That's an important distinction to recognize, because the fundamentalists, who firmly believe that their revealed knowledge must be true, because it comes from their religion, want to conflate fundamentalism with religion. It gives them the appearance of numbers they don't have, and even occasionally allows them to manipulate otherwise normal people into supporting fundamentalism under the guise of "Religion is under attack!".
There can be no common ground between science and revealed knowledge simply because they are polar opposites. Revealed knowledge can never change, science is always changing. Revealed knowledge is beyond question, science questions everything. Of course, the real problem is that science pretty much always shows the Revealed knowledge of fundamentalist religions to be wrong. And that's why there's a war of ideas going on, because the revealed knowledge of fundamentalist religion is wrong and the fundamentalists hope to hide that little problem away by attacking science.
That's an interesting theory, that governments always choose to maximize revenue, but one that is not born out by the facts. Let me present a few counter examples:
1) Acid Rain is an example where a cap and trade system was put into place and emissions have fallen.
2) Smoking is another example, contrary to what your theory would indicate, government anti-smoking campaigns and taxes have lowered the rate in North America, a move which reduces the tax base from the sale of cigarettes.
As for making "green" energy source cheaper than carbon-based energy sources, that is exactly one of the reasons for putting a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. It's supposed to make those using carbon emitting energy sources pay the full cost of their activities rather than relying on externalities to subsidize their behavior. In effect they are currently forcing everyone else to clean up their mess for them, the carbon tax simply puts the responsibility back on the people who are making the messes in the first place. Of course if you have to pay the cost of the fuel and cleaning up the mess made by the fuel, then cleaner technologies now have a real cost advantage. As long as CO2 emissions are not taxed, the public is effectively subsidizing CO2 emissions to the detriment of greener technologies.
Frankly, I think the fact that CO2 is a major problem has been sufficiently demonstrated. I'm no expert on the topic, but there's about a 95% or better agreement among the experts that it is a problem. You don't get that type of agreement from experts unless the issue is pretty much resolved. (When was the last time you asked for a 20th expert opinion before making up your mind?)
I don't understand your rhetoric over conflict of interest. I'm not sure who you're implying is going to benefit from climate change, after all it's not just scientists:
"Count a growing number of Colorado businesses among those deeply disenchanted with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its stance that climate change legislation is largely based on junk science and will further derail the American economy.
Earlier this month, heavy hitters like Apple, Exelon, Levi Strauss and Pacific Gas and Electric Co. outright quit the nation’s leading business organization. Nike resigned from the Chamber’s board but maintained its membership, and companies like Duke Energy, General Electric, Alcoa and Johnson & Johnson have disavowed the chamber’s positions on global warming.
The Pentagon will for the first time rank global warming as a destabilising force, adding fuel to conflict and putting US troops at risk around the world, in a major strategy review to be presented to Congress tomorrow. The quadrennial defence review, prepared by the Pentagon to update Congress on its security vision, will direct military planners to keep track of the latest climate science, and to factor global warming into their long term strategic planning.
So, what I'm confused about is, if there's a real problem, what incentive do climate scientists have to mislead us about the cause of the problem?
As for the taxes issue, fuel is not the only source of CO2 emissions and yes taxes on fuel do indirectly tax CO2 and if fuel was not taxed in most countries, we would be in a worse situation right now.
As far as taxes being entirely ineffective, there's two reasons why that's unlikely. The first is that consumption is factor of demand and price. Increase the price and consumption drops unless demand increases. There are different demand curves depending on the flexibility of the demand and the alternatives. The second is that at some point alternatives which produce fewer emissions will become more affordable than the C02 emitting energy sources we use now. At that point there will certainly be deflation in the demand for CO2 emitting energy sources. So yes, a CO2 tax should actually reduce the rate of global temperature increase.
Forcing people to pay a tax or to buy imaginary 'carbon offsets' (fuck, how stupid are some people) is not a way to a solution, it's a way to monetize a problem...
Make no mistake, I think everything else you said is also wrong, but I though this deserved special attention. Of course, "carbon offsets" are a way to monetize a problem. It's quite obviously a bribe to capitalists to get them to support reducing CO2 by monetizing the problem. The way capitalism works, nothing will ever be done about anything that doesn't translate into money. As long as CO2 emissions are free, corporations will pay, at best, lip service to reducing emissions. Corporations only have one real duty, and that's to deliver profits to their owners. If it doesn't cost anything and the alternatives do, the alternatives will rarely be used (essentially only by specialty companies that cater to patrons who care and can afford to deal with such a companies).
