Is Climate Change A Superstition, Scam, Or A Hoax???

[podfish]

Just for those who want a more 'scientific' perspective from a link where at least there is for the most part within it a science based (as far as I can tell anyway) opinion behind the author's belief that CO2 has little to do with the current global warming event.

I have neither the math knowledge nor the time right now to digest and interpret it but I think it is at least worth a look at.
https://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/global-warming-01.html

I may have the math but not the time (or inclination) to engage with "Dad" Peden on a point-by-point debate. But as I've mentioned in other similar threads I know several very smart people who take opposite views than I do on several of these topics. Some are willing to study the issues more deeply than I do (as I'm sure Peden does) and others, not so much but enough to have reasoned opinions.

Regarding the article: I find the presence of sniping at opponents, and extensive over-generalization or outright misrepresentations of their positions, distracting and frankly damaging to the believability of the argument. Kind of like if a lawyer wore a clown suit to trial. But when the rest of it is well developed I overlook it because frankly it makes for more fun writing (and hopefully more entertaining reading). I indulge in it myself in several of my posts, obviously, though I do try to avoid ad-hominem if I notice it in my posts. I also find the self-characterizations of being in the role of Cassandra quite off-putting. Whining about the way one is slighted or ignored by the powers-that-be has too much the flavor of a five-year-old's reaction to opposition, or a rejected teen wondering why the cool kids don't notice him but asserting he doesn't care. (Hey, was that ad-hominem?? maybe...)

There are reasons I don't accept Peden's page. He talks of growing glaciers; I've been to several of those places and there's no talk of growing glaciers, but lots about them melting. I think the detail about the sun's radiant energy in this context is a bit like false precision in statistical arguments ("58.7% of dentists recommend Crest!") since it's probably only one of a ton of other factors. The analogy to Piltdown man isn't appropriate either - the bones were always received with skepticism and never included as part of the recognized family tree in any serious sense - not like, say, the way Neanderthals are. It was a one-off outlying piece of unsupported data at best.

The part where I can't join the argument as an equal participant is when he starts talking about the analysis of the "hocky-stick" graphs, in particular when he talks about Steve McIntyre's critique. I know Mann is widely respected, I know nothing about McIntyre, but weighing reputation isn't the same as weighing the merits of their opinions.

It looks to me like Peden is at base proposing an alternative model for interpreting the available data - picking factors that he thinks are compelling and taking them to their conclusions. He's also done the important other part - showing key parts of the opposing model and explaining why he doesn't accept their validity. By the way, those steps are sadly lacking from a lot of the links that get injected into wacco threads. But to me this is where us amateurs start having to take a different tack. I'd have to leave it to Mann to refute Peden's criticisms of his data or its interpretation. For all I know, Peden's assertions about Mann's claims or the NAS's reaction to them are cherry-picked and unfair. But he makes a thorough case, offering lots of specifics that can be contested, and has the integrity to add this:

"And we might be wrong. We're pledged to good science, without any political or environmental agenda producing hasty conclusions, and this ball game is still in play. We've done an enormous amount of homework, and reached a preliminary opinion on the matter, and are intent on remaining politically independent in this regard. If we're wrong, delaying immediate action will only hasten doomsday"

I find this kind of article helpful to read just to avoid living in an echo chamber. But I'm not quite clear on what's the best way to incorporate them into wacco-type discussions. These need to be here, of course. When I alluded to link-wars earlier, I didn't just mean in the "linkreactive" sense Scott discussed. It's also that a bunch of links to pages like this aren't best responded to by a bunch of links to, say, Mann's support of his chart. These are the footnotes, but on a forum like this we're never going to follow them up by thoughtful, much less technical, analysis of Peden's outline of atmospheric physics. The parts of his page that are more manageable are the summaries, and this is where we run into a dead end. I'm unconvinced that his conclusion ("In short, there is no "climate crisis" of any kind at work on our planet") inevitably follows from his far-more-narrow earlier points, and in fact I don't think all of his points are well established (Man's contribution to Greenhouse Gasses is relatively insignificant. We didn't cause the recent Global Warming and we cannot stop it.).

But this is a compelling subject none the less, as can be seen by the number of words I and others throw at it. I find it easiest to challenge rationales that people bring to the discussion that are clearly not relevant or as well-established factually as the posters might think. It's great when people do post something that's not just a link to an opposite perspective, but is instead a link to a direct refutation of the points on a specific page. I don't see lots of those. And it might be interesting to hear why one side or the other resonates more with different posters. That's probably the most relevant to our own community. Interestingly enough, a lot of the posters of links to more thoughtful arguments (like Hotspring, here) explicitly disavow any endorsement. I do that too... maybe why we do that is in itself worth some discussion??

[arthunter]

Fascinating .. thank you ...

I've been giving this subject some of my time, looking at charts of ice growth and ice melting and weighing opinions both for and against man made climate change ... I've also been discussing the subject in other groups ... today an activist in France published this video ... it's only eleven minutes long and I think that it's a good addition to our discussion ...

Just for those who want a more 'scientific' perspective from a link where at least there is for the most part within it a science based.

[rossmen]

this is a great blog, thanks for bringing it forward. i have been hearing, reading, watching, and thinking about this debate for 36 years. the tide is definitely turning, in my mind at least, which is a great relief. and fun too, if you like watching wrenching scientific evolution. while for other environmental reasons, i have no problem with regulatory structures to reduce our carbon output, it has always been clear they don't achieve much globally. perhaps there is a future here closer to the beauty it is, rather than a climate like baha.

There seems to be a tendency to discredit anyone expressing an alternative point of view ... let's look at a more balanced description of this "bogus" website ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Up_With_That%3F

According to journalist Christopher Booker, in 2007 WUWT readers, along with Stephen McIntyre, found that selected temperature records published by theGoddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) based on data from United States Historical Climate Network were in error, causing GISS to mistakenly label 1998 as the hottest year on record for the United States.^[6] In August 2007, McIntyre alerted GISS to the problematic numbers, which GISS acknowledged and corrected.

According to Alexa internet statistical analysis, What's Up With That? is ranked No. 9,282 in the U.S. and No. 24,144 world-wide.^[13] WUWT receives more than two million visits per month.^[14] Fred Pearce, environmental writer and author, described WUWT as the "world's most viewed climate website" in his 2010 publication of The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth about Global Warming.^[15] Matt Ridley of The Spectator described WUWT as having "metamorphosed from a gathering place for lonely nutters to a three-million-hits-per-month online newspaper on climate full of fascinating articles by physicists, geologists, economists and statisticians".^[16]

Patrick J. Michaels, climatologist and contributor to the IPCC First Assessment Report, described WUWT as part of a new "parallel universe" of emerging online publications, manned by serious scientists critical of world governments approach to climate change: "A parallel universe is assembling itself parallel to the IPCC. This universe has become very technical – very proficient at taking apart the U.N.'s findings."^[17]

In February 2010, climatologist Judith Curry, as a guest contributor, published an open letter on WUWT and other climate-related blogs, "On the Credibility of Climate Change, Towards Rebuilding Trust," in which Curry commented on the benefits of blog-led debate and called for greater transparency in scientists' work.^[14] Also in 2010, Christopher Monckton published on WUWT his account of his "influence on Lady Thatcher's views about climate change during the 1980s".^[21] Monckton, a skeptic towards the theory of anthropogenic global warming, also published a detailed rebuttal on WUWT in response to criticism directed at him by John Abraham, associate professor of mechanical engineering at University of St. Thomas.^[22]

Fox News has attributed to WUWT exclusive photographs used in FoxNews's coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster.^[23]


Sorry, Edward, but this doesn't really seem bogus to me ...

