Jonathan Chait weighed in yesterday on conservative skepticism toward global warming, claiming that as evidence accrues to support the idea that human activity contributes in substantial part to the phenomenon, conservatives actually stiffen their stance against the evidence:
The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a study, with input from 2,000 scientists worldwide, finding that the certainty on man-made global warming had risen to 90%.
So, the magazine asked the question again last month. The results? Only 13% of Republicans agreed that global warming has been proved.
He goes on to say that this recalcitrance is based on hatred:
National Review magazine, with its popular website, is a perfect example. It has a blog dedicated to casting doubt on global warming, or solutions to global warming, or anybody who advocates a solution. Its title is “Planet Gore.” The psychology at work here is pretty clear: Your average conservative may not know anything about climate science, but conservatives do know they hate Al Gore. So, hold up Gore as a hate figure and conservatives will let that dictate their thinking on the issue.
Well, let’s consider this a little bit. First of all, the Republican position on the matter has to do with the question of what consititutes “proved.” The idea that Republicans are going to rely on a UN report claiming that the probability is 90 percent, given their view of the probable agenda of the UN in stating so, is laughable. Chait seems very willing to state his view that Republicans are in the pocket of big energy concerns, employing an analogy that reminds one of someone(s), even as he elides the idea of global warming and the anthropogenic component in his representation of the issue:
Leading global warming skeptic Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Texas), for instance, was the subject of a fascinating story in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago. The bottom line is that his relationship to the energy industry is as puppet relates to hand. [my emphasis]
It’s especially fascinating, of course, that the evidence derives from that right-wing organ, the WSJ, and that this assertion proceeds from the kind of implication–the generalization of a specific example–that would be decried by someone(s) if it were directed against a sympathetic figure or idea.
Meanwhile, Dr. Chait (Emeritus) assures us that:
In reality, nuclear plants may be a small part of the answer, but you couldn’t build enough to make a major dent. But the psychology is perfect. Conservatives know that lefties hate nuclear power. So, yeah, Rush Limbaugh listeners, let’s fight global warming and stick it to those hippies!
Please show your work, Dr. Chait, or I’ll have to make a major dent in your credibility. Because, as everyone knows, lefty hatred of nuclear power is completely rational, as are bohemian sensibilities in general. Dr. Chait’s theory also has difficulty explaining why the polar ice caps of Mars seem to be thawing. Nor is it clear why nuclear power might only make up a small portion of a solution. Are we running out of fissile material?
Meanwhile, a new Rasmussen poll shows that only 24% of Americans consider Al Gore an expert on climate change. The man who claims that the amount of media space given to the opposing view is too great and ought to be throttled down. One of the many who wish to declare the victory of the global warming consensus that doesn’t exist, so as to close the debate. It is worth noting that women are about twice as likely to be Al Gore believers as men are, though it might be cause to lose your job as president of Harvard to speculate on why that might be. Of course, the LA Times’ readership can hardly be thought to be as partisan as that of the National Review.
Michael Barone addresses the issue today in terms that readers of PW and Scott Burgess’s Daily Ablution will recognize in ”Gore’s Faith Is Bad Science.”
Even The New York Times bridles at this. After Gore won the Academy Award for his film on climate change*, the Times printed an article in which respected scientists—not Republicans, not on oil company payrolls—charged that Gore has vastly exaggerated the likelihood of catastrophic effects.
When you read the fine print of even the scientific reports that Gore likes to cite, you find the same thing. Gore foresees a 20-foot rise in sea level—240 inches. The IPCC panel report foresees a maximum of 23 inches. Gore says that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this.” Geologist Don Easterbrook says there have been shifts up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”
That’s rather a large differential, wouldn’t you say? Doesn’t it rather impeach the 90% ballpark figure that the UN is relying on? And hasn’t the UN itself even revised its figures down, considering that the hyperbole was likely to harm the credibiliity of its global income-redistribution scheme? And hasn’t the US done significantly better in cutting its emissions than many of the signatories to Kyoto? None of that matters to Chait.
This moral objectivity and lack of free-floating hatred towards President Bush extends to other columnists, such as Max Frankel of the NYT, who, in speaking of the erosion of press freedoms due to the Scooter Libby trial (which proceeded from an investigation that the Times strenuously urged), states that:
[Libby] was no Daniel Ellsberg, who gave the top-secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times to expose the nation’s devious drift into war in Vietnam. Libby peddled secrets with comparable fervor, but to defend misjudgments and misrepresentations on the path to war in Iraq.
