Sorry, PaleoMagi, but young creationists have told me that it has been mathematically proven that the earth is only 6,000 years old. For God's sake, man, they used math so that can't be wrong!!!

Please don't bother debating me, I am only being sarcastic.

Haha...I have a 6,000 year old pottery jar in my collection. So that would make it the FIRST thing ever made! Better than an early Batman Comic! Cool. Guy pops into existance and makes a pot. Ingenious!

No problem Balducci

Nice Doug!I have pots and other items from the same era 3-5000 BCE. Mostly Sumerian.Did you know the Sumerians invented beer.God bless them.!

Rich

The Creationists will tell you that anything that scientific analysis indicates to be over 6000 years old was made that way by God as a test of our faith in the "facts" the Bible teaches.

I've heard creationists use the argument that God could have brought in material from another dimension to make the earth and that material could be over 6000 years old, but the earth itself was 'built' 6000 years ago. I wonder what Gore has to say about that.

Oh stroke a carp
Oh Stroke a carp
and the other fish
will cry.

Goodness - the silly folks out there.

What I hate more than anything else about the GW hysteria...is the scaremongers out there always attack back with the base of that if you disagree you are a polluter who feels pollution itself is not a problem. This is genreally not the case. I think we all can and SHOULD live cleaner and more pollution free lives. The less wasteful we are, the more we can produce.

I for one think that Gore is leading the hystericals into a lovely money making machine driven by their own guilty conciences. Gore IS a hypocrit who does NOT practice what he preaches.

Higley says it best...Follow the money.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Unfortunately in our culture if immanent danger and destruction of life as we know it isn't employed ones issue doesn't get the attention it requires.
We went through the whole end of the world scare with pollution back in the late sixties and early seventies. Would the world have ended if we had not started to clean up our water and air back then? Not at all but would we have been able to enact legislation requiring businesses to be more environmentally responsible if the anti pollution movement hadn't employed such dire scare tactics? Probably not.
Are we better off now because of the environmental movement? Definitely. Just look at China. That very easily could have been us had we not forced corporations to do the right thing and stop pushing toxins into the environment.
The Global Warming Scare is just another tactic to get people to do the right thing and think about the impact we as a species have on our environment.
Big Business screamed just as loudly in the sixties about how the draconian environmental legislation was going to drive them all out of business but it didn't. Granted it a lot of them did the irresponsible thing and move their manufacturing off shore where the could still keep polluting as much as they liked but fortunately these days are coming to an end as the countries they moved to are starting to enact anti polluting legislation as well.
I do believe that we have played a role in Global warming but that it isn't as dire as a lot of people want you to think it is. however adopting a ho-hum attitude about it isn't going to get the job done and being flatly against it by denying it isn't happening is just foolish.

Money making? What people are making big money off of global warming? Surely if making money was your goal, you would do far better investing in oil, gas, and energy companies rather than in the global warming hype machine. Follow the money indeed.

As for Gore being a hypocrite, this analysis may be of interest:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/governm......ergy.htm

Excerpt below:

In the book version of An Inconvenient Truth where Gore discusses what ordinary citizens can do to help combat global warming, he stops well short of calling for deep sacrifice or lifestyle change.

First, he lists a number of modest steps individuals can take to make their homes and activities more environmentally friendly -- like using energy-efficient appliances, adjusting the thermostat by a couple of degrees, installing solar panels, and using less hot water when possible -- all of which are economically as well as ecologically beneficial, and none of which we have any reason to believe Gore is not taking himself.

Second, he preaches activism -- voting for environmentally enlightened measures and candidates and spreading he gospel of global warming. And in these we know Al Gore has played an exemplary role.

Third, he argues that everyone ought to try to achieve a "carbon neutral" lifestyle. How? By doing precisely what he does -- offsetting one's environmental impact through investments in projects and enterprises aimed at reducing energy consumption overall.

So, where is the disjunct between what he says and what he does? Unless you put words in his mouth, there isn't one. You might argue that it would be better for the environment if people like Gore lived in smaller houses and modified their lifestyles instead of shelling out bucks for carbon offsets -- and you might even be right -- but that's a policy disagreement, not proof that he's a hypocrite. Folks who dislike his politics will no doubt call him hypocritical just the same, but judged strictly in terms of whether or not Al Gore practices what he preaches, the case against him is a sham.

