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US Senate Set To Vote On Whether Climate Change Is a Hoax
sciencehabit writes The U.S. Senate's simmering debate over climate science has come to a full boil today, as lawmakers prepare to vote on measures offered by Democrats that affirm that climate change is real—with one also noting that global warming is not "a hoax." In an effort to highlight their differences with some Republicans on climate policy, several Democrats have filed largely symbolic amendments to a bill that would approve the Keystone XL pipeline. They are designed to put senators on the record on whether climate change is real and human-caused.
I think that approximately everyone who is smart enough to get elected to the senate understands that climate does change. Past that point, you can say that "climate change" is as real as Saint Nick.
It's warmer today than it was 100,00 years ago, and it's colder today than it was 150,000 years ago. If that's what you mean by "climate change", we can all agree. San Francisco will not in fact by underwater by the year 2020. That meaning of "climate change" is a hoax, it's false. Recently, the Obama administration updated the dire predictions in some of their stuff from "by 2010" to "by 2050". Maybe the predictions will come true this time, but the search-and-replace nature of changing all references to "2010" to "2050" is a bit suspect. Some informed people think those claims are false, scare mongering, a hoax.
When I've pointed out some of the stuff that professors of climatology said in the 1990s, the environmentalists here on Slashdot have said "that guy is a wacko, he doesn't represent the mainstream of liberal thought on the issue". I'll take them at their word. So we all agree the UC climatologist's "science" was false/bogus/wrong. And we all agree that the climate has changed. Not really useful.
Saying whether or not climate change is real, is not real, or is unknown is not a statement for non-subject-matter experts to make until/unless there is enough evidence that it is clearly real or clearly not real to the layman. If either one were the case, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
In other words, every Senator who isn't either a subject-matter expert or an arrogant person and who doesn't want people to think he is in one of those two groups must abstain if this comes to a vote.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The next time you get to vote on if your senator is a hoax...
Sadly not true. The fashion for some scientists to make names for themselves by producing misleading headlines for their supposed evidence has yet to fizzle.
Was 2014 the warmest it has ever been globally? No.
The satellite records (either one) show no special warmth for 2014 and the BEST record shows no statistical significance to the claim that 2014 was the hottest. Why? Because the tiny increase was well within the error bars of the mean temperature statistic
Has the global warming hiatus ended? No. Do the climate models reflect this? No.
That said, should Congress be making such a determination? No it shouldn't. But what this Congress is certain to do is cut the funding of climate change to the bone. Then we'll see how much was real and how much was money-powered hype.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Yeah, NASA now says they oopsied, and are only 34% certain that last year was the hottest, by .01 degree fahrenheit which is much smaller than the margin of error for the calculation.
And not having access to pesticides like DDT.
Nope. The real problem is that DDT is no longer effective against mosquitos in many parts of the world as they have evolved to be immune to it. The stuff that is still effective against them is so damn toxic that it has to be used carefully in case too much gets into drinking water, makes it into the food chain in other ways or even just poisons the rivers and kills all the fish on its way to the sea.
I dont read
I think the euro-centric view is 'first do no harm' and the American view is 'show me the money'.
Obama will veto the bill anyway, so its all a wash anyway... except for the grandstanding.
The Republicans know Obama will veto it, but they want him to have to do it. And the Democrats know the Republicans will pass the bill, so they just want to force them to go on record to state something to get a dig in on them as well. Net result? No Keystone XL pipeline. Effort required for negative result? Years.
They need to do away with the rules that allow off-topic amendments. Congress takes too long to act as it is without it adding bullshit amendments to every bill to make a point, or worse, to add riders that completely subvert the bill or even add completely unrelated stuff.
It's tough enough to get transparency on things in DC without them adding amendments simply so that you look bad for voting for something that neither you nor your constituents want just to get a more important change through.
> Obama will veto the bill anyway, so its all a wash anyway... except for the grandstanding.
Except (and this may be a minor point) we'd have a clear record of who voted for it and who voted against it, which might have an effect on the next election cycle.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Yeah, it's going to galvanize the Republican voters even more, and we're going to have even more Republicans elected in 2016.
Who really thinks that Republican voters are smart enough to know that climate change isn't a hoax?
I'm actually curios ho you pan to get 5 to be bigger than 15 (without simply redefining symbols which would be cheating)
I'm sorry, as you can see on this paper I've just produced, I clearly drew the number five larger. You really should have waited for me to show you the data before you jumped the gun with your answer.
So basically, the only way you can prove your point is to ignore all the facts and question completely out of context.
That's exactly how deniers work, well played sir, well played.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Well, we have perfectly good reasons to stop releasing sequestered carbon (by burning oil for fuel) even if we are to ignore the atmospheric output of the process. We have to work progressively harder to get a given energy input. Technological advances that allow us to extract additional sequestered carbon, like fracking, are not infinite in nature. Eventually we must reach an energy balance between the energy required for extraction and the source of energy extracted. So changes in the direction of reducing release of sequestered carbon and finding other energy inputs to society, or reducing the need for those inputs, are called for regardless of whether it is going to get too warm.
Bruce Perens.