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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.
But of course that fact won't get people to click on your article.
Though I do believe humans are doing a good job of trashing the environment, I have always felt like Global Warming was being used as a scare tactic, much like those "Repent and be saved!" guys that stand on street corners and preach about the end of days.
Is Global Warming happening now? Yep, it appears it is. Is mankind the only cause of this phenomenon? I'm not 100% sure on that, and if we don't keep looking to see what's really going on, we may be in for a rude awakening in the not too distant future. when though our best efforts at curbing carbon emmisions, we still end up screwed.
... follow the money.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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?
If we were to engage in climate engineering, warming things up and adding a little CO2 is exactly what we'd want to do.
It would increase the range of latitudes for food production and mitigate future ice ages, which are much more catastrophic than any effects from warming.
They try to debate us because they can't answer the experts.
He laughably accuses scientists of being in the pay of vested interests all the while being a PR front for fossil fuel interests such as the Heartland Institute that published this very piece.
His 'argument' amounts to long debunked talking points.
He shows he hasn't read an IPCC report when he says IPCC will "consider only the human causes of global warming". IPCC outlines scientific consensus on all sources of climate change from solar cycles to milankovitch cycles.
He shows he hasn't looked at paleoclimate reconstructions which show that the Earth has been generally cooling for the last 8000 years and that the current temperatures are likely higher than at least the last couple thousand.
The rest of his argument boils down to simple incredulity, which is not very compelling.
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
Gazzilions of years ago or whenever it was, when the oil we use now was floating around in the form of giant mats of algae, some belching deadly hydrogen sulfide as they decompose, there was a lot more life on the planet. But do we really want to live on a world choked with so much scum? Over time, that algae turned to oil and the carbon really was sequestered -- but now we're putting it all back into circulation -- I suppose it could become more animals, more corn, more people, but it could also become massive amounts of stinking toxic slime.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
No need to know science
That is equally true for the far left as the far right. To berate a person for wanting to investigate non-human causes is political, not scientific. Aren't many heroes of science those who went against the scientific consensus of their day and were eventually proven to be correct?
why didn't you suggest this graph instead?
http://data.remss.com/msu/graphics/C12/plots/RSS_TS_channel_C12_Global_Land_And_Sea_v03_3.short.png
which actually suggests a trending downward?
While people can bear amounts of CO2 much higher than 5000ppm, which is unsurprising given the amount of CO2 in the ehxaled air, it does not mean, that they do not sense much lower levels. At 1000 ppm, the negative influence on a human in so substantial, that it is actually measurable using simple tests [1]. The question is, which levels makes air feel stuffy, or at least not "outdoor fresh".
[1] Is co2 an indoor pollutant? Direct effects of low to moderate co2 concentrations on human decision, Satish U. 2014.
That one only shows five years.
Because there's no such thing as a 4 year climate "trend". At those time scales, you're staring at noise.
Right, maybe we should burn him at the stake for heresy!
You true believers have absolutely no idea how foolish you come across.
The biggest danger to science is not the US GOP. It's not even the states of Kansas or Texas. Or even Arkansas. It is Greenpeace.
Greenpeace vs. Biology: Species are static in their description vs. species change over time.
Greenpeace vs. Physics: Long half-life is more dangerous vs. short half-life emits more radiation over time.
Greenpeace vs. Chemistry: Chemicals are bad vs. Everything you eat is a chemical.
Greenpeace vs. Environmentalism: Spotted Owls only nest in old growth forests vs. they nest anywhere they damn well want.
And this is just a few examples.
I went to a very weird university when I was younger. We had a very large population of stark-raving bonkers environmentalists, tree-hugger forest protectors, and loony free-thinkers. Greenpeace showed up at a environment conference at my school and they were booed off the campus. Why? Because our stark-raving environmentalists were lovers of the great outdoors that went hiking, fishing, hunting, prospecting, mountain climbing, and enjoyed being out in the woods. Because our tree-hugger forest protectors were forestry workers, farmers, silviculturists, and flood management. Because our loony free-thinkers were interested in bio-fuels, alternative energy that actually worked, developing fuel efficient vehicles and HEVs, and coming up with technologies to make our lives better.
