How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

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Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

Postby zangtang » Fri Jul 24, 2015 12:21 pm

I've always been a fan of the 'I'll murder that bridge when I get to it',
but think the evidence is piling pretty high that
allo the burnt boats & broken bridges are going to turn up @
pretty much almost exactly the same time,
give or take the blink of an eye.

If i'm wrong, there'll be no need for about four thousand million of you to die within the next decade
to ensure i'll have enough food and water for myself.................................
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Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

Postby Sounder » Fri Jul 24, 2015 5:23 pm

stillrobertpaulsen » Fri Jul 24, 2015 3:29 pm wrote:^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Drop the binary pose, Sounder. Some of us are concerned about BOTH. Did you know there's already a 123 page thread dedicated to the subject of your post?


First off RI don’t mean squat. The more proper metric is the air time given by the great Wurlitzer for CC versus Fukushima. And it is telling that in the one case the issue is a revenue bonanza for the uberclass while the other might impose stress on GE and other large entities.

I'm not going to color you a right-winger, but to call Climate Change "inconsequential" is denial. Because it isn't just a future threat - the rising levels of methane in the Arctic as the ice cap melts away is happening NOW.


Yes, well compared to the current dead zone called the Pacific Ocean, and the lack of heat this summer and the last two years, (yes, only my personal experience) and the following article, which does not make it sound at all like the Arctic is ‘melting’, I feel comfortable calling CC inconsequential.

The CCGS Pierre Radisson escorts the oil tanker Havelstern to Iqaluit July 17. Tough ice conditions in area have delayed this summer's annual resupply, and have now derailed the CCGS Amundsen from its carefully planned summer research program.

A carefully planned, 115-day scientific expedition on board the floating research vessel, the CCGS Amundsen, has been derailed as the icebreaker was called to help resupply ships navigate heavy ice in Hudson Bay.

"Obviously it has a large impact on us," says Martin Fortier, executive director of ArcticNet, which coordinates research on the vessel. "It's a frustrating situation."
During the summer, the Amundsen operates as a floating research centre with experiments running 24 hours a day. This year it was scheduled to reach North Baffin Bay.

The CCGS Amundsen left port July 10 to head to the Arctic. (@ArcticNet/Twitter)
But the icebreaker has been rerouted to escort commercial ships en route to resupply communities in Northern Quebec on the eastern side of Hudson Bay.

Worst conditions in 20 years

Johnny Leclair, assistant commissioner for the Coast Guard, said Tuesday conditions in the area are the worst he's seen in 20 years.
With only two icebreakers available in the Arctic — the CCGS Pierre Radisson has been escorting resupply ships through ice-choked Frobisher Bay — he said the only option was to re-deploy the Amundsen

Leclair did say there should be two more icebreakers headed to the Arctic in the next week, which should free up the Amundsen to return to its scientific mission.
Fortier is hopeful the season will still be productive.

"The people planning the large expeditions have a plan B," Fortier said. "We have already curtailed or either moved to a later date some of the stations and some of the areas we were suppose to sample."

Rory wrote...
Also that events like fukashima are more likely in the future because of climate change. The majority of nuclear facilities are on the coast or coastal estuaries. As sea levels rise, then we will have basic storm level weather events become existential threats. Decommissioning nuclear energy is an essential part of dealing with the current and real threat of climate change related phenomena - fukashima itself, is more precarious now precisely because of weather events becoming more severe,alongside ocean rises.

As I said to Sounder a while ago - to rank these issues in terms of import: Fukashima is a threat that will grow into the future but the real damage wont reach it's maximum harm until many thousands of years into the future. Climate Change is here today - within present member lifespan timescale, it could have disastrous affects for all here.

By the time Fukashima has irrevocably altered your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandchildren's DNA (and killed off many people due to cancer and other disease), Climate Change would have already killed them or at least broken their (anthropological) world beyond repair.


