If you’ve been wondering which environmental protections the incoming administration will target and how exactly they’ll try to undo them, take a look at the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s legislative agenda, “Free to Prosper.” Just a few months ago, this radical plan to dismantle environmental safeguards would have been dismissed as the wacky wish list of a conservative fringe group. But with Donald Trump headed to the White House and Myron Ebell, CEI’s director, overseeing the transition of the Environmental Protection Agency, the report, which was released last week, is a chilling preview of the attacks on environmental and health regulations that are likely to come — and a must-read for anyone trying to avert them.
Beyond laying out specific paths to destruction, CEI’s legislative roadmap helps explain the group’s twisted logic for attacking environmental laws in the first place, something that may be lost on the vast majority of Americans, who want clean air and water, accept the reality of climate change, and are not steeped in anti-governmental legal theory.
As CEI sees it, efforts to address the effects of pollution from fossil fuels on our climate are really a “war on affordable energy.” Bizarrely, the report uses a decline in global death rates due to extreme weather since the 1920s to justify the continued burning of oil and coal and its claim that carbon-based fuels “increase life expectancy.” While fossil fuels have unquestionably kept many people warm over the past century, alternative energy sources can also provide plenty of heat — and have the additional appeal of reducing the likelihood of extreme weather events.
Most disingenuously, CEI presents its efforts to do away with climate protections as stemming from a concern for the poor, since “energy costs already impose real burdens on low-income households.” In truth, the poor are disproportionately affected by climate change. And, of course, huge energy and chemical companies are the ones who stand to benefit most from the assault on climate and other environmental protections suggested in the report. Not coincidentally, many of these same powerful interests, including Exxon, Dow, Texaco, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Koch Brothers have funded CEI.
Trump has already made it pretty clear that he would like to undo the Paris Climate Agreement. CEI lays out a plan for doing so by reclassifying the agreement as a treaty requiring ratification in the Senate, which would almost certainly fail to receive the necessary two thirds vote.
CEI also calls for overturning the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which includes carbon dioxide and other pollution standards for power plants. If Congress can’t dismantle the actual Clean Power Plan rule, which the report describes as “an unlawful power grab that will increase consumer electricity prices,” the think tank suggests a plan B, defunding the EPA’s implementation of it.
Budgets may be the most direct way to paralyze environmental progress, and CEI proposes slashing a number of them. “Free to Prosper” also calls on Congress to cut off the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, an intergovernmental group that gathers and shares information on strategies for addressing greenhouse gas emissions and preparations for the impacts of climate change.
Although some environmental advocates have offered assurances that dismantling environmental laws will be difficult and time consuming, the CEI report suggests specific strategies the Trump administration might pursue, such as amending the Clean Air Act so that the EPA no longer has the ability to affect climate policy; altering the Clean Water Act so that the EPA has no power to regulate wetlands; and reforming the Endangered Species Act so that it’s harder to add threatened animals.
Generally speaking, whatever natural resource you might think of, CEI believes it doesn’t need protection. So the Waters of the U.S. Rule, which limits pollution in lakes and rivers, should be overturned; the federal government should transfer ownership of land to the states or private citizens, or at the very least make it available for “resource production”; fuel standards for cars should be allowed to expire; and Congress should push back against the Fish and Wildlife Service, which, according to CEI, is engaged in “a vast new endangered species power grab.”
If Congress follows the “Freedom to Prosper” blueprint, it will also roll back restrictions on toxic chemicals. The group suggests eliminating funding for what it calls “activist research,” which includes the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences study of the endocrine disruptor BPA, and for “Safer Choice,” through which EPA helps companies eliminate toxic chemicals from their products. Another CEI target is IRIS, the EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System, which identifies hazardous environmental chemicals, such as formaldehyde, styrene, and TCE. IRIS has proven particularly troublesome to industry because it targets widely used chemicals and, as the report notes, drives clean air and drinking water regulations.
Most people want government to keep them safe from such dangers. But CEI seems to have no compunction about eliminating efforts designed to protect health, even when they’re aimed at babies, such as the government’s efforts to restrict dangerous chemicals called phthalates from kids’ products. Although the Consumer Products Safety Commission has been working on such a ban for years, the report recommends conducting oversight hearings that would slow the process further. It’s worth noting that Exxon Mobil, which has funded CEI — and whose CEO is now poised to become Trump’s secretary of state — manufactures phthalates and opposes the ban.
That conflict of interest is just one of many. “This is standard CEI — hysteria, nonsense, and dishonesty to promote the most extreme pro-chemical manufacturer agenda,” said Daniel Rosenberg, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “These people are not relevant players, they’re at the margins,” he added. “Or at least they used to be.”
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/311032-epa-stops-work-on-climate-rule-compliance-option
The Clean Power Plan, which is on hold thanks to a Supreme Court order that halted it during litigation, assigns each state an individual greenhouse gas reduction level for its private sector.
The model rules outline basic cap-and-trade systems for power plants that states could set up to comply. But states would not be mandated to use the cap-and-trade systems and would be free to find other ways to comply.
Congressional Republicans, state attorneys general challenging the rule and other opponents had argued that the EPA was violating the Supreme Court’s stay on the Clean Power Plan by working on related programs like the model rules.
Ideas have consequences; insane ideas have very bad ones when those holding them are in power
The Scariest Thing About Trump’s Presidency So Far Is Michael Flynn and His Team of Nutters
Flynn is Trump’s choice for his national security adviser. This is truly frightening, but the author of this piece — Jonathan Chait — has no one to blame but himself and his fellow neoliberals. Populism shot through with madness won because the Democrats refused to offer the rational populist alternative.
The fantastic works of Hannah Arendt should be read by everyone.
And, yes, anti-intellectual ideas do have scary consequences!
Damn, and I thought Donald Trump was at least a little bit to blame!
Seriously, your statement is an example of extremely poor reasoning.
Nope. Hillary and the DNC actively promoted Trump’s
s candidacy because they thought he’d be easy to beat. While at the same time they actively sabotaged their own populist candidate.
Yep, but Trump promoted Trump’s candidacy, too. Almost everybody thought he would be easy to beat, including possibly Trump himself. Hence the desperate measures.
Flynn is most known for his opposition to arming and funding Islamic “rebels” against Syria and warned that if Obama continued that they would create their own Islamic “principality” in Eastern Syria.
He was right and Obama was wrong, And now we have the Islamic State
Anti-intellectualism, disdain for facts, led to madness in Turkey
Turkisj journalist, Ece Temelkuran, takes to the Guardian to discuss the rise of Erdo?an’s administration as a dictatorship in the making, in which “tragedy plays a role in manipulative government and post-truth repression.”
Anti-intellectualism, and a contempt for truth and facts, can help midwife totalitarianism
WaPo reexamines Hannah Arendt’s penetrating and widely heralded book, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
The sharp rise in conspiratorial and irrational beliefs — their becoming mainstreamed — is a hallmark of a mass movement toward totalitarianism.
Irresponsible and ignorant use of the scientific language does not entitle one to any credit, nor does it entitle these ignorant uses to be called “dissent”. Take for example, the pseudo-scientists of the discovery institute (from Wikipedia).
“A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism (or Dissent from Darwinism) is a statement issued in 2001 by the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian think tank based in Seattle, Washington, U.S., best known for its promotion of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design. ”
Many of you have seen these individuals in debates and understand what I am saying when I say that a parrot can also learn to repeat the words of Bertrand Russel, but Bertrand Russel a parrot does not become.
Perhaps those who don’t believe that climate change is human-caused or particularly problematic could at least agree that pollution is disgusting and amounts to befouling our home and poisoning the air and water.
It’s hard to see the LA skyline most days without thinking of a nightmarish Monet, but Beijing has it worse – and so the Chinese are finding necessity the mother of invention as they simply have to find sensible alternate energy sources just so people can, well, breathe.
If we don’t watch out, the Chinese will “save the planet” before we do, and we’ll never hear the end of it – if we could pull out all the stops to pointlessly go to the “slag-heap” (Arthur C. Clarke) of the moon just to beat the Russians, surely we could get our feistiest scientists to come up with something amazing.
(And no, I didn’t call you, the reader, Shirley.)
In the meantime, I propose we all start charging trolls for arguments with us (note that I don’t think of myself as a troll, mostly because I’m too cute), like that old Monty Python skit. We could make a fortune, and devote it to research.
Was it like this? You know, during the long, agonizing decline and eventual collapse of Rome? You know, the didactic, “my side is better than yours”, finger-pointing back and forth, while “our” current-day Rome burns? I give credit where credit is well deserved. The Intercept (and lately many others, thank goddess) gives us citizens a writing/reading platform to fill the vacuum left by the demise of our democracy’s demise. Currently, we are NOT a functioning democracy: no free press, but now bought – not written or read, by an educated self-critical citizenry, but viewed as “infotainment”. Who is left? Who knows the real story of the real historic colonial America? Can we break through the prevailing corporate mass media collapse into jingoisms? Falsehoods based on “group think” repeat over and over the lies put out by huckster banksters in silk suits. Multi-national corporate “free market” jingoisms refute that our Mother Earth is their biological mother. They use religious beliefs over science to sell our Mother – our own water, back to us. “Must be the season of the witch” – Al Kooper with Mike Bloomfield
Once a source is established to hold not even just one, but multiple views that are literally incredible, and that they are not amenable to reason when discussing these rigidly-but-wrongly held beliefs, it is logical and intellectually sound to doubt all other contestable claims they make. For this is so:
@Mona
What’s with the blind links? (5 or more) Is it your ‘rational wiki’ page where you mock the mentally ill or is it your skeptical science play-pen for Enquiring minds?
Your expert knowledge of science is skeptical undoubtedly so I commend you on your topic. Straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Those closest to the problem are most likely the source, eh?
Please post an excerpt from your link when you are interested in discourse.
You could even post an excerpt using one of your many handles; Gert, Maisie, and the rest of the gang.
Reply.
Meet Teh Press just played a clip of Hillary telling a crowd of donors, the hack probably cost the election. She sounded as if she was tying to convince herself as well as the audience.
Hillary’s is a crappy liar.
And then they went all in with Podesta. What a clueless, unrepentant, punk.
The Intercept is becoming depressingly morose. How about a positive Trump story?
Trump made reinstating Glass-Steagall a part of the Republican Party platform. Any news on that front?
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-07-18/republican-platform-under-trump-backs-glass-steagall-s-return
None that I know of, but here is the likely scenario: First, Congress will repeal Dodd-Frank. Why? Because the majority party is pretty much lined up against it. Then they can start discussing its replacement. The head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors (late of Goldman Sachs) will be asked to testify, as will the Secretary of the Treasury. Both will strongly advise against reinstatement of Glass-Steagall in anything approaching its original form. As the due process grinds on for the remainder of Trump’s two terms, the markets will be unregulated.
Two terms, you ask? We knew about George W. Bush yet he won a second term, and we knew about Barack Obama yet he did too. It has become too mentally troublesome for the US electorate to contemplate changing presidents more often than necessary. In fact, most lament that the Presidency is not like the House or Senate, where people get elected for life.
Rightwing cranks are often deeply resentful of intellectuals and the change often that accompanies their contributions. Richard Hofstadter, already referenced in this thread, was an insightful historian of American intellectual trends. He observed:
When the intellectuals also operate as elitists, with that ridicule Hofstadter points out at the end, this especially arouses populist anti-intellectualism. And there certainly has been a great deal of mockery and ridicule directed at, e.g., creationists.
Creationists cannot prevail against reason and logic, which infuriates many of them. Add in widespread derision, and they look for payback.
It was very possibly unsound for the pro-science forces to be as militantly mocking as they have been; an angrily aroused, numerically significant populism heavily predicated on anti-intellectualism is very bad for the body politic. The anti-intellectual Trump and his supporters — a number of whom are active in this thread — are partially the consequence of intellectuals’ victories with perhaps some unseemly crowing.
“an angrily aroused, numerically significant populism heavily predicated on anti-intellectualism is very bad for the body politic. ”
very true. This is the best argument against Democracy.
