Tyger do you have any ballz at all to debate here
As stated so many times, I am not interested in debating the science. Never have been.
or will you continue to hide on one of your liberal/socialist/progressive pseudo science
Pixel your comment: "liberal/socialist/progressive" is pure politics. Not an ounce of science in any of it. As for "pseudo science", it is you who are out on left field in this. The science is very clear. You just have to read it.
As for "non debating" threads - the science is not being debated, but how the future may look is certainly a topic for discussion - we could certainly have varying opinions on how climate change will wind up impacting us and what the world will look like, be like, to live in.
But to Oreskes' video -
In Oreskes' 2007 talk linked to in post#12 she goes into the background of the four physicists who argued for the Tobacco Industry and then became spokesmen for the Oil and Coal Industry regarding climate change science (Jastrow, Seitz, Nierenberg and Singer). Since I have no confidence that you (pixel) will actually view the video, I will present notes on the content of the last 10 minutes or so of her talk - though you really should listen to the entire video. You often rant that others are being 'taken for a ride' - when I fear it has been you who seems to have swallowed the kool-aid and have been duped by liars starting in the 1990's - the time frame of your epiphany (as you have stated).
In all instances, the four physicists lost their debates - acid rain was proven to be caused by acid emissions, CFC's were demonstrated to be linked to the ozone layer and were banned, and ETS (environmental tobacco smoke) does cause lung cancer. And yet they were able to use the same arguments again and again - namely, that the science was uncertain, the concerns were exaggerated, technology will solve the problem, and there is no need for government interference. She calls this 'the tobacco strategy'.
The question is - why would distinguished scientists do this? Why would scientists attack science and defend tobacco? It's politics, a political ideology, and it's actually something rather specific - it's the issue of regulation. Because in each of these cases, the underlying goal of the work these men did was to stave off government regulation. It was underscored by an ideological position that is known and been around for a long time, the ideology of "Laissez faire" - of letting free markets 'do their thing' without government interference.
SDI was different - it was about defending the US against Soviet Communism and to win the Cold War. Jastrow, Seitz, Niereenberg and Singer (the four physicists) were fiercely anti-communist. They were also fiercely pro-free markets, and therefore opposed to government regulation and control. They were examples of what George Soros has called 'market fundamentalists' - they had a kind of unshakeable faith in the invisible hand of the marketplace to solve all problems, and an intractable hostility to government regulation as a form of creeping communism. In fact in some articles they have published they have referenced environmentalists as 'watermelons' - green on the outside, but red on the inside.
So now it becomes clear why global warming is so important - because energy is at the root of all economic activity. Everything we do, everywhere we go, everything we make, every vacation we take, all implicate us in using energy and therefore in using fossil fuels. Global Warming is the mother of all environmental problems - energy is at the root of all economic activity. Singer cited Jastrow and Niereenberg as being worried that international treaties like the Kyoto Protocols would undermine US sovereignty, and that, in effect - having won the Cold War, we would lose the peace.
Barry Goldwater had said that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. But this story shows that extremism is indeed a vice. These men who promulgated climate science denial, may have been perfectly justified in having the political beliefs that they held, but they did not make a political argument on political grounds. They disguised a political debate as a scientific one - they camouflaged a political debate as a scientific debate. In the process, they greatly misrepresented the facts about climate science, confused the American people, and delayed political action on one of the pressing global issues of our time.
In the 1980's one of Bill Nierenberg's favorite arguments about global warming was that we could afford to wait and see. We have waited and we have seen, and what we have seen is that the predictions of the 1970's and 1980's, even the 1950's, have largely come true. Global Warming is here (and there are almost no Communists left).