"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Friday, January 16, 2009

Theory of Everything

You might have thought our problems originated at least to some extent in the fact that the USA had been run by a tribe of drunken lemurs for eight years, but you would be wrong. No, the cause of our problems, all of them, the wars, the economic collapse, the budgetary problems, the international hostility, the decline of civility, the prosecution of innocent people for political purposes, disease, depression, beach erosion, mercury pollution, the lack of due recognition of the Longhorns as the #1 college football team this year, in fact everything that troubles us, all of it, is entirely due to the IPCC and their vile coterie of nefarious co-conspirators:
The establishment of the Church of Global Warming immediately attracted as acolytes those leftists orphaned by the collapse of the old Soviet Union, those who saw, and continue to see, free-market capitalism and individual liberty as grave threats. So convincing were they developing plausible pseudo-science and both faulty and falsified data that they were able to bring into the church those political leaders — read United Nations — who have long sought the destruction of the one bulwark standing against the encroaching tide of totalitarianism.

The success of Gore’s evangelical fervor can be seen in the apparent commitment of President-elect Barack Hussein Obama to some sort of cap-and-trade program, a program designed by Gore to create a personally lucrative market for a product that will be created by legislative fiat. The legislative fiats already in place, spurred by Gore and his followers, have played a major role in helping to bankrupt the American automobile industry, have driven up the cost of food, have hamstrung domestic energy exploration and production, and are threatening to destroy, through onerous taxation, the American livestock industry.

Even the livestock industry! So says Dan Sernoffsky in the website of the Lebanon Daily News of Lebanon, PA. Fortunately, we can always count on the Russians in time of need:
Despite its best efforts to brand as heretics those who would question the basic tenets of the church — that global warming is man-made, that it is immediately imminent, and that the only salvation lies in the church — there is increasing evidence that those tenets are, and always have been, wrong. A man named Khabibullo Abdusamatov, who heads a space-research laboratory in Russia, has suggested that the world is headed for global cooling, a hypothesis seconded by one of his countrymen, Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, another respected scientist.
God bless Khabibullo Abdisamatov and Oleg Sorokhtin, saviors of the livestock industry!

This is the best bit, here:
Not unsurprisingly, the Church of Global Warming has been quick to claim that the drop in temperatures is simply proof of the basic tenet of their faith, that man-made global warming does exist, hoping, no doubt, that what they have perceived and read about sunspot cycles will enable them to ignore temperature drops when sunspot activity increases and leads to rising temperatures.
Ah, the selective use of evidence. Nobody should tolerate selective use of evidence. Look, here are two obscure Russian fellows who agree that this is all based on selective evidence! Case closed!

You can't make this stuff up. Anyway, at least I can't. But anyway I can share. You're welcome.

7 comments:

King of the Road said...

He doesn't seem to be too clear on the implications of a double negative.

"Not unsurprisingly..."

Anonymous said...

Anonymous, as a first question, where do you get your information?
And secondly, how did you come to this blog?

Dano said...

Anon:

The new generation of wind turbines are bird-friendly. You may want to check it out.

And the talking point about WV and CO2: addressed long ago. That is: talking point doesn't work.

Lastly, cosmic ray flux: no correlation [1.]

HTH.

Best,

D

PS: just checking, Michael?

Michael Tobis said...

Wrong thread. You want this one. Please explain the graphs, thanks.

As for global warming on other planets, global mean temperature can only do two things: rise or fall. If you want to come up with a solar explanation you had best show comparable time scales and comparable anomalies on all planets, not an agreement in sign on some of them. See, e.g., Steinn Sigurdsson's RealClimate contribution.

Consider that even if the Svensmark mechanism works well enough to affect global conditions, that is not enough. Nobody denies that there are natural mechanisms that heat or cool the earth. Let's stipulate (despite the lack of evidence in observations) that this one really works.

You still have to explain why the greenhouse effect fails. And you are left with a much deeper puzzle about the ice age cycles. What is it that amplifies the Milankovic cycles so severely on that time scale?

You seem to have a great deal of confidence in the Svensmark theory but it's unclear why.

The relationship of water, CO2, and methane is routinely screwed up by the press and the denial squad, and you have duly joined in the confusion of concentration, optical depth, and anthropogenic perturbation.

Finally, CO2 correlates about as well with temperature, given natural variability and understood lags, as expected. Not surprising, I suppose, because our expectations are largely guided empirically. Of course the correlation is substantial. The idea that it doesn't correlate at all is strikingly wrong.

Your beliefs are obviously not the result of any actual expertise but a parroting of some of the more common of the mutually inconsistent talking points of the denialists.

You should tell us on what basis you formed your opinions. Do you think there is some chance that you worked backward from the conclusion you prefer to the evidence?

If you intend to defend your position, please get yourself a blogger name so we can keep our Khabibbulists and Svensmarxists straight, and take it up on the sunspots thread linked above.

Dano said...

Michael,

When you see the framing in religious terms, you know you have someone framing from their worldview, which is threatened by man-made climate change. That's all you need to know.

Best,

D

bi -- International Journal of Inactivism said...

"Khabibullism"

Heheheheheheheh. :-B

Dano said...

Frank,

is that goalie worship?

D