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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."
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.
Strangely enough this is from a website that is sporting anti-bush t-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers
Wait a minute, are you telling me someone can be for truth and against Bush?! We'll see what Bill O'reilly has to say about that!
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.
This really makes no sense: a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science
What? If they are scientists, and they "know" something, then surely they must have some very solid scientific evidence for their assertion, and thus should feel comfortable publishing it in a scientific journal. I'm always skeptical of claims that hundreds or thousands of supposedly respectable scientists hold a non-mainstream view but can't express it because some shadowy cabal is forcing them to stay quiet.
If they have solid scientific evidence to refute the solid scientific evidence in support of global warming, then they should publish it. If they don't, then as scientists they should know better than to spout off without any proof of their claims.
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.
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
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.
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
Those opposed to the idea of global warming have to responsiblity to do anything here.
Yes they do. They have to point to flaws and holes in the current theory, otherwise they're just gasbagging.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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?
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."
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.
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
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.
I have two responses to this:
1) The notion that there's no gain from reducing carbon emissions - even in the unlikely event that there turns out to be no effect on long-term global temperatures - is patently absurd. Offhand I can name benefits: improved air quality with attendant lower of non-carbon aerosols like mercury and uranium (which would lead to lower incidence of many diseases), less acidification of lakes and other bodies of water, reduction of ecosystem damage in bodies of water like the Gulf of Mexico (large stretches of which are now hypoxic to anoxic), an extraordinary leap in energy efficiency as a generation of industrial machines are upgraded to modern versions, and finally a reduction in global economic instability as energy sources are made more distributed. And that's just off the top of my head. So it's hard to argue that this money is a vast waste.
2) There is a very simple and very reliable way to approach situations where the outcomes are not well known: risk analysis. Every day, all over the world, people assess the severity of risks and the likelihood of that contingency occurring. By basically multiplying (convolving, whatever you like) the risk by the severity of the outcome, you get a good metric for whether to try to mitigate a particular risk. In this case, the risks (as Gore's movie well illustrates) are extraordinary, so even those with less likelihood merit active mitigation strategies. And given that the conversion from emitting to non-emitting energy sources does not require science particularly beyond our grasp to accomplish, it's impossible to argue that we can't take active steps to mitigate the risk. So why do the same people who employ risk mitigation all over the place (e.g. insurance, tort "reform") argue so furiously against anything like this on a large scale?
Finally, it bears mentioning that the scientists in this article (only two of who are named) are an extraordinary minority - the vast bulk of climate scientists (and I know many personally, thanks to a degree in ocean physics) are in agreement that human activities are contributing to global warming. So while these folks are entitled to their opinions, scientific or otherwise, it's pretty misleading of this here Canada Free Press to present them as a mainstream view.
. . .the only thing ever proven in science is that a model is wrong.
Disproving a positive is not the same thing as proving a negative.
Scientific theory is not based on proven negatives, it is based on positives which it has been impossible to refute.
You are mixing up your logical concepts. Mind your pees and ques.
KFG
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.
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.
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make install -not war