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Don't Worry About Global Warming, Say 16 Scientists in the WSJ
An anonymous reader writes "According to an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, there's 'no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy'. From the article: 'The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2. The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle.'"
No action will be taken anyway.
Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.
Actually that's two sentences. The first is the one I would choose as the thesis, and the second one to back it up. I don't know if there is much evidence they are wrong on that point.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
say 16 Doctors*,
"you're just going to die anyways."
*not necessarily medical doctors"
I like microcars
The fact that water is not a pollutant. It's a colorless and odorless liquid, consumed and expelled in high volumes by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's lifecycle.
And therefore we should disable all flood and tsunami advanced warning systems.
You will die without it. You will also suffer greatly if you have too much of it. Urine is natural. Do you want to swim in it? Poop is natural. Do you want to live in it?
Lots of things are natural, the concentrations are what matter. I don't need to read the flaming article if the summary is going to quote such moronic and specious reasoning.
It's like the wags who try to get people worked up with some flippant story about Dihydrogen Monoxide being a toxin, only to reveal it's water. Well, la-de-dah, but I happen to live somewhere we spent quite a few millions to stop flooding, so you know what? I'm going to regulate the stuff and be happy with interrupting that part of the natural process.
Think about how much a can of fuel weighs. Think how many of those you put into your car in a year. Think how many cars are out there. How many trucks delivering food. All that weight, all that fuel goes into the air and converts oxygen into CO2 as it goes. That is a lot of mass of CO2 that is being added to the air that was not 100 years.
We know stuff we dump in the environment comes back to us. Lead, Ozone, Mercury, these are chemicals we have dumped into the air in the past and found they were affecting us. So we know our outputs can affect the global condition.
This reads, unfortunately, like a WSJ op-ed, with lots of polemic, and relatively little science. Have the 16 scientists in question written up a more sober whitepaper that I could read? I'd actually be interested in reading their analysis, if there were a version with more data and less rhetoric about "those promoting alarm", drumbeats, and CO2 being colorless.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Which is the more credible source for scientific analysis: reports written in terms of physics, and published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal; or an opinion piece written in terms of politics and economics, and published in the house organ of the financial-commodities-trading industry?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
To add my single data point.... I lived in my area my whole life.... the whole winter it was unseasonably warm except for maybe 7 or so days. We're talking late April/October temperatures. One of the days it was cold, it snowed on Halloween, and we never used to get snow before New Years/Christmas. Freakish.
It used to be a mild area with no significant weather of any type. And the last 5 years was so much the opposite. Previous two winters we got so much more snow dumped on us than usual (this year almost nothing), every week more and more of it. High winds at certain times of the year. Blistering summers where the grass is parched now.
I know I'm a single data point in a short amount of time, but compared to what it was like growing up, it feels like a real change has been taking place.
The same guy who owns the WSJ owns Fox News.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
I wonder why they signed it? They aren't subject matter experts.
CO2 levels in the atmosphere are the highest for 450,000 years. There's been a steep rise since the 1950s, from 315ppm to 370ppm (parts per million). And, in case the WSJ has forgotten, we can't breathe CO2. Too little and too much oxygen will kill us. Too much CO2 would eventually lead to too little oxygen, among other things.
Oh well, maybe we'll start burning fossil fuels to create enough energy to split off oxygen from water and sell it in supermarkets, resulting in even less oxygen available. Oh, and we need oxygen to burn fossil fuels, so eventually we all lose...
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
Edward David
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_E._David_Jr.
Roger Cohen
http://www.durangobill.com/RogerCohen.html
Basically: weather != climate
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Greenland was not named sarcastically, it was named so people would want to go there.
I think that says it all. What surprises me most is that the top denialist "scientists" dug up an old, easily disproven, barroom-grade argument ("No *atmospheric* warning in the last decade or two! IT'S A HOAX!") as their primary argument. It's like the response doesn't even matter, and they know it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Tell me, if you burn a gallon of gasoline in an engine, where do you think the products of the reaction go?
