More evidence that we are causing climate change and that we had better stop
Submitted by Rocky Barker on Fri, 09/04/2009 - 3:10pm.
Here is the latest data that shows the climate is changing and that human activity is causing it.
Greenhouse gas emissions caused by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities has reversed a 2,000-year cooling trend in the Arctic, Juliet Eilperin reports in the Washington Post.
The evidence, based on borings of lake sediments collected across the Arctic, show that the sun was 620,000 closer then and that it should actually be cooler. But instead, the study published in Science shows arctic temperatures are 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer.
The reports says if we don't so something quick the warming of the arctic permafrost will release even more methane and that will accelerate the Earth's warming.
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So Rocky Barker and ALL ecokook posts are killing us?
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There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control...
I think we will outlive all the wimpy ecofreaks.
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There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control...
foreignoregonian
Is there any way to block this person's repetitive drivel?
Nope II
It's easy enough to scroll though his stuff, and some of it is even amusing or insightful at times, but it sure does block up the "Recent Comments" index and make it hard to follow a discussion or a dispute between other posters when he gets on a multiple-post roll.
I've suggested giving FO his own Recent Comments list, or at least making the existing list three of four times longer and identifying posters with their Subject, but there has been no response from Rocky or the Statesman on these suggestions.
I actually enjoy reading FO's entries because of their familiar wackiness and brevity, but I really don't like how it jams up the Recent Comments file so badly -- especially when several days have transpired between visits to this blog.
And yes, the cut-and-paste repetitiveness is tiresome and quickly becomes drivel in every sense of the word. Sorry, FO, but the second or third time a joke is repeated almost everyone gets tired of hearing the same punchline over and over.
Don't think you'll stop reading, sure as hell not asking...
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There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control...
I don't cut and paste.
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There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control...
Are you saying?
FO:
Are you saying you type "There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control..." from scratch each and every time?
Or do you use some other method than cut-and-paste for repeating the bulk of your responses over and over and over and over?
It's a signature and saved on the McClatchy server...
Just because you never pay attention and just post.
I've explained this forty seven and 1/8 times. Click My Account and hush.
It shows in the reply window when I am signed in. If I tab from the subject line to the comment box it lands below the signature. I have to move up, hit return twice and then return to the top. I got poked at once because I didn't do that and ever since some of you freaks have accused me of cutting and pasting. My sincerest apologies on the loss of your minds.
Attack a signature file. I know when an attacking poster has nothing to fight with.
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There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control...
power on FO
I don't always agree with or understand you, but I support you and you unique cryptoids. The site would be less for your loss. As far as your sig. who cares? I only read it when it changes.
Those who don't read instructions deserve it blowing up.
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There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control...
correlation not causation
There is still no empirical data showing that humans are causing any perceived warming.
Kook bloggers raise CPU temps and the other users' also.
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There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control...
Human caused climate change is a scam
I have looked at the data "supporting" AGW (anthropogenic global warming; i.e. the theory that human activity is warming the atmosphere) and it is all garbage. The scientific method requires experimentation to prove cause and effect. Why do you think billions are spent on particle accelerators? AGW arguments all rely on anecdotal evidence and least squares curve fitting. Anecdotal evidence is garbage in this case because we have been scientifically observing nature for the blink of an eye in geologic time. Who knows what the glaciers looked like ten thousand years ago. Curve fitting is also garbage. One of the first thing that budding scientists are taught is that correlation does not equal causation. I don't care if your R squared is 1, you have only proven correlation. Actual experimentation is required to prove causation. Note that I have a degree in physics and am qualified to talk about this unlike most of the morons who have bought into AGW.
It is also reasonable to look at this question from a philosophical point of view. Do you really believe that the thugs who run the UN give a rat's behind about the temperature of the atmosphere hundreds of years after they will be dead? Or US politicians for that matter? I don't think so. This is a power grab pure and simple. They are watermelons. Green on the outside, red on the inside. Don't give up your freedom for the lie of climate control. The earth has heated and cooled for millenia and has survived just fine. The idea that the continued health of wilderness is dependent on me giving up my freedom is laughable. DON'T BUY THE LIE!
Climate change
Another battle of words, but here's the proverbial bottom line: Every time you fire up a lawn mower or weed whacker, or chainsaw or leaf-blower, or your car, you're polluting the air we all breath with carbon dioxide and other fossil-fuel gases. Think about what the next generation will say.
