Global Warming: fact or fiction?

joejv4

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This topic will likely have some very polarized points of view, however, I am hoping it generates a good healthy exchange.

My personal thought on Global Warming, now called Climate Change because we're no longer sure that the planet is warming, but "we must do something to protect the environment for the polar bears" is nothing more than politics at its worst.

During the 1970's, the big scare went out that the planet was cooling and we were headed into the next glaciation. In 30 years, we suddenly went from cooling to warming.

Now, why do I not buy into what we're being told by the likes of former Vice President Al Gore and the UN sponsored IPCC? There are multiple reasons.

1) Lack of data.
- "Oh, but they have tons of data!!!"
- NO, "they" don't. How long have we had the ability to measure surface temperatures on a "global" scale? Maybe 50 years, and those measurements have only started becoming relatively accurate and timely within the last 25 - 30 years. So, armed with this knowledge, what are the IPCC-types using for a baseline? Answer: A guess and some computer models.

- "But there's the evidence from the ice cores!!!"
- Ummmm, last I checked, "ice" exists at temperatures at or below 32 F or 0 C. How does ice from either of the polar regions tell us what the temperature was in Kansas 5000 years ago? It doesn't. It tells us that the core site was cold enough for ice and snow 5000 years ago. It tells us some of what the content of the atmosphere was 5000 years ago at the site of the core sample. It even tells us how much snow fell at the site of the core sample 5000 years ago, but it does not tell us the average global serface temperature (no matter how much the global warming proponents want to "infer" from what the ice contains)

-"The tree ring evidence proves it!"
-Somehow, I can't get myself to make a leap to global warming based on an analysis of the rings of three "cherry-picked" trees from Siberia. On top of the fact that since they came from one region, they demonstrate "weather" not "climate"

-"There is data that proves that the mean global surface temperature has risen in the last 20 years!"
-Yep, it's gone up a whopping fraction of one degree. What does that tell me? Not much of anything since it does not show any clear long-term trend - and again, there is the question of what is being used for a baseline. Pick a year with a strong El Nino for a baseline - low and behold, the mean global surface temperature has decreased!!!!!

-"But the greenhouse effect! Everybody knows how greenhouses work"
-Fortunately we don't live in a greenhouse. The atmosphere does not behave like a greenhouse. A greenhouse is a controlled environment, where our atmosphere is anything but controlled. There are so many variables that play in the way that our atmosphere behaves that the whole notion of applying "the greenhouse effect" to it, is a load of... nonsense.

2) Politics and Science should not mix.
A scientist that has been given a grant by politicians to "Study Global Warming", must start with the premise that global warming is a fact - if they want continued funding (read - employment).

A thought to ponder: The notion of "Global Warming" followed on the heels of the end of the Cold War. For 40 years, governments used the fear of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) to influence and to some extent control their citizens. Fear is a powerful tool for a government, be it a real fear or one manufactured for that sole purpose. Suddenly, when the Berlin Wall fell, the MAD mechanism for controlling people went away, and the current terrorist threat had not fully developed. What could governments do to instill fear in their populations and thus exert their wills (and more importantly, political agendas) on the masses? Hmmm, the environment is a good one - in fact it's an awesome one!!! Think about it. Fear of the end of the world, driven by SUV's and factories. And even better, since we're talking about saving our planet for our grandchildren, who will argue against the need to go "green". We can push all sorts of political agendas, all in the name of saving the planet!!!! Eureka! We've discovered the Holy Grail for political leverage!!!!! Now, lets fund some struggling science programs with big money to study "Global Warming". Notice the choice of words. I didn't say "study global climate trends", and that's the same way that governments approached the use of Global Warming as their instrument of control. By the time the IPCC was assembled by the UN, the notion of Global Warming was already a foregone conclusion, and it became the mission of the IPCC to assemble data to support Global Warming and to discount data that runs contrary to it.

