Exactly. Sure, human activity has sharply increased CO2 levels. Here's the thing though. CO2 levels have sharply increased in the past, well before there were people walking the earth. Life did not end. The catastrophic AGW scenarios depend on a positive feedback loop being in place, and if that were the case, we'd have become a hot house like Venus a long, long time ago.
The massively funded PR campaign is surely working against good science here, since I am certain that they will indiscriminately fund scientific-sounding cranks.
Who is funding this supposedly "massively funded PR campaign" against AGW?
How much funding is it receiving?
How much funding is it receiving compared to funding allocated to the PR campaigns (IPCC, anyone?) of the AGW crowd?
You know, the AGW pundits like to point to some dark, sinister conspiracy of evil industrialists conspiring to suppress all the great research being done by climatologists. But strangely enough, you look at the industries that actually fund people like the CRU, and you end up finding companies like Exxon-Mobile and British Petroleum. You know, "Big Oil"...the same folks that you would think would be bankrolling people like Steve McIntyre...but don't. It's funny you guys talk about your opponents in engaging in witch hunts and propaganda...when that is exactly what you do to skeptics.
FWIW, I did not invoke Al Gore. It is interesting that you bring up industry as a source of funding for skeptical research. The problem with that, going by the leaked CRU emails, the oil industry is in no small part in bed with the AGW crowd and funds a large amount of their research. Makes a certain financial sense because some of the oil companies are in a perfect position to profit from a cap and trade scheme of limiting carbon emissions. Dissenters like Steve McIntyre aren't being funded by anyone, they are just providing valuable corrective analysis to the AGW gone amok crowd. As far as I know, there isn't any greedy industrialist waiting in the wings to pay some scientist to prove that AGW is false.
The real problem with the AGW crowd is the fact that they have done their damnedest to squelch people like McIntyre.
I think recent climate research research papers have significant reduced the severity of the prognostications, but it wasn't just Al Gore claiming the sky was falling. A lot of that was coming from groups like the CRU and the IPCC.
I think you mistook my point as attacking the entire scientific establishment. My point was directed entirely at the folks around the AGW establishment. AGW science has more in common with disaster charity fund raising (always looking for the next disaster to raise money) than it does other areas of science. Lots of politically contentious money being funneled into it, most of it predicated on the unproven thesis of a looming disaster. Upset that thesis, and you might disrupt the gravy train.
See "settled science" or comparing skeptics to Holocaust deniers or labeling AGW skepticism as a crime against mother earth. The skeptical crowd didn't start the mud slinging. People in glass houses running shoddy science probably shouldn't be throwing stones, or complain when some stones get thrown back in their direction.
And anyway, the problem was the CRU folks and Michael Mann have been claiming for a long time that there data, statistics, and conclusions were beyond reproach. Settled science, remember? See their dismissive attitude towards Steve McIntyre, who, despite not being an accredited climate scientist, seems to have a better track record at being right than the CRU does, and seems to have figured out that complicated, mystical field of statistics pretty well.
So how do you explain the conspiracy to deny skeptics the right to publish in peer reviewed journals? How do you explain the stalling tactics in regards to legally mandated disclosure of data (aka FOI)? Is this part of the dirty little sausage of how "science" is "made" (up)?
The problem with comparing evolution to anthropogenic global warming (subsequently rebranded as "climate change") is that there are no competing alternative viewpoints to evolution that don't require invoking divine intervention.
Scientific criticism of the AGW "science" centers along a few different axes: - that there is not, in fact, any significant warming - that the warming, such that it is, is explainable primarily through natural causes - that if the warming is in fact caused by humans, the AGW have NOT conclusively proved this (ie, by using computer models that spit out the same result regardless of the data input) - that if there is global warming caused by humans, the dire prognostications of total biosphere annihilation may be just a *tad* extreme.
What the CRU scandal has laid out is that the AGW crowd has been playing a rigged game. Their standard public response is "this is settled science, and until the skeptics post peer reviewed studies, they aren't worth commenting on"...all the while, they are actively conspiring to deny skeptics the right to publish in peer reviewed journals.
I see a few people bemoaning the introduction of "politics" into "science". Don't be fucking idiots. The AGW crowd is the one that made is political by pushing things like the Kyoto treaty. Blowback was inevitable. And the AGW crowd is now suffering from having a less-than-totally-scrupulous methodology and being a little less than transparent in their disclosure. The discrediting of AGW is entirely the fault of the people at the center of the controversy, not the folks holding up the controversy and saying "see, I told you so". If the science was anywhere near as good as the AGW crowd has been claiming for the last decade and a half, there would be no "see, I told you so" opportunity for the skeptics.
This "mud" wasn't created by the denialists, but by the CRU themselves. The same way you can't cheat an honest man, you can't smear someone with their own words.
Yeah, they never conspired to lock out research that cast doubt on their piss poor research. And while acting as reviewers for publications, they never leaked out research papers to AGW parties so they could have an advance shot at rebuttals. They never conspired to not release their data.
A capped, government controlled monopoly on campaign air time is inconsistent with the principal of free speech. You can have one or the other, but you can't have both (as example, as a private citizen, what if I want to pay for an add in the NY Times criticizing Bush prior to an election?)
I think given that 2/3rd of Obama's campaign contributions came from opaque online fund raising, you can't really definitively say where he got his money from. There were more than a few cases (as pointed out in the article) where people circumvented campaign finance laws to donate more than the legally allowed amount. It's highly probable that corporations and PACs bypassed it as well.
You don't raise $750 million on the backs of old folks mailing in their $5 donation. That requires a corporate effort.
In any event, you are quibbling over minutia. The main point is, how in the hell can you trust the government to be a fair distributer of campaign money (given the distribution of the bailout funds which went overwhelmingly to Democratic districts, why wouldn't the same happen to campaign funds)? Or maybe that's your point...if government controls who gets a voice, and government is controlled by your people, we can usher in a Chavez-like polity of one party Democratic rule.
Almost always, the most money makes its way to the most viable candidates. Your "solution" is a recipe for removing everyone but self-financed candidates, because I sure as heck would not donate money to a pool of candidates, only one of which I may support.
How is "Fox 'News'" one easy example, but MSNBC not? The "News" is NOT some vaunted Fourth Estate like it pretends to be. It is a business that caters to a market. Fox News caters to a market that was grossly under served by the mainstream news shows for 3 decades as they (the MSM) dispensed with all vestiges of impartiality and began wearing their left-wing ideologies on their sleeves. Fox News is no better or worse, in that regard, to CBS or MSNBC. They are just on the other side of the spectrum.
What you're essentially saying is that the solution to corporate interests influencing government is to out-bribe them.
No the solution is to out-vote them. As long as there is full transparency, I don't have a problem with Senator X getting $50,000 in campaign contributions from EvilCorp PAC, as long as that information is public. Then you know when Senator X votes in favor of a windfall for EvilCorp.
Fundamentally, the problem is lack of citizen involvement at all levels of the political process. Not enough people that "care" about good governance get involved in the party process by participating in campaigns, and even fewer get involved in the actual running for office. In theory, the US is supposed to have a citizen LED government, but somewhere along the line we created a permanent political and bureaucratic class that views it as their divine right to lead the citizens. This is the fundamental problem, not corporate money.
Um, sure, Obama supported the bill, right before he pulled out of public campaign financing when he realized he had a corporate fund raising juggernaught that smashed all fund raising efforts.
I'm incredulous that the same folks that have problems with corporations making campaign contributions don't see ANY problem with having the government (!) completely control the purse strings for elections. Because the government is full of civic minded, responsible, hard working individuals that would never abuse their positions of power to enrich themselves, attack their enemies, and establish political dominance.
Bush 41 was a bomber pilot in World War II. He was also relatively successful as an oil man, although his father's connections certainly helped out.
Go on, I challenge you to name any presidents to have actually worked their way from the bottome, where most of us live, up to the top. Kennedy might qualify, but his daddy was a criminal with lots of money.
??? Kennedy doesn't qualify as someone that worked his way up from the bottom. He was born every bit as wealthy as George W Bush was.
Reagan worked himself up from nothing. Clinton worked himself up from nothing. Obama, arguably, worked himself up from nothing (although he apparently got a lot of help from "Fellow Travelers"). But Kennedy sure as hell didn't.
Sure you're ignorant, because you think the way to solve the problem of big business is big government. The problem isn't big or small government or big or small business. It's corruption endemic through and through the whole system, but it is empowered by government corruption, not business corruption. Goldman can only loot the public treasury through the malfeasance and participation of government bureaucrats. Trying to increase the scope and control of these kleptocrats is beyond moronic. Organizations don't suddenly become "good" when they cross the over the private boundary into the public one as you state worshipers would have us believe.
Re:News for nerds. Stuff that matters
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Health Care Reform
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Because life expectancy is a poor metric for evaluating a country's performance in health care. A number of reasons for this, but demographic differences play a large part in the differences in any number of statistics in America and European countries.
Cost is a poor metric as well. Spending in health care is directly related to discretionary income, and increases at the margin.
