Politics of Global Warming

[pixelsmith]

Can we all agree that the "experts" in this field are from the IPCC and that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a political body? I am making sure we are on the same page here so I can post views from IPCC scientists here.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

And:

2014 Was The Hottest Year Since At Least 1880, Government Finds

 

[pixelsmith]

And:

2014 Was The Hottest Year Since At Least 1880, Government Finds

You apparently didn't read their retraction.

Nasa climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest year on record… but we’re only 38% sure we were right

 

[Tyger]

This is an excellent source for the state-of-affairs - the tension between those living the problems up against the corporate push.

LINK: Beyond the Light Switch | Documentaries | DPTV

 

[pixelsmith]

Tyger you do realize 1880 was the end of the Little Ice Age right?

 

[pixelsmith]

In coming out of an ice age which way would the global temperatures trend? Take your time.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

You're trolling. Present some information please rather than ask the same questions over and over again.

 

[pixelsmith]

Presenting opposing information is obviously not getting us anywhere. Let's bring this back full circle to the very basics and maybe we can all learn something.

 

[Tyger]

Presenting opposing information is obviously not getting us anywhere.

Because this is not a thread that is debating the science. This is a thread about the politics involved in the situation

 

[Tyger]

and just begin a question/answer dialogue we can get somewhere.

That question/answer dialog will not be on this thread. Debating the science of climate change is best done on a debate thread.

Why try to sand-bag this thread? Is it that important to make sure the politics going on around this issue stays obscure and hidden? You are very keen to distract this thread away from it's purpose.

In all due respect, the trolling is being done by Tyger (and you Gene) by presenting information that means nothing or is not supported by observed data.

How to 'unpack' this remarkable sentence!

First off, Gene - as the owner of the site - cannot troll his own site.

Second off, me-self - as the poster that initiated the thread - cannot troll my own thread.

Pixel, you are simply on the wrong thread. The conversation you want is not happening on this thread. It's pretty simple: find the threads that are having the conversation you want to have.

or tyger complains to the mods.

That's right - when you sand-bag a thread, when you stalk me from thread to thread, when you get (personally) nasty as in trying to smear me - I
say something. Surprised? Is it your expectation that when you bully or smear posters they take it and shut-up?

A simple question/answer dialogue between us is clearly the place to start.

No, it isn't - not on this political thread - but if you can gum up the political thread with any off-topic conversation - you effectively shut down the political postings. That is interesting to me. This goes beyond a mere variance in views. It's why I am engaging you to the extent I am - because I think this is an illustration of the whole problem.

 

[mike_thoth]

Global Warming, the ultimate fatalist subject in my humble opinion. For me the politics and the business of "global warming" is what drives the significant alarm at this point. I recently heard an interview with an Australian scientist who was fully behind the AGW hypothesis. The sceptical person was suggesting was for me far more scientific & was far more clear in his message. There have been 3 warming periods over the last 100 years or so, each one equal in both duration & temp increase. The first two were agreed to be fully natural, without any human factors. The third one according to the standard party line is down to human beings. Given that 97% of CO2 is natural, 3% human, why is it that the first two can be natural variation & the last one man made.

What has swayed me in the direction of being sceptical of these AGW claims is the dubious & poor science that has been first publicised by media, recycled by people of fame and then parroted by political and green advocates the world over. There is a belief system at work here where logic exits the door & emotion is used to "educate" the masses. Another issue is global warming business. If global warming was proven tomorrow to be a natural event, who would lose out? How many departments, companies, lobby groups the world over would lose all funding? How many scientists out there that have become dependant on government grants to in some way tie in their own specialisation into climate change would lose out? The business of Global Warming is now a multi billion dollar industry, a juggernaut & there is far too much money & agenda ingrained in it to let it go.

The increasing Alarm in the predictions is another aspect of this. Claims become louder, longer and more alarmist. The problem for these people is they are dependant on the Earth actually following the party line, which it seems to not be doing. Despite rejections of the Global Warming Pause, many pro AGW scientists are having to write papers to explain why this has happened. They at first reject that the warming has paused, refuse to accept it and then ultimately have to explain it, in the scientific way. What happens if the Earth has stopped warming for the next 30 years and we have a cooling trend again?
There are also many people out there that keep track of the claims made over the years and then remind people of them when their tipping point has been reached. I for one have many examples of this and they do make for some very funny reading.