3) We do not have the technology to accurately model climate. Think of it this way. Today's meteorologists have continuous feeds of weather data that they feed into their computer models to forecast the weather. How accurate is your local weather forecast? One day out, pretty good - in fact, generally speaking, they are able to fairly accurately forecast what will be happening down to a given 8 hour period of the day. Pretty impressive... until we start to look at two days out, three days out, and the week-ahead forecasts. How accurate are those forecasts? Not very accurate. They are able to give you a temperature range and a percent chance of percipitation, but as the day draws closer, the forecast almost always changes. If we can not predict the weather for a specific locale, one week out, how am I to believe that anybody can predict the climate of the entire planet over the next 5, 10, or 20 years?!

Computer models are only as accurate as the data that is fed to them. In the case of local weather forecasting, very accurate real-time data is constantly fed into these models - and the still manage to get it wrong. How is it, then, that the Climate Change models can be right - when they utilize some real-time, accurate data, coupled with a lot of inferred, possibly incorrect data, and have no way to account for the complexity of the world wide weather patterns or variability in the atmosphere itself? Again, there is also the question of what do these models use for a baseline. Short answer - they can not, with any statistically relevance, predict anything.

That's my quick perspective on Global Warming. What is yours, and why?
 
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Well i think is a fact.
Because There is a Global warming atm, but there is a professor that say that whe warm up now and later like maby 100 or 100 years away the earth will cool down to a iceage and after the iceage the earth will warm up again.

Maby hi is right or maby hi is wrong.
 

farscapeone

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Whatever it is I don't think it's that much important. If we are changing this planet to a worse environment for us that's means we don't deserve to live here. That is true because we will suffer form every change we made and eventually we will destroy ourselves if we don't do something. But rest assure, this planet will continue to live. This climate change everybody is talking about is not the first one, nor it will be a last one on this planet.

Life found the way to deal with almost any challenge, the question is, can we?
 

fractalfeline

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Huh! Whatever happened to the old link re: global warming? I don't see it anymore. I'd link it if I could find it. :)
 

silkje

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Interesting points! I think my take is the climate change we are going through is a natural one.. although i am willing to except that due to us dominating most of the planet (together with our pollutants) there is a percentage that we are adding to make it 'unnatural'. I can go green but i think there should be much more pressure on BIG businesses.

I have often wondered about the global warming media agenda, just seems weird how countries around the world would rather gather and talk about the weather than some real issues (war or poverty). :nuts:
 

joejv4

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Yes, there are certainly more important things to deal with than Global Warming. As for political agendas that are being promoted by the Global Warming scare tactic, I'd say the biggest is an attempt to hurt capitalism and free-market economies - promoting a socialism and redistribution of wealth.

The climate of this planet has always been in change, and there isn't anything that the human race can do about it one way or another. If the climate is indeed warming a little, I wouldn't be surprised, since the last ice age was only 10K years ago and we may very well still be on our way out of it... OR, we could be getting ready to begin the next ice age. Nobody knows, and that is why the term "Global Warming" has gone by the wayside and the new term for this scare tactic is "Climate Change". Essentially the politically driven pseudo-science that the climate change scare tactic is based on, tells us that we don't know if the climate warming or cooling. If the planet is warming (or cooling) it is not because I drive an Explorer instead of a Prius, it's because the Earth's climate is always changing and it has shown to be a cyclical thing, not an anthropogenic (man-made) thing.
 

silkje

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It certainly is a lot to think about. I guess one positive about the whole climate change story is that its not so much about the individual but about the whole. In particular over population and people moving to densely populated areas resulting in higher energy footprints? Unfortunatly there are few things that can be done about the former but can be seen in motion (war or even the legality of smoking) but the latter is a group effort. However it would be fairer to see more being done by big industry and its like rather than individuals.

The example of what car being driven is a typical one, but change begins with you. Whether you want to change is up to you.

