Slashdot Mirror
House of Commons Finds No Evidence of Tampering In Climate E-mails
dwguenther writes "The first of several British investigations into the e-mails leaked from one of the world's leading climate research centers has largely vindicated the scientists involved. The House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they'd seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit ... had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming."
According to the article, the head of committee which produced the report "said the lawmakers had been in a rush to publish something before Britain's next national election, which is widely expected in just over a month's time"; two further inquiries are to examine the issue more closely. The "e-mails appeared to show scientists berating skeptics in sometimes intensely personal attacks, discussing ways to shield their data from public records laws, and discussing ways to keep skeptics' research out of peer-reviewed journals," but the committee concluded that East Anglia researcher Phil Jones was not part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that weakens the case for global warming.
The appalling quality of the software used to model the situation (not flagging errors, but carrying on regardless) makes any conclusion pretty much worth less than the paper on which it is written
But, fact remains that the Earth has been warmer and the Earth has been cooler. It WILL change. We may not like that but it is a fact. I would MUCH more prefer global warming than global cooling. You want a disaster? Try an ice age! Even a mini-ice age like happened in the 1800's and other centuries causing mass starvation and migration.
Well if the House of Commons can't find it, it doesn't exist!
Well, that's enough for me. I'm convinced!
That is strange.
Phil Jones admitted it.
Exxon-Mobil finds no evidence of danger in fossil fuel use.
that the bullshit noise that fox news and deniers spread around got quashed by some actual investigation.
I think that the crap that the right wing manages to pass off as 'facts' has done a lot to hurt any attempt to debate issues openly with any chance of keeping the discussion rational and factual
Wherever You Go, There You Are
The problem with the whole Global Warming panic was not that these scientists were distorting the data. The real issue was that they didn't allow public scrutiny of the information. If another group of scientists can't reproduce these results, that the results are not science. Let other climate scientists have the raw data, and we'll see what they say. If you can get a whole bunch of people reproduce the same conclusion, then the study can be taken as credible. Until then, I reserve judgement.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
I heard about this yesterday and it seems like a deal was struck. Phil Jones steps down, and the house of commons declines to charge him. We'll never know, of course.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Global warming is used as a justification to tax (carbon taxes) and control (cap and trade, various environmental regulations.).
There's nothing a government body wants more than money and control. Ergo, it's in the interests of the House of Commons to say 'yep, everything's legit here, and because it is, we're taking more of your money and restricting your lives & business even more. Gotta save the earth, ya know. It's for your own good.'
(The astute reader can guess my position on the matter of anthropogenic global warming, but the above statement is independent of the scientific truth of the matter.)
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Just because you are correct doesn't mean you should lower yourself to using ad hominem name-calling. Rise above, my friend.
RTFA, it does find that they had a keen interest in stonewalling critics. So much for peer review, taking some criticism, and I dunno integrity?
Truth should be easy to defend. There's not much scientific integrity if you have to stifle descent.
Also FTFA: "Lawmakers stressed that their report — which was written after only a single day of oral testimony — did not cover all the issues and would not be as in-depth as the two other inquiries into the e-mail scandal that are still pending."
As Winston Wolfe said: "Let's not start sucking each other's dicks just yet, Gentlemen."
The Deniers never really cared about silly things like evidence, or the opinions of pretty much every expert in the field.
Likewise, the Believers never really cared about a silly thing like evidence but instead settled for the opinions of pretty much every expert in the field.
"...had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process". Butthead: "Huh-huh, you said perverted."
No UK government investigation has found any evidence of any wrongdoing for anything in at least the last ten years - even when the previous six weeks have been wall-to-wall damning evidence reported in every UK newspaper, TV channel and website regardless of its usual political stance.
Modpoints here, not a denier but I'm still tempted. Painting all skeptics with the same piss-soaked brush doesn't help, it just makes YOU look like a fanatic.
Remember, they are the conspiracy.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I'm curious what evidence it was that convinced you that global warming is happening, is caused by humans, and will lead to catastrophic results. I'm agnostic on the first, because I've seen no reliable evidence given the problems with the global temperature data sets, but on the other hand it makes sense that the planet would be warming given that we're still coming out of the Little Ice Age. I've see essentially no credible evidence on the other two points at all. So what was it that convinced you that such claims (that is, the claims made by the global warming activists) are true?
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
If only scientists and skeptics had some sort of common ground, maybe these kinds of conflicts could be avoided.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You find some correlation with Climate Change, you get more funding to investigate. If you disprove something, you're done.
Exactly. Especially in mediums that are only (or at least primarily) going to be read by educated people, there's no reason to prevent debate - the facts will speak for themselves.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
RTFA, it does find that they had a keen interest in stonewalling critics.
Right but there is a point at which any person just gives up on his critics. Whether it be one persistent critic or an internet full of critics, you just get sick of it and concentrate on what actually matters: your work. And then when this happens suddenly you're "stonewalling." Or "unable to defend your statements." I don't know all the details and I'm not going to get into my own anecdotal stories but at some point you just don't care what they think and you get tired of having to engage in rebuttals and 'discussions' if they are inane or offtrack.
For what it's worth (not to defend this), the above phenomenon can also lead you to opt not to release your data because your critics can either pour over it to find more ammunition or use it for their own devices. Thankfully the House of Commons called for the release of all data and all source code and hopefully soon we'll be pointed into a better direction about who is the most correct in their analysis.
My work here is dung.
Why would I apologize? Not that I'm a basher, more of a civilized critic. This report, while it doesn't implicate him in a "conspiracy", also readily admits that he's been treating people with my point of view as mere obstructions to his mission. My impression of Mr. Jones is that he believes firmly that something must be done about CO2 and the problems that come with it, all for very good reasons.
I also suspect that he knows that the normalization of the data would not hold up to scrutiny, but in his view there is too much at stake to risk the public airing of that laundry. His heart is in the right place, but I happen to believe quite firmly that the growing apathy regarding climate change is a perfect example of why we can't put all our environmental eggs in one basket. Why can't we just focus more on particulate emissions, groundwater contamination, and dozens of other issues which have clearly visible impacts on the biological world?
AC: Only on slashdot... could the sentence "My hovercraft is full of eels." be moderated "+4, Insightful
So you missed the results of the expenses enquiry then. Sort of hard given all the news coverage it got.
Plus, newspapers don't contain "damming evidence" they contain editorialised content designed to sell newspapers.
While I generally agree, you have to keep in mind that not all whom one might call "deniers" are actually "skeptics". Skepticism is not just "Yeah, Whatever, don't believe it. [Citation Needed]" - Skepticism requires bringing forth arguments. Many arguments from the "climate skeptics" side are long since debunked and still repeated all over the place. Not saying that there are no valid arguments against anthropogenic global warming or especially against the resulting politics - but not all of it deserves the "skeptic" tag. Goes for both sides, of course, as always.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I'm glad we get back to real, actual science on this issue. With potentially falsifiable claims, experiments, theoretical, provable predictions and the possibility for all peers to independently verify each experiment, statistical analysis and data collection effort.
Not like in bogey-science, where opposing views are heretics, underlying data is top-secret, claims are even theoretically falsifiable only after waiting at least 30 years, all anecdotal evidence in favor is significant and all anecdotal evidence to the contrary is just coincidence.
Which would be a shame to bet billions of Dollars on, to reduce 30% of the countrie's share of about 10% of emissions of a molecule that has a 0.001% share in the entire atmosphere and of which only 10% is human-made at all.
And while we're in science-land, we probably can explain how heavier-than-air molecules are supposedly floating in the upper levels of the atmosphere for extended amounts of time while preventing the oh-so-precious heat loss of our planet. I'm not even talking about how 0.001% of all air molecules could stop a significant fraction of all infrared radiation or how these molecules supposedly always reflect their absorbed energies back towards the Earth instead of reflecting them in all random directions including sideways or deflected into space, despite rolling around in what is a perfect Brownian motion. Just tell us how molecules that are quite a bit heavier than air manage to stay up in the stratosphere for long enough to have any substantial and lasting effect. I'm very interested in hearing this since that would revolutionize air travel when we can lift airships with cheap and abundant CO2 instead of pesky H2 or expensive He.
Right but there is a point at which any person just gives up on his critics.
That's too bad. The debate about global warming isn't a bar room argument. If the scientists "give up", then that means they've left the field to the opposition.
No, we believe because of the evidence. You believe despite all evidence. We start from theory and test it against reality, you start from fantasy and find data that fits. In science, the truth always wins out in the end. In science, if you can prove that everybody else is wrong and you are right, you will be the next Einstein and your name will go down in history forever. So, when all the experts agree, that's pretty good evidence that none of them could make a huge name for themselves by disagreeing. And with the HUGE amounts of money that corporate polluters are pouring into this debate, not only would anyone who proved climate change be famous, they would be very, very rich.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Truth should be easy to defend. There's not much scientific integrity if you have to stifle descent.
You'd think the truth that cigarettes cause cancer and emphysema would have been easy to defend too, but look how long the tobacco industry strung out that debate. They even went so far as to lie, under oath, in front of Congress.
And climate change is infinitely more complicated than "smoking is bad for your health," while having much more money involved.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
RTFA, it does find that they had a keen interest in stonewalling critics. So much for peer review, taking some criticism, and I dunno integrity?