Carbon Dioxide is an externality, there are really only about four possible way to fix an externality: Criminalization, Civil Tort law, Government provision, Pigovian taxes. If CO2 is a problem you have four possible solutions: 1) Criminalize CO2 emissions. 2) Allow citizens to sue companies because of their CO2 emissions. 3) Tax everyone to pay for large carbon sequestration operations. 4) Tax the people who release the CO2.
If you don't like option #4, what would you choose instead and why?
It seems to me that the problem here is that colleges aren't flunking people out properly. If you learn nothing other than alcohol tolerance, your college/university career should end it's first year. Instead you seem to have many colleges that are simply milking their students for money without providing much of value in return.
If that's truly the case, then what you need is for state governments to require some standards be met for the colleges to keep their funding. Standards that can't be met simply by applying a bell curve to whatever results the students happen to turn in. If the colleges are truly providing nothing of value, then they are simply stealing taxpayer money to subsidize 4 years of drunken debauchery for the young adults of the middle class, something that taxpayers should be outraged over.
The most important question is whether this is an accurate picture of the situation or not.
I think you have to right idea, but the wrong scapegoat. It appears to be the vice-president of the privately run company that provides the food that is afraid that their federal funding might be in peril because of the prayers.
Mostly it seems to be one old fool who's thrown a spanner in the works. The Senior Citizens Inc. company should stick to delivering the food, what's said before or after should be no concern of theirs as long as they are not the people saying it. They don't even own the venue where the prayers were being said. So, even if the prayers were seen to be an issue, the fault and liability should lie the with the Ed Young Senior's Center and not with Senior Citizen's Inc.
The problem here isn't religion or atheism, it's stupidity and knee-jerk reactions. You could possibly also blame the generally lousy state of American law.
Sorry, bub, but nothing you wrote makes any sense.
1) I'm not sure how the "second warmest year on record" and "record setting warmest year in the southern hemisphere" combine to make you think "hey, it was pretty cold actually". Obviously the second warmest year on record, is the second warmest year on record.
2) The second sentence is pointing out a remarkable fact about the year that supports the premise. Anyone with basic reading comprehension would understand that. And one half of the world hardly seems to be a "local temperature" as you imply.
3) Global climate models aren't used to predict weather, they're used to predict climate trends. Climate and weather are not the same thing, if you don't understand the different, you're not educated enough to be a useful participant in the debate.
4) There are very few things that you don't know that have a 50-50 chance of being right. If that were the case, then there'd be a hell of lot more lottery winners.
Sorry, if I don't agree with you, if you're working with a budget it's ok to not keep data that somebody else is responsible for archiving anyway. The data hasn't been destroyed, it's archived and kept by a different organization. Media Matters seems to have a reasonable explanation of the situation.
I will reiterate, the point here isn't that the data isn't available, it's to attack the credibility of the CRU for trivial reasons. Their results are nearly identical to every other organization that is independently investigating climate change. The data is available and their data construction could be replicated if anyone really wanted to do so.
The reason no one is doing so, is because they already know that there's not enough value in doing so. There are multiple independent organizations who have all reached the same conclusion. Neither the pro-AGW or the anti-AGW people really think there's any value in duplicating the same basic research again. It's just a convenient way to criticize one research group for the sake of criticizing them. It's not about good or bad science, it's about political manipulation.
Well, in the U.S., if you group Electric Utilities and Oil and Gas companies together, they are the single largest lobby group. Independently they are 3rd and 6th respectively.
Yes, oil and gas companies do want prices to go through the roof, as long as they're the people who get that excess money. Like I said, they're not so fond of taxes that raise the price of oil and gas because they do sell less gas and they do lose some money. The way businesses are currently run not increasing profits every year is tantamount to failure.
And finally, yes, many companies tend to love the idea of carbon credits because it represents an alternative to a tax. A carbon tax would benefit governments and social programs, a carbon trading scheme benefits financial organizations and energy companies.
Actually, so far all temperatures have fallen withing the predicted range of temperatures in the IPCC models from 10 years ago. So, the predictions have all come true so far, the models work, and chaos theory is as aspect of weather, not climate. It's possible to average out chaos. So while, for example, it's difficult to predict the result of a single coin toss, we can predict that you'll get about 50 heads if you do 100. The same thing occurs for climate, the average temperature is easier to predict than the specific temperature on any given day.
