We can't possibly have litmus tests for SCOTUS appointees. That would be so gauche.

'Roy Blunt said '

*falls over laughing helplessly*

"9,000 to three?" Can I see a list?

only faith-based science.

Over at RedState, they're all excited about this op-ed by Jim Inhofe. Apparently Inhofe is preparing to "grill" Al Gore at some hearing tomorrow.

That oughta be good for a laugh.

And by the way, who spiked your Wheaties this morning, Drum?

This is post #9 for the day and it's still early.

It's just like the GOP; Deny evolution by showing the party is run by neanderthals that won't ever evolve.

This is why our country is trillions in debt, embroiled in an endless war, and almost as hated as N. Korea.

Well done, modern Republicans.

who needs scientific data? we've got ideology!

Republican credibility?

I know not of what you speak.

That is pathetic. There is just no other term for it. We can and will argue about what the proper actions in response to climate change should be. But there's no excuse for the "there's not enough evidence" line. Tell me, GOP leadership, is there enough evidence for a spherical earth?

Roy Blunt said he didn't think.

Which every Missourian has suspected all along.

Good for Wayne Gilchrest!

He's from my hometown. His kids were on my little league team. As GOP'ers go...he ain't bad.

Science is the devil's way of luring believers into sin.

I wish that I were joking. I once had a born again tell me that science is "idolatry of the mind".

This is the problem.

People who actually know about a subject are denied the seats they should have, because Republicans value loyalty and party above fact.

The more blinded by ideology you are, the better chance you have of getting the keys to the GOP Executive Washroom, and the better chance of getting that vaunted Medal of Freedom once you screw up REALLY badly.

Btw, if Gilchrist were a real Republican he would have just lied to Boehner. He needs to be sent to GOP reedujamacation camp.

Roy Blunt said he didn't think.

Which every Missourian has suspected all along.
Posted by: Blue Girl, Red State

Okay. You won that round.

Thank you. (smiles and curtsies)

Republicans, hardnosed and softheaded.

So avoid the nose.

cld, you are busting me up over here today. That's like the third time. We are getting into Stefan/craigie territory here.

The GOPers around here have been saying that about Wayne for years..."you ain't uh reeeuhl Repooblikan, Wayne".

Globe, I got a smart new haircut today, so the pressure's off.

Repooplikans, that's the word I was looking for.

What makes this country great is that we have politicians that will protect us from the inconvenient truths of science.

The GOP is right. I was listening to Jerry Falwell, and he showed where the Bible says that global warming is impossible. And that proves it.

Disputo: "Science is the devil's way of luring believers into sin."

Martin Luther said that reason is the devil's whore -- no, I'm not making this up.

Climate Change.

Human caused, or divine intervention?

I don't think desertification can be blamed on "natural" causes. Look at China.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2849/

The definition of climate change is an alteration in air temperature and precipitation patterns.

How on earth is deforestation NOT HUMAN CAUSED?

Deforestation and desertification are human induced (for the most part).

Humans also pollute the oceans, reducing their productivity, and hence the capacity to capture carbon.

Urban centers all over the globe are "climatically" shaped by human influences.
Heat Islands (all that asphalt and concrete).

Hmmmm, I haven't even said anything about CO2 releases.

I realize that some folks argue that IN THE PAST, lots of CO2 was belched from volcanoes, independent from humans. But isn't our understanding of past climates scientifically based?

Or do faith-based pontifications about the Universe trump the marvel of scientific inquiry?

I got a smart new haircut today, so the pressure's off.

I'm just going to quit consuming liquids at the desk when I'm on this site.

And Disputo - if yo are out there, send me an html ticket and I will pay the fine...

Ah, Kevin.

This is very typical. Galileo probably felt the same as Congressmen Boehner as he went before the papist hardliners. Now Beohner must face the UN sponsored scientist hardliners.

The more things change...

counterpoint here:

http://www.nrel.gov/

ah egbert, our fuzzy little yellow chicken-hawk!

Scientist hardliners, huh?

You mean people who test hypotheses and amass evidence, and go where the facts follow, rather than fixing facts around a pre-determined policy? Oh! Horrors!

And yes, I am proud to be a scientist hardliner.

Republicans have completely lost the ability to distinguish between what is true and what is politically expedient. Our little egbert is a good example.

That kind of self-delusion is an extremely valuable attribute. Voters can tell if you are being dishonest, so it's important to actually believe all your own lies.

Via ThinkProgress...

Philip Cooney is the former chief of staff to President Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality who made hundreds of edits to government climate reports in ways that played down links between human activity and global warming. He worked for the American Petroleum Institute before coming to the Bush administration, and left the White House for Exxon shortly after his edits were revealed.

Cooney appeared yesterday [Mar/ 19] before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) told Cooney he wanted to determine whether what is “driving the policy of this administration on global warming and climate change is the science or whether it’s something called the politically correct science.�

Cooney admitted it was the latter: “My objective was to align these communications with the administration’s stated policy� of climate skepticism.

Assuming that this Unitary Executive doesn't turn into Almighty Emperor Bush in the next few years, I'd just have to think that this continuous subordination of science and reason to party loyalty is going to be the death knell to the Republican Party as we know it. They are becoming so ensconced in their own self-congratulatory idiocy that they are utterly oblivious to anything remotely resembling external reality.

That may be good for keeping that hardcore 25-30% base happy, but it does nothing for anyone else.

Hey! I think we should just pollute the shit out of everything! Yank the muffler and catalytic converter off your car and let 'er rip! Yee-ha! Let's flush our toilets straight into the rivers and oceans - brown trout for everyone! Ya think I care if some damn fish die? Fuck 'em! Carbon dioxide? The hell with it! Who gives a shit? Its the GOP way. Woo-hoo......

Ahh... the faith-based crowd and science. I wonder how the polio vaccine is working out for them? 'Coz it's obviously the work of the devil.

Twits.

Flat worlders...always been fun to poke fun at. Ignorance always invites ridicule when it's not accompanied by humility but instead self-righteousness and arrogance.

You're half-right Manco. The grassroots entrepreneurs and technologists will likely solve the problems, as we decentralize the power grid (in many dimensions), while you suffer in your ignorance thinking that reactionary authoritarianism is the answer to the world's problems. When people stop engaging, the growing parasitic monopolies and oligarchies pushing non-action will just take over more territory.

Climate-change policies seek to help those who will be most affected by climate change, the vast numbers of humans, mostly poor, who live near and depend on coastal and inland waterways and plant/agricultural cultivation of a fairly predictable and slow-changing environment. For the wealthy among us, like here in America, we are concerned with creativity and innovation, as the competitive curve is obviously going towards conservation and greater efficiency of energy use, as well as realizing our valuation systems are completely out of whack.

Capitalism isn't the problem, it's who has dominated the determination of value in the comprehension of markets, and how these folks have ignored natural systems and services.

In an episode of M*A*S*H, the army hospital is subject to bombing because of its proximity to a munitions storage. The munitions were kept next to the hospital in order to discourage its targeting; a technique of the Nazis, according to Major Frank Burns. Captain Pearce commented that we should not adopt the methods of the losers of the previous war.

In the past six years, our unfortunate country has adopted or institutionalized a number of the practices of our long-time enemies. We have engaged in domestic spying and warrantless surveillance. Our government is ever more cloaked in secrecy. We hold prisoners for indefinite periods without due process, and torture them while they are in custody.

The subordination of scientific evidence to ideology that is applied so aggressively by this administration smacks of Lysenkoism.

Again: We should not adopt the methods of the *losers* of the previous war.

You folks obviously think the debate on whether humans cause global warming is over. Actually, it is just starting. If you haven't noticed, a lot of Russian and Chinese climate scientists are saying that the new green religion's "blame humanity" explanation just doesn't fly. It is hot stuff in the West mainly because of the political way climate science gets funded, the herd instinct in academic promotion circles, and sheer politically correct bullying.

I am not going to be bullied by algore and crew just yet. For one thing, Antarctica is actually getting colder. For another, it seems to me that estimates of how thick the Arctic ocean ice sheet was on average 50 years ago were greatly over-estimated. Our submarines starting in the mid-1950's had no trouble poking up through the Arctic ice whenever they wanted. The Russians built a whole class of submarines (Typhoon class) intended to hide under the Arctic ice and rise up to fire missiles immediately when needed.
It is very difficult for a submarine to break through more than ten feet of ice.

Other areas of climate science hotly disputed are the various solar causes of Earth warming, which boil down to either more sunlight at certain times or hotter sunlight. This line of argument is allegedly supported by a surprising NASA factoid to the effect that Mars seems to be warming. We also should keep in mind that "deforestation" in certain well-publicized areas does not mean a smaller total number of trees in the world. North America today probably has more trees in toto than it did when Lewis and Clark crossed the continent, largely due to man hating forest fires and loving parks.

Also, deforested regions are usually planted right into food crops, which suck as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as do old-growth trees, which, no longer growing, don't need much new carbon at all. New growth, replanted forests suck out more carbon than anything.

But it is not even that clear that there have not been periods of Earth's long climate history where the atmospheric carbon level was as high as today but there was no warming. I think about 600,000 years ago is being proposed as such a time.

Sorry Mike - those dogs won't hunt. Your post is a litany of mistakes. Antartica *is* cooling down, but 1) global warming does not preclude local cooling; 2) Antarctic cooling is actually predicted in global warming models. You're debating factual data on Arctic ice cover with anecdotes. Changes in solar insolation have been exhaustively measured for the last 30 years - I'm an astronomer who constructs solar models.

There is no evidence of any significant changes in solar properties during the recent sharp warming spike. The Martian warming claim is just wrong - go to realclimate. Your comments about trees are irrelevant, and your comments about uncorrelated CO2 levels and warming in the distant past are simply incorrect. More to the point, you haven't addressed the overwhelming scientific case for the basic properties of human-induced climate change:

1) The composition of the atmosphere is changing;
2) People are causing this change;
3) There is well-known basic physics that predicts a resulting warming trend;
4) Nonlinear effects that could counter the basic physics have been exhaustively studied, and they do not do so;
5) The actual climate of the Earth is changing dramatically and the evidence for both ongoing and accelerating warming is now overwhelming.

I have regularly studied and surveyed this field over the past 12 years, and the skeptics have been consistently wrong. The case for global warming has gotten stronger and stronger. In short: the scientific case has been settled, and its time to move on to discuss what we're going to do about it.

I saw this article yesterday if anyone is interested. Unless you've been so brainwashed you couldn't possibly digest an alternative opinion.

"It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of Earth", Bjarne Andresen says, an an expert of thermodynamics. "A temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system. Furthermore, the climate is not governed by a single temperature. Rather, differences of temperatures drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate.

He explains that while it is possible to treat temperature statistically locally, it is meaningless to talk about a a global temperature for Earth. The Globe consists of a huge number of components which one cannot just add up and average. That would correspond to calculating the average phone number in the phone book. That is meaningless. Or talking about economics, it does make sense to compare the currency exchange rate of two countries, whereas there is no point in talking about an average 'global exchange rate'."

Bjarne Andresen, a professor at The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen

1) The composition of the atmosphere is changing;
2) People are causing this change;
- Marc

Some scientists remain a little skeptic about that Marc.
Here's another interesting read:

"In their efforts to capture the public's attention, then, have climate scientists oversold global warming? It's probably not a majority view, but a few climate scientists are beginning to question whether some dire predictions push the science too far.
"Some of us are wondering if we have created a monster," says Kevin Vranes, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado.
Vranes, who is not considered a global warming skeptic by his peers, came to this conclusion after attending an American Geophysical Union meeting last month. Vranes says he detected "tension" among scientists, notably because projections of the future climate carry uncertainties — a point that hasn't been fully communicated to the public."

Hey Marc, you do have impressive credentials. Do you happen to have read the recent issue of METEOLOGY AND ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICS by Lin Zhen-Shan and Sun Xian of Nanking Normal University?
These guys are predicting global cooling in the next several decades. Maybe they forgot to "correct" the balloon and satellite data because that data was politically inconvenient.

You admit that, locally, Antarctica is getting cooler (on average, some areas may have warmed slightly.) You don't address why you are so damned sure that the estimates of the thickness of the Arctic ice sheet fifty years ago and more are correct. You say Mars is not warming. OK, I agree that just because a planet's atmosphere is almost completely carbon dioxide, it wouldn't warm up.

Have you seen the paper in Environmental Research Letters on the critical role the dusty Sahara plays in supplying the Amazon rain forest with vital soil nutrients? That is neither here nor there on the issue of global warming directly, but green leftists like to throw out all these red herrings like "more hurricanes now" (there aren't) and "drowning polar bears" (more bears than ever because of changed hunting regulations for native tribes.)

In fact, if the Arctic ice really is thinning, the polar bear population will probably soar because these animals depend on holes in the ice itself for their livings, not on impenetrable ice sheets. Also, the deep haline ocean currents are not changing. This winter in North America was no kind of record-warm year. Estimates of the snow pack here in Washington State were apparently exactly wrong. It looks like green zealots at the University of Washington cooked the books or something because our snowpack is increasing, not decreasing.

But the latter issues are all red herrings. Does man cause significant climate change or not? I still think not and the recent change is a coincidence. We can probably expect a cycle of cooling soon enough if skeptics like me are right.

