Guardian UK: 'Global warming is baloney' signs put the heat on Burger King

A row between the fast food giant Burger King and one of its major franchise owners has erupted over roadside signs proclaiming "global warming is baloney".

The franchisee, a Memphis-based company called the Mirabile Investment Corporation (MIC) that owns more than 40 Burger Kings across Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, has described Burger King as acting "kinda like cockroaches" over the controversy. MIC says it does not believe Burger King has the authority to make it take the signs down.

'Global warming is baloney' signs put the heat on Burger King

I love how he acts completely innocent about this being political or a top-down decision, although from his own responses you can tell it obviously is both.

or at least it shouldn't be. His point about Olbermann calling the owner of about 40 Burger Kings the "Worst Person in the World" is a joke, I have to agree with. The last I knew an opinion is much less vicious then murderers, rapists, thieves or people who didn't shower sitting next to you on the subway.

My local Bank of America branch shows Fox News on it's TV. I couldn't care less. Nor would I care if it was CNN or MSNBC.

And that it shouldn't be political, but the problem is the right deniers are the ones making it political - they refuse to believe in it because it's championed by Al Gore and no other reason that I can tell.

They can't admit how wrong they've been, or face what a big problem it is and what it's meant to fight it for decades. Many of them are against it 100% until they die, that's my opinion from the examples I've seen.

It's a common trait among the hardcore right to see admitting error as a weakness, so it's pretty rare to see any of them ever admit they were wrong about something, even if the continual denial hurts them directly (see: George Bush 2004, Iraq, etc.)

I look at the data and I look at the science. Both are questionable. The long term record is a joke. Try looking at the GISS (NASA) data. It's not a pretty sight. They claim accurate data going back to January 1880. Their January 1880 data includes 2 temperature measurements for the continent of Africa. One looks to be Algeria and the second to be the island of Sao Tome something like 100 miles off the coast. Neither South America or Antarctica had any coverage yet we are expected to believe their numbers are accurate. Only Europe was largely covered. The US was but the rest of North America was generally empty.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2009&month_last=04&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=01&year1=1880&year2=1880&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=250&pol=reg

This map shows what the temperature anomaly was in a 2 degree longitude by 2 degree latitude grid. I choose the smaller of the two options. This is anything within 250 kilometers (150 miles) on either side. That's like saying that you can tell the temperature of Washington DC by standing in Central Park (New York City).

But it gets worse. They will allocate a temperature to an entire grid if there is a measurement within 250 km. Lets go back to Sao Tome. A 250 km radius around a point is 196,250 square km. Because they assign a temperature to every grid that even barely overlaps the 250 km radius that number grows massively.

They assign 12 2 X 2 grids to Sao Tome. They total about 593,141 sq km. All for one thermometer and we are expected to believe that they know the temperature within a tenth of a degree. Lets not even talk about the quality of the data.

If you believe the models fine (I don't) but the actual data sucks.

I know this is anecdotal but a former roommate of mine is an oceanographic geologist who talks to a lot of scientists in different fields studying this right now, and there's an extremely strong consensus on global warming as well as it being largely man-made, although there are differences of agreement on degree, naturally.

Granted, her branch is not the whole picture, but the parts she does see from core samples to studying coral reefs and beyond are alarming and happening now, not in some model of the future. I consider her a very smart person and not someone who tends to be easily swayed into any sort of party line. She's a total skeptic until she sees hard data about everything, so when she says this is something real, I tend to believe her. Again, anecdotal and an appeal to authority, but she knows first hand a hell of a lot more about it than I do, so I trust her opinion a lot.

In a court of law I think that it would be hearsay but that's OK. Hearsay is inadmissible because the opponent can't cross examine. I believe you and I believe that she is sincere in her beliefs.

Anecdotal is like deciding that the world is warming because it doesn't snow in NYC in December or that you saw a robin a week earlier then last year.

I'm not sure if the "core samples" you refer to are growth rates or a proxy temperature measurement. Proxy data has to be taken with a grain of salt. I'm not as familiar with coral data as I am with tree rings. Trees as you can imagine are not just susceptible to temperature but light and water. If "Grandpa" tree falls down and dies, the tree will get more sunlight and have more tree rings. If it's a hot and dry year the tree won't grow as much. These things are tough to identify 400 plus years later when all you have to go on is a tree ring.

I don't doubt that the planet is warmer then a hundred years ago but I question why and by how much. The temperature record is a joke. They are using numbers that may or may not have been accurate from long dead people that couldn't conceive that a tenth of a degree would be important. The planet does it's own thing and I don't think that we can significantly impact it in terms of temperature.

There are all sorts of nasty chemicals belching into the atmosphere and CO2 isn't one of them.

Sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, lead and particulate matter are all bad. The US and Europe have made great strides in cleaning this crap up. China is spewing more and more of this crap out and nobody seems to care. The world is obsessed with CO2 which is what makes plants grow. I don't doubt that if we hadn't cleaned up our act the UN would be bitching about this instead of CO2.

There are 2 things I can't forget- The Republicans who argued with me online for years against the environment, And the anti-environment, mostly-religious conservative politicians who've done everything they can to slow down progress.
I mean the Democrats fail too, if we were really trying we'd have cars getting 100 miles a gallon by now, but at least they weren't completely against it. Humans killing parts of the ocean and wiping out ecosystems and driving so many species to extinction (forever) is worse than Murder in my opinion because the future for all the babies we squirt out will be nasty. It is Theft of their beautiful planet. Environmental Rape.
It's not really vicious though, no, because it's from short-sighted stupidity.. it's just pathetic, and being pathetic isn't against the law :)

But I also think him saying "Worst Person in the World" in redundant :rofl: so there's that!