Climate change deniers are “ridiculous” and akin to “flat-earthers”, according to Sir Nicholas Stern, who advised the government about the economic threat posed by global warming. The respected economist compared climate naysayers to those who deny the link between smoking and cancer or HIV and Aids in the face of mounting scientific evidence.
Socialist/activist/columnist George Monbiot chimes in with another funny analogy. Apparently if you question the global warming agenda you think AIDS can be treated with beetroot and lemon juice. Interesting assertion by a non-existent association. I mean, cripes!
Sammy Wilson’s appointment as Northern Ireland environment minister appears to have been conceived as some sort of practical joke. It’s no longer very funny. He fills the same role as the former South African health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who claimed that Aids could be treated with beetroot and lemon juice.
Huh?
“A sane man in an insane society must appear insane.” – Mr. Spok
there is no denying that the climate is changing.
what is delusional is thinking that man is so grand that he alone is effecting the change. -or, that he can effect a permanent, positive change when he still has trouble forecasting the weekly weather correctly.
-s
Seems fairly accurate. I mean why is it claimed there is a scientific debate intelligent design/evolution? Its the difference between what people would like to be true and what people can show to be true.
I think that applies to climate change as well. I don’t think many people want it to be true that climate change may seriously impact many peoples lives, and a good proportion is due to man. Is that whats going on? Most serious climate scientists think so. And no I don’t think they are saying that cos of grants.. jeez. Theres lots of scientific and empirical evidence that climate is changing. How much is due to humans is debatable – but it looks like a reasonable chunk. Can we do something about it? Yes, it looks possible for us to do something about it. Is it worth the effort – not known as the risk is unknown. Will we do something about it in time? At the moment it seems unlikely.
Some just don’t believe humans can affect the earth. They are idiots. Its all around us how humans are impacting the earth in large ways.
Most of the arguments against aren’t backed up by much. Just hand-waving. A bit like intelligent design.
So all you have left is some kind of conspiracy – by governments, or scientists or something like that. Seems to me stupid. For governments its against there interests – as it requires retooling and a large (in the short term at least downward) hit on the economy therefore taxes. For scientists.. well call me old fashioned but I think most scientists are trying to do science – and in that culture exposing contradictions and exceptions is what its about.
And then you have the energy companies – particularly oil and coal coming out with stupid adverts.
Have you seen the exxon advert where they say they are perfecting a method to turn gasoline into hydrogen inside a car? WTF? Aren’t we trying to reduce gasoline usage, and how is that going to be more efficient than just using the stuff? And where does all the carbon in the gasoline go?
Anyway I rant. But bottom line – I think Sir Stern has a point.
The truth of climate change aside, I’ve noticed the same meme for a while now, too. It’s also applied to “9/11 deniers” who doubt the official story. Whatever it’s applied to, it originates in use viz. the Holocaust, and now they are trying to take the force of Holocaust denial and use it to shut people up with the full force of taboo. It’s a horrible thing to do, a horrible gesture.
“So the “deniers” have been grouped with holocaust deniers in particular. Another track has them categorized as insane, literally. They are also being associated with the Creationists as much as possible”
Maybe that’s because too often those turn out to be the same people.
Is the climate changing? Yes, it always has been Is man effecting the change? Probably….enough to measure or have a forceful effect? ya maybe but should it matter? This should be mute question since the answer is to reduce pollution it will be advantageous for us to get on this and cut down or eliminate our contribution of these gasses to the atmosphere. Even if a cleaner environment is all we gain we still will have gained the world.
Now the time as our house of cards has been knocked down lets try to make the investment and build it better this time.
I might believe in ‘climate change’ if they could produce a model that makes accurate predictions. Until then…
We’ve been hearing about how there’s a small window of opportunity before a tipping point is reached, for at least 20 years now.
If you don’t believe them now, you’re like the guys who deny the Holocaust.
If the science is settled, then show me where those scientists predicted a cooler Earth. Who came up with that in their models?
The only one I know is Lindzen, a global warming skeptic, and even he gave it about 50-1 odds.
Name calling and blanket condemnation have no place in a scientific debate, which should be won or lost on the preponderance of evidence alone.
#4, “Theres lots of scientific and empirical evidence that climate is changing. How much is due to humans is debatable – but it looks like a reasonable chunk. Can we do something about it? Yes, it looks possible for us to do something about it.”
The problem is that if you can’t show by how much humans contribute to the change, how can you possibly say what is needed to be done to offset it? What does “do something about it mean” even mean? Are you suggesting we can reverse climate change, or simply brace ourselves to soften the impact?
If we are barreling at 70 mph towards climate induced extinction, slowing the speed by 5 mph isn’t doing anything to gain back the ground we’ve already lost.
As #3 stated,
To believe in global warming you MUST believe in all three things;
1) The earth is warming
2) That man is exerting a big enough effect to have a demonstrable impact.
3) That man can not only change entirely his effect in (2) but also has the power to over-ride the other forces in (1).
