Tuesday, June 15, 2010

IPCC "Consensus" on Global Warming

This isn't much of a consensus in my book:

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony...

Hulme’s depiction of IPCC’s exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, found here.


Here are my questions to the Church Of Global Warming adherents:

Are you ready yet to accept that you were duped, that you allowed your emotions to get the best of you?

Are you ready to admit that there never was a "consensus" on global warming?

Are you ready yet to do what you yourselves said you were promoting all along--to let the science speak for itself?

Can you accept that your passion alone does not "settle" the science, and that the science in this case was faked?

Can you let it go yet, or are you too emotionally invested in being right to admit you're wrong?

7 comments:

  1. Burning fossil fuels? Never a really good idea - in fact one our worst. Being dependent on such a commodity. Again, never a good idea. Not considering the possibility of alternatives. Not a good idea.

    Granted, in the short term, reality rules and the world needs oil. But to dismiss the even 1% possibility of significant environmental damage and avoidable "climate change" is not very rational.

    Forget the owls and polar bears, smog is bad.

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  2. No one's arguing that smog is bad, especially in Denver. That's a straw man or a red herring or something.

    I was pretty clear what this post was about.

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  3. allen (in Michigan)6:40 PM

    Oh Mike, if you think burning fossil fuels is a bad idea I shudder to think what you might believe to be a good idea.

    And if you think fossil fuel power is bad you ought to get more familiar with the less attractive side of animal power.

    I've gotten to the point now that when I see a western, especially an older western, I burst out laughing at the obvious lack of the most obvious evidence of the passage of large numbers of horses.

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  4. Darren

    About six months ago when Climategate started that idiot Ed Begley was on Fox. I used to have some respect for him. Unlike the rest of the left he’s not the pure bred hypocrite that the likes of ALGORE, Barbara Streisand etc are. But he kept screaming about “everyone look at the peer reviewed documented stuff….that tells the whole story…remember it’s got to be peer reviewed”.

    Brings up a minor fact that the worshippers of the church of the global warming don’t want brought up. There propaganda wasn’t peer reviewed…and the objective media wouldn’t check on it.

    mazenko this obsession with CO2 as a warmer of the earth’s atmosphere from the same people who said in the mid 70s we were heading to a new ice age makes us to say the least skeptical. More like we think people like ALGORE are bold faced liars and are trying to make money off this crap. BTY, what happens if we do increase our % of CO2 in the air? Plants get more of it to breath

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  5. Allen, you're being silly. It's all cost-benefit analysis, and I am not disputing the integral role that petroleum and the internal combustion engine played in the modern age. Despite that, the pollution and environmental damage that results from burning fossil fuels is never a "good idea," it's simply an acceptable cost, or was for a long time.

    That said, the internal combustion engine is outdated technology and has been for at least forty years. The problem, of course, with a replacement is infrastructure and an industry committed to the status quo. Yet, remaining wedded to fossil fuels without actively pursuing alternatives with a preferable cost-benefit curve is not simply stagnant thinking, it's backwards.

    MikeAT - like Reagan believing that trees cause pollution? Real intelligent, there. You've got some chemistry and biology to study, Bud. And, I'm primarily focused on pollution, though CO2 levels is a component of the equation.

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  6. allen (in Michigan)3:36 AM

    Oh Mike, the only reason I'm "being silly" is because you have no effective response.

    Technology doesn't emerge on demand, we do with what our level of technology allows. The extant technology that existed before the internal combustion engine, at least for local, modest-requirement levels of power, was animal power. That's our choice and if you reject the one you don't get to choose from non-existent alternatives; it's either internal combustion power or animal power and like I wrote, no one who's had an opportunity to appreciate the polluting properties of horses thinks the internal combustion engine is a step backward.

    Of course as a lefty you arrogate to yourself the certainty that what you want is someone's responsibility to provide and is probably available but for the morally-bankrupt nature of those keeping you apart from that which you deserve.

    Sorry, there's no technology to replace the internal combustion engine and there may not be for some decades. That's not a result of "stagnant thinking" but of having to deal with the real world.

    Oh, and since you'd like to think yourself smarter then a two-term president of the U.S., two-term governor of California, six-term president of the Screen Actors Guild, successful actor, successful columnist and the man who encompassed the destruction of freedom's single, greatest opponent, you ought to crack a book some time. Trees do emit pollution and pretty nasty pollutants at that although the amount is strongly dependent on time of year and species.

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  7. mazenko, you ignorant slut! :) (Apologies to Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtain)

    To quote myself, “BTY, what happens if we do increase our % of CO2 in the air? Plants get more of it to breathe”

    I don’t recall mentioning Reagan or trees causing pollution. However, I think you need to review this thing called the Oxygen Cycle. Mammals inhale air, use the O2 to produce energy and their bodies and exhale CO2. Green plants take in the CO2, use the photosynthesis, process to generate energy and send out O2. Works out pretty well for all involved.

    What I find hard to believe is that there are supposedly intelligence people saying a natural gas that is essential to the majority of the plant life on this planet is a pollutant and that we (humans) can raise the temperature of the earth.

    Now, can you give me an alternative technology for a 18 wheeler powered by a diesel engine when you need to move twenty tons of supplies 500 miles over the Rocky Mountains overnight. Trains are limited in where they can go and even after they get where they go they have to dismount the stuff and ship it somewhere. Electric motors do not have the torque to move heavy loads or God forbid, fly. Planes still need av gas or jet fuel.

    "Yet, remaining wedded to fossil fuels without actively pursuing alternatives with a preferable cost-benefit curve is not simply stagnant thinking, it's backwards"

    No one is saying do not pursue alternatives. There is a group working on a (for lack of a better word) “windmill” for the water. It would be lowered to 500 ft below the surface where there would always be stream turning the blade. In theory you could run a line of these “water mils” off the coasts and power the entire US for electricity. But we have a problem. The same groups who say “No more oil” etc (while their leaders like little Bobbie Kennedy get in their SUV to get to their private jet to fly off to their twenty thousand square foot mansions to plan anther rally against excessive use of gas and electricity) are the same ones who say No Nukes and no hydro power (don’t want to kill a fish). If that groups gets the "water-mill" working how much you want to bet Earth F#$%ed, err Earth First will sue in court to block it because might hurt a whale.

    For the foreseeable future (we’re both in our 40s so I can say this, in our lifetime) we will need oil and fossil fuels for power. Coal and natural gas for electricity, oil for vehicles (and other things like plastics and rubber). We have more known oil in the US than in the Middle East but we have placed that off limits. As an aside, if the federal government had allowed BP to drill in 500 ft of oil instead of pushing it to a mile deep do you think that spill would be sealed by now…if they had ever happened.

    Yes, we get more benefit from the use of fossil fuels and they cost us.

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