Another problem with comparing a country like the UK to a country like the US is the scale difference. The UK has 61 million people (France has 62 million). The US has 307 million. We also span a continent, while you could fit the UK or France inside of Texas. It takes 10 hours to drive from the top of the UK to the bottom of the UK, it takes 14 hours to drive from the north of Texas down to the southern tip. The US is a large country with a fairly distributed population. Our medical servicing needs are a little bit different and costs are generally going to be higher for the same service because of the distribution problem.
As a corallary to this you could ask is there really anything big business does right? I mean we get a finiancial collapse every 5 years, Enron (remeber them), GM (we can't make a decent car by an american company), Microsoft (we are a bloodsucking monopoly that stifles innovation), Insurance Companies, Banks (they charge 30% credit card fees, get money from free from the gov't and collapse the economy) - the list just goes on and on - YES! given a choice bettween Goldman Sachs and the US government I will take the US goverment ANY time!
Beautifully ignorant post. Who enables Goldman Sachs? The US government. The Treasury Department is a revolving door for GS execs. Who oversees Goldman's corrupt trading? The SEC and the FRBNY. The closer these firms move towards government, the worse it becomes for us...cue the catastrophes that are Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
In a functional capitalist system, when companies fail spectacularly, they go out of business. In today's America, they get bailed out by taxpayers.
What you are basically saying is that you are not allowed to die without state permission. Your death takes valuable labor resources away from the state, it could take invaluable knowledge as well. Therefore, anything you do to yourself that the state does not approve of is to become a taxable event.
The funny thing about people like the parent is they have no fucking problem telling everyone else how to live and trying to impose their wills on the rest of us. It's the new fascist puritanism, dressed up as environmentalism or some other ism, but in the end, it's the same impulse to rule other's actions that has driven mankind for ever...and it's always advertised as being for your good.
Yes, that unbiased source called "factcheck", operated by the Annenberg Foundation. The same Annenberg Foundation that played matchmaker for Obama and Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. I'm sure, just as you are, that there is no way that these fair and honest arbiters of fact would have any dog in this fight. It's just a coincidence that FactCheck writes an article defending HR3200.
(And note, contrary to your distortions, they don't parse the legislation for you, they only parse what they deem to be relevant portions relative to a chain email).
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Exactly. Sure, human activity has sharply increased CO2 levels. Here's the thing though. CO2 levels have sharply increased in the past, well before there were people walking the earth. Life did not end. The catastrophic AGW scenarios depend on a positive feedback loop being in place, and if that were the case, we'd have become a hot house like Venus a long, long time ago.
The massively funded PR campaign is surely working against good science here, since I am certain that they will indiscriminately fund scientific-sounding cranks.
Who is funding this supposedly "massively funded PR campaign" against AGW?
How much funding is it receiving?
How much funding is it receiving compared to funding allocated to the PR campaigns (IPCC, anyone?) of the AGW crowd?
You know, the AGW pundits like to point to some dark, sinister conspiracy of evil industrialists conspiring to suppress all the great research being done by climatologists. But strangely enough, you look at the industries that actually fund people like the CRU, and you end up finding companies like Exxon-Mobile and British Petroleum. You know, "Big Oil"...the same folks that you would think would be bankrolling people like Steve McIntyre...but don't. It's funny you guys talk about your opponents in engaging in witch hunts and propaganda...when that is exactly what you do to skeptics.
A few rambling points.
FWIW, I did not invoke Al Gore. It is interesting that you bring up industry as a source of funding for skeptical research. The problem with that, going by the leaked CRU emails, the oil industry is in no small part in bed with the AGW crowd and funds a large amount of their research. Makes a certain financial sense because some of the oil companies are in a perfect position to profit from a cap and trade scheme of limiting carbon emissions. Dissenters like Steve McIntyre aren't being funded by anyone, they are just providing valuable corrective analysis to the AGW gone amok crowd. As far as I know, there isn't any greedy industrialist waiting in the wings to pay some scientist to prove that AGW is false.
The real problem with the AGW crowd is the fact that they have done their damnedest to squelch people like McIntyre.
I think recent climate research research papers have significant reduced the severity of the prognostications, but it wasn't just Al Gore claiming the sky was falling. A lot of that was coming from groups like the CRU and the IPCC.
I think you mistook my point as attacking the entire scientific establishment. My point was directed entirely at the folks around the AGW establishment. AGW science has more in common with disaster charity fund raising (always looking for the next disaster to raise money) than it does other areas of science. Lots of politically contentious money being funneled into it, most of it predicated on the unproven thesis of a looming disaster. Upset that thesis, and you might disrupt the gravy train.
So does the AGW crowd.
See "settled science" or comparing skeptics to Holocaust deniers or labeling AGW skepticism as a crime against mother earth. The skeptical crowd didn't start the mud slinging. People in glass houses running shoddy science probably shouldn't be throwing stones, or complain when some stones get thrown back in their direction.
I bet you are wrong.
And anyway, the problem was the CRU folks and Michael Mann have been claiming for a long time that there data, statistics, and conclusions were beyond reproach. Settled science, remember? See their dismissive attitude towards Steve McIntyre, who, despite not being an accredited climate scientist, seems to have a better track record at being right than the CRU does, and seems to have figured out that complicated, mystical field of statistics pretty well.
So how do you explain the conspiracy to deny skeptics the right to publish in peer reviewed journals? How do you explain the stalling tactics in regards to legally mandated disclosure of data (aka FOI)? Is this part of the dirty little sausage of how "science" is "made" (up)?
The problem with comparing evolution to anthropogenic global warming (subsequently rebranded as "climate change") is that there are no competing alternative viewpoints to evolution that don't require invoking divine intervention.
Scientific criticism of the AGW "science" centers along a few different axes:
- that there is not, in fact, any significant warming
- that the warming, such that it is, is explainable primarily through natural causes
- that if the warming is in fact caused by humans, the AGW have NOT conclusively proved this (ie, by using computer models that spit out the same result regardless of the data input)
- that if there is global warming caused by humans, the dire prognostications of total biosphere annihilation may be just a *tad* extreme.
What the CRU scandal has laid out is that the AGW crowd has been playing a rigged game. Their standard public response is "this is settled science, and until the skeptics post peer reviewed studies, they aren't worth commenting on"...all the while, they are actively conspiring to deny skeptics the right to publish in peer reviewed journals.
I see a few people bemoaning the introduction of "politics" into "science". Don't be fucking idiots. The AGW crowd is the one that made is political by pushing things like the Kyoto treaty. Blowback was inevitable. And the AGW crowd is now suffering from having a less-than-totally-scrupulous methodology and being a little less than transparent in their disclosure. The discrediting of AGW is entirely the fault of the people at the center of the controversy, not the folks holding up the controversy and saying "see, I told you so". If the science was anywhere near as good as the AGW crowd has been claiming for the last decade and a half, there would be no "see, I told you so" opportunity for the skeptics.
This "mud" wasn't created by the denialists, but by the CRU themselves. The same way you can't cheat an honest man, you can't smear someone with their own words.
and found we did nothing wrong.
Surprise surprise.
Yeah, they never conspired to lock out research that cast doubt on their piss poor research.
And while acting as reviewers for publications, they never leaked out research papers to AGW parties so they could have an advance shot at rebuttals.
They never conspired to not release their data.
No, these are not the droids you are looking for.
A capped, government controlled monopoly on campaign air time is inconsistent with the principal of free speech. You can have one or the other, but you can't have both (as example, as a private citizen, what if I want to pay for an add in the NY Times criticizing Bush prior to an election?)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/28/AR2008102803413.html
I think given that 2/3rd of Obama's campaign contributions came from opaque online fund raising, you can't really definitively say where he got his money from. There were more than a few cases (as pointed out in the article) where people circumvented campaign finance laws to donate more than the legally allowed amount. It's highly probable that corporations and PACs bypassed it as well.
You don't raise $750 million on the backs of old folks mailing in their $5 donation. That requires a corporate effort.
In any event, you are quibbling over minutia. The main point is, how in the hell can you trust the government to be a fair distributer of campaign money (given the distribution of the bailout funds which went overwhelmingly to Democratic districts, why wouldn't the same happen to campaign funds)? Or maybe that's your point...if government controls who gets a voice, and government is controlled by your people, we can usher in a Chavez-like polity of one party Democratic rule.
That's not a solution, it's just a dumb idea.
Almost always, the most money makes its way to the most viable candidates. Your "solution" is a recipe for removing everyone but self-financed candidates, because I sure as heck would not donate money to a pool of candidates, only one of which I may support.
How is "Fox 'News'" one easy example, but MSNBC not? The "News" is NOT some vaunted Fourth Estate like it pretends to be. It is a business that caters to a market. Fox News caters to a market that was grossly under served by the mainstream news shows for 3 decades as they (the MSM) dispensed with all vestiges of impartiality and began wearing their left-wing ideologies on their sleeves. Fox News is no better or worse, in that regard, to CBS or MSNBC. They are just on the other side of the spectrum.
What you're essentially saying is that the solution to corporate interests influencing government is to out-bribe them.
