Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for February 06, 2012

Do you have facts to prove Copernicus was wrong?

Gonna be an interesting week …

Rush’s research bureau?

I bet this is where our idiot state senator got his facts about the origin of AIDS and it not being transmitted by heterosexual relations.

Trudeau is still sooo on the money!!!

So man induced change to the earth’s climate is a political issue? If I vote Republican I am a denier & vice versa. Typical.. The climate changes and always has and always will. Man’s impact is not measurable. The deniers are those who agree with Gore, ie. If not for man there would be no change. This should be out of the political agenda.. the financial implications alone demand that. . .

Interesting how TD refers to alarmism skeptics as “climate change deniers.”

Just a metaphor for the internet. Everyone is now an expert on everything. Research is so fragmented that no one has the whole picture, and all authority (i.e. expertise) is to be discounted unless we already like what it says. Techies imagined that the digital age would be an age of knowledge, with so much information readily available. Instead, it is becoming the age of Babel, an age of Ignorance. So many of our political debates concern what has happened, what is happening, and (under various scenarios) what will happen. And we can’t begin to agree even about the first two, less alone the last. It isn’t a matter of knowledge vs. ignorance. It’s presumption vs. presumption. I am fed up with the blind faith of those who deny the possibility of anthropogenic climate change. I am also fed up with the blind faith of those who think it a proven fact. Those who call themselves skeptics, should be skeptical of both claims. But how often do you hear a pundit or politician claim “nobody knows for sure” and mean it? I imagine yourself the third party in a conversation on a cruise ship. “Hundreds of these ship make a total of thousands of cruises every year, and none of them ever sink. So why waste our time with lifeboat drills? Or even waste deck space and spend our hard-earned ticket money on lifeboats?” says one. “Because I saw the captain this morning, and I think I smelled alcohol on his breath, and I heard two of the crew members make disparaging comments about the captain’s competence, and the crew seem a little slipshod in general. AND I cast the tea leaves this morning, AND checked my horoscope, AND read the tarot cards and ALL of them indicated imminent disaster. I tell you this ship is going to sink! It is a fact! We’re going to need those lifeboats, and we should have drills!” says the other. So what do you say? Who do you agree with? The arrogant presumption of the first is more dangerous than the alarmist kookiness of the second. People who have never had anyone try to break into their house or any of their neighbor’s houses will still keep a loaded gun at bedside. Are they being alarmists? Yet they are sometimes the very ones who sneer at those who would have us take precautions against the possibility of antropogenic climate change. Anthropogenic or not, some countries are unquestionably suffering the effects of changing weather patterns, and see attitude of rich countries in relatively unaffected temperate zones as callous and irresponsible. But never mind. No matter what happens to the world climate, we will never know what role we played in it. Maybe in a century or two our descendants will know, and shake their heads at our alarmism, or at our denial of the obvious.

@doughfoot

Did the Costa Concordia get covered in the US?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/9062812/Costa-Concordia-Italian-woman-sues-over-miscarriage-after-cruise-ship-disaster.html

‘I saw the captain this morning and he said he wanted to wave to a friend on the island as we went past…’

Fact: the hockey stick chart used by “global climate change” activists was generated using a program that contained a Y2K programming glitch. When the bug was corrected, the hockey stick disappeared.Fact: while the global ice sheet is thinning in one area, it is thickening in another.Fact: while Al Gore preaches green, his house in Tennesee has been show to use more electricity in one month than three normal homes use in a year.Fact: going green can and will improve the health of the entire planet but global warming scare tactics based on junk science and disproven temperature graphs are causing most people to tune green activists out.

I knew this cartoon would generate some hot air, and heated discussions.

… who may expect to spin in his grave for some time to come.

My experience trying to deal with Republican relatives is like the Blue Collar Comedian says, “You can’t fix stupid.”

I’am sure of the contribution we have had on the acceleration of the change. I’am not sure if we can alter that effect. But we should seriously talk about what steps we should take to best weather the changes that are coming. That’s myfacts.

The latest is scientists of NASA reporting global climate change is real and this version is affected by man’s actions.

I know what’s going on. Dylan Thomas died in the ’50s

Still nothing from DylanThomas?Wish I knew what’s going on.

Let’s indulge in some wishful thinking…I think he went to a seminar in Fiji and stayed over to enjoy the weather. Sunspots have compromised internet traffic in the region.

I would pull up some facts myself, but my science teacher does it much better. Check out Dr. Jay Wile’s blog at http://blog.drwile.com/And if any of you want to argue, he will definitely oblige. Trust me, we’ve argued.

obviously, these people have no clue, or never had an aquarium or a terrarium.

small minds and big lies usually go together. i’m so glad Copernicus had it all wrong. too bad these people use electricity, the internal combustion engine or medical treatments.

they need to go live on a island and keep those bad Climate change people far far away.. how dare facts get in their way of denialism, me-ism and fantasylandia.

Lies, Damn Lies and then, Statistics!

I just love how ignorant yahoos, like some on this comment thread, think they know more than the overwhelming majority of scientists (in the high 90 percentiles) who are convinced that climate change (or global warming or whatever you want to call it) is real, and is man made. The arrogance on the part of the right knows no limits. When you people have published peer reviewed papers on the subject, maybe you’ll be worth listening to, but in the meantime, I’ll go with science, and not listen to fools like you who suck down stupid propaganda because it’s 1) what you want to hear, and 2) you lack the critical thinking skills to evaluate what you’re being fed. Again, I’ll go with science. :And as for those ignoramuses who point to people like Al Gore and others who still consume fossil fuels – get a clue – we all live, grew up, and operate in this particular society – it’s on a course for disaster, and we’re doing what we can to change this. Change isn’t easy, but it’s going to come, one way or another. Mother Nature always bats last.

Have you ever noticed that when people say, “I just can’t believe that …” what they really mean is “I refuse (won’t, or don’t want) to believe that …” But they use that “can’t” to justify what is little more than a preference.

The sun revolves around the Earth, and Jesus will return in MY lifetime: this was the accepted FACT by Mark, 2,000 years ago. When Mt St. Helens erupted, a few thousand acres of forest were “destroyed”, and weather was temporarily affected. In the history of Man, MILLIONS of acres of forest, world-wide, have been permanently destroyed and converted to grasslands, or desert. Seven BILLION people now occupy the planet occupied by a few million at the time of Mark. Mark didn’t drive either a Hummer, or a Leaf.

The simple fact is that science trumps myth, and history doesn’t support “religious predictions”. Funny how keeping Jews around so we can have Armeggedon is “accepted”, but the long history of Man converting all planetary ecosystems is not. The question is NOT whether those who refused to accept history will re-live it, but rather how long our species will be around. It isn’t the “panic” of a few decades, but certainly doesn’t look good for a century or two “out”. And we will have done it to ourselves, no “hand of God” required.

Of course, we are so puny and pathetically small, how could we possibly affect a planet this size? Pay no attention to all those cars each putting out 7-10 TONS of CO2 per year; or the factories, cows, clearcutting fires, power plants, or anything else we do; it has no meaning.

What if we were to reduce pollution, making our environment both healthier and more beautiful, and it turned out the climate-change deniers were right?Wouldn’t that be HORRIBLE???

I trust there are seperate facts for Democrats, Republicans and Independants.

Cool. A database to use, confuse and abuse the co-workers. Especially the confuse part. Like that. (the H*** with the facts, ma’am.)

Hey, Tigger, let’s put on our bellbottoms and cruise on down to the disco. We can listen to the new Elvis album on the 8-track in my Gremlin. After all, nothing’s changed from the 70’s has it?

As Jonathan Haidt said, “Reasoning and Google can take you wherever you want to go.”

I am always astonished that people talk about “believing in” climate change or the “myth” of climate change. Scientific propositions are not questions of faith, and should not be treated as religious dogmas. They are questions of evidence, and the manner in which that evidence is analyzed, and the reliability of the predictions made on the basis of that analysis. Predicting climate is, in some ways, much harder than predicting weather: the time frame (centuries) is so much greater. Perhaps it is easier, too, for it can ignore many passing phenomena, such as the incredibly unseasonably warm winter we are having here in Virginia, and the blizzard they just has in Italy. But as unreliable as we all know the TV weather forecast to be, don’t we often take umbrellas or raincoats based on its predictions? Check out the different websites that give weather forecasts for your area. Do they all make the same forecasts for tomorrow or next week? Climate change deniers remind me of people who just won’t believe that the hurricane coming their way is really going to be all that bad, and think those who are stockpiling supplies or, worse, ordering evacuations, are just crazy. The hurricane might NOT be so bad. It might turn away in a different direction at the last moment. The evacuation might have been entirely unnecessary. Does that mean we should stop taking precautions? Deniers are so sure they are right, are so governed by blind faith, that they would gamble with the future of us all rather than run the risk of taking unnecessary precautions. I don’t BELIEVE in climate change, OR in massive conspiracies involving ten of thousands of scientists and researchers. Climate orthodoxy may be wrong, its true! But I am still going to carry that umbrella when the weatherman suggests its a good idea.

myFacts seems like an organization that Duke would manage or Sal (aka Ben) would work for – remember Dr. Whoopee?

In the seventies, scientists were realizing that the earth had spent the majority of the last 2 million years glaciated, and that we had already gone longer without a new glaciation than was typical in that 1.8million year period. So some (not all) famously predicted it could only be a matter of time before the ice sheets advanced again. The part they had right was that it was unusual that we had gone so long without a new glaciation. They made a forecast based on past trends

Then they began studying actual long term climate patterns in more detail, bringing together data from multiple sources – and looking at how much global CO2 levels had changed since the mid-1800’s – and how much faster they are rising every single year. And realizing that not was there no sign of a new glaciation – and in fact the trend was continued warming. Which parallels the long term historic data shown by 800,000 years of detailed info obtained from ice cores – which show a close relationship between atmospheric CO2 levels and periods of warming and cooling over the several periods of glacial maximums and minimums. Do we know everything now? Certainly not. But we have enough data to suggest quite clearly that regardless of historic warming and cooling trends – the world is currently warming rapidly, more rapidly than at nearly any time in tens of millions of years. Past rapid warming episodes, whatever their cause, have resulted in drastic changes in the environment and ecology.

Interesting subject. The Global Warming debate was predictable. I’ll be interested to see if this arc develops into a contrast between Creationist “facts” and Scientific “theories!”