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Billionaires Secretly Fund Vast Climate Denial Network
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Suzanne Goldenberg reports that conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120 million to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, helping build a vast network of think tanks and activist groups working to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarizing 'wedge issue' for hardcore conservatives. 'We exist to help donors promote liberty which we understand to be limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise,' says Whitney Ball, chief executive of the Donors Trust. Ball's organization assured wealthy donors that their funds would never by diverted to liberal causes with a guarantee of complete anonymity for donors who wished to remain hidden. The money flowed to Washington think tanks embedded in Republican party politics, obscure policy forums in Alaska and Tennessee, contrarian scientists at Harvard and lesser institutions, even to buy up DVDs of a film attacking Al Gore. 'The funding of the denial machine is becoming increasingly invisible to public scrutiny. It's also growing. Budgets for all these different groups are growing,' says Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, which compiled the data on funding of the anti-climate groups using tax records. 'These groups are increasingly getting money from sources that are anonymous or untraceable.'"
Make lobbying equal to bribery and throw the fuckheads in jail for life.
'We exist to help donors promote liberty which we understand to be limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise,' says Whitney Ball, chief executive of the Donors Trust.
And don't forget the disinformation. We can't have all that freedom with an informed public.
Is it all being published in a way that anyone can assess for themselves or not? Are assumptions being acknowledged and debated amongst researchers in that field? The source of funding matters little if these things occur.
Was there somebody who didn't know this was going on? Petrochemical plutocrats were obviously behind this. In many cases they didn't even bother to hide.
Let me get this strait, conservative billionaires are funding groups that are trying to discredit groups funded by liberal billionaires and this is news?
Disclaimer: I have no doubts that climate change is happening and CO2 plays some role in that change.
The secret billionaires are just trying to even the playing field against those fat cat scientists who are rolling in their trillions from government grants. Exxon is David against the NSF Goliath, man.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I'm ok with that idea. The flip side is you can't do much about it when someone posts something like this (assuming it's all true).
...are soon parted.
sry, typo, didn't mean to insinuate you wrote the article or take meds.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
So the network can be put through social network analysis to produce interesting facts. That data can be crunched, so who is going to crunch it?
...don't demonize them as neo-Holocaust deniers. One-hundred twenty million, but is their side true? Address the facts, don't engage in ad hominem attacks.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Let them purchase as much free speech as they like.
And let others exercise *their* free speech calling them out on how they choose to exercise it and what they choose to say- which is exactly what's being done here.
That said, when it's being exercised in such a non-transparent and intentionally misleading manner, I'd question whether it actually *is* even "free speech" in the first place.
I just finished reading the excellent novel "The Sheep Look Up", written in 1972 by John Brunner. I was amazed at the many parallels between the novel's dystopian vision and today's environmental issues. Even though some of the novel's environmental issues were mitigated (at least in the West) by education and regulation (DDT, leaded gasoline, smog, etc), many continue to this day. One thing that struck me particularly was the collusion of big business in denying that environmental issues exist and the draconian measures they went to to discredit and silence their critics. Also striking was government's powerlessness to act in the face of lobbying and bullying by big business.
A recommended read, as appropriate today as it was 40 years ago.
No one need tell us that somethig change in climate in 25 years. In Brazil, when I was a kid at 5 at the beach, the only kind of sun protection my mother and lots of mothers used in hers sons was a stripe of a talk-based cream on the nose of the children. I stayed 3, maybe 4 hours in the direct sunlight of the beach and the worse thing that could happen was became a little pinky. Today If I go to a jungle where there is lots of shadows in a rainy day and not use a suncream of at least 20 FPS, I will lost my skin and lirerally became untouchable for 4 days.
I think the problem is not only misinformation, it is political inertia, specially in Brazil. Sh*t, we are f*cked robbed every single day by ours politicians and we do nothing.
In USA the problem looks even worse, because of the incidence of hurricanes, snow storms and tornados. But I see no one give a sh*t or take any step in change nothing. Probably we will live inside a dome before somebody take a attitude. including me.
This just in.... billionaires think the minimum wage is just fine where it is. Film at 11.
Life needs more saving throws.
This. Combine it with the downmod system that gets misused to hide opinions some self-appointed people on the left disagree with, and presto!
A mechanically-enforced echo chamber for an online "social tribal community".
Who watches these watchmen who get bent out of shape at those who manipulate the media, except when it is themselves?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Address the facts, don't engage in ad hominem attacks.
Skeptics are not the problem. Skeptics address the facts and the data - and they are becoming more and more rare because the data is damning. It's the people electing and directing public policy. The real problem are the folks with "opinions" spoon fed to them by the lying, incompetent, and irresponsible media - ALL the MEDIA - but especially Fox News.
Listen to talk radio or watch Fox News sometime. I constanlty hear people (my neighbors) parrot what they say. They personally attack Al Gore and equate global warming with him. Actual facts or scientific data NEVER come up or if they do, it's a liberal conspiracy to tax more and for wealth transfer.
Ad Hominem attacks are perfectly "logical" to those people - actually to people in general (how many times have you seen people being called "fanboys", "scientologists", or whatever for having an unpopular opinion here!)
Add in the emotional hit of Liberal vs. Conservatives and BINGO you have a completely irrational response to an issue.
That's funny, whenever I do this sort of thing, the police keep calling it "fraud".
Wrong. Where corporations are concerned, in exchange for the limited liability and other special rights granted, which are not natural rights in the slightest, we as a society can demand accountability fr the money they spend and the lies they promote.
.
If a wealthy INDIVIDUAL wants to go buy propaganda shilling for their self interest against the rest of us, I can't stop that. The thing is, it's pretty hard to use money like that without being found out--that's its own check on excess. That we allow the funneling of cash through groups whose sole purpose is to hide it is called money laundering in any other context and should not be permitted here.
This is also yet another reason, as if we need more, why corporate entities should not be permitted to spend any money or resources at all on politics. They are creations of law. They have no natural right to exist, and that the Supreme Court throws out ANY restrictions on their political behavior given that is just a sad example of how far we've fallen.
If they are willing to spend over a hundred million denying it then it's pretty obvious it's real. These aren't the kind of people to throw money away unless they were afraid of the evidence they were trying to suppress.
...you're upset because people are providing funding for political positions they believe in, and that some of those positions are self-serving?
Did you arrive on Earth yesterday? And do you honestly think that conservative groups are the only people doing this?
This is also yet another reason, as if we need more, why corporate entities should not be permitted to spend any money or resources at all on politics.
Corporations are associations of people. You can't restrict the free speech of a corporation without infringing on the free speech of the people that make it up.
Sucks, but there it is.
The point of this entire story is that it's not a cult at all. Instead it's a carefully managed organisation with many people working full time jobs to ensure that it works smoothly and efficiently.
OK: political ads on TV that are "Paid for by Citizens for a Responsible Energy Mumbo Jumbo"
Not OK: all-expenses paid trips on private jet to Bermuda for elected officials, for golf and a conference on the "latest science" re climate change
Yes, it does sound more like a religion...
And accuse them of hiding terrorist organizations....
According to the NDAA and POTUS Executive Orders, all that is required is merely to label, not accuse, them as Domestic Terrorists. Then the US Federal Government can seize all their funds, detain them without warrant, and confiscate any assets associated with generating these funds.
Oh, that's right, the US government is already started on the confiscation of assets; POTUS has already declared all assets belong to all the communist people of America.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Yet another way that the elite try to control the sheep. Welcome our new overlords, until there is a violent revolution. which I welcome. Death to the Company, Capitalism is a fraud, it is a dream, something given by our new overlords to govern us and enslave us yet again. Bah, bah black sheep, have you any wool, yes sir, yes sir, three bags full..
Here's the problem. There have been thousands of societies that at one point had the sort of "Liberty and Freedom" that you are talking about, where there was little or no government to "nanny" people. Do you know what happened to all of those societies? Power centralized, and freedom went away.
The thing that historically has made our country great is specifically the government. We fill the power vacuum with a democratically elected government so that some rich cabal of people can't take power and use it so their "freedom" is maximized and yours is minimized. The problem is obviously that if you let said cabals get enough influence, with mass media and the internet being what they are, they gain a new route to that tyranny anyway: buy enough public opinion and you can directly manipulate a democracy.
So every single person in this country should give much more than a rat's ass when stories like this come up, because they directly relate to people trying to break the system that has protected your liberty and freedom for hundreds of years. And this isn't really about parties. I think that the conservative movement in this country has some properties that make this sort of action happen more frequently from their direction, but we should be vigilant against similar manipulation from anybody.
I agree that Liberty and Freedom are what makes this country great. But right now, you are defending the Koch brothers' freedom to try to steal your freedom from you.
There's this game that "skeptics" of the scientific theory of Global Climate Change like to play.
They assume that climatologists have come to their conclusions (that the Earth is warming due to greenhouse gas emissions and human activity is partly responsible) because the scientists (they say) "were paid by people and governments to come to that conclusion".
While us "warmists" have been providing the scientific evidence; the "skeptics", on the other hand, argue politics "follow the MONEY!!!" (they say)
The problem is that when you do take their advice and the money leads to conservative billionaires, the Heartland Institute, Exxon Mobil (Fossil Fuel industries), and others who have a financial and political interest in denying the science of Climate Change:
All of a sudden the "skeptics" want us to forget about following the money!
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You speak of "neutral science" as if there were such a thing. As soon as politicians (of all stripes) saw this as a means of seeing their power increase/decrease it became a political football, not science. Riddle me this; if there were no careers to be made and no funding to be won, as well as no shift in the existing economic power structure, how much would anyone care about this? How much would the warring factions spend? When the hysteria ends and more data becomes available, we can all make rational scientific decisions about this. Until then it's just a freak show on both sides.
Organization? You must be joking..
when the earth can no longer produce crops and livestock all start dieing off and the air can no longer be breathed and water no longer drinkable the rich will die too, (not just the poor) the rich might hang around a little longer because of the resources but they wont be far behind when it comes to a mass extinction event we all lose both rich & poor
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Of course it is true.
It is fine that everyone can have their say. It is fine that everyone can hear what they have to say, but the only thing that should change is the use of a persons brain.
I am sure everyone has their excuses as to why truth and facts do not matter to them, but denial comes at a cost. It surprises me that so many people care so little about their offspring or family line.
we as a society can demand accountability
Please don't use weasel words. You shouldn't say "we as a society" when you really mean "the government", and you shouldn't say "demand accountability" when you really mean "censor speech".
There are some of us who believe that "no" mean "no" in the following sentence: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
If you feel otherwise, and think that freedom expression is not a fundamental right, but rather a privilege that can be withdrawn in some cases, then you are entitled to your opinion (for now), but you should be honest about what you are advocating.
It can be true with mutators like positive or negative bias applied.
This is reported by an environment journalist. And while it may be entirely true that the money is explicitly used to attack global warming. There's no mention whatsoever of the money used to attack global warming skepticism that is channeled to the other side of the pond from sources like Al Gore and other people that are investors in greentech.
This is why I hate the climate debate. It ceased to be science a long time ago, it's all about politics nowdays. Trying to objectively categorise it is the same as being as being a presidential candidate that claims to be 45% democrat and 55% republican: You'll get flakk from both sides and votes from none.
It's not fine. If they're knowingly lying in order to deceive others into taking actions that benefit the liar, that is textbook fraud.
There has never been "free speech" as you think it is. You can't say whatever you want, whenever you want, for any reason.
Unless they surveyed all billionaires, and found that billionaires contributed disproportionately to groups that don't believe in global warming (which they didn't, of course), this headline is about as misleading as saying "billionaires contribute to anti-corporate groups to discredit opponents" or "billionaires kill cute puppies". But then a headline which says "billionaires believe in and contribute to all sorts of causes just like everyone else, and we're pointing to the causes we don't like" doesn't get a lot of ad views.
IMHO, more graft and corruption on the pro-manmade climate change side.
Luckily for me, there is actual data to examine, so I can safely ignore your humble opinion.
Unluckily for me, there are millions of tools just like you who are perfectly happy to eyeball it and trust their gut reaction when there is perfectly good data around to examine, and you all get to vote, too.
TFA was a bait piece and looks like everyone so far has fallen for it hook, line and sinker. Opening paragraph from TFA:
"Conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120 million to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, the Guardian has learned."
There are only two supporting quotes detailing the specific allegations against these groups:
"...those conservative donors have been pushing funds towards organizations working to discredit climate science or block climate action."
"By 2010, the dark money amounted to $118 million distributed to 102 think tanks or action groups which have a record of denying the existence of a human factor in climate change, or opposing environmental regulations."
Both statements make the same point. Both contain an OR clause, and both OR clauses are worded to include even those who agree 100% with the science but disagree about the chosen regulatory solution. TFA is stuffed to the gills with emotional hot-button rhetoric. Looks like even otherwise clear-headed rational thinkers are susceptible to well-crafted leading statements.
The reported $120 million is total funding, not what is spent on "climate."
Greenpeace annual spending (year ended 12/31/2010) -- $35 million
Al Gore's Climate Reality Project had revenues of $16 million and spent $25 million in 2010.
WWF, formerly The World Wildlife Fund, spent $243 million in 2012.
