How the GW myth is perpetuated

[zoofer]

Consensus is in cuz I not Suzeki said so.
Made made CO2 causing GW is rubbish. Fear mongering abetted by the CBC.
It is the sun's orbit primarily.
The earth is cooling since 1998. CO2 at 1000 PPM made the earth a better place.
Climate has changed from day one. Fraudsters and charlatans have tied pollution to global warming to keep their useless carbon credit scams working.

 

[Tonington]

Oh it's the sun's orbit, around the milky way perhaps? Milankovitch must have missed that one....

 

[Walter]

The Hadley Center Tries Again

The U.K.’s Hadley Center has issued a forecast that 2008 will come in as one of the top 10 warmest years in its 150+ year record of global average temperature. While this forecast is about as risky as predicting that the next box of a dozen doughnuts you buy will contain twelve of the one-holed wonders, the press seems enthralled by it, as virtually all major news wires ran the story under with some variant of the headline “2008 to be among hottest years on record.”

The Hadley Center does not have the greatest track record for making accurate forecasts. Recall that in early January 2007, they issued a statement proclaiming that 2007 would likely be the warmest year on record for the globe. In fact, they went as far as to assign a probability (60%) to their forecast of a record year. And, of course, this prediction was also widely covered in the press (for example, see this BBC story).
When all the numbers are in (they aren’t yet), 2007 will likely come in as around the 6th or 7th warmest year in the Hadley Center global temperature record, probably about a tenth of a degree (which is a lot) behind the record holder (1998). In other words, their forecast was way off.
Apparently stinging from this forecast bust last year, they decided to make one this year that is much broader and virtually certain to be correct.
It doesn’t take a genius (and in that light should not make any news at all—after all, we are not talking about the Darwin Awards here) to figure out that it is very likely that 2008 will be among the all-time top 10 warmest years for global temperatures. In order for 2008 to fall outside the top 10, the average temperature would have to be about 0.15ºC cooler than this year. Not impossible, but it would likely take something like a very strong La Niña (which usually only follows a strong El Niño, which we haven’t had since 1998 or a (non-predictable) major volcanic eruption to cause it to happen.
Why it is so unlikely that 2008 will not fall outside the top 10 warmest years on record? Because natural variability (as measured, in this case, by the standard deviation of the detrended Hadley Center annual global temperature record since 1977) is only about 0.08ºC. Remember that 2008 will have to be about 0.15ºC, or about 2 standard deviations, cooler than this year not to fall within the top 10. Statistically speaking, the chance that the temperature departure for one year will fall outside of 2 standard deviations from the mean is about 5%. And since we are further requiring it to fall 2 standard deviations below the mean, then the chance drops in half, or to 2.5%. Thus, based on simple statistics alone (derived from data which includes several El Niño/La Niña cycles and two major volcanic eruptions) there is only about a 1 in 40 chance that 2008 will not be among the top 10 warmest years on record. Add to the fact that there is an overall warming trend of about 0.0.18ºC/year that also has to be overcome, makes it even more unlikely that 2008 will fall outside the top 10.
That this no-brainer of a forecast is the kind of thing that makes the news these days is either a sad commentary on the state of environmental hysteria, or else is simply the result of an incredibly slow news time.
Let’s hope that it is the latter, but we’ll issue the forecast that it the former.

 

[Walter]

January 05, 2008
Global Hot Air from the BBC

By Graham Cunningham


Billions of people now ‘know' about global warming and how it threatens the planet. They ‘know' that it is all the fault of decades of irresponsible, profligate industry and capitalism.

And yet, what exactly do they really know? Have they delved in to the research data? Have they made it their business to acquire a thorough understanding of atmospheric processes and of climatology? Or have they simply heard it ad nauseam on the news. Heard it so insistently, emphatically and endlessly repeated that it must be true. Surely?

And who exactly are these newsmen and women? What is it about these particular people that makes them so particularly equipped to be the guardians of our knowledge of current affairs? What were their primary motivations for climbing the media greasy pole to become the minor celebrity intellectuals that they have become? Is it that they are notable for their intellectual rigour; their erudition and ability in assessing the provenance of scientific research? Or is it their love of a journalistic drama and love, even more, for themselves to be the centre of attention in that drama?


I personally do not know how much real substance there is to the global warming fear. I do not know whether there has been, in recent times, a sustained and inexorable rise in global temperatures. I do not know whether changes in temperature are primarily affected by levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or whether other factors are as (or even more) important. I do not know whether these levels are primarily driven by man-made factors or by other ecological factors outside of mankind's control. To be honest the task would be so daunting that I have not chosen to devote my life to this particular quest for understanding.

But I have --- as I always do -- listened out for alternative voices, different points of view, contradiction, paradox and logical fallacy in the assertions of others who claim that they DO know. And this has led me to conclude that the evidence is far from open-and-shut clear one way or the other.


What I DO know is that the global media machine is driven by forces quite alien to intellectual rigour, cold rationality, empirical scepticism etc. I also know that it is now -- in the early 21st century -- so powerful that it is capable of seducing pretty much anybody -- scientists, academics and politicians included, with its insistent and pervasive dramatic narrative.


