Do you think republicans REALLY don't know that greenhouse gases can cause cooling?

[Bill]

So, here's the question, prompted by the Heartland Institutes fake conference on climate.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute

Are republicans so badly educated in science that they don't know that the predicted possible side effects of greenhouse gases includes two possible sources of global cooling, the first being a short term effect of instablity in the upper atmosphere and pockets of temperature change in the ocean (the "bathtub effect"), the second being a long term effect caused by a slowdown of ocean currents due to salinity and ocean temperature changes?

Or is it all an act?

Or is it just that they repeat what they are told to repeat by their corporate masters and phony "think tanks" like the Heartland Institute?

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Side question - are republicans so bad at math that they don't understand the concepts of "mean", "average", and the concept of the mean of a line on a graph?

Or is it all an act?

[kres24GT]

You've answered your own question.

[LogicallyYours]

I don't know about your average Joe Republican, but your NeoConservative....They know, they just don't care. They are all about what they can do for themselves today, now. In the short term the can continue to rape the environment and rake in huge profits because they won't be around in the future to have to deal with it.

Why should they give up what could be theirs today so that someone can have a better tomorrow?

[kres24GT]

I don't know about your average Joe Republican, but your NeoConservative....They know, they just don't care. They are all about what they can do for themselves today, now. In the short term the can continue to rape the environment and rake in huge profits because they won't be around in the future to have to deal with it.

Why should they give up what could be theirs today so that someone can have a better tomorrow?


careful Bill can only see things as Republican vs. Democrat. if you get outside of of these labels he gets confused on which side of an issue to be on.


FYI: Most Americans don't care, regardless of politcal affiliation or lack thereof.

[LogicallyYours]

careful Bill can only see things as Republican vs. Democrat. if you get outside of of these labels he gets confused on which side of an issue to be on.


FYI: Most Americans don't care, regardless of politcal affiliation or lack thereof.

To be honest, again, I don't people actually know? The deniers have put up such a good smoke screen that most people believe its an open issue.

Somethings need an official public discourse.

[kres24GT]

To be honest, again, I don't people actually know? The deniers have put up such a good smoke screen that most people believe its an open issue.

Somethings need an official public discourse.


Most people just don't care and if they do care it's only to argue on politcal message boards. Being environmentally conscious is hard work, the politcians have told us hard work is not something we want to be a part of. Politicians will gladly rob us of our freedom, but will they force us to recycle or stop using disposable everything? We are told we can't do anything without government doing it for us, so why would we do these things? American Idol is on.

[Bill]

Here's a bit from Scientific American on this today. Now, it's important to remember, that Scientific American is the most corporate controlled of all science publications. It's not condsidered the most reliable source for science articles, because it is so heavily influenced by american industry.

But not even the folks at Scientific Anerican can stand by while people who don't know scientific method from a hole in the ground spread misinformation.

http://science-community.sciam.com/blog-entry/Sciam-Observations/Despite-Fox-News-Rush-Limbaugh/300010070&start=0&sc=WR_20080304

This kind of meaningless bloviation comes from the ideologically-driven disinformation machine so often that it's hardly worth highlighting here, except that this is a particularly egregious example of it.

(And those of you who think I'm unfairly picking on the political right need only examine our coverage of the Thimerosal = Autism controversy and Genetically Modified Food issue to realize that the left is just as susceptible to this sort of nonsense, and just as wont to be called out by this publication.)

Yesterday both Rush Limbaugh and Fox News reported that last year was so much cooler than previous years that it contravenes any evidence of Global Warming (or Climate Change, if you prefer.)

Except that's expressly not true.

As reported by Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy:

The latest round was brought to my attention from DarkSyde, a science blogger at DailyKos. In an article he put up last night, he notes that an online mag called Daily Tech has a blogger who is claiming that last year was cooler than average… which contradicts a study by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies that shows that last year was among the hottest on record.

Which one is right? Duh. NASA. The Daily Tech columnist evidently confused a below-average January temperature for an entire year’s worth.

UPDATE: Actually, the original post by Phil is incorrect - the columnist *did not* make the full year / January mistake alleged above. See the comments, below, for the full story.

I regret the error - apologies to the original author, Michael Asher.

However, I can't let him off the hook entirely, because Asher has a history of being a partisan in the global warming debate -- and not on the side of the overwhelming body of evidence.

Doing a little digging via google reveals that on DailyTech.com he has a history of cherry-picking news reports and other findings for results that support his transparently denialist agenda. Originally I was going to say that it was the pundits who had used his original reporting who were at fault here, but it's clear they sourced him in the first place because he is, like them, hardly an unbiased source.




So, to simplify, all the fuss is because Jan 2008 was significantly colder than Jan 2007, and the fuss ignores the other measurement, which is that the year 2007 was, on avergae, among one of the warmest on record.

Selected from the comments:

I trust NASA too. And or course UAH too (I earned a masters degree from UAH.)

Phil should have examined the NASA data at which point he would realize the data posted by NASA is from Jan. '07 to Jan. '08.

UAH reporst essentially the same data as do a couple of other sources.

