20 years ago I was told in school that fossil fuels would run out in under 50 years. Wouldn't we run out of fossil fuels before we do too much more damage by heating up the earth.
It seemed to me that any politician who was not willing to dump a huge amount of money into rebuilding New Orleans was viewed as lacking compassion and above all a racist. Obviously if they didn't do what the residents of New Orleans told them, they wouldn't be in power long. That gives you something nice to think about as you're paying your homeowner's insurance premium and your taxes. I guess that's why more Americans get their news from CNN!
Why wouldn't alternative energy sources be on the market now if they really were that practical? It looks to me that they still don't even come close to oil economically. It's hard for me to see everyday people changing until they're absolutely forced to do so. Won't this happen soon when fossil fuels run out?
Is Satan the author of the Global Warming lie?
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_Mephitus
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 820
- Joined: Sun Dec 31, 2006 1:44 pm
The best book I've found that does a realistic look at environmental issues was "the skeptical environmentalist"
http://www.amazon.com/Skeptical-Environ ... 351&sr=8-1
I recomend it for people on both sides of the issue.
http://www.amazon.com/Skeptical-Environ ... 351&sr=8-1
I recomend it for people on both sides of the issue.
One nice thing is, ze game of love is never called on account of darkness - Pepe Le Pew
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_Coggins7
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 3679
- Joined: Fri Nov 03, 2006 12:25 am
Nothing much to add here unless someone wants to really get into specifics, as bc has done a sterling job debunking, in thumbnail form what has evolved into the greatest pseudo-scientific hoax of the last century, by which I mean, of course, catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
The major force behind this ideology (and we should be clear at the outset that AGW is an ideology, as much as it is a theory about climate change) has been, for the last 25 years or so, the environemtenal movement, which, in its dominant form, is both a political ideology and a fundamentalist religion that, in either case, shares nothing with either the with either the historical Judeo/Christian tradition or the west's classical liberal political and economic values.
Environmentalism is a form of militant primitivist neo-Pantheism; really a modern militant neo-Gnosticsm that finds its ground in a romanitcization of nature and the primitive, distrust or hatred of technology, and a visceral distaste for western concepts of liberal democracy including property rights, economic liberty, individualism, and democratic forms of governance.
In its political form its simply Communism dressed up as neo-Pantheism. In its stronger neo-Pantheistic form (Deep Ecology) its an anti-human, anti-modern, and anti-capitalist fundamentalist religion that sees mankind as a cancer upon a pristine and undefiled nature that has no more moral worth than any particular aspect of nature itself.
To make a long story short, AGW has not a shred of empirical evidence from observations and measurements made in nature to support a single one of its claims. The entire edifice still rests upon GCMs that although "sophisticated", are notoriously poor at predicting even simple weather patters within very short term time frames, and involve vast gaps in scientific knowledge of global climate dynamics. None of it, but none of it, has been substantiated by empirical climate science, not one iota.
To cut to the proverbial chase:
1: The climate has warmed a little over a half a degree Centigrade in somewhat over a century, a minuscule rise well within historical variability.
2: Most warming has been at ground level, in northern latitudes, at night, and in the winter months.
3: The South Pole hasn't warmed at all (a major problem for the GCMs, which said it would be noticeable there first) but has been in a slight cooling phase for upwards of 25 years.
4: The bulk of the warming ended in 1940, and the planet cooled off (the background temperature continued to rise, but at a much slower rate) from that point on, ending in a more noticeable cooling in the Seventies, at which point warming began again in the early Eighties. Warming appears to have ended in 1998.
5: Arctic glaciers per se are not melting, only some of them are, around the periphery of the continent. The bulk of the interior has and continues to cool and, most importantly, the continent is growing as heavy snowfall continues to increase total ice mass.
6: There is no known human "footprint" as of yet, and this is especially relevant, not only because the empirical evidence does not exist, but we know that the total output of human industrial activity is utterly dwarfed by the output of natural sources.
7: Virtually in every instance in the geologic past in which temperature has fluctuated in a substantial way, CO2 has followed, not preceded general planetary warming.
8: There have been times in earths geological history when CO2 levels have been much higher than at present, while global mean temperatures have been cooler, and vice versa, there have been periods of low CO2 concentrations and temperatures substantially higher than today.
This is just a very tiny nutshell prolegomena to what could be written on this subject, suffice it to say that the religion of environmentalism, as well as the cult of Socialism that still festers (as Gobachev's retreat into environmentalism even as the last chunks of the Berlin Wall were being carted off to fireplace mantels unknown, attests) throughout the Western world in various forms, under the guise of "green" politics, is one of the gravest dangers the modern civilized world faces with respect to the preservation of individual liberty, the rule of law, and representative government.
Is Satan, in a theological sense (leaving for a moment the scientific, philosophical, and political aspects of the question) behind the ideology of AGW and the corruption of climate science and even prestigious journals such as Nature? Is he behind the 20 plus years of media and pop cultural hysteria about a concept that has never had even the slightest empirical support outside of highly oversimplified and predictively poor GCMs?. Is he behind the relentless and continuing assault on property rights, economic freedom, First Amendment rights, modern technology and innovation, biotechnology, and the economic and industrial development of the Third World that are perceived as hostile to the pampered and decadent Western intellectual elite's taste for nature worship?
Was he the impetus that caused the United States, The U.N., and then the E.U. To ban DDT for use in insect vector control, thus dooming thirty million Third World peoples to death over the last three decades when such could have been, for the most part, completely avoided?
You betcha.
One further thing regarding Analytics post containing the link to the EPA. First of all, science does not work through consensus. This is one of the worst features of our pop left wing media driven society coupled with the utter failure of American public schooling to give people the intellectual tools necessarry to negotiate the intellectual ghetto that is our mainstream media and most of our political public discourse. There is no consensus in the scientific community regard AGW, and if there was, that would bespeak the serious corruption of the scientific enterprise in that area.
Secondly, the EPA is a respository and bully pulpit for junk science and has been for several decades at least (a low point was hit in the Nineties with Carol Browner) and should not be taken seriously by thoughful people seeking to understand the AGW debate.
Loran
The major force behind this ideology (and we should be clear at the outset that AGW is an ideology, as much as it is a theory about climate change) has been, for the last 25 years or so, the environemtenal movement, which, in its dominant form, is both a political ideology and a fundamentalist religion that, in either case, shares nothing with either the with either the historical Judeo/Christian tradition or the west's classical liberal political and economic values.
Environmentalism is a form of militant primitivist neo-Pantheism; really a modern militant neo-Gnosticsm that finds its ground in a romanitcization of nature and the primitive, distrust or hatred of technology, and a visceral distaste for western concepts of liberal democracy including property rights, economic liberty, individualism, and democratic forms of governance.
In its political form its simply Communism dressed up as neo-Pantheism. In its stronger neo-Pantheistic form (Deep Ecology) its an anti-human, anti-modern, and anti-capitalist fundamentalist religion that sees mankind as a cancer upon a pristine and undefiled nature that has no more moral worth than any particular aspect of nature itself.
To make a long story short, AGW has not a shred of empirical evidence from observations and measurements made in nature to support a single one of its claims. The entire edifice still rests upon GCMs that although "sophisticated", are notoriously poor at predicting even simple weather patters within very short term time frames, and involve vast gaps in scientific knowledge of global climate dynamics. None of it, but none of it, has been substantiated by empirical climate science, not one iota.
To cut to the proverbial chase:
1: The climate has warmed a little over a half a degree Centigrade in somewhat over a century, a minuscule rise well within historical variability.
2: Most warming has been at ground level, in northern latitudes, at night, and in the winter months.
3: The South Pole hasn't warmed at all (a major problem for the GCMs, which said it would be noticeable there first) but has been in a slight cooling phase for upwards of 25 years.
