Green Myths On Global Warming, Debunked

Myth: Everything will work out just fine if we leave Big Business alone.

Fact: Yes, when we're all dead all of our problems will be over...

 

And why should we believe British Drivers? Is there some sort of scientific knowledge inherent in being one of them?

The series on National Geographic; "Earth: A Biography" would seem to disagree with much of that.

 

See Nigel Humprhies is an Idiot for more on the Association of British Drivers:

The ABD, for example, campaigns against ANPR cameras - the entire aim of which is to make motorists safer by spotting uninsured and stolen cars and taking them off the road, since anyone who’s ever had their car stolen or been hit by a stolen or uninsured car will testify to the hell it is getting compensated.

Google for their website and you’ll find global warming denial, doing the usual stupid quote mining. As an added bonus, they quote Kary Mullis, a creationist, astrology freak and HIV denier. Brilliant minds at work there.

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The ABD also thinks educating people about CO2 is the equivalent of Nazi Propanganda. I wish I were exagerating. Although, per Godwin's Law, that pretty much means the ABD loses.

 

That certainly was a collection of baloney. The arguments have appeal only to people who can't be bothered to gather even the most basic facts. Propaganda, pure and simple. Aimed at the uneducated. Look at their first point: if we look at the last three years, there is been no global warming. Anybody who's looked at the threads here should understand that you can't look at a time period that short and say much of anything, unless you get some really unusual event. By and large, if you look year-to-year you are looking at weather, not climate. Over a three year period, using Hansen's original projections, you'd expect manmade greenhouse gases to increase mean temperature by 0.072 degrees centigrade. Less than a tenth of a degree centigrade. That's far too small to be resolved against the year-to-year random fluctuations in temperature. So they are looking at weather and interpreting it as climate. Yet, that's the leadoff pitch, and it continues in that vein. I didn't see a point there that hadn't already been thoroughly addressed on realclimate.org.

So, my question back is, why are we being subjected to classic propaganda techniques on what is otherwise a fairly civilized and intelligent board? Not this one post, but a whole string of essentially useless denialist posts? Where either the content of the article is laughably naive (like this one), or with completely misleading sensational headlines, or where the content of the article actually contradicts the headline. I realize that, as propaganda, that works fine -- most people will only remember the headline regardless of the content of the story. So, I understand this as a propaganda method, I just question why its being posted here.

Off the top of my head, we have this one; the one where an editorial by one member of a scientific body was posted as if that were the official policy position of that body; the "Huge Volcanoes" under the icecap that turned out to be undersea vents unrelated to the melting of the icecap; the "Europe is Cooling" one where the article actually said that the regional climate model supported mainstream global warming models in the long run, and so on. At least the thread about tropical stratospheric warming had something interesting to explore, even if the guys who wrote the paper made a simple statistical blunder (and then boasted that they had destroyed the entire framework of global climate models, which I think would be classified as hubris.)

My point is that, once again, if all you can do is scrape the bottom of the barrel, it's a pretty good indication that barrel's empty.

 

Godwin's law, I'll definitely have to remember that.

 

EasyRider,

Instead of intentionally stirring the pot with this kind of nonsense, why don't you find some real peer review science to bolster you agenda? Or just bury you head back in the sand an leave the debate to those that can make a cogent argument on their own!

(I think there are two answers to my above question, A: Your too lazy to research, read and UNDERSTAND real research papers, and B: There aren't any that support your denier ideas!)

Icarus

 

How 'bout you just find some real science. Let's start there. Peer review doesn't necessarily mean a damn thing. An acquaintance of mine who's a big dog at NREL was telling me how shocking the peer review process can be. He was really surprised at some of the drivel that was "peer reviewed" (this was with regards to Solar PV research, not climate research). That doesn't mean that all peer reviewed papers are shite, not by a long shot. But it also doesn't mean that they're all good either. Then there's the whole group think aspect that can pervade any group of people and scientists are no different.

That said, no one has presented a credible argument that satisfactorily explains what we're seeing with the climate now. The current consensus does the best job and should be our operating assumption whilst we try to poke holes in it. The denialists are using rater blunt knives to do their poking at the moment.

 

Tripp,

I agree with you whole heartedly,,except to say, at least peer reviewed science is a bench mark to use, and one that is pretty easy to meet.

I for one subscribe to "The Journal of Irreproducible Results"! If you don't like the results,, change them.

Icarus

 

Nice. We've got a little game of post tennis going on here. That's a capital journal, the JIR. I've not read it in a long time, I remember it from school back in the '80's.

 

As I've pointed out before, Jan Hendrik Schon is a great example of peer review gone bad..... Temporariliy that is. They eventually caught up with his fraudulent research claims.

As has been stated, peer review is not the end all be all of evidence but it does provide a damn good bench mark. One must really consider what type of research is being showcased and who is doing the reviewing. IE a paper on the geology of the mid-Atlantic ridge should be considered suspect when reviewed by the International Journal of Medicine.

 

True, dat.

 

Ack! You[SIC]'d me! I need to start checking my posts before hitting submit.

 

You can forget that last one.

Sample. By a mechanical engineer who writes freelance for an indepentent news organization. No indication of whether the sampling was random or they were chosen to support a particular point of view. In other words....completely useless.

Second is also Canada Free Press.

And so is the first.

If this was for a paper for my class you get a "D" for citations. You used three from the same source and you didn't evaluate for bias. "F" would be for failing to provide any citations at all.

 

What you've got above is energy-industry propaganda.

Tim Ball and Tom Harris, the writers of your articles above, both work for the "Natural Resources Stewardship Project"
Natural Resources Stewardship Project - SourceWatch
NRSP Controlled by Energy Lobbyists | DeSmogBlog

You've digested the propaganda of the oil companies and are disseminating it in just the way they like! Cause hey, $4.00 a gallon isn't enough to pay for gas.

If you're curious as to how the opinions you've been fed were designed, you might try reading:
Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science

 

If there is such thing as Hell I believe people like Tim Ball and Fred Singer will have a special place set aside for them. :target: lol