[Keith_McClary]

It's the The Borowitz Report and I got snookered.

Sort of cheating to publish it on April 5. It's getting harder and harder to tell the news from satire these days. There oughta be a law that satire is only allowed on April 1.

[ennui2]

Borowitz Report is legendary for being presented without proper disclaimers to warn people that it's satire. Saying "The news, reshuffled" with a smiling caricature of the guy isn't enough. It looks too much like real news and it's irresponsible journalism.

[Keith_McClary]

Borowitz Report is legendary for being presented without proper disclaimers to warn people that it's satire. Saying "The news, reshuffled" with a smiling caricature of the guy isn't enough. It looks too much like real news and it's irresponsible journalism.

[dinopello]

Here is Maher's take.

[onlooker]

You have a point. It's called kick the can down the road and hope you're not around by then to catch the hot potato.

I pity the poor suckers left in charge with no solution other than to suggest to their constituency to grab ankles firmly with both hands, put head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.

Great responses throughout this thread. Yes these issues do not garner any votes they can only take away votes. Excuse me voters we have two major problems we can do nothing about unless you all want us to halt the economy in it's tracks to combat GW. This is the part when the tomato throwing begins
Besides as was said the political-economic system is now so corrupt that those within in are just trying to get theirs while the getting is good. That means maintain the status quo for as long as possible. But you know what who cares at this point as even if we wanted too nothing can be done really about these two issues. It is like a runaway train approaching the wall too late to stop it. So we all are going to need to be pitied within not too long.

[dinopello]

Pope, GOP collide on Climate Change

This should be fun to watch.

The Vatican is set to release Pope Francis' highly anticipated encyclical -- an official document delivering teachings from the Pope -- on the environment and climate change this week. Marking the second such document from the Pope since he assumed the papacy in March 2013, the encyclical is expected to cast the battle against global warming as a moral obligation.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, one of many candidates vying for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, represents a faction of the GOP that's skeptical that global warming is a real phenomenon.

"The satellite data demonstrate that there has been no significant warming whatsoever for 17 years," Cruz said earlier this year, making the case that the "global warming alarmists" don't base their claims on facts.

Other candidates, like Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, have also expressed serious skepticism about the theory of global warming. "Someone is an ignoramus who would say, 'Oh, we've had three hurricanes this year, this proves that somehow the climate is warming,'" Paul said last year.

Santorum, who landed in hot water for criticizing the Pope for weighing in on climate change, said this month that he's disturbed by scientists who say the debate is "settled."

"All the predictions that were made 15 years ago, none of them have come true," Santorum said on Fox News. "So all of this certainty -- this is what bothers me about this debate."

"I don't think the science is clear of what percentage is man-made and what percentage is natural. It's convoluted," former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is expected to launch his White House bid on Monday, said last month in New Hampshire.

Fellow Floridian and declared presidential candidate Marco Rubio has followed a similar tack: "Humans are not responsible for climate change in the way some of these people out there are trying to make us believe," the senator recently said on CBS.

[Lore]

No longer interesting, just dumb on the conservative politicians part. You have to figure it's pretty much over when the leader of a major religion is opposed to your views.

[Dybbuk]

No longer interesting, just dumb on the conservative politicians part.

It's just a script they read, because of their political agenda. I would guess that most of them know that AGW is real. But the truth is irrelevant in politics.

[Lore]

No longer interesting, just dumb on the conservative politicians part.

It's just a script they read, because of their political agenda. I would guess that most of them know that AGW is real. But the truth is irrelevant in politics.

You are correct and there in lies the true crime.

[Keith_McClary]

Tomgram: Naomi Oreskes, Why Climate Deniers Are Their Own Worst Nightmares
Posted by Naomi Oreskes at 7:57am, June 16, 2015.

[KaiserJeep]

Bill Maher is a f*cking liar. I watched the clip and I know.

I KNOW already that most of you flaming rectums think that you can tap into the Internet and your f*cking big dome intellects will let you filter completely error-free the TRUTH from all of the BS.

