Al Gore's hocky stick

[tim290280]

Slamming the Climate Skeptic Scam
by Jim Goggan

Updated: June 15, 2009

There is a line between public relations and propaganda - or there should be. And there is a difference between using your skills, in good faith, to help rescue a battered reputation and using them to twist the truth - to sow confusion and doubt on an issue that is critical to human survival.

And it is infuriating - as a public relations professional - to watch my colleagues use their skills, their training and their considerable intellect to poison the international debate on climate change.

That's what is happening today, and I think it's a disgrace. On one hand, you have the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – as well as the science academies of every developed nation in the world – confirming that:
* climate change is real;
* it is caused by human activity; and
* it is threatening the planet in ways we can only begin to imagine.

On the other hand, you have an ongoing public debate - not about how to respond, but about whether we should bother, about whether climate change is even a scientific certainty. While those who stand in denial of climate change have failed in the last 15 years to produce a single, peer-reviewed scientific journal article that challenges the theory and evidence of human-induced climate change, mainstream media was, until very recently, covering the story (in more than half the cases, according to the academic researchers Boykoff and Boykoff) by quoting one scientist talking about the risks and one purported expert saying that climate change was not happening – or might actually be a good thing.

Few PR offences have been so obvious, so successful and so despicable as this attack on the science of climate change. It has been a triumph of disinformation – one of the boldest and most extensive PR campaigns in history, primarily financed by the energy industry and executed by some of the best PR talent in the world. As a public relations practitioner, it is a marvel – and a deep humiliation – and I want to see it stop.

Here’s how it works: Public relations is not a process of telling people what to think; people are too smart for that, and North Americans are way too stubborn. Tell a bunch of North Americans what they are supposed to think and you’re likely to wind up the only person at the party enjoying your can of New Coke.

No, the trick to executing a good PR campaign is twofold: you figure out what people are thinking already; and then you nudge them gently from that position to one that is closer to where you want them to be. The first step is research: you find out what they know and understand; you identify the specific gaps in their knowledge. Then you fill those gaps with a purpose-built campaign. You educate. If people are afraid to take Tylenol (as they were after someone poisoned some pills), you explain the extensive safety precautions now typical in the pharmaceutical industry. If people think Martha Stewart is arrogant and uncaring, you create opportunities for her to show a more human side.

In the best cases – the cases that are most personally rewarding – your advice actually guides corporate behavior. That is, if a client wants to protect or revive their reputation, if they want to convince the public that they’re running a responsible company and doing the right thing, the most obvious public relations advice is that they should do the right thing.

It's the kind of advice that, historically, has been a hard sell in the tobacco industry, in the asbestos industry - and too often in the automotive industry. Those sectors have provided some of the most famous examples of PR disinformation: "smoking isn't necessarily bad for you;" "it's not certain that asbestos will give you cancer;" "your seatbelt might actually kill you if you're the one person in five trillion whose buckle jams just as your car flips into a watery ditch."

But few PR offences have been so obvious, so successful and so despicable as the attack on the scientific certainty of climate change. Few have been so coldly calculating and few have been so well documented. For example, Ross Gelbspan, in his books, The Heat is On and Boiling Point sets out the whole case, pointing fingers and naming names. PR Watch founder John Stauber has done similarly exemplary work, tracking the bogus campaigns and linking various pseudo scientists to their energy industry funders.

I have filled a whole book with details of the documented corporate action plans to deny climate change and confuse the public. Climate Cover-up will hit the shelves in the fall of 2009. In the meantime, one of the best proofs of climate disinformation came in a November 2002 memo from political consultant Frank Luntz to the U.S. Republican Party. Luntz followed the rules: he did the research; he identified the soft spots in public opinion; and he made a clever critical judgment about which way the public could be induced to move.

In a section entitled "Winning the Global Warming Debate," Luntz says this:

"The Scientific Debate Remains Open. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field."

If you download the memo and read the whole thing, you will notice that Luntz never expressly denies the validity of the science. In fact, he says, "The scientific debate is closing [against us] but is not yet closed."

" ... not yet closed"? Among those who disagreed with that assessment when Luntz wrote this report were the 2,500 scientists in the IPCC, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Canada. In 2004, Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science magazine, said, "We're in the middle of a large uncontrolled experiment on the only planet we have." And to back up this sense of certainty, he reported that University of California, San Diego science historian Dr. Naomi Oreskes had published an analysis in Science in which she had combed through 928 peer-reviewed climate studies published between 1993 and 2003 and found not a single one that disagreed with the general scientific consensus.