If the price goes up, the quantity sold goes down unless demand is very, very inelastic. There is significant evidence to show that if the price of gas rises high enough, people buy less gas. They take the bus or train more often and they walk or ride bikes more often. That means oil companies will almost certainly lose money when someone else raises their prices long term.
The energy companies are already making record profits. Though it is probably true that coal companies are more afraid of AGW than oil companies. However, records do indicate that at least some oil companies are afraid enough of AGW that they've hired lobby and public relations firms to fight political action related to AGW.
Did you read the article you linked to, or just the headline?
Last year Mr Gore's venture capital firm loaned a small California firm $75m to develop energy-saving technology.
The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient.
The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants, the New York Times reports. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts.
So, Al Gore decides that efficient electricity grids are a good thing and you want to tar and feather him for investing in that? Really? You're really going to take the position that inefficiency is inherently good?
This is one of the reasons, I don't like climate change deniers, you keep repeating the same tired old falsehoods as if they are facts because you happen to like them.
The planet is still warming, there is no cooling trend, just an unusually cool year. We are at a solar minimum at the moment so when you reduce one factor that warms the planet you slow the rate of increase, but it is still increasing. According to NASA, 2009 was the second hottest year on record. The "earth is cooling" meme is just a stupid graph trick. You pick the highest point on the graph and draw a line towards some subsequent point and say "look things are decreasing", but that's not real statistics. You're suppose to fit your slope line to the entire graph, not two arbitrary points. When you properly fit the graph, temperature is still rising, though at a pace that is slightly below the predicted level per decade (0.18C for the last decade versus 0.2C). Mind you the predicted number is the average per decade, and will be both higher and lower on individual decades. If the solar minimum ends soon, we will likely experience more than 0.2C warming over the next decade.
According the the leaked emails "we can't explain" why tree aren't growing at the rate they're supposed to be growing. As it turns out, particulate pollution has darkened the world so less sunlight is reaching the ground levels, for example, which may be a contributing factor for the discrepancy. That particulate has also had a cooling effect on the world which has lessened the amount of warming that has occurred.
It appears the Wall Street Journal is wrong. The "Climategate" scandal showed no such thing, this has been independently confirmed by two separate investigations. That entire first paragraph reads as classic anti-AGW propaganda, no small part of that is because it blatantly misrepresents the facts.
In the second situation, it is possible to determine that there are more of something that previously thought without determine exactly how much more. For example, if you have two rabbits and one day you see dozens of rabbit ears in your backyard, you can probably sure that you have more than two rabbits now without actually rounding them all up and counting them. If you see more than four rabbit ears, you are pretty likely to have more than two rabbits.
Keeping everything is a luxury some people do not have, some people have to live with budgets and limited resources. As far as I understand the data still exists, the CRU just doesn't have it's copy of the raw data anymore. Presumably anyone sufficiently interested could gather the raw data themselves, but that would be costly and unlikely to advance anyone's agenda.
Do your debates never end? Does the debate continue past the point where there is anything new to say? Do you let the debate run forever as long as one side is profiting from your lack of desire to take action? The debate over global warming is largely manufactured to delay the inevitable changes that will arrive. Why? Because it's cheaper to manufacture the debate than it is to change our ways.
Eventually every debate must end, when the critics have nothing worthwhile left to say, it's probably past the time to end the debate. It's been quite some time since climate change critics have said anything interesting, new or useful. A few of them have found minor errors, which they seem to invariable trumpet as the "final nail in the coffin of global warming" and yet their amazing breakthrough discovery always falls short of actually having an impact.
For all intents and purposes the debate is over, the climate change deniers have begun resorting to legal persecution of scientists, they began resorting to name calling a long, long time ago. It's been almost a decade since they began trying to censor the scientists and muzzle them in those countries in which they had power. And yet, when some scientists lay out the generally accepted facts of the situation and ask for an end to bogus legal prosecutions and lies, you accuse them of trying to silence their critics?
It's laughable really. You side with criminals, censors, and liars to accuse their victims of fraud, censorship and lies when they protest the abuse heaped upon them.
That's not surprising, it certainly seems like a lot of anti-evolutionists are also in the anti-AGW battle. I suppose there's a couple of reasons for that. For one AGW questions the literal truth of the Bible, because if AGW is true, then maybe God didn't really give the world to Christians to do with as they wish. The other big reason is that anti-evolutionists have a tendency to be anti-science, thus it is natural for them to take up any side which questions the credibility of scientists and scientific consensus. Evolution is just the wedge issue that they're hammering away at to try and break science.