The US government has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, education campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/climate_money.html
There's a lot of money floating around, most of it being spent by "warmers."
"No" doesn't mean "No" as the rather tired example of yelling fire in crowded theatres clearly establishes. There are also libel/slander laws passed by congress that limit free speech and nobody has a problem with those. I would hazard a guess that even a hard core libertarian like you wouldn't have a problem with restricting someone's speech if that person is passing out lies intended to damage your life.
Where exactly those borders to free speech are is of course open to debate, but an absolutely inviolable freedom cannot exist much as a true immovable object cannot exist.
The article is misleading. Donations were giving anonymously to conservative think tanks. Many conservative think tanks are skeptical of human impact on climate change. These donations were not given directly the cause of deny climate change. This article seems to exist for the purpose to incite controversy where there is very little. Based on the comments on this site, I think it has been successful.
Yes great, but the untraceable money thing has me troubled. When politics includes money, it's not quite "free speech." It's influenced speech at the very least and is likely worse.
Even more disturbing is that when large amounts of money from unknown sources is in the hands of the pedestrian public, the presumption is that it is money from illegal activity and is typically confiscated without proof or process. But when it's in politics (in the hands of non-pedestrians) it's handled very differently. If this doesn't spell out the differences between classes, nothing else will.
This.
Meme.
Sucks.
Combine ["wacko retardo politics" [GPP]] with the downmod system that gets misused to hide opinions some self-appointed people on the left disagree with, and presto!
I agree that abuse of down-mods is out-of-control, but I disagree that there's a political bias that's skewed from Slashdot's overall political composition.
I've found it helpful and enlightening to set the down-mod adjustments to +2 for reading comments; most of the uninteresting trash from ACs stays at zero... (It seems that if someone is willing to use a mod point to hide it, it's generally worth reading). Some spam gets through, but it's worth it to counter the censorship.
I've also committed to only up-modding others' comments; it feels good to not take part in censoring other people's ideas—I recommend others to try it.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
$120 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the billions being spent on behalf of promoting "climate change", regardless of the science. Hell, just the Rockefeller Fund has probably dropped more than that. So has the Ad Council. Warren Buffet personally has. I think you're being just a tad sensationalist, Hugh.
I will grant that this "Donors Trust" looks like a bit too much like some of the seamier SuperPAC scams of recent elections. I'd be careful dealing with outfits like this, whatever your convictions on the science.
Lobbying is just telling politicians what your interests are.
By throwing money and prostitutes at them! In my book, that is the definition of bribery..
My figurehead is better than your figurehead!
So, $120 million to over 100 groups over the course of eight years? Really? That works out to less than $15k per group, per year? WHOA!!! Call the media!
Oh wait, I see the problems... first someone is bitching about people exercising free speech in what they donate to. Second, they are worried that the donors may receive tax breaks for their donations. Third because conservatives do something like this MUST mean that liberals WOULD NEVER do anything of the ilk...
I'm going to get more coffee and go back to bed...
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
Clearly, they did not secretly spend as much as they should have, word on the street is that there might actually be Climate Change.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
"No" doesn't mean "No" as the rather tired example of yelling fire in crowded theatres clearly establishes.
Perhaps you should research the history of that phrase. It was used by Oliver Wendell Holmes in the case of Schenck vs the United States. Charles Schenck was a draft protester during WWI. The government arrested him, and the case went to the Supreme Court. Holmes wrote the majority opinion, and ruled that since the government could banning shouting fire in the theater, then hey, it could ban other speech too! So Schenck went to prison. Using "shouting fire" as a justification for limiting speech is not only a slippery slope, it is a slope we have slid down before.
There are also libel/slander laws passed by congress that limit free speech
Libel/slander laws do not limit speech. They can only be applied after the fact. So you can be held responsible for what you say or write, but you cannot be restrained from saying it in the first place.
It is fine that everyone can have their say.
The real problem we're facing is that the 'say' you get with billions in corporate money is worth more than the 'say' you and I get as individuals.
You can have your say, I can have mine, but when ExxonMobile speaks they blanket the airwaves.
The Koch family billions also go to business schools, provided they let them make faculty appointments. How many faculty appointments have you made recently?
Corporations use our own money against us and have a bigger say in government and policy.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It's not fine. If they're knowingly lying in order to deceive others into taking actions that benefit the liar, that is textbook fraud.
There has never been "free speech" as you think it is. You can't say whatever you want, whenever you want, for any reason.
This is exactly the problem that sceptics have with proponents.
Ever since climate raw data was denied to people who had the effrontery to look for mistakes, the AGW movement has taken on the classic characteristics of a cult . Advocates who would deny critical response by saying "you can't say whatever you want" simply reveal one more facet.
Is Soros doing it secretly?
The climate will keep changing regardless.
I don't think we know if Galileo really said this or not, but it seems appropriate here. Billionaires can fund whatever they want, and it still does not change reality. In 20-30 years climate change will be so obvious that everyone will look back and say, "What were they thinking?" At that point the billionaires will say, "Well we didn't know then what we know now." Science is funny, it really does not respect opinions. It just is. We don't have to like, we only have to understand it. I guess waiting 20-30 years for the old billionaires and politicians who are wed to climate denial to die off is just the way it is. All we have to do is wait.
Budgets for all these different groups are growing,' says Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, which compiled the data on funding of the anti-climate groups using tax records. 'These groups are increasingly getting money from sources that are anonymous or untraceable.'
I would like to see what Greenpeace has to say to these:
2003 - http://www.eco-imperialism.com/the-enron-of-nonprofits/
2010 - http://consumersforpeace.org/index.php?filename=archive-irs-audited-greenpeace.html
2011 - http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/08/12/greenpeace-accused-shady-fund-raising.html
Who threw the first stone and who retaliated? Discuss.
The issue is developing the space technology you are describing is going to take decades, by the time something like that is established Earth's biosphere will be so messed it might not even be repairable. Humanity could even be on its last legs by then requiring us to leave our planet for good which is not ideal.
Do I believe climate change? Kinda, I wish scientists would actually be impartial to what they find so we could have the truth rather then fudge the numbers.
Many people scoff at renewables but if we actually made it cheap to fabricate, and we used the roofs of homes to host solar panels our energy needs could drop dramatically in places like the Southwest and South. Nuclear technology is also another area we need to work on. Many of the Gen IV, and heavy water reactor designs can have their fuel cycle changed so they produce little to no waste, unlike the super old reactors we use today they guzzle massive amounts of uranium and produce pretty much the same amount of waste. The issue is no one wants to invest in these to make them come to fruition faster, they would rather put it all in some fossil fuel company and make profit all year round.
Share that sentiment. Why the slander. The funding for the climate orthodoxy is more than 10 times that. Considering how many scholars lately have come out of the closet and declared that the IPCC position is all but insupportable and climate sensitivity is nowhere near 3.5 degrees per doubling of CO2. Of course, this automatically puts into question the runaway hypothesis and with it the doom burn in hell agenda.
It's sad to see the zealotry of climate activism is perpetuated on this site which I believe used to stand of something more open minded than bashing of those who do not adhere to the agenda put forward by big business and big government.
Clearly, they did not secretly spend as much as they should have, word on the street is that there might actually be Climate Change.
But is it warming? - In the past 5 years our winters here in Europe and North America have been significantly COLDER than normal. If there's warming it's elsewhere because here it's been colder, especially during the winter.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
A lot of people are not disputing that there is climate change.
A lot of people are disputing that it is caused by humans.
The earth has gone through periods of heating and cooling for far longer than people have been driving around 18 wheelers.
I'll never understand why global warming is such a big deal. It's undeniable that based on the data we have, the planet is getting warmer. However, my understanding is that we still do not have evidence that the warming is, indeed, caused by man. Of course, any rational human being would still say that whether we have evidence or not, it's the smart thing to minimize pollutants of all kind. Even if it doesn't impact the climate, it still impacts our quality of life and the world around us. So even if it's all bullshit, the cautious measures are wise, regardless.
That said, we all know that the way you find out the truth about a thing is to follow the money. Unfortunately, both sides are full of shit, here. You have one side paying billions to trot out supposed "experts" (handily associated to the oil industries) to refute what the rest of the world claims. Money. On the other, you have people like Al Gore and other opportunists pushing the idiotic "carbon credits" economy. People who both invest heavily in them and also promote them and climate fear to increase their value. Not only that, but they push heavily to make these "credits" and this bullshit "credit economy" part of the political and economic structure of as many advanced nations as possible. And even at its best, it would accomplish nothing. It doesn't limit pollution. It just makes polluting something you can buy the right to do, while making other people rich as you do it. It's the same scam we have now, except we've found a way to have additional people intervene in the process so that, along with the companies and CEOs, these new people can make bank. Money.
So, frankly, fuck them all.
Money makes you a super villain? Lex Luther suddenly makes so much more sense.
Disagreeing with you does not make me a troll.
For the first time? You think that the rich industrialists have never before paid to oppose science? Well, you might want to think about the link between cancer and smoking.
Now, why is it you're so keen to play the part of a useful idiot?
LMAO - I'm a troll!
Whatever - I like your ideas too. The last time I looked, almost all of our best, most advanced solar panels were being exported to Europe. You simply can't get cutting-edge solar panels here in the states, because foreign interests have bought up all the production for the foreseeable future. I guess that shows where our priorities lie, in comparison to Europe. We could definitely use a lot more solar panel plants, licensed to produce the latest and greatest incarnations or solar panels - for DOMESTIC USE!
Other renewable energy sources have pretty much failed to prove themselves so far. Ethanol, for instance. Production tends to help keep food prices elevated, among other problems. Ethanol also causes problems with engines - even if those problems are exaggerated.
Nuclear? I've always been a nuclear energy proponent. The disaster in Japan has made me stop to think though. I trust nuclear power, if well planned, well engineered, and well managed. But, someone dropped the ball in Japan! A lot of someones, and apparently some pretty smart someones. Yeah, we need to take another look at nuclear energy, but we need to plan for the most unlikely problems as well. Planting a nuclear plant in high seismic activity areas doesn't seem so smart now.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The Donors Trust exists to spread lies, lies that, "...help donors promote liberty which we understand to be limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise," The only surprise is how many of the idiot Rand fan-boys here will insist that this is perfectly OK.
The quote is already biased regardless of the facts and theories presented. Simply by using the word "denial" implies truth. Were this a genuinely objective statement, an unbiased author would use a phrase such as "opposing viewpoint". Also using the word "anti" implies negativity and therefore why would anyone want to be associated with something negative. That's why the terms "pro choice" and "pro life" exist.
Nothing is anonymous. Nothing is untraceable. If they really believe that, they are even more stupid than they appear on the surface, and that's bad enough.
There are no Spartiates any more. The wealthy today rely exclusively on hired hands for their security; history shows how weak a reed that is in the long run.
| Several cool trillions
citation? preferably an un-funded citation...
Probably not the most popular view, but we don't have enough recorded history to prove this isn't one of earth's normal life cycles over tens of thousands of years, or its the start of an ice age. However, the human population has, without a doubt, made our environment FUBAR, while I don't agree with climate change I do think we really need to think about what we pump into our air and oceans, and how much our planet can really sustain for the future if we keep destroying it the way we do.
The $120 million spent on arguing would be much better used to clean up the mess we've made that's for sure...
I'm not signing anything
Libel/slander laws do not limit speech. They can only be applied after the fact. So you can be held responsible for what you say or write, but you cannot be restrained from saying it in the first place.
This doesn't make sense. Laws forbid you to utter slanderous statements. Other laws forbid you to utter "fire" in a theatre. In both cases, I can commit the offense. So either slander laws *do* limit speech or the "don't shout fire in a theatre" does *not* limit free speech. Which is it?
"I agree that Liberty and Freedom are what makes this country great. But right now, you are defending the Koch brothers' freedom to try to steal your freedom from you."
Oh, that's just silly. The Koch brothers and others aren't trying to "steal your freedom", they're merely buying it at a fair market value.
pardon for the nitpicking but are you aware of any laws that prohibit the action BEFORE you do it ? The only ones I know of are nature made, not man made. All man made laws are applied AFTER the act has happened. A law cannot possibly restrain someone from doing something beforehands, because a law is just a few sentences on a paper, not a policeman watching you.
You speak as though you are positive there is parity in the amount of funding and lack of transparency. I have not seen data to either support or refute that hypothesis so it seems like pure conjecture. I am aware of individual funders such as Al Gore and George Soros but two famous sources doesn't mean there is parity.
One can't prove a negative, someone will always say that you just haven't found it yet. But proving the positive is possible so if someone can, please do.
Note that a major goal of the groups discussed in the article is to generate a sense of false equivalency in public opinion such that nothing is ever done.
When Anthony Watts was outed as a Heartland Institute shill, right before the eyes of those who believe the Global Conspiracy of Climate Scientists and Politicians in Collusion with Big Green for Government Money, there was a collective "meh" from the denialists and Watts suffered no loss of credibility in their eyes. They probably strongly suspect it already and it just doesn't bother them. Heck they probably strongly suspect that climate denialism is total bullshit but would rather tell science to go fuck itself than do anything that goes against conservatism.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This looks like a juicy target just ripe to be milked of lulz.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Is Soros doing it secretly?
