What, exactly, do warmists think that deniers are denying?

[Abraham3]

And serve in their nation's armed forces?

 

[Iceweasel]

Then why did those people pay federal taxes?

To avoid jail since it isn't optional. Good job of missing the point.

 

[Iceweasel]

And serve in their nation's armed forces?

Huh?

 

[flacaltenn]

do any of you from the warmer side of the aisle actually want to specify what you think deniers deny? or better yet, do you want to bring up some other areas that both skeptics and warmers agree upon.

What is behind this sudden widespread urge among you and your friends to get us to speak for you?

Without leaving this forum, we can find deniers that deny all manner of things. From those who believe the world is not getting warmer to those who believe everything the IPCC says save the magnitude of the threat. Thus the query you and FCT have been trying to make is completely pointless.

If you actually think YOU have been mischaracterized, fill us in on what your actual position on the issues under discussion might be. Perhaps we can devote a thread to maintaining a table of posters and their beliefs. Won't know the players without a program!

If you had any familiarity with logic and reason, you would know that the exercise IS NOT pointless. It is inaccurate and unethical and childish to claim that the ENTIRE SPECTRUM of dissent is a "Denial of Global Warming". Which is what politicians, the media, YOU, and Dr Tyson are doing.. In fact -- the number of dissenters who deny the Earth is in a post Ice Age warming period is close to zero. So virtually NOBODY is denying Global Warming. It would be impossible to identify REAL deniers when the so-called science of Global Warming is so imprecise and lately INACCURATE in it's wide range of modeling and projections.

As Ian pointed out.. The empirical observation is that MOST "deniers" are closer to the evidence with that simple 1.2degC/doublingCO2 than ANY of the IPCC predictions. And with every year, the EXCUSES from the GW priesthood make it harder and harder to justify the fearful predictions of your cult. Especially with recent admissions about decadal delays in climate equilibrium and the realization that Ocean Heating is a HUGE negative feedback on runaway warming.

This "denier" label is just a horseshit excuse to shut down dissent, not debate the issues, not address questions, and to continue a faulty climate science meme that gets us no closer to understanding VITAL elements of the climate system.

1) Go ahead -- NAME NAMES -- who exactly is denying that the Earth has warmed about 0.5degC in your lifetime?
2) Tell us EXACTLY what the Global Warming for 2065 are.. You cannot DENY a range of values that INCLUDES the denier estimates. But a warmer can CERTAINLY be as vague as they want when they CLAIM a consensus exists -- when in fact -- there IS NO consensus on CONCISE projections..


Meanwhile, again as Ian has pointed out, you cling to pronouncements that were NEVER in evidence. Such as the lie that we know for CERTAIN that no other period in climate history has warmed this quickly or this much.. That is simply NOT supported by the weak proxy evidence when taken on a GLOBAL scale.

The debate hasn't even started. The science is settled crowd is nothing but a street theatre sideshow. And you folks are wasting a lot of time and energy on slogans and slurs and bullshit consensus statements instead of doing science..

 

[Bfgrn]

do any of you from the warmer side of the aisle actually want to specify what you think deniers deny? or better yet, do you want to bring up some other areas that both skeptics and warmers agree upon.

What is behind this sudden widespread urge among you and your friends to get us to speak for you?

Without leaving this forum, we can find deniers that deny all manner of things. From those who believe the world is not getting warmer to those who believe everything the IPCC says save the magnitude of the threat. Thus the query you and FCT have been trying to make is completely pointless.

If you actually think YOU have been mischaracterized, fill us in on what your actual position on the issues under discussion might be. Perhaps we can devote a thread to maintaining a table of posters and their beliefs. Won't know the players without a program!

If you had any familiarity with logic and reason, you would know that the exercise IS NOT pointless. It is inaccurate and unethical and childish to claim that the ENTIRE SPECTRUM of dissent is a "Denial of Global Warming". Which is what politicians, the media, YOU, and Dr Tyson are doing.. In fact -- the number of dissenters who deny the Earth is in a post Ice Age warming period is close to zero. So virtually NOBODY is denying Global Warming. It would be impossible to identify REAL deniers when the so-called science of Global Warming is so imprecise and lately INACCURATE in it's wide range of modeling and projections.

