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Climate Denial Kookery

Cheerful Charlie

Cheerful Charlie

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http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/03/21/the-paper-they-dont-want-you-to-read/

From Pharyngula blog

The climate change denialists are a bit thin-skinned; they’ve also been exposed as a bit on the wacko side. The journal Frontiers in Psychology is about to retract a paper that found that denialists tend to have a cluster of weird beliefs (NASA faked the moon landings, the CIA was in charge of the assassination of political figures in the US, etc.) because the denialists screamed very loudly.

,,,,
What they didn’t realize was that they were generating more data to support the hypothesis. The authors of the first paper then wrote a second paper, the one that is now being retracted by the cowardly publisher, called Recursive Fury: Conspiracist Ideation in the Blogosphere in Response to Research on Conspiracist Ideation, in which they scanned public posts and comments on the first article, and analyzed the text for evidence of conspiracist tropes (it’s a nefarious scheme, they’re out to get us, it’s an organized movement to defeat us, etc.) and found that yes, conspiracist reasoning was quite common on climate change denial blogs.

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With links to copies of the now suppressed PDFs demonstrating denialist kookery.
 
Wait. Let me get this straight.

You deny that there is a vast international conspiracy involving over 90% of the scientists from the relevant field and over 90% of all scientists, and you think we are the ones who are conspiracy theorists? Well, if that don't just beat all. How can you possibly be that delusional? Those emails prove that the conspiracy is being run from an obscure school in the UK, and Ross McKitrick definitively proved that global warming is a hoax.

How can you possibly accuse us of being conspiracy nuts when you're the one that is actually part of a conspiracy? Do you even think before you open your mouth and make these arguments? [/conservolibertarian]
 
Cheerful Charlie said:
yes, conspiracist reasoning was quite common on climate change denial blogs.
Click to expand...

Let me see - do I have this right? There's now a conspiracy among conspiracy nutbars to keep the fact that they are conspiracy nutbars... a secret?
Nothing like closing the barn door after the cows are gone...
 
Movie Plot: 97% of climate scientists conspire to reap trillions using nothing but charts and research papers, until they're stymied by a handful of plucky billionaires and oil company CEOs.

(Saw somewhere.)
 
James Brown said:
Movie Plot: 97% of climate scientists conspire to reap trillions using nothing but charts and research papers, until they're stymied by a handful of plucky billionaires and oil company CEOs.

(Saw somewhere.)
Click to expand...

Lies, damn lies, and statistics!

Also, liberals are exactly as bad because they claim that Obama doesn't have a secret weather machine. How gullible! Why do y'all have to be such sheep? [/conservolibertarian]
 
Underseer said:
Wait. Let me get this straight.

You deny that there is a vast international conspiracy involving over 90% of the scientists from the relevant field and over 90% of all scientists, and you think we are the ones who are conspiracy theorists? Well, if that don't just beat all. How can you possibly be that delusional? Those emails prove that the conspiracy is being run from an obscure school in the UK, and Ross McKitrick definitively proved that global warming is a hoax.

How can you possibly accuse us of being conspiracy nuts when you're the one that is actually part of a conspiracy? Do you even think before you open your mouth and make these arguments? [/conservolibertarian]
Click to expand...

Obscure school in the UK? You mean Hogwarts? Damned wizards.
 
Coca Cola is by far the best selling lolly water on the planet. Does that mean it's the best lolly water available?
 
Perhaps if the alarmist didn't exaggerate people would have more faith in their findings. Michael Manns hockey stick panic immediately comes to mind.
 
angelo atheist said:
Perhaps if the alarmist didn't exaggerate people would have more faith in their findings. Michael Manns hockey stick panic immediately comes to mind.
Click to expand...

The hockey stick is a perfect example of the hysteria of conservolibertarians. The chart was accurate and it took a pile of lies to suggest that there was anything wrong with it. It's just typical of the actions and arguments of the anti-science attitudes of rightists. They even tried to destroy the career of an academic. Attacks on intellectuals are typical of authoritarian political movements.
 


The consequences of climate change, showing among other things, the further dishonesty of people in the denialist religion.
 
What used to be called " global warming" has now become climate change because the old misnomer was having no impact out in joe public land beause the warming hasnt eventuated. It was predicted that the melting of the icecaps would flood most of coastal regions of the globe by 2018 at the latest. This, all done with modeling, not observation.
I think joe public has every right to question the science.
 
angelo atheist said:
What used to be called " global warming" has now become climate change because the old misnomer was having no impact out in joe public land beause the warming hasnt eventuated. It was predicted that the melting of the icecaps would flood most of coastal regions of the globe by 2018 at the latest. This, all done with modeling, not observation.
I think joe public has every right to question the science.
Click to expand...

You've got it exactly backwards. Republican spinmeisters started using the term climate change because it sounded less scary than global warming, this has been well documented. Scientists always used both terms, since one is a direct consequence of the other.

And nobody has ever made a prediction about melting icecaps being a problem by 2018, that's a flat out lie. The real problem is that predictions of melting were far too low. Original projections indicated we would not see an ice-free arctic in the summer until the end of this century. That quickly had to be revised to point to the middle of this century. Given the latest observed trends in arctic ice, we may actually have an ice-free summer in the next decade. Every single time scientists have tested their predictions about the speed of climate change, they've been wrong, but they've been wrong on the conservative side. Actual warming is hitting this planet far faster and harder than expected, and will almost certainly be more dangerous than you can imagine.
 
angelo atheist said:
Perhaps if the alarmist didn't exaggerate people would have more faith in their findings. Michael Manns hockey stick panic immediately comes to mind.
Click to expand...

The panic about the hockey stick wasn't nearly big enough. Michael Mann's work has been reproduced and expanded on more than a dozen times, and every single time the data shows that Mann was not only right, but that the future is worse than you think.

Here's a graph that combines an 12,000 year temperature trend, measured by Marcott et al, plus the predicted temperature rise by the end of this century if we continue on our current path. That's the entire history of human civilization, the entire history of human agriculture, on the blue line. The red line essentially shows the end of modern agriculture as we know it.

Carbon-Final.jpg
 
It's because of Mann and the chairman of IPPC Pachouri [spel] that it has very little credibility except in the left circles. Polling shows the majority of the public are not alarmed, in fact many don't believe a word of it. Until it's admitted that humanity may cause at tops 3% of carbon dioxide with the rest been a natural planetary phenomena the public will not swallow all this alarmist propaganda being put out by bodies such as IPPC.
 
angelo atheist said:
It's because of Mann and the chairman of IPPC Pachouri [spel] that it has very little credibility except in the left circles. Polling shows the majority of the public are not alarmed, in fact many don't believe a word of it.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the same "many" in the public that don't believe in evolution, do believe in a fairy tale daddy in the sky, are illiterate on the vast majority of basic facts in history and science, and are largely incompetent at the most basic reasoning skills. Resistance by members of the public to science tells us nothing about the merits of the science or how it has been conveyed by scientists.

Until it's admitted that humanity may cause at tops 3% of carbon dioxide with the rest been a natural planetary phenomena the public will not swallow all this alarmist propaganda being put out by bodies such as IPPC.
Click to expand...

Why would scientists admit to a claim that is so grossly wrong and mischaracterized? The % of CO2 entering the atmosphere each year that is directly from human activity is not remotely the % of total CO2 currently in the atmosphere due to human activity, and the latter is what matters. People who harp on your 3% figure are grossly ignorant of the basic facts of the carbon cycle and carbon "sinks". What matters is the natural carbon cycle and the balance of CO2 taken out of the atmosphere relative to the amount that enters the atmosphere, with the difference constantly accumulating in the atmosphere. If you only put 3% of each paycheck into a retirement account, you'll have a huge savings at the end of 100 years caused by constantly putting 3% into that account. It is humorous how many free market faithers seems to grasp this basic concept when it comes to earning profit for themselves but fail to grasp the exact same principle when it doesn't serve their profit interests.
 
angelo atheist said:
Until it's admitted that humanity may cause at tops 3% of carbon dioxide with the rest been a natural planetary phenomena the public will not swallow all this alarmist propaganda being put out by bodies such as IPPC.
Click to expand...
Your understanding of climate change is precisely why the average public shouldn't be allowed to comment. It's dismally bad. It's woefully pathetic. Nobody is going to admit something that is so horribly, horribly incorrect that it's not even wrong.

Let's get some basic facts straight: Before industrialization, Earth had about 30 degrees of greenhouse effect. That 30 degrees is what keeps Earth from being a ball of solid ice. That greenhouse effect was produced mostly by water vapor, but partially by more powerful greenhouse gasses like CO2. And greenhouse gas concentrations have been in a very stable range for at least a million years, around 200-300ppm in CO2 equivalent. But a stable concentration actually means a very active carbon cycle, natural forces annually put about 750 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year, and natural forces also remove about 750 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year. As long as the amount added and removed is equal, the net concentration stays the same.

So along comes human industrialization. In addition to the 750 billion tons of carbon that nature puts into the air, humans add another 20 billion tons every year. But natural forces are still trying to pull out 750 billion tons. Actually, natural forces react to the increase and speed up, but they can't speed up fast enough, so they remove 760 billion tons. That means that every year, an additional 10 billion tons stay in the atmosphere. Concentrations jump out of the stable range of 200-300ppm, and are now over 400ppm. Humans are 100% responsible for that increase, since they are the ones that added an unbalancing force to a stable system. And it's entirely that increase in concentrations that is important, since it's entirely the increase in global temperatures we are worried about.

Remember, Earth starts with 30 degrees of greenhouse effect keeping us from being solid ice. But that's a planetary average, and very small changes in that number have a huge effect. Since we start the chart with 30 degrees, just a 10% increase in greenhouse effect is 3 degrees, which may sound small to you. But 2 degrees is actually the difference between today and the last ice age. So scientists decided that 2 degrees of change was a dangerous amount, and tried to figure out how much CO2 increases would lead to 2 degrees of warming. Here's where it gets scary: if you double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, you get between 2 and 5 degrees of warming. Humans have nearly doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere already, and we're planning to double it again before the end of the century! So we should expect between 4 and 10 degrees of warming by the end of the century, which is so far out of the safe zone that it should be considered catastrophic. That could be the temperature differential of 5 ice ages all stacked on top of each other!

The problem is not that the IPCC is an alarmist group. The exact opposite it true: the IPCC reports are so conservative and watered down that they understate the risk severely. 10 degrees of warming in 100 years would completely destroy our world's ecological balance. And by ecological balance, I really mean agriculture. Crop yields would plummet. We barely feed 7 billion people right now, what do you think happens when populations rise to 9 or 10 billion and crop yields drop in half? Do you really think billions of starving people will just sit there and die quietly, without attempting any sort of desperate actions first? The Department of Defense is already warning about the consequences of climate change, and the primary problems they see are entirely increases in terrorism and regional resource wars. The IPCC report only recently began hinting about these problems, and those hints are provided in such a watered down fashion that you have to look carefully to see them.
 
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