Founder of The Weather Channel Slams Global Warming "SCAM"

[Big Don]

Excerpted From ICECAP http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/comments_about_global_warming/
It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create in allusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the “research” to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus

 

[Big Don]

The greatest scam in history...

 

[Jai]

I'm going to be sick

 

[michaeledward]

Whew! What a relief.

I guess I don't need to trade in my hulking S.U.V. which is really terribly inefficient. But, even at a $100.00 a barrel, my job pays me money per mile I drive, so the price of gas doesn't affect me.

Now that I know those carbon atoms coming out of my tailpipe aren't doing anything bad, I don't need to try and reduce them.

Do you suppose we can get the petroleum companies to stop putting ethanol into the gasoline (this is probably a scam too - but they say it cause petroleum distillate to burn 'cleaner' - whatever that means). That whole ethanol thing is driving up the price of my corn flakes.

It's amazing ... ten years ago, all those scientists and governments got together in Kyoto Japan, all to pull a fast one on us. Got to wonder what they got out it.

I guess we can be glad that two oil men, like George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney could see through there charade.

As I said ... what a relief.

 

[tellner]

Even the Bush Administration has finally admitted that it's real. They just don't want to do anything that would cost money or require action. The evidence is incontrovertible. We have evidence from many different sources of data from ice cores to direct temperature measurement. We're already seeing the changes unprecedented in hundreds of thousands of years. We know that the temperature is rising, that the rate of change is increasing, and that the polar ice caps are shrinking and all at rates faster than the more pessimistic predictions. Hell, there was clear water all the way to the North Pole this Summer. That has not happened in at least thousands of years. The latest review of all the climatology literature of the last decade has found not one single peer-reviewed scientific study that refutes the hypothesis. Not one.

But since it's an environmental issue and one that might inconvenience the oil companies the Right Wing Lie Machine spins into high gear. They can't get any atmospheric or climate scientists to agree with them. So they resort to having political hacks alter scientific reports not one but at least a dozen times and make Administration scientists lie to Congress about the effects of the problem.

It's exactly like other issues such as DDT, ozone depletion, and the rise of antibiotic-resistant germs. Here's how it works:

1. Refuse to even acknowledge that the issue has been raised
2. Call it "speculation"
3. Say that it's insane
4. Start vicious personal attacks against anyone who holds a different opinion
5. Lie. Find some paid shill who will repeat your lies
6. Say that it's too early to tell
7. Say that it's happening but it's a good thing
8. Say that it's too early to do anything
9. Say that it's too late to do anything

This is how the Right deals with unpleasant scientific facts. It is so deeply delusional that it believes political spin and smear campaigns make a difference to physical reality. We're at about stage seven on this one.

 

[Big Don]

Funny that you mention DDT, whose banning has consigned hundreds of thousands of people to death. But, that's ok, as long as the birdies are alright...

 

[RED]

Bummer I was hoping the saunna like conditions of global warming would solve our ever growing obiesity problem. Every generation has had a "the sky is falling story" from eugenics to climate issues to nuclear fears. There is hugh money in fear. What is next?

Good old mother Earth will take care of herself. This planet has been here longer than us and will be here longer than us. No scence fearing the inevitable.

 

[Rich Parsons]

Global Warming and Colling occurs naturally.

The year of 1816 is called the year with no summer in the norhtern hemisphere. Check Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=the+year+of+no+summer&client=netscape-pp&rls=com.netscape:en-US


This was after a volcano eruption in 1815. See google again, first link:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...&cd=1&q=volcanoes+in+the+19th+century&spell=1


The Dark ages were dark not only as "Western" Society was taking steps backwards also there were many dieseases and famines and other such caused by a cooling of the earth, which made it harder to grow food easily and also made disease easier to spread in high population areas as the cold wet wether made it ripe for its spreading and growth. (* The Big Chill little Ice Age - Histroy Channel *)

So we are measuring against a known cold period to see about increases. This will cause errors in the calculations as until the known frequency of the normal variations is determined we are only seeing a small part of the graph of time and temperature.

