That Bridenstein’s recent comments were more equivocal on the top isn’t clear evidence that his views on the topic have actually changed, and his adoption of stock, “just asking the question” positions that are identical to those used by anthropomorphic climate change denialists indicates disingeneous intent rather than a critical reassessment of the evidence that he is in any case not qualified to make. Being a scientist or astronaut is not crucial for the role of NASA Administrator but listening to and accepting recommendations from scientists and astronauts is. NASA, along with NOAA, the EPA, the Department of Energy, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Department of the Interior are crucial agencies in preparing for and abating the impact of climate change; having a leader who has openly stated that NASA should not work on climate surveillance is beyond absurdity, and there is no indication that Bridenstein will be any better of an overseer for NASA than Scott Pruitt has been for the EPA or Betsy DeVos has been for Education.
Nice find, Stranger! This bullshit right from the horse’s mouth supports the Scientific American quotes, too. And for the record:
[ul]
[li]Global temperatures did not “stop rising 10 years ago”, of course. Of the 10 hottest years on record, 7 were in the past decade, and 5 of them were the past 5 consecutive years. 2016 was by far the hottest year on record, 2017 only slightly behind.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]Recent global temperature changes absolutely do NOT correlate with solar output.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]The Medieval Warm Period was most likely not warmer than today, but most significantly, the MWP was limited to Europe and some other parts of the northern hemisphere, and was not globally synchronous.[/li][/ul]
Bridenstine is either a practiced congenital liar or a scientific illiterate, maybe both. Not good qualifications for NASA chief.
Fair enough, but note that I provided a simplified three-point denialist staircase myself, such that I think it’s fair to say that “climate change denier” for practical purposes applies to anyone who denies any of those points of scientific consensus, including someone who fully accepts AGW but has invented fanciful reasons that we cannot or should not do anything about it, because mitigation and the reasons for it are inseparably part and parcel of the science – hence why the national science academies of many countries issued joint statements on the matter.
With that as a guide, I would not call someone a climate change denier simply on the basis of their objections to the terms of a specific climate agreement. It clearly doesn’t meet the definition. And indeed, when such objections were raised about US participation in the Paris accords, I did refute them on their merits (or lack thereof), such as misinformation being peddled that the accord would make hardly any difference to global temperature rise.
Arguments about climate change mitigation policy are the kinds of arguments I like to have. It means progress has been made and we have a common understanding of the science, and now we just have to agree on the best policies going forward. The arguments that frustrate me are the ones where scientific illiterates refuse to acknowledge the definitive evidence of man-made causes, or claim (like Bridenstine also did, which I forgot to mention as yet a fifth point in post #29) that temperature records are questionable because terrestrial records and satellite measurements don’t agree. There’s a long story about that, but the essence is that the claim is false.
I think the video that Stranger posted is definitive evidence that Bridenstine is a first-class unmitigated denier, and is either a total scientific illiterate or lies like a rug. According to my “denialist staircase” I think the case was made earlier on anyway, since he tried to undercut the human-causes aspect (point (b) on my list) and flatly stated that there wasn’t enough evidence to justify action (point (c)). Apparently, though, he’s even worse than I thought.
wolfpup and Stranger got ahead of me, but I had this made:
I think Scientific Amercan based that on what Bridenstine said on his demand for an apology in 2014: (With footnotes added pointing to rebuttals (some even made by human induced climate change skeptics!) made years ago):
[QUOTE]
Trump NASA Nominee Rep Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) Demands Obama Apologize on Global Warming
[/QUOTE]
Uh, no. in fact contrarian scientist Pat Michael said before that anyone making those 10 years arguments will kill any respect for experts like him if you make arguments like that one.
[QUOTE]
"You've all seen articles say that global warming stopped in 1998. Well, with all due respect, that's being a little bit unfair to the data...it was a huge El Niño year, and the sun was very active in 1998...make an argument that you can get killed on, and you will kill us [skeptics] all..if you lose credibility on this issue, you lose the issue."
[/QUOTE]
(and that already should be enough IMHO, thread over, but I expect many contrarians will not get mad at Bridenstine and the sources he uses, but will continue to get mad with the ones pointing at the evidence that Brisdentine and others should not be leaders that one should follow)
“Flatly denied,” now means “OK, not flatly denied, but criticized and subtly denigrated?”
OK. I agree that he’s criticized and subtly denigrated anthropogenic global warming.
But I deny (ha!) that this is fairly described as “flatly denied.”
And I find your defense (“What does ‘flatly denied’ even mean today?”) to be several shades of hilarious. Apparently, it means not flatly denied.
This continues to be a pattern with the SDMB crowd. No one is comfortable saying, “Yeah, OK, that was hyperbole. He doesn’t flatly deny. But that wasn’t the important part of my point, which was that he casts doubt with faint and hedged acceptance, and that’s not what a NASA Administrator should do.”
Instead, everyone doubles down, trying desperately to prove that “flatly denied,” means something other than “flatly denied,” and growing frustrated that they can’t.
Or… “if you lose credibility on this issue, you lose the issue.”
Pot, meet kettle. Please explain how the video of Bridenstein from Post #41 (repeated below for the convenience of not having you pretend to misunderstand the reference) is anything other than flat denial. You may use the entire notebook and any words you can find in Merriam-Webster.
Bricker, to be fair to you, I’m going to assume that you just didn’t read ahead to the pertinent posts later in the thread.
