37 Comments

1. david foster:

Many people who have studied nonscientific disciplines probably assume, implicitly, that the test of truth is *authority*…ie, you’d better agree with the professor’s interpretations of 14th century Italian poetry (or whatever) if you want a good grade…and really don’t understand the extent to which science is a matter of observation and analysis rather than of authority.

Dec 22, 2008 - 1:00 pm 2. AlanC:

Roger,

One of the major problems with this discussion is that there is a lot more to it than the complexity of climate science. Since all of these doom and gloom scenarios are based on computer models; you have to bring in the whole subject of statistical analysis and computer modeling REGARDLESS of the underlying science. And neither of those areas is simple itself no matter what you are studying or modeling.

This was the downfall of the infamous hockey stick. It was not proven worthless by examining climatology but by examining the statistics. Computer modeling is a whole nother subject and the warmenistas fail pretty miserably on that too (an area I have some knowledge of).

Like any scientific proposition worth its salt you first come up with a theory (aka guess) then you define predictions from your theory; then you do experimentation/observation that supports (NOT proves) your theory; or discover evidence that disproves your theory. Given the difficulty of the experimentation phase this can be a real challenge. (Read about the testing of Eistein’s theory about gravity bending light waves)

As far as has been published, the theory has made no testable predictions that have been tested and shown to be correct, but several that have been shown to be wrong.

This is not science no matter what Arnie says; it is religion.

Dec 22, 2008 - 1:14 pm 3. irishlad317:

One would think that it would be politicians, those keepers of the public trust, that would be skeptical of something upon which billions (or trillions) of taxpayer dollars might be spent. You’d think they’d be VERY intersted in the possibility that man is not causing the environment to warm (or cool, or whatever it’s supposedly causing this week). Maybe they DON’T have to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to solve a non-existent problem. Maybe those dollars can stay in the pockets of the taxpayers, who can circulate them in the economy, thus strengthening the economy. Heck sakes, if the human burning of fossil fuels is NOT causing global warming (or cooling, or whatever it’s causing this week), perhaps they could even open ANWR and the coasts to drilling, giving the economy a boost on the oil companys’ dime, keeping wealth in the USA, and reducing dependence on foreign sources of energy. (Gas is cheaper right now, but the money’s still going to people who hate us.)

What is it that would cause the politicians to seem to WANT “climate change” to be man’s fault? Could it be that they gain power if they have another reason to control more of our money and our lives? Politicians? Those servants of the people… those protectors of the common weal? Naw. How could I think such a thing?

Dec 22, 2008 - 1:20 pm 4. Barry Dauphin:

Whatever happened to the old saw: “Everybody talks about it, nobody does a thing about it…”?-ed.

It went out because some folks figured out a way to make some money off of “doing something about it”.

Dec 22, 2008 - 1:32 pm 5. davidingeorgia:

the study of all things generally referred to as “global warming” stopped being science and became an organized religion a good 20 years or so ago so now, if you refuse to “believe!” then you’re a heretic and are branded as such…

the actual science of it is confusing and not at all clear no matter what Al Gore and CNN tell you every night…there’s probably just as much or more evidence pointing to a coming ice age/cooling period (or that we’re in a temporary – on a geological scale – warmer interlude in a longer ice/cold cycle already)…

I’ve refused to believe 90%+ of the “conventional wisdom” on the subject ever since finding out that the initial, famous study that “proved” global warming was taking place – with the infamous “hockey stick” graph – left out one kinda major piece of data in its calculation…the amount of energy – and waxing and waning thereof – put out by the Sun at any given time period. You know…just a teeny, tiny little detail that might, I don’t know, have some effect on TEMPERATURES…lol

if the people in the global warming cabal weren’t trying to grab the power necessary to do things that’ll wreck what little is left of our economy, they’d be hilarious to watch…well, they’re hilarious anyway, but with the potential to do enormous amounts of damage.

Dec 22, 2008 - 1:44 pm 6. Ben:

OK, how sure are you that global warming is a hoax? Are you 80% sure? So, there’s a 20% chance that a catastrophe will happen that will have drastic negative impacts on the human race as a whole. When there’s vast agreement on man-made climate change, that has to give you SOME pause, right? Are you willing to gamble when the potential cost is so much higher than the current cost or preventive measures?

Dec 22, 2008 - 2:20 pm 7. imadoc:

All major scientific organizations, world wide, have accepted anthropogenic climate change as a very strong hypothesis, with very strong supporting evidence. That’s quite a few ‘indentured servants’ needing to be in the thrall of ignorant politicians.

