Tom Toles for October 29, 2009

The last Japanese soldiers kept fighting long after the war was over, but they did nothing to delay the end of the war.

The climate change deniers are still fighting, and are still delaying any real action to fix what is a real, and very important, problem.

Even if the climate is getting warmer globally…what exactly does that mean? By the time we would know for sure it will be too late or you will have made some of the people pay more for living in an advanced society; thus insuring the revolving door of inequity. Yes, I deny “global climate change”! I deny that you have the ability to know what is in fact a “catastrophic” climate change. I DENY you the right to manipulate other peoples lives in the name of your egotistical vanity.

seriously CA? Deny it all you like, it is a problem, but even if you dont, there is no reason you shouldnt clean up your act too. Even if we took climate change off the table, that does not remove the dangers of desertification of previously areable land as a result of over production of meat, asthma and other breathing problems caused by pollution, or any of the other thousands of health issues caused by heavy metals, carcinogens and other toxins being produced by the massive over production and consumption of uneccessary consumer goods. Even if climate change was sped up by human activity, that does not mean that there arent secondary and proven consequences for our ill behaviour. So to put it bluntly, climate change or not, we need to clean up our acts.

Wow. Just… wow. I guess you guys’ve never heard of this thing they have in science called “empirical evidence”, huh?

Climate change is and will become most evident at the poles. Winters in Alaska have, on average, become 5 degrees warmer in the last sixty years. You can look this up on the internet for free - it is recorded temperature data and has nothing to do with computer models.

I agree that the environmental movement is pretentious and arrogant in some ways, but that doesn’t mean we should do nothing. In my experience, the fiercest deniers of climate change are also lazy, heavy consumers. Be honest with yourselves and the rest of the world. Tell it like it is. You don’t -want- there to be a climate problem because you’re too cheap to spend any money fixing it and you can’t be bothered to change your wasteful, self-indulgent lifestyle.

I’m all for innovation and “greening” up. But that would already be taking place right now if the American government hadn’t turned business into an all or nothing process. If there was more competition smaller more efficient companies would have already shouldered out the corrupt big corporations with their inefficient unions. I just heard Boeing is going to open a production facility in S.C. ; work for hire, hmmmm? Efficient and greener cars would already be established if consumers wanted them; but, no, our business people have to negotiate through a capricious legal and governmental system that never delivers anyway. You Libs talk big here with your super-sensitive nomenclature and actually sound like you have reality on your side; but, it’s just another shell game. The only reason “environmentalism” is a going concern with the rest of the world is because it gives the governments of our competitors the opportunity to block our exports…The other nations like China do not care. On the other hand, I’ve heard you Libs compliment the Chinese on their “green” innovations and you claim they are farther ahead than us…Could it be because they also have the money and productive freedom to do it?

^I agree with Scott. Slave-to-conformity, I have looked up so many stupid sites offered by you Libs saying how it proves global warming - only to find vaguely worded BS,. usually from whiners without climatology experience. Here’s what a rational person would do: wait til there’s proof.

What gets me are the people like Sarah Palin and the republican mayor of Helena Montana - who both acknowledge climate change is real and having devastating impacts where they live yet say “Who cares if it’s man-caused or not? Stop trying to lay blame; we have to do something!”

Ummm… If it’s not man-made and really is a natural trend then what can you do? If you want to try and “fix” it, you pretty much have to admit we’re causing it.

I find it hilarious that a few of you are trying to claim science on your side - like you, Canis. churchill, I’m afraid your report is indeed completely escapable - because the research doesn’t rely on one source of data. Some of the other data points include: Satellite scans Existing patterns over time Arctic and Antarctic melting patterns now and in the past Precipitation patterns Direct measurement of greenhouse gases from the past and now Measurement of greenhouse gas and other atmospheric chemical levels from past times through, for example, ice-core samples (which can also indicate melting patterns) and rock samples …And those are the ones I, a non-expert, can pull off the top of my head. I know there are far more. Yes, it is complex, but more and more data is piling up, whereas the skeptics seem to be relying on cherry-picking and trying to pick flaws in the data. No data is perfect, folks. What will you accept, pup - ten degree increase over a century? The elimination of Arctic ice? Flooding the cities? What’s the number - eight of the ten warmest years on record are in the last ten? The patterns are mounting, and that’s what is important, not the one-off variations, mistakes, and glitches. And I notice none of you are referring to the AP study - they gave the data that supposedly supports “global cooling” to a set of statisticians without explaining the data (in “blind” conditions), and, whaddya know – all three independently rejected the “global cooling” conclusion. http://tinyurl.com/yf4xnj6 - full story http://tinyurl.com/ykmgteu - more details on the administration

