They’re just as nucking futs as the others:
Last night I read a post over at Volokh about how climate data was being faked. I sighed and moved on. Then, about an hour ago, I got an email from a conservative reader asking if the Volokh post undermined my faith in global warming. I told him it didn’t. Then, a few minutes later, I noticed Megan McArdle linking to the same post. Obviously this thing wasn’t going to go away quietly.
Some Guy
The general public, including thoughtful conservatives, know next to nothing about the production of scientific knowledge and conservatives are highly motivated to treat climate change like the flag pin. Together than means any unprincipled action on the part of a climate scientist means the whole thing is a conspiracy.
Strangely, unprincipled actions by conservatives never seem to undermine faith in Edmund Burke.
Xanthippas
I saw that. I was going to go over to that VC post and comment about how wrong Lindgren is but, predictably, comments were off. Guess somebody should send HIM an email.
Zifnab
Hundreds of billions of dollars in this game. Probably more than the insurance reform bill. And the upsides (not losing Florida to rising tides in 2057) seem a lot more abstract than the downsides ($.15 extra / gal on gas! $20 / month more on my utility bill! Outrageous!) to the average consumer.
None of the Democratic issues of the day are easy. The corporations and special interests that oppose them are extremely well financed and well positioned. And, like I said, there’s a metric fuckton of money on the line.
Morbo
They don’t seem to realize that they’ve found the solution for global warming. Move all the temperature monitoring stations into the shade and don’t account for the change in the mathematical models. Problem solved.
FlipYrWhig
No other conservative political party in the world embraces this level of utter idiocy. I guess that’s that famous “American Exceptionalism” we’ve heard so much about.
Hunter Gathers
I have noticed that the Dumb Side of the Force has been running awfully strong these past few days.
Sammy
It really doesn’t matter what anyone says to refute these guys. It’s either all the data was faked and/or lost, the person writing the article is slanted, or everything needs to be open to public oversight. There is literally nothing one can say in arguing with them that matters. Their entire purpose is just to make arguments for the sake of making the scientists look like wishy-washy.
mistersnrub
I just don’t think any President in this day and age can fight the special interests effectively. There is just too much money and broadcasting power on their side. Something’s rotten in the states of America.
ruemara
Once again, where’s the motherfucking asteroid to put this planet out of it’s misery. Even the aliens aren’t coming down to ass rape us as often. We’re too busy to doing it to ourselves.
PeakVT
I had forgotten VC even existed.
Amanda in the South Bay
Only Kevin Drum would call Megan McArdle a principled conservative.
Run for the Border
Great – Now I have to learn the lyrics to “Oh Canada”and get a maple leaf tattoo.
dr. bloor
@Zifnab:
You might want to cite an example that’s nearer and dearer to our hearts, like California. Or perhaps Tuvalu.
The Grand Panjandrum
Come on Doug you know as well as anyone that these climate scientists have an secret meeting every year! All 14-15 thousand of them can have a righteous good time when they synchronize their stories and settle on allowable variances between the fake river data, the fake precipitation data and the fake ocean data. Sounds pretty sexy, in a geeky kind of way. Dunnit?
Pangloss
@Sammy: When you totally refute their insane claims with piles of evidence, witnesses, testimonials, references, articles, facts, and figures…. they just calmly move on to the next crazy meme, and the process begins anew.
4tehlulz
@Pangloss: Or they recycle an old one. “Solar activity!!!!” has been making a comeback lately.
SpotWeld
If any of the denailsts were actually skeptics they would be mining these emails for “information” and not “innunendo”.
Information, once brought into the light of day must be integrated into the latest theory. That’s how science works. (Event to the point of abandoment of the previous theory). Innunendo needs no factual basis, and in fact demands that it be maintained beyond conflicting factual basis.
So, no, this won’t go away.
If they had facts, they would be flogging the facts and using them to develop new questing which they can use to get more facts.
Instead they have rumor and scandal, which will be reapeated over and order to given them the perceived weight of facts.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
3 words: Trofim Denisovich Lysenko
wvng
I think it may be time to transfer our nuclear weapons to a sane country. We’re swamped with teh stoopid, which may be worse than Islamic teryists.
Kryptik
Again, it’s the Dunning-Kruger effect: People mistaking their lack of expertise for actual expertise and operating off of that, and outside observers who don’t know any better balancing sides as if both are credulous.
It’s the academic equivalent of ‘Fair and Balanced’. Morons on one side, experts on one side, given equal credence even though one side is demonstrably false and once side actually knows their shit.