People who feel the hypothesis mistaken therefore have a responsibility to offer a competing hypothesis to explain the facts. Someone on this web site want to take a shot at that?

Dec 22, 2008 - 2:43 pm 8. Roger L Simon:

“When there’s vast agreement on man-made climate change, that has to give you SOME pause, right?”

Absolutely. On the other hand there are an increasing number of skeptical scientists coming out of the woodwork for a wide variety of reasons. Are you scientifically trained? How much do you know? Or are you relying on various media? I’m curious.

Dec 22, 2008 - 2:46 pm 9. Roger L Simon:

I will say this, however: things we have to do to combat AWG are often the same things we should do to get energy independence for our country. The latter is a political issue, quite clear, and something I am absolutely in favor of. After all, I drive a Prius.

Dec 22, 2008 - 2:50 pm 10. lwolv:

For one who lived through the Limits to Growth silliness as a skeptic then, I look at the current global-warming controversy in the same doubting light. There are several questions that need to be answered regarding global warming before the policy decisions can be responsibly made.

1. Is global warming occurring?

There is a large accumulation of evidence that global warming is occurring. Glaciers are melting, and temperatures under various measures seem to be rising. These changes seem to be more than just a warm winter in Siberia or record heat in the South.

Unfortunately, the data are not perfect, primarily because extensive, regular, “real time” measurements have only occurred on a systematic basis for a short period of time—decades for satellite measurements. As a result, data have been pieced together from various sources, such as tree rings and ice-core samples, to create longer time series for analysis than what is available currently.

The evidence that global warming is occurring is strong. A caution, however: the evidence, while large, may not be conclusive. 1) temperature records around urban areas are rising due to the urbanization itself. A new record in northern New Jersey, for example, may be due to global warming, or it may be due to the increasing density of population; 2) there are studies that show a seesaw effect between Northern and Southern Hemisphere temperatures: as one rises the other falls and vice versa; 3) according to some scientists, there are important measures of climate change that have not increased or even have fallen for the last two decades, and 4) the period of time in which accurate and extensive record keeping has taken place is very short and the time period over which data are needed is very long. Widespread and accurate surface temperature data have been recorded for less than two centuries. Satellite data are available for less than a quarter of that time.

Conclusion: Despite the cautions, the evidence seems strong that global warming is occurring.

2. Is the warming abnormal? This is the key question.

To determine abnormal in this instance, one needs to look back over the last several thousand years to see if there have been similar or warmer periods.

We know that from about 950 to about 1250, there were human settlements in Greenland with extensive agriculture. Thus, the ice cap on Greenland must have melted enough—raising ocean levels, presumably—to allow for cultivation of crops.

There is some science to suggest that the melting of Alpine glaciers has occurred maybe a dozen times over the last 15,000 years, so the combination of temperature levels and precipitation that leads to smaller glaciers is normal.

There are observations that the ice cap on Mars is melting as well, which would imply that perhaps sun cycles are the cause of what is happening.

Conclusion: What is occurring today, whether partly caused by human activity or not, is not out of the ordinary when considered over the long horizon. Thus, global-warming advocates need to explain why the past cycles are not applicable to the current situation. I have seen no such explanation.

3. How can we tell the difference between a normal occurrence of a climate-change phenomenon, large as it may be, and something caused by human activity?

If one accepts the fact that the earth has been warmer in the past, then the task is to isolate what is caused by the normal fluctuation of the earth’s temperatures and what the particular effect is of human activity. To illustrate the problem: if the range of high temperatures experienced on August 17 in Ames, Iowa, say, is between 70 degrees and 95 degrees, to make up numbers, and the actual temperature was 85 degrees in 2006, how does one know if there is a trend toward warmer August 17ths or whether the temperature that day is a product of normal fluctuations.

The same problem occurs under an analysis of global warming. Are the retreating glaciers a part of the normal fluctuation of the size of glaciers, or is human activity causing them to melt more quickly than they would have otherwise done?

The answer to this question does not come from measurements of current or past temperatures, because the 20th and 21st Century types of records have not been collected long enough to provide the answers to both the human-activity and long-term change effects on global warming over a few thousand years. The longer series that are constructed from tree rings, carbon measures and such may not be accurate enough to be dispositive of the issue.

The answer to the question really has to come from statistical and systems-analysis models of climate. Unfortunately, the complexity of climate requires extremely complex models. Besides good data, the models need to be able to parse out the difference between climate cycles and human-caused disturbances.