Now, should we look at controlling things we know about? Yes.

Should we be smart about it? Yes.

Are vehicles the number one source for CO2 or Hydrocarbon emission? I think not. A drop of gasoline one drops after fueling their vehicles would fail a SULEV Federal Test Procedure. There are other sources we should look at besides just our vehicles. (* I said besides not instead of *).

This includes maintaining the rain forest. But how do we in the USA tell people in Brazil to not burn it down? Maybe we buy it and keep it as a preserve. I am sure there would be a very large "TAX" on this to support the people on what they think they "COULD" have made on the land otherwise.


Ask questions.

Be open minded.

Look for solutions.

Understand there will be false leads and money spent that is of no value.

Understand that the solution will cost money and time and or other things that people might not be able to directly measure.

Look at the big picture. Do not narrow the solution down that might in the end make it worse over all as one did not see the earth for the issue at hand.

 

[Sorros]

Looks like Al Gore who always had the reputation for twisting the truth or down right lieing. Has finally told his biggest lie yet.
I remember the scare of the eighties being Global cooling.

 

[Sukerkin]

Come on chaps, haven't we been through this enough?

The ones with a vested interest in not doing anything other than making profits will continue to obscure analysis of the data until such time as the profits are to be made from exploiting the outcome of the data.

Whatever my personal opinions of Al Gore happen to be is irrelevant in the face of the simple question:

Does he need the money he gets from his lecture tour to secure his lifestyle?

If the answer to that is "Yes" then it casts a shadow of doubt over his reasons (tho' not the content). If it's "No" then what on earth is the point of attacking him (however tangentially) for speaking what he sees as the truth?

In the end, as I've said what seems like a thousand times on various sites, the planet dosn't give a stuff what the political axe-grinders have to say. It's getting on with temperature regulation and couldn't care less if we help it wipe us out or not.

I grew up expecting to see the onset of an encroaching ice age when I hit my middle to late years, instead we're faced with the consequences of the warming effect of industrial society as the oceans cease to absord the excess greenhouse gasses.

To argue against the reality of the changes is folly. Whereas King Canute was showing his wisdom of the limits of political power when he demonstrated his inability to make the tide "Go back", the naysayers of global warming are misguided at best and sophists at worst.

It's happening. You can't argue with the thermometer. The problem is,with global climatology, that by the time you see something has started it is far too late to do anyting about it.

Anyhow, the whole issue is almost minor compared to the magnetic polar shift that's underway. Prepare for Sunblock 5000 and underground living ... okay that may be an exageration but I invite speculation as to what the effects of the Van Allen belts diminshing to 10% of their first detected strength would be.

 

[tellner]

Come on guys.

First, don't insult your intelligence or ours with the Al Gore crap. He wrote a book and did a documentary. Whether you like him or not he didn't do the research. He didn't make the models. He is reporting on the work of others. When you start in with "I don't like Al Gore. Al Gore wrote about this. He's a bad nasty man, so whatever he wrote about can't be true" you have just excused yourself from the company of adults. In Republicanland slandering a person changes physical reality. In the real world it doesn't mean diddly. Facts are facts.

Second, the tired old lies about "There are always fluctuations. This isn't our fault," have been debunked so many times that it just doesn't bear thinking about. The current century and a half of warming correlates damned near perfectly with the rise in global CO2 and methane levels. And over the past, oh ten thousand years or so, the fluctuations have been random ones around a mean. This change is monotonic within the noisiness of the data. It's increasing. It's accelerating. It fits all of the statistical and theoretical models or exceeds them.

Third, when people were "worried about global cooling" it was a very small number of climatologists. It was at a time when we knew a lot less than we do now. The computational power wasn't readily available. We didn't have anything like the data that we do now. And it was a controversial "maybe someday" speculation. The warming trend is severe, well established, in line with much better modeling and a hell of a lot of hard data. There isn't a single climatologist and damned few meteorologists who have any doubts except "how fast, how far, how bad". The fact that a businessman who founded a weather reporting channel - and who is a huge donor to the Republican Party - doesn't like it in no way changes the reality.

