You have to loved the fact that the entire “Climategate” argument from our right-wing bloggers is based completely on a British wingnut blogger citing Russian sources. Go check out memeorandum- it is like a Wingnut Who’s Who. Even Pam Atlas shows up.
And on the other side, you have thousands of scientists.
Ehh. We humans had a good run.
NobodySpecial
Did we?
Pangloss
I seriously think it’s time to get together and use some reverse psychology with these morans. So much of their political positioning is based on pissing off liberals, it just might work.
jeffreyw
“Bring on the breakfast” should be a tag.
Pangloss
I’ve been wondering about this for a while…. what is the genesis of the “Bring on the Brawndo” tag? It sounds so hilarious there’s got to be a good story to go with it….
GregB
In other news.
Someone get Cokie Roberts a fainting couch. Sarah Palin was spotted on vacation in the most foreign and exotic places one can imagine.
Darkest Hawaii.
-G
Violet
But the MSM continues to cover “Climategate” as if it’s a real issue. Ergo, it’s real. I can’t stand our media.
Not so sure we had a good run.
JenJen
Speaking of humans having a good run, has this been discussed already?
Palin’s McCain Cover-Up
It was so adorable on “Morning Joe” today when the entire panel accepted Palin’s explanation: “Oh, I was just tryin’ to be incognito so I wore a visor” or something to that effect. Guess she can’t afford a new visor, or inexplicably missed the dozens of “visor and other tourist crap” stands all over Hawaii, so she took out the magic marker and just wore the old hat.
Mavericky.
This is definitely one of those “IOKIYAR” moments.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@NobodySpecial:
Hell yeah. Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Michaelangelo, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Madison, Adams, Jefferson, Darwin … it’s a long list.
Heart surgery, vaccination, dialysis …. Air conditioning.
What have monkeys given us lately?
Speaking as a cow, I think you guys have done pretty well.
me
@Pangloss: It’s the thirst mutilator!
Kryptik
@Pangloss:
It’s from the Mike Judge film “Idiocracy”.
Think of the world 100 years in the future if Palin were president for life, and the consequences of such. Brawndo, meanwhile, is a Gatorade analog…which has essentially replaced water in all purposes, including gardening and farming. Guess where that ended up.
bemused
@GregB:
Good grief, this woman is stupid. There aren’t even enough words to describe it.
dmsilev
But Al Gore uses electricity, so global warming *must* be fake.
(Just anticipating the inevitable. Someone in another forum somewhere dubbed that particular debating technique “reductio ad Goreum”, not to be confused with the closely related “reduction ad Mooreum”, aka “Michael Moore is fat”).
-dms
wilfred
Today it occurred to me that the physical world I was born into will be dramatically different when I leave it. Has any generation ever been able to say that? Polar ice caps really are melting. A glacier that I once trekked alongside now starts at 5,000 meters instead of 2,500.
I could go on. Glacial time has been reduced to a life span. It’s too big of an idea for anyone, I’m afraid. Maybe poets will discover the anti-sublime, the stupefying fear that nature once inspired transformed into the unspeakable terror of it all melting away.
In a way I don’t begrudge these people for being in denial. We all are.
Brian J
Weren’t the e-mails from East Anglia leaked by a government source or something like that? If so, that’s a real example of a government doing something sinister, and yet they somehow overlooked that.
jeffreyw
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
And you folk have added tremendously to the asset side of the ledger: half&half – to just name one thing that gives me much pleasure.
Chat Noir
@JenJen: God but I hate that woman.
Brian J
@dmsilev:
Well, Michael Moore is fat, so health care reform is obviously a Soviet/Islamofacist plot.
Does it all make sense now?
Noonan
This is pretty awesome:
That reminds me: if you donate this week to Greenpeace they’re promising two enslaved wingnuts for every $500 . There’s a strict no return policy though.
Will
This is the best rebuttal of Climategate that I’ve seen.
Dave Fud
I would say that America had a good run. Hopefully, the climate change problem doesn’t wipe all humans out, just those of us on the coasts and the drier areas.
Either way, I hope that the next round of civilization can pick up where we leave off. We have learned amazing things, but seem too foolish to use our discoveries in non-destructive ways. Maybe a few thousand years on the sidelines will teach humans wisdom.
Then again, novels like “The Road” don’t exactly point to a rosy “noble barbarian” situation…
fizzlogic
To our news media, they aren’t doing their job effectively until every issue is split 50/50. If that means the country becomes ungovernable then so be it.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Okay, I am begging here…
Can we please stop appending “-gate” to everything? Pretty please? Even when other people do it? Because they’re idiots? Can’t we call it something like “the CRU hack” or similar?
I mean, I realize I’m complaining about the equivalent of punctuation in “Going Rogue”, but dammit, nothing screams “lazy journalism” more than seeing “-gate” as a scandal name. It is a pernicious meme that obfuscates more than enlightens.
