How the GW myth is perpetuated

[Walter]

Cold wave in India attributed to global warmingTuesday, 12 February , 2008, 21:58 Mumbai: The recent cold wave sweeping across Mumbai and other parts of India could be attributed to global warming, experts said on Tuesday here at an environmental conference.

Addressing the ‘Combat Global Warming’ conference at the Indian Merchants Chamber (IMC) here, former Union minister for power and environment Suresh Prabhu said global warming was primarily a problem created and induced by human beings.
He said the increase in emission of green house gases like carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and methane had resulted in the situation, which could prove catastrophic if unchecked.
Prabhu said the cold wave that swept Maharashtra and other parts of India recently could be attributed to the phenomenon of global warming.
He said global warming had already affected agriculture and water availability in various parts of the country. "A recent study revealed that 70 percent of India's water bodies are polluted," Prabhu said.
The former minister said India was one of the world's top five polluters, which also include the US, European nations and Japan.
IMC president Niraj Bajaj said the fluctuating climatic conditions due to global warming posed a threat to the very survival of the planet.
To drive home his point, he quoted Mahatma Gandhi: "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." Environmental scientist Emmanuel D'Silva said Mumbai and Kolkata were among the ten worst cities in the world with regard to environmental pollution and sanitation. "It is estimated by the year 2050, another seven million persons are expected to take refuge in Mumbai after global warming leads to either a drought or deluge in their village or city elsewhere in the country," D'Silva said.

 

[Walter]

Global warming blamed for unusual cold spell

Nishika Patel

Thursday, February 14, 2008

As Hong Kong shivers through its second-longest cold spell since 1885, scientists point to global warming to explain the abnormal cold weather phenomenon worldwide.

Unusually cold weather is gripping a number of countries, including China and Canada.
"We are seeing extremely unusual weather across the world," said polar researcher Rebecca Lee Lok-sze. "This is due to human activities and our style of living. Carbon dioxide emissions are heavy, which is changing the weather rapidly. We could see colder winters and hotter summers in the future in Hong Kong."
Greenpeace echoed the view, saying mainland scientists had also concluded that the extreme cold weather in China was triggered by climate change. "This does not only cause an increase in global warming but also causes extreme weather patterns," said campaigner Edward Chan.
Hong Kong yesterday recorded its second- longest cold spell - 21 days. The longest cold period - when temperatures fall below 12 degrees Celsius - lasted 27 days in 1968. This record is expected to remain intact as the thermometer is forecast to register a low of 13 degrees by Sunday.
Hong Kong has also experienced more than 456 hours of cold weather this winter - more than double the 205-hour record in January 2004.
Some experts have said the cold weather in China and Canada may be linked to La Nina, a sea-surface cooling pattern in the east Pacific, which leads to a warmer sea surface in the west Pacific near China and Asia.
" La Nina is causing warm moist air to move to the south of China," said Professor Yan Yuk- yee, who specializes in climatology at Hong Kong Baptist University. "When this meets the cold air of the monsoon, it causes freezing conditions."
The cold spell has led to higher admissions to public hospitals. In most wards, occupancy is already full, the Hospital Authority said. Contingency measures including strengthening of the manpower in accident and emergency departments and medical wards are being implemented to relieve the pressure, its spokesman said.

 

[Walter]

Bill would require California’s science curriculum to cover climate change


SOME THINK SCIENCE ISN’T DEFINITIVE ENOUGH TO TEACH
By Paul Rogers
Mercury News
Reading, writing and . . . global warming?
A Silicon Valley lawmaker is gaining momentum with a bill that would require "climate change" to be among the science topics that all California public school students are taught.
The measure, by state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, also would mandate that future science textbooks approved for California public schools include climate change.
"You can’t have a science curriculum that is relevant and current if it doesn’t deal with the science behind climate change," Simitian said. "This is a phenomenon of global importance and our kids ought to understand the science behind that phenomenon."
The state Senate approved the bill, SB 908, Jan. 30 by a 26-13 vote. It heads now to the state Assembly. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken numerous actions to reduce global warming, but he has yet to weigh in on Simitian’s bill. Other Republicans in the Capitol, however, are not happy about the proposal.
Some say the science on global warming isn’t clear, while others worry the bill would inject environmental propaganda into classrooms.
"I find it disturbing that this mandate to teach this theory is not accompanied by a requirement that the discussion be science-based and include a critical analysis of all sides of the subject," said Sen. Tom McClintock, R-Thousand Oaks, during the Senate debate.

 

[Tonington]

Wasn't it the Republicans who hired a PR firm who suggested that the Administration call it climate change? Now they're upset because a text book will have a section on climate change? I didn't read that it would have a section on global warming. Whiny little pissheads.

