Possible Futures

[horatio83]

Our whiskey producers probably don't incur one dime of taxes that isn't passed directly to consumers

Only true if whiskey demand is perfectly price inelastic which is hardly realistic.
Do you want us to transport an economics textbook over to the mirror universe or do you prefer to remain ignorant? Not that you need basic economics to understand that somebody who is involved in a trade of any kind has an active interest in having low taxes on the particular good which is traded.
Rich fucks and banks do not appreciate capital taxes just like Jane Doe or her employer do not like labour taxes just like John Doe and the company he buys XYZ from do not like a VAT on XYZ.

If one's ideology enables one to ignore common sense this very ideology is obviously pretty screwed up.

 

[MANT!]

Keep drinking the Cool-Aid GT...

 

[gturner]

Our whiskey producers probably don't incur one dime of taxes that isn't passed directly to consumers

Only true if whiskey demand is perfectly price inelastic which is hardly realistic.

Well, if you study the liquor industry you'll need to drop your preconceptions. Whiskey, cigarettes, meth, and coke aren't quite like beans and widgets. Not only can demand be price-inelastic, increased prices often increases demand, sometimes dramatically. Nobody wants to drink Montezuma or Kentucky Gentleman, everyone wants Patron and Basil Hayden's. Hollywood actors don't want cheap crack, they want lines of coke. Think of it as part of the luxury fashion industry. Our distillers raised prices to increase sales.

Similarly, Neiman Marcus often takes a set of European clothes that nobody is interested in, marks it up three-fold, and then everyone has to have it.

But back to the question of whether the distillery, if demand decreased, is actually paying any share of the tax. Just because they come out with less money doesn't mean they paid any of it to the government.

So somewhere in the distillery, Mr. Jim Beam XII notices that he only sold 500,000 bottles instead of 600,000 bottles (possibly because of the higher taxes, or possibly because the higher taxes weren't high enough to push his product into the premium market). He sold fewer bottles, so he made less revenue, but he spent less making the fewer bottles.

Jim's cost per bottle is unaffect by the tax, because they're taxing whiskey, not grain. His profit per bottle is unaffected by the tax (because he can charge whatever he wants, and all his competitors got hit with the same tax, so relative market share is largely unaffected). Jim doesn't even have to know that his product is being taxed, because he never wanders into a liquor store and the tax could be placed purely on retailers, while Jim only deals with wholesalers.

All Jim knows is that he made $500,000 instead of $600,000, so his business taxes are lower, and if he pays himself a fixed percentage of business profits, his personal taxes are lower. How is he paying more in taxes if he's writing a smaller check to the government? But if the taxes are high enough to drive his product into the premium market and he made $700,000 instead of $600,000, is he getting a tax subsidy? Does the IRS actually write him a check?

ETA:

And the big question is, what if he could get the government to, in an effort to reduce alcohol consumption, reduce production by 30%. The alcoholics and rich drinkers have to have their alcohol, and if supply is limited the price can double or triple and people will still pay it.

BTW, the alcohol industry runs on the 20%/80% rule, where 20% of the population buys 80% of the product, and of that 20%, 20% buys 80%, and of that 20%, 20% buys 80%). These are your occassional, frequent, habitual, and heavy drinkers. Almost all advertising is aimed at the heavy consumers.

Normally the industry profit is constrained by over supply (the stuff is cheap to make and demand is limited, so the price tends to stay stuck near the production costs). But with a very inelastic demand, prices and profits skyrocket during a period of limited supply. The Kennedys and Al Capone made their fortune because of artificial limitations on liquor supplies (prohibition). Our Eastern and Western Kentucky moonshiners had an economic boom time. The only reason the legal liquor industry hated prohibition was because they were the ones locked out of the incredibly lucrative market, which is normally barely profitable.

Prohibition wasn't at all like a liquor tax.

 

[horatio83]

Not only can demand be price-inelastic, increased prices often increases demand, sometimes dramatically.

Good thing you are not running a company. Hey Joey, nobody wants to buy our crap so let's make it more expensive.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Some of us don't want to live in a wigwam powered by a toy windmill and drive a golf cart to a carbon-neutral gourd dipper factory.

