THEN you discover he is a card cheat and has cards up his sleeve.

Did he EVER earn your chips? Does he get to keep your money even after discovery?

Common sense - once a con man, always treat as a con man.

My revelation was in reading the 2001 IPCC technical report. The politicized summary was not supported by the technical part. The discussion of the various forcing functions put anthropogenic CO2 as a minor one that could be positive or negative. They noted the lack of understanding of how the various forcing fumctions interacted and made no conclusions.

Subsequent IPCC reports didn’t allow that to happen again.

Ten years ago we were told that temperatures were rising too rapidly for it to be a “natural” process and that models predicted an even faster rise in the future. However, in the past decade, temperatures have NOT done as predicted and have, instead, declined just a bit. The failure of this prediction tells me that the people who made it don’t know what they are talking about.

Have you tried looking around? Here, let me help you http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/wheres-the-data/

You will find links to the data you don’t really want anyway.

From an economics perspective clean fuels are coming down in price far faster than dirty fuels. Everybody with any observational capability expects that sometime in the near to medium future the two lines are going to cross and at that point, dirty fuels will get pushed out by clean fuels, period. The question is how are we going to manage that transition. For certain very limited cases it is possible today to purchase nameplate capacity of solar power for less money than it would take to purchase the same nameplate capacity using coal. That’s revolutionary even with the long line of caveats that go with it.

If we have time, the cheapest way to do the transition is to continue using the dirty fuels and as machines and plants wear out, you switch them over, with early retirement pushing up if clean fuels actually get cheaper than dirty fuels. In this scenario, we don’t have to do much political reform, no treaties, no global governance initiatives, the free market pretty much takes care of the problem and governments best assist by goosing the R&D along with targeted investments. The vast majority of climate skeptics favor this approach.

But if we don’t have time, the whole emergency socialist bit comes into action like a war emergency such as WW II. We have to have a crash program. We have to have vastly enlarged government powers to force the early retirement of machines, of power plants, etc. We have to ban charcoal BBQ and other pursuits that heretofore have been considered innocent private pleasures. “Consensus” scientists overwhelmingly favor this approach.

If there has been a Medieval Warm Period (MWP) that had global reach and significantly higher temperatures than today, we have time. If there was no MWP or it was just regional or very small, we might very well not have time. That’s the significance of the hockey stick. It scares people into thinking we might not have time and that the fate of the planet depends on quick, emergency action. It’s a scare con with the twist that they might be scaring us about a real problem that is truly “bet the planet” scary.

The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) team is committed to scientifically proving that our current temperatures are unprecedented and therefore we might not have time. They are pro-government intervention, the lot of them. They know that they must argue away the historically recognized MWP. They use temperature proxies like tree rings. What ClimateGate does is bring to public consciousness that the proxies in use are not reliable enough to carry the point without cheating.

We can double check proxies on tree rings from about 1850 or so. That’s 160 years give or take. For about 110 of those years the proxies and the thermometers track pretty well. Then about 1960 they don’t. Nobody knows why. That means that for 50 of the 160 years (31%) of the data we can check, a major proxy has proven unreliable and instead of discarding the proxy and seeing what they can prove with proxies that have not veered off into known unreliability, the CRUTape letters show that they’ve been trying to hide the decline in accuracy. That’s not scientific. It won’t be clear how much this unscientific conduct matters until the data gets thoroughly checked.

What we need to make sense of this which we don’t have, a list of proxies that have not declined in accuracy, a clear identification of the proxies that have declined and the papers that have become unreliable because of them, and how much of the IPCC’s conclusions depended on those unreliable papers.

Had the CRU crew not tried to “hide the decline” we would have had 4 decades to work around this problem and could have advanced the science in a reliable way much further. Now we’ve got 40 years of backlog, my entire lifetime, to go through and figure out how much still stands when you take out the unreliable stuff.

All the while if the AGW crowd is right the clock’s ticking and we can’t tell the difference quickly whether these are harmless lies or a massive long term con with horrible consequences. If we bet wrong either way, there’s going to be a body count and massive financial losses.

This is deadly serious stuff. Bjorn Lomberg with his Copenhagen Consensus work has come up with a great list of all the stuff we’re going to sacrifice, complete with casualty counts, if we overspend on global warming. Al Gore and company have provided us with the other side, including casualty counts.

http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-ourenvironmentalfuture.html (2005)
“In my view, our approach to global warming exemplifies everything that is wrong with our approach to the environment. We are basing our decisions on speculation, not evidence. Proponents are pressing their views with more PR than scientific data. Indeed, we have allowed the whole issue to be politicized — red vs blue, Republican vs Democrat. This is in my view absurd. Data aren’t political. Data are data. Politics leads you in the direction of a belief. Data, if you follow them, lead you to truth.”

Then again he said:
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-environmentalismaseligion.html (2003)
” I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—…..And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.”

Who would have thought back in 2003 snd 2005 that Michael Crishton was right on!. Now thats a brain that could understand the complex and explain them in common sense terms to stupos like myself.

RIP Michael Christon.

Over the past billion/million (whatever) years, species (and the planet itself) have been evolving into more complex and advanced species and systems. The human body alone is SO “intelligently designed” that the most advanced computers pale by comparison.

For that matter, WHY does “survival of the fittest” exist in the first place? WHY are species designed — and somehow programed — TO survive and reproduce?

If “intelligent design” is to be shunned, then evolution occurred through “chaos” and disorder even though ORDER and structure is how we now exist and advance as a species. On it’s face, pure Evolutionary Theory is blatantly ILLOGICAL.

You can’t get something from nothing. Therefore, SOMETHING existed forever and ever and ever . . .and then it BEGAN to evolve. Again, what caused the evolutionary process, itself, to begin to evolve? IMO, the obvious: we are the product of “Intelligent design.”

No intelligent design discussions here. No such thing as faith based science.

The idea that the theory of evolution has not evolved is utter nonsense. I guess you fell asleep in biology class when genetics were discussed. Evolutionary biology is a whole new scientific discipline that uses genetic markers to track the evolution of species.

Go to a religious board if you want to discuss ID. This is a pseudo-science free site.

ed.

Photo of one of Tiger’s hos friends. We generally avoid tabloid stuff, but we had to make a little room room for the great Tiger. Via Am Thinker:

… The Tiger Woods that was constructed for corporate consumption was spotless and smooth, an edgeles…