Global warming, errr cooling and NASA - Page 5

garland · 05-08-2008, 11:15 AM

I don't see anyone trying to inhibit additional research; surely not from the enviro side. What I see is people saying--okay; we've got the research, now let's do something. Not just dither and wring our hands and whine that we don't like change. Act. That's always been America's forte.

Ten or twenty years from now, we will have an enormously different problem than the one we have now, as the CO2 levels continue to rise. How can trying to maintain the level now in the atmosphere be rash?

It's like saying, well, yes, handwashing might cut down on germs and the spread of disease, but germ theory isn't well established yet, and it's (in Kluge's terms) such a drag to enforce it; let's wait another ten or twenty years, examine the question some more. Surely that can't hurt, right?

ag54 · 05-08-2008, 03:39 PM

Quote:

I have a reasonably well informed lay understanding, but by no means "scientific" understanding

Yet you vehemently put down any person who has a viewpoint that is contrary to yours because you read articles that support your viewpoint and quote them as if you are an expert. What makes you any different than Barrons, hmm?

You're a lawyer right? Not a climatologist?

ag54 · 05-08-2008, 03:41 PM

IMO, companies like BP, Shell, and the dreaded Exxon Mobil are jumping on the bandwagon because it is in their economic interest to do so. They see where the $$$$ is going to be coming from soon.

Somebody in the thread earlier asked where she could buy anti-global warming stocks - well the BIG OIL (duh, duh, duhhhh) companies would probably be a good place to start - don't you see their full page ads in the paper? They're all greenies now!!

barrons · 05-08-2008, 04:06 PM

Handwashing won't cost trillions of $$$s in direct and indirect costs for the most dubious results. They won't even know if it iS working because so many other things come into play with the weather/climate. You know-a butterfly flaps in Brazil and there is a hurricane across the world.

fundingfather · 05-08-2008, 04:07 PM

"I don't see anyone trying to inhibit additional research; surely not from the enviro side. What I see is people saying--okay; we've got the research, now let's do something. Not just dither and wring our hands and whine that we don't like change. Act."

Sure. The "Ready, Fire, Aim" method is a specialty of the enviro crowd. The problem is that the research is not done. How do you answer the number of scientists who used to believe in AGW who have now, after further research, changed their perspective and now believe that it is either a hoax or nothing so serious that it requires prohibitively expensive or economy killing solutions? I see that Nancy Pelosi is already spending millions of tax payer's money in changing the lighting for the Capital dome. Now there's a great use of the tax dollar.

garland · 05-08-2008, 05:27 PM

FF--no. I just don't see that. It's not something that people "Believe in" and then don't. It's central, accepted science except for a few non-experts with chips on their shoulders.

Hey, we'll deal with it one way or another (as Blondie would say). I wish it were the responsible way. And I think it's starting to be.

edad · 05-09-2008, 09:30 AM

Whether or not you are a "believer" is only a small part of the issue. Assuming man's actions are causing significant and detrimental global warming, then the big issue will be arriving at solutions. Most of what we hear is politically correct but useless. Cutting back on energy use is fine but on a global scale the world has hundreds of millions of people trying to make a jump from rural subsistence economies into the modern world. We need alternate sources of energy and lots of it. Solar panels and windmills are not going to cut it - not even close.

fundingfather · 05-09-2008, 10:20 AM

"FF--no. I just don't see that. It's not something that people "Believe in" and then don't. It's central, accepted science except for a few non-experts with chips on their shoulders."

garland,

At one point it was accepted science that hormone replacement therapy was a panecea for many health issues concerning aging women. Then, because of additional research, it was found to be otherwise. Your view of global warming science being "settled" is just as dangerous. Your pejorative view of any scientists that after using their expertise change their views is just as dangerous for the advancement of science.

