Climate Change skeptics? [ot]

As a stand alone statement, is it true?

If so, please explain how it is misleading.

Sorta like the 405 freeway - we can't predict with any accuracy the precise speed of a given car at a given time on a given date. But we cab bound it nicely; let's say it will be between 0-300 mph and we could do a bell curve between 0-70 with the sweet spot 15-55 mph. Now add in car make, regional events, etc, etc. etc and we still have a bounded-probability.

raymond phule

climber

Feb 24, 2015 - 12:21pm PT

yes, if you interpret it in the way that the whole paragraph suggest.


It is misleading because people like you believe that the sentence say something that it doesn't say.

The sentence is easily misinterpreted if taken out of context.

out of context
[of an utterance or the report of an action] removed from the surrounding context of the event, thereby misrepresenting the intent of the utterance or report.

Now in my own words: You took one sentence in the middle of a paragraph, which was in the middle of a report. The sentence lacked the surrounding context [text] which had meaning to the sentence you quoted.

Make sense?

EdT, living in a world of make-believe.

The Peril of Great Causes

As a Lukewarmer I cheerfully accept the science explaining how our high emissions of CO2 have contributed to the current warming period. As a liberal progressive I support large-scale (government and NGO) efforts to address the pressing problems of today. And as someone who has worked in the solar power industry and reported on green technology for over a decade, I believe that green energy can provide a partial solution to some of those problems.

But as a Lukewarmer I see flaws in what has become a Great Cause–to me it seems to often be an excuse for NGOs to ask the public for more money, for politicians to gain easy support and to replace the stock prayer from beauty pageant contestants for world peace.

Climate change is real. The political struggle over acknowledging the scope and impacts is full of unreality.

When a political cause gains traction among those in power, a curious thing happens. Conventional ideas about right and wrong slip in priority and winning becomes so important that criminal activity and sexual impropriety become forgivable by those in service to a Cause.

Peter Gleick stole documents and forged another to attack his political opponents. Despite the gravity of this crime he was welcomed back into the fold of those promoting worst-case scenarios about the impacts of climate change as if he were a hero, not a criminal. This is not unusual in political movements. The cause becomes more important.

Al Gore was one of the first who promoted global warming as an imminent threat to human safety. His sybaritic lifestyle was evident from the first–private planes, living in a mansion, conspicuous consumption. None of that was sufficient to cause the Cause to disavow him. It still is unclear whether it was his arrest for pressuring a masseuse for sex or his sale of his television channel to a fossil fuel organization was the cause of his fall from grace–but that fall was apparently temporary, as he still speaks on global warming before green groups the world over. The rules don’t apply.

And now it is the turn of Rajendra Pachauri. Women are now speaking of a decade-long pattern of sexual harassment. Even before this revelation, Pachauri was involved in misconduct, ranging from suppressing dissent to hiding the income from his foundation. He showed incredibly poor judgment in publishing a bodice ripper of a novel while head of an organization that had been criticized by the IAC–with many of those criticisms calling into question his leadership. But it doesn’t matter. He was a champion of the Cause.

Currently, some bloggers and mainstream media sources are reviving decade-long questions about the funding of a scientist named Willie Soon, that he received funding from fossil fuel sources.

It doesn’t matter that institutions ranging from the CRU and Stanford University have received funding from fossil fuel sources, or that BEST’s Richard Muller actually got money from the Koch Brothers. It doesn’t matter that this information is old.

What matters for the Cause is that headlines of supposed misbehavior hit the news at the same time as Pachauri’s disgrace.

Because none of this is about science. It is about controlling the levers of power, making sure the right message is fed through the media channels and that funding for the right issues is uninterrupted.

Oh for the days when we talked about science.

In their January 2015 updates NASA and NOAA both show continuing "warm" global temperatures. I've been graphing these intermittently either as monthly or yearly values, but it occurred to me that an uncentered 12-month moving average would have the advantages of both -- smoother (like annual values) but updated each month and up to date (like monthly). So here's what that looks like for the NASA index, showing 12-month averages each month from January 1900 to January 2015.

too busy filtering your bullshit Sketch.