Why Do Some Conservatives Believe in Global Warming?

I agree with pegminer only on the AGW being a political issue, the question is only political because politicians have decided to take action on it. In the end, the science will not be settled by politicians, but by scientists. Further research and observation will either prove the AGWers right or grossly wrong. My bet is that they are right that man has a little effect on the climate, but they are way off on the amount of change that we can affect. The problem comes when you accept models over observation. Accepting the hockey stick, without regard for the fact that the hockey stick has certainly not shown true for the last 10 years is foolish. Now while I will agree that 10 years is nothing to base a decision on, I would also suggest that 30 years is nothing to base a decision on either. Our true amount of observed data is small and pathetic in respect to what we are trying to analyze. The certainty that has been claimed by the AGWer camp is certainly not warranted. We are truly melding different types of data from many different locations collected many different ways and pretending like it is all good standardized data.

That being said, it is hard to ignore the political side when the ex-vp makes a blanket scientific statement that the science is settled. Now nothing could be further from the truth, but he's a politician and an idiot to boot, so what would one expect?

AS far as the rest of what pegminer says, I find it rather obnoxious idiocy to reduce all those that disagree AGW to be ultra-right wing conservatives. In fact I am entirely against the AGWers and voted for Obama in the last election. I voted for him due to his stance on Iraq, abortion, gay marraige etc. Unfortunately, we are still in Iraq and I would prefer to see him work on building the economy, not destroying it with cap and trade.

Actually, some people are jumping on the man made climate change to make money. In California, they already have the strictest environmental laws, so strict that no new power plant has been built for at least 30 years. They still can not meet current EPA regulations mainly because they are down wind of Asia and their ever increasing polluted air.

That being said, we have been slowly moving towards greener sources of energy for at least 50 years. What has hurt the United States is the fear of doing any damage to the environment. We can't build certain forms of renewable energy sources in certain areas because we may harm a bit of the environment.

We have to make a choice, do we want our electronic gadgets that take a lot of energy or do we want to preserve all wild life? I for one think that we can balance the two but there are a lot of environmentalists out there that think that wild life needs come before all others.

They are basically two different ways of saying the same thing. Simply it is less well educated liberals noting that overall the climate has warmed slightly since the mid 1800s when the sun returned to a higher energy output mode after more than 400 years of low to extreme low activity scientists and historians called the little ice age. This followed almost 500 years of exceedingly high output that had produced a noticeably warm period known in science and history as the medieval warm period. The first link below illustrates the regularity of this process of variable solar activity causing climate shifts on the planets of the solar system. In both European and Oriental societies we have almost 5,000 years of documentation on this showing 3 major warming periods preceding this modern optimum and 3 cool periods and one cold one. The only thing unusual about the current optimum is the extreme slowness of the onset and that has not come up to the even the average warmth of the current geological period called the Holocene. So the unusual is that the current optimum is the coldest documented and possibly the shortest as it looks as we are heading into another serious solar minimum again.

The problem of AGW was caused by the sloppy failed peer review system used today for most non-critical scientific publication. This allows those whose work is not up to the stricter scientific method to get published anyway if their work supports a politically correct position. So unless some assumption, hypothesis or theory has been verified by the scientific method it can not be trusted to be real or scientific. There have been a lot of things that have killed or injured millions that passed peer review/ Chernobyl after all was passed by peer review while later examination through scientific method showed the basic problems that caused the failure.

Some scientific information revealing the truth about global warming, when it happened and what probably caused it.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/global_warming.h...

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data....

http://reasonmclucus.tripod.com/CO2myth.html

http://mc-computing.com/qs/Global_Warming/Atmosphe...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sunspot_Numbers....

Where the heat came from and why it was abnormally cold previously

http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~dbunny/research/global/215....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_minimum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum

The question of whether global warming is real or not is a scientific issue, not a political one. Mitigation of it would involve political decisions, and many of the so-called "conservatives" can't separate the two issues. BB and jim z are perfect examples of why Obama is now president--because the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican party has driven out the moderates. They try to disown any member of the party that is not a John Birch anti-abortion fundamentalist Christian xenophobe, then they're surprised that they lost big in the last election. Go figure. The Republican Party is the only party I have ever registered under--but no more--you've got be insane to see someone like Cheney as a party leader.

EDIT: Interesting that jim z thinks me an ultraleftist, since I've only cast one vote for a democrat in my life. Of course, I think the only republican I've voted for was Schwarzenegger, and that was because I was impressed with his pragmatism. I'm a fiscal conservative and a social liberal, which used to match well with the libertarians, but they seem to have been taken over by right wing wackos. I'm still waiting for a party based on science and logic.

EDIT for Jayd: Why do you think I was reducing all those that disagree with AGW to ultra-right wing conservatives? I'm pretty sure that's not what I said at all. Frankly, I was trying to answer the question that was asked, which was about why SOME conservatives do believe in it. That's why my comments are specifically about conservatives. Perhaps yours would have been too, if you had actually answered the question that was asked, rather than just going off in a different direction.

There are actually a lot of conservatives who agree that humans are causing global warming. Almost every one of their 2008 presidential candidates - Huckabee, Hunter, McCain, Romney, Giuliani, etc. Only Thompson was a fence-sitter on the issue. There's Nikolas Sarkozi - president of France and a leader of their conservative political party, who's been a big leader on global warming as well. In fact only in the USA is global warming considered a "liberal issue".

Global warming is obviously not a liberal hoax. This is just an excuse some conservatives use to remain in denial about the subject because they don't have a scientific leg to stand on.

If you consider Arnold a conservative, your definition is far from mine. I suspect Newt considers human emssions of CO2 to have added to warming. It is a matter of degrees. How much has the CO2 added? Is it harmful or significant? A politician always has an incentive to scare monger so he can offer himself as the solution. I heard Newt kick Dr. Jack Horner's (honorary doctorate) butt in a debate so I think Newt is pretty smart in science. That doesn't mean I am going to take my marching orders from him or discount what I learned in my geology and other related classes. Just because you can find a few conservatives that have bought into some of the hype, doesn't detract from the fact that the overwhelming majority of AGW are leftist and their solutions typically are as well. Why would you even try to deny that? Have you been paying attention at all? Can you recognize a liberal?

I wouldn't call it a hoax. I would call it paranoia and exaggeration. There is a psychological phenomena that causes some people to blame everything on humans and assome the worst is going to happen. Those people are typically from the left.

Note: I suspected Pegminer was an ultraleftist in spite of his suggestions to the contrary. I was proved right. I am not John Birch, anti-abortion, fundamentalist Christian, or a xenophobe .

First of all..... Schwarznegger is not a REAL republican..... though he is by California standards.

Secondly, if Gingrich is indeed embracing a 'belief' in 'Man-did-it' global warming..... it is indeed for political purposes.

Finally, the so-called 'science' of global warming is not settled. In fact, there are serious concerns that data/research supporting 'Man-did-it' has been manipulated/falsified..... or at very least, the s0-called science has been 'sloppy'.

For the same reason some conservatives acknowledge that the Earth isn't flat.

It is not just conservatives who dispute Al Gore and the radical environmentalists. Here is a good article on it.

http://nationscrier.com/index.php?option=com_conte...

Global warming deniers look to characterize global warming as a political issue, where it's just some funny greenie liberal environmentalists and Al Gore pushing it, as opposed to the scientific community.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on...

Making it a political issue helps them win over public opinion from certain large ideological groups.