Does your list of "non-experts with chips on their shoulders" include those listed here - all of whom used to believe in global warming but have apparently kept their scientific mind open and were willing to accept additional research findings.
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.c...6-d702baea2a42

A closed mind is a terrible thing to waste.

garland · 05-09-2008, 12:57 PM

FF--I find it's useless to debate assertions from highly partisan sources, like Mark Morano. Again, these lists are anecdote; mostly not climate related scientists, and not serious scientific argument--whatever their backgrounds. BAsically, a list of "I don't buy it." We could play a game all day of lists of discrete examples; I don't see the purpose of that.

fundingfather · 05-09-2008, 01:39 PM

It sounds like you are taking the same approach with global warming as Barak Obama is with Iraq - "it doesn't matter what the situation is or evolves to become, I have made up my mind and will do exactly as I said last year."

garland · 05-09-2008, 01:46 PM

My approach is--sift through the obfuscations; look for where the scientific community stands. On any subject, you could spend all your time following contrarian paths (heck, Holocaust deniers think your mind is closed if you don't investigate "their side" of the issue.)

I welcome an actual "controversy", not a manufactured one.

garland · 05-09-2008, 02:18 PM

Rather than individuals on a random list, how about major institutions?

Quote:

The addition of greenhouse gases and aerosols has changed the composition of the atmosphere. The changes in the atmosphere have likely influenced temperature, precipitation, storms and sea level (IPCC, 2007).

Recent Climate Change | Science | Climate Change | U.S. EPA

Global Warming and Climate Change Policy Websites
(fascinating list of global warming links, starting wit the website of Inconvenient Truth. OH, those NASA hotheads!)

MIT Joint Program on the Science & Policy of Global Change

Etc. I could spend all day listing major scientific, respected government, academic, and other research institutions that agree on the basics of climate change. For some reason, you will stick to your guns that if even if one person on the planet disagrees, that makes a "controversy." that, to me, is puzzling. but we will have to disagree. You know, I'd love you to be right (you wouldn't believe that, but it's so.) Why would I want to look forward to a lot of potentially disastrous changes, and why wouldn't I want to feel off the hook about who caused them? but for me, that would be magical thinking, which i don't feel I or the Earth can afford.

fundingfather · 05-09-2008, 02:27 PM

Don't look now, but you are an unwitting soldier in a manufactured controversy - only the manufacturer appears to be the IPCC. Read this account of how the IPCC, without the contribution of known experts, manufactured the public view of the relationship between global warming and hurricanes. Of course, this is timely because our Nobel laureate and former VP is out now to shamelessly use the deaths of the people in Burma for the same purpose.

Quote:

You are Christopher Landsea of the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory. You were a contributing author for the UN's second International Panel on Climate Change in 1995, writing the sections on observed changes in tropical cyclones around the world. Then the IPCC called on you as a contributing author once more, for its "Third Assessment Report" in 2001. And you were invited to participate yet again, when the IPCC called on you to be an author in the "Fourth Assessment Report." This report would specifically focus on Atlantic hurricanes, your specialty, and be published by the IPCC in 2007.

Then something went horribly wrong. Within days of this last invitation, in October, 2004, you discovered that the IPCC's Kevin Trenberth -- the very person who had invited you -- was participating in a press conference. The title of the press conference perplexed you: "Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity." This was some kind of mistake, you were certain. You had not done any work that substantiated this claim. Nobody had.

As perplexing, none of the participants in that press conference were known for their hurricane expertise. In fact, to your knowledge, none had performed any research at all on hurricane variability, the subject of the press conference. Neither were they reporting on any new work in the field. All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability, you knew, showed no reliable upward trend in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes. Not in the Atlantic basin. Not in any other basin.

To add to the utter incomprehensibility of the press conference, the IPCC itself, in both 1995 and 2001, had found no global warming signal in the hurricane record. And until your new work would come out, in 2007, the IPCC would not have a new analysis on which to base a change of findings.

The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science

Landsea decided that the IPCC had become too politicized and declined to participate in the latest issue. However, here is what the lead author of chapter on hurricanes in the recent IPCC study said about the way it was falsely used to present a particular point of view:

Quote:

"I was disappointed that after more than two years carefully analysing the literature on possible links between tropical cyclones and global warming that even before the report was approved it was being misreported and misrepresented. We concluded that the question of whether there was a greenhouse-cyclone link was pretty much a toss of a coin at the present state of the science, with just a slight leaning towards the likelihood of such a link. But the premature reports suggested that we were asserting the existence of much stronger evidence. I hope that when people read the real report they will see that it is a careful and balanced assessment of all the evidence."

