Off Topic Post

 "Like all the best religions, fear of climate change satisfies our need for guilt, and self-disgust, and that eternal human sense that technological progress must be punished by the gods. And the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful."~Boris Johnson, journalist/former Mayor of London

can you deny that:

global cooling was all the rage in the 1970s before we started warming again?

again, has the Earth warmed in the last 10 years?

did you know sea levels have risen eight inches in the past 100 years? and that most of that isn't because of glaciers melting but warming water?

that cows and other ruminants account for fifty percent more greenhouse gas than the transportation center?

that carbon dioxide is not the major greenhouse gas?

read superfreakonomics, then get back to me on man made global warming/climate change/whatever name you come up with next to fear-monger. some of their solutions are iffy because of the unintended consequences, but they do a great job of pointing out some of the myths and problems in general global warming theory.

oh and climate science (particularly in modeling is not like traditional science where people are running actual experiments. they're just creating models whose parameters they choose and pick the values that they're going to roll with. possibilities for bias and over-representation is unfathomably high.

 but not because of cars I assume?

Fo the love of God Lenny please explain all the grapphs which show the Earth going thru SEVERAL NATURAL warming and cooling cycles over MILLIONS and MILLIONS of years.  Homosapians been here about 200k years. Cars less than 100.

Then explain why you man/made warming people only use the recent data (several hundreds of thousands of years) since we have been in a warming cycle.  If you go back twice as far in time as AL Gore does the graph looks TOTALLY different.  Why does he decieve?

Then explain why my home state of Michigan has fossels of PALM trees from Millions of years ago.  Why is there evidence of oceans in the desert?  Man do this too?

Then admit that G'ovt scientists get more grants by saying there is impending danger than they would if everything was honkey-dorey.

For the record, I own two Durango's and my wife drives an extended Escalade (usually only one person in the SUV's), have a 7,000 sqft home with Two air conditioners and Two furnaces, my 50ft boat gets less than 1 mile per gallon, jet ski and snomobile burn oil.....BUT we do recycle our plastic.

I am all for buying trees in foreign countries and saving the oceans and donating to Greenpeace.  We rescue dogs from the pound and only fertalize our lawn 3 times per year.  I would love to buy a Chevy Volt but the body design is uber gay.

Am I a hypocrite?

ps I do feel for those poor polar bears but it ain't my falut

 Why are there palm fossils in Michigan? Ummm... plate tectonics much?

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/geology/anim1.html

marinersheep:

I'm just using "truthers" as a blanket term. People that don't believe that global warming is real get that label. I'm confused as to what your issue is with my statement?

slizza420:

I apologize sir I misinterpreted what you were saying. I thought that by comparing 9-11 truthers with global warming truthers you were basically insinuating that people who believe in global warming were fools. I am a lil bit of a dumb jock sometimes so forgive me for my rants. There are a lot of smart people in OT and this was a very good discussion with a lot of great points coming from both sides of the argument. I will rarely post anymore because I always seem to go off on somebody and that's not really my true character at all. I apologize to anybody on here that I have ever been rude to that's not what I'm like in real life at all. Anyways I enjoyed reading this thread and I suppose that I am a bit biased on this subject because I live in an arctic environment and have seen some of the glaciers here shrink to almost nothing in the last 20 years.

 [x] People pretending to know science in this thread

 [x] People gobbling up whatever position their political party holds itt

 [x] Politics itt

 [ ] Science itt

 [x] People actually paid for and read Superfreakanomics itt

 [ ] Peer reviewed articles itt

 [x] Common misconceptions itt

 [x] The power of interest groups itt

 [x] Standard mention of global cooling itt

 [ ] Jesus on a dinosaur itt

Lenny, I knew you were going to ignore the whole Al Gore graph vs Natural cycle stuff but thanks for the rest of the info.

I am certainly for energy independence.

Lenny:

Sea levels ARE rising. Hundreds of millions live within a few feet of sea level in the deltas of South and South East Asia.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5067351/Rise-of-sea-levels-is-the-greatest-lie-ever-told.html

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".

When I spoke to Dr Mörner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an "expert reviewer" on the IPCC's last two reports, he was "astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one". Yet the results of all this "deliberate ignorance" and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.

Lenny:

 However, this is one research center out of hundreds, a few dozen scientists out of thousands and does not represent the sum total of climate science.

The CRU at East Anglia is the basis of many of the charts ICPCC and Al Gore used to promote their theory and why they received their Nobel Peace Prize.  Way to play down the CRU's contributions to this myth.

Phareal15:

 

Polar shifts. Our magnetic north pole is soon going to meet with our physical north pole.

Lenny:

... unfortunately what I see from the climate change deniers and free market zealots is unwavering defense of business as usual.

standard.

profit$ >>> everything else

ginwilly:

 i really miss Underdog in threads like this.

dpottz:

they caught a lot of flack for that chapter and some of it well-deserved. possibly the best point made was that the chapter seems to go against the whole spirit of freakonomics. after all, the majority of the stories in freakonomics are about unintended consequences of our actions, yet in that chapter, they recommend something that very easily could have dire, unintended consequences.

marinersheep:

I'm just using "truthers" as a blanket term. People that don't believe that global warming is real get that label.