When even the most obtuse partisan hack ought to realize by now that Libby was brought low by leaking the truth about Yellowcake Joe and his super-covert wife. If you want to see vitriol, go check out what Bush-haters have to say about Andrea Mitchell’s assertion that Valerie’s CIA employment was well known on the DC cocktail circuit, a contention that seems well supported by Armitage’s telling Woodward that everyone knew about it because Wilson was peddling the story to media contacts.
Frankel’s version blithely asserts that Plame was covert, even though Waxman was able to say only that he was told by Hayden that he “would not be incorrect” to state so, and though he tried to prevent expert witness Victoria Toensing from framing the issue as a matter of the law according to the IIPA. If that does not speak to practiced journalistic ears, they are tone-deaf.
This idiocy of claiming that one’s own perspective is less biased than someone else’s has to stop. The only thing that can substitute is respect for the truth. And if leftist journalists don’t like the public’s perception of Al Gore, then they only have themselves to blame.
Here is an example of Frankel’s own distortion:
When in early 2002, Cheney and Libby came upon a fresh report about uranium sales, they insistently asked an already dubious C.I.A. to check into it further. So with the assistance of Valerie Wilson, two of her colleagues in the agency’s counterproliferation division invited Joseph Wilson, her husband, to seek out friends in Niger, where he quickly gathered proof that no such deal had been or could be made without being discovered.
He makes it sound as though Joe Wilson was sent on his errand due to an information request from the VP’s office. That’s demonstrably untrue. Further, since Valerie Plame insisted that she did not send, recommend or suggest her husband, what was the assistance of Valerie Plame? In Niger Wilson may have come to the conclusion that “no such deal had been or could be made without being discovered,” but notice how Frankel slips into the next part:
Wilson’s oral report to that effect and other findings persuaded the C.I.A.’s director, George Tenet, to remove any mention of uranium sales from a presidential speech in October 2002, but the Niger scare resurfaced three months later. Propelled by the winds of wishful thinking, it sailed clear into the president’s prewar State of the Union address, becoming a notorious 16 Words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.†It was only one sentence among the pretexts for war, but because others were even less credible, it proved to be radioactive.
Our understanding is that Wilson’s report actually bolstered the idea that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger within the agency, and at any rate Bush’s assertion in the State of the Union was that according to British intelligence that was so, which is something that Wilson’s report does not and cannot consider. This is merely dishonest rhetorical sleight of hand on Frankel’s part. If he has evidence that this was not learned by the British government, by all means let Frankel bring it forth.
UPDATE: K Ashford offers this in the comments:
I urge everyone to “read the fine printâ€Â. Because if you do, you will learn that the “20-foot rise†mentioned by Gore discusses what would happen if global warming continues unabated to the point where the polar ice caps melt. This, according Gore’s sources, would happen (if it happens) â€Âover the next couple centuriesâ€Â.
The IPCC panel’s figure of 23 inches, conversely, predicts the rise in sea level by the end of this century.
Got that? 23 inches by the end of this century; 240 inches within the next couple of centuries.
This is not inconsistent science, if the rate of global warming is increasing.
* In which he played a scientist.
More Science: Sheeple.
They’re going to have to boost that percentage a lot higher before I’d consider . . . you know.
HOLY SHIT: A mosquito in March in Indiana?
This is the money quote from Barone. It all has to do with baby boomer narcisism.
Barone writes:
Gore talks about distortions by deniers of global warming—and this is a perfect example.
I urge everyone to “read the fine print”. Because if you do, you will learn that the “20-foot rise” mentioned by Gore discusses what would happen if global warming continues unabated to the point where the polar ice caps melt. This, according Gore’s sources, would happen (if it happens) ”over the next couple centuries”.
The IPCC panel’s figure of 23 inches, conversely, predicts the rise in sea level by the end of this century.
Got that? 23 inches by the end of this century; 240 inches within the next couple of centuries.
This is not inconsistent science, if the rate of global warming is increasing.
I frankly don’t care what Barone and others think of Al Gore personally. Suffering from Gore Dereangement Syndrome isn’t going to alter the facts that (1) there is a global warming problem and (2) man contributes to it. Any analysis beyond that is superfluous.
