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AGW Denial - The New Creationism/Holocaust Denial Anti-Intellecual Meme?

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The Painter said:
You're joking, right? That is exactly what AGW Skeptics are saying. It is a natural cycle.
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no. i think our temperature is cyclical..with a general trend upwards due to AGW.

ice core data is clear, avg. world-wide temps go up and down cyclically.

why is it cooler now? cycles.

but over 100 years..the cycle will go up..and not down.
 
The Painter said:
You're joking, right? That is exactly what AGW Skeptics are saying. It is a natural cycle.
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They say this even when all the data contradicts the claim. What is such a position to be called?

A person who makes a claim that "I don't believe the the arctic ice is melting" or "I believe that the temperature trend is cooling" is a skeptic if when shown the data that yes, in fact the overall trend of the artic sea ice is clearly down and no, the overall trend of global avg temperature is in fact up despite a slight cooling in recent years, they accept the weight of evidence and change their mind. That's what a skeptic is, simply a person who asks for a reasonable amount of quality evidence before accepting a claim. But when given the evidence, they accept it, no matter what sacred cow is killed in the process.

A person on the other hand who makes the same claims and is then shown the evidence and instead of changing their opinion ignores it, or claims not to understand the difference between short term and long term trends or starts talking about how stupid Al Gore is, is not not a skeptic but a denialist, same as any other denialist. There are some topics that are uncertain such as how much the temp will actually rise (models have a wide range of values) and what the best course of action is, but there is no question about the actual data.

The sea ice is trending down and has been for some time. The temperature is trending up and has been for some time. Atmospheric CO2 is trending up and has been for some time and without a sizable uptake in carbon sinks or a reduction in incoming solar radiation the laws of physics _requires_ a global avg temp increase. This is as certain as we can be of anything.

It really is that simple. Al Gore may be fat and not overly bright, but even his lard ass cannot change the laws of physics. There is simply no reason to think the current temp trends and rate of change are natural and Gigatons per year of atmospheric carbon to think they are not.

In fact, if the temp were _not_ rising, we would have some serious splainin' to do Lucy because according to everything we know about thermal bodies, decreasing the atmosphere's ability to radiate infrared radiation must cause an increase in global temp. If it did not we had better find some increased solar radiation blocking or uptakes in carbon sinks or physics is in serious trouble.
 
Anybody seen any straw? I heard you guys had a lot of it. Oh, I see you made a man out of it. How cute.

The above message brought to you by all the scientists I know. They aren't riding the AGW alarm wagon because the science isn't conclusive yet. Yes, the planet is warming. If you lot want to crawl under the bed, so be it. Stop juding others because they aren's as scared as you are. :p
 
When you say "global warming denier" you are engaging in propaganda. How can you deny something that is not an established Truth? There is NO ROOM for the politically charged word denier in any science. It is, these days, linked with the holocaust. How can you have a polite debate when one party is calling the other a Nazi? In my view, these two things are VERY VERY different. We KNOW the holocaust happened, we have mountains of evidence. Unfortunately, climatology is a very new science that is growing in sophistication and, I think, still has a lot of room for error and paradigm revolutions. I just came across an interesting paper that makes the case that the greenhouse effect violates the 1st and 2nd law of thermodynamics. I'm not sure if I agree or not, but the point is that the debate is FAR from over. People who want the debate to be over are moreso the Nazi Creationists than the skeptics.

What the heck is wrong with being skeptical about Global Warming? It's an unfalsifiable prophecy. If it happens, then wow they were right. If it doesn't, then they take all the credit for "solving it". Yet, if it doesn't, and we didn't do anything, then they look really bad. If I spent the last 10 years of my life working on this, I certainly wouldn't want to look really bad ;)

Shame on you for perpetrating these two very unscientific and anti-skeptic viewpoints on a skeptic board. If you are anti-AGW, and use good reasoning based on evidence, then you have EVERY RIGHT to deny it.

You're picking on the weak links here with your post that will probably believe whatever propaganda they got their hands on first, pro or anti AGW. True intellectuals are far more sophisticated and DO NOT appreciate the term "denier".
 
mythstifieD said:
When you say "global warming denier" you are engaging in propaganda. How can you deny something that is not an established Truth? There is NO ROOM for the politically charged word denier in any science.
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Deniers aren't interesting in science, just their political or ideological positions. You can't advance science by arguing that established science isn't true without offering an alternative. There are still, I believe, AGW skeptics, but that doesn't disprove the existence of deniers.
 
