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Consensus on Global Warming
FredFnord writes "Well, here's an interesting one: the fine folks at Science Magazine have done an analysis of the last ten years' published scientific articles (articles from crank or non-peer-reviewed publications were not counted) on the subject of global climate change. The results themselves are interesting, but the most remarkable part was that, of the 928 papers they found, 75% accepted that global warming was caused by human activities, either explicitly or implicitly. 25% made no mention either way. And not a single paper asserted otherwise." JamesBell submits this article by a geologist which suggests that the Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger.
So Should I be Running climate prediction.net on my P4 Prescott or not?
I just don't get why this is news to some people, but unfortunately it is.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
(BTW, that 'fine fellow' at Science Magazine happens to be a woman :-))
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Soon, it will be China and India that you're pointing fingers at, and not the US (or Europe).[1]
So... Then what?
And uh, is this news? Does anyone credible seriously disagree that emissions from human activity are at least in part contributing factors? Or is this another jab at boogiemen that don't exist? There's nothing "remarkable" about these so-called findings.
Also, the "Earth" isn't in danger. Yes, I know this distinction is splitting hairs, but what's in danger is Earth's inhabitants. Our actions are not going to alter a several billion year old rock.
[1] Don't feed me the per capita shit. China will be a far, far greater polluter in this realm, per capita or no. Further, the economic empowerment of the Chinese people will eventually drive them to a level of concern about the well-being of the environment, so, in a way, their accelerated economic development is a good thing, politically and environmentally. Incidentally, China has proven they can reduce greenhouse emissions, even while growing economically (1, 2)...but the point is, they're still on an upward trend. And they've got a lot more people who will begin to thirst for energy-hungry luxuries.
the Bush administration affirmed that it would not do any steps towards preserving the environment if there would even be a remote chance that a single American might be temporarily inconvenience in doing so...
The official EPA Global Warming website is located at: www.epa.gov/globalwarming/
Mars Emerging from Ice Age, Data Suggest
e _031208.html
By SPACE.com
posted: 03:00 pm ET
08 December 2003
Scientists have suspected in recent years that Mars might be undergoing some sort of global warming. New data points to the possibility it is emerging from an ice age.
full story at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-ag
Now what are we going to DO about it?
You are not the customer.
...is to figure out a way to turn matter directly into pure energy. That way, we could drastically reduce greenhouse gasses on the earth while netting tons of energy!
You gotta love groupthink.
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
Regardless, the final paragraph of the article begs a very interesting question:The begged question is Will it be bad or will it be good? Wouldn't warmer climates provide more arable land? What I get out of this is "We dont know what it means, but it looks like at least SOME climate changes are caused by man".
...just keep gas cheap and interest rates at all time lows. God will come save us if this turns out to a problem, be it global catastropy or the end of no money down, 90 day same as cash financing on 72" plasma tv's.
Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger ? You gotta be kidding. What they mean is that human beings on Earth are in serious, unavoidable danger.
The planet has seen worse, it will just route around us and be fine with it.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
JamesBell submits this article by a geologist which suggests that the Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger.
*sigh* When will people ever get it? The planet is fine. It's the people that are screwed!
Global warming will cause the earth to explode? Oh wait, you mean people (and possibly much of the life on earth) could be in danger. I doubt global warming will make much of a difference to the planet itself, except possibly to allow it to make more room for heat resistant lifeforms :-)
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
> "Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger."
;)
The sky is not falling yet
Why bother reporting it? We're doomed anyway.
It was called "The Day After Romorrow", I think it was on the Discovery Channel. Anyone really interested in this topic should watch it. It's a real eye-opener to what we face in the near future.
and I feel fine.
From the article:
The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8).The American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysica Union? What a bunch of communists. They are just trying to destroy our way of life. They don't want me to live my life the way I want. Now, where did I park my Ford Explorer? I gotta run and buy a pack of smokes...
I, for one, welcome our sun-tanned, beachfront-dwelling overlords from Iowa.
[George W. Bush]: "All them scientists don't know nuthin. Ain't that right Andy boy?"
[Andrew Card]: "Yessir, that is absolutely correct sir. Don't know nuthin."
[George W. Bush]: "Ain't that right Scott towell?"
[Scott McClellan]: "Right in every way sir!"
[George W. Bush]: "Ain't that right Colonoscopy?"
[Colin Powell]: "I gotta get out of here."
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
JamesBell submits this article by a geologist which suggests that the Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger.
Well, if it's unavoidable, then switching to renewable recourses won't do a damn thing!
So no consensus is valid as a scientific argument.
First Century News:
Scientifics reach a consensum: The earth is the center of the universe
I think the reason this is news is because the Bush administration is still trying to pretend that this is not proven science... that it's just a theory that can be ignored. They want to ignore it because it's inconvenient for their business cronies, and those business cronies fund party activities and candidates' re-elections. I don't think there will be any changes on this front until this administration is out of office, no matter how much evidence is presented. It's quite unfortunate.
-- Gargonia
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.
Oh come now, you panicky Chicken Littles in lab coats!
We can just hide in our SUVs. They have heated seats.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Is this another way of saying that anyone that disagrees with our opinion on the matter is a crank and we'll ignore their input for this "scientific" study?
I assume that by 'global warming' and 'climate change' the articles are referring to the current climate as compared to years ago. A beefy computer and [now] commonly available weather data, and it's pretty clear.
I'm more interested on a consensus that the climate change will continue changing. From what I understand, that is the area under more debate, and frankly the area which will influence humanity more.
Proving correlation is easy. Determining the direction of causality is much tougher.
Oh, come on. Class out the peer-reviewed journals you don't like as "crank" and publish a research that says "Journals I like agree with me".
That's life in the more controversial sciences. Everyday business in economics, you learn to keep your ears up.
The Global Warming issue reminds me of big Tobacco. Deny , Deny , Deny. Years from now their will be no doubt that our habbits accelerated Global warming.
And the US supports the principles of Kyoto, but does NOT support the exemption of countries termed "developing", like China.
That gets a big "so what". How many have actually produced any evidence? Science should never use popularity as any kind of evidence.
I'll be dead by the time any of this happens. What incentive is there for me to really care? Honestly? I know it's a problem, but how do you get people to care about it, when 1. They'll be dead by the time this happens and 2. There are more pressing concerns to deal with (bills, life, etc.)?
I don't respond to AC's.
Despite all the hoopla, the USA is not the greatest danger to the environment. We Americans are making steady progress. Note that Honda is technically an American automobile company since Honda does more than 50% of its manufacturing in the USA.
The greatest threat to the environment is China. The Chinese have been overwhelmingly burning coal. Coal horribly pollutes the environment and unloads tons of radioactive material into the air.
Given the current rate of pollution in China, once it reaches Singapore's level of economic development, the level of pollution in China will exceed that in the USA. India is equally horrible.
How many were rejected from the peer review process which suggested or concluded otherwise? More to the point (and obviously, this cannot be known) how many were never submitted for peer review in the first place because of concern over the backlash?
Most US science funding in climate and solar research comes from the federal govt (in geological and oceanic research sizable amounts can come from private groups). When politicians don't want to look like they're anti-environment they screen funding to make sure it's not going to go to "enemies of the planet" (I kid you not, that's the phrase).
How can a survey of peer reviewed journals be a valid source of data when people are afraid to publish "the wrong results"?
Perhaps global warming is caused by adult white male toenail clippings, but I'm pretty sure we have no reasonable way of finding that out right now.
Don't published papers go through peer review before being published? I imagine the following reviews... "This paper claims that humans are not at fault for the global warming. It lacks conclusive evidence, and it clearly contradicts 500 papers (some partial list is provided) on this subject. I recommend to reject this paper unless revised."
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
...is being suckered into accepting the neutral "Climate Change" euphemism, which downplays its significance. I wonder who started that trend?...Hmm...
Power to the Peaceful
Global Warming is a Myth
It seems just about every article I read about global warming tends to show a plot from about 1200 or 1400 A.D. to present showing average global temperature. In this plot there are several distinctive sharp increases and decreases in various 50 year periods. The greatest increase is shown between 1950-2000, and tends to be about 50% larger than the next biggest increase.
Perhaps I'm reading articles that are too oriented toward the layman (probably the case), but I never see a reasonable explanation of how the graph is relevant given that it shows several other warming trends that carry 2/3 the magnitude of the current one. I've always looked at these graphs and read them as "we're in a warming trend that is slightly greater than the ones we've had in the past millennium." This has always been a sticking point for me with global warming, though I'm genuinely open to learning more.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
I just read an interview with Michael Crichton about the chicken little behaviors. it was a promo for his book, State of Fear.
c ar ing.html
The article started off with an ominous warning about climate change from the 1970s about...global cooling. The article title was "Let's stop scaring ourselves."
The link below doesn't work yet.
http://archive.parade.com/2004/1205/1205_stop_s
Another amusing article by him is "Aliens Cause Global Warming"
http://www.ccfassociation.org/crichton2.htm
I'm sure scientists today have learned lots of lessons from the mistakes of scientists of yesteryear. Right.
Despite all the hoopla, the USA is not the greatest danger to the environment. We Americans are making steady progress. Note that Honda is technically an American automobile company since Honda does more than 50% of its manufacturing in the USA.
The greatest threat to the environment is China. The Chinese have been overwhelmingly burning coal. Coal horribly pollutes the environment and unloads tons of radioactive material into the air.
Given the current rate of pollution in China, once it reaches Singapore's level of economic development, the level of pollution in China will exceed that in the USA. India is equally horrible.
I'm not denying Global Warning exists, but I'm not 100% convinced, either. All I'm asking is, are the naysayers of today more likely to be true 'cranks', or are they more likely to be people who espouse views not in keeping with what their peers believe?
Just asking questions. No reason to get all excited.
http://www.lomborg.com/books.htm Or any of the following reviews or responses in Nature and Science?
http://www.lomborg.com/critique.htm
Oh right, those don't count because refuting environmental destruction claims isn't politically correct! Look, I don't agree with much of what Bjorn says, but the point is he compiled some statistics, came to some conclusions, and was then ostracized by the political machine for being "irresponsible" for advocating what a very liberal Euro nation dubbed "wreckless science". The critique of his science (that wasn't much of that) was second to the smear campaign leveled against him for being irresponsible. His work didn't "count" I guess in however cooked up his stupid statistic also.
This is the same thing John Stewart was talking about during his CNN Crossfire talk, we're so right or left now we can't have an honest debate about real issues, which we really need. No papers are published because its career death because a very liberal academia has decided anyone going against this trend is scum, without even looking at the science. Nature would not accept a paper from someone that claimed otherwise, but this is a debate we really need to have folks.
Jeff
I don't have too many years under my belt (less than 50), but every year has gotten hotter and hotter and less snow. 10 years ago we had blizzards constantly, last year we maybe had 2 days of snow. That could just be a natural variance in temperature between seasons, but it seems to go hand in hand with all this talk about global warming.
Hasn't the climate been drastically changing for millions of years... were we the cause of that too? Isn't it just possible the one ultimate source of all our energy (aka the Sun) is responsible for the warming trends just as it has been for all of measurable history? What wonderful arrogance that our blink of an eye existence could cause such global changes... Hate to break it to you.. but industrial emissions have only been around for a 100 years or so... which is not even a blip on the radar in the geologic time that such changes are measured.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
Now the key is to figure out where the least expensive land is that is currently about 202 meters above sea level so I can have beachfront property to retire on. I wonder if I can get a good deal on a submerged English castle to ship over to move onto said property?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I'm not really surprised. Hell, I've witnessed it myself! I don't have the statistics, but I hope someone can bring them up - the average temperature in Finland has rised [I]dramatically[/I] in recent years. We don't even have decent winters here in southern Finland anymore. Please, if you can dig up some statistics, give us a link! This is interesting!
than all those tree hugging scientist asshats
Now, there's a solution I can get behind (no, I'm not joking). Nuclear energy, pursued with a strong eye towards safety and security, would be a step forward in terms of our efficiency and use of energy.
Bankrupting the industrialized nations of the world for an unproven solution isn't.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
Mankind and most of the animals are, but not earth.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Save the Earth??? The Earth is fine! The people are f**ked." - George Carlin
I don't understand why scientists insist on saying the Earth is in danger. The Earth doesn't care, it's a rock. Maybe if they start saying The Human Race is in "serious, imminent, unavoidable danger" people might pay attention.
No, probably not.
-AlPhAbEt
to the drawing board.
We won't destroy the earth (unless we physically blew it up). What will probably happen is that life (probably not ours) will adapt to the new warmer or colder climate and go on. After all, not all life on earth thrives due to an oxygen rich 72 degree atmosphere. Some life flourishes in places that are deadly to us humans.
Either global warming is real, scientists take it as a given, or scientists are afraid to do research that would contravene conventional wisdom.
The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong.
Although my bet is on #1, the thoughts of #2, scientific complacency, or #3, scientific political correctness are actually more scary.
Just to be clear - #2 and #3 are 99-1 longshots in my humble opinion.
The bottom line - assume we are the cause of the problem and look to find solutions, but at the same time, if someone does good, solid research that shows this assumption is wrong, publish it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Who decides what a "crank" or "non-peer-reviewed" publication is? They can just declare every publication that happens to have a conservative or business-oriented viewpoint as "crank", and then they can ignore contrary viewpoints. The fact is that there are credible, scientifically sound alternative theories that are ignored only because of the liberal bias of the scientific establishment, and that establishment controls what gets published and what doesn't.
relevant...asshat
From the climate simulation studies I have seen, Canada would be one of the very few places on earth that would actually benefit from global warming. Much of the northern territories would become viable for farming, and the northern passage explorers have dreamed about for centuries between east and west would become a reality, effectively making the Panama canal obsolete if it warmed up enough to permit year round traffic.
On the other hand, Africa gets totally screwed - the sahara expands to cover 80% of the continent, most of it is uninhabitable and some island states like the Maldives get flooded out and cease to exist.
My rights don't need management.
If global warming is truly human caused, how could sea levels have been highest during the Cretaceous Period, millions of years before mankind?
Couldn't this be part of a natural cycle? If so, I doubt that humans can do much of anything either way about global climate change.
No self-respecting geologist would ever claim that the earth is in danger of anything short of a truly enormous bolide (comet/meteor). We can do nothing to harm the earth; we can only make it inhospitable for various life forms. Even these changes are temporary, fleeting alterations on a planet that has survived much much worse.
Having now read the article in question, 25% of the articles listed both human activity and paleological activity as possible causes... It is still surprising to me that only 1 in 4 bothered to include alternative polution sources...
Clearly, this is just a bias of the Liberal Medi....err....Liberal Scientific Conspiracy.
I've never seen an explanation to this question of mine: If we have only be keeping quality temperature records for the last 100-200 years, and only been taking quality temperature records all over the planet for the last few decades (uninhabited poles, jungles) how in the world can you reach the conclusion that the earth is warming? More less it is warming because it caused by humans?! I know fossil records can be used to -ESTIMATE- temperatures based on the temperature, but how exact can this be? Is it possible that the earth fluctuates temperature in a 3000 year cycle and we are just freaking out over something we don't understand (imagine that)? I accept the possibility of global warming by humans, but where is the proof?
those jackass scientists have political motivations
"Unfair is one nation producing over 25% of global CO2 emissions ..."
"...and produce 31% of the worlds output." Conveniently, you forgot this part. Seems a common oversight.
