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PenOnBeadedChain -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/15/2010 3:15:00 PM)
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quote:
That is part of the problem that many skeptics have with the global warming argument... many of the scientists now claiming that we are going to melt, were claiming the exact opposite in the '70s.
C'est la vie, shit changes, new data comes about, somebody always bucks the system...
Ah, Tired Denialist Red Herring #214. Simply false. The few scientists who were looking at climate back in the 1970s were already starting to wonder about a newly-identified thing called a "greenhouse effect". It didn't seem particularly urgent back then, because the long-term Industrial Age upward trend in temperature was still being masked by aerosols (particulates, which have a solar-blocking effect) put out during the post-war industrial boom, before the needed clean air laws came into play in the 70s. (That's why the temperature didn't pick up till the 80s. One could argue that those Clean Air laws worked to spur on warming, but they were needed for basic public health reasons.)
The famous magazine covers ("Coming Ice Age!") that denialists like to wave about were all popular media fluff pieces (Newsweek, Popular Science, etc.). Sadly, most of the denial crowd doesn't know the difference between peer-reviewed science and Newsweek. Nor do they probably care to - especially if they can find a misleading use for conflating the two, and stalling public option further on this.
Stay tuned for all the other favorites in the never ending cavalcade of Red Herrings. Congressman Jim De Mint building an igloo on the Capitol steps to mock the very scientists who have been saying that we'll get more precipitation with warming, because it speeds up the water cycle. All the Greatest Hits of the Head-in-Sand crowd, on their way to your town today! And Exxon is laughing its ass off at us, all the way to the bank. They never dreamed they'd be able to pull this off for this long. Cue the P.T. Barnum line.
What a sad, uneducated country this is. The rest of the world is waiting for us to pull our head out of our collective ass, and all we get is this tired old recycled see-through crap.
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