Yet journalists continued to report updates from the best climate scientists in the world juxtaposed against the unsubstantiated raving of an industry-funded climate change denier - as if both were equally valid.

Notwithstanding, Luntz wrote: "There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science." He recommended that his Republican Party clients do just that. He urged them to marshal their own "scientists" to contest the issue on every occasion. He urged them to plead for "sound science" a twist of language of the sort that George Orwell once said was "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind."

Luntz's goal – which was embraced with unnerving enthusiasm by the Bush Administration - was to manufacture uncertainty and to politicize science. Like all tragedy, it would be hilarious if you could play it for laughs.

Luntz himself actually backed off this position a couple of years later, saying that the evidence of climate change was overwhelming. So it’s difficult to tell who is being wilfully blind and who, like Luntz, was falling victim to gross negligence in the way they ignore the science - and in the potential catastrophic risks that they promote. Whichever way you cut it, their actions reflect badly on the whole public relations industry.

As you might assume from my earlier criticism, I'm not suggesting that Frank Luntz or even a dubious cabal of ethics-free PR people are solely to blame for the public confusion on climate change. They have received extensive, if clumsy assistance from the media, which in a facile attempt to provide "balance" is willing to give any opinion an “impartial” airing as long as it is firmly in contradiction with another.

This is not just a feature of the point/counterpoint talking heads that have emerged as the principal vehicle for television news. Newspaper reporters are just as guilty of canvassing "both sides" of every argument, often without providing any critical judgment as to the validity or relative weight of either side. On the issue of climate change, journalists have consistently reported the updates from the best climate scientists in the world juxtaposed against the unsubstantiated raving of an industry-funded climate change denier - as if both are equally valid. This is not balanced journalism. It is a critical abdication of journalistic responsibility. Any reporter who cannot assess the relative merits of a global scientific consensus - especially in contradiction to an "expert" that the coal industry is paying to help "clear the air" - deserves to have his pencil taken away in solemn ceremony and broken into bits.

There is yet more blame to go around. You could criticize scientists for the dense, cautious and conditional language that they use in talking about the threats of climate change. But in science, credibility is a currency (this, in apparent contradiction to the state of affairs in journalism or PR). A scientist who strays, even momentarily, off the path of certainty or who wanders from hard science into policy is immediately dismissed as someone with an axe to grind.

You could also criticize environmentalists, whose tendency has been to stray too far in the other direction, extrapolating scientific assumptions to create scare stories so dispiriting that they create apathy rather than activism. These, in turn, have made easy targets for the energy industry's climate change deniers.

The important thing at this point, however, is not to assign blame. It is to educate yourself and to join this increasingly urgent political debate. This is not one of those relatively low-level PR boondoggles. We're not talking about single individuals dying because the auto industry held out against seat belt laws. We're not even talking about many 100s of thousands of people dying of lung cancer because the tobacco industry held out for "sound science" while actively increasing the amount of addictive nicotine in their product. We're talking about the future of the planet.

So please read on.

Read everything.

If you are actually practicing public relations, take a close look at your clients and at your own performance. There has to be a point where principle trumps short-term economic gain, a point where you admit to yourself that it’s not worth the money to put the planet at risk.

Whatever you do, you must keep a wary eye. By all means, read the sites that deny the reality of climate change. But then check on www.sourcewatch.org to see who paid for those opinions. Read the DeSmogBlog. Don't accept the word of people who pass themselves off as "skeptics." Be skeptical yourself. Ask yourself what motive the scientific community has to gang up and invent a phony climate crisis. Compare that to the motives that ExxonMobil or Peabody Coal might have to deny that burning fossil fuels indiscriminately could change irrevocably our existence on the planet.

And if you still leave the lights on when you're done, make sure they're shining in the shamed faces of the PR pros who are still trying to prevent sound, sensible policy change to affect this, perhaps the biggest threat humankind has ever faced.

 

[tim290280]

Unsettled Science
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/unsettled-science/#more-2187

Unusually, I’m in complete agreement with a recent headline on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page:

“The Climate Science Isn’t Settled”

The article below is the same mix of innuendo and misrepresentation that its author normally writes, but the headline is correct. The WSJ seems to think that the headline is some terribly important pronouncement that in some way undercuts the scientific consensus on climate change but they are simply using an old rhetorical ‘trick’.

