Retreat of Athabasca Glacier in the Canadian Rockies, 1919-2005 (photos from different angles, but most of the foreground of the recent picture was covered by ice in 1919)
The quote in the title comes from a column by economist Paul Krugman, and it is well worth a few moments of your time. Briefly, Republicans in Congress held a hearing on climate change and global warming in which they invited a lawyer, an economist and a professor of marketing, and an actual scientist known for being involved in climate skepticism. The professor, Richard Muller of Berkeley, has been working with a study called the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which (with some funding from conservative groups including the Koch foundation) was to review and perhaps dispute the findings of global warming studies by NASA and NOAA.
One of the leaders of the skeptics/denialists of global warming, Anthony Watts, was "prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong". Unfortunately for the manufactured doubt/denialist crew, Muller said that the preliminary results of their work finds that there is a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”
As Krugman reports, the denialists, including Watts, have predictably not changed their minds. Still, this is huge development; imagine if back in the 1960s and 1970s if a researcher from the tobacco industry had reported that cigarettes did in fact cause cancer. There should not be any argument that global warming is occurring. One needs only to look at what is happening to glacial ice across the planet.
The problem is that if energy companies and car manufacturers and others were to admit the reality of global warming, they would have to take responsibility for their role in producing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. They don't want to do that, so they will continue their efforts to muddy an issue that is clear to climate scientists, but is a difficult issue for those uneducated in the earth sciences.
I posted the pictures above just over a year ago in a blog about who accepts the findings of science, and who doesn't.
Climate change deniers are what Salman Rushdie has described as having "a chosen ignorance, not the ignorance of innocence"
ReplyDeleteIt's worth pointing out that this is how science works -- scientists make claims, and then other scientists see if they can replicate those results.
ReplyDeleteOver time, a consensus builds up about how the universe works. There is no "conspiracy" to convince the world to go green. Just data, analysis, and a willingness to accept reality.
Tell the above to members of my family. I don't even like discussing anything remotely scientific with them.
ReplyDeleteThe fact remains that there is no peer-reviewed and or experimental evidence that CO2 has any kind of thermal effect on the atmosphere. The notion is untested and untestable. It isn't science and, therefore, there can be no scientific consensus on this notion that CO2 warms the atmosphere. There is only a political consensus, the main proponents of which are government and univerisity scientists seekig lucrative grants and tenured positions.
ReplyDeleteClaudius, the nature of your statement suggests that nothing I could say, nor any reports I could point you to could possibly change your mind. You have parroted a series of talking points concisely, but that doesn't make any of them true. You've missed the whole point of this episode: a skeptic with scientific credentials examined the evidence, and ended up accepting the conclusion that global warming is in fact human-induced. This is real science in action.
ReplyDeleteIf you want a summation of the evidence, though, you can check this out
ReplyDeletehttp://hot-topic.co.nz/return-of-the-climate-clueless%e2%84%a2-theres-none-so-blind/
Every skeptic on MMGW I've talked to (none of them are scientists) cannot even successfully convey to me a reasonable explanation of the Carbon Cycle. In many ways it's a hopeless battle where we may just have to wait for them & their ignorance to die off before any real change is made. That's not a good prospect due to the CO2 lag effect.
ReplyDelete