islander wrote: 
If you're equating the two sides in this "debate" then I'm mystified. There's no equivalence. Climate change denial is every bit as honest, rational and respectable as the campaign to cast doubt on the harmful effects of tobacco. Remember that? (Indeed, it has many of the same motives and many of the same people behind it.) All they can do is delay the inevitable, but this delay is fatal, when we urgently need to be accomplishing something. Denial and footdragging hurts everyone, and that's hard to forgive.

 islander wrote: 

Let's all repeat it together:  Zero-sum game.  

Equals "end game."

 

 steeler wrote: 
There is no longer any issue that will not be polarized into left/right, dem/repub, north/south in this country. It's not about right and wrong anymore it is about win/lose and which team are you on. It's unfortunate and will be our downfall. People truly believe that they can't have theirs if somebody else get's theirs first. We have become a mob scrambling for a dwindling supply of robotic hamsters. I doubt a majority of people even care about the base issue as long as they can win the argument/battle/election/hamster scramble.

Politics has been uglier in the past, but the political system has never been worse. And the trend line that we are following is not good.

Just to repeat, from another source:

UN hits back at climate sceptics amid e-mails row

The UN's official panel on climate change has hit back at sceptics' claims that the case for human influence on global warming has been exaggerated.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said it was "firmly" standing by findings that a rise in the use of greenhouse gases was a factor.

It was responding to a row over the reliability of data from East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit

Leaked e-mail exchanges prompted claims that data had been manipulated.

Last month, hundreds of messages between scientists at the unit and their peers around the world were put on the internet along with other documents.

Some observers alleged one of the e-mails suggested head of the unit Professor Phil Jones wanted certain papers excluded from the UN's next major assessment of climate science.

The body of evidence is the result of the careful and painstaking work of hundreds of scientists worldwide Professor Thomas Stocker and Professor Qin Dahe, IPCC

Professor Jones, who denies this was his intention, has stood down from his post while an independent inquiry takes place.

In a statement, Professor Thomas Stocker and Professor Qin Dahe, co-chairmen of the IPCC's working group 1, condemned the act of posting the private e-mails on the internet, but avoided commenting on their content.

They went on to point to a key finding that states: "The warming in the climate system is unequivocal.

" is based on measurements made by many independent institutions worldwide that demonstrate significant changes on land, in the atmosphere, the ocean and in the ice-covered areas of the Earth.

"Through further independent scientific work involving statistical methods and a range of different climate models, these changes have been detected as significant deviations from natural climate variability and have been attributed to the increase of greenhouse gases."

They added: "The body of evidence is the result of the careful and painstaking work of hundreds of scientists worldwide.

There is an anti-science group, there is a flat Earth group, if I may say so, over the scientific evidence for climate change Gordon Brown, Prime Minister

"The internal consistency from multiple lines of evidence strongly supports the work of the scientific community, including those individuals singled out in these e-mail exchanges."

The row comes ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit which starts on Monday.

Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-chairman of the IPCC, said it was no coincidence the information was released in the run-up to the summit.

He claimed unnamed conspirators could have paid for Russian hackers to break into the university computers to steal the e-mails.

He said the theft was a scandal and was "probably ordered" to disrupt the confidence negotiators have in the science.

Earlier, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband told the BBC he would be "very surprised" if there had been any wrongdoing on the part of the East Anglia University scientists.

"We're in a moment when the world is about to make some big political decisions," he said.

"And there will be people who don't want the world to make those big decisions and they are trying to use this in part to say somehow this is all in doubt and perhaps we should put the whole thing off.

"Well, I just think they're wrong about that."

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the scientific evidence was "very clear" and called doubters a "flat Earth group".

He said: "There is an anti-change group. There is an anti-reform group. There is an anti-science group, there is a flat Earth group, if I may say so, over the scientific evidence for climate change."

'Open and transparent'

Meanwhile, the Met Office said it would publish all the data from weather stations worldwide, which it said proved climate change was caused by humans.

Its database is a main source of analysis for the IPCC.

It has written to 188 countries for permission to publish the material, dating back 160 years from more than 1,000 weather stations.

John Mitchell, head of climate science at the Met Office, said the evidence for man-made global warming was overwhelming - and the data would show that.

"So this is not an issue of whether we are confident or not in the figures for the trend in global warming, it's more about being open and transparent," he told the BBC.

The Met Office said it had already planned to publish the material long before the row and denied reports that government ministers had tried to block the publication.

It's all down to whom we trust: climatologists, or people who aren't.
Climate chief dismisses e-mail outrage

By Hilary Whiteman, CNN December 8, 2009 7:42 a.m. EST

(CNN) — One of the world's leading authorities on climate change has dismissed the contents of controversial e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia as nothing more than friends and colleagues "letting off steam."

"Well, I can tell you, privately when I talk to my friends, I use language much worse than that. This was purely private communications between friends, between, colleagues, they were letting off steam. I think we should see it as nothing more than that," Rajendra Pachauri, the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told CNN.

