Amazing how much time you spend criticizing Jill Stein (a candidate with 0 chance of being elected), and how little you criticize Hillary Clinton (our likely next president, who is weak on fracking, against drug decriminalization, shows worrisome acceptance of military intervention, etc.).

Hopefully you will be hallucinating Jill Stein pursuing you with a big ass syringe full of mercury for the last 50 miles.

Isn't there another pic of Jill?

So now The Stranger has stooped to throwing James Hansen under the bus to further their crusade against Jill Stein. Pathetic.

One minute of Googling turns up the sources of Jill's information that Ethan Linck was incapable of finding before posting his stupid little hit attack:

http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/16/3761/2…

Continued high fossil fuel emissions this century are predicted to yield (1) cooling of the Southern Ocean, especially in the Western Hemisphere; (2) slowing of the Southern Ocean overturning circulation, warming of the ice shelves, and growing ice sheet mass loss; (3) slowdown and eventual shutdown of the Atlantic overturning circulation with cooling of the North Atlantic region; (4) increasingly powerful storms; and (5) nonlinearly growing sea level rise, reaching several meters over a timescale of 50–150 years.

(More here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP-cRqCQ…)

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/us-wi…

What does the U.S. look like with an ocean that is 10 feet higher? The radically transformed map would lose 28,800 square miles of land, home today to 12.3 million people.

That assertion was made by one Dr. Benjamin Strauss (http://www.climatecentral.org/what-we-do…

"Dr. Benjamin Strauss serves as Vice President for Sea Level and Climate Impacts at Climate Central. He is a national expert and author of numerous scientific papers and reports on sea level rise, as well as architect of the Surging Seas suite of maps, tools and visualizations. Strauss has testified before the U.S. Senate and presented to state and local elected officials, and the White House has highlighted his work. His research and Surging Seas have generated coverage across the U.S. and internationally by, among others, the New York Times, Washington Post, AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, The Guardian and USA Today, totaling more than 2,500 stories. He has appeared as an expert on national network news, nationally syndicated radio and documentary television."

I'm going to change my vote to Jill Stein just as a fuck you to The Stranger for their abysmal coverage of this election.

After the 2 hottest years on record, amidst floods & heat waves, media attacks me for discussing climate scientists' worst-case scenarios. 🤔

-- Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) August 19, 2016

The Stranger's election coverage has been a shitshow for the past few months.

Jill Stein is the only candidate talking about taking substantial action against climate change and you guys are all like, "Actually..."

Ethan Linck continues to be intellectually dishonest about Jill Stein's comments on vaccination.

As for sea level rise, there is no consensus position but it well understood that the IPCC predictions are very conservative because the non-linearity of ice wastage grounded below sea-level is poorly understood.

So where the fuck is Charles Mudede to chastise Ethan for "aiding the climate change deniers" by discussing data and nuance rather than simplified bullshit?

Glad to see that we can actually discuss the details of the scientific consensus around climate change at this paper for once. I really appreciate it.

/And to answer the rest of your Stein supporters, she fucking courts people who are anti-vax, anti-gmo and anti-science in general. Those views will result in the deaths of thousands if not more. Fuck you for supporting a piece of shit like that.

Based on recent UW research, it is within possible range for massive melt in Antarctica Arctic and Greenland.

If that happens and we don't end all fossil fuel depreciation deductions and subsidies, Jill has a possible correct prediction.

Playtime is over children, it's serious now.

@9 Hey dipshit, she's purposefully courting anti-vaxxers and supporting bullshit alternative medicines like homeopathy. The language and diction she uses throws unsupported and unreasonable skepticism on medicines that have been proven safe and effective for decades. Do you enjoy watching people die from preventable diseases or something?

By the way, she also questions the effects of Wi-Fi on the development of children. Why in the fuck would you support that? I've seen you post here, and you're not fucking stupid here, so what gives?

Finally, it isn't just Ethan who takes issue with the 9ft number. Climate scientists all over the country did as well.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ener…

See that? Actual fucking scientists who study actual fucking climate change think Jill Stein is full of shit. Maybe folks like you and Mudede should shut up and listen to the experts instead.

Ishmael, you're a dickhead.

@4: Neither of those documents support her claim of 9 feet over 35 years.
@6: This geoscientist is attacking her for her anti-science policy proposals and for her reckless misrepresentation of legitimate research (which is to be fair not remotely restricted to her but rather a pervasive problem).

@12 the Washington Post citing 2 scientists (including a grad student) isn't proof of anything, . Especially since the 3' in 2100 number is widely known among glaciologists to be a gross underestimate because we don't know how to model tidewater glacier retreat. Mooney is talking out of his backside.

Venomlash, you're an asshole and a moron.

Linck's own blurb acknowledges "Hansen had suggested that sea level rise of 'several meters' might occur by 2050-2060 under the worst case scenario" (answering his own manipulative question). The phrasing in the report I linked predicts "nonlinearly growing sea level rise, reaching several meters over a timescale of 50–150 years", which would certainly allow for 9 feet of rise by 2050. But no, it doesn't specify 9 feet within 35 years. So let's take a look at this article:

The biggest disagreement centers on Hansen’s finding that Greenland and Antarctica will lose ice much more rapidly than most glaciologists say. He assumes that the “doubling time,” the amount of time it would take for ice loss from the ice sheets to double, could be as short as 10, 20 or 40 years. At the low end of this range, sea levels would rise by several meters as soon as 2050

I would wager that Stein was referring to those numbers in her tweet. Yes, Hansen's projections are controversial, but they indisputably grounded in hard science. Ethan Linck's attack of Stein for referencing Hansen's findings is a bogus smear.

My second reference answers Linck's dishonest claim that, "Where she attained the number 12.3M remains less clear."

Your characterization (and Dan Savage's, and the neoliberal contingent of The Stranger and its commenters) of Stein as anti-science is bullshit propaganda and you know it. Stein is unequivocally not anti-vaccination and her support for GMO labeling is primarily about opposing corporate (Monsanto, et. al.) control of agriculture and the food supply.

Gosh, it must take so much courage to stand up for the big guy.

What's with your super-edgy "alter ego" shtick anyway? How old are you?

@14: To paraphrase: "don't listen to the climatologists cited by the Washington Post, listen to the vague and unsubstantiated claims made by me, some anonymous guy on the internet!"
Your claims about methane emissions were stuff that was "widely known" in the industry, too, until it turned out you were making them up out of whole cloth.
And if you want to talk science, don't disparage the research and expertise of grad students. We don't just go to class (like most undergrads do); we PERFORM ACTUAL RESEARCH.

@15: Does someone need to explain basic arithmetic to you?
2050-2016=34
34<50
But yeah, if you interpret "several" to mean "nine" and shape the nonlinearity so as to massively frontload the increase, I suppose you could twist Dr. Hansen's claim into a statement such as Stein tweeted out.
Now if you want to talk about where the 12.3M figure came from, I suggest you ACTUALLY READ the WaPo article linked in Linck's original post, because it discusses that explicitly. Dr. Strauss is mentioned as a possible source, but they interviewed him and he disavowed Stein's claim, pointing out that his research speaks of much longer-term sea level rises rather than conditions in 2050. And while Stein's campaign pointed to Dr. Hansen as a source for her (misleading) claim, they haven't given any indication of where the 12.3M claim comes from.
SO YES, IT IS TRUE THAT WHERE THAT NUMBER COMES FROM IS LESS CLEAR. Reading comprehension is important!

@15: As for Jill Stein's anti-science positions?

First off, she wants to ban hydraulic fracturing. Not regulate, but a flat BAN. Fracking is perfectly safe IF done under certain circumstances (mostly making sure that the reservoir doesn't communicate with groundwater or any significant fault zones) and is an excellent short-term way of reducing our dependence on coal (which is probably THE WORST fossil fuel). But Stein doesn't want to regulate fracking; she wants to ban it, because it's scary and can be dangerous if done improperly.

Similarly, she wants a total ban on nuclear power. Why? Because it's scary and can be dangerous if done improperly. Never mind that fission plants emit far less radiation than coal plants do, that modern plant designs are far safer and more efficient than the ones currently in service, and that nuclear power represents the single biggest alternative to fossil fuels currently available to us...

And of course the GMO issue. If she's worried about undue corporate influence in agriculture, she could go after the way we farm these days, maybe even pick a fight with King Corn. If she thinks there are specific risks of particular GM crops, she could open an investigation into them or call for a moratorium pending research to prove their safety. Or if she thinks we need to be less reliant on pesticides, she could call for revision of the laws regarding how pesticides may be applied. But no, instead she's decided to ban ALL genetically modified crops, because (sing along with me, we all know the words by now) they're scary and could be bad if misused! Banning GMOs in an attempt to fight corporate influence over agriculture is like banning the jet engine in an attempt to fight transportation oligopolies. It won't do shit for the stated goal, and it'll just mean we're stuck using older technology.

And then there's her party's support for unreliable and frequently dangerous types of alternative medicine. (Sure, accupressure can help, but there are also kooks out there pitching Vitamin B13.) They just took explicit support for fucking HOMEOPATHY out of their platform a few weeks back. If conferring official legitimacy on alternative medicine (not just legitimate stuff but also absolute woo) in a bold rejection of empiricism isn't anti-science, I don't know what is.

And that brings us, at long last, to the vaccine issue. No, Jill Stein is not an anti-vaxxer, in the same way that Donald Trump is not a neo-Nazi. But they both pander hard to those who are! When asked about vaccines, Stein could have declared them safe and commended them as an example of putting healthcare before profits (in contrast to other practices found within the pharmaceutical industry). She could have dismissed the conspiracy theories and moved on to the actual crimes of Big Pharma. But instead she claimed that we just can't trust vaccines to be safe at all and that the fault lies not with anti-vaxxers and their delusions but rather with the pharmaceutical industry's questionable ethics.
Despite the breathtaking safety record of modern vaccines and the low profit margins produced by them (though they've become more lucrative of late thanks to widespread vaccination in developing countries), she painted a picture of scary dangerous vaccines peddled by a cartoonishly evil Big Pharma that's less concerned with making a buck and more concerned with oppressing people. Note that by dismissing the research supporting the safety of vaccines, allegedly because it's somehow scare-quotes-"tainted" by Big Pharma, she's doing that thing all anti-science types love to do: throwing away conflicting evidence. She may not have said herself that vaccines are dangerous. But she repeated and legitimized the words of those who do.

"Gosh, it must take so much courage to stand up for the big guy."
I don't have a side. I'll pick a fight with hippies, yippies, yuppies, suits, drones, Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, capitalists, socialists, communists, rich folk, poor folk, kleptocrats, hepcats, and anyone else who starts spouting bullshit. If you've got your facts straight, I've got your back; if you're lying or misrepresenting the evidence, I'll be on your ass like a dog on a meat-wagon. Sometimes I'll call a guy out for lying and then back him up on a different issue where he's telling the truth (as seen here). Big guy? Little guy? How about who's got the facts on their side, huh? As it is written:
"Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment; thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor favour the person of the mighty; but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour." (Leviticus 19:15)

And finally, since you asked, I'm 24. Why do I have two accounts? For my own inscrutable amusement and purposes.

