Harper, Trump & Science a la Carte: A Warning From Canada
Stephen Harper and cats.
Canadian science writer Graham Templeton says the election of Donald Trump and a Republican controlled Congress threatens a repeat of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s nine-year war on science.
Though Americans might be surprised to hear it, Canada offers a good example of why there is a very real need to worry, and of how the coming anti-science administration could realistically affect all of national research. My home and native land has been a fair ways down the road America is just now preparing to travel and, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the endpoint is absolutely disastrous….
In 2006, Canada elected the Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper to the position of Prime Minister, and formed a new national government that would endure in some form until the end of 2015. During this time, the Harper Government carried out what has come to be widely known as the War on Science. The target wasn’t merely climate change research, but fisheries, forestry, air quality — anything with an environmental focus, it would appear. Perhaps it’s just a big coincidence, but these also seem to be the areas of science that most often produced findings contrary to the interests of Canada’s enormous mining and petroleum industries. They also produced recommendations contrary to the Harper government’s attempts to withdraw from international climate accords….
The government used a variety of methods to carry out its attacks on earth sciences experts and experiments. First, of course, there was the defunding of certain sorts of research, and the public questioning or demeaning of much of the rest. Thousands of scientists lost their jobs. Canada lost its importance within some international research collaborations, simply because it could no longer pitch in as effectively. Due to a deep dependence of government-supported grants, the campaign rippled outward to similar research at universities and private facilities. Scientific libraries were closed, and their contents simply destroyed or thrown in the trash.
But there was also a much more insidious mode of attack, in a project that would become known as “muzzling.” Muzzling was literally the practice of telling government researchers that they may not discuss their research, period. The stated goal was a more coherent, curated face for government research, leaving the media stuff to real media professionals and thus making sure that government communication is effective and efficient — and doesn’t that all sound nice?
Donald Trump (Credit: Michael Vadon)
This does sound disturbingly familiar. Trump has claimed that global warming was a hoax invented by the Chinese to destroy American industry. Trump now says he has an open mind on the subject. What that means given his tendency to flip flop is anybody’s guess.
Attitudes in Congress are no better. Consider these claims made by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who is vice chairman of the House Science Committee.
Just so you know, global warming is a total fraud and it is being designed by—what you’ve got is you’ve got liberals who get elected at the local level want state government to do the work and let them make the decisions. Then, at the state level, they want the federal government to do it. And at the federal government, they want to create global government to control all of our lives. That’s what the game plan is. It’s step by step by step, more and bigger control over our lives by higher levels of government. And global warming is that strategy in spades.… Our freedom to make our choices on transportation and everything else? No, that’s gotta be done by a government official who, by the way, probably comes from Nigeria because he’s a UN government official, not a US government official.
Pretty paranoid stuff, huh? But, it’s par for the course among Republicans in Washington.
The Republican members who control the House and Senate science committees deny global warming is a serious threat. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has run one-sided hearings that have included Canadian jazz musician and conservative pundit Mark Steyn — a man with no scientific expertise — as an expert witness. Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), a leading candidate for NASA administrator, attacked the Obama Administration’s spending over climate change using grossly misleading budget numbers.
Nobody’s saying that Trump and Congressional Republicans reject all science. There are clearly basic scientific tenants and theories they accept. But, with global warming and other issues that threaten the vested interests that support them, their acceptance of science is strictly a la carte.
It’s a worrisome time. The Trump Administration has promised to cut the budget for NASA Earth science research, with a particular focus on climate research. What is left is likely to be transferred to NOAA. Republicans say this will be a more efficient way to conduct the research and that it will “depoliticize” the science.
However, they’re not proposing these changes because they want healthy, well-funded programs to study the Earth and climate change. There are no indications that NASA is doing a poor job with Earth science research. Or that the current division of labor between NASA and NOAA is causing any serious problems. Earth science researchers are not advocating a transfer to NOAA, much less budget cuts, as a solution to some problems that exist.
The popular argument among Republicans is that shifting Earth science to NOAA will allow the space agency to focus on exploration is a red herring. The United States’ inability to send astronauts beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) for the past 44 years cannot be attributed to the agency’s study of the home planet. NASA can walk and chew gum at the same time. Gutting the Earth science program and moving it to another agency will not solve any of the problems that have left us stuck in LEO.
