Skeptic Project

Well this is extraordinarily convenient.

So, emails and documents showing that Scientists could have been wrong and covering their asses and/or wanting to please certain people proves to you that there's a massive global warming cover up to destroy industry, destroy the third world, only to help bring in population control? I mean, that's the conspiracy, and you admit to believing it.

I don't know if it was a hoax or not, or what this information really means. I've been skeptical of jumping on the "world's coming to an end due to global warming" bandwagon because prior to the latest scare, I read in magazines and such from the 1970s and onward about the same thing. In, I think, 7th grade I remember reading a book that predicted by the year 2000 all of the ice caps would have been melted and our transformation to a Venus-like planet would be well underway.

That doesn't mean, however, that I think the whole thing is a big fraud/scam. I haven't done a lot of major research into it yet, so I can't really say one way or another what's happening, but I will be able to eventually I hope.

Posted three weeks ago and... ?

Exactly what I thought. Nothing.

This Climategate stuff is sheer nonsense. Basically, out of a ton of emails a few were cherry picked out because they were especially snobby. Nothing more than someone breaking into computers, stealing data and then quote mining it for deniers to make strawmen with. You know, mentioning Al Gore's jet and stuff. Whoever did this had an agenda, and it wasn't a noble one.

There are plenty of reasons to question climate change in a political context. There are plenty of reasons to question entirely blaming humanity for it. I tend to ignore the politicized side of it and listen to the scientists who say climate change is real. The deniers seem to be lawyers, pundits, energy industry front groups and PACs rather than scientists.

Climate change isn't even about the world ending. It is about understanding our planet and the changing environment, regardless of who's fault it is.

Lord Monckton has an excellent, well argued discussion of the full story of Climategate here: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/Monckton-Caught%20Green-Handed%20Climategate%20Scandal.pdf

"Disinformation Agent #70031337, long time no see, last time I saw you we were at Illuminati training camp together."

Ah, yes. Hello Edward. I believe we were in Troop 666 together. I have many fond memories of our "How To Blame The Jews And Make People Like You" seminar.

I've been working off and on for a global warming article for a while. It's something that I knew very little about, and it's taking me a long time to research it. It will be done eventually, but I don't want to put it up until I'm certain that it will be correct. I definitely don't want to reach a conclusion about what's going on and be wrong about it. It's definitely a big issue.

In common with 99% of the people who comment publicly on global warming, I know next to nothing about the science involved. The Oregon Petition however, I find to be a little dubious. Here's a critique:

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-11-12</p>

The number of signatories is not really relevant, in fact the high number does less to convince me as so many of them are not actually qualified in the field. I know that Professors of Economics know next to nothing about Archaeology, so I would imagine mathematics professors are similarly ignorant of climatology.

Let me try to understand your logic. You would listen to a governmental body composed of less than 2000 scientists, many of them not qualified in the field, led by a railroad engineer (UN IPCC) rather than a listing of over 31,000 scientists that signed a petition that basically said that they don't agree with the UN IPCC because there is too many of them? The link you gave referred to someone that questioned the validity of the petition due to the lack of questions so it wasn't a survey and the meaning of consensus. If someone signs a petition that the Kyoto Protocol and similar proposals should be rejected because there is no convincing evidence that human release of greenhouse gases is detrimental, then they they have answered a question and they agree to the statement for the most part if not totally. As far as being not qualified in the field, the petition was signed by 3804 atmosphere, earth, and environment scientists, 5812 physics and aerospace scientists, 4821 chemistry scientists, 2965 biochemistry, biology, and agriculture scientists, 935 computer and math scientists. If you go to www.pettionproject.org you would see the complete breakdown of who signed and what their qualifications are.
You state that you know next to nothing about the science. The people that signed the petition do. How about common sense? Does it make sense that the gas we exhale and plants take in is a pollutant?

Global warming is not a hoax and it is not a conspiracy. The science out there about it has been settled for years. It's not "a governmental body composed of less than 2,000 scientists" saying that manmade causes are behind climate change. It's study after study after study, many going back 20, 30 years. Attributing climate change to a tiny group of scientists is exactly like claiming "there's no consensus on the evidence that smoking causes cancer."

This report is pretty comprehensive:
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm

Also you may want to look at this report which is an official endorsement of climate change conclusions by science organizations from 11 countries:
http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf</p>

You might also want to look at this article which is an interesting survey of almost 1000 peer-reviewed scientific papers published over a 10 year period, which found that 75% of them accepted the conclusions of climate change science, and 25% expressed no opinion--not a single one disputed the conclusions.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686#</p>

Oh, and those CRU emails? They don't even come close to showing a "conspiracy" to promote global warming.
http://layscience.net/node/805</p>

Lord Monckton and his ignorance of the true science of climate change have been debunked many times. Here's an example:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/05/moncktons-deliberate-manipulation/</p>

"How about common sense? Does it make sense that the gas we exhale and plants take in is a pollutant?"
Yes, it makes perfect sense. If it wasn't, the planet Venus would not be nearly as nasty as it is. Perhaps you haven't heard, most of its atmosphere is composed of carbon dioxide, and as a result a winter's night at the north pole of Venus is about the same temperature as the inside of a self-cleaning oven. You can Wikipedia that to verify it--I'm not going to do all your work for you!

Edward, I think you should post a page on climate change denial, which is every bit as ludicrous and illogical a conspiracy as "9/11 was an inside job" or any of Alex Jones's delusional rantings.

I fail to see how you can compare the 96.5% CO2 atmosphere of Venus with the 0.04% CO2 atmosphere of Earth on an equal basis. CO2 is a greenhouse gas that requires a logarithmic increase to have any significant effect.
As to your statement that the science is settled is straight out of the Al Gore playbook. Science is always exploring new theories and should be openly discussed. In previous years the "science" was settled that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Every good scientist follows the Scientific Method where a question is posed, research is done, a hypothesis is constructed, the hypothesis is tested by experimentation, the test data is analyzed and a conclusion is drawn, then the results are communicated for peer review. The CRU, which is under investigation for a variety of malfeasance, hid or destroyed their raw data, bullied peer review publications, and depended on computer simulations to "experiment". The computer models can't depict the climate without "fudge factors" for previous years let alone predict future climate. There are too many unknown variables.

Edward, I know that I grossly simplified the connection between us exhaling CO2 and plants taking it in but, I was trying to emphasize the point that didn't pass my bullshit meter. Also many studies show that plants are absorbing more CO2. The University of Minnesota has shown a direct link with CO2 and tree growth. I should also include animals because CO2 is utilized in many biological functions. Crustaceans utilize dissolved CO2 in seawater to build their shells for instance.

Edward, I am unfamiliar with the data where a CO2 increase caused a 9 degree increase and then a backlash "iceball Earth". When did this happen and was it a man-made effect?

Argonessen, I apologize if I erroneously leapt to the conclusion that you are convinced of AGW. I can understand your trepidation at accepting the credentials of people on the petition. Climatology is a relatively new field so there aren't that many PHD's around. Other Earth Sciences have been around quite a while so there are more to choose from. My point is that the science is not settled and there is considerable disagreement in the scientific community so any actions we as a society make should be well thought out. I can suggest that the signatories have listed their degrees and you could Google them if its important to you. If you could also find the credentials of the few scientists at the IPCC that would be helpful for comparative purposes. The chairman of the UN IPCC is a railroad engineer.

I agree with the juicy and savory babybackribs. It's something I often bring up. Even if global warming 100% isn't happening because of humans, is it bad to work towards cleaner and better technologies? We do know a lot of coal fire plants increase asthma, fluorosis, and various other lung problems.

I think what we do need to do is not incite panic. I know the "market decides" such as a lot of corn being switched over to ethanol, but that's lead to massive food shortages in countries that depend on the US, and the fuel created is 1:1.5, for every liter of oil used to create ethanol, you get 1.5 liters of ethanol. That's total shit and a waste of time and money. Not only are you basically getting no improvement, but you're wasting oil too.

I often suggest hydrogen, because diesel motors can also run it, but also because it's really easy to make, literally anyone can do it. An idea would be use solar energy to turn ocean water into hydrogen. People over complicate hydrogen power by wanting to make it into a complex fuel cell system, but there's no reason to do that (except for better fuel mileage, but we're talking about simpler solutions here).

Mike Ruppert claims that without oil fuel is impossible, even hydrogen, but that's total bullshit. Hydrogen isn't better than ethanol, it takes as much energy to create it as makes, which isn't great, but it's not coming from something that could feed people nor is the energy used to create it coming from another valued source (oil), and there's not a lot of overhead, so there's areas that improvements could be made, and like I said, with solar energy. As for plastics, those too can be made from other sources, such as ethanol. Ethanol would work for that quite well, but for now the plastics from it are those crappy ones you get from like taco bell. There's still about another decade of research until it can make harder plastics.

I've also suggested that building all new homes with solar shingles, and in addition to having a water heater and air conditioner, as every house has today, there's a battery pack. Excess energy can be pumped into the grid. Imagine if every house did this, we'd basically not have to worry about power shortages again.

Fill in the holes with nuclear power and we've got a pretty solid solution. The capital investment would be massive though, especially solar panels, you're talking $20K per house. The money part is not what I'm good at, just the ideas.

It can be done, and should be done, but won't be unless the market decides it, and it won't. Large investments without short term income almost never come from the free market. I know that glenn beck credits the free market with creating the Internet, but it was actually the government which built the large research and development infrastructure to design it, then implement it, and I can't imagine the free market ever deciding this shit. For the longest time the average person didn't even want computers.

>> Don't think tanks exist to do this kind of thinking?

Yes, but most are paid for by big companies now that have conclusions based in their favor.

Brad270,
I agree, and have stated that is mostly an economical issue. In fact, I'm sure of it as before my transition period, I was working for an oil company. And people like to talk a lot. The technology can be bettered, but the corporations want it to also be just as costly as what it is now so that they can continue to make a profit. Plus, we can't forget that a corporation doesn't do all of this because "it has nothing better to do with it's life", but because the investors... 0_0 .. want money! That's what I believe the main issue is.

It's not a bad thing, in my opinion. But it's one of the things right now holding us back.

I understand what you're saying, Brad270. And although it is not entirely right they could be lying to us. I personally don't believe they are lying. More or less making things seem worse than they are, yes. But not out right lying.

Further more, what I was also pointing out was the mental morality that people look at this with.

Not saying you haven't heard of it, but for those that would like to know more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master-slave_morality</p>

The difference is, in laymens terms, that the slave mentality/morality looks to see if the actions of someone or something is done with good or evil intentions. The Master mentality/morality looks to see if the outcome is beneficial or not.

This is what I'm arguing. Even if they were lying, which I clearly doubt, they are still doing it for the benefit of everyone. So I personally see nothing wrong.