So Veizer and Shaviv in GSA Today wasn't peer-reviewed?
Maybe Mr Bush should have learn to read science papers or maybe acccept views based on facts different from his onw?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
global cooling again. in the 70's they thought the world would freeze over, someone make up their mind
I rather like this 'Global Warming' thing.
SAILING MISHAP
you must be one of those kkk types who voted for Bush.
Interesting article by an MIT professor (?) that talked about how science is supposed to be about critical thinking where as the topic of Global Warming is more akin to a Religious Belief instead of about science.
He tied it in with the issue of scientists needing to get funding for projects, and there is no money involved with studies that show critical thinking against global warming.
Very interesting read, sorry I don't have the link. I personally don't "believe" in the theory that Humans, by means of SUV's (et al), can affect the overall climate of the earth. But that is just my belief system (ie: Religion).
-- DJC
(1) For some reason, this site put a space in the first URL (in the word "Scaring").
(2) Here's an excerpt from the second article about "consensus science":
At the risk of being labeled a troll. There are only a few ways that can convincingly prove a scientific theory: 1) carefully done experiments where all the extra parameters are kept constant, which is impossible in this case, or 2) either analytical derivation or computational simulation from "first principles" (also can't be achieved despite all the progress in HPC).
Studies that I'm aware of either show that there is a historical correlation between CO2 levels and temperature (no control for other sources that change climate) or ad-hoc models that are made to fit past data and then used to extrapolate into the future (approach has been tried before for stock market prediction without much success).
It's just very hard to prove human influence on climate.
Having said this, I think it's a very good idea to try find a better source of energy than oil and gas.
Well no-duh. They already know that the earth climate goes in a cycle. They have proof of that. There's nothing to argue.
They also don't really argue that we, the people, have an impact. That's because they know its true, we do impact the cycle. We cause it to accelerate
I'm not a doctor, but I play one in bed.
It means that non-scientific opinions (opinions that come from outside the scientific process) were ignored.
As well they should be, seeing as how it's a survey of scientific opinion.
I read the following quote from the article and sorta freaked out:
"The consequences of such a sea level rise would be calamitous, comparable (and perhaps including as a consequence) a global war. Unlike a world war, though, civilization cannot get back to normal afterwards, as much of the landscape will have been drowned, effectively forever. We consider the threat to be imminent, the timescale of the global changes seeming likely to include the lifespans of our children."
If we really are just the smartest monkeys (and it looks like we are) then it stands to reason that we are nowhere near intelligent enough as a species to manage a global ecosystem and sustain economic growth at the same time. I'm a believer in the idea that everybody, even the great leaders of yore, were fallable humans with specific talents so we can't assume that they'll just take care of it. I hope this article is a wakeup call because I'm sure as hell not having kids until someone comes up with a plan. Not having kids is bad for the economy though and the economy runs on hydrocarbons so maybe that's a good thing.
Maybe that international consortium of countries pursuing fusion will pull their thumbs out when a big chunk of the coldest continent slides into the ocean. Hopefully there aren't giant tsunamis in its wake when it does finally happen. Maybe this is why Bush is inexplicably dumping so much money into NASA.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
It doesn't make sense that the USA government would really be so clueless about gloabal warming.
It does make sense that globalist corporations can't wait to get their greedy little paws on Artic oil and Syberian shipping lanes. Both of which global warming will make available.
I suspect they have been encouraging global warming specificaly for future profit.
This way they can protect energy companies with lax environmental laws and at the same time open up new energy profit potentials.
All this amounts to is a temporary (perhaps couple of centuries) spike on the graph until the buffering system equilibrates. While the interim results may be moderately dramatic for people, along with those species we haven't killed off already, it won't have a whit of impact on "the Earth" or the flora and fauna that will take advantage of new niches.
KeS
Then you'd better not challenge the ideas of your PhD advisor. There is a definite "liberal/green" slant in academia. I have no opinion on global warming, but to ignore that slant is rather disingenious...
I grepped for occurrences of the word "years" in the article linked in the above text, but didn't manage to find the bit where it tells you how soon this serious "danger" will actually affect us. I'd prefer not to actually read the article, instead could someone (who has read it) tell me if it indeed tells us this, and if so, when is it?
The Bush Administration rejects the Kyoto protocols, whether for good reasons or not, and then refuses to do anything else about global warming.
Bullshit.
14 Nations to Participate in Plan to Reduce Methane
This is largely driven by the US and it includes India and China. It'll have the same greenhouse effect as removing 7% of US fleet of cars from the road and it costs next to nothing.
Just because Bush doesn't sign up to a program with name recognition, doesn't mean the US government isn't doing anything.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Good thing everyone posting on this article pointed out it was people that were in trouble not earth.
/.
/. can be sometimes. Why not just fill up the whole page with GNAA posts?
Wow, you are all so smart. You should all be given medals for focusing on one word and not making any effort to comment on the actual article itself. Comment after fucking comment about how "people" are in trouble not "earth". Well, thanks a fucking lot I think I figured that out quite well after the first 40 posts repeating just that.
What really kills me is the same lame asshats making these posts bitch about dupes posted on
It just blows my mind how fucking retarded
"At first, we thought it was just another snake cult."
I agree that the scientific community has a history of being affected by groupthink and politics.
But, this is the scientific process. That community has come up with most of the innovations of the last few centuries, including the computer and networks you're reading this on. They can be and sometimes are wrong. But betting against them is not a smart bet. Especially with life as we know it on the line.
Books generally don't count since they are not filtered though peer review. The one you link to, "The Skeptical Environmentalist" has the distinction of generating some peer discussion in scientific magazines. The only problem is that the discussion has been unilaterally negative. At least he did get some arguments started, so hats off to him. But if he's serious about changing scientific opinion, he should (and maybe has) submit to peer reviewed papers. They may not be published, but that's where the true battle is waged.
-Ryan C.
Just because everybody is saying it, doesn't make it true.
But okay, I'm the last person to deny global warming is upon us. Other than some US folks still not convinced or thinking it's not that big a problem (or simply putting their head in the sand), global warming is observed, and the only question is about how much of it is the result of human activities, and how much by natural causes. Oh yeah, and what to do about it.
For the rest: nothing to see here.
According to some, the 'analysis' was slanted to support the desired results (notice footnote #9 and wonder who decides if a paper is 'about climate change'). For more (and other fun reading) visit: http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/content/120604.shtml
There was an article in Discover or Astronomy, I don't recall which, 3 or 4years ago. Well, not so much an article as one of those 3 paragraph quarter page thingies. It showed a graph that went back to the 1700s and correlated global temps to sun activity. In just a few charts, it clearly dispelled any doubt about global warming being the enormous farce that it is.
Humans are too stupid to really do anything about it. We'll trash the environment and deplete our follil fuels. Only then will we really start looking for alterative sources.
Any inelligent being should see Nuclear power is obvious. It is cheap and clean. Do not listen to what they nay-sayers say. We not not _EVER_ have to store radioative waste. What we need is a cheap and safe mecanism for getting nuclear waste into orbit. Once there, you can toss it roughtly at the sun, and eventually it'll get sucked in and never pose a threat again.
Nuclear fission power in cars is dumb, but we can use neclear to generate the hydrogen fuel for cars.
However if we get to nuclear FUSION, we are in the clear.
Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels, we still have to LUBRICATE every oving part under the sun. That is no small amount of oil. That's what oil should be doing. Not burning, but lubricating.
But we won't do anythin unless it is forced upon us. Eventually enough people will die of heat exhaustion (too poor to afford cooling) or starve (because farm land is under water) that the poluation will plumit, and so will our usage, and Mother earth will keep turning, and working on resoring balance.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I mean what to worry? Come on! Even us nerds will be hot when this happens! That's what we all have dreamed about, isn't it?
It's pretty vain of us (as humans) to think that we are single-handedly responsible for the deterioration of our atmosphere. In fact, the truth is it would likely be deteriorating on it's own just as fast, even if we weren't here. I'm not referring to the vast number of belching cattle that would terrorize the planet if we weren't here to subjugate them, though they are a small part of the equation. A very small part, just as humans and automobiles are. The truth is, there are plenty of natural events taking place every single day that release more pollution than all the automobiles and factories that exist, or have ever existed. Let's look at just one example: Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii. It's one of the many volcanos in that region alone that errupt frequently, nice show, spews lava, etc. Only sometime in the mid 80's it decided to just start continuously dumping about 2000 TONS of sulfur dioxide out, PER DAY. Somehow I don't think my old truck, even with it's crappy milage, could ever hold a candle to that.
That 75% number is interesting.
Suppose I went around and asked a bunch of people how tall the Empire State Building is. Then I averaged their answers. If I ask 20 people, my answer will be twice as accurate as if I ask 10 people, right?
Actually, no. If I did that, I would have an estimate of the height of the building, but there is no guarantee that this number would have anything to do with the actual height. Each person would have their idea of how tall the building is, their own bias if you will, and there is no way of assuming that the biases would cancel each other out.
In short, I'm not very interested in what percent of people buy the global warming hypothesis. What I want to see are numbers.
In particular, if someone is trying to push a computer model on us, I want to see them feed data from 1950 to 1960 into it, and then see it predict 1970 correctly. If a model cannot even "postdict" correctly, we have no reason to believe it will tell us our future correctly. And we definitely have no reason to spend billions on something like Kyoto.
By the way, I would be in favor of spending more on trying to establish exactly what is going on. I'm afraid that any research will be colored by politics, however: can they find anyone to do the research who hasn't already made up their mind?
I notice very few of the comments on here have anything to do with the science. It's all a bunch of political arguing. This really tells me global warming is much more about political ideology than any actual science. Considering an earlier report showed 80% of college professors were liberal, the 75% number here sounds just about right.
Ahh, the perils of agenda-driven statistical analysis....
It's important to research all sides of this complicated issue. Here's a dissenting view that highlights problems with the 'consensus position':
http://www.techcentralstation.com/120704G.html
like they did with ATHLONS
Well, let me be one of the 0% that chimes in with my opinion.
Why exactly are humans soley responsible for global warming? Hasn't the planet been warming up for the past 50,000 years? We were in an ice age at one time, were we not? How do we know that this warming cycle is not due to some earthly cycle that occurs once every X thousand years? We simply haven't been around long enough to collect enough data to determine whether we are responsible or not.
I've read some articles that show that humans are only 1% responsible for global warming and that the other 99% is due to natural causes. Humans are awefully arrogant to think that they alone can destroy the planet through pollution. Mother nature has quite the track record for polluting itself for the past few million years. Anyone take a look at Mt St Helens when it blew in the 80's? It blasted more toxins and pollutants into the atmosphere than mankind has since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Interesting conclusions, and they seem entirely valid. One thing I was wondering just last week, though: Astronomers point to a period of reduced solar activity (sunspots, flares, etc.) about four hundred years ago and say that this accounts for a "mini-Ice Age" experienced in Europe at the time. That is, without the flares sending huge amounts of radiation towards earth as they normally do, the quiet period on the sun lowered our temperatures significantly during that 80-100 year period (in the 1600s). No one is quite sure why that happened, nor can they predict when it might happen again, though at least a couple people have suggested something like a 400-year cycle, which would be some point in the next decade.
So the interesting question will be: How will our human-generated global warming (which they didn't have during the Maunder minimum four hundred years ago) affect the climate if temperatures already drop due to lower solar activity? Just something random (and hopefully interesting) to contemplate.
What does it count if someone states something in an article and the only argument is references to other articles! I bet that is what is done in the 90% of the 75% of the articles. You can keep pepeating the same "fact" over and over again and everybody starts believing it!
It is interesting how these guys prioritize. I happen to share thier priorities to a certain extent. Others are taking the tack that our economic survival is more important. I think both are paramount. We cannot give up our freedoms and we certainly don't want to give up our cities. So we need a solution that allows us to keep both.
The world-averaged temperature could remain unchanged by cooling some regions and warming others, and both things could be difficult in terms of crop adjustment, etc. And there is a lot of concern about water as well as heat; think drought.
The expanded phrase also includes the "climate of weather", i.e. the slowly varying statistics of the quickly varying fields. For example, we ask whether the weather would be more stormy in the future.
I've never heard it said that climate change is a euphemism ... to folks like me who work in this field, it's a more encompassing phrase.
Bush didn't "pull out of" anything. Why YOUR revisionist history, Anonymous Coward?
The US is a Kyoto signatory, but "On June 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was to be negotiated, the U.S. Senate passed by a 95-0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". Disregarding the Senate Resolution, on November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Aware of the Senate's view of the protocol, the Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol for ratification."
All of this happened under Clinton.
So, sorry, but your bullshit post is just that.
Well, I HOPE you aren't anyways.
Yes, groupthinking like 2+2=4 and the earth is round, is just sooo bad.
How are mathematical statements and established facts groupthink? Groupthink is belief in an opinion or hypothesis because it is the most popular one. There is consensus based on scientific observation of climate data that global temperatures are rising along with atomspheric CO2 levels. There is actual evidence of this.
The evidence pointing to the CAUSE of global warming isn't so solid. All we know for sure is that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are heating up the planet. The impact of human activity on CO2 levels may be negligable for all we konw. One major volcanic eruption, for example, can pump out more climate-altering emissions in days than all of humanity could do for years. The observations in this article do not present any evidence at all, they just demonstrate that scientists who write papers happen to have come to a consensus that human CO2 emissions have an impact on global warming. Being there is not SOLID, DIRECT proof of that one might say it is "group think"...scientists have succumbed to "group think " before...
The article itself makes a good statement:
The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.
Science isn't always right. One thing is for sure though, reducing CO2 emissions due to the burning of fossil fuels might not stop global warming for sure, but it certainly can't make the problem worse. And besides that, it is probalby wise to conserve the worlds biggest NON-renewable resource, much of which happens to be unfortunately located in politically unstable countries where mentally unstable terrorists like to hide.
The earth is not in danger...
we are.
The earth will keep on going long after we've blown ourselves to smithereens, made the ecosystem unable to support all but the most rudimentry life, and used up any/all natural resources at our disposal.
The earth will keep spinning, repair itself, and wait for the next buch of f&*k-ups to spawn.
http://www.globalclimate.org/Newsweek.htm
There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production- with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas - parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia - where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree - a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. "A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale," warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, "because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century."
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras - and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age" conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 - years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. "Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data," concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper
We need to develop advance nano to replace all our existing technologies with much more efficient tehcnologies and we need to use this nano to make super AI's to help us...it would be usefull at that point to start limiting the virus-like population growth and because we now have good nanotech, do permanentlly dump this concept of excessive materialism and exploitative capitalism (as everything will be open source by then, just simply download the latest (well designed table, car, laptop and make them from the last car/table/laptop that wears out). the concept of being "rich", "powerfull", "warmongering" etc will have long been assigned to the trash heap of history. Hoping that your imaginairy gods will protect you won't work (there have been over 6000 religions in recorded human history, there is no evidence any were real or helped those people in any serious times of crisis). If there are any major wars or conflicts in a non-nano future, those societies affected will more than likely, not be able to recover from a war-induced stone age existance because all the easily availible raw materials will exausted and nobody will want to share in that future sort of world. So we had better dump Bush because it's monkey-see, monkey do...the cold war produced the terrorists because we offered no reasonable solution to conflic besises war and now a lot of countries (except canada) wants nukes eventually...so if you create a war-like world, the problems will never end.
