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  1. #1
    Veteran DarrinS's Avatar
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    http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...+Commentary%29



    "What the heck went wrong?" That, apparently, is the question roiling the environmental community as it realizes that the fight against climate change has fizzled.

    As Brad Plumer writes in the New Republic, everything was looking great in 2008 for a sweeping effort to make good on candidate Barack Obama's pledge to start turning back the rising oceans. The Democrats held Congress. Both John McCain and Obama had promised to push for capping carbon emissions. Corporations had gotten on board. Al Gore and "An Inconvenient Truth" had seemingly softened up the public to the point where it might go along with whatever a popular president promised.

    "Instead, the climate push was ... a total flop," laments Plumer.

    And of course, Plumer's right, though not entirely for the reasons he claims.

    Climate change is dead as a major political issue for the foreseeable future. Don't believe me? Check out Obama's remarks in his weekly radio address last weekend. It was all about energy policy, and yet not once did he talk about climate change.

    In one sense, that's odd, given that without global warming, his energy policy goes from merely misguided to outright bonkers. After all, if you wanted to create non-exportable jobs, wean America off foreign oil or pursue energy independence from the Middle East, absent any concerns about climate change or releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, you would unleash America's massive energy reserves in coal, gas and oil. According to the Congressional Research Service, hardly a mouthpiece for Big Oil, the U.S. has the largest energy resources of any country, Saudi Arabia and Russia included.

    But in another sense it's not odd, because telling voters that they have to pay high gas prices in order to ineffectually fight climate change would be honest but incalculably dumb, politically. Recent polling shows that Americans care about the economy more — a lot more — than global warming. Skepticism about the existence of a problem or its scope has been rising in the U.S. and Europe. When a Pew poll in January asked voters what their biggest priorities were, climate changed ranked second to last. Only obesity was deemed less of a priority. (Don't tell Mic e Obama.)

    Even Madison Avenue has noticed. The New York Times reports that increasingly budget-conscious consumers are no longer willing to s out extra for self-described "green products." As a result, the number of new Earth-friendly products has plummeted.

    Why has climate change lost its oomph? Plumer lays out some of the reasons, though he minimizes the damage greens have inflicted on their own credibility thanks to the 2009 Climategate email scandal and wildly overstated predictions. For instance, the United Nations predicted there would be 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010. They're nowhere to be found.

    No wonder Obama constantly insists that switching to vastly more expensive and less-efficient energy sources will create jobs. No wonder he insists that if we all get onboard the high-speed rail bandwagon, we'll win the future. No wonder he's trying to change the subject to as-of-yet-nonexistent gas station price gouging and allegedly outrageous subsidies for the oil industry.

    Obama's claims are dubious at best. The Chinese word for high-speed rail should be "white elephant." Green jobs destroy more jobs than they create, and pay less. In Spain, Obama's favorite clean-energy innovator, one study found that 2.2 jobs were destroyed for every one that was created. Indeed, across Europe, massive investments in wind and solar simply haven't paid off.

    One suspects that Obama would dearly love to drill a lot for more oil and gas, simply for the political windfall in jobs and economic growth. But after he flipped on offshore drilling, then flopped after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, he cannot flip again without infuriating his base. So he brags about how much more drilling there is today, even though that's the result of policies already in the pipeline.

    Obama and the greens are in an exquisite bind. Without economic recovery, Americans won't support Obama's "investments," but Obama's investments are a hindrance to recovery.

  2. #2
    keep asking questions George Gervin's Afro's Avatar
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    The climate's fine..nothing to see here... there's nothing that humans do that affect mother earth.. nothing at all..

  3. #3
    Veteran Wild Cobra's Avatar
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    The climate's fine..nothing to see here... there's nothing that humans do that affect mother earth.. nothing at all..
    You're wrong again, but I'll forgive you for not using blue.

  4. #4
    Veteran DarrinS's Avatar
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    The climate's fine..nothing to see here... there's nothing that humans do that affect mother earth.. nothing at all..


    Not true. There were 50 million climate refugees last year. The UN said so.

  5. #5
    Veteran Wild Cobra's Avatar
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    Here in the Willamette Valley, we still mostly have rainy cloudy days. I think the climate is revering back to what I remember in the early 70's here.

    That's some powerful global warming to wrap the odometer back to cool!

  6. #6
    Veteran DarrinS's Avatar
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    At least California was smart and passed their own climate change legislation. It has created millions of jobs and lowered their average temperature.

