How the GW myth is perpetuated
- Thread starter Walter
- Start date
Less snowfall and more rain! My ass! We're into our 7th major snowfall of the season today and no end in sight. I:xt's getting harder every day to believe in global warming.
Hmmm, South America had it's coldest winter in 90 years, the antarctic sea ice reached a record size (and it's still well above normal) and now the arctic sea ice (that everyone was so worried about when it blew away) is all back, and then some.
Not quite what was predicted.
Current ice cover can be seen at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Polar Research Group, Department of Atmospheric Sciences.
Not quite what was predicted.
Current ice cover can be seen at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Polar Research Group, Department of Atmospheric Sciences.
January 1, 2008
Findings
In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm
By JOHN TIERNEY
I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.
You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.
Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.
But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).
Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.
A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record — it was actually lower than any year since 2001 — the BBC confidently proclaimed, “2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.”
When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.
When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to be a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate modelers. When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm — by some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest in three decades — the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject. Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have more, not less, precipitation over all).
The most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact on the public.
When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don’t have so many vivid images readily available.
Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.
The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.
“Many people concerned about climate change,” Dr. Sunstein says, “want to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people’s minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I don’t doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat, but there’s a danger that any ‘consensus’ on particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade.”
Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.
Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they’re also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents. Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention — and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.
Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.
Guess which paper jibed with the theory — and image of Katrina — presented by Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”?
It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was published in December — by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.
In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn’t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded somewhat mysteriously to “stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,” and focused on other kinds of disasters, like “massive droughts” and “massive flooding.”
“In the last few months,” Mr. Gore said, “it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.” But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.
Findings
In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm
By JOHN TIERNEY
I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.
You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.
Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.
But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).
Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.
A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record — it was actually lower than any year since 2001 — the BBC confidently proclaimed, “2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.”
When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.
When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to be a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate modelers. When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm — by some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest in three decades — the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject. Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have more, not less, precipitation over all).
The most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact on the public.
When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don’t have so many vivid images readily available.
Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.
The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.
“Many people concerned about climate change,” Dr. Sunstein says, “want to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people’s minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I don’t doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat, but there’s a danger that any ‘consensus’ on particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade.”
Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.
Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they’re also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents. Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention — and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.
Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.
Guess which paper jibed with the theory — and image of Katrina — presented by Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”?
It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was published in December — by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.
In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn’t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded somewhat mysteriously to “stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,” and focused on other kinds of disasters, like “massive droughts” and “massive flooding.”
“In the last few months,” Mr. Gore said, “it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.” But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.
It's been higher.Ah the the flat-earthers still grasp onto what straws they have left even though no one can dispute the following chart.
Go ahead, ask what the temperature were during the same time......if you have the guts.
Not during the age of Civilization, and not without significant differences from todays climate. Further, not since the period changed from 40 kyr to 100 kyr for climate variance about 700,000 years ago. That's why this current situation is anomalous from the proxy records.
Ah the the flat-earthers still grasp onto what straws they have left even though no one can dispute the following chart.
Go ahead, ask what the temperature were during the same time......if you have the guts.
I don't have to ask. I know what they were doing. For the first half of your graph they were falling. For the second half the were rising. No correlation.
The Biggest Whopper of 2007
Julie Walsh, CEI
January 2, 2008
Among the candidates for the biggest cock-and-bull story in 2007 must be NASA’s James Hansen with his work of creative genius on Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets and his wannabes, who subsequently copied his imaginative tour de force.
Even the facts are no match for James Hansen and his incredible modeling machine! Though Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice rests in deep bowls, Hansen declares them inclined planes. Then despite ice cores that show little to no movement for the past 400,000 years (including the warm periods), he shamelessly states that these gigantic ice sheets are slip, slidin’ away and the world will be flooded.
The idea of “meltwater lakes on the surface finding their way down through cracks in the ice and lubricating the bottom of the glacier is not compatible with accumulation of undisturbed snow layers. It might conceivably work on valley glaciers but it tells us nothing of the ‘collapse’ of ice sheets,” according to Cliff Ollier, School of Earth and Geographical Science at the University of Western Australia, “Indeed ‘collapse’ is impossible.”
Alarmists have to be thrilled with the successfulness of Hansen’s 2007 con—without this lie there is no catastrophic flooding, and all they are left with is the IPCC’s non-eventful one-foot-in-a-century sea level rise.