As an aside, btw, when did 'skeptic' become a bad word? When I was trained being a skeptic was considered a necessary prerequisite to being a scientist of any sort
Skeptic isn't a bad word, however "skeptic" is, because it implies that the person quoting it doesn't believe the person's label of himself.
The most interesting part of your post is how it is exactly the opposite of my experience. What I've found is time and again whenever I've looked at any anti-AGW argument that the argument is based on lies, hyperbole, tricks and mirages:
Medieval warm period? Not as warm as claimed. The earth was warmer? ~10 million years ago. Hockey stick false? Sorry, it's got a very small bump in it. The temperature has been declining for the last 15 years? No, it's been rising. No change in temperature from prominent scientist? No, sorry he said over the time period chosen there's no statistically signficant rise in temperature because the period is too short.
Every time I look into the anti-AGW claims they are exposed as mere propoganda. Every time I look into the pro-AGW claims they appear to be well backed and well researched. There have been occasional mistakes but I just don't see the same pattern of deliberate deception I see from the anti-AGW people.
Unfortunately, every time I find out the anti-AGW people have lied to me, I become ever less charitable towards their viewpoint. That's what constant and far-ranging deception does to the people who see through it. I can't even be sure that your post isn't a sort of soft-peddled FUD, but I'm willing to extend the benefit of the doubt for now.
The earth hasn't been cooling for the last 15 years. 10 out of the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the last 15 years (2009 is tied for 2nd place according to NASA). How is that cooling? When you consider the last 30 years there's a clear warming trend that continues to this year. The last 15 years or alternatively 12 years is a cherry-picked number because 1995 and 1998 were unusually warm years. Thus if you start with either 1995 or 1998 you get a flatter slope on your graph because you start with a high number and gives a misleading impression that 1995 or 1998 were typical of the time period before the graph starts. It's a very common way to trick people with graphs.
Sure they can refuse to give it to you, but usually they do that because they expect you to pay them for the work they've done. I know this is a foreign concept to some people.
"Unverifiable by you" is not the same as "Unverifiable". And even "they won't give me the data" is the same as "Unverifiable", that's "Unverifiable without doing a lot work". I mean, even with a proprietary data set, you should be able to go an collect and collate the data yourself. It's expensive and time consuming, though. Which is why they purchased the rights to use the data in the first place.
If you won't pay for the data like they did, or collect it yourself, what do you expect to happen?
Well, by that standard you can't believe anything anyone says because everyone has interests. It's not a very useful viewpoint. The point about Fox News was that many of their "independent" experts are there as representatives of materially interested Fox News advertisers. So for example when discussing whether genetically modified foods are safe, the "expert" is a paid consultant of Monsanto. When discussing the practicality of missile defense, the "expert" is a engineer for a missile defense company. Of course, that's not a huge problem, except Fox News doesn't tell the audience that the people being presented as neutral experts are, in fact, not only biased but generally there specifically acting as spokespeople. There are really big conflict of interest issues here that are swept behind a curtain of "Free Speech". It's fortunate for Fox News that people don't need to pay Fox to watch their shows, because if they did, Fox could be liable for fines under anti-fraud legislation.
According to NASA, 2009 is tied for the second warmest year on record, and it was the warmest year ever recorded in the southern hemisphere.
The only time you would see a decline is if you plaid a game by changing the starting position of your graph to be the highest year ever recorded. Then you get a downward slope because you're concealing the rise in temperatures.
What ClimateGate exposed was how desperate and unreliable many of the self-professed skeptics of AGW are. I routinely see people use the flimsiest of "evidence" from the ClimateGate emails to make extraordinary claims. What it shows to me is that the "skeptics" aren't. If they were actually skeptics they wouldn't be leaping to conclusions because that's exactly what skeptics don't do, by definition even.
Absolutely, or even better, how about an inter-governmental panel that brings the foremost scientists and mathematicians from around the world into one giant committee of the world's best and brightest. And then how about we repeat it three or four times to make sure they come up with the same answers each time?
Slashdot Mirror
Science isn't anti-religion, it's anti-revealed knowledge.