We’re an advanced technological society that increasingly relies upon scientific research for our well being. Our national interest is not served by a government that is hostile to scientists, and that believes it can pick and choose what scientific results it does and doesn’t believe. I fear we could be going down the same path as Canada with the Trump Administration. It’s scary.
61 responses to “Harper, Trump & Science a la Carte: A Warning From Canada”
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Never fear. The scientists who have been successfully getting funding and research grants by promoting their various causes like the barely to un detectable climate change fraud should do really well selling used cars.
Ah the sweet sound of leftist wailing and teeth gnashing!
Wish we could clean the stables in the Australian CSIRO, a sheltered workshop if ever there was one.
Irrational liberal fear and loathing is irrational.
Climate “science” isn’t science, it is politics. The value judgement that we should abolish industry, energy, transports, agriculture in order to try to manipulate the climate is an unscientific political statement. It is up to the people, everyone, to make the value judgement weather we should abolish wealth to try to manipulate the climate, or if it is better to keep adapting to climate changes, natural and potentially anthropocentric.
Marxism was another political ideology which falsely claimed to be “scientific”. Marxism also had a kind of deterministic doomsday vision of the future, and claimed that the only salvation is for every human being to abstain all power, monies and freedom to a world government of ideologically pure elitists that bureaucratically use government force to dictate everything in all human’s lives (i.e. slavery). It is as if the Marxists have realized that they only ever have achieved poverty and therefor now preach that poverty is a good thing. The billion poorest in the world certainly do not agree. Energy poverty kills millions every year and is very much worse than sea levels maybe rising by 1 mm a year.
Climate science is science. The response is politics. One political party believes we should take proactive steps to minimize the damage to our one and only planet. This is a political value judgement that one can choose to agree with or disagree with.
The other mainline response is to claim that a well-established branch of science with trivially understood causative mechanisms (look at Venus, now look at Mercury, which one is hotter…) is a Marxist conspiracy. Note that no value judgement is invoked here: This response is simply an untruth, often backed up by selectively cherry-picked data. (See, for example, Matt Drudge highlighting Antarctic sea ice growth when it’s the Arctic that everyone is concerned about).
You don’t see Republican politicians saying “Well, climate change is real, but we have decided that we need to prioritize wealth over the safety of future generations.” Because that would be f*cking ridiculous. So don’t try and invoke this noble “value judgement” idea, because it doesn’t exist. This is truth versus fantasy, plain and simple.
I’m worried about the quality of climate predictions. How well did Al Gore’s hockey stick fall out? Or any of the “climate models” in vogue back then? Climate science forecasts have failed very severely and is very far from being mature enough to have any input of value for political decision making.
Real climate scientists MUST very clearly distance themselves from anti-industry environmentalists and state that their historic and current research has no political implications of any kind whatsoever, in order to be taken seriously as scientists. Unfortunately, that happens very rarely. Greedy personal money profits talk instead.
Isn’t Arctic ice cover dominated by the sweet water outflows from the many huge rivers surrounding continents? Sweet water has lower density and lower freezing point than salt water. So lower outflows leads to lesser ice, and colder climate leads to lower outflows since the rivers then freeze from the north earlier and blocks outflows of sweet water to the Arctic sea. That water instead floods the inland.
From a paper published in 1981, updated with an extra 31 years of temperature records: http://www.realclimate.org/…
– J. Hansen, D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, and G. Russell, “Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide”, Science, vol. 213, pp. 957-966, 1981.
If you consider the null hypothesis for that 1981 paper to be “no systematic positive trend”, then the prediction from 1981 is clearly a closer match to the subsequent 30+ years than the null hypothesis.
That graph should scare people. It looks like the trend has been consistently above the worst-case projections on warming for said 31 years.
Hey, I went to school in 1981, and then the new global ICE AGE was the big climate threat in marxist politruk propaganda media and school indoctrination! This is Orwellian.
Orwellian? Just so we’re clear, you believe that at the behest of the… Al Gore, I suppose?… the owners and editors of the journal Science have edited it’s archives of its 1981 edition to insert a phony paper, and every academic and science library with a copy has gone along with the change and replaced their own copies?
Or were you just using a word you don’t understand?
It’s not at all representative of the projections made then. Climate change forecasts have failed miserable. They are not mature enough to have any value whatsoever for political decisions.
Still peddling this same crap eh? Despite concepts you consider utterly alien like facts, research and statistics you’re STILL wibbling around claiming climate change isn’t real. Give it a rest you enemy of reason and logic.