You do us all a disservice by associating antiscientific behavior and attitudes with one side of the political spectrum. In fact there is a wealth of evidence of similar behavior on the left. If you are interested in reading an entertaining and compelling documentation of that fact, might I suggest you read Corrupted Science: Fraud, ideology and politics in Science, by John Grant. The three major protagonists of the book are Hitler, Stalin and G.W. Bush. Pretty much the entire political gamut, eh?
I did no one a disservice and I neither said, nor do I believe, that “anti-scientific behavior and attitudes” are limited to one side of the political spectrum. The article above us, however, is about environmental issues, and specifically climate change, vis-a-vis the incoming Trump administration.
A casual perusal of this thread will reveal what is more broadly true, to wit: climate denial is the province almost completely of rightwing cranks. Moreover, in the U.S., the right has historically been anti-intellectual, not the left.
(I can, and have, discussed anti-science ideologies adopted by some fringes of the academic left, but that is a separate issue and topic.)
Hitler, Stalin and G.W. Bush don’t constitute the entire political gamut, by any means.
Memorable quotes of 2016:
“And? The minute you (or someone) provided documentary evidence that Luke is, in fact, a Truther, I immediately changed my mind and conceded the point.” –Mona-
Yes, I concede error immediately upon being show with credible evidence that I am mistaken. As opposed to you, who thinks Frtitz Springmeier is authoritative. His latest: The Satanic Bloodlines
That you find a crank like Springmeier authoritative explains why you do not get that it inures to my credibility to admit it when the evidence shows I am wrong. As well as why you so heavily promote climate change denial.
Was your eventual concession on Rudkowski’s Trutherness empirical?
His own words.
“I concede error immediately upon being show with credible evidence that I am mistaken.”
Yes, we know, you want “credible” evidence.
MacroMan rang-up a six-pack, time and dated, of your fallacious statements and nary a word from you.
If that happened I didn’t see it, but I am very doubtful this MacroMan thing occurred, certainly not as you describe it. Moreover, this latest claim is yet more of your continued flopping around to avoid that, 1. This is true:
And 2., this is also true:
THAT is who you find authoritative.
There is nothing you can spout about me — whether true or false — that would change that both 1 & 2 are true. You are stuck with them.
Ha! Nothat was an error. I thought I was replying to Communete. I do not substantively reply to this other person.
Mona, I know this is off-topic, but I’d love for you to explain why the all-seeing eye imagery has basically saturated our culture for decades. I actually agree that there’s a lot of whacked out theories being propagated by cranks, so I’m wondering if you have a more grounded explanation for the prevalence of esoteric pagan symbolism in our media.
“I actually agree that there’s a lot of whacked out theories being propagated by cranks, ”
There’s only one person here calling others “cranks”.
She posts blind links too. by the butt-load.
Well I was simply agreeing with Mona on that one. I’ve actually sieved through a lot of crazy conspiracy stuff, so I can attest to that. I’m just wondering what her thoughts are about the subject, since she went on that diatribe about not listening to people who deny evidence that’s right in front in them…
The Founders tended to be Deists, and some were Masons. Both cohorts tended to have a fascination with ancient pagan symbols and myths. Not unlike in my lifetime the whole New Age thing was a big fad, even among intelligent people.
Earlier when I commented on the value of the “Scientific Method”, I neglected to emphasize the danger presented by fools who abuse it. As it is true with every other powerful tool, foolish use of the Scientific Method leads to foolish conclusions. I think this was Mona’s point with regards to the closing of comment blog by the Scientific journal, but it is worth restating.
> “I think this was Mona’s point with regards to the closing of comment blog by the Scientific journal,….”
“Dissent is abuse.” -the censorious progressive left
““Dissent is abuse.” -the censorious progressive left”
Most people think they understand science.
The ‘Presidential Debates’ are an example of what satisfies the perception of debate.
Americans are some of the poorer performers in Math and Science across the globe.
If one does not grasp fully mathematics then one has a distorted view of the world.
If you cannot handle fractions or percents, you do not understand proportion.
If you can’t handle geometry you don’t know why some things stand and some things fall.
But that never stops people from asserting their opinion on how the world works. Heck,people study the bible.
Yes, cranks often do not grasp the is/ought distinction. Scientists qua scientists determine what is, not what ought to be done. When they undertake to address the latter, their value judgments are entitled to no more deference than anyone else’s.
I just turned off Donna Brazile on ABC (home of the fighting dems).
She is relieved that people are finally taking notice of the Russian hack. “It wasn’t just against the Democrats; it was against the party of the President!!.”
People like Donna Brazile are why we have Trump and not Bernie. She knows, deep inside, she empowered the defeat of Shillary.
David Niose, the activist lawyer, has written quite a bit about anti-intellectualism and its threat to both democracy and human well-being. His emphasis:
His entire piece repays reading.
Funny that you, who spreads the government’s position of the tower collapses, prattles on about “anti-intellectualism”.
Reply.
I literally typed, “Why don’t you post a blind link as a response.” but I deleted it because, well, I decided it would have more impact if it appeared all by itself.
You can’t disappoint.
When will you post an excerpt from your site? I am skeptical of your abilities in science.
Reply.
Among other criteria:
Do you still believe a NYT that tells you, every new year, that the prior year was The Hottest Ever? When that same corporate leftist, globalist propaganda organ told you that the polls were irrefutable, it’s Hillary in the lead.
Do you still believe a convicted felon — for armed bank robbery — who argues that the Illuminati controls the world through Satanic mind-control?
Yet even skimming Springmeier, you’re unable to reproduce that line or any variations of it.
The “Selected Works” of one of your favorite authors:
One of his more recent works is titled: The Satanic Bloodlines.
THAT is who you find authoritative.
Polls and the research done by climate scientists are two very different things–almost opposites. The fact that the NYT (and almost everyone who didn’t vote for Trump) were mistaken for giving more credence than was warranted to the polls for the 2016 election, doesn’t mean they’re also mistaken for giving credence to the much more scientific work done by nearly all of the world’s climate scientists. Belief in what the NYT says about them (if belief is the correct word here) is irrelevant, since they’re not the source of the info–the sources of the info (the pollsters, or the scientists) stand or fall regardless of what the NYT says about them.
Popular science and medicine can now find, lightning fast, a treatment for anything said to ail you or the planet. Advertising helps. Our age is wondrous because we can make these discoveries by lunchtime, on our schedules. Advertising helps.
It’s possible because little spheres of chemistry, serotonin, dopamine, CO2, CH4, are so easily managed, volumetrically manipulated upward or down. The science is settled because those are things that can be controlled with no immediately discernible change in state.
Because all that matters is…all the subtle compounds you happen to know of. As well as how effectively you can technologically manipulate it. Because to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I so enjoy the comments on any environmental topic on The Intercept! Especially when it comes to the so-called climate change debate! (Which is not a debate, really, just opinionated people yelling at each other.)
What everyone appears to miss is the simple fact that the earth is finite, and as a result the quantity of everything on earth is also finite. That includes coal, oil and natural gas, which were produced here on earth by plants tens to hundreds of million years ago, using sunlight to convert CO2 and H2O along with some trace elements into complex hydrocarbons. We are using that reserve of material up at an ever increasing rate, which cannot be sustained for long. What will we do when the supplies run out? Would it not be prudent to conserve and develop alternative sources of energy now, when we have abundant fossil fuel to power the development of the necessary infrastructure, rather than waiting until those fuels become exorbitantly expensive due to dwindling supply?
Personally I am convinced of the reality of anthropogenic climate change. But I have come to realize that the vast majority of my countrymen are either incapable or unwilling to absorb the source material that is a necessary prerequisite to coming to an unbiased conclusion. You cannot effectively argue with believers, nor with the stupid.
fake balance, counterposing science deniers with “believers”, by which i suppose you mean people who think scientists know what they’re talking about. whether you are personally convinced by the evidence that every major science organization has accepted doesn’t mean much, and one doesn’t have to be an expert in order to come to an unbiased conclusion. on one side, we have a propaganda campaign against the science funded by fossil fuel companies, on the other we have scientists. on a scientific issue.
Although I find myself aligned with the scientific consensus on this issue, I reject the notion that what is accepted by the majority – the consensus view – is necessarily correct. For centuries the doctrine of the Church was based on the false notion that the earth was at the center of the universe, and consensus science strove to produce geocentric theories of solar and planetary motion that conformed to that doctrine. At the turn of the 20th century, there arose a consensus of scientists who believed first that Special Relativity, then General Relativity, were wrong. Then in Nazi Germany those early consensus views, which had long since been discarded by the vast majority of scientists, became codified. Relativity, even quantum mechanics, were deemed “Jewish Science” (ironically, as the principal inventors of QM were German and Austrian; Einstein remained a doubter for his entire life).
Thus I hope you will see the logic of my argument and sympathize with my observation that the current US debate over climate change is more reminiscent of the Nazis than of the kind of discourse that goes on in the pages of peer reviewed scientific journals or at the meetings of the American Physical Society, for instance.
Allow me to add that the proper way of deciding one’s stance on an issue such as climate change is to develop an understanding of the scientific basis for the various arguments and to critically examine the evidence provided by both sides. Lacking the training to do so puts one in a position of being forced to accept one position or the other based on empathy, which is not a good way of doing science. Alternatively, one could examine the quality of the arguments. In this case, for instance, there are a fair number of computer codes (“models” ) in use, and all of them appear to support the notion that human activity is behind global warming. Those who doubt or deny appear to do so by cherry picking data, and have as yet published no models that support their contention. Thus it might appear to an unbiased outside observer that the climate change deniers base their stance on dogma. And we know quite well where clinging to dogma has taken us in the past.
That majority view was not based on the scientific method; it was driven by religious myth. Scientific consensus (properly) replaced this myth.
As for your argument about consensus and Special Relativity, as I recall
Planck — already by 1909 or so — compared it with the Copernican Revolution, and it was by then accepted by most theoretical physicists and mathematicians. Because of vigorous and rigorous scientific debate that left SR standing as the functional, provisional truth, superior to all competing truth claims.
You mock the physics of the tower collapses while you “recall Planck” …
that is one of the funniest things you’ve posted.
Reply.
Your argument that the majority view was not based on the scientific method is correct in the sense that until around the time of Galileo, the scientific method did not exist. So it is a pretty meaningless statement.
As for your attribution to Planck, I am reminded of something Einstein himself said at about that time, in response to a pamphlet entitled “One hundred authors against Einstein”: ‘ If I were wrong, one would be enough.’ So in 1909 Planck was a member of a distinct minority. What is your point?
No.
Mere majority view is not remotely the same as a scientific consensus. An overwhelming consensus of people who adhere to the scientific method to reach their conclusions is far, far more reliable than a mere majority of people at large.
In any event, I don’t think Planck was a minority by 1911 or so. But that;’s just a point historical curiosity and is not relevant to this discussion either way.
Scientists are human beings. Human beings tend to prefer the status quo. But that isn’t particularly problematic. New hypotheses must be supported and proven before they are permitted to displace the prior consensus. This is normal and proper. Moreover, even tho the scientific consensus is wrong sometimes — this is obvious or no new consensus would ever replace an old one — that kind of consensus is still far more likely to be true than a mere majority view of people at large.
Science deniers were always disputing Eugenics Science, but here’s peer-reviewed proof of its verity, in Eugenics Review. Its archive is here for the doubters:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/1186/
We know alcoholism genes are largely responsible for this now.
Eugenics has nothing to do with the topic under discussion. This remains true:
Coming from so-called ‘scientists’ who think dinosaurs roamed Saturnine moons, and that palm fronds and ferns and pterodactyls were subducted several miles under the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Not to mention before they were fully exsanguinated and micro-organically putrefied into the upper topsoil.
Good luck with that Mona. You’ll believe anything the NYT tells you (and you’ve claimed that media in the past as a reliable source).
That entire comment is a mish-mash of incoherent babble and falsehood. (No one familiar with me for more than two seconds would swallow that I believe everything published in the NYT.) But even if that all made sense and were the case, it would not alter that this is true:
Yes, and there are peer reviewed journals on parapsychology, likewise peered by quacks. Eugenics is a doctrine quite separate from heredity and molecular biology; one that seeks to breed a master race or cull inferior beings through selective human breeding. That there is a genetic basis for alcoholism, or for the tendency to develop breast cancer, has nothing to do with Eugenics.
