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Scientists Respond to Gore on Global Warming
ArthurDent writes "For quite a while global warming has been presented in the public forum as a universally accepted scientific reality. However, in the light of Al Gore's new film An Inconvenient Truth many climate experts are stepping forward and pointing out that there is no conclusive evidence to support global warming as a phenomenon, much less any particular cause of it."
Wow. This is a bold line from the article:
Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science"
Strangely enough this is from a website that is sporting anti-bush t-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers
Windows Admin Tools
Announcer:
... Live From New York, its Saturday Night!
And now, a message from the President of the United States.
President Al Gore:
Good evening, my fellow Americans.
In 2000 when you overwhelmingly made the decision to elect me as your 43rd president, I knew the road ahead would be difficult. We have accomplished so much yet challenges lie ahead.
In the last 6 years we have been able to stop global warming. No one could have predicted the negative results of this. Glaciers that once were melting are now on the attack.
As you know, these renegade glaciers have already captured parts of upper Michigan and northern Maine, but I assure you: we will not let the glaciers win.
Right now, in the 2nd week of May 2006, we are facing perhaps the worst gas crisis in history.
We have way too much gasoline. Gas is down to $0.19 a gallon and the oil companies are hurting.
I know that I am partly to blame by insisting that cars run on trash.
I am therefore proposing a federal bailout to our oil companies because - hey if it were the other way around, you know the oil companies would help us.
On a positive note, we worked hard to save Welfare, fix Social Security and of course provide the free universal health care we all enjoy today.
But all this came at a high cost. As I speak, the gigantic national budget surplus is down to a perilously low $11 trillion dollars.
And don't get any ideas. That money is staying in the very successful lockbox. We're not touching it.
Of course, we could give economic aid to China, or lend money to the Saudis... again.
But right now we're already so loved by everyone in the world that American tourists can't even go over to Europe anymore... without getting hugged.
There are some of you that want to spend our money on some made-up war. To you I say: what part of "lockbox" don't you understand?
What if there's a hurricane or a tornado? Unlikely I know because of the Anti-Hurricane and Tornado Machine I was instrumental in helping to develop.
But... what if? What if the scientists are right and one of those giant glaciers hits Boston? That's why we have the lockbox!
As for immigration, solving that came at a heavy cost, and I personally regret the loss of California. However, the new Mexifornian economy is strong and el Presidente Schwarznegger is doing a great job.
There have been some setbacks. Unfortunately, the confirmation process for Supreme Court Justice Michael Moore was bitter and devisive. However, I could not be more proud of how the House and Senate pulled together to confirm the nomination of Chief Justice George Clooney.
Baseball, our national passtime, still lies under the shadow of steroid accusations. But I have faith in baseball commissioner George W. Bush when he says, "We will find the steroid users if we have to tap every phone in America!"
In 2001 when I came into office, our national security was the most important issue. The threat of terrorism was real.
Who knew that six years later, Afghanistan would be the most popular Spring Break destination? Or that Six Flags Tehran is the fastest growing amusement park in the Middle East?
And the scariest thing we Americans have to fear is
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
... is that it inspired one of the worst novels I've ever read, Michael Crichton's State of Fear.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I don't consider any site that has over 50% of the page content taken by ads as an authority in the matter. Especially dancing cursors. Yuck.
I found it interesting a bit back when it was reported the ice caps were diminishing on Mars due to its own "global warming." When a scientific issue becomes politically charged it is the most vulnerable to misconstrued notions. Perhaps scientists should leave politics to politians (which they mostly do) and, indeed, politicians should leave science where it belongs too. There are plenty of other reasons to want to end the usage of fossil fuels without mentioning global warming. Mr. Gore, please stick to what's sure and not what's "the buzz"....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
As long as certain groups stand to profit, and as long as certain people might look like idiots if proven wrong, the debate on this topic will never end. I'm talking about people on either side of the issue. The tough part is that global warming is difficult to prove either positively or negatively, so it's a prime vehicle for unrelated agendas.
We'll know in a thousand years.
_And_ I hope we don't do anything about it.
Just so we can get rid of Florida. Serve them right for 2000...
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
From the story: "For quite a while global warming has been presented in the public forum as a universally accepted scientific reality." This is plainly not true. For as long as the global warming issue has been in the public consciousness, it has been referred to as "the global warming debate". There has always been strong opinion and evidence on both sides of this issue. Where have you been, Arthur Dent?
Professional Idiot
This sort of dissent has existed for years, ignored by 'all right thinking people', but out there. Looks like Gore's movie has goaded a few of the dissenters to go on the record and risk destroying their careers. Gotta salute the poor brave but doomed bastards.
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But what I'm amazed at is Slashdot actually accepting a dissenting opinion as an actual article submission instead of this being posted as a reply to a glowing review of the film.
For another whack at Gore's credibility try this one:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDE3ZTkyOWYx
Democrat delenda est
Why Exxon Mobile of course!
p hp?id=1134
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.
The website he writes for also did a great piece on how McDonalds was good for you, after they took a bunch of cash from McDonalds.
As was pointed out in the Digg discussion, Bob Carter gets his funding from Exxon...
p hp?id=1134
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.
There's lots more in the actual article.
And this is the guy who wrote the above entry:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/200
... that of a huge sample of 900+ *peer reviewed* papers about climate change, 0 contested that it was occuring or that it was a result of humans.
It would be almost impossible to say that no scientist disagreed with these claims. There will always be somebody. There are still some "scientists" who claim that the Sun revolves around the earth because of their positions in whatever religious institutions they belong to.
If they want to contest the points in his movie, that's obviously fine... but also let them publish their claims in a peer reviewed journal so that people smarter than most of us can judge them.
I'm sure I'll hear that the plural of anecdote is not data, that it is too expensive to fix, that we should throw up our hands and accept things. Global warming is not happening; and even if it is, we didn't do it; and so what if we did, so what - we should write off Bangladesh, forget the polar bears, and be happy to grow wheat in Canada instead. Sure. But please, read some of these stories.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
... is that it inspired one of the worst novels I've ever read, Michael Crichton's State of Fear.
I guess you didn't read Prey.
-h-
yes but al gore like so many people on both sides of the isle from the materialistic atheist to the born again Christian is a man of faith.
... er.. playing politics ;)
He has faith that WE are the cause of global warming far beyond what the science can support. Just as a Christian has faith in a God that cannon be proved and the materialistic atheist has faith that God does not exist beyond what can be proved.
My point is much of the action we take is based on faith not science.
Politics is about emotion not science. Anyone who tells you otherwise is
I sometimes thing the environmental issue is as much a religious war as so many other issues from copy write to abortion seem to really be.
The interesting thing is that Gore as a born again Christian is bond by his ethics to seek what is real and true. An atheist has no such moral obligation.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
This website hosting this article is just not very credible. It uses popup windows and hosts ads for dubious anti-aging products and precious metals investments.
I'm all for a debate on global warming, but this source doesn't pass my personal credibility filter.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
There's no conclusive proof that smoking causes cancer either, but there is strong evidence.
Look at who is the basis for the article, Professor Bob Carter. This man is effectively a spokesman for the energy industry. He gets support from the Australian Institute of Energy. The membership of this agust body is a who's who of the oil, gas, coal, and power companies in Australia. No wonder he thinks the global climate is doing just fine.
Exxon pays his salary. Here's another of his gems: Global warming is good for plants!
It's funny how I get a hopeful feeling when I see that there may still be some credible debate on this topic. Sadly the truth really is inconvenient, and depressing.
-Ryan C.
Here is a chart of the Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, going back to 1973.
ftp://140.172.192.211/ccg/figures/co2_mm_obs.png
http://www.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccgg/insitu.html
I consider myself a scientific conservative -- I don't want to find out what happens when CO2 hits the 430 ppm mark. Some people say that nothing bad will happen. They could be cataclysmically wrong.
