Video description:
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) launched a major television ad campaign criticizing Representative Rodney Davis’ anti-science agenda and for denying the proven science of climate change
I’m kind of stoked that someone is buying serious ad time with the idea that climate change is a big deal, and people care about it. I’m even more stoked that the targeted politicians are more than a little freaked by it. And again, I’m seriously stoked that “climate denier” is now the official descriptor for what these people are.
League of Conservation Voters press release:
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) today launched a major television ad campaign criticizing Representative Rodney Davis’ anti-science agenda and for denying the proven science of climate change. The ad begins running today in the Champaign-Springfield and St. Louis markets and is part of a nearly $2 million nationwide LCV campaign to hold climate change deniers in Congress accountable for their extreme voting record.
“The American people are tired of Washington politicians like Rep. Davis ignoring basic scientific facts and standing in the way of action on climate change,” said Gene Karpinski, President of the League of Conservation Voters.
The ad highlights Rep. Davis’ dangerous, anti-science agenda and for claimingthat “global warming has stopped 16 years ago.” Documentation for the ad can be found here.
Rep. Davis’ extreme record includes opposing landmark comprehensive clean energy and climate change bill, and President Obama’s common sense climate change plan. The President’s plan would significantly cut carbon pollution from power plants, which are the single largest source of carbon pollution.
Rep. Davis’ positions are out of step with his constituents, and LCV urges them to contact the Congressman to tell him that it’s time to act on climate change. The scientific views on climate change are as solid as any public policy question will ever get. According to NASA, 97 percent of scientists agree that human activity is contributing to climate change, and that extreme weather is increasing due to climate change.
Good, good, and really darn good. I love it that we are going on offense now.
I hope that the democrats in Orange County (California) get their act together and go after that idiot Rohrabacher.
It’s not like the democrats would have to spend much money writing juicy attack ads — Rohrabacher has (unwittingly) already done most of their leg-work for them.
The demographics in Orange County are changing — old white idiots comprise a steadily shrinking percentage of the electorate there.
OC is seeing an influx of rich Chinese capitalists, who are buying up property as a hedge against the Chinese government going after their cash piles. Probably not the most sympathetic group regarding the climate. I once encountered a young Chinese transplant girl who was worth millions secondary to the family real estate investment business (property in China and in Los Angeles), who held very conservative/Republican type views. Not that one case study makes a consensus. Still enough to keep the ears perked up for what’s happening.
Reminds me of a little story a co-worker recently told me.
He and his wife went to China a couple of years ago. While they were staying at a hotel in Beijing, he spent a bit of time “channel surfing” on the TV.
He came across what appeared to be a Communist Party “game show”, where squeaky-clean, perfectly-groomed “young communists” would jump up and answer questions put to them by Party officials.
He told me that even though he did not understand the language, the young game-show contestants (with their mannerisms and appearance) struck him as being amazingly like Young Republicans here in the USA.
Right-wing authoritarian types all around the world — whatever they call themselves — are very much alike.
–caerbannog666 (ignore the mangled WordPress userid)
see the recent repression of gay people in Russia. Right wing hyper-patriotic faux religious zealots in this country would feel right at home with that behavior. Religion and ideology are only the thin patina over the expression of age-old hatred, bigotry, fear, and tribalism.
The one issue I have with the video is it showing a planetary nebula when it say “discovering new galaxies”. Otherwise a step in the right direction 🙂
They should also go through the Oregon Petition and look up some of these medical doctors and start calling them out on review sites like yelp.com. Then put up local articles with headlines such as ‘Is your doctor a science denier?’, listing the local doctors on the Petition.
Due to the sensitive nature of my “day job” I can’t elaborate too much, but I will tell you that my market is getting blitzed by similar ads by LCV. I’m just itching for an opportunity to go on the air to clear the air! 😉 I subscribe to RMI’s newsletter and read Amory’s post. My FB page is loaded with fresh and refreshing material as well. My experience shows me that if you present new energy as an opportunity, rather than a requirement “for the environment” you will get deniers to come around really quickly. Especially when you tell them that it’s gonna cost us some 6 trillion over the next century to clean up the rat’s nest we call our infrastructure. Keep up the good fight, all.
In the meantime, where I live in North Carolina, Real World, we’re having the coolest, wettest summer I can ever remember. Other than the excess mosquitoes, it’s wonderful. As I type this, it is just 61°F, and when I looked at the thermometer yesterday (around 1:30 p.m.) it was just 72°F. In most years in mid-August it is brutally hot here, and we’re rationing water.
