The Coming Paradigm Shift on Climate

[Epoetker]

1. Clean air is beneficial outside of global warming. I don't think government spending on climatologists is anywhere near a budgetary concern.

I'm concerned less about the budgetary hazard (that mostly exists in anti-poverty programs) than the moral hazard of scientists working for Funding and Social Prestige rather than Truth and Profit.

2. What specific taxes would cease to exist or decrease?

A bunch of very smart people would no longer be wasting their lives on intractable problems.

3. Coal mining is bad for the environment outside of global warming and it's a very hazardous profession. You remind me of the politicians who vote to fund the building of tanks the military doesn't want so people can keep their jobs.

Are you a complete idiot? Because I didn't hear you once offer a defense of a form of energy less hazardous than coal when you made this attack. All energy-sector jobs invite hazards, and the bigger and more concentrated the energy yield the more dangerous the mistakes. If you want to move away from coal because it's a dangerous, crappy job, plug for nuclear power.

[Sparko]

I still don't understand your argument. If our government wanted to consider these changes they could hire people to look into these statistics. If you want proof that these ideas would be effective then you're missing my point. I'm not arguing that they are.



1. Clean air is beneficial outside of global warming. I don't think government spending on climatologists is anywhere near a budgetary concern.
2. What specific taxes would cease to exist or decrease?
3. Coal mining is bad for the environment outside of global warming and it's a very hazardous profession. You remind me of the politicians who vote to fund the building of tanks the military doesn't want so people can keep their jobs.

1. I never said we shouldn't have clean air. That is a completely different topic than trying to eliminate excess Co2 if Co2 isn't an actual problem and is not causing man-made global warming. The government goes beyond pollution control and wants to control c02 output by limiting industries and creating crap like carbon credits.

2. Well, I have just gotten a letter from my electrical company saying that my rates are going up because of government regulations on global warming. And if electrical plants can't use cheap sources of energy like coal, the costs are higher than they should be. The EPA has a ton of regulations and are adding more penalties and taxes on industries to force them to comply with Co2 Emissions. Those costs get passed down to the consumer. Me and you.

3. Coal mining is not bad for the environment. We have clean burning coal plants that do not pollute. The reason the government wants to eliminate coal is because it claims that burning coal (which is basically just carbon) raises co2 levels and causes global warming. I am from eastern kentucky where closing of coal mines has put thousands out of jobs in coal mines. That means that the towns have no income, which means that other businesses go out of business too because there is no money coming in from the mines. The end result is that people have to move away, or end up on welfare. And that costs the taxpayers more because someone has to support all those people on welfare.

[Psychic Missile]

I give up. Why don't you just say "I don't know"?

I don't know why we seem to be miscommunicating.

I'm concerned less about the budgetary hazard (that mostly exists in anti-poverty programs) than the moral hazard of scientists working for Funding and Social Prestige rather than Truth and Profit.

Aren't funding and social prestige tied to truth and profit? Good science stands on its own merit, and a scientist that can find hidden truths is desired.

A bunch of very smart people would no longer be wasting their lives on intractable problems.

Are they? Global warming isn't its own discipline.

Are you a complete idiot? Because I didn't hear you once offer a defense of a form of energy less hazardous than coal when you made this attack. All energy-sector jobs invite hazards, and the bigger and more concentrated the energy yield the more dangerous the mistakes. If you want to move away from coal because it's a dangerous, crappy job, plug for nuclear power.

I would.

1. I never said we shouldn't have clean air. That is a completely different topic than trying to eliminate excess Co2 if Co2 isn't an actual problem and is not causing man-made global warming. The government goes beyond pollution control and wants to control c02 output by limiting industries and creating crap like carbon credits.

I think we would both agree that there needs to be limits on Co2, otherwise we'd see what's happened to air quality in China happen here. Even if you don't like carbon credits (I don't either) the argument for them can still be made outside of global warming.

2. Well, I have just gotten a letter from my electrical company saying that my rates are going up because of government regulations on global warming. And if electrical plants can't use cheap sources of energy like coal, the costs are higher than they should be. The EPA has a ton of regulations and are adding more penalties and taxes on industries to force them to comply with Co2 Emissions. Those costs get passed down to the consumer. Me and you.

The purpose of the tax would be to get people to use less energy so their bill would be equal to or smaller than what it was before the taxes were implemented. I don't think it's right for people to use non-renewable energy sources without having a limit on consumption.

