Big Sky Cairn

Each of the following quotes is taken from a popular news source. Some were published in the decade between 1970 and 1979, while others are more contemporary ranging from 2000 to present. This is quiz number two.  See if you can identify which decade gave birth to what rhetoric:

____ “To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advancd signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather.”

____ “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects.”

____ “The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.”

____ “Some observers have tried to connect the eleven-year sunspot cycle with climate patterns, but have so far been unable to provide a satisfactory explanation of how the cycle might be involved.”

____ “Whereas ocean and land surfaces reflect 5-25 per cent of the incident solar energy back into space, snow and ice reflect 80 per cent of solar energy back into space.”

____ “We can also think about the problem from the points of view of the safety engineer and the politician. To each of these the probabilities and the costly demonstration of natural forces in the last three years offers a significant threat.”

____ “It is based on the conjunction of several natural phenomena. The phenomena will occur. The expected consequences may not, but there is strong circumstantial evidence that suggests it is more likely they may.”

____ “The cod off the Cape aren’t coming as close to the land as they used to, says Joseph C. Allen, who has been covering fishing for The Vineyard Gazette for 50 years, and the fishermen believe that the reason si the unusually warm winter water.”

____ “Interest and concern in such events has thrust climatologists into the limelight and brought forth a number of popular books dealing with the general topic of climate change.”

Each of the following quotes is taken from a popular news source. Some were published in the decade between 1970 and 1979, while others are more contemporary ranging from 2000 to present. I’ll post a list of quotes each day this week, and next weekend I’ll post the answers.

See if you can identify which decade gave birth to these arguments:

____ “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patters have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth.”

____ “If the frequency of mention in newspaper headlines is a guide to popular concern with a given subject, then climate and weather must rate highly on any scale.”

____ “Despite the various relationships of sunspot cycles (11-year cycles) to climatic features, no one, including Dr. Hurd C. Willett, professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and perhaps the leading authority on sunspots and weather, has been able to demonstrate conclusively what cause-effect might be involved.”

____ “Measurements since the late 1800s show that the volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by about 15 per cent, probably as a result of increased burning of fuels.”

____ “Such probabilities are well within the range that requires that even the costliest precautions be taken if we value life and our civilization.”

____ “How much money is half the world’s population worth, or large geographic areas of civilization? This problem is a moral one and science is not capable of providing an answer.”

____ “As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval.”

____ “The collision of air masses of widely differing temperatures and humidity can create violent storms - the Midwest’s recent rash of disastrous tornadoes, for example.”

____ “The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only ten years from now.”

I’ve discussed the orthodoxy of science - the fall-in or get out mentality that political advocacy has created in the scientific community. I’m not personally sold on Intelligent Design. I’m not a fan of Christian Apologetics. But the way science acts to protect the status quo is similar to our discussion on Global Climate Change.

Obviously, I haven’t seen the movie. I’ll probably end up getting the DVD on Netflix. Whether or not you agree with Intelligent Design doesn’t seem to matter. From what I’ve seen, the movie is less about the nuance of origins and more about the way the debate is waged.I was going to write more, but Montana Headlines beat me to the punch, and did it with much more eloquence than I would be able to muster.  Go read.

In my Global Warming Axioms, I stated that the the choices that scientists (people) have made with regard to pseudo-scientific issues like catastrophic man-made global warming runs the serious risk of undermining science (method) in the long run. My concern is that by politicizing something that should be apolitical, scientists undermine the credibility of science. The flaw is human; it always is.

And so when I read that large segments of the public have grown skeptical of science itself, I am not surprised. The left has commandeered the scientific throne for political exploitation. The Nobel Prize was awarded to a politician for his advocacy of public policy. This misuse has dulled the tool for its intended purpose - observation of the natural order of things.

And the scientific community (the people) seem intent on dulling the tool of their trade even further by increasing its political involvement. Great Nobel laureates - once recognized for their accomplishments in scientific method - recently invited McCain, Obama and Clinton to a great science debate, and then mourned their refusal. Unless science has become as much about politics as about scientific method, what business do three politicians have in debating science? Shouldn’t that be the providence of scientists?

Sadly, I find myself more skeptical of all science because I no longer trust the scientists who report it, and I think the damage may not be undone in my lifetime.

Perhaps more sadly is the fact that the real culprits may not be the scientists, but the media who seek out the most extreme positions and then portray it as the consensus.  This not only drives scientists to the fringes for recognition and federal support, but it feeds the monster with more and more attention.