As Ian pointed out.. The empirical observation is that MOST "deniers" are closer to the evidence with that simple 1.2degC/doublingCO2 than ANY of the IPCC predictions. And with every year, the EXCUSES from the GW priesthood make it harder and harder to justify the fearful predictions of your cult. Especially with recent admissions about decadal delays in climate equilibrium and the realization that Ocean Heating is a HUGE negative feedback on runaway warming.

This "denier" label is just a horseshit excuse to shut down dissent, not debate the issues, not address questions, and to continue a faulty climate science meme that gets us no closer to understanding VITAL elements of the climate system.

1) Go ahead -- NAME NAMES -- who exactly is denying that the Earth has warmed about 0.5degC in your lifetime?
2) Tell us EXACTLY what the Global Warming for 2065 are.. You cannot DENY a range of values that INCLUDES the denier estimates. But a warmer can CERTAINLY be as vague as they want when they CLAIM a consensus exists -- when in fact -- there IS NO consensus on CONCISE projections..


Meanwhile, again as Ian has pointed out, you cling to pronouncements that were NEVER in evidence. Such as the lie that we know for CERTAIN that no other period in climate history has warmed this quickly or this much.. That is simply NOT supported by the weak proxy evidence when taken on a GLOBAL scale.

The debate hasn't even started. The science is settled crowd is nothing but a street theatre sideshow. And you folks are wasting a lot of time and energy on slogans and slurs and bullshit consensus statements instead of doing science..

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
Edmund Burke


What a pile of flaming horse shit. You are either a liar or you are willfully ignorant.

You want to portray legitimate scientists as part of a 'priesthood', and THEN have us SOMEHOW believe that oil, coal and auto industries are merely benign observers sitting on the sidelines hoping their billion dollar industries are not regulated. Even though the most blatant evidence of their plan to launch a well funded PR and disinformation campaign was leaked years ago when the American Petroleum Institute issued their 'action' plan in 1998. And that action had nothing to do with science. It had everything to do with preserving their profits. And other leaked memos since then from right wing think tanks like the Heartland Institute show a CONSCIOUS effort to undermine ANY action on climate issues. It is a well funded campaign to spread disinformation.

Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups.

Throughout the 1990s, when the coalition conducted a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign challenging the merits of an international agreement, policy makers and pundits were fiercely debating whether humans could dangerously warm the planet. Today, with general agreement on the basics of warming, the debate has largely moved on to the question of how extensively to respond to rising temperatures.

Environmentalists have long maintained that industry knew early on that the scientific evidence supported a human influence on rising temperatures, but that the evidence was ignored for the sake of companies’ fight against curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. Some environmentalists have compared the tactic to that once used by tobacco companies, which for decades insisted that the science linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer was uncertain. By questioning the science on global warming, these environmentalists say, groups like the Global Climate Coalition were able to sow enough doubt to blunt public concern about a consequential issue and delay government action.

George Monbiot, a British environmental activist and writer, said that by promoting doubt, industry had taken advantage of news media norms requiring neutral coverage of issues, just as the tobacco industry once had.

“They didn’t have to win the argument to succeed,” Mr. Monbiot said, “only to cause as much confusion as possible.”

NY Times

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Climate skeptics are recycled critics of controls on tobacco and acid rain

The authors show that the same group of mischief-makers, given a platform by the free-market ideologues of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, has consistently tried to confuse the public and discredit the scientists whose insights are helping to save the world from unintended environmental harm.

Today's campaigners against action on climate change are in many cases backed by the same lobbies, individuals, and organisations that sided with the tobacco industry to discredit the science linking smoking and lung cancer. Later, they fought the scientific evidence that sulphur oxides from coal-fired power plants were causing "acid rain." Then, when it was discovered that certain chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were causing the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, the same groups launched a nasty campaign to discredit that science, too.

Later still, the group defended the tobacco giants against charges that second-hand smoke causes cancer and other diseases. And then, starting mainly in the 1980s, this same group took on the battle against climate change.

