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Greenpeace Co-Founder Declares Himself a Climate Change Skeptic
New submitter PensacolaSlick writes that [Patrick Moore a], co-founder of Greenpeace, and seven-year director of Greenpeace International, with other very pro-environmental credentials, has come out with a brief rationale for why he is "skeptical that humans are the main cause of climate change and that it will be catastrophic in the near future." He argues instead that in a historical context, human activity has saved the planet, declaring that "at 400 parts per million, all our food crops, forests, and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet for carbon dioxide."
(Consider the source, which according to the New York Times is "the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism.") Moore breaks with what might be expected of a Greenpeace founder as well in that he is currently chair of Allow Golden Rice.
1) Was the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm a historic low?
2) Was the level decreasing before the industrial revolution?
3) Is there a minimum level of CO2 plants need to grow and if so, what is it?
they are referred to as the 'fairer sex' for a reason
"Fair" as in lighter, weaker. NOT as in open minded and logical.
Modern Greenpeace is doing things like defacing ancient monuments thousands of years old to spread propaganda. If this guy WERE with Greenpeace any time recently I would have cause to question his sanity and/or motives... instead he seems like a guy that actually cares about the environment instead of money or publicity.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What global warming? The global temperature record is aggregated from 5 datasets. The 2 satellite datasets say no global warming for the last 18 and 26 years (the entire time the satellites have been measuring), while the 3 terrestrial datasets say no global warming in the last 10 years (only after urban heat islands are ignored and measurement gaps are adjusted upwards).
We can argue about whether or not the Earth is warming/cooling and whether that warming/cooling is due to man, but the AGW Alarmist arguments totally break down when they get into value judgements about the supposed facts.
The only real fact is that a person's opinion that warming and adding CO2 is beneficial is every bit as valid as someone saying it's not.
However, at our stage of understanding the system, climate engineering is probably not such a good thing to be doing. The planet isn't an experiment that we can easily clean up after we make a mess. We can't 'nuke it from orbit' just to make sure.
That is a major issue with the carbon sequesters and everybody else. We're really running in the dark. We need to put quite a bit more energy (pun intended) into understanding the system before we blithely go and tinker with it (like we are doing at present).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Pretty much my veiw point. Does human activity cause some manifestations in the weather that are excacerbated by current climate change, I'm sure it does. Is "global warming" 100% human caused, I doubt it very much. To many conflicting arguments as far as I can tell.
I don't agree with his latest position, not at all actually, but I'm with in on that one.
More specifically, the "green movement" has become a harbour for all the malcontents who don't so much care about the environment as despise the society we live in. These people see global warming not as a problem, but as the solution: what will force society to change its ways.
And I know for a fact he has been playing up his "greenpeace founder" credentials for a couple of decades now. He's uses it as a cudgel every time some corporation needs to fight regulation of their pollution. The guy is a hack and as usual, the dumb-as-rocks slashdot editors fell for it.
Please both Evolution and Newtonian mechanics are predictive, "Climate Science" is not. When or if it ever does become predictive then the science will be settled
Moore breaks with what might be expected of a Greenpeace founder as well in that he is currently chair of Allow Golden Rice.
Well, while he is wrong about climate change, his stance on Golden Rice is pretty well on. We know it works, we know it is safe, Greenpeace still opposes it because they know damned well that their cries of genetic engineering being a dangerous horrible thing that you should totally give them loads of cash to fight are going to look a bit silly when it is saving the lives of thousands of children. It's despicable that they are willing to allow unnecessary death and human suffering in developing countries just to further their careers as professional activists. They're no different than anti-vaxxers who bring back vaccine preventable disease, not in my book. I don't agree with Moore's stance on climate change, but at least he's doing good on this front to bring attention to the harm Greenpeace and other anti-science groups are doing.
Keeping adding the same energy to a system. Reduce energy going out. System warms up.
That's predictive and settled.
It would increase the range of latitudes for food production ... a thing that might destroy your own property or that of your children - and where you have full control about by reducing CO2 production - is less important than a thing that will happen in 100,000 years and you have no control about?
It would not. northern and southern latitudes unusable for food production have the dreaded polar day and polar night cycle.
