Climate change

[somatichypermutation]

Climate change is not a concern.

We are in a cool inter-glacial: http://climate4you.com/images/VostokTemp0-420000%20BP.gif

The temp has not risen in 17 years: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/global-land-ocean-mntp-anom/201101-201112.png

What are we worried about again?

[West of the Rockies]

You're cherry-picking data to support your position.  I could do the same thing but have no interest in doing so because it won't change your mind and, to be honest, I have better stuff to do.

I hope you are right.  I wish there were no climate change.  I'll be thrilled if it turns out that Al Gore is, indeed, an over-weight huxster.  (I mention his weight because that seems to be of special significance to most global-warming naysayers.  Funny how none of them are concerned about Rush's weight in terms of how intelligent/honest he is.)

However, I think the preponderance of evidence is clear and inescapable.  Climate change is real; its impact may very well prove devastating.

[Juan]

Of course "climate change" is real.  We have millions of years of evidence of that.  Where I'm now sitting was once deep beneath the sea.  The debate was always whether people had anything to do with it and, if so, whether politicians could do anything about that.

Unfortunately this is another area where secular Calvinism reared its head and true believers tried to enforce Orthodoxy rather than make scientific investigation.

[West of the Rockies]

You're right, of course, Juan.  Our climate has changed drastically over the last tens of millions of years and will probably continue to do so whether humans are on the planet or not.  The question is though, is human activity causing it to change rapidly in a way it would not have done so -- and will that change cause our ruin? 

Are you, by the way, UFOFill with a new name?  I recognize the avatar as UFOFill's.

[Juan]

Yes, I was the other name.  I made the announcement on the noory sucks thread.  I was so angered by Cheap Channel's shenanigans is getting on Indie 104, that I didn't want any association with sNoory - even through a sarcastic user name.

[Heather Wade]

Missed your post on GNS, been wondering about that.  Understand, though.

[somatichypermutation]

You're cherry-picking data to support your position.  I could do the same thing but have no interest in doing so because it won't change your mind and, to be honest, I have better stuff to do.

I hope you are right.  I wish there were no climate change.  I'll be thrilled if it turns out that Al Gore is, indeed, an over-weight huxster.  (I mention his weight because that seems to be of special significance to most global-warming naysayers.  Funny how none of them are concerned about Rush's weight in terms of how intelligent/honest he is.)

However, I think the preponderance of evidence is clear and inescapable.  Climate change is real; its impact may very well prove devastating.

I don't, and since you don't have any data in your post it is impossible to refute.  I put up data, and you say it is cherry picked - data from the last few ice ages and the best temp data on the plant - and you claim cherry picking.  Pretty amazing.

[onan]

I don't, and since you don't have any data in your post it is impossible to refute.  I put up data, and you say it is cherry picked - data from the last few ice ages and the best temp data on the plant - and you claim cherry picking.  Pretty amazing.

pretty amazing to think the subject can be covered in a couple paragraphs with a link. It is a rather complicated issue that in reality, perhaps 2 or three members are actually informed enough to discuss the subject. But since it is easy to post something to affirm one side is right... well party on garth.

[Little Hater]

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

- Washington Post, 1922

[Juan]

I just have to wonder how accurate the raw data is.  For instance, in the US the temperature reading stations are supposed to be over grass at a certain distance from buildings, parking lots, etc.  A few years ago, the one nearest me was only a couple of feet from a black asphalt parking lot.  Now, due to street construction and probably Homeland Security concerns, the parking lot has been removed and replaced with grass.  The weather station sits about 25-feet from an asphalt street now.  Obviously the temperatures it reads now will be lower than when it was next to the black asphalt.  Consulting only the temperature readings from that station, one would assume "climate change" - but the climate didn't really change - the environment around the weather station did.  How often does this happen?

[West of the Rockies]

Good points, Juan... (I still think of you as UFOFill!)...  It is easy to look at a snippet of data to support your position.  With the issue of climate change, just looking at temperatures isn't enough.  One has to consider rising ocean levels, CO2 in the atmosphere, glacial melt, etc.  I am sure there is much more at play, too -- I am no climate scientist.  I don't have a Ph.D. in planet science.  Collectively, however, I find the data to be deeply concerning.  Not everyone agrees, obviously enough.