That's an important distinction to recognize, because the fundamentalists, who firmly believe that their revealed knowledge must be true, because it comes from their religion, want to conflate fundamentalism with religion. It gives them the appearance of numbers they don't have, and even occasionally allows them to manipulate otherwise normal people into supporting fundamentalism under the guise of "Religion is under attack!".
There can be no common ground between science and revealed knowledge simply because they are polar opposites. Revealed knowledge can never change, science is always changing. Revealed knowledge is beyond question, science questions everything. Of course, the real problem is that science pretty much always shows the Revealed knowledge of fundamentalist religions to be wrong. And that's why there's a war of ideas going on, because the revealed knowledge of fundamentalist religion is wrong and the fundamentalists hope to hide that little problem away by attacking science.
That's an interesting theory, that governments always choose to maximize revenue, but one that is not born out by the facts. Let me present a few counter examples:
1) Acid Rain is an example where a cap and trade system was put into place and emissions have fallen.
2) Smoking is another example, contrary to what your theory would indicate, government anti-smoking campaigns and taxes have lowered the rate in North America, a move which reduces the tax base from the sale of cigarettes.
As for making "green" energy source cheaper than carbon-based energy sources, that is exactly one of the reasons for putting a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. It's supposed to make those using carbon emitting energy sources pay the full cost of their activities rather than relying on externalities to subsidize their behavior. In effect they are currently forcing everyone else to clean up their mess for them, the carbon tax simply puts the responsibility back on the people who are making the messes in the first place. Of course if you have to pay the cost of the fuel and cleaning up the mess made by the fuel, then cleaner technologies now have a real cost advantage. As long as CO2 emissions are not taxed, the public is effectively subsidizing CO2 emissions to the detriment of greener technologies.
Frankly, I think the fact that CO2 is a major problem has been sufficiently demonstrated. I'm no expert on the topic, but there's about a 95% or better agreement among the experts that it is a problem. You don't get that type of agreement from experts unless the issue is pretty much resolved. (When was the last time you asked for a 20th expert opinion before making up your mind?)
I don't understand your rhetoric over conflict of interest. I'm not sure who you're implying is going to benefit from climate change, after all it's not just scientists:
"Count a growing number of Colorado businesses among those deeply disenchanted with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its stance that climate change legislation is largely based on junk science and will further derail the American economy.
Earlier this month, heavy hitters like Apple, Exelon, Levi Strauss and Pacific Gas and Electric Co. outright quit the nation’s leading business organization. Nike resigned from the Chamber’s board but maintained its membership, and companies like Duke Energy, General Electric, Alcoa and Johnson & Johnson have disavowed the chamber’s positions on global warming.
The U.S. military also considers climate change to be a real issue:
The Pentagon will for the first time rank global warming as a destabilising force, adding fuel to conflict and putting US troops at risk around the world, in a major strategy review to be presented to Congress tomorrow. The quadrennial defence review, prepared by the Pentagon to update Congress on its security vision, will direct military planners to keep track of the latest climate science, and to factor global warming into their long term strategic planning.
So, what I'm confused about is, if there's a real problem, what incentive do climate scientists have to mislead us about the cause of the problem?
As for the taxes issue, fuel is not the only source of CO2 emissions and yes taxes on fuel do indirectly tax CO2 and if fuel was not taxed in most countries, we would be in a worse situation right now.
As far as taxes being entirely ineffective, there's two reasons why that's unlikely. The first is that consumption is factor of demand and price. Increase the price and consumption drops unless demand increases. There are different demand curves depending on the flexibility of the demand and the alternatives. The second is that at some point alternatives which produce fewer emissions will become more affordable than the C02 emitting energy sources we use now. At that point there will certainly be deflation in the demand for CO2 emitting energy sources. So yes, a CO2 tax should actually reduce the rate of global temperature increase.
Forcing people to pay a tax or to buy imaginary 'carbon offsets' (fuck, how stupid are some people) is not a way to a solution, it's a way to monetize a problem...
Make no mistake, I think everything else you said is also wrong, but I though this deserved special attention. Of course, "carbon offsets" are a way to monetize a problem. It's quite obviously a bribe to capitalists to get them to support reducing CO2 by monetizing the problem. The way capitalism works, nothing will ever be done about anything that doesn't translate into money. As long as CO2 emissions are free, corporations will pay, at best, lip service to reducing emissions. Corporations only have one real duty, and that's to deliver profits to their owners. If it doesn't cost anything and the alternatives do, the alternatives will rarely be used (essentially only by specialty companies that cater to patrons who care and can afford to deal with such a companies).