The phrase “the science is settled” is associated almost 100% with contrarian comments on climate and is usually a paraphrase of what ’some scientists’ are supposed to have said. The reality is that it depends very much on what you are talking about and I have never heard any scientist say this in any general context – at a recent meeting I was at, someone claimed that this had been said by the participants and he was roundly shouted down by the assembled experts.

The reason why no scientist has said this is because they know full well that knowledge about science is not binary – science isn’t either settled or not settled. This is a false and misleading dichotomy. Instead, we know things with varying degrees of confidence – for instance, conservation of energy is pretty well accepted, as is the theory of gravity (despite continuing interest in what happens at very small scales or very high energies) , while the exact nature of dark matter is still unclear. The forced binary distinction implicit in the phrase is designed to misleadingly relegate anything about which there is still uncertainty to the category of completely unknown. i.e. that since we don’t know everything, we know nothing.

In the climate field, there are a number of issues which are no longer subject to fundamental debate in the community. The existence of the greenhouse effect, the increase in CO2 (and other GHGs) over the last hundred years and its human cause, and the fact the planet warmed significantly over the 20th Century are not much in doubt. IPCC described these factors as ‘virtually certain’ or ‘unequivocal’. The attribution of the warming over the last 50 years to human activity is also pretty well established – that is ‘highly likely’ and the anticipation that further warming will continue as CO2 levels continue to rise is a well supported conclusion. To the extent that anyone has said that the scientific debate is over, this is what they are referring to. In answer to colloquial questions like “Is anthropogenic warming real?”, the answer is yes with high confidence.

But no scientists would be scientists if they thought there was nothing left to find out. Think of the science as a large building, with foundations reaching back to the 19th Century and a whole edifice of knowledge built upon them. The community spends most of its time trying to add a brick here or a brick there and slowly adding to the construction. The idea that the ’science is settled’ is equivalent to stating that the building is complete and that nothing further can be added. Obviously that is false – new bricks (and windows and decoration and interior designs) are being added and argued about all the time. However, while the science may not be settled, we can still tell what kind of building we have and what the overall picture looks like. Arguments over whether a single brick should be blue or yellow don’t change the building from a skyscraper to a mud hut.

The IPCC reports should be required reading for anyone who thinks that scientists think that the ’science is settled’ – the vast array of uncertainties that are discussed and dissected puts that notion to bed immediately. But what we do have are reasons for concern. As Mike Hulme recently wrote:

cience has clearly revealed that humans are influencing global climate and will continue to do so, but we don’t know the full scale of the risks involved, nor how rapidly they will evolve, nor indeed—with clear insight—the relative roles of all the forcing agents involved at different scales.
…
The central battlegrounds on which we need to fight out the policy implications of climate change concern matters of risk management, of valuation, and political ideology. We must move the locus of public argumentation here not because the science has somehow been “done” or “is settled”; science will never be either of these things, although it can offer powerful forms of knowledge not available in other ways. It is a false hope to expect science to dispel the fog of uncertainty so that it finally becomes clear exactly what the future holds and what role humans have in causing it.

Dealing with the future always involves dealing with uncertainty – and this is as true with climate as it is with the economy. Science has led to a great deal of well-supported concern that increasing emissions of CO2 (in particular) are posing a substantial risk to human society. Playing rhetorical games in the face of this, while momentarily satisfying for blog commenters, is no answer at all to the real issues we face.

 

[tim290280]

Climate change: The next ten years

* 13 August 2008 by Fred Pearce and Michael Le Page
* New Scientist Magazine issue 2669.


WHAT's going to happen to the climate over the next 10 years or so? Is it time to buy that air conditioner you considered during the last heatwave? Should you rip up your garden and replant it with drought-resistant plants, or can you expect more rain - perhaps even floods - in your part of world? The other possibility, of course, is that your local climate will change little in the near future.

On the one hand we have weather predictions for the next few days. On the other we have climate forecasts for the very distant future. But what happens in the middle? Why don't we have forecasts for, say, 2010 or 2018? Knowing how temperature and rainfall will change over the next few years would be invaluable to many people, from farmers to the tourism industry to those in charge of our water supplies. Yet while you might think predicting how the climate will change over the next few years would be a lot easier than saying what it will be like in 2030 or 2050, it's actually harder.

Nevertheless, some meteorologists and climate scientists are now trying to make just these kinds of forecasts. It is a new and controversial field, but over the past year some groups have published the first short-term forecasts. So what are they predicting - and can we trust their conclusions?

