Slashdot Mirror
Another Climate-Change Retraction
jamie writes "It seems every time someone twists global-warming science into 'good news,' a retraction is soon to follow, and so it must be for Slashdot. Yesterday, the conservative Wall Street Journal published yet another apologetic claiming 'the overall effect of climate change will be positive,' by someone who (of course) is not a climate scientist. Today, Climate Progress debunks the piece, noting 'Ridley and the WSJ cite the University of Illinois paper to supposedly prove that warming this century will be under 2C — when the author has already explained to them that his research shows the exact opposite!' We went through this same process last year, with the same author and the same paper, so it's pretty embarrassing that he 'makes a nearly identical blunder' all over again."
Anything to keep you from looking at the root cause of the problem. Pollution, waste, dumping, strip farming/mining, and so on and so on are never discussed. Problems that we see like the great pacific garbage dump are ignored, as are ocean dead zones and polluted water.
I don't believe 99% of what is paid to be published, because, well hell look who is paying for the media spin? The same people pushing more and more pollution in most cases.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
"Whoops! I meant to make the same argument with a *different* paper!"
He also admits, he doesn't know what the heck he's talking about:
"my objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have."
http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2151
He's not an expert on the current science. Taking his advice is like asking a guy who wrote COBOL in the 60's about something like open stack.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Relevant: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174
Black lie is what I call it. These scum knew what they were doing. They've been told, repeatedly, that they are wrong and why they are wrong, and they just dismiss and ignore everything and say those lies again anyway. They were printing propaganda. Throwing raw meat to the conservatives. That's all the WSJ's opinion section has been since Murdoch bought it.
It's like the black knight skit in Quest for the Holy Grail. "It's only a flesh wound" and "The earth has had worse." Won't quit fighting even after his legs have been cut out from under him.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
He's a physicist, not a climatologist. He certainly would be better in some respects at assessing the models, but nowhere near as competent as, oh, I dunno, a climatologist. On the flipside, if a climatologist starts making grand declarations about quantum electroydnamics, I'm sure I'd be turning to Dyson for a rebuttal.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Forbes WSJ FoxNews and of course all of wright wing talk/hate radio, and others , consistently misrepresent the facts of climate science, what climate scientists are saying and how climate modeling is done.
Either they're, for reasons unknown, persistent and unlucky victims of poor reporting, poor analysis and mistaken inference or there is a persistent and deliberate determination on their parts to knowingly and with malice of forethought lie about climate science to the American , British Australian and European public.
If it turns out it's the latter, we can ask some interesting questions., Since persuading people that climate change is not as the scientists represent it -a ticking time bomb we are running out of time to defuse and one whose consequences include the mass death of humans, is lying about climate science not the equivalent to shouting (no) fire in a crowded (and burning) theater?
If it is, then are they not already criminals and are they not already responsible for those deaths? I think this is called "manslaughter" and when the number of people you caused to die numbers into the millions, I think that's elevated to "crimes against humanity".
Of course the US will never go there, but what about other nations? Hasn't the US demonstrated that people who threaten Americans are subject to executive action irrespective of where they are or whether the host nation is inclined to turn them over?
Could China or Japan or Germany or Russia or any other country just legally and unilaterally decide that say, David and Charles Koch represent too much of a threat to human civilization to permit them to go on living? Would they be within their legal right to quietly see to it that the perps are silently and quietly and discretely brought to final justice?
And what about the money these organization make from their climate denialism? Isn't that money, even if it's been dispersed to their heirs and partners actually. ill-gotten gains and subject to something like international civil forfeiture? The money to cover the catastrophically high cost of attempting to turn back climate change at the last possible moment has to be extracted from someone.
Obviously this is all beyond the pale for the current times, but time change and when they change, attitudes change, often suddenly and dramatically. What was just an amusing thought experiment one day becomes harsh reality another.
Laws exist to make society livable. They are defined according and in reaction to the environment. If that environment changes dramatically, then we can expect that near future generations of people will look back see the times we are living in now quite differently than we do, just the way we look back on slavery as an abomination or the post WWII generation of Germans were completely appalled at what their parents had done.
The bottom line is that lying works when you are dealing with low-information people.
Table-ized A.I.
It is, in fact, many of the same people who helped obscure the underlying science in both cases. Nicely documented by historians Naomi Oreskes and Naomi Oresekes in Merchants of Doubt.
Twice means is purposeful.
Your right, we SHOULD be listening to the people pushing for more taxes for the government instead, because they OBVIOUSLY have your best interest in mind.
Have you got a solution that doesn't involve regulation?
What is being said here seems to be "I don't like the solutions that I think will be imposed, so therefore I will vehemently argue that the problem doesn't exist, or if it exists that it's not as bad as projected."
The logical fallacy of that should be obviously: whether a particular solution is right or wrong has no logical bearing on whether the science-- that human-generated carbon dioxide contributes to temperature according to well-known models-- is correct.
If you don't like the solution, perhaps you should work on figure out a proposal for a solution that is acceptable, rather than denying the science is right.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
And. "But, but, but Feel Better Inside." is not an argument I care to hear.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Have you actually read the IPCC working-group 1 report, The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change. I don't mean, a summary of it ... Have you actually read the report?
I beg to differ. Even reading the Summary could be greatly beneficial for many of the victims of the disinformation campaign. The full WG1 report is a lot of reading. There's an overwhelming amount of science to get through and expecting non-specialists to tough it out is not entirely realistic. That, after all, is why the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) exists.
And the advantage is that on any area of science where you want to get your hands dirty, you can navigate from the SPM, into the the appropriate place of the Full Report proper and via the citations to the original publications in the scientific literature.
And on that point, don't waste your time right now reading the AR4 report. The AR5 report is due for release from the 27th of this month, starting with the SPM, from here.
And the SPM makes it so easy for non-specialists to get a handle on the science, it's simply unforgivable for anyone who presumes to venture an opinion on this issue not to have digested it.
The word was used properly. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an apologetic for climate-change denial—a defense of their previous statements. Today, Climate Progress debunked that apologetic.
There has been no apology.
Words are important.
One of these days I really hope they'll add a "I'm an idiot and want to indicate that I no longer stand by this comment" button here on Slashdot, since this is one of those moments for me. I stand corrected, and with good reason, since I was apparently just skimming the summary. Honestly and sincerely, thank you for calling me out on not reading it properly, since I definitely deserved to be called out on it. :)