The US Republican Party Is The Only One That Doesn't Get It

A recent study (from earlier this summer) that I only just came across shows that the US Republican Party is the only conservative party among many studies that actively and pretty much completely denies the science of climate change. This is not very surprising since the GOP denies science in general and has done so for years. Also, the GOP is the party that is probably more fully paid off by business interests. And, the party seems to represent the rather large fraction of the American public that is cynical about science, and that sees science as part of a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.

The study is: ore than Markets: A Comparative Study of Nine Conservative Parties on Climate Change and here is the abstract:

Cross-national comparisons of proposed policies of individual parties are an underdeveloped part of the literature on environmental politics in general and climate politics in particular. Although conservative parties are portrayed as skeptical toward adopting climate measures or even supposed to ignore climate change, this study of nine conservative electoral manifestoes nevertheless finds that most of them support climate measures, even in the form of state interventions in the market economy. Market measures are not as dominating as could be expected, but a clear finding is that available fossil reserves seem to have an influence on conservative climate politics. The U.S. Republican Party is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change. Conservative parties as such are not in opposition to climate policies, but the pro-business position is evident in that conservative parties do not challenge coal or petroleum in countries with large reserves of these resources.

More like this

Makes sense. Whores learn early on not to challenge their pimps. Their johns like them to appear unblemished.

By Brainstorms (not verified) on 07 Oct 2015 #permalink

It is incorrect to say the rePUKEians are against science, as the support big business which is nowhere without science. Its more like they are against and deny any science that hits their profit margins. Its the same for dims who deny evilution while dialing their iPhone! Again they USE the science that supports both while denying the one they dislike. It is PURE distilled hypocrisy!!!

Does this address the differences among Tea Party and other Republicans, i.e., as per Larry Hammilton's work, such as The elephant in the room?

By John Mashey (not verified) on 07 Oct 2015 #permalink

An interesting 9:48 of a Republican questioning a Sierra Club executive:

http://therightscoop.com/briliant-watch-ted-cruz-destroy-sierra-club-pr…

[Thanks for the link. That is a great example of a denialist being a snarky jerk. Something you are good at spotting, apparently.

Cruz refers to the lower troposphere data which are the wrong data to use. Typical denialist canard.

Regarding the pause, the Sierra club guy was right, there was a pause in the 40s. Cruze is wrong in saying that the satellite data indicate a pause. The data he is referring to is a different and unrelated thing. Cruz notes that "one bogus study" is all the evinces warming. And he's trying to make the argument that the "alarmists" are ignoring the data. Etc. This is an excellent example of a climate science denier getting it all wrong, slinging bullshit, and lying.

Things are warming up no matter how you name it:

See this regarding the consensus.

-gtl]

By See Noevo (not verified) on 07 Oct 2015 #permalink

In the 9:48 video above, the Sierra Club guy falls back on the “97% consensus” about a dozen times if he does it once.

I’ve heard the 97% consensus is bogus.
A paper by Dr. Richard Tol “shows that the Cook et al. paper claiming that there is a 97% consensus among scientists is not just impossible to reproduce (since Cook is withholding data) but a veritable statistical train wreck rife with bias, classification errors, poor data quality, and inconsistency in the ratings process. The full paper is available below.”

[Link to denialist blog site removed. Also note that Tol's critique of the Cook et al consensus research has been debunked.

Regarding the Tol and the consensus, see:

Climate contrarians accidentally confirm the 97% global warming consensus

“There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct.”

These are the words of economist and Global Warming Policy Foundation advisor Richard Tol in a new paper published in Energy Policy.

Richard Tol's Attack On 97 Percent Climate Change Consensus Study Has 'Critical Errors'

Since that study was published, Professor Richard Tol, an economist from the University of Sussex, has been planning to attack Cook’s paper.

Tol is advisor to the UK climate sceptic group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, founded by Lord Nigel Lawson, who was treasurer to former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Tol is also an IPCC lead author but withdrew from the team writing the Summary for Policymakers, claiming the report was “too alarmist”.

Tol accepts that humans cause climate change but his work consistently claims that economic impacts will be small and won’t turn negative until the back end of this century.

Richard Tol and the 97% consensus – again!

Richard concludes with

This undermines Cook’s paper. Theirs was not a survey of the literature. Rather, it was a survey of the raters.

No, Richard, Cook’s paper was a survey of the literature.

The Cook et al. (2013) 97% consensus result is robust

Richard Tol has also advanced various criticisms of Cook et al. (2013). It's worth noting that Tol does not dispute the existence of the consensus, writing:

"There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct."

BUSTED: How Ridiculous Richard Tol makes myriad bloopers and a big fool of himself and proves the 97% consensus

Richard Tol didn't do any reanalysis. He didn't categorise all the abstracts himself. He just did some wonky sums and got the wrong answer, based on flawed assumptions and more. And he threw in a large number of unfounded speculative statements. Not only did Richard not show the claim was "unfounded", he wrote that he accepts the main finding of Cook13.

Richard Tol and the 97% consensus

Richard Tol now has a 7th draft of his paper criticising the Cook et al. study, and appears to want to resubmit this to a journal....

-gtl]

By See Noevo (not verified) on 07 Oct 2015 #permalink

“There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct.” Richard Tol, in Energy Policy.

Tol seems to have a problem with doing statistics sn - you simply have a problem understanding anything.
http://skepticalscience.com/climate-contrarians-accidentally-confirm-97…

Would you like to know what I know about liberals? Liberals are so open-minded that their brains routinely fall out.

By Not_Man_Made (not verified) on 07 Oct 2015 #permalink

sn – you simply have a problem understanding anything.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when pushing his political agenda depends on him not understanding it."
-- Upton Sinclair

By Brainstorms (not verified) on 07 Oct 2015 #permalink

I see that Greg is now responding to me by imbedding his comments within mine (e.g. #4, #6).
I don’t recall him doing that before, at least not with me.

[I do it now and then. I would like to do it more often. It works well. -gtl]

I guess if you run the blog you can do whatever you want to a commenter’s posts.
…………
Regarding the global warming pause of the last 18+ years, which the warmers try to dismiss:
[Link to denialist site deleted. -gtl]
………………………..
Also, I’d like to see the *detailed*, *specific* beliefs of the 97% consensus.
For example, what is the 97% consensus on
-The cause of the temperature pause of the last 18 years,
-The reason for the paucity of U.S. hurricanes in the last 10 years,
-Why their models should be respected given that they’ve failed to predict current climate when fed past climate data,
-The cause of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age,
-The cause of the Ice Age and its end.
[Had you read the original research you would know! -gtl]
For these and other items, I'd like to see the 97% consensus' detailed, specific answers.
Anyone know where I can find them?

By See Noevo (not verified) on 07 Oct 2015 #permalink

Wow, so 97% are saying the earth is cooking and heating up.

Interesting. I live in one of the hottest, driest, countries on earth in the summer and I can tell you that aside from roughly 5 days to a week - usually in February - our summers have become increasingly cooler and wetter, where normally they're tinder dry and scorching hot.

But hey, if 97% of scientists tell me that's not happening, then I guess it's just not happening.

By NotImpressed (not verified) on 07 Oct 2015 #permalink

Anyone know where I can find them?

You've asked for things to be supplied to you often in the past, and you have never looked at the references people have aupplied. Try to do some work yourself, as foreign as that concept is to you.

NotImpressed forgets about the "Angry Summer" of 2012-2013, Australia's hottest on record.

Unimpressive.

NotImpressed, please look up the difference between weather and climate. They are not the same...

Also, 97% are not "saying the earth is cooking and heating up". They are in agreement that the data we have collected indicate that the earth is heating up unnaturally. And that data also indicates why.

Ignore what they are informing you about at your peril. Denial will only make the outcome worse. Denial is not a magic want to make it go away.

By Brainstorms (not verified) on 08 Oct 2015 #permalink

"I can tell you..."

My experience with people who talk from own 'experiences' and who ideologically don't quite like something to be true, is that those personal experiences tend not to be corroborated by the data.

So I looked for some data. Annually for Australia it looks like shown here
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/annual/aus/2013/20140103_Tmean_pl…
An increase in temperature over the last 100 years, interestingly most obvious from 1950 onwards.

So, how about summer? For the whole of Australia it looks like this:
https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/tmean-aus-1202-27476.png
Well darnit, it *also* shows a warming trend!

Of course it is possible that NI lives in a little part of Australia that has seen cooling, but I couldn't find where that could be...

"... if 97% of scientists tell me that [Australian summers becoming increasingly cooler and wetter i]s not happening ..."

I can tell you... They're not telling you that. Why do you read it as though they were? Who told you that?

Refer to the data above for a climate scientist to tell you what the data reveals is happening in Australia -- with regards to climate, not your local weather.

By Brainstorms (not verified) on 08 Oct 2015 #permalink

"Would you like to know what I know about liberals? Liberals are so open-minded that their brains routinely fall out."

There are few things as pathetic as a part-time pirate's plea for attention. Lobbing a non sequitur here gains you no more 'street cred' than that Harley sticker you placed on your Rascal.

My question to you is: If everybody jumped off a bridge would you?

By Not_Man_Made (not verified) on 08 Oct 2015 #permalink

Not man made, do you have anything like a point?

(See Noevo could easily find answers to those ill-posed questions via Skeptical Science [and, in fact, by searching here at Science Blogs as well as many, many other sites]. Whether he or she is intellectually honest enough to let go of such cherished denier myths as a global MWP, a "recovery from the LIA", or a "hiatus since x" is another matter entirely.)

I stand by my initial response. Your checklist of contrarian memes is a waste of time without a basic understanding of the larger issue, though your continued ignorance suggests that time-wasting is in fact why you're here.

There is no question there is global climate change.

With the handle "Not Man Made" we must assume that in your mind global climate chance is a totally natural event with man not causing any part of it. Therefore we are so screwed.

If global climate change is a natural event, man has no chance of turning back the tide of the change.

However, it becomes much simpler (not easy but simpler in concept) to reverse this process if man is providing lets say 95% of root causes. The closer the percentages between natural causes and man made causing become; the harder it will become to make significant changes to reduce global climate change.

#22 re. #20
He doesn't know what everybody means.

By cosmicomics (not verified) on 09 Oct 2015 #permalink

NMM, My question to you is: If everybody was being thrown off a bridge by self-serving corporations, would you let them throw you off, too?

By Brainstorms (not verified) on 09 Oct 2015 #permalink

See Noevo

"For example, what is the 97% consensus..."
The right wing Heartland Institute put up a billboard saying you have to be crazier than Unabomber Ted Kaczynski to doubt global warming.
The right wing Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine polled everyone with a science, technology, engineering, math, MD, or DVM degree (more than 5 million currently employed in the US, according to the Census Bureau; many of the signatories to the OISM petition are retired or dead), and only could come up with 31,000 who reject man made global warming. You do the math.(hint: it's less than 1%)
... on"

– The cause of the temperature pause of the last 18 years,"
There isn't a pause - http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/last:216/mean:6/plot/hadcrut4g…
even UAH shows an upward trend

"– The reason for the paucity of U.S. hurricanes in the last 10 years,"
http://models.weatherbell.com/global_major_freq.png"
Data is noisy; trends are up; except for Sandy, we got lucky, probably related to what Dr Jennifer Francis observed about the "lazy" jetstream.

"– Why their models should be respected given that they’ve failed to predict current climate when fed past climate data,"
False premise. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-013-1922-6/fulltext.html " Our results suggest that although models and data are in agreement on the direction and spatial pattern of the large-scale features of climate change (Braconnot et al. 2012; Schmidt et al. 2013; Izumi et al. 2013; Li et al. in press), there are still shortcomings in the amplitude of simulated changes."
ftp://soest.hawaii.edu/coastal/Climate%20Articles/Rahmstorf_2007%20Sea%… "The global mean surface temperature increase (land and ocean combined) in both the NASA GISS data set and the Hadley Centre/ Climatic Research Unit data set is 0.33°C for the 16 years since 1990, which is in the upper part of the range projected by the IPCC." "Since 1990 the observed sea level has been rising faster than the rise projected by models, as shown both by a reconstruction using primarily tide gauge data (2) and, since 1993, by satellite altimeter data (3) (both series are corrected for glacial isostatic adjustment)."
http://neven1.typepad.com/.a/6a0133f03a1e37970b017d3da64b2b970c-pi
The model shortcomings underestimate the severity of changes, and have greater errors on the high side, where the risks grow exponentially. The Precautionary Principle demands greater respect and quicker response to mitigate global warming.

"– The cause of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age,"
The PAGES 2k Consortium produced the most comprehensive overall reconstruction of local and global surface temperature changes over the past 1,000–2,000 years. (78 researchers contributing as co-authors from 60 separate scientific institutions around the world. Their analysis combines records from tree rings, pollen, corals, lake and marine sediments, ice cores, stalagmites and historical documents from 511 locations across seven continental-scale regions to reconstruct past global surface temperature changes over the past 2,000 years.) They concluded "There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between ad 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions.
Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period AD 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years." - http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n5/full/ngeo1797.html#group-1
There are more authors on this one paper than there are on the wikipedia "List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming" - 63 total; 17 of them actually accept the basic scientific premise that anthropogenic global warming is/will happen, but believe that not enough is know to accurately project by how much; and 4 are dead.
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/articles/littleice… "...Little Ice Age (whether defined by the particularly cold conditions in Europe during the 16th – 18th centuries, or the more modest large-scale cooling of the 15th – 19th centuries) invites questions as to what factors may have led to such a cooling....Though some of the long-term cooling of the climate prior to the 20th century might have been associated with astronomical factors, such factors cannot explain the pronounced and relatively short-duration cooling observed in many regions....injection of sunlight-reflecting sulfate aerosols by explosive volcanic eruptions, for example, may be responsible for some of the cooling of the early and mid 19th century...the observation that other regions, including the western US and the Middle East, appear, in fact, to have been warmer than usual is consistent with a hypothesized relationship between volcanic forcing of climate and the response of the North Atlantic Oscillation. The longer-term variations, and in particular cooler temperatures during the 17th century and warmer temperatures during the 18th century were likely to have been related to a concomitant increase in solar output by the Sun by approximately 0.25% following the Maunder Minimum of the 17th century (Lean et al. , 1995; Mann et al. , 1998) ( see Maunder Minimum, Volume 1). Finally, changes in the ocean circulation (e.g., the Gulf Stream) of the North Atlantic, and associated impacts on North Atlantic storm tracks, may have emphasized temperature changes in Europe.

"– The cause of the Ice Age and its end" Try googling "Milankovic cycles"

By Brian Dodge (not verified) on 15 Oct 2015 #permalink