[QUOTE=davar55;243657]As long as you make one good suggestion at a time, there's never a threat of odium or totalitarianism.[/QUOTE]That statement has continued to bother me, and I don't think I explained why very well when it was first posted.

"As long as you make one good suggestion at a time, there's never a threat of odium or totalitarianism."

The number of good suggestions should never constitute a threat of odium or totalitarianism, no matter how many are offered at a time! Not if they're [I]good[/I], especially.

You seem to be confusing the idea of the effort needed for you to consider a (long) list of suggestions with the idea that [i]any[/i] of those ideas is necessarily odious or totalitarian. What about a long list of [u]good[/u] (your own adjective) non-odious, non-totalitarian solutions?

Remember, [u]there's no requirement that AGW must be mitigated by only [i]one[/i], or [i]a few[/i], solutions[/u]. It's not only possible, but eminently practical and freedom-preserving, that AGW be responded to by a large enough number of mitigating methods so that no one method has to be overarching.

But delay, as advocated by head-in-the-sand opponents of taking action, only makes the problem worse, and reduces the efficacy of any particular solution.

[quote]This approach, rather than by making sweeping unpopular enforced changes, such as making only electric or hybrid cars legal by fiat rather than over time through competition, or ending oil exploration in the arctic preserves, is far more palatable, even to those of us who don't see a short-range problem.[/quote]But each of those is an example of implementing only a single suggestion (whether good or bad).

Thus, it is precisely the advocation of only a [U]small[/U] number of suggestions -- the idea that the [I]only[/I] feasible solutions had to come from a [U]small[/U] group sharing a characteristic of unpleasant imposition -- that would be a hallmark of an agenda toward some brand of authoritarianism!

... and that is what [U]opponents[/U] of actions to mitigate AGW often argue: that solutions [I]must necessarily be unpleasantly imposed, or necessarily involve "big" government[/I]. It is their false contention that possible solutions are small in number and necessarily odious that is actually the telltale sign of a political agenda. They never emphasize the wide range of possible actions that are not odious or totalitarian, because that would undermine their head-in-the-sand argument that AGW is politically-, rather than scientifically-motivated!

[quote]As primarily a mathematician, I have to put the political implications ahead of the possibly alarmist warnings of the science weather community, in
light of what I've read and heard before entering your discussion.[/quote]Why do you not mention political implications in connections with the [I]anti-AGW propagandists[/I]?

Have you somehow been convinced that only one side, the side that wants you not to take any actions, has purely-motivated intentions?

[quote]We could discuss the science, which would take me weeks to get up to speed on,[/quote]Have you gone to any of the explanations for beginners that I recommended? None of them would take weeks to read.

[quote]but the conclusion of impending doom, even if it's 100 years from now, strikes me as extremely overzealous.[/quote]Oh?

Has Japan's historic emphasis on preparation for large earthquakes been "overzealous"?

Don't know if some version of this has appeared previously in this thread, but my sister sent me the following:

[url=http://www.venganza.org/2007/05/new-chart/]Proof that global warming is caused by lack of pirates[/url]

Argh! I knew it wasn`t the CO2……but the study methodology seems questionable, because they failed to include mermaids in their modeling.

For those who are looking for a 'hockey stick' at the extreme right of the graph, remember, pirates don't do hockey. In fact, for the most part, pirates are a tropical species, though, like their fellow tropics-dweller the coconut, some [url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071853/quotes]are migratory[/url].

(Regarding the latter point, some scientific explanation is in order: Coconuts have been know to float extremely long distances across ocean waters. At some point, it is hypothesized, there arose a coconut which lived in shallow waters around estuaries and mudflats, and had developed prmitive limb-like frontal fins which it could use not only to swim, but also to lift and propel itself forward in water too shallow to swim, and even on water-saturated land. Over the eons, the descendants of this coconut lineage spent an increasing fraction of lives out of water, which ability co-evolved with the ability to breather air, for for short periods through the gills, then by way of increasingly internalized gill-descended structures which eventually evolved into primitive lungs. At some point the evolving land-friendly branch of the lineage no longer needed the water at all, though the break was very gradual. The rest, as they say, is history.)

Evidence that AGW is a hoax?
 

Re: the frequent allegations and accusations that AGW is a hoax

Can anyone point us to solid evidence that AGW is a hoax?

In particular, when did the AGW hoax start? What documentation or other solid evidence exists to support that? Can we put one time limit on that by googling when "AGW" and "hoax" first began appearing in the same sentences on public websites?

How did the hoaxers persuade over 90% of the world's climatologists to believe the hoax?