Once again, “climate change” is the term used in the comic. Ha, the climate has “changed” regularly throughout history…why don’t they still press the panic button about “global warming”? It IS global man-made “warming”, right?

http://www.petitionproject.org/

Eight of the last ten years are warmer than ever before? The Telegraph and other publications have printed numerous studies that indicate that warming plateaued in 1998. This past summer was one of the coldest in the United States in the last twenty, that’s for sure.

If global warming is not our falt… we’re hosed. If it is our fault….we’re still hosed. Consider:

The technology for carbon capture has not been proven industrially viable. More fuel will need to be burned if it does work to overcome its inefficiencies. You have to convince every power plant on the planet to install the system. A piping network as extensive as the world’s existing natural gas piping system will have to be constructed to transport the stuff. They aren’t real sure if trying to stuff 50,000,000,000 tons of CO2 in to a salt dome will work. Buy sun screen.

If the house were on fire, the deniers would run to the kitchen and stand alongside the fidge cause it would be cool there.

HQ et all, would any amount of evidence ever convince you? I’m curious - I mean what if ever scientist in the world who wasn’t in the employ of a carbon-producing corporation said that human-caused global climate destabilization was real and that it harmed us – would that make you do anything differently? I guess I’m beginning to think that no evidence would ever convince you because you have no interest in believing it.

The righties like Puppy, Howie, Harley and Scott are convinced that the Rapture will occur before they, or their (shudder!) offspring are hurt by the climate change.

let’s take that very high standard for emperical evidence for proof of global warming and apply it to:

the benefits of privatizing utilities gay rights ruining marrage terrorism down because of the war in iraq revenues up by cutting taxes torture gets results usa heath care is the best in the world death penalty is a deterrent teaching of abstinence reduces sexual activity

if the people so upset in this thread demanded the same level of proof for these other topics, i would believe them to be sincere on this topic.

What I asked is, would there ever be evidence that would convince you? Show me where I said all your observations are wrong.

Eft, you’re asking that anti-American posters like Scott, Striper, Nandy, Puppy, Harley, Stan, and others apply your reasonable standards to our country.

But in doing so, you’re asking them to apply those standards in compliance to their mythological religions.

They’re not interested in your rational goals for our country.

They’re only interested in enforcing their religious beliefs on every one.

Even if it results in the destruction of our country.

After all, if our country is destroyed, but upon death they think they’re going to their mythological heaven, they don’t care a bit about their fellow citizens’ fate.

I just find it rather interesting that Shell, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron spent the most to deny climate change, but now that they are producing “alternate energy”, and grabbing off the gas leases, and patenting new technologies, they are suddenly pointing out the change is real, and they are now the “good guys”.

“Compact” and efficient cars were available decades ago, and oil companies shot them down. Mass transit was shot down by oil and car companies. It was Nixon who signed NEPA, the Clean Air Act, and Clean Water Act- so even the “right” back then wasn’t as wrong as deniers are today.

ScottFreitas: There is one country in the world where I think you might enjoy living. It has no appreciable government. No government control of any aspect of people’s lives. Taxes are not exacted to build roads or for health care or for climate change at all. It is a country completely free of government control of your life. It sounds like a paradise for you.

It is Somalia.

Have a nice trip.

^ we might even all be convinced to chip in for ‘plane ticket. Or do they prefer yachts in their waters?