There are two major criteria the models need to meet: a) Do they predict (or backcast) the known wide range of historical climate experience—in particular the Greenland warming and cooling periods that occurred in recorded history at the same time as they are predicting the next century, and b) do the various models exhibit a consistency of results? Neither of these criteria appear to have been met. The Middle Ages warming period reflected in Greenland tends to be ignored—that is, not included in a back cast—and the models, while pointing in the direction of warming, have widely different predicted impacts. As a consequence, the parsing of human-caused versus nature-caused warming is inconclusive at best.

There are two major problems that the models face. 1) The data are not very good. The best-quality data come from recent measurements, but the past data are developed from inference: there are no observations or data points for the year 1217, for example, except what can be gathered from such sources as tree-ring, ice core or carbon analyses.

2) The models come from the autoregressive, operations-research areas of research. Such models can be good or spectacular failures as were the Limits to Growth energy-forecasting models of the 1970s and 1980s. That is, the climate models rely more on mathematics—using complex data patterns—than on the physics that underlies climate—for good reason, because the complex physics of cause and effect is not well understood. If the data patterns are incomplete or omit key impacts of the physics, then the models, though sophisticated, can come to inappropriate conclusions. The Limits to Growth analysis omitted the economics of supply and demand and resulting prices that caused people to consume less and seek more energy supply, so the model-predicted exhaustion of resources did not occur. To the extent that the climate models have omitted key physics results, they may have the same spectacular downfalls.

The models are the weak link in the demonstration that human activity causes global warming.

Conclusion: The models do not provide a solid basis for differentiating between human-caused global warming and that which occurs in nature’s long climate cycles.

OVERALL CONCLUSION OF THE SCIENCE AND DATA: From the data and modeling it is difficult to conclude that the analysis shows in a “slam dunk” fashion that human activity is responsible for global warming.

Dec 22, 2008 - 2:58 pm 11. D Cohen:

The US has been called the “Saudi Arabia of coal.” The most obvious way for the US to have energy independence is to convert coal to liquid fuels, like Germany did during WWII. The AWG’ists hate this idea because coal produces much more carbon dioxide than other forms of energy. Hence AWG ideology could in fact act to maintain the US dependence on outside energy sources. By the way, historically speaking periods of relatively warm climate, such as the medieval optimum, have been good news, leading to population growth and the spread of civilized behavior. Periods of relatively cool climate have produced the opposite effects. As just one example of this, consider the rise and fall of the Viking colonies in Greenland. It is quite possible that a climate significantly warmer than today’s would have more pluses than minuses. After all, it is very easy to add up the costs of changes forced by warmer weather, which is what AWG alarmists always do, and very difficult to predict the new opportunities and easier ways of living that will come with a warmer temperatures.

Dec 22, 2008 - 3:25 pm 12. Larry J:

Lately, I’m hearing the warmmongers prefer the term “climate change” to global warming. That way, they can claim any change that occurs. However, if you study the Earth’s geologic history, you’ll find that the planet has cooled and warmed many times even predating the existance of human beings. The one thing that seems constant about the climate is that it changes. During the last major ice age less than 20,000 years ago, a significant portion of the northern hemisphere was covered with ice over a mile thick. That ice melted, so obviously the Earth must have warmed. As lwolv pointed out, Greenland was warm enough about 800 years ago to support agriculture. There was also the Little Ice Age that lasted about 500 years, along with other climate cycles over the eons.

There is little reason to doubt that the climate is changing still. The question is whether human activity is responsible for the change, even in part. The evidence to support this is pretty thin. As someone who programmed computers for many years, I know there are lies, damn lies, and computer models. The accuracy of any model is based on how well the developers understand the fundamentals of the domain being modeled. There’s also a question of validation for the results. To validate a climate model, a good approach would be to start at some known set of conditions in the past (say 100 or 500 years ago) and see how well the model reflects what actually happened in the time since. If the model can’t reliably predict what actually happened, how can anyone believe it can accurately predict what might happen in the future?

Dec 22, 2008 - 3:41 pm 13. Mike_K:

The problem is that the time intervals defy attempts to quantify anything. The Medieval Warm Period was left out of the “Hockey Stick” one bit of evidence that the error may not have been accidental. There are a number of good web sites that present both sides of the issue. Here’s one.

This guy makes the best arguments on statistics plus he has addressed the issue of whether warming is a bad thing.

Here’s one of my blog posts with some examples of scientific ignorance.

Dec 22, 2008 - 3:57 pm 14. Alan Kellogg:

A huge part in all this disagreement is played by the fact we can’t stand having to admit we don’t know. We think it makes us look weak.

