Talk:Global warming

CP
As with climate change, I find ZERO links to global warming from the Congresspedia. Artificial Intelligence 08:00, 21 March 2007 (EDT)

At the moment the SourceWatch articles on greenhouse related issues are a bit all over the shop -- we have: http://www.SourceWatch.org/wiki.phtml?title=Climate_change http://www.SourceWatch.org/wiki.phtml?title=Global_Warming (with caps) and http://www.SourceWatch.org/wiki.phtml?title=Global_warming

I'm proposing that:
 * the bulk of the core material be consolidated into the Climate change page (as the most accurate and commonlu used term)
 * that one of the global warming pages remain but in a shortened version with the first link to the climate change page;
 * the other global warming page be deleted;
 * that we break the lists down a little to make them more accessible;
 * we add in links to other material in D such as sceptics, think tanks campaignin on the issue etc.

I'll start along these lines in the meantime - --Bob Burton 01:25, 15 Dec 2004 (EST)

- Relocated from a newly created article page Global Warming - more appropriate on a talk page with this pre-existing article Bob Burton 22:37, 27 Dec 2004 (EST)

Originating from this thread on slashdot: 

The discussion is an attempt to discover why the environmentalist message very often falls upon deaf ears, despite what seems like overwhelming evidence.

The above article lists many of the often heard rebukes, but it is my opinion that all scepticism stems from one simple fact:

100% of all proposed environmentalist solutions are socialist in nature.

All of them. There is not a single exception. And yet we look at the worst polluters on the planet - The former Soviet Union and China - whose governments have complete control of the environment, and trash it without any regard to its well being or even common sense. And of course the US government is the worst polluter (by far) in the United States - thanks mainly to the military, who has zero accountability.

There are many solutions to help clean up pollution and general destruction of the environment - one option is more private ownership. This is based on the concept that very few people will tear down the walls to their house for firewood. Yet logging corporations will gladly clear-cut a swath of forest that they have leased from the government, before they move on to the next piece of land that they have no long term concerns about. This is common sense, and yet it is never discussed as an option. All solutions regarding the environment involve greater governmental control and ownership of resources.

That is why I don't believe you when you say you care about the environment. I believe that the environmentalist movement has long since been hijacked by the socialist movement, and is a convenient Trojan horse. So either you are a closet socialist, or you have been fooled by them. It's like having a fundamentalist Christian present their arguments against abortion and euthanasia -- these are important and difficult issues -- yet everything they present is colored by theie concept of the soul, and the 'God says it's bad' argument. Good for them that those things are what are most important to them, but it means that you will not get any kind of objective discussion about the social and political concerns on that topic.

I can form an objective opinion about the problems, causes and solutions to environmental pollution and global warming about as easily as I can about second hand smoke &#8211; scientific studies and results differ wildly from one side to the next &#8211; whether they be supported by the nanny-statists who want to ban all smoking (and fatty foods and such), or are supported by the smoking lobby, who want us to believe that smoking is healthy and cool.

This is not meant to start off an argument of any kind, but to simply explain what is happening to the message. My only recommendation would be for each person to decide what is more important to them - environmentalism or anti-capitalism, and if it is the former, to completely separate it from the latter. And then being open to all solutions will follow, and the message will be heard.

I reverted back to Paul R's version because you have no citation for the counter argument that the scientist in question defended or proposed global cooling. I'm sure it would be that hard to find a site of the guy with past refrences to his work, and then use that to cite his theories on global cooling. SiberioS

I'm familiar with Schneider's publication, and as an oceanographer I know what his papers are talking about. Global warming "skeptics" try to badmouth mainstream scientists, and Schneider, because of his high public profile, is a favorite target. Since GW "skepticism", like most pseudoscience, is largely guru-based, the practitioners think that if they can "discredit" the other side's "gurus", then that will neutralize the science. That's why it's so important to badmouth people like Schneider.

That said, SS was the second author on a paper by Rasool which noted that future high levels of atmospheric particulates could overpower increases in the greenhouse effect and cause large-scale cooling -- which is true, but highly unlikely. Rasool and Schneider did underestimate the manmade greenhouse effect in that paper. Within a couple of years (about 1973, or so), Schneider's own papers showed more mainstream values for the greenhouse sensitivity. The notion that he was some sort of cooling panic-monger is fiction.

However, it's also not true that he was one of the first to warn of human CO2-induced greenhouse warming. Many other scientists (Arrhenius, Callendar, Revelle, Bolin, etc.) preceded him by decades. By the time he got out of graduate school, it was generally accepted by meteorologists and oceanographers. (I know. I started graduate school about that time.)

- Ok, I see, only one school of thought is allowed, all else is "pseudoscience", is that it? Truly the antithesis of scientific thinking!

With regards to SS, here are a couple of his statements: "It is found that, although the addition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does increase the surface temperature, the rate of temperature increase diminishes with increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. For aerosols, however, the net effect of increase in density is to reduce the surface temperature of Earth. Becuase of the exponential dependence of the backscattering, the rate of temperature decrease is augmented with increasing aerosol content. .. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age." (Science, vol.173, 9 July 1971, p.138-141) "To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest." (Discover magazine Oct 1998)

Hence, it seems fundamentally relevant to point out that, once upon a time, he was a global warming skeptic and indeed once warned of global cooling. Which, coupled with his statements on effectiveness vs honesty, certainly puts his global warming expertise in a different light, don't you agree?

Regards, Johan - No.

I am familiar with both statements. The first is edited from the paper by Rasool and Schneider that I was talking about. You will note that the statement about cooling is conditional. I am willing to say that the Earth will cool if the Sun turns off, which is also a conditional prediction of cooling. As I pointed out, Rasool & Schneider used what was probably too low a CO2 sensitivity. The second statement is a fraud. A genuine statement by Schneider was tendentiously clipped to produce it. The edited version circulates around the Internet. It appears you haven't actually seen either article you cited. Your citations, therefore, should be to the source which you actually used, not the original sources. A citation to a source you haven't seen is a fake citation, and the use of fake citations turns scholarship into folklore. It also leads to the circulation of misleadingly clipped quotes.

Physical climatology depends in no way upon the personal credibility of individual scientists. The disparagement of Schneider is only introduced as an ad hominem argument.

Whoops missed that and put it in the wrong category. SiberioS

Poppy's Cock!
"100% of all proposed environmentalist solutions are socialist in nature."

The flatworlder who wrote this plays upon the political bi-polarity and fear. Is he in line to be appointed as hnocho of a bush bureaucracy? The ideation that all green remedies are socialist is fallacious, and an expression issued from an uncreative fatalist.

Simply, if a requirement of environmental mitigation of a pollutant is given to all entities currently responsible for its present day releases, these entities are allowed to mitigate their pollution by the removal of even more of the same or more harmful pollutant that originated from souces in the past; if this is a more economically feasible route. Entities with a surplus of environmental remediation are in possession of a commodity that they can sell to less efficient entities on the free market. If one thinks of solutions with the free market in mind, then solutions will not be socialistic.

There have been limited successes with this idea already, and there has been talk of using the same in Kyoto-styled mandated decreases of greenhouse gases. Countries which have done better than their minimum reduction could use the extra as a type of commodity, thereby seeing their relative wealth amongst nations to increase. Pure Adam Smith, but then crony corporapists have never truly believed in a free market.

The absolutist who claimed that 100% of environmental solutions have been socialistic in nature is a fool, a politicising troll, or someone compelled psychologically to mitigate his genitalia deficit disorder vis a vis ownership of a cadillac jeep.

The fact that most green solutions up to this point have been solutions with a decidedly socialist bent, is a function of the political world view the conceptualisers of the solutions had started with.

Let's face it. Not many free-market conservatives have been toiling away at solving environmental problems. Here's a radical freemarket libertarian-left solution to many, at least localised, environmental problems. Create extensive new property rights comprised of the enviroment for everyone, allowing all a right to seek redress for their property's harm as a tort; and not through worthless class actions suits either. Threaten corporations with a consequence of material dissolution, and let the executive actors of corporations know that they will be held accountable also.

Right now corporations and their political cronies bewail the costs of cleaner manufacuring, and operating. Let them begin to see that the extreme costs will soon be on the side of those who refuse to change for the environment's sake, and that their failure will mean that their capital will flow with liquidity into the pockets of those whose property has been harmed.

There are some who postulate that evoloution is not usually the slow process of specieation that Darwin predicted, but instead resultant from a heavily stressed population rapidly mutating as it faces extinction because of an extreme environmental change. An amphibian's extra limb growing from its back, seems at first to be a monstrous genetic accident, but in an environment dominated by a toxic sun, a superflous leg to lose in the first round of battle against it suddenly becomes a successful survival strategy, for at least long enough to complete a reproduction cycle.

If corporations are suddenly forced with the same decision, to either most will evolve, and remain profitable within their new environmentally friendy body.

--Hugh Manatee 03:08, 5 Jan 2005 (EST)

citation for BP's profitable co2 mitigation
Seth Dunn, "An Oil Company Proves Bush Wrong On Climate Change," Tom Paine.

An article by a Research Associate at the Worldwatch Institute, which tells of successful pollution mitigation methodologies that end up being a cost saver also, because limiting emmissions tends to be a more efficient way to do things. --Hugh Manatee 04:42, 24 Jan 2005 (EST)

-

Query on who argues peak oil is a distraction? While I can follow the argument I'm currently not persuaded that discussion of peak oil is a deliberate diversion strategy by govts/corporates etc. As the following par stands it implies that those raising issues about peak oil are either propaganda agents or dupes for a diversion strategy. (I guess I'm not persuaded that concern over peak oil is mutually exclusive to also supporting action on climate change and I half wonder whether its just two groups of people jostling trying to assert primacy of their concerns over the others). So the recent additions would be helped by a few more specifics which I have flagged below. --Bob Burton 21:16, 1 Sep 2005 (EDT)


 * It is also postulated by some that peak oil rhetoric is actively promoted as a means to distract from climate change/warming, as it is far easier for the oil industry and oil supply expansionists to argue to seek for oil in vulnerable areas, or invade oil-producing countries, and find "surprising" new oil sources, than it is for them to adjust their business model to simply burn far less oil.


 * who exactly? Are there some references and direct citations? Is there any evidence that climate change sceptics are embracing peak oil arguments? And if not, don't we have to explain why not? After all, if part of the role of many of the sceptics/think tanks etc is to amplify the otherwise marginalised policy positions of companies like Exxon, why would they be silent on peak oil if it was part of the big oil agenda?

Re Michael Crichton novel:
 * Harold Evans, Opinion: "Crichton's conspiracy theory," BBC, October 7, 2005: Evans "takes issue with Michael Crichton's latest thriller, in which global warming is the work of mad eco-scientists."

Links

 * http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/bali-UN-climate-kyoto-talks-open-021207
 * http://internationalrivers.org/en/climate-change
 * http://www.climatenetwork.org/
 * http://www.climatenetwork.org/home-page-content-panel/eco

No mention of recent controversy?
I find it a little shocking that there is no mention of the recent 'ClimateGate' controversy. I will provide a section on this to provide some coverage of this major event. --Jzyehoshua 17:40, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

SourceWatch articles rely primarily on volunteer contributors. We have over 50,000 articles in SourceWatch and as a small non-profit we do not have the staff to update each of them and, as a wiki, the articles depend on volunteer editors like you to improve the coverage of topics of interest to readers. Thank you for jumping in with your editing and documentation, Jzyehoshua. Lisa


 * Sure, glad I could help! I think I did a good job keeping the new section neutral and just reporting on the facts, hopefully any information that I missed can be provided by others. --Jzyehoshua 19:16, 27 May 2010 (UTC)