An Inconvenient Truth": Has Polar Bears Survived & Thrived?

[Andre]

We thank you for that. I do think that the moderator should have deleted some of the posts by Skyhunter in this “Earth” forum.

Well, perhaps. I don't mind though. It gives me the opportunity to demonstrate that most of the global warming message is based on appeal to emotion, ad hominems (the oil companies) and other fallacies. Whenever passers by note that and review other global warming messages to recognise that all of a sudden. I'm happy.

Take for instance:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-oreskes24jul24,0,823343.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

That's a though one, isn't it? Who would be able to maintain that global warming is mostly a natural process after such a brilliant resume? However, if you would remove the fallacies then there would be nothing left than an empty paper. There is nothing in that paper that contributes to proving or refuting global warming. Notice how nice "global warming deniers" resembles "holocaust deniers".

How about the consensus anyway? Apart from the fact that this is the bandwagon fallacy that proofs nothing whatsoever. Indeed if some journals select main warmers like Mike Mann as referees, they will reject all papers that do not support global warming, so it's actually a double bandwagon fallacy. However is this a fact anyhow? Probably yes, because the letter of Benny Peiser challenging that http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Scienceletter.htm here got refuted as well. This way it's easy to proclaim consensus.

Anyway, I'm member of a club of about 270 persons, over 50% PhD in climate related issues (geologists, meteorologists, general physicists), none of which is getting coins from oil companies, who know that the climate has very little to do with the concentration of greenhouse gas.

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=52171&st=60 is a friend too:

Naomi Oreskes asks wrong climate question
By David Wojick

The first rule of surveys is "ask the right question," but Naomi Oreskes did not read the book. Oreskes did a survey of the scientific literature on climate change and claims to have found that the science is settled. She is wrong, because she asked the wrong question.

Her claim appears most recently in "Global Warming-Signed, Sealed and Delivered-Scientists agree: The Earth is warming, and human activities are the principal cause" by Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at the University of California San Diego, in an op ed in the Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2006 (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-oreskes24jul24,0,823343.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail).

This study is news, not because it is new -- it is two years old - but because it came up in a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Some claim that the Oreskes study was refuted, citing the Wall Street Journal, and she fired back in the LA Times. Readers can go the LA Times piece for the gory details.

But here is what is wrong with the Orestes study. As a student of the history of science, she really doesn't understand very well how science actually functions.

She summarizes her findings as follows:

"Not a single paper in a large sample of peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 refuted the consensus position, summarized by the National Academy of Sciences, that 'most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.'"

The weasel word is "refute." As a serious student of the climate change debate, I agree that I have never seen a single paper that claimed to refute the theory of human induced warming. But suppose we ask the right question-are there any papers that cast doubt on the theory of human induced warming? The answer is sure, plenty, maybe most.

Orestes' refutation question shows a deep misunderstanding of the climate science debate. There is no single test, experiment or observation that is going to either refute or prove the human warming theory. But individual tests, experiments and observations are what get published in scientific papers. There is no killer scientific argument here, so no wonder Orestes did not find one.

Dos this mean there is any kind of consensus on the science? By no means. In fact, the debate has widened in recent years, as the number of alternative theories to human induced warming has grown. The science is diverging, not converging on a single explanation for the warming.

Presuming, of course, that there is any warming, which is still an active subject of research. Note too that the temperature record only shows warming in about 20 of the last 50 years, something else we are trying to explain. The $1.7 billion U.S. climate change research program is a catalog of alternative theories, arguments and counter arguments. It's not a consensus.

For example, and to return to Orestes' bungled literature survey, consider solar variability. Numerous papers report strong statistical correlations with various aspects of solar output and the Earth's temperature record. Numerous papers explore how this solar variability might drive temperature. In short' this is a very active area of research.

But would any of these papers show up in Orestes' survey? No, because none of them claims to "refute" the human induced warming theory. They merely support the competing theory of solar variability as the cause of the warming. By the same token, there are no papers that refute the theory of solar variability. Climate science is not about refutation, it is about assembling a million tiny pieces of research to try to figure out the world's most complex system. The Orestes approach is mind-bogglingly naive.