Climate Gate emails were also a very poor example of how science was being done. I have personally read many hundreds of these emails and they are not misunderstood. Anyone who would think that is incredibly naïve. There was also a great report put out by the Global Warming Foundation regarding the enquiries and to say they were half arsed efforts would be too good a comment on it. In order for the AGW temperature /CO2 correlation to be correct then we need to look at the geological record, not just the last 800,000 years, the last 30 years or last 20 years. We need to look over the period of 500 million years. IS there a correlation, No.

Climate gate was the Blue Book, Condon Committee of climate studies, a recent announcement from the Global Warming Policy Foundation has assigned a group of 6 expert scientists to review the data used by global warming scientists to see if the data has been fiddled. Lets see what they find.

 

[mike_thoth]

I have no time at all for people who say the debate is over. One of the things that upset me very much about this emotive subject is the analogies people create. A person like John Kerry who compare climate change (without doubt the most complex subject ever studied by science) to that of gravity, or the temperature ice freezes. This man is likely to make an absolute fortune should carbon trading come into affect, he will personally benefit from this so yes he will support it to the hilt, just like Al Gore, who in the same year released "An Inconvenient Truth" purchased a condo in San Francisco for $4 Million, yards from the sea front, which his movie predicted would rise very soon.

If we take just one aspect of climate, cloud seeding. The weather & climate depend massively on how clouds form. Statistically speaking we know nothing about this subject, virtually nothing. However people think that such a fundamental force of nature can simply be left out of consideration because CO2 is for some reason more important over just the last 50 years?

The result of such ideology & certainty can be measured in dozes of ways, this is just one. I live in the Wales, UK, near here Google Maps

The valley I live inside is now surrounded by these massive windmills that actually don't work for most of the year. The cost of these farms are astronomical and in a time of austerity huge government subsidies are spent to erect these machines that on a good day, provide 3% of our electricity in the UK. The reason these are erected ultimately........ global warming. CO2 apparently is a pollutant to some people, to me its plant food, a vital cog in what I learned in school was the carbon cycle. If I were worried about CO2 emissions, which I am not, then I would be concerned about how much these things firstly cost in cash, but then in carbon emissions, as the metals are sourced all over the world, neodymium for instance, comes from China & the ore is extracted using a very nasty process which pollutes the water table.

This winter I have to read and listen to old people who must decide whether to switch on the heaters at their homes or use the electric blanket at night time because the energy rates are artificially high because of renewable energy.

The way I see it, human contribution of CO2 will have a negligible affect if any in the long term. CO2 is NOT a pollutant, it is vital to the growth of plant life, and therefore, all life on earth. CO2 doesn't track over geological periods. Energy austerity is as bad as financial austerity & we don't need any fake energy solutions like renewable energy.

For energy we have Oil, Shale Gas in the short term. We have Thorium, plentiful reserves. Fast neutron reactors will allow us to use our nuclear waste as an fuel over the next 300 years and we have a global project in the South of France called the eTER which is figuring out a way of using heavy water nuclear fusion, a limitless technology which essentially powers the stars. All of these methods of generating energy have zero pollution, and zero carbon dioxide emissions if one cares about that. I don't.

I was not setting out to put such a long post together but the whole thing angers me because of the irrationality of it.

Support of this AGW crisis comes from some kind of guilt that people have about being human beings. Yes we can be evil and bad, but we can also be brilliant, loving, caring & genius. I prefer to take the positive mind set & I hope others here on this forum join me in the sunshine.

 

[mike_thoth]

That's a good point, there are always groups of people who insist the world needs to be saved, and saved from us. Take a stab at some of these past crisis;
Global Cooling - Ice Age largely because of human CO2
Ozone Layer - CFCs
Population Bomb - Run out of food - Eating our own dead - Humanity as a disease
DDT Ban - Will cause major problems for bird populations amount other things
Eugenics - Human Stock was becoming too weak - Started in the United States before World War 2, the Nazis were behind the US in this particular field & sterilisations were still being given to certain groups in the 50's & early 60's. A real evil.

