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The Great Global Warming/Cooling Thread Part 2

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an opinion piece in the australian by the former chairman of the abc about another news article which has been previously shown to be false and misleading. this is the best you can do now?

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Dolos if you don't know the difference between religion and science then there is no hope for you, you can believe anything you want to. To call scientific evidence religious belief is an astonishing and very basic error in your misunderstanding of what science is about, and quite honestly I feel quite sorry for anyone who makes this basic error because it is the difference between non-thinking belief and genuine attempts at understanding and interpreting the world around them. I am sure there are better ways of explaining this, but the very basic error you have made seems almost impossible to address, especially given the aggression you show towards science, but explains perfectly why you are unable to accept any of the scientific explanations of climate change.

 

My name is not Maurice .L. Newman and I am not the former chairman of the warmist and alarmist ABC.

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an opinion piece in the australian by the former chairman of the abc about another news article which has been previously shown to be false and misleading. this is the best you can do now?

 

Nothing has been shown to be false and misleading other than that from the IPCC...over and over again but you know that. Poor qualia...I really piss you off don't I... :lol:

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My name is not Maurice .L. Newman and I am not the former chairman of the warmist and alarmist ABC.

 

Nothing has been shown to be false and misleading other than that from the IPCC...over and over again but you know that. Poor qualia...I really piss you off don't I... :lol:

 

Your opinion is taken from newspapers that promote ideology in politics and social policy because you believe that science is false and misleading, and you enjoy winding people up. An interesting intellectual position.

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not really, i don't respect you enough for you to piss me off.

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It is useful to be reminded from time to time that the “know nothings” in the US are still a minority and that even the most lavishly financed industry public relations programs can fail.

This month the Centre for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University and the Yale Project in Climate Change released a report on US attitudes to climate change. Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes found that American’s belief in the reality of global warming had increased by 13% over the past two and half years, from 57% in January 2010 to 70% in September 2012. For the first time since 2008 more than half of Americans (54%) believe global warming is caused mostly by human activities, an increase of 8% since March 2012. About 40% of US citizens believe people around the world are being harmed by global warming and a slightly smaller percentage thinks it is currently harming Americans themselves. Worry levels about climate change are the highest since November 2008.

The results are interesting to say the last. For a significant period of time the usual suspects now trying to buy the election (courtesy of the US Supreme Court) for Mitt Romney have been funding campaigns which spread confusion and doubt about climate change. Their tentacles also reach well into Australia among the usual suspects here. Plus, 2008 is also significant because after that year a lot of people in the US had other things — like survival — on their mind.

Why the difference? Perhaps it’s due to declining insecurity and some economic improvement; perhaps the grassroots environmental campaigns are having an effect; and, perhaps social media is now being deployed by scientists as effectively as it is by climate change denialists.

Extreme weather events in the US over the past few years might also have played a part — while Texans may not have changed their attitudes (well, outside Austin anyway) the news about Texas weather may have influenced others.

This week’s storm will also have an effect if a September report from GMU and Yale is to be believed. It strongly suggests extreme weather may have been a factor with 74% of Americans believing global warming is affecting US weather. Significantly, another report from the same teams in March 2012 found that more than half of Americans have tried to reduce their energy consumption, although fewer people talked about global warming with people they know or searched out information on the topic. The same survey also found that more Americans increased their attention to global warming stories in the news.

It may also be that some of the climate change communications are being framed in different ways. A paper published online by researchers from GMU, American University Washington and Yale discusses different ways of framing climate change in terms of public health and/or national security. In particular it looks at “the potential for various frames to elicit emotional reactions consistent with climate change mitigation and adaptation goals”.

The research found that framing it in terms of national security was a no-no and provoke anger among audience segments already doubtful or dismissive about the issue. This probably says more about the general mindset of people who find national security important than it does specifically about climate change. It also implies that national security is largely a code for a whole set of attitudes which may have little to do with the reality of what makes the US secure or not.

