Channel 4, The Great Global Warming Swindle

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Channel 4, The Great Global Warming Swindle

British channel 4 has made a dokumentary called The Great Global Warming Swindle that aired this week. I havent seen it yet but it might be interesting. It has recived critisism as expected. Channel 4 have made great dokumentaries before, like Undercover in the secret state a film about north korea.

 

Here is a link where you can download it:

http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3635143/Channel_4_-_The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle.avi

 

And here is a blogpost that talks about it.

http://globalisation-and-the-environment.blogspot.com/2007/03/great-global-warming-swindle.html

[MOD EDIT - fixed links]


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yer i saw it, at first i was

yer i saw it, at first i was very skeptical since i'm currently doing an atmospheric physics module at uni which indicates global warming is anthropogenic, so i was torn. If the "facts" they presented were true then it does bring about some good controversy. Also the people being interviewed were doctors at Cambridge, MIT, Harvard... so i'm guessin they had a clue


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The link in the first post

The link in the first post didn't work for me. Here's another link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6IPHmJWmDk&mode=related&search= 


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It's important to bear in

It's important to bear in mind that the only evidence for the existance of Satan is the media.  Seriously, although Channel 4 are probably the best channel on terrestrial T.V. and all the different offshoots tend to provide the best entertainment, controversial subjects garner the most attention, meaning more viewers, meaning they then have more reason to churn up advertising prices and money money money.

I'll be auditioning Gods in my office on monday morning. - Aesop Rock


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Though I believe in Global

Though I believe in Global Warming it seems to me that man has very little to do with it.  Unless we are also responsible for the heating up of EVERY OBJECT in the solar system.  I realise that Earth is the center of the universe but other objects do effect us... not just man. Eye-wink  Read this link for more.  http://www.redicecreations.com/specialreports/2006/11nov/solarsystemwarming.htmlThis still doesn't give people the right to waste and destroy our environment.  -.-

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While I'm back to fence

While I'm back to fence sitting on the matter, I am aware that even if other planetary objects are warming(which I've seen absolutely nothing to suggest is remotely accurate), it is a logical fallacy to assume climate on Earth and Pluto are the slightest bit related.

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It's all the sun. I've

It's all the sun. I've poured through the data, read all 3 IPCC reports and examined documents from the upcoming, examined the ice core data. It's clear, humans have added to the total CO2, but it is so insignificant to the natural causes it does not warrant panic. CO2 is a product of the Earth's temperature and not a cause. Solar output, temperature and CO2 all follow the same lines. However CO2 is erratic and actually lags temperature a few hundred years, which makes perfect sense knowing how the sea functions. Yet solar energy and temperature line up almost perfectly.

Consider this account closed. It's disgraceful this site has no function to delete an account. I cannot be part of an organization that seeks only to replace the religion of the god of the bible with the religion of "poor me" bleeding heart liberalism. Rational my ass! Not believing in a god is one thing. A rational view of the rest of the world is something else, which isn't found here.


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In the show the "rebel"

In the show the "rebel" scientists were talking about how noone really will speak out against global warming without getting slammed by the rest of the scientific community, does this not indicate a fundamental issue that needs to be dealt with. The beauty of science is its independance from politics or other influences, is this being lost?


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The human effect is minimal

I believe the human effect on climate change is very small, but I also believe that anything that gets funding to science is good. The earth's climate has been changing for millennium, why would we suddenly expect a balance?


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stephenmarkjackson

stephenmarkjackson wrote:
In the show the "rebel" scientists were talking about how noone really will speak out against global warming without getting slammed by the rest of the scientific community, does this not indicate a fundamental issue that needs to be dealt with. The beauty of science is its independance from politics or other influences, is this being lost?

 

This is my problem with global warming and public policy. It seems like politics has gotten its teeth into it and that always throws up red flags for me.  A good case in point is compact fluorescent lights. They use A LOT less energy so now there is legislation in progress that would mandate their use. Cool, except for the problem that these bulbs contain mercury and wholesale adoption of them would create serious problems with mercury pollution. But it is a real easy feel good measure that politicians can wear proudly - as long as the mercury thing does not become widely known.


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I've read the IPCC report

I've read the IPCC report for most parts and from all I can tell, the only logical explanation is that the global warming is caused by humans. When I have the chance to decided whom I believe, I'd rather believe in the majority of scientists than in Bush and oil concerns.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. - Immanuel Kant


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wavefreak wrote:   This is

wavefreak wrote:
 

This is my problem with global warming and public policy. It seems like politics has gotten its teeth into it and that always throws up red flags for me. A good case in point is compact fluorescent lights. They use A LOT less energy so now there is legislation in progress that would mandate their use. Cool, except for the problem that these bulbs contain mercury and wholesale adoption of them would create serious problems with mercury pollution. But it is a real easy feel good measure that politicians can wear proudly - as long as the mercury thing does not become widely known.

The mercury emissions from coal plants are much higher than the mercury content in the bulbs.  A regular light bulb uses about three times as much mercury over it's lifespan (10mg) compared to an average CFL which uses about 2.4mg (and the CFL lasts much longer).  The technology for the mercury in the bulbs can change and the bulbs can be disposed of so as not to contaminate groundwater.  There is no control for mercury emissions from power plants as indicated by higher levels of mercury in the food stream.

LED light bulbs contain no mercury and are more energy efficient than CFLs.  Currently the price for those bulbs are quite high but, like the CFLs, are expected to go down. 


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I havent seen this video

1


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I havent seen this video

I havent seen this video and im not sure what their view is on this subject but no matter what the view the facts remain unchanged.

global warming is not due to humans. It has happend several times in the last 4.5 billion years. There is money in causeing panic  for us in global warming. The global temprature has risein 1-3 degrees F in the last hundred years, it has risein 5 the hundred yrs before that proveing these people are full of shit. This trend of warming will result in an ice age. There is no shortage of oil, trees, waste dumps or fresh water. We cant change it, stoping anything we have done the entire existance of our human race wont save the planet, the planet is fine, if we dont change our hippy bullshit ways we wont be fine thats all there is to it. THE END

"Freedom of religion, means freedom of religion"

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So those thousands of

So those thousands of scientists and hundreds of studies are wrong and you're right because? It's quite something to go against numerous scientific findings.  Much like creationists who say the thousands of scientists are wrong about evolution I'm sure you'll present the scientific evidence that completely blows all this research out of the water.

 So far, like the creationists, nobody has.  Perhaps the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is part of a huge, massive global conspiracy, but probably not.


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sometimes in the universe

sometimes in the universe NEW things happen. that is my problem with the evidence they put forward on the show, it was entirely based on the past.

It is true that the disolution of CO2 into water is exothermic and so heating the oceans has a reversing effect releasing some of it. This is some of the cause of climate change in the past, as you say CO2 lags solar energy variations. However what can be seen from the data is once that oceanic CO2 is released, if there is enough released into the atmosphere the earth is pushed out of its stable equillibrium and pushed into a new equillibrium, most of the time an ice age.

 The thing about anthropogenic CO2 is that it's simulating the oceanic CO2 release which can cause the runaway effect. In the past few decades CO2 count in the atmosphere has risen by almost 40%, most of which CAN be accounted for by our emissions and deforestation etc. Obviously CO2 isnt the only greenhouse gas, we produce methane aswell (cows etc) and also the warming and cooling towers can produce more steam which is also a greenhouse gas.

 Anyway i'm just rambling but my point is there is a point where runaway occurs as the imbalance causes more imbalance.... We are producing that imbalance in a NEW but very REAL way so talking about ice records is useless as this is a very different issue.


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D-cubed wrote: A regular

D-cubed wrote:

A regular light bulb uses about three times as much mercury over it's lifespan (10mg) compared to an average CFL which uses about 2.4mg (and the CFL lasts much longer).  The technology for the mercury in the bulbs can change and the bulbs can be disposed of so as not to contaminate groundwater. 

Can you explain why there is mercury in an incandescent lamp. I thought they were constructed of a tungsten filament in argon (metal in an inert gas).

G


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D-cubed wrote:So those

D-cubed wrote:

So those thousands of scientists and hundreds of studies are wrong and you're right because? It's quite something to go against numerous scientific findings.  Much like creationists who say the thousands of scientists are wrong about evolution I'm sure you'll present the scientific evidence that completely blows all this research out of the water.

 So far, like the creationists, nobody has.  Perhaps the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is part of a huge, massive global conspiracy, but probably not.

"Wait what are you talking about? Studies on what? Global warming? Global warming due to us? The study how hippys saved the world? The scientific community has given us a straight answer on all of this. Global warming is true, we cant stop it, we didn't cause it, the only thing we can do is survive it, which can be found in many of discovery channel programming. The people you may be talking about contradicting the words i have said above are the same people controlling your religion and media, its a scare tactic to get small minded people to worry, and spend money and then they will tell us they have beaten global warming making them god in your eyes. Being a hippy will get you no were but dead, its survival of the fittest and that includes whose toughest against the weather."

"Freedom of religion, means freedom of religion"

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D-cubed wrote: So those

D-cubed wrote:

So those thousands of scientists and hundreds of studies are wrong and you're right because? It's quite something to go against numerous scientific findings. Much like creationists who say the thousands of scientists are wrong about evolution I'm sure you'll present the scientific evidence that completely blows all this research out of the water.

So far, like the creationists, nobody has. Perhaps the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is part of a huge, massive global conspiracy, but probably not.

Exactly.

Explicit Atheism wrote:
Global warming is true, we cant stop it, we didn't cause it, the only thing we can do is survive it, which can be found in many of discovery channel programming.

There are still the few hundred scientific studies that show that it's our fault though. Also, it may be true that we can't stop it entirely, but there's a thing called "limitation of damage". Instead of watching the discovery channel, maybe you should take a peek at the ICPP report and make up your own opinion. Smiling

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. - Immanuel Kant


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GUNT wrote: D-cubed

GUNT wrote:
D-cubed wrote:

A regular light bulb uses about three times as much mercury over it's lifespan (10mg) compared to an average CFL which uses about 2.4mg (and the CFL lasts much longer). The technology for the mercury in the bulbs can change and the bulbs can be disposed of so as not to contaminate groundwater.

Can you explain why there is mercury in an incandescent lamp. I thought they were constructed of a tungsten filament in argon (metal in an inert gas).

