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Swedish Farmers Have Doubts About Climatologists and Climate Change
cold fjord (826450) writes with this excerpt from ScienceNordic: Researchers the world over almost unanimously agree that our climate is changing ... But many farmers – at least Swedish ones – have experienced mild winters and shifting weather before and are hesitant about trusting the scientists. The researcher who discovered the degree of scepticism among farmers was surprised by her findings. Therese Asplund ... was initially looking into how agricultural magazines covered climate change. Asplund found after studying ten years of issues of the two agricultural sector periodicals ATL and Land Lantbruk that they present climate change as scientifically confirmed, a real problem. But her research took an unexpected direction when she started interviewing farmers in focus groups about climate issues. Asplund had prepared a long list of questions about how the farmers live with the threat of climate change and what they plan to do to cope with the subsequent climate challenges. The conversations took a different course: "They explained that they didn't quite believe in climate changes," she says. "Or at least that these are not triggered by human activities."
(Original paper here.)
...don't believe in Global Warming
Film at 11.
There's alot of ppl. who don't believe in climate change (or its cause). I doubt Swedish farmers are the only group so I wonder why they are newsworthy while the groups are not?
I'd be more concerned about politicians and corporations that deny climate change.
Strange study.
libtards are so stupid they observe how blacks run black nations and black cities like detroit - go move there i dare you!. they see how blacks are a net drain on society with crime and welfare. they see how blacks contribute so very little new inventions and science compared to whites and asians. then they somehow conclude blacks are equals. they can perform the mental gymnastics to convince themselves of anything!
libtards are so stupid they know the gov't lies to everybody all the time and is run by the worst most crooked kind of ppl. then they want gov't to have more control over everything. now its health care. tomorrow itll be something else. they can perform the mental gymnastics to convince themselves of anything!
libtards are so insecure they cant STAND anybody who disagrees with them. you don't just disagree with a libtard. you commit SACRILEGE! how DARE YOU question our global warming err sorry climate change narrative! HERETIC!
Repeat that after me, Mr. Fjord.
It is expected that there will be areas of happy, mild weather in any scenario you care to imagine. It is to be expected that a bunch of locals in regions suffering from happy, mild weather might not be as concerned about the issue as someone who had their house wiped out by a tornado.
But it the concerns and insights of either set of persons would be irrelevant to the discussion of GLOBAL climate change (hint, the word that is BOLDED is important).
Climate in not weather. Weather is not climate.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
How many times do we have to perform this sequence before everyone realises it's a one-way process?
Anecdotally, I don't believe the Earth revolves around the sun and YOU CAN'T MAKE ME.
That doesn't mean it's not the case, that I'm qualified to research or understand the model or that my opinion holds ANY weight whatsoever.
What it means is that on some topics, the "majority opinion" doesn't really have much bearing on the facts of the matter - and thus "Democratic" approaches to dealing with problems that are important but beyond the scope/scale of one person or group's anecdotal experiences probably won't be successful without education.
Should we listen to what they have to say? Absolutely. With that grain of salt handy, absolutely. They aren't 99% of the world's climatologists.
"Researchers the world over almost unanimously agree that our climate is changing" if this was true, there would be no climate deniers, we would all agree. Record polar ice this year :)
A fact means the models should match the observed results, I am not a denier, I Am a fence sitter, when models don't dramatically fail, I will be no longer on the fence.
Shall we burn people at the stake for not believing the religion ?
Farmers who haven't read up on climate change state that mild winters, on their own, aren't sufficient evidence for climate change.
We can safely discard decades of satellite data and trends on global weather and climate, and the analysis of all climatologists all around the world, because a few carefully choosen farmers in sweden think that it is not happening.
Farmers also spend a lot of time outdoors, unlike researchers, and have a better idea of how minor human effects are.
n/t
Some academic with a model in an ivory tower with a million dollar grant or the lyin' eyes of a farmer who spends his life outside dealing with the real climate?
Maps showing anomalies for summer heat in the paper "Perception of climate change" by Hansen et al. show Sweden as having led a charmed existence so far. http://www.pnas.org/content/10...
The US Northwest and Mid-Atlantic, A region around the Urals and China have been fortunate thus far as well.
They want to make Scandinavia the breadbasket of Europe.
Check the data, satellite data shows no warming for the past almost 18 years, despite a time when 25% of all human CO2 has been emitted.
Hmm, something wrong with the models !
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/04/the-pause-continues-still-no-global-warming-for-17-years-9-months/
The surface temperature records are heavily manipulated to make the present warmer, and the past cooler to create a trend for political purposes. The satellite record is not so corrupted.
