The next 11 presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, all had higher job approval ratings than Obama at this stage of their tenure. Their ratings were:
-- George W. Bush, 86 percent
-- Bill Clinton, 52 percent
-- George H.W. Bush, 71 percent
-- Ronald Reagan, 49 percent
-- Jimmy Carter, 57 percent
-- Gerald Ford, 52 percent
-- Richard Nixon, 59 percent
-- Lyndon Johnson, 74 percent
-- John Kennedy, 77 percent
-- Dwight Eisenhower, 69 percent
-- Harry Truman, 49 percent
You are entirely agenda driven and closed minded, the fact that Monckton can put together a literature review to justify his biases doesn't make him an expert. Putting a conservative politician with no scientific background as your superstar in a scientific debate highlights how weak climate sceptics arguments are.Hello! Maurice Strong is a Communist and I posted his recent criticism of the ballot box. What do you think a world government is that we can't vote for?
BTW attacking Monckton personally for gathering science that others did and presenting it is not going to stop other climatologists from responding to AGW attacks. Monckton got the Nobel Prize pin because of Al Gore (who represents the IPCC) and Monckton contibuted to the 2007 IPCC report. He was being sarcastic.
Welcome to the Copenhagen Climate Challenge Web Site
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index....Store_id=83947f5d-d84a-4a84-ad5d-6e2d71db52d9
All their arguments about how deniers are like tobacco companies can easily be thrown towards the AGW lobby. Anybody thinks that there is no wrong doing in the emails didn't read them. Deleting back up data so no one could check them or threatening to delete something to prevent Steve McIntyre from checking it is an enormous problem and denying (A-ha) the problem is not going to satisfy the critics and will create more critics as we are seeing right now.
Have you read your posts lately?
You come as the most "religious" in this thread. You believe any piece of junk science that comes your way as long as it supports your side.
BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change -- Oreskes 306 (5702): 1686 -- ScienceBEYOND THE IVORY TOWER: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change
Naomi Oreskes
Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently assert that climate science is highly uncertain. Some have used this as an argument against adopting strong measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, while discussing a major U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report on the risks of climate change, then-EPA administrator Christine Whitman argued, "As [the report] went through review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change" (1). Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case.
The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme, IPCC's purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature (3). In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" [p. 21 in (4)].
IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise" [p. 1 in (5)]. The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: "The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue" [p. 3 in (5)].
Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8).
The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies' members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9).
The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.
Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point.
This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.
The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.
Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.
You are entirely agenda driven and closed minded, the fact that Monckton can put together a literature review to justify his biases doesn't make him an expert. Putting a conservative politician with no scientific background as your superstar in a scientific debate highlights how weak climate sceptics arguments are.
You throw out labels like socialist and communist at people who talk about how to deal with a tragedy of the commons situation while completely ignoring the problems of increased CO2 in our atmosphere. You don't give a fuck about global warming because your favoured political talking heads oppose it.
I had some sympathy for climate change scepticism in 2005-2006, but I changed my mind in light of learning more about the evidence. You are taking a political position and reposting claims from a right wing echo chamber without a jot of honest active doubt.
An article written by a respected historian of science and published in the journal Science.BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change -- Oreskes 306 (5702): 1686 -- Science
The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.
Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.
We don't know everything about the climate system, but we can say with confidence that our carbon dioxide emissions are effecting climates and will have an impact on ocean acidity. The implication of having a complex and dynamic climate system isn't that you can ignore an input (such as more CO2), but that we will have unforseen outcomes that ripple through the system; pushing climate beyond 2 degrees will impact the biosphere and it could trigger a mass extinction.
I used obscurantist to highlight the way that your side deliberately minimises and obscures climate science for political ends, something that the scientific community is able to moderate with its system of checks.
In evaluating global seawater impacts of (1) model-predicted global warming and (2) direct seawater chemical consequences of a doubling of the air's CO2 content, Loaiciga (2006), for example, used a mass-balance approach to (1) "estimate the change in average seawater salinity caused by the melting of terrestrial ice and permanent snow in a warming earth," and he (2) applied "a chemical equilibrium model for the concentration of carbonate species in seawater open to the atmosphere" in order to "estimate the effect of changes in atmospheric CO2 on the acidity of seawater." Assuming that the rise in the planet's mean surface air temperature continues unabated, and that it eventually causes the melting of all terrestrial ice and permanent snow, Loaiciga calculated that "the average seawater salinity would be lowered not more than 0.61‰ from its current 35‰." He also reports that across the range of seawater temperature considered (0 to 30°C), "a doubling of CO2 from 380 ppm to 760 ppm increases the seawater acidity [lowers its pH] approximately 0.19 pH units." He thus concludes that "on a global scale and over the time scales considered (hundreds of years), there would not be accentuated changes in either seawater salinity or acidity from the rising concentration of atmospheric CO2."
Science and Public Policy Institute - SourceWatchThe Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) is a global warming skeptics group which appears to primarily be the work of Robert Ferguson, its President.