Underlying trends

For long-term forecasting, what matters is underlying trends, and at the moment the key trend is warming due to rising levels of greenhouse gases. Predictions made two decades ago are pretty close to the mark. In the short term, though, natural variability matters more than the underlying trend - global warming does not mean that each year will be warmer than the preceding one.

The problem is a bit like trying to predict how the weather in New York will change over January compared with how the weather will change from January to July. It's hard to say whether the last week of January will be colder than the first, but you can confidently predict that it will be colder during January than in July.

So making forecasts is all about figuring what dominates the state of the atmosphere on various timescales. Some things, like accumulating greenhouse gases, matter over many decades while other things, like warm and cold fronts, dominate over days and months. Over periods of a few years, there's growing evidence that the oceans are the key - and this is encouraging researchers to attempt short-term forecasts.

Ocean oscillations

"It takes the oceans a long time to heat up and cool down," says Doug Smith, who runs 10-year forecasting trials at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, Devon, the UK's official centre for climate change research. "That makes it a lot easier to predict than the atmosphere. We now think we can predict the key ocean fluctuations 10 to 20 years ahead."

The oceans are crucial because they store so much heat. It takes more than 1000 times as much energy to heat a cubic metre of water by 1 °C as it does the same volume of air. Globally, this means that if the oceans transfer just a tiny fraction of their heat energy to the lower atmosphere, there can be a big rise in surface air temperatures. Conversely, if the oceans soak up more heat from the atmosphere, there can be surface cooling.

Most of the natural variability in surface air temperature from year to year is due to heat sloshing back and forth between the oceans and atmosphere, rather than any overall loss or gain of heat by the entire planet. The state of the sea surface determines what happens, and it affects both temperature and rainfall. For instance, in recent years, climate scientists have successfully forecast droughts in west Africa and north-east Brazil several months ahead by measuring sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic.

Huge influence

The long-standing droughts in Australia could be due to persistently low sea surface temperatures to the north of country, relative to warmer water in the Indian Ocean, say Wenju Cai and Tim Cowan of the CSIRO marine and atmospheric research centre in Aspendale, Victoria. Rainfall over southern and eastern Australia has been declining for half a century now, causing major problems in river systems like the Murray-Darling basin, which produces much of the country's crops.

The huge influence of sea surface temperatures has led many researchers to try to understand how they fluctuate over years and decades. Predict this, and you should be able to predict all sorts of other things as well.

The best known of these fluctuations is the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. In the tropical Pacific, cold water normally wells up near South America, while hot water piles up on the other side of the Pacific. Sometimes, for reasons poorly understood, the hot water spreads right across the surface of the Pacific in a shallow layer.

This increase in the area of warm water boosts the transfer of heat and moisture to the atmosphere, changing air circulation patterns and producing widespread consequences - from droughts in Indonesia to floods in the Americas. An especially intense El Niño in 1998 made it one of the warmest years on record.

El Niño

Yet contrary to what you might expect, if El Niño has any long-term effect on global warming it may be to slow it down. Models suggest that by increasing heat radiation into space, it may reduce the net gain of heat by the entire planet as a result of increasing greenhouse gases. Actual measurements are not yet accurate enough to confirm this, however.

The opposite of El Niño, La Niña, results in a heat transfer from the lower atmosphere to the ocean. The strong La Niña during the early part of this year could make 2008 one of the coldest years since the early 1990s.

The El Niño cycle lasts anywhere from three to eight years, but its state cannot be predicted more than a year in advance. However, in the Pacific north of the tropics, there seems to be something akin to El Niño that lasts far longer. It is called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and its influence is extensive, on land as well as at sea (see "Trendsetters").

The PDO was in a negative phase - with cooler sea surface temperatures - between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s, and may have been partly responsible for the cooler global surface temperatures during this time. This does not mean a negative PDO has a cooling effect overall; on the contrary, it's likely that a negative PDO increases the planet's total heat by reducing heat transfer from the oceans to the atmosphere and thence into space. Since 1976, the PDO has been mostly positive again, which may have contributed to the strong warming in Alaska and the prolonged droughts in south-east Australia.

Droughts and monsoons

The other major ocean fluctuation is the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, a semi-periodical change in surface temperatures north of the equator. Most researchers agree that the AMO is largely due to changes in the speed of the deep-ocean current known as the thermohaline circulation.

When the circulation speeds up, more warm water from the tropics moves up into the North Atlantic, transferring huge amounts of heat to the air as it goes - the positive phase of the AMO. When a slowing circulation pushes the AMO into a negative phase, more warm water stays in the tropics, and surface temperatures fall in Europe and the eastern side of North America.

