Forget the Colbert Report, the real comedy arrives when Maximum Bob comes in contact with uncontrived Canadian earnestness. George Stroumboupoulos gazes deep into the Car Czar’s eyes and asks him “what happened to the North American auto business,” with all the bewilderment the question deserves, Lutz fumbles around a bit before hitting the punchline. Not enough taxes! Seriously folks, the lack of European-style taxation and investment in mass transit created a “Darwinian Environment” in which people demanded large V8 vehicles. But Mr Lutz, didn’t Detroit benefit from cheap gas? And what do you say to those who accuse automakers of colluding with Big Oil? “If there is a conspiratorial relationship between the oil companies and the automobile companies, could we see our 50 percent please?” deadpans Lutz. Ba-doom-boom! Anyway, GM does sell small, high-technology, high-efficiency cars– in Europe. ‘Cause Americans won’t pay for them. Having “just looked at the numbers,” Lutz said the average Swiss transaction price on GM products was $42k. Switzerland? When George confronts Lutz with his “global warming is a crock of shit” quip, MB lashes out at his quotee and insists he must “plead the fifth amendment.” “You’re in Canada!” George reminds MB, and then draws the Czar into his sunspot rant. Up next: Vegas! [Thanks to emro for the link]
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Bob: Well, when I came into GM, back into GM, in 2001, we were making money, not as much as we should have been making, but –
George: – don’t think it’s your fault.
Bob: Well, you know, I joined a battery company when I left Chrysler and that didn’t do too well after I got there so maybe it is me, I dunno.
You’re definitely on to something, Bob.
Interesting interview, and maybe even a tiny bit less squirm-inducing than Colbert Report, though he got grilled much more on global warming as wasn’t given much opportunity to hype the Volt. The most revealing part of the interview was when he said he caught a lot of flack internally at GM for his “crock” remark. It’s good to know that there are a least some people at GM who are tasked with trying to keep Bob in line. Since he only nibbled at his foot in this interview instead of shoving it all the way into his mouth, they may be making some progress with him.
I vote that next time you post George’s Evangeline Lilly interview instead.
The ‘Switzerland claim’ is probably about right and more in line with a large part of the European car market than you’d probably think.
If you use the current exchange rate I guess the average price of a GM product sold in the Netherlands is in that 40k range as well if you consider the list price including taxes.
A decently equipped Opel Astra easily goes into EUR 30K+ territory, A fully loaded one with the quicker diesel engines, navigation etc (not OPC) is about 35-40K. Yes, we are talking about a Saturn Astra here. And yes, it’s been among the top 5 best selling cars for forever in the Netherlands (previously Kadett).
Even in Germany and Italy (the cheapest countries for cars in Europe) considering exchange rates cars are way more expensive than in the US). Something I personally don’t understand by the way since in Germany there’s only Value Added Tax on new car prices (19%)…
He says that “nobody forsaw” the sudden jump in fuel prices in the US. Maybe I’m a genius or something, but logic dictates that fuel prices could shoot up at any time. I’m so glad I bought my Jetta TDI back in 2003 when gas was dirt cheap and almost no one wanted a fuel efficient vehicle. Bob Lutz seems somewhat intelligent, so it’s too bad he doesn’t know what he’s doing at GM. Interesting interview though.
http://www.climatecooling.org/
Not to side with MB, but you might want to read the main page of this site. There are legitimate counter-opinions in the scientific community.
Yet another post on GM, which is doomed and badly managed and … we know, TTAC, we know.
For a change, why not take a crack at commenting on the VW -Porsche policial/management events? Given TTAC (and other) enthusiasts love these cars (save for Chrysler sourced Routan), wouldn’t their ownership and management politics be of some interest here?
Interesting – The reason that GM can’t succeed in the US is that its car market isn’t enough like the European car market?
I wonder why Toyota and Honda can succeed in the US then.
At least Lutz is following the old colloquial phrase “Don’t hate the player (Toyota and Honda), hate the game (the US auto market).”
I am with most of you at TTAC in my opinions of GM management.
But while these men may not exactly know how to run a car company, Bob seems to be a pretty likeable guy.
I found myself laughing a few times while watching this interview. I almost feel bad for him.
Maybe he isn’t the devil, just a person in the wrong position.
rrt108:
Not to side with MB, but you might want to read the main page of this site. There are legitimate counter-opinions in the scientific community.
I don’t think the problem here is that MB rejects AGW. There is certainly evidence (or a lack thereof) to suggest that Global Warming is, indeed, a crock of shit (i.e. a theory).
MB is entitled to his opinion on this highly contentious “issue”– privately. By my reckoning, when you are the mouthpiece for what was once the world’s largest automaker, you need to either acknowledge/accommodate the prevailing wisdom or, at the very least, keep your mouth shut.
Something is causing global warming and cooling.
And it must be huge to have such an effect.
Say, about the size of a star.
Like the sun.
MB ain’t always wrong.
There are legitimate counter-opinions in the scientific community.
Something is causing global warming and cooling.
And it must be huge to have such an effect.
Say, about the size of a star.
Most climate scientists who aren’t funded by industries with a vested economic interest in keeping carbon costs low are saying that climate change is an issue, and the carbon unlocking is probably a large factor, and that continuing to do it at the levels we are now is probably a stupid idea.
The bulk of the counterpoints that are made aren’t rebuttles of the general theory, but the kind of attack-the-position-not-the-facts that demagogues, marketing departments and self-aggrandizing defense lawyers love: harping on points like “Well, if the whole community isn’t 100% certain, why should we believe you at all?” or “Global warming can’t be real, because it was colder in Podunk this winter”.
Yes, the cause, timeline and effects of the chaotic system that is weather are not completely understood. But that doesn’t mean that the general concept is flawed, or that, even just to hedge your bets, it might be a good idea to minimize environmental impact just in case could get worse.
I have yet to hear a really sound reason on why reducing the unlocking of interred carbon would be a bad thing. Other than “It would result in me making less money” or “I don’t want to change my lifestyle”, of course.
Bob’s just playing to the audience. Seriously.
Here is the Winter Socialist Workers Paradise (Canada) – where the Conservative Party is what you’d might call a Moderate Democrats, the Liberal Party is akin to San Francisco Lefties, and the New Democrats are quite simply Communist fellow travelers.
Saying that the fault of any issue is the lack of taxation actually strikes a cord with a lot of people – as being correct. Really.
From what I can tell, the per-capita income in Switzerland is about $57k per year. In the US it’s $21k. Gee Bob, ya think that has something to do with the transaction-cost discrepancy?
http://www.junkscience.com
No, Bob is not crazy. Maybe a little outspoken, but he does have a lot to back up the crock o shit idea. And I agree with him (even if I wouldn’t buy 99% of GM’s products).
Stroumboupoulos
Stroumboulopoulos
FTFY
JEC: junkscience.com
Unfortunately, Milloy egregiously fails the (reasonable) conflict of interest test proposed by psarhjinian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Milloy
“Milloy’s close financial and organizational ties to tobacco and oil companies have been the subject of criticism from a number of sources, as Milloy has consistently criticized the science linking secondhand smoke to health risks and human activity to global warming.”
he must “plead the fifth amendment.” “You’re in Canada!”
ahahahahahaha! burn!
It pains me that I missed this, as I watch Strombo regularly.
Let’s play a war of links, shall we?
From davidsuzuki.org:
“To gain an understanding of the level of scientific consensus on climate change, a recent study examined every article on climate change published in peer-reviewed scientific journals over a 10-year period. Of the 928 articles on climate change the authors found, not one of them disagreed with the consensus position that climate change is happening or is human-induced.”
So, if the skeptics have a legitmate, why haven’t they published their findings in a peer-reviewed journal? It’s not like they’ve shied away from controvesial stuff (Cold Fusion comes to mind) so why not try?
It’s not like a rebuttal of climate change would be any less contentious within the scientific community than the regular shellacking that fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics takes.
Again, from Mr Suzuki:
This discrepancy is largely due to the media’s drive for balance in reporting. Journalists are trained to identify one position on any issue, and then seek out a conflicting position, providing both sides with roughly equal attention. Unfortunately, the “balance” of the different views within the media does not always correspond with the actual prevalence of each view within society, and can result in unintended bias. This has been the case with reporting on climate change, and as a result, many people believe that climate change is still being debated by scientists when in fact it is not.
If you’ve watched journalists (or marketers who pose as them) in action, you’ll see the phrase “Of course, some disagree” crop up again and again. Scratch, and the skeptics are usually funded by the oil industry. Exxon alone spends millions of dollars per year on astroturfing media and government on climate change, and Exxon is far from the only company whose revenue stream depends on carbon outputs staying more or less where they are now, if not increasing.
Meanwhile, who stands to make money on reducing carbon outputs? Really, who? I hear about this “Radical Environmental Lobby” all the time, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out where their money comes from, because I’d be really impressed if you can find anyone with the financial clout of GM, let alone Exxon, Chevron, BP or Royal Dutch Shell.
That the environment movement manages to do anything at all is amazing, given that their up against organizations whose net wealth is orders of magnitude greater.
I do think that there are economic issues to addressing carbon emissions–don’t get me wrong–but I really resent paid public relations shills masquerading as legitimate skeptics.
Most climate scientists who aren’t funded by industries …….