Truth should be easy to defend. There's not much scientific integrity if you have to stifle descent.
When your critics make it clear through their words and actions that their goal is not so much to find the truth so much as to bring you and your research down, then it isn't surprising when you aren't exactly inclined to help them out in this process. It doesn't even matter if you have the truth on your side; people will be able to make you look bad by selectively picking parts of your results and making it seem like you completely screwed things up, even if you in fact did not.
Besides, the critics already had all of the data that they needed to independently either reproduce or disprove the results, since most of the data was already published elsewhere and they were even pointed to where in response to their FOIA request; they were complaining because they did not receive *exact* data set that was used by the CRU since some of it was owned by another agency and couldn't be released, and they refused to work with anything less than the exact data set even though working with equivalent data sets that were publicly available would have been sufficient for the purpose of validating the results.
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
Weirdly, the atmosphere does not consist of layers of gasses sorted by their molecular weight. The stuff gets up there because their thermal motion overcomes gravitation largely, so there is no layering and the mixture is largely homogenous. Then, no one posits that the IR radiation is ONLY directed back to the surface. In fact, every models assumes an isotropic emission by CO2 - which, however, leads to a reduction in net energy flux to space, because PART of it is directed back to the ground. If those are your arguments in "science land", I'd suggest you actually travel to "science land" first yourself and acquaint yourself with the local customs.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Thanks for making the sceptics and critics and denialists responsible for hiding data, compromising scientific integrity and stifling peer-review.
Let's welcome the "Denialists made me do it" defense.
I know your tongue is planted firmly in cheek, but I did some research on the matter, and found that the fossil fuel industry, automobile industry, and wal-mart-like fossil-fuel-based mega-scale consumer goods distribution industry have many thousands of times more money at stake (~$10 trillion annually) on the outcome of this debate than do the scientists in question.
Not to mention that the side denying anthropenic global warming is also the side whose proposition lets comfortable people, and wasteful, unsustainable industries off the hook, and lets them continue without changing anything about their behavior.
The other side's proposition suggests or implies that change, some substantial change, is needed, and that is going to require effort and some shifting of those who are currently sitting in the musical chairs.
I wonder which side is going to be more biased and vocal and strident in its bending of facts to suit its desired course of
action or inaction?????
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Scepticism doesn't require anything. They just point at the null hypothesis and call it a day.
Those making a claim bear the burden of proof.
Its been joked about but they actually did it!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Oh, no problem, folks. Let's just wait. We survived so far. What can go wrong? I mean, if it turns out climate change is a thread, we will deal with it at face value. Right?
So you missed the results of the expenses enquiry then. Sort of hard given all the news coverage it got.
Plus, newspapers don't contain "damming evidence" they contain editorialised content designed to sell newspapers.
Let's look at this in context.
In order to write this comment, I looked at the Telegraph's list of implicated MPs. I gave up counting after I hit 120 MPs and I wasn't even halfway down the page (and yes, I did exclude names where it said "... did not claim"). Frankly, I think it would have been easier to get a list of MPs who weren't implicated and deduct that from the total number of MPs.
Many have repaid money voluntarily. Of those that haven't, how many have been asked to repay money? A dozen? Two dozen? A fraction of the number involved, of that I'm sure.
How many are being investigated by the police? 5, last time I checked.
Now, if you or I were to be caught red-handed in a high-profile tax swindle publicised in a national newspaper, do you honestly believe there's less than a 5% chance we'd be prosecuted if we "agreed to repay the money"?
Decide for yourself!
http://www.heartland.org/books/PDFs/SurfaceStations.pdf
Major report by Anthony Watts on junk surface stations
"Executive Summary: Global warming is one of the most serious issues of our times. Some experts claim the rise in temperature during the past century was "unprecedented" and proof that immediate action to reduce human greenhouse gas emissions must begin. Other experts say the warming was very modest and the case for action has yet to be made.
The reliability of data used to document temperature trends is of great importance in this debate. We can't know for sure if global warming is a problem if we can't trust the data.
The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Until now, no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations.
During the past few years I recruited a team of more than 650 volunteers to visually inspect and photographically document more than 860 of these temperature stations. We were shocked by what we found.
We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.
In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations - nearly 9 of every 10 - fail to meet the National Weather Service's own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.
In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.
It gets worse. We observed that changes in the technology of temperature stations over time also has caused them to report a false warming trend. We found major gaps in the data record that were filled in with data from nearby sites, a practice that propagates and compounds errors. We found that adjustments to the data by both NOAA and another government agency, NASA, cause recent temperatures to look even higher.
The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.
The errors in the record exceed by a wide margin the purported rise in temperature of 0.7 C (about 1.2 F) during the twentieth century. Consequently, this record should not be cited as evidence of any trend in temperature that may have occurred across the U.S. during the past century. Since the U.S. record is thought to be "the best in the world," it follows that the global database is likely similarly compromised and unreliable.
This report presents actual photos of more than 100 temperature stations in the U.S., many of them demonstrating vividly the siting issues we found to be rampant in the network. Photographs of all 865 stations that have been surveyed so far can be found at www.surfacestations.org, where station photos can be browsed by state or searched for by name." "Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?" h/t Roger Pielke Sr.
Ignoring all arguments and data brought forth so far, then pointing at the null hypothesis and calling it a day is called skepticism these days? Guess we are indeed doomed.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Obviously if you run the same code on the same data you will get the same result But what happens when you run it on the other data?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
You want disaster? Try a 2 fluctuation C warming or cooling across all our most important foodbelts! Even a minor, persistent decline or increase in ecological carrying capacity will cause serious production issues.
You want disaster? Try halving or doubling the amount of precipitation (rain and snow) available to a few dozen major watersheds across the globe. Even a minor, persistent decline or increase will lead to all kinds of resource conflicts, quite possibly even the shooting kind like is happening now.
Bottom line? When you build a complex, resource-intensive society of ~7 billion people, and run that society really close to the margins of earth's natural carrying capacity (as we are today), then arbitrarily messing around with a bunch of climate parameters is a stupid idea. It might work out okay, or it might not.
I am so bold as to to say, the conclusions of this type of research is stretched beyond what can safely be predicted of a chaotic system.
The more bold claims are used by power mongers to take more control of peoples lives.
People ought to be able to look for themselves how far the data is being stretched.
Yes, except driving is 100% purely voluntary.
C'mon...you can do better than that. That's pretty weak.
What they did was not illegal though, which is the point. The police investigated for illegal activities that the bulk of them were not involved in.
Those that did break the law are being prosecuted.
The expenses system as it existed was pretty scandalous (claiming for moat cleaning, duck islands, family members as employees etc), but it was not illegal.
I was amazed when a CNN reporter asked Al Gore about the CRU emails. Gore said they were "old news" because they are "10 years old". When I checked my copy of the emails I found the most recent was just 5 days before they were released:
From: "Thorne, Peter (Climate Research)"
To: "Phil Jones"
Subject: Letter draft
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:17:44
So much for Gore's "analysis" of the emails.
I have been struggling to reduce Climategate to something easier for folks to comprehend, and to help them realize the media's duplicity in the whole Climategate affair.
A few weeks ago I was watching a PBS show recounting the Bernie Madoff pyramid scheme. The parallels are amazing. Then it hit me...
CRU is to science as Madoff is to investing.
What catalyzed that thought was an interview on CNN where an AGW scientist proffered the reason why, despite the revelations in the FOIA files, the science was still good: "Who could keep a conspiracy like that going for so long among so many scientists?", she replied.
Madoff worked his scheme for over 40 years. That's how long. The CRU scheme has been running for almost 20 years. Madoff's 19th floor office in the Lipstick building, where he conducted his marketing campaign and gave tours for the curious, could be compared to the IPCC. He bogus trading statements were created on the 17th floor, which would be the CRU. We learned in the "HARRY_README.TXT" file that since 1990 the temperature proxies had been "synthetic", "homogenized" so much that they bore little resemblance to the raw data, which the emails say had actually been thrown away so they couldn't be used later to discredit their work, and Harry documented many examples of how that was done. Only a fool or a conspirator would accept the the "trick" and "hide the decline" as anything less than what it was, scientific fraud. Why would so many conspire in the AGW fraud? Madoff PAID influential investment firms to funnel investors into his scheme. The UN and various government agencies around the world PAID scientists to generate what the emails called "deliverables", which were published in climate journals which didn't require data archiving. So, what were other scientists "peer reviewing" when they didn't have access to the data on which the published research was based? To avoid that question peer review committees were stuffed with other scientists also paid to generate "deliverables".
The IPCC wanted these "deliverables" to "prove" that CO2 generated by the First World was THE cause of claimed temperature rises. With that "fact" the UN could then call for justice and demand redistributing the "right to burn Carbon", in the form of "Carbon Credits" to the poorer nations so their standards of living could rise, while the First World's dropped, and everyone would become equal Carbon consumers somewhere in a happy middle. Classic Marxist dialectical materialism, which may explain why the left wing of the media was only too happy to play their part in publishing the "alarming news".
