Al Gore's anger

[whitehall]

It was a pretty normal year climate wise. Agra investors are warning that the better than normal crop harvest in the east because of ample precip this year might be bad for the economy for reasons that escape me. We had a couple of frosts in the Mid-Atlantic and a cooling weather front in sync with the seasons. If democrats weren't in power we could go on with our lives but the crazy theory promoted about 14 years ago by a degenerate former politician with no background in science makes my life tougher because I have to spend more on fossil fuel home heating and everything in stores is based on the cost of diesel fuel. Fifty cents lower current gas prices are pretty nice but the threat of tyrants holding a non-science of global warming over our heads and crazy theory that has become a religion to lefties is still a problem. It's freaking snowing in the Rockies. Can't the radical left enjoy it without crazy theories?

 

[Billy_Bob]

If the left doesn't have a boot on your throat and you in need of them for your very survival they are not happy. These communist bastards need to be purged IMHO. Sadly we have way to many useful idiots for the alarmists to use.

 

[S.J.]

Al Gore must be depressed having to settle for Cult Leader, since he couldn't be President.

 

[RollingThunder]

It was a pretty normal year climate wise.

You rightly begin your thoroughly insane rant with a completely bogus claim.

Like many jingoistic rightwingnuts, you stupidly imagine that the USA is the whole world. It's not! The U.S. covers only about 2% of the Earth's surface.

"Pretty normal"??? LOLOLOL.

2014 On Track To Be Hottest Year On Record


***

 

[Billy_Bob]

It was a pretty normal year climate wise.

You rightly begin your thoroughly insane rant with a completely bogus claim.

Like many jingoistic rightwingnuts, you stupidly imagine that the USA is the whole world. It's not! The U.S. covers only about 2% of the Earth's surface.

"Pretty normal"??? LOLOLOL.

2014 On Track To Be Hottest Year On Record


***

 

[RollingThunder]

It was a pretty normal year climate wise.

You rightly begin your thoroughly insane rant with a completely bogus claim.

Like many jingoistic rightwingnuts, you stupidly imagine that the USA is the whole world. It's not! The U.S. covers only about 2% of the Earth's surface.

"Pretty normal"??? LOLOLOL.

2014 On Track To Be Hottest Year On Record


***

That describes ALL of your posts, BoobyBobNutJob. But thanks for labeling your work so clearly.

 

[Saigon]

Why would anyone care what Al Gore thinks?

Do you really think droughts happen or do not happen based on what some politicians says?

Science is NOT politics.

Given there is very close to a total scientific consensus on this issue, I think the smart money is on going with scientific expertise, and not on listening to what ANY politician says.

Why anyone thinks this issue is political is beyond me. That's just a way to get as confused as the OP is.

 

[racewright]

Why would anyone care what Al Gore thinks?

Do you really think droughts happen or do not happen based on what some politicians says?

Science is NOT politics.

Given there is very close to a total scientific consensus on this issue, I think the smart money is on going with scientific expertise, and not on listening to what ANY politician says.

Why anyone thinks this issue is political is beyond me. That's just a way to get as confused as the OP is.

My friend all things are political.... Money follow the money this will explain it all. Sorry that's just the way of the world.

 

[Saigon]

Race -

That really is such total nonsense.

What goes on with the nuclear, coal and solar industries is undoubtedly a money game, but the real world of scientific research is conducted in universities, Quangos and institutes where money plays a very small role indeed. Governments have no say into what universities research, and even less say over what conclusions they draw. That is how the European university system is designed and structured. You also have to ask yourself why conservative governments in Germany, the UK and Sweden would have been funding left-wing research results. It doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?

Even if your assertion could be true - there is far, far, far more money in oil, coal and nuclear than renewables - and yet all of the oil companies and automanufacturers confirm that climate change is for real.

Care to tell us why Shell oil - a company that draws more than 90% of its revenue from oil - would confirm that oil worses climate change, if it wasn't true?