The AMO was in a negative phase from the late 1960s until the mid-1990s. We're now in the middle of a positive phase again, which may have contributed to the very rapid warming in the Arctic in recent years and the dramatic fall in the extent of its sea ice during the summer. The effect of a positive AMO on the planet's overall heat budget is not clear, but it may speed up global warming since less ice cover means less solar radiation is reflected back into space.

What's more, there is growing evidence linking the AMO to climatic trends on land, even in areas far from the Atlantic. Decades-long fluctuations in the intensity of the Indian monsoon rains, droughts in the region of west Africa called the Sahel and even the numbers of Atlantic hurricanes all seem to depend on the AMO. Droughts in the western US, including the 1930s Dust Bowl and low river levels in the 1990s, all happened during its positive phase.

The big picture

So what does the future hold? If the AMO stays positive in the coming decade, it will increase summer rainfall over India and the Sahel - and increase Atlantic hurricane activity. However, the AMO may be poised to turn negative, says Rowan Sutton of the Walker Institute at Reading University, UK, who has studied the phenomenon in detail.

The thermohaline circulation is driven by the sinking of cold, salty water near the Arctic. Its strength, and thus the phase of the AMO, seems to depend on what happens in the waters between Greenland and Scandinavia. "There is evidence that we can sometimes predict the changes up to 10 years ahead," Sutton says.

Meanwhile, the PDO has already been negative for the past couple of years. If both ocean fluctuations were to be in a negative phase over the next few years, things will be very different.

For starters, there will be a slowdown in the rapid warming seen around the Arctic and North Atlantic in recent years. The rapid fall in the extent of sea ice in summer - which has been happening much faster than predicted - could slow and perhaps even reverse.
A temporary respite

Droughts could return to India and the Sahel, but for the parched American west there could be a desperately needed respite. On current trends, the great reservoirs on the Colorado river that sustain western cities like San Diego and Phoenix could be dry within a decade. "We are stunned at the magnitude of the problem, and how fast it is coming at us," says Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. If the AMO enters a negative phase, then the river may live on.

Some also predict a decline in hurricane activity in the Atlantic. But Michael Mann of Penn State University says some things attributed to the AMO are more likely a result of global warming. He thinks the AMO has little influence on tropical sea temperatures, so he predicts that Atlantic hurricanes will intensify even if the AMO is negative. We will have to wait and see.

That's the broad-brush picture. In Europe, several groups are trying to model exactly what might happen over the next 10 years or so. Smith's team produced the first such forecast last year. It suggests that surface air temperatures will remain steady for the next six years or so as cooler sea surface temperatures keep the lower atmosphere cool despite ever higher greenhouse gas levels.

But this respite won't last. Smith expects surface temperatures will start to rise again by 2014, and that they will go into overdrive with a string of record highs at the end of the next decade if both the major ocean oscillations kick back into positive phases.

Global cooling

Earlier this year another group, headed by Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute for Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, produced an even more striking forecast: "Global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade."

Climate change deniers promptly proclaimed that we could expect "more global cooling ahead". But surface temperature is not the same as the overall heat content of the planet. Since the 1960s, 90 per cent of the excess heat due to higher greenhouse gas levels has gone into the oceans, 7 per cent into land and ice, and just 3 per cent into warming the atmosphere. Even if the lower atmosphere doesn't warm in the next few years, that's no reason for comfort so long as the strong warming trend in the oceans continues. In the long run, warmer oceans inevitably mean a warmer atmosphere.

In any case, many climate researchers don't think the Keenlyside forecast is right. "The way they try to predict the AMO is almost guaranteed to give you the wrong answer," says Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Center for Space Studies in New York.

The way they try to predict it is guaranteed to give you the wrong answer

The issue is where the models start from. If you're trying to forecast natural variability, conditions in the seas in the model must match those in the real world. Thanks to a network of undersea sensors, we are now starting to get good data on both temperature and salinity levels in the crucial upper layers of the Atlantic. However, feeding this information into models is not as easy as it might seem and - unlike Smith's team - the Keenlyside team put only sea surface temperatures into their model.

Completely wrong

"If you match the sea surface temperatures but not the salinity values, the water density will be completely wrong," says Schmidt. Yet this density is crucial for determining the state of the thermohaline circulation and hence the AMO.

