A MUST SEE! Global Warming Swindle! by CrevanReaver

Quote:
Originally posted by CrevanReaver:

In the film the core ideology of the anti-humanitarian, neo-Marxist modern environmentalist movement is torn to shreds. Several experts make point-by-point explanations that show exactly why global warming is actually nothing more than a natural phenomenon triggered by the solar cycle.

Actually no it didn't. It just pointed out some issues with the science which everyone already knew were there mixed in with a bunch of fud.

I'll also point out that they used the same sensational techniques that "the other side" uses that they criticize. The whole thing was quite hypocritical.

Sorry, but all this /movie/ was, was the anti-global warming people further muddying the waters. In all seriousness, the "scientists" on both sides should bloody well be embarrassed for things such as this.

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I am on The List. We are The Forsaken and we aim to burn!
"We don't fear the reaper"

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Wednesday, May 23, 2007 5:15 AM

MALBADINLATIN

Quote:
Originally posted by CrevanReaver:
I'm sure a lot of you have already heard of "The Great Global Warming Swindle" and seen it. For those of you who don't know, it is a brilliant and fascinating and surprisingly entertaining documentary by British journalist Martin Durkin.

Now I want to be clear...I haven't researched this info thoroughly, just skimmed it. The thing that struck me is how you described the documentary as entertaining. It's my experience that hard science is usually not entertaining. If you're being entertained, I would be suspicious. Because entertaining is what politicians and the media do to lock you in, as a viewer, or a voter. They also use anger but that's another story.

Anyway, give it a look, they discredit Martin Durkin and address the claims made inividually. I don't claim it's true, just thought you mght want to see it

http://scan.editme.com/200703GGWS

And you can't change that by gettn' all bendy.

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Wednesday, May 23, 2007 2:48 PM

Oh yah, I forgot to mention something.

Professor Tim Ball, which is the first guy that shows up in the movie, is listed as being from the Department of Climatology of the University of Winnipeg.

Well, here's two little facts that people might be interested in:

1) There is no such department at the University of Winnipeg

2) He wasn't a faculty member at the University of Winnipeg as of the making of this movie, not even close to it in fact. Poking around shows he retired in 1996.

Now, who's going to trust a "documentary" with these things going on? Better yet, who's _not_ going to question there ethics?

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Wednesday, June 27, 2007 12:01 PM

CREVANREAVER

http://www.skepticism.net/faq/environment/global_warming/

For those who don't want to go through the entire documentary, here's the gist:

Global warming does indeed exist, however human-produced CO2 (carbon dioxide) is not causing that warming. It is actually nothing more than a natural phenomenon triggered by the solar cycle.

Each day the news reports grow more fantastically apocalyptic. Politicians no longer dare to express any doubt about climate change. There is tremendous intolerance of any dissenting voice and it is the most politically incorrect thing possible - to doubt the climate change orthodoxy.

Global warming has gone beyond politics. It is a new kind of morality. Yet as the frenzy over man-made global warming grows shriller, many senior climate scientists say the actual scientific basis for the theory is crumbling.

It is often said that there is a consensus of thousands of scientists on the global warming issue, and that humans are causing a catastrophic change to the climate system. Well, there are many scientist that simply think that is not true.

We are told that Earth's climate is changing. But the Earth's climate is always changing. In Earth's long history there have been countless periods when it was much warmer and much cooler than it is today. When much of the world was covered by tropical forests or else vast ice sheets. The climate has always changed, and changed without any help from us humans.

We can trace the present warming trend back at least 200 years to the end of a very cold period in Earth's history. This cold spell is known to climatologists as the Little Ice Age. In the 14th Century Europe plunged into the Little Ice Age. And where we would look for evidence of this are the old illustrations and prints and pictures of Old Father Thames, because during the hardest and toughest winters of that Little Ice Age, the Thames would freeze over. And there were ice fairs held on the Thames, skating and people actually selling things on the ice.

If we look back further in time before the Little Ice Age, we find a balmy golden era, when temperatures were higher than they are today, a time known to climatologists as the Medieval Warm Period.

It's important people know that climate enabled a quite different lifestyle in the Medieval period. We have this view today that Warming is going to have apocalyptic outcomes. In fact wherever you describe this Warm Period it appears to be associated with riches. In Europe this was the great age of the cathedral builders, a time when, according to Chaucer, vineyards flourished even in the north of England. All over the city of London there are little memories of the vineyards that grew in the Medieval Warm Period.

So this was a wonderfully rich time. And this little church in a sense symbolizes it, because it comes from a period of great wealth.

Going back in time further still, before the Medieval Warm Period, we find more warm spells, including a very prolonged period during the Bronze Age known to geologists as the Holocene Maximum, when temperatures were significantly higher than they are now for more than three millennia.

If we go back 8,000 years in the Holocene period, our current interglacial, it was much warmer than it is today. Now the polar bears obviously survived that period, they're with us today, they're very adaptable, and these warm periods in the past, what we call, posed no problem for them.

Climate variation in the past is clearly natural. In the current alarm about global warming the culprit is industrial society. Thanks to modern industry, luxuries once enjoyed exclusively by the rich are now available in abundance to ordinary people. Novel technologies have made life easier and richer. Modern transport and communications have made the world seem less foreign and distant. Industrial progress has changed our lives. According to the theory of man-made global warming, industrial growth should cause the temperature to rise.

Anyone who goes around and says that carbon dioxide is responsible for most of the warming of the 20th Century hasn't looked at the basic numbers.

Industrial production in the early decades of the 20th Century was still in its infancy, restricted to only a few countries, handicapped by war and economic depression. After the Second World War things changed. Consumer goods like refrigerators and washing machines and televisions and cars began to be mass-produced for an international market. Historians call this global explosion of industrial activity the Post-War Economic Boom.

Since the mid-19th Century the Earth's temperature has risen by just over half a degree Celsius. But this warming began long before cars and planes were even invented. What's more, most of the rise in temperature occurred before 1940, during a period when industrial production was relatively insignificant. After the Second World War, during the Post-War Economic Boom, temperatures in theory should have shot up. But they didn't. They fell. Not for one or two years, but for four decades. In fact, paradoxically, it wasn't until the world economic recession in the 1970s that they stopped falling.

CO2 began to increase exponentially in about 1940, but the temperature actually began to decrease 1940, continued till about 1975. So with the CO2 increasing rapidly but yet the temperature decreasing we cannot say that CO2 and the temperature go together.

Temperature went up significantly up to 1940 when human production of CO2 was relatively low. And then in the Post-War years when industry and the whole economies of the world really got going, and human production of CO2 just soared, the global temperature was going down. In other words, the facts didn't fit the theory.

Just at a time when, after the Second World war, industry was booming, carbon dioxide was increasing, and yet the Earth was getting cooler and starting off scares of a coming Ice Age, it made absolutely no sense. It still doesn't make sense.

Carbon dioxide forms only a very small part of the Earth's atmosphere. In fact we measure changes in the level of atmospheric CO2 in tens of parts per million. If you take CO2 as a percentage of all the gases in the atmosphere, the oxygen, the nitrogen, and argon and so on, it's 0.054%. It's an incredibly small portion. And then of course you've got to take that portion that supposedly humans are adding, which is the focus of all the concern, and it gets even smaller.

Although CO2 is a greenhouse gas, greenhouse gases themselves only form a small part of the atmosphere. What's more, CO2 is a relatively minor greenhouse Ggas.

The atmosphere is made up of a multitude of gases. A small percentage of them we call greenhouse gases. And of that very small percentage of greenhouse gases, 95% of it is water vapor, it's the most important greenhouse gas. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, by far the most important greenhouse gas.

