What we the people believe: We hate to say it, but Digby isn’t gloomy enough concerning climate change!
On Saturday, Digby offered this gloomy post about the way GOP politicians reject the notion of climate change. As she ended, she offered this account of what we the people believe. Her quote comes from a lengthy report in the National Journal:
DIGBY (12/3/11): I'm not sure why this has not resulted in all-out war between the parties—it's not like Big oil and gas are funding the Dems in anywhere near these numbers they fund the GOP and the Kochs are as partisan as it comes. It seems to me that this is one area where we cannot explain away the Democrats' tepid response by a need to appease an industry that funds them. So what is it? It's not like the people aren't with them.Digby said the public is with the Democrats, and against the Republicans, when it comes to the science of global warming. She quoted from the National Journal: “Overall, Pew found, 59 percent of adults say there is solid evidence that the Earth’s average temperature has been getting warmer over the past few decades.”
“In a Pew survey last spring, 75 percent of staunch conservatives, 63 percent of libertarians, and 55 percent of so-called Main Street Republicans said there was no solid evidence of global warming. Those views are far out of step, however, with those of the general public: Overall, Pew found, 59 percent of adults say there is solid evidence that the Earth’s average temperature has been getting warmer over the past few decades. GOP candidates’ climate-science skepticism could win primaries but lose general elections.”
I urge you to read the whole National Journal article. It's chilling (no pun intended.)
When it comes to a topic like this, 59 percent isn’t a landslide! But the actual story is much, much worse. The truth about the public’s outlook is worse than that by far.
That figure—59 percent—represents the number who think that climate change is occurring. But a much smaller number believe it is happening because of human activity. For a full breakdown, click here, then scroll to page 84. But here’s the general story:
Overall, only 36 percent of respondents said that global warming is happening due to human activity. As best we can calculate, this includes about 28 percent of independents—and only about 55 percent of Democrats. (Republicans: Roughly 13 percent.)
Our tribe is better than their tribe on the science of warming. But according to the survey in question, the people aren’t with the Democrats on this! But then, we liberals often fail to grasp the way we the people think.
We assume "those people" think those crazy things all by themselves. Quite often, that just isn't right.
Digby's lame ass game is soooooo tiring.
ReplyDeleteHow many iterations of that completely stupid question has she asked over the years?
As others have pointed out, Digby's fake question boils down to: "Democrats. Stupid or evil?"
Digby goes with stupid and expects us to sympathise and support Democrats no matter what because they are the lessor evil.
But Digby's bloomers are full of bullshit. She's a party HACK that has no interest in the truth--she's just suckering the next round of "progressive". She wants you to vote for Obama and give money to Act Blue and to give her some more money so she can continue whoring for the Democratic party.
Digby earns money by whoring for the Democratic party.
Why would anyone take anything she says seriously?
How many times have we heard her ask this insincere question about the Democrats motivation?
There's a reason Digby the party hack ignores following the facts to their logicial conclusion (she's a hack). If she were sincere in her analysis she would see that her dreamboat crush, Obama, is WORSE than the god damned Republicans.
Bah. I'm sick of hacks like Digby. We need honesty and we need to throw the bums out--that includes the Democrats and their fangirls like Digby.
Wait a second....
ReplyDeleteAccording to page 84, 36% say its caused by human activity while 18% say its mostly because of natural patterns.
Surely you can't make the case that the public is behind the republicans/staunch conservatives/deniers on this when only 1 in 5 say what's happpening is perfectly natural, leave human causes out of it.
It seems to me, as far as the public is concerned, the jury is still out while those who do have an opinion say it's due to human activity by a 2-1 margin over those who say it isn't.
This is another example of the 24/7 coast-to-coast and border-to-border propaganda machine trumping the 97% of publishing climate scientists who have examined the data and say climate change is due to human activity.
Digby's lame ass game is soooooo tiring.
ReplyDeleteHow many iterations of that completely stupid question has she asked over the years?
As others have pointed out, Digby's fake question boils down to: "Democrats. Stupid or evil?"
Digby goes with stupid and expects us to sympathise and support Democrats no matter what because they are the lessor evil.
But Digby's bloomers are full of bullshit. She's a party HACK that has no interest in the truth--she's just suckering the next round of "progressive". She wants you to vote for Obama and give money to Act Blue and to give her some more money so she can continue whoring for the Democratic party.