Some of the scientists who write for the RealClimate blog are so sure that the forecast is wrong that they offered the Keenlyside team a bet of €2500 that the average surface temperatures for 2005 to 2015 will, contrary to the team's forecast, turn out be higher than during 1994 to 2004. The team has not accepted the bet.

Even if the various "model initialisation" problems can be solved, is it really possible to predict how the oceans will behave so far in advance? According to David Battisti at the University of Washington in Seattle, who specialises in studying natural variability, there's a growing consensus that the PDO is just the mid-latitude "debris" left by the past two or three El Niños or La Niñas. If this is right, it means the PDO cannot be predicted long in advance.

No predictability

"There is no predictability in the Pacific," he says. "If there's any hope for predicting natural variability, it's in the Atlantic." Even there, Battisti thinks it will only be possible to make accurate decadal forecasts for tropical regions where there is far less variability from year to year than in higher latitudes.

What's more, there is another aspect of natural variability that cannot be predicted years in advance: volcanoes. Major volcanic eruptions like those of El Chichón in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991 can throw up so much dust and sulphur that they cool the entire planet. The average effect of eruptions can be included in forecasts looking several decades ahead, but not in 10-year ones. "The forecast will be wrong when one occurs," says Smith.

There is no doubt that enormous progress has been made in understanding and predicting some of the factors responsible for the tremendous variability in surface air temperatures and rainfall from year to year. But the field is in its infancy. It is still far from clear to what extent natural variability can be predicted years in advance - and it's going to take decades to find out for sure.

In the meantime, 10-year forecasts should come with a very clear health warning. "There is a danger that if we make a forecast and it's wrong that people will lose faith," Smith acknowledges. "But I don't agree we shouldn't make them."

 

[lifterdead]

I love debates like this.

:gaysign:

OK, here's the deal. Anyone who argues with the following facts is an idiot:

1) Global temperatures have risen considerably.
2) Civilization has obviously had some influence on it.

However.......

3) We don't know what's going to happen to our climate in the far future.
4) We don't know, but if we didn't make guesses at what was causing it, we'd be idiots. The best data now supports some anthropogenic warming at the very least.







Could scientists be wrong about anthropogenic warming? Sure.
Would I rather they didn't do anything? No.




PS- I still hate Al Gore and think he's an idiot.

 

[dilatedmuscle]

I love debates like this.

:gaysign:

OK, here's the deal. Anyone who argues with the following facts is an idiot:

1) Global temperatures have risen considerably.
2) Civilization has obviously had some influence on it.

However.......

3) We don't know what's going to happen to our climate in the far future.
4) We don't know, but if we didn't make guesses at what was causing it, we'd be idiots. The best data now supports some anthropogenic warming at the very least.







Could scientists be wrong about anthropogenic warming? Sure.
Would I rather they didn't do anything? No.




PS- I still hate Al Gore and think he's an idiot.

WTF???? why do you hate Al Gore? sure he is a tool but he gave us ManBearPig!!!.... MANBEARPIGGGGG!!!!

 

[lifterdead]

 

[Braaq]

I love debates like this.

:gaysign:

OK, here's the deal. Anyone who argues with the following facts is an idiot:

1) Global temperatures have risen considerably.
2) Civilization has obviously had some influence on it.

However.......

3) We don't know what's going to happen to our climate in the far future.
4) We don't know, but if we didn't make guesses at what was causing it, we'd be idiots. The best data now supports some anthropogenic warming at the very least.







Could scientists be wrong about anthropogenic warming? Sure.
Would I rather they didn't do anything? No.




PS- I still hate Al Gore and think he's an idiot.

Great post

 

[dilatedmuscle]

im just posting now so i can see my name on all of the latest posts at once

 

[Ironslave]

im just posting now so i can see my name on all of the latest posts at once

Please refrain from doing this, it's bad enough seeing your name as the latest post in a single thread, if I see it as the latest post in all of the threads in a sub forum I will be forced to call my cable provider and cancel my internet service.

 

[El Freako]

Please refrain from doing this, it's bad enough seeing your name as the latest post in a single thread, if I see it as the latest post in all of the threads in a sub forum I will be forced to call my cable provider and cancel my internet service.

:iorofl:

 

[dilatedmuscle]

Please refrain from doing this, it's bad enough seeing your name as the latest post in a single thread, if I see it as the latest post in all of the threads in a sub forum I will be forced to call my cable provider and cancel my internet service.

LOL sorry, it was like one of those once in a lifetime moments like peeing while sitting down.