A Place for Conservatives

[Heathme]

I just wanted to thank everyone for the more civil discussions going on now. This is what I wanted from the beginning.

 

[Red]

But the thing I really liked about that Heartland article was that, especially in the first portion of the article, it asked logical questions about this issue

From the opening paragraphs of that article:

"Democrats, climate campaigners and renewable energy interests are in full outrage mode over news that President Trump intends to launch a Presidential Committee on Climate Science. He should do it now.

The PCCS would, at long last, review and question the “dangerous manmade climate change” reports by federal agencies and investigations funded by them. The committee would be led by Dr. Will Happer, a highly respected scientist and well known skeptic – not of climate change, but of manmade climate chaos. He would be joined by other prominent experts – of whom there are many – who share his doubts.

No way! the climate alarmists rant. How dare you question our disaster claims? Our settled science?"
--------------------
Now, I regard that opening as disingenuous. The answer to this proposal to form such a committee, is not as the article puts it at all. The answer offered by climate scientists is that there already exists a venue for such debate and discussion. It's called peer review, and the scientific debate takes place, and has done so for decades, in peer review publications. That is the case in all the sciences.

I would submit that the President and "climate denialists" are simply setting up a venue where they can use the pretext of such a committee to promote their fossil fuel industry agenda. So I find myself in the position of thinking "who do they think they're kidding?" As I recall, Scott Pruitt was hot for this idea. It really befuddles me when "climate denialists" accuse 97% of climate scientists as engaged in a political game, when the denialists are transparently political and clearly engaged in a non-scientific agenda and end run around the practice in all sciences for generations where research publication, discussion, debate, and emergence of consensus is concerned.

 

[Red]

And when I look back at the 20 year old data that claimed we would be sweltering and our coastal cities flooded by now

While trying to find specific info on this statement, and apparently I have not found the right search terms yet, I came across this interesting read:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...h-climate-change-20-years-ago-documents-show/

 

[fishonjazz]

I just wanted to thank everyone for the more civil discussions going on now. This is what I wanted from the beginning.

You're welcome

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6013 using JazzFanz mobile app

 

[Getting Traded]

That link you pointed out does not feel like a place that would tell me the truth. It feels like a place that, much like the Heartland Institute, gathers all of the info they possibly can on one side of the argument. But the thing I really liked about that Heartland article was that, especially in the first portion of the article, it asked logical questions about this issue. I'd love to see a climate expert address that article, line by line, in a scientific way. It makes no difference to me what positions the Heartland Institute might have backed in the past, or who is paying the salary of the person who asked the questions in that article. I want to see the answers. I am completely unimpressed by the crazed ravings of politicians and activists.

Then just listen to the scientists. All of those who study climate change as a profession are in the alarmist camp. Furthermore, Trump doesn't appoint people who disagree with him.

 

[Red]

To me, this article is very reasonable:
https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/stop-the-anti-climate-science-totalitarians

Last night, I laid into the opening lines of this Heartland missive as it pertained to the formation of a Presidential Committee on Climate Security(PCCS). I'd like to go into a bit more detail here as to why this simply represents the politicization of peer reviewed science.

First, here is a Heartland Institute statement supporting the formation and mission, as they see it, of a PCCS:

https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/america-needs-president-trumps-climate-science-committee

Apparently this is to be set up in a red team/blue team format( a la Scott Pruitt's original plan at the EPA). And, as I mentioned, since this would amount to a peer review of the peer review National Climate Assessment, produced by hundreds of scientists at many federal agencies, most scientists would recognize, (especially once it is factored in the profile of the scientist chosen to lead the effort), the political nature of the proposed PCCS.

Lawfare points this out:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/white-houses-climate-committee-red-teams-reality

"The panel—even in its latest incarnation—appears designed to challenge the claim that climate change is something the government should be worried about at all. Don’t take my word for it; there is plenty of evidence. The president, after all, has called climate change a “hoax” and frequently tweets his disbelief that the climate is changing when the temperature drops below freezing. After the release of a November 2018 report outlining the potentially devastating consequences of climate change for the United States—a report compiled by 13 U.S. government agencies—Trump simply told the media, “I don’t believe it.”