3. Coal mining is not bad for the environment. We have clean burning coal plants that do not pollute. The reason the government wants to eliminate coal is because it claims that burning coal (which is basically just carbon) raises co2 levels and causes global warming. I am from eastern kentucky where closing of coal mines has put thousands out of jobs in coal mines. That means that the towns have no income, which means that other businesses go out of business too because there is no money coming in from the mines. The end result is that people have to move away, or end up on welfare. And that costs the taxpayers more because someone has to support all those people on welfare.

The World Coal Association has a list pf possible environmental problems, and while I would not call their list at all exhaustive, it illustrates that the goal industry itself admits negative environmental impact is at the very least a possibility. I don't think we should employ people to do a job we don't want or need them to do. I don't see how that's any different than welfare. If anything, it's worse. I would rather all those people have better jobs that people want and need in their community.

[John Reece]

The Coming Paradigm Shift on Climate

The following is the opening paragraph from a three-page behind-a-pay-wall article in The Weekly Standard:

Climate Cultists

Has the desperate global warming crusade reached its Waterloo?

JUN 16, 2014 • BY STEVEN F. HAYWARD

Instead of confronting the fact that their cause has foundered mostly of its own dead weight—and the sheer fantasy of proposals for near-term replacement of hydrocarbon energy—the climate campaigners have steadily ratcheted up their bad-faith arguments and grasping authoritarianism. The result is a catalogue of exaggerated claims and appalling clichés, the most egregious being the refrain that “97 percent of scientists ‘believe in’ climate change.” This dubious talking point elides seamlessly into the implication that scientists should strive for unanimity and link arms in full support of the environmentalists’ carbon-suppression agenda.

Here is a paragraph from the middle of the three-page article:

The IPCC modeling chapter, which virtually no reporter reads, is also candid in admitting that most of the models have overpredicted recent warming. The 17-years-and-counting plateau in global average temperature, following two decades of a nearly 0.4 degree increase in temperature that boosted the warming narrative for a time, is the biggest embarrassment for a supposed scientific “consensus” since Piltdown Man. The basic theory says we’re supposed to continue warming at about 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade, but since the late 1990s we’ve stopped. In one of the infamous emails revealed in the East Anglia “climategate” scandal of 2009, Kevin Trenberth, a prominent climate scientist, called it a “travesty” that scientists couldn’t give a good reason for the pause. They’ve been scrambling ever since, offering a variety of explanations, but none of them can minimize the fact that nearly all of the models failed to predict a “pause” of this length, and if the “pause” continues for another 5 to 10 years, all of the models will be falsified.

Here are the two concluding paragraphs from page three:

The real “deniers” today are the climateers who refuse to consider that their case for catastrophe has weakened even as they promote unserious solutions that do little or nothing to stimulate the genuine energy transition they say they want. Their default position continues to be simpleminded exaggeration or distortion of every possible angle for political gain.

The best opinion polls from Pew and Gallup show that the public doesn’t buy it and is suffering from a case of “apocalypse fatigue.” The rank politicization of the issue and the relentless demonization of any critics within the scientific community are a catastrophe for science and debilitating for serious deliberation about policy. But the left is so far gone into climate madness, and the Democratic party so beholden to its green faction, that they are likely to persist in their inordinate fear of the Keystone pipeline, natural gas fracking, and the extraordinary revival of American oil production, all of which, in a relatively unmolested market, would tend to displace coal. Absent an unusual level of political resolve from Congress, the climate campaign may yet succeed in hobbling the electric power sector in America. That would be a high price to pay for indulging a fanatical movement that in every other respect must be reckoned a pernicious failure.

Steven F. Hayward is the inaugural visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Ronald Reagan distinguished visiting professor at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Public Policy.

[John Reece]

This is the concluding paragraph of an article at What's Up With That, titled "Standard Deviation, The Overlooked But Essential Climate Statistic":

IPCC studies and prediction failures were inevitable because they lack data, manufacture data, lack knowledge of mechanisms and exclude known mechanism. Reduction or elimination of the standard deviation leads to loss of information and further distortion of the natural variability of weather and climate, both of which continue to occur within historic and natural norms.

[John Reece]

We know the increases in CO2 are human-driven because the C13/C12 ratio of the atmosphere is characteristic of fossil fuels.

However, there is no documented cause and effect correlation between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and the trend line of surface temperature.

See here and especially here.

[Truthseeker]

Great good news for alarmists! G. B. Trudeau, the brains behind the comic strip Doonesbury, is on your side! Here's proof: http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com...hive/2014/6/22 Now you have nothing to fear.