There are a fair few people who just dont know how accurate the science is, a common question I get is "How can we measure air (CO2) from thousands of years ago", I point them towards the Wikipedia page on Ice Cores and say "because it's been trapped there all this time".
I find your citation of ice core data amusing, because in general it doesn't support the AGW thesis. Two major results have been the confirmation of ancient warm periods, and the fact that higher CO2 concentrations have lagged behind times of higher temperature, not the other way around.
It's really rather ironic that the AGW proponents, who have clearly not been objective regarding the science, have the nerve to paint the skeptics as fanatics. Any truly objective person who reads the leaked CRU emails and source code will see a group committed to furthering its agenda at any cost, certainly to include lost scientific objectivity.
The frightening thing is that if natural climate variability had cooperated, we might be wasting trillions of dollars to no good purpose, since "the science is settled". Crazily, the EPA is still parroting that nonsense, but clearly the tide is turning. I think in the end good science will prevail, saving us from the extremist environmentalist agenda.
Scientists will quite reasonably say, "just before we chuck out all the accumulated evidence and thinking about how the world works and accept your argument that you've shown it that is, in fact, possible for humans to add net tens of billions of tons of gases such as CO2 and CH4 to the atmosphere in the space of decades without it having an impact on climate, do you mind terribly if we take a very long hard look at your evidence and reasoning?"
One of the problems with this debate is that the issue in question is often misstated.
Most of the skeptics agree that additional CO2 has an effect. The debate is over whether the effect is problematic, or even significant. There is also the question as to whether or not proposed mitigating efforts will prove effective, if there is a problem.
I believe that given the current sorry state of "climate science", which has failed to show extraordinary warming and is based on very questionable computer modeling, that a "wait and see" attitude is appropriate. It appears even more so, given that warming has slowed, stopped, or reversed depending on which data you believe. This should be viewed in the light of the undisputed fact that the Earth has been in a net warming trend since the last Ice Age. What we should really be worried about is the inevitable coming big dip into the next one.
The problem with the current brain-dead idea of "Cap and Trade" is that it's inordinately expensive while even its proponents agree that it will produce no noticeable effect on the climate. This is because the United States is no longer the largest "carbon polluter", and China, India and other up-and-coming industrial nations want no part of such an economy-killing proposal.
AGW proponents also steadfastly refuse to consider the benefits of higher CO2 and a warmer planet, such as more arable land and faster plant growth. Humans have generally had a much harder time in cooler conditions. Personally, I have no problem with the concept of humans altering the environment, many species have done so and it's almost unavoidable regardless. Elephants and alligators are two classic examples of species that have substantially altered their native ecosystems.
These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China."
You missed the most important point in the source article:
and is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants.
These aren't "renewable" technologies, nor do they need to be. What they are, though, are the only realistic way of producing enough energy to power our society going forward.
The new generation of nuclear reactors is completely safe, and disposing of the waste products is a completely solvable problem.
How is patent encumbered food products a win for environmentalism?
One of the craziest aspects of all this is patented genomes.
I saw an incredibly sad documentary on GM crops where a farmer was forced to give up his family's seed bank developed over decades because the crops had been contaminated with Monsanto GM pollen from an adjacent farm (wind pollination).
If you think software patents are bad, genome patents are far worse. They are corporatism incarnate. The practical aspect for farmers is that instead of planting their own seed season after season, they're forced to buy new seed each year from the megacorps.
That 250,000 times one year of solar output number wasn't very meaningful, since the star released all the energy in 1/5 of a second.
So, we should look at the actual ratio. There are 31,557,600 seconds in an average year (365.25 days). Five times that (to account for 1/5 seconds) is 157,788,000. That number, times 250,000 is 39,447,000,000,000.
So, for that 1/5 of a second, the neutron star put out about 39.5 trillion times as much energy as the Sun. Since the Sun puts out about the energy of 100 billion H-bombs per second, well that's a LOT of energy. Some might call this a "superflare", I'd call it one heck of a big explosion! Note that the energy intensity was much higher than for a supernova!
One of the funnier things, actually, is the resolute attempt by the CRU and IPCC to discount the Sun as a source of climate variability. None of the IPCC models take into account the sunspot cycles, nor are there "what if" runs based on possible variability. That's not entirely surprising given that the mechanism for sunspot minima causing lower temperatures isn't understood. However, we do know historically that minima such as the Maunder Minimum produced sharply lower temperatures.
As I understand, solar activity correlated for most of the time we have direct temperature records, but the correlation diverged markedly in the last two decades. Solar activity having reduced in that time is unable to explain the continued rise in temperature.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm
Solar activity is therefore not something I can use to explain currently warming trends.
The graph at your link has some problems. First off, the "global temperature average" is poorly known before satellite records. Then, in recent years the GISS temperature record has been skewed, both from cherry-picking data and siting climate stations in urban heat islands while not applying appropriate corrections. It's well known that 1998 was the warmest year on record, while the chart shows 2005 as quite a bit warmer, eh?
Further, your graph is of "solar radiance", not "sunspot number". The mechanism for cooling during solar minima is apparently more complex than simple differences in radiant output. One theory is that high cosmic ray activity spawns more cloud formation - but the jury is still out on that. Regardless, we do know that during the Maunder and Dalton minima, temperatures fell sharply.
True, although the "greenhouse effect" applies to closed systems (bounded in the case of a greenhouse, with glass). It's not at all clear the IPCC is modeling the open "greenhouse effect" here on Earth properly.
The "greenhouse effect" in any sense of the word not a closed system. Even a glass greenhouse has external energy input via sunlight and output via the gradual dissipation of heat into its environment via the contact of glass with air. The distinction is false.
My use of "open" and "closed" wasn't scientific, sorry. The glass walls of a greenhouse don't permit convection, whereas the atmosphere does. Some highly nonlinear things happen in the atmosphere when convection occurs - mainly falling under the category of "clouds". Clouds reflect a lot of solar energy back into space. So, the comparison between a conventional greenhouse, and the Earth's atmosphere is not straightforward at all.
To equate climate change to phlogiston or egg cholesterol is a long stretch indeed.
Not really so much, but the other thing to keep in mind is that phlogiston was never used as a justification for spending trillions of dollars, permanently changing the world economy, and affecting the standard of living of billions of people. So, the standard for the science used to "prove" anthropogenic global warming should be high indeed.
As if changing the world economy is a bad thing. The standard of living of billions of people is already poor and developed nations grapple with traffic congestion, pollution, rising grocery prices due to poor planning and energy security. Trillions of dollars were spent on saving the economic system from collapse and bailing out banks to preserve a world economy that didn't work particularly well. Commitments to save the planet pale in comparison by orders of magnitude.
There are quite a few problems with your "logic" here. First of all, the trillions spent to save the economic system from collapse have already been spent - they're gone. We don't have trill
Phlogiston, persisted as a theory because no competing hypothesis existed at the time could better explained the data, and the data available at the time did not contradict the theory.
Climate science today is different with many scientists going out of there way to enormous quantities of data ranging from this such as tree rings, to limestone deposits, to sun spots to ice cores to real temperature data from the ground and from satellites.
One of the funnier things, actually, is the resolute attempt by the CRU and IPCC to discount the Sun as a source of climate variability. None of the IPCC models take into account the sunspot cycles, nor are there "what if" runs based on possible variability. That's not entirely surprising given that the mechanism for sunspot minima causing lower temperatures isn't understood. However, we do know historically that minima such as the Maunder Minimum produced sharply lower temperatures.
Mind you, the term "greenhouse effect" was introduced way back in the late 19th century, so the idea is hardly new. It is certainly way longer than say the intervening time between the discovery of eggs in cholesterol, and the discovery that consumption of eggs do not increase blood cholesterol levels.
True, although the "greenhouse effect" applies to closed systems (bounded in the case of a greenhouse, with glass). It's not at all clear the IPCC is modeling the open "greenhouse effect" here on Earth properly.
To equate climate change to phlogiston or egg cholesterol is a long stretch indeed.
Not really so much, but the other thing to keep in mind is that phlogiston was never used as a justification for spending trillions of dollars, permanently changing the world economy, and affecting the standard of living of billions of people. So, the standard for the science used to "prove" anthropogenic global warming should be high indeed. IMO, the current state of the art is not even close. Fortunately, given the state of the Sun's sunspot cycles we may be in a multi-decade timeout on warming, anthropogenic or no. We should know quite a bit more twenty or thirty years down the road.
So when you see hacked emails showing scientists dissing people like them, or McIntyre, or any of that ilk, realize that the scientists *really do* think that these people are putting out garbage and have vested agendas. It's just that when speaking publicly, they usually have more tact.
