Your argument is ad hominem, a logical fallacy where one attacks the character or motive of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself.
Furthermore, free speech is a natural human right, to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being, not an Americentrist historical accident.
The main thesis of the 1619 project was that the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. This is categorically false according to actual historians, and so the NYT had to issue a correction (some 7 months later). None of the leading scholars of the whole period from the Revolution to the Civil War were consulted on the project, yet now it is being taught in some public schools
Thanks. I guess I could have spent a few minutes reading the wiki, which has a pretty good section on it.
>The 1619 Project has been criticized by some American historians, including historians of the American Revolution Gordon Wood[6] and Sean Wilentz,[43] and Civil War experts Richard Carwardine[5] and James McPherson.[7] McPherson stated in an interview that he was "disturbed" by the project's "unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which was clearly, obviously, not an exclusively American institution, but existed throughout history." McPherson continued, "slavery in the United States was only a small part of a larger world process that unfolded over many centuries. And in the United States, too, there was not only slavery but also an antislavery movement."[7] Historian James Oakes criticized Hannah-Jones's assertion that "Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country."[44]
> yet now it is being taught in some public schools
That's the real problem. Newspapers get things wrong all the time. There's a conversation, people put forth their views pro and anti, and everyone makes up their own mind. But making a newspaper story that has come under fire from a huge number of respectable scholars part of the school curriculum for children is nakedly ideological.
I think/hope everybody recognizes that mistakes happen. In this particular case I think it goes beyond a mere mistake. Some points to consider: The 1619 Project refers not merely to "a newspaper story". Originally it was 100 page magazine with ten essays, a variety of poems and stories, etc. It has since become an ongoing multimedia project. Secondly, as mentioned above, the NYTs has not been particularly responsive to criticism from actual historians.
Conflation of "resources" with supply-and-demand. Living near the ocean doesn't use more resources but it's priced higher more because people want to live there bidding up prices. Similarly living in cities cost more because people want to live there (in aggregate).
A few places in the U.S. do already have this system and it works well. The city owns the fiber optic links between your house and a central office, but you get to choose your own ISP (often from dozens of options).
It's not about climate it's about political control. It's a political boogeyman. Left wing politicians have successfully brainwashed a generation to believe they’re gonna die in 12 years unless socialists and communists control our planet and the lives of everyone on it. I was a huge believer in Climate Change as a youth. I wanted to save the environment. Then I caught one lie. Then two. Then three. Then I read the current data. Then I realized they’ve been exaggerating & fear-mongering headlines for decades. No climate apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true to date.
Whenever there is an extreme weather event, such as a flood or drought, people ask whether that event was caused by global warming. Unfortunately, there is no straightforward answer to this question. Weather is highly variable and extreme weather events have always happened.
I’ve worked with global temperature data, and know that you can produce any shaped global temperature graph you want by picking the right set of stations. There are grossly inadequate amounts of both historical and current data to produce a meaningful long term temperature graph for the earth. Much of the data is fake – by their own admission. https://realclimatescience.com/overwhelming-evidence-of-coll...
Climate scientists openly discussed getting rid of the 1940s warmth in the temperature data without understanding the anomaly. An email unveiled by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request said: “It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with why the blip”. http://di2.nu/foia/1254108338.txt
One can download the original and altered data directly from the NOAA. ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5 You can see and construct the graphs yourself, first hand, with the data pre-plotted in a Google sheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mWanx8ojmOkcazzRhDao... on the “Graphs” tab.
Patrick Moore, Greenpeace co-founder has said: “I can adjust the data to show any trend I like.”
According to the Toronto Sun, Canada’s Department of the Environment just purged 100 years of data on climate change. Patrick Moore said: “I don’t care why they scrapped the data, that is simply wrong. They could make note of why they don’t trust it but to destroy it is a crime against science and history.” https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1174909654297538560 This seems suspicious as no data set should ever be purged, for posterity. This dataset could have simply been deprecated.
Since the NOAA sensors have been unreliable the US has been building a new network higher-quality sensors called the US Climate Reference Network (USCRN) starting in year 2004. The vision of the USCRN program is to maintain a high-quality climate observation network.
It is an error to mis-attribute warming to increased CO2 when many other known causal factors exist. Those other factors are the reason the USCRN was developed, funded, and put in place. The non-CO2 causal factors include increased population density in cities, increased energy use per capita, reduced atmospheric pollution, increased local humidity from human activities (lawn watering, industrial cooling towers), changed site conditions from rural to urban, long-term drought, and wind shadows from buildings in cities. https://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2017/03/us-air-temperatu...
The USCRN data is rarely mentioned in NOAA’s monthly and annual “State of the Climate” reports to the U.S. public, instead buried in the depths of the NCDC website, one can get access to the data and have it plotted.
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) doesn’t do original research but reports on others’ research, which they call Assessment Reports. There have been 5 thus far.
A scientist working with the IPCC said the IPCC is above Freedom of Information Acts: “One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 [Assessment Report 5] would be to delete all emails at the end of the process. … Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden.”
Scientists with NOAA view global warming as a political cause rather than a balanced scientific inquiry and much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of facts and data. https://observer.com/2017/02/noaa-fake-global-warming-data-p...
The IPCC report relies upon six long-term surface temperature datasets to come up with the 0.2°C per decade rate of increase. The report does not cite the two global temperature datasets derived from satellites: the University of Alabama in Huntsville reports that global average temperatures are rising at a rate of 0.13°C per decade, and Remote Sensing Systems reports the rate of increase at 0.18°C per decade. At the UAH rate of warming, the 1.5°C threshold would not be exceeded until around 2070. https://reason.com/2018/10/11/how-big-of-a-deal-is-half-of-a...
The myth of an almost-unanimous climate-change consensus is pervasive. It’s often said that 97% of scientists agree with the anthropogenic climate-change thesis. However, a 2012 poll of American Meteorological Society members also reported a diversity of opinion. 11% attributed the phenomenon to human activity and natural causes in about equal measure, while 23% said enough is not yet known to make any determination.
The UN has been making the same claim that we only have twelve years to save the planet from global warming, for the past 30 years.
The 12-year deadline is a talking point for politicians. However the IPCC said there is not some “magic global mean temperature or total emissions that separate 'fine' from 'catastrophic’”
Aren't you missing a rather larger point that we're also currently polluting the planet in the process, smog, water tables, rivers, ocean trash, deforestation, excess meat consumption linked to chronic disease?
Exactly this. It doesn't matter if climate models are all wrong. Polluting the environment we require to live in is a dumb idea generally speaking. It's as if your house wouldn't have a toilet and you, your family and all guests just take a dump in the living room. It's just a matter of time until smell and diseases spread around your house and make you sick.
That we are polluting is beyond doubt. Deforestation, mining, nuclear accidents... all these are real problems that need no additional backing science or guvernamental panels, yet they hardly get the spotlight in mass media compared with Co2 levels. Co2 is reported as the worst problem by politicians to scare us, make us feel guilty and pay.
The degree of overconsumism rooted in our system is hardly environmentally friendly. Yet we want to be environmentally friendly by consuming a new generation of Co2 friendly products, which polluted the planet to be manufactured.
Consuming is the problem, not the solution, but who is going to say in a capitalist system backed by fiat money that is only sustainable by an ever increasing debt that we need to have negative growth and lose some comfort to decrease our footprint?
One other interesting point to add to the list. If you look at plots of historic CO2 estimates derived from the Vostok ice core [1], you'll notice that we are presently at the very peak (in time) of a climate cycle that aligns almost perfectly with four other cycles from the last ≈400k years. Now two points here:
1. It is extremely unlikely that anthropogenic emissions would align so conveniently with the tip of a natural climate cycle. There must be some other factor underlying the correlation, and/or the influence of human emissions is overstated.
2. The argument is that there is an alarming discrepancy between current measured CO2 and historic data derived from cores. However, core data is an estimate based on a number of assumptions regarding capture and diffusion of gasses during and post ice formation, and I have not come across any literature which questions whether ice core derived CO2 values may underestimate historic CO2 levels. Indeed, there are hints from plant data that this may be the case, but publishing such a conclusion would probably be career suicide in the current politicized academic climate.
The first point alone indicates that some natural degree of warming is to be expected at this point in natural climate variations, something which is never mentioned by proponents of climate change. The second point, if true, would mean that the effects of human activity on global climate are over stated and the current evolution of the system is normal, beyond our control, and/or has happened in the past almost exactly as it is happening now.
You're probably confused by the fact that (1) they are plotting ice core based CO2 concentrations as years before 1950 and (2) the time resolution of the ancient ice core data is quite low, while all the anthropogenic action happened in the last 150 y or so (and about 50% of the CO2 addition happened in the last 50).
Look at [0] for a more authoritative source and specifically compare the 800 and 400 ky data to the 2000-year (Law Dome, Antarctica) data. This will show you that we are indeed at the top of a very slow CO2 cycle, but that we added about 100 ppm on top of that in the past ~100 y! This is more than the amplitude of the underlying cycles.
What I'm saying is that all of our historic CO2 data comes from cores, which are a proxy for paleo-CO2 levels. The theory is that bubbles of atmospheric gas are trapped in ice as it forms over thousands of years. What I'm saying is that there's the possibility that this trapping is imperfect, and ratios of atmospheric gassed may change after being sequestered, such that past ppm values are underestimated, and the currently measured values are not unusual in history, and are rather consistent with the peak that historic core data shows us to be at.
In fact, here [1] is a well sourced article which highlights at least one indication that this is the case - historic CO2 estimates derived from plant stomata are much higher and closer to contemporary measured levels than ice core data. Then there is the idea of time averaging smoothing out peaks, and we can only speculate/model the loss of resolution.
It's very easy for a well intentioned group of researchers to reason themselves into a corner, particularly when things like institutional momentum, political biases, and understandable doomsday concerns influence the kinds of questions scientists ask and the paths they are willing to take to find answers. Because this research has broad effects on economic, social, and corporate policy, it is dangerous to close off one side of questioning behind an apparent consensus, not to mention it's simply bad science.