  7. #7
    Veteran Wild Cobra's Avatar
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    At least California was smart and passed their own climate change legislation. It has created millions of jobs and lowered their average temperature.
    It was so good, it lowered the temperature where I live too!

  8. #8
    Independent DMX7's Avatar
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    Of course those implied statistics you're citing are pulled out of your ass too.

  9. #9
    Veteran Wild Cobra's Avatar
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  10. #10
    W4A1 143 43CK? Nbadan's Avatar
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    Where's Manny?

  11. #11
    e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0 MannyIsGod's Avatar
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    I'm right here. Climate change is still happening, but as I told NBADan in the other thread, people like him are the worst thing for those who would actually want to change things for the better. They overstate bull and are just as bad as the DarrinS people of the world.

    I gave up on meaningful climate legislation a long long time ago.

  12. #12
    Veteran Wild Cobra's Avatar
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    Here's an interesting blog:

    Hall of Record

  13. #13
    Veteran Wild Cobra's Avatar
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    Of course those implied statistics you're citing are pulled out of your ass too.
    That's right, be the sore loser while we are having fun with it.

  14. #14
    Veteran Wild Cobra's Avatar
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    I gave up on meaningful climate legislation a long long time ago.
    I'm all for meaningful climate legislation. The problem is, they have been going after the wrong culprit.

  15. #15
    W4A1 143 43CK? Nbadan's Avatar
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    I'm right here. Climate change is still happening, but as I told NBADan in the other thread, people like him are the worst thing for those who would actually want to change things for the better. They overstate bull and are just as bad as the DarrinS people of the world.

    I gave up on meaningful climate legislation a long long time ago.
    Meaningful climate change legislation won't happen because the Manny's of the world are in cahoot with the Darrins and Johnsmith of the world....not because people like me are saying 'look over here"...

  16. #16
    Veteran DarrinS's Avatar
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    Climate change is still happening, ...

    Always has and always will be. Climate change is the norm. If it stopped changing, it would be for the first time in 4½ billion years. Global warmists are the climate change deniers.

  17. #17
    I am that guy RandomGuy's Avatar
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    You know, I was just thinking to myself that we needed another global warming denial op-ed piece.

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  19. #19
    I am that guy RandomGuy's Avatar
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    Always has and always will be. Climate change is the norm. If it stopped changing, it would be for the first time in 4½ billion years. Global warmists are the climate change deniers.
    Fallacy: Straw Man

    The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and subs utes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of "reasoning" has the following pattern:


    Person A has position X.
    Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
    Person B attacks position Y.
    Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.
    This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not cons ute an attack on the position itself. One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person.
    Find one person supporting AGW that claims that climate does not change, or states anything even close to that.

    If you can't, then tell me why you feel the need to use logical fallacies to state your case.

  20. #20
    Veteran DarrinS's Avatar
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    You know, I was just thinking to myself that we needed another global warming denial op-ed piece.

    Global warmists are the deniers. Climate change has been happening for 4½ billion years. Good day.

  21. #21
    Veteran Wild Cobra's Avatar
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    Bla bla bla is right.

    Consider this, if the global average is increasing, we should never be seeing record lows. What would account for them? Record highs however can easily be due to the way we have temperature sensing sites in urban areas.

    Ever hear of an Urban Heat Island?

  22. #22
    I am that guy RandomGuy's Avatar
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    Bla bla bla is right.

    Consider this, if the global average is increasing, we should never be seeing record lows. What would account for them?
    [Complex systems sometimes behave in unexpected ways.]

  23. #23
    I am that guy RandomGuy's Avatar
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    Global warmists are the deniers. Climate change has been happening for 4½ billion years. Good day.

    Fallacy: Straw Man

    The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and subs utes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of "reasoning" has the following pattern:


    Person A has position X.
    Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
    Person B attacks position Y.
    Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.
    This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not cons ute an attack on the position itself. One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person.
    Find one person supporting AGW that claims that climate does not change, or states anything even close to that.

    If you can't, then tell me why you feel the need to use logical fallacies to attempt to further your case.

  24. #24
    Veteran DarrinS's Avatar
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    Find one person supporting AGW that claims that climate does not change, or states anything even close to that.

    If you can't, then tell me why you feel the need to use logical fallacies to attempt to further your case.


    Maybe you should try a larger font.

  25. #25
    e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0 MannyIsGod's Avatar
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    Good job trolling, IMO.

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