The Yale-GMU team also looked at the impact of attitudes to global warming on voting intention in the presidential election and published a report on this in September this year. The findings were probably unsurprising and suggested that other factors were more important in influencing which candidate was likely to be supported although a majority of undecided (at that stage) favoured Obama on the issue.

So the usual suspects might get Romney elected and get the climate change policies (or rather lack of policies) they want — but Americans do seem to have been unconvinced by the denialist dogmas.

 

http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/11/02/come-in-spinner-americans-unconvinced-by-climate-dogma/

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65-clipboard-1.jpg

Even with the latest climate models, temperature projections are fraught with uncertainty (light areas around the temperature curves for different scenarios). Credit: Josef Kuster, ETH Zurich / Knutti and Sedlacek 2012 Nature Climate Change / Galyna Andrushko, Fotolia

(Phys.org)—How accurate is the latest generation of climate models? Climate physicist Reto Knutti from ETH Zurich has compared them with old models and draws a differentiated conclusion: while climate modelling has made substantial progress in recent years, we also need to be aware of its limitations.

We know that scientists simulate the climate on the computer. A large proportion of their work, however, is devoted to improving and refining the simulations: they include recent research results into their computer models and test them with increasingly extensive sets of measurement data. Consequently, the climate models used today are not the same as those that were used five years ago when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its last report. But is the evidence from the new, more complex and more detailed models still the same? Or have five years of climate research turned the old projections upside down?

It is questions like these that hundreds of climate researchers have been pursuing in recent years, joining forces to calculate the climate of the future with all thirty-five existing models. Together with his team, Reto Knutti, a professor of climate physics, analysed the data and compared it with that of the old models. In doing so, the ETH-Zurich researchers reached the conclusion: hardly anything has changed in the projections. From today's perspective, predictions five years ago were already remarkably good. "That's great news from scientist's point of view," says Knutti. Apparently, however, it is not all good: the uncertainties in the old projections still exist. "We're still convinced that the climate is changing because of the high levels of greenhouse gas emissions. However, the information on how much warmer or drier it's getting is still uncertain in many places," says Knutti. One is thus inclined to complain that the last five years of climate research have led nowhere – at least as far as the citizens or decision makers who rely on accurate projections are concerned.

Simplifying models in various ways

Knutti sees this in a somewhat more differentiated light. For him, there are plausible explanations as to why the uncertainties cannot be eliminated more effectively: they arise because each of the thirty-five models sets different priorities to break down the extremely complex climate system in such a way that it can even be simulated on a large-scale computer in the first place. The different models also yield slightly different results and thus a certain range of projections.

One would assume that the longer scientists concentrate on the climate, the more accurate the results of the model calculations should become and hence the projections of the individual models should converge. According to Knutti, however, this assumption might well be true in the long run, but not in the short term. After all, the more complex a model becomes, the more processes are factored into it and, unfortunately, the greater the uncertainty becomes in the short term. "The models might not have become more accurate in the last five years, but they are more reliable, especially since today's models consider more physical processes more realistically," says the climate physicist.

Weather more variable than one might think

As Knutti's results reveal, climate models might well enable tendencies to be calculated reliably, but they eventually reach their limits. One such limitation is also apparent in the present trend of making increasingly small-scale and short-term projections on the climate, says Knutti and refers to another study conducted by him and other climate researchers that was recently published. "Whether there will be an increase in heat waves or especially cold winters in the USA, in Europe or in Russia in the next twenty years certainly doesn't depend solely on climate change caused by humans," Knutti points out. The frequency of locally stable weather situations particularly has an impact on this. And these have greatly been influenced by such phenomena as North Atlantic Oscillation, which (unlike the long-term, manmade trend) cannot be predicted several years in advance.

The problem with the new, short-term projections: the shorter the timescale, the smaller the influence of the manmade trend and the greater that of variable weather phenomena. Especially in the mid-latitudes we live in, the weather phenomena vary greatly and the climate change caused by humans is obscured by them. Therefore, as the researchers write in their study, it is difficult to make short and medium-term climate predictions, however good the models are.

Robust heat stress projections

The climate events that are difficult to predict also include extreme weather events such as flooding, periods of drought, or heat waves. Interestingly, however, the combined measures of temperature and atmospheric humidity can be predicted fairly well. All the climate models yield similar results for these measures, as Knutti and Erich Fischer, a senior researcher in his team, were able to demonstrate recently in a third study. "This is significant as the risk of heat stroke is greatest when it's hot and humid at the same time, for instance," says Fischer. The fact that the combined measures of temperature and atmospheric humidity can be predicted so well is linked to the fact that temperature and humidity also depend on each other through physical processes. One factor why temperatures were so high during the so-called heat wave of 2003, for example, is that it was so dry and hardly any soil moisture could evaporate anymore.

Even if climate projections sometimes reach their limits because of divergent predictions and the influence of unpredictable weather phenomena, accurate projections are thus perfectly feasible in certain areas, too – projections that will also influence the next IPCC report, which will be published in September 2013.

http://phys.org/news/2012-11-limitations-climate.html

 

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I'll admit it. I have global warming anxiety. No, it's worse than that - I have global warming anxiety anxiety. I don't know how much I should be worried. I mean, we're bombarded by conflicting opinions.

You've got the scientists going "Burning fossil fuels heats the atmosphere. Record temperatures. Extreme weather!"

And then you've got the skeptics going, "Don't be silly! The Earth has always had warming cycles. Human activity has nothing to do with it."

And I feel sorry for the poor guy caught in the middle!

So I decided it's time to go on a quest to visit the top experts to answer three essential questions:

Is there climate change?

Are WE causing it?

And if so, is there anything we can do about it?

 

3 page article & video here:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3445_162-57548138/the-scientific-truth-about-climate-change/

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is it just me or is it almost ALWAYS fuckin windy these days? i live on east coast nsw.. within 200km of sydney

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Film maker Chris Tangey shot this footage of a naturally occurring event. But no matter how clearly he demonstrated it had nothing to do with man-made warming, Al Gore’s team would just not accept natural as an answer. This exchange of emails is a damning insight into the Gore mindset.

Gore team’s first attempt to buy the footage for propaganda purposes:

 

On 25/09/2012, at 2:52 AM, Jill Martin wrote:

 

Hi Chris,

 

I work for former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. Mr. Gore recently saw the amazing footage of the fire tornado taken on September 11th, and is interested in showing it during some of the presentations he gives on environmental topics.

 

Could you give me an idea of what you might charge to license that footage to us? Here are some details about how it would be used:

 

Usage: in live, PowerPoint-type presentations to live audiences

 

Where: worldwide

 

Term: for up to five years

 

Context: Mr. Gore often shows
and video of wildfires in his presentations. This video would augment that section.

 

Thank you very much,

 

Jill

 

Jill Martin | Office of the Honorable Al Gore

 

Jill@xxxx

 

 

From: chris tangey

 

Date: 30 September 2012 5:29:32 PM ACST

 

To: Jill Martin

 

Subject: Re: Licensing the “fire tornado” film clilp

 

Jill,

 

Sorry for the late reply but I have been in Melbourne on a shoot down there.

 

I’ve now had time to look at your offer to license my footage, no doubt for a substantial amount of money, and have carefully considered it.

 

Having now had time in the last couple of days to research Mr. Gore and his usage of third party material previously I have to say I am a little concerned about the context in which my footage might be used.

 

To be honest, in terms of a global warming/climate change presentation it is difficult for me to imagine a fire event less relevant. This was, by all accounts and as reported, a highly localized event. The fire occurred in a patch of highly flammable spinifex grass, renowned for its intense heat, which had remained unburnt for a period of over 50 years, possibly causing an unprecedented build up of oils and resins in that small area. The local cattle ranchers had been protecting the habitat of the nearby mesa, Mt.Conner right up until this month’s fire.

 

On top of that it has been reported that the 10 day-old fire it emerged from was deliberately lit, not a natural event. In fact with not a cloud in the sky that day or even the slightest breeze, the only “weather” around had to come from the very-much contained area of the fire itself.

