How the GW myth is perpetuated

[Avro]

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.

The copy and paste king strikes again.:lol:

 

[Walter]

The copy and paste king strikes again.:lol:

Professional writers put words together more better than me do.

 

[Cobalt_Kid]

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.

Yah, and maybe if you slip on your ruby slippers, click your heels together and wish real hard you'll get back to Kansas too.:lol:

This is one of the most moronic things I've read here. What do you think happens to all the C02 produced from burning the billions of tons of fossil fuels over the last couple of centuries. Whether it was the coal that fueled the industrial age and still powers many nations electrical grids or the massive amounts of oil that have been pumped from underground reservoirs and burned in ships, power plants, cars, planes etc...our whole way of life revolves around using substances that put emmense amounts of CO2 gas into the atmosphere and oceans every year, of course there's an anthropogenic origin to the rise in C02 levels. You remind me of the idiots who think the oceans can't be fished out because they're JUST SO BIG.:lol:

"There's no place like home, there's no place like home...":lol:

 

[Tonington]

Yes, Cockburn, the one who spurns the peer review process. There is an inconvenient truth to the claims he posits.

First, there are only two carbon sources in the carbon cycle that could have produced the atmospheric changes we can see in the past 100 years. The oceans and the land biosphere. If that is where the carbon has come from, we can easily measure that.

So here's a simple challenge, and it doesn't require knowledge of the science heavy relationship between oxygen isotopes and carbon dioxide. How many observations are there that show the carbon in the oceans is decreasing? After that, how many observations are there that the carbon in the ocean is increasing? Hmmm, Cockburn, you have a problem.

What about the land biosphere you say? I'm glad you asked. Sibine in 2004 found that the land biosphere had increased it's absorption of carbon by 39 Petagrams(that's 39,000,000,000,000 kg's) in response to climate change. Then we had that great article, which Walter kindly cut and paste for us, which showed that in fact global tropical forest cover is in fact not decreasing.

Well, it's getting harder to find the source in the carbon cycle.

Ohhhh, that's right. Hydrocarbons aren't part of the carbon cycle. Forgot about that one. And how much are those emissions? About 117 Petagrams. And only half of that is taken up by the oceans and land biosphere.

And, like I said, that's without even getting into the chemistry/biology of photosynthesis and it's prejudice for certain isotopes.

 

[Walter]

[FONT=arial,helvetica][SIZE=+2]Climate Wise
by Brad Allenby
January 2008 [/SIZE][/FONT]
The Dangerous Rise of Carbon Fundamentalism

A professor writing in the Medical Journal of Australia calls on the Australian government to impose a carbon charge of $5,000 on every birth, annual carbon fees of $800 per child and provide a carbon credit for sterilization. Another recent article in the New Scientist suggests that the problem with obesity is the additional carbon load it imposes on the environment; others that a major social cost of divorce is the additional carbon burden resulting from splitting up families.

A recent study from the Swedish Ministry of Sustainable Development argues that males have a disproportionately larger impact on global warming ("women cause considerably fewer carbon dioxide emissions than men and thus considerably less climate change").The Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that those who suggest that climate change is not a catastrophic challenge are no different than Hitler (he now claims that his words were taken out of context, but the reporter who conducted the interview, Lars From, stands by it). E. O. Wilson calls such people parasites. Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman writes that "global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers."

There are always fringe articles and unfortunate comments in areas of active public debate. But the sheer volume of articles, the vicious language and the retranslation of so many social and cultural trends -- divorce, obesity, gender conflict and much else -- into terms of carbon footprint suggests that something more fundamental is going on.

Most obviously, the extreme language -- comparing academics who disagree about interpretation of data to Hitler or to Holocaust deniers -- is indicative of a profound if subtle reframing of climate change. One does not debate Hitler: the use of such language indicates a shift from helping the public and policymakers understand a complex issue, to demonizing disagreement, especially regarding policies favored by the scientific community.

