Man Based Global Warming....

Look, I'm an old man. I've lived through enough false hysteria to have a healthy respect for common sense and a distrust of those who are certain of their right to do good for all those who are too stupid to help themselves or even recognize it.

As a child I rode my bicycle into fogs of DDT over the years it was used to vanquish malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases in this country. It was great fun. I can still conjure up its unique smell in my memory.

I eventually read Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring and believed it when it told me of the great danger to the environment from DDT. Due to the hysteria caused by the book, DDT was banned by bureaucrats at the federal level in 1972, despite the fact that later scientific studies could show no ill effects from using it. Total B.S., but a revered pioneer of certain elements of the environmental movement.

Today the UN wants to ban DDT globally despite the fact that three to five hundred million people contract malaria on an annual basis and it kills about 2,500,000 of those. Hey, but they're people, you know, not animals. Or are they?

I read Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb:

From Wiki: [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb"]The Population Bomb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

The Population Bomb (1968) is a book written by Paul R. Ehrlich. A best-selling work, it predicted disaster for humanity due to [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation"]overpopulation[/ame] and the "population explosion". The book predicted that "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death", that nothing can be done to avoid mass [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine"]famine[/ame] greater than any in the history, and radical action is needed to limit the overpopulation.

People believed it. Despite spectacular failure after predictive failure, Ehrlich has continued to write books and make hysterical predictions of this sort. They still let this man teach at Stanford. Ain't tenure great?

Both books are still on the Sierra Club reading list:

Reading Lists > William E. Colby Memorial Library Index > Sierra Club

Shouldn't falsehoods be excised from serious consideration?

I could go on about the predictions that signal the end of mankind, but suffice it to say that I'm distrustful of the hyperbole spouted by those caring souls like Al Gore.

Why don't those involved in climate science render the information used to draw their conclusions transparent? The Human Genome Project was the type of scientific endeavor where scientists worked in concert and openly and instantly shared ALL the information they uncovered. The present state of climate science pits one group against the other. Data are misrepresented to bolster a viewpoint. Politicians are involved. It's a mess and I'm not willing to agree giving up freedoms to a politically motivated and unproven idea. If the possibility that man-made climate change truly threatens our very existence, shouldn't serious scientists share data?

You will find numerous examples of refusal to share data. That alone should make a thinking person wonder why.

 

I'm not in favor of government doling out subsidies for anything or anybody. (Our government has gone WAAAAAAAY beyond its Constitutional limits in many regards). By the same token, it should not tax businesses to death. Certain politicians want to further tax oil companies for 'windfall profits'. This has happened in the past and is a bad idea:

The Tax Foundation - Oil Company Profits and Tax Collections: Does the U.S. Need a New Windfall Profits Tax?

Oil companies are easy targets for unscrupulous politicians and government. They make about 8% compared to Microsoft and Pfizer's 20% and yet the government wants more and more. Can you think of any reason why government should take as much or more profit than the oil company?

FactCheck.org: Does the government really make more in taxes from the sale of a gallon of gasoline than the oil companies do?

 

IMHO, This whole Global Warming thing is nothing but pure political brainwashing. They are using it as an attempt to get rid of vehicles some years down the road...

 

Wow this last page with ufourya/dbermanmd & Jimmie84's comments finally some real common sense being made. If GW was true then why let emerging economies ignore it? Wouldn't it be smarter to subsidise their technology to update it to GW standards? Of course it makes sense except it (GW) is pretty much BS. Big Al pretty much ignores it at his own residence and pockets millions (always follow the money) No GW means no government grants to study it. Is it any wonder their are so many people screaming GW but failing to publish any meaningful data that can be looked at and debated. Lets face it it is a theoretical GW stance as the real world proves it wrong just like the"Population Bomb" rhetoric has proven to be false. Yet politicians (mostly "never let a good crisis go to waste" liberals) will jump on any weird ideas in order to pump themselves up with thier electorate. Now you may understand a bit more as to why GW became Climate Change instead. Too much actual hard data to ignore.

 

You guys are rich.

Lets get back to the science please.....