G

From what I read at Wiki the mercury is needed to control the gas pressure.  Newer designs are lowering the amount of mercury used and Wal-mart is pressuring it's suppliers to reach a lower content so we should expect in the near future to have less mercury content than we have now. 


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Explicit Atheism

Explicit Atheism wrote:

"Wait what are you talking about? Studies on what? Global warming? Global warming due to us? The study how hippys saved the world? The scientific community has given us a straight answer on all of this. Global warming is true, we cant stop it, we didn't cause it, the only thing we can do is survive it, which can be found in many of discovery channel programming. The people you may be talking about contradicting the words i have said above are the same people controlling your religion and media, its a scare tactic to get small minded people to worry, and spend money and then they will tell us they have beaten global warming making them god in your eyes. Being a hippy will get you no were but dead, its survival of the fittest and that includes whose toughest against the weather."

 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change controls the media and religion?  Better keep on wearing that tin foil hat, it helps reflect the sun back.  I'll stick with the science, you keep on with those bizarre conspiracy theories like scientists plotted to create the thermostat for their ultimate plot to get people to drive hybrids.


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D-cubed wrote: GUNT

D-cubed wrote:
GUNT wrote:
D-cubed wrote:

A regular light bulb uses about three times as much mercury over it's lifespan (10mg) compared to an average CFL which uses about 2.4mg (and the CFL lasts much longer). The technology for the mercury in the bulbs can change and the bulbs can be disposed of so as not to contaminate groundwater.

Can you explain why there is mercury in an incandescent lamp. I thought they were constructed of a tungsten filament in argon (metal in an inert gas).

G

From what I read at Wiki the mercury is needed to control the gas pressure.  Newer designs are lowering the amount of mercury used and Wal-mart is pressuring it's suppliers to reach a lower content so we should expect in the near future to have less mercury content than we have now. 

I'm very interested in this because I am an electronics tech involved exclusively in entertainment technology so I work with a lot of Intelligent lighting and Audio equipment. A major change recently has been the RoHS restrictions which is an international initiative to reduce the amount of hazardous chemicals in our landfill. The three major concerns are lead, mercury and cadmium. I won't go into the frustration of the reliablility of leadfree solder (leadfree solder is mostly tin and tin grows whiskers over time and causes failures as well as having a smaller useable temperature range... a massive drama to manufacturing)

The RoHS compliance definition states "Any RoHS compliant component must have 100 ppm or less of mercury and the mercury must not have been intentionally added to the component."

I was never under the assumption incandescent lamps contained any mercury and I found on this Wiki page... "Disposal and recycling | The disposal of phosphor and particularly the mercury in the (flourescent)tubes is an environmental issue. (Incandescent lamps do not contain mercury.)"

I agree with your conclusion that due to the emmissions of mercury from power stations a CFL is more friendly but I find it weird our governments while enforcing RoHS seem to overlook the violation to RoHS compliance with respect to intentionaly added mercury in CFLs.

G


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D-cubed wrote: The

D-cubed wrote:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change controls the media and religion? Better keep on wearing that tin foil hat, it helps reflect the sun back. I'll stick with the science, you keep on with those bizarre conspiracy theories like scientists plotted to create the thermostat for their ultimate plot to get people to drive hybrids.

Don't be naiive (I mean that in the nicest possible way). With the global political climate the way it is these days, isn't it possible that someone's calling the shots for all these issues? And Explicit didn't say it was the IPCC that controls media and religion, but suggested that they're controlled by the same people at a higher level. I'm not saying we should go overboard with conspiracy theories, but things aren't exactly adding up right.

Explicit, please stop referring to people who believe in global warming as "hippies." Even if its not true that we cause global warming, giving a crap about the environment shouldn't be labelled negatively. Have some respect. 

 

On the actual issue at hand, I was recently promoting awareness of global warming but I realise now that there's as much evidence one way as there is the other way. All those scientific studies that claim global warming is our work focus on change in the last 150 years or so, if that. The studies of the LONG-TERM climate changes (hundreds of thousands, if millions of years) suggest that we SHOULD be experiencing a period of warming right now. So do you assume that it's a natural occurence, or do you expect that perhaps we're experiencing an anomaly because of C02 emissions of our own causes?

The main argument I've heard in defense of global warming relating to C02 is that, in most studies, C02 levels start to rise AFTER the environment heats up, not before, contradicting  the claim of causality. Global Warming scientists say that this is simply 'lag.' In a recent New Scientist article I read, the suggestion was made that we shouldn't assume there'll be a perfect correlation between past temperature and C02 levels but this doesn't change the fact that C02 is a greenhouse gas and affects temperature.

What needs to be included in assessment are the implications of taking one or the other path. If we take Global Warming as caused by humans to be true, what are the global economic factors such including the affects on third-world countries exporting materials that might be replaced by other technologies, such as African nations' oil. If we don't say it's caused by humans, should we switch to more environmentally-friendly technology anyway?

My general impression is that the effects are too far underway to be stopped, and natural "disasters" are going to be more frequent for a while. What matters to me, then, is what we can do to reduce the damage that will occur. 


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I've seen both the Great

I've seen both the Great Global Warming Swindel and another BBC doc called Global Warming:  Doomsday Called Off.

 The predominant theory in both is a combination of man-made Co2, Solor Magnetic activity, cosmic rays and Global Dimming.

The concept is very simple and a wrote about it a long time ago on my old blog.  It's long winded and I don't want to write it all out again, so I'll just quote from my writtings there:

Targeting The Global Warming Bandwagon!

My faithful readers will remember that some time back I posted the FACTS about how the scientific community and the media has been attempting  to skew findings when it comes to the warming of the planet earth.  Any information that seems to dispute the coming "Global Warming/Global Climate Change" disaster tends to get poo-pooed and ignored in the media. 

I also laid out this remarkable little gem of evidence that I stumbled upon at the Junk Science website which shows just how ALARMIST and GOOFY the Enviro-Fascists have gotten when it comes to Global Warming.  The fact that the supposedly alarming increase in global temperatures of 0.6 degrees Celsius is within the margin of error ( +/- 0.7 degrees Celsius) for all of the data recorded since 1951, and the fact that some areas of the earth are not warming  or are actually cooling tends to shed some light on the issue at hand.

So what do we know?  Well, we know that the warming isn't GLOBAL, that the average change in the climate is well withing the margin of error for the data collected, and that climate change is nothing new for the planet Earth.

But wait, you exclaim!  Don't we have evidence that SUVs and fossile fuels are destroying the environment?  Don't we know that man is responcible for all this drastic global warming?

Nope, and anyone who tells you that they DO know that we're causing Global Warming is lying because we now have VERY CONVINCING EVIDENCE that concept of Global Warming is a thing of the past and that we may well have found the REAL culprit behind the 0.6 degree change in the average global temperature of the planet Earth, and here's a hint:  There is nothing we can do to stop it because WE DIDN'T CREATE IT IN THE FIRST PLACE!

I've said it before and I'll say it again;  We simply DO NOT KNOW enough about the climate of our planet to be able to make any kind of decisive statement about what is causing what we KNOW to be a moderate warming trend on the planet earth.  Despite this FACT, the Enviro-fascists are hard at work producing propaganda and misinformation designed to stop or eliminate our way of life.

Make no mistake, the Enviro-fascists have rapidly descended from their perches high up in the redwood trees that they love to hug, with the spotted owls they love to snuggle.  No, the Tree-hugging, spotted owl tongue kissing, environmental alarmists are less and less concerned with protecting the environment and more and more concerned with the destruction of capitalism and the American way of life.

Global Warming has become their favorite weapon with which to bash capitalism and the American economy.  We all have heard the hysterical comments about "Big Oil," "Halliburton," and "SUVs."  We've heard about how America is the biggest pollution producer in the world and that we all need to be driving hybrid vehicles and dismantling the industrial complex.  We've been beaten over the head with the Kyoto treaty and how George W. Bush was an idiot for not signing onto a treaty that required America to clean up it's already "cleaner than most" industrial complex while exempting China and other BIG polluters from ANY enforced changes.

Well, it's all a big steaming pile of class-one, grade-A, USDA Certified Bullshit.

First and foremost, the so-called Third World and Industrial "new comers" in South America and China are responsible for MORE pollution and MORE environmental damage than the United States of America.  American Industry is, more often than not, cleaner than her counterparts in China or anywhere else for that matter.  The reason is that we have regulations in place and the companies often make enough money that they can invest in equipment that reduces or eliminates harmful pollutants.  While we do drive a LOT of cars and trucks and SUVs, Americans drive more modern vehicles that produce less pollution.  Look at the third world and what do you see? 

The TRUTH is that our rivers, lakes, streams, air, and soil are CLEANER than most any other nation because for the most part we DO CARE about the environment.  And that's why the enviro-fascists are so effective in their attacks on our way of life.  Why, if we all care about the environment, all they have to do is tell us how someone doesn't care to rally support.  And they've tried to rally that support to a treaty that would have CRIPPLED the American Economy and done NOTHING to reel in polluters in other nations.

The Kyoto Treaty would have let countries like China go on exempt from the treaty while the American Economy would be forced to absorb a lot of the costs.  So far, the Kyoto Treaty has cost the nations that signed onto it almost $99 Billion to enforce and has produced a "POTENTIAL" temperature savings of  0.001024986 °C.  Yep, $99 Billion for 1/1000th of a degree in temperature savings.

But nowhere have the enviro-fascists been more effective than in their "Global Warming" Jihad.

The lie has been shouted from the roof-tops for so long and so loud that it's taken root and people actually believe that man has been able to do more damage to the Earth and her delicate atmosphere than has ever been done before.  People readily accept that we have caused the climate to change and the planet to warm.

But if that is the case, then what about Mars?

Scientists have recently announced the discovery that the Southern Polar Ice-cap on the planet Mars is retreating at an alarming rate.  After an unprecedented recent couple of years actually observing Martian climate and geology, we've found that not only is Mars warming up, it's also losing it's southern Ice Cap and is going through a warming trend of it's own.

Let's break this down.  What is it that both planets have in common that COULD be the reason that Mars is experiencing the same warming trend that Earth is?

Well, it's not animal or plant life.  There is pretty much a universal acceptance that there is no life left on Mars, though there may have been some at some distant past.  We've not sent any astronauts to Mars for the purpose of exploration, so we know that there are no humans on Mars. Last time I checked, the Mars Rovers are solar powered and are not producing any toxic, environment-killing green house gases.  Last I checked, NASA has been the only entity to receive a no-bid contract to explore Mars, and Halliburton is nowhere near that planet.  So what could possibly contribute to the warming of the planets Earth and Mars at the exact same time?