Have you found that alcoholism gene yet, 24b4Jeff? That was big news in disease theory.
“We know alcoholism genes are largely responsible for this now.” – your statement. Ha! Ha! You got me! Fool that I was for believing that something in your post might actually be true, especially when you use it to bolster your argument. Well, I certainly won’t be making that mistake again!
@Karl
This manner of engagement is typical of the anti-intellectual rightwinger such as you and “Communete.” Promiscuous trafficking in fallacies under-gird virtually everything you both argue. In this case, the “straw man.”
What I have persistently, and accurately, stated is this:
Reasonable people accept the above when the scientific consensus is the result of an intellectual environment in which empirical investigation is permitted and not encumbered so as to dictate outcome (e.g., the coercion of intellectuals/scientists in Stalin’s USSR). Further, a consensus that extensive cannot reasonably be explained by claims of “bias,” as if, e.g., this 97% all worked for Big Tobacco and the issue was second hand smoke.
Among those who are not anti-intellectual, a handful of cranks are not preferred over 97% of intellectually free climate scientists vis-a-vis climate issues.
William Happer, physicist; emeritus professor, Princeton University
Nicola Scafetta, physicist, Duke University
Fred Singer, environmental sciences; emeritus professor, UVA
Mike Stopa, physicist, Harvard
Freeman Dyson, physicist (and Nobel laureate); emeritus professor, Princeton
Ivar Giaver, physicist (Nobel laureate); Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
…are but a few who disagree with your consensus.
History of Science shows it’s consensus opinions which don’t have a rich reputation for accuracy under later scrutiny.
Nope. Institutional inertia in favor of the status quo has sometimes resisted intellectually sound challenge, e.g., early opposition to plate tectonics by the majority.
In the instance before us, however, the status quo has been upended by a new consensus, that is, the overwhelming finding that humans are causing climate change. This new consensus is akin to those who were once in the minority on plate tectonics, until they weren’t; now, like climate change, plate tectonics isn’t argued against by any but a handful of cranks, including some creationists.
Your limited capacity for critical thought obviates that Creationism and plate tectonics aren’t mutually exclusive.
lol you’re a creationist too? figures.
He’s the embodiment of the anti-intellectual crankery of the far right. Creationism, and he thinks the world is under attack by an Illuminati plot to Satanically control the minds of tens of thousands.
and how many of them have been funded by the fossil fuels industry? and how many of them practice in the field? a few right wing physicists who let their economic ideology overwhelm their critical thinking do not prove the vast majority wrong. you can find a few biologists who dispute evolution, too. you can always find a few cranks or shills, and the fossil fuel industry, which funded it’s own studies back in the 70’s and 80’s, which reached the same conclusions as the scientists, decided to fund a propaganda campaign instead of dealing with the problem.
The vast majority of those who argue against the overwhelming scientific consensus do so for ideological reasons. Many perceive climate change as a threat to capitalism; others see it as (sometimes also) horrible for being a global problem requiring a global solution. Such individuals react to the word and concept of “global” as the vampire does to the crucifix.
Most of this climate denialism is driven by irrational, rightwing obsessions. A smaller bit of it is motivated by being in the pocket of corporations for whom climate change is unwelcome news for their bottom line.
“…and thus a reasonable person accepts that consensus as functionally true.” – -Mona-
Bell Curve 101.
Your aunt’s pen is on the table.
Confusing people with someone else again Mona?
Replying to an inane non sequitur with one of my own.
You’re a credulous consumer of the New York Times as a font of truth. Corporate media, establishment orthodoxy, and peer pressure, are guiding principles for you.
Nope, nope, nope and nope. No evidence for any of that, but then, you do not “do” evidence. Or logic. Or analytical reasoning.
Mona insisted in a past thread that We Are Change wasn’t a 9/11 Truth site. She had to be later informed it was founded on just that singular premise.
And? The minute you (or someone) provided documentary evidence that Luke is, in fact, a Truther, I immediately changed my mind and conceded the point. Because my conclusions about the material world are dictated by tangible evidence. You simply do not get that my having publicly changed my mind only supports my endorsement and practice of logical reasoning and empiricism.
Unfortunately for you, you have not — and cannot — similarly demonstrated the truth of climate change denial. If you, or anyone could, I would concede that as well.
> “And? The minute you (or someone) provided documentary evidence that Luke is, in fact, a Truther, I immediately changed my mind and conceded the point.”
And you’re Glenn’s sometime book “researcher”*! That should scare your audience.
–
* and full-time groupie and thread crapflooder
Yes, I do research for a variety of people, including Glenn. (And catch errors that way.) You simply manifest more crankishness by assuming researchers should be incapable of unresearched fact errors. All humans make mistakes of fact, including researchers.
Yet you happen to *write* a lot on subjects but without prior knowledge or regard to fact.
We need the North Wall desperately to prevent the Canadians from blowing extreme cold air across their border. Hillary will pay now that she can’t get any more donors. Her rate for speech has evaporated, now she only gets thanked for silence.
The latest Climate Science model has just been released:
import java.util.Calendar;
class ClimateModel {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Calendar year = Calendar.getInstance();
year.add(Calendar.YEAR,1);
String prediction = “Australia, the U.S., and the rest of the world will have record hot temperatures in “+year.get(Calendar.YEAR)+”.”;
System.out.println(prediction);
}
}
Commentators like Mona are free to consume the fake news they prefer, whether it be from the selective East Anglia “Hide the Decline” Climate U, or from the New York Times and CNN, breathing their own cooked poll numbers–wishing, propagandizing, a criminal to victory.
Again wishfully. Pretending is something that immature people never grow from. The DPRK pretends; anything not officially recognized is cast aside, unpublished. Willful ignorance, stupidity, empiricism to the blind exclusion of a recognition that there’s an unfathomable universe of dynamics they’ll never be aware of. Peers’ need to impress their wives by bringing home regular paychecks is pretty universal. Braced by globalist money. But wishing is not the truth.
there was no improper science at east anglia, but in your slavishly uncritical acceptance of fossil fuel propaganda you will ignore that. critical thinking indeed.
An internal whistle-blower at East Anglia thought very much otherwise, and leaked e-mails that prove that East Anglia is a mill house for globalist funded propaganda.
The environment freaks have blood on their hands. The extreme cold weather for the last few days have killed hundreds.
Intellectuals can be a useful group if they help people to understand difficult subjects but not if they try to dictate what people should think. Scientists are the same but if either group joins an agenda and lies as some important scientists have done about the progress of GW who should believe them . They have measured GW over time and even though some of that measurement was falsified the trend is undeniable.
The problem now is that the scientific community wants people to believe their projections about the future and they have bought into the Big Green agenda as the solution to GW. They couldn’t tell the truth about past measurements of GW so why should anyone trust their projections about the future even if they may be accurate.
Technocrats are who are driving the Big Green agenda and scientists are aiding these forces. This is where the real conflict is being manifest with the Deniers protecting their established fossil fuel industries facing the Warmers who are trying to sell their unproven assumptions that their program will reduce GW. The best research/analysis I could find shows that solar may be nearly as much a CO2= producer as coal and they still have no low carbon replacement for gasoline.
Really? Then you know what you are.
It required almost incredible self delusion to vote for Donald Trump, claiming to believe that he was really for the little people. That is the same mental feature present in those who deny global warming, or even those who pretend to take a sophisticated position sitting on a fence.
Most people are willing to leave other’s self delusions alone. But that stops when the danger from doing so gets too great. Claims that “the Big Green agenda” exists as an entity as powerful as “industry” is no different from claiming that “terrorism” is a threat to the existence of the US.
When the Sierra Club becomes as rich and powerful as a small country, as is Exxon Mobile, you might be right to worry about them, too.
I think the Sierra Club gets funding from Exxon Mobile just as most environmental groups are now in partnerships with big industry.
Big Corporate Green is already represents an industry and it will continue to grow even under Trump but we may not see the government cramming its snake oil down our throats. If you want to learn about this new industrial movement search CERES, the green industry group that includes tar-sands companies in its roster.
This conflict is probably too complicated to actually understand for many people so they stick with simple slogans and easy targets but it is about huge sums of money and where it will be invested with GW or climate change used mostly as a PR tool.
$3000 in 1999? That does not support what you are saying at all.
Some of the commentary in this thread demonstrates the worrying revolt against reason and empiricism that is well-embodied by Donald Trump. Opposing elites and elitism is not coterminous with rejecting use of one’s critical faculties; failure to see and/or apply that distinction characterizes most of the Trump supporters in this site’s comment space.
This essay gets to the heart of this issue, emphasis in original:
That well captures the differences between, on the one hand, populists who ardently support Donald Trump, and on the other, those who were for Bernie Sanders (or another progressive candidate). In general, the Trumpers here are anti-intellectual while the progressives are not.
Richard Hofstadter’s “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” really springs to mind here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life
As an outsider, I watch with horror and disbelief how the ‘richest nation on Earth’, the ‘Exceptional Nation’ seems to descend into pure and simple anti-intellectualism and into a a New Dark Age, this one with a surplus of frightening technology.
It would be naive to see this as the endgame of American Empire, as this sorry state of affairs will only serve short-thinking (but very cunning) elites to further their grasp on power and economics. See also Trump, a pied piper if there ever was one…
That brings to mind a recent piece by Jeet Heer at The New Republic. Heer is very knowledgeable about 20th century American intellectual history (tho too much the “liberal” for my taste — he probably saw Hillary Clinton as the better choice than Bernie) and has incorporated Hofstadter into his writing many times.
He did so in this recent piece on Trump: Donald Trump’s United States of Conspiracy
Part of the explanation for the achievement of the US, particularly in the 20th century, is in the fact that many of the key contributors and great teachers were from abroad.
For instance #1: The Manhattan Project. Fermi, Oppenheimer, Teller, von Neumann – all born and educated in Europe, came to US to escape Hitler and Mussolini.
For instance #2: US Rocket program. Scores of German scientists (not just von Braun) brought over after WW2. [A telling side story about this: The first US satellite was supposed to be launched by the US Navy and their all-American team. After Sputnik I was launched, there was real pressure for the US to respond, and the Navy tried – three times – to launch their satellite. All three blew up on the launch pad, on national television if I recall. Finally von Braun’s team was given the OK and within 30 days they put the first US satellite into orbit.]
For instance #3: Training of a generation of great US scientists by Europeans. Richard Feynman is an example, trained by Bethe.
It will be interesting to see how the US fares now that that generation has died off. Already we see the US slipping in educational scores relative to the rest of the G20 – we are now below average in that group. Left to our own devices, perhaps our recent presidential election will become a paradigm for our ability to innovate (other than in finding new ways to steal).
Well, at least the fantasy of US’s exceptionalism can finally be put to rest.
I am anti-elitist; I am not anti-intellectual. The difference is vast and critical.
Isaac Asimov was right when he declared:
While it may be true the mystic metaphysical Hotel manager bereft of scientific discovery would quickly fall into the ‘quagmire of superstition’ … surely the intellectually rigid empirical scientist of the late, great Industrial Revolution has fallen into the ‘slough of materialism’?
Will wonders never cease? According to theorists like Albert Einstein and Gary Zukov in his book The Dancing Wu Li Masters the discoveries of science will never end:
*of course, even dancing Wu Li Masters have to root-hog or die sometimes … what you got in your poke there, sis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFHwG8ikZAY
The “slough of materialism” is more of a “spiritual” problem. The opposite error of the anti-intellectual rejection of empiricism is scientism.
More proof that the liar Trump is about as ‘anti-establishment’ as Hillary Clinton:
Trump Picks Pro-TPP, Pro-NAFTA, Anti-Minimum Wage Economic Adviser
Queen bees like Mona cannot help but to advocate for consensus opinion (I believe that it is the sense of inferiority derived from their modified ovipositor that makes them obsessively domineering and compulsively eusocial). For those of you who do not yet identify as stinger-less drones:
Must Watch: Climatologist Breaks the Silence on Global Warming Groupthink
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GujLcfdovE8
That’s inaccurate. This is accurate:
Wrt to your proffered youtube video, this is the Skeptical Science entry on Judith Curry.
Hmmm, I’m not touching that link.
