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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.
More proof that this debate is political and not scientific.
Passing a law that says it is real is like voting on the sex of a chicken. No matter the outcome of the vote, only testing can provide the answer.
How about we get politics out of science and rely on the scientific method to determine if "Global Warming" is real or not.
I wish the vote were worded "Is the denial of climate change a hoax?"
This is the type of thing you actually have to research and prove one way or the other.
Twinstiq, game news
Indeed. Congress is evidence that evolution didn't take place: they are sh*t-flinging apes, still.
Table-ized A.I.
NASA seems to think that climate change is being caused by human activities and they back it up with a lot of references to studies on the matter. IMHO, we're never going to convince people to change their behaviors or give up their luxuries. If we want to make a difference we need to develop the technologies that make it more advantageous to adopt the renewable solution (like kick-ass cars and cheaper home energy).
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Congress may be out to do that...
I tend to be a strong skeptic on the subject, but that said, Congress has no business declaring jack shit when it comes to anything scientific. They are more than free to debate, create, and modify *laws* based on it, but they have zero authority to declare anything a hoax.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Let's just say that the Scoville units are a wee high on that one...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
If we can simply use the vote to determine reality, why are we bothering to vote on climate change. I say we treat the senate gavel like a genie's lamp and vote on the realities of cancer, aliens, death, and god.
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.
I agree. But sadly they don't vote on whether senate is a scam.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Funny thing is that the summary directly contradicts the title. The democrats are attaching riders to the Keystone XL bill that declare climate change caused by man a fact. This is just as bad, but done by the other side of the aisle.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The next time you get to vote on if your senator is a hoax...
The article linked says the bill implied Pi should be 3.2...
So you really want to bring that up in the context of a bill that claims humans cause substantial warming? Or that the warming we see is anything to be concerned about?
Observable reality is what it is, no matter how much a law rounds or chastises.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The scientific method is for experiments. If you wanted to use it to see if global warming was real, you would make a forecast like "The world will get hotter than it's ever been.", and see if it comes true or not. It did come true. Last year was hotter than it has ever been, globally. Scientists were telling us that would happen for years.
It's time to stop denying. It's time to stop saying "they should use the scientific method" when you know full well they have. You know, that is, unless your head is in the ground or your preferred news network is putting it there.
Bruce Perens.
Malaria is not a warm weather dependent disease. England in the 16th Century had malarial marshes (in the middle of the Little Ice Age) and the largest malarial outbreak of the 20th Century occurred in Arctic circle Russia.
The real vector of malaria is poor sanitation, which in turn is a function of poverty and lack of economic development.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Free oil for everyone's rivers!
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Exactly what benefits do we get from the pipeline? If you think we are going to actually get longterm jobs out of it you are naive.
Importantly, as Raddatz said, these jobs would only be supported during the construction phase, which is expected to take one to two years. After construction, the pipeline would employ about 50 people, primarily for maintenance.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/nov/16/russ-girling/transcanada-ceo-says-42000-keystone-xl-pipeline-jo/
Every country does deeply stupid things.
Look at the EU and their policy on GMO. It is ENTIRELY fear based. They just label something as GMO which is completely useless and people are taught that GMO is bad period. Even research into GMO has almost entirely ended in Europe. It doesn't matter that their own studies show the ones they have tested are safe they continue to be against it not just in the EU but world wide. The EU is a pretty major factor in stopping the usage of golden rice.
This kind of thing can go both ways.
I am currently in Germany working on a Masters degree and PhD but some of my professors have already told me that to do my work once I am done I will have to go back to the USA since DNA editing on humans is pretty much defacto illegal in the EU and they don't allow the research into it either. However in the USA we have companies using technology like CRISPR/CAS9 to silence genes that causes diseases like Huntington's disease. Imagine a one time injection and you are completely cured of a horrible genetic disease? Imagine being able to replace faulty tumor suppressor genes and virtually wipe out cancer.
However none of that matters. People in different areas of the world have a world viewpoint and then they pick and choose the science that supports it and try to claim superiority over others based on that. With liberals in the USA we have the anti-vaccine movement and that is something that conservatives are almost universal in support of and the anti-vaccine movement is massively anti science and should be stopped before they cause the deaths of tens of millions of people. We have the conservatives not accepting human damage to the environment. We have Europeans against genetic engineering. We have countries where their religious beliefs means that women are second class citizens.
The human race is a bunch of barely evolved thugs and barbarians and they like to claim they are civilized by choosing bits and pieces of science to support their worldview and make fun of anyone else that does not accept that science also while ignoring the stuff they refuse to accept.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
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.
That understanding was based on a scare program. The truth is quite the opposite.
No, they have complete authority to declare things hoaxes, even if they aren't. This is what we get with democracy (or at least, a democratic republic): people who are actual experts in their fields are overruled by yahoos who were popularly elected by the People. It doesn't matter what's true or not, all that matters is what the People think and want, and they vote for it, based on promises made by political candidates running for office.
If the politicians campaign that they will pass a law that forces the circumference of a circle to be exactly 3 times its diameter, and the People vote for it, that's what we get: a law that directly contradicts mathematical reality. If they promise to pass a law which sets the speed of light to be infinity and the People vote for it, that's what we get: a law that directly contradicts observed fact.
You may think Congress has no business declaring jack shit when it comes to anything scientific, but you've been overruled by your countrymen at the polls, who think it does.
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 like how everyone assumes not only that a supreme being exists, but also that it has a penis.
