“I don’t think that is a fair analogy. A better analogy is you take what you think is your perfectly healthy child in for a routine checkup and the doctor says that your child is in danger of dying in 20 years if he doesn’t get a medical procedure done NOW and the procedure will bankrupt you. Wouldn’t you want a second opinion? Wouldn’t you ask for further testing? Whenever an understanding of a potential causal link is uncertain, any action to mitigate the potential effects is misguided? Hell yes when the action to mitigate actually may do more harm than good.”
Why take things to the extreme? Why assume any mitigation will do more harm than good? Why not support mitigation that won’t bankrupt us? Why not pick some low hanging fruit? The extremist positions of the Heritage Conference make it easy to marginalize reasonable skepticism—and make a cap and trade all the more inevitable. I was at the WIREC Convention this week, and unfortunately reasonable skepticism all too often gets painted with some same brush as people that are denying any possibility of anthropogenic global warming. Like they know that doubling atmospheric co2, which is known to trap heat, has nothing at all to do with temperature increase. I accept your analogy and would want a second and third opinion. That’s why I favor admitting that there are some things to be concerned about, move forward vigilantly with the science, take prudent steps. That’s different then the rah rah nothing is happening approach. Heritage is the mirror image of Gore on this. They aren’t saying let’s slow down here and be careful, and look at these red flags. They are saying global warming is a sham—ignore it.
“From the outset they proclaimed that they were meeting to give an alternative pov to believers in man made global warming and to show that there is no consensus. Nothing shadowy or underhanded there. Your jab at their financial backing is fine as far as it goes. Somebody tell me why nobody in the media attacks the IPCC that practically started the global warming scare whose backing is the UN.”
Clearly, both sides are influenced by funding. The “debate is over crowd” and the “there is nothing to worry about crowd” are pari delicto IMHO. It frustrates me that fellow conservatives, due to their built in (and justifiable) prejudices against the IPCC are willing to buy into all this Heritage propaganda which is just as bad.
“After a decade of Al Gore and global warming alarmists attacking anyone that disagrees with them I think they have earned a right to a little advocacy and hyperbole as you call it. In fact, the debate has been so one sided for so long, the debate needs a LOT of hyperbole and advocacy if we are going to get anywhere near to balanced and evenhanded debate over climate change. Any timidity would simply be shouted down.”
I don’t believe deception should be met with deception. Loud is OK. Exageration of truth to make a point, or to reset the middle ground, is just a kind of a lie. I see it done on both sides, and I will not abide by it. Moreover, I don’t think it is effective—but rather marginalizes legitimate positions.
I think my analogy was pretty fair. Get a second opinion. And a third and a forth. As for mitigation, nobody has proven that any effort to halt “global warming” will have any mitigating effect. If we stopped all anthropogenic co2 tomorrow, the earth may just go on warming as part of a natural cycle. But, and I think this is your position, why not err on the side of caution and do something? Anything! As you put it, pick some low hanging fruit. Well, other than technological innovations, the proposed solutions accepted by government elites ARE NOT low hanging fruit. They are economically devastating or will be ineffectual(see cap and trade) or both. Scientists and policy makers who except Kyoto as the answer to our ills, agree that the world will have to reduce emissions by 50-85 percent by 2050 and even then they agree that the globe will go on warming(?!). They paint a pretty grim picture of a post Kyoto world. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2007/11/18/ST2007111800216.html
“The extremist positions of the Heritage Conference make it easy to marginalize reasonable skepticism—and make a cap and trade all the more inevitable.”
I think you mean Heartland Conference and it was called the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change. Extremist positions? Like what? Be more specific. What positions in “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate” are extreme? As for the conference, I did a cursory count of speakers and it looks to be about 80-90 percent PhDs. With the remainder having credentials that certainly qualify them as experts in their respective fields. Yuri Izrael Vice Chairman of the IPCC even spoke. Check it out(PDF warning). http://www.heartland.org/NewYork08/ConferenceSchedule.pdf . I counted maybe 5 speakers who you could loosely call being from advocacy groups. More accurately they were from respected think tanks. Not an extremist pov in the whole bunch. Lord Monckton and John Coleman of Weather Channel fame being the most outspoken of the bunch.