If anyone wants to see some of the thousands of papers that Orestes missed, I recommend http://www.co2science.org. The subject index leads to an endless supply of plain language summaries of scientific papers that cast doubt on the theory of human induced warming, all sorted by topic. Maybe Orestes should have looked here before publishing her silly findings
----------------------------------------
--
David E. Wojick, Ph.D.
Climatechangedebate.org

The lack of support and the public opinion however, effectively precludes any change of the paradigm. I'm quite sure that there will be shiploads of psychology textbooks, written to explain the greatest hoax of mankind ever, after a few decades, when the next little ice age, the Landscheidt minimum, strikes hard.

 

[Andre]

I don't think we are going to agree about the cause of the warming any time soon.

I think so too, but it will be very interesting to hear, which evidence is there to be convinced of global warming as in doubling CO2 means some 2-5 degrees temperature increase or so.

Still studying, but I will get back to you.

http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/reference/bibliography/2002/soden0201.pdf .

CH4 So which is it?

The greenhouse effect is not linear but basically logaritmic from that it could be inferred that the doubling of CH4 from 0,7 ppmv to 1,4 ppmv as we have seen in reality would have a similar effect as doubling CO2 from preindustrial 280 ppmv to 560 ppmv. Or 0,7 ppmv CH4 appears to be comparable to 280 ppmv CO2. which would make CH4 400 times stronger than CO2. It's just how you bias your calculations.

But then MODTRAN came, showing http://home.wanadoo.nl/bijkerk/modtranrun2.gif .

Let's calculate ourselfs http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/cgimodels/radiation.html .

Enter zero's for CO2 and CH4 and hit "submit the calculation" (or enter) to find a basic radiation of 250.352 W/m2

Now let's run all those values seperately

For CH4 0.7 ppmv: 249.599 W/m2
and double 1,4 ppmv: 249.253 W/m2

for a difference of 0.346 W/m2

Now for 280 ppmv: 230.005 W/m2
and double 560 ppmv: 227.713 W/m2

for a difference of 2,292 W/m2

making CO2 some 6.6 times stronger as a greenhouse gas for doubling the historical values. Insights can progress, can't they? But notions persists much longer, especially if they are supporting alarmism.

There must be a lot of scientists out there with purely social objectives.

And that bias perverts their science, which will backfire eventually.

 

[Mk]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-oreskes24jul24,0,823343.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

That's a though one, isn't it? Who would be able to maintain that global warming is mostly a natural process after such a brilliant resume? However, if you would remove the fallacies then there would be nothing left than an empty paper. There is nothing in that paper that contributes to proving or refuting global warming. Notice how nice "global warming deniers" resembles "holocaust deniers".

How about the consensus anyway? Apart from the fact that this is the bandwagon fallacy that proofs nothing whatsoever. Indeed if some journals select main warmers like Mike Mann as referees, they will reject all papers that do not support global warming, so it's actually a double bandwagon fallacy. However is this a fact anyhow? Probably yes, because the letter of Benny Peiser challenging that http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Scienceletter.htm here got refuted as well. This way it's easy to proclaim consensus.

Heh, you're kind of right. The article is basically this:

AN OP-ED article in the Wall Street Journal a month ago claimed that a published study affirming the existence of a scientific consensus on the reality of global warming had been refuted. This charge was repeated again last week, in a hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

<talking about herself>

<Consensus by IPCC, NAS, BRS, and "even" the Bush administration>

<Skeptics are wrong because they can't accept the truth, because they are old>

None of this is to say that there are no uncertainties left — there are always uncertainties in any live science. Agreeing about the reality and causes of current global warming is not the same as agreeing about what will happen in the future. There is continuing debate in the scientific community over the likely rate of future change: not "whether" but "how much" and "how soon." And this is precisely why we need to act today: because the longer we wait, the worse the problem will become, and the harder it will be to solve.

 

[Skyhunter]

Ihttp://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/reference/bibliography/2002/soden0201.pdf .

Excellent link. Although I had already read this one when I was looking into volcanic eruptions and their influence on short term climate effects.

This study does seem to support the water vapor feedback loop, which is used in the climate projection models.

Nevertheless, the results described here provide key evidence of reliability of water vapor feedback predicted by current climate models in response to a global perturbation in the radiative energy balance. Given the importance of water vapor feedback in determining climate sensitivity. such confirmation is essential to the use of these models for global warming projections.