[Ben Shockley]

I have a LOT to say on this topic: some of y'all know I do ...
but just to keep it brief:

LET'S JUST SAY for a minute that climate change IS human-driven.  Okay, boys?
IF that's true, and yet you keep laughing and work every step of the way to keep anyone from doing anything, like Fox "News" keeps any politician from doing anything lest they get laughed at for being "like Al Gore (what could be worse)"-- who is to blame?  Who is to blame when the lower elevations of the planet are flooded?   Who is to blame when 2-mile-wide tornadoes regularly scour the middle of North America and make it uninhabitable?  Who is to blame when massive hurricanes and typhoons scour the coastal regions of the world?
Who would be to blame?
You?, for abetting it in the late stage?

NOW, lets imagine that you are right, that everything weather-wise is totally random, and that all them goddamn pointy-headed scholars are WRONG.....
Yet you are "forced" to go along with what they recommend.
What do you lose?
What do you lose IF THEM DAMN LIBRULS are wrong?  What do you think you will lose in any "misguided" effort to stop non-human-caused climate change...?

Why do some of y'all seem gleeful when Hannity tries to say it ain't happening?

Folks, balance what you think you "lose" if you go along with us faggoty Libs, against what you lose if you and Limbaugh and Hannity are wrong.  Human life on this planet.

[West of the Rockies]

Well, Ben, I'd guess that climate change naysayers would argue that proactive environmental policy is causing harm to business, is causing bright and brave entrepreneurs to flee to other countries to begin their businesses, etc.  In short, it's costing Americans jobs, damnit! 

Oh, and friggin' snail darters!  Goddamned spotted owls anyway! 

Drill, baby, drill!

Okay, maybe this is a bit reductionist... I suspect that one can doubt climate change without necessarily being an endangered-species-killing-cretin.

Hoisted on my own petard of nuanced rhetoric!

[Juan]

What you lose is rights to use your property as you choose, jobs, freedom of movement, privacy, etc.

Plus, we've been working at reducing pollution for about 50-years.  Things are much cleaner than they were in the 1960s.  What has been the effect of cleaning up?  Is the earth better off now than then?  The rhetoric of environmentalists seems to say no, we are not better off.  If not, then what effect does anything mankind does have?

[onan]

What you lose is rights to use your property as you choose, jobs, freedom of movement, privacy, etc.

Plus, we've been working at reducing pollution for about 50-years.  Things are much cleaner than they were in the 1960s.  What has been the effect of cleaning up?  Is the earth better off now than then?  The rhetoric of environmentalists seems to say no, we are not better off.  If not, then what effect does anything mankind does have?

Well, rivers aren't catching on fire.

[FightTheFuture]

Well, rivers aren't catching on fire.

Those were the days...



Cuyahoga River

[West of the Rockies]

What you lose is rights to use your property as you choose, jobs, freedom of movement, privacy, etc.

Plus, we've been working at reducing pollution for about 50-years.  Things are much cleaner than they were in the 1960s.  What has been the effect of cleaning up?  Is the earth better off now than then?  The rhetoric of environmentalists seems to say no, we are not better off.  If not, then what effect does anything mankind does have?

Yeah, Juan, clean-up efforts, no doubt, have been helpful, but we also hear about how our oceans are absolutely choking on plastics and other debris.  We've seen mercury levels shooting up in our fish supply, too.  I think more needs to be done to protect our environment.  I adore Republican TDR for having the vision to create our National Parks system.

[Juan]

I'd like to know why mercury levels are higher in fish.  Is it because there is more mercury in the water?  If so, it would seem that someone would have produced statistics.  Is it because the huge factory ships are fishing in waters that were previously avoided because of high mercury levels?  Is it because of some other stupid reason? 

