The best way to read this article is to start at the end and read backwards. I didn't at first recognize the recently and Orwellianly rebranded name (in the wake of disastrous publicity) of the federal government's agency that's supposed to be in charge of regulating companies involved in offshore drilling, but this is the same agency whose personnel has recently been implicated in not just being figuratively in bed with, but literally having sex with, people from the offshore drilling companies they're supposed to be regulating (and snorting cocaine with them too). You just can't make this stuff up.
And so extreme is the apparent regulatory capture that a scientist who works for the agency and reports seeing dead polar bears gets interrogated and then suspended by his employer.
OK sorry to comment on my own comment but I've been reading up on this the past couple hours and I once again call total bullshit on the Obama administration.
I made several donations to the Obama campaign but like so many others I have been terribly disappointed at what a flimsy useless ballsack he has been at actually walking the walk and even ensuring a halfway decently basic level of adult functionality in the federal government.
How hard is it after two and a half years in office to have an agency that isn't still figuratively if not still literally spreading its legs wide open for the industry it's supposed to be regulating.
The US Federal government employs 2.5 million people. Promising significant changes in such a gigantic organization is one thing, actually achieving them quite another, no matter how well-meaning or competent one is...
The problem is that one thinks that they can control and manage such a large organization. There are inherent structural dynamics that will always come to fore.
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine the can design.” F. A. Hayek
Hmm, climatedepot.com looks pretty a bit... unhinged. Do the various professors on its parent organization's Board of Advisors (http://www.cfact.org/about/1551/CFACT-Board-of-Advisors) realize they're running essentially a tabloid? I would think that even if you had skeptical views on the climate-change debate, you would want your name associated with publications that take a more serious tone...
I'm sure they have less "unhinged" publications as well. But this site echoes how a lot of people think, and how those who fund CFACT want them to think. I doubt anyone works for them without realizing this. Ultimately, their job is to sway the opinion of the general public into this direction, and I suppose they see this as covering all their bases.
I don't know anything about this particular propaganda site but I have done research in the past that showed there are a lot of just pure propaganda machine organizations that get funding from the likes of Exxon Mobil and who all write off all their budgets and funding for tax-free "education" purposes, that just spew out the stupidest and most unscientific bullshit you could possibly imagine. I have interviewed scientists who are quoted in press releases by these propaganda mills who vehemently protested to me about how terribly their research had been misrepresented. There is literally nothing to the entire worldwide "global warming skeptic" movement that is not completely based on and funded by these well-funded and completely unscientific propaganda campaigns. I found out the people running these propaganda mills, who are by the way total morons, are paying themselves in the quarter-million-dollar range for annual salaries for their Exxon-Mobil and Mellon / Scaife Foundations funded "educational non-profits". And the reach of their propaganda bullshit machines is at least enough to brainwash a whole lot of dupes even on Hacker News to place downvotes in the past eight hours to anything that discusses global climate without saying that every single scientist in the entire world is party to a global conspiracy to smother john fucking galt.
And by the way there are an astonishing number of exactly the same organizations and exactly the same people in the propaganda machine against global warming who also raked in millions of dollars in the failed campaign to convince the world that smoking cigarettes was totally awesome and completely harmless to human health. Get a fucking clue people. TO YOU HACKER NEWS DOWNVOTERS: IF YOU THINK GLOBAL WARMING IS NOT REAL YOU HAVE BEEN COMPLETELY DUPED BY A NOT EVEN VERY SMART PROPAGANDA MACHINE AND YOU ARE NOT A COOL REBEL SMARTER THAN MOST PEOPLE, YOU ARE A DUMB AND COMPLETELY BRAINWASHED PAWN. Deal with it.
EDIT TO ADD, funny how nothing I've ever posted on HN before has ever been downvoted into negative territory except calling out global warming "skeptics". Good job, you clever and not at all duped rebels who can't be bothered to try to propose any actual rational thought or commentary in the process!
EDIT AGAIN to say I am astonished by the sheer volume of downvotes being rained down on every post in this one HN page without one single comment of explanation by the downvoters, which is like nothing I've ever seen on Hacker News. Where are your ovaries and/or balls to explain yourselves, downvoters?
