Why don't Republicans belieave in Global Warming?

Discussion in 'Politics' started by mahram, Jul 25, 2006.

Is the world getting warmer

  1. yes

    17 vote(s)
    81.0%
  2. no

    4 vote(s)
    19.0%
  1. Pekelo

    Pekelo

    I can not believe that you are trying to explain away facts. So hey let's just take the word of the US government who has vested interest not to acknowledge global warming and implement laws that would cost its lobbyist corporations huge amount of money...

    After all, we could just flip a coin on the issue...or, take a look at the almost completely melted snow of Kilimanjaro:

    http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=10856
     
    #41     Jul 27, 2006
  2. And the losers will be the people who live in the temperate zones. Aka most of northamerica, europe, asia, and africa. What people are asking for is action now. prepare for the events that are coming. Just look at cali. Over 100 dead so far. And most of the united states going througth record heat. Most of europe going through record heat. china suffering some of it worst storms in over 2000 years of recorded chinese history.

    LOL canyonman00, just look at katrina of how unprepared the government is to react to something that is so predictable. And thats when they think they are prepared. Can you imagine how people will react to a heatwave that lasts througth the spring and ends in october. And with extreme water protection measures. Aka no baths, no showers, no extra usage. its already here. Large parts of the US are facing class 1 water restrictions.


     
    #42     Jul 27, 2006
  3. canyonman you remind me of those people who still smoke, deny they have cancer, deny smoking caused their cancer, while they are in chemo for lung cancer :D

    Yes canyonman smoking doesnt cause cancer.

    LOL canyonman if the republicans belieave that the weather and temperature of the earth isnt changing, why are they pushing laws to prevent lawsuits against companies that cause global warming, and allowing companies to drop insurances for weather related damange :D

     
    #43     Jul 27, 2006
  4. newbunch

    newbunch

    More people die each year from cold than from heat:
    http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V6/N17/C1.jsp
    http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V8/N21/EDIT.jsp
     
    #44     Jul 27, 2006
  5. Arnie

    Arnie

    Climate of Fear
    Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.

    BY RICHARD LINDZEN
    Wednesday, April 12, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

    There have been repeated claims that this past year's hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?

    The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science--whether for AIDS, or space, or climate--where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.

    But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.





    To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.
    If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion. Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well, and calls for drier, less humid air. Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, not less--hardly a case for more storminess with global warming.

    So how is it that we don't have more scientists speaking up about this junk science? It's my belief that many scientists have been cowed not merely by money but by fear. An example: Earlier this year, Texas Rep. Joe Barton issued letters to paleoclimatologist Michael Mann and some of his co-authors seeking the details behind a taxpayer-funded analysis that claimed the 1990s were likely the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the last millennium. Mr. Barton's concern was based on the fact that the IPCC had singled out Mr. Mann's work as a means to encourage policy makers to take action. And they did so before his work could be replicated and tested--a task made difficult because Mr. Mann, a key IPCC author, had refused to release the details for analysis. The scientific community's defense of Mr. Mann was, nonetheless, immediate and harsh. The president of the National Academy of Sciences--as well as the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union--formally protested, saying that Rep. Barton's singling out of a scientist's work smacked of intimidation.

    All of which starkly contrasts to the silence of the scientific community when anti-alarmists were in the crosshairs of then-Sen. Al Gore. In 1992, he ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. Nor did the scientific community complain when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists--a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry.

    Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.

    And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as "discredited." Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming--not whether it would actually happen.





    Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.
    Mr. Lindzen is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.
     
    #45     Jul 27, 2006
  6. Arnie

    Arnie

  7. Arnie

    Arnie

    From the WSJ 7/14/2006..............


    Friday, July 14, 2006
    Global Warming - Hockey Stick Hokum

    More data on the swindle known as 'global warming'.

    WSJ.com - Hockey Stick Hokum:

    "It is routine these days to read in newspapers or hear -- almost anywhere the subject of climate change comes up -- that the 1990s were the 'warmest decade in a millennium' and that 1998 was the warmest year in the last 1,000.

    This assertion has become so accepted that it is often recited without qualification, and even without giving a source for the 'fact.' But a report soon to be released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee by three independent statisticians underlines yet again just how shaky this 'consensus' view is, and how recent its vintage.

    The claim originates from a 1999 paper by paleoclimatologist Michael Mann. Prior to Mr. Mann's work, the accepted view, as embodied in the U.N.'s 1990 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was that the world had undergone a warming period in the Middle Ages, followed by a mid-millennium cold spell and a subsequent warming period -- the current one. That consensus, as shown in the first of the two IPCC-provided graphs nearby, held that the Medieval warm period was considerably warmer than the present day.

    Mr. Mann's 1999 paper eliminated the Medieval warm period from the history books, with the result being the bottom graph you see here. It's a man-made global-warming evangelist's dream, with a nice, steady temperature oscillation that persists for centuries followed by a dramatic climb over the past century. In 2001, the IPCC replaced the first graph with the second in its third report on climate change, and since then it has cropped up all over the place. Al Gore uses it in his movie.

    The trouble is that there's no reason to believe that Mr. Mann, or his "hockey stick" graph of global temperature changes, is right. Questions were raised about Mr. Mann's paper almost as soon as it was published. In 2003, two Canadians, Ross McKitrick and Steven McIntyre, published an article in a peer-reviewed journal showing that Mr. Mann's methodology could produce hockey sticks from even random, trendless data.

    The report commissioned by the House Energy Committee, due to be released today, backs up and reinforces that conclusion. The three researchers -- Edward J. Wegman of George Mason University, David W. Scott of Rice University and Yasmin H. Said of Johns Hopkins University -- are not climatologists; they're statisticians. Their task was to look at Mr. Mann's methods from a statistical perspective and assess their validity. Their conclusion is that Mr. Mann's papers are plagued by basic statistical errors that call his conclusions into doubt. Further, Professor Wegman's report upholds the finding of Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick that Mr. Mann's methodology is biased toward producing "hockey stick" shaped graphs.
    ...
    In other words, climate research often more closely resembles a mutual-admiration society than a competitive and open-minded search for scientific knowledge. And Mr. Wegman's social-network graphs suggest that Mr. Mann himself -- and his hockey stick -- is at the center of that network."
     
    #47     Jul 27, 2006
  8. You are making many unwarranted assumptions about scientists.

    You say "I don't think they have enough information," but how do YOU know? What is "enough information," and how are you qualified to make that determination?
     
    #48     Jul 27, 2006
  9. Citing a WSJ article is weak evidence beause it is a BUSINESS publication, for the most part, not a scientific one.
     
    #49     Jul 27, 2006
  10. newbunch

    newbunch

    And we should not cite the IPCC since they are primarily a political organization, not a scientific one.
     
    #50     Jul 27, 2006