(It is worth noting that in the late 1990's, George Carlo founded a group known as the "Science and Public Policy Institute" to work on issues such as electro-magnetic radiation and health issues. Approximately eight years later Ferguson founded his group with the identical name, oblivious to the existence of Carlo's group. Ferguson states that after registering his organization in Virginia he discovered that Carlo's group existed but by then his group had created the website and printed their stationery).
The website of Ferguson's SPPI draws heavily on papers written by Christopher Monckton.
Prior to founding SPPI in approximately mid-2007, Ferguson was the Executive Director of the Center for Science and Public Policy (CSPP), a project of the corporate-funded group, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute.
SPPI describes itself as "a nonprofit institute of research and education dedicated to sound public policy based on sound science." It also proclaims that it is "free from affiliation to any corporation or political party, we support the advancement of sensible public policies for energy and the environment rooted in rational science and economics. Only through science and factual information, separating reality from rhetoric, can legislators develop beneficial policies without unintended consequences that might threaten the life, liberty, and prosperity of the citizenry."
https://www.up.ethz.ch/people/ngruber/publications/orr_nat_05.pdfToday's surface ocean is saturated with respect to calcium carbonate, but increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are reducing ocean pH and carbonate ion concentrations, and thus the level of calcium carbonate saturation. Experimental evidence suggests that if these trends continue, key marine organisms—such as corals and some plankton—will have difficulty maintaining their external calcium carbonate skeletons. Here we use 13 models of the ocean–carbon cycle to assess calcium carbonate saturation under the IS92a 'business-as-usual' scenario for future emissions of anthropogenic carbon dioxide. In our projections, Southern Ocean surface waters will begin to become undersaturated with respect to aragonite, a metastable form of calcium carbonate, by the year 2050. By 2100, this undersaturation could extend throughout the entire Southern Ocean and into the subarctic Pacific Ocean. When live pteropods were exposed to our predicted level of undersaturation during a two-day shipboard experiment, their aragonite shells showed notable dissolution. Our findings indicate that conditions detrimental to high-latitude ecosystems could develop within decades, not centuries as suggested previously.
We don't know everything about the climate system, but we can say with confidence that our carbon dioxide emissions are effecting climates and will have an impact on ocean acidity. The implication of having a complex and dynamic climate system isn't that you can ignore an input (such as more CO2), but that we will have unforseen outcomes that ripple through the system; pushing climate beyond 2 degrees will impact the biosphere and it could trigger a mass extinction.
I used obscurantist to highlight the way that your side deliberately minimises and obscures climate science for political ends, something that the scientific community is able to moderate with its system of checks.
In another set of troubling emails, the CRU crew and associates discussed how to freeze out researchers and editors who expressed doubts about the man-made climate change. For example, an email from CRU’s leader Phil Jones saying that he and Kevin Trenberth would keep two dissenting scientific articles out of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next report "even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" In addition, the CRU crew evidently plotted to remove journal editors with whom they disagreed and suppress the publication of articles that they disliked. If they actually succeeded, this compounds the tragedy. Eliminating dissenting voices distorts the peer review process and the resulting scientific literature.
Even if true, do we have to accept only the most catastrophic projections? Even if we lose land to higher sea levels and suffer droughts in Africa aren't we going to reclaim land (including minerals, coal and oil) previously covered by ice? Won't we have longer growing seasons and other benefits.
Even if true, is the prudent course to forfeit our sovereignty over to unelected international bodies to police and regulate energy usage around the globe?
Hah! Isn't that the truth...
Your article comes straight from science and public policy instituteScience and Public Policy Institute - SourceWatch
It is a political lobby group, the "paper" that you produced isn't peer reviewed science, it's a cherry picked literature review promulgated by a climate sceptic think tank.
Here is a proper paper on the subject.
Orr, J.C. et al. "Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the twenty-first century and its impact on calcifying organisms", published in Nature in 2005https://www.up.ethz.ch/people/ngruber/publications/orr_nat_05.pdf
Whatever the specific mechanism(s) involved, our results suggest that the impact of elevated atmospheric pCO2 on marine calcification is more varied than previously thought.
Barring any massive natural outgassing of greenhouse gas, CO2 levels will not rise as high as those in the fourth test environment, at least not in the foreseeable future. The atmosphere did experience similar CO2 levels during the middle of the Cretaceous period about 100 million years ago. “This is an interval in which many of these organisms lived and apparently did okay, despite the extremely elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 that existed at that time,” Ries said. “The take-home message is that the responses to ocean acidification are going to be a lot more nuanced and complex than we thought.” As usual when Earth's climate changes, there are winners and losers but life carries on.
Scepticism is a hallmark of science, in the competitive world of science peer review is a legitimate check and you have to justify your dismissal of it.We know that peer review is used for political purposes. The appeal to authority/lab coat effect is not going to work until skeptics are allowed to engage the debate.
Scepticism is a hallmark of science, in the competitive world of science peer review is a legitimate check and you have to justify your dismissal of it.