There is only one way of checking whether the recent warming was due to an increase in greenhouse gas and that is to look up in the sky. Or a part of the sky known to scientists as the troposphere. If it's greenhouse warming, you get more warming in the middle of the troposphere, the first 10 or 12 kilometers of the atmosphere than you do at the surface. There are good theoretical reasons for that, having to do with how the greenhouse works.

The greenhouse effect works like this - the Sun sends its heat down to Earth. If it weren't for greenhouse gases this solar radiation would bounce back into space, leaving the planet cold and uninhabitable. Greenhouse gas traps the escaping heat in the Earth's troposphere, a few miles above the surface. And it's here, according to the climate models, that the rate of warming should be highest if it's greenhouse gas that causing it.

All the models, every one of them, calculates that the warming should be faster as you go up from the surface into the atmosphere. And in fact the maximum warming over the Equator should take place at an altitude of about 10 kilometers.

There are two ways to take the temperature in the Earth's atmosphere, satellites and
weather balloons. What's been found consistently, is that in a great part of the Planet, that the bulk of the atmosphere is not warming as much as we see at the surface, in this region. And that's a real head-scratcher for us, because the theory is pretty straight forward. And the theory says that if the surface warms, the upper atmosphere should warm rapidly. The rise in temperature of that part of the atmosphere is not very dramatic at all, and really does not match the theory that climate models are expressing at this point.

One of the problems that is plaguing the models is that they predict that as you go up through the atmosphere, except in the polar regions, that the rate of warming increases. And it's quite clear from two data sets, not just satellite data, which everybody talks about, but from weather balloon data, that you don't see that effect. In fact it looks like the surface temperatures are warming slightly more than the upper air temperatures. That's a big difference. That data gives you a handle on the fact that what you're seeing is warming that probably is not due to greenhouse gas. That is, that the observations do not show an increase with altitude. In fact, most observations show a slight decrease in the rate of warming with altitude. So in a sense you can say that the hypothesis of man-made global warming is falsified by the evidence.

So the recent warming of the Earth happened in the wrong place and at the wrong time. Most of the warming took place in the early part of the 20th Century and occurred mostly at the Earth's surface, the very opposite of what should have happened according to the theory of man-made global warming.

Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" is regarded by many as the definitive popular presentation of the theory of man-made global warming. His argument rests of one all-important piece of evidence taken from ice core surveys in which scientists drilled deep into the ice to look back into Earth's climate history hundreds of thousands of years. The first ice core survey took place in Vostok in the Antarctic. What it found, as Al Gore correctly points out, was a clear correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature.

Al Gore says in his film, "The relationship is actually very complicated, but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others and it is this - when there is more carbon dioxide the temperature gets warmer." He says the relationship between temperature and CO2 is complicated, but he doesn't say what those complications are. In fact there was something very important in the ice core data that he failed to mention.

When we look at climate on long scales we're looking for geological material that actually records climate. If we were to take an ice sample for example, we use isotopes to reconstruct temperature, but the atmosphere that's imprisoned in that ice, we liberate and then we look at the CO2 content.

Scientists have indeed discovered, as Al Gore says, a link between carbon dioxide and temperature. But what Al Gore doesn't say is that the link is the wrong way round. CO2 lags behind the increase in temperature. It's got an 800 year lag. So temperature is leading CO2 by 800 years.

There have now been several major ice core surveys. Every one of them shows the same thing. The temperature rises or falls and then after a few hundred years, CO2 follows. So obviously carbon dioxide is not the cause of that warming. In fact we can say that the warming produced the increase in carbon dioxide.

CO2 clearly cannot be causing temperature changes. It's a product of temperature - it's following temperature changes.

The Ice Core record goes to the very heart of the problem we have here. They said if the CO2 increases in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas then the temperature will go up. But the Ice Core record shows exactly the opposite. So the fundamental assumption, the most fundamental assumption of the whole theory of climate change due to humans, is shown to be wrong.

To how it can be that higher temperatures lead to more CO2 in the atmosphere, it the obvious point must be noted that CO2 is a natural gas produced by all living things. Organisms are made of carbon dioxide. It is how living things grow.

What's more, humans are not the main source of carbon dioxide. We produce a small fraction, in the single digits, percentage-wise of the CO2 that is produced in the atmosphere.

Volcanoes produce more CO2 each year than all the factories and cars and planes and other sources of man-made CO2 put together. More still comes from animals and bacteria which produce about 150 gigatons of carbon dioxide each year, compared to a mere 6.5 gigatons from humans. An even larger source of CO2 is dying vegetation, from falling leaves for example in the autumn. But the biggest source of CO2, by far, is the oceans.

The ocean is the major reservoir into which carbon dioxide goes when it comes out of the atmosphere or where it is readmitted to the atmosphere. If you heat the surface of the ocean it tends to emit carbon dioxide. Similarly if you cool the ocean surface, the ocean can dissolve more carbon dioxide. So the warmer the oceans the more carbon dioxide they produce, and the cooler they are, the more they suck in.

But why is there a time lag of hundreds of years between a change in temperature and a change in the amount of carbon dioxide going into or out of the sea? The reason is that oceans are so big and so deep. They take literally hundreds of years to warm up and cool down. This time lag means the oceans have what scientists call a "memory" of temperature changes. The ocean has a memory of past events, running out as far as 10,000 years. So for example if somebody says, "Oh, I'm seeing changes in the North Atlantic - this must mean that the climate system is changing", it may only mean that something happened in a remote part of the ocean decades or hundreds of years ago, whose effects are now beginning to show up in the North Atlantic.

The current warming began long before people had cars or electric lights. In the past 150 years the temperature has risen just over half a degree Celsius. But most of that rise occurred before 1940. Since that time the temperature has fallen for four decades and risen for three. There is no evidence at all from Earth's long climate history that carbon dioxide has ever determined global temperature.

Isn't it bizarre to think that it's humans, you know, when we're filling up our car, turning on our lights, that we're the ones controlling climate. Just look in the sky. Look at that massive thing, the Sun. Even humans at our present six and a half billion are minute relative to that.

In the late 1980s solar physicist Piers Corbyn decided to try a radically new way of forecasting the weather. Despite the huge resources of the official Meteorological Office, Corbyn's new technique consistently produced more accurate results. He was hailed in the national press as a super weather man. The secret of his success was the Sun.

The origin of the solar weather technique of long-range forecasting came originally from study of sunspots and a desire to predict those, and then Dr. Corbyn realized it was actually much more interesting to use the Sun to predict the weather.

Sunspots we now know are intense magnetic fields which appear at times of higher solar activity. But for many hundreds of years long before this was properly understood, astronomers around the world used to count the number of sunspots, in the belief that more spots heralded warmer weather.

In 1893 the British astronomer Edward Maunder observed that during the Little Ice Age there were barely any spots visible on the Sun. A period of solar inactivity which became known as the Maunder Minimum.

In 1991, senior scientists at the Danish Meteorological Institute decide to compile a record of sunspots in the 20th Century and compare it with the temperature record. What they found was an incredibly close correlation between what the Sun was doing and changes in temperature on Earth. Solar activity, they found, rose sharply to 1940, fell back for four decades until the 1970s, and then rose again after that.

Professor Friis-Christensen and his colleagues examined 400 years of astronomical records, to compare sunspot activity against temperature variation. Once again they found that variations in solar activity were intimately linked to temperature variation on Earth. It was the Sun it seemed, not carbon dioxide or anything else that was driving changes in the climate.