At least they aren't fighting about evoultion in a *gasp* biology class....

 

[Walter]

Chilling Effect

Global warmists try to stifle debate.
February 25, 2008
John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all promise bold action on climate change . All have endorsed a form of cap-and-trade system that would severely limit future carbon emissions. The Democratic Congress is champing at the bit to act. So too is the Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of companies led by General Electric and Duke Energy.
You'd think this would be a rich time for debate on the issue of climate change. But it's precisely as sweeping change on climate policy is becoming likely that many people have decided the time for debate is over. One writer puts climate change skeptics "in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial," another envisions "war crimes trials" for the deniers. And during the tour for his film "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore himself belittled "global warming deniers" as unworthy of any attention.
Take the reaction to Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg's latest book, "Cool It," which calls for a reasoned debate on global warming. Mr. Lomborg himself leans left, and he opens his book by declaring his belief that "humanity has caused a substantial rise in atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels over the past centuries, thereby contributing to global warming." But he has infuriated environmentalists by saying it is necessary to debate "whether hysterical and head-long spending on extravagant CO2-cutting programs at an unprecedented price is the only possible response." To do so, he says, it will be necessary to cool the doomsday rhetoric, allowing a measured discussion about the best ways forward. "Being smart about our future is the reason we have done so well in the past. We should not abandon our smarts now."
Mr. Lomborg's solution is to avoid discredited cap-and-trade programs, in which developing nations limit economic growth while they fruitlessly try to convince booming economies such as India and China to do the same. His alternative: "Let's focus on research and development. Let's focus on noncarbon-emitting technologies like solar, wind, carbon capture, energy efficiency and also, let's realize the solution may come from nuclear fission and fusion." He laments that the climate change issue has been demagogued by ideological groups on both sides, "and the ones who are making panicky or catastrophic claims simply have better press." At the end of the day, he ruefully acknowledges that potential progress and the sorts of solutions he advocates "are just boring things."

* * *​

Let's hope Mr. Lomborg is wrong in his fear that the media are uninterested in showcasing a real debate on climate change. The proof may be found next week, when hundreds of scientists, economists and policy experts who dissent from the "consensus" that climate change requires radical measures will meet in New York to discuss the latest scientific, economic and political research on climate change. Five tracks of panels will address paleoclimatology, climatology, global warming impacts, the economics of global warming and political factors. It will be keynoted by Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who has argued that economic growth is most likely to create the innovations and know-how to combat any challenges climate change could present in the future. (Information on the conference is here.)
The conference is being organized by the free-market Heartland Institute and 49 other co-sponsors, including a dozen from overseas. Heartland president Joseeph Bast says its politically incorrect purpose is to "explain the often-neglected 'other side' of the climate change debate. This will be their chance to speak out. It will be hard for journalists and policy makers to ignore us."
I wonder. Already, environmental groups have sent out their opinion to their media friends that the conference is simply a platform for corporate apologists and can safely be ignored. One group alleges the conference will have "no real scientists" present despite an impressive array of speakers such as Patrick Michaels, a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, and Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Critics point out that ExxonMobil gave nearly $800,000 to Heartland between 1998 and 2005 and that the group's board of directors include several people with ties to energy companies. The authors of the blog Real Climate don't engage the issues raised by the conference but instead attack it as stuffed with shills. When Heartland experts tried to respond to those charges, they were blacklisted from the comments section of the Real Climate Web site.
All this has led the Western Standard, a Canadian magazine sympathetic to the global warming skeptics, to predict that "the gathering will be completely ignored, even though it's being held in the news media capital of the world." Let's hope not. Global warming is too important a subject to not to debate, and we in the U.S. may rue the day we rushed pell-mell into expensive and shortsighted solutions when much more rational and cost-effective ones were readily available.
From WSJ

 

[Walter]

Greenagers' Want Climate Change Action
Updated:10:27, Monday February 25, 2008
British children, well versed in the effects of climate change, are putting pressure on older generations to act now to halt environmental decline.

Children fear for globe's future

New research shows 95% of children aged between 4 and 15 were 'concerned' by global warming, with more than half 'very concerned'.
And three out of four respondents believed they were more fluent on the subject than their parents.
The eco-conscious youngsters, dubbed 'Greenagers', now want to put more pressure on older generations to take a lead in environmental decision-making.
Some 70% of those polled believed climate change is something that will affect them in their lifetime.
Another 85% thought people should be more concerned about the issue and 96% believed it is important to encourage other people to be more environmentally friendly.

The research has been conducted by the UK kids' channel Nickelodeon as part of their environmental campaign called 'Nick's Big Green Thing'.
The channel has launched a week of programming to encourage children to create a greener environment.
One of the week's hosts, acclaimed adventurer and environmentalist David de Rothschild, was delighted to see the youngest generation were paying attention to the subject of global warming.

He said: "Our climates changing quicker than anyone ever expected and we can't afford to ignore the signs.
"The good news is we have the solutions and this research proves that kids are taking action helping to create more stable environmental conditions for our future generations."
The survey further showed that more than half (59%) of children were aware of the concept of a 'carbon footprint' and were keen to alter their home life in order to reduce it.
Better recycling, switching off lights in empty rooms, avoiding car travel and reducing the use of household appliances all polled highly.
Despite the awarness of home environmental initiatives, the respondents felt that they learned more about the environment from school teachers rather than their parents.

 

[Walter]

Cold wave in India attributed to global warmingTuesday, 12 February , 2008, 21:58 Mumbai: The recent cold wave sweeping across Mumbai and other parts of India could be attributed to global warming, experts said on Tuesday here at an environmental conference.
Addressing the ‘Combat Global Warming’ conference at the Indian Merchants Chamber (IMC) here, former Union minister for power and environment Suresh Prabhu said global warming was primarily a problem created and induced by human beings.
He said the increase in emission of green house gases like carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and methane had resulted in the situation, which could prove catastrophic if unchecked.
Prabhu said the cold wave that swept Maharashtra and other parts of India recently could be attributed to the phenomenon of global warming.
He said global warming had already affected agriculture and water availability in various parts of the country. "A recent study revealed that 70 percent of India's water bodies are polluted," Prabhu said.
The former minister said India was one of the world's top five polluters, which also include the US, European nations and Japan.
IMC president Niraj Bajaj said the fluctuating climatic conditions due to global warming posed a threat to the very survival of the planet.
To drive home his point, he quoted Mahatma Gandhi: "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." Environmental scientist Emmanuel D'Silva said Mumbai and Kolkata were among the ten worst cities in the world with regard to environmental pollution and sanitation. "It is estimated by the year 2050, another seven million persons are expected to take refuge in Mumbai after global warming leads to either a drought or deluge in their village or city elsewhere in the country," D'Silva said.

 

[gopher]

Global warming myth?

So why does the Pentagon say otherwise and gets so many billions every year to take measures against it?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver

 

[Walter]

World saved! (Again)



Tuesday, 26th February 2008

As we all know, the world is about to end because of global warming. Temperatures are soaring, ice is melting, glaciers are retreating, seas are rising, and we’re all gonna fry. Pretty damn terrifying. We’re all up to here with worry about it. The Royal Society says there’s no longer any room for scientific doubt about it. Britain’s Chief Scientist says it’s a bigger threat than global terrorism. Every global warming sceptic is denounced as clinically insane. Every developed nation wags its finger at every other (well, ok then, at America) and tells it to Emit Less. Every politician and B-list celebrity now anxiously measures his or her carbon footprint. Every British schoolchild is now drilled to believe that man-made global warming is a Fact along with poverty and the existence of Belgium. It’s a wonder any of us has any incentive to get up in the morning.
So you might think that the news that the world isn’t frying after all would be all over the media. World saved! That’s a helluva story, surely. Imagine the relief as a weeping nation storms its corner newsagents or rushes to switch on the Today programme to learn that it is not, after all, doomed! Or alternatively, if apocalyptic millenarianism is something you just can't live without, that we are all about to freeze to death in a new ice age!


Here, then, are the glad tidings. The Telegraph has reported that, although during January Europe, northern Asia and most of Australia experienced above average temperatures, large parts of the globe had their coldest winter for decades:

According to the US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), the average temperature of the global land surface in January 2008 was below the 20th century mean (-0.02°F/-0.01°C) for the first time since 1982. Temperatures were also colder than average across large swathes of central Asia, the Middle East, the western US, western Alaska and south-eastern China. The NCDC reported that the cold conditions were associated with ‘the largest January snow cover extent on record for the Eurasian continent and for the Northern Hemisphere’. In some parts of China and central Asia, snow fell for the first time in living memory, the NCDC noted.’For the contiguous United States, the average temperature was 30.5°F (-0.83°C) for January, which was 0.3°F (0.2°C) below the 20th century mean and the 49th coolest January on record, based on preliminary data’.​

Much of North America was also hit by the heaviest snowfall since the 1960s. Meanwhile, the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre found the January 2008 Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent, while below the 1979-2000 mean, was greater than the previous four years. And the January 2008 Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent was significantly above the 1979-2000 mean, ranking as the largest sea ice extent in January over the 30-year historical period.​

Fancy!