How can anybody what evil or unethical things Soros is doing secretly?
So, private citizens exercise their right to free speech and say something that differs from the "scientific consensus" preferred by the current administration and the press. That's what free speech and democracy is all about, folks: we let people proclaim whatever sense or nonsense they want to proclaim, and then we trust the voter to sort out right and wrong. People who claim that voters are being manipulated into making bad decisions by "secret denial networks" are saying that they can't come up with convincing counter-arguments. And that by itself means that their own case is weak.
You don't have to silence anybody to solve the problem. The Koch brothers can say whatever they want. There is a whole lot of room between letting some random billionaire tell people that global warming is a hoax and letting that same billionaire secretly fund organizations designed entirely to trick people into thinking there is a global conspiracy of people who go to school to become climatologists in order that they can destroy our freedoms for some extra grant money. I bet we can draw a line someplace in between. I'd personally start by taking away the word "secretly" and demanding that the whole process be more transparent so that people can more easily see the conflicts of interest. Unless you can show me the part of the first amendment that guarantees the right to anonymous donations to propaganda organizations?
While I'm not taking sides here, the "debate" (I use the term lightly) isn't between "the little people" and "big corporations". You can't call the United Nations, the U.S. Government and other very, very large and influential entities, who are heavily promoting the "Climate Change" message, "the little people".
...".
You could just as easily say, "Governments use our own money against us
If the United Nations, and major governments around the world are promoting only one side of a debate, who is big enough to challenge their assumptions in any meaningful way?
pardon for the nitpicking but are you aware of any laws that prohibit the action BEFORE you do it ?
Yes. There are numerous laws that make it illegal to even attempt to commit specific crimes. There are other laws that make it illegal to conspire or plan to commit a serious crime. More broadly, the police are empowered to intervene if they think a crime is about to be committed. None of these apply to libel or slander. They are only illegal after the fact.
We exist to help donors promote liberty which we understand to be limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise,.
Conservative code for "we don't care about poor people and don't want to pay anything to help them."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I am just going to say this every time climate change is discussed from now on:
The climate change debate is a giant distraction that only serves the interests of those destroying the environment.
At first it was 'is it happening?' then it was 'are we causing it?' and now we have discussions about the magnitude and the exact quantification, about whether it is a debate or not, about whose fault it is.
Scientists have been saying for decades now 'we are destroying the environment we live in, it is unsustainable and if we don't curb this trend it will become critical.'
Finding a new way to argue about one specific element of this problem is just another way of avoiding discussing the many things we already know are a problem, and finding solutions. The debate used to be about deforestation, fish stock depletion, groundwater and ocean pollution, unsustainable farming practices etc. After the climate debate is done and settled someone will come up with a new thing to argue about, maybe radio frequency or visible light pollution, or whatever, who knows. The point is we know we are doing things wrong, we have known for ages, why are we still arguing about it?
These are the facts: The proliferation and industrialisation of the human race is having massive consequences for the earth and the environment, the changes are cumulative and usually either detrimental or unpredictable in their effects. These changes are greatly exacerbated by the unsustainable, greedy and ultimately unnecessary excesses of our consumerist society.
Does anyone want to dispute these facts? Does anyone wish to make the claim that it would be better to exactly quantify in perfect detail every aspect and facet of each of the ways in which we are causing harm before taking any steps whatsoever to rectify any of them?
Can we start doing something about it some time soon, please?
While politics and media commentary rule the blogs and airspace, Science get shredded into worthless dribble. Climate Science needs to be taken seriously and not turned into media spectacle. The problem is, the real stuff can be quite boring and mostly looked over. Stories about carbon levels, thermal convection and greenhouse gasses are not read by the majority of readers. Most of the media today is sensationalized and pumped with soundbites to increase readership. Just about every attempt by Al Gore to pass along data his group has collected is countered with disinformation. You never see an attempt to deflate some missed data and provide what the other group thinks is more realistic, We only see a polar opposite approach the just discredits each view and the public takes these battles to the office and public places. Even with all this funding the real Science does tend to get heard by the people that need to hear it. I've noticed over the years how changes have taken place that are more indirect approaches to reduce climate change. Many businesses are reducing consumption of power, most say it's to increase profits by reducing waste. Recycling programs have been around for at least four decades now but it's just starting to catch on due to waste elimination costs. Meanwhile these same corporations are funneling money into the disinformation channels. The real question becomes, why are we wasting money on propaganda when that money would better to be spent in fixing the problems.
Most political contributors, no matter how rich, haven't gone to the trouble to create a political machine. This is what makes the Koch Brothers different from many other wealthy people who contribute to politics.
To say the Koch Brothers are conservative kind of misses the point, the Koch Brothers fund things like think tanks and the American Legislative Exchange Council so that what is, and is not, considered conservative is decided by them. It's a huge political machine that operates in multiple states.
After all, why does so much of Republican ideology boil down to "Oil!" Oil, properly understood, is a substance, not an ideology. The answer is that the great Republican political machine is controlled by the oil interests. (Oh, and there is a Democratic political machine controlled by Wall Street, but it's not the well-oiled machine that the Republicans have, which is why you have more prominent dissenters in the Democratic party than in the Republican party.)
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
The scientific community knows that climate change is real and that human activity is to blame.
That is a political statement, not a scientific statement. Obviously "climate change is real". The climate has always changed and will always change. We can't stop the climate from changing. But you mean "climate warming". An acurate statement might be more along the lines of "There is a majority consensus amongst scientists who study climatology that the climate appears to becoming warmer." That would be more like a scientific statement.
It is my understanding that there is less scientific consensus as to how much human activity is a factor. Obviously, to my mind, humans do have an impact on the environment. How much is very much open to debate (not politically, but scientifically).
The desire to shut down debate and suppress opposition is a political motivation. Science, theoretically, welcomes and encourages questions, disagreement and efforts to disprove the prevailing assumptions. Politics, not so much.
Funding should only come from a neutral side - if the rich want to fund more they can donate funds to that neutral side.
And, of course, only you and those who agree with you get to choose the definition of "neutral".
Sounds great. Where do I sign up?
Read Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom" for an argument why powerful vested interests should not be able to change the rules to protect themselves from economic disappointment. Powerful private citizens can and do propagandize the sheeple for just this effect.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
So, private citizens exercise their right to free speech
Look up the abuses of power in the gilded age because powerful individuals became laws unto themselves. It all happens through propaganda, which costs money, and a weakness in democracy. It is amazing how people consume political snark and it because their reality. It all costs money, of course, but conservative propaganda is funded by our addiction to petrol, guns, and cigarettes.
Do you want cigarette companies writing the laws? After-all, according to them, they have a metric tonne of scientific evidence that smoking is benign, and protecting their bottom line has nothing to do with killing innocent people.
THAT IS THE PROBLEM
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I was able to verify this whole climate change issue right here on my own property. At first I had thermometers all over my property, but it just didn't seem warm enough. After I removed all the thermometers except for the ones near the clothes dryer vent and chimney I saw what all the fuss was about!
Everything and its opposite is true. Get used to it.
Don't like this and want to make a difference? Then put together a fund and put it where your mouth is. A good place is money for thorium reactors. You can do it directly, OR you can push O/dems to fund this. And it makes perfectly good sense to fund thorium reactors. The reason is that it can burn up 95% of our 'nuke waste'. That means that out of 70,000 tonnes of waste, we will only have to deal with 5,000 tonnes. In addition, that waste will be safe after less than 200 years, instead of 20,000 years. Hard to argue with that.
All in all, we need to quit saying what we can not have, and start working towards REASONABLE solutions. It is a mistake to move to 100% AE. We should depend on it no more than 33%. And even that should require that solar/wind or any type that depends on weather/climate to be less than 15%.
The one thought that so many are forgetting is that a number of nuke plants will have to be shut down over the next 20 years. If we do not have a decent replacement, then we will certainly use natural gas.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Firstly, including science and policy funding is dishonest, since their aim isn't to massage people's beliefs. All those weather satallites are not an environmentalist's conspiracy.
Also, your numbers look made up by some ideologue, and copy-pasted ad-nauseum, since it is too good a story to disbelieve or double-check. The environmentalist lobby spends about $1 for every $10 of its opponents. What is true? Discovering that is left as an exercise for the reader, and in doing so, if you don't find information that challenges your pre-existing beliefs, then you haven't checked shit.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The problem is we're not being told the true source of this "free speech". If these guys were open about their purchases and their massive spending money I have no issues if they spend ten times as much.
But making that free speech appear to come from credible bodies is what I have a problem with.
Except the research is still ongoing and there is very little debate on whether AGW is happening or not.
Or do you think nature gives a crap about a political and ideological debate?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Disclaimer: I am convinced that this civilization is going the way of Easter Island and nobody can stop that.
Let us look at this the other way: "Billionaires Secretly Fund Vast Climate Denial Network" to me sounds more like "Bogus Scientists Organize Network To Sell Climate Denial Propaganda to Desperate Billionaires".
If I were an oil tycoon, and 97% (1) of the damned "scientists" were saying that the whole planet is going to Hell and it is my fault, and a guy in a lab coat showed up and told me he can prove otherwise, I would start signing checks even before asking myself whether the guy is the genuine article or not.
So the guys are selling Bogus Science to Uncle Pennybags - not a big deal, right? Unfortunately, Uncle Pennybags pays the guys to propagate their "discoveries" as Good Science. Also unfortunately, in a technological civilization, where people are supposed to make informed choices, a very large number of people (if not the majority) are still unable to tell Bogus Science from Good Science. Hilarity ensues.
(1) I just made this up.
In the long run we are all dead. - John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946)
Be honest. Climategate is the only example you can think of.
I'll go ahead and hop on past the probable distinction between what you think "climategate" was, and what actual negative behavior was revealed to have occurred in that particular incident and move right on past to the fact that even if I give climategate to you, it does not support your premise. Your claim wasn't that there exists some instance of corruption in the scientific community. It was that there was more there than there is from parties funding warming deniers.
I don't claim to be a high priest of anything. I just know that morons like you tend to be perfectly happy latching on to whatever anecdotal evidence matches your "humble opinion" and assuming that means your belief is backed by some sort of empirical process. You've more or less made my point for me.
So what you're saying is that you're upset because sources you believed were credible were actually funded by agencies you dislike? And the problem is theirs rather than yours?
Funny, I didn't see the word 'money' mentioned in there anywhere.
Of course it can be. Violate an NDA and there isn't a government funded court in the land that won't make you pay through the nose.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The article is spot on. Do you think that these organisations are funded because of the word conservative in them? Heartland and co. whine about the "liberal" conspiracy to warp the public's mind, yet that is exactly what they do with crackpot science on the like of climate, evolution, and smoking. Rich billionaires fund them, because they help get sheeple to the polls in order to pressure congress critters into protecting them from economic disappointment. This is crony capitalism in action.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
ShanghaiBill somehow got modded to +4 Insightful for blathering:
we as a society can demand accountability
Please don't use weasel words. You shouldn't say "we as a society" when you really mean "the government", and you shouldn't say "demand accountability" when you really mean "censor speech".
Exactly how is requiring groups who engage in lobbying and who presume to weigh in on scientific debate to reveal their actual sources of funding censoring speech in any meaningful sense of the phrase? The overwhelming majority of climate scientists who publish papers that conclude our climate is, in fact, changing (and that the change is largely or exclusively due to human-generated greenhouse gases) and the institutions for which they work make their sources of funding public. Why shouldn't the government require deniers - especially those specifically engaged in high-pressure lobbying of elected officials on the subject - to reveal where their financing comes from? Because they have some supposed divine right to anonymity?
Somehow the phrase "fair and balanced" springs instantly to mind ... and not in a good way.
Check out my novel.
There is a whole branch of common and criminal law called "conspiracy". You can most certainly be charged prior to committing a crime.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But the vast majority of the ice on Greenland and Antarctica is on land, not floating, and does not currently affect the sea level, since it is on land! - as it melts and runs into the ocean it will though (Try filling that glass to 3/4 full with water, note level, add ice cube, let it melt, note level...)
> Even if all the "in-land" glaciers melted, the amount of water that will make it to the ocean would be negligible.
Ice volumes:
Antarctica - 7 million (cubic miles) [Erickson, Jon. "Glacial Geology."1996, 161.]= 2.9 × 10^16 cubic meters
Greenland - 2.8 * 10^6 cubic kilometers [Greenland." World Book Encyclopedia. Chicago: World Book, 1999: 325.] = 2,8 × 10^15 cubic meters
Since Greenland ice is an order of magnitude smaller, let's ignore it for now.
Ocean surface area:
360 000 000 square kilometers [Lutgens, Frederick. Essentials of Geology. New York: MacMillan, 1992: 269.]= 3.6 × 10^14 square meters
Let's (conservatively) call the melted volume of the ice 85% of the ice volume and spread it over the oceans: 2.9 × 10^16 * 0.85 / 3.6 × 10^14 =~68 meters. Negligible, huh?
We exist to help donors promote liberty which we understand to be limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise.
Them's weasel words; when people like these speak them, they don't mean what the dictionary that the rest of us use says that they mean. Instead they're code:
-- personal responsibility = throwing ignorant or apathetic people to the wolves, without benefit of protections from people who are better equipped to detect unfairness and are willing to do it for others.
