The state of the GOP

[Jim in CT]

Paul, as to global warming, it's far from settled. I wa saround when the scientists all said that the earth was freezing, and we needed to act to stop that threat. Then it was global warming. Then climate change.

we need to look into these things, obviously. But I'm not ready to tell anyone, that they can't live as comfortably as I do, until we have mor efacts. If much of what the alarmists predicted was true, Denver would be underwater by now, and North Dakota would be exporting pineapples.

It must be nice to hide behind a theory where if it gets warmer you are right, if it gets colder you are right, if it rains you are right, if it doesn't rain you are right, if it snows you ar eright, and if it doesn't snow you are right. But it's OK for the face of this movement, Al Gore, to have huge mansions and a private jet because shut up!!

[RIROCKHOUND]

But but but Gore...

Gore did a great thing by mainstreaming the science in a palatable way for the general public. If you think we scientists run around asking him what to say.....

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

Paul, as to global warming, it's far from settled. I wa saround when the scientists all said that the earth was freezing, and we needed to act to stop that threat.

This is such a line of crap that gets tossed around, largely due to a newsweek article. See below. I bolded a great line. Read Merchants of Doubt, it is a good book on the climate change rhetoric.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/What...l-cooling.html

"Figure 1: Number of papers classified as predicting future global cooling (blue) or warming (red). In no year were there more global cooling papers than global warming papers.

So in fact, the large majority of climate research in the 1970s predicted the Earth would warm as a consequence of CO2. Rather than climate science predicting cooling, the opposite is the case. Most interesting about Peterson's paper is not the debunking of an already well debunked skeptic argument but a succinct history of climate science over the 20th century, describing how scientists from different fields gradually pieced together their diverse findings into a more unified picture of how climate operates."

The science the CO2 is a greenhouse gas is settled, as is the fact that we are contributing to changes to the climate. This is not just done with models, which larely do work, but with actual data. A chosen few stay and try to fight that, but the legitimate science on this is done.

Trust me, scientists are contrarians by nature. The but but but grant money so they lie argument is crap. Do you know how much funding would be available to those who could disprove (legitimately) human's impact on climate change? What attempts get made, an email hack that basically showed nothing when viewed in context, a bunch of people playing games with statistics on other peoples results, etc..

I think reasonable people can debate the changes that are very likely to (are) occurring. Ask local fisherman with a long memory; Laptew was quoted in an article lately outlining all the changes he has observed, particularly on the changes of species ranges, which lines up with the temperature measurement data from local waters. Not models, actual measurements.

There are alarmists, and Hansen's latest paper is one. Is it out of the realm of possibility that rates of sea level rise could be drastically higher than currently estimated? Of course not, but it may be on the extreme. That is what we should be discussing, will sea level be 1ft bt 2050, or 2075 or 5ft by 2100; not bury our heads in the sand and accuse all the scientists of lying.