http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/160556
"CLIMATE scientists yesterday stunned Britons suffering the coldest winter for 30 years by claiming last month was the hottest January the world has ever seen.The remarkable claim, based on global satellite data, follows Arctic temperatures that brought snow, ice and travel chaos to millions in the UK.At the height of the big freeze, the entire country was blanketed in snow. But Australian weather expert Professor Neville Nicholls, of Monash University in Melbourne, said yesterday: “January, according to satellite data, was the hottest January we’ve ever seen."
Wow!.
Global warming must be real! We really need to takes some serious steps to curtail this planetary heat wave, which threatens to cover so much of the earth in snow and ice!!!
This warming trend that has brought record high global temperatures this past month, and year (indeed this past decade - even though it has been admitted by the lead 'scientist' that there has been no significant warming in the past 15 years...), and record snowfalls to so many areas on the planet, must be STOPPED!!!
The only way I can see to do it effectively is to cap CO2 emissions, or at least introduce a trade system whereby heavily polluting industries can buy 'carbon credits' from lesser polluters so they can keep pumping out their normal amounts whilst passing the costs onto the stupid consumers.
Funny, but I don't see anything about how much higher the temps were. And I don't see anything about which data was used, or how much it would cost if a private person were to try and recreate the data. Because I just did a search on my local area of San Diego. The data I wanted, from just three stations in my area, would cost me nearly $700 to obtain.
When will the madness end? We are burning up, even as we are trying so desperately to keep warm.
Our coastal cities are being flooded as we type - so 'they' say.
Nero fiddled as Rome burned. Are we doing the same?
Or, did he know something we have yet to grasp?
Maybe we simply need to live and adapt with an ever changing planet, instead of trying to be control-freaks that try to control even Mother Nature.
Oh, Hi Mumblefratz, been a while since I've seen you on the forums. I'm using the Impulse forums now. Is that where you're coming in?
I also still hang out at http://www.tyrannyofevil.com/ although traffic has slowed down a bit with less interest in the game these days.
Good to hear from you though.
Been using Impulse a lot to get access to new games, so that's a good entry point for me now. Some of the GC2 forums are shared, but not all of them.
Yea, that explains it, people are pretty left wing for the most part at the GC2 forum so we rarely had debates like this and most of the gamers on Impulse forums are also pretty left wing. That surprises me that the off-topic forum has such wide access. My wife hates Ayn Rand with a passion. Sometimes I get tired of her rants, but she's my wife, so... Personally, I don't get too excited about any of it. I figure life is too short and I'm getting up there.
I love Aynn Rand's writing but some of her disciples are a pain.
Sorry about the momentary topic shift. But back to the main point of this thread.
After participating in a number of these "discussions" I've concluded that there really is no point whatsoever in arguing with people that are willing to deny 30 years of documented warming. There is no argument that cannot be ignored, denied, obfuscated or outright lied about. It's the tactics of the tobacco industry all over again. There is no need to prove any claim, there is no need to disprove the most scientifically sound peer reviewed findings. All that's required is for someone, anyone, regardless of expertise or field of study to stand up and say "but I don't agree". Just by doing so you give people that have a vested interest in the status quo some excuse for believing the way they do. It doesn't need to be a credible excuse just an excuse. They can thereby claim that the science isn't settled simply by talking about it as if it isn't.
Like I said these are exactly the same techniques that were used by the tobacco industry so effectively for 20 to 30 years (and in many cases with the same right wing "think tanks" involved) but who today really believes that smoking isn't bad for you or that secondhand smoke isn't dangerous as well. In another 20 or 30 years we'll all be in the same position with respect to AGW.
So I really have no desire to argue a point with an obvious denier because there is no thing that I or anyone else can say that will ever change their mind. When I appear to reply to some denier's argument it's not to try and convince them the folly of their ways because they are hopeless. My reason to reply is so that people that may be reading the thread that may not have made up their mind have proper evidence to base their opinions on.
I make no claim to being anything remotely approaching a climate expert. I'm an Electrical Engineer. I do my job of designing electrical systems that most other people in the world are not capable of designing. I trust in science and I trust in the idea of specialization. I know I can do my job better than any untrained amateur and I trust that specifically trained and educated climatologists can do the same.
The deniers inevitably claim that they are experts in the field and may even know enough or be able to throw enough confusing arguments at you so that you'll come to agree that the science isn't settled. However if these folks were really all that smart then why don't they simply publish their own results proving climatologists wrong in respected peer reviewed journals. The reason is that they can't and it's not because a handful of climatologists have a strangle hold on the peer review process it's because the science is overwhelmingly in consensus that Global Warming is indeed happening and that man's activity is the predominate cause of it.