PINK ELEPHANT.

DENIER.

Ok, when I said the d-word up there, did you first think of the holocaust or global warming?

Maybe even both at once?

Make up whatever excuse or rationale you need to justify it's use, the point is that the word evokes very sorrowful and hateful memories in the world-mind.

The average Joe and Mary doesn't have your more philosophical definition of denier, "People not interesting in science, just their political or ideological positions".

They hear denier and knee-jerk "OH! I don't want to be one of those!"
 
mythstifieD said:
PINK ELEPHANT.

DENIER.

Ok, when I said the d-word up there, did you first think of the holocaust or global warming?

Maybe even both at once?

Make up whatever excuse or rationale you need to justify it's use, the point is that the word evokes very sorrowful and hateful memories in the world-mind.

The average Joe and Mary doesn't have your more philosophical definition of denier, "People not interesting in science, just their political or ideological positions".

They hear denier and knee-jerk "OH! I don't want to be one of those!"
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Actually I was thinking of deniers in general, be it holocaust, evolution, AGW, or whatever. The "average" person may think theory means is idea that may or may not be true, but it isn't. It's always nice to be as clear and precise as possible with language.

I think you are reading far too much into what I said.
 
Slimething said:
Let me get this straight. You believe that AGW, in its present form, is a scientific theory?
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Wow, reading comprehension isn't high today is it. I used "theory" as an example, mostly with all the "'theory' of evolution" crap.

But to answer your, technically non sequiter, question: from my understanding, global warming is a theory, and from what I've seen the evidence heavily favors AGW. The evidence against anthropomorphic I've seen has been... lacking. But I'm not a climatologist, nor do I play one on tv.
 
elbe said:
Wow, reading comprehension isn't high today is it. I used "theory" as an example, mostly with all the "'theory' of evolution" crap.
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Actually, it's quite high. What's lacking is writing skills...yours.

But to answer your, technically non sequiter sequitur, question: from my understanding, global warming is a theory
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There. Fixed it for you. Also, your understanding is wrong. Try hypothesis.

I've met too many people like you. Welcome to my IL. Bye!
 
The Painter said:
You know it's funny. When all the "scientists said there was no such thing as plate tectonics or Continental drift, every 3rd grader looked at south America and Africa and said, " but it looks like they fit together".
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Plate tectonics was doubted for a long time because no one could propose a mechanism by which the solid parts of the Earth's crust would move, nor provide evidence proving such a hypothesis. But eventually a mechanism was proposed, and observations supporting that mechanism made.
 
elbe said:
As far as I know this is a first for me! Is there some sort of standard celebration for being ignored? I hope so. Maybe with hats!
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I couldn't find any appropriate hats, but here's someone bouncing with celebration.

:bounce2

(That was quite the absurd dialogue...)
 
This lecture looks at the history of the tactics of some global warming deniers and the nature of their arguments, as well as the history of the science of global warming (often portrayed as incredibly new, and therefore can't be trusted 'cause of its newness):

http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=13459

Also, it strikes me there may be a more direct link between the tactics of AGW deniers and other woo groups. I know there are US evangelicals that accept evolution and global warming, but there is a sizeable population of evangelicals who reject both. Alex Jones, conspiracy theory nitwit, doesn't believe global warming is caused by human activity. GReNME cited another example. Groups who reject scientific evidence and consensus overlap, and there may be some cross pollination of tactics going on.

GReNME, I think and hope that much of the debate has moved past whether or not AGW is happening -- certainly the scientific debate has. But I think there will be a persistent need to restate what is known and how it is known, just as there is over evolution, real history and anything else attacked by anti-intellectual individuals and groups.
 
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The Painter said:
You know it's funny. When all the "scientists said there was no such thing as plate tectonics or Continental drift, every 3rd grader looked at south America and Africa and said, " but it looks like they fit together".
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Sure. The moment someone could think of a way an entire continent could physically move from place to place. Once such a theory was found, and worked, scientists accepted continental drift.

Every child can look at the sun and say, "but it looks like it revolved around the earth". Which it does. Still no reason to change back to the geocentric system.
 
GreNME said:
The whole tempest in a teapot surrounding the "climate-gate" issue that was played and re-played
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Hardly a tempest in a teapot. People are rightly outraged, for this is a crass abuse of trust. What people are angry about is the lack of faith these scientists showed in those of supposedly lesser intelligence, e.g., non-scientists: "Oh look, these results won't look good to the layman -- let's bury them!". As if laymen are incapable of understanding the difference between long-term and short-term: that they won't be able to tell the difference between short-term cooling and long-term warming.