There is only one thing that both of these planets have in common, and it's something that EVERY planet in the solar system has in common with each other.

It's the sun.

 It turns out that according to scientific records and data, the sun is shining brighter than it has in the last 8000 years.  In fact, recent scientific work has revealed that everything we know about the connections between the cycles of the sun and the cycles of the climate of the planet Earth are directly related.

In 2003, the same team of scientists announced the correlation of the brightness and the number and severity of sun spots with the warming and cooling trends going back 1000 years.

To make a long story full of scientific terms a little shorter and easier to understand, scientists have been able to work out that the sun is producing more sunspots, and shining brighter than it has done in the last 8000 years.  Outside the known 11 year cycle of solar activity, there exists at least one magnetic cycle that produces more sun spots, but increases the brightness of the sun.  Further, Scientists in Ireland have found a direct correlation between solar activity and warming and cooling trends.

"We can see global warming taking place over the past two centuries that suggests that changes in the Sun are at least partially responsible."

"It's quite apparent from our data that global warming, of about a degree C, has been taking place for at least a hundred years."

"We have found that it gets cooler when the Sun's cycle is longer and that Armagh is warmer when the cycle is shorter."

The key is cosmic rays. Cosmic rays interact with the atmosphere, creating isotopes like C-14 and Be-10 which in turn interact with water vapor in the atmosphere, turning that vapor into clouds and then as those clouds grow, those molecules act as condensation nuclei which in turn becomes the rain.

It's by this process that the C-14 is absorbed into plants and is how scientists can look at the rings of a tree and discover the level of cosmic radiation that made it's way to Earth in the years when those rings were formed.  The same goes for the Be-10 which is found in the Polar Ice caps in Ice Cores.

In sort, as more cosmic rays reach the Earth, levels of lower atmosphere cloud cover increases, causing more of the solar radiation to be reflected back into space.  This causes a general cooling trend and may have been more that partially responsible for the last ice age.

In the opposite case, when cosmic ray levels drop, so does the lower level cloud cover.  This leaves the higher elevation cloud cover which acts more like a mirror pointed at the Earth, reflecting the infra-red radiation of the earth back toward the ground.  Thus more radiation is absorbed by atmosphere, and less escapes from it which in turn leads to warming trends.

Whoa!  Wait a minute!  Didn't you just say that the Sun is shining brighter than in the last 8000 years?  If that is the case, shouldn't there be more cosmic rays?

Well, yes.  One would think that way, but the problem is that the brightness of the sun is directly related to the number of sun-spots on it's surface.  Sun spots are caused by magnetic activity within the sun.  These magnetic lines prevent cosmic rays from escaping the sun.  They are grabbed, along with the plasma storms that make up the surface of the sun and pulled back down to the surface.

In this way, when the sun is at it's brightest and most active, LESS cosmic radiation can make it's way through space to the planet Earth.

The sun that we all depend on for life and warmth may well be the cause for EVERY warming and cooling trend that the planet earth has ever seen.  Remember that the last time the Earth experienced solar levels like this was at the time that the last Ice Age was ending rapidly.

Remember the story about Global Dimming?  Here is is, slightly edited for format and because I don't need to make this story any longer than it already is.

Two recent studies have revealed that the Air is cleaner today than it has been in years, and the Enviro-pseudo-Scientists are up in arms!

First we were told that the all the pollutants and gasses in the atmosphere will lead to global warming and that we're all going to die. Now comes word that the air has less dirt and particulate material in it and that it is going to lead to even more global warming and we're all going to die.

Our planet's air has cleared up in the past decade or two, allowing more sunshine to reach the ground, say two studies in Science this week.

   Reductions in industrial emissions in many countries, along with the use of particulate filters for car exhausts and smoke stacks, seem to have reduced the amount of dirt in the atmosphere and made the sky more transparent.

That sounds like very good news. But the researchers say that more solar energy arriving on the ground will also make the surface warmer, and this may add to the problems of global warming. More sunlight will also have knock-on effects on cloud cover, winds, rainfall and air temperature that are difficult to predict.

The results suggest that a downward trend in the amount of sunlight reaching the surface, which has been observed since measurements began in the late 1950s, is now over.

The researchers argue that this trend, commonly called 'global dimming', reversed more than a decade ago, probably following the collapse of communist economies and the consequent decrease in industrial pollutants.

So let me get this straight, it wasn't the American economy that was driving the mass pollution of the Atmosphere? It was Communist economies like that in the former Soviet Union? I thought that America was the big trouble-maker.

Let's tie these stories together, shall we?

Global Dimming, due to all the particulate matter in the atmosphere has been decreasing and more solar energy has been reaching the surface, with less material in the lower atmosphere to reflect solar radiation back into space, the surface temperature has begun to rise.

So aside from the fact that this story is telling us that air pollution was actually helping to keep the atmosphere cool (tell that to an enviro-fascist and watch their heads explode), but that the trend began in the 1950's and is reversing as of about a decade ago.

So we have a combination of pollution being slowed down and solar activity preventing solar radiation from reaching the planet that has led to an increase in temperatures over the last 100 years, but more drastically in the last 50 to 60 years.

Wild and his team looked at data on surface sunshine levels from hundreds of devices around the planet. They found that since the 1980s there has been a transition from decreasing to increasing solar radiation nearly everywhere, except in heavily polluted areas such as India and at scattered sites in Australia, Africa, and South America

Surprisingly, Wild's study shows a brightening trend in China, despite the fact that there is a booming, fossil-fuel-intensive industry in that country.  Wild says he can only speculate that the use of clean-air technologies in China might be more widespread and efficient than has been thought.

In contrast, India's vast brown clouds of smog, which result from wildfires and the use of fossil fuels, have reduced the sunlight reaching the ground.

India?  India? We're behind India? Sweet Smoggy Savior! We're not even in the Top Five? We're falling behind. Obviously we don't have enough SUVs and coal burning power plants. Let alone open pit arsenic incinerators...

It's time to face the facts here. We're all going to die, regardless of the level of particulate matter in the air. If the air is clean, then global warming is going to kill us. If the air is dirty, then global warming is going to kill us. We should just give up. I mean seriously, we're looking at global death no matter the quality of the air we breath.

I had to leave that last part in there just because it still makes me laugh...

But on a serious note, the data all fits together.  We're BEGINNING to see that while there is still global warming to worry about, it's not all our fault.  Hell, our attempts to clean the air are leading to higher temperatures!  So we're damned if we do and damned if we don't.

Do you realize that there is an idea floating around that the best way to stand off global warming is the wide spread pollution of the atmosphere in order to create more low level clouding?  Yes, enviro-fascists are beginning to advocate the intentional pollution of the atmosphere...

 So does this mean that we're off the hook?  No.  There is evidence that increased levels of co2 can lead to the dreaded green-house effect.  Does that mean that we're the cause of all that co2?  Nope.

Case in fact.  One single and significant volcanic eruption such as the ones at Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii, Mount Saint Helens, or Mount Pinatubo cause more damage than the entire history of human civilization.

In fact, the act of igniting oil wells in the first Gulf War did less environmental damage than a single, small-scale eruption of ANY volcano.

So what can we gleam from all this information?  Well, we can clearly see that while we can have an effect on the level of green house gasses we produce and use, we have NO CONTROL over the influence of solar radiation on low level clouds which has been shown to be a driving force in the warming and cooling trends in the past.

So the next time someone tries to bring you down by telling you that your SUV is destroying the environment, or that Halliburton is the cause of Global Warming or that if we all just embraced socialism and abandoned capitalism we would all live in a better world, remind them that since we've began cutting back and restricting the use of green house gasses and cleaning up the air, Global Warming has continued and gotten worse.  Top that off with the fact that the same damned thing is happening on Mars and you can pretty much take the Religious Fanaticism of Environmentalism and place it in the ash heap of history.

Stick a fork in it, because it's done.

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Wish it away as long as you

Wish it away as long as you want, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by more than 3% (!!) each year between 2001-2004, according to an international team of scientists (The article is in the "Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences&quotEye-wink.

It reached almost 8 billion tons of released CO2 in 2005 and it's still getting more and more every year. If you think this wouldn't effect the climate... just take a fucking look at the polar ice caps.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. - Immanuel Kant


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sorry i didnt read that

sorry i didnt read that huge post, got exams soon so have to save brain space.

 There is a major issue being missed out here, you guys who want global warming not to exist seem to be foccussing too much on the past. The theory of global warming is that CO2 absorbs infrared (the peak wavelength of the earth's black body emmission spectrum) which is A SCENTIFIC FACT (well as factual as u can get), about half the absorbed energy is then reemitted back down to earth (the other half into space, good thing). However CO2 doesnt absorb visible light (the peak wavelength of the sun's light) which is also A SCIENTIFIC FACT. Which obviously means more energy is going in than to the system than is coming out. The greenhouse effect is a fact, despite what discovery channel says. And so if you increase the CO2 in the atmosphere, you increase the green house effect

The reason i'm explaining this is because i havent seen any understanding of the greenhouse effect in this discussion so far (unless there was some in that long post!) .

 YES other things affect the climate like the milankovich cycles, ocean salinity or other catastophes like volcanic eruptions and YES these were probably the cause of every other climate change in history before. But thats because the industrial revolution hasnt happend to earth before!!!! YOU CANT USE THE PAST AS EVIDENCE ANYMORE BECAUSE THIS IS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SITUATION!!!!!!

 Anyone who's convincing themselves this isnt an issue is doing so to rid themselves of guilt cos they cant be bothered to sacrifice any luxuries.

And just for a side note, i'm studying this as part of my physics degree so my opinion is entirely based on the physics, not the politics.


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I didn't read the entire

I didn't read the entire post either.  As soon as I see someone reference the Junk Science website there's no point in continuing further.  The Competitive Enterprise Institute is already a known shill for the oil industry so why should I believe a website that they sponsor?  They've already argued such nonsense that CO2 isn't really a pollutant, that it's actually life.  Junkscience.com also argued that cigarette smoke has no connection to lung cancer, absestos is harmless, pesticides in food is harmless, and lead poisoning is fiction.  There's no need to continue but I hope the science deniers keep their tin foil hats on tightly.


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Mattness wrote: Wish it

Mattness wrote:

Wish it away as long as you want, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by more than 3% (!!) each year between 2001-2004, according to an international team of scientists (The article is in the "Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences&quotEye-wink.

