conservatives: your views on global warming?

Question

i'm looking to get a fairly accurate judgment on just how misinformed conservatives are on this topic. i've already heard amateur arguments such as: "the sun is causing the warming" "global warming is a hoax" "man does not have the power to change his environment" "a couple [minority] of scientists believed in global cooling in the 70's -- [therefore global warming is presumably not possible]"

anyone with the even slightest degree of knowledge of climatology knows these are ridiculous claims. i'm looking to discover just how misinformed other conservatives on this topic. perhaps, assuming they are misinformed, they are this misinformed on every topic. maybe not, but we'll see.

and please no "the weather man doesn't believe in it". i'm not sure what that proves, other than you base your opinion of AGW entirely off the weather man's (one person) opinion. only facts pertaining to global warming itself, not attacks against or for individual scientists.

Answer 1

It all comes down to, "how bad (really) is the problem, - what will it cost in terms of the economy".

Answer 2

Misinformed--Mars is warming and we have two Solar powered vehicles running around on it.

Why do you dismiss this as amateurish? To me it points directly to the sun as causing any warming.

Lets face it. The global warming crowd wants to impose restrictions on economic growth based on what is at best flimsy evidence and anecdotal examples. They want the most economically developed countries like European countries and the USA to cut back--while allowing the developing countries to continue to pollute.

It is the "SKY is Falling Argument." and the more I hear about it the more skeptical I become of their motives.

For instances--anybody that comes out with a study that is ANTI-GLOBAL warming. Well those guys are in the pocket of big oil. But anybody that gets their funding from the pro global warming groups and says there is global warming--Well those guys are saintly and above questioning.

Why are they above questioning --did they not get their money from a person or group with a bias?
Do they want to continue getting money from that group.


There are FIVE MAJOR Items that keep me from believing in GLOBAL WARMING.

1) The ice age started and ended without one SINGLE SUV on the planet.

2) Weathermen can't forecast local weather more than a few days out and even then they are NEVER 100% accurate. Yet you want me to change my lifestyle based on forecast 100 years out!

3) The Warmest recorded Year on record in the United States was in the 1930s.

4) The earths climate is always in a state of flux. It has warmed and cooled over and over again throughout history.

5) If global warming is indeed a scientific event. Why did Algore receive the NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. Why not a Nobel prize in a Hard Science.

Answer 3

Is the planet warmer today than 50 years ago? If the records say so, then who am I to argue? However, Meteorologists can't even accurately predict the number of hurricanes in a season. They have been wrong, extremely wrong the last 3 years. With that being said, why should we think they can predict 100 years out with any more accuracy?

By the way, the same things that scientists are saying is causing global warming, according to scientists 30 years ago was causing global cooling.

Of course, my answering this is a waste of time, because by your question, you don't care about any one's opinion anyway, if different from your own, no matter how wrong your's may be.

Answer 4

Well the only one who made an effort was BrianthePigEatingInfidel. He quotes this guy Solanski who blames sunspots. Let's have a look at the sunspot vs. global temperature data, shall we?

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/600px-Temp-sunspot-co2.svg.png

Looking at that data, I'd have to say that anyone who blames sunspots for the warming over the past 30 years loses all credibility. But let's not stop there, let's look at TSI too.

Here is a graph of Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) as measured by satellites (taken together called ACRIM and PMOD):

http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/acrim1.jpg
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/pmod1.jpg

Here are the trends of those graphs:

http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/pmodacr.jpg

And here is what the global temperature has been doing over that same time period:

http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/t1975.jpg

Does that look like the Sun is responsible? It's not.

"The ACRIM data shows a slight increase in TSI - the PMOD data shows practically no trend at all. Regardless of which dataset you use, the trend is so slight, solar variations can only have contributed a [small] fraction of the current global warming."

http://www.skepticalscience.com/acrim-pmod-sun-getting-hotter.htm

'No Sun link' to climate change

Article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6290228.stm
Scientific paper: http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/proceedings_a/rspa20071880.pdf

The only way to be a global warming skeptic/denier is to cherrypick the data or to believe a pack of lies. In Brian's case, he's cherrypicking. He listens to one scientist who disagrees with the consensus of thousands. He looks at solar data (well, he himself probably doesn't look at it), but ignores the data over at least the past 30 years.

Global warming deniers seek out the few scientists who are willing to tell them what they want to hear. Or instead they just listen to Rush Limbaugh.

Answer 5

Well why dont you show us the flawed data that global warming is entirely based on? Why dont you tell us why a British court found the data to be seriously flawed and biased? Biased enough that they dont allow "global warming" to be taught in schools without strong evidence showing that it does not exsist. Why dont you explain why the majority of the "experts" were receiving government grants and were in danger of losing their grants if global warming was not proven? Why dont you explain why only researchers whose data fit the profile were picked to sit on the panel? Why were any dissenting voices excluded from testifying? Why dont you "explain" to us why a recent study conducted by the national academy of science researchers has concluded that their is no viable evidence of a "global" warming but there is actually a mini ice age coming in he next decade?

Answer 6

Al Gore and Hollywood movie makers and all of the money hungry scientists have convinced closed minded people like you that the sky is falling. Get a life.

Answer 7

Um, sorry, but how is "the sun is causing the warming" amateurish and wrong? Scientists have been observing that all the planets in the solar system are heating up.

"A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes.

"Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.

"The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years."

"Dr Solanki said that the brighter Sun and higher levels of "greenhouse gases", such as carbon dioxide, both contributed to the change in the Earth's temperature but it was impossible to say which had the greater impact.

"Average global temperatures have increased by about 0.2 deg Celsius over the past 20 years and are widely believed to be responsible for new extremes in weather patterns. After pressure from environmentalists, politicians agreed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, promising to limit greenhouse gas emissions between 2008 and 2012. Britain ratified the protocol in 2002 and said it would cut emissions by 12.5 per cent from 1990 levels.

"The team studied sunspot data going back several hundred years. They found that a dearth of sunspots signalled a cold period - which could last up to 50 years - but that over the past century their numbers had increased as the Earth's climate grew steadily warmer. The scientists also compared data from ice samples collected during an expedition to Greenland in 1991. The most recent samples contained the lowest recorded levels of beryllium 10 for more than 1,000 years. Beryllium 10 is a particle created by cosmic rays that decreases in the Earth's atmosphere as the magnetic energy from the Sun increases. Scientists can currently trace beryllium 10 levels back 1,150 years.

Dr Solanki does not know what is causing the Sun to burn brighter now or how long this cycle would last.

He says that the increased solar brightness over the past 20 years has not been enough to cause the observed climate changes but believes that the impact of more intense sunshine on the ozone layer and on cloud cover could be affecting the climate more than the sunlight itself."

Answer 8

Conservatives get many of their views from network and cable media, which is controlled by the large corporations , who do NOT want Global warming to be real or people to worry about it, because that will cut into their profits which is their ONLY reason for being , so they tell us it's junk science or "Not to worry -- technology will get us out of any problem technology gets us into. " The minority opinion often turns out to be the right one.

Answer 9

Its a hoax, the last 100 years the temperature has risen 1 degree, its the earths natural cycle, it warms and cools all the time

Answer 10

It is real but it is not all our fault some of it must be caused by somthing natural.