Originally Posted by Eric the Green

If you are not duped, then why do you make such statements that you do? I think you need to start with the fact that global warming is happening, that it is killing off species, that it is caused by fossil fuel use, and that plenty of resources exist to convert within a decade to clean energy. If you can start there, then at least you don't raise my suspicion that you are not ready to deal with reality. It is a question of starting with the facts.

You said otherwise, and you also said that you talk to engineers. Who are they, besides employees of the very companies doing the pollution? I think that's a fair question. Do tell. It is not a matter of trust, but of evidence. Comparing the royalities gained by Al Gore, which he probably puts most of back into his work, to BP, which makes hundreds of billions of dollars in profits, is nonsense. Why do you defend it? All these companies refuse to put any resources into alternative energy, yet broadcast propaganda even on the PBS Newshour that they do.

I think, rather than portraying people as "wicked," I am challenging you on the facts, which are wicked enough.

I'm sorry, but you will have to find someone else to flame. Your Manichean world has no place for people like me.

James50

Originally Posted by James50

I'm sorry, but you will have to find someone else to flame. Your Manichean world has no place for people like me.

James50

Let's just hope that the oil world (which I think you may help to enable) is going up in flames. What is happening in the Gulf of Mexico may be a good start.

Additional comment. It's not my world alone we're talking about. We live in different worlds, James, because I perceive facts that you don't (and I'm sure you know some things that I don't too). Also, as Bob says, we may have different values.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

What we have seen on these forums is that values locked conversations go nowhere. Logic and evidence are not decisive in such conversation.

It's more than values. It's what sorts of facts constitute evidence too.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

It's more than values. It's what sorts of facts constitute evidence too.

Only those facts which support many individual's values constitute evidence.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Only those facts which support many individual's values constitute evidence.

The whole values vs. "reason" (facts, evidence, logic) concern you bring up Bob is valid and worthwhile; although to discuss it might be another more-philosophical thread. I think people do have different values, based partly on their own experience and background, which has led them to their general orientations. I have "new age" and "green" values mostly based on my experiences in the Awakening/2T, plus things like my Dad was a pacifist, etc. Plus each person is different physically, genetically, spiritually, mentally, etc., and has different gifts to express, which are often ignored or supressed, etc.

One rejoiner to your point might be though, as is often said, that "ultimately we all want the same things." Getting down to the root of values, they might end up being pretty universal, with individual differences in degree and emphasis based on experience and background. Perhaps one way for people to be able to see the facts more clearly, then, is to relate them to that more universal level of values.

What gets in the way of genuine knowledge, actions and solutions are frequently our fears, indulgences, reactions, less-than-conscious desires and hurts, habits, grasping and clinging, etc.-- what Buddha called the Second Noble Truth. This is the real cause of suffering, and I suspect that some or much of what you call "values," which can blind us to the facts, are really the fears and attachments we have that take us away from real consciousness and reality. These may be rooted in our animal survival instinct, and given further wing by our human minds and emotions.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Only those facts which support many individual's values constitute evidence.

I would say only those facts that fit their worldview constitute evidence. Your model doesn't explain folly.

For example, the Iraq war. One can choose to support the rationale for war out of values. But values didn't cause Rumsfeld to to cancel planned reinforcements and withdraw troops at a critical time. Values did not cause Bush to take steps to see to it that Iran would be the primary beneficiary of American blood and treasure.

The Bush administration did what it did because their trusted advisors truly believed that a pro-Western democracy would just happen spontaneously like it did in Eastern Europe.

A hurricane in Los Angeles?

Originally Posted by Mikebert

I would say only those facts that fit their worldview constitute evidence. Your model doesn't explain folly.

For example, the Iraq war. One can choose to support the rationale for war out of values. But values didn't cause Rumsfeld to to cancel planned reinforcements and withdraw troops at a critical time. Values did not cause Bush to take steps to see to it that Iran would be the primary beneficiary of American blood and treasure.

The Bush administration did what it did because their trusted advisors truly believed that a pro-Western democracy would just happen spontaneously like it did in Eastern Europe.

But there also was a lust for power and a greed that was working within the minds of the authors of the Project for a New American Century who launched the Iraq War. Plus an ideology of American imperialism and empire.

Originally Posted by TimWalker

A hurricane in Los Angeles?

An on-topic post. Will wonders never cease.

A New Little Ice Age?

If I understand Calvin correctly, Greenland is warming up faster than it has in the past. The implication is that the ice cap will slide out to sea on a lubricating layer of meltwater...rather than melting away gradually.

I don't know how it would play out, having a huge amount of ice abruptly dumped into the ocean.

Would the result resemble the Younger Dryas?

Home, sweet home

Holocene, sweet Holocene

aerosol/cloud interactions

New Scientist May 15-21st has an article on Deniers of all sorts - not skeptics, but those who keep on denying and denying whatever it is they're denying regardless of the preponderance of the evidence. The most important parts of the article are:

1) Their style of argumentation. Which I have seen done on these forums, detail for detail, argument for argument, fallacy for fallacy.

2) That some of them have been traced back to industry mounting an astroturf campaign - including Big Oil "XO" wasting MY stockholder's money on trying to convince people that global warming is an Unreal Marxist/treehugger/materialist*/atheist* Plot Against Our Noble Industry. Bah, humbug. Why can't they compete with alternate energy by innovating liek everybody else?

3) That some of their leaders show signs of paranoid thinking.

Just FYI,

Pat

*Big Oil - claiming their opposition is *materialist* and *atheist*? As the stockpot said to the teakettle, "My, how badly you need a good scrubbing."

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

Why can't they compete with alternate energy by innovating liek everybody else?

The only way they could do that is to go into alternate energy, which is the innovative part of the industry. Also, it will never be as outrageously profitable as oil can be under peak oil price-hike conditions.

It's all quite carefully calculated. The oil companies know very well they're going to have to get out of the oil business eventually, but there's a graph that can be plotted of oil prices and profits, and a point on that graph where the price becomes so painful that most people literally cannot buy energy. They want to delay the transition until the point of peak profit.

Mediterranean cyclone

more on no-analog communities

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

New Scientist May 15-21st has an article on Deniers of all sorts - not skeptics, but those who keep on denying and denying whatever it is they're denying regardless of the preponderance of the evidence. The most important parts of the article are:

1) Their style of argumentation. Which I have seen done on these forums, detail for detail, argument for argument, fallacy for fallacy.

2) That some of them have been traced back to industry mounting an astroturf campaign - including Big Oil "XO" wasting MY stockholder's money on trying to convince people that global warming is an Unreal Marxist/treehugger/materialist*/atheist* Plot Against Our Noble Industry. Bah, humbug. Why can't they compete with alternate energy by innovating liek everybody else?

3) That some of their leaders show signs of paranoid thinking.

Just FYI,

Pat

*Big Oil - claiming their opposition is *materialist* and *atheist*? As the stockpot said to the teakettle, "My, how badly you need a good scrubbing."

Pat (glad to know your first name) - anyone who reads New Scientist is a winner in my book. It is one of the only magazines I still subscribe to. Their twitter feed is amazing. I wish I could read them in a timely fashion, but they tend to stack up next to the bed. I am about a month behind, but I never throw them away without reading them.

James50

marine cloud whitening

cloud ships

more...on....

yet more....

"crop dusting" over Arctic

2010 still aiming to be the warmest year on record

Originally Posted by Odin

2010 still aiming to be the warmest year on record

Generated by the NOAA/Space Weather Prediction Center

For years the 11 year solar cycle has been on a cooling trend. Thus, CO2 forcing has been in part countered by well understood solar effects. Various skeptics have thus been cherry picking a warm year in the past and tracing it to a cool recent year and claimed a long term cooling trend.

We've bottomed out. The next solar cycle is predicted to be less intense than the last one, but the slow down in short term temperature gain is apt to reverse over the next several years. Both CO2 and solar forcing are apt to be pushing towards hot. Depending on how the El Nino / La Nina cycle lines up, 2013 could be ridiculous.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

For years the 11 year solar cycle has been on a cooling trend. Thus, CO2 forcing has been in part countered by well understood solar effects. Various skeptics have thus been cherry picking a warm year in the past and tracing it to a cool recent year and claimed a long term cooling trend.

We've bottomed out. The next solar cycle is predicted to be less intense than the last one, but the slow down in short term temperature gain is apt to reverse over the next several years. Both CO2 and solar forcing are apt to be pushing towards hot. Depending on how the El Nino / La Nina cycle lines up, 2013 could be ridiculous.

I noticed something in April in southern Michigan: we usually get one last big spring blizzard when a wintry cold front meets summer-like warm, humid air, when the temperature goes from 70F to 25F in one day. This time we had nothing of the sort. In fact we got our last winter snowstorm in the winter.

Welcome to Tennessee, I suppose; we might not replace our apple groves with orange groves, but we might become cotton country if the climate changes enough.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

I noticed something in April in southern Michigan: we usually get one last big spring blizzard when a wintry cold front meets summer-like warm, humid air, when the temperature goes from 70F to 25F in one day. This time we had nothing of the sort. In fact we got our last winter snowstorm in the winter.

Welcome to Tennessee, I suppose; we might not replace our apple groves with orange groves, but we might become cotton country if the climate changes enough.

Same in Minnesota. It was in the 60s all April

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

For years the 11 year solar cycle has been on a cooling trend. Thus, CO2 forcing has been in part countered by well understood solar effects. Various skeptics have thus been cherry picking a warm year in the past and tracing it to a cool recent year and claimed a long term cooling trend.

We've bottomed out. The next solar cycle is predicted to be less intense than the last one, but the slow down in short term temperature gain is apt to reverse over the next several years. Both CO2 and solar forcing are apt to be pushing towards hot. Depending on how the El Nino / La Nina cycle lines up, 2013 could be ridiculous.

I think you are forgetting about the Icelandic volcanoes. Also El Nino is fading. If we get a La Nina, it will cause cooling. I am afraid short term predictions are little better than guesses; and when the predictions are wrong, there are a host of people who will use the error to discredit the bigger picture of AGW.

James50