It reached almost 8 billion tons of released CO2 in 2005 and it's still getting more and more every year. If you think this wouldn't effect the climate... just take a fucking look at the polar ice caps.

 Look at the polot ice caps then.  The ice sheet is THICKENING.  http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05140/507684.stm  http://www.cfact.org/site/view_article.asp?idCategory=4&idarticle=244

Next. 

Who needs God when you have Chopin?


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stephenmarkjackson

stephenmarkjackson wrote:

sorry i didnt read that huge post, got exams soon so have to save brain space.

There is a major issue being missed out here, you guys who want global warming not to exist seem to be foccussing too much on the past. The theory of global warming is that CO2 absorbs infrared (the peak wavelength of the earth's black body emmission spectrum) which is A SCENTIFIC FACT (well as factual as u can get), about half the absorbed energy is then reemitted back down to earth (the other half into space, good thing). However CO2 doesnt absorb visible light (the peak wavelength of the sun's light) which is also A SCIENTIFIC FACT. Which obviously means more energy is going in than to the system than is coming out. The greenhouse effect is a fact, despite what discovery channel says. And so if you increase the CO2 in the atmosphere, you increase the green house effect

The reason i'm explaining this is because i havent seen any understanding of the greenhouse effect in this discussion so far (unless there was some in that long post!) .

YES other things affect the climate like the milankovich cycles, ocean salinity or other catastophes like volcanic eruptions and YES these were probably the cause of every other climate change in history before. But thats because the industrial revolution hasnt happend to earth before!!!! YOU CANT USE THE PAST AS EVIDENCE ANYMORE BECAUSE THIS IS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SITUATION!!!!!!

Anyone who's convincing themselves this isnt an issue is doing so to rid themselves of guilt cos they cant be bothered to sacrifice any luxuries.

And just for a side note, i'm studying this as part of my physics degree so my opinion is entirely based on the physics, not the politics.

If you're correct, then why is it that solor activity actually correlates almost perfectly with all past warming and cooling trends and co2 levels have been shown to lag up to 800 years behind temproature changes according to ice core and seabed sediment studies?

The reason is that the oceans release more co2 when the temporature rises, only it takes a long time for the cycle to work.

Further, if co2 emissions were indeed the direct cause of global warming, then we would expect to see a rapid increase in global temporature after 1942 with the industrial revolution.  In TRUTH the temportature was already going up drastically, 1/2 of the overall increase in the average earth temporature occured BEFORE 1940...  Then when co2 emissions began ramping up going into world war 2, the temporature DECREASED. 

The simple truth is that there is MORE evidence that the sun is driving global warming then for man-made co2.

Temporatures are rising all over the solor system.  Martian Ice caps are melting...  I guess that Haliburton and SUVs are to blame for that too...  Smiling

Yes, I know my post was long, but it links to more than just Jusnk science.  The only Junk science link there goes to the Kyoto count-up which is tracking the cost of Kyoto and the estimated cimatic impact of the treaty.

Everything else, unless I'm missing something that I'd like someone to point to directly, is to peer reviewed scientific publications... 

Who needs God when you have Chopin?


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Quote: Look at the polot

Quote:
Look at the polot ice caps then.  The ice sheet is THICKENING.  http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05140/507684.stm  http://www.cfact.org/site/view_article.asp?idCategory=4&idarticle=244

Next.

HAHA, thats funny that you consider those websites reliable, and i'm only laughing because you were so cocky while being wrong. In truth the Polar ice caps are DEFINITELY getting SMALLER (not thinner, they may have thinkened by a millimetre or two but if you're losing such a great area of land that is pretty minimal) illustrated well by the fact that polar bears are dying out with less hunting ground each year. which is why America are looking like they might accept global warming soon and get their act together, maybe you should think about doing it aswell.


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Ghost Rider

Ghost Rider wrote:
Mattness wrote:

Wish it away as long as you want, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by more than 3% (!!) each year between 2001-2004, according to an international team of scientists (The article is in the "Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences&quotEye-wink.

It reached almost 8 billion tons of released CO2 in 2005 and it's still getting more and more every year. If you think this wouldn't effect the climate... just take a fucking look at the polar ice caps.

 Look at the polot ice caps then.  The ice sheet is THICKENING.  http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05140/507684.stm  http://www.cfact.org/site/view_article.asp?idCategory=4&idarticle=244

Next. 

Wrong. The ice caps are melting faster every year. It is projected that there will be no ice at the pole during the summer by 2020.
http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/sapient/all_things_environmental/6492
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=674132007

Next.

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Quote:

Quote:
If you're correct, then why is it that solor activity actually correlates almost perfectly with all past warming and cooling trends and co2 levels have been shown to lag up to 800 years behind temproature changes according to ice core and seabed sediment studies?

The reason is that the oceans release more co2 when the temporature rises, only it takes a long time for the cycle to work.

DID YOU EVEN READ MY POST!?!?! I'll say it again just to emphasise it for you: YOU CANT USE THE PAST AS EVIDENCE ANYMORE BECAUSE THIS IS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SITUATION!!!!!! I'll turn it into some flow diagrams for you:

IN THE PAST:

solar radiation changes -> earth heats up -> lag in CO2 increase because the ocean has 1000x the heat capacity of the atmosphere so it takes a long time to heat up ->natural greenhouse effect

NOW:

forced imbalance of CO2 levels -> greenhouse effect -> earth heats up -> polar ice caps melt decreaseing albedo of earth (hence less solar radiation is reflected this more heating) -> lagged CO2 release (as before) even more heating -> runaway situation.

If anyone tries to use evidence from the past again i'll probly shoot myself.

Quote:
Further, if co2 emissions were indeed the direct cause of global warming, then we would expect to see a rapid increase in global temporature after 1942 with the industrial revolution. In TRUTH the temportature was already going up drastically, 1/2 of the overall increase in the average earth temporature occured BEFORE 1940... Then when co2 emissions began ramping up going into world war 2, the temporature DECREASED.

I really hate to break this to you but the industrial revolution happened in the mid 1700s and really boomed in the early 1800s which, if you look at the temperature trends, fits quite nicely.

http://www.grida.no/climate/vital/17.htm

Quote:
The simple truth is that there is MORE evidence that the sun is driving global warming then for man-made co2.

again this is evidence based on the past and so doesnt apply in this new system.

Quote:
Temporatures are rising all over the solor system. Martian Ice caps are melting... I guess that Haliburton and SUVs are to blame for that too... Smiling

Martian ice caps melt and refreeze quite a lot ever year. And mars is approaching a near point to the sun in its orbital milankovitch cycle whereas ours is quite circular (conveniently for life to survive)


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stephenmarkjackson

stephenmarkjackson wrote:

HAHA, thats funny that you consider those websites reliable, and i'm only laughing because you were so cocky while being wrong. In truth the Polar ice caps are DEFINITELY getting SMALLER (not thinner, they may have thinkened by a millimetre or two but if you're losing such a great area of land that is pretty minimal) illustrated well by the fact that polar bears are dying out with less hunting ground each year. which is why America are looking like they might accept global warming soon and get their act together, maybe you should think about doing it aswell.

Well, I could provide you with the entire list of links that google brought up when I searched it, but I doubt that you would want to read all  84,000 that come up.  Those two were in the top five or so, but just incase you feel that those where so wrong:

 http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-95908.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1720024.ece

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/wea00/wea00184.htm

http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/cold-science/2002-01-18-wais-thicker.htm

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/science/Canada_Ice.html

What all these stories have in common are that they point out that ice is melting is some areas and thickening in others.  The point ou that ice in the northern hemisphere is retreating, while the antactic is thickening...  All of this is entirely in line with previous measurements and fluctuations in the climate of the planet.

I'm not saying that co2 isn't bad, but I think that the global warming alarmists have made it out to be a lot worse than it is.  There is a lot of science still being done on what realy drives climate changes, but the earth was doing just fine when Greenland was warm and being farmed and free of the massive glaciers that make it less habitable than it was in the past... 

The current level of co2 in the atmosphere is somewhere in the neighborhood of 380ppm which is increased from the ice core data, however the increase in co2 does not directly correlate to increased temporature on the planet Earth.  In fact, the temporature was HIGHER than it is today during the Roman Warming back around 200 to 600 b.c.e. when there was NO man-made co2 being placed into the atmosphere.  How is that possible if co2 is driving the increase? 

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Quote: What all these

Quote:
What all these stories have in common are that they point out that ice is melting is some areas and thickening in others.  The point ou that ice in the northern hemisphere is retreating, while the antactic is thickening...  All of this is entirely in line with previous measurements and fluctuations in the climate of the planet.

I apologise i only read one since i was sure the other three were american and then maybe had bias due to the larger controversy over there at the moment and the other one was just a forum like this one where anyone can say anything. And so i read the newton and that actually contradicted you.

Quote:
I'm not saying that co2 isn't bad, but I think that the global warming alarmists have made it out to be a lot worse than it is.

And yet they clearly havent made it sound bad enough for america or china to get there act together. 

Quote:
There is a lot of science still being done on what realy drives climate changes, but the earth was doing just fine when Greenland was warm and being farmed and free of the massive glaciers that make it less habitable than it was in the past...

I wont shoot myself since you posted this just after i posted mine so you probly didnt read it (or you want me to shoot myself). The main problem with the ice caps melting is the increase in sea level which would sink major cities and population centres

I wont answer the last bit as it refers to the past again. 


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Ghost Rider

Ghost Rider wrote:
stephenmarkjackson wrote:

HAHA, thats funny that you consider those websites reliable, and i'm only laughing because you were so cocky while being wrong. In truth the Polar ice caps are DEFINITELY getting SMALLER (not thinner, they may have thinkened by a millimetre or two but if you're losing such a great area of land that is pretty minimal) illustrated well by the fact that polar bears are dying out with less hunting ground each year. which is why America are looking like they might accept global warming soon and get their act together, maybe you should think about doing it aswell.

Well, I could provide you with the entire list of links that google brought up when I searched it, but I doubt that you would want to read all  84,000 that come up.  Those two were in the top five or so, but just incase you feel that those where so wrong:

 http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-95908.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1720024.ece

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/wea00/wea00184.htm

http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/cold-science/2002-01-18-wais-thicker.htm

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/science/Canada_Ice.html

What all these stories have in common are that they point out that ice is melting is some areas and thickening in others.  The point ou that ice in the northern hemisphere is retreating, while the antactic is thickening...  All of this is entirely in line with previous measurements and fluctuations in the climate of the planet.

