Cap and Trade Farce

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
121

[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
thunderbolt23 wrote:
<<< the cost is too high. >>>

The thing about this though is that if what these alarmists are claiming were actually true and a bill would accomplish what it claims then NO cost could possibly be too high.

What difference would anything else make if the planet were actually being made uninhabitable?

The hypocrisy on the part of most of the loudest and most hysterical proponents of this is astonishing. They proclaim the literal extinction of the human race caused by others while they personally conduct themselves with abandon. If I really believed I was causing the world to end. I would at least live my own life in accordance with that belief.
[/quote]

Has anyone ever said this? Anywhere? Seriously, if you can link a single major politician or scientist saying this I’ll eat my words, but I’m pretty sure it’s never happened.

122

[quote]â??The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is by far the highest in 650,000 years. Temperatures are estimated to rise anywhere from 2 degrees Fahrenheit to as high as 11.5 degrees by the end of the century. We can expect rising sea levels, more intense storms, increased drought in some areas and more floods in others, heat waves, spread of tropical diseases, extinction of species, changes in ocean salinity, and melting ice in the polar regions.

â??The catastrophic hurricanes of 2005, Katrina and Rita, foreshadow the challenges we will face. All along our coastlines, our great cities and small towns will be threatened by rising sea levels and intensifying storms.

â??Not only coastal areas will be affected. Inland communities will be gravely affected as well by drought and flood. Movement of climate change refugees from one country to another could increase political instability in many regions of the world.

â??Looking through the window into the future that you have opened, we also see that we can reshape our activities now and prevent catastrophic global warming. Where once we thought the effects of global warming would occur decades away, change is already underway.

â??We hold our childrenâ??s future in our hands â?? not our grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, but our own children."[/quote]
Nancy Pelosi 02/08/2007 Science and Technology Committee hearing on global warming

Here’s a quick one. What is logical conclusion of this? What does “Save The Planet” mean after after all?

123

[quote]Tiribulus wrote:

â??The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is by far the highest in 650,000 years. Temperatures are estimated to rise anywhere from 2 degrees Fahrenheit to as high as 11.5 degrees by the end of the century. We can expect rising sea levels, more intense storms, increased drought in some areas and more floods in others, heat waves, spread of tropical diseases, extinction of species, changes in ocean salinity, and melting ice in the polar regions.

â??The catastrophic hurricanes of 2005, Katrina and Rita, foreshadow the challenges we will face. All along our coastlines, our great cities and small towns will be threatened by rising sea levels and intensifying storms.

â??Not only coastal areas will be affected. Inland communities will be gravely affected as well by drought and flood. Movement of climate change refugees from one country to another could increase political instability in many regions of the world.

â??Looking through the window into the future that you have opened, we also see that we can reshape our activities now and prevent catastrophic global warming. Where once we thought the effects of global warming would occur decades away, change is already underway.

â??We hold our childrenâ??s future in our hands â?? not our grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, but our own children."
Nancy Pelosi 02/08/2007 Science and Technology Committee hearing on global warming

Here’s a quick one. What is logical conclusion of this? What does “Save The Planet” mean after after all?[/quote]

Meanwhile, to your point, travel junkets are on the rise by 50% since the Democrats took control of Congress. Apparently, Democratic politicians need to belch out ever more emissions as they research the globe for solutions to our world-ending crisis.

124

[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
â??The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is by far the highest in 650,000 years. Temperatures are estimated to rise anywhere from 2 degrees Fahrenheit to as high as 11.5 degrees by the end of the century. We can expect rising sea levels, more intense storms, increased drought in some areas and more floods in others, heat waves, spread of tropical diseases, extinction of species, changes in ocean salinity, and melting ice in the polar regions.

â??The catastrophic hurricanes of 2005, Katrina and Rita, foreshadow the challenges we will face. All along our coastlines, our great cities and small towns will be threatened by rising sea levels and intensifying storms.

â??Not only coastal areas will be affected. Inland communities will be gravely affected as well by drought and flood. Movement of climate change refugees from one country to another could increase political instability in many regions of the world.