[onan]

I'd like to know why mercury levels are higher in fish.  Is it because there is more mercury in the water?  If so, it would seem that someone would have produced statistics.  Is it because the huge factory ships are fishing in waters that were previously avoided because of high mercury levels?  Is it because of some other stupid reason?

http://toxics.usgs.gov/highlights/pacific_mercury.html

Before this work, some scientists hypothesized that methylmercury in the open ocean was geologic in origin and associated with deep-sea spreading centers. Data and modeling results from this paper support the notion of a Mercury Methylation Cycle, in which much of the methylmercury in the open ocean is the result of biologically mediated transformation of mercury into methylmercury. Most of the mercury originates from atmospheric fallout to the ocean surface and the subsequent transport of the mercury to greater ocean depths (200 to 700 meters) where the methylmercury production process occurs. At these depths, naturally occurring bacteria decompose organic matter, which is largely comprised of settling algae (commonly referred to as ocean rain) that are produced in the sunlit waters near the surface (the photic zone). However, the decomposition of organic matter

[NowhereInTime]

What you lose is rights to use your property as you choose, jobs, freedom of movement, privacy, etc.

Plus, we've been working at reducing pollution for about 50-years.  Things are much cleaner than they were in the 1960s.  What has been the effect of cleaning up?  Is the earth better off now than then?  The rhetoric of environmentalists seems to say no, we are not better off.  If not, then what effect does anything mankind does have?

How the hell does pollution reduction result in a loss of rights?!?
God, can any of you ever address a single issue without obfuscation?

[Juan]

Sorry you are unable to understand. 

[NowhereInTime]

Sorry you are unable to understand.

WTF are you talking about? What rights are you losing?

[21st Century Man]

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

- Washington Post, 1922

LOL!  Its funny to see that as early as 1922, the mainstream news elites were trying to convince the people that there was man-made global climate change.  Back then, of course, there was very little scientific data that they could manipulate to advance such a proposition.  Now, of course they have climate stations across the world that of course are being accurately "setup" and "monitored"(nudge-nudge, wink-wink)

[Yorkshire pud]

LOL!  Its funny to see that as early as 1922, the mainstream news elites were trying to convince the people that there was man-made global climate change.  Back then, of course, there was very little scientific data that they could manipulate to advance such a proposition.  Now, of course they have climate stations across the world that of course are being accurately "setup" and "monitored"(nudge-nudge, wink-wink)

Can you point to the part where it states the 'mainstream news elites' were trying to convince the people that there was man made global climate change?

I've read the piece twice and I can't find it.

[Ben Shockley]

WTF are you talking about? What rights are you losing?

It's easy to understand, Nowhere:  Property rights über alles, baby!

For the actual big-time capitalists, it's a matter of their owning:
-- oil wells and other extraction sources
-- machinery and patents for processing extracted resources
-- politicians who protect the capitalists' property and even grant them subsidies to augment their already-insane profits.   
Those capitalists "own property," and they by god mean to milk it for all it's worth before they spend one extra cent on altering or overhauling their methods.   To hell with the costs for the rest of the world:  it's THEIRS and they can DO WHAT THEY WANT WITH IT, so tough luck for you, nyah-nyah !!

As for what exactly "Juan" meant by loss of rights etc., I really do wish he had elaborated, although it's possible that he's actually never thought beyond the soundbite / bumper sticker.   Most likely he has just been conditioned by the capitalists' defensive propaganda, so that he feels the "false consciousness" of thinking that their interests are his.  Just like *Boy's bugaboo is that "all social action meant to improve the human condition leads inevitably and rapidly to mass murder by Judaeo-Slavs / Chinese / Cambodians," it may be that "Juan" has developed the knee-jerk belief that all such social action "leads inevitably and rapidly to his loss of material status symbols."   It might be, for example, that in his effort to emulate capitalist callousness, Juan has become more worried about his being able to drive something designed as a military utility vehicle down to the corner store to get a pack of hearing-aid batteries than he is about other humans and living creatures trying to exist on this planet.