ALAN C. GREGORY
Lt. Col, USAF, Ret.
(former resident of Boise)
CO2 is fertilizer for plants
Dear Lt. Col, thank you for your service to our country. I salute you! Now as to the hype about CO2. Here are some scientific facts that the mainstream media has withheld from you. Water vapor makes up about 95% of the greenhouse effect. CO2 is a small time player. The water vapor coming out of your tailpipe has a bigger effect on the greenhouse effect than the CO2. Without CO2 we would all be dead because plants *cannot* grow without it. The vast majority (over 97%) of CO2 released into the atmosphere comes from natural sources. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have been much higher in the past than they are now according to ice core analysis. Algore' graph that purports to show that CO2 changes lead temperature changes is wrong. Actually, CO2 changes lag temperature changes by about 700 years. Want to know why? The vast majority of the CO2 on the planet is dissolved in seawater. As we all learned in high school chemistry, the ability of a liquid to hold a gas is a function of the temperature of the liquid. In other words, as sea water warms due to factors (say output of the sun or something like that), CO2 comes out of the water. As sea water cools, again due to other factors, CO2 is again captured by the ocean. So, in summary, CO2 is our friend, not a poison. The commies have obsessed on CO2 because they know if they control that, they control you.
The next generation
I'm an historian. I know how this works. The next generation won't notice or care. Not a bit -- not anymore than we care about dairy farmers or auto workers or the loggers who supplied the lumber for our homes from past generations.
The worst that will happen is that one of them will notice slightly for a moment or two and say something like, "nice job mowing the lawn, Grandpa," or "Get a rake! That thing is too loud!"
I hate being called "grandpa" and I hate leaf blowers, but that's how communication goes between the generations.
The real problems we can address are unnecessary (predictable and preventable) catastrophic wildfires and pseudo-scientific federal policies that are destroying our forests and rural economies. These places were a lot nicer, safer, more beautiful, and more productive when past generations managed them than they are now -- weren't they? That's our true legacy. Not leaf blowing or lawn mowing.
My GOD, you had a 512 in a '69 Vette? WICKED!
That is exactly what most boys and even a few girls will say.
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There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control...
Now they are calling it "Climate Change"
The whole global warming argument has not been working for the eco-communists lately. Anecdotal evidence is a major basis for their arguments and things have not been going well there. It has been quite cold lately. In fact, for the last ten years things have been going against them. When your argument is based on the shifting sands of anecdotal evidence, you have to change it to fit the data of the day. Now they are way into "climate change." How stupid do they think we are??? Even Algore's charts show a constantly changing atmosphere. The climate never has been and never will be static!
Do they really think they can guilt us into huddling around a candle in a cave with such a weak argument? DON'T BUY THE LIE.
Too late for Rocky
He's already drank the kool-aid, set up a stand, and has been using his weekends going door to door trying to sell this nonsense.
But it's not too late for his readers and other humans with a brain still connected to their eyeballs.
The good news is that Rocky has degenerated from the Global Warming mass hysteria of 50% of all species going extinct in a couple of years to the Worst Enemy of Wilderness. It's still the daffy pronouncements of a gullible journalist, but at least the tone is less shrill and the consequences less goofy and dire. The unfortunate thing for the Rock -- and the other liberal Democrat media promoters of apocalypse -- is that he has put everything into writing. You can only backpedal so far.
The weird thing about these True Believers, though, is their smugness. The try and act as if it is we, the "deniers," who are not considering the evidence correctly and are the lazy thinkers. They have The Awful Truth to spread, and us Polllyannas just aren't quite bright enough to get it.
Oh, well. Keep up the good work. I liked the watermelon analogy.
the problem
I'm no scientist. I'm a nurse. I can't argue the minutia of global climate dynamics. I try to stay informed in order to make informed opinion. I see that the majoity of climate experts (not experts on native American forest management, or general(?)physics) are in agreement that the global temp is in an upward trend (ten year deviations included) and that human activity is a driving force. Who am I to believe? Let me put it this way. If my kid has a brain tumor, and my oncologist says surgery is needed, I'm not going to a dermatologist for a second opinion.
As for the belief that there is some sort of power grab taking place, or that the human driven global warming proponents are only in it for the money, or that liberal Democrats are behind it to move us towards communism, or that "they" are trying to take away our freedoms....well, I can only think Glenn Beck's paranoia must be contagious. I file all this nonsense in the Truther, Birther, grassy knoll, Mexico-Canada superhighway, perpetual motion machine file. It is a round file and needs periodic emptying.