Roger Moore
@dr. bloor:
Actually, the Left Coast is in much better shape in dealing with rising sea level. Our slope up from the coastline is much steeper, so we’ll lose a lot less land. Maybe you meant an area that’s nearer and dearer to our hearts like Boston.
El Cid
The Leakey mafia wants us to believe that humans have only been around for a few million years, but legitimate scientists not trapped by the ‘recent human’ establishment have proven that modern humans have been around for hundreds of millions if not billions of years.
And the medical establishment wants you to think that you have to take dozens if not hundreds of different types of pills to treat various infections, but the so-called “medical science” elites won’t tell you about the simple, natural treatment that can kill all infectious agents.
Liberals act like they want real scientific debate but then when somebody says something different, maybe without all the ivory tower ‘degrees’ and publishing in some ‘scientific’ ‘journal’, then suddenly they all become Hitler and don’t want to listen to you.
And you know who was just like that.
The Republic of Stupidity
I’ve tried ‘ridicule’…
… and it rolls like water off a duck’s back, it does…
I’ve tried ‘facts’…
… and they put them in their mouths and treat them like
rawhide chew toys…
I say Fuggitall… it’s time for ‘bad poetry’
Ahem…
***clears throat***
‘There once was a problem with climate…
But harder again was to rhyme it…
If the problem is gas and how much we pass..
Perhaps we just all need to to time it…’
El Cid
@4tehlulz: If these ‘climate scientists’ are so smart how come they never once thought of studying the SUN?
Lemme tell them ivory tower type what’s what: the SUN is HOT.
I know this must come as a surprise to people that learned all they know about the Universe from Al Gore’s movie, but if you look up in the sky, maybe you can get a clue.
Zandar
Now when the Obama Derangement Syndrome inevitably forces the Climategate and Tiger Woods stories to cross paths, the dimensional rift that particular collision will open may not be able to be sealed before it consumes Earth.
wvng
Spotweld: “the perceived weight of facts.” Yep. Perceived. It has become quite clear to me that Rove’s belief in the ability of the powerful to shape reality works perfectly well in his own party and among malleable independents. Doesn’t work with sentient beings, doesn’t actually change reality a whit, but it hardly matters. Benen has an excellent piece up titled: CREATING A STRONG INCENTIVE TO LIE in which he says:
Yup.
Rommie
Yeah, a visit to my Favorite Wingnut Game Designers and their boards today has them declaring that Warming is all a scam, Case Closed. Discussions are over, it’s a “fact” and disputing that just proves your true intentions (stealing tax dollars, consolidating power in the hands of soc-ialists, etc.)
They’ve been given the “proof” they need to justify that what they want to hear, and that’s that. They’ve been given the Truth they want, not the Truth as it may be.
It’s the Garak defense in action again (they think the opponent is lying and doing scumbaggery X, because they would do it if the situation were reversed)
Citizen Alan
@ruemara:
A-freakin-men. I’ve been rooting for the killer asteroid ever since November of 2004, when it became clear that we are collectively a stupid species which deserves its extinction. I am so glad I didn’t bring any children into this obviously doomed world.
Dave L
1. Top climate Cassandra James Hansen works at NASA.
2. A large share of our evidence for climate change, data and imagery, comes from NASA.
3. I don’t have to believe any of it.
QED
geg6
When are you gonna learn, Cole? The idea that you can modify the word “conservative” with the adjectives “thoughtful” or “principled” is dead. They have no thoughts worthy of the word and we’ve seen what sort of principles they have over the last 30 years.
However, just to make us all feel a bit better, here’s a thoughtful and principled person who made a fine, passionate speech during the debate on the House Financial Reform bill last night:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWS3p6SdqP8&feature=player_embedded
More Democrats like Rep. Gutierrez D-IL, please.
shoutingattherain
My solution? Just give up. It’s easy and painless. It’s already WAY too late to do anything about the global calamity comin’ our way. China and India won’t be changing their energy plans to any significant degree, and we’re never going to stop our beloved corporations from raping and pillaging for profit. Think Congress is going to take a principaled, brave, neccessary stand when there is so much money to be made?
Nobody is listening anyways. Fuck it. And fuck us, too.
CalD
All I can say is I hope they all hold that thought until at least next November or so.
SpotWeld
We got about 5 more years before the popular media will have some amazing footage they can splash across the nightly news.
The arctic ice will melt, a major resivoir will dry up totally for the first time in centuries (resulting in drought) or there will be a new “dustbowl”. It’ll be tragic. (Maybe not of Katrina magnitudde) but full of those fluffy human interest moments that prime time newsmagazines are made for.
