Tom Toles for May 15, 2012

And the right is divorced from reality.

Or you could clean up your act enough that you can sell your carbon credits to earn some extra cash.

What falsified data?

Why not? That is what the democrats think and say to everyone else. It is also what the democrats mean when they say compromise.

Keep your fingers in your ears and keep singing loudly. More people are waking up to the lies of man made global warming. Your books have been cooked, your head liar says he invented the Internet. You even have change the name to climate change because warming is a lie. You lie about polar bears and ice. You lie about sea levels and temperatures. Your lies help ruin the world’s economy except for the countries that know your are lairs and don’t listen to you. Just go away.

True. Hence the GOP “theories” are not reality. Anthropogenic global warming, however, is not only real, it is even worse than we thought. The IPCC predictions have proven conservative for years now, as those of us know who actually read what is going on. This is not new: I can’t find the article I read last week on this, but here’s one from 2009: http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/02/14/us-climate-idUSTRE51D29E20090214Furthermore, the real “hoax” is by the coal and oil industries paying off people to diddle the data.http://www.salon.com/2012/02/17/secret_papers_turn_up_heat_on_global_warming_deniers/

Oh, you bet; it works that way—one study with jiggered results negates hundreds of actual, peer-reviewed studies leading to the same conclusion. By your logic, because ONE guy has cheated on his taxes, NONE of us have to pay them…

Ima and zoid, as on so many issues, are conservative truth deniers. Climate change is proven, and the fact that it’s man-made is proven. They’ll quote you data from fifty years ago, or from coal company paid hacks, because there’s no science whatsoever on their side. Conservatives used to have a reputation as being level-headed and rational, but they squandered it on greed and bigotry, but mostly on staring truth directly in the eye and denying it. There’s no reason left to vote Republican.

The posts on this page from the climate change deniers are really sad comments on the state of 21st century humanity. No matter how desperate the situation becomes, no matter how dangerous our behavior becomes, these knuckleheads tune in to Fox noise, suck in the lies, then spit out their shallow, old world thinking on these pages as well as to anyone who will listen. Reasonable posts, citing actual scientific research, have no impact on these guys because the big oil boys have rotted out what was left of their little pea brains. Sad, juvenile little robots, standing in the way of progress. Sad and very, very dangerous. They are to be ignored.

Dangerous, eh? Ok Tom, but I rarely hear “global warming” discussed on FNC. I was going to suggest though, the real problem is the marriage of science and politics.

HAhaha! Some of these ignorant imbecile comments sure are hilarious.

Why don’t you AGW sissies hurry up and die of fright, so we more hardy and adaptable organisms can carry on and deal with life?

lma I agree with you but with this group we on the right have to post evidence. Don’t know why the left doesn’t but here you go. http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/&http://hotair.com/archives/2011/05/15/former-alarmist-scientist-says-anthropogenic-global-warming-agw-based-on-false-science/&Here is the left point of view not an attack on ideas but an attack on the rights opinion after this has been proven. http://mediamatters.org/research/201108080030The left could not fight the science so they attacked the messenger.

Not cooperating with the president in a time of war is treason, Mitch! Remember the President Nincompoop’s “your either with us or agin’ us”

THOUSANDS of individual research projects and studies have shown HUMANS are causing climate change, regionally, and now globally, when looking at the cumulative impacts. Add in ocean acidification, and pollution, and humans, sorry, DO come out the bad guys, and the conclusion is unavoidable, except conswervatives too stupid to live.

what profiteth a man who gains the world by losing the planet?

I guess you just don’t pay attention when your strawman gets disassembled. You seem very fond of trotting it out, regardless of how many holes it’s had shot in it. Give the poor wee bundle of dead grass a rest. As I’ve said to you before: certain regions have certain ranges of temperature and certain patterns of precipitation which are not only known and chronicled, but which are relied upon – they are specifically advantageous to our primary food crops, and we have built a very large global economy around them. When we start disrupting these ranges of temperature and precipitations it results in crop failures and widespread food shortages, and sometimes destruction of property in densely populated areas, and it consequently hits the world economy hard. The idea that we demand adherence to “a precise temperature at all times” is stupid nonsense and you know it; but it is not rocket science to understand that climate effects crops and cities in the real world.

As a side note, you mention a comparison between the “debate” around the science of smoking and cancer, and the “debate” around climate change now. Are you aware that it isn’t just a similar situation, in some cases it is actually the same people being used to create doubt and confusion about the science?

I live near Mt. Rainier and I can see the effect of global warming on its glaciers. There used to be one called the Paradise Glacier. It even had caves you could walk into, underneath.

It’s completely gone now; nothing but bare rock all the way to the head of the cirque. Of course, the ignoranti will say it has nothing to do with Man, or that warming is beneficial.

If you know next to nothing about atoms and molecules, or light and its interaction with matter, AGW cannot be understood. You can’t cure stupidity

It’s later than you deniers think… the trigger may already have been pulled (to use a phrase from “Hotel since 2079”).

Vast methane ‘plumes’ seen in Arctic ocean as sea ice retreats

If you would read some science textbooks, (they don’t even have to be about AGW specifically) instead of blogs written by people even more ignorant, stupid and biased than you, you might actually learn something new.