Reminds me of the Indiana Pi Bill. It's not even that the Indiana Rep. felt strongly that Pi equals 3.2, but he was unqualified to understand the subject, but had no problem passing a law based on 'expert' testimony.
Classic Dunning-Kruger all over town.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Now look, I know many Americans have been hearing from elite liberal leftist Harvard professors in their ivory towers who keep saying that 15 is greater than 5. And, I have heard from many other experts in this field who are frankly quite skeptical that this is the case, that we're simply overlooking 5 and what a tremendously big number it is. So I don't think it's time to just cut off debate before the data is in, as if 15 is just greater than 5 so we should just get used to it whether we think it's right or just. It doesn't comport with the experiences of average hardworking Americans who deal with these numbers every day, who depend on them for their livelihood. So at the end of the day, I think it's obvious that the data is just not in yet. Now I'm not a mathematician. But one thing I do know, is that on the other side of the aisle, we have people who also are not mathematicians, but they see this as an opportunity for their agenda to shove a draconian arithmetic inequality down the throats of the American people!
Regardless of specifics of the actual objective results, anthropogenic climate change is a scientific question -- whether certain consequences of our actions are leading to a fairly specific set of changes to climate.
That politicians want to vote on it strikes me as a significant indicator as to their incompetence. As if we needed any more...
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
But with global warming you don't necessarily get warmer weather. That's because "warming" is a misnomer. What's actually going on is the total amount of kinetic energy in the atmosphere is going up. That means **on average** the globe is warmer, true, but nobody actually experiences the global average. They experience the **instantaneous local temperature**.
With a more energetic atmosphere, air masses move around more and differently. That means a lot of places will get stretches of unusually warm AND unusually cold weather. And some places will get wetter, and others drier. The hallmark of climate, as you are most likely to experience it personally, is what would be anomalous weather a few decades ago.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Where does this bullshit originate? I guess the same place as the "global warming is a fraud" bullshit.
While DDT was banned for agricultural use, it was never banned for malaria control. One of the problems with DDT and most pesticides including antibiotics is that overuse gives the pests a chance to develop pesticide resistance, this is what finally killed DDT usage, it was so overused that mosquitoes became resistant. Currently it is being used by at least 12 countries (India and some S African countries as of 2008) for malaria control and the WHO is encouraging the use of it, though not overuse. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Where ever you are getting your propaganda from you should stop using as they are spreading outright lies and if they can lie about something as easy to check as the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Pesticides how are they lying about harder to check things such as climate change?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I spent many years working with vector borne disease control, so I actually know something about this. Let me suggest a slightly different way of thinking about DDT.
The problem isn't DDT per se, but how, where and when it is applied.
In WW2 draftees were dusted with DDT powder to kill body lice, and so far as we know no adverse health results resulted -- probably because there were none. That's because this *application* is benign. Likewise spraying house interiors with DDT is a cost effective, safe, and environmentally benign.
Indiscriminate fogging with DDT on the other hand is neither environmentally benign, nor in the long term effective. DDT is (potentially) great stuff, and therein lies the problem. It promises (to a certain kind of mentality) to take the brain-work out of deciding when and where to spray. It's tempting to roll the trucks with ULV sprayers and spray anywhere and anytime, and it will often produce dramatic effects in the short term for not much money. In the long term it produces a host of environmental problems, and pesticide resistance -- particularly if it enters aquatic habitat. For one thing, it is toxic to invertebrates. **That's why we use the stuff**. The problem is that it is non-specific, and it (and its toxic by-products) remain in the environment for years or decades. Modern alternatives break down rapidly into non-toxic byproducts. In fact DDT's persistence is what makes it highly desirable for in-house spraying. One spraying can last for a year or more. That's good when you want to kill everything, for a long time; but that's not what you want to do when you're applying outside. Many invertebrates are beneficial, or even indispensable.
It's notable that in the article you link only quotes papers from the '69 to '72 era when it comes to the ecological impacts of DDT. This smacks of cherry-picking. When an idea like eggshell thinning enters the scientific discourse, it is normal for evidence for and against the idea to be found in the literature. This means it is *always* possible to find early literature citations which appear to refute the current scientific consensus. A quick google scholar search for articles on eggshell thinning and DDT from 1975 on shows overwhelming evidence in support of the hypothesis. For example it reveals the reason that the early feeding studies cited failed to find eggshell thinning: in many species it is not DDT, but DDE (a by product of the environmental breakdown of DDT) that is the culprit.
That DDT per se is not particularly toxic to humans is no news to anyone. I was actually briefly part of a team that looked at ways of tracking DDT usage so that it could be used in house spraying in Africa. The problem is that in desperately poor countries stuff gets stolen, and the danger is that material intended for safe and environmentally benign domestic spraying would be diverted to agricultural use which while not particularly threatening to human health would have disastrous impact on environmental health and the economic activities that depend on that.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I think you are confused. If there were no pipeline the oil would have to be refined nearby. This WOULD create lasting jobs and keep much more of the profits near where the oil is being extracted. The whole point of making a pipeline to the Gulf Coast is to enter the global crude oil market or more precisely to benefit the big oil companies who can ship the crude oil to countries with little or no environmental protections but cheaper refineries thereby keeping a larger share of the profits for themselves. The pipeline may not be directly bad for the environment but it is intended to avoid the costs and environmental regulations imposed by refining in Canada or the USA.
I like how everyone assumes not only that a supreme being exists, but also that it has a penis.
Of course god has a penis. Read the old testament. Only something with a penis could be deliberately that childish, evil, and destructive and not only expect people to be happy about it, but also people to worship the ground he walks on.
~X~