Then Stossil will step up with his usual “But is that really what’s going on” formula, and the voters will go hmmm for another year or two.
At that point there will be enough people cashing in on actual green enery that we’ll see some effective counter-propaganda to the current Rove-based-douchery
Seebach
@shoutingattherain: No kidding. The only “global warming” conspiracy Al Gore started is the crazy idea Americans would ever have the will to do anything about it.
And that is the biggest bullshit story of the century.
Randy P
@El Cid:
As usual with wingnutty-type posts here, I can’t quite decide if you’re snarking or serious. I’ll respond as if you believed what you wrote.
The relationship between the sun and the earth (distance, amount of radiance from the sun) hasn’t changed significantly for billions of years.
The temperature of the earth has.
There is nothing the sun is doing that correlates with the last couple of centuries of upward trends in various measures.
David Hunt
That argument at least intrinsically admits that global temperatures are rising. That’s about one third of the battle. The next step is get the denier to realize that what is causing rising temperatures is not as important as figuring out how to stop them. This step is much harder as it is moving closer to doing something that a liberal could agree with and consider good (taking some step to stop or even slow down GW). I’ve yet to meet a denier who could make that mental leap.
Kryptik
@Randy P:
With El Cid’s history, it’s definitely snark on his part.
@shoutingattherain: @Seebach:
I’m honestly ready to break out the Everclear and sauce my brain away at this point.
cleek
well, of course it’s not. it’s silly to expect people who don’t want to understand how science works to understand how logic works, too.
and anyway, who needs thinking when you’ve got the adrenalin-pumping, chest-thumping, conclusion-jumping power of demagoguery ?
4tehlulz
@David Hunt: Then they’ll go, “NOT OUR FAULT DON’T NEED TO CHANGE LOL.”
Realistically, they’ll say anything that allows them to conclude that.
Seebach
@Kryptik: Just to be clear: I think we should try. I think we should try hard.
I just also think we should remember which country we’re trying in, is all.
MikeJ
You should recall that Cassandra’s predictions were right.
Davis X. Machina
El Cid is on the side of the angels — and been around for donkey’s years.
I can’t put my head in a space where it’s better to sit in the ruins of a once-great civilization saying “I won! I won!” than to have had others save the civilization for me but having ‘lost’ in the process.
It’s like the Total Perspective Vortex, in reverse.
aimai
Randy at 34 Good try–but the wily El Cid is a known instigator, agitator, and all around right wing stooge. No mere logic will affect him. He’ll be back in a few posts and cover his tracks by writing extensive and well reasoned posts that look totally liberal, and even progressive.
In other word’s, you’ve just responded seriously to El Cid’s turing test of poe’s law.
aimai
Eric U.
the best part of this for the wingnuts is that it pisses us off that it’s not even a partisan issue and yet they’ve made it into a partisan issue.
John S.
Conservatives have a really tough time with metaphors.
Brick Oven Bill
A cluttered desk is a sign of an empty mind. Check out Al’s desk! Al teaches us:
“Make no mistake, Arctic Sea ice is melting. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the maximum extent of the winter sea ice cover for 2008-09 was the fifth-lowest on record. Underscoring their point, the agencies added, ‘The six lowest maximum events since satellite monitoring began in 1979 have all occurred in the past six years (2004-09).'”
What Al does no teach us is that temperatures peaked around ten years ago, and that the ice pack is now growing.
Artic Ice Data.
The temperatures should be accelerating upward, and the ice pack should be accelerating downward. This is why Al will not debate. His primary concern is return on investment. This is his job.
Bubblegum Tate
@Some Guy:
Bing bang boom. Especially the part about treating climate change like a flag pin (which raises the question: What DON’T they treat like a flag pin?). This is exactly the dynamic that has them screaming, “This proves climate change is a massive hoax, and it’s just the evidence we need to throw Al Gore in jail!” and not be kidding about it in the slightest.
El Cid
@Randy P: But if scientists have been measuring and studying the Sun and solar activity, how then could so many climate change skeptics mention the importance of solar activity and variability as an explanation? Because that type of question would presume that scientists haven’t been taking the Sun and its measurements into account, and I just can’t believe that climate change skeptics such as radio hosts and neighbors and people next to me at the bar would make such a basic error. That would be silly, and absurd, and therefore it isn’t what has happened.
Andy K
@SpotWeld:
Or the fresh water lake under the Greenland glaciers is released into the North Atlantic and causes the Gulf Stream to stop flowing, which in turn allows cold weather- and brand new glaciers- to creep down from the Arctic, rendering useless the fertile soil of the Northern Hemisphere, causing world wide mass starvation.