There is hope for the future, however, eventually all you baby-boomers whose brains are way past their “use by date” will be too old and sick to work, and the SS and medicare and other communist stuff you hate will be gone. You will homeless and living under a bridge like the troll you are. Hopefully, voter ID laws will disqualify you from voting since you will be homeless.

You’re worse than a denier. Burning fossil fuels creates CO2. That’s a fact that can be calculated by chemists or measured in the laboratory. It’s just one piece of the picture of AGW, but if you deny it, belittle those who know the facts, call them liars, and claim they are falsifying data, that just brands you as an arrogant piece of excrement. If you know that CO2 isn’t created by burning fossil fuels, you’re either the biggest genius of all time, or a total idiot.

It’s one thing to be ignorant, but to be invincibly ignorant is contemptible.

God, it’s getting warm in here!

Yes, this cartoon is right on, except the elephunt is portrayed a little to quiet compared to reality. I would expect the objection to dominate the room.

Lucy’s in the sky, with dimwits. Forty days of rain, cloud heaven, gold plates, and “infallible” leaders, yep, that’s really something to count on, instead of proven facts.

There is no “falsified” data. The data have been checked and rechecked, including the original data sets, by multiple research teams. Get over it. Repeating a lie doesn’t make it true, and it’s pathetic of you that you make no attempt to even verify what you repeat.

How much science do you even understand? Do you understand that making up your mind in the absence of real information and understanding means that you are unlikely to have a good grasp of the issue? Do you ever think that maybe there might be something you could learn about?

There are probably a few dozen “reputable scientists”* (largely emeritus) who quite happily denounce the whole thing as a fraud and a scam. I’m sure you can find a few more quotes than this. There are also, however, thousands of reputable scientists who actually work and publish in the field, who not only support the consensus interpretation, but actually contribute to it. I wonder if you have any idea the actual volume of work that goes into the field, or the actual number of teams and individuals and studies. I refer you to the links above; try visiting them. While you are at it, the IPCC has a fairly complete explanation of the basis for its conclusions, freely available.

It’s a very similar situation to the fact that there are a small handful of trained biologists who denounce evolution as “impossible” while the other 40,000 or so life scientists actually just get on with things, using evolution all the time.

Something for you to think about: I’ve worked with academics for years, and I can tell you that 30 academics in the same department, in the same university are completely incapable of maintaining a conspiracy to keep getting free coffee. You are asking people to believe that tens of thousands of researchers in a dozen or so different fields, in thousands of different institutions in well over a hundred different countries, speaking dozens of different languages and with at least that many different political and religious affiliations, are all in on a conspiracy to defraud the public and control society – noting, of course, that all these people are also taxpayers.

And you apparently find this more credible than simply believing that there is broad agreement in the field because the data all point in the same general direction, but that there are a few malcontents, ideologically rigid deniers, and industry-paid lobbyists who have personal reasons not to want to accept the conclusions.

Really? You really have such a hard time with this?

*Note that many of the “reputable scientists” who denounce climate science are not in relevant fields; it’s a false authority, given that mechanical engineers and microbiologists have as little to say about climatology as climatologists have to say about better gear design or mutations in S. pneumoniae.

In other words, you truly have no idea how much data we have, you know nothing but strawman and stereotype about the real policy recommendations, and you happily (and with great determination) ignore the real work done by skeptics to examine the real data. Instead, you demand a televised “debate” for the lay audience to vote on what they think reality is, as if this has any effect on what reality actually is? 0_o And you refuse to believe anything which has not been presented to you in the format you demand??

I would genuinely prefer it if you tried to understand science and logic a little. Or more than a little, really. Asking too much?

Well hey, you picked one relevant thing there, perhaps by accident. Excellent. Let’s talk about orbital eccentricities.

So, tell me what you know about Milankovitch factors. If you know what these are, can you tell me where we are in the Milankovitch cycles, and how much of past climate change is explained by these cycles, both in terms of occurrence and magnitude. Please, I wait with bated breath.

::sigh::

There are three Milankovitch cycles, not one, ice ages do not happen 25,000 years apart, and in short, you are in no way serious about caring what the science is.

Ok, seriously, explain something to me, please. Why would you consider someone who didn’t understand the basics of a subject competent to form a valid opinion on that subject?

Don’t need your permission to comment to Lynne. But I guess I hit a nerve, huh?You haven’t progressed beyond the “science” of the 6 century BCE. It’s too much work for someone your age to learn new things, so your only option is to live in the “demon-haunted world.”

Posting a link to a Wikipedia article does not indicate any understanding on your part, and given that you got your single-sentence description of the “Milankovitch cycle” (supposedly singular) completely wrong, I’m not inclined to believe that you have any grasp of it at all.

You seem to spend plenty of time on these boards writing comments; if you understood what the subject was at all, you could surely spare three sentences to sum it up semi-accurately. Especially since you claim that it’s “not that complicated.”

I’m going to ask you this again, since you ignored it:

Why would you consider someone who didn’t understand the basics of a subject competent to form a valid opinion on that subject?

…Besides, YOU are the one who said “what do you want to talk about” and offered a list of possible subjects. I got the impression that you wanted to demonstrate that you understood some science. Maybe that was a bad move on your part, given that it doesn’t seem to be working for you.