How about a snippet of info regarding Skeptical Science? Reminds me of ‘Intelligent Design’.
Since your knowledge of math includes the “sideways carot [sic]”, I’m skeptical of any skepticism of “science” you might proffer.
Reply.
Skeptical Science is the best that you can do? Really?
Citing James cook and the venerable Rockefeller funded Global Change Institute is like asking the fox to check the lock on the chicken coup. Wasn’t it the Rockefeller family who was responsible for undermine the early trend in electric modes of transportation for the purpose of optimizing the profit potential of his vast holdings in fossil fuels and their production? You might as well cite Al Gore who followed Kenneth Ley’s advice and preemptively positioned himself in the marketplace to reap huge dividends from carbon trading.
I bet that you actually believe that it takes a known proselyte of the global warming consensus model to apply empiricism to objective evaluate its merits…
Sorry about the numerous typos, but I feel little desire to up my game when encountering the likes of Mona.
Not a word of that misdirection and tap dancing defeats the fact of scientific consensus on climate change:
When approximately 97% of the humans who employ empiricism — and subject their findings to the peer-review process — reach a conclusion sufficiently firm that they no longer argue about it among themselves, I accept that consensus as functionally true. That’s because such consensus has long been demonstrated to reach truth, truth that is often of enormous benefit to humans.
You have failed to properly cite your sources Mona. Is there a reason for that?
It’s the same source.
Even the deeply biased source that you have now attempted to repeatedly use in support of your faith-base consensus opinion does not agree with this statement. In examining the purported “myth” of 1970’s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus, Mr “Cook the books” notes that 14% of climate scientists predicted catastrophic global cooling as a result of increasing CO2. Even in addressing this alleged “myth,” Mr. Cook included the following summation:
Ouch!!! Again, Mr Cooks own RETROSPECTIVE analysis of the scientific consensus concerning the effect of rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere during the 1970s was:
However the admitted lack of “empirical evidence”did not stop 42 of 49 peer reviewed scientific papers of that period from definitively concluding that rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere would result in global warming.
None of that litany of non sequiturs is relevant to this fact: 97% of the humans who employ empiricism — and subject their findings to the peer-review process — have reached a conclusion on climate change sufficiently firm that they no longer argue about it among themselves, and thus a reasonable person accepts that consensus as functionally true.
This 97% cannot plausibly be the product of any “bias” other than a bias for empiricism.
Simply labeling an argument as a non sequitur does not make its so.
The integrity of your own arguments hinged on the specious claim that scientific consensus equals truth. I clearly demonstrated that even the deeply biased source upon which you chose to rely in making that nonsensical claim failed to support your faith based dogmatism. When coupled with the link that I provided, one can plainly see a pattern wherein a scientific consensus is being generated in service to political ends in absence of conclusive empirical evidence.
“When approximately 97% of the humans who employ empiricism — and subject their findings to the peer-review process —”
H. pylori
your welcome
and I count at least 3 blind links to where?
Reply.
realclimate.org is the best we can do. global warming is not based on models, it’s based on empirical evidence and established physics. to refute it you need a theory that will better explain the evidence, not just conspiracy bullshit. you need to publish it in reputable scientific journals. the fossil fuel companies like exxon did their own research decades ago, which came to the same conclusions as the consensus. there is a reason there is a consensus, and it is not “groupthink”; it is because the science is good, the predictions have been right, and there is no better theory.
Global warming is defined as:
I believe that what you meant to say is that “EXPLANATIONS for global warming are not based on models…”
Of course you are wrong in this assertion.
A sound scientific hypothesis is just an accurate description of a particular natural phenomena. It normally relies upon a set of observable and measurable data that, when correctly understood, provides a testable model of causation of the phenomena. Computer modeling has become the mean by which change in complex array of climate indicators (data) are compiled over a finite period of time. It is the purportedly predictable change in these indicators upon which global warming projections rely. If projected temperature and rainfall patterns fail to meet the expectations projected by a specific climate model then its capacity to provide an accurate pattern of causation must be questioned.
William Happer, physicist; emeritus professor, Princeton University
Nicola Scafetta, physicist, Duke University
Fred Singer, environmental sciences; emeritus professor, UVA
Mike Stopa, physicist, Harvard
Freeman Dyson, physicist; emeritus professor, Princeton
…and others disagree strongly with your consensus opinion. Their views must not count.
There are more (including Nobel laureate Ivar Giaver):
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2009/nov/11/aps-rejects-plea-to-alter-stance-on-climate-change
And even more at OISM.
A tiny fraction of scientists (160) does not alter the fact of an overwhelming consensus (47,000) in that body alone. The 160 theoretically could be right, but are very unlikely to be. Nor are you in a position to assess the relative merits of their scientific arguments (neither am I).
Even for the scientist among us, it is sometimes difficult to identify the pseudo-scientist. Confirmation bias takes many forms – we have our views and then we look for material to confirm our own biases.
We invented the scientific method because, generally speaking, we are terrible at explaining our own experiences. Science tries to disconfirm our assumptions one by one until the outline of the truth begins to form. Had we not discovered the effectiveness of the scientific method, we would still be administering tobacco enemas.
Don’t be taken in by the phrenologists!
The phrenologists are too busy still applying electricity to various surfaces of people’s heads and calling that science too.
Is this what happened to you?
Ha! You do have a scathing wit!
“Is this what happened to you?” says -Mona-‘s puppet.
Show me on the doll where Mona embarrassed you.
Reply.
What’s with the blind links? Is it your ‘rational wiki’ page where you mock the mentally ill or is it your skeptical science play-pen for Enquiring minds?
Your expert knowledge of science is skeptical undoubtedly so I commend you on your topic. Straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Those closest to the problem are most likely the source, eh?
Please post an excerpt from your link when you are interested in discourse.
Reply.
As Resident Loon I “Communete, please do treat us to your views on stuff like Waco.
Enquirinng mids want to know..
george w. appointed a bunch of oil lackeys to important posts as well. it’s cold comfort, but just remember that the EPA has been pretty useless to begin with. they’ll do the bare minimum but they’re just as bought and sold as any governmental agency.
plus, as noted, a lot of the changes will be slow to happen if they happen at all and the impetus will then fall on whoever gets elected in 2020 to roll it all back. there’s also potential at the state level to resist many of the possible and moronic changes these ayntards will propose.
Commenter “Communete” is representative of why Popular Science closed its comment section. The same disservice toward truth can be seen in short-term debates between “creationists” v actual scientists as happens in situations such as here, where climate change is at issue.
These sorts of individuals can superficially appear knowledgeable to low-information, non-discriminating readers. Their effect can be pernicious. As PS put it when announcing their decision to end comments:
Thus, when a crank such as Communete, who advocates, e.g., that the Illuminati is running Satanic mind-control experiments, posts less obviously freakish comments such as:
He can still do harm to the truth, just be the sheer volume of his negative but baseless comments. His sources are overwhelming the province of crankdom, and his beliefs are constituted of paranoid garbage (which he sometimes hides). When he takes care to mask his more extreme positions he can seem seductively knowledgeable; he’s not. He is, at all times, a crank.
All readers, especially those of us who have no special expertise in the relevant science, are advised to take his postings with a huge pile of salt.
Mona if Communete is all “Get all out of here about Arctic Summers Ice-Free” I wonder how he’ll answer questions on the topic of geoengineering?
Does he ever look up in the sky?
Does he remember ever seeing square clouds when he was young?
Does he ever look at the old movies and ask how come we do not have a sky that looks like that anymore?
When was the last time he saw a true blue sky?
Why when he was young was the sky not usually a strange haze of white?
Can he remember when it was easy to identify the North Pole in the sky?
Why can people like him not see we have lost our way?
Chemtrails would be best to google if he wants to study the denier’s opinion on the subject.
Geoengineering would be best to google if he wants to study the scientist’s opinion on the subject.
_”Elevated silver, barium and strontium in antlers, vegetation and soils sourced from CWD cluster areas: do Ag/Ba/Sr piezoelectric crystals represent the transmissible pathogenic agent in TSEs?”_
“…common practise of aerial spraying with ‘cloud seeding’ Ag or Ba crystal nuclei for rain making in….”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15236778
I don’t deny geoengineering. Mona does, though; Mona, Glenn’s sometime book ‘researcher’ who insisted on the threads that WeAreChange wasn’t a 9/11 Truth site until someone had to clue her in.
Are you familiar with Dane Wigington? http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/
My wife and I met him and found him to be very knowledgeable and creditable.
I didn’t believe it based on your mere assertion. Presented with credible documentation, however, I immediately agreed that Luke is a Truther.
Unlike you, I am an empirical and logical thinker. When presented with clear evidence that I am in error, I concede it.
(The one significant issue in which you have, in your entire long string of absurdities, ever contributed to my knowledge base was on the matter or recent science vis-a-vis fluoride. This has never been an issue of any concern for me and I didn’t track it, but you did demonstrate that modern science has made adverse findings about certain levels of fluoridated water. I saw that, and immediately conceded the point. By contrast, however, the vast bulk of what you spew is crank bullshit.)
You are not empiricism-based. One of your favorite authors is this man, who thinks Satanic conspiracies control the world. Another is a deranged, ersatz Russian Orthodox monk who rants that the end is near.
You have no credibility, but like the stopped clock, are right every now and then.
“Unlike you, I am an empirical and logical thinker. When presented with clear evidence that I am in error, I concede it. ”
Absolutely. Fucking. Hilarious.
You prattle on about others lacking credibility … nice attempt at delegitimizing a commenter.
You are like a broken digital clock; blank.
Reply
Could you please post some more links with evidence of Illuminati running Satanic mind-control experiments, Commu?
Again, the general public deserves to know, donchathink?
Seems more important than the “fluoride issue”, would you agree?
Where do you see that such a thing was written, other than in Mona’s words? You people are Jacobins.
The same goes for this article author’s PhD degree in (Muppets?) climate science, as well as Mike’s ‘scientific’ degree in calling everyone idiot.
Nope.
And why not, o ye, a high priestess of eternal truth, I humbly dare to ask?
You made an assertion with no factual or reasoning support. It is not my burden to even address it, and the most I will do is deny it. That’s wholly sufficient to a fact-and reason-free assertion.
I agree. Rethinking your own arguments clearly helps.
I’ve thought out that argument over decades, and you offer me no reason to rethink it.
I was merely supportive. No need to be all wound up and defensive now.
I am neither “wound up,” nor “defensive.” I set forth reasoning, and declined to accept mere assertion.
in a democracy, freedom is more valuable than truth. let everyone think and say what they want
Freedom is not in opposition to truth. Freedom leads to the best truth available.
Freedom also allows pernicious bullshit to flourish; others exercising their freedom to highlight, check and debunk pernicious errors perform a service — to truth and humans.
> Freedom leads to the best truth available
that’s an article of faith. if it’s true, why did Popular Science close its comment section? they said, “Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again.” and we have a climate science denying president
the truth is that freedom comes with no guarantees. it must be valued as an end in itself or we’re not going to have it
Nope, it’s a fact of history. Humans having the liberty to undertake empirical analysis, to investigate and determine facts, and publish them without fear, is the engine of truth-determination –or as near as we can get.
Popular Science closed comments because a comments section is not peer-reviewed, and is under no voluntary protocols for the empirical method. It’s largely a sea of lay people who are free to spew any nonsense they like.
PS relied on studies showing that empirical findings are undermined to a lay audience reading in such a “free-for-all” milieu. Truth is better ascertained where those who adopt an empirical epistemology are privileged. Those who reject it are and should be allowed to speak, but not necessarily in an empiricism-based enclave where they wrongly cloak themselves in the empiricism-based cachet of the site.
The non-empiricists can stay at infowars, or wherever, and bask in all the reputational glory such sites merit. The scientists have little or no interest in bothering them there; that is, they are generally happy not to exercise any freedom to comment there, and likely wouldn’t give hoot if they were prohibited.
Says who, FFS?
in a perfect democracy, every adult citizen has an equal say in the decision-making process. but that equal say is meaningless without freedom of thought and speech. therefore, freedom is essential to democracy and truth is not. in a democracy, the truth – like everything else – is always up for debate
Seriously Mona no satanic mind control experiments? What a gyp!
