Brits - Channel 4 9pm Tonight "The Great Global Warming Swindle"

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Dis
long as we don't have a runaway greenhouse effect...

conditions like on Venus could be a little tough on us.

It didn't turn into venus when the dinosaurs ruled their muggy tropical paradise so I'm not too concerned. Studies of stomata on leaf fossils strongly suggest CO2 levels were *much* higher at that time in addition to the much higher temperatures.

Not until a few hundred million years from now when the gradual increase of solar radiation has come closer to venus levels would I begin to worry much about a runaway greenhouse feedback transforming earth into a Venus twin.

[Dis]

my main point is we can't deny human nature.

Can we force humans to live in small cities crammed together and forgo automobiles and massive energy consumption? I think most people desire a home to live in and a personal means of transportation. It offers a form of freedom unique to every other form of transportation. I love having a car.

That being said, why do cars need to have so much horsepower? Why not have all electric cars? I'm content with my little 1.6 liter engine in my Corolla. Though I do sometimes miss my 300 HP Mustang. . But it was too much power, and I tended to drive too fast. But it was sweet. This is human nature I suppose.

The only way to do it is have the goverment mandate that no vehicle have over 120 horsepower. Except if they are driving a vehicle that can be proven to be used for towing. But this contradicts with our system of values in western society. I still think the goverment should mandate all cars get at least 50 mpg by the year 2012.

So while some regulation can be made, I think it's unreasonable to expect humans to radically shift their lifestyle in an attempt to stop global warming. As I said before, our best bet is more research and development.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

The soft admonishment of the NYT to Gore. (Translation Gore is in Trouble)

From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype

Al Gore’s film on global warming depicted a bleak future.

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: March 13, 2007

Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.

Don J. Easterbrook, a geology professor, has cited “inaccuracies” in “An Inconvenient Truth.”

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”

Mr. Gore, in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his work made “the most important and salient points” about climate change, if not “some nuances and distinctions” scientists might want. “The degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger,” he said, adding, “I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand.”

Although Mr. Gore is not a scientist, he does rely heavily on the authority of science in “An Inconvenient Truth,” which is why scientists are sensitive to its details and claims.

Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots.

Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for “getting the message out,” Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were “overselling our certainty about knowing the future.”

Typically, the concern is not over the existence of climate change, or the idea that the human production of heat-trapping gases is partly or largely to blame for the globe’s recent warming. The question is whether Mr. Gore has gone beyond the scientific evidence.

“He’s a very polarizing figure in the science community,” said Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental scientist who is a colleague of Dr. Vranes at the University of Colorado center. “Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue to the person, and become a referendum on Mr. Gore.”

“An Inconvenient Truth,” directed by Davis Guggenheim, was released last May and took in more than $46 million, making it one of the top-grossing documentaries ever. The companion book by Mr. Gore quickly became a best seller, reaching No. 1 on the New York Times list.

Mr. Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and people die en masse. “Unless we act boldly,” he wrote, “our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes.”

He clearly has supporters among leading scientists, who commend his popularizations and call his science basically sound. In December, he spoke in San Francisco to the American Geophysical Union and got a reception fit for a rock star from thousands of attendees.

“He has credibility in this community,” said Tim Killeen, the group’s president and director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a top group studying climate change. “There’s no question he’s read a lot and is able to respond in a very effective way.”

Some backers concede minor inaccuracies but see them as reasonable for a politician. James E. Hansen, an environmental scientist, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top adviser to Mr. Gore, said, “Al does an exceptionally good job of seeing the forest for the trees,” adding that Mr. Gore often did so “better than scientists.”

Still, Dr. Hansen said, the former vice president’s work may hold “imperfections” and “technical flaws.” He pointed to hurricanes, an icon for Mr. Gore, who highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research suggesting that global warming will cause both storm frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the United States.