This is of course qualified by a previous statement;

Although it is possible that other processes, such as clouds, could act in place of water vapor to provide the strong positive feedback necessary to amplify the cooling, the observational evidence clearly indicates a reduction in water vapor that is consistent with the model predictions.

 

[Skyhunter]

Well, perhaps. I don't mind though. It gives me the opportunity to demonstrate that most of the global warming message is based on appeal to emotion, ad hominems (the oil companies) and other fallacies. Whenever passers by note that and review other global warming messages to recognise that all of a sudden. I'm happy.

Take for instance:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-oreskes24jul24,0,823343.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

That's a though one, isn't it? Who would be able to maintain that global warming is mostly a natural process after such a brilliant resume? However, if you would remove the fallacies then there would be nothing left than an empty paper. There is nothing in that paper that contributes to proving or refuting global warming. Notice how nice "global warming deniers" resembles "holocaust deniers".

I seem to have missed any reference to the holocaust in Naomi Oreskes piece. The analogy used was this.

A historical example will help to make the point. In the 1920s, the distinguished Cambridge geophysicist Harold Jeffreys rejected the idea of continental drift on the grounds of physical impossibility. In the 1950s, geologists and geophysicists began to accumulate overwhelming evidence of the reality of continental motion, even though the physics of it was poorly understood. By the late 1960s, the theory of plate tectonics was on the road to near-universal acceptance.

Yet Jeffreys, by then Sir Harold, stubbornly refused to accept the new evidence, repeating his old arguments about the impossibility of the thing. He was a great man, but he had become a scientific mule. For a while, journals continued to publish Jeffreys' arguments, but after a while he had nothing new to say. He died denying plate tectonics. The scientific debate was over.

Now just who is it that is resorting to hyperbole?

 

[Andre]

I seem to have missed any reference to the holocaust in Naomi Oreskes piece.

No problem I get that for you:
http://www.eco-imperialism.com/content/article.php3?id=180 should make clear why the term "climate deniers" is so popular by the witch hunters like Oreskes

As part of the current media frenzy over the “imminent demise” of Planet Earth from global warming, it has become fashionable to demonize global warming skeptics through a variety of tactics. This has recently been accomplished by comparing scientists who don’t believe in a global climate catastrophe to “flat-Earthers,” those who denied cigarettes cause cancer, or even those who deny the Holocaust.

It is interesting that it is not the scientists who are making the comparisons to Holocaust-deniers, but members of the media. For instance, Scott Pelley, who recently interviewed NASA’s James Hansen for CBS’s “60 Minutes,” has been quoted on the CBS News PublicEye blog saying:

“There is virtually no disagreement in the scientific community any longer about ‘global warming.’ … The science that has been done in the last three to five years has been conclusive.”

Pelley also posted this quote to the same blog:

“If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?”

This comparison between global warming skeptics and Holocaust-deniers illustrates the upside-down worldview...cont'd

The analogy used was this.

...A historical example will help to make the point...

Now just who is it that is resorting to hyperbole?

No, just the fallacy of the false analogy. Global warming is about faulty physics and has nothing to do with the psychology behind paradigm shifts. Whether or not somebody believes i plate tectonics or not is not going to change the rights or wrongs about global warming.

Compare that for instance with the very last (fallacy free?) E-mail I wrote in my discussion group about the logic behind global warming:

I agree with "your" logic. After all it is "Popperian" logic in which theories can never be proven, they can only be refuted. So as long as there is ''evidence'' for (actually observations consistent with) AGW, it can be assumed 'not untrue'. Therefore it is required to falsify it with evidence that opposes AGW.

So how about that scientific method: observations -> sound physical explanation -> test by predictions.

1: We have observations of the Earth getting warmer.
We also observe CO2 is increasing

We have the "when-there-is-more-CO2-it's-warmer-bias experience. which is (seems to be/ was) true for

a Venus
b the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum
c The Pleistocene Ice Ages
d The hockey stick
e Last 30 years.

But then again it was not true for

a Mars
b Cryogenian Era (alleged Snowball Earth) 850 Ma - 635 Ma.
c Ordovician (440Ma) and Late Triassic (220Ma) extinctions which are (have been) associated with ice ages
d The early Holocene Thermal maximum
d the hockey stick after it's refutal (Medieval Warm Period)
e between about 1940 and 1975

So the CO2=warm observation is not that consistent.