In a way it's not surprising. The Sun affects us directly of course, when it sends down its heat. But we now know that Sun also affects us indirectly through clouds. Clouds have a powerful cooling effect.

In the early 20th Century scientists discovered that the Earth was constantly being bombarded by sub-atomic particles. These particles, which they called cosmic rays, originated, it was believed from exploding super-novae far beyond our Solar System. When the particles coming down meet water vapor rising up from the sea, they form water droplets and make clouds. But when the sun is more active and the solar wind is strong, fewer particles get through and fewer clouds are formed.

Just how powerful this effect was became clear only recently when an astrophysicist Professor Nir Shaviv decided to compare his own record of cloud-forming cosmic rays with the temperature record created by a geologist, Professor Jan Veizer, going back 600 million years. What they found was that when cosmic rays went up the temperature went down. When cosmic rays went down the temperature went up. Clouds and the Earth's climate were very closely linked.

Professor Shaviv compared the graphs, just put them one upon the other and saw very explosive data. These vastly different records came together to show really what was happening over that long period of time. The climate was controlled by the clouds. The clouds were controlled by cosmic rays. And the cosmic rays were controlled by the Sun. It all came down to the Sun.

If you had x-ray eyes, what appears as a nice friendly yellow ball would appear like a raging tiger. The Sun is an incredibly violent beast and is throwing out great explosion and puffs of gas. and endless solar wind that's forever rushing past the Earth. We're in a certain sense inside the atmosphere of the Sun. The intensity of its magnetic field more that doubled during the 20th Century.

In 2005, astrophysicists from Harvard University published a graph in the official journal of the American Geophysical Union. The graph displayed a blue line that represented temperature change in the Arctic over the past hundred years compared to the rise in carbon dioxide over the same period. The two are not obviously connected. But looking again at the temperature record and a red line which depicts variations in solar activity over the past century, as recorded independently by scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration it's clear that solar activity over the last hundred years, over the last several hundred years, correlated very nicely on a decadal basis with sea ice and Arctic temperatures.

To the Harvard astrophysicists and many other scientists the conclusion is inescapable: the Sun is driving climate change. CO2 is irrelevant.

The emphasis on man-made carbon dioxide as a possible environmental problem is something very favorable to the environmental idea of "Medieval Environmentalism," of let's get back to the way things were in Medieval times, and get rid of all these cars and machines. Radical environmentalists love it because carbon dioxide is for them an emblem of industrialization. It's clearly is an industrial gas. So it's tied in with economic growth, with transportation in cars, with what we call civilization. And there are forces in the environmental movement that are simply against economic growth.

Man-made global warming caused by man-made carbon dioxide could be used to legitimize a whole suite of myths that already existed, anti-car, anti-growth, anti-development and above all anti- that great Satan - the United States.

The shift to climate being a major focal point came about for two very distinct reasons. The first reason was because by the mid-1980s the majority of people now agreed with all of the reasonable things those in the environmental movement were saying they should do. Now when a majority of people agree with you, it's pretty hard to remain confrontational with them. And so the only way to remain anti-establishment was to adopt ever more extreme positions.

The other reason that environmental extremism emerged, was because world communism
failed, the Wall came down, and a lot of peaceniks and political activists moved into the environmental movement bringing their neo-Marxism with them, and learned to use green language in a very clever way to cloak agendas that actually have more to do with anti-capitalism, and anti-globalization, than they do anything with ecology or science.

The Left have been slightly disoriented by the manifest failure of socialism and indeed even more so of communism, as it was tried out - and therefore they still remain as anti-capitalist as they were, but they had to find a new guise for their anti-capitalism.

By the early 1990s man-made global warming was no longer a slightly eccentric theory about Climate. It was a full-blown political campaign. It was attracting media attention and as a result, more government funding.

Prior to President George H. W. Bush , the level of funding for climate and climate-related sciences in the United States was somewhere around the order of 170 million dollars a year, which was reasonable for the size of the field. It jumped to 2 billion a year, more than a factor of 10. And, that created a lot of jobs. It brought a lot of new people into it who otherwise were not interested. So you developed whole cadres of people whose only interest in the field was that there was global warming.

Research relating to man-made global warming is now one of the best funded areas of science. The U.S. government alone spends more than 4 billion dollars a year.

The large amounts of money that have been fed into this particular rather small area of science have distorted the overall scientific effort. We're all competing for funds. And if your field is the focus of concern, you have that much less work rationalizing why your field should be funded.

By the 1990s, tens of billions of dollars of government funding in the U.S., U.K. and elsewhere were being diverted into research relating to global warming. A large portion of those funds went into building computer models to forecast what the climate will be in the future.

But climate models are only as good as the assumptions that go into them and they have hundreds of assumptions. All it takes is one assumption to be wrong for the forecasts to be way off. Climate forecasts are not new. But in the past, scientists were more modest about their ability to predict the weather.

All models assume that man-made CO2 is the main cause of climate change rather than the Sun or the clouds. An analogy that can be used is that your car is not running very well, so you ignore the engine, which is the Sun, and you ignore the transmission which is the water vapor, and you look at one nut on the right rear wheel which is the human-produced CO2. The science is that bad.

If you haven't understood the climate system, if you haven't understood all the components, the cosmic rays, the solar, the CO2, the water vapor, the clouds, and put it all together, if you haven't got all that, then your model isn't worth anything.

The range of climate forecasts varies greatly. These variations are produced by subtly altering the assumptions upon which the models are based. The models are so complicated you can often adjust them in such a way that they do something very exciting. With a mathematical model, and you tweak parameters, you can model anything. You can make it get warmer, you can make it get colder, by changing things.

Since all the models assume that man-made CO2 causes Warming, one obvious way to produce a more impressive forecast is to increase the amount of imagined man-made CO2 going into the atmosphere.

Many put an increase in carbon dioxide in them that is 1% per year. It's been 0.49% per year for the last ten years. 0.42 for the ten years before that. And 0.43 for the ten years before that. So the models have twice as much greenhouse warming radiation going in them as is known to be happening. It shouldn't shock you that they predict more warming than is occurring.

Models predict what the temperature might be in 50 or 100 years time. It is one of their peculiar features that long-range climate forecasts are only proved wrong long after people have forgotten about them. As a result there is a danger that modelers will be less concerned in producing a forecast that is accurate, than one that is interesting.

Even within the scientific community it's a problem. If a scientist runs a complicated model, and they do something to it, like, melt a lot of ice into the ocean, and nothing happens, it's not likely to get printed. But if they run the same model and adjust it in such a way that something dramatic happens to the ocean circulation, like the heat transport turns off, it will be published. People will say this is very exciting. It will even get picked up by the media. So there is a bias, there's a very powerful bias within the media, and within the science community itself, toward results which are dramatizable.

To the untrained eye, computer models look impressive, and they give often wild speculation about the climate the appearance of rigorous science. They also provide an endless source of spectacular stories for the media.

The most elementary principles of journalism seem to have been abandoned on this subject. In fact the theory of global warming has spawned an entirely new branch of journalism. There exist a whole new generation of reporters - environmental journalists and if you're an environmental journalist - and if the global warming story goes in the trash can, so does your job. And the reporting has to get more and more hysterical because there are still, fortunately, a few hardened news editors around who will say - "You know, this is what you were saying five years ago". "Ah, but now it's much, much worse, you know. There's going to be ten feet of sea level rise by next Tuesday" or something. They have to keep on getting shriller and shriller and shriller.