It's a great thing we have such a fearless, balls-to-the wall Strong Leader in the White House, someone who's not afraid to make the tough decisions.
Who do we start bombing? Maybe we can bomb hurricanes?
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
the volcanos.
I'd just like to reply to all the detractors of Kyoto and to doing anything constructive about this problem.
It is true that there are doubts about what the effects are going to be, but why in God's name are you advocating taking the risk!??
If the sea level rises by even 1 metre 100 million people will be homeless!!!
Now you've seen the way the stock markets react when oil goes up by a dollar US a barrel, well that's peanuts to what this is going to do. The last thing we need with a ballooning world population is less land.
Get it into your heads, global warming mightn't end the world but it can certainly end Western Civillization.
Back whatever plan of action you can, for you own sake. and for God's sake, wake up...soon.
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
Maybe this is just a nitpick, but people tend to overestimate the importance of humans and our impact on the planet. The issue here is our own survival. The opening of the article lays it out plainly:
Global climate change is increasingly recognised as the key threat to the continued development - and even survival - of humanity.
Exactly. The Earth will go on spinning and evolving new land masses and creatures as it has done for billions of years, no matter what we do to it, short of actually blowing it to pieces. Even massive global nuclear contamination would fade away eventually, becoming a mere hiccup on a geological time scale. Our activities might destroy a lot of species in addition to ourselves, but in planetary history mass extinctions are routine non-events.
What motivates my concern is not that we need to preserve this or that for its own sake, but that we want to maintain a pleasant world to live in. For some people that might include spotted owls and obscure mud lizards, for others not. I think the environmental movement might get more attention from the people who make the decisions if they give up on the sacred earth-spirit thing and focus on the fact that nobody wants to think of their great grandchildren living in shelters and subsisting on hydroponic fungi.
Seems like they only put any particular paper into a single category. A paper supports anthropogenic climate change, or opposes it, or is about something else. But what if the paper says that climate change is due to a combination of factors: partially anthropogenic and partially natural? IIUC that's what most people believe, with argument about how much of each. But the article doesn't indicate how such papers are counted. It seems like this should have been the first thing they thought of when they wrote the methodology. That it gets no mention is IMO suspicious.
The climate change debate has become corrupted by politics, media, and money,' he said. 'It's a sad story. You have scientists making meaningless or ambiguous statements about climate change they are then taken by advocates to the media who translate the statements into alarmist declarations. You then have politicians who respond to all of this by giving scientists more money. Agreement on anything is taken to infer agreement on everything. So if you make a statement that you agree that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, you agree the world's coming to an end, because carbon dioxide is destroying the atmosphere. You have to believe the world's coming to an end, there's no variable here. It's not true.
The key to improving the science of climate change lies in altering the way scientists are funded.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
This is old news. However, the correct news is that there is a direct link between solar flare activity and global warming. Samples taken from ice cores have shown a direct correlation between earth's temperatures and solar flare activity.
There are numerous histograms showing this direct relation for over 250,000 years. And, I did not know the caveman drove cars and refrigerated their meat. Scientists? FrRrRRRrRrTt... *sniff* *sniff* Take a whiff of my contribution biatches...
Id rather have an Ice age than a hotter climate.
People don't research how "man isn't affecting nature"... but people do research the opposite.
You look for something hard enough, you're going to find it... or at least think you found it.
This 'meta-research' should not be trusted by anybody.
Read real research, if the story is so compelling, the numbers should add up. I haven't seen such a thing yet, so I don't know..
The data showing the hockeystick temperature rise, on which all of this global warming hysteria is based, has been shown to be wrong.
_ muller101504.asp?p=1
The consensus is therefore based on flawed data.
The original writers have also admitted to flaws in the data.
Good article on this
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/10/wo
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Didn't we have a ./ article recently that showed a graphic of the words top CO2 producers, and wasn't China the top producer?
If you want to rag on someone, rag on China.
A proud American.
Why does it seem like anyone who wants the U.S. to spend assloads of money to reduce greenhouse gasses is also adamantly opposed to building new nuclear power plants? You know, technology has come a long way in the last 60 years. A new generation of high tech nuclear power plants could dramatically reduce the U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and go a long way toward energy independence. China knows this and is preparing to build a whole bunch of pebble-bed reactors. But just try to build a nuclear power plant in the U.S. You'll have thousands of lawsuits, thousands of NIMBYs, and thousands of protesters doing everything they can to stop it. (Who remembers Diablo Canyon in the 70's? Never mind the fact that Diablo Canyon saved California's bacon during the rolloing blackouts.) The U.S. had better wake up to modern nuclear power or else be left in the dust.
More like theory of evolution. Cranks will never accept it.
Hopefully someone has said it already, but:
It doesn't matter what the consensus is... only what the data says.
It's all aliens anyway. Or, to be more serious, go Read Crichton's essay on the subject.
Right or wrong, political or otherwise, consensus is what economists, journalists, and politicians do, not what scientists do. Scientists do science and to hell with the "consensus" opinion.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
There were 4 changes in sea level of 75-100 meters in the last 3 million years all the result of global climate change. What caused those? We are currently at the upper end of a geologic time scale sea level change which has been going on for several thousand years. (there have been hundreds of such warming and cooling cycles over geologic time)
Banning SUVs is a great idea, but spending money fighting the natural cycles of the earth is silly.
Why spread panic about a problem that isn't confirmed or denied. The Bush administration isn't preaching about how a meteor could hit the earth or how the earth's core could explode, why should it preach about global warming.
We have absolutely no evidence that it's not a normal process.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
What Saddam did was in the middle of war; we are prepared at any time to fire nuclear missles at other countries, which just might be a bit worse on the environment than Saddam's oil fires. FYI when Saddam asked the US about invading Kuwait, Bush Senior's administration told him they had no opinion on the matter. Not that I'm defending him, but I can see how he might have been a bit bitter on his way out of Kuwait.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
The USA does more than any other country in our playing field, when it comes to being green.
While I agree we can do more, alternative power sources isn't always a great thing. The next large power source will be frozen hydrogen which we will obtain from our shore lines. But this alternative fuel source causes more damage to the environement, not less.
Watch it happen.
Of course, the gulf stream might restart once the north had frozen over, starting the cycle over again.
Bottom line - it's very difficult predicting the results of global warming. Climate has all sorts of cataclysmic tipping points, most of which we surely do not understand.
I doubt global warming will be enough to kill off humanity, though it might thin the herd a bit. Our children will adapt and move on. It won't even come down to Kevin Costner drinking his own urine.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Here is an interesting discussion given by the Alfred P. Sloan professor of Atmospheric Sciences Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Massachusetts Institute of Technology...Richard S. Lindzen entitled: CLIMATE ALARM - Where Does it Come From?
It may help to explain why most "scientists" agree in this topic.
http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/264.pdf
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
Excellent article on "the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy."
Bring on that CO2 baby, and whip out the Coppertone!
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
I, for one, will not mind a warmer earth.
so now we have finally convinced those fundimentalists that the sun does not revolve around the earth can we square away evolution and global warming once and for all?
I woke up to 32F this morning just 20 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, Snow was just a few miles north of me. November has been very chilly here as well with January not looking much better with a good chance of snow for us.
Global warming my hairy ass! I'm sure we could all use a few degrees of warming here and there even if it were true. Folks we're coming OUT of an Ice Age! IMHO, I think it's mostly from all that hot air from those 928 blow hard academic types presenting their papers.
... you can safely remain ignorant of anything you'd like. It appears you are immune to being persuaded by facts.
The ice-core trends of temperature and greenhouse gases match so precisely that there has been room for doubt as to what is cause and what is effect. Thus, could the temperature changes be driving CO2/methane levels in the atmosphere (by altering patterns of global biomass production and storage, say) rather than the other way around? If this was true, then the currently increasing levels of CO2 and methane need not give rise to significant global warming: they would be a consequence, rather than a cause.
If you understand what this is saying, the meaning is clear. They don't know if CO2 is causing global warming or if it is caused by global warming. This kind of puts a different spin on the remainder of the article. If you don't know if you are treating a cause or an effect, the whole matter is kind of pointless.
Clearly, if you assume that (a) humans are the cause of increased CO2 in the atmosphere and (b) increased CO2 will doom the planet and kill millions (if not billions) of people, then some real changes need to be made right now. It is clear that the referenced article isn't thinking about individual automobiles as "the whole problem", but fixed-site industrial energy use.
This is something that most of the global warming activists seem to miss. I have yet to see a ranking that says something like:
Should such a chart be published, reviewed and verified this would present a clear call to action - eliminate cars, utterly and completely. However, what if the chart looked more like:
It would be far, far different and there would be no clear-cut "call to action". Would anyone seriously propose that we give up farming?
Not having this kind of explanation of sources, it is extremely difficult to judge who to kill and who to save. Turning off the heat for North American and Europe would certainly save a lot of CO2, but it would likely kill as many people as Bangladesh being underwater. Similarly, taking away everyone's car in the USA would eliminate some CO2 (how much?), but it would surely kill some significant number of people that didn't get to a doctor or a hospital.
Do you see the point here? If the situation is as bad as some would like us to believe, then we are at the juncture of having to make the kinds of decisions along the lines of "Who do we kill?" Do you really blame the US Government for not wanting to get behind any plan that results in the deaths of thousands of people? At this point in time, no decision is the same as not killing those people because the water isn't rising yet. Until it does, it is highly unlikely that decisions are going to be made which can be clearly traced to any sort of mass death. You can make what you like of that - I'm sure some will say that it is better if the mass death occurs elsewhere than the US and it isn't old fat white people that are doing the dying. However, no matter where you live, your government is unlikely to make any decision that leads to mass death, anywhere, even when the alternative (no decision) has the potential of mass death.
I think that to some extent this might be missing the point. I don't think anyone (cranks aside) questions whether the release of greenhouse gases causes global warming. The fundamental question is about how much of an effect human activity will have over other, natural factors, and what outcome that activity will have. There is a significant amount of disagreement on this point, and what to do about it as an insurance policy. Saying "Humans contribute to global warming" is not nearly enough.
So, he's a profit, then. God is getting pissed, and she's gonna punish us unless we clean up our act.
--LWM
A quote relevant to this headline:
Claiming most scientists believe in global warming and that none claim that it definitely will not happen completely misses the point. "Opponents" of global warming are not arguing that it is definitely not going to happen, but rather that the current information is insufficient to make the statements many have been making on the subject.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Let's put things into perspective here. Do you want to know who the top polluter of 2004 was?
It wasn't automobines.
It wasn't factories.
It wasn't even hot air from all the political rhetoric we've had to face this year.
The top polluter of 2004 was... Mount Saint Helens.
Really makes you stop and think, doesn't it?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger.
Earth is fine. It's HUMANS who might be in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger.
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
I think the general consensus is that climate change is inevitable, but that humans are making it happen sooner than it would, if we just let nature run its course.
Your commentary about the herds of cattle is laughable -- cows exist because of mankind, they have practically no survival skills and wouldn't be here without us.
You mention a natural source of sulfur dioxide, which is implicated in acid rain but not so much in global warming. Is there an equivalent natural mechanism to make irrelevant the levels of CO2 or NOx emissions we are producing? And could there be a "sink" for natural emissions, yet no equivalent mitigating factor on the man-made side to offset all our output?
I'm not sure who else you could "blame" for the degradation of the atmosphere. When, due to a century of steelmaking, the snow turns brown in Pittsburgh, then they clean up their act and the snow turns white again, are you suggesting there's no correlation between those events? Last I checked there aren't any steel mills in the wild.
"The results themselves are interesting, but the most remarkable part was that, of the 928 papers they found, 75% accepted that global warming was caused by human activities, either explicitly or implicitly. 25% made no mention either way. And not a single paper asserted otherwise." JamesBell submits this article by a geologist which suggests that the Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger."
/.'s favorite staple topics, but this is totally bogus.
Funny how Michael Crichton doesn't seem to think so... And you'll be hard pressed to find an author who does as much factual research on the subjects he writes about. Not saying his word is gospel, just dispelling the myth that there are no disscenting theroies or that propganda we're regularly fed is beyond question. So much so that I won't even bother linking the articles that measure the sun as heating up or the profound peaks and vallies the Earth's climate rolls through again. I know this is one of
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Most scientists are not dispassionate observers of the truth and the media exploits them for their own agenda. Take a hint from author Michael Crichton and take everything you read with a grain of salt.
Please do us all a favor and park your truck inside a closed garage, sit in front of your exhaust pipe and breath deeply until you pass out.
What I would like to see studied and addressed is an issue that I haven't seen anyone touch as of yet. Namely, that we know the global climate has changed dramatically and rapidly in the past, and how do we know that that is not what is occuring now. We've had ice ages where the glaciers extended down into what is now the continental US. We've also had extemely warm periods, such as when a good portion of the US was under a sea. How do we know that we're not simply entering another hotter period in our planet's history? If anyone knows of a study that has addressed this, please post information about it, as I would be very interrested to read it.
If there was a 60/40, 75/25, or 80/20 split I'd take the news better...
No dissenting opinion at all?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Scientists these days are no more ethical than Used Car Dealers or Politicians. They go where the money is. And there's no money in proving that humans aren't causing Global Warming. And there are no publications that will give ink to alternative theories. Scientists get their funding from grants. Mainly from the government, but from NGOs as well. The money says, "Prove that humans are causing Global Warming". Yes, the money talks. And the scientists listen. Moral of the story: Don't trust a scientist any more than you would trust a poltician or used car dealer.
Well no matter what we do to help solve this people are going to complain, its human nature. If we raise gas prices like the UK to $5 a liter (you do the math) people would complain. If we eliminate meat, to eliminate the high amounts of methane produced by cows, people complain. So why don't we give up and move to the moon.
After the most recent Slashdot story I actually steeled myself to do something about it. I re-read the whole story at Threshold 2 to gather UIDs of people who might help. The idea is to build a list of myths and authoritative answers to them. For example, the old line that the sun's getting hotter, and that this explains global warming, comes up over & over again. Many, very patient! and knowledgable people posted to that story with excellent refutations of such nonsense.
I'm going to put my plaintext mail address in this comment, that's how serious I am about this! You can even help if you believe that Climate Change is hippie nonsense trotted out by pseudo scientists who just want more funding!!
What I am looking for:
If you have violent objections to the idea that global warming is a bad thing, please email me at the address below describing why you think this. As you will see if you hit 'see the rest of this comment', the existing list - which were collected from a single Slashdot story - is already pretty long, so this isn't so vital.
If you can help knock down such gibberish- if you have posted with a calm, well-argued and ideally knowledgable or carefully referenced refutation of a wild claim - please email me and make yourself known; I will get in touch in the next few days.
If you want to subscribe me to lots of spam lists, don't bother; Gmail are very good at spam filtering, you'll get yourself blacklisted when I hit 'report spam' and you won't be helping your cause one little bit.
If you can help, mail me at:
username: imipak; domain (at): gmail.com
Here's the list I collected from the last Slashdot climate change story, only a few days ago, about "why anthropogenic climate change is a myth". Read it and weep.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
In the two billion years the planet has been around and has survived everything from birth of the universe, Meteors comets and the formation of water from Oxygen and hydrogen (imagine the power it would have required to do that at the scale that it happened), to the drying of the land mass's and the evaporation of the seas to provide the atmosphere (again imagine the power to do that). The beginning of the formation of amino acids and proteins, which came together, got sparked and wow now we have life (I would have to believe that it didn't just start with one cell as the probabilities of survival would be zilch).
The cellular generation of complex bio-systems to insects and crustaceans then fish, air breathers, dinosaurs and finally mammals and humans them self which by the way have only occupied the planet for about 4 million years give or take an epoch; the incredible arrogance of the people who believe that we actually are powerful enough to permanently damage or change the earth? After what, 2 billion years of change? To think that we as a collective or as individuals could effect enough on our environment, something that in the 4 millions years of us being around we have, oh about what, maybe 150-200 years of history study and documentation. Global warming? I don't think so, Ozone loss? maybe... probably not. Destroying the fragile eco system? Geeeez give me a break. This is the earth right? We are dealing with educated alarmist who for their own interest are waging a war against the people who express freedom and the American way probably stronger then any one group. What we need is to educate our selves and then the rest of the world on what the SIMPLE truth is. We as a race will not change the world, we as race do not have that kind of power over the earth. We may in our stupidity eliminate ourselves. There may be a life threatening event such as a big ass comet falling on our heads, or at least change the tilt axes again to where it was before (single biggest contribution to the change in land mass). Bet that would stir the pot.
Ok... a bunch of geologists spent a lot of money, went out to find out exactly how much oil the united states had in reserve and at the current projected consumption rate how long before we ran on empty? Well guess what They DONT KNOW. Why don't they know? Because they cant find the damned bottom of the deeper oil cavities; machine can't see it, too far down, They do know that a very large oil reserve starts at about Manitoba to the south goes over the pole to well inside Russia, all the way to Alaska on the left and Greenland on the right. Big huge and at least 5-20 miles down.
The earth is about 8000 miles in diameter and we figure the core is about 4000 miles in diameter with mantle leaking up to about 6000 miles. So what's the rest of it made of? Well there is some speculation based on fact that a great part of it is hydrocarbon in some from or other. One thing to remember: the earth is still cooling. After billions of years its still not done folks. And like the solar furnace that gives us life it's got a long way to cool. When it does it will probably no longer support life, but that's not in our near future.
Remember all the public land closures to off highway vehicles from the Clinton administration? Turns out this is the reason we have so many big fires that we can't control. Gee, now there's a surprise, How do you make a forest thicker? You prune it. These land closing, dirt bike, off road, horse back, bashing tree huggers are very educated. Educated enough to truly distort the facts to those who are not.
I wish I had points.
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
The Earth will be just fine. It will go on evolving as it has for billions of years. We humans, however, may not be so fortunate if we don't change our habits. As George Carlin once said, "the Earth will shake us off like a bad cold".
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
I'm sick and tired of the truth, too. I wish I had the same kind of sand that you have. It must be comfortable to put your head into.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
articles from crank or non-peer-reviewed publications were not counted
This is the very reason why the layperson does not take this seriously.
When sources that disagree with the researchers are ridiculed, the people that are inclined to believe those sources lose interest in the research.
Instead of saying that "Research institute X has found Y, but their model is incorrect because they didn't factor in Z", these people are pretending that the other research doesn't exist. They need to get the support of lay people if they want their research to be taken seriously outside of academia.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Isn't it funny how in 1997 under Clinton, they wouldn't even submit Kyoto for ratifying, but in 2003 under Bush, emissions were voted on and reduced, yet Bush is the one who gets bashed for anti-environmentalism and Clinton is never mentioned?
Other posters are right--this issue has become way too politicized, mostly by bitter liberals who hate that Bush is President again.
Any monkey can pick and choose which papers it wants to include in a pool to search thru. This is like the Ex-Soviet Union saying that 98.999 % of the people supported it. Of course they can say this, they make the rules. They ignore the countless research papers published in peer-reviewed journals over the last 10 years, that demonstrate that temperatures were generally higher during the medieval warm period than they are today! They ignore the fact that solar variability is most likely the key factor of any noticable climate change. And that most of the models used in climate modeling are highly questionable.
Using the methods that this researcher used I could find 10 papers written by Scientists that claim that the earth is flat, and then go around saying "10 out of 10 Scientists say that the earth is flat, So it must be true!" This paper is a total waste of Slashdots Time and effort.
And you will be modded down my the spelling nazis.
They're better equipped to survive in nasty air.
...100% of peer-reviewed journals refuse all articles which cast doubt on global warming.
There are many articles in peer reviewd journals, by scientist who do not agree with the idea that humanity is causing global warming. That the author, in her report, can not find, nor report on any of these dissenting view brings the credibility of the study into question. As she did not publish her methodology, nor include sources further casts a shadow over the validity of this report.
Fly Fish? Participate in our forum
somewhat i fear that related to climate change they will follow the sentence like "we are at the edge of the abyss, but we will take a step forward"
Kyoto will do nothing to actually save us, but it WILL cause a huge amount of resources to be consumed.
What resources? How?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Essay Claiming 'Scientific Consensus' for Global Warming is Ridiculed
"A one-hundred-percent record of 'scientific consensus' on anthropogenic climate change would be a sensational finding indeed. In fact, such a total result would be even more remarkable than any 'consensus' ever achieved in Soviet-style elections," Peiser noted sarcastically."
No effect AND destroy the environment you say!?!? I bet you also have faith that Republicans are for "small government" and that tax cuts stimulate the economy.
JamesBell submits this article by a geologist which suggests that the Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger.
So does his brother Art Bell.
I think he always pronounces it "nucular" in public addresses. "Nucular" is an incorrect but very common pronounciation of "nuclear"; as this dictionary entry explains, it's common because so many other terms (circular, spectacular, molecular, ocular, vascular) end with a "-ular" sound, whereas "-lear" is comparatively unfamiliar.
An analogous word would be "minuscule", very commonly misspelled as "miniscule", because so many familiar words begin with "mini-".
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
"This snow is beautiful. Thank god global warming never happened"
"It did, but nuclear winter cancelled it out"
....in Canada, Global warming is A Good Thing
Nobody debates global warming.
The debate is centered over a number of things.
First of all, the earth is coming out of an ice age. In geologic terms, the ice ages were yesterday, and the day before it was hot and sunny. Right now, we're in spring after the ice age, and it's hard to predict if we've reached summer or not, but we know it's not as hot as it was before the winter.
We haven't been observing long enough to be able to make any conclusion about what's going on in geological terms.
What we do know is that humans are contributing to the polution and were not before. Scientists are mixed on how much the contribution matters, and not long ago, were predicting that there would be ice ages (the theory before global warming).
Kyoto makes sense to a point for a number of reasons unrelated to global warming, and as I said nobody is debating either that warming is occurring nor that humans contribute to it. The debate is largely over how much of it is natural and how much is not.
However, Kyoto doesn't apply to many countries, and this is where the Senate took exception, and it's not been resolved.
Kyoto does nobody any good if all the poluters move to third world countries exempt from the treaty. It won't cut polution, and it will hurt the economy.
That, right there, is why the Senate rejected it, and I believe it is a reasonable and correct decision personally.
It's a global problem. If member countries are still allowed to deal with countries that can produce things without obeying the treaty, then the polution will just move off shore, to those locations, and the global problem will remain.
If your code is acting bloated, and is running rather slow, it's likely and predicted that some loops you will unroll.
I saw this article on the front page and wondered to myself if there would be yet another stream of comments denying that there is evidence of climate change or that it could have any deletarious impact. Of course there was.
I am a scientist, not working directly on how anthropogenic activities are effecting the atmosphere but on what the predicted effects may have on vegetation.
As a scientist I look at all the available evidence for a question and come to some conclusion based on that evidence. There is no other sensible way to make a decisison. Where the evidence is lacking, I would try and do some work that would provide evidence one way or another.
Virtually all available evidence points to anthropogenic emmisions causing climate change and there is plenty of evidence as to what those changes may be and what the effects of those changes on the biosphere may be.
Consequently, what I wonder about the, extremely predictable, Slashdot response to an article such as this is whether it reflects the attitude of the US or whether it reflects the attiude of the predominently young, middle-class and technical readership of Slashdot?
Either way, I'm fearful of the general ignorance and lack of logical thought.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
I am pretty convinced that global warming is happening, as it did frequently in the geologic past. However, I am not convinced that it is going to be universally harmful. Climate will change, getting worse in some places and better in others. I have half a mind to invest in arctic ocean beachfront property in Nunavik Canada :-) Ships will be passing by soon. And it may become a great fishing and swimming spot. The vast Canadian plains to the south will become rich farmland as the western US becomes desert.
What's amazing to me is that these scientists conveniently ignore the fact that the Earth's climate was warm enough during a period of time in history, where the ice receeded enough to form a land-bridge between Asia and North America.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You've got that backwards. The Bering land bridge between Asia and Alaska formed because the Earth had grown cold enough that enough water was trapped up in glaciers that the water level receded, allowing the people to walk across the land below today's sea level. That was a likely drop of about 300 feet.
What's the explaination for that, since most of these scientists believe that we were just a bunch of monkeys during that time
We evolved from a common ancestor to monkeys. Humans didn't fully evolve into their current form until about 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. The Bering bridge last emerged above water about 70,000 years ago.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Since you assert there are countless such papers, please cite 10. Thanks.
This study just did what scientists do all the damn time: discard the evidence that doesn't support your theory and hope no-one else notices.
This is not surprising at all. Very few human beings bite the hands that feed them and scientists are human--those in academia are especially human and especially political. They're not going to be out there proving that global warming isn't happening or that it is a natural phenomenon when doing so, in sufficient numbers, will guarantee that funding will dry up on the topic and they'll have to find another research gravy train.
This also doesn't consider how many studies may have been done, submitted for publishing, and rejected. This could be just as much a political condemnation on those that decide whether or not a study is worthy of being published as it is any comment on the validity of global warming and/or its possible human sources.
Any time you see every scientist agree (or at least no scientist disagree) on a very controversial topic, be very suspicious.
The oil/automotive industry and "Bush's EPA" do not publish scientific journals, which goes immediately to the heart of the parent posters assertion that most journals won't even give dissenting opinion the time of day. Anyone who has been around 'scientists' knows that its not about the science. Its about the politics and the money.
Even if Kyoto was signed and enforced today, it's just a pebble in the (rising) ocean of what's needed to prevent massive climate changes.
I don't think this means the end of humanity, but we're probably looking at the death of 10's to 100's of millions through flooding, starvation and most probably civil conflict caused by shrinking land resources.
So it's now time to start looking at what we might do in terms of food production, flood protection and mass migration strategies. Is building cities underwater an option? How can we save the species from countries that will be completely submerged? It's time to start this conversation, because nobody's listening to the warnings.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
This result isn't very interesting, much less newsworthy.
The first problem is that the primary source material for most academic papers is - other academic papers. There is a strong Andy Warhol effect in academia: once a paper is referenced by enough papers, it becomes standard practice to reference that paper. It becomes famous simply for being famous. Regardless of the papers' actual merit, a small but ideologically homogeneous set of original texts can easily spawn an entire cottage industry of follow-ons.
Secondly, who are the "peers" who review these papers? By what standard do they decide what gets published and what doesn't? The belief that someone who claims to be a scientist is only interested in the truth is, to be polite, extraordinarily naive.
One man's religion is another man's belly-laugh. - LL
Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that scientists are any different than most human beings. Individual scientists can succumb to greed, lust for fame, etc and, occasionally, will get away with publishing intentionally erroneous data. Usually when this happens, especially in an area where so many scientists are working (like climate change), their lies will be uncovered and they will be ruined (ex: cold fusion, etc).
The article being discussed here states that the vast majority of hundreds of studies on the subject have all come to the same conclusions: global warming is both real and anthropogenic. I suggest that the groundswell of /. opinion that all these researchers are wrong/lying is due to the rather unfortunate consequences of the truth. We will have to face the facts that our climate may change. Maybe for Canadians, this will be a good thing. For ocean algae and those in the lower lattitudes it will most certainly be bad.
Society invests a huge amount of money in scientific research each year, and does so in a way that ensures maximum objectivity and honesty on the part of the researchers. Averaged over time and sufficient numbers of studies, science usually hits pretty close to the mark. Therefore, to all those doubting, suck it up and deal with the damage we've done. Don't blame the messenger if you dont like the message.
Since we just had a thread on a good, clear writing, we might as well use the word "consensus" correctly and clearly.
A consensus is when you have unanimity. In other words, a consensus means that people pretty much unanimously agree on the conclusion. This is not the same thing as if 75% of the people tacitly accept a conclusion and the other 25% express no opinion. No, a consensus is reached when discussion or investigation reaches a point where a very large majority of the people involved or all the people involved mutually agree that one conclusion is the conclusion the group accepts as a whole. If a majority of the members of the group agree with a conclusion, others have no opinion, and others disagree, then what you have is a majority opinion, not a consensus.
Oddly enough I found that article comforting. If you don't know your past you don't know your future kind of feel.
Their suggestion to implement civil nuclear power is quite a shock at the end though. To me it seems a gamble between local / global risks. Carbonization - grow a plant today!
UBU
One of my meteorology professors debunked this myth, of which I believe him. The earth's climate has always cyclically gone from warm to cold. It's just a matter of time until we start the turn to an "ice age."
This is similar to observations made by Michael Crichton during a lecture at Caltech. http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/Calen4/consensus.html Bascially he says the science behind global warming is dubious at best.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
I hope you will at least look at the work of scientists who are critical of the global warming theory. Look up Drs. Sallie Baliunas and Patrick J. Michaels and at least get the other side of the story before making up your mind.
If there had been at least *some* articles pushing the opposite perspective, I would have faith that the scientific machinery is working as intended, with people pursuing multiple and opposing theories to find the real answer.
But the fact that there is *not one single* opposing viewpoint makes the whole idea of consensus sound a bit specious. I can't take seriously a scientific debate in which there is only one side of the matter being discussed.
(1) there has never been any doubt that human activities contribute to global warming. The only point of contention is wether an alteration of our current activities would cause a significant change in the rate of global warming, and wether, if this is the case, we should attempt to do so.
(2)Consensus has nothing to do with truth... unless you subscribe to the WOD view of the universe, in which case we could fix all our problems by believing at them really hard.
Good to know that human foolishness is once again aligned in a predictable direction, though.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
From my chemistry classes....
What happens when you run an arc through air?
The smell of ozone
The same is happening in the upper atmosphere
The UV strikes ordinary O2, splitting it in two, and
giving the individual atoms energy. These individual
oxygen atoms than combine with more 02 molecules to
form ozone. The ozone either breaks down in time, or absorbs some more UV, and breaks apart again. The real defense against UV is the O2, NOT the 03!
Now if I could only remember a source to cite this from....
Terrible is the fall of the mighty, for their pain is great to behold [Personal Quote(TM)]
Science is founded upon doubt--constantly challenging existing theories in search of physical truth. Considering most predictions concerning the earth's climate are based on poorly performing computer models, current theories are far from conclusive. Check out Patrick Michaels http://www.cato.org/people/michaels.html.
By asking this question you raise doubt about the quality of the work without actually presenting evidence that only a minority of the scientists do serious work on this. But if you are driving an SUV a statement like that might seem insightful even though it's completely void of information.
what wonderfully circular logic. don't question an article for its lack of information, as doing so is devoid of information. wow.