â??Looking through the window into the future that you have opened, we also see that we can reshape our activities now and prevent catastrophic global warming. Where once we thought the effects of global warming would occur decades away, change is already underway.

â??We hold our childrenâ??s future in our hands â?? not our grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, but our own children."
Nancy Pelosi 02/08/2007 Science and Technology Committee hearing on global warming

Here’s a quick one. What is logical conclusion of this? What does “Save The Planet” mean after after all?[/quote]

Everything she’s saying is consistent with scientific consensus. None of it amounts to “We’re going to go extinct,” like you accused people of saying before. I’m not sure what you’re getting at here.

125

Where is this scientific consensus? Don’t give me this Al Gore foolishness, Global Warming is the biggest lie since Hitler said that Aryan Blood was different then normal blood.

Again I showed you the 30,000 scientist who sued Al Gore, so unless you have 30,001 who agree with Al Gore ( I doubt there is even 3001) stop saying there is a consensus because there clearly isn’t and if there is, you have yet to prove it.

126

[quote]quidnunc wrote:

None of it amounts to “We’re going to go extinct,” like you accused people of saying before. I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. [/quote]

Seriously, you are going to whistle past her apocalyptic commentary and pretend it wasn’t warning of ultimate catastrophe?

We can expect rising sea levels, more intense storms, increased drought in some areas and more floods in others, heat waves, spread of tropical diseases, extinction of species, changes in ocean salinity, and melting ice in the polar regions.

Be serious.

128

[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
quidnunc wrote:

None of it amounts to “We’re going to go extinct,” like you accused people of saying before. I’m not sure what you’re getting at here.

Seriously, you are going to whistle past her apocalyptic commentary and pretend it wasn’t warning of ultimate catastrophe?

We can expect rising sea levels, more intense storms, increased drought in some areas and more floods in others, heat waves, spread of tropical diseases, extinction of species, changes in ocean salinity, and melting ice in the polar regions.

Be serious.

[/quote]

“Bad things are going to happen” - she said this, and it’s true.

“We’re all going to die” - she didn’t say this, and it’s false.

129

[quote]nik133 wrote:
Where is this scientific consensus? Don’t give me this Al Gore foolishness, Global Warming is the biggest lie since Hitler said that Aryan Blood was different then normal blood.

Again I showed you the 30,000 scientist who sued Al Gore, so unless you have 30,001 who agree with Al Gore ( I doubt there is even 3001) stop saying there is a consensus because there clearly isn’t and if there is, you have yet to prove it.[/quote]

I’ve linked you the statements of every single relevant scientific organization. Do you think all of them are wrong?

Your petition has been signed by a grand total of 39 climatologists. They don’t give breakdowns by terminal degree within disciplines, but let’s assume that their claimed overall proportion of PHDs (9000 out of 30000, though I don’t think they do any credential checking) applies here. That suggests that there are 11 or 12 self-described PHD climatologists who oppose the scientific consensus in the whole country, which is perfectly consistent with my assertion that non-denialists outnumber denialists by a factor of about 100:1.

130

[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
quidnunc wrote:

None of it amounts to “We’re going to go extinct,” like you accused people of saying before. I’m not sure what you’re getting at here.

Seriously, you are going to whistle past her apocalyptic commentary and pretend it wasn’t warning of ultimate catastrophe?

We can expect rising sea levels, more intense storms, increased drought in some areas and more floods in others, heat waves, spread of tropical diseases, extinction of species, changes in ocean salinity, and melting ice in the polar regions. [/quote]

Oh, but fear not, because – quoth the Messiah – “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

131

[quote]pushharder wrote:
nik133 wrote:
Where is this scientific consensus? Don’t give me this Al Gore foolishness, Global Warming is the biggest lie since Hitler said that Aryan Blood was different then normal blood.

Again I showed you the 30,000 scientist who sued Al Gore, so unless you have 30,001 who agree with Al Gore ( I doubt there is even 3001) stop saying there is a consensus because there clearly isn’t and if there is, you have yet to prove it.

Archive this thread.

I predict in 20 years or less the egg dripping off so many faces will emit a sulfurous smell so rank it will be laughingly unbearable.