In 2002 a talented statistician reverse engineered the market performance of Madoff's hedge funds. After four hours of analysis he uncovered eight facts which proved that Madoff's hedge fund was a pyramid scheme. He wrote up his finding and sent it to the SEC, which would the equivalent to climate journals. The SEC sat on the information for years and did nothing. Similarly, the climate journals refused to publish McIntyre's and McKitrick's analysis of Briffa's hockey stick report. Then, five years later, another person reverse engineered the Madoff hedge fund performance history and established twenty one points demonstrating that Madoff's market performance was bogus, and sent it to the SEC. It took the SEC a couple years and a visit to the 19th floor for the SEC to issue a report clearing Madoff of any misconduct.
Then the market crashed. In hearings before Congress the SEC refused to comment because "the matter is under investigation". Cong
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I think what you meant to say is, "Just because you're correct doesn't mean you're going to convince anyone who has made up their mind that it's all a scam by the evil liberals."
You are welcome on my lawn.
Wow, the government supports something that means more revenue for itself and more derivative trading schemes for their banker buddies? I would have expected the investigation to go the other way.
I feel sorry for true AGW believers. If they're right, western governments and the IPCC sure seem to be doing their best to fuck it up lately. AGW may in fact be true, but it just looks like such a con job at this point that I can never be for upturning the economy over it. And of course, I'll take global warming over an (overdue) ice age any day, so I wouldn't recognize the urgency, even if it were true.
Why not go back to fighting good old fashioned pollution? That's something everyone can get on board with. What about the disappearing honey bee and genetically modified foods? There are all sorts of environmental problems out there that have been ignored in favor of this (seemingly) manufactured issue.
If a photon is reflected in all random directions by a molecule several kilometers up the stratosphere, its chance of NOT leaving the planet is pretty low. Combined with the already low chance of even hitting one of the magic 0.001% of all air molecules, the share of photons actually being deflected right back to Earth should be phenomenally slim.
The only molecule that can overcome gravitation are He and H2 which can escape the gravity well in significant proportions. O3 is heavier than air, but it is constantly created and destroyed in the upper atmosphere, so it cannot really sink down.
All other molecules obey the laws of gravity as expected, with heavier molecules like O2 and CO2 converging at the bottom, lighter molecules on top and an obviously gravity-influence density distribution from Ground to Space.
For those who believe in a "homogenous and non-layered mixture of gasses" (like the parent claimed the atmosphere is): try to open the door on a commercial airliner at cruise altitude.
Or for those with less suicidal tendencies: climb a mountain of 2000m or more and note the sudden decrease in oxygen content. Or climb a bit higher, to 5000m or more, and take off the breathing mask for a minute and bask in the clean mountaineous air clearly devoid of heavy molecules like oxygen and carbon dioxide. Don't do it for too long, though.
Mate, the decreased oxygen content at altitude is a function of decreased density, not of changed atmospheric composition. Please, educate yourself.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
So pointing out a flaw in software being used to model the climate is being a "denier"? Well count me in. I deny that software works properly sir because it's a fact. Reviewing with a critical eye a process that could change the world, well that is wise not foolish.
It's "you" people that scare the shit out of me. "Consensus" has removed the ability to disagree apparently. Attacking critical thinking is not part of science. Climate science is becoming a religion and it makes me want to puke.
As CogDissident said, the data's freely available to the public for download. You don't have to submit a request to CRU for the data.
Interestingly enough, global warming deniers were inundating CRU with requests for information that could have easily downloaded instead. This kept the CRU researchers busy fulfilling information requests, instead of actually doing climate research -- essentially a DDOS. This is why the CRU researchers started turning down information requests, and I don't blame them.
said the lawmakers had been in a rush to publish
No kidding. A political body doing an "investigation" like this? The phrase "the fix is in" seems to apply here - if you are honest, you have to admit the conclusion was pretty much decided before any "investigation" by the body was done, regardless of whether you trust current climate science or not.
Thanks for the info.
The whole global warming bugaboo has been one of the holes in my awareness. It became so utterly huge and confusing that I just stepped back and tuned it out figuring that when the dust settled, I'd wade back in and try to make sense of things. -That independent researchers who were smarter and more dedicated than me would be able to put the larger pieces together.
I find it no surprise that greed and a war of social control are driving the Carbon Trading scheme, but I think there is something more also hidden beneath it all.
Climate change is still with us; the weather is really peculiar. One theory which makes a lot of sense given numerous other big and weird things going on is that the whole bundle of confusion and corruption which is Climategate might be there simply to stop people from focusing on and asking what is really going on. What's up with the planet?
-FL
Because it's possible to do something about those issues without suspending democracy.
"Especially in mediums that are only (or at least primarily) going to be read by educated people, there's no reason to prevent debate - the facts will speak for themselves."
Only it's known that the medium IS NOT going to be read by educated HONEST people.
Do you know how many other independent datasets point to global warming? Has Glen Beck told you that even though CRU dataset might be questioned, other datasets still point to global warming?
No? Why not?
"Not like in bogey-science, where opposing views are heretics, underlying data is top-secret, claims are even theoretically falsifiable only after waiting at least 30 years, all anecdotal evidence in favor is significant and all anecdotal evidence to the contrary is just coincidence."
You are stupid. Most of underlying climate data AND models are open. You can easily get several open independent datasets and use different models on them.
There's no conspiracy.
Truth has never been "easy to defend" against people who are ideologically dedicated to spreading falsehoods.
When you've got an educational system that is weak in teaching science, myths are going to win out over truth more often than not.
Let's suppose for a second that you've got a population where 25% believe a certain political leader is the Antichrist. How likely do you think it is that those people are going to be willing to, much less able to, discern useful information from scientific data?
If you've got 25% of the population ill-informed at one end of the political spectrum, and 25% ill-informed at the other end of the political spectrum, and everybody else in an ever-deepening fog of consumption, what are the chances that you'll have a society that's ever going to be able to address any serious issue?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The blacksmiths were not put out of work by feel-good legislation, which is what is happening now.
Does this mean we need to nuke... our imagination?
I agree with the other poster. Educate yourself. Wikipedia is a good place to start. To show how stupid this particular claim is:
"The homosphere and heterosphere are defined by whether the atmospheric gases are well mixed. In the homosphere the chemical composition of the atmosphere does not depend on molecular weight because the gases are mixed by turbulence.[3] The homosphere includes the troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere. Above the turbopause at about 100 km (62 mi; 330,000 ft) (essentially corresponding to the mesopause), the composition varies with altitude. This is because the distance that particles can move without colliding with one another is large compared with the size of motions that cause mixing. This allows the gases to stratify by molecular weight, with the heavier ones such as oxygen and nitrogen present only near the bottom of the heterosphere. The upper part of the heterosphere is composed almost completely of hydrogen, the lightest element."
So you're not going to encounter the effect you claim at 5000m, but at 100,000m. (And at 100,000m you'll actually find the _highest_ relative partial pressure of Oxygen and CO2, the hydrogen-only part is even higher!) But don't just stop with wikipedia! Maybe it's been vandalized by Global Warming Believers or something! Go to the library and read some books on the subject! I am very sure that they will agree with that synopsis.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I'm one of those people who downloaded the 40MB foia.zip file. I've read the emails. I've read the HARRYREADME file, and I've looked at the code examples. I get the impression from reading the comments here that most people have not actually done that. Oh, they'll say "The data proves" but they haven't actually LOOKED at the data. I would have thought that slashdot readers, being the objective technically-minded people they say they are, would have wanted to tear into that code and take a look.
What you will find is really fascinating. It's not very good. Climate scientists, on the whole, aren't really very good programmers; and they are not good statisticians. Why should they be? You can't be expert in everything. So you have a situation where Michael Mann, for example, rather than use the statistical manipulation suite "R" instead used Fortran, sometimes. When you read through poor "Harry's" lament you find a kind of frustration only a programmer could feel. Missing data, bad data, programs that throw an error, don't tell you, and keep on going. Missing data sets for entire countries.
Now, the essence of science is replicability, correct? If you're going to claim 'cold fusion' you publish your data and your methods and other scientists attempt to replicate your findings, or not. But the climate gate folks have steadfastly refused to release their methods, including their computer code, and the data they did release was not the data they used in their publications. Further, they 'lost' some data altogether.
Let us turn to the most famous of the emails: "I've just used Mike's Nature trick to hide the decline." Jones says he used the word "trick" to mean a "clever thing to do." Let's look at his "cleverness." What he actually did is meld together the historical record, based on proxies like tree rings, and the more recent instrumental record. On the surface that looks like an okay thing to do, but why did he do it?
The reason is that the tree ring data showed a warming since the early 1800's, and the instruments showed a warming since 1960 or so. Meld them together and you get warming! Global Warmimng! Yay! But why take out the tree ring data? Did it not continue and show warming into the nineties along with the instruments, thus verifying what these guys were saying?
No, it did not, thus you have the problem of "divergence" which is a fancy way of saying the tree ring data wasn't cooperating and showed COOLING since 1960! Well, these Climategate guys decided it 'must be something else' so rather than include the tree ring signal, they CUT IT OFF to HIDE THE DECLINE it showed. Thus an 'inconvenient truth' was 'disappeared' in favor of not 'confusing' the issue. They were afraid that if they showed just this one tree-ring line in their spaghetti chart declining, they'd have to explain it.