Just a few scientific quotes from today’s discussion from the scientist Mike Sulzer:
“In the future, you idiot.”
“It is warming up you idiot”
“You can do this because you are an idiot.”
“Only a fucking idiot such as you…”
“yo denied the relevance of the question”
“You are still a fucking idiot.”
“How would an idiot such as you…”
I’m afraid the planet indeed is warming up, for some.
Hard for people to care a whole lot about protecting the environment when they don’t have a good job to take care of themselves and their families. A point the Democrat party has sorely missed.
Note the countries that do not fluoride their drinking water. (Here are the ones which do):
http://fluoridealert.org/content/bfs-2012/
Thank the EPA for not protecting you from actual environmental hazards.
Your perpetually failed so-called ‘model’ predictions have consequence in a reality where big-funding for it isn’t bestowed by globalists who want to use your cult mindset to insidiously enslave you.
Your pseudoscience is measured by your always failed predictions. Your models don’t show when California’s drought will reverse, so how could it possibly predict anything else? You’re only deluding yourselves.
How would an idiot such as you know what can and cannot be predicted?
You not talking about the article author, right?
no he isn’t. he’s talking about the idiot who thinks he knows more about climate science than climate scientists.
Ah, so it is self-reference.
which would be a reference to communete, if you think about it, but i’m not convinced you did.
Ah, well, in that case, except for the standard drivel like ‘for it isn’t bestowed by globalists who want to use your cult mindset to insidiously enslave you.’ which, BTW equally colors the article,
I see much more rationality in Communete’s post above than in anything you or Mike managed to say, so far.
What….??? “…IF YOU WANT TO SEE HOW DONALD TRUMP WILL DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENT, READ THIS LEGISLATIVE ROADMAP…”
We wonder if Sharon Lerner ever stops to consider just how destructive the lint from her dryer is to her household environment..? Does she stop to send a sample to SM&E for testing..? We wonder if this type of article will be tagged as Fake News by Facebook..?
Now, we like Sharon, she has a great writing style. She just needs to perk up and really re-read what she writes before it makes its way to the digital abyss. We wonder if this article will ever be used by Erin Brockovich in any of her class action lawsuits that are stewing? Does Sharon Lerner stop to consider that Donald Trump has more info that the articles that Sharon references to come up with this article..? Has she ever stopped to consider where Carbon Nano-tubes gets its CARBON from..? Carbon can be found in COAL. Does Sharon not think that a jury can understand that coal is far more valuable for Carbon Nano-tube generation than being burned in a COAL fired plant for electricity..? We wonder what type of lobby firms are slushing for Sharon to write such an article for the Intercept..? How unethical would that be..?
Sharon should be in the grill of Megyn Kelley every night as well as Rachel Maddow. Does Sharon stop to consider how these two fine women barter for millions to distract the viewing public.? Why would Hillary Clinton want to close COAL mines if our entire new Carbon Nano-tube 3D personal manufacturing economy depends on it….? If Elon Musk and SpaceX can build a rocket every 18 days then what are they planning to build in SPACE with all that Carbon Nano-tube built infrastructure..? Does Sharon Lerner want to know..? Her Intercept pension may depend on it…!
There is plenty of carbon; you need to check yourself back in.
Here’s the good news.
Almost everything Donald Trump says is wrong.
“I like to be unpredictable.”
You’re not.
You have to think anyway, so why not think big?
Sure. Since you have to run out for coffee, why not run a marathon?
Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.
Does he understand the meaning of “invest”? Sometimes the money you don’t spend means you have more money than if you spent it.
Brilliant
!I’ve always said, ‘If you need Viagra, you’re probably with the wrong girl.’
He should ask his daughter about that.
On second thought, he better not.
You know the funny thing, I don’t get along with rich people. I get along with the middle class and the poor people better than I get along with the rich people.
Oh my god! He doesn’t realize.
He’s a tourist in his own life.
Private jets cost a lot of money.
But the bragging is free.
It’s always good to be underestimated.
So why brag so much?
“Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich.”
“Beauty” isn’t a word people associate with Donald Trump.
Just the opposite.
Every time you walk down the street people are screaming, ‘You’re fired!’
Sometimes a message is meant just for “you.”
Beautiful!
I wonder if Trump’s talk of libel law reform will include prosecuting the hoi polloi’s contributions, such as your own? ;)
“alternative energy sources can also provide plenty of heat — and have the additional appeal of reducing the likelihood of extreme weather events”
That’s a lot of arm waving for one sentence, but a) alternative energy sources, other than nuclear and hydro, are not nearly enough to power a modern society economically and b) where is the evidence for mankind’s effects on extreme weather effects, which have been going down for decades ?. Stopped reading after that, as it’s just more of the usual biased rubbish…
The author is an idiot
Even if your catastrophic warming predictions were true (they aren’t) that doesn’t hurt the environment.
climate science predictions have been borne out many times. and yes. severe climate change hurts the environment, if you consider a great extinction as hurting the environment.
No your predictions have always been wrong.
The IPCC has officially renounced and lowered it’s predictions several times already
And no, warming and c02 does not hurt the environment. Your prophecy is that it will cause flooding in coastal cities of humans. Life as a whole benefits even in the worst case scenario
One can not destroy the environment, that in which everything exists.
Where are those Arctic shipping lanes JayZ?
In the future, you idiot.
10 years ago:
_“Arctic Summers Ice-Free by 2013?_
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm
If your predictions are wrong, your so-called models are wrong. You’re being lied to by interests who want to slowly restrict your freedom.
It is warming up you idiot. That is the major prediction, and it is happening at a rate not too different from predicted. But that is OK, you can go ahead and find something that is not predicted perfectly and declare the whole thing wrong. You can do this because you are an idiot.
isn’t that precious, a newspaper, well i guess we can all believe what we read in the newspapers, right? like russian plots to install trump and nonexistent iraqi wmd’s.
The Russians ate my homework. Are you calling the BBC’s 2007 _“Arctic Summers Ice-Free by 2013?_ fake news too?
One of the most challenging problem facing scientists is to explain critical scientific concerns to the non-scientist who does not know science but does not know about his/her own ignorance of science.
For the most part, the Arctic ice has been outside of 1sigma for the past four years and outside of 2sigma for the past two years. Care to calculate the odds?
One of the most challenging things problems facing eugenics science is to explain critical concerns to the lay person:
Archive of The Eugenics Review
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/1186/
Write back when your pseudomodels can predict the ends of California’s droughts. You can’t get from A to Z without passing through B. And no, wishing won’t work.
Based on your random assertions so far, one may get the impression that your views are more suited to discussions of pseudoscience.
If you wish to have relevance, then please elaborate one single coherent thought, and present evidence.
_“Arctic Summers Ice-Free by 2013″_
It’s from 2007:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm
That’s the EPA’s so-called ‘science’ under globalism.
So it is taking longer than the most extreme predictions. Only a fucking idiot such as you would take that to mean it is not going to happen.
Most forecasts suggest it will happen by around 2030. Some say mid century. 2013 was certainly the most aggressive forecast. Maybe I should explain how this type of forecasting works, or am I wasting my time?
Briefly: You run multiple stochastic physics-based models under a range of assumptions. The distribution of outcomes is what you look at to have an idea of what to expect. For example, you might find that the most likely year for an ice-free summer is 2025, with a certain confidence interval, say, 5% chance that it will happen before 2017. (Those are just examples, not actual predictions.)
Data on sea ice extent can be found here and the situation is indeed pretty bad going into 2017.
Your only problem is your “stochastic physics-based models under [CO2 and CH4] assumptions” never work. Ever.
Climate is more than CO2 and CH4. (‘Climate science’s serotonin and dopamine.)
We know there was 14x the CO2 in the Ordovician atmosphere than there is today. By contrast you don’t know how weak the sun was. The earth was also internally hotter then than it is now.
It’s also a little more complex than the gas-filled lab terrarium with the plastic lid you want to compare it to. ‘Climate scientist’ have yet to begin to understand the fundamental mechanics of cloud formation, let alone how to account for the untold trillions of BTUs of dynamically changing ocean-floor space heaters ringing the Pacific–opening here, closing there.
Or how a variety of forces applied through the gradient of the atmosphere affect outcomes closer to sea level.
Or how magnetic polar shift (on a scale so acute now–and accelerating–that several airport runways have had to be renumbered in the past decade) affects salt-water ocean currents. Or how immense iron deposits in the Earth’s crust affect geological movement as they’re directly influenced by the rapidly changing magnetic pole shift occurring now.
Or that two outer planets’s magnetic poles have already flipped after our solar system has begun to pass through the equatorial plane of the Milky Way. Or even begun to fathom how heat fluctuates in the core of the earth while these changes occur–in a strata of the earth about which literally almost zero is known:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/sc…anted=all&_r=0
Instead you just want to wish your pseudoscience into reality. Science unfolds over centuries, and doesn’t work on your semi-monthly paycheck or retirement calendar.
Climate models are as sophisticated as the amount of effort the model programmers are able to put into them. Some of them use grid models of the Earth’s surface, simulating land distribution the way it’s in the real world, with sophisticated atmospheric simulations that consider much more than the 2 main greenhouse gases. They might include very elaborate cloud models, for example. There can be a lot of short-term variability given all the parameters, and that’s why multiple models need to be run to have an idea of the range of likely outcomes.
Your models always fail. Because their programmers are working off flawed assumptions, including grossly insufficient input.
It doesn’t sound like you know the first thing about climate physics or predictive modeling.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/science/earths-core-the-enigma-1800-miles-below-us.html
“could be” is not “will be”, and the bbc is not the epa. i know these are fine distinctions to you. also, shockingly, the science has advanced in the past 10 years. sadly, an ice free arctic is increasingly probable, humpty dumpty.
Instead EPA follows fake “Climate science” that spouts so called ‘models’ that never worked.
_”Arctic ice ‘grew by a third’ after cool summer in 2013″_
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33594654
(Here’s a blast from the past):
_“Arctic Summers Ice-Free by 2013?_ -BBC
Where are those Arctic shipping channels?
But God forbid don’t address actual environmental hazards.
the models have done well, and you don’t even know that the science is based on a lot more than models. ignorant climate change deniers often don’t know that.
The models have done so well that they’ve failed in all instances–and still cannot predict when California’s droughts will end.
Light pollution? EPA sez, “Hunh? Wazzat?”
So much LED glare in new city-streetlight grids and security lighting that astronauts report this:
“Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are snapping photos of Earth to measure light pollution, and they’ve found something surprising: Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) — which are touted for their energy-saving properties — are actually making light pollution worse. And the change is so intense that ISS crew members can see it from space.” -Business Insider
And this:
_”LED Streetlights Are Giving Neighborhoods the Blues”_
“Early adopters of LED street lighting are struggling with glare and light pollution”
http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/led-streetlights-are-giving-neighborhoods-the-blues
EPA says, “Duh, that’s light.”
I would prefer not to ‘see’ Mr. Trump at all, ms. Lerner. .. much less bear witness to his further destruction of the planet as we know it!
“Cut it out” *President Obama
When will the Intercept cover geoengineering?
http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/
Nobody will save our climate but many will lose money if the politics involved in it will change. May be Trump (in case he will manage to become präsident) will invest into alternative energies just to create jobs. Then he will have done more fore our envirement then any profit-eager lier.
It is really nice to have a chance to clean house , getting rid of the trash and cleaning out t he house
Do tell, Dave. Whatcha’ getting rid of?!
Keep dumping this stuff deliberately into your potable water:
_”Impact of fluoride on neurological development in children”_
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-childrens-health-grandjean-choi/
Where’s the EPA on actual environmental hazards?
newsflash, there can be more than one environmental hazard at a time. the epa has been captured by the industries it regulates.
So what good is the epa?
So can you tell me how the level of exposure from naturally occurring fluoride affecting these Chinese children compares to the amount added intentionally to water to prevent tooth decay?
Mike, do you swallow Neosporin to treat skin cuts?
Fluoride is a topical application that in theory remineralizes enamel by binding free calcium at the surface. You’re supposed to brush it onto teeth over time, not swallow it. Putting it in your foodstuffs and drinking water is pure stupidity.
