comment #1

Hash says ...

Ah yes. Anybody who doesnt agree with your way of thinking and actually provides research to support their objection (whether its true or not) is automatically an idiot.

Im wondering what independent research Jeff has completed on the subject of global warming. Shit, wait...Al Gore said its true, so why bother contesting the status quo?

comment #2

judge says ...

Feeling quite like the independent thinker there, Hash?

From a Guardian story on this "documentary":
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2001692,00.html

"The decision to commission this programme seems even odder when you discover who is making it. In 1997 the director, Martin Durkin, produced a similar series for Channel 4 called Against Nature, which also maintained that global warming was a scam dreamed up by environmentalists. It was riddled with hilarious scientific howlers. More damagingly, the only way in which Durkin could sustain his thesis was to deceive the people he interviewed and edit their answers to change their meaning. After complaints by his interviewees, the Independent Television Commission found that "the views of the four complainants, as made clear to the interviewer, had been distorted by selective editing" and that they had been "misled as to the content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part". Channel 4 was obliged to broadcast one of the most humiliating primetime apologies it has made. Are institutional memories really so short?"

comment #3

Josh Massey says ...

How dare anybody question the unrequited truth? Dammit, don't they know the earth is flat?

comment #4

jeffmcm says ...

Josh, the flat-earthers are the ones who don't believe in global warming (or believe in it and see it as the herald of the Final Days).

comment #5

Devin Conroy says ...

If we cannot trust a scientific consensus (a gathering of the world's greatest skeptics proclaiming something as true), what can we believe?

Judge's information says it all. This director is just an unethical asshole doing anything whorish for a little attention.

comment #6

rocco says ...

Greenhouse zealots make me sick...fucking political ignoramuses who would struggle to name the difference between CH4 or C03 with the audacity to hope...uh, sorry, wrong discourse...with the audacity to attack an attempt to question the current warming mantra?? What is your agenda? Why side with anthropomorphic causes with the complete dismissal of solar radiation or other natural phenomena?? It just doesn't make SENSE! As a rational individual I want to learn WHY our planet is warming, not CONFIRM my bias that humans are causing it. Confirmation bias is a rabbit-hole in which creationists, anti-evolutionists (yes, there's a difference), and other religious zealots have been trapped for centuries...why join them????

Most amusing, or frustrating, are attacks by fucking amateurs like Jeff who have yet to see the documentary and the case presented...it smacks of willful ignorance and you should be ashamed. Even from a position of minimal understanding, to unilaterally reject any challenge to mainstream thinking before objectively reviewing the evidence is autocratic and oppressive horseshit.

Shame on you Mr. Bush...shame on ... upp, there I go again...shame on you Jeff.

Exploring alternate causes of warming should not be considered blasphemous, it should be considered due diligence! It should be pointed out the scientific consensus affirms with 90% certainty that we are causing temperatures to rise. There may be "only" a 10% chance this is natural, but 10% is a big number. Who here would happily accept a 10% paycut? Or a 10% increase in taxes...ok, maybe this isn't the best crowd to be asking that...or a 10% increase in troops in Iraq? We would all balk at such attempts because 10% is a very significant number. Scientists left room for debate, and we should at least examine it here just as we would in other instances...of course, when it's inconvenient, 10% means nothing.

The only point of contention with which I'd agree is the denial of value of attempts to lower C02 emissions around the globe. There's no reason to continue to rely on fossil fuels considering all of the geopolitical and likely environmental considerations, and the suggestion does raise questions as the to motives behind the doc...

...but it never fails, this type of reaction is becoming too commonplace...it's dangerous and counterproductive, and it needs to end. You sound like a bunch of witch-hunters or grand inquisitors...

Notice I've said nothing against the actual consensus or have I suggested we should question or cease current efforts to reduce what we currently understand is the catalyst for change. Inevitably, though, because I respect the 10% and concurrent attempts to explain it or explain it away, I'll be vilified as a denier.

I'm not so quixotic to believe this post will change any of the great or profound minds here at H-e, but hell, it's my only real online blogging indulgence...it makes as much sense here as anywhere else, I suppose.

comment #7

rocco says ...

(make anthropomorphic --> anthropocentric...blah)...

comment #8

Mgmax, le Corbeau says ...

Well said, Delbomber. Odds are this hysteria will fade as quickly as all of Paul Ehrlich's claims of imminent disaster in the 70s (the population bomb, famine, the crash of '79, etc. etc.)

Even if it were caused by humans and not (as is far more likely) the result of natural cycles on a scale that dwarf human comprehension, there's this argument (made recently by Jonah Goldberg) which the Gore-followers never wrestle with:

"In the history of trade-offs, never has there been a better one than trading a tiny amount of global warming for a massive amount of global prosperity.

"Earth got about 0.7 degrees Celsius warmer in the 20th century while it increased its GDP by 1,800 percent, by one estimate. How much of that 0.7 degrees can be laid at the feet of that 1,800 percent is unknowable, but let’s stipulate that all of the warming was the result of our prosperity and that this warming is in fact indisputably bad (which is hardly obvious).

"That’s still an amazing bargain. Life expectancies in the United States increased from about 47 years to about 77 years. Literacy, medicine, leisure and even, in many respects, the environment have improved mightily over the course of the 20th century, at least in the prosperous West.

"Given the option of getting another 1,800 percent richer in exchange for another 0.7 degrees warmer, I’d take the heat in a heartbeat."

comment #9

Larry says ...

This guy is just questioning the certainty with which the environmental establishment claims global warming is mainly caused by humanity. I understand you're an expert, Jeff, because you saw An Inconvenient Truth (which also makes you morally superior to anyone who differs from you), but if you care to explain why so many people with actual degrees in the subject don't agree with Al Gore on everything, please, by all means, give us a learned essay refuting all the data that doesn't go your way. (You can start by explaining why it seems Mars is warming up.)

I mean, for someone who denies the basic facts (as reported by the mainstream press) in the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame affair--facts, mind you, not fears for the future--you've got a lot of nerve to claim others are in a state of denial.

comment #10

christian says ...

and NASA satellite photos of our crumbling ice caps and that widening ozone hole over the antarctic that those crazy libs at NASA have determined is caused by industrial pollution...

well, screw that! i'd rather get a tan!

comment #11

christian says ...

and how fitting that on the day jeff posts this a pentagon report comes out confirming the very thing you armchair anti-global warming theorists don't believe:

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Last week the Bush administration came under heavy fire from a large body of respected scientists who claimed that it cherry-picked science to suit its policy agenda and suppressed studies that it did not like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said that suppression of the report for four months was a further example of the White House trying to bury the threat of climate change.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1153513,00.html

comment #12

rocco says ...

...act according to today's consensus, absolutely, but continue to seek the truth...

...that's what my post boils down to...does that make me an armchair (or is it deskchair) anti-global warming theorist?

If so, well then god help us, because the arena for rational debate and scientific rigor no longer exists.

comment #13

christian says ...

clearly the power arena is stacked in favor of those who choose to ignore the rational and scientific rigor -- i.e., the bush administration and 90 percent of the republican party.