If Al Gore wants to run for President in today's political climate, I don't think making a documentary about global warming that leaves him vulnerable to being called a far-left enviro-hippy is really the best strategy. Despite Bush's falling popularity, this country is still too far to the right to elect someone like that.
Be aware that the website hosting the article is a far-right broadsheet, the Canadian equivalent of Free Republic. Their agenda is strongly anti-global-warming, which doesn't necessarily discredit the article, but does suggest that one should view it with the same scepticism as one views the recent 'ads' by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Last summer was hot. Last winter was warm. This summer (which has not started yet) is cool.
So...extrapolate your observations into a long-term trend.
I'm not saying that you're not seeing the effects of global warming. I'm just saying that based on three observations in Turkey, one in Germany and one in the Netherlands over the course of less than a year, you can't really draw a conclusion. And that's part of the problem of the whole global warming "debate".
-h-
I'm a computer programmer but a formally trained Marine Biology major. In that, I took a season of Oceanography. What is IMPORTANT for the layman to understand here is that we have these cycles that one must understand FIRST. Every 10 years or so, there is a drying pattern in California that leads to drought. There are 10, 20, 50 and 100 year overlapping cycles of temperature, moisture, etc... cycling that happen everywhere in the world. Some areas have droughts every 10 years, some every 20. And sometimes, areas that have 100 year cycles and 10 year cycles overlap to be particularly worse. These time-scales are so large that 1 or three bad years do not definitely mean "OMG! Global warming is here!" It is very important for people to know that, especially when it is June and and already 100 degrees every day in Texas. There are also years where there are more hurricanes and hurricanes of greater severity as well as years with less.
It would do everyone well to look up a book on Oceanography and read how the ocean affects climate. It's just one chapter. Hit your local library.
Now, with that understanding under your belt, animal populations in the aquatic world (read: schools of fish) are fed by the ocean conveyor belt bring nutrient depleted hot water down to the bottom and causing the nutrient rich cold water to flow up. This feeds the krill and shrimp and plankton and they are eaten by bigger fish and so on. If this conveyor is stopped, all fisheries dependent upon it in the world are screwed and we don't know what will happen but it's most likely not good.
Climate (hotness, moisture, rainfall) affects food growers the world over. If the climate patterns change, it will mostly be destabilizing to farmers and that is bad. Less food, rising prices.
Everything we are doing to influence climate change builds up momentum towards that change. It may be slow but once it is started, it is hard to slow down and reverse. 1 degree difference in the entire ocean is a huge difference. Also, unlike us, water temperature in many parts of the ocean is constant to a few degrees. If it changes faster then the critters can handle, they die.
Once you know the rules upon which the ocean works and how it creates climate, running fast and lose with stuff that might change it is hugely dangerous and irresponsible to take a chance on. More moist warm air in places it wasn't before means more tornados and hurricanes in places they haven't been before. More extreme weather in general. This means more insurance claims and that means higher insurance costs factored into the economy.
Most of the times in America, we wait for disasters to happen before we spend enormous amounts off money and time to fix them. I don't want to be a betting man with our affect on the entire climate of the Earth. Calving icebergs the entire size of Rhode Island is not something normal. If we want Florida, New Orleans, Manhattan, Holland or those small islands in the pacific to be around in 50 years and have enough food to eat, I would not expect it to be if we (the US) and China (the largest emerging polluting market)do not take radical steps to curb global warming pollutants. It's that simple.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Find it here. Google is our friend.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Bruce Perens pulled the same story over at Technocrat because the author is "from a paid political PR agency." link
Read, but read with caution. The author is paid to have his opinion.
a quick google for the researcher the article focuses on shows that he doesn't publish. his main credits are online opinion pieces, and the closes thing to a publication i found (the second page of the google) is a .doc file on his labratory's webspace
if anyone can find anything peer-reviewed by this guy, i'd be keen to see it
"In this envelope I have the research that PROVES this so-called 'global warming' effect is not an unusual phenomenon to the Earth. Here, I'll read some excerpts- Hm, a stack of $100 bills. Guess I brought the wrong envelope..."
Yes, we understand these tags always apply: fud, dupe, typo, slashdotted, topic name
You judge for yourself: http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.p hp?id=1134
Carl P. Corliss
I always find it helpful to track the sources of information they are siteing. For example, there's Professor Bob Carter. This is a professor who claimed that global warming stopped in 1998 when it turns out that 2005 was the hottest year on record (since we began tracking such things).
I saw a similar article making similar claims yesterday and the "experts" they sited weren't even in the field of climatology, and had gone so far as to fake a letter from the National Academy of Sciences to give their position a supposed credence.
Show me one peer reviewed scientific paper that says anything other than global warming is happening and it's caused by human emissions of CO2. To my knowledge, this does not exist. I recognize that peer review is somewhat prone to group think, and in that you might expect a leaning one direction or another. But to have ZERO? That seems rather dramatic to just be a group think issue.
A lot of the "scientists" that I've seen taking a position on this are clearly hucksters working for the likes of Exxon Mobile, etc. I have little doubt that there are some scientists who are legitimate who don't buy into the common thinking, but that doesn't mean the common thinking is wrong. They need to back up their beliefs with sound evidence and method. But they don't.
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Other articles from this website:
- Christianity under Attack: Assault against America's Christian traditions continue
- The ultimate epithet in the liberal lexicon
- Throw the U.N. on the Ash Heap of History
Do I need to continue? Jesus Christ, Slashdot! Do you do any sort of editorial fact checking before posting a story - under Science!
No Digg.
X
There isn't any conclusive evidence for theories on how gravity propagates. We have theories; special relativity space-time warping, string/m-theory transmitting gravitons. However no one can explain with 100% certainty why gravity works. So the theory of gravity lacks certainty. But last I checked, if I were to jump, gravity from the Earth would cancel out my force and return me to the ground. So yup, Gravity still works despite not having certainty behind theory.
According to the scientific process, we'll have to observe global warming in a biosphere before the theory will gain certainty. Last I checked we did not have a spare biosphere hanging around, or millions of years to test, or a spare Earth somewhere in orbit where we can conduct long term testing in order to satisfy the scientific method.
I am all for the scientific process and honestly wish it were used in more cases in every day life. However, in some cases, especially in those studies that overlap the lifespan of scientists, I feel it is ok to act without certainty in cases where the speculative evidence supports the theory. Say it with me now: Supporting evidence in the case where no alternative evidence exists wins everytime. In other words, just like the theory of gravity, lack of 100% certainity does not make the opposite true.
Despite whether or not global warming is a real phenomenon, not acting now would be like driving without auto or medical insurance. Sure, you might make it home safe, but you might also get hit by a drunk driver in a 4 ton truck with no insurance. Our laws require insurance for that reason. Why don't we start insuring the Earth with pre-emptive care?
Science Magazine analyzed a total of 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming between 1993 and 2003. Number that challenged the consensus that global warming is real and caused by human activity: zero. Scientists don't debate whether global warming is occurring, or even that it's caused by humans. Only politicians do.
Check out the Union of Concerned Scientist website. The Union's members are from varied fields of science, but many of its members are atmospheric scientists. The Union concludes that global warming is strongly support by available evidence. http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/
Why are we talking to someone from 'James Cook University' about global warming? In my parallel computing class at Berkeley we have had scientists from LBNL come and talk to us about simulations, the math behind them, and results from various teams. There was only one major simulation that said there was no global warming, and it was from the University of Alabama at Huntsville, headed by this guy named John Christy. Too bad his tropospheric data was wrongly interpreted in the simulation code (which LBNL at one point demanded that it be turn over for inspection) due to a wayward negative sign, and the re-run with the new code showed global warming. I can't find the very detailed article on the simulation, but the Wikipedia entry on him mentions a little about the data fiasco:
5 /08/the-tropical-lapse-rate-quandary/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Christy
Real Climate also has more on it:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/200
The speaker ended his presentation to our class by saying that his generation would have to spend their whole lives convincing others that there is a problem and that it would be up to us to come up with solutions to it. But by then it might be too late. So let's stop listening to random scientists from random institutions (UAH, JCU, or Carleton, or what have you) that are of little scientific repute and think about reducing vehicle emissions. If anything we will have better air quality so there is no harm in trying except that a few higher-ups in major corporations make less money.
This one was torn a new one on Digg this morning. I thought the /. editors had more sense.
What's next? Stories pointing to junkscience.com?
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
That's also not how the scientific process works. This isn't about "proving a negative", it's about "invalidating an existing hypothesis" which is the basis of scientific progress. Scientists spend lots of time running experiments trying to prove than an opponents theory is wrong. Part of becoming a generally accepted "theory" is having lots of people try to invalidate your hypothesis and failing to do so. Indeed, the thing that's impossible to prove is that the hypothesis is valid. "Oh, sure, it looks like solar radiation can cause skin cancer, but can you prove that some as-yet unfound and undetected external force isn't responsible?"
Yes, if you're going to advance a hypothesis you need to find some evidence to support it, but if you're waiting for "extremely strong evidence" you're in for a long, long wait in just about any scientific endeavor.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
A telling statistic about this is in Gore's movie. They did a random sample of scientific peer reviewed papers on global warming. Of 932 samples, ZERO disagreed with the conclusion that global warming was happening and was man made. On the other hand 56% of the articles on the subject they randomly surveyed said the jury was still out.
This is the long standing problem in the media of false equivalency. They take any issue and assume that there are two sides and that both sides have similar standing. So if 932 peer reviewed scientific papers say that global warming is happening and humans are causing it, and there's 932 articles written by crackpots and industry lobbyists saying the opposite, the media treat this as being two equivlanet sides of an issue. It makes good copy, but it's incredibly desceptive.
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So why not publish the dissenting findings in a reputable, peer-reviewed journal? If there are sufficient grounds to question the research that has been published thus far, I would expect that it would not be difficult to promote a dissenting work.
Heck, Phillipe Rushton still gets published from time-to-time, and his research has been widely discredited. This suggests that the relative popularity and/or merit of your findings does not appear to have much influence on whether (or not) you get published,
So, if the case for global warming is as weak as some of these folks claim, why have they not published rebuttals or counter-claims?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Here's my take on the counterpoint to Al Gore's claim of global warming... who cares if he's wrong?
If we worked hard as a society to get off the oil and coal crack pipe, would that be a bad thing? The socioeconomic reasons alone are totally worth it. Let's not forget that right now we're at war over the stuff, not to mention spending $50 for a tank of gas. Meanwhile the fatcats at Exxon are crying all the way to the bank, global warming or not.
Think about it, who cares if he's wrong, there's too much good to come out of us pretending that he's right! If you're interested in reading more, I have a longer point about this that I made on my blog last week (click above)
Sure you can measure it and determine any change, but that doesn't tell you what caused that change. The unfortunate thing about climatology is that we can't do any simple experiments to test the individual factors to determine which are really important.
I don't think it was that bad. It was just typical Crichton formula science fiction, which is something he's very good at. I find most of his books very engaging despite that fact that having read one, I've essentially read all of them. Same plots, different "bad guys."
The key value of the book is not any sort of rebuttal against global warming, since that is not what it tries to do (read the endnotes if you didn't). It's the argument that most of global warming fuss is FUD founded on really heavy rhetoric like "our children won't have Florida because it will be underwater" as opposed to the actual science (which in general is supportive of the theory) looking at the increase in CO2 and methane concentrations, computer modeling, long term temperature trends (both on modern and geological time-scales), solar activity, ocean level changes, etc.
I think the book is really quite amusing in how he attempts to bring all these little elements of the debate into play: lawyers, eco-terrorists, movie star run-ins with cannibals, and that crazy professor with his idea that we always we need some big thing to be afraid of and global warming was a good substitute for communism after the end of the cold war.
I've my own doubts about global warming, but it does seem that the "con" side are often folks who are paid to have those opinions.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
From the article:
r ter
Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change.
What a weaselly way of putting it. Here's what 30 seconds of Googling says about Professor Robert Carter: He's a member of the Institute for Public Affairs, a corporate-funded think tank.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bob_Ca
You see, he isn't working for the coal industry per se. He's working for a think tank that is funded by corporate donors that may or may not include the coal industry. See the difference?
In piling up scientist after scientist while failing to refute Gore's arguments, this article is reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda pamphlet "100 Scientists Against Einstein." Einstein's response still applies: "If I were wrong, one would be enough."
I don't see you complaining when articles from Daily Kos are posted. Why is it so bad to hear both sides of a contreversy?
There is a slight difference between people posting political opinions on an openly political web site, and people who try to pass their political opinions off as science. Further, when they aren't actually anybody's political opinion, but rather paid propaganda as part of a lobbying campaign, the difference is even greater.
If they want to have a blog called "Exxon Outgassing" or something like that, and post their spin there, I have no problem with that. Or if this were a case where someone actually had some research to present, that would be fine. But so far as I can see, this is propaganda, pure and simple, and trying to pass it off as "the other side of a controvery" is dishonest.
--MarkusQ
P.S. The odd thing is, I used to be a HCGW skeptic, until the sheer duplicity of the oil lobby convinced me to look into it more. So in my case, at least, their money backfired on them.
The Clinton administration did not ratify the Kyoto protocol. It never intended to. Gore signed it "symbolically", whatever the heck that means, but they never actually submitted the protocol to the Senate. More here. Gore might have been a big fan of Kyoto, but his administration never was.
Seems to me you've got three outright lies, and one complete irrelevancy
Seems to me you've got one piece of non-truth there.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
1) Global atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing:
. stm
. stm. html3 .html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4803460
2) CO2 dissolves in water
3) The oceans are water
4) CO2 dissolves in the oceans
5) When CO2 dissolves in water the PH of the water goes down
6) When the PH of the water goes down, Calcium Carbonate concentrations go down
7) When calcium carbonate levels go down the plankton dies
8) When the plankton dies, so does everything else by starvation
9) Ergo, people who think disproving global warming will let them drive their hummers without killing their own species, and a lot of others with it, are total asswipes.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4803460
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/265052_acid31
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/265241_coral0
Someone had to do it.
There is only one other article by Tom Harris at CFP, but I found another at National Post, both attacking climate change. Canada Free Press and National Post are both conservative newspapers, particularly the latter. According to the byline, Tom Harris is mechanical engineer and Ottawa Director of High Park Group. And what is the High Park Group, seeing as how their web page say absolutely nothing of substance? Why it's an industry shill.
Dig a little deeper and you'll find this from way back in 2002. It has quite a bit more to say.
If you know more say so.
Of course, articles about "scientists" refuting global warming are a dime a dozen, and go against the plain fact that the vast majority of climate scientists are firmly convinced of its existence.
And for the record when I looked at the article before it was running an ad pushing Condaleeza Rice for president... in a Canadian newspaper no less.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Of course they were:
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2006/04/global-warming
http://timlambert.org/category/science/bobcarter/
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2005/04
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php
Furthermore, even though the FCP article tries to paint Carter as an independent, ExxonSecrets.org links him to "Tech Central Science Foundation or Tech Central Station". Here's what the site lists as their details:
The entire Canadian Free Press article loses credibility because of this line:
A non-industry expert who works for a place that's paid for by Exxon.
I can't believe this article got posted on the main page. I guess since Al Gore's in a movie, posting some already-been-written article quoting a few paid shills who say he's lying had to be done to keep things politically balanced. I personally think news links should only be posted if they actually represent reality.
Suppose you believe we can't tell what effect we'll see from running up CO2 levels (which we're doing: direct measurement says they're going up, isotope ratios show that the increase is fossil carbon).
If you don't know the effects, isn't a conservative approach appropriate?
If you see someone who doesn't know what they're doing making changes to your starship's life support system, would you let him continue just because he paid some of the engineers to say "we can't be sure there will be a catastrophe"?
Experimenting on a planet while you're living on it is just plain dumb.
We all know that you can find any opinion on any topic on the internet and that you have to be more careful then ever about your sources. So, if slashdot is going to refer to articles on controversial issues, shouldn't it stick to sources that have some authority or respect?
I wouldn't be surprised if Gore did go to far - few things are as certain as they are presented to us by either side. However, the article goes way too far and ignores the fact that the general concensus of the scientific community is in line with what Gore is saying.
So, it makes me wonder what this strange website is? It is run out of my city (Toronto) and yet I've never heard of it. I don't see a bio of the author on the website, but I note that the two main authors involved in this website are from the Toronto Sun and Fox News. I don't need to say anthing about FOX, but you might not have heard of the Toronto Sun. It is a right wing tabloid, featuring girly pictures on page 2. You probably have one in your city, so you know what I mean.
I'd say it's pretty obvious where they're coming from. Slashdot's really going to hell. This is a sample from just their front page:
"The images are slowly coalescing out of the smoke of the progressive anti-war campfires, the bonfires in New Jersey, where our Constitution and Ann Coulter's latest book are being consumed by the current purveyors of charitable lock-step liberalism, and from the super heated mind of Howard Dean, the showman extraordinaire and carpet gnawing Democratic spokesman deluxe."
"Once again, the gay marriage issue has come before the Senate. And with no surprise, Senators motioned to strike down a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. What a sad state the Senate has become! It should have been a no-brainer to stand up in the defense of marriage! "
'As the price of gasoline and the myriad products that utilize petroleum in their manufacture rises, Americans are going to ask why the Congress has resisted accessing the billions of barrels' worth of oil and natural gas in our offshore continental shelf. "
"It's so darned funny and I am such a naïf. I thought it would take a day or two for the left to begin to down play the death of Zarqawi, one of the premier death dealers on the planet today, and a guy responsible for a litany of murder and mayhem among our troops--OUR TROOPS. You know, the guys everybody pledges to support even though the liberal cognoscenti and the progressive Nomenklatura all hate the war."
"Great rivers of destiny are churning just below the Electoral dam.
It looks like the stage is being set for the next round of heartbreak for the Democrats, their quest for 15 seats in the House and their need to overthrow the Republicans in that charnel house of the Senate, should this, their greatest of all electoral endeavors, not pan out."
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Please change the title of this article from "Scientists Respond to Gore on Global Warming" to "Industry Shills Respond to Gore on Global Warming". Not that journalistic integrity has ever stopped you from running obviously wrong headlines before; I'm just trying to advise on how to maintain what little dignity you have left.
Nathan's blog
CFP is an ultra right wing blog and has an anti global warming science agenda. The have no balancing articles.
u te_of_Public_Affairs
3 813
But hey, the maybe posting a valid article. Let us see who wrote it.
Tom Harris wrote the article. He is a PR person working for PR/Lobby firm High Park group. They don't say who they are working for, but this guy is paid to have this opinion. I suppose it is possible that he was paid by some concerned for the environment corporation, but I have my doubts.
http://www.highparkgroup.com/services.htm
How about the Scientists:
Bob Carter. First "Scientist" quoted. Known climate change skeptic, Member of Institue of public affairs: Lobby group.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Instit
Funded by Oil/Gas/Mining/Pesticide/Logging corporations.
Bob wrote this Gem of a piece about protectin Austrailians from the dreaded disease "Mother Earhism":
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=
"Compare these tiny changes with the experience of an Australian citizen who moves from Hobart to Darwin to live. Such a person experiences a change in annual average temperature of 18C, which is accommodated quite happily by wearing fewer clothes, drinking more beer and trading in one's heater for an air conditioner."
There you go folks, just wear less clothing and global warming will be a non issue.
I really have to wonder who falls for this stuff.
Not to mention wondering about the sellouts who write this stuff.
1. We need to have an energy source that is not based on localized supplies in the middle east (or elsewhere)
2. The air around our population centers is polluted by fossil fuel consumption with serious health consequences
3. Fossil fuels cannot be used for deep space travel or colonization which is necessary for survival of our species (eventually)
4. Fossil fuels are poisonous to mine and refine and harm the workers in those industries and towns.
5. Centralized control of energy sources leads to higher prices and a permanent "tax" on economic development and expansion
6. Fossil fuels are poisonous to transport and have caused enormous damage to the marine ecology during spills
7. Systems used to convert fossil fuels to energy are complicated and wear out quickly. They are expensive to produce and maintain
8. Systems used to convert fossil fuels to energy create noise which causes problems in urban environments
9. Fossil fuel "control" implies a loss of personal and national liberty
Note that I am not saying that existing alternatives solve any of these problems.
I am saying that there are significant costs/problems to the current energy systems.
We have lived with these costs and written them off, but they are still there and still important.
Its worth significant effort to solve these problems. The research to solve
these problems will also likely benefit us in other areas.
It would be far better to solve the problems than to continue to live in an
unstable,poisonous,noisy world.
After years as a lurker, this write-up has finally compelled me to register at slashdot (well, that and the death of Plastic).
It is a fact that an overwhelming marjority of scientists in the world agree that climate change is real, it is happening now, and it is being caused mainly by humans. Only in the United States does there remain a "debate" and it remains only because a certain number of scientists have been paid off by large corporations to lobby the US government on their behalf. The expressed aim of these lobbyists is to muddy otherwise very clear science to make sure the general public at large is confused and doubtful about the existence of climate change. This effort is clearly working, and it is to the detriment of all of us.
Al Gore's film, and many other well-respected books (including the highly recommended "The Weather Makers" by Tim Flannery) outline in great detail the overwhelming evidence from peer-reviewed journals that is accepted by the world scientific community at large.
The short list of accepted facts, which have been derived by scientific observation and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals:
- The average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere is rising, and has spiked sharply in recent years, far beyond any of the "normal natural trends" that take place over thousands or millions of years, not mere decades.
- The average temperatures of the oceans are also rising.
- Historical photo evidence clearly shows the polar ice caps have melted dramatically in recent years. This is decreasing the amount of white snow that reflects sunlight and replacing it with dark water that absorbs sunlight, creating an ever-accelerating negative feedback loop. For the first time there are observations of polar bears are drowning in the north pole because they cannot swim between icebergs. Entire towns and cities in the north that were built on permafrost (so called because it was always considered permanent) are now sinking as the permafrost melts for the first time ever in human record.
- Historical photo evidence clearly shows that many glaciers around the world that are known to have have existed for millenia have suddenly and dramatically melted in recent decades.
- Scientific evidence shows that the number of species becoming extinct because they cannot survive in warmer climates and cannot migrate to cooler places due to human development is rising sharply.
- The number and intensity of hurricanes and severe storms have increased sharply over recent years, in direct parallel to the measured rise in air and ocean temperatures during that same time.
When I see a clear counter-argument for climate change that addresses the data behind all the above observations, perhaps I'll listen. So far, the arguments I've seen against climate change seem to consist of either 1) nitpicks at tiny holes in a vast complicated body of data, 2) the mistaking of small annual or geographical variations in an overall warming trend as "proof" that the trend is false, 3) insane unsubstantiated accusations that the vast majority of the world's scientists are involved in some sort of conspiracy, or are so inept at what they do that they must engineer a vast lie just to "get funding".
The rest of the world is on board. Only in the US (and since our last election, to some extent Canada) has climate change become caught up in pathetic left vs right politics, with conservatives adamently denying climate change by default as an invention of whiney liberals. It's a damn shame, because this is a serious issue, and the future of all humans depends on us waking up and doing something about this NOW.
How many droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, floods, rising oceans, missing ice caps, and extinct animals will we need to have shoved in our faces before we admit that we've made a huge mistake, and that we need to stop bickering and get on with solutions?
The views in this original post exhibit wishful thinking, not reality. Accusations of "junk science" by climate change doubters is extremely ironic, to say the least.
