NPR helpfully weighs in on climate change and the upcoming election. Even though a certain party has had super-majority control of the Congress and the Executive branch for the past 2-years (and done nothing on energy/climate policy), NPR blames the real boogeymen and women: GOP candidates not-yet-elected and, of course author George W. Bush. Their arguments, aside from being of the typical straw man variety, go back to the age-old meme: if only the knuckledraggers and flat-earthers would get with the program and accede to the demands of the enlightened (NY Times John Broder summarizes that argument, dutifully). From NPR, which is known for impartial analysis:
The more carbon that gets released into the atmosphere, the higher the average temperature rises.
That’s a scientific fact.
Human activities, such as driving, flying, building and even turning on the lights, are the biggest contributor to the release of carbon.
That too, is a fact.
And yet the majority of Republicans running for House and Senate seats this year disagree.
Ken Buck, the GOP senate candidate in Colorado admits he’s a climate change denier. Ron Johnson, who leads in the polls of Wisconsin’s senatorial race, has said that “it is far more likely that [climate change] is just sunspot activity or something just in the geologic eons of time where we have changes in the climate.”
And when Christine O’Donnell, the Republican candidate for Senate in Delaware, was asked whether human activity contributes to global warming, she said, “I don’t have an opinion on that.”
Conservatives in Congress are turning against the science behind climate change. That means if Republicans take control this November, there’s little hope for climate change policy.
Today’s climate change denial trend isn’t new. Years ago, when President George W. Bush was in the White House, scientific data on climate change was censored, and some scientists and top-level policymakers resigned in protest.
Scientific Findings Dismissed
For 10 years, Rick Piltz worked as a senior official for the Global Change Research Program — the main governmental office that gathers scientific data on climate change carried out by U.S. researchers.
“It was an office where the world of science collided with the world of climate politics,” Piltz tells NPR’s Guy Raz.
In the spring of 2001, Piltz was putting together a major report for Congress. The report would include clear evidence that tied carbon emissions to a rapid shift in global temperatures.
Piltz says his team was told “to delete the pages that summarized the findings of the IPCC report. To delete the material about the National Assessment of climate change impacts that had just come out.”
The IPCC, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is the international body that collects climate research from countries around the world. The National Assessment was a similar report that covered research from U.S.-based scientists. In both cases, the result was conclusive: Climate change was happening and human activity was speeding it up.
But the Bush White House didn’t buy it.
“The expertise had come together to make pretty clear and compelling statements, and to say that you didn’t believe it was to say that you didn’t want to go along with the preponderance of scientific evidence,” Piltz says.
The science was being politicized. Over the next four years, almost every report Piltz and his team put out was heavily edited. References to climate change or carbon emissions were altered or even deleted.
By 2005, Piltz couldn’t take it anymore. He resigned and told his story to The New York Times.
A Conservative Who Spoke Up — And Paid The Price
It’s a big deal for Republicans in Congress to say they believe that humans are heating the planet.
“People look at you like you’ve grown an extra head or something,” says Rep. Bob Inglis, a Republican from South Carolina.
Inglis has represented South Carolina’s 4th District for the last 12 years, but this one will be his last.
In June, Inglis lost the primary bid to Tea Party-backed Republican candidate Trey Gowdy, who accused him of not being conservative enough.
For the longest time, Inglis says, education, health care issues and the environment have been Democratic issues, while taxes and national security have been Republican issues. Inglis says that’s not right.
“As a Republican, I believe we should be talking about conservation, because that’s our heritage. If you go back to Teddy Roosevelt, that’s who we are.”
Inglis paid the price for speaking out about the importance of conservation and climate change.
He admits he may have “committed other heresies,” such as voting for TARP and against the troop surge. “But the most enduring problem I had, the one that really was difficult, was just saying that climate change was real and let’s do something about it.”
Inglis, who also voted no on cap-and-trade, tried to make climate change palatable for conservatives. He proposed a revenue-neutral tax swap: Payroll taxes would be reduced and the amount of that reduction would be applied as a tax on carbon dioxide emissions — mainly hitting coal plants and natural gas facilities.
Inglis also tried to connect the issue of climate change with the issue of national security. “We are dependent on a region of the world that doesn’t like us very much for oil. We need to change the game there.”
Inglis even stressed the need to hold the oil and coal companies accountable for their environmental practices.
Accountability, he says, “is a very bedrock conservative concept — even a biblical concept.”
Even though Inglis won’t be coming back to the Hill to serve another term, he hasn’t lost hope in climate change policy. The choice, Inglis says, is clear.
“Do we play to our strengths? Or do we continue to play to our weakness — which is playing the oil game.”