Many scientists are AGW skeptics
Hi, once again, the mainstream media has obfuscated the truth. Check out this page:
http://www.petitionproject.org/
Over 30,000 scientists, including over 9,000 with PhD degrees, have signed the petition rejecting AGW. The majority of the scientists who support AGW are biologists, many funded with government grants. Here are some suppressed facts about government research. When Algore was VP, he mandated that only climate studies that blame human activity for global warming will be funded, and this was never changed. Government at all levels has outspend opponents of AGW by about 8,000 to 1. The government has spent almost nothing investigating things like the output of the sun, the effect of the magnetic field, etc. From a scientific point of view, this is malpractice. The earth has warmed and cooled many times before with out our influence. Until the reasons for past changes are identified and ruled out as causing this cycle, no one in their right mind can state positively that human generated CO2 is warming the planet now.
As far as the IPCC, tell me one thing that the UN scientific community has contributed over the last 50 years. I'll give you a hint: NOTHING. So now all of the sudden they purport to have studied an extremely complex system, our atmosphere, and concluded that a single variable, human caused CO2, is causing catastrophic warming. BWHAHAHAHAHA. That is like getting your kid's diagnosis from a doctor who got his license from a cracker jack box.
petitions?
Even discounting the UN scientists(although I'd imagine UN scientists have contributed quite a bit through the years, especially in the field of epidemiology) and looking at only USA scientific opinion, the majority opinion is in favor of AGW. For instance...
http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/2007climatechange.html
Instead of petitions, show me a position paper of a recognized American scientific association that denies AGW.
'Out here in the cornfields where the wood got heavy'
Check out April 28 1975 Newsweek global cooling article. (Peter Gwynne) I might of been one of the idiots standing there with a sign saying WARM THE GLOBE. Ahh youth, BTW my first and only winter in Chicago, it was a cold one.
Forest history
seevee:
I am technically an "historical ecologist." That is, I study the role of humans in the environment. My focus is forestry and, specifically, the forests of North America. That is why you refer to me as an "expert" (thank you) on native American forest management -- in the past, before the coming of white immigrants, North American forests were managed by Indian people. So I study the role of those people in relation to the evolution of these forests. And enjoy doing so.
The climatologists you are listening to are predominantly "modelers"; that is, they use computerized models to predict the future. Fifteen years ago I used my knowledge of past forest conditions to test the most powerful climate predictive models of that time -- it is a generally recognized fact that if a model can't accurately "predict" past conditions, there is no way it can provide accurate forecasts of future conditions. Not a chance.
The models failed completely. I presented the reasons why I felt they failed into a presentation delivered to an international symposium of climate experts (TOTAL "peer review") in 1992, and summarized the results in a paper published by EPA a few years later. My conclusions on the shortcomings of these predictive models are just as valid today as they were then. My funding was immediately cut off by EPA after my presentation, and all further work in the field stopped. To my knowledge, there has been no further testing of these models on documented past conditions since. Otherwise, I am confident, there would be no "consensus" at this time. Apocalyptic consensus generates billions in taxpayer dollars, so it is important. Think "cure for cancer" as one example.
Your trust in the medical field is admirable. The state of climate prediction is in its infancy, though -- listen to the weather report for accuracy if you don't believe me. Two hundred years ago the medical profession might tell you to go to a barber and get bled to cure your ailments. And there may have been an overwhelming majority of such practitioners giving out that advice. It was stupid, but people believed it because they trusted their doctors. Those were the "experts" of that time.
I don't think I need to stretch this analogy any further. The American public, in my view, is being bled. It has nothing to do with Glenn Beck or goofy conspiracy theories -- those are a straw man that you have constructed, not a fair comparison. It has everything to do with the quality of the science being performed, and the reliability of the methods being used. To be polite, they are untested and unproven. There is no reason for hysteria or even undo alarm regarding "climate change" at this point. The bleeding might well prove to be far more harmful than the complaint. My guess is it will. Time will tell.
Time Will Tell
I can't speak to your experience with EPA cutting off your funding. Every story has two sides. As far as predicting the weather, I am generally impressed with the 2-3 day out forecasts. I know it's popular to knock the weather forecasters, but I think the science has really improved in my 55 years on the planet, and from what I gather, computer models have helped quite a bit.