Without addressing the narcissism, there’s no getting around if you don’t believe in all three you are just wasting your time.
But global warming is more of a belief based ideology that with involved scientists (whose income is directly supported by the belief), not a fact based scientific endeavor. Every religion has its armageddon theories (crops fail, mass starvation, oceans rise to destroy the earth, etc) this happens to be a secular one.
” The prospects for having a modest climate change impact instead of a disastrous one are quite good, I think.”
“Skepticism thus plays an essential role in scientific research, and, far from trying to silence skeptics, science invites their contributions. So, too, the global warming debate benefits from traditional scientific skepticism.”
“While I don’t agree with Dick Lindzen’s viewpoint on climate change, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences with outstanding accomplishments to his credit (and incidentally, an intellectual and a very effective debater).”
Statements by James Hansen.
And, don’t forget the oxymoronic Christian “Haters.”
Climate change, maaaaaybe. Has it ever happened before in the entire history of the planet? The answer (and the g
GIGANTIC hurdle climate change/global warming proclaimers, aka, The Sky is Falling! Nutballs, can’t get around) is, not only yes but, HELL YES!
Maybe Al Gore’s caveman ancestor was going around trying to charge smoke taxes on his fellow troglodytes who figured out how to make fire.
There is “the science” of global climate change, and there is “the politics” of global climate change.
The denier argument is 100% a political argument and completely irrelevant to the science of it.
Know what game you’re in before you start betting.
climate change??? what happened to global warming??? oh i know…. ’cause i had to shovel a load climate change this year outta my driveway…
sounds like the global warming brigade are trying to iron plate their *ss….
Climate change has a Bernard Madoff stamp of approval! (However due to the untimely death of Jim Jones we regret to inform you there will be no beverage service with this scam)
@MikeN
Stick your head in the sand much? You ARE the problem.
Seems accurate to me. The climate is always changing. 20,000 years ago, there was an ice age. If climate change wasn’t real, it definitely wouldn’t be this warm in California right now. Of course there are those who don’t believe in the ice age either, and they’re called creationists.
Climate change? Sure, the climate has never been static and never will be. But, we’ll never be able to change it ourselves, at least until we advance enough to do terraforming.
97% of climatologists agree that global warming is happening and man is significant factor.
I’m not sure anyone on this board knows more about the climate than those guys, so i’m going to believe them.
If we are lucky, in 50-100 years we can maybe say climate change by man is real or not. Humankind has yet to really experience the damage. It may be in our future.
The Holocaust happened in less than a decade and left behind a huge amount of evidence and witnesses. It is in our history.
To use the comparison of one to the other is absurd and intellectually dishonest. Hopefully, those individuals who do will be called out on it like JCD is doing in this post.
Maybe they have been taking too much Oxycontin, or smoking too much locoweed. Either way, their brains aren’t wired correctly. OR, they are fossil fuel barons, who make a killing by killing the environment.
I think it’s possible to disagree with every single post here. That’s why the internet is such a useless tool: people are idiots.
To start, the topic isn’t climate change but the meme “denier” being attached to those who take issue with the grand march of the globe’s governments towards more power and control via the concern of climate change. Just like the so-called War on Terrorism — you take a problem and use it to expand your control, or at the least, enact stupid policies. Calling somebody a “climate change denier” is meant to make their sin something unholy on par with Holocaust denial, which has been raised to the status of sacred sin, beyond even what Stalin or Mao managed to accomplish, despite their killing more people.
I suspect that what makes people like Dvorak bristle is that the new concern by governments about “climate change” is such a transparent ploy for a power-grab. So, they get stuck at this level, not even wanting to consider whether climate change is real or not because it’s already being used for nefarious purposes.
So here are some errors:
#3: The flipside of what you’re saying is really Nature-worship. A lot of fundamentalists refuse to believe Man could change the climate irreversibly because secretly Nature is their proof of God, i.e. of huge, divine force that wreaks havoc on the countryside. Here’s a counter-example to your argument: what would happen if the human species decided to set off every single nuclear warhead it’s got stored? Everyone agrees that the climate would be irreversibly changed (in human terms) and would take millions of years to reset. So Man can change the climate. Lesson: It’s just as arrogant (anthropomorphic) to elevate Nature to some divine status beyond the reach of arithmetic.
#7: Accurate predictions? How accurate? Depending on how much detail, how much accuracy you want, you could say that right now physics isn’t able to accurately model a ball rolling off my desk. At some level it’s always incomplete. This point of view seems to beg, to cry out for some remedy: “I don’t believe something is real unless science can tell me 100% that it is.” Not only are you refusing to believe, you’re abdicating your power of reason to science.
#11: Something seems awfully wrong with this point of view, too. It smacks of a sophistic trick. If you were careening suddenly off a cliff, what’s the natural reaction? To do nothing, since trying isn’t guaranteed to work? (And what’s “trying” mean anyway?) Another reasonable point of view which somehow isn’t reasonable at all.
