Yes in the wake of the Climate McCarthyism we see on display against Lennart Bengtsson, I wonder if these people might re-think some of their own roles in the smearing of climate skeptics?
The webcast is on now at Yale Climate Connections, and is titled:
“Re-thinking Climate ‘Denialism’”
May 15, 2014, 2:30pm EDT, 11:30am PDT
From http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/30onclimate-videos/
As discussions drag on over what to do about our warming climate, let’s step back to reconsider the battlefield of rhetoric and discord. And how and whether it eventually can lead to harmony.
Political scientist and climate change policy expert David G. Victor, of the University of California at San Diego, encourages changing labels and strategies in ways that recognize a more complex political landscape. No more “climate denialist” name-calling, he urges.
Co-author of the recently published mitigation report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Victor will be the featured guest on The Yale Forum’s next 30onClimate webcast — May 15 at 11:30 am PDT (2:30 pm EDT).
30onClimate moderator Bruce Lieberman will interview Professor Victor about the complicated rhetorical landscape of climate change, and importantly, what the latest report from the IPCC has to say about where the globe’s climate is headed and what we can do about it.
You can access the webcast either by Google+ or YouTube feed
Have a question? Send an e-mail now!
Some background:
“Bizarre and threatening” is the term U.C. San Diego political science professor David G. Victor uses to describe how many in the climate science community view what some call climate “denialism.”
But Victor thinks a big part of the problem involves just how scientists and their supporters approach the subject — beginning with the use of the term “denialism.”
“If you really want to understand what motivates these people and what motivates the captains of industry and voters who listen to them,” says Victor, “stop calling them denialists.”
Source: http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2014/03/climate-denialism-through-eyes-of-uc-davis-political-scientist/
“Re-Thinking” is Marxist jargon, and like all Marxist jargon, it does not mean what it sounds like it means. The phrase is deliberately misleading.
You watch one day the spin doctors will announce that it was a tough job but we succeded and climate change is no longer a threat
In a related matter in the region where David Victor works, we now have alarmists declaring the San Diego fires a “wake up call” while UCSDs own climate change website on Santa Ana wind conditions says that springtime Santa Ana winds are common.
Furthermore, if anyone ever wanted to look at stats related to a series of events and infer a human cause, the ignition times and locations of the 9 San Diego fires almost rule out entirely natural ignition of the fires. Arson (a human intervention if there ever was one) sticks out as a likely cause.
Yet the community that yells “denialist” and “irrational” at us doesn’t seem to even contemplate that some person(s) might have lit these fires – it undermines that guilt laden narrative and highly oiled blame treadmill that gets fired up at every natural disaster.
/Rant off
Folks need to be careful here, many of us sceptics are not card carrying left or right wing nutters, but live pragmatically in the real world in between. There’s a danger of colouring climate change with one political hue, the danger being that it’s actually not that clear cut, despite what some of the more lunatic fringes would have us believe.
We will know they have really come to proper terms when they start calling us “infidels”—-from their point of view, which is a religious, pseudoscientific faith in an approaching climate apocalypse, we are unbelievers, heretics, and infidels. “Denialist” just does not get to where these purportive scientists have gotten to.
Only in religion do proclamations of faith and condemnations of dissent grow in inverse proportion to the facts supporting the believer’s world view. The religious shout at the non-believers not only to suppress dissent but also to quiet the doubts in their own heads.
Nobody in their right mind could look at the absence of warming in the last two decades and not have doubts about the rectitude of the climate models on which the great faith is based on. The doubts are painful to a believer, and shouting at dissenters is a kind of anesthetic.
“Infidels!!” That is what they really think we are.
Is “Re-thinking” anything like “Re-education”?
Beesaman: right on. I’m turned off just as fast by right-wing group-think as by left, and I know I’m by no means the only one.
Reality speaking – the CAGW group own the political discourse in the media and publications, but they have failed to win over the public. Now their only method they have left is the use of force to prevent the growing voices of dissent. They know the public is their enemy. Nature itself is not cooperating – they have no where else to run and hide. Force is their last option.
beesaman says:
May 15, 2014 at 11:46 am
“Folks need to be careful here, many of us sceptics are not card carrying left or right wing nutters, but live pragmatically in the real world in between. ”
Ah, so you’re a Hegelian calling other people nutters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism
I can’t speak for the Climatist priesthood, of course, but I would suggest they regard skeptics as more ‘heretics’ than ‘infidels’ (hence the term ‘deniers’). After all, infidels (who adhere to a different or no True Belief) can be converted; heretics (who claim the tenets of the True Belief are false) have to be eliminated.