We do have a new pristine temperature series in the US, the CRN (climate reference network) with no flaky adjustments, but it is only 10 years old.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/07/noaa-shows-the-pause-in-the-u-s-surface-temperature-record-over-nearly-a-decade/
And guess what, it shows NO warming. Scroll down in the article, to see the graph. Of course 10 years is a short period, but again NO warming detected with our best monitoring system.
patiently watching reality always trumps agenda driven hysteria
meanwhile the IPCC has been furiously back pedaling on its more dire predictions since 2000
It's part of natural solar and planetary cycles. There is certainly not a unanimous agreement among the scientific community about whether or not man made CO2 has any substantial effect. The NIPCC produces reports to counter the IPCC reports using the very same scientific research reports that the IPCC uses, except they prove that the research has the opposite conclusion. I don't care that the Libertarian leaning Heartland Institute helped create the NIPCC reports because the UN and government agencies helped create the IPCC report which also have their own political agendas.
It's motivated reasoning: farmers are 'against' climate change, because the implications of it being true would force them to make difficult changes. Therefore they choose not to believe this fact.
Farmers are typically greedy and not very bright -- mostly due to a 'Dead Sea effect' of all the bright and motivated people leaving rural communities, leaving the genetic detritus behind.
Bjorn Lomborg Is Part Of The Koch Network — And Cashing In: http://thinkprogress.org/clima...
Got some smart farmers up there.....
The infection! It is spreading! Where is the Last Ship now?
Skoh!
So I went into the thesis.
There is NOTHING quantitative here. Department of Thematic Studies? WTF?
As far as I can tell this is a conclusion based on building castles in the air.
Little miss leading on that first line. Make it sound as if scientists all agree on man-made climate change, but in reality it just that everyone agrees that the climate is always changing ever since the beginning of time. How would these farmers ever even know that people think there is man made climate change if they are not told?
This "almost unanimously agree" was 10 years ago, ever sense there have been fewer and fewer scientists that agree with this because of all the falsified studies to push man-made climate change. As some politicians have said in the last few months, they said something like.. "Its fine to lie about it as long as it gets people to believe it".
The key is the last item in the article:
“This is a resistance to decrees which they think undermine competitive Swedish agricultural production,”
The researcher has probably never spent time on a farm. She apparently had a stereotype of farmers as victims of big industry helplessly struggling to live in harmony with nature in the face of changing climate. In real life farmers are industry - the agricultural industry. They work very hard to maintain a farm, a farm being something radically out of balance with nature. Unless the laws and 'free' 'trade' agreements change to alter their economic incentives, their focus will be on their immediate, short-term economic situation and whatever mythology is tied up with their understanding of those economics.
The telling part is "Or at least that these are not triggered by human activities." If the climate is changing, then the question of the cause is the first part of finding a solution, but the problem does not magically become less serious depending on who or what the cause is. Someone who goes off-topic about human activities is trying - poorly - to rationalize their denial.
And as we know, farmers are on the cutting edge of science.
I've never eaten any food from Sweden, other than a few candy fish. Is it logical for me to doubt the existence of Swedish agriculture based on it not affecting me (as far as I know)?
Climate changes. That's what it does. It doesn't remain at some optimum setting forever and ever. Farmers have continuously dealt with changing climate for millennia. Thus they don't see any reason to hyperventilate over a perfectly natural occurrence.
This is not to say that humans have no effect on climate. It just means people who deal with weather/climate on a daily/yearly basis and, indeed, depend on it for their livelihood, don't see any catastrophic changes happening. One might think that farmers in high latitudes would serve as a miner's canary but then what do I know?
She starts with claiming the researchers are almost unanimous. That's simply not true; more accurately, any who are not in agreement are drummed out of the committees. It's a selection problem, a bit like asking an lgbt studies group whether sexual orientation is nature or nurture. The farmers, though, play the long game. They see political fads come and go. If their families have been on these plots for just two centuries, they've seen parts of the Little Ice Age, the recovery from that and the Global Cooling hysteria of the late 1970s-early 1980s. If the researchers are wrong, they write follow-up papers and continue with their careers. But if the farmers make bad decisions, they lose their livelihoods and the historical homestead. The researchers may be right, but the farmers have more at stake and have a better long-term success rate.
And your posting this because there is any doubt, and we care what Swedish farmers think?
Reality distortions don't occur due to ignorance, or do they?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Random person trusts personal anecdotal evidence over well-researched science, is wrong. Fascinating.
"Our local weather trends haven't changed much, therefore the rest of the world isn't changing either."
Perfectly sound logic, why DO we listen to those pompous scientists anyway?
Another day, another Slashdot "We're going to force anthropocentric global warming down your throats!" post...
Once again the chicken littles are squawking,
Of course once again beginning by making a double fallacy, combining argumentum ad populum and argumentum ab auctoritate.
The one where the authorities of their secret sect of cargo cult science, only choose those novitiates that know how to sprinkly tea leaves over tree rings and determine the global climate from a plant that has moved at most a few inches, and how to use the magic trick of hiding the decline.
Because history proves that the best way for science to proceed is to push out all dissenting opinions.
OH and ignoring the opinions of a bunch of people whose very lively hood depends on the climate. Of course the high priests don't know what a lively hood is, living off of their tithes to recite their mystical incantations.