[phredo]

I like eleven minute videos! The main argument in it against the idea that climate change is human caused is to show that in the past CO2 levels have risen after temperature rise and is therefore a result of warming temperatures and could not be a cause of warming temperatures.

Most arguers in support of the idea that climate change is human caused think that CO2 rise in recent decades is capable of causing climate change and create impressive models of how that works. What that suggests to me is that both situations might be true: that in the past heating precedes (and likely causes through increased plant growth) CO2 rise but that CO2 rise might also cause heating. If the latter is true, then perhaps the past situations might also include a positive feedback, where the heating caused CO2 rise which in turns causes more heating, etc.

So the film provides good information to add to the fund of knowledge but isn't definitive, in my opinion.

Since it's the case (I think this is correct) that current levels of CO2 rise are in the same magnitude as those shown on the graph in the film to have been concurrent with temperature rise, it would be interesting to know if these current levels can be shown to have been produced by human activity. I'm sure this has been studied, I just don't remember having read about it. Because if they can be shown to have been produced by human activity that provides a sort of case that human activity may be cause of the current temperature rise. Anyone know?

I have another question someone may know the answer to. Much of the film gave interesting information about Greenland. I recently read an article in Harpers, which was in addition to a book by the same person about the plight of indigenous people in northern Greenland. For a long time they have relied on the cold conditions to allow them to hunt for their food. In the last decade or so, warming conditions have been destroying this way of life by affecting both the animals' habitat and the people's ability to hunt. My question is, "what did those people do during the long period of several hundred years when Greenland was much warmer?" The article, which I read, and the book, which my wife read, didn't seem to touch on that period and gave the impression that the Inuit in Greenland had been living like they have since "time immemorial", as the expression goes. Anybody know?

Fascinating .. thank you ...

I've been giving this subject some of my time, looking at charts of ice growth and ice melting and weighing opinions both for and against man made climate change ... I've also been discussing the subject in other groups ... today an activist in France published this video ... it's only eleven minutes long and I think that it's a good addition to our discussion ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP3b...layer_embedded

[podfish]

... I recently read an article in Harpers, which was in addition to a book by the same person about the plight of indigenous people in northern Greenland. For a long time they have relied on the cold conditions to allow them to hunt for their food. In the last decade or so, warming conditions have been destroying this way of life by affecting both the animals' habitat and the people's ability to hunt. My question is, "what did those people do during the long period of several hundred years when Greenland was much warmer?" The article, which I read, and the book, which my wife read, didn't seem to touch on that period and gave the impression that the Inuit in Greenland had been living like they have since "time immemorial", as the expression goes. Anybody know?

'the Inuit' isn't a single guy or even tribe, of course, and that's likely the answer. I was curious too so I looked at the convenient but not overly authoritative sources on Wikipedia - take it for what it's worth. If you're specifically curious about the details in Greenland, I'm sure real anthopologists (boy, in the context of AGW & denial it's an easy typo to say 'apologists'..) have written about it.
Anyway, time immemorial isn't really all that long; especially when talking about the history of population in a region. It depends on how specifically you want to define 'population'. People migrate in waves that sometimes retreat from the metaphorical shore. But if the question is 'does long habitation work against a theory that warming is a problem', evidence of long settlement doesn't mean much by itself. How was the health of the group? And a destroyed way of life can be followed by a different one, to be destroyed in its turn.

[podfish]

I'm starting to see more and more expressions of this sentiment. I think it's reflective of a lot of people's attitudes across the country, thus leading to my conclusion way earlier in this thread that we're screwed...

Despite everything, Morris couldn’t accept the idea that he might be witnessing the effects of climate change. “I don’t see the science behind the global warming thing,” he said. “There’s always been times when it was hot and dry, and there’ll be some more.” But when I pressed him in Cargill’s querulous style—what if climate change is real, what if the hot, dry times were permanent—he stiffened. “If climate change is the real deal,” he said, “then the human race as we know it is over. And I don’t believe that.”

Morris, like so many in Texas, has perfect faith in our ability to innovate and overcome whatever immediate challenges we may face.

that's from New Republic.
There's a tendency to hope that once a problem is obvious enough, people will get together and fix it. What's Churchill's quote, something like "Americans will do the right thing once they've tried everything else first" or some such. This sentiment is different; it's a lot more fatalistic. I just hope it's not also more realistic.

[geomancer]

This is really bad news - if the West Antarctic ice sheet collapses, it could raise global sea level over 10 meters.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0430191140.htm

Gravity data show that Antarctic ice sheet is meltingincreasingly faster

Date: April 30, 2015Source: Princeton University

Summary: Researchers 'weighed' Antarctica's ice sheet using gravitational satellite data and found thatduring the past decade, Antarctica's massive ice sheet lost twice the amount of ice in itswestern portion compared with what it accumulated in the east. Their conclusion -- thesouthern continent's ice cap is melting ever faster.

Expand

Princeton University researchers "weighed" Antarctica's ice sheetusing gravitational satellite data and found that from 2003 to 2014,the ice sheet lost 92 billion tons of ice per year.
Credit: Image by Christopher Harig, Department of Geosciences

During the past decade, Antarctica's massive ice sheet lost twice the amount of ice in its westernportion compared with what it accumulated in the east, according to Princeton University re‐searchers who came to one overall conclusion -- the southern continent's ice cap is melting everfaster.

The researchers "weighed" Antarctica's ice sheet using gravitational satellite data and found that from 2003 to2014, the ice sheet lost 92 billion tons of ice per year, the researchers report in the journal Earth and PlanetaryScience Letters. If stacked on the island of Manhattan, that amount of ice would be more than a mile high --more than five times the height of the Empire State Building.

The vast majority of that loss was from West Antarctica, which is the smaller of the continent's two main re‐gions and abuts the Antarctic Peninsula that winds up toward South America. Since 2008, ice loss from WestAntarctica's unstable glaciers doubled from an average annual loss of 121 billion tons of ice to twice that by2014, the researchers found. The ice sheet on East Antarctica, the continent's much larger and overall morestable region, thickened during that same time, but only accumulated half the amount of ice lost from thewest, the researchers reported.

"We have a solution that is very solid, very detailed and unambiguous," said co-author Frederik Simons, aPrinceton associate professor of geosciences. "A decade of gravity analysis alone cannot force you to take aposition on this ice loss being due to anthropogenic global warming. All we have done is take the balance ofthe ice on Antarctica and found that it is melting -- there is no doubt. But with the rapidly accelerating rates atwhich the ice is melting, and in the light of all the other, well-publicized lines of evidence, most scientistswould be hard pressed to find mechanisms that do not include human-made climate change."

