Last night in the SOTU address, Obama made this pronouncement about climate change:
But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.
To that, I say this:
There’s never been any assertion that climate didn’t change, the idea that somehow this is something new to the 21st century is absurd. For example, this graph illustrates just that fact:
Click image for a full sized print (3000 pixels wide, suitable for printing) or choose the PDF below. Note the blip in the top line at the far right, that’s our climate change today. Source: Andy May
Younger_Dryas_to_Present_Time_Line (PDF)
And, as science itself has demonstrated through history, it is never settled, it is always searching for new information, retesting, and sometimes discarding old ideas based on new knowledge.
Saying “the science is settled” is as ridiculous as this famous quote attributed to Lord Kelvin who reportedly said in 1900*
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement”.
* This quote is reputed to be Kelvin’s remark made in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1900). Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomson,_1st_Baron_Kelvin#Pronouncements_later_proven_to_be_false
Equally preposterous (now) is this statement from Kelvin:
In 1898, Kelvin predicted that only 400 years of oxygen supply remained on the planet, due to the rate of burning combustibles.[62][63] In his calculation, Kelvin assumed that photosynthesis was the only source of free oxygen; he did not know all of the components of the oxygen cycle. He could not even have known all of the sources of photosynthesis: for example the cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus—which accounts for more than half of marine photosynthesis—was not discovered until 1986.
Kelvin’s pronouncement, which he believed to be true at the time based on the facts he had at hand, were later disproved by new science and obviously discarded. But, imagine if there were a panic movement then to conserve oxygen, with “oxygen taxes” applied, massive government funded research implemented, and reams of NGO’s feeding on the frenzy demanding a host of new laws and changes in human behavior to avert the crisis.
They’d look pretty stupid to us in the context of science knowledge today, wouldn’t they?
Max Hugoson said @ur momisugly January 29, 2014 at 2:10 pm
Aaah! Knowing what you don’t know is the first step to wisdom 🙂
Gail Combs said @ur momisugly January 29, 2014 at 2:25 pm
Whats settled is the lib-left is to far down the global warming rabbit hole to change course now.. It would be disastrous for them to even try and explain how they could be so completely wrong.. So they wont..
What has to happen is they have to be voted out and kept out until the vested interests retire/die or move on to the next scam..
Gail Combs
You said
“Only the shock of continued cold water straight in the face is going to wake the Sheeple up and with luck Ma Nature will do so.”
The winter is not over yet and the month of February is cooling faster than any month for Contiguous US. Here are the rates of cooling in F degrees per decade since 1998. I am afraid that there is a major disconnect between what the democrats are saying publically and the observed world that the public is experiencing when it comes to climate in United States .
WINTER
DEC -0.70F/ decade (declining)
JAN -1.49 F/decade (declining)
FEB -2.64 F/ decade (declining)
SPRING
MAR +1.39F /decade (rising)
APR -0. 22F /decade (declining)
MAY -0.58 F /decade(declining)
With April and May also cooling , the risk for increased tornado activity is also there in the spring.. This may again be wrongly blamed on global warming
well, Gates apparently did join with Gore to call for population control at Davos recently…in the name of CAGW:
24 Jan: CNBC: Jeff Cox: Contraception key in climate change fight: Gore and Gates
Stopping overpopulation is one way the dangers of climate change can be mitigated, according to two of the most prominent believers in global warming.
Former Vice President Al Gore and Microsoft founder Bill Gates said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that contraception is a key in controlling the proliferation of unusual weather they say is endangering the world…
Though Gore said corporations collectively are coming around to the dangers of global warming—a condition that has been the subject of fierce dispute—they still too often treat the atmosphere “like an open sewer.”
“These extreme weather events which are now 100 times more common than 30 years ago are really waking people’s awareness all over the world, and I think that is a game-changer,” he said…
He (Bill Gates), too, made a pitch for birth control as a way to reduce excess population that generates pollution, which in turn creates unusual weather events…
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101361600
How’s your run for the House of Reps or the Senate from your new state going?
Remember, if you’re not leading, you’re probably following …
.
Gore and Gates should go back in time and make sure they are not conceived and then we will all be better off here, safe from a few less conceptions, while they take one for the team!:]
Even Stephen Hawking has decided Black Holes may be more than he previously thought. That’s the way science work.
This isnt science its politics.. Obama is gonna earn his Nobel by protecting his friends.. End of story..
“Climate change is a fact.”
I think science is not about fact-finding. I think science is a research methodology.
Correctly applying scientific methodology an investigator might find “facts” that stand as such until the next investigator proves otherwise.
Jim says: @ur momisugly January 29, 2014 at 3:28 pm
How’s your run for the House of Reps or the Senate from your new state going?…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Are you kidding? I do not want to be anywhere near DC when the government hacks start sequestering all that CO2!
(Besides I am not a lawyer or a Liar)
Some other Obama quotes “CO2 causes climate change” and CO2 is a pollutant. If CO2 is so bad, he should ground air Force 1 and do his business over the phone, he already has a pen.
“The president said ‘climate change is a fact’
That’s what the sceptics have been saying since the beginning of the AGW scare. The warmists only claimed CC when they realised the earth wasn’t warming as predicted.
