i attack the source because it's valid to attack the source. a company- exxon for example- are hardly going to pour money into think tanks if those think tanks aren't going to provide the answers exxon want. in turn those think tanks will be under pressure to provide the 'right' answers. this is not credible information.

i can't defend information properly when it isn't complete- but why should i have to defend al gore? if al gore makes money of climate change, does that make it not real? is the science suddenly discredited because al gore keeps his plasma tv running too long?

If you can't attack the science then all you are doing is fear-mongering.

A scientist only gets his/her research funding renewed when they find a problem. No one gets funding approved to do additional research where no problem has been found. But you don't see this as a conflict of interest. These scientists are above and beyond reproach. But a scientist who accepts research money from a corporation, well he/she is just a corrupt evil mother fucker. Their scientific findings aren't even worth looking at, I'll just attack the person. What are you, a closet fear mongering republican?

How logically flawed. Look, even when you say, "Well, it's not so much about energy use as it is carbon footprint." You have a leg to stand on there. And to an extent, you are right. It's not as damning to list broad energy use as it would be to show that he's still drawing X-% of his energy from the non-renewable carbon producers. Okay. Fair enough.

But when it comes to RAW DATA who FUNDS finding out the data is IRRELEVANT!

When George Soros paid to publish that ridiculous Lancet study that said a bazillion Iraqi's had died, I didn't say, "George Soros, a multi-billionaire and currency manipulator, was funding this, so obviously the study was going to provide answers that George Soros wants." No, I pointed to flaws in the study, and pointed to a much more accurate study done in the same manner, with a much larger sample to disprove the study. Where the financing comes from is totally irrevelevant. What is relevant is the actual data collected and the conclusions you draw from it.

what scientific findings are you talking about? they looked up al gore's energy usage!

again, how is al gore's energy usage important?
further, how can we trust the conclusions they make from said data when they don't appear to show the whole picture, as i outlined in my original post?

So this would have what to do with the founder of the group and Exxon corporation? You mean, I could have done it? No need for massive financing? It's just information!!!!



Well, again, I have a tendency to agree with you.

The problem I have, with the context that is given, is that Al Gore bemoans us for doing anything with our meager sums of money that does anything to remotely pollute the world. Anything. We aren't supposed to have RV's, or fly planes, or have trucks that can pull horse trailers or fifth wheels or boats, we're not supposed to have incandescent lightbulbs, it goes on and on and on and on. So, one year its found that Al Gore is ginormous hypocrite because he draws more power in a year than a dozen average homes. So he turns around and invests tens of thousands of dollars in green energy so that he can continue to bemoan you and me for living our daily lives as we see fit. His power is green. Let's for a moment pretend like ALL of his energy usage is green. He can AFFORD IT without any sacrafice at all. So, simply because he's filthy fucking rich, and can AFFORD this shit, he still has the right to bemoan the common people because they can't afford all that expensive ass shit to live green like him? Come on. Get with the program.

To Al Gore, the only people that should have to sacrafice anything, are the common people.

As if this doesn't make the desperation in that post any more obvious:

so, al gore's a hypocrite, just like every other human being ever. does that have anything to do with the validity of his message?

That article on Al Gore's energy usage is ridiculously biased. The Tennessee Center on Policy Research is an anti-environmental conservative think-tank. It receives funds from a variety of organizations that fund anti-environmental causes. What the TCPR failed to report was the responses of Gore's own spokespeople:

Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider says that while electrical consumption at the Gore manse—which also serves as offices for the power couple and their respective staffs—has increased, she says that, overall, there has been a 40 percent reduction in energy use at the house, which she says is carbon neutral. She explains that by using solar panels and installing a geothermal heating and cooling system, the Gores have realized a 97 percent reduction in their gas bill. Kreider also says the Gores are enrolled in the Green Power Switch program through TVA. This means that all of the Gores’ electricity has been generated by wind farms, solar collectors or methane gas, further reducing their carbon footprint. This energy is purchased in blocks, and Kreider says that the Gores always overestimate how much they need and, in essence, pay for more than they use.

http://blogs.nashvillescene.com/pitw/20 ... reen_1.php

And the statement about George Soros funding the Lancet study on Iraqi casualties is even more ridiculous. While criticisms of the study methodology are certainly valid, the Lancet is a highly respected, peer-reviewed medical journal. Funding for this study was provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Both funding agencies are also highly respected.

http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/image ... 694919.pdf

Here is an interview with lead author Gilbert Burnham.

There have been many articles in reputable MSM like the Wall Street Journal raising serious questions about the methodology used. How do you respond? Thanks!