Compared to other types of data, the Princeton study shows that ice is melting from West Antarctica at a fargreater rate than was previously known and that the western ice sheet is much more unstable compared toother regions of the continent, said first author Christopher Harig, a Princeton postdoctoral research associatein geosciences. Overall, ice-loss rates from all of Antarctica increased by 6 billion tons per year each year dur‐ing the 11-year period the researchers examined. The melting rate from West Antarctica, however, grew by 18billion tons per year every year, Harig and Simons found. Accelerations in ice loss are measured in tons peryear, per year, or tons per year squared.

Of most concern, Harig said, is that this massive and accelerating loss occurred along West Antarctica'sAmundsen Sea, particularly Pine Island and the Thwaites Glacier, where heavy losses had already beenrecorded. An iceberg more than 2,000 square miles in size broke off from the Thwaites Glacier in 2002.

In Antarctica, it's the ocean currents rather than air temperatures that melt the ice, and melted land ice con‐tributes to higher sea levels in a way that melting icebergs don't, Harig said. As the ocean warms, floating iceshelves melt and can no longer hold back the land ice.

"The fact that West Antarctic ice-melt is still accelerating is a big deal because it's increasing its contributionto sea-level rise," Harig said. "It really has potential to be a runaway problem. It has come to the point that ifwe continue losing mass in those areas, the loss can generate a self-reinforcing feedback whereby we will belosing more and more ice, ultimately raising sea levels by tens of feet."

The Princeton study differs from existing approaches to measuring Antarctic ice loss in that it derives from theonly satellite data that measure the mass of ice rather than its volume, which is more typical, Simons ex‐plained. He and Harig included monthly data from GRACE, or the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, adual-satellite joint mission between NASA and the German Aerospace Center. GRACE measures gravity changes to determine the time-variable behavior of various components in the Earth's mass system such asocean currents, earthquake-induced changes and melting ice. Launched in 2002, the GRACE satellites are ex‐pected to be retired by 2016 with the first of two anticipated replacement missions scheduled for 2017.

While the volume of an ice sheet -- or how much space it takes up -- is also crucial information, it can changewithout affecting the amount of ice that is present, Simons explained. Snow and ice, for instance, compactunder their own weight so that to the lasers that are bounced off the ice's surface to determine volume, thereappears to be a reduction in the amount of ice, Simons said. Mass or weight, on the other hand, changeswhen ice is actually redistributed and lost.

Simons equated the difference between measuring ice volume and mass to a person weighing himself by onlylooking in the mirror instead of standing on a scale.

"You shouldn't only look at the ice volume -- you should also weigh it to find the mass changes," Simons said."But there isn't going to be a whole lot of research of this type coming up because the GRACE satellites areon their last legs. This could be the last statement of this kind on these kinds of data for a long time. Theremay be a significant data gap during which the only monitoring available will not be by 'weighing' but by 'look‐ing' via laser or radar altimetry, photogrammetry or field studies."

Harig and Simons developed a unique data-analysis method that allowed them to separate GRACE data byspecific Antarctic regions. Because the ice sheet behaves differently in different areas, a continent-wide viewwould provide a general sense of how all of the ice mass, taken together, has changed, but exclude finer-scalegeographical detail and temporal fluctuations. They recently published a paper about their computationalmethods in the magazine EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, and used a similar methodfor a 2012 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that revealed sharper-than-ever details about Greenland's accelerating loss of its massive ice sheet.

Robert Kopp, a Rutgers University associate professor of earth and planetary sciences and associate directorof the Rutgers Energy Institute, said the analysis method Harig and Simons developed allowed them to cap‐ture a view of regional Antarctic ice loss "more accurately than previous approaches." Beyond the recent pa‐per, Harig and Simons' method could be important for testing models of Antarctic ice-sheet stability devel‐oped by other researchers, he said.

"The notable feature of this research is the power of their method to resolve regions geographically in gravitydata," Kopp said. "I expect that [their] technique will be an important part of monitoring future changes in theice sheet and testing such models."

Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Princeton University. The original article was written by
Morgan Kelly. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.Journal Reference:

1. Christopher Harig, Frederik J. Simons. Accelerated West Antarctic ice mass loss continues to outpaceEast Antarctic gains. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2015; 415: 134 DOI: 10.1016/j.ep‐sl.2015.01.029

Cite This Page:
Princeton University. "Gravity data show that Antarctic ice sheet is melting increasingly faster." ScienceDaily.

[nicofrog]

CO2 or no co2

heat is going up majority of info rules

Polar ice cap obviously goner trapped methane release,tundra anaerobic composting

tsunamis , Hurricanes ,tropical storms,big earthquakes and volcano eruptions are up
conveyor current begins to break up and shift wheee

all this causing INCREASING OCEAN ACIDIFICATION no science needed
See world TOP Oceanographer from scripps oceanographic predicts ocean death in 12 years shortly before his death.
google it yrself plz

no argument needed re arranging deck chairs on the titanic,while the "trodden upon masses" are still locked in the lower decks...these masses ,if released would have the skills and know how to tie all the deck chairs in a bundle with the abundant rope on board,but the ARISTOCRATS and privileged few are busy arguing about whether icebergs exist .
hoping if they can argue loud enough we wont notice we are being screwed by tar sands pipe lines fracking ,everything being shipped from CHINA made by their coal power plant pollution, etc etc .

Nothing of any quality made in u.s. is worth dung anymore.

and fukushima and hundreds of other nuke plants right on the shore where YES the water is coming up, and more earth quakes to add to the fun

Sure the Earth will be FINE, who needs HUMANS .

YOU tell this "No problem" story to my godchildren(6 yrs old) will you? I haven't the stomach or cheek for it.

Ridiculous

there was never an "ozone hole" that was a lie the thing is tattered all over
Auto exhaust was not the real problem, not flourocarbons
It was and still is simple CHLORINE the real culprit is so big she's invisible you are standing on her tummy,she could squash you with a droplet.
I do not believe we will turn this ship in time to continue human life as we knew it ,millions are already dieing and dead from this and the argument goes on BLAH BLAH BLAH

Bucky Fuller told me all this in 72 why does it take people SO LONG to wake up
deny on I'll be dead anyway... Nico
also google "the Adam Trombly Story"

tell ya what you guys prove all this wrong and I'll change my user name to chicken little

This is really bad news - if the West Antarctic ice sheet collapses, it could raise global sea level over 10 meters.
Gravity data show that Antarctic ice sheet is meltingincreasingly faster.

[phredo]

Sort of long, but worth it.

In the original article, the footnotes work.


Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question
By Erik Lindberg

Myth #1: Liberals Are Not In Denial

“We will not apologize for our way of life” –Barack Obama

The conservative denial of the very fact of climate change looms large in the minds of many liberals. How, we ask, could people ignore so much solid and unrefuted evidence? Will they deny the existence of fire as Rome burns once again? With so much at stake, this denial is maddening, indeed. But almost never discussed is an unfortunate side-effect of this denial: it has all but insured that any national debate in America will occur in a place where most liberals are not required to challenge any of their own beliefs. The question has been reduced to a two-sided affair—is it happening or is it not—and liberals are obviously on the right side of that.