When are people going to rise up and say "Screw you and your worthless money!! You can't use it when the planet is dead!" and just take over? ...that said, I drive my Jeep Cherokee to work and back every day with no sign of changing... not like I have any alternatives though.
..."meme".
Here's a url for a news item with one scientist claiming their research ignored numerious peer reviewed and published items not suportive of global warming! www.cnsnews.com//ViewNation.asp?Page=\Nation\archi ve\200412\NAT20041207a.html
People who go into hysterics about how the earth is in danger and the apocalypse is upon us because of all of us horrible people with our nasty machines really annoy me.
What arrogance!
Human beings have existed for only a few hundred thousand years in any recognizable form. We will probably only exist for a few hundred thousand more in any recognizable form. To the Earth, which is over four billion years old and which has survived cataclysm after cataclysm, including impacts which caused almost every single species on the planet to go extinct within a several-year timeframe, we're NOTHING. We're a weird little blip in time.
A few million years from now, there won't be any trace we ever existed. The continents will have shifted, our buildings will have been ground into dust by erosion, and whatever species takes our place will be studying our fossils, wondering what we were like.
GET OVER YOURSELVES. Even if we totally fuck up everything, in a few million years it'll all be right back to normal. We have no power whatsoever to ruin things in any permanant way. We just flatter ourselves that we're powerful.
In reality, we're nothing; we came from nothing, and we will return to nothing. So it isn't the EARTH that we should be worried about; the Earth doesn't care WHAT we do, it's just a big, immortal, unkillable rock.
Worry instead about whether we're fucking things up for OURSELVES. Because THAT, my dears, is the REAL issue.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I hate to be the one who says the Emperor is wearing no clothers here, but where is the the science in this?
Remember that old definition of the "Scientific Method". That method is not concerned with how many papers say what or whom they are funded by. For those who are more into scientific stamp collecting than real science (ie: atmosphereic sciences vs., well, Physics), let me lay it out for you.
The Scientific Method
1. Observation
2. Hypothesis
3. Experiments to Test Hypothesis
4. Hypothesis validated? Try again and have as many other people as possible try it too. The more your hypothesis is validated, the closer to reality you are.
5. Hypothesis not validated. Modify and go to step (1) or throw it out. You were wrong.
This is as opposed to the sort of conjecture and "data archeology" that passes for science in the global warming and evolution communities.
Now before all you "real scientists" get all bent out of shape, I'm a real scientist too. Let's just remember what science with a capital 'S' means.
Yes, Darwin or some variation on Darwin looks likely. Until you've done the experiments (and there are precious few as far as I can tell) don't quote that stuff as real.
About the only experimental validation of evolution that I've seen are attempts to recreate either the chemical or informational environment of early life. In other words simulating either the chemical environment of Earth's early atmosphere or the DNA automata structure.
Obvious examples are the finite-state automata of the John Conway's Life sort. I believe the Miller-Urey experiments came up with some interesting examples of pre-biotic amino systhesis in their experiments. (With a passing tip of the hat to Tierra et al)
Even more interesting are the thermodynamic models of Ilya Prigogine for which he won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on Non-Equilibrium Dissapative Structures. He demonstrated how you can get local pockets of decreasing entropy (increasing order) naturally without breaking the 2nd law of Thermo. In other words the background possibly for life, the Universe and Everything (tm). Most people aren't even aware of Prigogine's work.
These are the only experiments I'm aware of that point the way to evolution being real. I'm sure there are a few others, but it really annoys me when someone starts arguing the "science" of evolution by showing me his stamp collection of fossils.
That doesn't mean I'm siding with the knuckle-dragging troglodites that push creationism, but the stamp collectors do a disservice to their field by calling it science.
Which brings me to topic at hand. I don't know of any arguments that would be as persuasive as the works of Conway, Miller and Prigogine to "prove" global warming. That even admitting that Conway, Miller are mostly very interesting simulations.
The fact that a large group of people might have gone data mining to get themselves more funding shows nothing. If I had a group of peer-reviewed scholarly bible articles, and someone said that 95% of the articles said jesus christ was the son of god, does that mean that (1) he existed and (2) he was the son of some god?
Of course not, but it might mean that they are suffering from the madness of crowds. If you do nothing but talk to people who are mostly convinced of the things you are convinced of, you might have a hard time getting people who *aren't* convinced, convinced.
Please, please, please do not take this as a denial of the fossil record or some blanket rejection of all weather studies. Hopefully they are more reliable than the weather predictions I usually get on weatherunderground.
To a large degree global warming just doesn't make much sense. Anyone who has studied complexity theory knows that initial conditions can make huge differences in long term processes. That's why it becomes progressively more difficult to determine the weather the further you try to predict out.
Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in Social Anthropology & Sport Sociology at Liverpool John Moores University and the editor of of CCNet (Cambridge Conference Network) webzine, labeled Oreskes' essay a disturbing article.
"Whatever happened to the countless research papers published in the last ten years in peer-reviewed journals that show that temperatures were generally higher during the Medieval Warm Period than today, that solar variability is most likely to be the key driver of any significant climate change and that the methods used in climate modeling are highly questionable?" Peiser asked.
"Given the countless papers published in the peer-reviewed literature over the last ten years that implicitly or explicitly disagree with the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, one can only conclude that all of these were simply excluded from the [Science Magazine] review. That's how it arrived at a 100 percent consensus!" he added.
According to Peiser, Oreskes' assertion that there is a 100 percent consensus about the issue is not backed by science.
"Even [former Soviet dictator Joseph] Stalin himself did not take consensus politics to such extremes," Peiser explained. "In the Soviet Union the official 'participation rate' was never higher than 98-99 percent.
"So how did the results published in Science achieve a 100 percent level of conformity? Regrettably, the article does not include any reference to the [unpublished?] study itself, let alone the methodology on which the research was based. This makes it difficult to check how Oreskes arrived at the truly miraculous results," he added.
There's no time to stop for gas, we're already late.
Energy efficiency is great, but it's not going to be the solution to global warming. What's likely to happen is that the cost savings from energy efficiency will result in more economic growth that, you guessed it, results in more energy use.
Reducing energy usage substantially will require fundamental changes to the Western, and particularly the American, way of life. Swapping your current SUV for a hybrid ain't enough. Housing will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. It'll have to be much smaller, and air conditioning will have to be reduced substantially. Private swimming pools will likely have to go. Consumer goods will have to be more expensive to be energy-efficient, and not nearly as luxurious - that room-sized fridge-freezer combo will have to go, as will that wall-sized plasma TV. Plane travel will have to become rarer - as well as chewing fuel, apparently contrails do have a not insubstantial effect on global warming.
And the above will all be pretty much in vain - because China and India will continue to grow quickly and burn lots of coal in the process.
In my view, the only practical solution is to find ways of getting energy that don't cause global warming. And we need to do something fairly dramatic right now. And nuclear is the only feasible option for that something.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
http://accesstoenergy.com/
Our government has recently enacted a Clean Air Act AND a Healthy Forests Initiative, so we can expect this whole global warming issue to resolve itself in a few months.
Share and rate p
The Earth is decidedly NOT in "serious, imminent danger". The planet is going to be just fine for quite a while, as far as anyone can tell. Get it right. Life on Earth might have a hard time adjusting to rapid climate change, but that's happened before, and life (and, yes, the planet Earth itself) has continued to exist. The REAL question (as the discussion appears to notice) is how much of this climate change do we have control over, and what should we be doing to keep ourselves out of trouble?
Time for rampant hedonism and fornication. We're all doomed.
Can we get an exact date on the doom? I want to start the bacchanalia about a week before, so as to optimize my avoidance of consequences.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I direct you to the book "Environmental Overkill"
by the late Dixy Lee Ray (who also wrote "Trashing
the Planet"). She was Governor of the State of
Washington, chairman of the Atomic Energy
Commission, Assistant Secretary of State in the
U.S. Bureau of Oceans, a long-time member of
the Zoology faculty at the University of
Washington, and most important to those of
you on the left, she won the United Nations[sic]
Peace Prize (as well as other non-U.N. awards
and honors). In the book she takes each liberal
position and blasts it to small particles!
I also direct you to Michael Crichton, who has
an excellent statement on this issue at the
end of Jurassic Park (book, not movie).
And to the Reader's Digest book "Strange Stories
and Amazing Facts", published in the 1970's,
which details the coming ice age (LOL). They
tried that one, and when it didn't happen they
moved to the other extreme and "global warming".
Leonard Nimoy's "In Search Of" show, original not
newer version, also did an episode back in the
late 70's or early 80's about the coming Ice Age!
And we were supposed to run out of food, but if
we had done that then we all wouldn't be so fat.
They can't have it both ways! And if the
population was as big of a problem as they stated
then how come we can still feed everyone. We
export more food than we import too! I'll bet
every country wishes they had our problems!
And we had lines back in the 70's to buy gas.
Now, with NEW and IMPROVED abilities to extract
oil we couldn't access before (not to mention
better, non-destructive ways to get at the oil
we could reach before, like drilling down and
then sideways), we STILL have enough to go
around for all those extra people who are so
fat. LOL!
Some of you chicken-littles need to get an F'n
life! I wish you luck with that! Personally,
I think your side needs the tin foil more...
Mod this guy down ... he used the 'N' word!
this criticism is pretty slack. it ignores the point of Crichton's diatribe - that being concensus is often used when there's no hard supporting science - in favour of a rib jab. E=mc2 is a quantifiable equation, as is the distance to the sun, and the effect of malnutrition. human affect on the environment, on the other hand, is not honestly quantifiable as the historical data is severely lacking in context. regardless of the simple fact that i'd look sideways at any scientist that claims we're not affecting the global climate, i'd probably look *down* on a scientist that claims it's proven.
does that dismiss human affect on climate change? absolutely not, but there are people who believe that questioning an absolute certainty of it does dismiss it. they're wrong, they're arrogant, and they're not learning from history.
You have your doubts about gravitation too, then? mt
mt
The guy is a professor of Statistics for Political "Science". Not exactly a great background for commenting on paleoclimatology or geochemistry or environmental biology or any of the other specialized disciplines he asserts have somehow gotten it totally wrong.
...
(E.O. Wilson's decades of field work? Useless stupidity - how could he learn anything by staring at ants all those years? He should have spent his time productively misrepresenting other peoples work, like Lomborg.)
So it's no surprise his work's not popular with people who actually do science - he doesn't seem to care what is actually going on with the biosphere.
His political and monetary success, however, does at least put the lie to the old saw that "those that can't do, teach"
hehe, i can't tell if you're jokey or not. the grandparent talks about misuse of begging the question, and you zing him for begging the question? bravo, sir!
This is a classic one. Take a group of people with widely divided opinions on an issue. Take the point you want to prove, stated in a sufficiently broad manner. Take the inverse of that point.
Now, divide the group into people who support your point and people who support the inverse, without asking them directly, but rather based on reading related things which they have written.
The fallacy here is that most of them actually haven't stated an opinion on your point at all - you have excluded the middle possibility that the response might be "no comment", and redistributed this group between the extreme cases. It's not actually in "How to lie with statistics" but it could have been.
Most of these papers say things like "Here is an interesting correlation that I found". These are valuable scientific papers, but it must be understood that correlation does not imply a connection. It merely implies that there is something here worth investigating and explaining. Most of the people who wrote those papers are fully aware of this and were not stating an opinion on what was going on - they were just offering something interesting that they discovered. History teaches us that correlations in the physical sciences are occasionally connections but more commonly they are things which we don't understand at all.
You can't prove anything outside a laboratory. (Or more accurately, it's not proof unless it's possible to replicate in a laboratory by anybody with the right tools).
You can argue all day about what you want people to do (personally, I don't care), but you're going to have to do it without proof. Because there isn't any, and we can't pack a solar system into a laboratory to investigate it.
Jesus told Bush it's all part of the Rapture, so don't worry about it.
If you actually take the time to compare the incidence of volcanic eruptions with global temperature (or appropriate proxies) you'll find that there is an inverse correlation. That's right: lots of volcanoes actually reduce the Earth's temperature. This is assumed to result from the aerosols and ash released from the eruptions -- the particulate matter helps scatter solar energy back in to space.
Anyway, I just thought that was relevant as long as we were on the topic of volcanoes.
Does anybody know how the global emissions from volcanos compare to human emissions?
I'm not be trying to be a troll or anything -- I actually don't know and am curious.
There's something odd about this article. Here's what I noticed:
1. They don't list how many different authors generated the 928 papers. It could be that the same group of scientist are generating a lot of material that is naturally reaching the same conclusion.
2. Why did they select "climate change" as the keywords? What did other keywords yield? For example, "greenhouse gaseses" or "global warming".
3. The footnote #9 seems to indicate some degree of subjectivity:
"The first year for which the database consistently published abstracts was 1993. Some abstracts were deleted from our analysis because, although the authors had put 'climate change' in their key words, the paper was not about climate change."
This also would lead one to believe that the keyword process is not accurate and could be potentially missing many abstracts. If the authors have keyworded unrelated papers with "climate change", how are you certain that all related papers were keyworded with "climate change?". This leads back to point #1. If there are many of the same authors creating similar content, then it follows they are more likely to use the same keywords when they create their documents. Likewise, if different authors are creating many dissenting documents, then they could be using different keywords.
4. Why was just the ISI database searched? This study could be used just as easily to prove that the ISI database has a bias towards papers that favor the human involvement in climate chang theory.
I don't know whether or not human activities are causing the earth to warm, but I don't think we can draw any conclusions from this. To me, this article doesn't exactly look like science.
This seems to me a matter of managing risk - for example:
Risk : The sea-level will rise 8 meters (~25ft) in the next 100 years.
Likeliehood : say 1% within 100 years;
Cost : Hundred's of low-lying cities flooded; huge tracts of arable land sterilised leading to inadequate food production; fresh water supplies contaminated for billions of people; Deaths of 1-5 billion people (another guess depending upon when).
If we assume the risk of occurrence over the next 100 years is only 1%, and that the consequences are so calamitous, then they cannot be ignored. The risk managers are our governments; without government action, our collective response to the identified risk is just "hope a lot" and I don't think that's good enough.
We do not inherit the world from our parents; we borrow it from our children - American Indian Proverb
Nobody writes papers of the sort "global warming, yes or no?" in scientific journals. They write papers like, um, these. (result of a search for papers with abstract including the words "climate change" in J. Clim. in 2003-2004)
Despite what you hear on Slashdot comments and in the press, very large and imminent anthropogenic climate change is not controversial within the relevant sciences. The question for the public to consider is only whether Michael Crichton and the Wall Street Journal editorial page know more about this subject than the membership of AGU and AMS and AAAS and NAS and pretty much every similar group worldwide.
mt
This global warning crap has taken on a religious cult status. It is freakin obvious that the earth is warming up. It has been doing so for 10,000 years and it is still colder than it was when the dinosaurs roamed.
It is probably going to get much hotter still - get used to it.
Oh well, what the hell...
So where can I find these refutations (backed by research figures)?
I'd like to start buying my acres now. This is like... better than Superman the Movie!
"This seems to be a problem with the "chicken little's" of global warming. They report predictions that are easily dismissed as "so what?" ... It's not like even the most extreme activist is predicting Waterworld or anything.
OK, so my personal opinions are not as "so what? But there is a valid point to these objections."
Maybe not Waterworld, but (extreme activists aside) some fairly conservative scientific models are predicting that large areas of inhabitable land will no longer be so in the next century. (Hint: don't buy land in Florida) As an example I live in a city which is already running out of water (Sydney, Australia), the computer models predict that in 70 years time rainfall will only be 40% or current levels (that is I think the worst case scenario, at least I hope it is). At the same time temperatures are going to (are already) soaring. We are seriously considering desalination plants down here. I think invading Canada would be more cost-effective, but anyway ...
I sure hope that these predicitions are wrong, but here in Australia, hardly anyone whose job it is to investigate this hasa any doubt that global warming is already upon us. From the CSIRO Atmopheric Division, to the Insurance Industry, the Fire Service and even our conservative government, climate change (nor even its anthropogenic nature, simply isn't a matter of controversy. The only controversy is whether to sign Kyoto or not, which our government won't, despite claiming to meet our Kyoto goals (and the excuse we get isn't "China," its the "it doesn't go far enough" line).
I find all this talk about the "chicken little's" (sic), the scientific conspiracy (from others, not you), etc to be extremely surreal. Let alone an argument that because the climate has never been static it's just cool that we actively make Earth's atmosphere resemble Venus'! I mean, do you guys all live too far north of the equator, a different planet, or what?
The time for fart-arsing around about "legitimate philosophical questions" passed about 10 years ago. Right now the questions are how are we going to 1) Stop the burning of fossil fuels (which IMHO means going nuclear) and 2) Deal with the effects of climatic change that are already with us.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
..CFC's were found to be an ozone depleting gas at exactly the same time that the patents ran out; requiring entire industries to switch to a recently patented, more expensive, less inert alternative.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
I suspect it's going to be tough for them to avoid growing emissions as they continue to grow economically, now that they've done the easy stuff - at least, without using a lot of nuclear power.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Guys, I've been contributing to the global warming for years now.
You might want to think of someone other than yourself for a change. Our children and our children's children maybe...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Like Bush could pronounce "Colonoscopy". As if.
fish and pipes
an interesting statistic would be how many articles were rejected
goddamn cows
Our understanding of gravity is not complete. There is still research being done.I nertia& Gravity1.htm
http://www.mrelativity.net/InertiaGravity/
It is possible that the gravitational force could be foud to be a subset of another force, so maybe gravity as its own entity doesn't exist.
http://arxiv.org/html/physics/9908024
I am in agreement with the grandparent. It is worry some that little research seems to be done on alternative theories.
University of Leicester geologist Jan Zalasiewicz heads a group of eminent geologists which has just published a paper in The Guardian
1) The Guardian is not a peer-reviewed journal.
2) The Guardian is notorious for it Left-leaning political views.
These changes did not lead to catastrophic global extinctions of the earth's biota.
3) The extent of extinctions in those periods of significant climate change can only be estimated roughly, based on the small fraction of plants and animals that were in the special conditions necessary for fossilization to occur.
4) The phrase, "catastrophic global extinctions" leaves unanswered how widespread the extinctions are believed to have been in those eras.
5) Is the geological group prepared to claim that current climate changes would lead to "catastrophic global extinctions," and, if so, how solid is the evidence for such a claim?
The extensive animal and plant communities of the past, undisrupted by human development, could adapt to the changes by migrating, or by shrinking or expanding populations.
6) Animal and plant communities certainly have retained the option of changing their populations.
In shrinking animal populations, of course, there is an excess of deaths over births, by starvation or predation. Our current human population, faced with comparable climate change, will have a similar choice, and there is now little room for migration.
7) Humans occupy a very small fraction of the entire Planet.
8) Human adaptibility gives humanity virtually unlimited migration opportunities.
the longest Antarctic ice-core record yet obtained shows that the warm phase before that, a little less than half a million years ago, lasted some 30,000 years. That long interglacial episode is thought to be the best model for our current warm phase, because of the similarity of the earth's alignment vis-à-vis the sun's rays. On these grounds, therefore, even without human intervention, another 20 000 years of warmth may be expected.
9) Climate change (global or local) is not understood well-enough for reliable, direct extrapolations from a single historical data point.
That the earth has been shown to recover eventually is philosophically comforting, but will be of no practical help to many hundreds of human generations.
10) Of course, Earth is not harmed by climate change, and Dr. Zalasiewicz surely must know that. Such a comment is a sloppy-slip more commonly seen from environmental alarmists.
So how much can sea level rise in a world where, say, the levels of CO2 are at twice pre-industrial levels and where global temperatures are between 2 and 5 degrees higher? We cannot predict this precisely, but sea level rises of a few to several tens of metres would not be geologically unusual.
11) The only way to know how far sea levels would rise per atmospheric change is to make careful measurements of sea level changes against atmospheric changes, controlling for other variables. Appeals to what has happened in other circumstances are mere idle speculation.
Even at today's slightly elevated temperatures, with a rise of around half a degree centigrade, mountain glaciers are receding significantly, as also seem to be, locally, the margins of the ice in Greenland and Antarctica. The Greenland icecap is vulnerable, and its loss would mean a sea level rise of some 7 metres... This would accord with geological evidence indicating past ice-sheet collapses, releasing 'iceberg armadas' and causing sea level rises of several metres in a decade.
12) Noteably, the article presents absolutely no measured change in sea levels.
The threat to humanity is clear: such a disappearance of living space (with some 100 million people living within less than 1 metre a
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
I thought a major impact on the atmosphere was caused by simple things like cows and termites passing gas?
You'll have a hard time fitting air filters onto every cow's backend (not to mention the termites)...
Step 2: Along with a number of solar power satellites at the Earth-Moon L4 and L5 points, build solar parasols at the Earth-Sun L1 point. Make enough of them to block 1-2% of the solar flux.
Step 3: Profit!
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Having followed the topic as an interested lay-person for the last 20 years, I find it the need to refute attempted dismissals of climate change hypothesis hard to comprehend. However, the point of the exercise is to build a solid list of such refutations. I have a fwe dozen things listed in various bokomarks files, but clearly what's needed is a systematic lists of properly sourced and justified sources.
At some point it'll probably come down to *toc-toc-toc* these scientists are all crazy!" on the part of the nay-sayers. At that point I suspect we'll have to resort to simply shrugging and saying "well if you're not going to accept the science that makes your computers run, models atomic reactions to 1x10^20th degree of accuracy, etc etc (pick your favourite metric) - you might as well be arguing that an invsible Snarg Monster is reading everything you type over your shoulder - ie., the arguments are beyond the arena of rational debate and may therefore be dismissed as unscientific, irrational etc etc. The difference is that *after* this exercise, I'll be able to point nay-sayers to chapter and verse before insulting them ;)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
The climate is changing and the planet is getting warmer. So what if Antartica melts! Say that global warming will cost the USA 100 billion dollars in property damage. That's chump change compared to some of the money we're blowing now. Now, look at the benefits, longer growing season, more frequent rain in some parts of the country. It could turn out that the benefits of global warming outweigh the cost. Rather than trying to somehow "undo" all of our modifications to the planetary eco-system, the USA should learn how to control them, so we can arbitrarily alter global climate as suits its strategic needs.
This is my sig.
The best site on this I'm aware of is Spencer Weart's history:
The Discovery of Global Warming.
A quarter-million words on why scientists know that the climate is changing, and how they know that we humans are the main cause.
Energy: time to change the picture.
The solution to the global problems of energy, pollution, food, etc. is fewer people. Malthus was right, advances in technology over the past 150 years or so have simply forestalled what is otherwise inevitable.
Even if there is some end run around Malthus's predictions, we don't know what it is today. Therefore, population reduction is still the quickest available solution today.
Finally, if each North American / Western European consumes X times what people in other parts of the world consume, logically the first thing to stop is the movement of people into the areas of North American / Western Europe (i.e., stop creating new North Americans / Western Europeans).
Check Lomborg's book... http://www.lomborg.com/books.htm And various commentaries.
I notice in the last linked article the solution
does not really seem to be nuclear power, which
can only help to reduce emissions and won't affect
concentrations for some time. The solution seems
to be sequestration which could catch up with and
overtake emissions so that concentrations could be
reduced to preindustrial levels.
I though the sea level--ice shelf issue was interesting.
I love how these people constantly raise the bar. First it's "There is no scientific consensus one way or another". Then when shown that there is, they revert to "Consensus doesn't matter. If everyone jumped off a cliff would you too?" No dude, that cliff is exactly what we are trying to avoid. What the heck are you doing?
i remember seeing nova from the late 70s narrated by spock that talked about the next ice age coming soon to a city near you. does this mean i should trade in my parka for some shorts w/ palm trees on them?
always mosh clockwise
Most people don't feel like spending green on being green. They'd rather have a plasma TV set.
I bought a $1300 fridge that runs on $40 of electricity a year. Extra insulation, new design, better motors, whathaveyou.
Now the payback period on that is almost ten years. Worthwhile as the fridge should last at least that long. But in the meantime I've lost opportunity on that money and I don't have a plasma tv set.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
On Friday, December 3, 2004, the weather reports said that Saturday would be 67 degrees and partly cloudy. Sunday would have a 70% chance of rain. Saturday morning, I woke up to rain dumping down, and it rained all day and into the night. Sunday was a nice, beautiful day in the mid-60's. These guys can't even get the weather right for the next two days, but they want me to believe their climage change models and make drastic changes that will negatively affect us economically and lower our lifestyle! Amazing.
Here's a report from NASA and NOAA which claim that the sun's solar output is increasing:y /sun_output_0 30320.htmll arda3.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronom
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/so
Show us your reports that show the opposite.
It disingenious to say "I find it the need to refute attempted dismissals of climate change hypothesis hard to comprehend", but that's the whole point of science. Nothing is *EVER* proven. The best you can say is that it has not been refuted despite our best attempts. We believe Einstein's equations and Quantum Mechanics because they could not be refuted after all this time -- not because anyone proved that they were correct.
So yes, responding to naysayers is essential. Look at these facts:
* The sun is thousands of time bigger and millions of time hotter than the earth.
* We are a thousands of times smaller and produce heat that's thousands of times cooler than the earth -- we can't even put out a forest fire over a small part of the world.
Without looking at any evidence as to the cause of global warming, what does Occam's rasor tell you is the most likely cause of global warming? Does it seem unreasonable to believe that the Sun is the true source of global warming, especially since there is ample evidence that the Sun *is* getting hotter?
"yet you yourself are following these scientists (have have just as much data against them as with them) as though they are you own personal Saviour."
Please see the Science article I referenced in another posting. You'll see that this statement is false. Multiple independent studies have shown that humans are having an impact on the climate, and there seems to be wide agreement among scientists. Hell, even the EPA has a website up about it.
"The last ice age, volcanoes, and the billions of years that this planet has been in existence, yet some scientists using an incredibly short span of history believe they can suddenly prognosticate what impact we humans are having on a planet whose age is so large a number that we can scarcely wrap our minds around it say we're suddenly about to impact it more than all of the previous time combined".
Oh, the planet will balance itself and recover eventually. We just may manage to impact our environment enough so that it won't be very livable for us!
But hey, relax, kick back with a beer, and enjoy your oceanfront property in Kiribati!
Whatever the merits of the argument, you're asking people to try to prove a negative, aren't you?
Typically the way these things work is that you come up with a hypothesis, gather some data, look for a mechanism and do some statistics. If the stats are amazing you can get by with asserting a causative effect without a mechanism, but if they're not you have to stick with correlation.
So far, we have a theory, some short-term data, and some signs of correlation. That Slashdotters are throwing out alternate unproven theories doesn't change the process - they can be safely ignored.
That they are driven to even try fits with Dr. Lindzen's observations on the media's love affair with the story. I mean, "End of the World," now that sells papers!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Actually, there are plenty of "scientists", like those at the "Greening Earth Society", who deny the Greenhouse, and anyway it'll be better, and besides, it isn't their fault. Those are the people on the take - from the coal, oil, gas and other Greenhouse industries. Stop joining the denial that's killing our species, destroying our civilization. It's hard enough to fix without dragging all you noisy coincidence theorists along with us.
--
make install -not war
The article you are referring to says Mt St Helens polluted more than any *single* factory in Washington State. You seem to be implying that it polluted more than all the factories in the world combined. In fact the article points out that human produced pollution is about 100 times greater than all the volcanoes in the world combined.
Not only are you not an atmospheric scientist, you don't understand chaos, though that doesn't stop your farting in the wind. Chaotic equilibrium, like climate, demonstrates statistically stable states, in which actions are dampened in negative feedback, except when the overall system is stressed, or an unusually unstable interstitial state is entered. After that tipping point, a new stable equilibrium is reached, which can be very different from the original one. A single straw breaks the camel's back.
There's not a lot we can do about the large natural processes that compose most climate dynamics. We wouldn't want to, either - the ecosphere evolved a stable balance with us included, not to mention the disastrous effects human meddling has so far shown, conscious or not. Nor need we - the natural equilibrium is largely self-correcting, and we're at home in it. But the recent human straws that are breaking the camel's back need to be understood, because we *can* control them, and we need to, in light of this overwhelming consensus of scientists, among whom the Greenhouse is not so "controversial" - because they are the experts, not ostriches in the public, the media, or polluter industries.
--
make install -not war
If "everybody" is just a bunch of Slashdotters clacking their keyboards, consensus has no bearing on truth. When thousands of scientists, in their specialties, have 75% consensus, with the rest not committed, that's how we tell that something is most probably true. How do *you* tell if something scientific is true, that you're not experiencing directly and immediately? Why do you trust the *other* scientific conclusions that don't set off your personal denial field?
--
make install -not war
If global warming is indeed caused by man, then the environmentalists who oppose nuclear power (i.e., most environmentalists, but not all) are more to blame than anyone else. Check out some Amazing Facts About Nuclear Power.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
You seem to be of the opinion that refuting nonsense will somehow help. It won't.
First, I agree that there's a lot of gibberish here, on both sides of the argument. But those who believe in the nonsense (some of what you posted, for example) aren't the type to be convince by refutations of that nonsense. So on this score, the effort is wasted.
Second, and most importantly in my mind, is that you don't prove a thing by refuting objections to that thing.
Here's why I don't buy global warming: It's insufficiently proven. You want to make me buy into it? Then PROVE it. That's all there is to it. You can spend all day showing links between this and that, and you can spend all night showing correlations and such. But until you actually provide some form of testable science, then I'm not going to buy your little theory.
Most science like, say, physics, attempts to describe reality as best it can. From this you can make predictions and then see if your theories bear out. From this, you can say that the theory is correct, or useful, or good. Longer term experimentation may modify the data and thus refine the theory and such.
But the whole climate change debacle fails this test. It's making predictions, however these predictions are tending to be of the gloom and doom variety and so you get people wanting to enact MASSIVE changes to prevent this sort of thing. Well, that's fine and understandable, but the problem is that you haven't shown your theories to be correct yet.
It's like a chain letter type of science. 30 people forwarded the letter and are not rich and powerful, while Joe Blow didn't and now lives in a van down by the river.
Show your theory is correct. Show it to the common man. Explain every little detail if you have to. Dumb it down if necessary. People accept Einstein's Relativity as being more or less true when they couldn't grasp the math for the life of them. But it's been explained and dumbed down and make simpler to get the word to the masses.
If I'm going to shoulder some form of monetary burden to fix this climate problem that is being whined about, then I damn well need to understand it. That's all there is to it. Explain it to me. In enough detail to convince me. I don't expect to have to go learn a hell of a lot of climatology to understand that a thing needs to be done, but I do need some explanation why.