Those folks ought to look into further education, particularly job-specific training, if they're currently living in such conditions and want to better themselves.

Unless that's what you meant, your remark neither addresses any real circumstance now nor is it at all observant or successful as satire.

Refusal to accept the findings of science and implement the real innovations necessary to address our changing circumstances simply because it's inconvenient to Right-wing ideologies guarantees that your descendants, if any, will live in poverty.

 

[gturner]

It's not a finding of science, its a conjecture that doesn't match the observations. Alll through the geological record, CO2 lags temperature swings by centuries. The evidence that CO2 is a primary driver temperatures is non-existent.

The science keeps refuting the hockey stick, with the latest tree-ring data giving a beautifully detailed record of the Medieval Warm Period that Michael Mann and his cohorts desperately tried to make disappear. Recent studies of antarctic temperatures confirm that the Medieval Warm Period was both large and global, also refuting the IPCC's work.

The climate models rely on fudge factors and guesses at the relationships, drivers, and feedbacks, still can't successfully backcast temperatures over the past century any better than a random stochastic walk, and fail at making remotely reproducible regional predictions.

Satellite studies of cloud feedbacks using a variety of methods continually find the feedbacks to be negative, whereas the IPCC predictions rely on high positive feedbacks because without that assumption, the 2100 temperature predictions hardly rise 1 degree C.

Studies of the link between solar cycles and temperatures are producing the best gains in modeling climate, especially with the recent research showing that the sunspot number predicts the temperatures during the next solar cycle, not the current one. When that is combined with the PDO and AMO (ocean c ycle) time lags, it matches up with past climate far better than the GCM's used by any of the IPCC contributors. The IPCC models are tuned to take CO2 as an input and produce the temperature graph from around 1980 to 1998, where the correlation between two rising values is trivial. The models fail everywhere else, both prior and after this period. As the head of the East Anglia CRU said, "We can't explain the lack of warming, and it's a travesty that we can't."

And as I've said, the geological record and human history shows that warmer temperatures produced high plant productivity and biodiversity, as does simple logic.

What will be more interesting is the later books and scientific articles written about this period as the dark-age of science, examining the factors that led to a total failure of procedure and method, led to groupthink, fraud, suppression of disssenting research, the blackmailing and blacklisting of prominent scientists, corrupt collaboration with government and media (such as the BBC/CRU investigations), and the psychological factors involved.

"I'm saving the planet" will be prominent, because anyone who thinks they're going to save the planet and all of humanity can mentally justify anything to convince everybody else of the imagined danger. This leads directly to "noble cause corruption", which is what led an esteemed scientists like Peter Gleick to commit idendity fraud and forgery. The shinanigans of "The Team" are definitely inflicted with paranoia and insular groupthink, and prominent scientists in other fields have pointed to the shoddiness of climate research as evidence (such as their statistical methods that wouldn't pass an undergraduate statistics class, because they won't even consult with a statistics professor).

How such a large swath of the public got sucked into this nonsense through very simplistic claims and cheesy advocacy groups, to the level that they act like cult members, is also worth a couple books.

For example, we're all sitting here on a Trek Board, commenting away on all sorts of topics. We have mainstream protestants, evangelicals, Orthodox, Catholics, Jews, an occassional Muslim, lapsed versions of them, small 'a' atheists and hard-core atheists. We have hard-core communists, socialists, liberals, moderates, conservatives, and libertarians.

And nobody gets much upset by anything other people say - unless someone mentions future global average temperature predictions, one of the most trivial, unimportant topics anyone could possibly bring up. Then the believers turn into stark, raving lunatics and start screaming, cursing, and denouncing anyone who expresses the slightest doubts as an evil greedy, corporate pawn of Satan.

How can a projected 1 degree change in average climate be important, especially when all the people sitting here commenting are sitting in average climates that vary by at least 20 degrees? Do they really think that if we randomly swapped chairs, half of us would die?

It's like a splinter in their mind. If the commenter from Alberta said he was moving to Singapore (right on the equator) or Phoenix (right in the middle of a desert), we'd expect him to keep commenting from his new apartment - after a jump in his average climate that absolutely dwarfs the IPCC's craziest prediction for 2200. In the last 3 days my local temperatures dropped from 104F to 69F, and it wasn't even worth mentioning. If temperature were really important to us, we'd all have long ago moved to place where we're all at the same temperature, all day long, perhaps renting out a Hawaiian condo for Trek BBS members.