In fact it’s the presence of it in some Chinese drinking water supplies that was studied by the Harvard School of Public Health.
On a side note, what in the heck is this?
_”Chinese Fluoride In Mass. Water Raises Concern”_
“Department of Public Works Director Rob Desmarais said after he mixes the white powder with water, 40 percent of it will not dissolve.
“‘I don’t know what it is,’ Desmarais said. ‘It’s not soluble, and it doesn’t appear to be sodium fluoride. So we are not quite sure what it is.'”
http://www.wcvb.com/article/chinese-fluoride-in-mass-water-raises-concern/8157985
Why do you do this to yourselves? And where’s EPA?
But of course yo did not answer the question because you do not know. In fact, yo denied the relevance of the question.
Mike, the study was done in China, not the U.S. You can try extrapolating the results.
There are also higher incident bone cancer in higher fluoride environments.
The non-initiate who didn’t take the secret oaths just can’t win, can he. Donald is the bad man.
Not much different from Barak Obama and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, is it?
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-spill-the-scandal-and-the-president-20100608
“The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder”
So in other words the next 4 years are going to be even worst. Ha most of these pres are a joke
The BP oil spill and the PG&E methane leak in California both happened during the Obama years. This means that three of the worst environmental disasters to have ever befallen our country have occurred under his watch… the last being Trump.
I am horrified at reading their policy paper. And with Trump in office I worry many of them could be implemented. I really hope Dems grow a backbone and fight these attacks upon everyone’s water, food, privacy, and digital freedoms (what’s left of them). Maybe we all can get together and try to impeach him somehow? I’m sure he’s going to break *some* law that is an impeachable offense.
It’s it really possible that anyone spouting these things doesn’t understand? Can they really be so short-sighted?
Lee Camp makes some excellent points here about how manipulated and asleep we are regarding Big Energy, banks and militarism:
We Need To Change The Mental Paradigm Starting With Mainstream Media (9 mins)
Unfortunately, Maise, some of the people we thought would be trying to change that dynamic turned out to be con artists themselves – Jill Stein and her refusal to support #bankexit, for example, in contrast to Susan Sarandon.
https://tytnetwork.com/2016/11/04/susan-sarandon-interview-with-cenk-uygur-on-the-young-turks/
Sarandon promoted divesting from funds invested in the Dakota Pipeline; Jill Stein defended her investments in the oil majors and refused to divest. That’s the reality, unfortunately.
I was stunned to find out how wealthy Stein is (but excused it to myself with the fact that many millionaires seem to be decent enough people – not that I actually know any), and how some of her investments were in such places.
I didn’t know she’d refused to divest, not having been involved with the Green Party since the election (I’m starting my own Party Hot Chicks For a Cooler World). Still agree with most of what she said, and don’t regret my support.
Definitely feel a bit jaded by politics, though. And people generally.
(It’s “Maisie,” with two i’s. No big deal, but it’s amazing how often it gets misspelled.)
Your leftists want to invade Syria, badly. If anybody itches for militarism, it’s Big Government progressives.
if anybody itches for militarism it’s the right wingers who run the democrat and republican parties.
How can that be, pretzelattack, when Big Government police state funding progressives call right wingers “isolationists”?
There is a fallacy at the heart of the argument for deregulation. People and groups that oppose environmental regulation say that regulation hold back business and slow job growth.
The problem is most explanations of environmental regulation is 2-3 degrees of separation from most people. The argument for regulation seems obtuse and hypothetical. But this has to do how it is presented.
I have a business and I rent a dumpster to take the business trash away. It cost about $400 a month to have it and get it serviced once a week.
Now I could stream line my business if I got rid of the dumpster and just dumped the trash on the side of the road. That would save my business a good part of a monthly payment on another delivery truck. I could hire another person and I would make more money in the long run.
But the other half of that equation is the trash didn’t disappear. I just shifted the burden of the trash removal to the neighbors and the county.
All the deregulation ideas are just another schemes to shift the burden for the consequences of the pollution from the company that creates the problem to the public.
The notion that regulation slows job creation is also a fallacy. If a company is made to clean up their own mess they have to hire people to clean it up. If they shift the burden to the public the polluter saves money but the extra profits doesn’t necessarily go into reinvestment most of the money goes into the pockets of the share holders in a public traded company or in to the pockets of the owners of a private company.
For $400 a month? Who are you, King Midas? No worker is worth more than $200 a month.
with the extra income from another delivery truck I could hire another worker, maybe more.
If you could turn things to gold why would someone settle for being just king? But then eventually so many things would get turned to gold the value of gold would drop to say the price of lead or nickel.
Hail to the Emperor of Lead.
A very good comment! Nobody will save our climate but many will lose money if the politics involved in it will change. May be Trump (in case he will manage to become präsident) will invest into alternative energies just to create jobs. Then he will have done more fore our envirement then any profit-eager lier.
You just described self regulation. The myth is that government deregulation will mean no reg at all.
The role of the EPA is to protect polluters from angry residents infected by nimbyism – the unreasonable objection to being poisoned in your own backyard. It therefore provides a valuable service. Historically, the EPA has benefited from bipartisan support – the Democrats love its bureaucracy and the Republicans love that it protects polluters. So Mr. Trump should not be over hasty in eliminating it.
People knew who they were voting for. Not just for Trump, also for the Senate, House, State Governor, State Senate, and State House.
No they didn’t. There were no good options in this “election”. A 2 party system is not democracy neither is the current electoral college.
This is easily the worst most divisive presidential election I’ve experienced (late 30’s here). A whole lot of people voted out of spite – i.e. not because they wanted someone specifically but because they didn’t want the “other side”.
I just finished watching Oliver Stone’s “The Untold History of the United States”. I heartily recommend it to anyone. These dark times are about to get positively medieval.
I suggest that those who don’t take this author’s concerns to heart read the other articles that she has written about environmental pollution. They are also about human health: how people are seriously harmed and killed by environmental pollution. How will you feel when your water is poisoned and you get cancer?
And I bet the author drives home every day in her gas powered car, lives in her house made from trees and heats her house with gas.
You’re coming up with imaginary stories about the author to give yourself an excuse not to take her arguments seriously. You must really be afraid of thinking deeply about this subject.
I have an idea: let’s drop the pretense, and just do away with the EPA. Let companies do what they want, roll back the emissions control laws on motor vehicles while we are at it, and rescind the ban on CFCs. That is what the republicans really want, and what the democrats’ corporate sponsors want.
It is surprising at this point that Trump has not yet reversed himself on TTP and TTIP, because those treaties would enable corporations to invalidate the laws of other nations in areas such as GMO crops, pesticides, and climate change. Failing to have those treaties in place will disadvantage US corporations in marketplaces where there are laws in place to protect the environment and counter climate change.
It might be a battle of wills – and who has the ear of the President (elect). I was reading about General Mattis (I think it’s better w/him as SecDef) who might be the only sane one.
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/11/30/trump-defence-secretary-favourite-gets-climate-change/
https://climateandsecurity.org/2012/03/20/the-u-s-geographic-combatant-commanders-on-climate-change/
As far as your story – it’s crazy-land over at CEI. It is Opposite Reality. They sure know how to spin s**t into sweet tea (or ice cream), and they have been working overtime in getting the language – just R I G H T. It’ll work.
We have to push back harder.
It couldn’t be more terrifying than this.
Great and fearful story, without a hint of exaggeration, Sharon Lerner.
Trump can just ignore the laws. Tell the polluting companies they are in “Sanctuary Counties”.
Everyone wants clean air and water. The Dems want ultra pure air and water.
Everything is a compromise.
When Reagan appointed James Watt to head the Interior Dept. we thought that would be the end of the natural world in this country. These nominations are awful, but hopefully there will be enough pushback to at least limit the harms that they do. And like the intelligent commenters said here, Obama and the Democrats have been bad on the environment too — the war on wolves, expanding oil drilling, failing to list species as endangered or threatened, etc. — these appointees will just destroy it faster, which is the most important difference between Democrats and Republicans (the pace of destruction, as pointed out by California governor Jerry Brown before he sold his soul and fell off the wagon as what he described as a “recovering politician).
The people running these corporations, Exxon, Dow, Koch Industries, etc. Trump included don’t see a correlation between maximizing profit and a future in jeopardy, they’re too god damned selfish. They’re old men.. what do they care beyond the next Bahama vacation?
They (and this includes mega-rich Dems) also have lavish underground bunkers to protect them while the population diminishes due to greater war and climate change.
Poor plebs like us banging on the doors screaming to get in are out of luck, though, as they will only have enough caviar and Champagne to last fifty years or so.
You realize the Koch’s strongly supported opposed Trump right?
But that can’t be! Trump is anti-establishment, not a corporatist puppet! Oh wait, he’s a liar.
That’s a shame, because the fuckbastard Obama has been so good for the environment. Oh wait, he hasn’t.
How oxymoronic to say endangered species are grabbing power. I mean … really?
“Congress should push back against the Fish and Wildlife Service, which, according to CEI, is engaged in ‘a vast new endangered species power grab.'”
I keep thinking Orwellian. Classic Orwell, or am I mis-remembering?
Of course it is ridiculous.
That’s how they roll.
Is this the cold hand of Frank Luntz? He said he wanted to move to New Zealand after the election. He provides the language to make things worse and leaves town. It’s classic Republican disinformation in a sentence. Sounds like a hit and run.
I think the whole lot of these guys should be made to go visit all of the superfund sites without protective gear, and then while they lay gasping on their deathbeds from the multitude of poisons they’ve been exposed to, perhaps they’ll realize that letting business rampantly trample over environmental and consumer protections is possibly a bad idea.
Those laws were brought in for a reason and it wasn’t just “we don’t like money.” It was “companies can’t be trusted to regulate themselves so we have to.”
And that’s not even getting into climate change or species extinction issues. Yes, that’s a nice big power grab — we’re attempting to “grab” away the power to destroy our planet and way of life from those who continuously prove their willingness to not only use but abuse it in the name of short term profit.
As CEI sees it, efforts to address the affects of pollution from fossil fuels on our climate are really a “war on affordable energy.”
affects should be effects…just sayin
The Time-Space paradox is a good place to start. Would it even be possible to restore Earth as she once was? If those in power knew what it is that they’re doing, would we be witnessing the intentional, final solution that completes the erasing of our natural Earth right off the map? Entropy is “a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder”. What if this is done intentionally? At the greatest calculated speed possible in a precise, cost-minimal way as possible? Like a corporation. “4 more years! 4 more years! 4 more years! 4 more years! Of that?” Gil Scott-Heron.
And rebuild with what? The well-healed, scientific community needs to get off their doomsday quotes, i.e. “We are going to need another planet,” (I don’t want to name names), but… whomever, needs to get a sign outside their houses, at least. Holler. Make sure that people hear the truth! We are sinking fast. Thanksgiving next year for some will be eaten in a tent, instead of that split-level beauty. Legislative redress of our Earth “problem” needs to be number 1 priority for all humankind. Thank you, Standing Rock! Thanks Sharon
The Earth cannot be restored as it used to be; the Earth is a dynamic living organism that changes with time. That is not to say that these natural changes are at all the same as the destructive unnatural changes that humans have caused.
It appears that young journalists are being trained to write for the 8 year old demographic offering political agitprop that even these kids will eventually question.
Pleasant sounding program names such as Clean Power Plan when actually examined cover the reality of the transition to fracked natural gas that has many unclean properties but could be cleaner.
The superficially examined but bold claims of the wonders of Big Green clean renewable energy are attractive but they begin to resemble snake-oil when used for political salesmanship and don’t produce the promised results.
Hmmm… Obama’s green revolution? I believe that Abby Martin recently made mention of the driving force behind much of Obama’s green initiatives in one of her recent Empire File broadcasts:
Abby Martin Exposes John Podesta
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fWwLpgvS0U
This is a must watch video for those of you who truly want to understand the significance of the Podesta Email leaks!!!
The government is deliberately holding back energy development in the same way it is blocking the development and spread of strong encryption.
Blocked technologies include nuclear fusion and Thorium based fission reactors.
