Winged Wheeler

All right, the average doesn't matter--the point is that humans lived like a pack of wild dogs 15,000 years ago (plus obsidian tools and lots of leather). We've prospered in the years since despite 100+ meters of rising sea level.

The 20th century sea level rise was about 15-20 cm. That's faster than recent parts of this interglacial period and slower than other parts. I don't see the crisis.

Are the models projecting bigger sea level rises based on melting glaciers? They've retracted a lot of peer reviewed projections on glacier melt lately.

The model projections have been so consistently wrong on temp, sea ice, etc.--why should we believe the sea level projections?

It's the Pentagon's job to see everything as a threat to US interests--let them fight wars and take the rest of their stuff with a grain of salt.

WW

KC10 FATboy

Ugh, just as our temperatures FINALLY got above average, we've gone back the other direction and there's yet another Nor'easter getting ready to dump heavy snow in the northeast.

Yeah yeah yeah, I know know ... this has nothing to do with Global Warming. W H A T E V E R ! ! !

jungle

Cargo cult science is a term used by physicist Richard Feynman during his commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, United States, in 1974 to describe work that has the semblance of being scientific, but is missing "a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty".


[edit] The speech
The speech is reproduced in the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and on many web sites. He based the phrase on a concept in anthropology, the cargo cult, which describes how some pre-scientific cultures interpreted technologically advanced visitors as religious or supernatural figures who brought boons of "cargo." Just as cargo cultists create mock airports that fail to produce airplanes, cargo cult scientists conduct flawed research that fails to produce useful results. Feynman cautioned that to avoid becoming cargo cult scientists, researchers must first of all avoid fooling themselves, be willing to question and doubt their own theories and their own results, and investigate possible flaws in a theory or an experiment.

He recommended that researchers adopt an unusually high level of honesty which is rarely encountered in everyday life, and gives examples from advertising, politics, and behavioral psychology to illustrate the everyday dishonesty which should be unacceptable in science. Feynman cautions that "We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science."

An example of cargo cult science is an experiment that uses another researcher's results in lieu of an experimental control. Since the other researcher's conditions might differ from those of the present experiment in unknown ways, differences in the outcome might have no relation to the independent variable under consideration. Other examples, given by Feynman, are from educational research, psychology (particularly parapsychology), and physics. He also mentions other kinds of dishonesty, for example, falsely promoting one's research to secure funding.
wiki

The origins of Cargo Cult:

Cargo cult - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The whys are many, but it has become obvious that we have been the victim of fraud based on numerous motives. Some of those motives are clear and some not so clear, but Science has little to do with what has happened or the industries that sprang up around the Cult.

It sometimes seems hard to believe that many millions of humans thought the Axis powers were a correct way of thinking or that Communism was the way of the future. Many did so with "Scientific" support. We are far from the advanced creatures we sometimes imagine ourselves to be...

tomgoodman

But...but...our cause is so righteous that anything said in its defense is Truth, in the ultimate sense of the word.

jungle

Yes, of course, who could possibly argue against saving our Mother Earth and all of her children?

Q: Who would most benefit from an artificial increase in the cost of energy and a complex set of rules to govern "proper" behavior?
A: Certain financial concerns who have carefully positioned themselves for just such an event and certain political concerns who desire more revenue and control.


Q: Who would benefit from lower energy costs?
A: Just about everyone else in the world.

tomgoodman

How can we deny these "concerns" the booty which they have worked so hard to obtain?

Wouldn't that just make them lazy, and give them time and resources with which to stir up trouble?

jungle

•"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."
- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 3





•"In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science.' The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc."
- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 9

FDXLAG

Here is a study on Spain and "Green Jobs".

Green Jobs: Study Reveals Real-World Numbers

http://www.juandemariana.org/pdf/090...-renewable.pdf

Bottomline every Spanish green job comes with a cost of $800,000.00 associated with it. Additionally the subsidies killed 2.5 regular old polluting jobs by taking that money out of the economy.

N2264J

We’re Gonna Be Sorry

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: July 24, 2010

When I first heard on Thursday that Senate Democrats were abandoning the effort to pass an energy/climate bill that would begin to cap greenhouse gases that cause global warming and promote renewable energy that could diminish our addiction to oil, I remembered something that Joe Romm, the climateprogress.org blogger, once said:

The best thing about improvements in health care is that all the climate-change deniers are now going to live long enough to see how wrong they were.

Alas, so are the rest of us. I could blame Republicans for the fact that not one G.O.P. senator indicated a willingness to vote for a bill that would put the slightest price on carbon. I could blame the Democratic senators who were also waffling. I could blame President Obama for his disappearing act on energy and spending more time reading the polls than changing the polls. I could blame the Chamber of Commerce and the fossil-fuel lobby for spending bags of money to subvert this bill. But the truth is, the public, confused and stressed by the last two years, never got mobilized to press for this legislation. We will regret it.

We’ve basically decided to keep pumping greenhouse gases into Mother Nature’s operating system and take our chances that the results will be benign — even though a vast majority of scientists warn that this will not be so. Fasten your seat belts. As the environmentalist Rob Watson likes to say: “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is.” You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax. No, Mother Nature is going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate, and “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000,” says Watson. Do not mess with Mother Nature. But that is just what we’re doing.

Since I don’t have anything else to say, I will just fill out this column with a few news stories and e-mails that came across my desk in the past few days:

• Just as the U.S. Senate was abandoning plans for a U.S. cap-and-trade system, this article ran in The China Daily: “BEIJING — The country is set to begin domestic carbon trading programs during its 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011-2015) to help it meet its 2020 carbon intensity target. The decision was made at a closed-door meeting chaired by Xie Zhenhua, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission ... Putting a price on carbon is a crucial step for the country to employ the market to reduce its carbon emissions and genuinely shift to a low-carbon economy, industry analysts said.”

• As we East Coasters know, it’s been extremely hot here this summer, with records broken. But, hey, you could be living in Russia, where ABC News recently reported that a “heat wave, which has lasted for weeks, has Russia suffering its worst drought in 130 years. In some parts of the country, temperatures have reached 105 degrees.” Moscow’s high the other day was 93 degrees. The average temperature in July for the city is 76 degrees. The BBC reported that to keep cool “at lakes and rivers around Moscow, groups of revelers can be seen knocking back vodka and then plunging into the water. The result is predictable — 233 people have drowned in the last week alone.”

• A day before the climate bill went down, Lew Hay, the C.E.O. of NextEra Energy, which owns Florida Power & Light, one of the nation’s biggest utilities, e-mailed to say that if the Senate would set a price on carbon and requirements for renewal energy, utilities like his would have the price certainty they need to make the big next-generation investments, including nuclear. “If we invest an additional $3 billion a year or so on clean energy, that’s roughly 50,000 jobs over the next five years,” said Hay. (Say goodbye to that.)

• Making our country more energy efficient is not some green feel-good thing. Retired Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson, who was Gen. David Petraeus’s senior logistician in Iraq, e-mailed to say that “over 1,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan hauling fuel to air-condition tents and buildings. If our military would simply insulate their structures, it would save billions of dollars and, more importantly, save lives of truck drivers and escorts. ... And will take lots of big fuel trucks (a k a Taliban Targets) off the road, expediting the end of the conflict.”

• The last word goes to the contrarian hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, who in his July letter to investors, noted: “Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for ... what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible ‘conspiracy theory’: the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?”

FDXLAG

Mr Friedman is an idiot I just filled up my truck and I can swear that the price for carbon in Louisiana is currently 2.61 a gallon. Those guys in New York must have it pretty sweet if they dont have to pay for carbon.