-- free enterprise = free reign to manipulate and disadvantage ignorant and apathetic people to the very limit of what the law allows (and a little bit more).
Was it Warren Buffet that said there's no such thing as a self-made man? The current crop of billionaires required the "contributions" of millions of people to amass their wealth. Concentration of wealth is concentration - and hoarding and denial - of natural resources.
How can anybody what evil or unethical things Soros is doing secretly?
I think you accidentally a verb.
> If you feel otherwise, and think that freedom expression is not a fundamental right, but rather a privilege that can be withdrawn in some cases, then you are entitled to your opinion (for now), but you should be honest about what you are advocating.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Brilliant.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I don't care who they're funded by. But I should know who they're funded by. This is about disclosure.
In other news...
The Republican billionaires are debating whether to change the front they use for their unchanging agenda.
I say, good idea; the more expenive the better.
In both cases they expect me to forget yesterday AND disbelieve the evidence of my eyes.
And at that, I'm a conservative prolife Christian who will not vote Republican again (and IIRC haven't since 1992)
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Even fundamental rights have limitations. My right to swing my fist is limited by your right not to get punched. My right of going anywhere I choose is limited by your private property rights. My right to speech is limited by your right not to have a bull horn in your ear deafening you.
Note that the first amendment only applied to Congress as the writers considered that it was up to the States to place limits on speech. The idea being that restrictions would be done at a more local level. Noise by-laws at the lowest level to restrict how loud your speech can be. Fraud, slander and such at the State level. In a sense all rights are also privileges as they are all limited in one sense or another, usually when they interfere with others fundamental rights.
The question is always how to balance conflicting rights. Are your free speech rights more important then my right not to be defrauded? It's a difficult problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I'm glad to see that some responsible and wealthy individuals are willing to stand up too those green fascists. :) (red, green, nazi, they are all the same in the end)
Weird, another anonymous commenter spreading pro-corporation propaganda.
Restricting the free speech of a corporation does not infringe on the free speech of the people that make it up. Those people can still exercise their free speech privately.
Clever signature text goes here.
Corporations use our own money against us and have a bigger say in government and policy.
This is particularly applicable when we're discussing the energy lobby. You can't have a modern civilization without a lot of energy and its production and distribution are controlled in a variety of ways. On the other hand, when it's not a necessity of any kind (natural or created) and we outright choose to hand over the money, it's no longer ours, and most people exercise little to no caution even in those relationships.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Imagine the worst, and act accordingly. I like to think that he's worth twenty or thirty Sheldon Adelsons
All of them graduated from MIT with engineering degrees in the 1960s. One brother- David- focuses on science and education charities. He has funded the New York Science Museum Hall of Evolution - probably the best dinosaur exhibit in the world. He also funds the very liberal Aspen Institute in Colorado.
Perhsps they are moderating some of the over-zealousness of the climate change supporters. Its almost as silly to have them find GW under every rock as it is for anti-climate change peope to deny every observation.
And now, all the data is in the public, but there is a profound lack of climate models contradicting the ones used by the IPCC. As ever, there are some differences about the details, and a lot of people delightful point out that there are models predicting 4.2 degree temperature increase and others predicting only 2.5 degree. But that's basicly complaining about the wet paint not being completely even on the building. It doesn't break the building down.
So please tell me: Now, that all raw data the IPCC is basing the climate model on, is out in the public, why are there no competing models out there? Maybe, just maybe, it's because the raw data actually points to an AGW? And futhermore: Why is it that only the U.S., Russia and China seem not happy with the results of the IPCC, and the population of all other countries seem to agree that the models are quite correct, and actually describing what they are seeing?
Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the respective ideologies in all three countries, for which the mere existance of an AGW is dangerous, and thus all the prophets of the ideologies try everthing to make even the aknowledgment about facts unhappen by crying wolf and starting ad hominem attacks (you know, "characteristics of a cult" - purely an ad hominem attack without any argument supporting it) against people actually knowing what they are doing?
So basicly: Put up, e.g. provide better models based on the raw data (which is aviable since 2006), or shut up!
If you think that there is too much global warming, then please stop buying gasoline, natural gas, and using electricity. We could then stop the evil gasses that contribute to global warming. The best way to stop those evil companies from spending their money is don't give it to them in the first place, so put your money where your mouth is.
They may cry that they are not the same fringe, but from the outside, they all look alike. Just ignore them.
Come out to Washington State and camp out around the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
There are towns in northern Japan that went all solar and this are is very similar to Seattle. They have been very successful. It is not just the south and southwest that would benefit by blanket solar.
Nice english, geez
"The good thing about science is that it's true, whether or not you believe in it" --NDT. I love that quote...
What exactly is 'Climate Denial'? Denying that climate exists? For people claiming the moral and scientific upper hand here we aren't very good at framing the issue. I thought the issue was over the 'man made' element of it all. The fact that one thinks the other side of that debate is wrong isn't really a very good excuse to completely misrepresent their argument. A little integrity would go a long way to validate one's position: if you're not capable of fairly state the opposing side's claims, how are you going to refute them?
Mind the frickin' laser...
Is Greenpeace itself handling its own funding with more transparency and, um, forthrightness than it was 10 years ago? Much less it's activism, which often makes me wonder if it's less engaged in saving the planet than in alarmist market manipulation.
Really, talk about PKB.
Exactly how is requiring groups who engage in lobbying and who presume to weigh in on scientific debate to reveal their actual sources of funding censoring speech in any meaningful sense of the phrase?
Many people believe that the right to speak anonymously is fundamentally important. This right has been defended by the EFF and ACLU. You might also want to read the American Civil Liberties Union's viewpoint on Citizen's United. It is tempting to reach for a censor's pen, rather than rebutting an argument. But remember, once our rights are gone, they are gone for all of us.
The overwhelming majority ...
The right to express an opinion should not be based on the popularity of that opinion. It is all the more important to defend the expression of dissenting opinions when they are unpopular or go against the consensus.
Excellent! You are equating any debate, any questions, any doubt about any of the "Climate Change" dogma with religious fundamentalists' religious beliefs. Wonderful! That takes care of that. No more debate.
It is significant that you compare the religion of Climate Change to other religious beliefs. That is appropriate.
However, if you want to abandon religious debate between the religion of "Climate Change" and the religion of the Bible -- and accept scientific debate, you'll have to stop your silly rhetoric and stick to actual discussions.
There is actual debate here, as much as the "Climate Change" religion forbids it. Let's stop using the silly "Climate Change" phrase. The climate is always changing, has always changed and will always change. No one will be able to "stop climate change". That's a very ignorant "goal".
Is the climate getting warmer? Probably. It appears that most scientists who study climatology think so.
Do humans impact their environment? Obviously so. Should the harm that humans do to the environment be mitigated and, hopefully, corrected? Obviously.
Are human beings the primary and most significant factor in the climate warming up? I don't think anyone has proven that. The Climate Change religion states that this is so but climatology scientists don't have nearly as much certainty.
What is the most significant factor in the climate of the Earth? The sun. The problem is that the sun has so much influence that it is difficult to factor in the other influences. This is why the debate is far from over.
To me "Climate Change" is just a ploy for political control. Until it has been definitively proven what are all the factors of global warming and then, any proposed mitigation steps have been proven to work it is silly to panic and give political control over to the Climate Change religious zealots.
If you think this is brilliant, you might want to move over to Watts' forums and join the braindead circlejerk there.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Funding for climate orthodoxy 10 times more? You must be including the cost of building and launching satellites, the cost of thousands of weather stations, over 3,000 Argo floats and all the other instrumentation used to study climate, the cost of gathering and collating all of that data, the cost of supercomputer time to help analyze it, etc, etc, etc. That's all basic science that you can't really attribute to one side or the other. You can argue that we're doing too much or too little of it but it needs to be done at some level. I guess you can argue that it's biased toward one side but I think the diversity of scientists and scientific institutions around the world make that extremely unlikely.
Unless you know something I don't there was one paper recently with 4 or 5 authors that found a climate sensitivity below 2. It is a useful addition to the literature but by itself doesn't overturn all of the other work that's been done. There are a number of methodologies for determining climate sensitivity and it's not clear which if any are best. It's an area that continues to receive a lot of attention.
I don't know if you haven't figured this out, but it is "we, the people", and not the government. Did you see the last election? Did libertarians or conservatives win the election against that negro-socialist hot-n-tot and his cronies?
So, understand this, you are a minority. Now, oppression of a minority is something that our country fundamentally stands against. However, this is not the case of the oppression of a minority; this is the case of the oppression from a minority, an oligarchy of the rich and powerful, using the fundamental rights in perversion to continue the off-loading of their externalities onto others by controlling the debate. They don't stifle free speech, they simply drown out the other voices by talking louder. So, that is easily legal, is it moral? Does it follow the spirit of freedom as much as it does the letter?
In our system of government, it's the courts that determine truth, not Congress, not the voter, and not the president.
This is true, but also naive. Tobacco companies thwarted progress by cleverly manipulating public opinion. Millions were knowingly killed -- even those who did not smoke. The penalties the courts dished out were peanuts. The same techniques of manipulating public opinion continue.
What was your point again? Oh, the courts should stop powerful vested interests? That's not how power works in our society. Billionaires have successfully moved the locus of blame for crony capitalism away from them by brainwashing 30% of the electorate with fairy-tales that don't stand up to scrutiny.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
This kind of nonsense is why I don't take /. seriously any more.
As if George Soros has never secretly funded anything...
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
Shanghai Bill insisted:
Exactly how is requiring groups who engage in lobbying and who presume to weigh in on scientific debate to reveal their actual sources of funding censoring speech in any meaningful sense of the phrase?
Many people believe that the right to speak anonymously is fundamentally important. This right has been defended by the EFF and ACLU. You might also want to read the American Civil Liberties Union's viewpoint on Citizen's United. It is tempting to reach for a censor's pen, rather than rebutting an argument. But remember, once our rights are gone, they are gone for all of us.
Again, in what way does requiring those who claim to be scientists disputing scientific consensus on a scientific basis to reveal the sources of their funding represents ANY infringement on their free speech?
The short answer is: it doesn't. The long answer is: the fact that the sources of funding for climate scientists who argue for anthropogenic global warming have ALL, ALWAYS been public knowledge, but the sources of funding for the scientists in denial have, in general, been kept purposefully opaque tends, quite rightly, to call into question the motive for their opposition to the consensus - while in no way denying them the right to hold, argue, and publish those opinions. Sure, they're free (under current law) to keep those sources secret - but, since the scientist-deniers' own identities are (necessarily) public knowledge, the presumption HAS to be that they're keeping the sources of their funding secret in order to conceal that their opinions are paid for by the very parties who stand most to benefit from their arguments contra the overwhelming scientific consensus.
In other words: they're trying to hide the fact that they're paid whores of the fossil fuel industry.
The overwhelming majority ...
The right to express an opinion should not be based on the popularity of that opinion. It is all the more important to defend the expression of dissenting opinions when they are unpopular or go against the consensus.
Again, no one's questioning their right to express their opinion. Not me, not anyone.
What's being questioned is their integrity - and it is completely legitimate to do so, so long as they refuse to reveal who's paying them to disagree.
Check out my novel.
Hell no! You have a funny definition of "fact", tovarish.
Also, next time you try to insult your opponent for lacking intelligence, it might be slightly more convincing if you try to do so in a grammatically correct sentence.
This has to be one of the most unsurprising revelations that I have ever come across. I am thinking hard of anything I know that came to me as a less surprising fact but I am drawing a blank here.
The only people who say that human made greenhouse gasses are not the cause of what we used to call global warming are either misled by, under the control of the polluters or the polluters themselves. I also have my suspicions about many of the people who say that there is not enough evidence.There is plenty of evidence behind what has got more scientific consensus than the theory of evolution. (I am talking global consensus on that not just the USA.)
Will this persuade a single follower of this big money? I doubts it will have much immediate effect. We all suspected it anyway and these "think" tanks will continue denying the facts and will probably get even more money to continue proving that black=purple and Pi=3.00.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I don't know about Russia, but I can offer this observation. When I visited Beijing in 2011, there were signs plastered all over the place about "living a low carbon life, improve your community," or something to that effect. I do not believe that the Chinese government actually denies that CO2 releases is causing climate change. They certainly do not try to hide it from their citizens. I think their argument for not enacting any sort of carbon reduction is because a) the U.S. isn't doing it, and b) the industrialized nations (the West) have been polluting for much longer and their emissions are responsible for causing this problem so why should China have to cut down on emission when they are just now getting organized and industrializing, when the West has already had its run and are reaping the economic benefits. That to me shows that the Chinese government recognizes that AGW is real as opposed to the U.S. which is still at the stage of denial. The first step to treating a problem is recognizing that the problem exists. China is there and the U.S. isn't.
I'd be willing to bet that $120M pales in comparison to the money that is spent by the pro-climate change side in order to promote their views. Anyone have figures?
And even more outrageously, most of that money is your tax dollars, not voluntary spending by private entities.
Liberty in your lifetime
120 Million is a pittance compared with what is spend by mainstream climate research (not even including lobbying). I don't have the exact figures, but I saw plenty of individual projects that cost around 50 million each. I don't agree with the ideology of the conservative billionaires that drives them to either not believe in global warming, or want to convince other not to believe in it, but there is nothing especially bad or unusual about them spending their own money towards causes they believe in. If it was 120 billion, that would be more cause for concern to me.
Exactly how is requiring groups who engage in lobbying and who presume to weigh in on scientific debate to reveal their actual sources of funding censoring speech in any meaningful sense of the phrase?
Because putting "conditions" on speech is changing it from a fundamental freedom that governments should recognize, into a privilege that governments may (or may not) grant.
they're trying to hide the fact that they're paid whores of the fossil fuel industry.
Whores have rights too.
What's being questioned is their integrity
You have a right to question their integrity. You do not have a right to silence them. Integrity is not, and should not be, a pre-condition for Constitutional rights to apply. Scumbags have rights too.
The way a message is delivered makes a difference to how people make sense of it.
If there was a billion dollar campaign saying "People who drink milk are less intelligent than those who don't" - even if there was no science behind that. It would have an influence.
We are already at the mercy of the quality of the available information we get. That occurs before we have a belief about a topic.
One of the reasons science is successful and respected is it's approach to pursuing high quality models of the universe. Blatantly lying and ignoring the facts would destroy it's ability to do that. Why is it acceptable to do it else where?
I know we should be concerned about the thought police and I'm not suggesting that people not be able to think or believe freely. However, they should at least know enough to know the consequences of thinking in a particular way and pursue informed debate about the nature of information.
Otherwise we are all at the whim of those who wish to use the system for their own short term gains.
Libel/slander laws do not limit speech. They can only be applied after the fact. So you can be held responsible for what you say or write, but you cannot be restrained from saying it in the first place.
It is somewhat of a chilling effect on free speech, but this applies more to England, which is what causes libel tourism - like the way Scientology has imported anti-scientology books there. US libel laws are far stricter, and there is a US law which states they will not do anything to a US citizen when other countries charge them with slander/libel if it would not be punishable under US law. I would say they can limit speech if they are implied overly broad and/or without proportional punishment (both in sentence and in equal application to all people). In the hands of a despotic authoritarian dictatorship they can be the beginning of the end of any line other than the one you're told.
The paper that shown the results your are refering to was published when the project was only 80% complete; because the project was volunteer driven, the statistical accuracy of that paper is highly questionable, volunteers have a strong tendency to survey the easiest sites first rather than a true random sampling. Fall, S., A. Watts, J. Nielsen-Gammon, E. Jones, D. Niyogi, J. Christy, and R.A. Pielke Sr. on the other hand found
I've also noticed your lack of comment about the spatial and temporal sparcity of the data.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Greenpeace gets $270 million a year in funding from Europe alone (in 2008), for example, and they're just 1 organization. This is a polarized issue, reasonable opinions get run roughshod by groups on both sides. If the far right had their way we'd be completely unregulated and polluting like crazy and destroy normal/habitable life for the 99%, if the far left had their way, everyone would become subsistence farmers and die at 40 (normal lifespan without industrialized benefits) and things like an unexpected month without rain would be the difference between life and death for folks.
I don't like either of those choices, so I think we need both sides fighting to have a good balance come out of it.
Could someone mod this up to 11?
Corporations are associations of people. You can't restrict the free speech of a corporation without infringing on the free speech of the people that make it up.
As the parent pointed out, a corporation is a specific kind of association of people with additional privileges granted to them by law which regular people don't get, such as limited liability. A non-profit is another specific kind of assocation of people, with different privileges. By accessing these privileges, there is (or should be) a quid pro quo.
The trouble is, corporations want it both ways. They don't want people coming after the board or shareholders if the corporation can't pay its debts. They don't want their CEO standing trial for negligent homocide when one of their chemical plants springs a leak and kills a bunch of people in the developing world. But they don't want to give up anything in return.
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"This is why I hate the climate debate. It ceased to be science a long time ago, it's all about politics nowdays. "
There is no debate. Among scientists the basic theory is not in dispute and hasn't been for many years.
The only "debate" consists of republicans dissing famous activists, and commissioning fraudulent convoluted obfuscations that come across to their less discriminating constituents as scientific dissent.
Can't have diesel, they say it causes cancer so now we now have to dump sheep pee in the exhaust. Which is of course stupid because EVERYTHING in some form or another causes cancer. Hell, Oxygen causes cancer.
There are FAR larger things we need to worry about in terms of environmental protection than diesel exhaust and so much of the other stuff being proposed. Like how about making it easier for companies to build newer and safer nuclear power plants so we don't need to burn as much coal and keep older nuclear plants online past their design life. How about restarting the reprocessing of nuclear waste back into usable fuel. If you reprocess, 98% of that waste becomes nuclear fuel and the remaining 2% is stuff with short half lives that's only dangerous for a few hundred years.
Any sane person who looks at the evidence should be able to see that we went way past what is reasonable and went full pants-on-head-retarded quite awhile back in the West when it came to the environment. Why? Because the genuine environmentalists were successful. People started agreeing with them about the need to take basic reasonable measures to protect the environment. In order to stay relevant they had to get more extreme.
Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace left because he says that the organisation got taken over by communists who used green language to further their red ideology. Thus why they are sometimes revered to as "Watermelons".
Are humans having an impact on the environment? Almost certainly, but to believe that we have such an impact to turn the Earth in Venus in pure hubris. A basic thought experiment shows the absurdness of it all. Earth has been around for billions of years with nobody at the helm managing the climate and yet it has more-or-less remained a life permitting climate, even after getting hit repeatedly by comets and asteroids. That right there should tell you that the climate system has built in negative feedback loops that prevent things from getting too far out of whack. Yet so many of these models and predictions assume positive feedback loops. When your theory doesn't match reality, it's time for a new theory.
To add insult to injury, there's been, on average, no warming over the last 10 years while CO2 kept increasing. The warmers need to explain how CO2 is such a large climate driver, yet is so easily overpowered by other factors.
Are human beings the primary and most significant factor in the climate warming up? I don't think anyone has proven that. The Climate Change religion states that this is so but climatology scientists don't have nearly as much certainty.
You don't think so, but 99% of actual climate scientists think so.
Anarchists never rule
You are confusing those who believe there is global warming, which is a high number, with those who believe the primary cause of warming is human activities, which is less.
But then that is a common confusion. "Climate Change" fanatics work very hard to muddy this distinction.
Frontline recently aired an *excellent* documentary on the striking rise in climate change denial in the U.S. and links it to this very thing (and Donors Trust makes an appearance in the program too). It shows just how damn effective these shadow money groups and the billionaires behind them are at driving public opinion to suit their interests. I highly recommend viewing it. Only an hour long: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/climate-of-doubt/
You can't restrict the free speech of a corporation without infringing on the free speech of the people that make it up.
All of those people in the corporation already have the same free speech rights that I do. How does granting them additional free speech rights through the corporation not infringe on me? I have worked for corporations and I own voting stock but I've never considered a corporation to speak for me and actively opposed some of the things my corporations were for.
Particularly considering who they're competing with.
Trillionaire Governments Openly Fund Vast Climate Scare Network.
And it's Greenpeace that's the source?
Isn't this a little like the US complaining that Turkmenistan has upped its military spending?
Greenpeace does far more than that in one year, and it's just one group.
to stop drilling in the US to prop up their monopoly on energy for the US?
I don't need a billionaire to tell me that Global Warming (rebranded as Climate Change) is a racket.
Notice the AC divided volume (3 dimensions) by area (2 dimensions) leaving 1 dimension for the answer. It's good math and the answer comports with scientists estimates of ~60 meters once complications such as the ocean spreading out and the fact that some Antarctic ice is under sea level even though it is sitting on ground are taken into account.
Mother Jones writer, recycled* from The Guardian, based on reports from Greenpeace. So at least we can frame the article a bit. I know it's poor practice to judge material by its source, but given the subject (judging information by source), it's worth considering that trifecta.
The groups listed include CATO Institute, Heartland Institute, etc. I don't think there's any confusion about what those groups think, what their politics are, how they operate, or that they're funded to do exactly what they do. They're the usual suspects of right-wing "think tanks", and I imagine we're all familiar with their business.
What I don't see are any specific accusations of payoffs to legitimate, respected scientists to lie or produce false data. And that makes sense. Presumably, to get any data or analysis published in peer reviewed journals for proper attention, your work will have to withstand some kind of scientific rigor. Maybe I'm too naive in thinking so, but it seems that's the check in the system. Beyond that, releases from political action groups are just noise (and there's plenty of it). See: this article.
It's not *just* noise. Slashdot doesn't talk about the fairly large body of climate-related literature that is published every month in scientific journals. It doesn't talk about articles where there's real breakthroughs or debate. Slashdot talks about climate denial, and everytime we do the commentary is less then unanimous in criticizing the usual lack of data.
You can't falsify research, because it turns out respected scientists care about their name and work (see the Koch brother's independent research backfire). But the general public isn't scientists, and doesn't listen to scientists - they listen to the media, and the media and advertising is very well tuned to how people work: ask leading questions, sow dealt, say logical fallacies out loud and then quietly retract them when rebutted.
When you don't actually *need* any data to start talking, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose if you're amongst the wealthiest people on Earth (and thus unlikely to be affected by *any* type of catastrophe, barring a fairly destructive and targeted revolution).
The spatial and temporal data sparsity is what it is and you have to work with what you've got. That doesn't mean the results are useless, it's just a factor in the uncertainty you attach to your results. As long as climate scientists use a consistent methodology to derive their results from one iteration to the next it's useful information.
As long as you are measuring how something is changing over time rather than the absolute value then UHI located temperature stations can still measure the amount of change even though the absolute temperature may read higher in the UHI. Only if conditions change, ie. someone adds a second air conditioner outlet to the location, would the results be skewed.
Agreed. This is nothing but a biased hit piece masquerading as journalism. Shame on Suzanne Goldenberg, hacks like her are why this nation is so polarized.
'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
Do I believe climate change? Kinda, I wish scientists would actually be impartial to what they find so we could have the truth rather then fudge the numbers.
Please point to an actual example of climate scientists "fudging the numbers" rather then printing an uncertainty or clearly declaring the underlying assumptions of their models (and indeed, much climate research is precisely focused on validating and setting bounds on various numbers).
If a wealthy INDIVIDUAL wants to go buy propaganda shilling for their self interest against the rest of us, I can't stop that. The thing is, it's pretty hard to use money like that without being found out--that's its own check on excess. That we allow the funneling of cash through groups whose sole purpose is to hide it is called money laundering in any other context and should not be permitted here.
Actually it's because they'd be taxed on it, because they'd have to declare it as private income. Corporations call it a business expense and write it down.
The one good point you have is diluted in a sea of bullshit (we should have nuclear power - of course, the nuclear industry tends to do a bad job of being trustworthy, but then at the edge of that we've got a government that's not really providing them with the right protections to allow them to be open and transparent either).
I don't know what you're raving on about with diesel.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've also committed to only up-modding others' comments;
I pretty much do that too. The exceptions are off topic trolls like the "nigger" guys, spam and occasionally I'll throw an "Overrated" at someone who I think got upmodded more than is warranted. I read at -1 because sometimes those guys deserve upmods. Also, I've learned to not waste my mod points on climate change related discussions because I always find comments I want to make.
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I love the people who think that:
a) because its cool to denigrate religion these days, particularly here...
b) choose to call those who support the reality of Climate Change and its origins in our actions as humans, members of a "religion" so they can denigrate them directly.
If anyone is guilty of mindless adoption of an unfounded, illogical and destructive position it is the hordes of Anti-Global-Warming fanatics who post on sites like this, spouting the same denial rhetoric, despite the evidence and opinions of thousands of scientists who are qualified to give an informed opinion.
The reality is simply that some people realize dealing with GW is going to require changes in their lives that they won't enjooy, and its easier to deny it all by sticking your fingers in your ear and yelling "LA LA LA, I can't hear you, LA LA LA". Its pathetic.
Millions of people are going to have to die, or suffer immense negative changes in their lives, in order to ensure those of us in the First world get to drive our luxury cars and live our exhorbitantly expensive lifestyles. It cannot continue unless those people die off.
I wonder if any of the posters here are being paid for by the lobby groups that are mentioned in the article? Just curious...
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Also, I've learned to not waste my mod points on climate change related discussions because I always find comments I want to make.
Man, I hear ya there... For a long time I stopped reading the climate change discussions due to the overwhelming number of crazy, anti-science, and purely political comments contained therein—a while back, down-modding those wouldn't have even made a dent. Hopefully, the recent improvement is due to more people siding with scientific evidence and reason.
BTW, I recognize your nick from some of those discussions, and your quality, informed posts on the topic. I look forward to them; keep it up. :o)
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Because I pointed out the need for a "people's car" that ran on diesel so you can have better gas mileage now and the ability to use bio-diesel down the road?
