Winning arguments with AGW deniers/ 2011

[Sixstrings]

Well said 6Strings.
The whole process of clear thinking is put out of whack by emotionalised issues and there isn't much more of an emotive topic than this. That IS something which needs to be acknowledged and which AGW lobbyists need to keep front and center as we communicate the message.

Genuine mitigation means giving things up, including more of your money over to the government. In the case of cap and trade, Goldman Sachs would get their skim and Hugo Chavez would get a check -- Chavez may or may not actually reduce emissions.

I think this debate is doomed to be emotional, it involves money and people buying less Stuff. That's a tall order there, raising taxes and trying to turn the tide of consumerism. Only hope I see is that Lovelock is wrong and increasing energy efficiency and gradual progress will be good enough.

(but don't let me bum you guys out, who knows maybe the general public will come around in a few years and be ready for serious mitigation)

[Keith_McClary]

Genuine mitigation means giving things up

Suppose your doctor tells you you need to give some things up, otherwise you have a high probability of personal doom.

Would you respond in the same way?

[Homesteader]

Genuine mitigation means giving things up, including more of your money over to the government.

Surely you can be more creative than pulling that old line out?

[mos6507]

If there weren't an agenda attached, if every "inconvenient truth" talk didn't follow the same pattern of scare the hell out of 'em

You don't get it, Six. Do you understand anything about human psychology? Frog in the pot syndrome? This is a clear-cut case of frog in the pot. People don't see the downstream effects. Therefore they don't feel an existential threat. They treat environmentalists as scare-mongers because there is a disconnect between what the computer models tell us and what our flawed short-term psychology tells us when we're shoveling the damn snow or being warned or dealing with an arctic cold snap (as I am right now).

So when exactly do you think might be the right time to strike an apocalyptic tone that doesn't come across as Chicken Little? Even after the methane bomb goes off, the general public will still feel the weather is vaguely in an acceptable range (with the weirdness always still being chalked up to acts of God).

When we realize that things are really bad, it will be too late to do anything about it. So it's not the failure of scientists, Six, it's the failure of our own brain's wiring to evaluate dangers. Tragedy of the commons. Yeast in the petri dish.

Sure, people don't like being insulted, but if the shoe fits...

The problem is you keep portraying joe sixpack as a group of people who need to be courted and seduced and appeased into acting. You can't do this because the nature of the problem does not present itself with a way out that is attractive to people. It doesn't matter whether you use carbon taxes, carbon credits, or anything else. No matter how you slice it, it's powerdown and it's gonna feel like a sacrifice. People won't do that unless they feel the cost of not sacrificing is greater than the cost of sacrificing (think WWII rationing).

And that means that you HAVE to amp up the threat to a level that breaks through the frog in the pot complacency.

If that means that the message gets tuned out as Chicken Little, then you're at least no worse off than if you said nothing, because nobody was gonna do anything anyway!

But instead what I'm seeing is all of this judging of the style and tactics of environmentalism, like it's American Idol. "If you just smile a little more, maybe Joe Sixpack will turn down his thermostat."

It doesn't work that way. It's not style. It's content, and the facts are the facts so there's no changing of the content without avoiding giving people the cold hard truth, which is what real manipulation is all about. To downplay the risks and oversell the optimistic scenarios if we all do what we're being asked to do. That's where I'm currently at odds with the TT movement, that it's manipulative the way a used car salesman doesn't want you to know the car's got a bad clutch.

Lovelock is one of the only guys who actually says "die-off" point blank, and gets excoriated as a malthusian for doing so. Scientists hide behind euphamisms like "it will get bad, catastrophic, etc..." WE know what they mean, but they don't want to come right out and say "die-off". Even James Hansen shies away from that sort of talk.

[dohboi]

Well put, mos. Except I think the brightest scientists are using the strongest language because they have the most accurate take on things. Remember even they could be wrong on the optimistic side.

Denialists always assume any uncertainty (and science always has uncertainty) implies that things are going to be better than the scary projections. But the likelihood, for example, that temp increase per doubling is less than 2 degrees C is vanishingly low, and the likelihood that it is considerably higher is much greater.

Uncertainty is not necessarily our friend.

[vision-master]

Ice age......

[Lore]

Global Warming continues....

Cold comfort: Canada's record-smashing mildness
The largest anomalies here exceed 21°C (37.8°F) above average, which are very large values to be sustained for an entire month.


Surface temperature anomalies for the period 17 December 2010 to 15 January 2011 show impressive warmth across the Canadian Arctic. (Image courtesy NOAA/ESRL/PSD Map Room.)
http://www2.ucar.edu/currents/cold-comf ... g-mildness

[vision-master]

Ice age a coming......

Russian scientist predicts global cooling

MOSCOW, Aug. 25 (UPI) -- A Russian scientist predicts a period of global cooling in coming decades, followed by a warmer interval.

Khabibullo Abdusamatov expects a repeat of the period known as the Little Ice Age. During the 16th century, the Baltic Sea froze so hard that hotels were built on the ice for people crossing the sea in coaches.

The Little Ice Age is believed to have contributed to the end of the Norse colony in Greenland, which was founded during an interval of much warmer weather.

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2006/08 ... z1BxzNR2Sc

[scas]

"They expect the cooling to begin within a few years and to reach its peak between 2055 and 2060"

That report is from 5 years ago and still no cooling. Who knew random Russian scientists were scammers? I don't know why I bother to reply to your posts, it's always pseudoscience.

[Lore]

My advice Mr. Abdussamatov, is lay off the vodka.

Abdussamatov claims that "global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy—almost throughout the last century—growth in its intensity." This view contradicts the mainstream scientific opinion on climate change as well as accepted reconstructions of solar activity.

He has asserted that "parallel global warmings—observed simultaneously on Mars and on Earth—can only be a straightline consequence of the effect of the one same factor: a long-time change in solar irradiance." This assertion has not been accepted by the broader scientific community, some of whom have stated that "the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations" and that it "doesn't make physical sense."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khabibullo_Abdusamatov

[vision-master]

Global Cooling Is Coming -- and Beware the Big Chill, Scientist Warns

The hottest new trend in climate change may be global cooling, some researchers say.

Contrary to the commonly held scientific conclusion that the Earth is getting warmer, Dr. Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University and author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, has unveiled evidence for his prediction that global cooling is coming soon.

“Rather than global warming at a rate of 1 F per decade, records of past natural cycles indicate there may be global cooling for the first few decades of the 21st century to about 2030,” said Easterbrook, speaking on a scientific panel discussion with other climatologists. This, he says, will likely be followed by “global warming from about 2030 to 2060,” which will then be followed by another cooling spell from 2060 to 2090.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/ ... s-warming/

[scas]

During the last 55 million years, the sun has increased its radiative intensity by 0.4%, yet the Earth has cooled 12 degrees. Can you explain this VM?

[scas]

Fox News and The Heartland Institute? That's who you go to for your climatology information VM?

[Lore]

Easterbrook is a skeptic who is taking a singular look at one temperature variable while ignoring that the evidence does not substantiate his theory as the world continues to warm due to the affects of GHGs.

Don J. Easterbrook is a geology professor emeritus at Western Washington University. From that perspective, he is skeptical of global warming. He has criticized Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth and IPCC temperature projections and has appeared on the Headline News program Glenn Beck and in the New York Times as a global warming skeptic.

He presented his research on "Glacier fluctuations, global climate change, and ocean temperature changes." at the International Conference on Climate Change NY, 2009. In a summary of this work, Easterbrook wrote: "We are entering a solar cycle of much reduced sunspots, very similar to that which accompanied the change from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age, which virtually all scientists agree was caused by solar variation. Thus, we seem to be headed for cooler temperatures as a result of reduced solar irradiance."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Easterbrook

[vision-master]

You guy's are full of it - I won't drink yer tea.

