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Conservatives and climate change

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mhaze said:
Hey, no problem. We'll all just agree to BELIEVE the liberal 50 year forecast which lock step leads into give them all your money for ......(current subject) SAVING THE WORLD.
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I do appreciate that you state your base premise upfront, so the reader does not have to consider the conclusions drawn from it.

Do you have any evidence of liberals calling for everyone to give all their money to "them" to save the world? Or is this still just mhaze continuing to ascribe false positions to others because he knows his own positions can not be supported on their merits?

I am curious, though, why you are pushing your own unsupportable economic predictions even as as you declare economic predictions in general to be without value. I mean, I get why YOU are doing it, but why do you think this is better than just admitting you are wrong?
 
I'd like to welcome TheSapient to this forum. I appreciate his evident commitment to civil and rational discourse.

Steve Chapman, a member of the Chicago Tribune's editorial board, is another conservative columnist who decries rejection of climate science. In an editorial entitled "Conservatives flee from science: Rejecting the facts about climate change", Chapman gives concrete examples of conservatives' former respect for environmental science, and draws a contrast with their recent denialism:

Steve Chapman said:
Over and over, we saw a pattern. Environmental and public health groups with a leftward bent said the sky was falling; conservatives and libertarians (me included) asked for scientific evidence; and the science sooner or later debunked the fears.

...snip...

But that was another century. Today, it's scientists who agree on the validity of a major environmental peril — climate change caused by human activity. It's liberals and environmentalists who can point to a broad scholarly consensus for their claims. And it's the skeptics who now revile the scientists as stooges and liars.

...snip...

They arrive at their position by reasoning backward: They reach a conclusion and snatch at any shred of evidence that justifies it. The climate change deniers don't like the idea of governments restricting greenhouse gas emissions, so they insist that these emissions are nothing to worry about, that scientists are corrupt and that it's all part of a socialist power grab.

They used to uphold respect for science. Now they prefer magical thinking.
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bit_pattern said:
....What climate research has Ehrlich authored, Mhaze? Why do you think his opinions from 40 years ago matter?
.....
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That's rather my point. Why do you think your opinions will matter 40 years hence?

Anyway, what Ehrlich's sermons were about were economic consequences. And that's the nature of my question. I brought up Ehrlich only as a single example. Yes, he's a ridiculous one.

What exactly is wrong with asking about forecasts of economics made 50 years ago?
 
Science evolves. What we understand now will not be the same in detail 40 years from now, that is true, but science builds on its base and approaches the truth more closely every generation.

On this issue, science is remarkably stable.

No credible person today will claim that CO2 is not the reason the earth isn't a snowball.

No credible person today will claim that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will not heat the planet.

And that has been the case for at least 50 years.
 
Take your science fiction and send it to someplace like Pluto, where the sun don't shine.

You claim a smog disaster is just alarmist? And then laugh when I show you thousands of people dead in the modern era from smog? And then point me to some worthless (for purposes of any discussion of reality) SciFi?

Great Scott! You are hilarious.
 
bit_pattern said:
The fact they have nothing to do with climate science, for starters.
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Really? So arguments about the critical need to make changes now BASED on cost differences between doing nothing and doing something are not based on long term economic modeling?

Yes, they are. And I'm not talking about the (increasingly growing longer) list of the "loons of the left", such as Ehrlich, Gore, Suzuki, Carlson, Lovelock, Hansen, and Monbiot) here.

But instead about more mainsteam economic forecasting of the various options.
 
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mhaze said:
Really? So arguments about the critical need to make changes now BASED on cost differences between doing nothing and doing something are not based on long term economic modeling?

Yes, they are.
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Did Ehrlrich author the economic models being used by the IPCC? If the answer is no then your red herring argument is a red herring.
 
BenBurch said:
Take your science fiction and send it to someplace like Pluto, where the sun don't shine.

You claim a smog disaster is just alarmist? And then laugh when I show you thousands of people dead in the modern era from smog? And then point me to some worthless (for purposes of any discussion of reality) SciFi?

Great Scott! You are hilarious.
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Why?

Even in science fiction, where Gibson predicted under that alternative history a London where the sun never could be seen through the smog...

