OK, two more:
- Jon Cohn's 10 Things Worth Fighting For in health care. Among them:
- Subsidize people farther up the income ladder (up to 400% of poverty level);
- Open up the exchanges (like our Connector) to anyone;
- Yes, public option
… And others. Really good stuff — it would be a pretty darned good bill if we got all that.
- Along those lines, the Globe says increase the subsidies. Irony: For all the concern about a.) the public option, b.) the CBO scores, and c.) bipartisanship … what if we did something that satisfied all those criteria and left 16 million people uninsured?
Uh … WIN??
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- Hey, where did Medford City Councillor Bob Penta get those kooky ideas about health care reform at Markey's event Monday night? Yup, you guessed it — a chain email. And I talked with him afterward, and as “evidence” for his claims, he provided … a couple of blog posts. Good gravy … can't trust those bloggers, Bob.
- I'm going to write a book about a bunch of individualists who drop out of society and go up a mountain in Colorado out of spite … and how nobody misses them one bit. (Except their moms, but the feeling's not reciprocated.)
I'm calling it Galling Goats. *
- In case you missed it, Sens. Lindsey Graham and John Kerry came out with an op-ed in favor of action on climate change. This is immensely good news, say Joe Romm and David Roberts of Grist — and we've been starved for good news on this stuff. The deal will apparently include more offshore drilling … which is bad … but if it's included in a deal to bring CO2 emissions down overall, you do what you gotta do. More American oil proportionally, but less oil overall.
Graham's already taking flak for this. I suspect we'll see some less-insane Republicans folowing, though.
And to Kerry's detractors around here … if sufficiently strong legislation passes on climate change, that's the legislative equivalent of a late-inning Ortiz homer, Roberts' stolen base, and the bloody sock game, combined. Miraculous, victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat.
- In a dispatch from the other side … Eabo says “Leave it to the Brits. At least they are reporting the facts. The Earth is NOT warming, in fact over the last few years we have been cooling.”
And if Eabo now considers the BBC to be an honest broker in this discussion, let's add a few more BBC links for good, honest information!
- “Climate change: The evidence”
Our world is getting warmer. Over the last 100 years the average global surface temperature has risen by about 0.74C.
This seemingly small rise has already had a significant effect on our planet.
For example, the record books have had to be re-written recently, as 11 of the 12 hottest years recorded so far have all taken place since 1995.
- “Four degrees of warming likely”
In a dramatic acceleration of forecasts for global warming, UK scientists say the global average temperature could rise by 4C (7.2F) as early as 2060.
They really do make it too easy … but then again, the problem is not lack of information. It's human nature.
- “Climate change: The evidence”
It’ll be a sad day at BMG when we no longer have him to kick around. He keeps setting ’em up, and we just keep knocking ’em down; it’s actually a lot of fun. Watching Charley here is like watching a pro basketball player dunk on a high school JV player. Repeatedly.
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p>It is disheartening to see, though, that with all EaBo’s engineering training (from a fine public-option university) that he chooses to ignore science via confirmation bias in favor of a losing political view that is becoming outdated even in his own Jurassic party.
Sure we are destroying the enviornment that is a given now what to do about it. Big Al Gore would have you just stop burning stuff. Well I personally don’t know an Amish family I could go and live with. This man has traveled the globe bringing the message of doom and gloom with the very slick message of have to act right now on this singular issue. Let us tax everybody back into pre-industrialism and give all that money to the Bernie Madoff types of the world to fix the problem. Ya, know I just don’t see it. What I do see is an identical marketing plan consistently repeating over and over and over which does indicate it comes from Satan’s think tanks.
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p>Personally I love the enviornment yet I have ceased doing the small things like recylcing and hold in contempt anybody spouting off about global warming as idiots, products of Charolette Iserbytian dumbed down society.
Anti-global climate swindle for life and teaching everyone I know who will listen the very same thing.
http://www.informationliberati…
I won’t waste electrons debunking it here. Others have already done it.
would have been the correct marketing theme.
A large solar coronal mass ejection would ionize the air making electrical transmission impossible. Aleady has in Canada. The only answer to this would be localized Amish type communities which of course today is highly impractical.
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p>What is practical however is GLOBALLY taxing people into joblessness and giving that money to the Bernie Madoff types of the world. That is why till the day I die global warming is fraud. When you consistently lie to people they go reactionary, the other way.
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p>No, no he wouldn’t. He would have you
(a) burn less stuff. That means everything from putting on a sweater in the winter to upgrading the performance of your home with better insulation, an improved building envelope, re-commissioning of HVAC, and even programmable thermostats.
(b) capture more energy from renewable resources such as wind, active and passive solar, biomass, geothermal, etc.