Warren Terra
@ FlipYrWhig, #5
I don’t know much about them, and — call this American Exceptionalism if you must — I don’t see how they could possibly be as crazy as our conservative party, but the Australian conservative opposition party recently elected a new denialist party head and promptly torpedoed the climate bill.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
The whole CC discussion is deranged. Let’s say the wingnuts manage to move AGW from “a sure thing” to “maybe”. Considering what’s at stake, it would seem like the conservative course of action would be to err on the side of safety and set about to mitigate our impact on the planet.
But no: instead, the misinterpretation of 10 year old pilfered emails = it’s OK to leave my Hummer idling while I go shopping.
El Cid
What BOB said. No matter how much the Arctic ice may lose in volume, it is still growing, and increasing. In some sense or another. In maturity, in experience, in wisdom perhaps.
Liberals are just like Hitler when they insist on measuring only the volume and mass of ice while ignoring all the subjective elements.
tamied
I’m thinking of investing in beach-front property…in Philadelphia. @SpotWeld:
The Moar You Know
There’s a very simple principle of human behavior going on here, one which I’m stunned nobody here has figured out yet:
No one has ever had their mind changed as the result of an argument.
They’ve had their minds changed by going out and looking for information themselves, or by the opinions of those in their social cohort changing, but arguing with people not like them just entrenches them more deeply in their belief systems. There are far too many cognitive psychology studies that prove this to even bother citing; it’s just how we are wired.
Give up. Go mix a drink or plant a garden or do something fun. These people didn’t want to do any hard work or pay any extra taxes or gas bills, and thanks to some inexcusable negligence, some half-assed hacking, and some really stupidly worded emails, now they don’t have to. This battle is over for now, and the stupids have won.
If you felt like putting in the effort, and I don’t, and you still want these people to start giving a shit about climate change, then get some DFHs to start denying it. That’s the only way you’re going to even get them to listen.
SpotWeld
B.O.B.
That’s it, no more juiceboxes. And I think we need to take your crayons away too.
Look at that chart.. very carfully. See how the red, yellow and orange lines are almost always on the bottom of the group of curves. See how the blue and purple lines are almost on the top of the group.
On the lower left of the chart that shows which years line up with those colors. Which years are the most recent.
Seebach
@Warren Terra: If there are any Aussies currently here, I’m actually curious to know where Australian stupid comes from. American stupid seems to be a racism/frontiersman/religious nut mix.
What is the origin of the Australian conservative idiocy?
Randy P
@Brick Oven Bill:
You’re aware the x-axis there is month of the year, right? So what are you interpreting as “the ice pack is now growing”? The fact that there’s more ice in December than in September every year? Yes, over the last few months as we move into winter, the ice grows.
You don’t really believe that’s what is meant by whether the ice is growing or shrinking do you? Do you spend every summer going “Oh no, global warming is real, temperatures are increasing” and every winter going “Aha, global warming is false, temperatures are decreasing”? Nobody’s that dumb… are they?
Hell, knowing your posts, maybe you do.
Here’s a clue: If you want to know the trend year after year, you should see what is happening in the same season/month. And this chart only shows 8 years worth of data. It’s hard to get much of a story out of that, but I do see at least one thing: 2007-2009 minima were WAAAY below the other years. So the worst minima are also the three most recent.
When climate scientists sound the alarms about sea ice, one of the things they’re talking about is an ice-free summer. There’s no ice-free month in that data. There’s none on record. That would be a bad thing if it happens, even if there’s a nonzero amount of ice by December. That would be significant. Do you understand that?
Bubblegum Tate
OT, but this display table is full of win.
SpotWeld
@Andy K: Well, i get you point.
But you see glaciers aren’t “Warm” so the media will have a tricky job of relating that to any sort of “Global Warming”… so infact they’ll go the easy route of the brand new Kansas ski slopes and maybe show a 3rd grade class in Texas having a snowball fight during recess for the first time.
Dork
So us libtards are faking the loss of Artic ice? The whole “loss of mountain glaciers” in S. America and Asia is due to a progressive hologram?
Icebergs off the coast of Australia is a magic trick?
I dont understand how they deny obvious, clear-to-the-eye data. Can we fake the numbers? Sure. But the proof is obvious at both poles. WTF?
truculent and unreliable
@Bubblegum Tate: Palingenesis!
Chad N Freude
@dr. bloor:
How about this.
Kryptik
@Seebach:
Trying’s nice, but it seems like the amount of effort necessary to be taken seriously is so drastic between people who actually know their stuff and people who can just spout BS. “Climategate” is just the biggest and most recent example. 15+ years of research, and it’s utterly subverted in public eye by 4 or so emails taken out of context, stolen by hackers (who have been elevated to whistleblowers at this point, forget the illegality of the hacking_.
It’s just…so mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly pointless it seems…
SpotWeld
I think the vote is unanimous.
B.O.B. has lost his juicebox privileges
Stefan
If there are any Aussies currently here, I’m actually curious to know where Australian stupid comes from. American stupid seems to be a racism/frontiersman/religious nut mix.
Well, they’ve got the racist/frontiersman legacy, just without our religous nut mix.
Plus, living upside down causes all the blood to rush to their heads.
Anne Laurie
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Nonsense. “I Got Mine, Fvck Y’All” is the highest possible conservative principle, and McMegan is a sterling exemplar of its glory.
Randy P
@Howlin Wolfe:
After reading a few more, I get that El Cid’s snarking. But it’s such close mimickry that it still makes me want to chew on my monitor while beating my head against the floor.
El Cid
Maybe if all the glaciers would stop being so damn elitist with their high mountain residences and exclusive parties where people have to wear special booties and pick up all their trash behind them to come visit them, if maybe the glaciers would come live and work in the Heartland and the American South which is the most patriotic area, then they’d have the guts to work back up again instead of asking for a global liberal handout to ‘save us’ so that Al Gore can stay fat.
Howlin Wolfe
@MikeJ: If he weren’t right, he wouldn’t be a “Cassandra”. Check the myth – she predicted the fall of Troy, but nobody believed her.
Randy P
After reading a few more, I get that El Cid’s snarking. But it’s such close mimickry that it still makes me want to chew on my monitor while beating my head against the floor
I love edit but I think I just found a bug. I edited a post and my edited version had all the spaces and punctuation converted to HTML codes like “%20”. That ever happen to anyone else? I deleted the post to resubmit.
Never mind. It looks right again after a refresh. (/emilylitella)
Randy P
Dammit, edit is broken. When I edit, all my spaces get converted to %20’s and the text becomes unreadable.
Kryptik
@Randy P:
As I say to many people when this sort of thing comes up:
Satire and parody are obsolete, when reality is more absurd than the parody.
MikeJ
@Howlin Wolfe: Indeed, it is central to my point.
El Cid
@Kryptik: They’re not obsolete — you just have to learn how to work much harder, and weirder, than you ought have to in a sane world.
This is a world in which the people who launched our last 3 decades of periodic bank failures after nearly 70 years of banking stability with the Savings & Loan ‘financial innovation’ are still invited into planning meetings and onto the TV shows to tell us what we need to do with our banking system.
arguingwithsignposts
In completely unrelated economic news, New York is broke (via Atrios). I miss my country. Can I have it back?
geg6
@tamied:
Ha! Beat ya to it here in Pittsburgh!
jacy
Stop reading McArdle!
Seriously, it makes you dumber. It’s scientifically proven.
My dog has a more sophisticated worldview, and he spends half his day eating cat poop out of the litterbox.
catclub
Dork @ 59
An atheist progressive hologram – the worst kind.
Seebach
@arguingwithsignposts: It’s weird. For the younger of us, this IS our country. It’s just always been this way. Obama is the closest thing to a “win” I’ve personally been aware of.
catclub
Randy P @ 71
Nope, it only looks like that to the one editing, we are fine
here. I worried about that, too. Also.
geg6
@Dork:
I admit it. I’ve been sneaking up to Alaska and Northern Canada with an ice pick and chip, chip, chipping away at the glaciers and Arctic ice since some time back in the early 1980s. It’s all an elaborate liberal hoax so I can make money off of carbon taxes and polar bear skin rugs.
arguingwithsignposts
@geg6:
LOL. I thought that was you. DFH.
truculent and unreliable
@Seebach: I dunno, the mid-90s weren’t all that bad, other than that Contract on America bullshit. (I was born in 1980, FWIW).
kay
@Seebach:
That’s true, and it has occurred to me.
That’s as far as I got, though.
geg6
@Seebach:
Think it’s weird for you? Try being my age. I actually remember when it wasn’t this way. In fact, I remember Republicans your could actually vote for and feel okay about it, like Nelson Rockefeller. In fact, I remember when I voted for a Republican (John Heinz) and was happy about it. Makes me feel like I’m living in the Twilight Zone.