[Sixstrings]

This skeptic presentation is pretty good, all science based:

Catastrophe Denied: a Critique of Man-Made Catastrophic Global Warming Theory
http://climatemovie.s3.amazonaws.com/Catastrophe_Denied_rev_Jan_2010.wmv

I'm still keeping an open mind, here's where I am so far:

1) IPCC appears to be a quasi science / political organization. Both sides agree on the this -- the AGW catastrophe side complains that because of its politics the IPCC is too conservative since they have to run everything past China and a host of other nations to reach what is really a political consensus. The skeptic side thinks the IPCC is biased towards the other direction. So both groups raise questions about the IPCC's credibility.

2) Everything, this whole darn thing, absolutely hinges on the "runaway warming" portion of the debate. Until I have a deeper understanding on that side, I can't possibly make up my mind in good faith.

3) Arctic ice cap loss is concerning, even if the Antarctic ice is growing. I'll have to look more into that.

4) The bogus hockeystick graphs still bother me, the way they just erased the little ice age and medieval warming period. In the video I linked, the guy talks a bit about computer models and how they can be made to predict the past just by adjusting the model -- that's not proof it can predict the future though, all you've done is made a model that can get the right answer for the past.

5) In the video linked above he talks about proxy paleotemp measurements. I've read about this in some other places, and I have a problem with some of the proxies. Tree rings for example -- tree growth varies over time for lots of reasons. More CO2 in the air can speed growth so how do we know the tree rings aren't really measuring CO2 concentration rather than temperature?

On a common sense level, I feel much more comfortable with ice core data. With that they're testing captured air samples from the past. What I wonder is, why use all the proxies why not just stick to Greenland and Antarctic ice cores? All these other proxies add a lot of room for error.

6) It sounds like on the international politicking side, developing countries come right out and say they'll try to do something with the caveat "as long as it doesn't hurt the economy." That remains a big problem with mitigation proposals, a first world only solution is not a global solution there's no getting around that.

7) To refresh my knowledge of the political side, I actually checked the GOP website. They don't even have a climate or environmental section. They have a "energy" section under issues where they advocate more of everything: coal, nuclear, wind, oil. This is the only climate specific thing I could find:

We oppose so-called cap and trade legislation that would impose a national energy tax on families and small business that would kill jobs and raise utility prices.

EDIT: Other lingering doubts.. for more than a century we've been coming out of the little ice age, and we're still coming out of the little ice age so it makes sense that the planet is warming.

Also.. what is the "normal" climate anyway? The only way to pick normal is to put your finger on a graph, pick a date and decide to call that "normal." It may be "optimal" but there is no "normal." Of course, you guys say that it's human activity that will set off a runaway warming chain reaction and that's fair and I'm not sure on that. But I think most folks don't quite realize there is no "normal" climate either way, our species has already been up and down ice ages and warming periods about 4 or 5 times now.

[dohboi]

Scas, I like your graph. We owe a great debt of gratitude to India for smashing into Asia, pushing up the Himalayas, which, through weathering, steadily drew down the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere so that we could get gradual cooling over the last tens of millions of years, even as the sun was gradually warming.

We are in effect undoing this grand geological/climactic event and then some.

Maybe the global engineers can arrange to have a few more continents smash into each other really quickly in the next few years???

[vision-master]

diode, you think the deluge is myth, right?

[scas]

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/great-gl ... g-swindle/

You should watch that video Sixstrings.

[Sixstrings]

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/great-global-warming-swindle/

You should watch that video Sixstrings.

I'm trying to watch it. So far it's a sham-job.. first part is attacking the filmmaker on all kinds of things that have nothing to do with the argument at hand.

Then when they interview him, the interviewer isn't being objective at all he's so biased it's just a debate where the pro-AGW side gets to cut the other guy off and control all the questions -- because he's the "interviewer."

The interviewer won't let the filmmaker talk about the hockeystick graph, much less allow the conversation to get into the nitty-gritty of paleoclimatic proxy data.

The BIGGEST disservice to this whole debate is the utter absence of real, objective journalism.

I'll try to finish the vid but it's hard to watch, they're not even talking science with him.

EDIT: I deleted an overly-inflammatory sentence.. it's important to keep emotion out of the discussion