#12: Again with the “narcissism” behind man-made climate change, as if this weren’t reverse Nature-worship. In Nature, 2 + 2 always equals 4. Global climate is a chaotic system that achieves local regularity, in terms of time as well as location. Throw it out of whack and all sorts of unpredictable, unexplainable things happen. The idea that seven billion human beings and all their industries and waste aren’t impacting the climate, probably for the worse, isn’t reasonable.
#20: Find the figure on the number of square miles of the planet’s surface now under pavement. Terraforming accomplished.
#21: Don’t believe them just because they’re scientists.
# 24 horacesmiley said, “#20: Find the figure on the number of square miles of the planet’s surface now under pavement. Terraforming accomplished.”
Umm, no. Learn something, then come back.
# 11 Sea Lawyer
‘The problem is that if you can’t show by how much humans contribute to the change, how can you possibly say what is needed to be done to offset it? What does “do something about it mean” even mean? Are you suggesting we can reverse climate change, or simply brace ourselves to soften the impact?’
The short answer is I don’t know – I don’t think anybody does truely. Some scientists say its mainly due to man, and we can do things to stop the worse effects. Other say its not. So it comes down to probabilities.
If there was a meteor heading to Earth, that had a 1% chance of hitting, but if it did it would wipe out 50% of all life. Should we do anything about it? And if so how much should we do? The earlier we do something about it the easier it will be, but the less likely we know the outcome.
I think you see where I’m going.
Rationally you could argue well a fairly sizable amount of effort would be worth it. In reality I think procrastination/denial (hey it’s Gods plan!) would lead to very little being done. Much like with climate change.
In the climate change scenario I think I can say
> 50% there is climate change and the majority is caused by man
25% – 50% chance that we can do anything considerable about it
If we don’t do anything about it whats the cost likely cost? Millions of people will be displaced. Due to war, shortages of resources, perhaps millions killed.
The economic cost to do something about it will be high, but will make humans more efficient + therefore polute the world less.
Is that worth it? I think doing something (like reducing coal/oil dependency), is worth doing. I think that’s worth doing anyway though (for security/economic reasons). Carbon trading etc – I’m not so sure.
What I object to is the people saying it cannot _possibly_ be human produced, or deny its a even possibility.
There is a conspiracy folks – and that’s by big business, and in particular energy suppliers, to keep business as usual.
# 27 freddybobs68k said, “There is a conspiracy folks – and that’s by big business, and in particular energy suppliers, to keep business as usual.”
The only conspiracy is by the econuts to keep us from using viable tech to produce electricity at a low cost without oil/gas.
@ # 24
Harsh but fair 😉
And I think you are right that the ‘climate change denier’ meme is pretty stupid, in the same vein as ‘war on terror’ meme is stupid.
When I was in the Uk a few years back a news report said over 2% of the land is covered with concrete/road. Although that doesn’t sound like much – when you really think about it it’s pretty amazing.
@ # 28
I stand corrected. Big business is really looking out for the little guy. They said so on the tv. No conspiracy here. Just ‘econuts’ which I’ll now call terrorists to simplify things for everybody. Sigh….
97% of non-stoned-out-of-their-gourds climatologists agree that global warming is not happening and man is an insignificant factor in anything that might happen on a planetary scale.:)
ok- maybe someone here will surprise me by actually addressing a few points.
1) There’s a coal seam in China that has been on fire for centuries. Its annual output of CO2 is roughly equivalent to that of all of the cars on the earth. Volcanoes occasionally blow their tops and spew absurd quantities of greenhouse gases into the air – Mount Pinatubo(sp?) is estimated to have produced as much in a single eruption as the human race has since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
There are others.
My point/question – how does it make sense for us to break our collective economic backs, with all of the lost human potential and increased human misery that choice entails, in order to make a small impact on a system that is subject to huge, rocking impacts on a random basis all the time?
2) When tobacco company-funded scientists tell us cigarettes are not addictive or do not cause cancer, we laugh because we know where their bread is buttered. Same with oil company-funded scientists and various pronouncements they make. Same with the idea that our corporate-owned media will never do the hard investigative journalism that would skewer our “corporate overlords”. None of these points are the same as saying that these people MUST be lying. That way lies madness – it would be absurd to argue that because there is consensus on a given position that that position must be wrong. We’re just taking notice that their statements are consistently in line with their and/or their employers’ interests.
Why don’t we apply the same skepticism to climate scientists, who raise themselves from obscurity to critical importance when they themselves claim the sky is falling?
3) how is it reasonable to say there is NO QUESTION about such a complex issue? You folks who more-or-less agree with the idea that “deniers” are crazy because of consensus- do you also insist that it’s crazy to believe that man can build a flying machine, that black folks are just as intelligent as white folks, that a human can run a 4 minute mile, that there is such a thing as a cosmological constant? All of these are matters (FORMERLY) of broad scientific consensus.