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p>Then, frankly, you don’t love the environment. If you’re not even willing to do zero-cost easy things to reduce your impact, you don’t love the environment.
My wife works in health care. She did bow to pressure and got the REGULAR flu shot and didn’t tell me.
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p>It explains why she has crashed on the couch every day this week at 2:30 in the afternoon exhausted. She promised me, never ever again.
I’m trained as an environmental engineer, and I’ve managed to convince 2 different universities (good ones, but I’m not here to go elite on ya) to give me a science degree.
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p>I’m familiar with climate science from Tyndall and Arrhenius (On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground, 1896) to present (see e.g. Murphy et al., “An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950”, 2009).
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p>Some arguments of the current climate skeptic community are consistent with scientific research. The research of the 1940’s. Literally- see this thorough history.
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p>The only leg skeptics have to stand on is the unlikely possibility that climate sensitivity to increased CO2 isn’t all that high, thanks to some as-yet-undocumented negative feedback. The more legit. skeptics are at least trying to find this mechanism, but so far they don’t got much.
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p>And then there’s the problem of ocean acidification (CO2 + H2O <=> CO3H2 <=> CO3H- + H+). Of course, the ocean is heavily buffered, but the calcium that’s most readily available to buffer is tied up in sea creatures’ shells and skeletons. Talk about osteoporosis.
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p>So, you don’t like the various policies proposed to deal with climate change. That’s fine, but it doesn’t invalidate the science.
so I know how to apply the statistics to prove anything you would like to prove. Since enviornmental science is a relatively new diploma I tend to think of you as a “kid” but maybe I’m wrong there. Anyway the political solution is the political solution which is showering money upon the Bernie Madoff types of the world.
BUT—I still want someone to explain to me ( doesn’t have to be in laymans language) why the earth has had repeated significant temperature changes over the last two thousand years.
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p>I want to know what caused the warming and the “mini ice age” in the past 100-150 years.
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p>I want to know what causes El Nino and El Nina and why they are unpredicatable.
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p>I want to know why 1998 was the hotest year ( allegedly) in the 20th century and since the atmospheere seems to be cooling.
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p>I want to know why we currently enjoy 15% less available sunlight per circadian day than say 1945 and what “Enlightened” left scientist are going to do about it—like grounding all the worlds high altitude aircraft (everything over FL 15).
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p>I want to know what the “enlightened” lefty scientists of the world plan on doing if there are singular or multiple
significant volcanic eruptions that cause a 30%-50% obscuration of available sunlight for greater than 24 months.
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p>A small but significant meteor strike in mid Pacific or Atlantic with attendant tsunami and weather pattern changes for years—–what’s the latest plan from the do gooder segment of the western climatological scientists?
No one disputes that the climate can vary naturally. No one. The data shows otherwise.
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p>But pointing to natural variability as an argument against man-made impacts is like pointing to wildfires caused by lightening and arguing that arsonists can’t set wildfires.
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p>What causes natural variability? All sorts of things. Variations in solar output.
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p>1998, an ENSO year, was the hottest of the 20th century. You may find people talking about 1934 as perhaps hotter, and that’s possibly true- for the US, which makes up ~5% of global area. The rest of the world wasn’t as hot.
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p>The “cooling since 1998” meme is a logical fallacy. Check out the satellite record (maintained by a prominent skeptic:
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p>Now, squint and project a line that ignores the short-term wiggles. Is that line sloping up or down?
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p>Check out the heat content of the oceans:
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p>If several volcanos hit and block out 30-50% of sunlight, it’s going to be a cold few years. Sunlight comes in at ~1360 W/m. Natural sources of variability, and CO2 forcing, is on the order of ~ 1 W/m- enough to move the climate’s needle, but a small % of the total. If volcanic soot blocks out 30% of sunlight (and we’re talking about the mother of all volcanos- Pinatubo temporarily blocked ~4%), it’s going to get fricking cold for awhile, regardless of the amount of CO2. But volcanoes are a sideshow- Pinatubo, a big volcano, had a big, but very short term, climate impact.
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p>Here’s what’s going on currently:
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p>1. We’re driving heating by putting more CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere; higher concentrations of these gases trap radiative energy at specific wavelengths (that are not saturated at the top of the atmosphere). The basic heat-trapping mechanism is well understood.
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p>[1a. We used to produce a lot more soot than we do now. Like volcano output, this can have a cooling effect, and may be a factor in the temperature record (that is, sooty pollution may have masked the amount of CO2-induced warming).]
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p>2. Solar ouput continues to vary (it’s a little low right now), and there’s clearly not been an upward trend over the 30 year satellite record.
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p>3. Various natural processes shift heat around between the oceans and atmosphere- e.g. ENSO, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, etc. No one disputes this. People do dispute that these natural processes are the primary drivers of long-term global temperature trends in the past few decades.
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p>4. There are other natural processes that affect the amount of radiation energy that gets trapped- e.g. clouds. Cloud dynamics are not particularly well-understood, and can have a significant impact on climate. That’s the limiting factor on the utility of climate models.
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p>So, putting these together: If the long term climate is warming, but there are a lot of factors that cause oscillations on the order of months to years, you are not going to see a smoothly increasing temperature. In fact, you might see something like this:
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p>One thing to note: Every year in this decade has been hotter than every year in the 1990’s, apart from 1998. Does that seem like cooling to you?
You are talking to lasthorseman. No amount of verified science will dent this individual’s conspiracist armor. He is a junk science enthusiast of the first order.
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p>Keep doing what you’re doing, but don’t waste your breath on this one.
Emphasis on hot. This is satellite data published from one of the prominent skeptics (who questions the causes, not the trend):
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than a disciple of Ayn Rand. It geths no crazier than that.
… that the evangelist of maximum individualism encouraged and dominated a cult of personality — one literally founded on the assumption that “Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who ever lived.”
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p>http://www.tnr.com/article/boo…
Anthem.
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p>Most people don’t know this, but the Ayn Rand Institute sends out cases upon cases of free Rand novels to American high schools every year. Want 50 copies of Anthem, The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged? We got ’em. She may have been a lot of things, but a competent novelist isn’t one of them. We chuck boatloads of ’em on a regular basis.
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p>The only novel that manages to make its way into American classroom that rivals Rand’s Anthem as worst. novel. ever. written. is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. I actually have used that particular text as an example of what not to do when writing a novel. So awful it’s hilarious.
Paul Constant’s column on books that turn you into assholes from a few years back still rings true:
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p>Of course, Whittaker Chamber’s Rand take down is still the classic:
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p>Any resemblance to posters beloved by Bob Neer and disliked by almost everyone else is purely coincidental. 😉
I love this; it’s a keeper:
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p>Ain’t that the truth.
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p>Ya gotta hand it to her, though. She demonstrated that a thin veneer of bullshit combined with a patently manufactured mystique can make even the most egregious anti-social behavior look respectable.
It’s short and has only one point: being a selfish asshole is a good thing.
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p>Sample quotes:
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p>and
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p>I read this and thought “what utter bullshit.” People of my acquaintance found it freeing. They’d always found the idea of a social contract constricting. Rand allowed them to feel superior for it.
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p>Truly amoral.
The whole light bulb metaphor adds new dimension to trite and cliched. A second grader could do better. Gee, what could I use to suggest a new idea, a new way of thinking, progress…..???? I got it! A light bulb? Aye yay yay….
This stuff is like statistics—much of it is meaningless.
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p>What does NOAA and some of the other international weather offices have as far as numbers?
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p>Another thing—-when Global warming proved to be problematic —because as I speak–we are freezing our asses off—-they changed the drum beat to Climate change—and again—please explain why Greenland warmed up and got cold again—was that Global warming or Global cooling and what was the causation?
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p>Please feel free to add your pronouncements re sunspot activity and earths weather patterns.
This stuff is like statistics—much of it is meaningless.
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p>I think that exempts us from having to respond. If you regard the language of science as mostly meaningless, what does that leave?
More “meaningless” statistics.
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p>As a self-described “health care provider”, I wonder if he also views the science of clinical trials as similarly “meaningless”.
refused
So all scientific datasets (except the ones that are consistent with our beliefs) are not trustworthy?
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p>You can support phony arguments with statistics. The nice thing about the way science is conducted these days is that you have to document your methods, so people can reproduce your work. If they can’t reproduce it, you either are lying about your methods or made a mistake.
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p>It’s pretty easy to commit scientific fraud. It’s pretty hard to successfully maintain that fraud for very long.
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p>Nihilism can be fun, but it doesn’t leave you with much to go on.
here, because the graphs look nice and the sources are fully documented.
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p>Skeptic Roy Spencer tends to have a lot of posts to real data sets.
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p>The solar data comes from PMOD WRC.
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p>The ocean heat content data came from- wait for it- NOAA.
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p>Here’s the one stop shop for NOAA climate-related info.
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p>All of this stuff is based on peer-reviewed scientific research.
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p>MCRD: One more time, for emphasis:
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p>The climate can and does vary naturally. No one disputes this. But natural variability does not preclude modern man-made impacts on climate. Both can (and do) exist. Natural variability can be superimposed on top of an underlying warming trend (or vice versa, whatever floats your boat). In fact, that’s what the modern temperature record reflects.
Story here.
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Weather anomalies occur all the time. Look up weather and then look up climate and get back to us.
since the population was a declining Icelandic one and a more-stable Norwegian one.