It is now common in the media to lay the blame for every storm or hurricane on global warming. But this is purely propaganda. Every textbook on Meteorology is telling you the main source of weather disturbances is the temperature difference between the Tropics and the Poles. And we're told in a warmer world this difference will get less. Now that would tell you you'll have less storminess, you'll have less variability. But for some reason that isn't considered catastrophic. So you're told the opposite.

News reports frequently argue that even a mild increase in global temperature could lead to a catastrophic melting of the Polar Ice Caps. But that's not what the Earth's climate history tell us. We happen to have temperature records of Greenland that go back thousands of years. Greenland has been much warmer. Just a thousand years ago, Greenland was warmer than it is today. Yet it didn't have a dramatic melting event.

Even if we talk about something like permafrost. A great deal of the permafrost, that icy layer under the forests of Russia for example, 7,000 or 8,000 years ago melted far more than we're having any evidence about it melting now. So in other words, this is a historical pattern again. But the world didn't come to a crunching halt because of it.

Over time, the Ice Caps are always naturally expanding and contracting. There're reports from time to time, of a big chunk of ice breaking away from the Antarctic continent. Those must have been happening all the time, but because now we have a satellite that can detect those, that's why they become news. Data from NASA's meteorological satellites shows huge natural expansion and contraction of the Polar Sea Ice taking place in the 1990s.

News reports frequently show images of ice breaking from the edge of the Arctic. What they don't say is that this is as ordinary an event in the Arctic as falling leaves on an Autumn day. Ice falling from the edge of the glaciers is the Spring break-up. It happens every year.

Sea level changes over the world in general are governed fundamentally by two factors. What we would call local factors, the relationship of the sea to the land, which often, by the way, is to do with the land rising or falling, than anything to do with the sea. But if you're talking about what we call eustatic changes of sea level - worldwide changes of sea level - that's through the thermal expansion of the oceans - nothing to do with melting ice - and that 's an enormously slow and long process.

People say "Oh I see the ocean doing this, last year. That means that something changed in the atmosphere last year." And this is not necessarily true at all - in fact it's actually quite unlikely - because it can take hundreds to thousands of years for the deep ocean to respond to forces and changes that are taking place at the surface.

It is also suggested that even a mild rise in temperature will lead to the spread northward of deadly insect-borne tropical diseases like malaria. But mosquitoes thrive in very cold temperatures. They are not specifically tropical. Most people will realize that in temperate regions there are mosquitoes. In fact, mosquitoes are extremely abundant in the Arctic. The most devastating epidemic of malaria was in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. There were something like 13 million cases a year, and something like 600,000 deaths. A tremendous catastrophe that reached up to the Arctic circle. Archangel had 30,000 cases and about 10,000 deaths. So it's not a tropical disease. Yet these people in the global warming fraternity invent the idea that malaria will move northwards.

Scientists who speak out against man-made global warming have a lot to lose. It's generally harder to get research proposals funded because of the stands that they've taken publicly. And you'll find very few of them that are willing to take a public stand because it does cut into their research funding.

It is a common prejudice that scientists who do not agree with the theory of man-made global warming must be being paid by private industry to tell lies. There is almost no private sector investment in climatology. And yet to be involved in any research project which involves an industry grant, no matter how small, can spell ruin to a scientist's reputation.

An example is Patrick Michaels is Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia. He was Chair of the Committee on Applied Climatology at the American Meteorology Society, President of the American Association of State Climatologists, the author of three books on meteorology, and an author and reviewer on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. But when he conducted research part-funded by the coal industry, he found himself among those under attack from climate campaigners.

There's a huge tail out there, of people who have in one way or another been recruited to join this particular bandwagon. Anybody who stands up and says, "Hey, wait a minute. Let's look at this coolly and rationally and carefully and see actually how much merit, how much this stands up", they will be ostracized.

Scientists accustomed to the relative civility and obscurity of academic life, suddenly find themselves publicly attacked if they dare to challenge the theory of man-made global warming. Vilified by campaign groups and even within their own universities.

Today if you are skeptical about the litany around climate change, you are suddenly like as if you're a Holocaust denier. The environmental movement, really it is a political activist movement, and they have become hugely influential at a global level. And every politician is aware of that today. Whether you're on the Left, in the middle or the Right you have to pay homage to the environment.

In the past year the global warming campaign has won a great victory. The United States government, once a bastion of resistance has succumbed. President Bush is now an ally.

But reasoned debate is not the only casualty in the global warming alarm. As international public policy bears down on industrial emissions of carbon dioxide, the developing world is coming under intense pressure, not to develop.

Western governments have now embraced the need for international agreements to restrain industrial production in the developed and developing world. Policies being pushed to supposedly prevent global warming, are having a disastrous effect on the world's poorest people.

Global warming campaigners say it does no harm to be on the safe side. Even if the theory of man-made climate change is wrong we should impose draconian measures to cut carbon emissions, just in case. They call this the precautionary principle. This principle is basically used to promote a particular agenda and ideology. It's always used in one direction only. It talks about the risks of using a particular technology, fossil fuels for example, but never about the risks of not using it. It never talks about the benefits of having that technology.

Two billion people, a third of the world's population, have no access to electricity. Instead they must burn wood or dried animal dung in their homes. The indoor smoke this creates is the deadliest form of pollution in the world. According to the World Health Organization 4 million children under the age of 5 die each year from respiratory diseases caused by indoor smoke. And many millions of women die early from cancer and lung disease for the same reason.

If you were to ask a rural person to define development, they'll tell you, yes, I'll know I've moved to the next level, when I have electricity. Not having electricity creates such a long chain of problems, because the first thing you miss is the light. So you get that they have to go to sleep earlier, because there's no light. There's no reason to stay awake. I mean, you can't talk to each other in darkness. No refrigeration or modern packaging means that food cannot be kept. The fire in a hut is too smoky and consumes too much wood to be used as heating. There is no hot water.

We in the West cannot begin to imagine how hard life is without electricity. The life expectancy of people who live like this is terrifyingly short, their existence impoverished in every way.

Africa has coal, and Africa has oil. But environmental groups are campaigning against the use of these cheap sources of energy. Instead they say Africa and the rest of the developing world should use solar and wind power. Wind and solar power are notoriously unreliable as a source of electricity and are at least three times more expensive than conventional forms of electrical generation.

The rich countries can afford to engage in some luxurious experimentation with other forms of energy, but the people of Africa are still at the stage of survival. The idea that the world's poorest people should be restricted to using the world's most expensive and inefficient forms of electrical generation is the most morally repugnant aspect of the global warming campaign. If we're telling the Third World that they can only have wind and solar power, what we are really telling them is, "You cannot have electricity". A solar panel is not going to power a steel industry. It is not going to power some railway train network.

One of the most pernicious aspects of the modern environmental movement is a romanticization of peasant life. And the idea that industrial societies are the destroyers of the world. Because of this, the environmental movement has evolved into the strongest force there is for preventing development in the developing countries.

One clear thing that emerges from the whole environmental debate is the point that there's somebody keen to kill the African dream. And the African dream is to develop. Africans are being told, "Don't touch your resources. Don't touch your oil Don't touch your coal." That is suicide.

It's legitimate to call them anti-human. You don't have to think humans are better than whales or better than owls or whatever, if you don't want to, right. But surely it is not a righteous idea to think of humans as sort of being scum you know. That it's OK to have hundreds of millions of them go blind or die or whatever because of your hatred of industrialization. This is pure evil.

The theory of man-made global warming is now so firmly entrenched, the voices of opposition so effectively silenced, it seems invincible, untroubled by any contrary evidence, no matter how strong. The global warming alarm is now beyond reason.

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Wednesday, June 27, 2007 12:24 PM

For those that don't want to read CrevanReaver's post it's mostly the same sophistry that is presented in this laughable "documentary" and elsewhere on the net.

----
I am on The List. We are The Forsaken and we aim to burn!
"We don't fear the reaper"

http://www.newsoftheverse.net
Searching the 'Verse so you don't have to.

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Wednesday, June 27, 2007 5:54 PM

CREVANREAVER

Quote:
Originally posted by SigmaNunki:
...it's mostly the same sophistry that is presented in this laughable "documentary" and elsewhere on the net.

Stop global whining.

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Wednesday, June 27, 2007 7:05 PM

Got anything else to say aside from attempting to be clever?

EDIT: fix a typo.

----
I am on The List. We are The Forsaken and we aim to burn!
"We don't fear the reaper"

http://www.newsoftheverse.net
Searching the 'Verse so you don't have to.

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Saturday, July 7, 2007 1:16 PM

ANTIMASON

http://prisonplanet.com/audio/060707rothschild.mp3

you guys have got to hear this, ALex Jones debates David Mayer De Rothschild(yes, of the luciferian Rothschild empire) on global warming. listen while its still free

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Friday, May 1, 2009 10:05 AM

CREVANREAVER

Now that the socialists are in power in America more people need to see this documentary.

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Friday, May 1, 2009 10:24 AM

I said it years ago; it's a natural trend being hurried somewhat by man. That's all. And if all the man-made pollution stopped cold tomorrow, it'd still happen.
My point is: it's REAL, and we can't deny it IS happening. But anyone who wants to debate the cause(s), feel free.

Pollution should be addressed just for it's toxic effect on us, if for no other reason.

The laughing Chrisisall

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Friday, May 1, 2009 4:38 PM

ANTHONYT

Freedom is Important because People are Important

"The rich countries can afford to engage in some luxurious experimentation with other forms of energy, but the people of Africa are still at the stage of survival. The idea that the world's poorest people should be restricted to using the world's most expensive and inefficient forms of electrical generation is the most morally repugnant aspect of the global warming campaign. If we're telling the Third World that they can only have wind and solar power, what we are really telling them is, "You cannot have electricity". A solar panel is not going to power a steel industry. It is not going to power some railway train network."

Hello,

This bit at least seems logically legitimate to me. You can't restrict the development of poor nations to 'green' technologies unless you are also willing to subsidize their development.

I personally prefer not to subsidize any other nation until we get our own affairs in order. This is morally easy for me, as I believe our foreign aid to Africa is often as harmful as it is helpful.

--Anthony

"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner

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Thursday, June 25, 2009 3:21 PM

ANTIMASON

the thing that gets me is... if the GW theory had never been propogated, no single person within their lifespan could discern a shift in climate change. even if it were true, the recordable variations are so miniscule, who would notice within their life time? i mean really?

however, the impact on western economies from GW initiatives would essentially plunge us back into the 19th century. its regressive! its purely a means of social control, plain and simple. the statist, collectivist mindset has no regard for liberty, GW theory is social engineering, plain and simple

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Thursday, June 25, 2009 3:24 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by antimason:
no single person within their lifespan could discern a shift in climate change.

I can cast no stones as I have said things just as insipid in my own time on this planet.

The laughing Chrisisall

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Thursday, June 25, 2009 3:48 PM

ANTHONYT

Freedom is Important because People are Important

Hello,

Sometimes, a problem can truthfully exist (Terrorism, for instance.)

And this problem can be used as an impetus to implement changes to a society.

Often, changes made in the name of solving a problem are actually implemented for undisclosed reasons far apart from the stated ones.

Universally, the more emotional you can make someone feel about a problem, the more willingly and un-critically they will embrace proposed solutions to that problem. (Say, curtailing Civil Liberties in exchange for Safety.)

I am cautious when people tell me that I have to do {A} (something they want me to do) in order to avoid {B} (something bad that I wouldn't want.)

Fortunately, I don't need to believe in Global Warming, and neither do any of you.

Fuel Economy, Toxin Reduction, and Cheap Abundant Renewable Energy are their own rewards. These are rewards we can encourage and implement for their own merits, without bringing in the specter of Global Warming, and certainly without imposing our will on other countries.

--Anthony

"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner

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Thursday, June 25, 2009 3:54 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by AnthonyT:

Fortunately, I don't need to believe in Global Warming, and neither do any of you.

But that won't stop the partisan bickering, Tony.

But I'm with ya.

The laughing Chrisisall

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Thursday, June 25, 2009 4:11 PM

I do not agree with this documentary.

I have seen no hard evidence that global warming exists.

The most compelling evidence of warming we have is melting ice in various regions of the world. While this demonstrates regional warming, it is a leap to generalize the observance to GLOBAL warming.

Global warming, as we know it, is entirely defined by computer modeling. They don't take average temperatures across the globe, and then average them over the year, and then compare averages year to year to find a significant increase. No....

Quote:

This is what really happens. Climate scientists take readings from weather stations and feed the data into a computer model that adjusts for all sorts of variables, including number of wet days, cloud cover, sunshine, diurnal temperature range, etc. Using computer modeling, they divide the world into 5x5 grids, and fill the boxes with known data and interpolate unknown data. They run the model for a while and come up with a single mean for a 30 year period, usually 1961 - 1990. This mean is called a climatology. The GISS site discusses the Elusive Absolute SATs (Surfact Air Temperatures):

Q. If SATs cannot be measured, how are SAT maps created ?

A. This can only be done with the help of computer models, the same models that are used to create the daily weather forecasts. We may start out the model with the few observed data that are available and fill in the rest with guesses (also called extrapolations) and then let the model run long enough so that the initial guesses no longer matter, but not too long in order to avoid that the inaccuracies of the model become relevant. This may be done starting from conditions from many years, so that the average (called a 'climatology') hopefully represents a typical map for the particular month or day of the year.

http://freedom2question.blogspot.com/2008/11/elusive-standard-deviatio
n.html

In other words, climate researchers invent something called a climatology, which they claim to represent the global average over a 30 year period. Climatologies are computed by modeling, which is basically a "Sim Climate" of sorts. But as anyone who has played sim games knows, the output depends entirely on the subjective understanding and oversimplifications of the programmer, and rarely reflects the complexities of reality.

Any conclusions derived from "Sim Climate," such as "The earth is warming," should be considered as a hypothesis at best. It is NOT a fact.

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Thursday, June 25, 2009 4:18 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by canttakesky:

I have seen no hard evidence that global warming exists.

So, you're like, what? 20 years old?

The laughing Chrisisall

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Thursday, June 25, 2009 4:21 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zzetta13:
I’ve always felt that the global warming issue was the excuse Big Petroleum companies were touting to the major governments in order to raise gas prices through the roof.

The big push in global warming legislation is to require "carbon sequestration." Dept of Energy scientists are getting huge amounts of money to research this. Carbon sequestration is capturing carbon dioxide waste and sending it anywhere other than the atmosphere. Surprisingly, Big Petroleum is extremely supportive of global warming legislation. On second thought though, it is not so surprising after all.

Carbon sequestration requires energy. More energy means more fuel consumption. If one liter of fuel produces X amount of carbon dioxide, but 2 liters of fuel captures that 2X amount and reroutes it into the ground (for example), who makes out in all this? Why, the fuel suppliers of course.

It is a swindle after all.

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Thursday, June 25, 2009 4:29 PM

@ CrevanReaver: I have never ever heard anything to indicate that studies are concluding that solar cycles are causing the current period of warming. Technically, going by the geological record and the Milankovitch cycle, for the last ten thousand years, we should have been going further into an ice age.

