Climategate!

[shikitohno]

Global Warming is not killing anyone, this global warming movement is. Governments are scaling back their agriculture production in favor of producing crops for biofuels as part of the green movement. That's food that people could be eating. Going green and spending money on this green thing is going to choke out the lower class. If anything, let the free market handle the green movement, it's already happening in many companies.

The attempt to make a switch to biofuel isn't just because of global warming alarmists. Whether or not you want to accept global warming, oil isn't going to last forever, and it's not exactly the quickest thing to replace. For a change, I'll agree with you that the corn→ethanol idea is stupid. US government saw Brasil do it, and decided it was an awesome idea to emulate. Failed to take into account that Brasil managed to switch over mostly to biofuel produced by surplus sugar cane. Brasil uses substantially less oil than most countries, developing or not, but it worked for them because they could make it from something they had lying around as waste. Setting aside corn for it on the other hand, not the best move.

Still, you can't blame the green movement for people starving for want of food. For decades, in perhaps the most Soviet-esque bit of US market manipulation we've got, farmers are paid to throw away massive quantities of food they've grown in order to keep prices on produce high enough that farmer's (already quite poor) standard of living doesn't plummet due to insane surplus. The US only has a free market when it suits the country. It's not a place I would trust to become eco-friendly of its own initiative.

[justintempler]

The attempt to make a switch to biofuel isn't just because of global warming alarmists. Whether or not you want to accept global warming, oil isn't going to last forever, and it's not exactly the quickest thing to replace.......

Drill baby drill doesn't work.
and
Buying your oil from the Middle East is just helping to pay for terrorists that we end up fighting wars over.

I'm a fan of T Boone Pickens propane, solar and wind power and rebuilding the power grid. I think electric and hydrogen are the way to go.

[wa3zrm]

<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/zORv8wwiadQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed>

[sgreger1]

Global Warming is not killing anyone, this global warming movement is. Governments are scaling back their agriculture production in favor of producing crops for biofuels as part of the green movement. That's food that people could be eating. Going green and spending money on this green thing is going to choke out the lower class. If anything, let the free market handle the green movement, it's already happening in many companies.

The attempt to make a switch to biofuel isn't just because of global warming alarmists. Whether or not you want to accept global warming, oil isn't going to last forever, and it's not exactly the quickest thing to replace. For a change, I'll agree with you that the corn→ethanol idea is stupid. US government saw Brasil do it, and decided it was an awesome idea to emulate. Failed to take into account that Brasil managed to switch over mostly to biofuel produced by surplus sugar cane. Brasil uses substantially less oil than most countries, developing or not, but it worked for them because they could make it from something they had lying around as waste. Setting aside corn for it on the other hand, not the best move.

Still, you can't blame the green movement for people starving for want of food. For decades, in perhaps the most Soviet-esque bit of US market manipulation we've got, farmers are paid to throw away massive quantities of food they've grown in order to keep prices on produce high enough that farmer's (already quite poor) standard of living doesn't plummet due to insane surplus. The US only has a free market when it suits the country. It's not a place I would trust to become eco-friendly of its own initiative.

You know I live down the street from David Blume, author of the famous "Alcohol can be a gas" book and a huge leader in the permaculture movement. At first it looked cool untill I looked into it. And basicly what I foudn is exactly what you've said. It works in places like brazil but that's because they've got a shit-load of sugar cane in surplus and it makes for great fuel.

In America we don't have the same capability as they do. And your right, the way subsidies work etc it ****s the real enviro movement for monetary gain. I'm all for going green, but it just seems like it's being used for political purposes and to make more money for big corps and people like Al Gore, who is charging $1,209 to shake his hand at the UN btw.


Your right, oil will run out and it's a dirty substance anyways that was forced on us when automobiles were first getting big since gasoline would have otherwise beena waste product of petrolium refinement and would have ot have been disposed of properly. Instead they maanged to sell it as a fuel so we could burn it up in our cars. One thing is for sure, and that's that we need to get away from oil. But as the US is almost solely based on oil nowadays, as well as our economy (since most oil is traded in USD$) I don't see us having a real "green" movement that means anything in the near future.

[sgreger1]

The attempt to make a switch to biofuel isn't just because of global warming alarmists. Whether or not you want to accept global warming, oil isn't going to last forever, and it's not exactly the quickest thing to replace.......

Drill baby drill doesn't work.
and
Buying your oil from the Middle East is just helping to pay for terrorists that we end up fighting wars over.

