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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (114142)	6/29/2009 12:17:20 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541429

We need serious conversation from opponents. And that will be elicited by ridicule and hyperbole? Taunt them into behaving like grownups? It doesn't compute. Krugman will be grist for all the winger talk jocks trying to whip up a further frenzy, not informed debate.

To: JohnM who wrote (114142)	6/29/2009 12:31:09 PM
From: Steve Lokness	Respond to of 541429

John; The opponents on the floor of the House did not speak from a different understanding of the science And the proponents spoke with an understanding of the science? You don't see that as coming across as ...we're right and you're wrong nananna. All that Krugman's argument does is piss people off and send people into their corners. This is what Obama is trying so hard to change - he needs and deserves a chance to do that. To elevate the argument to one of science to get Americans to work together is the only chance THE ONLY CHANCE to get to meaningful change. Just as Krugman pounded Obama on his original stimulus plan, he is doing it again with energy policy with congress. With his mind, he could and should do a lot better. steve

To: JohnM who wrote (114142)	6/29/2009 1:08:51 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541429

I, obviously, don't join you in that judgment You don't??? :)) I believe that there IS serious conversation in academic circles. But at our level, many people decide based on one particularly convincing argument and then choose only to see what supports it, or on ideological grounds, or on semantics. To me, lots of the stuff written is noise and posturing. And we sure have no reason to believe that either side of Congress is intelligent or honest enough to really get it. Krugman's point about that is no doubt true. But when you start a column with BETRAYAL! you set up an emotional reaction, not an intellectual one. I was reading an article at PfP the other day that offered a more scientific stance from the other side. (Well, I think it did, what do I know?) But this part sounds a lot like my roomie's POV. Interesting, the scientist speaking is from MIT... dunno if she knows him. Long article here: Message 25701457 Addressing the scientific debate, Lindzen drew the line between the mostly accepted issues (CO2’s rise from 280ppmv to 380ppmv since start of industrial age, global mean temperature anomaly increase of 0.5-0.8°C in that time, etc) and those in conflict, such as whether the warming is sufficiently large to exclude natural origin and are the proposed policies of relevance to climate per se. Lindzen insists that the public discussion conflates the non-serious with the serious issues “to the detriment of significant meaning,” and offers Gore’s slide show as an example of “this intentional and misleading confusion.” Lindzen explained why the process behind the U.N’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) claim of man’s responsibility for the warming since 1954 is “an embarrassment.” First they created a number of models which could not “reasonably simulate known patterns of natural behavior (such as El Niño (ENSO), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO)), claiming that such models nonetheless accurately depicted natural internal climate variability.” Then, when those models failed to replicate the warming episode from the mid seventies through the mid nineties, they proclaimed it proof that “forcing was necessary and that the forcing must have been due to man.” And they relied upon those same “existing poorly performing models” which are fraught with “errors in the feedback factors” to make their argument that “sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 could be anything from 1.5 to 5°C based on the claimed range of results from different models.” What we see, then, concludes Lindzen, is that the very foundation of the issue of global warming is wrong. S. Fred Singer added that once you recognize that we’re dealing with natural and not human forces all the to-do about this is nonsense. Attempts to mitigate CO2 -- which is not a pollutant – are pointless, very expensive and completely ineffective. They’ll have no effect on the climate and in fact will have little effect on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. ---