I know that every time I hear a story on the news, that story is dripping with bias and editorial selectivity. One person gets murdered and it "catches the public imagination" we are told by the newsman. Another person gets murdered on the same day - and that person's mother is grieving too - but you will hear about it once only, if at all, in a bit column in a local newspaper.


Or to take just one recent ‘global warming' example; the BBC devoted much airtime tracking the drama of the Bali conference on climate change. It has made a very great deal out of the frustration with America for not falling into line with the binding emissions targets that everyone else in the world allegedly wants.

But not a word of explanation of why -- from their own perspective -- the American delegation has been taking that position. Barely a mention that what is really at issue is whether the huge polluter developing nations like China and India are also given targets. It has been presented as if it is simply the case that everyone else wants to do the right thing - excepting America, who just wants to do the selfish thing. No coverage, let alone rigorous analysis, of the likely impact on global warming if these targets were to be confined to the developed nations only. No mention that the reductions in the developed nations would be dwarfed by the increases of those developing nations. No mention about claims for America's rather impressive recent record in bringing on stream actual as opposed to rhetorical improvements in clean technology.


And why no mention of this? This remember is the great and good BBC; the great bastion of impartiality. I can only conclude that it is because they are so mesmerised by their own pious rhetoric that they are unable to step outside it.


In the cloying hothouse atmosphere of media political correctness they are quite simply unaware that there is any other way of looking at it. Other positions would in any case be ‘right wing' and therefore to be discounted. After all how could anything involving someone like George Bush be in any way defensible. And more importantly it would spoil the dramatic storyline, which is quite simply this: Look at what big bad America with its ‘incredibly right wing administration' is doing NOW!


Anyone who is anyone in the establishment in-crowds of the media, academia and politics is now on the man-made climate change bandwagon. Any one who dares to question the consensus gets the full force of moral outrage posturing and is labelled a climate change denier. Such is the loudhailer consensus that the ordinary man in the street just gets carried along. We are told that there is just no two ways about it. Well maybe, maybe not but, either way, the atmosphere is experiencing an unprecedented explosion of media hot air and not just on the subject of global warming. It may not threaten the planet but it does rather threaten the survival of post-Enlightenment civilisation.


The hard reality is that if you want to understand anything -- the great currents of change at work on the planet or anything else for that matter -- you are going to have to invest time and energy in educating yourself on that subject. You are going to have to actively go looking for alternative sources of information, checking the provenance of sources, cross - checking for logical inconsistencies, vested interests etc. You are categorically not going to get it on a plate from the world's media.


In this respect Western civilisation has gone backwards in recent decades; not forwards. We are awash with junk knowledge and yes it can be dangerous. The headlong rush into ‘environment friendly' bio fuel is just one example. Our academic and political establishments are awash with ‘deniers' of this change in the intellectual climate even though they dare not ask their publics the question whether or not society is heading in the right direction.


Mankind has, of course, always been subject to episodes of mass hysteria and the witch hunts that will follow in its wake. Never before though have the forces of unreason had such a loudhailer as is now provided by the mass media. Let's have an intergovernmental UN panel of scientists to investigate the quality of information provided by the world's media. How often have they presumed to foretell the future - and how often correctly so? How often have they accurately warned the world of an impending calamity? Check the media record on the ‘scientific consensus' on the spread of Aids or Bird Flue or BSE. Let's have a UN inquest on the ‘Millennium Bug' or the ‘Next Ice Age'. Remember those? Your great television and newspaper savants apparently do not.

 

[Tonington]

The hard reality is that if you want to understand anything -- the great currents of change at work on the planet or anything else for that matter -- you are going to have to invest time and energy in educating yourself on that subject. You are going to have to actively go looking for alternative sources of information, checking the provenance of sources, cross - checking for logical inconsistencies, vested interests etc. You are categorically not going to get it on a plate from the world's media.

Well, I think it safe to proclaim this your best snip job yet Walter. I hope you heed the advice of this author.

My only beef is that he selectively only portrayed one side as guilty of the accusations he made. There is a plethora of junk media stories on the subject, and they hail from both camps.

 

[Walter]

January tornados
January 9th, 2008 by Ed The news stories already are stating that the January tornado outbreak in Midwest is “rare” and “unbelievable”, etc., intimating that it is due to global warming. None of those reporters are going to mention this little tidbit (actually pretty large and detailed) article in Wikipedia. “The Great Storm of 1975 (also known as the Super Bowl Blizzard, Minnesota’s Storm of the Century, or the Tornado Outbreak of January, 1975) was an intense storm system that impacted a large portion of the Central and Southeast United States from January 9 to January 12, 1975. The storm produced 45 tornadoes in the Southeast U.S. resulting in 12 fatalities, while later dropping over 2 feet (61 cm) of snow and killing 58 people in the Midwest. This storm remains one of the worst blizzards to ever strike parts of the Midwest, as well as one of the largest January tornado outbreaks on record in the United States.”…..
Weren’t we being warned of a “New Ice Age” about that time?

 

[Walter]

​

 

[Walter]

 

[Walter]

Cooling the hot air

Remember that global warming, hottest-year-ever prediction? Oops, never happened

By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

Let's examine the flip side of global warming -- global cooling.
Inconveniently, while Al Gore was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, 2007 became the seventh straight year in which there's been no global warming, despite increasing concentrations of man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
And for Y2Kyoto believers, 2008 isn't looking good.
Last Jan. 4, Britain's Meteorological Office, among those at the forefront of climate change research, headlined its annual prediction of global temperatures made in conjunction with the University of East Anglia: "2007 -- forecast to be the warmest year yet."
The MET, as it's known, predicted 2007 would likely surpass 1998 as the hottest year on record.
(A caution. When we talk about any year being the "hottest on record" globally we're only talking about the 150-odd years for which instrumental temperature records exist, not the hottest year "ever." Such "records" are thus less impressive than they sound.)
You probably heard about the MET's prediction since it was trumpeted by the media worldwide a year ago. Many quoted a MET consultant solemnly emphasizing: "This new information represents another warning that climate change is happening around the world."
In fact, not only was 2007 cooler than 1998, it wasn't statistically different from any year going back to 2001. None came close to 1998. How many media outlets which gave the original story such prominence will correct the record? We'll see.
The MET quietly mentions in its footnotes for this year's prediction, issued Jan. 3 and rather wistfully headlined "Global temperatures 2008: Another top 10 year": "The forecast value for 2008 mean temperature is considered indistinguishable from any of the years 2001-7, given the uncertainties in the data. It is most unlikely that 2008 will be as warm or warmer than the current warmest year of 1998 ..."
Translation? Oops, 2007 wasn't the hottest year, as we predicted a year ago.
And 2008 will probably be cooler. Indeed, a climate researcher quoted in this year's release asserts: "The fact that 2008 is forecast to be cooler (my italics) than any of the last seven years (and that 2007 did not break the record warmth set (in) 1998) does not mean that global warming has gone away." He argues there's an "underlying rate of warming."
Enough. While man-made global warming remains the accepted theory to explain the rise in global temperature over the past several decades, data for one, seven or 10 years don't conclusively prove anything.
It's not long enough. There are also theories global warming is being temporarily masked by ocean and/or aerosol cooling. Maybe.
Then again, 35 years ago, many scientists thought we might be on the verge of a new Ice Age. There's lots we don't know.
Meanwhile, Y2Kyoto believers today even cite local heat waves as evidence of global warming. More nonsense, which confuses climate change with weather.
They should read, "Year of Global Cooling" a clever piece by Prof. David Deming, a geophysicist, in the Dec. 19 Washington Times.
It begins: "Al Gore says global warming is a planetary emergency. It is difficult to see how this can be so when record low temperatures are being set all over the world ...
"Since the mid-19th century, the mean global temperature has increased 0.7 degrees Celsius. This slight warming is not unusual, and lies well within the range of natural variation. Carbon dioxide continues to build in the atmosphere, but the mean planetary temperature hasn't increased significantly for nearly nine years. Antarctica is getting colder. Neither the intensity nor the frequency of hurricanes has increased. The 2007 season was the third quietest since 1966 ...
FIRST SNOW SINCE 1918
"South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires snow fell for the first time since the year 1918 ... In Peru, 200 people died from cold and thousands more became infected with respiratory diseases. Crops failed, livestock perished, and the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency." And on it goes.
As Deming writes, Y2Kyoto hysterics basically argue "all weather variations are evidence for global warming" no matter what they are, adding bemusedly, "I can't make this stuff up."
Unfortunately, many people are.

 

[Gonzo]

Exxon has been consistently criticized for its environmental record. Exxon was a long-term primary supporter of the anti-Kyoto Protocol, Global Climate Coalition from 1989 until its deactivation in 2001. The Global Climate Coalition was a group of mainly United States businesses opposing immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The group formed in 1989 as a response to several reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They funded scientist in their “research” to debunk the fact that climate change was happening because of carbon emissions. There have been 40 ExxonMobil-funded organizations that either have sought to undermine mainstream scientific findings on global climate change or have maintained affiliations with a small group of "skeptic" scientists who continue to do so. These organizations received more than $8m in funding.
For some reason, the small group of skeptics get allot of attention in the media.
In 1994 the influential Republican strategist Frank Luntz advised members of the GOP, with regard to climate change, that "you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue" and "challenge the science" by "recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view." Those “experts” were funded by Exxon. In 2005 Philip Cooney, a former lobbyist and "climate team leader" at the American Petroleum Institute, had "repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents." The George W. Bush administration had hired Cooney in 2001 as chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, "the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues."
The British Royal Society conducted a survey that found ExxonMobil had given US$ 2.9 million to American groups that "misinformed the public about climate change," 39 of which "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence".

 

[Extrafire]

[...]
The British Royal Society conducted a survey that found ExxonMobil had given US$ 2.9 million to American groups that "misinformed the public about climate change," 39 of which "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence".

Is that all??? The alarmists get 5 billion a year to misrepresent the science and scare school children.

 

[Extrafire]

[...]

My point is, where is the climate driver that proceeded the rise in greenhouse gases? Your graph makes a good illustrative point, but there is no information in there about radiative forcing changes. Current skeptics will say the sun is doing this or that, but even if that were so, which has unsatisfactorily supported those assertions, where is the natural forcing which induced the greenhouse gas feedbacks? Or more aptly, when?

The climate driver is the sun, which fluctuates all the time. There is the 11 year sunspot cycle, the 87 year Gleissberg cycle and the 210 year DeVries-Suess cycle of solar irradiance. There is also unimpeachable geological evidence of a past warming and cooling cycle of about 1500 years called the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle that has been detected going back over the past 1 million years, but there is no corresponding solar cycle. However, when the 87 and 210 year cycles are superimposed (7 - 210's and 17 - 87's) they nearly coincide at 1470 years, producing the warming and cooling patterns that have been observed. We know that historical and geological evidence supports this pattern for the last couple cycles. 600 - 200 BC was cold. 200 BC - 600 AD was warm - good times for humanity. 600 - 900 was cold, known as the Dark Ages, plagues, disease, crop failure and starvation, and the accompanying human conflict. 900 - 1300 was warm, good times again. 1300 - 1850 was cold, this time with the triple whammy of the Maunder minimum sunspot cycle and the quadruple whammy of (it's believed) several massive volcanic eruptions, making it the Little Ice Age. 1850 to present is warming again, and will continue to warm for a century or two yet before the next cooling takes place. Keep in mind that it is not a smooth transition, it is rather erratic and includes reverses like the cool period between the 1940's and 1970's. Another cooling period would not be evidence that the warming pattern has ended, it's to be expected. We will likely see a return to the benign climate of the Medieval Climate Optimum. This 1500 year cycle was not influenced at all by CO2 concentrations.

We already know that once those feedbacks are kicked in, warming is a feedback of the greenhouse feedback from the proxy records. But show that initial perturbation(s) that caused the greenhouse feedback that could explain the rising concentration now. There is no disconnect between human released greenhouse gases, and the warming that it has caused.

Read my response above for the explanation. As far as contrary to scientific evidence, there is no human signal in the proxy record, instead we have incorporated what we know from the proxy record, with current empirical measurements, and we can see that we are causing warming. That is not contrary to the science at all.

What I hear you saying here is; that over the 400,000 years before significant human emissions, we know what the influences were on the production of CO2 and the levels in the atmosphere. But since then, there is a different pattern of CO2 levels, inconsistent with past patterns, so something else must have entered the picture. It would make sense to look for any new cause that was absent in the past, and the only one found is human activity. I'm with you thus far. Seems quite logical. Your next point seems to be that since the only additional input is human activity, therefore human activity must be responsible for the increase of CO2. Here we part company, because you cannot make that conclusion without direct evidence that points to humans. Since humans are only responsible for 3% of CO2 emissions, we could not be responsible for the amount of increase observed. That aside, you then seem to jump to the conclusion that we are causing warming...by how? Are you inferring that our CO2 is causing the warming, contrary to the reaction to CO2 in the past? This is not logical.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Radmath.htm
That breaks it down fairly well. You're doing the same as early researchers, treating the atmosphere as a homogeneous entity. What do you say about the upper atmosphere, where there is very little water vapour? Where the bands are not saturated at all and more carbon dioxide traps the outgoing radiation that would have left the atmosphere?

From the link:

Much remained to be done to account for all the important real-world factors, especially the physics of clouds.

They still don't know near enough about clouds to factor them into their calculations and the general circulation models are still not viable.

And how much is the atmospheric concentration rising by? We know that the ocean eats about half of our contribution, though even that rate is falling.

When oceans are warming they release CO2 to the atmosphere.

Was it you that said sometimes it more about what isn't said then what is said?

Nope, wasn't me, but I like it.

Natural emissions have been a fine tuned balance for eons. Human contribution is adding to what wasn't there. If you notice, the concentration in the atmosphere was fairly stable for the last few thousand years, which suggests that there was an equilibrium.

Seems to have been, but there have been much greater proportions in the past, even as much as 8 times as high during an ice age. (Can't find that info at the moment.) And there's no evidence that more of the stuff will harm us, but lots of evidence that it will be beneficial.

But as you haven't been able to pinpoint the forcing which in the past has caused this change, your argument is what exactly? We know we're increasing emissions, and we know the sinks are not absorbing all of that. This past week, a study released shows that the forests now are absorbing less carbon than we had predicted. The Oceans are absorbing less carbon

We know that we're increasing emissions and we know that nature's emissions are greater my many orders of magnitude and we know that nature is also increasing emissions.

 

[zoofer]

There is only one solution to man made global warming and that is to sharply reduce the number of men. Women get a pass as they do not fart as much.

So would all true brainwashed tree hugging believers do the right thing to save the planet?

Take a long walk off a short pier?
:thumbup:

 

[zoofer]

... and if you are loathe to do your part for the ultimate sacrifice for the carbon credit hucksters consider getting a snip job.

Mark Steyn: Children? Not if you love the planet

By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist
Comments 24| Recommend 34
This is the time of year, as Hillary Rodham Clinton once put it, when Christians celebrate "the birth of a homeless child" – or, in Al Gore's words, "a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child."
Just for the record, Jesus wasn't "homeless." He had a perfectly nice home back in Nazareth. But he happened to be born in Bethlehem. It was census time, and Joseph was obliged to schlep halfway across the country to register in the town of his birth. Which is such an absurdly bureaucratic overregulatory cockamamie Big Government nightmare that it's surely only a matter of time before Massachusetts or California reintroduce it.
But the point is: The Christmas story isn't about affordable housing. Joseph and Mary couldn't get a hotel room – that's the only accommodation aspect of the event. Sen. Clinton and Vice President Gore are overcomplicating things: Dec. 25 is not the celebration of "a homeless child," but a child, period.
Just for a moment, let us accept, as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and the other bestselling atheists insist, that what happened in Bethlehem two millennia is a lot of mumbo-jumbo. As I wrote a year ago, consider it not as an event but as a narrative: You want to launch a big new global movement from scratch. So what do you use?
The birth of a child. On the one hand, what could be more powerless than a newborn babe? On the other, without a newborn babe, man is ultimately powerless. For, without new life, there can be no civilization, no society, no nothing. Even if it's superstitious mumbo-jumbo, the decision to root Christ's divinity in the miracle of His birth expresses a profound – and rational – truth about "eternal life" here on Earth.
Last year I wrote a book on demographic decline and became a big demography bore, and it's tempting just to do an annual December audit on the demographic weakness of what we used to call Christendom. Today, in the corporate headquarters of the Christian faith, Pope Benedict looks out of his window at a city where children's voices are rarer and rarer. Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe. Go to a big rural family wedding: lots of aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas but ever fewer bambinos. The International Herald Tribune last week carried the latest update on the remorseless geriatrification: On the Miss Italia beauty pageant, the median age of the co-hosts was 70; the country is second only to Sweden in the proportion of its population over 85, and has the fewest citizens under 15. Etc.
So in post-Catholic Italy there is no miracle of a child this Christmas – unless you count the 70 percent of Italians between the ages of 20 and 30 who still live at home, the world's oldest teenagers still trudging up the stairs to the room they slept in as a child even as they approach their fourth decade. That's worth bearing in mind if you're an American gal heading to Rome on vacation: When that cool 29-year-old with the Mediterranean charm in the singles bar asks you back to his pad for a nightcap, it'll be his mom and dad's place.
I'm often told that my demographics-is-destiny argument is anachronistic: Countries needed manpower in the Industrial Age, when we worked in mills and factories. But now advanced societies are "knowledge economies," and they require fewer working stiffs. Oddly enough, the Lisbon Council's European Human Capital Index, released in October, thinks precisely the opposite – that the calamitous decline in population will prevent Eastern and Central Europe from being able to function as "innovation economies." A "knowledge economy" will be as smart as the brains it can call on.
Meanwhile, a few Europeans are still having children: The British government just announced that Muhammad is now the most popular boy's name in the United Kingdom.
As I say, the above demographic audit has become something of an annual tradition in this space. But here's something new that took hold in the year 2007: A radical antihumanism, long present just below the surface, bobbed up and became explicit and respectable. In Britain, the Optimum Population Trust said that "the biggest cause of climate change is climate changers – in other words, human beings," and professor John Guillebaud called on Britons to voluntarily reduce the number of children they have.
Last week, in the Medical Journal of Australia, Barry Walters went further: To hell with this wimp-o pantywaist "voluntary" child-reduction. Professor Walters wants a "carbon tax" on babies, with, conversely, "carbon credits" for those who undergo sterilization procedures. So that'd be great news for the female eco-activists recently profiled in London's Daily Mail who boast about how they'd had their tubes tied and babies aborted in order to save the planet. "Every person who is born," says Toni Vernelli, "produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases and adds to the problem of overpopulation." We are the pollution, and sterilization is the solution. The best way to bequeath a more sustainable environment to our children is not to have any.
What's the "pro-choice" line? "Every child should be wanted"? Not anymore. The progressive position has subtly evolved: Every child should be unwanted.
By the way, if you're looking for some last-minute stocking stuffers, Oxford University Press has published a book by professor David Benatar of the University of Cape Town called "Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence." The author "argues for the 'anti-natal' view – that it is always wrong to have children … . Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct." As does Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us" – which Publishers Weekly hails as "an enthralling tour of the world … anticipating, often poetically, what a planet without us would be like." It's a good thing it "anticipates" it poetically, because, once it happens, there will be no more poetry.
Lest you think the above are "extremists," consider how deeply invested the "mainstream" is in a total fiction. At the recent climate jamboree in Bali, the Rev. Al Gore told the assembled faithful: "My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here." Really? The American Thinker's Web site ran the numbers. In the seven years between the signing of Kyoto in 1997 and 2004, here's what happened:
•Emissions worldwide increased 18.0 percent;
•Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1 percent;
•Emissions from nonsigners increased 10.0 percent; and
•Emissions from the United States increased 6.6 percent.
It's hard not to conclude a form of mental illness has gripped the world's elites. If you're one of that dwindling band of Westerners who'll be celebrating the birth of a child, "homeless" or otherwise, next week, make the most of it. A year or two on, and the eco-professors will propose banning Nativity scenes because they set a bad example.
©MARK STEYN
http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/opinion/nationalcolumns/article_1942317.php

 

[Tonington]