Elsewhere, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that

almost all the allegedly ‘lost’ ice has come back. A NOAA report shows that ice levels which had shrunk from 5 million square miles in January 2007 to just 1.5 million square miles in October, are almost back to their original levels (my emphasis).​

And so now those poor confused polar bears face a new horror: starvation because there’s now too much sea ice.


Fancy! While on Daily Tech, Michael Asher notes:

Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years [my emphasis]. All in one year time. For all sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.​

Fancy!!


Meanwhile Professor Philip Stott, a consistent voice of scientific sanity from the very start of the MMGW madness, points out that global warming seems to have, er, stopped:

Of course, little can be gleaned from such a short data run of only 10-years [“‘Global warmers’ also please note, thank you”], but the temperature anomaly has clearly dipped, and then flat-lined below its 1998 anomaly peak - and for nine years now. In other words, since 1998 there has been no global warming [not even any ‘global warming’]. Yet, atmospheric CO2 has continued to rise, from c. 368 ppmv in 1998 to c. 384 ppmv in November, 2007 [see: ‘CO2 Signals From The Past’, February 1]. Moreover, politicians persist in claiming that temperature is rising faster than at any other time in the history of the whole Earth..... but then, we always believe our politicians, don’t we?​

So, does this mean to say that other factors may actually be driving climate and temperature? Oh me, Oh my! What a shock! Perhaps with all those shredders in our offices and homes, there are just too many tiny bits and bobs of credit cards floating up into the air and cooling the atmosphere? Or, weddings may have increased in number, and particulate confetti is having an unknown effect? Or, then again, the rise out of the ‘Little Ice Age’, which ended c. 1880, might just be stuttering a tad? Who knows?​

Who indeed? Not the public, for sure — because here’s the strangest thing. Apart from a couple of lonely newspaper pieces, virtually none of this dramatic news has been reported. The world has no idea that it is no longer doomed to fry but maybe should invest instead in some thermals and start emitting more heat. The Chief Scientist has not said anything about it. The Royal Society has not said anything about it. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and Sir John Houghton and Sir Jonathan Porritt and the Today programme have not been heard to say anything about it.

I wonder why?

 

[Tonington]

Gotta love those bloggers and their strawmen. In the first sentence no less! A moving target like reality is so much harder to hit than their dummy decoys

 

[Walter]

So cold it's getting hot

It may be cold, but CBC reassures us that calamity still looms
Terence Corcoran, Financial Post Published: Friday, February 29, 2008
Ah, the weather. It's cold as hell out there. How cold is it? It's so cold the CBC had to rush to assure all of us that global warming is still a big, big problem. With record snow falls, record cold snaps, the return of sea ice to the north, snow in the Middle East and a deep freeze in China, any sensible person might begin to wonder and even have doubts about global-warming theory and climate change. A little skepticism might begin to creep into the public sphere and threaten to undermine public belief in global warming.
Fear not, says the CBC. We have nothing to worry about: climate calamity still looms. The good news is that the polar caps are still going to melt, hurricane risks are still mounting, drought conditions are more likely, forest fires are set to rage, and it's going to get hot, hot, hot.
In response to the current global cool-down -- provocatively labelled a possible New Ice Age by National Post columnist Lorne Gunter -- the CBC has presented a full range of explanations and reassuring reports to calm a troubled population. At least three explanations exist:
This cold is normal According to Environment Canada's David Phillips, the warm winters of recent years have been unusual, and what we have now across the country is just a return to the kinds of winters we used to get.
La Nina According to CBC Radio's The Current, the cold is a function of La Nina, which is the cold sister of El Nino, the periodic weather system that makes things warmer than normal. Today's cold is a La Nina effect.
But not so fast.
Climate change could be the problem. Under climate theory, as we know, all weather can be explained as part of the global-warming scare. Extreme weather events, such as frost on the Nile or wherever, are exactly the kind of weather developments we should expect from global warming. If it gets really cold suddenly, that's because of global warming.
This explanation was offered up by a World Meteorological Organization official on CBC Radio. How cold is it? It's so cold it's getting hotter.
Above all, however, under no circumstances are we ever to begin to think that evidence of a cooler climate or colder weather (different things) are a sign that the great climate change theories of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore might be weak or even wrong.
As reassurance on this, on Wednesday night CBC Television's The National brought in Andrew Weaver, of the University of Victoria and a lead author on IPCC reports, for the following exchange with reporter Kelly Crowe, introduced by host Peter Mansbridge:
Mansbridge So with all this talk of brutal cold and all those bulky snow banks, you might be wondering how an old-fashioned Canadian winter can still exist in these days of global warming. It's a question scientists studying climate change get all the time. The CBC's Kelly Crowe now with their answer.
Crowe It's been such a wintery winter, Canadians can't resist asking: Whatever happened to global warming?
Weaver Oh, it's ... it drives you nuts.
Crowe It's a question Andrew Weaver hears all the time as a climatologist and a lead author on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Weaver It's always fascinating when we have a cold snap or a cold-weather event that everybody suddenly believes that global warming has somehow gone away.
So there's Mr. Weaver decrying the ignorance of people who might suspect that when it gets cold outside it might mean something more than the mere fact that it's getting cold. But then, a few minutes later, Mr. Weaver makes the same assumption in the other direction:
Crowe Even as we shiver through this winter, there is mounting evidence of climate change.
Weaver Whether it be through temperature, sea ice melting much more rapidly than we thought before, precipitation extremes, increased likelihood of drought, you know, pine-beetle infestation, forest fires and on and on and on and go.
So when it gets hot or when pine beetles infest forests, that's a sign of man-made climate change. But if it gets cold or the ice caps return, that's not a sign of anything. Whatever the facts are, Mr. Weaver and climate activists cannot have it both ways.
In the meantime, in New York this weekend, the largest ever meeting of global-warming skeptics and critics begins. Organized by the the Heartland Institute, the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change expects 500 people to attend to hear papers and ideas from scores of people, including Canadian Ross Mc-Kitrick of Guelph University and Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic. It's not a science meeting, but it is a rare assemblage of some of the people -- including scientists -- who might be inclined to echo General Motors chairman Bob Lutz, who recently said that he personally thought global warming was a "total crock of ****."

