New survey data on what Tea Party supporters believe about climate change and global warming totally supports the goals of fossil fuel industries. This can be explained. by Joel S. Hirschhorn
(libertarian)
Thursday, October 21, 2010
One of the more depressing aspects of this year's politics for those us with enough education and intelligence to make a sensible judgment about climate change and global warming is that Tea Party supporters are in denial about what is happening to planet Earth. Their views are far different than the rest of the American public, according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll conducted this month. Let these findings sink in:
While only 1 percent of other respondents believe that global warming does not exist at all, 8 percent of Tea Party adherents believe that.
Only 14 percent of Tea Party supporters said that global warming is an environmental problem that is having an effect now, while 49 percent of the rest of the public believes that it is.
More than half of Tea Party supporters said that global warming would have no serious effect at any time in the future, compared to only 15 percent of other Americans.
What explains these divergent views? Is it just education and intelligence or is it more disturbing? To begin with, the Tea Party views align with those of the fossil fuel industries, which have for decades waged a concerted campaign to raise doubts about the science of global warming and fight public policies to address it. They have spent fortunes to shape public opinion, obviously succeeding with the Tea Party crowd. They formed well funded institutes to produce anti-global-warming studies, paid for rallies and Web sites to question the science, and generated scores of economic analyses that spread fear that policies to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases will destroy jobs and the overall economy.
Those industries have collectively spent an amazing $500 million just since the beginning of 2009 to lobby against legislation to address climate change and to defeat candidates accepting what the vast majority of scientists tell us is fact, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
The other big factor is that celebrity right wing idols have worked aggressively to spread exactly the same views as the corporate interests, including Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, George Will and Sarah Palin.
Being ignorant and stupid is one thing, but falling for the self-serving corporate propaganda is idiocy. But there is more. Many of the pundits and Tea Party supporters also cite the Bible as providing justification for denying the science and impacts of climate change and global warming. This reaches the status of lunacy. For example, Lisa Deaton, who started We the People Indiana, a Tea Party affiliate, said "Being a strong Christian, I cannot help but believe the Lord placed a lot of minerals in our country and it's not there to destroy us."
I and many others have seen for themselves in places like Alaska the incredible visible evidence of global warming, notably huge areas of melting glaciers. Others have been watching the impacts of rising sea levels, which result from both melting ice and higher ocean temperatures. Here is what I found recently:
San Francisco Bay's sea level rose by 7 inches in the 20th century. New scientific findings indicate that without significant actions to fight global warming California sea level may rise by as much as 55 inches this century, and that the amount could be much higher. The impacts are unimaginable.
The shoreline in northeastern North Carolina is receding at an average rate of about 2.7 feet per year. North Carolina's famous Outer Banks are destined to disappear.
In Nigeria, Stefan Cramer an advisor to the government recently said "In 50 years with a one-meter sea level rise, two million or three million people would be homeless. By the end of the century we would have two meters and by that stage Lagos is gone as we know it."
A resident in a coastal town in India recently said that in the 1980s the sea was 300 meters from his house; today it is just 40 meters away.
The Greek coast is receding on average by 1 to 1.2 meters a year.
The Dutch have spent fortunes protecting their low level lands and billions will be spent to protect Venice, Italy in the relative near term. A Dutch plan included more than $144 billion in new spending through the year 2100 to take measures, such as broadening coastal dunes and strengthening sea and river dikes.
The U.N.'s environmental panel has warned that, at current rates, sea level would be high enough to make the island nation of the Maldives uninhabitable by 2100.
Nearly all the Tea Party candidates follow the corporate propaganda. If they are so stupid, idiotic or brainwashed to hold ludicrous views on climate change, can they really be trusted to pursue sensible public policies in other areas? Or are they merely intentional or inadvertent servants of corporate interests?
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Posted By: sarasile
Date: October 23, 2010 01:26:33 AM
Joel you should do some research on this before you write such nonsense. Think for yourself instead of letting the MSM (mainstream, lamestream, propaganda machine old media) fill you full of BS. The chicken-little AGW crowd could at least make a plausible argument for their case in the 1990s but the past ten years have shown that there is no AGW or even GW. The Earth's is just showing its typical climate variation.