@Andrew Harding –
Yes, you would think a glance out the window would suggest to der Fuehrer that his AGW meme isn’t quite on target – but let’s not forget (as I mentioned in my previous post above) that ideologues are uninfluenced by facts, no matter how dramatic. Der Fuehrer will never be persuaded that there is anything but the warming he claims even if temps drop 5 C over the next five years, winters routinely start in October (April, S hemisphere) and end in June (December, S hemisphere.
While it’s possible that the man knows he is lying and thereby simply manipulating the sheeple, I am not inclined to credit him with that much intelligence. That in itself would be a recognition of a concept foreign to ideology, and excluded by its first rule, which is to not recognize the existence, let alone the validity, of contrary evidence. It would take enormous intelligence and strength of will to overcome that barrier, which he surely does not have. Therefore, since “lying” is a concept absent from [his] ideology, [he] would never see his utterances in that light even if he is otherwise fully conscious of what he is doing..
From Summa Theologica written by Thomas Aquinas d.1274:
Both an astronomer and a physical scientist may demonstrate the same conclusion, for instance that the earth is spherical; the first, however, works in a mathematical medium prescinding from material qualities, while for the second his medium is the observation of material bodies through the senses.
good news gets twisted in a para to doom and gloom:
29 Jan: Phys.org: Jonathan Nott, The Conversation: Record lows for Australian tropical cyclone activity
The number of tropical cyclones hitting Queensland and Western Australia has fallen to low levels not seen for more than 500 years, new research published in Nature shows…
But while that’s seemingly great news for people in cyclone-prone areas, our new research into Australia’s past cyclone records also highlights a serious risk…
Our study shows that current seasonal cyclone activity is at its lowest level in Western Australia since 500 AD and since about 1400 AD in Queensland. That decline began about 40 years ago.
While Australia’s official cyclone records only date back to 1906, we can track cyclones further back in time using measurements of isotopes housed within limestone cave stalagmites…
But while the number of cyclones is expected to decrease, the intensity of those cyclones that do occur is expected to increase…
We cannot be sure that this current decrease in cyclone activity is due to climate change – but it is mirroring the forecasts…
http://phys.org/news/2014-01-lows-australian-tropical-cyclone.html
Source:
30 Jan: The Conversation: Jonathan Nott: Tropical cyclone frequency falls to centuries-low in Australia – but will the lull last?
Disclosure Statement: Jonathan Nott receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
COMMENT by Victor Jones: I guess if there is a positive to come out of more destructive cyclones is that those who contributed to global warming the most, the rich, will be hit hardest in first world coastal areas.
http://theconversation.com/tropical-cyclone-frequency-falls-to-centuries-low-in-australia-but-will-the-lull-last-20814
The Pompous Git says:
January 29, 2014 at 2:21 pm
The consensus before Steno was that fossils only coincidentally resembled living things, or that the Flood had carried marine forms high into the mountains. Steno convinced natural philosophers with his sharks’ teeth that the former proposition was false, while his laws of sedimentation showed how weak the case was for 17th century Flood Geology. Remarkably, he did all this before his Church condemned Galileo for heresy, or strong suspicion thereof.
Even in the late 18th century, Thomas Jefferson in the first edition of his Notes on the State of Virginia still perpetuated the notion that fossils weren’t really from once living things. He soon learned differently however. This settled consensus belief died hard.
Gunga Din says:
January 29, 2014 at 1:52 pm
Going off topic, but maybe only sort of, seems to be my role here.
The cosmology of Job is no different from the rest of the Bible, both Old & New Testaments. Since it probably stems from Ugaritic texts predating most of the rest of the OT, it could hardly mark a change in cosmology. The Bible´s cosmology is Ancient Near Eastern from start to finish, ie flat earth covered by the domes of heaven (more than one). Even the NT, written after Greek science had overturned the ANE cosmos, still favors the old conception of the universe.
Yet again to quote Galileo’s friend, Jesuit Cardinal Bellarmine, “The Bible is intended to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go”.
PS: Baal Zephon also shows up, strangely enough, in Exodus, about the time that Pharaoh’s forces are drowned.
Max Hugoson says:
January 29, 2014 at 2:10 pm
I fail to see what the possibility of other internal heat sources has to do with the fact that the discovery of nuclear decay falsified Kelvin’s age of the earth calculation based solely upon thermodynamics.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/07/18/nuclear-fission-confirmed-as-source-of-more-than-half-of-earths-heat/
Although it’s an interesting question.
Why does the graph show the present warm period to be warmer than the Medieval period?
milodon’s proof text for claiming the Bible teaches that the earth is flat is a Psalm that says that the sun’s rising is at one end of heaven, and it’s circuit is to the other end of heaven.
So if you ever use the terms “sunrise” or “sunset,” you may be a flat earther.
milodonharlani said @ur momisugly January 29, 2014 at 4:57 pm
The scholastics certainly believed the account contained in Aristotle’s Meteorology but that portion of the Meteorology is attributed by most modern scholars to Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor at the Lyceum. The inclusion was most probably made by Aristotle’s Arabian translators. Elsewhere he wrote that fossil shellfish since they so closely resembled living shellfish must have once been alive.
From the wiki-bloody-pedia:
“But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.”
On Earth, that is a nearly information free statement.
AGW attack dogs hounding climate skeptics would do well to pay attention to this report:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4489792.stm
The predator can sometimes become the prey.