One time at a writer’s workshop I had something happen in a story I was sharing. One of my fellow attendees asked me what the cause was, and I informed her, “I haven’t the foggiest.” I was admired and feared for the rest of that night because I had dared to break the unspoken rule. We disagree about a lot of things, because we don’t know.

we don’t know how extra CO2 is going to change things. We don’t know what’s going to happen with Greenland thaws out and all that fresh water enters the North Atlantic. We don’t know, we’re afraid to admit we don’t know, so we blather and bloviate about matters we are simply not competent to speculate on.

BTW, over at Maggies Farm a video from Reason is available featuring Bjorn Lomborg. In it Mr. Lomborg says that global warming is probably true, that average temperatures will increase over the next 100 years. But, that we’re going about the matter all wrong. That, for instance, we could lower average city temperatures by increasing the amount of greenery in our cities, and by bringing more water, than by cutting CO2 production. Simply changing clothing and architectural styles to those better suited to hot climates would be a solution cheaper and quicker to implement than the panic responses some people are insisting on.

It comes down to this, we don’t know enough to make definitive statements, and what does happens what always be what we expected. Also, loose fitting, loose weave, light weight cottons are the way to go for summertime wear.

Dec 22, 2008 - 4:14 pm 15. David Thomson:

“Why we never get the truth on global warming…”

What are the odds that global warming is even a problem? We need to embrace a realistic interpretation of the precautionary principle. Is anybody purchasing a tank to drive down to the corner store? No, I don’t think so. A little common sense can go a long way.

Dec 22, 2008 - 4:41 pm 16. John Moore:

The biggest problem is the hysterical rush to drastic policy “solutions” based on the sort of logic comment Ben shows:

@Ben OK, how sure are you that global warming is a hoax? Are you 80% sure? So, there’s a 20% chance that a catastrophe will happen that will have drastic negative impacts on the human race as a whole. When there’s vast agreement on man-made climate change, that has to give you SOME pause, right? Are you willing to gamble when the potential cost is so much higher than the current cost or preventive measures?

There are at least three problems with Ben’s “precautionary princple” logic:

1) He divides the possibility space into only two parts: no change and catastrophic change, then assigns an arbitrary but high probability to the latter. This is fallacious. The probability of “catastrophic” climate change is very low.

2) He fails to perform an cost/benefit analysis. What is the cost of doing something now vs letting the effect happen? Warming hysterics rarely understand that the incredible amount of CO2 emissions changes needed to make an impact (per the AGW models themselves) would be economically disastrous. They also probably think that we can all just cut back a little luxury, missing the fact that major economic costs on the wealthy of the world will literally kill the very poor.

3) He fails to consider other possible catastrophies, including those of high probability, and they their prevention should compete for attention and resources. How much is he advocating that we do to reduce the impact of inevitable global pandemics? How about preventing biological warfare? How about the lower probability but vastly more damaging inevitable asteroid strike?

Dec 22, 2008 - 6:33 pm 17. Paul:

It’s no coincidence that AGW became a major focus of the left right after the fall of the Soviet Union. Up until the collapse of the USSR the Marxist left still was trumpeting Marxism-socialism as a competitive economic system to capitalism…it was always purported to be able to provide a potentially higher standard of living for the masses due to the elimination of the “waste” of profits and the accumulation of too much wealth by too few.

The truth dealt a devastating blow to the left’s claims however. It was obvious that communism failed miserably in providing anywhere near the standard of living enjoyed by capitalist democracies, but with the advent of the theory of AGW the left found a new weapon to wield against the hated capitalists. Not only did it level the charge of global destruction as the side effect of capitalism and consumerism it conveniently presented the case that a lower standard of living was essential for our collective survival, thus absolving the left of its former claims to increased prosperity at the hands of a socialist economy. Naturally the nation in need of lowering these standards the most was the hated USA.

Only with the scare tactics of global catastrophe could one hope to get people to voluntarily lower their standard of living, thus the frantic propaganda efforts of the global warming hysterics. The chance to control and ration our energy consumption is a dream come true for those who believe in a top down command and control political system administered by an “enlightened” elite, and that in a nutshell is what the Transnational Progressive left is all about.

The fact that we’re flat to slightly cooling for the last eight or nine years and that an increasing number of reputable skeptics are making persuasive arguments refuting AGW hypotheses have the hysterics ratcheting up the volume and frantically trying to shut down dissenting voices.

