Global Warming, Full Quivers, and Social Irresponsibility

[there buster]

Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts?

By Timothy Ball

Monday, February 5, 2007

Global Warming, as we think we know it, doesn't exist. And I am not the only one trying to make people open up their eyes and see the truth. But few listen, despite the fact that I was the first Canadian Ph.D. in Climatology and I have an extensive background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition.“Few listen, even though I have a Ph.D, (Doctor of Science) from the University of London, England and was a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg.” . For some reason (actually for many), the World is not listening. Here is why.

What would happen if tomorrow we were told that, after all, the Earth is flat? It would probably be the most important piece of news in the media and would generate a lot of debate. So why is it that when scientists who have studied the Global Warming phenomenon for years say that humans are not the cause nobody listens? Why does no one acknowledge that the Emperor has no clothes on?

Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification. For example, Environment Canada brags about spending $3.7 billion in the last five years dealing with climate change almost all on propaganda trying to defend an indefensible scientific position while at the same time closing weather stations and failing to meet legislated pollution targets.

No sensible person seeks conflict, especially with governments, but if we don't pursue the truth, we are lost as individuals and as a society. That is why I insist on saying that there is no evidence that we are, or could ever cause global climate change. And, recently, Yuri A. Izrael, Vice President of the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed this statement. So how has the world come to believe that something is wrong?

Maybe for the same reason we believed, 30 years ago, that global cooling was the biggest threat: a matter of faith. "It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species," wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.

I was as opposed to the threats of impending doom global cooling engendered as I am to the threats made about Global Warming. Let me stress I am not denying the phenomenon has occurred. The world has warmed since 1680, the nadir of a cool period called the Little Ice Age (LIA) that has generally continued to the present. These climate changes are well within natural variability and explained quite easily by changes in the sun. But there is nothing unusual going on.

Since I obtained my doctorate in climatology from the University of London, Queen Mary College, England my career has spanned two climate cycles. Temperatures declined from 1940 to 1980 and in the early 1970's global cooling became the consensus. This proves that consensus is not a scientific fact. By the 1990's temperatures appeared to have reversed and Global Warming became the consensus. It appears I'll witness another cycle before retiring, as the major mechanisms and the global temperature trends now indicate a cooling.

No doubt passive acceptance yields less stress, fewer personal attacks and makes career progress easier. What I have experienced in my personal life during the last years makes me understand why most people choose not to speak out; job security and fear of reprisals. Even in University, where free speech and challenge to prevailing wisdoms are supposedly encouraged, academics remain silent.

I once received a three page letter that my lawyer defined as libellous, from an academic colleague, saying I had no right to say what I was saying, especially in public lectures. Sadly, my experience is that universities are the most dogmatic and oppressive places in our society. This becomes progressively worse as they receive more and more funding from governments that demand a particular viewpoint.

In another instance, I was accused by Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki of being paid by oil companies. That is a lie. Apparently he thinks if the fossil fuel companies pay you have an agenda. So if Greenpeace, Sierra Club or governments pay there is no agenda and only truth and enlightenment?

Personal attacks are difficult and shouldn't occur in a debate in a civilized society. I can only consider them from what they imply. They usually indicate a person or group is losing the debate. In this case, they also indicate how political the entire Global Warming debate has become. Both underline the lack of or even contradictory nature of the evidence.

I am not alone in this journey against the prevalent myth. Several well-known names have also raised their voices. Michael Crichton, the scientist, writer and filmmaker is one of them. In his latest book, "State of Fear" he takes time to explain, often in surprising detail, the flawed science behind Global Warming and other imagined environmental crises.

Another cry in the wildenerness is Richard Lindzen's. He is an atmospheric physicist and a professor of meteorology at MIT, renowned for his research in dynamic meteorology - especially atmospheric waves. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has held positions at the University of Chicago, Harvard University and MIT. Linzen frequently speaks out against the notion that significant Global Warming is caused by humans. Yet nobody seems to listen.

I think it may be because most people don't understand the scientific method which Thomas Kuhn so skilfully and briefly set out in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." A scientist makes certain assumptions and then produces a theory which is only as valid as the assumptions. The theory of Global Warming assumes that CO2 is an atmospheric greenhouse gas and as it increases temperatures rise. It was then theorized that since humans were producing more CO2 than before, the temperature would inevitably rise. The theory was accepted before testing had started, and effectively became a law.

As Lindzen said many years ago: "the consensus was reached before the research had even begun." Now, any scientist who dares to question the prevailing wisdom is marginalized and called a sceptic, when in fact they are simply being good scientists. This has reached frightening levels with these scientists now being called climate change denier with all the holocaust connotations of that word. The normal scientific method is effectively being thwarted.

Meanwhile, politicians are being listened to, even though most of them have no knowledge or understanding of science, especially the science of climate and climate change. Hence, they are in no position to question a policy on climate change when it threatens the entire planet. Moreover, using fear and creating hysteria makes it very difficult to make calm rational decisions about issues needing attention.

Until you have challenged the prevailing wisdom you have no idea how nasty people can be. Until you have re-examined any issue in an attempt to find out all the information, you cannot know how much misinformation exists in the supposed age of information.

