Phatscotty wrote:Metsfanmax wrote:Phatscotty wrote:Honestly, you saying the carbon exchange is a right wing conspiracy is thee DUMBEST thing I have ever heard anyone say. It has nothing to do with Republican or Democrat, and everything to do with simple knowledge.
So perhaps now you know how we scientists feel when you say climate change is a conspiracy made up by those who want more government control.
I don't think that at all. The climate is always changing, it always has, and it always will.
You know perfectly well what we are talking about. Please avoid using semantics to dodge the issue.
The correct words to describe what I have been saying and what I believe is 'exploit', 'exaggerate', 'manipulate'. Certainly you could agree that is what politicians do regardless of party?
Since you believe that this behavior is what occurs regardless of party, why do you believe that the stance taken by many conservative politicians is the more credible one?
I do believe humans contribute, just as much as I do believe government tries to pretend they have the answers and want to use the issue to grow government power and control, just as much as I believe many people want to use the climate change issue to redistribute wealth on a global scale. my vote in the poll is 'there may be a little something to it'.
I also believe some (not all, not even most) scientists do try to get the answers they want, and there is evidence to back that up. And I believe it is those kind of studies government wants to use and is using most.
On this issue, the exaggeration occurs in the opposite direction. That is to say, most government officials and scientists who talk about climate change (even the ones who believe we should take significant action) are exaggerating on the
conservative side. They are downplaying the threat. On the part of scientists, that's because they don't want to be wrong, so they make more guarded statements, even at the risk of being less precise about the potential outcomes*. On the part of government, actual action -- the kind that would shake up the status quo enough to shift the way we produce energy in this country -- is hardly ever spoken of. If you look at the EPA regulations recently proposed by the President, they're effectively a joke. They do way less than is necessary to make a serious dent in the problem, and the targets are set artificially low because of the baseline chosen (2005). (If you think that it's going to lead to significantly increased government control, do some more reading on it.) However, they do just enough to throw a bone to those of us who are paying attention. There's only a handful of people in Congress who actually are arguing for significant, serious action that scales with the actual threat (Sheldon Whitehouse, Bernie Sanders, etc.). I believe that most Democrats are on the right side of this issue in the sense that they understand the scope of the problem -- they just aren't yet willing to take the action necessary to deal with it. For their part, I also believe most Republicans understand this issue in private -- they just may not yet understand that taking action on this issue, using a market-based approach, is actually the conservative measure to take. And of those, I think some of them do, and are just constrained by the current perceived political situation when it comes to primary elections.
*The IPCC reports are well known for being a conservative estimate. That's literally the best-case scenario that has been projected.