So for those of you that may not have made up your mind here's the latest Climate Denial Crock of the Week and for you deniers please feel free to ignore it as I'm sure you will.
How about the University of Illinois? British Antarctic Survey? Roger Pielke? Norwegian Polar Institute? NSIDC?
Are these your "Rush Limbaughs"? Well to some they may be, but to most cognizant people, they represent truth, not fiction. And they all say the ice aint melting away.
You mis-wrote. it is the religious AGW crowd. There is no relligious anti's. An oxymoron (a big word for you I know). And besides, you quote 2 of the biggest skeptics for your proof (which is indeed the truth for a change, January was the warmest on record - for the record of 30 years). Why discount or ignore this? unless you are contending (once again since you know nothing of science or proof) that weather = climate?
Again a principal fallacy by the Goritites. If it supports AGW, then it must be climate, but if it does not, then it must be weather. Any reason no one is buying your snake oil?
You would know, you are the master of it. But then that is all the AGW crowd has, scare tactics. How is it such a "crises" when history shows us it was warmer 1000 years ago? How is it a crises, when there was no fossil fuels that caused that warming 1000 years ago? Why is it that the AGW crowd tries to show long term trends when they can "hide the decline", yet use such short term ones when they can't? (Like your sun activity which is short term and only proves you dont know science).
No, the only voodoo religion here is your AGW. The sad fact is, there may be a causality. But we will never know with the anti-science crowd running the AGW religion. Gavin Schmidy is NOT a scientist. He is a priest in a new religion and knows zero about real science, yet he is the main source of all your dogma. What a shame.
Goritite. So awesome. I need a T Shirt or something.
Sometimes I think you are a highly intelligent AGW proponent channeling the ultimate parody Denialist. If so I salute you, sir, because you make me laugh every day and you really know your audience.
If, OTOH, you honestly believe the ludicrous tripe you spout like it's self-evident then I'll point out once again - you do more to hurt your cause than I or Mumble ever could.
Please don't stop.
o7
Your Friendly Neighborhood AGW Goritite Religious Zealot/Bigot,
Kestrel
I would laugh, but then you are not even funny. I would ask you to point out the ludicrous tripe, but sadly know that like MF, you are all talk, and no knowledge. Which is fine. The world is full of ignorant people, and most have mouths to spout stupid opinions with.
I would love to say that you are an embarrasment to the AGW scientists, but as the unfolding scandal shows, they do quite well on their own. I don't think you could be more of an embarrasment than they are to themselves, so I guess that makes you less than useless.
So do all these "credible organizations" have solid evidence that the sky is green and the world sits on a turtle, too? I know blue when I see it. Hop on a plane yourself and go somewhere--anywhere--where there's glaciers and see it for yourself. They're not running and hiding from you. You go where the glacial morraine (where the glacier used to be) disappears into the horizon, it retreated so much. Or where everybody's houses are losing their foundations because the tundra underneath them is melting. Or where everybody who didn't even bother installing central AC when they built their homes now wishes they did. Or where the locals are enjoying the glaciers "while they can" like children on a snow day, because they remember what it was like 10 years ago and they don't think the glaciers will still be there 10 years from now. I have seen GW denialists literally stammering when they saw this stuff. They may retreat to the position of, "well okay, but maybe this wasn't man-made"--but to say the ice caps aren't melting after seeing this stuff, you'd have to be on LSD.
2 Points. You said ice caps not glaciers. Are you changing your story now?
And 2, the glaciers have been retrreating since the last major ice age when they covered half of north America! So you are now contending that man was pumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere over 10k years ago?
Glaciers grow and retreat for many reasons. Some are growing, some are retreating. The cause has not been attributed to AGW by anyone except the now discredited part of the IPCC AR4 report. So your proof that AGW is causing it is from where?
And the only pot smoker here is the one not questioning anything or learning anything. Whether AGW is real or not, we do know that they glacier part of AR4 has been thoroughly discredited and admitted wrong even by Pachauri. So that leaves you as the only one spouting that nonsense now.
Anti-AGW = Pro-Tobacco
The caption says it all. Every single one of the following right-wing "think tanks" that are heavily involved in the fight against AGW were and in some cases still are equally heavily involved in the fight against Anti-Tobacco legislation. Same people. Same lies.
Smoke'em if you got'em. LSMFT
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americans_for_Prosperity
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cato_Institute
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Competitive_Enterprise_Institute
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=The_Advancement_of_Sound_Science_Coalition
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Citizens_for_a_Sound_Economy
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Marshall_Institute
You guys are broken records. Still going back to the altered surface station data after it's proven to be manipulated, admitted to be flawed, and all along been in direct conflict with other methods of observation. Match the TSI up with tree ring and satellite data and you've got something worth mentioning. You might as well be a flat earther to still be linking manipulated surface station proxies.