/Mr Lynn
I’ve just finished reading Dr Brian Fagan’s “The Little Ice Age” for the
second time. I paid particular attention to the violent storms which he
documents. They hit the North Sea coasts some twenty to thirty years
or so after cooling started. They were vicious, and very destructive
with over 30.000 deaths attributed to one.
The irony is these climate warmists are right in one sense. We are headed
for bad or worse `extreme weather.’ But they are wrong about the reason
or mechanism. The Sun has entered a quiescent phase with most of the
indicators of its magnetic activity also showing lows. This decline may have
been responsible for the current 17-year `pause.’
Historically, significant climatic cooling has been associated with these
lows, so we can most likely expect some of that to occur this time. The
PDO has peaked and gone into the cooling part of its cycle. We can
definitely expect some cooling from that. I remember the `incoming ice
age’ of the middle 1970’s when the PDO reached the bottom of its cycle.
One plus one equals two. Don’t sell your shares in wool!
Not that my opinions matters, but I think it’s better to refer to the other side as “people concerned about global warming” rather than alarmists or warmanistas or what have you. Even though we are called deniers and criminals and worse by the other side there’s no reason to sink to their level. It would be nice if they could refer to us as “people who are skeptical about global warming” too, after all we’re all people in the end. Of course I doubt it will ever happen, but it would be nice.
“Rethinking Climate Denialism”
They’re idiots at Yale, though from what I have read, innocent ones. For example, they probably actually believe the “captains of industry” are on the skeptics’ side. They certainly cannot follow the money.
Also, they are naive from a strategic communications point. Extreme ostracism against the skeptics is the ONLY profitable strategy to keep the money flowing. For example, acceding to ideas of lower climate sensitivities would destroy tens of billions, maybe hundreds of billions, in value in the carbon (dioxide) markets.
I hang out with a bunch of avowed atheists, but due to their politics they embrace the religion of climate change, it is maddening for me but I just do not bring up politics or CAGW.
No DirkH, I’m a Pragmatic Realist somewhat along the lines of James, Dewey, Peirce, Haack, Rescher, Biesta etc…
Giovanni Papini likened Pragmatism to “a corridor in a hotel room. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you might find a man writing an aesthetic volume; in the next someone on their knees praying for faith; in a third a chemist investigating an element’s properties…They all own the corridor, and all must pass through it.”
Sadly Papini was a bit right wing, as many were of his generation in that part of Italy but his analogy is still not bad.
For me Pragmatism rests in the usefulness of the scientific method, but not in a blind obedience to it, as Pragmatism demands of science the same fallibilism that it demands in all things, which is not the same as a blanket scepticism as it allows for action based upon plausibility (abductive reasoning). For me some of the claims made by ‘Climate Scientists’ are just not plausible.
Just call the alarmists “racist bigots” for wishing to damn non-white Third-Worlders to a life of respiratory distress breathing fecal dung fire fumes in every dark hut.
. Beesaman wrote: “There’s a danger of colouring climate change with one political hue”.
You make a valid point, but you have to realize; it is the LEFT that has made this choice, and no one else. Name a single influential Democrat in the US today who will say, on the record, that he doubts that “climate change” is an absolute fact, and really isn’t a dangerous threat that must be addressed immediately. I can’t.
When one side goes lock stop in favor of an ideology like they have, the die is cast. They have decided that anyone who doubts the reality of “climate change” is on the “Far Right”, and if you oppose them that is what you will be called, no matter whether you think you belong there or not. The choice of labels isn’t yours, it’s theirs.
(and this might be useful in pointing out that quite a few other people who are labeled “far right” by the media noise machine really don’t deserve that label, either. That’s just the label they use to marginalize people who have ideas that they don’t want to deal with honestly.)
WWS – not everyone lives in America… 🙂
“John Boles says:
I hang out with a bunch of avowed atheists, but due to their politics they embrace the religion of climate change, it is maddening for me but I just do not bring up politics or CAGW.”