I'm a fan of T Boone Pickens propane, solar and wind power and rebuilding the power grid. I think electric and hydrogen are the way to go.

Hydrogen baby. Just need to find an efficient way to produce it on the spot because hydro fuel cells explode pretty easly lol. And if we could get off the Middle east's oil tit it would fix a lot of the war problems we are having over there. It's not sustainable in the long run to be buying your main energy source from your enemy who you are actively waging a war against.

[RRK]

What about switchgrass?

[Mordred]

Ok, been lurking here for a while, registered specifically to reply to the above video.

That guy is a complete and utter moron. Science teacher? Wrote a book? No wonder the world's a mess...

*puts on preacher outfit* "Yeah oh my brothers, I tell unto thee, the great angel Gabriel spake to me this night and told me that a great catastrophe would befall mankind, the likes of which we have never seen before. But he also told me of a way to avert this catastrophe, because our Lord is indeed merciful. My prayers, augmented by the goodwill of our nation, can indeed stop this. As a material proof of your goodwill, I shall require a 5 dollar bill from each one of you. Hallelujah!"

So, let's apply the moronic "grid".

1) The prophet is wrong, we pay him. Result: We lose 5 bucks.

2) The prophet is wrong and we don't pay him: We keep our 5 bucks.

3) The prophet is right, and we pay him: We lose 5 bucks but avert the apocalypse.

4) The prophet is right and we didn't pay him: We burn in fire and brimstone

So clearly, our best option here is to pay the prophet... just in case. Because the worst that can happen if we pay him is we're out 5 bucks.

Right, so let's apply this to the climate debate, we'll need to change a few things of course like... er... well, actually, all we need to change is "prophet" into "Al Gore" and we pretty much got it.

Jokes aside, how can he possibly make a risk assessment without looking at probabilities of the different scenarios? Just because they're all a square in a grid does NOT mean they are equally likely. I could carry around a parachute 24/7 "just in case" I ever need to jump off a burning building. Failure to have a parachute will result in certain death, right? Yet I don't. None of us do. Why? Because the probability of needing one is very, very low.

Furthermore, he again neglects probability when assigning "worst case scenarios". Curbing CO2 will most certainly result in stunted economic growth in developping countries (essentially halting their development and denying the people there access to electricity, clean water etc, thus killing them) whereas a rise in temperature will most likely result in localized damage displacing certain populations. The extreme climate shift proposed in the video is completely unlikely.

So really, if this completely disingenous twat is indeed a science teacher, I feel deeply sorry for his students.

[sgreger1]

*puts on preacher outfit* "Yeah oh my brothers, I tell unto thee, the great angel Gabriel spake to me this night and told me that a great catastrophe would befall mankind, the likes of which we have never seen before. But he also told me of a way to avert this catastrophe, because our Lord is indeed merciful. My prayers, augmented by the goodwill of our nation, can indeed stop this. As a material proof of your goodwill, I shall require a 5 dollar bill from each one of you. Hallelujah!"

Wtf, how sir, did you get a copy of Al Gore's speech that he plans on using at the UN?

Seriousely, the "if you don't pay Al Gore the world will end" thing has goten out of control. Lets focus on realistic green initiatives, with the goal of getting off oil as our main source of energy. I will not be behind this green movement as long as it's sole purpose is to we can create another fiat currency via carbon credits for the big shots to trade around.

[NorSnuser]

Screw global warming, global dimming may be more important to look at. This documentary covers another complex component of climate change. It's worth a watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLfBXRPoHRc

[Mordred]

I also watched his follow-up video (yeah, I'm a masochist) and it's basically a repeat of the original EXCEPT he talks to the solution that is, in his oppinion needed: "A change of policies" Read: taxes.

He goes on to say: "We need nothing less than a change in the culture itself."

Finally, his true colors. It's never about the environment or climate change, not anymore. Greenpeace got started by people genuinely wanting to clean up the world and stop pollution. It was their only agenda. But now, the environmental movement has a new goal: to change our culture. 20 years ago, it was about using bio-degradable packaging for our sweets, today, we're being told the sweets themselves are evil, worse, that WE are evil. 20 years ago, we were polluting the earth, nowadays WE are the pollution. It's disheartening.

