Why is there a Global Warming Conspiracy?

And along these same lines, it would be a lot easier to convince people which programs to pass, if only they didn't, you know, actually get implemented. So long as we do nothing to address a known problem, people won't care about it until too late because NOT addressing a problem is free.

Well, see, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Granted, it's a trace gas in the atmosphere, and granted there are climate factors far more important than CO2. But over a period of decades, these other climate drivers average out to pretty much constant, while the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising steadily, by about 15 billion tons a year, year after year. This is only a 5% increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, but it's 5% MORE every year. Today, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is the highest it has been in about 800,000 years. And it's growing.

Is this important? In the short run, not very. As you point out, the greenhouse effect of CO2 can easily be overpowered by more influential factors, which may mask the growing CO2 concentrations for some periods. But eventually, the fact that the other factors are cyclical and CO2 is cumulative is going to become meaningful.

 

That's it, when confronted call your challenger a 'liar' then go off on a 'because I said so' rant.

 

I'm not part of the 'anti-vaccination' crowd which is, of course, totally irrelevant. Hey NOBODY (except the government and 'friends' of government) is getting rich off the 'growing problem.' That's because government thrives on 'growing problems.'

 

I probably shouldn't respond - I don't deny global warming. However....

I'm going to try real hard and accept your last sentence as true. That's difficult because you included so much loaded and prejudicial terminology, accusations, and innuendo into your post.

I do not believe that most climate scientists are engaged in a conspiracy. I do believe there is a smallish cabal that has acted in unprincipled ways to squelch skeptics and their message. But one is inclined to assume that most scientists are honest - but by no means all of them.

And, yes, there are scientists who make it difficult to believe they are completely honest. Dr James Hansen comes to mind. In 1988 he warned of the catastrophes of anthropogenic global warming. But in 1999, he wrote "... in the U.S. there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years, the time of rapidly increasing greenhouse gases — in fact, there was a slight cooling throughout much of the country." He also wrote "Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought." In the paper (published in 2000) they [Dr. James Hansen and the GISS team in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)] make these two bold statements: ....we argue that rapid warming in recent decades has been driven mainly by non-CO2 greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as chlorofluorocarbons, CH4, and N2O, not by the products of fossil fuel burning, CO2 and aerosols."

Perhaps it's a case of "Noble Cause Corruption" for many scientists in the field. While this concept is most often applied to police officers, I see no reason it cannot apply to other professions. The idea is that good outcomes justify bad behavior. And there are several statements by AGW proponents and environmentalists that meet this definition. For examples:

1. We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination…So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts…Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
- Prof. Stephen Schneider,
Stanford Professor of Climatology,
lead author of many IPCC reports

2. “We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
- Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation

3. “The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”
- Prof. Chris Folland,
Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research

4. “I believe it is appropriate to have an ‘over-representation’ of the facts on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience.”
- Al Gore,
Climate Change activist

5. "It is no secret that a lot of climate-change research is subject to opinion, that climate models sometimes disagree even on the signs of the future changes (e.g. drier vs. wetter future climate). The problem is, only sensational exaggeration makes the kind of story that will get politicians’ — and readers’ — attention. So, yes, climate scientists might exaggerate, but in today’s world, this is the only way to assure any political action and thus more federal financing to reduce the scientific uncertainty."
Monika Kopacz, atmospheric scientist

Yep, there is a lot of money being spread around to support various positions, hypotheses, NGOs, foundations, universities, etc. And any who think that $billions cannot corrupt - or perhaps "shade" - opinion is naive. But one most often hears that it is the skeptical scientists who are biased by their funding - nothing about the AGW proponents. That hardly seems reasonable. If we assume that a certain percentage of climate scientists are corruptible and that "97% of all climate scientists" agree with the AGW hypothsis, then we should assume that there are 33 times as many corrupted climate scientists on the proponents' side.

Funding for research (publish or perish!) is much easier to obtain if one includes the words or alludes to the words "anthrogenic global warming" or "anthropogenic climate change". In fact, proponents of AGW are fond of pointing out how many more studies there are that support those concepts than are skeptical about them. The number of studies says nothing about the validity of the hypothesis, however. Science is not about the number of studies that exist on a specific subject. As one might expect, the quality of studies matters much more than the number.

As for funding, WWF and similar organizations as well as governments have a much, much larger piggy bank to use to fund studies than "big energy" companies do. Citing the total assets of an oil company as some kind of proof of nefarious intent is ludicrous. Do you actually believe they are going to use their entire asset base to fund skeptics? Are you aware that Greenpeace has recieved as much funding from "big energy" as the Heartland Institute did from Exxon? Or that the US part of the WWF's budget is about 50 times that of the Heartland Institute? We all know that not all of either organization's budget is spent on a single study area. But it addresses the point that simply saying that such and such has "X" dollars is meaningless.

So what to make of all this? For one thing, scientists on either side of the question cannot be labelled and boxed like so much fruit. And skeptics are not of a single mind about the honesty and sincerity of AGW believing climate scientists. Further, using one or two examples of source assets or budgets is not illuminating.

 

Can't help yourself, can you? When confronted with your own lies, you make no effort to explain or correct them. You simply attack. Nonetheless, I will continue to point out lies as you excrete them.

 

In this fairly long post, after some careful reading, I find not even a glance in the direction of the actual physical evidence. But AGW wasn't invented whole-cloth as part of any conspiracy by anyone to defraud the people out of money wasted to pad pockets. It grew out of a considerable body of observations. It seems odd that in all your points, none of them allude to this evidence in any way.