This is not surprising at all, but I do not think it is necessaily connected to their “politics”. I am a Catholic Christian myself, and I believe that God has put a desire in all of us to connect with something mysterious and much, much greater than ourselves. Some of the most “religious” people you will ever come across are atheists. From my own biased point of view – CAGW, Earth Worship/extreme environmentalism , the most extreme whackos in PETA, etc are all ways of simply trying to fill a hole that is in each of us. I am a believer in both science and Christianity, and I believe there is truth in both pursuits, but they are mostly separate, in the sense that truths gained by proper scientific study, while often of great benefit to mankind, are not the ones that necessarily get one closer to God and his eternal (timeless) kingdom, which exists in dimensions we have not and likely will never discover through science; and many of the truths of God and his kingdom are not necessarily applicable to scientific study . But, science itself can become a religion as well for some people.
This is what gets me about some of the commenters on WUWT – the absolute need to create a solid block of people to hate without definition.
I grant that most of the political rhetoric on man-made climate change has come from the progressive left in the US, a clear demographic that includes not a few academics. But those of us of an independent mind would say that the drawing of battle lines in this has come from the “Exclusionist Right” with its rhetoric of removal of any democratic rights to those who don’t believe in certain core political beliefs and the pillorying of large parts of America who don’t think like that as “Marxists, communists, socialists and liberals”.
What progressives have learned about how they conduct themselves in the climate debate is a near perfect mirror of the politics and rhetoric of exclusion as practiced by some conservatives since the Reagan Administration and the rise and rise of Karl Rove. Attack at every opportunity and never ever apologise for any mistakes. Attack the person not the argument. Decry your opponents as shills of Big XXXXXX whatever that may be. Circle the wagons with like-minded people and call it a consensus. Proclaim that America is under threat if these people are heard. Exclude them from the floor of the debate by any means possible. Make preposterous and offensive comparisons with the Nazis and the Holocaust. Make claim to speak for the “Silent Majority” and for unborn generations. Mischaracterise the arguments of your opponent in the most bone-headed offensive way.
Science is the most profitable enterprise both financially and intellectually the world has ever known. I type this on a machine massively more powerful than the one used on Apollo 11, a testament to the power of science and of competitive and open markets.
But climate science has been overtaken by fervent religious beliefs of exclusionary apocalyptic alarm and all I can hope is that science, done properly and well, will endure and the tsunami of irrationality will abate, leaving most of the good stuff behind.
It isn’t left and right, because anyone can be fooled by their own unstated biases and unconscious pre-conceptions. Witness Roy Spencer rejecting Darwinian Evolution and stating his belief in “Intelligent Design”, a clearly religious belief in biologic origins that has no evidence other than assertions to ignorance and incredulity and no predictive capability whatsoever. I don’t believe in evolution by process of natural selection because I like it and want it to be that way, but because it makes sense of the history of life on Earth in a way that no competing theory has ever done.
Why did I reject AGW? Partly because I recognized the very strong religious background to this supposed Theory of Everything that in my view is as pervasive and unfalsifiable as the Christian doctrines of Original Sin and the Fall of Man. It is Creationism in secular garb. Little wonder that it proponents are on the hunt for backsliders and infidels.
Maybe some of them are finally catching on about the disadvantages of using counter-productive epithets. What they still don’t get is that people who know some basic science can see through them and recognize when there is something fundamentally amiss. If you know anything about cheese or eggs or fish or wine the sniff test tells you “No Thanks!”
Am I being too cynical when I observe that a “challenging funding environment” is (at least partly) causing the request for “re-thinking”?
Rethinking would mean that climate scientist would have to remove their snot from the trough. And that ain’t going to happen.
David Victor is clueless as to the motivations of skeptics/climate realists so he invents some categories, which are basically straw men.
Including a mention to the “captains of industry” makes any other nonsense appear trivial. I laughed out loud.