@17 Don't make your lack of knowledge of this issue be our problem. There is no consensus about sea level rise predictions because we simply don't know everything we should to be able to do so. The IPCC itself acknowledged a couple of iterations ago that we didn't know how to model the response to climate of ice masses grounded below sea level and consequently estimates could be way off. Most sea level authors put sea level rise at ~1m by 2100 but a non-negligible numbers of them (~10-15% here) think it could be at least twice as much; moreover not every sea level expert understands questions relating to non-linear ice sheet dynamics (which exposes the fallacy of your appeal to authority btw) This is the way science works and this is the state of the science in case you didn't notice. Your attempts to enforce a nonexistent orthodoxy on this and other issues not only reflects your ignorance but is profoundly anti-science.

@17 Anybody can confirm that fugitive methane emissions have been found to be several fold to an order of magnitude greater at several active plays using fracking technology than industry figures used by EPA, and that a large increase in atmospheric methane concentrations is observed after ~15 years of fracking, which puts the "bridge to clean energy" into perspective.

@19: Next time, try attacking the arguments I actually make instead of the ones you imagine. Seriously, what you wrote there had nothing to do with the post to which you replied.

@20: Nope, that's not what you said. You repeatedly claimed that methane emissions are rising (they're not), insisted that highball estimates are unassailable fact while dismissing out-of-hand the lower estimates, demanded that particularly leaky plays be used as proxies for emissions nationwide and lied about how much they contribute to total production while willfully ignoring well-managed plays (which you're doing again, I might add), and refused to consider the effect of loss-reduction technology which has enjoyed amazing and affordable success where it has been implemented.
And of course, there you go again with "[a]nybody can confirm". Yeah, it's universally accepted common knowledge because you say so, right? I honestly think you've forfeited what credibility you had in that regard on account of your lies and misrepresentations on the methane issue.

@17: Absolutely hilarious. You breathlessly lecture me on arithmetic and reading comprehension while utterly failing at both.

Here, I will try to explain one last time. Let's see if you can follow along.

As reported here, in Dr. Hansen's worst case projection, "sea levels would rise by several meters as soon as 2050".

The key phase there is "several meters". Now that is not very specific, but where I'm from the word "several" means three or more. And evidently you skipped that day of class, so you'll be surprised to learn that a meter is more than a foot. In fact, 3 meters is equal to 9.84252 feet!

Lo and behold! Jill Stein rounded down when she said "9 ft by 2050" in her tweet!

Moving on, no one claimed that Dr Strauss endorsed Dr Hansen's worst case scenario. But what Dr Strauss did say (it's all there in one sentence) is that 10 feet of sea level rise would displace "12.3 million people". That means 10 feet by 2050 or 10 feet by 2150. It is perfectly clear that this is the figure Stein conveyed in her tweet.

Reading comprehension is important!

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's take a step back and consider the bigger picture.

While you Clintonistas are spending so much effort poring over the minutiae of Jill Stein's tweets, HRC has just named Ken Salazar to head her transition team, where he will be in charge of staffing the 4,000 positions in Clinton's cabinet.

This is a guy who has pushed for the TPP, is a cheerleader for fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline, and is the epitome of the revolving-door crony that Clinton has lately tried to distance herself from.

With this choice Clinton telegraphs her true colors and the policies that her presidency will pursue. This is the rightward shift that we've all been warned was coming.

And where is The Stranger's reporting of this incredibly significant development in the Clinton campaign? A single mention tucked innocuously into this feel good piece about HRC's transition team being majority women.

Shameful.

@22: Reading comprehension IS important, and I advise you to try it sometime.
Sure, Ms. Vaidyanathan says "several meters as soon as 2050". But it's not what the Stein campaign spokeswoman said ("several meters of sea level rise as soon as the next 50 years"), and it's certainly not what the Hansen et al. paper claims. What's the actual worst case scenario we're talking about here? Well, if you will direct your attention to Figure 5(b) of the paper itself, you'll see that even with a 5 year doubling time, the resulting sea level rise is projected to be just a hair over 1m by 2050.
So apparently, your argument in defense of Jill Stein is that it's not her fault, because a writer from ClimateWire did a little inaccurate reporting. Yeah, that dog don't hunt, buddy.

And do you need someone to explain to you the difference between 9 feet and 10 feet? (It may not seem like much, but let me tell you as a scientist that these things matter.) You're recklessly casting about for some number vaguely related to the Stein campaign's claims and making whatever assumptions you need to make everything fit into your narrative. (Again: the Stein campaign confirmed that they got the 9 feet claim from Hansen et al. but haven't given a source on the 12.3M figure. You can't just assume things because they seem reasonable; plenty of reasonable-seeming connections turn out to be baloney.)

@23: So...nothing about Jill Stein's anti-science record? To paraphrase:
"Never mind all that stuff Stein said about how we can't trust research and how we need to ban things for being scary! Look over here! Hillary Clinton hired A GUY WITH TIES TO THE PETROLEUM INDUSTRY!"

Good lord you are desperate, kid. Your repeated claims of being a scientist don't make your weaksauce attacks any more valid.

For a tweet beginning with the word "could", the rigors you are trying to apply are beyond reason. When we are dealing with a figure as specific as "several meters", 9 ft versus 10 ft is insignificant. And again the minimum interpretation of "several meters" is 9.84252 ft. If an accurate model shows 12.3 million people displaced by 10 feet of rise, we can reasonably accept that as a ballpark figure for 9.84252 ft.

But if you really want to get that precise, fair enough -- figure 5(b) in the report does show about a 1.5 m sea level rise by 2050 for a 5-year doubling time. And that very same projection shows a 5 m rise by 2060! With a 10-year doubling time, the figure shows we'd hit a 3 m rise by about 2085.

Perhaps Vaidyanathan misinterpreted Hansen's report when making the comment about "several meters as soon as 2050", or perhaps she is referencing some other data. I can't access the ClimateWire article she links to, so I don't know either way. But looking at that WaPo article we find:

Figueroa also pointed to an April article in the Insurance Journal, which paraphrased the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Margaret Davidson, a coastal sciences advisor, as follows: “Davidson said recent data that has been collected but has yet to be made official indicates sea levels could rise by roughly 3 meters or 9 feet by 2050-2060, far higher and quicker than current projections.”

And later:

As for the article quoting NOAA’s Margaret Davidson, she appears to have subsequently clarified her words, in an email to Slate’s Eric Holthaus. There, Davidson cited concerns about rapid loss of West Antarctica and said “actually said my personal opinion was increasingly leaning towards 2-3 meters in next 50 years (that 2100 was not a useful frame for most people).”

So maybe Stein didn't see the clarification that the estimate was 3 meters by 2065 rather than 2050. Surely that's justification enough to hound her for being anti-science, right?

Moving on, your paraphrasing skills are as bad as your reading comprehension. Your lame attempt to trivialize HRC's pick of Salazar is quite telling. You want to talk about reckless? Hillary is now giving shape to an administration that has the telltale signs of one that will continue if not ramp up policy that accelerates climate change.

While you're bitching and moaning about the precision of Jill Stein's interpretation of a worst case scenario, Hillary is making choices that just might ensure we hit that worst case scenario!

Get your fucking priorities straight, son.

@25: So let me get your reasoning straight:
-It's not Jill Stein's fault that her campaign made an outrageous claim unsupported by the evidence because a journalist inaccurately reported the modeled results of a study (that anyone can pull up and skim through), and because another journalist misinterpreted the remarks of an NOAA official regarding unpublished data.
-Exaggerating the worst-case conclusions of a study whose middle-of-the-road projections are already far outside the mainstream predicted trajectories isn't misleading, because what difference does ten years make?
-There's no difference between a study explicitly cited by a campaign as their source for a claim, and a projection with numbers that are vaguely similar but which the campaign hasn't said anything about, as far as conclusiveness of origin goes.

Really?
And once more, I'd love to hear your response to Jill Stein's anti-science policy proposals. This reckless exaggeration (because we should TOTALLY engage in counterfactual alarmism like the deniers already think we're doing) is just another drop in the bucket.

I'll get to the Clinton distraction later (gotta go to work now) but teal deer is that you're wrong and you should feel bad.

@25: So, your distraction from Stein's unscientific policy proposals is to point out that she tapped Ken Salazar to lead her transition team? And you think that Salazar, who admittedly is friendlier to the petroleum industry than many Democrats, is going to use this authority to enact an agenda cutting efficiency standards, eliminating emissions controls, and pushing fossil fuels at the expense of renewables?

If Salazar really were so dead-set on giving fossil fuel companies everything they want, please explain why he didn't do so during the four years he was Secretary of the Interior. (After all, environmental causes have advanced under the Obama Administration, including during his first term when Salazar was in charge.)

And Salazar is absolutely correct that fracking CAN be done safely and responsibly (see above in my critique of Stein's knee-jerk opposition to it) and that it should be done when plausible in order to increase production of shale gas and reduce our dependency on coal.
You, like such others as anon1256 and TheMisanthrope, are simply projecting your worst nightmares onto a candidate you dislike (regardless of her actual record on the issues) and engaging in the most vapid sort of conspiracy theorizing (she's secretly in favor of everything we hate! the head of the CoC said so!) to support your delusions.

(in first paragraph of #27, "she" being Hillary Clinton. realized I left that super ambiguous)

After all of your twaddle, the only offense you can possibly attribute to Stein is that she tweeted a worst case scenario that was off by 15-30 years from the projections of several authorities (though she was likely referencing one of the two reports discussed above that put the 3m threshold at 2050).

Despite your claim of being politically independent, your zeal for disparaging Stein flags you as a (perhaps unwitting) lackey of the anti-Green establishment. This transparent smear job to tarnish Dr. Stein -- a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard and former teacher at Harvard Medical School -- as "anti-science" is blatant character assassination.

There is nothing remotely "anti-science" about taking a cautionary approach to potentially hazardous technology. Fracking has been documented to contaminate groundwater and cause earthquakes. Nuclear energy always carries the possibility of disaster as the Fukushima catastrophe illustrates all too well. The hornet's nest of nuclear waste disposal is just the icing on that shitcake.

When recent research shows that we can shift to 100% renewables to fulfill all of our energy needs within decades, there is simply no justification for increasing environmental pollution and jeopardy to human health and life merely to further enrich energy barons and their political cronies. There is no doubt where Salazar's allegiances lie.

And no, Stein assuredly does not promote homeopathy, so do yourself a favor and drop that line of horseshit now.

Whether you know it or not you are carrying water for the power elites in this increasingly unequal system. I hope you wise up soon.

The Salazar line should link here: www.commondreams.org/views/2016/08/22/cl…

I don't know why the links aren't working. It's an article at Common Dreams by Norman Solomon titled "Clinton’s Transition Team: A Corporate Presidency Foretold".

Final attempt: https://t.co/anaSFCnOdv

Oh, and I didn't even mention the most dangerous consequence of fracking: methane leaks. As Bill McKibben lays out in this excellent piece, the magnitude of methane leaking from fracking operations has considerably offset much of the supposed carbon emission benefits of natural gas vis a vis coal.

Here are a few excerpts:

If you combine Howarth’s estimates of leakage rates and the new standard values for the heat-trapping potential of methane, then the picture of America’s total greenhouse-gas emissions over the last 15 years looks very different: Instead of peaking in 2007 and then trending downward, as the EPA has maintained, our combined emissions of methane and carbon dioxide have gone steadily and sharply up during the Obama years, Howarth says. We closed coal plants and opened methane leaks, and the result is that things have gotten worse.

With that in mind, the other conclusion from the new data is even more obvious: We need to stop the fracking industry in its tracks, here and abroad. Even with optimistic numbers for all the plausible leaks fixed, Howarth says, methane emissions will keep rising if we keep fracking.

We’ve reached the point, that is, where the idea of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to a renewable future is a marketing slogan, not a realistic claim (even if that’s precisely the phrase that Hillary Clinton used to defend fracking in a debate earlier this month).

Except we’ve been doing exactly the opposite. We’ve become the planet’s salesman for natural gas—and a key player in this scheme could become the next president of the United States. When Hillary Clinton took over the State Department, she set up a special arm, the Bureau of Energy Resources, after close consultation with oil and gas executives. This bureau, with 63 employees, was soon helping sponsor conferences around the world. And much more: Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that the secretary of state was essentially acting as a broker for the shale-gas industry, twisting the arms of world leaders to make sure US firms got to frack at will.



The new data prove them entirely wrong. The global-warming fight can’t just be about carbon dioxide any longer. Those local environmentalists, from New York State to Tasmania, who have managed to enforce fracking bans are doing as much for the climate as they are for their own clean water. That’s because fossil fuels are the problem in global warming—and fossil fuels don’t come in good and bad flavors. Coal and oil and natural gas have to be left in the ground. All of them.

@32 You don't understand Ishmael: we are obviously all "lying" to Venomlash as he claims repeatedly (but hey, WE are the paranoid "conspiracy theorist" after all). Our little friend has an ego the size of the empire state building and will never admit to anything (he is in fact actively moving ever further to the right just to defend Clinton's actions) . His arguing that Hansen et al didn't find a possible 5m SLR by 2050 when figure 5b sure look like it happening by ~2055 and that the error bars involved in the exercise are obviously quite large points to his not understanding the purpose of the study in the first place (purpose being to show that a multi-meter SLR is possible this century) and shines an adequate light on his "i only wear the mantle of science" posturing.

It is always amusing when Venomlash gets into comment thread fight. Remember folks 'touch not the cat bot a glove'

I <3 Venomlash.

@29: "the only offense you can possibly attribute to Stein is that she tweeted a worst case scenario that was off by 15-30 years from the projections of several authorities"
Once more, please read my post #18. FRACKING, NUCLEAR POWER, GENETIC MODIFICATION, ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE, VACCINES. Her policy positions range from crank-pandering (in the case of the last) to outright rejection of the evidence (the first three). You're not doing yourself any favors by repeatedly denying that I've given examples of Stein's anti-science positions.

"This transparent smear job to tarnish Dr. Stein -- a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard and former teacher at Harvard Medical School -- as 'anti-science' is blatant character assassination."
Nice appeal to authority, jackass. Dr. Ben Carson is a graduate of Yale and of the University of Michigan, and is legitimately one of the finest neurosurgeons of his era. And yet he's a climate denier and a Creationist, and has repeated the ludicrous claim that the Pyramids were built to store grain. So how dare I accuse such an accredited individual (a medical doctor, for crying out loud!) of being anti-science! Why, it's the education that counts, not the delusional and factually challenged public statements, right?

"There is nothing remotely 'anti-science' about taking a cautionary approach to potentially hazardous technology."
This is the attitude that leads people to want to shut down CERN because they think it'll create a black hole. This is the attitude that causes people to oppose the irradiation of foods because they think it'll turn the foods radioactive. This is the attitude that gives us South Korean fans that shut off automatically because people think they'll use up all the oxygen otherwise.
There is nothing wrong with a cautious approach IF that caution is based in the facts. And unfortunately, Stein's claims here do not qualify as such. It's based in fear-mongering, playing to underinformed (and outright misinformed) paranoiacs and NIMBYs.

"Fracking has been documented to contaminate groundwater and cause earthquakes."
One, you (and your source) have conflated hydraulic fracturing with wastewater injection. (It's a common mistake, but you're still wrong.) Two, fracking HAS caused damage, but these risks can be minimized through regulation. Both groundwater contamination and fault lubrication are contingent (as briefly mentioned above) on communication between the fracked reservoir and local aquifers or fault zones. If the reservoir is relatively isolated, being bounded by impermeable units, fluids injected into it will remain there. And happily, we have ways of mapping out the lithology of an area in order to determine if this is the case. (I speak of well core analysis, well logs, reflection seismology, and a few others.) I've been telling anon1256 about this for a while now, but he's apparently determined not to understand how fracking can be done safely.

"Nuclear energy always carries the possibility of disaster as the Fukushima catastrophe illustrates all too well. The hornet's nest of nuclear waste disposal is just the icing on that shitcake."
You, like most of the anti-nuclear crusaders, are stuck thinking in the paradigms of the past. You know when Fukushima Daiichi was built? 1967! We're still using designs from forty-plus years ago for most of our nuclear power generation, from before we had modern CAD software and the sophisticated simulation tools that allow engineers today to test their work before building it. Why are such old reactors still in service? It's complicated, but a big part of why is that anti-nuclear advocates prevent them from being replaced with newer, safer, and more efficient designs through their unceasing opposition to new nuclear projects.
And of course, it's important to note that the relevant concern is not how much radiation nuclear power plants emit, but rather how much they emit compared to alternative sources of power generation. Under normal operating conditions, a single kWh generated by a coal plant comes with several times more released radiation than that same kWh generated by a uranium fission plant. And that's not even considering the heavy metals, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur oxides released from coal-burning! And if you're worried about catastrophic failure of nuclear power plants (say, when an 48-year-old plant is struck by the fourth-most-powerful earthquake ever recorded at a bare 100 miles from the epicenter and then hit by the associated tsunami), may I recommend to you the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR)? It's got its own technical challenges to work out, but it's been done successfully, and the nature of its structure and operation is such that it doesn't suffer from the same meltdown risks as conventional uranium reactors.
Educate yourself on the issues before forming your opinions.

"When recent research shows that we can shift to 100% renewables to fulfill all of our energy needs within decades"
One, that's not research. It's a proposal. Two, Prof. Jacobson attacks nuclear power for its physical footprint while claiming that wind turbines are "merely poles in the ground"; I should hope he is aware of turbines' effects on aerial biota in their vicinity. Wind farms, while certainly useful in the fight against climate change, do have deleterious effects on birds, bats, and (let us not forget) insects that pass by them, not only due to the spinning blades but also as a result of the pressure disruptions they cause. Three, he's suggesting that we resort to hydrogen fuel cells as a way of moving away from gasoline. As I have told John Bailo many a time, fuel cells are absolutely fucking stupid, and I really hope I don't have to explain why to you.

"Stein assuredly does not promote homeopathy"
I never said she did. Reading comprehension is important! What I said, and which is true, is that the official platform of her party contained, up until a few weeks ago, explicit support for the practice. Given that she's been a major player in the party for quite some time, and given that she was actually their nominee four years ago, why did it take them that long to can their support of it? (Or more likely, make said support implicit rather than explicit.) Could it be that they pander to anti-science cranks?

"Whether you know it or not you are carrying water for the power elites in this increasingly unequal system."
Excuse me, but I'm not going to hold the truth hostage to political expediency. As I said above, I'm for the evidence, wherever it may lead. If the glorious revolution can't work within the confines of objective fact, it doesn't deserve to win out, and it will not have my support.

@31: So in other words, some guy doesn't like Salazar, and Sanders delegates (not to be confused with Sanders supporters) don't like Kaine.
Say, if Kaine is really such a union-buster, how come the AFL-CIO rated him between 92% and 100%? Meanwhile, William K. Black seeks to tar Salazar by imaginary association to a shadowy group of alleged ultraconservative puppet-masters within the Democratic Party, and by real association to the lobbying firm WilmerHale (conveniently leaving out WilmerHale's more or less respectable track record). No actual evidence to support the wild claims you're making, but I can't exactly bring myself to be surprised at that.
But hey, let's hear it again: if Salazar is actually planning to do the nefarious bidding of the petroleum industry in his every move, why didn't he do so as Secretary of the Interior?

@32: I've been over this already with anon1256. The teal deer is that you're both cherry-picking high estimates of methane emissions over low estimates with no objective rationale as to why, trying to extrapolate from particularly leaky plays while ignoring better-managed ones with far lower emissions per unit of production (cough cough PERMIAN), focusing on the 20-year analysis while ignoring the 100-year one, and completely ignoring the loss-reduction technology that has (where implemented) resulted in HUGE FUKKEN DRASTIC DECREASES in upstream methane losses. (See the linked thread for sources on that.)

@33: Careful with those quotation marks, anon1256. They have meaning, you know.
Now, do I actually have to explain to you the difference between 2050 and 2055? It's kinda stupendous, honestly, that you're still defending Stein's claims on this matter. She takes a projection that's ALREADY outside the climatological mainstream (not that that's inherently bad), takes that projection's WORST CASE SCENARIOS, and then what does she do? She EXAGGERATES THEM FURTHER. The denialists love to claim that we're just a bunch of alarmists making dire predictions that won't come true, and you want us to vote for the person who's doing her best to prove those assholes right in that respect?
Now, to simplify things for you: I am not claiming exclusive rights to scientific accuracy. I'm just calling out a few of those who don't qualify for their distortions, fabrications, and general subjugation of fact to ideology. Case in point:
"the error bars involved in the exercise are obviously quite large"
Or put differently, YOU'RE JUST GOING TO MAKE AN ENTIRELY BASELESS ASSUMPTION TO HIDE THE FACT THAT STEIN'S CLAIM LIES ABOUT THE RESULTS OF THE STUDY. What on Earth makes you think the error bars are that large? Hell, what makes you think that graph even HAS error bars? Are you aware of what Figure 5 even represents? GOOD GOD ALMIGHTY, you are dense.

For those following from home, Figure 5(a) of Hansen et al. 2015 simply plots the volume of meltwater released each year ASSUMING that melting follows an exponential increase curve, in which total (cumulative) melt doubles every 50, 10, or 20 years until reaching a maximum threshold corresponding to 1 or 5 meters of sea level increase. Figure 5(b) simply plots the sea level increase under those scenarios.
These are not predictions, per se. They are hypotheticals, assumptions made for the sake of simulation. I've been going with the 5-year doubling time as the "worst case scenario" because it's the worst case they've entertained the possibility of; the authors in fact admit that it is worse than is really plausible, but simulated it for convenience's sake (and also to model how the Earth's climate might respond to drastic acceleration of icemelt):

Doubling times of 10, 20 and 40 years, reaching meter-scale sea level rise in 50, 100, and 200 years may be a more realistic range of timescales, but 40 years yields little effect this century, the time of most interest, so we learn more with less computing time using the 5-, 10- and 20-year doubling times.

The curves are not measurements. They are not the result of some simulation. They are the GIVENS in a computer experiment, and so there are no error bars associated with them, which anon1256 would have realized had he read the study instead of just looking at the pretty pictures and making shit up. (And how eerily crisp, smooth, and geometric the curves are really should have tipped him off.)

Now just to be clear, I should probably have been clearer and more explicit as to the nature of the figure I was talking about. But hey, if you can't skim a few pages on your own without someone holding your hand, you probably shouldn't be telling the people who DID do the reading that they're wrong.

@37: "But hey, let's hear it again: if Salazar is actually planning to do the nefarious bidding of the petroleum industry in his every move, why didn't he do so as Secretary of the Interior?"

And what makes you think he didn't do exactly that? The devastation of the Gulf of Mexico by the BP Deepwater Horizon spill happened under Salazar's watch, after his department had given BP an exemption from conducting an environmental impact study.

Two great articles from 2010 detail Salazar's cronyism and ineptitude that created the conditions under which the BP disaster occurred.

One at Salon:

Salazar turned out to be exactly what it was obvious he would be when Obama chose him. As Mother Jones‘ Kate Sheppard reported this week, Salazar hired Sylvia B. Vaca for the position of deputy administrator for land and minerals management. Who is Vaca? She’s a former BP Executive who is the classic case of the revolving-door sleaze that runs the Federal Government on behalf of the industries it purportedly regulates. She was an Interior Department official during the Clinton administration, and then — when the GOP took over — she went to BP where she ”held several senior management positions with the company,” then went back to the Interior Department under Salazar. Though she did not work on BP matters, she is, as Sheppard put it, “an excellent example of the revolving door between government and industry that MMS has been accused of facilitating” (h/t Susie Madrak).

And one at Rolling Stone:

Salazar was far less aggressive, however, when it came to making good on his promise to fix MMS. Though he criticized the actions of "a few rotten apples" at the agency, he left long-serving lackeys of the oil industry in charge. "The people that are ethically challenged are the career managers, the people who come up through the ranks," says a marine biologist who left the agency over the way science was tampered with by top officials. "In order to get promoted at MMS, you better get invested in this pro-development oil culture." One of the Bush-era managers whom Salazar left in place was John Goll, the agency's director for Alaska. Shortly after, the Interior secretary announced a reorganization of MMS in the wake of the Gulf disaster, Goll called a staff meeting and served cake decorated with the words "Drill, baby, drill."

[...]

Under Salazar, MMS continued to issue categorical exclusions to companies like BP, even when they lacked the necessary permits to protect endangered species. A preliminary review of the BP disaster conducted by scientists with the independent Deepwater Horizon Study Group concludes that MMS failed to enforce a host of environmental laws, including the Clean Water Act. "MMS and Interior are equally responsible for the failures here," says the former agency scientist. "They weren't willing to take the regulatory steps that could have prevented this incident."

Just two years later it was Salazar who opened up the Arctic sea to … for the first time in two decades. He was later forced to rescind that approval when Shell fucked up their first attempt. But they were back at it again in 2015 -- I'm sure you were at the Shell No! protests with the rest of us, right?

If you want more, here's a thorough rundown of Salazar's judgement in appointments during his tenure as Secretary of the Interior:

“The Department of the Interior desperately needs a strong, forward looking, reform-minded Secretary,” says Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity. “Unfortunately, Ken Salazar is not that man. He endorsed George Bush’s selection of Gale Norton as Secretary of Interior, the very woman who initiated and encouraged the scandals that have rocked the Department of the Interior. Virtually all of the misdeeds described in the Inspector General’s expose occurred during the tenure of the person Ken Salazar advocated for the position he is now seeking.”As a leading indicator of just how bad Salazar may turn out to be, an environmentalist need only bushwhack through the few remaining daily papers to the stock market pages, where energy speculators, cheered at the Salazar pick, drove up the share price of coal companies, such as Peabody, Massey Energy and Arch Coal. The battered S&P Coal index rose by three per cent on the day Obama introduced the coal-friendly Salazar as his choice to head Interior.

With Salazar as Clinton's transition team chair, the continuity between the Bush-Obama-Clinton administrations should disturb anyone who gives half a damn about this country or this planet. Given Clinton's and Salazar's track records it would be naive to think they won't make partnerships with Big Oil a priority in their administration.

And still The Stranger remains silent on Clinton's pick of Salazar.

Oh, Jill clarified her statement on Hansen's worst-case scenario in a press conference yesterday. She acknowledged that the gravest projection shows a several meter rise occurring "as soon as 50 years from now", as the abstract of Hansen's paper makes clear ("nonlinearly growing sea level rise, reaching several meters over a timescale of 50–150 years").

And I only just noticed that Jill's twitter account is managed by campaign staff, she most likely didn't even send the tweet herself.

Aside to anon1256 @33: I've seen you attempt to enlighten him in the past. I commend you for your valiant yet futile efforts.

@33

Now, do I actually have to explain to you the difference between 2050 and 2055?

The extent of your intellectual dishonesty is mesmerizing. It doesn't entirely surprise me though as you have displayed it on many occasions before in your attacks on Stein and defense of Clinton.

@39: "The devastation of the Gulf of Mexico by the BP Deepwater Horizon spill happened under Salazar's watch, after his department had given BP an exemption from conducting an environmental impact study."
So...the Minerals Management Service conducted basically the same study on previous work at the Deepwater Horizon site (and others) in 2007, according to your link. And then they granted BP a fairly routine waiver (hundreds issued every year) based on the earlier studies and BP's assurances, and because this happened three months after Salazar became Secretary, this is apparently proof that he's some evil peon of oil interests? The evidence is slightly less conclusive than that proving Hillary did Benghazi.
As for the rest, there's a difference between failing to clean house sufficiently and being a co-conspirator with petroleum companies. I've readily admitted that Salazar is more friendly to the energy industry than are many other Democrats, but his record simply doesn't support your claims. He's voted on multiple occasions to protect the ANWR from petroleum exploration, to set more ambitious goals increasing the share of energy from renewables and decreasing oil consumption, against giving China and India essentially veto power over our climate change response, and in favor of tax credits for energy conservation. (source) You're cherry-picking the facts and drastically distorting his record in order to portray him as a villain.

@40: multi-meter ≠ several meters
It's pretty clear from the abstract and from Figure 5(b) that the authors speak of the point where sea level rise surpasses one meter.
"I only just noticed that Jill's twitter account is managed by campaign staff, she most likely didn't even send the tweet herself."
Oh, okay. She didn't falsely exaggerate the results of a study herself; it was just done in her name by someone she authorized to speak for her. Completely different!

@41: Meaning, exactly...what?
I'm sorry, I'm not the one inventing phantom error bars in an attempt to twist a study into supporting a batshit claim. Care to explain what's so dishonest about recognizing that five years makes a difference?
Nice job running away from THAT one, m88. :^)

I've got a nerdgirl-woody for Venomlash's brain right now.

@42: "So...the Minerals Management Service conducted basically the same study on previous work at the Deepwater Horizon site (and others) in 2007, according to your link. And then they granted BP a fairly routine waiver (hundreds issued every year) based on the earlier studies and BP's assurances,"

Wow dude, I did not expect you to be so blunt in your approval of such egregious regulatory capture. Well played. At least now I know where you're coming from: you support the fossil fuel industry full bore and welcome their domination of government. (By the way, a few token pro-environment votes as Senator -- a position in which he was at least partially bound by the will of his constituents in Colorado -- does not confer Salazar trustworthiness in the executive branch.)

But just so we're all on the same page, let's go ahead and state the obvious: when a department of the government bases its decisions on the assurances of a corporation that it is charged with regulating, you've got malfeasance at best and corruption at worst.

I am dismayed to see commenters Sandiai and Lissa applauding such an asinine outlook.

Let's take another look at that Rolling Stone article (emphasis mine):

Scientists like Steiner had urgently tried to alert Obama to the depth of the rot at MMS. "I talked to the transition team," Steiner says. "I told them that MMS was a disaster and needed to be seriously reformed." A top-to-bottom restructuring of MMS didn't require anything more than Ken Salazar's will: The agency only exists by order of the Interior secretary. "He had full authority to change anything he wanted," says Rep. Issa, a longtime critic of MMS. "He didn't use it." Even though Salazar knew that the environmental risks of offshore drilling had been covered up under Bush, he failed to order new assessments. "They could have said, 'We cannot conclude there won't be significant impacts from drilling until we redo those reviews,'" says Brendan Cummings, senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity. "But the oil industry would have cried foul. And what we've seen with Salazar is that when the oil industry squeaks, he retreats."

One last thing: "And then they granted BP a fairly routine waiver (hundreds issued every year)"

There's a term for that. It's called rubber stamping:

In April 2009, the DOI’s Mineral Management Service (MMS) provided BP with a “categorical exclusion” from impact studies mandated by the EPA. BP was not alone. A DOI spokesperson told the Washington Post that the agency routinely grants 250 to 400 waivers per year. Much like he had the coal companies in the Powder River Basin, Salazar allowed BP and other offshore drillers to operate outside of the law. Instead of an independent study, the agency relied on BP’s self-assessment, which was heavily colored by the company’s desire to continue production, that the likelihood of a major spill was “minimal or non-existent” (Washington Post, 5/5/2010). In addition, no notice was taken that BP had contracted Halliburton to cement the rig while the company was under investigation for a faulty cementing job that led to a spill in the Timor Sea in 2009.

In the days prior to the spill, BP was using its ample lobbying muscle to push the MMS to extend its waiver, thereby avoiding a new environmental impact study. This proposal would have undoubtedly been accepted by a DOI that, under Ken Salazar’s direction, had been reduced to rubber stamp for big oil and big coal.

Hey, wanna hear something absolutely hilarious? One of the firms BP contracted to lobby for them at that time was the Podesta Group, which was founded by brothers Tony and John Podesta:

BP also hired the Podesta Group, led by uber-lobbyist Tony Podesta, to lobby Congress. Podesta is a top Washington insider whose brother is former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta. The firm also counts David Marin among its lobbyists - he once served as a top GOP investigator for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Yep, that John Podesta -- Hillary Clinton's current campaign chair. You can't make this stuff up, folks.

@42 This is what I said: "His arguing that Hansen et al didn't find a possible 5m SLR by 2050 when figure 5b sure look like it happening by ~2055 and that the error bars involved in the exercise are obviously quite large points to his not understanding the purpose of the study in the first place (purpose being to show that a multi-meter SLR is possible this century) and shines an adequate light on his "i only wear the mantle of science" posturing. "

In other words, I said that the uncertainty involved was quite large and frothing at the mouth over a few years in the timing of events showed that you were clueless. Responding by claiming that I said there were error bars as if the nature of the work lent itself to it points again to your intent to obfuscate, especially when combined with your continuing insistence that a difference of 5 years in the timing of events is meaningful in this context. Either the error is quantifiable and Stein slightly misstating the timing of events may be significant or this is a gross estimate and Stein slight error in the timing of events has no importance whatsoever, you can't have it both ways, imbecile. As i have said a few times already, I am quite fed up having to correct your continual distortions, and misdirection but let me assure you that I am not impressed by your grandstanding and that it won't work.

Nothing to see here, it's all a conspiracy theory.

Whistleblower: EPA Official Covered Up Methane Leakage Problems across US Natural Gas Industry — News Release from NC WARN

At least 10 people, including high-ranking EPA officials, directly knew that devices used in two critical studies of methane leakage and venting at fracking gas sites were underreporting. The inventor of the key device found that it was malfunctioning – and reports that EPA has covered it up for three years. Even the manufacturer later admitted its Bacharach samplers were widely underreporting the emissions of methane, a super-potent greenhouse gas that’s now driving the climate toward a chaotic tipping point, due largely to the recent fracking boom.

News Release from NC WARN

@44: "Wow dude, I did not expect you to be so blunt in your approval of such egregious regulatory capture."
Read what I wrote again, dickhole. I'm not arguing that such waivers should be handed out like candy the way they are; I'm simply pointing out that they were common and unremarkable long before Ken Salazar took office, and that you've been incredibly misleading and dishonest by claiming that it's all Salazar's fault that BP got one. The is-ought distinction escapes you, I guess?

"By the way, a few token pro-environment votes as Senator -- a position in which he was at least partially bound by the will of his constituents in Colorado -- does not confer Salazar trustworthiness in the executive branch."
Yeah! Never mind his voting history! Never mind his actual track record! What matters is that you think he's secretly going to hand the government over to the fossil fuel industry! </sarcasm>
If it's all the same to you, I'm going to judge my politicians based on what they do, not what some guy with an agenda thinks about them. It's called empiricism...

"A top-to-bottom restructuring of MMS didn't require anything more than Ken Salazar's will: The agency only exists by order of the Interior secretary."
It's like you're thoroughly unfamiliar with the nature of bureaucracies. Just because the Secretary of the Interior has final authority over an agency doesn't mean they can make everything happen with a snap of their fingers. I mean, the President has final authority over the entire Cabinet and their respective staff; they all serve at the President's pleasure, right? And yet when the Bush Administration fired a bunch of U.S. Attorneys, they got in trouble over it, because the firings were seen as (and almost certainly were) politically motivated and because no clear rationale was given for giving them their walking papers. Even if one technically has the authority to hire and fire people at will, indiscriminate use of that power quickly gets one in trouble. (And this doesn't even get to the trouble of replacing people with qualified and competent candidates, especially those who will be in position to make major decisions.)
The Rolling Stone article even (reluctantly) admits that he hung crooked employees out to dry when he had the evidence, referring them to prosecution. But apparently if he wasn't able to find conclusive evidence of wrongdoing on the part of everyone who was on the take, and was unwilling to abuse the powers of his office on a witch hunt, it means that he (surprise surprise) must be a puppet of oil companies, according to you.

@45: Again, you're pretending that everything was hunky-dory at MMS until Salazar took over and brought out the rubber stamps. And that's simply not true; it's a problem that long predated his tenure.
And hey, you know who else the Podesta Group lobbied for? National Public Radio, Michelin, and the Republic of Georgia, among others. This bullshit guilt-by-association, in which anyone who hires a lobbyist who takes on clients of questionable ethics must himself be evil, is conspiracy-mongering of the lowest kind.

@46: ...except that your claim regarding the uncertainties in the graph was false from start to finish! (Please reread post #38 if you struggle to understand.) Faced with the necessity of finding some rationale by which to defend a false claim, you chose to invent uncertainties out of thin air. If you're going to point to peer-reviewed articles in support of your claims, I really must insist that you limit said claims to what is actually supported by those articles.

"your continuing insistence that a difference of 5 years in the timing of events is meaningful in this context"
I'm sorry, five years is not an insignificant amount of time when it comes to modern events. Are you saying that it's okay that Stein lied, because she only lied about a few years one way or the other? Heck, why not scale that lie up a bit then? Please tell me, by how many years must one exaggerate a timescale before you'd consider it an actual lie and not a benign embellishment? Let's hear it, you jive turkey.

"Either the error is quantifiable and Stein slightly misstating the timing of events may be significant or this is a gross estimate and Stein slight error in the timing of events has no importance whatsoever, you can't have it both ways, imbecile.
Nice false dichotomy. If you actually READ THE PAPER, you'll see that the 5-year doubling time, 5m sea level rise curve was a worst-case scenario far beyond that which the evidence supported, one which they entertained merely as a what-if and for convenience of simulation. Again, IT'S NOT A PROJECTION BASED ON A MODEL, BUT RATHER AN ASSUMPTION MADE FOR THE SAKE OF EXPERIMENT. THERE IS NO ERROR ASSOCIATED WITH THE CURVE, AND IT IS NOT AN ESTIMATE.
Your frantic backpedaling reveals a certain disdain for evidence, I'd say. Rather than admit that someone you like lied, exaggerated, or distorted the literature, you come up with all sorts of roundabout explanations attempting to justify the statement in question, even if it means misrepresenting a study yourself.

"I am quite fed up having to correct your continual distortions, and misdirection"
That's big talk coming from a guy who literally made up confidence intervals for a graph that doesn't have any error in order to try and spin the figure into supporting a false claim made by a politician he likes. (And that's not even getting into all the bullshit you invented back on the topic of shale gas.) I guess whenever I point out a lie you told, it's misdirection, because I'm distracting the reader from how Jill Stein Is Totally The Best Scientist In Politics, huh...?

@43: XOXOX

@47: ANTI-FRACKING ADVOCACY GROUP RELEASES ANTI-FRACKING OPINION PIECE! FILM AT ELEVEN!
If I cited a Tea Party website's (unsourced) writeup in a discussion about Clinton's bona fides, would you take me seriously? Of course not, because they're not an objective and reputable source. (And before you start telling me that what you're doing is okay because you're the good guys who tell the truth, bear in mind that that's also what the Teabaggers are saying. Learn to distinguish between actual reporting and biased advocacy.)

@48) So let me get this straight: rubber stamping of drilling operations in a Bush administration was inexcusably irresponsible, but rubber stamping of drilling operations in an Obama administration is perfectly understandable because... "that's how bureaucracy works". Ahhh, got it.

>>"Even if one technically has the authority to hire and fire people at will, indiscriminate use of that power quickly gets one in trouble."

The problem is that Salazar indiscriminately used his power to maintain the status quo. A circumspect use of his power would have been to flush out the bad actors and overhaul the agency. AKA doing his job! Confusing stuff, I know.

The lengths that you've gone to in order to defend Salazar's glaring malfeasance and ineptitude is quite stunning. But I guess ethics and integrity go right out the window when a nominal Democrat is under fire. It is downright astonishing that you can paper over the ties between the fossil fuel industry and the Democratic establishment and the obvious conflict of interest (at the absolute minimum) that that creates. You have a long career of licking the boots of power ahead of you.

Oh, but there's more! (emphasis added):

A 2016 IBT report found that the State Department approved a permit for a major U.S.-Canadian oil pipeline that environmental groups have criticized. In the lead up to the approval, federal records showed that Chevron and ConocoPhilips lobbied the State Department on the issue of “oil sands,” as did a trade association linked to ExxonMobil. That trio of oil conglomerates have delivered between between $2.5 million and $3 million to the Clinton Foundation.

And even more!:

Oil and gas companies have contributed more than $700,000 to Clinton’s campaigns throughout her political career, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. In 2008, she was the seventh-largest recipient of oil and gas campaign cash in the entire Congress. Meanwhile, oil giant ExxonMobil has given at least $1 million to the Clinton Foundation and $2 million to its event arm, called the Clinton Global Initiative, according to the Wall Street Journal. ExxonMobil has contributed $16.8 million to Vital Voices, a nonprofit that Clinton co-founded to empower women, the paper reported.

In her 2016 bid, Clinton has relied on a slew of current and former advocates for the oil and gas industry for fundraising support — including Tony Podesta, the brother of Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta. As recently as this year, Tony Podesta has lobbied for BP, the company responsible for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. He has also lobbied for a company part-owned by ExxonMobil. Podesta has raised over $130,000 for Clinton’s campaign, according to federal election records.

As a senator, Clinton voted twice in favor of expanding offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and to end restrictions on drilling off the coast of Florida. During her time leading the State Department, the agency signed the “U.S.-Mexico Transboundary Hydrocarbons Agreement” — a deal it said would help energy companies expand offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Clinton said the pact would “promote the safe, efficient and equitable exploration and production of cross-boundary reservoirs.”

@51: Okay fuckwad, did you know that quotation marks have meaning? You quoted me as saying "that's how bureaucracy works" in regard to Salazar's tenure as Secretary of the Interior. Care to show me where I wrote that? (PROTIP: you can't, because I never wrote that anywhere here.) If you want to paraphrase me, that's all fine and good, but don't put quotation marks around it or you're shoving YOUR words in MY mouth. If you can't make an argument based on what I actually said and have to resort to lying about my statements and beating a strawman, what does it say about your arguments in the first place?

And hey, speaking of beating a strawman, I never actually said that the rubber-stamping under the Obama administration was good or understandable. All I said was that it wasn't Salazar's doing; he inherited the mess, and there was only so much he could conceivably do about it without causing more problems than he fixed.

"The problem is that Salazar indiscriminately used his power to maintain the status quo."
You've presented literally no evidence to support this bold assertion.
"A circumspect use of his power would have been to flush out the bad actors and overhaul the agency. AKA doing his job!"
The Rolling Stone article that you yourself quoted confirms that he DID do this; their complaint was that he didn't do enough of it (because he apparently had de facto fiat power over every level of the organization). Congratulations, you played yourself.

"The lengths that you've gone to in order to defend Salazar's glaring malfeasance and ineptitude is quite stunning."
I'm just defending a guy against a witch hunt. The fact that you're convinced that he's the puppet of Big Oil (or is he just incompetent? sorry, you can't seem to decide whether he's a bumbling fool or a skilled agent of corruption) in the absence of evidence, or even in the face of evidence, is testament to your disinterest in actually getting to the bottom of the story.

@52: Goodness! You mean to say that some of the same oil companies that have benefited from the outcomes of decisions that Clinton could possibly have influenced have given money to charities set up by the Clintons? GOSH.
What are the odds that huge petroleum corporations might be affected by U.S. energy policy and also might donate to one of the larger international humanitarian organizations out there? Surely there is no other explanation than rank corruption!

See, you're still stuck in your sentence-first-verdict-afterwards mentality. You've decided that Hillary Clinton is some kind of ultra-corrupt politician-for-hire, and so you fit everything you see into that mold (or reject it out of hand).
Tell me, can you point to any decision where Clinton wrongly acted based on donations or patronage from any corporate interest? Demanding that any politician change their decision-making to avoid doing anything that will benefit a donor is just as wrong and misguided as improperly aiding a donor. So let's hear it: what did Hillary Clinton, acting as a public servant, do for the purpose of helping a contributor that she wouldn't have done in the absence of the contribution? Come on, don't be shy, hit me with your best example!

And as long as we're on the topic: the smears about the Clinton Foundation are the usual VRWC trash (source). Also, Clinton's campaign hasn't received anywhere near as much money from petroleum interests as some would claim, and telling supporting super PACs to reject donations from people connected with the petroleum industry, as Sanders supporters called on Clinton to do, would actually violate federal law (source).
Gotta stick to the facts if you wanna run with the adults, Ishmael.

@50 Environmentalists actually care about the environment and climate, which is the reason people who actually care about the environment and climate won't outright dismiss their communications as lying propaganda the way you do. I think we know which side you are on given the mass evidence for increase in fugitive methane emissions due to fracking that you have been provided with and your refusal to even entertain that a comprehensive monitoring program was required before you started drilling like only Republicans and corporatists Democrat advocate. Moreover, your proestablishment propaganda has no special claim to balanced reporting as we just saw in your outright dismissal of NC WARN even though I am not sure how you could determine from your couch that their claims were false when they appear to largely rest on the scientific publications by the inventor of the emission monitoring device. You sound a lot like a climate denier.

@49 quit making shit up. I didn't invent a confidence interval. I said that the error bars as in, the uncertainty, was "quite large" and moaning about a minor difference in the timing of events (which could literately be accounted for by rounding down) showed that you were completely out of your depth, which didn't prevent from spewing as if you any competence in this domain.

@52) Your blather is tiresome, kiddo. You've got no substance, only puerile insults. Now you're even contradicting yourself within a single paragraph:

>> "And hey, speaking of beating a strawman, I never actually said that the rubber-stamping under the Obama administration was good or understandable. All I said was that it wasn't Salazar's doing; he inherited the mess, and there was only so much he could conceivably do about it without causing more problems than he fixed."

You're literally making excuses for Salazar's rubber stamping -- i.e. explaining it away as understandable!

I've clearly laid out the case for Salazar's failings as Interior Secretary that make him unfit for the job of transition chair and I've referenced a plenitude of sources that explicate the entire scenario in far more detail. If you're too daft and too deluded to understand the significance of those points there is little reason to think reality is ever going to sink in for you.

>>"What are the odds that huge petroleum corporations might be affected by U.S. energy policy and also might donate to one of the larger international humanitarian organizations out there?"

Are you really this clueless, dipshit? Do you imagine that the creme de la creme of corporate executives attained their positions by being bad at business? Do you think they're in the habit of making investments that don't yield returns? And doing so repeatedly over the course of many years with enormous sums of money? What you can't seem to grasp is that this is not one or two isolated instances here and there, this is a pattern of financial relationships and administrative decisions that benefit those donors and lobbying corporations (see @52 for just a few examples).

And it's not just the Clinton Foundation, Wall Street and Big Oil corporations have donated to the Clintons in a multitude of ways including direct campaign contributions, Super PACs, and exorbitant speaking fees. The pattern is clear. But bully for you, there's no smoking gun to prove outright corruption (yet). There's just a mountain of circumstantial evidence that stinks to high heaven.

>> "And as long as we're on the topic: the smears about the Clinton Foundation are the usual VRWC trash (source)."

Of course! Any criticism of HRC is nothing but a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy! And obviously that notorious right-winger David Sirota is the leader of this VRWC about pay-to-play at the Clinton Foundation!

Oh yah, and the NY Times is part of the VRWC, too:

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

[...]

Amid this influx of Uranium One-connected money, Mr. Clinton was invited to speak in Moscow in June 2010, the same month Rosatom struck its deal for a majority stake in Uranium One.

The $500,000 fee — among Mr. Clinton’s highest — was paid by Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank with ties to the Kremlin that has invited world leaders, including Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, to speak at its investor conferences.

Whoops, that should read "@53)", obviously.

Wow, Venomlash is kicking your fucking ass.

/High fives Venomlash.

@54 Venomlash agrees with Scalia, Thomas and Roberts that only explicit exchanges of money for favors matter and that institutional corruption is a myth. Clintonites used to disagree with Citizens United until Clinton needed corporate money to defeat small donations supported Sanders.

@55: "Environmentalists actually care about the environment and climate, which is the reason people who actually care about the environment and climate won't outright dismiss their communications as lying propaganda the way you do."
Oh, I have no doubt that they care. Unfortunately, as you so keenly demonstrate, caring about the environment doesn't in and of itself make one correct. (This is why we follow the evidence rather than blindly trusting the claims of a perceived authority.) And the NC WARN write-up didn't cite any sources (primary or secondary), merely making vague claims without any attribution. It speaks in the unverifiable weasel words of "high-ranking EPA officials", "[m]any other studies", and "[p]rominent scientists". I refer you to Hitchens's Razor: THAT WHICH IS ASSERTED WITHOUT EVIDENCE CAN BE DISMISSED WITHOUT EVIDENCE.

"I didn't invent a confidence interval. I said that the error bars as in, the uncertainty, was 'quite large'"
Error bars are a graphical representation of a confidence interval. Those error bars you see on some graphs? They typically represent a 90%, 95%, or sometimes even 99% confidence interval. It's okay if you don't have any background in statistics, but please don't throw terminology around willy-nilly if you don't know what it means. And to repeat, the sea level rise curves reported in Figure 5(b) of Hansen et al. 2015 DO NOT HAVE ERROR ASSOCIATED WITH THEM. You're imputing a large confidence interval to a curve that, by its very nature, doesn't have one; that's literally you lying about what a paper says in order to claim that it supports a claim made by a politician. Have you no integrity, no respect for truth? Are you really going over to the Lying For Jesus policy of excusing any falsehood if it is in the service of The Greater Good?

@59: Aaand [citation needed], as usual.
More to the point, I'm not trying to restrict the definition of corruption to explicit quid-pro-quo transactions. I'm just asking that you show some causal effect before insisting that a politician is bought and paid for. What you and Ishmael are demanding is that every public servant meticulously refrain from making any decision, right or wrong, that could possibly benefit anyone who's ever given money to them or to a cause they care about. That's a ludicrous and insane way of running a country.
Suppose a legislator has received campaign donations both from oil and gas companies and also from environmentalist groups. By your standard, they'd be guilty of obvious corruption no matter how they voted on any bill relating to fossil fuels. Comprende-vous?

@56: "Your blather is tiresome, kiddo. You've got no substance, only puerile insults."
Or, to paraphrase: "maybe if I just pretend he doesn't have any arguments, nobody will notice"
+1 for the chutzpah to say "[y]our blather is tiresome, kiddo" and then immediately follow it up with a complaint about me calling you mean names. I gotta respect those big brass balls!

"You're literally making excuses for Salazar's rubber stamping"
And there you go again, characterizing it as something that Salazar did. Read the material over again; the Secretary of the Interior handles high-level policy decisions and isn't involved in the day-to-day issuance of permits and waivers. That's what the Department has lower-level staff for. And as I've pointed out before, the problem of insufficient scrutiny was inherited from Salazar's predecessor, and despite your attribution of godlike powers to the guy who is de jure in charge of everything, he couldn't just fire everyone and pick a new staff that would do a better job. (If you genuinely think that he could have and just chose not to, I refer you to the curious case of Alberto Gonzales.)

"Do you imagine that the creme de la creme of corporate executives attained their positions by being bad at business? Do you think they're in the habit of making investments that don't yield returns?"
...you actually believe that large corporations don't make charitable donations? You actually believe that load of bullshit? Go ahead, tell me how the Ronald McDonald House is really just a slick PR operation for Mickey D's. Let's hear about how Google expects some return on the 9% of their profits that they give away yearly.
Really? That's the best you've got? You're telling me that big companies NEVER give money to worthy causes, that EVERYTHING they do has some ulterior motive. And you know this for a fact because it just sounds right to you! Wow. I'm a cynical sonuvagun, always wondering who benefits, but even I know better than to make that batshit (and, you'll note, completely unsupported) claim.

"But bully for you, there's no smoking gun to prove outright corruption (yet). There's just a mountain of circumstantial evidence that stinks to high heaven."
In other words, you don't have any actual examples of donations swaying Hillary Clinton's judgment to the effect that she put the donor's interests before that of her constituents. You just have some stuff that you think is fishy because you've long since decided that Clinton was guilty of SOMETHING (and you just needed to find out what).

"Any criticism of HRC is nothing but a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy! And obviously that notorious right-winger David Sirota is the leader of this VRWC about pay-to-play at the Clinton Foundation!"
You misunderstand me; the particular line of criticism (that Clinton is a bought-and-paid-for minion of the sneering global elite) you're bringing up has its origins in the VRWC, even if it's delivered by left-wingers who have bought into it.

And no, the NYT isn't part of the VRWC. That's why they didn't accuse Clinton of corruption in connection with the uranium deal. You'll notice that nowhere in that entire chain of events was Clinton actually shown (or even implied) to have done anything unusual or improper to further the deal. The focus of the article is literally that people involved in the deal donated to the Clinton Foundation (which, remember, doesn't pay the Clintons a salary and doesn't contribute to their campaign funds). Sure, the State Department ultimately signed off on the deal, but it was one of many agencies that could have nixed it. So which is more likely: that Clinton knew something that the other agencies didn't but ignored it because the donations had bought her allegiance, or that the State Department simply made the same decision as the others?
This is what I'm talking about. The moment anything looks remotely sketchy regarding the Clintons, you (and all the other Clinton-haters, right and left) declare that it's PROOF POSITIVE that she's been doing everything you've accused her of. Like I said, you already had your mind made up before you looked over any of the evidence. And when you're only expecting to see one thing...well, let's just say you miss the dancing gorilla.

Ishmael, Anon1256, if you just stop moving the cat will get bored and stop smacking you around.

@60 of course you couldn't be bothered to read the original complaint of NC WARN with the EPA. After all NC WARN is only supported in their letter by a few dozen environmental organizations like the Center for Biological Diversity and 350.org so why not keep slandering them. It's pretty obvious that is the course YOU have chosen deliberately instead of reading the original complaint. Again, summarily dismissing evidence that a scientist funded by fossil fuels corps has been promoting faulty technology to monitor methane emissions is similar to what your average climate change denier would do.

Scientists often casually use the expression "error bars" when they discuss uncertainty, I certainly do especially when I am calling you on your nonsense about a minor round off in the context of citing the findings of this study. If you understood what you read (assuming you read it), you'd also know that the authors say that "Actual current freshwater flux may be about a factor of 4 higher than assumed in these initial runs, as we will discuss, and thus effects may occur 20 years earlier.", which is a discussion of uncertainty in the findings and shows that you do not know what you speak about.

@62 yeah sure, Scalia, Roberts and Thomas is such good company. How to you plan to fight the regressive agenda once you have completely surrendered to it and you have no credibility left?

@63: I don't care if NC WARN is supported by the Jackson Five and the Grand Poobah of Outer Slobovia; if they've got a claim to make, they can show us the evidence. THAT IS HOW SCIENCE WORKS.
There's no evidence in the press release you linked or in either of the letters it links to to support the quoted claims. But hey, if it's true, I'm sure you'll be able to easily find documentation of it. And as long as we're on the topic of supporting evidence, how about your accusation of slander, anyhow? (Though it's technically libel if in print; thank you, J. Jonah Jameson.) Care to point out any false claims I made about NC WARN? I described them as an anti-fracking advocacy group, implied that they're not objective, and accused them of making claims without providing supporting evidence and of using vague and misleading language. So, where's the libel? (Or slander for that matter?)
Of course, if by "slander" you mean that I spoke irreverently of an organization you quoted and doubted their claims, count me guilty as sin. That's how it works in your preferred world, where words have whatever meaning you personally want them to have.

"Scientists often casually use the expression 'error bars' when they discuss uncertainty, I certainly do especially when I am calling you on your nonsense about a minor round off in the context of citing the findings of this study."
That's bullshit; error bars have a very specific meaning. We scientists typically just say "uncertainty" or "error" when we mean uncertainty. So having been caught in a lie, you're now claiming that you meant something other that what you actually wrote.
And exaggerating by five years isn't "rounding". Saying "the 2050s" to mean 2055 would be rounding. Saying "2050" to mean 2055 is just blatant misrepresentation. How long are you going to keep insisting that Stein's tweet was accurate to the trends plotted in Hansen et al. in the face of the clear evidence that she exaggerated?

"a discussion of uncertainty in the findings and shows that you do not know what you speak about"
Did you honestly think you'd get that one past me? One, that's talking about temperature response, not sea level rise. Don't try to walk back your fabrications, or pin them to a different trend. Two, that claim is made about a 10-year doubling time, which would see in 2050 an increase of slightly more than 0.6 meters of sea level rise, assuming the increased flux. So if you make that assumption, Stein's claim is...even more wrong!

There you have it, folks. You take a study that suggests the oceans may be rising far faster than the mainstream scientific community suspects, and you take all of ITS worst-case projections, and then you STILL feel the need to exaggerate them, apparently. I mean, the prospect of the oceans rising by a meter or two in the next century is already pretty damn alarming; why must Jill Stein (and her zealous defenders in this thread) lie, when the truth itself would be sufficient? The only explanation is that they just don't care about being accurate.

@64: So when you run into an argument you can't refute, your response is to accuse me of taking similar positions as people you don't like? Well, solid reasoning! I certainly must bow to your mastery of debate! (I do like how you think it's a grave insult to tie me to Justice John Roberts.)

It's Friday evening and I'm not going to waste any more time trying to educate the willfully ignorant.

But for anyone still following along I highly recommend two must-read articles at The Intercept rebutting the recent obfuscations put forth by Clinton apparatchiks like Matthew Yglesias and David Brock (and dutifully repeated by their lackeys here).

* One by Glenn Greenwald:

The reality is that there is ample evidence uncovered by journalists suggesting that regimes donating money to the Clinton Foundation received special access to and even highly favorable treatment from the Clinton State Department. But it’s also true that nobody can dispositively prove the quid pro quo. Put another way, one cannot prove what was going on inside Hillary Clinton’s head at the time that she gave access to or otherwise acted in the interests of these donor regimes: Was she doing it as a favor in return for those donations, or simply because she has a proven affinity for Gulf State and Arab dictators, or because she was merely continuing decades of U.S. policy of propping up pro-U.S. tyrants in the region?

While this “no quid pro quo proof” may be true as far as it goes, it’s extremely ironic that Democrats have embraced it as a defense of Hillary Clinton. After all, this has long been the primary argument of Republicans who oppose campaign finance reform, and indeed, it was the primary argument of the Citizens United majority, once depicted by Democrats as the root of all evil. But now, Democrats have to line up behind a politician who, along with her husband, specializes in uniting political power with vast private wealth, in constantly exploiting the latter to gain the former, and vice versa. So Democrats are forced to jettison all the good-government principles they previously claimed to believe and instead are now advocating the crux of the right-wing case against campaign finance reform: that large donations from vested factions are not inherently corrupting of politics or politicians.

Greenwald goes on to cite the brilliant dissenting opinion of Justice John Paul Stevens in the Citizens United case. An excerpt:

Corruption can take many forms. Bribery may be the paradigm case. But the difference between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind. And selling access is not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one's behalf. Corruption operates along a spectrum, and the majority's apparent belief that quid pro quo arrangements can be neatly demarcated from other improper influences does not accord with the theory or reality of politics.

* And one by Lee Fang:

There may be many other potential influence-peddling stories, but the State Department has not released all of the emails from Clinton’s private server and other meeting log documents, while redacting identifying information that could shed light on other stories. For example, Mother Jones and The Intercept have reported that Clinton used the State Department to promote fracking development across the globe, and in particular her agency acted to benefit particular companies such as a Chevron project in Bulgaria and ExxonMobil’s efforts in Poland. Both ExxonMobil and Chevron are major donors to the Clinton Foundation.

@65 Saying "2050" to mean 2055 is just blatant misrepresentation

perfect illustration of your continual verbal diarrhea

@65 "(I do like how you think it's a grave insult to tie me to Justice John Roberts.) "

As if your liking the favorite of libertarians didn't indicate that you are a right winger

@64 Well to start with I'd stop spinning my wheels in the mud.

@69 If you are looking for something spinning, I'd talk to the guy who claims seriously that "saying 2050 to mean 2055 is just blatant misrepresentation".

@67, 70: So let me get this straight.
You're saying that it's NOT misrepresentation of a fact to say one year and mean an entirely different year?
Just another example of the post-facts society in which we live.

(also, LOL at the guy who's trying to portray Stein's factually-challenged tweet as being plausibly supported by the relevant science...accusing ME of spin.)

@71 rounding off isn't "blatant misrepresentation" when the uncertainty in the finding is significantly larger than the error introduced by rounding off, which is the case here in spite of your obfuscation viz "error bars". Only someone who has no idea about unstable marine based ice sheets would think that a 5 year difference in the timing of projected SLR benchmarks is meaningful within the context of continued GHG emissions. It is already possible that anything we do cannot stop the disintegration of West Antarctica over century-millennia time scales, but we sure can speed it up with unchecked methane emissions among other possibilities.

I wouldn't have said what Stein wanted to express in the fashion she did but I doubt it is possible on tweeter. I would have put it in the context of the state of the science but I don't believe anything she said was factually incorrect according to what we know. The probability of a multi meter sea level rise by mid-century is very low but I assume it is finite with heavy consequences for human societies and consequently cannot be ignored the way you do. Stein was correct to bring it up.

@72: "uncertainty in the finding"
There you go again, making shit up!
The worst case scenario they entertained (5 year doubling time) they directly stated was unrealistic; it is that curve (Figure 5(b)) we were talking about, since it came the CLOSEST to supporting Stein's false claims. Since it came fairly close, you resorted to making up error bars pertaining to it, mistaking an assumed curve for a predicted one.
Caught in your lie, you began searching for figures in the paper with actual uncertainty, settling on a discussion of projected temperature increase (Figure 4). Taking at face value the possibility of faster melt discussed therein, the total sea level rise by 2050 would still be a meter at most, which doesn't remotely come close to supporting Stein's claim.

"I don't believe anything she said was factually incorrect according to what we know."
It's hard to call it "factually incorrect" because she's speaking of future predictions of the state of an incredibly complex system, but she sure as shit doesn't have evidence to support her assertions. I think "factually challenged" works fine in this situation.
"The probability of a multi meter sea level rise by mid-century is very low but I assume it is finite"
There you go again, just ASSUMING that what you're claiming is true. And are you really playing the game of (to paraphrase) "well, it COULD happen, we don't know for a FACT that it's impossible"? Because that's how Republican gynoticians justify requiring doctors to tell women that abortions cause breast cancer. Yeah, we COULD magically see nine feet of sea level rise by 2050. And Donald Trump COULD fuck off into space and become a public defender for some ayylmaos who live on Titan. We don't know for a FACT that it's impossible!

WHEN YOU ASSUME, YOU MAKE AN ASS OUT OF UMA THURMAN.

@73 "Caught in your lie"

Have you talked to your shrink about liars?

@73 rather than seize on the rare opportunity to discuss how future human beings will have to deal with sea level rise because of our burning fossil fuels, you decided to focus on Stein using an extreme estimate of future SLR. Is it really all that you can bring to the table?

@74: No, but I've talked to you about your lies. Bakken and Eagle Ford produce 4/5ths of America's shale gas and oil? Locally increasing methane emissions prove that nationwide methane emissions are rising? Your dogged insistence in this very thread that Stein's claim is actually supported by Hansen et al.?
I especially like how your response to being called out on this shit is to imply that I'm paranoid or delusional and perceiving lies everywhere, dismissing my accusations as the product of mental illness. Say, isn't that what they call "gaslighting"? You're not a very good liberal, are you...

@75: Okay, lying-for-Jesus it is. Yes, because climate change is an important issue, we should just accept that people are going to recklessly exaggerate and not criticize them. After all, since the exaggeration might scare people into doing something about it, the lie is for The Greater Good, right?
WRONG, BOZO. When you have the facts on your side, the worst thing you can do is to lie about them. The prevailing accusation from deniers is that climatologists are a bunch of "alarmists" that greatly exaggerate the hazards facing us. (They seem to conflate climatologists with politicians, but that's a separate issue.) I'm not interested in proving deniers right. I'd rather stick to the facts and follow where the evidence points, not sink to the level of the conspiracy theorists.

Hate crimes by the Far Right are on the upswing and their numbers are growing both here and abroad, and here you are endlessly punching left at a party that poses little threat to you beyond challenging your sense of moral superiority. Rethink your priorities guys.

@76 "Bakken and Eagle Ford produce 4/5ths of America's shale gas and oil?"

I acknowledged that i was mistaken after you pointed out my error. Insisting that I lied does suggest that you have some issues.

"Locally increasing methane emissions prove that nationwide methane emissions are rising?"

You were given a reference that showed methane emissions have been rising for 15 years (Turner et al) as well as a slew of other studies showing that plays with high drilling frequency have emissions several fold to an order of magnitude higher than industry data used by the EPA. Evidence that the EPA has knowingly sampled emissions with faulty technology that severely underestimated said emissions. You dismissed it all out of hand. If you were an actual expert, rather than a blowhard on the internet, your reaction would probably amount to some kind of malfeasance.

Your agreeing with Cliff Mass in his misrepresentation of how extreme climatic events are related to climate change says all that we need to know about how much you want us to mitigate climate change effectively. Until you start acting in a way that doesn't minimize the effects of climate change, I am afraid that your rhetoric about "alarmists" is rather self serving

@78: "I acknowledged that i was mistaken after you pointed out my error. Insisting that I lied does suggest that you have some issues."
Yes yes, you lied and then admitted you were wrong after I called you on it. I remember, I was there. But simply 'fessing up doesn't change the fact that you made shit up, as is your usual habit.

"You were given a reference that showed methane emissions have been rising for 15 years (Turner et al)"
No, I was given a reference that showed increased methane concentration in the atmosphere over a 4-year time span in a geographic pattern strongly divergent from that of petroleum exploration or fracking, which declined to point any fingers as to the likely cause of said increase, and which additionally inferred increasing methane emissions based on the results of three studies with wildly different methodologies covering in total a 7-year interval, making no attempt to adjust for the effects of the differences in those methodologies. No idea where you got the claim about a 15-year trend (or for that matter your characterization of the study as conclusive proof of increasing emissions), but it's perfectly par for the course given your track record of making shit up.

"a slew of other studies showing that plays with high drilling frequency have emissions several fold to an order of magnitude higher than industry data used by the EPA"
You posted one or two studies showing higher emissions from a few particular high-producing plays but low emissions from other (better-managed) high-producing plays, said a great deal about the former, and completely glossed over the latter. Oh, and just a reminder, you flat-out lied about how much the leaky plays contribute to total production in an attempt to justify comparing them to nationwide estimates.
Do you have any idea just how dishonest it is to compare local measurements to nationwide averages? It's like complaining about inaccuracies in climatology because it was 105 F one day in Arizona, when those climatologists say the average temperature is supposed to be 53 F. You're comparing two completely different quantities.

"Evidence that the EPA has knowingly sampled emissions with faulty technology that severely underestimated said emissions."
Um...if I recall correctly, you posted a press release from an environmental advocacy organization that alleged such but didn't have any actual evidence of such in or attached to the document. If you have evidence to support that assertion, I'd love to see it!

"You dismissed it all out of hand."
Hitchens's Razor.

"Your agreeing with Cliff Mass in his misrepresentation of how extreme climatic events are related to climate change says all that we need to know about how much you want us to mitigate climate change effectively."
I'm sorry, you're just 100% wrong here. Even if climate change were responsible for a 50% increase in number of named tropical storms, say, it would still be inaccurate and misleading to point to any one storm and declare it the fault of climate change. Things behave differently individually than in aggregate.

"Until you start acting in a way that doesn't minimize the effects of climate change, I am afraid that your rhetoric about 'alarmists' is rather self serving"
In other words, you see no alternative other than exaggerating the dangers of climate change or minimizing them, and one who rejects one is necessarily endorsing the other.
HEAR ME WELL, NITWIT. I AM FOR THE EVIDENCE. I am for putting the facts in the situation first, and let politics fall by the wayside if need be. A meter of sea level rise within a century is scary enough, and that's a low-to-moderate estimate. We don't need to profane ourselves by cooking up tall tales; the truth is sufficient. For me, at least. I don't know about you.

*average temperature of the USA
should be, in the analogy to weather

@79 It's YOUR choice to behave like some unhinged MF when people get something wrong. Nobody else.

You were provided with enough evidence about fugitive methane emissions and EPA misconduct, that any scientist worth his salt would have asked for some kind of investigation to clear it up. Instead you chose to deny everything like a climate change denier would do. This a rather conclusive observation in my book because it shows that you are not really interested in preventing more dangerous GHG emissions. As I said if you were actually competent on this topic, your response would amount to malfeasance.

Again you are trying to obfuscate what Cliff Mass really does. Mass tries to pin everything on natural variability and tries to disappear that although any particular event cannot be attributed to climate change, these extreme events are consistent with how we expect the climate to change. Waving one's arm to claim that megafires are due to natural variability is NOT evidence, it's politicking to minimize the effects of climate change in order to better argue for business as usual, like you do.

@77 Then why aren't you criticizing Charles Mudede for constantly being anti-science?

I'm unfamiliar with that aspect of his work. I mostly just remember him targeting libraries and memorials to dead kids in a working class neighborhood as part of his anti-quirk crusade and talking about how he didn't stop a guy from ransacking his neighbor's house because Marxism. Anyway, what's that got to do with anything?

@81: In other words, its my own fault for caring about factual accuracy, and I should just simmer down and let exaggeration, deception, and outright falsehood slide. I'm sorry, but I do actually care about sticking to the facts.

"You were provided with enough evidence about fugitive methane emissions and EPA misconduct, that any scientist worth his salt would have asked for some kind of investigation to clear it up."
You cited some evidence about fugitive methane emissions, but all you had regarding EPA misconduct was a bunch of allegations without supporting evidence. And pertinently, you demanded that I accept your preferred estimates for methane emissions over all others, despite there being significant variation across different estimates; to wit, you want to cherry-pick a few studies and ignore the rest. I'm all for further research, but simply declaring one study among many to be the One True Fact neither scientific nor honest.
"Instead you chose to deny everything like a climate change denier would do."
Again, Hitchens's Razor. If you can't be bothered to show the least iota of evidence to support your claims, I'm under no obligation to consider them. And no, citing a study and lying about its conclusions doesn't count as supplying supporting evidence. (Case in point, your false claims about Turner et al.)

"This a rather conclusive observation in my book because it shows that you are not really interested in preventing more dangerous GHG emissions."
I'm the one looking at the big picture. You're so hidebound in your opposition to fracking in any and all circumstances that you neglect the larger system. More shale gas means less exploitation of coal, and coal is not only far dirtier than natural gas, but much harder to minimize the harms of. (Loss-reduction tech cuts upstream methane leakage to a small fraction of its previous rate, but even the finest electrostatic precipitators can only do so much about heavy metals and radiation emitted by coal plants.) It's an optimization problem on a massive scale, and your proposed solution (the moonshot of 100% renewables) carries an extremely high risk of failure, whereas using natural gas production to cut coal use practically guarantees significant reduction of harm. I'm being a pragmatist, as always; you're stuck in La-La Land, where everything always works as intended.

"Mass tries to pin everything on natural variability and tries to disappear that although any particular event cannot be attributed to climate change, these extreme events are consistent with how we expect the climate to change."
And as usual, [citation needed]. Mass is perfectly justified in his refusal to blame individual events on climate change. If you don't understand this, I strongly suggest that you reread the second to last graf in post #79.

And reminder: anon1256, in response to being accused of lying, lied about the content and conclusions of a paper he referenced in support of his arguments (Turner et al., seen above). Nowhere in it does it claim a 15-year increasing trend, and it explicitly refuses to attribute the inferred increase in emissions to petroleum exploitation. And yet when accused of lying, he then proceeded to claim that it had...

@84 "you want to cherry-pick a few studies and ignore the rest"

Several major studies showing that EPA is underestimating methane emissions by up to an order of magnitude warrant a lot more than your "nothing to see here", especially when it was claimed that it would be cleaner to burn NG than burning coal. You are a deceitful fraud and your repeating ad-infinitum the same obfuscating tangents won't change any of it.

"Mass is perfectly justified in his refusal to blame individual events on climate change"

Ignoring what I said for the nth time may be very convenient for you but it isn't very honest for anyone trying to have a discussion. Mass isn't justified at all in is trying to pin every extreme climate events on natural variability and his not mentioning systematically that extreme climatic events are consistent with how we expect climate to evolve.

@86: "Several major studies showing that EPA is underestimating methane emissions by up to an order of magnitude"
And when those studies show up, we can talk about them. In the mean time, you seem to be persistent in your delusion that comparing local emissions to nationwide estimates is meaningful, and also in the more pernicious false belief that the studies you've linked actually implicate petroleum as you claim they do. Your response to your claims being questioned seems to be to reference the same two or three papers over and over again, COMPLETELY IGNORING THE FACT THAT THEY DON'T SAY WHAT YOU SAY THEY DO.

"it was claimed that it would be cleaner to burn NG than burning coal"
Burning natural gas IS cleaner than burning coal. That's really just a fact by any metric. Your justification for continuing to use coal rather than gas is based on restricting the focus to short-term warming (rather than long-term warming, ocean acidification on any timescale, or the harm caused by emissions of heavy metals, radiation, or acid rain precursors), assuming that the highest estimates of upstream losses in gas systems are correct, and assuming that current loss-reduction technology is NOT implemented in new production. Your entire argument on that issue rests on one dubious assumption, one entirely ludicrous assumption that can be undone with minimal cost through simple regulation, and a disingenuous and cherry-picked definition of harm. You want to talk about deceitful argumentation? You're constructing a whole great set of artificial terms to try and justify an argument in favor of continuing to exploit the dirtiest fossil fuel in use rather than prioritizing a much cleaner one. (And that's not even getting to your habit of lying outright.)

"You are a deceitful fraud and your repeating ad-infinitum the same obfuscating tangents won't change any of it."
I'm a geoscientist who's forgotten more about this stuff than you've ever known. And again (and this is the common thread of my arguments here) I put the evidence before ideology. I'm against reliance on fossil fuels, and yet I recognize that the best possible approach (in terms of preventing climate change and also of maintaining an advanced civilization) is to wean our society off them rather than attempt to quit all at once.
I also take exception to your characterization of my direct refutations of your claims as "obfuscating tangents". Say, where in Turner et al. do the authors say that methane emissions have risen over a 15-year interval? You claimed that directly in post #78, and yet it is entirely unsupported by the text of the paper. If you're wondering why I repeat the same things over and over again, it is because you repeat the same lies over and over again, and I figure that I might as well keep refuting them until you acknowledge what has been said instead of just ignoring it. So anon1256, time to put up or shut up. Where in Turner et al. do you get a 15-year increase from?

"Mass isn't justified at all in is trying to pin every extreme climate events on natural variability"
Like I said before, [CITATION FUCKING NEEDED]. Cliff Mass is right to say we can't blame individual events specifically on climate change (how much clearer do I need to make this?), and that's what he's been saying. If he's claimed that all anomalous events are the result of natural variability, you're going to need to show some evidence. (What he HAS said, however, is that at present the effects of climate change are fairly weak, and natural variation can obscure the signature. And he's not wrong about that.)

@87 verbal diarrhea ad infinitum

You are a fraud

@88: You complain that I simply deny or dismiss your arguments (apparently you didn't actually read the point-by-point refutations), and yet your response is to simply call me a fraud and ignore my post?
You've committed even more of your usual dishonesty, by the way. The Nature news dispatch you linked referenced leakage rates of up to 9%...AT ONE PARTICULAR FIELD. So long as you insist on comparing nationwide estimates to localized measurements, you're going to be wrong. That's literally the same approach as the deniers who say that because a certain area is cooling, global warming must not be happening; extrapolating from a nonrepresentative locality doesn't give you accurate information about the system as a whole!

And once more, you claimed in post #78 that Turner et al. 2016 "showed methane emissions have been rising for 15 years". Those are your own exact words. Please show me WHERE in the paper you find support for that claim. Go ahead, show everyone that you're telling the truth.
Your track record of lying about the contents of the papers you reference doesn't do much for your credibility...

Finally, your very own source here (the Nature bulletin) suggests that even assuming leakage rates are consistent with high estimates, if methane emissions could be cut by 1/3rd from current rates, there would be immediate climate change benefit (never mind the toxic pollution issue or long-term warming) to switching over from coal to gas. This is easily achievable by mandating the use of loss-reduction technology already available, as I've repeatedly suggested. Do you MEAN to post links that support my arguments? Or do you just do so by mistake?