GW takes a blow

OK ... the end of the world is coming. Berman seems to be siding with a French Socialist.

 

I'd think Dr. Berman would be concerned if one of his patients had time-sequenced pictures that revealed a growing tumor.

These pictures concern a lot of people > http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=htt...active%26sa%3DG

This does not seem so off-topic. If fossil fuel consumption is reduced, it reduces the US debt to unfriendly OPEC nations - a goal I doubt there will be disagreement on.

 

Nice article, It just goes to show people are more believing of the Gloom & Doom factor. More so than the real truth.. B)

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Proco @ Mar 5 2007, 12:36 PM) [snapback]400326[/snapback]</div>

A nice response to Mr. Allegre here, highlighting a couple fundamental errors he makes in his science (in addition to citing a "Nature" study actually published in Science. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archi...-ma-non-troppo/

 

All this article does is repeat the same argument that's always presented by anti-global warming people: "global warming might be all or partly a natural phenomenon."

It then goes on to say that the science is far from settled in the eyes of many (duh), and that this one guy who isn't convinced thinks other scientists should be more actively proposing solutions, not just spreading fear (double duh).

Personally, I'm more concerned about the political risks that have always been a part of the oil trade. We're fighting wars across the world right now just to hold on to the nasty stuff when we could be very actively building the new energy economy. I think there's money in renewable energy and oil companies just don't want to see those markets evolve because they have such a large investment in the current system.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(priusguy04 @ Mar 5 2007, 08:50 AM) [snapback]400343[/snapback]</div>

Guess you should do more research instead of immediately asimilating data that fits YOUR frame and tossing out everything else or refusing to look deeper.

From RealClimate.org <.. MegansPrius beat me to it. lol

Climate change denial is not necessarily a speciality of Washington DC think tanks - sometimes it can also be found in old Europe. Right now there is a little media storm passing by in France evoked by an article from Claude Allègre in L’Express. Who is Claude Allègre? He is one of the most decorated french geophysicists specializing in geochemistry and the use of paleomagnetism. Being a longtime friend of the former prime minister, Lionel Jospin, he even became Minister of Education and Research in the former Socialist government. He still plays an active role within the Socialist party and though he has never published anything directly related to anthropogenic climate change, one would assume that he has some understanding of the scientific matter. But this assumption would be wrong.

In the French weekly journal l’Express he exposed his “sceptical†views in an article entitled “The snows of Kilimanjaroâ€. In the short editorial, he somehow became lost when following Ernest Hemingway to East Africa. Allègre mentions two scientific examples to demonstrate that there is something fundamentally wrong in the IPCC statements on the reality of climate change. First, he commented on the disappearing glaciers of the Kilimanjaro, sometimes treated as the “Panda†of anthropogenic climate change. Citing a "Nature" study (which was in fact published in Science) by Pierre Sepulchre and colleagues from my laboratory, he claimed that this modelling study demonstrated that Kilimanjaro’s glaciers are controlled by tectonic activity. In fact, the article describes the impact of tectonics of the East African Highlands on Indian ocean moisture transport ---- on a time scale of millions of years! This confuses glacier variability over the last ~100 years with rainfall trends extending back to the time of the early hominids (such as Lucy).

 

Yes there's a causal relationship between nations wanting more oil, and nations fighting over oil.

I'm tossing aside global warming there because at this point I think we're both too late to fix it, and too stupid collectively to do anything about until there's a market incentive for change.

You call it the beauty, I call it the tragedy of our system that we ignore problems until the damage is done, as long as we're making slightly more money than we're losing.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(dbermanmd @ Mar 5 2007, 09:01 AM) [snapback]400352[/snapback]</div>

Here is a good article and graph that would explain the 2nd part of your question regarding midieval warming.



What If … the “Hockey Stick†Were Wrong? - Jan 2005

Sorry I only have RealClimate data. I cannot access my college's library online to find journals.

 

Anti-intellectualists love to base their arguments on the belief that if 99% of scientists agree on something, the other 1% must be correct. After all, "they" said Fulton's steamboat would not work, therefore the lone voice must always be right.

Meanwhile, conservatives don't really care, because if Jesus is going to return in a couple of years, there's no point in worrying about the environment.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(dbermanmd @ Mar 5 2007, 05:01 PM) [snapback]400352[/snapback]</div>

Specifically? And I can't believe even you are really stupid enough to write the second half of that sentence.

Ah yes, the American myth of being the lone hero fighting against the massed hordes of evil.

Clearly any lone voice against the "establishment" is, by narrative necessity, correct. Never mind if those "lone voices" are backed by huge government/military/industrial/financial/oil/religious complexes. :lol:

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(dbermanmd @ Mar 5 2007, 09:32 AM) [snapback]400380[/snapback]</div>

Why yes, partially. Along with numerous other testable data like ice cores, geoformations like cap carbonates, stalamites, and the oxygen isotopes that go long with temperature and CO2 relationships, fossilized calcifying organisims and even manganese and iron nodules that form under varying atmospheric and ocean conditions. So let just make it easy and say that there is not a single line of evidence point in the direction of GW but many.

As for your other question I would rather rearch it further before just taking a pot shot at it and spreading incorrect info.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(dbermanmd @ Mar 5 2007, 09:37 AM) [snapback]400380[/snapback]</div>

The first is commonly charged to the push of religion and THEIR views on how the earth works and any "scientist" of that era would be killed for reporting otherwise.

The 2nd has a lot more to it than GW. What a lot of the uneducated don't understand is that GW is only one part of the big complex fabric that includes environmental degredation, human rights, geopolitical stablity, and an antiquated economic model and a whole bunch of greedy %$#s! lol

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(dbermanmd @ Mar 5 2007, 09:51 AM) [snapback]400394[/snapback]</div>

From what I have read, no not ALL scientists believed in those theories. You MUST remember that books are often funded by people with agendas, IE the church or the ruler of that country. There is a also a HUGE difference in the availability of measuring devices and knowledge that allows us to make better predictions and understand our planet. In the last 30-40 years there have been monumental findings and paradigm shifts in all the fields of science. So to base everything on some static model of science is pretty silly.


Weather and climate are completely different in repsect to predictions. You really cannot put the two together in any sense other than they both involve things like temperature or precipitation. Climate models are definately not perfect and things like CO2 or aerosol forcings are not 100% understood but the relationships are as well as the historical trends. Again, think precautionary princple. You're view of "our ways of life" is VERY damaging in SOO many ways that it can only benifit from a change. I do not like the ideas of laws and regulations any more than you problably do but I insist that if the majority of people in the world understood the implications of their behavior that we wouldn't need so many laws. In the absence of knowledge we must rely on laws and regulations which were essentially set up to limit the insane and criminal from hurting the rest of society. Unfortunately for us our schools and media have only increased the number of insane (the people who think they have no connection to the rest of the world and their actions have no effect) and criminal (mega-corporations and the Bush/Cheney's of the world) thus we end up with more laws.

Sometimes, I encounter arguments suggesting that since we cannot predict the weather beyond a couple of weeks, then it must be impossible to predict the climate in 100 years. Such statements tend to present themselves as a kind of revelation, often in social settings and parties after I have revealed for some of the guests that I'm a climatologist (if I say I work for the Meteorological Institute, I almost always get the question "so, what's the weather going to be like tomorrow?"). Such occasions also tend to be times when I'm not too inclined to indulge in deep scientific or technical explanations. Or when talking to a journalist who wants an easy answer. In those cases I try to provide a short and simple, but convincing, explanation that is easy for most people to understand why climate can be predicted despite the chaotic nature of the weather (a more theoretical discussion is provided in the earlier post Chaos and Climate). One approach is to try to relate the topic to something with which they are familiar, such as to point to empirical observations which most accept (I suppose with hindsight it could be similar to the researchers in the early 20th century trying to convince that nuclear reactions were possible - just look at the Sun, and there is the proof! Or before that, the debate about whether atoms were real or not - just look at the blue sky, and you look at the proof...). I like to emphasised the words 'weather' and 'climate' above, because they mean different things.

More info: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archi...n-be-predicted/

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(F8L @ Mar 5 2007, 12:42 PM) [snapback]400388[/snapback]</div>

**GASP** You refuse to spread incorrect info? What in the world is wrong with you?

That's simply unacceptable, F8L. The naysayers on this thread do not understand the term "research," and they LIVE for incorrect info.

You're turning their world upside down, here...creating a bizarro universe.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(dbermanmd @ Mar 5 2007, 10:27 AM) [snapback]400434[/snapback]</div>

No, just as one more piece of evidence that what we are doing is wrong and incompatible with the natural world and human societies. You keep mentioning warming. You are no doubt aware of the 100s of other downfalls we face if we continue with our fossil fuel addictions right? Nerfer explained it some in the other thread on this topic. Why must you take on the cartesian mindset on any problem that is brought up in this forum? Are you versed in systems thinking at all or is dualism more to your liking? That is not meant as a slam at all. I'm just curious as to your rational model so that I can better explain myself to you in the furture and facilitate true communication. Otherwise all we are doing is argeuing and I'd rather not participate in that kind of dialog.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(livelychick @ Mar 5 2007, 10:00 AM) [snapback]400411[/snapback]</div>

LOL, as much as I'd like to shoot from the hip I realize that it is a poor way to educate or sway a person into at least trying to understand my point of view.

I could just take the neocon tact and shoot from the hip then hire multi-million dollar think tanks to twist my words into something the public will believe. :lol: