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Global Warming: Do You Believe?
This concern about global warming is significant, especially in light of the fact that the government's existing environmental policies (along with growing perceptions of technological and cultural imperialism) are making the U.S. once again the most resented country in the world. Already high on the agenda of Western Europe and a cause on U.S. college campuses, this could be the first in a series of techno-political issues that will rise up in the 21st Century. Issues like genomics will morph from gee-whiz cover stories in Time to very real concerns for individuals.
Most Americans are now aware of global warming, says a comprehensive report cited in American Demographics magazine, even though significantly fewer express concern or understanding about its impact.
In August 2000, the Harris poll asked Americans about their beliefs concerning global warming and, more specifically, about the relationship between temperature changes and forest fires. Many more than in previous surveys said they believed that global warming exists and is a serious environmental issue, although only 35 percent believe it was directly responsible for increasing forest fires in the United States.
In l997, 67 percent of Americans surveyed believed that increased carbon dioxide and other gases released into the atmosphere would, if unchecked, lead to global warming and increasing average temperatures. By last year, the figure had risen to 72 per cent. Even though they weren't aware of any specific or urgent impac on their own lives, and thus weren't particularly alarmed, nearly half thought that global warming should be treated as a "very serious" problem. In fact, only 13 percent of Americans said global warming wasn't a serious problem, a record low.
But science and the environment are becoming among the planet's hottest political issues. President Bush touched off a firestorm when he refused to sign the Kyoto accord. Although the reaction in the U.S. was less pronounced, a March 2001 Time/CNN poll found that two-thirds of Americans think the President should develop a plan to reduce the gas emissions that may contribute to global warming.
The U.S. has largely remained reluctant to address science through politics no matter how serious the issues. Big media political coverage tends to focus attention on scandal and confrontation, away from explanations of issues like global warming, or the equitable distribution of technology. Although they differ on certain scientific and environmental issues, neither of our two increasingly similiar dominant American political parties pay much attention to technological issues, or have anything resembling a scientific ideology or agenda.
When a serious matter like medical research involving stem cells from frozen embryos arises, politicians worry at least as much about religious support as they do about what scientists advise.
One might think members of Congress would be up in arms at the growing control of genetic research by a handful of bio-tech corporations; instead, there's hardly any debate about it at all.
My prediction: global warming will become the first issue of science and politics that captures the imagination of large numbers of American voters and becomes a national political issue (one on which the President definitely seems to have taken the unpopular side.) Why? Because it's a tactile phenomenon; people can feel that the weather is changing. They can see pictures of penguins dying in Antarctica. They read that skin cancer rates are rising.
Unlike more abstract scientific issues like genetics (which may become a highly visible political issue, but which isn't yet), or technologically-related social issues like intellectual property and copyright, even the myopic American political and media system, which focused for nearly two codependent years on Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, will have to start paying attention to global warming.
That you credit a petition signed by X thousand self-proclaimed "scientists" (dermatologists, industrial process engineers, opticians, linguists, and the like, all of whom deemed "scientists" by virtue of having a B.S. or M.S.) speaks volumes about your capacity for critical thought.
about that petition...
Back in the 1970's the same global warming scaremongers were telling us that a new global ice age was coming. Now it is global warming. The prescription is the same though: immediate radical new government regulations, a reduction in industry, expensive new pollution control requirements, and forcing people to live lifestyles they haven't voluntarily chosen. And of course the sky is falling and if we don't do something NOW, we'll be in serious trouble.
Well, the global temperature did rise about 1 degree - in the first half of the century. The temperature of the earth and the surface climate have radically changed many times in the past, and without any any artificial greenhouse emmissions from humans. The effect of the sun's radition, volcanos, etc have long had an effect on the earth. There may also be long term cycles we know nothing about.
There is some evidence for the earth's warming, but the evidence is far from clean and many observations (such as (corrected) satellite data and weather balloons) show no warming. Most of the climate change predictions are based on computer models. Given our inability to forecast weather accurately at any interval, I doubt very much the computers can handle the much greater complexities of climate change. Certainly more research is warranted and we may yet find some links to human activity that need to be addressed.
But "Global warming" as such as is a political program not science. WHen the New York Times famously said "Blame global warming for the blizzard" (notwithstanding the huge number of major weather events throughtout human history) it has to make you wonder. I honestly believe that if the temperature and precipitation came in right at normal every day, we'd be told that this was a catastrophe caused by global warming and "robbing the earth of its critical climate diversity needed to support its fragile ecology".
There may be good reasons to cut emmissions of lots of chemicals, quite apart from global warming. But the use of hysteria and scaremongering to sell a political agenda is wrong IMO. Let's be honest about what we really want and debate these issues through the normal political process, not as another moral crusade. We've already got too many of those.
The fruit flies are an incomplete system. You can buy a sealed glass globe containing water, brine shrimp, and everything else needed to keep it going apparently for months or years (if light is provided).
(Subtitle: and not a diatribe on global warming like the rest of the posts.)
The reason no one cares about global warming is that it hasn't touched them directly yet. It's the inverse of the NIMBY factor: If it's not in my backyard it's irrelevant. Global warming has not yet provably hurt individual human beings; anyone they have direct contact with in their daily lives. It took a while for AIDS to catch the public eye, but once friends and celebrities started dying it became noticed, and now everyone uses condoms, or at least know it's a good idea. Wait until people start selling their coastal homes in droves, or until everyone around you has skin cancer, or until NYC becomes uninhabitable (well, more so).
I'm rather neutral on this issue, since unlike conservative pundits I *recognize* that I am ignorant about climate science. I don't know if global warming is happening, because BOTH sides of this debate have political incentives to lie. I can't get a dispassionate opinion from anyone. But I *do* recognize BS when I see it, and you are generating a huge amount of it by convieniently not mentioning that the ice in antarctica isn't currently displacing any water right now so your experiment doesn't apply.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
It has been proposed to dissolve wastes in Pyrex glass, cast the glass into stainless-steel tubs, then case the result in concrete for shipping and bury it into geologically stable desert cave regions. The fatal objection to this plan is that if somehow it were subject to 1000-atmosphere pressures and 500-degree water containing phosphoric acid, it would dissolve the Pyrex and release the wastes.
I'm sorry; I do not find this a credible objection. What I find in this objection is someone who wants to play God. And who doesn't mind lying in the attempt.
FWIW.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I guess the real issue is; I'm shocked. Totally shocked, at the wide range of conclusions drawn from the SAME POOL OF EVIDENCE.
My conclusion is that there is no hope for humanity, whether global warming is real or not. It's really a moot point whether we're changing the climate or not. If we can't *all* look at the same pool of scientifically gathered evidence, agree upon a rational conclusion, and take action to ensure our own survival - we, as a species are doomed.
Whether it's global warming that eventually kills us, or a global plague, or some other threat. If people can't get together and agree on empirical evidence - we're just fucked.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Climate fluctuation over geologic time scales is much larger than the change we're seeing over the last 50-100 years; true. What you fail to mention is that change over geologic time scales vs. change over 50-100 years is a meaningless comparison -- as in apples to oranges.
Extinction can be thought of as the effect from environmental change so radical and rapid that organisms previously well adapted in said environment become unable to reproduce and thus, instead of benefiting from selection pressure to evolve into the new environment, simply all die as a result. Vast numbers of species are going extinct the world over, which suggests radical environmental change at a very rapid pace. The change is permanent -- extinct creatures and the environment they create will never return. We are walking off a precipice without any safety ropes. From Rainforest clearcutting, Coral reef bleaching the world over (along with massive overfishing), and global climate change from industrial and energy production. I strongly doubt that we'll be able to survive without these basic habitats to maintain our food supply. JMO.
--Maynard
The business community would like us to put our heads in the sand and forget about all these pesky problems steamrolling our way. But the consequences of inaction could be devastating for life across the planet, and our species survival. To continue to trivialize the debate by turning the issue into one of belief instead of verifiable facts simply accepts the common US big media propaganda and spin. This is not a debate of the number of angels on the head of a pin, it's a scientific debate whereby the vast majority of academic scientists the world over have accepted a common view that global climate change is real and could be devastating to life on earth. Please also see: Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development documents on the issue as well.
--Maynard
As the comments in this thread indicate, a lot of people don't believe. It may seem clear to you and I, not to mention virtually every scientist not employed by oil companies, that there's evidence that human activity affects the environment; it may further seem self-evident to you and I that if the evidence suggests it affects the environment negatively that we have sufficient grounds to modify our behavior without waiting for "proof" of the extent of damage, rate of decline, and computation of short-term economic consequences.
But the greenwashing from companies that have vested interests in the status quo is pretty effective. "Hey," they say, "the earth has gone through climate change before without our contribution, so obviously that means we're not having an effect this time--it's just a natural cycle! So keep burning fossil fuels with impunity and ignore those idiotic regulation-loving liberals who talk about how much we'd conserve if we did horrible, freedom-oppressing things like raise fuel economy standards by 50%."
See, if you believe the "chicken littles," you'll be inconvenienced. If you don't, you won't be. And, hey, who wants to be inconvenienced just on the theory, the unproven possibility, that our great-grandchildren might face mass extinction? We should at least wait for a few more decades to see if things are obviously getting worse. Sure, that means that trying to fix things then will cause orders of magnitude more hardship than they would now, if it isn't too late--but until then, check out my new Chevy Subdivision SUV!
At risk of being pedantic, this is what is known as a "hard choice." Despite all the noise about spotted owls and New Age women who live in old growth trees, by and large we've consistently been choosing to protect that GDP than protect the environment.
I don't disagree that we shouldn't take economic hardships lightly. I don't disagree that choosing to protect the environment won't have significant costs. In fact, I suspect if we put a serious effort into it, over the short term things could really suck.
What I do disagree with is the contention that "let's wait and see" is a viable alternative. One of history's clearest lessons is that as expensive as proactive approaches may be, they are consistently far cheaper than reactive approaches.
This is kind of like the "Year 2000 bug." Everyone in IT ran around frantically for two or three years fixing problems, and when the rollover finally came, the damage was virtually non-existent. And of course, everyone said, "Look, it wasn't any big deal after all." But if we hadn't proactively treated it like a big deal, it would have been. If we'd done nothing, and even a fraction of those systems that hadn't been fixed had failed, then what would the costs have been? Everything that was spent proactively, plus all the costs for cleanup. "Cleanup" would at the least involve billions, with a 'b,' in lawsuits, and might involve minor--or even major--disasters. (Some of the systems that were reported as having critical flaws were in hospitals, for instance, and in waste water treatment facilities.)
There were great strides made toward reducing auto emissions, appliance energy use, and cleaning up power plant and factory pollution made in the '70s--and gosh, things in the '90s weren't nearly as bad as people in the '70s said it was going to be. This doesn't mean the people in the '70s were right--but it hardly proves they were wrong. And if they were even partially right, we've saved a whole damn lot of money in energy costs and air and water cleanup.
...and a non-scientist is not whether they have theories or whether they understand what theories are. It is whether they test their theories against real-world data to determine the degree to which they predict that data. Everybody (scientists and non-scientists alike) has theories. Everybody tests them or accepts them without challenge. Those who rigorously test them in an open environment where others can review their work are scientists.
Climatologists who believe in global warming have for years put forward theories which, to a greater or lesser degree, made predictions which (for the most part) have been borne out by the subsequent data. When they have proven wrong, they have modified their theories or become skeptics. Those who consider themselves "global-warming skeptics" have likewise put forward theories (global warming is not caused by humans, global warming is good, the homeostatic mechanics of weather will fix the problem). When they have proven wrong, they have changed their theories or become supporters of the global-warming hypothesis.
To whatever extent any of those on either side have refused to accept evidence, they are not scientists. Right now, the tide of data is running against the skeptics. But that doesn't mean it always will. If they come up with theories which better predict the data, they will gain ascendency.
The theory put forth in Fallen Angels is not a "competing" theory because it assumes that the global-warming theorists are right about the effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The fact that this theory suggests that greenhouse gases are holding back an ecological catastrophe in no suggests that another ecological catastrophe would not be created by over-shooting the needed amount of warming. In fact, the theory in the book almost requires that the global warming theory be also possible.
Fallen Angels is a fun book, but it has almost nothing to do with global warming. The real question it asks is whether a bunch of geeks at a sci-fi convention could actually put a spacecraft in orbit if they really wanted to. (I heard a rumor that an actual science-fiction convention raised money by holding an auction or raffle whose prize was a place in the book.)
The use of the scientific theory in the book is to give them the motivation: The idea is that eco-extremists have instituted a totalitarian state to restrict greenhouse-gas emissions, triggering the ice age which those emissions were preventing. These enviro-Nazis are clamping down on technology, including the space program. (This explains why the government won't put up the spacecraft.) The last bastion of technology is the space station, which has fans among the clandestine groups who still meet at illegal, underground SF conventions. When two astronauts crash, the geeks have to get them back to space before the government finds them.
All of which is fun, but not very believable. The theory is interesting, but of no particular relevance to the current debate over greenhouse gases. In the book, the banning of fossil fuels triggers an ice age, eliminating the need for the ban. But the government continues to suppress the one thing which could save the earth from the advancing sheets of ice.
While this might be believable, the fact that the population continues to go along is not. (The exception is Milwaukee, where the city's government secretly burns fossil fuels.) People might be fooled into accepting a phoney ban on carbon dioxide when global warming was a real issue. But by the time it's snowing in July that argument is gonna fall real flat.
This post says less about science or theories or greenhouse gases than about the will to believe demonstrated by its author. Robotech_Master obviously wants to believe that global warming is "just" a theory, so he is willing to ignore the fact that the theory he puts forward actually includes global warming. Indeed, one could argue that many of the posts to Katz's piece (on both sides) are more evidence of the will to believe than anything else.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
I've noticed that, when somebody comes along with a counter-theory, the junk-science purveyors (again, on both sides of any issue) glom onto it. Even if the counter-theory was presented with a genuine interest in science (and not deliberate deception as appears to be the case here), those who've come to use it in their arguments do so without regard to whether it checks out or not.
You can see the results here: surface temperatures versus atmospheric temperatures, ice ages held off, any number of items which (whatever their original validity) no longer hold water scientifically trotted forth by those who want to believe in what they want to believe more than they want to know what is really true.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Every EU country has passed the internal laws (or is passing them) required for Kyoto. Many are way ahead of us on this. The U.S. adopted a wait-and-hope-it-proves-wrong strategy in 1990 while the Europeans adopted a do-as-much-now-as-we-can-so-it'll-hurt-less-later strategy. Both were valid strategies. We now know which one was better.
Why do the anti-Kyoto FUDsters think they can get away with saying the Europeans haven't ratified? Because it's technically true: Members of the EU are not allowed to ratify treaties. That's the EU's responsibility. The EU hasn't ratified because it hasn't yet decided what the procedure for ratification will be under the European Union. They are agreed on ratification of this treaty, but they aren't going to rush to create a bad ratification procedure just to ratify something they all know they're going to approve. They'd be stuck with that bad procedure.
The Senate vote was 0-98 because those who support the treaty want the right to bring it up later, something which only those who voted against can do under the rules of the Senate. So, why do the opponents of Kyoto keep resurrecting this cannard? Because their goal is to deceive, not to inform.
It is clear who is repeating lies, Shivetya, the only question is whether you are one of those deceivers or one of the deceived.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
I was aware that the treaty had not been sent to the Senate for ratification. I was also aware that the reason it was not sent by the Clinton administration was that they knew it would not pass.
That is a far cry from saying, as the FUDsters are, (and I do not put you in that category by any means) that there was no support for Kyoto in the Senate and no support in the EU. There is insufficient support in the Senate and overwhelming support in the EU, both among politicians and among the people (even in the business community).
While I do not agree with you on the exemption of non-industrialized nations from the limits, I appreciate the fact that you acknowledge the arguments on the other side and address yourself to those arguments rather than spreading five-year-old disinformation.
I'm sorry my carelessness caused you to doubt my statements about the EU. I will email you a transcript which may help restore my credibility. My main concern is that this discussion is dominated by oft-repeated FUD, which suggests that those who oppose the treaty don't have the kind of reasoned arguments you put forward. I hope my own mis-statements do not get repeated so often they similarly undermine my own position (which is less than full support for the treaty).
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
...the sheer volume of nonsense and dishonesty being propagated by those who oppose the Kyoto Treaty. There are certainly questions about the scientific truth of global warming predictions. But they are not being accurately portrayed in the three posts above this one. Let's look at three posts (working downward in the current tree):
general_re started with:
Master Bait replied with:
And Golias weighed in with:
Here we see FUD of the highest order: everything from outright lies to glib irrelevancies.
Start with general_re's claim that "there is far from any consensus that this warming is the result of human activity." By any definition of "consensus" this is flatly false. There is a consensus (indeed, very close to unanimity) that global warming exists. There is a consensus (strong and widespread, verging on unanimous) that some portion of that warming is caused by humans. There is a consensus (strong and growing, but not unanimous) that the human-caused share is signficant and dangerous. There is even a consensus (much weaker, but still signficant) that most of the currently observed warming is caused by human activity. This last consensus derives primarily through negative data showing that other proposed causes are not contributing.
While Master Bait's claim that only people who aren't part of this consensus get grants from big oil isn't strictly true, it is true that a disturbing number of the "skeptics" are financed by those with a financial interest in the results. Master's exaggerations are dwarfed by Golias' counter-exaggeration:
"That's fun to say, but the largest and most current study to date on the topic (a joint venture by the feds and the National Academy of Sciences done almost immediately after the final nail in the Kyoto Treaty coffin was hammered in), showed that there was, in fact, no consensus in the scientific community about this at all."
Which is also fun to say, I'm sure, but far more inaccurate than Master Bait's overstatement. Almost as fun as paraphrasing "members of the NAS" without citing references, credentials or names (or giving anyone a chance to see if they have since changed their minds -- as many skeptics have).
Picking on four of Golias' itemized points, I would say: (1) wrong or irrelevant; (4) irrelevant; (6) irrelevant and wrong; and (7) totally irrelevant (as befits all good FUD). And then he ends with a true fact which argues against everything he seems to be saying. (All of this is not to imply endorse any of the other points.)
(1) We're not very good at predicting the weather, but we're pretty good at predicting the climate. It's going to rain in the rain forest. It's going to snow in the mountains during winter. Weather is a chaotic system; climate is a thermodynamic system. Northern Europe might cool off while the rest of the world is heating up, but the average has been pretty accurately predicted (by those models Golias derides in item 2). And we're getting better. And the degree to which we aren't good at predicting climatic change is irrelevant if our best current knowledge says a disaster will come if we don't respond.
(4) Geologic temperatures are in constant flux on a geologic time scale. And that flux has often meant bad things for the creatures of earth. The fact that historically recorded fluxes have shortened people's lifetimes is an argument against a concern for global warming only for those who don't care if their lives are shortened. The fact that geologically recorded fluxes have wiped out a vast majority of all the species which have ever evolved on the planet is an argument against a concern for global warming only for those who don't care if their species is wiped out.
(6) Sun spot cycles have been long suspected as contributors to climatic change (since it was first realized that the earth could be viewed as a thermodynamic system and the numbers didn't add up). They have also been completely eliminated as the cause of the observed global warming of last 10 years (as recently confirmed by Pres. Bush's commission on which he made sure there were respected "skeptics"). To the degree that item 6 is not wrong, it is irrelevant: It would not matter to the dead people whether they were killed by sun spots or the combined neglect of two Bush administrations; they would still be dead.
(7) Upper-atmosphere clouds (and, indeed, the entire chaotic system of weather and climate) have, in fact, been discovered to be extremely efficient thermostats by precisely the same kind of science which has discovered that greenhouse gases turn up that thermostat. The fact that upper-atmospheric clouds also regulate the temperature of Venus does not prevent it from being a hellish wasteland of greenhouse gas.
And, finally, the fact that trees can be used to mitigate the accumulation of CO2 says nothing about whether that accumulation should be mitigated.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
When the scientific community at large is as divided as they currently are about a topic that is as 'hot' (no pun intended) as this one is, we certainly owe it to ourselves to research all sides as best we are able.
Otherwise, we are simply choosing and supporting a side as thought it were a religion.
Passion is powerful, but rarely a direct indicator of truth, and any passion, once raised, becomes it's own motivator.
We should ignore our passions until we have explored both sides. More often, however (and I'm guilty of this too), we choose the side that appeals to us (for whatever reasons reasonable or otherwise) and then seek out high-status opinions to support our chosen point of view.
Always give the Devil his due. By exercising honesty and integrity, your final position will be much stronger and more flexible, imho.
**>>BELCH
I say flexible because, more often than not, when you research (however humbly) both sides of an issue, you usually can't help but see degrees of truth and delusion on both. This makes it less pleasing to hurl brimstone at those with whom you disagree, but makes you a far better human being/animal overall!
**>>BELCH
When not even the Nat'l Academy of Sciences or the head-in-the-sand Bush administration denies the reality of Global Warming, it would take a masterly writer to come up with...
While the Bush administration may have acquiesced to pressure not to outrightly deny the 'reality of global warming', I wonder if you can point me to some sort of document in which they acknowledge that global warming does in fact exist ('global warming' as directly attributed to the pollutive aspects of modern industry, not simply the fact that the world today is warmer than it was a little while ago).
Thanks in advance.
**>>BELCH
Sorry but are you expecting people to go out and "research" stuff and get results similar to that which professional scientists obtain?
Agreed - more people should look the facts up BUT they should do so with an open mind, not as a reaction to the perceived status quo in the scientific community.
What's the worst that can happen if the environmentalists are wrong about Global Warming? People have to make sacrifices unnecessarily? Boo hoo.
:)
The worst thing that can happen is a global depression, including mass starvation. Here is the core of the issue: there is no way, I repeat no way, that we can significantly reduce human-produced greenhouse gas emmissions without a MASSIVE economic catastrophe.
Even stabilizing US CO2 emmissions at 1990 levels by 2010 would require at least a $0.50 per gallon gas tax increase, as well as fuel cost increases of nearly 50% for electrical generation. Studies show that this kind of CO2 emmission reduction would cause US GDP to decrease by 1 to 2 percent annually, with nearly a million lost jobs. And this in a country that shouts "monopoly" when gas prices go up a few cents...
But of course, stabilizing CO2 emmissions at 1990 levels is not enough. It would only slow down warming while simultaneously we destroy the world economy. And of course, most of these numbers are pulled "out of the air", and I think they probably underestimate the true tax levels required to reduce CO2 emmissions. I still can't explain SUVs.
And that doesn't even include the economic damage required to reduce methane emmissions from Asia (more greenhouse potent than CO2). Perhaps China would just round up and shoot all the rice farmers. Actually, they have pretty good experience at politically inspired mass starvation already...
So we're stuck in a situation where we either have disaster due to global warming or due to economic failure. The truth is that politics being what it is, most nations would not accept political solutions to CO2 and methane emmissions, with the possible exception of Western Europe
So this leaves another alternative: innovate out of the problem. Don't destroy the economy now, hold out until we have a solution (such as a pure hydrogen/oxygen economy).
We can look into sequestration to some extent as well. Globally, farms are becoming more productive, and farmland can be returned to dense biomass forest. Algae sequestration can be looked at as well.
this was the most controversial posting that I have ever had. 15 mods. Many were positive but apparently most were negative.
.02
Shows that moderation really doesn't work all the time, and good posts are sometimes buried b/c of it.
Just my worthless
Dr. Fun has a most appropriate cartoon for today. Except that it doesn't mention Katz by name...
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
300 million sheep are not necessarily smarter than one person.
Science lesson: the accurate definition of the greenhouse effect, which I thankfully learned in astronomy class, is as follows:
In other words, any time any planet has an atmosphere, of any composition, that atmosphere will tend to be more transparent to sunlight than to infrared. So, light passes through the atmosphere, hits the planet's surface and warms it. The atmosphere then tends to hold in the heat which is reradiated from the planet's surface. This is a Good Thing: it helps keep the Earth at a habitable temperature.
What's even scarier are the people who were TAUGHT the Al Gore version in their classes!
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Where we live, we just "enjoyed" one of the coldest, snowiest winters on record: in the top 10 in recorded history. But of course, the acolytes of global warming will (om-mane-padme-om) have an explanation, right?
One little bit of info that the g.w. religionists like to point to is a receding glacier in Iceland. Problem is, they don't check their history records: the valley where the glacier is now was used for agriculture in the 1700s!
"Global warming" is pure "B" as in "B", "S" as in "S". It is a pack of lies being dumped on us for the purpose of justifying more government regulation.
Don't believe the hype.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
It is recognized by most of the scientific community that humans are accelerating the trend of global warming.
I'm sorry, but that's simply not true. While many scientists believe that the earth is gradually warming - and many have questions about even that - there is far from any consensus that this warming is a result of human activity.
While I agree that it is important to continue studying this issue, I also think it is important to let the evedence accumulate before we all go off half-cocked, and start imposing "solutions" that have very real costs without first knowing what the benefits will be, or even if there will be benefits.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
About the only people in the scientific community that don't believe in what you say are the very few who get research grants from big oil companies to make up research poopooing global warming.
Ahh, yes. That would be why over 15,000 scientists signed this petition supporting the conclusions of this paper detailing how greenhouse gases have had little or no measurable effect on the global climate. That consensus. Stooges of the oil and gas industry, every one of 'em.
Of course, if they are puppets of big oil, their fraudulent or misleading or incorrect research and conclusions ought to be relatively easy for you to expose, rather than making essentially ad hominem attacks.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Global climate change is a phenominally complex system that is not possible to describe in simple "cause-effect" arguments
You're kidding, right? Look, either human activity (the cause) is changing the global climate (the effect), or it isn't. Since 20 years worth of satellite-based temperature measurements - which are far more accurate than surface-based measurements - show NO temperature change at all, there may very well be no effect. In which case, why go looking for causes? Or maybe you've finally blown away that whole causality thing by finding effects without causes.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
From the link you cited:
I couldn't find the names of anyone I knew.
You'll forgive me, but not knowing who folks like Richard Lindzen and Pat Michaels are doesn't exactly inspire my confidence in his knowledge of the field.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Why, that's right. Now you're getting it. You don't really have to respond to the issues presented, or form some rational critique. You just have to make snide comments about the intelligence and motivations of the folks you disagree with, and everyone will understand you perfectly. And to do it all anonymously, too - what a bonus. Kudos! You are hereby promoted to Eco-Nut, First Class! Wear your badge with pride, little tree warrior, and when you feel you have some substantive criticism of the article, the adults will be more than happy to listen.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
> unless there is some huge problem with electric cars I am missing.
Like the fact that transmission of electricity isn't terribly efficient? That electricity doesn't come from the magic electric fairies, and that you still have to burn stuff? That no one wants any of the new hundreds of power plants this would require sitting in their backyard?
Well there's always nuclear. Except for that little waste problem (not like the crap they scrape out of coal plants is exactly health food though)
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
The sea levels are NOT RISING 1 meter every 10 years. That would be very obvious to those of us who live in coastal areas.
There are many reasons we should not act on the current knowledge about cliamte. The one that you may be most interested in is that wealthy people care about the environment, and poor people do not. The more wealthy people, the more pressure on government and industry to be clean. Poor nations can't afford the efficient systems that we use to:
heat our homes (would you rather that they burn wood, making more CO2 and air pollution?),
aquire our food (modern farming rather than slash and burn the amazon to grow their crops for a few years?),
make scientific developments (viagra rather than grind up tiger penises as aphrodisiacs),
be peaceful (build complex industries and trade rather than have to constantly war over resources that they will squander on the next war),
and finally, to communicate in such a manner necessary to create special interest groups powerful enough to make them care about the earth.
Surfing the net and other cliches...
Surfing the net and other cliches...
(Who Meta-Meta-Moderates the Meta-Moderators?)
I'm glad you think it's ironic for you to take the skeptic's position. Most lay people do not feel that the burden of proving HEG falls on its proponents, rather that the burden of disproving it falls on the skeptics, leading to the akward situation of trying to prove a negative.
f eb 97_1.htm
4 2/ 2_objective.html
As for extrodinary claims, Lindzen put it best:
"In some ways, we are driven to a philosophical consideration: namely, do we think that a long-lived natural system, like the earth, acts to amplify any perturbations, or is it more likely that it will act to counteract such perturbations? It appears that we are currently committed to the former rather vindictive view of nature." Richard Lindzen, in testimony to Congress, July 1997
Critisism of treatment of clouds...
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/essd5
From the horses mouth:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/spm22-01.pdf (toward the end. Page 18 or 28?)
Gov't Agency.
http://www.arm.gov/docs/documents/project/er_04
Good model anecdote:
http://users.erols.com/dhoyt1/annex8.htm
Surfing the net and other cliches...
Surfing the net and other cliches...
(Who Meta-Meta-Moderates the Meta-Moderators?)
Lots of people who take global warming as it is presented by the media do ask to prove a negative.
There is a ton of evidence for climate change, but who would expect that a system as complex as the earth to be static?
If it would take 10000 years to cool down, why should we expect it to only take 30 years to heat up? After all, direct CO2 warming is suppossed to be rather small, and positive feedback mechanisms are suppossed to amplify it. So positive feedbacks are fast and negative feedbacks are slow?
From the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program's website:
In order to understand energy's role in anthropogenic global climate change, significant reliance is being placed on General Circulation Models (GCMs). A major goal of the Department is to foster the development of GCMs capable of predicting the timing and magnitude of greenhouse gas-induced global warming and the regional effects of such warming. DOE research has revealed that cloud radiative feedback is the single most important effect determining the magnitude of possible climate responses to human activity. However, cloud radiative forcing and feedbacks are not understood at the levels needed for reliable climate prediction.
When they figure out the clouds, and ocean mixing, the sun, and the many other factors glossed over in the current models, then I'll trust the models. The right thing to do now is to study, not create meaningless treaties.
Surfing the net and other cliches...
Surfing the net and other cliches...
(Who Meta-Meta-Moderates the Meta-Moderators?)
--
Ironically, Americans aren't worried about the technological issues that are seriously changing their lives, and will increase in impact in the future, but are all in a tizzy about global warming, which is bullshit.
But what do you expect, when most of us are products of the government schools?
-
A recent letter in Science provides 13 citations for reports of such exciting phenomena as reduction in alpine glaciers, increase in permafrost thawing, later freeze-ups & earlier thaws of lakes, etc. etc. etc. occuring over the past 60 years.
These 13 citations are A VERY SMALL FRACTION of the total evidence supporting a warming trend over the recent past. A quick search through the web of science over just the past 2 years turns up 595 articles. Do they all provide evidence of a warming trend? No. Do many of them? Yes.
Heck, even a quick search on CNN turns up evidence of ocean warming caused by humans.
A more complete review of the evidence is presented here.
There is very little doubt that the earth is getting warmer. The debates over the past few years settle on "is it caused by humans" and "how much will it affect climate". The evidence seems pretty clear that humans are responsible for a good portion of the warming. The overall affect of this warming, however, is still very much in doubt. THAT'S where the main scientific debate is.
And, on a slightly unrelated rant . . .
Comments like this really piss me off. It's clear you haven't done any poking through the scientific literature about global warming, and your "as i understand it" comes from mouthpieces of our good friends in the oil industry, rush limbaugh, and others.
Plus, EVERYTHING in science is a theory. It's an explanation of how the world works, based on experimental data. A good theory explains the current data and makes predictions about the results of future experiments (ie, warming the earth will cause an increase in the rate of polar ice cap melting). Theories are NEVER PROVEN - there's always the chance that some experiment in the future will provide data that can't be explained by the current theory - which leads to its modification or, in very rare and exciting cases, a completely new theoriy. This is why we have a "theory of gravity" or "theory of evolution" - they can't be proven, but they explain very nicely all the data we've picked up to this point.
Sheesh.
What I don't understand is why we don't have electric cars yet. No emissions, no high gas prices. Is it because of the influence of oil companies? lack of electricity (ex. rolling blackouts)? I just don't get it. Environmentally it makes so much sense- unless there is some huge problem with electric cars I am missing.
There are many huge problems but the ones causing the most problem are range and slow fill ups.
I can get in my car and drive 400 miles on a fillup, stop in a station and do another 400 miles after a 5 minute operation. Once an electric car can do that they MAY be more feasable.
A competing theory, put forward fictionally in the book Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn (available free in its entirety through the Baen Free Library), is that the earth is actually entering a cooler period (a Maunder Minimum), and if it weren't for the "greenhouse gas" in the atmosphere, we'd be experiencing another ice age.
The book is fiction, but the scientific theory it cites is real. (And it has RMS in it.)
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
How about taking a look for yourself on the web for some of the information that is out there. I just hacked in 'Global Warming' into Google and had a nice selection of sites from a variety of perspectives, including this, from the "Union of Concerned Scientists".
It's a fact. Wake up America.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
Tell that to someone living in a low level country such as Bangladesh or the Netherlands, as the sea levels rise up and destroy their countries.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
I believe George Carlin said it best: the planet's doing fine, it's the people who are going to kill themselves off.
My Blog. Sela Ward can sell me long distanc
Something will be done about it "soon" (that is geologically soon, say in the next couple millenia). The earth is an ecosystem, after a while, the earth will balance out, and buck off our species. Sure a few million of us will survive, but most will die.
Don't worry about mankind destroying this planet, we can't do it, due to our ego's we think we can, but in real life, we can't. After a while, the problems that we are causing will balance out.
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
Following this logic, everybody should convert to my religion
Then you didn't follow his logic.
Given two choices, if one has disastrous effects and the other has negligible effects, and either one is equally likely, choose to avoid the disastrous effects.
Choosing the wrong religion (at least western ones) would have disastrous effects regardless, because it measn an etenity of suffering. Therefore all choices are equally defensible and logical.
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Right, I can see that most people here don't believe, given that the only serious posts that are above +2 are anti-global warming.
We have four scenarios, as follows:
1) Global warming is false, and we do nothing
2) Global warming is false, and we take action
3) Global warming is true, and we do nothing
4) Global warming is true, and we take action
1), 2) and 4) are fine - either there's nothing to worry about, or in 4), we at least try to avert disaster.
In 3), we're fscked - the seas rise, climate changes, etc.
Assuming that all 4 are equally likely(*), that effectively gives us a 75% chance of being fine. Of course, that means that we have a 25% chance of dooming ourselves. Personally, I wouldn't play Russian Roulette with a 6 chamber gun, let alone a four chamber one.
What's the worst that can happen if the environmentalists are wrong about Global Warming? People have to make sacrifices unnecessarily? Boo hoo.
What's the worst that can happen if they're right, though? I can't imagine that anyone is going to die through recycling too much of their rubbish, or leaving the car at home and walking too often.
It seems to me that until we have conclusive proof that Global Warming is rubbish, we really ought to play it safe.
(* Yes, I know that's not the way it works, but I'm simplifying things. Given that we have no consensus on the matter, it's not such a terrible simplification to make.)
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
In 1997, 67 percent of Americans surveyed believed that
By last year, the figure had risen to 72 per cent
In fact, only 13 percent of Americans said global warming wasn't a serious problem, a record low.
... a March 2001 Time/CNN poll found that two-thirds of Americans think the President should develop a plan to reduce the gas emissions that may contribute to global warming.
Now this will sound like a digression, so bear with me for a minute. There is an old story about the nose of the emperor of China. This man wanted to know how long the emperor's nose was. The problem was, that no one in China had ever seen the emperor. So he went around to many thousands of people, asking each of them how long they thought the emperor's nose was. He accumulated a large amount of data, and was able to use the latest in statistical techniques to come up with a very good number, with confidence intervals and the whole nine yards.
However, no matter how good the statistical analysis is, no one had ANY hard information at all, so all the statistical analysis means NOTHING. And this is what Jon Katz's numbers are. Asking what people think about global warming doesn't tell us anything about global warming at all.
---
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
from merriamwebster.com:
Main Entry: theory
Pronunciation: 'thE-&-rE, 'thi(-&)r-E
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ries
Etymology: Late Latin theoria, from Greek theOria, from theOrein
Date: 1592
1 : the analysis of a set of facts in their relation to one another
2 : abstract thought
3 : the general or abstract principles of a body of fact, a science, or an art
Refers to a body of knowledge. Gravitation is a theory, evolution is a theory, law is a theory. This doesn't mean "we're not sure." There may be some varying degree of surety within that body of knowledge, but that does not invalidate the entire body of knowledge.
Not understanding the mechanism doesn't mean it doesn't do what it does. Gravitation kept everything earth-bound long before the apocryphal apple landed on Newton's head.
The modern study of climate encompasses maybe 50 years. Oldest reliable weather obs date back about 400 years (and at a precious few locations), and older data are deduced from ice cores and such making assumptions which could be wrong and which yield less-than-finely-grained data. With an enormous and enormously complex system involved, and with the physics and chemistry incompletely understood, not to mention extremely challenging to model, and assuming infinite computational power (which is not as bad as you might think, since climate and nuke modelling are #s 1 and 2 on CPU use over most supercomputing facilities), we can't possibly venture more than barely educated guesses.
Scientists are pretty evenly split on whether global warming even exists, though neither the press nor the politicians are clever enough to convey this to the public, who are probably not interested or educated enough to understand even that. Read this by a scientist involved in evalutaing claims used to support Kyoto. There is ample evidence to support claims on both sides, and only the most zealous and those with agendas will claim irrefutable proof.
Do people affect the environment they live in? Sure. Do greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere? Of course, that's why they're called that. Can these effects really overwhelm the huge natural processes and cycles of the planet to modify it enough for us to notice? We don't know.
Maybe we're staving off the now-overdue ice age. Perhaps we're experiencing a regular or otherwise cycle of climatic oscillation. Maybe we're screwing ourselves. Who knows? It is relatively certain that curtailing our emissions would have smaller impact on the environment, but that impact might already be much smaller than we think.
Certainly it couldn't hurt, but Kyoto could, and a decision to support it or not should be based on solid environmental, economic and political considerations. Kyoto not only radically reduced limits on pollution in the US and other 1st world nations, but guaranteed the right of 3rd world nations to continue to pollute indefinitely. There were many other difficulties as well, many of which reflect the USA's decreasing involvement in international affairs (W can't even spell UN, so we shouldn't be surprised), and the diplomatic Napoleon complex being expressed by the EU, trying to throw it's new, generally left-leaning politcal weight around.
The world is likely to be severely impacted by an asteroid large enough to cause catastrophic climate change, and will without doubt suffer even worse damage as our sun ages in a billion years or so. Politicians pay no atention to these issues, which would be easy to mitigate given the time until their effects will be felt. Any time they spend on Global Warming is to garner public accolades for their "green" side. Maybe this cancels out drilling in ANWAR.
Thank you for the addition of some logic and level-headedness to a topic that usually generates nothing but emotionalism and flame wars.
It's nice to see there are a few people (still) out there who are not in a hysterical panic, and are willing to research the facts themselves.
If we could only get it out there like a mantra-
_There_is_no_global_warming_
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
"Global Warming" (which is a dumb title for the Greenhouse Effect) will seem a lot more real in 40 or 50 years. the theory of the Greenhouse Effect states that as the amount of vapors (H2O, CO2, etc) in the atmosphere increases, more heat energy from the sun will be absorbed and trapped in the atmosphere. now we've set this ball in motion by doing two things: dumping large amounts of CO2 in the air (and cutting down a lot of trees that would gladly breathe it) and eating away at the ozone layer (in the upper atmosphere, where it absorbs ultraviolet rays). more UV is coming in, heating up more vapor in the air.
the 0.5degC increase in global climate may not seem like much, but when you consider how many extra millions and millions of tons of water are in the air, you can probably easily imagine the climactic changes. more humidity planet-wide == more storms, more violent climate. a rise in sea level (from slowly-melting, enormous icecaps) is probably to come in the next 50 years too, putting major metropolitan ports underwater.
the 0.5degC increase in climate is also a reversal of the natural trend in recent centuries. no one can say with certainty if it's just the Earth's natural cycle, but an intelligent human can tell that mayyyybe mankind had something to do with it.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Huh !! Check your facts dude ! the US alone is responsible for nearly 50% of world CO2 pollution. I think that an american must consume something as 100 times (not exactly sure, but ig gives an order of magnitude) as much energy than an indian ! amazing !? no
Sure, I BELIEVED, then I researched paleoclimatology untill I got the facts, now I KNOW most of what they tell me is wrong, half assed, and for political reasons. Don't listen to me, go out there and look up the OPPOSIE of what youve been told, and see if there is more information and if their side makes more sense. Ever heard of the little ice age 200 years ago? Most people havent. Puts a new slant on the warming trend of the last 100 years when you realise we are coming out of a minor FSCKING ICE AGE. Mideveal england was 1-3 degrees warmer than it is now, which is why there were colonies on greenland which died off when the climate GOT COLDER!! Don't believe me, do your own research. Look at the ice core data, listen to that crackpot opposed to the Microsoft, I mean popular view.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
OzonAnyone with any knowledge of chemistry realizes that when a cosmic ray hits O2 it form 03 (ozone). In other words, depleting ozone just makes the atmosphere produce more ozone. Anybody with a knowledge of physics knows that heat diffuses from hot to cold, and that pressure tends to equalize in a gas. So, the Earth's atmosphere has uniform density and temperature everywhere, right? (wrong) A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You are assuming that there is an equillibrium between O2 and O3, which is simply not true.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
GM claims to have poured 1 billion USD into making the EV1. The Wall Street Journal says it's probably closer to $1.5 billion USD. So far they have "sold" 1000 EV1s. I say sold, because the car is actually leased -- at $900 down and $550 a month (plus $50/month for the charger if you want (need, and yes, you do) that). At 1000 copies, that breaks down to either a million dollars a copy or 1.5 million, depending on whose estimate you believe. This is for a car that doesn't handle particularly well, accelerate any better than average, is hauling around a ton (literally) of batteries, is built more like a light plane than a car (read spartan interior, no sound deadening, no luxuries), has a greatly reduced range, and only carries two people and about as much luggage as a Miata. You could also lease a Chevrolet Corvette for the same amount -- and the EV1 is obviously heavily subsidised. Any surprise that the auto companies are balking at building these?
-------------------------------------------------
.. that global warming predictions might be correct?
.. call me an extremist, but I tend to think that the IC engine is (gasp!) not the pinnacle of Personkind's engineering prowess! We can (and will) do far better.
Let's look at this from a practical standpoint. You say there is nothing to global warming. I say there is. Let's say that we sit back and do absolutely nothing about it. If you are right and I am wrong, then we will have lost nothing. On the other hand, if I am right and you are wrong, we will have lost everything and will endure an eternity of torture and suffering, followed by probable extinction.
It seems to me that even if it is ultimately shown that global warming is a ridiculous liberal myth, it still is in our best interests to take steps to advance our skillset and develop new technologies that allow us to build cleaner factories, renewable energy sources, etc. We need to do away with the internal combustion engine
I realize that many of the opponents of global warming are conservative and old and not long for this world, and therefore not particularly concerned about it since they will not have to suffer the effects. But why do we need the threat of global warming (whether it is real or not) to "frighten" us into straightening up our act and investing in newer, more efficient, more eco-friendly technology? It seems to me that we should be doing this anyway. If everybody had the same attitude that some people display here, we'd still have coal trains belching black clouds of smoke into the air.
Try thinking outside the box for a change!
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Okay, so you're so gullible to believe a politican, and so sheltered to be actually shocked by it? Come on, pols lie for a living.
Do you really believe this? I can't help but be skeptical. Politicians attempt to pass (or oppose) legislation for a living. Lying politicians get voted out of office all the time. In fact, a strong argument can be made that part of the reason that Gore isn't in the White House is because of the apparent deceptions of former Pres. Clinton. In other words, the voters punished Gore for the lies of Clinton. Voters don't like their elected officials to lie to them, nor should they. I *do* expect my elected officials to tell the truth. This isn't being gullible, it is having standards.
So when Bush goes against an explicit campaign promise, it is noteworthy, at the very least. We should expect our elected officials to keep their promises. Otherwise, why elect them in the first place? If they all lie constantly, then we should just pick who we vote at random. After all, we can't base our vote on what they say. Perhaps you feel that we should always distrust politicians. I agree with that. But if you go further and say that we should expect and accept the lies of politicians, then my good man I must disagree with you. I do not and will not accept lies, especially if a promise is broken.
- Rev.I saw a pretty interesting program on TV a while ago, and have since been reading up on it a bit.. According to a growing group of scientists,
l .0 3/
the real reason for the ups and downs of the earth temperature that we are observing are in fact caused by solar activity!
It is very sound theory, though pretty new. What scientist like about this theory is, that is simple but gives strong predictions.
The group of scientist which did the research, wasn't specifically interested in explaining global warming, but rather finding an explanation for reoccuring trends in historical weather patterns.
So they applied a lot of historical data to this theory, and so far the results has been very good.
It does look like, that this new theory, combined with traditional weather models, does explain historical weather data, very, very well.
When the scientist published their study, their data seems to exclude, that man-made activities played any great role in the weather system. (Their theory could within some margins, 'predict' historical weather)
But here is the point: When the scientist published their study, they had only applied historical weather data, up until 1972.
When they started to apply more recent weather data, somethings changed; their theory could no longer, within the margins, explain the more recent historical weather data anymore. (their theory, as I understand it, would still give better 'predictions' than traditionel weather models, without their theory).
So the "solar activity" theory as it stands now, actually seems to give a very strong indication, that global warming does exists. It also hints, that the global warming is man made, since it is very good at explaining weather, up until the last 30 years.
People often states, that the recent high temperture measurements, could be a natural cycle like earth so often has been going through before. In itself a reasonably statement. But cycles are cycles, because something cyclical, and therefore predictably occur. So far science has become better and better at finding theses cycles (solar activity being last). But no good scientific explanation exist, for which, and what kind of weather cycle, earth is experiencing right now.
Something on solar activity and global warming:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/intro/shindel
I had this exact conversation with my mother a few weeks back. She told me about a show (on Discovery I believe) that had a number of well known scientists, biologists, and geologists featured on the show. They were asked about global warming and they laughed, citing the information I gave above and even more of their own info. They were asked about the deforestation of the planet (cutting down trees) and again they laughed saying that it was a total crock. They said that for every tree cut down, most lumber companies plant two. They said that the tree coverage of the planet is back to where it was in the early 1900's and that it is spreading rapidly. They said sattelitte photos of the Earth's surface shows this quite vividly. Now they do admit that the cutting of certain forests may destroy medical remedies of animal and plant species yet to be discovered. That is very apparent but the planet isn't loosing its trees. If anything the trees are taking over much of the land. I live iin Kansas (yes it can be boring). I went back home this past weekend (south-east of Wichita on the edge of the Flinthills) and I noticed how much of the pasture land had been taken over by trees since I was last home. Trees are spreading and in many places are going unchecked. We keep saying that we're loosing our trees but has anyone ever asked the question, "What will too many trees do to us?". They were asked about some document or petition that supposedly some large number of scientists, biologists, and geologists type people signed saying that global warming (or was it the trees) was a major major problem and that it would be Man's fate or something like that. I guess it got big press. What the media didn't want to tell you is that something like 6 times as many of those scientist's, biologist's, and geologist's peers and colleagues signed another document stating that it was a crock. Reporting that won't get the media anything. Blood and guts sells. Truth doesn't. I wish I could find a copy of that special. I'd love to see it. If anyone knows what it is, email me.
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Overall I agree with the concepts, but I would like to clarify a few points. We need to convince people we know what we're talking about, which means keeping the hand waving and tongue-clucking moralizing to a minimum.
...and conservative wackos like yourself. Practice what you preach and leave science to the scientists...
I am a degreed scientist (I'd like to know what you are)...
I am reminded of Troy McLure's famous line, "Just ask this 'science-ologist!'" Simply claiming 'I am a scientist so I know more than you' won't cut the mustard. 'Degreed scientist' is not necessarily credentials that make you even as knowledgeable as an educated layman. What kind of scientist? Computer scientists might or might not know environmental issues. The same with a psychologist, or social scientist. I, for example, am a geophysicist, who specialized in environmental work for my thesis. But even there, my thesis work was aimed more at landfill remediation, and not climate issues. Still, I have kept up with the literature, and talked now and again with guys who were doing climate work, so I probably know a little more than your average man-on-the-street.
The disparity between surface and upper air trends in no way invalidates the conclusions that surface temperature has been rising.
Well, this is true, but does this support your implication that climate change is related to anthropogenic (fancy-talk for man-made) effects? The same climate models that predict that increased CO2 in the atmosphere will lead to warming via the greenhouse effect also predict that surface and upper-level temperatures should rise together. If the data does not support the theory, then the theory is wrong, and we need to know why. You imply in this statement that since we have one data point that supports your theory, we should ignore the one that doesn't fit.
That being said, I believe that the upper-atmospherics were based on a satelite measurements. If I recall correctly, a couple of years ago, I heard a report saying that they had figured out a slight error in the calculations they were using to calculate the temperature from whatever remote-sensing method they were using (remember, these are not direct measurements of the temperature). Once they went back and corrected for that glitch, the upper-level measurements seemed to bear out the global warming models. However, before you go quoting me on this in a letter to your senator, I'd like somebody who knows a bit more about it to back me up. I remember hearing this, but I couldn't tell you the source, and I could be wrong.
Thanks! Name calling will really win people over to our side! And really, telling people not to get involved in the scientific debate, and to wait for us scientists to come tell the masses what they should do is SUCH a convincing argument!
Educate yourself... Ozone depletion (yes, it IS linked to global warming) is worsening.
Once again, if you're going to lecture people on science, get it straight. First, while it is now thought that ozone recovery will take longer than previously believed, the level of ozone-destroying chemicals in the atmosphere has been dropping steadily since the introduction of CFC limits and the like, and the ozone layer is projected to heal itself eventually, although the rate of recovery is not yet known for certain. Second, ozone depletion is only secondarily related to global warming in that some of the ozone depleting chemicals are also greenhouse gases. However, CO2, the biggest component in most greenhouse models, is NOT an ozone depletor, and a healthy ozone layer does nothing to stop global warming. The ozone hole will effect skin cancer rates, and possibly bio-diversity (UV may damage amphibian eggs, and so forth) by allowing more UV into the atmosphere, but this is a fairly small portion of the actual energy budget which won't cause a rise in temperatures. And with a personal history of skin cancer, I pay attention to this stuff. Vested interest, and all.
Your post god modded up to a 5, which is sad considering what a poor job it does of actually stating our case. This post was based more on venom aimed at people you don't like, which makes you and your fellow environmentalists feel better, but does little to actually convince anyone that you are right. You state the alternate opinion that you express is so phenomenally unsupported, so completely discredited... yet you do little to support yourself except for some URLs that you didn't even bother to tag, and some of which have spaces, so even if you copy them to your browser they won't work.
Here's a link that will be more convincing when you're talking to these guys. The Economist (respected by people you dismissively refer to as consrvative wackos) has an article stating that Bush will probably have to come to some compromise over Kyoto (although it probably won't have the name Kyoto so Bush can save face). This one will have more impact than all the quotes from policy wonks you throw out, since no one can claim the source is biased against business or the US. This is how to win the debate and actually build a concensus.
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
The motion you are thinking of is the motion to reconsider. Although one has to have voted on the winning side to make a motion to reconsider, one need not have voted on the winning side to vote for a motion to reconsider. Thus, it is wholly unnecessary (and highly irregular) for the entire support base for a measure to vote against it just to leave open the possibility of a motion to reconsider. Traditionally the party leadership takes on this duty. Furthermore, even if for some odd reason all the hypothetical Kyoto supporters in the Senate did vote against the treaty for the purpose of reconsidering, why didn't they do so?
Your misunderstanding goes even deeper, however, because you don't seem to realize that the Kyoto treaty was never sent to the Senate for ratification. The 96-0 vote people keep referring to was for Senate Resolution 98, which was passed before the Kyoto treaty was signed. The resolution laid out the conditions any treaty would have to fulfill in order for the Senate to ratify it. Many analysts feel that the Kyoto treaty fails to meet these criteria, and thus would be disapproved by the Senate, were it to be submitted. Since SR-98 is nonbinding, it's entirely possible that the current Senate would ratify it, but the chances of mustering the required 2/3 vote are basically nil (and that, by the way, is why if Gore had been elected the Kyoto treaty would still not be law in the United States).
All of that brings us to the final point, which is that whether or not you believe that climatic change is human caused (a whole debate unto itself), the Kyoto treaty is a bad treaty. There are plenty of analyses of the technical flaws of the treaty out there, but the most damning thing in my opinion is that it places responsibility for controlling CO2 emissions squarely on the shoulders of the industrialized nations. While that seems like a reasonable thing if you consider only that the (currently) industrialized nations have historically dominated world CO2 output. However, many developing nations have a tremendous rate of growth in their CO2 emissions, and when you take that into account, exempting them from emission limits will completely hamstring efforts to reduce global emissions. Advocates of Kyoto say that it isn't fair that industrialized nations have been emitting for years, and it isn't fair to ask developing nations to stop now that they are starting to ramp up their economies. They may have a point; it probably isn't fair, but the question you have to ask yourself is do you want to put a dent in global CO2 emissions or don't you? If the answer is yes, you do, then Kyoto isn't going to get you there. Controlling global emissions requires a global effort, not just effort from the nations the world loves to hate.
-rpl
Man, you have a lot to learn. An article by Jon Katz should fill you with foreboding - what sort of trollfest is about to erupt? And sure enough, check out the highest moderated comments - what beautiful trolls!
When not even the Nat'l Academy of Sciences or the head-in-the-sand Bush administration denies the reality of Global Warming, it would take a masterly writer to come up with "Do You Believe?" (The f*** it matters whether or not you believe anyway.) And sure enough the trolls respond. I don't even know why I bother to read the comments mostly, except that a few like this one keep me coming back for more.
My advice, if you're a newbie, is stop, look, and listen, and please don't shoot your mouth off except where you are an expert. You'll feel clean that way.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
It has become pretty apparent to me that the oil on the planet is getting tapped out - hell, we've already fought an oil war...
After reading some R. Buckminster Fuller I got to wondering if there is enough oil/coal for us to screw things up completely. Obviously we are not very energy concious in the US as of yet... Anyone that has been outside of the US knows that we have a lot of nast habits about energy, not to mention that our appliances consume a sizeable chunk of power while just sitting there "off".
I just wonder:
What do other people think?
+++ ATH0 +++
So the National Academy of Sciences' report on global warming that Bush requested, was not written by "real" enough scientists, and did not display "real" enough data for you (there's at least one known skeptic on the credits)? And last I checked, Earth First was a non-profit organization, not an "invironmental" publicity "Corperation".
we'll probably tell you before everyone is dead. (as we get into our rocket and leave)
Hey, that's a great attitude! Your true colors show through. "Fuck 'em all - I want to continue my high-on-the-hog lifestyle!" (Oh, excuse me, in the words of the president's spokesperson Ari Fleischer conspicuous consumption is the "American way of life...a blessed one")
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The worlds largest polluter, either by nation, or per captia is waking up to polluting the planet.
But will they mind paying twice as much for gas to save the planet, or is it just another crock of shit.
Sorry to get passionate about this but the US is acting like the spoilt child of the planet, complaining that the 3rd World doesn't have to do as much, and thus the US is at a disadvantage, of course it is, the worlds strongest economy must be shitting itself that Namibia pollutes less per capita than the US, and isn't required to reduce that lower pollution rate by as much.
Its time to sue the US for damaging the health of the planet, others have a case to answer but at least the rest of the industrialised world is reducing emmisions, unlike the US which is still increasing them.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I remember when I started into science, and the publications all talked about climate cycles and how we were starting into a new ice age. A few decades later and "oops", were actually warming the earth.
I've been reading the literature on this subject for years, pro and con, and am convinced that the "pro" camp uses peer pressure more than good science.
Specifically:
1. The role of feedback mechanisms such as oceanic phytoplankton and cloud albedo is not understood sufficiently to create an accurate model of the climate feedback mechanisms that would counter any signifigant effect. In the case of cloud albedo, NASA has only started measuring solar flux reflectivitity across the entire atmosphere during the last few years! The potential impact of this mechanism alone (on reflecting solar IR back into space) is _orders_ of magnitude greater than _all_ other declared effects combined, and guess what - it counters warming.
2. The claims regarding rising temperature trends from monitoring stations in urban areas covered with increasing percentages of materials that hold heat such as concrete and asphalt introducing a rising error bias into measurements remains more statistically signifigant than the reported rise in temperature.
You can't claim X is happening based on measured trends in A, B, and C, when the margin of error in A, B, and C are greater than your measured trends! You can't claim Y is happening because of A and B when M can negate A-L combined!
And as for human impact, the Greenland ice core samples show orders of magnitude greater temperature swings without any industrial contribution whatsoever during the geologic past.
Until the science community can address these valid arguments with real data instead of ad-hoc attacks and "look at all these reports we smart people published" (and got our budgets preserved or even increased based upon the threats therein with a little help from media alarmism and an uneducated, unquestioning public), there will remain plenty of skeptics.
Hold on there cowboy... First of all, the mechanics of climate change are very poorly understood (by any scientists).
And the planet is getting hotter.
But you are absolutely correct, the earth has been warming up. Never mind that its been cooling off for the last 1000 years.
Ozone depletion (yes, it IS linked to global warming) is worsening.
Ozone depletion research corresponds nicely with the expiration of the patent on Freon. Anyone with any knowledge of chemistry realizes that when a cosmic ray hits O2 it form 03 (ozone). In other words, depleting ozone just makes the atmosphere produce more ozone.
These are scientific facts that no amount of bullshit rhetoric will change.
You're not much of a scientist if you can't distinguish between facts and conclusions. Just because the planet is warming up doesn't mean that human activity has anything to do with it. (It doesn't mean that it doesn't have anything to do with it either) Any correlation between particular types of human activity and global warming is just that, correlation, which proves NOTHING, and certainly isn't a fact.
If you would like to read more about the kind of fallacious argument you are making, read "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field" by Kary Mullis. He's a real scientist, and has a Nobel Prize. And he's not a conservative, nor is he bought by industry. Nor does he engage in "Bullshit rhetoric".
--Rich
Free your mind and your Ass will follow -- George Clinton
Put me down as believing that the climate is warming, most probably because we are still emerging from the "little ice age" of the 1700's, and that we have not reached the temperatures common in the 1200's (it was warm enough then that the vikings could settle in Greenland!).
Given those long-term trends, I find the evidence that human greenhouse gas generation is driving the warming effect to be unconvincing.
The deregulation was put into place during a Republican administration with the full support of the industries being deregulated.
Oh, right -- blame Pete Wilson. Last I checked it was the legislature and not the governor that writes the laws. It went into force on Davis's watch because it was passed by a democratic legislature.
California currently has democratic governor, democratic legislature, two democratic senators, and mostly democratic representatives. It voted heavily for Clinton and Gore in the last 3 elections. Yet as soon as something bad happens, they're blaming Bush and the previous governor. Odd that one is before and one is after the problem started.
And of course the industry loves partial deregulation. Why wouldn't they? When the government is stupid enough to give you a non-free marketplace advantage, you take it. I wish I'd bought their stock - it's probably outperformed the NASDAQ pretty well.
Having personally launched and tracked balloons (with scientists from the University of Wyoming) to sample the ozone layer over Antarctica and worked with NASA scientists on the retrieval and processing of the data from TOMS-EP (a satellite that uses reflected sunlight to indirectly measure column ozone over any lit spot on the earth), I think can respond to this.
Ozone is created and destroyed constantly all over the earth. It's how we are protected from UV radiation from the Sun. What occurs over Antarctica, the "Ozone Hole", is a case where under certain conditions, more ozone is destroyed than created, disrupting the equilbrium. You need three things in proximity to shift the balance - temperatures around -80C at about 100km altitude (30,000 ft.), a depletion agent (chlorine, bromine, etc.) and sunlight (energy). If you don't have the right temperatures, ice particles of the proper size can't form, eliminating the site where depletion happens. If you have no agent, there's nothing to catalyze the reaction. If you have no energy, there is no way to sever the O3 bonds.
All winter long, ozone forms over the South Pole as the air gets colder and colder due to radiation cooling in the absence of sunlight. The cold air can't mix with warmer air from temperate latitudes because of the circumpolar winds which corral-in the air over the polar plateau (which is two miles tall, exascerbating the heat loss). By the time the first rays of sunlight hit in late August, the ozone concentration at 100km is at its annual peak. Over the next few days, the concentration of ozone plummets dramatically. By the first week of October, the air has warmed up enough that there are no ice crystals of the appropriate size for further loss to occur. There's still chlorine and energy, but no site for depletion to take place. A few weeks later, the upper atmosphere, now heated 24/7, is energetic enough to disrupt the circumpolar current and ozone poor air from above Antarctica mixes with ordinary air from the South Pacific and South Atlantic, diluting the concentration of ozone over the entire Southern Hemisphere.
Perhaps you have missed the warnings issued to southern Chile over the past couple of years about particularly dilute patches passing overhead and the risk of skin and eye damage from as little as 15 minutes exposure if unprotected? New Zealand (occupying from approximately 43 degrees S to 48 degrees S) is at similar risk.
Yes, depleting ozone just makes the atmosphere make more ozone, but it's not a uniform process. It's a seasonal process. This detail does not often make it into the popular press because it's a) not sensational enough and b) too complicated to fit into a sound bite. What scientists currently study is not the percentage of ozone in the stratosphere (at the right altitudes to form the right kind of ice crystals, it's 0% by the start of Summer), it's not the physical size of the hole (which is determined by the shape of Antarctica and the circumpolar current), it's how fast the hole appears as compared to the winter-time minimum and the spring-time maximum extent.
As to the impact of human activity, the documented trends are that chlorine at 100km parallels (with a 18-month lag) the amount of release at ground level, and the more chlorine that's up there, the higher the rate of formation of the hole. It's not a straight uphill line; it has its minor variations up and down like a stock market graph. The overall trend, from decade to decade is up and up and up.
-ethan
http://penguincentral.com/ozone.html
I wish more people were this level-headed (as lythander). I am continually amazed at how people leap to conclusions without supporting facts.
Glancing around at other posts, my amazement continues. People are quick to blur the difference between fact and supposition, and this sort of muddy thinking only hurts the situation, it doesn't help.
And while I'm posting...
"When a serious matter like medical research involving stem cells from frozen embryos arises, politicians worry at least as much about religious support as they do about what scientists advise."
Couldn't politicians be concerned that life begins at conception rather than birth? That's the real crux of the abortion debate, too. Every human is granted rights in our country, but at what point do we consider them "human."
I don't see this as a religious debate at all. I find it unforunuate that so often "religious" people are assailed in such ways. And while I won't agree that some politicians make their decisions based on popular opinion, I hold out hope that others follow their conscience, and I find it perfectly reasonable that some might believe that life begins at conception.
Guess I'm getting off-topic. I'm just sick of this sort of poor journalism. Does Katz get paid for this rubbish?
What if I gave you three dollars? How much? Thr-- four dollars? Keep talking, I'm listening.
The Earth has gone through several interglacial warming cycles throughout the last few millions of years. Indeed, there is ample evidence that at various times during the span of this planet's existence that global temperatures have been above that measured during the short timeframe that humans have occupied. What caused these global temperature variations is the subject of numerous research efforts. The conclusions of these research projects vary from changes in the amount of CO2 that can be stored in the world's oceans to the density of terristrial plant life.
My greatest concern isn't necessarily that the Earth may be warming; that may have occurred regardless of the activity of humans. What concerns me is the adaptation that we may lack when sudden and possibly catastrophic changes in ocean thermohaline currents occur. Can we, as a species, adapt quickly enough to make significant changes to our livestyles to adjust to a shorter growing season in the north; can we migrate millions of people from what will become uninhabitable areas during extended winters in the northern hemisphere; will we survive our retreat back to the equator without hostile action with our southern neighbors?
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
You do realize that the earth's climate fluctuates wildly over long periods of time. Every few thousand years there is an ice age, during which time thousands of species can become extinct. With this in mind, please tell me why the human race is doomed to become extinct due to global warming? If we're affraid for the very existence of our race over adversely affecting the climate, then we need to be equally, if not more, concerned about the natural changes to our climate.
Also, who is to say that global warming isn't going to save the human race from the next ice age?
Please note, I am not proposing that *I* know the answers to any of this, but the truth is that no one does. No one even has a clue what global warming will do, or that it is even really happening. The climate changes observed during the last 100 years are in no way out of sorts with the normal climate changes that natually occur.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Of course air pollution is bad. In lots of cities you can smell it all the time, and even see it. It covers trees with soot, and probably causes lung disease. However, we have already seen the affects of air pollution, and we have even been able to control it somewhat. Cities like L.A. actually have cleaner air than in the past. It's not good, but it's simply not endangering our species, while the argument with global warming is completely different in that no one has a fucking clue what it amounts to, or that it really exists.
With all that said, I am extremely in favor of cutting back on polution, and especially finding alternative fuel solutions. Not only is fossil fuel dirty, but it's also going to run out someday, that is an undisputable fact.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Learn to read. The climatic changes over the last 50 - 100 years are perfectly consistent with climatic changes that happen over such timespans. What we have is approximately a 1 1/2 degree temperature difference from ~100 years ago, which is perfectly consistent. What's got people worried is the fact that it coincides with the tremendous burning of fossil fuels. Creating CO2 SHOULD increase the temperature, that's a fact, but no one knows how much. We have NOT seen any changes that are undeniably the result of increased CO2.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Well, here you are; I'm a *real* scientist. I'm even a climate researcher. I think it's fair to say that there no doubht that the climate is warming and basic physics (plus data from the not so distant past) shows that increasing CO2 will warm the planet. To say that because I think (not believe as I agree that many environmentalists are quasi-religious) that global warming is happening, and thus that I'm an liberal environmentalist, is like claiming that all doctors who care for lung cancer patients are out to get tobacco companies. Mike. PS. I've voted just about equally for republican and democrat presidential candidates. In my experience most scientists are politically lazy and don't even vote at all. And note that when given the chance I hunt, fish and the burn trees to cook said victums, but yes I care to have a clean health environment. Scary, no?
... a long hole, surrounded by metal or plastic, centered around the hole. -- science describes a
Umm, pal.
I should have emphasized my main point a bit more. We are not merely putting CO2 into the atmosphere (we do that anyway just by breathing), we are putting HUGE AMOUNTS of CO2 into the air.
The trees use some in photosynthesis and the oceans can absorb some but we have simply released too much CO2 for some kind of worldwide change not to happen, as I was trying to mention above.
A lot of libertarians are victims of this sort of propaganda, and of course, a lot of /.ers are libertarians, so this is the sort of thing one might expect. This particular piece of nonsense was a constant in the coal company litany for years, though it's no longer true. 1940 is chosen because it was an unusually warm year - that spike was chosen not because 1940 is a round number but because it was the warmest year in the 20 years on either side of it. So there's a basic dishonesty there which has taken many people in. What's more, it is no longer true. Though 1940 over the 1890 baseline was over half the warming through the early 1990s, the warming has accelerated over the past decade (as expected and as predicted by theory and model).
The rest of the points are less egregiously misleading, but are the sort of carefully selected fact-wielding that junk scientists on both sides of any issue wield. The preponderance of the evidence supports the simple physics - carbon is being released into the active atmosphere/biosphere system, resulting in a residual buildup of CO2, which is a greenhouse gas, resulting in warming.
Climatology is a complicated science, but the basic facts of the matter are simple, and nothing in the complicated science shows any signs of contradicting the simple analysis. Exponentially increasing world fossil fuel consumption means exponentially more CO2 in the air above baseline means accelerating temperature increases. Period. The details are complicated, but those basic facts are not disputable any more except by people who are selective with their evidence.
As a matter of fact, I do have a Ph.D. in climatology, thanks.
mt
It's funny, but generally browsing the responses to this article, you'd come to the conclusion that most people disagree with global warming, therefore, it's not real. Of course, in science we don't vote on the facts. Clearly there is an issue with global warming (every country outside the US is convinced), but large energy companies are against doing anything about it, and generally so is the public.
As long as we have a president cozying up to his buddies in the oil industry, a public that loves to drive their gas-wasting SUVs, and an industry that depends on both to make record profits, you'll always have a group of people that claims that global warming isn't happening.
