The ten best climate friends you can have this year…
These are the ten best friends you can have in a fight.
In a debate.
In a hard corner…
They watch your back.
And especially when you need support in arguments about climate change.
Ideas and facts make best friends easily.
Often they make far better friends than physical carbon based Life forms ;–)
Sorry there are no people to befriend on FB but surely these ten are far more serviceable for you and me.
Because there’s no doubt that now we must win the public conversation this coming year.
Cause even though historically, temperatures and greenhouse gas fluctuations are minimal – as compared to the warming planet increases we’ve seen in the past century, in the last decade and last years – we still doubt as humanity our responsibility in this.
These ideas will help you carry the message far and wide and positively influence the Social Media conversation.
Use these ideas to create Social Capital to help our Climate & Atmospheric Commons.
Because snow in the South, ice gain in Antarctica and scientists seemingly fudging climate data doesn’t help us win hearts and influence minds.
The current snowmaggedon, snowpocalypse, snowicane cause some to say that the global warming debate is over…
We say:
Definitely not.
Still Climate Skeptics are on the winning side.
Global warming deniers have gleefully seized on geeky scientists, lack f social grace, their recent scandals and stupidly misinterpreted data, to bolster their collection of arguments, but still there are these pesky things called facts.
Fact that keep getting in the way of the climate deniers agenda.
But how do you respond to that misguided friend, to the passionate neighbor, the unemployed oil worker in the Gulf, the cranky nephew, the denier sister, or the retard reporter who uses the current snowmaggedon, the cold snap, the sunspots, Al Gore’s greed and a limited grasp of climate science to claim that global warming isn’t really happening but it’s a giant conspiracy…
Presenting the top 10 global warming denier arguments, and the facts that thoroughly debunk them might help… and thus we call them climate friends.
Still presenting the ten best ”Climate Friends” will definitely give you some food for thought and a bunch of useful ”friends” to refer to your other misguided friends and the Glenn Becks, the Lord Moctons, the Sean Hannitys, the Nigel Lawsons, the Bjorn Lombocks and the rest of anti-climate warriors and assembled idiot savants of nature.
Because these sillyness bellow are all of their so called facts.
Their cherry picking is what we offer you.
Simple minds – simple facts.
And these friends can help to foster healthy debate and bring about balance and harmony.
1) It’s all the sun’s fault and the fancy sunspots and sun storms
In 2004, a group of researchers announced that the sun is increasingly active, and that a rise in the number of sunspots corresponds to the rise in temperatures over the past century. Of course, global warming skeptics jumped on this as an easy explanation for warming.
But the fact is, the sun has shown a slight cooling trend — in direct opposition to the warming trend on Earth. Naturally, the sun does have a lot of influence on the climate, and during the 1,150 years for which scientists have records, temperatures on this planet closely correlated with solar activity.
It was right around 1960 that the Earth’s temperatures began to break away. Numerous peer-reviewed studies have concluded that the sun’s role in warming trends is, in fact, negligible.
2) It hasn’t warmed for over a decade and even before that it was cooling
This wholly inaccurate argument is a favorite of Glenn Beck and his ilk especially now when a lot of snow is falling in the major Northern hemisphere capitals.
Bur here are the facts:
1998 – 2009 were record-breaking, blazing hot years. But 1998 was exceptionally hot. Since average global temperatures haven’t quite reached those levels since, some critics have claimed that the Earth hasn’t continued to warm over the past decade — or even that the Earth is in a cooling period.
That’s just wrong. Though there were several years in the past decade of relatively cooler global temperature averages, that has to do with normal short-term climate variability caused by climate events like El Niño and La Niña. The combination of global warming and El Niño produced the dramatic spike in 1998, while La Niña has contributed to slight cooling in years like 2008 — which was still the 10th warmest year on record. In fact, NASA research has found that the past decade was the warmest on record and 2010 temperatures are on track to reach near-record levels. Or, put in simple terms: A year of record-breaking heat in 1998, that was followed by a decade of record breaking heat, isn’t cooling. It’s still unusual record-breaking heat as you can see from the “Global Temperatures” chart.
Moreover, surface temperatures aren’t everything. The entire planet, including the oceans, is accumulating heat. Skeptical Science puts the data in terms that are easier for the layperson to understand: The amount of heat that the oceans have accumulated since 1970 is roughly the equivalent of “190,000 nuclear power plants pouring their energy output directly into our oceans.”
3) There’s no consensus among scientists with so many skeptics
The 31,000-strong “Petition Project” is proof that there’s no scientific consensus on climate change! Except that it’s not a legitimate petition. An investigation by the Seattle Times into the “scientists” who signed the petition found that dozens of names were made up including “Perry S. Mason,” “Michael J. Fox,” “John C. Grisham” and Spice Girl “Dr. Geri Halliwell.”
Only 0.1 percent of the Petition Project signers have a background in climatology. An unrelated survey found that 97.4 percent of actual climatologists who actively publish research on climate change believe that human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.
Twenty-four scientific organizations and the Academy of Sciences from more than a dozen different countries all support the consensus, and a survey of all peer-reviewed abstracts on the subject of global climate change published between 1993 and 2003 found that not a single paper rejected the consensus position.
4) ‘Climategate’ proves it’s all an elaborate scam by greedy self serving earth scientists
When Koch Petroleum sponsored PR hackers stole e-mails written by England climate scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in November 2009, and created a furore just before Copenhagen’s COP15 that led to derailing the UN conference – skeptics hailed it as “the final nail in the coffin for global warming” – without examining the evidence. To much of the public, the content of some of the e-mails seemed damning: The scientists, including Phil Jones, joked about physically harming opponents and referred to their work in terms that seemed to boast of intentionally manipulating data.
But the quotes were clearly taken out of context. Few people took the time to read the e-mails in full before deciding that their contents proved global warming a scam. In reality the emails if anything proved conclusively the case for global warming.
While Jones himself admits that the personal attacks in some of the e-mails were “awful,” an extensive independent examination of all 1,073 e-mails by the Associated Press and a panel of moderate climate scientists found no evidence whatsoever that the science of global warming or the data stream was faked.
A British panel in July rebuked the scientists for their behavior, but found the same thing. In fact, a New York Times story that came out after the British panel issued its decision noted that after a handful of separate investigations, “All five investigations have come down largely on the side of the climate researchers, rejecting a number of criticisms raised by global-warming skeptics.”
When “Climategate” fizzled, skeptics homed in on a new target: a few minor errors in a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pertaining to the glacier melt time frame in a certain Himalayan glaciers. The Koch petroleum PR sponsored propaganda machine went full tilt again and brought over another tsunami of BS for public consumption by the skeptics community…
As the old adage goes – He who believed the PR – is fit to eat the BS.
5) Antarctica is actually gaining ice, not losing it and so is the Arctic
Melting at the Earth’s poles has long been considered a major warning sign of global warming, so when two recent studies indicated a slowing of overall surface warming across Antarctica — and even some ice gain — skeptics took it as solid proof of their point. The problem is, NASA satellite data shows that Antarctica has been losing more than 24 cubic miles of ice each year since 2002.
The “discrepancy” boils down to two things: First, there’s a big difference between land ice and sea ice. Sea ice is increasing, but it’s not because Antarctica is cooling — in fact, the Southern Ocean is warming faster than any other ocean on earth. It’s due to a series of events including the hole in the ozone layer and wind currents pushing sea ice around.
Second, scientists suspect that Antarctic ice shelves are being eroded from underneath by warming seas, and satellites can’t measure under the ice. While there’s not much happening in East Antarctica, which is a high, dry desert making up two-thirds of the continent, West Antarctica — a series of ice-covered islands that rest on the ocean floor — is retreating at a dramatic pace, especially along the southern portion of the Antarctic Peninsula.
The Peninsula is the farthest point from the South Pole, so its deterioration could be a sign of what’s to come for the rest of the continent.
6) Temperature data are unreliable and even prove a bit of cooling
Skeptics like to claim that temperature records showing a warming trend are unreliable because weather stations are often located in areas that absorb and radiate heat, like rooftops and asphalt parking lots. But in reality, the Urban Heat Island Effect has had a very small influence on temperature readings and climate scientists adjust the data to account for it.
All major temperature reconstructions for the past 1,000 years published in peer-reviewed journals show some variability in surface temperatures over centuries (above graph), with a dip in the Little Ice Age and a huge uptick during the last century. Even if those reconstructions are excluded and we only look at the last 150 years (below graph), there’s a significant rise.
When it comes down to it, surface temperature records are far from the only evidence of global warming. With bore hole analysis, weather balloon temperature data, satellite measurements, glacial melt observations, sea level rise and other indicators can be used completely independently of surface temps.
7) Climate change is part of a natural cycle and not human influence
“How can we, petty little humans that we are, possibly alter something as huge in scope as the planet’s climate? After all, when you think about just how complex the Earth really is, we’re just not that important. So why should we change our habits?”
That might have been true until about two centuries ago, when the Industrial Age came along and we first started burning massive quantities of filthy, CO2-producing coal. Since then, as technology has advanced and our population has multiplied to almost seven billion people, we’ve gotten dangerously BIG, pushing the limits of just how much pollution we can pump into the air before seeing catastrophic global effects.
There’s no doubt that historically, temperatures and greenhouse gas levels have fluctuated naturally, but those fluctuations are nothing compared to what we’ve seen in the past century.
8) Warming is a good thing for agriculture in the Northern climes
Many people believe that global warming would be good for the Earth and us.
Some cite fewer winter deaths, an ice-free Northwest Passage and increases in the number of certain species. Others argue that if the climate were to cool instead, even a little bit, a feedback effect would make things worse as growing Arctic snowfields caused more sunlight to reflect away from the ground. And another Ice Age wouldn’t exactly be kind to humanity. But while a few select regions could benefit from a warmer overall climate, most of the world would suffer on a nightmarish scale, and the feedback effect applies to warming as well.
Raging wildfires, extreme water scarcity, expanding deserts, changing ecosystems. Heatwave deaths, the spread of deadly mosquito-borne diseases, growing dead zones in the oceans,death of healthy trees and other vegetation, coral extinction. War. Climate refugees. That’s only a small fraction of the projected consequences, but it’s surely more than enough.
9) Look at all the snow and frozen cities in US and EU
Record snowfall illustrates the obvious: The global warming fraud is without equal in modern science, trumpeted an editorial in the conservative Washington Times. And let’s not even get started on the Snowmaggedon, the Snowpocalypse, or the snow-icane….
Right, because winter is never cold, and all that snow can’t possibly have anything to do with a near-record amount of moisture in the air. Meteorologist Jeff Masters explains that heavy precipitation events are increasing as the world warms, and at the freezing point and below, that means snow and lots of it on the northern climes. Global warming doesn’t mean winter is going to go away. Just that snow storms and cold snaps will become more severe and shorter…
The U.S. and northern Europe aren’t the entire world. They only represent jointly 2.5 percent of the whole globe. But they represent fully 99% of the Media world globally.
The Earth’s atmosphere is getting warmer, but different climates will be affected in different ways.
Local weather is becoming more volatile across the board due both to warming and normal variability, but while that has translated to more frequent, more severe snow events in North America and North EU, Brazil, Africa, India and South Asia are experiencing a near-record heat wave at the same time.
10) It’s all a hoax perpetuated by money-hungry Al Gore and his merry band of Hollywood friends
“You fools are being taken for a ride! Al Gore just made all this stuff up about global warming so he can roll in the Benjamins at his mansion.”
Fact: Gore donates all of the proceeds from both the book and DVD of An Inconvenient Truth to environmental causes. He also donated 100 percent of his Nobel Peace Prize award as well as the salary from his venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, to the Alliance for Climate Protection.
Al Gore isn’t the only target. Some claim that scientists “follow the money right onto the man-made global warming bandwagon.” But most funding for global warming research comes from government grants, and the money is doled out before the results are determined.
Meanwhile, dirty energy companies and anti-climate-action groups shower scientists who are willing to argue against climate change with cash. Exxon Mobil was one of the largest sources of funding for such scientists for over a decade, and purported to stop in 2008.
Surprise!
They lied.
And they lie again and again.
Yours,
Pano
PS:
Talk, Fight, Network this….
Chase the climate bastards off the stage.
Cream pie them, and shame them off and into their fully deserved rest and silence.
Hound them until they crawl under whatever rock and into whatever reptilian hole they come out from.
Whether manmade (anthropogenic) climate change is “real” or not is not the important issue.
The real issue is whether we could do anything about it, and do so in the near term before catastrophic consequences kick in.
The answer to both of these at present is an emphatic NO.
It appears to not be possible.
Believing otherwise is often called more ignorant than not believing in climate change.
And that is what we need to change…
We need to believe we can win.
We need to believe that change is possible…
And we ought to do it ourselves.
Because No government decree is going to change the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere anytime soon or slow it down at a meaningful rate.
Even the most aggressive IPCC proposals only reduce CO2 enough this century to “cool” the planet an insignificant 0.5C away from business as usual that will warm the planet by up to 6C in the same time.
And these proposals are not even realistic.
The fear propagated by the naysayers, is that the effect that the necessary CO2 emission restrictions would have on people and economy, not to mention the less fortunate is huge.
The loss of jobs, the increased cost of living, and the slow uptake of “Green jobs” and “green economy” are the scare crow of the debate.
Our proposals are heard as idealistic boosts, sort of like “hope and change.”
So should we do nothing?
No, and we are not sitting idle around either.
For thirty years companies and people have been working on practical alternatives for fossil fuels.
Not just because of global warming of course but because fossil fuels are a finite resource and the cost of them will continue to climb.
Whoever manufactures and uses renewables, and Green Tech and those who come up with the sorely needed green tech solutions will become very wealthy.
Renewables will give us a very wealthy country, city, region, persons and companies.
Certainly as the price of fossil fuels climbs over time this will quicken the pace.
PS2:
We are post Peak oil and need to feel it too.
Prices of fossil fuels are climbing.
But to artificially skyrocket the cost of energy today is senseless especially since the actual effect on the climate would be insignificant and the pain would be considerable.
What we do know is that the way they are configured currently, wind and tidal/wave power are not significantly useful answers, but the answer is not there.
The real answer to our Energy global civilization needs rests with Solar power.
We also know that solar will not be developed by any government alone but by many millions of people working to harness the power of the sun daily with installations on their work and home…
It will likely be a distributed DIY personal, free formed movement and a huge human entrepreneurial enterprise, mimicking the activity of plants using photosynthesis in tandem without any visible joint decision making but simply self interest for adaptation.
Mark my words, No amount of government coercion will make it happen tomorrow.
In fact this is what I am most skeptical about.
Whether governments want to create carbon markets and invoke these new taxes and fees because of their understanding the need to combat climate change or whether it is more about growing government power and control.
I strongly suspect the latter.
We need to break out and freely distribute the Solar technology in an open source way for all.
The wisdom of the species, and adaptation drivers are the real cause of change…
And our species’ adaptation needs the Technology drivers for Solar Energy.
Same as photosynthesis needs the sun.
PS3:
It’s an existential decision.
As I used to say to our investors:
There is a common set of scientific facts.
And although You are entitled to your own opinions;
You are not entitled to your own facts.