 

[Blotan Hunka]

As if all the predictions about the weather have been so accurate to date??? But NOW they really know what the future will bring...right.

 

[Sukerkin]

Blotan, I've seen enough of your posts by now to realise that you're not a stupid or un-insightful person, so I'm curious as to why, on this issue, you've consistently displayed an unwillingness to even discuss the possibility of there actually being a problem?

By all the signs of the intrinsic cycles of the climate, we should be entering an ice age but instead are seeing unprecidented (by modern records) heating, saturation of the 'gas sump' and ice melt of scary proportions (considering what that does to the all important deep ocean currents).

To borrow a line from HHGG, arguing that man has no influence on it has all the efficacy of lowering haystacks from the decks of the Lusitania.

 

[Blotan Hunka]

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ed...2007/02/07/chicken_little_and_global_warming/

 

[Big Don]

As if all the predictions about the weather have been so accurate to date??? But NOW they really know what the future will bring...right.

What you're saying is: They can't forecast the weather for a week in one town with 100% accuracy, so how can they claim to know what will happen over the course of decades?
Is that what you meant? If so, I agree wholeheartedly. The weather forecasters (As my dad calls them "Weather guessers) are the only people outside of politics allowed to be completely wrong 100% of the time and still keep their jobs.

 

[Blotan Hunka]

Ill put the sunscreen next to my Y2K supplies.....

 

[Sukerkin]

To borrow a line from the article, the sky is still falling, mate.

I've oftentimes argued myself that the role of humankind in climate change can be disputed one way or the other but, to steal a delightful American phrase, that doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the face of the fact that climate change is happening.

I happen to believe that it's a precursor to a tipping-point inversion back into cooling but that's just my belief - I'm an economist/historian/engineer, not a climatologist at the end of the day .

 

[CoryKS]

I don't honestly know whether global warming is fact or fiction. While I'm open to the possibility that people are making an impact on the environment, I have to temper that with the realization of several facts:

1) Many of those who embrace it are those who I consider to be horribly wrong on many other topics;

2) Many of those who embrace it do so with a fervor reminiscent of the zealots who stand on streetcorners with megaphones handing out Chick tracts;

3) There is no third thing;

4) Those who embrace it tend to focus on "solutions" which, coincidentally, target the same capitalist entities that they hated long before global warming conveniently came along. And say nothing about more egregious offenders such as Russia or China, for whom environmental policy is an unknown concept.

5) The coming Ice Age - remember that one?

But what really concerns me is the imperative to "do something" when we don't even know what the right "something" is. If we affect the environment, we affect it no matter what we do. There may be very real benefits that humanity provides, whether we are aware of them or not. There has been, as far as I know, no real study of what could happen if we do enact every inane, emotional "solution" that Starbucks jots down on the side of a coffee cup in order to save baby polar bears. Did the folks who successfully lobbied to get DDT banned foresee the explosion in deaths from malaria and dengue fever that resulted?

I think it's naive to think we have enough control over our environment to correct it without overcompensating. The analogy that comes to mind is this.

 

[Blotan Hunka]

Exactly Cory..."The Sky is Falling" my Yankee ***. Ive never stated that we have NO impact on the environment, or that we SHOULDNT be conserving, exploring green energy, alternate fuels etc. But if you dont run around like a chicken (little) with its head cut off in panic wanting to legislate our country into another depression to lower the global temp 1 degree, then you are a "nonbeliever". And while the "fact" is that temps have been rising over the minuscule slice of global time we have been measuring it, the jury is FAR from out regarding what its cause is. Or that we would ever be able to influence it in a desired direction.

People have this perplexing desire to panic. Y2K, Swine Flu, Bird Flu, Asteroid Impact, Super Volcanoes, Global Warming...

 

[Gordon Nore]

Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild “scientific” scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda.

It reads like an old Archie Bunker script if you swap in the words "pinko," "hippie," and "weirdo."