Originally Posted by
N2264J
I've never said the science was settled. That's not the nature of the scientific method. However, the debate among the peer reviewed scientific elite is over. But screw that, let's talk politics:
- At one time, there was no link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.
- We had a problem with acid rain in the northeast. After government intervention, corporations were required to filter sulfides out of their factory emissions and we started using unleaded gas and catalytic converters in our vehicles. It was, in fact, a cap and trade system and today, the rain is no longer killing vast tracks of US forrests.
- Then, there was the environmental problem with the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Government intervened again and we changed the types of aerosols and air conditioning agents we use. The hole now seems to be healing although there are still some annual fluctuations. But the threat of not having to spend all your time indoors and out of the sun's harmful UV is no longer as urgent as it once was.
In all three instances, corporate funded shills were screaming "junk science" because the "fix" was going to cost them a lot of money.
I'm not the only one who was struck by the false equivalency of attaching "gate" to "Climate" and the timing of this tempest in a teapot - two weeks before Copenhagen.
Forget the science for a minute and try to see the opportunity here. We don't manufacture much in this country anymore and our economy shows it. There's a large number of well paying jobs to be had building commercial windmills, solar panels, geothermal units, smartgrid etc. - not to mention the blood and treasure we can save by not stealing and guarding the oil spigot in some desert rathole.
Only a year ago, deniers were freting that addressing global climate destabilization was a fool's errand because China and India weren't going to participate. But while you were focused on cherry picked Emails lately, you may have missed that China is committed to manufacturing green technology to sell to the world and leapfrogging the US.
The longer we wait to do something about it, the more it's going to cost to fix it provided it's fixable at all at some future date. Addressing the problem now is a win-win both environmentally and economically.
I had exceeded my self imposed thread limit on this one so I let it go. Thanks to N2264J for bringing it back to life. Watch this space for some great visuals later. As for now:
I'm not sold on that first part of your argument. So you dug up three cases where some people cried junk science on things that were later found to be generally true. Logically, that has no connection to the global warming discussion. I could pick something like Piltdown man or global cooling (ca.1975) to make the opposite point to yours, but I won't because it is a bad argument.
I think the timing of the release is great. While the world was paying attention climate science was shown to be, at least, fallible. You can blame the media for the timing--the emails were given to the BBC in OCT but they decided to sit on them, hence the late NOV release.
I'm not that crazy about the "gate" suffix either.
You are right that we don't manufacture much here any more. I think you could make a convincing argument that this was due, in no small part, to the influence of green regulation in the past 40 years. Those jobs you talked about are all in industries subsidized by the government--they are good jobs for the few that have them, they are a drag on taxpayers who support them. China wouldn't manufacture that green technology if our government wasn't artificially creating a market.
I wasn't fretting a year ago that China and India wouldn't participate--I was hoping they wouldn't. Check the news, developing countries have walked out--Christmas comes early this year for Winged Wheeler.
Your last paragraph contains the old "it'll be crisis in the future, so let's manufacture a crisis now"--I never understood why anyone thought that was a good argument.
Anyway, thanks for digging this corpse up. Cheers.
WW