So somehow, over the past decade or so, people who don't have the slightest care what their climate's average temperature is, to probably within plus or minus 10 or 15C, are convinced that any change, however small, in a parameter they don't actually care about, is the most important thing in the history of the world. They will sit and scream about the possibility of a 0.1 degree change over a decade, typing away while the air temperature outside their house jumps by 100F. They get irate if anyone even dares to question a piece of illogical data they heard, even data they heard from a blonde journalism major who heard it from a blonde communications major who heard it from an intern at an animal park. The irrationality of it is mind blowing.

Needless to say, how this came to pass, and what's going on in these people's heads, is very interesting to those who take the time to observe it.

 

[sonak]

It's not a finding of science, its a conjecture that doesn't match the observations. Alll through the geological record, CO2 lags temperature swings by centuries. The evidence that CO2 is a primary driver temperatures is non-existent.

The science keeps refuting the hockey stick, with the latest tree-ring data giving a beautifully detailed record of the Medieval Warm Period that Michael Mann and his cohorts desperately tried to make disappear. Recent studies of antarctic temperatures confirm that the Medieval Warm Period was both large and global, also refuting the IPCC's work.

The climate models rely on fudge factors and guesses at the relationships, drivers, and feedbacks, still can't successfully backcast temperatures over the past century any better than a random stochastic walk, and fail at making remotely reproducible regional predictions.

Satellite studies of cloud feedbacks using a variety of methods continually find the feedbacks to be negative, whereas the IPCC predictions rely on high positive feedbacks because without that assumption, the 2100 temperature predictions hardly rise 1 degree C.

Studies of the link between solar cycles and temperatures are producing the best gains in modeling climate, especially with the recent research showing that the sunspot number predicts the temperatures during the next solar cycle, not the current one. When that is combined with the PDO and AMO (ocean c ycle) time lags, it matches up with past climate far better than the GCM's used by any of the IPCC contributors. The IPCC models are tuned to take CO2 as an input and produce the temperature graph from around 1980 to 1998, where the correlation between two rising values is trivial. The models fail everywhere else, both prior and after this period. As the head of the East Anglia CRU said, "We can't explain the lack of warming, and it's a travesty that we can't."

And as I've said, the geological record and human history shows that warmer temperatures produced high plant productivity and biodiversity, as does simple logic.

What will be more interesting is the later books and scientific articles written about this period as the dark-age of science, examining the factors that led to a total failure of procedure and method, led to groupthink, fraud, suppression of disssenting research, the blackmailing and blacklisting of prominent scientists, corrupt collaboration with government and media (such as the BBC/CRU investigations), and the psychological factors involved.

"I'm saving the planet" will be prominent, because anyone who thinks they're going to save the planet and all of humanity can mentally justify anything to convince everybody else of the imagined danger. This leads directly to "noble cause corruption", which is what led an esteemed scientists like Peter Gleick to commit idendity fraud and forgery. The shinanigans of "The Team" are definitely inflicted with paranoia and insular groupthink, and prominent scientists in other fields have pointed to the shoddiness of climate research as evidence (such as their statistical methods that wouldn't pass an undergraduate statistics class, because they won't even consult with a statistics professor).

How such a large swath of the public got sucked into this nonsense through very simplistic claims and cheesy advocacy groups, to the level that they act like cult members, is also worth a couple books.

For example, we're all sitting here on a Trek Board, commenting away on all sorts of topics. We have mainstream protestants, evangelicals, Orthodox, Catholics, Jews, an occassional Muslim, lapsed versions of them, small 'a' atheists and hard-core atheists. We have hard-core communists, socialists, liberals, moderates, conservatives, and libertarians.

And nobody gets much upset by anything other people say - unless someone mentions future global average temperature predictions, one of the most trivial, unimportant topics anyone could possibly bring up. Then the believers turn into stark, raving lunatics and start screaming, cursing, and denouncing anyone who expresses the slightest doubts as an evil greedy, corporate pawn of Satan.

