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Bickmore Takes On Senator Hatch
BYU geologist Barry Bickmore has recently directed his ire toward Senator Orrin Hatch. First there's his post, Orrin Hatch and the Open Mind, then there are his op-eds in the Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News from a couple of weeks ago.
DN: Global warming consensus matters
SLT: Separating truth and fiction in climate debate
Here's a taste from the Tribune:
Lately, opposition to mainstream climate science has become something of a litmus test for Republican politicians. As a Utah Republican myself, and an Earth scientist, I have been disappointed with how many of our politicians have gone beyond the usual wishy-washy dodge of saying they support “developing all sources of energy” to actively promoting anti-science....
Instead of wallowing in anti-scientific doubt-mongering, why can’t Republicans start garnering support for solutions to the climate change problem that don’t involve massive increases in government revenue and control?
14 comments:
I so badly wanted to title this post, "Bick-slapping Senator Hatch," but had a vague feeling that some might find it offensive. So there you go.
"why can’t Republicans start garnering support for solutions to the climate change problem that don’t involve massive increases in government revenue and control?"
Because politicians and people like Brickmore won't let them. In fact the very premise of the question is an insistence that the government (in the form of Republican politicians) still do some government control. Us "anti-scientist climate change deniers" would like to see you Climate Change advocates put your money where your mouth is. Spend your own cash on saving the planet. Tell hypocrites that represent you (movie stars and Al Gore) to stop acting like hypocrites. If you supporters can't take the "science of climate change" seriously, there is no reason us deniers should concede and start worshiping Gia like good little robots.
Jettboy,
Of course you want others to pay for the cleanup of the mess all of us have made. It's a common theme among, say, 3-year-olds.
Jared - You should have used your alternate title; I would have gotten a chuckle out of it.
Most of us conservatives do NOT dispute that climate change is occurring. What we object to is that scientists are extrapolating current trends and making catastrophic predictions based primarily upon the extrapolation. Then they ask us to pony up hundreds of billions to pay for "solutions". I just read a story in which some scientists are now claiming that global warming causes cancer. How can you expect any rational person to believe that kind of hype? "Everything" seems to cause cancer nowadays; have we forgotten that it is appointed unto all men to die one time?
Science is NOT inerrant. Science once believed the sun to revolve around the earth; Galileo was tried for heresy when he insisted otherwise. Galileo turned out to be right.
Science is not religion.
Jack,
1. I looked at the article you linked, and they aren't saying that higher temperatures will cause cancer. They are saying that higher temperatures will allow more toxic chemicals to be released into the water supply, which could cause more cancer. This is totally plausible, from a geochemist's perspective, and in any case, they only said it was a possibility that should be investigated.
2. If what you object to is that scientists take the current temperature trend and then extrapolate it to predict the future, then perhaps you should revisit the issue. That's not what they do to make temperature projections.
This is an important issue. Please take the time to become better informed, and encourage our elected representatives to follow suit.
Barry,
It seems like you're playing "cat and mouse." Without establishing current temperature trends there is no predictive power in climate science. You can use any other qualifier -- and if there isn't a rise in temperature associated with it it's meaningless.
Jack
(not Jack Mormon)
Hatch is a proven panderer...and a whiner. Gee, but it would be nice to have a grown-up from Utah in the senate.
Jack (not JM),
I'm not sure what you mean. I said climatologists don't make projections by simply extrapolating the current trend into the future, and that's perfectly true. The projections are based on models that are built to include the major physical processes involved, and are tested against temperature (and other) trends over the past 150 years. Simplified models that incorporate the same physical processes are tested against longer-term paleoclimate data, e.g., the glacial-interglacial cycles of the last million years or so and rougher climate indicators over the last 500 million years or so. The fact that they can use the same physical processes to adequately reproduce the trends on such disparate time scales gives climatologists confidence that the models have the major physical processes about right, and that projections into the future will be somewhere in the ballpark.
So of course a lot of effort has been expended to "establish current temperature trends," but I don't see what that has to do with what I said.
Barry,
Thank you for noticing the post and participating in the comments.
I'm not a policy wonk, but I think Rep. Inglis's idea, highlighted in your SLT op-ed, is interesting. Are you aware of other Republicans, or Republican-leaning think tanks, who have policy proposals that take the science seriously?
Hi Jared,
Nope. Inglis's proposal is the first really serious proposal I've heard of. Most of the rest is along the lines of Bjorn Lomborg's idea of innovating our way out of the mess by inventing cheaper clean energy technologies. That's fine as part of the strategy, but if that's the whole thing, it's sort of like buying a ticket on an airplane that hasn't been built.
Barry,
Sorry, I didn't read your comment carefully enough. I thought you were suggesting that current temperature trends played zero part in predictive modeling. My bad.
That being said, I do wonder at some of the predictions we've seen from Hansen and the like. Some of it is pretty outrageous -- with the appearance of pure extrapolation from the most convenient of historical markers.
Jack
Technical errors aside, the entire argument for anthropogenic global warming is little more than an argument from authority. The climate scientists and bureaucrats want to believe that it is true, their career, reputation, and livelihood depend on it.
Take a wildly exaggerated temperature trend that has lasted all of two decades, and all the sudden the world is coming to an end. And it is all our fault, even though there is no substantive evidence to that proposition. The evidence of global warming from 1980-2000 is unequivocal - if exaggerated. The evidence that humans were the cause of it is dangerously close to non-existent.
What we have left is a bunch of wishful thinking converted into quasi-religious furor and opportunistic corruption of the temperature record, politics, and the scientific process. The GISS adjusted temperature record, for example, is a complete fraud. So is everything Al Gore has ever said on the subject, and most of what the MSM has reported as well.
Jack,
Can you give me some examples? Climatologists predictions are never a single trajectory, but rather a range of possible outcomes. From what I've seen of Hansen, he thinks things will pan out on sort of the higher end of the range, but he's by no means considered to be "out there".
Mark,
All you've got is a conspiracy theory. None of the data that contradicts your view is valid, because the giant conspiracy fudged it.
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