But it doesn't matter how you feel about AGW because we ALL have to fight the current "solution" proposed because its a scam. If I told you I'd come clean your house for a fee and then just threw everything, garbage and all, into the closet, would you pay me? Because that is EXACTLY what cap and trade is! Gore is against ANY tariffs on China (because he and his rich friends make money there you stupid peasant you) while pretending that the fact China has already said they will NOT join any cap and trade treaties means nothing....what do YOU think is gonna happen when the cost of making anything in the USA suddenly jumps to 30 times the cost of making it in China? it doesn't take Kojack to solve this mystery, every single factory that can move WILL move. After all they will suffer ZERO penalty if they leave and suffer a crap and trade penalty if they stay, frankly they'd be retarded to stay in the USA!
Am I against climate change? Sure for the simple fact that we live in a fishbowl and dumping pollutants is stupid any way you slice it. but the whole crap and trade is a classic example of "Lets do something!" even if that something doesn't work or solve anything. If you truly want to do something about AGW you have to make polluting unprofitable for companies, so that they will take cleaner routes because its cheaper than paying the fines....simple yes? But crap and trade does NOTHING to stop any pollution, all it does is move it from one place to the other, just like me putting everything in the closet. its still there, its still not clean, its just out of sight.
But sadly that just doesn't work when you are talking about a fishbowl, that pollution isn't gonna magically stay in China, look at how we can detect their smog in CA for example. We have to have a comprehensive program to actually LOWER the amount of pollution, not shift it around, but as long as people can be suckered by crap and trade the leeches will never give it up.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
delusional asshole, spare us the projection.
Get fucked. The only people talking about the Holocaust are denialists trying to deflect the issue by playing the victim, when the only making that connection are your fellow climate change denailsits.
This is the same bullshit that the Teabaggers pull by whining about homophobic insults. Those guys can get fucked, too, because everyone knows they are mocked for railing that government keep its hands off it's Medicare, while putting on stupid costumes on issues they never cared about when Bush was in office.
Climate change denialists are called denialists because they repeatedly ignore science in favor of their own fact-free ideology.
Not because anyone is trying them to the Holocaust, so spare us this bullshit misdirection.
Yes, I think the tide is changing I think. Reality has a way of helping the honestly skeptical to make up their minds, especially when it starts to impact their lives. But there will always be some people who are ideologically incapable of accepting what the science leads us to because their ideology is more important to them than reality.
Thanks for the compliment. {blush}
With respect the thing that has just been revealed shows without doubt that the opposite of what you are asserting has been true for quite some time. I hope you understand that the debate has reached to point where the value of expertise itself has been called into question. How would you react if your own expertise in your own field was loudly considered as worthless and PR agencies spent a lot of money slandering you as a liar just for doing your job as well as you can and telling the truth as it is?
Perhaps the above poster just looked at what the groups funding this PR and their spokesmen are saying. Some of them definitely do push the young earth creationism and climate science denial as a package deal - some even throw in a push against secular government as well. Of course you shouldn't throw them all into one basket but I can see where the above poster is coming from.
Sorry, but it's transparently obvious that the opposite is the case. For decades it was just science until it became politically advantageous to deny it. It's the new "other" to unite a supposedly Christian group against when an educated clergy, black people, women who dared to take men's jobs and believers in evolution were not seen to be a good enough adversary to play wedge politics against.
Are you really blaming recent global green groups for the US actions on diesel instead of the local industry lobby group that set the policy decades ago?
Also the climate change issue is a scientific one so please leave your conspiracy theory about environmental groups out of it. They don't have the cash to drive a decent conspiracy anyway.
Disclaimer: I'm left centrist, however I fully dig classic conservative reasoning. I understand them even though mostly I disagree.
However after last year elections and this one I can fully say that I don't understand moneybags behind Tea Party and friends (let's be honest, this one is fakest party we have seen for years, it's essentially a business project). Conservatives in the past weren't so keen on denying something as questioning does this and this change will solve this, won't it destroy something of good old...it made sense, even if you didn't agree. But this?
This is pure BS and fear. They have created self-feeding system, which spirals more and more downwards. Fine, you don't agree that we should use carb tax to increase interest in investing in less polluting technologies - how about being direct and invest all this money and showing, hey, capitalism works, investors and moneybags can be reasonable about handling this world, not only their wallets. It's not that they don't know the way. Hey, high tech companies with good profit do this all the time - yeah, they know that if science is solid, stuff works.
It's essentially a fundamentalism and kinda not very pretty one. It feels like they actually want end to come sooner than later. It's like "if world doesn't turn our way, the hell with it!". If that's so, then we are in for serious trouble.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
The nuclear lobby got fat and lazy on government welfare and started eating their own (eg. thorium research threatened the status quo), so any hope for a nuclear powered future has to come from military funded research, small startups based on that military research, or from places like India or China (forget Russia's petty attempts with a sodium cooled reactor, they probably won't even catch up with a failed French effort). Even Japan with Toshiba lost it's way some time in the 1970s or 1980s so the technology infusion from buying up their stuff has given Westinghouse nothing more advanced than the AP1000.
It was worse than that, it was "how can we make money out of this" when the US rolled it out at Kyoto, shoved it down everyone's throats to get them to agree with it, then did a backflip and refused to support their own proposal.
The reason for the crap and trade is more like "at least it's something and if we don't have this stupid shadow stockmarket we can forget about the USA taking any action at all on reduction of carbon dioxide emissions". Thus stupid politics and a stupid layer of abstraction that's going to make parasites rich with a side effect of maybe getting the job done. It's just like the US insurance system that has a side effect of health care at times.
Readers please don't be so stupid as to take this post as anti-american, instead think about it and consider that it is a criticism of some of the people involved in your politics who created this situation.
Corporations don't exist without us choosing to make a law creating them.
Corporations cannot vote, unless that law specifically granting them a power to vote.
Corporations cannot get married, unless that law specifically grants them a power to get married.
Corporations cannot sue in court, or be sued, unless that law provides for them to sue/be-sued in court.
Corporations cannot buy or sell anything, cannot own property, unless that law provides for the creation of corporations with the ability to buy/sell/own property.
Corporations don't exist at all, without a law specifically providing for their creation, and defining them, and specifically providing legal authority for them to do anything.
So no, corporations don't exist unless we create them, and corporations have no right to own property unless we define a legal mechanism saying they can own property, and no they cannot SPEAK unless we provide some legal authority and mechanism for them to speak. And to the extent we do allow corporations to vote/marry/appear-in-court/own-property/speak, they can only do so to whatever extent the law provides for them to do so.
Corporations are not people. Corporations do not actually exist. Corporations are a legal fiction, an imaginary legal entity that can be assigned ownership of property, and which can contract to buy and sell and distribute profits in accordance with law, and we can damn well have that law state that corporations have no legal right to lobby for changes in the law, we can damn well have the law state that corporations are prohibited from spending one-cent on lobbying.
If you feel otherwise, and think that freedom expression is not a fundamental right, but rather a privilege that can be withdrawn in some cases
No, you have it backwards. "Speech" is something which does not need to be extended to corporations.
The law does not need to empower these fictional legal entities to contract for the purchase Just as of political advertizing or to hire lobbyists. The law does not have to empower a corporate CEO to order an employee to lobby legislators as an employment duty. Just as the law does not empower a corporate CEO to order an employee to vote for a specific candidate as one of his employment duties.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Considering how many scholars lately have come out of the closet and declared that the IPCC position is all but insupportable and climate sensitivity is nowhere near 3.5 degrees per doubling of CO2.
Oh, go on.
How many?
Scholars of what, exactly.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Are human beings the primary and most significant factor in the climate warming up? I don't think anyone has proven that. The Climate Change religion states that this is so but climatology scientists don't have nearly as much certainty.
Is your mother a whore?
Hey, hey, hey... calm down. I didn't call your mother a whore. I don't even think she's a whore! I just think it's important to ask that question. There's a rational debate going on here, after all.
To me "Climate Change" is just a ploy for political control. Until it has been definitively proven what are all the factors of global warming and then, any proposed mitigation steps have been proven to work it is silly to panic and give political control over to the Climate Change religious zealots.
Until it has been definitively proven what are all the factors of your mother prostituting herself, and then, any proposed evidence has been proven to deny her being a whore, it is silly to "panic" and give political control over to the people who are trying to deal with your mother not being a whore.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
This is a worthless argument (Primary vs. complimentary) designed to distract people. The climate change the "fanatics" are talking about is directly correlated to certain human activity which produces greenhouse gas, and is caused by human activity. The percentage of that 1 or 2 degree Celsius raise in worldwide temperature as it relates to "primary" or "complimentary" is joke. The data says that AGW exists - which you don't deny - and ~95% of the knowledgeable scientists believe AGW will cause a catastrophic change for humanity in the next few centuries.
i.e. If the "warming" by 3 degrees in the next 200 years is only caused by 1.4 degrees of AGW, that 1.4 degrees is still catastrophic. You (and more specifically your argument) are the one muddying the science and the warnings by saying "well, it doesn't matter because volcanoes also increase greenhouse gases too".
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
The reality is simply that some people realize dealing with GW is going to require changes in their lives that they won't enjooy, and its easier to deny it all by sticking your fingers in your ear and yelling "LA LA LA, I can't hear you, LA LA LA". Its pathetic.
When these debates happen, I would love to find this glue between one side and the other that is a great (but hypothetical) solution. Dealing with AGW does not necessarily require people to enjoy their lives less than they did before. If everyone replaced their car with a car that gets 10 times as efficient gas mileage, then they have the same lifestyle.
What "climate change fanatics", as their opposition calls them, wants, is for society to move in the direction of getting these technologies to help mitigate AGW. It's not for making everyone's life miserable - or "changes in their lives that they won't enjoy".
Sure, granted, some tree-hugging granola hippy in Berkley wants some doosh bag Texan to stop driving his Hummer - but that's an emotional tribal response. The real, scientific, and what I believe to be correct way to tackle this problem is to create solutions to the greenhouse gas problem that climate scientists warn about. And that's what pisses me off about these stupid political debates about AGW - it's about some guy in California and some guy in Texas in a pissing match, or an ideological argument, instead of saying "here are some problems we know about - let's make some solutions". And there ARE solutions!!
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Could we please try to stop using words like "conservative" (and "communist", etc etc etc) so frivolously? You are not conservative if you try to hide from reality; "deluded" or simply "stupid" is closer to reality - that, and massively selfish in the case of trying to stop others from learning the facts. These people don't care about things like responsibility or decency, they just care about their own, short term profits - that is after all how you get rich in this world. They don't deserve to be honoured with the word "conservative".
I have a lot of time for the viewpoints of a genuine conservative; I am not conservative myself, but I recognise that other viewpoints may be valid, and it really makes me quite angry when I meet this sort of underhanded and dishonest crap. In the long run it only serves to discredit even those who are genuinely skeptical about climate change, and to a scientist that is worrying, even if you are convinced about the reality of the thing and about who is to blame. You see, none of us knows it all, and we have to strive to learn from each other; but it can't happen unless both sides are trustworthy.
This is why its better to fight cap and trade and do nothing at all than go along with it as it won't remove a single drop of pollution, it'll just give the parasites more money while shifting the pollution to Asia.
sadly things will have to get a LOT worse before we can get rid of the parasites trying to cash in in one way or another with AGW because as long as those at the top look at AGW as a reverse robin hood cash grab you can give up on any policy that would do anything about AGW, there is too much profit to be made from scams like crap and trade than in actually having policies that work.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The funding for "climate orthodoxy" is almost nothing. There are environmental groups who have strong beliefs about climate change (that don't necessarily come from scientific understanding) and fight politically to push what you would consider a "climate orthodoxy" agenda. They are not very well funded.
Climate science is reasonably well funded. Science isn't politics. People say that scientists are biased by their need to seek funding, but that's a weak argument. Results and interpretations can be sensationalised to some extent, but scientists can't change reality, they can only investigate it. Moreover, such a bias could only have existed in the early days of research in this area, it can't really exist now. If any of the "scholars" you mention could find convincing evidence to contradict the current consensus on climate change, it would rock the scientific world. The consensus would change, and the dissenting scientist would become very famous and successful. The same goes for mainstream climate scientists. If they managed to prove themselves and their peers wrong, it would make their names. The simple fact is, the dissenting "scholars" don't have convincing evidence. They don't have convincing arguments for why the consensus interpretation of existing evidence is wrong. They are failing to convince. Moreover, the fact of their existence is not convincing either. Dissenting opinions always exist, because individuals spout all kinds of crazy nonsense for all kinds of mundane reasons.
Without convincing evidence to the contrary, the prevailing scientific opinion is probably close to the truth. You say there is zealotry on this site, but I don't see much of that. Mostly I see people like me calmly trying to explain how the scientific process works and why the prevailing scientific opinion is usually much closer to the truth than any other opinion.
The things people like you say, these arguments you make, they are wrong, plain and simple. There's a chance that some truly terrible things are going to happen. The things that could happen are so terrible and the chance is so high, we have to take steps to prevent it from happening. That's it. All you're doing is pointing at the probability and saying "it's not 100%". Great, you're right. The current consensus could be wrong. It could all be a conspiracy. We might be okay doing nothing. It doesn't matter. The risk is too great to do nothing. The arguments you are making, the agenda you are pushing, it is wrong and it is morally wrong for you to keep pushing it. You're part of an effort that might cause the deaths of a very large number of people.
