" they refused to give the label "liberal" up to those who are explicitly illiberal."
Yes, it's lost its meaning. I hear it used (here in my old-school liberal area) to mean a generic "a good guy" or "honest person". I've heard people say, "her friends thinks he's this nice liberal, but I caught him acting underhandedly."

It' also has the meaning you're talking about of classical liberal. There's neo-liberal, which is what old-school liberals, aka "the traditional liberal bloc" calls me.

I use it in the sense of open to new ideas, not doing things JUST because that's the way they were done historically. Since we're always learning new things, reality has a liberal bias.

Well said and to add from Mark Marano of Climare Depot
Mann is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with climate science today. He is a hardcore political activist, very thin skinned, does not take criticism well at all, and he surrounds himself within his own little world of supportive warmist activists. Even the scientists in Mann’s “own little world” resented his knee-jerk reactions to criticism from other scientists, as made clear in this Climategate email from a colleague who sent it anonymously to a list of trusted scientists:
is the author of the books Dire predictions: understanding global warming (2008) and The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (2012), which have been described as self-aggrandizing scare tomes. He is a member of the Council of Advisers of the Climate Accountability Institute, which held the Planning Workshop that guided the state attorneys general “AGs United for Clean Power” to prosecute climate skeptics.

Mann is also a direct collaborator with the RICO20 professors, who along with U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), have called for prosecution of all climate skeptics. Mann’s arrogant, intolerant and vengeful attitudes — as reflected in his writings and even his Twitter feed — have caused even colleagues to be wary of him, and spurred the targets of his attacks to redouble their efforts. In a June 2016 speech, Mann tried to convince the Democratic Party Platform drafting committee that Democrats must act urgently to enforce his alarmist agenda before the “right wing denial machine” distorts his message.

There still is plenty of propaganda on some the cable stations to keep fear-mongering Climate Change. NatGeo seems to be doing a pretty good job of it with their latest program called 2Degrees. This program features mostly Climate Change Activist's spewing their dire warnings with accompanying graphics ,etc. Programs like this keep fueling that philosophy.

Almost all who call themselves "liberal" today are at least welfare statists, as were Hayek and Friedman despite their appeals to a more legitimate "liberalism"; it was a package deal. The best we can do now is "classical liberal", referring to what "liberal" meant during the Enlightenment founding of the country against conservative statists and oppressive religionists.

"Liberal" doesn't mean what it used to. Political elitist "liberals" today are very illiberal, not what used to be known as liberal societies in contrast to statism and religion.

Dobrien: A good find.
The conclusion is not new but the experimental evidence verifying analysis looks sound to me.
The entire AGW proposition fails on lack of evidence and theory, and bad predictive power. The support is from many examples of fraud (eg hockey stick) and loud emotional moral posturing.

Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek called themselves liberals for those reasons. Just as Ayn Rand sought to recapture the proper meaning of "capitalism" and "selfishness" they refused to give the label "liberal" up to those who are explicitly illiberal.

It is no better than conservatives who think that they are "science aware" even though they are engineers. Engineers are well-represented among jihadi Muslims and fundamentalist Christians. See the arguments here about "hockey sticks." They latch on to a single egregious case and make a generality out it, denying all evidence of global warming and APG.

Strictly speaking, reality does not even have a "reality bias." As you say, it has no bias; it just is. That said, however, we know that we achieve more when acting in accordance with reality than denying it. I took CG's statement to mean that in the context of our political theories, those people who have a liberal bias are more in accordance with reality. It is why liberal societies of the West are materially better off than than illiberal societies (dictatorships, failed states). It is why (very generally) the rich are liberal and the poor are conservative.

I am far from convinced that "climate change" is, or
has been, caused by man. As to proportions, I don't
know.

https://www.omicsonline.org/open-acce...

Reality does not have "liberal" bias. Reality doesn't have "biases", it just is. Liberals have a bias to think they know better than everyone else in the name of science. The first ones to ignore are overwrought, hand wringing "liberals" (with or without adopting a pompous "calm"-appearing demeanor anywhere on the Algore-Kerry scale) who think they are saving the planet and are entitled to shove their policies down our throats because they know so much better. Their religion is no more science than Christian Scientists, Scientologists, Scientific Socialists or anyone else stealing the mantle of science to sell his own fervently held beliefs. Being "open" to beliefs different than their parents does not make it science; it usually means they were taught to believe something different in the propaganda of "education" and others making pronouncements based on comfortable-feeling false premises. It is no better than religious conservatives who believe their supernatural is "true reality".

The "quiz" also has nothing about climate hysteria belief. Those who have memorized some facts and think that it means they are "science aware" because science is what someone called a scientist says, are most likely when "aware" of authoritarian viro claims in the name of science to believe that is science, too.

"Does water boil at a higher or lower temperature in Denver versus Los Angeles?"
I say this only half jokingly: The tests are about reality and reality has a slight liberal bias. It's only half joking because reality is understood by doing experiments, making observation, and reasoning. A key part of that is being open to answers that are undesirable or different from how our parents and other respected people from the past saw things. It means disregarding people who are overwrought and propagandists, and ignoring fallacious reasoning instead of desperately grasping it as a straw man. I'm not sure if "liberal" is the right word because that can mean almost everything. But if we had to see the test through a political lens, which we don't have to, the test has a liberal bias because it deals in reality.