There are over 5000 patents seized by the Federal Government in the name of National Security. many of them are energy related.
https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2010/10/invention_secrecy_2010/
“Plenty of heat” sounds like it should be more than enough …
The author appears to have little understanding of the volume of heat humans need. The ability to create that volume of heat is a function of energy density of available fuels. We have been an industrial society for the past three centuries because of the high energy density of fossil fuels; keeping warm is only part of the volume of heat people need.
“the appeal of reducing the likelihood of extreme weather events.”
As if renewables will turn the tide … they will not contribute as much to planet warming but we have long past a tipping point. The planet is not going to start cooling absent a cataclysmic event; 400 ppm CO2 today + melting permafrost (methane) are going to heat the planet. This is the argument that drives climate change denial. It might be slowed but at what cost and who is going to pay?
There is nothing wrong with the sentence you quote, and everything wrong with your response. The industrial revolution would not have started without plentiful fossil fuels, but there other ways to make the necessary energy now.
Climate change denial is not driven by the argument that we have already put so much CO2 into the atmosphere that putting more into will not matter much. I do not hear deniers saying “burning carbon does not matter, but, oh, by the way, it once did, until we burned too much.” They are still saying “There is no warming”, or “If there is warming, we did not do it.”
” there other ways to make the necessary energy now.”
That is not true. Renewables just do not make enough. Nuclear and fossil fuels make the majority of power today. Steam coal is disappearing to be replaced with gas. That’s cleaner but still a near wash with greenhouse emission, factoring leakage of gas throughout the piping/storage.
I do not deny climate change is man-made with fossil fuels being the biggest contributor.
Distribution of renewables and the extensive environmental impact of solar production means we are going to burn fossil fuels for years to come. (a hybrid car, hooray for the environment, takes twice as much copper, and a butt-load of lithium and rare earths, as a gasoline car. And hybrid cars don’t last as long as gasoline cars.)
Quote:
‘I do not deny climate change is man-made with fossil fuels being the biggest contributor’
I do. We don’t even know for sure if CO2 leads or lags the rise
the scientists do, whether you do or not.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ice-core-data-help-solve/
And how many of you drive gas cars.
I have posted above the link to the scientific evidence that CO2 lags temperature over long periods in earth’s history.
Thus, I deny it is a proven fact that CO2 causes minor temperature increases detected in last two centuries.
Is it still possible? Is there this or that loopback effect? As you yourself write, nobody really knows for sure. Which is in essence the same as what I wrote.
I deny that hypothesis is either true or false, until proven true or false.
But your resorting to ad hominem attack right away, because I made a statement in elementary logic shows who you really are.
You are still a fucking idiot. If the feedback mechanisms work, as they almost certainly do, then when T increases for other reasons, CO2 increases will follow. The same mechanism is at work when CO2 is increased. T goes up by more than it would have if the positive feedback did not work. Your analysis is nonsense.
Heh, heh, you keep supporting your ‘analysis’ with a lot of evidence showing your complete incapability to have a rational discourse.
“We don’t even know for sure if CO2 leads or lags the rise”
You don’t understand the point you are trying to make.
CO2 tracks with temperature. Don’t cloud the issue.
@Mike;
yes, clowns deny climate change but the scholarly deniers are thinking of the economics vs the potential gain. They think the pooch has been screwed, advocates think it isn’t pregnant, yet …
I think we have passed a tipping point.
I’m also thinking of marketing my house, high on a hill overlooking a river delta, as future lake-front property.
Really? Tell me whey they cannot make enough.* But you cannot. You are just believing what you want to believe, making a circular argument based on ignorance.
* And do not refer me nonsense from organizations with stupid names such as “The Energy Alliance for Safe Productivity and Progress.”
“And do not refer me nonsense from organizations with stupid names such as “The Energy Alliance for Safe Productivity and Progress.”
Have I ever linked to pseudo-science? No.
‘Tell me wh[]y they cannot make enough.”
Because we use more energy than is available (ie recoverable). People think we’ll just cover everything with solar cells ‘X amount of energy hits earth. X is > energy needs of humans. problem solved‘
Here is an excerpt from an article on the MIT Energy Initiative
We need to be able to do something that hasn’t been done and might not be doable; that’s all.
I support research into solar. I believe it will be the dominate power source one day in the future. Until then we have fossil fuel. We aren’t lowering our rate of energy consumption and that does not bode well for the planet’s temperature.
And you obviously have NO understanding of human overpopulation, biology, or ecology. The problem is that there are far too many people trying to live far too unnaturally, not that cleaner sources of energy are not sufficient.
“And you obviously have NO understanding of human overpopulation, biology, or ecology. ”
Perhaps if your head was not obscured by the inside lining of your abdominal cavity you would see that everything I said is true. OF COURSE the number of people using heat matters.
7 billion industrialized people is the fundamental problem for the human species. It would be far more tolerable to have 7 billion people if people didn’t burn high energy-density fuels.
What you said is only true in a very narrow and myopic sense. Complaining that cleaner energy sources would be insufficient is saying that human population and consumption levels are OK, which they’re not. So in the big picture, what you said is dead wrong.
In the big picture you do not understand work and heat. The fundamental problem is with a technological society the Earth cannot support 7 billion people.
Arm waving doesn’t change reality; the planet is heating and man is mostly responsible. He might be able to slow it in the way you put a bucket out in a rain storm to mitigate local flooding.
Because, as I said, you obviously have NO understanding of human overpopulation, biology, or ecology, you are totally blind to the big picture and are mired in your reductionist and irrelevant science. I never said that the planet isn’t warming, but you’re so out of it that you don’t even understand the simple ideas I’m raising.
I never said the planet was not over-populated.
We are where we are.
Pie-in-the-sky solutions are what you seem to be advocating.
Have you driven a car today, or ill you?
Did you turn on the heat this morning and maybe take a shower?
7 billion people are attempting to do that. Who gets to decide which society burns coal or makes solar panels?
Scientists agree, 97% anyway, that global warming is anthropogenic.
That consensus falls apart on how to respond.
I believe the planet is in thermal runaway because sequestered methane in permafrost is coming out and there is no way to put it back. Many people believe if we stop burning fossil fuels the CO2 will drop and we’ll not cook. (CO2 was the kindling but methane is the main fuel.) Good luck putting that fire out.
Of course we are where we are; the idea is where we go. You are advocating more of the same massive energy consumption, to which I’m strongly opposed. People who claim that my solutions — many of which are long-term solutions (we didn’t get into this mess overnight and aren’t getting out of it overnight either) — are pie-in-the-sky (as you put it) are just advocating for the status quo. We need major changes, and they need to be started immediately, even if their final results won’t be seen for a very long time. We obviously need short-term “band aid” solutions where immediate solutions are required, but without the big solutions the band aid Milquetoast ones would just slightly delay the disasters to come.
As to the implied personal attack: 1) I have no kids; 2) I don’t own a car; 3) yes we use heat and hot water, though re the former, restricting humans to tropical and Mediterranean climates would be a good solution to excessive energy consumption for heat.
There is no “deciding” re burning coal and erecting solar panels; everyone everywhere who uses electricity should be required to have rooftop solar, and burning ANY fossil fuels for electricity should be banned ASAP. Nature and natural laws decide, because extracting and burning fossil fuels are both extremely harmful.
As to the feedback loop (what you call thermal runaway), my guess is the same as yours, though unlike you I don’t pretend to know (even climate scientists don’t know this, it’s just educated guesses). But there are many other serious harms caused by extracting and burning fossil fuels and by overpopulation than global warming/climate change, and there’s no excuse for acting immorally by harming the rest of the planet. We should always do the best we can regardless of what we think the outcome will be; that’s the only moral way to live.
“but you’re so out of it that you don’t even understand the simple ideas I’m raising.”
I just reread this bit and I think I get it. You don’t seem to understand that the planet crossed the threshold for over-population at the turn of the last century when the planet held one billion people.
The consensus exists for what has triggered climate change; there is less consensus on what will reduce the change. I never ‘denied’ climate change; I mentioned the position held by science on how to respond is less settled.
My first complaint about your comment in this sub-thread was that you prioritize creating huge amounts of energy that humans want — which create environmental and ecological problems regardless of the energy sources — instead of advocating for a change in attitude and lifestyles that would require far less energy. I never said that you deny climate change. What I said is that you, along with most other modern humans, deny the simple fact that you can’t have your cake and eat it too; specifically in this case, you deny that you can’t create the massive amounts of energy that you’re talking about and not wreck the natural environment.
As to overpopulation, there is no evidence that the Earth can support more than 10 million humans living as hunter-gatherers without humans causing immense damage, such as species extinctions and destruction of ecosystems. The problem goes way beyond human population exceeding a billion people around 1900. That’s not to say that 10 million is the absolute limit of what global human population could be without being harmful to the rest of our planet — we would need some serious and unbiased studies analyzing the maximum number of humans before they cause substantial ecological harm — but this idea that there can be a billion people on Earth without harming anything is ludicrous and shows a total lack of knowledge about ecology and paleontology.
the environment was being destroyed anyway. trump will just speed up the process. after eight years of delusion, we’re entering another period of clarity
You said it! The last Democratic president who even gave a small damn about the environment was Jimmy Carter, and you saw how long he lasted.
The apocalyptic language that is always attached to climate change articles has become mind numbingly boring and ineffective. I wish I could turn it off.
Is it really just impossible to present a balanced view of the trade-offs involved with clean energy vs economics? Does it have to be dogma 24/7?
I’ll just address one subject. Climate change policies disproportionately affecting low income earners is a much bigger problem in China and especially India where most of the people live and where most of future emission increases will come from. A large segment of India still doesn’t have indoor toilets. In these cases the delta cost for clean energy is something they are unwilling to justify. Go visit these places and try to convince them that “saving the world” is more important than having clean water. It matters.
Instead of harping on the CEI or Trump try advocating for making clean energy cheaper and as reliable as fossil fuels. Everyone wins.
98% of the energy of the climate change movement is wasted heat demonizing their imagined enemies and virtue signalling their peers. When you continuously, purposefully, and unnecessarily alienate the opposite side of the aisle what do you expect is going to happen when the pendulum changes direction?
If you want to vent for the next 4/8 years, fine, go ahead. If you want to make progress try different tactics.
Well said.
Actually, a lot of alternative energy sources are competitive with or even cheaper than fossil fuels, even without subsidies.
Problem solved! If only it was true. Wind and solar have intermittency issues, you still need some form of base load backup. Nobody wants to pay for power twice. If you can convince India and China of the economics that will be huge step forward.
This is complete false equivalence. The environment is infinitely more important than money. There is no way to have a discussion with people like you because your morals are so deficient.
So reading all this, an agreement on the much feared TTIP agreement before the beginning of the presidency of this puppet would have been a good thing after all.
Not at all true. Trade agreements are all environmentally harmful regardless of their provisions, because they require massive amounts of oil consumption and burning in order to transport goods that should be made where they are to be sold.
Actually, the main problem with the TTP and TTIP is that they are not fundamentally trade agreements, but rather means for restructuring world governance to place the power in the hands of the large international corporations. It is difficult to talk about them in detail because most of their provisions are secret, not even available to members of Congress. But thanks to the leaks by Greenpeace, we know that:
1) One of their central purposes is to facilitate offshoring of employment;
2) Another of their central purposes is to enable corporations to overturn local laws that affect their profitability.
How will those purposes be accomplished? Through a process of arbitration. Here is how it works: Company A does not like the fact that nation B has enacted a law (say mandating a minimum wage or requiring labeling of food products containing GMO material). They file a protest, and an arbitration process is undertaken. The process involves a board with three members, one from Company A, one from nation B and a third, ostensibly neutral person. All of these board members are attorneys from one of the large international law firms that specialize in arbitration. Nobody is elected; and nation B is not directly represented, they merely are allowed to hire a lawyer. If these three lawyers decide in favor of Company A, then nation B’s law is overturned. The people of nation B have no right to appeal or to reinstate the law.
These treaties are far worse than the “World Government” that right wing conspiracy theorists talk about. But the conservatives especially seem to favor them. It is just a matter of time before Trump reverses himself, because these kinds of treaties benefit men like him.
“If these three lawyers decide in favor of Company A, then nation B’s law is overturned. ”
I also object to the Investor Dispute Resolution format. But it’s important to be clear that the panel only has the authority to award money damages not overturn laws. These awards are not subject to appeal in any national courts.
