Tom Toles for October 30, 2012

Yup, just ignore the last 50 years of changes, regional, and finally global. Gee, it’s about those Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, of 1969, when folks WERE starting to pay attention, but then went back to sleep, while the "energy industry’ ran the show.

Well I guess the record number of people on food stamps right now ARE thinking about more urgent things.

Actual scientists have found that as far back as can be measured, (over 5000 years now) weather patterns follow solar flare activities….look that up. And look up how the wind farms are killing raptors (you know, birds of prey). Also, the extinction you speak about came about because the ice age killed dinosaurs that had no internal temperature regulation mechanism, look that up. It is your liberal close minded views that need to cycle through extinction. We need thinkers to actually work through environmental issues and coexist with nature, not a bunch of hacks who want to regulate and assess fines just so they can have power.

Oh, like the “thinkers” at AEI and others who are paid by the oil companies to refute real science? Unfortunately that kind of prostitution is legal, if still immoral. Any new technology brings other problems to be solved. They are already working on turbines with minimal blade length to try and solve the raptor problem. I suppose you want to go back to more nuclear power? We still have material stored all around this country that will be dangerous for thousands of years, yet Congress cannot get its act together to find a proper storage place. Yucca Mountain is out of play now, but there is no talk of what else to do.

@Morty, the “not” in the first panel is implied in the second, so it’s like “Not now, either.”

Vote Republican for bigger and better storms as they ignore science!!

Hey! You’re right!

Bill Nye the Science Guy did some interviews on climate change recently.The research he cites disproves much of the anticlimate change ‘proofs’ noted above.Even if it is a cycle, and not effected by man….the first I agree with, the second I don’t…. why aren’t we doing the job creating and life saving things we can do to resist the cycle of devastation? If a meteor the size of a football stadium, or bigger, is going to hit earth, do you put resources into launching an effort to divert it from hitting us, or do you ignore it because messing with the meteor isn’t good for jobs…oh, and it may be God’s will?Bad things are happening to our planet, we have the science and talent to address those things. Why do conservatives resist doing so to the degree we read even in this one toon’s comments?C.

Like the old story of the man with the leaky roof: His neighbor asks him, “Why don’t you fix your roof?” “I can’t today, it’s pouring rain.” “Then why don’t you fix it when it isn’t raining?” “It doesn’t leak then!”

A famous weatherman named John Coleman told me this climate change stuff is part of the natural cycle. He’s a scientist and really knows his stuff. His degree was in journalism and I think he graduated in 1872, but he has lots of experience with maps and lighting bolt graphics, so I’ll trust him over a bunch of hippies in lab coats.Meteors smashing into the earth are part of the natural cycle, too. Besides, it would be futile to try and stop a huge meteor from crashing into the earth. We have more urgent problems, like the price of a gin and tonic at my country club.

Motivemagnus: Are you sure Harper’s Conservatives don’t? They generally seem to be a branch plant of US Republicans.

There is no climate change. There is no global warming. There is no evolution. There is no gravity. The sun revolves around the earth. So sayeth the ignorati

Forty years ago, scientists were predicting another ice age.

i haven’t got a dog in this fight, so just for the record, after all the dust settles, can EITHER side provide sufficient evidence in this case?

Simply put, last year’s Irene, and now Sandy fit right into the main models predicting anthropogenic Climate Change, and impacts, period. Denier mythologies, and twisted logic by misinterpreting “science”, are garbage.

There’s more to come folks, and that idiot MItt wants to privatize, or do away with, FEMA. Now Bush adding 33 agencies to create “Homeland Security” was, and remains, idiotic, but FEMA in the last four years has done a pretty good job, it just took and administration with brains to appoint decent people to make it work.

In Bush’s first year, he said he wanted FEMA done away with. He thought he had done it with by putting it under “Homeland Security” and appointing a dog show expert in charge of it. As much as he tried to ignore Katrina by barbequeing in Texas, it brought the necessity of FEMA to the public eye and ended his desire to eliminate it.

Check Ryan’s budget.

No climatologist sees this as a “cycle.” There’s nothing like it that has ever happened before at this rate.

So where are the states supposed to get the money? They’re claiming budget crises, yet cutting taxes to help “create” jobs! Our Declaration guarantees the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Without a strong federal government, we get disparate rights from state to state. (Jim Crow anyone?) This argument fits right in with the drown it in a bathtub crowd. Let’s let the states defend themselves, levy tariffs, etc. while we’re at it!

Bush rightly deserves blame for gutting FEMA. It was highly regarded before he tried to eliminate it. Thank God professionals are running it now. Anybody with a brain can see that sending money to the states to deal with a superstorm like Sandy is idiotic. There’s an editorial in todays NY Times “A Big Storm Requires a Big Government”. How many people in Sandy’s path do you think would argue with that?

Repugs have always ignored science. That’s what they do. Of course, he supported scientific consensus before he was against it to appease the Tea-Bots. As soon as I saw this cartoon, I knew there just HAD to be a time when he agreed that climate change was facilitated by human activity. One little google search, and BINGO:

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/romney-human-activity-contributes-to-global-warming

As Bill Clinton said: O has failed on his promise to turn back the seas. Another promise unkept.

As Scooby-Doo says ‘HUH?" Only one man ever turned back the sea, and only one walked on water. Both sides have a tendency to make the latest candidate into God. Obama never said he’d “turn back the sea”. Clinton said that in reference to the snark from the right.

Over 97% of climate scientists — the RELEVANT scientists — believe that Anthropogenic Global Warming is occurring. Recently, one of the few QUALIFIED high-profile deniers, Richard Muller, whose research was even funded by the Koch brothers, finally said this:“CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”Not only that, but his results were HIGHER than those of the IPCC, which comes as no surprise to those of us who are actual scientists following this; the IPCC has been consistently proved conservative in its estimates of climate change. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all)This site is run by one of the leading researchers, who puts his data up for others to see as well: www.realclimate.orgThe time for “proof” is long past. The time for action may be past as well, but I am an optimist. There are things we can do.