You have some vague memory of a dumb/hysterical article in the popular media about the next ice age (there was, and continues to be, research into the cycles and causes of ice ages, with attempts to work out if/when the next one will happen.) And so you assume that mainstream climate research was also dominated by that same thing; even though you had no other knowledge of actual climate research, and still don’t.
And so when someone points out something that contradicts your childhood memory, you scream conspiracy.
In reality, papers about global warming were dominating atmospheric research throughout the 1960s and ’70s. By the late 1970’s, atmospheric scientists around the world were concerned enough to put together dedicated conventions on global warming so they could compare notes. The first World Climate Conference was held in 1979, leading to the ongoing World Climate Program. That let to IPCC in 1988, and then UNFCCC in ’92, and Kyoto Protocol in ’97.
The global conferences in the ’80s also led to the beginnings of professional opposition to climate research, I believe the first was funded by the American Petroleum Institute.
The paper by Hanson&co that I referred to was the major work in climate research in the early ’80s. It pulled together all the separate threads of climate research from the late ’70s and set the standard for subsequent research. In other words, the basic science of “global warming” was done and settled by 1981. Since then, climate research has been about the details (and dealing with paid professional deniers, corrupt politicians, and idiots like you.)
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Scientists were debating the role of CO2 in the 1890s and speculating about global warming caused by human activity.
In the 1950, U.S. atmospheric scientists set up stations to measure carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere at the South Pole and at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, specifically to collect evidence of rising CO2 levels.
In 1965, Lyndon Johnson told Congress: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through … a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”
In 1988, UK Prime Minister Thatcher said: “The problem of global climate change is one that affects us all and action will only be effective if it is taken at the international level.”
Extremely well? Here’s a 2008 summary of reconstructions; keep in mind that this is 8 years old already and the anomolies have increased further since then. (See here for a NASA source from Goddard.)
Real climate scientists must also distance themselves from pro-industry…industry.
Of course their research has political implications. It’s up to us as a society to act on those implications; scientists’ only obligation is to tell the truth as best as their observations allow.
I wasn’t going to bring this up, but you did, so…you do realize that the energy industry pays much better than academia, don’t you? Money talks, indeed.
I don’t know, I don’t study the Arctic. When people who do study the Arctic are worried about ice levels, I’m worried too. For example, this NASA paper from 2014 demonstrates that warmer river water (not colder) is contributing to the larger rates of sea ice melt.
Beyond all that, though, your hypothesis about a colder climate leading to reduced Arctic ice levels is difficult to support, since the climate is not getting colder. (See 2nd link in my first paragraph.)
“Well, climate change is real, but we have decided that we need to prioritize wealth over the safety of future generations.”
Except quite often, “wealth” is simply a minimal standard of living for many people in the developing world – which is where most emissions growth has been over the past few decades. (China and India, for example, now account for more than double the carbon emissions of the U.S. and Canada put together.)
Perhaps it’s possible to continue lifting hundreds of millions of Chinese, Indians, and Brazilians into something approaching developed world standards – access to electricity, safe running water, simple consumer goods – while still meeting the aggressive targets of the Paris accords. But in too much of the First World discourse, it doesn’t seem like this is even a concern. Which might one reason why the governments of the countries in question seem chilly to embracing these policies.
I think it is safe to say that we’re in uncharted territory here. This is the first time a non-politician will occupy the West Wing. I don’t believe anyone has cloud-free crystal ball at this point. It’s wait and see time for everyone. We’ll know a great deal more by mid-summer.
One thing is for certain, the President Elect is a business guy. If I were pitching the incoming administration, I would be furiously building PowerPoint presentations that focused on return on investment for as many programs as possible. ROI is understood and, outside of government, the only metric that most deals are judged by.
ROI for basic science is difficult to quantify but technology programs should be able swag a figure pretty readily. Either way, I’d be working very hard right now to figure out a way to demonstrate the upside of all NASA programs.
The upside to NASA’s Earth science is a deeper understanding of our planet and what global warming is doing to it.
Republicans who see global warming as a hoax see that as a downside because it undermines their beliefs.
He really isn’t. Not the way you mean.
One of the reasons Trump despises “Wall Street” and “International Bankers” is because he can’t get finance for his projects any more, he’s considered too high a risk. (Basically he rips off his business partners and investors.) And it’s why he’s so tight with Russian oligarchs, since that’s who funds most of his business these days. Russians oligarchs (and Chinese banks) hold most of his enormous debt.