You don't think that the downvotes are due to your tone, or the fact that you're not really adding anything to the conversation? I enjoy insulting people who don't believe in climate change as much as anyone, but never in the context of trying to present my research (note that you claim that your first paragraph is the result of your research) and never on HN, since it adds nothing to the conversation and weakens arguments. Complaining about being downvoted and insulting anyone who downvotes you also tends to be a good way to get downvoted - adds nothing to the conversation, doesn't make people think that you're a level-headed person they should listen to.
EDIT: And your comment is now in the positive. Which lets me point out that a really standard pattern on HN is for comments to be downvoted before being upvoted - since the first people who get to comments tend to be those who blindly downvote anything they dislike, and are then followed by the ones who actually look at comments. Complaining and freaking out about it can only make it worse.
Yeah, the tone was not ideal for persuasive writing. I just found myself astonished to witness a volume of downvotes, not only on this post but also on my original post on this page which did not have the same exasperated tone, that across the board was orders of magnitude greater than anything I've ever seen on HN, but without a single comment from the downvoters to try to explain themselves, which really called into question why there are so many people on HN who have managed to accumulate enough karma to downvote but who are also both (1) dumb enough to be hostile to every post on the topic of global warming that doesn't treat it as a made-up conspiracy, and (2) ovary-less and/or ball-less enough not to offer any explanation why they are downvoting.
You seem to be reciting a bunch of talking points from "your side", some of which are clearly false and others of which you couldn't possibly know are true. You have jumped to conclusions beyond that suggested by the data.
When you say you "did research in the past" what you appear to mean is that you googled up a couple of pages from places like SourceWatch and ExxonSecrets and read what the propagandists on your side say about the propagandists on the other side. That's not research. You have to look at both sides to reach valid conclusions.
For instance, you say "There is literally nothing to the entire worldwide "global warming skeptic" movement that is not completely based on and funded by these well-funded and completely unscientific propaganda campaigns."
That is pretty obviously not true. The skeptics who post at, say, http://climateaudit.org are not funded by companies like Exxon or getting any conclusions from them. Steve McIntyre's work (Or Craig Loehle, or...) isn't "completely based on" or at all based on the work of Exxon-Mobile, Mellon/Scaife or, heck, the Illuminati / Trilateral Commission / Church of England. Meanwhile, some of the sources on your side of the issue - advocating climate alarmism - are actually funded by energy interests. For instance, CRU was funded by British Petroleum. ( source: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history/ )
"I found out the people running these propaganda mills, who are by the way total morons"
If you want to say something like that, you need to be specific. What organizations are you calling propaganda mills, who are "the people" you claim are "running them", and what is your evidence that these people are "total morons"? Absent any of that info, you're just making an unfocused and uninformative rant that should be downvoted in favor of comments in which people say things that are actually, well, things. You're accusing several vast vaguely-defined groups of people of having been "COMPLETELY DUPED" - not partly, but completely - by several other vaguely-defined groups of people who are controlled by other vaguely-defined groups of people. And going on to make specific nasty assertions about all these entirely undefined groups. This isn't even information. It's just incoherent rambling.
Thanks for having the ovaries or balls to speak up for your until now silent cohort, and OK I'll name names. Here's one great example: Amy Moritz Ridenour:
She is a total intellectual prostitute for the anti global warming agenda, takes a shitload of tax-free "educational" funding from the likes of Exxon Mobil and the Scaife Foundations, which is publicly available knowledge (but not from the Trilateral Commission as far as I know, sorry to disappoint your puerile cheap shot to paint anyone with a different opinion than you as a conspiracy theorist), to pay herself a salary that last I checked, several years ago, was north of $200,000 a year for a ridiculously easy and worthless job and allowed her and her employee husband, whom she also pays a salary out of these tax-free donations, to live on a lovely cul-de-sac near Washington D.C., and who also totally prostituted herself to the tobacco companies' deceptive propaganda campaign, as exposed by Mike Ceresi et al during the great tobacco litigation, before that ran dry and she had to make the switcheroo to brainwashing the gullible into thinking there's any possible scientific doubt about the reality of global warming. (You have to search under "Amy Moritz" for her work during her tobacco company whore days since that was before she got married.)
As you'll notice from her Wikipedia page she's also been involved and questioned in various Jack Abramoff schemes and other scandals which I didn't bother to mention before since they're not as important as the overarching evil of her intellectual prostitution to the anti global warming propaganda campaign.