Whenever I run into someone from Greenpeace protesting technology, they are invariably wearing Nylon and Gore-Tex. It's just sad.
Yup. That's about the level of 'argument' presented by Patrick Moore. It basically amounts to just making stuff up. Here is the temperature increase over the last 18 and 26 years according to the satellite reconstruction compiled by skeptic Roy Spencer: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/u... . The warming over the period is considerable. Equivalent to billions of nuclear bombs worth of accumulated energy.
Even at 30 years, it's all noise.
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.
http://scienceblogs.com/gregla...
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Which checks would those be? The checks from Goldman Sachs for pushing the AGW reverse robin hood credit default swaps...err I mean ":carbon credits". Or would those be the checks from Al Gore who is in bed with Goldman Sachs and has set himself up to become carbon billionaire if he and GS get their giant scam that won't do shit but make them even richer made into the law?
Dude if you believe EITHER side gives a single fuck about the environment? I have some genuine Arkansas anti global warming crystals I'll be happy to sell ya, only $499.99 so act now! BTW if you actually DO give a shit about the environment? DO NOT BUY THE SCAMS, talk to somebody that actually walks the walk...Ed Begley Jr. unlike Rev Al who lives in a McMansion whose indoor basketball court uses more AC than a family home? He lives in a modest 3 bedroom, Rev Al drives a fleet of SUVs to his one man Lear jet? Begley drives an electric car to a commuter flight.But if you were to look up Begley's thoughts on the subject? You'd find an overdose of COMMON SENSE, make it easier for folks to use electric cars, promote renewables in places like AZ where solar works really well, invest in tech that will let us do more with what we have and recycle easier...its ALL common Goddamned sense!
But of course you can't become a billionaire with sensible logical approaches which is why you are getting pounded with "ZOMFG teh sky is fallin! You HAVE to do this thing (which won't do a damned thing because we filled it with more loopholes for our 1% pals than a Coke has HFCS) because we have to SAVE TEH EARF!"
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Opinions are like arseholes. Everyone's got one. This guy's is paid for by the Hearland Institute.
How does this ex-greenpeace guy feel about begley? Does he write him checks now?
Not quite. You can show that 30 year intervals have statistically significant trends.
The science behind what he's saying isn't really adding up. While there's naturally studies on both sides, this study indicates greater CO2 levels can inhibit growth http://news.stanford.edu/pr/02...
Moreover, methane is significantly more responsible for global climate change because it traps 100 times more heat than CO2. http://www.onegreenplanet.org/...
" 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."
Our crop are starved from other stuff than carbon. if carbon was the problem only, we would put carbon in our fertilizer. But we don't what provocated an explosion of food production was not the CO2 increase during industrial revolution up to today, but NPK fertilizer (nitrogen, Potassium, phosphorus).
While it is true that plant growth would increase as a whole, our crop would still be far more dependent on fertilizer than CO2. And then there is the impact of the change of climate on the zone where the top soil is best for crop growth. If the winter and summer become more extreme, wheat growth might hit a water problem. What good is CO2 if you have not enough water to fix it ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
As opposed to the checks given to IPCC by government (you know... the people who kill people for a living).
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I'm still of the opinion that we're dumping too much CO2 in to the air. Although I know that scientists make mistakes, scientific knowledge is never 100% perfect, and that science is a system of incrementally improving our knowledge, I'm not a science skeptic. Climate scientsts are better experts on this topic than I am, science is highly competitive (remember, they all compete for a very limited supply of grant money, so one scientists's failure is another's success, so they want to overturn each other's ideas), and peer-review is effective much more than it is ineffective.
