Sounds like an idea of the month!

The earths temp has always been changing and will always do so… i.e…. Past oceans are now deserts. Lets suppose you are sitting on your coach and your house began getting to warm. Would you sit there and swear that there was to much CO2 warming the house? No, you would get up and walk to the thermostat and turn down the heat! Why would you do that? Because it is your furnace heating your home… Guess what, we get our heat from the sun, the solar cycles match our past hot and cool stages… Hmmmm… Sounds logical to me… Hotter sun = Warmer Earth…

That makes as much sense as a “scientist” telling half the truth or declaring worst case scenarios to recieve his grants… Many are just trying to collect thier paycheck and look for “science” to justify thier existence while ignoring conflicting facts to thier belief system…

That being said you may have a valid point about CO2 holding in the heat. The solution then would be to plant more trees, or let nature take its course and let the plants catch up with our CO2 output… Unless all that shade led to global cooling…

PS; CO2(Carbon Dioxide, the global warming gas) is also used for carbonation in soda so fear the poison, and please consider holding your breath…

Rather than lay out a lengthy scenario of our options I can only suggest in the strongest terms that you get and read this book – IMMEDIATELY – and judge for yourself.

Lovelock, James: The Revenge of Gaia – Why the earth is fighting back – and how we can still save humanity. London: Allen Lane (Penguin)2006
ISBN 0-713-99914-4

Not available until August 2006 here in the USA (unless it is suppressed) but you can get it at Amazon -UK now. You will see some of the same graphics as in Al’s movie. But this book goes much futher with its offer of real answers, and an analysis of which of our options will work or not.

as i’ve said repeatedly, i think the “debate” on global warming is a complete waste of time. you guys can play “my science is better than your science” all day long — personally i think it’s all alot of hot air. pardon the pun.

the point i was making in the paragraph you excerpted was not about global warming at all. it was about the tactics of the debate and how a particular tactic of the right is to attack an apparent strength of the left — the desired result of which is not to win but merely to make people question that strength. the truth is that al gore does have a strong position on global warming that is supported by a clear majority of scientists in the relevant fields. but, of course, all you (or the oil companies) have to do is provide one scientist that disputes that and you’ve achieved your goal — obfuscating the issue and making your target have to defend a supposed strength.

incidentally, you bring up dr. gray…although i have no opinion on his scientific veracity, i do have to say i don’t trust scientists that go out on a political limb as he has, calling opponents of his beliefs guilty of “mild-mccarthyism”. but that’ll get your name in the papers, won’t it?

The kind of decision to be made — whether to act or not act based on something for which evidence is not entirely conclusive and for which action and inaction both has costs — is the same. So given the cost structure of each decision by any fair accounting of costs (of course most people underestimated the costs of action in Iraq and of inaction on global climate change while over-estimating the opposite costs), how could one support the Iraq war and oppose action on global warming? I think my question still stands, don’t y’all?

No the situation was generally equivalent. Not everybody was convinced Iraq still had WMDs. Some people thought the threat existed. Some people dismissed it. The POTUS was making it sound like Iraq would slip Al Qaeda a 1 Gigaton bomb any day but when his words were parsed carefully they turned out to make Clinton’s “it depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is” look like plain-speech.

The fact of the matter was the decision made was a decision in which people were generally uncertain as to whether Iraq did or did not have WMDs and there were costs associated with action or inaction. As much as we liberals may think that CO2 emissions are an issue and “conservatives” poo-poo this notion, my friend from my undergrad days, Dean of Physical Sciences and later Chancellor Ralph Cicerone, is right … not all the evidence is in — it can never be all in, that’s the way science works — it doesn’t give final answers only provisional ones (and twisting science to give final answers, e.g. about religion as the ID types are wont to do will only contaminate religious belief with what will eventually and inevitably be shown to be false) … so in the case of CO2 emmissions, the evidence will never “all be in” (and conservatives who claim we need more evidence are disingenuous unless they are helping or advocating for people in Ralph Cicerone’s line of work to get more money ;) ) so again, as in the case of Saddam Hussein and his possibly existent WMDs, we need to act on the basis of partial data.