Wow, the hypocrisy here is stunning. Having read a lot of the leaked/hacked emails, it's more than clear the scientists have quite an agenda of their own. Intentionally distorting results, discarding inconvenient data, suppressing peer reviewed articles, and refusing to honor valid Freedom of Information requests all clearly happened. The first three are directly forbidden by good scientific practice. I hope those responsible have their credentials revoked, at a minimum.
I think healthy skepticism of claims that would result in a complete re-ordering of the world economy is more than justified, whatever the source. A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, and pretty soon your talking real money!:-P
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and so far the IPCC position is looking far more like smoke and mirrors than honest, unbiased science.
The fortunate thing is that plenty of folks see this deception for exactly what it is.
Do you really believe that? It's clearly not true.
The quote from the Declaration of Independence is "All men are created equal.". Let's go ahead and extend that to "all people". Fine.
The point of the statement was that there is in fact no "divine right of kings". I'm fairly sure you aren't arguing that there is.
However, the fallacy in your statement is that, after birth, all humans are interchangeable (actually that's an argument for equivalence, not equality, but that's a lesser standard). There are wide ranges of intelligence, strength, courage, stamina, dexterity...OK I'll quit listing role-playing statistics. I'm sure you get my point.
Any system that attempts to enforce the "equality" of people in general, such as socialism, is doomed to failure. The real world doesn't work that way. Those who excel, which generally benefits society, should be rewarded. Those who don't, not so much. That simple principle is responsible for the success of the United States, and is ignored at our peril. Yes, I strongly believe in American Exceptionalism, since it's an observed fact.
Plus, it's so ironic that this summary concludes with:
Oh, and by the way: October was the hottest month on record in Darwin, Australia."
This is of course no more meaningful than the scads of low-temperature records we've had this year in the states, or many ski resorts having their earliest openings in history. The concern is, of course, the global mean temperature.
Can't methane be Carbon-dated like any other metabolic by-product?
Yes, but ancient methane would be in the same situation as Earth's coal, since the half-life of C14 is less than 6,000 years - no measurable isotope would likely exist.
Possible, but unlikely. Mars tectonics had stopped a loooong time ago.
I'm curious how you arrived at this conclusion. It sounds suspiciously like the "Moon is dead" thesis, which was shattered by the existence of lunar quakes and possible volcanic activity.
And without plate tectonics it's pretty hard to imagine how geologic traps for organic material could have formed.
Time and again the natural world has confounded the human imagination. Perhaps this is one of those times.;-)
Another possible explanation might be ancient underground methane deposits leaking into the Martian atmosphere...if this has been ruled out, how?
It seems possible that life existed in the distant past on Mars, leaving behind methane deposits much like oil and natural gas deposits here on Earth...
Rubbish, the scientists aren't "pushing for" anything, they're just presenting results.
Rubbish yourself, the "scientists" at CRU were clearly "pushing for" a pro-AGW outcome. Why else the attempt to banish anti-AGW papers from the IPCC reports regardless of their merit, or to blackball a scientific journal based on its editorial practices?
Good science stands on its own merits. It doesn't require backroom deals or underhanded methods.
The end result of Climategate should be academic discreditation for several of those involved, and jail for a few - most likely to include Phil Jones. He very blatantly disregarded valid Freedom of Information requests. That's a felony in Great Britain.
While it is true that Kagan was appointed by Obama, nevertheless I expect that Obama himself probably has never actually given an opinion on the subject.
"The buck stops here." - Harry Truman
BTW, (given the state of modern "education") he was a Democrat.
Slashdot Mirror
or give everyone in San Fransisco a 1Gbps internet connection
Or give everyone in San Francisco a 1 Gbps Internet connection! :-)
There are a fair few people who just dont know how accurate the science is, a common question I get is "How can we measure air (CO2) from thousands of years ago", I point them towards the Wikipedia page on Ice Cores and say "because it's been trapped there all this time".
I find your citation of ice core data amusing, because in general it doesn't support the AGW thesis. Two major results have been the confirmation of ancient warm periods, and the fact that higher CO2 concentrations have lagged behind times of higher temperature, not the other way around.
It's really rather ironic that the AGW proponents, who have clearly not been objective regarding the science, have the nerve to paint the skeptics as fanatics. Any truly objective person who reads the leaked CRU emails and source code will see a group committed to furthering its agenda at any cost, certainly to include lost scientific objectivity.
The frightening thing is that if natural climate variability had cooperated, we might be wasting trillions of dollars to no good purpose, since "the science is settled". Crazily, the EPA is still parroting that nonsense, but clearly the tide is turning. I think in the end good science will prevail, saving us from the extremist environmentalist agenda.
Scientists will quite reasonably say, "just before we chuck out all the accumulated evidence and thinking about how the world works and accept your argument that you've shown it that is, in fact, possible for humans to add net tens of billions of tons of gases such as CO2 and CH4 to the atmosphere in the space of decades without it having an impact on climate, do you mind terribly if we take a very long hard look at your evidence and reasoning?"
One of the problems with this debate is that the issue in question is often misstated.
Most of the skeptics agree that additional CO2 has an effect. The debate is over whether the effect is problematic, or even significant. There is also the question as to whether or not proposed mitigating efforts will prove effective, if there is a problem.
I believe that given the current sorry state of "climate science", which has failed to show extraordinary warming and is based on very questionable computer modeling, that a "wait and see" attitude is appropriate. It appears even more so, given that warming has slowed, stopped, or reversed depending on which data you believe. This should be viewed in the light of the undisputed fact that the Earth has been in a net warming trend since the last Ice Age. What we should really be worried about is the inevitable coming big dip into the next one.
The problem with the current brain-dead idea of "Cap and Trade" is that it's inordinately expensive while even its proponents agree that it will produce no noticeable effect on the climate. This is because the United States is no longer the largest "carbon polluter", and China, India and other up-and-coming industrial nations want no part of such an economy-killing proposal.
AGW proponents also steadfastly refuse to consider the benefits of higher CO2 and a warmer planet, such as more arable land and faster plant growth. Humans have generally had a much harder time in cooler conditions. Personally, I have no problem with the concept of humans altering the environment, many species have done so and it's almost unavoidable regardless. Elephants and alligators are two classic examples of species that have substantially altered their native ecosystems.
Nice post, I completely agree (except I don't think GWB is a fascist lol).
However, you left out another classic:
"If you want to get serious about it, these guys claiming that the snow in Washington disproves climate change are almost unpatriotic."
My jaw dropped when I saw that Nye had said that. It was great seeing Bastardi take him apart. :-)
These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China."
You missed the most important point in the source article:
and is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants.
These aren't "renewable" technologies, nor do they need to be. What they are, though, are the only realistic way of producing enough energy to power our society going forward.
The new generation of nuclear reactors is completely safe, and disposing of the waste products is a completely solvable problem.
How is patent encumbered food products a win for environmentalism?
One of the craziest aspects of all this is patented genomes.
I saw an incredibly sad documentary on GM crops where a farmer was forced to give up his family's seed bank developed over decades because the crops had been contaminated with Monsanto GM pollen from an adjacent farm (wind pollination).
If you think software patents are bad, genome patents are far worse. They are corporatism incarnate. The practical aspect for farmers is that instead of planting their own seed season after season, they're forced to buy new seed each year from the megacorps.
Harrison Bergeron's world, are we there yet?
Keep supporting 0bama and his ilk, and we'll be there soon enough.
So far he's only pursuing the economic equivalent, but once that's done...
What, so every two years we need to update the entire vocabulary of tech? Moron... (that term never goes out of style! :)
That 250,000 times one year of solar output number wasn't very meaningful, since the star released all the energy in 1/5 of a second.
So, we should look at the actual ratio. There are 31,557,600 seconds in an average year (365.25 days). Five times that (to account for 1/5 seconds) is 157,788,000. That number, times 250,000 is 39,447,000,000,000.
So, for that 1/5 of a second, the neutron star put out about 39.5 trillion times as much energy as the Sun. Since the Sun puts out about the energy of 100 billion H-bombs per second, well that's a LOT of energy. Some might call this a "superflare", I'd call it one heck of a big explosion! Note that the energy intensity was much higher than for a supernova!
It's fine if these engines are being killed because something better (as powerful with better efficiency) has come along. If not, it sucks.
To see which it is, just take a look at Ford Motor Company - you know, the one that ISN'T owned by the government! ;-)
BTW, regardless diesel engines rock! :-)
Once again, FUBO! =:-D
Correction: Without taking into account cloud related cooling, a doubling of CO2 from current levels would result in about 1.5 deg C of warming.