Christians, most of which are "convenient Christians" subscribe to the notion that they might as well believe in god, just in case he's really there. Pascal's wager as it's called, is based on the notion that erring on the side of caution when there doesn't seem to be any serious repurcussions is a wise choice, but it seems these same people bury their head in the sand when it comes to the subject of global warming. Wouldn't it seem like a wise idea to assume it might be happening and act to reduce the effects, as opposed to arguing about it?
Regardless of whether global warming is a reality, the solution will involve finding cleaner, cheaper, alternative sources of energy. How can that be a bad thing? Don't start with the bullshit about jobs being lost. We can create just as many job opportunities in the pursuit of alternative energy as are working in the oil industry, paid shill degreed academics, or lobbyists in Washington to pay crooks to write misleading legislation like the "Clear Skies Initiative."
People are fucking stupid sometimes.
Both articles were written by the same author (Tom Harris), who is a director at a public relations firm "High Park Group" ( http://www.highparkgroup.com/tharris.htm ).. Some may call such a business a lobby group.. others may call it an industry-friendly strategic consulting firm. A very trust-worthy source, especially when it comes to public interest.
High Park Group's is proud to offer our clients a wide range of services, including:
- policy and strategic consulting
- project development
- project management
- issues management
- research initiatives and analysis
- economic analytics
- direct lobbying
- event planning
- media relations
- fundraising
Sure, he made that comment when he was running for President in 2000, but realize he had left the Senate 8 years prior. So sure, you might've been using the Internet for 9 years, but any biils he championed in Congress undoubtedly came about before you got online. And the Internet of 1991 was quite a bit different than the ARPANET that was around when Gore was first elected Senator in 1984.
I'm inclined to believe the guys who actually designed the Internet's infrastructure (such as Vint Cerf) when they agree publicly that Al Gore had a strong positive impact on the Internet we know today. He was, after all, on the Commerce, Science and Transportation committee in the Senate, and eventually became chairman of that committee.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
If you'd like to run your own NASA Global Climate Model (GCM) on your own computer, the EdGCM project has ported a GCM to Mac & Windows and wrapped it in a GUI so you can point-and-click your way around. Turn the sun down or add some nitrogen, whatever you want...
Disclaimer: I'm a developer on the project.
Space and Computers.
Actually, a key part of the debate is if WE are causing the climate change, AT ALL. Read it again, worded different... if we didn't exist, the climate change would STILL occur. Right NOW, exactly as it is ocurring.
There are two flavors of the extreme "global warming is BS" camp. The first states that we have no impact on "global warming". Half the camp believes it is, in fact, a precursor to an "Ice Age" and is NOT "warming". The other half believes that it is the tail end of an "Ice Age". There is nothing we can do to stop it, any more than there is something we could do to cause it. The second flavor, which typically has political vestings, denies that any climate change is happening no matter what.
The moderate "it's BS" camp believes that we have little impact on "global warming". You'll find varying opinions on if it is, in fact, a precursor to (or end stage of) an "Ice Age". Most will state that, if anything at all, our impact was to increase the change rate by a fraction of a fraction of a percent. They reference beetle studies from the English coast, and use phrases like "Atlantic Conveyor".
The moderate "dunno" camp doesn't know what to think. They've got morons on all sides who have strong financial interests, telling them that the other side is the problem. Moderate "dunno" people all have one thing in common - they all agree that there is an assload of money to be made by the (politically) extreme group that wins.
The moderate "it's real" camp believes that we have significant impact on "global warming". Some believe that it will LEAD to an "Ice Age" (as opposed to an upcoming/terminating ice-age CAUSING it); most think that Earth will end up like Venus.
The extreme "it's real" camp believes that we are the absolute cause of "global warming". The melting of the polar ice is a direct result of CO2 emissions etc, and has nothing to do with the Atlantic Conveyor / freshwater / IceAge cycle. Most of the extreme "It's real" camp has never heard of the Atlantic Conveyor, anyway, and some (right here on Slashdot, where else?) have attributed an increased Solar Flare activity to SUV emissions. The exception to this is extremists who are politically vested. The extremists who are vested... have economic interests. And exactly like the "No Climate change has happened" extremists, they will invent whatever data is required to win.
Operative word with both political extremists - "Invent". Take a look at the origins of the "hockey stick" for further detail, the data gathering reads like a Microsoft funded study of TCO. Also understand that both extremist camps have all the money.
The true argument, here, and the reason most "in the know" have avoided it... is that "global warming" has *nothing* to do with science. No fact in the world (regardless of which "side" it's on) can stand against an onslaught of political, completely unaccountable BS that is spread with an unlimited budget. It'd be suicide to speak in such an environment. If you need proof, consider that there are "sides" to this issue in the first place. The last time I checked, the only thing that mattered was "the truth"... and it doesn't have "sides". THAT is why you won't find a good scientific argument, either way... its buried in noise, with the author ducking for cover. Kind of like why you picked "I'm not disputing global warming" as a subject, then asked for facts to demonstrate it was real. You knew your question could easily devolve into a flame fest.
For what it's worth, the real reason we're still running on Oil is because noone owns the sun. Yet.
Have a good one,
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Technocrat: "We ran a pointer to a global-warming-doubter story this morning. Here's the link. I decided to pull the story after reviewing the author attribution (he's from a paid political PR agency), and the venue's other coverage on this issue. Sorry."
You seem to be implying that all Al Gore did was go to Congress sometime in the 90's and say, "Hey guys, this Internet thing is really cool!". As other posters have pointed out, some of the core innovators in what we now call the Internet credit Gore for his work at making the Internet what it is. I trust them more than I trust you.
Let's get specific, though. According to Did Al Gore Invent the Internet?
That bill passed in 1988, several years before you started using the net (not that your personal experience matters at all on this issue).Some nice things that that bill did, besides sponsor Andreesen? It set up a national computing plan, it linked research centers and universities across the country, and it funded a lot of other important research.
Did Al Gore invent the internet? No. He did sponsor the bills that provided funding and vision for some key components of it, though.
BTW, to say you were there to see the Internet created, and then say you've been on the Internet since 1990 is idiotic. The net's been around a lot longer than that. The ARPANET, which is what evolved into the Internet, has been around since 1969. Email came along in 1972. TCP/IP a year later, and things just grew from there. Let me quote from A Brief History of the Internet
What is probably true is that your first exposure to the Internet came because of a project that was made possible by the bills that Al Gore sponsored. So, think of it from your own point of view - you got to use the Internet in 1990 because of Al Gore.My initial reaction to this article is that it looks like propaganda. If you read each of the quotes from the scientist in it, you'll noticed that the qualifying adjectives around each of the stated facts in quotations minimize the importance of any observable facts that can't be denied, and the attributive verbs for the quotes are chosen to slant the reader's perception as well.
s tory.html?id=d0235a70-33f1-45b3-803b-829b1b3542ef
e -skeptic-response.html
Climate change experts, like most scientists, tend to be pretty circumspect with their public statements and avoid hyperbole, so the quotes calling Gore "pathetic" and "an embarrassment" are a red flag as well.
Any "feature" article is going to have something of a slant--and there's nothing wrong with that--but the words in article seemed so consistently well-chosen that they seemed vetted by some PR flack versed in the art of using words to sell your opinions to stupid people.
While that's not enough, in itself, to make me disregard the article, it did make me want to see what I could find out about this "Tom Harris" guy who wrote it. Turns out this guy has made something of a cottage industry out of "debunking" global warming, and in at least one case has co-written an article with the Patterson he quotes in this article. He doesn't disclose this fact, although, in fairness, it was written for a "journal" that, amazingly for 2006, has no web presence.
Harris also wrote another article along the same lines as this one, entitled "The Gods Are Laughing", which you can find here:
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/
This one starts out with a lead paragraph that points out that *real* scientists disagree with "liberal arts graduate" Gore about global warming. More red flags here, because people with a good case to make generally don't have to resort to challenging the scientific credentials of their opponents.
The fact that Gore has no PhD in climatology isn't really germane to the debate, although it seems to be a major focus of these pairs of articles. Although once certainly needs some advanced training to conduct climatology research, one would hope that you wouldn't need to go to school for eight years just to be able to read the conclusions section of a peer-reviewed paper. Else, what's the point of doing research, if your findings can only be conveyed to other scientist who are already working from 99.9% of the same knowledge base as you? And one certainly doesn't need a PhD to talk to climatologists and build a consensus view of their opinions.
The director of the atmosphere and energy bits of the Sierra Club of Canada wrote a missive below that explains in more detail a few of the shady rhetorical tricks Harris uses, and which I have alluded to above:
http://www.sierraclub.ca/national/postings/climat
Personally, I'm starting to lean toward the this-guy-is-a-shill theory, myself.
-k. ^-^ ^D
This is about the US climate, not the world climate.
I'm sure you've heard that we can use carbon nanotubes to build a space elevator. That's just one thin ribbon going up to space. We can build it wider, all the way around the US, so that we don't have to share our tropical climate with places like Sweden (go bork yourself) and North Korea.
We'll probably split the Atlantic down the middle and go two thirds the way across the Pacific. As a bonus, I think there will be at least a 50% drop in Mexicans climbing over the border.
More important that all of that, of course, is the fact that while the arctic ice pack sits on water, the antarctic one sits largely on land ... and that Greenland also supports a significant ice pack. Since these are supported by the land (not buoyant force), when they melt, they would significantly raise the waterlevel globally.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
articles. Rather, it is challenging Gore's (and the political left's in general) interpretations.
I am a scientist, though not climatologist. I feel that the data is all but certain that the atmosphere has warmed about 1C in the last one hundred years. I think virtually all of my colleagues agree with this. As for the cause of global warming, things are far murkier. Since we don't have hundreds of earths where we can run nice reproducible tests in order to study what variables matter and what do not, we can NEVER provide conclusive evidence for cause. That being said, the data is still fairly solid that we are most of the problem. The current consensus from the ICC implies something like "there is a 90% chance that human activity is the primary cause of the observed global warming". I think this is fair, given the data. Certainly, a 90% chance of a problem is enough to justify the consideration of preventative action.
Some GW skeptics claim that since the earth's temperature has been all over the place in the past, some "natural" phenomena could have caused the warming. While this is possible, they should be able to point out what this "natural phenomena" is. So far, none of the logical possibilities have panned out. For example, there is slight evidence that solar radiation may have increased, but nowhere near enough to explain the observed warming. Changes in orbit, which have largely driven the ice ages, have not occured. If it is NOT CO2 and other greenhouse gases, it must be some other cause. If it is, we should be able to measure it. What is it? The skeptics fail to point out plausible alternatives. If the alternatives are not plausible, it is logical to conclude that it is the greenhouse effect. Hence the ICC's 90% odds.
The left, however, vastly exaggerates any data supporting the existence of GW or its dangers. Any talk of "tipping points" or blaming Katrina on GW, for example, are either entirely unsupported by the data or extremely premature. At worst, without GW Katrina would have been a weak Cat 4 instead of a strong one. GW did not "create" Katrina, though it is possible that it made her slightly worse.
Another problem with the left is that they ignore economics. When the economists crunch the numbers, they often find that even assuming GW is real, adaption is simply the cheaper option as compared to prevention. To put it simply, doing anything about GW that would actually make a difference could be far more expensive than it is worth. It may be easier to build some flood walls than buy a zillion solar panels, for example. I rarely find that the left is even willing to engage in this debate, probably because they are on very weak footing there.
10) Drive Hummer, get laid
11) Your high reproductive rate increases the probability your progeny rule the world after the coming die-off
If you're dissenting opinion was financed by Exxon and the oil lobby, I can guarantee it will get published. Not only that but it will get picked up by the popular press because Exxon's PR firm will be working their press contacts for ink.
You can buy any kind of research results you want if you have enough money. I used to see tobacco companies do it all the time when I was in contract research. You'll be able to buy some really big name scientists and get the conclusions you want. They'll justify the intellectual prostitution by telling themselves that the research they do with the money they get will out-weigh the evil of promoting a position paid for by oil money, or tobacco money or Monsanto or whoever is funding your research center.
Big corporate money is corrupting our government, our research institutions, and our media. Half the fluff pieces you see on the news were produced by some industry group. Probably 90% of the articles you read in trade rags are influenced by an advertiser or their PR firm, it's really getting to the point you can't believe anything you read.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
See his web site : http://www.highparkgroup.com/
If you pay his company enough, he will represent whatever view you need. What to chip together and make him pro-global warming?
Or did they form those opinions and become vocal about them just because they knew they could get paid for having them? :-)
Bruce Perens.
There are whores with PhDs, sometimes in the sciences, who are directly or indirectly (usually, via ultra-right-wing think-tank) on Exxon-Mobil's payroll willing to state otherwise. If you want to consider them scientists, go right ahead.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Boy, now there's a statement begging to get ripped apart by a 20 to 50 year cost of money analysis. Unless the contractor, municipality, state, or national government makes sure the flood walls cost less by building to what they want it to cost, rather than what's needed to work, even a few hundred miles of dikes can get rather pricey. The Netherlands is densely populated enough that it's cost effective to do them right. Given the geography and political culture in the US, it would be a political necessity to - in future hindsight - fuck it up.
What it boils down to is that it's the oil and coal extractors and the coal fired power companies that will really have their nuts in a vice over the expense of prevention. They would prefer to continue offloading the effect of their current business practice by spreading the cost of adjustment over the entire economy.
If you'll excuse the broad brush, fuck 'em.
Luke, help me take this mask off
The unfortunate thing about climatology is that we can't do any simple experiments to test the individual factors to determine which are really important
This is true with the word "simple," which you used, but is not true once you factor in that bright scientists are more than capable of doing complicated experiments that give real insight.
Evolution suffers from the same problem of inescapable complexity. That's one of the reasons why people who value simplicity (feel free to substitute "simpleminded" ) have a hard time understanding it. Thankfully, the world community of scientists tends to value observation and experimentation over simplicity, even if it is less convienient.
TW
And you're the idiot. Eisenhower, for example, while president, took the initative in creating the interstate highway system, but he didn't invent roads. Gore, while Senator, took the initative in creating ARPAnet and expanding it from a government project to the real world.(1) Hillary, while first lady, took the initative in creating a national health care system, and she isn't a doctor and didn't invent medicine.
Creation doesn't mean invention, and what's more, 'taking the initative in creation' doesn't even mean 'creation', so you're like two steps away from truthfulness. I can take the initiative to do something by standing up and getting others to do it. Senators, obviously, cannot do everything, so they tell others what to do. That is why he said he 'took initative' instead of saying he actually did it. It was, instead, done in a lab, at his direction. (Granted, his rather indirect direction. He said 'Hey, you got a bunch of computers talking to each other? Here's some more money, keep spending it on that.'.)
No one in the universe parses 'When I was in a political office, I took the the initiative in creating X' as saying 'I invented X' unless they're delibrately trying to misparse it. Politicians take initiative by championing bills.
What's more, they use that exact terminology all the time. That is, in fact, what the damn word 'initiative' means in politics. Witness Bush's 'American Competitiveness Initiative' and 'Helping America's Youth Initiative'. How is he going to help American's youth? Why, via legislation. I quote the GOP: Hughes has served as an adviser to President Bush on many foreignpolicy fronts and took a special interest in the status of women in Afghanistan, leading the President's initiative to free Afghan women from the Taliban. Holy shit. The president is wandering around freeing women in Afghanistan?
Or is Gore 'taking' the initiative somehow different from Bush possessing the initiative? What grammar silliness are you going to try to weasel through there?
The Republicans had a theme in the 2000 election that Gore lied all the time, and this is just one of their most absurd twists of his statements. (This theme is really ironic in the face of who we got instead, Mr. let's-pretend-they-have-WMD.)
1) And, in what continues to baffle me, everyone knows he was a damn champion of this. The entire fucking first term of Clinton was filled with Hillary yammering about national health care, and Gore yammering about, wait for it, The Information Superhighway. Granted, he was talking about earlier, when he was in the Senate, but if there's any politican anyone alive during the early 90s should link to the internet, it's Gore.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
It is just about a fact that humans have increased the CO2 in the atmosphere. Very few dispute this. What is disputed is the impact of such a change. Maybe recent warming weather is a cooincidence, but a warming trend along with more CO2 is pretty good evidence that we are causing it. If we ignore it until there is 100% proof, it may be too late. And if we were wrong, there are many *other* benefits of cleaner air. Thus, it is best to error on the side of cleaner air and less petroleum-dependence.
Table-ized A.I.
No, that's not what scientists do.
After they get all this data, scientists take it, and then go, 'My theory is that carbon dioxide levels were X% 300 years ago. This makes me predict that if we measure certain things, they will fit this theory.'
And they keep measuring.
However, the GP is wrong in what he's implying, and you are correct. We pretty much have determined temperatures and CO2 levels for, I think, a few thousand years back, because various independent data all shows the same stuff. Anyone arguing we don't have 'the facts' about those things should be slotted into the same place that people who argue we don't have any evidence that the earth is really billions of years old.
What we don't know is why any of these changes happen at all, except for some very obvious exceptions like the Year Without A Summer in 1816, which we're almost certain was due to a few volcanic erruptions.
We also know that temperature changes by itself by huge amounts if you look at time on a span of hundreds of thousands of years. We don't know why that happens, and, what's more, we don't know how fast that happens.
However, what's not in question is: Ice is melting. As ice melts, the sea level must go up. If that keeps happening, we're going to be in serious trouble 'shortly'. Not just flooding, but ocean currents shifting. Ocean currents that make very inhabited places inhabitable. Randomly changing weather patterns on the earth is a good way to kill 10% of the population directly and starve another 30%. Good thing, too, because we'll lose like 20% of our living space to the ocean.
Whether this is our fault or not, whether we can stop it regardless if it is or isn't, whether it will change by itself, and whether shortly means 'two decades' or 'two hundred years' are all unknown.
It's entirely possible we're about to tip into some huge climate change completely independent of anything we've done. It's entirely possibly we're nearing one end of a 100-year yoyo and we'll soon turn around and head the other way.
It's also entirely possible the human-caused global warming people are correct. And even if they aren't correct in that we are the actual 'cause', they probably are correct in that we are speeding it up, and can slow it down if we choose.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Spoken like a True Liberal! Actually, Conservatives are people who believe in what has been shown to work in the past. Liberals are people who want to say, "Everything YOU think is true is actually wrong -- MY ideas are better."
Suffice it to say that using labels like "Conservative" and "Liberal" to equate to "Stoooopid" and "Smart" is just silly and counterproductive. Both camps are full of "fluff pieces" and people only willing to look at the world through their own particular filters. You just happen to like your filters better than those of the Conservatives.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Of the hundreds of comments attached to this story, yours is by far the most insightful and informative. I disagree with your polite "none very impressive", and think you're wrong about "none in global warming" and "unqualified scientist". That panel is composed of professional Greenhouse deniers. They are "impressive" and "qualified" to testify before a Canadian fake "Conservative" government that's hired by polluters to protect Canada's giant fossil fuel exports to the US (our #1 supplier). And probably dreams of a "warm Canada" their vast real estate holdings can finally cash in on as people "migrate" from uninhabitable regions to the south, while finally getting a year-round passage between East and West hemispheres across the Arctic.
Just look at their actual resumes, of course not quoted by "Canada's Fastest Growing Independent News Source", probably also funded by the Canadian Greenhouse industry and their global Murdoch partners.
Tim Patterson is a geologist, not a climate scientist - exactly the kind of scientist the BS article excludes to fake its conclusion that most Greenhouse scientists aren't qualified.
Boris Winterhalter is also a geologist, not a climatologist.
Geologists mostly work for the oil business, which is where most of the money for the entire science comes from, their peers who review, their "next gig pool".
Bob Carter doesn't even rate a page at his tiny Australian department where he's just an "Adjunct" professor.
Timothy Ball's "EnviroTruth" org is a division of the National Center for Public Policy Research, an front for Exxon Greenhouse denial propaganda and other Vast RightWing Conspiracy players.
Wibjörn Karlén's research supports Gore, but he signs the BS letter anyway.
Dick Morgan doesn't have an Exeter page, nor does he have ">any recorded association with the World Meteorological Association, so he has no credentials whatsoever, apart from lying.
These people are professional Greenhouse deniers. That Canadian panel and its Canadian tabloid (an obvious rightwing rag, just looking at its front page) are cheap fronts for the polluters responsible for the Greenhouse. They're not even trying to hide it more than a couple of googles and clicks deep, they hate us so much. And judging from the hundreds of posts in this story falling for it, we are that stupid.
--
make install -not war
I don't have the proof in front of me, and frankly, I don't see how it's my responsibility to find it for you. It's in several published papers--if you're in the field you'll know how to find them. The models that are projecting increased temperatures--and pointing a finger at CO2 as an important forcing in that trend--are capable of simulating the temperature trends of the 20th century. In fact one even correctly predicted the affect of an eruption--confirmed by Pinatubo in 1991.
Of course if you were in the field you'd also know that there are many more forcings than just CO2 that affect the global mean temp. You'd also know that a chaotic systems don't respond linearly. You'd probably also know that although there have been cool years and hot years since the beginning of the 20th century, the overall delta to now is clearly positive. And presumably you'd understand that global trends are not local trends, therefore local anecdotes like the 1969 hurricane season do not prove or disprove global mean phenomena.
If you're not in the field, I recommend realclimate.org.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
From the side of economics and policy. When economists and policymakers talk about the "cost" of fighting global warming, what they are actually calculating and referring to are the burdens placed on existing industries, as they exist today. They have a much harder time with two other aspects of the economy, though: very long-term costs (such as environmentally-driven health factors), and innovation that creates or radically transforms new industries. The former is just too difficult to estimate with any reliability, and the latter represents a "wall" of future change through which current knowledge and analysis cannot penetrate.
As such it is important to remain skeptical of the claims of the burdens related to fighting global warming. Regulatory and environmental constraints can harm existing industries, but they can also spur the development of new technologies and new industries, and thereby spur overall economic growth.
The real economic question is one of the pace of change. Large public companies concerned with quarterly earnings and stock price have a deep interest in managing the pace and nature of change, and they spend a lot of money in Washington and the states and the media in an attempt to do so. It is very difficult for large companies to change their business model; often impossible. They will expend huge capital to prevent or delay change that would require them to do so. Whereas disruptive, smaller companies--the great American entrepreneurs--prefer to move quickly in the market, innovating and growing as fast as they can.
Some corporations manage change very well. You can probably name some of them right off the top of your head--they're the ones who were advertising their "green" technologies on TV a year or two ago. Toyota, Honda, GE, BP, etc. There is proof around us, right now, that moving to a more energy-efficient society is economically beneficial. The companies leading the way are experiencing growth.
The left often gets caught up in the global social and scientific arguments--the "best" reasons for doing something. And, there is an underlying element of conservatism to much environmentalism--a desire for natural things to remain the way they are, or a desire for a return to the "good old days" of living in harmony with nature. Like most conservatism it is based as much on wishful thinking and emotion as it is on clear logic.
As a result they miss the tremendous economic argument FOR beginning a response to global warming. And they often miss the glaring precedents for government action. A great one is the mandated move to digital TV over the air. Here is a situation where the government identified a precious resource and regulated to enforce its conservation and more efficient use. Is anyone expecting this to cripple the TV industries? No of course not--everyone is going to have to buy new TV equipment (broadcast and consumer), and it represents an opportunity to design upsells--DVRs and HDTV. It's a classic example of government regulation spurring economic growth through innovation and transformation.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Like any editor, I can "ban" whoever I want. Freedom of speech does not obligate anyone to give you a podium. And like any good editor, I exercise the obligation to filter for my readers.
