I would really like to see a news article where some knowledgeable reporter goes to the weird backwaters of the Princeton physics department or the Institute for Advanced Study and gives them zero slack for their preposterous beliefs about climate science.
Why punch down when you can hit up at rural Oklahoma?
I find it a little irritating (not sure if in any systemic way) that this article asserts this county of 20,000 people has the highest rate of climate denialism, but bases this on a statistical model, presumably one that takes national surveys and decomposes by demographics and then predicts by county from county demographics. Admittedly it seems to produce fairly satisfactory results as far as pointing to a place to report on, but later the author treats it as if it's a solid fact.
I'm not sure how meaningful it is to juxtapose what they say with the fact of the serious drought, even if lots of them are farmers. Droughts do happen, and at least so far, distinguishing the local effects of climate change from natural variation is not really an intuitive slam-dunk without being aware of the research and what's happening worldwide.
Heebie, you're welcome to friend my mom on facebook. Then you can read all about how awful it is for kids to have gay parents and not be connected to their birthparents and how everything is about abortion and you'd better not give money to the biggest Juvenile Diabetes charity because fetal stem cells and blah blah blah. But she's a lovely grandmother to the girls, at least.
3.1: I didn't look at the details, but I share your skepticism.
4: You'll be shocked to learn there's no shortage of such people here, either.
Where is your god Populism now, hippies?
6 cont'd: But of course, there are a huge number of right-thinking people as well.
I'm rolling my eyes pretty hard at the journalist getting all upset people don't pay more attention to science but taking days or weeks to figure out that this 30% number means not everyone in the town is a climate change denier.
Journalists are usually shit at mathing and statistical reasoning.
Oh, I know! This guy was kind of a jerk about people in general, too.
I didn't read the article. I have a conference call, so maybe I'll get to it then.
I have a friend with relatives who farm in downstate IL. Apparently, the belief that windmills put up for energy change the weather patterns is widespread. Conservative hate for windmills and solar installations is widespread in the US, not just farmers.
On the other hand, both solar and biofuels have led to widespread scamming in the Czech countryside, with EU-funded biofuel initiatives having led to lots of corn planting. So if the fine print of the incentives is badly done, people in the country see capital-rich scammers swooping in to skim. I'm not sure that I see a good solution.
Farmers who get paid by companies who lease ground for windmills like them a bunch.
13: What is the scam? Or do you mean that corn as biofuel is itself a scam (which, yeah, definitely).
I've never looked into all the home solar stuff, but the way it publicizes itself has, to me, a lot of scam yellow flags - touting no cost, tax breaks covering everything, etc. And aggressive sales people setting up tables in Best Buy and saying "Hi, do you care about the environment?"
"Scam Yellow" should be in the crayola box.
The thing about Oklahoma is that it was home to the dust bowl - a human-caused climate catastrophe, which is not yet beyond the edges of living memory. And still, with the bullshit.
There is a fine blog about this phenomenon here: http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/
Maybe it's because I have a distorted view by having Fox news watching climate change denying parents (and brother ) but I hear that this place has the highest rate of climate change denialism in the country and it's only 30% and I'm thinking that's very good news indeed.
I have almost zero tolerance for listening to conservatives talk about disability issues. And very low tolerance for "special needs parents".
Or possibly I'm just cranky because my back hurts and I spent 15 hours in the car yesterday.
Anyway I clicked over to the Catholic mom but decided I didn't have it in me to make it past the second paragraph. Maybe Heebie can coax me through it after I get to her house tomorrow?
The climate change post mainly made me wish I had a yellow sun hat.
I don't think it would be a very good use of my or your time.
Okay. We'll drink beer and make fun of people instead.
And very low tolerance for "special needs parents".
I don't have any energy or time to take this on now, but I try in the parenting groups I'm part of (which tend to have big overlaps with that sort of title) to push back on a lot of the creepy stuff. But if you ever write a guest-post rant or anything like that, I'd love to read it and share it and steal from it and all that. There's some stuff out there that is so awful and I hope not to be part of that but I probably cross some lines I shouldn't.
16: Right now in a lot of states the scam, as such, is that the state is spending a bunch of money on solar, or more-or-less forcing the utilities to spend money on solar, by requiring them to hit X% targets for solar power. Given that, and the mechanics behind them (tax breaks and SRECs), it frequently is a great deal for the homeowner. Financing outfits like SolarCity, SunRun, etc. are pitching it hard.
(I'm in on the scam, I suppose, having paid all of $2500 for a 20-year solar-lease arrangement for 5000 kWh per year).
