Stephen Colbert To Fen Montaigne: Americans Voted That Global Warming Isn't Happening (VIDEO)

While Stephen Colbert may satirically claim that global warming is no longer happening since "the American people voted that it's not," author and journalist Fen Montaigne perfectly argued the contrary last night on "The Colbert Report."

Fen Montaigne is the author of "Fraser's Penguins: A Journey To The Future In Antartica." His book explains that the plight of Antartica's penguins foreshadows the world's future due to climate change. Montaigne also reveals his experiences in his Huffington Post article, "The Life of an Adélie Penguin in a Warming World."

In this smart, snappy video, Colbert and Montaigne debate the merits of global warming. Colbert jokes that global warming "was very popular in 2007, I believed in it then because Al Gore's movie made money, but now he's getting divorced." But Montaigne argues back, "The strangest thing is happening, even despite this new Congress, many of whose members don't believe in global warming, it's still going on." And while Colbert may have been most interested in asking Montaigne "what part of your body did you miss feeling the most [in Antarctica]?" Montaigne smartly replies that he wasn't nearly as cold as he should have been.

WATCH Montaigne hold his own against Colbert:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Fen Montaigne
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Comments

[Todd Donald]

03:58 PM on 02/02/2011

BTW - What was this "Vote"? I'm an American and never heard of any vote or survey about global warming! Maybe it was conducted by the same firm that claimed to have surveyed American's and therefore changed Burger King's french fries some years back...

Either way - Man made global warming is a hoax and I HOPE that most people have enough common sense to realize it.

[dashingdwl]

06:46 PM on 01/13/2011

AGW: One huge hoax. Thankfully this crap is being brought to its knees.
The so-called "models" used to 'adjust' and 'cleanse' the data are a joke.

There is a distinct lack of understanding of the cyclical nature of global climate by the general public (well, those who have no capacity of critical thinking in any case) which allows them to be duped by this fraudulent data and reporting.

[ObjectiveRealist]

10:57 PM on 01/13/2011

Find me just one error, in one climate model. They're all online, but I don't need to tell you that, do I? Not if you know what you were just talking about.

So list the URL, line number of the error, and explanation of why it's wrong. Thanks in advance, for taking back the libel we all know you can't back up with any facts.

[scrzbill]

12:42 AM on 01/14/2011

Automatically saying "so called models, adjust, cleanse" is an obvious model for those who have no capacity of critical thinking in any case. Who causes global pollution? Geesus?

[rifraf1001]

12:19 PM on 01/13/2011

Next up American's vote on evolution, gravity, the second law of thermodynamics (I'm rooting for no, it would do wonders for our energy future), and the oldie but goodie the Aristotle versus Copernicus solar system.

[erikqj]

07:14 PM on 01/12/2011

People will doubt anything that requires an unpleasant course of action. Humanity as a whole is quite biased on the subject, making for a depressing outlook for those few who take reliable science seriously.

[TYRANNASAURUS]

06:55 PM on 01/12/2011

This was funny.....................but very sad.....

Electric cars, light bulbs and solar panels won't change anything as weather becomes more extreme. It will get worse as China and India's 2,500,000,000 people move up the success ladder and demand even more energy.
Sad but check all the earth sciences and you will find everything in the process of collapse due to over population of the planet including starvation which has been going on for years, even that will increase and pick up momentum.
Dufar in the Sudan looks on the surface to be ethnic cleansing. Next time you look, look not at the starving people but the desert they live in that won't support the winners of this war. The Sahara is moving south at 20 miles a year.
Because of religions grip on procreation, people continue breeding at a breakneck pace. They refuse to recognize that this planet can’t sustain 7,000,000,000 people devouring everything like a plague of locus in a wheat field.
Extreme weather at this point is beyond the human reach to repair it. It is picking up momentum as anything does when going down hill. We don't have 100's of years left in spite of what many people want to believe.
The planet will continue to heat up for the next several thousand years since it is now running on automatic and regardless of what you hear not much can be done about it.

[baxtron]

11:08 AM on 01/13/2011

Sudan can buy whatever they need with oil money. The overpopulation arguement would work if the amount of food produced worldwide could not support them. Unfortunately, starvation is political rather than practical.

[joshmcdonald]

12:20 PM on 01/13/2011

Perhaps for now.

[PCPrincess]

05:37 PM on 01/12/2011

MAJORITY OF AMERICANS: I don't trust a majority of American's on America's highways. I don't trust a majority of Americans to vote wisely. I don't trust a majority of Americans to know how government works or it's founding documents. I don't trust a majority of Americans to name 3 supreme court justices. I don't trust a majority of Americans to think about family planning or use birth control before engaging in sexual behavior. I don't trust a majority of Americans to believe in scientific fact. And I don't trust a majority of Americans to think of anyone outside of themselves.

[dragonmaster]

05:14 PM on 01/12/2011

How could Americans vote for something many have to conceptual understanding of?

By the time they begin to feel the effects strongly- it will be way too late for us to do anything to ward off its catastrophic effects.