>"1) The composition of the atmosphere is changing; 2) People are causing this change;

Some scientists remain a little skeptic about that Marc." -- Jay

Jay, could you please cite a single reputable scientist who disputes that human activity is causing [the current] atmospheric change?

While there is some room to debate the effects of the changes on the climate [IMHO small room], I haven't seen anyone offering a credible explanation for the explosive growth of CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere since 1850 other than human activity.

mike cook wrote: Hey Marc, you do have impressive credentials.

So do you, mike -- as a fact-impervious Bush Cultist. That's why your dogs never hunt.

Jay, could you please cite a single reputable scientist who disputes that human activity is causing [the current] atmospheric change? - buford

When I have more time, I can provide names and places of study. The fact is there are many reputable scientists that don't buy into the drama.

"Not all scientists buy into global warming. There are hundreds of scientists, some prominent, who either argue against global warming entirely, the drastic effects it supposedly will have or whether it's even something to worry about in the first place.

They're starting to be noticed by the media and the public, and scientific journals are including articles that discuss different reasons for climate change and what we should expect to see.

Many of these particular scientists were shunned by others in their fields if they offered a dissenting viewpoint, such as global warming is neither man-made nor a threat. To believe in global warming and to live eco-friendly became a lifestyle statement."
by Hilary Wade
published on Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Just to save you time, I know you will discredit what they say and their reputation because it doesn't fit your agenda.

I still think not

...will be etched on your tombstone, Cook.

The fact is there are many reputable scientists that don't buy into the drama.,/em>

Then you should have no problem finding ONE NAME or ONE PEER REVIEWED JOURNAL.

In other words...present your evidence.

Bushies at it again

Capitalism isn't the problem, it's who has dominated the determination of value in the comprehension of markets, and how these folks have ignored natural systems and services.
Posted by: Jimm

Yeah. Exteriorization of the costs is a persistent flaw that allows the system to flourish as though the real world doesn't in fact exist at all.

Does hack scientist Bjarne Andersen lose all credibility when he says: "That would correspond to calculating the average phone number in the phone book."

Memo to Bjarne: A phone number isn't a measurement. So naturally, if you were to average them, they would be meaningless.

Michael beat me to it. If it can't be counted, it can't be averaged; and Andersen loses all credibility with that stupid, sneering statement alone.

Marc wrote:

Antartica *is* cooling down, but 1) global warming does not preclude local cooling; 2) Antarctic cooling is actually predicted in global warming models. You're debating factual data on Arctic ice cover with anecdotes. Changes in solar insolation have been exhaustively measured for the last 30 years - I'm an astronomer who constructs solar models.
________________________

Marc, then how do you explain the effect of the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age?

The earth was considerably warmer than it is now from about 1000 to 1350 CE. Within the space of ten years, the average temperature fell over four degrees and then took a further drop when the Maunder Minimum occurred around 1640. The Little Ice Age left as suddenly as it arrived in the mid-19th Century.

Most of the increase in temperature in the past 100 years occurred before 1940, well before industrialization really took off. The average temperature actually dropped from 1940 to around 1975, when the current warming trend resumed.

Ice core samples strongly suggest that, far from causing global warming, increased CO2 is a product of global warming. This is borne out by the fact that graphs of CO2 changes generally lag behind those of temperature change.

What are the assumptions in your solar models regarding the effects of solar energy on cosmic radiation and the resulting effects on the earth's temperature?

Jay: Well, I would be a little skeptical of that paper. Eli Rabett has a pretty good look over here.

Mike Cook:

In reagrds to Shan and Xian, I don't think the forgot about satellites and balloons since they apparently don't deal with the physical science. From a quick read of the paper I gather they are looking at the issue in light of some statistical responses. Color me doubtful on this one since it does not explain why we won't get warming when the IR properties of CO2 are well known as is the fact that we are causing the elevated increases.

However, your comment

But it is not even that clear that there have not been periods of Earth's long climate history where the atmospheric carbon level was as high as today but there was no warming. I think about 600,000 years ago is being proposed as such a time.

is interesting. I'll call you on that one. Can you back this up with a shred of evidence?

Y.

