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It's called "winter". You may have heard of it.

Yes, I have. It's up 20%.

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png

You didn't cite any references which contradict the theory of CO2-based global warming

There's no need. All I need do is show a graph of the global temperature anomaly.

http://www.nationalpost.com/893554.bin

P.S. If you're so worried about forestalling the next ice age, you should be arguing that we save our excess fossil carbon for later when we really need it for climate control, instead of using it all up now when we don't.

The argument is that man changes the Climate and has done since he started deforestation and agriculture. It's hard to argue with this as it's obvious. What's also obvious (and should be obvious to any intelligent person), is that when you are "against" warming or cooling, you're against it given the value you associate with the status-quo. That is, you assign a value judgement to current climate as your starting point for "best". It's clear that no run-away warming can take place, given the paleoclimate record:

http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.gif

, you can see that CO2 has been far, far higher in history than today, as have global temperatures. If these very simple facts aren't enough to convince you to at least question the hypothesis, then I'd say you are the one looking for evidence to support your position, not I.

OK, no counter-arguments like man-made CO2 is only 0.117% of ALL global-warming contributions...

See, this is where it all breaks down... "Don't give me facts, my mind is made up!" Rather than just go "OMG We're DOOMED!" I'd rather like to know really WHAT our contribution is, is what happening really man-made, and if so, what tradeoffs are we looking to make. It's not about DENYING there's climate change; it's about questioning what is CAUSING it! There's a LOT of data that's being overlooked - for obviously political reasons - that say the number one cause is the universe - you know, the sun, cosmic rays, and the like. We're doing actually darn little to the system...

Call me a Luddite, but I like a bit of reason and checking the data before decisions are made. At my job, when I spot a problem, I don't immediately start working on the first solution that pops to mind. Rather I spend a bit of time to figure out what the problem really IS, and then design a solution that will solve the problem in a way acceptable to me and my employers.

In terms of the climate, 20 years is nothing. And that's essentially what we're working with. 20 years of data fitting, research, and "what-ifs"... How about giving it a bit longer before we throw away our entire society? If not, then how about giving up your computer, car, house, and most modern conveniences and do your share?

Pssst!.... don't tell anyone but none of them ever had irrefutable proof.

I think Pasteur had pretty irrefutable proof. They had microscopes. They knew what caused the problem. All he had to do was convince religious freaks that bacteria didn't spontaneously appear out of nowhere by an act of God. But if you feel bacteria spontaneously generate themselves out of nothing but component pieces, feel free to drink unpasteurized milk and scoff at the rest of us for being just as susceptible to disease as yourself.

I don't think science is what you seem to think it is.

I guess that all depends on whether or not you classify global warming as science. GP is simply asking for a bit more than speculation before making trillion dollar policy decisions. I don't think that is too much to ask. Climate scientists claim CO2 is one of the primary drivers of "global warming." Yet, CO2 was an order of magnitude higher 450 million years ago and temperatures were roughly the same as they are today. CO2 concentrations are about 20% higher today than they have been any time in the last 400,000 years yet drastic temperature increases have not followed suit. In the mid 90's, Dr. Patrick Michaels called bullshit in front of Congress when predictions of higher temperatures made by computer models did not materialize. After wiping the egg from their faces, "climate scientists" once again were eating humble pie when computer models that generated gloom and doom "hockey stick" graphs were shown to spit out hockey sticks with random input by people who were not climate scientists.

Given that brief synopsis, I can see a person might be skeptical. Especially when the people predicting the end of the world are asking for taxpayer dollars to do it.

Pssst!.... don't tell anyone but none of them ever had irrefutable proof.

I think Pasteur had pretty irrefutable proof. They had microscopes. They knew what caused the problem. All he had to do was convince religious freaks that bacteria didn't spontaneously appear out of nowhere by an act of God. But if you feel bacteria spontaneously generate themselves out of nothing but component pieces, feel free to drink unpasteurized milk and scoff at the rest of us for being just as susceptible to disease as yourself.

I don't think science is what you seem to think it is.

