You know, we should chat about global warming

[Lobohan]

@doorhinge

Hahahaha. You’re a hoot. Did the Democrat Party tell you to say that?

No. I based my opinions on evidence.

In this case, that evidence is the nonsense you spew because you’re too much of a pussy to acknowledge it when you’re shown that you’re wrong.

[GIGObuster]

@Lobohan

No. I based my opinions on evidence.

In this case, that evidence is the nonsense you spew because you’re too much of a pussy to acknowledge it when you’re shown that you’re wrong.

As I pointed many times before powerful interests managed to add climate change denial to the litmus test to be a “good republican”. The fossil fuel industry was aware of the problem but instead of being neutral about it they financed denial efforts and supported deniers of AGW into higher office. The fossil fuel industry knows that now that they made the Republicans the party of climate change deniers they don’t need to support climate change denier groups anymore, they can now “officially” support Republicans that they know will do their bidding.

This is not pandering anymore, the Republicans are doing actual economical harm and it is causing also harm to humans.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/climate-change-more-divisive-abortion-blame-republicans

American Pipe Dream

When it comes to the general election, the climate issue poses an electoral problem for the Republicans: A majority of Americans say they are more likely to support political candidates who promise to tackle climate change, according to a recent poll. Conducted by the New York Times, Stanford University and Resources for the Future, the poll found that two-thirds of Americans say they would support candidates who promised to take action to combat climate change. Almost half of Republicans (48 percent) say the same thing. The poll also found that a solid majority of U.S. voters, 83 percent, believe global warming poses a serious threat to the world.

While there are climate deniers across the globe, this anti-science stance is a particularly American phenomenon. In the U.S., elected GOP climate deniers are commonplace; several of them are seeking the presidency. It’s a different story in other industrualized nations. “In Europe, climate change denial is seen as the preserve of the crackpot,” writes London-based finance and economics writer Imogen Reed. “Few political figures or members of the news media would dream of mentioning it, as doing so often receives the same contempt from the European public as denying the Holocaust.”

Even citizens of emerging countries are more attuned to the realities of global warming. The 2010 Pew Global Attitudes Project found that the majority of consumers in China (91 percent), India (73 percent) and South Korea (71 percent) are willing to pay higher prices to address climate change. Not so in America, where a mere 38 percent of consumers would do the same. “In this sentiment, people in the U.S. are out of step with the world,” the report’s authors write. “In most of the countries surveyed people are more likely than Americans to be willing to pay for efforts to slow global warming.”
“In this sentiment, people in the US are out of step with the world,” according to the Pew survey. “In most of the countries surveyed people are more likely than Americans to be willing to pay for efforts to slow global warming.”{4} - See more at: http://www.justmeans.com/blogs/if-you-had-to-choose-solve-the-climate-crisis-food-crisis-or-financial-crisis

The GOP’s climate denial, buoyed by a massive social, financial and political machine oiled by conservative think-tanks and activist groups, has created a potentially disastrous situation in which climate change — arguably the most pressing global issue of our time — has also become the most polarizing topic in the nation whose leadership is absolutely critical to finding a solution.

[Colibri]

@doorhinge

Hahahaha. You’re a hoot. Did the Democrat Party tell you to say that?

Even your insults are stupid.

[dropzone]

@GIGObuster

Changes like I did about not keeping a lawn, but doing Xeriscaping are good…

Tried that. It was easy since my land was originally grassland, but the village told me I still have to mow it. They didn’t like my idea of a yearly controlled burn.

OTOH, the back yard has been taken over by this cute, native, 3" groundcover that I have seen in seed catalogs, but which volunteered to grow there for free.

[GIGObuster]

@dropzone

Tried that. It was easy since my land was originally grassland, but the village told me I still have to mow it. They didn’t like my idea of a yearly controlled burn.

OTOH, the back yard has been taken over by this cute, native, 3" groundcover that I have seen in seed catalogs, but which volunteered to grow there for free.

2 words:

Landscaping pebbles.

Well, some more words: dig a bit and put the black plastic first to prevent weeds from growing. Then the pebbles go over. Of course this works when your yard is not a huge one and you are in the west. The Xeriscaping part is just a few desert bushes and small trees.

I save lots of water and there is no mowing. I used to live in California with my brother and he had a lawn, I also wondered why, the recent droughts mean that he finally had to give up on it.

[doorhinge]

@Lobohan

You’re the zealot, because facts cannot damage the opinion you currently hold. You’re a clockwork man, unable to do anything but what the GOP watchmakers have programmed into you.

@doorhinge

Hahahaha. You’re a hoot. Did the Democrat Party tell you to say that?

@Lobohan

No. I based my opinions on evidence.

In this case, that evidence is the nonsense you spew because you’re too much of a pussy to acknowledge it when you’re shown that you’re wrong.

Hahahaha. You’re like a salesman who can’t close a deal so he attacks his future customers. You’re not going to make a sale that way. Little wonder many people find the ranting’s of the man-made-CO2-is-evil zealots to be unbelievable. And depressing.