That all being said, a perhaps a more accessible issue people should be talking about is all the other crap we're dumping into the air *besides* the CO2. We're poisoning ourselves. And besides the air, what about junk we're putting into our bodies from other sources, like pesticides, BPA, and all manner of other harmful chemicals?
Ok, so maybe global warming is something that will only kill our great-great-great-grandkids, and we don't care about them. What about the stuff that's killing us right now?
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
This article explains who this paid idiot is: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/06/27/who-founded-greenpeace-not-patrick-moore/
Patrick Moore is an industry shill if there ever was one. Yes, claiming to be a Greenpeace founder is a nice gimmick, but it's not true at all: http://www.desmogblog.com/2014... - Also, when did the Heartland Institute ( http://www.desmogblog.com/hear... ) become a source for Slashdot? This is a very interesting post+comment thread, first time that sanity has not instantly overwhelmed some tentative /. climate science denial.
If we were to engage in climate engineering, warming things up and adding a little CO2 is exactly what we'd want to do.
Except that despite large increases in CO2, we've seen no statistically significantly warming in almost two decades now. So it's ver questionable now if that would be the right approach to take if you wanted to cause warming.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"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
RSS data looks far different.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
All the glaciers melting is a normal phenomenon that has happened in every previous interglacial warming period.
We're in an interglacial warming period. Nothing man has don started this warming period and man is incapable of stopping the warming. At some point the Earth will reach the warmiest point of this warming period and then, history tells us, the Earth will cool down to the point where much of North America is under an ice sheet miles thick. This has happened many times and will keep happening until the sun burns out; man can only effect it at the margins.
The big problem the warming alarmists have and cannot answer is its most basic anti-scientific paradox: It's hanging on a claim that effect can precede cause; the temps began rising before man-made CO2 emmissions rose and the current pause in rising temps happened while CO2 emissions were rising. There is on other place in science where anybody claims with a "straight face" that the cause of something is decoupled from the effects and even trails it by massive margins and over centuries.
I do not fear the warming, which constitutes an excess of energy in the system (and we humans are very good at using energy) - what I fear is the cooling (which is a lack of excess energy). The next ice age will probably kill billions of people.
From http://www.parks.ca.gov/pages/...
"Miwok were great conservationists. Nothing was ever wasted. Game were killed and fish were caught not for sport, but to feed people. After they had inhabited this country for a number of centuries, the white man came and found the wild game plentiful, the streams fresh and clear, the air pure and clean, the timber uncut and the large deposits of gold still lay untouched in the foothills of the Sierras."
Compare to today: overpopulation, pollution, drought, clearcuts. There is much we could have learned from the native Americans; instead we greedily pursued the "barbarous metal" and ruined the land.
Actually, the California gold rush was a movement to rapidly settle the West Coast that we had expropriated from Mexico. We won a war against Mexico and California was part of the 'spoils' of that war. President Polk 'won' the land, and we needed to quickly settle people onto it.
Uh, fair has never meant "weaker" in the English language. The phrase "fairer sex" refers to the definition of "fair" as pleasing to the eye or mind.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
For many years, he hasn't worked or been an active environmentalist. In fact he works for a marketing company whose blog you can read here: http://greenspiritstrategies.c... and contains many articles in which he openly espouses anti-environmentalist positions such as:
Furthermore, the article is published by the Heartland institute, which is notoriously a lobbyist for many not-so-great corporations such as the fossil fuel, tobacco or walmart.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
My Stack Overflow user
natural volcanic emissions (which are what triggered previous notable climate catastrophes) have been and still do (to this day) emit tons and tons of more emissions (and directly to the stratosphere) than mankind ever can or will... the simple fact is the earth expands as its internal nuclear reaction occurs and emits atmospheric altering gasses and projects them directly into these spheres.. don't blame yourself.. is mankind a factor? well yes, but so are other animals ... so just because you can relate human emissions doesn't mean if you removed all human emission this still wouldn't happen naturally.. which is what we should really be focusing on instead of relating statistics to generate profit.. we should generate change instead.. but of course, there are profits to be made from
"The optimum level of carbon dioxide for plant growth, given enough water and nutrients, is about 1,500 parts per million, nearly four times higher than today. Greenhouse growers inject carbon-dioxide to increase yields." - Dr. Patrick Moore.
