Prosecutions Coming for Global Warming Deniers?

[RiversideGator]

Your statement was nonsensical and attempted to put words into my mouth.  I did not accept any such thing.  Nice try though.

[RiversideGator]

Try actually reading my posts.

You do have a vivid imagination, I will give you that.   

[RiversideGator]

Right...   

[Driven1]

not true.  no prosecutions coming.  just clearing that up.

[RiversideGator]

There may be a psychological basis for the belief in the increasingly unbelievable global warming theory:

When Prophecy Fails   [Chris Horner]

The Bret Stephens piece that Ed Craig excerpts below also brings to mind the work of Leon Festinger, whose pioneering work on cognitive dissonance theory is so applicable to a movement whose noisiest champions often lead the most incompatible lifestyles imaginable.

Festinger co-wrote (with Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter) the 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, which chronicled a fairly typical cult following: a housewife claimed to be receiving doomsday messages from aliens, who nonetheless offered hope for those who listened to their counsel. (Quick, someone check James Hansen’s immigration status, and bone up on the Alien Tort Claims Act climate litigation.)

Festinger et al. detailed how the failure of a prophecy to come about can often yield the opposite effect of what the rational person would expect: the cult following gets stronger and its adherents ever more convinced of their truth. One reading of Festinger, as to why the rational response should not follow in that situation, is that such prophesying is not rational, or the act of rational beings.

We should not have been surprised with the current mantra, of “Cooling? Why, that’s just another sign of warming.” It is the logical next step of a movement neatly captured by Greenpeace’s Steven Guilbeault’s incantation, “Global warming can mean colder; it can mean drier; it can mean wetter; that’s what we’re dealing with.”

Beam me up.

Festinger deliciously penned the following assessment about this phenomenon:

    A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.

    We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating attacks.

    But man’s resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.

As a meteorologist colleague commented to me last night about a recent manifestation of precisely this, “these people are no different than the guys sitting around waiting for the spaceship.”

07/01 09:30 AM

http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/

[RiversideGator]

BTW, still no prosecutions...   

[RiversideGator]

Here is the Bret Stephens piece referenced in the above post:

GLOBAL VIEW
By BRET STEPHENS    
   
Global Warming as Mass Neurosis
July 1, 2008; Page A15

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.

What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA's Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of "99% confidence").

But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world's oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that "80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters," according to a report by NPR's Richard Harris.

The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.


The New True Believers

This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn't mean God doesn't exist, or that global warming isn't happening. It does mean it isn't science.

So let's stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.

The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore â€" population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations â€" and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species.

A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." That's Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.

And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?

As it turns out, a lot, at least if you're inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature's great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.

In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, "morbid-minded" religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121486841811817591.html?mod=todays_columnists

[RiversideGator]

Keep dreaming.   

[KenFSU]

Thank GOD that me, my yet unborn children, and my grandchildren will be able to stave off this fierce and very real, very dire threat by throwing our money to our savior, the government, in the form of a carbon tax.

[Driven1]

any convictions lately in this arena?

[Downtown Dweller]

I heard they are looking for Midway...

[Charleston native]

So you simply cannot answer a simple fairly innocuous question.

Well River, Charleston.  If the simple asking of a question like "Do you believe that Smoking Causes Cancer"  can shut both of your mouths and strike such fear in your hearts that you dare not speak the answer at all, then I think any reasonable reader can see right through your disingenuousness.

You cannot answer this question.

No one wonders why.

Um, did you read my last post? I said that smoking has a correlational relationship to cancer, but as usual, you're using another apples and oranges comparison for this glo-bull warming. Please read above.

[Charleston native]

Oh yeah, we might as well add this group of 50,000 physicists to Stephen's fantasy of people up for prosecution, even though Al Gore's "science" is continually derailing (granted, this is not APS's official statement, but there is acknowledgement of a large group of scientists in the organization that are skeptics):

"Considerable presence" of skeptics

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming.  The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science.  The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming "incontrovertible."

In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,"There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution."

