Accusing your opponents of indulging in a “circle-jerk” is a pretty lame substitute for credibly refuting their arguments. The trouble you’re having seems to be that when it comes to climate change, the so-called “leftists” (who include decidedly non-leftist posters like John Mace, by the way) are the ones with most of the facts and reason on their side.
If you’re embarrassed by conservatives like Clothahump and mks57 and stutteringjane making ill-informed drive-by “skeptical” comments that receive well-earned rebuttals and/or derision from most of the other participants in the thread, you shouldn’t be blaming the “leftists”, you should be trying to help educate your fellow conservatives. It is not our fault that ignorant climate-change skeptics sound stupid, nor is it our fault that conservatives as a group are not doing a good job of distancing themselves from ignorant climate-change skeptics.
First of all:
Is it happening? Sure
How much is anthropogenic? I’m not sure. I guess, at most 1/3.
MAN!!! Do you really believe it??? Well, I’m sure somebody believes that crap, but generalising to more than 0.0001% of religious people is…too much meth.
I’m as religious as anyone can be and whatever I think about global warming has nothing to do THAT. One of the things you learn from Genesis (even if it’s only a pathetic myth by drunken fertile-crescent Palaeolithic guys trying to scare others into giving them food and women) is that the ONE thing we humans do is fuck everything up. So, if anything, GW would prove it right, we fuck everything!!
BTW, when doom ensues; is the Atlantic coast of the US gonna freeze or sink under 20 feet of water? Been hearing both sides for a while.
Unless we find a good way to reduce it without sending us third world countries into even deeper poverty with cuts in production or with plans that don’t include India and China or without alternative sources of energy that really work…don’t ask me to join.
The summary of the IPCC is down to around a foot of sea-level increase and almost surely killed the hockey stick, so I’m not sure what to believe other than I still think that predicting weather 100 tears down the road is impossible.
Heh. What they seem to be ignoring is the simple fact that the more climate change worsens, the harder the cold hand of Regulation will have to squeeze in order to reduce the environmental damage and its economic costs. Delay is not cost-free. The more serious the environmental and economic problems posed by anthropogenic climate change become, the more draconian regulatory policies will have to become to counteract them. A little bit of that old “leftist” gas-taxing and carbon-trading now could potentially save us some real regulatory pain later.
Interesting. Where did you get that figure? Is there any scientific reason that we should believe your 1/3 figure rather than the IPCC’s estimate that most of the recent warming is anthropogenic?
What do you mean, “when doom ensues”? AFAIK, most climate scientists aren’t suggesting that anthropogenic climate change is going to be a sudden definite onset of “doom” like a nuclear explosion. Rather, it’s predicted to involve extensive changes to global climate over timescales from decades to millennia. (And where are you getting the “freeze” predictions, by the way?)
Well, there probably won’t be any totally economically pain-free way out of the problem of anthropogenic climate change. As I noted above, though, the longer the problem continues unchecked, the more painful the solutions are likely to be; and this is likely to be even more true for third-world countries.
Weather is not the same thing as climate. Climate-change skeptics would add about 30 points to their perceived IQ in these debates if they could just learn to stop making that one stupid error.
I keep thinking there is a lot of money to be made in new technologies and more efficient existing ones. Manufacturing should be jumping on this as a great new business opportunity. Instead of a left-wing conspiracy it should be a massive right-wing conspiracy to make more money selling newer and more expensive products. You know like the vast arms dealer conspiracy. Think if companies are aggressive there is a lot of money to be made. BP is thinking towards the future. They are very big into Solar Panels already. We need American companies to be more aggressive. GM & Ford need to push hybrids and E85 and anything else they can develop.
I wonder why Clothahump, Homo Ergaster, stutteringjane, **mks57 ** & **Debaser ** are so anti-business.
Man, some of you folks have a very selective memory … give us a citation for that claim, or go reconsider your foolish beliefs. Here’s the actual study, which said that 53% of the media articles committed the unbelievable sin of being … balanced. Can you believe that? 53% balanced, 41% in favor of the AGW study, and only 6% supported the skeptic’s view. Ooooh, that proves the media’s bias, all right …
I supposed I shouldn’t be shocked by this kind of misrepresentation of facts, or by the selectivity of memory, or by the fact that people swallow this kind of garbage as truth … but here on the SDMB, it’s kind of depressing …
From what I’ve read in the press lately, it appears that companies which make a dedicated, intelligent effort to go green discover they actually save money through reduction of waste streams and so forth.
Well, like I said in the concurrent GD thread where you posted this same complaint, giving “balanced” coverage to two sides of a debate is not necessarily unbiased, if one side is not as well supported scientifically as the other.
If I’m reading an article about the solar system, for example, unbiased fairness doesn’t require the author to present balanced coverage of the geocentric hypothesis as well as the heliocentric one. Nor does it even require the author to note that the heliocentric model still has a few unresolved problems and unpredictable occurrences.
I never found any statistics on it, but it seems Hybrids are selling well with good margins in a generally tough automotive market.
