maundering inconvenient truths [Archive]

Andre

May20-07, 02:57 AM

Okay then, let's call in the experts and judge the accuracy of Kristen's assessment.

http://tinyurl.com/2577dq

http://tinyurl.com/ypkeck

be sure to have a pop blocker on for the next one: or let me copy paste, to save you from a deluge of pop ups.

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/harris061206.htm

Al Gore, Global warming, Inconvenient Truth
Scientists respond to Gore's warnings of climate catastrophe
"The Inconvenient Truth" is indeed inconvenient to alarmists

By Tom Harris

Monday, June 12, 2006

"Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it," Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film "An Inconvenient Truth", showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie?

Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?

No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.

Even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."

This is highly valuable knowledge, but doesn't make them climate change cause experts, only climate impact experts.

So we have a smaller fraction.

But it becomes smaller still. Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. "These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios," asserts Ball. "Since modelers concede computer outputs are not "predictions" but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts."

We should listen most to scientists who use real data to try to understand what nature is actually telling us about the causes and extent of global climate change. In this relatively small community, there is no consensus, despite what Gore and others would suggest.

Here is a small sample of the side of the debate we almost never hear:

Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"

Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.

Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, takes apart Gore's dramatic display of Antarctic glaciers collapsing into the sea. "The breaking glacier wall is a normally occurring phenomenon which is due to the normal advance of a glacier," says Winterhalter. "In Antarctica the temperature is low enough to prohibit melting of the ice front, so if the ice is grounded, it has to break off in beautiful ice cascades. If the water is deep enough icebergs will form."

Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, "Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems."

But Karlen clarifies that the 'mass balance' of Antarctica is positive - more snow is accumulating than melting off. As a result, Ball explains, there is an increase in the 'calving' of icebergs as the ice dome of Antarctica is growing and flowing to the oceans. When Greenland and Antarctica are assessed together, "their mass balance is considered to possibly increase the sea level by 0.03 mm/year - not much of an effect," KarlÈn concludes.

The Antarctica has survived warm and cold events over millions of years. A meltdown is simply not a realistic scenario in the foreseeable future.

Gore tells us in the film, "Starting in 1970, there was a precipitous drop-off in the amount and extent and thickness of the Arctic ice cap." This is misleading, according to Ball: "The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology."

Karlen explains that a paper published in 2003 by University of Alaska professor Igor Polyakov shows that, the region of the Arctic where rising temperature is supposedly endangering polar bears showed fluctuations since 1940 but no overall temperature rise. "For several published records it is a decrease for the last 50 years," says KarlÈn

Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. gives the details, "There has been some decrease in ice thickness in the Canadian Arctic over the past 30 years but no melt down. The Canadian Ice Service records show that from 1971-1981 there was average, to above average, ice thickness. From 1981-1982 there was a sharp decrease of 15% but there was a quick recovery to average, to slightly above average, values from 1983-1995. A sharp drop of 30% occurred again 1996-1998 and since then there has been a steady increase to reach near normal conditions since 2001."

Concerning Gore's beliefs about worldwide warming, Morgan points out that, in addition to the cooling in the NW Atlantic, massive areas of cooling are found in the North and South Pacific Ocean; the whole of the Amazon Valley; the north coast of South America and the Caribbean; the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Red Sea; New Zealand and even the Ganges Valley in India. Morgan explains, "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (which doubled the area of warming in Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic Ocean) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."

Gore's point that 200 cities and towns in the American West set all time high temperature records is also misleading according to Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. "It is not unusual for some locations, out of the thousands of cities and towns in the U.S., to set all-time records," he says. "The actual data shows that overall, recent temperatures in the U.S. were not unusual."

Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."

In April sixty of the world's leading experts in the field asked Prime Minister Harper to order a thorough public review of the science of climate change, something that has never happened in Canada. Considering what's at stake - either the end of civilization, if you believe Gore, or a waste of billions of dollars, if you believe his opponents - it seems like a reasonable request.

Andre

May20-07, 03:08 AM

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/harris110706a.htm

Same pop ups, so this is what it says:

Al Gore, Global warming, Inconvenient Truth
A sample of experts' comments about the science of "An Inconvenient Truth"
By Tom Harris, Natural Resources Stewardship Project

Tuesday, November 7, 2006

Dr. Chris de Freitas, climate scientist, associate professor, University of Auckland, New Zealand: ”I can assure Mr. Gore that no one from the South Pacific islands have fled to New Zealand because of rising seas. In fact, if Gore consults the data, he will see it shows sea level falling in some parts of the Pacific.”

Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner, emeritus professor of paleogeophysics & geodynamics, Stockholm University, Sweden: “We find no alarming sea level rise going on, in the Maldives, Tovalu, Venice, the Persian Gulf and even satellite altimetry if applied properly.”

Dr. Paul Reiter, Professor - Institut Pasteur, Unit of Insects and Infectious Diseases, Paris, France, comments on Gore’s belief that Nairobi and Harare were founded just above the mosquito line to avoid malaria and how the mosquitoes are now moving to higher altitudes: “Gore is completely wrong here - malaria has been documented at an altitude 2500 m - Nairobi and Harare are at altitudes of about 1500 m. The new altitudes of malaria are lower than those recorded 100 years ago. None of the “30 so called new diseases” Gore references are attributable to global warming, none.”

See also:
Scientists respond to Gore's warnings of climate catastrophe
The gods must be laughing
Dr. Mitchell Taylor, Manager, Wildlife Research Section, Department of Environment, Igloolik, Nunavut, Canada: “Our information is that 7 of 13 populations of polar bears in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (more than half the world’s estimated total) are either stable, or increasing …. Of the three that appear to be declining, only one has been shown to be affected by climate change. No one can say with certainty that climate change has not affected these other populations, but it is also true that we have no information to suggest that it has.”

Dr. Petr Chylek, adjunct professor, Dept. of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: “Mr. Gore suggests that Greenland melt area increased considerably between 1992 and 2005. But 1992 was exceptionally cold in Greenland and the melt area of ice sheet was exceptionally low due to the cooling caused by volcanic dust emitted from Mt. Pinatubo. If, instead of 1992, Gore had chosen for comparison the year 1991, one in which the melt area was 1% higher than in 2005, he would have to conclude that the ice sheet melt area is shrinking and that perhaps a new ice age is just around the corner.”

Dr. Gary D. Sharp, Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study, Salinas, California: “The oceans are now heading into one of their periodic phases of cooling. … Modest changes in temperature are not about to wipe them [coral] out. Neither will increased carbon dioxide, which is a fundamental chemical building block that allows coral reefs to exist at all.”

Dr. R. M. Carter, professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia: “Both the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps are thickening. The temperature at the South Pole has declined by more than 1 degree C since 1950. And the area of sea-ice around the continent has increased over the last 20 years.”

Dr./Cdr. M. R. Morgan, FRMS, formerly advisor to the World Meteorological Organization/climatology research scientist at University of Exeter, U.K.: “From data published by the Canadian Ice Service there has been no precipitous drop off in the amount or thickness of the ice cap since 1970 when reliable over-all coverage became available for the Canadian Arctic.”

Rob Scagel, M.Sc., forest microclimate specialist, Pacific Phytometric Consultants, Surrey, British Colombia, Canada comments on Gore’s belief that the Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB) is an “invasive exotic species” that has become a plague due to fewer days of frost: “The MPB is a species native to this part of North America and is always present. The MPB epidemic started as comparatively small outbreaks and through forest management inaction got completely out of hand.”

Andre

May20-07, 03:15 AM

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/5/3/144127.shtml?s=rss

The experts speak, regarding the Kyoto Treaty:

MARLO LEWIS, COMPETITIVE ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: Three-quarters of the total expense would fall upon the United States.

TIM BALL, NATURAL RESOURCES STEWARDSHIP PROJECT, PH.D (UNIVERSITY OF LONDON): I think there`s only two countries that are even coming close to meeting their targets.

PATRICK MICHAELS, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA STATE CLIMATOLOGIST: The amount of warming that would be prevented, perhaps, is 7/100 Celsius.

PATRICK MOORE, FORMER DIRECTOR, GREENPEACE INTERNATIONAL: It does not include China, India, Brazil, and these countries are all industrializing rapidly.

CHRIS HORNER, AUTHOR, "POLITICALLY INCORRECT GUIDE TO GLOBAL WARMING": Kyoto encourages people to run the hell away from it.

JOHN CHRISTY, PH.D, ALABAMA STATE CLIMATOLOGIST: There are examples of Chinese factories that are being used to buy credits for European countries, so European countries can say, "Well, we can pollute because we`re reducing pollution in China."

BJORN LOMBORG, AUTHOR, "THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST`S GUIDE": Kyoto is, at the same time, impossibly ambitious and yet entirely inconsequential when you talk about the environment. It will cost lots of money and end up doing virtually no good. That`s not a good deal.

****
On global warming studies, temperature change, and the possible effects (natural disasters, rising oceans, etc.):

LEWIS: Where [Gore]'s misleading is that he gives the impression that this is something that is likely to happen. The likelihood of this is next to nil.

DAVID LEGATES, PH.D, CLIMATOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE: The IPCC report is that the upper limit of sea level rise by the year 2100 is going to be about 23 inches.

BALL: We now know for certain that the temperature changes before the CO-2. And one of the fundamental assumptions that Gore doesn`t understand is that in the theory of global warming due to humans is, as the CO-2 goes up, the temperature will go up. Well, the ice floe records show it`s exactly the opposite.

GEORGE TAYLOR, CLIMATOLOGIST: Most of the climate change we`ve seen up until now has been as a result of natural variations.

ROY SPENCER, PH.D, FORMER SENIOR CLIMATE SCIENTIST, NASA: Politicians and some of the scientists like to say that there`s a consensus now on global warming or the science has been settled, but you have to ask them, what is there a consensus on? Because it really makes a difference. What are you talking about? The only consensus I`m aware of is that it`s warmed in the last century. They completely ignore the fact that there`s this thing called the Oregon petition that was signed by 19,000 professionals and scientists who don`t agree with the idea that we are causing climate change.

CHRISTY: One of the statements in the SPM was the statement that, if you boil it down, it says we are 90 percent certain that most of the warming in the last 50 years was due to human effects. I don`t agree with that. I think things are much more ambiguous.

MICHAELS: There are two factors that most climatologists think happened that don`t seem to be included in it, which are the little Ice Age, which is a very cold period that ended in the late 19th century, and the medieval warm period, around 1000 or so.

HORNER: Since the third U.N. report, for which this was the smoking gun, there`s been a fourth U.N. report. Does anybody see a hockey stick in there anywhere? I can`t see you. It`s not in there. Guess what? It`s air-brushed out, in classic fashion, and they don`t even mention why it`s not here. What hockey stick? I didn`t see any hockey stick.

On the global warming crowd, and their intimidation tactics:

LEGATES: I think those people are entitled to their views, but in many cases it`s not the scientific consensus.

BALL: Many times I`ve been tempted to say why am I doing this? If I had gone along with the prevailing wisdom, the funding would have been enormous. Instead, I`m accused of getting the money from the oil company, which is simply a lie. I think that the truth is absolutely paramount, and if we abandon that, we`re lost ... The problem with the media is that it`s essentially become a business, and everything`s got to be more sensationalized.

MARTIN EBERHARD, CEO, TESLA MOTORS: I think that anybody whose idea about how to fix the world starts off by, "First, we`re going to change human nature," is doomed.

Beck says he has had countless calls from parents whose kids are being shown "An Inconvenient Truth" in art class of all things, and relays a news story that a hotel in California that wants to be certified as the first "green hotel" has just replaced the traditional in-room Bible with an in-room copy of "An Inconvenient Truth."

"No one wants the Earth to die," Beck concludes. "But it`s what we do about it that`s at question. And let me be clear: The correct decisions will not be made when fueled by frantic alarmism.

"Al Gore`s version of climate change has no longer become science. It`s dogma. And if you question it, you are a heretic.

"For now, all we can do is look for sober solutions in a world drunk on hysteria. The debate is not over. I have a feeling it`s just beginning."

Andre

May20-07, 03:55 AM

Andre, at one time I thought you were a solid skeptic... now I'm beginning to think you're just hard-headed about the subject.

Excellent illustration of:

Al Gore`s version of climate change has no longer become science. It`s dogma. And if you question it, you are a heretic

I really don't know what's going on anymore in Global Warming, and one of my current jobs is actually relevant to it (laser scattering off non-spherical particles). I've pretty much lost trust for anyone that thinks they know what's going on.

Just go here (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=169202) and here (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=162192) and note that panical global warming is refuted by the absence of the essential positive feedback and then you can just resume with normal emisivity data. Nothing wrong with that from a climate point of view.

Pythagorean

May20-07, 04:53 AM

Excellent illustration of:

Just go here (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=169202) and here (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=162192) and note that panical global warming is refuted by the absence of the essential positive feedback and then you can just resume with normal emisivity data. Nothing wrong with that from a climate point of view.

I'm not really concerned with Global Warming; I'm not panicking, and I'm not doing the research to prove anything, I just like the idea of being able to figure out what particles are with long range scanning; it's neat to me. I analyze infrasound signals too for the same reason... long distance information... it's neat!

Global Warming debate? Well, you've about bored my pants off with it. I just don't care anymore, I'm finding little truths, not big ones, at least not until I understand nature a lot better, and I'm not taking anybody's word for it.