Gore said it. I believe it. That settles it.
KAshford, if I’m still alive a couple centuries later, I certainly hope we’ve advanced technologically beyond what we have now. For my commute to work, I’d hope Scottie would beam me there rather than being stuck on the Tri-State tollway or sitting next to some stinky guy on the El.
KAshford, surely you don’t intend to suggest that your two points are the only relevant ones?
Shouldn’t we be interested to know whether man’s contribution is 0.01% or 99.99%? Particularly before we turn western economies upside down?
Because the only possible trend is an increase!
Ashford, the problem is that the climate has warmed and cooled in the past without regard to humanity’s actions, and warming has historically been beneficial to mankind.
Furthermore, there’s no evidence that CO2 production is contributing to a change in climate; the usual data offered as “proof” in fact shows that atmospheric CO2 lags, not leads, increases in temperature. The only way CO2 could cause warming is if you ignore causality, and once you do that, you’re not talking science anymore.
Then there’s the fact that the usual suspects offer the same solutions to every environmental catastrophe, regardless of what that catastrophe entails. It’s always about the rest of us—but not the elite—living poorer lives and sacrificing freedom.
Why not take the Bjorn Lomborg argument: the money and lost opportunities we would be spending to try to prevent a climate change would be better used to improve the lives of the people supposedly “hardest hit” by climate change. As that would make the whole world richer, I think that’s a morally superior argument.
(Oh, and then there’s the sheer gall of people who claim to be telling us the “inconvenient truth” resorting to out-and-out falsehoods, like claiming polar bears are in danger of extinction.)
Hmmmm.
Complete and utter nonsense.
NOT “polar ice caps” at all. It’s “Antarctic ice cap”. Why?
Because there’s no frigging appreciable amount of land in the Arctic Circle so that volume of water locked into the northern ice cap has already raised the ocean levels just about as much as they ever will.
For all the other informational detritus surrounding PlameGate, this is the point where I lose faith with my friends on the Left.
How, in God’s name, could Joe Wilson – or any single human being – have ‘gathered’ proof’ that ‘no such deal’ could be made without being discovered?
Wilson talked with friends for a week, he stayed in the city, did no site inspections, was ill-equipped to determine the validity of any records. About the most that Joe Wilson could do is stare into the eyes of the people telling him ‘No, Joe, Saddam could not have purchased yellow cake from us’ and believe them.
Or maybe Joe could have pulled a Columbo on his way out the door – pause as he’s going out the door and ask “Just one more thing, how did you know that I was asking about the shipment from the 16th when I never gave you the date?’
But that would mean that Wilson had caught them in a lie. It seems Joe has proved a negative, which heretofore had been outside the bounds of logic.
Way to go, Joe.
My take all along is that any intelligence value to Wilson’s visit comes from monitoring the comms chatter among the Nigerians that resulted from his visit – sort of like sending a plane on an border incursion to see what radar sites light up.
“Did Joe Wilson believe you?”
Of course, Wilson looked into my eyes. His brain is as churned butter. He believed me.
”…with input from 2,000 scientists worldwide…”
Uh-huh. What kind of scientists? Care to name names? And what about the 15,000 scientists in climate-related disciplines that say the “human-induced” theory is so much hooey?
A mere bagatelle!
A few days ago, I suggested that we deal with global warming by making it Europe’s problem. It should have pleased both the skeptics and the believers.
But no one seemed very enthusiastic. Eh, what do you people know from ingenious solutions, anyway…
Hmmm.
In addition to the regular reason why lefties believe in Global Warming nonsense is added, IMHO, the control freak factor.
Baby-boomers like nothing more than the concept that they are capable of controlling every aspect of their lives. That anything they want done, can be done. Anything that they want started can be started at will. And anything that they want ended will end upon their decision for it to end.
This sort of idiotic nonsense drives a lot of lefty thinking, which I think also explains quite a bit about how and why lefties are so disdainful of terrorism today. They have this intrinsic feeling that if they demanded terrorism to stop, it’ll stop in mid-beheading and the Islamic terrorists will shuffle their feet, apologize for bothering everyone and go home.