I guess that all depends on whether or not you classify global warming as science. GP is simply asking for a bit more than speculation before making trillion dollar policy decisions. I don't think that is too much to ask. Climate scientists claim CO2 is one of the primary drivers of "global warming." Yet, CO2 was an order of magnitude higher 450 million years ago and temperatures were roughly the same as they are today. CO2 concentrations are about 20% higher today than they have been any time in the last 400,000 years yet drastic temperature increases have not followed suit. In the mid 90's, Dr. Patrick Michaels called bullshit in front of Congress when predictions of higher temperatures made by computer models did not materialize. After wiping the egg from their faces, "climate scientists" once again were eating humble pie when computer models that generated gloom and doom "hockey stick" graphs were shown to spit out hockey sticks with random input by people who were not climate scientists.

Given that brief synopsis, I can see a person might be skeptical. Especially when the people predicting the end of the world are asking for taxpayer dollars to do it.

So Global Warming looks like a comet?

Yeah. Actually, It does. See, here's how it works. You preach enough Global Warming fire and brimstone and all the telescope money gets spent on worthless computer models. Hence, when a planet killer does show up out of the blue, the money that could have been spent on real science that could have saved us instead went to a stupid religion.

I have a question for you global warmers... Why don't you tell us how the planet managed to go into an ice age 450 million years ago when the CO2 concentrations were at 4400 PPM compared to our current 370... I'm waiting.

Could it be that CO2 is like a warm blanket. Keep adding CO2 and it's like adding blankets. Throw an extra blanket on your bed and you're warmer. Throw two extra blankets on your bed and you're warmer still. Throw an extra 30 blankets on your bed and you're not really that much warmer than you were with three blankets. Oh wait!! Fire and brimstone! Fire and brimstone!! And boogie men! Sleep under 30 blankets and you'll combust spontaneously! Oh my gawds, its teh global warmins!!

1) It's not necessarily a vicious circle. Lots of people think that global warming will lead to faster/worse ice ages. Lots of other people say those people are crazy. Earth != Venus.

2) We also create a lot of other gasses. And affect the environment in 1000 other ways. Some of them destroy greenhouse gasses and other lead directly to global cooling.

3) Part I: No it hasn't, we've only been producing noticeable amounts for a couple hundred years. Part II: No it hasn't. That's not a huge spike, and the Industrial Revolution was meaninglessly recent on a geological timescale. Earth has seen average temps higher than now, and those were *good* times. The Sahara was lush and inhabitable. Greenland was farmable. It was different, not better or worse. Ice ages are what we should be concerned with. Ice ages suck.

Temps over the last 160,000 years (long live global warming!):
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/PageMil l_Images/image161.gif

To think that you know what is actually happening is quite insane.

And here is a chart of carbon dioxide going back several million years. And, oh look, the planet is just as cool now as it ever was before. And when we hit levels of 4500 ppm back in the Silurian era, we were colder then any other time on the planet.

Sheesh. The largest increase in CO2 emissions by humans was between 1900 and 1940. Yet, the Earth somehow responded with a massive wave of cooling from 1950-1980 that caused many scientists to worry we were plunging into the next ice age. You are extrapolating 30 years of data out by a century or more. Bad Science! No Doughnut!

The fact is that we are in a period of CO2 starvation on the planet. Recent estimates have suggested that the increase in CO2 in the modern era is responsible for as much as 30% of the "extra" food that has helped to feed more than a billion people in the last 50 years. If Gore had his 280 ppm, we might be able to lay one billion people who starved to death at his feet. The law of unintended consequences runs rampant in this "catastrophe". http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/ar ticles/V4/N8/EDIT.jsp

And it's not like the Earth hasn't been warmer before in human history. In the 12th century there were orange groves in Berlin and vineyards in England. http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm

Water Vapor is the main culprit to global warming, not CO2. The site mentions how the DOE has omitted water vapor as a greenhouse gas.

Okay. You may safely remove your sarcastic quotation marks now.

Next.

Do you read any other site than "realclimate.org"? You have no counterargument for the fact we contribute less than 0.5% greenhouses gases and that temperatures have not risen since 1998. That's eight years! Do you have any response at all to these numbers? These facts?