Tackling Climate Change Takes Both The Left And The Right
Bill McKibben, scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont and the founder of 350.org, says it is a tragedy that conservatives are turning their back on the science behind climate change.
“On this issue maybe more than most, we need that interplay of liberal and conservative,” he says. “Liberals are good at sort of pointing the way forward in kind of progressive new directions and conservatives are good at providing the anchor that says human nature won’t go along with that. That back and forth has been very useful.”
If Republicans take control of the House this November, McKibben says, he doesn’t see a future for climate change policy.
“Look, the Democrats — with a huge majority — couldn’t pass climate change legislation even of a very, very weak variety this year, so I doubt there’ll be any action over the next two years.”
That is, unless conservatives decide to team up with liberals.
“We desperately need conservatives at the forefront of the fight,” McKibben says. “The sooner that conservatives are willing to accept the science, the reality, the sooner we can get to work with their very important help in figuring out what set of prescriptions, what combination of market and regulation will be required in order to deal with the most serious problem we’ve ever stumbled into.”
Congratulations Ryan, you’ve no credibility left. How does it feel?
Owen says:
“You’re kidding, right? This is the level of your understanding of absorption spectroscopy? This is climate skeptic science?”
=============
I think you’ll find our scepticism surrounds the extravagant conclusions that are drawn from wisps of information. Your inference that Enneagram’s dubious analogy represents “skeptic science” is emblematic of this tendency.
Your comment a little later that “Many of your skeptic friends try to argue just the opposite” succeeds in emasculating your own rhetoric.
This topic can be discussed at many different levels, your choice appears to be the basement. Let us know when you bump into positive feedback down there.
The NPR website says that the response to the Williams story crashed their contact form. Maybe we can also do it with this story.
I only listen to NPR every once in a while to check on whether they are still at least as looney as they have been in the past. And it’s amazing how quickly the evidence appears!
But thanks to this post and NPR’s treatment of Juan Williams, there just doesn’t seem to be any more need to do it.
R.S.Brown says:
October 23, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and later, Henry David Thoreau, all
subscribed to the notion, “That government is best which governs
least.”
You may want to source that quote: It’s apparently from Thoreau, not Jefferson or Paine.
http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/spurious-quotes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Disobedience_%28Thoreau%29#.22That_government_is_best_which_governs_least.22
Jefferson was a wealthy plantation owner, and, Tom Paine was poor and believed that government could relieve the misery of mankind: http://www.politicususa.com/en/beck-thomas-paine (I have no idea which group posted this, but, I like their analysis and not necessarily them.). Jefferson’s initial negative view of the federal government changed when he became president and had to actually run things. Think, “Louisiana Purchase” and “Lewis & Clark Expedition”. I’m hardly a Jefferson expert, but, I’m sure there’s more. You can’t follow manifest destiny without a lot of government intervention.
Thoreau was using his society as a backdrop to see how little socially necessary work could be done, which is why he started living in the woods. He was a critic of organized society and thought misery could be reduced by having more time to live life. And like many critics, he was unfair to many people whose labor he could not do without. So, on this government issue, I oppose Thoreau. Personally, I believe that government is best which governs best. But, tautology doesn’t sell books.
I was going to bail out on this reply, but, I put a half hour into writing it, and, now you all have to read it. 🙂
Let us not forget that NPR really is about promoting left-wing politics and……nothing else. Maybe their scientific writers need a psychiatrist.
National Propaganda Radio.
Defund NPR.
NPR is one of only two external radio stations I can and do listen to on my satellite feed.
While acknowledging the left/liberal bias in some of it’s programs I still find the station informative and interesting. Certainly they are no worse than the BBC and in many instances much better.
Surely having alternative points of view on a whole range of subjects is a good thing. NPR seems quite willing to air views that don’t align with their various bias as I have found when phoning in with my own views. That is what WUWT does too.
Rather than descend to the depths that the liberal/left does by trying to stifle alternative views we should rather encourage as much diversity in broadcasting as possible . It’s the marketplace of ideas after all that allows us to convince others in a rational way. Having access to the other guy’s point of view helps us sharpen and strengthen our own. The small amount of state support that the NPR gets is money well spent if it helps to progress the debate.
Now who do I talk to about getting Rush and Howard and Glen to to a free satellite feed?
“….Ken Buck, the GOP senate candidate in Colorado admits he’s a climate change denier…”
My name is Chris and I admit I am also a climate change denier.
No seriously, how can you take these people seriously when they don’t even know the difference between carbon and carbon dioxide?
And what can one make of “….climate change was happening and human activity was speeding it up…..?
Apostasy!
If anyone doubted that global warming is anything less than the rich and powerful regulating and taxing the poor and powerless, this should give you some thought:
When the rich and famous get involved in “climate change” politics, it’s just conscience-salving on their part for their extravagant lifestyles.
