Global Warming: The New Religion

[Bullockracing]

BTW some countries don't even have the equivalent of the US' EPA (Korea for example), and that is who needs to be looked at...

[Matt308]

Certainly there is room for improvement in EVERY country. But at what expense?

[pbfoot]

Originally Posted by Matt308

Certainly there is room for improvement in EVERY country. But at what expense?

your right
and it should start in your kitchen don't toast the bagels as much

[Matt308]

I don't like my bagels toasted.

[Erich]

everyone also has seen that the planets are also warming up...........

the universe is on a spin cycle boyz

damn it's too frickin hot with all the snow on the hills......

my balls hurt mommie and I slipped and went boom (thanks Les)

[Matt308]

Erich. He said bagels. Not balls.

[Erich]

dang ! sorry yes I feel a little bit burnt this morn, better check my lube

[Matt308]

Eeeewww.

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Originally Posted by Civettone

Statistically it's a fact that we're not just in another cycle. People should stop building up arguments with things they saw or experienced in their personal past. History is also full of these accounts.
There's GW and it's not part of a natural cycle. Period.

Okay where is your proof?

Why do I ask? Because scientists on both sides have proof for there cases. All I want to know is how is one side right and the other wrong.

My personal belief is that it is a natural cycle but we as humans are doing things either way that are destroying this earth and that we need to get under control.

[Civettone]

CLIMATE CHANGE-US: Delay Now, Pay Dearly Later
By Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Oct 16 (IPS) - The United States is facing hundreds of billions of dollars in weather-related damages in coming years if it does not act urgently on climate change, the first-ever comprehensive economic assessment of the problem has found.

The costs of inaction on climate change on U.S. infrastructure, and its agricultural, manufacturing and public service sectors, will far outweigh the costs involved in making the needed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, according to the report, "The U.S. Economic Impacts of Climate Change and the Costs of Inaction", released Tuesday.

"We're making billions of dollars of infrastructure investments every year and often without taking impacts of climate change into account," said report co-author Matthias Ruth, director of the University of Maryland's Centre for Integrative Environmental Research.

"Climate change will affect every American economically in significant, dramatic ways, and the longer it takes to respond, the greater the damage and the higher the costs," Ruth told IPS.

(...)

CLIMATE CHANGE-US: Delay Now, Pay Dearly Later

Kris

[Civettone]

Originally Posted by DerAdlerIstGelandet

Okay where is your proof?

Why do I ask? Because scientists on both sides have proof for there cases. All I want to know is how is one side right and the other wrong.

No Chris, the vast majority, as represented by the IPCC, sees it this way. Just because there are some scientists who claim the opposite, doesn't change the fact that there is a consensus in the scientific world as you'll always have people going in to scientifically agreed conclusions. You'll probably still have a couple of scientists who claim that the Earth is flat. Or even worse, that the world is just a few thousand year old and created by a metaphysical entity. Imagine that...

My personal belief is...

You're not a scientist. Your personal opinion is worth something when it comes to non-scientific discussions like the war in Iraq or WW2 aircraft. My personal opinion would be the same as yours but I know it doesn't mean a thing so I simply discard it and look to scientists as they at least know what they're talking about.

Kris

[plan_D]

I have to point out that the last post actually contained no evidence. I read the article and it contained a big fat zero amount of evidence that we are causing global warming - the article was all about future costs...that's not evidence.

Now -

More than 17,000 scientists have signed a petition circulated by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine saying, in part, “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” (Go to Home - Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine for the complete petition and names of signers.) Surveys of climatologists show similar skepticism.

Satellite readings of temperatures in the lower troposphere (an area scientists predict would immediately reflect any global warming) show no warming since readings began 23 years ago. These readings are accurate to within 0.01ºC, and are consistent with data from weather balloons. Only land-based temperature stations show a warming trend, and these stations do not cover the entire globe, are often contaminated by heat generated by nearby urban development, and are subject to human error.

All predictions of global warming are based on computer models, not historical data. In order to get their models to produce predictions that are close to their designers’ expectations, modelers resort to “flux adjustments” that can be 25 times larger than the effect of doubling carbon dioxide concentrations, the supposed trigger for global warming. Richard A. Kerr, a writer for Science, says “climate modelers have been ‘cheating’ for so long it’s almost become respectable.”