As for doing "research in the past", actually I didn't just spend five seconds on Google, I found the single most significant piece of actual scientific evidence Ridenour had ever cited in her rants, actually from a peer-reviewed scientific journal, quite the rarity in her oeuvre, about a single time series of temperature measurements in Antarctica that had gone down over time, and I went to a conference in Chicago and personally met and talked with the lead investigator scientist from that paper and asked him about it in person, and he told me his temperature recordings had been going up everywhere he had been measuring in Antarctica except for one location that had had one temporary downward dip and he was tired of how often he'd been outraged to be contacted by national media outlets who had been told his research hinted that global warming wasn't true. And I confronted Amy with this fact, and she totally backpedaled and made moronically lame excuses about the one closest thing to actual scientific evidence she had ever produced in her entire career in intellectual whoredom.
So as for the propagandists involved being morons, that's just my personal experience dealing with people like Amy so I don't have a citation for those dealings, but her Wikipedia page is also a great place to start for anyone else wanting to get a sense of her moronitude, and a more extensive analysis of her life's work will reward any curious student with an exploding brain in response to the depraved depths of moronitude to be found. As for references I don't really give a shit and you can take over from here if you actually care about learning true facts about your world, i.e. it's left as an exercise for the student, because I got burned out on all this shit a few years ago after trying to deal with the total wreckage of the Bush Administration for a few years.
And FYI I was shocked to see how much of every single Republican congressperson's written and spoken commentary about global warming came absolutely VERBATIM from Ridenour and other fellow absolute moron prostitutes like her, and I'm sure that hasn't changed or if anything is worse than ever. And this total bullshit was the best these members of congress could come up with to make excuses to do nothing about global warming. Spend a little time thinking about that.
As for my actual position, I'm left-wing enough to hold the same position as that radical left-wing rag The Economist in accepting the scientific reality of global warming and that we have uncertainty about its coming effects but that uncertainty is reason to do more, not less, to understand and mitigate its efforts, in the same way that uncertainty about whether your house might possibly ever catch fire is not a good reason to refuse ever to spend a dime on homeowners' insurance.
And as for where to place blame, I have to have some pity on Amy who managed to find a way to make a really good living despite being a moron, i.e. exactly the same basis for pity I have for most members of congress, but I ascribe more moral failing to smarter people who don't do enough personal intellectual due diligence of their own to filter the bullshit from their dumber fellow humans, and I hope and expect Hacker News users to be smarter than members of congress not named Rush Holt and certainly smarter than those who make their living whoring for the more evil members of congress.
And if Ridenour or whoever else in the Republican intellectual whore wasteland wants to try to sue me for defamation or some other stupid bullshit now, she has more than enough information to find me and that is a fight that I would win and that would absolutely fill me with delight.
So when you said "There is literally nothing to the entire worldwide "global warming skeptic" movement that is not completely based on and funded by these well-funded and completely unscientific propaganda campaigns.", are you claiming that everybody who is a skeptic is getting their info from Amy Moritz Ridenour or some similar person?
My guess is that you're defining "the global warming skeptic movement" in a limited and essentially circular way. You're defining anybody who comes by their AGW skepticism independently or as a result of reading scientific papers or thinking things through from first principles or following the blog debates...as not part of the "movement".
As one contrary data point, I consider myself a skeptic, have followed the AGW issue for at least a decade, and I'd never heard of Amy Moritz Ridenour or - so far as I know - been influenced by her. People I have been influenced by include Steve McIntyre, Craig Loehle, all the IPCC reports, Richard Feynman, Michael Crichton, and the whole gang at RealClimate (both positively and negatively). I do tend to assume politicians are going to (a) tend to be morons, (b) tend to get their talking points from PR firms and think tanks. So if you just look at what Republican lawmakers say you might have a point. But AGW skepticism as a whole is something that has been independently invented by a great many people, including scientists who publish papers and get in debates and even get involved with the IPCC. Including people who aren't republicans.
One can surely explain some AGW skepticism as the result of astroturf organizations that fear carbon taxes, just as one can explain on the other side some AGW boosterism as the result of groups that expect to profit from Carbon Trading markets. But to explain all of it that way misses the mark. People believe what they believe based on what they know and have seen. AGW boosters and AGW skeptics tend to have different priors. They had different values going in, which flavored how they perceived the case being made by the two sides.
