Climate Researchers Feeling Heat From White House 635
Jeff K writes "Facts and science collide with tribal loyalties, the Washington Post reports: 'Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.'"
Re:do they care? (Score:5, Interesting)
-Rick
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Offtopic (Score:3, Interesting)
Obviously, this is just an 'interesting' travel anecdote - and has nothing to with anything here.
Re:Your skin is not melting (Score:1, Interesting)
-Is it a process that has been going on over 15,000 years now. NOTE: Even this is not in dispute. We did just come out of an ice age, by the way....
-Do we have very much control over this process. Other than destroying > 95% of the worlds population, then NO! Burning "clean" fuels will not do crap when you have > 6 Billion people consuming. It is not an issue of clean, but rather scale.
The world is changing. It has been allot warmer even a million years ago. Get used to it!! If I hear another person talk about "mother earth being sick", I think Im going to hurl. There is this perception with people that everything is perfect until we do something to mess it up. Well, this theory might work in sunday school, but is just a big fat lie!
Re:Your skin is not melting (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article: "Although Bush and his top advisers have said that Earth is warming and human activity has contributed to this, they have questioned some predictions and caution that mandatory limits on carbon dioxide could damage the nation's economy."
It doesn't sound like there's any denying going on, but rather a question regarding the impact?
Re:Its nice to know someone has balls (Score:3, Interesting)
On The Plus Side ... (Score:3, Interesting)
The deliberate intrasigience of the feddies is not the last word. Technology to combat catastrophic climate change is the next big economic opportunity. The only question is whether we make it here and sell it there, or vice versa.
As long as our political leadership are tied to old-fashioned energy sources, they have no incentive to develop & implement the new technologies that will replace the old ... it's a classic "Innovator's Dilemma" [businessweek.com].
And it has an "Innovator's Dilemma" solution: outsiders develop small, nimble technologies, some of which fail, some of which succeed; eventually they eat the dinosaurs (...sorta like the desktop PC in the era of the mainframe.) You, yourself, can probably figure out a few clever ways to create or implent a green tech in your own city. Give it a try! [A few suggestions here] [rewinn.com]
What is better than making an honest buck while thumbing your nose at the anti-scientists!
Not about truth (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing is, the people want both religion and politics to be abou truth. We all have a primal need for our 'team' (ie: tribe) to be correct. We all want to believe our side is the Good Guys. The problem, as people become better educated, it becomes harder and harder for any but the most ignorant and gullible to buy into centuries-old superstitious nonsense of religion or the greed-saddled crap spewed out by politics.
If we ever have political leadership that genuinely prioritizes truth as their policy, that is when we will see a resurgence in interest from the populous. Until then, people are too bored with the gigantic quagmire of lies to care whether something is coming from one rich white guys' camp or the other.
Re:Not just Americans. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm more worried about the current administration's failure to legislate forced change to energy (particularly oil & gas) consumption, then I am about the American public's lack of awareness of the facts.
It's a classic free rider problem [wikipedia.org] and therefore a responsibility of government. It's also a worldwide free rider problem, where individual countries can choose to be a free rider.
The vast majority of people is not competent to judge what is happening. As always, people will believe the story if they believe in the authority of the messenger. In many countries in Europe, the climate change story has been adopted as fact for some time by governments, media, and meteorological services. In the US it hasn't.
The willingness to act on climate change obviously also depends on the consequences. In the Netherlands the government is already investing billions to deal with higher sea levels and more river water than was projected in the past. The last two decades have been so extremely wet that it cannot be a coincidence anymore according to the national meteorological service.
Re:Your skin is not melting (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds like the author of that book had an agenda. And wasn't very well informed.
Volocanoes are responsible for "global warming". If the gases that they spew are more plentiful that all that humans can put out in 100 years then they are far more responsible.
Except that volcanic eruptions over the last 100 years only account for 4% of the total greenhouse gas emissions over that same period. Which goes back to my point. You'll need to find a better book to quote.
It's rather amazing what conclusions you can reach when you decide the results before you begin your "research". Most of what the right-wing comes out with is based on this kind of "research".
It's so strange. Politically, I'm in the middle-right myself. Lately, however, I find that I have more in common with the statements coming from the left than the right-wing nutjobs, who seem to have not only inhaled, but gargled the bong water. My most sincere hope is that McCain can carry the Republican ticket, and we can wrest the Republican party back from the lunatic fringe. Wasn't the Republican party supposed to be the one defending personal liberties? So why in hell is the current president & cronies leading the charge to destroy our Constitutional freedoms?
(I know the answer: neo-cons are actually fascists at heart. It was a rhetorical question.)
Regards,
Ross
Re:Yes, they care (Score:3, Interesting)
As an American, I'd like to add (anecdotal) evidence that many Americans are just as sensitive to this topic as our European counterparts. I apologize if I ramble a lot, but I hope somebody at least finds it an interesting read. I work in the IT department at the American subsidiary of a European-based corporation. Almost every aspect of my job involves working directly with people in Germany, Singapore and the UK via conference calls. Even my interactions with the personnel in the local office are usually over the phone. With the exception of front-end loading on project startups, there is absolutely NO reason why I need to be in the office. Because of the ridiculously overinflated housing market, I could only avoid living in a trailer by buying a house 35 miles from the office where I work. This means that I drive 70 miles a day, every day of the week. The car I drive is one of the more fuel-efficient non-hybrid models that gets over 30 miles per gallon. Although I could do better with a hybrid or diesel, the cost of maintenance on both those types of vehicles leaves me slightly biased against them. And, since I'm a parent, the ultra-fuel-efficient two-seater vehicles are not practical for me. Recently, my company sold part of the land on our local campus, and we are now renting two of the buildings that sit on the land we sold from the company we sold to. I have suggested numerous times to my management that at least two thirds of the workforce could just as easily work from home. I have offered to pay my own bills for internet and telecomm access, only charging back international calls to the company (at a lower rate than they currently pay). I have offered to sign a waiver of liability so that there are no insurance issues associated with my working from a home office. I have demonstrated that I get more done in the same amount of time in the quieter environment of my home office, and I have carefully explained that I would probably start working earlier and finish later because I don't have two hours of driving a day. I have patiently explained that if those whose jobs permitted were allowed to work from home, we would be able to stop leasing the two buildings on the land we sold and easily fit everybody into the remaining buildings with a few "virtual cubes" available for when people need to come to the office. My American management is completely in support of this idea. However, the transplants from our corporate headquarters in Europe absolutely cannot stand the thought of not being able to watch people work. I have even used the "Global Warming" argument (out of frustration), and they refuse to relent. Now, just imagine what would happen if 25% of the work force in the US started working out of home offices. They would reduce their daily driving to vitually zero. Imagine the impact to greenhouse gases this would have.
So, what's my summary? I think the companies we work for could very easily contribute to improving the environment if they would just think out of the box a bit. For some reason, they refuse to do so. I also think that our European counterparts are just as blind to potential solutions as we are, but just in different ways.
Re:Come on now.... (Score:1, Interesting)
That was in 1991. A year or so later, Gallup reported that most researchers believed that global warming was a reality. Today, about 15 years later, pretty nobody with a brain they're willing to use doubts it any longer.
Re:Your skin is not melting (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, the Bush gang does seem to have wised up that the denial isn't really going over all that well. So they've switched to the traditional "Further research is needed" approach.
"Yes, some scientists say there's warming, but they don't agree on exactly how much or exactly what the causes are. We should wait until the scientists can reduce their error estimates to zero and prove exactly what's happening. Until then, we should all just go about our business as usual."
And since science hardly ever actually proves anything, this amounts to an indefinite delay to taking any action that might interfere with business and industry.
One of the interesting codes is the recent use of the phrase "sound science" by the Republicans (and a few others). If you look for the definition, you'll find that it means science that can absolutely prove its results, with no error bars or conjectures remaining. This sounds good to most non-scientists. But hardly anything in science has ever been proved to this degree. Scientists are still testing the Laws of Thermodynamics, the Theory of Relativity, and even the Law of Gravity. (They're all hoping to become famous for finding a loophole.
So basically Bush & Co are insisting that we wait until scientists have done something that science doesn't do. It may be a long wait.
Re:Why Bush and Cheney anger people (Score:3, Interesting)
If you call what he's doing "entirely responsible", what would you call what European countries are up to? Because they are inarguably way ahead on doing something about the problem.