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Today's Poll!The American ‘allergy’ to global warming: Why?
In this July 15, 2011 photo, atop roughly two miles of ice, technician Marie McLane launches a data-transmitting weather balloon at Summit Station, a remote research site operated by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and situated 10,500 feet above sea level, on top of the Greenland ice sheet. Climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that manmade greenhouse gases are warming the planet, accelerating the melt of Greenland's ice, and yet resistance to the idea appears to have hardened among many Americans. Photo by The Associated Press.
Monday, September 26, 2011
NEW YORK (AP) — Tucked between treatises on algae and prehistoric turquoise beads, the study on page 460 of a long-ago issue of the U.S. journal Science drew little attention.
“I don’t think there were any newspaper articles about it or anything like that,” the author recalls.
But the headline on the 1975 report was bold: “Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” And this article that coined the term may have marked the last time a mention of “global warming” didn’t set off an instant outcry of angry denial.
In the paper, Columbia University geoscientist Wally Broecker calculated how much carbon dioxide would accumulate in the atmosphere in the coming 35 years, and how temperatures consequently would rise. His numbers have proven almost dead-on correct. Meanwhile, other powerful evidence poured in over those decades, showing the “greenhouse effect” is real and is happening. And yet resistance to the idea among many in the U.S. appears to have hardened.
What’s going on?
“The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows,” concludes economist-ethicist Clive Hamilton.
He and others who track what they call “denialism” find that its nature is changing in America, last redoubt of climate naysayers. It has taken on a more partisan, ideological tone. Polls find a widening Republican-Democratic gap on climate. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry even accuses climate scientists of lying for money. Global warming looms as a debatable question in yet another U.S. election campaign.
From his big-windowed office overlooking the wooded campus of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., Broecker has observed this deepening of the desire to disbelieve.
“The opposition by the Republicans has gotten stronger and stronger,” the 79-year-old “grandfather of climate science” said in an interview. “But, of course, the push by the Democrats has become stronger and stronger, and as it has become a more important issue, it has become more polarized.”
The solution: “Eventually it’ll become damned clear that the Earth is warming and the warming is beyond anything we have experienced in millions of years, and people will have to admit...” He stopped and laughed.
“Well, I suppose they could say God is burning us up.”
The basic physics of anthropogenic — manmade — global warming has been clear for more than a century, since researchers proved that carbon dioxide traps heat. Others later showed CO2 was building up in the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels. Weather stations then filled in the rest: Temperatures were rising.
“As a physicist, putting CO2 into the air is good enough for me. It’s the physics that convinces me,” said veteran Cambridge University researcher Liz Morris. But she said work must go on to refine climate data and computer climate models, “to convince the deeply reluctant organizers of this world.”
The reluctance to rein in carbon emissions revealed itself early on.
In the 1980s, as scientists studied Greenland’s buried ice for clues to past climate, upgraded their computer models peering into the future, and improved global temperature analyses, the fossil-fuel industries were mobilizing for a campaign to question the science.
By 1988, NASA climatologist James Hansen could appear before a U.S. Senate committee and warn that global warming had begun, a dramatic announcement later confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a new, U.N.-sponsored network of hundreds of international scientists.
But when Hansen was called back to testify in 1989, the White House of President George H.W. Bush edited this government scientist’s remarks to water down his conclusions, and Hansen declined to appear.
That was the year U.S. oil and coal interests formed the Global Climate Coalition to combat efforts to shift economies away from their products. Britain’s Royal Society and other researchers later determined that oil giant Exxon disbursed millions of dollars annually to think tanks and a handful of supposed experts to sow doubt about the facts.
In 1997, two years after the IPCC declared the “balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate,” the world’s nations gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to try to do something about it. The naysayers were there as well.
“The statement that we’ll have continued warming with an increase in CO2 is opinion, not fact,” oil executive William F. O’Keefe of the Global Climate Coalition insisted to reporters in Kyoto.
The late Bert Bolin, then IPCC chief, despaired.