Science isn't enough to combat this, because the US has been steadily becoming anti-science since probably the 1970s. The US became very concerned about Russia becoming a threat in the 1950s due to Sputnik, so there was an agressive campaign to increase the science-literacy of students in schools. These days, things are much different. Today, we have a number of states that tried (or are trying) to remove biological evolution from public schools and teach myths instead. Every newspaper in the country carries astrological horoscopes to "tell you your future". Some guy has his own cable show where he "talks" to audience members' dead relatives. Is this the society that you think will be convinced they should give up their 8 MPG SUVs to prevent the Earth's climate from changing?
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
The problem with the whole Global Warming debate is most people can only tell you there is Global Warming because some actor or rock star told them there was. The general public couldn't name one scientist that has proven that Global Warming exists but because Ted Danson and his toupee said there is Global Warming, there must be. Its a sad statement of our culture. As long as you are popular, rich, beautiful and have the right press agents, you can push any sort of BS on the American public -- shades of the 1930s in Germany.
I am actually more worried about Global Cooling. NYC has been so cold this summer! We have only broken 90 once -- it was 62 F last night! We are due for a nice little ice age any day now (geologically speaking) and all this effort to prevent greenhouse gases might just help mother nature take us there sooner.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Rarely, if ever, do you watch the 6 o'clock news and hear "Scientists report that the status quo is a-okay." Telling us that everything is fine tends to lose ratings to more shocking, if less credible, news. Researchers looking to make names for themselves can release controversial findings to catapult themselves into the spotlight. In the case of global warming, researchers will get funding because they're siding with the enormously powerful environmental lobbies. Corporations like the PR they get from giving grants to research the environmental groups that release many of these findings.
Just a few weekends ago John Stossel on ABC did a "gimmee a break" report on how the environmental lobbies have basically succeeded in convincing many American public school children that Man is destroying the planet. Children were interviewed, saying things about how cities were going to flood and pollution would be so bad that no one will be able to breathe. Did anyone else see this report? Environmental lobbies know that if they can create this sort of mentality, they will receive funding and power for their pet causes in the future.
People have been constantly told that everything man creates is horrible, while everything natural is inherently good. Yet it's only because Man has tamed nature somewhat that people don't fear being attacked by wild animals on their way to work. While everyone _could_ forgo modern convenience for a more primitive lifestyle, mortality rates would shoot through the roof. While many environmentalists wish we could be as in tune with nature as Native Americans once were, Stossel's aforementioned report pointed out that the life expectancy for these environmentally friendly people was only 30 years.
Like every other issue, you should never blindly trust what you hear. The extreme right-wing would say exactly the opposite as environmentalists--using fossil fuels is good for the air, carbon dioxide emissions are making life better for people--for the same reasons: greed and lust for power. Jon Katz probably knows all of this, but is more concerned with creating debate than presenting the facts. After all, it's better for his career.
Last month's U.S. government report on Global warming did show that there is definite warming going on. I'll keep my laughter about G.W. ordering the report to myself.
Except that report confirmed exactly what Bush has been saying: there is a consensus on the warming, but there is no consensus at all on what role, if any, human beings are playing in it.
The ozone hole is real, and for a really good description of it and how close we came to killing off most life on this planet, I suggest you read Billions and Billions by Carl Sagan, which has a great chapter on exactly this.
He explains why it takes years for our changes in emissions to take effect and how we really came close to wiping out all the plankton in our oceans. Plankton is, the beginning of the food chain, and you wipe it out, and you pretty much wipe out the entire chain.
Is Sagan an alarmist or an extremist? I guess that's the question you have to ask. His essay provides enough annotations and evidence that I give it a great deal of creedance. He was also one of the most respected scientists of the late 20th century.
Your statement is evidence of precisely the problem that besets us constantly, viz.
Special interests from the fringes of the spectrum have been all too willing to impose their political views on their interpretations of science.
In this country we could use more of people willing to apply sound scientific principles to influence their political views.
Usually, it suffices for many to sample filtered "facts" to support hypotheses that make them most comfortable, ignoring the rest and refusing to consider more facts to support alternative hypotheses.
Global warming is still somewhat contentious from a scientific vantage point, with much suggestive evidence indicating that it is a real man-made phenomena, but without the kind of ironclad proof that we would all like to have.
In that sense, I think the issue is akin to where we were in the 1960's, evaluating health risks from cigarette smoking. Statistical evidence was piling up to a considerable weight, while the Tobacco Institute kept holding out for a demonstrated biochemical pathway that remained elusive for a while longer.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The UN is so far off in la-la land that it voted the USA off the human rights commission and replaced it with Sudan!
Sudan wasn't competing with US for membership on the commission - US was competing with other European countries for "Western" spots.
After breaking or stating they intend to break international treaties (Kyoto, ban on nuclear tests, ABM) and in general not caring anything about the rest of the world, US won't get a lot of favors from Europe. Bush is making a great job of creating enemies of former allies with his right-wing views (some would say "extremist" views, and outside the US they would be correct).
Of course, the fact that the US didn't have an ambassador to the UN doesn't exactly make it more likely to gain allies in the fight for a place in the comittee - and for human rights, the fact that US is the worst in the west should make it pretty clear they didn't belong on the comitte (death penalty being a major issue - US' friends on this subject are China, Iran and Saudi Arabia)
Perhaps because science and technology have always been dominated by educated, sometimes arrogant elites
Must be a new record, usually I read at least half of Jon's articles. Don't you have to be educated to be in a science or technology field? Is this opposed to science and technology that is dominated by people that are uneducated? Also if I'm educated does that make me sometimes arrogant and always elite? or is that sometimes arrogant and sometimes elite? Whatever. At any rate the statement makes no sense, and does nothing for Katz's rant on global warming or his typical buy into the popular media attitude.
Now if someone could just tell me why I don't go and turn of the Jon Katz box .... I guess I'm just masicistic
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The Anti-Blog
Our planet has seen everything...ice ages, heat waves...I've lost track of how much the temperature of this planet has fluxuated, and I'm not worried about it now. Imagine the worry the people here in North America must have went through back about 8000 years ago when the pollar ice caps were receeding: "This just in: half of North America's land is covered by icy glaciers, but they are receeding at an alarming rate. According to estimates, at this rate, by the year 2000 BC, glaciers will cover only 1/50th of North America! PANIC!!!"
If anyone has ever been to Lake Louise in Canada, there's a nearby glacier (I forget the name) where the path you walk on to go see it has signs saying where the location of the glacier was in 1880, 1900, 1950, 1955, etc. In 1880, the glacier reached all the way to the parking lot of the visitors center, while today it's nearly 2/3rds of a mile away. So how come they didn't start to worry about this problem in 1880 or 1900? Because our planet has been on a constant warming trend for the past 1000 years.
Really, ask any scientist. The problem with analizing the weather is that everyone thinks that you can "accurately" measure the average temperature of the Earth by doing just that. The problem is that the weather has such incredible fluxuations that your findings in a span of 10 years are going to differ from the last span of 10 years, and yet when you put those two periods together, you could conclude even more.
I mean, for my state during the 1990's, during the winter we saw record amounts of snow and temperatures that were way below average, during the time where global warming was "warming up" as a hot topic. Before then, we had a series of very mild winters. Back in the 1880's and 1890's, we saw some very heavy winters. Our weather has varried so much that it just continues on and on. Heck, in 1997 when we were having one of the worst winters ever, Anchorage, Alaska was having a very mild one. You could say that the world has always been warming up ever since the ice age a million years ago or however long ago it was.
What I wish is that people would stop worrying about all the smoke that's dubiously contributing to global warming and instead worry about all the smoke that's contributing to air polution.
I don't care that the karma police are gone and that my post is probably going to go unheard by most of you, but I need to get this off my back.
I KNOW that the Earth is warming up. Every single stupid report I have seen circulating around in newspapers, magazines, scientific journals, and online articles have said it is warming up. But I don't care. Why?
Because you are all ROOKIES when it comes to weather. That's right. I'm NOT a weatherman. I have not studied bullshit when it comes to weather outside the little quips that our local weatherman gives at 6:13pm every night when the news is on. But I do know this: The Earth has been around for thousands/millions/billions of years, and weatherman have been able to accurately measure the last 100 years.
THAT'S why I don't listen to people complain about global warming. This planet has been here for far too long for you to step in in the last 100 years and say to the world that because the weather in the last 10 years has grown proposterously (aka 1.7 F or whatever the number is), that this is cause for the apocolypse.
You have NO idea what "normal weather" is supposed to be. You only know what has happened in the past 100 years. Well guess what? The industrial age began over 200 years ago. We've been pouring industrial smoke in the air for a long time. We've been screwing up this world long before that. But we managed to live through 6000+ years of weather.
So don't cram down my throat that what's been going on in the past 10 years is cause for worry. You have no idea what's gone on in the past 6000, and until you do, don't use your life to stand as the prime example of the human race.
I'm sure there would be a lot less global warming if it wasn't for all the hot air that blows from Jon Katz.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Well actually yeah we do, it's really, really big and called the universe <grin>. But your point is still well taken.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Not that I don't necessarily disagree with you, but you need to support your argument better. A theory IS NOT reality, it is a possible reality. Even less scientific law IS NOT reality, it is a framework that enables us to think and reason about the world around us, but there is NO way of ever knowing that it's true, just that it's the best fit so far. You have to remember that these are theories, if there was sufficient proof, they would be scientific law which is still debatable (see above) but could at least be considered solid.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Whoops you're correct. Serves me right for trying to make a quick joke without checking verifying my memory. . I guess it's been to long since I've looked at that stuff.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
I live in MN. It's been cold as hell up here this summer. It's finally beginning to warm up, in the middle of July. No warming here!
1) Is the warming real?
Yes - there is enough data to show the Earth is warmer now than 100 years before (ignoring the other 4.5+Gyr for the moment).
2) Is it due to man-made causes?
No - the scientific data (not GCM models based on CO or CO2 as being the primary greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, except that would be water, which ISN'T contained in any GCM because that is a much harder thing to model --- oops) show that anthropogenic global warming as the primary cause either violates basic cause-and-effect (the temperature build-up occurs before 1945 and then essentially levels out), or there's a global cooling effect that is being ignored by the GCMs that for the most part counteracts the predictions over the last 50 years!
There's another "claim" that's bandied around which is to say that "most" scientists support the belief of anthropogenic global warming. This started with some list that was referred to by the White House in a press conference, except that no one that I know of has ever been able to get a copy of that list. On the other hand, nearly 20,000 physicists, climate scientists, etc. signed a petition NOT supporting the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, which was slammed by the eco-fundies (who also attempted to taint the data by registering fake people - which goes to show how honest some of them are --- and yes, I'm one of the signers, have read the research papers, and drew my own educated opinion on the subject).
What's sad is that most of the people who have strong opinions on this topic have never looked at the data, or have looked at horrible distortions of the data (the plot in Earth in the Balance makes one feel that there's a huge explosion in CO in the last 100 years, until you discover that all the other data points have been binned differently --- I refer the reader to Tufte's excellent books and what he says about "the lie factor").
Go back to Friis-Christensen and Lasser (1991, in Science or Nature) look at that plot, compare to the actual warming trends. Then look at the warming trends over the last few millenia, and once you've removed the solar component that's obviously there, examine what's left. Perhaps there IS a man-made component lurking in there somewhere, but so far it's a small fraction of a degree.
The dire consequences for low-elevations doesn't care if the cause is man-made or not. However, the best plan of attack DOES change depending on our choice of allocating resources. Throwing $$$ at the "man-made" solution when there's no demonstrable effect could do MORE harm than good if $$$ isn't available when nature continues unabated. In that regard the anti-Kyoto people might be more on-target then the people who are trying to save the Earth.
A great article that talks about how scientists should be objective.
Yes, we have a severe effect on the amount of carbon dioxide, and currently there is more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than ever in the history of the earth. The ppm of CO2 is skyrocketing off the charts.
This may not be totally bad. The show mentioned that CO2 makes great plant fertilizer. Plants grow much better under high-CO2 atmospheres. Really, the coal industry funded a major study showing that CO2 in the atmosphere isn't such a bad thing! The bad news is, well, I wouldn't want to live in Florida.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Read the news! Planting trees won't do much to help the situation.
That's a lot of obfuscation you've thrown in there, but most of it is not relevant (nor is it scientifically sound). There are two things that we know about global warming (facts -- not disputed by any reputable scientist).
1. CO2 in the atmosphere absorbs energy from the sun (i.e. heat). This is why Venus is the hottest planet. It is also why the temperature of Venus only drops by 3 degrees during the very long Venutian night.
2. We (humans) are putting a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere in a very short amount of time.
It is true that climate models are generally crappy, but that doesn't mean that we are unable to predict general trends, and that has been done. The temperature is rising, and we have an explanation for why. All of the other crap that is thrown around is just speculation that maybe there is something else in the environment that counteracts the effects of CO2 or that maybe something else is responsible for the increase in temperature. But it's just speculation. The simplest explanation that is supported by real evidence (invoking Occam's Razor) is that CO2 is causing the temperature of the atmosphere to rise. Simplicity is the rule of scientific reasoning, unless the simple explanations fail to explain the evidence.
It remains to be seen what kind of impact this will have on the environment, and that's where the real disagreement between scientists comes in. But I say leave well enough alone. It's not likely to help things, and if it hurts, it may be bad enough that we can't dig our selves out of it. Why take huge risks like that when we don't have to?
Don't know about Germany, but England has been inside the Kyoto C02 limits for years, thanks to converting much of there old coal fire power stations to natural gas. We're also investing heavily in Hydroelectric, Wind and Tidal power research projects. In additional nuclear power seem to be slowly get back in vogue.
France has always been one of the most nuclear powered nations on earth, and creates much less C02 than most other nations of there economic size. France has always taken the stragratic view that they don't want to be over dependent on Fossil fuels becuase they have none of there own.
For those who don't know, the Maunder Minimum was a period of unusually low solar output which occurred several hundred years ago and correlated with low global temperatures. Whole carnivals were held in the middle of the Thames river because it froze over hard, Louis XIV had warmer floors installed in Versailles, and the canals froze in Amsterdam.
My understanding from my astrophycist friends is that we're not actually presently in another Maunder Minimum period, but that present sunspot activity seems awfully similar to the activity the sun exhibited immediately before the Maunder Minimum. It also seems similar to activity exhibited by other stars shortly before what are believed to be their reduced activity periods. (One of my close friends is big in hunting down other stars similar to our sun, but there isn't enough information to draw conclusions yet.)
In other words, folks, we might possibly be in for a minor ice-age soon. Also, since solar activity continues to correlate with global temperature, either global warming we are presently observing is caused by the sun, or our use of aerosol cans here is somehow turning up the temperature on the surface of the sun.
Now, please excuse me while I climb into an asbestos suit, and while you're aiming your flamethrowers at me please remember that I'm actually a radical liberal and believe strongly in living in an unpolluted environment, I just want some factual reality involved.
Frankly, I'd have to agree with you. I know everyone loves to bash Jon Katz on here, so it's quite the cliche. I've never read any of his articles, and I know why now. Not clear writing is definately the way to put it.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Nevermind science, I'm a product of pop culture! And boy, I sure do like hot weather!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
It's good too see someone has the good sense to post some evidence on here. Naturally, no one listens to it, here at least. Why listen when we can use such logic as: "But it was cold than usual here yesterday, so global warming must not exist!" or, another favorite: "But cold weather sucks! Global warming isn't happening, but if it was, I welcome it!"
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Evidence? Bah! Who cares! I have faith that counters the evidence! If I ignore it really hard it'll go away!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I definitely agree, Jon Katz isn't presenting the full story and his logic is fuzzy.
Katz says the U.S. is becoming one of the most resented countries in the world. Hello Katz! The U.S. has ALWAYS been one of the most resented countries because of its prosperity. The rest of the world loves to belittle the U.S. for any reason it can come up with because of its prosperity.
Next Katz talks about surveys:
67% of Americans surveyed believed that increased carbon dioxide and other gases released into the atmosphere would, if unchecked, lead to global warming and increasing average temperatures.
Since when does the general public have the scientific knowhow to analyze factors and trends in the Earth's chemical content? They think that because its what they are TOLD by the liberal media not because they have made a scientific analysis of the situation.
Katz goes on to say that this issue is going to capture large amounts of attention and that our nation's president is definitely on the unpopular side. Katz, the environmentalist left has been preaching this for decades. The truth is that global warming is NOT based on fact it is based on scare tactics. If the rest of the world jumped off a bridge would the U.S jump too? I'm proud that our president has stood up for his belief that environmentalism, when carried to the extreme, is very unhealthy for everybody. If you believe that global warming is truly a threat, do your homework and research the topic instead of blindly trusting liberal rhetoric. You'll find that global warming is actually at odds with science and is just another political tool.
The Tick : Spooooooooooooooooooooon!.
The Tick : Spooooooooooooooooooooon!.
Neo : There is no spoon.
I concur :) By having global warming, the earth will actually increase the amount of arable land. Northern Canada and Siberia will eventually become fertile farmlands, for example :) There are a lot of other silly "what if?"s that global warming fanatics raise, like weather phenomina, etc, but it is just pure speculation, and pointless speculation at that. Life has survived through past cycles, it'll certainly survive through this one. :)
-= rei =-
"This may be presumptuous..." "That's my favorite kind of 'This'."
We do know that this is a trend. We have antarctic ice core samples that go back 420,000 years, showing three up-down temperature cycles in that period. We're supposed to be getting warmer right now. We've just accelerated it a bit.
-= rei =-
"This may be presumptuous..." "That's my favorite kind of 'This'."
Yep :) And that's why it balances out. It actually more than balances out, in the favor of new growth. Throughout history, pollen counts have been highest during the warm periods between ice ages, at their peaks. We're still on the upslope from the last ice age. Sure, we're speeding the slope up, buuut... :)
-= rei =-
"This may be presumptuous..." "That's my favorite kind of 'This'."
(addressed to you and the person you replied to):
Do you realize how much of a raise we're talking about here? A little over 200 feet. That's not a huge dent on farmland. And, that's if everything melted. The average temperature (average, now) is -37 degrees celcius. We've seen a few degrees change since accurage measurements began in the early 1800s. And about half of that was expected, just from the fact that we're still recovering from the last ice age.
-= rei =-
"This may be presumptuous..." "That's my favorite kind of 'This'."
Ah, but we're talking about *everything melting*. Sea levels have risen about 3 inches since accurate measurements started in the 1800s. That's not even going to touch you ;)
-= rei =-
"This may be presumptuous..." "That's my favorite kind of 'This'."
All you have to do is read some of the descriptions of what goes on in places like The Three Sisters and especiallyYellowstone to get a real scare--the place has heaved up 86 cm this century.
A major caldera explosion at yellowstone could cover the American breadbasket with ash and plunge the world into volcanic winter.
So, why don't they build huge hydrothermal plants at places like that to siphon off some of the heat. That is, assuming that we could actually make a difference. When you are dealing with something capable of ejecting 240 cubic *miles* of ash into the atmosphere, I'm inclined to think we will be powerless.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Or you could just convince the ignorant masses that there really is a global catastrophe coming and put them on the rockets first... After we've shot them off into space, we have the whole planet to ourselves.
"He was a wise man who invented beer." -- Plato
I'm glad Hollywood has finally gotten around to recognizing global warming. It's about time.
Hopefully they can make a movie about a time in the near future, when we've destroyed almost all plant and animal life on the planet, even exausting the supply of plankton in the ocean, and the only thing humans have left to eat are other humans. But most people wouldn't know that their food is people -- it would be kept a secret from the population. And then, in the last scene, the truth should be revealed! That would be a cool movie. Why hasn't hollywood made something like that yet? What a bunch of lame asses.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Try re-reading that comment after smoking a big bat ;)
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
It doesn't help when imbeciles like Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.) dismiss scientific evidence as "Liberal Claptrap"
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I saw a pretty interesting program on TV a while ago, and have since been reading up on it a bit.. According to a growing group of scientists, the real reason for the ups and downs of the earth temperature that we are observing are in fact caused by solar activity!
In short, the theory is that when the suns solar activity increases, the intensity of the magnetic field around the solar system increases. This field is part of what shields us from the so-called cosmic rays, rays from distant objects and energies in the universe.
Now suppose it's true as they claim to have found, that the level of cosmic rays influences our atmospheres ability to block or 'keep' sun radiation, and a whole new dimension is suddenly added to the discussion.
Using similiar methods as for tracking the environment back in time, they tracked the level of cosmic rays backwards in time aswell, and found a 100% match between the levels of cosmic rays and the average temperature on earth. And as if that wasn't enough, it even was able to explain the 'exceptions' from the until-now believed CO2 rule, like during the second world war when the CO2 levels in the air were immensely increased compared to the years before and after, but the temperature was falling..
Problem: Political unwillingness to consider new views and theories. And ofcourse the fact that politicians and environmental organizations already have spent billions in time and money on the CO2 'problem'... It's not hard to imagine how embarrassing it would be for them to admit that they might have been wrong..
Love over Gold.
Are you insane? If we set our minds to it, we could fuck up the planet in a jiffy. Step 1: make a lot of nukes. Step 2: nuke everything. Result? Roaches and heavy radioactivity.
If we could bring about mass extinction and heavy mutation, what makes you think it'd be "arrogant" to think we could affect the balance of the ecosystem? And if we can, what's unreasonable about thinking burning hundreds of millions of tons of fossil fuels might have an impact?
Spielberg raises some profound moral issues involving A.I. in his new movie, drawing a number of critical raves but proving a disappointment at the box office
AI was a box office disappointment? It's made almost $60 million in less than 2 weeks. What do you call a success?
Like sex? Read and write about it! Indecent Blogging
Mosquitoes and other disease vectors will have new ranges open to them, and diseases will spread quickly among vulnerable populations of animals, plants, and people.
Dont underestimate the power of humans to change climate. It is well within our power the eliminate all vegetation on the surface of the earth in a geological instant. We have a massive effect on the earths albedo and chemical composition. A very small change in the energy in the earth's system can have a very macroscopic effect.
When weather changes, it tends to do so quickly, though it can change back just as fast. And the effect of civilization on the earth is unprecedented- so looking at the geological record is of limited utility.
The Earth has nothing to fear from humans. Itll recover even if we wipe ourselves out by ruining our habitat.
Now, as we bare more of our skin when we go out, the skin cancer rates rise from when we kept more of ourselves covered. Seems like there's a corellation there.
Yes, I know corellation does not necessarily indicate causality, but still... look at it and think about it.
Despite the overwhelming opinion so far that there is no global warming I can't help but scratch my head and wonder why people seem to be in denial about it. Calls for "more research" seems to be a typical response to the non-believer but there is a crapload of research already out there supporting this theory. Check out http://www.ciesin.org/TG/OZ/oz-home.html and look at the picture at the top of the page. Is the satellite that took the picture lying? Did the scientists that control the satellite alter the data? Come on, there's a huge freakin' hole in the atmosphere and anybody can take a picture of it given they have the right technology to do so.
Doesn't it seem odd that we're about the only nation in the world that hasn't accepted the global warming theory and that we're the one nation that will suffer the most economically if we enact the necessary cutbacks and reforms? Do you think that the oil and automotive industries aren't trying to protect their interests and are at this moment lobbying hard in Washington to stall or kill any global warming related reforms?
It's beyond me how a statement like "show me an environmentalist and I'll show you a cult follower" earns a score 5:Insightful rating. All scientists and environmentalists that support pro global warming theories are cult followers and have no real basis to support their beliefs. Right. I think hell would freeze over before a "Show me a Linux user and I'll show you an anti-Microsoft anti-innovation zealot." statement got modded to score 5:Insightful.
I think that stem cell research would have been a far better example of the current administration's disconnect with modern science. Already, stauch Bush supporters and anti-abortion crusaders like Orrin Hatch have recognized the potential that stem-cell research offers. Nevertheless, Bush is stalling on the issue and is likely to render a decision that is detrimental to the scientific community--putting him in conflict with over 75% of Americans.
The fact that Europeans acknowledge the importance of global warming does not, in any way, indicate that they are more attuned to how science should affect policy. In fact, their irrational crusade against genetically modified crops, in spite of the fact that there is no evidence supporting thewir health and environmental concerns, is no less a product of ignorance than Bush's reluctance to acknowledge global warming.
The simple fact is that both conservatives and liberals will deliberately remain ignorant of scientific facts for the purpose of pandering to their constituencies.
Lenny
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
Perhaps it's not modded up because it mischaracterized the findings of the NAS. The NAS most emphatically did not agree on the global warming issue.
If you simply look at the actual report (rather than the press kit summary), you will see that they said there is no consensus and no certainty concerning the conventional wisdom of CO2 causing catastrophic global warming.
Here is what the NAS actually said:
That's from page 1 of the report. If you click here you can order a copy the 28-page report yourself. As shot as it is, the word "uncertain" or "uncertainty" appears 43 times.
Or you can go here and read how two actual participants in the study reacted to the massive distortion of their findings by the global-warming crowd and their cheerleaders in the media. It's loaded with actual facts about the NAS findings, something the global warming debate could use a lot more of.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
2. We (humans) are putting a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere in a very short amount of time.
What do you mean by "huge amount"? One statistic that the anti-alarmist crowd likes to trot out is that the total industrial-age output of CO2 from fossil fuel burning is less than the CO2 blasted from a single volcanic eruption.
Clearly, the biosphere is more than capable of adjusting to a massive injetion of carbon into the atmosphere. It has had to do so on many occations.
Putting that aside for a moment, there are a couple questions worth asking:
What is the exact percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere today?
How much has it risen since... oh, say 1960?
How much of that change is from man-made sources?
Simply looking at a net 1 degree change in temperature over 120 years of land measurements is hardly evidence that we are putting ourselves in grave danger. It might not even be something that we are doing.
Another point of yours I take issue with:
It is true that climate models are generally crappy, but that doesn't mean that we are unable to predict general trends, and that has been done.
As I said before, use those models to predict general trends with data from 20 years ago, and they prove to be wildly inaccurate. Why should we trust the predictions that they make with current data?
The simplest explanation that is supported by real evidence (invoking Occam's Razor) is that CO2 is causing the temperature of the atmosphere to rise.
No, the simplest explanation is that global climate is in constant flux, and a change of 1 degree over 120 years is nothing to be overly concerned about.
Furthermore, what nobody who replied to me wants to address is the fact that the only total global measurement (total atmostphere, including over the oceans, measured mostly from space) record we have (which goes back a couple decades) show absolutely no evidence of global warming at all.
The only "evidence" of current global warming we have at this point is a record of land-based tempreature measurements going back to about the 1890's, and a lot of very unreliable predictive models which indicate trouble in the near future.
If you have other evidence to present, fine. I would love to see it. (And don't just link to yet another web site that will just repeat the same arguments we've seen here. Just tell me, in once paragraph, what other evidence do you know of which demonstrates that potentially catastrophic global warming is occurring?)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I read a report from two members of NAS which raised several issues:
1. There is no certainty about any of this. We are very bad at predicting weather, and still understand very little of it.
2. The computer models that people keep talking about don't work. If you give them data up to 1970 and ask them to predict 1990, they are way off. Not even close. This gives one reason to believe that we should not trust what it says about 2020 when we give it current data.
3. The land measurement records show a warmer earth now than 120 years ago... but most of the warming took place prior to 1940. This was followed by a couple decades of cooling! Then it started warming up again. The net change for those 120 years? Less than 2 degrees F.
4. Geological temeratures are in constant flux. From about 800 to 1300 AD there was successful agriculture in Greenland. The cold period of the centuries that followed forced the Vikings to abandon their settlements in North America, and shortened average human life spans in Europe by 10 years.
5. The only readings we have of the entire troposphere (from the Earth's surface to 30 miles up, measured everywhere, including over oceans), which have been gathered with the help of NASA and confirmed by balloon measurements, show absolutely no global warming over the last twenty years or so.
6. The sun spot cycles seem to have a much bigger impact on global climate than we once suspected. When your main source of heat is a massive, chaotic, uncontrolled fusion reaction, change is something you need to learn to expect.
7. Over the short term (less than a century or two), upper-atmosphere clouds have been discovered to be extremely efficient thermostats for the Earth. When the ammount of heat coming from the sun changes, the clouds get bigger or smaller to compensate, regulating the climate.
Some people feel that the best way to counter all this carbon going into the air (mostly in the form of CO2) is to use some kind of machine to extract atmospheric carbon. Fortunately, such machines already exist. They are called trees. It appears that John Denver had the solution to global warming figured out before anybody ever heard of it.
One last point. AI was not a bomb at the box office because interest in science is on the decline. Apollo 13 was a huge hit. AI was a bomb at the box office because it was a bad movie. Simple as that.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
There are perhaps two climatologists with tenure at top universities who like to get quoted in the business press about the limitations of scientific knowledge and the supercomputer models used to track and predict climate. They may be sincere; they may be whores. Some of the rest of the field may be whores too. But not the whole field, about 98% of which, by conventional measures of who gets called a 'scientist,' agree we have a tremendously serious threat.
Just curious, where do you "science is whatever it's convenient for me to believe, I burn a lot of gas, I want to believe I'm innocent" folks get your misinformation? And are you all regular /.ers - who seem generally aligned to rational, even deep discussions of science and technology premised on the truth of natural law and the reality of evidence - or is there some IRC channel where the 'global warming: myth' crowd gets their latest action alert to go to /. or wherever and moderate each other's nonsense up?
Sorry about the trolling, but jeeze y'all are doing way too much of it too.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
> Ask a dinosaur what it was like to have his
.033%v/v to about 0.043%v/v. (30% increase, which is an arbitrary increase I've made up)
> atmosphere altered.
An asteroid strike or severe volcanism doesn't rank up there with increasing CO2 content of the air from
Remember than methane is about 100x more potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. Since methane composes 2 ppm v/v (0.0002%), a 30% decrease in methane (to 1.6 ppm v/v) will result the same effect as a the increase in CO2.
How do we decrease methane? We all become vegetarians and get those pollution spewing cows and goats off the farms! Digestion processes of herbivors and of decay of organic matter (usually in swamps) are the two bigggest sources of methane.
Ban the cow. Open hunting season on wild goats and sheep. And fill in all the swamps. There is a recommendation for all you bleeding hearts who insist that Mother Earth's temperature should be kept from changing.
-AD
We are currently coming out of an Ice Age, caused by the interposition of dust between us and the sun. The Earth's orbit shifts over time, being rather complex, and part of this is that the plane of the ecliptic wobbles up and down.
The current wobble is taking us away from the clouds of dust, so in a few thousand years, the Earth will be warmer, and we will have far fewer meteor showers.
Using unleaded petrol or demanding cycle lanes all over isn't going to help.
You misunderstand me. I do not use the word belief to mean blind faith. I simply mean the state of being convinced of something.
Where we agree is that on this issue people's beliefs should be based on scientific evidence rather than a gut feeling or other factors.
There's a whole area of philosophy which deals with how we know what we know and how certain we can be of it. You yourself say that science is "our vision of truth, as close as we can get it". Sometimes science brings along a change so radical that it completely alters what we thought we knew ("the world is round not flat", "the earth goes around the sun"). So I think that using the word 'believe' is often more appropriate than 'know' - even where we are discussing scientific conclusions based on evidence.
To quote Obi-Wan Kenobi "Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view"
I'm not really disagreeing with your underlying point but you need to understand that faith can be based on evidence as much as it can be based on nothing or wishful thinking.
I agree with nearly all of what you've said.
However I think Jon Katz actually raising the issue of belief is a key one. Until people believe the problem is real they won't be motivated to make the changes, or influence their governments to make the changes.
I think all of three people saw Waterworld. Costner, the director, and Dennis Hopper.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
What I don't understand is why we don't have electric cars yet. No emissions, no high gas prices. Is it because of the influence of oil companies? lack of electricity (ex. rolling blackouts)? I just don't get it. Environmentally it makes so much sense- unless there is some huge problem with electric cars I am missing.
We were paralyzed because we have no equipment or experience dealing with snow. For our northern friends, if I point out that the city was literally "on hold" with Police warnings not to leave your home because of dangerous road conditions for three days, and then add that we got 1/4 inch of snow, they'll laugh their butts off. The problem is that everything is slanted here for water runoff, and all those overpasses and bridges all froze and we had no way to remove the ice, short of waiting for the sun to do it on its own. We tried to borrow de-icing equipment, but cities north of us who had it, were USING it, understandably.
If things start to get too warm we can cheaply fix it then. Edward Teller, father of the H bomb, had some suggestions along this line a few years ago. Essentially send up fine particles into the upper atmosphere just like a volcano. Or maybe by then then we'll have an even simpler more reliable solution using nanotech.
I don't know about anyone else, but personally I don't care if 100% of the "people on the street" believe whatever about a complex scientific issue. Without a lot of study and some minimal level of comprehension of the relevant science involved, all they are doing is parroting TV or People magazine or whatever.
If the stats were based on surveys of atmospheric physicists and climatologists, then maybe the stats would be relevant.
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
"Twenty-five signatures turns the most frightful stupidity into an opinion" -Kirkegaard
I live the the midwestern region of the United States and can give you INDISPUTABLE EVIDENCE of global warming within hours of my home. Look at the plains. Look at the rivers. Look at the moraines across Illinois and Wisconsin. This whole area was covered by a large sheet of ice only a short time ago (in geological terms).
The Earth has been getting warmer over the last million years or so. What about global erosion? I can show you Devil's Tower in WY where they have lost 1,200 feet of elevation over this same period.
Of course, no one wants to hear about this kind of cycle because it can't be blamed on Republicans or big business.
The liberals should just lobby congress or the UN to pass a law telling the Earth to stop changing. We like it the way it is. Stop climate change! Stop the axis wobble! Stop evolution and extinctions. We must protect the planet! Forget the fact that it was here long before us and will be here long after the last human is dust.
Viv
-----------
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
This is the nerd's folly: unwavering faith in the march of technology to get us out of whatever mess we find ourselves in. It doesn't work like that. We can't just assume that, for instance, should the earth become too inhospitable, we can pack our bags and move to Mars. Is it possible? Yeah, sure. But since it's not evenly remotely feasible now, we should treat out as what it is: a possibility, not a certainty.
It's even more depressing considering that this is the exact same reason people have trouble accepting the concept of global warming: we can't prove with 100% accuracy that it exists, so we should assume it doesn't. This is stupid. Adjusting our practices to be slightly less damaging isn't going to seriously harm anyone in the long run, and if global warming can eventually be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, we're in significantly better shape.
But nonetheless, people won't be willing to accept something like global warming until (if) the planet turns into a giant toaster oven, yet are perfectly willing to place their unwavering faith in a pipe dream that ensures that humanity can use its vast knowledge to adapt to whatever situation it finds itself in. And that, my friends, is a hypocrisy even worse than self-extinctionist hyperbole, because it has the potential to harm others just as readily as it can harm one's self.
Keep in mind, I've not said whether or not I believe in global warming, and I do believe that it is concievably possible that we could "build something that will let us survive" should the predicted catastrophes that would accompany it arrive. But I still don't see the point in betting our entire society and way of life, if not our continued existence as a species itself, on such a gamble.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
Goto Google, type in "UHIE" or "Urban Heat Island Effect". Tada! *Still* unrefuted (haven't seen a good write-up against it) proof that "Global Warming" is the "Troll of the 20th Century".
I don't know what specific question they asked, but in general polls like this are totally useless. Why? Because they ask questions in the format "Would you like X to happen?" without ever exploring any of the costs involved. Of course two-thirds of Americans believe, when asked in the abstract, that we should reduce emission of greenhouse gases. But get down to specifics and I guarantee you would see the numbers change.
The poll question I want to see would be something like this: What steps are you willing to take to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 20%? (Check all that apply.)
A. Pay $5/gallon for gas
B. Take mass transit to work (or carpool) twice a week, every week.
C. Raise taxes by $1,000 per person per year.
D. Cut home energy consumption by 20%.
I'm making up the specifics, obviously, but my point is this: Questions that ask people to indicate whether they'd like a particular benefit without making reference to the tradeoffs involved are pointless. And I bet that when you start making people realize that nothing comes for free, their opinions will change -- fast.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Lets face it, most people follow the "see no evil - hear no evil -- well I guess there's no evil" philosophy. Aids didn't even get recognized as a problem until started effecting the general population. When the problem is clearly visible and starts costing us money then people will believe. Too bad we have to wait for it to become a problem before doing something about it.
Willy
The time you speak of was a significant number of millions of years ago, long before our time. Climate change over millions of years is one thing, but climate change over 50-100 years is something else entireley.
My joke got modded as Insightful and my insight got modded as Funny.
Maybe Global Climate Change is a better term. Even as the earth does get warmer, a degree or so either way isn't something we're really going to notice - daily variations tend to be much greater anyway. What we do notice is the weather systems getting screwed up as a result of the small rises knocking the established systems out of whack.
Over the last year or so, we've had the atlantic weather systems reverse themselves; a weather front set itself up over Europe, all summer long, so the north didn't get a summer and the south stayed in the 100s (40s in C); the Mississippi has taken to flooding regularly; Southern California, as opposed to its usual 5 days of rain hardly stopped raining from January through March; and then there's South America that seems to go from one weather related disaster to another.
I'm sure a load of people who know the subject far better than I [or at the very least are convinced they do] can offer other explanations. All I'm attempting to show is that Global Warming [assuming it exists] wouldn't be something that's visible by "Oh cool, extra beach days," but by that extra degree or two screwing up the weather in general.
One observation is El Niño, which commonly drenches the west coast with torrential rains, is a shifting weather pattern caused by "global warming", however, the rainfalls of 1998 were less than during a 4 year period in the late 1800's.
What I believe is there is a connection, like applying more heat to a mug of coffee increases the brownian motion. The downside isn't flooding low areas (Washington DC is one of them) by melting ice caps, but how unpredictable climates will play havoc with agriculture. Perhaps some good ol' genetic engineering will provide us with grain which can survive in anything and taste almost as good as fricaseed cockroaches.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This would be a great point of view if it wasn't so full of shit. I am a degreed scientist (I'd like to know what you are) who has been following science news about global warming for close to a decade. In that time what I have seen is story after story, report after report, that affirms that global warming is occurring and, increasingly, that human activity is indicated in it's cause.
You're a degreed scientist who has read a bunch of reports instead of doing your own research/thinking on the issue. You're just a media blowhorn sporting a degree as a badge of elitism over people who are putting original thought to the subject instead of believing everything they read. If any argument is full of shit, it's most certainly yours.
Heh...apparently, science is something that is not being taught at the high-school level anymore, as this poster adequately demonstrates. Let's see...
Point the Zeroth: Droughts and rising sea levels...
Frankly, I don't see how you can have droughts AND rising sea levels at the same time...
Read a book on climatology. There's several of 'em out there...STW. Look specifically for ice-albedo feedback effects.
Point the First: Boneheaded Ice Argument
Yes, ice is less dense than water, and ergo takes up more volume. But nobody's worried about the frappin' icebergs, kid, it's the continental ice sheets sitting on land (you know, like Antarctica? Greenland? Study geography at all?) that causes concern. Do this experiment: fill up a tub nearly to the top with water. Wait a while. Put a wire rack above the tub and put some ice on it. Let the ice melt into the tub. Notice your floor getting wetter as the tub gets fuller and fuller? That's what people are concerned about. Illustrative analogies only work when they're accurate
Point the Second: Kooky CFC arguments
One word, kid. References. Who said that CFC's don't act as catalysts in mixed-phase oxidation of ozone? Published where? Peer reviewed by whom? See, in science, we can't just say whatever we want and make it true. I want the facts.
Look, I know I come accross harshly in this post. The reason I am so harsh about issues such as these is they display the underlying problem with America: Apathy.
Been listening to Rage Against the Machine again, huh? I agree that people tend to believe whatever they're told. You're a perfect example. What you should know is this: having an viewpoint that differs from the popular viewpoint does not make you right if your alternate viewpoint is based on bullshit too. Global climate change is a phenominally complex system that is not possible to describe in simple "cause-effect" arguments. Most of the scientific community understands this. Media (of popular and alternate forms alike) does not do so well, however, with situations that cannot be easily explained in a two-minute soundbite. Certainly jabbering on
How do we get people to finally think for themselves?
Demonspawn, at least you want to try.
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
Exactly. What, it was something like 30 or 35 years ago that a lot of scientists were dead afraid of global cooling, to the point that a new ice age was "probable". Guess what, the same reasons they used to justify that answer are being used to justify global warming.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Jon, you aren't clear enough in your thinking to be writing stories for a major publication like Slashdot.
Bush's education improvements were
My guess is that, in number of person-hours spent reading, Slashdot is far, far more popular than Atlantic Monthly.
I agree A.M. is a respectable, likeable publication, but Slashdot gets READ.
I agree that Mr. Katz is in need of an editor. Every writer, no matter how skilled, needs an editor. Particularly people like Mr. Katz, who write before their thinking is clear.
But also, Mr. Katz is just not wise enough to write for Slashdot. Many of the people who post here write very well and have informed, carefully considered opinions.
Bush's education improvements were
All this states is that the temperature is increasing FASTER than previously measured. I'm neither a scientist, nor a degraded scientist, but doesn't the glaciation cycle happen on approximately 100,000 year cycles?
If I understand the data I've seen (again, I'm no scientist), the climatological data appears to suggest that average global temps vary by as much as 12-15 deg F from min to max over these spans.
I think the current period is called the Holocene, and it started at the end of the last ice age - about 8700 BC. Since then it appears to have varied far more widely up & down than the current 'catastrophists' say would be terrible for the human race. Didn't we invent AGRICULTURE in that time period? I don't think that was so bad for us.
Are we polluting our atmosphere? Yes, of course. Is it changing short-term climate data? Probably, the same way if you exercise you raise the temperature of the room you're in. But it doesn't mean the house is going to fall down, either.
I just get the sense that the people screaming "GLOBAL WARMING" were the same ones who told us Petroleum would be exhausted by 1988, and we'd have 20 billion people living in starvation by 2000. As much as I care about the environment, it's hard not to get a severe case of the "cry wolf"ies when I hear these doomsayers.
Most of the things I mention are summarized at http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA194.html
-Styopa
Have you ever heard of a concept called "negative feedback?" It happens all over the place in biological organisms and nature. What he is saying is that the cycle goes like this:
1) Ozone is depleted through natural or unnatural causes
2) More cosmic rays get through the ozone layer
3) Cosmic rays interact with O2, creating more ozone
The concept is not rediculous, nor is it unique. It's elementary chemistry and elementary biology. It's the process that keeps things at equilibrium. It's negative feedback processes like this that keep your body at a constant temperature and your chemical levels level. Do you think the Earth would have stayed around for as long as it has if it had no way of keeping itself in equilibrium? I didn't think so either.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
You would think that we could just read reports such as the NAS' report on climate change and identify the conclusions of climate experts. That turns out not to be the case. Often nonscientists (sometimes with their own agendas) write the conclusions. You should take a look at this letter written by MIT Meteorologist, Richard Lindzen, one of the report authors. He claims that the summary reaches much different conclusions than the report itself. The essence of Dr. Lindezn's position is, "But--and I cannot stress this enough--we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future."
Only on country in the world ratified the Kyoto treaty, and that is Romania.
Where is France, Germnany, or England when it comes to putting their money where the mouths are?
NO WHERE.
Besides blaming Bush is a cheap shot and the liberals love nothing more than a cheap shot. Clinton could have pushed for it, but he never did. Remember, the Senate voted 98-0 TO NOT RATIFY. How can you blame Bush Jon? You can't with facts, but facts aren't what you or your type are interested in.
Most Americans might survey that they are concerned about Global Warming, but I bet 90% don't know any real facts about what it is or what causes it.
Apparently the left expects to use their only real strategy, repeat a lie until it becomes the truth, or is at least believed.
As for the A.I. reviews, it got just as many harsh ones as it got raves. It died because it doesn't connect with people, and that is the only review that matters.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Sorry. I'd still rather believe the bulk of the scientific community than some shmuck like you.
First of all, I am completely stunned by the staggering number of posts claiming to know more about our earth and climate than the bulk of the scientific community. Never before have I seen such a display of arrogant, ignorant bullshit.
Pull your head out of your ass and pay attention: There is comprehensive, undisputable, sound, scientific EVIDENCE that global warming is quite real and human activity caused it. You can choose to believe otherwise but then you'd be wrong.
But let's assume for a moment you DO choose to believe otherwise. That it's all just a big lie and the scientific community doesn't know what they're talking about -- would eliminating CO2 emmissions be a bad thing anyway? Of course not! We would have clean running automobiles, no more smelly coal fired power plants, no more acid rain, no more dependence on foreign crude oil, increased technical innovation, and a generally better and cleaner place to live.
So it seems to me we should respond to the threat of global warming. And even if it turns out to be a big hoax, we'll all be much better off anyway. If it's NOT a big hoax (and it isn't), then we can potentially save ourselves from a horrible and disastrous future.
So far as I can see, the bulk of the evidence suggests the following:
Global warming is occurring, but we don't really know how fast.
Human activity appears to be a contributing factor. Some of the waste we produce will contribute to a warming of the atmosphere, but we don't know how much.
We have a lot to learn.My question is: why are we all standing around picking our butts? Either we are contributing to global warming or we aren't. Why take the chance? We have the technology to at least avoid screwing things up if the science proves correct. It's a nasty game of Russian Roulette, with potentially devastating global consequences. The worst part is, there is absolutely no need whatsoever for us to be playing this game (unless we believe Shell Oil, in which case we are damned fools for doing so).
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Please read this article and find out about the real science the "mainstream" media is hiding from you. Among many interesting points: global temperatures may simply be tracking the fluctuations in the energy output of the sun.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
There just isn't any conclusive proof of humans having an effect on global warming. I used to attend Iowa State University as a physics major. When Freeman Dyson, whom some of you may have heard of, visited as a guest lecturer, us geek physics students got to have a Q&A session of our own with him. One of the big topics was global warming and his view was that there was a lack of accurate data so vast that nothing conclusive would be possible for a couple of centuries.
If you look at studies that have been done, most of them don't report any findings that conclude humans have had any effect, but environmental groups only tote the few that do.
Global warming may be partially caused by us and then again we may contribute 1% to what is just a cycle that we are a small cog in. I think it merits further study, but not immediate action and should definitely NOT be used as a boogeyman to scare our kids into hating large corporations.
--- Don't be a player hater: I meta-mod ALL negative mods as Unfair.
Global warming may come to the forefront of american politics, but not for the reasons specified. Maybe the weather has changed, but it's different year to year, and individuals are not very good at noticing slight changes in weather patterns. Penguins may be dying, but even the near extinction of the Bald Eagle never really caught the attention of Joe America (especially not enough to influence a presidential race). Melanoma is already the leading killer of young adults (23-39) in America, and every day people run to the beach to get a tan.
Presidential elections are influenced much more by the media and by taxes, and a news anchor running around spouting a doomsday theory (especially one that almost everyone has already heard) isn't going to draw much ratings. Even more than that, the average person has already heard so much about the greenhouse effect that many are resigned to a "there's not much I can do about it" position.
By the time American voters realize first hand that this is an issue, it's going to be too late. Subtle changes in the weather can have drastic effects. It certainly isn't going to take a 20 degree F change to melt the polar ice caps, and by the time the changes are significant for the average person to observe, it's going to be too late to reverse the effect in time to save Venice... or Manhattan, but that might be a good thing ;).
The comment I'm replying to here should not be modded -1. Please mod it up so it has the visibility it deserves
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
"[R]eal scientists displaying real data..." I guess in your little fantasy world this doesn't include the World Meteorological Organization or it's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which includes scientists from a hundred countries, and has been developing the evidence that global warming is real since the 80's. I guees it doesn't include the National Acedemy of Science, which concluded last year that:
"The warming trend in global-mean surface temperature observations during the past 20 years is undoubtedly real and is substantially greater than the average rate of warming during the twentieth century. The disparity between surface and upper air trends in no way invalidates the conclusions that surface temperature has been rising."
I guess it doesn't include such publications as Science, Nature, Scientific American and Chemical & Engineering News (and literally hundreds of others which have all repeated the same conclusion: that the overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming is real.
The alternate opinion that you express is so phenomenally unsupported, so completely discredited by the overwhelming burden of valid scientific evidence, that it is espoused only by vested interests like power generation and conservative wackos like yourself. Practice what you preach and leave science to the scientists: you don't know what you're talking about.
Evidence: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ol/climate/globalwarming. html#Q9
http://www.sciam.com/2000/0800issue/0800epstein.ht ml
http://www.ucsusa.org/environment/0warming.html
http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/faq/index.html
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/
Educate yourself. Sea levels are rising. The permafrost is melting. Ozone depletion (yes, it IS linked to global warming) is worsening. And the planet is getting hotter. These are scientific facts that no amount of bullshit rhetoric will change. And it will affect us in purely negative ways in our lifetimes and in our children's lifetimes.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Yes, but the number of trees doesn't seem to be increasing-- or at least, not enough to reverse the increases in atmospheric CO2. The most practical extraction solutions I've heard don't involve trees-- instead, they revolve around carbon sequestration through the dumping of rotting crop-residue into the oceans or stimulating ocean algae growth.
It's all a little bit questionable-- if we're going to address the question, we should ask ourselves whether we want to try something completely untested such as artificial carbon sequestration (with all of the potential side effects), or maybe just look for alternative energy sources; wind power could provide enormous quantities of electricity if we simply encouraged it and allowed market forces to improve the technology (as the Europeans have begun to.) And it would reduce our dependence on a resource that we really shouldn't be dependent on, for economic reasons as well as the environmental ones.
AI was a bomb at the box office because it was a bad movie.
Amen. But Jurassic Park III is coming out soon, so just hang in there...
I think it's safe to call X-files mainstream. They had an episode where remote-contolled nano-bots were injected into ... Mulder? Pretty sure it was him. So I think Hollywood has heard of them.
Nope, no sig
It is recognized by most of the scientific community that humans are accelerating the trend of global warming. Granted, the Earth's temperature does fluctuate on it's own, but the point of the matter is that we are actually adding to the trends. Ever spin a bottle? Sometimes if you spin it a little, it will wobble about and maintain it's upright orientation. If you spin it a bit too hard though, the bottle might lose control and fall down. The way I see it is that we are adding to the natural fluctuations of the Earth - and that perhaps we may be instigating a dramatic climate change that would not happen in the natural cycle of things.
Reversing human impact on the environment is something we need to start taking seriously. Never in the history of man (that I know of anyways) have we possesed technology that could alter the nature of our planet to such a degree. To argue that we shouldn't take this seriously because other countries haven't is a very naive way of looking at things. Granted, the Kyoto Treaty is not really a solution, but it is a beginning, and by refusing to sign it we are giving all the rest of the countries incentive to follow in our footsteps - after all, if it isn't good enough for the US, then why should it be good enough for the rest of the world?
Global Warming must be approached scientifically, not by opinion and government policy that is rooted in economic development.
Some links:
"An ye harm none, do what ye will" - The Wiccan Rede
My prediction: global warming will become the first issue of science and politics that captures the imagination of large numbers of American voters... They read that skin cancer rates are rising.
Well, the skin cancer rates are due all the CFC's eating the ozone layer, which was a pretty big deal a decade or so ago.
It's a good prelude the global warming battle, but an easier one - the scientific evidence was a lot more definitive, and not nearly as many industries were affected by the required solution ("Ban cfc's, use alternatives.")
--
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Nietzsche
Sorry. I classify global warming in the same category as I classify the global epidemic of mad cow disease. It's a joke. James P. Hogan wrote a really good commentary on this called "Ozone Politics." It's a good read. You might be able to find it on his web site here.
So what if the climate is changing? There was an ice age not so long ago, remember? For some reason, I don't think that humanity's industrialized heat and waste output 100,000+ years ago had anything to do with warming the environment to what it is today. And what about the huge ozone hole detected in the 50's? Why don't we hear about things like this?
The reason is because the only information that makes the news is the information that supports a catastrophe. You can thank the media for that one.
So, while the rest of you whine about global warming and cover up, I'll be eating a nice hamburger made from european beef and afterwards I'll catch some rays on the beach.
Do you have anything from say june or july instead of may?
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
Hmm, while I am not sure if the ratified it, the EU put forth the thing, so I am fairly certain that they will back it. And the EU has been offering compromises to the US and Japan to try and sway them. I think that this shows a degree of commitment. And they probably will not sign it until the final version (with the compromises) is agreed upon. And if you believe that the EU does not count as an industrially advanced country, then perhaps you should define what you count as an industrially advanced country.
-CrackElf
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
Uhh, hello?!? Didn't you see Waterworld?!? Everything will be flooded to the mountaintops, and the only survivors will be Kevin Costner and the Exxon Valdez! Panic NOW!!!!
If you believe in global warming, let me ask you this question: do you know global warming is happening? How do you know? Where are you getting your information? From the media? Where are they getting their information? From... scientists? Which scientists? Are politicians involved somewhere? Ok, out of all of those involved people, from the lowly scientist to the news person reporting that news, is every one of them an altruist? Are they all 100% trustworthy with no hidden agendas? Maybe most are. But it's naive to assume that all of them are all of the time. Humans havn't changed in thousands of years. And propaganda is the first tool of opression.
For every scientist who says global warming is happening, I can show you one who says it isn't. So who wins? the one with the most scientists? How smart is that? 1700 scientists signed the Kyoto treaty. How many didn't? Why? You never hear about that because the media has chosen to tell you only certain, carefully selected pieces of information.
What about statistics! You can't argue with statistics! If I polled 1000 college students and asked who they will vote for, what will they say? 1000 retirement home residents? 1000 caucasian people in an affluent shopping mall? 1000 inner city residents? Take your pick. Ready made statistics to fit your agenda.
The point is that no one can ever know the 100% truth. And anyone who says they can are fooling themselves. Even scientists make mistakes. All you can do is look at all the evidence together, from as many sources as possible, and make your best guess.
People, especially the american people, are sheep. Nothing more. And, for the most part, they ask the questions they're told to ask, and believe what they're told to believe, and vote accordingly.
Don't be a sheep.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
I disagree that the problem of global warming will be the first scientific or technological issue to attract massive public attention. Instead, the issue of radiation and fallout from above-ground nuclear tests, and the related issues of nuclear power and weapons proliferation, attracted public attention decades ago.
The results were decidedly mixed. Although public pressure stopped above-ground nuclear testing (which is a good thing), public paranoia about radiation in any form has yet to recede. We see this in many forms - remember the panic about radon gas in basements a few years ago? I'm also convinced that the issue of cell-phone "radiation" is covered by the same fear, in spite of the fact that RF energy from cell phones is low frequency and non-ionizing -- but just try explaining that to Joe Sixpack. Ironically, nuclear power represents a short-term solution to the greenhouse effect, by giving an immediately practical alternative to coal- and gas-fired generators.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
With that said, I think some of the problem with the believability of these scientists with some people (especially in the US) is that scientists are human after all. Often they view their reputation as being more important than the work they do. Being right is less important than being famous.
So when one political group or another starts to protest something as "dangerous science," there's always at least a few people in the community willing to back up their claims. They do this mostly because you get more attention by running around waving your arms shouting about how the world is going to end than you do by saying "Oh, stop worrying, it's going to be alright." And the fewer of your colleages that agree with you, the better. No need to share the limelight with anyone else.
To make matters worse, it's often quite easy to manipulate data in a way to make what you're saying seem true or more favorable. Anybody who's heard of last year's presidential debates knows that Democrats were against giving tax breaks to "the wealthiest 1%," not "the wealthiest 2.6 million people."
This leaves us with a scientific community where, instead of having everybody who calls themselves a scientist making rational decisions and rational statements, we've had physicists telling us about how nuclear energy is the root of all evil, medical doctors explaining the need to "detoxify" our bodies, and we've had biologists passionately arguing for creationism.
(While these views may or may not be true, most of the arguments for these sides that I've heard are mostly along the lines of "I'm right, and if you don't agree with me, then you're either blind or a fool." It's tough at times to figure out where "science" ends and "scientology" begins.)
People can only take so much of this before they get tired of these boys crying "Wolf!" So when they next see a meterologist on TV telling us about how we need to change or perish, beating their podium ala Kruschev, a lot of them are just going to roll their eyes and keep on changing the channel.
Combine this with rational (and seemingly valid) arguments on both sides of the fence, as well as differences in opinion about how the problem should be solved ("The US should/shouldn't be the one to drop emissions the most."), and global warming becomes a very confused issue.
Now, you can argue that current energy problems in the US are their own fault. This is true, but doesn't change the fact that the problem exists. You can also argue that placing tighter emissions restrictions on energy development would ultimately yield a greener and more cost effective energy solution. This would be true for the long run, but not the short run. I'm sure it wasn't easy for the President to decide to back out of Kyoto. Unfortunately, he's stuck with the legacy (translate "mess") left to him by Clinton and his own father.
GreyPoopon
--
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Of course it's not that simple. The real question is: How many people would die if we *didn't* industrialize in the first place? How many people are alive today because of ambulances rushing them to hospitals (powered by gasoline), how many people are saved by plastic helmets, how many people are saved by sterilization, how many people are saved by our industrialized world? Well, a quick answer would be to look at countries that haven't industrialized. What is the average lifespan there? what is the quality of life?
the real problem is no one is even analyzing this. No one cares. No one sees that the world has become a whole hell of a lot better place to be. No longer is everyone starving, wishing to god the forces of nature would be kind and not wipe out their potatoe crop. No longer is the world a malevolent demon... rather it is now a tame beast in the hands of those who want more than ever to live.
If you argue against me, and you say that man has no right to alter the planet to suit his survival and happiness, then consider what you are. You are a man who has used his brain to reason and decide that mankind has no right to live. You have used your only tool of survival, your mind, to extinguish the idea that the mind should exist. There are killers who are acting on the premise of death, who tell you that life digging for survival is immoral.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
http://www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/03 09068916?OpenDocument
A lot of people have been posting a link to this article as proof that global warming is real, PLEASE, take the time to read it.
This article clarly shows thet the global warming crowd has no evidence at all. The only light spot in their report is thet they managed to smudge their computer model suffeciently so that it would still predict global warming.
The only place they found warming was in the surface temperatures. Unfortunately, this collected data is far from reliable since the detection of surface temperatures very often is done in urban areas (like at an airport, or in a cities downtown centers). These detectors will show an increase in temperature because of the heat island effect of larger and larger urban areas (feel the temerature of the concrete or street vs natural grass or dirt).
The only reliable data they used (satallites and weather ballons) showed no change in temperature. However, to receive continued funding, their computer model had to show global warming was real, so they fudged their computer model until it did.
"For example, natural events such as the eruption of
Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 tended to decrease atmospheric
temperature for several years. And burning coal and
oil for energy produces tiny aerosol particles in the
atmosphere that can have a cooling effect. Upper-air
temperatures also can be reduced by depletion of ozone
in the stratosphere caused by chlorofluorocarbons and
other chemicals being emitted into the atmosphere. When
these variables are accounted for in atmospheric models,
satellite and balloon data more closely align with
surface-temperature observations"
Yes, once they include effects that they are claming warm the atmosphere as cooling effects, their model works. Note that they can pick and choose their fudge factors to make their model come out just right.
Its amazing to me that so many people blindly believe hollywood celibs when they say "global warming is real, be afraid". Interestingly enough, its about the same percentage that believe psychic phenomenon.
I'm sorry, but the earth is a crazy, spinning planet, our climate goes through cycles and phases just like everything else. It changes. We need more time to decide if we've really screwed it up or not, until then, I'm sick to DEATH of lame movies like AI and Waterworld that tell us about how terrible the world is going to be when we screw it up and can't fix it back. We can't look at 100 years in the life of a billion year old planet and decide how it's going, it just can't happen.
Besides, I like hot weather. Tank tops are comfortable.
spacefem.com
For those interested in both sides of the global warming debate, the review "Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide" may be of interest. From the abstract, "Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in minor greenhouse gases like CO2 are in error and do not conform to current experimental knowledge."
Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling's Viridian Movement is a culture movement devoted to combating climate change by making pollution unfashionable. The Sterling-edited Summer 02001 issue of Whole Earth Review makes a good introduction to Viridian ideas. So does the entertaining Viridian Design Web site.
From the manifesto:
Carbon dioxide is not a time-honored philosophical dilemma or some irreducible flaw in the human condition. Serious fossil-fuel consumption, as a practice on the grand scale, is only about 200 years old. The most severe rise in carbon emission occurred during the past fifty years. We're painfully dependent on this practice, but it's not as if we've married it.
[...] Civil society does not respond at all well to moralistic scolding. There are small minority groups here and there who are perfectly aware that it is immoral to harm the lives of coming generations by massive consumption now: deep Greens, Amish, people practicing voluntary simplicity, Gandhian ashrams and so forth. These public-spirited voluntarists are not the problem. But they're not the solution either, because most human beings won't volunteer to live like they do. Nor can people be forced to live that way through legal prescription, because those in command of society's energy resources will immediately game and neutralize any system of legal regulation.
However, contemporary civil society can be led anywhere that looks attractive, glamorous and seductive. [...] The world needs a new, unnatural, seductive, mediated, glamorous Green. A Viridian Green, if you will.
[...] The best chance for progress is to convince the twenty-first century that the twentieth century's industrial base was crass, gauche, and filthy. This approach will work because it is based in the truth. The twentieth century lived in filth. It was much like the eighteenth century before the advent of germ theory, stricken by septic cankers whose origins were shrouded in superstition and miasma.
And from the Sterling speech that formally announced the movement:
A genuinely degraded climate doesn't mean that the sky is falling. It doesn't mean armageddon, or utter annihilation, or anything half so romantic. It means a conclusive end to our Belle Epoque, though. Basically, it means smoke and heat and damp, clinging filth. All our cultural circumstances will become different then. Everything we know and cherish about life will suddenly become antiquated. It will belong to a vanished, beautiful, innocent era. That will be our Belle Epoque's version of the Great War, in other words.
So why is this an aesthetic issue? Well, because it's a severe breach of taste to bake and sweat half to death in your own trash, that's why. To boil and roast the entire physical world, just so you can pursue your cheap addiction to carbon dioxide.... What a cramp of our style. It's all very foul and aesthetically regrettable.
Sterling's Viridian Notes mailing list amusingly documents the sad procession of recent climatic catastrophes, such as the recent melting of the North Pole.
"If you tell 100 Americans 'The Earth will burn up if you don't stop driving your car,' 99 will say 'Let it burn!' and the hundredth will shoot you." -- Allen Varney
First of all, nice article. I am a newbiew around here (two days :-)) and this is the best I have seen so far.
Second, I am not from USA. I may have a different perspective from the average american, altought it is obvious that I do not have from who wrote this text.
That said, I think the weather challenge cannot be won without the USA.
That's quite obvious analizing the reasons that lead to the Kyoto protocol, which may fall without USA support.
The United States is responsible for much of the pollution that goes to our air, land and water. There's no doubt about this, numbers everywhere to confirm.
Per person, it is the country that produces more pollution.
But at the same time, I believe a lot more is going on. USA has taken in the past years a role of technological leader in the world. Most research breakthroughs (spelling?) come from there. So much ahead of other countries, that the other countries are fighting back with more 'humanitary' global actions.
ONU's chair in human rights was the 'concrete' action of something bigger. Slodoban's and Pinochet's happening on Europe enlarge that continent's role of 'social', 'humanitary' leader. What we have now are two sides of serious future consequences that need to develop and unfold together.
In one corner you have tech development. On the other human society. Body and mind, matter and spirit if you wish. You cannot separate them, cannot only concentrate on one side. They must grow together for a better future.
But, a historial view of the last years, after the Industrial Revolution, will make you think that we as humans have pend much more to the tech side than the spiritual one.
Antique societies, old religions, they all got weaker since the beggining of the century. I am not talking about christianins (again, sorry for the misspelling, english is not my primarly languague), but instead, almost every other religion on the world, that takes the perception of life after dead very different than our ocidental way.
To simplify, west tries to enjoy life at maximum because we all gonna die, so do it quickly and do it now. East, on the contrary, have a vision more like "we all gonna die anyway, why do it?".
But, tech improvement is changing this. We don't die at 30 now, like 150 years ago. Most people that are 20 years old nowadays with go beyond 100, easy, easy.
This perception that life has increased, that we really don't have to do it fast and do it now, the 'eastern' life and death vision, is losing its forces.
With this in mind, you can justify people's concern with the weather. At the same time we are taking care of our lives, improving it, we are taking away the force of who gave us life, 'Mother Nature'.
Prodigal sons, we are now taking the harder route to the 'eco growth', an economy based on the principles that we must take care of the enviroment.
Earth has been around for billions of years with or without us, and will probaly be after we are gone from here to other planets. What we say now, is a 'rearrange' of forces, like a system where it must balance what is inside. There's no weather problem for Earth. Our planet is what it is. There is weather problem for ourselves, for our future as a race.
I hope as soon as is possible we learn how to balance matter and spirit, tech and religion inside us, so we can exist in union with our planet.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Um, did you even read the letter from the parents of the children that were interviewed, in which they described Stossel as "ask[ing] leading questions to get [the children] to say what [he] wanted"? That immediately and irreparably destroys the credibility of anything the children might have been portrayed on screen as saying; given Stossel's track record, it's very easy to believe that he simply edited out the children that didn't say anything he could use.
*blink* Wow, can I get the address of the cave you've been living in these past few years? Perhaps you just missed that incident last summer, when Stossel was caught faking test results on organic foods and had to apologize on air. And that's just the one he got caught on; he does this sort of thing consistently nowadays. Particulary notable, for instance, was his April`94 20/20special on the environment; two of the three producers resigned in protest after Stossel and the third producer systematically threw out evidence that refuted the ideological position they wanted to present.
(shrug) Granted, CNN's demonstrated pro-establishment, pro-corporate, anti-liberal bias does give me pause (as does the fact that they're owned by AOL/Time-Warner). And no, the rest of the mainstream media isn't much better.
You won't read any of these links, of course, as you probably didn't in my previous article -- or perhaps you'll read just enough to convince yourself that they're just "a load of leftist whining" and can therefore be dismissed out of hand, without any need to actually try to refute them or anything.
--
#/usr/bin/perl
require 6.0;
sed 's/In Soviet Russia/In NSA America/g' < yakov-smirnoff-jokes.txt
"Now you might take the view, as I do to some extent, that in the long term the eradication of the 'virus with shoes' wouldn't actually be a bad thing".
Are you volunteering commit suicide first? Or are you just another hypocrite?
GKC
I'm no scientist, but I thought the argument went rising temperatures -> melting ice caps -> rising oceans -> less land (with less arable land being a subset of that).
And if Siberia is becoming just warm enough to sustain agriculture, wouldn't you imagine some other place just cool enough now will become too hot/dry to sustain agriculture? Raise the temperature of the Great Plains by 6-8 degrees and you have a big dust desert.
Life has survived through past cycles, it'll certainly survive through this one.
The point is that it isn't a cycle. It's called Global Warming - not global warming then cooling. The earth will just get hotter. Yes bacteria are there to eat the CO2 and they will flourish and whatever eats them will flourish as well, but they can only convert so much. Man will always be able to conquer nature, and if we sit on our hands we'll spit out more CO2 and other shit than the earth can handle.
I have every confidence in the human race to do this.
Nooch.
granted, the air around some island in the middle of the pacific with no factories will be clean. there's nothing to mess it up. if you put a factory on that island, there's now a source for pollution. but as countries develop more, beyond the first inefficient, 1830s-style factory period, their air begins to clean up. around cities there's no getting around it, the air will have car exhaust in it (at least for a few more years, then the hydrogen fuel cell might be able to fix that). but on the whole, the air in the u.s. is better than the air in azerbaijan. pollution is inefficiency, so even if the industrialised world cleans up pollution only because it's a less efficient use of resources (which i don't think is its only motivation, none of us wants to have to breathe bad air), the air still gets cleaner. and someday we won't need fossil fuels for anything, and the air will be cleaner than it was for the cavemen.
this topic is getting more attention now that spielberg put out a movie where global warming is an important piece of background. it's odd that in the future we'll be able to create robots that can love, but won't be able to do anything as the polar floodgates turn manhattan into atlantis. maybe if the hague went under...no more bogus ipcc reports...
rm
Knowledge is, indeed, that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another.
This past March President Bush reneged on his campaign PROMISE to have a MANDATORY reduction of CO2 emission. That shows what: 1) his promises are worth, 2) how much he cares about the environment.