And they could not. In fact, the issue of the tree rings not cooperating calls into question using tree-ring data AT ALL. If it's not an accurate 'treemometer' how can you base historical climate on it? This is but one example of dozens and dozens of manipulations done by the Hockey Team as they attempt to salvage their careers and grants. It is simply not true that 'thousands of scientists' have replicated Global Warming. They have not. They have all used the same corrupted data sets in their calculations.
The Himalayan glaciers are not disappearing. The rain foretss are not turning into grasslands. African crops are not failing. Arctic ice is normal in every respect. There were 2500 polar bears a couple of decades ago and now there are 15,000. The Antarctic has record ice. The Netherlands is not 50% below sea level and the sea levels are not rising any faster than they have since 1800. Hurricanes are not more frequent, nor are tornados. Forty years ago there were 6,000 surface-temperature measuring stations, but only 1,500 by 1990, which coincides with what global warming alarmists say was a record temperature increase. Most of the deleted stations were in colder regions. Geologists for Space
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Let's be honest, James Lovelock doesn't speak for the entire movement, whatever else you want to say about that little statement.
I suspect that you're alluding the the larger notion that climate change is merely a vehicle for the increase of "world government". I find broad international regulation to be worrisome as well, but to suggest that the entire movement is inspired by such motivations is as disrespectful to the proponents of AGW as suggesting that all skeptics are oil-company cronies.
AC: Only on slashdot... could the sentence "My hovercraft is full of eels." be moderated "+4, Insightful
No, we believe because of the evidence.
While I can believe that you personally may have looked through the evidence, the GP is right; most 'believers' haven't. They just believe because someone told them to, and most likely because all their friends do. Just as there are those like you who believe in global warming because of the evidence, there are also those who believe global warming is not a problem, also because of the evidence. This is not really a problem, it is fairly common in fields where the evidence is not strong enough in one direction or another.
Qxe4
So your refutation is to assert that his question can never be asked? Basically you are saying that there is no such thing as increased efficiency and that there is no such thing as pollution. Finally you don't even address the question of how this effects the economy except to make another assertion that anything attempted will down us 'in a sea of harm.' How is that a reasonable or useful response?
I think we can all agree that people will come up with amazingly stupid ideas to solve nonexistent/pointless problems that being said people can come up with even more amazing solutions to real world problems given the resources to try. As far as I have seen the current attempts to reduce pollution have had a dramatic effect: there are far fewer instances of acid rain throughout the world than 20 years ago, building maintenance has been eased by not having to routinely clean coal dust from every nook and cranny, and rivers and streams throughout the world are providing humanity with cleaner safer drinking water and food. Do you have any instances where 'the approach taken is so stupid and expensive that any benefits are drowned in a sea of harm?' or are you just preaching to some choir that I don't hear.
But the evidence is incredibly strong in one direction, and totally lacking in the other. There is as little question about global warming as there is about gravity.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Of course, this post will instantly get you labelled "denier", but I think you have made your case simply and well.
To be honest, the evidence for global warming is so blatantly obviously everywhere, so incredibly pervasive that it becomes hard for anyone with a scientific mind to treat those that can't see the obviousness with dislike. Just how must of us hate the flat earth society.
I mean, just think about the oceans, and the amount of heat water can store, the amount of heat it takes to melt ice, and you realize the melting ice caps and the warming oceans are more than enough proof that global warming exists.
Really, with that overwhelming visual evidence, it is obvious the earth is warming, regardless of surface air temperatures (which vary drastically and constantly based on local conditions). Not only that, but scientists must do exactly what evolution scientists and geologists are forced to do, and comb over every last detail with a fine tooth comb and make sure their are NO published discrepancies, because even the smallest data variation leads to thousands of crazed unscientific nut-jobs storming about how everything you have ever said is a lie and that you are a dirty fraudulent alarmist and nothing more.
Whether or not it is caused by people? that is easy enough, just look at any city from afar, or smell the city air compared to the country air, or go within a few miles of a factory. You quickly realize that we are polluting to no end, and even if it isn't bad for the environment it is bad for us. But that is clearly at least slightly bad for the environment. Whether or not we are causing global warming is irrelevant to whether or not we should limit pollution, it is just used as a distraction and crux for major energy companies and industries that have the entire republican party and those that worship it in their pocket.
Attacking consensus with logical and valid evidence is one thing, but to deny the blatantly obvious is what makes scientists dislike deniers. Just as they dislike evolution deniers (and we can watch evolution before our vary eyes), radio-carbon dating deniers, and so on. There was once a time when the absolutely insane were widely accepted as such, but scientific illiteracy has made this not only main-stream, but has caused a whopping 50% of people to deny well accepted science (in the case of global warming).
As XKCD says, "A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them" It troubles the lovers of science when the fate of their future is at stake over such idiocy though.
Climate science is no more a religion than is belief in the heliocentric model of our solar system.
Bugs in software are one thing, but it is undoubtable that our ice-caps are glacial deposits are shrinking, and that the oceans are getting warmer. No amount of bugs in software can make that false. And no number of calculation mistakes make the smog clouds above cities disappear.
The Hatchet
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
I'm sure many of the rest are horrified that he said it. Gives too much ammo to us nutty conspiracy theorists, after all.
Not "world government" as such, just an massive increase in government power for existing national governments. The climate change movement of course is heterogeneous, but those using it as a vehicle for increased government power are well-represented.
I disagree entirely.
Qxe4
Actually that's pretty well what it has devolved into on the denier side. Actually most bar-room arguments are probably better grounded in reality because they usually involve subjects in which the participants actually have some applicable experience and because the participants aren't lying their faces off due to ulterior motives (with the possible exception of relationship gossip).
There is no point in "debating" with someone who keeps on spouting gibberish. You waste your time and make it seem like their gibberish actually warrants being taken seriously.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
And while we're in science-land, we probably can explain how heavier-than-air molecules are supposedly floating in the upper levels of the atmosphere for extended amounts of time while preventing the oh-so-precious heat loss of our planet.
Exactly, everyone except global warming conspiracists know that heavy objects and gasses sink! Unfortunately I'm at sea level, and nitrogen is lighter than oxygen. I would help you debunk their theories except I'm obviously breathing 100% nitrogen and am about to
If I told you tomorrow that it would rain toads. Such a fierce toadstorm, you would WISH that water was coming down on you... and then tomorrow, there is nothing but sunshine -- hardly a cloud in the sky -- and I told you that my predictive model was right! It may not have been toads, but it was NOT water that was precipitated, rather sunshine! (just as I predicted) and I've got city, state, and federal governments all lobbying to force a "toad tax" and "toad insurance" upon all their citizens, every science book in the world claiming that it will rain toads on us all, and my book "Toads: The True Threat of Technology!" nets me a nobel peace prize -- would I be following the scientific method? Where did it go wrong?
Why is it so important that my model predicted an incorrect weather pattern if my model was designed to predict a weather pattern? Does "the complete opposite of what happened" count as undeniable proof in scientific predictions nowadays?
If Human-caused climate change was a 2nd grade science project, it would get an F for its results. "Predicted major hurricane season. Weakest hurricane season in decades. Perhaps my model was incorrect, but ALL the assumptions it was based on are correct! Haters gonna hate."
Believers have not followed the scientific route. They've outright contradicted it. Their models said "toads" and then there were no toads. They cannot claim "Well, climate change has made weather so unpredictable that can't even predict whether or not there will even be toadstorms!" Their models are false and they continue to extrapolate them because they are liars. They need to change their models, predict weather accurately, and start telling people what they've learned.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
No, pointing out flaws in software does not make one a "denier", but talking vaguely about how horrible the software is and how therefore its conclusions are worthless without giving concrete proof in support of this claim does.
(Mind you, having said that, I fully acknowledge that the GP post saying "You fucking deniers are morons, thanks for fucking us all over asshole." was a troll.)
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
If you have extraordinary claims to make, they require extraordinary evidence. We've presented our extraordinary evidence, where's yours?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Carl Sagan predicted Nuclear Winter as a result of the fires the Iraqis set in the first Gulf war, and then turned around a few years later with AWG; you don't have to be right and everybody else wrong, you just have to be a good self promoter.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
> Stop f*cking ranting and cheering for your political party, open your f*cking eyes and vote
> for the right person for the job, not because they are wearing red or blue this week.
Clueless twits can always be counted upon to spout this fallacy, that you should vote for the man and not the party. It is right up there with 'there is no real difference between the two parties' in being quick ways to spot someone who knows nothing of politics but has convinced themselves they not only know more but are morally superior to the people who actually invest the effort to get a clue.
In saner times there is a measure of wisdom in your advice but most times, especially since the start of the Progressive Era, there are stark differences between the two (or more) camps. In modern times there are two great philosophies contending in the public arena.
1. The name shifts every couple of years since the majority of Americans HATE the ideas so every time a critical mass realize the new name is just the same old dogfood the name changes again. And to be fair there are policy differences and some shades of grey. But essentially this camp is the Progressives, Fascists, Liberals, Social Democrats, Labor, Socialists, Communists, etc. They are all bound together by the common belief that the State, personified in a "Great Leader", should lead a dictatorship of the enlightened few over the clueless masses. Believes in the Rule of Men.