2. Then we have an explanation: a little CO2 greenhouse effect enhanced with a massive positive feedback.

If we agree on the little greenhouse effect (not necesarily true) then again it boils down to either proving or refuting that mysterious massive positive feedback.

3: CO2 hypothesis prediction. See the Hansen 1988 temperature prediction graph. However it will take quite a while before we can consider that prediction to be false.

Alternately the AGW hypothesis could be refuted by showing that another hypothesis fits the observations much better than AGW.

 

[Bystander]

(snip)I still do not fully understand the science, (who does) but your input has been most helpful in my education.

--- and, from #31,

The obvious explanation, is that there is more land in the Northern hemisphere. Land radiates heat at night faster than water,

Is this misstatement deliberate? Or, a reflection of your misunderstanding? Land cools more rapidly at night, and warms more rapidly in the day. What's that mean? That means, that rock and soil, being solid and opaque to visible light absorb less heat during the day in a smaller volume than do the oceans; the smaller heat capacity of rock and soil absorbing sunlight results in daytime warming to higher temperatures than seen in daytime ocean warming; at night, rock and soil contain less heat at a higher temperature than the oceans, and radiate that heat more rapidly (since they start at a higher temperature), cooling rock and soil to provide a "sink" for onshore breezes at night.

therefore I would suspect that the greenhouse effect would be greater, since the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the higher percentage of IR is trapped. So the more IR energy combined with a stronger greenhouse effect, results in a more rapid warming in the northern hemisphere.

Less heat being radiated means less heat being trapped; the fact that the heat is being radiated at a higher initial temperature means that an even smaller fraction is subject to the 10 micron CO₂ absorbtion.

Care to try again?

 

[Skyhunter]

Care to try again?

I would rather hear your explanation for why the northern hemisphere is warming faster than the southern. The most obvious difference between the two is land mass.

Since water is a better heat sink than land, as you stated the land warms and cools faster. CO₂ is not the only GHG, by singling out CO₂ you are oversimplifying. Warmer air holds more water vapor, which in turn traps more heat, throughout more the spectrum.

 

[Bystander]

We went over this in the "consensus" thread in P&WA --- remember? It's a systematic drift in systematic error in a measurement method. Let's review:

meteorological temperatures are indicated air temperature, not true air temperature;
meteorological temperatures are taken from thermometers that are uncertain to plus or minus 1 K (2 F), by specification;
meteorological thermometers are located in instrument shelters which yield a "hot" error of around 1 K at "wind" speeds of 1 m/s, increase to a 3-5 K max at zero wind speed, and drop off to 0.1 K at 10 m/s, and smaller, at higher wind speeds;
the meteorological record does NOT include wind speeds with "max-min" temperature records, so no correction for wind speed is possible;
global population increased by 4-5 billion over the past century, and two thirds (?) of that increase occurred in the northern hemisphere;
housing and movie theaters, bowling alleys, barns, factories, and other structures for 3 billion people interfere with screen height (instrument shelter) air movement;
population center in the U. S. moved southward by 2 latitudinal degrees during the 20th century;
the latitudinal temperature gradient between New Orleans and Minneapolis, or Miami and Boston, or San Diego and Seattle is on the order of 0.5 K per latitudinal degree;
1000 1 K thermometers can be used by a single observer to determine the temperature of a fixed temperature reference to 0.1 K;
a single 1 K thermometer can be used by a thousand observers to determine the same temperature to 1 K;
a thousand observers with a thousand different 1 K thermometers CANNOT measure a temperature field while moving randomly around in that field to any better than 1 K;
a thousand observers with a thousand different thermometers moving randomly around a temperature field and changing thermometers on a random time basis (breakage, age, loss) CANNOT measure a time dependence for that temperature field to better than 1 K;
a thousand observers with a thousand thermometers moving randomly around a temperature field, randomly changing instruments, and subject to drifting systematic error in measurement method --- are a waste of time and effort far as long term records go.​

Meteorologists collected the data for real time use in plotting 5 or 10 degree isotherms on weather maps --- let's 'em identify air masses and the movements of same --- that's all the data's good for. It is NOT a climate record. It was NOT designed to be a climate record. It was NEVER intended for use as a climate record.

 

[Skyhunter]

We went over this in the "consensus" thread in P&WA --- remember? It's a systematic drift in systematic error in a measurement method.

Meteorologists collected the data for real time use in plotting 5 or 10 degree isotherms on weather maps --- let's 'em identify air masses and the movements of same --- that's all the data's good for. It is NOT a climate record. It was NOT designed to be a climate record. It was NEVER intended for use as a climate record.

Not according to NOAA.

When calculating global temperatures, NCDC scientists, as well as those at NASA and in the United Kingdom, use methods that address areas of the globe with sparse observations or measurement biases. The various methodologies result in very small differences (on the order of a few hundredths of a degree Celsius) between the global temperature estimates, and these differences can affect individual yearly rankings. Although the ranking of individual years may differ slightly from data set to data set, all records indicate that during the past century, global surface temperatures have increased at a rate near 0.6°C/century (1.1°F/century), but the trend has been three times larger since 1976, with some of the largest temperature increases occurring in the high latitudes.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2005/ann/global.html#top

 

[Mk]

meteorological temperatures are indicated air temperature, not true air temperature;

I thought they used thermometers.

meteorological thermometers are located in instrument shelters which yield a "hot" error of around 1 K at "wind" speeds of 1 m/s, increase to a 3-5 K max at zero wind speed, and drop off to 0.1 K at 10 m/s, and smaller, at higher wind speeds;

Why would error go down if the wind speed goes up?

 

[Bystander]

I thought they used thermometers.

Why would error go down if the wind speed goes up?

Short answer: meteorologists are interested in temperatures of air masses; the instrumental setup yields a steady-state "indicated temperature" arising from heat transfers from the sun (5500-6000 K), the ground (200-350 K), the instrument shelter (some combination of sun, ground, and air T), and what air moves through the shelter (air T, the quantity of interest); the higher the wind speed, the greater the effect air temperature has on indicated temperature of the thermometer.

'Nuff? Or, you wanta dig deeper? Google "Stevenson (R. L.'s father) screen," or "cotton region shelter," for an idea of the environment the thermometer is sampling. Hit Rohsenow & Hartnett for emissivities of white paint, various ground surfaces, and thermometer liquids.

 

[Mk]

Wow. Paint emissitivites and thermometer liquids—theres' always more unthoughtof variables

I don't understand the way you say wind velocity is connected to error range.

 

[Bystander]

Zero wind speed: is there any exchange of air inside the shelter with free air, the properties of which are the only interest; what does the thermometer see? Yeah, diffusion, odd local convection as the shelter collects solar and surface radiation; the thermometer sees the air inside the shelter which is going to be more in equilibrium with the shelter temperature than with air outside the shelter.

Move the air at 1 m/s, and carry off kW/K of the solar and surface radiation the shelter is collecting for a 1 m cube (close enough for looking at shelter errors); depending on emissivities, you're looking at order of 100-300 watts the shelter collects and either radiates, or conducts to air. If the air is still T can rise several K --- if the air is moving, that heat is transported away from the thermometer.

 

[Mk]

Stevenson (R. L.'s father)

You mean "Robert Louis"? Wow.

 

[Andre]

I hear that the movie is now in Australia. Please, dear antipodes, review the elements of demagogery and then go to the movie with a checklist of items to be ticked off, what are the fallacies, appeal to fear, hyperbole, ad hominems, band wagons, rethoric etc? That's much more fun. You will see that's a real masterpiece of demagogy par excellance.

 

[reasonmclucus]

Should we expect the warming to be linear?

World temperature was slightly warmer in 2005 than in 1998. Note the warm extreme anomalies as opposed to cool extreme anomalies. If you compare them with historical extremes these two years are somewhat unique in that there are almost no cold extremes. Also note the number of +5C anomalies in the subarctic northern land temperatures.