Because very simply, that has not been done. You're asking the general non-scientific public to pay for change and this sort of pseudo-science you get back is a REACTION to the lack of understanding of the original theories and problems in the first place.
Refuting the objections themselves is not going to work because they aren't based on logic in the first place. They're based on lack of understanding of the original problem.
Take a few years making Discovery channel specials that explain the whole system in detail and watch those objections disappear. Then we can talk about taking action based on the theory.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
You can see a list of signatories here on a petition against the signing of the Kyoto accord and against the "global warming scare industry":
http://zwr.oism.org/pproject/
So, no, there is not a consensus on the issue. Of course those who are most committed to the global warming myth are going to be the same ones publishing papers about it! They want research grants.
I am a biochemist who left my field to pursue a different direction. (I get paid to blow things up now. It's fun)
anyway...
I make no money from research.
I have taken enough math and chemistry to understand some of the research on global climate change. The people in the lab next door were working on atmospheric sciences, it was scary to talk to them and I never felt they were selling out. They were really deeply concerned.
I believe the situation is far worse than we expect or predict.
but at core, Global Warming is religion
You are using a conspiracy theory to argue against a scientific theory. You may be right but your arguments are less than rigorous.
I would like to see some actual scientific rebuttal of the available evidence for global warming (and there is some, Ice cores, melting glaciers etc. Also there is no doubt that CO2 levels are much higher).
Fight science with science. Not just a conspiracy theory.
All scientists agree that splitting the atom will produce energy.
Stanza:
Only atoms larger than Helium.
Of course you meant to say Iron.
Other than these sorts of controlled experiments it is 'just a theory' supported by observation (but not direct experimentation) that the forces which effec an atomic clock in a fast mover also cause the various observations of uncontrolled (by humans) processess.
Seems to me likewise you could 'prove' climate change by showing the effect in a laboratory.
Eg if adding green house gasses to a system which is heated by the sun (or a radiant heat source producing the same wavelengths as the sun) causes temperatures in the system to rise, global warming is as proven as relativity, given the limits of our ability to demonstrate large scale processes within controlled environments...
I thought I should point out that the Earth is not in any danger at all; it's the humans (and other lifeforms) residing there that are in trouble. Earth has gotten hot & cold lots of times during it's geological history.
A change is coming; it's inevitable.
Putting 100 million people's homes under water is probably not good.
Tomorrow's forecast: not the same as today.
Thursday's forecast: different than that.
Friday's forecast: Even more different than a naked guy sitting in front of a piano.
Someone had to do it.
Didn't I see this in a movie or two?
I believe in global warming. Fact: the earth is getting hotter -- by 0.5 degrees C on average, as of 100 years ago. Fact: the insular nature of certain types of gas causes greater heat retention. Fact: many of those gases are produced en masse by human industry.
... that is, I'm willing to accept the lack of scientific evidence because I believe that reduction of pollutants is good policy.
These things are all true. There's no doubt about any of them. How can our dumping tons and tons of pollutants into the atmosphere be anything but bad?
But to say that I believe in global warming is very different from saying that it's true. Let me underscore this: I consider myself an environmentalist. I don't drive a car as a lifestyle choice, I have told people that I won't own a motor vehicle unless it's zero emmissions (ie, electric), and I intend to stand by that decision.
But the truth is, while believing in global warming is all well and good, the evidence for it is largely circumstancial. All the things I said in the first paragraph are true; that is, the change in temperature over the last 100 years and the change in emmission of greenhouse gasses over the same period are in what statisticians call "positive correlation". What this means, essentially, is that if you take the data points and graph them on orthogonal axes, the slope of the resulting linear fit will be positive.
But correlation is not causation, even if it seems likely. Obviously, two completely unrelated things can be positively correlated: take the last home game in Washington DC before an election thingee that came up on Slashdot a while ago. Obviously, the outcome of a US presidential election and a football game don't have anything to do with each other, and yet, they seem to, by virtue of positive correlation.
Now, it gets a bit more difficult to keep your head on straight when two related data sets are positively correlated. But unless you can quantify the relationship, you have not established causality. This may seem like nit-picking, and in a way it is. Remember, I believe in global warming, and I believe that the reduction of greenhouse gases produced worldwide is good policy.
But, and this is important, global warming fails the science test. An increase in 0.5 degrees, average, over the last 100 years is frightening, but doing the same measurement in the 1930s reveals a net cooling effect! What gives?
What gives is that we don't know how climate change operates. I think that causality is reasonable
But I don't believe that we should sacrifice the quality of science to achieve political ends. Global warming, as far as science is concerned, is bunk -- just like acid rain, second hand smoke, and nuclear winter. Good policy, bad science. No one wants acid rain, no one wants second hand smoke, and no one wants a nuclear holocaust -- and by the same token, no one wants global warming. So it makes sense to me to institute preventive measures and policies to protect against these undesirable outcomes.
But when you start spouting pseudoscience, or implying that the two page digested soundbite in Newsweek on the subject is representative of proper scientific methodology, you start losing my support.
Protect the earth, yes. Protect the integrity of science, yes. I guess I'm just the only environmentalist I know that feels that the ends (reduced pollution) don't justify the means (cheapening of science), even if I believe firmly in those ends (firmly enough to deny myself the convenience of a car, even if it means a two hour commute by bus and metro that would otherwise take 20 minutes).
Worry when the business press starts writing articles (free reg req.) about ways to profit from global warming.
From the Dec. 13, 2004 issue:
Denver businessman Pat Broe, owner of the subarctic port of Churchill, Canada, stands poised to profit from polar trade. Why? The ice is melting.
A thousand scientists say the sky is falling. It must be true!
If it weren't for global warming, the Earth wouldn't have come out of the last ice age 12,000 years ago and raised the sea level a few hundred feet. Global warming keeps the Earth from becoming one big iceball. And if it weren't for human additions to global warming, we wouldn't be able to drill for oil in the Arctic in the coming decade or two. Gotta have gas for my Ford Expedition even if I have to pay $1.65 or more a gallon for it. And if the sea rises some more who really needs Holland and a bunch of dykes anyway? Let them all move to Germania or Belgium. They'll probably freeze anyway when the melting polar and Greenland ice disrupts the Gulf Stream and prevents warm water from getting to Europe.
It sounds more convincing than say a thousand chicken little say the sky is falling. I've heard the scientific boys cry wolf one to many times and I don't care any more. They like the Cassandra reporters are ignored. I've read enough to be convinced that humans have added to global warming. But beating people over the head with arguments like this only serve to alienate those who need to be persuaded. Arguments from authority can be effective but 99 time out of a 100 they aren't.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
They clearly didn't bother to poll Slashdot. Had they consulted the thinkers here, they would have found their results to be roughly reversed.
This was always the prediction, too. (Just to really rub it in. .
-That once the stubborn denial finally broke down under the weight of objective reality, that the wishful-thinkers, unwilling to give up their positions of studied arrogance, would turn around and provide us with such wonderfully mature (and wildly inaccurate) epithets as, "It's still the Environmentalists fault because they oppose nuclear power!" and "Well, that's good, because now the world will have better growing seasons!"
--All of which boils down to, "Yeah? Well, so what? I'm STILL better than you! (Even though you were right.)"
I find it interesting that looney toon psychopaths like Nixon's G. Gordon Liddy hold similar views on global warming. What does that say?
-FL
is that all these are consensus despite the evidence, global warming is a consensus because of the evidence.
You don't specify a country, so I assume you have an internationalist outlook :-)
Obviously a civil nuclear programme needs to be rolled out world wide, This includes the OPEC countries, since they will be out of oil sometime in the future. It also includes countries that have no native energy supplies and wish to advance to the same state as their neighbours.
So we should be promoting nuclear programmes in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Burma, Palestine amongst others.
I had never heard of OSIM and I have been interested in climate science for a long time. I have heard of "The Union of Concerned Scientists" many times and they seem like an independent group of sceptics on just about anything. They claim that OISM is a front and a fraud (my summary), they also have a roundup of some other "prominent sceptic organisations". I spent 2 minutes to google OISM climate funding and select one link from the 251 (mostly negative) articles. I went a bit further ( google "Arthur B. Robinson" fund ) another couple of minutes I find that "Frederick Seitz" (see below) was heavily involved in the tabacoo industries fraudulent junk-science(surprise,surprise).
You YELL A SUBJECT LINE but offer nothing more than a bunch of signatures obtained by deception. Then accuse the aurthors of fixing the results to obtain a fudiciary benifit. You really have to ask yourself why you have swolled the political crap to the point where you are yelling, posting fradulent petitions and sigining of your post with a character assination. Or maybe you are a paid A/C activist, since it is hard to imagine someone who can so easily be duped.
Relevant section on OISM from this link follows...
The Marshall Institute co-sponsored with the OISM a deceptive campaign -- known as the Petition Project -- to undermine and discredit the scientific authority of the IPCC and to oppose the Kyoto Protocol. Early in the spring of 1998, thousands of scientists around the country received a mass mailing urging them to sign a petition calling on the government to reject the Kyoto Protocol. The petition was accompanied by other pieces including an article formatted to mimic the journal of the National Academy of Sciences. Subsequent research revealed that the article had not been peer-reviewed, nor published, nor even accepted for publication in that journal and the Academy released a strong statement disclaiming any connection to this effort and reaffirming the reality of climate change. The Petition resurfaced in 2001.
Spin: There is no scientific basis for claims about global warming. IPCC is a hoax. Kyoto is flawed.
Funding: Petition was funded by private sources.
Affiliated Individuals:Arthur B. Robinson, Sallie L. Baliunas, Frederick Seitz
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It should read OISM.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
So Clinton was beholden to the same people? The current administration is not the first to reject Kyoto.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
It did not take long. These people are spending up big on climate FUD. One notable among the names associated with the FUD is Frederick Seitz who was responsible for $45M in tabacoo research. Another A/C...wonders if A/C's are paid to be stupid?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Global warming is old, small news.
Americans are going to have to wait for some big shock to "get" their real news.
The critical confusion, which corporations love, is that people equate "US Corporate interests" with "American public interests".
"We're all americans", they keep telling us.
The reality is, corporate profit is loyal to no nation, no name, and nobody - except their own profits. And gladly sell off the US public more every day, as seen with exporting jobs, bankrupting people with misleading loans and insurances, and clogging up people's brains with distractions and worthless products. Then psychiatric "medicines" if they're start losing it.
Believe a corporation's word or agenda and accept their salary, information, or product, at your own peril, and that of your community, city, and people. Loyal to you, or humanity they aren't. When profits are threatened, they'll change stories and pay nicely to willing corrupt politicians, Feds and Marines to ruin anyone's life much before we realize what our "bad luck" is all about.
Think I'm paranoid? Go seriously investigate what really goes on in Washington. Talk to some lawyers or secretaries and translators who worked there. Never mind the lobbyists. Look for the police files, murders, child prostitution, sex favors, drugs, etc. See who is profiting. See your board members, directors, and CXO's. See our big corporate employers.
There ain't no "government" - it's an illusion, we're all on our own, and we ain't talking.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
If global warming is anthropogenic, what can we do to prevent/ameliorate the situation? Is there some way we can hold people responsible for their actions today so that they do not get away with passing the buck? If someone is peddling bad science (anyone on either side) and having a dispropotionate impact on public opinion, how would one correct this? Essentially, instead of arguing whether or not global warming is man made, what can we do about it? AS a slashdot reader I do not think I can single handedly ratify the Kyoto protocol. But there must still be something we can do.
Are you just daft?
The per captia figures of China should be calculated using their true productive population, not this fake pseudo-science crap of using their entire population - of which the bulk doesn't do much of anything to contribute to any pollution.
Its idiot logic like yours that cause a lot of people to discount any sensible talk on Global Warming
Not one single paper asserting otherwise, huh?
http://www.lomborg.com/books.htm
Rebuild natural massive carbon sinks like plankton, sea algae, and rainforests
That's still eye-wash, the bio-mass is going to go where? Most likely it will decay into Methane, and CO2 inside of 50 years and have to be re-removed; my 21 billion tons of CO2 assumes that the carbon would not be recycled back into the atmosphere and would get us back to 1850 levels in 30-50 years. A world population of 6.4 people means everybody would have to take 3 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and sequester it someplace permantly every year for 30 years.
North America even tho has significantly increased forest coverage, can't compete against slash-and -burn agriculture in Africa and South America. In Sub-Sahara Aferica almost every scrap of burnable wood has been burnt for fuel. throwing your daily newspaper into the landfill wouldn't be enough!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Firstly I agree with the idea behind the quote: essentially that being in a minority does not necessarilly make you wrong.
Problem is, without the benefit of hindsight, how do we seperate the geniuses ahead of their time from the plain wrong ?
Mike-"Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future?"
As far a climate science goes Mike has not got a clue, ref: title of post.
Mike-"And make financial investments based on that prediction?"
Investment based on prediction would mean reversing the tried and true US policy of making predictions based on investments. Both sides of the Clinton/Bush thread show that "not one US job" will be sacraficed. (Nothing but a pile of straw there)
The USC are known as a die hard sceptics organisation, here is thier take on climate FUD .
Mike-"Has everybody lost their minds?"
Frederick Seitz certainly has.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Reading slashdot regularely for one year now, something strikes me. As an european, I never saw anybody during the last two years doubting humans activities on climate change. I saw a general consensus in scientifics, politics and public opinion in Europe and especially in France where I live (examples: a famous parisian museum "La cite des sciences" made a big event called Climax about climate change, there are TV spots about energy comsuption by a french state agency etc...) So when I saw (some) slashdot comments, sites like these http://globalwarming.org/ and US policy, I wonder how can a so big gap exists. Can you help me?
I live in Detroit, Michigan. I remember that back when I was a child, that by December 7th, we used to have large piles of snow all over the place. Yesterday, we had a torrential downpour that ten years ago would have been a blizzard.
I would rather have the blizzard then the springtime downpour in the beginning of December. Just as I am certain that the people in Florida would have rather had their two to three low-level hurricanes, instead of the significant number of very powerful hurricanes.
Both of the above examples can be attributed to an alteration of Global Weather patterns, due to the general warming of the globe. If there is a method by which we can slow down and even reverse that process, it is imperative that we do so in order to protect life as we know it.
Since there is a preponderance of evidence showing that human activities have assisted in speeding up the natural process of global warming, we need to look into ways to minimize our impact on the natural global warming process and work hard on potential methods that could help us rollback the natural process of global warming.
If that involves building Carbon Dioxide 'Scrubbers' that are both stationary and mobile within the atmosphere, we should look into that. (It's been a while since I have read about this idea and what I read had some merit.) If it means we coat cities with foliage in order to cut down on the amount of ambient heat that cities hold for periods of time far greater then natural foliage does, then we need to look into that as well. Both of these proposed ideas are potentially huge job creation opportunities that can fuel tremendous economic growth.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
The planet Venus has increased in temperature as well. No humans to blame. I have read in plenty of papers that GW is due to a normal warming. The bad part is that we can slip down into a deeeep freeze soon.
Yes, indeed, the sky IS falling. That little chicken was correct. Who knew?
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
I don't think it is possible to argue that the average temperatures on Earth have gone up since we starting tracking them. But the problem I have is how to explain what effect or how much of an effect human beings have on it.
It has been show that Mars is also experiencing rapid global warming is humanity responsible for this also? We do not know enough of our own geological past to know whether or not the current trend is part of some long geological cycle (maybe the climate is moving to a point similar to Mesozoic Era).
The fact is Earth has had much higher average temperatures and much lower average temperatures in its past that have lasted for 100s, or 1000s of years. Maybe the current temperature shift is do to Earth's magnetic poles shifting again (which it does approximately every 700,000 years and it has been approx 780,000 years since the last one).
This difference now from then is that the human population is much much larger now and and a larger portion of the population is more likely to be affected in an adverse way than in the past. However, some parts of the world could be affected in a good way also. To say that we know enough to say that the only good Earth is one that does not change but instead stays exactly the way we remember it and want it too is the height of human arrogance.
It just may turn out that global warming whether caused by humanity or not could put the Earth in a new steady state that will in the end be better for us in the long run...
It was never implemented under Clinton either. Bush did nothing to take the process back from any previous level, nor did anyone "pull out" of anything, regardless of what the title of your CORPWATCH!&@^%!&%# article says. It was never ratified under Clinton, never was binding over the US, and was never "pulled out" of. Clinton had THREE YEARS to implement it, and did nothing more than Bush has done.
So fuck off, and nice try.
Turkey oil. CWT's biomass reactor is 85% efficient in turning agricultural (and other) waste into barrels of fuel oil. America's agricultural waste could totally replace imported petro fuels. And simultaneously reduce the amount of wasted land in landfill, which also reduces the Greenhouse gases that are wasted in that slower composition. Unlike other sustainable energy carriers, their fuel can also be refined to plastic and other petro products.
--
make install -not war
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Consensus has nothing to do with truth
Consensus does not affect the truth, but that's completely irrelevant. Consensus is the best way that we all, as a group, can best figure out what the truth is. What other mechanism do you propose?
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Do you have any proof of this? Any reason to believe this? Any slight indication EXCEPT that he doesn't reach your conclusion?
He's been hotly debated in Denmark, including many attacks which were more aimed at his homosexuality than the matter at hand.
If he had gotten money from Exxon, I think someone other than you would have found out.
Please stop making up facts. Thanks
>Easy for someone living a few blocks from their workplace to tell someone else to ride their bike 40 miles to work everyday!
What the hell is "40 miles"?
Oh right, you still aren't using the metric system.
The 12th century called, they want their measurement system back.
That would be the NORTH polar icecap -- as it's floating on water -- it wouldn't raise the sea level (just lower it's salinity).
The SOUTH polar icecap is resting on land... if THAT melts, it drains in to sea raising the sea-level. Do your same experiment, but hold the icecube above the water and let it melt. As it drips in to the glass, as you would expect, the level rises.
A paper isn't a scientist saying something, it's his research saying something.
Science is making the democratic fallacy - if you have a pain, you usually see a doctor, not have a group of people vote on the diagnosis.
I AM curious if the late 1970's journals were just as unanimous about the certain to be upcoming Ice Age.
If there is an existing bias in the Journals' review boards that reject anything that doesn't tow the party line on apocalyptic global warming, of course no such articles will be published regardless of the quality of the argument.
Scientists are not the new holy priesthood who have no biases (or needs for funding - though a lot of the scientific apocalyptic talk does sound like a televangelist - global warming is coming! contribute now!). There are some honest ones, but others who are political and follow scientific fads and fashions. They are human too.
IF you read history (does anyone, even here?) Plate Tectonics was contraversial and was a quack theory when it was proposed in 1905 - it is considered the correct explanation today.
How much pollution did Mt. St. Helens just inject into the atmosphere? How much chlorine did Mt Pinatubo inject into the ozone layer - oh, but those are good little chlorine molecules, not like the bad CFCs that sink into the soil, and are digested by bacteria, but can make ozone swoon and decompose 60 miles away...
Correleations may or may not be meaningful.
Causation - in the strict scientific sense - requires some strictness to prove.
You should try it sometime. 100 million is the number of people who live within 1 meter of sea level. It's in the article. Sea levels vary with CO2 levels. It's in the article. Modest increases of CO2 - less than the current increase - have led to several meters rise in sea levels. It's in the article.
Advocating doing nothing and continuing to go down in flames needs more justification than the incoherent rantings of some painkiller addict.
It's always funny to read remarks from people who assume that everyone in the world is exactly like them.
'I would sell my soul for grants, and lie to everyone and pretend there are dangers when there aren't, just for a little money. Pity I'm not cut out to be a scientist. But obviously since I would, then EVERY SINGLE CREDIBLE SCIENTIST would, since everyone else in the world is just as dishonest at the core as I am.'
Right? Right?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
So, 30 years ago everyone agreed, the earth was cooling, now scientists want us to believe it is warming. I'd have hated to see us place soot on the earth's poles to melt ice based on this "science".
http://www.globalclimate.org/Newsweek.htm
Oh, wait, none of that happened. So why are you claiming that scientists are close-minded?
There are a few things that are known beyond any principled denial:
- Earth is roughly 50 degrees F warmer than a body with its absorptive characteristics would be at our distance from the Sun, absent other influences. (Venus is an extreme example.) This proves the greenhouse effect.
- The greenhouse effect is due to a number of gases in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide.
- Adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, particularly non-condensible ones, will have a warming effect on the Earth.
Now, you can have principled disputes about the interactions of mechanisms at work (greenhouse vs. reflective clouds), but you cannot deny that increasing the concentration of the most important non-condensible greenhouse gas by a large fraction is certain to do something. I see you dismissing the entire concept as religious dogma; it appears to me that your dismissal is itself dogma, like the political attempt to dismiss evolution from biology classes.You also engage in non-sequiturs.
You are using a claim of economic damage to deny a scientific conclusion which suggests a need for action. Well, gee, if I posit a scientific conclusion about the way that cholera and typhoid are spread it might suggest a need for billions of dollars of investment in water treatment systems! Our budgets are too tight, so by your "reasoning" my conclusion has to be wrong.Or maybe it's time for you to realize that the world isn't always as you like it. In other words, grow up.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
If mother earth would be so much better off without us, feel free to set a noble example, and go jump off a bridge.
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Those "scientists" believe in this "global warming" humbug have conspired to keep all the true scientists out of their journals!
This is just like the conspiracy to keep the shame of the evolution theory alive, as well as the fake moonlanding, and the lie that our world is not flat!
Eg if adding green house gasses to a system which is heated by the sun (or a radiant heat source producing the same wavelengths as the sun) causes temperatures in the system to rise, global warming is as proven as relativity, given the limits of our ability to demonstrate large scale processes within controlled environments...
That's your proof? That's seriously the best you can do? Heat a box up with a lamp, shove some gas in there, note a slight variation in temperature, and then state that because of this we need to spend umpteen trillion dollars and completely change everything about our lives and the way our world economy works.
Wow. You're gonna have a long road ahead convincing people with that particular "proof".
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Whenever you see a result like 75% for, 25% neutral, 0% opposed to any hypothesis, you have to assume there's a publication bias.
Example, public health studies of gun control. I've read them ALL up to about 1995 and most of the big ones after that. In US, Canadian and British medical journals 60 of 65 articles from 1975 up to about 1995 on the subject advocated increased gun control as a solution to murder rates, the other five were neutral. That's 91.6% for, 8.3% neutral, 0% against. Yet we know that there was a thriving debate on the issue with considerable publication of scholarly opinion and scientific evidence against gun control as a solution to violence.
The medical journals ignored any and all authors whose conclusions did not support gun control, plain and simple. Medical journal editors cherry picked articles they liked, spiked ones they didn't, and authors obliged them by not quoting from contrary findings. They are STILL DOING IT, even after the US Congress cut the CDC's funding for doing it.
Given that eye opener, I have to say I can believe in a systematic publication bias a lot faster than I can believe that NOBODY has found any reason to doubt the global warming hypothesis. People are not as noble and concerned with the Pursuit of Truth as one would like to believe.
Now, since I'm on a mission to destroy karma, I'd like all you little EcoNazis with mod points to crash this comment down to -1 as fast as possible. You managed to get me timed-out last time I posted on this subject but it took you a day or two. See if you can get it down to a couple of hours this time, eh?
And since I'm still here talking, take note of just how much return you're getting from your effort to shut guys like me up.
they seem convincing, that is the point. Of course no one's stock values depends on relativity being right or wrong. People who clamor for "proof" of a "theory" before "believing" in the theory don't understand the scientific method (or are oversimplifying it to the point of non-sense for political or religious reasons). Controlled experiments are always subject to the criticism that natural systems are uncontrolled. However, the principle that adding CO2 and hydrocarbons to a system that is warmed by radiant heat source will result in an increase in the overall temperature of that system is a "fact", it is "proven", it is "true". Increasing the carbon load in the earth's system will increase global temperatures so long as the energy from the sun remains the same or increases, that is "proven" by controlled experiments as well as historical observation. Just how that will effect day to day life (whether it will in the long run be "good" or "bad" for human population), of course is a much complex question.
Another problem with your "theory" is that you have obviously never studied atmospheric chemistry. The reason that you see the thinest is more complex than simply where CFCs are produced, especailly considering CFC's dissolve throughout the atmosphere in about a year.
The EPA has an EXCELLENT site http://www.epa.gov/ozone/science/hole/whyant.html that responds (with nice hard irrefutable science) to the misinformed statement above.
Because you have rejected the scientific method.
That meathod relies on experimentation and observation. Both show us that more CO2 and hydrocarbons in the atmosphere of a planet lead to a rise in temperatures.
If you applied the same criteria for "proof" to other areas of science, you wouldn't have ok'd the money spent on the Manhatten project, either.
Regarding the "spending billions" red herring, we are already spending billions dealing with the predictable effects of a rise in global temperatures and sea levels, and we will be spending trillions more.
>> you need to prove it TO THEM
Otto, you and others like you can;t be convinced by science on this issue, as you reject the scientific method. Historical observation can't convince you, laboratory experiments can't convince you, and observation of other systems can't convince you.
I have no doubt that as sea levels rise and we need to build dikes or abandon them, you will be claiming its being caused by sunspots or goddidit, not SUVs, not even when a billion chinese are driving them.
I was just pointing out that the science for human effects on global warming (really the effects of rising atmospheric carbon levels) is as solid as the science for relativity, as the grandparent raised that as some sort of standard, I'm not trying to convince you to spend billions on prevention rather than spending trillions on clean-up.
I have little doubt that given the current anti-science human climate, you folks in the political majority won't start listening to them snooty egg-heads on this issue until the seas have risen at least 1m.
It's really good; taste a little like bald eagle.
Keeping an open mind and focusing on the data rather than other people's analyses of it? If temperatures are going up and humans are producing chemicals that are chemically capable of causing global warming, that just means that temperatures are going up and humans are producing chemicals that are capable of causeing global warming. Unless the link can be measured, it's not necessarily there, eh.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
Keeping an open mind and focusing on the data rather than other people's analyses of it?
Uh ok... in other words, who cares what the "experts" and "scientists" who "know" more about it than I do think - I'm going to make up my own mind based on my own understanding of the situation (which is about 1% of the knowledge of the people whose *job* it is to study it...)
But you can't make that argument if you "don't CARE about the science" because then the sea level rise and more violent storms are being caused by God to punish us and the solutions are religious ones, not ones based on reason.
If you leave the science out, then there is no argument, we should just keep playing until God comes back and cleans up our mess.
Woohoo, pass me a Duff!
the sea level rise and more violent storms are being caused by God to punish us and the solutions are religious ones, not ones based on reason.
Please pay more when you are reading, often one sentence builds on an idea initiated in the previous one. The science predicts the sea levels will rise and storms will get more violent, and the statement was discussing what people will blame it on if they reject the science.
Sea level rise Beware, there are some scientifical terminalogies here.
If you can't do that, then you're just fucked, eh?
What an odd statement.
Scientists are urging people to get ready for the effects of and perhaps try to reduce the pace of global warming because we're all "fucked" if we don't.
most folks have an attitude like yours "prove it to me, but don't ask me to learn anything new". Can't be done, if you won't learn the science, you won't, and it's pointless to argue with you. Oil addiction is like drug addiction, you have to want to change, and you have to work at it and you'd deny and defend and hide from what's happening, until something happens that really knocks you in the head. We'll start making real steps to reduce carbon emmisions when major cities start being flooded. Of course it will be too late by then to save much of the coastal communities, but that's the way people generally operate. See you on the dark side of the moon...
I read a newspaper article around April of 2003 that scientists were not measuring the output of the Sun. Isn't that an important variable to consider before concluding anything about global warming?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
most folks have an attitude like yours "prove it to me, but don't ask me to learn anything new". Can't be done, if you won't learn the science, you won't, and it's pointless to argue with you.
Thankfully, most folks don't have an attitude like yours: "If you're not going to take my word for it, then fuck you". Sorry, but I don't take this sort of thing based on authority, and I have no interest in people who expect you to buck up without explaining why.
If you can't explain it in layman's terms, then you don't understand it. It's just that simple.
By the way, I personally do understand the science. That's the kind of guy I am. However, the conclusions by the actual science do not point toward any kind of impending catastrophe no matter how much you want them to.
Nevertheless, what the science actually says is not what I was arguing about *at all*, and since I can't seem to make you understand that, I'll just have to drop it. There's no point in arguing it any further. If you're not going to get it after 5 attempts, then I guess you're not going to get it.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
the next century. If that isn't an impending tradgedy to you, than you are a pretty major misanthropist. This is much more likely than getting cancer from smoking or dying in a car wreck, and of course the sea level will rise a good deal, the % is over how much (1m, .5m, 2m, etc.).
If you can't explain it in layman's terms, then you don't understand it. It's just that simple.
The reason scientists use all them big words is because we are talking about concepts that can't be described in ordinary english. Once you actually try reading some real science (as in Nature, not Popular Mechanics) maybe you'll get it.
If the general public doesn't get global warming, and won't trust the scientists, and won't learn enough of the science to figure it out for themselves, then it will take a major disaster to convince them that something is going on and them climatological eggheads have something to say.
Ok, if you put it that way, then I guess the duty comes out more on the lines of "know enough to judge who actually knows what they're doing". For instance, simple empirical test tell me that the 'expert' who tells me what the wether is going to be like tomorrow is unreliable at best, making his analyses useless. Likewise, I know that I can trust the guy who built my house on how to build houses, because my house hasn't fallen down yet. The ideal, the state to be achieved, is to be educated enough in the everything to be able to make that kind of call with everyone.
Yeah, it's practically impossible. But I'm getting closer every day. And if I can't judge the reliability of my source, I just refrain from judging the analysis as well.
In all honesty, you seem to do the same thing, you just have a more regular criterion for trusting people's judgement. If "it's their *job* to study it" then you accept. I guess that's more efficient than my way, but I'm going to hold off on adopting it, as it would force me to become a member of at least 100 different religious groups. After all, it's the *job* of a fundamentalist southern baptist preacher to tell me what god wants, but I'm still not entirely certain of his assessment that the world will be a better place if we burn out all the gays and non-whites.
Just my 2 cents, eh.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/MSU/msusci.html
Sure looks like a trend that is less than the noise to me.
*sigh* no-one is disputing that solar output fluctuates over time. The thing that you don't seem to have realised is that *this is taken into account* by climate models. Believe it or not, climatologists are not, in fact, morons.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe