From the newspaper SouthCoastToday.com
Our View: There is no debate on climate change
The “debate” over the reality and cause of climate change stopped being scientific long ago. Today, the “debate” is nothing more than a distraction that serves a political purpose for those who would stand to lose the most by policies that would curtail the release of carbon from its restful, stable location below the surface of the earth, in the form of fossil fuels, into our environment.
One hundred percent of the current and former UMass Dartmouth scientists participating in an editorial board meeting at The Standard-Times on Tuesday agree both that climate change is occurring and that human activity — particularly the combustion of fossil fuels — has a significant impact on it.
The point was made in the meeting that it is not typical that scientists would agree so broadly. There’s a reason for that: Theories aren’t agreed upon in the scientific community, but facts are.
Theories are debated. Facts are facts.
The UMass scientists were invited to discuss three undeniable, provable effects that burning fossil fuels has on our oceans: acidification, warming, and sea level rise.
Read the rest here: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20140205/OPINION/402050305
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When the public’s right to know is threatened, and when the rights of free speech and free press are at risk, all of the other liberties we hold dear are endangered. -Christopher Dodd
Source h/t to WUWT reader “Vico”
I did some digging (as usual)
Hathaway Publishing from WIKI
Ottaway Newspapers Inc., became The Dow Jones Local Media Group, a subsidiary of Dow Jones & Company, which is itself a subsidiary of News Corp.
Dow Jones is publisher of The Wall Street Journal. (again from WIKI) (a Murdock CORP)
News Corp was split and then on September 4, 2013, sold off Dow Jones Local Media Group to Newcastle Investment Corp.—an affiliate of Fortress Investment Group.
So that more or less explains why a change now.
If UMass Dartmouth scientists are convinced that humans cause climate change, what are they doing to change their own behavior? Why is it that people like these fly around the world to convince the rest of us to lower our carbon footprint when theirs is so much larger than ours? They obviously feel no pressing urgency to reduce their own footprint. Instead, as self-designating members of the elite, they claim an exemption from the rules they wish to impose on the rest of us.
Acidification, warming and sea level rise…. So where is the demonstration that any of these are linked to the rate and mass of CO2 emissions from human activity? The ‘debate’ has been about the absence of any links save in models programmed with said links embedded.
@RaiderDingo
>They don’t even seem to understand what is in dispute.
Exactly. It is slightly embarrassing to admit that I was a student team advisor to this institution a couple of years ago. What on earth have they been teaching them about engineering and logical thought processes? Are they even aware that there has been no meaningful rise in global temps for more than a decade while CO2 emission rates ramp up annually?
People are used to seeing an effect and wondering about the cause, but this is a case of a ’cause’ without any effect! Good grief. Show me where the sea level rise rate changed from the background level. Show me where the pH of the ocean alters with AG CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. Show me where the warming is hiding this time.
The facts I will agree on are they have not done their homework, came to a debate poorly prepared and seek to bury contrary evidence. Does ‘Ivy’ League mean ‘greenhorn’?
I blew the last comment Robert Thomson and News Corp are no longer owners. So back to digging.
Khwarizmi:
“When fascism came to the United States in the 1930s, it was wrapped in the flag and heralded as a plea for preservation of life an liberty.”
I’m not sure the quote has exactly been placed in the past tense quite yet, let alone specifically to the 30s. While our economic system appears to be trending that way, I feel I was fairly clear in that I was referring to the autocratic implications that come with such an economic system, which in this case is censorship.
Suppress, control, censor, degrade, marginalize, pressure.
Hey, it’s a tried-and-trued method favored by all fascist dictators.
One need only study the ways of Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini…
The following, among many, is why there should be a debate. They talk of facts and get their first ‘fact’ wrong.
“Today, the “debate” is nothing more than a distraction that serves a political purpose for those who would stand to lose the most by policies that would curtail the release of carbon from its restful, stable location below the surface of the earth, in the form of fossil fuels, into our environment. ”
.
OK then, lets just hypothetically take that as a given..The question then is..who would, in fact, stand to lose the most?