4: The bulk of the warming ended in 1940, and the planet cooled off (the background temperature continued to rise, but at a much slower rate) from that point on, ending in a more noticeable cooling in the Seventies, at which point warming began again in the early Eighties. Warming appears to have ended in 1998.
5: Arctic glaciers per se are not melting, only some of them are, around the periphery of the continent. The bulk of the interior has and continues to cool and, most importantly, the continent is growing as heavy snowfall continues to increase total ice mass.
6: There is no known human "footprint" as of yet, and this is especially relevant, not only because the empirical evidence does not exist, but we know that the total output of human industrial activity is utterly dwarfed by the output of natural sources.
7: Virtually in every instance in the geologic past in which temperature has fluctuated in a substantial way, CO2 has followed, not preceded general planetary warming.
8: There have been times in earths geological history when CO2 levels have been much higher than at present, while global mean temperatures have been cooler, and vice versa, there have been periods of low CO2 concentrations and temperatures substantially higher than today.
This is just a very tiny nutshell prolegomena to what could be written on this subject, suffice it to say that the religion of environmentalism, as well as the cult of Socialism that still festers (as Gobachev's retreat into environmentalism even as the last chunks of the Berlin Wall were being carted off to fireplace mantels unknown, attests) throughout the Western world in various forms, under the guise of "green" politics, is one of the gravest dangers the modern civilized world faces with respect to the preservation of individual liberty, the rule of law, and representative government.
Is Satan, in a theological sense (leaving for a moment the scientific, philosophical, and political aspects of the question) behind the ideology of AGW and the corruption of climate science and even prestigious journals such as Nature? Is he behind the 20 plus years of media and pop cultural hysteria about a concept that has never had even the slightest empirical support outside of highly oversimplified and predictively poor GCMs?. Is he behind the relentless and continuing assault on property rights, economic freedom, First Amendment rights, modern technology and innovation, biotechnology, and the economic and industrial development of the Third World that are perceived as hostile to the pampered and decadent Western intellectual elite's taste for nature worship?
Was he the impetus that caused the United States, The U.N., and then the E.U. To ban DDT for use in insect vector control, thus dooming thirty million Third World peoples to death over the last three decades when such could have been, for the most part, completely avoided?
You betcha.
One further thing regarding Analytics post containing the link to the EPA. First of all, science does not work through consensus. This is one of the worst features of our pop left wing media driven society coupled with the utter failure of American public schooling to give people the intellectual tools necessarry to negotiate the intellectual ghetto that is our mainstream media and most of our political public discourse. There is no consensus in the scientific community regard AGW, and if there was, that would bespeak the serious corruption of the scientific enterprise in that area.
Secondly, the EPA is a respository and bully pulpit for junk science and has been for several decades at least (a low point was hit in the Nineties with Carol Browner) and should not be taken seriously by thoughful people seeking to understand the AGW debate.
Loran
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_Coggins7
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 3679
- Joined: Fri Nov 03, 2006 12:25 am
Here's an excellent nutshell on Gore's propagandamentary "An Inconvenient Truth" from NRO of late. Interesting reading.
For a more thorough dismantling of Gore's silly agitprop, go to http://www.cei.org/gencon/030,05632.cfm. Another excellent intro to the subject is http://www.ncpa.org/pub/st/st285/st285.pdf and http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/harris061206.htm. I'll cut and paste this last one as well as it takes Gore and his legions of lemmings to the woodshed big time.
Gorey Truths: 25 Inconvenient Truths for Al Gore
Op-Eds & Articles
by Iain Murray
June 22, 2006
With An Inconvenient Truth, the companion book to former Vice President Al Gore’s global-warming movie, currently number nine in Amazon sales rank, this is a good time to point out that the book, which is a largely pictorial representation of the movie’s graphical presentation, exaggerates the evidence surrounding global warming. Ironically, the former Vice President leaves out many truths that are inconvenient for his argument. Here are just 25 of them.
1. Carbon Dioxide’s Effect on Temperature. The relationship between global temperature and carbon dioxide (CO2), on which the entire scare is founded, is not linear. Every molecule of CO2 added to the atmosphere contributes less to warming than the previous one. The book’s graph on p. 66-67 is seriously misleading. Moreover, even the historical levels of CO2 shown on the graph are disputed. Evidence from plant fossil-remains suggest that there was as much CO2 in the atmosphere about 11,000 years ago as there is today.
2. Kilimanjaro. The snows of Kilimanjaro are melting not because of global warming but because of a local climate shift that began 100 years ago. The authors of a report in the International Journal of Climatology “develop a new concept for investigating the retreat of Kilimanjaro’s glaciers, based on the physical understanding of glacier–climate interactions.” They note that, “The concept considers the peculiarities of the mountain and implies that climatological processes other than air temperature control the ice recession in a direct manner. A drastic drop in atmospheric moisture at the end of the 19th century and the ensuing drier climatic conditions are likely forcing glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro.”
3. Glaciers. Glaciers around the world have been receding at around the same pace for over 100 years. Research published by the National Academy of Sciences last week indicates that the Peruvian glacier on p. 53-53 probably disappeared a few thousand years ago.
4. The Medieval Warm Period. Al Gore says that the “hockey stick” graph that shows temperatures remarkably steady for the last 1,000 years has been validated, and ridicules the concept of a “medieval warm period.” That’s not the case. Last year, a team of leading paleoclimatologists said, “When matching existing temperature reconstructions…the timeseries display a reasonably coherent picture of major climatic episodes: ‘Medieval Warm Period,’ ‘Little Ice Age’ and ‘Recent Warming.’” They go on to conclude, “So what would it mean, if the reconstructions indicate a larger…or smaller…temperature amplitude? We suggest that the former situation, i.e. enhanced variability during pre-industrial times, would result in a redistribution of weight towards the role of natural factors in forcing temperature changes, thereby relatively devaluing the impact of anthropogenic emissions and affecting future temperature predictions.”
5. The Hottest Year. Satellite temperature measurements say that 2005 wasn't the hottest year on record — 1998 was — and that temperatures have been stable since 2001 (p.73). Here’s the satellite graph:
6. Heat Waves. The summer heat wave that struck Europe in 2003 was caused by an atmospheric pressure anomaly; it had nothing to do with global warming. As the United Nations Environment Program reported in September 2003, “This extreme wheather [sic] was caused by an anti-cyclone firmly anchored over the western European land mass holding back the rain-bearing depressions that usually enter the continent from the Atlantic ocean. This situation was exceptional in the extended length of time (over 20 days) during which it conveyed very hot dry air up from south of the Mediterranean.”
7. Record Temperatures. Record temperatures — hot and cold — are set every day around the world; that’s the nature of records. Statistically, any given place will see four record high temperatures set every year. There is evidence that daytime high temperatures are staying about the same as for the last few decades, but nighttime lows are gradually rising. Global warming might be more properly called, “Global less cooling.” (On this, see Patrick J. Michaels book, Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.)
8. Hurricanes. There is no overall global trend of hurricane-force storms getting stronger that has anything to do with temperature. A recent study in Geophysical Research Letters found: “The data indicate a large increasing trend in tropical cyclone intensity and longevity for the North Atlantic basin and a considerable decreasing trend for the Northeast Pacific. All other basins showed small trends, and there has been no significant change in global net tropical cyclone activity. There has been a small increase in global Category 4–5 hurricanes from the period 1986–1995 to the period 1996–2005. Most of this increase is likely due to improved observational technology. These findings indicate that other important factors govern intensity and frequency of tropical cyclones besides SSTs [sea surface temperatures].”
9. Tornadoes. Records for numbers of tornadoes are set because we can now record more of the smaller tornadoes (see, for instance, the Tornado FAQ at Weather Underground).