I don't know how you see me 'taking Al Gore's side' as it were. I know as much as the next guy that fear is a profitable market, and whether Global Warming is true or not, people are going to play off those fears.

Andre

May20-07, 07:44 AM

Well you choose to enter this thread with some confronting statements. I was merely thinking of doing my duty to warn a hypothetical crowd that the world could be a little different.

using fiction to impose fear is probably the most used mechanism in history to straighten out the crowd and lead them into the next war. That's how a lot of religions work. So, the essential thing is if we allow us Gore to lead us back into the dark ages with devils and dragons or if we allow factual reasoning to guide us.

edward

May20-07, 11:55 AM

using fiction to impose fear is probably the most used mechanism in history to straighten out the crowd and lead them into the next war. That's how a lot of religions work. So, the essential thing is if we allow us Gore to lead us back into the dark ages with devils and dragons or if we allow factual reasoning to guide us.

Whoa there Andre, read that last paragraph. You apparently are obsessed with defeating the global warming supporters.

I'd hardly call advocating the use of clean energy sources "leading us back into the dark ages." :rolleyes:

Whether there is global warming or not is irrelevant to the fact that our current energy sources are polluting the entire planet.

Andre

May20-07, 12:13 PM

Pythagorean

May20-07, 02:58 PM

Well you choose to enter this thread with some confronting statements. I was merely thinking of doing my duty to warn a hypothetical crowd that the world could be a little different.

I was confronting your hardheadedness; Global Warming just happens to be the subject where you've already picked what you want to be true, and now you're just looking for ways to prove it, digging up whatever you can. Anybody can do that, once they've chosen a conclusion they want to be true.

Does that mean Al Gore is right and you're wrong? No... It just means that I put you in the same boat as him. You come off as a propagandist, which makes your arguments completely ineffective to someone like me. I'm not going to dig up data that suggests that, I'm just "doing my duty" and pointing out that you're emulating skepticism, and not actually being a true skeptic.

Andre

May20-07, 05:45 PM

I was confronting your hardheadedness; Global Warming just happens to be the subject where you've already picked what you want to be true, and now you're just looking for ways to prove it, digging up whatever you can. Anybody can do that, once they've chosen a conclusion they want to be true.

Does that mean Al Gore is right and you're wrong? No... It just means that I put you in the same boat as him. You come off as a propagandist, which makes your arguments completely ineffective to someone like me. I'm not going to dig up data that suggests that, I'm just "doing my duty" and pointing out that you're emulating skepticism, and not actually being a true skeptic.

hey, I offer what I consider refuting evidence, you react with ad hominems. recheck the rules of the game here. What does that make you?

Evo

May20-07, 06:09 PM

Let's not get into a fight.

It's funny, a couple of years ago I believed in AGW. I started doing research on it in order to back up AGW but what I found instead was evidence against the gloom and doom predictions. I no longer believe that human pollution is capable of "significantly" affecting our climate. Significant is the keyword here, it's a no brainer that pollution contributes to greenhouse gasses, but what is not known is what effect it has on climate. Quite honestly, all of what we see could be quite normal and the effects of human pollution so insignificant as to not really have an impact, we do not know.

I have to agree with Andre in his post

And there you are terribly wrong. of course there is a problem, we have to somehow get Earth going in the light of the increasing human pressure on the ecology. There is no doubt about it.

BUT ONE MUST NOT USE A LIE TO ACHIEVE THAT.

You can debate about the extent of greenhouse effect, you can fear that it's significant, you can prove that it's not so. But willfully deceiting, exagarating and distortion of the truth as Gore admits he does, may have a short term desired effect but will be disastrous in the long end. When all your actions are driven by the urge to terminate the use of energy. No combustion, no nuclear, in the end you may be happy with a few hours light. And then nature decides to launch another little ice age. How are you going to fight that off?

If we want to convert to a sustainable society we must get rid of the lies, get real, face the real facts and act accordingly. Anti combustion and anti nuclear dogmas are just as likely to ruin what you want to save. We just need reason back and pure science not poisoned by the urge to proof global warming. The longer it takes, the more science has to loose and the longer it takes to restore faith.

living with a lie as the highest dogma is what I see as the new dark ages.

Pythagorean

May20-07, 10:58 PM

I'm just saying, Mother Teresa did much worse things than Al Gore.

An Inconvenient Truth is something we (climate scientists and scientsts-in-training) joke about at the office. It's not really affecting anyone more than the usual Millennial Fever crowd, and your thread will never touch them anyway.

loseyourname

May20-07, 11:46 PM

What???? You use HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS as your "experts"?

I'm not stating an opinion about global warming because I don't know jack about it, but it looks like what Kristen did is publish a compendium of facts and opinions that were either researched or given by experts. Some of the opinions are hers, but not all of them. Don't forget, our very own Physics Forums was also started by a kid as a high school extra credit problem as a place to compile expert advice, and if people had realized he was a high school kid and concluded they had nothing of value to gain from reading our site, that would have been unfortunate indeed.

Andre

May21-07, 04:40 AM

Thanks Evo and L.Y.N. I'm sorry about that. I was a bit overwhelmed about the strong reactions. I still am.

mheslep

May21-07, 03:27 PM

... I'm just "doing my duty" and pointing out that you're emulating skepticism, and not actually being a true skeptic.

Seems to me you are just talking the talk, and not walking the walk. Please do some actual 'pointing out'. Any details at all will do, where is he 'hardheaded', not a true 'skeptic', etc.

Pythagorean

May21-07, 04:30 PM

Seems to me you are just talking the talk, and not walking the walk. Please do some actual 'pointing out'. Any details at all will do, where is he 'hardheaded', not a true 'skeptic', etc.

(disclaimer: I like Andre more than Al Gore. Furthermore, I'm not an intellectual and I don't think you can change people's opinions with pointing out and proof, because then people start arguing about interpretations of data... then they argue about semantics, then throw more proof/data in and argue about interpretation more. I'm a scientist, I do things, I'm not an intellectual/philosopher whatsoever, I like to drink and fly kites and go hiking, not sit around and think intentionally, I'm an animal. I was just stating my opinion)

Anyway, for your sake:

how I arrived at my long-term conclusion:

I come to this forum occasionally every couple months and it's always the same thing coming from Andre. Just look over all posts by Andre, right here on physicsforums for your evidence, he's obsessed with the subject!

what triggered it:

Andre siting a high school girl.

Now, I don't deny that this may have been an emotional response to Andre, but that doesn't concern me in the least. I'm often proud of my ad homi-whatevers. Just because I insult somebody doesn't mean I'm wrong. If you refuse to see it, that's fine, don't confuse me with facts. Facts don't mean crap if an idiot is interpreting them.

Skyhunter

May21-07, 11:43 PM

And there you are terribly wrong. of course there is a problem, we have to somehow get Earth going in the light of the increasing human pressure on the ecology. There is no doubt about it.

BUT ONE MUST NOT USE A LIE TO ACHIEVE THAT.

You can debate about the extent of greenhouse effect, you can fear that it's significant, you can prove that it's not so. But willfully deceiting, exagarating and distortion of the truth as Gore admits he does, may have a short term desired effect but will be disastrous in the long end. When all your actions are driven by the urge to terminate the use of energy. No combustion, no nuclear, in the end you may be happy with a few hours light. And then nature decides to launch another little ice age. How are you going to fight that off?

If we want to convert to a sustainable society we must get rid of the lies, get real, face the real facts and act accordingly. Anti combustion and anti nuclear dogmas are just as likely to ruin what you want to save. We just need reason back and pure science not poisoned by the urge to proof global warming. The longer it takes, the more science has to loose and the longer it takes to restore faith.

living with a lie as the highest dogma is what I see as the new dark ages.

Great post Andre.... except the subject is WMD and the liar is George W. Bush. :biggrin:

So Gore neglects to explain all of the details of the correlation between the rise in CO2 and rise in temperature. And then he overlays 2 graphs in a visually stunning yet misleading representation of the data.

:uhh: Andre... Al Gore is a politician. The movie was not about the science and should not be cited as a scientific source. Politicians are going to exaggerate, the media will hype the science press releases. and and the denialists blogs will continue to spin papers published in peer reviewed scientific journals.

The worlds scientists, are not by and large part of any conspiracy to cast the world into some kind of solar powered fascist vegan society.

Well, at least not the vegan part.

I agree that the scientific community does not know what is going to happen, but unlike you, that frightens me more than Al Gore smoothing a graph to emphasize a correlation between CO2 and temperature.

From the melting of the Arctic ice cap to the upwelling of CO2 from the deep oceans, the scientific community's predictions, as opposed to being alarmist, have consistently been far to conservative.

There is always hype in the media.

But when you use a pseudo science blog that cherry picks selected headlines, and then edits them together, and offers it as evidence of scientific doublespeak... well Andre that does tend to lead people to the conclusion that you are... shall we say, more than skeptical. :smile:

Pythagorean

May22-07, 01:56 AM

But when you use a pseudo science blog that cherry picks selected headlines, and then edits them together, and offers it as evidence of scientific doublespeak... well Andre that does tend to lead people to the conclusion that you are... shall we say, more than skeptical. :smile:

I think his investigative talents would be better used against more harmful policies that ruin lives like the war on drugs, crusading governments, and embezzling evangelists (to name a few).

But a movie? Star Wars has a bigger following than an Inconvenient Truth. It may be creepy, but it's just as harmless as GWA advocates.

Maybe I'm missing something... how does this affect you negatively Andre? I mean, given that politicians and lies aren't uncommon companions.

phoenixy

May22-07, 03:13 AM

Another borrowed piece from Andre, from a high school kid no less. Hope it fairs better than the other ones in the past.

Start maundering

We all know Al Gore, ... (Intro) ... he always assumed that every harmful phenomenon (extreme weather, rising sea levels and horrible diseases) was correlated or associated with global warming and due to “man made” emissions.

A somewhat fair description of Al. I will overlook the "put words in his mouth" type minor offense. At least the author didn't bought up the internet joke.

Now, lets start at the beginning of the movie ... ( sierra club ) ... Al does not seem to consider that his generation was not the first to love and want to protect the Earth.
don't really care.

Now let science commence

Farther into the movie, Al explains the greenhouse gas effect ... (water vapor ) ... But is water vapor really a bad thing?
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/22/215837/90

Al also discusses the late Charles Keeling ... ( glacier melting ) ... And the same is true for all of the glaciers he mentioned. They all started retreating at the end of the Little Ice Age (1850). Most glaciers around the world are retreating while some are not, mainly due to changes in storm tracks. Many of the glaciers around the world slowed or reversed their retreats during the cooling period between 1944 and 1976 and began retreating again after that. Many glacier retreats have accelerated in recent years.

Very nice original research, except she missed the point. CO2 does not triggers GW, it just contributes to GW and keep it going. Thus, the time-line she constructed makes logical sense in support of Al: industrial age starts the melting process, GW continues it.subject to local and short term variation.

But then, Al only showed a few picture and you can only conclude so much out of a small sample. For more info on glacier, look here
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/10/31/115130/58

Al then begins a presentation about how temperatures during the last thousand years were relatively stable until ... (hockey stick, solar output) ... In this graph you can see that there was an increase in solar activity during the same warming periods listed above.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/14/01828/236
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/28/090/30666

So she believes it's solar

Al’s presentation on carbon dioxide quickly falls ... ( CO2 leads temp ) ... first then were followed by changes in CO2. ... (couple paragraphs break) Al then shows ... the globe should have been warming at that time.

Again, CO2 is not the catalyst. It just keeps the reaction going.

For anyone who states increased in CO2 is induced by temp, I got a simple question: why? When it's there is the other way around, there is an elegant explanation. So please provide a more scientifically sound argument, or theory, or just maybe. Anything.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/22/231145/76

During this part of the presentation Al says that when you look at the ice core ... ( Clean Air Act affects ice core ) ... he'll correct it in future versions of his slideshow.”

Yep, this one I agree. A mistake is a mistake. Edit out that one sentence please.

Now let’s stop here for just a moment and look at the graph below. We have all heard of El Nino ... (El Nino) ... El Nino’s or solar variation as a part of global warming which is one of his most crucial mistakes.

Well, El Nino as the cause of GW, ok. But throwing out an observation can only accomplishes so much. What about the scientific explanation, the theory behind it? Not even an external link?. She sets out a very poor example if she is trying to say Al failed to do his homework.

People are getting more fat in the past 30 years, and temperature increased during that period. Al Gore failed to account for this fact, which is a crucial mistake. Wow, that's easy.

Al then discusses how many of the worlds cities have broken their temperature records ... ( ?, she is now doubting GW? ) ... about one third of the temperature increase of the last 30 years disappears.

Not sure what she's getting at. UHI exists and is well accepted. But is she backtracking and now tries to cast doubt on GW (the only use of UHI for skeptics)?

In the next section Al discusses computer models, which predict future climate. In my view, predicting future climate with computers is a joke. ... ( ban computer ) ... affect climate such as clouds and water vapor are still not understood.

:rolleyes: She's more interested in to become a politician than a scientist, it seems. She fully admits things she doesn't understand, yet she's eager to cast her opinion on the subject. Ignorance is strength.

OK this is getting boring. I will only continue if anybody actually wants to read this. I took a quick glance at the remaining stuff and she's going too much off-topic. She's not going to convince me that the only thing GW gives is the gift of Arctic passageway. Seriously, it becomes comical after awhile with gem like this

Al then talks about how the insurance industry pays out more money to flood and storm victims. This may be true but is because more people are building expensive beach houses right where the storms hit.

Conclusion. Very nice attempt by this student. It's certainly much better than the last argument I saw, which can roughly be summarize as: cleaner environment is not profitable, so don't do it. :biggrin:

Andre

May22-07, 06:52 AM

Again, CO2 is not the catalyst. It just keeps the reaction going.

No, it is not, as has been demonstrated here (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=162192) and here (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=169202).

mheslep

May22-07, 11:03 AM

... don't confuse me with facts...

Sorry for the interruption. Back to your science now where you 'do things'.

Pythagorean

May22-07, 03:04 PM

Sorry for the interruption. Back to your science now where you 'do things'.

Since you brought it up, I'm analyzing infrasonic signals from Mt. Eerbus on Antartica right now and learning how to use a powerful technique called the fourier transform (for digital data, though).

Beats whining about the entertainment industry...

edward

May22-07, 03:41 PM

No, it is not, as has been demonstrated here (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=162192) and here (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=169202).

Positive feedback has been demonstrated. I can only assume that you disagree. gees this time you referenced your own previous posts.:rolleyes:

Science Daily — Studies have shown that global climate change can set-off positive feedback loops in nature which amplify warming and cooling trends. Now, researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley have been able to quantify the feedback implied by past increases in natural carbon dioxide and methane gas levels. Their results point to global temperatures at the end of this century that may be significantly higher than current climate models are predicting.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060522151248.htm

mheslep

May22-07, 05:18 PM

Positive feedback has been demonstrated. I can only assume that you disagree. gees this time you referenced your own previous posts.rolleyes:
Which in turn references a good set of external references in line w/ a detailed discussion pro/con discusion. :rolleyes:

If you see any fallacies in either of those threads from either point of view please point them out.

Andre

May22-07, 05:29 PM

Positive feedback has been demonstrated. I can only assume that you disagree. gees this time you referenced your own previous posts.:rolleyes:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060522151248.htm

Most certainly I disagree. Whilst certain elements in the global warming arena constitute positive feedback like albedo changes due to snow cover, Olavi Karner showed in detail why the overall nett feedback effect is negative. Math included. I show the calculation model of feedback (not to be confused with prediction model) that refutes a nett positive feedback on the Antarctic ice core proxies. You'd show the math that this is not true.

edward

May22-07, 06:03 PM

Most certainly I disagree. Whilst certain elements in the global warming arena constitute positive feedback like albedo changes due to snow cover, Olavi Karner showed in detail why the overall nett feedback effect is negative. Math included. I show the calculation model of feedback (not to be confused with prediction model) that refutes a nett positive feedback on the Antarctic ice core proxies. You'd show the math that this is not true.

I didn't show any math, and what do albedo changes due to snow cover have to do with anything other than seasonal changes?
You have already stated that all of the models, which I presume would include the math are not true!!! Am I to accept that only your selected models are true? Fluff from 2001 will not override fact from 2007.

Did you ever consider that your boy from Estonia is full of himself?

Andre

May23-07, 02:43 AM

what do albedo changes due to snow cover have to do with anything other than seasonal changes?

Snow cover is a true example of positive feedback on temperature. But indeed, since the seasonal changes appear not to be affected too much, it's a very weak feedback. nevertheless it's used many times to illustrate positive feedback.

You have already stated that all of the models, which I presume would include the math are not true!!! Am I to accept that only your selected models are true?

You are confusing mahematical models with prediction models. mathematical models like Karner uses, are very useful to capture natural processes. Prediction models just do what the programmer thinks they should do. Claiming that prediction models proof something should be considered a criminal act.

Fluff from 2001 will not override fact from 2007.

There is no time limit on data processing. Karners calculations can be repeated to today and in 10 years or anytime. That's science, reproduceability. Don't you think that if Karners calculations were proven to be wrong that para 1a sub (1) of the summary of policy makers would state that positive feedback, the main issue of global warming, is proven? The fact that this study is carefully avoided, suggests otherwise.

Did you ever consider that your boy from Estonia is full of himself?

That statement is an ad hominem attack, which usually indicates that there are no genuine arguments. It could be noted that the ad hominem attack is the main element of the global warming hype. Anybody who is *against* global warming must necesarily be a crook, a denialist, etc. it's unthinkable of course that being sceptic has to do with the science behind global warming just being junk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_science).

edward

May23-07, 04:02 PM

Andre you are getting much too upset about this. The remark was not aimed at you.

A number of little known scientists have gained recognition by coming out against GW in the past few years. Can I not question their credibility? And yet you expect to call all other science junk.:rolleyes:

Pythagorean

May23-07, 04:40 PM

You are confusing mahematical models with prediction models. mathematical models like Karner uses, are very useful to capture natural processes. Prediction models just do what the programmer thinks they should do. Claiming that prediction models proof something should be considered a criminal act.

Don't you think this is bias behavior? Discounting all prediction models? I am interested in the Global Warming Debate, and not Global Warming itself, I don't think I'm educated enough to make conclusions about GW, but I think it's interesting to watch the behavior of AGW extremists (yes, I'm commiting the middle-ground fallacy, I'm aware of that, but I find arguments like yours to be as extremist and bias as the millennial fever crowd.

That statement is an ad hominem attack, which usually indicates that there are no genuine arguments. It could be noted that the ad hominem attack is the main element of the global warming hype.

This is something I've seen you do before too, accuse those of us who are non-partial (who may or may not study GW, and are mildly curious, but haven't made a judgment. In my case, I'm studying a scientific debate, and not particularly the science) of having some sort of tactic. You pick your words carefully, but you imply we're AGW advocates attempting to convince everyone that the end is near.

I like the way this guy put it:

...Skepticism thus plays an essential role in scientific research, and, far from trying to silence skeptics, science invites their contributions. So too, the global warming debate benefits from traditional scientific skepticism.

I have argued in a recent book review that some "greenhouse skeptics" subvert the scientific process, ceasing to act as objective scientists, rather presenting only one side, as if they were lawyers hired to defend a particular viewpoint. But some of the topics focused on by the skeptics are recognized as legitimate research questions, and also it is fair to say that the injection of environmental, political and religious perspectives in midstream of the science research has occurred from both sides in the global warming debate.

from http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/

and note this:

But when Pat Michaels testified to congress in 1998 and showed our 1988 predictions (Fig. 1) he erased the curves for scenarios B and C, and showed the result only for scenario A. He then argued that, since the real world temperature had not increased as fast as this model calculation, the climate model was faulty and there was no basis for concern about climate change, specifically concluding that the Kyoto Protocol was "a useless appendage to an irrelevant treaty".

Andre

May24-07, 03:25 PM

Don't you think this is bias behavior? Discounting all prediction models?

Look again, I said: Claiming that prediction models proof something should be considered a criminal act.

I'm happy if you run a prediction model and declare that you expect / forecast such and such to happen. If you're right then you are still inbusiness. You have a white swan. The riskier the forecast, the bigger and the more beautiful white swan.

But the general gist is that there is a body of evidence that global warming is true. Models predict that the temperature will rise so much, etc etc., suggesting that the prediction models are proof.

This is something I've seen you do before too, accuse those of us who are non-partial

Please, show the case. This way it's a bit cheap.

Andre

May24-07, 03:31 PM

Andre you are getting much too upset about this. The remark was not aimed at you.

It's not personal. It is just the mechanism. So somebody has reservation against global warming and immediately a herd of warriors character murder him.

For instance:
http://www.realclimate.org/
http://www.monbiot.com/

So the witch hunt continues. A very interesting study indeed.

Pythagorean

May24-07, 03:53 PM

Please, show the case. This way it's a bit cheap.

http://physicsforums.com/search.php?searchid=717907

Andre

May24-07, 05:15 PM

Pythagorean

May24-07, 05:33 PM

Okay the search didn't work for me. But please be a bit mild, whenever I show that things don't add up, I get kicked around immediately. There is a certain manager here with some issues. That makes a bit paranoid

Fair enough. I'm sure anal retentive online professionals don't like me either. I come here to learn and share knowledge if I can, but not to preach or listen to preaching or pretend I'm a great intellectual.

I simply entered Andre as the author and hominem as the subject. You have about two pages of using the ad hominem defense, and you tend to put fearmonger along side it (committing ad hominem while accusing someone of it)

I'm not disagreeing with you that things don't add up, but when you use words like fearmonger and ad hominem in the same sentence against someone like me (who could care less about whether people are afraid of global warming or whether it's anthropogenic), it casts doubt on your ability to actually study the subject without bias, even if you may be right about some of your biases.

In your other thread (in Earth (http://physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=1340069#post1340069)), you said "We're using the scientific method here" and while you didn't explicitly say "I'm holier than thou", it sure came off that way to me.

I must say though, it was interesting to learn we had horses in Alaska, and I do think the Mammoth was killed off by human hunting. We used to be able to hunt whales too and that was genocide.

Skyhunter

May24-07, 10:23 PM

No, it is not, as has been demonstrated here (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=162192) and here (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=169202).

I think that I will go with the conclusions of the climate researchers (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060522151248.htm) at Cal. No offense Andre, but I am confident that they are more qualified to analyse the Vostoc ice cores than you.

As for your simple model "proving" that feedback doesn't exist.....:bugeye:

Here (http://www.realclimate.org/images/ghg.jpg) is a simple model that demonstrates the opposite.

And here is the authors summary:

Summary

While this is just a simple model that is not really very Earth-like (no convection, no clouds, only a single layer etc.), it does illustrate some relevant points which are just as qualitatively true for GCMs and the real world. You should think of these kinds of exercises as simple flim-flam detectors - if someone tries to convince you that they can do a simple calculation and prove everyone else wrong, think about what the same calculation would be in this more straightforward system and see whether the idea holds up. If it does, it might work in the real world (no guarantee though) - but if it doesn't, then it's most probably garbage.

N.B. This is a more pedagogical and math-heavy article than most of the ones we post, and we aren't likely to switch over exclusively to this sort of thing. But let us know if you like it (or not) and we'll think about doing similar pieces on other key topics.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/learning-from-a-simple-model/

Oh, and my bad.

I thought Gore may have been intentionally misleading.

After reading this however I will withdraw such judgement.

Now, it there is a minor criticism one might level at Gore for his treatment of this subject in the film (as we previously pointed out in our review). As it turns out though, correcting this would actually further strengthen Gore's case, rather than weakening it. Here's why:

The record of temperature shown in the ice core is not a global record. It is a record of local Antarctic temperature change. The rest of the globe does indeed parallel the polar changes closely, but the global mean temperature changes are smaller. While we don't know precisely why the CO2 changes occur on long timescales, (the mechanisms are well understood; the details are not), we do know that explaining the magnitude of global temperature change requires including CO2. This is a critical point. We cannot explain the temperature observations without CO2. But CO2 does not explain all of the change, and the relationship between temperature and CO2 is therefore by no means linear. That is, a given amount of CO2 increase as measured in the ice cores need not necessarily correspond with a certain amount of temperature increase. Gore shows the strong parallel relationship between the temperature and CO2 data from the ice cores, and then illustrates where the CO2 is now (384 ppm), leaving the viewer's eye to extrapolate the temperature curve upwards in parallel with the rising CO2. Gore doesn't actually make the mistake of drawing the temperature curve, but the implication is obvious: temperatures are going to go up a lot. But as illustrated in the figure below, simply extrapolating this correlation forward in time puts the Antarctic temperature in the near future somewhere upwards of 10 degrees Celsius warmer than present -- rather at the extreme end of the vast majority of projections (as we have discussed here).

<snip>

What Gore should have done is extrapolated the temperature curve according this the appropriate scaling -- with CO2 accounting for about 1/3 of the total change -- instead of letting the audience do it by eye. Had he done so, he would have drawn a line that went up only 1/3 of the distance implied by the simple correlation with CO2 shown by the ice core record. This would have left the impression that equilibrium warming of Antarctica due to doubled CO2 concentrations should be about 3 °C, in very good agreement with what is predicted by the state-of-the-art climate models. (It is to be noted that the same models predict a significant delay until equilibrium is reached, due to the large heat capacity of the Southern ocean. This is in very good agreement with the data, which show very modest warming over Antarctica in the last 100 years). Then, if you scale the Antarctic temperature change to a global temperature change, then the global climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 becomes 2-3 degrees C, perfectly in line with the climate sensitivity given by IPCC (and known from Arrhenius's calculations more than 100 years ago).

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/

Andre

May25-07, 04:45 AM

I simply entered Andre as the author and hominem as the subject. You have about two pages of using the ad hominem defense, and you tend to put fearmonger along side it (committing ad hominem while accusing someone of it)

There is a slight difference here. If chicken little proclaims that the sky is falling, calling that fear mongering is not an ad hominem. There difference is "being" versus "doing/making". The main verb in an ad hominem is "to be" in the form "you are a crook hence you are wrong". Chicken little is adorable but she is wrong making that statement - No ad hominem.

I must say though, it was interesting to learn we had horses in Alaska, and I do think the Mammoth was killed off by human hunting. We used to be able to hunt whales too and that was genocide.

In Europe men and mammoths have co-existed for 50-60,000 years, where the mammoths dissapeared at the onset of the Bolling Allerod event 14,500 years ago.

At the transition of the Bolling Allerod event to the Younger Dryas (12,700 Cal years BP, 10,700 Radiocarbon years ago), both men (Clovis) and mammoths disappeared without a trace in North America. Men (Folsom) returned much later.

Shortly at the end of the Younger Dryas 11,600 Cal years ago, when the Mammoths thrived in Northern Siberia, (Taimyr peninsula) they disappeared suddenly without a trace and without any single piece of evidence that men were witnessing the tragedy. Men had disappeared already 30,000 years ago in that area.

Conclusion: Mammoths perished allways at a major climate transition, regardless if men were around or not. So whodunnit?

Andre

May25-07, 05:02 AM

I think that I will go with the conclusions of the climate researchers (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060522151248.htm) at Cal. No offense Andre, but I am confident that they are more qualified to analyse the Vostoc ice cores than you.

I reckon you would. I guess I'm too old to play the kid that exclaimed that the emperor wears no clothes. Indeed I do not analyse ice cores. I analyse the reasoning of the analysers. It was better it the analysers sticked to analysing only.

As for your simple model "proving" that feedback doesn't exist.....:bugeye:

Strawman, I said that the nett resulting feedback is not positive.

Here (http://www.realclimate.org/images/ghg.jpg) is a simple model that demonstrates the opposite.

Were are the data? I only see some expressions. The test is with the actual data. So why would a mere mathematical expression have the power to refute data testing?

Back later.

edward

May25-07, 04:56 PM

Strawman, I said that the nett resulting feedback is not positive.

Andre, your lack of respect for others on this forum is getting to be annoying.
Strawman : Are you really that desperate.?

The strawmen are the scientist who took money from Exxon and the other big oil companies to attempt to discredit AGW.
This has given many of us good reason for keeping a watchful eye on global warming skeptics.

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1876538,00.html

The largest single funder for AGW studies has been the Untied States Govenment., not some strawman or corporation who has a vested interest.

Karner's overall nett negative feed back assumption was based on doing an statistical analysis of satellite tropospheric data over time. This proves nothing except that he has convinced himself that two older studies were possibly inaccurate.

It is easy to weight a statistical analysis of anything to get a desired result. It happens all of the time in the pharmaceutical industry.

Karner states: “The revealed antipersistence in the lower tropospheric temperature increments does not support the science of global warming developed by IPCC [1996]. Negative long-range correlation of the increments during last 22 years means that negative feedback has been dominating in the Earth climate system during that period. The result is opposite to suggestion of Mitchell [1989] about domination of a positive cumulative feedback after a forced temperature change. Dominating negative feedback also shows that the period for CO2 induced climate change has not started during the last 22 years. Increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the Earth atmosphere appeared to produce too weak forcing in order to dominate in the Earth climate system.”

http://www.warwickhughes.com/hoyt/allfeedbacks.htm

Andre

May26-07, 04:55 AM

Andre, your lack of respect for others on this forum is getting to be annoying.

Well, as usual there is the tendency to shoot the messenger.

Strawman : Are you really that desperate.?

Why, thank you for your concern. it has improved significantly after reading your post :biggrin:

The strawmen are......

From your following statement I infer that we do not have a common definition of a straw man fallacy (http://www.fallacyfiles.org/strawman.html). Please do click the link to understand why I could not let an alleged statement stand.

...the scientist who took money from Exxon and the other big oil companies to attempt to discredit AGW.
This has given many of us good reason for keeping a watchful eye on global warming skeptics.

Thank you for giving the opportunity to address this complicated fallacy.

Firstly: It basically says: If you don't believe in global warming then you are a crook. If you're not a crook, we'll make you one. After all, there is always money. However, I know most of the climate sceptics. I also know that this Exxon thing is a fiction. Certainly Exxon is funding a huge amount of institutes as do all large coorporations. Exxon has even made top priority of saving the tiger from extinction, which is logical of course. A lot of institutes get funding from a multitude of corporations, among which, Exxon. Some associates from those institutes are working on climate issues with competing ideas, without the global warming bias. That's the real story of the massive bribery tales. Finally, there may be climate skeptics on the pay roll of Exxon, I don't know them, but it could be. Those that I know are not funded by anybody or get paid independed of their visions. If honest people have an opinion, would it change anything if some crooks had the same opinion?

Secondly: as said numerous times before. Bribery ad hominems do not change the truth. Whenever **fill in your own favorite worst enemy of manking here** says: water boils at 100 degrees celsius; you cannot say that this is wrong because he is a crook.

Thirdly: Science is about attempting to proof theories to be right, by the failure of attemps to proof that they are wrong. That's Popperian philosophy. Whenever I have some weird ideas, like planet Venus having converted the rotational energy to heat due to internal mechanical failure, or the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum being caused by a empty Arctic ocean bassin filling in, or the Ice ages being caused by pulsating poles, I ask the experts to proof us wrong. If they can't, we may be on to something. Therefore, the scientific method demands global warming to be subject to rigourous fail safe testing since so much depends on it.

But the problem is that this testing may reveal that global warming is wrong. How to handle that?:

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1876538,00.html

Thanks for the link. So if global warming is not robust to withstand falsification, you either accept failure or you attempt to prevent falsification by shutting up the opposition, because so much is at stake?

Karner's overall nett negative feed back assumption was based on doing an statistical analysis of satellite tropospheric data over time. This proves nothing except that he has convinced himself that two older studies were possibly inaccurate.

It is easy to weight a statistical analysis of anything to get a desired result. It happens all of the time in the pharmaceutical industry.

http://www.warwickhughes.com/hoyt/allfeedbacks.htm

Brilliant link. thanks.

But what kind of fallacy is that? I guess the fallacy of the accident. (http://www.fallacyfiles.org/accident.html) "Karner uses statistics to falsify global warming. With statistics you can weight a statistical analysis of anything to get a desired result. So proving anything you like, proves nothing."

What Karner did with satelite data was essentially the same what I did with ice core data, investigate persistency of noisy data. There is no way to predict the next data point from previous data points. It's a random walk, but feedback, always having inertial delay when processed again in the system, does influence the direction of the next datapoint. Negative feedback resists change and tends to reduce step size away from the average (non persistent). Positive feedback propagates change and tends to increase the step size away from the average value (persistent). This is something you can observe. Even if it's statistics, it's rather a impossible position to hold of seeing negative feedback behavior but nevertheless claiming that it must be positive feedback otherwise global warming won't work.

Kirsten-B

May26-07, 07:36 AM

This thread was about my Gore critique and yet I do not see a single comment about the facts that it contains.

Pythagorean

May26-07, 07:44 AM

You and Al Gore are competing for a sleep remedy? You're in the lead so far, but that's just because Al Gore told his personal stories with visuals and music and made me feel like I really knew him... before falling asleep.

Kirsten-B

May26-07, 08:46 AM

edward

May26-07, 10:16 AM

Well, as usual there is the tendency to shoot the messenger.

No one is attempting to shoot the messenger, that is only your perception. As for your post and your long winded condescending self approved version of the world ; it is mostly smoke and mirrors. It is common knowledge that Exxon was funding AGW sceptics, denying it only discredits you. So lets just cut to the chase here.

Karner only proved to his own satisfaction that he might be correct. Others have not come to the same conclusion, nor obtained the same results.

When NASA attempted to replicate Lindzen's iris hypothesis they came up with data that essentially disproved it.

Given the current political and scientific concerns about global warming, Lindzen’s colleagues in the Earth system science community were very interested in his findings. One litmus test for whether or not a new hypothesis is true is whether other scientists can reproduce the same experiment and arrive at the same findings as the original experimenter. Two teams of scientists—one based at NASA’s Langley Research Center (LaRC) and the other at the University of Washington—replicated Lindzen’s experiment and arrived at surprisingly different conclusions. (Only the LaRC team’s experiment is presented here in part 1.)

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Iris/

Kirsten-B

May26-07, 10:43 AM

Skyhunter

May26-07, 11:12 AM

Kirsten-B

May26-07, 11:21 AM

edward

May26-07, 11:27 AM

Edward,

In the posting above, you comment on oil companies funding sceptics. What about the funding of AGW research by extreme environmental groups like Greenpeace? What about the various projects that were funded by the US that were lobbied for by the same? It seems unfair to mention only one side.

I did mention the other side. The biggest contributor to AGW studies is the United States Government. Greenpeace, unlike Exxon has no ulterior profit motive involved in whatever financial contributions they may have made.

As for the Iris hypothesis article you linked, that was a 5 year old article where the three scientific teams came to different conclusions (not surprising since there are three different locations being observed at three different times) and at least the two teams listed in the article stand by their findings. Both teams are very reputable. Is there an update? Surely there must be more by now.

I would like to see an update on that myself. I am concerned that the acceptance of AGW by the majority may hamper further scientific studies on both sides of the issue. This would be totally wrong and I hope that it never happens.

In a way that is how we got ourselves into the fossil fuel predicament. It was cheap and plentiful, so for the most part, we just quit looking for cleaner energy sources.

Skyhunter

May26-07, 11:51 AM

I reckon you would. I guess I'm too old to play the kid that exclaimed that the emperor wears no clothes. Indeed I do not analyse ice cores. I analyse the reasoning of the analysers. It was better it the analysers sticked to analysing only.

Strawman, I said that the nett resulting feedback is not positive.

Were are the data? I only see some expressions. The test is with the actual data. So why would a mere mathematical expression have the power to refute data testing?

Back later.

Not a strawman, a poor choice of words.

You are claiming that there is no net positive feedback evident in the ice core data. I don't believe you to be qualified to make that claim. I found your analysis of the date to be amateurish and biased. You start with an erroneous assumption as to how the feedback should look, and then when it doesn't meet your false assumption you declare it evidence that AGW is a hoax.

By your own words it is based on analyzing the reasoning of a person or persons you do not even know. Not very scientific. I think the term you would use for that is "ad hominem".

Andre you accuse the scientific community and the worlds governments of a grand conspiracy to plunge the world into a totalitarian state. And yet, when someone questions your questionable sources, you accuse them of fallacy.

See any contradiction there?

I'll make it easy for you.

You show me a peer reviewed study that explains the warming and cooling trends contained in the data without CO2 and then we have something to talk about. You cannot do this because there is no way to explain past and present climate without CO2!

I am not saying that CO2 explains everything, it does not. There is an ocean of ignorance about climate and how the planet will react to the AGHG forcings.

I have seen experiments go badly wrong with disastrous effects. We only have one planet. I suggest we stop this experiment now. The projected results are not looking favorable for the subject.

Kirsten-B

May26-07, 12:03 PM

Edward,

Money and power. Oil = money, Greenpeace = power. Both are just as bad and neither should be involved in furthering their agendas by corrupting science, yet both try to do it.

As for the "fossil fuel predicament," I read that the problem was conservation and pollution. Pollution was reduced by adding pollution equipment in cars. Conservation was a problem because certain politicians could not get campaign contributions from oil companies. So they started yelling conservation, we are going to run out next year. Back in the 70's there was little geologic data to refute this claim. They gave tax breaks to people for solar and etc. That changed along with the oil lobby getting the tax breaks reversed. The story is different now because we are using so much more, especially China and India are stressing the supply so much that it made a large contribution to the price increases of recent years. (mid east instability being the other) Thats just oil prices, the gas prices in the US went up more because environmentalists stopped independent refiners from opening up (i bet the oil companies did not lobby against this, all they did was upgrade their existing refineries). So now what do you have? Oil companies sell more gas for 3 times the price. Exxon/Mobile in the first 3 months of this year had record profits of 9.8 billion. That will not change until a whole lot of people change to electric cars that are charged by, for instance, a solar charger in their driveway at home.

Kirsten-B

May26-07, 12:14 PM

Skyhunter

May26-07, 12:34 PM

IIn a way that is how we got ourselves into the fossil fuel predicament. It was cheap and plentiful, so for the most part, we just quit looking for cleaner energy sources.

Jimmy Carter foresaw the problem 30 years ago. The policy he set in motion was changed by Ronald Reagan.

It wasn't because it was cheap, it was because it was profitable.

I don't think that we run the risk of not studying the AGW enough. There is so much that is still unexplained that there will be no shortage of funding for research.

There is a problem for the denialist think tank funding however. Murdoch has quit funding them, and I believe that Exxon has approached the Union of Concerned Scientists, to come to an agreement where they will stop funding think tanks to spread "uncertainty."

The problem with the denialists, is they are not being objective. I don't see any evidence of "warmers" being convinced of AGW as gospel truth.

I do see plenty evidence of denial from the skeptics, without any real evidence, or with cherry picked and distorted evidence. The most vocal of the climate deniers are not scientists. Nor are they propagating scientific findings.

When I read the scientific papers I see little bias, whether it be Lindzen or Mann. I will say that Lindzen has written some op-ed pieces that I found to be somewhat ludicrous. But on the whole climate scientists are in agreement about GHG's and there contribution to GW.

To claim that there is little or no evidence to support the current conclusions of the scientific community, using questionable sources and then ignoring evidence and the work of 10's of 1000's of real scientists is IMO ludicrous.

Kirsten-B

May26-07, 12:47 PM

Skyhunter

May26-07, 12:48 PM

That's right Sky, and both the oil companies and the environmental groups are looking to get their agendas advanced. One usually uses their own money to do it. The other lobbys the government to get the money to do it.

Neither Greenpeace nor Exxon fund research into global warming. Greenpeace lobbies congress and has some access to the media, as well as lots of members to raise awareness of issues it is concerned with.

The Exxon agenda as outlined in this memo (http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/3860_GlobalClimateSciencePlanMemo.pdf) is quite specific about the strategy and funding. Exxon funds think tanks to promote their agenda.

I would not consider Greenpeace to be an extreme environmental group. ALF and ELF are extreme environmental groups.

But I digress.

Let us look at the motives of the two groups.

Greenpeace motive:

Save the whales.

Exxon motive:

Profit.

So I contribute to Greenpeace and live a low carbon lifestyle.

Moridin

May26-07, 01:08 PM

Greenpeace is a political organization with many goals. One of which happens to be a raving assault of globalization. It has also shown that they are not afraid to use unorthodox methods, as well as not being able to separate a harmful pollutant from water.

For an interesting look at their past.

http://web.archive.org/web/ INSERT Asterix /http://www.greenpeace.org/

Sorry for the strange formatting, but the correct one broke the forum design.

Kirsten-B

May26-07, 01:08 PM

Like the memo says, the funding is through the API (American Oil Institute). Exxon Mobil gives them money for this.

Now let's look at Greenpeace. Their lobbiest goes to a member of congress and has them get money for a certain scientist who, like the API, will give them the desired result.

Either way, this is how science is corrupted and both sides are as guilty as the other regardless of the motivation.

Skyhunter

May26-07, 01:09 PM

Comment from Sky,

"You show me a peer reviewed study that explains the warming and cooling trends contained in the data without CO2 and then we have something to talk about. You cannot do this because there is no way to explain past and present climate without CO2!"

You do not need one, NOAA data sets are available on line. Compare the world temp and the ENSO and see where it comes from. But do not make the same mistake that the rest did by using a basis temp (ocean) from 20 years before. You have to use the ocean temp from the year before. You cannot forget the 11,000 year solar high that we have experienced in the last 70 years and the way it heated the oceans during this time.

CO2 in the vostoc ice cores lags temps. There is no evidence that even supports the claim that CO2 amplified temps in this time. Temperature increase in the last 100 years lead 80% of the CO2 rises. The global cooling from 1944 to 1975 correlates very well with ENSO, not the hypothesized and now disproven idea that global smog cooled the world during this time. And finally, there is no way, using AGW theory, to explain the leveling out of temps in the last 5 years.

A. I don't understand how you can conclude that NOAA scientists have made a fatal flaw in their analysis of the temperature data.

B. What does El Nino have to do with GHG concentrations and their effect on climate?

The fact that CO2 lags temperature is no surprise. In fact it had been predicted 30 years ago and is well understood by the scientific community.

Andre would call that a strawman argument, since the point is irrelevant.

It is quite effective however since on the surface it appears to contradict what people thought they knew about global warming.

Here is a great question and response from a climatologist:

Dear Jeff,

I read your article "What does the lag of CO2 behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming?" You mention that CO2 does not initiate warmings, but may amplify warmings that are already underway. The obvious question comes up as to whether or not CO2 levels also lag periods when cooling begins after a warming cycle...even one of 5,000 years?

If CO2 levels on planet Earth also lag the cooling periods, then how can it be that CO2 levels are causally related to terrestrial heating periods at all? I am not sure what the ice core records are related the time response of CO2 to the cooling trends. If there is also a lag in CO2 levels behind a cooling period, then it appears that CO2 levels not only do not initiate warming periods but are also unrelated to the onset of cooling periods. It would appear that the actual CO2 levels are rather impotent as an amplifier either way...warming or cooling. We are talking about planet Earth after all and not Venus whose atmospheric pressure is many times larger than Earth's.

If there is also a time lag upon the onset of cooling, then it appears that some other mechanism actually drives the temperature changes. So what is the time difference between CO2 levels during the onset of a cooling period at the end of a warming period and the time history of the temperature changes in the ice cores?

Dear John,

The coolings appear to be caused primarily and initially by increase in the Earth-Sun distance during northern hemisphere summer, due to changes in the Earth's orbit. As the orbit is not round, but elliptical, sunshine is weaker during some parts of the year than others. This is the so-called Milankovitch hypothesis [this really should say "theory" -- eric], which you may have heard about. Just as in the warmings, CO2 lags the coolings by a thousand years or so, in some cases as much as three thousand years.

But do not make the mistake of assuming that these warmings and coolings must have a single cause. It is well known that multiple factors are involved, including the change in planetary albedo, change in nitrous oxide concentration, change in methane concentration, and change in CO2 concentration. I know it is intellectually satisfying to identify a single cause for some observed phenomenon, but that unfortunately is not the way Nature works much of the time.

Nor is there any requirement that a single cause operate throughout the entire 5000 - year long warming trends, and the 70,000 year cooling trends.

Thus it is not logical to argue that, because CO2 does not cause the first thousand years or so of warming, nor the first thousand years of cooling, it cannot have caused part of the many thousands of years of warming in between.

Think of heart disease - one might be tempted to argue that a given heart patient's condition was caused solely by the fact that he ate french fries for lunch every day for 30 years. But in fact his 10-year period of no exercise because of a desk job, in the middle of this interval, may have been a decisive influence. Just because a sedentary lifestyle did not cause the beginning of the plaque buildup, nor the end of the buildup, would you rule out a contributing causal role for sedentary lifestyle?

There is a rich literature on this topic. If you are truly interested, I urge you to read up.

The contribution of CO2 to the glacial-interglacial coolings and warmings amounts to about one-third of the full amplitude, about one-half if you include methane and nitrous oxide.

So one should not claim that greenhouse gases are the major cause of the ice ages. No credible scientist has argued that position (even though Al Gore implied as much in his movie). The fundamental driver has long been thought, and continues to be thought, to be the distribution of sunshine over the Earth's surface as it is modified by orbital variations. This hypothesis was proposed by James Croll in the 19th century, mathematically refined by Milankovitch in the 1940s, and continues to pass numerous critical tests even today.

The greenhouse gases are best regarded as a biogeochemical feedback, initiated by the orbital variations, but then feeding back to amplify the warming once it is already underway. By the way, the lag of CO2 of about 1000 years corresponds rather closely to the expected time it takes to flush excess respiration-derived CO2 out of the deep ocean via natural ocean currents. So the lag is quite close to what would be expected, if CO2 were acting as a feedback.

The response time of methane and nitrous oxide to climate variations is measured in decades. So these feedbacks operate much faster.

The quantitative contribution of CO2 to the ice age cooling and warming is fully consistent with current understanding of CO2's warming properties, as manifested in the IPCC's projections of future warming of 3±1.5 C for a doubling of CO2 concentration. So there is no inconsistency between Milankovitch and current global warming.

Hope this is illuminating.

Jeff

Kirsten-B

May26-07, 01:11 PM

One more thing, there is nothing wrong with saving the whales or making a profit. But there is something wrong when you corrupt science to do either.

Kirsten-B

May26-07, 01:24 PM

Sky comment:

"A. I don't understand how you can conclude that NOAA scientists have made a fatal flaw in their analysis of the temperature data.

B. What does El Nino have to do with GHG concentrations and their effect on climate?"

You misunderstood me. NOAA publishes both temp and ENSO figures. There are no fatal flaws in the NOAA temp data (although they will downgrade their warming estimates in July because they are eliminating urban heat island effect that skews the data)

The warming effects of ENSO are clear in the temperature record. My point is that ENSO correlates with temperature changes where changes in GHG's do not.

The points made in the letter you provide is not new. But when the tops and bottoms of the peaks on the graph do not support the idea that CO2 was an amplifier. I do agree with the guy in the letter that CO2 was something from biological processes.

Skyhunter

May26-07, 01:30 PM

Sky's comment,

"Jimmy Carter foresaw the problem 30 years ago. The policy he set in motion was changed by Ronald Reagan." If I recall correctly, Carter was the guy who could not get money from the oil companies and Reagan was the one who did.

As for the rest of the comments, can you show me a measurment of AGW? To this point it has all been calculated and the observations do not support it.

Were you alive then?

We just allocated another $100 billion to occupy an oil rich nation. And you are comparing the influence of Greenpeace to the influence of the worlds biggest corporations? :surprised

I think your understanding of global politics is as naive as your understanding of climate science.

I don't know what you are looking for when you say measurement. My sense is that you are looking for some simple explanation to a complex system and if you don't get one you will not accept any conclusions.

If you cannot find in all your research evidence that CO2 contributes roughly 30% of observed warming then I don't think there is anything I can provide you that will change your mind.

Your first fallacy is that AGW is just calculated. That is incorrect and I believe related to your misunderstanding and xenophobic reaction to the computer climate models.

The models are calibrated to the observed record. The more data, the more observation, and the more understanding of the dynamics, the better the models get.

Kirsten-B

May26-07, 01:43 PM

LOL Sky, I was not alive then, like I said, I had to read about it. Personally I would rather concentrate on the science.

The comment about being naive is really insulting. Is that what you do to all of the students who visit this forum who disagree with you? You cannot provide a single scientific study that measures the warming of the GHG hypothesis so you begin the insults? I thought this was a place for learning.

As for the computer models, they have never and they never will. Not only do they not understand clouds and water vapor, but they cannot predict solar, volcanoes, ENSO, PDO or kelvin waves. These things are tuned to death and after 39485723490857 simmulations they are given a large range to account for "Natural Variation." Under these circumstances I can program my Nintendo 007 game to say all the spies were killed by GHG's.

Skyhunter

May26-07, 01:53 PM

How does it not support CO2 as an amplifier?

I think you are making the same mistake that Andre has. You are assuming that for A to be true then B must fit your preconceived notion as to how the graph should look. This is a simplistic assumption and your analysis is meaningless, since neither you nor I are qualified to interperet the data.

As the letter points out, there is a lot going on, and still huge gaps in our knowledge. But my point is, and let me make it very clear:

Scientists cannot, let me repeat, cannot account for the observed warming and cooling trends today, nor throughout the geological history of our planet without CO2.

All the climate models include the effect of atmospheric CO2 because if they did not they would not match the observed record! If you want to question that assumption you must provide a plausable alternative.

Skyhunter

May26-07, 02:00 PM

I was alive then and have a much richer experience from which to draw, than whatever historical literature I might have been exposed to.

I don't mean to sound insulting but when you offer simplistic arguments to complex issues, it demonstrates a certain naivety.

Kirsten-B

May26-07, 02:19 PM

Sky comments:

"How does it not support CO2 as an amplifier?

I think you are making the same mistake that Andre has. You are assuming that for A to be true then B must fit your preconceived notion as to how the graph should look. This is a simplistic assumption and your analysis is meaningless, since neither you nor I are qualified to interperet the data.

As the letter points out, there is a lot going on, and still huge gaps in our knowledge. But my point is, and let me make it very clear:

Scientists cannot, let me repeat, cannot account for the observed warming and cooling trends today, nor throughout the geological history of our planet without CO2.

All the climate models include the effect of atmospheric CO2 because if they did not they would not match the observed record! If you want to question that assumption you must provide a plausable alternative."

Before I begin, can we please avoid the language such as "preconceived notions." I have not made those kinds of accusations with you.

If in fact all of the models all consider CO2 then that is probably why they can not get it right. They have tried to add anthropogenic aerosols in a big way to explain 1944-1976 cooling and to prevent run-away warming scenarios. When you look at the monthly graphs you can see the effects of the different things that affect climate. Vilcanoes, solar and etc. There were record keeping problems around world war 2. You can see these things in the temperature record. Also, you can definately see ENSO in the temperature record. What you can not see is a temperature departure caused by CO2 when all these things are considered.

As for qualifications, it is not necessary, given all of the literature on this subject, to give simmulation and calculation better weight than observation.

Evo

May26-07, 02:28 PM

When I read the scientific papers I see little bias, whether it be Lindzen or Mann.You seem to be unaware that Mann's "hockeystick" turned out to be a disgrace for Mann.

The “hockey stick” representation of the temperature behavior of the past 1,000 years is broken, dead. Although already reeling from earlier analyses aimed at its midsection, the knockout punch was just delivered by Nature magazine. Thus the end of this palooka: that the climate of the past millennium was marked by about 900 years of nothing and then 100 years of dramatic temperature rise caused by people. The saga of the “hockey stick” will be remembered as a remarkable lesson in how fanaticism can temporarily blind a large part of the scientific community and allow unproven results to become “mainstream” thought overnight.

The “Hockey Stick” is dead.

But, the “hockey stick” was remarkable. And as such, it will be remembered as a remarkable lesson in how fanaticism can temporarily blind a large part of the scientific community and allow unproven results to become mainstream thought overnight. The embarrassment that it caused to many scientists working in the field of climatology will not be soon forgotten. Hopefully, new findings to come, as remarkable and enticing as they may first appear, will be greeted with a bit more caution and thorough investigation before they are widely accepted as representing the scientific consensus.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2005/03/03/hockey-stick-1998-2005-rip/

To claim that there is little or no evidence to support the current conclusions of the scientific community, using questionable sources and then ignoring evidence and the work of 10's of 1000's of real scientists is IMO ludicrous.So true, so why do you still believe in AGW?

Skyhunter

May26-07, 04:26 PM

You seem to be unaware that Mann's "hockeystick" turned out to be a disgrace for Mann.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2005/03/03/hockey-stick-1998-2005-rip/

So true, so why do you still believe in AGW?