Also, I'd recommend looking at the chemistry of burning carbon fuels. I can guarantee to you that CO2 is being produced, and it's being produced by human activities.

As for humans being unable to effect the atmosphere... We're talking changes in concentrations on the order of parts per million, and yet, considering the volume the chemicals are going into, that's a lot of tonnage being belched out into the air. And I can tell you it's not nothing.

Remember the Ozone Hole? CFCs are far from the largest volume of chemicals we were putting into the atmosphere back then. Did they have an effect? Well, there's blind Rabbits on the Cape of Good Hope because of UV from the Antarctic Ozone hole.

But in the 1980s, aerosol industries complied with recommendations of scientists, and switched to HCFCs to pressurize their fluids. On account of the hydrogen in the chemical formula allowing the chemical to dissolve in water droplets, HCFCs have a lower residence time in the atmosphere (a few months compared to 5 years). This means that CFCs no longer are reaching Antarctica, and are no longer contributing to a breakdown of Ozone in the winter months. We've started to see the concentration numbers in the Ozone hole begin to climb back up. So not ONLY were people able to cause a problem on the atmospheric level, we were able to mediate it.

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Thursday, June 25, 2009 4:58 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by canttakesky:

It is a swindle after all.

Swindles are built on realities, CTS.

The laughing Chrisisall

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Thursday, June 25, 2009 5:04 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
there's blind Rabbits on the Cape of Good Hope because of UV from the Antarctic Ozone hole.

They were paid to act blind by special interests, I conjure.

The laughing Chrisisall

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Thursday, June 25, 2009 5:55 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by chrisisall:
Swindles are built on realities, CTS.

Swindles are built on magic tricks, cons, illusions of reality.

All lies have some truth in them. Swindles are built on conclusions that aren't true, based loosely on a few facts that are true.

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Thursday, June 25, 2009 6:49 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by chrisisall:
My point is: it's REAL, and we can't deny it IS happening.

What is your basis for believing it is real? Because a lot of experts say so? What if in a few generations, the popular trend reverses and experts then say it isn't real. Would you then believe it isn't real?

I'm not targeting you specifically. I am just saying most people believe it by reason of authority, because they believe a lot of people more knowledgeable than they are believe it. Most people have never looked at the evidence themselves--just the conclusions of authorities they trust. That is what GW boils down to. Trust. Faith. It's become a religion, with climate scientists as priests. Computer modeling is the new oracle, predicting the tides of good and evil, reinforced by signs from the Gods: anything from melting ice to increase diseases. Skeptics are seen as heretics, condemning the world to a special, very warm hell.

Quote:

Pollution should be addressed just for it's toxic effect on us, if for no other reason.

I am all for addressing pollution. But that shouldn't lend support for global warming, let alone manmade warming.

--------------------------
U.S. Senate Report: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateRepor
t

Freeman Dyson Takes On
The Climate Establishment

http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2151

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Thursday, June 25, 2009 8:51 PM

Actually, I'd say I've probably looked at this issue a lot. And I agree with the experts.

Even if you take out the computer models and all the uncertainty about just how the climate is changing... And if you take out all the smokescreen from the corporate interests, scientists have built up a pretty good case. In fact, I've known one of the scientists who was studying acidification of the ocean, and he is not the kind of guy to just be trying to put forward an agenda, whether it's on behalf of an increasingly controlling government or energy companies wanting to manipulate the market.

Do I think Global Warming is being sensationalized? Well, yes, probably about as much as the Ozone Holes were. But that didn't mean they weren't a problem.

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Thursday, June 25, 2009 9:21 PM

CITIZEN

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
@ CrevanReaver: I have never ever heard anything to indicate that studies are concluding that solar cycles are causing the current period of warming.

In fact the Sun is undergoing a period of low activity.

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Thursday, June 25, 2009 11:26 PM

CUDA77

Like woman, I am a mystery.

Quote:
Originally posted by CrevanReaver:
Now that the socialists are in power in America more people need to see this documentary.

The socialists are in power? Since when? I know I certainly voted for Brian Moore but I'm pretty sure he got flattened in the election. All I see in power is a bunch of hypocrites and liars who claim to have a liberal agenda but once they get voted in show their true conservative colors.

That's the one thing I can at least respect about the Republicans. They do say exactly what they intend on doing. They don't lie like the Democrats. As far as I'm concerned, Democrats in America are Republicans who say nicer things than their opponents to get elected. And that anyone can think that Obama & Co. are socialists is so damn laughable. The only, and I mean ONLY candidate that had even remote socialist leanings was Dennis Kucinich (my personal pick in the primaries) but he sadly dropped out.

Please, take as much time researching socialism and Obama's platform as you seem to have done on global warming and you will come to the realization that Obama is far more like GWB than Karl Marx. Sorry for getting off on the tangent.

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Friday, June 26, 2009 11:54 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
Actually, I'd say I've probably looked at this issue a lot. And I agree with the experts.

Which experts? Because the experts don't all agree....

My husband is a research scientist working at the Dept of Energy, where everyone pays lip service to GW. But he doesn't subscribe to it, and he doesn't know any of his colleagues who does. But hey, that's where the money is, so they all go along. There is a difference between experts who don't believe it but don't want to rock the GW boat, and experts who aggressively push the GW agenda, and experts who deny GW, and experts who question the validity of the data.

No matter one's position on GW, one can always find experts to support that particular position. It's called confirmation bias. One finds the evidence to support a position that has already been chosen. That is why "appealing to authority" is one of the most popular rationalizations for one's position. Science is the careful practice of weeding out both appeals to authority and confirmation bias.

For me, the default position is business as usual. If someone wants to make a case for GW, they have to present evidence, hard scientific evidence. So far I haven't even seen hard scientific evidence that the earth is warming. Climatologies are intelligent, educated speculation, but speculation nonetheless. No one knows, with any certainty that meets scientific rigors, what the annual mean of the earth's surface temperature is, let alone knows if it is rising.

And if you have looked at the methodology and data for determining climatologies and think they are scientifically valid and representative of the earth's true mean of hugely variant surface temperatures for a 30 year period, please explain why you think they are more than speculation.

--------------------------
Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.
-- Richard Feynman, physicist (1918 - 1988 )

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Friday, June 26, 2009 12:05 PM

The Earth has warmed on average 0.6 degrees Celsius in the last half century. The above linked "documentary" even ACKNOWLEDGES this. Furthermore, as that is an average global temperature only, temperatures have have been twenty degrees higher, on average, in arctic and antarctic climates.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/instrumental.html

http://www.acia.uaf.edu/pages/overview.html

Look, no offense, but the DoE has ENERGY as it's concern, not the climate. I'm really not surprised to hear that your husband and his colleagues don't think global warming exists, or is a problem.

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Friday, June 26, 2009 12:37 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
The Earth has warmed on average 0.6 degrees Celsius in the last half century.

And how do you know this? Because the experts you linked to say so?

Where's the real life data? (As opposed to fake, sim data.)

Let me put it another way. Where is the absolute data, that is data based from actual thermometer measurements? See, all the links you sent, and all the links I've looked at, show relative data, data relative to the flatline 0 degrees, which is the computer-modeling derived climatology. It is all artificially adjusted and computed, not the actual measurements. The thing about adjusting and computing data is that you can adjust them to whatever you want. Sort of defeats the purpose of science. If you trust their judgement, expertise, and integrity, then you can trust their adjustments. But science is supposed to be NOT about trust.