Brick Oven Bill
Let us now consider something we call ‘values’. There are mathematical ‘values’, not to be confused with Glenn Beck’s ‘Values’. We will compare 2007 ice levels with 2009 ice values (2007/2009):
January (12.2/12.2)
February (13.2/13.3)
March (13.9/14.3)
April (13.5/14.0)
May (12.0/12.5)
June (11.0/11.0)
July (8.0/8.6)
August (5.5/6.5)
September (4.5/5.5)
October (4.5/5.7)
November (6.5/6.6)
Aggregate!
12.2 + 13.2 + 13.9 + 13.5 + 12.0 + 11.0 + 8.0 + 5.5 + 4.5 + 4.5 + 6.5 = 104.8
12.2 + 13.3 + 14.3 + 14.0 + 12.5 + 11.0 + 8.6 + 6.5 + 5.5 + 5.7 + 6.6 = 110.2
Divide!
110.2 / 104.8 = 1.058
Translate!
The ice pack has grown by 5.8% in the last two years.
Conclusion!
Shove that juice-box up your ass SpotWeld.
shoutingattherain
@Kryptik:
That’s it! That was the phrase I was looking for! Mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly pointless to argue with teh Deniers. They ain’t listening, and they ain’t gonna.
@Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon):
No. The conservative course of action is deny reality, stop any and all regulations and controls on the amount of CO2 emmisions thru any means necessary, and go dig more coal and drill baby drill for more natural gas to build more power plants so they can make more money. It’s ALL about making more money for the people who already have plenty.
Comrade Jake
McArdle is fucking brain dead, doorknob stupid. I’m sorry but that really does need to be shouted from the rooftops.
geg6
@truculent and unreliable:
But…but…CLENIS!
gypsy howell
It’s times like these that I’m kind of glad I’m on the downslope of life, having reached my mid-50s. The catfood diets and cardboard box shelters I and my cohort will be living in soon probably won’t allow for an extended old age, so at least I won’t be around for the worst of what’s coming down the pike for you youngsters. That’s my only consolation for not being able to do a damn thing, apparently, about the corporate-sponsored stupidity that’s gripped this country, and which will take it down like the Titanic (along with the rest of the world.)
asiangrrlMN
@geg6: Thanks for a much-needed laugh. God. This shit is dispiriting.
Seebach
@truculent and unreliable: Hmm… true. I did vote Nader in 2000 because I had read all of these books about how Clinton was a sellout to banking and industry and we would rue the day that we repealed Glass-Steagall, so I may be a bit jaundiced.
In my defense, I thought Nader would be able to get 5% and Gore would win. I never thought we would be so stupid. I realize my crime.
scudbucket
I think some in the GOP are a bit hamstrung by climate change, much to our collective, and their individual, dismay. One of the ‘rally the troops’ cries that emerged from Gore Derangement Syndrome was that AGW was orchestrated by an elitist, communist cabal under the dominion of Gore the Puppetmaster. Now that meme is an article of faith within their base. Even if some of the more savvy GOPers wanted to engage in discussions of mitigation, they couldn’t: they’d get run outa town on the nearest fuel-burner with wheels.
SpotWeld
B.O.B
You’re getting all wound up and rude.
Back to your coner until your mom says your time up is over.
I’m starting to suspect you were up all night playing with you’re Wii, you’re so grouchy.
As for your juicebox, you kept saying Ecto Cooler was your favorite… that’s what you mom gets for trying to do something nice I guess
The Moar You Know
@Brick Oven Bill: Awesome work. I’ve got a job for you, picking cherries. I’ll pay 10 bucks an hour. It’s a lot more than most cherry-pickers get but you obviously go the extra mile.
El Cid
It may be shocking for some people to consider, but sea ice is measured not only in surface area, but in volume and mass as well.
Of course, they have to use a bunch of faggot satellites and gay ass computers and shit to do it, instead of being all manly and doing calculations like we all used to do in grade school, which is the right way to do science, so this means it’s not true.
Noonan
My first thought was that including McArdle undercut Drum’s argument. She’s an idiot.
truculent and unreliable
@geg6: How I miss teh Clenis.
@Seebach: Oh, it’s not like Clinton was this crazy-ass liberal or anything. I actually voted for Nader, too (in my defense, I was living in Kansas, so I might as well have voted for Bush). After 6 months with GWB, though, I realized that while I may have been technically correct that a corporatist is a corporatist, some corporatists are better than others. And that Nader is a douche.
But yeah, it’s depressing to think that Reagan and/or his phlegmmy ghost has been haunting this land for as long as I’ve been alive.
Brick Oven Bill
I would like to state for the record that I own no video games, other than ‘pinball’ on this computer, which I only play on airplanes.
Video games suck. SpotWeld does not know what he is talking about.