How can a projected 1 degree change in average climate be important, especially when all the people sitting here commenting are sitting in average climates that vary by at least 20 degrees? Do they really think that if we randomly swapped chairs, half of us would die?

It's like a splinter in their mind. If the commenter from Alberta said he was moving to Singapore (right on the equator) or Phoenix (right in the middle of a desert), we'd expect him to keep commenting from his new apartment - after a jump in his average climate that absolutely dwarfs the IPCC's craziest prediction for 2200. In the last 3 days my local temperatures dropped from 104F to 69F, and it wasn't even worth mentioning. If temperature were really important to us, we'd all have long ago moved to place where we're all at the same temperature, all day long, perhaps renting out a Hawaiian condo for Trek BBS members.

So somehow, over the past decade or so, people who don't have the slightest care what their climate's average temperature is, to probably within plus or minus 10 or 15C, are convinced that any change, however small, in a parameter they don't actually care about, is the most important thing in the history of the world. They will sit and scream about the possibility of a 0.1 degree change over a decade, typing away while the air temperature outside their house jumps by 100F. They get irate if anyone even dares to question a piece of illogical data they heard, even data they heard from a blonde journalism major who heard it from a blonde communications major who heard it from an intern at an animal park. The irrationality of it is mind blowing.

Needless to say, how this came to pass, and what's going on in these people's heads, is very interesting to those who take the time to observe it.

your reasoning baffles me in parts here. What are you trying to demonstrate by your examples saying that someone who moved from Green Bay to Miami or in the Caribbean somewhere would see huge average temperature differences? What does this have to do with whether climate change is occurring?

 

[gturner]

^ It's pointing out that none of us cares, to a very large degree, what our average climate actually is. Nobody lives at an average of all locations, they live at a one or a couple of locations. Everybody on the planet occupies a particular spot, and they live in the climate at that spot. But the particular spot doesn't really matter to them (we live everywhere from the arctic to the equator), and the climate at the particular spot doesn't really matter to them (we live from tundra to desert to jungle).

We change our climate whenever we change spots, and nobody bats an eye at moving from Northern Sasketchewan to Singapore, or vice versa. We willingly make such moves for extremely trivial reasons, a 5% raise, met somebody on the Internet, liked a documentary on the Discovery Channel, etc. So to us, our actual climate must be more trivial than even these trivial reasons. But is there any subjective difference whether we move to Singapore's climate or Singapore's climate moves to us? If we wake up hungover and walk outside, how could we tell which happened without looking at our GPS coordinates?

How can people, who don't care about their actual climate to within 10 or 15 degrees C, be obsessing over 0.5C over decades? I'd argue that it's religious or primitive symbolism, akin to a superstition about Karmic balance. They could've been told that odd numbered temperatures are good, and even numbered temperatures are bad and they'd be just as happily deranged.

On top of that, the changes for even the IPCC's most alarmist predictions aren't like Singapore and Sasketchewan, a difference we find trivial. They're like Kentucky versus Tennessee, Delaware versus Maryland, or north central California versus south central California. Since the magnitude of the temperature difference won't alarm anyone who gives it much thought (drive 60 miles South and behold the future 30 years hence), alarmists have to portray change as the real danger.

But these climate changes are always taking place. We're recovering from the little ice age. We're likely still much cooler than the Roman or Medieval Warm Periods (Farming in Greenland is still futile), and those periods were cool compared to much of the current interglacial. We're still in what geologists consider an ice age, and before that (and during previous interglacials) it was much warmer than present - and life thrived.

So the alarmists associate every bad location and every bad event with "climate change", even though scientific research says global warming would alleviate weather extremes. They associate it with broiling hot days, even though the theory says days will be little changed, but the nights won't be as cold. They associate it with drought, even though warming largely drives rainfall.

The largest desert is the antarctic, and the most obvious feature of the Sahara (and Saudi Arabia), visible from the moon, is that it reflects sunlight almost as much as snow does. In part, it is a desert because it doesn't heat up enough to drive strong vertical convection currents and destabilize the atmosphere to produce clouds and rain from all the water vapor wafting in from the Atlantic. Cities, on the other hand, are massive heat islands that can produce their own daily thunderstorms, a well-studied scientific phenomenon in Atlanta, home of The Weather Channel.

