Global Warming Debunker Debunked

Earlier this month we ran an article linking Christopher Monckton's attempt to discredit global warming. The submitter asked plaintively, "Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?" George Monbiot has now done so. From the article: "This is a dazzling debunking of climate change science. It is also wildly wrong... In keeping with most of the articles about climate change in [the Sunday Telegraph], it is a mixture of cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation, and pseudo-scientific gibberish. But it has the virtue of being incomprehensible to anyone who is not an atmospheric physicist... As for James Hansen, he did not tell the US Congress that temperatures would rise by 0.3C by the end of the past century. He presented three possible scenarios to the US Senate — high, medium, and low. Both the high and low scenarios, he explained, were unlikely to materialise. The middle one was 'the most plausible.' As it happens, the middle scenario was almost exactly right. He did not claim, under any scenario, that sea levels would rise by several feet by 2000." And on the political front, the only major ally for Pres. Bush's stand on global warming, Australia's Prime Minister John Howard, is now willing to look at carbon trading.

Comments

The Bush position

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

From the Financial Times, July 7 2006:

  "I recognise the surface of the earth is warmer and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem," he said during a visit to Denmark en route to Gleneagles.

Re:I really don't understand how people ...

[NeutronCowboy]

OK - this is getting easier and easier, since more and more people have extensively answered your questions before.

1) This is why people prefer global climate change rather than global warming, because it gives people who read only headlines the wrong idea. What that article refers to is thermohaline inversion and the stopping of the Atlantic conveyor belt, which is responsible for a good chunk of the nice coastal temperatures in Europe. For more details, and just because I can, I'll point you to alink that is in the same article you just quoted.

2) The Clean Air act is supposedly responsible for this nice little event. As for whether this would be able to affect the global climate in the level that we're seeing it, I'll refer you to this link.

3) Nice little effort at cherry-picking your events. For an actual event, you can go to Greenland and see how their farming efforts are a little easier now. However, the bad events far outweigh any positives we've gotten so far, primarily because it takes time to profit from change. Until we learn to take advantage of what Global Climate Change can do for us, we'll have seniors dying in droves from heat waves, pipelines and houses buckling due to vanishing permafrost and crops dying in areas that are getting too hot for comfort.

4) Since this is the same exact point as in 2) (complete with link to article that has the same quote), I'll refer you to the link I posted there. Besides, that article is a complete light weight when it comes to determining how much more light has reached the earth, its causes (which, btw, include reduced albedo, which is a side-effect of Global Climate Change) or its impact on what we're seeing.

Try again.