RE: Did 'cap and trade' go up in smoke?
>>> I don't have any problem with Michael Mann's statement. Realclimate is a
>>> site for real climate scientists to present their findings to a wider
>>> audience and to answer as Mann said the disinformation being perpetrated
>>> by others. The screening simply keeps the denialosphere from overrunning
>>> the site with useless noise. A recent response by Gavin Schmidt to one
>>> message they did let through puts it pretty succinctly:
Of course you wouldn't have a problem with it. It's your side "hogging the microphone", as it were. Which is OK, it's their site. They can do whatever they please with it. But, don't pretend it's "fair and balanced", or impartial, or of much use in settling a complex scientific issue or doing much of anything other than flogging its owner's propaganda. Personally, I only go there when I want a cheap laugh. (Wow, they were still trying to pass off that Hockey Stick the last time I looked-- ROTFLMAO.)
>>> "The idea that thousands of scientists have conspired over decades, roping
>>> in all the National Academies and the relevant societies, to impose their
>>> vegetarian/socialist/eco-fascist dystopia on the world is self-evidently
>>> ridiculous. If you disagree, I think the prospect for any dialog between
>>> us is dim.- gavin"
No dimmer than you are, Gavin.
It didn't even need to start out as a conscious conspiracy. Maybe it did and maybe it didn't. Many things that look like conspiracies actually organized spontaneously because of people of similar mindset responding to the same stimuli (each independent of the others) and coming to the same conclusions and taking similar actions. Only later, when they realize that they've stumbled into simething good, do they start comparing notes and start taking steps to protect the positions they've attained.
Is it such a stretch to posit that a government, any government, is going to be a magnet for people who have personality traits that make them want to run other peoples' lives?
And is it such a stretch to imagine that once these folks have gained control of a pot of money with which to fund research, that they will greatly prefer to fund research that shows a dire and immediate necessity for them (the politicians and bureaucrats, that is) to take ever increasing control of once-prosperous nation's economies to research that suggests otherwise?
And once some "scientists" (they stopped being scientists when they started falsifying and destroying data) have decided to attract government funding by toeing (and helping to concoct) the Party line, and have started cranking out the sort of systematically manipulated "data" we've been seeing out of NASA Goddard and the East Anglia CRU lately, is it such a stretch to notice that they have a vested (and lucrative) interest in shouting down anyone who dares to present contrary evidence.
Pretty soon, the field of climatology is dominated by those "state-kept schoolmen" (to borrow a phrase from Kipling), everyone else has long since been marginalized or driven out entirely, they aren't seen on the boards of the vetted journals these days. "After all", the Warmists argue, "if they were any good, they would be getting the big grants, like we are." (Which argument sidesteps the real issue, which is, of course, "If they were saying what the granters-of-grants wanted to hear, they would be getting the big grants like we are." And so a dodgy theory, supported by falsified and cherry-picked "evidence" becomes dogma.
The CRU hackers did the world a service by throwing a wrench into the Augean stability of the warmists' racket. The problem with a conspracy is that like any secret, it can be kept by two people only if one of them is dead.
Add to this things like the spectacle of Al Gore flying around in about the most polluting and least fuel efficient private jet there is and the gridlocks (both aircraft and surface vehicles) at the Copenhagen airport. Because these people are all too important to fly in on commercial flights, don't you know. And many, many other hypocrisies, large and small. Since you clearly haven't figured it out, it's all about getting (and keeping) us peasants in line while our betters par-tay on our dime. And, of course, it MUST be done RIGHT NOW! (Or else, the marks might have time to think it through. Or someone might have time to hack our email.) I'm afraid that it takes more than the aforementioned inventor of the Internet and a bevy of Hollywood airheads claiming that the science of global warming is settled, and that that nasty, greedy western capitalist industry is solely to blame, to actually settle the science.
If Earth was, in fact, still warming, and if it was still warming AND other bodies in the solar system were not also warming, (I'm waiting to see what those temperature curves start doing now that the sun isn't shining quite so brightly.) AGW might be tenable as the primary driver of "climate change". But would you please explain how anthropogenic gases are causing proportionate rises in the atmospheric or surface temperatures of other planets and moons in the solar system when our industrial contributions to those atmospheres consist of the occasional solar-powered robot probe. Or, how the Earth's atmosphere is miraculously insensitive to the changes in solar output which is apparently driving these other planetary heat waves. (Yes, the solar "constant" does change-- by a few tenths of a percent. The changes that have been observed correlate with sunspot count. More sunspots, more total radiation. The current dearth of sunspots is being accompanied by a reduction of the solar output by the usual amount.)
Never mind that Carbon Dioxide is about the weakest "greenhouse gas" there is. Water vapor and methane are both orders of magnitude stronger.
You wonder why we don't trust you?
Besides, why are you so worried? Aren't we all going to die in December 2012 anyway?
-- Paul
PS-- All you Gaians out there. Are you so sure that the Great Mother didn't engender us for the specific purpose of getting all of that lovely Carbon back into the ecosystem, not to mention getting rid of all of that nasty, desolate ice while we're at it?
A broad cap-and-trade plan to reduce carbon emissions has been pronounced dead by one of the senators pushing hardest for it.