I'm not saying that co2 isn't bad, but I think that the global warming alarmists have made it out to be a lot worse than it is.  There is a lot of science still being done on what realy drives climate changes, but the earth was doing just fine when Greenland was warm and being farmed and free of the massive glaciers that make it less habitable than it was in the past... 

The current level of co2 in the atmosphere is somewhere in the neighborhood of 380ppm which is increased from the ice core data, however the increase in co2 does not directly correlate to increased temporature on the planet Earth.  In fact, the temporature was HIGHER than it is today during the Roman Warming back around 200 to 600 b.c.e. when there was NO man-made co2 being placed into the atmosphere.  How is that possible if co2 is driving the increase? 

Ice in the antartic is thickening? Why are the ice shelves collapsing then? Why do these say otherwise?

http://news.softpedia.com/news/A-Texas-Sized-2-Miles-3-km-Thick-Ice-Chunk-From-Antarctica-is-Gonna-Take-off-50732.shtml

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/TimeShelf/time_shelf4.html

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I somehow fail to make up

I somehow fail to make up my mind in this matter.

I am not very keen on climate change and I do not want to be influenced by my personal wishes and beliefes. But I find the evidence that is available very inconclusive and confusing. On one side you have the IPCC which claim to have superior scientific evidence in the area. Of course that is very convincing, but then again there is the factor that we want to believe that. I mean to be perfectly honest most people supporting them probably know nothing about the actual evidence. You could tell them anything, say you’re a doctor and they’d buy it. Ah I will probably have to spend a countless amount of hour’s reading into the evidence. But so far I have about 50 arguments for and against human caused climate change, So I am guessing the truth will be somewhere inbetween.

 

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Anyone who thinks

Ghost Rider wrote:
My faithful readers will remember that some time back I posted the FACTS about how the scientific community and the media has been attempting to skew findings when it comes to the warming of the planet earth. Any information that seems to dispute the coming "Global Warming/Global Climate Change" disaster tends to get poo-pooed and ignored in the media.

You say that you have posted facts of how the scientific community and the media have been attempting to skew findings. I noticed that you did not offer any evidence of that. You say that a few people had their papers turned down, but you did not tell us what their papers argued or the support for their arguments. In other words, you did not disclose whether these papers had sound arguments. Because you did not disclose this, I think that I should.

The first paper that was referenced was about an online survey that was posted to the American Meteorological Society, the Climlist server, and some institutional lists in Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom. This survey was password protected in the hope of preventing non-scientists from participating; however, someone leaked the username and password to the Climate Sceptics mailing list, which had over 200 members at the time, most of whom were non-scientists. The survey received a total of 557 responses, but the leak of the username and password made the results of the study unreliable. It could have been useful but it was turned into junk. The author said the people involved with the publication of Science "said it didn't fit with what they were intending to publish". That would be correct. They have no intention of publishing junk.

The other referenced paper, which is actually a letter and not a peer-reviewed study, was intended as a rebuttal of Oreskes' paper that looked at 928 articles to see how many of them were in agreement with anthropogenic climate change. The author claimed that 34 (less than 4%) of them reject or doubt the consensus position that we are experiencing anthropogenic climate change. When he was asked for the abstracts by Tim Lambert, he provided 33 of the 34 abstracts. It appears that twenty five of them did not express an opinion, five of them doubted anthropogenic climate change but did not reject it, two of them supported it, and only one rejected it, which had a conflict of interest problem seeing as how it was published by the oil industry. The spokesman for Science that you mentioned in your article was probably referring to these problems when he said the rebuttal was rejected "for a variety of reasons".

You have accused Science of refusing to publish particular papers in an attempt to skew findings, but they did their job well for refusing to publish the paper, which was a study of junk data, and the unreviewed letter, which was full of inaccuracies. Science would only have been skewing the facts if they had published them!

Ghost Rider wrote:
I also laid out this remarkable little gem of evidence that I stumbled upon at the Junk Science website which shows just how ALARMIST and GOOFY the Enviro-Fascists have gotten when it comes to Global Warming. The fact that the supposedly alarming increase in global temperatures of 0.6 degrees Celsius is within the margin of error ( +/- 0.7 degrees Celsius) for all of the data recorded since 1951, and the fact that some areas of the earth are not warming or are actually cooling tends to shed some light on the issue at hand.

Whoever put forward that argument has over-simplified the matter so much that it does not even come close to matching reality. Each and every temperature recording that has been made does come with a margin of error, but even if the temperatures were consistently +0.7 degrees over the real temperature, or +0.6, +0.5, ..., -0.7, the result woud be the same: there is a warming trend of 0.6 degrees celsius. In most data sets, the margin of error is not so consistent. One would expect entries to be +0.7, -0.1, +0.3, -0.7, +0.4, -0.6, and so on, but when considered together, it tends to balance out near 0, perhaps 0.1 degrees above or 0.1 degrees below the actual temperature. This means they do, for the most part, indicate actual temperature trends. The only way to argue otherwise is to assert that the temperature records for the first few decades were consistently lower than the actual temperatures, thus making the recent decades look hot by comparison, or to assert that the records for the last few decades were consistently higher than the actual temperatures, or to assert some combination of those. Any way you slice it, that would require a very improbable anamoly in the statistics — it would be about as likely as playing a game of poker and receiving several royal flushes in a row. One would have to be a fool to suppose that is the case.

In one of your earlier articles, you argued that temperatures were rising throughout the solar system. Now you have argued that Earth's temperature might not be rising at all. This two positions contradict eachother without supposing that there is a massive global dimming effect that prevents the Earth from heating up like the rest of the planets. There is no evidence for a global dimming effect of that magnitude. If you suppose there is such a dimming effect, then you have contradicted the facts, and if you do not suppose there is such a dimming effect, then you have contradict yourself. Either way, you have not made a compelling argument.

You said that some parts of the world are cooling and not warming. That does not amount to anything unless it can be shown that those parts of the world are cooling to the same extent or to a greater extent than the other parts are warming. As it stands, your argument does nothing to support your position, because exceptions to a rule do not define the rule.

Ghost Rider wrote:
I've said it before and I'll say it again; We simply DO NOT KNOW enough about the climate of our planet to be able to make any kind of decisive statement about what is causing what we KNOW to be a moderate warming trend on the planet earth. Despite this FACT, the Enviro-fascists are hard at work producing propaganda and misinformation designed to stop or eliminate our way of life.

There is no reason to suppose that they are trying to stop or eliminate your way of life. I doubt your way of life consists primarily of being wasteful and adding tons of dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere, as opposed to activities that can be done in either wasteful or unwasteful ways. Most activities can be done in less wasteful ways than they are currently done. For example, keep using your computer but instead of setting the screen to a high brightness and low contrast, set it instead to a low brightness and high contrast — the display will look only a bit different, but it will use much less energy. For another example, keep using your air conditioning unit but plant a tree, tall shrub, or large grass beside it to shade the air around it so the unit doesn't have to work as hard to cool it. For yet another example, switch your incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescents. None of these changes would stop or eliminate your way of life. The goal is to eliminate wastefulness, not happiness. Your argument here seeks only to demonize good people.

Ghost Rider wrote:
First and foremost, the so-called Third World and Industrial "new comers" in South America and China are responsible for MORE pollution and MORE environmental damage than the United States of America. American Industry is, more often than not, cleaner than her counterparts in China or anywhere else for that matter. The reason is that we have regulations in place and the companies often make enough money that they can invest in equipment that reduces or eliminates harmful pollutants. While we do drive a LOT of cars and trucks and SUVs, Americans drive more modern vehicles that produce less pollution. Look at the third world and what do you see?

If we can reduce our pollution without any significant impact on our way of life, then we should reduce it. What the other countries are doing has no role to play in our decision. We cannot point to them and argue that we should be inefficient and wasteful because others are. That is not a good argument.

Ghost Rider wrote:
But nowhere have the enviro-fascists been more effective than in their "Global Warming" Jihad.

Atheism is a religion; science is a religion; evolution is a religion; anthropogenic climate change is a religion — can we please bury this line of reasoning? The corpse stinks.

I will not bother reading or rebutting the rest of your post. Your sensationalizing is unsensational, your facts are counter-factual, and I see no reason to suppose the rest of your argument will be any different.

Stultior stulto fuisti, qui tabellis crederes!


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You have been hoodwinked

Your are basing your belief on the IPCC's reports!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Granted it's been two years since you posted but isn't it great what the future can tell you.

 

The British Climate Institue had its systems hacked. They admit that, they also admit that emails were taken along with other sensitive information.

 

The emails quite cleary show that the computer model simulations that the IPCC use to bolster their arguments was fiddled with to give the pro climate scientist ammunition to attack so called "deniers and skeptics" (what!! i question you and straight away i'm a skeptic, well i can same the same to those who call me that, especailly when the "skeptics" are basing their arguments on millions of years of data rather than a computer simulation).

 

The opposite effect happened compared to the computer model.

 

We are cooling not warming, hence why they have all of a sudden changed the name from AGW to this new Carbon relases blah balh balh....

 

All they are doing is trying sleight of hand to deviate from the results.

 

Evidence was also in the emails to suggest that CO2 is actually needed to stop the earth over-heating.....

 

Their is no peer review, so what we have in effect is the IPCC saying accept are argument and you can't question it.

 

Science does not work this way to be effective.

 

Plianian events - major eruptions - over history have pumped much more co2 into the atmosphere than we ever have.

 

Nature pumps more c02 combined into the air than humans do.

 

The facts are their, people are being denied those facts though because the pro climate change people are making squillions out of it and need to justrify their funding as well as appeasing political masters.

 

An email quite clearly points out that a scientist by the name of Wei who provides info to the IPCC fudged the data so as to get more fundidng (apparently funding is linked to proving climate change not looking or thinking about it rationally and looking at all avenues).

 

I suppose what alarms me the most is that even though 30,000 scientists question climate change, not one media outlet is giving them any time, instead they give pro climate change scientist full run to make claims that have no factual basis.

 

People say that volcanic eruptions don't release that much c02 into the air.

 

I ask this question, HOW did they come to that conclusion when ground sampling from various soil depths show extremely large amounts of CO2 deposits during these eruptions.

 

Yep, we are all being hoodwinked by the greedy and those with agendas.