If we broadened the debate just a little bit, however, we would see that most liberals have just moved a giant boat-load of denial down-stream, and that this denial is as harmful as that of conservatives. While the various aspects of liberal denial are my main overall topic, here, and will be addressed in our following five sections, they add up to the belief that we can avoid the most catastrophic levels of climate disruption without changing our fundamental way of life. This is myth is based on errors that are as profound and basic as the conservative denial of climate change itself.

But before moving on, one more point about liberal and conservative denial: Naomi Klein has suggested that conservative denial may have its roots, it will surprise many liberals, in some pretty clear thinking. [i] At some level, she has observed, conservatives climate deniers understand that addressing climate change will, in fact, change our way of life, a way of life which conservatives often view as sacred. This sort of change is so terrifying and unthinkable to them, she argues, that they cut the very possibility of climate change off at its knees: fighting climate change would force us to change our way of life; our way of life is sacred and cannot be questioned; ergo, climate change cannot be happening.

We have a situation, then, where one half of the population says it is not happening, and the other half says it is happening but fighting it doesn’t have to change our way of life. Like a dysfunctional and enabling married couple, the bickering and finger-pointing, and anger ensures that nothing has to change and that no one has to actually look deeply at themselves, even as the wheels are falling off the family-life they have co-created. And so do Democrats and Republicans stay together in this unhappy and unproductive place of emotional self-protection and planetary ruin.

Myth #2: Republicans are Still More to Blame

“Yes, America does face a cliff -- not a fiscal cliff but a set of precipices [including a carbon cliff] we'll tumble over because the GOP's obsession over government's size and spending has obscured them.” -Robert Reich

It is true that conservative politicians in the United States and Europe have been intent on blocking international climate agreements; but by focusing on these failed agreements, which only require a baby-step in the right direction, liberals obliquely side-step the actual cause of global warming—namely, burning fossil fuels. The denial of climate change isn’t responsible for the fact that we, in the United States, are responsible for about one quarter of all current emissions if you include the industrial products we consume (and an even greater percentage of all emissions over time), even though we make up only 6% of the world’s population. Our high-consumption lifestyles are responsible for this. Republicans do not emit an appreciably larger amount of carbon dioxide than Democrats.

Because pumping gasoline is our most direct connection to the burning of fossil fuels, most Americans overemphasize the significance of what sort of car we drive and many liberals might proudly point to their small economical cars or undersized SUVs. While the transportation sector is responsible for a lot of our emissions, the carbon footprint of any one individual has much more to do with his or her overall levels of consumption of all kinds—the travel (especially on airplanes), the hotels and restaurants, the size and number of homes, the computers and other electronics, the recreational equipment and gear, the food, the clothes, and all the other goods, services, and amenities that accompany an affluent life. It turns out that the best predictor of someone’s carbon footprint is income. This is true whether you are comparing yourself to other Americans or to other people around the world. Middle-class American professionals, academics, and business-people are among the world’s greatest carbon emitters and, as a group, are more responsible than any other single group for global warming, especially if we focus on discretionary consumption. Accepting the fact of climate change, but then jetting off to the tropics, adding another oversized television to the collection, or buying a new Subaru involves a tremendous amount of denial. There are no carbon offsets for ranting and raving about conservative climate-change deniers.


Myth #3: Renewable Energy Can Replace Fossil Fuels

“We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” –Barack Obama

This is a hugely important point. Everything else hinges on the myth that we might live a lifestyle similar to our current one powered by wind, solar, and biofuels. Like the conservative belief that climate change cannot be happening, liberals believe that renewable energy must be a suitable replacement. Neither view is particularly concerned with the evidence.

Conventional wisdom among American liberals assures us that we would be well on our way to a clean, green, low-carbon, renewable energy future were it not for the lobbying efforts of big oil companies and their Republican allies. The truth is far more inconvenient than this: it will be all but impossible for our current level of consumption to be powered by anything but fossil fuels. The liberal belief that energy sources such as wind, solar, and biofuels can replace oil, natural gas, and coal is a mirror image of the conservative denial of climate change: in both cases an overriding belief about the way the world works, or should work, is generally far stronger than any evidence one might present. Denial is the biggest game in town. Denial, as well as a misunderstanding about some fundamental features of energy, is what allows someone like Bill Gates assume that “an energy miracle” will be created with enough R & D. Unfortunately, the lessons of microprocessors do not teach us anything about replacing oil, coal, and natural gas.

It is of course true that solar panels and wind turbines can create electricity, and that ethanol and bio-diesel can power many of our vehicles, and this does lend a good bit of credibility to the claim that a broader transition should be possible—if we can only muster the political will and finance the necessary research. But this view fails to take into account both the limitations of renewable energy and the very specific qualities of the fossil fuels around which we’ve built our way of life. The myth that alternative sources of energy are perfectly capable of replacing fossil fuels and thus of maintaining our current way of life receives widespread support from our President to leading public intellectuals to most mainstream journalists, and receives additional backing from our self-image as a people so ingenious that there are no limits to what we can accomplish. That fossil fuels have provided us with a one-time burst of unrepeatable energy and affluence (and ecological peril) flies in the face of nearly all the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Just starting to dispel this myth requires that I go into the issue a bit more deeply and at greater length

Because we have come to take the power and energy-concentration of fossil fuels for granted, and see our current lifestyle as normal, it is easy to ignore the way the average citizens of industrialized societies have an unprecedented amount of energy at their disposal. Consider this for a moment: a single $3 gallon of gasoline provides the equivalent of about 80 days of hard manual labor. Fill up your 15 gallon gas tank in your car, and you’ve just bought the same amount of energy that would take over three years of unremitting manual labor to reproduce. Americans use more energy in a month than most of our great-grandparents used during their whole lifetime. We live at a level, today, that in previous days could have only been supported by about 150 slaves for every American—though even that understates it, because we are at the same time beneficiaries of a societal infrastructure that is also only possible to create if we have seemingly limitless quantities of lightweight, relatively stable, easily transportable, and extremely inexpensive ready-to-burn fuel like oil or coal.

A single, small, and easily portable gallon of oil is the product of nearly 100 tons of surface-forming algae (imagine 5 dump trucks full of the stuff), which first collected enormous amounts of solar radiation before it was condensed, distilled, and pressure cooked for a half-billion years—and all at no cost to the humans who have come to depend on this concentrated energy. There is no reason why we should be able to manufacture at a reasonable cost anything comparable. And when we look at the specific qualities of renewable energy with any degree of detail we quickly see that we have not. Currently only about a half of a percent of the total energy used in the United States is generated by wind, solar, biofuels, or geothermal heat. The global total is not much higher, despite the much touted efforts in Germany, Spain, and now China. In 2013, 1.1% of the world’s total energy was provided by wind and only 0.2% by solar.[ii] As these low numbers suggest, one of the major limitations of renewable energy has to do with scale, whether we see this as a limitation in renewable energy itself, or remind ourselves that the expectations that fossil fuels have helped establish are unrealistic and unsustainable.

University of California physics professor Tom Murphy has provided detailed calculations about many of the issues of energy scale in his blog, “Do the Math.” With the numbers adding up, we are no longer able to wave the magic wand of our faith in our own ingenuity and declare the solar future would be here, but for those who refuse to give in the funding it is due. Consider a few representative examples: most of us have, for instance, heard at some point the sort of figure telling us that enough sun strikes the Earth every 104 minutes to power the entire world for a year. But this only sounds good if you don’t perform any follow-up calculations. As Murphy puts it,

"As reassuring as this picture is, the photovoltaic area [required] represents more than all the paved area in the world. This troubles me. I’ve criss-crossed the country many times now, and believe me, there is a lot of pavement. The paved infrastructure reflects a tremendous investment that took decades to build. And we’re talking about asphalt and concrete here: not high-tech semiconductor. I truly have a hard time grasping the scale such a photovoltaic deployment would represent. And I’m not even addressing storage here.” [iii]

In another post,[iv] Murphy calculates that a battery capable of storing this electricity in the U.S. alone (otherwise no electricity at night or during cloudy or windless spells) would require about three times as much lead as geologists estimate may exist in all reserves, most of which remain unknown. If you count only the lead that we’ve actually discovered, Murphy explains, we only have 2% of the lead available for our national battery project. The number are even more disheartening if you try to substitute lithium ion or other systems now only in the research phase. The same story holds true for just about all the sources that even well-informed people assume are ready to replace fossil fuels, and which pundits will rattle off in an impressively long list with impressive sounding numbers of kilowatt hours produced. Add them all up--even increase the efficiency to unanticipated levels and assume a limitless budget--and you will naturally have some big-sounding numbers; but then compare them to our current energy appetite, and you quickly see that we still run out of space, vital minerals and other raw materials, and in the meantime would probably have strip-mined a great deal of precious farmland, changed the earth’s wind patterns, and have affected the weather or other ecosystems in ways not yet imagined.

But the most significant limitation of fossil fuel’s alleged clean, green replacements has to do with the laws of physics and the way energy, itself, works. A brief review of the way energy does what we want it to do will also help us see why it takes so many solar panels or wind turbines to do the work that a pickup truck full of coal or a small tank of crude oil can currently accomplish without breaking a sweat. When someone tells us of the fantastic amounts of solar radiation that beats down on the Earth each day, we are being given a meaningless fact. Energy doesn’t do work; only concentrated energy does work, and only while it is going from its concentrated state to a diffuse state—sort of like when you let go of a balloon and it flies around the room until its pressurized (or concentrated) air has joined the remaining more diffuse air in the room.

When we build wind turbines and solar panels, or grow plants that can be used for biofuels, we are “manually” concentrating the diffuse energy of the sun or in the wind—a task, not incidentally, that requires a good deal of energy. The reason why these efforts, as impressive as they are, pale in relationship to fossil fuels has to do simply with the fact that we are attempting to do by way of a some clever engineering and manufacturing (and a considerable amount of energy) what the geology of the Earth did for free, but, of course, over a period of half a billion years with the immense pressures of the planet’s shifting tectonic plates or a hundred million years of sedimentation helping us out. The “normal” society all of us have grown up with is a product of this one-time burst of a pre-concentrated, ready-to-burn fuel source. It has provided us with countless wonders; but used without limits, it is threatening all life as we know it.

Myth 4: The Coming “Knowledge Economy” Will be a Low-Energy Economy

"The basic economic resource - the means of production - is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor. It is and will be knowledge." -Peter Drucker

“The economy of the last century was primarily based on natural resources, industrial machines and manual labor. . . . Today’s economy is very different. It is based primarily on knowledge and ideas — resources that are renewable and available to everyone.” -Mark Zuckerberg

A “low energy knowledge economy,” when promised by powerful people like Barack Obama, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg, may still our fears about our current ecological trajectory. At a gut level this vision of the future may match the direct experience of many middle-class American liberals. Your father worked in a smelting factory; you spend your day behind a laptop computer, which can, in fact, be run on a very small amount of electricity. Your carbon footprint must be lower, right? Companies like Apple and Microsoft round out this hopeful fantasy with their clever and inspiring advertisements featuring children in Africa or China joining this global knowledge economy as they crowd cheerfully around a computer in some picturesque straw-hut school room.

But there’s a big problem with this picture. This global economy may seem like it needs little more than an army of creative innovators and entrepreneurs tapping blithely on laptop computers at the local Starbucks. But the real global economy still requires a growing fleet of container ships—and, of course, all the iron and steel used to build them, all the excavators used to mine it, all the asphalt needed to pave more of the world. It needs a bigger and bigger fleet of UPS trucks and Fed Ex airplanes filling the skies with more and more carbon dioxide, it needs more paper, more plastic, more nickel, copper, and lead. It requires food, bottled water, and of course lots and lots of coffee. And more oil, coal, and natural gas. As Juliet Schor reports, each American consumer requires “132,000 pounds of oil, sand, grain, iron ore, coal and wood” to maintain our current lifestyle each year. That adds up to “an eye-popping 362 pounds a day.”[v] And the gleeful African kids that Apple asks us to imagine joining the global economy? They are far more likely to slave away in a gold mine or sift through junk hauled across the Atlantic looking for recyclable materials, than they are to be device-sporting global entrepreneurs. The Microsoft ads are designed for us, not them. Meanwhile, the numbers Schor reports are not going down in the age of “the global knowledge economy,” a term which should be consigned to history’s dustbin of misleading marketing slogans.

The “dematerialized labor” that accounts for the daily toil of the American middle class is, in fact, the clerical, management and promotional sector of an industrial machine that is still as energy-intensive and material-based as it ever was. Only now, much of the sooty and smelly part has been off-shored to places far, far away from the people who talk hopefully about a coming global knowledge economy. We like to pretend that the rest of the world can live like us, and we have certainly done our best to advertise, loan, seduce, and threaten people across the world to adopt our style, our values, and our wants. But someone still has to do the smelting, the welding, the sorting, and run the ceaseless production lines. And, moreover, if everyone lived like we do, took our vacations, drove our cars, ate our food, lived in our houses, filled them with oversized TVs and the endless array of throwaway gadgetry, the world would use four times as much energy and emit nearly four times as much carbon dioxide as it does now. If even half the world’s population were to consume like we do, we would have long since barreled by the ecological point of no-return.

Economists speak reverently of a decoupling between economic growth and carbon emissions, but this decoupling is occurring at a far slower rate than the economy is growing. There has never been any global economic growth that is not also accompanied by increased energy use and carbon emissions. The only yearly decreases in emissions ever recorded have come during massive recessions.

Myth 5: We can Reverse Global Warming Without Changing our Current Lifestyles

“Saving the planet would be cheap; it might even be free. . . . [It] would have hardly any negative effect on economic growth, and might actually lead to faster growth” –Paul Krugman

The upshot of the previous sections is that the comforts, luxuries, privileges, and pleasures that we tell ourselves are necessary for a happy or satisfying life are the most significant cause of global warming and that unless we quickly learn to organize our lives around another set of pleasures and satisfactions, it is extremely unlikely that our children or grandchildren will inherit a livable planet. Because we are falsely reassured by liberal leaders that we can fight climate change without any inconvenience, it bears repeating this seldom spoken truth. In order to adequately address climate change, people in rich industrial nations will have to reduce current levels of consumption to levels few are prepared to consider. This truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.[vi]

Global warming is not complicated: it is caused mainly by burning fossil fuels; fossil fuels are burned in the greatest quantity by wealthy people and nations and for the products they buy and use. The larger the reach of a middle-class global society, the more carbon emissions there have been. While conservatives deny the science of global warming, liberals deny the only real solution to preventing its most horrific consequences—using less and powering down, perhaps starting with the global leaders in style and taste (as well as emissions), the American middle-class. In the meantime we continue to pump more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with each passing year.

Myth 6: There is Nothing I Can Do.

The problem is daunting; making changes can be difficult.[vii] But not only can you do something, you can’t not do anything. Either you will continue to buy, use, and consume as if there is no tomorrow; or you will make substantial changes to the way you live. Both choices are “doing something.” Either you will emit far more CO₂ than people in most parts of the globe; or you will bring your carbon footprint to an equitable level. Either you will turn away, ignore the warnings, bury your head in the sand; or you will begin to take a strong stance on perhaps the most significant moral challenge in the history of humanity. Either you will be a willing party to the most destructive thing humans have ever done; or you will resist the wants, the beliefs, and the expectations that are as important to a consumption-based global economy as the fossil fuels that power it. As Americans we have already done just about everything possible to bring the planet to the brink of what scientists are now calling “the sixth great extinction.” We can either keep on doing more of the same; or we can work to undo the damage we have done and from which we have most benefited.

[Hotspring 44]

Sort of long, but worth it.

In the original article, the footnotes work.

...Myth 6: There is Nothing I Can Do.

The problem is daunting; making changes can be difficult.[vii] But not only can you do something, you can’t not do anything. Either you will continue to buy, use, and consume as if there is no tomorrow; or you will make substantial changes to the way you live. Both choices are “doing something.” Either you will emit far more CO₂ than people in most parts of the globe; or you will bring your carbon footprint to an equitable level. Either you will turn away, ignore the warnings, bury your head in the sand; or you will begin to take a strong stance on perhaps the most significant moral challenge in the history of humanity. Either you will be a willing party to the most destructive thing humans have ever done; or you will resist the wants, the beliefs, and the expectations that are as important to a consumption-based global economy as the fossil fuels that power it. As Americans we have already done just about everything possible to bring the planet to the brink of what scientists are now calling “the sixth great extinction.” We can either keep on doing more of the same; or we can work to undo the damage we have done and from which we have most benefited.

I used to walk or ride horse to town when nobody else in my neighborhood did until I was almost ran over once too many times now I don't, I drive a fossil fueled vehicle or go with someone in a car pool who uses a fossil fueled vehicle.

I use to reuse plastic bags until they were full of holes but they eventually ended up in the trash anyway, just not as many as if I used them once only until I realized my doing that was not making enough difference to matter in the least.

I use to do so many such things thinking that my miniscule refrain would make a difference or at least be like the Hundredth monkey effect thing, but, of course, that never materialized nor could it have.

The crux of the matter is that everyone (human) has to change fundamentally the way we use the available resources (extremely few exceptions) and how we treat each other, the earth's ecosystem as a whole, and other living things.

Human history as we know it suggests that humans will act the same as always:
The ones who have military, and resources who can maintain the power will prevail over other humans, animals etc., and to the extent possible, the 'local' environment, in this case the whole earth's 'humanly' available (extractable) resources with very few exceptions are at play now.

I use to have a saying in my mind that said something like:
“If you really care enough and are truly willing to do anything to save the planet and you live how most people in this country do; polluting and using resources so much etc., then the quickest and most immediate thing to help save the planet is to... ...Drop Dead!”... ...LOL!... ...No joke I at the time really meant that literally!

Nowadays, that is more/less a saying that is almost never really mentioned... ...by me anyway.

[phredo]

Yeah, the problem with articles like the one I posted is always the "what is to be done" part. When I went to a seminar in Willits given by Jon Jeavons, the "double-digging" guy who wrote the "How to grow more vegetables..." book, he put the situation in stark terms: either start growing your own food with human muscle power only, using for fertilizer only the compost you produce from the land or be "part of the problem." I've tried to grow some of my food that way, and I can see that it's doable, but I never got beyond about 30%.

So does that mean we're doomed? Maybe. But we can still go down swinging, trying our best and trying to convince others. And, avoid the truth as we may, the blogger's point that "we have met the enemy and he is us" is well taken. We, and I would guess all of us using this forum come rather close to being in the 1%, in terms of world incomes and we all of course consider ourselves to be "progressive", are the ones who need to change, just as much as a rancher in Texas or Bill Gates. It's too bad, isn't it?

I considered posting the article to the recent "population" thread also, because solutions would be much easier to achieve if there were only about 10% as many people on the earth as there are in fact, and we could all breath a sigh of relief.

I used to walk or ride horse to town when nobody else in my neighborhood did until I was almost ran over once too many times now I don't, I drive a fossil fueled vehicle or go with someone in a car pool who uses a fossil fueled vehicle....

[arthunter]

I'm continuing to do research about all of this and I've found some interesting information ... first is this Forbes article about the financial implications of the climate change scenario ...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhen...f-the-century/

Secondly, this article by The Telegraph which has a lot of people talking, including Fox News ...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ear...ndal-ever.html

So what's going on here? ... it's obvious that something is going on .... no one has mentioned geoengineering in this discussion but this is actually being discussed globally with whole conferences being devoted to it, including a recent conference at Stanford ... if you have trouble believing in geoengineering then I suggest that you watch this video ... if this isn't geoengineering, then what the hell is it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOYA54k_8e0

[Hotspring 44]

...because solutions would be much easier to achieve if there were only about 10% as many people on the earth as there are in fact, and we could all breath a sigh of relief.

Those 10% who are left after the 90% of the rest of us perish.
That is quite stark to say the least.
I think anyone who thinks that they will be in the surviving 10% in a scenario like that is way more an 'optimist' than I am.

I personally have gotten burned-out on trying to convince others of pretty much anything, particularly when it involves them changing their whole lifestyle to accomplish so-called 'goal'.

As far as I can tell; anyone who will actually do something to make the change personally would have to be interested and motivated about it in the first place.
Considering that, they are most likely to be intelligent enough to figure out, on their own what needs to happen without my input; in fact my input may actually be a negative (as what my experience would suggest), because if the way they perceive me or what I have to say as repulsive to them they resist my input and are likely to become more prejudiced against it than they would otherwise have been in the first place...

...So at this point in time, I have decided that I am still willing to talk to people who are very into talking about it with me but otherwise I am no longer going to waste my precious energy and risk turning someone off to thinking about it on their own by trying, in vein, to talk them into being interested... ...(as what my experience suggests at a 99+% rate).

[podfish]

... no one has mentioned geoengineering in this discussion but this is actually being discussed globally with whole conferences being devoted to it, including a recent conference at Stanford ... if you have trouble believing in geoengineering then I suggest that you watch this video

you're right - it hasn't come up much in this discussion. Which I think you can expect, because of the nature of the discussions on sites like this aimed at a casual audience who gets their information filtered by Fox news or random websites, with no vetting of their credibility.

Geo engineering has been part of the discussion of climate science for many many decades. That's what chemtrails are all about, after all - and people have done what they could to modify weather (and they've accidentally modified weather, by things like deforestation) for millenia.

If you hunt for some more technical sources, or sources discussing the legality of it, you'll find a huge range of information. I only peripherally track it, but there are a couple of key factors that have a much larger impact than any secret spraying from airplanes that may be going on now: first, it's very hard to design a weather-modification program with predictable outcomes, and second, there are immense legal hurdles because the ownership of the atmosphere is equally ambiguous. If you do believe in secret cabals who don't care about national laws, I suppose the second hurdle is imaginary. However, weather modification that impacts a neighboring country could be seen as an act of war. This is something that is acknowledged and discussed, just not in the popular media. As for the first, one example of unintended consequences would be that several plans for removing C02 from the atmosphere would end up increasing ocean acidification.

Because of this, geo-engineering solutions aren't likely to be tried on any major scale until the situation is so bad that it's probably too late anyway. And despite all the panic over how close to the brink we are politically and socially, it's helpful to compare modern crises with things like, say, the cold war era. We're actually in a situation where positive action is more likely than at any time in history. That may not be enough, if the worst predictions come true. But fortunately we have a long history of worst predictions not coming true.

[arthunter]

Actually Podfish, I have done a great deal of research about geoengineering and I am allied with Max Bliss in France and Alexandra May Hunter in Arizona, two important activists and speakers in the upcoming Climate Change Conference in Paris, France in July.

Max published this video today ... I suggest that you watch it ... it is very informative ... geoengineering is happening now ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrNNtNFVwmI

...Geo engineering has been part of the discussion of climate science for many many decades. That's what chemtrails are all about, after all - and people have done what they could to modify weather (and they've accidentally modified weather, by things like deforestation) for millenia.

If you hunt for some more technical sources, or sources discussing the legality of it, you'll find a huge range of information. I only peripherally track it, but there are a couple of key factors that have a much larger impact than any secret spraying from airplanes that may be going on now:...

[podfish]

Max published this video today ... I suggest that you watch it ... it is very informative ... geoengineering is happening now ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrNNtNFVwmI

that's an hour long! an hour of my life I'd never get back.

There's a reason people who publish research results do it in print; if there's a video it's supplemental material. Video's great for advocacy, though, because it has so much more emotional impact.

[nicofrog]

Chemtrails!

OH YEAH study THAT history very carefully

THEN do not forget to,beware the ZOMBIE apocalypse!!

and after that there is the VAMPIRE WORLD TAKEOVER!

and then the REPTILIAN ALIENS in the White House

frankly you are all off center, I have firm evidence that after the Giant flood wipes us all out
NewAH's great ark will populate the entire world with BOBBLE HEADS which will give final proof that there IS integument life on earth!
I think~~

[arthunter]

yup, this was my first reaction to the idea of chemtrails ... a friend brought the subject up 5 years ago and my first reaction was to ask her what she was smoking ...

but since then much has changed including the publishing of lots of information from lots of smart people ... lots of serious groups have formed including two in San Francisco for researching and activism ... conferences around the world, etc. ... and please do explain the video that I posted out of London ...

here's an example of what's been going on ... this is from Shasta, California ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaLCOQhRaFY

Chemtrails! OH YEAH study THAT history very carefully. THEN do not forget to,beware the ZOMBIE apocalypse!! and after that there is the VAMPIRE WORLD TAKEOVER! and then the REPTILIAN ALIENS in the White House

frankly you are all off center, I have firm evidence that after the Giant flood wipes us all out
NewAH's great ark will populate the entire world with BOBBLE HEADS which will give final proof that there IS integument life on earth!
I think~~

[Karen the KAT]

Air = 1.3 kg/m3
CO2 = 2.0 kg/m3

Any questions????

[Karen the KAT]

www.artificialclouds.com

[arthunter]

The global fight over this continues ...

https://www.reuters.com/article/2015...0NT0E320150508

[Sara S]

New Strain of Fact-Resistant Humansz
from: theborowitzreport.com in The New Yorker:

MINNEAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report) – Scientists have discovered a powerful new strain of fact-resistant humans who are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life, a sobering new study reports.

The research, conducted by the University of Minnesota, identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, leaving scientists at a loss as to how to combat them.
“These humans appear to have all the faculties necessary to receive and process information,” Davis Logsdon, one of the scientists who contributed to the study, said. “And yet, somehow, they have developed defenses that, for all intents and purposes, have rendered those faculties totally inactive.”
More worryingly, Logsdon said, “As facts have multiplied, their defenses against those facts have only grown more powerful.”
While scientists have no clear understanding of the mechanisms that prevent the fact-resistant humans from absorbing data, they theorize that the strain may have developed the ability to intercept and discard information en route from the auditory nerve to the brain. “The normal functions of human consciousness have been completely nullified,” Logsdon said.
While reaffirming the gloomy assessments of the study, Logsdon held out hope that the threat of fact-resistant humans could be mitigated in the future. “Our research is very preliminary, but it’s possible that they will become more receptive to facts once they are in an environment without food, water, or oxygen,” he said.

The global fight over this continues ...

https://www.reuters.com/article/2015...0NT0E320150508

[podfish]

MINNEAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report) – Scientists have discovered a powerful new strain of fact-resistant humans who are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life, a sobering new study reports.

he's taken over for Dave Barry.

the thing is, it's not really that simple. The resistant humans find a lot of 'facts' available, and just find the logic supporting some more convincing. Not that different than us fact-persuadable people. The thing is, the quality that makes one 'fact' more believable to the resistant humans isn't really a scientific one. For example, the link that triggered your response is to an article quoting someone who dismisses the science behind AGW. This is largely because they think the real issue is that a new world order is being established based on the 'facts' revealed by the science. For many, if someone claims there's an agenda on the part of the researchers, it prima facie diminishes the plausibility of the results. Especially when it's so awful as NWO. It's kind of like shouting "squirrel!"

There's a group of posters here who get drawn in to this over and over - pointing out that sure, there are arguments on both sides, but that they're not of equal weight and we explain why. By now, it's not worth pointing out that credible arguments against AGW are only made by outliers - and the majority of AGW refutations are incredible. It's of course worth considering the merits of criticisms of a well-accepted theory, but normally a theory with the level of support that AGW has is dealt with as if it were a 'fact' - at least when the theory implies that immediate action is called for and delay is harmful.

[rossmen]

wickerman was never more evident. the truth about climate theory is that it calls for evidence, and there are two lines, the fact of global warming, and the ability to predict, using the most powerful computers and models ever. the second line has not been demonstrated, even using historical data. that's why the scientific consensus remains elusive and the commentators agenda important. dave berry is still here, he just wants us to buy his latest book!

he's taken over for Dave Barry...

[rekarp]

So do you agree with this?

The global fight over this continues ...

https://www.reuters.com/article/2015...0NT0E320150508

[rossmen]

1. its a news report, whats to agree or disagree with? if the question is is abbots minister a tool of the aussi coal industry then spell it out and make your case, i have no idea. while down under has whiplashed between drought and flood in recent decades they are under the global dimming cloud of china's industrialization, a complicating factor that doesn't seem to be a part of climate change modeling. what do you think of that?

So do you agree with this?

[phredo]

the thing is, it's not really that simple. The resistant humans find a lot of 'facts' available, and just find the logic supporting some more convincing. Not that different than us fact-persuadable people. The thing is, the quality that makes one 'fact' more believable to the resistant humans isn't really a scientific one. For example, the link that triggered your response is to an article quoting someone who dismisses the science behind AGW. This is largely because they think the real issue is that a new world order is being established based on the 'facts' revealed by the science. For many, if someone claims there's an agenda on the part of the researchers, it prima facie diminishes the plausibility of the results. Especially when it's so awful as NWO. It's kind of like shouting "squirrel!"

There's a group of posters here who get drawn in to this over and over - pointing out that sure, there are arguments on both sides, but that they're not of equal weight and we explain why. By now, it's not worth pointing out that credible arguments against AGW are only made by outliers - and the majority of AGW refutations are incredible. It's of course worth considering the merits of criticisms of a well-accepted theory, but normally a theory with the level of support that AGW has is dealt with as if it were a 'fact' - at least when the theory implies that immediate action is called for and delay is harmful.

More aspects of the problem:

1. There is so much information available to us now that no one can read or watch everything or understand everything one might read. So we are left to trusting "experts" rather than analyze it our self. Even when we try to analyze on our own, we end up trusting experts to provide correct data.

2. People whom we might look to as experts often lie. High position psychologists lie about their role in torturing for the CIA. Many "experts" in government lie all the time. In the last few days we've learned that Obama lied about major aspects of the killing of Bin Lauden, and those lies were supported by many other high ranking officials. (I don't even believe Bin Lauden was killed that day, but that's another story.) Economists lie about the condition of the economy. The government is currently lying in its demonization of Russia and many other aspects of its foreign policy.

3. Other experts acquiesce to incorrect theories. Although it is still debated, to me it is clear that the official story of 9/11 cannot possibly be true, and yet most architects and engineers would still, publicly anyway, support the official story. Most historians would still support the "lone gunman" theory of the Kennedy assassination despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

4. Much of the lying and seeming illogic are surely due to political and economic pressures. Experts lie to shape public beliefs and other experts "go along to get along", when not doing so would damage their careers.

5. Often experts are simply wrong. For decades scientists supported eugenic sterilization. Science changes from year to year on the advantages or disadvantages of a high or low fat diet. Well intentioned economists will never agree on economics, even at the most basic level.

Given all the above, it's not strange at all that intelligent people will be skeptical of statements by experts, including expert climate scientists. It is easy and logical to believe that political or economic pressures could motivate some climate experts and that others could go along to get on a popular bandwagon. Although the evidence in favor of human caused global warming appears overwhelming to many, unless one is a high level scientist how can one know that the evidence is true. And even a knowledgeable scientist could be biased by wishful thinking, economics, or peer pressure.

Painful as it is, the only solution I see to convincing anyone one way or the other about climate change is to get right into the data itself, without appeal to how many experts support one position or another. If one side says the temperature has been going up and the other side says the data collection is flawed, then that's what has to be decided one way or the other. If one side says humans are driving up the CO2 and the other side says that humans can't drive up CO2 enough to make a difference, then that has to be discussed until the truth is agreed on. Each side has to be committed to sticking with a point until there's no wiggle room left. And of course it's difficult to do. Who has the knowledge? Who has the time? Who would be listening? We need many public debates with strict agreed upon parameters.

[podfish]

There is so much information available to us now that no one can read or watch everything or understand everything one might read. So we are left to trusting "experts" rather than analyze it our self.

yeah, but it's not supposed to be blind trust, or a dart-board throw to choose the expert you'll follow.

There's nothing unique about this process, either - there's always "more information available" than you can analyze yourself. Take something totally non-intellectual: your vision system pulls in way more data than you can ever handle, and your eyes aren't Hubble telescopes - they provide data with a lot of uncertainty in the values. Yet you can extract meaningful patterns out of it, separating what's meaningful or useful from what's noise or unnecessary detail.

So use that analogy. You look for patterns, you look for reliability of claims. Picking out some for probing more deeply is great; picking out a random (and random's important) selection to see if there's concensus is even more revealing. So on your points:
2 - experts often lie. Yeah, if you take that as "well, we have to ignore experts" then we might as well just make shit up. It's only useful information if you're assuming that instead experts are always absolutely authoritative.
3 - experts are sheep. If one expert says something, others just fall in line. Or, more rationally, you do need to account for group-think when comparing the number of experts on either side of a debate. I don't think it's an overwhelming effect.
4 - there are reasons they lie. Yeah, but again, if they're lying with great frequency who cares if there are reasons or if it's random psychotic behavior?
5 - they're often wrong. That's the great triumph of science. It's a self-regulating system that is designed to correct errors. It doesn't have to be perfect to work. It also is useful to remember that we're not talking philosophical "TRUTH" here, we're coming up with theories and deciding how plausible they are.

to address some of the points in your epilogue:
So no, it's not strange that people are skeptical of experts. That's essential and it's misreading the position of, for lack of a better term, "AGW defenders". Which is a terrible term, but, like the "pro-life" group, you've left the opposition with no palatable choices. Also, even a high-level scientist who generates his own data still needs to weigh the opinions of other experts very highly, using them to test his own results. So I completely disagree that having each of us do his own evaluation of the science would lead to better understanding. That's what 'experts' are for - they generate the data and process it to another level. We get to do the meta-analysis, deciding what the overall trends are based on the quality (as far as we can tell it) of the individual claims. So when someone claims sea-level rise is a hoax, unless they're really incompetent forgers it's easier for me to compare their claim against a rebuttal of it than it is to pick apart the techniques they used to measure C02 in ice cores.

[arthunter]

Well said, Phredo …

I noticed that Democracy Now reported on the Bin Laden story so I know that it's verifiable … and the rest of what you mentioned definitely needs to be investigated, but don't hold your breath …

Given all of this BS, I do think that it's appropriate to question “the official story” in spite of the resulting labels which attempt to discredit you for doing so …

Many in the world now understand that a lot of systems and laws have been created for the primary reason of making money … we are now openly called an oligarchy … many describe our “democracy” as a police state …the number of counter actions to fix all of this grows daily and most can be found on this forum …

There are things that I know for sure that would shock most people … I don't mention them any more because I've been threatened … as I've said I work with torture victims IN AMERICA!

The truth behind the climate change movement is not something that I know for sure, but 31,000 scientists putting their signature on a declaration of fraud gets my attention, regardless of how one tries to discredit this event....add to that the consequences of the climate change movement, increased power to the UN, and I'm watching it carefully …. not because I have an innate distrust of governing bodies, but because of the many intelligent warnings out there about all of this …

This is a brief description of who controls the UN … at the end of the article the author invites you participate in the research … I do the same ….


https://www.collective-evolution.com...is-in-control/

More aspects of the problem:

1. There is so much information available to us now...

[Hotspring 44]

Re:

...We need many public debates with strict agreed upon parameters.

And who decides what those 'parameters shall be? Sounds like yet another political round robin just waiting to rear it's ugly head to me; unfortunately.