Originally Posted by motivez I'll go with scientific consensus over paid research by companies with a vested interest in a specific outcome, Both sides do this. But once again you're siding with a consensus not based on science, but for other reasons. There's simply not the same profit motivation for ...
02-24-2007, 08:04 PM
| #261 | ||||
| Braccae tuae aperiuntur.  Reform Party NJ 
| Originally Posted by motivez Both sides do this. But once again you're siding with a consensus not based on science, but for other reasons.
And once again we're back at the argument of "profit motivation." Both sides are guilty and it's irrelevant. A lot of good science came out of "profit motivation." I don't understand how someone can form an opinion on a scientific debate without using the science, but rather extraneous variables... The science from both sides is presented. Is Ball's opinions really that extraordinary? He's simply saying global warming was real. The earth was warming. Yet humans played a very small role and explained why. And in my opinion he does a much better job based on relevant and up to date scientific data than Al Gore, politicians and the global warming hysterics, yet everyone wants to throw them on a pedestal and demonize anyone who disagrees. | ||||
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02-24-2007, 08:16 PM
| #262 | ||||
| ipsa Scientia Potestas est  Pragmatist North Carolina
| I'm siding with the vast majority of scientists who aren't paid by companies who have come out and said very specifically that their idea of success is seeding doubt about the issue. It is based on science, even if people want to reject it. Maybe it's not a complete picture, but it's the best we have right now.. and it's certainly better than the tainted rhetoric of oil industry lackies that get worshiped by certain posters here. It's hardly irrelevant, although it's very obvious why one would want to make it seem that way. On the contrary though, it's at the crux of the issue when it comes to the credibility of these "skeptics".. The fact that they are paid by an industry who's goal is to seed doubt simply removes all credibility they have on the issue. Their association makes them far too biased. There's no "Anti-Energy-Industry" out there paying all of these other people to support their desired conclusion like there is with people like Ball, so the suggestion that it's both sides is pretty ridiculous. There's nothing wrong with a profit motive by itself, it's when the companies with the profit motive decide the conclusion should be independent of the science like has been done here that it becomes a problem. They want to seed doubt to protect their business model, to make sure they can continue selling their product despite a movement for cleaner energy and yadda yadda.. I'm sure moving forward we'll begin to get a more accurate picture of what's truly going on, and if the science is wrong, well, the science is wrong and I'll change my opinion when the science does. However, in the mean time, if the movement helps us clean up our planet, pollute less, and makes our nation begin to shift away from fossil fuels and reliance on countries like Saudi Arabia.. well, I'm all for it. | ||||
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02-24-2007, 08:22 PM
| #263 | ||||
| Braccae tuae aperiuntur. Reform Party NJ
| Originally Posted by motivez Why, isn't that the point of being a global warming skeptic? To get counter information out there and start to get people to change their opinion or induce doubt?