Even in science fiction, one cannot reach the depths of fantasy of a moonbat loon of the left like Ehrlich.

"I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." (1969)
 
bit_pattern said:
Did Ehrlrich author the economic models being used by the IPCC? If the answer is no then your red herring argument is a red herring.
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No, because you didn't read or understand my comment. Try again please.

But instead about more mainsteam economic forecasting of the various options.
 
yeah all you warmers are just like those nutters that claimed smoking can cause cancer....
 
Economics only enters into this because you added it.

The arctic ice does not seem to care;
 

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mhaze said:
...We'll just not discuss Alarmist forecasts of the past which are so very embarrasing. This was we will look like modern progressive elitists, with knowledge, with science at our side, with certainty, instead of total morons.
...
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Here's an easy one that happens to be handy
"Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 during the Past Decades"
ROGER REVELLE, HANS E. SUESS
Tellus
Volume 9, Issue 1, pages 18–27, February 1957
"...estimates by the UN indicate that during the first decade of the 21st century, fossil fuel combustion could produce an amount of carbon dioxide equal to 20% of that now in the atmosphere (Table 1). This is probably two orders of magnitude greater than the usual rate of carbon dioxide produced by volcanoes,..."

http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/2007/07_02_15.html - "...This seems like a huge amount of CO2, but a visit to the U.S. Department of Energy's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) website (http://cdiac.ornl.gov/) helps anyone armed with a handheld calculator and a high school chemistry text put the volcanic CO2 tally into perspective. Because while 200 million tonnes of CO2 is large, the global fossil fuel CO2 emissions for 2003 tipped the scales at 26.8 billion tonnes. Thus, not only does volcanic CO2 not dwarf that of human activity, it actually comprises less than 1 percent of that value..."​


27 billion tonnes is two orders of magnitude greater than 200 million tonnes.
Looks like a correct prediction to me.
 
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mhaze said:
We'll just not discuss Alarmist forecasts of the past which are so very embarrasing. This was we will look like modern progressive elitists, with knowledge, with science at our side, with certainty, instead of total morons.


"In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish." Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day 1970

"Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make, ... The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years." Paul Ehrlich in an interview with Peter Collier in the April 1970 of the magazine Mademoiselle.

"By...[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s." Paul Ehrlich in special Earth Day (1970) issue of the magazine Ramparts.

"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death." (Population Bomb 196

"Smog disasters" in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles. (1969)

"I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." (1969)​

The Apocalypse is always set just a few years off from the current date.
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One of the dumbest and most disingenuous things science-deniers do is to criticize so-called alarmists whose predictions did not come to pass, while ignoring the fact that it was changes made in response to the alarm being raised that thwarted those predictions.
 
mhaze said:
No, because you didn't read or understand my comment. Try again please.

But instead about more mainsteam economic forecasting of the various options.
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More like you didn't understand mine. What has Ehrlrich got to do with anything whatsoever? Why are you trying to link his predictions with mainstream, economic forecasting?
 
johnny karate said:
One of the dumbest and most disingenuous things science-deniers do is to criticize so-called alarmists whose predictions did not come to pass, while ignoring the fact that it was changes made in response to the alarm being raised that thwarted those predictions.
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Yeah, well spotted, the Green Revolution was a response to these kinds of "alarmism". Y2K is another great example... "Look, we averted a disaster," "I TOLD you those hippies were wrong!"
 
Travis said:
Sometime in the near future a GOP Presidential candidate is at the podium giving his acceptance speech for his party's nomination.
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The difference is, celestial mechanics is fairly well-understood. Astronomers can calculate orbits well enough to predict a year in advance where they will have to aim their telescopes. NASA can launch a probe to Uranus that will not require human attention or even real-time AI course adjustment until it gets within a few diameters of its goal. With AGW, scientists have to account for a failure of predictions with ad hoc explanations, like Chinese particulate emissions or Mount Pinatubo emissions. There's a lot that people don't know about feedbacks, like reflection from clouds or from tree growth or from the interaction between surface chemistry and atmospheric chemistry. Celestial mechanics is much cleaner.
 
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