Some AGW skepticism is organic and perfectly reasonable, given the information available to the people involved at the time. There are lots of conflicting theories one could point at to explain the same data; some of these theories have been published in peer-reviewed literature and haven't been well-addressed.
I don't care to defend Ridenour, because I don't know her and even if she were squeaky-clean, I'm sure you can find somebody who is what you say she is. But being able to find one example of somebody in a movement who makes mistake X is different from saying that everybody in that movement makes mistake X. I think the burden of proof is still on you to support that your claims weren't ridiculously overbroad.
UPDATE: Some people become skeptics when they see alarmists engaging in shenanigans that go beyond the science or deliberately downplaying uncertainty in the science, and always doing so in the same direction. For one such instance, consider Chris Landsea's resignation letter. Was it, in your view, unjustified? Is it unreasonable for someone who has read Landsea's letter to thereafter take IPCC conclusions with a grain of salt? ( http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/La... )
I'm especially thinking of Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" lecture. His idea is that you should bend over backwards to expose any possible flaw in your own ideas. If you find an intellectual opponent who has made logical mistakes, fix those mistakes and try to answer the best possible version of the opposing argument. The opposite of that - the lazy thing to do - is to focus only on your opponent's weakest arguments and use them as an excuse to dismiss his views entirely. That's kind of what I see you doing in pointing at Amy whatsername.
(For Crichton, I'm mostly thinking of his "Aliens Cause Global Warming" talk, which did in my view capture some of the relevant dynamic on modern "consensus"-building.)
Yes, Feynman's Cargo Cult Science lecture is an old favorite of mine, and anyone who doesn't bend over backwards to repeatedly question every assumption and bit of evidence and source of information is never going to reach the best available analysis.
And doing that is hard, and all of us humans have huge limitations in our analytical abilities, and as a result I find it tremendously important to nurture an intellectual humility about my own understanding and knowledge and analysis. At the same time I find it important that at some point when you've done a lot of analysis on a lot of evidence over a long time, not to waffle about contradictory opinions that a hard look will show have little to no substance, because it's just a giant and completely uninteresting waste of time, and trying to debate every person who is wrong on the Internet who demands you provide a complete body of analysis and evidence that the Earth is not in fact flat, could easily absorb and completely waste every waking moment of one's life.
I also find it tremendously important to respect every person, even when I don't believe or respect an analysis or opinion of theirs, both as a basic axiom of human existence and because doing so makes me happier and because it's the only way to open the other person to a reasoning dialog, and obviously I haven't quite mastered that yet but I am practicing. I admire that you kept to an honest effort at reasoned debate after my exasperated flame.
With that said, I'm puzzled how after citing Feynman's Cargo Cult Science lecture and the importance of looking to rebut the strongest evidence rather than the weakest in an opposing view and looking straight to original scientific findings instead of to meta-meta-opinionating, the one real argument you bring up is Landsea's resgination letter.
The worldwide efforts to study the Earth's climate and to study what we might want to do about it involve untold thousands of people around the entire world for years on end. What are the chances that some one human being somewhere in there doesn't spend every moment of their life behaving in an absolutely rational and honest manner? And if the chances of that are non-zero, how much do all the molecules in the Earth's oceans and atmosphere care about that? And if those molecules don't care, what would you find a more useful focus of inquiry on which to spend your brain's finite operational lifetime?
You made a big batch of assertions to the effect that all skeptics are being completely fooled by organizations that are funded by Exxon and/or Koch. You said this with great confidence and amplified upon it based on "your research". But it's an extraordinary claim - basically you're saying everybody who disagrees with you has been fooled by a big conspiracy - it's a conspiracy theory. It's a "denial" of the more obvious possibility that some people just happen to disagree with you.
Like you, I'm kind of tired of debating CAGW and so I had no intention of trying to convince you CAGW is actually wrong. I only hope to disabuse you of your view that all skeptics are in thrall to The Cabal. To do that, I only need to find a counterexample or two.
CAGW is in practice an extremely complex chain of assertions; there are a great many particulars in which somebody might reasonably have a specific differing view from "the consensus" or be skeptical that the case for "the consensus" is sufficiently well-established to act upon.