The only thing worse is this idiotic rambling about receeding glaciers. You're behaving as if they haven't been receeding for twenty thousand years and we're witnessing a new thing. After you've been spoon fed the information a hundred times already, shut up.
non-sequitur. Show the funding for Anthony Watt, Steve mcIntyre, Roger Pielke, RSoC, IOP, Steven Mosher, paul Dennis, Richard Lindzen, Patrick Condon, etc. Please do.
But should we now show that some of the supporters of AGW are eco terrorists, baby killers (see England), and smokers (see Obama)? What has that to do with the debate of the facts and issues?
Nothing, and nor does your post. Nothing. but as I said, you know nothing of science and proof, so you must resort to the last refuge of scoundrels. Non Sequiturs and attempted guilt by association.
Shall I call you a baby killer every time you post a stupid post like this one? if not, please do not try to be an idiot again, and either post facts (or even opinions) and lay off the slander and lies.
Go ahead and call me a baby killer, is that supposed to scare me or something? Yeah right, I'm shaking in my boots.
Your behavior reflects on you, not me.
Threatened? I do not feel threatened. I was pointing out your stupidity. So again you dodge the issue and resort to non-sequiturs. I was not trying to scare you, just point out the absurdity of your dodging the debate. I guess that you refuse to acknowledge the argument, you are conceding it. That is your perogative, but it has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
As a side note, if you want, I will ask you why you associate with and support baby killers? Does that make you happier? Does that have anything to do with AGW? clearly the answer to the latter is again NOTHING. So you seem to be saying you have nothing to add? Nothing to contribute?
That seems to be a logical following of the fact you know nothing of science or proof. There is no rules that say you cannot continue to post non-sequiturs, but I have to ask you (and do not expect an intelligent answer) why you do so when it does nothing for the debate, and only weakens your avowed position for those looking for facts, information and reasoned analysis.
Thanks to you and your ilk, the issue of AGW is being set back and the truth being subverted. It will take time to undo the damage you continue to inflict on your position so that the rest of us can try to get to the truth of the matter. I know you are satisfied with your juvenile behavior, but it only damages your position.
Oh, here we go again, lol. You said the same thing in the last post. You've still yet to link to any credible study that shows that Antarctica is in fact not melting. I'm not talking about East Antarctica, I am talking about Antarctica as a whole here.
In fact it is likely that whatever you read on the British Antarctic Survey was another one of your skewed articles that took things out of context. They've repeatedly held the stance that humans are causing climate change on several levels:
The British Antarctic Survey on melting ice shelves:
Sea-bed sediment cores indicate that before their recent loss, some ice shelves were present continuously for at least 10,000 years. This suggests that the current ice-shelf retreat, and climate warming, are unprecedented on this timescale and are not solely part of a natural cycle of change.
Ah, but their worldview and selfesteem hangs upon them being right and everybody else being wrong. So you've to forgive them to feel threatened by new information and change.
You think it's a good thing that the truth is being subverted? Strange freudian slip that one.
Also, don't kid yourself. You don't have any significance at all to the outcome of wether AGW will be seen as true or not. You're neither a scientist (which do find out the truth) nor a politician (which do obfuscate the truth ^^ ), just a little drone that parrots some absurd position.
The Final Nail in the Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming.
First there was Climategate. Then there were the Himalayan glaciers. Then there was Snowmageddon.
"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" - Mark Twain
Recently there have been so many nails in the coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming that I could build a house.
To bad none of them are worth the paper they're not printed on.
Here's a few observations about the differences between AGW proponents and AGW skeptics.
AGW proponents generally make no particular claim to any expertise in the field of climatology. Basically they are "regular" folks that have a field of knowledge usually related to their job within which they are competent but outside of that field they make no claim of superior knowledge and like pretty much every other field of endeavor about which they are not expert they are perfectly willing to defer to the opinion of educated, credentialed, acknowledged and published experts in the field.
AGW skeptics on the other hand almost invariably claim to be experts in the field of climatology, so much so that their analysis of the data is such that they can disprove the findings of the educated, credentialed, acknowledged and published experts in the field and do so using the experts very own data. Wow! Impressive!
And if you doubt the AGW skeptic's expertise then all you have to do is to ask them and they will patiently explain it to you with only a few snide comments of "idiot" or "stupid" because it's very clear that since you don't acknowledge their expertise by accepting their every undocumented opinion as proven fact that you therefore *must* be an idiot.
In fairness there probably is the occasional AGW skeptic that has significant expertise and knowledge in the field however it's clear to me at least that it's simply not realistically possible for so many armchair experts to exist, particularly when most of the things they say hardly seem to indicate they even graduated from high school let alone are capable of using an acknowledged expert in the field's own data to disprove their findings.