[Kimstu]

@doorhinge

It’s not a insult to call someone a zealot.

It’s not an insult to call a gorilla a cheetah, either, but that doesn’t make it accurate.

Just because a gorilla is an African mammal and a cheetah is also an African mammal doesn’t mean that a gorilla is a cheetah.

Similarly, just because climate scientists have some very strong opinions and zealots also have some very strong opinions doesn’t mean that climate scientists are zealots.

@doorhinge

You’re like a salesman who can’t close a deal so he attacks his future customers. You’re not going to make a sale that way.

This isn’t about “making a sale”. Pretending that explaining scientific facts is somehow equivalent to selling commercial products is a childish and deliberately obscurantist approach. As I pointed out back in post #335,

@Kimstu

Scientific facts are fundamentally different from consumer goods like new soda flavors or designer athletic shoes. Consumers are fully entitled to act like petulant demanding brats who can refuse to pay attention to the new product if the marketers don’t tempt and coddle and flatter them as much as they’d like. Citizens, on the other hand, have a fundamental responsibility to engage rationally with scientific facts even when they’re uncomfortable to think about and unflattering to the ego.

[Colibri]

@Kimstu

This isn’t about “making a sale”. Pretending that explaining scientific facts is somehow equivalent to selling commercial products is a childish and deliberately obscurantist approach. As I pointed out back in post #335,

doorhinge does however reveal something fundamental about how he’s formed his opinions on the issue: not on the basis of evidence, but based on who can offer him a better deal. Conservative politicians and fossil fuel interests tell him he can continue his comfortable way of life without having to take any actions or make any hard choices. He’s bought this bill of goods hook line and sinker. For doorhinge it is about making a sale, but he doesn’t understand how big a sucker he’s been taken for.

[Kimstu]

@Colibri

doorhinge does however reveal something fundamental about how he’s formed his opinions on the issue: not on the basis of evidence, but based on who can offer him a better deal. Conservative politicians and fossil fuel interests tell him he can continue his comfortable way of life without having to take any actions or make any hard choices.

And in addition, they throw in the ego boost of reassuring him that he can feel superior and smug concerning a complex scientific problem without having to do any of the hard labor of actually learning about or understanding the science.

[Lobohan]

@doorhinge

Hahahaha. You’re like a salesman who can’t close a deal so he attacks his future customers. You’re not going to make a sale that way.

Point of fact, I have been a salesman. And when someone has a closed mind, like you, you can’t make a sale. You’re just not smart enough to see that you’re being manipulated. The facts are on my side, and yet you prattle on demonstrating that you don’t understand how to think.

Little wonder many people find the ranting’s of the man-made-CO2-is-evil zealots to be unbelievable. And depressing.

What’s evil are the men and women who have fed you misinformation to the extent that your very sense of self is predicated on it.

[bobot]

One of these days a global warming denier will come along who isn’t a political conservative, and who doesn’t deny it for political (corporate bottom line) reasons. I’d be interested to hear what that person has to say.
Until then, the last person I need to tell me about science is a politician. Or a radio windbag shouting about “Jerbs!”

[Colibri]

@bobot

One of these days a global warming denier will come along who isn’t a political conservative, and who doesn’t deny it for political (corporate bottom line) reasons.

Some years ago, we would occasionally get one or two people who would argue against global warming who were genuine skeptics - that is, they had some understanding of the science but weren’t convinced. Although they were conservatives, their opinions weren’t based purely on politics. Although some of these posters are still around, I haven’t seen them try to argue against the science for some time.

What we now have left are the dregs like doorhinge who can only regurgitate a few phrases that they’ve heard on Fox news as indicating something or other about climate change, but which they understand no more than a parrot does.

[kidchameleon]

I was one of those, but FX changed my mind.

[GIGObuster]

@bobot

One of these days a global warming denier will come along who isn’t a political conservative, and who doesn’t deny it for political (corporate bottom line) reasons. I’d be interested to hear what that person has to say.
Until then, the last person I need to tell me about science is a politician. Or a radio windbag shouting about “Jerbs!”

Well, many deniers like to call themselves skeptics, unfortunately for them real skeptics do investigate the issue and if the weight of the evidence tells them that humans are to blame for the current warming they don’t deny the evidence. They do become convinced.

This did happen to one of the last best hopes of the deniers, the former skeptics of Berkeley Earth with Professor Muller at the helm.

**But these were all people [top skeptical scientists (who now are former skeptics)] who shared the same doubts that I had. **So we wound up doing an enormous effort completely rebuilding a program to use historic temperature records and did it in what we believed to be the best statistical approach to doing this we managed to put together a record.

We studied the systematics…I had no hope that we would able to wrestle all the systematics.

In the end we could.

And that came as a wonderful surprise to me, each one required a great deal of effort; poor station quality; the urban heat island effect, the data adjustment that’s been done; and most important of all: the data selection bias, the fact that every other team was using less than 20 percent of the data and in some cases only about seven percent their data, so how they pick their data? And does that lead to a bias? Even an inadvertent bias?

So we managed to address all these and in the end we got a nice curve that showed the temperature and it was rising! Now, we never expected to address the question of what caused it.

I tried fitting it to an exponential…

That actually wasn’t very good fit… Try a parabola…

No, it wasn’t a good fitting either, okay try the US population… no, that wasn’t so good.

Hey dummy! :smack: Try carbon dioxide!..

Smack on!

…

Not only was global warming real and roughly consistent with what the previous groups had said but the match to carbon dioxide and the fact that solar variability was not responsible… **we just had ruled out the primary alternative theory.
**
Another alternative theory is that the absence of volcanic eruptions in the recent period is why it’s warmer but we could see these individual volcanic eruptions because we went back further in time and we can see that their effect was temporary so we can rule out the other one, in fact we can rule out every scientific theory other than the greenhouse gas theory.

Now there are some people who say “Oh, I believe it’s something else” “That there were changes in the earth’s orbit”…** I wrote a book on the changes of the earth’s orbit, a technical book meant for graduate-level study on the so called milankovitch cycles, it doesn’t match those!**

Some people say “Well there’s something else going on!” and I say “what is the prediction you make?” “Oh, I don’t know, it’s random”… That’s not what we call a scientific theory.

If you say “well it’s something else and I don’t know what is” my answer is:

Something else that just happens, by accident, to perfectly match the carbon dioxide increase…

Are you serious?

[GIGObuster]

Out of edit time.

I needed to point at a post in that Youtube link that is the perfect TLDNR for what Professor Muller did say:

[QUOTE=internetReviewerGuy]

Summary: “We did everything in our corporate-funded power to discredit climate change science, and we fucking failed.”

[/QUOTE]

[Gyrate]

Did they take into account the fact that Al Gore is a big poopyhead? Because I understand that’s significant.

[doorhinge]

@Kimstu

…Similarly, just because climate scientists have some very strong opinions and zealots also have some very strong opinions doesn’t mean that climate scientists are zealots.

This isn’t about “making a sale”. Pretending that explaining scientific facts is somehow equivalent to selling commercial products is a childish and deliberately obscurantist approach. As I pointed out back in post #335,

(post shortened)

Did you forget what the dictionary definition of zealot is? Or do you expect others to forget what the dictionary definition of zealot is because it hurts your feelings or you find it depressing?

Having strong opinions and trying to make others have those same opinions is the dictionary definition of a zealot. Just because you don’t wish to be identified as a zealot doesn’t mean that you aren’t one.

You’re trying to sell your idea of man-made-CO2-is-evil to a larger audience than the one you have. You need to convince more people that you’re right. You’re the one who is trying to change the status quo. Your problem is that you suck at selling.

The effort to sell the public on the idea of clean air and clean water was successful because the clean air/water zealots were able to bring more and more members of the public to their side. The claims were believable. The facts were believable. People voted for elected representatives to pass laws to provide clean air and water.

Besides insulting people on the internet, what can the man-made-CO2-is-evil zealots do to make their bill of goods seem more appealing?

[doorhinge]

@Gyrate

Did they take into account the fact that Al Gore is a big poopyhead? Because I understand that’s significant.

I believe everyone on both sides of this issue are already aware that Al Gore is a big poopyhead. He’s the best spokesmodel that the man-made-CO2-is-evil zealots have.

[doorhinge]

@Lobohan

Point of fact, I have been a salesman. And when someone has a closed mind, like you, you can’t make a sale. You’re just not smart enough to see that you’re being manipulated. The facts are on my side, and yet you prattle on demonstrating that you don’t understand how to think.

(post shortened)

Hahahaha. Keywords - you can’t make a sale. I’m shocked. How many times did you try to manipulate your clients by telling them they were not smart enough to see they were being manipulated by someone other than you?

[Kimstu]

@doorhinge

Did you forget what the dictionary definition of zealot is?

I think you were hoping that I’d forget that you carefully cherrypicked the most general and vague definition of “zealot” you could find and ignored all its synonymous meanings, such as “religious fanatic” or “a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their religious, political, or other ideals”.

Nice try, but I didn’t. No, climate scientists and zealots may both have some strong opinions, but climate scientists on the whole are not zealots.

@doorhinge

You need to convince more people that you’re right.

The trouble is that mere scientific facts and evidence can’t convince people who aren’t approaching the subject rationally. And scientific facts and evidence are all we’ve got.

@doorhinge

Your problem is that you suck at selling.

No, our problem is that we’re dealing with people like you who don’t understand the difference between a commercial transaction and a scientific explanation.

You are so used to being flattered and soothed and lied to by advertisers catering to your lazy whims, with no effort required on your part, that you’ve forgotten that there are some things you have a responsibility to actually think about and strive to understand rationally.