The scale is still small, but there appears to be a solid market and I have read the sales are doubling yearly. This would make me think GM should be more aggressive. Here is a weird idea; my generation is prepared for its mid-life crisis. We all loved classic Camaros and Mustangs. Mustangs are already selling well and the Camaro is being reintroduces as a retro Pony Car soon. Ford and GM should offer a powerful Mustang and Camaro hybrid option. It is possible and it would make 36-44 year olds feel better about buying a frivolous sports car and thus increase sales. “Look, I am not having a mid-life crisis, it is a Hybrid”.
Building better houses that are insulated properly and take advantage of southern facing and are built for the climate they are in, does not actually raise the cost of building by a large amount. Actually rather small considering the cost of housing in the NYC, LA and San Francisco Metro areas. If new houses conformed to better standards, we would see a large reduction in the energy these houses used.
None of this is difficult or complicated. There are dozens of ways to reduce greenhouse gases and dozens or hundreds of opportunities to make money in the transition. We just have to go forward and do our thing. If not, well my house is high enough up that when most of the current NJ shoreline is lost to Global Warming in 50 years, I will be a lot closer to the shore. This might work out well for my kids. It would really be sad to lose large portions of NYC, DC, Baltimore, Boston, Florida, Savannah, New Orleans of course, LA, San Diego, etc. Hopefully the last of the vocal doubters will come to realize this is not some strange sneaky socialist scheme.
Your cite is a review of popular media. The study Trunk’s referring to is a review of almost 1,000 peer-reviewed papers from various scientific journals. Here’s a cite.
What you’ll notice when you compare those two reports is that the balanced representation of climate change in the popular media is at odds with the vast majority of actual scientific work being done on the subject.
The study by Naomi Oreskes claimed that she couldn’t find a single scientific article “refuting” the consensus from among 928 articles she looked at … either she is very poor at reading articles or very good at selecting papers, but I find articles in the scientific press nearly every week that cast doubt on some aspect of the consensus that the temperature rise over the last century has been mostly CO2 driven, that we are at the warmest point in 1,000 years, and all the rest.
For example, the “HockeyStick” has been the subject of a number of papers which have highlighted various problems that, in total, completely invalidate the HockeyStick. There have been a recent spate of papers demonstrating the effect of cosmic rays on the climate. NOAA itself has said that land-use changes may have had more effect on climate than CO2.
How did she miss those, and all of the rest like them? There is a list here of hundreds of papers, online results, scientific presentations, and books, almost all of which questions some aspect of the consensus.
The problem is, she asked the wrong question, viz:
Our level of climate knowledge at present is far too low to refute almost any position. For example, I suspect that you would not be able to find a single paper “refuting” the position that NOAA took saying that landuse might have had more effect on temperature than CO2 over the last century.
For another example, there is a large and increasing body of knowledge showing undeniable correlations between solar variations of various kinds (TSI, solar wind, sunspots, etc.) and climate. But do any of these “refute” the CO2 hypothesis? Of course not, our knowledge is not that far advanced. However, they do cast doubt, as do dozens of other papers, on the idea that CO2 is causing major temperature changes.
In short, the Oreskes study is useless, because she was looking for papers that refute the “consensus” that CO2 is the major climate forcing, and found none. She would have found the same thing had she looked for papers that “refute” the idea that land-use is the major climate forcing, or that solar is the major climate forcing, or that black carbon (soot) is the major climate forcing. The current state of climate science is that we cannot refute any of those hypotheses.
Looks like you’re a little annoyed that your lies were pointed out in that thread. But please keep it up with your semi-coherent blather. It only helps reveal Anthropogenic Global Warming as the politically correct hoax it so obviously is.
Then it is your duty to write up and publish your efforts. Clearly there is a need for correction there.
What is this “hockey stick” that global warming deniers are all suddenly so interested in? It seems like such a curious point of sudden common interest among them all that one suspects a strawman has been planted by a single source somewhere.
Speaking solely as someone who’s been following the debate, without any particular axe to grind: what, precisely, has Colibri lied about? I point out that the “SDSAB” under that poster’s handle stands for “Straight Dope Science Advisory Board”. Effectively you are accusing him of lying about information in a field for which, presumably, the editors of The Straight Dope may call upon him for references. That’s a pretty serious charge.
She is accusing me of lying that there was a link to the IPCC report in the OP of the original thread because it wasn’t a one-click link. The OP linked to a news story which provided another link labeled “IPCC Report.” Being a cretin, she was unable to locate it, and accused me of lying to hide her own stupidity.
Well, if that’s the case, then her accusation is indeed false. Just a minute ago I went to that thread, found the Yahoo article, followed the link embedded therein to the IPCC summary report, read a bit of it, and copied the report to my computer to finish later.
Well, to be fair to her, she did call it a “little” lie. But she actually said “lies.” So there must be more. Was there something you said was at the bottom of page 1 that was actually at the top of page 2, or something like that?
Are we sure, by the way, that she is a she? Again, and this is a bias on my part which I freely admit, but I’m just not used to seeing such aggressive stupidity from women.
I’d wager that she is neither a female, nor does she stutter. I mean, if she did, imagine how long it would take her in real life to spew partisan anti-science screeds at all the dupes of the global warming hoax. The poor thing!
