Comments on: Why This Republican Worries About Climate Change

By: B.A.Borton

B.A.Borton — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:09:39 +0000

Sorry, I cant leave this thread without a shout-out to gerrysh! – http://wattsupwiththat.com – What a great site! Everybody should peruse. Thanks for the post!

By: JJWFromME

JJWFromME — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 02:01:36 +0000

No personal attack. It’s just what I think. Anyone who sees every organization mentioned on this page as “biased” is seeing their *own* biases through a funhouse mirror:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change I quote the other sources to make certain points, convey insights. And it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans whether Professor Naomi Oreskes is publishing a piece in the NY Times, the LA Times or the Washington Times. It has nothing to do with anything we’re discussing. (And also it seems to me we’re taking up too much of this site’s bandwidth with this silliness, so this will be my last comment in this post.)

By: B.A.Borton

B.A.Borton — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 01:23:05 +0000

So out comes the misdirections and personal attacks. Please don’t presume to know how or what I feel. I take the people I meet one at a time and treat no one as my enemy unless they give me just cause. You did called me out on prisonplanet (honestly I should have found a different source for the same article, I was too hasty, so thank you). All I was doing was just pointing out that the LA Times and the New York Times are probable about as unbiased as say using Fox News or the NY Post editorials for sources. This started out as a discussion about climate change and anthropogenic CO2 emissions. If you have to lower the level of discussion to that of the last post, I feel that we may have strayed a tad bit off point, no?

By: JJWFromME

JJWFromME — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:30:39 +0000

Well, the Paul Krugman column is a clearly partisan article and it may not belong in this discussion. But the rest of the material is not. If you see it all as such, to me you are clearly seeing your own ideological biases in a funhouse mirror. It must be difficult living in a world with liberal enemies lurking around every corner like that. (Which again, brings to mind the Hofstadter essay that I linked to below.)

By: B.A.Borton

B.A.Borton — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 23:40:55 +0000

Lets see, an Op-Ed piece from the Los Angles Times written in July of 06 and now an Op-Ed posting from New York Times written in August of 05. Truly fonts of unbiased, even handed reporting if ever there was any.
By disguising a political debate as a scientific one, you mean the IPCC?

By: JJWFromME

JJWFromME — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 23:10:04 +0000

Biologists, scientists, teachers, all permanently suspect, thanks to the stoked resentments from people who want to disguise a political debate as a scientific one: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/05/opinion/05krugman.html

By: sinz54

sinz54 — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 22:47:14 +0000

JJWFromME: It’s true, ordinary Americans always harbored deep suspicions of the Establishment, the banks, the “robber barons,” etc. But ordinary Americans used to take considerable pride in the achievements of their scientists and inventors. Americans were proud that Einstein made his home here; that our scientists developed the A-bomb first; that American astronauts walked on the moon first. What changed? Some of the advances of modern science have threatened not just our way of life but our entire civilization–nuclear destruction, chemical pollution, etc. And that’s triggered a backlash by folks who wonder if science isn’t digging into areas best left alone. Also, scientists started getting involved in political lobbying and political activism themselves, incurring the suspicions that Americans have traditionally had of being sold a political bill of goods. Groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists are just using their scientific knowledge to rationalize a doctrinaire left-wing agenda. Finally, the resurgence of Christian fundamentalism, which for centuries saw the scientific worldview as a philosophical threat to revelatory truth, has been counterattacking against Darwin’s theory of evolution and against advances in the social sciences.

By: gerrysh

gerrysh — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 22:43:51 +0000

… and the hits just keep on coming …
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/27/james-hansens-former-nasa-supervisor-declares-himself-a-skeptic-%20says-hansen-embarrassed-nasa-was-never-muzzled/

By: JJWFromME

JJWFromME — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 12:31:48 +0000

And remember, it’s not *me* you have to persuade, it’s the actual scientists working in the field. Any discussion we have here is not relevant to that. This is where you get into the legacy, I think, of conservatives like Irving Kristol (who I mentioned below). It’s a permanent suspicion of the “New Class.” How the heck do you get things done in a complicated world when you have a set of people (some of them in the media) who have permanent resentments and suspicions against whole classes of professions?

By: JJWFromME

JJWFromME — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 12:14:52 +0000

Well, as Obama said during his inaugural address, “we’re not going to apologize for our way of life.” But he also appointed physics Noble laureate Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy, who talked about manufacturers… assigning the job [of addressing problems] to the engineers, instead of to the lobbyists. (See my link below.) And as for people talking about other causes of warming other than greenhouse gases. You have to come up with actual persuasive evidence. As Naomi Oreskes put it: “As American geologist Harry Hess said in the 1960s about plate tectonics, one can quibble about the details, but the overall picture is clear.

Yet some climate-change deniers insist that the observed changes might be natural, perhaps caused by variations in solar irradiance or other forces we dont yet understand. Perhaps there are other explanations for the receding glaciers. But perhaps is not evidence.

The greatest scientist of all time, Isaac Newton, warned against this tendency more than three centuries ago. Writing in Principia Mathematica in 1687, he noted that once scientists had successfully drawn conclusions by general induction from phenomena, then those conclusions had to be held as accurately or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypothesis that may be imagined.

Climate-change deniers can imagine all the hypotheses they like, but it will not change the facts nor the general induction from the phenomena.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jul/24/opinion/oe-oreskes24