It really shouldn’t be difficult to find polite and non-judgemental terms for all the main positions in the climate debate. The widespread use of “denier” and other insults merely shows how many people are more interested in destroying the opposition than in proving their own case. To demonstrate that it’s possible, here’s a simple “Climate Concern Scale” that I just made up:
Concern Level 0 (the “stasists”) – Nothing unusual is happening to the Earth’s climate so no action is required
Concern Level 1 (the “naturalists”) – Global Warming is happening but is largely or wholly due to natural causes so the only possible response is to adapt to it as best we can
Concern Level 2 (the “adaptionists”) – Anthropogenic Global Warming is happening but the consequences are not likely to be very serious so gradual adaptation is a sufficient response
Concern Level 3 (the “mitigationists”) – AGW is happening and the consequences are likely to be very serious so adaptation will not be sufficient and large-scale mitigation efforts are required
Concern Level 4 (the “catastrophists”) – AGW is happening and the consequences are likely to be catastrophic so mitigation strategies must take priority over all other political, economic and social concerns
Concern Level 5 (the “fatalists”) – It is already too late to prevent CAGW so all attempts at mitigation or adaptation will be unsuccessful
OK, civility break over. War resumes in 3..2..1..
For John A., I think you hit the nail on the head when you wrote:
“Why did I reject AGW? Partly because I recognized the very strong religious background to this supposed Theory of Everything that in my view is as pervasive and unfalsifiable as the Christian doctrines of Original Sin and the Fall of Man. It is Creationism in secular garb. Little wonder that it proponents are on the hunt for backsliders and infidels.”
I think that puts the current state of affairs very well; Climate Alarmism is the new Hellfire and Brimstone Religion for people who tell themselves they’re too smart to fall for a Hellfire and Brimstone Religion.
But politically, since one party has gone “all-in” in support of this idea, you have a choice, as we all (in the USA, at least) have a choice – do we vote to support the secular religious fanatics? Or do we try to vote in those people who oppose the secular religious fanatics?
Or do we simply drop out, and just hope that someone else takes care of our problems for us?
I wish there were some other choices besides those three, but as things stand today, there really isn’t.
I suspect one reason they call us deniers is because of the Dragon Slayers. It’s like the moderate Republican Party accidentally finding itself in bed with Bible bashing fundamentalists or moderate Democrats with North Korean Communists.
My question is simple: WHAT DO I DENY??? (I can be viewed as a ‘moderate’). From my experience MOST sceptics argue about the projected temperatures and speed of warming for the year 2100. Even the IPCC can’t really agree. I do agree with the IPCC on “the most important greenhouse gas” gas though.
I forgot to add
IPCC
“16 No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.”
The terms should be “believer” and “heretic”, to more clearly align the differences with the religious context.
OK, I will say it if no one else will. The real DENIE*S are actually on the Warmist side. I predicted this over 3 years ago on the Guardian comments section. I told one commenter that we will soon know who the real denie*s are as the climate changes – again. That is what we are seeing today.
• Global sea ice OK
• Antarctica sea ice OK
• No surface warming for 17 years
• The heat went deep, deep undercover
• Multi year ice up slightly in the Arctic
• Failed IPCC projections………..again
• Thermal expansion????
• Rate of sea level rise NOT accelerating despite their best efforts, no credible evidence.
They have created their own traps, painted themselves into a corner, digging themselves into a hole, nailed their flags to the mast and are looking for possible rat holes. There are none, you blocked them.
I am a CAGW sceptic.
If I lived in the United States I would most probably vote Democrat, though I would not rule out voting Republican, depending on the issues. Is this hard to understand? I was not born a pigeon and I will not be pigeon-holed by anyone.
There are many Democrats in the United States who are sceptical of CAGW.
There are Jewish scientists and none-scientists who are sceptical of CAGW.
Why should they be called the offensive D word? It’s a very simple question which demands a simple answer. Below are some examples of individuals who simply disagree. I want any Warmist to step up and proclaim the D word on any of the following. Life is not black and white, but shades of gray.
HERE ARE THE ALLEGED DENIE*S
Siegfried Fred Singer
[Atmospheric physicist]
Why I Remain a Global-Warming Skeptic
Searching for scientific truth in the realm of climate.
“But the main reason that I am skeptical about the IPCC, and now the Berkeley, findings, is that they disagree with most every other data source I can find. I confine this critique to the period between 1978 and 1997, thereby avoiding the Super El Niño of 1998 that had nothing to do with greenhouse gases or other human influences. ”
Wall Street Journal – November 4, 2011
—————-
Professor Richard Siegmund Lindzen
[Atmospheric scientist]
What Catastrophe?
MIT’s Richard Lindzen, the unalarmed climate scientist
“All other things kept equal, [there has been] some warming. As a result, there’s hardly anyone serious who says that man has no role. And in many ways, those have never been the questions. The questions have always been, as they ought to be in science, how much?””