I don't understand what the problem is. Essentially you're saying these scientists have a differing view that employers and companies don't want to fund. The only people who fund them are oil companies. And once they take that funding you write them off completely. That doesn't seem conducive to promoting sound science. Argue their points. If they're so radical and wrong it should be easy. I'm the kind of person who needs to be proven something. I'm not willing go with the general opinion just because it's popular or someone is associated with a group I dislike or distrust. I need all the science and I need to make up my mind for myself. And when you look at all the science it's very hard to not have some doubt. Even still out of all the science posted from Ball, all his facts and points... here we are numerous posts ahead talking about oil companies and completely ignoring his points. Are they that hard to counter that ignoring him and demonizing his work because of his funding is all that can come from it? Until the scientific community as a whole can step up and disprove people like him I'm going to continue to not be 100% satisfied with their position. If the way to refute Ball's science is to attack him and not his work, I'm gonna have to ignore the scientific communities making such claims until they can provide something better. | ||||
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02-24-2007, 08:34 PM
| #264 | ||||
| ipsa Scientia Potestas est Pragmatist North Carolina
| Their points have been argued and dismissed by the vast majority of scientists in the field today, that's why we have scientific consensus on the issue. If their opinions were found to be valid, why would the rest of science not embrace them and begin to work based on their conclusions? What's the motivation here? Right or wrong there's always going to be a need to study the environment and the climate and changes in the way the earth reacts, I see no need for a mass conspiracy to reject these peoples work because there's no benefit for one side. I'm not going with anything because it's "popular," but rather because the majority of scientists who seem to be less biased have reached the same conclusion, and those who have reached a different one all strangely have the same types of connections. I have a very hard time believing that they couldn't publish their research that so easily counters the rest of the scientific community (as you claim) without the help of the oil industry. In fact, if they cared about the science more than they do being paid, one would think they would avoid connections to organizations that would damage their credibility on an issue. For example, If I want to find out whether or not a certain race of humans is better than another one at various things, I don't go ask someone in a racial superiority group. I ask someone who studies biology and genetics and things of that nature. Someone who studies that but is also associated with a racial superiority group would strike me as someone I would find it hard to take seriously on the subject. This is no different. Find scientists with degrees in Climatology (or another closely related field), with no to the energy industry who, have published research in a peer reviewed journal of some sort that disagree with the scientific consensus. It's interesting that no one has been able to do this so far. I don't care enough to look because the vast majority of scientific minds in the world currently agree, and I'm not smarter or more knowledgeable than they are on the issue. | ||||
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02-24-2007, 10:45 PM
| #265 | ||||
| Banned  Conservative Government is another way to say Better Than You
| Inconvenient Truths Novel science fiction on global warming. By Patrick J. Michaels This Sunday, Al Gore will probably win an Academy Award for his global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a riveting work of science fiction. The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland’s 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100. Where’s the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent Policymaker’s Summary from the United Nations’ much anticipated compendium on climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gore’s film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent. Even 17 inches is likely to be high, because it assumes that the concentration of methane, an important greenhouse gas, is growing rapidly. Atmospheric methane concentration hasn’t changed appreciably for seven years, and Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland recently pronounced the IPCC’s methane emissions scenarios as “quite unlikely.” Nonetheless, the top end of the U.N.’s new projection is about 30-percent lower than it was in its last report in 2001. “The projections include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica for the rates observed since 1993,” according to the IPCC, “but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future.” According to satellite data published in Science in November 2005, Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. Dividing that by 630,000 yields the annual percentage of ice loss, which, when multiplied by 100, shows that Greenland was shedding ice at 0.4 percent per century. “Was” is the operative word. In early February, Science published another paper showing that the recent acceleration of Greenland’s ice loss from its huge glaciers has suddenly reversed. Nowhere in the traditionally refereed scientific literature do we find any support for Gore’s hypothesis. Instead, there’s an unrefereed editorial by NASA climate firebrand James E. Hansen, in the journal Climate Change — edited by Steven Schneider, of Stanford University, who said in 1989 that scientists had to choose “the right balance between being effective and honest” about global warming — and a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was only reviewed by one person, chosen by the author, again Dr. Hansen. These are the sources for the notion that we have only ten years to “do” something immediately to prevent an institutionalized tsunami. And given that Gore only conceived of his movie about two years ago, the real clock must be down to eight years! It would be nice if my colleagues