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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?
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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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.
"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.
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.