Didn't think so...please preach the religion somewhere else.

Penn and Teller ARE bullshit, first off. That show is not science, their analyses of basically every topic they've tried have been lopsided and skewed, and you would do well to not take it as anything more than a fictional bit of entertainment.

Lopsided and skewed? They present facts and interview the key figures, and they make the very important point that environmentalism has just become a shell for anti-globalist forces. They even talk to the co-founder of Greenpeace who left the organization for just those reasons, and they explain where the hysteria began and how it was inflated by the media.

You just don't like what they say in the episode, so you're dismissing it without addressing the points raised. I especially love the rally they go to where they get a bunch of people to blindly sign a petition banning water, to prove a point about groupthink.

As for the "we don't really have any control" thing... cite your sources and we'll see.

Well, aside from this very article we're discussing claiming cleaner air still means rising temperatures, there's also the fact we only contribute 0.28% of so-called greenhouse gases. It's just over 5% without water vapor factored in, which is what most environmentalist outfits do to inflate the numbers and make it look like we're destroying the planet.

But even if it's true, it doesn't decrease the steaming pile of shit that humanity finds itself in at the moment.

Well, it suggests it's a natural cycle. Remember that temperatures dropped half a century ago.

If global temperatures really are rising without our help, that just means that there's NOTHING to stop the mass destruction that's going to happen in the next couple hundred years. The end effects of global warming aren't in dispute, and they are not pretty.

Unless the cycle reverses itself like last time. I'm sure that then, all the scientists will be claiming a new ice age like they were decades ago, which didn't turn out to be true.

You're right, and I got the numbers wrong when I looked at the original stat.

It's not 0.5%, it's only 0.28%.

Global Warming: A closer look at the numbers

CO2 in the atmosphere is mainly volcanic in origin, accounting for 97% of the CO2 found in the atmosphere, most of which travels to the oceans. Estimates at CO2's effectiveness as a greenhouse gas vary, but are generally around 10-100 times lower than water weight for weight, leaving a "net" greenhouse effect of man-made CO2 emmissions at less than 1%

The precise figure is around a 0.27% contribution from mankind.

It's usually considered good form to cite the quote, so we can see who said it and what evidence they had for the claim. As it is, the power of google comes to the rescue and I find the original source for your above quote is Wikipedia::Global_warming_controversy which in turn links to Monte Hieb's personal website.

Well, that's OK, a personal website isn't necessarily a bad source of information. We shouldn't be concerned that Mr Hieb has no education in climatology, isn't a scientist nor a doctor, doesn't have any peer reviewed papers, doesn't do research nor experiments, and isn't cited by anybody except the enthusiastic gunslingers of the "global warming is a myth" brigade. All of those details are irrelevant if Mr Hieb gets his facts right. Unfortunately he hasn't got his facts right either. If you google his name the first hit is somebody ripping apart Mr Hieb's claims. You immediately find out that Mr Hieb redefines existing scientific terminology. Tut tut, that's not a good sign.

Here the authors redefine "global warming". While the term usually refers to human caused warming, they use the term to include natural changes as well. A similar redefinition has been used with other environmental problems such as ozone depletion and acid rain. ("Global warming" has been increasingly replaced by the more accurate and inclusive "climate change"). -- http://info-pollution.com/chill.htm

That page goes on further to refute the "facts" asserted by Monte Hieb. Somebody once tried to get Mr Hieb's claims into other pages on Wikipedia but those attempts were ... uhhh... rejected. Here's a comment that accompanied one such rejection.

But to turn to the GHG page, which is what this is really about. C says: objects and deletes all sources and documentation that state anything he disagrees with. This in turn is a ref to him trying to insert a dubious value of 95% for the greenhouse effect of water vapour, based upon this source: http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/greenho use_data.html. That page isn't a source: its just some bods pet page. The numbers on it are wrong. All this has been, is being, discussed on the talk page of greenhouse gas. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_fo r_comment/William_M._Connolley

That 95% figure (which is intrinsically linked to your 0.27% figure) isn't supported by the data. The best guess figures are between 60% and 70%. If you continue to google Mr Hieb's name you'll find that pattern repeated over and over; Mr Hieb uses incorrect values, redefines terminology and eventually arrives at incorrect conclusions. But who is Monte Hieb?