You have liquid hydrocarbons and oxygen and you react them in a chamber. Then you empty that chamber and fill it with new reactants. Do that repeatedly until you have no gasoline left. Where are the products of this reaction?
Where does all the mass go? I mean, I assume your car doesn't have a waste tank you have to empty every time you fill your car with fuel.
It makes a number of key points that have been left out of the public debate.
That's right, climate scientists are generally not keen to study economic effects, which means they are not any more qualified than anyone else to propose economic solutions. Most economists believe eliminating carbon emissions today would be disastrous, well beyond the scale of that climate scientists have predicted.
Even though we've learned a lot about the climate in the last 30 years, we still know next to nothing about it. We shouldn't be accepting the results essentially heuristic computer models as rock solid predictions for the future, and we should still be working to understand the climate better first and foremost.
I would like to add that improving the water infrastructure in most of the world would go a long way toward mitigating the effects of global warming, and that it's something that is badly needed today in any case. So if they wan't to put money into that, that would probably be ok too.
maybe its not the weather that is out of whack, but our expectation of it.
maybe the seasons have decided they don't want to conform any more to the three monthly slots we've allocated for them.
Its not easy for them to do so. I think it starts off in the brain as "Some liberals said this, so it must be wrong". The brain then has to wash all of this actual data and supported information until anything that rejects the "some liberals said this, so it must be wrong" thesis. At that point, with a considerable absence of most of the original data and the presence of a fair sized can of bullshit, you can assuredly feel that this global warming stuff is all crap.
The folks that go through this process have absolutely no idea how our global climate works, and neither do the people supplying them with their own set of facts. In fact, I'd go so far out on a limb as to say that 95% of them just dont care one way or the other, but them there librals need someone to tell them off.
Like I said, I believe in climate change. Did you actually read what I wrote? I'm sure their arguments are invalid; the point is, the rebuttal letter did not actually rebut any of the arguments, it just ignored them. No wonder the WSJ didn't bother printing it; I wonder why Science did. We would all have been better served by a letter that actually deigned to debate the issues, one that proved the point. Right?
When scientists start appealing to popularity instead of arguments, you may want to reconsider what they're saying...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I believe in climate change, personally
Please, do not BELIEVE in anything. Question, prove, discover, argue!
Believing is being controlled. It has been like that forever. Be it religion, the government or whatever.
Once upon a time (very long ago) the purpose of the press was to tell us what was going on in the world. Now the purpose of the press is to align us with their goals. It's a sad thing to see. Thank goodness for the Internet where we can get a vast array of biased viewpoints instead of just one.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
But if you really want to reduce C02, just stop cutting down trees in south america and asia. Stop buying solid wood furniture and tables.
Actually, that's one of the common examples that doesn't really work very well. Wood that's turned into furniture is carbon that isn't returned to the atmosphere; it's kept out of circulation for the long term. Granted, there are scraps to dispose of, but woodworkers (and furniture factories) try hard to minimize the scrap, because good wood is expensive (and getting more so).
We do live in a house with a fireplace, but right now it's blocked by a sofa and a coffee table, so we're not burning much wood in it. ;-)
What we really should do is persuade people to buy good quality furniture that won't be discarded after a decade or two. World-wide, people need a lot of furniture, and all of it that's made of wood represents CO2 that's taken out of the atmosphere for as long as the furniture lasts.
(OTOH, studies have shown that a good portion of the atmosphere's CO2 - and about 1/3 of the methane - comes from termites. So try to keep the little critters out of your local wooden artifacts, OK? ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
If the ice caps over LAND melt, it is a disaster. Over water the result is 0.
A hoax? From the scientific community? Maybe you could lay off the magic mushrooms for a bit.
I'm a scientist. We live or die by how well our theories explain the natural world. You seem to be suggesting that there's a cabal of scientists who are for various reasons trumpeting "the hoax" for precisely what? Our reward system would make any of us fabulously rich if only we could conclusively prove man-made warming is wrong. It hasn't happened.
And that's the rub. Can anyone conclusively prove that we aren't forcing the world to warm? But that only leads to the real point. If we do not know, why should we conduct an experiment for which there's no turning back?
This somewhat reminds me, and here I'm betraying my own bias, of the controversy over smoking. Does it cause lung cancer or not? It took years and many "scientists" on the take form the tobacco industry to swear it didn't before it was finally resolved. And it wasn't resolved within the scientific community (they were adamant that it did), it was resolved when the public finally decided whom to believe.
So we have the current debate? It will not be resolved by scientists, per se. Most have already decided. It will be resolved by the public and what they can see with their own eyes. But then if we have turned the world into one with a runaway greenhouse effect, does it matter? Do you feel lucky? Should we wager the planet on, "Gee, I don't think it could happen" when most scientists are telling you it could?
Let's "inject a bit of reality" and admit that being odorless and colorless is not relevant to the question of whether it's causing global warming.
I don't know, people have been talking about weird weather for as long as I've been alive. They've been talking about it as long as my grandmother has been alive.
I suspect that the natural cyclical variations in weather are longer than the human lifespan, and thus for any given human, he will always be seeing weird weather. Once I looked up the annual rainfall for my region, and the years it was 'normal' were much fewer than the years that were 'strange.'
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I can hardly believe you folks are still seriously using Farhenheit.
I mean, the power of social norm and all, but really, Farhenheit? What's next, miles? Stones?
No wit here.
Yeah, I know your position is desperate, but seriously, Celsius can't be rounded? And EVERYONE knows that body temperature is around 36C, that -10C is freaking cold and so on.... And if you want to play games, c'mon, water freezing at 32F? Boiling at 212F?
There's a reason the whole world uses Celsius.
Fahrenheit makes excellent sense for what most people use air temperature to refer to: human comfort.
Don't even try to rationalise it. You use Fahrenheit for the same reason I use Celsius, because that's what we've always done.
The Celcius equivs are harder to remember: 37.777...., -17.77..., -12.22...
That's because they're not the equivalents that a Celsius using person would use. 0 is freezing, 10 is cool, 20 is nice, 30 is hot, 40 is unbearable, 100 is the boiling point of water. Not so hard if you open your mind a little bit...
No amount of hand waving changes the fact that they push a political agenda.
Yeah... all truths are socially constructed, there is no difference between education and indoctrination, and no such thing as erudite disinterested investigation.
I happen to be one of those scientists -- and this nonsense about the NAS being political is just a typical ploy a partisan political position that is devoid of content.
This is from Lifton's famous book on thought reform in communist China:
The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.
You have suggested that every organisation is as objective as any other. (It is your opening statement.) This supposedly profound statement makes a mockery of a basic and nuanced continuum between ideologically polarised organisations (e.g.: a political advocacy group) and a loose nit association of professional scientists, using facts to compete for mind-share with their peers.
I'm guessing you are politically right, and opposed to totalitarian socialism. Way to go with the thought-terminating cliché!!!
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Climate fluctuations over the course of a single decade, or a single person's lifetime does not allow for enough data to seriously consider the question of Global Warming/Global Cooling/Climate Change. We, as a species, have only been accurately recording global temperatures since around 1850. This record itself is not sufficient for providing a true picture of Earth's changing climate. For this we must resort to Paleoclimatology.
Anecdotal evidence in the form of "this winter has been really warm" is totally unhelpful. Where I live this year has been pretty warm... but last year was one of the coldest that I can remember since I've lived here. Both statements are true, but neither of them indicates either a global or regional trend.
Climate change is very real. The Earth's climate has changed dramatically over it's 5.5 billion (6,000?) year history. Change is inevitable whether it is caused by humans or other natural processes. What we as a species must decide is whether or not we want to affect that change in a way that benefits humanity or if we want to allow these processes, whether natural or man-created, to determine the fate of our species. I for one support the global engineering of climate to benefit humanity and preserve as many other species as we can in order to sustain nurture our species to create a better tomorrow.
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
One possibility is that global temperatures have been cooler than the norm for the past several thousand years and whatever caused that global cooling trend has now corrected itself and Earth's temperatures are returning to more normalized levels that were experienced around 5-10 thousand years ago.
What we should be debating is not Climate Change but Climate Engineering: engineering Earth's climate to be most beneficial to humanity and other species as we and they exist today. We should focus on maintaining the climate to which we have become accustomed rather than being puppets of either natural or man-made climate variation.
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
Au contraire, mon ami.
When Europe came out of the Little Ice Age, temperatures warmed up even faster than what has been observed lately.
Look, when it comes to the whole "Global Warming" thing, I'm an agnostic. I have no dog in the fight; no ox of mine will be gored one way or the other. I am perfectly willing to be convinced either way, and I'm equally skeptical of both sides.
It is not lost on me, for example, that the big oil companies and other major industrial emitters tend to be on the side - by which I mean "fund" - the studies that argue strongest for the "it ain't happening" side. That's as you'd expect; that the short term profit motive and general bad behavior of these sorts of organizations would motivate them to attempt to refute and deny any soi-disant "inconvenient truths".
But on the other hand, the "it's happening and it's all human activity" side is RIFE with corruption, falsified studies, poor models, groupthink, and generally shitty behavior too. Some of this we can chalk up to normal primate "Gorillas in the Mist" social (bad) behavior - but certainly not ALL of it. Not even MOST of it.
If the case for man-made global warming was so compelling, there would be no need for all these shenanigans. The science should be able to stand on its own. And yet, it clearly does not.
There are aspects of the "reduce the carbon" movement that I can fully support. Fuel efficiency, for example (energy efficiency in general for that matter) is a great idea on its own merits. We really don't know what the fossil fuel supply reserves really are, and anything that conserves fuel is ultimately a good thing. The same thing with protecting forest areas and reforestation/greening in general (green roofs and the like) These measures all have compelling arguments for them without playing the global warming bugaboo.
But as it sits right now, all the arm-waving and Strongly Worded Claims aren't doing anything to address the problems that people like myself have with the underlying science. The case is not at all made.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
All they did was sign an editorial. It does even say how much they were paid or if they were paid.
In any event, more importantly what these guys haven't provided is any kind of cogent explanation that if its not carbon dioxide that is heating the planet, then why on earth is virtually every single glacier on the planet that has been accurately measured for some time showing dramatic retreat. If the temperature were not getting warmer it would stand to reason that on average half the world's glaciers would be growing rather than melting and not only melting doing so at ever accelerating rates?
The fact these 16 guys are silent on this point and have no evidence, whatsoever to explain this, only shows that this isn't little more than the deniers forming their final "Alamo defense". Keep in mind its not as if the Wall Street Journal is a peer reviewed publication.
It's not just "some liberals said this, so it must be wrong" - the current right-wing political ideology of so-called limited government in the US makes it impossible for them to actually do anything about global warming, so admitting that it exists would mean admitting their ideology was flawed.
*facepalm*
I am agnostic not because I am "ignorant", but because my analysis of the studies that I have read - many, many of them - arrives at the following conclusions:
1. Neither case is particularly compelling; and
2. Both cases are presented by people with vested interests and evidence of fraud, so neither side is particularly trustworthy.
Thank you, by the way, for providing an example that proves my point. You regurgitate the groupthink, and instead of relying on science to make your argument for you, instead immediately go to an attack on the man, rather than the facts. This is the sort of behavior that makes me profoundly distrustful of the proponents of "global warming" as a postulate.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book