Global warming deniers get a grip: It's all too real...

[marmar]

Global Warming-- Signed, Sealed, and Delivered
Scientists agree: The Earth is warming, and human activities are the principal cause.
by Naomi Oreskes

An Op-Ed article in the Wall Street Journal a month ago claimed that a published study affirming the existence of a scientific consensus on the reality of global warming had been refuted. This charge was repeated again last week, in a hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

I am the author of that study, which appeared two years ago in the journal Science, and I'm here to tell you that the consensus stands. The argument put forward in the Wall Street Journal was based on an Internet posting; it has not appeared in a peer-reviewed journal — the normal way to challenge an academic finding. (The Wall Street Journal didn't even get my name right!)

My study demonstrated that there is no significant disagreement within the scientific community that the Earth is warming and that human activities are the principal cause.

Papers that continue to rehash arguments that have already been addressed and questions that have already been answered will, of course, be rejected by scientific journals, and this explains my findings. Not a single paper in a large sample of peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 refuted the consensus position, summarized by the National Academy of Sciences, that "most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."

Since the 1950s, scientists have understood that greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels could have serious effects on Earth's climate. When the 1980s proved to be the hottest decade on record, and as predictions of climate models started to come true, scientists increasingly saw global warming as cause for concern.

In 1988, the World Meteorological Assn. and the United Nations Environment Program joined forces to create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action. The panel has issued three assessments (1990, 1995, 2001), representing the combined expertise of 2,000 scientists from more than 100 countries, and a fourth report is due out shortly. Its conclusions — global warming is occurring, humans have a major role in it — have been ratified by scientists around the world in published scientific papers, in statements issued by professional scientific societies, and in reports of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society and many other national and royal academies of science worldwide. Even the Bush administration accepts the fundamental findings. As President Bush's science advisor, John Marburger III, said last year in a speech: "The climate is changing; the Earth is warming."

The rest is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0724-28.htm

[BOSSHOG]

1. And Valerie Plame was not undercover at the CIA

and Iraq had enough wmd to blow up the fucking universe eight times and cells are more valuable then our soldiers in the field and diseases cannot be passed by heterosexual sex and Teri Schiavo was just a day or two away from rewriting war and peace.

And don't forget the right wing story about global warming being the result of "cycles." Like the cycle when the earth is closer to the sun, it occurs once every 100,000 years of so and it ain't happening now. Sorry for all these facts and stuff but I don't listen to limbaugh or faux.

[megatherium]

2. Oreskes gives an example of a contrarian in science who was

wrong--Sir Harold Jeffreys, a Cambridge University geophysicist who died denying plate tectonics (continental drift). Perhaps a better example is Peter Duesberg, the UC Berkeley retrovirologist who continues to deny AIDS is caused by the retrovirus HIV.

[opihimoimoi]

3. Someone had better inform Rash Limpballs cause he was forever

denying GW

Because of guys like him....we have the rejection from the Right GW is due to us Humans. Making all kinds of excuses till today they deny the obvious.

Bush had an opportunity but lost it when he rejected the Kyoto Accord. Pity.

This is what we get for adhering to Fantasy.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

4. How global warming deniers work:

They will continue to deny the earth is warming for as long as they can.

And then when they can't deny it any more, they admit that the earth is warming.

And then they will continue to deny that, while the earth is warming, it is not human beings that are responsible.

And then when they can't deny it any more, they admit that it is human beings that are responsible.

And then they will continue to deny, while humans are responsible, that it is not too late to do anything about it.

In other words, global warming deniers are not worth talking to.

[mcscajun]

6. You're correct; there *is* No Point in talking to the deniers.

I know one personally. He used to accept the fact of Global Warming, and ridiculed his brother-in-law for being a denier. How he got turned around, I Don't Know, but I DO know that Fox News and CNSNews.com played a big part in it.

Now, he spouts the most ridiculous nonsense; one example: Global warming: It's all a big scam by Wall Street to make money. Another: there's no real Oil Shortage, yet in the next breath he's blaming "environmentalists" (his usage puts the quotes around it, not mine) for our "failure" to build more refineries and rants that we should be drilling in the ANWR. He's impossible to argue with; so I don't.

[Strelnikov_]

5. Are Always Some Individuals Who Simply Refuse To Accept New Ideas . . .

and evidence."

Dr. Gray, are you listening . . .