Global Warming Debunked?

limbicsystem writes, "I'm a scientist. I like Al Gore. I donate to the Sierra club, I bicycle everywhere and I eat granola. And I just read a very convincing article in the UK Telegraph that makes me think that the 'scientific consensus' on global warming is more than a little shaky. Now IANACS (I am not a climate scientist). And the Telegraph is notoriously reactionary. Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong? Because it seems to be solid, well researched, and somewhat damning of a host of authorities (the UN, the editors of Nature, the Canadian Government) who seem to have picked a side in the global warming debate without looking at the evidence." The author of the Telegraph piece is Christopher Monckton, a retired journalist and former policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher.

Comments

Why doesn't anybody do the easy thing?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The answer to global warming is *very* simple, and *very* well known. We just need to plant massive amounts of biomass to soak up all the excess carbon. We just need to turn the United States into a temperate rain forest- with enough variety to ensure tree survival and food production from the rain forest itself. Lock up that carbon in wood- and then use the wood to build houses- locking up the carbon for decades, maybe centuries...

Re:Why doesn't anybody do the easy thing?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

When biomass dies, it either rots or is burnt.

Yes, which then goes to feed more biomass- the idea is to match our logrithmic curve of carbon production with a logrithmic curve of biomass creation.

As much as I'd like the answer to Global Warming to be as simple as planting a few trees, it really isn't. Tree planting has its place, but isn't nearly as effective as reduction in man-made CO2 levels.

Actually, if you could just replace the area lost in the Brazilian rain forest in the last 3 years, you'd do more than 20 Kyoto Accords put together. Trees are *extremely* efficient in this, and some trees that we've found that grow here in America can survive up to 20 centuries if taken care of.

Conspiracy theorist...?

[lawpoop]

This is the very first paragraph:

" Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science." [Emphasis mine]

OK, so not only is the American right-wing co-opting Evangelical Christians and 'values voters' to take away our civil liberties and conduct mass surveillance on the American public, but now hippies, greenies, and environmental scientists are also going to take away our freedoms by reducing greenhouse emissions, raising vehicle fuel efficiency, and sequestering carbon!?

Man, things are getting really weird when people on both sides of the aisle are starting to agree with Alex Jones.

A world in denial

[supersnail]

Every year the evidence for global warming gets more convincing.
The scientific evidence just builds and builds.
And when youve just gone through a summer in northern europe
when the tempreture never went below 30c for 8 weeks who needs
scientists.

The really scary bit is this:
The classic argument against global warming is that the climate
has always varied wildly -- sometimes it gets warmer sometimes
it gets colder, shit happens.
However historians have been patiently examining all the cool
spells and they all correlate to drop offs in human activity.
The last really big dip in temperature happened just after the
Black Death when approx. one third of humanity died.

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Re:Poking Holes is EASY

[spencerogden]

Except that in this case, the general consensus is usually based on worst case projections and copious amounts of rounding up. For instance a 1% annual growth in atmospheric CO2 is commonly used in projections, like the Stern report. The problem is that the actual rate is more like 0.35%. Now maybe it will double in the next 50 years to 0.70%, but that is still far different from saying CO2 will grow at 1% from today on. It grossly exaggerates the CO2 concentrations we'll be looking at in 100 years.

It's not really poking holes when you say, "How about we use average estimate instead of the doubling the worst case estimates". If you run the projections on average, or even plain worst case scenario numbers, you don't get a scary story. Even taking the UN's worst case scenario, you get a temp increase of like 7 c over the next 100 years, and that pretty much assumes that we make no progress in alternative energy, which seems pretty pessimistic.

Wrong Questions

[Spittoon]

I posted this in the "Snowball Earth" thread, but it applies here too.

At the moment the question seems to be "Are humans having a serious negative impact on the global climate?" This is used to reinforce the status quo, right? It's not our fault, what we're doing isn't the problem, so why bother changing what we're doing?

Shouldn't the questions be:

"Is the climate changing?"
"Is it changing in a way that will benefit humanity?"
"If not, how do we manufacture the change we desire?"

These questions should be framed with the idea that the climate is changing and will eventually wipe life as we know it off the face of the Earth. Eventually, something will replace all that biodiversity. But mankind won't be around to see it, so it behooves us as a species to guarantee our own survival by making sure the climate changes in a manner that allows us to continue to thrive.

Re:you'll get answers

[ceoyoyo]

I didn't say anything about whether global warming exists or not, or whether we're to blame or not.

What I said was that the assumed source of human caused global warming is carbon dioxide, which is not one of the pollutants that make noticeably unclean air. And if we're going to really reduce our carbon dioxide emissions your fresh vegetables are going to become more of a luxury. Cheap (and fresh) vegetables depend at the very least on mechanized farming (which produces carbon emissions) and in most cases some sort of transport (which produces carbon emissions).

So liking fresh air is irrelevant to the topic of global warming and fresh vegetables are something we may well have to sacrifice if the worst predictions about global warming are true.

Re:you'll get answers

[Vintermann]

"Well, if what the article submitter says is all factually correct, then there has been a large conspiracy to misinform and lie to the public about what is actually happening."
I agree. However, I reason somewhat like this,

A: What the submitter says is correct
B: There has been a conspiracy.

A -> B
!B (I don't believe in large conspiracies involving the UN and the vast majority of all natural scientists)
---
!A

This article is BS, and the "wow, this was pretty convincing" is just a seller line. I've seen a lot more convincing articles. I've also seen this article aggressively sold elsewhere in a similar manner. You know, I never heard of any successful global conspiracies on the scale that would be needed to conceal that global warming isn't happening/isn't mostly increasing due to C02/isn't increasing mostly due to our emissions... but I've heard of many successful astroturf jobs. I've fought for attention with press releases myself, but some people take it ten steps longer, without necessarily being open about it.