Thank-you! Great analogy! I would add that it’s impossible to have a rational debate with someone who refuses to accept, or fails to comprehend the facts.

OK, so let’s say for argument that he is correct and climate scientists aren’t 99% certain that were are facing impending climate catastrophe.

That would mean our situation is like driving on an unfamiliar road at night in the fog. We don’t know what’s in road ahead; maybe an obstruction, a sharp turn, a cliff?

Under such conditions, the normal person would say we need to slow down and be careful. The denier mentality is to keep going at full speed, or actually to speed up (Drill, Baby, Drill!).

So then, when we consider that climate scientists are saying there is NOT great uncertainty, that we are clearly facing terrible consequences, the denier viewpoint is obviously completely irrational.

Correction:

o They take random pictures of many temperature stations in easily accessible places, without bothering to take temperature measurements in order to show the temperature record is wrong

Ahem. Sorry. Carry on.

Best,

D

Deniers, that is.

It seems there are no standard ways to measure climate footprint and that makes for plenty of methods to obfuscate.

Thanks for the link!

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/dod/desc.htm

I am not sure what we are looking at with most of this denier structure.

It just doesn’t scan right. So many contradictions. Here are just a few of the contradictions we are expected to believe:

*They claim and attempt scientific interest in Global Warming
*They dismiss the science of Global Warming

*They claim to be trying to have a “reasonable discussion” about Global Warming
*They use every sneaky debater trick in the book to pull the conversation into chaos

*They helpfully go out and develop lists of scientists to disprove Global Warming exists, and to help the rest of us understand the lack of consensus
*They ignore 99.99% of the literature and the actual consensus

*They are so concerned about understanding the “hockey stick” that they delve into statistical science and set up slick websites (where every thing works perfectly (note to ameteur deniers, there should be some problems with links and spelling and stuff on your “ameteur” sites)) to demonstrate just where Mann etc went wrong, again acting as “citizen scientists”
*They make fundamental blunders which they simply won’t acknowledge, and distort every detail of Mann et al’s work

*they show up at actual real Global Warming web sites and distribute their stuff
*they delete anything on their own sites which doesn’t support what they are pushing

*They are working hard to research every temperature station in the world in order to show the temperature record is wrong
*They ignore all the melting ice, permafrost, etc like somehow that can’t be a temperature indicator

And dozens more. There is just no place where they are consistent

There is likely a missing piece which explains their behavior. Or a missing structure, and several missing pieces.

We had a disagreement this weekend when I stated (wholly without evidence!) that the US military has a ginormous carbon footprint. He insisted that it is a negligible percentage of GDP.

I have had a difficult time finding any evidence to support either point of view and would welcome links to studies that document the relative contribution of the defense department.

The one link I found is this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/ 2007/ sep/ 27/ ethicalliving.carbonfootprints?gusrc=rss&feed=environment

“Amory Lovins, the world-renowned energy consultant, agrees that the US military has a “fat fuel-logistics tail” and believes that this is a “very teachable moment for the military” on reducing its immense fossil fuel consumption.

And it is indeed immense: according to a report in Energy Bulletin earlier this year, the Pentagon is the single largest consumer of oil in the world. If the Pentagon was a country, it would be the 36th biggest consumer of oil. The US military officially uses 320,000 barrels of oil a day, but this total only includes “vehicle transport and facility maintenance”. What about the 130,000 US contractors in Iraq rebuilding the ruined infrastructure? (Lovins estimates that about a third of the military’s oil is used to run generators, the vast majority of which power air-conditioning units.) And compared with the second world war, the military in Iraq and Afghanistan is using 16 times more fuel per soldier, according to a Pentagon report published this year.

Which seems to support us both – that the military is the largest purchaser of fossil fuels in the world, but even so, it is dwarfed by 60 times as much by the rest of the US economy (if you google Amory Lovins and believe him).

This is so off-topic but I’m going to post it anyway, thanks for any information.