2. Conservatives and Libertarians in a grand alliance against the forces of Statism. Believes in classical liberal ideas like natural law, individual rights and the Rule of Law. More bluntly, American ideas.
These two philosophical systems are so divergent that little common ground exists for compromise. We basically have a Cold War going on with two hostile camps kept from violence only by both sides seeing the better chance at the ballot box. But this situation isn't stable, our government is growing ever more unstable and people are losing faith in it. Eventually one side must defeat the other, driving their foe from the field and (re)implementing their system of government. And since neither side is likely to simply retire from the field without a final appeal to the sword the future doesn't look good.
So no, I won't vote for the man instead of the party. To paraphrase RAH (since I don't have the book handy) it is better to vote for a dunderhead of your own party, so long as he is subject to party displine and lacks such moral flaws as to render him a menace to society, than a genius of the party opposing. For while the dunderhead won't accomplish much even a dunderhead can represent his voters wishes. Meanwhile the genius of the party opposing is likely to accomplish much, almost none of which I will like.
Democrat delenda est
There is no point in "debating" with someone who keeps on spouting gibberish. You waste your time and make it seem like their gibberish actually warrants being taken seriously.
Sounds like you're one of the fanatics on the other side. If there was such a compelling case for anthropogenic global warming and a urgent need to do something about it, then you wouldn't need to worry about the denialists. My view is that there's probably AGW, but we need better evidence for it before we restructure our society.
WTF???
The "e-mails appeared to show scientists berating skeptics in sometimes intensely personal attacks, discussing ways to shield their data from public records laws, and discussing ways to keep skeptics' research out of peer-reviewed journals," but the committee concluded that East Anglia researcher Phil Jones was not part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that weakens the case for global warming.
Hiding data and trying to keep skeptics work OUT of the peer review process is NOT part of a conspiracy??? B&S. Freaking newspeak.
I am ALL for development of alternative and much cleaner and more decentralized energy sources, and I have put my money where my mouth is there, but this stuff is just slap wrong on a lot of levels. It's tainted. Throw it out, start from scratch, wide open this time, NO AGENDA one way or the other, ya know, real science this time, and take that &&(*($@#?6%ing wall street trillion buck bailout #4 "carbon tax and cap and trade" complete conjob out of the picture right now, off the table. NO, that's way too much money to avoid corruption, and it is completely unneeded and just a huge skim that would take away cash that could be put into REAL research and development and *deployment*. We don't need any more freaking derivatives. We need deployed cleaner energy production units. Deployment as in get that stuff out there installed and working, stop waiting for the perfect mr. fusion device to show up before this happens, we can use all the various better alternative energy sources we have now,. and then just start making it better from that point. Stop pharting around. Mass scale manufacturing to get the dang prices down.
And no, we DON'T need a world government because of "climate change", take that horse hockey watermelon wet dream off the table right now as well.
And climate change is infinitely more complicated than "smoking is bad for your health," while having much more money involved.
Seems to me then, that in the face of that obstacle, you really need to have solid evidence, right?
So, you are saying there is a conspiracy to cover up evidence refuting global warming? Is that what you are claiming?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
No, we believe because of the evidence. You believe despite all evidence.
Right. More empty words. The problem here is that you "believe". I'm not willing to gamble the future of the world on a belief.
Belief based on evidence is sanity. Belief based on fantasy is insanity. You ARE gambling the future of the planet on a belief, and an insane one to boot. What we propose will help the planet to continue to sustain us, at the same time it creates millions of new jobs. Your proposal is to let corporate polluters continue to put their costs onto us and future generations, your plan is to bend over further and spread wider for your corporate masters. Excuse me if I don't think that's a very good idea.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
No UK government investigation has found any evidence of any wrongdoing for anything in at least the last ten years - even when the previous six weeks have been wall-to-wall damning evidence reported in every UK newspaper, TV channel and website regardless of its usual political stance.
But the real question is, did our MPs manage to expense the costs of this investigation? Wouldn't want them to miss out on an opportunity to line their pockets while whitewashing the damning evidence against their pet researchers and rubber stamping their highly questionable results. And I say this as one who believes global warming is happening, and is very likely a direct result of human activity and CO2 emissions. That doesn't change the fact that their behaviour was reprehensible, their models flawed, their data still missing and no longer verifiable (it's hard to verify data that has been deleted wholesale), and that as such it should not be the basis for any public policy.
But why let anything as inconvenient as facts get in the way of a juicy new (carbon) tax?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
That CO2 is going to cause a global catastrophe? Is that your extraordinary claim? Because I haven't seen the extraordinary evidence.
If your claim is that CO2 affects the global temperature, I'm not going to disagree with you. If your claim is that it's the most significant segment in the change of temperature over the last decade, I'm going to say, "the evidence for that is extremely weak." If you say, "global warming is a disaster and we must act now to stop it!" I'm going to say you're wrong.
Now that I think I've made my position clear, I will tell you my evidence for this is mainly in the IPCC report. It's a good summary of the science of global warming (I am referring to WGI, not WGII). There just isn't anything in there that's very scary.
If you want to get a more accessible presentation of a 'denier' view on global warming, here is a good piece.
I especially like the approach John Christy takes. He does what I would do if I had the time, he does his own experiments. He saw that the temperatures based on ground based thermometers had potential weaknesses, so he went out and got a separate data source (satellites). He wanted to understand climate models, so he built his own. I would do that if I had time. His conclusion in the paper is, "fundamental knowledge is meagre here, and our own research indicates that alarming changes in the key observations are not occurring."
That is basically my position as well, that I have seen no evidence that leads me to believe a climate catastrophe is about to happen.
Qxe4
http://climateaudit.org/2010/03/31/tricking-the-committee/
McIntyre is the only voice of reason as per usual
Great, except that you need to classify carbon as "pollution" for your argument to make sense. And carbon is "pollution" only if it significantly contributes to global warming, so your argument has to assume its conclusion!
Limiting carbon emissions is expensive - that's why there is a legitimate argument about how much human contribution to emissions matters and whether incurring those costs now is the best way to respond to the risks of global warming in the future.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
I say bullshit! There's evidence that Mars is also warming. No man made CO2 there-- so what does that say?
Absolutely nothing.
It says Heightened-Solar-Activity.
Solar activity is already taken into account. How stupid do you think scientists are?
In the 70s the scientists all said we were going to be freezing our asses off at this point in time.
They weren't, thats pretty much a modern myth.
I don't think anyone who thinks that global warming is real is against discussing rationally what should be done, if anything at all, about it. Personally, cutting back on energy use saves me money, so I'm all for research on high efficiency cars, lights, motors, etc...
Anarchists never rule
The reason CO2 traps heat is because it can absorb infrared radiation because of the way the bonds in the molecule vibrate. Not all molecules absorb IR, and some absorb it better than others. When that molecule absorbs the energy it moves more quickly (energy must be conserved - it gains kinetic energy) and is thus "hotter".
The bulk of the re-radiated IR from the earth's surface is lost to space (and is very variable depending on local conditions - water absorbs IR too, which is why cloudy nights are warmer and why the desert is so cold at night with very little water in the atmosphere to help trap the heat). As the global CO2 and other GHGs concentrations increase, more IR will be trapped. It's basic science. Whether this is a human phenomenon is what is under debate. Looking back over the past 650,000 years though, the global CO2 concentration has never been this high - the result is that the heat trapped due to this effect is going to be higher. Again, whether this is an issue for the human race is under debate.
I think you are getting confused about the way the atmosphere is composed. If you fill a balloon with a gas that has a molecular weight above the average for "air" (which is really a mixture, but we'll assume the MW of nitrogen, which makes up nearly 80% of it) so over 28, then the balloon will sink. If that balloon is popped, however, while a lot of the gas will stay near the ground, diffusion will ensure that it spreads out to fill all available space from areas of high to low concentration. Even the heavier atoms will do this. It's not just gravity at work - there are thermal gradients, winds, concentration gradients and other factors all involved in stirring up the atmosphere.
You can test this at home. Put some food that smells in the oven and wait upstairs while it cooks. If you can smell it then the molecules that make that smell have somehow miraculously overcome the power of gravity and made it all the way upstairs to your nose. Many molecules that smell are heavier than air, especially in foods and perfumes.
In "Science-land" the composition of the atmosphere and the way gasses fill it is well understood. I suggest you go read up on it.
Not all opposing views are branded as heresy - but the bulk of the deniers really have no understanding of what is going on (or assume that the atmosphere is made up the way you described in your post). Science is all about testing the hypotheses that we create to refine them and get closer and closer to the truth. It's not about giving the time of day to anyone who *thinks* they understand the science or the scientific process.
The politics of the matter are irrevocably intertwined. If I was an advocate for global warming, I wouldn't want to point out any conflict of interest on the part of the folks who fund most of the AGW research.
If you can find an AGW proponent that has acknowledged the potential of ulterior motives of politicians promoting AGW, then perhaps I misspoke.
However, given that:
1) You correctly identified my political alignment as right wing though I made no direct statement of the science.
and
2) You used the political, purposely inflammatory, non-scientific term 'denialism'
Perhaps the science and politics are no longer separable, eh? Maybe you'd be best off coming to terms with that.