One of the funnier things, actually, is the resolute attempt by the CRU and IPCC to discount the Sun as a source of climate variability. None of the IPCC models take into account the sunspot cycles, nor are there "what if" runs based on possible variability. That's not entirely surprising given that the mechanism for sunspot minima causing lower temperatures isn't understood. However, we do know historically that minima such as the Maunder Minimum produced sharply lower temperatures.
As I understand, solar activity correlated for most of the time we have direct temperature records, but the correlation diverged markedly in the last two decades. Solar activity having reduced in that time is unable to explain the continued rise in temperature. http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm Solar activity is therefore not something I can use to explain currently warming trends.
The graph at your link has some problems. First off, the "global temperature average" is poorly known before satellite records. Then, in recent years the GISS temperature record has been skewed, both from cherry-picking data and siting climate stations in urban heat islands while not applying appropriate corrections. It's well known that 1998 was the warmest year on record, while the chart shows 2005 as quite a bit warmer, eh?
Further, your graph is of "solar radiance", not "sunspot number". The mechanism for cooling during solar minima is apparently more complex than simple differences in radiant output. One theory is that high cosmic ray activity spawns more cloud formation - but the jury is still out on that. Regardless, we do know that during the Maunder and Dalton minima, temperatures fell sharply.
True, although the "greenhouse effect" applies to closed systems (bounded in the case of a greenhouse, with glass). It's not at all clear the IPCC is modeling the open "greenhouse effect" here on Earth properly.
The "greenhouse effect" in any sense of the word not a closed system. Even a glass greenhouse has external energy input via sunlight and output via the gradual dissipation of heat into its environment via the contact of glass with air. The distinction is false.
My use of "open" and "closed" wasn't scientific, sorry. The glass walls of a greenhouse don't permit convection, whereas the atmosphere does. Some highly nonlinear things happen in the atmosphere when convection occurs - mainly falling under the category of "clouds". Clouds reflect a lot of solar energy back into space. So, the comparison between a conventional greenhouse, and the Earth's atmosphere is not straightforward at all.
To equate climate change to phlogiston or egg cholesterol is a long stretch indeed.
Not really so much, but the other thing to keep in mind is that phlogiston was never used as a justification for spending trillions of dollars, permanently changing the world economy, and affecting the standard of living of billions of people. So, the standard for the science used to "prove" anthropogenic global warming should be high indeed.
As if changing the world economy is a bad thing. The standard of living of billions of people is already poor and developed nations grapple with traffic congestion, pollution, rising grocery prices due to poor planning and energy security. Trillions of dollars were spent on saving the economic system from collapse and bailing out banks to preserve a world economy that didn't work particularly well. Commitments to save the planet pale in comparison by orders of magnitude.
There are quite a few problems with your "logic" here. First of all, the trillions spent to save the economic system from collapse have already been spent - they're gone. We don't have trill
Phlogiston, persisted as a theory because no competing hypothesis existed at the time could better explained the data, and the data available at the time did not contradict the theory.
Climate science today is different with many scientists going out of there way to enormous quantities of data ranging from this such as tree rings, to limestone deposits, to sun spots to ice cores to real temperature data from the ground and from satellites.
One of the funnier things, actually, is the resolute attempt by the CRU and IPCC to discount the Sun as a source of climate variability. None of the IPCC models take into account the sunspot cycles, nor are there "what if" runs based on possible variability. That's not entirely surprising given that the mechanism for sunspot minima causing lower temperatures isn't understood. However, we do know historically that minima such as the Maunder Minimum produced sharply lower temperatures.
Mind you, the term "greenhouse effect" was introduced way back in the late 19th century, so the idea is hardly new. It is certainly way longer than say the intervening time between the discovery of eggs in cholesterol, and the discovery that consumption of eggs do not increase blood cholesterol levels.
True, although the "greenhouse effect" applies to closed systems (bounded in the case of a greenhouse, with glass). It's not at all clear the IPCC is modeling the open "greenhouse effect" here on Earth properly.
To equate climate change to phlogiston or egg cholesterol is a long stretch indeed.
Not really so much, but the other thing to keep in mind is that phlogiston was never used as a justification for spending trillions of dollars, permanently changing the world economy, and affecting the standard of living of billions of people. So, the standard for the science used to "prove" anthropogenic global warming should be high indeed. IMO, the current state of the art is not even close. Fortunately, given the state of the Sun's sunspot cycles we may be in a multi-decade timeout on warming, anthropogenic or no. We should know quite a bit more twenty or thirty years down the road.