……are funded by governments who have a vested interest in self-aggrandizement and increased power over their subjects. Wait a few more years and I believe we’ll see that those scientists have traded their credibility for a mess of pottage.
Man made global warming is a crock of shiz.
My opinion.
…are funded by governments who have a vested interest in self-aggrandizement and increased power over their subjects.
And funding the green movement is how they’re going to get there?
Please. They have Homeland Security for that.
The greenies are useful idiots. Homeland Security, as represented by the TSA, are merely idiots.
Politicians, in their drive for power over us, will use any and all tools – greenies and TSA alike – at their disposal.
Will the real climate scientist please stand up?
Seriously though, does anyone here have a graduate degree in some climate science?
How can you profess to know more than the individuals who spend their lives studying a topic?
So folks really think there is no global warm or that it’s not man made? Ms. Palin agrees with you. So when you go up in a plane and can see there is less spring ice thus the polar bear is in trouble you say either the photos lie or it’s not man made? In the 2 sides to every story you could say that about anything including the holocaust. or the moon landing. I mean you saw pictures but were YOU there? (I get to use the holocaust comparison ’cause my relatives died in it). People of the Christian right have stated that the grand canyon is only a few thousand years old. But Not sure it makes it so. When you read that the admin. (who hired their own scientests) had wording changed to down play global warming makes ya wonder.
Well, it’s been both colder and warmer earlier in human history, and even recently in recorded history. Notably, warming periods rivaling or exceeding today’s have occurred when there were too few humans to unlock enough carbon to make a difference. Is there climate change verifiable today? Yes. Is it induced by man? That’s a different question entirely, and very few climate scientists are pure of bias instigated by the source of their livelihood, in the eyes of the rabble that question them. One side says any scientist funded by an energy firm cannot possibly be objective, especially if their scientific method leads them to conclude that blaming mankind for climate change is a hasty and insufficiently substantiated conclusion. On the other hand, we’re expected to believe that government-funded science is completely free of political bias despite the taxation, regulation and wealth management agenda of public servants who drew their conclusions about the perfidy of man in climate phenomena when the science was no more than conjecture.
One does not, including Mr. Lutz, blame climate change on sunspots. Sunspots are indicators of the state of our neighborhood star’s variable output and underlying physics. Earth’s climate has and will continue to be always warming or cooling due to our sun alone.
A minority of climate researchers believe a long-term cooling of earth’s climate will commence within two or three decades and that the idea current warming trends will continue unabated are both knuckleheaded and dangerously wrong. Yes, it’s a sliver minority, at least among published climatologists, but then so much of what’s turned out to be correct scientifically has been championed by contrarians. The minority could be badly mistaken this time.
So we really don’t know that climate change is anthropogenic, but it feels good to the regulatory crowd to blame ourselves and it’s such a handy lever for gathering, seizing and wielding more power. It’s possible climate change will prove to be anthropogenic. let’s give the dread merchants benefit of doubt. It’s just that they’d have so much more credibility if their view of climate science was anchored to a political and action agenda that would actually address the problem in the near term. It’s in the alarmists reflexive attack on personal mobility that one sees the insincerity of the worried.
If we could overnight replace the existing US private automotive fleet with one that averaged the fuel economy of the Prius, the reduction of carbon emissions would be *less than 2%* of the total annual emissions reduction that the UN-IPCC prescribes to arrest and roll back anthropogenic global warming. We have fuel economy objectives set for 2015, 2020, 2030 and possibly beyond. Silly. The automobile is already on a one-way vector to mitigated environmental impact. If alarmists were serious, they’d focus on massive private and commercial solar power adoption to reduce coal burning, clean coal, carbon sequestering at fixed location combustion plants, expanded nuclear power and wind, wave and tidal surge alternatives.
Suits to stop offshore wind farms or allocations of huge tracts of land in the desert southwest for large scale solar farming would be invalidated. That kind of integrated, federally-subsidized approach could yield real progress in five years, and dramatic reductions in 10 – 15. But no. The alarmists and their political allies would rather strangle personal mobility and bank on a 40 year fleet replacement to show progress on solving the problem they’re so eager to fear.
We’re much better off attacking the alleged carbon problem at fixed-location infrastructure first, and driving for efficiency gains in the net energy consumption of buildings, as a hedge against the possibility that the anthropogenics are right. At the same time we should be allocating resources to coping with the consequences of warming while being careful to anticipate when we may well have to cope with exactly the opposite. Global cooling, especially of the kind lasting 100 – 300 years, will prove considerably more daunting if it materializes.
Phil
psarhjinian sums things up quite well. But for those who would like the straight scoop from real scientists who don’t have an axe to grind, check out:
http://www.realclimate.org/
GM was wise to put a lid on Lutz’s global warming rantings. He was hurting the corporation’s reputation. If Lutz wants to dabble in policy why doesn’t he retire from GM and run for office?
Well the fact is the Earth is now cooling not warming which kinda shoots a hole in the old AGW theory. There is presently a low level of activity from the sun and climatic situations in the Pacifac Ocean that all point to cooling particularly in NA.(plus the Farmers Almanac says so) Stock up on long johns for this winter. You all want global cooling? Your gonna get it.
Both sides of the debate
http://climatedebatedaily.com/
And Real Climate is a bunch of AGW nuts.
The Arctic has seen similar low levels of ice in the 30’s and 40’s.
From Halifax to Vancouver in 86 days in 1944 through the Northern route of the Northwest Passage.
http://www.ucalgary.ca/arcticexpedition/larsenexpeditions
psarhjinian, I certainly agree with your (and a community of thousands of respected and knowledgeable scientists’) position on anthropogenic climate change, and would humbly opine that the inarticulate responses in opposition make arguing the point rather seductive. However, it’s wise to never argue with the dishonest. Climate theories will become ever heavier with the weight of irrefutable evidence, and all we have to do is stand back and watch as the vested (and oil lifestyle-lubricated) opinions being voiced here and elsewhere gain an ever stronger circus-like air, comprising much noise and little substance.
# Robert Farago :
September 19th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
There is certainly evidence (or a lack thereof) to suggest that Global Warming is, indeed, a crock of shit (i.e. a theory).
Robert – If you’re saying that to call Global Warming “a crock of shit” is the same thing as saying it’s a theory, your’re wrong.
Anyone whose only contribution is that AGW is “a crock of shit” is an ignorant idiot. However, anyone who uses available evidence and reasoned argument to support a view other than AGW deserves to be respectfully listened to.
ghillie:
Robert – If you’re saying that to call Global Warming “a crock of shit” is the same thing as saying it’s a theory, your’re wrong.
The ONE TIME I try to be nice, I get called out. OK, gloves off!
…are funded by governments who have a vested interest in self-aggrandizement and increased power over their subjects.
And funding the green movement is how they’re going to get there?
Please. They have Homeland Security for that.…
AWESOME REPLY
Don’t fret. Most of us posting here will be around for the next 20 or 30 years. We will all get our answers. Interesting that battling climate change is so emotionally charged, probably because altering the man made portion will require change in how energy is found, transported, and how much is used. That is something that the “free market” will never address on its own, at least not in time to make a difference. Funny how the more libertarian thinkers abhor the thought of the government interfering in the market with regulation. Where are those “free marketers” now? Yeah, in line waiting for their government bailout. Bear, Fannie/Freddie, AIG, here comes GM…so it goes like this – if you cost me or my industry money GO AWAY. When I mismanage the economy – PLEASE help me. We’re too important to die. Love the hypocrisy.
ghillie, others
There isn’t a single damn thing scientists put forth that isn’t a theory or a hypothesis. If you don’t think its just a theory, then we should give up talking, because thats a religious position. I respect your right to religious belief, even if I think this one is right up there with dancing around holding a pair of snakes and speaking in tongues.
As for consensus, lemmings have consensus too. As for speaking out against this juggernaut, its tough to do if you want to get funded and make a living. Einstein had a famous comment in the 1930’s when 200 scientists got together to denounce his work. Look it up. He could do it because his academic position was by then unassailable.
Here’s the problem. All significant energy comes from the sun. The rest of it, everything the climate scientists work with, is mass transport convective effects – measuring them past and present and predicting forward. Trying to figure that out absent the solar variability is like trying to figure out a car’s efficiency while ignoring the engine (work with me here, I’m trying to keep this at least a little grounded in the site topic). NASA is going to have a teleconference on the 23rd re: the sun’s output. Be interesting to hear what they have to say.
Farago: “I don’t think the problem here is that MB rejects AGW. There is certainly evidence (or a lack thereof) to suggest that Global Warming is, indeed, a crock of shit (i.e. a theory).”
It has always been amusing to me that the automotive press has been so uniformly “conservative” in its outlook on environmental issues. Certainly there are economic and social pressures from the industry to not stray too far from the reservation. However, the simple fact of the matter is that the car buying public — particularly on the coasts — tends to view these issues from more centrist perspectives.
Over the next decade I suspect that this gap between the auto industry and the public will become more visible. If so, the first automotive blog that adopts a truly independent approach to covering environmental issues could do very well. In automotive terms, such a blog may become the “Honda” of the industry, while the GMs and Fords continue to fight over a declining market share.
It will be interesting to see how TTAC shifts with the times.