Eliza says:
February 6, 2014 at 12:08 pm
Simply don’t buy or look at that newspaper anymore, really easy…..
Exactly. This is the real reason print newspapers are going out of business. You can find all the lies (and then some!!) on the web, but the only place you can find the truth is on the web. Newspapers are easier to read than the computer screen, and that would be where I would get my news–if they would only print it.
I’m waiting for them to fold up shop. Printing on paper is environmentally hazardous and kills Carbon eating trees. Going online uses up too much Carbon-produced electricity that in turns produces too much Carbon pollution. If they were really out to save the world, then they’d close up shop and spread the news by word-of-mouth.
Then do as you preach. Here are some electric vans that are recharged from ?????? generated electricity. Let’s see how “rapidly” the shift “from fossil fuels to alternatives.”
http://www.esb.ie/electric-cars/electric-car-enterprise/choice-of-electric-fleet-vehicles.jsp
Have I got these chaps in a vice grip yet?
Perhaps, in the interest of restoring carbon to its natural resting place, you will turn over all your diamond rings so that the diamonds (pure carbon) may be buried. /sarc/
BTW the ocean is akaline and is warmed by the sun without regard to the amount of CO2 dissolved therein.
I have a watch. At the moment it is 4:28 pm EST. Take away my watch and how would I be able to conclude that everyone who says it is really 11:30 am EST is wrong?
The Board of Directors (Which I was looking for to start with) is HERE
These guys are no light weights! (What is it with bankers as news board of directors?)
Quoted from various pages within the site:
>
Gareth Phillips says:
February 6, 2014 at 12:26 pm
“…take a tip and stop debating…”
So like the news paper above you are for suppression of speech. Do you read the LA Times they don’t allow dissenting opinions?
“that everyone who says it is really 11:30 am EST is wrong?”
I are wanting to correct a typo.
“that everyone who says it is really 11:30 am EST are wrong?”
Oh the humiliation!
From the article:
“Ocean warming: The greenhouse gases — from a variety of sources — that prevent radiational cooling have been raising the temperature of the atmosphere, melting glaciers and polar ice over the decades. The atmosphere warms further because there is less ice to reflect the sun, further diminishing radiational cooling. The oceans warm by absorption both of atmospheric heat and melting ice. Scientists are unclear about how new patterns of currents will affect fish populations and more energetic weather systems.”
This is so dumb I am astonished the editor allowed it to be published.
Any addition of radiational gases (sic), as they call them, increase the ability of the atmosphere in emit heat into space at the TOA, cooling it, increasing the height to which thunderstorms can dump heat. The process dries out the stratosphere (there’s a fact to check). Has Dartmouth perhaps discovered fossil CO2 molecules that are bent so as to emit only downwards? Methinks they have discovered a set of climate coprolites.
Less ice? Where is this ‘less ice’? Globally less ice? Ever been to WUWT to see the Sea Ice Page? I know Americans famously reputed to be ignorant about geography but surely they realize at Dartmouth that Antarctica is ‘polar’?
Are they aware that removing ice from the Arctic sea increases heat loss through the atmosphere dramatically? What did they study in Mechanics 101 and those radiative heat transfer classes?
Students:
Show me one ocean that has been warmed by ‘atmospheric heat’ and explain the mechanism for same. Please explain also ‘ocean cooling’ from a warmer atmosphere. Please demonstrate this warming from your nifty swimming pool footbridge and a hair dryer (keep the plug out of the water). Show me a ‘more energetic weather system’ that is created by a lower Delta T between the low and high pressure side. You are the ones claiming the Arctic cold side is warming! The Tropics are not warming at all; lower ΔT.
Dartmouth, thy new name is Berkeley East.
Step outside and pitch in with the neighbours to shovel all that global warming.
First they came for the sky dragons and I did not speak up, for I was not a sky dragon …
How can you argue with ignoramuses who know nothing of the scientific method?
The hypothesis does not fit the models so it FAILS.
If a purveyor of news elects to decide what you get to read, and which news is worthy of transmitting, that would be one thing. The problem here is they have made an open announcement that they will provide only one side of a debate.
If they can do that without recourse on one subject, they can do it on any and all subjects.