The data driven and exploratory processes of science are choked off by inculcation of belief systems that rely on archetypal and emotive strength. Importantly, the extreme language is directed not against those who deny anthropogenic climate change completely, for there are few of those left (a credit to the traditional scientific debate process while it still existed in this area), but those who, while accepting the existence of the phenomenon, do not believe it is an existential and immediate crisis. The authority of science is relied on not for factual enlightenment but as ideological foundation for authoritarian policy prescriptions which might otherwise be difficult to implement.

This is reinforced by the number of articles, some verging on self-parody, that redefine more and more social and cultural phenomenon in terms of carbon footprint. It is not that each assertion may be wrong; indeed, since life at base is creating order, it is not surprising that changes in individual, social and institutional networks will have concomitant implications for coupled natural systems -- especially energy and material consumption and thus the carbon cycle.

Defining complex human behaviors and states, such as obesity or having children, in terms of carbon footprint, however, enables a new structure of good and evil to be imposed on society. Obesity is now morally questionable not for health reasons or Calvinist theology, but because it is evil in that you are destroying the world through your carbon footprint-generating gluttony. A complex public health problem is nicely converted into a simplistic moral mapping.

Similarly, the Swedish article uses climate change to reinvent the ecofeminist condemnation of males as evil destroyers of the environment (the New Scientist lead on the news item read "Male eco-villians"). The campaign to create a moral universe predicated on carbon footprint, which began with anti-SUV initiatives, is now extending across society as a whole. Climate change science and policy is rapidly becoming carbon fundamentalism, an over-simplistic but comprehensive structure of moral valuation that can be applied to virtually any individual or institution.

As the IPCC Nobel Peace Prize and perusal of journals reveals, many scientists are active participants in this process. But fundamentalism of any stripe is dangerous because it oversimplifies complex problems and because it facilitates "good" versus "evil" framing that cuts off dialog and thus tends to be profoundly anti-democratic, anti-intellectual, anti-rational -- and anti-scientific. Because science is for many people an important source of information, guidance and truth, in the short run it can provide substantial authority for carbon fundamentalism. Converting science into an authoritarian belief system is, however, dangerous not just to those whom it demonizes but, eventually, to the health of the institution itself.

 

[darkbeaver]

While I was accessing this thread, this happened----transferring data from www.jewish World review.com and something called photobucket.

 

[Walter]

[SIZE=+0]More Ice Than Ever[/SIZE][SIZE=-1]By [SIZE=-1]Patrick J. Michaels [/SIZE][/SIZE][SIZE=-2]Published 2/5/2008 12:07:29 AM
[/SIZE]The Washington Post recently ran a shocking above-the-fold article warning us of "Escalating Ice Loss Found in Antarctica." A new paper by Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows a net loss of ice where most scientists thought the opposite would occur.
The Post went full-bore with this one, spreading the article on to an entire interior page. The piece ends by noting that Rajenda Pachauri, head of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is so concerned that he's is personally going down to inspect the situation.
He should. Before he even gets to Antarctica, Pachauri is going to see something even more surprising than Rignot's finding. Despite a warming Southern Ocean, the amount of ice surrounding Antarctica is now at the highest level ever measured for this time of the year, since satellites first began to monitor it almost thirty years ago. This represents a continuation of the record set last winter (our summer).
Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, we can also look at the departure from the average for ice mass in a given month. At present, the coverage of ice surrounding Antarctica is almost exactly two million square miles above where it is historically supposed to be at this time of year. It's farther above normal than it has ever been for any month in climatologic records. Around now, because it's summer down there and the ice is headed towards its annual low point, there should be about seven million square miles of it. That means, as data in University of Illinois' web publication Cryosphere Today shows, that there is nearly 30% more ice down in Antarctica than usual for this time of the year.
All of the IPCC's models of Antarctica in the 21st century forecast a gain in ice, as a warmer surrounding ocean evaporates more water, which subsequently falls in the form of snow when it hits the continent. It's simply too cold for rain in Antarctica, and it'll stay that way for a very long time.
Concerning Antarctica as a whole, the IPCC's new climate compendium notes "the lack of warming reflected in atmospheric temperatures averaged across the region." Other studies, such as Peter Doran's in Nature in 2003, show actual cooling in recent decades. (There is a small area of significant warming in the peninsula that points towards South America, but this is less than 2% of Antarctica's total land mass.)
There's brand new evidence, just published in mid-January in Geophysical Research Letters, of a striking increase in snowfall over that peninsula. The few snowfall records that are available elsewhere in Antarctica show considerable variation from decade to decade, so discriminating the "signal" of increased snowfall caused by global warming from all the rest of the "noise" may be very difficult indeed.
We see the same problem with hurricanes and global warming. Their strength and numbers vary considerably from year to year. 2005 was the most active year ever measured in the Atlantic Basin, while 2007 was one of the weakest in history. How do you find the fingerprint of global warming amidst such variation?
So it's not warming up, and the snowfall data are equivocal, yet the continent is experiencing a net loss of ice. How can this be, and is it even important? The current hypothesis is that warmer waters beneath the surface are somehow loosening the ice. That's plausible, but again, there's precious little proof of it.
And further, the bottom line is that there is more ice than ever surrounding Antarctica.
One of the tired tropes that reverberate throughout global warming reporting is that inconvenient facts get left out. In this case, it's blatant. Midway through the Post's page-long article comes a statement that "these new findings come as the Arctic is losing ice at a dramatic rate." Wouldn't that have been an appropriate place to note that, despite a small recent loss of ice from the Antarctic landmass, the ice field surrounding Antarctica is now larger than ever measured?

 

[darkbeaver]

Walter, I believe you. Why do you think they perpetuate the myth and the half truths about global warming? Have you read anything about the comets?

 

[Walter]

Sen. Kerry Blames Tornados on Global Warming
Former Democratic presidential nominee blames 'intense storms' that have killed more than 50 on climate change.

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
2/6/2008 5:07:05 PM


Politicians using tragedy to advance an agenda has been a tried-and-true strategy. Paint the idea green and a natural catastrophe became political fodder for former Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry (Mass.).

Kerry appeared on MSNBC on February 6 to discuss storms that have killed at least 50 people throughout the Southeastern United States. So, of course, Kerry used the platform to advance global warming alarmism.

“ don’t want to sort of leap into the larger meaning of, you know, inappropriately, but on the other hand, the weather service has told us we are going to have more and more intense storms,” Kerry said. “And insurance companies are beginning to look at this issue and understand this is related to the intensity of storms that is related to the warming of the earth. And so it goes to global warming and larger issues that we’re not paying attention to. The fact is the hurricanes are more intensive, the storms are more intensive and the rainfall is more intense at certain places at certain times and the weather patterns have changed.”


Kerry’s assertion tornado activity is related to any type of climate change is questionable based on the writings of at least one meteorologist. Roger Edwards, a meteorologist at the Storm Prediction Center of the National Weather Center in Norman, Okla., has doubts about any global warming and tornado relationship.

“As of this writing, no scientific studies solidly relate climatic global temperature trends to tornadoes,” Edwards wrote on the Earth & Sky Web site in April 2007. “I don’t expect any such results in the near future either, because tornadoes are too small, short–lived, hard to measure and count, and too dependent on day to day, even minute to minute weather conditions.”

 

[Tonington]

Well, Kerry was actually wrong when he said it came from the weather service. The same month that Edwards wrote there were no scientific studies, NASA actually submitted a paper. It was published in Geophysical Research Letters in August of 2007. It will take some time before model results can be compared to observations, but this is one area where it's wide open. The weather is noisy compared to long term trendy climate, as Edwards correctly notes.

BMI seems to be off the mark when accusing Kerry of advancing an agenda, when they actually use an outdated quote, which appears to further their own agenda.

 

[Extrafire]

Yah, and maybe if you slip on your ruby slippers, click your heels together and wish real hard you'll get back to Kansas too.:lol:

This is one of the most moronic things I've read here. What do you think happens to all the C02 produced from burning the billions of tons of fossil fuels over the last couple of centuries. Whether it was the coal that fueled the industrial age and still powers many nations electrical grids or the massive amounts of oil that have been pumped from underground reservoirs and burned in ships, power plants, cars, planes etc...our whole way of life revolves around using substances that put emmense amounts of CO2 gas into the atmosphere and oceans every year, of course there's an anthropogenic origin to the rise in C02 levels. You remind me of the idiots who think the oceans can't be fished out because they're JUST SO BIG.:lol:

"There's no place like home, there's no place like home...":lol:

You need to use a little perspective here. The emmense (sp) amounts of CO2 gas that we put into the atmosphere only amount to 3% of the total input. Immense it may be, but it's tiny in relation to the total, which means any human influence would be negligible at most. And since the science indicates that the sun is responsible for climate change, not CO2, the whole issue becomes irrelevant.