The Weekly Standard – Jan 13, 2014
—————-
Dr. Nir Joseph Shaviv
[Israeli-American physics professor]
Nir Shaviv: On IPCCs exaggerated climate sensitivity and the emperor’s new clothes
“The longer answer is that even climate alarmists realize that there is a problem, but they won’t admit it in public. In private, as the climate gate e-mails have revealed, they know it is a problem. In October 2009, Kevin Trenberth wrote his colleagues:”
JoNova Guest Post – 13 January 2012
—————-
Dr. Nathan Paldor ?
Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
By Nir Shaviv
On Sunday last week, a global warming debate was held at the Hebrew University, in front of a large public audience. The speakers included myself, and Prof. Nathan Paldor from the HU, on the so called sceptic side,…..
Science Bits – 3 December 2007
————-
Lord Lawson
[British Conservative politician & Member of the House of Lords]
Climate change: this is not science – it’s mumbo jumbo
The IPCC’s call to phase out fossil fuels is economic nonsense and ‘morally outrageous’ for the developing world
“This is not science: it is mumbo-jumbo. Neither the 90 per cent nor the 95 per cent have any objective scientific basis: they are simply numbers plucked from the air for the benefit of credulous politicians and journalists. ”
Daily Telegraph – 28 Sep 2013
—————-
Benny Peiser
[Director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation]
“No one knows whether next winter will be warm or cold or average, no one knows whether next summer will be hot or wet or dry. It’s very, very difficult to make long-term predictions and therefore, I remain rather sceptical about the reliability and accuracy of these kind of speculation. They are pure speculation, they are not based on any hard facts, it’s an assumption.”
GWPF – 25 March 2013
—————-
Dennis Prager
[Columnist & talk show host]
“Climate change: A reasoned skeptic’s response”
Jewish Journal – December 7, 2011
—————-
Daniel Greenfield ??
[Columnist & blogger born in Israel]
The God of Global Warming
“The God of Global Warming is the embodiment of liberalism and holds all the politically correct beliefs while carrying out brutal atrocities in the name of the left’s favorite political causes.
…..Now Carbon has become the new Storm God, bringing bad weather because people won’t do anything meaningful, like cripple their economies and destroy their standards of living to appease him……”
Jewish Press – November 19th, 2013
Bruce writes “David Victor is clueless as to the motivations of skeptics/climate realists so he invents some categories, which are basically straw men.”
It was interesting to see his categorisation of sceptics was people who where concerned about increasing government control. Its like they cant bring themselves to believe that many of us are actually sceptical about the science. Sceptical about the interpretations of the data, whether the data is fit for use on answering a particular “climate” question or even whether a particular analysis is a valid thing to do.
So for example my take on David Victor is that he has his own area of speciality which he looks at with respect to the climate science and doesn’t understand enough about the science itself to have a view on where scepticism is warranted and to him the so called consensus is all he needs to know the science is mostly “correct”
I’m with beesaman and John A. From my left wing nutter point of view, a lot of the commentary around AGW scepticism seems to emanate from the grind-the-faces-of-the-poor-send-the-children-down-the-mines-burn-the-widows-and-orphans-restore-early-Victorian-society tendency. For at least half the world, this gives AGW a very nasty smell. It requires dedication to logic and science to separate the political aura from the core science, and many people do not have the time, or the training, or, in some cases, the inclination to do that. They go with what we might call their political instincts.
For this reason, I think the emphasis should be on science, and leave out the political rants.
I call them the “Sterilize the “extra” people crowd” and I hook my finges like quotation marks around “extra people” and I simply tell whoever’s listening
“I’ll be damned if I’ll join a bunch of academics who don’t know meteorology and aeronautics calculate the temperature of any volume of atmospheric air using the Ideal Gas Law – not the Greenhouse Gas Law. You DO know, there IS a calculation for any given volume of atmospheric air right? It’s called the Ideal Gas Law and that’s why the people at NASA knew Hansen was perpetuating dishonesty in research for saying there was potential for his claim. For the claim to have potential the atmosphere would have to not operate according to Ideal Gas Law, as it’s known to.”
That usually shows whoever I’m dealing with,
who they’re dealing with.
Avionics. We’re the field who keeps your jetliner from hitting mountains, and hitting the tarmac harder than it does, as the navigation computers assign atmospheric density and airspeed etc.