The problem is that this isn't the first time scientists were caught fudging data to make it more "dramatic" or "understandable" to the layman (in their view), as in the infamous "hockey-stick" graphs so often used to predict "let's do something NOW!" about just about anything.

This, naturally, undermines public trust in scientists and makes them suspect that scientists are just making stuff up. This is not true, but the fault is not the public's or the media's. It's a real scientific scandal, brought upon the scientists by their own behavior.

Note that evolutionists and holocaust historians did not act in this way. Was there ever a case of an entire history department deliberately discarding historical archives so that the "official story" about how the holocaust occurred will not be "hurt" by confusing data? Had an entire paleontology department ever destroyed a fossil deposit because new creatures there did not "fit" with the current understanding of evolution and the public would just get all confused and think evolution never happened if they hear about it?

I don't deny this is theoretically possible, but I certainly have not heard of such a case. The opposite, if anything, is true: when paleontologists found fossils that changed our view of the fossil record, or historians found documents that changed our view of the holocaust, they published it.

My point is that the moderate and rational stuff surrounding the issues gets blocked out specifically because the more extreme voices, particularly in the anti-AGW crowd, are shouting down the ones who are moving past the "is there Global Warming" question-- which has been pretty thoroughly answered, and the answer is "yes"-- and not allowing the conversations to move on to the next step, which should be "what should we be doing about things right now?"
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My understanding is that the situation right now is -- global warming (as a theory that explains what climate change occurs, not the fact that there is climate change), 95% (say) certain; AGW, 80% certain; what to do (if anything), many possibilities.
 
elbe said:
Wow, reading comprehension isn't high today is it. I used "theory" as an example, mostly with all the "'theory' of evolution" crap.

But to answer your, technically non sequiter, question: from my understanding, global warming is a theory, and from what I've seen the evidence heavily favors AGW. The evidence against anthropomorphic I've seen has been... lacking. But I'm not a climatologist, nor do I play one on tv.
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You need to be more careful.

Global Warming is a scientific theory because there's actually data.

Anthropomorphic Global Warming is a hypothesis, which hasn't convinced me either for or against yet.
 
Corsair 115 said:
Plate tectonics was doubted for a long time because no one could propose a mechanism by which the solid parts of the Earth's crust would move, nor provide evidence proving such a hypothesis. But eventually a mechanism was proposed, and observations supporting that mechanism made.
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Exactly.

Just fits together isn't good enough for science. That could be a freak coincidence. Besides, there's also the GROWING EARTH hypothesis, which is quite funny and fantastical. Works just as well, at the surface, except for the important thing: evidence.
 
Matilda said:
This lecture looks at the history of the tactics of some global warming deniers and the nature of their arguments, as well as the history of the science of global warming (often portrayed as incredibly new, and therefore can't be trusted 'cause of its newness):

http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=13459

Also, it strikes me there may be a more direct link between the tactics of AGW deniers and other woo groups. I know there are US evangelicals that accept evolution and global warming, but there is a sizeable population of evangelicals who reject both. Alex Jones, conspiracy theory nitwit, doesn't believe global warming is caused by human activity. GReNME cited another example. Groups who reject scientific evidence and consensus overlap, and there may be some cross pollination of tactics going on.

GReNME, I think and hope that much of the debate has moved past whether or not AGW is happening -- certainly the scientific debate has. But I think there will be a persistent need to restate what is known and how it is known, just as there is over evolution, real history and anything else attacked by anti-intellectual individuals and groups.
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Ugh. The debate is never over in science.

What fallacy is this? When you discredit other sources (ie. Alex Jones) and think this bolsters your sources any? It doesn't. Your sources still need to be convincing on their own.

AGW has not been proven, only conjectured. The debate still RAGES about AGW. Copenhagen was incredibly premature.

Honestly, if we're ON THE BRINK of WORLD WIDE MELTDOWN, then say your prayers: it's too late. I think we have time to rationally think this through, and if we don't have time, then it doesn't matter anyways.
 
mythstifieD said:
Besides, there's also the GROWING EARTH hypothesis, which is quite funny and fantastical. Works just as well, at the surface, except for the important thing: evidence.
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The growing earth idea is very, very funny. But not only does it lack evidence, it's falsifiable -- the existence of subduction zones.
 
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