NASA Study Indicates Antarctica is Gaining More Ice Than It's Losing -

[Pat Hartman]

You can tell by the headline that it is fake news. No one with a brain questions climate change. The dispute is whether or not humans are the proximate cause for it. Given that the change has been constant for billions of years and humans have only existed for a microcosm of that time, I'm going with -we are polluters and we need to get better about that but we are not the cause of climate change. It will happen with or without us.

 

[Galaxiom]

You can tell by the headline that it is fake news. No one with a brain questions climate change. The dispute is whether or not humans are the proximate cause for it. Given that the change has been constant for billions of years and humans have only existed for a microcosm of that time, I'm going with -we are polluters and we need to get better about that but we are not the cause of climate change. It will happen with or without us.

Many who now accept climate change but deny it is man made used to deny there was any change at all for a long time. Does that mean they grew a brain in the interim?

 

[Pat Hartman]

I don't remember anyone denying climate change. The topic has always been slanted in the press. If you don't believe humans are the proximate cause of climate change, then they call you a "climate denier"

Notice how the dialog has moved from "global warming" to "climate change" and now we've escalated to "climate crisis". It's a little like Faucci flipflopping to keep us terrified of our neighbors and wearing masks in perpetuity. It's all about control. NOTHING that the climate hustlers are pushing would have anything but a a miniscule impact over 50 years but Greta thinks we're doomed in 12. The Paris accords don't require anything of China or India, the worlds two biggest polluters. The Chinese all wear masks and have been for years because they can't breath in their large cities they are so polluted. But how many new coal plants does China build every year? And speaking of that, while it is nice to not have the local pollution of emissions from internal combustion engines, just where does all that electricity come from to charge the car batteries? Oops, coal. The greenies won't let us use Nuclear plants and solar and wind are unreliable at best as well as significantly more expensive per kilowatt and hydro is bad for the little fishes so that leaves gas and coal to form the backbone of our electrical generation network.

We absolutely need to be better about pollution and in the US we've done remarkably well and we've also reduced our emissions by more than what was demanded of us by the Paris accord which Trump pulled us out of. The sky is no longer green in LA. The Monongahela is not likely to catch fire again anytime soon. You can swim in the Hudson. We are not going to stop improving our husbandry of our country but we also should not be forced back to the dark ages or penury to satisfy the climate hustlers.

Except in large, Democrat run cities, even the streets are clean. You rarely see litter any more along the roadside. 50 hears ago, it was horrible everywhere.

 

[Jon]

Many who now accept climate change but deny it is man made used to deny there was any change at all for a long time. Does that mean they grew a brain in the interim?

Yes, this has been the great misrepresentation of the argument. The climate alarmists keep telling the big lie, so they set up a strawman argument to make the climate skeptics look silly. But the skeptics are not saying they don't believe that the planet is warming up. They are mostly in agreement. However, the extent of the warming projections from the alarmists were excessive, as history has so far shown.

The main argument is about how much of the warming is attributed to human CO2 emissions. I say argument, but there isn't too much of one. They want to shame the skeptics by linking them to the holocaust by calling them deniers. It is a form of cancel culture. Rather than argue with facts, they want to shame with feelings.

It is a legitimate argument to be had. Science is about argumentation over reality. Let it continue, unimpeded by shaming and cancelling.

 

[Pat Hartman]

If a volcanic explosion can give use a year without a summer (1816), humans could probably affect the climate if they caused that much pollution. We aren't causing that much and at least in the US, our emissions are going down. But don't forget, so far the Earth has recovered from large eruptions and we've had several We had one in Iceland a few years ago that disrupted air travel for quite a while. Doesn't mean the next one won't kill us off though. Yellowstone could be the end of the US. Or would could have a meteor strike similar to the one that landed in the Gulf of Mexico and which scientists think might have been what killed off the dinosaurs.

 

[Galaxiom]

If a volcanic explosion can give use a year without a summer (1816), humans could probably affect the climate if they caused that much pollution. We aren't causing that much

Oh yes we are. Man made carbon dioxide emissions are about 100 times the average that is emitted by all volcanism.

 

[Galaxiom]

.... so they set up a strawman argument to make the climate skeptics look silly. But the skeptics are not saying they don't believe that the planet is warming up.

Denial that the climate was changing, the planet warming and the sea level rising was very common until about 2016.

Climate Change skeptics mange to make themselves look silly without any help from anyone else.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I have tried to not be a denier of climate change but I question the CO2 causality. I believe studies have shown that water vapor is the bigger culprit. This is not to say that pollution that includes CO2 is something you should ignore. I'm a believer in reducing pollution because of its health risks. I merely have different reasons than some. I just don't believe in trash science of the type presented some years ago with the hockey-stick graph - that now conveniently cannot be reproduced because the author has lost the original data set. One of the potentially most import scientific data sets ever offered ... and he LOST it. Sorry, but as someone who has engaged in original research at various times, this is something you just DO NOT DO. This destroys ALL credibility of the study, at least in my mind.

 

[AccessBlaster]

Unfortunately science can be politicized, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg are just two examples of political corruption that foster's distrust. Politics aside the financial incentives to cook the science is enormous, profiting in climate change is the new global frontier.

 

[Jon]

I was a "believer" before. Then I watched some YouTube videos which set me on a path to investigating a little more on the subject. Then I find disingenuous attempts to scare people into submission, together with a moral crusade and virtue signalling thrown in. The distrust set in. It made me think that it was becoming a religion, rather than sticking to science. Then, take the position of the "impartial" climate change scientists. If they interpret data in a way that suggests man is not causing most of the change, they can lose their job and grant, since they are no longer needed. Throw in the moral outrage and hate from their peers and you have set up a system to fail, producing pre-determined outcomes rather than let the science do the steering.

Much of the public believe the skeptics are nut-jobs. Yet they know very little about the facts behind climate change. They are relying on the media and governments around the world. Well, look at what happened with masks for Covid. Whether or not you believe they work, the government changed their argument largely based on supply. "They don't work, save these things that don't work for the medics, since they need things that don't work."

So, I ask the armchair critics of climate change skeptics to explain their arguments. Even if CO2 emissions have shot up, and then global temperatures have gone up, you are ***assuming*** that CO2 is the main cause. Many things are correlated, but have no direct causal link or any causal link at all. A lot of people don't understand this, or say they understand this, but in this case it is different, because all the rational scientists say so. These rational scientists who are under threat of moral shaming, losing their job and ability to feed their family, who have pre-determined that climate change is caused by man and discount any evidence to the contrary.

I am a skeptic because of the above. That is a different position to saying that I believe that CO2 is not the main cause. It just means that the scientists have not convinced me due to their cancel culture, shaming, moral outrage, misrepresentation of facts, like in the "97% of scientists agree" Cook report, political manoeuvring, hypocritcal Al Gore/John Kerry/ Harry and Meghan/Lewis Hamilton personal jet flying hypocrites. It is easy to buy into your own hype when you are surrounded by group think. When you try to shut down the debate, you are engaging in politics, not science.

 

[Pat Hartman]

I'm with Jon on this. If they have to manipulate the data to prove their point and if the biggest "pushers" don't believe that they should have to live by the same rules they want me to live by, then I remain a skeptic.. I've worked with data long enough to know that I can manipulate the statistics with my set selection.

The US has been very good about cleaning up their pollution. One of the ways we've done it is to off-shore certain industries. That didn't stop the pollution in those countries. It just moved it from us to them.

I think that cutting down the rain forest in Brazil is a huge mistake. I think clear cutting trees in any forest is a mistake. We have a couple of evidences of civilizations being destroyed by cutting down all their trees. Easter Island and Haiti come to mind. There are sustainable ways to use trees. without destroying local ecosystems. Connecticut actually has more tree cover than it did a century ago because we have very little farming left. That is actually bad because it increases the distance we have to ship food.

The biggest impact we could make in the US is to switch to nuclear power. It produces very little waste. But people have been so terrified of it, we continue to use fossil fuels when we could get rid of a large number of fossil fuel fired plants. Makes me wonder. How much did the fossil fuel industry contribute to the Nukes are scary campaign. For years people believed the tobacco is "safe" campaign. A large portion of the population hates Trump due to the nasty press. The people who push electric cars conveniently ignore where that electricity is coming from. A large portion of the population is absolutely terrified of covid because they can't be bothered to actually look at the numbers and the media refused to acknowledge that the initial models were wrong by a factor of 100. Doesn't mean that COVID isn't deadly, just that it shouldn't have been the end of the world as we know it. And if Faucci has his way, we'll be wearing masks forever because there will always be some "variant" lurking out there. He's right BTW. New viruses occur normally. This one was helped along by sloppy work in the Wuhan lab which was funded by Faucci's department even after Obama said to stop gain of function research as well as malfeasance by the Chinese government once it escaped. No wonder they don't want it called the "Wuhan" virus. It will remind people that they didn't even try to stop it from spreading outside of China. However it is perfectly OK to call the variants after the places where they occurred. A little hypocritical don't ya think? Not to mention all the other viruses we name after their place of origin. It was the common naming scheme until China objected so it is the South African variant but we have to call the original virus COVID-19 If I were from South Africa or the UK, I'd be crying foul.

 

[Steve R.]

Below is what I wrote back in February 2021 from the thread: 97% of scientists agree that climate change is.
I have bolded five bullet points made in that post as a method of reiterating them as compelling focus points for this thread.

Good video. It is a gigantic scam.