A couple of years ago I talked with a swedish meteorologist that explained me it's quite difficult to shame people in his country about their impact on global warming, because definitely when you spend a very large part of the year with few sunny hours and one meter of snow at your door stop, "a bit warmer" definitely doesn't sound this bad.
I expect this applies to Swedish farmers as well...
Herve S.
Why are lay folks so hung up on models?
The data has proven that our climate is warming. The models are just to see how that warming will affect the climate in certain parts of the World. The climatologist are trying to predict what will happen in the future and they are tweaking them. The funny thing is, many of their models were a little too conservative - in some areas, things are worse than they predicted.
It's unfortunate that the denier pundits (AM Talk Radio and Fox News - a foreign owned entity) use the models as an argument to discredit the facts. I have personally heard Sean Hannity use the "models are wrong" argument in an attempt to discredit global warming and the unsophisticated fall for it hook line and sinker.
The pundits are nothing but entertainers and their game is to scare their listeners (Oh no! The liberals are using Global Warming as an excuse to tax more!). They want their listeners to be too scared to not listen. They bend the truth, lie, and say anything to piss off and terrify their listeners off so they keep listening.
I'm always cynical whenever someone labels an issue "Conservative" or "Liberal" because whoever they may be, they are attempting to manipulate me.
Oh and here's another factoid: Cox family of Cox communications owns and makes millions of dollars off of those pundits. They donate heavily to the Democrats. Yeah, while your listening and boosting listeners, they are funneling money to the Democrats. Suckers.
So while I'm not ready to completely discount the stories of some Swedish "focus groups" (from the article), that anecdotal evidence would be balanced (overwhelmed? flooded? washed away? submerged?) by the experiences of tens of millions of rice farmers here in S.E. Asia (Mekong delta) who are literally seeing their future disappear before their eyes.
I think the rate of inundation by the ocean here (I live in Vietnam) is getting ridiculous, I frequently read in the local papers about KILOMETERS per year of rice paddies being lost to the sea; if not by direct submergence then by saltwater infiltration. I don't think there's a shadow of a doubt to these farmers that SOMETHING very bad is happening, though honestly I'm not sure if many of them have even heard of climate change.
Now of course there are a lot of other things going on that could be contributing to this. Overuse of groundwater, damming of the Mekong, improper irrigation; I'm not a climate scientist and I haven't screened out those effects (of course climate scientists who've looked at this closely have and they say the effect is real). But neither are those Swedes climate scientists so if their unprofessional opinion is that nothing out of the ordinary is going on, well I've got ten times (a hundred times? a thousand times?) more opinions here to counter that. Then again, there just might be some biases in listening more to white europeans as opposed to brown asians so maybe their opinions don't count. (I rarely if ever see any articles in Western media about the tremendous loss to agriculture that these farmers in the Mekong are facing; the rice basket to HUNDREDS of millions of people; nor do I see articles about the gloomy forecasts made by the governments here that in 20 years or so millions of people in cities like mine, saigon, will be flooded out).
If we get rid of all the farmers, not only will we have unity of ideas, but everyone will starve so we've solved anthropogenic global warming.
Of course, even at this point it may well take a long time for the existing effects to reverse, but we can rest easy in our graves. ;)
(Extreme tongue in cheek warning for the humorless bastards on both sides of this flamepit topic who'd take anything seriously no master how ridiculous.)
It amazes me how a small variation in the data can generate so much apparent controversy (or should I say non-intelligent repetitious shouting). Those of you posting with your ferver on this insignificant story betray how insecure you really are: if you knew you were right, a small number of doubters wouldn't matter to you.
These threads about global warming are quite entertaining. They provide very little reliable information and prove nothing. They do, however, instruct upon the methods used by propogandists. These threads are the Slashdot equivalent of television wrestling matches: they are designed to attract a certain kind of audience, and the outcome is known in advance. There's no true competition here that will result discovery of any truth.
So to those of you who are distributing the climate propoganda: make your deposit here in the porcelain bowl, and I'll be happy to pull the lever that produces that satisfying "glug-glug" after it swirls down.
The reason there is so much concurrence is all of the so called climate scientists were trained to think the same way and anyone who thinks differently is excluded. If you check with geologists, oceanographers, mechanical engineers (thermodynamics) and meteorologists you will find relatively few of them agree with the climatologists. The climate change establishment is spending as much time trying to discredit anyone who disagrees with them as they do on basic research.
Climate change is not local weather. Got it now? If not climb under the rock where you belong.
Here's a novel concept: The climate _is_ changing, but for NATURAL reasons. And a tip for the enviro-nazis: if you want to make a difference, go clean up China and Mexico. You're past the point of diminishing returns here. But those places are environmental hell-holes.
Sweden and some other northerly countries are probably situated in much better locations to observe minor climatic variations. A bit hotter probably doesn't mean much in the Midwest of the USA, where they already have long growing seasons. It means a lot where a few degrees can make the difference between sucess and failure of a crop and an entire society. And having such a sensitive indicator makes them better judges of past climate patterns.
Have gnu, will travel.
Feelings, instincts, personal experiences are NOT scientific proof.
This kind of crap shouldn't be posted on Slashdot. What a bunch of Swedish farmers think and feel has nothing to do with the cold hard science that has proven global warming is real.
Sometimes I feel Slashdot has degraded in the way Discovery channel has.
I'm old enough to remember the Food Pyramid and the groupthink 'science' that led to it. To say I'm suspicious of the current AGW craze is an understatement. Anytime contrarian scientific findings and theories are discounted out of hand, my BS detector blows a fuse. Take the politics out of current Climate Science and let's look at *all* the data and theories.
Organization? You must be joking..
Fortunately, in 10,000 to 20,000 years or so, the next ice age will arrive and the glaciers will wipe out climatologists and others alike.
I guess we Americans aren't the only stupid people in the world!
And as we know, farmers are on the cutting edge of science.
Many are, actually, because agricultural science is one area where the government both funds it very well (at least in the US) and there's a lot of work put into practical applications. (Some) farmers are using RTK GPS for tending their fields, robots equipped with vision processing to pick fruit (a piece of fruit's IR reflectivity is an excellent way to judge ripeness) and so on.
I know someone who owns a milk farm. He jokes he's got a "degree in dirt" - but what that means is that he spent four years learning about soil/nutrient management and how to most effectively use his family's most valuable resource.
Now, that said: these guys are idiots. We have more than a hundred thousand years of ice core samples showing climate data. Everything we're collecting now is far off the charts from everything else.
Please help metamoderate.
This must be slashdot, as nobody appears to have read TFW, or at least comprehended what was said there.
Just yet another small group relying on provincialist reasoning to deny the existence of something that vast majority of the world's experts agree, after carefully collating data collected on a truly global scale, does exist. Same ignorant denialist shit. Different day. If you substitute "Energy Industry Shill on Fox News" for "Swedish Farmers" would this even be news?
...agree that the human society will collapse in a few years as Climate Change brings the World's agriculture to a halt.
What do these farmers know? They're just deniers. Slashdot should allow NO denier propaganda to be published.
...don't understand how important it is to follow scientific fads.
-Styopa
It's a requirement if you are trying to get real work done, but not needed (actually much better off without) if you are just sucking in the grant money for producing politically correct results.
So this is no surprise in any way shape or form.
The earth does not care about the composition of the atmosphere. The presence of oxygen at its current percentage is not the "normal" state, a higher carbon dioxide level was "normal" millions of years ago. Go back billions of years and you will find that our oxygen rich atmosphere is the result of an organism that changed the global climate by emitting oxygen as a waste product.
Don't confuse what is normal for the human species, what we are evolved to expect, for what is normal for the "earth". Environmentalism is about saving humans not the earth.
Now it is finally being reported that NOAA changed the temperature data since the 30's because it didn't fit the global warming hoax!
When will you dupes finally admit that you've been lied to?
Well, if the Gulf Stream ceases to exist due to the changes (which has been considered a couple of times), the Swedes won't be all that glad I guess. Siberia will look like a warm and cozy place in comparison. Rome will be a bit colder than New York.
Now we know what is the level of scientific literacy of deniers: FARMER LEVEL.
Obama Declares War On Sweden
Climate change is happening and nothing is going to stop it. The thing is, nobody is willing to make sacrifices to stop human-made climate change. Essentially we will have to cease being such zealous consumers of resources. That 's never going happen generally because very few people are willing to:
Give up your cars, including hybrids and electricals. Those may be low or zero-emission vehicles, but the factory where they were build isn't.
Cancel your annual flight down south each winter.
Give up your 300W 50" LCD TV, 100W/channel 7-speaker amplifier, and the rest of their electronic gadgets that soak up coal-plant produced electricity.
Endorse nuclear energy and be willing to allow reactors to be build nearby your homes.
Be willing to wait an extra week for your courier packages to get shipped by rail instead of fuel-guzzling trucks.
Give up tropical fruits & vegetables in winter months to cut down on the trucks (thus emissions) needed to ship those items up north from the tropics. Do you really need watermelon in January when it's -25C outside?
Get rid of your lawn so you no longer need to fertilize it. The nitrogen fixation process uses a ridiculous amount of energy, which likely comes from coal plants.
The point of this comment is that (if) climate change, sea level increase, melting glaciers & polar ice caps, etc. are caused by human activities, then we humans are going to have stop doing many of things that we normally take for granted in our high standard of living lifestyles. How many of us are willing to make these changes? I bet very few.
Very well replied. Now I think imminent changes in the Gulf Stream are more difficult to actually check Comparing this to the remark above (some more warm days will make or kill the growing season), we are facing a hard time...
Herve S.
Even some of the more extreme estimates of the amount of temperature change expected just mean, to a farmer, that his great grandsons might do better if they switch to crops that are currently grown a couple hundred miles closer to the equator or a couple hundred feet lower on the hillside. (Something like they did during the Medieval Warm Period, when Iceland had lots more cropland and grapes were grown on a large scale in Britain.)
So even if you convince them that global warming is real, don't expect anything but a cheer from the farmers of Sweden.
There are a lot of steps between "It looks like the average temperature might go up four or five degrees C in the next couple centuries." to "We must take drastic action RIGHT NOW to AVERT DISASTER!". Like figuring out whether such a temperature rise is really a threat - or might even be a boon. We're still working on "Is it real?"
Except, of course, for politicians, who can use that last claim to increase their power, or (like Al Gore) make billions off a "carbon credit exchange" built on anti-global-warming legislation.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A hundred thousand years of ice core samples? Don't scientists claim the earth is over 2 billion years old? I don't doubt the earth is getting warmer and undoubtably man has contributed to that warming. How much contribution may be debatable but what is not debatable is that the earth has been far hotter than it is now. The problem is that we have a group of people who have made up their minds that humanity is destroying the world's climate and that this must be stopped at all costs and they are willing to go to any length whatsoever to further their aims. There is another group that is more afraid of these people than they are of the average global temperature climbing another 10 degrees farenheit in the next century. The first threat is here now and drastic while the second threat is mostly in the future and gradual. The strident howling and shrieking of the climate change gurus is more feared by many than climate change itself.
Why trust the CRN above other sources? All the data manipulation I have seen has been valid and is to do with different methodologies and sources. In fact if you don't do this you end up with invalid results.
(There is probably some data manipulation somewhere that is improper though, just through chance)
Wow. That's certainly an ignorant and elitist statement.
No food for you!
The strident howling and shrieking of the climate change gurus is more feared by many than climate change itself.
I'd take that as a warning sign as to a persons ability to asses threat accurately.
we kind of like the longer growing season. Please don't do anything that would shorten it.
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
farmers the world over have been amongst the most skeptical of the whole thing because they have weather and climate records that go back hundreds of years.
People seem to forget that farmers were the first climatologists. And to this day, the most accurate predictions about the weather and climate changes actually come from the agro sector.
Silly publications like the Old Farmer's Almanac consistently out predict the pHDs and super computers of climate academia.
example:
http://news.investors.com/ibd-...
Now, does that mean global warming isn't real? No... but it does mean that farmers especially feel they understand the climate at least as well as anyone else... and they're therefore less inclined to accept the opinion of experts without more information. And that information has to be in line with their existing information... which as cited... remains at least as accurate in its ability to predict the future as anyone else... if not a great deal more accurate.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
... Swedish farmers do not understand climate science as well as scientists do. In other news, water is wet, grass is green and your dog wants steak.
Perhaps what you're failing to understand is that Global Warming is good. It will lead to gentler winters, more arable land in the polar regions, longer growing seasons, our being able to grow crops that we couldn't grow before, the opening up of vast territories to both wildlife and agriculture. The fact of the matter is that in the past the periods of warming are when life bloomed and species diversity expanded greatly.
Global Warming is good news. You want bad news? Toxic pollution - that's bad news. Global Cooling - e.g., a new ice age - that's bad news. But warming is good. The reality is the world used to be a lot warmer than it is now and it was a better place. That real science, not politically correct greenwash.
Noisy climate change dilettantes have set themselves up for this problem because every time they point at some individual extreme weather event and claim it is evidence of climate change they open the door to the reverse argument when the day to day weather really has little significance in regard to long term global temperature trends. That is the problem with throwing bullshit around, it gets everywhere, even on yourself.
I live in a farming community in Australia and have farmers volunteering to me they think everything is normal and fine *locally* so *global* warming is bullshit, apparently. And they vote accordingly.
The RSS record shows some cooling in the past 18 years but they're using an old satellite whose orbit is decaying and there are questions about how accurate that record is. The MSU satellite record and all of the surface temperature records still show warming.
Regarding the surface temperature records even if you use the raw data without any adjustments they still show warming.
Finally the US surface temperature record only covers ~3% of the globe. A minor factor in the whole picture.
"And as we know, farmers are on the cutting edge of science."
Actually, we are. Historically a lot of scientists were farmers.
Exactly. Warmer would be appreciated. Warmer is nice for those of us living in the north country. Please come farm through our -45ÂF winters and then pretty soon you'll appreciate a 10ÂF or 20ÂF rise in temperatures. Balmy.
Some of you are confused, very confused. I believe in global warming, I'm for it. I'm pro-warming. I'm pro-climate change. The best of times have been when our planet was warmer. Life and biodiversity flourished. The worst of times were during global cooling, the ice ages. Move north and get some perspective on this. Or just study geological history. Science rules.
What is Sweden?
Point out anything counter to the politically-correct paradigm on global warming. B-)
Religious zealots are more than happy to abuse the moderation system to suppress discussion threads when they begin to question any aspect of their religion.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Swedish farmers dont believe the climate scientists and all of the climate science evidence that has been collected and analysed.