And I don’t know what Ecto-Cooler is either.
SpotWeld
B.O.B.
I thought about it and decided that you’re really trying your best.. so here’s your juice box
Now go suck on it
Morbo
@Comrade Jake: @Anne Laurie: I got my gourmet salt, peasants!
Pangloss
@The Moar You Know: $10 an hour? McCain would pay $50…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWOZKeOauN
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
El Cid,
You are so awesome!! I heart snark!
scudbucket
@scudbucket:
Dang edit! That should say ‘some in the GOP are’ at the beginning of that comment.
asiangrrlMN
@El Cid: I gotta say, you’re on fire today. Keep it up!
Seebach
@truculent and unreliable: I live(d) in Texas, so my Nader vote was pretty much equally irrelevant. But, still…. ouch. That’s what we call conditioning. Vote 3rd party, watch month-long recount and major terrorist attack.
scudbucket
@Comrade Jake:
I don’t mean to pick a fight, but….
I read Megan frequently and find her quite intelligent. I don’t usually agree with her conclusions, but that’s because I don’t usually agree with her premise. She is a clear writer and a good aggregator/analyzer of data. I find her to be one of the clearest and most consistent advocates of libertarian positions on the nets.
Now the fight part: just cuz you disagree with her doesn’t make her stupid.
Andy K
@Brick Oven Bill:
The public library let’s you borrow the computers? K3wl.
Comrade Jake
@scudbucket:
I just find her writing/analysis to be stupid, period. It doesn’t have anything to do with her POV.
There’s plenty of very smart people I disagree with. I just don’t consider McArdle to be one of them.
Martin
@Dork:
God has determined that we don’t need that ice any longer now that we have Slurpees. It’s all part of the plan.
BruceFromOhio
@Brick Oven Bill:
So screw it all, let’s open a Hummer dealership! Drill, baby, drill!
Martin
@scudbucket: No, she really isn’t a good data analyst. In fact, she rather sucks at the economic stuff especially in light of the econ bona-fides that she pushes. She’s overly simplistic in her approach and tends to wave away inconvenient data.
Zandar
Science only has one conceivable goal: blowing shit up.
If it’s not used for that end, it’s a goddamn hoax.
Can I haz Cato Institute grant now?
El Cid
@BruceFromOhio: A Hummer dealership on the fucking Arctic sea ice, baby!
The Raven
BOB: cite your data sources. Oh, and by the way, why are you only using two years? No way to tell if something different happened in ’08, or if there’s a trend, from just two years.
Is that supposed to be a serious argument?
Oh, yes, and “the temperature peaked about 10 years ago” is nonsense. 1998 was a hot year, yes. But there’s still a steady trend.
arguingwithsignposts
@Martin:
The sad part is she has no econ bonafides. She has an MBA and her undergrad was in English lit.
Brick Oven Bill
Being FUCKING SNOWBOUND, in a house WITH NO FUCKING RUNNING WATER because the well is frozen, having NOT HAD A FUCKING SHOWER for three days, let us now consider how many ice cubes are in 110.2 minus 104.8 x 10^6 square kilometers of the increased arctic ice pack.
A Google search suggests typical ice pack thickness to be around ten feet. Calculate total ice volume:
5,200,000 km^2 * 10ft * (1000m/km) * (1000m/km) * (ft/.305m) * (ft/.305m) = 5.59 * 10^14 cubic feet, or 559 trillion cubic feet of new ice
Measuring the size of my ice cubes, which I can readily produce outside the house at the current time, the dimension are approximately: 1.2 inches by 0.7 inches by 1.0 inches, or:
1.2 * 0.7 * 1.0 in^3 * (ft/12inches) * (ft/12 inches) * (ft/12inches); or
0.000486 cubic feet per ice cube
Let us now calculate the number of equivalent new ice cubes the earth has produced since 2007:
559,000,000,000,000 / 0.00486 = 1.15 * 10^17 new ice cubes; or
115,000 trillion ice cubes.
115 quadrillion?
This is a lot of ice cubes.
Mike in NC
Today’s local rag had a half page rant by some wingnut on the subject of climate change. Now I can understand them being pissed off by someone having the wrong skin color or religion or whatever, but what exactly is it about the comparatively unexciting subject of climate change that causes these whackos to soil themselves so easily? I don’t want to have to read a Glenn Beck ‘book’ for the answer.
El Cid
Yeah, I’m with you. What kind of longhaired “science” faggots would go out and throw a whole satellite into fucking space in order to actually measure polar ice volume and mass when any fucking snowbound numbnuts could use Google to calculate the cubic footage of ice trays?
