Iowa Scientists Tell Republican Candidates to Accept Climate-Change Research

Watch this space for amusing commentary from the usual suspects.  Ain’t nobody telling the GOP pretenders to accept science that does not support unfettered business expansion and screw the consequences.

jimeddy

They didn’t establish policy, or try to. They said whoever is elected president should. Big difference.

Kind of ironic that this is coming from an institution notorious for harboring and funding scores of worker bees for agribusiness, which isn’t known for its concern for the environment.  But hey, any port in a storm, I guess.

This is sad. There has never been a time that the climate has not been changing. It has been hotter in the past. It has been colder in the past. CO2 has been many times higher in the past. Of all CO2 released into the atmosphere, humans account for a tiny fraction of to total; about 3 percent. To reduce the human CO2 emissions by 1/2 would devastate the human condition . . . and reduce their contributions to 1.5%. The rhetoric from politicians and ‘scientists’ receiving grants from those politicians does not comport with simple observation and common sense. The whole thing has the look an smell of artificial crisis stirred up to keep the less discerning public in a state of agitation and misdirection. We’ve been there before folks.

Real understanding of the climate change debate can be secured by following the money. By “money” I include all pieces of paper that are perceived to have value. This would include those “carbon credits” manufactured out of thin air (or thin CO2?) that traders can now aggregate and market not unlike the “securitized mortgages” that recently brought financial markets to its knees. Another example of worthless paper with big numbers on them would be stocks in the dot-com ventures that kicked the economy in the head a few years back. See: http://tinyurl.com/6opomp2

The folks who made out like bandits were those who collect brokerage fees in cash as piles of paper with big numbers on them cross their desks. And so it is with “carbon credits”. Nothing more than another form of money that wouldn’t buy you a cup of coffee . . . but is of great value to Al Gore’s trader buddies . . . and to governments that use them as tools of social engineering. You can bet that traders in carbon credits won’t take their fees in carbon credits . . . they’ll want real dollars . . . and if they’re smart, they immediately convert dollars to gold. Dollars are yet more pieces of paper having numbers on them with increasingly dubious value.

Science is not a matter of consensus. It is demonstrable fact. Theories may prove to be useful and true but until they’re demonstrable, they are only fodder for debate, not foundation for public policy. The folks who read this journal have a duty to teach simple-ideas . . . ingredients that go into demonstrable recipes for success. They also have a duty to protect liberty . . . the fundamental right to be left alone. When anyone teaches, legislates or regulates demands on behavior of an honorable citizen, alarm bells should be going off. Until an individual can be shown (by due process of law) to be attacking the liberty of another individual, then in OUR country, that individual is to be left alone.

The dogma proffered by the high priests of the Church of Climate Change does not conform to the rules of repeatable experiment necessary for a theory to become useful science. Nor should it be given credence by honorable teachers in an institution of higher learning in the United States of America.

you misunderstand how science works and the difference between a theory and a hypothesis.   A hypothesis is an idea that scientists test without being sure.  Scientists then test their hypothosis and the results of that testing gets disseminated to other scientists who use their expertise to critically review the results as well as the methods of the test itself.   Many of those scientists will then re-test the hypothesis using a combination of exact replication of the experiment, slight modifications, or whole new approaches.  The results of these additional experiments are then disseminated for review again by the general scientific community (and the public for that matter).  Only once that hypothesis has withstood multiple and repeated attempts to prove AND disprove it does it become considered a Theory.  Usually the level of certaintly is somewhere between 95% and 99%.  
Simply claiming that you disagree with the data that’s been produced by literally thousands of attempts to disprove that human effects are causing climate change does not make it so.   You are figuratively spitting in the wind.   You are correct in saying that climate has changed in the past, however what you are missing is that our civilization has adapted to the climate that exists now.   You are also missing the fact that small percentage changes in CO2 levels can result in relatively radical changes in temperature because you are failing to take into account with your common sense that what is for us a radical temperature change is for a planet, a mild swing.   Remember that the earth itself is in an environment that’s close to -272 degrees celsius on the dark side and over 140 degrees on the light side.   If a 3% swing in C02 resulted in even 0.1% change in global average temperature, then you’d be potentially raising the global temps by about 4 degrees centigrade, which is enough to play havoc with crops, weather patterns, etc.  

Ultimately though, you’re conflating two sets of questions.   The first is “is climate changing regardless of what we do and thus should we figure out a way to adapt?”   That answer is unequivically yes on both parts.

The second question is “is climate changing faster than what it should, and generating a risk that neither us nor the things we rely upon for life and civilization will be able to adapt quickly enough because of our accelerating effect?”   That is where the argument potentially is.   Since you’ve established that you aren’t relying on science then I’ll use another mode.  In any free-market based risk assessment, most risk managers would say that a low-probability, high consequence event should be mitigated (that’s why people by earthquake and flood insurance).   The higher the probability that the event will occur, the more likely it is that you should do something to mitigate it.   In this case, even if there’s a 2% chance of total civilization collapse, one would think that any sane risk manager would want to take some action to mitigate that contingency.   Now if you bring that percentage up higher (that’s where science comes back in), to something like 5% or so (so a 1 in 20 chance), then the risks grow to the point that serious mitigation must occur.  This is why we require expensive blowout preventers on oil rigs and this is why we require people to wear seatbelts and spend 10% more on cars so that they have the proper safety equipment, and their chance of being in an accident is much lower.   Why can’t we spend 10% more on protecting our civilization?

How’s that for common sense?

Some scientists and academics are afraid of sticking their necks out, especially in public and in the news media.  Some are more brave then others.  It depends on whether or not you have tenure and what area the topic is in.  Some have no trouble even venturing out of their academic discipline and commenting on public or political affairs.  Some never do.

Dude, wake up!  You say “Science is not a matter of consensus. It is demonstrable fact.”  You got that.  The measurements are clearly showing significant warming in the past century.  Even when it cannot be considered proven that humans are causing it, there is even worse approach one can take by categorically stating that humans have nothing to do with it.  This is what most conservative politicians seem to be doing, and it is stupid.

Very few of the scientists at these colleges would have expertise in climate science. I will presume that only the professors who actually are knowledgeable in this field would have signed the peitition.

Is this democracy!  Or is it do or loose??

Trainer12 sez: Nuckollsr doesn’t seem to understand the purpose of government under our
constitution.  The purpose of government is to provide for the “general
welfare” and to “protect and defend” the citizens of the United States
against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

“General welfare” appears in Constitution twice. In the Preamble and Article I, Section 8. Article 1,. Section 8 is specific as to the constitutional duties of our government. See:

http://www.usconstitution.net/const.pdf

I interpret ‘general welfare’ not to be a mandate for any particular activity but a prediction of outcome if the recipe for success is faithfully executed. How does this phrase become a license to do anything beyond specific mandates cited elsewhere? If ‘general welfare’ were a mandate for any ‘good and necessary action’, why then did the Founding Fathers bother to enumerate the duties and restrictions in the paragraphs that followed?

Bastiat teaches that honorable law is a collective extension of our individual right to self defense, then how does an individual’s carbon footprint become an attack upon our liberty . . . much less a prosecutable foreign (subversive) or domestic (treasonous) threat?

Here are a select few supporting references produced over a span of over 200 years by some of my cherished teachers. See:

http://tinyurl.com/c75pok3

http://www.aeroelectric.com/Simple-Ideas/TRL/Hillsdale/

http://www.barefootsworld.net/nortonuc09.html

I’ve not heard/read any words by these individuals where government under our constitution has a mandate to tell anyone to do anything except to cease and desist attacks upon an honorable citizen’s liberty and dispense justice in cases proven by due process. Due process does not include arbitrary and capricious selection of winners/losers by application of regulation without representation.

So, if I am interpreting this correctly, there are no reliable, helpful, useful, or credible experts? We should listen to no interpretations of complex facts, and certainly not any being offered by those who have actually studied in the field? We should follow our hearts in matters of extreme challenge? Is there someone better qualified to offer advice to our politicians? Or do we simply acquiesce to the idea that our politicians are, after all, simply the best minds we have, minds that will always find the right way to move? Hmmm.

Our own EPA is fond of citing anthropogenic sources of new CO2 while beating the drums loudly on the contributions from burning fossil fuels. Take this piece:

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/globalghg.html

from which I quote: ‘Atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are affected by the total
amount of greenhouse gases emitted to and removed from the atmosphere around
the world over time. Figure 1 shows a breakdown of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas
emissions by each gas measured on a CO2-equivalent basis.”

A perfectly true statement but I believe designed to mislead. In the material that follows, they feature breakdowns of man-made CO2 emissions with pie charts and ‘hocky stick’ looking graphs that give rise to alarm in uninformed individuals. They open with words about “atmospheric concentrations” (global) and then proceed to discuss the evolution of only the anthropogenic portion of the total.

But if you look at the BIG picture, the planet itself is participating in the generation of CO2 as well . . . but on a much grander scale.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

Even when man-made CO2 is agreed to be a tiny percentage of the total production of new CO2, some folks argue that the forcing function of small changes in CO make it mandatory for governments to start telling people what to do and punishing them for failure to comply. This is where the computer models come into play. I applaud the intellectual energies put into such endeavors but deplore the willingness of governments to make policy based on output from those models.

On a much smaller scale, computer models for finance convinced sellers and buyers of certain investments had relatively small and manageable risks . . . based on the false assumption that trends in real estate prices were never down much for very long. Their assumption was flawed by the fact that government was forcing sales of houses to millions of folks who could not pay for them. This caused a building surge, a boom in financial activity that spurred some really creative bundling of mortgages into large chunks of “value” that took a decade to collapse.

Modeling the planet’s climate is 1000 times more complex than predicting the value of mortgage backed securities. Virtually all popular climate modeling tools are replete with assumptions: “This thing always does that, that thing always does this . ..  and done together, they cause a 1.043% change in the other thing.” Multiply that kind of reasoning by 1000 and you begin to see the degree of uncertainty in the science of planet climate modeling. One of the most egregious oversights in climate temperature modeling is an assumption that over time, energy output from the sun is predictable.

Bottom line is that our Founding Fathers gave us a recipe for protecting the liberty of honorable citizens from attack by dishonorable citizens . . . especially those in the employ of government. The day may come that computers and the talents of individuals who run them will become the useful crystal ball for predicting the future. But even then, you do not give Gore, Frank, Dodd, et als such tools to influence the lives of citizens of the United States. Good tools in the hands of fools do not improve upon the goodness of outcome.

I’m no expert on this, but I believe it was Toyota vehicles that were suspected of being “susceptible to ‘sudden acceleration syndrome.’”