The mean trend has not changed significantly, but it is possible we have reached a plateau and will now experience a cooling as has been suggested by Bill Gray, professor emeritus, who predicts:
"In just three, five, maybe eight years, he says, the world will begin to cool again."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003040068_warming05.html

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2005/ann/global.html#Gtemp

I notice that the temperature increase is primarily in the northern latitudes where most of the people live. Has anyone attempted to measure the amount of heat generated by human activity. Human skin temperature is about 88 F if I remember correctly which would likely cause some warming during much of the year. then there is the heat of human machinery. The exhaust gas entering a catalytic converter is over twice the temperature of the air as measured on the Kelvin scale. Urban heat islands are known to be as much as 5 to 10 F over rural areas. This factor may be small, but it needs to be accounted for.

 

[||spoon||]

An Inconvenient Truth

Hey all,

I have just finished watching the newly released DVD (at least in Australia) of "An Inconvenient Truth" featuring Al gore's lectures and it has made me want to change my own habits to those which are more environmentally friendly.

What effect has it had on anyone else that has seen the movie?


if you haven't seen it yet, WATCH IT!, it might change your perspective on things

Thanks

-Spoon

 

[Andre]

World temperature was slightly warmer in 2005 than in 1998.

only in the dreams of Jim Hansen. All other series showed 1998 warmer to considereable warmer than 2005. The satellites for instance:

http://home.wanadoo.nl/bijkerk/tltgmam-5.2.gif

 

[BillJx]

I found Gore's movie fairly factual. If it's alarmist it's because the situation is alarming. What's most alarming to me is that most people claim to be concerned but don't seem to be doing anything differently. Every day, the newspapers carry a couple of stories on climate change, and the rest of the paper is unchanged. Travel, RV'ing, home fashions etc.

Gore was less than honest on one score. We can't "fix" this problem. We can only try to reduce the scale of the oncoming disaster. Or we can just deny it, which is a lot easier.

 

[Moridin]

To reconnect with the question in the OP, I did notice some incorrect information, both things that where definitively incorrect, others than might have been correct from the beginning and things that I found somewhat irrelevant to the movie.

I was also negative to Gore's opening statement about not speaking much of the science behind it. Aside from the blatant sympathy videos of his family and past and the anti-Bush propaganda, there where a picture of the Tasmanian tiger in the list of species supposedly killed by changes in climate. This species was hunted to extinction by the early European settlers of Tasmania and the last one did in the 1930's. Perhaps he meant animals that mankind had affected in a way that lead to extinction.

I was quite surprised when he mentioned that diseases are coming back as a result of the human influence on the world, and he mentioned the avian flu in particular. This was very interesting, as the flu that circumnavigates the planet every year is a sort of avian flu, just not H5N1[1]. It is safe to assume that he meant the Spanish flu contra H5N1.

Finally, a politician lecturing on science?

[1] http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/323/

 

[BillJx]

This thread illustrates what depresses me most about the movie. Incomprehension. Denial. A campaign of misinformation aimed at a poorly informed public that doesn't want to change anyway.

The rise in temperatures is beyond question. Glaciers are retreating, the sea level is rising perceptibly, the permafrost is melting. Changes like these are not good. Agriculture, for one thing, depends on consistent and predictable weather patterns. Mountain snowpacks feed the rivers that provide irrigation through the summer.

There's the other little inconvenience, that climate change tends to occur is relatively sudden jumps after a period of gradual heating or cooling.

"An Inconvenient Truth" is the perfect title. Sounding the alarm is different from being "alarmist".

 

[Andre]

Well, you may want to cheer up, as there is a lot more depression to follow when the hoax will unfold in another decade or two. The same kind of depression that came upon many, when the mutual assured destruction bombs did not want to drop, as the cold war ended. So, there was a bright future all of a sudden again to deal with. As this was unthinkable, it did not last very long. After all, what's a man without fear and sense of guilt.

Also very strange that the Earth went through several warming and cooling stages in the last 500 million years which were opposite to the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. But when mankind starts producing these gases, it's leading to the end of the world all of a sudden.

 

[Evo]

We are, after all, nearing the end of the current interglacial period (warming period) that naturally occurs between ice ages. Where I live used to be under a glacier during the last ice age.

 

[Andre]

Indeed so it seems. It should also be noted that CO2 lags the apparent changes from glacial to interglacial with about 1000years and back with several thousand years, without a trace of feedback influence.

Anyway, the extent of the last glaciation in North America has always been subject to hot debate. At Penn State last weekend a new compilation tool has been introduced to register and reconstruct the deglaciation process and habitat changes over time.

