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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
 Posted - 07/01/2001 : 11:37:56 [Permalink]
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For the longest time, environmentalists have been using the argument that over 2000 scientists signed on to a report that said they agreed that humans are causing harmful climate change. It made big news, I'm sure you remember, the press claimed it 'proved Global Warming', as they call it. Now that 17,000 scientists are being sited as opposing that theory, oh, they are only a fraction of the scientific community, or oh, they are in it for the money, or oh, they are obviously shills for the oil industry. It's very ironic that you mention creationists...
Why are scientists who have an obvious benefit to telling Congress that the world is in danger, and only a huge grant given to them can help stop it are above reproach or suspicion but any scientist against it is in doubt as to what their motivations are? They should both be given equal hearing and equal suspicion. Why are you only choosing one?
I have a theory, and it is as follows:
Any idea held or espoused by a group labelled as "right" is immediatly opposed, no matter what the idea involves, by people who hold the "right" in contempt. You are biased against the idea, simply because it is associated with groups you oppose for other reasons.
It is you who are not looking at all the evidence, simply because you hate a lot of the people who hold the opposing view for idealogical reasons. Global warming must be caused by humans, and it must pose an immediate threat to humanity, because people like Rush Limbaugh surely can't be right about anything!!!
You assume that anyone who doesn't accept the 'ecowackies' (to use bestonnet_00's term) view must be anti-environment or not care about it? You are wrong, and show more similarity to creationist-type thinking than your so-called 'anti-environmentalists'. (Who the hell doesn't want a clean environment? Everyone breathes the same air and drinks the same water.)
Like I've said before, I live in Huntsville, AL, home of many environmental science projects and home of NASA (where I work). We have local climatologists and environmental scientists who work with satellite data, and I hear and read what they have to say. A lot of what you hear in the media about climate change is just plain wrong.
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Gambatte kudasai! |
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Bozola
Skeptic Friend
USA
166 Posts |
Posted - 07/01/2001 : 16:23:22 [Permalink]
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You might want to practice your skeptism.
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The Leipzig Declaration
Copyright 1996 Times Publishing Company
St. Petersburg Times
July 29, 1996, Monday, South Pinellas Edition
Cool to the warnings of global warming's dangers
By David Olinger
Maybe you haven't noticed it yet, but scientists are telling us global warming has arrived. They expect we'll start to feel the difference any decade now.
Many atmospheric scientists agree Earth's temperature is creeping upward, with potentially dangerous times ahead. Glaciers could melt, and sea levels rise. Rainfall might shift with temperatures, deluging deserts and parching forests.
About 2,500 researchers considered the threat serious enough to work together on a comprehensive global warming report. They expect average temperatures in the next century to rise at a rate unseen in at least 10,000 years.
The authors called this report a consensus of the world's climate scientists.
Now, along come 84 men and women in the United States and Europe who say that's not so. They signed a declaration of concerned scientists asserting there is no "scientific consensus" about the dangers of global warming.
Who are these rebels?
Some are scientists by anyone's definition, and some are scientists by their own definition.
One signatory is Tampa Bay's own Roy Leep, the weatherman at Channel 13.
Another runs Dick's Weather Service, where callers can get yesterday's temperature and rainfall in Springfield, Ohio. Another gives weather reports on Channel 5 in San Francisco.
Leep, who attended Florida State but never graduated, said he doesn't consider advanced academic training necessary to qualify as a scientist. "I've been a meteorologist for 45 years," he said. "I have a background in meteorology."
The declaration Leep signed - formally, the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change - has been distributed to news organizations around the world as evidence that many scientists are skeptical about global warming and oppose constraints on oil and coal use.
Global warming is a complicated topic. Scientific discussions about it get terribly technical, burdened with caveats, reliant on climate models spun out by supercomputers - and fraught with immense political and economic consequences.
Overrate the risks of global climate change, and we could find ourselves pumping high-priced gas into tiny cars because an international treaty rationed fossil fuels for no good reason.
Understate them, and the price of inaction could range from drowned condos on the Florida coast to droughts in the farm belt and tropical diseases invading the world's temperate zones.
The Leipzig declaration grew out of a November 1995 meeting of scientists who say the risks are overrated.
"Contrary to conventional wisdom," it states, "there does not exist today a general scientific consensus about the importance of greenhouse warming from rising levels of carbon dioxide." All who signed it are identified as scientists.
In the United States, this declaration was circulated by S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist known to buck the mainstream on environmental issues.