You know: these same knee-jerk "conservatives" usually don't miss an effort to genuflect to the military.  I wonder what they would have thought of the significant material-lifestyle sacrifices that Americans were called on to make in the Second World War, in order to support the military and it's efforts.  I wonder if Juan and his ilk would have been screaming about "loss of property rights" etc. in WW2.  I guess they don't see protecting the environment as being as important as defeating the Axis.
In fact, dig his "logic:" 

...we've been working at reducing pollution for about 50-years.  Things are much cleaner than they were in the 1960s.  What has been the effect of cleaning up?  Is the earth better off now than then?  The rhetoric of environmentalists seems to say no, we are not better off.  If not, then what effect does anything mankind does have?

To extend my WW2 analogy, and by Juan's "logic," in late 1942, after already fighting the Japanese for 7+ months and having ground troops on Guadalcanal for 3 months, when the American public heard of the landings in North Africa, they should have immediately demanded the resignation if not execution of FDR and the entire high command of the U.S. military.  We had been fighting for 7+ months in the Pacific and still hadn't won, and NOW that goddamn Rosenfeld is wanting to send more boys to die fighting a totally different enemy?!?  Those Democrat sonsabitches are exceeding their powers!   Right?
Anything worth doing is able to be finished soon, right?  We've been picking up roadside trash since Iron Eyes Cody cried upon seeing it, so the atmosphere should be healed too by now, right?

What's funny is seeing people who fall far short of owning capital property whining about "property rights" precisely as the capitalists have conditioned them to do.   Juan, if you're nothing else, you're well-conditioned ideological cannon-fodder.   Like an overage Alex P. Keaton, just keep talking the talk, and eventually the big boys will notice what a good loyal lackey you are, and let you in the club and make you an honorary billionaire and just maybe take you away to that pristine planet they are keeping in reserve for when they have finally fucked this one up beyond all hope of reclamation.

Right?

[21st Century Man]

Can you point to the part where it states the 'mainstream news elites' were trying to convince the people that there was man made global climate change?

I've read the piece twice and I can't find it.

Um, the story is from the Washington Post.   'Nuff Said

[Sambo]

To be a believer in man made climate change brands you a leftist. Ever wonder how that happened?

Man made climate change is real. Think about it. How far in to the industrial revolution are we? 250 years?  Can you fathom how much shit we've put in the air and water, and how much green space we've destroyed? And you think the planet just absorbs all of that with no repercussion?

Man made climate change is a liberal conspiracy.... I wonder if that was as common a knee jerk response baxk when Reagan and Mulroney got together to deal with the effects of acid rain. A pair of conservatives concerned about the environment. Imagine that.

You're brainwashed if you are compelled to juxtapose the notion of man made climate change with a political ideologue. And I bet subconsciously you want to see everything go to hell in a handbag in your lifetime.  Wake up dammit! Our great lakes, every one of them are loaded with plastic particulate, and we've been making plastics for since half the time span of the industrial revolution. And you bloody well don't believe we are fucking up our air and atmosphere?

[West of the Rockies]

I agree with your observations, Sambo.  I suggested early in this thread that someone was cherry-picking data to support his/her point that climate change is either a big, fat hoax, or that it is all part of a naturally-occurring cycle.  I'll hear someone exclaim in January, "Hey, it's 25 degrees outside where I live; so much for global warming!"  One has to look at the big picture:  rising seas, certain gases in the atmosphere, polar ice samples, etc.  Sure, there is some disagreement among scientists -- that's pretty normal and healthy, actually.

Anyway, as I said before, I'd love it if the whole thing were a big hoax (climate change), but I don't think it is.  Ignoring the warning signs could prove our undoing as a species.

[Yorkshire pud]

Um, the story is from the Washington Post.   'Nuff Said

Um; but where does it mention man made global climate change in the WP article? 

I'm just asking to see what argument you're presenting, then we can see what you're saying.

[tensy]

Climate change is the biggest political football ever.

Changing your light bulbs to CFLs isn't going to do squat when China builds a new coal fired plant each week.
Taxing your airline ticket (for carbon offset) isn't going to change a thing.   

This is all about power and money.