It’s also the reason why so many lefties have bought into Global Warming in such depth. There is a desire to think that recycling a couple of fucking soda cans will save the world. That you can avert imminent disaster in your own home, in your spare time. That uncontrollable volcanoes produce more CO2 in one year than all of humanity in a century doesn’t cut it. Because then it would require lefties to admit that their ability to control matters is utter shit.
And in a way I think it also leads to why lefties hate religion, particularly Christianity, so very much. It requires acknowledging that the individual might not have absolute control as it requires admitting the existence of a higher being.
Lefties. Can we ship them all to Mars or something?
The confusing issue with Gore’s movie is that, IIRC, it asserts that NYC will be flooded to a depth of 20 feet. This assertion leaves the viewer with the impression that this will happen within life span of the viewer. If you tell me that the island of manhattan will be under water by the year 2500, that does not impart the same sense of urgency.
Fact #1 is not established, and is indeed in dispute, as it seems historically unsupportable.
Fact #2, predicated upon fact #1 has a host of problems, one of which is a matter of significance, and another of which leaves us with the question of whether it’s an actionable item. Or, is it largely due to factors we have no control over such as this obvious one and this? And if it’s actionable, do you really think that an answer is to spew as much carbon as you like and then buy indulgences?
If you’re that convinced that we’re the primary cause of the “problem”, perhaps you should do your part by ceasing your relentless conversion of pure life giving oxygen into nasty carbon dioxide.
memeomachine,
And if it should melt, it will contract not expand, decreasing its volume not increasing it.
Stupid science.
/Homer
Really? Let’s look at that UN report for a moment, shall we? Specifically, let’s look at the summary table (Table SPM-1) which identifies the seven climatic trends studied. For five of the seven climatic trends the study concludes that it is more likely than not (50-66% probability) that human activity has contributed to the trend while they conclude that it is likely (>66-90% probability) that human activity has contributed to the other two trends, in their “expert judgement”.
“Has contributed to”. That’s not quite the same as “caused”, is it? And only two of seven trends aproach 90% probability, at the outside, that we’ve even contributed to the problem, for the rest the scientists think it’s “more likely than not” that humans have made some contribution. How’s that for an inconvenient truth? Remember this next time someone tells you that anthropogenic global warming has been “proven”.
More like, there’s a global comfortabling benefit! But I digress…
Dr. Chait (doctor of faith-based science):
KAshford:
You True Believers have to get your acts together—start with ranting from the same playbook. So in “the next couple of centuries”, Chait offhandedly asserts that the US couldn’t build enough nuclear plants to lower our coal emissions to offset the relatively few parts per million of CO2 that America might contribute to the atmosphere? Tell that to France.
Or is he taking into account that, if CO2 is the problem, then we are already DOOOOOOOMed!!! because of China and India, who don’t seem to have heard of this Al Gore fellow? So no, we couldn’t build enough nuke plants fast enough… nor could we cut auto emissions fast enough… nor could we cut factory emissions fast enough.
This climate scientist is calling shenanigans.
Ouch. No one knows how to skewer a lib like another lib.
Nice little Harvard dig there. For me, actually, what happend to
Summers plays a big part in how I think about the global warming debate. As a person in one of the top two or three positions in American academia, Larry Summers lost his job because he (and I mean this literally) committed the sin of scientific heresy. Why then, should appeals to scientific consensus be given credit when dissent and debate on politically charged topics can ruin one’s career?
Is there a link available to the Chait piece?
The debate over Global Warming is still another example of the problem we have in communication, because we have divested meaning from language. If you ask me,”Do you believe that there is a potential problem with an increase in Earth’s temperature that could be catastrophic?”, I would answer in the affirmative. If you further asked, “Do you believe that mankind may be contributing to the problem,” I would similarly answer in the affirmative. The jury is still out.
If you asked the same question in a more declarative manner, Do you believe there is a potentially catastrophic problem that is created by man, I would answer no, for the same reason.
We ask questions framed to give the answers we seek, both left and right. Al Gore is eager to use worst case scenarios with extended timelines to drum up support for anti-GL measures. GL skeptics will include molecular biologists in surveys of scientist who are skeptical. And since they are Scientists, they must be informed.
This is all crap. Science is about discovering relational proofs, not some sort of “4 out of 5 dentists surveyed suggest Global Warming causes tooth decay.” Add $ and the politics that inevitably follow $, and you get this gibberish.