I was greatly influenced several years ago by Aaron Wildavsky's book "Yes, but is it true?" The author taught political science at a New York University and realized how science was being influenced by and apparently misused by politics. He gave his graduate students an assignment to pursue the science behind a policy generated by a highly publicised environmental concern. To his and their surprise they found there was little scientific evidence, consensus and justification for the policy. You only realize the extent to which Wildavsky's findings occur when you ask the question he posed. Wildavsky's students did it in the safety of academia and with the excuse that it was an assignment. I have learned it is a difficult question to ask in the real world, however I firmly believe it is the most important question to ask if we are to advance in the right direction.

Dr. Tim Ball, Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (www.nrsp.com), is a Victoria-based environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg.

[Bravus]

Dr Ball has some good rhetoric, but presents zero scientific evidence for his claims beside his own word and his qualifications. If he understood Kuhn he'd know that he still needs to provide some evidence of his own in order to challenge the dominant paradigm. When there are experimental results that the current paradigm fails to explain and that his proposed alternative does, then it's time to talk.

[there buster]

Al Gore Is a Greenhouse Gasbag

Penn professor Bob Giegengack has a few quibbles with the former VP on this whole global warming thing

By John Marchese

image

LUKEWARM: Says Gieg of Gore, "What he's doing is no less than the scare tactics used by people like Karl Rove." / Photo by Chris Crisman

It’s the last day of November, which means winter begins in three weeks. Yet the temperature on the Penn campus is nearing 70 degrees, and it’s muggy. Walking to the offices of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science from a remote parking lot makes me sweaty. Global Warming.

Driving here this morning, I heard a report on WHYY from National Public Radio that the International Ski Federation was canceling races because there’s no snow in the Alps. Got to be Global Warming!

Yesterday, down the road in Washington, where the temperature was 16 degrees above normal, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case in which 13 state governments are suing the Environmental Protection Agency to force the government to begin controlling carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the decades-old Clean Air Act. If that doesn’t happen, the states claim, the rising sea levels caused by greenhouse gases will rob them of coastline. GLOBAL WARMING!!

And this is just one ordinary day in the new normal. Even if daily weather has nothing to do with global warming, and even if the scientific debate about it is not quite done, its cultural moment has certainly begun. Insurance companies have stopped writing policies for coastline residents. A government report out of England warns that global warming may be so economically deleterious that it will make the upheaval of the Great Depression and World War II seem benign.

Michael Crichton has already dramatized the issue in a best-selling novel. Leonardo DiCaprio is working on a documentary on the subject. A recent Time magazine cover featured a polar bear in danger of drowning and the warning: “Be Worried. Be Very Worried.”

I’ve come to Penn to see the skeptic.

In Room 100 of the classic Christopher Wren-inspired Towne Building, Robert Giegengack seems much less than worried. The 67-year-old professor is preparing to give one of the semester’s final lectures to his 150-student class in environmental analysis, a popular science elective among Penn’s arts and sciences undergrads.

For decades, Giegengack was content to be a relatively obscure geologist who taught more than he published. Recently, though, he’s stepped into the swirling tempest surrounding global warming, in part because he says it’s not even one of the top 10 environmental problems we face. To make that point, he occasionally joins in a panel discussion, or gives a quote to a science writer. He’s thinking about writing something for one of the smarty-pants magazines. “I’ve always been interested in this question,” he says, “but when I first started working, no one cared — you couldn’t get an article published if you wanted to.” Now, though, “The public appetite for all this [censored] seems to be insatiable.”

Giegengack is a slim man of medium height, with a prominent nose and a very high forehead. “I traded my hair for eyeglasses,” he’s been known to say. In this weird late-fall weather, he’s dressed as if he might run off for a round of golf or a sail — khaki pants, striped dress shirt (short-sleeved) and boat shoes. His name is pronounced “GEEG-in-gack,” and over the nearly four decades he has taught at Penn, students have developed the habit of simply calling him “Gieg.”

Gieg is situated at a lectern in the pit of an amphitheater classroom. As the seats fill, he fiddles with his Mac laptop, where he has stored a PowerPoint presentation that covers today’s lecture. Before that, though, he runs a short clip from a Simpsons episode in which Bart and Lisa argue over whether water drains in different directions in the Southern and Northern hemispheres. Though Gieg has long been known as an entertaining lecturer, he’s not The Simpsons. The students laugh out loud at the clip, as does their professor. When the lights come back on, the professor assures them: “Bart will probably not be on the final.”

The class is a typical-seeming group, heavy on girls, some of whom wear ripped jeans and do-rags, others of whom are carefully made up and snappily dressed, pulling their notebooks from designer bags. Midway through the class, Gieg says, “Now it’s time for us to talk about the number one political/environmental issue of our time.” He reads a snippet from a New York Times editorial about the Supreme Court global-warming case.

“What I’m going to try to do the rest of today and also probably on Tuesday is bring you up to date on this. I’ll try to avoid editorializing or politicking. I’ll just tell you some stuff. Give you information. There’s lot’s of stuff, and it’s very complicated.”