If Company A wins, it wins money and if Country B is more than willing to pay the billions of dollars, or so, then Country B can keep its laws. See,, it’s not a direct legal grab at overturning laws. The agreements even say the Parties (countries) can pass laws to protect health and safety. These arbitration panels are overtly designed to get the Country B’ s taxpayers’ money. But covertly? Surely. it’s not their fault if, rather than pay up, Country B voluntarily repeals or adjusts their troublesome laws and regulations. That’s just a choice outside the scope of the agreement, right?
One more thing regarding these agreements that needs to be part of any consideration: these trade agreement suits are being securitized and bringing in outside investors, so Company A doesn’t even have to put up any money to file a case but Country B does and it may agree to a money settlement just to avoid the risks of greater losses in these pro-corporate tribunals.
Dear 24b4Jeff,
what you say was quite obvious to me to. I just imagined, as information on those treaties was always kept secret here in the old world, that if something was agreed on before some person takes over responsibility for a country, those things might only be changed at unagreeable high cost, no matter how greedy, daft, obnoxious or whatever else negative this presidential person actually is. Never mind, I believe we got each others point and again nobody in charge gives a flying…whatever flies in your part of the world… We are looking forward at some pretty dark times to come.
No, the main problem with them is that they promote transporting things around the world by fossil fuels instead of making and selling things locally. Once you do that, the rest are minor details because of the environmental harms you cause by consuming and burning massive amounts of fossil fuels — not to mention the immense noise all these ships make in the oceans disturbing all life there, and all the whales that are now being killing by being hit by these ships.
And BTW, while I generally support Greenpeace (I worked for them briefly, sometimes they’re too conservative), you don’t need them to tell you that the main purpose of these agreements is offshoring jobs. I mean, come on! NAFTA? Hello? This has been known for decades. Kudos to Greenpeace for providing the info though, I’m sure that the assholes who want these agreements weren’t happy with that.
You continue to cling to the notion that transportation is inherently anti-environmental. While it is presently true that fossil fuels provide the overwhelming fraction of energy used for transportation, that need not be the case. There are numerous candidates as clean sources of energy for transportation, and in the future these will come to dominate by necessity.
I say by necessity because what the climate change deniers fail to realize is that the amount of coal, oil and natural gas is finite. It is tricky to estimate how long we have before what remains is used up, because of the possibilities for the discovery of new reserves and the invention of new means for extraction. But the store is finite, and it WILL be used up. So what then? Do we revert to a paleolithic existence? Become extinct?
You’re way off base on this. Like most modern humans, you have a childish attitude that you can have your cake and eat it too. Well, you can’t, period. ALL sources of energy are environmentally harmful, just some like oil are more harmful than others, like solar and wind. However, solar and wind simply cannot power these hideously monstrous ships that transport the vast majority of this crap; only oil can do that. And if you’re waiting for oil to run out, forget it. Humans will have destroyed our planet before that happens. Peak oil is happening, but all that means is that oil is getting harder to get at. It would be a very long time before oil runs out.
Here’s the thing, making people think that corporations are responsible for jobs and nice things like sport stadiums and other entertainments, and government is responsible for keeping people from getting hurt, sick, or dieing from pollution or bad work environments worked to create populations of Americans who see corporations as good, and government regulation as a failure, in a lot of the states that voted for Trump. Betting that setting up the same dynamics won’t produce the same results with more of the population seems to deride your fellow Americans, something that isn’t likely to generate sympathy or even a willingness to listen to your arguments.
Use the tactics of the right, attach riders to these bills that do things like force doctors to call it ‘Exxonma’ rather than asthma, ‘Khocher’ rather than cancer, ‘carricane’ rather than hurricane.
For all that people claim, and hope, that reasoned arguments win over crowds, this last election shows that that is just as silly as believing prayers keeps one from dieing when bullets are flying. It is emotions that sway crowds, and if the name Exxon etc evoke the emotional memory of watching a child gasping for breath, a sibling, spouse, or parent painfully wasting away, your loved possessions and loved ones being taken from you by bad weather, that will make a difference when it comes to voting for someone who says ‘trust Exxon to do the right thing’ or someone who says ‘we need to watch Exxon like a hawk, and hit it hard enough to hurt every time it does the smallest thing to hurt more people’.
Yes, most of the left and even centrist liberals don’t get this. They should all read George Lakoff.
Here is the new boss; same as the old boss. Guys like Trump used to own the “sock puppet” politicians but one of the “owners” is actually in the WH now. This should be interesting, one of the davos crowd in the chair. He is one of the loose cannon types though and was not fully acceptable to the ruling class; something like the crazy prince no one talked about until he became King. In any event, there are way too many things going on from the threat of Nuclear war to some horror from some lab to to climate change to, to for the species to survive. Death by sociopathic greedy people and their unthinking rabble. Enjoy the party, iltes will be out soon.
Hmm, I may be out of a job soon if Trump takes the next step and decides the Health Department is just a business impediment. Not like Gov. Rick Scott is going to stand in his way.
There is a lot frightening there – especially the “transfer of ownership”, because that offers many opportunities for corruption familiar from the later days of the Soviet Union, or John McCain’s handover of a sacred tribal future super-productive copper mine in exchange for scraps.
That said, they have one point I see there, which is that costs on carbon emission DO affect the poor. It is fairly obvious that the poor, having poorly insulated homes, can have serious energy costs, and so taxing energy can be a regressive tax. It is less obvious that carbon emissions trading has this effect, but it does — if you hand out a right to emit a billion tons of carbon to one guy whose daddy built a coal plant on the prairie, it doesn’t cost him a penny, but if his *competitors* have to pay $100 a ton to build a *new* plant, then that is the cost that will be passed on to *his* customers *today*. He will pocket the cash, then loudly decry the expense of carbon credits!
Obviously the answer is to give a per capita rebate on the tax, i.e. give everyone a per capita tax credit to reflect they have the right to burn some amount of carbon for free. But if you don’t do that, then you are open to this criticism.
The problem is giving financial issues priority over environmental ones. Doing this is immoral and very environmentally harmful. Environmental safeguards should be implemented regardless of financial considerations; those considerations can be dealt with as you suggest.
That said, lowering consumption of everything, including electricity, must be a priority. Rooftop solar is the least environmentally harmful way to produce electricity, but even solar panels require mining and fossil fuels for transportation and manufacture. This idea that humans can just consume whatever they want has to go; it’s one of the two main environmental problems, the other being overpopulation.
Look, I’ve seen what happens when we don’t give financial issues priority over environmental ones. What happens is the voters give Republicans priority over Democrats, and we end up… here. There are none of us so pure that we leave no footsteps, burn no fire, and shit rainbows. But the key here is that the people who do the polluting are the ones who pretty much own the Earth, and the 99.9% don’t *actually* have anything in common with them. So long as we don’t throw the coal miners out of work or raise the net price of heat, the voters aren’t going to care if the people who own all the mineral rights in the state have to dig into their abundant resources to offset their carbon and put scrubbers on their stacks. But if we fail to target ecological measures economically with a strong liberal sensibility, what we get is not a “gentle compromise” but something that hasn’t got a prayer. To the consumer, environmentalist moderate is far more radical than environmentalist left-wing.
I don’t think you got my point: we need a major shift in attitude and a major change in lifestyles. Humans have to give up their attitude that they can just consume and otherwise do what they want, and they need to start consuming a lot less and living a lot more simply and naturally. If they don’t, your “gentle compromises” will be nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
I am a very long time environmentalist and can attest to the fact that the environmental and ecological problems caused by humans are immense and getting worse by the second. We are on the path to destroying life as we know it on Earth — for example, humans have caused the Sixth Great Extinction, which we’re in right now — and Milquetoast compromises aren’t going to fix anything. To paraphrase the Native American saying, good luck with your fucking money when you have no clean air, water, or food.
Spot on Jeff. From another standpoint the Buddha said three things cause suffering: Greed, hatred and delusion. Plenty of that to choke on these days.
If I had my way, the people running the planet would be Buddhist monks and TRADITIONAL indigenous leaders. Instead, the money changers are still running the planet (as Jesus put it).
why do you think all the jobs went overseas?
The FAILURE of the US was accomplished by greed which was permitted to be also disloyal – like a bad marriage – between rock solid Americans and a selfish cheating partner. There are 2 countries who actually have what it takes to make America great again… North Korea and Iran. Both countries have leaders who fiercely advocate 100% self sufficiency. America – except for oil and rubber, had that. Proof – the oil created in the US is shipped to the gulf port where it is placed on the “world market”. That is a clear violation of America First. The treasonous thieving ceo’s of these companies are the relationship violaters who have ruined the country. It’s like in that movie with Kevin Costner, build the field and they will come. Well, build an America that people really want to live in and enjoy and they will want to come.
For your consideration:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176222/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_donald_trump%27s_energy_nostalgia_and_the_path_to_hell/#more
Real pollution laws won’t be repealed, just some rollback of those associated with the Climate Change hoax. Trump’s election is a great victory for reality.
So,
what this means is that Trump is very likely to continue
the same kind of dismantling of safeguards, restricting of
environmental reviews, and fast-tracking fracking and pipeline
construction that has been enabled by the Obama administration
through executive orders and support of
what are now annual, last minute, corrupt
omnibus(iness) legislations which gut previous safeguards
in the manufactured urgency of keeping the corrupt fake
government of corporate domination expanding.
Of course when Trump does this it will be more blatant and
the id-iots will pretend that the democrats could have stopped
the corruption of which they are a more deceptive part.
Here is another clue – watch how quickly the Keystone XL is
again revived and how Trans Canada is monetarily rewarded for
their patience during the time Obama pretended to not support it.
Sentences like:
‘While fossil fuels have unquestionably kept many people warm over the past century, alternative energy sources can also provide plenty of heat — and have the additional appeal of reducing the likelihood of extreme weather events.’
indicate that this journalist probably doesn’t understand what is she talking about but, instead, just assembled a bunch of common, sound bite talking points.
I see you have already scolded properly the author for this sentence.
I stopped reading the article after that line.
It was to be expected. Obama went to far with his ideology that put humans behind Liberal elite dogma in coastal cities. Unfortunately now the pendulum will swing to far to the other direction, because the Democrats and environmentalists believed they had the right to infringe on peoples lives moreso then they did. Obama’s mistake was he thought he could effect change without going through congress. It only works for the 8 years he holds the office. then with the same pen, the following president can reverse it easily. This is a direct condemnation of Obama’s laziness.
ideology… Liberal elite dogma in coastal cities…infringe on peoples lives more than they did…Obama’s laziness.
You are nothing but a troll. It’s written all over the choice of your words. Unfortunate that unthinking trolls are starting to infiltrate this site. Used to be that intelligent discourse was the mainstay. Now, posts such as yours.
Good luck drinking frack water and wearing that full face respirator.
Obama allowed fracking. Fracking kills. I re-itereate, the methane gas trapped in earth was a shock absorber for regular minor disruptions but the chemists and the ceo’s and obama were too stupid or too greedy to understand the importance of physics. Now the a-hoes are going to tell us we need to start looking toward mars – yeah, so we can escape the death trap we have turned this planet, my planet, into.
I think that I will invest in respirators. I could buy them from Chinese factory in Bejing. I’ll make millions. I have a nice piece of property for the next Trump Tower. It is right next to Love Canal.
I agree. This site had the best discussion group of any site I’ve ever used. It still does, but there are a lot more trolls here now than there used to be.
Opening statement, “Just a few months ago,” pretty much sums up all that will follow is based on this premise… LET’s point out that Trump has not followed what he stated to a “T” in his election stumping… It’s kind of like believing what someone says to you drunk the night before a one night stand.. but in this case they called back the next day… and so your are stuck!
Funny thing is most of the media is acting like her is in office already.. and even when he is all will be tampered down as to accomplish tasks as not to show he has blown off steam…. Funny how the Democrats accept words and not actions whereas Trump my be different and is surrounding himself with people who have a record of action and if they do not keep to such.. I am sure they will be fired without honorguard or asskissing of the boss who fired them.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.
That was my take away, too. “What?”
That spun my head around..maybe it’s written in a new Trump-speak form of English