 

[Extrafire]

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.

:lol:You're suggesting that the weather channel and Wiki are reliable evidence for global warming? Did the weather channel mention, by any chance that it's been snowing on Hawaii this winter?

And the MidEast, Tehran, Jerusalem, Saudi Arabia?

and for the first time in recorded history in Baghdad?

I'm sure you must have heard the news about the unusual and record snow in Japan

And China

Yup, that sure looks like global warming to me! How can I deny it any longer?:roll:

 

[Extrafire]

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.

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.

It's been so long I'm forgetting the thrust of this discussion. First, Mann didn't have sampling errors, he had deliberate fraud and was exposed as such. When that was removed, his data showed the climate fluctuations he was trying to get rid of, the MCO and LIA. As for the subsequent studies you mention that reached the same conclusion, I am not aware if they have been similarly investigated, but if they had I suspect they would also be debunked. This is because tree rings aren't the only proxies on the planet. There are others such as cave stalagmites, lake bed and sea bed strata. And then there are the historical records. The hockey stick, no matter who produced it, contradicts all other records and proxies. Science likes to find corroborating evidence when it is available, and there is none for those hockey sticks, but there is for the MCO and LIA. That link I provided was for NON-tree ring proxies.

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

Hadn't heard of that. Was it noted in all the others? There are many of them that corroborate the findings, so I suspect that may not have been a factual error.

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.

It would be a massive effect for us puny little humans to actually be able to do that. And even much more so if we were able to achieve your definition of massive. Mind you, for the sun, it's only a very minor effect from a minor fluctuation.

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.

Are you suggesting that tropical corals have evolved in the last 30 years or so? Because in the '30's it was just as warm and they managed to get through that. And the Medieval warm period which was even warmer. And then there's the rest of the Holocene, the majority of which was much warmer than now. And the last few interglacials which were warmer still. Seems to me that if they are in trouble, it isn't because of the warming of the oceans since they've made it through all that.

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.

I had a habit of copying interesting articles to my documents without the links, and that's one of them. I didn't post the article, just a summary because I couldn't provide the link (copyright). I have quite a few articles like that and generally don't use them for that reason, but I made an exception in this case.

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.

Can't help you on 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.

Yes, but the CO2 effect is so weak at this stage that the feedback wouldn't be measurable.

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.

My orthodoxy must be loving my thith? That I don't get. My brain mustn't be totally awake yet this morning.

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

Oh I do, but what is the time line of the stream? Are we excluding volcanoes? They put out massive amounts of CO2 don't they? More that we do. Coal is in the stream if you go back far enough.

 

[Tonington]

It's been so long I'm forgetting the thrust of this discussion.

The thrust was, Mann is commonly quoted by the "skeptics", but they have nothing to say about Oerlemans, Moberg, Huang, Esper, Jones, and many other proxy studies. The overwhelming finding of all these studies is that while the warming during medieval was noticeable, it was not as high as it is now, nor did it happen as quickly as it is happening now. All of these without the flawed principle component analysis that Mann used, and without relying solely on tree rings like you suggest. They are similar in what they found about the past climate, not on methodology. Seriously, nobody would bite that bullet.