I, too, was concerned about the loss of the artic icecap. A presentation here in Wichita by Mike Smith (founder of Weatherdata and current CEO of Accuweather) and Dennis Hedke (a professional geophysicist) showed that the likely cause of this is pollution from China that is clearly visible in satellite photographs moving ENE and settling on the ice and snow, darkening it. This causes more heat to be absorbed and the ice and snow to melt.
The greenhouse gas theory has been disproved as well. Google David Evans, Australia's chief scientist on climate from 1999 to 2005, who was in charge of both computer climate modeling and actual measurements of the Earth's temperature. He was a believer in AGW until he saw that the upper atmospheric hot spot that should be there if the greenhouse gas theory is correct, does not exist. Evans has written two pieces on this topic. Go to "I was on the global warming gravy train" at http://mises.org/daily/2571 and "No smoking hot spot" at http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/no-smoking-hot-spot/story-e6frg73o-1111116945238 and see what he has to say.
You should also see The Petition Project at www.petitionproject.org and see where 31,487 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,029 with PhDs, stating that there is no convincing scientific evidence for AGW.
Instead of casting these foolish aspersions at the Tea Party folks you should get your own facts straight.
Posted By: Ahov
Date: October 23, 2010 01:32:28 AM
Answer me this: how did the earth reheat itself after each ice age? Humans weren't around to be "harming" the planet, and yet here we are, not in the ice age.
By the way...higher Co2 levels hundreds of thousands of years ago, with lower temperatures.
Posted By: jaggedben
Date: October 23, 2010 01:42:44 PM
@Steven A. Rosile
The Petition Project is a fraud and a hoax, and the money behind it is traceable to Exxon. One of it's main initiators was Fred Seitz, who made a career of denying that cigarettes cause lung cancer.
Vast numbers of the supposed 30,000 'scientists' are not scientists at all, and less than half a percent of them have any expertise in anything remotely related to climate science (that's even including astrophysicists).
Steven, for your own sake I hope you are merely a dupe of the fossil fuel industry, and not a paid shill. It would be more reasonable to assume you are paid shill than to listen to the claptrap you are peddling.
Posted By: Joel S. Hirschhorn
Date: October 23, 2010 02:12:22 PM
Any idiot or shill for industry can provide comments, as they do here at this site. With a Ph.D. in engineering, a former full professor of engineering at a major university, and the author of many articles in science and engineering journals and a number of books, I have the capabilities to reach sound judgments on things like climate change and global warming. But even those without such professional credentials can use their own eyes to see the impacts of global warming, such as rising sea levels and melting glaciers. Also, it needs to be understood that there are legitimate different views on causation and solutions, but not on actual global effects already hitting the planet. Being very literate on Internet issues, as soon as I viewed the Petition Project site I thought is highly suspicious; there was little to no solid information on who was behind it and, by the way, petitions with just a signature and nothing more should not be regarded as kosher.
Posted By: sarasile
Date: October 23, 2010 03:45:55 PM
Joel, I assure you I am not a shill for oil interests. I have never worked for any energy, oil or gas companies nor am I being paid by any now or ever.
Every signer of the Petition Project has his name, credentials and employer listed. You can acyually contact them if you choose. Dennis Hedke is a signer and I know him personally. He is a partner at Hedke-Saenger Geosiciences, Ltd. Mike Smith was a weather forecaster for many years at a major broadcast affiliate here in Wichita until he left to found Weatherdata Services, later acquired by Accuweather which Smith now is CEO of. The founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman, called AGW "the greatest scam in history".
Even my brother-in-law, who rarely agrees with me on anything but who has a degree in geology, agrees that AGW is a hoax and a fraud.
I have studied the record of the planet's temperature and find that we are nowhere near the highs that the best scientific estimates show for the past two millenia. The disinformation coming from so-called "science climate" experts is simply astounding, such as the "hockey stick" graph so promeniently displayed in Al Gore's mockumentary "An Inconvenient Truth" (which, by the way, British courts ruled that any screening for school children had to be accompanied by a disclaimer that it was political rather than scientific). That graph totally ignores the medieval warm period and the little ice age that followed it. Don't you remember from your high school history classes that the vikings colonized Greenland for two centuries early in the second millenia. It was a green land at that time.