In the single sentence
you've revealed a number of unflattering things about the emotional and intellectual level you operate on.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
You are missing the point - they are of course not legitimate expenses, but the way the system was set up, it did not matter.
There is nothing to be done - it was all legal (slimy and dishonest, but legal). The rules have been changed to prevent this, but you can't prosecute someone for something they did before the laws and the rules had changed.
It would seem prudent first to ask whether we have any data to suggest there is much CO2 in the stratosphere. If we do have measurements to show it is there, why deny this observation simply because you are not yet aware of the mechanism?
Then maybe relevant data (such as historical trends) could shed some light on methodologies for such transfer.
Suggesting that it must be some sort of anti-gravitation mechanism we could harness for transportation seems a bit premature.
If you really are interested in researching this (which... ahem... your tone belies), you could start with these sites:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v316/n6030/abs/316708a0.html
http://www.scienceonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/274/5291/1340
Any time an industrial process produces waste, there is something being paid for as a raw material, whose processing is also being paid for, whose storage is again paid for, but which then produces nothing that returns anything for that investment. There is always going to be some waste, but some of that waste will actually be stuff intended for the primary product of that process, lost through (inevitable) inefficiencies. Since nobody is going to claim any industrial process is at peak efficiency, it is safe to conclude a better yield (and therefore less waste at LESS expense) is going to be possible. Other elements of that waste may be usable by other industries - the proverbial turning muck into brass. Again, this reduces pollution AND reduces expense.
The specific example - carbon emissions - is tougher, but I think it reasonable to say that power stations (a big source of carbon dioxide) and car engines (another big source of carbon dioxide) are highly inefficient at converting fuel into energy. Fuel is expensive (and will get ever more so, as no new uranium deposits are being found for nuke power and we're within 5 years of peak oil by some estimates). Titanium is theoretically as extractable from ore as aluminium (although nobody has developed a process that good yet). Titanium cars would need far less energy to reach or maintain a given speed than a car built out of a lump of iron. This is probably true for trucks and mass transit vehicles too. Blended-wing aircraft should also need less fuel than a traditional wing-and-cylinder body, so civilian aircraft (another big fuel consumer) could also be improved.
As for carbon being pollution, high CO2 levels reduce how efficient vegetation can photosynthesize (above a certain level which is really not that high). Since vegetation is a major part of the part of the carbon cycle that removes CO2, breaking that part of the carbon cycle is probably a Bad Idea. Carbon dioxide doesn't contribute nearly as much as sulpher dioxide to global warming, but it unquestionably contributes a fair bit. (I remember having this debate with my father, one of the pioneers in inorganic biochemistry - now called environmental chemistry - back in the 1970s, when he first introduced me to the science of Global Warming. Yes, the subject has been around for a while.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Oddly enough there is exactly that in South Australia - it's called Goyder's Line.
Seems to me then, that in the face of that obstacle, you really need to have solid evidence, right?
I think you missed the point.
In the face of solid evidence, the tobacco industry created the Tobacco Industry Research Committee in 1954 (which was later renamed the Council for Tobacco Research) and the Tobacco Institute in 1958. The tobacco companies pumped millions of dollars into research reports and PR campaigns claiming that tobacco was safe and healthy. The two shill organizations didn't close their doors until they were sued out of existince in 1998/99.
Global warming research has hit the same kind of roadblock. In the face of general consensus, companies/industry groups created think tanks and research institutes, then pumped millions of dollars into reports showing that global warming either isn't happening or isn't a problem.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
We've burnt a lot of coal and oil, and those combustion products did not just vanish by magic but hang around like smoking inside a car with the windows up. In the 1970s this was shown to have an effect on climate.
All the doubts raised by paid PR and various crackpots cannot change that.
Dude, people routinely climb mountains with heights in the 5000-6000m range with no supplemental oxygen at all. People have even climbed Everest, at 8848m, without supplemental oxygen. You're just flat out wrong.
just ate the hens, chickens and good lord...the FOX is moving on to the Goose!!
-gc
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
"you need to classify carbon as "pollution" for your argument to make sense. And carbon is "pollution" only if it significantly contributes to global warming, so your argument has to assume its conclusion!"
Here let me free you from that infinite loop - RF = 5.35*ln(c2/c1) - Fourier 1824.
I'm assuming you call yourself a skeptic so let me give you a skeptical analysis of your argument. It's assuming every physicist since Fourier has been wrong about the properties of CO2, it's also denying some basic findings of modern science such a the QM of photon absorbtion and the science behind spectral analyis.
In otherwords accepting your infinite loop argument leads to the same sort of irrational conclusions as accepting creationist "science" does. Some examples; everything we know about the composition of the cosmos via spectral analysis is wrong; radiation such as the suns rays don't cause atoms to jiggle (heat); atoms do not spontaneously lose energy by emmitting photons. There are many more implications of refusing to acknowledge the well known properties of CO2 but I'm sure a genuine skeptic will get the idea. You are a genuine skeptic, right?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Exactly right. I'm invoking Godwin's Law on this thread, but here goes; historians gave up "debating" Holocaust Deniers about the holocaust years ago because they realised the futility of it. By showing up to the debate they gave a small amount of credibility to the deniers. Even if they won the debate, they still lost.
We can prove because of the evidence, they believe despite the evidence.
Probably just a poor choice of words, not bashing you for it. But belief by definition does not require evidence, in fact belief is expected to be maintained in the fact of contradictory evidence.
Nitpic aside, I agree with your post.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Global warming is to be expected, but I can't honestely say that there is unquestionable visual evidence of it, at least around where I live. Rain cycles didn't show any measurable change (nothing bigger than the usual changes), sea level at the nearest coasts are within historical values, wind patterns didn't change. If it wasn't for highter temperatures, there would be no local evidence at all, and if global warming wasn't expected, it would be quite easy to explain that by some local phenomena.
That said, there is lots of evidence from far away, mainly from polar regions (I live at the tropics). Also, the place you live can be on a completely different situation, as all that is local. Anyway, global measurements of temperature and its proxies are very important, since it isn't easy to accept the evidence you point as definitive.
On a different topic, the software in question had almost no relation to the evidences of global warming. Neither did the "hokey-stick" graph, but it is easier to convince people that your measurements are real when they fit your model (go figure). The "hokey-stick" was evidence of antropogenic warming, but even then, a weak one.
Rethinking email
Wait, what? .125C over the last century is plainly visible? No, no I don't think so.
Before you blast me I want you to research this topic. I promise it won't take long.
You brought up warming oceans. How many ocean temperature sensors were there in 1960 and where were they located? How many oceanic temperature sensors are there today and where are they?
Come back when you have the answers.
No.
Your extraordinary claim is that everyone that is an expert on the subject is wrong.
That's a pretty big claim to make and needs something to back it up.
This is what we call a Scot's Verdict. It's not that the Commons absolved them of wrong doing. It's just "Not proven."
"The result is the modern perception that the 'not proven' verdict is an acquittal used when the judge or jury does not have enough evidence to convict but is not sufficiently convinced of the defendant's innocence to bring in a "not guilty" verdict. Essentially, the judge or jury is unconvinced that the suspect is innocent, but has insufficient evidence to the contrary."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_proven
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
A House committee has found that excessive Federal spending is NOT the cause of the huge national debt.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I can't decide if you are a troll or just incredibly naive and clueless about the world, because there are certainly 'skeptics' who are experts in the field of climatology. I referenced two of them in my post, one of them was a lead author of the IPCC report, and the other a contributor. Apparently 'lack of reading comprehension' goes along with being a troll.
Qxe4
Extremely well said!
My girlfriend (yes, I have one, I'm in my forties, it's allowed :) ) just pointed out to me that much of the debate regarding release of data about global warming is similar to a lot of the arguments regarding release of data from nations that are suffering potential pandemic diseases; those nations (Indonesia, for one) believe that other nations can use that data to their advantage and to the detriment of the nations undergoing the problems. Those people saying that have a point. But!
While the analogy isn't perfect, it does point out one thing; that any data about any phenomenon that can have a global impact should ALWAYS be completely open to all; otherwise it's self-defeating for the ones withholding the data. Eventually any problem that can affect everyone on the planet, affects everyone on this planet. Nobody can know if there might not be a critical piece of data somewhere that will help in providing a solution.
It's unfortunate that in the global climate debate, it's the western nations who seem to be leading the charge; and the western nations who are also just as well known for hoarding data in other fields - and particularly in the medical field - that gives their corporations an advantage.
Perhaps - and this is a long thought - perhaps it's not governments, nor religions, who should be feared in that respect; but international corporations, who hold no allegiances except that of profit. It's hardly a new thought, but I bring it forth here again...
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I suggest finding out what they are really saying instead of just imagining that they agree with your view that by some magic humans have had not effect on earth.
It's easy - cause and effect. The only argument at this time is about the details of the effect. I think you'll find that is what those experts you think agree with you are talking about instead of pretending that it's a different cause.
I never said that humans have not had an effect on the earth. You have no reading comprehension, or at very least have shown no desire to use it.
Qxe4
There is a real scientific problem with your skeptics dismissal.