Whimsical font sizing aside, this post covers my main issue, which is that I don't care that much about the perspective of the parents, and it irritates me to read things where they are the main character instead of the disabled person.
This is longer and better-said.
Yes, thanks, those things exactly. And when there's bossiness and disregard of the perspectives of actual adults with actual lived experience, it's horrifying.
I teach these students -- well, students very like these students. Not every ONE of them is from Oklahoma. Some are from Greenwood, Arkansas. And Rudy, Arkansas. And SO ON.
It's true that some can be sweet as pie. But holy hell it gets exhausting.
There are such things as savory pies.
16/26: I have a cousin who owns a small business setting things like that up. From what I've heard from him (and not as a sales pitch because, well, I don't live in that area and don't own a home and probably couldn't afford the outlay even if I did) the regulatory stuff really is one of the big advantages. But I think the real selling point is that the money-saving stuff might be temporary but they'll clear the installation costs pretty quickly so even if/when those go away you'll still end up with a nice extra energy source that'll lower your bills on the whole, which is what makes it a good investment.
He's pretty businessman-conservative*, so "also you will contribute less to what the people I vote for are blocking the measures necessary to prevent is going to do to the human species overall" didn't come up as a selling point, which actually makes me trust his analysis more.
*Which, yes, makes his career selling renewable energy sort of hilarious to me. And also it's a small business which means he's pretty much over the moon about Obamacare because before it was passed he was having to form coalitions with other businesses/take risks/pay large costs and so on in order to get reasonable health insurance for his employees. Family reunions on that side seem to always involve learning some odd stuff like that.
Oh, hey, and we ("we") launched something related to this today: http://google.com/sunroof
Offer currently only valid in SF and the Boston area.
Wow apparently my roof blazes with the intensity of a thousand suns and I'll save over $1k per year.
32 I'm getting a 404 on that. Maybe because of where I'm located?
I own some roof space that ought to be good for solar. But the carbon savings from the energy generated would probably be offset by having to cut down a bunch of trees to get it out of the shade.
15. The ownership of many of the large CZ solar farms is opaque, bad sign. Presumably, people in the US who respond quickly to sudden legislative incentives in the middle of nowhere are more in tune with markets than local environment and local economy, and may be actually crooked in addition to short-sighted.
On maize, the rule creates a financial incentive to plant the same thing everywhere all the time and fertilize the shit out of the soil year after year. The green law as implemented is an environmental train wreck there. Not a scam exactly.
But basically, these are non-crazy phenomena. From seeing these, I can see where country people would become suspicious of improvements in general.
34: Odd. Did it redirect to google.xx/sunroof? (whatever your local country code is for 'xx'). Alternately, try http://www.google.com/get/sunroof .
No, they're both still .com in the address bar for both:
http://www.google.com/get/sunroof
or
https://www.google.com/get/sunroof
the URLs remain the same but I get a 404 error for both.
This is where I'm from. So declasse!
It seemed nice enough when I was last there. That was maybe '86 or so. Really humid.
omg did you see a squat eight year old girl with two older brothers?
Probably not. I saw a sinkhole, a relative, my former neighbours, some German family, and not one single alligator.
Although, technically seeing my own sister might qualify.
Your sister qualifies as an alligator?
I've been breaking the "never read the comments" rule recently, on Seeking Alpha, because some of the writers of the more interesting articles turn out to be B.S. artists or woefully unequipped to give advice on anything (or both of course), and the commenters call those people out.
Anyway, the commenters are always talking about what sort of investments would be good to prepare for how the weather is obviously changing in this or that place and people will have to adapt and the real estate there will change and the industries there will change and so forth.
And the commenters also respond to every article about any sort of renewable energy company by pointing out that renewable energy is a fad and scoffing at the idea that these companies could even exist without misguided bleeding-heart government handouts and/or corrupt Obama-crony government handouts. Now, these might be two different groups of people, but neither of them seem to encounter any counterarguments among the world of would-be investment geniuses.
My mother recently referred to one of her dogs as "special needs" apparently because it pees indoors. She didn't have any excuse for why the other one barks incessantly.
Possibly it doesn't like the smell of urine.
Are there any instances of computer models being wrong? This is a serious question.
No, there has never been a computer model that was wrong.
Is that a thing now? Classifying global warming as a "computer model" so that it's lumped in with bankers trying to model interest rates instead of actual science.
That's sophistry of the "even scientists call it 'the theory of evolution'" sort.
Typically, climate models have been wrong by being too optimistic.
Hmph. I live in the Boston area but apparently not close enough to the actual Hub of the Universe, so no sunroof for me.
I found California's water. Omaha is really green for August.