As for my "straw man" construct, I was refering to others besides yourself. My mistake.
I'm not advocating hysteria, panic, or undo alarm. I think we can reduce hydrocarbon burning in such a way that we are less dependent on other nations, create jobs, and clean up the environment. It's win win to me. If there is anything to the whole AGW we may not have too much time to diddle, if not, we would benefit from the effort to change things aqnyway, as long as we don't adopt draconian measures in doing so. That's the rub, and what I think you are most concerned about. Rightfully so, but that shouldn't stop us from going forward. There is little reason for worry about too rapid a change IMO due to the entrenched interests that will fight hard for the status quo, thus ensuring a more gradual transition away from gas and coal. Besides, replacing those (gas and oil) as energy sources isn't in our grasp at present anyway. But that shouldn't stop us from trying to develope fuel cell, solar, wind, battery, thermal energy solutions.
Total agreement
seevee:
I am in total agreement with what you have written. There are lots (and lots) of good reasons to practice energy conservation and the development of alternative fuels. I personally don't believe CO2 is one of those reasons, but if it is, that's OK, too. Whatever gets the job done.
Putting a stop to needless forest fires, and using dead wood in our forests to produce energy (rather than harmful smoke) are two closely-related methods to help achieve the goals you state.
Draconian efforts are not needed -- and the ones often being proposed are probably not part of the solution anyway. Goofy pronouncements, such as Rocky's assertion that Global Warming is the Worst Threat to Wilderness are not helpful either. At best, they are needless distractions from the real problems of catastrophic wildfires and wasted resources that were the focus of my response.
The worst threat to wilderness...
I agree with you BobZ - the worst threat to our wilderness is locking it up and letting it burn.
http://www.fs.fed.us/r4/sc/fire/fireuse/fcwild/images/fc_1985-2000.pdf
Poor Frank.
No party affiliation
The last time I registered with a party was in 1972 in Illinois as A Republican. I participated in a Democratic caucus in 1976 in Wisconsin. Since then I have stayed on the sidelines.
I'm neither smug nor lazy. I keep up on the latest science daily. And the latest science shows the long term cooling trend had been reversed by the greenhouse effect caused by fossil fuel burning. This is not based on predictive models but on data collected about past conditions.
Don't be lazy, Read the study:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8236797.stm
Then tell me what's wrong with it.
Global Warming is a partisan issue
C'mon, Rocky, get a clue!
Reading the study has nothing to do with laziness, it is entirely about discrimination. As in discriminating reading tastes.
Clue 1 The period is only 100 years. The measuring system has been refined within the last 10 years. hmmm. I wonder when their funding started, and what they hoped to find? And who writes their press releases?
Clue 2 (don't be lazy, read your reader's posts): Correlation DOES NOT equal causation. These people are lazy thinkers. They've found a correlation that puts food on the table. wow. This is certainly not even close to establishing any type of causation.
Clue 3 So What?!? For the sake of argument, let's say things have been warming up on the poles for a while. How is this in anyone's wildest dreams a "Threat to Wilderness?" When are all those species going to go extinct? Remember the Population Bomb? Big difference between fear and reality.
Clue 4 Wilderness is a political creation. There was no Wilderness before Congress created it in the 1960s. The descriptions of Wilderness are political, not biological. Realistically, the biggest threats aren't even catastrophic wildfires caused by mismanagement -- they're probably political. Or economical.
Clue 5 Belief (and that is the exact right word) in Global Warming apocalypse is far more pronounced among Democrats than Republicans. Maybe this is how Global Warming fears fanned by Democrats result in loss of credibility and political questioning and reevaluation of Wilderness desirability. So, in a way, maybe you're right. Global Warming politics are the biggest threat to Wilderness political stability. hmmm.
If I just look at the clues, Rocky, and compare them with your writings, I have to come to the conclusion that you're a closet liberal Democrat, since you won't own up to any particular affiliation at this point in your life. Whether that's a result of nature or nurture, I can't be sure. Are your parents Democrats?
(Maybe you'd like to read the paper I wrote on the topic and give me your views on it, if you're not too lazy?)
Clue #5 Belief....denial doesn't mean the other side is wrong.
So just because the Republicans choose not to believe, the Democrats are using unfounded hysteria? Just because the Republicans don't believe, the Democrats are losing credibility?
That's a proof?
Whether we stop or not we're still going to go blind.
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There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control...
Keep one hand on the keyboard, one on the mouse...