(Please, folks: Ambiguous quotes taken out of context do [i]not[/i] constitute solid evidence.)

Serious replies only, please.

Today, I read that the latest budget bill is "Cutting funding for the establishment of a Climate Service at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a program intended to provide data regarding climate change." (LA Times: [URL="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-budget-riders-20110416,0,763558.story"]Gray wolves, abortion funding and other policy changes in the budget bill[/URL])

Some time back I was gobsmacked to learn that 6% of scientists identify themselves as Republican (55% of scientists are Democrat). This great disparity leads me to consider that bipartisan compromises are a compromise away from science. [URL="http://www.slate.com/id/2277104/"]Most scientists in this country are Democrats. That's a problem.[/URL]

What forces could perpetuate such a disparity?

From a reference in a previous post:

[begin]
A March 2010 Gallup poll showed that 66 percent of Democrats (and 74 percent of liberals) say the effects of global warming are already occurring, as opposed to 31 percent of Republicans. Does that mean that Democrats are more than twice as likely to accept and understand the scientific truth of the matter? And that Republicans are dominated by scientifically illiterate yahoos and corporate shills willing to sacrifice the planet for short-term economic and political gain? Or could it be that disagreements over climate change are essentially political—and that science is just carried along for the ride? For 20 years, evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding [B]international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth[/B]. These are the sort of things that most Democrats welcome, and most Republicans hate. No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science.
[end]

Someone asked for evidence that AGW is a hoax? Just consider
political cause and effect. If the result is those bolded (by me)
political-social intentions, then the origin is the political leanings
of those who did the "science" or champion its truth.

This constitutes proof in my book. AGW is a political hoax.

[QUOTE=davar55;258707]Someone asked for evidence that AGW is a hoax? Just consider political cause and effect. If the result is those bolded (by me) political-social intentions, then the origin is the political leanings of those who did the "science" or champion its truth.

This constitutes proof in my book. AGW is a political hoax.[/QUOTE]I didn't ask for [I]suspicion[/I], which is all you present. "Evidence" is not a synonym for "suspicion".

Do you have any [U]evidence[/U] that AGW is a hoax?

"Evidence" -- you know, the sort of thing that the prosecution has to present in court in order to prove that the defendant committed a crime. We don't convict people (or scientific theories) on the basis of mere [I]suspicion[/I], not since the Inquisition.

Scientific studies show that the downward longwave infrared radiation (DLR, AKA "heat") from Earth's atmosphere matches what AGW predicts. When one measures the DLR, one finds that the data matches the spectral emissions of greenhouse gases (including the anthropogenic ones) and is at the intensity that would produce the amount of global warming that has been attributed to anthropogenic GHGs.

To put it simpler: in regard to the wavelengths of heat, the air looks just like what AGW predicts. It's not just that anthropogenic greenhouse gases send radiation back to Earth's surface -- it's that they do so in amounts, at the exact frequencies, that correspond to their measured abundances in the atmosphere.

See:

[URL]http://leisureguy.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/how-do-we-know-co2-is-causing-global-warming/[/URL]

[URL="http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/02/11/co2-%E2%80%93-an-insignificant-trace-gas-part-six-visualization/"]http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/02/11/co2-%E2%80%93-an-insignificant-trace-gas-part-six-visualization/[/URL]

[URL]http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/07/24/the-amazing-case-of-back-radiation-part-two/[/URL]

[URL]http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/simple-observational-proof-of-greenhouse-effect/[/URL]

Is there any refutation (based on [U]evidence[/U], not suspicion) of this scientific finding?

How could "hoaxers" possibly make the real atmosphere look like their "hoax" predicts, if in fact the "hoax" were a hoax and not actually true?

I'm not trying to persuade you that AGW is true -- I'm asking you to show why anyone should believe the "AGW hoax" myth that you cite has any basis in reality rather than conservative wishfulness.

- - -

[I]BTW, this shows how simple it would be for conservatives to blow the AGW theory out of the water (if it were actually false, that is).[/I]

All they'd have to do is to get a DLR spectrometer (commercially available for well under a million dollars), make their own measurements, and publish them, showing that the DLR from the air does NOT match what AGW predicts.

Yet, they don't do that simple thing.

Why not?

Why refrain from making a relatively simple scientific measurement that would demolish all the pretensions of AGW hoaxers? (If the measurement they made actually disagreed with the hoax, that is.)

They're spending millions of dollars on the disinformation campaign. Why not spend a fraction of that to [I]scientifically[/I] demonstrate that AGW is a hoax?

[QUOTE=only_human;258667]Today, I read that the latest budget bill is "Cutting funding for the establishment of a Climate Service at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a program intended to provide data regarding climate change." (LA Times: [URL="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-budget-riders-20110416,0,763558.story"]Gray wolves, abortion funding and other policy changes in the budget bill[/URL])

Some time back I was gobsmacked to learn that 6% of scientists identify themselves as Republican (55% of scientists are Democrat). This great disparity leads me to consider that bipartisan compromises are a compromise away from science. [URL="http://www.slate.com/id/2277104/"]Most scientists in this country are Democrats. That's a problem.[/URL]

What forces could perpetuate such a disparity?[/QUOTE]

Let's start with the trend (started in the 1960s) where the democratic party went from having a liberal and a conservative wing, by adopting civil rights, to having only a liberal wing.
As a scientist(note: credentials, MS in Mfg Systems, engineer, father a famous nuclear engineer, people say I talk like a PhD), I can tell you that race-blindness in public affairs is to the collective advantage. Do you think race riots, with burning cities, are a good thing? Yet conservative republicans are opposed to affirmative action, and the quid-pro-quo for black republicans in this area is obvious.
(this will have to be finished later)

(Continuing rant on why scientists are largely democrats)
Note: This area means central Virginia.

Not to mention: Have you looked at who gets PhDs lately? I'll give you a hint: Industry siphons off the republicans that might get PhDs when they get their bachelor's degrees, and it's done by paying a good salary. What remains, on average, is mambers of minorities that in the years before civil rights, might have been disallowed to get PhDs. Therefore, hostility to affirmative action is hostility to scientists.

We can go on to other anti-science positions of the republican party. Climate Science is one....I recall that the amount of CO2 measured in the atmosphere was rising at a measurable and substantial rate in my high-school textbooks. You can't tell me that adding a substantial proportion of an IR-absorbing gas to the atmosphere won't have an effect, even if I personally think it will be storms first, and measuring the variation in the weather will find the change long before looking for a rise in temperature will.

I'll bet support exists among republicans for "creation (pseudo-) science". The classical example trying to destroy radioactive dating has a rock fresh from the lava at Mt St Helens getting dated at a million years old. Figures don't lie, but liars figure: if you run the numbers, you discover that Potassium (K) was used for the dating, and, on it's billion year timescale, a million year old rock is very young....and very small experimental errors easily create that much error in the measurment.

1980 air traffic controller's strike. That strike was over working conditions, which are extremely stressful for air traffic controllers. Rather than mediate, republican president Reagan showed his iron fist and fired all of the controllers. I don't think things have improved; in a recent incident, the lone controller at Washington National Airport in DC was asleep when planes came in to land in the middle of the night.

Space Shuttle esplosions. My wife is taking a leadership course via CDs, and both the columbia and challenger disasters are being revisited. In both cases, commecrialism trumped science and curiosity was discouraged.

Immigration: Republicans claim it's a problem, and inflame the rednecks over it., even as they perpetuate the current situation with lots of noiisy and frankly hypocritical inaction, which is in the best interests of their rich sponsors who profit from illegal immigrant labor, which holds down wages generally. Scientists in the US are largely relatively recent immigrants.

Finally, I think the republicans are conservatives, longing for the "good" old days. A famous scientist once said that discovery is an accident happening to a prepared mind, and numerous examples (penicillin, teflon) back this up. I think scientists, especially immigrants, know that the world is a very much better place for them than when they grew up, and aren't alarmed and exhausted by all the recent changes. I called my wife from on the road the other day, as others went and surfed the net in the back seat and checked in on things, and I said to the driver "Another unremarked miracle".

[QUOTE=davar55;258707]From a reference in a previous post:

[begin]
A March 2010 Gallup poll showed that 66 percent of Democrats (and 74 percent of liberals) say the effects of global warming are already occurring, as opposed to 31 percent of Republicans. Does that mean that Democrats are more than twice as likely to accept and understand the scientific truth of the matter? And that Republicans are dominated by scientifically illiterate yahoos and corporate shills willing to sacrifice the planet for short-term economic and political gain? Or could it be that disagreements over climate change are essentially political—and that science is just carried along for the ride? For 20 years, evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding [B]international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth[/B]. These are the sort of things that most Democrats welcome, and most Republicans hate. No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science.
[end]

Someone asked for evidence that AGW is a hoax? Just consider political cause and effect. If the result is those bolded (by me) political-social intentions, then the origin is the political leanings of those who did the "science" or champion its truth.

This constitutes proof in my book. AGW is a political hoax.[/QUOTE]As already noted, you presented not one shred of [U]evidence[/U] there that AGW is a hoax.

All you did is parade your [i]suspicions[/i], based on your own political bias.

In other words, you clearly demonstrated for all of us to see that your anti-AGW beliefs are no more than extensions of your own political leanings.

In other words, you want to persuade us to believe [I]your own political hoax[/I] about AGW.

Yes, there is a political hoax about AGW, all right. It's the hoax that 97% of the world's climatologists are motivated by politics (note that even if only 6% of climatologists are Republicans, then even some of them have to be part of that 97%) above scientific integrity. It's the hoax that ones personal political desires, without much scientific training or education or knowledge, are more scientifically important than objective evidence.

It's the hoax that somehow, magically, hundreds and hundreds of climatologists around the world were bribed by the promise of large amounts of money that they would receive if only they sacrificed their scientific integrity in favor of supporting a tale about which anyone with a longwave infrared spectrometer could expose its falsity for all the world to see.

It's a hoax that's been documented (in a book, [I]Merchants of Doubt[/I], among other places) to have been spread by many of the same organizations and people who spread hoaxes about the scientific bases of DDT's danger to wildlife, tobacco's connection to cancer, sulfur emissions' connection to acid rain, and chlorofluorocarbons' connection to damaging the Earth's ozone layer.

And you've fallen for that [U]real[/U] hoax, a hoax that has been carefully crafted by experts to appeal to folks sharing your political worldview and able to be distracted from actual evidence.

So, now that we've presented allegations of opposing hoaxes -- how to determine what is true? Answer: look at the scientific evidence -- the real evidence, not propaganda.

Perhaps you've never received a science education sufficient to enable you to distinguish pseudoscience from real science, to enable to detect when someone's argument against a scientific consensus is based on deception rather than fact. That's unfortunate. But it can be remedied. You can still educate yourself about what constitutes [U]real[/U] science. The key is whether there are measures and procedures taken to avoid self-deception, one example of which is thinking that compliance with ones political worldview is more important than objective evidence.

- - - -

[quote]For 20 years, evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding [B]international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth[/B].[/quote]But those linkings were not scientific linkings; they were political linkings, made not in a scientific context but in a political one.

We all are partly scientists and partly politicians. That doesn't mean that the science and politics are inseparably linked. Different scientists that agree on a scientific result can have different political opinions about what to do.

The [I]science[/I] of AGW [U]does not say anything about what must be done about it[/U]! The [I]politics[/I] of AGW does not prove anything about the evidence for or against it.

There's a difference between:

(a) the scientific theory of AGW and the evidence (in the present and past) supporting it,

(b) projections, scenarios, and predictions about climate in the future,

and

(c) decisions about what to do in light of (a) and (b).

Wishes about (c) have nothing to do with the validity of (a) or (b)!!

Beware of anyone who mixes (a), (b) and/or (c) in the same statement -- they are mixing stuff that should not be mixed!

The scientific findings about AGW ((a)) have never been predicated on (c). Claims that they are, without any supporting factual evidence, are simply propaganda.

Show us the [I]evidence[/I] for (a) being predicated on (c), if you repeat that assertion.

There are plenty of ways to respond to AGW that involve neither international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, nor the redistribution of wealth. But the longer we delay putting non-odious and non-totalitarian solutions into effect, the more likely it is that the worsening of the climate situation will make it difficult for more pleasant measures to succeed.

- - -

Care to try finding and presenting real evidence (such as accurate measurements of DLR) to us, rather than just expounding on your political biases?

[QUOTE=davar55;258707]This constitutes proof in my book.[/QUOTE]As long as simple confirmation of your political biases is your standard of scientific proof, you're destined to be a puppet of politicians for the rest of your life.

Only_human, I have three more somethings for you to consider as to why scientists might be overwhelmingly democratic.
First, there's no question that the republican party has a right-wing christian fundamentalist, anti-science, anti-evolution branch.
Second, you may not have seen "La cage aux folles", but it was amazing how it replayed recently when certain prominent anti-gay republicans were caught doing things like soliciting gay sex, with, illustrative but predictably tragic results (suicides). Republicans don't seem to want to acknowledge that sex, other than the male-female kind, isn't evil, and that people with other leanings and compulsions should be human. A scientist can see that at work, it's not hard to figure out that scientists might be next.

Finally, there's a book out, worth reading, called "The Republican War on Science". Betting is, with that kind of reputation, it's no wonder scientists are overwhelmingly non-republican.