The properties of Co2 are not in question here and never were. The question is whether or not the change in the amounts of Co2 is large enough on scale to have the claimed effect outside of other observations because the raw physics equation doesn't side with observations. Co2 is a very small part of the atmosphere and the amount that is supposed to be a problem something like .0005 of the total atmosphere. And to add to that, there are plenty of other green house gases that display properties similar to Co2 in much larger quantities which are more effected by natural events then man made events. There are many outside factors that contribute to the problem like submarine volcanic activities, shifts in oceanic currents along with the decadal oscillation events responsible for El Mino and so on. That's why there is a complex climate model and not a climate math problem that any high school child could figure out.
I mean seriously, if it was as simply as Co2 has X heat retention value when exposed to Y amounts of heat then the entire proof would be X+1*y. And for every one in addition to X, simply measure the temp and see if it's accurate. Well, it's not that simple and to date, no attempts to make it that simple have been accurate.
What you are doing is essentially saying Wool is warm, I see ten sheep with wool, I am going to be warm and criticizing anyone who doubts you. Your league of followers may believe that you will eventually shear the sheep and make fabric from the wool that you will eventually make into some warm clothing and wear, but I don't have to believe you will, the guy you responded doesn't have top believe you will, actually, no one who can critically think should believe you will until we see you wearing the wool sweater and socks. SO if Co2 is actually the problem, more specifically, man made Co2, then show us the damn wool socks and sweater already. Don't sit there and cry because the properties of Co2 are such or that someone questions the claim. `All that does is show how little about the situation you actually do know. And when I say situation, I mean both global warming as well as the skeptics.
Not really. I've actually tried to look at some of the arguments used against AGW, and most of it really is gibberish. Plausible sounding gibberish to a layman, but gibberish just the same. A large portion of the official scientific criticism of AGW has come from industry-sponsored research groups who come up with ahem, very questionable approaches. The unofficial criticism is pretty well Alice in Wonderland reality-disconnect territory.
I've been following this with increasing attention for 20 years. 20 years ago, I was a skeptic. These days, while there is still room for improvement in the science and the models, the evidence supporting AGW is pretty overwhelming. But most of the criticism of AGW in the last 10 years has been very reminiscent of two other scientific fiascos, the attempts by the tobacco industry to discredit research linking their product with cancer and other serious health issues, and the efforts by intelligent design proponents to stir up "controversy" over evolution. Like evolution, AGW can certainly stand some improvement, but its hard to conduct worthwhile research that advances the field when you spend your time fighting the lies and PR of moneyed interests who are dedicating substantial resources to discredit all the work (whether bad or good) that you've done.
Just as with evolution, there's a large portion of the population willing to accept "theories" opposing AGW even when they are trivially demonstrable as false or invalid, because those people are going to grab at any straws that allow them to avoid re-evaluating fundamental tenets of their world view. Which is pretty standard for people, they'll resist change until something smacks them in the face with a 2x4. The big problem though is that this 2x4 is going to smack everyone around, not just the ones with their head in the sand.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Phoenix321 just gave me the answer: to have no fucking clue whatsoever about stats and how scientists use them.
So how do you explain that when you remove the effect of my simplistic calculation from the observed record the warming trend dissapears? Science is about the best explaination, from what I can tell you don't have an explaination. Scientists have spent decades looking for alternative forcings and have come up empty handed.
Hint: El-nino is not a forcing it's large scale turbulance.Your rant about El-nino is similar to saying the convection currents are what is causing the water to warm when I put a pot on the stove but that's what you get when you take creationist style arguments to their logical conclusion.
RF = 5.35*ln(C2/C1), or 3.71 W/M^2 for a doubling of CO2.
T = (3/3.71)*5.35*ln(387.5/280) = 1.41 degC since pre industrial times. Almost half of which we have not seen yet due to the massive thermal inertia of the oceans. If we burry our heads in the sand it will only take another 40yrs to turn 387.5 into 480, I will leave the calculation of that temprature increase as an exercise for you.
Sure without looking at the facts it's possible to say that the increase could be masked by -ve feedbacks but basic physics says the 1.4DegC MUST be accounted for. If you actually do look at the feedbacks and compare them to gelogic records you will find it's much more likey fedbacks will ADD to the warming rather than mask it. You can expect to observe this in the N Hemisphere over the next decade or so since the melting of the Artic sea ice is a large +ve feedback that is occuring well before the "alarmists" predicted it would. The only way I can see of avoiding it would be to hope China and India vastly increase (and sustain) their output of smog so that the -ve forcing of the smog will mask the increase from CO2.
Some things really are quite simple to grasp when you take the time to understand them. AGW on a global scale is as simple as looking at the radiation striking the Earth and comparing it to what is re-radiated back out into space, when these are not in equiblirium due to increasing GHG absorbing IR radiation then the planet will heat up. When there is less radiation striking the Earth due to Milankovich cycles the Earth will cool down.
The only advise I can give people like you is to stop being a usefull idiot for vested interests and crack open a text book on the subject.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Well said, thanks. I have more to add.
"There is only one race, and that's the human race."
Edward James Olmos, aka Commander Adama of the Battlestar Galactica
Exactly. This is not a game. It's not a race to see who gets first place. It's a struggle for survival. Right now, it's OUR struggle to survive, the whole human species, against a universe that doesn't have an opinion, doesn't have a bias, that will just kill you if frak up, and will eventually kill you anyway. (you think the universe has a bias? ask it not to kill you the next time you do something stupid. Try it. Won't see you later. )
The universe doesn't have an "opinion" or a bias or any of that superstitious quackery. Quit thinking that it does. That sort of thinking gets you killed. (with apologies to Larry Niven wrt Louis Wu, hardly new but certainly deserves to be said again. Again. Again. )
You think we're special? Next time you are outdoors, on a clear night, look up at the multitude of stars, and the distances between them. Think then on how those stars are only a tiny part of many more much larger communitities of stars. Then tell me just how special we are.
What we have here might not be the only intelligence in the universe - if we can call ourselves that (hubris, indeed) but what we have is uniquely ours. Let's not fuck it up.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Yes, just keep repeating and repeating and repeating these lies until they become true. That's how propaganda works.
Clever signature text goes here.
Just sayin', but nobody ever claimed that CO2 was the only pollutant responsible. There's things like methane, too, and most of that will be released due to a small raise in temperature.
But you know what? There are way to many sites on the internet already, and I am feeling somewhat XKCDish with the comment "I'll be right in bed; there's someone _wrong_ on the internet!"
No, he has been treating dishonest denialists as dishonest denialists.
This is of course nonsense. Pure wishful speculation.
Clever signature text goes here.
And just about all of them are not even climate scientists, and they have ties to right-wing think tanks like the Heartland Institute. Fail.
Clever signature text goes here.
No data was hidden. No scientific integrity was compromised. No peer-review was stifled. At worst, all they did was to decide not to put up with the same old bullshit from a specific group of denialists anymore. This group had a history of FUD, lies, flooding and Denial of Service attacks.
Clever signature text goes here.
You are very confused, and mixing science and politics. The fact of AGW is what the denialists are denying. You are talking about disagreements over policy based on the fact of AGW, but that has got nothing to do with the science.
Clever signature text goes here.
And they were commonly called coffin nails and smart people knew to stay away from them.
Their they're doing there hair.
Here's a very simple physics argument for AGW.
Imagine a sphere the size of the earth at the earth's distance from the sun with the earth's albedo (average reflectance). What will the surface temperature be due to solar radiation? Do the maths and you get a temperature about 33C lower than that we observe on the earth's surface today. In other words, the earth's atmosphere acts as a blanket trapping heat and raising the temperature by about 33C: the greenhouse effect.
What parts of the atmosphere are responsible for this 33C increase? By far the most important is water. As a gas and in clouds, it is responsible for up to about 90% of the effect. The remaining warming is caused by the so-called greenhouse gasses: CO2, Methane, O3, NO, etc.
If you examine the absorption spectra of these gasses and weight by atmospheric concentration, you'll find about 40% is due to CO2. So 40% of 10% of 33C is around 1C of warming due to atmospheric CO2. Atmospheric CO2 has gone up by roughly 40% since the industrial revolution, so we would expect about a 0.5C rise in global temperatures due to human CO2 output. We know that the observed CO2 increase is due to fossil fuel burning thanks to the radioisotope ratios we can see in the atmosphere today.
Of course that's a very, very crude back-of-the-napkin calculation, but the result is approximately in line with the IPCC reports.
Here's another version of the same calculation (but a bit more complex), with full references and some maths you can download and try out yourself:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing
This suggests that AGW is a plausible explanation for the temperature and atmospheric changes we are observing. But is it correct?
If human CO2 output is not responsible for the observed temperature rise, we need to find two things: a strong cooling effect to counter the increase that we know rising CO2 must be causing, and a second strong warming effect to be behind the observed temperature rise. This sounds unlikely (and as yet no one has been able to make a convincing case for what these alternatives might be in 40+ years of research), therefore it is probable that the temperature increases we are seeing are largely caused by fossil fuel use.
(I think I posted this before, but I can't find it in my comment search history now, ah well)
IF this was true, then we would not need to "worry about the denialists" about the cause of AIDS, where humans came from, (or, from the past) whether you should have lead in your gas, the effects of smoking, and a host of other issues.