In late November, a substantial file including more than 1,000 e-mails either sent from or to members of the University's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in eastern England were allegedly hacked and leaked on the Internet.

They contained language seized upon by climate skeptics who say they offer evidence that scientists have manipulated climate data to exaggerate the threat of global warming.

The affair has been covered extensively in the global press under the moniker, "Climategate."

One e-mail allegedly sent by the head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, refers to using "Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years ... to hide the decline."

As one of the world's leading research bodies on climate change, the CRU's research was used in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report released in 2007, which is considered to be the most authoritative report on climate change to date.

Pachauri told CNN there was no way that unreliable climate data could have made its way into the IPCC report.

"There are so many checks and balances in the processes and procedures that we follow at the IPCC, there is not one iota of possibility that something like this would happen," he said.

He added he would not hesitate in using the unit's information in any future IPCC reports.

"Well why not, if they are qualified in professional terms I certainly would," Pachauri said.

"I don't see any reason why they should be excluded. The fact is that their actions, their contributions have been totally above board. And they've been completely objective in what they've carried out. So I don't have any reason whatsoever to leave them out if there's a requirement and they qualify," he added.

Last week, Jones stepped down from his position as head of the CRU while a review is conducted into claims of data tampering.

The e-mails were released just three weeks before the start of the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen where around 100 heads of state are meeting to agree on a new climate deal.

I have a new barometer... my left ankle full of screws..
OOOO i think I should write a song about that... 

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
Disastrification 

Got to admit, they're very creative when pushing their point. Here's an older article I just stumbled across, which has an interesting take on conservatives in the US and their use of language. Ever since that guy with the little moustache, the Germans have been careful not to go down that slippery propaganda path. Use of language to push a political / ideological point of view is much more accepted over here in Switzerland btw., which doesn't have the same history as Germany to look back on. Hence those horrid minaret posters that proved very effective last week. They never would have passed in Germany or other European countries.

Regards und Grüsse ins Nachbarland, _O_

 Zep wrote: 

I think that both of you gentlemen have hit the nail on the head. These issues will be difficult enough in and of themselves without all the socio-political and economic guilt that seems to be the weapons of choice with the church of the end of the world and gnashing of carbon footprints.

 steeler wrote: 
Yes, it's very sad.  It often seems like the substance of any point-of-view is irrelevant anymore - subjugated by a desire to just be adversarial.

 rosedraws wrote: 
I said that?

 MrsHobieJoe wrote: 

Just shows how polarized America has become.

One would think that this would be non-partisan issue, but no . . .  I'm baffled by that.  And it also is why the discussion has degenerated. More dogma than anything else, and it blots out much of the substance.  It's become more akin to a reality television show, with people crying fraud and  greed, and trying to claim their 15 minutes of notoriety.  Sad, really.   

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
Perhaps because being very far "right" in Germany is at best unpopular, at worst downright illegal.

 Zep wrote: 
In addition many plants don't actually produce much of a net change in CO2.  They respire, just like us.  The only CO2 not given off in gasses, is the CO2 trapped in the wood of the trees themselves.

 Beaker wrote: 
Oh there is no doubt the earth will continue to adapt to whatever input conditions are introduced to it.  More CO2 is good for plants, obviously.  The question is, how amenable is planet change to humanity and human activities? 

I'm with NoEnz - the focus should be less on far-horizon events, like climate change, and more on quantifiable limits, such as energy reserves, population growth, and economic development. Man has never lived to a level of sustainability within his environment, always setting out to colonise new lands and find new hunting grounds. Sustainability is possible, but it takes commitment and sacrifice. 

More than that, it requires an honest evaluation of current economic models predicated on growth.
 

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
That's 'cause you're not stuck with a two party system.

 MrsHobieJoe wrote: 
You're not missing anything. One of the worst quality spoofs I have ever seen and that is saying something.

I don't get the left/right divide in the States either. Just doesn't exist in Germany, well if so, totally minimal.

I'm not watching something with a non-word in the title.  Let's start posting some of the articles from the scientific journals here.  There's some pretty interesting stuff there that hasn't been politicised.  How come there appears to be a right/left wing split in the US?  That's not so much the case in Europe.

 Beaker wrote: 
um, rapid depletion of finite resources.

 Beaker wrote: 
It's easy to pick holes in the greenhouse gas => climate change argument although curiously, the above argument can be taken as proof that atmospheric CO2 levels are elevated, so you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot quoting this.

Another factor in climate change is a recent discovery that phytoplankton blooms from the ash given off by volcanic eruptions, absorbing huge amounts of atmospheric CO2 in the process.. not that I see any huge eruptions around at the moment, just that is a another variable in a hugely complicated system (and I wouldn't want to be around for the ensuing famine either).

I have never been a fan of concentrating the entire issue of sustainability on climate change. The real issue IMO is not climate change but that we are soon going to run out of resources, oil being the primary one. Worse, scarcity is going to hit us suddenly and hard. We need to get the alternative technologies up and running now. If climate change is the bogeyman to get governments to act as one, then so be it but it is not the real issue.