Perhaps Millroy does fight second hand smoke claims – that’s because there actually IS NOT any solid evidence to support the idea that second hand smoke is anywhere near as harmful as primary smoking. Shocked? You shouldn’t be, check out some of the info on it and decide for yourself. Most “death” statistics are merely projections based on erroneous data that was taken from a now-discredited study – that study is the only “scientific basis” to the whole SHS panic.
Anyhoo, enough of that off-topic rant. Point is, there are two sides to any debate, even if you try to dismiss one side as corporate BS.
PS the reason why some of us are so irked by environmental hysteria is not the principle of the debate – sure, we want to save the environment as much as anyone. Can’t go wrecking things like morons. But when the evidence is flimsy and constantly shifting (if not outright wrong in some cases), it makes us think twice about the arguments. Then there is the problem of how it affects us personally. I like to think those of us in Canada and the US live in a liberal (that’s Smith’s liberal, not left-liberal) economy where we are relatively free to make our own choices. Greenheads are moving to restrict our choices for reasons of AGW. So I have to pay more taxes and ditch my old car because of AGW? Why me, Joe Nobody? – you should be targeting those assholes at the top of the corporate structure with billion dollar industries that churn out millions of tonnes of carbon per annum, not the average citizen who has virtually no effect on the country’s carbon output. I’m not running a billion dollar coal plant in my backyard, so piss off and leave me alone.
Then there is the flipside, where viable alternatives are rejected due to other forms of hysteria – nuclear power anyone? No? That’s my point.
And of course there is the widespread hypocrisy and poor-planning of green measures that make me laugh. Ethanol is number 1, then we have low-energy bulbs with high mercury content and other such foibles. Not to mention the pig headed greed surrounding the exploitation of green products that are generally neither environmentally friendly nor organic, but have the gall and legal loopholes to call themselves such.
Einstein had a famous comment in the 1930’s when 200 scientists got together to denounce his work. Look it up.
I was astounded to see you referencing this as an argument in favor of standing tall against mainstream opinion. Einstein was referring to a Nazi publication attempting to smear him by lining up 100 (not 200) Aryan scientists who denounced relativity as Jewish science. See the end of this link, for instance:
http://www.time.com/time/time100/poc/magazine/a_brief_history_of_rela6d.html
If you are suggesting that most climate researchers are like Nazi propagandists, that’s incredibly offensive. If you are trying to say something else…well, then I have no idea what you are trying to say.
The relevant point here is that Einstein’s general theory of relativity was regarded as interesting but inconclusive until scientists found convincing observational evidence for it in 1919. Global warming, too, was regarded as worrisome but inconclusive by most researchers until climate scientists found convincing evidence for it. There is still a lot we don’t know about climate change, but the now-overwhelming evidence is that human activity is responsible for a substantial part of it.
Lutz…sweet guy, but – dinosaur. Should have retired with Dave Keon. Sit in the back yard with an orange in his mouth and play with the grand kids. If you keep burning stuff you spread soot. Just a little at a time but with a fixed volume of air and water it adds up. What’s not to know?
The theory says that as the level of manmade CO2 increases the Earths temperature will increase and the planet will reach a tipping point and then we fry. For the last 10 years there has been a huge increase in manmade CO2 yet the Earth has cooled slightly and now the cooling is accelarating.
Right now the Sun has an extremely low level of Sun spots(none), the Pacifac ocean is experiencing both a cooling PDO and the cooling of a La Nina. A tiny miniscule amount of CO2 is not going to burn up the world. Regular climate is going to go on like it always has.
Plus the Farmers Almanac predicts a cold Winter. All you Globaloney warming followers better get your long johns.
From what I can tell, the per-capita income in Switzerland is about $57k per year. In the US it’s $21k. Gee Bob, ya think that has something to do with the transaction-cost discrepancy?
To be fair to Mr. Lutz, it doesn’t. Switzerland has some of the lowest car prices in Europe: http://www.finfacts.com/irelandbusinessnews/publish/article_10005755.shtml
What Mr. Lutz gets wrong is that what happens in Switzerland is irrelevant. New car prices are lower in the US than they are in much of the rest of the world, and companies operating in the US just have to deal with it. The successful ones do deal with it and make plenty of money selling cars to Americans.
GM simply won’t admit that their smaller cars are inferior to the competition. Instead of beating the competition, they make Cobalts and then scratch their heads when they sell fewer of them at lower prices.
cpmanx, I think that is precisely what he means to suggest. The greenwash might not be on par with Nazi propaganda, but it’s not that far off. I haven’t heard a balanced debate on the subject, uh, ever. Not since Al Gore started spreading his gospel, anyway. There ARE two sides to this debate, so why are we only hearing one? And why does the scientific info always get filtered through the media where it is skewed, misconstrued and hyped up to play off green-fear? Doesn’t anyone remember the scientists calling for calm and for people not to worry, catastrophe wasn’t coming and their theories were just hypotheses that projected minor fluctuations? No? Exactly.