Similarly, appending “-thon” to anything that lasts a while (telethon, sellathon, Toyotathon) is just as stupid and for exactly the same reason.
Brian J
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Is Complaintgate turning into Complainathon, or is it the other way around?
Narcissus
It’s got what plants crave. Don’tchaknow.
Zifnab
@fizzlogic:
If by 50/50, you mean “50% very serious conservative, 50% very serious moderate, 0% even slightly liberal”
russell
“I for one welcome our insect overlords”.
And we thought that was a joke.
Kryptik
@Zifnab:
But the non-conservative side is usually made of journalists! They’re DFH by default, aren’t they?
Brick Oven Bill
Balloon Juice is a pretty good place to get the news, and broke the Climate emails two days before they made Drudge.
Balloon Juice has also analyzed the arctic ice data and demonstrated that the ice caps have increased by 5.8% in the last two years. This was like several days before Richard Lindzen, a real MIT scientist said:
“He’s [Al’s] just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.”
Which, of course, is exactly right. Al Gore is lying through his teeth as he is an owner Generations Investment, Limited Liability Partnership. His Partnership has stated that its first priority is rate of return for investors.
Al Gore is fat, has a big mansion that uses lots and lots of fossil fuels, and flies all over the place.
El Cid
It’s not like NASA or any other fancy pants gay scientists actually have satellites and stuff which measure polar ice volume and mass. No, for that you need weirdos who guesstimate how many ice cubes you could make.
Roger Moore
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
I assume you must be leaving out the part where we ate all of your friends and relatives.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Roger Moore:
Well, we are fighting back with e coli, so there is some comfort in that.
Brick Oven Bill
“These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”
-Al Gore, 2009
Al tries to make climate science seem complicated, but it isn’t. His theory is that as Carbon Dioxide levels rise, which they are doing (only around 0.028% of the earth’s atmosphere though), that these rising CO2 levels will increasingly insulate the earth, and entrap heat in our world in increasing amounts.
World temperatures under this model would accelerate upward.
But temperatures over the last decade have trended downward. This morning my car battery was frozen for the first time in three years. It is almost impossible to account for a ten-year trend as ‘data-scatter’.
Here is the ice-cap data. You can observe the 2007 results that Al’s False Rhetoric has extrapolated, as well as the 2008-2009 growth in the ice cap.
Against this data, Al’s argument can be compared, and it can be observed that he is not being honest. Hear his 2009 words. Match Al’s 2009 words to the 2007 data. Observe the 2008-2009 data. Hear Al’s silence on this data. Note that he will not debate. Note his investments.
This is a man of few Principles.
asiangrrlMN
@jeffreyw: You are a god in the kitchen. Seriously. Yum yum.
@Pangloss: I agree with you. “Oh noez! Not a public option! Pleeez, anything but that! No no! Not banking regulation! We would HATEZ that!”
@JenJen: You know why she did this? Because she’s a grifter who loathes to throw anything away, but could not stand to have McCain’s name on the visor.
Morbo
The right wing blogosphere is entirely populated by KGB agents. It all makes sense now.
asiangrrlMN
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: And mad cow. Thanks for the laugh.
jeffreyw
@asiangrrlMN: They just have “issues”, OK?
asiangrrlMN
@jeffreyw: Well, I would have “issues”, too, if I were a cow.
asiangrrlMN
@Will: Thank you for posting that. It really helped me understand what all this screeching was about and, as usual, how stupid the rightwingnutters are for making it into a ‘controversy’.
J. Michael Neal
@Noonan:
Only if they come with free ball gags so I don’t have to listen to them while I profit off of their enforced labor. Also, do they come with a money back guarantee? I’m always afraid that these slaves are going to Go Galt.
trollhattan
bOb,
Take it here and get your substantial ass handed to you on a DFH platter:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/
In the meantime, stop embarrassing yourself. Wait, impossible…nevermind.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Brian J:
Don’t make me come after you…
S. cerevisiae
All the deniers need to do is muddy the waters for John Q. Public and nothing will get done – so they think. Unfortunately for them it seems that there are enough in congress who realize that business as usual with regard to carbon emissions will wreck the biosphere.
Unfortunately for humanity it is likely to little, too late and the positive feedbacks are already kicking in.
The future belongs to the r-selected.
thingsbreak
@John Cole:
Oh, it’s much better than that. Not just “Russian sources”, a market fundamentalist econ think tank founded by a Cato Senior Fellow.
some guy
Anyone else find it, er, amusing that these supposed super patriots now approvingly quote Russian oligarch-funded think tanks and Pravda on a regular basis?
Cat
@Brick Oven Bill:
That data only shows the extent of the ice, it doesn’t show the thickness so it doesn’t give you a complete picture of the amount/volume of ice present which is the more relevant number.