Go ahead, Quid, and ride that global warming train, buddy. There is a trestle ahead with missing abutments. Pack a parachute. [/quote]

I predict in 500 years many things we KNOW today will be chuckled at with the same merciful and sympathetic rolling eyes we now give to the flat Earth thing. For all of the legitimately incredible advancements of the last few generations, compared to what’s left to learn in a whole list of areas? We don’t know shit. Every era believes IT is knocking on the ceiling of knowledge.

133

I read an interesting article a while back that examined the matter of how many times in the last century the “consensus” view was that, alarmingly, we were headed either for a disastrous Ice Age or dire warming. Complete with example clippings and quotes.

I forget the exact numbers but approximately, I think there were 6 periods of warnings of imminent Ice Age disaster, reversed later of course by warnings of imminent global warming disaster.

So in the past it hasn’t taken anything like 500 years for reversals on this topic. Indeed, some of the top global warming fearmongers today were Ice Age fearmongers till relatively recently.

The big and very critical difference is that until now, no one figured how to get huge money and huge political power out of the fearmongering, and also grant money for creating computer models for climate was not so readily available as it is now.

Also, until now no one figured how they could guarantee getting the money and power no matter what actually happened by means of calling it “climate change” which they were predicting, wherein either increased heat or cold, increased rain or drought, increased hurricanes or lessened hurricanes, more snow or less, receding ice or thickening ice, etc, all would (supposedly) support their case.

There’s nothing better than a non-falsifiable scientific theory that rakes in the cash and increases power of politicians!

Oh wait a sec, I thought that non-falsifiable “theories” were by definition not scientific…

134

I am sure you know the story with “global cooling.”
It was a shortlived scare, never with broad scientific support. And in fact there was a cooling trend in the middle of the 20th century, due to particulate pollutants like SO2. We got rid of the pollution and the trend reversed.

Yes, it’s TNR, but the facts are not in dispute and I’ve read them in various other sources.

135

You are quite incorrect. Actually the record of the last few hundred thousand years can leave little doubt that another Ice Age is, in the sense of geological time, at the door. What is unknown is whether we have already passed the peak global temperature of the current interglacial period, or whether it will be decades or centuries before average temperature goes irrevocably – or rather, for tens of thousands of years – downwards again.

CO2 always rises to levels such as this at the end of interglacial periods, regardless that man wasn’t there to put any in the atmosphere. Change in CO2 levels has also been shown to lag change in temperature: thus, it isn’t change in CO2 driving change in temperature (unless you believe in causation reaching from future to past) but rather change in temperature driving change in CO2. If one understands properties of gases dissolved in water this will not come as a surprise.

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again. Your idea that global cooling is only a blip and only has the cause you state is mistaken. Long term, it is an inevitable trend in the Earth’s climate. Short term, the idea that you present that man is the cause is also quite lacking. There are causes man can do nothing about.

Why don’t you try looking into how much money Al Gore is making from all this, and consider how incredibly profligate with fossil fuel he personally is, and see what that suggests? This is about power and money. It is not science. It is playing with computers in a manner that has absolutely zero integrity. In absolutely no other field that I know of would such models even be considered publishable except with very strong caveats clearly stated.

136

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
You are quite incorrect. Actually the record of the last few hundred thousand years can leave little doubt that another Ice Age is, in the sense of geological time, at the door. What is unknown is whether we have already passed the peak global temperature of the current interglacial period, or whether it will be decades or centuries before average temperature goes irrevocably – or rather, for tens of thousands of years – downwards again.

CO2 always rises to levels such as this at the end of interglacial periods, regardless that man wasn’t there to put any in the atmosphere. Change in CO2 levels has also been shown to lag change in temperature: thus, it isn’t change in CO2 driving change in temperature (unless you believe in causation reaching from future to past) but rather change in temperature driving change in CO2. If one understands properties of gases dissolved in water this will not come as a surprise.

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again. Your idea that global cooling is only a blip and only has the cause you state is mistaken. Long term, it is an inevitable trend in the Earth’s climate. Short term, the idea that you present that man is the cause is also quite lacking. There are causes man can do nothing about.