My three-point “ladder of denialism” was intended to identify the three pertinent points of scientific fact on which to judge whether someone is denying any of the material aspects of climate change. The evidence we had at that point was that Bridenstine was denying two out of three, which is plenty. He was clearly flatly denying that there is incontrovertible evidence of the dominance of the anthropogenic factors for climate change, and stating bluntly that there is insufficient evidence to justify mitigation policy. That’s a denialist by any reasonable definition. It’s hard to imagine that there could be anything more blatant.
And yet, if you read on to the later posts that you must have missed, Bridenstine goes from scientific illiteracy to outright hilarity. Turns out, he claims current global warming is all caused by increased solar output. He also claims there hasn’t been any warming in ten years. He claims CO2 can’t cause warming. He also previously claimed that terrestrial instruments and satellite readings on temperature don’t agree (so who knows what’s really happening anyway!).
He has, in fact, if you read through what we’ve amassed since then, with many thanks to Stranger and GIGO, made pretty much every claim that any denialist could possibly make, and made all of them in spades. The man is not just a denialist, he’s an ignorant, lying laughingstock.
Bricker, I know how much you like to win arguments and avoid admitting you were wrong, but it’s really and truly time for you to give up on this one and move on.
Being forced to acknowledge something that can be proven by shoving the most basic facts in front of his face is not a repudiation of all the nonsense he has been spouting or of the man’s complete lack of integrity and scientific understanding.
Knowing that many of the people that Trump appointed have been divisive and then reportedly “found” understanding and clarity just about when they were drilled in their congressional hearings, I have to say that history has shown that just like Pruitt guys like him say enough to get the votes and then do as what deniers and fossil fuel pushers like Inhofe expect him to do.
Well, that’s the icing on the cake, isn’t it? Not so much this one guy, but the many, many other scientifically trained people who have reversed their positions in the face of a GIGOlanch of data. When this theory first surfaced, almost nobody believed, and rightly so, because the grunt work had yet to be done.
I bet the vast majority of science geeks that currently accept the AGW outline didn’t start out that way. But over time, and work, now they do.
So, did some evidence emerge that convinced him to change his belief? Or did he just change his tune to avoid controversy in a Senate confirmation hearing? Because, as we all know, nobody lies in Senate hearings.
It was incorrect when he said it also. Comparing against a year with a temperature spike was yet another tactic of deniers. It was like claiming in 2009 that unemployment had not increased - since it hadn’t when compared to 1931.
You should maybe think more about the science and less about the adverbs.
I spend a lot of time in a lot of internet communities. And while I see differences that are unique or nearly so to the SDMB, this is not one of them. It just seems to be how people normally talk. It’s also how people I know talk in real life.
I wish to propose that the difference is your expectations. You have expectations in how people argue that are not met hder. You put what I consider undue weight on small things and lose sight of the bigger picture. This is especially true of the exact words someone uses, which I argue rarely matter, unless they’re trying to use language to misdirect or cause confusion.
That’s not to say you’re the only one who does so. But you do seem to be one of few who sees it as a lack of integrity.
If there is some other place online that sees arguments the way you do, I would like to see it.
First of all, what do we think of this argument? :— Regardless of what steps the U.S. takes toward CO[sub]2[/sub] reduction, Rhode Island should be exempt from any reduction. Because Rhode Island’s total emissions would be insignificant compared with New York’s.
I don’t know what the name of this fallacy is — perhaps the reasoning is so stupid no one has bothered to give the fallacy a name — let’s call it the Rhode Island Fallacy.
Did you quote him correctly? His answer here has nothing to do with the question asked.
But, even though his knowledge of science is seen to be almost non-existent, can we all concede that as head of NASA, he shouldn’t fall for the Rhode Island Fallacy? Yet that is what he has done: CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions per capita are higher in the U.S. than in any of the other countries he named: more than twice as high as China’s in 2015 and more than 8 times India’s according to this source. Even in absolute terms, the U.S. emits more than twice what India does, and almost three times as much as Russia. This makes Bridenstine’s answer particularly ill-informed.
We need to invent and incentivize clean energy. They desperately need to! And they are betting they will be in a position to sell it to the world. I think they’ve made a smart bet, I’m afraid they may have made a very smart bet.
Still defending Bridenstine? Since this guy has an indisputable well-established history as a flagrant climate change denier, as cited in this thread with quotes of some of the most idiotic and unscientific falsehoods ever uttered about the subject, it appears that your new tactic is claiming that he’s had an epiphany of some sort and now has different beliefs.
Can you cite what those new beliefs are, and when this alleged epiphany occurred? Because from your own previous cite, we see him casting doubt on the human connection to climate change, something the science resolved long ago, and stating that there isn’t enough evidence to drive climate policy, something that science also resolved long ago. From your own previous cite, we see him trying to respond to the question “Is there any data that would change your view that fossil fuels and human activities aren’t warming the climate?” – he doesn’t challenge the premise of the question, but instead tries to evade it by digressing into lies about the emission levels of the US vs other countries. Seems like the same old Bridenstine to me. If you have evidence that he no longer believes in this idiocy, let’s see it.
Bricker isn’t so much trying to defende Bridenstine at this point as he is to “win the debate”, if not with facts than by pettifogging and semantic arguments. It is clear that despite Bridenstine’s equivocal comments in his confirmation testimony that he still holds to major tenets of climate change denial and has presented no rationale for why he would have changed his prior position that climate change of any kind is due to natural phenomena. We’ve quite famously seen various Trump appointees thus far either lie by omission or make factually untrue statements under oath in order to be more acceptable candidates for confirmation so it would hardly be surprising that as another Trump pick Bridenstine would be less than forthright about his beliefs.