Alarmists frequently quote the executive summaries of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations organization, to support their predictions. But here is what the IPCC’s latest report, Climate Change 2001, actually says about predicting the future climate: “The Earth’s atmosphere-ocean dynamics is chaotic: its evolution is sensitive to small perturbations in initial conditions. This sensitivity limits our ability to predict the detailed evolution of weather; inevitable errors and uncertainties in the starting conditions of a weather forecast amplify through the forecast. As well as uncertainty in initial conditions, such predictions are also degraded by errors and uncertainties in our ability to represent accurately the significant climate processes.”

Temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period (roughly 800 to 1200 AD), which allowed the Vikings to settle presently inhospitable Greenland, were higher than even the worst-case scenario reported by the IPCC. The period from about 5000-3000 BC, known as the “climatic optimum,” was even warmer and marked “a time when mankind began to build its first civilizations,” observe James Plummer and Frances B. Smith in a study for Consumer Alert. “There is good reason to believe that a warmer climate would have a similar effect on the health and welfare of our own far more advanced and adaptable civilization today.”

The U.S. spends more on global warming research each year than the entire rest of the world combined

[Matt308]

Originally Posted by Civettone

CLIMATE CHANGE-US: Delay Now, Pay Dearly Later
By Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Oct 16 (IPS) -
CLIMATE CHANGE-US: Delay Now, Pay Dearly Later

Kris

For got a section

"The Stern Review was criticised by economists on various technical grounds, and Ruth's report does not offer any total costs to the U.S. economy because the methodology for calculating that does not yet exist. Climate science is well-established, but the economics of climate change impacts is still in its infancy, he said.

"We're not ready to assess the large-scale aggregate economic impacts of climate change," Ruth said.
"

[Matt308]

The Politics of Global Warming

By Bill Steigerwald
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Saturday, February 10, 2007


Timothy Ball is no wishy-washy skeptic of global warming. The Canadian climatologist, who has a Ph.D. in climatology from the University of London and taught at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years, says that the widely propagated “fact” that humans are contributing to global warming is the “greatest deception in the history of science.”
Ball has made no friends among global warming alarmists by saying that global warming is caused by the sun, that global warming will be good for us and that the Kyoto Protocol “is a political solution to a nonexistent problem without scientific justification."

Needless to say, Ball strongly disagrees with the findings of the latest report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which on Feb. 2 concluded that it is “very likely” that global warming is the result of human activity.

I talked to Ball by phone on Feb. 6 from his home on in Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island, which the good-humored scientist likes to point out was connected to the mainland 8,000 years ago when the sea level was 500 feet lower.


Q: The mainstream media would have us believe that the science of global warming is now settled by the latest IPCC report. Is it true?

A: No. It’s absolutely false. As soon as people start saying something’s settled, it’s usually that they don’t want to talk about it anymore. They don’t want anybody to dig any deeper. It’s very, very far from settled. In fact, that’s the real problem. We haven’t been able to get all of the facts on the table. The IPCC is a purely political setup.
There was a large group of people, the political people, who wanted the report to be more harum-scarum than it actually is. In fact, the report is quite a considerable step down from the previous reports. For example, they have reduced the potential temperature rise and they’ve reduced the sea level increase and a whole bunch of other things. Part of it is because they know so many people will be watching the report this time.

Q: Why should we be leery of the IPCC’s report -- or the summary of the report?

A: Well, because the report is the end product of a political agenda, and it is the political agenda of both the extreme environmentalists who of course think we are destroying the world. But it’s also the political agenda of a group of people ... who believe that industrialization and development and capitalism and the Western way is a terrible system and they want to bring it down. They couldn’t do it by attacking energy because they know that would get the public’s back up very quickly. ... The vehicle they chose was CO2, because that’s the byproduct of industry and fossil-fuel burning, which of course drives the whole thing. They think, “If we can show that that is destroying the planet, then it allows us to control.” Unfortunately, you’ve got a bunch of scientists who have this political agenda as well, and they have effectively controlled the IPCC process.
Q: You always hear the argument that the IPCC has several thousand scientists -- how can you not accept what they say?

A: The answer, first of all, is that consensus is not a scientific fact. The other thing is, you look at the degree to which they have controlled the whole IPCC process. For example, who are the lead authors? Who are the scientists who sit on the summary panel with the politicians to make sure that they get their view in? … You’ve got this incestuous little group that is controlling the whole process both through their publications and the IPCC. I’m not a conspiracy theorist and I hate being even pushed toward that, but I think there is a consensus conspiracy that’s going on.