Mike Cook,
Your posts are a great example of how damaging humans can be when they apply amateur understanding of nature to systems and issues that they know nothing about. It's like Ann Coulter's criticism of evolution: she doesn't actually understand it, so she criticizes her own misconceived version of it. Another wingnut who's an expert straw man architect.
Regarding polar bears: It won't matter one whit if humans aren't hunting polar bears like they used to if the bears cannot get to their feeding grounds. The break-up of the pack ice is the equivalent of cutting off the bears from their food supply. They don't find seals by simply looking for a hole in the ice, just as you don't catch a tuna simply by dropping a baited hook into the ocean. The bears know where they need to go, but nowadays they can't get there because there's too much liquid ocean where their used to be ice. They are drowning because their swims are now too far....because the ice is MELTING.
As for the various jabs here and elsewhere about how it is fashionable to think that global warming is real, the same could be said about "skeptics" like yourself. At least the evidence is on the side of the so-called "alarmists." Many of you seem to think that Al Gore invented climate change and that there's some kind of liberal cabal out there that's just looking to stir up trouble and make life difficult for the oil and coal industries and their reps in the White House. Scientists are probably the most skeptical people on Earth (it's a job requirement), but their skepticism is actually channeled into a process that is what makes science work. James Inhofe's skepticism is based on what he WANTS to believe.
And yes, your point about dust from the Sahara being imporant to the Amazon rainforest is indeed neither here nor there. Nobody is arguing that Earth shouldn't have storms or strong winds or hurricanes. We are arguing that ignoring our role in changing the climate is stupid and ultimately suicidal.

Trashhauler: I gotta run to a meeting but I will post a reply in a couple of hours.

Cudos to tinisoli, hitting several nails on their respective heads.

The worst Republicans are stewing in the juices of their own ignorance here. They are doing more than simply denying science; they are pretending to be rational and hard-headed while simultaneously trying to insist that reality must bend to their ideological preferences.

The case for global climate change is convincing. The case that human agency is involved is persuasive. However, that global climate change must inevitably lead to worldwide disaster is speculative at best. It is entirely possible that the impact may be much less than some suggest, or that a negative impact in one area of the world would be offset by largely positive environmental changes elsewhere. I have not yet seen that any scientists anywhere have developed reliably testable models to confirm the impact of climate change in the near or far future. And the idea that we must assume the worst possible scenario and spend massively to offset otherwise ?inevitable? environmental catastrophe is not science, but ideological special pleading.

Ironically, some conservatives and liberals ultimately share a superstitious world view. Some religious conservatives see natural disasters as signs that a vengeful deity is displeased with human immorality. Some liberals see environmental change that inherently destructive humans are despoiling the natural landscape. Neither side can accept the idea that exceptional or disruptive environmental occurrences might be random or that human agency might be powerless to affect or alter them.

Hey, Mike Cook! Got ergot?

You cannot have any meaningful exchange with this same-old-same-old tagteam of climate change deniers who infest this site.

They trot out the same useless and discredited crap time after time. Refutation is a waste of time.

It's like arguing with Flat Earthers. Scorn and derision are the weapons of choice. Laugh 'em out of the room. Don't debate them.

"Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein

>"1) The composition of the atmosphere is changing; 2) People are causing this change;

Some scientists remain a little skeptic about that Marc." -- Jay

So, Jay, is it the polar bears that are driving all those cars that put all those auto emmisions into the air? Are the gophers running all those coal fired generators? Oh, right, it's the cow farts that are causing all the trouble. Right.

The case for global climate change is convincing.

The cause is pure garbage scientifically and even worse politically. Kyoto was/is the dumbest treaty ever negotiated in the entire history of mankind. It did nothing to reduce emissions instead accelerating emissions by mandating the rapid transfer of manufacturing capacity from the 1st world where there are safeguards to the 3rd world where there there are no safeguards and will never be safeguards.

China, Brazil and India to name just 3 have already stated they will not be observing ANY restrictions on their energy production now or anytime in the future.

Intel just announced still another chip factory, in Asia. Gee, I wonder why?

The best past of the politics us that you fools have elevated Albert Gore, the worlds biggest dick, to status as an intellectual. The man is a moron. Better yet you've got every Hollywood airhead celebrating this development. It's not just that he pisses away 20x's as much energy as the average user, in just one of his mansions, but that he's a moron. His movie is full of th dumbest exaggerations proving unlimited opportunities ro mock him.

Try the new blog at National Review Online called Planet Gore or timblair.com to name just two sites dedicated toward mocking the gross stupidity of the eco-freaks. You'll find they are chock full of links to serious studies debunking the many myths supporting GW while detailing the incredible debacle that is Kyoto.