That will go a long way towards preventing blindness.
Of course it's a proof.
Proof that it's a "partisan" issue, Boisepoet. Look at the Subject line.
Proof that we are using "Climate Change" as a political issue and that we had better stop. (Now look at Rocky's headline).
And just because it's a proof, doesn't mean it's amore.
The antartic shows no warming
Take a look at this one about the Antarctic.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/02/27/antarctica-ain%E2%80%99t-cooperating/
The takeaway: “All records correlate significantly with all other records during all seasons from 1982 to 2001. Near-surface temperature trends are statistically insignificant (p >0.05) on annual timescales within every data set analyzed, for both the longer (1960–2002) and shorter (1982–2001) periods.”
If the earth is warming, why is Antarctica not heating? Why is the Antarctic ice growing?
Now to address your BBC article. A key statement: "It also shows there's lots of variability on the 100-year timescale, and that's probably more so in the Arctic than elsewhere." Again, looking back even a thousand years is a blink of the eye in geologic time.
The article makes an affirmative statement:"The root cause of the slow cooling was the orbital "wobble" that slowly varies, over thousands of years, the month in which the Earth approaches closest to the Sun." This is complete conjecture. How does the author know that it was not the variability of the output of the sun or the variation in the earth's magnetic field? He does not. There is no fossil record of these variations. In fact, there have only been calibrated thermometers in existence since around 1848 or so. Everything before that is estimated with ice cores, tree rings, etc. with a large margin of error.
The real stunner in the article is when a member of the research team states that "the Sun is no longer the most important thing governing the temperature of the Arctic." This is utter and complete nonsense. He wants us to believe that a trace gas has more impact on the temperature of the arctic than the sun?
For all we know the temperature patterns now being observed are completely normal. This article is nothing more than fancy curve fitting and anecdotal evidence. No way to experimentally test the hypothesis. No way to validate the hypothesis. A hypothesis it must remain. Those who call this settled science don't understand science.
Rocky, your problem is you
Rocky, your problem is you are not an historical ecologist with scads of data about forest conditions centuries ago to feed into models which, surprise, surprise, don't predict present conditions. What do scientists today know?
Dave, you're in error
Actually, Dave, the historical data do predict present conditions fairly well. Growth and yield tables are one example, specific to forestry.
The 1990s beetle kill on the Cascade summit on Highway 20 predictably turned into a catastrophic wildfire in 2003 (B&B Complex) in which the 1993 beetle kill map almost exactly correlated to the 2003 wildfire map. The results were predicted, correlation and causation established and documented. The fire engulfed major portions of the Mt. Jefferson and Three Sisters Wilderness areas.
The Silver Complex of 1987 predictably became the Biscuit reburn of 2002. Both fires burned through the entire Kalmiopsis Wilderness. Prediction, correlation, causation (dead conifer trees = dry, pitchy fuels that will eventually burn).
The 6-year Jinx Tillamook Fires of 1933, 1939, 1945, and 1951 are another good example.
Got a Wilderness area covered with trees? My prediction (based on voluminous historical data) is that they will be killed by beetles or fire sometime in the foreseeable future, if they haven't been already.
The problem is that the climate models use much of the same proxy measures as forest history (tree rings, pollen fossils, carbon prisms), and that just isn't very good stuff for guesstimating temperatures. The test is to predict the (known) past with these models, which they can't do. That makes it impossible for them to accurately predict the future.
The present is like a photograph of an arrow. If you don't know where it came from, or what its trajectory is, how do you know where it is going? Or what the results will be?
Nixon in '72 and Carter in '76 your, O-2
Your not lazy, but haven't you voted since 1976?
Rocky destroyed the 1970s?
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There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control...
Good comeback slipstream
Actually I was a Udall supporter in 76. Since then I have been a journalist and keep my votes to myself for the most part.
Rocky is just a blogger
Don't bother trying to educate Rocky. He's a blogger, not a scientist.
No matter how much sense you make or what data you present, he is only gonna believe in his current opinion. These types don't process information like a lot of us do. You can't change their minds with real science. He's too proud or foolish to ever admit he formed his opinion on faulty science fueled by a political agenda.
Anything that seems to be associated with conservative politics or is against the opinion of the people he idolizes will be disregarded.
And you are just a commenter on a blog...
Kinda makes the stain on the Charmin seem important now, eh?
Only if you are a guy...
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There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control...
