Friday, December 11, 2009
Don't be fooled by deniers
Not one, but two opinion pieces in the Santa Fe New Mexican last Sunday are full of falsehoods and misleading statements about climate change. I will address these fully in response to the New Mexican, which I'll either excerpt or provide a link to on this blog, but in the meantime you can find facts and links to more information to counter most of the spurious claims in the New Mexican pieces in this piece by Scientific American. Remember, 97% of US climate scientists, the scientists who actually study this subject, agree that global warming is real and that it's caused by humans. Our National Academy of Sciences under George W. Bush, along with the academies of science of 10 other nations, agreed that the evidence for climate change and humans' role in it was strong enough to warrant fast action by governments. Update: The US National Academy of Sciences, along with the Academies of Science of 12 other industrialized and emerging nations, signed a statement in June 2009 including the following quotes: "Climate change is happening even faster than previously estimated,""The need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable," and "Limiting global warming to 2°C would require a very rapid worldwide implementation of all currently available low carbon technologies. The G8+5 should lead the transition to an energy efficient and low carbon world economy." When we are faced with such great consequences and quite substantial evidence, do you think we should wait until the consequences are so dire that they can't be denied? The people who live on various islands and in the polar reaches, not to mention many species of plants and animals, are already facing dire consequences. By the time the consequences are in the faces of the rest of us, because the ocean and the natural world absorbs CO2 and heat and delays these consequences, scientists tell us it will probably be too late to avoid a world far different from the one that civilization evolved in. Do we really want to let a minority of vocal deniers, some of whom have been paid by oil companies to delay government action, confuse us into losing our chance to save ourselves and thousands of other species? Would you rather prepare for a catastrophe that might not happen, or not prepare for a catastrophe that is actually already happening, but not yet to most of us?
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http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/121309/liv_534648754.shtml
ReplyDeleteLisa Lewis on Christmas gifts that are eco-friendly
Thanks, Patty! The story contains a link to a source of eco-friendly gifts for parents of young children. Here's the link:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.asmallgreenfootprint.com/
You'll need to copy and paste these links into your browser if you want to follow them.
This is not an endorsement, just information.
I did send that My View response off to the New Mexican yesterday. I'll keep you all posted.
Sorry, but your information presented here is totally wrong. There are hundreds of scientists like myself (B.S., M.A., S.M., Ph.D., in paleoclimatology and geochemistry) who know that the recent, short term and small changes to the earth's climate are natural and not CO2 (human or otherwise) related. As a matter of fact, there is no scientific evidence that CO2 has ever been the primary cause of the earth's climate changes, it has always been scientifically proven to be Milankovitch cycles of various durations and overlaps with CO2 following by many hundreds of years.
ReplyDeleteFor many of us Norteños who have educations in this field, those with enviro-degerees are just not educated enough in the proper sciences to comment or understand the science and are thus reduced to reading (and believing as in religion) the IPCC dogma produced by political scientists and government bureaucrats.
For those of you who are genuinely interested in the truth of global warming, here is an excellent site that answers both Dr. J's comment and other denier's claims: www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php.
ReplyDeletePerhaps if you want to listen to a real, reputable scientist rather than an enviro-lobby AGW activists and promters, non-scientific "Cliff's Notes" version, you should read this by one of my old Profs at MIT, Dr. Lindzen:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ecoworld.com/global-warming/climate-science-is-it-currently-designed-to-answer-questions.html
Your blog post and the opinion piece in the New Mexican do a good job of summarizing the evidence that climate change is real, and then there are always those melting ice caps that are kind of a smoking gun. There will always be people who will argue that there is nothing wrong, but I would say we have enough evidence to act and to try to reduce our carbon output.
ReplyDeleteI like to take baths in the winter. I leave the warm water in the tub until it cools and it keeps the bathroom pleasantly warm.
ReplyDeleteI like to burn incandescent light bulbs in the winter in the house, empty rooms, and my well house. They have just enough heat to keep the rooms or well house warm (to prevent freezing of the pressure tank and pipes), make the house look lived in to keep burglers away, and save on propane heating bills and reduce real pollution (SOx, NOx, Hg, O3,)produced by coal fired plants for those with electric heat. However, since the Obama admin has outlawed those bulbs, the energy waste and pollution will increase for many of us in rural areas during the winter months as we will have to use much more inefficient heating without our handy incandescents and being forced to buy only CF bulbs with no heat and use energy hog devices like heat-tracing for pipes.
ReplyDelete