 

[Bfgrn]

Why would anyone care what Al Gore thinks?

Do you really think droughts happen or do not happen based on what some politicians says?

Science is NOT politics.

Given there is very close to a total scientific consensus on this issue, I think the smart money is on going with scientific expertise, and not on listening to what ANY politician says.

Why anyone thinks this issue is political is beyond me. That's just a way to get as confused as the OP is.

My friend all things are political.... Money follow the money this will explain it all. Sorry that's just the way of the world.

You are absolutely right; follow the money.

The Relentless Attack on Climate Scientist Ben Santer

In 1995, the IPCC declared that the human impact on climate was now “discernible.” This wasn’t just a few individuals; by 1995 the IPCC had grown to include several hundred climate scientists from around the world. But how did they know that changes were under way, and how did they know they were caused by us? Those crucial questions were answered in Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change, the Second Assessment Report issued by the IPCC. Chapter 8 of this report, “Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes,” summarized the evidence that global warming really was caused by greenhouse gases. Its author was Ben Santer.

Ben Santer had impeccable scientific credentials, and he had never before been involved in even the suggestion of impropriety of any kind, but now a group of physicists tied to a think tank in Washington, DC, accused him of doctoring the report to make the science seem firmer than it really was. They wrote reports accusing him of “scientific cleansing” — expunging the views of those who did not agree. [1] They wrote reports with titles like “Greenhouse Debate Continued” and “Doctoring the Documents,” published in places like Energy Daily and Investor’s Business Daily. They wrote letters to congressmen, to officials in the Department of Energy and to the editors of scientific journals, spreading the accusations high and wide. They pressured contacts in the Energy Department to get Santer fired from his job. Most public — and most publicized — was an op-ed piece published in the Wall Street Journal, accusing Santer of making the alleged changes to “deceive policy makers and the public.”[2] Santer had made changes to the report, but not to deceive anyone. The changes were made in response to review comments from fellow scientists.

Every scientific paper and report has to go through the critical scrutiny of other experts: peer review. Scientific authors are required to take reviewers’ comments and criticisms seriously, and to fix any mistakes that may have been found. It’s a foundational ethic of scientific work: no claim can be considered valid — not even potentially valid — until it has passed peer review.

Santer had done what science requires him to do. He was being attacked for being a good scientist.
Peer review is also used to help authors make their arguments clearer, and the IPCC has an exceptionally extensive and inclusive peer review process. It involves both scientific experts and representatives of the governments of the participating nations to ensure not only that factual errors are caught and corrected, but as well that all judgments and interpretations are adequately documented and supported, and that all interested parties have a chance to be heard. Authors are required either to make changes in response to the review comments, or to explain why those comments are irrelevant, invalid or just plain wrong. Santer had done just that. He had made changes in response to peer review. He had done what the IPCC rules required him to do. He had done what science requires him to do. Santer was being attacked for being a good scientist.

Santer tried to defend himself in a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal — a letter that was signed by 29 co-authors, distinguished scientists all, including the director of the US Global Change Research Program. [3] The American Meteorological Society penned an open letter to Santer affirming that the attacks were entirely without merit. [4] Bert Bolin, the founder and chairman of the IPCC, corroborated Santer’s account in a letter of his own to the Journal, pointing out that accusations were flying without a shred of evidence, and that the accusers had not contacted him, nor any IPCC officers, nor any of the scientists involved to check their facts. Had they “simply taken the time to familiarize [themselves] with IPCC rules of procedure,” he noted, they would have readily found out that no rules were violated, no procedures were transgressed and nothing wrong had happened.[5] As later commentators have pointed out, no IPCC member nation ever seconded the complaint.[6]