The Pacific is dead right now; frankly I don’t think we will be waiting ‘thousands of years’ for ‘maximum harm’ to be registered. (Although there may be ways to remediate the radiation if 'smart people' were not such slaves to our current Standard Model.)

Also, it seems a bit anthropocentric to focus on the travails of humans in the future when we are killing billions and billions of living beings, while doing nothing to stop it, right now. Here, maybe you missed it the first time.

Interview with Ivan Macfadyen, Talk Radio Europe, May 24, 2015 (at 14:30 in): “The reality was… if I would have had no spare dry food on the boat — relying on fish this time around — we would have starved to death — because, quite literally, there isn’t any fish. There’s vast tracks where they’re just all gone. Where you could fish reliably, they’re just not there… I used to fish here on exactly the same course, at exactly the same time of year… the same ocean, on the same course, into the same place — and I could catch fish everyday, and for some reason now 10 years later they’re all gone.”
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

Postby Sounder » Fri Jul 24, 2015 5:23 pm

stillrobertpaulsen » Fri Jul 24, 2015 3:29 pm wrote:^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Drop the binary pose, Sounder. Some of us are concerned about BOTH. Did you know there's already a 123 page thread dedicated to the subject of your post?


First off RI don’t mean squat. The more proper metric is the air time given by the great Wurlitzer for CC versus Fukushima. And it is telling that in the one case the issue is a revenue bonanza for the uberclass while the other might impose stress on GE and other large entities.

I'm not going to color you a right-winger, but to call Climate Change "inconsequential" is denial. Because it isn't just a future threat - the rising levels of methane in the Arctic as the ice cap melts away is happening NOW.


Yes, well compared to the current dead zone called the Pacific Ocean, and the lack of heat this summer and the last two years, (yes, only my personal experience) and the following article, which does not make it sound at all like the Arctic is ‘melting’, I feel comfortable calling CC inconsequential.

The CCGS Pierre Radisson escorts the oil tanker Havelstern to Iqaluit July 17. Tough ice conditions in area have delayed this summer's annual resupply, and have now derailed the CCGS Amundsen from its carefully planned summer research program.

A carefully planned, 115-day scientific expedition on board the floating research vessel, the CCGS Amundsen, has been derailed as the icebreaker was called to help resupply ships navigate heavy ice in Hudson Bay.

"Obviously it has a large impact on us," says Martin Fortier, executive director of ArcticNet, which coordinates research on the vessel. "It's a frustrating situation."
During the summer, the Amundsen operates as a floating research centre with experiments running 24 hours a day. This year it was scheduled to reach North Baffin Bay.

The CCGS Amundsen left port July 10 to head to the Arctic. (@ArcticNet/Twitter)
But the icebreaker has been rerouted to escort commercial ships en route to resupply communities in Northern Quebec on the eastern side of Hudson Bay.

Worst conditions in 20 years

Johnny Leclair, assistant commissioner for the Coast Guard, said Tuesday conditions in the area are the worst he's seen in 20 years.
With only two icebreakers available in the Arctic — the CCGS Pierre Radisson has been escorting resupply ships through ice-choked Frobisher Bay — he said the only option was to re-deploy the Amundsen

Leclair did say there should be two more icebreakers headed to the Arctic in the next week, which should free up the Amundsen to return to its scientific mission.
Fortier is hopeful the season will still be productive.

"The people planning the large expeditions have a plan B," Fortier said. "We have already curtailed or either moved to a later date some of the stations and some of the areas we were suppose to sample."

Rory wrote...
Also that events like fukashima are more likely in the future because of climate change. The majority of nuclear facilities are on the coast or coastal estuaries. As sea levels rise, then we will have basic storm level weather events become existential threats. Decommissioning nuclear energy is an essential part of dealing with the current and real threat of climate change related phenomena - fukashima itself, is more precarious now precisely because of weather events becoming more severe,alongside ocean rises.

As I said to Sounder a while ago - to rank these issues in terms of import: Fukashima is a threat that will grow into the future but the real damage wont reach it's maximum harm until many thousands of years into the future. Climate Change is here today - within present member lifespan timescale, it could have disastrous affects for all here.

By the time Fukashima has irrevocably altered your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandchildren's DNA (and killed off many people due to cancer and other disease), Climate Change would have already killed them or at least broken their (anthropological) world beyond repair.


The Pacific is dead right now; frankly I don’t think we will be waiting ‘thousands of years’ for ‘maximum harm’ to be registered. (Although there may be ways to remediate the radiation if 'smart people' were not such slaves to our current Standard Model.)

Also, it seems a bit anthropocentric to focus on the travails of humans in the future when we are killing billions and billions of living beings, while doing nothing to stop it, right now. Here, maybe you missed it the first time.

Interview with Ivan Macfadyen, Talk Radio Europe, May 24, 2015 (at 14:30 in): “The reality was… if I would have had no spare dry food on the boat — relying on fish this time around — we would have starved to death — because, quite literally, there isn’t any fish. There’s vast tracks where they’re just all gone. Where you could fish reliably, they’re just not there… I used to fish here on exactly the same course, at exactly the same time of year… the same ocean, on the same course, into the same place — and I could catch fish everyday, and for some reason now 10 years later they’re all gone.”
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

Postby Nordic » Fri Jul 24, 2015 7:39 pm

I live on the Pacific coast and I'm freaked out by both of these things. No need to bicker.

We're fucked in so many ways.
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick
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Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

Postby DrEvil » Fri Jul 24, 2015 11:03 pm

Sounder wrote:
The Pacific is dead right now; frankly I don’t think we will be waiting ‘thousands of years’ for ‘maximum harm’ to be registered. (Although there may be ways to remediate the radiation if 'smart people' were not such slaves to our current Standard Model.)

Also, it seems a bit anthropocentric to focus on the travails of humans in the future when we are killing billions and billions of living beings, while doing nothing to stop it, right now. Here, maybe you missed it the first time.
..snip..


Really..? You're saying the Pacific is dead, based off the word of one guy who thought the ocean was too silent? There should be millions of people starving to death right now. Funny we don't hear about them.

And climate change, specifically ocean acidification, is killing billions and billions of living beings right now. Maybe we should try to stop it?

And this:
Although there may be ways to remediate the radiation if 'smart people' were not such slaves to our current Standard Model.

What does this even mean? Seriously - don't be so vague, spell it out! What are the 'smart people' missing?
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Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

Postby Sounder » Sat Jul 25, 2015 7:57 am

Really..? You're saying the Pacific is dead, based off the word of one guy who thought the ocean was too silent?


Uh, no, not the word of one guy, it’s about empiricism, a preference for assessing a situation through direct observation rather than rationalism that all too often turns a-priori assumptions into faith based and ideological directives, and I just don’t roll with that sort of thing.

This is a decent primer, if anyone is interested.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ratio ... mpiricism/

There should be millions of people starving to death right now. Funny we don't hear about them.


There are, but that is from wars and food mal-distribution issues, not CC, or radiation for that matter. And why would we hear about them? Let the victims suffer in silence.

And climate change, specifically ocean acidification, is killing billions and billions of living beings right now. Maybe we should try to stop it?


Is the ocean acidification killing the billions and billions living beings just like all the methane is being released because the arctic is melting? Or, is it CC that is killing the billions and billions of living beings, or is it radiation? That in either case is not causing millions of people to starve.

And this:
Although there may be ways to remediate the radiation if 'smart people' were not such slaves to our current Standard Model.


What does this even mean? Seriously - don't be so vague, spell it out! What are the 'smart people' missing?


I try to say Dr. Evil, but much of what I feel a need to say seems to be resented of ignored.

People gobble up the self-righteousness candy so helpfully dispensed by the uberclass, and in my opinion AGW does the same thing to the Left that the Bircher thing did to the Right.

But at this point it doesn’t seem helpful to spell it out because most readers here would likely take it as just another scurrilous attack on the validity of their self-identity.
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Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

Postby DrEvil » Sat Jul 25, 2015 6:28 pm

Sounder » Sat Jul 25, 2015 1:57 pm wrote:
Really..? You're saying the Pacific is dead, based off the word of one guy who thought the ocean was too silent?


Uh, no, not the word of one guy, it’s about empiricism, a preference for assessing a situation through direct observation rather than rationalism that all too often turns a-priori assumptions into faith based and ideological directives, and I just don’t roll with that sort of thing.

This is a decent primer, if anyone is interested.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ratio ... mpiricism/


So do you have any other sources than the one guy who empirically observed the pacific to be dead? Did he check all of it?

There should be millions of people starving to death right now. Funny we don't hear about them.


There are, but that is from wars and food mal-distribution issues, not CC, or radiation for that matter. And why would we hear about them? Let the victims suffer in silence.


Uh, do you have any idea how many people live off what they catch in the pacific? If the largest ocean on Earth was dead we would definitely know about it.

And climate change, specifically ocean acidification, is killing billions and billions of living beings right now. Maybe we should try to stop it?


Is the ocean acidification killing the billions and billions living beings just like all the methane is being released because the arctic is melting? Or, is it CC that is killing the billions and billions of living beings, or is it radiation? That in either case is not causing millions of people to starve.


We're releasing CO2 that is absorbed by the oceans, which in turn makes the oceans more acid, messing up the habitat for untold number of beings. If we do wipe out the pacific millions will starve.

And this:
Although there may be ways to remediate the radiation if 'smart people' were not such slaves to our current Standard Model.


What does this even mean? Seriously - don't be so vague, spell it out! What are the 'smart people' missing?


I try to say Dr. Evil, but much of what I feel a need to say seems to be resented of ignored.


It's kinda hard to resent what you say when you never come out and say it when asked directly! :wallhead:

People gobble up the self-righteousness candy so helpfully dispensed by the uberclass, and in my opinion AGW does the same thing to the Left that the Bircher thing did to the Right.

But at this point it doesn’t seem helpful to spell it out because most readers here would likely take it as just another scurrilous attack on the validity of their self-identity.


Right, you can't say what you really mean because it could hurt our feelings. That's the dumbest excuse I've seen in a long while. Or is it just that you throw out vague nonsense as usual with nothing to back it up?

You are a great example of why this thread is needed.
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Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Jul 27, 2015 4:37 pm

Sounder » Fri Jul 24, 2015 4:23 pm wrote:stillrobertpaulsen » Fri Jul 24, 2015 3:29 pm wrote:^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I'm not going to color you a right-winger, but to call Climate Change "inconsequential" is denial. Because it isn't just a future threat - the rising levels of methane in the Arctic as the ice cap melts away is happening NOW.


Yes, well compared to the current dead zone called the Pacific Ocean, and the lack of heat this summer and the last two years, (yes, only my personal experience) and the following article, which does not make it sound at all like the Arctic is ‘melting’, I feel comfortable calling CC inconsequential.


Then I would assert that you have not done enough research on the subject.

"Lack of heat this summer"? Wrong. Three meteorological agencies have concluded that June 2015 was the warmest June ever recorded, and that 2015 is on track to have the hottest average surface temperatures since record taking began in 1880.

"...and the last two years"? Wrong again. 2014 was, globally, the hottest summer on record. 2013 had a number of extreme heat events that summer attributable to climate change.

"the following article, which does not make it sound at all like the Arctic is ‘melting’"? Well, that snip of an article for which you neglected to provide a link is telling, just not for the reason you or the people connected with that story think, but by the larger question it ignores. Oil tankers are having trouble navigating the Arctic ice? Why the fuck are we drilling for oil up there in the first place?! I mean, even setting aside any and all environmental concerns, oil prices are in the gutter based on oversupply worries. From a strictly economic perspective, it would make more sense to attempt that when demand and prices are higher.

So why didn't we try to do that during the 1970s when the Saudis and Iranians were flexing their respective muscle?

Image
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Could this possibly be the reason?

Yes, Sounder, the Arctic has been melting for some time now, and this summer is no exception. The Arctic sea ice extent for June 2015 was 7.7% below the 1981-2010 average, making it the 3rd smallest June sea ice extent since satellite records began in 1979. I give fuck-all whether that leaves enough ice to block goddamn oil tankers from traversing the area, that's hardly a barometer for measuring the severity of the situation.

The "great Wurlitzer" doesn't mention it too often, but that shrinking Arctic cap pretty much guarantees more methane being released into the atmosphere. While there is debate about how much and when, I would encourage you to read what Nafeez Ahmed has to say on the subject if you're really interested in finding out what's going on beyond just stepping outside wearing a long-sleeved shirt muttering, "Sheesh, global warming? What's the lamestream media going on about, anyway?"
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Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Oct 22, 2015 7:57 pm

Meet the 97 Percent Climate Truthers

How Ted Cruz and other Republicans are even denying the scientific consensus
By Rebecca Leber

October 22, 2015

Two years ago, a group of international researchers led by University of Queensland's John Cook surveyed 12,000 abstracts of peer-reviewed papers on climate change since the 1990s. Out of the 4,000 papers that took a position one way or another on the causes of global warming, 97 percent of them were in agreement: Humans are the primary cause. By putting a number on the scientific consensus, the study provided everyone from President Barack Obama to comedian John Oliver with a tidy talking point.

That talking point put climate deniers in a bind. They have successfully delayed political action for years by making it seem like there's still a scientific debate over anthropogenic warming. But when confronted with a statistic like this one, they have been forced to take a different tack: dispute the statistic itself.

They're the 97 percent truthers, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz is leading the recent charge. At a hearing in early October, the GOP presidential candidate peppered Sierra Club President Aaron Mair with questions for ten minutes about the so-called 18-year pause in global warming—a point that's been thoroughly debunked. Mair replied to Cruz’s repeated demands to retract his testimony on climate change by citing the 97 percent consensus, which Cruz brushed off by saying the “problem with that statistic that gets cited a lot is it’s based on one bogus study.” Cruz added that the point was irrelevant to the debate. “Your answer was, pay no attention to your lying eyes and the numbers that the satellites show and instead listen to the scientists who are receiving massive grants who tell us do not debate the science,” he said.

Conservative sites celebrated Cruz's questioning. National Review ran two stories, one claiming “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists’ say no such thing” and another that “the 97 percent stat is pure public relations b.s.” The attempts to discredit Cook's study are as old as the study itself. Rick Santorum, another Republican presidential candidate, contested the 97 percent consensus in late August. "That number was pulled out of thin air,” he told Bill Maher. The Wall Street Journal took issue with it last year, arguing that these peer-reviewed studies never said manmade climate change was “dangerous.”

The main criticism of Cook's study is that it omits the vast number of papers that take no position on global warming's causes. That's true: Cook’s study of the 12,000 abstracts found that 66 percent of them took no position, so he excluded them in calculating the percentage. As Cook explained in an online video, he omitted these papers because abstracts are short summaries that "don’t waste time stating something they assume their readers will already know"; just as most "astronomy papers don’t think it necessary to explain that the Earth revolves around the sun," he said, "nowadays most climatology papers don’t see the need to reaffirm the consensus position.”

The deniers' criticism hardly discredits his study. After all, roughly 4,000 of those abstracts did take a position, and 97 percent of them endorsed anthropogenic warming. And it's hardly the first study of its kind.

Cook's finding is backed by a field of literature. A paper in the journal Science published a decade earlier by Naomi Oreskes found 75 percent of peer-review literature from 1993 to 2003 agreed on man’s role in global warming. That percentage has only risen as the scientific study on climate has progressed. In June, a longtime research of the subject, National Physical Sciences Consortium director James Powell, found that 97 percent might be too low. His paper, which has not yet been published, found 99.9 percent of the field agreed in 24,000 peer-reviewed papers published in 2013 and 2014.

“The fact that each of these studies have used completely different methods to arrive at the same result demonstrates just how robust the overwhelming consensus on climate change is,” Cook said, pointing out that these studies have relied on techniques like directly surveying climate scientists, analyzing public statements, and examining peer-reviewed papers. All these approaches confirm the same point on the vast agreement.

Even if you want to ignore the consensus literature, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—which includes the most robust panel of respected climate scientists in the world—said in its most recent and fifth assessment that it has 95 percent confidence that humans are driving warming (equivalent to the scientific certainty that cigarettes cause health problems).

That's not the only case deniers make against the 97 percent figure. They argue that if you include non-experts (academics in fields unrelated to climate change) or only look at the studies that say global warming dangerous, you'd get a much lower number. There are some obvious problems with these arguments: Shouldn't expertise in a field matter? And how to define "dangerous" warming was outside the scope of Cook's study. After all, the whole point of the study was to answer a simple question that cuts through the rhetoric of climate politics.

All this debate over one statistic might seem silly, but it's important that Americans understand there is overwhelming agreement about human-caused global warming. Deniers have managed to undermine how the public views climate science, which in turn makes voters less likely to support climate action. According Gallup polling, only 60 percent of Americans think that most scientists believe climate change is occurring.

Yet another study shows how that number could rise. A PLOS One paper from Princeton, Yale, and George Mason University researchers took a step back to consider whether the 97 percent argument is effective at changing public opinion. Researchers gave 1,000 subjects various messages in pie charts or statements, all of which emphasized the 97 percent consensus. Respondents who received this message were more likely to accept climate change, and were also more likely to think of it as a problem. “Repeated exposure to simple messages that correctly state the actual scientific consensus on human-caused climate change is a strategy likely to help counter the concerted efforts to misinform the public,” the authors wrote.

The researchers called 97 percent a “gateway belief” that could even convince Republicans that climate change is a problem. It's only a matter of time before Cruz publicly questions that study's findings, too.
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Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

Postby brainpanhandler » Fri Nov 13, 2015 11:27 am

Textbooks from different major publishers give climate deniers equal weight as vast majority of climate scientists who cite scientific evidence of human-caused global warming

If American teens are unsure about climate change or its cause, some school textbooks aren’t helping, says teaching expert Diego Román, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, co-author of a new study on the subject.

...

“We found that climate change is presented as a controversial debate stemming from differing opinions,” said Román, an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning in the SMU Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development. “Climate skeptics and climate deniers are given equal time and treated with equal weight as scientists and scientific facts — even though scientists who refute global warming total a miniscule number.”

The message communicated in the four textbooks was that climate change is possibly happening, that humans may or may not be causing it, and its unclear if we need to take immediate mitigating action, the researchers found.

...

When attributing information to scientists, the textbooks used verbs such as believe, think or propose, but rarely were scientists said to be drawing conclusions from evidence or data. There was one occurrence when the noun evidence was used, the authors said, and then it was to suggest the notion that climate change is not new:

“Scientists have found evidence of many major ice ages throughout Earth’s geologic history.”

...

Does the language reflect a compromise by publishers as they walk a fine line?

“It appears textbook publishers include discussion of climate change to appease one segment of their market — but then to appease another segment they suggest doubt, which doesn’t reflect the scientific reality,” he said.

http://blog.smu.edu/research/2015/11/09 ... ific-fact/


I once did an inadequate study of how textbooks were treating 911. I would love to see a thread studying American public school textbook publishers.
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Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Dec 08, 2015 6:15 pm

Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting
by Ben Jervey

With the second week of climate talks in a relatively steady holding pattern, the most interesting news out of Paris today had nothing to do with the negotiations themselves. Greenpeace used the platform of COP21 to release results of an undercover investigation that revealed just how easy it is to pay an academic to say whatever you want him to.

While posing as representatives from oil and gas companies, the Greenpeace U.K. investigators struck deals with academics from Princeton and Penn State to publish academic articles that promoted the positive benefits of carbon dioxide and the positive impacts of coal for the poor.

One of the academics exposed, William Happer of Princeton, is actually testifying at Ted Cruz's Senate hearing on protecting climate denial this afternoon.The details from the sting are a fascinating look into how academic credibility can be bought.

In Happer’s case, investigators said they were part of a “Middle East oil and gas company” and asked to ensure that their commissioning of the report could not be traced. Happer reached out to a friendly Exxon lobbyist who suggested channeling it through Donors Trust, the shady donor anonymity organization that has been called the “dark-money ATM” of North American conservatives.

They followed up with Donors Trust, asking if they accepted money from a Middle Eastern oil and gas company. The Trust basically said no problem, as long as the cash came from an American bank account. “We can take it from a foreign body, just we have to be extra cautious with that.”

The emails and recordings also outline how Happer ran a sham peer-review process through the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a prominent U.K.-based climate skepticist think thank. Happer admits that his papers would not likely be published through typical the academic peer review process. “I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.”

The case of Frank Clemente of Penn State University has similarly damning details. Investigators asked Clemente, a sociologist, if he could publish a paper to “counter damaging research linking coal to premature deaths (in particular the WHO’s figure that 3.7 million people die per year from fossil fuel pollution).”

Clemente said that he could be quoted in support of the report using his university job title, and that it would cost $15,000 for the 8-10-page paper. Asked for assurance that the oil and gas funding would be kept secret, Clemente referenced past articles and even testimony in front of state legislatures and said, “In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is publised as an independent scholar.”

“There is no requirement to declare source funding in the U.S.,” he explained.

Clemente also took home the biggest paycheck of any in this particular sting. He said he was paid $50,000 for a report titled “The Global Value of Coal,” which was actually published by the International Energy Agency in 2012.

If you want to get a deep inside look at how to get an academic—a greedy one, at least—to sell their soul, give these email chains a read.
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Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

Postby tapitsbo » Tue Dec 08, 2015 6:45 pm

Where does one demarcate between fearing the loss of rigor allegedly still practiced by academia and cheerleading for its complete desecration and ruin?

(was that a joke?)
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Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

Postby backtoiam » Fri Dec 11, 2015 4:43 am

When you see this man smiling at your wallet its time run... :sarcasm


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Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

Postby brainpanhandler » Mon Apr 11, 2016 10:32 am

Agent Orange Cooper » Fri Apr 08, 2016 12:50 pm wrote: I think it's obvious that the "climate" is "changing." I'm kind of expecting another ice age fairly soon to be honest. I'm not denying the possibility that it is being driven by humans, but I doubt very much that it is happening the way Al Gore and the UN's international consortium of science™ has so helpfully explained it. The reasons are likely far more complex, and sinister, than excess CO2. They've been mucking around with geo-engineering tech for decades now, I have no trouble believing that altering the planet's atmosphere has had some effect on the Sun in turn.

the Sun may be a living being for all I know, literally responding to human activity in conscious fashion (like, Sun: hey, what the fuck Earth, why are you heating up your own ionosphere? that's kind of annoying Earth: it's these humans they've figured out how to mess with the atmosphere, I can't seem to get rid of them Sun: oh ok let me take care of that. this may hurt *belch*). that one's pretty out there though.

At the end of the day I'm concerned with questioning all media-driven narratives, which is what "global warming" has always been.
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King Jr.
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Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

Postby Rory » Mon Apr 11, 2016 11:03 am

Re: How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

^^ in this case, pretty bad
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