“We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is,” Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Gore. “On the other hand,” Dr. Hansen said, “he has the bottom line right: most storms, at least those driven by the latent heat of vaporization, will tend to be stronger, or have the potential to be stronger, in a warmer climate.”

In his e-mail message, Mr. Gore defended his work as fundamentally accurate. “Of course,” he said, “there will always be questions around the edges of the science, and we have to rely upon the scientific community to continue to ask and to challenge and to answer those questions.”

He said “not every single adviser” agreed with him on every point, “but we do agree on the fundamentals” — that warming is real and caused by humans.

Mr. Gore added that he perceived no general backlash among scientists against his work. “I have received a great deal of positive feedback,” he said. “I have also received comments about items that should be changed, and I have updated the book and slideshow to reflect these comments.” He gave no specifics on which points he had revised.

He said that after 30 years of trying to communicate the dangers of global warming, “I think that I’m finally getting a little better at it.”

While reviewers tended to praise the book and movie, vocal skeptics of global warming protested almost immediately. Richard S. Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, who has long expressed skepticism about dire climate predictions, accused Mr. Gore in The Wall Street Journal of “shrill alarmism.”

Some of Mr. Gore’s centrist detractors point to a report last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that studies global warming. The panel went further than ever before in saying that humans were the main cause of the globe’s warming since 1950, part of Mr. Gore’s message that few scientists dispute. But it also portrayed climate change as a slow-motion process.

It estimated that the world’s seas in this century would rise a maximum of 23 inches — down from earlier estimates. Mr. Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.

Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist in Denmark long skeptical of catastrophic global warming, said in a syndicated article that the panel, unlike Mr. Gore, had refrained from scaremongering. “Climate change is a real and serious problem” that calls for careful analysis and sound policy, Dr. Lomborg said. “The cacophony of screaming,” he added, “does not help.”

So too, a report last June by the National Academies seemed to contradict Mr. Gore’s portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said, current highs appeared unrivaled since only 1600, the tail end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period.

Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, said on a blog that Mr. Gore’s film did “indeed do a pretty good job of presenting the most dire scenarios.” But the June report, he added, shows “that all we really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400 years.”

Other critics have zeroed in on Mr. Gore’s claim that the energy industry ran a “disinformation campaign” that produced false discord on global warming. The truth, he said, was that virtually all unbiased scientists agreed that humans were the main culprits. But Benny J. Peiser, a social anthropologist in Britain who runs the Cambridge-Conference Network, or CCNet, an Internet newsletter on climate change and natural disasters, challenged the claim of scientific consensus with examples of pointed disagreement.

“Hardly a week goes by,” Dr. Peiser said, “without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory,” including some reports that offer alternatives to human activity for global warming.

Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.

“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore’s assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had corrupted. “I’ve never been paid a nickel by an oil company,” Dr. Easterbrook told the group. “And I’m not a Republican.”

Biologists, too, have gotten into the act. In January, Paul Reiter, an active skeptic of global warming’s effects and director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Mr. Gore for his portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria.

“For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against the unsubstantiated claims,” Dr. Reiter wrote in The International Herald Tribune. “We have done the studies and challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the facts.”

Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton who advised Mr. Gore on the book and movie, said that reasonable scientists disagreed on the malaria issue and other points that the critics had raised. In general, he said, Mr. Gore had distinguished himself for integrity.

“On balance, he did quite well — a credible and entertaining job on a difficult subject,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. “For that, he deserves a lot of credit. If you rake him over the coals, you’re going to find people who disagree. But in terms of the big picture, he got it right.”

NYT

[Drake Tungsten]

The Tuesday Morning Quarterback has what sounds like an interesting cover story on dealing with global warming in next month's Atlantic Monthly. Unfortunately I don't subscribe to the Atlantic, so I was only able to read this interview about the article, not the article itself. Luckily, the interview is interesting in its own right.

[One_more_turn]

I'm all for the alternative energy. We need the "next thing" to keep ourselves going, our society would stagnate and rot otherwise.

Space race is another great "next thing" idea. I read that Germans now plan their own moon missions.

[Solly]

There's nothing wrong with a stable society.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Oerdin

Old man, you just haven't a clue.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wingnut

You must like abrupt abuse. You seem to crave it. I think it must be an unhealthy fetish of some sort, so I shall decline to feed your neurosis.

I'll begin by asking when Websters or Oxford turned the floor over to internet polls for defining our language? Did I miss a memo?

If they did, would the staggering sum of... erm... 110 responses (all of them unique individuals, no doubt) be the benchmark of definition?

Oh, and then we may enquire for an explanation of your fervent, if not fragrant, insistence on nailing slang down in definition. It occurs to me that it seems to be the habit of an authoritarian to wish to pin the wings of the butterfly in such a fashion.

So, would you be a linguistic thug of the right variety, or of the left? In either case, 'wingnut' seems to apply.

[One_more_turn]

Originally posted by Doddler
There's nothing wrong with a stable society.

Our societies always have tons of problems, the longer we wait with solving these problems, the more unstable our society becomes.

One big current problem is the declining ratio of work force versus retirees in many developed countries. The whole social security concept was built on the assumption that there would always be more workers than retirees. But is this assumption still valid today? If not, how do we deal with the promises made to the future retirees? This is a very serious and destabilizing development that need to be addressed sooner rather than late.

Implementing solutions always means change. Since our society is dynamic and new problems creep up everyday, that means constant changes are needed to keep it stable.

Remember the Eastern Islanders? They didn't find the right solution to their problems and were forced to EAT EACH OTHER in the end.

[Drake Tungsten]

Remember the Eastern Islanders?

No, I don't...

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten

Remember the Eastern Islanders?

No, I don't...

it looks like a typo'ed "Easter Islanders" to me.

[Drake Tungsten]

whoosh

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
whoosh

swish! he scores!

(congrats)

[Dinner]

Originally posted by notyoueither
So, would you be a linguistic thug of the right variety, or of the left? In either case, 'wingnut' seems to apply.

Seeming or other wise the common usage for wingnut means right winger while the common usage for moonbat is a left winger. They're similiar terms which mean the same for opposite sides of the political spectrium

[Wezil]

Wingnut - Someone who is bat**** insane, regardless of place on political spectrum.

Moonbat - Never heard it used.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by Wezil
Wingnut - Someone who is bat**** insane, regardless of place on political spectrum.

Yup

Moonbat - Never heard it used.

Wiki is your friend

The term came into popular use in blogs in February, 2004 with the Barking Moonbat Early Warning System blog in which blogger Allan Kelly humorously describes a moonbat as "a human whose cerebral cortex has turned to silly putty causing him or her to mentally slide down the evolutionary ladder to the level of a winged rat who is influenced by the moon and who wants to eat your brain. These creatures have broken brains and since the brain is the organ that tells us all when we're broken, their broken detection mechanism is unable to tell them that they are barking mad."

Open source advocate Eric Raymond used the term in an interview in The New Yorker to describe eccentric Wikipedia contributors.[3] The term has come into wider use in politics, sometimes as "moonbat crazy"; Boston commentator Howie Carr uses the term regularly.[4] In September, 2006, Carr ran a number of "How do you spot a moonbat?" segments on his daily radio show, and defined the term to mean "A left-wing nut who probably suffers from Bush Derangement Syndrome."[citation needed]

More generally, it is becoming a term to describe any left wing political extremist, and like many epithets, it can be used to describe less extreme individuals as if they were extremists.

On March 8th, 2007, the Boston Herald published an article titled "Moonbats enter their blue phase" [4] to describe the shock of leftwing supporters of newly elected Democratic governor Deval Patrick upon revelation of his use of the governors office in unethical business deals in February 2007.

Wingnut (politics), a mildly derogatory term for a person who holds either strong right-wing or strong left-wing political beliefs.

Wiki Wingnut

Wiki - Moonbat