Of course, people don't read the final report, they take what is initially fed to and reported by the news media.

kluge · 05-09-2008, 05:57 PM

Fundingfather, regarding:

Quote:

it doesn't matter what the situation is or evolves to become, I have made up my mind and will do exactly as I said last year.

I'll accept it as your position on the matter. Regarding the collection of "prominent scientists" propped up by Sen. Inhofe - do you ever check this stuff out? A quick random sampling of the "experts" on the list you linked to gave me the usual results (all comments from Wikipedia):

Zbigniew Jaworowski:
Jaworowski published several papers (Jaworowski, 2007; Jaworowski, 1999; Jaworowski, 1997) in 21st Century Science and Technology, a non-refereed magazine published by Lyndon LaRouche.[4]

Jaworowski has also written that the movement to remove lead from gasoline was based on a "stupid and fraudulent myth," and that lead levels in the human bloodstream are not significantly affected by the use of leaded gasoline.

David J. Bellamy OBE (born 18 January 1933): In 2004, he wrote an article in the Daily Mail in which he described the theory of man-made global warming as "poppycock" [4]. A letter he published in New Scientist (16 April 2005) asserted that a large percentage (555 of 625) of the glaciers being observed by the World Glacier Monitoring Service were advancing, not retreating. George Monbiot of The Guardian tracked down Bellamy's original source for this information and found that it was Fred Singer's website. Singer claimed to have obtained these figures from a 1989 article in the journal Science, but to date this article has not been found.[5] Bellamy has since admitted that the figures on glaciers were wrong, and announced in a letter to The Sunday Times on 29 May 2005 [6] that he had "decided to draw back from the debate on global warming"

Ján Veizer, born in Slovakia, is an emeritus professor.

In short, the usual sampling of crackpots and retired guys getting a last shot of celebrity by making "bold, contrarian" pronouncements that they've got no science to back up but which are guaranteed to get them smirking applause from the denier claque.

ag54, what separates me from Barrons is that I assess the legitimacy of information provided to me based on the qualifications, peer reviewed studies, and research performed by the scientists involved. Barrons simply repeats anything which is published by anyone which is anti-climate change theory - without even reading it to see if the article actually makes the statement he asserts, which is frequently not the case.

I've got no ideological reason to want the answer be one thing or the other. I'd very much prefer anthropomorphic climate change theory to be wrong. If it were proven wrong (by real scientists, using real data from real research) tomorrow, that would be a cause of great joy. We have benefited greatly from the ability to use cheap fossil fuel energy for the past 100 years. It would be really cool if we could continue. I wouldn't have to worry about what to do with spent nuclear reactor fuel; bird kills from windmills, siltation behind hydro dams, etc. We could just burn more coal. But if the scientific consensus on climate change isn't somehow miraculously all wrong, by ignoring it we're royally screwing our children and grandchildren's generation. The cost of that irresponsibility will be borne by them, not by my generation.

I personally think that people who choose to ignore the scientific consensus are immature and selfish. They don't want to deal with the consequences of what science is telling us in a responsible manner - they want a free lunch. But they're dining at the expense of future generations. So you'll pardon me if I'm less than impressed with their "brave" poses of "intellectual skepticism" based on wishful thinking and crackpot theories. It's easy to be a contrarian when it means you get to eat a lunch that someone else will have to pay for.

fundingfather · 05-09-2008, 09:33 PM

Yes, kluge, I was waiting for you to swing in and attempt to discredit a whole list of people by finding a few whose views you find to be "crackpot" or ... (gads) ... old. I thought that you had better logical thinking than that.

You may want to put all your eggs into a politically dominated group like the IPCC, but I have heard enough horror stories about their objectivity and desire to shape the story that I don't trust them. And forget Al Gore and his ilk - even the IPCC is level-headed when compared to Gore's wild-eyed fantasies.