What is amazing is that, although these attacks on science have been wrong for 30 years, they still sow doubts about established facts. The truth is that there is big money backing the climate-change deniers, whether it is companies that don't want to pay the extra costs of regulation, or free-market ideologues opposed to any government controls.

Climate sceptics are recycled critics of controls on tobacco and acid rain | Jeffrey Sachs | Environment | guardian.co.uk

 

[IanC]

hey flac.... at least I tried.

it is amazing to me that so many here cling to the belief that ideas do not stand on their own merit, instead they only grant value according to who speaks of them.

as a kid I was a huge fan of logic and induction puzzles. the rules I learned back then have made it a lot easier to notice all the non sequitur statements that come out of climate science. climate science seems more like a rigged court case with biased judge saying 'overruled' to every objection, no matter how relevent.

 

[Iceweasel]

I believe in science but I don't believe in scientists. Scientists are people and people have opinions, enough opinions create a consensus but that doesn't make it science. The consensus has been wrong about many things for as long as science has been around. Science demands objectivity and believing in popular opinions, especially by those who stand to benefit financially, is an act of faith.

 

[IanC]

I believe in science but I don't believe in scientists. Scientists are people and people have opinions, enough opinions create a consensus but that doesn't make it science. The consensus has been wrong about many things for as long as science has been around. Science demands objectivity and believing in popular opinions, especially by those who stand to benefit financially, is an act of faith.

I agree with you that scientists are only human, and that you have to get along as an undergrad and postdoc if you want to climb the ladder in academia and research. there is no vast conspiracy, just the usual amount of groupthink and sucking up.

 

[Iceweasel]

I believe in science but I don't believe in scientists. Scientists are people and people have opinions, enough opinions create a consensus but that doesn't make it science. The consensus has been wrong about many things for as long as science has been around. Science demands objectivity and believing in popular opinions, especially by those who stand to benefit financially, is an act of faith.

I agree with you that scientists are only human, and that you have to get along as an undergrad and postdoc if you want to climb the ladder in academia and research. there is no vast conspiracy, just the usual amount of groupthink and sucking up.

Yes, I agree. I didn't mean it as in a conspiracy, just that people tend to operate from a bias and scientists are not immune to it.

 

[flacaltenn]

What is behind this sudden widespread urge among you and your friends to get us to speak for you?

Without leaving this forum, we can find deniers that deny all manner of things. From those who believe the world is not getting warmer to those who believe everything the IPCC says save the magnitude of the threat. Thus the query you and FCT have been trying to make is completely pointless.

If you actually think YOU have been mischaracterized, fill us in on what your actual position on the issues under discussion might be. Perhaps we can devote a thread to maintaining a table of posters and their beliefs. Won't know the players without a program!

If you had any familiarity with logic and reason, you would know that the exercise IS NOT pointless. It is inaccurate and unethical and childish to claim that the ENTIRE SPECTRUM of dissent is a "Denial of Global Warming". Which is what politicians, the media, YOU, and Dr Tyson are doing.. In fact -- the number of dissenters who deny the Earth is in a post Ice Age warming period is close to zero. So virtually NOBODY is denying Global Warming. It would be impossible to identify REAL deniers when the so-called science of Global Warming is so imprecise and lately INACCURATE in it's wide range of modeling and projections.

As Ian pointed out.. The empirical observation is that MOST "deniers" are closer to the evidence with that simple 1.2degC/doublingCO2 than ANY of the IPCC predictions. And with every year, the EXCUSES from the GW priesthood make it harder and harder to justify the fearful predictions of your cult. Especially with recent admissions about decadal delays in climate equilibrium and the realization that Ocean Heating is a HUGE negative feedback on runaway warming.

This "denier" label is just a horseshit excuse to shut down dissent, not debate the issues, not address questions, and to continue a faulty climate science meme that gets us no closer to understanding VITAL elements of the climate system.

1) Go ahead -- NAME NAMES -- who exactly is denying that the Earth has warmed about 0.5degC in your lifetime?
2) Tell us EXACTLY what the Global Warming for 2065 are.. You cannot DENY a range of values that INCLUDES the denier estimates. But a warmer can CERTAINLY be as vague as they want when they CLAIM a consensus exists -- when in fact -- there IS NO consensus on CONCISE projections..


Meanwhile, again as Ian has pointed out, you cling to pronouncements that were NEVER in evidence. Such as the lie that we know for CERTAIN that no other period in climate history has warmed this quickly or this much.. That is simply NOT supported by the weak proxy evidence when taken on a GLOBAL scale.

The debate hasn't even started. The science is settled crowd is nothing but a street theatre sideshow. And you folks are wasting a lot of time and energy on slogans and slurs and bullshit consensus statements instead of doing science..

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
Edmund Burke


What a pile of flaming horse shit. You are either a liar or you are willfully ignorant.

You want to portray legitimate scientists as part of a 'priesthood', and THEN have us SOMEHOW believe that oil, coal and auto industries are merely benign observers sitting on the sidelines hoping their billion dollar industries are not regulated. Even though the most blatant evidence of their plan to launch a well funded PR and disinformation campaign was leaked years ago when the American Petroleum Institute issued their 'action' plan in 1998. And that action had nothing to do with science. It had everything to do with preserving their profits. And other leaked memos since then from right wing think tanks like the Heartland Institute show a CONSCIOUS effort to undermine ANY action on climate issues. It is a well funded campaign to spread disinformation.

Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups.

Throughout the 1990s, when the coalition conducted a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign challenging the merits of an international agreement, policy makers and pundits were fiercely debating whether humans could dangerously warm the planet. Today, with general agreement on the basics of warming, the debate has largely moved on to the question of how extensively to respond to rising temperatures.

Environmentalists have long maintained that industry knew early on that the scientific evidence supported a human influence on rising temperatures, but that the evidence was ignored for the sake of companies’ fight against curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. Some environmentalists have compared the tactic to that once used by tobacco companies, which for decades insisted that the science linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer was uncertain. By questioning the science on global warming, these environmentalists say, groups like the Global Climate Coalition were able to sow enough doubt to blunt public concern about a consequential issue and delay government action.

George Monbiot, a British environmental activist and writer, said that by promoting doubt, industry had taken advantage of news media norms requiring neutral coverage of issues, just as the tobacco industry once had.

“They didn’t have to win the argument to succeed,” Mr. Monbiot said, “only to cause as much confusion as possible.”

NY Times

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Climate skeptics are recycled critics of controls on tobacco and acid rain

The authors show that the same group of mischief-makers, given a platform by the free-market ideologues of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, has consistently tried to confuse the public and discredit the scientists whose insights are helping to save the world from unintended environmental harm.

Today's campaigners against action on climate change are in many cases backed by the same lobbies, individuals, and organisations that sided with the tobacco industry to discredit the science linking smoking and lung cancer. Later, they fought the scientific evidence that sulphur oxides from coal-fired power plants were causing "acid rain." Then, when it was discovered that certain chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were causing the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, the same groups launched a nasty campaign to discredit that science, too.

Later still, the group defended the tobacco giants against charges that second-hand smoke causes cancer and other diseases. And then, starting mainly in the 1980s, this same group took on the battle against climate change.

What is amazing is that, although these attacks on science have been wrong for 30 years, they still sow doubts about established facts. The truth is that there is big money backing the climate-change deniers, whether it is companies that don't want to pay the extra costs of regulation, or free-market ideologues opposed to any government controls.

Climate sceptics are recycled critics of controls on tobacco and acid rain | Jeffrey Sachs | Environment | guardian.co.uk

As usual you stick to an irrelvant and inaccurate ad hominen. A declaration of victory and several non-topical liinks. You didn't contradict a SINGLE OBSERVATION that I made.
This has nothing to do with tobacco, oil companies, or other boogeymen under your bed.
It has to do with scientific process (or the lack thereof) and avoidance of specifics.
When you address my post specifically -- we can chat...

 

[flacaltenn]

hey flac.... at least I tried.

it is amazing to me that so many here cling to the belief that ideas do not stand on their own merit, instead they only grant value according to who speaks of them.

as a kid I was a huge fan of logic and induction puzzles. the rules I learned back then have made it a lot easier to notice all the non sequitur statements that come out of climate science. climate science seems more like a rigged court case with biased judge saying 'overruled' to every objection, no matter how relevent.

