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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.'"
http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/01/27/remarkable-editorial-bias-on-climate-science-at-the-wall-street-journal/
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The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has long been understood to be not only antagonistic to the facts of climate science, but hostile. But in a remarkable example of their unabashed bias, on Friday they published an opinion piece that not only repeats many of the flawed and misleading arguments about climate science, but purports to be of special significance because it was signed by 16 “scientists.”
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I recall reading about these sort of opinions before with regard to both climate change and evolution, and the common thread seems to be the amount of attention given by the American news media. Differences of opinion, although common in every field, don't quite seem to get that kind of attention unless someone conveniently benefits from giving them press. Would be interesting to find out years later, if this latest opinion-piece was somehow published in response to the recent interest by the NCSE to start educating people about climate change, also explained further here.
What if it's a hoax and we incur societal costs we can't afford?
California is levying carbon taxes on business and as you might expect, businesses are leaving California. That means more unemployment in a state that already leads the country unemployment figures.
There are very real costs to carbon reduction.
According to the NOAA, 9 of the 10 warmest years since 1880 (the first year we kept records) have been since 2000. And they've all been in the top 13.
But it's the personal anecdotal evidence that people really respond to. And this is the year where Winter skipped the east coast. The past few years have been off, but it's crazy now. Everyone seems to see the weather doing something bonkers.
The ______ Agenda
I read the rebuttal letter, it was printed in Science magazine. It wasn't a "comparable" letter, it probably was scientifically accurate, but it only stated claims, no actual arguments. The letter in the WSJ actually gave arguments. All the letter in Science did was rely on the weight of the names behind it. What they should have done was stated some facts and then drawn conclusions. I am a little confused as to why the letter was such a poor rebuttal (I believe in climate change, personally). Maybe next time they could show a little science. At least the original letter gave the reasons *why* they thought climate change was overblown, the rebuttal letter should have done the same, told *why* they believed in climate change. Instead, they basically just said "there's 255 of us and you better believe us or bad things will happen!"
... this is the year where Winter skipped the east coast. The past few years have been off, but it's crazy now. Everyone seems to see the weather doing something bonkers.
Yeah, but here in New England, we're hearing even more comments from the natives, to the effect that they think global warming sounds like a fine thing. ;-)
And on a very tiny scale, we have at least one good bit of "anecdotal" evidence of the growing problem, in our yard. We have a lot of herbs planted (some invading the neighbors' yards). One our our real successes was a infestation of a rather nice variety of thyme. But last spring, it was almost all dead. Last winter was one of the mildest on record, though colder than this winter has been. The only clump of thyme that survived was growing on a small ledge with a northern exposure, next to a sidewalk that didn't get much sun. Its root system was frozen solid for the entire winter, which is just what it likes. Everywhere else, conditions were milder, with repeated thaws every few weeks. The thyme couldn't take those conditions, and nearly died out. It's likely that this spring, that one remaining clump will also be dead.
Of course, our side-yard thyme crop isn't what you'd call a serious problem to the world. Our Greek and Italian oregano are still strong and healthy, and we can probably get a more heat-tolerant thyme variety. (We still bring the pot of rosemary in, because it isn't frost tolerant, and we have had several mild frosts.)
OTOH, an important commercial crop in New England is its apples, which require a good frost to develop their fruit. If an apple tree dies, you can't just plant a few sprigs of another variety and have a crop next year. Migrating apple groves will be a much slower process. The farmers in both the old and new apple-growing areas will have go through the long process of learning to make a new crop profitable.
Also, humans have imposed national borders in the paths of most crops' migration paths. This will further slow down the adaptation to the new climate regime.
But around here, we're looking forward to the plant nurseries supplying palm trees, to replace all the old cold-climate trees that are on the way out.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
> Then, WHY is there global warming?
Short scale: We're climbing out of the Little Ice Age, just a hair above the three-century trendline right now, but not unprecedentedly so; early 1700s had quicker warming than the last half-century.
Long scale: We're approaching the end of an interglacial period, and that's when it's warmest.
> Regardless of the cause, that change must be stopped,
No, we should do our damnedest to speed it up, and hope to God the alarmists are right in everything they say. The wildest forecasts I've heard are that a billion, maybe a billion and a quarter, will be killed off by AGW. Beats the hell out of the six and a half billion or so that would be killed off by the next Ice Age, which we're a bit overdue for already; and if they are right than we can get the average temperature up 6, hey that's just about the amount than an Ice Age lowers it. How convenient!
Given the bullshit the authors are pushing, I think it is likely they have had more than a sniff.
Claude Allegre is the first scientist cited. This is from his Wikipedia entry
Claude Allègre
In 1996, Allègre opposed the removal of carcinogenic asbestos from the Jussieu university campus in Paris, describing it as harmless and dismissing concerns about it as a form of "psychosis created by leftists".[6] The campus' asbestos is deemed to have killed 22 people and caused serious health problems in 130 others.[7]
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Absolutely agree. That's the scummiest lie on there. Just because something is natural doesn't make it not a pollutant. "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". The "high concentrations" bit is ridiculous. It's higher than standard atmospheric concentration, obviously, but they're completely icing over the fact that the carbon in the CO2 animals breathe out comes from a fairly closed cycle. We breathe it out because we got it from our food in the first place. Our vegetable food got it from the atmosphere. Our animal food got it from vegetable matter, or from other animals that got it from vegetable matter, etc. Some natural processes bring out more carbon from under the earth and the overall action of our biosphere is to sequester it under the earth again. Something that's already naturally present can be a pollutant if it's in the wrong concentration or in the wrong place. Too much oxygen would be a pollutant too (a very dangerous one since the world could catch fire). Ozone is a pollutant at ground level, but great for us in the stratosphere. The quote they give about CO2 applies equally well to excrement (well, minus the colorless and odorless part, and we don't normally exhale it, although those people who do are a great example of it being a pollutant when it's in the wrong place), but excrement is obviously a pollutant when there's too much of it in our water supply.
Someone should see how many of these "scientists" are willing to spend an hour in a chamber with 10% CO2. Then we can ask them if they still think it's not potentially a pollutant depending on concentration afterwards. We won't get much of an answer since they will have died painfully, of course.
First off, glaciers are never just stable. They're always growing and shrinking locally, due to differences in local climate. So it's not proof that the Earth as a whole was warmer in some past period, just because something from that past period has been found as a glacier recedes now.
Proof of the Earth as a whole gaining or losing temperature comes from looking at what the world's glaciers, as a whole, not individually, are doing. Right now they're rapidly melting, pretty much everywhere they exist. This is not entirely from greenhouse heating. Black soot from fires (largely ours) also lands on glaciers and cause them to absorb more heat from the sun. But it's happening, nearly everywhere, rapidly.
Now, the thing about the Greenland glaciers is they can take ice cores and fairly accurately date the ice. And the current glaciers are far older than the Vikings. It's not plausible that Greenland had no ice just a few centuries back and then suddenly the glaciers formed, because those glaciers are known to be many thousands of years old.
And, like glaciers just about everywhere, they're melting now with surprising rapidity.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
When you said "notice a pattern", I looked at the numbers and thought: "no". Your subject says "in the past decade". Your argument provides good evidence that the past decade has been significantly warmer than other decades in the past 130 years, however it does not support the argument that significant warming has occurred during the past 10 years . I ran a quick regression of those rank order vs year pairs just to check my intuition that they were not noticeably positively related. Indeed, the coefficient was -0.0449. That is, later years on that list tended to have slightly (insignificantly) lower ranks than earlier years.
That inspired me to go the next step. Instead of using the ranks you gave, I grabbed the global temperature deviations for those years off of the Wikipedia instrumental temperature record page. Running another regression I got a coefficient of 0.001201 with a p-value of 0.7046 for an F-test. So, statistically significant warming was not detected in the sample of years you provided.
Actually if we ran 2002-2011 (two very recent years, 2008 and 2011, don't make the top ten list) to check the last decade, we get a negative but insignificant relationship. So it's pretty clear that there has been no global warming in the past decade. The authors were, technically, correct. One could definitely argue that this does not constitute evidence against global warming. But that was not your approach.
Not to be a dick. Just saying.
I live in Stockholm, where 30C is fucking hot, you insensitive clod!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.