10. European Flooding. European flooding is not new (p. 107). Similar flooding happened in 2003. Research from Michael Mudelsee and colleagues from the University of Leipzig published in Nature (Sept. 11, 2003) looked at data reaching as far back as 1021 (for the Elbe) and 1269 (for the Oder). They concluded that there is no upward trend in the incidence of extreme flooding in this region of central Europe.
11. Shrinking Lakes. Scientists investigating the disappearance of Lake Chad (p.116) found that most of it was due to human overuse of water. “The lake’s decline probably has nothing to do with global warming, report the two scientists, who based their findings on computer models and satellite imagery made available by NASA. They attribute the situation instead to human actions related to climate variation, compounded by the ever increasing demands of an expanding population” (“Shrinking African Lake Offers Lesson on Finite Resources,” National Geographic, April 26, 2001). Lake Chad is also a very shallow lake that has shrunk considerably throughout human history.
12. Polar Bears. Polar bears are not becoming endangered. A leading Canadian polar bear biologist wrote recently, “Climate change is having an effect on the west Hudson population of polar bears, but really, there is no need to panic. Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear (sic) to be affected at present.”
13. The Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream, the ocean conveyor belt, is not at risk of shutting off in the North Atlantic (p. 150). Carl Wunsch of MIT wrote to the journal Nature in 2004 to say, “The only way to produce an ocean circulation without a Gulf Stream is either to turn off the wind system, or to stop the Earth’s rotation, or both”
14. Invasive Species. Gore’s worries about the effect of warming on species ignore evolution. With the new earlier caterpillar season in the Netherlands, an evolutionary advantage is given to birds that can hatch their eggs earlier than the rest. That’s how nature works. Also, “invasive species” naturally extend their range when climate changes. As for the pine beetle given as an example of invasive species, Rob Scagel, a forest microclimate specialist in British Columbia, said, “The MPB (mountain pine beetle) is a species native to this part of North America and is always present. The MPB epidemic started as comparatively small outbreaks and through forest management inaction got completely out of hand.”
15. Species Loss. When it comes to species loss, the figures given on p. 163 are based on extreme guesswork, as the late Julian Simon pointed out. We have documentary evidence of only just over 1,000 extinctions since 1600 (see, for instance, Bjørn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist, p. 250).
16. Coral Reefs. Coral reefs have been around for over 500 million years. This means that they have survived through long periods with much higher temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations than today.
17. Malaria and other Infectious Diseases. Leading disease scientists contend that climate change plays only a minor role in the spread of emerging infectious diseases. In “Global Warming and Malaria: A Call for Accuracy” (The Lancet, June 2004), nine leading malariologists criticized models linking global warming to increased malaria spread as “misleading” and “display[ing] a lack of knowledge” of the subject.
18. Antarctic Ice. There is controversy over whether the Antarctic ice sheet is thinning or thickening. Recent scientific studies have shown a thickening in the interior at the same time as increased melting along the coastlines. Temperatures in the interior are generally decreasing. The Antarctic Peninsula, where the Larsen-B ice shelf broke up (p. 181) is not representative of what is happening in the rest of Antarctica. Dr. Wibjörn Karlén, Professor Emeritus of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology at Stockholm University, acknowledges, “Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems.” According to a forthcoming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate models based on anthropogenic forcing cannot explain the anomalous warming of the Antarctic Peninsula; thus, something natural is at work.
19. Greenland Climate. Greenland was warmer in the 1920s and 1930s than it is now. A recent study by Dr. Peter Chylek of the University of California, Riverside, addressed the question of whether man is directly responsible for recent warming: “An important question is to what extent can the current (1995-2005) temperature increase in Greenland coastal regions be interpreted as evidence of man-induced global warming? Although there has been a considerable temperature increase during the last decade (1995 to 2005) a similar increase and at a faster rate occurred during the early part of the 20th century (1920 to 1930) when carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases could not be a cause. The Greenland warming of 1920 to 1930 demonstrates that a high concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is not a necessary condition for period of warming to arise. The observed 1995-2005 temperature increase seems to be within a natural variability of Greenland climate.” (Petr Chylek et al., Geophysical Research Letters, 13 June 2006.)
20. Sea Level Rise. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not forecast sea-level rises of “18 to 20 feet.” Rather, it says, “We project a sea level rise of 0.09 to 0.88 m for 1990 to 2100, with a central value of 0.48 m. The central value gives an average rate of 2.2 to 4.4 times the rate over the 20th century...It is now widely agreed that major loss of grounded ice and accelerated sea level rise are very unlikely during the 21st century.” Al Gore’s suggestions of much more are therefore extremely alarmist.
21. Population. Al Gore worries about population growth; Gore does not suggest a solution. Fertility in the developed world is stable or decreasing. The plain fact is that we are not going to reduce population back down to 2 billion or fewer in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the population in the developing world requires a significant increase in its standard of living to reduce the threats of premature and infant mortality, disease, and hunger. In The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford writes, “If we are honest, then, the argument that trade leads to economic growth, which leads to climate change, leads us then to a stark conclusion: we should cut our trade links to make sure that the Chinese, Indians and Africans stay poor. The question is whether any environmental catastrophe, even severe climate change, could possibly inflict the same terrible human cost as keeping three or four billion people in poverty. To ask that question is to answer it.”
22. Energy Generation. A specific example of this is Gore’s acknowledgement that 30 percent of global CO2 emissions come from wood fires used for cooking (p. 227). If we introduced affordable, coal-fired power generation into South Asia and Africa we could reduce this considerably and save over 1.6 million lives a year. This is the sort of solution that Gore does not even consider.
23. Carbon-Emissions Trading. The European Carbon Exchange Market, touted as “effective” on p. 252, has crashed.
24. The “Scientific Consensus.” On the supposed “scientific consensus”: Dr. Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, San Diego, (p. 262) did not examine a “large random sample” of scientific articles. She got her search terms wrong and thought she was looking at all the articles when in fact she was looking at only 928 out of about 12,000 articles on “climate change.” Dr. Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University in England, was unable to replicate her study. He says, “As I have stressed repeatedly, the whole data set includes only 13 abstracts (~1%) that explicitly endorse what Oreskes has called the ‘consensus view.’ In fact, the vast majority of abstracts does (sic) not mention anthropogenic climate change. Moreover — and despite attempts to deny this fact — a handful of abstracts actually questions the view that human activities are the main driving force of ‘the observed warming over the last 50 years.’” In addition, a recent survey of scientists following the same methodology as one published in 1996 found that about 30 percent of scientists disagreed to some extent or another with the contention that “climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.” Less than 10 percent “strongly agreed” with the statement. Details of both the survey and the failed attempt to replicate the Oreskes study can be found here.
25. Economic Costs. Even if the study Gore cites is right (p. 280-281), the United States will still emit massive amounts of CO2 after all the measures it outlines have been realized. Getting emissions down to the paltry levels needed to stabilize CO2 in the atmosphere would require, in Gore’s own words, “a wrenching transformation” of our way of life. This cannot be done easily or without significant cost. The Kyoto Protocol, which Gore enthusiastically supports, would avert less than a tenth of a degree of warming in the next fifty years and would cost up to $400 billion a year to the U.S. All of the current proposals in Congress would cost the economy significant amounts, making us all poorer, with all that that entails for human health and welfare, while doing nothing to stop global warming.
Finally, Gore quotes Winston Churchill (p. 100) — but he should read what Churchill said when he was asked what qualities a politician requires: “The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.”
Scientists respond to Gore's warnings of climate catastrophe
"The Inconvenient Truth" is indeed inconvenient to alarmists
By Tom Harris
Monday, June 12, 2006
"Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it," Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film "An Inconvenient Truth", showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie?
Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."
But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?
No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.
Even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."
This is highly valuable knowledge, but doesn't make them climate change cause experts, only climate impact experts.
So we have a smaller fraction.
But it becomes smaller still. Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. "These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios," asserts Ball. "Since modelers concede computer outputs are not "predictions" but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts."
We should listen most to scientists who use real data to try to understand what nature is actually telling us about the causes and extent of global climate change. In this relatively small community, there is no consensus, despite what Gore and others would suggest.
Here is a small sample of the side of the debate we almost never hear:
Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"
Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.
Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, takes apart Gore's dramatic display of Antarctic glaciers collapsing into the sea. "The breaking glacier wall is a normally occurring phenomenon which is due to the normal advance of a glacier," says Winterhalter. "In Antarctica the temperature is low enough to prohibit melting of the ice front, so if the ice is grounded, it has to break off in beautiful ice cascades. If the water is deep enough icebergs will form."
Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, "Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems."
But Karlen clarifies that the 'mass balance' of Antarctica is positive - more snow is accumulating than melting off. As a result, Ball explains, there is an increase in the 'calving' of icebergs as the ice dome of Antarctica is growing and flowing to the oceans. When Greenland and Antarctica are assessed together, "their mass balance is considered to possibly increase the sea level by 0.03 mm/year - not much of an effect," KarlÈn concludes.
The Antarctica has survived warm and cold events over millions of years. A meltdown is simply not a realistic scenario in the foreseeable future.
Gore tells us in the film, "Starting in 1970, there was a precipitous drop-off in the amount and extent and thickness of the Arctic ice cap." This is misleading, according to Ball: "The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology."
Karlen explains that a paper published in 2003 by University of Alaska professor Igor Polyakov shows that, the region of the Arctic where rising temperature is supposedly endangering polar bears showed fluctuations since 1940 but no overall temperature rise. "For several published records it is a decrease for the last 50 years," says KarlÈn
Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. gives the details, "There has been some decrease in ice thickness in the Canadian Arctic over the past 30 years but no melt down. The Canadian Ice Service records show that from 1971-1981 there was average, to above average, ice thickness. From 1981-1982 there was a sharp decrease of 15% but there was a quick recovery to average, to slightly above average, values from 1983-1995. A sharp drop of 30% occurred again 1996-1998 and since then there has been a steady increase to reach near normal conditions since 2001."
Concerning Gore's beliefs about worldwide warming, Morgan points out that, in addition to the cooling in the NW Atlantic, massive areas of cooling are found in the North and South Pacific Ocean; the whole of the Amazon Valley; the north coast of South America and the Caribbean; the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Red Sea; New Zealand and even the Ganges Valley in India. Morgan explains, "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (which doubled the area of warming in Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic Ocean) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."
Gore's point that 200 cities and towns in the American West set all time high temperature records is also misleading according to Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. "It is not unusual for some locations, out of the thousands of cities and towns in the U.S., to set all-time records," he says. "The actual data shows that overall, recent temperatures in the U.S. were not unusual."
Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."
In April sixty of the world's leading experts in the field asked Prime Minister Harper to order a thorough public review of the science of climate change, something that has never happened in Canada. Considering what's at stake - either the end of civilization, if you believe Gore, or a waste of billions of dollars, if you believe his opponents - it seems like a reasonable request.
The gods must be laughing
Dr. Chris de Freitas, climate scientist, associate professor, University of Auckland, New Zealand: ”I can assure Mr. Gore that no one from the South Pacific islands have fled to New Zealand because of rising seas. In fact, if Gore consults the data, he will see it shows sea level falling in some parts of the Pacific.”
Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner, emeritus professor of paleogeophysics & geodynamics, Stockholm University, Sweden: “We find no alarming sea level rise going on, in the Maldives, Tovalu, Venice, the Persian Gulf and even satellite altimetry if applied properly.”
Dr. Paul Reiter, Professor - Institut Pasteur, Unit of Insects and Infectious Diseases, Paris, France, comments on Gore’s belief that Nairobi and Harare were founded just above the mosquito line to avoid malaria and how the mosquitoes are now moving to higher altitudes: “Gore is completely wrong here - malaria has been documented at an altitude 2500 m - Nairobi and Harare are at altitudes of about 1500 m. The new altitudes of malaria are lower than those recorded 100 years ago. None of the “30 so called new diseases” Gore references are attributable to global warming, none.”
Dr. Mitchell Taylor, Manager, Wildlife Research Section, Department of Environment, Igloolik, Nunavut, Canada: “Our information is that 7 of 13 populations of polar bears in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (more than half the world’s estimated total) are either stable, or increasing …. Of the three that appear to be declining, only one has been shown to be affected by climate change. No one can say with certainty that climate change has not affected these other populations, but it is also true that we have no information to suggest that it has.”
Dr. Petr Chylek, adjunct professor, Dept. of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: “Mr. Gore suggests that Greenland melt area increased considerably between 1992 and 2005. But 1992 was exceptionally cold in Greenland and the melt area of ice sheet was exceptionally low due to the cooling caused by volcanic dust emitted from Mt. Pinatubo. If, instead of 1992, Gore had chosen for comparison the year 1991, one in which the melt area was 1% higher than in 2005, he would have to conclude that the ice sheet melt area is shrinking and that perhaps a new ice age is just around the corner.”
Dr. Gary D. Sharp, Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study, Salinas, California: “The oceans are now heading into one of their periodic phases of cooling. … Modest changes in temperature are not about to wipe them [coral] out. Neither will increased carbon dioxide, which is a fundamental chemical building block that allows coral reefs to exist at all.”
Dr. R. M. Carter, professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia: “Both the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps are thickening. The temperature at the South Pole has declined by more than 1 degree C since 1950. And the area of sea-ice around the continent has increased over the last 20 years.”
Dr./Cdr. M. R. Morgan, FRMS, formerly advisor to the World Meteorological Organization/climatology research scientist at University of Exeter, U.K.: “From data published by the Canadian Ice Service there has been no precipitous drop off in the amount or thickness of the ice cap since 1970 when reliable over-all coverage became available for the Canadian Arctic.”
Rob Scagel, M.Sc., forest microclimate specialist, Pacific Phytometric Consultants, Surrey, British Colombia, Canada comments on Gore’s belief that the Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB) is an “invasive exotic species” that has become a plague due to fewer days of frost: “The MPB is a species native to this part of North America and is always present. The MPB epidemic started as comparatively small outbreaks and through forest management inaction got completely out of hand.”
For a more thorough dismantling of Gore's silly agitprop, go to http://www.cei.org/gencon/030,05632.cfm. Another excellent intro to the subject is http://www.ncpa.org/pub/st/st285/st285.pdf and http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/harris061206.htm. I'll cut and paste this last one as well as it takes Gore and his legions of lemmings to the woodshed big time.
Gorey Truths: 25 Inconvenient Truths for Al Gore
Op-Eds & Articles
by Iain Murray
June 22, 2006
With An Inconvenient Truth, the companion book to former Vice President Al Gore’s global-warming movie, currently number nine in Amazon sales rank, this is a good time to point out that the book, which is a largely pictorial representation of the movie’s graphical presentation, exaggerates the evidence surrounding global warming. Ironically, the former Vice President leaves out many truths that are inconvenient for his argument. Here are just 25 of them.
1. Carbon Dioxide’s Effect on Temperature. The relationship between global temperature and carbon dioxide (CO2), on which the entire scare is founded, is not linear. Every molecule of CO2 added to the atmosphere contributes less to warming than the previous one. The book’s graph on p. 66-67 is seriously misleading. Moreover, even the historical levels of CO2 shown on the graph are disputed. Evidence from plant fossil-remains suggest that there was as much CO2 in the atmosphere about 11,000 years ago as there is today.