All of your arguments from the dismissal of the hockey stick graph to the argument that we don't have the understanding to justify the greenhouse effect have been kicking around the denialist movement for the past decade. You should be more honest about your motives and argue from economics rather than misrepresenting the state of climate science.
Warwick Hughes asked for the data and method he used for his claim of a 0.6°C temperature rise since the end of the nineteenth century. Jones responded, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”
What sort of settlement do you want for the science? You are taking a very hardline position akin to the Catholic Church on Copernicanism, as long as there are open questions or the slim potential for other explanations you don't think anything should be done. It is absurd to have such a high benchmark for action, anthropogenic climate change is an established scientific theory that explains observations of climate change both in the past and future, the only reason that you are posting denialist conspiracies is because you are an ideologue and you need to mask your bias with a slew of distractions.
anthropogenic climate change is an established scientific theory that explains observations of climate change both in the past and future
We don't know everything about the climate system,
Future??? Given that none of the models predicted a decade of cooling after a period of warming (causing great distress to leading climate scientists if you read the hacked emails). Given that, a good dose of skepticism about climate models 20, 30 and 40 years out isn't warranted?
this seems worthy of being quoted again.
Charles Krauthammer on National Review OnlineThe New Socialism
A metamorphosis from red to green.
By Charles Krauthammer
In the 1970s and early ’80s, having seized control of the U.N. apparatus (by power of numbers), Third World countries decided to cash in. OPEC was pulling off the greatest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. Why not them? So in grand U.N. declarations and conferences, they began calling for a “New International Economic Order.” The NIEO’s essential demand was simple: to transfer fantastic chunks of wealth from the industrialized West to the Third World.
On what grounds? In the name of equality — wealth redistribution via global socialism — with a dose of post-colonial reparations thrown in.
The idea of essentially taxing hard-working citizens of the democracies in order to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early ’80s). They put a stake through the enterprise.
But such dreams never die. The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism.
One of the major goals of the Copenhagen climate summit is another NIEO shakedown: the transfer of hundreds of billions from the industrial West to the Third World to save the planet by, for example, planting green industries in the tristes tropiques.
Politically it’s an idea of genius, engaging at once every left-wing erogenous zone: rich man’s guilt, post-colonial guilt, environmental guilt.
But the idea of shaking down the industrial democracies in the name of the environment thrives not just in the refined internationalist precincts of Copenhagen. It thrives on the national scale, too.
On the day Copenhagen opened, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claimed jurisdiction over the regulation of carbon emissions by declaring them an “endangerment” to human health.
Since we operate an overwhelmingly carbon-based economy, the EPA will be regulating practically everything. No institution that emits more than 250 tons of CO2 a year will fall outside EPA control. This means over a million building complexes, hospitals, plants, schools, businesses, and similar enterprises. (The EPA proposes regulating emissions only above 25,000 tons, but it has no such authority.) Not since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service has a federal agency been given more intrusive power over every aspect of economic life.
This naked assertion of vast executive power in the name of the environment is the perfect fulfillment of the prediction of Czech president (and economist) Vaclav Klaus that environmentalism is becoming the new socialism, i.e., the totemic ideal in the name of which government seizes the commanding heights of the economy and society.
Socialism having failed so spectacularly, the Left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green. The cultural elites went straight from the memorial service for socialism to the altar of the environment. The objective is the same: highly centralized power given to the best and the brightest, the new class of experts, managers, and technocrats. This time, however, the alleged justification is not abolishing oppression and inequality, but saving the planet.
Not everyone is pleased with the coming New Carbon-Free International Order. When the Obama administration signaled (in a gesture to Copenhagen) a U.S. commitment to major cuts in carbon emissions, Democratic senator Jim Webb wrote the president protesting that he lacks the authority to do so unilaterally. That requires congressional concurrence by legislation or treaty.
With the Senate blocking President Obama’s cap-and-trade carbon legislation, the EPA coup d’etat served as the administration’s loud response to Webb: The hell we can’t. With this EPA “endangerment” finding, we can do as we wish with carbon. Either the Senate passes cap-and-trade, or the EPA will impose even more draconian measures: all cap, no trade.
Forget for a moment the economic effects of severe carbon chastity. There’s the matter of constitutional decency. If you want to revolutionize society — as will drastic carbon regulation and taxation in an energy economy that is 85 percent carbon-based — you do it through Congress reflecting popular will. Not by administrative fiat of EPA bureaucrats.
Congress should not just resist this executive overreaching, but trump it: Amend existing clean-air laws and restore their original intent by excluding CO2 from EPA control and reserving that power for Congress and future legislation.
Do it now. Do it soon. Because Big Brother isn’t lurking in CIA cloak. He’s knocking on your door, smiling under an EPA cap.
Yes, there's that word again, socialism. And the same people that object to it and call it a boogeyman argument will be the same people that argue in favor of a government run health care system in this forum. Bet ya.
Charles Krauthammer on National Review Online
Yes, there's that word again, socialism. And the same people that object to it and call it a boogeyman argument will be the same people that argue in favor of a government run health care system in this forum. Bet ya.