I'm a reporter with a blog
And those who have followed my reporting over the years will recognize that I have run many competing views for more than a 15 years on the global warming issue including George Taylor of Oregon and Sen. James Inhofe, prominent skeptics of the world science view.
I followed the debate over whether the climate was warming and presented it as a debate for most of that time.
Today the scientific debate no longer lies with whether climate change or global warming is happening nor whether burning fossil fuels contributes to it. The debate now is how much we contribute and what it will take to reverse it, if in fact we still can.
Science is neither conservative nor liberal. Once we as a society accept a scientific challenge there are liberal, conservative and libertarian approaches as well as many nuanced approaches in between to address them. I have presented all of these in my blog and reporting and each have strengths and weaknesses.
I listen to all sides because as a journalist I have found that no side has a monopoly on the truth. If blog posters were willing to engage with all sides as I do they would find that they and their opponents probably agree on more things than they think.
And 9x % of science is theoretical, usually wrong in 2 gens
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There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control...
"The Debate Today" (according to Rocky)
Rocky writes:
"The debate now is how much we contribute and what it will take to reverse it, if in fact we still can."
Thank Gore that is not factual information! Debate among whom? The Democrats Rocky professes to be separate from? Is he talking about the cap-and-tax debate?
Even IF Global Warming is happening, and even IF it is caused by people (which are still the basic debate topics among scientists, if not politicians and journalists): So What? Warmer is better. Everyone who vacations in Hawaii instead of Antarctica is in agreement on that one.
"If in fact we still can" What? "Still can" control the climate with light bulbs and electric autos? Is that what you are saying? If so, when could we ever?
Yes, Rocky, you have printed both sides of the story quite well over time (George Taylor was on my committee, and one of the best scientists and thinkers I ever worked with), but you are accused of not fully considering the evidence. Based on your written assertions of the past few years (many of the more bizarre and outrageous of which you have stopped asserting lately), I would have to concur.
The imminent apocalypse and the need to "reverse course" is NOT being debated by most scientists. That's what you journalists and the (Democrat, mostly -- sorry, Rocky) politicians are doing. Scientists are still debating methods, data quality, predictions, and values. Because they're scientists. The apocalypse and taxation stuff is politics -- maybe political science at best.
Nature or nurture? Reasoned conviction or just plain obstinate?
In the long run, scientists are always wrong
I graduated with a degree in physics. I also had declared majors of English, economics, and electrical engineering along the way, plus got a minor in Spanish. Call me ADD boy, but I learned how to think. You would think that with a degree in a hard science, I would have more respect for scientists. The thing that impressed me the most is how little we really know and how smug we are about what we do think we know. At one point, "scientists" thought that there were 4 kinds of matter, earth, wind, fire, and water. Then men discovered elements and the periodic chart became the smallest divisions of matter. Then someone discovered protons, neutrons, and electrons, and they became the smallest particles of matter. Since then veritable menagerie of smaller critters have been discovered. The point is that at each of these stages of scientific development there were those who dogmatically defended their positions and there were quiet seekers of truth who were willing to challenge "accepted science" and dig deeper. True science is about rejecting conventional wisdom, which is invariably false.
Non-scientists seem to hold up scientists as some sort of all knowing infallible creature. Nonsense. For instance, we have been studying gravity since Newton. It is one of the fundamental forces of the universe. We can measure it and understand how it makes masses interact. But no human knows how it works. We cannot shield it, influence it, or even observe any wave or particle that causes masses to attract each other. Human science only explains a small percentage of the world around us.
Back to AGW. If the science community really wanted to study climate change, they would be looking at all factors that could influence temperature. Today they study human generated CO2 to the exclusion of all other phenomena. This is junk science. Any scientist who agrees with the current approach has sold his soul for grant money or does not deserve the title of scientist. I suspect that all of them know this in their heart of hearts, which is why I harbor suspicion that they are using science as a tool to manipulate us.
Nature doesn't care for if it ain't broke, fix it...
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There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control...
Nature doesn't care for if it ain't broke, fix it...
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There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control...
It used to be a lot warmer...
A fellow working on a drill rig north of the Arctic circle said they were finding trees buried in mud thousands of feet down - from when Alaska was sub-tropical.
Now Palin can sell mud pack!
She'll have a lot more of it than politicians could EVER SLING!
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There is no life in Idaho...it is a mirror site on god's server. You were dreaming but it is over. Go to your residence and await our commands and THEN we will restore control...