Surely if our populations continue to grow as it is its only a matter of time before later generations feel its repercussions, in what form i honestly do not know.. perhaps in air quality or temperature changes. i certainly do not worry about a "day after tomorrow" or "2012" movie scenario :biggrin:

More people consume, more people waste and what happens to the planet? :dunno:
 

ozcorps

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LOl i feel its Here now, i have had the coldest winter since i have been in USA for 15 years its snowed 4 times for an area that mostly only see's snow once,

what gets me though i know i will get flak for this but what the hell.
Why are those setting global rules are the same Ppl who RAPED the earth growing up.
things for me now are so Law based and Earth friendly some days i wish i was back in the days of the wild west were doing things like others didn't included being FORCED to separate my trash due to me being fined for that WHEN i dont make a cent off of doing it anyways and the County makes all the recycling funds.

call it moaning in today's standards, but i feel i didn't CREATE this CRAPy situation so why do we have to pay for our forefathers stupidity. anyways before anyone says i do do green friendly things and yes i hope the world goes on without any 2012 situation's for my sons sake, who is 2 and has a long life ahead but damn.

anyhow thanks for reading
 

sambosulker

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Global warming, possibly real. Man made? No...

After climategate revealed that the 43 scientists that provide the majority of climate change data the UN and Al Gore qote from lie, use tricks to "hide the decline", I think its pretty clear that global warming is being used as a reason for massive world wide taxation.

I want a clean environment, and I think the best way to do this is respect property rights - you cant pollute my property, and if I can prove you have I can sue you - but global taxation and world authority is the answer to nothing.
 

vishal

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I tthink its a FACT and it has to be
 

alexandgruntz

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How can global warming be a fact when the UK is snowed over? Also Florida is getting cold.

Global warming is fiction.
 

joejv4

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I tthink its a FACT and it has to be

OK, you have stated what you think, but for this to be a meaningful discussion, you should explain why.

I have given a brief overview as to why I believe that the "Global Warming Crisis" is nothing more than a manufactured crisis to forward the political agendas of those that are for socialism and against free-market capitalist economies, allowing the politicians to redistribute wealth through taxation. I have also outlined why I believe that the people promoting the Global Warming Crisis simply do not have the data needed to predict a real trend in global climate, warming or cooling.

Please share with us your reasoning for believing that Global Warming is a "Fact". I'm interested to hear which part of the world-wide propaganda blitz has influenced your thinking.
 

fractalfeline

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I'll forewarn everyone that I have absolutely no evidence to back any of this whatsoever, nor do I care to go dig it up.

From what I've heard, the earth is indeed warming up, but only by about a fraction of a degree per year. And from what I've heard, the earth has endured a wide spectrum of temperature fluctuations over time, and managed to survive. Humanity survived the ice age, what's to say we won't survive the (supposed) coming Hot Age? As for the other species on earth... well at some point you gotta keep the earth from stagnating. All species can't survive forever. Some will die off, others will adapt. Ecosystems might change, but aren't they always in a state of flux, if we believe the theory of evolution?

The main thrust of most anti-global warming propaganda I've heard is that these rising temperatures will cause droughts and violent, destructive weather, resulting in increased starvation and property damage. Mostly, I tend to think that humanity's continued survival has less to do with weather and more to do with a) economic stability b) controlling our population c) ingenuity. Most people in the wealthier countries won't have to worry too much about starvation, it's the poorer countries that need to worry. I won't be worried about starving, but I might be slightly concerned about rising food prices. Meanwhile, there might be milliions of poor people worldwide starving because they rely a lot more heavily on the variations of weather for their livelihood. Fix the world economy and the poor won't have to rely so heavily on the weather. It helps that the population is only increasing. From what I can tell, the more rich and educated countries are encouraging their population to limit the amount of children they have, but there are a myriad of reasons why more backwards, less educated, poorer countries don't. Culture, religion, taboo against contraception, insufficient means to obtain basic contraception, lack of education about menstrual cycles and fertility, the idea that more children makes a man more manly and a woman more worthwhile, gender inequality, etc. It's simple logic: the more people we have, the more thin we have to spread our resources, and the higher likelihood of starvation. And then ingenuity: we need to come up with ways to help solve the greater underlying problems so that any potential climate change does not create an impact. Things like engineering food crops that yield higher amounts of food per plant, insect-proof plants, education programs, buildings that are built to withstand bad weather, cost-effective ways to reduce air pollution (that don't require industry to shut down or increase costs, you can't expect industry to justify increasing costs without hard evidence about the benefit, and I'd rather think Big Industry doesn't care too much about benefits to Others as much as Itself)

It should be noted: here in USA, many corporations have been shipping their factories to foreign countries to reduce operating costs. This has something to do with labor laws and environmental laws in the USA that increase costs. Why not ship to a country that has no labor laws, has no environmental laws? Pollute to your hearts content, pay your laborers piddly squat, don't even care if they get injured or sick from working in your factory, and ship it all back to the USA for sale in Wal-Mart. I wouldn't terribly mind if this dynamic changed somehow. We could try to browbeat other countries into passing laws (but why would they if the factories produce jobs they wouldn't have otherwise?), or we could pass laws to discourage Big Industry from moving to foreign countries (good luck getting Capitol Hill to pass those.)

I suppose my TL;DR point is: you can't really talk about environment without talking about economy and social issues. They go hand-in-hand.
 

dharshan

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GLOBAL Warming is a FACT! and not fiction. human thru many processes have harmed the environment in such a way, the earths temperature levels has been rising for last few decades, and also this causes holes in the ozone layer, causing dangerous radition from sun to reach the earth surface...

with all these going on in the background, the glaciers in north & south pole which holds most of the water of earth, have started to melt and thus we have the sea water levels rising, and according to an article i read maldives (a belt of islands in the indian ocean) will loose most of there island in the near future...

and this change in sea level will affect the natural systems of earth, causing it to react in unexpected manner. to my understanding thats why we see the coldest days in 30 years... and probably in the near future we will see the Hottest days as well!
 

joejv4

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GLOBAL Warming is a FACT! and not fiction. human thru many processes have harmed the environment in such a way, the earths temperature levels has been rising for last few decades, and also this causes holes in the ozone layer, causing dangerous radition from sun to reach the earth surface...

with all these going on in the background, the glaciers in north & south pole which holds most of the water of earth, have started to melt and thus we have the sea water levels rising, and according to an article i read maldives (a belt of islands in the indian ocean) will loose most of there island in the near future...

and this change in sea level will affect the natural systems of earth, causing it to react in unexpected manner. to my understanding thats why we see the coldest days in 30 years... and probably in the near future we will see the Hottest days as well!

What data do you have to support that it is a "FACT"?

Check out the sources below for the real inconvenient truth about the polar ice caps and Global Warming in general. One reason this information is nowhere nearly as widely distributed as the Chicken-Little Global warming mis-information, is that the truth does not serve the politial agendas that drive the Global Warming Myth. What makes Global Warming the Holy Grail of political leverage, is that it is extremely easy to denounce the science and scientists that dispute the myth by simply saying that they don't care about the planet!

http://www.washingtontimes.com/weblogs/watercooler/2010/jan/10/inconvenient-truth-ice-cap-growing/
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,517035,00.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv15n2/reg15n2g.html
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=22003a0d-37cc-4399-8bcc-39cd20bed2f6&k=0
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/5/14/161152.shtml
http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-sciencepolicy.html
http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html
http://www.americanpolicy.org/un/thereisnoglobal.htm
http://everyman.mu.nu/archives/179716.php