Gieg gazes upward toward his young charges. “Every single one of you knows more about this than Al Gore,” he tells the undergrads. “And vastly more than anyone in this present administration.”

YOU REMEMBER AL GORE. Congressman, then senator from a political dynasty in Tennessee. Vice president for the eight years of the Clinton administration. President-elect of the United States for about 10 minutes, before being waylaid by the dangling chad. Since his bitter, disputed loss to George W. Bush, Gore has gone through some changes. He tried sporting a beard, reinvented himself as a media entrepreneur, hosted Saturday Night Live, gained a lot of weight. Then, last May, he burst back into the public eye as the star of a surprisingly successful documentary on global warming called An Inconvenient Truth. In a way that sometimes happens in America, Al Gore has come to personify an issue that until recently, most of us didn’t know we needed to know or care about. Oprah calls him “our Noah.” But if she’s going to get all ancient on us, Cassandra might be the better comparison.

Gore’s film has become the third highest grossing documentary ever, way behind Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 but closing in on number two, the equally surprising March of the Penguins. An Inconvenient Truth is basically the video of a PowerPoint presentation that Gore had been giving for years, jazzed up with animation and film clips, but weighted by some treacly autobiographical segments that seem to have been left over from an Al Gore for President campaign film.

The new Al Gore, visibly more relaxed and likable than during his last campaign, basically says this:

Our world is habitable because some of the heat from the sun is held here by gases in the atmosphere that are descriptively labeled “greenhouse gases.” Carbon dioxide is one of the main components. Unfortunately, measurements over the past 30 years show a steep climb in carbon dioxide concentrations and happen to track closely a concurrent rise in the average temperature of the Earth. All that extra carbon dioxide, a.k.a. CO2, isn’t produced “naturally”; it’s mostly a result of mankind burning fossil fuels.

If the profligate use of fossil fuels continues and the carbon dioxide levels keep rising, the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans will rise to calamitous heights, melting glaciers, disturbing water systems, and causing droughts, crop failures, and much stronger hurricanes and cyclones. Gore forecasts the worst-case scenario as “a nature walk through the Book of Revelation.”

But the real worst case that the once (and future?) politician presents is the breakup and melting of the two massive ice sheets that cover Greenland and Antarctica, an event that would raise global sea levels so much that many coastal areas would be under water. Using an animated seeping blue stain that’s reminiscent of how filmmakers once illustrated the progress of the Nazi regime, Gore shows large parts of San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai and New York becoming submerged. The result, he says, will be tens of millions of “climate refugees.” It will make the upheaval caused by the flooding of New Orleans and its displaced persons seem like a walk in the park.

There’s no way to watch An Inconvenient Truth without getting worried — at least a little worried.

Not Bob Giegengack. He has described Al Gore’s documentary as “a political statement timed to present him as a presidential candidate in 2008.” And he added, “The glossy production is replete with inaccuracies and misrepresentations, and appeals to public fear as shamelessly as any other political statement that hopes to unite the public behind a particular ideology.” This from a guy who voted for Gore in 2000 and says he’d probably vote for him again.

Geologists by nature and training take a long-term view. The professor clicks a slide onto the classroom screen. It reads: “In 1958, Robert Giegengack first heard about Global Warming!”

There are a few chuckles in the classroom. Giegengack waits a beat for comic effect. “I said, ‘Big deal,’” he tells the class. “I lived in New England.”

He’d been born in Brooklyn, but spent much of his life in New Haven. After a false start studying civil engineering at Yale, Giegengack discovered geology and got hooked. He got a master’s degree in Colorado, then returned to Yale for a doctorate and focused his research on rocks and climate change. He arrived as a young assistant professor at Penn just about the time the first Earth Day in 1970 was reflecting — and driving — an interest in the environment. Giegengack got the assignment to set up the university’s environmental studies program, which he would run for more than three decades.

A few years ago, Giegengack told the Pennsylvania Gazette, the school’s alumni magazine, that the environmental analysis course he’s teaching today often attracts students who want to be environmental activists and carry picket signs outside the offices of the bad guys in the military-industrial complex. “But I want them to understand that these questions are enormously complex,” he went on.

Yes, they are. I ask Gieg for a private tutorial based on the lectures he gives his students to make them consider the scientific complications of climate change. We sit one afternoon at a conference table near his office, his laptop open and the PowerPoint ready to go. Charts appear, one after another.

Giegengack may have a personal 50-year perspective on global warming, but the time range he prefers to consult is more on the geologists’ scale. The Earth has been warming, he says, for about 20,000 years. We’ve only been collecting data on that trend for about 200 years. “For most of Earth history,” he says, “the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has only rarely been cooler.” Those cooler periods have meant things like two miles of ice piled over much of what is now North America. Nothing to be nostalgic for.

The professor hits a button on his computer, and the really long-term view appears — the past 650,000 years. In that time, the Earth’s temperature has gone through regular cycles of rise and fall. The best explanation of those cycles was conceived by a Serbian amateur scientist named Milutin Milankovi´c. Very basically, Milankovi´c said this: The Earth’s orbit around the sun is more or less circular, but when other planets align in certain ways and their gravitational forces tug at the Earth, the orbit stretches into a more elliptical shape. Combined with the tilt of the Earth on its axis as it spins, that greater or lesser distance from the sun, plus the consequent difference in solar radiation that reaches our planet, is responsible for long-term climate change.

NOW TO THE CRUX OF THE Al Gore argument — the idea that rising carbon dioxide levels are causing an increase in temperature.

To determine temperatures and carbon dioxide levels in the distant past, scientists rely on what they call the “proxy record.” There weren’t thermometers. So researchers drill deep down into the Antarctic ice sheet and the ocean floor and pull up core samples, whose varying chemical elements let them gauge both the CO2 levels and the temperatures of the distant past.

Gieg clicks a button, and three charts come together. The peaks and valleys of the Milankovi´c cycles for planetary temperature align well with the ocean-floor estimates, and those match closely the records of carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature indications from ice cores. So, the professor maintains, these core samples from the polar ice and ocean floor help show that the Earth’s temperature and the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been in lockstep for tens of thousands of years.

Of course, that was long before anybody was burning fossil fuels. So Giegengack tells his students they might want to consider that “natural” climatic temperature cycles control carbon dioxide levels, not the other way around. That’s the crux of his argument with Gore’s view of global warming — he says carbon dioxide doesn’t control global temperature, and certainly not in a direct, linear way.

Gieg has lots more slides to show. He points out that within his lifetime, there was a three-decade period of unusually low temperatures that culminated in the popular consciousness with the awful winter of 1976-77. Back then, scientists started sounding the alarm about a new ice age.

Of course, it’s long been thought that the world would end either in fire or in ice. These days, the scientists are shouting fire. And in all his years around environmental issues, Giegengack has never heard so much shouting. “I don’t think we’re going to have a rational discussion of this question in the present environment,” he says. “The scientists are mad because they think nobody in Washington is listening to them. So it’s all either apocalyptic disaster or conflict of interest. If you suggest that we’re not going to hell in a handbasket because the rate of global warming is low compared to so many other environmental issues that we’re enduring, then you’re accused of being in the employ of the oil companies and you’re labeled a Republican.”

Giegengack says things started to get this way around 1988. There was a horrifically hot summer season that year, and drought led to seemingly apocalyptic fires in Yellowstone National Park. Something in those fires was galvanizing. Al Gore, who made his first run for president in 1988, published his first environmental jeremiad, Earth in the Balance, a few years later. Around the same time, the newly formed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was making noise, and governments met first in Rio de Janeiro and then in Japan to forge agreements on “targets” for carbon emission cutbacks. The resulting Kyoto Protocol has been ratified by most of the countries on Earth — none of which are doing very well at actually meeting the target cutbacks — but very notably not by the United States.

“WOW," SAYS GIEG AS Al Gore struts onto the stage of The Oprah Winfrey Show. “He looks like he’s had Botox or something.”

It’s afternoon in America, and Oprah is offering her millions of viewers a class with Dr. Gore that the producers are calling Global Warming 101. I’ve asked Gieg to watch it with me.

The show turns out to be pretty much a synopsis of An Inconvenient Truth, with Gore clicking through his hyper-produced PowerPoint program and Oprah exclaiming “Wow! Wow!” with dramatic concern. To dramatize the melting of the floating ice cap at the North Pole, Gore has inserted an animated clip of a polar bear swimming desperately to a tiny ice floe that isn’t strong enough to hold him. Global warming is drowning helpless bears. Oprah thinks it’s the coolest and saddest thing in Gore’s whole movie. Gieg starts shouting:

“We don’t know that. We don’t know that! We don’t know that polar bears haven’t drowned in every interglacial period. Nobody was watching them back then.”

It’s got to be a frustrating experience, seeing a topic you’ve spent some 50 years studying turned into an Oprah episode. “I like her,” Gieg says. “She’d beat Al Gore if she ran for president.”

Then Gore clicks again to dramatic footage of a collapsing polar ice shelf. “That’s irresponsible,” Gieg says. “What he’s doing is no less than the scare tactics used by people like Karl Rove.”

Oprah says she had no idea all these terrible things were happening until she interviewed the noted authority Leonardo DiCaprio. Gore is now into his segment on the melting of glaciers and the possibility of catastrophe if Greenland goes, or parts of Antarctica. The deadly blue water seeping over the world’s great lowland cities comes onto the screen.

“Sea level is rising,” Giegengack agrees, switching off the sound. But, he explains, it’s been rising ever since warming set in 18,000 years ago. The rate of rise has been pretty slow — only about 400 feet so far. And recently — meaning in the thousands of years — the rate has slowed even more. The Earth’s global ocean level is only going up 1.8 millimeters per year. That’s less than the thickness of one nickel. For the catastrophe of flooded cities and millions of refugees that Gore envisions, sea levels would have to rise about 20 feet.

“At the present rate of sea-level rise,” Gieg says, “it’s going to take 3,500 years to get up there. So if for some reason this warming process that melts ice is cutting loose and accelerating, sea level doesn’t know it. And sea level, we think, is the best indicator of global warming.”

By now, Al Gore is taking Oprah on an anti-global-warming shopping trip, buying compact fluorescent light bulbs and programmable thermostats.

We should all buy those things, the professor says, but he’s had just about enough of Dr. Gore. “See,” Gieg says, “the thing he doesn’t mention is that there are 2.4 billion people in India and China who have launched a campaign that will increase their energy consumption by a factor of 10. No matter what we do. If we somehow cut our CO2 emissions in half, you wouldn’t be able to measure the difference because of the role played by India and China.

“It’s over. If CO2 is the problem, we’ve already lost.”

When Gieg gets to this point in his argument, as he often does when talking about global warming, he gets a little frustrated. “I always get sidetracked because, first of all, the science isn’t good. Second, there are all these other interpretations for what we see. Third, it doesn’t make any difference, and fourth, it’s distracting us from environmental problems that really matter.” Among those, Gieg says, are the millions of people a year who die from smoking and two million people a year who die because they don’t have access to clean water.

Bob Giegengack likes to point out that there was a time when people like him were called natural philosophers, and he wouldn’t mind a return to the days when scientists spent more time asking questions and less time testifying before committees.

But that won’t happen soon. Now that Democrats run Congress again, they’re likely to ramp up the hearings to chide the Republicans for what they see as nearly a decade of stonewalling and misinformation on global warming. After all, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Committee on the Environment, Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, ignited a wildfire in the groves of environmentalism when he called the idea of catastrophic global warming a “hoax.”

Movie stars will continue to move in on the action. And look for Al Gore to keep rolling along as the Energizer Bunny of global warming, beating his drum incessantly, powered by a carbon-neutral battery.

In the long view, a geologist like Giegengack can take some comfort in, well, the long view. “There’s all this stuff about saving the planet,” he says. “The Earth is fine. The Earth was fine before we got here, and it’ll be fine long after we’re gone.”

That will probably be on the final.

John Marchese is a contributing writer. His book The Violin Maker: Finding a Centuries-Old Tradition in a Brooklyn Workshop will be published in the spring.

Comments on this story? Please send them to us.

Originally published in Philadelphia Magazine, February 2007.

[bevin]

Ok, so you have found two people who disagree with the opinions of thousands of climatologists.

Big deal - cherry-picking is not a path to truth.

/Bevin

[Bravus]

Lots there, but the idea of a more elliptical earth orbit is almost completely irrelevant. Distance from the sun doesn't change the heat directly, all it does is change, very very slightly, the proportion of the full sphere of radiant energy coming out from the sun that the earth intercepts. That is, the earth 'looks bigger' from the sun if it's closer, but by an infinitesimal amount.

But I do agree with Professor Giegengack that we have otehr major and arguably more major environmental problems. Like clean water. Oh wait... that, much more than sea level rise, is one of the most important human consequences of climate change.

The long view - that the earth will still be fine once we're gone - is probably not so reassuring when seen from our perspective.

[Bravus]

I do find the 'those who support climate change are all about belief, not proper scientific skepticism' arguments interesting... because they are usually made in the absence of evidence. Skepticism is indeed the proper scientific attitude, and openness to new evidence is the sine qua non of science. But I haven't seen much evidence presented, and what has been presented has already most often been discredited.

Sure, there's no *certainty* in science... but there's a balance of probability beyond which we need to take action.

[Woody]

Where I am living we are experiencing a lot of warming. It has been up to -30F. wind chill and -13F. tempt. with lots of snow. If this is global warming ....

[Bravus]

weather ≠ climate

[there buster]

Quote:

Ok, so you have found two people who disagree with the opinions of thousands of climatologists.

Whatever happened to "science is about evidence, not opinion?"

Seems like a scientific approach would deal with their evidence, not whether they agree or disagree.

[there buster]

Vostok ice core data:

Quote:

. Fischer and coauthors reported in Science (283: 1712-1714, 1999) that "the time lag of the rise in CO2 concentrations with respect to temperature change is on the order of 400 to 1000 years." In other words, CO2 changes are caused by temperature changes! Many other recent studies have shown similar results. Studies by Indermuhle et al (2000), Monnin et al (2001), and Mudelsee et al (2001) indicated a lag of 800-1500 years between temperature and CO2.

Quote:

Gieg clicks a button, and three charts come together. The peaks and valleys of the Milankovi´c cycles for planetary temperature align well with the ocean-floor estimates, and those match closely the records of carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature indications from ice cores. So, the professor maintains, these core samples from the polar ice and ocean floor help show that the Earth’s temperature and the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been in lockstep for tens of thousands of years.

Of course, that was long before anybody was burning fossil fuels.

So Giegengack tells his students they might want to consider that “natural” climatic temperature cycles control carbon dioxide levels, not the other way around.

Quote:

The theory of Global Warming assumes that CO2 is an atmospheric greenhouse gas and as it increases temperatures rise. It was then theorized that since humans were producing more CO2 than before, the temperature would inevitably rise. The theory was accepted before testing had started, and effectively became a law.

As Lindzen said many years ago: "the consensus was reached before the research had even begun."