There’s no calculation in any science on earth that assigns atmospheric temperature according to trace gas percentage. Anybody and everybody don’t change it by spitting in the faces of we in the avionics and atmospheric energy fields who have told the world’s academics and media tuber heads that’s how it is since the beginning.
There is no atmospheric temperature calculation according to anything called a Green House Gas Law.
The atmosphere obeys the Ideal Gas Law which precludes there being
an ‘Green House Gas’ law.
The only science that claims to calculate atmospheric temperature based on trace gas percentage is the one the real scientists of the world are grateful our scientific reputations, don’t resemble.
When the avionics/aeronautics fields project what the temperature of a parcel of atmospheric air is, it’s with reliance on the information derived from projecting the Mercury and Apollo orbits,
and that information was based in research done since the beginning of aviation through the high research years of WW2 and beyond.
If there was a calculation for atmospheric temperature regarding volumes of air in it, which was based on the infrared spectral response of that air,
we’d know it. There isn’t one.
That’s why all the self professing “skeptics” can’t predict their way out of the worst bout with
non-stop self inflicted humilation in the history of science – certainly in most anyone living’s memory. They’re politicians, academics, political government employees, media hacks.
They aren’t skeptics, they’re believers –
in a scam,
who didn’t believe
it was as bad as the scammers claimed.
The true heroes of this whole story are the people who have refused to even touch the claim of there being any proof of a Green House Gas Law being uncovered, overthrowing the real law,
the Ideal Gas Law.
If the avionics/aeronautics fields were populated with people like inhabit the research and reporting of climate there would be no aeronautics/avionics because there’d be no science.
It’s why the 40 retired astronauts and engineers from N.A.S.A. called the “The Right Climate Stuff” group say repeatedly they are ashamed at what one of the employees of that organization James Hansen has done to the reputation of N.A.S.A.
Modern climate reporting is the disgraced, reporting on themselves. Everyone of them believed it and if they did they drove the ones who didn’t, out of reporting on it.
15 May: RTCC: Sophie Yeo: White House to host Google+ Hangout on climate change
A Google+ Hangout hosted by the White House will be a chance for US energy secretary Ernest Moniz and Environment Protection Agency chief Gina McCarthy to address the biggest environmental move of Obama’s presidency so far: his plans to cut emissions from existing coal-fired power plants…
The Hangout will take place on Monday 19 May at 1pm ET, and participants can submit questions to Moniz and McCarthy over Google+, Facebook and Twitter, using the hashtag #WHClimateChat…
RTCC understands that the White House is now recruiting new staff to revamp its climate change division ahead of next year’s UN conference in Paris…
http://www.rtcc.org/2014/05/15/white-house-to-host-google-hangout-on-climate-change/
adopting their terms is accepting their terms of reference. A usual political trick. To make yourself king you have to adopt a narrative that makes others common which is a belitting insulting language that CLASSIFIES. So those who want to be kings in climate science have to belittle others into a class which if you manifest that would be a gulag.
when i get asked the usual trick question ‘do i believe in climate change’ i ask ‘do you believe in the scientific method?’.
Time to take a warmist to court over the term “denier”, which is both inaccurate and has implications of Holocaust denial.I have personally had a go at 2 groups in public who referred to me as a “denier” in the old denigrating tone.
I agree wholeheartedly with RoHa and the others over this left wing right wing debate. I am moderate left wing in my beliefs and I find much of the right wing ideology abhorrent. If I lived in the USA I would probably be labeled communist. However, I find the whole climate change debate appallingly unscientific and largely religious in its form and I feel the focus of this website should stick to science and get away from the left-right nonsense. I think some of the, obviously right wing, commenters here may be surprised at how many left leaning people are just as dismayed at the climate change debate as they are.
Prof Victor should note that some of his “hobbyists” skeptics are engineers who probably know more about climate science than the so called climate scientists as our profession has to deal with climate change in the real world with the construction of structures to withstand extreme weather events with a risk of occurrence for periods typically up to 1,000 years.
Our profession typically has a collective knowledge in developing modeling and analysis of empirical data than the so called climate scientists. Our modeling has to be right because our mistakes stand as monuments unlike so called climate scientists.
We know when so called climate scientists are gilding the lily because our profession is able to understand climate science and our skill sets in modeling and data analysis are more developed than so called climate scientists.
