Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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/
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
...aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.
The key word here is "economically".
Of course it makes no economical sense to do that.
That's because we're not trying to solve an economical problem.
You could also add that there's no economical reason to have children and you would certainly be right while totally missing the point.
Basically: weather != climate
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
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...
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.
> Think about nature. Think about how many active volcanoes there are on the planet.
> Now try and convince me that we humans are somehow MORE of a factor than nature when it comes to CO2 emissions
-- volcanoes emit 200 million tons a year.
- the global fossil fuel CO2 emissions for 2003 tipped the scales at 26.8 billion tonnes.
Care to reverse you position ?
Look at the facts. Human CO2 is more than 100x that of volcanic CO2.
Humans are a very significant impact on the atmospheric composition.
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 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.
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...
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
*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