Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

Some have said that the ultimate goal of the mass media supported, politically driven agenda of promoting the pseudo science of man made global warming is for the creation and legitimization of a broad based United Nations worldwide carbon tax.

The man made global warming message being promoted to the citizenry plays on our most sympathetic of human emotions. The question has been asked before. Wouldn't most be willing to pay more in taxes based on the assumption that those taxes were helping to save a Polar Bear cub and it's mother? Diabolically clever.


Personally speaking I would much rather live in an age of global warming than Global cooling and either way I don't need to be taxed any more thank you.

 

The same way Fox news is balanced. A different opinion with no data to back it up. In science if you are going to disagree you need the data to back it up.

Then again it could be just looking at the data and concern for the environmental and political disaster it would be. Not paying tax is not going to be much good when your 401k tanks.

 

I guess if you actually had studied science in college you could better understand the mechanisms behind global warming and the historic trends. So far everything I have learned concerning these mechanisms ties in with all of my bio, chem, geology, and geography classes. True we could be wrong as Tim says, likely due to some unknown variable, but I believe it would be quite unlikely. There are a large host of other problems associated with the excess carbon emissions so that even if it's effect on climate is minimal we should do something to curb our output.

If you are assuming that we will live in a lush tropical like environment with an huge increase in agriculture during a anthropogenic induced global warming era you may want to research that opinion again. Plant growth only increases for a short period of time before other factors like nitrogen deficiency come into play as well as little things like photosynthesis shutting down beyond 94 deg in some plants etc.. We do not even need to go into methane release or ocean acidification do we? No, it's been beaten to death.

Tim, whether we see eye-to-eye is irrelevant. I like your posts. I'll reply back tonight after entemology. I'm in a rush writing a prelab report and I should stop typing. LOL

 

An excellent graphical summary! I will permalink this so others can be easily directed to it.

 

You stated it well enough. Ocean circulation has changed before and we can expect it again, but so far the current warming has not yet had a significant effect.

Not nature's way, but man's. Cyclical variations in Earth's inclination and orbit would be driving us into a new ice age starting about now. This was recognized in the 1960s and led to alarmist talk in the popular media at the time, before global warming was widely recognized. A *little* warming, enough to prevent an ice age, could therefore be a good thing, but human CO2 release has completely overpowered the natural trend and is instead strongly warming the planet.

 

Uh-huh. As late as 1970 or so you could still find geologists who denied plate tectonics, and in 1990 an astronomer or two who denied the Big Bang. The global warming deniers too shall pass away. (Among scientists, I mean. There will always be amateur nutballs who reject AGW, fluoridation, relativity, evolution, a spherical Earth, ...)

 

I don't blame you for being defensive. It is hard to justify fears over global warming when many parts of the globe have experienced record cold. Oh wait I forgot, global warming causes all of this cold because global warming is the root of every climate or weather issue in the world!

Did the scientists back in the 70's who were warning of global cooling pass away yet or are they the global warming scientists now?

DailyTech - Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling

 

It's too bad your posts on the subject carry no weight and contain no substance. Your opinion has been dismissed numerous times so why do you bring it up?

 

A link to one site that has gone to great efforts in describing the 1970's cooling issue

Science-type stuff

One way to summarize it is to say that climate scientists have long realized that CO2 warms and particles (other than deposited black carbon) cool. The balance between these opposing forces was not understood well by climate models 40 years ago, but that understanding has much improved. If 'global cooling scientists' of the 1970s are still active, I guess their understanding of the system has improved as well.

It did snow a bit overnight here in Kunming, something that does not happen every year. If observations like this compel any to bet in favor of global cooling at narrow odds, you know where to make your offers.

 

Once again,,, to confuse weather with climate is wrong.

 

The posts carrys no weight with you because you appear to be some kind of closed minded academic elite. As for substance, it wasn't meant to be a substantive post, merely a commentary on another post...so take it down a notch Bobby Knight.

Look, I am open to the possiblity that the Earth's climate is warming as a whole and what the causes are for that possible warming. What I am offended by is this Stalinistic effort to stifle debate as to the cause and what should be done about this if it is even a real problem -- I frankly think there are many more critical issues out there!

I often read complaints from people on the forums complaining about Republican "scare mongering" and promoting fear in politics. The alarmist method in which people are promoting global warming is no different that the Republican tactics they perceive to be employed. The messiah of the stop global warming effort, Mr. Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize for his effort in this area and an Oscar for his "scare mongering" movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

Mr. Stephen Schneider (lead 2007 UN IPCC report author) is a good example of where I'm coming from on this issue:

Schneider once spoke of the difficulties scientists face communicating their work to the public:
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. (Quoted in Discover, pp. 45–48, Oct. 1989; for the original, together with Schneider's commentary on it misrepresentation see also American Physical Society, APS News August/September 1996. [3]). There are too many instances in science where the scientific community says one thing to be true and years down the road they reverse themselves and say it wasn't true after all...now X is true. I believe there are people in this "movement" are using the issue make political and social changes which may or may not be for the best!

 

Perhaps someone should tell Mr. Gore that since he subtly ties (or directly depending on your POV) Hurricane Katrina and the blip of increased Hurricanes in 2005 to global warming.

 

One weather event (Hurricane Katrina) is indeed "weather" A growing intensity or frequency of hurricanes CAN BE seen over time as climate change.

Icarus

 

I agree with both of those statements. I'm just saying Mr. Gore still makes that connection in his movie. However, hurricane frequency and intensity have not matched 2005, in fact, I believe both have fallen since 2005.

 

More critical issues than global climate change? Interesting. You do realize that climate change has a large effect on every aspect of life on this planet from wars, politics, food production, water distribution, extinctions, societal collapse, etc. right? Ecosystem collapse is nothing to dismiss lightly since we depend on them 100% for our lives. So what are these more critical issues in your opinion?

 

People have and there is a reason why most decent climatologists warn against mixing weather with climate and placing blame for any particular sotrm event on global warming. The talk I went to the other night spelled it out in giant print on the screen during a powerpoint presentation.

 

The problem with climate change, in my opinion, is I don't think we are/can be sure that any climate change is a direct result of human activity or whether it is part of a natural cycle or something to do with sun activity or a combination of all those issues. The point being, we could spend a tremendous amount of resources trying to change something we have little or no effect over.

An issue that I think is surpasses all of this is global oil production. A lot of people know that U.S. oil production peaked back in the early 70's. Now the question is when might global production peak? Some believe it will happen in the next 25 years, some in the next 5 years, some think it has already happened. The exact year isn't that important as there will be many years of oil left but it does likely mean that world production will not increase any appreciative amount.

In short, global consumption is on the rise. Rising demand combined with a decreasing supply usually means higher prices -- possibly much higher prices. That's where the rules of economics start to derail. Normally higher prices mean that demand decreases and every balances out again. Oil doesn't act that way since it is not a discretionary purchase. If oil prices continue to rise there is going to be significant damage to our economy and the global economy.

The nice thing is this issue intersects the global warming issue well. People who believe in global warming want to cut back on the amount of CO2 we use, which, in many cases translates into burning oil/gas. People like myself worried about long term oil supplies and foreign oil dependence want to burn/import less oil/gas for the obvious reasons -- and before you know it...WOW...common ground! That translates in to alternative technologies for energy, transportation, and a whole host of other things.

To sum it up, climate change due to human activity COULD happen. Depletion of global oil reserves and higher oil/gas prices WILL happen.

 

You obviously did not look at any of the sites I linked. Pielke is a climatologist and past IPCC contributor and reviewer. Climate Audit is run by Steve McIntyre, also a past IPCC reviewer. And the surfacestations site is loaded with extensive data and analysis regarding US climate stations.

I don't see how these are necessarily any more "opinion" than is RealClimate, run by global warming gloom and doomers Mann & Schmidt. I should also note that Mann was seriously spanked when a review of Mann's data & methods was undertaken by Steve McIntyre. So I guess I'm more likely to believe the data on Steve's Climate Audit site than that promulgated by Mann at Real Climate (particularly when Mann has refused on more than one occasion to reveal either his data or his methods). So it seems that for Real Climate fans, your question about "having to data to back it up" ought to be particularly relevant.

 

Hmm. Is that so? Then why does the NAS (click on the "page image" link for a gif image) characterize as "very low" the scientific level of understanding for 3/4ths of the known radiative forcing elements?

 

My understanding is that growing intensity / frequency due to global warming has been dis-proven...

“Despite the recent active 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, the authors do not find evidence of an increasing trend in hurricane strike frequencies†and “The hypothesis that hurricane strike frequencies are increasing in time is also statistically rejected.â€

See references relative to both frequency and intensity...

Englehart, P. J., M. D. Lewis, and A. V. Douglas. 2008. Defining the frequency of near-shore tropical cyclone activity in the eastern North Pacific from historical surface observations (1921–2005). Geophysical Research Letters, 35, L03706, doi:10.1029/2007GL032546.


Parisi, F. and R. Lund. 2008. Return periods of continental U.S. hurricanes. Journal of Climate, 18, 403-410.