“I’m not really surprised at the political reaction,” the Swedish climatologist told The Associated Press. “I am surprised at the way some of the scientific findings have been rejected in an unscientific manner.”
In fact, a document emerged years later showing that the industry coalition’s own scientific team had quietly advised it that the basic science of global warming was indisputable.
Kyoto’s final agreement called for limited rollbacks in greenhouse emissions. The United States didn’t even join in that. And by 2000, the CO2 built up in the atmosphere to 369 parts per million — just 4 ppm less than Broecker predicted — compared with 280 ppm before the industrial revolution.
Global temperatures rose as well, by 0.6 degrees C (1.1 degrees F) in the 20th century. And the mercury just kept rising. The decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record, and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.
Satellite and other monitoring, meanwhile, found nights were warming faster than days, and winters more than summers, and the upper atmosphere was cooling while the lower atmosphere warmed — all clear signals greenhouse warming was at work, not some other factor.
The impact has been widespread.
An authoritative study this August reported that hundreds of species are retreating toward the poles, egrets showing up in southern England, American robins in Eskimo villages. Some, such as polar bears, have nowhere to go. Eventual large-scale extinctions are feared.
The heat is cutting into wheat yields, nurturing beetles that are destroying northern forests, attracting malarial mosquitoes to higher altitudes.
From the Rockies to the Himalayas, glaciers are shrinking, sending ever more water into the world’s seas. Because of accelerated melt in Greenland and elsewhere, the eight-nation Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program projects ocean levels will rise 90 to 160 centimeters (35 to 63 inches) by 2100, threatening coastlines everywhere.
“We are scared, really and truly,” diplomat Laurence Edwards, from the Pacific’s Marshall Islands, told the AP before the 1997 Kyoto meeting.
Today in his low-lying home islands, rising seas have washed away shoreline graveyards, saltwater has invaded wells, and islanders desperately seek aid to build a seawall to shield their capital.
The oceans are turning more acidic, too, from absorbing excess carbon dioxide. Acidifying seas will harm plankton, shellfish and other marine life up the food chain. Biologists fear the world’s coral reefs, home to much ocean life and already damaged from warmer waters, will largely disappear in this century.
The greatest fears may focus on “feedbacks” in the Arctic, warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.
The Arctic Ocean’s summer ice cap has shrunk by half and is expected to essentially vanish by 2030 or 2040, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Sept. 15. Ashore, meanwhile, the Arctic tundra’s permafrost is thawing and releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
These changes will feed on themselves: Released methane leads to warmer skies, which will release more methane. Ice-free Arctic waters absorb more of the sun’s heat than do reflective ice and snow, and so melt will beget melt. The frozen Arctic is a controller of Northern Hemisphere climate; an unfrozen one could upend age-old weather patterns across continents.
In the face of years of scientific findings and growing impacts, the doubters persist. They ignore long-term trends and seize on insignificant year-to-year blips in data to claim all is well. They focus on minor mistakes in thousands of pages of peer-reviewed studies to claim all is wrong. And they carom from one explanation to another for today’s warming Earth: jet contrails, sunspots, cosmic rays, natural cycles.
“Ninety-eight percent of the world’s climate scientists say it’s for real, and yet you still have deniers,” observed former U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican who chaired the House’s science committee.
Christiana Figueres, Costa Rican head of the U.N.’s post-Kyoto climate negotiations, finds it “very, very perplexing, this apparent allergy that there is in the United States. Why?”
The Australian scholar Hamilton sought to explain why in his 2010 book, “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change.”
In an interview, he said he found a “transformation” from the 1990s and its industry-financed campaign, to an America where climate denial “has now become a marker of cultural identity in the ‘angry’ parts of the United States.”
“Climate denial has been incorporated in the broader movement of right-wing populism,” he said, a movement that has “a visceral loathing of environmentalism.”
An in-depth study of a decade of Gallup polling finds statistical backing for that analysis.
