<p>I don’t see anyone trying to inhibit additional research; surely not from the enviro side. What I see is people saying–okay; we’ve got the research, now let’s do something. Not just dither and wring our hands and whine that we don’t like change. Act. That’s always been America’s forte.</p>
<p>Ten or twenty years from now, we will have an enormously different problem than the one we have now, as the CO2 levels continue to rise. How can trying to maintain the level now in the atmosphere be rash?</p>
<p>It’s like saying, well, yes, handwashing might cut down on germs and the spread of disease, but germ theory isn’t well established yet, and it’s (in Kluge’s terms) such a drag to enforce it; let’s wait another ten or twenty years, examine the question some more. Surely that can’t hurt, right?</p>
<p>Yet you vehemently put down any person who has a viewpoint that is contrary to yours because you read articles that support your viewpoint and quote them as if you are an expert. What makes you any different than Barrons, hmm?</p>
<p>You’re a lawyer right? Not a climatologist?</p>
<p>IMO, companies like BP, Shell, and the dreaded Exxon Mobil are jumping on the bandwagon because it is in their economic interest to do so. They see where the $$$$ is going to be coming from soon.</p>
<p>Somebody in the thread earlier asked where she could buy anti-global warming stocks - well the BIG OIL (duh, duh, duhhhh) companies would probably be a good place to start - don’t you see their full page ads in the paper? They’re all greenies now!!</p>
<p>Handwashing won’t cost trillions of $$$s in direct and indirect costs for the most dubious results. They won’t even know if it iS working because so many other things come into play with the weather/climate. You know-a butterfly flaps in Brazil and there is a hurricane across the world.</p>
<p>“I don’t see anyone trying to inhibit additional research; surely not from the enviro side. What I see is people saying–okay; we’ve got the research, now let’s do something. Not just dither and wring our hands and whine that we don’t like change. Act.”</p>
<p>Sure. The “Ready, Fire, Aim” method is a specialty of the enviro crowd. The problem is that the research is not done. How do you answer the number of scientists who used to believe in AGW who have now, after further research, changed their perspective and now believe that it is either a hoax or nothing so serious that it requires prohibitively expensive or economy killing solutions? I see that Nancy Pelosi is already spending millions of tax payer’s money in changing the lighting for the Capital dome. Now there’s a great use of the tax dollar.</p>
<p>FF–no. I just don’t see that. It’s not something that people “Believe in” and then don’t. It’s central, accepted science except for a few non-experts with chips on their shoulders.</p>
<p>Hey, we’ll deal with it one way or another (as Blondie would say). I wish it were the responsible way. And I think it’s starting to be.</p>
<p>Whether or not you are a “believer” is only a small part of the issue. Assuming man’s actions are causing significant and detrimental global warming, then the big issue will be arriving at solutions. Most of what we hear is politically correct but useless. Cutting back on energy use is fine but on a global scale the world has hundreds of millions of people trying to make a jump from rural subsistence economies into the modern world. We need alternate sources of energy and lots of it. Solar panels and windmills are not going to cut it - not even close.</p>
<p>“FF–no. I just don’t see that. It’s not something that people “Believe in” and then don’t. It’s central, accepted science except for a few non-experts with chips on their shoulders.”</p>
<p>garland,</p>
<p>At one point it was accepted science that hormone replacement therapy was a panecea for many health issues concerning aging women. Then, because of additional research, it was found to be otherwise. Your view of global warming science being “settled” is just as dangerous. Your pejorative view of any scientists that after using their expertise change their views is just as dangerous for the advancement of science.</p>
<p>FF–I find it’s useless to debate assertions from highly partisan sources, like Mark Morano. Again, these lists are anecdote; mostly not climate related scientists, and not serious scientific argument–whatever their backgrounds. BAsically, a list of “I don’t buy it.” We could play a game all day of lists of discrete examples; I don’t see the purpose of that.</p>
<p>It sounds like you are taking the same approach with global warming as Barak Obama is with Iraq - “it doesn’t matter what the situation is or evolves to become, I have made up my mind and will do exactly as I said last year.”</p>
<p>My approach is–sift through the obfuscations; look for where the scientific community stands. On any subject, you could spend all your time following contrarian paths (heck, Holocaust deniers think your mind is closed if you don’t investigate “their side” of the issue.) </p>