Global warming? Singer has called it a problem manufactured by activists. Ozone depletion? He doubts Freon and its chemical cousins are at fault, and criticized the Nobel Prize awarded to the scientists credited with discovering the problem as "political."
About 45 Americans signed his global warming declaration. Some have well-established national reputations. Former National Hurricane Center director Neil Frank. Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences. David Aubrey, a coastal research scientist at the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
"One of my concerns has been the one-sided nature of at least a portion of the government's discussions about global climate change," Aubrey said.
Many other names on the Leipzig list are unrecognizable to leading climate researchers. Several are scientists whose daily bread has been buttered by industries that produce greenhouse gases.
Chauncey Starr of the Electrical Power Research Institute endorsed the declaration. So did Patrick Michaels, the global warming critic whose newsletter is financed by the Western Fuels Association. So did Robert Balling, the Arizona State University climate scientist whose research has been supported by coal companies and Kuwait.
So did Richard F. Groeber, whose scientific credentials do not include a college degree.
In Springfield, Ohio, Groeber is better known as the operator of Dick's Weather Service. He tracks weather data at his private station, but avoids the trickier job of forecasting. A long-time observer of Ohio weather, he suspects global climate trends are related to sunspots, not greenhouse gases.
Is Groeber a scientist?
"I sorta consider myself so," he said. "I had two or three years of college training in the scientific area, and 30 or 40 years of self-study."
At WTVT in Tampa, Roy Leep has a sophisticated array of meteorological equipment, a longstanding reputation for reliable forecasts and a seal of approval from the American Meteorological Society. A brief version of his forecast appears each day in the Times.
What Leep doesn't have is a Ph.D. in any scientific field, or for that matter, a bachelor's degree. He was taking meteorology courses at Florida State University and broadcasting radio weather reports when WTVT hired him in 1957.
Leep signed the Leipzig declaration partly because he thinks government money invested in global warming research would be better spent on other things, such as hurricane research. "As a taxpayer, I can see a lot more pressing areas of interest," he said.
In San Francisco, the "scientist" who signed the declaration is KPIX weatherman Brian Sussman, who thinks "the jury is still out" on global warming. He has a bachelor's degree in meteorology.
The latest round in the global warming debate began with a thick report from the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was supposed to achieve a global consensus among climate scientists.
Its authors found evidence of "a discernible human influence" on today's climate. They expect this influence to grow with the buildup of greenhouse gases, potentially changing coastlines, agricultural areas and infectious disease rates.
Fred Singer's Science & Environmental Policy Project responded with a list of scientists who find "drastic control policies - lacking credible support from the underlying science - to be ill-advised, premature" and perilous to a world that runs on coal and oil.
"What we're trying to do is bring to the attention of the American public that there is strong scientific disagreement about the conclusion of this U.N. report," Singer said. "The people who run this business are trying to marginalize us. Calling us a tiny minority."
Singer solicited signatures from scientists by sending the declaration to members of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union.
In fact, membership in the American Meteorological Society is open to people without any degree; all you need is substantial experience in the weather field and 20 semester hours of college science classes.
Does it bother Singer that people without a scientific degree would sign a declaration that begins, "As scientists . . ."?
Not greatly. "To me, that is not as important as the fact that we can demonstrate that 100 or so scientists would put their names down" as dissenters from the U.N. report.
Singer contends that more scientists wanted to sign his declaration, but |
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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
Posted - 07/01/2001 : 16:49:32 [Permalink]
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Forgive me for being dense, but what exactly does this have to do with anything?
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Gambatte kudasai! |
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bestonnet_00
Skeptic Friend
Australia
358 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2001 : 04:32:56 [Permalink]
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Many anti-environmentalists who call themselves scientists aren't.
Sure sounds like creationalism doesn't it?
Abondon Drugs, say no to Religion |
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Garrette
SFN Regular
USA
562 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2001 : 10:16:48 [Permalink]
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quote:
Many anti-environmentalists who call themselves scientists aren't.
Sure sounds like creationalism doesn't it?
Is everyone who questions the panic over global warming an 'anti-environmentalist'? I must confess that at my last Republican rally we plotted how to put more arsenic in the water; the high point was when I saw a child in school about to eat a healthy lunch and I snatched it from her just in time. Thank heaven we nasty right wingers were able to drastically cut the school lunch program (No! Wait! In reality we merely cut the RATE OF INCREASE from 10% to 7% which was still a good 2 percentage points above inflation, but what's a little demagoguery among friends, right?).
But back to your statement: It is undoubtedly true that there are self-proclaimed scientists who would not pass your muster on both (every?) sides of the argument.