Why don’t you try looking into how much money Al Gore is making from all this, and consider how incredibly profligate with fossil fuel he personally is, and see what that suggests? This is about power and money. It is not science. It is playing with computers in a manner that has absolutely zero integrity. In absolutely no other field that I know of would such models even be considered publishable except with very strong caveats clearly stated.[/quote]

You’re confusing two things:

The notion that, absent any human intervention, there would be a new ice age within the next few hundred thousand years. Virtually everyone agrees on this, it’s just not terribly relevant because a) we’re concerned about the world on a years-to-centuries timescale, not a millennia-to-eons timescale b) there is indeed human intervention.

The notion that, in the past few decades, there was a supposed scientific consensus that a human-created ice age was imminent, and that the invalidation of this “consensus” means that scientists can’t be trusted. As Alisa’s post above explained, this is totally false, and the idea was never widely accepted.

I’ve always found the denialist obsession with Al Gore to be kind of bizarre. Gore’s a smart guy, but he’s a layman, and it would be pretty weird if anyone relied on him for his original research. But no one does. He’s a good popularizer of science done by scientists, nothing more.

137

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
<<< Why don’t you try looking into how much money Al Gore is making from all this, and consider how incredibly profligate with fossil fuel he personally is, and see what that suggests? This is about power and money. >>>[/quote]

It’s a mob style protection racket on an epic scale:

Uh… I haven’t been having any problems with any riff raff.

138

[quote]quidnunc wrote:
thunderbolt23 wrote:
quidnunc wrote:

None of it amounts to “We’re going to go extinct,” like you accused people of saying before. I’m not sure what you’re getting at here.

Seriously, you are going to whistle past her apocalyptic commentary and pretend it wasn’t warning of ultimate catastrophe?

We can expect rising sea levels, more intense storms, increased drought in some areas and more floods in others, heat waves, spread of tropical diseases, extinction of species, changes in ocean salinity, and melting ice in the polar regions.

Be serious.

“Bad things are going to happen” - she said this, and it’s true.

“We’re all going to die” - she didn’t say this, and it’s false.

[/quote]

You’re splitting hairs, and you know it. “catastrophic global warming” “…our childrens futures in our hands. Not our great grandchildren or grandchildren, but our own children”. That’s as close in politico speak to “we’re-all-going-to-die-street-side-prophet-talk” as you’ll ever get from a politician.

And a side note for you — Bill’s a chemist with graduate studies and all the trappings you like. He does not work for Exxon either. Just FYI.

139

Also I am coauthor of several published scientific papers, and of the authors, the one that did the computer modelling work, in top peer-reviewed journals in a different field. I am not making stuff up (I never do) when saying that what is being done re global warming – which is all based on computer modelling – is unsound at a very fundamental level. If there were not money and power in it, such crap would not be taken seriously. But when there’s enough grant money and it suits political purposes, standards somehow become more lax.

As for it not being science, again I am not making it up that when persons construct a theory that does not allow being proven false under any circumstances – there are no tests of predictions that the author will accept as proving his theory wrong – then such a thing is considered, by definition, not to be science.

But to the “climate change” folk, every change supposedly supports their theory, and no outcome can disprove it. Failure of existing models to correctly predict following years – or the fact that if their models are created without utilizing data from a given decade, their models can’t reliably “predict” those years – just doesn’t faze them.

It is not science.

140

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
Also I am coauthor of several published scientific papers, in top peer-reviewed journals, on computer modelling in a different field. I am not making stuff up (I never do) when saying that what is being done re global warming – which is all based on computer modelling – is unsound at a very fundamental level.[/quote]

I agree. Computer modeling is remarkably tricky when doing “simple” things like modeling peptide interactions. To trust the primitive computer models we have for something as gigantically complex as the world climate is a bit reaching IMO. And they are primitive, relatively unrefined models. Especially when you compare them to models in other fields.

That doesn’t mean they’re wrong, it means they’re untrustworthy. Sometime in the last 40 years or so we moved from being empirically data based to computer model based. This is a universally bad move in every biologically based science I know of, and even in some pure physics fields.