The question you posed is LONG overdue. Partly because the dissent is fixated on the evidence and the process and tends to ignore the childish horseplay.. Glad you did this -- but apparently, this outcome of this "minor league" discussion is not much different from the larger "professional" drama that is being played in the media and politics at levels that matter.

 

[Abraham3]

as a kid I was a huge fan of logic and induction puzzles. the rules I learned back then have made it a lot easier to notice all the non sequitur statements that come out of climate science. climate science seems more like a rigged court case with biased judge saying 'overruled' to every objection, no matter how relevent.

What non sequitur statements would that be?

 

[Abraham3]

If you had any familiarity with logic and reason, you would know that the exercise IS NOT pointless.

I do have some familiarity with logic and reason and it takes only the most basic knowledge of those disciplines to inform me that this exercise IS pointless. Deniers are not some monocultural block holding identical opinions. You demand a singular answer to a question with millions of answers.

It is inaccurate and unethical and childish to claim that the ENTIRE SPECTRUM of dissent is a "Denial of Global Warming".

That likely explains why NO ONE OVER HERE EVER SAID IT WAS.

Which is what politicians, the media, YOU, and Dr Tyson are doing.

In fact -- the number of dissenters who deny the Earth is in a post Ice Age warming period is close to zero.

So virtually NOBODY is denying Global Warming. It would be impossible to identify REAL deniers when the so-called science of Global Warming is so imprecise and lately INACCURATE in it's wide range of modeling and projections.

As Ian pointed out.. The empirical observation is that MOST "deniers" are closer to the evidence with that simple 1.2degC/doublingCO2 than ANY of the IPCC predictions. And with every year, the EXCUSES from the GW priesthood make it harder and harder to justify the fearful predictions of your cult. Especially with recent admissions about decadal delays in climate equilibrium and the realization that Ocean Heating is a HUGE negative feedback on runaway warming.

This "denier" label is just a horseshit excuse to shut down dissent, not debate the issues, not address questions, and to continue a faulty climate science meme that gets us no closer to understanding VITAL elements of the climate system.

1) Go ahead -- NAME NAMES -- who exactly is denying that the Earth has warmed about 0.5degC in your lifetime?
2) Tell us EXACTLY what the Global Warming for 2065 are.. You cannot DENY a range of values that INCLUDES the denier estimates. But a warmer can CERTAINLY be as vague as they want when they CLAIM a consensus exists -- when in fact -- there IS NO consensus on CONCISE projections..

Meanwhile, again as Ian has pointed out, you cling to pronouncements that were NEVER in evidence. Such as the lie that we know for CERTAIN that no other period in climate history has warmed this quickly or this much.. That is simply NOT supported by the weak proxy evidence when taken on a GLOBAL scale.

The debate hasn't even started. The science is settled crowd is nothing but a street theatre sideshow. And you folks are wasting a lot of time and energy on slogans and slurs and bullshit consensus statements instead of doing science..

This is absolutely nothing but a bullshit semantic game and I'm not playing.

 

[Bfgrn]

If you had any familiarity with logic and reason, you would know that the exercise IS NOT pointless. It is inaccurate and unethical and childish to claim that the ENTIRE SPECTRUM of dissent is a "Denial of Global Warming". Which is what politicians, the media, YOU, and Dr Tyson are doing.. In fact -- the number of dissenters who deny the Earth is in a post Ice Age warming period is close to zero. So virtually NOBODY is denying Global Warming. It would be impossible to identify REAL deniers when the so-called science of Global Warming is so imprecise and lately INACCURATE in it's wide range of modeling and projections.

As Ian pointed out.. The empirical observation is that MOST "deniers" are closer to the evidence with that simple 1.2degC/doublingCO2 than ANY of the IPCC predictions. And with every year, the EXCUSES from the GW priesthood make it harder and harder to justify the fearful predictions of your cult. Especially with recent admissions about decadal delays in climate equilibrium and the realization that Ocean Heating is a HUGE negative feedback on runaway warming.

This "denier" label is just a horseshit excuse to shut down dissent, not debate the issues, not address questions, and to continue a faulty climate science meme that gets us no closer to understanding VITAL elements of the climate system.

1) Go ahead -- NAME NAMES -- who exactly is denying that the Earth has warmed about 0.5degC in your lifetime?
2) Tell us EXACTLY what the Global Warming for 2065 are.. You cannot DENY a range of values that INCLUDES the denier estimates. But a warmer can CERTAINLY be as vague as they want when they CLAIM a consensus exists -- when in fact -- there IS NO consensus on CONCISE projections..


Meanwhile, again as Ian has pointed out, you cling to pronouncements that were NEVER in evidence. Such as the lie that we know for CERTAIN that no other period in climate history has warmed this quickly or this much.. That is simply NOT supported by the weak proxy evidence when taken on a GLOBAL scale.

The debate hasn't even started. The science is settled crowd is nothing but a street theatre sideshow. And you folks are wasting a lot of time and energy on slogans and slurs and bullshit consensus statements instead of doing science..

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
Edmund Burke


What a pile of flaming horse shit. You are either a liar or you are willfully ignorant.

You want to portray legitimate scientists as part of a 'priesthood', and THEN have us SOMEHOW believe that oil, coal and auto industries are merely benign observers sitting on the sidelines hoping their billion dollar industries are not regulated. Even though the most blatant evidence of their plan to launch a well funded PR and disinformation campaign was leaked years ago when the American Petroleum Institute issued their 'action' plan in 1998. And that action had nothing to do with science. It had everything to do with preserving their profits. And other leaked memos since then from right wing think tanks like the Heartland Institute show a CONSCIOUS effort to undermine ANY action on climate issues. It is a well funded campaign to spread disinformation.

Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups.

Throughout the 1990s, when the coalition conducted a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign challenging the merits of an international agreement, policy makers and pundits were fiercely debating whether humans could dangerously warm the planet. Today, with general agreement on the basics of warming, the debate has largely moved on to the question of how extensively to respond to rising temperatures.

Environmentalists have long maintained that industry knew early on that the scientific evidence supported a human influence on rising temperatures, but that the evidence was ignored for the sake of companies’ fight against curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. Some environmentalists have compared the tactic to that once used by tobacco companies, which for decades insisted that the science linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer was uncertain. By questioning the science on global warming, these environmentalists say, groups like the Global Climate Coalition were able to sow enough doubt to blunt public concern about a consequential issue and delay government action.

George Monbiot, a British environmental activist and writer, said that by promoting doubt, industry had taken advantage of news media norms requiring neutral coverage of issues, just as the tobacco industry once had.

“They didn’t have to win the argument to succeed,” Mr. Monbiot said, “only to cause as much confusion as possible.”

NY Times

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Climate skeptics are recycled critics of controls on tobacco and acid rain

The authors show that the same group of mischief-makers, given a platform by the free-market ideologues of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, has consistently tried to confuse the public and discredit the scientists whose insights are helping to save the world from unintended environmental harm.

Today's campaigners against action on climate change are in many cases backed by the same lobbies, individuals, and organisations that sided with the tobacco industry to discredit the science linking smoking and lung cancer. Later, they fought the scientific evidence that sulphur oxides from coal-fired power plants were causing "acid rain." Then, when it was discovered that certain chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were causing the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, the same groups launched a nasty campaign to discredit that science, too.

Later still, the group defended the tobacco giants against charges that second-hand smoke causes cancer and other diseases. And then, starting mainly in the 1980s, this same group took on the battle against climate change.

What is amazing is that, although these attacks on science have been wrong for 30 years, they still sow doubts about established facts. The truth is that there is big money backing the climate-change deniers, whether it is companies that don't want to pay the extra costs of regulation, or free-market ideologues opposed to any government controls.

Climate sceptics are recycled critics of controls on tobacco and acid rain | Jeffrey Sachs | Environment | guardian.co.uk

As usual you stick to an irrelvant and inaccurate ad hominen. A declaration of victory and several non-topical liinks. You didn't contradict a SINGLE OBSERVATION that I made.
This has nothing to do with tobacco, oil companies, or other boogeymen under your bed.
It has to do with scientific process (or the lack thereof) and avoidance of specifics.
When you address my post specifically -- we can chat...

Hey Einstein, when does this "scientific process" and the "real debate" begin? AFTER the American Petroleum Institute, that academia bastion of climate science research finishes their plan to "Identify, recruit and train a team of five independent scientists to participate in media outreach"? Or AFTER they pay lobbyists from the SAME group of scientists who denied tobacco causes cancer to infest Washington with the intent of undermining any meaningful changes that will address climate?

Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?

The second is the use of fake experts. These are individuals who purport to be experts in a particular area but whose views are entirely inconsistent with established knowledge. They have been used extensively by the tobacco industry since 1974, when a senior executive with R J Reynolds devised a system to score scientists working on tobacco in relation to the extent to which they were supportive of the industry's position. The industry embraced this concept enthusiastically in the 1980s when a senior executive from Philip Morris developed a strategy to recruit such scientists (referring to them as ‘Whitecoats’) to help counteract the growing evidence on the harmful effects of second-hand smoke. This activity was largely undertaken through front organizations whose links with the tobacco industry were concealed, but under the direction of law firms acting on behalf of the tobacco industry. In some countries, such as Germany, the industry created complex and influential networks, allowing it to delay the implementation of tobacco control policies for many years.

In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute developed a Global Climate Science Communications Plan, involving the recruitment of ‘scientists who share the industry's views of climate science [who can] help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify controls on greenhouse gases’ However, this is not limited to the private sector; the administration of President George W Bush was characterized by the promotion of those whose views were based on their religious beliefs or corporate affiliations, such as the advisor on reproductive health to the Food and Drug Administration who saw prayer and bible reading as the answer to premenstrual syndrome. A related phenomenon is the marginalization of real experts, in some cases through an alliance between industry and government, as when ExxonMobil successfully opposed the reappointment by the US government of the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These events led a group of prominent American scientists to state that ‘stacking these public committees out of fear that they may offer advice that conflicts with administration policies devalues the entire federal advisory committee structure’.

The use of fake experts is often complemented by denigration of established experts and researchers, with accusations and innuendo that seek to discredit their work and cast doubt on their motivations. Stanton Glantz, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and who has made a great contribution to exposing tobacco industry tactics, is a frequent target for tobacco denialists. He is described on the Forces website as ‘infamous for being the boldest of liars in “tobacco control” that most ethically challenged gang of con artists’, adding that ‘he cynically implies his research into smoking is science, banking on the sad fact that politicians, let alone the media, have no idea that epidemiology is not real science and that his studies define the term junk science’.18

The third characteristic is selectivity, drawing on isolated papers that challenge the dominant consensus or highlighting the flaws in the weakest papers among those that support it as a means of discrediting the entire field.

 

[Bfgrn]

I believe in science but I don't believe in scientists. Scientists are people and people have opinions, enough opinions create a consensus but that doesn't make it science. The consensus has been wrong about many things for as long as science has been around. Science demands objectivity and believing in popular opinions, especially by those who stand to benefit financially, is an act of faith.

I agree with you that scientists are only human, and that you have to get along as an undergrad and postdoc if you want to climb the ladder in academia and research. there is no vast conspiracy, just the usual amount of groupthink and sucking up.

Yes, I agree. I didn't mean it as in a conspiracy, just that people tend to operate from a bias and scientists are not immune to it.

And NONE of that goes on in industry...

 

[Bfgrn]

The debate is over about whether or not climate change is real. Irrefutable evidence from around the world—including extreme weather events, record temperatures, retreating glaciers and rising sea levels—all point to the fact that climate change is happening now and at rates much faster than previously thought.

The overwhelming majority of scientists who study climate change agree that human activity is responsible for changing the climate. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is one of the largest bodies of international scientists ever assembled to study a scientific issue, involving more than 2,500 scientists from more than 130 countries. The IPCC has concluded that most of the warming observed during the past 50 years is attributable to human activities. Its findings have been publicly endorsed by the national academies of science of all G-8 nations, as well as those of China, India and Brazil.

Who are the climate change deniers?

Despite the international scientific community's consensus on climate change, a small number of critics continue to deny that climate change exists or that humans are causing it. Widely known as climate change "skeptics" or "deniers", these individuals are generally not climate scientists and do not debate the science with the climate scientists directly—for example, by publishing in peer-reviewed scientific journals, or participating in international conferences on climate science. Instead, they focus their attention on the media, the general public and policy-makers with the goal of delaying action on climate change.

Not surprisingly, the deniers have received significant funding from coal and oil companies, including ExxonMobil. They also have well-documented connections with public relations firms that have set up industry-funded lobby groups to, in the words of one leaked memo, "reposition global warming as theory (not fact)."

Over the years, the deniers have employed a wide range of arguments against taking action on climate change, some of which contradict each other. For example, they have claimed that:
• Climate change is not occurring
• The global climate is actually getting colder
• The global climate is getting warmer, but not because of human activities
• The global climate is getting warmer, in part because of human activities, but this will create greater benefits than costs
• The global climate is getting warmer, in part because of human activities, but the impacts are not sufficient to require any policy response

After 15 years of increasingly definitive scientific studies attesting to the reality and significance of global climate change, the deniers' tactics have shifted. Many deniers no longer deny that climate change is happening, but instead argue that the cost of taking action is too high—or even worse, that it is too late to take action. All of these arguments are false and are rejected by the scientific community at large.

To gain an understanding of the level of scientific consensus on climate change, one study examined every article on climate change published in peer-reviewed scientific journals over a 10-year period. Of the 928 articles on climate change the authors found, not one of them disagreed with the consensus position that climate change is happening and is human-induced.

Climate change deniers | Climate change basics | Climate change | Science & policy | Climate change basics | Issues

 

[Bfgrn]

An insider's view of how the energy industry has fueled a bogus controversy about climate change.

This book rips the lid off the campaign to discredit scientists, confuse journalists, and deny climate change. The tactics have been slick, but PR expert James Hoggan and investigative journalist Richard Littlemore have compiled a readable, accessible guidebook through the muck. Beginning with leaked memos from the coal industry, the oil industry and the tobacco-sponsored lie-about-science industry, the authors expose the plans to "debunk" global warming; they track the execution of those plans; and they illuminate the results—confusion, inaction, and an epidemic of public mistrust.

Climate Cover-Up names names, identifying bogus experts who are actually paid lobbyists and flaks. The authors reveal the PR techniques used to misinform, to mangle the language, and to intimidate the media into maintaining a phony climate change debate. Exposing the seedy origins of that debate, this book will leave you fuming at the extent, the effect, and the ethical affront of the climate cover-up.

[ame="http://www.amazon.ca/Climate-Cover-Up-Crusade-Global-Warming/dp/1553654854"]http://www.amazon.ca/Climate-Cover-Up-Crusade-Global-Warming/dp/1553654854[/ame]

Starting in the early 1990s, three large American industry groups set to work on strategies to cast doubt on the science of climate change. Even though the oil industry’s own scientists had declared, as early as 1995, that human-induced climate change was undeniable, the American Petroleum Institute, the Western Fuels Association (a coal-fired electrical industry consortium) and a Philip Morris-sponsored anti-science group called TASSC all drafted and promoted campaigns of climate change disinformation.

Climate Cover-Up

 

[bripat9643]

I agree with you that scientists are only human, and that you have to get along as an undergrad and postdoc if you want to climb the ladder in academia and research. there is no vast conspiracy, just the usual amount of groupthink and sucking up.

Yes, I agree. I didn't mean it as in a conspiracy, just that people tend to operate from a bias and scientists are not immune to it.

And NONE of that goes on in industry...

No one ever made that claim, but turds like you insist it doesn't go on in government. You're always saying "follow the money," unless it's government money.

 

[Abraham3]

"Turds like you". Impressive command of the epithet there Paddy.

Honestly, gentlemen, the repetitious expressions of your long standing hostility towards the educated has never really been necessary to establish the gaping dichomtomy twixt the two of you. I can't imagine that anyone would EVER get you confused. Move on, laddies. Move on.

 

[edthecynic]

And there's no observable warming these past 15 years because....?

Because this decade is the warmest decade in the history of direct instrument measurement.

Oh, wait a minute....