There are a couple links to Michael Crichton's website. He spent years looking at the data presented by the IPCC and came to the conclusion that the Global Warming Crisis is nothing more than the result of science mixed with politics - which in itself debunks any portion of the science. If you'd really like to be entertained while reading about the counterpoint to this man made crisis, I highly recommend Michael Crichtons novel, State of Fear. While it is a fictional novel, Crichton uses this work to present the counterpoint to the Global warming crisis in an entertaining, action novel. The best part is at the end of the book where there are in the neighborhood of 20 pages of bibliography citing the sources for the data presented inthe novel. Personally, this is the only novel I've ever read that had a bibliography! Give it a read and see if maybe you might start to question the propaganda that you have been constantly bombarded with over the last two decades.

Oh yeah, after hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Global Warming Crowd issued dire warnings that 2005 was just the beginning and that we could expect more hurricanes that are more violent, every year from now on because of global warming. In each of the last 4 years, then number and severity of hurricanes has steadily decreased, with 2009 ending with 11 named weather systems. 3 were hurricanes, 6 were tropical storms, and 2 were tropical depressions. The Global Warming crowd has once again let Mother Nature prove them wrong!!!

Lastly, who really cares about global warming anyhow? After all, according to the Mayan Calendar, we've only got 2 years left before the end of the world! There is as much proof for the 2012 scenario as there is for man-made global warming.
 
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natpit6

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:drool:
Whatever it is I don't think it's that much important. If we are changing this planet to a worse environment for us that's means we don't deserve to live here. That is true because we will suffer form every change we made and eventually we will destroy ourselves if we don't do something. But rest assure, this planet will continue to live. This climate change everybody is talking about is not the first one, nor it will be a last one on this planet.

Life found the way to deal with almost any challenge, the question is, can we?
 

phazzedout

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I will just say something simple, Global Warming does not mean that the summers will prolong and everyone will have a nice bronze tan. Global Warming is a much more complicated process than that, the summers get hotter and the winter gets colder. The reason for this is that one you start to heat up the planet our fresh water that used to by ice glaciers begin to melt. If those melt, they tend to go to the ocean. Now we all should know now that having less sodium in the water means it cools faster. Well if it cools faster we begin to have a problem. Our natural heat regulator called "The Ocean" (purty name) starts to progressive slow down or even shift. What this means is that nations like U.K. or France that like in Europe will begin to look more like Alaska or Greenland. Places like South America will begin to lose some of their humidity or sometimes even get hotter. Things like strong hurricanes hit more frequently, tornadoes get wilder because of the glacier cold north and the blazing hot south. After a while we begin to head into an ice age, where all of what we would call today the super powers would have to migrate to different nations that have been ignored.

Think about this, we have ignored nations like Africa or Mexico, etc. Let's say the political arena has not shifted much a couple of nations lose wars, etc. but it still looks essentially the same. Well if you start to migrate all these people that a nation dislikes we will begin to have other problems.

Just my insight on it. Hope you guys liked it.
 

mavr1c

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If you trust science instead of voodoo politics from the likes of Limbaugh, you know Global warming is real. It may not destroy humanity or all of wildlife in our lifetime but future generations will certainly pay for our crimes against nature.
The evidence demonstarting Global warming is overwhelming but there are always" experts" who deny reality and get rewarded for their dishonesty. Images from within our lifetime are proof positive in favour of the obvious. Natural fluctuations in the earth's life cycle do not explain what is happening today.
 

psycrosis

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To that pitiful little us can actually change the planet for good or worse is quite an egotistical thing as a race. A volcanic eruption or undersea earthquake can easily put out more greenhouse gases in a week then the human race has put out altogether.
 

joejv4

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If you trust science instead of voodoo politics from the likes of Limbaugh, you know Global warming is real. It may not destroy humanity or all of wildlife in our lifetime but future generations will certainly pay for our crimes against nature.
The fact of the matter is that I do indeed trust science - real science, that is. The science behind Global Warming is the single biggest example of voodoo politics I've seen in my short 45 years. Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. While he sometimes makes some valid points, the things he says are driven purely by ratings and should be taken with a grain of salt. I take the time to look into things and make my own judgments, and form my own opinions. I don't need an entertainer to tell me what to think. The political agenda behind the global warming "crisis", is transparent to anyone that bothers to look into it beyond the propaganda we're bombarded with on a regular basis.