Gilbert Burnham: The methods we use are standard methods, used all over the world, and heavily supported by the US Government. We stand by these, and there has been little criticism of the science. Mr Moore has done many surveys for Mr Bremer, but judging by his comments, he is not a statistician.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01279.html

Anti-war Soros funded Iraq study



A STUDY that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq was partly funded by the antiwar billionaire George Soros.



Lancet doesn't talk about this:

Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.

...

New research published by The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 151,000 people - less than a quarter of The Lancet estimate - have died since the invasion in 2003.

“The authors should have disclosed the [Soros] donation and for many people that would have been a disqualifying factor in terms of publishing the research,” said Michael Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The Lancet study was commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and led by Les Roberts, an associate professor and epidemiologist at Columbia University. He reportedly opposed the war from the outset.

His team surveyed 1,849 homes at 47 sites across Iraq, asking people about births, deaths and migration in their households.

Professor John Tirman of MIT said this weekend that $46,000 (£23,000) of the approximate £50,000 cost of the study had come from Soros’s Open Society Institute.

Roberts said this weekend: “In retrospect, it was probably unwise to have taken money that could have looked like it would result in a political slant. I am adamant this could not have affected the outcome of the research.”

The Lancet did not break any rules by failing to disclose Soros’s sponsorship.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 177653.ece

RIDICULOUS I TELL YOU!!!!! RIDICULOUS!!!!! IF ITS NOT FROM MEDIA MATTERS!!!! IT'S RIDICULOUS!!!!!

I should keep bringing this study up. Because you're all so ignorant about it.



Anti-environmental? Are you listening to yourself? I'm gonna start calling you guys anti-progress.



I like this. I really appreciate this comment. So, when I talk about sex and about how teenaged kids in high school shouldn't be doing it because it can destroy their lives, I'm called a hypocrite on the board because, ya know, TEN FUCKING YEARS AGO I had sex as a teenager. So therefore, I'm not allowed to comment on teenagers having sex. Or some shit like that. Let's not concern ourselves with the validity of my message. I'm a flaming fucking hypocrite because my opinions from ten years ago were different. But, when it comes to Al Gore, Black Jesus' long lost cousin or some shit, we're not allowed to point at his hypocricy, because the validity of his message somehow still stands.

Even if you take this away and pretend that he's...carbon nuetral...whatever the fuck that is, read up on the dinner and party he had in Phoenix, Arizona after he accepted his nobel peace prize. That will show you why he's a liberal socialite hypocrite.

The man is after a legacy. He's after money. The man does NOTHING out of his own accord. The only reason he installed this shit in the first place was because someone pointed out that he was a carbon pig.

Desperation? This is pure truth. There's nothing desperate about it. Your ilk spew this shit incessantly. This is essentially what Europe is like right now. Super cool.

Where on earth do you get your information? The Lancet is not some liberal blog. It is a prestigious PEER-REVIEWED journal. There is absolutely NO truth to the idea that George Soros commissioned this study. MIT Center-director John Tirman published an article in Editor and Publisher in order to discount this rumor.

My center at MIT used internal funds to underwrite the survey. More than six months after the survey was commissioned, the Open Society Institute, the charitable foundation begun by Soros, provided a grant to support public education efforts of the issue. We used that to pay for some travel for lectures, a web site, and so on.

OSI, much less Soros himself (who likely was not even aware of this small grant), had nothing to do with the origination, conduct, or results of the survey. The researchers and authors did not know OSI, among other donors, had contributed. And we had hoped the survey's findings would appear earlier in the year but were impeded by the violence in Iraq. All of this was told repeatedly to Munro and Cannon, but they chose to falsify the story. Charges of political timing were especially ludicrous, because we started more than a year before the 2006 election and tried to do the survey as quickly as possible. It was published when the data were ready.

The New York Post and the Sunday Times of London, both owned by Rupert Murdoch, followed the WSJ editorial and trumpeted the Soros connection and the supposed "fraud" which Munro and Cannon hinted. "$OROS IRAQ DEATH STORY WAS A SHAM" was a headline in the Post, which was followed by a story in which scarcely anything stated was true.

http://www.truthout.org/article/john-ti ... ontroversy

And the Lancet survey is by no means the highest casualty count. ORB puts the count at close to 1,000,000

http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_detai ... ?NewsId=88

And if you had bothered to read the New England Journal article, you would have seen that the authors note that the study suffers from severe underreporting due to the complete dissolution of households resulting in a lack of data.

As for Al Gore being a hypocrite. How do you define hypocrite? All of his energy, according the the Tennessee Valley Authority is generated from renewable sources. His personal usage is drastically down. And his philantrophic society has expanded two-fold in the past two years, yet his energy usage is up only 10%. Does that make him a hypocrite?

you haven't provided a valid response here at all. again, how do al gore's private actions, be they positive or negative, change the validity of what he and the world's scientists have been saying about climate change?

Validity of what exactly? And how does that change my validity that Al Gore is after power, wealth, and a legacy? And how does what Al Gore say prove anything in the first place? Particularly with global warming in a protacted lull while CO2 emissions continue to skyrocket? I'm sorry you people are unable to connect dots.

the validity of climate change. it doesn't change your statement. but this would be a decent post if someone here -- anyone -- had claimed gore's want for power, wealth and legacy proved global warming.

Exclusive: No ice at the North Pole

Polar scientists reveal dramatic new evidence of climate change

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Friday, 27 June 2008

It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.

The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic – and worrying – examples of the impact of global warming on the planet. Scientists say the ice at 90 degrees north may well have melted away by the summer.

"From the viewpoint of science, the North Pole is just another point on the globe, but symbolically it is hugely important. There is supposed to be ice at the North Pole, not open water," said Mark Serreze of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado.

If it happens, it raises the prospect of the Arctic nations being able to exploit the valuable oil and mineral deposits below these a bed which have until now been impossible to extract because of the thick sea ice above.

Seasoned polar scientists believe the chances of a totally ice-free North Pole this summer are greater than 50:50 because the normally thick ice formed over many years at the Pole has been blown away and replaced by huge swathes of thinner ice formed over a single year.

This one-year ice is highly vulnerable to melting during the summer months and satellite data coming in over recent weeks shows that the rate of melting is faster than last year, when there was an all-time record loss of summer sea ice at the Arctic.

"The issue is that, for the first time that I am aware of, the North Pole is covered with extensive first-year ice – ice that formed last autumn and winter. I'd say it's even-odds whether the North Pole melts out," said Dr Serreze.

Each summer the sea ice melts before reforming again during the long Arctic winter but the loss of sea ice last year was so extensive that much of the Arctic Ocean became open water, with the water-ice boundary coming just 700 miles away from the North Pole.

This meant that about 70 per cent of the sea ice present this spring was single-year ice formed over last winter. Scientists predict that at least 70 per cent of this single-year ice – and perhaps all of it – will melt completely this summer, Dr Serreze said.

"Indeed, for the Arctic as a whole, the melt season started with even more thin ice than in 2007, hence concerns that we may even beat last year's sea-ice minimum. We'll see what happens, a great deal depends on the weather patterns in July and August," he said.

Ron Lindsay, a polar scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, agreed that much now depends on what happens to the Arctic weather in terms of wind patterns and hours of sunshine. "There's a good chance that it will all melt away at the North Pole, it's certainly feasible, but it's not guaranteed," Dr Lindsay said.

The polar regions are experiencing the most dramatic increase in average temperatures due to global warming and scientists fear that as more sea ice is lost, the darker, open ocean will absorb more heat and raise local temperatures even further. Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, who was one of the first civilian scientists to sail underneath the Arctic sea ice in a Royal Navy submarine, said that the conditions are ripe for an unprecedented melting of the ice at the North Pole.

"Last year we saw huge areas of the ocean open up, which has never been experienced before. People are expecting this to continue this year and it is likely to extend over the North Pole. It is quite likely that the North Pole will be exposed this summer – it's not happened before," Professor Wadhams said.

There are other indications that the Arctic sea ice is showing signs of breaking up. Scientists at the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre said that the North Water 'polynya' – an expanse of open water surrounded on all sides by ice – that normally forms near Alaska and Banks Island off the Canadian coast, is much larger than normal. Polynyas absorb heat from the sun and eat away at the edge of the sea ice.

Inuit natives living near Baffin Bay between Canada and Greenland are also reporting that the sea ice there is starting to break up much earlier than normal and that they have seen wide cracks appearing in the ice where it normally remains stable. Satellite measurements collected over nearly 30 years show a significant decline in the extent of the Arctic sea ice, which has become more rapid in recent years.

Floating bodies displace their mass in water, so sea ice melting isn't going to change sea levels. Unless I'm terribly mistaken, that is. (I think I learned something from my fluids class)

So the question is: Whats the Antarctic going to do? I don't recall what they said about ice loss, but higher rates of precipitation are expected according to someone or other on NPR.

In a completely unrelated note, I read an amazing article published by yesterday about massive volcanic activity that's been taking place in the artic for quite some time now. Surely this is insignificant. Surely, this isn't going to be on the real news...

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news ... dc&k=73828