Well, it was fun guys, but all the climate scientists the world over now need to pack their things, close everything down and start looking for a new career. Climate Science is now officially dead and wrong.
The Swedish farmers have spoken.
So what? This is /.; not Drudge.
WTF? Can this nonsense get any more ridiculous? Do they mean 'catastrophic man-made global warming'? Of course they do - but now they won't SAY it, so that they can say "We didn't mean catastrophic man-made global warming, see? We said 'climate change'."
What a bunch of duplicitous turds and useful idiots these fucks are, who promote and/or believe in this 'global warming' nonsense.
Just /. trolling for "news" to get people blabbing.
Not worth my time; but somebody could write up a similar thing talking about immunizations and parents of Autistic children...
They have Autistic children so they must consistently out perform pHDs on things their children (or the pregnant mother) did during their development.
Too bad the internet wasn't 20 years younger so I could have experienced all this BS with the fight over smoking causing cancer.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Where's the evidence for global warming?
Real scientists don't make assumptions by measuring the current data point 100,000 times and giving it equal weighting. Of course, when I went to school Earth Science wasn't a real science compared to biology, Chemistry and Physics. But as it turns out, it's all the "science" you morons could handle and was the only one you even attended. Here's my prediction, there's another ice age coming, and since stupidity has survival factor, you less idiotic descendents will be burning all the coal they can dig out of the ice. Please STFU.
Actually... successful farmers do need to keep up with the latest and greatest and evaluate cost/benefit of those advances. I really hate that people think that farmers are idiots. The ones that are, went out of business years ago.
At this point there's probably very little we can do to reverse the course of climate change no matter who believes or doesn't believe.
Given I expect it will be very hard to be a farmer over the next 50 years or so, it really is for the best that the farmers cover their ears and sing "lalalalalala, I can't hear you.".
We need them to keep trying to grow food, so we have something to eat... If they need to believe "everything is okay" to stay in the game, fine by me.
This silly article continues the trend of acting as though people's "beliefs" are significant when it comes to questions about the physical world. I actually won't argue here whether climate change is human-caused or not, or even whether it is occurring. But it should be obvious to everybody that whatever the answers are, people's "beliefs" are completely irrelevant. "Reality is the stuff that can still hurt you even if you don't believe in it." - paraphrasing Philip K. Dick.
Yes, the trend is the same throughout the "western world" ... the people who live in the big cities are left-wing and all fall in-line supporting AGW while fearing the whole planet has become as screwed-up as their metropolitan dumps, and the people who live in rural areas are more right-wing, tend to not believe in AGW, and know that vast portions of the world are green and healthy and populated with plants and animals.
This is a sign of extreme mental disorder and poor education - but in the opposite direction you liberals think. You guys who live in totally fake environments of concrete, steel, and glass where you've paved everything over and you jam yourseleves and your kids into huge monolithic indoctrination centers are the ones who are totally diconnected from the Earth. You think the world is running out of trees and animals because you have stupidly eliminated YOURS. You think the world is getting hotter because you have stupidly created urban "heat islands" (the temps are higher in your big cities where you place more and more climate monitoring systems). You guys in your big cities whine about the fate of wild critters like wolves and polar bears... but you have no contact with any of these species except at your cramped artificial zoos. You concern yourselves with the demand that many thousands of miles of the west be preserved in its natural state, but you cannot be bothered to tear-down a few dozen sky scrapers and return THAT land to its wild "pristine" state. Tell me, do ANY of you people in the big cities have even the level of competence of a CHILD from the 1800's? If your power, gas, and water went out for a week could you SURVIVE? How many of you super-geniuses in the metropolitan areas answer questions like "where does drinking water come from?", "where does hamburger come from?", and "where does electricity come from?" with "the faucet", "the store", and "the wall outlet"????? People who live in rural areas are quite aware of weather AND climate and have proven to be far superior as stewards of the Earth... we've not eliminate OUR trees, or OUR wild animals the way you have. Before you rant about the ignorant hicks in rural areas, prove your "superiority" by cleaning up YOUR messes. Get the percent of YOUR land that's covered in green vegitation and open to wild animals to be at least half the percentage that rural folks have. Get your populations of wild roaming animals up to HALF the levels of rural people before you whine about our hunting.
The ignorance is ENTIRELY focused in the big cities. THAT is where people think a "computer model" is a better indicator of the weather/climate than the actual weather one encounters when one STEPS OUTSIDE and spends a few hours outdoors doing productive work. It's easy to fool big city people into thinking the whole planet is being paved-over and de-forested because that's what they see when they look out the window at their paved-over and de-forested cities. People who live in places where there's not another person within 50 miles, and there are more trees growing than at any other time in their lives, have an entirely different experience. The current generation of computer models are only convincing to people so unfamiliar with actual weather and actual climate that they have not noticed the models cannot even explain current or past weather/climate.
Reducing CO2 actually HARMS plant life, which NEEDS CO2 to live.
Oh, and the advocates for all this environmentalism NEVER apply it to themselves. Time to plow-under Manhattan and return that island to nature... it was once a wooded island home to lots of wild life and the rivers that straddle it USED to be clean. Time to make each and every state in the north-east quarter of the country preserve at least the same percent of "open space" as western states like Nevada and Alaska. Two-thirds of all the land (particularly including the cities) in those states should be ripped-up and re-planted as national park lands - put off-limits for average people to use in any way other than for the occasional camping trip. If parts of Colorado must be kept as they were in 1700, then so too should places like Boston and Philadelphia.
Why NOT? What could possibly be wrong with the cleaner air and water and increased "biodiversity" that would result???? This argument you made works quite well against you. Whatever YOU do for a living and however and wherever YOU live.... surely the planet would be better if that ended and was replaced by "greener" stuff.
It has been considered yes, but it can't really happen.
The current exist because of the temperature difference. What would happen isn't really that the Gulf stream stops but rather it would change direction. (And not going through the Gulf. Instead a stream would flow up from the coast of Africa up past Britain and even out the temperature to the Northern sea.
New York would be a lot colder and London would be a lot warmer but Scandinavia will probably not notice it that much.
There are a lot of people on this rock that do believe in a kind of supernatural being.
There are a lof of people who don't.
Who cares about beliefs ?
Besides how global is Sweden ? As in Global Warming.
We are not working on "is it real". You clearly don't know much about this.
Most commenters above consider farmers to be to simple to understand the bigger picture. It is worse.... Lot's of them are smart entrepreneurs in a business that is run in a way that pollutes the environment big time. Lot's and lot's of chemicals are being used. They have a business model that does not work with considering the environment. So they are skeptical about everything environmental. I know quiet a couple of farmers, most don't farm biological/ecological and they don't want to hear about it, don't want to know what is wrong with their work (and how it can damage them and their own families) and they don't even want to talk to any bio-farmer. So they are not going along with the climate change reasoning either. Just deny everything and don't change your life. That is the mindset. Now, the bio-farmers (who once where "normal" farmers) have a completely different mindset and do admit that how they used to farm was wrong (and how they realy realy didnt like bio-farmers). They will agree with climate change being a very very serious risk. As a farmer you choose side and stick to (the views) of the group you belong to.....
The hippiest liberalist place on earth has no room for them. Kick them out.
People seem to always mistake weather (ie what happens every day, or even over weeks or months) for climate, which is more like an average.
Think of a desert - here, the Sonoran Desert (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_average_temperature_in_Arizona) - the average temperature over a year is 22.5 Centigrade, if one simply takes the day and night temperatures for each month, add them up and divide by 24; 22.5C is really quite pleasant. So why is it so damned hot there in July? Who's lying?
The future threats are not going to be gradual. The very fact you claim that as gospel truth shows you really don't have a good grasp of the science. If you fear people calling attention to a problem more than the problem itself, you are not operating in the realms of reason.
Earth has been very much warmer than it is now, but there were no humans around. If it gets hotter and keeps hotter, there also will be no, or at the very best far fewer, humans around. That's the problem.
Francis Galton modernised Eugenics Karl Pearson the Statistician was an advocate as was Winston Churchill. Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, H. G. Wells, Norman Haire, Havelock Ellis, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Robert Andrews Millikan, Linus Pauling and Sidney Webb.
KKKKKKHHHHHHAAAAANNNN!!!!!! proved its worth during the Genetic wars at the end of the 20th Century so you must accept Anthropogenic Climate Global Change Warming, like Manbearpig, is real.
Yours cerealousy,
Al Gore, Nobel Laureate
Haven't RTFA, but...
i) If one is ignorant of current scientific findings, a rational person might conclude that current mild winters are not evidence of longer-term climate change.
ii) If one is ignorant about the scientific method, a rational person might conclude that conclusion i) is evidence for the proposition that that longer-term climate change does not exist.
iii) But regardless of one's awareness of how science works, no rational person could conclude ("at least" as is stated at the end of the summary) that mild winters are evidence that climate change is not caused by human activity.
iv) A rational person, regardless of that person's awareness or ignorance of science, would logically conclude that a person who does affirm conclusion iii) is motivated by a political agenda, or by a simple unwillingness to accept inconvenient truths.
It's interesting. If I ask what role the clouds seeded by those CO2 spewing jets play, I'm a 'denier' or some other ugly, borderline grammatical term. When I try to find what role water vapor plays as a greenhouse gas, it appears to be a factor.
I remember a NASA study that said global cloud cover had increased significantly in the jet age from contrails seeding clouds. If I recall, it was something like 10%, and that was a few decades ago.
"Everybody" who's anybody, the same crowd who warned in the 70's of the coming ice age, says global warming or climate change or whatever you want to call it is caused by CO2.
I remember getting a bad headache from rum and coke, so I switched to bourbon and coke and still got a bad headache. So I swore off coke. But I digress. Is there one, overriding, trace gas determinant in our complex environment, or are other forces at work?
By 'trace gas' I mean an atmospheric component that must be a somewhat rare molecule to find. There is more argon in the atmosphere than CO2.
And yes, I'll admit political conservatism in an independent sort of way. Which means, unlike Al Gore, I have no stake in carbon taxation.
And it's not carbon control we may need, it's carbon dioxide control. Diamonds aren't causing global anything.
I feel dumber for having read your post.
In the '70s we were running low on gasoline due to an oil embargo from the middle east, not because oil was running out and we were "just months away from pumping that last barrel from the ground." You're somehow confusing the oil embargo with the later notion that we may be running out of oil. Which isn't to say that oil is not out there under the ground, but rather that the easily extractable oil has already been tapped into. You can still get at the rest of the oil, but it will increasingly cost more money to do so. That isn't a problem as long as the price of oil keeps going up, making it cost effective. Although there is the additional issue that at some point it will cost more energy to extract the oil than you get out of it. Already the tar sands in Canada are near that point.
As for the stupid alarm that we're going into another ice age, that was simply an article in Time magazine--hardly a peer reviewed journal. Not to mention there was no consensus among 97% of climate scientists that we were in danger of doing so. But you make it sound like it was some big movement that all the scientists were behind and then poof! Forty years later don't those folks look like a fool.
Taking action against global can save you money, not cost money. Sure, carbon credit programs will cost a couple of bucks, but you can save a ton of money by simply using less gas and electricity. With a little insulation in the shack, turn the thermostat up a little in the summer and down a little in the winter my gas bill is 1/3 what it used to be a few years ago and my electric bill is 1/4 to 1/5 what my neighbors' bills are. The house is still comfortable and my lifestyle has not radically changed.
But if you want to be a tool for the energy companies, but all means keep on keepin' on.
The U.S. Midwest pretty much blows chunks too. We're dealing with record rainfall here because the jet stream has stalled out and is dumping buckets o' wet stuff on us. The Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers are at flood stage and it doesn't look like they're going to get back to normal any time soon.
99% of the world's climatologists have degrees in global warming and climate change taught by professors with the same degrees. Very few of them have ever been exposed to theories that do not revolve around evil man and his nasty industry. I simply ask them to reveal their bias and accept that I live on this planet too.
Of course the planet has been much hotter than it is now. The problem is that we have a large civilization that is adapted to a climate that's been varying within limits for thousands of years, and is getting outside those limits. The planet will survive. The biosphere will survive. Humanity will survive. It's very likely to be extremely expensive, though.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
We can safely discard decades of satellite data and trends on global weather and climate, and the analysis of all climatologists all around the world, because a few carefully choosen farmers in sweden think that it is not happening.
no, no, no. They know change is happening but they are not convinced that it is different from any of the periods of change that they or their fathers or grandfathers have experienced before.
I heard they are going to hire Swedish farmers for the CERN and MIT is going to fire all the staff to substitute it by Mongolian shepherds.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
I've seen so much over the top hype and hysteria from the climate change deniers
I don't pay attention to hype or hysteria, but I do pay attention to this reasoned comment from James Lovelock:
"The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Except when it helps "the cause".
Then... any unseasonably warm weather, tornado or hurricane is the direct result of "GLOBAL climate change".
You can't have it both ways.
And... actually... yes. The weather is the climate. In aggregate.
It appears that Swedish farmers are no better than Murcan farmers in this regard. All farmers regardless of country/ideology: if profits increase this year (food prices going up everywhere)--status quo; if profits do not go up, ignore/disparage the economic/environmental influences because the concepts are well beyond their grasp. Farmers are in essence superstitious and anti-science. Climate change? I got the Farmer's Almanac.
German farmers are happy they can grow things now that only used to grow in Spain and Italy ... :D
Gee I'm surprised that Farmers may not accept the evidence.
From a local perspective given that the Aussie farmers took over 50 years to understand that clear felling was causing the erosion they were bitching about it is not that great a surprise that their Swedish confrères are equally unable to understand reality.
Now if someone can prove that Farmers are the keystone of right wing blindness and not just religion the world will be explained.
Wolja Future Tombstone: Shit happened then I died
I don't know. Immediate threats tend to be more likely to get attention.
No matter what it'll get expensive. Ocean rise will be a real bitch for those living on the coasts.
Of course Swedish Farmers are mainly concerned about supplying the larders of Swedish Chefs!
But there is only one way to prepare Chicky in the Basky, and that's by firing a shotgun into the air.
Bork, bork, bork!
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
... farmers in cold norther climes who would benefit from longer growing seasons?
It's not that they "don't believe" in climage change, just that they want us to keep doing it!
You give away you know nothing. Turn off your TV and learn to think.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
In view of the belief that if you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem let's approach this from a different angle. If you are troubled by global warming, don't turn on your heaters this winter.
This is great news! (at least for Americans). See? We are not the only idiots denying climate change. Take that, rest of the World!
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
So not believing in a hoax is news now?