And then there's the IPCC Executive Summary, prepared not by scientists but by political aides:

Quote:

Richard Lindzen, who participated in the U.N. process but who argued that the summary was highly exaggerated. "It came from having scenarios with horrific and unimaginable emissions and putting them in the most sensitive [climate] model," Lindzen said.

Another American scientist who participated in the creation of the U.N. report also repudiated the spin of the "Summary for Policymakers." Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, told the London Times on February 20 that "there are 245 different results in that report, and this was the worst-case scenario. It's the one that was not going to happen. It was the extreme case of all the different things that can make the world warm."

That's the great thing about global warming: When politicos write the Executive Summary to a scientific report, which many scientists say misrepresent the science, that's "science."

But when scientists cite data that demonstrate that CO2 levels are unrelated to human activity, that's "opinion," mere "disagreement."

Good to have that cleared up.

[there buster]

Quote:

weather ≠ climate

perhaps you'd like to remind Al Gore of that. But wait--that would be inconvenient.

[Bravus]

Umm, nope, when two scientists of the hundreds who participated in the IPCC process issue a dissenting report (and Lindzen is well known as a dissenting voice already), for some reason their report is more science than all the other scientists who participated. Read the full report, if you like, and you'll find the enormously overwhelming consensus is that the currently observed climate change is human caused. Even these two guys are not saying it isn't - they are differing in terms of the details of modelling, and about the *extent* of the problem, not its *nature*.

Again, I'm not seeing their evidence... nor am I seeing peer reviewed science from them.

[bevin]

Quote:

Whatever happened to "science is about evidence, not opinion?"

Good question - where is these guy's evidence?

Increased CO2 might well be BOTH a cause AND an effect of global warming. Such a situation is called a positive feedback loop - and leads to big shifts rather than small ones.

Since controlled experiments are hard to do, we rely instead on computer modelling. The computer models show that the more CO2 we human's push into the atmosphere the warmer the place is going to get...

The following OLD NASA article discusses modelling. A lot of work has been put into the models over the last few years, and this work (not reflected in this OLD article) is one of the reasons that many scientists have changed their level of certainty over the last few years

http://www.maui.net/~jstark/nasa.html

Quote:

Getting reliable predictions from models is difficult because many of the secondary processes are not understood. For example, when temperatures start to warm because of the direct radiative effect of increasing carbon dioxide? will clouds increase or decrease. Will they let in less radiation from the sun, or more? These secondary processes are important

This article discusses the impact of volcanos

http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/climate_effects.html

Quote:

Volcanoes contribute about 110 million tons/year, whereas other sources contribute about 10 billion tons/year. The small amount of global warming caused by eruption-generated greenhouse gases is offset by the far greater amount of global cooling caused by eruption-generated particles in the stratosphere (the haze effect). Greenhouse warming of the earth has been particularly evident since 1980. Without the cooling influence of such eruptions as El Chichon (1982) and Mt. Pinatubo (1991), described below, greenhouse warming would have been more pronounced

The models are not yet perfect, for instance...

http://www.physorg.com/news3694.html

but, here is the question, how long do you continue sailing your ship into a fog knowing that there might be an iceberg straight ahead? Do you wait until you are absolutely sure it is not a mirage before you start to change course???

/Bevin

[there buster]

Quote:

Fischer and coauthors reported in Science (283: 1712-1714, 1999) that "the time lag of the rise in CO2 concentrations with respect to temperature change is on the order of 400 to 1000 years." In other words, CO2 changes are caused by temperature changes! Many other recent studies have shown similar results. Studies by Indermuhle et al (2000), Monnin et al (2001), and Mudelsee et al (2001) indicated a lag of 800-1500 years between temperature and CO2.

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It's in 'Science', which is about as prestigious as scientific publications get.

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Again, I'm not seeing their evidence... nor am I seeing peer reviewed science from them.

Yes. I almost forgot the rules here.

Rule 1: If it's in 'Science' it's prestigious if it supports global warming, but it's not evidence if it indicates the contrary.

Rule 2: If a 'known skeptic' puts forward data, it's invisible and can't be seen. If a 'known advocate' puts forth data, it's gospel.

Rule 3: It's always about the evidence, unless it's about how many scientists.

Rule 4: If 17,000 scientists disagree, it's about the evidence.

And, apparently, rule 5: If the scientists did not personally produce the data they cite, it's not really science.

[bevin]

We have a situation where

Thousands of scientists around the world are

(a) making measurements

( making models

© comparing the models to the measurements

Most of these scientists have reached the same conclusions

(a) the models do fit the measurements, but not exactly

( the models show that changing the amount of CO2 we produce will change the weather

© the models show that increasing the amount of CO2 we produce will, overall, produce worse weather - although some local effects will be better

Hence most of these scientists are saying that we should reduce our CO2 emissions, because it is likely that to fail to do so will cause a catastrophe - likely, not certain.

A handful of scientists are saying that one of these steps is wrong - either the model is not good enough, or that the weather is not going to get bad enough to be worth fixing.

So the question is - what does one decide to do when the predominant opinion of the experts is to do something you don't like, but there is a minority opinion that you don't have to do it.

