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[sundubuman]

It appears the mainstream media is waking up on the magnitude of the threat to intellectual freedom that the global warming jihadis represent.
Couldn't come a moment too soon.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/15/opinion/edjacoby.php

Hot tempers on global warming
Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe
Published: August 15, 2007


BOSTON: Introducing Newsweek's Aug. 13 cover story on global warming "denial," editor Jon Meacham brings up an embarrassing blast from his magazine's past: an April 1975 story about global cooling, and the coming ice age that scientists then were predicting.

Meacham concedes that "those who doubt that greenhouse gases are causing significant climate change have long pointed to the 1975 Newsweek piece as an example of how wrong journalists and researchers can be." But rather than acknowledge that the skeptics may have a point, Meacham dismisses it.

"On global cooling," he writes, "there was never anything even remotely approaching the current scientific consensus that the world is growing warmer because of the emission of greenhouse gases."

Really? Newsweek took rather a different line in 1975. Then, the magazine reported that scientists were "almost unanimous" in believing that the looming Big Chill would mean a decline in food production, with some warning that "the resulting famines could be catastrophic." Moreover, it said, "the evidence in support of these predictions" - everything from shrinking growing seasons to increased North American snow cover - had "begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it."

Yet Meacham, quoting none of this, simply brushes aside the 1975 report as "alarmist" and "discredited." Today, he assures his readers, Newsweek's climate-change anxieties rest "on the safest of scientific ground."

Do they? Then why is the tone of Sharon Begley's cover story - nine pages in which anyone skeptical of the claim that human activity is causing global warming is painted as a bought-and-paid-for lackey of the coal and oil industries - so strident and censorious? Why the relentless labeling of those who point out weaknesses in the global-warming models as "deniers," or agents of the "denial machine," or deceptive practitioners of "denialism?"

Interesting that Keane asked me just 5 minutes ago about my "denial" on the issue.

Wouldn't it be more effective to answer the challengers, some of whom are highly credentialed climate scientists in their own right, with scientific data and arguments, instead of snide insinuations of venality and deceit? Do Newsweek and Begley really believe that everyone who dissents from the global-warming doomsaying does so in bad faith?

Anthropogenic global warming is a scientific hypothesis, not an article of religious or ideological dogma. Skepticism and doubt are entirely appropriate in the realm of science, in which truth is determined by evidence, experimentation, and observation, not by consensus or revelation. Yet when it comes to global warming, dissent is treated as heresy - as a pernicious belief whose exponents must be shamed, shunned, or silenced.

Newsweek is hardly the only offender. At the Live Earth concert in New Jersey last month, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denounced climate-change skeptics as "corporate toadies" for "villainous" enemies of America and the human race. "This is treason," he shouted, "and we need to start treating them now as traitors." (Jihadis!!!!!!)

Some environmentalists and commentators have suggested that global-warming "denial" be made a crime, much as Holocaust denial is in some countries. Others have proposed that climate-change dissidents be prosecuted in Nuremberg-style trials. The Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen has suggested that television meteorologists be stripped of their American Meteorological Society certification if they dare to question predictions of catastrophic global warming.

[sundubuman]

continued...

A few weeks ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Marlo Lewis published an article opposing mandatory limits on carbon-dioxide emissions, arguing that Congress should not impose caps until the technology exists to produce energy that doesn't depend on carbon dioxide. In response to Lewis's reasonable piece, the president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, Michael Eckhart, issued a threat:

"Take this warning from me, Marlo. It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America."

This is the zealotry and intolerance of the auto-da-f�. The last place it belongs is in public-policy debate. The interesting and complicated phenomenon of climate change is still being figured out, and as much as those determined to turn it into a crusade of good vs. evil may insist otherwise, the issue of global warming isn't a closed book. Smearing those who buck the "scientific consensus" as traitors, toadies, or enemies of humankind may be emotionally satisfying and even professionally lucrative. It is also indefensible, hyperbolic bullying. That the bullies are sure they are doing the right thing is not a point in their defense.The greatest dangers to liberty," Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, "lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

Jeff Jacoby's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.

[keane]

1. Please quote properly. It's easier to follow.

2.

[keane]

Crap. I went and read your posted opinion piece. Now I have to respond.

W-w-w-wait... I'm s-s-s-still gi-g-g-gigg-giggling....

OK. All better.



sundubu, friend, when you respond to science with sleaze, what do you think you are accomplishing? Eckhart was out of line. Obviously everyone on the planet, particularly those slippery scientific types, send threatening letters to all skeptics every time they do some research or analysis or write a an op-ed piece.

I sure do!



I've got to hand it to you: you know your way around propaganda. Look how big my name is in that post! If I'm not forever tainted as a supporter of Eckert now, I never will be!

At least, not until your next "scientific review" of my postings.



One more thing: can you please point me to the science in that article? Is it in fine print? I must need glasses.

[keane]

Oh, and by the way:

[sundubuman]

Dude,

I'm not on the Exxon payroll.....I just want the truth....

And your totalitarianism on science (denial) tells me you are much more interested in politics than science.


Therefore...I wish you good day.


May the TRUTH prevail.....and may those who call people who are skeptical of a theory as deniers

learn to grow up and disassociate their political feelings from science.

It might be a naive wish on my part, but I truly hope for such a day.....

[twg]

[JMO]

Enviro-fascism? Are you Stephen colbert? You do know that the whole attach fascism/nazi to the end of a word thing has now been played out long past the point of ridicule, don't you?

[keane]

[JMO]

delete..meant to edit not quote.

[Butterfly]

I still have a pretty open mind in this issue; so would quite genuinely like to read some of the actual science from indepedant bodies with an alternative view to the common modern global warming one.

[sundubuman]

Butterfly....

A good place to start to receive a balanced scientific view on the issue is this wikipedia page listing some of the leading skeptics of the nature of the much vaunted "consensus"...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming


here are the type of people Keane would claim are "in denial" and Kennedy would call "traitors to the human race"

Roger A. Pielke, Senior Research Scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science

Hendrik Tennekes, retired Director of Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute:

Antonino Zichichi, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Bologna and president of the World Federation of Scientists

Khabibullo Abdusamatov, mathematician and astronomer at Pulkovskaya Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the supervisor of the Astrometria project of the Russian section of the International Space Station:

Sallie Baliunas, astronomer, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Reid Bryson, emeritus professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison:

Robert M. Carter, geologist, researcher at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia:

Ian Clark, hydrogeologist, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa:

Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology, Western Washington University

George Kukla, retired Professor of Climatology at Columbia University and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory,

David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware:

Marcel Leroux, former Professor of Climatology, Universit� Jean Moulin:

Tad Murty, oceanographer; adjunct professor, Departments of Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa:

Tim Patterson [33], paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada: "

Frederick Seitz, retired, former solid-state physicist, former president of the National Academy of Sciences:

Nir Shaviv, astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem:

Fred Singer, Professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia:

Willie Soon, astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London

Henrik Svensmark, Danish National Space Center:

Jan Veizer, environmental geochemist, Prof

essor Emeritus from University of Ottawa:

If you simply read the thoughts of these eminent scientists on the wiki page, you should realize that those who are advocating the Global Warming Theory are doing so for political/social reasons and not for scientific reasons.

In a few years, we will all look back on this with pretty much the same way we now look back on the Ice Age scare of the 70's and the Malthusian population scare that I was forced to study by my idiotic socialist professors back in uni.

This is just the latest attempt by leftist forces to gain power over the world's people, society, and economy.

They will fail and maybe actually be forced to produce something for a living some day...we can only hope.

[sundubuman]

and here are a few of the quotes from these eminent scientists...

"Global warming is a largely natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can�t be fixed."

"Global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy - almost throughout the last century - growth in its intensity...Ascribing 'greenhouse' effect properties to the Earth's atmosphere is not scientifically substantiated...Heated greenhouse gases, which become lighter as a result of expansion, ascend to the atmosphere only to give the absorbed heat away.

"It�s absurd. Of course it�s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we�re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we�re putting more carbon dioxide into the air."

"The authors identify and describe the following global forces of nature driving the Earth�s climate: (1) solar radiation ..., (2) outgassing as a major supplier of gases to the World Ocean and the atmosphere, and, possibly, (3) microbial activities ... . The writers provide quantitative estimates of the scope and extent of their corresponding effects on the Earth�s climate [and] show that the human-induced climatic changes are negligible."

"That portion of the scientific community that attributes climate warming to CO2 relies on the hypothesis that increasing CO2, which is in fact a minor greenhouse gas, triggers a much larger water vapour response to warm the atmosphere. This mechanism has never been tested scientifically beyond the mathematical models that predict extensive warming, and are confounded by the complexity of cloud formation - which has a cooling effect. ... We know that [the sun] was responsible for climate change in the past, and so is clearly going to play the lead role in present and future climate change. And interestingly... solar activity has recently begun a downward cycle."

"global warming since 1900 could well have happened without any effect of CO2. If the cycles continue as in the past, the current warm cycle should end soon and global temperatures should cool slightly until about 2035"

"This small warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood. Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential."

"I am of the opinion that [global warming] is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people."

"So many people have a vested interest in this global-warming thing�all these big labs and research and stuff. The idea is to frighten the public, to get money to study it more."

"About half of the warming during the 20th century occurred prior to the 1940s, and natural variability accounts for all or nearly all of the warming."

"The possible causes, then, of climate change are: well-established orbital parameters on the palaeoclimatic scale, ... solar activity, ...; volcanism ...; and far at the rear, the greenhouse effect, and in particular that caused by water vapor, the extent of its influence being unknown. These factors are working together all the time, and it seems difficult to unravel the relative importance of their respective influences upon climatic evolution. Equally, it is tendentious to highlight the anthropic factor, which is, clearly, the least credible among all those previously mentioned."

global warming "is the biggest scientific hoax being perpetrated on humanity. There is no global warming due to human anthropogenic activities. The atmosphere hasn�t changed much in 280 million years, and there have always been cycles of warming and cooling. The Cretaceous period was the warmest on earth. You could have grown tomatoes at the North Pole"

"There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years. On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"

"So we see that the scientific facts indicate that all the temperature changes observed in the last 100 years were largely natural changes and were not caused by carbon dioxide produced in human activities."

"...the myth is starting to implode. ... Serious new research at The Max Planck Institute has indicated that the sun is a far more significant factor..."

"Our team ... has discovered that the relatively few cosmic rays that reach sea-level play a big part in the everyday weather. They help to make low-level clouds, which largely regulate the Earth�s surface temperature. During the 20th Century the influx of cosmic rays decreased and the resulting reduction of cloudiness allowed the world to warm up. ... most of the warming during the 20th Century can be explained by a reduction in low cloud cover."


lotsa denial going on......

[sundubuman]

And another very untalked about aspect to the whole brouhaha is the fact that some of the temperature gauges scientists use to try to measure the global mean temperature (which many scientists don;t even believe is possible) are poorly placed/maintained.

http://www.surfacestations.org/

well-maintained station
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=56

poorly maintained one
http://www.surfacestations.org/images/MarysvilleCA_USHCN_Site_small.jpg

Both of these stations 100 years worth of statistics are used to gauge trends in temperature. Which one do you suppose shows "global warming"?

[keane]