But when the evidence is flimsy and constantly shifting (if not outright wrong in some cases),
No. You’re thinking like a lawyer, not a scientist. The theories** are being refined and modified, but the general consensus has not changed. Scientific theory is not a court of law, and showboating (swiftboating?) respectable, published papers on the grounds that they differ in detail, or evolve, does not disprove the root assumption.
The fact that the media simplifies the debate to soundbites doesn’t help matters.
This is what AGCC proponents either fail or refuse to understand: climate change is a theory about a very chaotic, dynamic system, and what the results might be in a particular region, or given a set of circumstances, changes are models are updated and refined. But the general consensus: that dumping tons of previously-locked carbon into the atmosphere is causing significant changes in climate patters, is not disputed.
Do you know those changes will be good? No. Do you want to hedge your bets that they will be? If I were you, I wouldn’t. Drastic climate changes, especially if they persist for a long period, can cause dramatic shifts in local ecology and, thusly, in the economy. They also tend to be violent in their degrees of swing as the climate system attempts to reach equilibirium.
Me, I’d like things to stay more or less the same, which is why I advocate reducing emissions. What we’re doing now has nebulous, but possibly unpleasant, outcomes.
** All science is theory. Science is not law or engineering, it does not deal in definites or opinion. Gravity is a theory. How it happens, what causes it and what it’s exact nature is is constantly being refined and understood. But a change in the understanding of gravity does not change the concept that it still hurts when you fall down on your face.
The greenwash might not be on par with Nazi propaganda, but it’s not that far off.
Bullsh_t.
You have no idea, do you, how offensive what you just said is? You’re comparing “Let’s try and use less oil because it might do something bad.” to “This group of people are so reprehensible that they should be made into soap.”
I haven’t heard a balanced debate on the subject, uh, ever.
I think that has more to do with your priorities than any sense of balance. Go read some IPCC papers on climate change, rather then relying on media soundbites from either side of the debate.
The IPCC are the AGW Bolsheviks.
They are the leaders in distorting the science.
The Temperature Hockey Stick is the prime example. With all the historical evidence of the warm conditions during the Roman Empire and the warming during the Medieval Warm Period let alone the recent warming in the 30’s and the cold of the Little Ice age and yet they make the case for the climate being a constant until the last few decades of the 20th century. This is not science but propoganda.
This is not science but propoganda.
Find me one, just one, peer-reviewed study that says unlocking carbon en masse is not having an effect. Again, it’s not like Nature et al have ever shied away from contentious or dubious topics, so why hasn’t one been published.
Could it be that, oh, they stand about the same chance as the “Smoking Does Not Harm You” or “Asbestos Does Not Cause Lung Problems” studies that the Tobacco and Asbestos industries “commission”? Look, I’ve seen peer-reviewed studies of vaccine/autism causality, and there’s serious money (and emotion) behind that, but, strangely, not one that says “Dumping Carbon Has No Effect At All on Climate”. I wonder why that is?
Oh, right, conspiracy of the left, I forgot. Somehow these all-powerful scientists that make maybe a hundred grand a year at most have their tendrils deeper into government and the media than oil companies with hundreds of billions of dollars in resources. Do you guys have no idea how ridiculous this sounds?
I cannot believe that people refuse to follow the money trail on this. It’s like you’re not even asking ExxonMobil to buy you dinner and drinks first.
The theory says that as the level of manmade CO2 increases the Earths temperature will increase and the planet will reach a tipping point and then we fry.
No, that’s not what the theory says. In fact, there’s no all-encompassing “theory”. There are a lot of possibilities and causes:
* We are seeing deglaciation at both poles
* We are seeing glacier recession across the planet
* The loss of locked water could cause more precipitation, or snap-glaciation. In some places, in others, it might dry out.
* We could see one or more gulfstreams shut down, which could do who-the-hell-knows-what
* We could see very wild swings in temperature, locally or globally
* We might see increased unlocking of carbon if the oceans heat, or not.
* All of the above is being facilitated by atmostpheric carbon percentage changes on a scale that hasn’t been seen since, well, at least one of the primary extinction events.
Point being, we could see a lot of changes, we’re not entirely sure that they are, but they’d certainly affect the status quo. With six billion people to feed, you do not want an unpredictable food supply.
Again, you and other AGCC proponents are oversimplifying to allow yourselves to continue ducking the issue: it’s not about temperature or trending, it’s about climate change and it’s causes & effects. It’s certainly not about “Global Warming” and Al Gore, though those two misfortunate lightning rods have done far more damage than good. Not one respectable, non-oil-industryfunded scientist or group has disputed human-derived effects. There’s been disagreements about effects, scale and other detail, but not one disputant of repute. Not. One.