[joshmcdonald]

12:21 PM on 01/13/2011

THE COLBERT REPORT IS SATIRE!!!!

Come on people, did I really have to say that?

[AustinG]

03:24 PM on 01/12/2011

I love the caption "watch Montaigne hold his own against Colbert". Colbert is playing a character. The argument that Montaigne is holding his own against is a straw man argument. The implication from the work that Montaigne is doing is that the Antarctic is facing a great deal of warming.

According to reports there is more ice in the Antarctic now than there has been on average in recorded history. Here is a graph of it: http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20110105_Figure6.png

There is no reliable data that shows that there is any warming in the Antarctic. There was a study done, but in that study the data was manufactured. The "warming" that it showed was a fraction of a degree. Since the data was artificially created no credible scientist would really want to draw any conclusions from it. How do you reliably gather data from a place with such extreme temperatures that traveling a few thousand yards could change the recorded temperature by 50 degrees? Not that it means that it isn't warming. It just means that we really don't know.

[ObjectiveRealist]

04:04 PM on 01/12/2011

Please cite the study you mean (title, author(s) & URL) and explain in detail how you believe that "the data was manufactur­ed."

[AustinG]

04:24 PM on 01/12/2011

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/antarctic-warming-is-robust/

They throw out the station that shows a relative cooling. They then create an algorithm to fill in missing data and data from that station. That data shows them that there is something like a 0.2 degree warming per decade for the continent from 1957-2006. In the little bit that I have looked into temperature in the Antarctic I have found that there can be huge differences in temperature over a short distance. The weather stations that they even have the imcomplete data from are kind of arbitrary measures. To fill in the missing data one has to assume that they take the temperature from other locations. How to they know that the locations correlate? One could guess that they somewhat did, but we are talking about 0.2 degree per decade. A predicted temperature is going to have a margin for error significantly higher than that in the best of circumstances.

Put simply if someone wants to prove something like that they can do so. You can tinker with your algorithm to get it to spit out whatever it is that you want it to spit out. Especially when you are looking backwards and there is no way to prove it incorrect. A good way to test your algorithm would be to have it predict temperatures from here going forward. I haven't seen that done by these people though I haven't really been looking.

[ObjectiveRealist]

01:21 AM on 01/13/2011

AustinG. is lying about the article it linked.
The truth:

Antarctic warming is robust
The difference between a single calculation and a solid paper in the technical literature is vast. A good paper examines a question from multiple angles and find ways to assess the robustness of its conclusions to all sorts of possible sources of error — in input data, in assumptions, and even occasionally in programming. If a conclusion is robust over as much of this as can be tested (and the good peer reviewers generally insist that this be shown), then the paper is likely to last the test of time. Although science proceeds by making use of the work that others have done before, it is not based on the assumption that everything that went before is correct. It is precisely because that there is always the possibility of errors that so much is based on ‘balance of evidence’ arguments’ that are mutually reinforcing.

So it is with the Steig et al paper published last week. Their conclusions that West Antarctica is warming quite strongly and that even Antarctica as a whole is warming since 1957 (the start of systematic measurements) were based on extending the long term manned weather station data (42 stations) using two different methodologies (RegEM and PCA) to interpolate to undersampled regions using correlations from two independent data sources (satellite AVHRR and the Automated Weather Stations (AWS) ), and validations based on subsets of the stations (15 vs 42 of them) etc.

[relians]

05:21 PM on 01/12/2011

right, and denial is a river in egypt.

[jwoww]

01:17 PM on 01/12/2011

please bring back global warming it's been too cold and snowy this year. and endless summer would be much better

[Pharos]

02:05 PM on 01/12/2011

Look up the definition of average.

[erikqj]

06:50 PM on 01/12/2011

There will be no endless anything with Global Warming. The common misconception that it will lead to a more comfortable weather is about as wrong as it can get. We'll see more extremes; extreme drought, extreme rain, extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme storms. The reason is that heat is energy. More energy in the atmosphere makes it more active. Atmospheric activity is weather, and more active weather patterns is not a pleasant thing. More periods of extreme cold and snowfall is actually one of the things we can expect with global warming.

To put it simple: The average temperature will go up, but the extremes in both ends of the temperature spectrum will increase as well. It'll be colder when it's cold, and warmer when it's warm.

[PuffDragon]

12:54 PM on 01/12/2011

"The Unchained Goddess", A film made in 1958 by US researcher s, shows the effects of global warming due to massive carbon emissions.

Climate Change due to carbon emissions was no secret even then - long before Al Gore reminded us of the problem.

[ProudToBeVeryLiberal]

12:50 PM on 01/12/2011

"Inhofe's 400 Global Warming Deniers Debunked
List of "Scientists" Includes Economists, Amateurs, TV Weathermen and Industry_Hacks.

Inhofe's latest claim is that "Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called 'consensus' on man-made global warming." It's a claim backed up by honest-to-goodness research, of the cut-and-paste kind.

