For too long, scientists who promote the hypothesis that man’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are causing dangerous global warming have been given a free ride by politicians and the press. Their pronouncements, no matter how fantastic, are accepted without question and repeated ad nauseam by compliant governments and reporters alike. When scientists do what all scientists are supposed to do — question and probe — they are treated as enemies of the people and condemned by opinion leaders.
With the upcoming release of the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, 2013 can be the year governments and media grow up on climate change.
Treat catastrophists who push for climate and energy policies that would bankrupt us just as we do other end-of-the-world cultists: demand they prove their beliefs before providing them the time of day, let alone our tax dollars. Insist that climate catastrophists cease with their speculations and instead employ the scientific method.
Humans thrive during warm spells. We die in the cold.
A poll conducted on November 5 by Rasmussen Reports found that an all-time high of 68% of “likely U.S. voters” say that global warming is “a serious problem”; 38% of them thought it was “very serious.”
Considering the benefits of warming and the fact that even the UK Met office shows that there has been no global warming in the past 16 years, this demonstrates the degree to which the population has been propagandized into believing the opposite of reality. We are the first generation in history to believe that climatic warming is a bad thing.
In a warmer world, less energy is needed for heating and transportation, resulting in less air, land, and water pollution. Snow and ice that seriously hamper movement and increase the costs of land and water shipping are reduced. Roads, bridges, and other infrastructure maintenance costs drop, as there would be less freeze/thaw and ice damage. Clothing expenses obviously reduce in a warmer world, and construction costs plummet as less insulation is required in all buildings.
The benefits of warming are especially prominent in agriculture. Longer frost-free periods will extend growing seasons as well as the extent of agriculture in middle- and high-latitude regions. More and greater varieties of food are then possible in areas that are currently agriculturally marginal.
With President Obama’s re-election, Al Gore’s “24 Hours of Climate Reality” coming up in a week, and the next UN Climate Change Conference starting two weeks later, we are going to be hearing a lot about the so-called consensus among climate experts that our greenhouse gases are causing a climate crisis. Consequently, it is important that climate realists have new, solid “talking points” to rebut this assertion.
Two pieces of evidence are most often cited to support the 97%/consensus argument:
1)A 2010 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (PNAS) by Anderegg et al.
2)A poll conducted in April 2008 by Professor Peter Doran and then-graduate student Margaret R. K. Zimmerman at University of Illinois at Chicago . The survey results were summarized in a paper published in January 2009 in the science journal EOS.
“Stopping global warming” has no place in U.S. Election
It’s a relief for Canadians that America’s real concerns are trumping the loud and aggressive climate lobby in the U.S. election. After all, we have pledged to follow the U.S. lead on climate change. For example, our Copenhagen greenhouse gas emission targets are exactly the same. If America brings in a national cap and trade system, you can be sure Canada will follow.
Consequently, even though we have no say in what Americans ultimately decide, the U.S. climate debates are extremely important to Canada.
Before the first Presidential debate, nine climate activist groups delivered petitions with 160,000 signatures to debate moderator Jim Lehrer urging him to focus on climate change. For weeks main stream media pushed the issue, asserting that President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney must address this, “the most crucial issue of our time.”
But they did not, and Lehr completely ignored the topic as well. The same thing happened in the second and third Presidential debates in which neither the candidates nor the moderators said anything about global warming at all.
The headline on an October 9 press release from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication read: “Poll Shows Americans Believe Global Warming Is Making Extreme Weather Worse.”
Mainstream media quickly reported uncritically on the poll. The Chicago Tribune ran a reproduction of a Reuters newswire: “Most Americans Link Weather to Global Warming: Survey.” At the Huffington Post: “Climate Change Survey Shows Most Americans Believe Warming Is Tied To Extreme Weather Events.”
But did the poll – ”Climate Change in the American Mind“ — actually demonstrate this?
To evaluate the significance of the survey results, we must compare the methodology employed by the researchers with that needed to generate meaningful results about this complex and controversial topic.
Re: Survey finds two per cent of respondents don't believe climate change is happening, by Jennifer Graham, The Canadian Press, Aug. 15.
Queen's University Prof. John Smol is right to say that it's "discouraging how slowly the science seems to have been translated into public policy and public opinion."
If science was driving climate policy, then we would have no carbon dioxide regulations at all, since the global warming scare is so weak scientifically.
Smol is totally mistaken to say that "the science has been in for a long time." As I showed the 1,500 students I taught for the past three years at Carleton University, the science of climate change is immature and discoveries are regularly being made that overturn previously popular ideas.
A quick check of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change shows that literally thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers have been published that disprove Smol's overconfident statement.
Sadly, the public opinion poll Smol was commenting on failed to ask the most important question of all, "Do you believe that emissions of carbon dioxide from human activities are causing dangerous global warming and other problematic climate change?"
A person’s cultural and social worldview, as identified by the labels above, have more impact on determining their opinion on global warming than any other factor (Image reference - The Second National Risk and Culture Study, Yale Law School, 2007).
Social science research provides the key to finally ending the divisive global warming debate
It has always been assumed that a lack of understanding of basic science and mathematics is the main reason the public can be so easily misled on controversial issues such as global warming. All that is needed, so science educators and campaigners believed, is a general increase in scientific literacy and people would come to more rational conclusions when presented with the facts.
But new findings published on Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change by researchers taking part in the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School shows that this is not the case at all. When faced with having to support one side or the other in important science debates, most people are influenced far more by their cultural and social worldviews than by solid science, no matter how well that science is presented. The public, especially those well-versed in science and mathematics, will usually agree with the side that comes closest to the values of the “tribe” they most identify with. In many cases, the facts don’t matter at all.
To examine the issue, Cultural Cognition Project researchers divide the population up as illustrated in the diagram at the top of the page.
"the revelation that Ottawa’s Carleton University hired Tom Harris, a PR man for a number of “astroturf” groups with a mechanical engineering background, to teach a course on climate change."
It is old news, not a “revelation”, that I taught a climate course at Carleton for the past three years. I was hired because of my teaching and science background as well as my decade of working with the course originator and primary author, Professor Tim Patterson, a leading academic and climate researcher at Carleton.
I am not a "PR man." Like Suzuki, I engage in public education. I have solid training and experience in thermodynamics, heat transfer and fluid mechanics, all relevant to understanding the causes of climate change. How does David Suzuki’s biology background equip him to comment so loudly on the immensely complex atmospheric/oceanic climate system?
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