But the Journal only published a portion of both Santer and Bolin’s letters, and two weeks later, they gave the accusers yet another opportunity to sling mud, publishing a letter declaring that the IPCC report had been “tampered with for political purposes.”[7] The mud stuck, and the charges were widely echoed by industry groups, business-oriented newspapers and magazines and think tanks. They remain on the Internet today. If you Google “Santer IPCC,” you get not the chapter in question — much less the whole IPCC report — but instead a variety of sites that repeat the 1995 accusations.[8] One site even asserts (falsely) that Santer admitted that he had “adjusted the data to make it fit with political policy,” as if the US government even had a climate policy to adjust the data to fit. (We didn’t in 1995, and we still don’t.)[9]

The experience was bitter for Santer, who spent enormous amounts of time and energy defending his scientific reputation and integrity, as well as trying to hold his marriage together through it all. (He didn’t.) Today, this normally mild-mannered man turns white with rage when he recalls these events. Because no scientist starts his or her career expecting things like this to happen.

Why didn’t Santer’s accusers bother to find out the facts? Why did they continue to repeat charges long after they had been shown to be unfounded? The answer, of course, is that they were not interested in finding facts. They were interested in fighting them.

A few years later, Santer was reading the morning paper and came across an article describing how some scientists had participated in a program, organized by the tobacco industry, to discredit scientific evidence linking tobacco to cancer. The idea, the article explained, was to “keep the controversy alive.”[10] So long as there was doubt about the causal link, the tobacco industry would be safe from litigation and regulation. Santer thought the story seemed eerily familiar.

He was right. But there was more. Not only were the tactics the same, the people were the same, too. The leaders of the attack on him were two retired physicists, both named Fred: Frederick Seitz and S. (Siegfried) Fred Singer. Seitz was a solid-state physicist who had risen to prominence during World War II, when he helped to build the atomic bomb; later he became president of the US National Academy of Sciences. Singer was a physicist — in fact, the proverbial rocket scientist — who became a leading figure in the development of Earth observation satellites, serving as the first director of the National Weather Satellite Service and later as chief scientist at the Department of Transportation in the Reagan administration.[11]

Both were extremely hawkish, having believed passionately in the gravity of the Soviet threat and the need to defend the United States from it with high-tech weaponry. Both were associated with a conservative think tank in Washington, DC, the George C. Marshall Institute, founded to defend Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or “Star Wars”). And both had previously worked for the tobacco industry, helping to cast doubt on the scientific evidence linking smoking to death.

From 1979 to 1985, Fred Seitz directed a program for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company that distributed $45 million to scientists around the country for biomedical research that could generate evidence and cultivate experts to be used in court to defend the “product.”

From 1979 to 1985, Fred Seitz directed a program for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company that distributed $45 million to scientists around the country for biomedical research that could generate evidence and cultivate experts to be used in court to defend the “product.” In the mid-1990s, Fred Singer coauthored a major report attacking the US Environmental Protection Agency over the health risks of secondhand smoke. Several years earlier, the US surgeon general had declared that secondhand smoke was hazardous not only to smokers’ health, but to anyone exposed to it. Singer attacked this finding, claiming the work was rigged, and that the EPA review of the science — done by leading experts from around the country — was distorted by a political agenda to expand government control over all aspects of our lives. Singer’s anti-EPA report was funded by a grant from the Tobacco Institute, channeled through a think tank, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution.[12]
Millions of pages of documents released during tobacco litigation demonstrate these links. They show the crucial role that scientists played in sowing doubt about the links between smoking and health risks. These documents — which have scarcely been studied except by lawyers and a handful of academics — also show that the same strategy was applied not only to global warming, but to a laundry list of environmental and health concerns, including asbestos, secondhand smoke, acid rain and the ozone hole.

Call it the “Tobacco Strategy.” Its target was science, and so it relied heavily on scientists — with guidance from industry lawyers and public relations experts — willing to hold the rifle and pull the trigger. Among the multitude of documents we found in writing this book were Bad Science: A Resource Book — a how-to handbook for fact fighters, providing example after example of successful strategies for undermining science, and a list of experts with scientific credentials available to comment on any issue about which a think tank or corporation needed a negative sound bite.[13]

 

[Bfgrn]

It was a pretty normal year climate wise. Agra investors are warning that the better than normal crop harvest in the east because of ample precip this year might be bad for the economy for reasons that escape me. We had a couple of frosts in the Mid-Atlantic and a cooling weather front in sync with the seasons. If democrats weren't in power we could go on with our lives but the crazy theory promoted about 14 years ago by a degenerate former politician with no background in science makes my life tougher because I have to spend more on fossil fuel home heating and everything in stores is based on the cost of diesel fuel. Fifty cents lower current gas prices are pretty nice but the threat of tyrants holding a non-science of global warming over our heads and crazy theory that has become a religion to lefties is still a problem. It's freaking snowing in the Rockies. Can't the radical left enjoy it without crazy theories?

You have it backwards. The "promoted" science used standard scientific procedure of peer review. It was the skeptics who used the media to argue crazy theories and mud-slinging.

The Relentless Attack on Climate Scientist Ben Santer BillMoyers.com


Special insert--An open letter to Ben Santer
25 July 1996
Dr. Benjamin D. Santer
PCMDI, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
P.O. Box 808, Mail Stop L-264
Livermore, CA 94550

Dear Ben:

On behalf of the Executive Committee of the American Meteorological Society and the Trustees of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), we take this opportunity to support you and the other scientists who have participated in the preparation of the recent IPCC report, Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change. We are aware of the tremendous effort you and other climate scientists from many countries around the world have put into this document, and the thought, care and objectivity which have characterized the process throughout.

We believe that attacks on the IPCC process in general, and you in particular, such as occurred in the editorial-page piece in The Wall Street Journal by Frederick Seitz (Attachment 1), have no place in the scientific debate about issues related to global change. Dr. Seitz is a prominent scientist, but his expertise is not atmospheric sciences and he was not involved in the IPCC process. The Wall Street Journal essay is especially disturbing because it steps over the boundary from disagreeing with the science to attacking the honesty and integrity of a particular scientist, namely yourself.

There appears to be a concerted and systematic effort by some individuals to undermine and discredit the scientific process that has led many scientists working on understanding climate to conclude that there is a very real possibility that humans are modifying Earth's climate on a global scale. Rather than carrying out a legitimate scientific debate through the peer-reviewed literature, they are waging in the public media a vocal campaign against scientific results with which they disagree.

We believe that it is important to separate two issues. The first one is the scientific question of how and why climate changes. The second question is, if the climate is changing and humans are causing part of this change, then what should societies do about it. The appropriate arena for debating the first, scientific question is through peer-reviewed scientific publications--not the media. However, the appropriate arenas for debating the second question of public policy are the media and political fora, because answering the second question is inherently a public and political process. And it is the responsibility of the scientific community to participate in the public and policy processes as well as in the scientific process.

The recent exchange in The Wall Street Journal is an example of why attempting to carry out a scientific debate in the media is inappropriate. In response to the Seitz opinion piece, you and 40 other scientists prepared a careful, thoughtful response, which is reprinted in its entirety below (Attachment 2). This letter was printed in The Wall Street Journal with minor changes, but without the names of the 40 distinguished scientists who supported your rebuttal, including the other three lead co-authors of Chapter 8.

 

[Crick]

It's freaking snowing in the Rockies.

It's freaking November and the Rockies are mountains.

From Weather - Rocky Mountain National Park U.S. National Park Service

Fall (September - November) September and October bring clear, crisp air, blue skies, and generally dry weather. An early snowstorm may occur. Aspen leaves start changing colors in mid-September. Elk mating season begins in September and continues through most of October. Trail Ridge Road usually closes for the winter by mid-October.

 

[Billy_Bob]

It was a pretty normal year climate wise.

You rightly begin your thoroughly insane rant with a completely bogus claim.

Like many jingoistic rightwingnuts, you stupidly imagine that the USA is the whole world. It's not! The U.S. covers only about 2% of the Earth's surface.