I am going to say this once. I was born in 1951, and I was in Junior High School when the great majority of Climate Scientists were screaming that we were about to induce an Ice Age. They were blaming a wide variety of causes, everything from paving over grasslands to acid rain to algae blooms caused by fertilizer runoffs. Some were even talking about the then new technology high altitude jets - the Boeing 707 was the popular target - destroying the ozone layer and causing the planet to first cloud up worse than Venus, and then freeze.

It was not "one NewsWeek article" as Maher puts it. Popular Science magazine had a cover with glaciers crunching over Manhattan, toppling the tall buildings. Scientific American published the latest and greatest on the approaching Ice Age nearly every month. Even Boy's Life, a publication from the Boy Scouts of America, was offering helpful hints about waterproofing frame structures, then earth-berming them so that you could survive the coming harsh winters.

This was not the first time when the vast consensus of scientists was wrong about something. That has happened many times and will continue to happen, because the Universe is an infinite place and our understanding of it is finite and grows slowly. It so happens that this more recent mistake was about climate - and embarrassingly, was wrong in the exact opposite way that the current crop of AGW fanboys is wrong.

Now all of you are foaming at the mouth, ready to jump in my sh*t, and tell me that I am WRONG about the things I personally experienced, and that you can prove that I am wrong, by linking me to some BS text somewhere on the internet, - or Bill Maher - and that the virtual internet truth trumps my life and personal memories of what I experienced.

Sorry folks, time to face up to what you don't want to think about: the Internet is a virtual reality and it is being edited in real time by millions of people, with thousands of different and often opposing agendas.

You can find some versions of the truth in the approximately 50,000 online History texts in the Project Gutenberg archive:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/subject/2091

...including everything I ever told you about the US Civil War and the origins of the two major US political parties. But unfortunately, everything that has happened since 1900 or so is NOT History, it is an entire other topic called Current Events.

Project Gutenberg does have a Current Events section, but it is a contentious place, full of academic catfights and with texts recorded by people wearing Red and Blue colored glasses, blaming each other for the world's problems.

We are now arriving at some form of consensus about the events of the period from 1900 up to the Great War. Soon a few of the many versions of the events of that time will be accepted as History, aka the academic consensus of the interpretation of events that happened then. Which is not, after all, the same as objective reality.

In another 50 years or so, we will have decided what History will record of the widespread popular panic about an Ice Age, induced by mankind's unwise and widespread impacts on the natural world, in the 1980's. Some of the same AGW fanboys of today are very anxious that you should forget their roles in that regrettable period of the recent events. Because that would make their efforts to produce a panic today more credible.

In another century, we will know whether the AGW fanboys were wrong again, or partly right, or entirely correct. But in fact the political winds are shifting, and it is unlikely that the next couple of decades will have politicians in power who believe in renewable energy or climate change.

They are NOT denying PO or CC, they are uncertain about it, and changing the subject, and effectively banning debate, as with all polarizing issues that would divide the vote in the coming election. I can tell you now, both major parties will not have PO and CC as part of their party political planks. Politicians of both major parties will make passing mention of PO and CC in speeches, taking whatever position garners the most votes from that audience, at that time, in that place. The following week in a different place, a different position will be mentioned.

Most importantly, no significant change to public policy will be made by either party, because that might curtail the revenue stream from the oligarchs through the lobbyists to the politicians who have won office in the coming election.

That is the way our oligarchy works.

[Lore]

I am going to say this once. I was born in 1951, and I was in Junior High School when the great majority of Climate Scientists were screaming that we were about to induce an Ice Age. They were blaming a wide variety of causes, everything from paving over grasslands to acid rain to algae blooms caused by fertilizer runoffs. Some were even talking about the then new technology high altitude jets - the Boeing 707 was the popular target - destroying the ozone layer and causing the planet to first cloud up worse than Venus, and then freeze.

You should rephrase that, as in, you're going to say this once again. I was born in 1950 and there wasn't a majority of climate scientists screaming we are about to enter an ice age. This is just something you heard and keep repeating here. You picked it up in the denier press where it has also been debunked many times. Your're ad hominems, and endless repetition of this myth doesn't lend any more credibility to it.

