S.o.s!!

[Siamanto]

Re: S.o.s!!

That's the thing Sip! Even if we assume for a minute, for the sake of argument, that there is global warming, there is absolutely no concrete or conclusive evidence that suggests man is the prime culprit.

It's more about what man can do about it; can you focus on that instead of viewing it as a commie/socialist/Islamist/Martian - aren't Martians green??? - conspiracy???

Well that's the thing Kar. Environmentalists are not truly concerned about the planet but about controlling people. It's just another avenue for the discredited ideology of Marxism. Since Communism fell now all these bumbling morons rush to environmentalism and the peak of their intents was manifested in the Kyoto Protocol, a stupid international treaty that only required the U.S. to cut emissions and left other countries such as China to do as they please. Furthermore this would have required massive outsourcing of companies as they would have to relocate to countries where Kyoto wouldn't apply to make money.

[Anonymouse, as a friend, I think that you really need to do something with your paranoia and lighten up. I'm really sincere when I say that you're scaring me, I'm not saying it to discredit your statements. You need to listen to yourself!]
Also, many believe that the US is losing markets only because their technologies/products are obsolete and environment unfriendly.
However, I agree that China is abusing it's "developing country" status to ignore certain obligations; however, may soon become more environment friendly than the US.

[Sip]

Re: S.o.s!!

aren't ill-posed problems a b*tch?

But that's where Ph.D's come from! At the heart of pretty much every Ph.D. topic, there is b*tchin non-linear optimization problem ... otherwise, the problem is too simple to begin with

[Sip]

Re: S.o.s!!

Now, I have a partly-genuine question. I'm a little perplexed: what is the political motivation for "environmentalists" to fight for major business and industry policy changes.

The problem with paranoid "environmentalists" is a lot like the reactions of those that buy into the post 9-11 "fear" climate. To continue on this parallel, pretty much over night we saw this country go into shear panic as to the impending doom that the "terrorists" are bringing. But did anything really change from 9/10 to 9/11? Of course not.

Same with Global Warming. This climate of "impending doom" and the fear that accompanies it is being used and abused to immediately shift people's views and stands on certain topics. Now one may argue that the final motivations behind the Global Warming movement is a "good" one (promoting energy efficiency, environmental conciousness, etc), but there is also the inherent danger of the "Anahita Syndrom" that comes along with it.

To clarify this a bit more ... people who disagree with eating of animals are using Global Warming as an excuse to bring to light to the "scientific observations" that farts of cows in Texas are also contributing to this. Then you have other people that are advocating electric vehicles as "environmentally friendly" alternative to our regular cars where it is entirely possible that those electric vehicles cause far more polution than internal combustion engines (starting from the fact that most electricity in the US comes from burning coal to the fact that the large batteries used in electric vehicles contain much more nasty chemicals in them than what might be coming out of the tailpipe of a new Corolla burning ethanol).

[Siamanto]

Re: S.o.s!!

Anonymouse, there is no use. I have been down this line before and once Siamanto's feelings get hurt, there is nothing to be "reasoned" with him.

If "there is no use' then why did you take the time to reply, below? What happened, why couldn't you control yourself and refrain from replying? Was your immature ego is so hurt that you couldn't refrain from replying? Or the "genius???" that you are had an enlightening idea - i.e. "a post that is teh win?" As usual, you're so laughable!

There in lies the problem. You put too much trust in the googles and wikipedias.

Did anybody mention Wikipedia? Is it what you do, limit yourself to Wikipedia when you google? I knew that you were mediocre, but not to this point!

Talk to some REAL climatologists and you will soon realize man-made Global Warming is mainly a political agenda and has little "proof" in science.

For the sake of argument, let'a assume that you did and I did not; so what did they tell you and how is it a political agenda??? Of course, the European public opinion cares so much about American political agendas???

The "evidence" is very similar to reports that claimed we are moving towards the next ice age just what, 30 years ago?

What is the evidence and how is it "very similar to reports that claimed we are moving towards the next ice age just what, 30 years ago?"

And once again so that you fully grasp what I am saying (hopefully without having your emotions cloud what you are reading): I am not saying there is no evidence of the Earth getting warmer in the last century and in the last few decades. But trying to make the leap and connecting it to human activity is much like trying to decide what is happening in a soccer match with just a picture. Hope that is clear now.

There is nothing complex in what you stated and I have grasped it the first time. I replied by pointing to your ignorance of the techniques used and the data gathered on the subject. Unfortunately, either "your emotions cloud what you are reading" or you are intellectually inapt to understand a simple reply.