>the time resolution of the ancient ice core data is quite low, while all the anthropogenic action happened in the last 150 y or so
The blog post you cited seemed pretty dodgy to me, so I went ahead and looked closely at the work they base many of their conclusions on, a PhD thesis from 2004 by Kouwenberg [0]. Specifically the data in Fig. 5.4 (p. 57) is what they base much of their argument on.
Kouwenberg herself however doesn't believe the crazy 300-700 AD CO2 excursion to around 400 ppm and spends a lot of time looking at alternative explanations, finally concluding on p. 65:
"""
The extremely low number of stomata per mm needle length in the Tsuga heterophylla record at Jay Bath between 300 and 700 AD does not appear to result from extremely high
atmospheric CO2 levels at the time, but coincides with the establishment of the species during a period of major disturbance at the site. The open, exposed setting after this disturbance probably provided highly stressed growth conditions for pioneering, early-successional T. heterophylla trees.
"""
Of that, there is of course no mention in the blog post you cited.
Importantly, of course, none of this is really that relevant to the discussion of anthropogenic global warming, since we know that we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere, and that CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat.
I'm really starting to see a pattern here, where facts that contain some grain of truth are used out of context to sow doubt, and everything just evaporates as soon as you look more closely (and then the next tangentially relevant fact is brought up)... It's probably quite effective - I mean, who is going to read that blog post you linked and then do what I just did and actually dig into the sources? I did that because I took the "advice" I got in this comment section to heart and wanted to give my "opponents" the benefit of the doubt.
> What I'm saying is that there's the possibility that this trapping is imperfect, and ratios of atmospheric gassed may change after being sequestered..
Do you seriously think that we don't consider these things? Seriously?
There's also evidence that CO2 lags temperature increase historically, meaning CO2 was not the causative agent for temperature increase, rising CO2 might be an artifact of increase temperatures.
At that point you're questioning pretty basic physics. What part of the influence of CO2 concentration on the infrared transmittance of the atmosphere are you questioning [0]? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The "basic physics" contradicts the data. Your error is approaching this enormously complex question with the assumption that climate science is unquestionably correct. This lag is a glaring discrepancy that begs resolution. No, it doesn't mean climate science is totally wrong, but this attitude of unquestionability is absolutely pervasive in both society at large and academia, and gives deniers a justifiable reason for suspicion.
And I'm not some snot nosed programmer looking in from outside. I'm a former geoscientist and I saw this pressure firsthand, even at a relatively conservative University.
It is of course totally possible and consistent with mainstream climate science for CO2 levels to trail temperature under some conditions, for example when the temperature is driven by Milankovich cycles. [0]
I was attacking the implied invalid conclusion that rising CO2 levels would therefore not drive temperature.
But, to address the point in more detail, look at the data in [1]. CO2 typically does not lag temperature. If you cherry-pick points in time at the beginning of a Milankovich-induced temperature increase it may, and this is adequately explained by outgassing of CO2 from the oceans, driven by the sun. [2]
> [...] this attitude of unquestionability is absolutely pervasive in both society at large and academia, and gives deniers a justifiable reason for suspicion.
I try to find citations for what I write here, and address specific points, both to teach myself the science and to keep the discussion honest. If everybody here did this there would certainly be no "attitude of unquestionability".
I agree that it can probably seem that way on cursory look. I personally find it hard to always keep cool when faced with a barrage of pseudo-scientific points that don't hold up to scrutiny. More importantly, I find the implicit arrogance really hard to stomach, i.e. thinking that a huge field of scientists is too stupid to understand some "obvious fault" that someone posted on their blog. Maybe that makes me unfair to some participants who are just trying to understand the issue better and / or have an honest discussion. I'm sorry if that was the case.
I don't get it. Climate change critics try to find one flaw in some straw man argument and then denounce the whole field as a lie. CO2 isn't the only thing that causes warming and no, scientists are not stupid enough to not account for these things. I mean this statement is trivial to disprove because methane and tons of other things also act as greenhouse gases or amplify heating. It doesn't change the threat caused by higher temperatures. 4°C are 4°C and we can bet on going way beyond that tiny puny number if no ones gives a damn.
It's one flaw of many. First, nobody really trusts the temperature data. Second, the earth was much hotter before. Third, there was an ice age, now there isn't, planet was already warming. Fourth, water vapor is recognized as the most powerful greenhouse gas. Fifth, we don't believe solar energy is being adequately accounted for.
We have a what we consider a lot of holes, big import holes, in the theory. These issues are immediately dismissed. The fact that people can say with a straight face that water vapor increases global warming, yet is not the primary cause, even though it's the strongest greenhouse gas, is beyond believe. It defies comprehension, I will never, ever take the CO2 theory serious, and I'll be here encouraging others to think for themselves as well.
Furthermore, free speech is a natural human right, to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being, not an Americentrist historical accident.