Guess Who’s Been Secretly Funding a Famous Climate Change–Denying Scientist?
I am no longer in either camp, I must say though that the weather seems weird, Oregon has had an incredibly warm winter, but that may be because we have had them before, and will again. But this article is illustrative of the whole problem with trying to address any issue: Money always finds it's way into it, and suddenly you have no idea if there is any truth in anything you have heard. The Gore monster screwed up one side, and guys like this one screwed up the other, leaving all of us in the middle to have to do our own measurements and analysis. So what is the point of having any of these "geniuses" when they all get bought out on one side or the other? A little truth please?
That said, the author Michael Crichton wrote a novel "State of Fear".
It made two points:
1) Global warming (et al.) is bullshit.
2) Funding of scientific research is to blame.
At the end of the book, there is a note from the author.
In this note, Crichton appeals for an agency (he did not care if it was public or private) to act as an official manager of the funding of scientific research.
This agency would provide funding in a double-blind fashion: the party which wants a subject researched and is willing to fund it never knows the party who is conducting the research, and vice-versa.
I think Crichton is right, but in speaking to research scientists I have met, there is also a problem with peer review (Monett and Gleason's naked plea for funding which AlGore cited as proof that the polar bears were dying off, was peer reviewed by, among others, Monett's wife) and with a glut of scientific journals responding to the overabundance of research scientists who believe their inferior research was given short shrift by being rejected for publication (e.g. The Journal of Vibration and Control)
At the end of the day, "science" (read that as pseudoscience) is the *religion* of our ruling class.
We all know how well *that* works out.
I have no problem with responsible environmental compliance, and can even stomach regulations on CFC's, but the definition of CO2 as a pollutant is downright ridiculous ... unless you want to stop breathing to help comply with the latest regulations.
The EPA after the clean air act required scrubbers for coal fired power plants. The reason the expensive scrubbers was to protect West Virginia coal, the same effect could have been had by just changing to hard coal from the western US.
15 years ago McDonalds had to pay people to cart away their waste grease today they have to lock up waste grease.
The history of capitalism is the history of turning waste products into useful products and this is what cleans up pollution, not regulations.
As for McDonald's grease, one of the two small businesses that I had took such waste vegetable oil and converted it into chemicals at a profit without government subsidies until President Zero ran for president touting solar energy.
This is a field I know all too well.
Nickursis, this is a field I know VERY well.
The problem is that CO2 doesn't generate enough free radicals to even be measurable. Water generates far more free radicals than CO2, albeit still not very many. Are we going to declare water as a pollutant, too?
I am familiar with your brother's company.
The solar cycle is nearing a 200+ year minimum.
Polluting smokestacks, for example , represent lost energy which represents lost dollars to a coal producing plant. Capturing methane emitted from landfills represents revenue. There are economic incentives for "cleaning up" your business. But this post is about man made global warming and simply stated the article was biased. If the science was compelling there would never have been a "need" to doctor research and collude. That makes govt backed research in the area as unethical as a business who dumps toxic waste.
"..actually, in that self interest will trump group interest."
"The notion of “collective rights” (the notion that rights belong to groups, not to individuals) means that “rights” belong to some men, but not to others—that some men have the “right” to dispose of others in any manner they please—and that the criterion of such privileged position consists of numerical superiority." Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness
https://twitter.com/overmanwarrior/statu...
I don't put all those articles up because I don't want to drive everyone crazy with them. But Ayn Rand was struggling with the same basic problem.
I know personally, if I'm driving across the middle of the desert and nobody is around, and some trash blows out of a car I'm driving. I go pick it up, not because of a government regulation, but because it's the right thing to do. I don't need some pin head to tell me what's right or wrong. I already know and act in accord to that knowledge. The question of the day is who is better equipped to provide morality, the capitalist, or the government. A blend of both simply doesn't work, which is what he have now.
But I will posit that the Free Market Capitalism is the best system to resolve issues. You must realize that the actions and reactions of all industries and companies within the bastardized and so-called capitalist system that's confounded by socialist-progressive government actually causes the examples you discuss above. Given a true free market capitalist system with protection from violence and harm from others by a government that only does that, I suspect that we would see an entirely different set of actions and reactions by business.
1) To allow free men and free markets to respond and change as they reason, or
2) To allow environmentalists and crony-capitalists and junk-scientists to continue their graft-ridden, Utopian schemes to drive humanity back to the hunter-gatherer world of our ancestors.
The choice is either/or. Regulation can only delay proper solutions and destroy the environment.
nickuris, you ask for truth.
The truth is that the heading -climate change denying- is dishonest.
The climate of earth, or more correctly the regional climates of earth, have changed are still changing, and will continue to change. Many eminent scientists of whom Soon is one, have established that human activity has no measurable effect on climate. This is heresy in the new religion for which they are punished by being censored and sacked from government jobs, hounded by green fanatics and there is unlimited money to investigate and publish any possible real and invented transgression. If Soon got money from a coal company or not is immaterial and insignificant compared with the flood of government money going to climate charge alarmism.
This alarmism, which has the aim of more taxes, more handouts to cronies and failures, and the return of civilization to the stone age, actually claims that carbon dioxide, a plant food, an essential to all animal life of earth, is a pollutant.
The truth is,
the more carbon dioxide the better, it is about 400ppm (about 0.04%) in the atmosphere at the moment.
No deleterious concentration has been suggested, amounts 20 times the current level are understood as safe. There is no sound theory and there is no evidence that it controls temperatures.
Exactly, government is the major source of science funding (money). Governments love carbon change alarmism as it justifies more taxes and more government jobs. A scientist to tap into this has to follow the party line. To actually disagree leads to sidelining and often dismissal even from university and apparently independent institutions as government money is so prevalent. Even worse, the green volunteer groups start massive smear campaigns.
If one wants the intellectual property to be free and clear, in AS or in real life today, the inventor(s) has/have to fund the work himself or herself or themselves.