Digby earns money by whoring for the Democratic party.
Why would anyone take anything she says seriously?
How many times have we heard her ask this insincere question about the Democrats motivation?
There's a reason Digby the party hack ignores following the facts to their logicial conclusion (she's a hack). If she were sincere in her analysis she would see that her dreamboat crush, Obama, is WORSE than the god damned Republicans.
Bah. I'm sick of hacks like Digby. We need honesty and we need to throw the bums out--that includes the Democrats and their fangirls like Digby.
Are the Democrats simply stupid or are they evil when it comes to the environment?
ReplyDeleteWell, according to this study, Obama is actually a MORE EVIL than Bush when it comes to environmental regulation:
http://leftwingnutjob.net/2011/12/obama-has-weakened-regs-more-than-bush-you-dont-say/#comments
Please read the report to see how Democrats are worse than Republicans but the entire media and both parties ignore the data. The Democrats have actually worsened environmental regs more than Bush!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Check out the story about how Daley, Obama's Chief of Staff, helped to gut our clean air rules on behalf of industry. That's right, you won't get this information from our media--and you won't hear about it from the Democrats and their hack suporters like Digby.
Digby doesn't want her readers to know that Obama is worse than Bush so instead she will create these fake stories of the Democrats being stymied by the mean Republicans.
It doesn't matter if the public supports environmental regulation or not. It doesn't matter to the Democrats--they will support industry no matter what.
ReplyDeleteThe only reason public opinion matters to them is to figure out a way to sucker their stupid voters into voting for them no matter the betrayal (and I don't write stupid as an insult--merely a description of voters who vote against their interested because they are massively ignorant of reality--which is ironic because this is exactly what "progressives" accuse conservatives of being when they vote for right-wing economic policy that hurts their interests).
Look, Obama just instituted Drill Baby Drill! I can't even wrap my head around the fact the Democrats just enacted the policy they spent all of 2008 running against. How many times did Digby mock Palin for her Drill Baby Drill rhetoric? And now Obama allows deep water drilling and a whole host of other industry favors, despite his promises to the contrary, and Digby carries on like nothing ever happened! Obama is outflanking Palin to the right (that's not hyperbole--Palin at least wants to redistribute oil wealth to the people--Obama wants to let them rape the environment and keep the money!!!). And yet Digby and the Democrats still act like they are the protectors of the environment or somehow "liberal" on the issue.
Noami Klein's article on the politics of global warming in the Nation http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate was worth thinking about. How much can the Democrats or any other party campaign and legislate on global warming when the required measures to counter warming would need to be massive and likely massively unpopular.
ReplyDeleteWhile Naomi Klein may support the drastic actions that need to be taken, very few others would follow her lead.
Digby doesn't seem to know what the global warming controversy is all about. She writes,
ReplyDeleteOverall, Pew found, 59 percent of adults say there is solid evidence that the Earth’s average temperature has been getting warmer over the past few decades. GOP candidates’ climate-science skepticism could win primaries but lose general elections.
The controversy isn't about whether the earth's average temperature has been getting warmer. Everyone knows that. The controversy is over:
1. Will the earth warm at a catastrophic pace?
2. Is the warming predominantly due to man's activity, particularly CO2?
3. If one believes that the answers to #1 and #2 are both "yes", can mankind change behavior sufficiently to make a big enough reduction in CO2?
4. Are we certain enough that answers to #1, #2 and #3 are "yes" so that we want to divert trillions of dollars into CO2 reduction, even though diverting those resources will reduce worldwide spending on education, health care, food, clean water, medical care, and so forth?
I don't know who Digby is but clearly she is a Democrat propagandist. You people need to understand that Durban is going to be the biggest failure of all of the climate meetings. Its already in week two and the media has reoported almost nothing. I'll bet even Al Gore himself does not attend.
ReplyDeleteThe UN spokepersons only talk about Kyoto and a few other topics but the real negotiations are about REDD. The UN FCCC want to push through their secretive REDD program from behind closed doors. But the idea of Wall Street owning all of the carbon stored in the Brazilian rainforest will not go over well with the public on both the left and the right. Obama could end up wearing it.
Climate change is dead. Its time to kill REDD too.
cheers
Dave in Cal said: "The controversy isn't about whether the earth's average temperature has been getting warmer. Everyone knows that."
ReplyDeleteNot so! In point of fact, a major disinformative talking point has been that the earth has actually been cooling over the last decade. The right (both politicians and the conservative press) has spread this disinformation around far and wide.
Matt, take a look at at the earth's actual temperature by year here Focus on the portion from 1998 foward. Don't your eyes tell you that temperature hasn't risen for this particular period? It looks to me as if a trend line starting either in 1998 or in 2002 would show a significant downward slope. A trend line starting 2001 would show a small upward slope. Overall, I think it's fair to say that temperature hasn't risen during this period.
ReplyDeleteOf course the fact that temperature hasn't risen for a decade or so doesn't mean it won't start rising again. IMHO this is probably just a temporary lull. However, what this actual record shows is that all the models from the late 1990's were wrong. They all predicted substantial warming for the most recent decade.
Wow Dave, your mad data-analysis skillz are truly amazing. You can actually take a graph that shows an unmistakeable upwards trend-line from the mid-1980s to present-day and interpret it to prove that the trend-line is actually downwards. That's awesome.
ReplyDeleteBy all means, starting your trend-line from the anomalous, outlying 1998 peak would show a downward trend. That's why outliers are usually discarded or given low weights when computing trend-lines.
How about starting your trend-line from 1999, only one year past your start-point, and going from there? Would it still be downwards? And what does that say about your conclusion that temperature hasn't risen 1998 to present?
Also, note that the y-axis of the graph is "temperature anomaly," not "average temperature." That means deviation from the historic yearly mean temperature. An upward-sloping trend on this graph means that not only is the yearly mean temperature increasing, but that that deviation from average is increasing every year. It's not just getting hotter, it's getting hotter faster and faster.
ReplyDeleteFrom Wikipedia:
ReplyDelete"Recent estimates by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and the National Climatic Data Center show that 2005 and 2010 tied for the planet's warmest year since reliable, widespread instrumental measurements became available in the late 19th century, exceeding 1998 by a few hundredths of a degree."
Also, NASA published this report on Jan. 12th, 2011:
"Global surface temperatures in 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest on record, according to an analysis released Wednesday by researchers at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.
The two years differed by less than 0.018 degrees Fahrenheit. The difference is smaller than the uncertainty in comparing the temperatures of recent years, putting them into a statistical tie. In the new analysis, the next warmest years are 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007 and 2009, which are statistically tied for third warmest year. The GISS records begin in 1880."
So, the first, second, and third warmest years (shared by 6 years) ever recorded since 1880 occurred between 1998 and 2010, inclusive. But you say the temperature hasn't risen for a decade or so. How is that possible?
Rob, yes, if one starts between 1998 and 2005, one can get a slight upward trend or downward trend depending on one's starting point. To me, this means it's fair to say that there has been no real rise in temperature for the last decade or so.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that there has been an upward trend from the mid-1980's to today. As I said, I rather expect this upward trend to reassert itself.
Here's what may seem like a gramatical quibble, but I think it's important: You wrote,
deviation from average is increasing every year.
I would say:
deviation from average increased on average. It got hotter.
Your formulation implies that the rate of increase from the mid-1980's to today will continue into the future. That may turn out to be the case, but the graph doesn't prove that.
The NASA chart is based on surface temperatures. The wiki chart is based on satellite measurements. If one looked at NASA's surface measurements, the conclusion would be different from what I wrote. However, the satellite measurements are considered more accurate, particularly for measuring trend.
Dave in Cal said: "Matt, take a look at at the earth's actual temperature by year here Focus on the portion from 1998 foward. Don't your eyes tell you that temperature hasn't risen for this particular period? It looks to me as if a trend line starting either in 1998 or in 2002 would show a significant downward slope. A trend line starting 2001 would show a small upward slope. Overall, I think it's fair to say that temperature hasn't risen during this period."
ReplyDeleteNo, not really. 1998 was a freak year; cherry-picking that year as a starting date will obviously lead to a deceptive conclusion. There's been no cooling, as one can easily observe from the general trend, as well as a wide array of indicators.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete"I agree with you that there has been an upward trend from the mid-1980's to today. As I said, I rather expect this upward trend to reassert itself."
ReplyDeleteOK, Mr. gram[m]atical quibble, how can a trend that has been in place "from the mid-1980's to today" "reassert itself?" Doesn't "to today" imply that the trend has been there all along, and persists?
But I'm glad you agree that there has been such a trend. That means you agree that your statement that "temperature hasn't risen for the last decade or so" was utter baloney, because clearly a trend of increasing temperatures "from the mid-1980's to today" can't be reconciled with that statement.
Matt, yes 1998 was a freak year. And, yes, the entire pattern has an upward trend. However, I was addressing the specific question: Has it warmed in the last decade or so?
ReplyDeleteThis is a somewhat vague question. I think a fair way to answer it would be to look at at the trends for a number of different periods. One might look at the trend line for
1997 - present
1998 - present
1999 - present
2000 - present
2001 - present
2002 - present
2003 - present.
I think the average of these 7 slopes would be pretty level and maybe slightly down. That's why I think it's fair to say that the earth's temperature has been roughly flat during the last decade or so.
Rob -- To show what I meant, consider the following sequence of 30 annual figures, grouped into a decade on each line. Assume that the first figure of 1 is the value for year 1, 2 is the value for year 2, etc. Note that for each of the years 20 through 30 the valued was 20.
ReplyDelete1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20
I would say there's an overall upward trend. The trend leveled out from years 20 to 30. Suppose the sequence continued
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 28 30
I would say trend reasserted itself after year 30.
Note also that the ten readings from years 21 to year 30 were the highest ever (at that time) even though the trend had been flat from year 20 to year 30.
The New Republic, a moderately liberal magazine, has an article Why the Decision to Tackle Climate Change Isn’t as Simple as Al Gore Says It says CO2 mitigation is a mistake, because the steps needed to actually reduce atmospheric CO2 would cost too much:
ReplyDeleteit is the uncertainties in our understanding that are the most compelling driver of rational action. And a massive carbon tax or a cap-and-trade rationing system would likely cost more than the damages it would prevent. Either would be an impractical, panicky reaction that would be both more expensive and less effective than targeted technology development in the event that we ever have to confront the actual danger: the very small but real chance of much worse than expected damages from greenhouse gases.
When even a (moderately) liberal magazine is opposing massive action on carbon, I think it's safe to conclude that the alarmists have lost the political battle on this issue.
The data Bob linked shows about 1/3 of Americans saying global warming is caused by humans (women contribute too), and 1/3 says it's not happening at all. 3/4 of staunch conservatives and staunch liberals each aligned with their respective position.
ReplyDeleteThat's not "The jury's still out," that's "This is a hyper-partisan litmus test." Makes sense, since most people don't get information about the science at all - true or false - while the mainstream media refuses to report on the science objectively. And as David in CA points out above, conservative media like The New Republic(an) is demagoguing this issue for all it's worth. Truth isn't likely to spread in such an environment.
And responding to a few of the comments above: is it at all possible to criticize digby's politics without calling her a "whore"? Or is such misogyny the only way to marginalize her?
Alex . . . fair point about the use of "whore", but in this case I did it knowing full well that Digby uses it against people who take money to push an agenda . . . she uses it against female politicians herself and I recall her writing an post defending its usage. If it's okay for Digby to dish it out it's okay for her to take it.
ReplyDeleteWhatever word one uses: she sells herself to the Democratic party.
I guess all the posts where she castigates the Democratic Party for not standing up to the Republicans don't count.
ReplyDeleteYes Rob, they do not count. That is part of her schtick. That's the progressive con game.
ReplyDeleteThey meekly criticize the president and the party ("I hope Obama smartens up and stops shooting himself in the foot") and then sit back and let him run the party! Their criticism is gentle but just critical enough to give them credibility, which they use to sucker people into staying in the Democratic party.
Hullabaloo is the classic veal pen operation.
She is paid to never leave the Democratic party and her criticism will always be meek and absolve Obama and the Democrats of intentionally working for the 1% and instead suckers us into believing he is simply incompetent.
Digby is a hack. A clever hack, but nevertheless a hack.
Packers and Movers in Nallagandla
ReplyDeletePackers and Movers in Kukatpally
Packers and Movers in Miyapur
Packers and Movers in Sainikpuri
Movers and Packers in Hyderabad
Movers and Packers in Jubilee Hills
Movers and Packers in Banjara Hills