Q: What is your strongest or best argument that GW is not “very likely” to be caused by SUVs and Al Gore’s private planes?

A: I guess the best argument is that global warming has occurred, but it began in 1680, if you want to take the latest long-term warming, and the climate changes all the time. It began in 1680, in the middle of what’s called “The Little Ice Age” when there was three feet of ice on the Thames River in London. And the demand for furs of course drove the fur trade. The world has warmed up until recently, and that warming trend doesn’t fit with the CO2 record at all; it fits with the sun-spot data. Of course they are ignoring the sun because they want to focus on CO2.

The other thing that you are seeing going on is that they have switched from talking about global warming to talking about climate change. The reason for that is since 1998 the global temperature has gone down -- only marginally, but it has gone down. In the meantime, of course, CO2 has increased in the atmosphere and human production has increased. So you’ve got what Huxley called the great bane of science -- “a lovely hypothesis destroyed by an ugly fact.” So by switching to climate change, it allows them to point at any weather event -- whether it’s warming, cooling, hotter, dryer, wetter, windier, whatever -- and say it is due to humans. Of course, it’s absolutely rubbish.

Q: Is the globe warming and what is the cause?

A: Yeah, the world has been warming since 1680 and the cause is changes in the sun. But in their computer models they hardly talk about the sun at all and in the IPCC summary for policy-makers they don’t talk about the sun at all. And of course, if they put the sun into their formula in their computer models, it swamps out the human portion of CO2, so they can’t possibly do that.

Q: Is the rising CO2 level the cause of global warming or the result of it?

A: That’s a very good question because in the theory the claim is that if CO2 goes up, temperature will go up. The ice core record of the last 420,000 years shows exactly the opposite. It shows that the temperature changes before the CO2. So the fundamental assumption of the theory is wrong. That means the theory is wrong. ... But the theory that human CO2 would lead to runaway global warming became a fact right away, and scientists like myself who dared to question it were immediately accused of being paid by the oil companies or didn’t care about the children or the future or anything else.

Q: Have you ever accepted money from an oil company?

A: No. No. I wish I did get some. I wouldn’t have to drive a ’92 car and live in a leaky apartment bloc.


Q: If someone asked you where he should go to get a good antidote on the mainstream media’s spin on global warming, where should he go?

A: There are three Web sites I have some respect for. One is the one I helped set up by a group of very frustrated professional scientists who are retired. That’s called Friendsofscience.org. It has deliberately tried to focus on the science only. The second site that I think provides the science side of it very, very well is CO2Science.org, and that’s run by Sherwood Idso, who is the world expert on the relationship between plant growth and CO2. The third, which is a little more irreverent and maybe still slightly on the technical side for the general public, is JunkScience.com.

Q: If you had to calm the fears of a small grandchild or a student about the threat of global warming, what would you tell him?

A: First of all, I probably wouldn’t tell him anything. As I tell audiences, the minute somebody starts saying “Oh, the children are going to die and the grandchildren are going to have no future,” they have now played the emotional and fear card. Just like in the U.S., it’s almost like the race card. It’s not to say that it isn’t valid in some cases. But the minute you play that card, you are now taking the issues and the debates out of the rational and logical and reasonable and sensible and calm into the emotional and hysterical. To give you an example, I was talking to a group in Saskatoon and a woman came up after and she said, “I agree with you totally. We were having a party for my 7-year-old. I went into the kitchen and there was a bang in the living room. I went back and a balloon had exploded. The kids were crying and I said, ‘Why are you crying?’ And they said, ‘There’s going to be another hole in the ozone.’”

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Originally Posted by Civettone

You're not a scientist. Your personal opinion is worth something when it comes to non-scientific discussions like the war in Iraq or WW2 aircraft. My personal opinion would be the same as yours but I know it doesn't mean a thing so I simply discard it and look to scientists as they at least know what they're talking about.

Kris

And neither are you. Therefore you statement that GW is real PERIOD (you came to the conclusion that it is a PERIOD) is not worth anything either. See my point. You choose to believe one side of the story. I choose to believe the other. Until something is proven 100 percent all either of us have is personal opinion. Since both sides (scientists) have evidence, technically all they have is personal opinion.