2. Kilimanjaro. The snows of Kilimanjaro are melting not because of global warming but because of a local climate shift that began 100 years ago. The authors of a report in the International Journal of Climatology “develop a new concept for investigating the retreat of Kilimanjaro’s glaciers, based on the physical understanding of glacier–climate interactions.” They note that, “The concept considers the peculiarities of the mountain and implies that climatological processes other than air temperature control the ice recession in a direct manner. A drastic drop in atmospheric moisture at the end of the 19th century and the ensuing drier climatic conditions are likely forcing glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro.”
3. Glaciers. Glaciers around the world have been receding at around the same pace for over 100 years. Research published by the National Academy of Sciences last week indicates that the Peruvian glacier on p. 53-53 probably disappeared a few thousand years ago.
4. The Medieval Warm Period. Al Gore says that the “hockey stick” graph that shows temperatures remarkably steady for the last 1,000 years has been validated, and ridicules the concept of a “medieval warm period.” That’s not the case. Last year, a team of leading paleoclimatologists said, “When matching existing temperature reconstructions…the timeseries display a reasonably coherent picture of major climatic episodes: ‘Medieval Warm Period,’ ‘Little Ice Age’ and ‘Recent Warming.’” They go on to conclude, “So what would it mean, if the reconstructions indicate a larger…or smaller…temperature amplitude? We suggest that the former situation, i.e. enhanced variability during pre-industrial times, would result in a redistribution of weight towards the role of natural factors in forcing temperature changes, thereby relatively devaluing the impact of anthropogenic emissions and affecting future temperature predictions.”
5. The Hottest Year. Satellite temperature measurements say that 2005 wasn't the hottest year on record — 1998 was — and that temperatures have been stable since 2001 (p.73). Here’s the satellite graph:
6. Heat Waves. The summer heat wave that struck Europe in 2003 was caused by an atmospheric pressure anomaly; it had nothing to do with global warming. As the United Nations Environment Program reported in September 2003, “This extreme wheather [sic] was caused by an anti-cyclone firmly anchored over the western European land mass holding back the rain-bearing depressions that usually enter the continent from the Atlantic ocean. This situation was exceptional in the extended length of time (over 20 days) during which it conveyed very hot dry air up from south of the Mediterranean.”
7. Record Temperatures. Record temperatures — hot and cold — are set every day around the world; that’s the nature of records. Statistically, any given place will see four record high temperatures set every year. There is evidence that daytime high temperatures are staying about the same as for the last few decades, but nighttime lows are gradually rising. Global warming might be more properly called, “Global less cooling.” (On this, see Patrick J. Michaels book, Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.)
8. Hurricanes. There is no overall global trend of hurricane-force storms getting stronger that has anything to do with temperature. A recent study in Geophysical Research Letters found: “The data indicate a large increasing trend in tropical cyclone intensity and longevity for the North Atlantic basin and a considerable decreasing trend for the Northeast Pacific. All other basins showed small trends, and there has been no significant change in global net tropical cyclone activity. There has been a small increase in global Category 4–5 hurricanes from the period 1986–1995 to the period 1996–2005. Most of this increase is likely due to improved observational technology. These findings indicate that other important factors govern intensity and frequency of tropical cyclones besides SSTs [sea surface temperatures].”
9. Tornadoes. Records for numbers of tornadoes are set because we can now record more of the smaller tornadoes (see, for instance, the Tornado FAQ at Weather Underground).
10. European Flooding. European flooding is not new (p. 107). Similar flooding happened in 2003. Research from Michael Mudelsee and colleagues from the University of Leipzig published in Nature (Sept. 11, 2003) looked at data reaching as far back as 1021 (for the Elbe) and 1269 (for the Oder). They concluded that there is no upward trend in the incidence of extreme flooding in this region of central Europe.
11. Shrinking Lakes. Scientists investigating the disappearance of Lake Chad (p.116) found that most of it was due to human overuse of water. “The lake’s decline probably has nothing to do with global warming, report the two scientists, who based their findings on computer models and satellite imagery made available by NASA. They attribute the situation instead to human actions related to climate variation, compounded by the ever increasing demands of an expanding population” (“Shrinking African Lake Offers Lesson on Finite Resources,” National Geographic, April 26, 2001). Lake Chad is also a very shallow lake that has shrunk considerably throughout human history.
12. Polar Bears. Polar bears are not becoming endangered. A leading Canadian polar bear biologist wrote recently, “Climate change is having an effect on the west Hudson population of polar bears, but really, there is no need to panic. Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear (sic) to be affected at present.”
13. The Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream, the ocean conveyor belt, is not at risk of shutting off in the North Atlantic (p. 150). Carl Wunsch of MIT wrote to the journal Nature in 2004 to say, “The only way to produce an ocean circulation without a Gulf Stream is either to turn off the wind system, or to stop the Earth’s rotation, or both”
14. Invasive Species. Gore’s worries about the effect of warming on species ignore evolution. With the new earlier caterpillar season in the Netherlands, an evolutionary advantage is given to birds that can hatch their eggs earlier than the rest. That’s how nature works. Also, “invasive species” naturally extend their range when climate changes. As for the pine beetle given as an example of invasive species, Rob Scagel, a forest microclimate specialist in British Columbia, said, “The MPB (mountain pine beetle) is a species native to this part of North America and is always present. The MPB epidemic started as comparatively small outbreaks and through forest management inaction got completely out of hand.”
15. Species Loss. When it comes to species loss, the figures given on p. 163 are based on extreme guesswork, as the late Julian Simon pointed out. We have documentary evidence of only just over 1,000 extinctions since 1600 (see, for instance, Bjørn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist, p. 250).
16. Coral Reefs. Coral reefs have been around for over 500 million years. This means that they have survived through long periods with much higher temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations than today.
17. Malaria and other Infectious Diseases. Leading disease scientists contend that climate change plays only a minor role in the spread of emerging infectious diseases. In “Global Warming and Malaria: A Call for Accuracy” (The Lancet, June 2004), nine leading malariologists criticized models linking global warming to increased malaria spread as “misleading” and “display[ing] a lack of knowledge” of the subject.
18. Antarctic Ice. There is controversy over whether the Antarctic ice sheet is thinning or thickening. Recent scientific studies have shown a thickening in the interior at the same time as increased melting along the coastlines. Temperatures in the interior are generally decreasing. The Antarctic Peninsula, where the Larsen-B ice shelf broke up (p. 181) is not representative of what is happening in the rest of Antarctica. Dr. Wibjörn Karlén, Professor Emeritus of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology at Stockholm University, acknowledges, “Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems.” According to a forthcoming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate models based on anthropogenic forcing cannot explain the anomalous warming of the Antarctic Peninsula; thus, something natural is at work.
19. Greenland Climate. Greenland was warmer in the 1920s and 1930s than it is now. A recent study by Dr. Peter Chylek of the University of California, Riverside, addressed the question of whether man is directly responsible for recent warming: “An important question is to what extent can the current (1995-2005) temperature increase in Greenland coastal regions be interpreted as evidence of man-induced global warming? Although there has been a considerable temperature increase during the last decade (1995 to 2005) a similar increase and at a faster rate occurred during the early part of the 20th century (1920 to 1930) when carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases could not be a cause. The Greenland warming of 1920 to 1930 demonstrates that a high concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is not a necessary condition for period of warming to arise. The observed 1995-2005 temperature increase seems to be within a natural variability of Greenland climate.” (Petr Chylek et al., Geophysical Research Letters, 13 June 2006.)