It doesn't matter if my husband is an energy scientist or a climate scientist. The key word is "scientist." A scientist approaches conclusions based on data. He's seen none, despite many GW seminars he is required to attend. And I have seen none either. If you have seen absolute data that supports the above quoted conclusion, please provide it.

Thanks.

--------------------------
The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't
misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know.
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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Friday, June 26, 2009 12:42 PM

GRIPPER

I always find amusement in the belief hel dby som epeople that the climate has NEVER changed in th epast,and that somehow a)WE are reponsible for preferring to liv ein this millenium,and b)That th eidea of a climatic shift i s ALWAYS a bad thing....hey,didn't Greenland used to be ,you know;green?

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Friday, June 26, 2009 12:42 PM

CITIZEN

Quote:
Originally posted by canttakesky:
Where's the real life data? (As opposed to fake, sim data.)

Another thing scientists aren't supposed to do is say data is only real if it fits their preconceptions.

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Friday, June 26, 2009 12:54 PM

I just edited the post to explain what I mean by "real" data. I mean absolute data.

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Friday, June 26, 2009 1:01 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by canttakesky:
And how do you know this? Because the experts you linked to say so?

Where's the real life data? (As opposed to fake, sim data.)

It doesn't matter if my husband is an energy scientist or a climate scientist. The key word is "scientist." A scientist approaches conclusions based on data. He's seen none, despite many GW seminars he is required to attend. And I have seen none either. If you have seen data that supports the above conclusion, please provide it.

Thanks.

I just LINKED you the hard data. The graphs you saw were not projected climate sims, but 200 years worth of temperature measurements, taken monthly and averaged for a year, and then averaged with (in the past 50 years) over 7,000 different monitoring stations at different locations AROUND THE WORLD. Global Temperature Average. 0.6 Degrees Celsius.

I am not just trusting the experts, canttakethesky. I am not a grant-based scientist, but I am an environmental scientist, with a heavy geology, chemistry, hydrology, and atmospheric science background. I got my degree at the University of Utah's Department of Geology, and if you didn't know, Utah is a fairly damn conservative state, all considering. I don't really enjoy hearing that 5 years of stuff I studied is being dismissed as myself just being a sheep.

Okay, how's about this: why do you think the DoE has more expertise in global warming data than National Air And Ocean? BOTH are government agencies. You're choosing to take one of their perspectives over the other because your husband is at one, okay. But does that make the conclusions of the other branch wrong?

I'm just saying, no offense to you, your husband, or his colleagues, but America is facing an Energy Crisis. And I can understand how people working in the department of energy might categorize global/national danger differently than myself. I can even see how people at the DoE might consider global warming as a THREAT to their efforts to resolve what they see as the greater crisis.

But maybe you and your husband shouldn't be so quick to just dismiss global warming. Not being convinced by the data is not evidence that the data doesn't exist, nor is it a judgment upon those who ARE convinced by the data.

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Friday, June 26, 2009 1:07 PM

Actually, no, Greenland was never green, except maybe several million years ago when it was part of Pangea. Or Gondwanaland. Or Rodinia. But in the recent past, for as long as we have ice data to figure out what temperatures have been, which go back a few ten thousand years, no.

Greenland was called Greenland as a marketing ploy. The viking group that discovered it was hoping they could encourage farmers to travel there.

However, climate change does NOT say climate change hasn't existed in the past, only that present, human activity is causing unprecedented change.

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Friday, June 26, 2009 7:29 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
I just LINKED you the hard data. The graphs you saw were not projected climate sims, but 200 years worth of temperature measurements, taken monthly and averaged for a year, and then averaged with (in the past 50 years) over 7,000 different monitoring stations at different locations AROUND THE WORLD. Global Temperature Average. 0.6 Degrees Celsius.

Uh...no. The data you linked to me is an adjusted computer modeled summary, comparing various measurements to a statistic simulated artifact called a "climatology." There is no absolute surface average temperature for the globe. It doesn't exist. What is that 0.6 degrees celcius? It is a RELATIVE change in temperature from the climatology. What was it before, and what did it change to? Do you know? No you don't. Because the absolute measurements don't exist.

Quote:
I don't really enjoy hearing that 5 years of stuff I studied is being dismissed as myself just being a sheep.

Then show me data that hasn't been adjusted by people you trust.

Quote:
Okay, how's about this: why do you think the DoE has more expertise in global warming data than National Air And Ocean?

I don't think that. See, I don't think in terms of expertise. So I don't compare which has more expertise, and who I should trust more. I trust the data, period. If it is not there, I see no reason to jump to conclusions.

Quote:
I can even see how people at the DoE might consider global warming as a THREAT to their efforts to resolve what they see as the greater crisis.

Oh, no! You miss understand me. They all embrace GW! They don't believe it, but they sure pay it lip service--cause that is where the money is, you see? They want money just like the next person.

Let me put it this way. If you are handing out huge research grants to investigate the Flying Spaghetti Monster, lots of people are going to send you research proposals to investigate it. After all, why not? It COULD exist. I'm not going to go on record to say it's all hogwash. I'm going to talk about how important investigating the FSM is and how my methods are going to help solve your problem. It doesn't matter that I don't believe in it, see? It's a job.

Quote:
Not being convinced by the data is not evidence that the data doesn't exist, nor is it a judgment upon those who ARE convinced by the data.

You are absolutely right here. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I am not saying GW doesn't exist. I will never say that. I am saying thus far, there is no hard evidence that GW exists. Big difference.

I also make no judgement on the PEOPLE who find existing evidence compelling. You want to believe in God, or the FSM, or GW, or whatever it is you believe, that is fine with me. I don't think less of you as a person.

What I am judging is conclusions of GW themselves as unscientific. I judge the fallacy of hasty generalization in climate research. I judge the fallacy of calling appealing to authority, "science." I also judge the offensiveness when people want to legislate their faith in "experts" onto me.

I apologize that I have been inept at making a distinction between criticizing a body of conclusions I see as an unmerited farce, and criticizing people who subscribe to those conclusions. I don't believe the tenets of hinduism for example, and I might severely criticize the core beliefs of that religion, but I don't have anything against hindus.

GW, as it stands, is like a religion to me. My only beef is when they try to pass for a science, and when they try to force me to pay for that religion. I have nothing against those who believe in that religion, personally. I also mean no offense, personally.

-----------------
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
-- Henry David Thoreau

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Friday, June 26, 2009 7:47 PM

I posted a link earlier that in turn, linked to this. But in case you didn't click on that link, here it is directly:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html

It explains why there are no absolute surface air temperatures, and why there is no such thing as an annual global mean surface temperature, and why the enormous variance of temperatures throughout the globe, throughout the year is neither here nor there for climate researchers. It clearly explains that when you look at what you consider to be "hard data," you are really looking at adjusted data compared to other adjusted data.

When data is adjusted, the conclusions leave the realm of the objective and become subjective. It leaves science, and becomes opinion, or faith.

--------------------------
Science has proof without any certainty.
Creationists have certainty without any proof.
-- Ashley Montague

I might add, GWists have certainty without any proof as well.

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Saturday, June 27, 2009 4:42 AM

It's really not simulated data. It's measured data. The reason the numbers on the right side range from -0.6 to 0.6 isn't because they're computer simulated, but because some reference temperature has been subtracted from the measured temperatures, in order to give a better idea of measured change. This is explained in the description on the link.

But, clearly you don't agree with that. If you don't agree with the graphed measurements, I believe there was a link to the numbers on that same link, I'll go check later. If not, they'll be easy enough to find. The site's down and I'm leaving to go on a hike soon.