Completely false. Why would a 'Doctor' misrepresent such basic facts regarding plant biology? Plants have 2 types of CO2 requirements - during the photo-period and during the non photo-period. Such extreme and sustained levels of 1500ppm CO2 during the non photo-period will result in chlorosis, stretching, wilting and eventually fatal compromise of their immuno-suppressant functions. 1500ppm is not the optimum level for plants - it is the level at which it is guaranteed plants will die. To avoid these negative factors, CO2 levels must be reduced to 400-500ppm during non photo-periods, especially in the presence of moisture.
Does Dr Moore have knowledge of a global CO2 photo-period regulator that I am unaware of? What an amateur. It is terrible these people are quoted and listened too at all.
The guy has been sold out. Climate skeptics are mostly sold out people or illiterate people. There argument is as illogical as the argument of any religious fanatic.
-- "Earth has been warming very gradually for 300 years"
The warming data clearly indicates that rate of temperature of last 50 years is far higher than any other period in history
-- Increase in CO2 in atmosphere directly correlates net fossil fuel burned
-- All computer models including from climate skeptics show that earth will warm with increased CO2
-- "...we are doomed unless we reduce carbon-dioxide emissions to zero. Effectively this means either reducing the population to zero, or going back 10,000 years..."
It is not the emission, but the net emission. Today we generate more electricity from non-fossil fuel than all of electricity we used to generate just 40 years ago. So it is not going back 10000 years. With proper conservation and focus on renewable, it is possible to get rid of fossil fuel based energy altogether without going back or reducing population.
-- He claims that without such doomsday predictions, there want be a need for IPCC. However, IPCC was formed because scientific study prior to it pointed towards doomsday scenario.
-- "The optimum level of carbon dioxide for plant growth, given enough water and nutrients, is about 1,500 parts per million, nearly four times higher than today."
This may be optimum (I don't know) level of CO2 if other variables are kept constant, such as temperature. However, at this level of CO2, there is not a single climate model in the world which predicts temperature increase less than 10C. At this level of increase, 70% of the land will be unhabitable without AC. Also, 70% of the land won't be able to sustain any plants which are in existence today.
-- "There has been no significant warming for 18 years while we have emitted 25 per cent of all the carbon dioxide ever emitted."
Except for one single outlier year 1998, the temperature has steadily increased by 0.2C a decade.
Of the seven temperature reconstructions you are going to put your faith in the minority report?
No, he's correct. Evolution has not been observed happening in real time at a genetic level. We have observed the long term effects of it. I.e. we can compare the DNA of one batch of bacteria in the E. Coli long-term evolution experiment with another batch and see that they have changed, but we don't know which exact bacterium started the change and why or how that change occurred during cell replication. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Or, as in your example, we can compare the DNA or RNA of a virus with a previous generation and we know it has changed. We didn't see it changing. We don't know why it has changed. I.e. we didn't see it evolve, but we observed the effects of the evolution (a changed organism).
The "future shock" scarcity of mass starvation was on track until China got it's act together, so your dumbed down idea doesn't fit the most simple comparison to reality.
I'm not an advocate of Chinese politics, their "justice" system is evil for a start with 99%+ convictions, but I just did not want to see such hardline left/right division stupidity run free.
Come on superwiz, you are not as dumb as the words you've written so don't be so lazy and lift your game.
C12 is for 30Km from the surface, that's why.
The link I gave shows the temperature for the lowest part of the atmosphere.
http://www.parks.ca.gov/pages/... .pdf
"In 1839, Swiss immigrant John Sutter settled in what is now Sacramento and began building a private empire defended by a fort. [...] Sutters fort became a symbol of oppression.
"Native Americans worked his fields [...] Sutter would control the Indian people through a system of forced labor.
[...]
"In 1848, the discovery of gold at Sutters sawmill set off a rush to California that would end the old world of the Sierra people and change their lives forever."
In other words, it started before the gold rush, but it could have been managed better without the blind greed of the forty-niners. It would have been slower, at least. Gold, the "barbarous metal".
As opposed to the checks given to IPCC by government (you know... the people who kill people for a living).
The IPCC runs an annual budget of $7 million, according to the Wall Street Journal, making the United States a major benefactor for its global warming agenda.
That's pretty much chump change in today's world.
Supporting a basic income means you think so much of yourself you believe the world owes you a living, literally. It doesn't. Pull your own damn weight.
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.
And it is also a very simple-minded idea that the effects of small changes over long periods of time won't end up as new species. Give me a budget and 100,000 years and I'll show you your new species.
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.
Libertarians are selfish pricks who can't think 10 minutes into the future, and do not recognize that they put all society in danger by their short-sightedness.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
And yet in previous epochs, atmospheric CO2 has ranged as high as 7000 ppm - more than 16 times the 'worst case' of 400 ppm presently under discussion. In fact, except during ice ages, it's been higher than the present value almost all the time. But the oceans were not (AFAIK) more acidic - or at least they had lots of life in them, including a majority of shelled creatures. If so, then perhaps the acidity (if it is actually occurring) may be a transition phenomenon.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I'm sure there are people here far more knowledgeable about politics, science and other topics than I. I however am moderately versed in all these things and I specialize in cause and effect both mathematically as well as sociologically as a hobby.
... somehow when there's just that much CO2 rushing up to suffocate us, it feels like a reaction to something we're not looking for. I don't like the idea of trying to scrub the CO2 down without first checking to see, do we need to CO2 to protect us against something else? Was CO2 the lesser of two evils?
1) I'm glad he came forward as a "semi-credible" skeptic. It's time we get someone "on the other side" who will attempt to use gray matter to ponder the mysteries of global warming. Of course, he's a political activist and therefore probably has burned up most of his gray matter and left holes by now, but he poses questions that need to be addressed.
2) Has anyone noticed that there's probably twice as many global warming skeptics that don't even know what it means, but side with the "Right" because they would die before siding with the "Left". I know people who believe strongly that it's Jesus's will that we have this issue and therefore when eggheaded lefties contradict that, it must be gods will to disagree. There need to be people trying to actually ask and answer questions who don't think in terms of "If we evolved from the monkeys why are there still monkey then?".
3) People will side with this guy. He's an egghead they agree with. Let's raise him up as a major scientific leader. Let's not bash him or attack him. Let's reason with him and show his new groupies that we don't have to make this a political left and right thing. It can be more reasonable than that. This is something that should rise above political interests and be delt with.
4) I am not a climate change skeptic.... I believe that since the beginning of time, there has never been a constant climate. I believe it's always changing. I believe we're hellbent on proving that we were right all along and that this chemical or that one must be the specific reason for the climate change. I am inclined to agree with the research I've read in the direction that suggests that CO2 is in fact the primary cause. I however also believe that it seems a little too easy and too obvious. I'm thinking
5) We have far bigger problems than CO2 right now. We have things like fracking. Don't get me wrong... global warming is very very very dangerous... but I see drinking water as being far more important short term. Do I think we should stop working on climate change? NO!!! We need to address this. We should have trillions of dollars of tax money going into fixing this. But we need to get the damn research done to prove that intentionally attacking the Earth's mantle and intentionally destabilizing it by intentionally cracking it to force it to bleed oil has to stop. I have never in my life dreamed of anything that sounds so impressively stupid as this. The U.S. is in a damn near perpetual clean water shortage in areas where 50+ million people live and now we're destroying even more clean water reserves. This is clearly a problem we can address and we don't. Why the hell isn't fracking a major item on the presidential election agenda?
I think I love this guy. I am so happy he's there and now let's use him for all he's worth. Let's stop attacking him and instead talk with him. Maybe his believers who have raised him to messianic status will follow him because they finally have "a credible scientist" to listen to. Let's educate him so he can educate his people.
Let's lead by example, not by insult.
The Dixiecrats, who favored segregation, largely became Republicans in the 70's.
Really?
http://www.archives.gov/federa...
What actually happened to the Dixiecrats is they essentially retired, and in their place were younger politicians which weren't pro-segregation, who joined the GOP.
And if you want a source, here it is:
http://freeplanetickettonorthk...
Note this bite in particular:
There weren’t many Republicans in the South prior to 1964, but that doesn’t mean the birth of the souther GOP was tied to “white racism.” That said, I am sure there were and are white racist southern GOP. No one would deny that. But it was the southern Democrats who were the party of slavery and, later, segregation. It was George Wallace, not John Tower, who stood in the southern schoolhouse door to block desegregation! The vast majority of Congressional GOP voted FOR the Civil Rights of 1964-65. The vast majority of those opposed to those acts were southern Democrats. Southern Democrats led to infamous filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Anyways don't let me get in the way of your quest to rewrite history. Remember to just keep repeating your lie enough, and it will become the truth.
Nice try but the chemists who are looking at the samples did a bit more than high school chemistry as well.
WTF is it with the science deniers? I suppose I should at least be happy that they are looking up new words on wikipedia and they may actual pick something up by osmosis (new word for you to look up kid that you would have learnt if you'd done high school chemistry).
Taking into account the rather tattered reputation Greenpeace seems to have on /. - perhaps emphasising this guys past involvement in the same is not the best way to give his words weight. And of course, when I read that he has gone from being the founder of what was always a 'leftist', anti-establishment organisation, to being a more right-wing person living off his past fame, then it seems to be simply what most most people do in their life; and he feels embarrassed and want to put some distance to his past.
Whatever the story may be, the science is science, and this article brings nothing new to the table - "climate change can't possibly be our fault, because who are we to think that we are so important?" - ignoring the fact that other species, and indeed the entirety of life, have a profound influence on the planet's climate, geology etc. Science does not postulate - it presents the facts, it tries to explain those facts, it submits itself to constant, critical scrutiny and gets new adjustments all the time. It leaves everybody to make up their own mind. But when you ask science for its advice on matters, you will get scientific advice - anything less would be dishonest.
This is not really news.
He's been saying stuff like this for a long time.
The wikipedia article about him says "In 2006, he wrote to the Royal Society arguing there was "no scientific proof" that mankind was causing global warming" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Also http://amherststudent.amherst....
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
The 20 year cooling trend
Ding! Liar detected.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1994/plot/rss/from:1994/trend
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Booker convieniently ignores the fact that the largest adjustment of historical readings reduces the warming trend.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
It would be simple minded. Of course I didn't say or imply that, so I'm not sure where you're coming from.
My apologies, Anonymous Coward was hidden. Now I see it...
What's wrong with thinking so much of yourself? I happen to think that much of everyone.
My question would be, why do you think so little of everyone that you feel they should be forced to spend the majority of their days performing some form of labour to prove their entitlement? Its not even like most of that labour is useful to society beyond making sure the system is perpetuated.
Probably because he, like the rest of us, have no idea what that person was talking about. Maybe if they were more specific as to what they meant by "mass murder" and in what context (since it was obviously hyperbole), there would be something to address.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
The DNP has not always been liberal and the GOP has not always been conservative. Before the Southern Strategy politics of the 60s, the DNP was comprised of two factions, the Northern/Progressive Democrats and the Southern/States Rights/Conservative Democrats (KKK included). They had different political ideologies but similar goals. That is why we had weird tickets like the very liberal JFK running with the very racist and very conservative LBJ. After the Southern Strategy politics (by Richard Nixon and the GOP), the State's Rights faction abandoned the DNP for the GOP, and the GOP have had a clear political/ideological divide ever since. Just because Calhoun was in the DNP doesn't mean he was liberal.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
"Today we generate more electricity from non-fossil fuel than all of electricity we used to generate just 40 years ago"
And those nonfossil sources are hydro and nuclear, compared to which all the other carbon-free sources are a rounding error. If Greenpeace were really trying to reduce carbon, it wouldn't be opposing these every chance it gets.
Actually, if by 'spoils' you mean we took it from them because we won, you're wrong. The US paid Mexico $24M for the south-western states (in 1800's money value). I wouldn't call land that the US purchased for money, 'spoils of war'.
The warming data clearly indicates that rate of temperature of last 50 years is far higher than any other period in history
Why do you believe that? It's not even true for the last 150 years - even less so if we include the rest of the Holocene.
Q: Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?
A: So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.
- Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/851...
Until a few decades ago it was generally thought that all large-scale global and regional climate changes occurred gradually over a timescale of many centuries or millennia, scarcely perceptible during a human lifetime. The tendency of climate to change relatively suddenly has been one of the most suprising outcomes of the study of earth history, specifically the last 150,000 years (e.g., Taylor et al., 1993). Some and possibly most large climate changes (involving, for example, a regional change in mean annual temperature of several degrees celsius) occurred at most on a timescale of a few centuries, sometimes decades, and perhaps even just a few years. The decadal-timescale transitions would presumably have been quite noticeable to humans living at such times, and may have created difficulties or opportunities (e.g., the possibility of crossing exposed land bridges, before sea level could rise)
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projec...
(This post does not question AGW. It does question strange statements regarding our current climate that have no scientific basis)
it's in my head
No sweat.
"declaring that "at 400 parts per million, all our food crops, forests, and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet for carbon dioxide."
Yeah but it seems there may be some unintended consequences...
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/ar...
Lead author Dr Roel Brienen, from the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, said: “Tree mortality rates have increased by more than a third since the mid-1980s, and this is affecting the Amazon’s capacity to store carbon.” Initially, an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – a key ingredient for photosynthesis – led to a growth spurt for the Amazon’s trees, the researchers say. But the extra carbon appears to have had unexpected consequences. Study co-author Professor Oliver Phillips, also from the University’s School of Geography, said: “With time, the growth stimulation feeds through the system, causing trees to live faster, and so die younger.”
"The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly Roy"
Actually, if by 'spoils' you mean we took it from them because we won, you're wrong. The US paid Mexico $24M for the south-western states (in 1800's money value). I wouldn't call land that the US purchased for money, 'spoils of war'.
Well. You're both right. The Americans paid for it, but it was a war treaty to stop the Mexican - American War. Mexico wasn't willing to sell before then. The US had offered over double that amount for the land purchase years earlier, but Mexico refused. Texas declared its independence, there was a dispute over what were the correct borders, and the US's annexation of that state was proceeded by full war.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The tobacco settlement was 206 billion dollars. What would the claimed damages for climate change be? Of course the fossil fuel industry is going to fight tooth and nail.
I was born and raised in Alaska. It's still a short growing season no matter what happens, and the light at the polar latitudes is less intense. Also, it's still cold there even when you add in AGW, so you still need cold-tolerant crops. Also, there's very, very little in the way of topsoil in these regions. Consult a map of permafrost extent in the Arctic, and mark off any land shaded in blue as being unsuitable for farming for the next millennium or so.
Generally speaking, we're still better off growing crops in the current latitudes.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The adjusted (not raw) warming data clearly indicates that rate of temperature of last 50 years is far higher than any other period in history
FTFY.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Patrick Moore is a pale shadow of Paul Watson!
Carbon Dioxide is pretty large in comparison to the ice crystal structure it has to get through, and drop that down to temperatures where the carbon dioxide isn't that far from being a solid itself and there's not a lot to drive diffusion is there?
It's not as you suggest and sounds like a gross insult to people who freeze their arses off in Antarctica to do this sort of sampling. It sounds like you are dishing out some "name calling" immediately before being asked for no response in kind.
So, got anything on electrolyte diffusion through ice - which in this case is fairly pure, solid right at the time of deposition and really cold? Would it happen at all? If so is it relevant at all in less than long geological timescales?
I'd be interested if it is relevant but it appears to defy all logic - thus easily mistaken for FUD bullshit if it has not been deliberated crafted as such.
Also the ice cores are not the only source of information available about historical carbon dioxide levels so you've got a few more things to debunk before you can push bullshit about an unchanging atmosphere down our throats.
Just because people are going to make money from something doesn't inherently make it bad, or a scam. Only whether it's actually bad or a scam can define that, and you've done nothing to prove your case.
If Al Gore is cashing in on green technology that doesn't mean green technology is a scam, it just means he's a competent investor in spotting markets to invest in that the human race are simply going to have to move towards to reduce the impacts of climate change, and similarly to reduce the impacts on non-renewable sources (like having to depend on middle-eastern dictatorships and Russia for fuel). You don't make money and become a billionaire by investing in shit that has no prospect for growth and that the world sees no value in.
It's possible to care about the environment, still make money, and have whatever you're investing in be a good idea all at once.
Carbon tax makes a lot of sense, because right now everyone else is paying the externalities of fossil fuel burning. Coal is a cheap power source because you and I have to pick up the bill for the health costs via your health insurance or my country's NHS. Moving that cost onto the people who make the profits from burning and causing those billions of pounds of health problems is eminently sensible, and it makes cleaner technologies like nuclear that already have to foot the bill for cleaning up their harmful chemicals (nuclear waste) more competitive.
I'm continuously amazed at how people fail to grasp what a good idea it is to tax polluters for polluting because they have absolutely no idea how much it's costing them personally to pay for the cleanup. Go Google fossil fuel externalities, even with the most conservative estimates you're currently paying a hell of a lot personally for the fact that such pollution has largely been untaxed such that you pick up the bill. There's no such thing as a free ride, burning all that shit and letting them pollute has a cost, why not make the people who profit from it pay for it? Why is that such a terrible idea? Or is yours just a kneejerk libertarian "OMG GOVERNMENT, TAX, IT MUST BE BAD!" response?
Nooo bringing in the same bunch that wrote the credit default swaps house of bullshit makes it a scam, along with having carbon indulgences for the worst polluters like the guy that owns the coal power plants on the east coast (who has actually bragged about how it won't do shit to him) makes it nothing but a reverse robin hood.
Did you bother to actually READ any of the links, or did you just come to wave your flag? Because if you would have actually bothered to read TFL you'd have seen the people they have hired are about as honest as your average infomercial huckster.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Sorry, but I don't read religious screeds. Try real science.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are people that believe "fairer sex" was a phrase referencing something other than physical appearance?
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
I think more people need to watch this. It puts the argument in really simple terms: either anthopogenic climate change is real, or it's not, and either we do something, or we don't. And the consequence of being right or wrong pretty much leave us with worst-case scenarios of: it's not real, we did something = we wasted some resources when we didn't need to, versus it is real and we did nothing = existential risk (i.e. civilisation collapse, or in layman's terms, we're screwed). Even if we're wrong (and that's in disagreement with most serious scientists), we're better to do something about it than not (and, as an aside, we're better to be reducing our environmental impacts anyway, so this is a good driver).
For reference: my position was climate change skeptic until I started talking to academics in the field and looking into the data myself. I don't think we've got the models perfect, far from it - climates are crazy-complex systems - but the data is pretty compelling.
Anyways don't let me get in the way of your quest to rewrite history. Remember to just keep repeating your lie enough, and it will become the truth.
If the "birth of the souther GOP" wasn't tied to “white racism.” - why the heck are there so many openly racist pigfuckers among them?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.