SpotWeld
Whoa..
..the hell?
El Cid
@Mike in NC: If you believe in climate change, it means you want Al Gore to appoint a set of Pol Pot Earth Firsters to transform our vibrant capitalist FREEDOM economy into enslavement camps where dissidents are forced to create organic peace sign wrist bracelets to be sold for AL GORE credits to keep AL GORE fat and flying on planes.
It’s all about a new way to bring about a Marxist Communist Stalin anti-capitalist revolution and the United Nations One World government that Hillary Clinton has been planning since the 1960s when Saul Alinsky put in place his grand plot.
Mike in NC
@El Cid:
OK, got it. This stuff is a dog whistle for the idiots who had those not-so-clever “Commie/Bore” bumper stickers way back in ’92.
VladCat
Damn. The Ecto-Cooler sounded good. They discontinued it in 2007. I was going to run out and get some. And Everclear.
handy
@Brick Oven Bill:
They’ve got medications for this nowadays. HTH.
RSA
Volokh is mainly libertarian law professors, as I recall. Of course they’re going to be global climate change skeptics—solving the problem clearly requires collective action (unless there’s some libertarian plan out there I’m missing), and this means, from a libertarian perspective, that we’d be screwed. (I’m simplifying a bit here.)
SpotWeld
@handy: What do you think we’ve been putting in his juice box.
SpotWeld
@handy: What do you think we’ve been putting in his juice box.
someguy
I don’t mind giving the government the level of power over my life that will be required to fix the environmental and health care problems, but I kind of wonder what President Palin and Vice President Huckabee are going to do with that power. I suspect we’ll get a combination of food stamps that only oil barons will be eligible for, abortions only in blue states (kill teh librulls!) and national health care will consist of free clinics where the doctors have been replaced by faith healers. That’s okay though. Once they force my local bar into a fascist public-private ‘partnership’, I can head down there and drink some Soylent Greenahol (it’s brewed from Greeeeeeeeens, and Greens are Peeeeeeeepul) to wash down my angst.
And you can laugh about the notion of Palin and Hucklebuck getting elected, but have you seen how stupid it is out there?
les
@El Cid:
Sweet voice o’ reason.
*golf clap*
les
@Andy K:
this is the best–absolute twofer: the denialists will proclaim there never was no warming, and Europe’s use of fuel will go through the ceiling, compounding the problem yet again. It’s time to stop having kids, if it’s not too late already.
Makewi
Then again, climate data is being faked.
Something Fabulous
@geg6: Thanks for linking this! As a (relocated) Chicagoan, I should know him, but seems I’ve missed him till now. Fan-tastic!
El Cid
@Makewi: All of it. It was all made up. The last century of studies, decades of observations, lab research scientific journals — it was all made up in advance by e-mails from the last couple years!
They used wormholes and quantum entanglement! They used subliminal advertising to get scientists from different countries to fake all their corroborating data, too!
There never were any NASA satellites nor ice cores. Just e-mail attachments with Photoshopped documents.
The equations for estimating the steps and energy levels of longwave infrared photons transiting through the atmosphere to space and being slowed in that process by greenhouse gases? All made up, and the scientists were hypnotized to think that the equations were real.
BruceFromOhio
@Brick Oven Bill:
You do math? Awesomish!
Question: How many Hummers does it take to piss off as many liberals as possible?
Answer: Tax Cuts!
And such is the nature of modern political discourse with respect to climate change.
Think warm thoughts, Spring arrives in precisely 100 days.
Platonicspoof
@Brick Oven Bill:
Deciding that one photo is a representative and sufficient data point to determine whether the “mess” is typical, decreasing over time, or increasing is the same as saying that today’s weather tells you enough to measure climate change.
Without an explanation or link, the rest is a non sequitur.
Are you trying to outdo El Cid at outdoing you?
Liberty60
E.D. Kain over at League Had a post on the Andy Schlafly interview with Colbert, and the conservapedia.
My comment on that, and this, is that the conservative movement- the Beck/Palin/Limbaugh group has become a cult of magical thinking, of faith-based politics, where results and outcomes are irrelevant, but ideology and directions must be maintained at all cost.
This is why when they don’t have mainstream science on their part, they resort to the “secret knowledge” that powers conspiracy theories, and always has.
They alone have “secret knowledge” or “insider scientists” who somehow can provide data and knowledge that the mainstream has overlooked.
You can argue all you want, but the Grassy Knoll adherents will always have yet another rebuttal, yet another piece of evidence, a piece of the True Cross or Fingernail of Jesus that powers them enough to keep from imploding.