Gore calls bullshit: the soundbite by aspenjournalism

Full remarks here.

Narration: A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never!

The Vatican Pontifical Academy of Sciences has just released a strongly worded report (PDF) on global climate change demanding in the strongest possible language that humans act decisively to avert a coming crisis. “We call on all people and nations to recognize the serious and potentially reversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants,” says the report. “If we want justice and peace, we must protect the habitat that sustains us.”

The report was not authored by the Pontifical Academy itself; rather, the Vatican convened a group of scientists with relevant experience, along with a few Nobel Prize winners. The group’s focus was on increasing evidence of glacier retreat, and the report ended up focused on its causes. The group’s co-chair, Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, used a somewhat controversial name for the “man-made” geologic era in which we are now living: the “Anthropocene.”

From 2007:

Global Warming Will Bring Violent Storms And Tornadoes, NASA Predicts

NASA scientists have developed a new climate model that indicates that the most violent severe storms and tornadoes may become more common as Earth’s climate warms.

Previous climate model studies have shown that heavy rainstorms will be more common in a warmer climate, but few global models have attempted to simulate the strength of updrafts in these storms. The model developed at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies by researchers Tony Del Genio, Mao-Sung Yao, and Jeff Jonas is the first to successfully simulate the observed difference in strength between land and ocean storms and is the first to estimate how the strength will change in a warming climate, including “severe thunderstorms” that also occur with significant wind shear and produce damaging winds at the ground.

To Global Warming deniers – isn’t it better to heed this warning, rather than do nothing on the chance that they’re wrong? Whatever, writing that sentence shouldn’t even be necessary.

Scientists have for the first time shown a link between intensifying climate events and tectonic plate movement in findings that could provide a valuable insight into why huge tremors occur. [...]

An Australian-led team of researchers from France and Germany found that the strengthening Indian monsoon had accelerated movement of the Indian plate over the past 10 million years by a factor of about 20 percent.

Rep. Inglis: Voters saw me on ‘Satan’s side’ of climate change debate

“For many conservatives, it became the marker that you had crossed to Satan’s side — that you had left God and gone to Satan’s side on climate change,” he added, “because many evangelical Christians in our district would say that it’s up to God to determine the length of Earth, and therefore, you are invading the province of God.”

So…Global Warming=hell.  Hell=Armageddon.  Armageddon=Jesus. Therefore, Global Warming=Jesus.

As much as I’m disappointed in Obama and think he’s more or less a Republican who’s controlled by many of the same forces that control both parties, he’s not controlled by the knuckle draggers of the religious right.  So while Obama’s apocalypse might be a slower burn than Sarah Palin’s apocalypse, that’s a lesser of a very major evil.

Whatever question there is about the reality of Global Warming is totally irrelevant. All you need to believe is that pollution isn’t positive. Cap and trade isn’t a great solution, but anyone who says “Global Warming doesn’t exist” is just saying, “Environmental degradation doesn’t happen.”  And that’s retarded – because obviously it does. Over time, this degradation will build up and have an impact on ecosystems, which will then affect other ecosystems. It shouldn’t take a scientist to understand that. Really, the only reason to argue against Global Warming is on religious grounds – and one of those religions is the too-devout attachment to a political party’s platform.

I don’t know why I’m arguing though. Because the people who think that Global Warming isn’t real are the same people who think Obamacare and cap and trade are a socialist plot – and they were both Republican plans.

So, Republicans=zombies. Zombies=eat people. Therefore, Republicans eat people.

It occurs to me that using Hynek as a source doesn’t make any more sense than discarding all pilots’ testimony. Hynek, after Blue Book, was an advocate of UFO research. But if we’re to use your sense of logic, this would mean that any opinion of his is clouded by his own bias – including his own statements about pilot error. By his own admission Blue Book was a whitewash, but your choice is to believe Hynek #1 over Hynek #2. How is this any less dubious than any other type of belief?

How is this any more fact-based than the belief that all UFOs come from Sirius: “For pilots, a split-second diagnosis can be a matter of life or death — and so they’re inclined to overestimate the potential threats posed by what they see.” That’s a strange generalization, as if every single person reacts exactly the same way in every single experience.