 

[Extrafire]

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

You know, you exhibit all the characteristics of a practitioner of fundamentalist religion No matter what, everything must conform to your faith and you go along with increasingly esoteric and far fetched explanations to support theories that are thoroughly debunked. Here's another debunking of the Hockey Stick nonsense.

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.

Svensmark was one. There are many others. Fangqun Yu, State University of New York-Albany, Paul Mayewski, UMaine's Climate Change Institute, Duke University and the U.S. Army Research Office, Max Planck Institute of Nuclear Physics I could go on and on. Then there's the CLOUD experiment on the subject, with results expected in 2010.

Cosmic ray changes lag temp. change? Get real. No way any temperature change on earth is going to affect incoming cosmic rays and/or the suns magnetic field.

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.

Oh I didn't admit there was any effect from CO2. I was merely referring to the massive effect of raising the global temperature claimed by the alarmists. Even a couple degrees increase caused by humans would be massive indeed.

Are you referring to coral bleaching? A natural process as corals react to temperature change, either warming or cooling. And since they've been with us for about 200 million years and have endured much warmer and much colder temperature swings than now, they won't suffer at all from climate change.

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.

No link, although there might be one. You could look for it.
Ref.
R. S. Lindzen et al., "Does the Earth Have an Adaptive Infrared Iris?" Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 82 (2001): 417-32
It was also the subject of a press release by the American Meteorology Society in Feb. of that year.

That study; confirmed an earlier study from NASA Goddard:
Y. C. Sud et al., "Mechanism Regulating Sea-Surface Temperatures and Deep Convection in the Tropics," Geophysical Research Letters 26 (1999): 1019-22

Two follow up studies confirmed the Lindzen findings:
J. Chen et al, "Evidence for Strengthening of the Tropical General Circulation in the 1990s, Science 295 (2002): 838-41
B. A. Weilicki et al., "Evidence for Large Decadal Variability in the Tropical Mean Radiative Energy Budget," Science 295 (2002): 841-44
I don't have the time to follow up and actually read those reports so I rely on the article that reported them. You are welcome to do the research yourself.

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.

According to the evidence, I most certainly can deny that.

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

No I can't. The only real noticed effect of increased CO2 thus far has been the increase in plant growth, which would hardly cause harm to the Inuit. If you're not actually talking about the impact of CO2, but rather the impact of warming of the area where they live, you might have a point. But it wouldn't be all that serious an effect at all. After all, their ancestors managed to live through similar, and even greater, warmings in the 1930's, the MCO, and the much higher temps of the Holocene, and in those times they didn't have the assistance of the Gov't of Canada as they do now.

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.

When billions of tonnes of anything are merely an addition to trillions of tonnes already entering the stream, there is little, if any effect.

 

[gopher]

Ain't it funny how this forum's right wingers continually insist that there is no such thing as global warming while the Weather Channel affirms that it is a fact every single day!!

 

[Extrafire]

Ain't it funny how this forum's right wingers continually insist that there is no such thing as global warming while the Weather Channel affirms that it is a fact every single day!!

It might be funny if the right wingers actually insisted that, but they don't. All they insist (supported by science) is that humans are not the cause.

However, it is funny that , for the most part (Tonington excepted) the left wingers make silly statements like this rather than trying to actually demonstrate us wrong by presenting evidence to the contrary.:roll:

 

[gopher]

Global warming was voted the #1 in 100 Biggest Weather Moments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weather_Channel_(United_States)


For those wacky right wingers who still insist they are right and all others wrong.

 

[CDNBear]

Global warming was voted the #1 in 100 Biggest Weather Moments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weather_Channel_(United_States)


For those wacky right wingers who still insist they are right and all others wrong.

