It remains to be seen what – if any action – Obama takes in climate change during his second term. However, stating the science is unequivocally settled is a break through moment in politics:
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Watching the Deniers 
Republicans
The NRSC “will press Democratic senators up for reelection next year in red states to distance themselves from President Obama’s promise to tackle climate change.” Politico’s Morning Score — “Your guide to the permanent campaign” — writes:
Votes for cap-and-trade sunk a bunch of House Democrats from coal country in 2010, and GOP leaders think this remains a winning issue in states with major domestic energy industries – including Louisiana, Alaska, Colorado and Montana. Energy is one of several issues, including guns, that Republicans hope Obama will force Democrats in competitive states to take unpopular positions on. “We hope that 2014 Democrats like Mary Landrieu and Max Baucus enjoyed the party circuit in Washington last night,” NRSC spokesman Brian Walsh tells Score, “but given President Obama’s vow to pursue a left-wing environmental agenda that will kill jobs in their states and others, voters deserve to know exactly where their Senators stand.”
Great piece from Mungo
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4474058.html
Science is never unequivocally settled, if you talk of the “settled science” then you are talking through your hat. Some comments in your previous post discussed the volume of new scientific papers published.
Most of these will relate to new interpretations of existing data or be publishing new information, and many of these will result in unsettling current ideas forcing scientists to discard existing settled science.
Obama is too intelligent to not know this, is he a politician, does he care about the truth?
You hang on to the God of the gaps
Scientists will always be filling in the details, and will continue to do so.
But our understanding of the heat trapping effects of CO@ in the atmosphere has been understood for well over 100 years.
See the 1896 paper by Svante Arrhenius:
Click to access Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf
Science has been building on this insight for decades, refining our understanding.
Climate science has a rich history, so your point is generally correct. What many sceptics discount or forget is just how solid the science actually is.
The implications of climate change are unsettling: hence the resistance and denial.
“Climate science has a rich history”
Yes, and it’s getting richer with each and every research grant.
The only problem with your ‘solid science’ is that there appears to be a lot of missing heat that the ‘solid science’ says increasing levels of CO2 must be producing.
The implications of climate change are not really unsettling when you look at all the doom and gloom predictions that have failed to materialise… people eventually stop listening when you keep saying that the sky is falling, but it never actually falls. The only thing that’s really unsettling is the economically destructive policy being advocated by alarmists based on a ‘settled science’ that, for the last decade, hasn’t been able to deliver the global warming which it promised.
Pure rhetoric skeptical, what are you talking about ?
Anthropogenic climate change (ACC)/anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is not a hypothesis. It is a robust theory, referred to as “settled fact” by scientists.
Per the National Academies of Science, in their 2010 publication Advancing The Science Of Climate Change (pp 44-45):
“Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small.
Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts.
This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.”
• http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12782
And note that the above National Academies paper is available for free download after a free registration. No purchase necessary. And the quote is from pages 44 & 45.
The scientific community says otherwise, the basics are settled.
Frank,
Too right. I’m sick of these scientists talking through their hats about…
– water boiling at 100 degrees C
– the earth being an oblate spheroid (which revolves around the sun)
– humans sharing a common ancestor with apes
– every point mass in the universe attracting every other point mass with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them
…when we all know that science is ‘never unequivocally settled’.
Sammy, did you see this, a possible explanation why the universe is expanding despite gravitational attraction .
this is like wow
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130104143516.htm
Cool!
Local Vets warn of current ideal conditions for ticks, numbers of pets being taken to vetinary clinics with paralysis tick have been increasing steadily over past years.
WTFIUWFE ?
You must have missed my post… 🙂
Believe me, we didn’t miss anything.
So it has killed a lot of tics… when the next generation is more resistant to temperature fluctuation we will still have mass droughts, floods and other erratic weather, the spread of malaria and other tropical diseases, failed crops leading to a reduction in food supply leading to starvation. We will also still have rising sea levels, melting ice caps, the loss of many animal species, the imbalance and destruction of a wide variety of ecosystems, more natural disasters…
But hey, at least global warming killed a few tics in Australia!
Double whammy coming up for WAIS ?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130122122411.htm
[…] 2013/01/22: WtD: Obama on climate: “some may deny the overwhelming judgement of science” […]