Nor is the rate of change unusual, either in geologic or historical times. The climate is always bouncing around, which is why models that simulate it as a random stochastic walk reproduce the variation patterns better than CO2 driven GCMs, which tend to produce a flatline past and then a ramp as CO2 levels increased. (This vast divergence between simple CO2 driven models and the historical record is what drove Michael Mann and The Team to try desperately to erase the Medieval Warm period).

I argued with an early comment about picking random locations on the planet and tossing a coin to either warm or cool the spot, then recording whether the new temperature was better or worse for life, and that the result should be 50-50 or biased towards warmth. But pretty much every single research paper that picks a location predicts horrible, catastrophic outcomes for it if the temperature goes up. That's not only not logical, it's not physically possible. Every single location on the planet can't already be at its highest optimal temperature, because the planet's temperatures vary over a roughly 200 degree range.

How can each degree on a thermometer be equally perfect if any slight change from one degree to another is catastrophic? It makes no logical sense, at least mathematically, but it does make great ecclesiastical sense. If God's creation is perfect then any change in it moves it away from perfection. That notion predates Judaism and Christianity because it's a predilection of our primate brains, and last time I checked, scientists and atheists were still using the same old-model monkey brain that everyone else, including medieval monks, were stuck with.

To our short-term oriented wiring, the climate shouldn't change, only the seasons should. We've never had lifespans long enough to watch the ice ages come and go and see that one year is not like the next, nor are the decades, centuries, and millenia. We're inherently convinced that nothing about the Earth should change because most changes happen to slow for us to care about, and what changes we do see are usually violent and frightening weather events.

And then to top it off, the high-priests of the tribe say the climate change is our fault. We have angered Apollo and Ares! We must repent!

So when I talk about change, and that the change will be slight and good, the tribe of primates reacts with fear, superstition, shocked disbelief, invokes mystic incantations, and calls me an evil sorcerer.

Amusingly, they always do this, kind of like a dog getting scratched in the spot that makes his back leg kick. But sometimes, a few of them figure it out and go back to real science and supportable logic instead of being terrified by a warning about a temperature rise vastly smaller than what they just experienced while eating a morning donut surfing the Trek board.

 

[horatio83]

Lots of soliloquies to skip. The professionals from Cato, AEI or any other right-wing think tank are better at this propaganda game.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

It's not a finding of science

Yes it is - or, more precisely, it's many findings, derived from a plethora of observations and masses of data collected and analyzed over periods of decades now by innumerable researchers. Of the few "doubters" who are, in fact, subject matter experts most owe their livelihoods to their supposed skepticism.

There is, of course, no shortage of gullible consumers of this bogus skepticism as it confirms and supports their political prejudices and agendas.

...its a conjecture that doesn't match the observations.

No.

 

[Ship's Computer]

Any M Class planet supporting life-forms will be effected by climate change given the dynamic nature of such environments. Why it should be such a contentious issue is really the question.

As for what the future holds for Mankind, the global economy is what drives the political and to some point the technological schema of things. Technology exists that can alleviate pollution, over-crowding, and civil war. However, such technologies are counter-productive to current economic trends where profits are all that matter. Why should an oil company allow the release of an engine that uses a fuel other than one derived from oil even if it's more powerful, more productive, cleaner, and cheaper to produce? Oil reserves are diminishing, however even the Japanese will eventually kill the last whale on the planet in order to conduct their "reseach".

Take the future of robotics: What will drive a company to produce a robot that looks human given that economically in the industrial world there is no need for a robot that looks human? Only the sex industry would benefit as robotic prostitutes which can be mass produced would be a safer and "cleaner" alternative to the existing trade in present day. Given that the sex industry is a multi-billion doller industry, we are once again faced with the reality that it's a profit margin driving our future.

Alternative fuels will come into their own but only when they become financially more viable than present fuels. Cars will one day fly, but only when existing tyre companies can think of a way to make a buck out of it without going broke.

It's all about money in the end.

 

[gturner]

It's not a finding of science

Yes it is - or, more precisely, it's many findings, derived from a plethora of observations and masses of data collected and analyzed over periods of decades now by innumerable researchers. Of the few "doubters" who are, in fact, subject matter experts most owe their livelihoods to their supposed skepticism.