 

I am aware that you may have missed the reporting on the very localized nature of this firestorm. However, in any case, I am confused as to why you would offer to buy a license to use it at all unless you had conducted even elementary research which might indicate that this Mt. Conner event had direct linkage to global warming/climate change. I am happy to hear your response, but I can’t personally imagine one that I would find convincing.

 

Having taken all of the above into account I have had to make a decision not based on monetary reward but on what is the right thing to do. Hopefully I have demonstrated that I have not dismissed this offer lightly. For me, if I were to allow this footage to be used in an out of context scenario, even by insinuation, I just wouldn’t feel right.

 

In fact if I were to use it myself in any climate change framework I would feel like I were being deliberately deceptive, so please thank the Vice President for your offer, but I must respectfully decline.

 

Kind regards

 

Chris Tangey

 

Gore team’s second attempt to buy the footage for propaganda purposes:

 

On 07/11/2012, at 1:04 PM, Andrea Smith wrote:

 

Hi Chris!

 

Wasn’t sure if this is the same Chris who shot the fire tornado? But I was curious if Alice Springs Television still controlled the rights to the footage?

 

I’m a producer working on some documentary pieces for a nonprofit organization doing an internet broadcast, and was wondering how much it would

 

be to license some of the footage?

 

Thank you so much for your help and time!

 

Best wishes,

 

Andrea L. Smith

 

Producer/The Climate Reality Project

 

andrea.xxxxxxx

 

 

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 4:28 AM, chris tangey wrote:

 

Andrea,

 

I mean no disrespect, but I have to say that at best your organisation has some serious internal communication problems.

 

At worst, Mr. Gore is now requesting these images “through the back door”, and I note in your email that you completely omit mentioning Mr. Gore or the specific intentions you have for its usage.

 

As I’m sure you are aware I have previously refused a request for this footage from your Founder and Chairman on the grounds that there is no evidence to support your proposed usage.

 

That is, that this intense, but incredibly localised, event has any relationship whatsoever to climate change/global warming. In fact from the expert advice I have received, I believe the evidence is to the contrary.

 

I am happy to be proved wrong, but that appears highly unlikely.

 

In any case, even if “the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing” in Mr. Gore’s organisation, I again have to ask the question; Why would you request this footage if you do not have firm evidence to prove that this particular event was caused by, or was in any way attributable to, global or even regional climate change?

 

If a project is bold enough to call itself “Climate Reality, “ then I would reasonably expect a great deal of fact and reality attached to it… Are all your requests for visual material to support climate change presentations made without any prior requirement for supporting evidence?

 

I must say that this continuing episode has adversely affected my view of those promoting anthropological climate change , and I now view any programs about it with a more sceptical eye.

 

So, yet again, I cannot in all conscience accept your offer, for any amount.

 

Sincerely

 

Chris Tangey

 

 

On 08/11/2012, at 4:05 AM, Andrea Smith wrote:

 

Chris,

 

First of all, I in no way meant to disrespect or offend you. I am an independent, freelance producer, and I don’t think anyone is trying to acquire the footage through “the back door.” I can assure you that the Climate Reality people have been very very tough on us as far as what stories we are able to cover. For instance, I have produced a piece on climate change and coffee in Colombia with scientists from CIAT, so it is very grounded in science, and both fascinating and terrifying as to what is happening all over this planet.

 

The program this year is to discuss “Dirty Weather” and “Extremes” of weather. It’s an open point for discussion for the scientists and panelists that will be participating. It’s to invite conversation and discussion. As a freelance producer I had no idea when I started this project that the US is the only country in the world that has an active Climate Denier movement - every other country in the world has accepted this as a fact and is moving forward to do something about it. From what I understand, Australia has implemented a very innovative carbon tax and has a number of other programs in place in many of their cities. I’m somewhat embarrassed I live in a country where we so greedily use up so much of the earth’s resources and seem immune to it.