When has sincerity become a barometer of fact? I'm not sure you're serious, but I'll answer as if you were. If the speaker is insincere, that is a really strong indication that you should question the message and look for what they have to hide. Sure, a sincere speaker can be wrong. But if only funded speakers are taking a particular position, that generally means that someone is trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
For your information, Gore was elected to the House in 1976, and, for further enlightenment, the House of Representatives is the other branch of, yes, Congress, where Gore said he was. Congress!=Senate. But it's fun to watch that little same factoid of misinformation about 1984 get repeated over and over, I guess you're all using the same talking points.
And, yes, ARPAnet already existed then, although I have to point out it didn't use TCP/IP until 1983, and that is the earliest traditional point that 'The Internet' started. Nothing before that can be called 'The Internet', and many people date it even later.
However, the ancestory between ARPAnet and 'The Internet' is almost entirely false. The actual links that the internet evolved from were made from NSFNET, which was made in 1986, linking five high speed computers operated by the NFS with high-speed T1 connections. It was hooked to ARPAnet via gateways, as were JANET and HEANET, but those were not 'ARPAnet'. ARPAnet was old and slow and essentially useless by the time it was shut down in 1990.
NFSNET continued to operate and everyone linked to it, until 1995 when the last link was sold off to private industry. And it became 'The Internet', along with some other networks it managed to pull along.
To put it another way: No organization still has IP numbers that were routed over ARPAnet. People do still have NFSNET-assigned ones that have been routed continually since 1987 or whenever, although obviously other organizations have been in charge over the years. This current internet is the NFSNET's child, not the ARPAnet. The ARPAnet was just a prototype. Yes, the technology was developed there, and yes Gore had nothing to do with it.
However, he had everything to do with funding NFSNET, which actually provided free fast servers and a fast enough connection made the whole thing useful, and let commercial organizations connect to it, which they couldn't do with ARPAnet.
In otherwords, he not only did what he said, he did exactly what he said. It's other people who have conflated 'The Internet' with TCP/IP or the web or ARPAnet that have it wrong. He didn't invent, or even fund, any of that. Before Al Gore, everyone had to use slow links and awkward multiple gateways that were mostly email and usenet. Then he funded 'the network of networks', and quite knowingly opened it up for everyone to use and hook to, and that thing became The Internet. He passed a law that created the network we would come to call 'The Internet'.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
How many of those scientists work for research organizations funded by oil companies? This has been covered extensively before. There IS a broad scientific consensus on global warming and its causes. The only scientists saying otherwise are on the payroll of oil companies. This is just like the "scientists" who the tobacco companies paid to say there was no proven link between smoking and lung cancer.
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
I lived next door to one of the leaders in the ice core project in Greenland. The goal was to drill down and get a "map" back in time looking at the ice.
n g.htm
Several conclusions came of this project and more will follow, but in regards to global warming he told me the following (in my own words):
"The ice core showed that we have seen several very cold and warm periods in the past, and none can be conclusive about our weather today."
and
"The measurements we have today, of temperature dates back about 150 years. That was a very cold period according to the ice core. So that the weather is getting warmer could be an obvious thing from that point."
So basically he says the data is inconclusive... but in the end he stated:
"When we look at CO2 and other green-house gasses in the ice core, we see a jump in the last few decades. I geological terms this increase is so significant that the only word we use for such a geological event is: Disaster or catastrophe! Its way off scale compared to any other event in time. What the effects are or will be I can't tell..."
Their site is here http://www.glaciology.gfy.ku.dk/ngrip/hovedside_e
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
It also inspired one of the best and funniest SciFi novels I've ever read: Fallen Angels, by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn.
The plot: SciFi geeks save fallen astronauts from a tyranically green/luddite government. Oh, and the glaciers? Our greenhouse gasses were holding back the next ice age, but the greens got their way. Most of Canada is already under the ice.
READ the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the other amendments! http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/const.html
The idea that forecast cannot be tested is absurd if you use the scientific method; predict, test, revise & repeat.
The UK Meteorological Office has successfull Forecasts of Global Temperature risk using their climate model for the last six years.
Here is there take on the future : Climate, the greenhouse effect and global warming - is the climate changing?
Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame.
t ok.co2.gif h ics/tempplot5.gif
CO2 and Temerature plots for the past 450,000 years from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/graphics/vos
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/temp/vostok/grap
No meaningful correlation!!!
Nutter: A person who is regarded as eccentric or mad.
ExxonSecrets.org
Many articles on Professor Carter's "qualifications"
I'm sure that there are more links about this professor, but even if there are some scientific dispute about a specific study sited about global warming, the bottom line isn't really in dispute: human activity is having and will have for decades to come a noticeable impact on our global environment.
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"Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that."
Despite what the headline article claims, and what some posters here sadly believe, human induced planetary heating (global warming just sounds too benign) is real and there is broad consensus across the scientific community on that. sadly the exxon funded shills are paid good money to add layer upon layer of doubt upon this scientific consensus. Its all handled by the same PR people who worked for big tobacco a decade or two ago.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
We should realize two things:
1. Many global warming deniers are:
a. funded by oil and coal companies that strongly encourage them to try to find anything so that they won't have to actually take action;
b. not peer reviewed; and
c. not supported by the more than 95 percent of climatologists who agree the GW does exist.
2. Global Warming is not what you think it is. It is actually large dramatic changes in the global temperature patterns, and even if the median temperature increases - which it is currently doing at an accelerating rate - it will tend to oscillate and result in massive changes in temperature - both Warming and Freezing - at both a local and global level.
This last point means that you can have some parts of the globe get colder while other parts - like say the Northwest section of the US - have 60 percent of their glaciers that have survived hundreds of thousands of years all melt.
You can also have, in global warming, a period where it gets much much colder for 2-5 years, and then suddenly gets a lot warmer for 5-100 years - in fact, much of our recent history shows this.
What is known is that man-made pollution, heat generation, and deforestation is now a major factor in global warming, and was not so before the 18th century. And it is becoming more and more of a major factor each and every day.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
from http://www.highparkgroup.com/
he gets paid for his opinion to be what it is!
--meh--
Bela Liptak, the Editor in Chief of the Process Control Handbook for Engineers, says that to control a process, we must first understand it. In this case, we don't really understand Global warming, even if we can show it exists. We don't know if it's part of the natural cycle the earth goes through, we don't know if it's caused by our own mismanagement (And don't discount that. The "Humans are too small to change the earth" arguement is verifably false -- Europe had to turn to burning coal because some irresponsible buffoon thought that humans would never cut down all the trees. Also, every piece of refined steel created during and after World War 2 is tainted with radioactivity that is in our atmosphere now because of nuclear weapons (So when we need a piece of steel without radioactivity, we take it from the sunken German battleships from WWI)). While limiting CO2 emissions is a prudent course of action until we learn more, it is by no means a sure-fire route to "Solving" the percieved problem.
It's been a long time.
Actually I would say that many scientists value simplicity. In my experience, the most simple solutions/answers are usually the right ones.
Oh, and another thing, a lot of science/liberalism suffers from one big problem, arrogance. That is why people tend to discount Evolution and Global Warming. Its never explained properly because people like you assume that the common person is to stupid(feel free to substitute "simpleminded") to understand it completely. Its really sad how embedded arrogance is into the scientific community.
By the way, I'm one of those "simpleminded" people who doesn't believe that Global Warming is as big a problem as people make it out to be. Though I do believe in efficiency and responsible use of resources. But the ends don't justify the means. Let the market take care of this issue. The main producers of "green house" gasses are non-renewable resources. So the market will reward those who use less as those resources become scarce and there for more expensive.
"We Don't Need No Truthless Heros!" - Project 86