Um, not by a long shot. Geologists (I live in a house full of them) note that CO2 has very weak, if any, correlation to temperature in the geological record. We've gone into ice ages with CO2 levels 10 to 15 times higher than present, and we've been much hotter with low CO2 levels. Those are observations. We go through ice ages timed by the Milankovitch cycles, and no one has yet suggested how animals and plants could somehow anticipate our orbital mechanics and die at the appropriate time to produce a CO2 drop).

These are observations, and they conflict with global warming theory, so a small band of scientists (usually called "The Team") worked to change the facts, in one case using a single tree as a temperature proxy for all of Eurasia (the tree now has a really nice plaque!) In their leaked e-mails, they desperately avoided questions from a botany professor who explained that pine trees can't be used as temperature proxies. Perhaps that's why in their hockey stick graph, they had to hide the last part of their tree-ring record, because it showed temperatures dropping since the mid-20th century. That was what the quote "Hide the decline" referred to.

Many of the scientists who worked on the IPCC report resigned, such as Chris Landsea, and upon investigation, it turned out that about 30% of the IPCC report comes straight from non-peer reviewed papers written by advocacy groups. That's how Pauchuri got burned on the disappearing Himilayan glaciers.

No skeptics make their livelihood from skepticism. As I pointed out, even the leading skeptics like Anthony Watts get perhaps a coffee mug. Conversely, the alarmist scientists are getting grants worth hundreds of millions of dollars, get millions from speaking (James Hansen has had to defend himself because he personally raked in over a million dollars from alarmists while a public employee of NASA).

There is, of course, no shortage of gullible consumers of this bogus skepticism as it confirms and supports their political prejudices and agendas.

Um, talk about gullible. Would you care to explain how scientists determined what the optimum average temperature of our planet actually is? I'll wait while you look that up.

*waits*

Oh, they skipped that step. Geologists would go with the Eocene maximum, when the Arctic was 73F, monitor lizards lived in Greenland, the Antarctic had forests, while Canada had palm trees and the same yearly average temperature that Florida does now. Geologists call it "the Eocene Optimum" because life flourished everywhere. The big mystery is that the tropics weren't much hotter than today, either. It's like the whole planet was warm and happy, like Hawaii writ large. Climate models can't reproduce it. They can't even come close, which tells you how good climate models are (Garbage in - garbage out).

No, they didn't do any studies to figure out what an optimal temperature might look like (and can't even figure out why the Eocene was so nice), but since their notion was that man was causing climate change, they just assumed the change would have to be a world-ending catastrophe of Biblical proportions. End of Days stuff.

The rest was finding evidence of actual, unambiguous change, which they couldn't so they made stuff up ("Which is what half of the interesting East Anglia e-mails are about), and then convincing everyone that they were right. They couldn't do that either, so they started blacklisting scientists and getting journal editors fired. They even said they would redefine what "peer-reviewed" literature is so they could dismiss anything they didn't like as appearing in a "non-peer-reviewed" journal. That's what the other interesting half of the East-Anglia e-mails are about.

When all the evidence is on your side, you don't have to resort to fraud, forgery, and chicanery. That they did so convinced more people, including many formerly alarmist journalists, that the skeptics were right than anything the skeptics ever said. It even convinced prominent and highly-respected climate scientist Judith Curry to meet skeptics half-way and look at what her field had become. Of course she was immediately branded a witch by believers.

You'd think the field wasn't even remotely connected to science, because in real science, scientists present and debate evidence and experiments, with standards like open access to data, repeatability, etc. In climate science they conduct progroms to expose and denounce heretics.

Of course in science a theory also has to be at least theoretically falsifiable, but to date nobody has come up with a hypothetical measurement or event that would disprove global warming. That's why you can't name one which I can't dismiss with a paper from the alarmist camp.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

It's not a finding of science

Yes it is - or, more precisely, it's many findings, derived from a plethora of observations and masses of data collected and analyzed over periods of decades now by innumerable researchers. Of the few "doubters" who are, in fact, subject matter experts most owe their livelihoods to their supposed skepticism.

