New NASA climate change site

Yawn. Your religion is collapsing all around you Alric. Sloppy and corrupt science at East Anglia, IPCC, USHCN, GISS, NCDC and on and on. Even Algore won't poke his head out of his hole these days. Bold of you to open a new thread on this when the threads are all coming unraveled.

 

It's wholly irrelevant to the initial post, but Al Gore had an op-ed in the Times yesterday.

 

Tim is absolutely right. Who would you trust more - Scientists who have been studying climatology for years, or folks who call into AM talk radio?

 

Says the guy who thinks the universe is six thousand years old and the Bible is a more reliable source of climate information than data collected by NASA.

 

Now, that's pretty harsh. Some people who literally believe the earth is 6000 years old in fact have a completely logical argument.

A rational Bible literalist will tell you the following, regarding data on the age of the earth:

When the earth was created 6000 years ago, it was created to look old. The Almighty took pains to provide information that you non-believers find so compelling, for example, embedding fossils and isotopes into the rocks; and aiming streams of photons at it that would mislead the unfaithful into thinking that the night sky reveals universe that is billions of years old.

In short, a true Bible literalist will tell you, flat out, that The Almighty faked the data. It's a test, to separate out those whose sin of pride is to put their trust in their own intellect ahead of trust in God.

Bible literalists are certainly un-scientific, but they are not necessarily ill-informed or illogical. Please don't lump Bible literalists in with climate change deniers.

 

Tim,

Not that I think you will take the time to read it, but you might find the following interesting. It is a sort of history of the "denial" side as well as the CRU issue(s) from the Globe and Mail newspaper. (Canadian)

Climategate's guerrilla warriors: pesky foes or careful watchdogs? by Jeet Heer, The Globe and Mail | Climate Realists

It spells out it some considerable detail how your heros have obfuscated the issue. (And how in spite of everything, the vast amount of science holds up pretty well!)

 

This argument was made way back in Darwin's time. Thomas Henry Huxley, who was given the nickname "Darwin's Bulldog" answered the assertion by saying. "I cannot believe that God would have written across the rocks such an enormous and all-pervading lie!"

Nowadays it's more common for evangelicals to say that it was not god, but Lucifer, who planted the fossils; but this argument is hard to maintain with regard to cosmological evidence. It's one thing to plant a few fake fossils in the ground; quite another to alter the evidence of light from stars which the Bible says that god (not Lucifer) made.

So in the end, you really have to be ignorant of the information now available, to assert an age of six thousand years for the universe. Or you have to believe that all of science is a grand demonic conspiracy to spread lies for the purpose of undermining the young-Earth hypothesis. But even that is hard to maintain, considering that science really got its start when devout people decided that learning about the natural world was the best way to glorify god.

A person who believes in god and is informed about the evidence has little recourse other than to denote god as a sort of prime mover who decreed the laws of physics such that the universe would evolve as it has, over the course of something like 14 billion years, giving rise to the Earth about 4 1/2 billion years ago, and eventually us. Note that mainstream Christians take this view, leaving only the anti-intellectual fringe in the young-Earth camp.

And I predict that eventually, perhaps when the Grand Unified Field Theory is discovered, scientists will be able to explain why the various physical constants are at the values they are, and there will no longer be any use at all for the god hypothesis. Then we can all become pagans and worship the trees and the streams, the flowers and the rain, and have wild monkey sex in the grassy meadows, the way we were meant to do.

 

Daniel, I apologize, I was being purposefully obtuse.

If a person wants to believe that the Lord Almighty faked the data, that's one level of belief.

I can respect, but disagree with, individuals who base their beliefs on an omnipotent and omniscient God who might take the time to set such a trap for the unbelieving. It's not my belief, but at least they've got a logically consistent mechanism in place. There is a single, unified source for the disinformation.

By contrast, to suggest that 10,000 or so scientists, working independently, in different fields, using vastly different metrics, managed to fake up a picture of global warming -- that's simply not logically defensible. To posit something like that is not to come even come close to explaining the evidence.

So I have more respect for somebody who posits a 6000 year old earth, based on an omnipotent and omniscient (but rascally) devine being, than I do for somebody who posits that the evidence for global warming is just one big conspiracy.

Simply as a matter of logic.

 

No need to apologize.

I was just saying that a person who concludes from the Bible that the Earth is six thousand years old must be either ignorant of the available information, or believe in a great conspiracy, because the argument that god or satan planted fake evidence is not tenable. I suggest that young-Earth creationists fall into two categories: people who lack the intellectual skills to comprehend the available information and have been bamboozled by frauds, and the frauds themselves, who knowingly disseminate false information.

Religion is big business, and there's a lot of money being made in it. Young-Earth creationism is not some random aberrant silliness: It's a concerted and organized and very profitable business. Just as cigarette companies lie to their customers to sell them poison, so evangelical preachers lie to their congregants to sell them poisonous beliefs. And those congregants pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year for their poison.

 

I'm right, you're wrong and if you don't agree with me then I'll hit you with an attack on your character.

Boring

 

That's what I said!

 

You're all apostates and heathens damned to Hell :_> The One True religion is Next Wednesdayism: the LORD G-d will create the world next Wednesday. All that we now seem to perceive and remember are merely divine premonitions (or illusions of the Devil, depending). See You Next Wednesday!

 

:hail:

 

Daniel, you were prescient, in a way that is scary beyond all reason. From today's NY Times:

Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets - NYTimes.com

I thought you were just being funny and snarky. But you seem to have nailed a deeper truth.

 

And are we surprised when, at a panel of Republican presidential candidates, the question was asked "who here does NOT believe in evolution?" that multiple hands went up? And these are the "leaders" of a major political party in the US?

And are we surprised that the denial community is populated (in large part) by right wing conservatives?

 

Religious fanatics are dangerous! Their leaders are unscrupulous demagogues who believe nothing, and will advocate anything for money or power, and their rank-and-file are angry, ignorant, unthinking tribalists who see themselves as possessors of TRUTH, besieged by devil-worshipers who know they are wrong but who choose evil out of pure perversity.

Their goal is to force everyone to adopt their religion and to impose their ideas of morality on the rest of us. They do not accept freedom of religion because they believe that god has commanded them to exterminate other religions. And they are becoming stronger and stronger in U.S. politics.

Note, by "religious fanatics" I do not mean anyone who believes in the Bible or some other book. I refer to those who see their duty as spreading their own religion at any cost, without regard for others. The kind of people who would burn you alive to "save" your soul. Make no mistake: There are people in this country who hold to the same philosophy as the Inquisition, though they belong to different churches.

 

It seems that the usual strawman arguments are being thrown out. This is not about the age of the earth, evolution, or any other subject - political or religious. You automatically assume that anyone who argues against AGW is non-scientific. I do not harbor the beliefs which you have attributed to me regarding evolution or the age of the earth, etc. So I will gladly accept your apology.

In any case, it was a nice attempt at diversion from the warmists here. But the crux of the issue IS science. How do you defend the corruption and misuse of science that has now been proven with regard to East Anglia, the IPCC, and many other scientists and institutions? Clearly, even the most non-scientific among the general public can appreciate that a temperature station sitting on an asphalt parking lot next to an AC vent is a problem. And when you multiply that by thousands of other poorly situated stations you have a biased dataset. When the IPCC uses data from Greenpeace and WWF, that is a problem. When "scientists" discuss how to keep certain papers from being published, that is a problem. When the temperature data records are not released in response to an FOI - and it turns out the scientists themselves have destroyed the data rather than turn it over, that is a problem.

You can change the subject all you want by trying to lump AGW "skeptics" into the camp of the scientifically illiterate, but it does not change the fact that there are serious problems with AGW theory and more are being revealed almost daily.