The evidence that supports anthropogenic Global Warming is all inferred. It is a guess at best. There is no hard data in existence that proves a long-term warming trend, or that anything the human race is doing has any meaningful impact on the planet's climate. The fact is, that there was no means to collect accurate temperature readings to calculate mean global surface temperature 40 years ago. Any estimates or models of long term trends that are made, are guesses. Ice core data from either polar region can tell us some things about the locations of the samples, but can not tell us anything about the rest of the planet. An ice core sample from Antarctica may tell us what it was like in Antarctica 5000 years ago, but it does not tell us what the climate was in Kentucky, London, Bangalore or Tokyo 5000 years ago. The data fed into the computer models is all cherry-picked to provide the desired predictions. In other words, since they are looking to prove warming, the model and inferred evidence are combined with recent hard data and consolidated in a manner to paint a picture of a long-term warming trend, and any evidence or data that does not fit the warming model is left out of the equation. All of the so-called evidence that exists was compiled with the assumption that anthropogenic global warming is fact to begin with, and any evidence that is contrary to that assumption has been discarded (the recently leaked emails demonstrate this quite nicely).

When scientists allow themselves to be beholden to politicians, the science they create is junk-science.

The planet may actually be in a small warming cycle, but if it is, it is due to the increase of solar activity, which, by the way directly correlates to the recent slight, short-term warming trend the pseudo-science global warming crowd points to as their "hard evidence". What they fail to relate in all of this, is that back in the 70's, when there was low solar activity, there was a slight, short-term cooling trend that was used by politicians to kick off a big "Global Cooling crisis". How quickly we forget things.

Many on this forum are young enough that they only have a vague understanding of what the Cold War was, and have no idea whatsoever, that Global Cooling was the "great threat to mankind" just a few short decades ago.

If you look at politics in this day and age, and over the last 40-50 years, the M.O. of politicians has been, and still is, to push agendas by crisis. The most recent example is the "Health Care Crisis". Are there problems with the healthcare system? Sure. Are reforms needed? Certainly. Is it the full-blown crisis that our "leaders" would have us believe it is? Absolutely not. Both the Congress and the Administration wasted valuable time and effort creating a fictional crisis around healthcare to promote an agenda, when they should have been addressing the real crisis faced by this country with runaway unemployment. This is just the most recent example of "crisis politics". It is the tactic of choice of Republicans and Democrats, conservatives, liberals, and moderates. It has been shown to work time after time, and until the "huddled masses" begin to educate themselves on what is behind these manufactured crisis situations, it will continue to be an effective political tool.

Back to Global Warming. There are mountains of evidence that disprove anthropogenic global warming, and no hard data to support any long term trend in global climate. While the notions of energy conservation, renewable and sustainable energy, recycling and all of the "green" initiatives are good things, and you'll get no argument from me that they will benefit the human race into the future, I choose to look at all of the evidence, both supporting and discounting the Global Warming crisis, rather than simply allowing myself to be spoon-fed the propaganda surrounding it, and have come to the conclusion that the science supporting the global warming crisis is nothing more than so much rubbish.

The evidence demonstarting Global warming is overwhelming but there are always" experts" who deny reality and get rewarded for their dishonesty. Images from within our lifetime are proof positive in favour of the obvious. Natural fluctuations in the earth's life cycle do not explain what is happening today.

Here's an amusing, poignant little piece you should read regarding the overwhelming evidence and the whole notion of attacking "denyers" as heretics. There are some excellent examples of this very situation from the history books. Enjoy:

http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html
 
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