Scotty of Somali…. has a nice ring to it!

hey trout, om, the rest of y’all - didn’t they find a couple of japanese soldiers hidden in caves quite a few years ago - they were subsisting on who knows what but they didn’t know the war was over and they had lived there since wwII

cd, yes if EVERY scientist in the world could empirically point at something and say, it’s causing X,Y, and Z, and we can do something about that, I suppose we would believe them. Even the Right would admit that there have been some smart measures in the modern age to clean up some acts of pollution that could be controlled.

It is preposterous to suppose you are EVER going to get every scientist to admit that producing an essential element of the environment (CO2) is necessarily a bad thing. There are, of course, numerous arguments favoring the increased production of CO2, if we were so able as to seriously impact the climate through our deeds.

churchill, that’s oversimplifying again. YES, I know that heating and cooling take place at various times, and the point is that people have started to determine why, which in turn enables us to sort signal from noise when looking at today’s climate. We have a better sense of how the Earth’s orbit influences climate (which was the source of all the “coming ice age” predictions forty years ago), we’ve learned a lot more about which chemicals trap or block sunlight (one solution to global warming is to pump synthetic volcano ash into the upper atmosphere – that works really well, but could lead to rather TOO much cooling if we blow it), and through triangulation of evidence there are decent clues to the makeup of the atmosphere relative to specific warm and cool spots through history. Saying that “it went up and down before us, so we have no influence” is like saying “my car has moved faster and slower going up and down hills, so my pushing the gas is irrelevant.” The point of the more recent data is that it enables us to track changes even in the modern times, which are particularly compelling if we can sift out the variables. (Here’s an interesting site I stumbled across that discusses ice-core analysis: http://www.chem.hope.edu/~polik/warming/IceCore/IceCore2.html) The vast majority of climate scientists (97%, remember?) think that there is a strong enough warming trend despite the noise – in fact, moving away from what was predicted in terms of the Earth’s orbit, etc. – to justify the conclusion that anthropogenic global warming IS taking place. The question is how much and how fast? If it is very slow, we have plenty of time to figure out what to do. Unfortunately, nature has a nasty habit of kicking into vicious cycles under certain circumstances, and I think that is the source of much recent worry among scientists. Indeed, CO2 is NOT the only greenhouse gas they are worried about, contrary to harley’s concern – there is a lot of methane (20x more potent) trapped in Arctic ice, which is another reason to fear the melting of the icecaps. (http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/exclusive-the-methane-time-bomb-938932.html)

If Scott is going to Somalia, I think he should walk.

Hey Church, the report on temp data quality you cited above is very interesting and bears consideration (in spite of the fact the author is a television weatherman). However I have a question:

The author sorted between high quality and low quality stations. He charts the location of the high quality stations, and they appear to be spread pretty evenly across the country. Why, then did he not compare the data trend from these stations against the data trend from the whole? The rest of the report makes it crystal clear he has access to the data and the ability to perform complex statistics, but he doesn’t drop the other shoe. I wonder why?

if they really believed what they are trying to sell they would be buying some future water front property

churchill, you just don’t get it. End of story.

smooch smooch

We need electric cars, more solar and wind power, less coal and oil, and a way to economically remove carbon from the air.

Think of the jobs to be generated by the manufacture of wind mills and the construction of wind mill farms. This would apply to solar panels also. This could be a big step forward in strengthening the economy and productivity of this country.

It has been working for China, Deadhead, who are now way ahead of the US in solar panel tech and production.

Ooooops, Anthony likes the way the Chinese do things. Totalitarianism, anybody? I guess you want Obama to head that reform, Anthony?

Yeah, Ahab, I toured China a couple of years ago, and was stunned at just how bad the air pollution was in the major cities. I’d get depressed really fast living in that. At least they finally seem to be trying to something about it, although the scale involved is daunting…and giant projects like the Three Gorges Dam are so giant that they create their own problems.

Strikes me that they couldn’t put their solar farms too close to their cities because not much sunlight would penetrate the smog!

Puppy, there are things to be learned from most cultures, unless you’re a closed-minded ethnocentric little snot.

Scott, you spend so much time posting nasty comments. Don’t you have a job to do or kids to take to school or a parent to take care of or a business to run or something?

Still freezing…