Of course the current economic crisis provides an alternative to AGW as an excuse for a power grab as the left will spin it as a failure of the free market and the need for more government intrusion into the economy, with it’s concomitant loss of economic freedom for the citizenry. Always the goal is the same. To take the freedom of decision making (power) from individuals and placing it in the hands of government bureaucrats. AGW provides a perfect vehicle for this and it explains why the left is ga-ga for the idea while the right smells a big stinking rat.

Dec 22, 2008 - 6:36 pm 18. John Moore:

lwolv writes

“The models come from the autoregressive, operations-research areas of research.

Well, no they don’t (except for the econometric ones used to forecast human actions such as changes in CO2 emissions).

They are almost all finite-element physical models – called Global Circulation Models (GCM). Furthermore, they are not used to forecast warming, but rather to attempt to measure the sensitivity of the atmosphere to increased CO2. It is impossible, even theoretically, to use physical models to predict future climate (or weather beyond a few days) due to chaos.

Unfortunately, the GCM’s (also used for weather forecasting) have many problems – spatial and temporal resolution, parameterization (including the inability to model convective processes – the primary heat engine of the atmosphere), inability to test against real world high CO2 situations (no data), poor calibration due to poor quality of paleoclimatic data, etc…

In other words, they are serious attempts to do something that is extremely hard or perhaps impossible, and they should not be given much weight.

Finally, some will argue that CO2 experiments “in the lab” show that it causes atmospheric warming through the “greenhouse effect.” This is true, but only accounts for a small amount of the forecast warming. The rest is through unvalidated, suspect hypothesized positive feedback.

Dec 22, 2008 - 6:38 pm 19. John Moore:

Forgot to mention

Very good site about this hypothesis: Climate Skeptic

Dec 22, 2008 - 6:41 pm 20. John Moore:

OOPS! SITE IS: http://www.climate-skeptic.com/.

Dec 22, 2008 - 6:42 pm 21. chuck:

In other words, they are serious attempts to do something that is extremely hard or perhaps impossible

On top of that, they are trying to model a small effect in a large background.

Dec 22, 2008 - 8:17 pm 22. davidFranklin:

Paul, I think you have very well summarized the politics that drive many, maybe even most, serious and organized AGWarmists. My compliments. Added to that, I think that there are now great herds of upper-class and upper-middle-class people, their old gods dead and searching for another, who always want to see themselves as doing something positive about the condition of the world, even if what they actually do is mostly symbolic, or even entirely disconnected and contrary to their desired outcome; they mostly want to bask in self-referential feelings of virtue by reciting the mantras of received opinion on the issues of the day. These people, who only “mean well,” and are being manipulated by the recent AGW campaign in the news media, public schools, universities and popular entertainment, are like a giant Petri dish for the growth of AGW alarmism. If the warmist campaign succeeds in translating its propaganda into solutions that give its adherents bureaucratic control of the levers of energy production and consumption, we will be in for a rather large spot of trouble that will undoubtedly come as an astonishing surprise to those same people now so taken with the AGW campaign; they will not enjoy the diminution of their freedom and standards of living that such control will bring, but may not be able to easily reverse them.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that the American people are now entirely sold on the AGW agenda. Thank goodness for the recent colder weather trends. Even if they don’t as yet represent a statistically significant event in the overall temperature history of the earth, I think they have given many ordinary Americans reason to bring a new attitude of skepticism to AGW dogma. This will, I hope, at least give us a chance to pause, study and consider rational and positive outcomes rather than blunder into some needless and catastrophic reordering of our economy.

Dec 23, 2008 - 1:08 am 23. hermie:

We should think about what Gore and the other Global Warming fearmongers were saying …that we only had 10 years and there would be huge increases in the ocean levels from the melting of arctic and antarctic ice. That was how many years ago, and can anyone see where the water levels are noticeably different? The Gorebots point to ’studies’ conducted in little-known or little travelled places and note their supposed changes in ocean levels. But go to NYC and check the levels there. Surely if the oceans were rising as fast as Gore has claimed, it would be clearly seen by millions of New Yorkers.

My dad one told me that the politicians would tax the very air we breathe if they thought they could get away with it. It looks like with ‘Global Warming’, they found a way.

Dec 23, 2008 - 6:31 am 24. cfbleachers:

Roger, I believe that there exists a tie-in with the “blame/absolution” culture that has developed, unfortunately with my generation.

Baby Boomers have become caught up in this rather bizarre and quite needy dependence upon seeking, finding, targeting and then exploiting objects of blame, from which they derive a holier than thou rush of adrenaline by making themselves the “enlightened” ones, through knowing nods and furtive winks at other members of the congregation.

If they didn’t have someone to hate, something to blame,…from which they can artificially elevate themselves, constructing a haughty perch from which they can look down on those who don’t believe the “message”.