 


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 Oh, good. Another moron

 Oh, good. Another moron jumping on the bandwagon without actually reading the content of the e-mails.

 

This was an unintentionally awesome way for exposing nutters for what they are. I should do something like it some time in the future. 


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zzREXzz,I haven't been on

zzREXzz,

I have not been on this website much lately, hence the reason I did not respond to your argument earlier. I hope you are still around to read this response. It is a long read, but sometimes a lot needs to be said.

Quote:
Your are basing your belief on the IPCC's reports!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I reached my conclusions about anthropogenic climate change independently of the IPCC assessment reports. Even if I had based my conclusions on them, that would not have been a grievous mistake because the IPCC assessment reports are mere summaries of the findings of the pertinent peer-reviewed literature. When a layman does not have the needed learning or time to follow the science closely, there is nothing wrong in turning to the assessment reports. It would be better for someone to do that than to have the aggressive gullibility of most of the deniers of anthropogenic climate change. Such people spout whatever uninformed drivel that happens to float to the surface of the denialosphere. For example:

Quote:
The British Climate Institue had its systems hacked. They admit that, they also admit that emails were taken along with other sensitive information.

The emails quite cleary show that the computer model simulations that the IPCC use to bolster their arguments was fiddled with to give the pro climate scientist ammunition to attack so called "deniers and skeptics".

I have read the e-mails that were put forward as being the most damning. In addition, I have read the arguments presented by both sides about the proper interpretation of them. I have reached the conclusion that the e-mails do not show anything mischievous and deniers are putting a huge spin on the facts.

Let me give an example of what I mean. The e-mail with the most notoriety among deniers was written by the climatologist Philip D. Jones. It says, "I've just completed Mike's [Michael E. Mann's] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i. e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's [Keith Briffa's] to hide the decline." The deniers have pointed to the expressions "trick" and "hide the decline" and suggest the data was fudged. I will now talk about both phrases and demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the deniers have put a spin on it.

The first thing to notice is that the trick was published in the journal Nature — hence, "Nature trick". That journal has a great reputation for extremely high quality standards. If the procedure was valid enough to pass the scrutiny of Nature's expert peer reviewers, then we can know with virtual certainty that the procedure has at least one legitimate use. Dr. Jones says in the e-mail that he did the same thing to Mann's data set that Mann himself had done. As such, Dr. Jones was conducting that part of his analysis legitimately. Hence, the "Nature trick" is a trick of the trade, not a trick of the devil, so to speak. Notice that the deniers have completely ignored the capitalized "Nature" in the e-mail to give "trick" enough spin to make it sound like a trick of the devil.

The second thing to notice is that the Dr. Jones also used that trick of the trade on the data set supplied by Briffa. This is significant because Briffa is not in a line of work that deals with temperature measurements. The closest that Briffa had come to that line of work is to work with a temperature proxy. In other words, he has worked with a data set that was put together by measurements of something other than temperature that nonetheless does correlate with the temperature well enough to tell you something about it. Because Briffa works mostly with tree rings, you can guess (correctly) that the proxy in question concerned tree rings.

To appreciate this point, you need to understand something about tree rings. As you know, you can learn the age of a tree by counting its rings, which are the bands of light- and dark-colored wood in the trunk. The light-colored bands are grown during the warmer half of the year and the dark-colored bands are grown during the colder half. The light bands tend to be thicker than the dark bands because the trees grow faster the warmer it is. Do you now see the correlation with temperature? The temperature plays a large role in determining how thick those light- and dark-colored bands are. When you observe the changes in thickness from one light band to another and from one dark band to another, you are observing the changes of temperature from one summer to another and from one winter to another. When you put this data together, you can make a rough reconstruction of the temperature data for the summers and winters of every year in which the tree was growing. This can be done with more than one tree too. Suppose you have one tree that grew from 1890-1967 and another tree that grew from 1940-2000. You can line up core samples of these trees for the years 1940-1967. Once you have done this, you can treat them together almost as though they were a single tree and reconstruct the temperature record for 1890-2000. If you have core samples of even older trees that overlap with those, then you can line up the bands again, treat them as though they were a separate tree, and make a temperature reconstruction for an even longer timespan.

In this way, Briffa had made a 1,000 year temperature reconstruction. In the process, he learned that it was not as straight-forward as my explanation of the science made it appear. Something about the northern hemisphere had changed from the 1960s onward that affected the growth of Siberian trees, which affected the thickness of the bands for the years 1961 onwards, which affected the temperature reconstruction for 1961 onwards. (I think the damage to the ozone layer was responsible for it, but that is a mere guess on my part.) The temperature reconstruction was showing a decline that did not match the actual temperatures. In other words, the trees were saying that 1961 and onward were cooler than they really were. This decline is known as the divergence problem. Now why have I bothered to spell all of this out? Because the divergence problem is the decline that Dr. Jones was talking about.

So the trees were not telling the truth about the temperature for 1961 onward and they were getting farther and farther away from the truth as the years went by — hence the decline in the temperature reconstructions. The temperature reconstruction would be a useless dataset unless that problem were fixed. The only way to fix it would be to substitute the lies with the truth — to substitute the inaccurate temperature reconstruction for 1961 onward with the actual temperature measurements. That is what Dr. Jones did. As he said, "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real [truthful] temps ... from 1961 for Keith's [temperature reconstruction] to hide the decline [caused by the untruthful Siberian trees]."

The deniers had not only ignored the capitalized "Nature" to make it seem like Dr. Jones was using a trick of the devil instead of a trick of the trade, and then they ignored the fact that Briffa's work was about temperature reconstructions and not actual temperature measurements to make it seem like Dr. Jones was covering up some decline in the actual temperature measurements. They spun the facts by ignoring two key pieces of evidence in that e-mail. What has been the result? Aside from the landslide of public stupidity that followed it, they argued that the actual temperature was declining such that we are experiencing, not global warming, but global cooling! There is no evidence for such a thing and all the evidence — such as the migration and growth patterns of innumerable species — contradicts it.

Nothing in that e-mail demonstrates an improper handling of data. It shows only that Dr. Jones was doing his job and doing it well. In the process, it shows that a good scientist doing good science was relying on Mann and Briffa, which shows that they are good scientists too — after all, good scientists don't depend on the data given to them by cranks. Nothing in any of the other e-mails seems to show any negligence or malpractice either.

Does this example not show the lengths to which the deniers will go to advance their agenda? When they see a good scientist doing good science, they demonize him and distort the science, and when they see data, they spin it, and when there is no data, they make it up. In the process of doing this, they have the audacity to hold up their fairytale to you and shout, "Smoking gun!" There is a smoking gun here but it is not the one they are making up. The smoking gun is their words, which are hollow and full of hot air.

(For those who take an interest in the subject of tree-ring temperature reconstruction, please note that my explanation was greatly over-simplified. Anything that can affect the growth of a tree, such as the acidity of the soil, can affect the temperature reconstruction if it is not properly accounted for. To reconstruct the temperature, you would need to do a lot of things that I did not explain here. If you want a more accurate and precise explanation, find a good book on "dendrology", which is just the fancy word for the science of trees.)

Quote:
(what!! i question you and straight away i'm a skeptic, well i can same the same to those who call me that, especailly when the "skeptics" are basing their arguments on millions of years of data rather than a computer simulation)

Do not pretend to respond to arguments that have not been made. In my mind, a skeptic is someone who has the intellectual virtue that compels them to dig for the truth. You have not demonstrated such a fine quality here. You have demonstrated the opposite. I would only consider calling you a skeptic should my life depend on it. Skepticism is a badge of honor that you have not earned and do not merit. This is the reason I call your positio, not the skeptical position, but the denier position.

Quote:
We are cooling not warming, hence why they have all of a sudden changed the name from AGW to this new Carbon relases blah balh balh....

We are warming, not cooling. You can determine this for yourself by watching the time-lapse satellite photography of the Earth. The ice we have had since the last ice age — that we have had for 10,000 years — is thinning and receding. That is the exact opposite of what you would see if they Earth were cooling. A more complicated but more precise way to determine just how much the Earth is warming can be done by collating the data from the temperature monitoring stations around the world. Such collation has already been done for us. The graphs that plot that data are plastered all across the Internet for anyone to access in less than thirty seconds.

There is no worldwide conspiracy to conceal the facts about the Earth's temperature. Such a conspiracy could be exposed by any pothead with a thermometer. There is not one person in this world who has at least two firing neurons in their brain that would attempt to conspire in such an obviously discoverable way. The intelligence needed to orchestrate a conspiracy involving thousands of temperature monitoring stations would be too much intelligence to go through it and the lack of intelligence needed to go through with it would not be enough to orchestrate it — hence, any argument that there is such a conspiracy must contradict itself.

Quote:
Their is no peer review, so what we have in effect is the IPCC saying accept are argument and you can't question it.

You do not know what you are talking about. The peer review process for the IPCC Third Assessment Report was more extensive and meticulous than anything found in any science journal in the world. It had 122 lead authors who are experts in their fields. It had 515 contributing authors who are also experts in their fields. The draft report was circulated for review by other experts, with over 420 submitting valuable suggestions for improvement, and that is not counting the experts who thought the draft was fine. That was followed by review by governments, which arranged their own peer review team however they pleased, and that resulted in several hundred more experts who participated in the peer review process. That peer review process is without rival. You would know this if you had paid attention to what climatologists and other scientists were doing during the long production of the Third Assessment Report, or if you had read the first volume's PREFACE. You cannot pretend to be qualified to judge the quality of a report if you had not even read the first section of text in it!

Quote:
Plianian events - major eruptions - over history have pumped much more co2 into the atmosphere than we ever have.

That is false. On average, humans release 130+ times as much CO2 as all of the active volcanoes in the world combined, including the subaerial and the submarine. (source) Our contributions to the CO2 trend are so great that even the ultra-Plinian eruption of Mount Pinatubo in June 1991 is almost imperceptible in the data:

Quote:
Nature pumps more c02 combined into the air than humans do.

That is false, but for the sake of argument, let us suppose it is true. The conclusion you seem to draw from it — that our contribution is insignificant — does not follow. A strong wind can push you many times harder than my pinky finger can, but that does not mean that my pinky finger is unable to push you over during a strong wind. There are many things in life that seem insignificant in themselves but that become significant when put in a particular physical context. 

Quote:
The facts are their, people are being denied those facts though because the pro climate change people are making squillions out of it and need to justrify their funding as well as appeasing political masters.