So when you see hacked emails showing scientists dissing people like them, or McIntyre, or any of that ilk, realize that the scientists *really do* think that these people are putting out garbage and have vested agendas. It's just that when speaking publicly, they usually have more tact.
Wow, the hypocrisy here is stunning. Having read a lot of the leaked/hacked emails, it's more than clear the scientists have quite an agenda of their own. Intentionally distorting results, discarding inconvenient data, suppressing peer reviewed articles, and refusing to honor valid Freedom of Information requests all clearly happened. The first three are directly forbidden by good scientific practice. I hope those responsible have their credentials revoked, at a minimum.
I think healthy skepticism of claims that would result in a complete re-ordering of the world economy is more than justified, whatever the source. A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, and pretty soon your talking real money! :-P
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and so far the IPCC position is looking far more like smoke and mirrors than honest, unbiased science.
The fortunate thing is that plenty of folks see this deception for exactly what it is.
All people are equal.
Do you really believe that? It's clearly not true.
The quote from the Declaration of Independence is "All men are created equal.". Let's go ahead and extend that to "all people". Fine.
The point of the statement was that there is in fact no "divine right of kings". I'm fairly sure you aren't arguing that there is.
However, the fallacy in your statement is that, after birth, all humans are interchangeable (actually that's an argument for equivalence, not equality, but that's a lesser standard). There are wide ranges of intelligence, strength, courage, stamina, dexterity...OK I'll quit listing role-playing statistics. I'm sure you get my point.
Any system that attempts to enforce the "equality" of people in general, such as socialism, is doomed to failure. The real world doesn't work that way. Those who excel, which generally benefits society, should be rewarded. Those who don't, not so much. That simple principle is responsible for the success of the United States, and is ignored at our peril. Yes, I strongly believe in American Exceptionalism, since it's an observed fact.
FUBO! :-)
Plus, it's so ironic that this summary concludes with:
This is of course no more meaningful than the scads of low-temperature records we've had this year in the states, or many ski resorts having their earliest openings in history. The concern is, of course, the global mean temperature.
Can't methane be Carbon-dated like any other metabolic by-product?
Yes, but ancient methane would be in the same situation as Earth's coal, since the half-life of C14 is less than 6,000 years - no measurable isotope would likely exist.
Possible, but unlikely. Mars tectonics had stopped a loooong time ago.
I'm curious how you arrived at this conclusion. It sounds suspiciously like the "Moon is dead" thesis, which was shattered by the existence of lunar quakes and possible volcanic activity.
And without plate tectonics it's pretty hard to imagine how geologic traps for organic material could have formed.
Time and again the natural world has confounded the human imagination. Perhaps this is one of those times. ;-)
It seems possible that life existed in the distant past on Mars, leaving behind methane deposits much like oil and natural gas deposits here on Earth...
Rubbish, the scientists aren't "pushing for" anything, they're just presenting results.
Rubbish yourself, the "scientists" at CRU were clearly "pushing for" a pro-AGW outcome. Why else the attempt to banish anti-AGW papers from the IPCC reports regardless of their merit, or to blackball a scientific journal based on its editorial practices?
Good science stands on its own merits. It doesn't require backroom deals or underhanded methods.
The end result of Climategate should be academic discreditation for several of those involved, and jail for a few - most likely to include Phil Jones. He very blatantly disregarded valid Freedom of Information requests. That's a felony in Great Britain.
Nonsense. Mitt Romney would never have authorized spending the unbelievable amount of money that 0 has.
Mitt Romney is plastic scum, but 0 is in a whole 'nother league of scumbaggery.
To make my stance clear: Palin '12! :-)
While it is true that Kagan was appointed by Obama, nevertheless I expect that Obama himself probably has never actually given an opinion on the subject.
"The buck stops here." - Harry Truman
BTW, (given the state of modern "education") he was a Democrat.
I'd respond if there was anything to actually respond to...
The previous administration was far from perfect,
It was the worst one since Roosevelt, until the current administration.
-jcr
jcr, I respect your opinions in general, but I find it impossible to consider GW to be worse than:
1) Lindon Johnson
2) Richard Nixon
3) Jimmy Carter
I'm more than willing to debate any of the above versus GW. You?
Take care.
Intact is one word, O ye editors...