Now, witness the response of miltary and national security leaders to this proposed PCCS:

https://climateandsecurity.org/2019...ized-presidential-climate-security-committee/

"This is the equivalent of setting up a committee on nuclear weapons proliferation and having someone lead it who doesn’t think nuclear weapons exist,” said Francesco Femia, Chief Executive Officer of the Council on Strategic Risks and Co-Founder of the Center for Climate and Security in an interview with The Washington Post. “It’s honestly a blunt force political tool designed to shut the national security community up on climate change.”

https://climateandsecurity.org/2019...-security-leaders-denounce-nsc-climate-panel/

“…we are deeply concerned by reports that National Security Council officials are considering forming a committee to dispute and undermine military and intelligence judgments on the threat posed by climate change. This includes second-guessing the scientific sources used to assess the threat, such as the rigorously peer-reviewed National Climate Assessment, and applying that to national security policy. Imposing a political test on reports issued by the science agencies, and forcing a blind spot onto the national security assessments that depend on them, will erode our national security.”

 

[Red]

Continuing, and offering further evidence that the proposed PCCS will be a political body formed because President Trump responded to his own National Climate Assessment with the observation "I don't believe it", a brief look at who would head this Presidential Committee or Presidential Commission. William Happer. He is a scientist. But, his specialty is optical physics. No background in climate science at all. On record as believing CO2 emissions are in fact good for the planet. Has compared "demonization" of CO2 to Nazi persecution of Jews. Makes it plenty clear, I believe, and IMHO, that the PCCS that the Heartland Institute is so eager to get off the ground, is in fact a farce, and simply represents Trump's attempt to overrule the National Climate Assessment his own administration produced.

This profile of William Happer is from the National Resources Defence Council, one of the leading environmental activist groups in the US. So, full disclosure on that, and like millions of other Americans, I am a member of the NRDC.

https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/trumps...mate-change-panel-says-co2-has-been-demonized

"..... First, more than a dozen federal departments and agencies working jointly under the auspices of the executive branch—your branch!—release the Fourth National Climate Assessment, a report that’s as unsparing in its depiction of global warming’s horrific impacts as it is unambiguous in its call for action. Then, to add insult to injury, your Defense Department releases its own report stating that climate change poses a serious threat to the nation’s armed forces and, by extension, to national security. Finally, less than two weeks later, your director of national intelligence has the audacity to defy your wishes by saying pretty much the same thing.

So, what do you do? Well, if you’re President Donald J. Trump, you try to muddy the waters by forming a special working group to investigate climate change—and you put a climate-denying ex-professor in charge of it. For some context, this ex-professor, William Happer, once bemoaned the “demonization” of carbon dioxide in terms so offensive that I can’t even bring myself to type them out. (Read or listen to his words here, if you have the stomach for it.) In an administration not known for its transparency, Trump’s latest move stands out as a uniquely transparent attempt to undermine expert opinion and give the most vehement climate deniers a role in crafting our public policy.

...........In truth, everything you need to know about William Happer’s credibility on the topic of climate change can be gleaned from the fact that he’s the cofounder of a group known as the CO2 Coalition."

 

[Ron Mexico]

This, to me, is the very definition of a moderate. Some issues from both sides of the aisle, vote for the least reprehensible that fits their standards most closely. Is this a "new conservative" then?

Nope, I'm a hard core liberal according to some people here.

 

[Ron Mexico]

Thats a good post until the last part(Ill get to that in a second)

I agree with with most of what you said. I feel the same way. I still like to see you as a liberal though. I need a target to fight the ideas that I dont like from the left.

So you are opposed to gay conversion therapy and repulsed by it, but you are not opposed to teaching kids to choose their gender, and transition as a child? The left is teaching that. Why didnt you mention it?

Is teaching your kids to stay in a state of being able to reproduce worse than teaching the opposite of that? Is reproduction not important?

That's a different issue. I have thoughts on that, but it's still a different issue and doesn't matter in regards to what I'm talking about.

 

[Bawse Dawg]

@Red

Well done, I’m afraid it will fall on deaf ears though.

 

[LogGrad98]

Nope, I'm a hard core liberal according to some people here.

