I am a regular reader of your article. And I am very impress with your blog upon Global Warming. Now I am also write a blog upon effects and causes of Global Warming. This blog is collection of news & reviews like the study found that global warming since 1985 has been caused neither by an increase in solar radiation nor by a decrease in the flux of galactic cosmic rays. Some researchers had also suggested that the latter might influence global warming because the rays trigger cloud formation.
As Donald Kennedy put it in his editorial for the 27 July issue of Science,
As data accumulate, denialists retreat to the safety of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page or seek social relaxation with old pals from the tobacco lobby from whom they first learned to "teach the controversy."
How soon, I wonder, before we're treated to the spectacle of a Fox Noise talking head telling Elie Weisel that the Holocaust is a Zionist lie?
How soon, I wonder, before we're treated to the spectacle of a Fox Noise talking head telling Elie Weisel that the Holocaust is a Zionist lie?
Probably never actually. Faux News is the mouthpiece of the moneyed class (with enough God, Guts and Guns talk to keep the mouthbreathers watching). There's no money to be made or protected in lying about the Holocaust. There's plenty in lying about fossil fuels and climate change.
I actually think you're right, 12th M. It's just that with gays out of the picture for the time being, we're seeing the right (neocon and theocon) training their guns on other "Them"s lately. And I just wouldn't put anything past the likes of O'Reilly and Coulter anymore, they've gone so far off the deep end.
Three years ago I took a trip to Alaska with my dad.
This is the Worthington glacier, as we saw it:
http://garote.bdmonkeys.net/
alas...pict0053_1.html
Note the "observation post", which is now a hundred yards away from the edge of the ice:
http://garote.bdmonkeys.net/
alas...pict0040_1.html
Thirty three years ago, my dad visited the same glacier. When he saw it, it marched all the way past the observation point and right up to the edge of the road.
I suppose it would too easy to point out that "global warming deniers" do not deny that temperatures have generally (though not globally) risen since the 1970s, or if you want a longer timeset, since the trough of the Little Ice Age at the end of the 17th Century (coinciding with a solar minimum which lasted 70 years!).
What is in considerable dispute is not the fact of climate change (as if this were news since climate always changes) but to the false certainty given that the cause is wholly or mostly manmade, and that natural variation is insignificant - that's where the divergence lies.
Also you will be old enough to remember that in the 1970s some climatologists were sounding the alarm about global cooling since temperatures across the globe had been falling since the early 1940s. So the scare is nothing new, what is new is the assertion that consensus trumps experiment and the outputs of climate models constitutes data.
The claim of denial is, like the claims of Discovery Institute regarding evolution, about painting opponents as hidebound to an illegitimate belief held because of an immoral or amoral foundation. It is a fallacy of course to claim that a person's evidence is invalid because of his or her supposed motives for holding them.
It also reverses the burden of proof (how many times have creationists tried to do that?) by claiming that the skeptics are the ones who must disprove the claim of man-made climate change rather than the promoters prove it. It puts dogma in the place of scientific hypothesis, which is always posed in such a manner that it can, in theory, be disproven by experiment.
Climate change is a fact, but it is trivially true, because there is no such thing as climate stability. Climate has never been stable, but for the record, the climate changes we have seen over the last 30-40 years are well within the range of natural variation.
And that's a fact.
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