<p>I welcome an actual “controversy”, not a manufactured one.</p>
<p>Etc. I could spend all day listing major scientific, respected government, academic, and other research institutions that agree on the basics of climate change. For some reason, you will stick to your guns that if even if one person on the planet disagrees, that makes a “controversy.” that, to me, is puzzling. but we will have to disagree. You know, I’d love you to be right (you wouldn’t believe that, but it’s so.) Why would I want to look forward to a lot of potentially disastrous changes, and why wouldn’t I want to feel off the hook about who caused them? but for me, *that *would be magical thinking, which i don’t feel I or the Earth can afford.</p>
<p>Don’t look now, but you are an unwitting soldier in a manufactured controversy - only the manufacturer appears to be the IPCC. Read this account of how the IPCC, without the contribution of known experts, manufactured the public view of the relationship between global warming and hurricanes. Of course, this is timely because our Nobel laureate and former VP is out now to shamelessly use the deaths of the people in Burma for the same purpose.</p>
<p>Landsea decided that the IPCC had become too politicized and declined to participate in the latest issue. However, here is what the lead author of chapter on hurricanes in the recent IPCC study said about the way it was falsely used to present a particular point of view:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Of course, people don’t read the final report, they take what is initially fed to and reported by the news media.</p>
I’ll accept it as your position on the matter. Regarding the collection of “prominent scientists” propped up by Sen. Inhofe - do you ever check this stuff out? A quick random sampling of the “experts” on the list you linked to gave me the usual results (all comments from Wikipedia):</p>
<p>Zbigniew Jaworowski:<br>
Jaworowski published several papers (Jaworowski, 2007; Jaworowski, 1999; Jaworowski, 1997) in 21st Century Science and Technology, a non-refereed magazine published by Lyndon LaRouche.[4]</p>
<p>Jaworowski has also written that the movement to remove lead from gasoline was based on a “stupid and fraudulent myth,” and that lead levels in the human bloodstream are not significantly affected by the use of leaded gasoline.</p>
<p>David J. Bellamy OBE (born 18 January 1933): In 2004, he wrote an article in the Daily Mail in which he described the theory of man-made global warming as “poppycock” [4]. A letter he published in New Scientist (16 April 2005) asserted that a large percentage (555 of 625) of the glaciers being observed by the World Glacier Monitoring Service were advancing, not retreating. George Monbiot of The Guardian tracked down Bellamy’s original source for this information and found that it was Fred Singer’s website. Singer claimed to have obtained these figures from a 1989 article in the journal Science, but to date this article has not been found.[5] Bellamy has since admitted that the figures on glaciers were wrong, and announced in a letter to The Sunday Times on 29 May 2005 [6] that he had “decided to draw back from the debate on global warming” </p>
<p>Yes, kluge, I was waiting for you to swing in and attempt to discredit a whole list of people by finding a few whose views you find to be “crackpot” or … (gads) … old. I thought that you had better logical thinking than that.</p>
<p>You may want to put all your eggs into a politically dominated group like the IPCC, but I have heard enough horror stories about their objectivity and desire to shape the story that I don’t trust them. And forget Al Gore and his ilk - even the IPCC is level-headed when compared to Gore’s wild-eyed fantasies.</p>
<p>Fundingfather, I googled 5 at random. No info on 2. The other three fit the pattern I’ve described before. Coincidence? Or just the same old, same old? I have no reason to believe that picking a different 5 would yield a different result. I did the same with Inhofe’s last list and found “climate experts” including an unschooled TV weatherman who didn’t believe in climate change because “God wouldn’t let that happen” and similar “scientists.” These are your experts, FF. Find me more than a handful of actual scientists, actively doing research, publishing scientific articles in peer-reviewed publications, same as I’d want in any other field of science, instead of attention-seeking geezers, tinfoil hat wearing Lyndon LaRouche types, and big business PR whores like Steven Milloy and we could talk. But you can’t. Those guys are the mainstay of the denier’s “stable” of scientists.</p>
<p>I’d like to think you’d apply a more rigorous, objective approach to science if you weren’t hamstrung by your ideology into a need to oppose anything that Al Gore is for. But maybe not.</p>