Why the Right Wing Rejects Science

I've long been a skeptic of climate change in large part because of another (in)famous "scientific" prediction made fairly recently.

Nuclear winter.

Back in the 1980s famous astronomer (who had made groundbreaking work on the climate of Venus) Carl Sagan head a group of various very prestigious scientists who assured world leaders that if a major nuclear war was fought that it would result in a worldwide plunge in temperatures that would extinguish all life on Earth.

A few years after insisting on this Sagan himself admitted that the actual evidence did not support this. And that and the others had promoted the idea of "nuclear winter" without evidence to support it because "the threat of nuclear war was so great".

I see the exact same kind of zeal, fanaticism and apocalyptic predicting on the part of climate change believers today.

 

I don't think one TV astronomer could convince every science agency on the planet

 

Carl Sagan and the other scientists in the small group called "TTAPS" from the last initials of the scientists managed to popularize the idea of "nuclear winter" to the point that it became "settled science" in the minds of millions of people around the world even though the evidence didn't support.

 

Prove to me that 162 scientific agencies all signed a letter in support of that theory. Because AGW has that.

 

I'd agree. All that crap is unnecessary. Defending the borders is the job of the federal government. What happens inside the borders is the job of the various states.

 

Good luck with that

 

To be fair, scientists have a moral responsibility, just as everybody else, to look at what they accomplish and ask themselves if they are a force for good or evil. The scientists who worked on the manhattan project forgot that responsibility, and I can't blame them, or anybody, for trying to put that genie back in the bottle. If lies will work, then lies will do. Didn't Oppenheimer write "Now I am become death."? Feynman had similar feelings once he realized just what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The problem is that our friends on the left aren't interested in stopping something they're responsible for. They're interested only in giving more power to the federal government because a totalitarian state is their ultimate goal. That's the end game of their "progressive" ideology, and they'll lie or do whatever it takes to achieve that goal.

 

"Back in the 1980's"

You DO realise don't you that science and especially computing power has evolved since then? The idea of a nuclear winter is not entirely dead though - just less likely

 

No evidence for this at all

 

But - if it had become so embedded why was it challenged?

Yeeesh conspiracy theories make my teeth ache

 

scientists are only human. They have their own biases and preconceived ideas.

 

Yep. So?

 

It was long challenged by people mainly in the Reagan administration and the defense establishment who saw "nuclear winter" as being used to advance a disarmament and anti nuclear agenda.

They were right in all respects

 

The federal government

THE

As in only applies to America

You do realise dont you that there are more world governments than the USA?

 

You keep thinking local with all of this

Scientists live in a global community - papers and theories are published internationally ergo it has very very little to do with regional politics

Oh and try google sometime

 

No. Many reject climate hysteria because it simply does not match the evidence easily available in the natural world.

We are in an ICE AGE, an interglacial period, thank God!, but an ice-age all the same. No one expects us to return to Warm Earth Conditions, if they did, then our current period would not be called an interglacial it would be called a post glacial period.

Think!

 

Well every science agency on the planet disagrees with you so there is that. LOL

 

Many scientists GLOBALLY had an interest in nuclear disarmament.

 

That's nice. So?

 

And with good reason - because, it you had actually googled nuclear winter you would find out

Mind you it did not stop scientists in India and Pakistan from developing nuclear capability and the ONLY reason that those two traditional enemies have not used the nuclear option is that they enjoy beating each other at cricket more than they would enjoy wiping each other off of the planet

 

As I wrote, they'll lie or do whatever it takes to promote their totalitarian utopia.

 

As I wrote...no evidence for this at all

 

Yeah well, it's like the EU or the UN, or any of those other globalist agenda driven governments that don't really like the idea of separate governments. Get us all under one roof because you don't care about the united states or the constitution or anything except get everybody on the face of the planet goose stepping to the same communist drummer.

 

WoW!

 

See, that's the problem with leftwing cultists, as soon as you are confronted with the hard fixed facts of the natural world, if they do not conform to your beliefs, you immediately reject them.

We are in an ice age that began 2.6 million years ago at the start of the Pleistocene epoch.

There have been at least five major ice ages in the earth's past (the Huronian, Cryogenian, Andean-Saharan, Karoo Ice Age and the Quaternary glaciation). Outside these ages, the Earth was ice-free even at the poles.

Now let's do a bit of math.

The earth is 4,500 million years old.

Our current ice age has lasted 2.6MY
Huronian - 300 my
Cryogenian - 85 my
Andean-Saharan - 30 MY
Karoo Ice Age - 100 my

Now total that up: 517.6 MY

The earth has spent less than 12% of it's existence in ice-age and more than 88% of it's existence in warm earth conditions, with no ice, anywhere, not even at the poles.

And why is no one with a brain predicting an end to the current ice-age?

Because of the current positions of continents. Our continents are currently arranged in a configuration that largely blocks the flow of warm water from the equator to the poles and this allow ice sheets to form. The ice sheets increase Earth's reflectivity and so reduces the absorption of solar radiation. With less radiation absorbed the atmosphere cools; the cooling allows the ice sheets to grow, which further increases reflectivity in a positive feedback loop.

There are three known configurations of the continents which block or reduce the flow of warm water from the equator to the poles:

• A continent sits on top of a pole, as Antarctica does today.
• A polar sea is almost land-locked, as the Arctic Ocean is today.
• A supercontinent covers most of the equator, as Rodinia did during the Cryogenian period.

Since today's Earth has a continent over the South Pole and an almost land-locked ocean over the North Pole, this ice-age will continue.

The Himalayas are a major factor in the current ice age, as these mountains have increased Earth's total rainfall and therefore the rate at which carbon dioxide is washed out of the atmosphere, decreasing the greenhouse effect. The Himalayas' formation started fairly recently, geologically speaking, only about 70 million years ago when the Indo-Australian Plate collided with the Eurasian Plate. And the Himalayas are still rising by about 5 mm per year because the Indo-Australian plate is still moving at 67 mm/year. And the history of the Himalayas broadly fits the long-term decrease in Earth's average temperature since the mid-Eocene, 40 million years ago.

The Isthmus of Panama closed about 3 million years ago and now we have a solid wall from the Bering Strait near the North Pole to Drake's Passage near the South Pole a solid wall that has largely shut down the exchange of water between the tropical Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that in ages past allowed a much more uniform temperature throughout the earth. Instead, now we have warm tropics and popsicles at each end.

So forgive me if I don't jump on board with the wild hair-brained claims of the Global Warming death-cult. I'll stick to science and the hard evidence of geologic record.