 

Anyway, it’s an incredible piece of footage and fantastic you captured it. I have been lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit your country twice for extended periods of time, including Alice Springs. I can easily say Australia is one of my favorite places in the world. Again, no offense meant, and none taken. I hope you do have the opportunity to watch part of the programming and that you find merit in it.

 

Very best wishes,

 

Andrea L. Smith

 

 

From: chris tangey

 

Date: 8 November 2012 11:25:39 AM ACST

 

To: Andrea Smith

 

Subject: Re: Firenado footage

 

Andrea,

 

Thanks for your response, I’m sure from your comments below that you are personally committed to the cause of anthropological climate change, but as copyright owner my primary concern is that any usage of this material should be scientifically valid and in context. I find that your response hasn’t addressed my specific questions on whether it would be scientifically appropriate to use it in an extreme weather context .

 

As has been widely reported, it was such a highly localised event it was most likely caused by the fire itself, let alone any external “weather” and certainly not anything on a climatic scale.

 

The cattle station owners (who have been on that property for 55 years) have indicated that is their firm belief, and that in fact its heat and severity was caused by the fact that they have deliberately protected that patch of resin-filled spinifex grass for over half a century, allowing that resin to build up over time. Spinifex (Triodia) is highly flammable and creates intense heat in any case.

 

Joel Lisonbee, Manager of the Northern Territory Climate Services Centre, was quoted as saying he also saw no connection between this event and climate change/global warming.

 

“This event was better described as a dust devil within a fire. Most of us have seen dust devils and know they are not uncommon,” Mr Lisonbee said

 

“You need hot, dry conditions but you get those in desert-like conditions everywhere, regardless of global warming.”

 

I know that we could just “agree to disagree” but I feel I must raise some real concerns to your response. Firstly your title indicates your are employed at the highest level of the Climate Reality Project, a Producer, freelancer or not, so I am confused as to why you refer to “the Climate Reality people” in the third person. Assuming for a moment that these people are separate to yourself you go on to say that they “have been very very tough on us as far as what stories we are able to cover”. So clearly this indicates they must have approved not just your enquiry about the footage, but the next stage of actually offering to buy it.

 

Since Mr. Gore’s office first contacted me to buy the rights, which indicated Mr. Gore himself had made the request to purchase, I have had cause to conduct considerable research on climate change. In the course of this research I have discovered a lot of non-scientific, apparently agenda-driven name-calling going on, including your below “Climate Denier” tag.

 

Apparently “climate deniers” are people with a different viewpoint to yours, so are fair game to be labelled , put in a box and publicly pilloried. I would have though the correct scientific response would be to simply convince them of your argument. I think few people have doubt that the climate is changing, the questions are to what extent and whether it is human-induced. I am happy to be convinced, but by simply labelling questioners who need more information “climate deniers” might be colorful politics, but would seem a doomed approach to science education.

 

Now, the doubts that I mention don’t appear from thin air, but have actually been introduced by your own “team” so to speak , so it would appear a bit rich to be blaming others, let alone calling them childish names for them now having doubts:

 

Much more relevant to me is that my research has shown that your own Founder and Chairman has had his own share of controversy:

 

I have even found a quote from Mr. Gore saying that “the science is settled”. As far as I know true operational science is never settled, it is always open to additional data that may later arrive at a new conclusion.

 

You say the context of using my footage on this global media event would merely be as “an open point for discussion for the scientists and panelists that will be participating” and to “invite conversation and discussion.” If there is going to be an “open discussion”, then I presume there will be Scientists with opposing opinions, if not, how will it be “open”?

 

I’m sorry, but this seems to me both disingenuous and illogical and echoes Mr. Gore’s original request to simply use it in “presentations” on “environmental topics”. In barely the space of a month 2 major Al Gore organisations, Climate Reality Project and Carthage Group have asked to buy this footage. Given the very reason for the existence of these organisations is to promote anthropological climate change, I am to believe that the purpose is actually NOT to sell viewers on climate change? Then sorry… why do you wish to buy it?

 

For your information I am no stranger to either science or extreme, wind-related weather events. For instance, I was Associate Producer, Head of Research and Co-Writer on the 1 hour long, 2001 National Geographic Channel (U.S.) documentary “Red Storm” which dealt with dust storms and the relevant science globally.

 

It seems to me I am the type of person you are making this program for, those of us yet to be convinced, but after the experience of the last month or so I’m afraid I am left less convinced than ever.

 

Cheers

 

Chris

From good old Bolti...http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/

Edited by Dolos

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^LOL^ that's pretty funny Dolos

 

Yes I thought so too at first...Then my emotion became disgust! It is amazing at what extremes they will go to keep perpetuating this fraud. Those types of examples are to be found every where.

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Little change in global drought over the past 60 years

 

 

Drought is expected to increase in frequency and severity in the future as a result of climate change, mainly as a consequence of decreases in regional precipitation but also because of increasing evaporation driven by global warming1, 2, 3. Previous assessments of historic changes in drought over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries indicate that this may already be happening globally. In particular, calculations of the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) show a decrease in moisture globally since the 1970s with a commensurate increase in the area in drought that is attributed, in part, to global warming4, 5. The simplicity of the PDSI, which is calculated from a simple water-balance model forced by monthly precipitation and temperature data, makes it an attractive tool in large-scale drought assessments, but may give biased results in the context of climate change6. Here we show that the previously reported increase in global drought is overestimated because the PDSI uses a simplified model of potential evaporation7 that responds only to changes in temperature and thus responds incorrectly to global warming in recent decades. More realistic calculations, based on the underlying physical principles8 that take into account changes in available energy, humidity and wind speed, suggest that there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years. The results have implications for how we interpret the impact of global warming on the hydrological cycle and its extremes, and may help to explain why palaeoclimate drought reconstructions based on tree-ring data diverge from the PDSI-based drought record in recent years

Much less to be alarmed over.

More here http://www.nature.co...ature11575.html

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There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.

He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”

Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. “You can believe this is about the climate,” he says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.” Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: “The issue isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires…. The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”

Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day conference, I will learn that Obama’s campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was really about “green communitarianism,” akin to the “Maoist” scheme to put “a pig iron furnace in everybody’s backyard” (the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels). That climate change is “a stalking horse for National Socialism” (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano, editor of the denialists’ go-to website, ClimateDepot.com).

Most of all, however, I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”

Yes, sure, there is a pretense that the delegates’ rejection of climate science is rooted in serious disagreement about the data. And the organizers go to some lengths to mimic credible scientific conferences, calling the gathering “Restoring the Scientific Method” and even adopting the organizational acronym ICCC, a mere one letter off from the world’s leading authority on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the scientific theories presented here are old and long discredited. And no attempt is made to explain why each speaker seems to contradict the next. (Is there no warming, or is there warming but it’s not a problem? And if there is no warming, then what’s all this talk about sunspots causing temperatures to rise?)

In truth, several members of the mostly elderly audience seem to doze off while the temperature graphs are projected. They come to life only when the rock stars of the movement take the stage—not the C-team scientists but the A-team ideological warriors like Morano and Horner. This is the true purpose of the gathering: providing a forum for die-hard denialists to collect the rhetorical baseball bats with which they will club environmentalists and climate scientists in the weeks and months to come. The talking points first tested here will jam the comment sections beneath every article and YouTube video that contains the phrase “climate change” or “global warming.” They will also exit the mouths of hundreds of right-wing commentators and politicians—from Republican presidential candidates like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann all the way down to county commissioners like Richard Rothschild. In an interview outside the sessions, Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, proudly takes credit for “thousands of articles and op-eds and speeches…that were informed by or motivated by somebody attending one of these conferences.”

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank devoted to “promoting free-market solutions,” has been holding these confabs since 2008, sometimes twice a year. And the strategy appears to be working. At the end of day one, Morano—whose claim to fame is having broken the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story that sank John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign—leads the gathering through a series of victory laps. Cap and trade: dead! Obama at the Copenhagen summit: failure! The climate movement: suicidal! He even projects a couple of quotes from climate activists beating up on themselves (as progressives do so well) and exhorts the audience to “celebrate!”

There were no balloons or confetti descending from the rafters, but there may as well have been.

* * *

When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the trends tend to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are usually precipitated by dramatic events. Which is why pollsters are so surprised by what has happened to perceptions about climate change over a span of just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent—well under half the population. According to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, this is “among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.”

Even more striking, this shift has occurred almost entirely at one end of the political spectrum. As recently as 2008 (the year Newt Gingrich did a climate change TV spot with Nancy Pelosi) the issue still had a veneer of bipartisan support in the United States. Those days are decidedly over. Today, 70–75 percent of self-identified Democrats and liberals believe humans are changing the climate—a level that has remained stable or risen slightly over the past decade. In sharp contrast, Republicans, particularly Tea Party members, have overwhelmingly chosen to reject the scientific consensus. In some regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified Republicans accept the science.

Equally significant has been a shift in emotional intensity. Climate change used to be something most everyone said they cared about—just not all that much. When Americans were asked to rank their political concerns in order of priority, climate change would reliably come in last.

But now there is a significant cohort of Republicans who care passionately, even obsessively, about climate change—though what they care about is exposing it as a “hoax” being perpetrated by liberals to force them to change their light bulbs, live in Soviet-style tenements and surrender their SUVs. For these right-wingers, opposition to climate change has become as central to their worldview as low taxes, gun ownership and opposition to abortion. Many climate scientists report receiving death threats, as do authors of articles on subjects as seemingly innocuous as energy conservation. (As one letter writer put it to Stan Cox, author of a book critical of air-conditioning, “You can pry my thermostat out of my cold dead hands.”)

This culture-war intensity is the worst news of all, because when you challenge a person’s position on an issue core to his or her identity, facts and arguments are seen as little more than further attacks, easily deflected. (The deniers have even found a way to dismiss a new study confirming the reality of global warming that was partially funded by the Koch brothers, and led by a scientist sympathetic to the “skeptic” position.)

The effects of this emotional intensity have been on full display in the race to lead the Republican Party. Days into his presidential campaign, with his home state literally burning up with wildfires, Texas Governor Rick Perry delighted the base by declaring that climate scientists were manipulating data “so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.” Meanwhile, the only candidate to consistently defend climate science, Jon Huntsman, was dead on arrival. And part of what has rescued Mitt Romney’s campaign has been his flight from earlier statements supporting the scientific consensus on climate change.

 

http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate?page=0,0#

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LOL

@ Dolos

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70–75 percent of self-identified Democrats and liberals believe humans are changing the climate—a level that has remained stable or risen slightly over the past decade. In sharp contrast, Republicans, particularly Tea Party members, have overwhelmingly chosen to reject the scientific consensus. In some regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified Republicans accept the science.

Wow. I am guessing that these figures aren't dissimilar to the science of evolution either. America really needs to sort out its education system, the future doesn't bode well when a place that has more military might than anywhere else on the planet also has the highest rate of fanatically religious, science rejecting illiterates.

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highest rate of fanatically religious, science rejecting illiterates.

well, the us is hardly top of the field in this regard. there's some pretty tough competition in the world.

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@ paradox - I can't say its been more windy then usual. I watch the wind alot for surf and it seems like a typical spring to me.

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Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations

 

 

H.E. Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary-General, United NationsFirst Avenue and East 44th Street, New York, New York, U.S.A.November 29, 2012

Mr. Secretary-General:

On November 9 this year you told the General Assembly: “Extreme weather due to climate change is the new normal … Our challenge remains, clear and urgent: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to strengthen adaptation to … even larger climate shocks … and to reach a legally binding climate agreement by 2015 … This should be one of the main lessons of Hurricane Sandy.”

On November 13 you said at Yale: “The science is clear; we should waste no more time on that debate.”

The following day, in Al Gore’s “Dirty Weather” Webcast, you spoke of “more severe storms, harsher droughts, greater floods”, concluding: “Two weeks ago, Hurricane Sandy struck the eastern seaboard of the United States. A nation saw the reality of climate change. The recovery will cost tens of billions of dollars. The cost of inaction will be even higher. We must reduce our dependence on carbon emissions.”

We the undersigned, qualified in climate-related matters, wish to state that current scientific knowledge does not substantiate your assertions.

The U.K. Met Office recently released data showing that there has been no statistically significant global warming for almost 16 years. During this period, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations rose by nearly 9% to now constitute 0.039% of the atmosphere. Global warming that has not occurred cannot have caused the extreme weather of the past few years. Whether, when and how atmospheric warming will resume is unknown. The science is unclear. Some scientists point out that near-term natural cooling, linked to variations in solar output, is also a distinct possibility.

The “even larger climate shocks” you have mentioned would be worse if the world cooled than if it warmed. Climate changes naturally all the time, sometimes dramatically. The hypothesis that our emissions of CO2 have caused, or will cause, dangerous warming is not supported by the evidence.

The incidence and severity of extreme weather has not increased. There is little evidence that dangerous weather-related events will occur more often in the future. The U.N.’s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in its Special Report on Extreme Weather (2012) that there is “an absence of an attributable climate change signal” in trends in extreme weather losses to date. The funds currently dedicated to trying to stop extreme weather should therefore be diverted to strengthening our infrastructure so as to be able to withstand these inevitable, natural events, and to helping communities rebuild after natural catastrophes such as tropical storm Sandy.

There is no sound reason for the costly, restrictive public policy decisions proposed at the U.N. climate conference in Qatar. Rigorous analysis of unbiased observational data does not support the projections of future global warming predicted by computermodels now proven to exaggerate warming and its effects.

The NOAA “State of the Climate in 2008” report asserted that 15 years or more without any statistically-significant warming would indicate a discrepancy between observation and prediction. Sixteen years without warming have therefore now proven that the models are wrong by their creators’ own criterion.

Based upon these considerations, we ask that you desist from exploiting the misery of the families of those who lost their lives or properties in tropical storm Sandy by making unsupportable claims that human influences caused that storm. They did not. We also ask that you acknowledge that policy actions by the U.N., or by the signatory nations to the UNFCCC, that aim to reduce CO2 emissions are unlikely to exercise any significant influence on future climate. Climate policies therefore need to focus on preparation for, and adaptation to, all dangerous climatic events however caused.

That sounds smart...

More here: http://opinion.finan...125-scientists/

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Time and time again, you miss the point, the really basic fundamental aspects to every argument surrounding CC.

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Time and time again, you miss the point, the really basic fundamental aspects to every argument surrounding CC.

 

Who's point? Yours? I could say the exact same thing to you. Time and time again YOU miss the point. Read it instead of presume what it says just cause I posted it.

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Illogically, they first state that there has been no climate change, contrary to all the evidence, and then they ask that only remedial measures are taken. Why even go as far as to ask for remedial measures if they believe that nothing is happening? Surely the statement "nothing is happening" means "nothing should be done"?

I really don't get deniers.

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Illogically, they first state that there has been no climate change

They don't actually say that there has been no climate change. They say:

there has been no statistically significant global warming for almost 16 years

Surely the statement "nothing is happening"

You may just have to point out to me where that statement is cause I can't find it. Oh...you made it up.

"nothing should be done"

They do actually suggest a few things that should be done. Maybe you should read again.

I really don't get deniers

I am not a denier! I believe the holocaust happened. And if you were referring to the changing climate well I am also not a denier of that. I just don't believe it to be caused by carbon dioxide nor do I believed it to be as bad as alarmists like to make it out to be. I really don't get the gullible. Climate has been changing and will continue to change for ever.

Seems to be a lot of scientists out there that agree. Ban ki-Moon and cohorts have been trying to alarm the populace with lies fudges and exaggerations...

But you two just keep playing the man...

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