Um, not by a long shot. Geologists (I live in a house full of them) note that CO2 has very weak, if any, correlation to temperature in the geological record. We've gone into ice ages with CO2 levels 10 to 15 times higher than present, and we've been much hotter with low CO2 levels. Those are observations. We go through ice ages timed by the Milankovitch cycles, and no one has yet suggested how animals and plants could somehow anticipate our orbital mechanics and die at the appropriate time to produce a CO2 drop).

These are observations, and they conflict with global warming theory, so a small band of scientists (usually called "The Team") worked to change the facts, in one case using a single tree as a temperature proxy for all of Eurasia (the tree now has a really nice plaque!) In their leaked e-mails, they desperately avoided questions from a botany professor who explained that pine trees can't be used as temperature proxies. Perhaps that's why in their hockey stick graph, they had to hide the last part of their tree-ring record, because it showed temperatures dropping since the mid-20th century. That was what the quote "Hide the decline" referred to.

Many of the scientists who worked on the IPCC report resigned, such as Chris Landsea, and upon investigation, it turned out that about 30% of the IPCC report comes straight from non-peer reviewed papers written by advocacy groups. That's how Pauchuri got burned on the disappearing Himilayan glaciers.

No skeptics make their livelihood from skepticism. As I pointed out, even the leading skeptics like Anthony Watts get perhaps a coffee mug. Conversely, the alarmist scientists are getting grants worth hundreds of millions of dollars, get millions from speaking (James Hansen has had to defend himself because he personally raked in over a million dollars from alarmists while a public employee of NASA).

There is, of course, no shortage of gullible consumers of this bogus skepticism as it confirms and supports their political prejudices and agendas.

Um, talk about gullible. Would you care to explain how scientists determined what the optimum average temperature of our planet actually is? I'll wait while you look that up.

*waits*

Oh, they skipped that step. Geologists would go with the Eocene maximum, when the Arctic was 73F, monitor lizards lived in Greenland, the Antarctic had forests, while Canada had palm trees and the same yearly average temperature that Florida does now. Geologists call it "the Eocene Optimum" because life flourished everywhere. The big mystery is that the tropics weren't much hotter than today, either. It's like the whole planet was warm and happy, like Hawaii writ large. Climate models can't reproduce it. They can't even come close, which tells you how good climate models are (Garbage in - garbage out).

No, they didn't do any studies to figure out what an optimal temperature might look like (and can't even figure out why the Eocene was so nice), but since their notion was that man was causing climate change, they just assumed the change would have to be a world-ending catastrophe of Biblical proportions. End of Days stuff.

The rest was finding evidence of actual, unambiguous change, which they couldn't so they made stuff up ("Which is what half of the interesting East Anglia e-mails are about), and then convincing everyone that they were right. They couldn't do that either, so they started blacklisting scientists and getting journal editors fired. They even said they would redefine what "peer-reviewed" literature is so they could dismiss anything they didn't like as appearing in a "non-peer-reviewed" journal. That's what the other interesting half of the East-Anglia e-mails are about.

When all the evidence is on your side, you don't have to resort to fraud, forgery, and chicanery. That they did so convinced more people, including many formerly alarmist journalists, that the skeptics were right than anything the skeptics ever said. It even convinced prominent and highly-respected climate scientist Judith Curry to meet skeptics half-way and look at what her field had become. Of course she was immediately branded a witch by believers.

You'd think the field wasn't even remotely connected to science, because in real science, scientists present and debate evidence and experiments, with standards like open access to data, repeatability, etc. In climate science they conduct progroms to expose and denounce heretics.

Of course in science a theory also has to be at least theoretically falsifiable, but to date nobody has come up with a hypothetical measurement or event that would disprove global warming. That's why you can't name one which I can't dismiss with a paper from the alarmist camp.

Sources?

 

[nightwind1]

A bunch of anti-climate change conspiracy warblgrbl clipped...

 

[gturner]

From The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/s...-gifts-from-gas-driller-a-roiling-debate.html

The recent disclosure of the Sierra Club’s secret acceptance of $26 million in donations from people associated with a natural gas company has revived an uncomfortable debate among environmental groups about corporate donations and transparency.

...