The self-gratification allows one to become automatically enrolled in the “Earnest and Erudite” club, without passing any…any…intellectual hurdles. One must only memorize and regurgitate the prefabricated message. ALL other points of view are unacceptable. Part of the great unwashed’s ignorance and impurity.

It is important to demonize, devalue and debase any other point of view and those who may hold them. If you subscribe to a healthy skepticism of the “message”, you are automatically enrolled in the “racist, homophobic, xenophobic, dim, dull, and very unchic” club.

I have my own pet theories as to what gave birth to the age of “faux intellectualism” and the hypocrisy ridden rules that destroy actual intellectualism, by stifling debate and championing ad hominem discourse, replacing the actual construction and defense of one’s positions.

This generation of mine, by and large…saw itself as smarter than its parents because it was more formally educated. It was spoiled rotten and grew up with a sense of entitlement, was a tantrum throwing bunch who behaved badly at the slightest provocation and has a very shallow sense of manners or etiquette.

It was told that every opinion was valuable and valid, if voiced stridently enough. It replaced deductive logic, with volume…and then lionized the shouting.

It lost respect for elders, then turned every in loco parenti “establishment” figure or institution into an “enemy” to be shamed, lorded over and isolated.

This “we are smarter than our father figures” attitude permeates all that they create. And when they took over our academic institutions, our movies and TV, our news rooms and publications…they took with them this arrested adolescent rebellion, with premasticated ideologies and “fast food logic”.

The invention of someone to “blame” for every single aspect of our lives, gives rise to “global warming” being the FAULT of __________________. The blank is filled in by the “establishment demons” that are to blame fore EVERY element of our lives. (corporate greed, republican exclusion, military expansion etc.)

One can only gain “absolution” from the blame…by adhering mindlessly to the “message”. Therefore, you aren’t going to get any real facts, real debate, real discussion of how to view this particular subject. Once it enters the realm of “the message”, truth is sucked into a special black hole…a blame hole…and will never come out again.

Dec 23, 2008 - 8:30 am 25. tim maguire:

Schwarzsengxpdqzzz…Arnold…is probably smarter than your average politician (few know that when he became an actor, he was already a successful self-made businessman), but sometimes he says remarkably stupid things. Like here, where he makes an analogy to flat earthers and then stops, thinking he’s made an argument. He forgets to show how denialists are like flat earthers, thus tying the analogy to the reality.

Generally, when someone does something as intellectually lazy and careless as this, I conclude the person is stupid. The only reason I’m not doing that here is that this particular example of laziness is widespread. I hear it from a lot of people, even intelligent ones. I also hear the fallacy in other places. For example, in politics, when BDS sufferers talk about “sheeple” without ever showing why the people they are insulting are like sheep. They’ve just made up a nifty word and figure it can stand on its own.

The underlying cause of this laziness is that they in fact can’t tie the two together–Arnold can’t show why denialists are like flat earthers, BDS sufferers can’t show why this or that group are like sheep. So they just put it out there and hope people are sufficiently impressed by the image that they fail to notice it has no substance.

One of my favorite quotes is from Voltaire: A witty saying proves nothing.

Dec 23, 2008 - 10:36 am 26. Bugs:

I was looking through some old pictures online the other day and I came across a series of wildfire pictures. I want to say they were from Brentwood. Wherever – the pics were all of famous people either trying to save their houses or surveying the ashes of their houses. There was LaVerne Andrews, Joe E. Brown, Fred MacMurray – oh, and there was even one of Richard Nixon standing on his roof with a garden hose.

Point being, they’ve always had wildfires in California.

Dec 23, 2008 - 10:48 am 27. hermie:

If you live in a place where acts of nature (fires, floods, hurricanes, etc) happen often, or are likely to occur more frequently, you either need to change conditions surrounding the area (fire breaks, active fire prevention/land use programs), or move. Otherwise, you take your chances.

Dec 23, 2008 - 10:55 am 28. ChemEngineer:

Roger -

I admire your cautious approach to this issue.

The problem here is that the exact propostition under discussion is never defined. The rhetoric thrown around is aimed at multiple ill-defined propositions, including:

1) the earth is warming
2) the earth is warming due to human activity
3) the warming is a crisis
4) we need to “do something about it”

If you dissent from any of these, the propagandists pretend that you dissented to #1, which leads to “flat earth” charges. The propagandists never allow for (even non-subtle) distinctions because then they lose the argument.

