cyberfarer’s Recent Comments

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  "I apologize unilaterally , but suggest the same admonition be applied to Cyberfarer as well ." I apologize for calling you, personally, a pseudo-intellectual but I do not withdraw the accusation against the denial industry and its faithful masses. You say, "those of us who are realistically trying to understand the actual science of the matter", but that is patently untrue. The science is well documented and readily and freely available. One cannot have read and understood the science and still deny it. I can understand those people who deny global warming because they fear it. What I find criminal, and what I think ought to be as socially abhorrent to all of us as child pornography, is those who know the science but still deny it and agitate against any mitigating actions out of short term financial interests. I stand in awe at the ability of conspiracy theorists to invent the dots for lines to be drawn when the very real conspiracy of the denial industry has been well documented including but not limited to the connections between big oil and coal to the same "scientists", PR firms, and communication strategies of big tobacco. In fact, one such PR guru even openly admits that the goal of the denial industry was to create a debate where none existed. The only exception to where on can read and understand science but still deny it is the case of religion where intelligent design "scientists" can place humans on earth with the dinosaurs. The climate denial argument is on the same scale of absurdity and engages in the same practice of ridiculing real science and scientists in order to raise up the ridiculous. The denial industry engages in a rather simple, but effective for the simplistic, strategy. They don't actually refute the findings of mainstream science, but instead they attack the models. But, of course, no model can be perfect because it is a model. It can only reflect what we know and what we can program into it. What ought to be alarming to most observers is that the models have been uniformly incorrect. Not in their predictions but in the speed at which their predictions are coming true. I'm sorry. I accept the Darwinian theory of evolution. I accept that smoking causes cancer. And I accept that pumping billions of metric tonnes of CO2 into our atmosphere is responsible for warming our climate and threatens our planet. If you want to put your children and grandchildren on a poker table and gamble on their lives, be my guest. But the gamble here is all life and the denial industry is not welcome to gamble with mine and that which I treasure.On Is "we're going to burn the coal anyway" an argument for carbon sequestration? posted 6 days, 10 hours ago 40 Responses

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  You're a very angry pseudo-intellectual, aren't you? We don't have any idea of what the weather impacts of climate change will be. The study cited is based on increased temperatures rather than any knowledge of changing weather patterns. It really isn't all that hard though I appreciate your efforts. A denier with graphs. How charming.On Is "we're going to burn the coal anyway" an argument for carbon sequestration? posted 1 week ago 40 Responses

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  I forgot to mention the denial industry's other argument: Excessive amounts of CO2 are actually good for us. The logic of the pseudo-intellectuals, as noted above, is that because CO2 is a "building block of life" and because CO2 was once at higher concentrations, it's all good. Earth once had a nitrogen atmosphere as well. No doubt pseudo-intellectuals of the denial industry will soon be telling us the increased levels of nitrogen in the atmosphere is a natural cycle that will usher in a world rich in carbon deposits (us). Following along the logic of the pseudo-intellectuals, a planet entirely submerged in H2O would, of course, be utopia, or at least Atlantis. These pseudo-intellectuals want to point out, for example, that there was much higher CO2 concentrations in Earth's atmosphere when the planet was too hot to support much life and again when dinosaurs walked the Earth. Yes, but of course, again, there were no humans at that time. It was the golden age of the reptiles that was introduced by a major extinction event. Perhaps we are opening the door to a re-emergence of the golden age of reptiles. The other fallacy put forward by the pseudo-intellectuals is the type and breadth of flora under a changed atmosphere. You see, we have no idea how global warming will change weather patterns, hydrological cycles, wind patterns, etc ... Lush areas today may be deserts tomorrow, while frozen areas may be temperate. But the other aspect of global warming is what it does to weather variability. Agriculture was successful over the past 6,000 or more years because we more or less knew when the seasons would arrive and when we should plant and harvest our crops. Global warming changes everything. As well, it may be true that agriculture could benefit in the short term from higher concentrations of CO2, but not in the long term: "In 2050 climate change will decrease food and agricultural production by up to 30 percent in parts of developing countries, UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) director-general Jacques Diouf said on Monday." http://english.cri.cn/6966/2009/10/13/1721s521980.htm Even the FAO warning assumes all else remains equal. It will not. More: "Dropping levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide may have given primitive land plants the cue to spread their leaves and soak up the sun. Four hundred million years ago, leaves were not the broad, efficient, solar panels they are today. Instead they were tiny stick-like projections called microphylls." http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6111-broad-leaves-evolved-as-carbon-dioxide-fell.html Unbelievably, the psuedo-intellectual, denial industry has a web site called ilovecarbondioxide.com where you can read the lies of sick people willing to trade our entire planet for their short term greed. These are the new child pornographers in my view.On Is "we're going to burn the coal anyway" an argument for carbon sequestration? posted 1 week ago 40 Responses

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  I think you're missing the bigger picture here. The role of the coal industry is to keep coal as the number one source of electricity in the world and, thus, to keep the dollars rolling in. The best way for the coal industry to accomplish that is to a) deny global warming; b) deny global warming is man made; c) interpret and spin data to minimize coal's contribution to global warming; d) have governments, the public, finance CCS to create a sunken public investment, and to redirect scarce public research dollars and subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and away from the alternatives. When you look at governments committing billions of dollars to perpetuate an entirely destructive industry, along every step of the supply chain, and waste not just dollars but opportunity on a technology that even its faith holders say is at least a decade away, you must recognize your grandchildren are having their lives traded away for false promises. What's incredible to me, is the lack of anger. I attribute that to people not recognizing the nature of a system which measures only short term profits derived from liquidating our life support system. It is not inevitable that we must "burn coal anyway." That is a political and social choice and it is a poor one. Spain's wind turbines supply half of the national power grid ( http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article6910298.ece ).On Is "we're going to burn the coal anyway" an argument for carbon sequestration? posted 1 week, 2 days ago 40 Responses

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  A) The existence of monocultures is no more a justification of GMOs than racism existing as a social condition is a justification for segregation. B) Local and sustainable agriculture is difficult to commodify as it defies the standardization required by the short term, profit interests of corporate capitalism. GMOs are by definition commodification as GMOs, by definition, create standards and represent the opposite of genetic diversity. C) Food and hunger are social problems and you cannot solve social problems with technology. They require social solutions. We could feed everyone tomorrow if we, as a global society, decided food was a human right that took precedent over the narrow profit motives of global corporate capitalism. Marginal lands also serve a purpose in nature. Growing GMOs in deserts does not put a single grain of food into a single bowl if the hungry still can't afford to feed themselves. Again, the solution is social and not technological.On Michael Specter's new book 'Denialism' misses its targets posted 1 week, 3 days ago 49 Responses