The climate driver is the sun, which fluctuates all the time. There is the 11 year sunspot cycle, the 87 year Gleissberg cycle and the 210 year DeVries-Suess cycle of solar irradiance. There is also unimpeachable geological evidence of a past warming and cooling cycle of about 1500 years called the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle that has been detected going back over the past 1 million years, but there is no corresponding solar cycle. However, when the 87 and 210 year cycles are superimposed (7 - 210's and 17 - 87's) they nearly coincide at 1470 years, producing the warming and cooling patterns that have been observed. We know that historical and geological evidence supports this pattern for the last couple cycles. 600 - 200 BC was cold. 200 BC - 600 AD was warm - good times for humanity. 600 - 900 was cold, known as the Dark Ages, plagues, disease, crop failure and starvation, and the accompanying human conflict. 900 - 1300 was warm, good times again. 1300 - 1850 was cold, this time with the triple whammy of the Maunder minimum sunspot cycle and the quadruple whammy of (it's believed) several massive volcanic eruptions, making it the Little Ice Age. 1850 to present is warming again, and will continue to warm for a century or two yet before the next cooling takes place. Keep in mind that it is not a smooth transition, it is rather erratic and includes reverses like the cool period between the 1940's and 1970's. Another cooling period would not be evidence that the warming pattern has ended, it's to be expected. We will likely see a return to the benign climate of the Medieval Climate Optimum. This 1500 year cycle was not influenced at all by CO2 concentrations.

One of the drivers is the sun. Some changes are unrelated to solar changes.

But you didn't answer my question. Yes some of those events are generally accepted, others are not. But did they cause the rise we see now? If so, how? What was the radiative change to the climate. That should be easy enough if it is indeed the case. Proxies record these changes.

What I hear you saying here is; that over the 400,000 years before significant human emissions, we know what the influences were on the production of CO2 and the levels in the atmosphere. But since then, there is a different pattern of CO2 levels, inconsistent with past patterns, so something else must have entered the picture. It would make sense to look for any new cause that was absent in the past, and the only one found is human activity. I'm with you thus far. Seems quite logical. Your next point seems to be that since the only additional input is human activity, therefore human activity must be responsible for the increase of CO2. Here we part company, because you cannot make that conclusion without direct evidence that points to humans. Since humans are only responsible for 3% of CO2 emissions, we could not be responsible for the amount of increase observed. That aside, you then seem to jump to the conclusion that we are causing warming...by how? Are you inferring that our CO2 is causing the warming, contrary to the reaction to CO2 in the past? This is not logical.

Humans are responsible for 3% of annual emissions. So how much is the atmospheric concentration increasing by each year?

What reaction to CO2 in the past are you talking about? In the past CO2 amplified the radiative change caused by the initial perturbations which caused the change in CO2 concentration. That is both logical and recorded. It matters not to the climate whether the CO2 is produced by human industry, or by a change in heat causing outgassing from oceans and soil.

From the link:They still don't know near enough about clouds to factor them into their calculations and the general circulation models are still not viable.

Not once have I said that we had wrapped up the science. The GCM's are viable. To say otherwise is to ignore a wealth of supporting data from many different species of models.

When oceans are warming they release CO2 to the atmosphere.

Right. And that is a feedback loop.

Seems to have been, but there have been much greater proportions in the past, even as much as 8 times as high during an ice age. (Can't find that info at the moment.) And there's no evidence that more of the stuff will harm us, but lots of evidence that it will be beneficial.

Depends where you live. The Inuit will be harmed. Coastal cities will be harmed.

We know that we're increasing emissions and we know that nature's emissions are greater my many orders of magnitude and we know that nature is also increasing emissions.

Ahh, but nature has and will absorb that which it released, when the seasons change. That carbon is already in the cycle. Ours was not.

 

[Walter]

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Jewish World Review [FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Week of Jan. 14, 2008[/FONT][/FONT]

 

[zoofer]

:laughing1:

So true.

It has become a religion to the eco terrorists.

 

[Extrafire]

One of the drivers is the sun. Some changes are unrelated to solar changes.

But you didn't answer my question. Yes some of those events are generally accepted, others are not. But did they cause the rise we see now? If so, how? What was the radiative change to the climate. That should be easy enough if it is indeed the case. Proxies record these changes.

Sure, there's other climate drivers, such as cosmic rays. But it all depends on the sun. It's known that the increase in irradiance isn't enough to account for the increased global temps. However it's also known that the action of cosmic rays and clouds in combination with the increased irradiance multiplies that increase by about 4 times, which accounts for pretty much all of the observed warming we see now.

Humans are responsible for 3% of annual emissions. So how much is the atmospheric concentration increasing by each year?

What reaction to CO2 in the past are you talking about? In the past CO2 amplified the radiative change caused by the initial perturbations which caused the change in CO2 concentration. That is both logical and recorded. It matters not to the climate whether the CO2 is produced by human industry, or by a change in heat causing outgassing from oceans and soil.

CO2 will amplify the radiative increase a bit, depending on how much of it is already in the atmosphere. The more there is, the less effect any more will have. It needs more irradiance to be effective to any noticeable extent. And no, it matters not a whit where it comes from, it all reacts the same, so to suggest the (comparitively) minimal amount we contribute can have such a massive effect is not at all logical.

Not once have I said that we had wrapped up the science.

No you haven't, although other alarmists have. I give you credit for that, as due.

The GCM's are viable. To say otherwise is to ignore a wealth of supporting data from many different species of models.

In 2001 NASA discovered a massive heat vent over the Pacific (the warmest spot on the planet, apparently) that had vented the equivalent heat into space during the '80s and '90s as would be produced by a doubling of CO2. They passed that info on to some of the scientists and asked them to include it in their models. They were unable to so so. Any GCM that omits that data is not viable. Similarly, there is so much unknown about the effect of clouds that any model can not be viable.

Right. And that is a feedback loop.

It would be a feedback loop if CO2 were the warming agent that the alarmists claim, but it's not.

Depends where you live. The Inuit will be harmed. Coastal cities will be harmed.

Just how does more CO2 harm Inuit or Coastal cities? I can't think of any possible way.

Ahh, but nature has and will absorb that which it released, when the seasons change. That carbon is already in the cycle. Ours was not.

Since nature has both absorbed and released amounts greater than it's dealing with now, it will handle this stuff too. As you said above, it matters not whether it's human caused or natural.

 

[Tonington]

Sure, there's other climate drivers, such as cosmic rays.

Cosmic rays? Funny how something like the Mann hockey stick can be so ill-regarded,yet it has been repeated many times, by many different investigations, and with different proxy records and assumptions no less. That is the repeatable element of science. But cosmic rays has been thoroughly ruled out of the current literature as not even meeting the most basic of statistics, the correlation, and has been repeatedly shown to be lacking in merit.

I admit freely, that there were errors in Mann's investigation. But others have yileded a similarly shaped graph, as I said with different proxies, and without the sampling errors Mann made. So the magnitude may be slightly askew, but the conclusions are no less potent. Mann is an easy mark to beat up on. Try the other studies, and see how they stack up.
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

But it all depends on the sun. It's known that the increase in irradiance isn't enough to account for the increased global temps. However it's also known that the action of cosmic rays and clouds in combination with the increased irradiance multiplies that increase by about 4 times, which accounts for pretty much all of the observed warming we see now.

Which study was that again, was it Svensmark? And to quote your skeptical dogma, the cosmic rays actually lag the temperature. Have a fun time explaining the temperature feedback to cosmic rays originating in space

There is no continuity in these solar explanations. Further, they are all based on models. So what makes you think these models are any better than any others?

If you're skeptical of greenhouse gases, there is even more reason to be skeptical of cosmic ray theory and cloud formations. Way more questions, and much weaker statistically.

CO2 will amplify the radiative increase a bit, depending on how much of it is already in the atmosphere. The more there is, the less effect any more will have. It needs more irradiance to be effective to any noticeable extent. And no, it matters not a whit where it comes from, it all reacts the same, so to suggest the (comparitively) minimal amount we contribute can have such a massive effect is not at all logical.

Yah, logarithmic. And a good thing too.

What massive effect are you talking about? Since when did you admit there was a current massive effect from the greenhouse effect? The temperature anomaly doesn't have to be 'massive' to make significant adverse reactions occur to eco-systems. It only needs to cross thresholds. Like the corals of the Caribbean in 2005.

In 2001 NASA discovered a massive heat vent over the Pacific (the warmest spot on the planet, apparently) that had vented the equivalent heat into space during the '80s and '90s as would be produced by a doubling of CO2. They passed that info on to some of the scientists and asked them to include it in their models. They were unable to so so. Any GCM that omits that data is not viable. Similarly, there is so much unknown about the effect of clouds that any model can not be viable.

Do you have a link to that story? I'd like to see that. I can understand heat transport to the atmosphere, but all the way to space doesn't compute.

It would be a feedback loop if CO2 were the warming agent that the alarmists claim, but it's not.

It is a feedback loop. You can't deny that. You can deny the strength of the relationship, as there are many qualified opinions on that.

Just how does more CO2 harm Inuit or Coastal cities? I can't think of any possible way.

I think you can, you just deny the impact CO2 has. We've been through this before. No sense repeating the same dance.

Since nature has both absorbed and released amounts greater than it's dealing with now, it will handle this stuff too. As you said above, it matters not whether it's human caused or natural.

What matters is capacity. You can't just dump billions of tonnes of anything into a nutrient stream and expect smooth sailing. Especially considering eco-system degradation. In the long run of course it handles it. But that's on a scales longer than human history. It's part of a long equilibrium.

 

[Walter]

Friday 25 January 2008
Alexander Cockburn


While the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in CO2 levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy.

In magazine articles and essays I have described in fairly considerable detail, with input from the scientist Martin Hertzberg, that you can account for the current warming by a number of well-known factors - to do with the elliptical course of the Earth in its relationship to the sun, the axis of the Earth in the current period, and possibly the influence of solar flares. There have been similar warming cycles in the past, such as the medieval warming period, when the warming levels were considerably higher than they are now.
Yet from left to right, the warming that is occurring today is taken as being man-made, and many have made it into the central plank of their political campaigns. For reasons I find very hard to fathom, the environmental left movement has bought very heavily into the fantasy about anthropogenic global warming and the fantasy that humans can prevent or turn back the warming cycle.
This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice.
This is a fantasy. In truth, environmental catastrophism will, in fact it already has, play into the hands of sinister-as-always corporate interests. The nuclear industry is benefiting immeasurably from the current catastrophism. Last year, for example, the American nuclear regulatory commission speeded up its process of licensing; there is an imminent wave of nuclear plant building. Many in the nuclear industry see in the story about CO2 causing climate change an opportunity to recover from the adverse publicity of Chernobyl.
More generally, climate catastrophism is leading to a re-emphasis of the powers of the advanced industrial world, through its various trade mechanisms, to penalise Third World countries. For example, the Indians have just produced an extremely cheap car called the Tata Nano, which will enable poorer Indians to get about more easily without having to load their entire family on to a bicycle. Greens have already attacked the car, and it won’t take long for the WTO and the advanced powers to start punishing India with a lot of missionary-style nonsense about its carbon emissions and so on.
The politics of climate change also has potential impacts on farmers. Third World farmers who don’t use seed strains or agricultural procedures that are sanctioned by the international AG corporations and major multilateral institutions and banks controlled by the Western powers will be sabotaged by attacks on their ‘excessive carbon footprint’. The environmental catastrophism peddled by many who claim to be progressive is strengthening the hand of corporate interests over ordinary people.
Here in the West, the so-called ‘war on global warming’ is reminiscent of medieval madness. You can now buy Indulgences to offset your carbon guilt. If you fly, you give an extra 10 quid to British Airways; BA hands it on to some non-profit carbon-offsetting company which sticks the money in its pocket and goes off for lunch. This kind of behaviour is demented.
What is sinister about environmental catastrophism is that it diverts attention from hundreds and hundreds of serious environmental concerns that can be dealt with - starting, perhaps, with the emission of nitrous oxides from power plants. Here, in California, if you drive upstate you can see the pollution all up the Central Valley from Los Angeles, a lot of it caused, ironically, by the sulphuric acid droplets from catalytic converters! The problem is that 20 or 30 years ago, the politicians didn’t want to take on the power companies, so they fixed their sights on penalising motorists who are less able to fight back. Decade after decade, power plants have been given a pass on the emissions from their smoke stacks while measures to force citizens to change their behaviour are brought in.
Emissions from power plants are something that could be dealt with now. You don’t need to have a world programme called ‘Kyoto’ to fix something like that. The Kyoto Accord must be one of the most reactionary political manifestos in the history of the world; it represents a horrible privileging of the advanced industrial powers over developing nations.
The marriage of environmental catastrophism and corporate interests is best captured in the figure of Al Gore. As a politician, he came to public light as a shill for two immense power schemes in the state of Tennessee: the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratory. Gore is not, as he claims, a non-partisan green; he is influenced very much by his background. His arguments, many of which are based on grotesque science and shrill predictions, seem to me to be part of a political and corporate outlook.
In today’s political climate, it has become fairly dangerous for a young scientist or professor to step up and say: ‘This is all nonsense.’ It is increasingly difficult to challenge the global warming consensus, on either a scientific or a political level. Academies can be incredibly cowardly institutions, and if one of their employees was to question the discussion of climate change he or she would be pulled to one side and told: ‘You’re threatening our funding and reputation - do you really want to do that?’ I don’t think we should underestimate the impact that kind of informal pressure can have on people’s willingness to think thoroughly and speak openly.
One way in which critics are silenced is through the accusation that they are ignoring ‘peer-reviewed science’. Yet oftentimes, peer review is a nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle. The history of peer review and how it developed is not a pretty sight. Through the process of peer review, of certain papers being nodded through by experts and other papers being given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it. Many people who fall back on peer-reviewed science seem afraid to have out the intellectual argument.
Since I started writing essays challenging the global warming consensus, and seeking to put forward critical alternative arguments, I have felt almost witch-hunted. There has been an hysterical reaction. One individual, who was once on the board of the Sierra Club, has suggested I should be criminally prosecuted. I wrote a series of articles on climate change issues for the Nation, which elicited a level of hysterical outrage and affront that I found to be astounding - and I have a fairly thick skin, having been in the business of making unpopular arguments for many, many years.
There was a shocking intensity to their self-righteous fury, as if I had transgressed a moral as well as an intellectual boundary and committed blasphemy. I sometimes think to myself, ‘Boy, I’m glad I didn’t live in the 1450s’, because I would be out in the main square with a pile of wood around my ankles. I really feel that; it is remarkable how quickly the hysterical reaction takes hold and rains down upon those who question the consensus.
This experience has given me an understanding of what it must have been like in darker periods to be accused of being a blasphemer; of the summary and unpleasant consequences that can bring. There is a witch-hunting element in climate catastrophism. That is clear in the use of the word ‘denier’ to label those who question claims about anthropogenic climate change. ‘Climate change denier’ is, of course, meant to evoke the figure of the Holocaust denier. This was contrived to demonise sceptics. The past few years show clearly how mass moral panics and intellectual panics become engendered.
In my forthcoming book, A Short History of Fear, I explore the link between fearmongering and climate catastrophism. For example, alarmism about population explosion is being revisited through the climate issue. Population alarmism goes back as far as Malthus, of course; and in the environmental movement there has always been a very sinister strain of Malthusianism. This is particularly the case in the US where there has never been as great a socialist challenge as there was in Europe. I suspect, however, that even in Europe, what remains of socialism has itself turned into a degraded Malthusian outlook. It seems clear to me that climate catastrophism represents a new form of the politics of fear.