Here is the big lie in the AGW story: that we can “do something about it”. According to the narrative, CO2 began to rise in the late 1800s. In other words, the ability of the earth to accept the excess CO2 was exceeded, therefore it began to build up in the atmosphere. So, to “do something” about AGW, the release rate of CO2 would have to return to pre-late 1800s levels. Anything short of this will continue to lead to a build-up, and therefore continue warming, albeit at a slower rate.

It is simply not plausible that the 21st century world, with 5X the number of people living at much higher standards of living than the 19th century could dream of, will return to that level of CO2 production. It can’t be done with increases in efficiency or increases in conservation. Those don’t get you anywhere close.

So, even if the AGW story is true, which I highly doubt, the only rational approach is to adapt.

Dec 23, 2008 - 10:56 am 29. Bugs:

I was looking through some old photos online the other day and I came across a series of wildfire pictures. I want to say they were from Brentwood. Wherever – the pics were all of famous people either trying to save their houses or surveying the ashes of their houses. There was LaVerne Andrews, Joe E. Brown, Fred MacMurray – oh, and there was even Richard Nixon standing on his roof with a garden hose.

Point being, they’ve always had wildfires in California.

The global warming business strikes me as a new flavor of old-fashioned millennialism – only for scientists/atheists rather than Christians. The difference is, Christians believe that the Apocalypse is outside their control and unstoppable while the secular people believe that human beings are the cause and that they can stop it through their own efforts. So you have a God-centered Apocalypse and a man-centered Apocalypse – but an Apocalypse nevertheless. Maybe human beings have some basic psychological need for or fear of the End Time.

Dec 23, 2008 - 10:58 am 30. Bugs:

Sorry about the double post. Firewall problems…

Dec 23, 2008 - 11:12 am 31. Nerf:

Think of it this way, Carbon leads to increased heat on the planet. The most common form of carbon on the planet is Carbon Dioxide. Too much carbon dioxide in the air leads to this increased heat. Over time when CO2 levels have risen due to natural events like mass volcanism that have occurred when the earth was younger, the result has been the warming of the poles which caused the deep ocean current to slow to a stop which caused the oceans to become anoxic (no 02) and give rise to huge algal blooms. Over time, these blooms would get larger and larger and the anoxic environment in these areas would kill off a great deal of oceanic life. These Algal booms used photosynthesis and that had the effect of removing CO2 from the air. As the individual algae died and sank to the bottom of the ocean they did not decompose natually due to the anoxic environment, they build up in massive layers. After a great deal of time, the algae would have taken enough of the CO2 out of the atmosphere and global temperatures would stabilize, the deep ocean current would restart and the algal blooms would dissipate as life returned to the ocean. The remains of the massive amounts of these dead algae at the bottom of the ocean were covered up and over millenia, they were transformed into oil and other ‘fossil fuels’. So essentially oil is fossilized sunlight from millions of years ago. Since this process tends to take incredibly long periods of time to happen naturally we would not see anything in our or most likely in the entire scope of humanity’s existence on the planet, BUT, when you start ripping through oil and burning it and loading up the atmosphere with all that CO2 that has been sequestered underground for millions of years since the last incident of massive global warming, it’s going to have a negative effect, don’t ya think? We’re using up MILLIONS of YEARS worth of stored up energy and dumping that CO2 back into the atmosphere, why wouldn’t the whole process start over again? Only at a vastly speeded up rate due to our use? That’s what I fear. That’s what we need to worry about and that is why we need to do something about our use of all fossil fuels before it’s too late and we can’t do anything about it at all.

Dec 23, 2008 - 12:08 pm 32. EdSki:

A couple of years ago I finished a book on the development of sexual ideals in the very early Catholic Church, by Dr. Elaine Pagels (very informative series on several aspects of the Church’s development and evolution). The final chapter was a series of thoughts she came up during the research and writing.

She has a theory that makes sense with global warming. That is humans, in general, would rather feel guilty than powerless.

If humans are causing global warming (I don’t believe so) then we can repent, take our penance, and then move on. If we’re not causing it, then we are powerless to halt it (we are).

Dec 23, 2008 - 12:11 pm 33. Bugs:

I should have said “Apocalypticism,” not “Millennialism. There’s a difference.

Dec 23, 2008 - 2:17 pm 34. tim maguire:

EdSki, I think you’re on the right track. I always thought Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth should have been called A Convenient Truth because it is aimed at those who can’t handle the real inconvenient truth–that we don’t control the weather.

In fact, AGW is very much like any other conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theorists believe the world is knowable, controllable. The problem is, the wrong people are in control. All we need to do to make heaven on earth is to get those wrong people out and get the right people in.

Conspiracy theories are for people who can’t handle the truth that the world is not knowable, not controllable. And Al Gore is here to make those people feel better, feel smarter, feel superior, just like they’ve always wanted.

Dec 23, 2008 - 2:28 pm 35. Valjean:

#6. Ben

My goodness, you are familiar with this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager), right?

Believing in something “to be sure” is a bottomless pit and ultimately ethically ridiculous — you’ll end up believing in everything. And the religious parallel is just too obvious.

Dec 23, 2008 - 5:08 pm 36. Insufficiently Sensitive:

So, there’s a 20% chance that a catastrophe will happen that will have drastic negative impacts on the human race as a whole.

Nice assertion there. I duly notice the lack of supporting information. I can also play this game:

There’s a 25.67% chance that, due to the near-unanimous resistance of flat-earth lefties and environmentalists to any action to end Iran’s nuclear weapons development, that a catastrophe will happen that will have drastic negative impacts on the human race as a whole.

And since my percentage is bigger, it is now declared imperative that we drop every other human endeavor to conquer Iran and ensure their nuclear program shall not continue.

Dec 23, 2008 - 6:55 pm 37. Ric Locke:

There are several components to the Global Warming “debate”.

Numbah 1: Is it happening at all?
Numbah 2: What is the mechanism?
Numbah 3: Do human activities make a notable contribution?
Numbah 4: What will the result be?
Numbah 5: What can, and should, be done about it?

Warmenists answer very simply: (1) Yes definitely, (2) Carbon dioxide, (3) Yes, CO2 emissions from industry, (4) Disaster for everybody, (5) Eliminate industrial and personal CO2 emissions. Even a little looking into it reveals that the reality is a good bit less simple. More nuanced, if you like.

ONE: Warming apparently has occurred, but the data is crap. In particular, the surface stations from which actual temperature data is derived are poorly managed, and many are of questionable quality. Furthermore, even those show a retreat from warming in the last ten years (since 1998).

TWO: It is not at all clear that CO2 is the culprit. Warming has been observed unambiguously on two other planets (Mars and Jupiter) and effects seen on three others can be most simply interpreted as due to warming. Satellite data doesn’t support the hypothesis, nor do deep-ocean data or measurements of the tropical atmosphere. That last seems obscure but is not. In a greenhouse the glass gets warm, too, both from solar radiation and from reradiation from inside. The atmosphere would do the same thing if the greenhouse effect were in operation. It does not, conclusively. Furthermore, recent results have called the accuracy of the “trapped air in ice cores” measurements into question. CO2 dissolves in water; that may not have been fully accounted for, and if it was not, the entire quantity of CO2 in preindustrial times may have been understated by as much as 50 percent!

THREE: The entire contribution of CO2 to the greenhouse effect is less than 5% of the total (the remainder comes mostly from water vapor, although methane and a few other trace gases weigh in around the half-percent level).The total contribution of human activity to the CO2 level is well under ten percent — half a percent of the total, and the US contribution is around twenty percent of that, one tenth of one percent of the total greenhouse gas. Eliminating all human activity would make a barely-visible dent in CO2. Dumping everything in the US into the Marianas Trench would not make any significant difference.

FOUR: Disaster scenarios fall into two categories: the “tipping point” hypothesis, which is supposed to turn the Earth into Venus, and sad stories about polar bear extinctions and flooding of seacoast cities. The “tipping point” hypothesis is pure bunkum. It depended on a simplifying assumption in the math — an infinitely tall atmosphere — that turns out to be invalid, as the principal investigator advocating it now agrees. (This should have been apparent all along. CO2 concentrations in the past have been much greater than now, and no “tipping” occurred. We are, after all, here.) The others are almost equally foolish, because they assume disaster for everybody. I cannot imagine that the farmers of Siberia or Canada would object to a longer growing season (and more CO2, which favors plant growth.)

FIVE: Look back at THREE. Eliminating the entire human race and all its works would make less than one percent difference in the greenhouse effect. To suppose that anything less would be effective, no matter how drastic, is fatuous.

There is more, especially as regards Point Four, but those who know and understand little about science do have one thing they can do. When someone shows you a graph of temperature over time, look for a substantial “bump” around the year 1000 (and at roughly thousand-year intervals back into the past, if the graph goes that far) and a severe “dip” around 1600-1800 (and, again, similar effects at intervals of a millenium). If they don’t show, the graph is simply an example of the maxim “figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.” Mann (he of the “hockey stick”) is a liar.

Regards,
Ric

Dec 24, 2008 - 2:37 pm

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