That's it, I'm converted!!!

These two vacuous wikiality articles (Of which, only one works) have finally broken the spell of the right wingers over me.

:roll:

 

[Walter]

Al Gore’s Amen Corner
By Mark D. Tooley
FrontPageMagazine.com | 2/11/2008
Hailed as a "Baptist prophet," Al Gore brought his Gospel of Global Warming to Jimmy Carter’s rally for leftist Baptists at a New Baptist Covenant Celebration in Atlanta last week. Gore toted a green Bible as he warned of Old Testament style famine and flood unless the planet hearkens unto the most apocalyptic of Global Warming scare stories.
"The evidence is there," Gore implored in ever-rising, apocalyptic tones. "The signal is on the mountain. The trumpet has blown. The scientists are screaming from the rooftops. The ice is melting. The land is parched. The seas are rising. The storms are getting stronger. Why do we not judge what is right?"
No hyperbole there.
Gore likened climate change to "a rising storm" eerily like the rise of Nazism in the 1930’s. In case anybody missed his point, Gore quoted Winston Churchill for good measure: "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."
Very stirring! And very appropriate for Carter’s new confab of Baptists, who are rallying around political themes of the Left rather than Christian doctrinal creeds.
Gore was addressing about 2,500 like-minded, left-leaning Baptists at a special Global Warming luncheon. Reportedly, 15,000 attended Carter’s overall event. The former president left the Southern Baptist Convention several years ago, miffed over that denomination’s conservative shift in the 1980’s. Carter, and some other Baptist refugees, prefer the Social Gospel activism of failing, mainline denominations to conservative Christianity.
Employing some of his slide show of melting glaciers and mourning polar bears that fueled his apocalyptic documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore added Bible verses to the scenes of environmental disaster so as to "put it in the context of my own faith as a Baptist." Quoting the prophet Isaiah, the former vice president urged, "Come let us reason together," he said, "and tell one another the truth, inconvenient though it may be, about the crisis, including the opportunity that we now face." Shifting to the Book of Deuteronomy, Gore then declared: "The ancient prophet laid the choice before the people," he said: "Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore choose life so both thou and thy seed may live."

 

[Walter]

ICE AGE OR LIE AGE?

By Geoff Metcalf
February 10, 2008
NewsWithViews.com
“It is difficult to believe that even idiots ever succumbed to such transparent contradictions, to such gaudy processions of mere counter-words, to so vast and obvious nonsensicality …” –H.L. Mencken
I recently interviewed Mark Lynas, author of ‘Six Degrees Could Change The World’. He was promoting the two hour world premier on the National Geographic Channel of the documentary based on his book. I watched the DVD he had sent along with his book and was incensed to hear Alec Baldwin announce “the debate is over.” BULLFEATHERS!
The debate is NOT over. The sycophant supporters of Al Gore’s ‘the sky is falling’ rhetoric just flat out refuse to discuss any and all facts or evidence that contradicts their preconceived opinions, prejudices and gospel.
Scientists, real scientists, continue to debate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of ‘global warming’ and specifically the significance (or insignificance) of man’s contribution to impacting the planet.

 

[Tonington]

You know, you exhibit all the characteristics of a practitioner of fundamentalist religion No matter what, everything must conform to your faith and you go along with increasingly esoteric and far fetched explanations to support theories that are thoroughly debunked.

Hmm, seems you missed my point altogether. I know very well that Mann's reconstruction had problems. However, there have been no problems with subsequent reconstructions by different research teams that produced similar results. To continue to use Mann's reconstruction would be folly, and that's an obvious fact to most who read up on these issues. But it seems that obviousness is lost on the believers of GCR's. They haven't addressed the matters satisfactorily. That hypothesis cannot address the lack of long term trends in GCR. There is no evidence of long term trend in cloud cover, no explanation for diurnal cycle trend, or an enhanced warming in the Arctic, or stratospheric cooling.

Greenhouse gases do produce explanations. The only arguing is over how much they can be indicted for. So holding onto GCR's, when they provide no clear explanation, when we already have one in greenhouse gases, is blind faith. That is similar to fundamentalist religion. That's not to say that some researchers won't find the information later, but for now it's still a hypothesis, because it lacks the evidence needed to be a theory.

Here's another debunking of the Hockey Stick nonsense.

As I said, I don't really care about Mann's reconstruction. There have been others since his, which have not been plagued by sampling errors.

Cosmic ray changes lag temp. change? Get real. No way any temperature change on earth is going to affect incoming cosmic rays and/or the suns magnetic field.

I know that. That's why I said good luck. The lag was noted in response to Svensmark's study.

Oh I didn't admit there was any effect from CO2. I was merely referring to the massive effect of raising the global temperature claimed by the alarmists. Even a couple degrees increase caused by humans would be massive indeed.

I know you didn't, I was asking what massive effect you're talking about. I'm unaware of anyone calling a rise of 0.6-0.7 degrees K massive. You're discussing here with me for the most part, not alarmists. I wouldn't consider the current warming massive. It troubles me, as it could very well become massive, but it isn't for now.

Are you referring to coral bleaching? A natural process as corals react to temperature change, either warming or cooling. And since they've been with us for about 200 million years and have endured much warmer and much colder temperature swings than now, they won't suffer at all from climate change.

But they are suffering from climate change. I wasn't referring to all corals, I was referring to tropical corals, which are in trouble. Temperate corals like those off the coast of NS are doing fine (in relation to temperature change), but tropical corals are not. They have evolved in a narrow temperature regime, whereas temperate corals have not.

Ref.
R. S. Lindzen et al., "Does the Earth Have an Adaptive Infrared Iris?" Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 82 (2001): 417-32
It was also the subject of a press release by the American Meteorology Society in Feb. of that year.

That study; confirmed an earlier study from NASA Goddard:
Y. C. Sud et al., "Mechanism Regulating Sea-Surface Temperatures and Deep Convection in the Tropics," Geophysical Research Letters 26 (1999): 1019-22

Two follow up studies confirmed the Lindzen findings:
J. Chen et al, "Evidence for Strengthening of the Tropical General Circulation in the 1990s, Science 295 (2002): 838-41
B. A. Weilicki et al., "Evidence for Large Decadal Variability in the Tropical Mean Radiative Energy Budget," Science 295 (2002): 841-44

I don't have the time to follow up and actually read those reports so I rely on the article that reported them. You are welcome to do the research yourself.

Why are you giving me the studies, instead of your reference? If you didn't read them what could I possibly discuss with you? Like figure 10 in Lindzen's study perhaps? After some browsing I found that Lindzen's paper was dismissed, and he got pissy about it. Oh well, he could go back and try again.

Anyways, that's not even what I was talking about. No one disputes heat transport. But to say that :

"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"

Well I can't find that anywhere. And that's what I was asking about. That would be very interesting to say the least. I don't know if that refers to ENSO, or if it was an anomolous. Would be nice to know.

According to the evidence, I most certainly can deny that.

What are you denying, the existence of the feedback, or the strength of the feedback? It's been known for well over a hundred years that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Any greenhouse gas will have a feedback loop like we were discussing.

No I can't. The only real noticed effect of increased CO2 thus far has been the increase in plant growth, which would hardly cause harm to the Inuit. If you're not actually talking about the impact of CO2, but rather the impact of warming of the area where they live, you might have a point. But it wouldn't be all that serious an effect at all. After all, their ancestors managed to live through similar, and even greater, warmings in the 1930's, the MCO, and the much higher temps of the Holocene, and in those times they didn't have the assistance of the Gov't of Canada as they do now.

You still haven't gotten it, like I said this would be pointless. Your orthodoxy must be loving your tithe. Warming of course is involved.

When billions of tonnes of anything are merely an addition to trillions of tonnes already entering the stream, there is little, if any effect.

Correction, already in the stream, not entering the stream. You don't understand simple things like additive effect?

 

[gopher]

`` The debate is NOT over.``

One thing's for sure --- you'll never get any truth from the radical right wing noodle brains in the Bush regime or any of its paid pundits. Therefore, it's best to keep an open mind.