Jeff over at Speedkill has responded to my Global Warming Axioms. His contribution is constructive and well-articulated - although I do disagree with some of his points. I appreciate the opportunity to engage him in such a debate - since it is actually the debate itself that my axioms are concerned with. Note that none of my axioms make a declarative statement that global warming is false. While I am a skeptic, my skepticism is not held in those axioms. What my axioms serve to do is make discursive room for my skepticism in the face of suggestions that there is no room for debate - that the question is answered. I intend to challenge the way the left carries out the debate on catastrophic man-made climate change. And to illustrate my point, let me skip to the last sentences of Jeff’s post:

Stop debating what’s already been debated and start talking about policy. Start promoting solutions.

One of the rhetorical foundations espoused by proponents of debate is that all meaningful argument must derive from common ground. This is why discussion between pro-life and pro-choice, evolution and creation are so pointless. The sides are coming to the debate with a completely different set of assumptions that shape their beliefs. Those differences alter how they view the same set of facts and even the very rules for how the argument should be waged. Without a nugget of common ground, their ability to persuade each other dissolves and the point of argument - beyond intellectual masturbation - is nullified.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I mentioned before, global warming is not a scientific hypothesis since it can’t be proven or disproven. A convenient side-effect of this reality is that global warming can be used to explain any evidence after the fact. Lots of hurricanes? Global warming. Not many hurricanes? Global warming. Convenient political platform.

Of course, the unprovable nature of global warming also relegates it to the realm of things held true by faith (another of my axioms). There’s a name for when a faith is preached in a classroom as if it were scientific fact. Brainwashing.

William Gray, the well-known Colorado State University hurricane forecaster, routinely uses the annual National Hurricane Conference as a platform to bash global warming. In a statement to Florida Today, Gray argued that the scientific consensus on global warming is bogus — and “a mild form of McCarthyism has developed toward those scientists who do not agree” that mankind is in danger.

“We are also brainwashing our children on the warming topic. We have no better example than Al Gore’s alarmists and inaccurate movie which is being shown in our schools and being hawked by warming activists with little or no meteorological-climate background,” Gray wrote.

Read the whole article.

Keep the faith, brothers and sisters in Hot Air.  And don’t forget to tithe.  Until it hurts.

A lot.

Amen.

Well maybe not my backyard precisely, but the US Geological Survey released its report on the Bakken-shale formation today stating they estimate there is 3-4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the area. Compare that to the previous estimate of 151 million barrels a little over 10 years ago. This discovery makes the Bakken the richest oil patch in the lower 48 states.

For those not from the Richland county area, which I assume is most everyone, the Bakken is a huge formation about 2 miles down which was first tapped around 2000 near Sidney and runs in roughly a right triangle from Minot south to Dickenson then diagonal northwest through Sidney to the Canadian border. People have known for a quite while that there was some oil in the formation, but no one knew how to get to it until recently.

So far according to USGS, 65 million barrels of oil have been extracted from Elm Coulee (the Richland county formation) in the past 7 years, they think there is another 410 million barrels in that part of the Bakken. This means at the current pace of drilling, Richland County has another 40 years of oil. Further north, Roosevelt, Phillips and Sheridan Counties are sitting on about 850 million barrels.

Put together, this means the State of Montana has the potential to reap a windfall on production taxes. Personally, I was sympathetic to Roy Brown’s idea of using natural resources to create a trust to fund the education shortfall. But the biggest thing for me, as an Eastern Montanan, is I do not want to see the tax dollars created from oil revenue syphoned off to Helena and Western Montana like they were last legislative session. Compared to the revenue put into state coffers, Eastern Montana got the short end of the stick on transportation funding, school funding and almost everything else related to state spending.

I have not mentioned how any new developments will be impacted by the Governor’s positions (or I suppose more accurately, his appointees) on climate change. New oil exploration, especially in the Bakken where there is a lack of natural gas plants, means increased CO2 emissions. But that will have to be a new post entirely.

Two maps, one eye opening reality.

First, take a look at this “carbon footprint” map from The Vulcan Project.

Carbon footprint, of course, is the smoking gun in catastrophic man-made global warming. Those little red spots? Those are the sources of our collective environmental suicide. For shame!

Now take a look at this map of the political breakdown of the United States in the last Presidential Election. Blue spots are Democrats - Red is Republican.

Notice anything? Almost all of the carbon footprint hot-spots are also Democrat strongholds. It appears that Democrats cause global climate change!

Where can I get this bumper sticker: Save the Planet - vote Republican.