“The extremist positions of the Heritage Conference make it easy to marginalize reasonable skepticism—and make a cap and trade all the more inevitable.”
Until you or anyone else shows me otherwise, I don't except that any at the conference took an extreme position. I assert that the conference was all about reasonable skepticism. In light of how marginalized scientists that are skeptical about the impact of anthropogenic CO2 on global warming are, saying that this conference marginalizes reasonable skeptism takes some chutzpah.
“I was at the WIREC Convention this week, and unfortunately reasonable skepticism all too often gets painted with some same brush as people that are denying any possibility of anthropogenic global warming. Like they know that doubling atmospheric co2, which is known to trap heat, has nothing at all to do with temperature increase.”
For one, I have nothing but good things to say about WIREC. I would hazard to guess that most of the speakers at the International Conference on Climate Change would too. But I think you assign beliefs to anyone who is skeptical about the prevailing opinion(not consensus but prevailing opinion) that anthropogenic CO2 is a major contributor to global warming and then call them extremists. We are skeptical, we don't “know” as you put it. Neither do any of the global warming alarmists. Science is all about skepticism. Its those that say human induced global warming is a FACT that are acting like extremists. We skeptics(most of us) argue in terms of degree, its global warming alarmists who argue in terms of absolutes. Could anthropogenic CO2 be exasperating a natural warming trend? Maybe. Could the level of contribution that it makes to what may be natural global warming trend be so infinitesimally small as to merit discussion on allocating resources in ways that increase technological innovation and other methods of adapting to what might be a natural warming cycle? Yes. Given what we don't know and do know about climate change, are we in a position to decide that the way to go is to reduce global CO2 emissions to pre 1990 levels? Definitely not.
“That’s why I favor admitting that there are some things to be concerned about, move forward vigilantly with the science, take prudent steps.”
I agree. So do most reasonable global warming skeptics. Go to Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute and look up what they have to say about global warming. These are the conservative powerhouses out there. They are about as freemarket as you can get but they don't claim that global warming doesn't exist. They differ on how much is caused by humans but more to the point, they aren't denying global warming but have moved past that to offer solutions to climate change. They also want everybody to calm down. Pretty reasonable. As for the conference, its keynote speaker of the first day was Dr. Patrick Michaels who said the we can expect the earth to warm by 0.17 degrees F per decade for the forseeable future. Granted thats lower than anything the IPCC has come up with but then that group adjusts its estimates downward whenever they get together.
“Clearly, both sides are influenced by funding. The “debate is over crowd” and the “there is nothing to worry about crowd” are pari delicto IMHO.”
I'd agree if those were the two opposing groups. Its not. Its between the “debate is over” crowd and the “we want a debate” crowd. The prevailing opinion of the “debate is over” crowd is that global warming is mostly caused by anthropogenic CO2 and that the only way to halt global warming is to drastically reduce emissions and the only way to do that is to have governments mandate caps on emissions. Its soley the “debate is over” crowd's fault that we are in an uphill battle to have opposing points of view heard.
“It frustrates me that fellow conservatives, due to their built in (and justifiable) prejudices against the IPCC are willing to buy into all this Heritage propaganda which is just as bad.”
It frustrates me when fellow conservatives use words like “prejudice” and “propaganda” and “buy into” when referring to a group that I am on the whole agreeing with. What propaganda? They had a conference of scholars and issued a white paper for pete’s sake.
“I don’t believe deception should be met with deception. Loud is OK. Exageration of truth to make a point, or to reset the middle ground, is just a kind of a lie. I see it done on both sides, and I will not abide by it. Moreover, I don’t think it is effective—but rather marginalizes legitimate positions.”
I don't think the conference met the deception(human induced global warming is a fact) was met with deception. You are the one that picked the word hyperbole. I shouldn't have repeated it. I should have picked another like impassioned. I don't abide lying either. Please point out for me any of the lies you found in any of the speeches made at the conference(as they become available) or in the white paper I've linked to when I started this thread. As for the Heartland Institute, they use impassioned advocacy for opinions that you may not agree with but that doesn't make them lies.