All they can see here is your reaction to the topics discussed and the posters posting. Therefore, since I tend to lash out at hypocrisy and sanctimonious self-righteousness, which we get far more from those in the left on this site than from those on the right, I have been labeled as they banner-boy for all things conservative by the fanatical leftists here. But what people see of us in limited interactions on an internet forum is rarely fully who anyone is, and often is more an affected persona than anything else.

 

[Stoked]

Watching The Gifted on Hulu and every time the character Trask talks the parallels between him and Trump literally scream out. Hiding beyond words games, division, fake patriotism...

Disgusting.

 

[Heathme]

@Red

Well done, I’m afraid it will fall on deaf ears though.

It's really not falling on deaf ears. It is falling on ears that have heard the reports of doom and gloom since Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006.

Or these 18 predictions since 1970:
http://www.aei.org/publication/18-s...st-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-3/

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in his 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.

14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”

15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Here are 107 more predictions all with footnotes and backed by "scientific data"

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/02/the-big-list-of-failed-climate-predictions/

There is plenty of room for skepticism.

 

[idestroyedthetoilet]

It's really not falling on deaf ears. It is falling on ears that have heard the reports of doom and gloom since Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006.

Or these 18 predictions since 1970:
http://www.aei.org/publication/18-s...st-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-3/

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in his 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.

14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”

15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Here are 107 more predictions all with footnotes and backed by "scientific data"

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/02/the-big-list-of-failed-climate-predictions/

Careful. There are many here who have bought into the world ending soon boogeyman. Like, believe it is 100% fact, a foregone conclusion. You aren't having a discussion with very many who take the stance of wanting climate stasis and thus a need to counter a 2-3 degree change.

 

[Heathme]

I wanted to get your thoughts on Bill Mahar ripping on Democrats for being scared to have a debate hosted by Fox News. I rarely agree with anything the guy says but this makes sense.

He even throws in some "Mormon" jokes for good measure. Nothing offensive.

https://therightscoop.com/grow-a-pa...ak-democrats-for-banning-fox-news-on-debates/

 

[gandalfe]

I wanted to get your thoughts on Bill Mahar ripping on Democrats for being scared to have a debate hosted by Fox News. I rarely agree with anything the guy says but this makes sense.

He even throws in some "Mormon" jokes for good measure. Nothing offensive.

https://therightscoop.com/grow-a-pa...ak-democrats-for-banning-fox-news-on-debates/

You mean like in 2016, when the Repulicans wouldn't have one hosted by MSNBC?

I think it's weak sauce. You should be prepared to go wherever you can to defend your ideas.

 

[Heathme]

You mean like in 2016, when the Repulicans wouldn't have one hosted by MSNBC?

I think it's weak sauce. You should be prepared to go wherever you can to defend your ideas.

Wow, what a comeback. Republicans did go on networks that had moderators from CNN, ABC, CBS and Fox News. Fox News was one of the most difficult debates because they can't appear to be biased. Republicans, as Bill Mahar pointed out, are not afraid to go on shows with opposing views.

 

[gandalfe]

Wow, what a comeback.

I was agreeing with you, you stupid git.

 

[Zombie]

You mean like in 2016, when the Repulicans wouldn't have one hosted by MSNBC?

I think it's weak sauce. You should be prepared to go wherever you can to defend your ideas.

Yeah, I think I disagree. If Fox News was a right leaning network that would be one thing, but they aren't. They're a propaganda outlet for the GOP and should be treated as such. The DNC has more to lose by treating them as legitimate than they have to gain imo.

I think this is actually way overdue.

 

[gandalfe]

Yeah, I think I disagree. If Fox News was a right leaning network that would be one thing, but they aren't. They're a propaganda outlet for the GOP and should be treated as such. The DNC has more to lose by treating them as legitimate than they have to gain imo.

Because they're the state media, and yet they have some people who actually trained in and want to do journalism, they have people who will actually try to do things fairly. But, even if not, so what? It's not like the world is Donald Trump's wet dreams, where you can't face any criticism at all. That's where you have to go to reach the people who don't already agree with you.

Note, of course, that I'm not running for president. I wouldn't walk into their building to deliver a hornet's nest. Not without a hazmat unit on standby to hose me down afterwards.