I can understand the Right’s points on healthcare, Iraq or taxation, even if I don’t agree with them, but this utter nonsense about climate change amazes me. If industry just came out and said “We oppose carbon caps and taxes because it hurts our bottom line” instead of astroturfing via “skeptics” and demagogues, I’d have a whole lot more tolerance for your point of view. Again, I’d disagree with it because I think the environment is more important the economy, but at least I wouldn’t have to listen to talking heads parroting what amounts to press releases.
The Big Skeptic Conference managed to dig up just twenty (that’s two-zero) scientists for their big shindig in March. That was “The Heartland Institute’s” Global Warming conference. Now, of those twenty, some agree that CO2 in the atmosphere is having an effect… they differed from the mainstream on the policy implications (adapt rather than mitigate) or degree. The New York Times covered this… in far greater detail than it deserved.
Curiously, “scholarships” were available for rooms and attendance fees waived for policymakers and government officials. If they were waiving fees and offering rooms for credentialed scientists active in the field who weren’t presenting, I sure didn’t notice that offer in the brochure. Curious, if you ask me, that they didn’t put a premium on getting scientists to attend a scientific convention. Do they need politicians to check Timothy Ball’s math (they stand as good a chance as any, I suppose)? They might have better luck checking his credentials (apparently, Ball can’t remember what they are, either).
One track featured a comedian (apparently, Al Gore jokes are “science”) and “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” warts and all, was shown a number of times.
The “proceedings” of the conference were written before it started (the foreword was written by someone who died just before the conference began) and was basically Fred Singer’s original circa 2001 rant against prevailing ACC theory. They didn’t bother to remove the things from Singer’s report that were known to be obviously wrong in 2001 and it didn’t look to me like they updated to use the latest datasets.
That’s it. That’s the state of “science” for those who disagree that digging up fossil fuel and burning it increases atmospheric CO2 and will change our environment.
—
Lutz is wrong. He’s seizing on anything convenient he can find to justify business as usual for GM’s profitable gas hogs and not giving the matter the thought it deserves.
“We are seeing deglaciation at both poles”
The Antartic ice level is at a high and the Arctic ice in 2008 has increased 9.4% from 2007.
Here is many scientist that do not believe and the list grows larger every day. The Earth is cooling despite a huge increase in manmade CO2 which renders the AGW theory a bit suspect to say the least.
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=c6a32614-f906-4597-993d-f181196a6d71
bluecon,
Yeah. When I want the latest developments in science, I turn away from Nature and to The National Post.
I’d bet a quarter it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch.
By the way, the latest word on Antarctica is “ice loss:”
Washington Post
There’s names of researchers and the title of the experiment. You can google for further details if you think the WaPo is getting something wrong.
By the way, where did you get your figure on Arctic ice “increase”? To say the least, it’s misleading.
National Snow and Ice Data Center
You would be better to say that the ice loss this summer was not quite as bad as last year, with 9.4% more retained ice than in the previous year.
However, it’s still far worse than the ’79 to ’00 average, at 65% of the normal ice coverage… which may, of course, be considerably less than the average would have been in the previous century, say. Of course, we don’t know… we only started directly measuring it in 1979.
The greenwash might not be on par with Nazi propaganda, but it’s not that far off.
It’s pretty safe to say that whenever you are in a debate and one side starts screaming “you guys are just like Hitler,” it’s time to declare the whole “debate” null and void. Clearly for some people the issue of climate change is not a matter of evidence and interpretation, it is a matter of name-calling and vilification. Uh…no thanks.
I encourage everyone who is interested in evidence and interpretation to look at what the actual leading climate researchers are saying. These are people who have dedicated their lives (at often crappy salaries) to understanding how the natural world works. They are not idiots. They know that climate varies naturally. They know that the sun changes over time. They also see very strong evidence that modern climate variations are dominated (but not solely controlled) by human activity.
This link alone cuts through a lot of the confusion above:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/myths-vs-fact-regarding-the-hockey-stick/
Please, let’s use the same standard of common sense here that we use in the rest of life: Get information first, then make up your mind.
Does anybody ever suggest that the increase in temperature is a good situation?
Does anybody consider the fact the if we moderated a long term cooling trend by an artificial increase in temperature, that people would be better off because we warmed the planet. The man kind induced warming could neutralize the natural cooling cycle and save many millions of lives through starvation and exposure.