The LCV and President Obma say that “97% of scientists agree” that (in President Obama’s words) “climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”
They’re lying.
Here’s the basis for that claim: as reported in an article by Peter Doran about a survey of 10,257 Earth Scientists by Margaret Zimmerman, 96.2% (76 scientists), out of 2.5% (79 scientists) selected from the 30.7% (3146 scientists) who responded, agreed that it’s “generally” warmer now than it was in the 1700s at the depths of the Little Ice Age.
http://tinyurl.com/clim97pct
In other words, the 97% consensus claim is a Big Lie.
Imagine polling 10,257 medical professionals about homeopathy, and then excluding the answers of everyone except 79 practicing homeopaths, and finding that a “consensus” of 97% of them believe in homeopathy. Claiming on the basis of such a fraudulent “survey” that 97% of medical professionals believe in homeopathy would be no worse than Obama’s claim that 97% of scientists agree that “climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”
This is the kind of premeditated dishonesty that makes any thoughtful person doubt the whole Climate Movement enterprise.
What’s more, by selecting just the 79 respondents who specialize in papers about global warming, Doran & Zimmerman biased the result to the point of meaninglessness. Those are the respondents whom they should have excluded.
Would you survey chiropractors about whether chiropractic is valid, or cold fusion researchers about whether cold fusion works?
Of course not. They’re the wrong people to ask, because they’re biased. They have a vested interest in the answer.
To answer such questions, you must survey “neighboring” disciplines. If you survey homeopaths and find that 97% of them say they believe in homeopathy, what have you learned? That would tell you absolutely nothing. If you want to learn about the acceptance of homeopathy, ask MDs and pharmacologists, not homeopaths.
That’s why you should ask scientists from other disciplines, like meteorology, what they think of the climate scare. Most meteorologists think the climate scare is way overblown, at best. Many think it is a complete scam.
Once again a climate denier that confuses weather and climate. And once again a denier that has a theory that other disciplines know more than scientists practicing in a particular area. Once again a denier that ignores the published and peer-reviewed findings of scientists practicing in the climate arena. Yeah, there’s a scam going on, all right, and denial is it. Give it up, Dave, you’re just an embarrassment.
No you are lying again! Or better yet you’re all wet!
If you are not aware that most meteorologists (TV meteorologists) have a broadcast degree not a science degree or just passed certification to be a TV meteorologists.
97%: Let just test this out by backing up your claim. Pick “Science” or “Nature” journals and search using global warming; Climate Change, and Global cooling for the last 60 years and read the abstracts. Now please show your work that it is less than 9X%.
The wettest summer try the wettest year (full Year) on record and it is August 15th. Yes extreme wet weather in GA, TN, NC, and SC with over 20 inches above normal for the Southeast (and we started off in extreme drought for a good part of the area. This is the reason for the coolest summer Dave. Here in East Tennessee we have only had 4 sunny days without rain this summer, and the current forecast for more! Setting all new records for the annual rainfall. Of course any rain from now on to the first of 2014 will move that recorded up. So Dave let’s think here, extreme drought to extreme annual rainfall records in just a few months. Hourly, daily, monthly, and Yearly Record set for part of this region and it is just August. If I not mistaken but wasn’t that the forecast of a warming planet from the IPCC?
Sorry my bad! I should had suggested the AMS American Metrological Society Journals not Nature. In answering “asking a meteorologists”. http://journals.ametsoc.org/
And
Thanks for the laughs!
http://www.burtonsys.com/climate/
This is just an example that you are so far right that you have fallen off the right side of your flat earth!
I love the lack of science notably science journals.
Except you wouldn’t ask a homeopathic doctor (or whatever they’re called) if the products he/she prescribes have been shown to significantly modify valid clinical endpoints defined in double blind, placebo controlled studies. You’d ask the folks doing those studies – those are the scientists – not the homeopathic guy. And the scientists would probably tell you the evidence is rather poor, based on the literature.
There is a distinction between a practitioner and a scientist. A scientist working on a study is actively seeking to destroy bias in the study. And they show their work in their reported methodology.
So if folks don’t like this particular survey, then they should go straight to the literature and do a survey of the literature. If a sample size of 70 some papers ‘feels’ too small (irregardless of basic statistical/mathematical instruction in the field of sampling), then take a sample size of 200 or 300 or whatever you want (though a statistician will tell you that going going over a certain sample size only marginally reduces the inherent error; in other words it’s a waste of time and money to ‘over-sample’ in a well designed study).
