A pretty good article, which makes some good points to muse over:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121433436381900681.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121433436381900681.html
A pretty good article, which makes some good points to muse over:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121433436381900681.html
I think the point he was trying to make about it not being able to be tested is that you can't test the alternative, so you can't be 100% sure people are the sole cause of the current global warming. I.e., 20 years ago, someone said, "I think global warming is happening because of industrialization", and coincidentally, it has been getting warmer the past 20 years (plus a whole lot longer). However, since you can't measure the temperatures of the last 20 years without any industrialization, you really can't prove that beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Our global climate has looked like a roller coaster of extremes over the past 11,000 years.
Too bad a cause of it more weighty than industrialization is gases......from cow anus. One of the most abundant of those evil "greenhouse gases" is....
.....WATER VAPOR
lol @ man-made global warming.
There have been multiple ice ages. Am I the only one that ever wonders what made the ice melt?
Of course scientists are flocking to it, because that's where the money is now, since it has become more of a political agenda than anything else. Unfortunately misguided politicians control the funds, and scientists will do whatever it takes to secure said funds. I find that totally irresponsible, but hey, maybe that's just because I care about the truth; whatever it may be.
People have been hawking this anthropogenic GW thing for a long time, which has resulted in nothing but Draconian policies. The world is much "greener" now than it was in the mid 90s, but guess what...it's still getting warmer. Oops!
but the facts aren't there
The notion of a scientific "consensus" is a terrible one and flies in the very face of the scientific method;
When other scientists bring up the fact that the earth has been warming for the last ten thousand years and that there is a great amount of vulcanism in the Antartic which may be contributing to the loss of some glaciation (all the while its becoming far colder inland)
It used to be general consensus that the world was flat.....
The problem here is that global warming is hardly a hypothesis. I don't have to come up with some speculative hypothesis to assert that dropping potassium metal into clean water will cause an explosion; we can already infer from the known rules of physics and chemistry that this will happen. Likewise, heating an insulated body is already a well-understood phenomenon. I'd like to see a scientist enumerate the ways that we could continue to heat and insulate the earth without appreciably altering local and global climates. (My hypothesis would be that there are many more ways for global warming to be true than there are for it to be false.)The only evidence that can be said to support this so-called scientific consensus is the supposed correlation of historical global temperatures with historical carbon-dioxide content in the atmosphere. Even if we do not question the accuracy of our estimates of global temperatures into previous centuries, and even if we ignore the falling global temperatures over the past decade as fossil-fuel emissions have continued to increase, an honest scientist would still have to admit that the hypothesis of man-made global warming hardly rises to the level of "an assertion of what has been or would be the result of carrying out a specified observational procedure."
That there is no dissent and that there is a "scientific fundamentalism" circulating around is hard to deny.
Some of the arguments against "man-made " global warming stem from the problems associated with climate models. There was even one comment, admitting the por results but suggesting that when all the spurious models were combined, there was some suggestion that global warming was occuring . . .
Also, the role of the sun is seldom considered. Most seem to think its a ******* lightbulb.
They have no love of dogma -- no matter from whom -- there . . .
I think it's kind of a weak argument to say that scientists only point to global warming because it's profitable. Global warming was an unpopular crackpot theory (with lots of solid, compelling evidence) for a long time before lobbyists and energy companies turned it into a revenue-generating buzzword.
As much as I've heard arguing against the evidence for global warming, I've never heard a single refutation (sensical or non) of the theory. It's already known that increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will increase its reflectivity and insulating capacity; that's simple chemistry. You can complain all you want about previous climate trends but that won't change anything about the nature of the phenomenon; you could also argue that because you've never crashed a car while drunk, alcohol only negligibly impairs your ability to drive. Who cares if the world isn't ending in 20 years? 20, 100, 1000 - it doesn't matter. I don't want to do anything that hastens the process, even if it's only by a few months against thousands or even millions of years. I've just got this stupid sentimental notion that it might be nice for my genes to be around for more than three more generations. For centuries, it didn't matter that we just dumped garbage outside of town, but more recently there's more people and more garbage, and now waste management is a real problem. (The same could be said of sanitation, but the scale is even more disproportionate.)
The problem here is that global warming is hardly a hypothesis. I don't have to come up with some speculative hypothesis to assert that dropping potassium metal into clean water will cause an explosion; we can already infer from the known rules of physics and chemistry that this will happen. Likewise, heating an insulated body is already a well-understood phenomenon. I'd like to see a scientist enumerate the ways that we could continue to heat and insulate the earth without appreciably altering local and global climates. (My hypothesis would be that there are many more ways for global warming to be true than there are for it to be false.)