Is there GL? Hell if I know. But the expiration of people speaking about it sure increases the carbon dioxide levels unnecessarily!
Jeff, I was going to email, but as long as you’re here, I’d be interested in your take on that Even Sayet lecture that Ace linked to yesterday. If anyone hasn’t seen it, check it out—an interesting take on modern liberalism.
Which is why it was discovered, and why the British came to the conclusion that it did happen, a conclusion they still hold.
If it had not been discovered, those infamous sixteen words would never have been spoken, now would they?
Was that quote re Wilson from somebody who objects to requiring children to learn logic, by any chance?
Sure it is, Dan! You’ve just got to put on your irrational glasses and it will jump right out at you.
Hate is not the answer!
Interesting that Chait, who wrote an article legitimating Bush hatred as a source of political motivation, thinks Gore hatred delegitimizes skepticism over Gore’s dogmatic repetition of a peculiarly religious version of global warming doctrine?
Oh, sorry, forgot. Only the Right can be subject to charges of hypocrisy…
TW: You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people, all of the time; but the MSM is how31 percent of the people became permanently deluded.
Global warming is not about science, its about power and money.
Which explains the UN’s interest.
The big problem is that for purposes of public debate the very definition of “man-made global warming” has been set by the likes of Al Gore– i.e., by people who are in the habit of conflating the cautious predictions which actually do command a scientific consensus with dramatic speculations which don’t, while implying that they’re all backed by the consensus. This is the scientific equivalent of forging a signature.
I continue to be amazed at how untroubled are Gore’s scientific fans by his admission that he came to believe all this in the 1970s— far in advance of most of the science which supposedly justifies it. The general view seems to be, “He may be a demagogue, but he’s our demagogue.”
<blockquote>When you read the fine print of even the scientific reports that Gore likes to cite, you find the same thing. Gore foresees a 20-foot rise in sea levelâ€â€240 inches. The IPCC panel report foresees a maximum of 23 inches. Gore says that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this.†Geologist Don Easterbrook says there have been shifts up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.â€Â
Since the first part was already debunked (Gore refers to the Antarctic ice sheet sheering off THE LAND and into the sea); the second part is not as fun, but just as easy. In the course of the Earth’s history climate has changed this much millions of times, but never in an industrialized, post-Neolithic period. We don’t know what would happen. We do know Greenland residents have noticed their glaciers were gone (maybe Al Gore used them for a highball while he plotted to end American civilization?)and we know I saw a freakin’ mosquito in my house last night. A mosquito in March in Indiana? Are you kidding?
All I know is I’m glad for the collective ostrich-esque, learned folks at PW. I hate winter! I hate that everybody moved down South when air conditioning became popular. I’m ready for them to move back. I never liked Florida, so hurricanes are alright by me. And, I own some Canadian land in the Arctic Circle. In the next twenty-five years, with Dan’s leadership, we can read Thomas Mann while basking at the beach where the sun never sets…it’ll be a Golden Age.
Of course, we should probably watch the conflagration in Europe as India’s billion people keep marching northward in search of arable land. Hell, that’s somebody else’s problem.
It is amazing since the conventional wisdom of the ‘70s regarding climate change was, ahem, a bit different. Okay, maybe the exact polar (no snickering) opposite. And we’re to believe only the Goracle envisioned a warming trend when everyone else was forecasting the coming ice age?
Nah, global cooling will have us plunging headlong into the next Ice Age by then… unless we give billions of dollars to climate scientists to study the problem (which will be somehow caused by…wait for it… Americans)
K Ashford, Fundamentalist Greenie
Sounds like a radio serial from the 1930s.
You don’t know what would happen, maybe, I suspect an industrialized, post-Neolithic society would actually have an easier time adapting than a bunch of fucking cavemen did, but that is just me. Did you ever wonder why they call it Greenland, by the way?
Surely a sign of the apocalypse. Pray for us all.
Europe isn’t north of India, timmy. There is not much of anything north of India, if they choose to migrate in that direction.
Marketing ploy. Eric the Red wanted to attract settlers, and calling it “the place even colder than Iceland” wasn’t working.
Oddly, his son wasn’t able to drum up much interested in Vinland or Markland.
I voted for “BigJugsland.” But does Eric the Know-it-all Prick listen to me? Noooooooo! All about the sailing, not so much with the marketing, that guy.