This I related to how the solar junkies have latched onto studies by folk like Svensmark and Friis-Christensen, that do also have statistical errors, and other spurious data manipulations! And they continue to use those studies as proof.

Hadn't heard of that. Was it noted in all the others? There are many of them that corroborate the findings, so I suspect that may not have been a factual error.

Others did not to my recollection. Not many corroborations, there are some. They don't all suffer from the same problem, because scientists usually use different methods to analyze data, depending on their background. Other studies have run into problems the same as Svensmark has though, like a lack of basic correlation during the past 30 years, or lack of an increased changes in polar cloud cover (the rays are known to have increased variation at high latitudes.)

It would be a massive effect for us puny little humans to actually be able to do that. And even much more so if we were able to achieve your definition of massive. Mind you, for the sun, it's only a very minor effect from a minor fluctuation.

Well, maunder minimum radiative change was 0.17 to 0.23 watts per square meter, while the Anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing is on the order of 1.66 watts per square meter. Also, it was you who said massive, attributing it to alarmists. I don't believe I have ever given you my definition of massive.

Are you suggesting that tropical corals have evolved in the last 30 years or so?

No.

Because in the '30's it was just as warm and they managed to get through that. And the Medieval warm period which was even warmer. And then there's the rest of the Holocene, the majority of which was much warmer than now. And the last few interglacials which were warmer still. Seems to me that if they are in trouble, it isn't because of the warming of the oceans since they've made it through all that.

So, you know what the SST was during the Medieval warm period? It was certainly warmer in some areas, but there's no compelling evidence that says the globe was warmer. All I said a while back was nothing needed to be "massive" to be a problem. Do you get that? Case in point, thresholds, like the large coral die off I mentioned. And if you want a more complete answer, the warming now is accompanied by other factors, acidification, overfishing and other pollutants, which only exacerbates the problem.

I had a habit of copying interesting articles to my documents without the links, and that's one of them. I didn't post the article, just a summary because I couldn't provide the link (copyright). I have quite a few articles like that and generally don't use them for that reason, but I made an exception in this case.

If it's a NASA finding as you said, it's not subject to copyright laws. You can find the articles that GISS researchers get published in journals on their website. When I asked for that you sent me links to heat transport, which I can find very easily. Whatever. Tis a dead horse now.

Yes, but the CO2 effect is so weak at this stage that the feedback wouldn't be measurable.

That's not even remotely true. Something tells me you don't remember what we're discussing...I'll give you a hint, it was warming ocean releasing carbon dioxide.

Anyways, we can actually measure the water vapour feedback from the anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The doubling of CO2 for example brings about more temperature from increased water vapour than it does from direct CO2. That's been validated by satellite data as far back as 1991.

My orthodoxy must be loving my thith? That I don't get. My brain mustn't be totally awake yet this morning.

Tithe. A shot at you for calling me a follower of orthodoxy.

Oh I do, but what is the time line of the stream? Are we excluding volcanoes? They put out massive amounts of CO2 don't they? More that we do. Coal is in the stream if you go back far enough.

The time line? The current timeline where we have lived for the past 200,000 years, but more succinctly, the past few thousand years. No, of course we aren't. You said natural emissions, that would include volcanoes wouldn't it? Volcanoes do not put out more than we do. That's just plain wrong. Our emissions of CO2 are about 150X that of volcanoes. I bet you don't have a link for that either. Of course coal is in the stream if we go back far enough. This goes back to geology, that coal is millions of years old. So we're helping push the carbon cycle to a time when there was much more carbon in the system. What do you know about the climates during the Cretaceous and the Eocene?

 

[Outta here]

The moderation team has noticed that this thread has been diligently kept alive for a whopping 36 pages to date. We think this is deserving of a special place - stickied at the top of the Science & Environment Forum for easy location by those dedicated members who keep finding more to contribute to this subject.

 

[Walter]

The moderation team has noticed that this thread has been diligently kept alive for a whopping 36 pages to date. We think this is deserving of a special place - stickied at the top of the Science & Environment Forum for easy location by those dedicated members who keep finding more to contribute to this subject.

Thank-you.

 

[Walter]

Teacher under fire for showing Gore film without rebuttal
By Ben Fulton
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 03/03/2008 06:33:44 AM MST

When Mark Colley learned late last year that his daughter viewed "An Inconvenient Truth" during science class at Midvale Middle School without advance parental notice, he was intrigued. When he learned his daughter’s teacher allegedly presented no rebuttal to former Vice President Al Gore’s popular documentary film warning about the perils of climate change, he was stunned.
"When you do that, you stop becoming a teacher and start becoming an advocate," said Colley, who considers Gore’s movie "a political statement."
"Under no circumstances would I pull my daughter out of her science class. She can get the other side of the argument at home," he said. "But I am concerned that there are 29 kids in that class walking away thinking that they know everything there is to know about global warming."

The Midvale science teacher did not return telephone calls for comment. The subject of climate change can become touchy in the public school classroom, a place where contending public opinions often color the core curriculum. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, Calif., said the study of carbon emissions on the Earth’s climate is so vast and involves the interplay of so many complex scientific disciplines, that it leaves even the best teachers almost helpless in offering useful lessons.

The choice isn’t left to Utah science teachers. The state’s standards of secondary core science curriculum expect that Utah science teachers introduce the topic, if only because students are expected to understand it to a degree. So science teachers walk the line, risking charges that their approach gives one side of the political debate too much credence, or none at all.

 

[Walter]

The media snowjob on global warming

Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, March 10, 2008

Ronaldo Schemidt, AFP, Getty ImagesAl Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize, not a science award.
Just how pervasive the bias at most news outlets is in favour of climate alarmism -- and how little interest most outlets have in reporting any research that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy -- can be seen in a Washington Post story on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), announced last week in New York.
The NIPCC is a counter to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The group was unveiled this week in Manhattan at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, along with its scientific report claiming that natural factors -- the sun, El Ninos and La Ninas, volcanoes, etc, -- not human sources are behind global warming.
The Washington Post's first instincts (not just on its opinion pages, but in its news coverage, too) were cleverly to sew doubt of the group's credibility by pointing out to readers that many of the participants had ties to conservative politicians, such as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and that the conference sponsor -- the Heartland Institute -- received money from oil companies and health care corporations.
That's standard fare, and partly fair, so that's not what I am talking about.
The insidiousness I am referring to is the unfavourable way the Post compared the NIPCC report to the IPCC's famous report of last year.
After reminding readers that the IPCC and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their work on climate change, the paper then, sneeringly, added: "While the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists."
First of all, the IPCC and Mr. Gore won the Peace Prize, not a science prize, which only proves they are good at politics. They didn't win the Physics Prize, for instance.
Also, while the former vice-prez may have invented the Internet (by his own admission), he is demonstrably not a scientist. Yet in the same paragraph as the Washington Post lionizes Mr. Gore for his work saving the planet, it backhands non-scientists for meddling in the climate change debate, never once showing any hint it recognized its own hypocrisy.
And the paper displays its utter lack of intellectual curiosity, too.
Hundreds of scientists may have contributed bits and pieces of work to the IPCC's gargantuan report, but just 62 wrote the chapter said to "prove" that man is behind global warming -- not that many more than the 23 from the new NIPCC who the Post so snidely dismiss as inconsequential in number. And just 52 people -- many of them the kind of non-scientists the Post would have us believe have no business passing judgment -- wrote the IPCC's "Summary for Policy-makers." That's the publication that gets all the ink and drives the climate alarmism because it contains the most provocative statements about the certainty of manmade warming.
The bias is that whatever the IPCC and its defenders claim, the Washington Post and most other outlets report without scrutiny. Meanwhile, the motives and sources of all sceptics are instantly suspected and derided.
There's nothing wrong with scrutinizing the motives of people engaged in a dicey debate. The subjectivity arises from scrutinizing only one side and always with a preconceived notion of what you are going to find.
Such bias is typical, though, of the climate debate, and not just among reporters and editors.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a column that was provocatively titled, "Forget global warming:Welcome to the New Ice Age." In it, I explained that, far from being warming activists, some solar scientists see the recent downturn in solar activity as harbinger of a coming Ice Age.
I wondered how come we don't hear about that in equal measure with the claims of an impending meltdown?
I received over 1,800 e-mails, most of them complimentary. A large number, though, were as hysterical and vicious as any I have received on any subject in almost two decades in journalism.
How could I not believe? Was I being dishonest or just stupid? How much had EXXON paid me? Until I could write in favour of the warming theorists, I should "go back into your oil company-funded bubble. You @*!/x-ing hack."
And that was from a climate scientist at a major university.
At last week's Manhattan climate conference, delegate after delegate related stories about how they had been denied tenure, shut out of scientific conferences and rejected by academic journals because no matter how scrupulous their research, their conclusions disagreed with the prevailing orthodoxy of the Climate Change Pharisees. They spoke, too, of colleagues too afraid for their jobs even to turn up at the conference.
I don't believe we are headed for an ice age any more than we're hurtling towards a meltdown. But we are in the midst of overwhelming bias in favour of the meltdown side.

 

[Walter]

NYT Scoffs at 400+ 'Skeptical' Scientists, Elevates 44 Green Southern Baptists


By Amy Menefee | March 11, 2008 - 11:42 ET

Remember when more than 400 scientists were revealed as "skeptical" about global warming hype? The New York Times's Andrew Revkin blogged about it, saying the "perennial tug of war" was actually "a distraction from fundamentals that are clearly established."
Of course, 44 Southern Baptists who buy into the green agenda received a respectful print story in the March 10 Times, widely quoting the church leaders saying things like: "when we destroy God's creation, it's similar to ripping pages from the Bible."
Actually, the man behind that statement, Jonathan Merritt, isn't really a church leader, according to the article - he's a 25-year-old seminary student. But he's "the spokesman for the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative." He used to be "an enemy of the environment," until he had the "epiphany" quoted above.
Such double-standard reporting on sides of the climate debate is standard for the networks, as the Business & Media Institute's new report shows. In "Global Warming Censored," BMI reveals how actors, musicians and just plain men on the street are used as voices in support of global warming hysteria.
400+ scientists or 44 Southern Baptists? Take your pick.

 

[Walter]

Man the Lifeboats - Global Warming Alarmism Is Swamping Debate
Media ignore opposition, call scientists 'flat Earthers' to sink climate change dispute.

By Dan Gainor
The Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow
Business & Media Institute
3/12/2008 2:57:38 PM


To hear the mainstream media tell it, we have a Titanic problem with global warming. Not large, but Titanic in that they believe “unsinkable” mankind is facing a looming cataclysm.

How do they know? Because some scientists tell them that’s the way it is. But when other scientists tell them that might not be the case, they only half listen and soon forget.

Such is the fate of the unprecedented 2008 International Conference on Climate Change put on by the Heartland Institute. That event drew 500 scientists, economists and public policy experts to New York to discuss the flaws in the Al Gorean “consensus” on global warming.

It should have been big news, but the media never gave it a fair chance. Reporters mischaracterized the three-day event as “quirky” or a “roast” of Al Gore and called attendees “flat Earthers,” as if we would sail right off the edge of the world.

The event had such promise. Along with about 100 scientists from around the globe, actual members of the mainstream media attended representing The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and major networks like ABC and CNN.

And that’s where things went off course. ABC had two of its top people there – John Stossel and Bill Blakemore. But no stories. That was typical. None of the broadcast network coverage the week of the event even acknowledged the conference existed.

CNN viewers would have been better off if the network had followed the same course. One-time anchor Miles O’Brien, famous for dozing during a global warming hearing on Capitol Hill, went full speed to the attack.

This time O’Brien was wide awake and compared the conference to “scientific trash talks.” He mocked Heartland Institute President Joe Bast, saying, “I can’t help but think you’re living on a different planet than I am.” O’Brien ended his piece by noting “even the Flat Earth Society didn’t fold its tent in 1493.”

Print coverage was nearly as bad. While some discussed the conference intelligently – like Investor’s Business Daily or columnist John Tierney from the Times – others used it as one more chance to sink opposition to the hype surrounding manmade global warming.

Times reporter Andrew Revkin seemed perplexed that he was “forced to cover the edges of the discourse” rather than “relax” with his family. But Revkin soon made up for it. Just seven paragraphs into one of the pieces he wrote on the conference, he turned to an expert to help him understand those wacky conservatives, rather than focus on the science being discussed.

He cited “Riley E. Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University who has studied the influence of conservative policy institutes,” and Dunlap gave the predictable sound bites. He said such groups “can hardly be considered to be underdogs" because they are, in Revkin’s words, so “well financed.”

For one last salvo, Revkin cited a Greenpeace activist who also attacked the event.

The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin quoted Gene Karpinski of the League of Conservation Voters, who said he’s “sure that the flat Earth society had a few final meetings before they broke up.” That quote ran the morning of the CNN broadcast. It’s unclear if O’Brien lifted his material from the left. Let’s just say he’s on board with their agenda.

Eilperin also showed she learned nothing from the conference. Less than a week later, she wrote a front-page story saying humans need to “cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.” She included no other viewpoints on that radical statement. I guess that means we all have to stop exhaling soon.

According to Eilperin, the study she cited was based, like many climate predictions, on “increasingly powerful” computer models and “scientists acknowledge that no model is a perfect reflection of the complex dynamics involved and how they will evolve with time.”

In other words, climate models aren’t necessarily accurate. Had she paid more attention to the conference, she would have heard from famous climatologist and hurricane forecaster Bill Gray criticizing the reliance on climate models instead of climate science. She might even have quoted him.

Just two days after the conference, “CBS Evening News” was warning that threatened bat populations were “the canary in a climate change coal mine.”

Those stories, and hundreds more like them, helped prove one of the very points the conference intended to make – that the mainstream media have given up the role of observer and become advocates for one side in the climate debate.