Carbon Dioxide is an externality, there are really only about four possible way to fix an externality: Criminalization, Civil Tort law, Government provision, Pigovian taxes. If CO2 is a problem you have four possible solutions:
1) Criminalize CO2 emissions.
2) Allow citizens to sue companies because of their CO2 emissions.
3) Tax everyone to pay for large carbon sequestration operations.
4) Tax the people who release the CO2.
If you don't like option #4, what would you choose instead and why?
It seems to me that the problem here is that colleges aren't flunking people out properly. If you learn nothing other than alcohol tolerance, your college/university career should end it's first year. Instead you seem to have many colleges that are simply milking their students for money without providing much of value in return.
If that's truly the case, then what you need is for state governments to require some standards be met for the colleges to keep their funding. Standards that can't be met simply by applying a bell curve to whatever results the students happen to turn in. If the colleges are truly providing nothing of value, then they are simply stealing taxpayer money to subsidize 4 years of drunken debauchery for the young adults of the middle class, something that taxpayers should be outraged over.
The most important question is whether this is an accurate picture of the situation or not.
I think you have to right idea, but the wrong scapegoat. It appears to be the vice-president of the privately run company that provides the food that is afraid that their federal funding might be in peril because of the prayers.
Mostly it seems to be one old fool who's thrown a spanner in the works. The Senior Citizens Inc. company should stick to delivering the food, what's said before or after should be no concern of theirs as long as they are not the people saying it. They don't even own the venue where the prayers were being said. So, even if the prayers were seen to be an issue, the fault and liability should lie the with the Ed Young Senior's Center and not with Senior Citizen's Inc.
The problem here isn't religion or atheism, it's stupidity and knee-jerk reactions. You could possibly also blame the generally lousy state of American law.
Sorry, bub, but nothing you wrote makes any sense.
1) I'm not sure how the "second warmest year on record" and "record setting warmest year in the southern hemisphere" combine to make you think "hey, it was pretty cold actually". Obviously the second warmest year on record, is the second warmest year on record.
2) The second sentence is pointing out a remarkable fact about the year that supports the premise. Anyone with basic reading comprehension would understand that. And one half of the world hardly seems to be a "local temperature" as you imply.
3) Global climate models aren't used to predict weather, they're used to predict climate trends. Climate and weather are not the same thing, if you don't understand the different, you're not educated enough to be a useful participant in the debate.
4) There are very few things that you don't know that have a 50-50 chance of being right. If that were the case, then there'd be a hell of lot more lottery winners.
Sorry, if I don't agree with you, if you're working with a budget it's ok to not keep data that somebody else is responsible for archiving anyway. The data hasn't been destroyed, it's archived and kept by a different organization.
Media Matters seems to have a reasonable explanation of the situation.
I will reiterate, the point here isn't that the data isn't available, it's to attack the credibility of the CRU for trivial reasons. Their results are nearly identical to every other organization that is independently investigating climate change. The data is available and their data construction could be replicated if anyone really wanted to do so.
The reason no one is doing so, is because they already know that there's not enough value in doing so. There are multiple independent organizations who have all reached the same conclusion. Neither the pro-AGW or the anti-AGW people really think there's any value in duplicating the same basic research again. It's just a convenient way to criticize one research group for the sake of criticizing them. It's not about good or bad science, it's about political manipulation.
Well, in the U.S., if you group Electric Utilities and Oil and Gas companies together, they are the single largest lobby group. Independently they are 3rd and 6th respectively.
Yes, oil and gas companies do want prices to go through the roof, as long as they're the people who get that excess money. Like I said, they're not so fond of taxes that raise the price of oil and gas because they do sell less gas and they do lose some money. The way businesses are currently run not increasing profits every year is tantamount to failure.
And finally, yes, many companies tend to love the idea of carbon credits because it represents an alternative to a tax. A carbon tax would benefit governments and social programs, a carbon trading scheme benefits financial organizations and energy companies.
Actually, so far all temperatures have fallen withing the predicted range of temperatures in the IPCC models from 10 years ago. So, the predictions have all come true so far, the models work, and chaos theory is as aspect of weather, not climate. It's possible to average out chaos. So while, for example, it's difficult to predict the result of a single coin toss, we can predict that you'll get about 50 heads if you do 100. The same thing occurs for climate, the average temperature is easier to predict than the specific temperature on any given day.
Basic microeconomics.
If the price goes up, the quantity sold goes down unless demand is very, very inelastic. There is significant evidence to show that if the price of gas rises high enough, people buy less gas. They take the bus or train more often and they walk or ride bikes more often. That means oil companies will almost certainly lose money when someone else raises their prices long term.
The energy companies are already making record profits. Though it is probably true that coal companies are more afraid of AGW than oil companies. However, records do indicate that at least some oil companies are afraid enough of AGW that they've hired lobby and public relations firms to fight political action related to AGW.
Did you read the article you linked to, or just the headline?
So, Al Gore decides that efficient electricity grids are a good thing and you want to tar and feather him for investing in that? Really? You're really going to take the position that inefficiency is inherently good?
This is one of the reasons, I don't like climate change deniers, you keep repeating the same tired old falsehoods as if they are facts because you happen to like them.
The planet is still warming, there is no cooling trend, just an unusually cool year. We are at a solar minimum at the moment so when you reduce one factor that warms the planet you slow the rate of increase, but it is still increasing. According to NASA, 2009 was the second hottest year on record. The "earth is cooling" meme is just a stupid graph trick. You pick the highest point on the graph and draw a line towards some subsequent point and say "look things are decreasing", but that's not real statistics. You're suppose to fit your slope line to the entire graph, not two arbitrary points. When you properly fit the graph, temperature is still rising, though at a pace that is slightly below the predicted level per decade (0.18C for the last decade versus 0.2C). Mind you the predicted number is the average per decade, and will be both higher and lower on individual decades. If the solar minimum ends soon, we will likely experience more than 0.2C warming over the next decade.
According the the leaked emails "we can't explain" why tree aren't growing at the rate they're supposed to be growing. As it turns out, particulate pollution has darkened the world so less sunlight is reaching the ground levels, for example, which may be a contributing factor for the discrepancy. That particulate has also had a cooling effect on the world which has lessened the amount of warming that has occurred.
It appears the Wall Street Journal is wrong. The "Climategate" scandal showed no such thing, this has been independently confirmed by two separate investigations. That entire first paragraph reads as classic anti-AGW propaganda, no small part of that is because it blatantly misrepresents the facts.
In the second situation, it is possible to determine that there are more of something that previously thought without determine exactly how much more. For example, if you have two rabbits and one day you see dozens of rabbit ears in your backyard, you can probably sure that you have more than two rabbits now without actually rounding them all up and counting them. If you see more than four rabbit ears, you are pretty likely to have more than two rabbits.
Keeping everything is a luxury some people do not have, some people have to live with budgets and limited resources. As far as I understand the data still exists, the CRU just doesn't have it's copy of the raw data anymore. Presumably anyone sufficiently interested could gather the raw data themselves, but that would be costly and unlikely to advance anyone's agenda.
Do your debates never end? Does the debate continue past the point where there is anything new to say? Do you let the debate run forever as long as one side is profiting from your lack of desire to take action? The debate over global warming is largely manufactured to delay the inevitable changes that will arrive. Why? Because it's cheaper to manufacture the debate than it is to change our ways.
Eventually every debate must end, when the critics have nothing worthwhile left to say, it's probably past the time to end the debate. It's been quite some time since climate change critics have said anything interesting, new or useful. A few of them have found minor errors, which they seem to invariable trumpet as the "final nail in the coffin of global warming" and yet their amazing breakthrough discovery always falls short of actually having an impact.
For all intents and purposes the debate is over, the climate change deniers have begun resorting to legal persecution of scientists, they began resorting to name calling a long, long time ago. It's been almost a decade since they began trying to censor the scientists and muzzle them in those countries in which they had power. And yet, when some scientists lay out the generally accepted facts of the situation and ask for an end to bogus legal prosecutions and lies, you accuse them of trying to silence their critics?
It's laughable really. You side with criminals, censors, and liars to accuse their victims of fraud, censorship and lies when they protest the abuse heaped upon them.
That's not surprising, it certainly seems like a lot of anti-evolutionists are also in the anti-AGW battle. I suppose there's a couple of reasons for that. For one AGW questions the literal truth of the Bible, because if AGW is true, then maybe God didn't really give the world to Christians to do with as they wish. The other big reason is that anti-evolutionists have a tendency to be anti-science, thus it is natural for them to take up any side which questions the credibility of scientists and scientific consensus. Evolution is just the wedge issue that they're hammering away at to try and break science.