This announcement just removed any possible classification as a reliable news source. And if they’re not reliable, why bother reading them.
I think the papers in is hoping to keep the ‘Useful Idiots’ screaming about the Keystone Pipeline since the parent company is busy buying up R/Rs
Since these guys are partners from Goldman-Sachs, the company that made a killing from the food riots in 2008.
I expect they hope to be in on the Natural Gas ‘Bubble’
They are also supporters of Oxfam International (Can I laugh myself sick now?)
Gail
Now that makes sense – I seem to recall a Timothy Geithner, former Goldman Sachs of Obama fame, the global warming president that heals the oceans and walks on water. How many guesses does one need to suspect the connections?
Cheshirered says:
February 6, 2014 at 12:24 pm
You need to make a differentiation between CO2 in the atmosphere, which is a greenhouse gas, CO2 in the ocean surface (the “mixed” layer) and CO2 in the deep oceans.
The different quantities involved:
atmosphere: ~800 GtC (pure CO2 as gas)
ocean surface: ~1,000 GtC (1% CO2, 90% bicarbonate, 9% carbonate)
deep coeans: ~37,000 GtC (slightly different from the surface)
The ocean surface and the atmosphere are in close contact and exchange CO2 at a high rate. Any increase (or decrease) of CO2 in the atmosphere is followed by a 10% increase (or decrease) of total carbon (thus CO2 + bicarbonate + carbonate, called DIC – dissolved inorganic carbon). That is the buffer factor of CO2 in the oceans. The buffer factor is caused by the reactions which dissociate extra CO2 in water to its different forms, but these reactions also increase the concentration of H+ ions, thus make seawater less alkaline. Some call that more acidic, which is technically correct, but highly misleading for the general public who thinks of “more acidic” as really acid…
Thus an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere decreases the pH of the oceans. Not much, about 0.1 pH unit since the start of the industrial revolution. No fish, algue, mussel or coral that will have troubles with that, as most of these creatures can live and grow in a quite wide pH range… Over time, the CO2 levels in the atmosphere increased with about 30%, that increased the 1,000 GtC in the oceans with about 30 GtC or 1,030 GtC, hardly measurable. There were some sporadic measurements of seawater pH, DIC, pCO2 (pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere in equilibrium with the seawater), etc. from the past and there are a few long term measurement series at Bermuda and Hawaii over the past decades:
http://www.biogeosciences.net/9/2509/2012/bg-9-2509-2012.pdf (Bermuda, Fig. 5)
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/30/12235.full.pdf (Hawaii, Fig. 1)
The deep oceans contain such an enormous amount of carbon (in different forms), that the extra CO2 plays no role there, up to now. The exchanges between deep oceans and the atmosphere are limited, so it takes a lot more time to bring these two in equilibrium, but when that happens, all human emissions since ~1850 combined would increase the deep ocean and atmospheric CO2 with only 1% or about 3 ppmv in the atmosphere…
The greenhouse gas effect is not in the oceans, it is in the atmosphere. Some wavelengths of the earth’s heat radiation are absorbed by CO2 molecules and re-emitted in all directions, including the earth’s surface. Which heats (in fact reduces the speed of cooling) the solid earth and the ocean’s surface. The latter is only over a fraction of a mm (IR radiation is directly absorbed by a tiny layer of water), which leads to increased temperature of the ocean’s “skin” and probably more evaporation. But that is a different discussion than that of the pH scare story…
Gail Combs says:
February 6, 2014 at 1:28 pm
The Board of Directors (Which I was looking for to start with) is HERE
These guys are no light weights! (What is it with bankers as news board of directors?)
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C’mon Gail… that must have been a rhetorical question, because you know full well what’s up with those people. One could say that the “truth about climate change” would affect their bottom line, but the answer goes much deeper- those bankers are in the club and humanity isn’t.
“Does ‘Ivy’ League mean ‘greenhorn’?”
Although one could no doubt find equally dim bulbs among the Dartmouth faculty, the professors they are referring to here are from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Massachusetts, a town on Massachusetts’ South Shore. The Ivy League school is different, located in New Hampshire.