Quote from PHOENIX TRADING: in Response to Futurecurrents
Oh I see you are so afraid of real debate you have to create a strawman.
My theory is FACT.
No matter how you claim to come to your decision on agw why do you think it's split almost 100% among ideological lines?
How do you explain that?
Phoenix Trading, sorry to have to be the one to bring you bad news, but there is some fairly decent evidence that your "theory" is not fact.
Although, you had asked Futurecurrents to explain it to you, perhaps you will permit me to explain instead.
The Republican party has traditionally been strongly aligned with corporate interests, more so at least in the realm of political debate then the Democrats -- both parties, of course, tend to be very friendly to business interests in the actual governing of the country.
This is why you see the position on global warming divided along political lines. It has not so much to do with science as it does with politics. Republicans seem too anxious to dismiss science that they believe might prove harmful to bottom line corporate profits.
Here is a specific example of the same sort of thing that is happening now with the debate on climate, but having to do instead with the 1980's debate on the ozone hole. At that time we saw, just as we do today, the Republicans aligned against the science. The reason was that the freon industry started by DuPont was huge world wide, and if we were to get rid of Freons as propellants and refrigerants, there would be a large, economic impact. Thus then, as now, the detractors, for the most part, were aligned with the Republican party, and a fairly heavy concentration of them was found in the ironically named "conservative think-tanks." Apparently, the kind of "thinking" in those organizations is more like that in the Fox News organization then among a group of intellectuals looking dispassionately at facts.
Here is the link to a very nice article by Dr. Jeff Masters that will explain very nicely why the ozone hole proponents and detractors were aligned along political lines. There is, I would say, a perfect parallel between that earlier issue and the global warming issue today. We see the same kind of political alignment now as we saw then, and for the same reasons.
http://www.wunderground.com/resources/climate/ozone_skeptics.asp
In case there is any lingering doubt among conservative political "thinkers" as to freons causing an ozone hole, let me point out that the science related to stratospheric ozone is rock solid. No informed person questions that science today. The detailed gas kinetics of ozone generation and catalytic destruction via the ClO radical coming from freons that have diffused into the stratosphere was worked out in detail, experimentally tested, and proven correct by Rowland and Molina and they rightfully won the Nobel prize for this work. To be fair, I should point out that the science as it relates to global warming, and especially the anthropomorphic aspects are not yet so well laid out. But that is not why the global warming debate is aligned along political lines.