So when an auto parts manufacture samples its products for quality control do you think they’re sampling huge quantities of their product relative to the population size? No. Their sampling is probably well under 1% of the number of products being manufactured. They could be selling thousands of parts per month, and they are reliant on the quality of their product to keep their market share intact, yet they only do very small sampling with respect to the population, because, inside of a well designed study, that small sampling is sufficient to say that their product is good enough to be sold in mass.
There’s lots to criticize about the 97% study, but to just say a sample of 70 something ‘feels’ too small, is a bit too touchy-feely and not very scientific with regard to applied mathematics.
There have been at least five or six major peer-reviewed studies on the consensus and every single one of them has produced the same figure of around 97% to 99%.
Here are a few of them.
http://www.richarddawkins.net/news_articles/2012/11/25/-why-climate-deniers-have-no-scientific-credibility-in-one-pie-chart#
Which shows that of 13,950 climate change research papers published in the last decade only 24 dispute AGW.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.full.pdf
Was published in the pNAS – probably THE most respected scientific institute in the world and surveyed 1372 publishing climate scientists and also produced the 97% figure.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1686.full
Is the Naomi Oreskes study of all 928 peer-reviewed research papers on climate change that had been published to 2003 and which failed to find a single paper that disputed AGW.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article
Is a study of over 11,944 peer-reviewed research papers and also produces the same figure of 97%.
I could go on – The 2007 Harris survey (97%) and of course the Doran survey on which the denierblogs have concocted a meme so perverse and twisted it’s acutaly difficult to figure out what they are even basing this particular piece of junk on.
Fact:
The Doran survey was based on a survey 3,146 scientists.
So far as anyone can tell the official denierblog meme is that it was based on a survey of only 79 scientists.
???
The truth of the matter is that the survey on 3,146 scientists showed that as the level of expertise in climate science increased the conviction that the Earth has warmed since before the Industrial Revolution increased also.
The most qualified of the 3,146 scientists surveyed were the 79 who have had over half of their research published in respected journals. Of these 77 concur with the consensus.
What is so difficult for you to understand? It would appear that you are being deliberately obtuse.
No matter. It is patently obvious that around 97% of qualified climate scientists concur with the evidence.
If the denial industry had a scintilla of evidence that suggested they didn’t they would be shouting it from the rooftops. But they don’t – because they can’t. Because ALL the evidence from ALL of the surveys and studies carried out over the last decade is that the scientific consensus is near unanimous.
If there were any significant number of climate scientists that didn’t concur then where are they? Why does the denial industry continualy have to wheel out fake “experts” on every piece of media coverage? The handfull (around 15 out of thousands) of climate scientists who dispute AGW have become household names due to their rarity. And even then they aren’t so stupid as to dispute the basic laws of physics. Most just believe the results will only be dire rather than disastrous.
Your whole standpoint is utterly bogus and obviously so.
Quote correctly without distortion. It shows right there on the video the source
is not LCV, its NASA.
Please don’t go to the tiny url link. It will not back up in your browser. Nothing but rehashed denier nonsense from questionable sources.
Denier trolls love to state opinions as fact,
“Most meteorologists think the climate scare is way overblown, at best. Many think it is a complete scam.”
I got a second opinion from an outside source, the AMA.
“It is clear from extensive scientific evidence that the dominant cause of the rapid change in climate of the past half century is human-induced increases in the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases” -AMS
http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/2012climatechange.html
Globally averaged sea level has risen by about 17 cm (7 inches) in the 20th century, with the rise accelerating since the early 1990s
So that proves it then. Man is causing global warming and sea level is rising.
How do I know, I got it from the AMA just like somebody told me to.
I just had no idea North Carolina was the Real World. You learn new things every day.
Christopher, to back-up in your browser from a tinyurl.com, bit.ly, etc. redirect link, simply click-and-hold on (or, with some browsers, hover over) the back-up link. That should bring up a history from in which you can click to go back two (or more) levels.
As for the AMS, their leadership may have signed on to the Climate Scare, but their membership hasn’t. From the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society we learn that most broadcast meteorologists (not merely TV weathermen, BTW!) say that they disagree with the claim that humans are primarily responsible for recent global warming. A newer survey of all American broadcast meteorologists by researchers at George Mason University confirms that result.
It’s not just meteorologists who pooh-pooh the climate scare, either. Harris polled 500 leading American Meteorological and Geophysical scientists in early 2007, and even back then, when the ongoing temperature plateau was less than a decade long, and before the Climategate & Gleick scandals revealed the shocking corruption which permeates the Climate Scare industry, there was no consensus. Harris found that:
“97% agree that ‘global average temperatures have increased’ during the past century. But not everyone attributes that rise to human activity. A slight majority (52%) believe this warming was human-induced, 30% see it as the result of natural temperature fluctuations and the rest are unsure.” Refs: [1] [2]
So how did Zimmerman/Doran get their 97%?
Well, they started out by by asking questions calculated to elicit positive responses, rather than meaningful responses. Even I would have had to have answered affirmatively to their questions! (That might be why they only got a 30.68% response rate.)
But that didn’t bias the result sufficiently. So Doran/Zimmerman systematically excluded scientists who might not be biased. They excluded 97.49% of the responses, after they had received them!!!
That got them to 96.2%. Close enough: they simply “rounded” it up to 97%, obviously by using methodology customary in Climate Science.
The “97% consensus” claim is a whopper of a lie, and those who repeat it discredit themselves by doing so.
Also, you should know that globally averaged sea level from the GLOSS-LTT tide gauges rose by less than 13 cm (5 inches) in the 20th century, with no acceleration in the rate of rise since the 1920s.
To get to 17 or 18 cm of SLR, it’s necessary to use add GIA adjustments (fudge factors!) to the measured data — including 3 cm compensation for hypothetical sinking of the ocean floor (which obviously makes the sum something other than “sea level”).
To get acceleration in sea level rise, it is necessary to compare apples to oranges, typically by conflating satellite altimetry with coastal tide gauges, or by changing the set of tide gauges used for measurements at different times; or else to cherry-pick tide gauges and short time intervals to coincide with known cyclical patterns.
“As for the AMS, their leadership may have signed on to the Climate Scare, but their membership hasn’t.”
Fair, let say for the sake of logical argument that we assume that statement is true. Then the journals are peer-review; therefore, the content would reflect publishing members. If the leadership dictated the content which was not the view of the publishing members there would be an uproar followed by massive drop in membership. So you were asked to look at the journals which don’t support your claim. And if the leadership is indeed dictating where is the uproar?
Granted that Broadcast Meteorology is a subset of Meteorology and doesn’t require an advance degree (Above BS level), you will find fewer publications because they don’t have the scientific expertise for research. (Note the adjective Broadcast http://geosciences.msstate.edu/bmp.htm )
What about the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They to show the same thing.
Anderegg et al. (2010) “Expert credibility in climate change” http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.abstract
“…Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.”
So they are lying too? Of course it is not like it was a publication that can be reproduced? Opps it is.
Mississippi State senior spring semester courses:
Dynamic Meteorology II
Weather Forecasting II
Practicum Broadcast Met IV
Mesoscale Meteorology
Broadcast Performance
Now, imagine two students with the following grades:
Student 1:
Dynamic Meteorology II: A+
Weather Forecasting II: A+
Practicum Broadcast Met IV: A
Mesoscale Meteorology: A+
Broadcast Performance: B-
Overall GPA: 3.9
Student 2:
Dynamic Meteorology II: D
Weather Forecasting II: C-
Practicum Broadcast Met IV: C+
Mesoscale Meteorology: D
Broadcast Performance: A+
Overall GPA: 2.1
Which student is more likely to be hired as a “TV meteorologist”?
The answer to that question will tell you a lot about why so many “TV meteorologists” are global-warming deniers.
Some requests:
1. Stay on topic
2. Provide reference link to original unbiased source, preferably a directly unaltered quote.
What does anyone care what broadcast meterologists’ opinions on AGW are? We want to know scientifically, not opinion.
BTW, http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2009BAMS2947.1
shows broadcast meteorologists agree global warming is real, not a scam, and the IPCC is correct that the globe is warming. They only have mixed opinions about whether it is caused by humans. That is not odd at all. They do not have the background to determine it. How would a background in meteorology prepare them to know the source of global warming? (better than that of a climatologist)
It sounds like a tempest in a teapot. What are you trying to do? If you want to convince the members of this community of anything, you have to do the above requests and refer to peer-reviewed papers from reputable climatologists. Arguing that broadcast meteorologists opinion surveys is better than peer-reviewed literature is a non-starter. Otherwise, its just trolling.