No, you and the other "global warming" alarmist chicken littles like you are the ones who need their heads examined.
I Googled Rosile and found absolutely no information giving him any credibility on important matters such as global warming; with an undergrad degree in political science from a second rate university and no apparent publications, but just a record of a losing Libertarian Party candidate, people like him who get their comments published demonstrate the downside of the Internet, where any idiot and extremist can have their words published. I always find it amusing that such extremists rarely directly address the substance of the articles they comment on; in this, for example, all the solid data on rising ocean levels. As to that petition project it has no credibility, nor the Oregon institute from which it is generated. The right wing nuts have their own world of nonsense, delusion and idiocy.
Posted By: sarasile
Date: October 23, 2010 06:25:38 PM
Joel, your ad homonym attack on me does not make your case. You have not refuted any of the pertinent and valid points I have made. I could make many more but you and the rest of the closed mind set will still prattle on with your AGW nonsense. You and the rest of the AGW alarmist bunch need to look in the mirror and see who the real idots are.
There have been many research done to prove or disprove the existance of AGW. There have been even more scientific research to prove or disprove the existance of God. No scientific conclusion have been reached on these two questions.
Brilliant Phisicist Albert Einstein was a believer in God while equally brilliant Phisicist Stephen Hawking is an Atheist. Neither one of them is dumb, or stupid. Joel, when you call the opposing side of your view dumb or stupid, you lose credibility and certainly even though your reasoning may lead you to believe the existance of AGW, calling the other side stupid weakens your argument.
Is Eisntein stupid for believing in God?
Is Stephen Hawkings stupid for not believing in God?
Today we have NO scientific conclusion to either of these two questions. Therefore, whether AGW exists like whether God exists is a matter of FAITH more than science. No one can predict the future. We can only guess.
Posted By: Bennett Kalafut
Date: November 8, 2010 12:31:50 PM
I had to read twice after seeing "ad homonym"--that reads like a pun having to do with being mistook for someone else.
Perhaps the sad thing about Mr Rosile and others like him is that they write and act as they do without even getting any oil money to do so. They're giving away their credibility for free.
As a scientist, I wouldn't hire Steven Rosile and would be reluctant to appear on a paper with him, and it is likewise for other signers of the Oregon Petition. It is not a mere difference of opinion. The so-called "skeptics"--how dare they imply that the scientists actually publishing on this subject and those of us who read
that work and conclude that it is sound are being unskeptical!--exhibit behavior ranging from unprofessional to immoral. At best it is a lack of due diligence--scientists and those writing about science are expected at the very least to do a literature search and at worst it is outright deceit.
The signature of greenhouse warming is hot tropopshere, cool stratosphere. That's it--and this is evident from a basic literature review, let alone those 'blogs. And if we weren't seeing greenhouse warming there'd be something wrong with a lot of physics as it would mean that simple radiative transfer considerations (ultimately, energy balance in a system that absorbs and radiates) would somehow not apply
to the atmosphere. This is why greenhouse warming is the least controversial bit of the case for AGW. But people like Rosile don't care to learn. The mindless parroting of false claims is a form of lying and Steven Rosile is therefore a liar.
Every time one of these characters pop up, demand to know why, if they have such a brilliant argument against AGW, they are not publishing it in science journals. And don't fall for a conspiracy theory involving being shut out. Ask to see the "smoking gun": "Please send me a preprint--and I'd also like to see what the editor or referees had to say."
They are not publishing in science journals because their arguments do not stand up to scrutiny. Their only strategy left is to make an end-run around educated peers and capable critics and dazzle the masses who don't know better. This is what I just caught Rosile doing in his appeal to the old "hot spot" argument. Now that he is
caught--like a fat child with his hand in the cookie jar--will he apologize or will he squirm and make excuses?
For those of you still foolish enough to be suckered by the AGW scam, it might help you to know that all the real scientists have declared it a hoax and have been jumping ship since day 1. Here's a article on the latest brilliant mind who had severe qualms about continuing to perpetrate the Al Gore sponsored fraud of AGW.