You can play with it here,

http://ess.nrcan.gc.ca/2002_2006/rcvcc/j27/1_1_e.php

 

[Evo]

Excellent article.

"When Eric the Red led the Norwegian Vikings to Greenland in the late 900s, it was an ice-free farm country--grass for sheep and cattle, open water for fishing, a livable climate--so good a colony that by 1100 there were 3,000 people living there. Then came the Ice Age. By 1400, average temperatures had declined by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, the glaciers had crushed southward across the farmlands and harbors, and the Vikings did not survive.

Such global temperature fluctuations are not surprising, for looking back in history we see a regular pattern of warming and cooling. From 200 B.C. to A.D. 600 saw the Roman Warming period; from 600 to 900, the cold period of the Dark Ages; from 900 to 1300 was the Medieval warming period; and 1300 to 1850, the Little Ice Age.

During the 20th century the Earth did indeed warm--by 1 degree Fahrenheit. But a look at the data shows that within the century temperatures varied with time: from 1900 to 1910 the world cooled; from 1910 to 1940 it warmed; from 1940 to the late 1970s it cooled again, and since then it has been warming. Today our climate is 1/20th of a degree Fahrenheit warmer than it was in 2001.

Many things are contributing to such global temperature changes. Solar radiation is one. Sunspot activity has reached a thousand-year high, according to European astronomy institutions. Solar radiation is reducing Mars's southern icecap, which has been shrinking for three summers despite the absence of SUVS and coal-fired electrical plants anywhere on the Red Planet. Back on Earth, a NASA study reports that solar radiation has increased in each of the past two decades, and environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg, citing a 1997 atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, observes that "the increase in direct solar irradiation over the past 30 years is responsible for about 40 percent of the observed global warming."

continued...

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pdupont/?id=110009693

 

[dmumsie]

For the thrill of a lifetime and tons of Global waming information try this
site. Good reading..

http://www.junkscience.com/

 

[Andre]

In today's Nature magazine Vol 445, page 806, there is an editorial of Michael Hopkin.

A few quotes:

Role of state climatologist comes under scrutiny

Many climate scientists get frustrated with those who don’t believe that human activity is causing global warming, but should having such views be a sackable offence? In recent months, two US state climatologists have been asked to stand down from their posts because of it, triggering debate about whether personal views should determine suitability for what many see as an academic position...

...Taylor, based at Oregon State University in Corvallis and appointed to his post in 1991, argues that his post is academic rather than political, and that it’s not his job to tell the state government what to do. “Most state climatologists have never even met their governor, let alone offered policy advice,” he told Nature.

Therefore, he says, his personal views on climate change shouldn’t be an issue. But Kulongoski clearly believes that a state climatologist should represent the state, and he argues that Taylor’s views are inconsistent with Oregon’s goal of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions...

Weren't climatologists specialists who know what's going on with climate? So is this the US of A with a first amendment or is this the USSR of Lysenko?

Does it sound familiar?

Lysenko's "revolution in agriculture" had a powerful propaganda advantage over the academics who urged the patience and observation required for science. Lysenko was admitted into the Communist Party hierarchy and put in charge of agricultural affairs. He used his position to denounce biologists as "fly-lovers and people haters," and to decry the "wreckers" in biology who he claimed were trying to purposely disable the Soviet economy and cause it to fail. He furthermore denied the distinction between theoretical and applied biology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

 

[Moridin]

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/409.htm

For a warming over Greenland of 5.5°C, consistent with mid-range stabilisation scenarios, the Greenland ice sheet contributes about 3 m in 1,000 years. For a warming of 8°C, the contribution is about 6 m, the ice sheet being largely eliminated.

Guess he forgot to mention that.

 

[Evo]

This is horrifying, someone I work with said that his wife teaches a mid-school science class (she has no science background). She thought the movie was great and has sent off for a school teaching kit the movie offers and will be teaching a course based on a movie with known errors!

OMG! Do we have no control over what is taught to our children? Do we teach based on movies now?

 

[turbo]

OMG! Do we have no control over what is taught to our children? Do we teach based on movies now?

Well, you can pick your poison. Do we allow the "teach the controversy" factions to set the agenda in regard to evolution, geology, etc? At least, the conservation measures urged by Gore et al will help reduce our energy dependence, if adopted. My wife and I started buying those coiled fluorescent bulbs to replace incandescents while they were still very expensive, and we have replaced nearly every conventional incandescent bulb in our house that gets any more than brief intermittent usage. We don't drive more than necessary, and share rides when possible. We have a clean-burning wood stove that heats our little house easily, and a 10 acre wood lot to harvest to supply the fuel. While the alarmism surrounding the global warming debate is a bit over the top, the fact is that conservation of energy is a healthy, productive exercise.

More important than conservation, IMO, is the enactment and enforcement of clean-air standards. Currently, Maine is suffering from the pollution from large coal-fired power plants upstream from us in the Midwest. We are warned to limit our consumption of wild fish caught from our inland waters due to mercury contamination, and we are warned not to eat the liver or kidneys of moose and deer due to cadmium contamination. Our summers are a string of ozone alerts, and our most sensitive fisheries are endangered by acid rain that leaches even more heavy metals out of the rocks and soils. Unfortunately, our government let's the most egregious polluters off the hook, allowing them to purchase "credits" from companies that don't pollute as much in order to average out the pollution. That concept is crap. Ask the people down-wind from the dirty plants. Our government is sacrificing our health and well-being and the stability of our ecosystems in order to save companies with dirty plants the costs of cleaning up. Since when do polluters deserve that kind of deference?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Do we teach based on movies now?

Remember Hemo the Magnificent?

Educational films are common
http://www.sc.edu/library/educfilm.html

Heck, I first learned about sex from an educational film [and the Vaughn twins].

 

[Andre]

This is horrifying, someone I work with said that his wife teaches a mid-school science class (she has no science background). She thought the movie was great and has sent off for a school teaching kit the movie offers and will be teaching a course based on a movie with known errors!

OMG! Do we have no control over what is taught to our children? Do we teach based on movies now?

I don't think it's the movie medium that bugs you. It's more the persuasive talk of its anchor man preaching doom purely based on fallacies and without any real substance. Better get used to it, it's only the beginning. The positive feedback loop of scaremongering and the need of fear to satisfy herd instinct leaves rationality chanceless, I'm afraid.

 

[Andre]

More important than conservation, IMO, is the enactment and enforcement of clean-air standards. Currently, Maine is suffering from the pollution from large coal-fired power plants upstream from us in the Midwest. ...Our government is sacrificing our health and well-being and the stability of our ecosystems in order to save companies with dirty plants the costs of cleaning up. Since when do polluters deserve that kind of deference?

Obviously all the more reasons to fight it and change things for the better, but what climate got to do with that. If pollution is the problem, fight pollution. get some nuclear power plants, have the coal plants to remove the polluting chemical before releasing the residue gasses.

Using the climate hype to change things for the better probably has more disavantages than solutions for pollution problems. People are inventing disingeneous solutions to reduce sunshine and remove CO2 from the atmosphere, which is useless in another decade when the sun is predicted to go into another quiet minimum.

 

[BillJx]

This is horrifying, someone I work with said that his wife teaches a mid-school science class (she has no science background). She thought the movie was great and has sent off for a school teaching kit the movie offers and will be teaching a course based on a movie with known errors!

OMG! Do we have no control over what is taught to our children? Do we teach based on movies now?

I wouldn't worry too much about it, other than the fact that many teachers lack a strong grasp of science and technology. That's something I put down to a bias in the educational system - - the guy who can design an engine on scrap paper and build it in his basement isn't an "intellectual" but the guy who can write a poem about it is.

As to the film, there are errors in everything. That doesn't change the overall factuality of the problem. The facts are that the ice in the Arctic is melting at a rate faster than expected; year after year we see new records broken for average global temperatures; glaciers and snowcaps are receeding in the Alps, the Rockies, the Andes, on Kilamanjero . . . Gore isn't making it up. Most climatologists, by far, have concluded that this is human-caused. If certain people want to believe that global warming is some great conspiracy they are welcome to believe what they want, but to me they don't seem at all credible.

There are a lot of crackpot theorists on the internet. For the "global warming is a hoax" crowd to convince me that they are anything else, they have to do more than scour the net for whatever seems to support their opinions.