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Do you believe in Global Warming?

You know you are struggling to come up with a list of respectable climate change skeptics when you read the descriptions and see that half of them acknowledge that climate change is real and their only quibble is the extent of the effect. The other half of the list is kooks and shills like Ebell from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The CEI is just a propaganda group for corporate fascists to buy off politicians and shove their agenda down our throats. Just look at their sponsors: ExxonMobil, Philip Morris, Scaife Foundations, etc. The biggest collection of right-wing fascists in the country.
 
You know you are struggling to come up with a list of respectable climate change skeptics when you read the descriptions and see that half of them acknowledge that climate change is real and their only quibble is the extent of the effect. The other half of the list is kooks and shills like Ebell from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The CEI is just a propaganda group for corporate fascists to buy off politicians and shove their agenda down our throats. Just look at their sponsors: ExxonMobil, Philip Morris, Scaife Foundations, etc. The biggest collection of right-wing fascists in the country.


This ought to get a debate brewing :D
 
John,

I don't know if the issue it that it is hard to come up with a list or that it is hard to go against the "consensus". Giordano Bruno went against the consensus and ended up dead. Galileo had to repent. Sometimes is hard to go against the crowd at this level.

I do see people in this list that seem from the extreme right. However, you sound to be on the extreme left. Is there a middle ground?
 
The whole idea of the global warming campaign is to introduce carbon tax. It means additional tax on everything - from the car you drive to the news paper you buy every morning. Campaign designed to make people feel guilty and accept new tax. Will proceeds be used fight global warming? To find the answer just check what part of $1.5 Billion in 2008 cigarette taxes in New York was used to fight smoking.
 
I do see people in this list that seem from the extreme right. However, you sound to be on the extreme left. Is there a middle ground?

It's a moot point. The debate now among climate scientists in not whether human-induced climate change is real but rather whether climate change -- initially induced by humans -- has developed an independent momentum of its own and cannot now be stopped by human agency. Even if it could be stopped by radical human action, we will not see it. It will be "too little, too late." Tepid and half-hearted measures get mooted at international conferences but are always shot down.

I don't know what "extreme right" is -- maybe the Scaife Foundation? But ExxonMobil is just looking at its bottom line.

Humans aren't good at long-term planning. We lurch from crisis to crisis. Climate change and other environmental problems will probably wipe out at least a big chunk of the species within a century.
 
The thing that is hard to go up against is scientific fact that has been extensively studied and debated within the scientific community for the last forty or so years.

The denialists have the backing and the extensive resources of the fascist corporate propaganda machine and their brain-dead counterparts in the corporate controlled media to give them a platform to spew their misinformation. This is not a he-said-she-said disagreement. This is a deliberate misinformation campaign designed blur reality for a largely ignorant public. The denialists are part of the same crowd that wants us to believe that smoking is not harmful to your health, evolution doesn't exist, the Earth is only 6000 yrs old, and queers getting married will destroy the institution of marriage (but cheating on your spouse is ok if you're a born-again senator or governor).
 
Campaign designed to make people feel guilty and accept new tax. Will proceeds be used fight global warming? To find the answer just check what part of $1.5 Billion in 2008 cigarette taxes in New York was used to fight smoking.
Are you saying this is an elaborate effort to add personal "carbon footprint" to the sin tax? I don't know it will become federal law but this has been done for years in many states, notably California. We are paying additional tax for PC recycle, bottle recycle, environment tax, etc.
I'm all for additional smoke tax, not because I don't smoke but the society is better off with fewer smokers, drinkers. I like NYC effort to make this city a greener, healthier place to live. The real political, monetary motives behind this is another story.

If the threat of personal carbon footprint tax makes people more conscious of how they use the limited natural resource, it's a good thing, don't you think?
 
If the threat of personal carbon footprint tax makes people more conscious of how they use the limited natural resource, it's a good thing, don't you think?

It will not make people more conscious. You will just have to pay 30 cents for news paper every morning instead of 25. If it will make less people buy newspapers and save our planet it might be good outcome at some sense. However, my point was that carbon (same like smoking) tax will not be used to fight with global worming. Therefore, the goal of this tax to make people's income less so they consume less carbon. You can achieve the same effect by increasing federal tax. However, this is much harder to do. Therefore, politicians are going to introduce "green" tax, which everybody is proud to pay.
 
there might be decrease in consumption in some areas, while it might lead to new innovations. buying less newspapers will lead to less trees being cut, but maybe we can read news online or maybe Kindle like devices can be used to read newspapers apart from books. so news will still have value and news agencies will exist only the mode of delivery will change. So this tax will spur new devices like kindle and hence innnovation.
The proceeds from smoking tax might have been used for different purposes, but I know personally of friends who quit smoking because of the high cigarette costs. So it did do good to society. Anyway, I agree green tax is extremely controversial and not sure if it will ever go through in full steam.

It will not make people more conscious. You will just have to pay 30 cents for news paper every morning instead of 25. If it will make less people buy newspapers and save our planet it might be good outcome at some sense. However, my point was that carbon (same like smoking) tax will not be used to fight with global worming. Therefore, the goal of this tax to make people's income less so they consume less carbon. You can achieve the same effect by increasing federal tax. However, this is much harder to do. Therefore, politicians are going to introduce "green" tax, which everybody is proud to pay.
 
offtopic
buying less newspapers will lead to less trees being cut

The newspaper business is dead. The trees are being cut because we use more paper now than ever. That's a topic for another discussion.
 
John,

I don't know if the issue it that it is hard to come up with a list or that it is hard to go against the "consensus". Giordano Bruno went against the consensus and ended up dead. Galileo had to repent. Sometimes is hard to go against the crowd at this level.

I do see people in this list that seem from the extreme right. However, you sound to be on the extreme left. Is there a middle ground?

alain courteously asks whether "there is a middle ground?"

And I'd say: Yes, of course. On a straight line, my position is (or could hypothetically be) as far away from John's as alain's, except on the opposite side.

And BTW, do you think Galileo would've done right by creating science that is at "a middle ground"?

But I think, when people come together to discuss an issue, it should begin at some point, and quite often, a middle ground is not a bad starting point. Mind you, I said "... starting point." The well established principles - scientific or otherwise - cannot be watered down for the sake of a middle ground.
 
And I'd say: Yes, of course. On a straight line, my position is (or could hypothetically be) as far away from John's as alain's, except on the opposite side.

I didn't get this part.

I think I need to understand more about the whole Global Warming thing form the physics standpoint... but not from political standpoint but from the scientific standpoint.
 
I am with you alain in your position; namely:

"I think I need to understand more about the whole Global Warming thing form the physics standpoint... but not from political standpoint but from the scientific standpoint."

The "I" above refers as much to you as it does to me.

But given the limitations within which we find ourselves, who are we to know better than the experts? Certainly, we, the laymen, should listen to the 'community' of climate experts, and give greater weight to their consensus than to those of others. All the while we need to keep an open mind as we listen and study different scientifically legitimate points of view. But shouldn't the climate discussion, or at least certain aspects of it, come to an end at some point in time? If the realistically anticipated consequences of our inaction can be potentially too drastic, shouldn't we then move toward a resolution now?
 
And I'd say: Yes, of course. On a straight line, my position is (or could hypothetically be) as far away from John's

In any other civilized country my views would be that of a political moderate, somewhat left of center. The problem here is that the far-right is so extreme that they make Mussolini and Pinochet look like a centrists.
 

I went, I saw and I was terrified! woohoohoo!

Except I was not convinced but was left quite unimpressed. One can apply the same binary grid to any contingency and would reach the same "inescapable" conclusion. Without actual probabilities, the grid has only educative value. I am reminded of Pascal's Wager, by which he tried to persuade nonbelievers that it's logically (or mathematically) more sensible to believe than not to believe in god. BTW, I don't mean to suggest that I am a skeptic of climate change or global warming. I am only criticizing the video by this post.
 
In any other civilized country my views would be that of a political moderate, somewhat left of center. The problem here is that the far-right is so extreme that they make Mussolini and Pinochet look like a centrists.

Right you are. As I'm fond of saying, there is no American Left -- there's only a Right and a Far Right (known in the US as "Left" and "Right"). As an American commentator pointed out a few years ago, the Democrats are slightly to the right of European conservative parties and the Republicans slightly to the left of European national front parties. A "moderate" in the USA is something between the Right and the Far Right. That's the political "spectrum." In these terms, Adolf Hitler comes out as a socialist.
 
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