As late-night comics like to mock, Trump lost money owning a casino. Trump failed to sell steaks and vodka. Trump couldn’t sell red meat and alcohol. If it wasn’t for the Russians using him to launder money to bypass US sanctions, he’d be long since bankrupt.
His gimmick is the illusion of success. Power, self-promotion, and dominance games. Which is what you yourself fell for “he’s a business guy… power-point… ROI”.
Trump is already going to buy off Wall Street with deregulation. He’s going to repeal a whole bunch of regs put into place to keep the bankers and the brokers who have repeatedly tanked the economy from doing it again. It’s what the Republicans in Congress want and Trump is happy to oblige.
The result will probably be a boom in the economy that Trump can take credit for when he runs for re-elections. He and the Republicans will be showered with contributions from Wall Street and the big banks.
The trick will be to get re-elected and avoid pulling a W: i.e., still being in office when the greed, avarice and outright criminality of these guys bring down the economy again. W wasn’t quite as lucky in his timing as Calvin Coolidge.
“One thing is for certain, the President Elect is a business guy.”
“He really isn’t. Not the way you mean.”
Absolutely. He’s proven over and over and over and over and over and over (there’s not really time for enough overs), that he is an incompetent “business guy”. His grasp of business and of the world in general is mirrored quite closely by his grasp of language, and I do mean that bigly.
I’m happy that so many of my readers can look at what’s happening with the climate and be so confident that there’s nothing to fear.
For the vast majority of the professionals who are actually studying the matter, global warming is real, driven by human activity, and increasingly scary. Take this 5-year study of the Arctic:
http://www.upi.com/Science_…
After 5-year study, scientists say unchecked Arctic melting may bring irreversible change
If the Greenland Ice Sheet melts away, global sea levels would rise by about 25 feet, the report warns.
I believe them. You may do what you wish.
It’s really just fascinating that a science and technology-focused blog brings in a readership that is, on average, technically well-informed, but in a very a la carte manner, as you put it. (A nice descriptor.) Is it down to the subject matter? The average age of readership? I don’t know.
I used to be very anti-climate-science myself, but then I went to school. I spent 6 years studying a very specific subset of engineering, and I still grasp only the very basics of the discipline. I realized how absurd it would be for internet know-nothings like Matt Drudge or Mark Steyn to question my work, and made a decision to respect other professionals in their fields just as I aim to be respected in mine. If climate scientists say humans are causing the Earth to warm, they are almost certainly correct in that verdict.
Apparently, in 2016, this point of view makes me some sort of globalist elitist Illuminati traitor to my country. I’m okay with that.
[edit: wow this one got away from me. Sorry. Read it, don’t read it. It’s okay.]
For me it was an interest in the paranormal when I was young, which led to a bit of “skeptical activism” when I was older (but still young enough to have the energy to care), which led to spending time in CvsE and UFO debates online.
There’s a pattern I noticed in genuine science, and a pattern in pseudo-science (and in the paid opposition to science.)
In genuine science, there’s usually progress. Which seems obvious, but it creates a distinction between things-which-are-reported-but-don’t-pan-out vs things-which-are-real.
An example I like is the Piltdown Hoax, beloved of creationists but it actually shows the opposite of their claim. When the “Piltdown Man” was first claimed, researchers who looked at it couldn’t tell it was a hoax. But science moved on. The big finds were coming from Africa and that’s where interest returned, Piltdown soon became seen as a minor side-branch, unrelated to the main story of human evolution. As time went on, and more and more was understood about human evolution, Piltdown Man was seen as less and less relevant. Hence for twenty years it was ignored and un-reexamined. But eventually it had become so obviously out-of-place, that it became interesting again. Eventually prompting a grad-student (IIRC) to chase down the original bones. Within seconds of seeing them, he knew that this was from a modern gorilla and this was from a modern human. He showed it to colleagues and professors and they too instantly saw what it was, going further to call it an obvious hoax (not a mistake, for example).
In just twenty years, the actual science had developed so much that the “finding” was first reduced to irrelevancy and then as a significant outlier, and, after just twenty years, a mere student could recognise the hoax at a glance.
Science moves on. No-one does research to “prove climate change” any more. Haven’t for decades. They do research on the interaction of deep cycle ocean currents with atmospheric heat transfer cycle, and how it affects the timing and intensity of the El-Nino/La-Nino cycle, and therefore the specific annual and decadal patterns within the long term climate data.
But opponents of climate change haven’t moved. Haven’t contributed to any new findings or new science. Still repeating the same long-since debunked memes over and over and over.
In the same way that no-one does research to “prove evolution” any more, they do research into how specific epigenetic effects interact with sexual selection to… etc. Whereas opponents of evolution are stuck exactly where they were 30 years ago, just rebranding their books occasionally.
In the same way that no-one does research to “prove the Big Bang”. But proponents of Steady State theory haven’t progressed on one inch. (At least since Fred Hoyle left mainstream science behind. Which is a shame, as an actual scientific skeptic of Big Bang he did extraordinary work on stellar fusion and element synthesis. Once he turned his back on proper science and fell in with the alt-science crowd, he contributed nothing.)
OTOH, UFOlogists haven’t made a single step towards proving UFOs are alien space ships. Or that abductions are real. Or ancient astronauts built the pyramids. Or any of it. Not one of their OMG-There’s-An-Pyramid-On-The-Moon/Alien-Base-In-Antarctica/Trees-On-Mars enhanced photos ever turn out to be more than just artefacts of photo-enhancement software.
Meanwhile, critics of the UFO-nuts have done research into hypnogogic hallucinations, false-memory-syndrome, blue-sprite/red-sprite “upwards lightning”, and so on. Even with the stench of crank over the subject matter, actual researchers did actual research and we know more about weird phenomenon than we did before.
But telepathy/telekinesis/remote-viewing/clairvoyance research hasn’t made a single inch of progress in 50+ years.
There was a pseudo-science therapeutic device that was popular with the alt-med crowd when I first got into the skeptic movement … and is still around under new names… It’s a crudely made bit of simple electronics in a box with a dial and a display, that supposedly emits and receives “frequencies” that can target specific molecules in the body. It’s meant to both detect and then cure anything up to and including HIV/AIDS.
In 30-odd years, the magic device changed name regularly but is essentially identical.
So imagine that it was a real phenomena. Imagine it actually worked.
I have no idea what your engineering speciality is, but picture what you and a handful of your fellow students could have achieved in just one year of tinkering with a simple electronic mechanism that could remotely identify and alter substances based on specific repeatable frequencies. What any first year class in engineering, or physics, or chemistry, or materials science, could do with such a phenomenon. Imagine how revolutionary it would be… if it actually worked.
But in the thirty years since I first noticed it, it’s achieved nothing.
Who is falling back onto memes and the same well worn argument? The Earth being the center of the Solar System/Universe was also once an accepted “scientific” fact. Be careful where you throw your hubris.
Jesus Christ, I’m actually embarrassed for you!
I’m not sure what Jesus has to do with your problem, but whatever..
“If climate scientists say humans are causing the Earth to warm, they are almost certainly correct in that verdict.”
Because scientists and their data are never wrong right? Because scientists are not human subject to the same biases, foibles, and group-think as the rest of us?
The skepticism that is the basis of “climate deniers” (as they are so biased labeled), is the core of the scientific method, if you still recall that. And the “climate changers” have done a very poor job of presenting the issue other than producing a bunch of numbers (that they produced) or anecdotal evidence and extrapolating ridiculous predictions from them. An entire industry has popped up to push for, politicize, and make a profit off of climate change fear, THAT is what “climate deniers” deny.
Meanwhile, deforestation, over population, and the pollution of the land and oceans with garbage and chemicals, receives a fraction of the attention and resources as GW/CC, yet are much more real and immediate threat (not to mention the root cause of any man-made CC). But because those problems are harder to deal with and aren’t as “sexy” (and the places its happening in don’t GAS about the UN or tree-huggers).
All the proposed global warming, climate change, carbon-neutered, solutions will accomplish is to muzzle the industrial productivity of the world, make most people poorer, make politicians and lawyers richer, and the planet will STILL get warmer. And everyone is STILL going to have to adapt to that change, but they will have fewer options thanks to the conceited lie that Man can control the Earth.
And that is the core of the political problem, namely the “limits to growth” element of the environmental movement has made climate change their core issue to downsize the economy. Since their predictions that we would run out of oil and gas by now failed to come true the movement needed a new cause to exist. They took the climate change research and used the result to change their argument to “Yes there is plenty of oil and gas, but if we keep expanding the economy we will destroy the world.” By packaging climate change with their doom and gloom worldview they made it unpalatable for a large percent of the population.
Sorry, you need to give up your SUV and ride to town on a bicycle. So what if it’s 10 below and snowing…
What the climate scientists need to do is denounce the “limits to growth” environmentalists and start providing/offering solutions that will enable economic expansion not downsizing to the back to nature lifestyle of the environments.
And as a final point. The same technologies that will enable economic growth and a continual rise in the standard of living are the same one that will be needed for space settlement. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos both recognize this, which makes them enemies of both sides of the climate change argument.
Yes, the most distressing thing is that all sides are perceiving and accepting that the world as a zero-sum or even shrinking resource pie with limited options delineated by political motivation. Which I think is the saddest commentary on our civilization (and likely to be our epitaph).
This is a f***ing lie! Environmental sustainability ALLOWS for economic growth. In fact future growth is now almost entirely reliant on a world going greener and switching away from unsustainable, low-efficiency fossil fuels. It’s like you lot WANT to live in a world of pollution and everything that goes along with it.
I agree they’re not climate deniers. That’s a totally incorrect word.
Dana Rohrabacher thinks it’s a plot to put us under UN control. Trump said it’s a hoax invested by the Chinese government to destroy America.
That’s paranoia. That’s engaging in conspiracy theories. That’s delusional.
>And the “climate changers” have done a very poor job of presenting the issue other than producing a bunch of numbers (that they produced) or anecdotal evidence and extrapolating ridiculous predictions from them.
Uh huh. Riiiight. It doesn’t matter how much evidence piles up, or how many examples are given or what form they’re given in…..you’ve got paradelusional conspiracy theoryists who will never accept reality because it threatens their way of making a living or their political beliefs.
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you…
“…you’ve got paradelusional conspiracy theoryists who will never accept
reality because it threatens their way of making a living or their
political beliefs. ”
Wait. Who are are referring to here? The Climate Change deniers or the believers? Its hard to tell them a part sometimes. 😉
The Rohrabacher and Trump examples were kind of a test how readers would respond.
Recoil in horror: Sane, avoids false equivalencies, coherent thought processes
Laugh it off: FAIL
Congratulations. You’re fully qualified for a high-level position in the incoming administration. Please contact the Trump transition team as soon as possible. Call now. Positions are running out.
I have thought about submitting my CV… It’s supposed to be great.
And after the past year I am numb to the horror that the American political and social landscape has become. I think your test does not pass non-partisan bias muster either.
I’m not a scientist so I don’t care too much about the “scientific method,” but I do know quite a bit about peer review. It involves people who actually know what they’re talking about examining your work and determining if its fit to publish. It doesn’t involve an army of right-wing bloggers and commenters making the same tired old argument over and over again, ignoring refutation after refutation. The scientific method, if I recal
So you admit, then, that your denial is not based on scientific fact, but instead on the bad behavior of environmental lobbyists? The scientific method, if I recall from high school, doesn’t involve much in the way of claiming the opposing theory the work of paid shills.
Okay, so we should probably focus on those problems too, then. We probably shouldn’t oppose things like more efficient cars, a pivot to renewable/nuclear energy, and emissions regulations just because deforestation etc. happens to be a problem as well.
Not as warm.
Not as painfully.
Can we control it? No. Can we destroy it? Look around. Can we stop ourselves? I sure hope so.
I’m not a scientist so I don’t care too much about the “scientific
method,”
Sigh…
but I do know quite a bit about peer review. It involves people
who actually know what they’re talking about examining your work and
determining if its fit to publish.
Members of the “Eugenics Movement”, of which the Nazi Party in Germany derived much of its ideas about “racial purity”, examined and determined that ideas and plans about mass sterilization of “undesireable” populations was fit to publish too.
“Peer review” is just consensus and acceptance. It does not make it fact or reality. You can write a nasty paper about how bad all black (or white, or whatever) people are, and I’m sure it could get accepted by some hate group’s publication somewhere.
Food for thought; the same logic, smug arrogance, and excessive confidence in data subject to interpretation and manipulation that is used to support climate change, also predicted Hillary Clinton’s “land slide” victory in the past election.
Okay, so you’ve decided to argue by analogy (always a poor choice) and now taken the position that the world’s climate science community is ethically equivalent to Nazi eugenicists. Alright.
To your second point (another poor analogy),
(1) Climate scientists and pollsters aren’t the same people. Pollsters aren’t even scientists. You’ve just created an arbitrary group of “People you disagree with” with the hope that Group A’s failure is correlated to Group B’s (statistics tip: It’s not).
(2): A year’s worth of polls doesn’t really contend with decades worth of climate data, particularly since polling data is much less statistically significant than climate measurements.
(3) The person taking the most scientific approach to the matter, Nate Silver, predicted a 30% chance of Trump winning, which is not at all infinitesimal.
You’ve completely missed and/or misinterpreted my point. Please (re?) read, think some, and then edit or delete your post. Or, don’t. Have a nice day.
P.S.- “Pollsters” prefer to be referred to as “Statisticians” and they like to think of it as a science, even a branch of mathematics, if you can believe the gall!
Your point was expressed poorly, using a bad analogy that doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Don’t try and hold me accountable for that.
Those were not analogies at all. At least not the ones you think they were. Stay in school kid.
No, they were certainly analogies. Go back to school, perhaps? As far as your kind advice, I’m going to go ahead and ignore it; too much going on in aerospace to sit around earning a PhD.
Actually the Greenland ice sheet is not the urgent issue. Much of the green house gases currently fixed in the Arctic permafrost will be release by a seasonal increase of several degrees in the summer. Also the loss of the permafrost will cause massive movements of the ground topography like massive landslides and ground became liquefied.(really bad if building is on top of that ground). Much of the Arctic and sub-Arctic will be will be very difficult to accessed.
This is true. There’s a whole chain reaction of effects that could really unravel very quickly.
But then will stabilize as they dry out and quickly become prairie grass lands and then arctic forests. At least if we don’t cultivate it first because it will be highly fertile and the summer sun will produce huge crops.
You do realize that for the Arctic & Sub-Arctic to be like Prairie grassland . Then the Sub-Tropics will became the Tropics and the current Tropics will be uninhabitable in the future for most of the world’s current major population centers.
Last I checked people still have feet. And these things called cars and aeroplanes. We can move, we can build new and better cities in different places. We can adapt just like our ancestors did during the last great bout of “Climate Change”.
Also no place on Earth is going to be “uninhabitable” just because of its lattitude. 2 degrees average temp isn’t going to “boil the seas”, it will just change weather patterns. Currently arid places will become wet and vice versa. See the above paragraph. Take a pill and stop drinking Al Gore’s koolaide.
Pfft, you and your liberal, leftist “facts”.
No matter where you stand on climate change gutting climate research is bad for space as it means fewer launches to LEO which is where many emerging light and micro launchers are aiming.
You can’t define an “air temperature” but you can certainly measure a “rock temperature.”
What I find interesting is how many folks think the issue of climate change is new.
Before Al Gore, Neil Degrasse Tyson nd Carl Sagan there was the Bell Science Hour. This is a program they aired in 1958. The problem of global warming is discussed starting at 50:10.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
One of reasons I became interested in space industrialization when I was in high school in the 1970s’s was because of a great chapter in Willy Ley’s 1941 book “The Days of Creation” on global warming and a 1958 essay by Isaac Asimov advocating nuclear power as a way to counter global warming. As Isaac Asimov pointed out in his 1967 essay “No Place Like Spome” the surface of a planet simply is not the proper place to develop an advanced industrial society.
The difference today is that they found a way to make money off of it.
Actually the AEC used global warming as one of the justifications to develop the nuclear industry. I recall it discussed in a 1960’s article in Scientific America. This was when environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society were still pro-nuclear. They only switched were those groups were taken over by the “Earth Day” movement in the early 1970’s that produced today radical environmentalists.
There was also Three-Mile Island, and the revelation of just how incompetently the government had handled radiological waste since the 40s.
Today’s radical environmentalism is a product of the 60’s counter-culture and socialist education system. Having lost the socio-economic war against Capitalism, they moved on to another “good fight against The Man” to give their lives meaning.
“Our national interest is not served by a government that is hostile to
scientists, and that believes it can pick and choose what scientific
results it does and doesn’t believe.”
You miss-align your concerns, Doug. Non-progressives are not hostile to science nearly so much as they are hostile to academia, which in the last 50 years has identified itself with science in the minds of the public through the efforts of the media, even while academia has been betraying non-progressive’s views of the Republic in academia’s political and social “activist” campaigns. Scientists are distrusted only in direct proportion to the extent their pronouncements serve progressive political aims rather than accepting that the limits of calculation apply to them, and to their simulations, as well as anyone else.
“I fear we could be going down the same path as Canada with the Trump Administration. It’s scary.”
It *should* be scary for anyone who seeks support for the progressive policy of engrossing the State through selective support of those scientists whose work so often ends with statements suportting putting ever more of our lives under government control. The only thing that is going to happen is that the selectivity will change. “The debate is over” crowd no longer has their hands on the funding spigot.
There will still be people putting out alarmist studies, Doug, and they will even get government funding, though perhaps not as much or from the same agencies. The change will be that the other side of the re-opened debate will also be funded. That your side has lost control of the funding is only a disaster for the other agendas that funding so long has supported, not for the Republic.
And here, my dear readers, you see an example of a tactic that has been used over and over again. Accuse your opponent of doing exactly what you are actually doing.
The amount of money that Exxon Mobil, the Koch brothers and other industry leaders have put into fighting climate change science is enormous. They have bought legislators and funded think tanks, experts and researchers to produce studies and results to support their claims that global warming is not a serious threat.
This is what industry always does. Look at the tobacco companies. Decades after the surgeon general linked smoking to cancer, the industry still poured out research to dispute the truth. It was fraudulent research. And they knew otherwise.
These lies were eventually exposed. Same thing will happen with climate change. States attorneys general are trying. The House “Science” Committee — whose Republican members mostly come from carbon fuel rich states — is doing its best to protect Exxon Mobil and the rest of them. That fight tells you everything you need to know about how much these guys have to hide.
As I said, I trust the scientists and their results more than I do Exxon Mobil and the Koch brothers. It’s not even close. This is not about ideology. It’s about accepting the realities of what we’re facing as a planet. Some people can face up to those realities; others cannot.
http://www.upi.com/Science_…
You betray your own ideology in this again and again, Doug. The idea that academics funded by politicians produce science that is somehow superior to science funded by the rest of society is a hallmark of progressivism.
“This is not about ideology.”
On the contrary, it is about the ideology of progressivism, expressed by activists funded by politicians to torture the numbers till they justify undoing the shift from allocation of resources by politics to allocation of resources by markets. That those activists all have degrees with relevant sounding disciplines on them means little.
You can be a scientist, or you can be an activist, not both.
This is why James Hansen and his political friends spent so many years building a funding hierarchy that would exclude those who did not agree with him. Hansen’s Hierarchy is going away. That is all that will happen. That will not be a disaster for science.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts,”-Richard Feynman
Without publicly funded science doctors would still be recommending smoking to their patients and the asbestos industry would still be able to claim their products don’t kill people.
The blanket claim you’ve just made about the superiority of science “funded by the “rest of society” is the mark of profound ignorance.The rest of your remarks are a sign of the paranoia and denial that has crept into the right.
Shouldn’t the caption read “Stephen Harper and cats.”?
Global warming denialists really are the worst form of pondlife. They’re right down there with the likes of Holocaust deniers.
Ban and limit? Rather like abortion, women’s rights, minority rights, immigration, etc….
A bit more evidence of the climate crisis we’re facing. Not that it will convince any skeptics; nothing seems to do so.
http://www.theverge.com/201…
Trump’s chief of staff announced today that global warming paradelusionalism will be the official policy of the new administration. So, don’t expect him to do anything about the problem.
Meanwhile, Trump took to Twitter to threaten a year in jail or revoked citizenship for anyone burning the American flag. So, while the planet’s ice caps melt, Trump will be jailing people and expelling them from the country for a symbolic act of protest. At least we know where his priorities lie.
The government can’t revoke the citizenship of native born Americans. They can do so for naturalized citizens if they used fraud to receive citizenship or committed serious felonies. But, give Trump time; I’m sure he’ll find a way to threaten us all.
It seems Hillary Clinton tried to get a similar law passed in 2005. It was a stupid idea then. It’s stupid now. That they’re taking this idea from a woman who they threatened to jail is pretty amusing — or it would be, if not the stupidity of what Trump wants to do..
That seems silly to do (what Trump said), though the russians and most of the eastern european countries (and communist countries) will throw you in prison for 5 to 10 years for it. But we have freedom here.
Though, if someone here illegally, or legally but not as a citizen, is caught burning the flag, they should be tarred and feathered and permanently booted from the country.