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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.'"
its rather nice having 62 degree days in the last weeks of January when it should be -3, let our children's children figure it out, they need to have something to do anyway as we keep doing it all for them as it is
I thought this global warming denial nonsense was long sense refuted for anyone willing to look at the facts in an objective manner.
No action will be taken anyway.
But instead, was published in a right-wing newspaper.
The global-warming deniers obviously have no evidence, because if they did, they'd publish it in a science journal.
What exactly are these right-wingers trying to hide? Their corporate oil-industry donors?
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
Average global temperatures are up 4c in the last century, 2c in the last decade, and it is more severe near the poles. Coastal water levels have risen by a few inches in the last decade.
Not doing anything possible to stop the planet from heating up until we get a runaway greenhouse effect is what is insane, especially when all we have to do is not even "that" hard - just stop burning fossil fuels that are just large amounts of carbon locked up in a solid as opposed to being in the atmosphere.
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.
That's how I removed myself from this jackassery.
Personally, I think that the preponderance of the scientific evidence suggests that we ought to be worried about climate change. However, there are people who seem to have a chip on their shoulder about this, and they seem to be centralized in the very states that are going to have it worst if they're wrong. Frankly, I hope they're right and that their already-sun-belt homes don't wind up in the middle of a new desert, and that their kids don't end up with some kind of mutant skin cancer.
But if they do? I don't care. Maine could use an extra degree or two, and it'll be funny to watch all the Red States run around begging the federal government for disaster relief like they do when a river floods or there's a hurricane in the gulf. "Oh, noes! Hotness! Who could have guessed! Please help us, evil socialist elitists. Our kids can't play outside and we're all so THIRSTY!!!! Waaaaaah!"
I'm smiling just thinking about it.
god is just pretend.
Obligatory cartoon
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
http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/01/27/remarkable-editorial-bias-on-climate-science-at-the-wall-street-journal/
Quote --
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.”
--
I see Allègre in the list of scientists. He is a very competent *geologist*. He has no clue in climatology. That did not stop him from writing a book about the topic in which he *falsified* data to fit his own personal views that are not supported by science. Here is one of several examples http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/04/claude-allegre-the-climate-imposter/ . No need to say that the people who published the original data are horrified by his fraud. So in the end the WSJ publishes crap. Nothing unusual.
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.
Here are the hottest ten years on record, in the past 130 years, in order: 2005, 2010, 1998, 2003, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2007, 2004, 2001
Notice a pattern? How about the fact that they are all in the past decade.
I notice also that of the 16 scientists, only 2-3 have titles that directly related to the study of climate and atmospheric sciences. The rest are the usual mismash of experts in other subjects who (as "smart" people are won't to do) apparently claim equal expertise in global warming, who are simply doing the classic trick of "donning a labcoat" to look authoritative.
Useful reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation
Yes, we're currently in an ice age. It's one of the relatively warm bits of an ice age (an interglacial period), but its still an ice age.
The earth's been warmer than this on average - if we're breaking out of the current ice age early, so what? Better than the alternative - the interglacial period ending and the earth slipping back into the main part of an ice age. Most countries can't cope as it is when a bit of snow falls - imagine what they'll be like in an ice age.
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/
False flag.
"The lack of warming for more than a decade" is contradicted by e.g.
"An increasing amount of seaborne traffic is moving along a new Siberian coastal route, cutting journey time and boosting trade prospects"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/05/arctic-shipping-trade-routes
The sea north of Siberia is opening up, for the benefit of transport! So, some in the industry are already using the global warming. Russia is planning expanding some of these harbors for summer traffic.
So, even if those WSJ jerks are wrong, there are some beneficial outcomes. Not all parts in the world suffer from droughts or desertification.
Still, the poor people in Nevada, California, Spain, Italy and elsewhere will suffer from an even drier climate.
The winners are the already affluent people in high latitudes, with an already booming industry.
Global temperatures during the Medieval Warming Period were actually lower than they are today. The warming you are describing was a local phenomenon experienced in the Northern Atlantic region.
RTFA. Someone actually tried that, then they got fired. Hell, I wouldn't do it if it meant not having a job when there's not an equally good one waiting for me in some other place, and that's in spite of the fact that I don't buy into this global warming stuff.
I don't recall anyone getting fired for conducting an experiment that seemed to show that neutrinos can travel faster than light(which is not something I believe most scientists would have considered possible). But when it comes to global warming, advocate it or lose your job. Firing someone because they disagree with you isn't scientific. There's a human element to this.
Sorry, but I'll trust the climatologists, and not the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.
The same guy who owns the WSJ owns Fox News.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
"16 Marketing Managers,HR Directors, and First-Level Help Desk Technicians have decided that routinely testing backups is a waste of effort and not needed at all".
It's a biased op-ed from a right-wing newspaper. To quote Forbes:
But the most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal in this field is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down. The National Academy of Sciences is the nation’s pre-eminent independent scientific organizations. Its members are among the most respected in the world in their fields. Yet the Journal wouldn’t publish this letter, from more than 15 times as many top scientists. Instead they chose to publish an error-filled and misleading piece on climate because some so-called experts aligned with their bias signed it. This may be good politics for them, but it is bad science and it is bad for the nation.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
Quote: "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."
Looks like someone found George W. Bush's notes.
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
1. Fill an ordinary pot with ice water.
2. Set the pot on a hot stove eye to boil.
3. Monitor the temperature of the pot's contents as the ice melts.
Amazingly, the temperature of the water will not begin to rise until the ice has melted. All the heat applied to the pot goes into melting the ice, not heating the water.
This is called a "phase change" (a reference to the phases of matter), and is a possible explanation for the Earth's not having burst into flames despite humans' venting unprecedented amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
I suspect once the ice caps melt, the real fireworks will begin.
Don't worry. The global warming deniers are slowly buying the high ground.
Greenland was not named sarcastically, it was named so people would want to go there.
1998 and 2001 are not in the past decade, just FYI
The problem with this is The Wall Street Journal is now just another rag spewing the opinions of its owner, Rupert Murdoch.
And Rupert Murdoch's climate change skepticism and his willingness to push this agenda through his news empire through conservative fanboys and other stories is long documented. A simple google search on Rupert Murdoch climate change shows just how ridiculous it is to put your faith in any climate change story from a News Corp, News International or News Limited organisation - even if they're right.
In fact Rupert Murdoch's fanboys have done such an excellent job of muddying the waters and inciting mindless division that its almost impossible now to have a constructive debate on the topic. Which was always the intention IMO. Arguments sell newspapers.
"exhaled at high concentrations by each of us" is wrong.
The air that enters a person's lungs is 78% nitrogen 21% oxygen, 1% argon and less than 1% CO2.
The air that leaves a person's lungs during exhalation contains 14% oxygen and 4.4% carbon dioxide.
since when is 4% high concentration ?
The article is trying to hard.
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.
the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections
Ah, yes. Dr. Curry uses an inappropriate statistical model (simple linear regression) to the team's data set, which ends with two unusually cold months. The result is to nearly eliminate the warming trend in the result (end points have unusual weight in a simple linear regression.) Drop those two months and you get about the same warming trend as the models predicted, or add the following two months (which were unusually warm) and again you match the models.
Impressive work, and the WSJ makes the most of it.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The best sources I can come up with (things like this [wsj.com] and this [transworldnews.com]) suggest that hundreds of millions are spent on one side, and billions on the other.
The big difference here is that those billions are mostly spent on scientific research, while the oil company money is mostly being spent on PR and lobbying.
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.
just stop burning fossil fuels
That's pretty hard. We'd need an alternative vehicle infrastructure, including either a way of getting sufficient supplies of rare earth metals or hydrogen power stations. We'd then need to convert electricity production to nuclear, and manage to build those in a way where contractors aren't walking off with gobs of money for building Fukushimabombs. Even with clean nuclear, we need something to do with the spent fuel that doesn't allow it to become rogue state bombs. And we'd have to do all that under the nose of companies so rich they get away without paying US taxes.
The ______ Agenda
The thing that always annoyed be about the global warming fear mongering is that it puts focus on something that, as the article noted, is not ACTUALLY a pollutant.
That would be relevant if the discussion about carbon dioxide had anything to do with pollution. Nice way to muddy the waters, though.
Keeping with GP's line of thought: "Don't pay attention to fear mongering about smoking. You'll be far better of if you focus on your problems with cholesterol and sugar, which cause real harm to your health", say 16 doctors*
* not necessarily medical doctors
Well, let's look at the sixteen climate scientists who signed this, shall we?
Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris: Sounds reasonable, though it looks like the proper name for the "University of Paris" is the "Paris VI University", or "Pierre and Marie Curie University". Unfortunately, it looks like the man is kind of a crank, and he hasn't been the director of that Institute since 1986, which makes it weird that it's the one thing they list about him.
J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting: That's pretty reasonable, but forecasting and climate science aren't exactly the same thing; forecasting is the study of what's going to happen tomorrow or next week in any topic, while climate science is trying to figure out what will happen in the next year or the the next ten years with the weather. Also, Armstrong's professional background seems to be primarily in advertising, not forecasting, and he hasn't actually published any papers on climatology that I can see.
Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University: I'm not exactly sure what he's doing on this list, since presumably it's a list of climate scientists? I mean, just because he's a researcher in one field doesn't automatically qualify him in others; it's like taking your car to ten mechanics and ignoring what they say, then asking your doctor about it and following his advice.
Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society: This dude seems to be a writer for the NY Times, and I can't seem to find anyone by that name on the list of Fellows of the American Physical Society. Maybe he received his fellowship before 1990? In any case, it doesn't signify much in terms of his ability to evaluate any kind of science; those fellowships are kinda prestigious, but they're handed out for all sorts of things.
Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences: What can I say? He's an electrical engineer. Would you trust him to diagnose a heart condition? An expert in one subject is not automatically an expert in all subjects.
William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton: What can I say? Damnit Jim, he's a physicist, not a climatologist! Sure, they're related - but would you trust this guy if he was talking on the way that chemists all over the world are trying to fool us about the mind control properties of fluorine? (as a side note, he's also a Fellow of the American Physical Society - why didn't they mention that?)
Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.: This dude is kinda hard to Google because he shares a name with a fairly famous guitar company and a well-respected journalist (who died in 2003); however, it looks like he's done some pretty awesome work on semi-conductors. Unfortunately, that doesn't have anything to do with climate research.
William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology: Well, for one thing, he hasn't been the head of the ABM since 1998 (this seems to be a theme, you know?); for another, he's trained as a meteorologist, not a climate scientist. Just because they both deal with the weather doesn't necessarily mean that his word carries extra weight, but I do have to admit that he's one of the better signatories of this list.
Ric
... since we are incapable of reducing CO2 production.
We're doubling the population every 40 years. If humans are causing global warming with CO2 production, it's just going to get worse, unless we get our breeding under control. That isn't going to happen, as will be proven by the replies to this. There will be variations on:
* The population is actually declining! ... among other things.
* Why do you hate babies?
* Malthus said we'd all be starving by now, but we're just fine, therefore we can make as many people as we want.
* Breeding is a human right!
Maybe we'll we can cut per capita C02 production, but the population growth will overrun it.
And what problems do we still have today that we were having in 1912? What knowledge did those people have that would have allowed them to solve or prevent the problems we're having in 2012? A pollution control program in 1912 would have amounted to cleaning horse shit out of the streets.
Yes, I do plan on letting future generations solve their own problems, because neither you nor I nor anyone else is competent to know what sort of a world those people will be living in, and what kind of problems they'll be experiencing.
Clue: there's no such thing as a 100 year old problem. Issues which were pressing matters 100 years ago are irrelevant to us now, and issues which are relevant to us now will be of no consequence to people 100 years from now. Think about it.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
remember, the threat is the liberal media pushing a liberal agenda
not a murdoch financed opinion piece pushing a corporate funded agenda
right? the threat to you is the liberal media, right?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
From this article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/01/27/remarkable-editorial-bias-on-climate-science-at-the-wall-street-journal/
"But the most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal in this field is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down."
Critters that live in the oceans and are killed by increased acidification resulting from CO2 dissolving in seawater would disagree with the assertion that CO2 is not a pollutant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
Their argument? Look at temperatures! Even if the temperature is warmer: that doesn't prove/disprove anything. The argument is causation.
"Look at the temperatures" isn't the actual scientific argument. The actual argument is causal and has to do with the atomic spectroscopy and radiative transfer physics of the greenhouse effect, along with the associated laboratory and observational studies that support that physics.
I'm not even going to pretend to say that I've thought out the science behind this, but I never hear anyone address: maybe things are warmer because there's more hot stuff?
World energy consumption is about 15 x 10^12 watts. Spread over the surface of the Earth (5 x 10^14 square meters), this is about 0.03 watts per square meter. Energy balance arguments show that you need roughly 4 watts per square meter to raise the temperature of the planet by 1 degree Celsius. (Divide this by about 3 or so if you include climate feedback effects that may amplify warming.) Let's say that "more hot stuff" raises the temperature of the planet by about 0.01 degrees Celsius. That's about two orders of magnitude smaller than the greenhouse effect of CO2.
It is about ~40% co2. The rest is carbon/water/ozone/other... (mostly water ~60%).
The heat from the reaction creates pretty much 2 major by products water and co2. Almost 99% of that ends up in the atmosphere. Some ends up in the filters (you change those every few thousand miles and is negligible). Some just blows right out onto the road (you see it as road grime). Some becomes particulate mater and floats around. But that is really a small percentage of the overall and is contaminates in the gas. For some cars there is even a percentage that comes out as gas. This is gas that did not combust due to lack of oxygen. It goes out the exhaust pipe onto the road usually.
To hear some people talk you would think it is 100% co2.
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.
The WSJ article gave arguments? I see a claim that the world hasn't been warming in the last 10 years (ignoring that the last 10 years have been the hottest on modern record), a claim that CO2 isn't a pollutant because trees need CO2 (and by similar logic I need water, therefor I can't drown), a claim that the evil AGW conspiracy tried to get some guy fired (but he kept his job), comparing AGW consensus to Lysenko, accusations of corruption by grant money (which having been paid by grant money for many years made me laugh, then cry when I thought about my finances), a strawman about AGW conspirators wanting to "decarbonize" the economy, and one mention of one economic study alleging that it's best to do nothing for 50 years as that will maximize the benefit to cost ratios, with the exact nature of the benefits, costs, and how no regulation bests any and all regulation left unexplained. What a pile of crap.
Oh, and that science article written by 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences wasn't a rebuttal. It was published in 2010.
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.
Well, it depends. Right now, we're conducting a planet wide experiment of which no one knows the outcome.
(1) The increase in greenhouse gases is handled by the system that is the Earth.
(2) The increase in greenhouse gases overwhelms the system that is the Earth.
Now, the question is: Well, do you feel lucky, Punk?
That's not how science works. Reality is there to be discovered. Reality is not there to be voted into office.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Except for outlaws cutting down on protected forests, that's not really true: wood producers want to actually continue to stay in business, so they plant new trees when they cut down the older.
Dilbert RSS feed
In reality, the arguments actually are all valid on their face. Everything there is factual, except the laissez-faire attitude. The problem comes from the writer(s) choosing to strip the context of each point.
I'm literally going to read it now (I chose not to when it popped up on a science blog recently), just to see how quick it is to correct (being written after the fact, it was about an hour):
It starts with Ivar Giaever, who, despite expert work in Quantum Physics and a solid background on Biophysics and coming from the country bordering the one where the discovery of global warming happend...a century ago, has chosen to ignore recorded, glacial, oceanic and tree records to declare, not that global warming is fictional, but his distrust of anthropogenic climate, due to the apparent popularity among physical, atmospheric, oceanic and glacial climatological scientists. Skepticism based on popularity is not uncommon, and you could likely pull up a couple more nominated Nobel Prize winners. His attack on the APS seems to ignore the difference between theoretical physics and real world macroscale examination. I believe it was Planck who said, "Science advances one funeral at a time."
Then there's the COv2 is not a pollutant, even though, as a relative output outside of the natural chemistry of the Earth (the effect of living creatures and other processes) it does count as a deposit which changes the chemistry of the surrounding environment, ergo, pollution.
The now over-used 10 year decrease/steady state analysis ignores the natural wave of environmental change. If you look at the larger source, search for "Global Temperature Anomaly 1880-2010," you would find that there is always a downward period, but taking the total effect of cycles, it average has always increased. Claiming the effect is related to changes in evaporation truly ignores that heating that much ocean to increase the level of evaporation is and incredible amount of energy...we use steam power for electricity...imagine how much electricity it would take to move the increased precipitation as just water from one side of a continent to the other.
To hit on "ClimateGate" is quite humorous within itsown context. As those who know what the supposed terrifying things said were, it's great to poke fun at those attacking it. First, it's a group of people who were amazed that faulty meta-research was actually included in the IPCC assessment; then, the, "mathematical trick," that they used was not only a justifiable, "We know the energy is there since no satellites have shown it disappearing," logic, but that mathematical trick CAME FROM THE PERSON WHO SUBMITTED THE FAULTY META-RESEARCH. It's one of those moments that only look bad out of context, and that's how denialists want the public to see it.
Also, recently explicitly justified: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-029
The IPCC's own projections were, in part, based on the larger than average spike during the 80's, possibly assuming the aforementioned wave-effect might have become reduced. Calling the first set of projections embarrassing is, to say the least, childish, and suggesting it was alarmest ignores how frightening the 80's spike was then perceived. To dismiss extreme weather's effect as a mitigator ignores the point of the previous paragraph.
While I've already covered carbon dioxide as a definition of pollution, the unique mention of a benefit to plants have ignored recent studies that plant have been decreasing their stomataphors in count and opening period in areas of higher COv2 concentrations, thus indicating and upper-bound limit to COv2's usefulness to plants.
Next, skimming past the unidentified fields of study, unidentified quantity, unconfirmable scientists, we have Dr. de Freitas, who is another well recognised name to those aware of the field. He's had some interesting logic. One: Human beings didn't use significant amounts of fossil
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
Here's the thing: Real scientists don't write or say things like this.
They don't talk about "embarrassment" of those who disagree, nor of anyone's "drumbeat". As I say in the title, these are right-wing dog signals.
Secondly, CO2 has never been called a "pollutant" in the sense these "scientists" want to portray -- they are using tools of propaganda with how they describe CO2 juxtaposed with how real scientists discuss it.
To top it all off, it's always been about _climate change_ -- there was no "shift" from "warming".
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
"ultra-wealthy SierraClub and PETA members!" ROFLMAO!!!
So wealthy they're pitching tents on Wall Street.
On what planet are there "ultra-wealthy SierraClub and PETA members" ?!?
Good news! You don't have to save up to buy a rocket ship to find out!
Mayor Bloomberg Donates $50 Million To Sierra Club
Sierra Club - Green Home - Advisory Board
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The mechanism is very well understood - hard sharp stuff the body can't break down gets in the lungs, can't get out, and then irritates cells, giving a small chance of cancer with every trapped fibre. Enough trapped fibres and that small chance turns into certainty.
It's also highly reflective and loose fibres drift in the breeze in the sunlight with a sparkling effect that looks very cool until you understand what it is. I've worked in a few power stations while it was being removed.
What we know about asbestos is very well established by scientists despite attempts to muddy the water by Lawyers paid to obstruct.
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
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2012/01/two_incontrovertible_things_an.php
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.
NASA provides an entire website dedicated to showing out of control CO2 levels are measureable and statistically significant over a long period of time.
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
"The Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.
The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years."
when Ruppert Murdoch is tried for crimes against humanity
Arguments like this are 50% of the reason people "oppose" global warming. Seriously.
Get a life.
(disclaimer: I am currently working on renewable Energies, so there may be a bias)
They ask for more funding for analysing weather data. They explicitly say: "we want to understand it better, because we want to control it in a *reasonable* way and prepare for it *as it is needed*". What they say (and that is a point which should have been argued better, taken into account that they ask for more observations....) is: we have roughly 50 years more to change it.
What they don't discuss is that the investment cycles in Energy Technologies are *incredibly long*. There is no energy technology which was ramped up from its invention to its massive use in less than 50 years (lets exclude civil nuclear reactors, which were a side product of building boms).
So my opinion (as a physicist who is convinced that the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is a parameter of the system we should not meddle with too much and thinks that these scientist are affected by a bias to get more satellites) is: we wont change it rapidly on the short term anyway. Also there will be no big flood wave coming the next year. Instead of hyping electric/hybrid cars to be the salvation we should take the time (the next 20-30 years) and seriously develop the new (or old) technologies and combine them in the ideal way.
I guess it stings when people attack your religious beliefs, doesn't it?
Considering the complete lack of credibility of the "scientists" who signed this letter, no. No, not really at all. This is more like bad comedy.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.