I don't think that is a correct way of looking at it. It's not illegal until they have monopoly power, until then it's still a dick move.
There isn't universal agreement that the world is round or that there are 24 hours in a day.
Universal agreement is pretty hard to get when some people are crazy and others can make money from dissent.
As an aside, btw, when did 'skeptic' become a bad word? When I was trained being a skeptic was considered a necessary prerequisite to being a scientist of any sort
Skeptic isn't a bad word, however "skeptic" is, because it implies that the person quoting it doesn't believe the person's label of himself.
The most interesting part of your post is how it is exactly the opposite of my experience. What I've found is time and again whenever I've looked at any anti-AGW argument that the argument is based on lies, hyperbole, tricks and mirages:
Medieval warm period? Not as warm as claimed.
The earth was warmer? ~10 million years ago.
Hockey stick false? Sorry, it's got a very small bump in it.
The temperature has been declining for the last 15 years? No, it's been rising.
No change in temperature from prominent scientist? No, sorry he said over the time period chosen there's no statistically signficant rise in temperature because the period is too short.
Every time I look into the anti-AGW claims they are exposed as mere propoganda. Every time I look into the pro-AGW claims they appear to be well backed and well researched. There have been occasional mistakes but I just don't see the same pattern of deliberate deception I see from the anti-AGW people.
Unfortunately, every time I find out the anti-AGW people have lied to me, I become ever less charitable towards their viewpoint. That's what constant and far-ranging deception does to the people who see through it. I can't even be sure that your post isn't a sort of soft-peddled FUD, but I'm willing to extend the benefit of the doubt for now.
The earth hasn't been cooling for the last 15 years. 10 out of the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the last 15 years (2009 is tied for 2nd place according to NASA). How is that cooling? When you consider the last 30 years there's a clear warming trend that continues to this year. The last 15 years or alternatively 12 years is a cherry-picked number because 1995 and 1998 were unusually warm years. Thus if you start with either 1995 or 1998 you get a flatter slope on your graph because you start with a high number and gives a misleading impression that 1995 or 1998 were typical of the time period before the graph starts. It's a very common way to trick people with graphs.
Sure they can refuse to give it to you, but usually they do that because they expect you to pay them for the work they've done. I know this is a foreign concept to some people.
"Unverifiable by you" is not the same as "Unverifiable". And even "they won't give me the data" is the same as "Unverifiable", that's "Unverifiable without doing a lot work". I mean, even with a proprietary data set, you should be able to go an collect and collate the data yourself. It's expensive and time consuming, though. Which is why they purchased the rights to use the data in the first place.
If you won't pay for the data like they did, or collect it yourself, what do you expect to happen?
Well, by that standard you can't believe anything anyone says because everyone has interests. It's not a very useful viewpoint. The point about Fox News was that many of their "independent" experts are there as representatives of materially interested Fox News advertisers. So for example when discussing whether genetically modified foods are safe, the "expert" is a paid consultant of Monsanto. When discussing the practicality of missile defense, the "expert" is a engineer for a missile defense company. Of course, that's not a huge problem, except Fox News doesn't tell the audience that the people being presented as neutral experts are, in fact, not only biased but generally there specifically acting as spokespeople. There are really big conflict of interest issues here that are swept behind a curtain of "Free Speech". It's fortunate for Fox News that people don't need to pay Fox to watch their shows, because if they did, Fox could be liable for fines under anti-fraud legislation.
What recent temperature decline?
According to NASA, 2009 is tied for the second warmest year on record, and it was the warmest year ever recorded in the southern hemisphere.
The only time you would see a decline is if you plaid a game by changing the starting position of your graph to be the highest year ever recorded. Then you get a downward slope because you're concealing the rise in temperatures.
What ClimateGate exposed was how desperate and unreliable many of the self-professed skeptics of AGW are. I routinely see people use the flimsiest of "evidence" from the ClimateGate emails to make extraordinary claims. What it shows to me is that the "skeptics" aren't. If they were actually skeptics they wouldn't be leaping to conclusions because that's exactly what skeptics don't do, by definition even.
Absolutely, or even better, how about an inter-governmental panel that brings the foremost scientists and mathematicians from around the world into one giant committee of the world's best and brightest. And then how about we repeat it three or four times to make sure they come up with the same answers each time?
Oh wait, that sounds somewhat familiar....