And if you’d asked some Greenland resident in the 1500s, he’d be wondering where the damn glaciers were coming from.
Odd that. You’d think that the migration would be the other way as already drier central Asia baked out further, and the rise in ambient temperature, CO2, airborne moisture from all the new sea level inlets, and rising water tables combine to turn India into tropical paradise.
B Moe, I think it would be the Russian Steppe, which is well nigh empty. I’d guess they’d make a left turn at some point.
That sort of kills the human causation argument, doesn’t it?
You do realize that a glacier, by definition, is constantly moving, don’t you, timmah?
Odd that I found this quote in the same article:
[Plame] was covert, even though Waxman was able to say only that he was told by Hayden that he “would not be incorrect†to state so,
Sounds like a case of “it depends on what the definition of ‘was’ is.” She may very well have been a super-duper, cloak-n-dagger kind of Valerie Bond at one time. But it doesn’t really speak to the question of whether she was covered by the statute when the Great Revelation was made to Bob Novak.
timmyb! What up dude?
Watch this very carefully … Greenland … GREENland … GREENland.
What is significant about this name?
Take your time…
BTW: Was Eric the Red living in an industrial age?
Don’t rush, think it through…
heh! He used it to chill the Koolaide…
They do?
The Clintons, sure. Jimmy Carter, definitely. But Al Gore?
90%: Bad for parachuting, good for “scieligion”.
So let me get this straight.
If Repubs are tools of the Energy Industry, then what does that make Gore a tool of? The UN? Made up predominately by countries that would like nothing better than to see the US suffer financially by taking on Kyoto? Or is Gore just a tool period?
I found KAshford’s post above fascinating – because it provides such a clear peek into the mind of the modern unthinking reactionary liberal.
Just … look at what he/she wrote. It explains literally everything about the modern Left. It is decided. Because a failed Presidential candidate told me so. There is no debate.
Scary. That kind of self-induced brainwashing is hard to find outside of a cult.
I find it ironic that it is the right that is insisting on straightforward scientific investigation and the left that is operating solely on blind, uncritical faith.
And it is faith. That is the only word for it. The hyper-emotional reaction to all global warming discussion’s is a religious reaction. Extremist environmentalism is their god. Like all absolute faiths, to question it is to attack it. Hence, the bizarre defensiveness.
The funniest part is that anthropogenic global warming really doesn’t make a lick of sense, either superficially or when examined more closely – certainly not as a new historical event, and certainly not as something that will likely have negative results.
The world has been warmer. It will be colder. And warmer again. Are we affecting it? Sure. I hope so. But rest assured that next ice age will appear, right on schedule.
Liberals amuse me.
Okay, how’s this for an idea for a Hollywood blockbuster:
Liberals are wrong – disastrously wrong – about global warming. But we embark on global efforts to cool the planet … and in a twisted stab of irony, our efforts plunge Earth into a vicious Ice Age, thousands of years ahead of schedule. The glaciers descend; the oceans freeze.
Global cooling destroys almost all life on the planet … except for a rag-tag group of heroic Americans, who spend their days releasing as much carbon into the atmosphere as they can, in the hopes of one day reviving the planet …
… get me funding for this, and I promise it won’t win an Oscar. But it’d make a lot of money. Because people dig irony.
For bonus points, have the carbon spewers where “V for Vendetta” masks. And call it “terra forming” like in the Alien movies.
SGT:
May I have option (b) please? The planet has a fever? GTFOOH!
PB: I’ll invest in your movie only if the props department comes up with some big, honkin’ carbon spewing ray guns. SNAP!
Personally my new favorite parlor game to shut up environmentals or “eMentals†is to ask them why the rising sea levels almost parallel the naturally occurring volcanic land mass growth/creation in the Southern Pacific Rim (for example) & the subtle shift & expansion of the continental shelf as explained by micro plate-tectonics coupled w/ basic water displacement as the most likely explanation to the measurable change in water levels throughout… traditionally the response is blank stares & immediate subject change every time. New ideas or ideas that have no discernible or overt political derivatives for the “eMentals†to pounce upon, but can rationally explain away or show their inherent lack of basic scientific knowledge, is something they fear more than almost anything else. It’s not their lack of knowledge or even the questioning of their axiomatic belief in man’s destruction of the environment, it’s their appearance in front of others, especially their peers they mostly wish to maintain. For much like Albert Gore has shown, he only has to appear to be environmentally friendly, not actually do it that legitimizes him.
Been done already.
Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Mike Flynn
Sorry.
N. O’B:
But were they rag-tag enough?
Chill out people , these guys will take care of our little problem .
I’m a little hazy on the math.
Rounding up a bit gives us a two foot ocean rise by the end of the century. The Gore model has that expanding about 10X to a twenty foot rise by the end of the following century. 2200AD.
What happens then? Two hundred feet by 2300AD
2000 feet by 2400AD?
Then everyone sinks into the bubbling mess and the whole evolutionary cycle starts over?
I’m not a total skeptic about human impact on the planet… my neighbors are their own little ecological disaster zone (anyone know where to buy a couple of cases of stun grenades?)
Don’t the Gore true believers just wonder how the hell Gore can see 200 years into the future?
I mean the guy flogged Katrina to death and then the next year…. zippo. He can’t even get his predictions right one year ahed.
Then there are knuckleheads that think seeing a mosquito in the midwest on the first day of spring “proves” that the earth will flood 20 feet deep and it is all our fault.
Here where I live I’ve heard the same nonsense. We had a warm spell with some new records…. of course some of the record were from the 30’s and some others from the 1890’s still stand, but who cares…. it’s global warming caused by us!
Cycles of drought and warm spells can be seen in tree rings, but those don’t count because this time we are here! It must be us!
Never pay someone today for something that they say will happen two hundred years from now… seem like a reasonable rule of thumb.
I do think I get it though. See, if the planet survives 200 years more in reasonable shape then Gore will be canonized. He will have babies named after him…. a legacy. Of course his work may have had no effect at all, but that will not deter the true believers pondering his every word and nuance.
He wants to be seen as pivotal….. essential….
The people who do nothing but take the global temperature disagree on how to measure our “fever”. But I’ll agree that we are in a warm cycle.
The warm cycle we are having is not abnormal by historical temperatures.
So are we in a normal cycle with more humans than ever or are humans screwing up the cycle?
Of course Gore chooses to disregard about a billion years of warming and cooling cycles and pins this one on you and me. I’m personally contributing to the misery of billions of people who are going to literally sink into chaos and despair 100 years from now. Wait… I’ll be dead then. I’ve got ancestors who were smart enough to haul ass out of Ireland during the potato famine, so I’ll figure my gene pool has some measure of survival skills and give my descendents 100 years from now a little more credit than to see them as sitting and staring dumbly at a rising sea wondering where FEMA is.
Facetiousness isn’t really your strong suit, timmah. Just a friendly tip.
There is no evidence of a non-zero co2 forcing?
Not for the past two centuries.
Co2 is possibly a feedback over geological timescales.
The AGW (sorry, happyfeet) case involves a co2 forcing over a hundred years or so.
Hmmmm.
Is to ask them: “What is the Earth’s temperature today?”
It’s a trick question because there’s no reliable method of determining a single comprehensive temperature for the Earth.
So if they reply with a number, I demand they show me how they came up with it. Which they cannot without showing that they pulled it from some nether region.
If they don’t reply with a number, I ask them how they know the Earth is warming up if they don’t even know the current temperature.
*shrug* beats me why I enjoy it. I never got into pulling wings off flies.
Crashed pilots from an air-scoop ship trying to replenish the atmospheric supply for the only human colony in space and a pack of SF fans and other assorted weirdos.
So, yeah, they were plenty rag-tag.
Sure there is. You just stick a giant thermometer up the Earth’s bunghole. I think Osama lives in it.
That was not the consensus position of climate scientists at the time.
That’s a reasonable point, just as global warming is not the consensus of climate scientists today.
Chait is basically trying to argue that conservative resistance to the theory of anthropogenic global warming is a sign of conservatives’ refusal to accept science that contradicts their ideological preconceptions.
I tend to think it demonstrates precisely the opposite: liberal embrace of the theory of anthropogenic global warming is a sign of liberals’ credulousness towards anything that might possibly put a gloss of respectability on otherwise-ridiculous social and economic policies that they were going to advocate for anyway.
Here’s the OISM petition to which you refer. And here’s some info on OISM.
And, interestingly…
The report accompanying the petition…
That’s not quite what they bought.
And then if you read even further:
So when you bold “catastrophic” it makes it sound like you interpret the petition to say that the increase in carbon dioxide due to human release is not catastrophic, rather it is beneficial.
Makes sense.
Tell us why there was a consensus then that climate change could not be predicted and there’s a consensus now that says we can. Please tell us that it’s a result of computer modeling. Please?
How much is enough Dan ? Just …um … wondering , you know .
tw: hell72 …. figures …
Well, an Imperial Buttload, to be precise.
….. EWE ….. gross .
To get a 20ft rise in sea levels you need to melt the Antarctic ice cap so tell me, how are you going to do that?
Remember that Antarctica gets no sunlight for large parts of the year and very little heat from the sunlight it gets the rest of the year. Remember too that it is a landmass covered in ice and, unlike the sea-ice in the Arctic, it cannot be melted by warm currents.
The only way to melt Antartica is by warm air, but warm air approaching over the oceans which surround the continent will pick up moisture and when it reaches the cold air it will fall as snow, This will thicken the ice.
Four ways to melt the Antarctic Ice cap. (None involving SUVS). Presnted in likelihood/time order
1) Tectonic shift moves Antarctica north. This could well occur over the next billion years or so but could be ameliorated by another land mass moving to the south pole or the northern landmasses finally settling over the north pole.
2) The Sun enters its red giant phase. Very likely over the next few billion years.
3) Some big space rock hits us and knocks us off our axis so that the South pole points at the sun. This has other climate effects, like what happens at the tropics.
4) A massive body such as a neutron star or black hole passes close enough to earth to drag us into an orbit closer to the sun.
So how much public77 money should we devote to studying ways to prevent these catastrophes happening?
My vote goes to getting us off earth and eventually to another solar system. (As long as we take the cute little polar bears.)
Kevin B ,
Check my link above , it’s being worked on , trust me .
“Consesus” and “objective scientific proof” are two mutiually exclusive terms. If there is a consensus about the science it isn’t very scientific.
Mans contribution to the problem pales when placed next to an medium sized volcanic eruption. Sorry. Ain’t buyin it. Besides it runs counter to the second law of thermodynamics.
Couple more questions for the warmers:
1. CO2 is a trace gas. It, water vapor, methane, and a few other things are considered so-called greenhouse gasses. Can man, influencing perhaps a hundredth of a percent of a trace gas, cause any warming whatsoever?
2. Can CO2 in general do such? I.e., is there any evidence that CO2 causes warming? It’s not an insignificant gas, transparent to solar energy (unlike water vapor, which has opacity and thermal trapping abilities?) Just asking…
3. Earth has a surface area of a half trillion square kilomaters. It carries a volume of a trillion cubic kilometers of water. Given this immense scale, the fact ice is less dense than water, and the nature of the Arctic’s already submerged ice mass, where’s all this flooding coming from?
4. Concerning the Antarctic (and for that matter, the Arctic) how isn’t raising the surrounding area not by a fraction of a degree but by some scores of average degrees, to above freezing, year around, going to melt it?
Correction: It’s
notan insignificant gasEnvirofatwa, issued by Mullah Gore and the United Imams.
Now you’re talking!!! You get their own old homes up there ready, and I’ll start bulldozing their new ones down here. I’d call that a highly sustainable development.
This reminds me of you guys arguing real estate and tax law. Lack of expertise is a feature, isn’t it? You guys(?) are so cute when you strut your cluelessnes.
Uh oh. Someone thinks he’s the smart one.
Please tell us how brilliant Mr. Gore is again, david.
PB..thats an interesting movie/thought experiment. So basically, the “science” would have us believe that if, for some reason, the world were discovered to be cooling to the point that civilization might be in danger, we would be able to stop, nigh reverse, our impending doom by cranking up our ACs, leaving our refrigerator doors open and driving Hummvees? The bumper stickers would read, “Save Mother Earth, Live Gore-ikly”
uh, wishbone, david only ever talks about his own brilliance. but please, don’t ask him to prove it or anything.
Salt.
Obvious once you think about it.
Oceanic salt doesn’t count.
Does? the? word? “Oscar”? mean? anything? to? you? wishbone?
geez
uh, wishbone, david only ever talks about his own brilliance. but please, don’t ask him to prove it or anything.
Because he can’t. But maybe he can tell us why the polar icecaps on Mars are melting.
consensus damnit