NASA just started measuring it in 2004 and shows a decrease. Who knows if this is a long term trend, but the risks of assuming it isn’t going to continue are much greater then doing something about it.
maya
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
But think of how absolutely lyrical it will sound when our present Sect of Defense gets nailed for wrongdoing. Or any Florida State football team cover-up. Or the possibilities when some publicly elected homosexuals conspire.
Rick Taylor
__
__
Hee, this isn’t actually Gore’s theory. He’s a popularizer, not a scientist. This is basic uncontroversial science. The mechanics are well understood; and you can even send satellites up to look at the spectra of radiation reflected from the earth and see the holes in the spectra that correspond to the various green house gases. It’s irrelevant that Carbon Dioxide is only 0.028% of the atmosphere, because it absorbs radiation that most of the rest atmosphere doesn’t; this is measurable. Without it, the world would be a colder place. This is completely uncontroversial among climate scientists, and not Al Gore’s theory.
__
This is farcical. Absolutely no one reputable argues that carbon dioxide is the only force driving the climate. No one. Solar activity and weather patterns also have an effect, for example. I’m pretty sure you’re a spoof, because citing a particularly cold winter to criticize Climate Change is so laughable, but plenty of other critics use this argument I admit.
__
But I’m curious. There’s been a long term warming trend over the last century. When climate scientists use the best models they again to measure the effect of increasing carbon dioxide on the climate using physics, and it predicts something similar to the observed change. When they run their models without factoring in the effects of carbon dioxide, it doesn’t. No one has come up with an explanation for the warming other than carbon dioxide that has passed scientific muster. It was proposed that changes in solar radiation explained the warming, and this would be plausible, except that our best measurements show fluctuations in radiation do not account for the warming.
__
So what’s your explanation? I’m not sure if you’re acquainted withe scientific method, but the way to falsify a theory like climate change is not by pointing out Al Gore is fat. The way to do it is to propose a theory that accounts for the observed facts as well as climate change does or better, and show collected data supports the assumptions of your theory. No one has been able to do this.
Seanly
A good run?
Let’s see – art, literature, music are mostly good. Some science is pretty good – we actually made it all the way to our own moon!
weigh that versus Republican leadership, Tonton Macoutes, Khmer Rouge, Nazis, South African tire necklaces, Thomas Kincaide paintings and human caused animal extinctions.
Hmmm, on the balance, I think we did alright.
Oh, is it irresponsible to throw Republican leaders in with those other groups? I think it’s irresponsible not to!
carlos the dwarf
@J. Michael Neal:
Actually, the best way to ensure their continued compliance involves dressing them entirely in leather and using whips when they misbehave. They love that sort of stuff.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
I’m not sure if you’re acquainted withe scientific method, but the way to falsify a theory like climate change is not by pointing out Al Gore is fat.
Yes, but fat people sweat, because they are hotter.
Population obesity is increasing just like Al Gore’s waistline.
This means that obesity generated heat is increasing, which isn’t accounted for in climate models. Therefore, global warming is caused by Al Gore being fat.
/spoof
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
I seriously think it’s time to get together and use some reverse psychology with these morans. So much of their political positioning is based on pissing off liberals, it just might work.
We could point out that global warming is likely to kill off a healthy proportion of the human population. Environmentalists have been talking about the need to reduce the size of the human population for many years now. So, really, if we started a campaign to ‘Bring on the devastation (before engineers figure out how to save us)!’, we could shake some of the pro-lifers out of denial. They are always accusing the environmental lobby of being pro-death.
Proper Gander
I’ve got what plants crave… lots of phosphorus and nitrogen
S. cerevisiae
@Rick Taylor: Well said!
nutellaontoast
“had a good run”
No, we haven’t.
Jay McDonough
“if public polling will be used to decide scientific questions, I’m waiting for the Rasmussen Poll on whether there really is a Higgs boson. It is, after all, predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, but perhaps we should allow the American public to decide.”
Something Fabulous
@jeffreyw: OMG I love your food photos (“phood photos!”); but this one put me over the edge to monitor-licking.
Comrade Puppet
“His theory is that as Carbon Dioxide levels rise, which they are doing (only around 0.028% of the earth’s atmosphere though), ”
280 ppm was the value several decades ago. It’s 380 ppm. Or, to put it another way, over 100 ppm higher than any value from icecore data in the past 800,000 years. Natural cycles my foreskin.
“But temperatures over the last decade have trended downward. ”
No they haven’t: you need to update your wingnut talkings points, as the peak EN/SO year in 1998 was *over a decade ago8. 1999 global temperature anomaly (GISTemp) was 0.32. So far, in 2009, it’s been 0.57, higher even than 1998.
See
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.txt
for the anomaly series figures you drooling cretin.