Assessment: This example is the crux of the matter, IMO, because it reveals the source of Cortonin's information. The website referenced is the personal website of Monte Hieb. A quick review of Hieb's credentials reveals that he has worked as chief engineer for the West Virginia Office of Miner's Safety. He has done some geological survey work on fossils. There are extensive links from Free Republic's website to Hieb's. WMC refers to him as "just some bod," but cle

Because it can trigger the next ice age, like a less dramatized version of "The Day After Tomorrow." "if enough cold, fresh water coming from the melting polar ice caps and the melting glaciers of Greenland flows into the northern Atlantic, it will shut down the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe and northeastern North America warm. The worst-case scenario would be a full-blown return of the last ice age - in a period as short as 2 to 3 years from its onset - and the mid-case scenario would be a period like the "little ice age" of a few centuries ago that disrupted worldwide weather patterns leading to extremely harsh winters, droughts, worldwide desertification, crop failures, and wars around the world." http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/ice_age s.html http://www.21stcenturyradio.com/articles/02/101014 0.html http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12 374,1083419,00.html http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0130-11.htm Or just google it yourself.

You Michigan home will become a frozener wasteland.

See this.

Anyone who is concerned with a major shift in the earth's climate is a troll? Even if you disagree with their conclusions, isn't it better to err on the side of caution and at least listen rationally to what they have to say? I mean, if they *are* right, the future of the entire human race might be in jeopardy...

Quite frankly, your post itself seems like a right-wing troll to me. However, I'm going to respond to it in the most rational manner possible just in case someone impressionable reads your post and thinks "well, he might have a point."

Short answer: you don't have a point.

Long answer...

1: Show me ACCURATE 1 million year tempature records. Wait!! We only have 80 years of records

Wrong. We have ice cores from Antarctica with 400,000 years of temperature records *and* CO2 concentration measurements. The data is chilling: the CO2 concentration is very well correlated with the temperature of the lower atmosphere over 400 millennia, and the CO2 concentration today (370 ppm) is higher than the maximum value in the last 400 millennia (300 ppm). Mind you, there have been numerous volcanic eruptions and major climate shifts (several ice ages, for instance) in that time period. Even considering those factors, the CO2 concentration is higher now than it has ever been in 400 millennia of recorded data.

Now, if you read that link carefully instead of just looking at the plots, you'll notice that they mention that 460 million years ago, CO2 levels were at 4400 ppm while the climat was roughly the same as it is today. That seems odd given that I'm claiming that there is a strong correlation between temperature and CO2 concentration (based on the fact that CO2 blocks infrared light but is transparent to visible light, thus trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere).

My answer to this conundrum is that we can only make projections on relatively short time scales. Correlating CO2 concentration and global temperatures over several hundred millennia is one thing; attempting to correlate them over timescales 1000x longer is quite another. For one thing the entire ecosystem of the earth was vastly different 460 million years ago: life was confined to the oceans. The sun may have had a lower radiative output than it does now, etc, etc.

2: Show me this hasnt happened before.

It doesn't seem to have happened at any point in the last 400,000 years.

Even if this kind of global warming *had* happened before, that's irrelevant. The point is that the earth's climate *does* shift naturally all the time. It doesn't shift by this much, of course (or at least the CO2 levels haven't been this high in the last 400,000 years), but it does change. The bottom line is: we couldn't survive a *natural* climate shift, let alone a bigger artificial climate shift. If global temperatures change by even a little bit, it will destabilize our civilization in frightening ways (which I describe below). If the climate shift is natural (which I don't believe it is) then we need to fight it to survive. If the climate shift is artificial, then we need to fight the industries that are causing it in order for humanity to survive.

3: Tell me the "scientists" studying arent also getting grants from... greenpeace or ELF..

Look at the links on the bottom of the page I already linked to. See all the references to Nature articles?

