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If it was Remnick trying to cast the New Yorker as a less stodgy magazine and more (God save me for uttering it) in-your-face, mission accomplished. A lot of people got that image in their face and were offended big time. The New Yorker is going to be dogged for this for a long time to come, I think, and the magazine's subscription as an NPR pledge premium is probably off the table at the next drive...
And what is supposedly being satirically skewed here could have been done a myriad of other ways... Too bad they chose this one.
Still stand on my original premise: they could have sent that point with a far less heated graphic.
I don't see any grand scheme behind this, other than publicity for The New Yorker mag, of which I am a regular reader. But it does strike me as a giant distraction. When the press asked McCain about the cartoon, instead of denouncing it, I think he should have said that he'd respond to a real issue if asked, but not cartoon issues.
By the way, the science IS still unclear. Do a column on climate change someday, and I will cite you chapter and verse of the IPCC reports, demonstrating how their evidence and conclusions do not join up seamlessly. Interestingly, the American Physical Society just this week joined the CO2 skeptics camp. The truth will out, the emperor's nakedness will belatedly be recognized. Or is that Al Gore's nakedness? The word "consensus" these days makes me laugh almost as much as the New Yorker cartoon.
As for the "chapter and verse" you intend to cite concerning the IPCC report, I invite all readers to take a look at this page from the American Metorological Society's ClimatePolicy website: http://www.climatepolicy.org/?p=20. It discusses the danger of "cherry picking" a few articles among the many thousands that have been written on climate change--particularly a single article that claims to refute every point within a report like the IPCC's, which collects the observations of a huge selection of scientists. (I assume that's the single article you're carrying around in your back pocket.) The money quote: "This type of cherry picking isn’t very effective for arguments within the research community because scientists draw on the larger body of knowledge when assessing the merit of individual papers or the arguments that rest upon them. Cherry picking can be highly effective in misleading non-experts such as politicians, journalists, and the public, however."
By the way, thanks for comparing Democrats to Muslims, this time because we supposedly can't take a cartoon joke. Methinks you just proved my point.
No, it was just irony. The sophisticated can spot the difference.
Also to clarify, I have not read the new article on the APS website. That is not the source of my skepticism.
I think the general problem is most easily seen on page four of the 2007 IPCC Summary For Policymakers, in Figure SPM-2. In this chart, we see eight anthropogenic factors which are claimed to affect post-industrial radiative forcing. For five of those eight factors, even the IPCC claims our level of scientific understanding is low to medium. They only claim "high" level of scientific understanding for two factors -- CO2 and other long-lived "greenhouse" gases.
It is not logical to claim certainty about the cause of warming when their understanding of five or six out of eight important factors is, by their own admission, low to medium. That's an easy, rational deduction to make. I don't see any way around it. You can't make predictions with a computer model where 75% of your inputs are not well-understood. Period.
In fact at the bottom of the figure, we find that their estimate of the anthropogenic contribution to warming varies from 0.6 to 2.4 watts/square meter. From the low end to the high end, that's a variance of a factor of four! If they really can't be more certain than that then frankly I wouldn't bet a dime on their predictions. And neither should anyone else in their right minds.
In addition, Nature published on their website an article showing the current models' inability to account for temperature fluctuations like the warm period prior to the 1940s. In addition, they noted that you have to reduce the confidence level to 90% to make the model fit the temperature records of the rest of the last century.
The IPCC and the "consensus" are stumbling around in the dark, claiming to have a candle. They don't. Thinking people, people who will look at the breadth of evidence, are not fooled. I hope you won't be either.
I encourage all readers to examine the IPCC report. The Summary for Policymakers that Eric trashes--available at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/sy... high to very high levels of certainty regarding its major conclusions, which are frightening. The degrees of uncertainty that Eric cites are actually to be found in the main report (available at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/sy...), in Figure 2.4 on page 39. When you look at that chart you'll see that the "anthropogenic factors" Eric is trumping up, because of the "low scientific understanding" related to them, are having a minuscule impact on global temperatures compared to the greenhouse gases about which these thousands of scientists have a high level of understanding.
In other words, Eric, you're pulling one smidgen of uncertainty out of a report that includes thousands of pieces of data about which 99 percent of the world's climate scientists agree, and trying to undercut the report's entire achievement because of it. THAT IS LUDICROUS. Talk about cherry picking!
What, do you think these scientists were paid by Al Gore or the Democratic Party to make this stuff up so that Detroit would have to make plug-in hybrids, and we could bankrupt the utility companies by forcing them to develop renewable energy sources?