I wonder if Hansen’s modeler can also make Everlasting Gobstoppers!
Julie Walsh, CEI
January 2, 2008
Among the candidates for the biggest cock-and-bull story in 2007 must be NASA’s James Hansen with his work of creative genius on Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets and his wannabes, who subsequently copied his imaginative tour de force.
Even the facts are no match for James Hansen and his incredible modeling machine! Though Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice rests in deep bowls, Hansen declares them inclined planes. Then despite ice cores that show little to no movement for the past 400,000 years (including the warm periods), he shamelessly states that these gigantic ice sheets are slip, slidin’ away and the world will be flooded.
The idea of “meltwater lakes on the surface finding their way down through cracks in the ice and lubricating the bottom of the glacier is not compatible with accumulation of undisturbed snow layers. It might conceivably work on valley glaciers but it tells us nothing of the ‘collapse’ of ice sheets,” according to Cliff Ollier, School of Earth and Geographical Science at the University of Western Australia, “Indeed ‘collapse’ is impossible.”
Alarmists have to be thrilled with the successfulness of Hansen’s 2007 con—without this lie there is no catastrophic flooding, and all they are left with is the IPCC’s non-eventful one-foot-in-a-century sea level rise.
I wonder if Hansen’s modeler can also make Everlasting Gobstoppers!
Global warming bias
Friday, January 4, 2008
It seems the world is jumping into the global warming waters the same way those Polar Bear Club members jump into some frigid body of water each New Year's Day -- with abandon.
How about an honest debate about global warming in 2008?
Pittsburgh native John Tierney gave the not-so Chicken Littles a small ray of hope the other day in his "Findings" column in The New York Times. Last year was not the hottest year on record, as British meteorologists had predicted it would be, he notes. In fact, 2007's global temperature average was lower than any year since 2001.
And Mr. Tierney also notes how the Antarctic sea ice last year hit the highest level ever recorded. But you wouldn't know it from most of the mainstream media's coverage.
And you likely didn't hear a whole lot -- or anything -- about the peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres that halved the previously calculated rate at which the planet has warmed.
What's even more astounding is that one of the authors of the rectifying study -- Patrick J. Michaels -- is a member of the global alarmists' much revered United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Tierney also documents this tawdry little global warming reporting phenomenon, citing a look-see by Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado. He exposed the gaping disparity in the number of news articles regarding studies that reached opposite conclusions about the nexus between global warming and increased hurricane activity.
A study in the obscure Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society that talked up the link resulted in more than 26 times the media coverage than a study in the more mainstream journal Nature that downplayed any nexus.
As Mr. Michaels notes, "Theoretically, assuming unbiased climate research, every new finding should have an equal probability of indicating that things are going to be more or less warm, or worse-than-we-thought vs. not-so-bad." But the fact is much of the climate research is biased and so is the reportage. And that only confirms what many have suspected all along -- global warming isn't about the planet but about politics, power and social re-engineering.
Friday, January 4, 2008
It seems the world is jumping into the global warming waters the same way those Polar Bear Club members jump into some frigid body of water each New Year's Day -- with abandon.
How about an honest debate about global warming in 2008?
Pittsburgh native John Tierney gave the not-so Chicken Littles a small ray of hope the other day in his "Findings" column in The New York Times. Last year was not the hottest year on record, as British meteorologists had predicted it would be, he notes. In fact, 2007's global temperature average was lower than any year since 2001.
And Mr. Tierney also notes how the Antarctic sea ice last year hit the highest level ever recorded. But you wouldn't know it from most of the mainstream media's coverage.
And you likely didn't hear a whole lot -- or anything -- about the peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres that halved the previously calculated rate at which the planet has warmed.
What's even more astounding is that one of the authors of the rectifying study -- Patrick J. Michaels -- is a member of the global alarmists' much revered United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Tierney also documents this tawdry little global warming reporting phenomenon, citing a look-see by Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado. He exposed the gaping disparity in the number of news articles regarding studies that reached opposite conclusions about the nexus between global warming and increased hurricane activity.
A study in the obscure Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society that talked up the link resulted in more than 26 times the media coverage than a study in the more mainstream journal Nature that downplayed any nexus.
As Mr. Michaels notes, "Theoretically, assuming unbiased climate research, every new finding should have an equal probability of indicating that things are going to be more or less warm, or worse-than-we-thought vs. not-so-bad." But the fact is much of the climate research is biased and so is the reportage. And that only confirms what many have suspected all along -- global warming isn't about the planet but about politics, power and social re-engineering.
The saying, "Less is more" rings true in the case of exclamation marks. One will suffice for almost any occasion, and forming a small army of exclamation marks to attack your reader with excruciating force is entirely unnecessary. Another appropriate analogy would be the boy who cried exclamation mark. If you use it all the time then people will begin to realize that you really don't have anything to exclaim. They will probably assume you have become addicted to their use and can't stop. One of the worst cases I have ever seen of exclamation excess was in the greeting from a personal ad. Every single sentence ended with an exclamation mark. One would think that generally, people want to make a good impression, but shouldn't that be even more true in a personal ad? What kind of person has so much exuberance bubbling from them that everything they say is an exclamation?
Excerpted from: http://dan.hersam.com/opinions/exclamation.html
Well gee Walt...what kind of person would continually post the same "news" about global warming and the "myth of global warming" and all the various other nuggets you've contributed on the same theme?
Exclamation points are punctuation Walt, they're muliple use in any contribution pales beside your litany of "AGW...what a Myth" chant that's filled these forums constantly.
If you abhor over-use of puncuation where is your perspective on offering up the same song time and time and time and time and time again....?
Exclamation points are punctuation Walt, they're muliple use in any contribution pales beside your litany of "AGW...what a Myth" chant that's filled these forums constantly.
If you abhor over-use of puncuation where is your perspective on offering up the same song time and time and time and time and time again....?
Independent means letting someone else make your points?
A thoughtful, thinking, independent person would have their own comments to make, and if needed rely on citations for why they think as they do.
I have yet to hear your specific beef with anything about the established science. What is your thoughtful opinion on the trend of temperature rise preceding greenhouse gas rise in the past, and why it is absent from the current trend?
What he's referring to Walter, is the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. In the past, as you can see in the graph below, temperature fluctuations always preceded CO2 fluctuations, either up or down. It's quite clear and has been known to science for some time that CO2 increases are a result of global warming, when the seas release CO2 to the atmosphere. What Tonington is talking about is that there is much more CO2 apparently in the atmosphere at this time than ever in the past, as is indicated by ice cores from Antarctica. The red line is the CO2 level, and if you look way over on the right side of the graph you'll notice that the red line goes up much higher than ever before. His point is that obviously the preceding temperature increase isn't sufficient to raise CO2 levels that high, so it must be human activity doing it.
That does appear to be the case, and it's somewhat reasonable to assume that humans are to blame for the unprecedented increase. He then assumes, contrary to scientific data about CO2, that for the first time ever, CO2 will begin (is already) driving temperature increase. His reasoning seems to be - there is global warming, we have lots of CO2, therefore CO2 must be the cause. (Correct me if I'm wrong about your theory, Ton)
His idea leaves out some important facts. We know that the more CO2 that is put into the air, the less effective it is as a greenhouse gas because there just isn't enough of the narrow band of infra red frequencies available for it to absorb. (Ton has someone who claims that isn't true, but established science and observations say it is.) We also know that human contribution to world wide CO2 emissions is about 3%, not nearly enough to be responsible for the massive increase. Thus, even if the increase of CO2 could warm the planet, humans wouldn't be responsible. And finally, some time ago I came across an article about a finding that the CO2 in ice core bubbles changes over time, and only about 50% of the CO2 remains. Thus the earlier increases of CO2 on that graph should be twice as high, making the current level well within the average. Problem is I can't find that article to post it.
Either way, the increased CO2 is not a problem and does not make more than a minuscule contribution to global warming, but instead is a great plant fertilizer.
Not all releases of greenhouse gases are global warming and not all are from oceans, but close enough. Initial Eocene warming was driven by volcanic basin interaction with clathrates, according to A. Malthe Sorenssen.
Nope, not what I said.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Was it you that said sometimes it more about what isn't said then what is said? 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.
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
Do a scholarly search. If it is as you say, it should pop up. Even climate audit or junk science would have displayed something like that prominently.