So you finally came off the fence.

I would suggest reading an unbiased view of the controversey regarding the hockey stick before jumping on a bandwagon.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4349133.stm

"This is a tiny step in the hockey stick analysis. If you do it in different ways, you still get the answer you got before, providing you don't throw away any significant data," said Gavin Schmidt, of the US space agency's (Nasa) Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, US, who has worked in the past with Michael Mann.

Dr Schmidt points out that McIntyre and McKitrick use a different convention but do not alter subsequent steps in their analysis to account for this.

As a result, he says, McIntyre and McKitrick's analysis removes crucial data included in the original hockey stick work.

Sorry, the opinion of a blogger does not constitute a disgrace.

However the opinion of the National Academy of Sciences should not be held so lightly.

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060626/full/4411032a.html

The academy essentially upholds Mann's findings, although the panel concluded that systematic uncertainties in climate records from before 1600 were not communicated as clearly as they could have been. The NAS also confirmed some problems with the statistics. But the mistakes had a relatively minor impact on the overall finding, says Peter Bloomfield, a statistician at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who was involved in the latest report. "This study was the first of its kind, and they had to make choices at various stages about how the data were processed," he says, adding that he "would not be embarrassed" to have been involved in the work.

You should follow the story to it's end, not get caught up in some sensationalist claim being perpetuated on a denialist blog.

Skyhunter

May26-07, 04:29 PM

Why do I believe in AGW?

The ice is melting.

[edit] Is that being to naive?

Pythagorean

May26-07, 04:29 PM

I was alive then and have a much richer experience from which to draw, than whatever historical literature I might have been exposed to.

As far as your judgments on the scientific community or judgments on AGW? Because if you're saying that you can judge AGW on a lifetime of experience (are you even half a century old?) then you're looking at too small of a sample period.

If you're saying you have more experience in the scientific field and understand the politics well enough, then extrapolate on that in the academic section of PF, tell me about the politics of my future career and academia...

Kristen:

Are you trying to discourage climate research or are you trying to discourage bad conclusions? I've seen this become a thing about the naughty climatologists want to support the fear for funding. I don't think there's any problem with researching the way petroleum products affect our environment.

Pythagorean

May26-07, 04:30 PM

Why do I believe in AGW?

The ice is melting.

Eh... why does it have to be Anthropogenic just because the ice is melting?

Why can't it just be Global Warming?

Evo

May26-07, 04:44 PM

So you finally came off the fence.

I would suggest reading an unbiased view of the controversey regarding the hockey stick before jumping on a bandwagon.I have read a ton about it. The data was skewed to create the wanted effect.

Sorry, the opinion of a blogger does not constitute a disgrace. Being found to be a fraud by Harvard Scientists is. :approve: "The first sign that something amiss with the “hockey stick” was published in 2003 by Harvard scientists Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. Soon and Baliunas performed a survey of the existing scientific literature concerning the climate of the past 1,000 years and compiled evidence for and against the existence of the MWP and the LIA. They found that overwhelmingly, within the scores of scientific articles that they reviewed, there was strong evidence to support the existence of these well-known climatic episodes that were largely absent from the “hockey stick” reconstruction. Apparently, the handle of the “hockey stick”—that part of it which represents natural variation—is too flat.These aren't bloggers.

"The issue focuses on a paper by them that supports the widely held view that the climate of the last millennium has been quite variable and includes a Medieval Warm Period and subsequent Little Ice Age. This is only controversial because it, and the wider body of scientific literature that exists, directly contradicts recent research by Michael Mann, a leading global warming proponent. Mr. Mann argues global air temperatures have been stable over the last 1,000 years, with the exception of the last 100. It is the "Mann-made" warming to which Mr. Soon and Ms. Baliunas have objected.

While most of these arguments are confined to academic discussions that the general public would find less than boring, this fight played out recently in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works. It has also been echoed in several news accounts from academic journals to the New York Times.

Mr. Mann testified before the Senate committee that his research is the "mainstream view" because it is featured in a chapter of the U.N. Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, of which Mr. Mann was a lead author. Mr. Soon and Ms. Baliunas challenged Mr. Mann's claim by reviewing the large body of literature that shows his claims to be unsubstantiated and his research to be fatally flawed. In truth, Mr. Mann's work is the scientific outlier — the one study that does not fit with the wealth of scientific evidence.

Mr. Soon and Mr. Baliunas argue that Mr. Mann's conclusions rest on a dubious manipulation of data. While many of the problems in Mr. Mann's work require scientific expertise to understand, one flaw is so basic that everyone can understand it. Mr. Mann and his colleagues compiled a historical climate reconstruction — called the "hockey stick" because of its shape — primarily using tree ring records to infer air temperature trends. Their use of proxy data is not novel, but the methods they used and thus the results, certainly are. For example, Mr. Mann and his colleagues simply attached the surface temperature record of the 20th century to the end of the proxy record. This is an apples-to-oranges comparison as air temperature readings are not directly comparable to proxy records. However, putting the two different sets of data together in this way makes a stunning visual display for the average reader.

Also, in his analysis for the Northern Hemisphere prior to 1400, Mr. Mann uses data from nine locations in addition to statistical summaries derived from data for the Western United States only. Four of these additional locations are in the Southern Hemisphere, including Tasmania and Patagonia.

The widespread acceptance of this revisionist history was possible because the global-warming community was eager to accept the "hockey stick" as proof of human-caused climate change.

continued...

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:AOjOzcvbz5gJ:www.washtimes.com/commentary/20030825-090130-5881r.htm+Willie+Soon+and+Sallie+Baliunas+hockey+s tick&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

Skyhunter

May26-07, 05:43 PM

I have read a ton about it. The data was skewed to create the wanted effect.

Being found to be a fraud by Harvard Scientists is. :approve: These aren't bloggers.

continued...

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:AOjOzcvbz5gJ:www.washtimes.com/commentary/20030825-090130-5881r.htm+Willie+Soon+and+Sallie+Baliunas+hockey+s tick&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

WOW :surprised

Does PF get funding from CEI?

And as for Soon and Baloney.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=000829C7-70D9-1EF7-A6B8809EC588EEDF&pageNumber=1&catID=4

Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reviewed more than 200 studies that examined climate "proxy" records--data from such phenomena as the growth of tree rings or coral, which are sensitive to climatic conditions. They concluded in the January Climate Research that "across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climate period of the last millennium." They said that two extreme climate periods--the Medieval Warming Period between 800 and 1300 and the Little Ice Age of 1300 to 1900--occurred worldwide, at a time before industrial emissions of greenhouse gases became abundant. (A longer version subsequently appeared in the May Energy and Environment.)

In contrast, the consensus view among paleoclimatologists is that the Medieval Warming Period was a regional phenomenon, that the worldwide nature of the Little Ice Age is open to question and that the late 20th century saw the most extreme global average temperatures.

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

In 2003, Baliunas and Willie Soon (also an astrophysicist) published a review paper on historical climatology which concluded that "the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium." With Soon, Baliunas investigated the correlation between solar variation and temperatures of the earth's atmosphere. When there are more sunspots, the total solar output increases, and when there are fewer sunspots, it decreases. Soon and Baliunas attribute the Medieval warm period to such an increase in solar output, and believe that decreases in solar output led to the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling from which the earth has been recovering since 1890.[9]

A few months afterward, 13 of the authors of the papers Baliunas and Soon cited refuted her interpretation of their work.[10] There were three main objections: Soon and Baliunas used data reflective of changes in moisture, rather than temperature; they failed to distinguish between regional and hemispheric temperature anomalies; and they reconstructed past temperatures from proxy evidence not capable of resolving decadal trends. More recently, Osborn and Briffa repeated the Baliunas and Soon study but restricted themselves to records that were validated as temperature proxies, and came to a different result.[11]

Half of the editorial board of Climate Research, the journal that published the paper, resigned in protest against what they felt was a failure of the peer review process on the part of the journal.[12][13] Otto Kinne, managing director of the journal's parent company, stated that "CR [Climate Research] should have been more careful and insisted on solid evidence and cautious formulations before publication" and that "CR should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication."[14]

[edit] Ozone depletion
Baliunas earlier adopted a skeptical position regarding the hypothesis that CFCs were damaging to the ozone layer. The originators of the hypothesis, Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and Frank Sherwood Rowland, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1995. Her arguments on this issue were presented at Congressional hearings held in 1995 (but before the Nobel prize announcement).

Although Baliunas never publicly retracted her criticism of the ozone depletion hypothesis, an article by Baliunas and Soon written for the Heartland Institute in 2000 promoted the idea that ozone depletion, rather than CO2 emissions could explain atmospheric warming.[15]

:uhh::uhh::uhh:What happened to citing credible sources on this forum. :uhh::uhh::uhh:

I offered you the BBC, and you give me back the Moonie papers commentary.:bugeye:

Evo, read the NAS conclusion of the controversy.

Don't give me links to climate blogs and opinion columns in the Washington Times and expect me to take your argument seriously.

It doesn't matter who they are, if they have a legitimate scientific argument then link their published papers in a peer reviewed scientific journal.

Ban me if you want but I believe that their is a certain standard that you as a moderator should uphold!

edward

May26-07, 06:19 PM

Also, in his analysis for the Northern Hemisphere prior to 1400, Mr. Mann uses data from nine locations in addition to statistical summaries derived from data for the Western United States only. Four of these additional locations are in the Southern Hemisphere, including Tasmania and Patagonia.

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:AOjOzcvbz5gJ:www.washtimes.com/commentary/20030825-090130-5881r.htm+Willie+Soon+and+Sallie+Baliunas+hockey+s tick&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

Should Mann have stayed at home and watched the Weather Channel ?:biggrin:

And what is wrong with using tree ring records? They have been the gold standard for climatology studies. The trees were actually there at the points in history in question.:yuck:

Evo

May26-07, 06:45 PM

WOW :surprised

Does PF get funding from CEI?

And as for Soon and Baloney.

:uhh::uhh::uhh:What happened to citing credible sources on this forum. :uhh::uhh::uhh:

I offered you the BBC, and you give me back the Moonie papers commentary.:bugeye:I'm really getting tired of your immature posts. If you can't post like an intelligent adult, don't post.

Also, your juvenile and insulting comments to Kirsten will not fly here. Sad when a teenager is more adult than the adult she's speaking with.

The article I posted was by David R. Legates, Director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware and an NCPA adjunct scholar. Want some salt with that crow you need to eat?

Kirsten-B

May26-07, 07:07 PM

Ply's question:

Are you trying to discourage climate research or are you trying to discourage bad conclusions? I've seen this become a thing about the naughty climatologists want to support the fear for funding. I don't think there's any problem with researching the way petroleum products affect our environment.

I think I made it clear, stop both sides from corrupting science. You are right, there is nothing wrong with researching if petroleum products are making environmental problems.

On the discussion about Michael Mann. Michael Mann already testified to congress that his "hockey stick" study was the first of it's kind (infancy of a particular area of science). That it had a lot of uncertanty and that he would not conduct the study the same way if he were to do it over again.
Each new reconstruction shows more and more warming around the time of the medieval warm period. But in reality, MWP was probably more of a normal temperature range in the holocene.

The problem with getting temperature from tree rings is that they studied tree rings the inexpensive way, ring width and density rather than isotopes. Using width and density is a great proxy for growing season, not temperature.

As for the ice melting, it has been melting for more than 100 years, beginning at the end of the Little Ice Age. That is not limited to one or two locations, but everywhere. That is more consistent with natural cycles because GHG's were not building up in the atmosphere at that time. I provided a number of good ref's on that one in my Gore article.

Skyhunter

May26-07, 07:08 PM

Evo I don't care who he is.

The piece you linked is his opinion published in the editorial section of the Washington Times.

The study he is citing was refuted by 13 scientists whose work was referenced saying that their studies were misrepresented.

So it is his opinion, based on a discredited study.

I linked you the NAS conclusion after their investigation of the whole controversy and you ignore it.

Skyhunter

May26-07, 07:45 PM

Eh... why does it have to be Anthropogenic just because the ice is melting?

Why can't it just be Global Warming?

It could be. But there is no natural cause that explains it.

Originally I was sceptical. I know how everything gets hyped in the media. Then I looked into the science behind it and found the idea to be credible.

Then I started hearing doubt being expressed so I looked into that. What I found was a concerted effort through the use of political think tanks to fund and promote the views of scientists with a contrary view.

I did not let the source of their funding stop me from trying to understand their argument however. At first it was difficult because there were a lot of contradictory and conflicting arguments, and I didn't know enough about the subject to sort the wheat from the chaff, and there was a lot of chaff.

Finally I found Andre and by reading his arguments following some of his links and then reading both sides of all the arguments I found, in general that the contrarian arguments were even more political and than the AGW proponents sensationalizing the science.

What I did discover was that what I thought I knew about GW as not at all the case.

Kirsten is right that Gore and others, some of whom are scientists are misleading in the way they present the science. This hurts the scientific argument for changing policy. It doesn't help and is partly responsible for my own past misunderstanding of AGW. On the other hand, the propaganda campaign by the denialist think tanks is insidious in it's distortion of the science.

The reason I now believe that the warming is anthropogenic is because there is no credible scientific study that demonstrates otherwise. In other words, nothing else explains it. Until I see a peer reviewed study that offers a plausible alternative theory and discredits the known science I will continue to act as the IPCC recommends in its Summary for Policy Makers.

Kirsten-B

May26-07, 07:48 PM

Soon and Baulinas studied over 200 climatology papers in their study involving over 700 scientists. Only 13 of the scientists refuted their work. The other 600 + did not. Let's be complete here.

Evo

May26-07, 08:08 PM

Also, Mann had to admit his work was skewed although he wouldn't admit how much.

How's this?

US Senate Commitee on Environment and Public Works

Another claim the media featured prominently was that temperature increases over the last century are unprecedented, at least when considered on a time-scale of the last 1,000 years. According to the IPCC, the 1990s were the warmest decade on record, and 1998 was the warmest year since temperature records began in 1861. The basis for this claim is the so-called hockey stick graph, which has become the iconic symbol of global warming alarmism.

The graph was constructed by Dr. Michael Mann of the University of Virginia and his colleagues using a combination of proxy data and modern temperature records. The hockey stick curve showed a gradual cooling beginning around 1400 AD (which is the hockey stick handle) then a sharp warming starting about 1900 (the hockey stick blade). Its release was revolutionary, overturning widespread evidence adduced over many years confirming significant natural variability long before the advent of SUVs. The IPCC was so impressed that the hockey stick was featured prominently in its Third Assessment Report in 2001.

As Dr. Roy Spencer, the principal research scientist at the University of Alabama, noted, “This was taken as proof that the major climatic event of the last 1,000 years was the influence of humans in the 20th century.” One of its authors, Dr. Michael Mann, confidently declared in 2003 that the hockey stick “is the indisputable consensus of the community of scientists actively involved in the research of climate variability and its causes.”

The hockey stick caused quite a stir, not just in the scientific community, but also in the world of politics. It galvanized alarmists in their push for Kyoto. It is supposedly ironclad proof that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet to an unsustainable degree.

But here again, one of the essential pillars of alarmism appears to be crumbling. Two Canadian researchers have produced the most devastating evidence to date that the hockey stick is bad science. Before I describe their work, I want to make a prediction: the alarmists will cry foul, saying this critique is part of an industry-funded conspiracy. And true to form, they will avoid discussion of substance and engage in personal attacks. That’s because one of the researchers, Stephen McIntyre, is a mineral exploration consultant. Dr. Mann already has accused them of having a conflict of interest. This is nonsense. First, Stephen McIntyre and his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist with Canada’s University of Guelph, received no outside funding for their work. Second, they published their peer-reviewed critique in Geophysical Research Letters. This is no organ of Big Oil, but an eminent scientific journal, the same journal, in fact, which published the version of Dr. Mann’s hockey stick that appeared in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report. Apparently the journal’s editors didn’t see much evidence of bias. The remarks of one editor are worth quoting in full: “S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick have written a remarkable paper on a subject of great importance. What makes the paper significant is that they show that one of the most widely known results of climate analysis, the ‘hockey stick’ diagram of Mann. et. al., was based on a mistake in the application of a mathematical technique known as principal component analysis.” Further, he said, “I have looked carefully at the McIntyre and McKitrick analysis, and I am convinced that their work is correct.”

What did McKitrick and McIntyre find? In essence, they discovered that Dr. Mann misused an established statistical method called principal components analysis (PCA). As they explained, Mann created a program that “effectively mines a data set for hockey stick patterns.” In other words, no matter what kind of data one uses, even if it is random and totally meaningless, the Mann method always produces a hockey stick. After conducting some 10,000 data simulations, the result was nearly always the same. “In over 99 percent of cases,” McIntyre and McKitrick wrote, “it produced a hockey stick shaped PCI series.” Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada, a government agency, says he agrees that Dr. Mann’s statistical method “preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data.” Even to a non-statistician, this looks extremely troubling. But that statistical error is just the beginning. On a public web site where Dr. Mann filed data, McIntyre and McKitrick discovered an intriguing folder titled “BACKTO_1400-CENSORED.” What McIntyre and McKitrick found in the folder was disturbing: Mann’s hockey stick blade was based on a certain type of tree—a bristlecone pine—that, in effect, helped to manufacture the hockey stick.

Remember, the hockey stick shows a relatively stable climate over 900 years, and then a dramatic spike in temperature about 1900, the inference being that man-made emissions are the cause of rising temperatures. So why is the bristlecone pine important? That bristlecone experienced a growth pulse in the Western United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, this growth pulse, as the specialist literature has confirmed, was not attributed to temperature. So using those pines, and only those pines, as a proxy for temperature during this period is questionable at best. Even Mann’s co-author has stated that the bristlecone growth pulse is a “mystery.” Because of these obvious problems, McIntyre and McKitrick appropriately excluded the bristlecone data from their calculations. What did they find? Not the Mann hockey stick, to be sure, but a confirmation of the Medieval Warm Period, which Mann’s work had erased. As the CENSORED folder revealed, Mann and his colleagues never reported results obtained from calculations that excluded the bristlecone data. This appears to be a case of selectively using data—that is, if you don’t like the result, remove the offending data until you get the answer you want. As McIntyre and McKitrick explained, “Imagine the irony of this discovery…Mann accused us of selectively deleting North American proxy series. Now it appeared that he had results that were exactly the same as ours, stuffed away in a folder labeled CENSORED.”

McIntyre and McKitrick believe there are additional errors in the Mann hockey stick. To confirm their suspicion, they need additional data from Dr. Mann, including the computer code he used to generate the graph. But Dr. Mann refuses to supply it. As he told the Wall Street Journal, “Giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in.”

Just a second: Who are “these people”? And what “intimidation tactics”? Mr. McIntyre and Mr. McKitrick are trying to find the truth. What is Dr. Mann trying to hide? For many scientists, McIntyre and McKitrick’s work is earth-shattering. For example, Professor Richard Muller of the University of California at Berkeley recently wrote in the MIT Technology Review that McIntyre and McKitrick’s findings “hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.” Dr. Rob van Dorland, of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, and an IPCC lead author, said, “The IPCC made a mistake by only including Mann’s reconstruction and not those of other researchers.” He concluded that unless the error is corrected, it will “seriously damage the work of the IPCC.”

Or consider Dr. Hans von Storch, an IPCC contributing author and internationally renowned expert in climate statistics at Germany’s Center for Coastal Research, who said McIntyre and McKitrick’s work is “entirely valid.” In an interview last October with the German Newspaper Der Spiegel, Dr. von Storch said the Mann hockey stick “contains assumptions that are not permissible. Methodologically it is wrong: rubbish.” He stressed that, “it remains important for science to point out the erroneous nature of the Mann curve. In recent years it has been elevated to the status truth by the UN appointed science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This handicapped all that research which strives to make a realistic distinction between human influences and climate and natural variability.”

If McIntyre and McKitrick’s work isn’t convincing enough, consider the recent paper published in the Feb. 10 issue of Nature. The paper, authored by a group of Swedish climate researchers, once again undercuts the scientific credibility of the Mann hockey stick. The press release for the study by the Swedish Research Council says, "A new study of climate in the Northern Hemisphere for the past 2000 years shows that natural climate change may be larger than generally thought.”

According to the paper’s authors, the Mann hockey stick does not provide an accurate picture of the last 1,000 years. “The new results,” they wrote, “show an appreciable temperature swing between the 12th and 20th centuries, with a notable cold period around AD 1600. A large part of the 20th century had approximately the same temperature as the 11th and 12th centuries.”

In other words, here’s evidence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, demonstrating that climate, long before the burning of fossil fuels, varied considerably over the last 2,000 years. The researchers note that changes in the sun’s output and volcanic eruptions appear to have caused considerable natural variations in the climate system. “The fact that these two climate evolutions,” they contend, “which have been obtained completely independently of each other, are very similar supports the case that climate shows an appreciable natural variability—and that changes in the sun’s output and volcanic eruptions on the earth may be the cause.”

http://epw.senate.gov/speechitem.cfm?party=rep&id=236307

edward

May26-07, 08:53 PM

Evo

May26-07, 09:12 PM

If all of the AGW data is flawed and all of the studies uncreible, then I would have to presume that Exxon just wanted to waste the $16 million that they contributed to GW sceptics.:rolleyes:

http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/ExxonMobil-GlobalWarming-tobacco.htmlEdward, do you really believe that environmental groups aren't lobbying and paying for research to back their cause?

There are fanatics and fraud on both sides. I dated a climate scientist and he told me that human pollution is too insignificant to change the world's climate. Pollution can cause problems in limited areas but it is not enough to change the world's climate. People just don't understand what it would take to accomplish something of that scale.

Skyhunter

May26-07, 09:48 PM

Also, Mann had to admit his work was skewed although he wouldn't admit how much.

How's this?

US Senate Commitee on Environment and Public Works

http://epw.senate.gov/speechitem.cfm?party=rep&id=236307

Is that Inohofe's speech?

Now you are going to try and persuade me with a speech from Senator Inhofe.

Here is a debate between him and Barbara Boxer on Larry King live after the famous smackdown.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u1vfnlqWVQ&mode=related&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA9YkEd10ZI&mode=related&search=

Once again, look at what the scientists say about the hockey stick controversey, all the scientists, not a select few or the one who writes op-eds for Sun Myung Moon.

The National Academy of Sciences, and if memory serves me it was at the request of the Senate EPW committee, looked into this and concluded that there were some mistakes made but they were minor in nature and did not change the overall results. I linked it, read it and then maybe you will realize that you are making much ado about nothing.

Skyhunter

May26-07, 09:58 PM

Soon and Baulinas studied over 200 climatology papers in their study involving over 700 scientists. Only 13 of the scientists refuted their work. The other 600 + did not. Let's be complete here.

Still the study was highly discredited in many scientific journals. And is today seen as an attack job on Mann partially funded by, let me see what was that organization, oh yea the American Petroleum Institute.

NileQueen

May26-07, 10:07 PM

Pythagorean

I simply entered Andre as the author and hominem as the subject. You have about two pages of using the ad hominem defense, and you tend to put fearmonger along side it (committing ad hominem while accusing someone of it)
Well there are a lot of people (including scientists whom I would expect to be more impartial) who attack the person rather than discuss the
ideas/opinions being presented

Pythagorean:
I must say though, it was interesting to learn we had horses in Alaska, and I do think the Mammoth was killed off by human hunting. We used to be able to hunt whales too and that was genocide.

Don Grayson evaluated kill sites in North America and his take on it was that there were only about 14 that were viable.

Man and mammoth were not associated in Siberia so the overkill hypothesis falls down there. My view is it is a climate change driven extinction, with massive methane hydrate releases a key factor, but there is a new hypothesis materializing that proposes an airburst by a comet over North America (see AGU conference abstracts May 2007). Conveners of session:
James Kennett, LuAnn Becker, Rick Firestone and Allen West.

We are still hunting whales, that is the Japanese have found a loophole to aggressively go after minke whales. It's reprehensible.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-05/osu-das051607.php

Skyhunter

May26-07, 10:24 PM

If all of the AGW data is flawed and all of the studies uncreible, then I would have to presume that Exxon just wanted to waste the $16 million that they contributed to GW sceptics.:rolleyes:

http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/ExxonMobil-GlobalWarming-tobacco.html

Exxon has requested a meeting with UCS to discuss their continued support and funding of junk science. I have not heard whether it happened or not or if it did what the outcome was.

The reality is, that the funding for climate skeptics is drying up, the talking head news/commentary shows don't give them much air time any more (except for maybe Glen Beck) because they have nothing new to say. And repeating old news is just not something the producers will do.

NileQueen

May26-07, 10:28 PM

Still the study was highly discredited in many scientific journals. And is today seen as an attack job on Mann partially funded by, let me see what was that organization, oh yea the American Petroleum Institute.

Let ME see...Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon are Harvard-Smithsonian Center astrophysicists. They point out that "only tree growth record over a single region is used in the SPM reconstruction for the crucial period." This is a legitimate criticism. It's always best to use mutiple proxies to check, balance and strengthen your case.

See: Climate History and the Sun, by Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon, Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, George C. Marshall Institute, June 5, 2001.

Using the extremely lame and tired excuse of the American Petroleum institute does demonstrate a flagrant ad hominem. I guess it is easier to make these trite comments that attack the presenters of ideas, than to discuss the merit
of their ideas.

NQ

edward

May26-07, 10:46 PM

Edward, do you really believe that environmental groups aren't lobbying and paying for research to back their cause?

Environmental groups don't have anywhere near the funding capability that big energy does.

But my point was that if big energy thought there was no GW, why would they have spent that kind of money to discredit it. And yes, Exxon does have it's own environmental scientists and climatologists.

There are fanatics and fraud on both sides. I dated a climate scientist and he told me that human pollution is too insignificant to change the world's climate. Pollution can cause problems in limited areas but it is not enough to change the world's climate. People just don't understand what it would take to accomplish something of that scale.

I have looked closely at both sides and I think the jury is still out on AGW ,but not on GW. Something is melting all of that ice. The worst case AGW scenario is that we would have to switch to clean energy. Sure that would come at a tremendous cost, but it would also create a whole new industry and the jobs that go with it. It also could be done over time taking some of the sting out of the cost. And again I think that the general pollution from fossil fuels worries me the most.

Personally I was a great fan of the late Carl Sagan. He was the first person that I remember mentioning global warming.

Anyway it beats the hell out of worrying about a nuclear winter.:smile:

Skyhunter

May26-07, 10:47 PM

As far as your judgments on the scientific community or judgments on AGW? Because if you're saying that you can judge AGW on a lifetime of experience (are you even half a century old?) then you're looking at too small of a sample period.

If you're saying you have more experience in the scientific field and understand the politics well enough, then extrapolate on that in the academic section of PF, tell me about the politics of my future career and academia...

I was referring to my more intimate understanding of the political atmosphere during the Carter/Reagan/Anderson election campaign. It was my first presidential election as an adult. There is no substitute for personal experience. You can ride in a car and watch someone drive a thousand times, but until you do it yourself, you don't know how.

Kirsten was implying that Carter was anti-oil because he did not get money from oil companies. I don't know for certain but I would guess that Jimmy Carter at some point in his career got campaign money from oil companies, the majority of national politicians do.

The campaign really hinged on the Iran hostage crisis.

George H. Bush, Reagans running mate, led a delegation that met with the Iranians and made a deal to have the hostages released.......After the election though, not before. And the deal was for weapons, and the money was used to arm the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Some of the key players in Iran Contra are now back, in the current administration.

phoenixy

May26-07, 10:59 PM

Edward, do you really believe that environmental groups aren't lobbying and paying for research to back their cause?

And what cause would that be? Environmental groups are trying to save lives and preserved a home for our future generation. Unlike certain industry, they are not footing the bills as a mean to generate more bills. Of course, we also have to take into the quality and the quantity of research into account.

I said "trying to save lives" instead of simply "save lives" because some environmental groups can make what I considered as mistakes. As such, they could very well be counter-productive and ended up moving further away from their cause. For example, I have huge issue with Greenpeace's anti-nuclear stance.

There are fanatics and fraud on both sides.

So is evolution VS. creationism, big bang VS. 6000 year old earth, etc. These sorts of "two sides to the story" are only somewhat evenly matched in the political arena, and for the most part, only in USA. In the scientific community the match is not even closed. If we accept that fraud is inherit and cannot be avoided, then it comes down to signal to noise ratio. Perhaps I can stomach more fraud from the skeptic community if it originates more credible and scientific research.

I dated a climate scientist and he told me that human pollution is too insignificant to change the world's climate. Pollution can cause problems in limited areas but it is not enough to change the world's climate. People just don't understand what it would take to accomplish something of that scale.

I can assure you humanity has the mean, the capability, and in the last 50 years, even the desire to terminate all live form on Earth through change in world climate and pollution. Yes, I'm talking about a nuclear winter. It is not that far stretch to imagine that some other non-natural climate-changing method would also exist.

PS: show of hand. Who thinks Thank You for Smoking is an awesome movie of industrial lobbyist VS. health advocate lobbyist?

Skyhunter

May26-07, 11:03 PM

Let ME see...Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon are Harvard-Smithsonian Center astrophysicists. They point out that "only tree growth record over a single region is used in the SPM reconstruction for the crucial period." This is a legitimate criticism. It's always best to use mutiple proxies to check, balance and strengthen your case.

See: Climate History and the Sun, by Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon, Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, George C. Marshall Institute, June 5, 2001.

Using the extremely lame and tired excuse of the American Petroleum institute does demonstrate a flagrant ad hominem. I guess it is easier to make these trite comments that attack the presenters of ideas, than to discuss the merit
of their ideas.

NQ
Sorry, I guess do tend to get a bit hyperbolic.

Criticism is one thing, and accusations of fraud are quite another.

Mann was being accused of fraud, he has been acquitted by his peers and I just get irked when this study is thrown up as exposing Mann, Bradely, and Hughes as frauds, which they are not. The study itself has been widely criticized. That is not to say that it did not raise valid issues, just that their intent, or at least the intent of the API was to discredit Mann and the hockeystick.

Which the study failed to do.

Kirsten-B

May26-07, 11:16 PM

Mann basicly retracted his own study before congress and they still use it in computer models.

Pythagorean

May27-07, 12:26 AM

There are fanatics and fraud on both sides.

Mann was being accused of fraud, he has been acquitted by his peers and I just get irked when this study is thrown up as exposing Mann, Bradely, and Hughes as frauds, which they are not. The study itself has been widely criticized. That is not to say that it did not raise valid issues, just that their intent, or at least the intent of the API was to discredit Mann and the hockeystick.

This is the kind of thing that makes me not even want to bother trying to understand what's going on right now. There's way too much political interest, on both sides. I have definitely seen oil propaganda living in Alaska, without a doubt, so I know oil companies aren't as innocent as people make them out to be sometimes.

Environmental groups don't have anywhere near the funding capability that big energy does.

A general counterargument to that is that this gives environmental groups more support from the masses (voters and certain politicians). With Al Gore involved, you can't really deny that the concept of AWG has just as much political power on the other side (I mean we're here, right, debating it, it's a hot topic, only the fools and the wise people are certain about what's going on, and I'm neither)

So there's a lot of political pressure from both sides on this project, data is going to be slashed, edited, discredited and replaced, while the interpretations of data will always be geared towards political motive if you follow the line of benefits and costs involved.

Don Grayson evaluated kill sites in North America and his take on it was that there were only about 14 that were viable.

Man and mammoth were not associated in Siberia so the overkill hypothesis falls down there. My view is it is a climate change driven extinction, with massive methane hydrate releases a key factor, but there is a new hypothesis materializing that proposes an airburst by a comet over North America (see AGU conference abstracts May 2007). Conveners of session:
James Kennett, LuAnn Becker, Rick Firestone and Allen West.

To be clear, I wasn't making an argument about GW or global population of mammoths. I think that in Alaska, mammoth hunting contributed significantly (as well as harsh temperatures) to local mammoth extinction.

Hurkyl

May27-07, 12:37 AM

But my point was that if big energy thought there was no GW, why would they have spent that kind of money to discredit it. And yes, Exxon does have it's own environmental scientists and climatologists.
If GW was real, why would they have spent that kind of money to discredit it? Which of those reasons fail to apply if GW is not real?

Andre

May27-07, 06:41 AM

NileQueen

May27-07, 06:42 AM

Pythagorean

To be clear, I wasn't making an argument about GW or global population of mammoths. I think that in Alaska, mammoth hunting contributed significantly (as well as harsh temperatures) to local mammoth extinction.

Do you have a reference? What is your source for this view?

Andre

May27-07, 07:36 AM

Not a strawman, a poor choice of words.

You are claiming that there is no net positive feedback evident in the ice core data. I don't believe you to be qualified to make that claim.

This has been addressed in the appropriate thread.

http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=162192

edward

May27-07, 10:39 AM

Do you have a reference? What is your source for this view?

I don't think that there is definite proof that mammoths were hunted into extinction. They were ,however, definitely hunted in North America. Since we did hunt the bison into near extinction I think it was presumed that man did the same with the mammoth.

The culture is named for artifacts found near Clovis, New Mexico, where the first evidence of this tool complex was excavated in 1932. Earlier evidence included a mammoth skeleton with a spear-point in its ribs, found by a cowboy in 1926 near Folsom, New Mexico. Clovis sites have since been identified throughout all of the contiguous United States, as well as Mexico and Central America.

http://www.crystalinks.com/clovis.html

The intriguing mystery is the massive sudden disappearance of the mammoth in Siberia which Andre has mentioned.

I think someone has mentioned that horses also existed in North America.
Recently in clearing ground for a new Walmart in the phoenix area, the skeleton of a camel was found.

edward

May27-07, 11:12 AM

Impressive fight here. I guess it confirms that reason will never be able to overcome passion. So we probably have to wait for the moment that we all see that this cycle of natural global warming cycles has ended in 2002 and we can make up for the battle of the coming ice ages hype.

We could blame it all on science itself. Without the satellites with their impressive data and the technology to study ice cores, we would be sitting around with nothing to do.:smile:

Problem is that from that moment on, there is no incentive left for the masses to have anymore belief in science, that conned them into cutting emissions to prevent global warming.

People have always been skeptical of new science, especially scientists.:biggrin: But I do see your point, if AGW turns out to be a false alarm, people may feel that science has betrayed them.

So, there is no reason whatsoever to think green, they are not going to be dragged into it anymore. What left is pure survival in a dire energy crises following the folly and climate science will be dead.

We have used fossil fuels for over two hundred years. If there is no incentive to find clean energy, it won't be found. Remember the old saying: "Necessity is the Mother of Invention".

I don't see a dire energy crisis unless the conversion to new energy sources is manipulated by unscrupulous people.

Pythagorean

May27-07, 02:04 PM

Do you have a reference? What is your source for this view?

http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF7/772.html

I work at an arctic science institute. I don't study biology or climate (I study physics and infrasound) but I hear a lot about it, so I'm expressing the local view. Remember that I said 'I think' and not that 'i know'.

'i know' that Mt. Erebus is active (because that's what I study, professionally, with infrasound and wave-analysis technology.)

you can go here:

http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/

and enter search term, "mammoth" to see more information about research on the Alaska mammoth.

NileQueen

May27-07, 03:05 PM

http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF7/772.html

I work at an arctic science institute. I don't study biology or climate (I study physics and infrasound) but I hear a lot about it, so I'm expressing the local view. Remember that I said 'I think' and not that 'i know'.

Your source is written by a seismologist and at the very least he is careless. It is possible he knows something about paleontology, but he talks about Paul Koch and David Fisher at U Mich.
Sorry, there is no David Fisher at U Mich. That is likely Daniel C. Fisher, the tusk expert/geologist/paleontologist there. They are using high magnification
microscopes to find butcher marks, but I have not seen anything that refutes the Grayson paper.
Here is this abstract by Fisher, dating to 1984
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/geology/mastodon/journals/butcher2.htm
but refers to mastodonts in the Michigan area, not Alaska.
Also 1984, D.C. Fisher
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/geology/mastodon/journals/butcher3.htm
He cites "compelling evidence" for paleoindian butchery of mastodons

Grayson paper, 2003
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-02/uow-eac022403.php
Evidence acquits Clovis people of ancient killings, archaeologists say

"Of the 76 localities with asserted associations between people and now-extinct Pleistocene mammals, we found only 14 (12 for mammoth, two for mastodon) with secure evidence linking the two in a way suggestive of predation," write Donald Grayson of the UW and David Meltzer of SMU in the current issue of the Journal of World Prehistory. "This result provides little support for the assertion that big-game hunting was a significant element in Clovis-age subsistence strategies. This is not to say that such hunting never occurred: we have clear evidence that proboscideans (mammoths and mastodons) were taken by Clovis groups. It just did not occur very often."

What is the state of the research on mammoths/mastodons in Alaska I wonder? It was largely unglaciated at the LGM.

'i know' that Mt. Erebus is active (because that's what I study, professionally, with infrasound and wave-analysis technology.)
When was the last time it erupted, and what type of volcano is it? (I find it interesting).

you can go here:

http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/

and enter search term, "mammoth" to see more information about research on the Alaska mammoth.
searching for "mammoth hunting" only brings up one article (the one you cited) on humans and hunting. That's a good site. I've read some of Ned Rozell's stuff.

Andre

May27-07, 03:06 PM

http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF7/772.html

I work at an arctic science institute. I don't study biology or climate (I study physics and infrasound) but I hear a lot about it, so I'm expressing the local view.

Curiously enough, the local view should be generated by the local autority, which is Dale Guthrie. I have never hear him propagate overkill. On the work with the horses he did make a strong case for climate change

Pythagorean

May27-07, 03:49 PM

Your source is written by a seismologist and at the very least he is careless. It is possible he knows something about paleontology, but he talks about Paul Koch and David Fisher at U Mich.
Sorry, there is no David Fisher at U Mich. That is likely Daniel C. Fisher, the tusk expert/geologist/paleontologist there.

You may have a bias against him, I didn't pick up that Fisher was from U of Mich, here's the direct quote of the sentence, I can see how you misinterpreted it:

David Fisher and Paul Koch of the University of Michigan

Is that the only discredit you had for him?

What is the state of the research on mammoths/mastodons in Alaska I wonder? It was largely unglaciated at the LGM.

I must admit I'm not that interested in extinction or mammoths so I have little exposure to the state of research. I'm largely here (in this discussion) to study the AGW debate itself, and how people argue about science that's polluted with politics. I have made no real conclusions myself, but I do probe with an argument occasionally to study people's motives.

When was the last time it erupted, and what type of volcano is it? (I find it interesting).

I'm not sure. I'm studying data from January of this year. I'm not a volcanologist (nor do I want to be) I'm just a physics undergrad taking any physics job I can get. I'm more interested in the wave analysis (being able to identify and filter digital signals via techniques like fourier transform and wavelet analysis) because it's a powerful tool that carried into many different fields of physics.

Even the group I work with aren't really volcanologists, they're an infrasound group. The volcanologists probably use our data though and we collaborate with them.

this is the cite to see for Mt. Erebus:
http://www.ees.nmt.edu/Geop/mevo/mevo.html

searching for "mammoth hunting" only brings up one article (the one you cited) on humans and hunting. That's a good site. I've read some of Ned Rozell's stuff.

I just meant to look up 'mammoth' for general info, wasn't really pushing the extinction by human hunting point. As I said before, there's no doubt harsh weather contributed too. I really can't say which was more significant, but cold weather is in every square foot during the winter (at least); humans only occupy about three square feet each, so It's not beyond my reasoning that weather was more significant.