So: Landsea. Landsea was skeptical of the IPCC's views on hurricanes - with good reason, since he was the relevant expert helping to write that chapter.
McIntyre was skeptical of the IPCC's views on Paleo reconstruction, again clearly with good reason and with no prior connection to the Kochtopus - statistics was a hobby interest of his and he just got curious.
I have a friend named Peter Ward who is an expert on volcanoes who does think AGW is a big important problem but is skeptical about CO2 as the primary driver - he thinks sulfur dioxide is more important than is commonly recognized (and has recently published a journal paper on the subject, albeit in a minor journal.)
So that's three people who are "skeptical" about some aspect of AGW not because they got talking points from whats-her-name but because what is commonly claimed contradicts their own expert assessment of the relevant literature.
Given the fact that there do exist people like that, your claim was false. That was all I was trying to say. I wasn't trying to prove that all skeptics are right or that none have been "duped" or, contrariwise, that all AGWers are mistaken. Just that some number of skeptics come by their views as a result of an honest assessment of the literature in areas of their own expertise. Or by evaluating the claims of others who have done that.
I absolutely agree with you that a few bad apples in the IPCC process don't necessarily spoil the whole bunch. The opposite of stupidity is not wisdom, sometimes it's just more stupidity. The AGW hypothesis is certainly worth somebody investigating. I just think claims of "consensus" and a need to "act right away, we don't have time to be certain" are a warning sign that one should probably wait and think some more about it. (This attitude has served me especially well when buying used cars. :-) )
Not considering this case in particular, but it is rather shameful how every single unusual weather event (and now 4 polar bears) is being exploited to promote the global warming political agenda. Not saying that the science is bad or that the policy objectives are wrong, but there should be more willingness for objectivity and reasoning.
Extreme events in isolation are saying nothing, the same as the isolated death of a few bears.
Objectivity and reasoning need on be founded on data, and data is a collection of single events, unusual or not. All this guy said was "we surveyed A1 square miles of arctic ocean and found N1 live polar bears and after a storm we surveyed A2 square miles and found N2 drifting dead bears, so basic arithmetic gives an estimate of X% of bears getting killed by such a storm in such an environment." And yeah, the small sample size results in a huge margin of error, but it's one perfectly legitimate datapoint. What connects it to global warming is that the environment in question has lately become increasingly ice-deficient, forcing the bears to swim long distances which is apparently very dangerous for them.
Global warming skeptics are free to provide their own data, but they seem to be more intent on personally attacking those who disagree.
Frankly, at this point anyone who claims that global warming isn't happening is either a paid industry shill or has allowed themselves to be brainwashed by such because he doesn't want to believe in something that implies his lifestyle is not sustainable. You can have legitimate arguments about the extent, speed, and cause of global warming, but claiming that it is not happening is neither objective nor reasonable given the undisputable evidence of shrinking glaciers and arctic ice covers.
Sure, some degree of global warming is probably happening. The bigger point here is that the "end-of-the-world" global warming is never going to happen. That is, the effect size of anthropogenic global warming is apparently small and does not match the original predictions put forth in the late 1980s. You can see the data (and complete lack of a rebuttal) here:
Note that the observed global temperature anomaly, in black, tracks Scenario C, a scenario that "assumed a rapid decline in greenhouse gas emissions around the year 2000." However, during the same period, atmospheric carbon dioxide increased by approximately 40 parts per million. [1]
So, where does that leave us? It leaves us with a climate sensitivity of 3°C for a DOUBLING of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Of course, this assumes the existence of positive feedbacks in the climate system. One such positive feedback might be a decrease in snowfall, something talked about in the early 2000s:
"According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become 'a very rare and exciting event'." [2]
Recently, though, the claims are now that "snow outside is what global warming looks like." [3]
Without positive feedbacks, the climate sensitivity is more like 1.2°C for a DOUBLING of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
OK but why does a scientist suddenly get interrogated by agents from his employer's Inspector General's office and then put on administrative leave for happening to mention in a report that he noticed dead polar bears. How do you even expect "science" to be done under those kinds of conditions. And the "global warming political agenda" is the thing you're worried about here? Seriously?
And so extreme is the apparent regulatory capture that a scientist who works for the agency and reports seeing dead polar bears gets interrogated and then suspended by his employer.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/09/10/52243/oil-companies-ga...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washington/11royalty.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09...