These are all issues that rely on one thing. The belief that human beings do not advance scientifically or technologically. Food for instance was predicted to run out because of population and room to grow crops. Science resulted in less land being needed for more population. 50,000 kids died each year when DDT was in force, it jumped up to 500,000 per year when it was banned. (these figures I am paraphrasing here). Paul Erlich & John Holdren once made a bet I think in the 1980ss with Julian Simon. The bet was to take 5 commodities & bet that within 10 years these metals chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten would go up in price. They went down as more reserves were discovered because of increased ability to detect them. This is the failure of all these arguments. For instance using Thorium as a liquid fuel in a nuclear reactor was not possible until science advanced enough to learn how to do this.

 

[mike_thoth]

I think it is also important to note that in official UNIPCC records they actually suggest reducing CO2 output by more than 100%. Really! Forgetting the fact that you cant reduce anything by 100%, but reducing the CO2 content of our atmosphere to say 150ppm would start a mass die off in plant life, therefore animal life, and the whole food chain in the natural world would collapse. These policies will result in genocide, no joke as you rightly imply in your own posts Pixel. We need more CO2 in the atmosphere, 1000ppm - 1400ppm would be fine. And for those out there still thinking that Co2 is a pollutant (which it is not), the Navy allows the CO2 in the atmosphere of a submarine to get upwards of 5000ppm for a month at a time.

 

[Han]

Court orders UK to cut pollution - BBC News

 

[mike_thoth]

I would agree with this news item. We should seek to remove pollutants & particulates from our atmosphere, for instance this comes on the back of a recent air pollution issue in the UK, mostly the South West/East where there was a convergence of sand & dust from the Sahara & pollution from Europe. Any reasonable person would like a clean healthy atmosphere. NO2 can be dangerous but at least in the wealthy Western nations we can afford to spend money on cleaning most of our emissions.

 

[Tyger]

That's a good point, there are always groups of people who insist the world needs to be saved, and saved from us.

Saved from 'us' as in our poor decision making 'as a group'. Though that is misleading because generally the decision making is relegated to the powerful and wealthy few. The rest acquiesce - or are compelled to acquiesce - for a variety of reasons.

Take a stab at some of these past crisis;

I am assuming the list you deliver is a list you feel contain bogus claims. Am I correct?

BTW - the term 'crisis' is subjective. You decide how you will see the problems associated with advancing science/technology. How newspapers decide - and decided in the past - to headline news articles is no one's responsibility save the newspapers. They composed headlines that sold copy. No more than that. Example: 'Headless Alien Abducts Child's Pet Squirrel.'

Global Cooling - Ice Age largely because of human CO2

This is an oft repeated statement. Care to give a source for this? In my memory global cooling was and always has been linked to the issue of global warming. The two go hand-in-glove.

Ozone Layer - CFCs

I assume you believe that CFCs were not reduced with the Ozone Layer subsequently recovering.

Population Bomb - Run out of food - Eating our own dead - Humanity as a disease.

Disregarding the sensational phrases (eating dead, humanity as disease) - I am again assuming that you believe we do not have a population problem/explosion, and that food and water (and shelter) are not an issue for a significant portion of the global population.

DDT Ban - Will cause major problems for bird populations amount other things.

Again, I am guessing you rejected the science based on DDT and objected to it's ban.

Eugenics - Human Stock was becoming too weak - Started in the United States before World War 2, the Nazis were behind the US in this particular field & sterilisations were still being given to certain groups in the 50's & early 60's. A real evil.

I would not place eugenics in this list. It's another matter entirely, though it surfaces - and will continue to surface into the future imo - transformed into the debate on how much advanced medical science/technology should be applied to birth and death - the two brackets of life.

 

[Tyger]

I came across this quote, seems relevant to what takes place with words in the politics of climate change, and other things:

"There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they piece your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic." - Diane Setterfield




​

 

[mike_thoth]

How about this as a quotation. "I was alarmist about climate change, and so was Gore. The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago." James Lovelock.

 

[mike_thoth]

Tyger, we can all pretend to be smart & pick quotations that support ones point of view but lets not over egg the pudding. I will try & answer some of these questions but lets try and be honest about it. Firstly climate deniers as a term is obnoxious, offensive & totally incorrect. No one denies climate change. No one deniers the earth has warmed. We question whether humanity is responsible for this warming & we question the science being done to prove mankind is responsible. I wont take part on any forum where a person is ignorant of these basic facts & guilty of using a term that reveals more about the accuser than the person the insult is aimed at.