Here is a corrected link to the 2nd test: http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-...

I am surprised on the second test most people got the last question about independent experiments and did not fall for the gambler's fallacy that says if you've tossed heads several times in a row the coin is more likely to land on tails next time.

The polls in question have their problems, of course, but are not about environmentalism. Does water boil at a higher or lower temperature in Denver versus Los Angeles?

See here:
http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/scien...

However, as Wired writer Rhett Alain pointed out about a different quiz (here: http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-..., these instant investigations ask not about scientific thinking but about the memorization of isolated facts. Even though I scored perfect (of course), I realized that if I had not had specific learning, and was just trying to reason it through, I would have chosen wrong on two of the Pew Research questions. Science is not easy. (See "Science versus Common Sense" here in the Gulch and on my blog: http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20... )

There is always an objective problem with loaded questions posing as straightforward. It is a "yes or no" invalid or dubious question based on and promoting a false premise. It counts on conservatives to buy into it, which they do in droves since "Marxism" now means to them (whatever you mean by it) almost anything they don't like in politics. "Ideological degree" of a concept doesn't even make any sense. To rationalize it as a straightforward question you have to strain to ignore all this, claiming one could answer 'yes' or 'no' despite it being loaded.

"Science educated" is what the climate hysterics call themselves whether they understand science or not, which the loudest propagandists promoting their "science" as authority do not. Environmentalism in general is falsely promoted as "science".

Funniest comment on this post. Thanks.

Good point +1

Minus 1. It is a question. It is a yes or no question. If you answer no, that is how you would disagree. If you answer no, I doubt very much if people on this forum would assume Mike Marotta to be a Marxist. Obviously, the question was disliked enough to warrant clicking and writing several paragraphs. I didn't know there was a problem with "loaded" questions in Objectivism. You've proven me incorrect, sir.

That is not entirely true. Recent Pew Research data says that people who are "science educated" are split along party lines on global warming. However, among self-identified Democrats, those who score low on science awareness tend not to accept APG and global warming in general.

It is a fact that 19th century courts could have found in favor of property rights, but ruled in favor of the "public benefit" to pollution. Strict property rights would lead to other solutions.

There is a difference between how rivers are viewed in wet climates versus dry, not surprisingly. Here in the American West, we had range wars over the fact you do not have a right to destroy your neighbor's property by cutting off his water, just because he was downstream from you. Islamic law developed the idea of a "foundation" as we understand it sometime before 1600 AD: the object in question was a water well -- no one could "own" it but the "owners" were responsible for managing it. They expanded that idea to financial foundations, family foundations, again, about 1600 AD. So, there are precedents.

Aside from separating science from politics (which most of the climate hysterics and many conservatives do not), Marxism is not the only kind of statism or collectivism. The viros' worship of an intrinsic value of nature superseding the rights and objective values of man is not following Marx. Some of them are influenced by Marx, but it is mostly against production for the benefit of humans at the "expense" of the rest of nature, not a labor theory of value, economic determinism, class warfare, or other Marxist premises.

Marxism is about control, and the climate is one big lie which allows people to be controlled in many activities. Climate change as a term is ridiculous, as climate has always changed naturally. Marxism calls for dumbing down people, which is what has happened to the lay person and science, they have no personal education in the field of climate. The are easy pawns for those seeking power via climate lies. Now even the paid "experts: say CO2 is not the issue they thought it was, but they will have to look deeper for the cause of climate change. That's right, too many people getting wise, so they need a new lie to sell to solidify their power quest.

We'd have to define "ideological degree".

Activities that accelerate global warming and Marxism are similar in that they both involve people benefiting from taking/trashing other people's property.

They're also related in that global warming is such a big a problem that people who never let a crisis go to waste try to exploit it politically. That's not peculiar to global warming, though. It's the same reason the day of 9/11 attacks people were planning wars with countries unrelated to the attack and shortly after they passed the PATRIOT Act. They didn't come up with those ideas the day of the attack. The attack was the crisis you could use to sell the new product.

My Grandpa used to always say, "You don't get paid until the job is complete", and part of the job is cleaning up the mess when you are done.

It doesn't take a PhD. to understand that we can neither drink water out of rivers full of industrial waste, nor can we breathe air full of toxic particulates.

Is climate change on a global scale a result of energy production? The data is at best contradictory and unclear, but it has been demonstrated that energy production can have an impact on local, smaller scale environments.

If Marxism is defined as "The political and economic ideas of Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels; specifically, a system of thought in which the concept of class struggle plays a primary role both in analyzing Western society in general and in understanding its allegedly inevitable development from bourgeois oppression under capitalism to a socialist society and thence to Communism." [The Tormont Webster's Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary], then it is easy to see how manipulation of small scale environmental issues caused by industry and energy production can be used as the means to seize control of industry and energy production by government and/or anti-capitalist "authorities".

In this way, I would agree that climate change as a concept IS one whose ideological degree is directly proportional to the degree of Marxian control over economic policy.

It is therefore imperative for industrialists and energy generators to be responsible producers and follow Grandpa's rule: Clean up your mess when you are done! The selfish payoff will be the inability of anti-capitalists to manipulate small scale environmental issues into global economic regulation and control.