If the facts are out there, then nobody's being denied the facts.

Quote:
An email quite clearly points out that a scientist by the name of Wei who provides info to the IPCC fudged the data so as to get more fundidng (apparently funding is linked to proving climate change not looking or thinking about it rationally and looking at all avenues).

Present it.

Quote:
I suppose what alarms me the most is that even though 30,000 scientists question climate change, not one media outlet is giving them any time, instead they give pro climate change scientist full run to make claims that have no factual basis.

You are referring to the Oregon Petition. It should not be taken seriously. Even the lowest-status doctor could put their name on the list if they disagreed even the slightest amount with the Kyoto Protocol's explicit or implicit statements about human well-being or had even the smallest inkling that the passage of the Kyoto Protocol could affect well-being. That has nothing to do with questioning climate change, but it gives people an opportunity to trumpet them up as competent professionals in the field of climatology, as you have just done. That is misleading and possibly deceptive.

Answer these questions, if you can. What procedures were followed to verify that signatories have the degrees they claim to have? How many signatories published in the peer-reviewed climatology literature? How many of them are working climatologists instead of being stay-at-home parents or something else that could result in forgetting their training? What expertise do the nuclear engineers, mechanical engineers, medical doctors, and dietitians have that qualifies them to address climatology competently? And how would one find the answers to these questions without blindly accepting the mere say-so of the politically motivated people who put the petition together?

None of those questions can be answered. That is why the Oregon Petition is argumentatively worthless. It proves nothing. 

Quote:
Yep, we are all being hoodwinked by the greedy and those with agendas.

You have been hoodwinked by the greedy ideologues of the coal and oil industries. You have made this obvious by spending so much of your time spewing their talking points and so little of your time researching them.

 

Stultior stulto fuisti, qui tabellis crederes!


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 I find the MMGW concept to

 I find the MMGW concept to be on par with mythology worship.  Now why do I say that?  Because, like mythology worshipers, the proponents of MMGW put forth claims that lack any conditions for disproving their hypothesis.  The basis of MMGW is simply that the climate is changing therefore it MUST be mans fault!  At first, in the 70's, it was Man Made Global Cooling.  Then in the 90's it was MMGW but now, because the climate has been cooling for the last 8 years, it is labeled Man Made Climate Change.  What will we have in the next decade if the climate stays EXACTLY THE SAME?  Man Made Climate Stagnation?!?!  I don't think that falsifiability is that much to ask for.... or maybe it is.  Eye-wink

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(Sigh) I can see that you

Michael,

It seems that you have not looked into the matter very deeply. I say this because you want over the "changed terms" talking point that gets peddled by the shills of the oil and coal industries. Anyone who knows the meaning of the terms 'climate change' and 'global warming' knows how wrong that talking point is. The term 'global warming' is about the rise of the average global surface temperature, and nothing else. The term 'climate change' is about the changes that global warming will bring about. For example, the rise of the average global surface temperature will result in greater evaporation. In turn, that will result in greater precipitation in the form of rainfall and snowfall. In addition, higher temperatures entail a more energetic atmosphere which will result in more chaotic weather, such as strong gusts of wind to push the precipitating clouds across larger and larger areas. Now keep in mind that the surface of our planet is mostly water and that small bodies of water are more responsive to heat than large bodies (which you can verify for yourself with a two pans of water on a running stove). The result of the strong gusts of wind pushing the precipitating rain clouds will be less and less inland water bodies and soil moisture because it will more often evaporation and get whisked away to be dropped into the oceans. The term 'climate change' covers all of this while 'global warming' does not. Scientists have not abandoned either term. Instead, they have started to use one more frequently than the other because they want to stress that global warming will bring about more than just warmer seasons, which some people wrongly think is a reason to celebrate.

The claim that scientists were predicting global cooling in the 1970s is yet another talking point of industry shills. The rate at which humans were releasing aerosols into the atmosphere caused global dimming, which had the consequence of ozone depletion and global cooling. The industry shills and their followers never put this fact into its larger scientific context because that would ruin the persuasiveness of the talking point. Contrary to what you might have heard, only a very few scientists thought the cooling trend would continue. That position was as unpopular among scientists then as your position is today. Even in the 1950s, scientists generally agreed that global dimming was masking the warming effect of carbon dioxide and that our ever-growing rate of carbon dioxide emissions would ensure that the warming effect would no longer be masked, meaning that once our carbon dioxide emissions overtook our aerosol emissions, the average global surface temperature would rise, rise, and rise some more. When ozone depletion was discovered, the major governments of the world curbed aerosol production. When this happened, our carbon dioxide emissions took precedence much sooner than expected and the average global surface temperature went skyrocketing.

Concerning the last eight years, you need to put them into a larger context because of normal weather variability. If you use a timespan that begins with such a variance, then you could say the following years show a cooling trend or a warming trend depending on whether the variance was an abnormally high temperature, such as that which is caused by El Nino, or an abnormally low temperature, such as that which was caused by the ultra-plinian Mt. Pinatubo eruption. To avoid the problem of weather variability, you need to use large timespans to get meaningful climate trend lines. The minimum timespan would need to be about 30 years, with longer timespans being preferable. Here is the most recent 30-year timespan that I could find with just a few minutes of searching (for more information, click on the picture and read the provided summary):

The following shows the trend line from 1880 to 2007 (again, click through for more information):

As you can see, there is a clear warming trend in both of them.

And lastly, the industry shills like to send people to ask others how to falsify anthropogenic climate change, just as Young Earth Creationists send kids out to bug the unsuspecting teachers. When people do not have enough time to think through a response, it can mislead people into believing the objection has merit. That is well enough in a formal debate, when the goal is to persuade an audience, but it is a vapid rhetoric and utter sophistry when the goal is to discover the truth. There are many ways that anthropogenic climate change could be disproved. Let me name a few of them here. First, one could point to a sustained decrease in average global surface temperature, which would indicate global cooling, which is an obvious contradiction. Second, one could show that there are greater heat gains for the daytime than the nighttime, which would show that the Earth is getting warmer because it receiving more energy instead of holding in more of the energy it does receive. Third, one could show that there is greater warming at the equator than at the poles, which would be more consistent with a change caused by the sun than the atmosphere. Fourth, one could show that there is increasing rainfall in the continental interiors, which should make sense in light of the first paragraph of this response. Fifth, one could show the weather pattern along the coastlines getting milder, which should also make sense in light of the first paragraph of this response. Sixth, one could show that forests and jungles are receding from the poles, which would indicate that areas further from the equator are becoming less and less hospitable to trees, which is the opposite of what global warming would cause. Seventh, one could show that the ice volume of glaciers is increasing, and note that I said volume instead of extent or thickness. Eighth, one could show that, globally, flowers are blossoming at the same time or at later times year after year, which would show that the temperature is stable or lowering. Many more ways to disprove anthropogeic climate change could be mentioned, but I think I have made my point. The problem for your position is that the scientists have already looked into these things and have not been able to falsify it. Indeed, the greater increase in temperature for nighttime than daytime shows that global warming is happening and that it is caused by something local to the planet. The results of their research have only strengthened their confidence that anthropogenic climate change is correct.

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 (Sigh) Your fanaticism is

 (Sigh) Your fanaticism is making you jump to far fetched conclusions.  You immediately assume that I am a follower of “Industry Shills”, as if there couldn’t POSSIBLY be another explanation (i.e. misinformed, old data, etc.).  I get this same kind of name calling from mythology worshipers and I’ve found it to be a telling sign of the closed minded.  I certainly hope that I am wrong in your case.

 

After reading through your points I found them to be less then persuasive.  For example: with a planet that is BILLIONS of years old how can you possible think that 30 years is a trend?!?!?  Your own chart (Global Temperatures) shows how faulty this thinking is.  1880-1910 clearly Man Made Global Cooling! 1910-1940 MMGW! 1940-1970 MMGC! 1970-2000 MMGW! 2000-?  well we all know what this trend is looking like!  I’m sure the MMGW advocates of the medieval warm period where screaming like Banshee’s during the last 30 years of it!

 

As for the rest of your points they are covered (with source material.) in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI&feature=related  I find repeating what others have already said to be wasteful and besides most people think videos are far more enjoyable.  

 

This video refutes most of the claims made my MMGW/MMCC advocates such as yourself.  I hope I’m wrong about your closed mindedness.

 

P.S. Over the weekend Phil Jones (ex head of the Climatic Research Unit) admitted that there has been no global warming over the past 15 years. Might want to rethink that whole "30 year time-slice" hypothesis.    Have a happy!

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Statistically significant?

Visual_Paradox wrote:
The following shows the trend line from 1880 to 2007 (again, click through for more information):

 



There is a clear warming trend in both of the statistically relevant time-slices.

Slide: http://www.dimagb.de/info/umwelt/pics/heiss/heiss32.jpg

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.png  Note that the time is not linear.  The last 150 years is plotted to be the same width as the last 2,000 years.

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Thanks...

 Visual_Paradox Thanks for the back up info and "Special Effects".  

 


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Michael A. Thompson:You

Michael A. Thompson:

You present the most bizarre example of "projection" I have seen here for quite a while.

You respond to a detailed and calm explanation from Visual_Paradox of the facts of Climate Change with a hysterical post full of "smilies" and illogical statements and accuse him of fanaticism??

What are you smoking?

The multi-biilion year history of the Earth is not fucking relevant to trends occurring over decades or centuries! Except for where it shows that when CO2 levels have been this high in the past they have been associated with far greater sea-level rise than we have seen so far, partly because our contribution has caused the levels to rise faster than it has in the past, apart from a few times where massive volcanic eruptions hit large coal deposits.

Tell your crap to to the Polar Bears with little or no sea ice to hunt on for the first time in thousands of years, way ahead of IPCC predictions.

Sea levels have been rising for over a century, mainly so far due to temperature rise, but increasingly due to melting of ice on land.

These are the sorts of things which are indicators of long-term trends.

Yes there are inaccuracies in the IPCC predictions, but recent data, such as the Arctic Ice business, suggests they are mostly too conservative.

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 Oh I see.  When

 Oh I see.  When Visual_Paradox refers to time slices of  "30+ years" to support his claim he is simply using a "detailed and calm explanation".  But when I use the same 30+ year time scale to illustrate my point I'm being hysterical!  Perhaps he should have specified that only the 30+ year time slices that underscored HIS belief should be considered.   Remind anyone of the selective referencing used by Mythology worshipers?