Another example; driving a few miles over the recommended distance between maintenance probably won't kill your car. So, you could say that the recommended distance is, say, 3005 miles instead of 3000. But then, the chance of something bad happening doesn't change much as you go from 3005 to 3010, either. So why is there a limit at all? Even if you don't notice the difference, human activity does add to the total amount of heat going into the earth's atmosphere. Assuming, for the moment, that the greenhouse effect is utter hogwash, we still have to deal with the additional energy that comes from all the stuff we burn; there were no combustion engines, iron smelters or nuclear reactors going 10,000 years ago, and that's a lot of extra heat. The air in your garage is constantly in a state of chemical and energetic flux; the gas mixture changes, the temperature changes, etc. So why don't you stay shut inside when your car engine is running? There's still a chance that there will be a spontaneous increase in oxygen and decrease in carbon monoxide that will balance out the contributions of the exhaust; besides, you could still breathe fine when you first started it up. Two minutes later, why worry? You've already been coughing for a while; that's probably normal. And dizziness is known to come and go - it'll pass this time too. But then, what do you know? You've killed yourself.
~Joe
PS - Since when was the WSJ a trustworthy source of scientific objectivity? Even when it comes to finance, half their content is editorial.
PPS - Anybody check the credentials of the author? I don't find it very assuring that Googling him leads to a refrigeration business and discovery.org...
Then you won't mind providing proof to back up your claims that the acceptance is due to anything beyond evidence.
Um, no. Wrong. Very, very wrong. No climate model has *failed* to predict global warming unless massively erroneous figures were used as input (inputs are based on actual measurable physical constants, so you know).
Oh, and how do you account for the 1988 computer model that *precisely matches* the 20 years of temperature records since?
Where are you getting your information? The Children's Coloring Book Guide to Climatology?
We have extensively examined the sun's effects, and there are several satellites out there right now measuring just that.
Oh, and so you know, the sun's output (as measured DIRECTLY by satellites) hasn't significantly changed in 20 years.
And I have no love of willful ignorance. Their "expert" is a chemist, not a climatologist, and is no more qualified to critique global warming than he is to perform open-heart surgery.
On top of that, for all his petty and inaccurate gripes about clouds and models, he neglects to note that a model made in 1988 predicted the subsequent 20 years of global climate change PERFECTLY. We're talking within one percent accuracy. And that was a model run on computers with less power than you cell phone.
So, if models are wrong, how can they predict the future with such accuracy?
Mokele
The first link in my second post is from a climatologist.Their "expert" is a chemist, not a climatologist, and is no more qualified to critique global warming than he is to perform open-heart surgery.
To quote you, if I may; "um, no." Take a look at the graph on page 4 (and the rest of the article as well): http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles 2004/Winter2003-4/global_warming.pdfThe past 11,000 years have been mostly stable, and the current peak is by far the largest and fastest deviation.
The first link in my second post is from a climatologist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMFn4D6RH3k
Here's your peer-reviewed journal articles:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/yx67836q6007k586/
http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=272455 (actually a book)
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/RobinsonAndRobinson.pdf
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a713849842~db=all
http://www.springerlink.com/content/f5uhmcp0qx4l81dj/
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mscp/ene/2003/00000014/F0020002/art00008
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v89/i2/e028501
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;243/4892/771 (points out large uncertainties in models)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/247/4950/1529
And there were plenty more I couldn't see the abstracts or full texts for.
Will someone please explain to me how buying a carbon offset decrease the "Actual" amount of carbon admitted into the atmosphere? You produce your carbon then buy something that says that carbon you just produced is negated? How is that so? Apparently I do not understand the concept.
To me it just looks like you buy the "offsets" to reduce the number of carbon you produce on paper, but the actual amount stays the same. Or am I missing a very big part of it?
The first link in my second post is from a climatologist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMFn4D6RH3k
Here's your peer-reviewed journal articles:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/yx67836q6007k586/
http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=272455 (actually a book)
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/RobinsonAndRobinson.pdf
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a713849842~db=all
http://www.springerlink.com/content/f5uhmcp0qx4l81dj/
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mscp/ene/2003/00000014/F0020002/art00008
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v89/i2/e028501
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;243/4892/771 (points out large uncertainties in models)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/247/4950/1529
And there were plenty more I couldn't see the abstracts or full texts for.