It reminds me of the labeling in the abortion arguments. Let's get rid of "Pro-Choice" and "Pro-Life". Let's call them "Pro-Death" and "Anti-Choice."
I'm with Tokyodreamer in general on this and on the specific question of why there is such a rush to question the motivation of those who doubt global warming and a hesitancy to do the same for those who support it.
Personally, I'm not anywhere near capable of claiming to be a scientist in any area, but I am fairly well educated, I am capable of being analytical and reasonable, I am capable of judging sources, and I am capable of changing my mind because I am capable of admitting when I am in error or when new information is brought to light.
I question global warming. I admit there are shills on my side of the argument, just as there are shills on the other side. I do not lightly discard the Oregon Petition, just as I do not discard the rebuttal of the NAS report Summary by MIT Professor of Meteorology Richard Lindzen who was on the NAS panel that wrote the report and also on the IPCC and rebutted its political findings, too.
As I've said in other threads on this and other topics, I may very well be wrong. If I am, my ego will hurt for a bit but I'll eventually change my position publicly. But I will not stand by and accept epithetical remarks about all those who argue in the same vein I do as being ideologues, quacks, extremists, and money-driven blackhearts while those on the opposite side are warm and fuzzy earth lovers with nothing but the good of mankind at heart.
Newsflash: there's big money in the environmentalist movement, too. You think the Sierra Club is poor?
2nd Newflash: I live on this planet, too, and I want my kids (I have three) to have a wonderful, beautiful place to grow up and live; that idea is, in fact, one of my primary motivations; forgive me if I doubt your methods as the best way to achieve that.
My kids still love me. |
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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2001 : 10:25:28 [Permalink]
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Thank you Garrette. You have said what I've been trying to say much better than I've managed.
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Gambatte kudasai! |
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Bozola
Skeptic Friend
USA
166 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2001 : 10:34:19 [Permalink]
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quote:
Any idea held or espoused by a group labelled as "right" is immediatly opposed, no matter what the idea involves, by people who hold the "right" in contempt. You are biased against the idea, simply because it is associated with groups you oppose for other reasons.
It is you who are not looking at all the evidence, simply because you hate a lot of the people who hold the opposing view for idealogical reasons. Global warming must be caused by humans, and it must pose an immediate threat to humanity, because people like Rush Limbaugh surely can't be right about anything!!!
I have looked at their data. It reeks.
The American political right wing has shown itself to be greedy, self-centered, pathological liars. Rush Limbaugh is a fine example to cite, thank you. These people are unimaginative mouthpieces for the self-centered corporate teat they suckle on.
The lesson here is that these people have no ethical difficulties with conflicts of interest and manufacturing concensus. This invalidates any credibility they may have had.
Bozola
- Practicing skeet for the Rapture. |
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Garrette
SFN Regular
USA
562 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2001 : 10:59:59 [Permalink]
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quote:
I have looked at their data. It reeks.
The American political right wing has shown itself to be greedy, self-centered, pathological liars. Rush Limbaugh is a fine example to cite, thank you. These people are unimaginative mouthpieces for the self-centered corporate teat they suckle on.
The lesson here is that these people have no ethical difficulties with conflicts of interest and manufacturing concensus. This invalidates any credibility they may have had.
Thank you! Thank you! I have needed that laugh for quite some time. Thank you again.
How can we possibly doubt that every single member of the American political right wing are greedy, self-centered pathological liars? How can I possibly hope to find a single Republican who can stand in the same moral light as such fine, upstanding characters as, oh say, Ted Turner, Ted Kennedy, Tom Daschle (was he the plagiarist? No, wait, that was Joe Biden.)
I am certain that when the U.S. Senate in 1997 UNANIMOUSLY rejected the Kyoto Treaty that the Republicans did it out of greed while the Democrats did it out of love.
I am certain that President William Jefferson Clinton and the Right Honorable Vice President Albert Gore, Jr. had lofty, high-minded reasons for not asking the Senate even once to reconsider the treaty during the last 3 years of their administration. I am sure the same folks have similarly high-minded reasons for now chastising President Bush for merely stating publicly what has already been done.
We'll set aside the scandals, too, as I'm sure they were all morally driven.
And I must thank you for chastising me and Tokyodreamer for using Rush Limbaugh as a source. Of course, neither one of us has, but you can never be too careful with the likes of us. (Tokyo merely mentioned Rush as someone that the left loves to hate; he did not use him as a source; and as an aside, Rush baby hardly needs to suckle at any corporate teat, having made his millions selling his books and his radio program).
And if you hadn't reminded me, I'd have surely forgotten that only the political right runs into conflicts of interest; though I admit I'm not sure what you mean by 'manufacturing concensus.'
My kids still love me. |
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Zandermann
Skeptic Friend
USA
431 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2001 : 11:06:48 [Permalink]
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quote:
...I must confess that at my last Republican rally we plotted how to put more arsenic in the water; the high point was when I saw a child in school about to eat a healthy lunch and I snatched it from her just in time. Thank heaven we nasty right wingers were able to drastically cut the school lunch program...
Garrette, you've forgotten your secrecy oath! Better report to your cell leader right away for re-education.
quote:
...I am fairly well educated, I am capable of being analytical and reasonable, I am capable of judging sources, and I am capable of changing my mind because I am capable of admitting when I am in error or when new information is brought to light.
Be careful now; you're sounding dangerously coherent here. Everyone knows that a person's position on the conservative/liberal spectrum in politics colors the thought processes...that folks who tend toward the right are incapable of scientific thinking or having original ideas.
quote:
I live on this planet, too, and I want my kids (I have three) to have a wonderful, beautiful place to grow up and live; that idea is, in fact, one of my primary motivations...
sounds like a "greedy, self-centered, pathological liar" to me!
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@tomic
Administrator
USA
4607 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2001 : 11:17:15 [Permalink]
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I can admit that some folks on the left are taking money from industry. That much is obvious. This does not make "The Leipzig Declaration" any easier to swallow considering that it appears to be signed by a bunch of self-proclaimed scientists. I have no problem with examining the findings of of studies financed from environmental groups. Of course that should be done. They should be real scientists, too.
I also think that the average conservative is concerned about the environment. Elected officials are another matter. No one gets to office without owing somebody. So I don't think it's fair to attack all conservatives, but it is perfectly fair to attack politicians or scientists based on what they have done. That goes for the liberal side as well.
@tomic
Gravity, not just a good idea...it's the law! |
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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2001 : 11:20:18 [Permalink]
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quote:
quote:
I have looked at their data. It reeks.
The American political right wing has shown itself to be greedy, self-centered, pathological liars. Rush Limbaugh is a fine example to cite, thank you. These people are unimaginative mouthpieces for the self-centered corporate teat they suckle on.
The lesson here is that these people have no ethical difficulties with conflicts of interest and manufacturing concensus. This invalidates any credibility they may have had.
Thank you! Thank you! I have needed that laugh for quite some time. Thank you again.
And I'd like to thank him for making my point...
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Gambatte kudasai! |
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@tomic
Administrator
USA
4607 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2001 : 11:29:20 [Permalink]
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Oh, and one more thing. I think that what you are objecting to here is the flip side of my objections to the term "Plump and well fed biofoods" that you had no problem with. Do you see my point in objecting to that yet? Hmmmmm?
@tomic
Gravity, not just a good idea...it's the law! |
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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2001 : 11:43:18 [Permalink]
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quote:
Oh, and one more thing. I think that what you are objecting to here is the flip side of my objections to the term "Plump and well fed biofoods" that you had no problem with. Do you see my point in objecting to that yet? Hmmmmm?
Oops! Sorry, I forgot to reply to that!
I see that there are at least two ways of interpreting that statement (both correct in their own context). So yes, I do see your point, and don't argue with it. But I also don't concede that the context in which I presented it was propoganda. I will concede that most people would probably interpret it your way, so you win! 
The purpose of propoganda is to discredit an entire idea. I don't think this was the point. It was to discredit some of the hypocritical trendy hardcore environmentalists who's extreme activities have potential harmful consequences, not to imply that bioengineering is completely safe and that we don't have to worry about it.
Nor was it intended to imply that all people on the anti-GM foods debate are 'plump and well fed" hypocrites. (Guess "plump and well fed" is redundant; I hate being redundant!  )
[could you explain what you mean by being the 'flip side'?]
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Gambatte kudasai!
Edited by - tokyodreamer on 07/02/2001 11:43:59 |
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@tomic
Administrator
USA
4607 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2001 : 11:48:49 [Permalink]
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By flip side I mean having the same propaganda tactic used to attack those on the other side of the issue.
@tomic
Gravity, not just a good idea...it's the law! |
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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2001 : 12:10:19 [Permalink]
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Sorry, I actually realized that.
I meant could you explain why you think what is being discussed here specifically is the flip side to what I was talking about.
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Gambatte kudasai! |
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