According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, July 2016 was the warmest month ever recorded. 2016 will likely be the warmest year on record. And the decades ahead will only get worse, much worse.
And yet, notes physicist Lawrence Krauss in The New Yorker this weekend, we have the GOP’s Frankenstein trying to demagogue his way into the presidency by calling climate science into question. Krauss writes:
In May, for instance, while speaking to an audience of West Virginia coal miners, Trump complained that regulations designed to protect the ozone layer had compromised the quality of his hair spray. Those regulations, he continued, were misguided, because hair spray is used mainly indoors, and so can have no effect on the atmosphere outside.…
Often, Trump is simply wrong about science, even though he should know better. Just as he was a persistent “birther” even after the evidence convincingly showed that President Obama was born in the United States, Trump now continues to propagate the notion that vaccines cause autism in spite of convincing and widely cited evidence to the contrary… In other cases, Trump treats scientific facts the way he treats other facts—he ignores or distorts them whenever it’s convenient. He has denied that climate change is real, calling it pseudoscience and advancing a conspiracy theory that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.”
And way across the pond, we have another politician, Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts, making his own kind of laughable claims. In a recent television broadcast, Roberts asks physicist Brian Cox for empirical proof that climate change exists. Cox offers evidence gathered by NASA, to which Roberts responds, NASA’s “data has been corrupted and manipulated.” Not good enough. If you regularly read our site, you know that this is not the first time that NASA has been accused of manipulating data. Conspiracy theorists have long accused NASA and Stanley Kubrick of faking the moon landing in 1969. Roberts bristles at being associated with these loons. But frankly it’s an apt comparison. And if anyone should be bothered by the comparison, it’s the moon landing conspiracists. However strange their theories might be, no one doubts that they’re heartfelt, genuine, and seemingly free from the hint of political and financial influence.
In the meantime, in a new video from NASA, you can see the Arctic ice levels retreating to one of the lowest levels in recorded history. Call the video “corrupted” and “manipulated” at your own peril.
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Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detection Kit”: 8 Tools for Skeptical Thinking
Richard Feynman Creates a Simple Method for Telling Science From Pseudoscience (1966)
Sally Ride Warns Against Global Warming; Wonders If Technology Can Save Us From Ourselves
The massive amount of money being made on the issue of AGW is staggering the say the least. Carbon taxes, carbon tickets; even to the point of taxation for breathing.
AGW is not consensus issue,the consensus 500 years ago believed the world flat, believing does not simply make it so.
AGW is in fact the greatest hoax pulled on mankind.
There is a natural carbon sink on this planet, the most perfect of all. it is called vegetation. the more carbon that is in the atmosphere the faster and more lush and dense the vegetation on planet earth.
It is important to note that no mention was made of the the chemical spraying of the atmosphere, which in fact has been going on since the forties and has never been more calcaulated and intense than in present day earth. This technology involving both HAARP and the chemical dispersion of numerous chemical has not been acknowledged in the AGW models.
Another amongst the myriad of facts that can be presented is the ever changing sun which is not recognized as the main driver of climate on this planet, in fact it should be noted we are in the atmosphere of the sun.
Sir, ever heard that vegetation (through photosynthesis) takes carbon (CO2) from the atmosphere and returns oxygen?. and that, the more the CO2 contents, the higher the temperature, thus the more acute the drought ‑and that vegetation NEEDS water?. The atmosphere of the sun?. lots of oxygen there, too.
Please the native people in the north have seen extraordinary changes in their frozen world. Melting icecaps, food is not as plentiful and these are people who know-they live there.
Scientifically the corrale in the Australia is dying due to the warmth of the sea. That is a scientific proof.
As you know, Scientists do not know the exact lifespan of dinosaurs, but they estimate that they lived about 75 to 300 years. Animal lifespans relate in part to their body size and in part to their type of metabolism. There are remnants of dinosaurs today yet the majority are gone. My argument is the dinosaurs lived long without human industry and humans have been here perhaps based on evidence several hundred thousand years disregarding findings of Leakey. So what is causing the heating of the earth? Anyone thinks it is natural, so be it and those who argue it is human so be it; the outcome is the same. Goodnight human race..
I don’t know anything about Mr. Trump’s comments, but “calling climate science into question” is actually something that climate scientists themselves currently do. Apparently, future climate change, and causes of climate changes that occur over time, are far from settled issue among scientists. You can watch a short video on the subject by Richard S. Lindzen, a Professor of Meteorology at MIT here: https://youtu.be/OwqIy8Ikv‑c.
Sadly we have a lot of nutters in Australian governmemt at present, and a lot of nutters who insist on continuing to vote for them.