1. What is the optimal temperature for the Earth?
2. Claiming that "global warming" would be "devastating" is anthropocentric. Maybe other life on Earth would find a warmer climate beneficial.
3. Changing the operative phrase to "climate change" from "global warming" is a red flag that we are being scammed.
4. Many of those screaming the loudest for climate change regulations are themselves unwilling to modify their behavior to demonstrate compliance. One recent example, John Kerry and his private jet.
5. Proposed solutions tend to be both superficial and unrealistically minimize the negative consequence of complying with climate change mandates. For example, the focus of addressing global warming is CO2 emissions while neglecting other concerns like increased urbanization. Next, we are to give-up using fossil fuels but many then suffer increased "pain" because everything becomes more expensive.
6. Population management. If you believe that people cause global warming, then it would naturally follow that you need to reduce the number of people in the world. Very few people ever point that out. Another scam indicator. The green advocates of today only promote superficial "painless solutions" that will never really solve the problem. The world population for now is expected to peak in 2055 at about 8.7 billion people. The current world population is around 7.8 billion.
7. Population management continuation. Standard of living and government regulations. Basically, the more people you have, the more each person competes for resources. That also means more government regulations to allocate and distribute those resources. Much of the world has a lower standard of living than the US. That translates into a lower per capita carbon footprint for the poor nations. Everyone should have a higher standard of living, unsurprisingly that would mean an increased carbon footprint -> screaming global warming!!! Of course, some will claim that we can achieve certain, as yet undiscovered, technological advances that would allow rich countries to reduce their carbon footprint while allowing poorer countries to increase their standard of living while keeping the worlds carbon footprint "equal". For now that is speculation. There are already proposals for marginally reducing our standard of living. But they have not received too much press. To sum things up, how much of your standard of living are you willing to give-up to minimize global warming?

 

[Steve R.]

As a rhetorical observation related to "global warming", consider the lowly McDonald's hamburger wrapper. According to one source. McDonald's, sells 6,480,000 hamburger per day, as only one of many fast food restaurants. Each hamburger, at the time of sale, is covered with a wrapper. The life expectancy of that wrapper, plus the paper bag it comes-in is probably less than one minute. (Additionally, consider the use of one-use containers for the fries and drink that may also be bought.) Think of all the carbon based energy and resources that generate CO2 emissions that go into producing that one wrapper and multiply it by the number of other fast food restaurants and/or even regular restaurants wrapping their food products.

The hamburger wrapper is but a small example, but we are a disposable society. The wrapper example effects on "global warming", fossil fuels, and the carbon foot print, has to be extended to a plethora of companies and products. Our standard of living is based on the luxury of being able to "waste" resources. Combating "global warming", if it is to be a serious effort, will mean reducing our standard of living. Do you want to have your wrapper at the time-of-sale?

 

[Pat Hartman]

In CT we've banned plastic bags. I miss them because I actually reuse them several times and have been using "permanent" bags at the grocery store for at least 10 years. I'm still having trouble remembering to bring my own bags into a department store but I'm not complaining. Most people didn't reuse their plastic bags so they are extremely wasteful when there are other alternatives. Not sure what we can do about wrappers for big macs except make sure they are biodegradable. But that becomes a technological problem because they have to be sturdy enough and greaseproof to last long enough to get the burger home. But I most miss the Styrofoam cups my DD coffee used to come in. Although the paper cups are better for the environment, they don't keep the coffee as hot and again, I reused any DD cup that made it into my house. Whenever I make my own coffee to go, I put it in the old DD cups. I would like to see a huge "deposit" on single use water and other drink bottles. A dollar wouldn't be too much for bottles sold by the case. The only exception I would make is at airports inside the "gate" where you are a captive audience.

My local bridge clubs have been using real cups for 20 years. They just run the dishwasher after the game.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

These climate activists will do anything to scare us!

Human penises are shrinking because of pollution, warns scientist

Dr Shanna Swan has found that chemicals called phthalates are causing human babies to be born with malformed genitals.

news.sky.com

 

[Pat Hartman]

Let's not even talk about what is happening to little girls due to all the growth hormones we feed to livestock

 

[AccessBlaster]

It's not "science" if you're not allowed to question it.
It's a belief system, a religion, a cult, but not science.

 

[Isaac]

It's not "science" if you're not allowed to question it.
It's a belief system, a religion, a cult, but not science.

Very well said. Anything - ANYTHING, that cannot bear the brunt of challenge and scrutiny, or is pushed by those rushing to silence the same, is not science at all, by definition.

 

[Jon]

The climate alarmists play the man, not the ball. It may (or may not) be true that man is the main cause of global warming. It is hard to tell. But trying to force through your opinion by shaming, closing down debates, misleading with bogus data and hypocritical actions, that is no way to convince someone who is not led by groupthink.

 

[harpygaggle]

A month ago, a giant iceberg, more than 20 times the size of Manhattan, just split off from Antarctica's Brunt Ice Shelf. Actually, the breaking off is normal, but what made this rare are the large calving that were detected.