On the question of whether they believed the effects of global warming were already happening, the percentage of self-identified Republicans or conservatives answering “yes” plummeted from almost 50 percent in 2007-2008 to 30 percent or less in 2010, while liberals and Democrats remained at 70 percent or more, according to the study in this spring’s Sociological Quarterly.
A Pew Research Center poll last October found a similar left-right gap.
The drop-off coincided with the election of Democrat Barack Obama as president and the Democratic effort in Congress, ultimately futile, to impose government caps on industrial greenhouse emissions.
Boehlert, the veteran Republican congressman, noted that “high-profile people with an ‘R’ after their name, like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, are saying it’s all fiction. Pooh-poohing the science of climate change feeds into their basic narrative that all government is bad.”
The quarterly study’s authors, Aaron M. McCright of Michigan State University and Riley E. Dunlap of Oklahoma State, suggested climate had joined abortion and other explosive, intractable issues as a mainstay of America’s hardening left-right gap.
“The culture wars have thus taken on a new dimension,” they wrote.
Al Gore, for one, remains upbeat. The former vice president and Nobel Prize-winning climate campaigner says “ferocity” in defense of false beliefs often increases “as the evidence proving them false builds.”
In an AP interview, he pointed to tipping points in recent history — the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dismantling of U.S. racial segregation — when the potential for change built slowly in the background, until a critical mass was reached.
“This is building toward a point where the falsehoods of climate denial will be unacceptable as a basis for policy much longer,” Gore said. “As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘How long? Not long.”’
Even Wally Broecker’s jest — that deniers could blame God — may not be an option for long.
Last May the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, arm of an institution that once persecuted Galileo for his scientific findings, pronounced on manmade global warming: It’s happening.
Said the pope’s scientific advisers, “We must protect the habitat that sustains us.”
Marry Me
Comments
JMO 1 year, 8 months ago
data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
TheRickster 1 year, 8 months ago
The facts that really hold stats are the melting of glaciers. That melted ice is going somewhere. And for the folks that live on water's edge at sea level around the world will get a first hand fact when the water comes inside the doors!
asb 1 year, 8 months ago
You will do nothing to convince somebody once they've made up their mind to go against knowledge for religious, political, economic or personal interests. Denial is so much more than a river in Egypt. Denial has adaptive advantages in certain circumstance and, like refusing to use a toilet because it's not manly, eventually will be overcome by law. Flat Earth societies persist to this day. It's a pathology.
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
Nearly all evidence says warming is ongoing, while no credible evidence says otherwise. Even the impacts are better modeled every day and to no real scientist's surprise, a sudden global change of climate doesn't appear to be a good thing. We're sitting in the greatest (human centric) climate period known and ANY change is likely to go downhill. Maybe not for everybody, but certainly for anybody reading this.
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
Warming evidence is overwhelming, reproducible, and totally consistant; even if a few climate scientists turn out to be snots. The sources of denial "science" are corrupt fakirs who's data warping is constantly debunked as they collect their lucre from carbon sellers. Sorry for the intensity of rhetoric but this is actually a very serious issue.
asb 1 year, 8 months ago
Alarmist climate deniers are led by a very small group raising concerns about the issue, that all evidence and experts agree is one way while the alarmists insist it's the other. Deniers are, therefore, alarmists. Some deniers have learned from their carbon industry propagandists how to reverse an arguement using high-school logic to frighten fearful sheep into believing their alarm calls of an islamo-socialist-weatherman conspiracy. I first read about global warming in the late 50's in a Weekly Reader about the IGY, and even then oil company "scientists" said whoa, you can't say that. Wanting food, shelter, meaningful work, and a future aren't signs of greed, but lying and buying a handful of so-called scientists and politicians for an extension of the period of maximum profits rather than re-investing in non-carbon energy are clear signs of greed of the most pathological kind. Considering the stakes, and the degree of fraud, prosecution should be arranged for the most obvious schills and pols selling the denial manure.
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
What exactly is the "warmist's" underlying agenda? I should not have said deniers are alarmists, I apologize. I know many deniers who are not alarmed or may not even give a fig, they just don't buy it because they're lied to about it and are responding to a threat with denial, a good monkey rationale. Yes, the Earth warms and cools, and there have been some much warmer periods. If civilization had developed then, we'd have been severely disrupted by more typical conditions. The key point of the issue is that we are presently warming very quickly, and it's our burning of carbon fuels that is doing it. Natural processes are mostly accounted for and are dwarfed by emissions as far as the rate of change being clearly documented. My underlying agenda is to reduce negative human impacts on the Earth to preserve the civilization I admire and that you despise.
NoMoBigBro 1 year, 7 months ago
Global Warming is fact. So is Global Cooling. Man made Global Warming is myth. These cycles have been proven to have been going on, and with more extremes than now, for millions and millions of years...man has only been around for a small portion of that. And Industrialized Man has been around even less.
They scared the heII out of me as a young child in the early 70s when they claimed we were about to experience global famine and disaster from the impending colder temperatures and new Ice age that was coming if they could not find ways to thwart the ice shelf that would drop down and envelop half of the US and it's major food producing states. Never happened, but not because we stopped it..or created it! Yet they know that fear is a great controller of the masses!
Even asb admits in his post that he has been hearing about this since the 1950s. Just so happens that was around that 30 year warming cycle. In fact, since recorded publication and newspaper print, around every 30 year cycle there has been stories and articles from the chicken little's of either an impending global cooling OR global warming disaster respectively. Now it's just "climate change", they're too lazy too even change the argument again. Just blame it all on the same thing! Kind of comes down to funding too. If there wasn't a problem do you think these scientists would be getting the $$ they need for their studies? Hmmm.....that's a NO.
When they scared the heII out of me I educated myself. I could go on and on with what I have found out but...go educate yourself! Or be a sheep. Either way it's your choice.
wyriontair 1 year, 6 months ago
Well said!! I too grew up when we were being told of the planet was in danger of another ice age and famine. My grandparents were farmers and taught us to always be good stewards of the earth and we have passed that to our grandchildren, it's time to end all the funding to "green energy" groups, if someone wants to invest in the "green" energy technology let them do it with their own money, not taxpayers and when they get the cost where people benefit, let the people decide what form of energy they wish to use.
NoMoBigBro 1 year, 7 months ago
Beside's, when this earth is done with us, there will be nothing we can do to stop it.
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
NoMo, absolutely no competent scientist ever claimed global cooling was going to cover us with ice. There was a brief conflict between a couple of data sets that allowed some to think a major cooling trend was underway. It has resolved into warming all the way. If you had educated yourself as much as you say, you'd know that NEARLY ALL reproducible science has identified and explained industrial carbon emissions as the source of a much longer than 30 years warming trend. You spout Beck/Limbaugh/OilCo nonsense. You deny because you fear and it's the tough manly thing to say. You are wrong.
TheRickster 1 year, 7 months ago
WOW,,Gracefull,,is everything Right or Left? What about real conditions no matter what the source? In Venice they have been pumping the rise for years also adding to foundations. They are seeing real water levels increasing. You have always just said what you wanted with Right-Left being a reason. Get you head outta the sand and really read without those blinders. Yes,,maybe the big scare was a little aggresive but when it is too late it is just that. But as for me,,I live way above the water tables that will be affected but over time the tides will tell!
JCLifer 1 year, 7 months ago
Man cannot control the weather. This is all in God's hands and is likely just natureal ebb and flow cycles of nature that He created. Man getting all worked up over God's domain is pointless, crazy, and wasteful of the short time he gives us on His planet.
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
We cannot control, but CAN impact, climate. The impacts measured and modeled fall far outside natural cycles and variations, and the rate of change has only been equaled by really big rocks falling out of the sky. This defines the Republican party, team up carbon sellers with religious fundamentalists to squeeze every possible penny out of people without investing in other energy sources; all while telling us it's God's idea so don't worry. Greed, it's so us! We're being mauled by that facet of human nature that every religion holds as man's worst, just for extra profit. Only thoughtless, mindless, greed could allow energy corporations to damage our and their futures for a little extra profit today. It's why we have a government, to control these natural corporate urges. It's not the market, not the long term one anyway, it's greed - unchecked by a neutered federal government that's being called a horrid monster just in case somebody suggests some controls. It's the apocolypse, the sky is falling, we're all doomed . . . lunch anyone?!
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
As all can see your view of the "science" is tainted by your politics
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
Those models can replay 1,000 years of Earth's climate history very accurately. Weather is too complex to predict more than a few days ahead, but climate is very open to prediction. To say "no one can predict anything about climate" is nonesense. You're doing Intelligent design fluff . . . it's too complex for you maybe, but not for sound science.
muleman 1 year, 7 months ago
None of us are going to get out of here alive
NoMoBigBro 1 year, 7 months ago
This may be about the most reasonable comment yet! Well done!
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
The comparison of climatology with economics is reasonable, both are overarching model systems built on less complex and more specific principles and relations. Several of the climate model inputs are not understood precisely enough for perfect predictions or interpretations of underlying data, clouds being a good example. Most high-level climate models do account for surface topography effects, land type effects, and solar effects. Well enough that the little ice age of a few hundred years ago pops up in most models. Economics has fewer hard variables, but wage, price, exchange rate, demographic, and even political variables allow good models, still leaving room for interpretation regarding the best means of accomplishing a given goal. Remember, economic goals are more variable than the models. Wealth tends to concentrate and maximize, while social good tends to disperse and level economic flow. Climate science has one goal, to accurately model past and future climate. and the data, math, physics and calibration are all moving major models closer to each other every year, and all showing human carbon burning as the greatest climate impact in Earth's history ouside catastrophic impacts and extended volcanism. The politics in climate science come from the effort to overcome political and economic actions supporting the corporate goal of maximizing profit. It's not the sun son. It's us.
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
That is denialist paranoid hogwash. There's been enough information for decades, with only vested carbon interests putting off the needed energy diversification purely to maintain minor profit margins. Your folly and their arrogance. Climate impact mitigation will be a boon to capitalism, for every branch of our industrial base except short term carbon industry profits. Even carbon sellers can make money in the long run diversifying their energy sources.
NoMoBigBro 1 year, 7 months ago
If "green" energy sources were so cost effective, wouldn't it be safe to assume that everyone would be jumping on board? Well, not many people are. Because it is NOT cost effective and it's benefits are miniscule. Only the well off can afford these so-called Hybrid and all electric cars. And what makes that electricity that powers the cars? Coal? I think scaring people into buying into global warming and "green" technology is a way to try and push the technology on everyone because they "believe" it to be good. Pretty hypocritical to say that what they "believe" in is right, but what someone else "believes" in is wrong. If that is what you want to believe in, so be it. It's like someone selling you a car, they are going to make their case that the car they want to sell is the best thing since sliced bread.
TheRickster 1 year, 7 months ago
Graceful,,global warming IS happening whatever the cause. And you are "on-track" but too bad that is a dead end spur! If you were so smart wouldn't we see you in something other than the comment section?
NfourWr 1 year, 7 months ago
blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/
We need to stop dividing ourselves left and right and stand together and discuss the topics. If we stand together maybe just maybe the powers that be will not be so inclined to lie and cover up such things. If you think it is just the left that is in this you may also be kidding yourself. you don't see the right standing up and saying "hey they are full of bologna, here are the facts". They are right there silently waiting to see if we can be deceived.
tonto 1 year, 7 months ago
Wrong. Business, GOP and farther right conservative interests are busy spreading their message with as little concern for relevance or accuracy as the "icebergs are melting" alarmists. Your SPPI comment below is illustrative of that process.
"The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) was founded by a long-time Republican staffer named Robert Ferguson. According to the SPPI website, Ferguson "has 26 years of Capitol Hill experience, having worked in both the House and Senate. He served in the House Republican Study Committee, the Senate Republican Policy Committee; as Chief of Staff to Congressman Jack Fields (R-TX) from 1981-1997, Chief of Staff to Congressman John E. Peterson (R-PA) from 1997-2002 and Chief of Staff to Congressman Rick Renzi (R-AZ) in 2002."
Until recently, Ferguson worked for an oil-industry funded think tank called Frontiers of Freedom. The Frontiers of Freedom are one of the most active groups in the attack on climate science and have received over $1 million in grants from oil giant ExxonMobil."
evenkeel 1 year, 7 months ago
That big bright yellow round object in the sky has a lot to do with global warming.
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
That's right, the sun wams the globe. Very good Evenkeel.
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
Climategate was a personality issue, the science was sound and has been reproduced by other teams using the same data sets. These childish academics responded very poorly to what was basically a Freedom of Information Denial of Service attack. They go tired of deliberate massive requests for information that they felt were keeping them from doing their work, so they whined and looked like fools, but their work has proven sound. The nail turned out to be a noodle and that should tell you what the coffin turned out to be.
NfourWr 1 year, 7 months ago
personality issue? What does personality issue have to do with it? of course using the same tampered information in the data sets they will reach the same conclussion. i dont see how you can claim that to be "sound" if the base information was not completely accurate.
h t t p://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/proved_no_climate_crisis.html
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
The issue became one of a group of climate scientists acting like school children and making their effort vulnerable to attack and them look like a set of fools. However, their results, and the data sets they used have been verified and reproduced by other groups since.
tonto 1 year, 7 months ago
SPPI is a front group that prints white papers disguised as scientific research. The "proved" comment is highly debatable. You and I are among the few remaining people skeptical of both sides' claims.
evenkeel 1 year, 7 months ago
Remember when Obama locked up the Democratic nomination back in 2008? That was “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” as Obama put it that night.
So, we got that going for us. Unfortunately, we also got the federal government investing in Solyndra. 527 million dollars gone. Ouch. Healing hurts.
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
Remind me what Solyndra has to do with warming.
evenkeel 1 year, 7 months ago
Maybe the thermometers are not accurate.
According to the Planet Gore blog at NationalReview.com " the thermometers that the climate alarmists rely on for their apocalyptic warming models could be measuring the temperature incorrectly." Go to "It's The Thermometer stupid."
Hmmm, we could surrender our freedoms and economic liberty to big government global warming propogandists and bureacrats or ... we could recalibrate those thermometers.
Difficult choice.
JCLifer 1 year, 7 months ago
We all know that the climate records from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries are all very accurate, as thermometers and other recording devices used back then were always calibrated to the NIST standards and ISO2000 protocols.
NfourWr 1 year, 7 months ago
h t t p://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/proved_no_climate_crisis.html
personality issue? ok. ^^^^
tonto 1 year, 7 months ago
No, SPPI is still a front group shilling for oil companies.
evenkeel 1 year, 7 months ago
asb, can anything move faster than the speed of light?
(Humph! What in the samhill does that have to do with global warming! What a loony thing to bring up in a thread about global warming. grumble grumble. Global warming is settled science. Everyone knows this except these deniers who are nothing more than the 21st century equivalent of flat earthers. grumble grumble)
Albert Einstein thought that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. The rest of the scientific community accepted that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. I would say it was "widespread acceptance" from the scientific community. Albert published his theory in 1905.
Now, over a hundred years later, we have something called a Neutrino. I have no idea what a neutrino is, but evidently it is fast. In a race with light, neutrinos win in a photo finish.
Global warming could be wrong, couldn't it? A little humility from the scientific community may be in order.
NoMoBigBro 1 year, 7 months ago
Common sense would be cool too...
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
What in the samhill does neutrino speed have to do with global warming!? Grumble, grumble. Everything! Many scientists have hoped for an earthshaking event like this their whole careers, but have had to live with what was know and proven over and over for better than 100 years. This will probably ADD to, rather than disprove, a century's worth of work on Einstein's theories. Nobody in this house is calling climate science settled, there's a ton of work to do narrowing the range of error in some of the fuzzier areas like clouds and aerosols, but the primary effects of human carbon use are already measured, documented and gently lapping at the sea wall. And yes, denying proven science and the endless reproducible conclusions from it does indeed put the Flat-Earthers in mind, grumble grumble!
Gabrielle 1 year, 7 months ago
Al Gore profits - he and his buddy set up the carbon trade system. That is who would profit! YES - he is nothing but a big hypocrite and I am glad I listened to people point it out. He says one thing and his actions speak louder.
NoMoBigBro 1 year, 7 months ago
hkchas, I guess it is safe for us to assume that you get around on a bicycle or golf cart, or perhaps another form of carbon free transportation? I, myself, am very curious to know since you are so against "gas producers". And if you are THAT concerned with how the world is being "poisoned", I'm sure you are 100% converted to solar power? Wind power? A combination? If you would, please enlighten us how you became so carbon free. Perhaps you can help others get off the grid. And just so you know, this is on the topic of GW, NOT evolution. Thanks.
evenkeel 1 year, 7 months ago
Well, no, I disagree with that asb. I do not think that finding that neutrinos are faster than light ADDs to Einstein's theories. Quite the opposite. I think Albert would have bet heavy on light, lost his shirt and caused his hair to become very disheveled-oh wait. The article I read said that the science of physics is now in chaos. Chaos! I don't know a thing about physics, but this has me flustered. I don't want physics to be in chaos. I may need to use a lever someday and I want to be able to rely on it.
I also think that once those thermometers are recalibrated and data is collected for the next 50 years, what we will be able to ADD about global warming is that it isn't happening or it is happening but it cannot be found to be man-made.
My theory is that global warming is caused by a change in the ocean currents. If I could snare a couple of million in federal grant money I would set-out tomorrow for the Caribbean or the South Pacific and I would not rest until I tested the waters very thoroughly. I would need a boogie board.
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
Correct Grace, saying something is science doesn't make it so. Independently, repeatedly reproducing a finding does. Evenkeel, I'd keep reading on the neutrino business, nobody credible is putting physics in chaos. The new finding will add to Einstein's work just as his breakthroughs added to Newton's work. 100 year of accumulated proofs of his possibly simpler theory won't go away.
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
Evolution is proven constantly. It is NEVER disproven. Talk to carbon-seller "scientists" about data warping, actual scientists can only do it once, then peer review and verification nulify it. I agree that most conservatives are for science and are aware of its limitations.
Spankthefed 1 year, 7 months ago
Darwin said of his THEORY, that if it was true the next hundred years would produce HUNDREDS of transitional fossels, since we have NONE, I guess Darwin was right, his THEORY is false. So, a false theory PROVEN wrong by its own creator, or creation, still viable, which one should we teach?
Global warming didn't even last as long as Darwin's false THEORY, the e-mail lies, atlas lies etc, have proven enough, a failing industry attached to a lousy idea, and the grant leaches scrambling to keep it alive, while Earth worshippers wring their hands in worry. omg, my sides hurt from laughing! :>)
tonto 1 year, 7 months ago
Sorry your sides hurt so much. The concept of a transition appears to be a problem. No one, and especially not Darwin, ever said that apes turned into humans. There was a completely different kind of transition and that's why there are no half naked ape man fossils. The next hundred years turned up literally hundreds of transitional fossils which indicated that humans and apes had a very ancient common ancestor. That was the discovery which keeps the theory in play.
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
Museums are full of transitional fossils, the daily work in genetics, and not one shred of credible evidence disproving evolution fully and completey support the theory (a term used to define a complex body of knowledge). Only in the offices of carbon sellers are emails and cherry-picked publishing mistake converted to evidence against the solidifying theory of climate science and sown amongst the fearful, gibbering religious, and haters of truth. Gallows funny I suppose.
JCLifer 1 year, 7 months ago
Who do you think created the fossils?
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
Evolution is totally proven. Many lines of evidence on scales from daily to nearly cosmic prove it completely. The word "theory" has more than one meaning. Regarding science at the scale of evolution it means a collection of related knowledge, not conjecture or "maybe." It's grammer. That's a favorite mis-direction of the religious, and now Right Wing Nut, deniers. The fraud regarding climate is presented mostly by the fossil fuel, and now Right Wing Nut, deniers. The false arguments against both are bogus, while the science, due to its nature, holds.
Spankthefed 1 year, 7 months ago
If it was proven, you wouldn't be panicking when faced with the facts, and they wouldn't be using theory to describe it. Reverting to name calling is as much as admitting you have no argument. Natural selection is one thing, one species, developing into another, is not possible, it is not in the separate genetic makeup in the creatures blue prints, and therefore false as a idea, theory, cristian bashing, or what have you. Make a cow into a pig, or make a cow the size of a whale and you might show the theory holds water, however since a whale size cow is not in the genetic material, it can't be done. Selection makes one a little larger, but then your done, no more, the wall appears, theory becomes toast. And who's denying the facts?
JCLifer 1 year, 7 months ago
God created us, Silly!
JMO 1 year, 7 months ago
While I think JCLifer was being sarcastic, a belief and God and a belief in science, even in evolution, is not mutually exclusive. Sure the Bible says God created the world in 7 days. But, it's the height of arrogance to say that we know what a "day" is to God. Maybe his "creation" took millions of years to our reckoning, but was an instant to Him.
Or maybe the Bible is just wrong. After all, it was written by men, not God Himself. Men are often incorrect or prone to exaggeration. But getting the details wrong doesn't mean God didn't have a hand in it or that He doesn't exist. Michael Crichton’s Eater’s of the Dead is total historical muck…but Ahmad ibn Fadlan was a real man who really traveled with Vikings as an ambassador.
BTW, I'm not a member of any political party, although I certainly lean left of center. I also have a degree in Anthropology/Archeology, among other things.
JCLifer 1 year, 7 months ago
Don't try to use Science to explain Religion.
Don't try to use Religion to explain Science.
The past is dead and gone anyway. Who cares how we got here. The question is what do we do now?
JMO 1 year, 7 months ago
Not trying to explain anything. I'm just saying you can believe in both. It isn't an either/or situation. I'm sure there are plenty of republican scientists and christian democrats.
JCLifer 1 year, 7 months ago
Yes. I agree with you.
JMO 1 year, 7 months ago
Since you pretty much live to try to offend Democrats, I think I'll just ignore anything you have to say on the subject.
Spankthefed 1 year, 7 months ago
With the mathematics involved in the universe, I would lean towards creation, beyond that who knows, we do know evolution (not natural selection) is false. Is an incredibly smart/lucky big bang possible? What made it possible? Who made God is another quandry, but all these are for another thread, the point is made on evolution. That we have time to stop and ponder is a statement towards our good fortune to be alive today, and in this great country.
Global warming is modern day snake oil, PERIOD.
asb 1 year, 7 months ago
Science denial is a tool of power, not so much snake oil as oil snakes.
Spankthefed 1 year, 7 months ago
Cherry picking information after 100 years of evidence, or lack there of, is just not science, in fact it rapidly has become a religion, the worship of earth, complete with false prophets and deciples with blinders on. Blind belief of theoretic science holds back the scientific process. Gotta leave room for EVOLVING ideas especially when the moldy ones up on the shelf have soured under the pressure of time and available evidence.
Spankthefed 1 year, 7 months ago
The primary driver of the allegation of man made global warming is the industries profitting from it, PERIOD. This includes acedemia grant hogs at the trough and the earth worshipping socialist ideologes strewn throughout the govt. It's an angle, a scam, the bye in on a giant ponzi sceme that Al Gore types (the high priest of the earth church) and Striesand types build their coastal mansions on, while they tell you to have another sip of koolaid, and to air dry your laundry. Meanwhile they jet coast to coast and limo back and forth to their doings eating the best off a cow they say produces too much methane for you to consider eating. A control mechanism for lemmings and fools, and man are the pickings easy these days.
spelchek 1 year, 7 months ago
Ener1 Inc. and Solyndra, that's why.
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