"Pretty normal"??? LOLOLOL.

2014 On Track To Be Hottest Year On Record


***

That describes ALL of your posts, BoobyBobNutJob. But thanks for labeling your work so clearly.

A libtard without facts...

I am still waiting for your proof that 120ppm has in some way affected the earths temp...

 

[Billy_Bob]

Race -

That really is such total nonsense.

What goes on with the nuclear, coal and solar industries is undoubtedly a money game, but the real world of scientific research is conducted in universities, Quangos and institutes where money plays a very small role indeed. Governments have no say into what universities research, and even less say over what conclusions they draw. That is how the European university system is designed and structured. You also have to ask yourself why conservative governments in Germany, the UK and Sweden would have been funding left-wing research results. It doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?

Even if your assertion could be true - there is far, far, far more money in oil, coal and nuclear than renewables - and yet all of the oil companies and automanufacturers confirm that climate change is for real.

Care to tell us why Shell oil - a company that draws more than 90% of its revenue from oil - would confirm that oil worses climate change, if it wasn't true?

Good ol Ben... HE lied many times and now that his last prediction that AGW would be disproved at 17 years without further warming the libtards want to move the goal posts again.. His dire predictions have all failed to materialize as have ever other foolish alarmist view. You guys are too funny.. You praise the disallowing of dissenting views from publication but when called on the dishonesty you cry like babies..

 

[Crick]

I am still waiting for your proof that 120ppm has in some way affected the earths temp...

What do YOU think has caused the warming we've experienced over the last 150 years?

 

[Saigon]

Billy -

You seem to be dodging this -

What goes on with the nuclear, coal and solar industries is undoubtedly a money game, but the real world of scientific research is conducted in universities, Quangos and institutes where money plays a very small role indeed. Governments have no say into what universities research, and even less say over what conclusions they draw. That is how the European university system is designed and structured. You also have to ask yourself why conservative governments in Germany, the UK and Sweden would have been funding left-wing research results. It doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?

Even if your assertion could be true - there is far, far, far more money in oil, coal and nuclear than renewables - and yet all of the oil companies and automanufacturers confirm that climate change is for real.

 

[jc456]

It was a pretty normal year climate wise.

You rightly begin your thoroughly insane rant with a completely bogus claim.

Like many jingoistic rightwingnuts, you stupidly imagine that the USA is the whole world. It's not! The U.S. covers only about 2% of the Earth's surface.

"Pretty normal"??? LOLOLOL.

2014 On Track To Be Hottest Year On Record


***

 

[RollingThunder]

It was a pretty normal year climate wise.

You rightly begin your thoroughly insane rant with a completely bogus claim.

Like many jingoistic rightwingnuts, you stupidly imagine that the USA is the whole world. It's not! The U.S. covers only about 2% of the Earth's surface.

"Pretty normal"??? LOLOLOL.

2014 On Track To Be Hottest Year On Record


***

Thanks again, JustCrazy, for labeling your posts so clearly, but of course, we all already knew that your posts are all utter BS.

Meanwhile....

The first nine months of 2014 (January–September) tied with 1998 as the warmest such period on record, with a combined global land and ocean average surface temperature 0.68°C (1.22°F) above the 20th century average of 14.1°C (57.5°F). If 2014 maintains this temperature departure from average for the remainder of the year, it will be the warmest calendar year on record. The past 12 months—October 2013–September 2014—was the warmest 12-month period among all months since records began in 1880, at 0.69°C (1.24°F) above the 20th century average. This breaks the previous record of +0.68°C (+1.22°F) set for the periods September 1997–August 1998, August 2009–July 2010; and September 2013–August 2014.
(source - NOAA Global Analysis - September 2014)


***

 

[Zander]

Nature is unpredictable. Get over it.

 

[Roadrunner]

Al Gore must be depressed having to settle for Cult Leader, since he couldn't be President.

I think Tipper ditched him too; he tried some kinky shit he learned hanging around with "Greens".