Mark V. Johnson, who works for AOL's Propeller.com. (...) combed through university profiles, oil money think tank rosters, news stories and the now-robust literature of climate skeptic debunking. He couldn't identify every name, and we'll say at the outset that there may well be a handful of skeptics on this list with legitimate knowledge of climate science who question some aspect of the theory. It is, however, useful to remember that a theory, in science, is as good as gold.

Here's a quick breakdown of Johnson's findings:

Inhofe's list includes 413 people.

- 84 have either taken money from, or are connected to, fossil fuel industries, or think tanks started by those industries.

- 49 are retired

- 44 are television weathermen

- 20 are economists

- 70 have no apparent expertise in climate science

- Several supposed skeptics have publicly stated that they are very concerned about global warming, and support efforts to address it. One claims he was duped into signing the list and regrets it."

http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/inhofe-global-warming-deniers-47011101

[life-of-riley]

11:54 AM on 01/13/2011

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm

[PuffDragon]

12:49 PM on 01/12/2011

Republican Climate Change deniers need to be taken to Antarctica for a 30-day fact-finding tour of the damage that is occurring.

Any member of Congress or the Senate has a responsibility to conduct Fact Finding tours: it is a part of their job they should take seriously.

[Martel LXIV]

10:11 AM on 01/13/2011

They'll get right on that when the weather warms up down there. 78F should be just about right.

[ProudToBeVeryLiberal]

12:41 PM on 01/12/2011

"A new survey finds consensus among scientists about the reality of climate change and its likely cause. (...) Peter Doran, University of Illinois at Chicago associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, along with former graduate student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, conducted the survey late last year. (...)

Doran and Kendall Zimmerman sought the opinion of the most complete list of earth scientists they could find, contacting more than 10,200 experts around the world listed in the 2007 edition of the American Geological Institute's Directory of Geoscience Departments. (...)

Two questions were key: have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels, and has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures.
About 90% of the scientists agreed with the first question and 82% the second. (...)

In analyzing responses by sub-groups, Doran found that climatologists who are active in research showed the strongest consensus on the causes of global warming, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role. (...)

Doran and Kendall Zimmerman conclude that "the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes." The challenge now, they write, is how to effectively communicate this to policy makers and to a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate among scientists."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090119210532.htm

[julieintx]

03:36 PM on 01/12/2011

That survey was cherry-picked, and is of very low quality. Here's a debunking:

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/01/03/lawrence-solomon-97-cooked-stats/#ixzz1A5px63Ax

It's stuff like this that makes people skeptical.

[ProudToBeVeryLiberal]

04:00 PM on 01/12/2011

Debunking? LOL Do you really expect republican corporate stooges to be unbiased?

[ObjectiveRealist]

04:20 PM on 01/12/2011

ProudToBeVeryLiberal linked to a story on ScienceDaily.com, which I know from experience, carries summaries of legitimate, peer-reviewed scientific research. I'm less familiar with the Financial Post, but it is obviously focused on finance, not physical science. And you have cited an opinion piece from that finance magazine. Before I get into the content of what either of you have linked, I have a simple question. On the physical facts of climate change, how relevant do you think a finance guy's opinion really is compared to the peer-reviewed research of professional climate scientists? A scale of 1 to 10 would be better than adjectives, and numerical weighting based on some objective measure of each one's expertise in climatology would be better still.

[Pharos]

12:17 PM on 01/12/2011

Anyone who is interested in how the anti-science campaign operates should read: "Science Bypass by John R. Mashey, Member ACM, IEEE CS, AAAS, APS, AGU"

http://www.desmogblog.com/another-silly-climate-petition-exposed

It is long, extremely detailed, and starts as follows:
"The American Physical Society (APS) was petitioned by 206 people, about 0.45% of the 47,000 members, to discard its climate change position and declare decades of climate research non-existent. The Petition was “overwhelmingly” rejected, but this anti-science campaign offers a useful case study. The Petition signers‟ demographics are compared to those of APS in general."

[julieintx]

03:39 PM on 01/12/2011

That's not true. The petition was to set up a topic group on climate, and to change the unscientific position statement that the APS made on climate, using inappropriate terms and politics.

[Pharos]

10:24 AM on 01/13/2011

Which part is not true? Did you even read it? And it is a fact that the petition was rejected by the membership. Point to a page, paragraph, and sentence where the author is mistaken in his research in any meaningful way.

[Bedazio]

10:45 AM on 01/12/2011

Hey Sarah,

How's that crossy-hairy thingy workin out fer ya?

http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/talk/content/rep-gabrielle-giffords-talks-about-overheated-rhetoric-march-2010-interview

[julieintx]

03:48 PM on 01/12/2011

It worked just as well as the tar get Kos put on Giffords. And we know that Loughner has been ha ting Giffords since 2007.

[julieintx]

03:48 PM on 01/12/2011

It worked just as well as the t ar get K os put on Gi ffo rds. And we know that Lo ughn er has been ha tin g Gi f f ords since 2007.