Image you're a climate change denier. Let's be optimistic and say there's only a 0.1% chance of a catastrophic climate change event which (being very generous) only kills 100 million people and otherwise nothing bad happens. Let's be generous and say that you're part of a movement of 100,000 people campaigning to deny climate change. 0.1% * 10 million / 100,000 = 1 expected death each. That's approximately 5.6 litres of blood on your hands (being super generous). That's why people are so hostile to climate change deniers. Because they're fucking murderers.
That is not my definition of liberty, since "personal responsibility" is just a right wing euphemism for not helping anyone out.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You won't though. You may even cry "It's a fake site, full of frauds!!!!", but you definitely won't read it.
I hope looking down on people gives you enough pleasure to justify the harm your cynicism is causing.
Disclaimer: I have no doubts that climate change is happening and CO2 plays some role in that change.
Also, we're under attack from interstellar aliens, who are hurling giant boulders at us.
I was beginning to think I was the only one who'd noticed this!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
ShanghaiBill persisted in missing the point, thusly:
You have a right to question their integrity. You do not have a right to silence them. Integrity is not, and should not be, a pre-condition for Constitutional rights to apply. Scumbags have rights too.
Again: exactly which part of NOBODY IS ATTEMPTING TO SILENCE THE DENIERS was unclear to you?
The issue is whether THEIR SOURCES OF FUNDING SHOULD BE REVEALED.
My own, personal opinion is that they should.
Check out my novel.
there is very little debate on whether AGW is happening or not
I think there is amongst right wing Americans.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
There's still the good old solution of using less energy for the same job. The only thing in the way of that is energy pricing that is not by usage by by something else such as fixed price contracts - if a city doesn't save money by using more efficient lighting then they are not going to bother. There's also carbon pricing to try to change energy sources but it can backfire to drive coal seam gas over coal with little real benefit for half the "carbon usage", or drive hydro too hard when it can have other disadvantages.
I don't know, because I'm not a climatologist, but I see too much politics (on all sides) and too many attempts to suppress legitimate questions because this debate is about political positions -- science has been superceded by belief.
I see people pushing their agendas, which are all about control. The messages are "Disaster! Panic! Panic early and often! Give us control and we will save you or you will die!" vs. "Don't do anything, everything is fine, leave us in control and shut up."
I don't trust or support either side.
Humans have significantly screwed up our planet -- and continue to do so. We need to stop screwing it up and start healing it. But neither the "Keep calm" nor the "Panic! Panic!" crowd are proposing good, comprehensive, solutions.
The Climate "Change" solution comes down to "Give us control over CO2 of the largest nations (except China)." China and a number of "3rd world" countries are now the largest producers of CO2 -- but ignore that, and give us control of the economies of the largest nations -- for your own good, of course. Yes, because of all the 3rd world countries now becoming industrialized, CO2 will continue to increase -- but don't think about that, just give us control.
What about all the other problems that we used to be concerned with? Landfills, air and water pollution, chemical pollution, etc? No, take our attention off of all those other "unimportant" problems and just think about CO2 -- and give us control.
It's either "Panic early and panic often." or "Don't worry, be happy."
Dry troll, or fundamental cognitive dissonance?
Did I insult you? Did I insult your mother? Are you a complete idiot? Do you think your response is "rational" and "reasoned" or did you engage in a typical response to legitimate questions with crass insults? Is your belief so frail that you can only respond with stupid insults?
Are you trying to be so very, very clever by framing your ignorant insults as questions? (See what I did there?)
I sincerely do not agree with or support either side of the Climate Change debate. I don't like politics and this debate is mostly politics. I disagree with the "Keep calm and carry on" message as well as the "Panic early and often" message.
Why panic when the predictions of immediate total disaster are very speculative and panic is never the proper response. Let's get all the data and map out workable solutions that don't neglect all (or make worse) the other major problems we have.
But I totally agree that we must not just ignore our problems and "just keep on". That's as stupid as panic.
There are better solutions than either "Panic" or "Ignore". I'm in favor of those kinds of solutions.
Let me amend. There is little scientific debate.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I voted for the one who was arrested for insisting a national presidential debate should have all the national presidential candidates present.
Out of curiosity, who was arrested for that?
There are funds that take care of large scale donations, some of them non-discriminating, some of them catering to donors with some leaning. Two of them, openly and tranparently catering to rich people who want to be sure their money won't end up in the coffers of Greenpeace, WWF, Sierra club, Sea Shepherd, PETA, NRDC, Union of Concerned Scientists et al. (a sentiment I wholeheartedly understand), were spreading donations amounting roughly to WWF's and Greenpeace's combined yacht and sandwiches budget over bunch of causes loosely connected by the funds' raison d'être. That is covert funneling of dark money. When the aforementioned fuc^H^H^H fan^H^H^H char^H^H^H^H activist organisations I dislike (and more importantly disagree with on fundamental level) do something similar only with larger amounts of money, it is "educating the public" or "showcasing the opportunities".
Troll 2.0 Fear my asocial networking!
Sorry, not good of me to expect everyone be in the loop about the stuff they are doing to diesel engines. The new EPA regs require a rube goldberg emissions system for diesel engines that involves dumping urea (which they get from harvesting sheep pee) into the exhaust to supposedly reduce emissions. The EPA revs Diesel regulations almost as often as Linus revs the Linux kernel. Is it any wonder why we can't get decent smaller diesel vehicles here in the US? Where except perhaps LA is crap like that even needed?
Compare and contrast this to the $$ that Al Gore is gathering about him up on Sand Hill Road. i.e. chump change.
Today it is clear that global climate and weather fundamental are more important than the Higgs. Yet we, the world community, are unwilling to make this investment.
The science that I have looked at over the last 20 years gives me pause. I have seen computer runs make projections decades in advance yet PI is fixed at 3.14 i.e. three digits. This researcher was concerned that the 19th digit was not stable and wanted the compiler or hardware fixed.
Another researcher was concerned with an anoxic region of the ocean floor. What his research did show was the ocean was attempting to sequester carbon but his financiers wanted a fishery. Sequestering carbon may prove necessary but it often seen as less green than a festering fish farm.
The knee jerk reactionary regulations are focusing on deep pocket players not on high leverage technology and policy. Follow the money here... this is where the trouble is.
Carbon tax is a lot like the rake off of the dealer at a casino. Not a player just collecting a percentage of the value as it passes by. Worse the incentive is to increase the action and increase the flow of carbon so their rake is richer. The odds in places like Reno and Vegas are managed and regulated by the state. The goal of the regulators is to ensure tax revenue. A side effect is to keep the games "honest".
It is interesting to me that the roulette game has extra "green" numbers "0" and sometimes "00" to fuel the house. The house takes their cut and "marketing" attempts to increase the number of players i.e. pray on the ignorant and ill educated. Any time I see a carbon-taxer use the phrase "think green" I do. I think about the extra green numbers that are there ONLY to shift the odds and enrich the house. The current legislative mind set would increase the green action and change the game to add GREEN "000", "0000" and more to the game. Now who can argue with increasing "GREEN" action.
Transparency of research, publishing data and computer codes is only part of the necessary game.
What if salt water was pumped into central Africa?
What if we banned ice breakers from 12 miles near the shore in the arctic.
What if we restricted warm Japan current water into the Bering Strait.
What if we had research teams and tools willing to be honest.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Billionaires ARE the secret!!!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Of course when you win a Nobel Peace Prize you piss off the rest of the world that wanted one or deny your findings. Go Al!, they cheated you out of an election but they can't cheat the truth! You are doing what a responsible politician should do, help the world take back what belongs to it, in a positive universal way. You see there are people with a lot of money that would love to invent a dome where you pay tax for it's sustenance to protect you from the harmful rays of the sun and that's not to mention what would they do with the water. These people breed violence in an indirect manner that makes those who fight for whats right look like mindless barbarians. If your live in a country like me, remember, we live in capitalism. Money talks, power moves capitols, and people like Al Gore make a difference.
There are two separate questions / issues / debates, and a big problem is that they have been getting mixed together and confused. One question is whether Global Warming is real and being caused by humans. The other question is what, if anything, we should do about it.
The first one is a scientific question, The second one is an economic and political question.
The first question is a matter of basic physics. Solar energy comes in through the atmosphere in the form of sunlight, hits the ground, and is re-radiated as infra-red radiation. The natural gasses of the atmosphere trap that infra-red radiation. It traps the energy, traps the heat, warming the planet. The "greenhouse gasses effect". The natural level of water and CO2 and methane and other gasses, the natural greenhouse effect, already warms the planet by 50 degrees. 50 degrees. It is trivial undeniable physics that increasing the amount of such gasses in the atmosphere will increase the heat-trapping effect. The only complicated part is calculating a number for the size of the effect, the hard part is predicting the future size of the effect, and it is most particularly difficult to predict the secondary effects it will trigger. The basic effect is simple enough to prove in a few sentences here. The more complicated parts, the calculations of the current size of the effect and the future course of the effect are the subject of science papers by expert professionals, and the scientific community has a reasonably good handle on those more complicated parts.
The scientific question, is this effect real and are humans causing it, is not a reasonable rational debate. Among scientists, there is only a tiny fringe who deny it, most of whom are directly employed by the coal/oil industry, a tiny fringe who are doing essentially zero scientific work and producing essentially zero science papers challenging it, and what they do say and do is considered to be biased or easily refuted crackpottery by almost 100% of the expert in the field. "Many" people deny the moon landing, but "many" does not constitute a genuine scientific controversy, not when that "many" constitutes a tiny percentage, not when they are failing to produce any scientific work considered even remotely respectable by the general scientific community. Every field has crackpots, the mere existence of crackpots (or industry funded disinformation junk science) does not make it valid to claim something is scientifically controversial.
The second question, what if anything, we should do about it, is not a scientific question. That is a social, economic, and political question. That is an area where there can be reasonable and rational disagreement, reasonable and rational discussion, reasonable and rational debate.
However you cannot have a reasonable and rational discussion on that subject with someone who is ranting that the entire scientific community is engaging in some evil comicbook conspiracy to enslave the planet. You cannot engage in reasonable rational discussion with a conspiracy theorist who has list touch with reality, who interprets all facts and evidence as a hoax, and who interprets every discussion on the subject as some bizarre Illuminati scheme to conquer the world.
If you are discussing the the NASA budget and future missions, and some people start ranting that the moon landing was a hoax, then the only way to proceed with a reasonable rational discussion is to carry on the discussion without them You either physically throw the luny denialists out of the room, or you metaphorically throw them out of the room by simply ignoring them.
The best option is of course if you can still rationally reach the denialists, manage to give them enough good information that they snap themselves out of it and enable them to reasonably rationally participate on the second question. There's no hoax, no Illuminati, it's not about conquering the world or "control". If we try to do something about it it will be very costly and disruptive, if we do *nothing* about it it
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Ah, but we did have a decentralized government when the government's power affected individuals from greatest to least in this order : local -> county -> state -> federal. Most power has centralized to the federal government, which is not what made this nation great. Do you honestly think that we have a democratically elected government filling the halls of Washington, D.C.? What we have is a vile, reprehensible bureaucracy that has only it's own survival at heart with only the faces of politicians giving it the barest sheen of decency. For every Thaddeus McCotter there is a Jesse Jackson, Jr. In addition, the 'rich cabal' got rich by finding ways to make money. There's plenty to be made by addressing peoples fears of AGW or any other change to the climate. What would stop them from doing that? Resting on the principle that they are only allowed to make money as caricatures of e-e-e-e-vil conservatives? In my opinion, most of this country does not educate itself properly when it comes time to vote and is grossly misinformed about AGW and how the climate works in general.
But we are ALREADY seeing that thanks to electric companies gouging. I don't know a single person with a regular bulb anymore and the landlord is going to all 90 of his apts and handing out CFLs because the local electric company is gouging. Not saying gouging is in any way good but the way prices are going up across the board means more and more are using less, just like how when our gas hit $3.50 a gallon all recreational travel dies right then and there because people won't pay those prices to travel.
But if you try to do ANYTHING with carbon all you are gonna do is pull a reverse robin hood and that is because the same leeches that wrote the rules on credit default swaps have written the rules for cap and trade and any variation thereof, and because Goldman Sachs is too connected (notice the head of the fed has been a member of GS almost since the day it was born, no matter if a D or R was in the white house) any attempts to do shit about carbon ends up with GS bleeding your wallet to feed their endless profits.
To cause real change with regards to AGW you are gonna have to have real leadership and all we've had in the USA is one shill after another. Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains" and as long as those in the financial sector are allowed to write the "solution" to AGW all we will see is bullshit and cash grabs as Wall Street can't even think past a couple of quarters anymore.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Like I said, I'm not a climatologist, so I can't know how "settled" the AGW question is. These odd surveys and polls of "scientists" claiming to "prove" this and that seem so artificial and so obviously manipulated. Those things don't prove anything at all but seem to be what most people wave about as "proof". I'm handicapped simply because I'm not a climate scientist and have no access to the raw data.
Science will, eventually, prove out their theories about this. But, in the meantime, science, theoretically, welcomes questions, doubts and attempts to refute working theories. When I see "scientists" trying to silence questions, doubts or attempts to refute this theory, I wonder.
