Republican he didn't want to piss off his party's large fundamentalist wing by noting the scientifically indicated age of the Earth. It's a mystery.
What's not a mystery is that the Earth is quite surely about 4.5 billion years old. Saying it's a mystery does a serious disservice to the overwhelming amount we do know about its age.
The main reason for global warming denying is to avoid having to change how rich corporations do business. Energy companies want to keep burning coal and auto companies preferred to make gas guzzlers. The joke is the very ones denying global warming tend to be the ones buying beach houses. Those same beach houses won't be around in 50 or 100 years due to global warming. They can assume it'll happen after they are dead but like what just happened in New Jersey many will be lost in the next 25 years. In truth I think the majority of deniers believe it's happening they just don't want to change how they live so it's easier to just claim it's all a lie.
or can anyone get in?
This whole business is a large part of why I can not vote for a Republican, at least in national races. Between the people mentioned in this story, and we all remember Todd "In the case of a legitimate rape" Akin and Paul "Lies straight from the pit of hell" Broun, both who were/are also on the House Science committee. I mean, a Republican can say, "Hey, yeah, that is looney, but we're not all looney!". But I have to ask, "Who let these people serve on the science committee, and what does that say about... their concern for the nation?" Its this unbelievable horror story that these people are in an elected office, just utterly baffling. Sometimes I expect Rod Serling to step out from around a corner and tell us all that this was all just an odd trip into the Twilight Zone.
Apparently unlike you, sir, I have a basic understanding of math and physics. Please explain to us all where the Stefan-Boltzmann radiation law is in error.
Hilarious. My Ph.D. is in statistical thermodynamics. The Stefan-Boltzmann radiation law is not in error. Nor does it disprove the greenhouse effect or any other well known result in radiative transfer physics.
The people who call themselves skeptics are the deniers.
Real scientists are the biggest skeptics. Skepticism is the basis of all science.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Latour is a chemical process engineer trying to explain thermodynamics to a climate scientist. His "rebuttal" is full of basic misunderstandings and laughable examples (that headlights example still makes me grin). He flatly declares (without backing evidence of course) that warmer bodies cannot possibly absorb any energy from cooler bodies (guess what? it slows cooling!), which directly contradicts nearly two centuries of well-established greenhouse theory and countless observations (starting with Fournier in 1824). He does not even try to address the primary issue of disparate absorption of thermal radiation from the Sun and Earth. And he then has the gall to accuse climate scientists of not understanding the difference between radiation and convection.
When (to cut through the misunderstandings) Spencer offers him a simple observational experiment he can do himself to prove the theory, he dodges it and accuses Spencer of shifting the goalposts. It's no wonder Spencer (a practicing climatologist with better things to do) didn't bother to engage further.
If you still think greenhouse theory is nonsense, read this. If you think greenhouse theory somehow violates thermodynamics, read this.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I think every mirror ever used in a high-energy laser experiment would disagree with you - *reflection* (such as from clouds) is a highly localized surface phenomena that does not require an ambient energy level sufficient to radiate. If it didn't those mirrors would all themselves melt when reflecting laser beams capable of melting through their glass backing. (Just one of the reasons that high-end laboratory mirrors are silvered on the *front*, so that the reflected beam never passes through the glass substrate).
As for actual radiation - any symmetric body above absolute zero will radiate energy in a symmetric pattern - the upper atmosphere doesn't somehow "know" that the Earth is warmer and not radiate in that direction, it radiates fairly uniformly in every direction - i.e. half of it goes downwards again, and *something* will absorb it (unless it gets reflected) Of course the *net* heat transfer will still be from the Earth outwards because the Earth is much warmer and hence radiating more energy. The problem is just that forcing even a tiny extra percentage of the heat radiated by the Earth to make an "extra bounce" before it escapes means the total energy within the atmosphere increases similarly - and even that tiny percentage translates to a truly staggering number in absolute terms.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I was impressed when John Huntsman (R) plainly said "I believe in evolution and I trust scientists on global warming."
It's sad you have to make sure you say that so people don't mistake you as the typically wrong thinking (in this aspect and much more) republicans.
He's a Mormon but he also created Dream Theater day in Utah when governor and is the ambassador to China. Funny thing is if he had been made VP you would alinate the far right but gain so much at the middle. Instead their strategy was to alienate not just a political spectrun but 47% of Americans which includes a large part of Republicans. Maybe they just didn't want to vote after that.
Funny thing, Paul Ryan maintained he loved Rage Against the Machine and it was funny how Tom Morello called him out and basically told him he was a hateful ass they didn't want as a fan. Bitch slapped by your favorite band, and a guy with a Harvard education.
Maybe I should've linked to the Basic page instead. The Intermediate page seems to have bounced off you.
Stefan-Boltzmann still applies, of course - warm bodies radiate energy - but it says nothing about a warm body's ability to absorb radiant energy, even if produced by colder bodies. This is where you're going wrong. Warm bodies radiate faster than cool bodies (that's thermodynamics), but cool bodies still radiate some energy, which can of course be absorbed by the warm bodies, slowing their rate of cooling. Is this not intuitively obvious? It's certainly long-established science.
Let me break down the atmospheric situation for you, in simple language: Greenhouse gases reflect & absorb certain IR bands of sunlight,but pass higher bands, like visible light. The sunlight that gets through warms the Earth, which radiates it back in the IR bands, according to Stefan-Boltzmann. Those same greenhouse gases now reflect & absorb the IR coming from the Earth as well - trapping much of the heat that would otherwise have radiated into space.
This process is in complete accordance with thermodynamics, and has been observed and proved to virtually everyone's satisfaction long, long ago. If Latour still labours under the belief that he can challenge this, he can attempt to publish a paper, but I predict his methodology will be torn to shreds by reviewers far more capably than I could manage.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?