The Climate Change Hoax

well bush jr is a *****

of course palin is highly inteligent and i hope she runs in 2012

 

Except for the fact that the science-ish cabal of 'chicken little' has been LYING for years; we skeptics have known of it all along, now it has been revealed for all to see. Several of the most eminent scientists in the entire debate are skeptics, and always have been.

So basically both your points above are demonstrably false.

Jimbo

 

go look at all the melting glaciers , that doesn't happen over night

 

He made me grit my teeth a few times, but he made me cheer a few times. I am still unhappy about some of his actions, but they are not about climate. They are more about borders, language and culture, not something we should highjack this thread over. Enough.

 

I doubt many glaciers will be melting this week.

 

By the way, some of that melting glacier evidence may be compromised.

 

one week or one location or even one year does not a trend make

 

Trouble is, glacial retreat is a documented 200+ year old phenomena, while significant anthropogenic CO2 has only a ~60 year history.

Jimbo

 

The Earth is a tropical planet. We are at the end of a short glacial period.

 

what the argument is about

You know, it might help to keep separate the various issues under discussion. There are quite a few.

1. Has the earth been warming over the last n years where n is some number between, 11 and, say, 200.
Before the document scandal this has been a much less controversial point than many alarmists understand. Many --maybe even most-- of the "skeptics" were willing to believe the scientists about the actual measurements they said they took. Now, of course, we have reason to doubt even this basic point.

2. Has the earth been warming over the last 11 years?
Pretty much all the scientists agree that it has not, that in fact it has been cooling. This is most likely what was being referred to in the famous "hide the decline" email.

3. Is the recent warming caused by increases in CO2?
This is a highly controversial point. The only evidence for it is computer models, and to date those models have proven completely unable to predict future climate variations.

Furthermore, (a) the variation is CO2 has been small compared to the total, (b) CO2 is a relatively weak greenhouse gas. Even water vapor is more significant. (c) a huge magma flow has been found under the Arctic where all of the loss of ice is occurring. In the Antarctic ice is increasing. (d) other planets have been experiencing a warming trend, which indicates that the sun may be a strong influence.

4. Is the recent increase in CO2 caused by man?
I'm not too familiar with this topic, but my sense is that most skeptics would say "yes" but that there is reason to doubt this also.

5. Is global warming a bad thing?
This question is often overlooked in all the heat over whether and how it is occurring, but it is legitimate to ask whether we would want to stop it even if we could. Sure, people who own real estate in Los Angeles, Manhattan and London really want to stop global warming, but why should the rest of us want to undergo such enormous sacrifice to save their real estate investments? Global warming could potentially open up millions of square miles of new living space and farm land in Canada, Europe and Asia.

In order to counter this point, the alarmists have invented various other models to show all of the climate disasters that will happen if the earth warms up, but against these unsubstantiated models there is the Medieval Warm Period where the earth was apparently much warmer than today and all civilization didn't come to an end.

5. Has there been a scientific conspiracy to manipulate data and suppress dissenting scientists?
Skeptics have been claiming this for years, and to tell the truth there was good evidence for it long before those emails were released. Since those emails have been released, I don't think any reasonable person can deny this. You can argue about the extent or the significance of the conspiracy, but it is pretty clear that the most influential scientists were involved in just such a conspiracy.

Furthermore, there is now significant evidence that even the data itself was reported falsely --or at least I consider it significant when they go to such great lengths to avoid letting others see the data, even to breaking the law and deleting it.

7. Does the conspiracy prove that AGW is wrong?
Some of the more enthusiastic skeptics seem to think so, but the real significance is more subtle than that. As many of the alarmists have pointed out, these emails only involved a small number of researchers. It does not automatically invalidate all of the other research.

What the alarmists are not taking seriously is that science is an iterative process. One work builds on another or discredits another. When a work is discredited, you switch tack and try again. The emails show that this process has been deliberately short-circuited in the global-warming debate. No one has been allowed to publish anything that would discredit the basic premises of AGW. And when the skeptics did manage to publish results that threw doubt on individual papers, the alarmists just ignored them and kept on the same tack regardless.

7. Even if the data were all good the scientists were all honest and objective, and the math were all error free, should we believe their climate-change models?
No. Science is not magic. They don't stir together a cup of measurement, two pints of mathematics and a pinch of academic jargon and out pops a sure-and-certain theory. You are missing the step where they make predictions based on their theory and then confirm the predictions. That step has been completely ignored in this debate.

Climate models have, in fact, made predictions, and those predictions have been uniformly wrong. Every year, climate scientists have to tweak their models, trying to get them to predict the previous year's climate.

Climate science is a babe in infancy, but the workers in the field don't want to wait for their science to mature before they start being so important that world leaders are listening to their advice.