would actually level with politicians about various “solutions” for climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, if fulfilled by every signatory, would reduce global warming by 0.07 degrees Celsius per half-century. That’s too small to measure, because the earth’s temperature varies by more than that from year to year. The Bingaman-Domenici bill in the Senate does less than Kyoto — i.e., less than nothing — for decades, before mandating larger cuts, which themselves will have only a minor effect out past somewhere around 2075. (Imagine, as a thought experiment, if the Senate of 1925 were to dictate our energy policy for today). Mendacity on global warming is bipartisan. President Bush proposes that we replace 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with ethanol over the next decade. But it’s well-known that even if we turned every kernel of American corn into ethanol, it would displace only 12 percent of our annual gasoline consumption. The effect on global warming, like Kyoto, would be too small to measure, though the U.S. would become the first nation in history to burn up its food supply to please a political mob. And even if we figured out how to process cellulose into ethanol efficiently, only one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation. Even the Pollyannish 20-percent displacement of gasoline would only reduce our total emissions by 7-percent below present levels — resulting in emissions about 20-percent higher than Kyoto allows. And there’s other legislation out there, mandating, variously, emissions reductions of 50, 66, and 80 percent by 2050. How do we get there if we can’t even do Kyoto? When it comes to global warming, apparently the truth is inconvenient. And it’s not just Gore’s movie that’s fiction. It’s the rhetoric of the Congress and the chief executive, too. — Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media. | ||||
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02-24-2007, 10:50 PM
| #266 | ||||
| helluo librorum The Lab Moderator  Humanist Chicago Suburbs
| Originally Posted by ballz2wallz
"But Peter Gleick, a conservation analyst and president of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, said "Pat Michaels is not one of the nation's leading researchers on climate change. On the contrary, he is one of a very small minority of nay-sayers who continue to dispute the facts and science about climate change in the face of compelling, overwhelming, and growing evidence." [7] Michaels responded by threatening to sue. (Michaels had gotten another scientist to withdraw similar remarks.)[8] But Gleick stood by his statement and others have joined him. Dr. John Holdren of Harvard University told the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, "Michaels is another of the handful of US climate-change contrarians... He has published little if anything of distinction in the professional literature, being noted rather for his shrill op-ed pieces and indiscriminate denunciations of virtually every finding of mainstream climate science." [9] Dr. Tom Wigley, lead author of parts of the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and one of the world's leading climate scientists, was quoted in the book "The Heat is On" (Gelbspan, 1998, Perseus Publishing): "Michaels' statements on [the subject of computer models] are a catalog of misrepresentation and misinterpretation… Many of the supposedly factual statements made in Michaels' testimony are either inaccurate or are seriously misleading." [10] And an article in the journal Social Epistemology concluded "...the observations upon which PM [Patrick Michaels] draws his case are not good enough to bear the weight of the argument he wishes to make." His peers don't seem to think he knows what he's talking about.  Last edited by Scrum; 02-24-2007 at 10:57 PM.. | ||||
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02-24-2007, 10:54 PM
| #267 | ||||
| ipsa Scientia Potestas est Pragmatist North Carolina
| I love how the debate for conservatives who politicize the issue has moved from being completely against the idea of global warming even having a remote possibility of existing to being "Oh, well, yeah, it's happening, but maybe we're not the cause! All the science isn't in!" Or, "Hey, maybe it's a good thing! It sure is chilly under this 20 feet of snow  "Like my title says, I'm pragmatic about the whole issue. Even if the science is wrong, who really cares at this point? The steps we take and the effects of moving to clean and renewable energy, ie: reducing our dependence on foreign oil, cleaning up the planet, and reducing our footprint on nature is good for humanity as a whole. IMO it transcends partisan politics and the "gotcha" game people try to play with the issue. As long as it's not taken to an extreme (and let's be honest -- it never will be, because even the most liberal electable President isn't going to sink our economy in the process), the process of transforming our society can be a great thing. I think there are smart ways to go about battling the issue, even if you believe it's a fake issue, that benefit everyone. Like the government providing incentives for using clean technology, for innovation on new power sources, for all sorts of things. It doesn't have to be about penalizing or putting a strangle hold on the economy, if there's better solutions out there, lets make it worthwhile for someone to put the effort into inventing them. | ||||
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02-24-2007, 11:01 PM
| #268 | ||||
| ipsa Scientia Potestas est Pragmatist North Carolina
| Originally Posted by Scrumtralecent What a shocker! Another non-published, non-credible source writing an opinion article disputing mainstream science without the credentials or facts to back their opinion up.
 There surely seem to to be a lot of them, but not many published, credible scientists in a relevant field who aren't bankrolled by the energy industry who disagree.. I wonder why? Is it a conspiracy?  | ||||
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02-24-2007, 11:12 PM
| #269 | ||||
| Braccae tuae aperiuntur. Reform Party NJ
| Originally Posted by Scrumtralecent Al Gore's peers don't subscribe the extremism he presents in the film. So I guess they have something in common...
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02-24-2007, 11:16 PM
| #270 | ||||
| Banned Conservative Government is another way to say Better Than You
| Originally Posted by motivez I thought you respected senior fellow's at Cato
 Suddenly you don't? Global warming isn't mainstream science. It's mainstream media hype. Don't confuse the two. Just because the media tells you 'the majority of scientists believe this or that' doesn't make it true. | ||||
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02-24-2007, 11:24 PM
| #271 | ||||
| ipsa Scientia Potestas est Pragmatist North Carolina
| Oh, so global warming doesn't exist again? I thought the conservative movement came to a consensus (including President Bush) that it existed and there was little doubt that we are in a period of warming, we just didn't know whether or not we were causing it. I suppose it'd be hard for anyone to keep up with all that flip flopping. And, well, if it's untrue about the majority of scientists in relevant fields believing that global warming is caused by humans, it sure seems to be a hard task to find many people who disagree who have distinguished and published careers in climatology or another closely related field who's credibility hasn't been tarnished by connections to the energy industry. | ||||
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02-24-2007, 11:30 PM
| #272 | ||||
| Banned Conservative Government is another way to say Better Than You
| Originally Posted by motivez That's it? You're going to argue the difference between Global Warming, the media-hyped controversy over human-led influence in our climate (this is, in fact, what I thought we were arguing, and was understood by the 14th page in a forum), and a warming trend? Get real.
Your argument is that 'their peers disagree with them'. Ever thought that Global Warming proponents have thier peers disagreeing with them too?Let's assume in my line of work I discover something or conuct research that refutes global warming, in any way shape or form. Suddenly, after publication of this research, I start getting funding from various organizations, private firms, companies, etc to continue my research. Is my work suddenly irrelevant? Those who work proving global warming get funding from environmental organizations...why is their work still credible to you? | ||||
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02-25-2007, 12:20 AM
| #273 | ||||
| helluo librorum The Lab Moderator Humanist Chicago Suburbs
| Originally Posted by JaJae Other people who make documentaries about GW?
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02-25-2007, 12:21 AM
| #274 | ||||
| helluo librorum The Lab Moderator Humanist Chicago Suburbs
| Originally Posted by motivez
Originally Posted by ballz2wallz Looks like it.
What if other scientists say that? | ||||
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02-25-2007, 12:25 AM
| #275 | ||||
| ipsa Scientia Potestas est Pragmatist North Carolina
| I simply find it incredibly "convenient" that the very few who actually disagree with the scientific consensus are funded by the energy industry. I'd like to see a list of them who aren't that are well published and respected in a field related to Climatology. It's also interesting that most of them aren't very distinguished in a related field and haven't been published anywhere peer reviewed. Isn't the mantra "Publish or Perish" in the world of academia? I'd wager there's less than 20 without connections to the oil industry, and of those 20 I'd wager less than half are well published in a related field, and of that half I'd bet not many of those are well respected in the community because of the absurdity of their claims and the shoddy nature of their research methods. Of those few, maybe one of them is the next Galileo who has stunning insights that the rest of the what, 2500? scientists somehow overlooked when coming to their conclusion in the IPCC report, but somehow I doubt it. I really have to sit back and laugh at the absurd hero-worship of these skeptics who's credibility in any other situation would be ridiculed.. But because certain people want to make it a partisan political issue they obvious is overlooked in favor of the party line. | ||||
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02-25-2007, 12:27 AM
| #276 | ||||
| ipsa Scientia Potestas est Pragmatist North Carolina
| Originally Posted by Scrumtralecent The only people who can speak for scientific consensus are conservatives that decide when "all the science is in" apparently?
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02-25-2007, 01:12 AM
| #277 | ||||
| helluo librorum The Lab Moderator Humanist Chicago Suburbs
| Originally Posted by motivez
|