The original data was posted by Anthony Watts who has this to say about DailyTech's "erasure" comment:

"There has been no “erasure”. This is an anomaly with a large magnitude, and it coincides with other anecdotal weather evidence. It is curious, it is unusual, it is large, it is unexpected, but it does not “erase” anything. I suggested a correction to DailyTech and they have graciously complied."

So the drop is real. There is no claim as to why there is a decline. I have seen no claim that atmospheric CO2 content has declined. I have seen cliams that the sun's output has declined and I believe NASA, UAH and other sources report that global warming and cooling correlate closely with various sun cylces and not CO2 content.

by rdholland Feb 29, 2008 1:14 PM


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by roboguy Feb 29, 2008 6:24 PM

For what it's worth, the original data are at: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt

And the Fox and Rush arguments, IMHO, show the danger in the quotation of statistics by people who are mathematically alternately enabled.

They quote changes from Jan 07 to Jan 08. Without a doubt, Jan 08 was significantly cooler than Jan 07: by about 0.8 C. But, if you compare previous months data, one sees that the temperatures were much closer:.21 C different between Dec 07 and Dec 06, and if you compare the years 07 and 06, you will find that 07 was warmer than 06.

If one goes back all the way to 1880 and averages, one finds that there is a 0.006 C +/- .27 C rise in temperature from the same month one year previous.

The conclusion that is to be made by anyone with any sense of data acquisition is obvious: compare intervals longer than a month in duration. The other obvious conclusion is that CO2 concentration is not the only factor. There are factors with rather short cycles that must be added on top of the CO2 effect to obtain a better model of the actual temperature. That’s why there is scatter in the data.

And, if we stopped having sunspots for 200 years, that would have a major effect, IIRC, about a 1.5C drop in the temp observed with a normal sunspot cycle.

The logical fallacy that Rush and Fox used is

CO2 concentration is not the only factor affecting world temperatures

Therefore

CO2 does not affect world temperatures.
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[Bill]

Here's a bit from the Bad Astronomy article. Bad Astronomy goes on in the article to explain why the "sunspots" theory of global warming is likely to be wrong, for those that are interested in such things.

http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/02/27/here-comes-the-sun-again/

He also quotes anecdotal data about places having cooler than normal weather. While he acknowledges this is only anecdotal data (though it’s his biggest paragraph in the story), he forgets that scientists have been saying for years now that global warming does not mean every place on Earth gets hotter. Some places get colder, much colder. The weather patterns changes, and arctic air can be brought down to areas on the planet that don’t usually get them.

Ironically, a few years ago global-warming deniers tried to frame the debate by changing the phrase "global warming" to "climate change", because it sounds less threatening. It’s ironic because it probably is a better term: the climate is changing. It’s getting hotter in some places, colder in others. Wetter in some places, drier in others. In some ways I wish it were as a simple as things warming up. It’s not.

We depend critically on huge areas of this planet being stable and capable of supporting crops. Ask a Kansas farmer what happens when it doesn’t snow all winter, or a citrus grower in California what happens when it gets unusually cold.

The Daily Tech article is very misleading — even plain old wrong — and that hurts the rational discourse on this topic… especially when garbage hounds like Matt Drudge pick up on it, as he did on his website today.


Here's the "global cooling" article from Daily Tech:

http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monitors+Report+Widescale+Global+Cooli ng/article10866.htm

And the NASA GISS report about 2007 temperatures.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/

The year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. 2007 tied 1998, which had leapt a remarkable 0.2°C above the prior record with the help of the "El Niño of the century". The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean is in the cool phase of its natural El Niño-La Niña cycle.

Figure 1 shows 2007 temperature anomalies relative to the 1951-1980 base period mean. The global mean temperature anomaly, 0.57°C (about 1°F) warmer than the 1951-1980 mean, continues the strong warming trend of the past thirty years that has been confidently attributed to the effect of increasing human-made greenhouse gases (GHGs) (Hansen et al. 2007). The eight warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 14 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1990.

[kres24GT]

All of this stuff is irrelevant Bill, all that matters is what political party you are. If you are Republican nothing to see here and let's move along. if you are democrat the world is going to end tomorrow if we don't pay Al Gore off. Sadly the issue has become so politicized and studies and numbers can be spun and skewed by both sides we will probably never know what is really going on. Like most things the truth is in the middle. Anything valid is lost in piles of garbage from the extremes.

Anyway no one is really interested in fixing any of the problems. Very few people are actually ready to make a drastic change in their life to live more eco-friendly life. In fact for most people it isn't even about the enviornment, its just about who can read the thermometer which way. I think it's pretty clear you are int his category of it being more a game than looking to the future.

[LogicallyYours]

Flush Windblow represents the stupid, stubborn bigoted side of America. Except he is much smarter than that, he recognizes that thereARE stupid, stubborn, bigoted Americans....And, that is his end-user and his Business Customer is the Neo Conservative and Large Corporations.

[kres24GT]

Flush Windblow r


LMAO... that is awesome

[LogicallyYours]

Thanks!...that's an original.

[disrupter]

They have a muddled, unclear, imprecise thought process.

It is all superstition rather than anything to do with empirical fact.

Bluff & pretense & no depth, substance or integrity.

On the good side they make the best looking bags of shit you will ever see.