Thomas Malloy wrote:
<<We conservatives question Liberal Orthodoxy, of which Scientific
Orthodoxy is an example. You've heard of Parksie's antics. Jed and Ed
agree with me on this when ox, LENR, is being gored.>>
Comparing AGW with cold fusion is rather different. With LENR-CANR the
majority of scientists probably do not believe in it because they swallowed
the party line a long time ago before there were many published papers. They
largely got their initial impression from Press coverage. They probably
still take their lead from people like Parks and sources like Nature. Within
the field of scientists working on cold fusion etc, there is a strong
consensus that it is real in exactly the same way that there is a very
strong consensus among the scientists working on global warming that it is
happening and that humans are mostly responsible and the chances are that it
will be uncomfortable at best with a small chance that it may be
catastrophic but that nobody can know for sure until we have run the
experiment (by which time it may be too late).
Scientists not working in the CF field who have not studied the papers and
take their attitude from people like Parks (who repeats false beliefs and
attitudes and are seemingly incorrigible) are clearly in the majority but
this does not mean that their views are worth anything. In exactly the same
way, thousands of "scientists" not working in the field of climate change,
who were not familiar with the thousands of papers and decades of work
behind them, signed the "Oregon petition". This tactic is one of the
fundamental deceits of the deniers (in this case S. Fred Singer) who
purposefully confuse the public by misrepresenting majority as being the
same as consensus. Extending the analogy, if the majority of scientists had
to express an opinion on cold fusion, they would probably say that it was
disproved in 1989 because that's all they know but the consensus of
scientists in the field would almost universally say that it is real. The
situation with global warming is that the consensus view of scientists in
the field is that AGW is real - there is a difference from the cold fusion
situation though - the majority of scientists not working in the climate
field would probably also go along with the consensus view because they
would take their lead from the policy statements of every major scientific
organization in the world that AGW is real.
<<As for insanity, it's clear to us that Liberalism is a form of
mental illness. It is a set of ideas which has failed every time that it
has been tried. It ignores physical reality. Like the fact that Radical
Islam intends to take over the government and impose Sharia Law. Like
economic laws, the government can't spend the country rich. Now the
Porkulus (economic stimulus) package could work in theory, but it never
has worked in practice.>>
I've seen this claim of so-called liberal mental illness on some barking mad
neo-con websites. Just think of the situation of the person in a mental
hospital who says they are the only sane one and everyone else outside is
mad - who is closer to the truth? Similarly with this neo-con claim. Bear in
mind that the forthcoming global economic chaos was purely and simply caused
by insufficiently finance using "greed is good" methodologies. I am sure
that the neo-con libertarian viewpoint supported those ideas more than the
"liberals". BTW, liberal and conservative mean very different things in
Europe, particularly in Britain, compared to their US meanings.
<<If I were to assert that a
wristwatch resulted as a result of random processes, (Jed) would never
accept that. However, the essence of Darwinian ideas is that living
organisms resulted from random chance ... Best of all, it fixes itself.
IMHO, this is the
informational equivalent of reversing the second law of thermodynamics.>>
Not really, the cell "fixes itself" by increasing the amount of entropy
(disorder) in the Universe by more than the amount of entropy it reverses by
"fixing itself". It uses energy to run up the escalator to get "higher" but
always uses more energy than it ends up gaining. If you warm yourself up by
setting a fire your personal entropy decreases but the entropy of the whole
system always decreases.
<<The Liberals delight in cultural degeneration, of which Springer is not
only a classic example, but a celebration. Conservative Talk is banned
in Europe of course.>>
Ridiculous distortion. Lies and propaganda tending to increase "hate crimes"
is rightly legislated against over here. Some Yanks have got very strange
and often dangerous ideas about what the ideas of free speech and freedom of
action should allow.
<<The primary driver of atmospheric temperature is the Sun. It was producing
more energy during the period
of maximum sun spot activity>>
True but irrelevant - a red herring. The amount of the recent observed
global warming, that can be attributed to the sun's tiny increase in
activity, is only about 20%. Do you really think that scientists working in
the field would not know about this and take it into account? This "it's all
the Sun" idea is another classic "fool the gullible" lie from the denier
lobby ruthlessly repeated on denier blogs - the actual small number of
scientific sceptics working in the field do not use it because it is
stupid>>
<< Faced with the cold hard facts, these people changed the name from global
warming to
climate change>>
Another shameless distortion from the denier lobby. The current emphasis on
saying climate change rather than global warming is actually a response to
the muddying of the waters by the denial lobby who tried to fool the public
by exploiting the misleading nature of the short description "global
warming" for their own ends. Global warming refers to the average
temperature (energy) of the whole Earth climate system. Global warming
doesn't mean that everywhere will uniformly warm by the same change in
temperature. Some places will get very much hotter and dryer or others will
get very much colder and wetter or icier. In part, due to the mindless
distortion of the deniers who use incidents such as exceptional cold periods
of weather as some sort of irrational proof that the globe isn't warming,
the public description of the phenomena tends now to be "climate change".
The deniers seized upon this change in description and one of the current
outrageous pieces of propaganda from them is that because the climate has
sometimes changed naturally in the past that therefore the current change
that we are seeing cannot be due to humans. Such a stupidly illogical piece
of crap would be laughable if the potential consequences weren't so
dangerous.
<<As for atmospheric pollution, it's clear to us that volcanoes contribute
way more pollution that all human activities.>>
How can it be clear to you? Where do you get your misinformation from? Why
do you choose to believe it rather than the truth? This volcano lie is wrong
wrong wrong - massively wrong, blatantly wrong yet the gullible parrot it
without thought or analysis. It is another example of endlessly repeated
denier black propaganda. As a matter of scientific fact volcanoes only put
out about one/one hundred and fiftieth (0.7%) of the CO2 that people do. The
other things they emit actually have a cooling effect
http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/climate_effects.html Scroll
down to "INFLUENCE ON THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT". This simple fact is easily
checkable. Check it now! After you have done, you must change your mind on
this one. You may then reflect that if the sources you rely on can be so
wrong or are so blatantly lying to you, that maybe a whole lot more of what
they are saying is lies and propaganda too.
<<The bottom line is that you want to take the weather predictions
seriously; (remake the economic
system) of people who can't forecast the weather beyond 10 days with any
level of accuracy, when they make predictions 100 years in the future.>>
You have fallen for another denier lie - they deliberately attempt to
confuse weather and climate in the public's mind. Predicting weather is like
predicting how many times red or black comes up in the next few spins on a
roulette wheel. You won't get rich. Predicting climate change is like
knowing that, over time, the red and black "incidents" will statistically
work out at around 50-50 - the casino gets rich.
Nick Palmer