As for the smilies I find they break up the monotony of forum posts, people put in a whole lot of work adding the things so it seems like a waste not to use them.

I don't smoke.  Smoking seems like a waste of resources (money) for what it does for/to you.  Besides, doesn't smoking add to Global Warming/Cooling/ Change/Stagnation?

 

Your comment about the CO2 levels and Polar Bears are answered quit pointedly in the Video so thanks for bringing them up.  Anyone interested in the subject of climate change might actually want to try watching it.

 

 

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this is what cinched it for me

Michael A. Thompson wrote:

 Oh I see.  When Visual_Paradox refers to time slices of  "30+ years" to support his claim he is simply using a "detailed and calm explanation".  But when I use the same 30+ year time scale to illustrate my point I'm being hysterical!  Perhaps he should have specified that only the 30+ year time slices that underscored HIS belief should be considered.   Remind anyone of the selective referencing used by Mythology worshipers?

As for the smilies I find they break up the monotony of forum posts, people put in a whole lot of work adding the things so it seems like a waste not to use them.

I don't smoke.  Smoking seems like a waste of resources (money) for what it does for/to you.  Besides, doesn't smoking add to Global Warming/Cooling/ Change/Stagnation?

Your comment about the CO2 levels and Polar Bears are answered quit pointedly in the Video so thanks for bringing them up.  Anyone interested in the subject of climate change might actually want to try watching it.

http://halgeranon.blogspot.com/2009/04/of-upward-slopes-and-isotopes-2.html

I am not going to argue the merits of this information with anyone.  I am NOT a chemist, let alone an expert atmospheric chemist. 

However, even if people are not the primary cause of oceanic warming and global climate changes, they appear to be a significant factor.  And I don't see how changing our dependence on fossil fuel for more sustainable fuels is a bad thing.  According to the Scientific American, there are a number of available technologies that are sustainable and will meet all current demands and a generous proportion of future demands. 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hot-rocks-tapping-an-unde

Hot rock geothermal is my fave.  Though wind, solar, tidal, nuclear all have their positives as well.  I don't understand the reluctance to tap these other sources of energy.  Yeah, it will cost lots in capital investments.  And what is the point of that argument?  Fossil fuels cost a LOT in capital investments - think about it.  It took over 100 years to develop the infrastructure supporting fossil fuels in the US.  We didn't have the interstate highway system two years after the internal combustion engine was invented.  Why does anyone expect the shift to new energy sources to take overnight?  And how much did it cost to build roads, bridges, wells, refineries, oil tanker trucks, service stations, automobile factories, high speed highways, and commuter lanes?  Not insignificant. 

We can move to alternative fuels.  It may not be as quick as some would like, but it is possible.  And think of this - if all that development is costing someone money, someone else is making money.  You have choices about which side of the equation you are on.  Me, when I get a job and catch up and save up a little, I intend to get an electric car and some solar panels.  Gasoline will go up past $4 a gallon in the US again, and each time it goes up, it never comes back down as far as it began.  I haven't seen 25 cents for a gallon of gas since I was in high school.

-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.

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Michael A. Thompson
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 Thanks for the links.  I

 Thanks for the links.  I don't think anyone is doubting that there is an increase in atmospheric CO2 (From a huge 0.0028% to 0.0038 over the entire 20th century) or that man is the cause.   Like you I am not a chemist and don't pretend to be.  All I am pointing out is that those scientists in the 90's who were professing MMGW, do to CO2 emissions,  made certain predictions based on that belief.  Those predictions were, among other things: increased global temperatures, increased hurricane numbers and severity.  But in the years following those predictions we have seen a DECREASE in global temperatures and DECREASE in hurricane activity.  So rather then say, "We all knowing prophets of how the earth works might POSSIBLY be wrong." MMGW worshipers spew out nonsense like: the lengthy cold weather is merely a pause- a 30-years-long blip-in the larger cycle of global warming - Professor Mojib Latif (Author of the U.N.'s IPCC report).  Please!   And I'M the shill?!?!?!

Now as for the alternative fuels I am more or less in your camp.  However, the most cost effective solution seems to be efficiency rather then building solar panels or wind turbines.  At the personal level insulation and reduced driving would be a good start.  At the government level stopping subsidies to HUGELY wasteful  suburbs, by removing the home owner tax deduction and the building of roads leading to them, would be a pretty good start.  But then I'm firmly in the Jane Jacobs camp when it comes to taking resources away from innovative cities and throwing them at the opulently wasteful.

 

p.s. The shill comment was not meant for you and thanks for commenting.

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trends

Michael A. Thompson wrote:

 Thanks for the links.  I don't think anyone is doubting that there is an increase in atmospheric CO2 (From a huge 0.0028% to 0.0038 over the entire 20th century) or that man is the cause.   Like you I am not a chemist and don't pretend to be.  All I am pointing out is that those scientists in the 90's who were professing MMGW, do to CO2 emissions,  made certain predictions based on that belief.  Those predictions were, among other things: increased global temperatures, increased hurricane numbers and severity.  But in the years following those predictions we have seen a DECREASE in global temperatures and DECREASE in hurricane activity.  So rather then say, "We all knowing prophets of how the earth works might POSSIBLY be wrong." MMGW worshipers spew out nonsense like: the lengthy cold weather is merely a pause- a 30-years-long blip-in the larger cycle of global warming - Professor Mojib Latif (Author of the U.N.'s IPCC report).  Please!   And I'M the shill?!?!?!

Now as for the alternative fuels I am more or less in your camp.  However, the most cost effective solution seems to be efficiency rather then building solar panels or wind turbines.  At the personal level insulation and reduced driving would be a good start.  At the government level stopping subsidies to HUGELY wasteful  suburbs, by removing the home owner tax deduction and the building of roads leading to them, would be a pretty good start.  But then I'm firmly in the Jane Jacobs camp when it comes to taking resources away from innovative cities and throwing them at the opulently wasteful.

 

p.s. The shill comment was not meant for you and thanks for commenting.

I knew I wasn't a shill - at least not in that sense.  Riddle me this:

http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/

Yes, there is a slight decrease in the last couple of years in the overall heat content of the oceans.  But seriously, the decrease brings us no where near the total heat content as measured in the 1980s.  And I would find it difficult to claim the trend is up or down from that graph.  And I believe, from what I have heard, no one else is claiming to know where the trend is going from here.  The slope on that downward trend is -to my mind anyway- distressingly close to level.  And it is certainly NOT a reverse of the trend as seen between 1985 and 2005. 

Leveling out would be at least not worse.  But in some ways it is worse in that our biggest problems are going to come from that 12 (?) joules increase.  We need the total heat content to drastically reduce to near 1950-1980 levels.  This heat content is what is increasing glacial melt in Greenland and Antarctica.  That is why sea levels will rise.  A leveling off will not stop the processes already started.  Also, the increase may also change the thermohaline circulation - which means no cold water for fisheries along the western North American Continent, no warm water for the eastern North American continent or the British Isles. 

Personally, I would feel a lot more comfortable about the fate of some of the coastline if the chart showed a stronger downward trend, regardless of the reason for the trend.  Here in Portland, OR, it looks bad for next summer.  We don't have a drought, but almost all of our precipitation has been as rain this winter, even in the Cascades.  (See the Winter Olympics just north of here for some of the unseasonal warmth.)  That snow provides city water, irrigation water, and power generation through the summer.  Not looking good for my lawn.  Is this a trend?  Probably not.  The western half of North America is in many places semi-arid.  That means rainfall is unpredictable.  And most native plants are adapted to too much rain followed by too little.    So I'm hoping the trend will move back to colder weather if not next winter, then soon.  Glacier National Park in Montana has lost almost all the glaciers.

Predictions are a funny thing.  Having worked in engineering and manufacturing firms, I have seen how non-engineers want to have a number.  They don't want to hear about the error bars.  If the engineer says "42  +/- 6", the other person will hear "42".  I don't know, but I will lay odds something similar happened with the climate predictions.  "It looks to me as if the trend is upward, so I will make my educated guess of ***."  Which was reported as "He said it would be ***." 

Alternatively, it depends on the model used to make the predictions.  For example, if they were using Markov chains, the prediction is "more of the same" since that is the nature of the model.  Weather forecasters used to use this model extensively.  "It didn't rain today, so it is unlikely to rain tomorrow."  They have moved on to better models and so have better weather predictions.  But predicting weather months into the future - hurricanes are weather, not climate - is still far from precise.  If I remember, at the time there were those who disagreed with the increase in hurricanes - not their fault the media largely ignored them.

The Day After Tomorrow was a damn silly movie.  But they did do a reasonable description of the thermohaline circulation.  I don't believe we will have drastic changes (2012 was even worse than TDAT), and neither do most scientists. (The producers asked a bunch of climate scientists to screen TDAT and I heard they all were rolling in the aisle.)  Gradual changes we can all live with most likely although moving entire coastal cities is going to be very expensive even if we need to do it over decades and not in the next few years. 

http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/currents/welcome.html

http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/pd/climate/factsheets/howlikely.pdf

http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/pd/climate/factsheets/isamount.pdf

http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/literacy/climate_literacy.pdf

I picked NOAA because they are pretty middle of the road as far as opinions go.  If they can't swing it to look good for the oil shills, then no one can. 

-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.

"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken

"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.


BobSpence
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Just for the record,and for

Just for the record, and for some balance, about Hurricane activity, and also here.

A rational article on global temperature trends, which certainly acknowledges the effects of man-made CO2. Another, from Stanford Solar Center.

Something about ice cover, and some sane responses to GW-skepticism in general.

A very recent article about the loss of Arctic Ice cover, which has occurred well ahead of IPCC predictions.

Another perspective on how well the predictions match what happened.

This is a complex subject, and you need to look at as many reasonably reputable sources as possible.

'Reputable' is inevitably subjective of course, but it helps to have a scientific background to sniff out the bullshit. The more you compare comments from a range of sources, the more patterns emerge. For example, when someone refers to well-known fallacies, such as water-vapour being the main factor in greenhouse effects, when it in fact provides a positive feed-back magnifying the effects of independent drivers of temperature, like CO2, is a dead giveaway of someone who doesn't understand the science.

EDIT: Coastline effects related to sea-level changes are complicated by changes in the load on major chunks of the earths crust, as ice melts or accumulates, and causes rises and falls of the continental plates. 

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