Lemme let you in on how the scientific debate process works. Scientists get grants from lots of different places. Honestly, I've never heard of anyone getting a grant from either Greenpeace or ELF (both of which are borderline terrorist organizations IMHO), but even if a scientist gets a grant from an organization you don't like, that is completely f*cking irrelevant! The research has to be s

Anyone who is concerned with a major shift in the earth's climate is a troll? Even if you disagree with their conclusions, isn't it better to err on the side of caution and at least listen rationally to what they have to say? I mean, if they *are* right, the future of the entire human race might be in jeopardy...

Quite frankly, your post itself seems like a right-wing troll to me. However, I'm going to respond to it in the most rational manner possible just in case someone impressionable reads your post and thinks "well, he might have a point."

Short answer: you don't have a point.

Long answer...

1: Show me ACCURATE 1 million year tempature records. Wait!! We only have 80 years of records

Wrong. We have ice cores from Antarctica with 400,000 years of temperature records *and* CO2 concentration measurements. The data is chilling: the CO2 concentration is very well correlated with the temperature of the lower atmosphere over 400 millennia, and the CO2 concentration today (370 ppm) is higher than the maximum value in the last 400 millennia (300 ppm). Mind you, there have been numerous volcanic eruptions and major climate shifts (several ice ages, for instance) in that time period. Even considering those factors, the CO2 concentration is higher now than it has ever been in 400 millennia of recorded data.

Now, if you read that link carefully instead of just looking at the plots, you'll notice that they mention that 460 million years ago, CO2 levels were at 4400 ppm while the climat was roughly the same as it is today. That seems odd given that I'm claiming that there is a strong correlation between temperature and CO2 concentration (based on the fact that CO2 blocks infrared light but is transparent to visible light, thus trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere).

My answer to this conundrum is that we can only make projections on relatively short time scales. Correlating CO2 concentration and global temperatures over several hundred millennia is one thing; attempting to correlate them over timescales 1000x longer is quite another. For one thing the entire ecosystem of the earth was vastly different 460 million years ago: life was confined to the oceans. The sun may have had a lower radiative output than it does now, etc, etc.

2: Show me this hasnt happened before.

It doesn't seem to have happened at any point in the last 400,000 years.

Even if this kind of global warming *had* happened before, that's irrelevant. The point is that the earth's climate *does* shift naturally all the time. It doesn't shift by this much, of course (or at least the CO2 levels haven't been this high in the last 400,000 years), but it does change. The bottom line is: we couldn't survive a *natural* climate shift, let alone a bigger artificial climate shift. If global temperatures change by even a little bit, it will destabilize our civilization in frightening ways (which I describe below). If the climate shift is natural (which I don't believe it is) then we need to fight it to survive. If the climate shift is artificial, then we need to fight the industries that are causing it in order for humanity to survive.

3: Tell me the "scientists" studying arent also getting grants from... greenpeace or ELF..

Look at the links on the bottom of the page I already linked to. See all the references to Nature articles?

Lemme let you in on how the scientific debate process works. Scientists get grants from lots of different places. Honestly, I've never heard of anyone getting a grant from either Greenpeace or ELF (both of which are borderline terrorist organizations IMHO), but even if a scientist gets a grant from an organization you don't like, that is completely f*cking irrelevant! The research has to be s

Here is a graph of CO2 ppmv and the correlating lower atomospheric temperature for the last 2000 years as determined from glaciers.
Graph Here

As you can see, the Temperature is highly erratic, while CO2 concentrations have been nearly static until recently. We have yet to see a difinitive trend. Don't let the number of plotted points towards the present confuse your judgement.... we have yet to see "hot" days like there were less than 500 years ago.

I thought water vapor was the most serious greenhouse gas contributing 95% of all global warming. If there is more water isn't it more likely to get more vapor? Of course our contribution is something that wasn't there before us but that's another thread.

Any application on a given desktop can send a message to any window on the same desktop, regardless of whether or not that window is owned by the sending application, and regardless of whether the target application wants to receive those messages.

I can't share my work because of bandwidth problems, but it was indeed groundbreaking. Through raw HWND handles or Microsoft's (or my own version) of the WinFinder control found in Spy++, one is able to select any existing window in the system. Arbitrary messages can be sent or posted. One can draw pixels over windows, enable disabled controls (as often found in shareware), send text to edit controls (I developed a simple scripting language to automate this process), right/left/middle/double click at any position (useful in closing annoying dialogs, like the dialup reconnection message for those on 56k), and even move or kill any window one choses.

As for the vulnerability itself...its well worth the read. Basically, shellcode is injected into an edit box by removing the CEdit's length restrictions. This is a valuable lesson to all Windows programmers out there -- do not rely on a control's restrictions to validate data! Its as dangerous as using JavaScript to validate web forms. Always in all cases check for buffer limits in the application code.

Of course, not all flaws can be blamed on the application developer:

The final message that we're going to make use of is WM_TIMER. This is a slightly odd and very dangerous message, since it can contain (as the second parameter) the address of a timer callback function. If this second parameter is non-zero, execution will jump to the location it specifies. Yes, you read that right; you can send any window a WM_TIMER message with a non-zero second parameter (the first is a timer ID) and execution jumps to that address. As far as I know, the message doesn't even go into the message queue, so the application doesn't even have the chance to ignore it. Silly, silly, silly...

I've only skimmed the article, but this is the first documented exploit I've heard of in my half a decade of Windows programming. But its worth mentioning that these fundamental flaws have existed since Windows 95, and Foon is correct in that there's absolutely nothing Microsoft can do about it, except ditch the current Win32 API and start anew. Guess we'll have to wait until Longhorn. -sr

I would very much like to discuss that.

Refuting global warming
Refuting importance of CO2 compared to H2O in global warming
Refuting rising sea levels

Please give them a read and we'll continue the discussion on those points. I do eagerly await your response.

Congratulations, you've just (almost) described the ultimate in today's educational curricula (which is really that of the medeival period rediscovered) - it's called "Classical Christian Education", and is taking the country by storm, first in private lower schools, where the curruculum is based on the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric), then in College (or University, a term which can have no real meaning outside of a Christian context...) where this was traditionally followed with the Quadivium of geometry, astronomy, music, and arithmetic.

And yes, there are a few places where this sort of thing can be found, although it's taking a while to reclaim these lost and time-proven methods. Read Doug Wilson's excellent book Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning for the full story. A few good web resources on the subject:

The Lost Tools of Learning, Dorothy Sayers classic 1947 essay on the subject, and a large influence on the Classical Christian School movement. Read this!

A good interview with Wilson about Classical Chrisitan Education.

The Association of Classical and Christian Schools, the accrediting body and nerve center of sorts for Classical Christian Schools.

Credenda/Agenda, sort of the journal of this movement - read, learn, and understand. It's also quite funny at times - the writing is usually quite good, and often excellent.

Finally, at the college level, this methodology is just beginning to appear, check out New St. Andrews College for details on a college designed for incoming high-school graduates who are already better educated than many 4-year liberal arts college grads.

Note that previous page of that site mentions that weathering of silicate rocks uses carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Also, the geological carbon cycle has 1,800 times more carbon than the atmosphere. Our climate has a lot more variation than our last thousand years. Well, maybe you'd rather just look at the last 300 years, if the Little Ice Age messes up your statistics. Or the last 30 years, as some have used, because the 1960s had an unusually cold winter and so makes "warmer" easier to show. And please do ignore that we've stopped the prairie fires that used to cover the central plains of North America.

Note that the main greenhouse gas is water vapor which is just a wee bit hard to measure and control. And we can only hope that we don't see another Iceball Earth.

Yes, it was in the 1970s that a new ice age was considered possible. So Earth was 10 years behind the global warming hoopla.

1) First, you can do it too. check out the DNA-o-gram generator:



Encode your own secret messages in DNA code. Now all you need is a synthesis machine to create your encoded ladder, and someone to give it to whose got some good biology knowhow and a gene sequencer machine. (I'm sure there are plenty of people in column A, but not column B)