1970s ice age predictions were predominantly media based. The majority of peer reviewed research at the time predicted warming due to increasing CO2.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age ... ediate.htm

[dinopello]

It is fun to look back and see what was going on in those days of global cooling

Newsweek - April 28, 1975

Here is Scientific American's Take on it in 2014

How the "Global Cooling" Story Came to Be

Gwynne was the science editor of Newsweek 39 years ago when he pulled together some interviews from scientists and wrote a nine-paragraph story about how the planet was getting cooler.

Fox News loves to cite it. So does Rush Limbaugh. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., has quoted the story on the Senate floor.

Gwynne, now 72, is a bit chagrinned that from a long career of distinguished science and technology reporting, he is most remembered for this one story.

"When I wrote this story I did not see it as a blockbuster," Gwynne recalled. "It was just an intriguing piece about what a certain group in a certain niche of climatology was thinking."

And, revisionist lore aside, it was hardly a cover story. It was a one-page article on page 64. It was, Gwynne concedes, written with a bit of over-ventilated style that sometimes marked the magazine's prose: "There are ominous signs the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically..." the piece begins, and warns of a possible "dramatic decline in food production."

And, Gwynne protested: "I wrote this in 1975!"

And then all the other outlets in 1975 ran with it

NY Times - May 21, 1975

and that fun cover of the glaciers crushing Manhatten...

[KaiserJeep]

I knew you flaming reality deniers would jump right on this, and use as your evidence the virtual reality of the internet.

Nor was it something I just heard, nor was it a single source. We spent four days discussing the topic in Science class, and it was all over the popular press, Walter Cronkite mentioned the "controversial theory", and even our parents had heard of it.

I even told you how you would react, and you did. But obviously, you never thought about it. Maybe some of the readers of this thread will actually think rather than reflexively act.

One can hope. One can hope that reality still has a place in the world, and cannot be altered in real time. It is far from certain.

[Lore]

I knew you flaming reality deniers would jump right on this, and use as your evidence the virtual reality of the internet.

I even told you you would do so, and you did. But obviously, you never thought about it. Maybe some of the readers of this thread will actually think rather than reflexively act.

One can hope.

The evidence is not virtual, it's the concrete facts. If you keep repeating yourself expect the same response. There is only one truth and you can't change that by repeatedly posting the same nonsense.

[KaiserJeep]

Just because you read something on the internet, and can still link to it, does not make that thing true.

[Lore]

Just because you read something on the internet, and can still link to it, does not make that thing true.

You're on the Internet, then why should I believe you?

[KaiserJeep]

Because I was there, I experienced what I am talking about first hand, I was scared by it, and I have never forgotten the circumstances or the reporting of the pending crisis. Which was all BS as it turned out, even though it was prevailing opinion - and now is just an inconvenient incident that the scientists involved would like you to forget ever happened.

It was a valuable lesson in objective reality. It was the first time I realized that words in print could not be trusted. A lesson that none of you who are still protesting have yet learned.

[Lore]

Because I was there, I experienced what I am talking about first hand, I was scared by it, and I have never forgotten the circumstances or the reporting of the pending crisis. Which was all BS as it turned out, even though it was prevailing opinion - and now is just an inconvenient incident that the scientists involved would like you to forget ever happened.

It was a valuable lesson in objective reality. It was the first time I realized that words in print could not be trusted. A lesson that none of you who are still protesting have yet learned.

I was there too and wasn't scared by it. Are you saying we should believe you because you were afraid about what was written in a few magazines? Better turn off Fox News then.

Then again that's why science uses peer review and not what's written in the press.

Here, you can read about the study right here.
https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf

Of course you're always welcome to conduct your own research to claim differently and submit it for review.

[KaiserJeep]

That was a good dozen years after the period I was in JHS, which was 1963-64. Which was when the popular media was reporting it, when Walter Cronkite commented on it, and when it made the rounds as dinner party conversation.

Which period is not even covered in the document you linked. Nor were any of the papers referenced even written then.

Clear miss on your part.