One more quote from the AMS website: "Groups of scientists rarely sit around agreeing with each other. Rather they voice their own views independently. These are individuals who often have different experiences and who come from a wide range of research areas....Professional credibility for scientists rests on being accurate. By presenting a skewed or indefensible picture of what is known, a scientist would lose credibility and potentially suffer serious professional consequences."
So please, stop making me cackle with your phrases about how "thinking people are not fooled" and "anyone in their right minds" is not heeding the IPCC's predictions. You may choose to continue living in your fantasyland, but if you succeed in delaying the implementation of real solutions for global warming much longer, your fantasyland will become more and more uninhabitable along with our "reality-based" world.
As for your bit of "irony": yes, the sophisticated can see the difference, but too many people have proven conclusively that they AREN'T that sophisticated, and your party has made a science out of preying on their worst instincts and fears. So congratulations.
(Schwartz, Charlson, and Rhode are a bit more charitable in their Nature Reports commentary, "Quantifying Climate Change: Too Rosy A Picture?." www.nature.com/reports/climatechange But they note the same thing I pointed out -- when you add up all the obvious uncertainties, the end result is not certainty! Duh.)
You also apparently misunderstood the magnitude of the other factors. Look at the IPCC chart I referenced again. The combined cooling -- that's right, COOLING -- effects of surface albedo and aerosols is, by the IPCC's own estimate, about as great as the warming effect of CO2. In other words, man is producing cooling effects on the planet that may be near to counteracting the warming effects of CO2. Add them up. It's right there on the chart. You can't miss it. You don't need a degree in climate science to add.
A final point. While the American Physical Society may lack the testicular capacity to man up and actually admit the uncertainty and bad IPCC science to which I have referred, they have clearly opened the floor for debate. One does not open for debate a scientific topic on which there is nothing to debate. Obviously they feel there is room for legitimate disagreement. They stated as much in the editor's comments to the July 2008 Physics & Society newsletter: "There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Since the correctness or fallacy of that conclusion has immense implications for public policy and for the future of the biosphere, we thought it appropriate to present a debate within the pages of P&S concerning that conclusion."
The editor does not dismiss or ridicule or belittle or question the motives of those who are skeptical. He simply admits a fact: there is a considerable presence -- considerable, not a lunatic fringe -- within the scientific community who disagree with the IPCC's conclusions. This being legitimately debatable, and very important for public policy, the doors are opened for debate.
Al Gore is wrong. The debate is not over. More scientists join the ranks of the skeptics every day. They will not go away quietly. There's too much at stake.
As for me, I will now go quietly. I've presented ample evidence here for anyone interested in open-minded inquiry to look at and decide for themselves, to begin a search for the truth about the global warming camp's phony iron-clad assurances. It is those who believe in conclusions based on half-baked climate models that are living in fantasyland, not those like myself who have taken the trouble to peruse the real historical data on CO2 versus temperature, for example.
Although you disagree, I thank you for listening, and taking the trouble to look at the chart. I am the enemy of bad ideas, not the people who believe in them. :)
What are you after here? What are your goals? Who or what are you protecting--the profits of big business? The business models of the oil and power companies? Because you are goddamn sure not looking after the interests of the human race or the rest of the living species on this planet.
There are economic, environmental and political crises brewing in this country and around the world, all of which point to the absolute necessity of getting us off our addiction to fossil fuels. You are obstructing that process through sheer obstinence. At what cost?
You have presented nothing but a Christian-Science, head-in-the-sand--and worst, ideologically motivated denial of millions of hours of professional scientific work, and a buttheaded refusal to act upon the clear-cut results.
Your cockamamie "evidence" is pure nothingness that vanishes upon the slightest examination. Again I ask, to what end? Whose interests are you looking out for? And to how many billions of people (and other living things) will you need to apologize if your foolishness results in action not being taken in time?
I will never "go quietly" on this issue. Far too much is at stake, and--apparently--too much of a fight left to be fought just to get to the work at hand.
Fortunately, this argument just goes to show why some things--particularly the alternate reality created by conservatives over the last decade--just aren't funny anymore.
That is precisely my motivation, for the reasons Michael Crichton presents in his speech "Aliens Cause Global Warming."
Perhaps at a future time I will explain this more thoroughly. I honestly believe the side effects of the actions people like Gore want us to take will be worse for most of humanity than doing nothing. Even if Gore is right about the cause of warming, I do not believe his solutions are the proper ones to take.
Racism is still far too prevalent in America for Obama to win. And if you think it's just the Republicans who tend to be racist you're blind. Obama will lose Kentucky and West Virginia and many other states with large working-class rural populations that tend to vote Dem, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why.
Bookmark this post and revisit in November and you'll see that I called it.
... Then again, this is eerily similar to my "America is still far too smart to elect an idiot (or even a half idiot) twice."