Aren't you talking out of both sides of your mouth? Here this morning you're gungho on AGW. But the same morning on the POE thread, you're poopooing AGW as a distraction from the energy independence angle you pretend is your major concern:
Message 26363989
About that methane which global warming is supposedly releasing - it was warmer than now for most of the holocene:
So how is it that our current warming is going to create catastrophic methane release?
Re. the AGW theory in general:
New circumstances and information justify changing positions for open minded people without positions they're emotionally committed to. I thought AGW sounded reasonable myself when I first heard of it 30 some years ago. It wasn't till I learned much more that I came to realize it as overly simplistic. The halt in warming for 15 years (recently admitted by former arch CRU druid Phil Jones), the problems with the temperature measurements (see Anthony Watts surfacestations project) and more importantly, the one-sided adjustments made to them (the recent warming temperatures comes mostly and in many places only as a result of adjustments made to the raw data), as well as the climategate emails .... all this have exposed weaknesses in the AGW position and a lack of scientific objectivity and rigor on the part of major climate advocates. Its certainly changed my opinion. I'd come over the years to regard AGW as simply an overly simplistic theory. Now I realize there's been actual scientific fraud going on (consider the Jones,Wong study, the Mann chart, the Briffa cherry picked tree(s)). Reasonable minded people ought to be willing to change their opinion with so much new information revealed.
Further, the appeal to authority (science has spoken, concensus has been reached, there's no doubt, the debate is over), the ad hominem attacks on skeptics (skeptics are paid by oil companies, are "deniers", "climate criminals"), the fear-mongering (innumerable conflicting claims of harms with little scientific justification, the claims human civilization will collapse, the earth is doomed, etc) have been the basis for spreading AGW since Senator Gore first began trying to browbeat MIT's Richard Lindzen in Senate hearings almost 20 years ago. Similar things occurred with other bogus "scientific" fear campaigns - like the one where imminent catastrophe was preached from over-population in the 1970's. Some of the same folks like Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren were involved in both of those campaigns. Further, the fact that EVERYTHING (snowstorms and the lack of snow, for example) are all put forward as evidence of AGW and that nothing could therefore be contrary evidence is another indicator AGW belief isn't really a science driven. |