Pick your favorite normative decision making method — justify a decision to act or not to act based on the costs/benefits of action vs. inaction: that’s a reasonable position, eh? To say that in one case “we had to act ’cause we all knew Saddam Hussein had WMDs” or more bizzarrely to say “who claimed he had them? oh, but we had to act anyway” whereas to say “let’s have more evidence” in this case is really quite an incoherent position unless you can make a better case that the evidence for Saddam Hussein’s magical WMDs was stronger than it really was and/or you make appropriate claims as to the costs/benefits of inaction vs. action in both cases. What was the expected cost of inaction in the case of Iraq — well, that Saddam Hussein might have WMDs at some point. What has been the cost of action? Quite high, I would say — and many of us predicted that cost from the get-go, so you cannot say “no-one could have forseen the costs of action”.

OTOH, what is the cost of action vs. inaction on global warming? Given the cost of global warming, even if the probability that CO2 emmissions are causing it is less than 100% (sorry for the Bayesian terminology — I am not Bayesian, but the terminology does have a certain intuitive appeal even if the theory turns out to be highly non-descriptive, and it would be shocking to me if it were discriptive), the expected cost of the status quo is still pretty high — if only for reasons unconnected with global warming per se (reducing dependence on oil). So why the resistance to action … including by people who wet their collective pants and helped to send our boys and girls to war? Is it somehow “noble” to take an “unpopular” and hence per force principled stand (any unpopular stand must be principled, eh?) and embrace the “lost cause” of the confeder… er, that global warming is not 100% known to be 100% caused by CO2 emmisions (because we all know global warming ’sceptics’ are all merely insistent that we have all the evidence in before we do anything — and they are just trying to defend science from hucksters who try to ‘politicize’ it and use scientific evidence to jump to unscientific conclusions, right?)? OK … that was an unfair snark and slap — but who says life is fair? ;)

Not exactly — I know many people who saw F9/11 ’cause of the buzz it got but who didn’t know enough about, e.g., the Iraq war to have an opinion other than the official, “mainstream” (TM) opinion that “we had to go to war ’cause of 9/11 and stuff” and who came away with quite a different opinion about the war.

I am amazed at how Michael Moore has been turned into a straw man considering how right he has been about so many things. What’s wrong with him? He’s slovenly and from the wrong social class? He’s “angry”? I don’t get the “Michael Moore” is the left’s Coulter mindset at all. Could someone please tell me how Michael Moore is the worst thing since pickled sausage?

Wow. OK, so that period between 1940 and 1970 that doesn’t fit into the anthropogenic global warming theory… yeah, that was just due to natural fluctuation and stuff. Move right along, don’t think about it!Never mind that CO2 was dramatically going up during this time, which in light of the theory that is being peddled, would mean that the temperature should have gone up. It’s akin to a conspiracy theory, where every fact that doesn’t fit the theory is undermined and discarded through jibberjabber. In fact, back then, they were talking about the imminence of “global cooling”. This is immortalized by the Newsweek article in 1975 predicting the temperature to fall the next few decades and that it was up to policymakers to do something about it. Sounds familiar, no?

Over to you Dick Cheney:

“And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons” – Dick Cheney, March 16 2003

March 16, 3 days before the war, and Cheney corrected himself for saying this as he meant their nuclear weapons program, not nuclear weapons. Oh, but Cheney isn’t allowed to slip up, one sentence is enough, everything else he said on the matter is suddenly meaningless. It doesn’t matter whether he said “nuclear weapons program” several dozen times before this, nope, all memory is erased when he goofs and leaves out “program”, which he then corrects for the record right away afterwards.

You see, that’s the only example I knew you would bring up, because that’s the only time the Bush administration actually said anything reminiscient of Iraq having nuclear arms. Everyone who doesn’t go looking for dishonest ways to fool people know perfectly well that they never alleged that Iraq had nuclear weapons. That would have been completely ludicrous for them to have done.

How about you Chimpy or did Condi make you say this;

“”The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” – George W. Bush, SOTU, 2003

Wow, the British government DID say that, and so did the NIE, and so did the French to the State Department in November 2002. Who’s the one being dishonest? The one making random accusations and omitting facts, or the one presenting facts?

So Seixon, your Reaganesque parsing may get you off in a court of law, but if I were you, I would say the smoke rising from your underwear gives you away….

Thanks for playing ’spot the whopper’, better luck next time.

Reaganesque parsing? Look, it’s a matter of fact that the Bush administration did not allege that Iraq had nuclear weapons. Alleging that Iraq had sought uranium within the last few years, how does that amount to Iraq actually having a nuclear weapon? It doesn’t!

That’s the whopper here that you are trying to peddle. It is similar to the whopper that the Bush administration claimed that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. I’m sure you’ll provide the most cliche and debunked ways of claiming that as well. I will get some popcorn and sit back to watch you crash and burn on it.

#174, Randy is a halfwit that’s true, Seixon is not – he is dishonest. Allowing lies to go unchallenged anywhere is what allowed these fascists to do what they have done. So you would rather not meet this head on and call a liar a liar, or would you let the right-wing noise machine have it’s say unchallenged?

Well, thank you for the backhanded compliment… LOL. I’m dishonest? Riiight. I just put up a dozen links to what I was talking about, and nobody has responded to any of them yet. Figures.

Progressaurus,

when someone with an alternate viewpoint comes here and disputes you, you have to go on the defensive. clearly it has been illustrated multiple times that the right wing will inject whatever untruths into the discussion they can. so merely having the discussion is giving them an opportunity to put you on the defensive and creates an even greater possibility that an outsider will see the discussion and come away with the impression that there isn’t a consensus on global warming.

Well then, I guess the only alternative is to shut out everyone with a different opinion. Then you can cling onto your “consensus” canard all you want. However, I’d like to present evidence that this is 100% BS and that the only reason you’re so fearful of this canard being exposed is because it’s a pure lie.

Here’s a scientist interviewed about Al Gore’s movie, a scientist sympathetic to Gore:

Cicerone took issue with some of Gore’s conclusions in the film. “There were some issues where scientists are not ready to say yet that the linkage (with global warming) is as clear as perhaps he is,” said Cicerone. “For example, the spread of certain diseases over the world.”

Golly, Gore presenting something as “consensus” even though it’s not. Who would have thought? Then you have Dr. Gray in Colorado and Lindzen at MIT. Those are just a couple scientists not in on the “consensus”. Dr. Gray, a renowned climate and hurricane scientist of 50 years, has not been asked by the IPCC for input. Gosh, I wonder why. Then we have that crazy scientist in Denmark, scientists in Russia… well, you see where this is going.

Appealing to consensus is what those who don’t have a strong argument that survives on its own do.

i have two problems with that point-
1) on this forum, you’re mostly preaching to the choir, so you’re not likely to change that many minds here.

2) when someone with an alternate viewpoint comes here and disputes you, you have to go on the defensive. clearly it has been illustrated multiple times that the right wing will inject whatever untruths into the discussion they can. so merely having the discussion is giving them an opportunity to put you on the defensive and creates an even greater possibility that an outsider will see the discussion and come away with the impression that there isn’t a consensus on global warming.

the longer this debate rages on, the more ground you lose, because your standards for winning the debate are, well, winning. they know they don’t have to win; all they have to do is what they’ve been doing here and elsewhere in the media: give the impression that there’s still a debate.

it’s clear that the strongest detractors of the veracity of global warming are the fossil fuel industries. unfortunately, popular opinion in america has dictated that economic issues trump environmental issues. you can provide as much scientific evidence as you want, but some people are still going to need more proof (you know — their house melting or something like that). regardless, the oil and coal industries can just pay their own “scientists” to refute the evidence, and then they can trot out the old ‘economic disaster’ boogeyman. net result: no public consensus.

but you know what? security is always going to trump the economy, environment, health care, gay marriage, immigration, education and even, apparently, basic civil rights. it’s inarguable that oil dependence is a national security problem. even seixon agrees, as he says in #172: “Now, we should lean away from fossil fuels, not because of global warming, but because we need to become indepedent of other nations when it comes to our energy needs – especially independent of places like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela”

so there’s your angle! there’s the common ground that leads to a consensus of yes, we should do something… but instead, in #173, you went right back to arguing ‘my science is right and yours is wrong’. and the debate rages on. and nothing gets done.

just remember, winning the debate doesn’t mean winning the issue. john kerry proved that in 2004.

I don’t expect to win the global warming debate frankly, although I am interested in the science professionally and personally and think that it provides an imperative to change our way of life before it is too late. The decadence will go on in the bar of Titanic until the water swirls around the humand race’s feet, i’m afraid. Its too easy for people to take an ostrich approach of: its not real, can’t do anything, Jesus will save me, the economy will crash, the Chinese will cheat, blah blah. Fear will work, so sure unleash the national security dog – trouble is Chimpy and his Organ Grinders sold this adventure as was on the cheap, the soldiers go to Iraq and the rest get to sacrifice by heading to Disneyland on a refinanced mortgage. I don’t think the US citizen is capable of the kind of sacrifice that energy dependence on all sources of oil and climate change brought on by fossil fuel overuse will require. And that’s the problem. There are ideas to change the debate – Apollo Alliance for example, but it will take another ‘Jesus H Christ’ event combined with getting the f***ing oil men out of government to move anything.

But if as you say, the broader issue of energy and national security, with a practical, realpolitik of a JH Kunstler or Greg Palast, that is an argument worth having. Same as the Iraq War is useless to argue on ‘moral’ grounds – realpolitik leads you to administration incompetence and mendacity and proposes an alternative which involves getting western nations off of the destabilizing addiction to any kind of fossil fuel.

all i’m saying is you want to win the debate, they want to prolong and confuse the debate so nothing’s actually done. that’s their tactic, and if you go along, you play into their hands. and i agree, don’t leave the field — in fact, do what they do… take them on their field, which is supposedly national security.

just a simple query: how do you expect to win the global warming debate in a country where, according to gallup, 46% believe “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so”?

i agree, as principled people you shouldn’t concede ground to liars. but you do realize that as long as this debate is occurring, they’re on the offensive, and you’re on the defensive. it’s easy to lie about global warming, though. just get an oil company to pay a “scientist” enough money (dr. balling, anyone?) and the waters of truth are officilly muddied.

it’s much harder to deny threats to national security — i mean, for obvious example, they manufactured an entire war on imaginary fears of wmd we now know did not exist.

our dependence on oil is directly responsible for the war on terror, 9/11, the energy crisis, and will likely lead to an economic disaster worse than anything predicted by right-wing pundits as a result of actions against global warming. it’s this simple: end the oil dependence, end the war on terror. no more foreign policy adventures.

btw, yes, good result by oz in the world cup, thanks. i’m an american (dual citizen actually), though, and frankly have very little interest in soccer. neighbors kept me up last night screaming…3 pm match in germany ends after midnight here (and all the oz scoring was near the end of the match). i did see the england – paraguay match, however. most of my friends here are from the uk…

“turn the debate to national security. the same changes that need to occur to prevent global warming need to occur for reasons of national security” Agreed, but only Wolfowitz-style, that is the one reason ‘to agree on’ that will work.

3-1 v Japan, fine result BTW. I saw Viduka and the keeper play recently, I rate OZ to be one of the surprises of 2006.

you can all keep playing seixon and randy’s game. as long as you do, they’re winning. the point of their game is to keep everyone arguing back and forth and consequently doing nothing.

just a reminder that it isn’t very progressive to sit around arguing with halfwits. especially when their goal is to bog down the debate and prevent anything from actually happening.

you do always have the option of getting up from your computers and actually doing something about it — you know, besides arguing with some right-wing hacks that you’re never going to convince anyway.

seriously, people, this is classic right-wing tactic here: you want to win the debate, but all they need is a draw — the net result is the same as a win for them: nothing is done

turn the debate to national security. the same changes that need to occur to prevent global warming need to occur for reasons of national security.

can anybody respond to these quotes:

bush, in his 2006 SOTU speech — “we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world”

Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy [http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org] — “We are funding terrorism with our petrodollars. The bulk of the funding for terrorism is money that flows from state sponsors of terrorism and from there to terrorist organizations. In other words we’re paying them to kill us…As one who approaches this from a pure national security perspective I really believe we have no choice but to seize the opportunity to move the country as rapidly as possible off the vulnerability associated with this current reliance on foreign oil.”

“Hansen’s group looked into the causes of the fluctuations, and they got a rather good match for the temperature record using volcanic eruptions plus solar variations. Greenhouse warming by CO2 had not been a major factor (at least, not yet). More sophisticated analyses in the 1990s would eventually confirm these findings. From the 1940s to the early 1960s, the Northern Hemisphere had indeed cooled while temperatures had held roughly steady in the south. This was largely because of normal variations in natural forces, although industrial aerosol pollution had helped. Then the warming had resumed in both hemispheres. “

Maybe you could get some publicity for yourself reviewing Michael Crichton’s next book?

But then again, there is this in your statement, so, if I were you I would be very careful what I said about anything I was not competent to comment on…

“Hmm. I’m sorry. I don’t recall anyone saying Iraq had nuclear weapons.” Reagan didn’t ‘recall’ either, but that ‘dog does not hunt either’ – Seixon. Post #172

Over to you Dick Cheney:

“And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons” – Dick Cheney, March 16 2003

How about you Chimpy or did Condi make you say this;

“”The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” – George W. Bush, SOTU, 2003

So Seixon, your Reaganesque parsing may get you off in a court of law, but if I were you, I would say the smoke rising from your underwear gives you away….

Thanks for playing ’spot the whopper’, better luck next time.

I wonder how many people who so blithely say “we should do nothing about global warming until all the evidence is in” also supported the invasion of Iraq because they just might have nuclear weapons?

Hmm. I’m sorry. I don’t recall anyone saying Iraq had nuclear weapons. Oh, and uh, Iraq had WMDs earlier, and the UN inspections were ongoing because everyone thought they still had some. In other words, for your comparison to work, we’d have to have experienced knowing for a fact that CO2 emissions caused global warming earlier, and then be scared it was going to happen again. That dog won’t hunt now will it.

So if you support doing nothing about global warming but supported the war in Iraq, I must ask why?

Because I can read a temperature graph and can see quite well that it is no warmer in most of the world than it was in 1930, and that CO2 emissions and the temperature do not correlate all that well, especially between 1930 and 1970. Even if CO2 was the thing making everything abnormally (well in some few places anyways) warmer, there’s not much we could do to stop it anyways. Other than invading China, India, and the entire third world and force them to stop what they’re doing. I doubt you’d support that, and neither would I. So what are you left with, the Kyoto Protocol? Nobody serious about global warming thinks that the Kyoto would solve anything, even if we take it as a given that all the IPCC’s predictions are accurate.

Oh, and eh, we can do BOTH. The main problem with CO2 emissions is that they are usually combined with other pollution. Pollution is bad. Also, CO2 emissions come from the use of mainly fossil fuels. Now, we should lean away from fossil fuels, not because of global warming, but because we need to become indepedent of other nations when it comes to our energy needs – especially independent of places like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

unbelievable,

It took you that long to come up with that lame b.s.? You have to leave to go to sleep conveniently when people have asked you for information at four in the afternoon over there? And you wonder why we don’t believe anything you say…

Eh, what? “Linkgate” erupted at about 6.30pm EDT, which is 12.30am my time. Then you asked me for links at around 4pm my time, when I was busy like most people are during the afternoon. Not only that, but you never specified what exactly you wanted to see a link for. I might as well just blurt out “SHOW ME A LINK!” and then complain because you don’t give me one because you have no idea WTF to give me a link for. How lame.

I won’t go to your blog because you’re always pushing it and I am not interested in reading more of your tripe than I already do.

OK, but you complain that I don’t provide links, yet I do because they are on my blog. Your unwillingness to read my blog to actually see what you claim you want to see shows you’re just being disingenuous and trying to paint me as dishonest or unreliable.

So, as always, you have nothing. Just what we’ve come to expect from you Seixon. You conservatives are shameless in your deception…

Have nothing for what? You STILL haven’t asked me for anything specifically. I have no idea what you want to see. This is the game you and others always play, like Zookeeper. You keep asking for links, but never specify WHAT you want to see links for. It’s like playing the “Who” gag. “Who’s here. Who? Yes, Who. No, Who’s here? Who is. Tell me who is here! Who is!”

Here’s the link I posted in the other thread: http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/2004ja010964.pdf

I have no idea if that’s what you wanted, but I’ll just take a wild stab in the dark.

Oh, and when are you going to stop deluding yourself into believing I’m a conservative? Liberals are every bit as deceptive as conservatives, the fact that you believe otherwise shows your true partisan flavor.

There’s more studies being done on the Sun out there, if you only cared to research it instead of gobbling up garbage from Think Progress.