Here's a video link to the 20/20 Stossel report on "climate change": http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/

I'm a creationist, but that theory is the most ridiculous thing I have heard in a
l-o-n-g time!

Still waiting for the "science" promised in the thread title.

John

No "Good" science here... just "Gore" baloney...

From http://www.carlsagan.com/

Baloney Detection Kit - Warning signs that suggest deception. Based on the book by Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World. The following are suggested as tools for testing arguments and detecting fallacious or fraudulent arguments:

Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts.

Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.

Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no "authorities").

Spin more than one hypothesis - don't simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.

Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it's yours.

Quantify, wherever possible.

If there is a chain of argument every link in the chain must work.

Occam's razor - if there are two hypotheses that explain the data equally well choose the simpler.

Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test). In other words, it is testable? Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result?

Additional issues are:

Conduct control experiments - especially "double blind" experiments where the person taking measurements is not aware of the test and control subjects.

Check for confounding factors - separate the variables.

Common fallacies of logic and rhetoric

Ad hominem - attacking the arguer and not the argument.

Argument from "authority".

Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an "unfavorable" decision).

Appeal to ignorance (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).

Special pleading (typically referring to god's will).

Begging the question (assuming an answer in the way the question is phrased).

Observational selection (counting the hits and forgetting the misses).

Statistics of small numbers (such as drawing conclusions from inadequate sample sizes).

Misunderstanding the nature of statistics (President Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence!)

Inconsistency (e.g. military expenditures based on worst case scenarios but scientific projections on environmental dangers thriftily ignored because they are not "proved").

Non sequitur - "it does not follow" - the logic falls down.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - "it happened after so it was caused by" - confusion of cause and effect.

Meaningless question ("what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?).

Excluded middle - considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the "other side" look worse than it really is).

Short-term v. long-term - a subset of excluded middle ("why pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?").

Slippery slope - a subset of excluded middle - unwarranted extrapolation of the effects (give an inch and they will take a mile).

Confusion of correlation and causation.

Caricaturing (or stereotyping) a position to make it easier to attack.

Suppressed evidence or half-truths.

Weasel words - for example, use of euphemisms for war such as "police action" to get around limitations on Presidential powers. "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public"

(excerpted from The Planetary Society Australian Volunteer Coordinators Prepared by Michael Paine )

Bone up on your reading boys: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/goreerrors.html

More science please.

I would imagine any link that ends with "Goreerrors" would certainly be fair and balanced, like Fox News.

To think that many of us are Pitchmen, Charletons and Prestidigitators and Hucksters and miss the trait in others is a wonder.

An amusing column by Pat Buchanan
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/staticartic......279.html

...the Big Con. The huckster arrives in town, tells all the rubes that disaster impends for them and their families, but says there may be one last chance they can be saved – but it will take a lot of money. And the folks should go about collecting it, right now.


(I realize Pat Buchanan raises eye brows but he also can write getting to the chase...)

Oh and thank you Sparks...that was great stuff.

Doug:A related article below the one you linked.

http://shop.wnd.com/store/item.asp?ITEM_ID=2043

Excerpt:

"Global problems, real or conjured up, require global governmental solutions. As Whistleblower explains, environmentalism is nothing less than the global elitists' replacement ideology for communism/socialism. With communism largely discredited today – after all, 100-150 million people died at the hands of communist "visionaries" during the last century – elitists who desire to rule other people's lives have gravitated to an even more powerful ideology. More powerful because it seems to trump all other considerations, as it claims the very survival of life on earth is dependent on implementing its agenda.

Thus, while scientists and climatologists who dare to question the rigid orthodoxy of man-made catastrophic global warming are openly ridiculed and threatened with decertification, the movement for global governance, complete with global taxation, is moving into the fast lane. "

Thanks for the link, that's hilarious. Now the global warming people are being tied into the New World Order, and part of a covert effort to turn the world into a single socialist state. I have to laugh. LOL.

Silence is Foo. (Daffy Duck)

Thaks Paleo but I like Buchanans better. I know...I'm simple.

Balducci...do Canadians LOL? How about the Funky Chicken? (I'm in a social studies mood.)