And by the ways, there IS a way to curb CO2 emissions drastically without going back to the middle ages, it's called nuclear power. Zero CO2. What's even funnier, is that nuclear power is how this all got started. Margaret Thatcher was a staunch supporter of nuclear power, because she resented being dependent on oil-producing countries, so her government was the first to fund research into CO2's (supposedly nefarious) effects on the climate. Poor Maggie sure didn't expect this turn of events.

On Al Gore:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbLK4RZDdzI

Admits being a partner in a company that invested one billion bucks into businesses that stand to profit directly from new legislation, supported by... Al Gore.

[sgreger1]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/...ategate_r.html



If anyone cares to know why there is no way to explain what these scientists have done, read this. It's long, but includes the programmers comments on the program made to create the hockeystick date, and it is explained in the code exactly how to fake the data. in plain english. They openly claim to using fake data because they can't explain the decline in temps and their data does not measure up to the tree ring data. So they faked it.

[sgreger1]

This week, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs claimed that global warming was no longer in dispute by most people. But a subsequent Rasmussen Reports poll of Americans finds only one in four adults believes most scientists agree on the topic.

And while only 20% claim to have followed the leaked e-mail story very closely, nearly 60% believe it is at least somewhat likely that scientists have falsified environmental data to support their own global warming beliefs and theories.

[justintempler]

Trick, Hide the decline and the art of quote mining.

<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7nnVQ2fROOg&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed>

[wa3zrm]

A new poll reveals that the percentage of Americans who believe carbon dioxide emissions will cause global warming has dropped dramatically in recent years.

And that poll by Harris Interactive was conducted between Nov. 2 and 11 — before the so-called “climategate” controversy erupted, calling into question the validity of some of the science supporting manmade global warming.

The poll found that the percentage of American who believe in global warming has dropped from 75 percent in 2001 and 71 percent in 2007 to just 51 percent.

At the same time, the percentage of those who do not believe in global warming has risen from 19 percent in 2001 and 23 percent in 2007 to 29 percent today, and the percentage who are unsure has climbed from 6 percent to 21 percent since 2001.

“The 51 percent who believe emissions will cause climate change is by far the lowest number recorded in any Harris Poll since we started asking this question 12 years ago,” Harris Interactive disclosed.

Opinions differed sharply along party lines — 73 percent of Democrats believe in manmade global warming, compared to 28 percent of Republicans and 49 percent of Independents.

As for the upcoming international conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, only 28 percent of those polled knew that the main topic to be discussed is global warming and climate change. Nearly 10 percent said the economic crisis would be the topic, while smaller numbers cited nuclear weapons, health and epidemics, terrorism, international trade, or drugs.

Six days after the poll closed, on Nov. 17, someone hacked a server used by the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and disseminated more than a thousand e-mails and other documents.

Climate change skeptics charge that the e-mails show collusion by climate scientists to skew scientific information in favor of manmade global warming.

The leaked documents “show that prominent scientists were so wedded to theories of manmade global warming that they ridiculed dissenters who asked for copies of their data, plotted how to keep researchers who reached different conclusions from publishing, and concealed apparently buggy computer code from being disclosed under the Freedom of Information law,” CBS News reported.

One climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research was quoted as saying: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

[sgreger1]

NASA-GATE
What's become known as "Climategate" may be about to explode on this side of the pond as well. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has threatened a lawsuit against NASA if by year-end the agency doesn't honor his Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for information on how and why its climate numbers have been consistently adjusted for errors.

"I assume that what is there is highly damaging," says Horner, who suspects, based on the public record, the same type of data fudging, manipulation and suppression that has occurred at Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU). "These guys (NASA) are quite clearly determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this."

They may have good reason, says Investor's Business Daily (IBD):

*NASA was caught with its thermometers down when James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, announced that 1998 was the country's hottest year on record, with 2006 the third hottest.

*NASA and Goddard were forced to correct the record in 2007 to show that 1934, decades before the advent of the SUV, was in fact the warmest; in fact, the new numbers showed that four of the country's 10 warmest years were in the 1930s.

*Hansen, who began the climate scare some two decades ago, was caught fudging the numbers again in declaring October 2008 the warmest on record.

*This despite the fact that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

*Scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on that October's readings at all; figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
Was Hansen, like his CRU counterpart Michael Mann, trying to "hide the decline" in temperatures, asks IBD?

*Hansen has said in the past that "heads of major fossil-fuel companies who spread disinformation about global warming should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature." What penalties would he recommend for himself and his CRU colleagues, asks IBD?