It is irrelevant as it leaves a band of deserts closer to the equator anyway.
and mitigate future ice ages
Wow
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This stuff certainly IS up for debate. There's always a danger when it comes to a majority of scientists agreeing with something and then having government money, and special interests ram it down everyone's throats.
Look at what happened in the 70s with the damn low fat craze. Everyone went low fat and Type II diabetes has gone through the roof.
I'll stay a skeptic till there is irrefutable science. And don't bother posting any links, cause for every article yo find, I can find one with a dissenting opinion. Though the whole planet seems to think that the matter is settled, that's not the case.
Climate Science has been incredibly inaccurate at times. It might be right in the end. But there's enough doubt to allow the naysayers to continue.
Well, I give him his due in that he took part in some of Greenpeace's earliest activities. And I agree with him on Golden Rice and GMO foods. And he *does* have scientific credentials as an ecologist, although that doesn't mean he's not a crackpot -- especially when he weighs in on areas outside his expertise.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What are the good intentions in cutting food stamps and social programs, when there is no scarcity of food or housing? They're defending scarcity thinking, not civilization, which has advanced enough to maintain a minimum standard of living for everyone. #BasicIncome!
"It is possible to debate this" /= "This is not settled science". Yes, I dare say you will be able to blether for as long as I can. But here's the thing. Science converges on the truth. Yes, it might be wrong. But by definition you cannot know better than the scientific consensus, especially not on something as well scrutinised as AGW. So, in short, you can shove your "scepticism" up your ass, because I don't care and your opinion is of no relevance.
[FUCK BETA]
I read the study on the Martian polar ice caps. I also read that all the planets in the inner solar system are heating up at the same rate. When you mention stuff like this, the Global Warming guys flip and jump down your throat that you can't use data from other planets to predict what's happening on Earth.
There was also a great article on how the polar ice caps are refreezing at the fastest rate ever.
The problem here is that the people on the side of man-made global warming think every mention of the fact that this may be a natural phenomenon or just temporary automatically makes you some kind of industry shill. That is far from the case. I think it's the job of every scientist to continuously question and test. No one should assume man-made global warming is 100% truth at this point.
And I do agree that is distracting poeple from many other problems. I hear combating global warming all the time, but no one EVER talks about cleaning up the Great Pacific Garage Patch. The average Global Warming advocate that would call you an industry shill, doesn't even know what the Garbage Patch is. Or they don't know that Wind Turbines for electricity production kill bats by the thousands. Or that the Toyota Prius battery factory in Canada is slowly destroying the environment around it.
When I mention any of this stuff, they get outraged, and continue to call me an industry shill. Which I am not. I'm trying to show them that Global Warming is NOT the greatest crisis to face mankind. Cause before that the greatest crisis was power lines causing cancer. And before that, it was acid rain. And before that was the Ozone Layer. Before that, a new ice age was coming. There's always some crisis out there that the media brings to the forefront. Global Warming is just the latest attempt to sensationalize headlines, use "carbon neutral" as a marketing term to sell products and keep you scared that this crisis is far worse than the last one that was supposed to wipe us out and didn't.
It's somewhat important to know how much is man-made vs natural (a question we are not very close to answering).
I think a way more important question though is, how much warming is too much? We know from historical temperature data that the warming we are supposed to see now in about 200 years, will be still a bit below the medieval warm period.
But if it continued beyond that, is there some point ay which we should consider drastic measures like climate engineering? I don't see a lot of studies that seem to be able to predict at all what happens as the climate gets slowly warmer over time (at least they have done a terrible job at predicting that so far).
We should not forget that the most dangerous thing of all would be to have the climate cooling, so to whatever degree man affects the climate, we should try to err on the side of warming. Energy is life, a frozen Earth is death for many.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Except for the last twenty years or so.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"One strike, you're out Greenpeace!"
If that strike is destroying monuments thousands of years old and causing irreparable damage to a very fragile desert ecosystem - yes, absolutely I would be strongly against ANY entity that did that, but more importantly didn't even consider it to be a problem.
Thanks for the 45 years of environmental activism, it was nice knowin' ye.
Greenpeace has not helped the environment in any meaningful way for at least two decades now. I consider helping them to be morally as questionable as supporting human trafficking, especially since you are taking away funds to help groups that actually help the environment instead of themselves (like the Nature Conservancy).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't need to examine anytihng.
The theory, as put forth, does a relatively good job of explaining MOST of the things we are seeing at present. The model has some issues with the Mideval mini ice-age and the peroid of significantly reduced polar ice that happened after that. It did a horrible job of predicitng the polar ice refreezing that happened 2 or 3 years ago.
And right now, the theory is being used as an excuse for everything. We had a record hurrincane year 2 years ago. We actually went through the whole alphabet and then some. Scinetists were all over the news telling us this is a result of global warming, since the oceans are now warmer. They said it fit the model to a tee, and that it's just going to get worse from year out. Last year was the mildest hurricane season they had seen in a long time. Global Warming was being used by meteorologists as the cause for the polar vortexes that dropped temperatures down into the single and negative digits.
So, yeah, global warming has been well studied, but it's not the damn be-all, end-all for how this planet does shit. Everythig bad that happens on the planet is not the result of the CO2 levels in the air. And all the work you do to try and save our asses from rising temparatures will be meaningless when the Yellowstone Supervolcanoe erupts and takes out half the country, which "well established science" said should have erupted close to 20 years ago.
I was a research biologist for a number of years, and it sickens me how many people these days make the data fit the theory, rather than making the theory fit the data
Like I said in a previous post, infra-red imaging of the inner planets in our solar system shows them heating up at a rate similar to Earth. But, say that out loud and people like you friggin flip out.
The left is not what's responsible for not having the scarcity. Leftist governments always create the scarcity. The drive to succeed is the drive to outproduce your competition. It is the constant improvements in the efficiency of production which creates lack of scarcity. What the left seeks to do is to destroy the abundance and return to the scarcity(and mass murder). It is evil.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Part of the reaction you might be getting is that many of these 'counter arguments' have been shown to be:
- outright fabrication
- cherry picking of data
- intentional misleading analysis
Things like the polar ice is a great example - there is a local phenomena of sea ice generation, but it doesn't refute the bigger picture of constant warming ocean and land temperatures. It is being studied by a number of teams, and will eventually expand our knowledge of the planet and its systems, but it doesn't change any of the argument to date.
I also want to say that you're not being terribly consistent when you complain others call you 'shill', and you then go on to give the 'sheeple' argument that society is being manipulated into a crisis mentality to simply sell some products. That's being hugely insulting and completely disingenuous to your skepticism. It shows the bias and lack of understanding you're investing into the sceptical position that you've decided to take.
You could take your ozone issue as an example - it wasn't just some crackpot genius marketing idea to sell new aerosol cans, it was a genuine issue that still effects everything everything in the lower southern hemisphere. It could have been catastrophic, but action was taken and the problem has stabilised (and begun to recover). I would also argue that most environmentalists are fully aware of issues like the Pacific Garbage Patch, and there are plenty of active campaigns to reduce waste in all forms. However, there is an element of relative urgency in all things, and just like you wouldn't complain to the doctor about the scratch on your arm when you need to be discussing your cancer treatment, plenty of people are naturally focusing on the perceived bigger environmental threat of global warming,
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
Out of curiosity, do you have a source for any of this that has voted Democrat since Kennedy? It's a lot of horseshit. The Dixiecrats, who favored segregation, largely became Republicans in the 70's. That's why Reagans first campaign speech after the convention was in Mississippi on the topic of "states' rights." This is code. And the Dixiecrats abandoned the Democrats because they supported integration! You're engaged in a long winded and grossly distorted fallacy of guilt by association.
You can only be amused by the responses these articles attract.
Here are some facts that puts all of these comments into perspective.
1. 99.9% of Slashdot commenters are NOT Climate Scientists. .01% of Slashdot commenters that ARE qualified to offer a valid opinion...don't do so on Slashdot. (Unless Curry and Man have Slashdot accounts?)
2. Probably 90% don't even have education in areas remotely related to Climate Science.
3. 90% are the posts seem to cite Skeptical Science in order to prove their point.
4. Skeptical Science is run by a Cartoonist.
5. The
The bottom line is that this is all a wankfest, complete with name calling and morons on both side who are under the delusion that A) their opinion matters and B) . That their opinion is worth a bag of warm shit, and it's getting pretty fucking annoying.