Obviously one should not do what one doesn't like, and use the minority view as backing for this course of action.

Simple question Ed. Why do you prefer the minority view - since (just like me) you don't understand the details of the science?

/Bevin

[bevin]

Quote:

Fischer and coauthors reported in Science (283: 1712-1714, 1999) that "the time lag of the rise in CO2 concentrations with respect to temperature change is on the order of 400 to 1000 years." In other words, CO2 changes are caused by temperature changes! Many other recent studies have shown similar results. Studies by Indermuhle et al (2000), Monnin et al (2001), and Mudelsee et al (2001) indicated a lag of 800-1500 years between temperature and CO2.

You keep bringing this out. This does NOT contradict what the global warming guys are saying.

That "A causes B" does not imply "B does not cause A".

In a nuclear pile "free neutrons cause fission" AND "fission causes free neutrons". We know where that leads.

In fact this data VALIDATES the models that they are using, since the models include this effect.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

So we are in a very dangerous situation.

Increased CO2 =>

increased temperatures =>

further increases in CO2 =>

further increased temperatures =>

...

Positive feedback is a very dangerous effect. If we are indeed in a situation where there are TWO causes for increased CO2 - the sun getting hotter AND the atmosphere trapping more heat - that makes the situation worse, not better.

/Bevin

[there buster]

I keep bringing it up because the current dogma holds that CO2 increases caused by human activity are causing the rise in temperature. According to the best data we have--in these ice cores--that never happened before.

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Increased CO2 =>

increased temperatures =>

further increases in CO2 =>

further increased temperatures =>

Well of course that's possible, but there's some self-limiting mechanism. If there weren't we'd be Venus by now. We're asked to believe that this time is the exception, that this time the self-limiting mechanism won't kick in--without even knowing what that mechanism is. And why? Because human activity is putting CO2 into the atmosphere. Much less CO2 than many natural phenomena in the past, but suddenly, this time, it's the crucial factor.

Well, maybe. It's an unproven hypothesis.

This is not about science. If it were about science then there would be no need to distort things like the ice in Antarctica. There would be no need to make contradictory data invisible. This is about the desire of some people to determine how others should live their lives.

If this was a church-led movement, people would be fulminating about church and state.

Well, environmentalism has become its own religion for many. It has dogma that no amount of empirical evidence can falsify. In fact, the only nationwide Sunday legislation that has happened during my lifetime came about, not from religious concerns, but concerns about fossil fuels.

But wait--that's not science, either. It's history.

[bevin]

Quote:

I keep bringing it up because the current dogma holds that CO2 increases caused by human activity are causing the rise in temperature.

The models certainly show that an increase in CO2 would cause global warming. Where we can test them, the models are good fits - although not perfect. We know how much CO2 human activity is releasing - and we know it is enough in these models to cause global warming.

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According to the best data we have--in these ice cores--that never happened before.

Humans have not, in the past, been making enough CO2 to make a difference - so it would have to be some other cause. Have there been any other causes of increased CO2 other than the acknowledged increased temperature cause?

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Much less CO2 than many natural phenomena in the past

http://www.gcrio.org/ipcc/qa/05.html

states that human emissions is about 3% of current natural emissions. However we previously had an balance - CO2 was being removed from the atmosphere at about the rate it was being put in. We have significantly increased the insertion rate, without a corresponding increase in the removal rate, so the amount present is climbing toward record highs.

http://www.gcrio.org/ipcc/qa/05.html

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But the older parts of the cores show that carbon dioxide amounts were about 25% lower than today for the ten thousand years previous to the onset of industrialization, and over that period changed little (Figure 5.1).

Human emissions can be seen here

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggccebro/chapter1.html

and the graph shows a very scary trend.

As you imply, and I agree, how important this is depends on whether there is a sink that will absorb this extra production. Given the possibility of a positive feedback loop, and given the slope of the human emissions curve, there is serious cause for concern...

/Bevin

[Bravus]

Quote:

Rule 1: If it's in 'Science' it's prestigious if it supports global warming, but it's not evidence if it indicates the contrary.

Um, no - I'm not seeing a publication in 'Science' that you've cited that supports a contrary perspective. Maybe I've missed it. I would say anything published in 'Science' (the journal, not the human activity) is prestigious, where prestige is shorthand for peer approval.

Edit: Ah, OK, you're right, the Fischer article is in Science. I'll go back and look at that original article now. Please not that the bolded text below is editorialising by someone else, not Fischer et al's own conclusion:

Quote:

Fischer and coauthors reported in Science (283: 1712-1714, 1999) that "the time lag of the rise in CO2 concentrations with respect to temperature change is on the order of 400 to 1000 years." In other words, CO2 changes are caused by temperature changes! Many other recent studies have shown similar results. Studies by Indermuhle et al (2000), Monnin et al (2001), and Mudelsee et al (2001) indicated a lag of 800-1500 years between temperature and CO2.

It also demonstrates the logical fallacy 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc' ('because it came before, therefore it caused').

Quote:

Rule 2: If a 'known skeptic' puts forward data, it's invisible and can't be seen. If a 'known advocate' puts forth data, it's gospel.

Nope. I knew when I wrote that about Lindzen that it might be misunderstood. My point is that he has a known position on this issue, and that his dissent to the current IPCC report should therefore be seen as arising from that broader view, rather than a Damascus Road experience in putting together this report. But the second part of the issue is that I have not seen any actual evidence or even argument from him in what has been posted. There's been the statement of a position without backup. Presumably he's published the science elsewhere, and I should read that.

Quote:

Rule 3: It's always about the evidence, unless it's about how many scientists.

Rule 4: If 17,000 scientists disagree, it's about the evidence.

Science is not a democracy, so it's not a vote about the number of scientists. The good science is the good science, even if only a small number of people are doing it. On the other hand, there is no unanimity in any field of human endeavour. There is still a Flat Earth Society. As non-specialists we have to look at the evidence as best we can and make decisions. I do think it's incumbent upon the dissenters, in any field, to make their case more strongly. Just by the nature of debate, if two people out of hundreds have a different view to the rest, their task is more difficult. Doesn't say they're wrong - they may well be the only ones who are right - but it does mean they have some work to do making the case and attempting to convince the majority (Kuhn).

Quote:

And, apparently, rule 5: If the scientists did not personally produce the data they cite, it's not really science.

Nope, that is perhaps a mis-statement on my part: 'evidence' is not the same as 'data'. Kepler used Brahe's data, for example, but made evidence of it. But you're missing the point, perhaps deliberately. There has been no scientific argument made by either Lindzen or Giegengack in the stuff cited here. They have said "I don't believe, and because of my qualifications you shouldn't". They have not said "The models are flawed in this and this specific way which is causing them to over-estimate this and under-steimate the other." *That's* what I mean by 'evidence' - we can use another word if you'd prefer. But you're lamenting the politicisation of the debate, then bringing political arguments rather than scientific ones to the table.

[Bravus]

Here's the Fischer article itself, along with a list of more recent articles that have cited it:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/283/5408/1712

[Bravus]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen

(Wikipedia links, handle as appropriate)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_global_warming_consensus

[there buster]

Quote:

It also demonstrates the logical fallacy 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc' ('because it came before, therefore it caused').

Yes, but then the whole global warming argument is based on that fallacy.

Humans began contirbuting large amounts of CO2, and then the temperature rose, therefore---etc. etc.

You can't have it both ways. No logical person looking at the ice core data would say "increased CO2 causes global temperature increase."

Or perhaps it operates like "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline." A paper several decades ago by a Ph.D. in Chemistry.

[there buster]

Quote:

Please not that the bolded text below is editorialising by someone else, not Fischer et al's own conclusion:

Very deft. But then, that's precisely what Kepler did with Brahe's data. He 'editorialized,' that is, he came to conclusions based on Brahe's data. Those conclusions were based on mathematics, but that's not the only type of acceptable logic.

[bevin]

Quote:

Quote:

'because it came before, therefore it caused'

Yes, but then the whole global warming argument is based on that fallacy.

Humans began contirbuting large amounts of CO2, and then the temperature rose, therefore---etc. etc.

Your statement is simply false.

http://www.pbs.org/now/science/climatechange.html

Quote:

1904: Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius was, according to NASA, "the first person to investigate the effect that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would have on global climate."

Arrhenius began studying rapid increases in anthropogenic — human-caused — carbon emissions, determining that "the slight percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere may, by the advances of industry, be changed to a noticeable degree in the course of a few centuries."

The unique research of Arrhenius suggested that this increase could be beneficial, making Earth's climates "more equable" and stimulating plant growth and food production. Until about 1960, most scientists thought it implausible that humans could actually affect average global temperatures.

1950s: Geophysicist Roger Revelle, with the help of Hans Suess, demonstrated that carbon dioxide levels in the air had increased as a result of the use of fossil fuels.

...

1988: NASA climate scientist James Hansen and his team reported to Congress on global warming, explaining, "the greenhouse warming should be clearly identifiable in the 1990s" and that "the temperature changes are sufficiently large to have major impacts on people and other parts of the biosphere, as shown by computed changes in the frequency of extreme events and comparison with previous climate trends."

The POSSIBILITY that increased CO2 emissions would cause global warming was being investigated almost 100 years before the effect was actually observed

It was predicted to be observable a decade before it was observed

It is based on models that were developed for general use, and improved based on mismatches between their predictions with actuality leading to better understanding of how the various pieces interact.

The idea that human-caused increased CO2 levels leads to global warming is based on very sophisticated computer models, not on some kind of "see one, see the other, obviously the nasty humans have damaged the nice environment" inanity.

Heck, the original scientist thought quite the opposite - he thought it would be a GOOD idea to warm

Quote:

The unique research of Arrhenius suggested that this increase could be beneficial, making Earth's climates "more equable" and stimulating plant growth and food production.

I still don't understand your motivation for so deliberately distorting the issue.

/Bevin

[bevin]

Quote:

No logical person looking at the ice core data would say "increased CO2 causes global temperature increase."

Red herring. Straw man. No-one is making the claim that the ice-core data does show this effect.

/Bevin