Yes Prof Victor you are right, keep calling us skeptics holocaust deniers and it will make us even more determined to win the debate against the totalitarian climate change scammers. With the internet and social media skeptics are able to by pass the warmist stooges in the media and science journals to win hearts and minds. Real climate scientists who practice their science profession in the spirit of Charles Darwin and Russell Wallace will eventually prevail over the scaremongering scammers.
wws
False dichotomy.
Do we support the secular religious fanatics or the theistic religious fanatics? Neither. The politics of the progressive left and conservative right are the “Smashmouth” politics of demagoguery and exclusion.
When I form my opinions and my arguments I make sure that I listen to and follow the logic of the arguments of my opponents. I think its called maturity.
I find it fascinating to read Mark Morano decry (correctly) the witch-doctor style proclamations of this weather being caused by this human behaviour and that extreme event being caused by that human activity. But the Republican Party is supported by and riven with people whose faith affirmations include exactly that in the Bible. Doubly ironic?
A mature approach would be to criticise the exclusionary tactics of people you are allied with, before you attack you political opponents.
Instead he advocates using labels of “shill, skeptic and hobbiest” To quote Mr. Victor from later in the article – “Denialism is here to stay,” Victor said, and “as the importance of the topic rises so will denialism.” -Typical
A. E. Soledad invokes the ideal gas law, but assuming it does accurately describe the atmosphere as he indeed claims, then the natural variations in air temperature over time will simply cause the unbounded atmosphere to expand and contract via the V term of the equation, just like the unbounded oceans do, and any additional greenhouse warming will merely do the same thing, so his paper tiger is toothless.
Reply to AndewZ –
I like your Climate Concern Scale. I would rank myself as a Level 2. Anthropogenic warming is well recognized at a micro-climate level and it would be incongruous to expect this would not translate into a global effect. How the global effect manifests over the entire future of humankind remains to be seen but I expect it to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
Just to be clear, I cheer those who are politically Independent; I think that is the most moral and ethical position anyone can take these days. And I do give a nod to at least some of the republicans who are trying to fight this, even though I never cease to wonder whether they’ll sell out as soon as the price is right.
But just this morning, here’s yet another example of typical Democrat rhetoric on the issue, a tweet from Keith Ellison, a Democrat member of the House of Representatives from Minnesota:
“Rep. Keith Ellison ✔ @keithellison
Communities of color are more vulnerable to deaths from heat waves, which climate change will make worse #ActonClimate
7:39 PM – 15 May 2014”
(end quote)
Who knew? Even the Climate is Racist now!!! And of course all of you “deniers” out there are racists, too. At least as far as the Democrat Party is concerned.
(Is Keith really so dim that he doesn’t realize that this is the punchline to a very old joke – “World Ends Tomorrow, Women and Minorities Hardest Hit!”)
Frodo says:
“John Boles says:
I hang out with a bunch of avowed atheists, but due to their politics they embrace the religion of climate change, it is maddening for me but I just do not bring up politics or CAGW.”
This is not surprising at all, but I do not think it is necessaily connected to their “politics”. I am a Catholic Christian myself, and I believe that God has put a desire in all of us to connect with something mysterious and much, much greater than ourselves. Some of the most “religious” people you will ever come across are atheists.
The problem is, most self-identified atheists have simply substituted the state for god. But there are still plenty of us who have no religious belief at all. (In fact, I endeavor to eliminate that term entirely from my vocabulary – I “BELIEVE” nothing
Don’t put us all in the same group.
JohnA: you clearly have bought into the common and demeaning ad hominem of the left in describing conservatives. I would concur with your desire to keep these discussions non-partisan, but you should be careful in arguing for non-partisan debate by deploying partisan slurs.
Just an observation: the preconceptions and MISconceptions I’m seeing about the beliefs of those of differing political stripes is truly staggering.
Not surprising, though – people rarely question the blinders of their own ideology.
Looked at part of the webcast. Victor was talking about making people understand climate science. That is simply search for more effective propaganda to spread their point of view. Their point of view is frozen into a belief that the greenhouse effect Hansen told us about is warming up the world. Unfortunately Hansen did not prove that the greenhouse effect exists because he was using a non-greenhouse warming as part of his “proof” that a hundred year greenhouse warming was observed. This means that all the reports of greenhouse warming emanating from the IPCC are just plain wrong, and their climate models coded to use CO2 are false. Neither Hansen nor anyone else has observed greenhouse warming in action. Twenty-four years have passed and billions of climate research dollars have been wasted yet no evidence of the existence of the greenhouse effect has been found. Its absence is not due to lack of IR absorption by CO2 because absorption works just as Arrhenius told us. But Arrhenius theory of greenhouse warming applies only in the case when just one greenhouse gas is present. The earth atmosphere has more, however. To handle the general case when several GHG’s are simultaneously absorbing IR we need the Miskolczi greenhouse theory (MGT). According to him, in such a case there exists a common optimum absorption window which the gases present jointly maintain. In the earth atmosphere the gases that count are carbon dioxide and water vapor. Their optimum absorption window has an IR optical thickness of 1.87, calculated by Miskolczi from first principles. If you now add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere it will start to absorb, just as Arrhenius told us. But that will increase the optical thickness and as soon as this happens water vapor will start to diminish, rain out, and the original optical thickness is restored. This, and not the missing heat hiding in the ocean bottom, is the reason why there has been no warming for 17 years despite increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in air. Any greenhouse warming older than that is simply natural warming, misidentified by over-eager “climate” scientists wanting to prove the greenhouse effect. There have been other periods in earth history when conditions were similar to the warming pause we are now living through. In 2010 Miskolczi used the NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948 to study the atmospheric absorption of IR over time. And discovered that absorption had been constant for 61 years while carbon dioxide at the same time increased by 21.6 percent. This substantial,increase of carbon dioxide had no effect whatsoever on the absorption of IR by the atmosphere. This is an exact parallel to the pause-hiatus we are now living through and proves that it is a long-term phenomenon. It is possible to interrupt it as the super El Nino of 1998 did but when things settle down a constant temperature is again established. To summarize: the enhanced greenhouse theory does not work at all and the Arrhenius greenhouse theory must be replaced by the Miskolczi greenhouse theory to correctly interpret the climate.
@Russ in Tx –
@Jimbo –
Be aware that simply supporting personal responsibility (i.e., integrity in science), limited government (i.e., no over-regulation or excessive taxation, such as nearly every country in the world now practices), and free markets (i.e., simple economic literacy and freedom of choice) will mark one as right-wing.
I always thought this was centrist – cf. John F. Kennedy. But folks pother than Americans may not agree.
Here’s my take on what is really right-wing today: old money, authoritarianism, we the elite know what’s good for you better than you do, the hoi polloi shall bow and scrape, the making of rules which one is not oneself bound to follow, clinging to inhumane ideas long since discredited. Guess whom I’ve just described: a whole sack of leftist billionaires, starting with good old Bloody Mess (= gore)
True, some of the others like Tom Steyer or George Soros may be new money, but otherwise they’re the same. Today’s left in the US is arguably in lockstep with traditional European right wingers, and the Democrat Party in the US is completely in the possession of these people.
By clarification: I mean the traditional right – hereditary privilege – in Europe.
The classic Right/Left dichotomy fails to recognize that those are simply the tiger’s two front paws, playing both sides against the middle.
The beast has the characteristics of both Right and Left because it is both, where the plutocratic oligarchy is supported by the fascist military-corporate-media-legislative-judicial state providing bread and circus for the masses, encapsulated control of reality on the boob tube, with projection of state power abroad in foreign adventures on the one paw, along with the various teats and troughs of the socialist state, on the other, almost no strings attached.
And this is a tiger who can and does change his stripes.
Using my “Superman” quick scanning abilities (joke…) so far I haven’t seen anyone commenting who actually listened to/watched the webcast. Is that correct?
Anyone here claim to have listened/watched?
You said you think the law establishing the temperature of any volume of atmospheric air
specifically precluding trace species temperature dependence “won’t stand up to challenges.”
I waited a few days to see if telling myself,
you didn’t tell me,
“because all warm air expands, the fundamental law defining gas mechanics can not be distinguished from a counterfeit.”
That’s what you said.
———————
May 16, 2014 at 5:00 am
A. E. Soledad invokes the ideal gas law, but assuming it does accurately describe the atmosphere as he indeed claims, then the natural variations in air temperature over time will simply cause the unbounded atmosphere to expand and contract via the V term of the equation, just like the unbounded oceans do, and any additional greenhouse warming will merely do the same thing, so his paper tiger is toothless.