No the solution is to out-vote them. As long as there is full transparency, I don't have a problem with Senator X getting $50,000 in campaign contributions from EvilCorp PAC, as long as that information is public. Then you know when Senator X votes in favor of a windfall for EvilCorp.
Fundamentally, the problem is lack of citizen involvement at all levels of the political process. Not enough people that "care" about good governance get involved in the party process by participating in campaigns, and even fewer get involved in the actual running for office. In theory, the US is supposed to have a citizen LED government, but somewhere along the line we created a permanent political and bureaucratic class that views it as their divine right to lead the citizens. This is the fundamental problem, not corporate money.
Um, sure, Obama supported the bill, right before he pulled out of public campaign financing when he realized he had a corporate fund raising juggernaught that smashed all fund raising efforts.
I'm incredulous that the same folks that have problems with corporations making campaign contributions don't see ANY problem with having the government (!) completely control the purse strings for elections. Because the government is full of civic minded, responsible, hard working individuals that would never abuse their positions of power to enrich themselves, attack their enemies, and establish political dominance.
Wait, what do you have against the NRA?
Bush 41 was a bomber pilot in World War II. He was also relatively successful as an oil man, although his father's connections certainly helped out.
Go on, I challenge you to name any presidents to have actually worked their way from the bottome, where most of us live, up to the top. Kennedy might qualify, but his daddy was a criminal with lots of money.
??? Kennedy doesn't qualify as someone that worked his way up from the bottom. He was born every bit as wealthy as George W Bush was.
Reagan worked himself up from nothing. Clinton worked himself up from nothing. Obama, arguably, worked himself up from nothing (although he apparently got a lot of help from "Fellow Travelers"). But Kennedy sure as hell didn't.
Funny how being against bad governance gets translated into being against all government by the left.
Sure you're ignorant, because you think the way to solve the problem of big business is big government. The problem isn't big or small government or big or small business. It's corruption endemic through and through the whole system, but it is empowered by government corruption, not business corruption. Goldman can only loot the public treasury through the malfeasance and participation of government bureaucrats. Trying to increase the scope and control of these kleptocrats is beyond moronic. Organizations don't suddenly become "good" when they cross the over the private boundary into the public one as you state worshipers would have us believe.
Because life expectancy is a poor metric for evaluating a country's performance in health care. A number of reasons for this, but demographic differences play a large part in the differences in any number of statistics in America and European countries.
Cost is a poor metric as well. Spending in health care is directly related to discretionary income, and increases at the margin.
Another problem with comparing a country like the UK to a country like the US is the scale difference. The UK has 61 million people (France has 62 million). The US has 307 million. We also span a continent, while you could fit the UK or France inside of Texas. It takes 10 hours to drive from the top of the UK to the bottom of the UK, it takes 14 hours to drive from the north of Texas down to the southern tip. The US is a large country with a fairly distributed population. Our medical servicing needs are a little bit different and costs are generally going to be higher for the same service because of the distribution problem.
As a corallary to this you could ask is there really anything big business does right? I mean we get a finiancial collapse every 5 years, Enron (remeber them), GM (we can't make a decent car by an american company), Microsoft (we are a bloodsucking monopoly that stifles innovation), Insurance Companies, Banks (they charge 30% credit card fees, get money from free from the gov't and collapse the economy) - the list just goes on and on - YES! given a choice bettween Goldman Sachs and the US government I will take the US goverment ANY time!
Beautifully ignorant post. Who enables Goldman Sachs? The US government. The Treasury Department is a revolving door for GS execs. Who oversees Goldman's corrupt trading? The SEC and the FRBNY. The closer these firms move towards government, the worse it becomes for us...cue the catastrophes that are Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
In a functional capitalist system, when companies fail spectacularly, they go out of business. In today's America, they get bailed out by taxpayers.
What you are basically saying is that you are not allowed to die without state permission. Your death takes valuable labor resources away from the state, it could take invaluable knowledge as well. Therefore, anything you do to yourself that the state does not approve of is to become a taxable event.
The funny thing about people like the parent is they have no fucking problem telling everyone else how to live and trying to impose their wills on the rest of us. It's the new fascist puritanism, dressed up as environmentalism or some other ism, but in the end, it's the same impulse to rule other's actions that has driven mankind for ever...and it's always advertised as being for your good.
Yes, that unbiased source called "factcheck", operated by the Annenberg Foundation. The same Annenberg Foundation that played matchmaker for Obama and Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. I'm sure, just as you are, that there is no way that these fair and honest arbiters of fact would have any dog in this fight. It's just a coincidence that FactCheck writes an article defending HR3200.
(And note, contrary to your distortions, they don't parse the legislation for you, they only parse what they deem to be relevant portions relative to a chain email).