 

Man, I wish I had read this before spending time on my posts. Roy Spencer says it so much better:

Why America Does Not Care About Global Warming

May 6th, 2009
It is clear that concern in the United States over global warming is diminishing. In a Washington Whispers editorial, Paul Bedard quotes a Gallup Poll editor as saying Al Gore’s campaign to raise awareness of the “climate crisis” has failed. In one recent Pew Research Center survey, global warming rated at the bottom of a list of 20 domestic issues that Americans are concerned about.
Why is there so much apathy in the U.S. over something that threatens to transform the world by killing off thousands of species, flooding coastal areas, and making the world as much as 10 degrees F hotter? Do we just not care about the environment? Has the global warming message been oversold? Is the public experiencing ‘global warming fatigue’? Does the global warming problem seem so insurmountable to people that they just want to ignore it and hope that it goes away?
From my travels around the country and talking to people, the largest source of apathy is none of these. In my experience, people simply do not believe the ‘scientific consensus’ is correct. Most people do believe the Earth has warmed, but they think that warming has been largely natural. This was recently supported by a Rasmussen Reports poll which showed only 1/3 of American voters now believe global warming is caused by humans.
How can non-experts question the opinion of scientific experts? I believe it is because the public seems to have a better appreciation than the scientists do of a fundamental truth: There are some problems that science does not yet understand. There have been predictions of environmental doom before, and those have all failed. This has made people suspicious of spectacular scientific claims. As I have mentioned before, even Mark Twain over 100 years ago made fun of the predilection scientists have for making grand extrapolations and pronouncements:
“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture from such a trifling investment of fact.”
-Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883)
The scientific community has brought this problem upon themselves by not following their own rules and procedures. Scientists have ‘cried wolf’ too many times, and some day that might end up hurting all of us when some unusual and dangerous scientific concern does arise. I think that people intuitively understand that spectacular scientific claims require spectacular evidence. Just saying something ‘might’ happen ‘if current trends continue’ does not impress the public. They have heard it all before.
The analogy I sometimes think about is our understanding of the human brain. What if there was a group of researchers who built a computer model of how the brain works, and they claimed that they could take some measurements of your brain and tell you what you would be thinking 24 hours from now. Would you believe them?
No, even though you are not an expert regarding the operation of the human mind, you probably would not believe them. From your daily experience you would suspect that those experts were probably overreaching, and claiming they knew more than they really did.
Of course, if the experts had performed such experiments before and succeeded, then you might be more inclined to believe them. But in the climate business, we have no previous forecast successes that are relevant to the theory of manmade global warming. We can’t even forecast natural climate variations, because we do not understand them. Simply forecasting long-term warming probably has a 50/50 chance of being correct just by accident, since it seems to be more common for warming or cooling to occur than for the temperature to remain constant, year after year, decade after decade.
And coming up with possible explanations for what has happened in the past (’hindcasts’) do not really count, either. It is too easy to happen upon the wrong explanation which can be made to fit the data, a technique scientists call (rather pejoratively) “curve-fitting”.
In weather forecasting, MANY forecasts are required before one can confidently determine, based upon the number of successes and failures, whether those forecasts had any real skill beyond what might be expected just based upon chance. Climate forecasting is nowhere near being able to demonstrate forecast skill to the level of confidence that is routinely discussed in weather forecasting.
So, for those of you in the environmental community who think the global warming message needs to be repackaged, or rephrased, or have a change in terminology …well…I think you are wasting your time. The people have gotten the message, loud and clear: Global warming is manmade, and it is only going to get worse.
The trouble is that the people simply don’t think you know what you are talking about. And if global warming is largely a natural process, cutting down on our greenhouse gas emissions is going to have no measurable effect on future global temperatures.
Now, if you think you might succeed through a different kind of deception of the public…well, that indeed might work.

Roy Spencer, Ph. D.

 

That was a raspberry...

 

Here's a poll that matters...

97% of climatologists say global warming is occurring and caused by humans

 

If you look into this a little further, you will see that the poll included only two questions. You will also see that out of the huge number of participants solicited, only 77 climate scientists responded. 75 answered in the affirmative, hence the '97%'. Your link is somewhat misleading in that it suggests thousands of climatologists make up the polling number.

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1184

And once again, the voice of reason:


...So, when you hear that climate researchers have determined that the only way they can explain warming in the last 50 years is with human influences, you need to be very wary. The reason they can explain the warming only when they include humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions is because we do not have sufficiently accurate global observations to say otherwise.
So, since they don’t have the data to determine whether there are natural sources of climate change, they simply ASSUME it does not happen. This makes the theory of manmade global warming to large extent a matter of faith. From talking to a few of them, I think that many of these researchers are not even aware they have made this implicit assumption.
And the truth is there is no unique human fingerprint of global warming to identify our present warmth as manmade, either. For instance, a slight natural decrease in cloud cover would let more sunlight in and cause the oceans to warm, thus causing an increase in water vapor (our main greenhouse gas), which would then look like manmade warming. Even the greater warming over land than the ocean we have experienced can be explained by warming oceans…because warmer oceans send more humid airmasses over land, which then causes a naturally-enhanced greenhouse effect over land. (This finding was published here.)
I find that meteorologists (by training) are perfectly comfortable with the idea of natural cloud fluctuations causing climate change. But climate modelers tend to look down on meteorologists, who as a group are generally distrustful of climate models.
I would argue that, until climate modelers begin to appreciate the complexities of weather – especially of clouds — as much as meteorologists do, then their efforts to predict climate change with computer programs will be as futile as tilting at windmills.

Dr. Roy Spencer

 

That's the way polls work. Nationwide polls are often based on the answers of 1 or 2 thousand people - and that can accurately represent an entire nation. It's statistically improbable that more respondents would translate into a different result. But nice try.

 

Frankly the real science (observable) says there isn't any global warming. It's the theorists that demand there is. Their theories do not match observable science. You don't develop a theory and then plug in the values to give you the answer you want. That is not science that is politics.

 

Wrong. Observations in ecology could be atributed to global warming (AGW or non-AGW).

• Changing range of species distribution in latitude and altitude.

"A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems"

"Ecological responses to recent climate change"

• increased frequency and intensity of el nino/la nina events and their effect on southern ocean food networks (predominately Euphausia superba).

Global Temperature Tendency and El Nino Frequency

Ecological Impacts - Pacific Coastline

Emperor penguins and climate change

Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate Change

THE EFFECTS OF GLOBAL CLIMATE VARIABILITY IN PUP PRODUCTION OF ANTARCTIC FUR SEALS


There is most definately evidence that could support global warming. You just have to look in the right places and those places are not political blogs or conservative/corporate media.

I'm curious. What field do you work in again?

 

I could post up dozens more journals/papers but it is unlikely you will read them or even have access to them since it appears most of the "experts" in this thread get their information from non-peer reviewed material or from the same 3 very vocal climate skeptics (Tim Ball, Roy Spencer, etc.).

I'm all for climate debates and even skeptisism but please, lets discuss science and not hyperbole and knee-jerk reactions. Posting up a quote from a favorite blog without being able to understand the concepts yourself is weak and not condusive to further discussion. It is very similar to individuals argueing over which baseball team is better when neither party (the antagonists) can play worth a damn to begin with!

 

Blanket statements do nothing other than express the poster's opinion. There is plenty of "real science" ongoing trying to get better answers to the effects of burning immense volumes of carbon fuels. One extreme position is that this burning will destroy the environment in short order. Another extreme position is that any actions will destroy the economy since there is no effect. Rather than state yet another opinion, let's cover some science basics:
1) Measurements of CO2 concentrations show an undebatable increase due to human burning of immense amounts of oil and coal. This is a direct measurement you can do in your own home.
2) CO2 is a greenhouse gas. This is basic chemistry
3) To the very first order, there should be some warming effect.
4) The first order is basically worthless in such an immensely complicated world.

Now, the above facts certainly justify performing more involved studies to see what the actual effects, and the results of these effects. Some models and measurements indicated sigificant warming possibilities. Some others do not. The only option is to keep working the science. The worst thing to do is state a conclusion.

 

Ah, figures.

Anyway, it is about time to ask you again about what I "lied" about and where your evidence is to support your claim.

As you recall, my statements were roughly as follows (supported by previously provided graphical evidence):
- arctic sea ice extent has returned to about its 1979-2000 average
- antarctic sea ice extent is near an all time high
- sea surface temps have fallen since ~2002
- global temperatures have been flat to declining for most of this decade

All this has occurred despite a continued rapid rise in CO2.

So I am waiting for you to provide evidence that these are "lies" or ... retract your statement that I am a "liar". What do you say, Fibber?

 

Well Fibber, you obviously know as little about polling and statistical sampling as you do climate science.

First, those polled would have to be randomly sampled, not self-selected, in order to represent the larger population of climate scientists. Secondly, to obtain an accurate sample (95% confidence with +/- 3% margin of error) for a population of say, 1000 climate scientists, you would need a sample size of 516 climatologists, not 77.

In any case, a poll is a meaningless way to prove a scientific point. What would be meaningful would be for a falsifiable AGW hypothesis to be advanced, then tested.

Of course, as we have already seen on this forum, the only hypothesis advanced was that suggested by Alric - that 50 years without warming during a period of rapidly rising CO2 would disprove AGW. And of course, I falsified Alric's hypothesis by demonstrating that temperatures fell from about 1932 - the mid '80s despite massive increases in atmospheric CO2.

 

Tim, a couple questions and/or concerns.

Your first bulleted point states Arctic sea ice extent has returned to its 1979-2000 average but you used a graph showing southern hemisphere sea ice anomoly. Did you mean to show this graph instead?



This article from The National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA may help describes the observed reduction in Arctic sea ice extent, particularly perennial sea ice. It appears sea ice extent is still below the 1979-2000 average even if it is up from the 2006-2007 season.

Arctic sea ice younger, thinner as melt season begins

NASA Examines Arctic Sea Ice Changes Leading to Record Low in 2007


This graph represents news I find particularly troubling. Sea ice total coverage is indeed important but when that ice is formed during the season (early, late, or normal) and when it melts away is of supreme importance to the recruiment rates of planktonic and quasi-planktonic organisms like krill and phytoplankton. This is critical in the southern oceans which is where most of my study on the subject is focused but it nonetheless applies to the Acrtic as well.


Here is a good one on sea ice age:

Figure 5. These images show declining sea ice age, which indicates a thinning Arctic sea ice cover more vulnerable to melting in summer. Ice older than two years now accounts for less than 10% of the ice cover.
—Credit: From the National Snow and Ice Data Center, courtesy J. Maslanik and C. Fowler, University of Colorado



Your 4th point is not clear to me. It seems you are looking at less than a decade of fluctuations which we both know is borderlinde risky at best but the graph you posted doesn't appear quite flat despite the sharp dip in 2008 which, if you see how quickly temperatures have repeated rebounded to higher than previous levels, leaves one a little less certain about how you can draw a real conclusion from such data. Personally I would not draw a pro-global warming conclusion nor could I could that as an anti-global warming conclusion.

 

Tim, I don't think you can treat a short period of temperature stagnation or even a slight reduction as falsifying argument. As you can clearly see from your graph the over trend for temperature is still upward. You know just as well as I do that other factors come into play and that CO2 is not the only contributing factor. I would not go so far as to state that CO2 is the main driver but it does not appear to be insignificant either. When adding heat to a system we know that the system will distribute that excess heat in many different ways. Thus rarely should we expect to find a nice smooth line of temperature gradation over a timeline spanning decades. Take ENSO events for example. When heat builds up in tropical waters this effects the frequency and intensity of ENSO events which work to redistribute the excess heat. These events can be measured worldwide so we should expect to find sudden spikes in some reason and dips in others while the system balances itself back out. So IMO counting 1-2years worth of temperature dips as proof that global warming is false or that CO2 is not a climate driver is no different than the global warming hysterics claiming a temperature spike is proof that CO2 IS a climate driver. Does that make sense? It's late and I'm sleepy so I apologize if I'm all over the place.

 

It's late - but a quick reply. My chart may have been the wrong one, I don't recall. As you know, the decline in arctic sea ice was trumpeted as clear evidence of AGW. However, NASA attributed much of the ice loss to unusual winds and the recovery of the ice has been largely ignored in the mainstream media. And of course, given a decline in ice from the end of last decade through about the middle of this decade, one would expect that the ice thickness might not be fully recovered. The trend (direction) is clear - more ice over the last year or two and one would expect a return of ice thickness as well if this trend continues.

BTW, your second chart has a more up to date version, here, that shows continued increase in sea ice area and in fact, record April levels of sea ice vs. the prior 7 years: