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njlauren -> RE: Climate scientist under investigation for witchcraft (3/1/2015 4:29:34 PM)
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There isn't a witch hunt against Soon, rather a freedom of information act request showed that Soon had not disclosed how much money he was getting from anti global warming sources, over the past several years he received several MILLION dollars in funding from the Koch brothers and the petroleum industry, and in the memos and such (since he works out of the Harvard/Smithsonian institute, which is federally funded, his e-mail and such is not private and is public information), you see Soon mentioning 'deliverables', which usually is information to refute Global warming. Not disclosing that is conflict of interest, and it also does lend a strong hand to why he would try and lie or otherwise distort things to try and take apart global warming, if someone is paying you 3 million bucks, you have a lot of reasons to lie. THe other factor is that Soon seems to grab theories out of thin air (literally), when one of his claims fails under research to pan out, he comes up with another one. His latest one is that cosmic rays are causing cloud formations that are warming the atmosphere, after he couldn't claim sunspot activity when the last several years were some of the warmest on record while sunspot activity declined...
And the kicker with Soon is his training is not in physics or climatology, he is an aeronautical engineering Phd, which is way, way outside climate theory.
As far as the guy claiming witch hunt, there is a problem with his statements. He says he supports global warming science, he backs the ideas that the climate is changing, yet claims that costs of weather related phenomenon are not tied to global warming. It is true that any single weather event cannot be tied to something like warming, a hurricane or a tornado might have happened anyway, but the problem is that his argument fails simple logic.
Here is the chain:
1)If he admits that global warming is happening, and that it is caused my man made phenomena (primarily CO2), then
2)As the climate changes, as it heats up, weather patterns are going to change, and as part of this, storms and droughs and other disasters are going to happen, and both be stronger and more frequent (and if you want to dispute this, Kirata, explain to me why when El Nino is active, when ocean currents are warmer, we see more intense storms; picture this on a global basis, and it takes someone really fooling themselves to deny this).
3)When bad weather happens,when severe climate actions are stronger and more common, the cost goes up, from recovering from it. One storm, Sandy, hit the east coast several years ago and the cost still has not been calculated, and a lot of places are hurting for it. We have severe snow in Boston, severe cold in the northeast, how much does that cost? How much are the severe droughts costing, how many billions are being paid out in crop insurance when the crops fail?
I think the real witch hunt are people like the Koch brothers spending billions and billions to try and stop what they know will be damage to their business model, they don't give a crap if people's storms are destroyed in storms, they don't care if people are killed, they and the oil companies and such only care about one thing, and one thing only, their own greed...the irony being, of course, that skeptics claim there is gold to me made in claiming global warming is real, when the money on that end is government grants, which measure in the thousands of dollars, when the Kock brothers and the oil company payouts are in the billions..which do you think, Kirata, is more likely to be a case of going for the gold, when you can make millions, like Soon, or a 5 thousand dollar grant from National Science Foundation?
And this model has been played out time and again, it was the same with tobacco, where they had doctors and scientists saying smoking was not harmful, that it was no more harmful then drinking alcohol, then it was smoking didn't hurt those breathing the smoke in; Corey Patterson discovered how inundated the air was with lead from leaded gasoline back in the 40's, and the oil companies tried to have him fired, then spent through some piece of shit doctor named Keyough to claim that lead in the air was of no consequence, despite the fact that lead has no safe levels of exposure and was present in the air in large quantities, but there were scientists and doctors who fought banning lead, it was only banned in the late 80's, which was academic since lead fouled the catalytic converters being put on cars, so the oil industry found substitutes. But hey, industry never lies, and the scientists and doctors who supported them were doing a public service, not whoring themselves out.
All I have to say is that the polar pack ice is thinning out rapidly, and january 2015, despite the deep cold in the northeast and parts of the south and midwest, is the 2nd warmest january on record, and record temps have been set in something like 8 of 10 of the last januaries..but it is all a myth, or it is solar radiation (that during that time, has not changed at all), or clouds, or cow farts, or cosmic rays......funny, the skeptics talk abotu how the supports don't have 1 model of how fast change will happen, but the skeptics throw out 100 different reasons that global warming is not man made, and that is proof. If in fact global warming is not real as a man made phenomena, but rather is caused by natural factors, you would figure that the opposition would settle on the real cause, but it seems like every month there is a new theory. We used to call that spamming in debate, it was throwing out as many ideas as possible as rapidly as possible, and hoping something would stick. Like evolution deniers, who are just as stupid, climate skeptics and deniers base their whole case on trying to catch supporters in something that is unclear or is proven to be wrong, and saying "well, that model failed, therefore the whole thing is crock"..and like with evolution deniers, funny part is that the objections of the anti evolution forces time and again end up getting blown out of the water by science; the creationist douchebags chortled about how there was no missing link between land and sea life, so evolution was false, suddenly they found fossils of such creatures, that not only existed, but basically were exactly as evolution would predict it. They throw out that an eye couldn't happen by evolution, or a flagellum, and science shows exactly how it did happen. As they said on Monty Python, showing that something doesn't work is not making an argument, it is just negating whatever the other side said. When the deniers can show real evidence, not evidence misread or taken from Elmer Fudd saying "Goodammit, must be global warming, I got 4 feet of snow today, hee", then they can come back, but science based on showing holes in someone else's theory is not science, it is demagogery.
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