For example you'll find the EU is doing a rotten job in meeting their quidelines and is increasing their emissions at 3x's the rate of the USA. That's correct. The more amazing aspect of this is the religious ferver of the true believers here but especially in Europe. It makes sense for the political class to support the UN in building a massive bureacracy to deal with global warming because there's nothing else for the UN to do and Europe is so economically weak they need the bureaucracy in Europe to create jobs.

Unfortunately GWB is their worst nightmare. The opportunity has passed. Kyoto is such a debacle there won't be another except for some face-saving paper-work pretenting to have meaning. Old Europe and the UN don't carry the necessary respect and they'll carry a lot less come 2010 and the Data on the EU come clearer.

From Planet GORE:

Al Gore on Europe [Iain Murray]

Al said that Europe is on target to meet its emissions reduction requirements under Kyoto. Perhaps he should tell Friends of the Earth:

While the EU has committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 8 per cent by 2012 compared to 1990, recent data published by the European Environment Agency show that general greenhouse gas emissions are actually increasing ( 0,3 per cent in 2004).

More from FOE:

In 2004, the combined EU-15 [2] emissions were only 0.9% below 1990 levels, meaning that the EU-15 is shamefully off-course to meet its international Kyoto Protocol obligations to cut greenhouse pollution by 8% by 2012.
Indeed, the EU itself disagrees with him on page 1 of its official report for 2005:

"Even with planned additional domestic policies and measures, the target will not be reached."

Has the Vice President misled the House?

Listen to Egbert and Al, ye doubters and deniers of Divine Truth and American Freedom.

It is a well established but almost universally denied truth that science has been overtaken by a brotherhood of distorters of reality whose sole purpose is to deny the workings of divine creation. The Global Warming conspiracy is only the latest in a series of assaults against the fortress of True Wisdom. Science has already succumbed to the insidious disease of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics. Only a brave few advocates of Intelligent Design carry the banner of divine truth and stand firm against the heathen hoards intent on victory for the regiments of Satan. Sadly, an earlier battle for Holy Wisdom was lost when the Anti-Copernicans finally surrendered the banners of truth to those who propagate the evil lie that the Earth revolves around the sun. Galileo is now presented to ignorant humanity as science's martyr when in reality he was Beelzebub's terrorist. Now mankind is lost in the thickets of ignorance, and the "scientific community" offers false lights that lead on to the abyss of Hell.

Americans must heed the wise counsels of those like Al and Egbert and American Hawk who know the truth: Satan is resident in the World and has his home in Brussels. The socialistic and satanic European Union is the inspiration of Beelzebub and draws its sword against America, the bastion of Divine Truth. The Brussels driven worldwide conspiracy against the Land of the Free - free because it embraces the Truth of the Lord - has paid its legions to spread the lie that man, especially American Man, created in the image of God and given mastery over the Earth, is destroying the planet by simply living according to the laws of Heaven. God gave America Freedom, Truth and Oil. It would be a transgression to tutn away from these rich gifts, passed on to humankind. Americans, it is your patriotic and religious duty to resist the tempatations of Satan; hold high the banner of the Truth of God and fight on the battlements to defend the bastions of Divine Wisdom; so get out there and BURN THAT OIL.

Geez.

The Froot Loop returns regurgitating the same old moronic shit.

"Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlements to a McHouse and a McCar." James Howard Kunstler

One of the reasons conservatives are reluctant to become alarmed on global warming is the fact that the majority of the scientific community may be misrepresenting data.

Now why would they do that? Simple. A scientist who says there is a global crisis coming is much more likely to get research grants in order to further investigate a deadly threat than a scientist who says that, yes, there may a small amount of climate change, but we do not know if it will have any significant effect. Just as fear of terrorism can lead to homeland security pork, fear of global warming can lead to pork for scientists.

This is not say that global warming isn't happening, but it must be remembered that just because a majority, even a vast majority, of scientists say something is so does not necessarily make it so. After all, a vast majority of scientists once believed that the solar system rotated on top of a set of invisible spheres, and a vast majority of scientists once believed that illnesses were created by an imbalance of the four humours.

rdw: Still following your old tactic of professing to know about the science while only arguing political reasons.

I have been waiting a while for us to pick up where we left off in this thread.

Again, do you have any science to actually back up your opinion? Please link to a Tim Blair argument - please, please.

LOL.

Y.

Trashhauler:

OK, a couple of points. You are quoting the CO2 phase difference in the old ice age sample. There has been some interesting work in this regards and lets just say that science progresses as you can see at this link.

You also say: Most of the increase in temperature in the past 100 years occurred before 1940, well before industrialization really took off. The average temperature actually dropped from 1940 to around 1975, when the current warming trend resumed.

That is not true. There was a warming period early in the century, but this was offset by cooling from sulfate aerosols. Only in the last 30 years has global warming overcome the aerosol cooling (also due to better sulfur emission standards).

Happy to help.

Y.

Good God, "brian" hauls out the scientists-just-wanna-get-rich meme as a final bulwark. Has the pushback crowd become that desperate?

Simply put, no. This "argument" carries no weight; back to the shelf. Suggest you avoid all forms of medical care, since the scientists who developed those vaccines and drugs and the MRI were just tools of liberal, lifesaving do-gooders. Real men just tough it out, or perform self-surgery.

If a "scientist" wishes to line his/her pockets, then there are Exxon-Mobil bucks aplenty for climate-change refutation, and it's simple to correlate the benefits to the funder. And perhaps a climatology department chair at Bob Jones U?

Trollhattan:

You are spot on. Research grants don't go to scientists but to administrations who let the researcher spend it on various approved things such as equipment and slave labour in the form of grad students.

Yelling in the fog,

Thanks for the cite, though I notice that their findings are correctly labeled as experimental: "Our finding suggests that the phase relationship between CO2 and EDC temperature inferred at the start of the last deglaciation (lag of CO2 by 800±600 yr) is overestimated and that the CO2 increase could well have been in phase or slightly leading the temperature increase at EDC."

I note that, even if their new constraints on the densification model are correct, it still doesn't establish causality. (I know, I know, that's a different thing altogether.) Still, the fact that the phase lag needs to be addressed shows that statements such as, "The science is definitive and incontestible" are far from correct.

Re the measured drop in mean temperature between 1940 and 1975, I'm not sure I read you correctly. Are you saying the decrease can be totally accounted for by the effect of aerosols? I'm not certain I even want to go where that suggests. ::grin::

It is undeniable that the earth is warming today, just as seven hundred years ago, it undeniably cooled without any aid from mankind and, equally undeniably a thousand years ago, it rose to levels quite a bit higher than today. We don't know why those earlier changes in temperature took place, though there are clues.

I note that you didn't address the Maunder Minimum effect during the Little Ice Age. I wish you would, because I haven't seen it addressed in most topical literature. Thanks, in advance.

Trollhattan,

Do you mean to say that the environmental sciences are the only ones immune to the pressure to acquire sufficient financing? If a legitimate scientist can link his study of the moment to a current topic of interest, then he or she will do so, because the grants become that much easier to justify. It isn't about lining one's pockets, but convincing the government boobs to cough up for legitimate science. If it has some relevance to global warming, or kids' diseases, or the flippin' better lightbulb, all the better.

If you think differently, you haven't ever applied for a sizeable research grant. Because if you had, you'd know you have to pad those applications with whatever you can.

Don't believe scientists because scientists once thought the heavens revolved on crystal spheres?

Say what?

The people who imagined the spheres were not scientists. The work of scientists discredited the sphere idea.

You seem to be saying because science has proven some hypothesis wrong we should not believe science?

No, it means we need to evaluate ideas based on scientific evidence and not wishful thinking.

Marc, I am trying to document the 600,000 year-old high carbon level factoid and believe I got it from the Discover Science channel concerning ice or sediment cores taken in the Great Lakes, but am not absolutely sure.

Now, about those drowning polar bears, really square one on this issue is how many polar bears should there be? What's the baseline? The Canadian government seems to say there are 25,000 in their neck of the woods. If more open water means more plankton means more everything down the food chain, then there will be more seals. The problem polar bears have is that they are used to ambushing seals at ice holes, which is kind of like fishing in a barrel as the seals must come to the hole for air. Some bears even snag up small whales that way. Note that the bears don't need really thick ice and it is plausible that as ice thins there will be more holes, not fewer. The scare-mongers seem to be insisting that ice doesn't go from thick to thinner to open water, it just goes "bang" into all open water with no holes in the remaining ice anywhere. Is the claim that there is no remaining ice anywhere?

So, I guess what you are really claiming is that there is a lot, really a whole lot more open Arctic Ocean in the winter than there used to be.
Back in the 1970's an oil company actually jammed a big oil tanker through the Arctic ice to transit from the Pacific to the Atlantic north of Canada. The ship made it, but the passage was so hard the company ruled out trying it again.

Now, if today there really is a lot less ice, we should be able to see video of really big ships transiting the Northern Passage because of the absence of ice. We should also see at least one video of a drowning polar bear.

But I am thinking we won't be seeing either of these anytime soon. People who snowmobile, ski, or dog sled to the North Pole have to cross crevasses all the time. Are you now saying they need water wings year round? Please send video and a GPS location of what you are showing. Or maybe I will just book a polar daytime flight to London and look for myself!

Trashhauler, you covered a lot of ground, but lets take a look.

You say that correlation does not equal causation which is true, but then seem to imply that there is no causation which is completely wrong. One of the strongest points is that there is a causal link. 1) CO2 absorbs IR radiation, 2) we are producing CO2. to deny causation you have to deny one of those two facts, which one is it?

Re sulfate aerosols, we are looking at climate and there is never just one cause of climate change. However the effect of anthropogenic sulfate aerosols is well established. Incidentally, it is the same process that cools the earth after volcanic eruptions.

You also asked for comment on the Maunder Minimum. Earlier you made this statement The earth was considerably warmer than it is now from about 1000 to 1350 CE. Within the space of ten years, the average temperature fell over four degrees and then took a further drop when the Maunder Minimum occurred around 1640. The Little Ice Age left as suddenly as it arrived in the mid-19th Century.

Ok, lets take a look at that statement. Can you provide anything to support that there was a global decrease of 4 degrees over 10 years? In regards to the Maunder Minimum, it actually started in 1645 and lasted for about 70 years. During that time there were very few sunspots. This is significant since sunspots act to “stir� the sun and move hotter material to the surface, so fewer sunspots less heat. Its not a great deal , but enough to cause some cooling. And what does it have to do with current global warming. I would say nothing but I am dying to hear your take on it.

Regards,
Y.

Mike Cook , I am also interested in seeing where you got your claim about the CO2 level 600,000 years ago because it does not agree with anything I have read.

In regards to the arctic and ice. The ship you are thinking of was the S.S.Manhattan which was a special ice breaker tanker. It did make a trip through the NWP in 1969.

However I would say that you metric for measuring ice decrease is a little strong. Economics, supply, pipelines all act to make the NWP less favorable to oil tanker trade right now. A better idea would be to actually measure the ice and this has been done. This diagram shows the ice extents and ice areas for the last 25 years. As you can see there is a clear decrease.

Y.

Yelling in the fog,

I haven't time to get into things here at work, but I'll try to get back tonight, if this doesn't age off.

I wasn't questioning the causality of sulphate aerosols, just the degree.

Granted, the facts surrounding the extent and severity of the Little Ice Age are in some dispute. It appears I was in error about the four degree drop (I conflated it with something else.) However, the existence of the cooling phenomenon for some centuries is not.

I appreciate your posts, as they are substantive and interesting.

Trashhauler:

I understand about work constraints and look forward to your post later. As a side note, you might have been getting your 4 degree drop from some work that was done on Greenland that indicated a significant temperature drop in the space of 10 years.

Y.

A scientist who says there is a global crisis coming is much more likely to get research grants in order to further investigate a deadly threat than a scientist who says that, yes, there may a small amount of climate change, but we do not know if it will have any significant effect.

Spoken like someone who has absolutely no clue whatsoever as to how research gets funded.

I have to admit though it's fun to see all these wingnuts proudly displaying their ignorance.

Trashhauler, you are disappointing me.

Mike Cook said: "I am not going to be bullied by algore and crew just yet. For one thing, Antarctica is actually getting colder. .."
AND
"You admit that, locally, Antarctica is getting cooler (on average, some areas may have warmed slightly.).."

Here's todays latest on Antarctica:

"Antarctic melting may be speeding up, Michelle Byrnes. Friday, 23rd March 2007
http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2007-03-23T103106Z_01_SYD275118_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-OCEANS-COL.XML

"Rising sea levels and melting polar ice-sheets are at upper limits of projections, leaving some human population centers already unable to cope, top world scientists say as they analyze latest satellite data....There has been no repeat in the Antarctic of the 2002 break-up of part of the Larsen ice shelf that created a 500 billion ton iceberg as big as Luxembourg.

But the Antarctic Peninsula is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, and glaciers are in massive retreat.

"There have been doomsday scenarios that west Antarctica could collapse quite quickly. And there's six meters of sea level in west Antarctica," says Tas van Ommen, a glaciologist at the Hobart-based Australian Antarctic Division....

But even in east Antarctica, which is insulated from global warming by extreme cold temperatures and high-altitudes, new information shows the height of the Tottenham Glacier near Australia's Casey Base has fallen by 10 meters over 15-16 years..."