There are issues where there is a hardened set of people that believe something contrary to the scientific evidence and will take pretty much any path to defeating the evidence, including quoting out of context, misrepresenting the data, pointing out any scientific discussion or disagreement as catastrophic to the science, and basically being disruptive. Climate change is one of those issues; to the majority of scientists in the area, the evidence seems overwhelming, but people outside have neither the knowledge or interest to get into the technical details, so they go with what people that they generally agree with tell them.
I am more familiar with the creation / evolution debates. Prominent people are constantly being attacked by dishonest people. They tend to become either more strident or clam up on themselves.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
Truth should be easy to defend.
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” -- Mark Twain (or Terry Pratchett :-)
Scientific truth (actually a strongly supported scientific conclusion in this case) is not easy to defend. Science is hard and messy. And it's really hard to defend when the other side has no scruples.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
Limiting carbon emissions is expensive - that's why there is a legitimate argument about how much human contribution to emissions matters
"It would be expensive" is not a valid argument against a scientific theory.
IF this was true, then we would not need to "worry about the denialists" about the cause of AIDS, where humans came from, (or, from the past) whether you should have lead in your gas, the effects of smoking, and a host of other issues.
And indeed we don't need to worry about the denialists in those cases. Ultimately, the merit of the science above wins out. For example, there have been several cases in the US where elected school boards have inserted creationist or intelligent design ideas into the curriculum. So far, they've been voted out of office every time that has occurred (I actually looked at the post-mortem outcome, a creationist school board has a life span of exactly one term). You can't prevent people from believing any silly thing that they want to believe or from them slipping into power on occasion. But democratic society will correct for grossly wrong beliefs.
The problem with climatology is that it isn't that definitive. Sure, I've heard the arguments for why it's supposed to be as solid as say evolution. There's two really obvious rebuttals to that. First, climatology depends heavily on opaque analysis of huge data sets with many subtle problems and other issues. That means, for example, that you can't demonstrate the effects of AGW, for example, in the same way that a set of fossils can demonstrate the evolution of the horse. It is far less accessible to the public and even to knowledgeable outsiders. I think that is a crucial flaw in current climatology. It leads to the sort of criticism of statistical and aggregation methods that is seen now. To be blunt, how you account for various things, like urban heat islands or the correlation of many observations made over different times and different places, has too much effect on the result.
Second, climate is very complex to model and there isn't a track record of successful predictions by the models. We're basically asked to believe predictions that can run out centuries when the models in question have only been worked on for a couple of decades.
In sum, while climatology has a lot of technical details, it needs to go beyond them in order to build a convincing case for AGW.
Hey, let him have his nonsense. In fact, encourage him to repeat that CO2 can't possibly be up that high, maybe other morons will start repeating it.
As we've actually measured plenty of CO2 up there, he'll look like the idiot he is. I mean, this isn't some debatable fact. We sent balloons and planes up that high, they measure CO2. Period.
In fact, now that I think of it, I'm suspecting this is some sort of crazy awesome troll trying to get a new meme into the denyosphere that there is no CO2 above ground level, making them look like total idiots. And now I've gone and ruined it. Let me try to fix.
To repeat: THERE IS NO CO2 ABOVE GROUND LEVEL BECAUSE CO2 IS HEAVIER THAN OXYGEN. TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS THE TRUTH ABOUT BOGUS CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
What a load of crap. A committee of politicians whitewashes the climate fanatics at East Anglia? My ass! You'd have to believe that anything a bunch of politicians say is reliable, true and believable. Given the odiousness of politicians across the world, and especially the idiots in Britain who are quickly turning the island into a Totalitarian Politically Correct prison, how could any democrat and intelligent thinker accept their views and opinions. Give me a break!
Why would I want to explain something that isn't completely reflective to the current discussion? In case you missed the point I made in my post, there are too many outside factors involve for your simplistic calculation to be accurate within the entire increase of Co2-CH4-H2O and other GHGs to coincide accurately with he increases in temperature. No one is denying that there is a green house effect, they are denying that man has significantly altered it. This is why the climate models are way more complex then simply taking the amount of radiation in and multiplying it with the amount of increased Green house gasses. Removing your calculation does nothing to the question, it's only accurate in controlled environments without positive or negative feed backs.
Scientist have also spent centuries looking for what causes gravity and the best we have is a couple of theories that can't be proven. We know more about how to use gravity, more about how to us items within gravity, and more about taking advantage of gravity then we do about it's causes or creation. If global warming was really as simply as a dumbed down equation, then there would be no debate or skeptics right now.
My rant about El Nino was little more then an example of a complication to your calculation. What you cannot tell us is how much of an effect el nino has on your calculations or if the effect has increased or decreased significantly over the same time span. In other words, the science of global warming is much more complex then that.
So your admiting that your calculations are accurate with the observed changes in temperature? You blame it on the oceans being a huge heat sink and want to question my claim that it's much to complex to use a simple equation like Fourier. Hmm.. I've had AGW discussions with you in the past, but never have you agreed with my premise while attempting to deny it. Is this some strange new debating tactic you are practicing?
Again, agreeing with me while disagreeing. Let me ask you a few questions, how do you know the -ve feed backs aren't sub-settling and creating positive feedback compared
I liked the XKCD reference. Today's is very fitting as I had to field a complaint over someone claiming all their programs and shortcuts were gone. Turns out they liked a co workers desktop wallpaper and instead of grabbing the image and setting it as theirs, they decided to log into the domain as the other user. But what can you do when the employees are relatives of the owner.
Anyways, I wasn't just talking about green house gases. I was speaking of the problems with heat from the middle of the earth in the form of volcanic activity, ocean currents that change bringing warmer or colder water to areas not typically accustomed to it and so on. There are a range of outside forces having an effect on the observations behind global warming that will not allow a simple Fourier equation to explain it all.
chrb, I bow thrice in thy honored direction, Osensei!
Lacking mod points, this is the best I can do!
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Your comments rating of troll is accurate, and here is why:
*note: following calculations are in calories per gram degrees celsius.
Melting ice is no small issue, neither are warming oceans. We know that the heat capacity of water is 1 and the heat capacity of ice is .5. We know that to melt 1 cubic centimeter or ice it takes 50 calories of heat, and we know it takes 10 Calories of heat to raise the temperature of 1 cubic cm of water 1 degree Celsius. and it takes .5 Calories of heat to warm 1 cubic cm of ice 1 degree C. So if the ice caps contain millions of metric tons of ice that is below 0 C, and it is not in an equilibrium of forming at the same speed that it is melting, then we can see that the total heat content of the earth in increasing, all other things held constant. Now consider the oceans, which cover the majority of the earths surface, and are very deep in places, constituting a massive possible store of heat, several orders of magnitude higher than Surface temps, air temp, and the ice caps combined.
So based on the fact that we know definitively that the oceans are warming, but quite a bit, and that the melting of the ice-caps also displays a gratuitous increase in total heat of the earth. While the air temps are fairly static, they carry very little heat compared to the other major mechanisms, and very difficult to accurately measure, and give us practically no insight whatsoever into the temperatures of our planet.
You attack what i say blatantly using the fallacy reducto ad absurdum, reducing logical constructions to absurdity by eliminating all of the important facets, as so many creationists, flat earthers, evolution deniers and republicans do. Any lover of science would do no such thing.
I talk about general concepts and things, you reduce and twist what is said to absurdium. Your points are neither here nor there, and you are broken. over 99% of the scientific community is in concensus over global warming, whereas polling figures from the big polling organizations deny it. You call me crazy and lofty while you ignore everything around you. Open your eyes.
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=377186311375
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=377231836375
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=377250136375
I was modded insightful because I displayed insight. You were modded troll because when you ignore everything I say and then insult me based on 5 or 6 buzzwords picked out of my post, you are doing justice to every other troll out there. Scientific reasoning says something important, rhetoric and foolishness is why people believe as you do. As Plato once said "Rhetoric is the art of making the lesser argument seem the greater" and you have failed at accomplishing such a disgraceful task.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
Edit: I for got to state the specific heat capacity of air in calories per gram is about .1-.2, and considering the low density of air compared to water and ice, it can clearly be seen that the amount of heat stored in the oceans and ice caps is many thousands of times greater, if not hundreds of thousands of times greater than the heat stored in the atmosphere. I am no climatologist, but I know a bit about thermodynamics, and you that calls me the glan beck of the green movement, I abhor you.
Also, for the record, I am not that 'green'. I am an engineer. I believe in efficiency, facts, logic, and truth. I chase these as far as the evidence takes me, regardless of political party. Glen Beck doesn't even know the most basic of logical principles, and if he does then he is manipulating his followers.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
Why was that scored as flamebait?
What a beautifull spin job.
Context or no context, every word I quoted came from your longwinded post.
You call my points neither here nor there, re-read your first one. Its a mess of points going in all sorts of directions.
99%... another statistic that is completely pulled from out of your ass.
You are a nice weaver of words, but that is it.
Ice melts, its what it does. And then it forms again.
Your whole melting ice theory is currently falling appart in current news.
You are back to square one. With 99% of the other beleivers.