Frankly, if this is all you’ve got – that the entire foundation of Kean’s book can fall apart due to pilot error – while overlooking radar (as many others have mentioned) and other witnesses on the ground and elsewhere, then this is a severely weak argument. And because it’s so weak, it really seems to come from someone who will debunk this issue no matter what is presented. It’s blatantly dishonest.

As Leslie Kean writes in the intro: “Principled skepticism is the foundational premise of this book.” She is far more principled than this review, which is why she’s being applauded for her sober take on this subject, and this review is getting ripped apart. Amazingly, your review is more speculative than Leslie Kean’s research.

The first comment on Kean’s response mentions how UFOs are never spotted and reported by astronomers. This was curiously also mentioned in a recent post on Bad Astronomer, as if in anticipation of Kean’s defense. On the Daily Grail, Greg Taylor points out that astronomers have reported about UFOs in the past, which Phil Plait  – the reasonable, rational investigator – fails to mention. What it comes down to, I think, is people being addicted to their sense of self-righteousness, but not really interested in getting to the truth of the matter.  As a result, many skeptics are really just debunkers whose arguments are as speculative as what they’re trying to counter.

This whole issue is starting to make me pissed off and kind of sad. I just watched The Age of Stupid about the global warming debate – a man in the future looks back and wonders why we didn’t see all the obvious signs.  I see no great difference between global warming denial and UFO denial. Here’s how it goes:

1.  Even if global warming is a hoax, the end result of global warming awareness is to support programs that help the environment. I actually recently read someone make this comment: “What’s the difference between preemptively fighting terrorism in Iraq or preemptively fighting global warming?” My God – perhaps  the difference between helping the environment and going to war. Small difference. If you’re overly concerned with a new tax then your priorities are misaligned. “Follow the money,” people say about the global warming “hoax.” Well, you can also follow the money to those who are leading global warming denial – the oil industry. So what is being achieved with global warming denial? That climate change is happening regardless of our impact, so change nothing? That’s as dangerous an idea as any other.

2.  And now to UFOs. Aggressively denying something so profoundly interesting to further the cause of “rationality” is irrational. It’s shutting off the fountain of curiosity and inquiry.  What exactly do you achieve by denying UFOs?  That people become “reality-based”?  Well, UFOs are a reality, so you’re being anti-reality based. You can counter the speculation that UFOs are from the Pleiades, but you cannot deny that we don’t fully understand this phenomenon. So denying UFOs is denying progress.  It solves nothing. It’s really disappointing.

Both UFO denial and climate change denial are looking five minutes ahead – not taking into account our future many years from now. At some point in human history, we are probably going to be in contact with an alien race – even if it takes another thousands years. At some point our pollution and overpopulation is going to come back to bite us, even if right now it maybe isn’t causing climate change. It’s myopic and visionless to think otherwise.

In a sense, the need to find irrefutable proof for certain issues is causing stagnation.  People cite a bunch of numbers and figures to support or deny global warming, but really we should all be able to come to some agreement that helping the environment is a good idea, regardless if it’s the apocalypse or not.  And UFOs, though currently unproven, are a vital topic worth exploring – and not out of the realm of possibility given the size of the universe.  Why either of these things faces such a backlash is a great mystery.

But humans seemed primed this way – to fear major change. If you look at the title of this post, it’s two against one.  It’s pretty dispiriting.  The status quo inevitably rules the day.  Until…it doesn’t.  I guess there’s always hope that the “it doesn’t” is also inevitable.

Good take on the financial meltdown and what caused it. Still don’t know how derivatives work. But then, nobody does. A reminder how clueless and dangerous Boehner’s ant comment was. Could have done without the political music interludes. I’m not sure if there’s a lower form of music than songs that are overtly political, singing about taxes and such. Very cool that this project was completed via Kickstarter.

Seeing Ross Gelbspan’s despair about the future of humanity is one of the more persuasive things I’ve seen about the Global Warming debate.  He knows his shit and he’s genuinely sad that the world as we know it could be coming to an end.  Follows the Global Warming debate through Katrina and “Inconvenient Truth ” – from total apathy to new interest.  It puts the oil spill in a different light – in that it could be another moment that drastically changes public perception for the better.  The argument about Obama’s anger is not necessarily his anger at BP – but his indignation, saying, “Things need to change and will. Now.”  Obama has sucked on this issue.  As much as it’s a disaster, it’s also a potential gift.

Also persuasive about how awful the mainstream media has become – the other side of the discussion is always given a seat at the table, no matter how dubious their claims.  Confuses the issue totally – unsurprisingly.  Because given the choice between a hoax and this-will-kill-you, why wouldn’t it be more comforting to believe it’s a hoax?  Even if the hoax idea is perpetrated by the Tony Haywards of the world.

Less effective because Naomi Wolf goes Godwin with a vengeance. I’m sure she got shit for this – haven’t look at reviews. But it’s fascinating to see Wolf couch the Bush administration in exactly the same terms as the Tea Party – erosion of liberty, believing in the constitution, etc. Imagine if Glenn Beck released a movie called the “End of America” equating Obama with Nazism. Basically, his show does just that every night. There may be more truth to what Wolf is saying, and the Bush administration was a total nightmare, but if we lived in a true totalitarian state, I wouldn’t be writing this. She’s as alarmed at Obama as well, who has been a real disappointment.

All of these issues should be of concern to the right wing base, except Tea Baggers don’t realize the problems in their own party, or don’t care. I wouldn’t be surprised if a Republican Party operative was the first person to start bringing Obama=Hitler signs to rallies. Then it metastasized. So long as Obama is painted as far left (because in the lunatic mind, Hitler=left) then anything he does, no matter how reasonable (or right-leaning) will be met with resistance, and so he’ll have to move rightward. This is exactly what’s been happening (see: healthcare). Trouble is, Obama might not have needed this push even without the insane resistance.

I’d like to see a master documentary covering all these things: Finance/Environment/War, without being overly partisan. Because a fair amount of blame goes to Clinton and Obama as well. In “Capitalism,” Michael Moore smartly called out the members of the Clinton administration who are responsible for deregulation, though he’s called far left. This is a populist issue, not partisan. Someone needs to make an Alex Jones documentary for non-paranoids.

A must read from the Huffington Post:

Extracting oil from the ground has almost always been disastrous for the people who live nearby. The only thing that is unusual about this morphing of “Drill, Baby, Drill” into “Spill, Baby, Spill” is that, this time, the world noticed the victims. From the Niger Delta to Azerbaijan, the world is littered with places poisoned by the petroleum industry.

To pluck one random example, Ecuador’s oil pipeline — fueling California — is located above ground, next to roads. It leaks constantly. The oil companies have to pump water into the Amazonian oil fields in order to extract it, which leaves behind a toxic soup of mercury, benzene and chromium 6. For decades, they simply pumped it into the local rivers, causing an epidemic of cancers and severely deformed babies. A US court calculated that the unpaid liabilities for destroying so many lives total more than $27bn. Who has heard of it?

Big Oil is occasionally, fleetingly honest about how it works. Sadad al-Husseini was vice president for exploration and production at Saudi Aramco, and he said of the industry:

If your tanker is old and you ought to retire it, you keep it working. If you have an offshore platform that is beyond the boundaries of a certain country and you can dump chemicals into the sea, you do. If you have to abandon a facility that is a pollutant, you abandon it without cleaning it up. If you’ve hired people and you can work them in unhealthy environments where you’ve got sulphur dioxide, you do it. All these are ways in which you say, it’s not my problem. It’s not my cost.

…The people who say we shouldn’t worry about global warming because we’ll find a way to adapt further down the line should look again at the Gulf. The most powerful country on earth can’t stop a single leaking pipe. How will they — or the rest — deal with rapidly rising sea levels, the drying up of agricultural land, and super-charged hurricanes?

What’s so horrendously short-sighted about global warming deniers is that they try to push the topic out of discussion – because global warming isn’t man-made, it’s a fraud and doesn’t matter. But if it’s purely a natural, unstoppable cycle, the results are still going to be the same, and we need to find a way to deal with it. Conspiracy theorists say global warming is a method of control – but if the worst effects of global warming happen, it’s going to be chaos. All methods of establishing order in a world of increasing disorder are not sinister. And as a solution to a coming ecological catastrophe, “Drill, baby, drill” is the most idiotic response.

More: Climate Denial Crock of the Week.