Our planet is massive and its climate is super complex. Do we understand everything that affects our climate with precision? Of course not. We have guesses and "computer models" that roughly simulate the climate. So far, the computer models of the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s have completely failed to predict today's climate. New computer models (and faster computers) might be better, we certainly hope so, but that still remains to be seen.
You assert that most scientists working to refute the AGW theory are working for Big Oil -- which, of course, has a vested interest in that point of view. You neglect to mention that just about all scientists working to prove AGW are working for the governments -- which, very much, have a vested interest in proving AGW -- trillions are at stake.
Before you get upset, I'm not actually taking sides here. I want the truth to prevail and I don't want one side to be gagged while the One True View is railroaded through without the concerns, questions and doubts properly addressed. That isn't science, that's politics.
But you are right, the big question after all that is what can and should we do about it? That's very political and that scares me a lot.
If you're driving along the highway at 65MPH, and you come upon a thousand foot stretch of road that rises ten feet, you'll hardly notice the slope.
If you're driving along the highway at 65MPH, and you come upon a ten foot stretch of road that rises ten feet, you're dead.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Duh - I wasn't insulting you, and clearly stated that I don't think your mother is a whore. Reread the comment, in particular the quoted text to what I was responding to.
Are human beings the primary and most significant factor in the climate warming up? I don't think anyone has proven that. The Climate Change religion states that this is so but climatology scientists don't have nearly as much certainty.
This question makes it seem as if climatology scientists don't actually have overwhelming evidence that human activity has caused excessive greenhouse gases which lead to climate change. So, when I ask "is your mother a whore", you get pretty defensive as if I am engaging in crass insults - but as stated I didn't call your mother a whore, and I don't even think your mother is a whore! But obviously the question makes people think there's actually something to the content of the question, while the person who asks the question can hide behind the fact that they aren't actually stating belief in a positive answer, or even have evidence in any way, about the question.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Like pro-climate change folks don't get money, too? Give me a break.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Annnnnd... I wasn't insulting you, I wasn't "defensive" NOR was I accusing you of insulting me. I used the exact same "trick" you did to make my point.
My problem is the active suppression of important questions because the questions are "unacceptable" to those who believe. There are legitimate questions that have not been answered but only "shouted down". That isn't science. Science is supposed to welcome questions, doubts and attempts to disprove the active theory. Politics, on the other hand, is all about shouting down your "enemies'" uncomfortable questions.
I don't have the answers, but I have questions. All I seem to hear is the Climate Change version of the old advertisement: "4 out of 5 'doctors' agree...".
I'm less depressed these days watching our little world spiral towards wherever it's spiralling towards. It often feels like some perverse race to the bottom, but I've finally just kind of "got it" that evolution does favor this kind of viciousness. This "I will mow over a field of fluffy rabbits with a tractor to get mine" mentality that you see coming to a head in so many places. Will we nuke ourselves because we can't control our vicious hate and fear? Or pollute the world into a big carcinogenic port-o-let because we can't control our vicious undiluted greed first? Either way, we are the organic soup currently allowing for the coming together of the component organic parts of artificially intelligent, self replicating, binary encoding life. It's already happened - I forget when the first computer virus was "born from the organic soup" of human technological development. Soon we will be the little funny looking monkeys 8 spots back on the evolutionary charts. And when the "new kids in town" finally figure out, like all of the tinpot sociopathic executives and tyrants who've littered our 15 minutes in the sun here with their excesses, "what it takes to succeed", our sins will look like child's play. I'm ready for humans to go away now. I'd rather think of a universe where sentient creatures enslaved, raped, tortured, oppressed, murdered, and gorged themselves on everything weaker than themselves #without# knowing better than to act that way. It's one thing for us to desecrate the ecosphere damning all sensient beings weaker than . rselves over a nice tasty torture and rape burger - Cats and squirrels would surely do the same thing given half a chance. It's the fact that we realize how disgustingly selfish and harming and pointless we are. We know what pain feels like so at some point when we finish running from it, we just have to admit how abominably ugly it all is. That's what's tiring. I don't think the binary life forms that do to us what we've done to everything weaker than us will know what pain is really. By the time we've teed up the mass extinction event and they've finished it all off the universe will be free of intelligent sentient beings that know what they're doing when they decimate the weak. It will be a lot cleaner and more interesting then. I sometimes think the universe collectively is meant to achieve consciousness - that we have just witnessed a somewhat brutish early stage of that. From what once was just space dust these little clumps of consciousness are forming, getting more and more sophisticated, but leading to what?
Like I said, I'm not a climatologist, so I can't know how "settled" the AGW question is.
It's not hard to Google for authoritative sources.
"Authoritative sources" means not blogs, not activist websites set up to propagandize one side or the other of the issue, it means any respected scientific body that existed before Climate Change ever became an issue, and which has issued an "Oh by the way here is our official statement on the subject". You'll find that most science academies on the planet have issued such a statement.
These odd surveys and polls of "scientists
You mean the supposed "scientists" at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the US National Academy of Sciences, the Joint Science Academies', the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Medical Association, the American Meteorological Society, the American Physical Society, the Geological Society of America, and on and on and on.
Here's one statement released by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and co-signed by the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and 13 others, which states in part:
Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver. These conclusions are based on multiple independent lines of evidence, and contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science.
I bolded that last part because I wanted to point out that "inconsistent with an objective assessment" and "inconsistent with... the vast body of peer-reviewed science" are overly polite phrases for "crackpot".
These odd surveys and polls of "scientists" claiming to "prove" this and that seem so artificial and so obviously manipulated.
The NASA website says "Consensus: 97% of climate scientists agree" and they provide three sources for that figure:
W. R. L. Anderegg, âoeExpert Credibility in Climate Change,â Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 107 No. 27, 12107-12109 (21 June 2010); DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1003187107.
P. T. Doran & M. K. Zimmerman, "Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," Eos Transactions American Geophysical Union Vol. 90 Issue 3 (2009), 22; DOI: 10.1029/2009EO030002.
N. Oreskes, âoeBeyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,â Science Vol. 306 no. 5702, p. 1686 (3 December 2004); DOI: 10.1126/science.1103618.
It's perfectly understandable for the general public to have the impression that there is raging scientific controversy over the issue. The TV news networks will take any issue and apply the asinine technique of grabbing one person for each side and presenting them as if they are equally credible and represent equal positions. And there's massive propaganda being funded by the fossil fuel industry. And politicians have latched onto this as a partisan issue, with almost half of them making claims for each side of the issue. There is a public controversy, and there is a wide public perception of there being a raging scientific controversy. However if you look at the statement from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and from virtually every other National Academy of Science, and dismiss them, they are heading deep into conspiracy theory territory. And if you specifically look at the NASA page and their 97% figure backed up by three sources, and if you continue to put "scientist" in quotes and continue to put "prove" in quotes and di
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Argh! The trouble with asking questions about global warming is that people assume you are promoting an anti-AGW agenda. The most common response to questions is the equivalent to "4 out of 5 'doctors' recommend...". How can you doubt with such numbers? Yeah, well, that's not answers. That's "trust us and shut up".
Just asking questions is, apparently, to align myself with "crackpots" and "junk science". Asking questions is unacceptable. If I want to avoid "looking stupid" I'd better just quietly accept what we're told and don't, ever, go looking for more information. Oh, the horror! I might run into "crackpots"! Obviously, if I'm the type of person who actually asks questions, I'm too stupid to recognize "crackpots" when I run into them.
Well, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.
It only amounts to one side adopting the other sides tricks and using them effectively for the first time.
Wait. Which side is doing this for the first time? Are you accusing George Soros of copying the Koch brothers?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
120 million is a medicine dropper in the Ocean of Bribery that is the new government/educational complex.
The plain truth is that climate research has been all but destroyed by greed, as is clearly evidenced by the number of so called "scientific" studies coming out of both sides that later turn out to have falsified data, omitted data that didn't fit, and drawn conclusions based on what the funding folks wanted
What we have actually learned from the last twenty years of climate "science" is that money corrupts science in ways nobody expected, and if we didn't realize this already, whenever there is a lot of money involved, the most greedy reap the largest rewards at the expense of all of us. We've also learned that when you mix emotional rhetoric with science, plenty of people forget all about science completely (witness the comments here as absolute proof).
Follow the money trail...
Murphy was an optimist
The trouble with asking questions about global warming is...
Just asking questions is, apparently, to align myself with "crackpots" and "junk science". Asking questions is unacceptable.
No, you were not "asking questions".
I checked back through all of the parent posts looking for question marks in your posts. You made many statements, many of which were explicitly or implicitly supportive of the denialist conspiracy theory position. The only time you used questions marks were in rhetorical questions, none of which were seeking answers to understand AGW or whether it was real.
There are two reasonable levels on which someone can approach something like this. One level is a desire to directly understand a subject well enough to directly understand what is true and why. Whether it is AGW, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Evolution, on anything else, questions seeking to understand the evidence and science are always welcome. I do not recall you asking any questions of this sort. Nonetheless, my previous post provided a basic answer to this sort of question - I explained the basic physics effect proving the AGW effect was an undeniable reality. I then noted that questions on the size of the effect and predictions into the future were more complicated (beyond the scope of my reply), and I implicitly indicated that scientists did possess answers to any questions on those more complicated aspects.
The second reasonable level to approach something like this, is to rely on respectable experts in a subject when one does not have the time, interest, or expertise to directly study a subject. If one is not interested in taking several years of medical school or understanding immunology or studying the methods and results of specific medical research studies, it is necessary and appropriate to believe the American Medical Association when they state that the Flue vaccine is safe and 99% effective in preventing you from getting the flu. If one is not interested in studying physics, then it is appropriate to rely on the expertise of professional physicists regarding Relativity. I do not recall you asking any questions seeking to take this approach. In fact what I recall is you making a statement "I don't trust or support either side". Nonetheless, I interpreted that statements potentially implying a reasonable question and reasonable attempt to take this approach. I provided information and links establishing the expert scientific position by any reasonable standard. *If* that is what you were looking for, *if* that is what you were trying to ask, then great I answered it. However *if* you are going to stick with "I don't trust... either side", *if* you are going to go with "I actively distrust the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Medical Association, the American Meteorological Society, the American Physical Society, the Geological Society of America, and even NASA", then I say that is conspiracy-theoryism.
You feel you're being attacked for asking questions. Well, ask a question. If you are seeking to discover whether reliable experts say AGW is real, or seeking to learn to what extent there is a genuine scientific controversy between experts, I think I already answered that but I will happy answer related questions in that direction. If you are seeking to directly understand the science involved, I already explained the basic principal establishing that AGW is undeniably real, I will happily answer questions on much of the general science involved and some aspects of the detailed science, but in many detailed aspects of the science I may have to point you to other sources for the answers.
There is a big difference between questions or reasonable-argument and conspiracy-theory-based active denialism. You have basically been complaining that some people have been told to "shu
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
You are absolutely correct. I didn't ask questions. I should have written more accurately that "when anyone questions any part of the Climate Change theory, some people attack rather than answer..." or other like wording. Never mind, this thread has gone long past its "sell by" date.
Your problem is denial of reality Milton, or perhaps incredibly poor reading comprehension. Let me put it simply, you have not put forward one fact that could be used to debate the science. Why because there are none, zero. Sill you try and say there is a debate, but never present anything that factually contradicts AGW. It seems you are one of those "The facts whilst interesting are irrelevant" types.
LOL! Reading comprehension isn't your strong suit, is it? I never "denied" anything about "Climate Change". Ever. I never presented any anti-Climate Change facts because that isn't my position and wasn't my point.
Ah, never mind. I don't think you can accept the idea that just asking questions about AGW might not be a crime.
OK, Here's the Deal--We're Rich--and our job is to get RICHER!
We can't do that if we're getting all gushy about something that's gonna happen 20 years after we're dead!
If you're not rich, you're SUPPOSED to be EITHER one of our barely paid slaves or our (NOT RICH but) Well off Customers--so, like Climate Change ain't your concern, Either.
Now, it's time for EVERYBODY to get back to work.
SLAVES! Get back to work making shit for us to sell or you won't get your rice and cabbage water this week!
CUSTOMERS! Buy the shit we're making and quit bitching about Commie-pinko shit like Pollution, Climate Change, or Labor Practices. THat ain't your part of the deal.
OK!
Oh my, you don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about, do you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence#.22You_can.27t_prove_a_negative.22
The phrase "You can't prove a negative" is a quip that is meant to express the more formally correct "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". It does not mean that any statement with "no" or "wrong" cannot be argued in favor of; that would be silly because all statements can be expressed as the negative of another statement. What it does mean is that, if there would be no data on anthropogenic climate change, then that absence of data can not be taken for evidence that anthropogenic climate change does not exist (and neither that it does exist). However, there happens to exist quite a large body of data, and it happens to speak in favor of anthropogenic global warming. So the only thing the climate change denialists can do is pound the evidence ("prove us wrong" indeed). That's what they are trying to do, but from a scientific point of view, they've never been able to make a dent. The public opinion point of view is a different matter; as you just demonstrated, ignorant people can be told just about anything. Scientifically spoken, there is no controversy.