How come nobody writes a good paper on this and sends it to the weather channels?
psarhjinian : … From davidsuzuki.org: …. “To gain an understanding of the level of scientific consensus on climate change, a recent study examined every article on climate change published in peer-reviewed scientific journals over a 10-year period. Of the 928 articles on climate change the authors found, not one of them disagreed with the consensus position that climate change is happening or is human-induced.”
psarhjinian : Are your reading comprehension skills so poor that you think Suzuki means that all 928 articles on climate change support the position of MMGW (man-made-GW)? Cannot you see that Suzuki is trying to mislead you here? This is what is so despicable and dishonest about so many of the environmentalist’s out there — they say things in manner to try and purposely mislead people. Suzuki is gaming you — misleading you into believing all these papers support man-made GW — when in fact they do not. You would probably be lucky to find 10 papers of that 928 that actually point the finger of GW on man-made release of CO2.
Lets say all 928 of those papers agree that there is climate change. Lets say 10 of the papers actually point to man-made causes as the culprit. Well, Suzuki can say the consensus position is that climate change is happening … OR … is human induced, and say all the 928 papers at least takes one of those positions. Read that statement more carefully, the use of the word OR doesn’t make it mean that all papers support MMGW. I can guarantee that only a very small fraction of the papers on GW/Climate change point the finger at man as the cause.
The bureaucrats that were writing the summary report of the IPCC for the politicians in 1995 were up to the same dishonest shenanigans …
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn05262007.html
In 1995 IPCC presented its second report: The Science of Climate Change”. In this report a large number of researchers work through hundreds of scientific reports and delivers a comprehensive report where they conclude that there is no evidence that human beings have had an influence on the climate. This conclusion is of course very important for politicians and policymakers around the world. But what happened? The editor of the IPCC report then deleted or changed the text in 15 different sections of chapter 8 (The key chapter concerning whether human influence exists or not) which had been agreed upon by the panel of contributors involved in compiling the document. In practice politicians and policymakers only read the so-called Executive Summary for Policy Makers. In this document consisting of a few pages it is clearly stated that humans have influenced the climate, contrary to the conclusions of the scientific report.
Also read … Why I Recanted …David Evans, Financial Post Published: Saturday, August 30, 2008 …
http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=756766
‘There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming’
I devoted six years to carbon accounting when I built models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector. … …
1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.
2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None.
psarhjinian : … From davidsuzuki.org: …. “To gain an understanding of the level of scientific consensus on climate change, a recent study examined every article on climate change published in peer-reviewed scientific journals over a 10-year period. Of the 928 articles on climate change the authors found, not one of them disagreed with the consensus position that climate change is happening or is human-induced.”
psarhjinian : Are your reading comprehension skills so poor that you think Suzuki means to imply that all 928 articles on climate change support the position of MMGW (man-made-GW)? Cannot you see that Suzuki is trying to mislead you here? This is what is so despicable and dishonest about so many of the environmentalist’s out there — they say things in manner to try and purposely mislead people. Suzuki is gaming you — misleading you into believing all these papers support man-made GW — when in fact they do not. You would probably be lucky to find 10 papers of that 928 that actually point the finger of GW on man-made release of CO2.
Lets say all 928 of those papers agree that there is climate change. Lets say 10 of the papers actually point to man-made causes as the culprit. Well, Suzuki can say the consensus position is that climate change is happening … OR … is human induced, and say all the 928 papers at least takes one of those positions. Read that statement more carefully, the use of the word OR doesn’t make it mean that all papers support MMGW. I can guarantee that only a very small fraction of the papers on GW/Climate change point the finger at man as the cause.
The bureaucrats that were writing the summary report of the IPCC for the politicians in 1995 were up to the same dishonest shenanigans …
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn05262007.html
In 1995 IPCC presented its second report: The Science of Climate Change”. In this report a large number of researchers work through hundreds of scientific reports and delivers a comprehensive report where they conclude that there is no evidence that human beings have had an influence on the climate. This conclusion is of course very important for politicians and policymakers around the world. But what happened? The editor of the IPCC report then deleted or changed the text in 15 different sections of chapter 8 (The key chapter concerning whether human influence exists or not) which had been agreed upon by the panel of contributors involved in compiling the document. In practice politicians and policymakers only read the so-called Executive Summary for Policy Makers. In this document consisting of a few pages it is clearly stated that humans have influenced the climate, contrary to the conclusions of the scientific report.
Also read … Why I Recanted …David Evans, Financial Post Published: Saturday, August 30, 2008 …
http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=756766
‘There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming’
I devoted six years to carbon accounting when I built models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector. … …
1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.
2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None.
1944 and the Arctic was frozen over solid pre AGW and SUV’s yet Henry Larsen took the St. Roch from Halifax to Vancouver in 86 days through the Northern Passage of the NW Passage. In 2008 the Northern Passage was froze over. This isn’t the first time for low ice levels in the Arctic.
http://www.ucalgary.ca/arcticexpedition/larsenexpeditions