The scientists want the stature for their egos, and the world leaders want a pending disaster to stave off so that people will idolize them for it. Positive-feedback situations like always end in catastrophic failure if there is no damping force to get them under control. In this case, the damping force would be people with good sense saying, "hey if they can't predict the climate ten years in advance, why should we believe that they can predict the climate a hundred years in advance?"

It's a good question, and one that the alarmists have yet to answer.

 

In a rethorical debate that leads nowhere that may have been a good question. Have a look at this photo of peaks above Santiago, in Chile. They were always covered with snow, and even in the summer the snow would strech down about a third of the total height of the mountain.

These peaks are above 5 km and the temps there are/were always very low due to the altitude. And only 10-15 years ago the snow was there, throughout the summer.

Today there's no snow to speak of. I agree that we are going through the cycles, but the speed of the snow melting away is not natural. It is to fast. Surely, we are contributing with all these internal combustion engines we are firing every day. Thousands of planes are in the sky 24/7, hundreds of thousands of ships are warming the seas, and how many billions of cars are out there?

Not to mention factories, airconditioners, coal and oil powered powerplants, termal plants for heating our homes in the winter.

All that heat is extra heat that did not contribute before.

To say that humans are not accelerating the process is also a nonsense, just as saying, without the honestly collected evidence, that we are.

Here is one confirmation. The snow is gone.

 

cutting down on emissions does no harm to the climate

but if we are changing the climate then cutting down emissions may save the planet

the cost of doing something even if its not necessary is just a economic cost

the cost of doing nothing if it is necessary will cost more than money

 

masrapido: even if your little corner of the world is warming (and your evidence for that is not conclusive), this does not prove that the world overall is warming. There are always some parts of the world that are warming and other parts that are cooling.

Also, just because it seems to you that man's activities just must have an effect on climate, this does not constitute evidence. I suggest that you have no clear grasp of the effects and the scales involved, and so your intuitions on the subject are to be discounted. How much bigger is the sun's energy contribution than man's? Ten times? A hundred times? A million times? Do you have any idea? How big would the difference have to be before man's contribution can be neglected? Do you have any idea?

That is what careful measurement and mathematics are for. Intuition is fine for many common tasks, but if you are building a ship or proposing enormous economic changes based on your predictions of the climate, you had better have something better to go on than your personal experiences and intuitions.

 

We don't know that. Maybe the earth is starting to enter another ice age and human-generated CO2 is the only thing holding it off. There is actually some evidence to support this. The evidence is not good enough that I would actually believe it, but it is about as good as the evidence for AGW.

and may harm the planet --we don't know.

"Just an economic cost"? If it leads to 75% unemployment, mass riots, a sixth of the population dieing from disease and bad drinking water, that's "just an economic cost". The measures that are being proposed have the potential to cause huge decreases in your children's standard of living for the potential benefit that it may allow your grandchildren to live in a slightly colder world instead of a slightly warmer one.

This is highly controversial. Global warming may actually be a great benefit.

 

Dave: even if your little corner of the world is "not" warming (and
your evidence for that is not conclusive), this does not prove that
the world overall is not warming. There are always some parts of the
world that are warming and other parts that are cooling.

Also, just because it seems to you that man's activities just cannot
have an effect on climate, this does not constitute evidence. I
suggest that you have no clear grasp of the effects and the scales
involved, and so your intuitions on the subject are to be discounted.
How much bigger is the sun's energy contribution than man's? Ten
times? A hundred times? A million times? Do you have any idea? How
big would the difference have to be before man's contribution can be
neglected? Do you have any idea?

That is what careful measurement and mathematics are for. Intuition
is fine for many common tasks, but if you are building a ship or
proposing enormous economic changes based on your predictions of the
climate, you had better have something better to go on than your
personal experiences and intuitions.

And just to demonstrate the lack of clear thinking (you must be a teenager without the real grasp on what you are talking about): this is general forum where personal opinions are prevalent form of communications. Exchange of ideas and thoughts. To demand "hard core" evidence is rediculous. People express their opinion and it is up to the readers to find the evidence pro or contra. THEN they can go on and debate for or against the view they dislike.

I do not expect you or anyone else to provide supporting evidence for their personal opinion, for example.

It becomes necessary, however, to have some proof if we engage in debate.

Since your shallow counter argument vaguely calls upon mathematics (that is what makes me think that you must be some kid not sure what to say or where to look) I'll give you a homework for your next argument. Since the first technological revolution and introduction of the steam (heat) engine, the amount of calories humans produced had increased dramatically. Since then the heat production was increasing rapidly.

Question: was the increase exponentila or geometrical? And how much heat have we produced since then to date?

I do not expect you to know that the snow in Swiss Alps is on its' lowest levels either, and that Groenland ice has lost over 25% in the last 5 years. Not everything is on the internet.Some things can be only found in papers.

Discounting other people's opinion just because you disagree is a poor form. Please do better. If you can't, then refraining from commenting on others opinion is the only way to go.

You can circumvent that by expressing your own opinion without pretending you know better than those who you disagree with.