A week ago, it emerged that the Oscar-winning film director had put his money where his mouth is by donating $1m of his personal fortune to opponents of Proposition 23, a ballot measure facing voters in California at the coming mid-term elections which would suspend the state’s landmark law combating climate change. Supporters of the proposition weren’t going to take that lying down, though. On Thursday, they returned fire by releasing a short film that claims to highlight a Titanic-sized gulf between Mr Cameron’s somewhat magisterial proclamations regarding the importance of combating climate change, and his actual lifestyle.
“He’s fighting Proposition 23 because he says we should use less fossil fuel,” notes the film. “But if Cameron succeeds, it will mean higher prices and job losses.” It proceeds to quote a recent newspaper interview in which he discussed global warming, telling a reporter that “we are going to have to live with less”. The camera then cuts to aerial footage of the three adjacent homes that Cameron inhabits in the hills of Malibu. Although they each have heated swimming pools, and together boast more than 24,000 sq ft of living space, the properties have not a single energy-saving solar panel or windmill between them. “He also owns a 100-acre ranch in Santa Barbara, a JetRanger helicopter, three Harleys, a Corvette, a Ducati, a Ford GT, a collection of dirt bikes, a yacht, a Humvee fire truck, and a fleet of submarines,” continues the narrator. “And yet he demands WE live with less? James Cameron: HYPOCRITE.”
“Human activities, such as driving, flying, building and even turning on the lights, are the biggest contributor to the release of carbon.
That too, is a fact.”
Isn’t that completely false? I thought human activity was responsible for about 4% of C02 produced.
“The more carbon that gets released into the atmosphere, the higher the average temperature rises.
That’s a scientific fact.”
There is no proven link. Correlation is not proof of causation. Not that the rise of atospheric co2 correlates with the rise in temperature very well anyway. Added to which, recent discoveries regarding the Sun, the oceans and their cycles point to most if not all of the late C20th rise in global temperature as being a natural phenomenon.
“Human activities, such as driving, flying, building and even turning on the lights, are the biggest contributor to the release of carbon.
That too, is a fact.”
Utter rubbish. The carbon cycle involves enourmous natural fluxes:
Ocean-atmosphere 92 gigatonnes/year
Trees-atmosphere 60 gigatonnes/year
Soils-atmosphere 60 gigatonnes/year
Fossil Fuels and cement production-atmosphere 6 gigatonnes/year
These ‘science reporters’ couldn’t lie straight in bed.
Rattus Norvegicus said on October 23, 2010 at 10:56 pm:
Perhaps no credibility left with the far-left NPR lovers. Which is not automatically a bad thing…
☺
NPR guy seems to be getting around a bit on those planes??? http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130729479
“The more carbon that gets released into the atmosphere, the higher the average temperature rises.
That’s a scientific fact.”
So why in the Carboniferous was CO2 like 1500ppm and the temperature was the same as today and the sun was a lot hotter then today?
JDN says:
October 23, 2010 at 11:35 pm
I had previously said:
What in the phrase subscribed to followed by the noun
notion has confused you ? I didn’t attribute the quote
or the principle it encompasses to any one individual.
A bit of early U.S. history:
Tom Paine wrote extensively on limiting government to prevent both
tyranny by the State and tyranny by the mob. He corresponded
with Jefferson before the Declaration of Independence was drafted. A
paraphrase of the “…which governs least” shows up in the
Anti-Federalist Papers which were written by various individuals
to agitate for a Bill of Rights to be included in any new
“constitution”. Alex Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison didn’t
want individual rights spelled out in a constitution or through
follow up amendments. The trio wrote and published the Federalist
Papers, saying in part that a Bill of Rights was a waste of time.
Some of the Anti-Federalist Papers were published in various
newspapers and circulated as handbills among the States’ delegates as
they were adopting their own state Constitutions. Most of the states
had their own Bill of Rights long before the United States of American
had the first ten Amendments added. The first ten Amendments to
the U.S. Constitution were done as an incentive for the States to adopt
the Constitution in the first place.
Sidebar:
Thomas Jefferson was the official “reporter” of the weather to the
1st Constructional Convention in 1775-76. His reports were logged in
the minutes by the clerk each day Jefferson was in attendance at the
Convention sessions.
As the American Ambassador to France, Jefferson got to see both
sides of tyranny, by the State and the mob, before he was
President.
We brought the Louisiana territory. We didn’t
conquer the French to get it. The purchase was viewed as a return
favor to a financially strapped France internationally, and as a
general boondoggle by most U.S. citizens in the early 1800s.
Lewis & Clark were sent out to prove we didn’t get our pockets
picked by those cunning Frenchies.
Jeff Alberts says:
“October 23, 2010 at 8:19 pm
evanmjones says:
October 23, 2010 at 7:34 pm
That is steam, not smoke.
First, smoke is BLACK.
Depends on the fuel. I’ve seen plenty of whitish/greyish smoke.”
The stuff from the tall stacks is smoke. Used a Ringelmanns chart many times to determine colour in my public health days. The stuff from the cooling towers beyond is water vapour. Of course neither are relevant to carbon dioxide. They use these pictures for ‘reportage’ to grab the readers attention and generally illustrate the subject.
Ironically gas power stations might show no signs of smoke but lots of CO2 – how do they get away with it?
noaaprogrammer says:
October 23, 2010 at 10:02 pm
Having been a computer programmer for the past 44 years (including programming for NOAA) I am well familiar with the difference between scientific facts and computer modeling. A computer model of our atmosphere is only a finite approximation to all the atmospheric physics, which isn’t even fully understoond. AGW is an outgrowth of computer models, not scientific facts.”
Indeed! The hubris of climate scientist is quite amazing. Just as computers were suppose to cut down on the need to print, but instead made thousands of charts much easier to produce and lead to much greater printer use, so computers and computer models take thousands of POORLY known actual numbers, and numerous equally POORLY understood physical processes, and arrive at certain answers of global disaster.
Climate science is arm waving through computers at hummingbird speed.
President Obama says people don’t think clearly when they are frightened.
That handily explains the thoughts of people frightened by global climate disruption then. Maybe the president got a thing right for once.
The earth is teetering on the brink of an ice age and that’s a scientific fact.
““We desperately need conservatives at the forefront of the fight,” McKibben says. “The sooner that conservatives are willing to accept the science, the reality, the sooner we can get to work with their very important help in figuring out what set of prescriptions, what combination of market and regulation will be required in order to deal with the most serious problem we’ve ever stumbled into.” ”
Oh that’s easy. 100% regulation, 0% market. That will lead to a fast collapse; and as we know from the USSR and lately from Ireland, collapse is the one thing that brings down emissions the fastest. And McKibben plays as if he doesn’t know that. I guess he needs some conservatives in his boat so he can blame them for the collapse after it happened.
I wish America luck in November. Here in Germany, it looks dire. The three socialist parties are not in government, but they have frighteningly high approval levels. I might be forced to escape to the free world come the next election.
Owen says:
October 23, 2010 at 8:39 pm
“There is plenty of data out there, data of different types that are all internally consistent. ”
At least he doesn’t want us to consider model outputs.
“Owen says:
October 23, 2010 at 8:03 pm
Mr. Hansford,
The argument that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is too low (not enough absorbers and too many windows) is totally incorrect.”
“Sorry to be so blunt, but I think neither Enneagram nor you have any idea about what Arrhenius was talking about. Learn some science, starting with absorption spectroscopy.”
We get that you disagree, but you advance no argument of your own. The impression I get is that you don’t understand the science yourself, you just repeat the propaganda.
I have noticed that AGWists never make the case, they just insult so-called knuckle-dragging Skeptics.
Who knows if I heard the case one day, I might believe it. but photo-shopped polar bears ain’t making the grade.
Owen says:
“You’re kidding, right? This is the level of your understanding of absorption spectroscopy? This is climate skeptic science?”
=============
So climate skeptic science is based on what one person posts? I could probably argue that he is right just to upset you or something, but since we are doing the scientific method of anecdotal incidences are truth, I think its more fun to just call you a third grader, explain to everyone else why you are, and then move on.
Here is in third grade speak what you did here:
1) Person A said X
2) Person A is part of Group 1
3) Group 1 all believe what person X said
4) You are all poopoo heads because you all believe that. the world is going to end!
We could discuss how you came to the conclusion the world is going to end, but with your logic, yes….I don’t think we need to worry about you and logic for a few more years.
What happened to the good trolls? I like to spank trolls from time to time, but you are no fun. Don’t tell me that I scared them away. I know I am ugly, but come on…
Christopher Hanley says October 24, 2010 at 12:34 am: “how can you take these people seriously when they don’t even know the difference between carbon and carbon dioxide?”
The “carbon=carbon dioxide” meme has been deliberately cultivated by the warmist propagandists to bolster their cause, in the same manner as stranded polar bears.
“Carbon” is dirty black soot, something one surely does not want to be spewing into the atmosphere.
But CO2 is a colorless, odorless trace gas comprising a minuscule 0.039% of the atmosphere, with an unknown “ideal” or best range range for life on Earth.
Now wouldn’t you rather promote climate alarmism with something dirty, black, and noxious, rather than with something innocuous, invisible, and with unknown effects?