20. Sea Level Rise. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not forecast sea-level rises of “18 to 20 feet.” Rather, it says, “We project a sea level rise of 0.09 to 0.88 m for 1990 to 2100, with a central value of 0.48 m. The central value gives an average rate of 2.2 to 4.4 times the rate over the 20th century...It is now widely agreed that major loss of grounded ice and accelerated sea level rise are very unlikely during the 21st century.” Al Gore’s suggestions of much more are therefore extremely alarmist.
21. Population. Al Gore worries about population growth; Gore does not suggest a solution. Fertility in the developed world is stable or decreasing. The plain fact is that we are not going to reduce population back down to 2 billion or fewer in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the population in the developing world requires a significant increase in its standard of living to reduce the threats of premature and infant mortality, disease, and hunger. In The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford writes, “If we are honest, then, the argument that trade leads to economic growth, which leads to climate change, leads us then to a stark conclusion: we should cut our trade links to make sure that the Chinese, Indians and Africans stay poor. The question is whether any environmental catastrophe, even severe climate change, could possibly inflict the same terrible human cost as keeping three or four billion people in poverty. To ask that question is to answer it.”
22. Energy Generation. A specific example of this is Gore’s acknowledgement that 30 percent of global CO2 emissions come from wood fires used for cooking (p. 227). If we introduced affordable, coal-fired power generation into South Asia and Africa we could reduce this considerably and save over 1.6 million lives a year. This is the sort of solution that Gore does not even consider.
23. Carbon-Emissions Trading. The European Carbon Exchange Market, touted as “effective” on p. 252, has crashed.
24. The “Scientific Consensus.” On the supposed “scientific consensus”: Dr. Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, San Diego, (p. 262) did not examine a “large random sample” of scientific articles. She got her search terms wrong and thought she was looking at all the articles when in fact she was looking at only 928 out of about 12,000 articles on “climate change.” Dr. Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University in England, was unable to replicate her study. He says, “As I have stressed repeatedly, the whole data set includes only 13 abstracts (~1%) that explicitly endorse what Oreskes has called the ‘consensus view.’ In fact, the vast majority of abstracts does (sic) not mention anthropogenic climate change. Moreover — and despite attempts to deny this fact — a handful of abstracts actually questions the view that human activities are the main driving force of ‘the observed warming over the last 50 years.’” In addition, a recent survey of scientists following the same methodology as one published in 1996 found that about 30 percent of scientists disagreed to some extent or another with the contention that “climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.” Less than 10 percent “strongly agreed” with the statement. Details of both the survey and the failed attempt to replicate the Oreskes study can be found here.
25. Economic Costs. Even if the study Gore cites is right (p. 280-281), the United States will still emit massive amounts of CO2 after all the measures it outlines have been realized. Getting emissions down to the paltry levels needed to stabilize CO2 in the atmosphere would require, in Gore’s own words, “a wrenching transformation” of our way of life. This cannot be done easily or without significant cost. The Kyoto Protocol, which Gore enthusiastically supports, would avert less than a tenth of a degree of warming in the next fifty years and would cost up to $400 billion a year to the U.S. All of the current proposals in Congress would cost the economy significant amounts, making us all poorer, with all that that entails for human health and welfare, while doing nothing to stop global warming.
Finally, Gore quotes Winston Churchill (p. 100) — but he should read what Churchill said when he was asked what qualities a politician requires: “The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.”
Scientists respond to Gore's warnings of climate catastrophe
"The Inconvenient Truth" is indeed inconvenient to alarmists
By Tom Harris
Monday, June 12, 2006
"Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it," Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film "An Inconvenient Truth", showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie?
Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."
But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?
No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.
Even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."
This is highly valuable knowledge, but doesn't make them climate change cause experts, only climate impact experts.
So we have a smaller fraction.
But it becomes smaller still. Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. "These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios," asserts Ball. "Since modelers concede computer outputs are not "predictions" but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts."
We should listen most to scientists who use real data to try to understand what nature is actually telling us about the causes and extent of global climate change. In this relatively small community, there is no consensus, despite what Gore and others would suggest.
Here is a small sample of the side of the debate we almost never hear:
Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"
Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.
Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, takes apart Gore's dramatic display of Antarctic glaciers collapsing into the sea. "The breaking glacier wall is a normally occurring phenomenon which is due to the normal advance of a glacier," says Winterhalter. "In Antarctica the temperature is low enough to prohibit melting of the ice front, so if the ice is grounded, it has to break off in beautiful ice cascades. If the water is deep enough icebergs will form."
Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, "Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems."
But Karlen clarifies that the 'mass balance' of Antarctica is positive - more snow is accumulating than melting off. As a result, Ball explains, there is an increase in the 'calving' of icebergs as the ice dome of Antarctica is growing and flowing to the oceans. When Greenland and Antarctica are assessed together, "their mass balance is considered to possibly increase the sea level by 0.03 mm/year - not much of an effect," KarlÈn concludes.
The Antarctica has survived warm and cold events over millions of years. A meltdown is simply not a realistic scenario in the foreseeable future.
Gore tells us in the film, "Starting in 1970, there was a precipitous drop-off in the amount and extent and thickness of the Arctic ice cap." This is misleading, according to Ball: "The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology."
Karlen explains that a paper published in 2003 by University of Alaska professor Igor Polyakov shows that, the region of the Arctic where rising temperature is supposedly endangering polar bears showed fluctuations since 1940 but no overall temperature rise. "For several published records it is a decrease for the last 50 years," says KarlÈn
Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. gives the details, "There has been some decrease in ice thickness in the Canadian Arctic over the past 30 years but no melt down. The Canadian Ice Service records show that from 1971-1981 there was average, to above average, ice thickness. From 1981-1982 there was a sharp decrease of 15% but there was a quick recovery to average, to slightly above average, values from 1983-1995. A sharp drop of 30% occurred again 1996-1998 and since then there has been a steady increase to reach near normal conditions since 2001."
Concerning Gore's beliefs about worldwide warming, Morgan points out that, in addition to the cooling in the NW Atlantic, massive areas of cooling are found in the North and South Pacific Ocean; the whole of the Amazon Valley; the north coast of South America and the Caribbean; the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Red Sea; New Zealand and even the Ganges Valley in India. Morgan explains, "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (which doubled the area of warming in Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic Ocean) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."
Gore's point that 200 cities and towns in the American West set all time high temperature records is also misleading according to Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. "It is not unusual for some locations, out of the thousands of cities and towns in the U.S., to set all-time records," he says. "The actual data shows that overall, recent temperatures in the U.S. were not unusual."
Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."
In April sixty of the world's leading experts in the field asked Prime Minister Harper to order a thorough public review of the science of climate change, something that has never happened in Canada. Considering what's at stake - either the end of civilization, if you believe Gore, or a waste of billions of dollars, if you believe his opponents - it seems like a reasonable request.
The gods must be laughing
Dr. Chris de Freitas, climate scientist, associate professor, University of Auckland, New Zealand: ”I can assure Mr. Gore that no one from the South Pacific islands have fled to New Zealand because of rising seas. In fact, if Gore consults the data, he will see it shows sea level falling in some parts of the Pacific.”
Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner, emeritus professor of paleogeophysics & geodynamics, Stockholm University, Sweden: “We find no alarming sea level rise going on, in the Maldives, Tovalu, Venice, the Persian Gulf and even satellite altimetry if applied properly.”
Dr. Paul Reiter, Professor - Institut Pasteur, Unit of Insects and Infectious Diseases, Paris, France, comments on Gore’s belief that Nairobi and Harare were founded just above the mosquito line to avoid malaria and how the mosquitoes are now moving to higher altitudes: “Gore is completely wrong here - malaria has been documented at an altitude 2500 m - Nairobi and Harare are at altitudes of about 1500 m. The new altitudes of malaria are lower than those recorded 100 years ago. None of the “30 so called new diseases” Gore references are attributable to global warming, none.”
Dr. Mitchell Taylor, Manager, Wildlife Research Section, Department of Environment, Igloolik, Nunavut, Canada: “Our information is that 7 of 13 populations of polar bears in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (more than half the world’s estimated total) are either stable, or increasing …. Of the three that appear to be declining, only one has been shown to be affected by climate change. No one can say with certainty that climate change has not affected these other populations, but it is also true that we have no information to suggest that it has.”
Dr. Petr Chylek, adjunct professor, Dept. of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: “Mr. Gore suggests that Greenland melt area increased considerably between 1992 and 2005. But 1992 was exceptionally cold in Greenland and the melt area of ice sheet was exceptionally low due to the cooling caused by volcanic dust emitted from Mt. Pinatubo. If, instead of 1992, Gore had chosen for comparison the year 1991, one in which the melt area was 1% higher than in 2005, he would have to conclude that the ice sheet melt area is shrinking and that perhaps a new ice age is just around the corner.”
Dr. Gary D. Sharp, Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study, Salinas, California: “The oceans are now heading into one of their periodic phases of cooling. … Modest changes in temperature are not about to wipe them [coral] out. Neither will increased carbon dioxide, which is a fundamental chemical building block that allows coral reefs to exist at all.”
Dr. R. M. Carter, professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia: “Both the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps are thickening. The temperature at the South Pole has declined by more than 1 degree C since 1950. And the area of sea-ice around the continent has increased over the last 20 years.”
Dr./Cdr. M. R. Morgan, FRMS, formerly advisor to the World Meteorological Organization/climatology research scientist at University of Exeter, U.K.: “From data published by the Canadian Ice Service there has been no precipitous drop off in the amount or thickness of the ice cap since 1970 when reliable over-all coverage became available for the Canadian Arctic.”
Rob Scagel, M.Sc., forest microclimate specialist, Pacific Phytometric Consultants, Surrey, British Colombia, Canada comments on Gore’s belief that the Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB) is an “invasive exotic species” that has become a plague due to fewer days of frost: “The MPB is a species native to this part of North America and is always present. The MPB epidemic started as comparatively small outbreaks and through forest management inaction got completely out of hand.”
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Coggins7 wrote:Nothing much to add here unless someone wants to really get into specifics, as bc has done a sterling job debunking, in thumbnail form what has evolved into the greatest pseudo-scientific hoax of the last century, by which I mean, of course, catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
The major force behind this ideology (and we should be clear at the outset that AGW is an ideology, as much as it is a theory about climate change) has been, for the last 25 years or so, the environemtenal movement, which, in its dominant form, is both a political ideology and a fundamentalist religion that, in either case, shares nothing with either the with either the historical Judeo/Christian tradition or the west's classical liberal political and economic values.
Environmentalism is a form of militant primitivist neo-Pantheism; really a modern militant neo-Gnosticsm that finds its ground in a romanitcization of nature and the primitive, distrust or hatred of technology, and a visceral distaste for western concepts of liberal democracy including property rights, economic liberty, individualism, and democratic forms of governance.
In its political form its simply Communism dressed up as neo-Pantheism. In its stronger neo-Pantheistic form (Deep Ecology) its an anti-human, anti-modern, and anti-capitalist fundamentalist religion that sees mankind as a cancer upon a pristine and undefiled nature that has no more moral worth than any particular aspect of nature itself.
To make a long story short, AGW has not a shred of empirical evidence from observations and measurements made in nature to support a single one of its claims. The entire edifice still rests upon GCMs that although "sophisticated", are notoriously poor at predicting even simple weather patters within very short term time frames, and involve vast gaps in scientific knowledge of global climate dynamics. None of it, but none of it, has been substantiated by empirical climate science, not one iota.
To cut to the proverbial chase:
1: The climate has warmed a little over a half a degree Centigrade in somewhat over a century, a minuscule rise well within historical variability.
2: Most warming has been at ground level, in northern latitudes, at night, and in the winter months.
3: The South Pole hasn't warmed at all (a major problem for the GCMs, which said it would be noticeable there first) but has been in a slight cooling phase for upwards of 25 years.
4: The bulk of the warming ended in 1940, and the planet cooled off (the background temperature continued to rise, but at a much slower rate) from that point on, ending in a more noticeable cooling in the Seventies, at which point warming began again in the early Eighties. Warming appears to have ended in 1998.
5: Arctic glaciers per se are not melting, only some of them are, around the periphery of the continent. The bulk of the interior has and continues to cool and, most importantly, the continent is growing as heavy snowfall continues to increase total ice mass.
6: There is no known human "footprint" as of yet, and this is especially relevant, not only because the empirical evidence does not exist, but we know that the total output of human industrial activity is utterly dwarfed by the output of natural sources.
7: Virtually in every instance in the geologic past in which temperature has fluctuated in a substantial way, CO2 has followed, not preceded general planetary warming.
8: There have been times in earths geological history when CO2 levels have been much higher than at present, while global mean temperatures have been cooler, and vice versa, there have been periods of low CO2 concentrations and temperatures substantially higher than today.
This is just a very tiny nutshell prolegomena to what could be written on this subject, suffice it to say that the religion of environmentalism, as well as the cult of Socialism that still festers (as Gobachev's retreat into environmentalism even as the last chunks of the Berlin Wall were being carted off to fireplace mantels unknown, attests) throughout the Western world in various forms, under the guise of "green" politics, is one of the gravest dangers the modern civilized world faces with respect to the preservation of individual liberty, the rule of law, and representative government.
Is Satan, in a theological sense (leaving for a moment the scientific, philosophical, and political aspects of the question) behind the ideology of AGW and the corruption of climate science and even prestigious journals such as Nature? Is he behind the 20 plus years of media and pop cultural hysteria about a concept that has never had even the slightest empirical support outside of highly oversimplified and predictively poor GCMs?. Is he behind the relentless and continuing assault on property rights, economic freedom, First Amendment rights, modern technology and innovation, biotechnology, and the economic and industrial development of the Third World that are perceived as hostile to the pampered and decadent Western intellectual elite's taste for nature worship?
Was he the impetus that caused the United States, The U.N., and then the E.U. To ban DDT for use in insect vector control, thus dooming thirty million Third World peoples to death over the last three decades when such could have been, for the most part, completely avoided?
You betcha.
One further thing regarding Analytics post containing the link to the EPA. First of all, science does not work through consensus. This is one of the worst features of our pop left wing media driven society coupled with the utter failure of American public schooling to give people the intellectual tools necessarry to negotiate the intellectual ghetto that is our mainstream media and most of our political public discourse. There is no consensus in the scientific community regard AGW, and if there was, that would bespeak the serious corruption of the scientific enterprise in that area.
Secondly, the EPA is a respository and bully pulpit for junk science and has been for several decades at least (a low point was hit in the Nineties with Carol Browner) and should not be taken seriously by thoughful people seeking to understand the AGW debate.
A post of this length, without a single reference, certainly deserves the 'Lazy Research' reward. So does the op-ed you posted next.
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_Coggins7
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 3679
- Joined: Fri Nov 03, 2006 12:25 am
Furthermore, I don't see how people who promote the environment are going to profit off of it. I do see it working the other way 'round though.
This is qute simple. The foundation babies and fundraisers for the exceptionally well heeled environmental groups are making a mint of of AGW, and that mint translates into political power because it translates into lobbying, PSAs, newspaper and magazine ads, TV spots: the whole apparatus of political propaganda.
The real problem, however, isn't whose profiting from it in a financial sense. The real profiteers are the profiteers of power, both in the special interest envirnomental movement and within institutional politics, by which I mean the political class in Washington. AGW is all about a continuing trend toward the centralizing and consolidating of unaccoutable power in the central government, and AGW has been, expecially since the 90s, probably the single greatest idological marketing ploy the Left here and around the world has ever concocted in its ever continuing quest to justify Socialism. After the Wall fell, the justification became, after the historic failure of the ideology proper, that we must have Socialism or were all gonna die. And why? Well, because of capitalism of course, and because of America and its dynamic, prosperous economy. And because of Christianity and its non-Pantheistic understanding of nature and humankind's place in it.
You see, all the usual suspects.
Loran
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_Coggins7
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A post of this length, without a single reference, certainly deserves the 'Lazy Research' reward. So does the op-ed you posted next.
You've got to be kidding. I've got reams and reams and reams of referenced essays, reports, and data on this subject on disk and everything I've got on disk is online. You're best point of entry is CO2 Science at http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2Sc ... /Index.jsp, which is the Idso's Webpage. Everything there is referenced to professional journals dealing with climate and other earth sciences relevant to AGW. Also keep up with SEPP at http://www.sepp.org/. Dr. Singer is eminant in the field, as is Robert C. Balling, a world authority on climate science, Richard Lindzen, Tim Ball, well, I could go on. Obviously you didn't evern read the post, or the other posts and related essays and links, before you posted your call for references.
And why? I don't know, eveything I posted in my own words is just common knowledge in the scientific community and in the professional literature, and anyone who was actually concerned about a substative understanding of this issue would frequent those sources of greatest intellectual veracity, and leave behind those of little veracity, such as CNN, CBS, The Sierra Club, and the NRDC, whcih is apparantly where you are getting you infomation on AGW. This isn't a professional journal and I'm not going to takes hours to source claims that are common knowledge and availabe to anyone with a computer who really want's to look at both sides of the issue. The competent sources of quotations and statements I've provided in the essays I posted, and the links, are far more than adaquate to dispell the superstitous totemic allegience to AGW uncritically supported by so many. There's alot to read and digest, but that's the only way. Now its time for you to do your own homework. I've already done mine.
Loran
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_Bryan Inks
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 324
- Joined: Thu Oct 26, 2006 5:03 pm
Coggins7 wrote:A post of this length, without a single reference, certainly deserves the 'Lazy Research' reward. So does the op-ed you posted next.
You've got to be kidding. I've got reams and reams and reams of referenced essays, reports, and data on this subject on disk and everything I've got on disk is online. You're best point of entry is CO2 Science at http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2Sc ... /Index.jsp, which is the Idso's Webpage. Everything there is referenced to professional journals dealing with climate and other earth sciences relevant to AGW. Also keep up with SEPP at http://www.sepp.org/. Dr. Singer is eminant in the field, as is Robert C. Balling, a world authority on climate science, Richard Lindzen, Tim Ball, well, I could go on. Obviously you didn't evern read the post, or the other posts and related essays and links, before you posted your call for references.
And why? I don't know, eveything I posted in my own words is just common knowledge in the scientific community and in the professional literature, and anyone who was actually concerned about a substative understanding of this issue would frequent those sources of greatest intellectual veracity, and leave behind those of little veracity, such as CNN, CBS, The Sierra Club, and the NRDC, whcih is apparantly where you are getting you infomation on AGW. This isn't a professional journal and I'm not going to takes hours to source claims that are common knowledge and availabe to anyone with a computer who really want's to look at both sides of the issue. The competent sources of quotations and statements I've provided in the essays I posted, and the links, are far more than adaquate to dispell the superstitous totemic allegience to AGW uncritically supported by so many. There's alot to read and digest, but that's the only way. Now its time for you to do your own homework. I've already done mine.
Loran
And yet, oddly enough, you won't accept the exact same amount of factual evidence that is "common knowledge" against your religion.
Got your blinders on tight enough?
It wouldn't be so bad if you had the testicular fortitude to at least admit you are a hypocrit.
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_Fortigurn
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 918
- Joined: Fri Feb 23, 2007 1:32 pm
Coggins7 wrote:A post of this length, without a single reference, certainly deserves the 'Lazy Research' reward. So does the op-ed you posted next.
You've got to be kidding. I've got reams and reams and reams of referenced essays, reports, and data on this subject on disk and everything I've got on disk is online.
Then why didn't you quote or cite any of it? The post as it stands is what BC calls 'lazy research'. Not a single reference was even cited.
You're best point of entry is CO2 Science at http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2Sc ... /Index.jsp, which is the Idso's Webpage. Everything there is referenced to professional journals dealing with climate and other earth sciences relevant to AGW. Also keep up with SEPP at http://www.sepp.org/.
On what basis do you recommend these sites? On what basis am I to take them as authoritative?
Dr. Singer is eminant in the field, as is Robert C. Balling, a world authority on climate science, Richard Lindzen, Tim Ball, well, I could go on. Obviously you didn't evern read the post, or the other posts and related essays and links, before you posted your call for references.
Your first post didn't contain any references. You second post, as I pointed out, was an op-ed. The fact that it quoted a handful of scientists (though without specific references), doesn't change the fact that it's an op-ed. It was also unclear as to exactly how the scientists quoted were related to the content of the op-ed. One or two of them seemed to be saying nothing supportive of the op-ed's main case.
I don't know, eveything I posted in my own words is just common knowledge in the scientific community and in the professional literature, and anyone who was actually concerned about a substative understanding of this issue would frequent those sources of greatest intellectual veracity, and leave behind those of little veracity, such as CNN, CBS, The Sierra Club, and the NRDC, whcih is apparantly where you are getting you infomation on AGW.
There's an interesting mix here of the fallacy of ad populum, the straw man fallacy, and simply not reading my posts. I haven't provided any information from CNN, CBS, The Sierra Club, or the NRDC.
This isn't a professional journal and I'm not going to takes hours to source claims that are common knowledge and availabe to anyone with a computer who really want's to look at both sides of the issue. The competent sources of quotations and statements I've provided in the essays I posted, and the links, are far more than adaquate to dispell the superstitous totemic allegience to AGW uncritically supported by so many. There's alot to read and digest, but that's the only way. Now its time for you to do your own homework. I've already done mine.
I'm sorry, but these are empty claims. You've expressed your opinion, quoted an op-ed, made claims which you say are 'common knowledge', represented certain sites as authoritative on AGW, and that's it. Not a scrap of evidence.
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_Coggins7
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 3679
- Joined: Fri Nov 03, 2006 12:25 am
The problem here fort, is that you're not even really in the debate. The claims made in the op-ed are all checkable on the Web. Get to it. The statements of the scientists are checkable, as are the mountains of data and arguments made on the websites whose links I gave you. Get on with it.
I laid out the evidence, in a "nutshell" as I said clearly in my first post, and you have yet done nothing by hairsplit and quibble over the veracity of the evidence because, Scratch-like, you obviously have not a shred of evidence of your own to bring to the table. That's Old Testament surprising to me at all, as there is none. So this is nothing to get excited over. I'm sure you will now continue, post after post, to ask me questions about the websites, their authors, their credentials, and finially, about their references, until all are blue in the face.
I understand this tactic and why it is the first refuge in many cases.
In other words, move on, nothing to see here.
I laid out the evidence, in a "nutshell" as I said clearly in my first post, and you have yet done nothing by hairsplit and quibble over the veracity of the evidence because, Scratch-like, you obviously have not a shred of evidence of your own to bring to the table. That's Old Testament surprising to me at all, as there is none. So this is nothing to get excited over. I'm sure you will now continue, post after post, to ask me questions about the websites, their authors, their credentials, and finially, about their references, until all are blue in the face.
I understand this tactic and why it is the first refuge in many cases.
In other words, move on, nothing to see here.