The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity -- the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause -- has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling.   A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.

Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton's paper an "expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and "extensive errors"

In an email to DailyTech, Monckton says, "I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC's 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central 'climate sensitivity' question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method." 

According to Monckton, there is substantial support for his results, "in the peer-reviewed literature, most articles on climate sensitivity conclude, as I have done, that climate sensitivity must be harmlessly low."

Monckton, who was the science advisor to Britain's Thatcher administration, says natural variability is the cause of most of the Earth's recent warming.   "In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years ... Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth."

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=12403

I love this quote from one of the commenters (although his spelling could use improvement):

How many more nails?
By karkas on 7/17/2008 12:37:25 AM , Rating: 5

How many more nails will it take before MMGW is buried. I'd like to see the media call APS quacks like the rest... Na, they will prolly just ignore it like all the other evidence which proovs the earth is round not flat.

[RiversideGator]

Once the GW nonsense is definitively proven to be wrong, you will not see any apologies from the left.  They will just move onto the next hysterical myth, like DDT or acid rain, to advance their agendas.  It never stops with them.  They use lies and propaganda to advance a hidden agenda which is socialism and a worship of the Earth and its creatures which is both anti-religious and perverse.

[avonjax]

There may be a psychological basis for the belief in the increasingly unbelievable global warming theory:

When Prophecy Fails   [Chris Horner]

The Bret Stephens piece that Ed Craig excerpts below also brings to mind the work of Leon Festinger, whose pioneering work on cognitive dissonance theory is so applicable to a movement whose noisiest champions often lead the most incompatible lifestyles imaginable.

Festinger co-wrote (with Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter) the 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, which chronicled a fairly typical cult following: a housewife claimed to be receiving doomsday messages from aliens, who nonetheless offered hope for those who listened to their counsel. (Quick, someone check James Hansen’s immigration status, and bone up on the Alien Tort Claims Act climate litigation.)

Festinger et al. detailed how the failure of a prophecy to come about can often yield the opposite effect of what the rational person would expect: the cult following gets stronger and its adherents ever more convinced of their truth. One reading of Festinger, as to why the rational response should not follow in that situation, is that such prophesying is not rational, or the act of rational beings.

We should not have been surprised with the current mantra, of “Cooling? Why, that’s just another sign of warming.” It is the logical next step of a movement neatly captured by Greenpeace’s Steven Guilbeault’s incantation, “Global warming can mean colder; it can mean drier; it can mean wetter; that’s what we’re dealing with.”

Beam me up.

Festinger deliciously penned the following assessment about this phenomenon:

    A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.

    We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating attacks.

    But man’s resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.

As a meteorologist colleague commented to me last night about a recent manifestation of precisely this, “these people are no different than the guys sitting around waiting for the spaceship.”

07/01 09:30 AM

http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/

At this point, whether global warming is real or not, I happen to believe it is, we are still RAPING this planet with no remorse.
But for the sake of future generations pull your head from the dark part of your anatomy and wake up.
I can hear the responses now, "blah, blah, blah....the planet is always changing and going through changes....but usually drastic change has taken place over a very long period of time.....
There will always be boths sides of the agrument, but there is evidence that man has been slowly chipping away at the health of the planet for years now.
Is it okay that we have polluted the St Johns River to the extent we have?  Our disregard of its health will cost millions of dollars to clean up and we still have the capactiy to destroy this precious and beautiful resource if we don't wake up.
The same with the Everglades. Greed and bad judgment has damaged one of the most unique and amazing ecosystems on the planet, the only one of its kind....And guess what, it is costing taxpayers MILLIONS of not more to save it.
All of this puts hardship on people and their quality of life.
If you don't believe mans abuse can cause irreversable damage just take a look at the Aral Sea in Russia. This is a man made disaster that has brought misery and suffering to many people and robbed them of their livelihood
I would rather err on the side of saving the environment, just in case the global warming side is right....
If you want to call me a tree hugger, thank you in advance for the greatest compliment you could give me....