The Sierra Club used the Chesapeake Energy money, donated mainly by the company’s chief executive from 2007 to 2010, for its Beyond Coal campaign to block new coal-fired power plants and shutter old ones. Carl Pope, then the club’s executive director, promoted natural gas as a cleaner “bridge fuel” to a low-carbon future.

Ouch. The New York Times says an oil and gas company was paying environmental groups to lobby against coal.

In the same article it mentions:

Between 2004 and 2006, the National Audubon Society accepted $2.1 million from the chemical giant Monsanto
...

“It reminds me a little of what happened during the fight for climate legislation,” Mr. Yarnold wrote in an e-mail. He recalled that groups like the Environmental Defense Fund were criticized in some quarters for forming alliances with General Electric, Duke Energy and others in 2007 to campaign for climate change legislation.

Exxon Mobile gives $5.2 million a year to environmental groups.

Shell partnered with the Nature Conservancy when they couldn't get government funding, giving them $500,000 for just one island project That's four times more than they gave to all politicians combined.

Use your head. In a world of expensive energy, energy companies make a fortune. In a world of cheap energy, they're stuggling at the margins. That's why George HW Bush, when he was Vice President, flew to Saudi Arabia and screamed at the Saudis to raise the price of oil back up, explaining that they were destroying the Texas oil industry. Al Haig bitched him out when he got back, because Reagan and CIA director Casey had gone to great lengths to convince the Saudis to drop the price of oil to hurt Soviet hard currency imports, along with hurting the Iranians.

I'd try to convince you that oil companies aren't made up of evil satan worshippers any more than Apple or General Motors is, but I know it would be fruitless.

 

[Avon]

because you can't convince yourself?

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Use your head.

No problem. Just upthread, I asked for sources for this post. Care to back up those claims with sources?

 

[RAMA]

Buck Rogers...Gil Gerard...disco...that's the future.

 

[gturner]

^ Oh, you were serious.

Some commenters just ask for sources over and over, no matter how many you provide, and pretend the posted sources don't exist.

http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/co2-temperature-during-middle-eocene-climatic-optimum

The name Eocene comes from the Greek and translates as “new dawn,” a reference to the first appearance of modern mammals. The Eocene climate is thought to have been quite homogeneous, with the temperature gradient from equator to poles only half what it is today. Rainy tropical climates extended as far north as 45° though the climate in the tropics was similar to today's. Most notably, the polar regions were much warmer than today and temperate forests extended right to the poles.

http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/23/11/1044.abstract

Latitudinal temperature gradients reconstructed here are broadly representative of Eocene climates, showing that the discrepancy between proxy data and simulations will not be resolved by regional adjustments to paleogeography or reinterpretation of individual fossil assemblages. Similar discrepancies between proxy data and general circulation model simulations for other time periods suggest that there is a basic flaw with the way climate models simulate heat transport to, or loss from, continental surfaces.

BTW, CO2 levels during the Eocene were up to 12,000 ppm. 350.org is so named because they think we'll die if the CO2 concentration goes above 350 ppm.


http://atripati.bol.ucla.edu/6.pdf

Climate proxy records indicate surface temperatures dramatically changed during the late Eocene–early Oligocene from a warm ‘‘greenhouse’’ state to colder ‘‘icehouse’’ conditions. The late Eocene (Priabonian; 36.6–40 Ma) represents a critical transition interval following a long-term cooling trend (beginning in the early Eocene), and precluding the onset of large-scale continental glaciation. Currently it is unclear whether these climate changes were in response to long-term changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas levels [Pearson and Palmer, 2000; Sloan and Rea, 1995; Freeman and Hayes, 1992] and/or to associated shifts in atmospheric/oceanic circulation [Lear et al, 2000; Sloan and Rea, 1995; Rind and Chandler, 1991].

Or just Google "eocene" etc.

For Mann and the Team, it would take hundreds of links to document it all. Everybody covered the scandal, and it even got a few mentions in the US press. I downloaded the entire FOIA archive of both e-mail leaks. Here are a couple.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/22/fresh-hacked-climate-science-emails

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15840562

I'll have to go back and look at the previous comment for more of what needs linking, since it's now back on a previous page.

 

[Mr Silver]

BOTH!

Everybody knows that business people and scientists are all attention seeking bastards!