So when you encounter a skeptic you should give them the benefit of the doubt, after all they may in fact be that one out of a thousand that might have some idea of what they are talking about. And if they are willing to argue reasonably, by arguing against the actual argument you make as opposed to the lies that they put into your mouth, then fine. You've found the one person out of a thousand with which you can have a reasonable discussion.
One the other hand once you've established that there is no thing that you can say to someone that will not be ignored, misconstrued or lied about then to continue addressing such people is tilting at windmills. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.
That's not to say that you should let their bald faced assertions stand unchallenged. Certainly I encourage anyone to post rebuttals to the drivel that they post, just that there is no sense in arguing with them directly or trying to convince someone that has proven that they're willing to deny 30 years of evidence that's right in front of their own nose.
YOu seem to have a reading comprehension. I was not out to "link" anything, only to "refute" an erroneous allegation. Are you saying you defend the original statement? if so, then you have to provide evidence and I will refute you. Please, take ESL so you can debate with reason, and not act like you can't understand the written word.
The statement stands as written. You will note I am not saying I am glad it is being subverted, only that any thanks there is for it is due to the ignorance of the devout followers of those who do subvert it (see East Anglia, et. al.). You do not seem to be able to understand complex statements. But then you don't seem to have much to offer either.
As for who I am, clearly you have no comprehension, and I would gather from your post, no capacity to understand it.
That's the issue for me. Let's posit that a reasonable, intelligent, educated critical thinker exists who has examined the tenets of AGW and found some or all of them lacking. Let's say this person has no ideological ax to grind, no horses in the race, and demostrates their perspective through careful, logical analysis of the research.
Assuming such a person existed it would be very easy to lose sight of them in the masses of screaming politically-motivated denialist mouth-breathers, no?
As it is, anyone who isn't rabidly ideological who does push back against AGW in these threads usually says something like:
"Well, yes, the planet is warming at an alarming rate, but at this point we have only circumstantial evidence that this is attributable to man-made CO2. It's probably got more to do with paving paradise and putting up parking lots"
In some small sense the second part is a victory, because a generation ago intelligent people in the same demographic wouldn't even pay lip-service to the idea that environment stewardship was desirable or necessary. I take some comfort in the idea that environmentalism has been co-opted on a general level in conservative American narratives, even if the specifics are 'debated' tooth and nail again and again.
That paradox is almost as interesting as the one created when the patriotism and sometimes jingoistic nationalism exhibited by mainstream American Republicanism has to be reconciled with the extremely negative long-term energy prospects this debate has engendered for the USA relative to OPEC, BRIC, and more specifically - China.
The manufactured debate at home gave Obama et al. no political capital to salvage the talks when China overtly sabotaged Copenhagen, and will make it that much harder to re-initiate a similar process down the road.
The benefits to China in obstructing meaningful regulation of emissions is clear. That country is being rapidly built huge on coal and oil and the labor of hundreds of millions hungry for their own piece of the Big Mac, and regulation presents a clear danger both explicitly and implicitly. The implicit threat is that already built-up countries like the USA could transition off of an emissions infrastructure at far less relative cost, and potentially far greater gain in green tech R&D.
Cap and Trade is far from ideal, but what it does present is the idea that emission is assigned a monetary cost. How much more rapid would development become in technology which alleviated that cost, and what nations would most benefit from that technology?
If we set aside the science and take a look at long-term American interests it's funny how Rush Limbaugh and his ilk begin to look like Manchurian Candidates
What particularly startled the committee members was the revelation by Jones that, in climate science – apparently as distinct from other scientific disciplines – refusing to share data was “standard practice”. One wonders why (well, actually, one does not wonder at all).
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100028050/climategate-a-lot-of-common-data-phil-jones-exposes-agw-dominoes-to-commons-committee/
I've always had what I consider to be a reasonable stance on AGW.
1) The planet is warming in an unprecedented manner.
2) That human activity is a significant contribution to said unprecedented warming.
That's really what the "scientific consensus" is all about. There are a wide range of possible outcomes and a wide range of possible remedies all of which are definitely not covered by "scientific consensus". AFAIK the official prediction range is for a temperature rise somewhere between 1.4°C and 6.4°C by 2100 assuming basically that we do nothing.
So if someone wants to argue that they believe the temperature rise will be in low end of the prediction range and that won't be all that bad so we shouldn't do anything then who am I to say they're wrong? It's a perfectly reasonable argument to make. Personally I expect something in the middle of the range as opposed to either extreme but as long as someone accepts the two basic premises of AGW then I believe them to be reasonable.
The problem is that people are so afraid of the implied solution that they deny the actual science and that's where they become unreasonable and impossible to talk to on the subject.
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