I'm willing to agree that, at the margin, we have opportunists who see this scientific discipline as a means of leveraging some fame or fortune. And it's hard not to notice that anytime any quantities of money get moved around, there will be some who gain what others lose. But the core of AGW is not at all the political and PR games being played on non-scientific stages. The core is a process of grinding hard work - measuring temperatures above and below the ocean surfaces, in the atmosphere, above the atmosphere, and correcting for seasons, jet streams, volcanos, urban heat islands, huge data gaps, etc. And also measuring the effects of not just CO2 but every composite of the land, sea and air to figure out which are changing and by how much and what their relative influences are, and so on and on and on.

A lot of the game players do not fund scientific studies anymore than creationists do. They fund public relations campaigns, and battles to own the language, and to tie AGW in with religious unbelievers (at which they've been surprisingly successful). What we the people SEE is all this PR battle going on. Few are capable of understanding what a gas partial-pressure is or what it means.

 

Sorry I did not meet your expectations. However, the OP was a request for opinion - which I tried to provide. It was not a call for evidence of the validity of AGW.

 

It's not a lie. It is true.

Because schemes are typically based on a false premise meant to sucker people. Like AGW.

No lie there either. Perhaps I should have explained for the simple minded among US that the connotation of the word 'wrench' also means causing emotional distress (as in telling folks the world is in danger from AGW). I didn't mean the actual tool itself.

There is not enough 'available evidence' to make such claims so, that is not a lie either. I think you regard anyone who disagrees with your on-high proclamations and challenges your AGW mantra as a 'liar.'

Well then somehow you have seen fit to call it AGW with only predictions, models and observations. An obvious FALSE conclusion.

There were no lies, you are being delusional. When you attack others with stupid accusations and call them liars, most folks think its a waste of time to respond to such idiocy. However, I'm still here so......apparently you are lying. LOL

And it has been SOUNDLY discounted to such a degree, the AGW 'industry' had to change it to 'climate change.'

Please show me the experiment where climatologists have actually changed global climate...repeatedly. Tell them to lift the polar freeze on the East coast of the U.S. and bring rain to CA. Let's see these 'tested, consistent, relevant, evidences.

 

You're wrong, renewable energy sources can't meet current energy demands, now or in the foreseeable future. It doesn't appear that you researched this stuff at all. We do need to change our lifestyles if we want to reduce CO2 emissions. A lot of climate change advocates are not interested in changing their lifestyle, they just want someone they can point the finger at in reaction to their fear of global warming.

I think you should go back and re-read your OP and ask yourself if you really presented your ideas in a way that would not offend anyone. Your "genuine questions" were presented in a totally adversarial way that could never be constructive towards having a conversation.

Fundamentally, trust is something that appears spontaneously when certain conditions are met. Modern liberals imagine that they can bully or force people into trusting them but that's impossible.

 

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/02/debunking_the_97_consensus_on_global_warming.html

 

Glad to see you're a champion of the rich, wealthy, white American way. So much for intellect.

 

Your last paragraph is true and a lot of the rest of the post makes valid points. However, your idea that something over 90% of climatologists are misguided idealists quite willing to misrepresent data and/or purposely come to invalid conclusions is disingenuous at best.

Now, yes, scientific questions are solved by evidence, not consensus, and if only one of the AGW deniers is right, then the 90% of climatologists are wrong. However, the only statements I've seen that flatly deny AGW come mainly from pundits that are pointing this out. They are sniping around the edges, acting as if any objection disproves the entire theory. All scientific theories are treated this way, they are proven mainly by trying to disprove them. Refuting the contradictions this method inevitably brings up should make a theory stronger, but in AGW the pundits routinely ignore any refutations and move on to add another "fact" to form a growing list of bogus objections that is, in their minds, never answered.

It's like when you're arguing with someone and they say "you've got an answer for everything, don't you?" as if, somehow, that invalidates your entire argument

 

Your last paragraph is true and a lot of the rest of the post makes valid points. However, your idea that something over 90% of climatologists are misguided idealists quite willing to misrepresent data and/or purposely come to invalid conclusions is disingenuous at best.

Now, yes, scientific questions are solved by evidence, not consensus, and if only one of the AGW deniers is right, then the 90% of climatologists are wrong. However, the only statements I've seen that flatly deny AGW come mainly from pundits that are pointing this out. They are sniping around the edges, acting as if any objection disproves the entire theory. All scientific theories are treated this way, they are proven mainly by trying to disprove them. Refuting the contradictions this method inevitably brings up should make a theory stronger, but in AGW the pundits routinely ignore any refutations and move on to add another "fact" to form a growing list of bogus objections that is, in their minds, never answered.

It's like when you're arguing with someone and they respond "You've got an answer for everything, don't you?" as if that somehow invalidates everything you've just said.

 

However, your idea that something over 90% of climatologists are misguided idealists quite willing to misrepresent data and/or purposely come to invalid conclusions is disingenuous at best.

I made no such claim.

 

Your tagline is ignorance. Man was not the cause of climate change (global warming), man contributed to an important variable which has hastened climate change.

 

I firmly believe in climate change... but.... I am not convinced that a carbon tax or cap and trade system is necessarily the wisest first response.... I lean toward investing in desalination of ocean water in order to turn deserts green???!!!!


http://www.bankingsystemsflaws.blogspot.ca

I believe that this type of opening gambit against climate change would fit better with a plan to bring peace to the Middle East.......and the threat of a nuclear war is one that should be taken seriously???!!!
http://www.politicalforum.com/showthread.php?t=322565

God's Peace Plan for the Holy Land
I read this intriguing plan for peace in the Middle East twice already! It is about fifty pages and well worth your time to consider!


http://www.godspeaceplan.org/

(Scroll down to the link: Click Here to Download Your Copy of the Peace Plan).