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Saturday, June 27, 2009 4:47 AM

In your link: that's absolute surface temperature. Not average measured surface temperature. Okay. When you measure temperature, it's in a constant state of flux. It's a bit like a car that's accelerating (changing velocity). Say you measure the car's velocity twice while it's accelerating, and you want to find it's absolute velocity it was going at a certain time between those two times of measurement. The absolute velocity is not going to be the average of two measurements equidistant and time apart, because acceleration is a curve. So instead, you have to integrate to find the absolute velocity at a particular time. A good example of this analogy in terms of temperature are the Newtonian Cooling Differential Equations. And yes, they are a pain, and easiest to do on computers because the sheer number of factors involved in them are ridiculous.

However. While the absolute temperature is only a snapshot, you can still take multiple measurements of temperature in different places and at different times and find an average temperature, and it's a valid measurement. Just like you can can calculate the average velocity of a car over some distance and time, regardless of the acceleration (change).

As such, average temperature as I linked to still fits within possibility, and is also a reasonable measurement, even considering the link you posted.

EDIT: Bah, NOAA's server is still down for whatever reason. I'll check later tonight for the numbers link, and barring that, tomorrow.

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Saturday, June 27, 2009 4:09 PM

Quote:
I don't think that. See, I don't think in terms of expertise. So I don't compare which has more expertise, and who I should trust more. I trust the data, period. If it is not there, I see no reason to jump to conclusions.

I guess I was being unclear myself, here. I was not saying one organization or other has less expertise, I was saying different agencies in the government have different ways of thinking.

When I posted the link to NOAA, you continued to abscribe to a perspective that you claimed was common to the DoE. Hence my question.

But I understand where you're coming from now, and apologize for the confusion.

On a side note, still no damn connection to that page I just linked. Isn't that just the way of things, right when when you need something...

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Saturday, June 27, 2009 4:58 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
It's really not simulated data. It's measured data. The reason the numbers on the right side range from -0.6 to 0.6 isn't because they're computer simulated, but because some reference temperature has been subtracted from the measured temperatures, in order to give a better idea of measured change. This is explained in the description on the link.

It's simulated data mixed with some measured data. All simulations do that--use measured data as input for the simulated output. That reference temperature you are talking about? That is simulated data called a "climatology." It serves as the standard ZERO baseline for comparing annual global mean temperatures, which is calculated by using computer modeling of some measured data mixed with extrapolated data. It is explained in the link I sent.

It doesn't give a better idea of the measured change. What it does is make an otherwise insignificant change of measured data appear significant by adding computer simulated adjustments.

Let me rephrase my question this way.

What WAS the global mean surface air temperature last year? What was it a hundred years ago? In degrees celcius? What is the standard error, that is, plus or minus how many degrees celcius?

The most common absolute temperature used to estimate a climatology is 14 degrees celcius. So let's say 100 years ago, the annual global mean was 14 degrees celcius. Now, it is 0.6 degrees higher: 14.6 degrees celcius. Consider the two following scenarios.

1898: 14 degrees celcius ± 0.5 degrees
2008: 14.6 degrees celcius ± 0.5 degrees
Wow, that looks like a really meaningful change.

OR...

1898: 14 degrees celcius ± 10 degrees
2008: 14.6 degrees celcius ± 10 degrees.
Wow, that looks like a random chance fluctuation that is completely meaningless.

You see? The standard error is everything in interpreting a mean.

What computer modeling does is it erases the huge variance in temperatures throughout the globe, throughout the year. This erases the huge standard error involved and artificially creates a teeny, weeny standard error to make the smallest change significant. They use computer adjustments to artificially create the first scenario.

--------------

As they say: There are 3 types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.

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Saturday, June 27, 2009 5:15 PM

Right, I understand you're waiting for me to give you the numbers and errors. I'm waiting for the link to start working again so I can look for them.

However, even if the reference temperature were never subtracted from the measured data, the measured data is still intact. The subtraction of the reference temperature does not remove the change illustrated, unless there were some mischief going on with the errors of the measurements as you suggested.

And let me just say, point blank, that measurement error exceeding one degree Celsius, let alone ten degrees Celsius, would be very unlikely, seeing as how even a mercury thermometer measures to at least one degree Celsius of accuracy.

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Saturday, June 27, 2009 5:22 PM

Wow. A lot of big words floatin' around this thread.
It's getting warmer. Is that too simple?

The laughing Chrisisall

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Saturday, June 27, 2009 5:25 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
So instead, you have to integrate to find the absolute velocity at a particular time. A good example of this analogy in terms of temperature are the Newtonian Cooling Differential Equations. And yes, they are a pain, and easiest to do on computers because the sheer number of factors involved in them are ridiculous.

I understand what you are saying, but that is not what they are doing when they calculate a climatology. A climatology is not "average measured surface temperature." They are not trying to find an absolute in constant change using complex calculus and differential equations. They are trying to find an average, given complex weights of different factors. They are saying, you can just compare averages if one weather station is at a higher altitude than the other, or has more dry days than the other, or has more cloud cover than the other. You have to compensate and weight those factors. You have to guess what the weather station might say, had it been at the same altitude with the same cloud cover and dry days as the other.

What's the difference? Subjectivity. The calculations you discussed are fairly objective. The way a climatology is calculated suggests a large amount of subjectivity--that is, for science.

Quote:
However. While the absolute temperature is only a snapshot, you can still take multiple measurements of temperature in different places and at different times and find an average temperature, and it's a valid measurement.

I agree completely. And if that is what they did, simply measured and averaged, and found a statistically significant change in mean temperatures over the years, I would be much more eager to jump on the GW bandwagon.

BTW, I wanted to say how much I am enjoying conversing with you. Though we disagree, and you even feel disparaged by me at times (with my apologies because that was not my intention), you have been uncommonly civil and intelligent in your arguments. Thank you.

Again, I apologize if I come across as an arrogant ass. I am a bit short on social skills when I am taking on an argument by the horns, as most folks here on RWED can attest. I mean well.

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Saturday, June 27, 2009 5:46 PM

I wasn't referring to the reference temperature when I wrote about the difference between absolute temperatures. I wrote it in regards to the measured temperature data, which consists of a lot of measurements taken that have then been averaged.

I think I keep misunderstanding what you're saying. Go me. :/

But, I now understand you were posting that link in response to the use of a reference temperature.

As for arrogance, no, I haven't really felt that from you. I almost thought *I* was being arrogant by posting that explanation about absolute versus average temperature. I was going to leave it out, but I wasn't sure just what your background here is.

And I also have not meant to offend you... Although I have been making some assumptions about where you're coming from that have possibly been unfounded and unfair, and I'm not proud of myself for jumping to those conclusions. I'm sorry for that.

But I think civility in any debate is important, because otherwise both sides of the argument undermine themselves. I think this is particularly true in a scientific debate where impartiality and sound judgment are key. Everyone means well in an argument, if we weren't concerned we would not argue.

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Saturday, June 27, 2009 5:59 PM

Gave up on NOAA, went to NASA.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt

The numbers given are in 0.01 degrees Celsius, and the error is implicit at +/- 0.001 degrees Celsius. They are given as the difference from the climatological temperature that you say is subjective, however, the temperatures can be converted back to their original, unadjusted measured temperature by adding the subtracted temperature, 14C.

The data has been plotted to produce a similar graph, as seen here.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/

The following link explains where the numbers came from: I used the temperatures from meteorlogical stations only. Temperatures for a month, and then a year, are averaged from many measurements from the record of the particular meteorology station. Statistically, the only adjustment I can find is that significant outliers beyond two standard deviations have been removed.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

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Saturday, June 27, 2009 6:03 PM