... and if you want to bring math into it, you are trying to fit a large nth degree model with very localized and sparse samples and ANY idiot (even the very mediocre ones) will tell you that it is a futile attempt

Please, bring the Math! You really should because I'd like to have some fun at your expense!
In the past, you amused me and made me laugh with your simplistic views and I won't mind some amusement.

[Siamanto]

Re: S.o.s!!

Now, I have a partly-genuine question. I'm a little perplexed: what is the political motivation for "environmentalists" to fight for major business and industry policy changes. If they actually secretly believed that it's all BS, what corporation or a mogul or industry is looking to undercut the involved sectors of industry: namely the auto, energy, and lumber...The question is partly cynical, but partly genuine because maybe there are real reasons, but I'm not seeing. The only real thing I've ever heard anywhere, besides generic references to "political motivation" and "politicized climatology" was the idiotic statement by some Congressman that without the "scare-tactics" Weather Channel wouldn't have a good rating.

It is sad that, in the US, it is still perceived through that narrow and distorting perspective; it's not inherently a political issue even if some are trying to use it to their advantage.

Do the solar power industry folks have that much money and political clout as be able to influence the top politicians?

It's probably the other way around i.e. the industries using obsolete and environment unfriendly technologies have strong lobbies.

[Fedayeen]

Re: S.o.s!!

I think it is part of the Earth's on going process. It gets cool, then it gets warm, etc.

But are we part of a problem, you bet.

We are using and burning fossil fuels at an alarming and growing rate. It is polluting our atmosphere. We are cutting down our forrests faster than we can re-plant them, and they do create the very air that we are polluting. Many of our rivers, streams and bays are unfit to swim in let alone drink from. And that is because of pollution.

We have far less of a long-term effect on the planet than we like to think.

That being said, we should use resources effectively and responsibly, avoid polluting, and keep the world in good shape for future generations.

[Sip]

Re: S.o.s!!

Siamanto, what is it really about me that intimidates you so much? I have never thrown my credentials in your face yet you keep bringing them up. Why is my educational background so irritating to you?

[Anonymouse]

Re: S.o.s!!

The problem with paranoid "environmentalists" is a lot like the reactions of those that buy into the post 9-11 "fear" climate. To continue on this parallel, pretty much over night we saw this country go into shear panic as to the impending doom that the "terrorists" are bringing. But did anything really change from 9/10 to 9/11? Of course not.

Same with Global Warming. This climate of "impending doom" and the fear that accompanies it is being used and abused to immediately shift people's views and stands on certain topics. Now one may argue that the final motivations behind the Global Warming movement is a "good" one (promoting energy efficiency, environmental conciousness, etc), but there is also the inherent danger of the "Anahita Syndrom" that comes along with it.

To clarify this a bit more ... people who disagree with eating of animals are using Global Warming as an excuse to bring to light to the "scientific observations" that farts of cows in Texas are also contributing to this. Then you have other people that are advocating electric vehicles as "environmentally friendly" alternative to our regular cars where it is entirely possible that those electric vehicles cause far more polution than internal combustion engines (starting from the fact that most electricity in the US comes from burning coal to the fact that the large batteries used in electric vehicles contain much more nasty chemicals in them than what might be coming out of the tailpipe of a new Corolla burning ethanol).

Quoted for truth.

[Sip]

Re: S.o.s!!

In the past, you amused me and made me laugh with your simplistic views and I won't mind some amusement.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, and not simpler. --Einstein

[Anonymouse]

Re: S.o.s!!

Stuff

Dissidents Against Dogma

By ALEXANDER CO(KBURN

We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. The claque endorsing what is now dignified as "the mainstream theory" of global warming stretches all the way from radical greens through Al Gore to George W. Bush, who signed on at the end of May. The left has been swept along, entranced by the allure of weather as revolutionary agent, naïvely conceiving of global warming as a crisis that will force radical social changes on capitalism by the weight of the global emergency. Amid the collapse of genuinely radical politics, they have seen it as the alarm clock prompting a new Great New Spiritual Awakening.

Alas for their illusions. Capitalism is ingesting global warming as happily as a python swallowing a piglet. The press, which thrives on fearmongering, promotes the nonexistent threat as vigorously as it did the imminence of Soviet attack during the cold war, in concert with the arms industry. There's money to be made, and so, as Talleyrand said, "Enrich yourselves!" I just bought two roundtrip British Airways ticket to Spain from Seattle and a BA online passenger advisory promptly instructed me that the CO2 "offset" cost would be $7.90 on each ticket, which I might care to contribute to Climate Care. It won't be long before utility bills will carry similar, albeit mandatory and much larger charges. Here's a forewarning of what is soon going to happen, courtesy of Samuel Brittan in the Financial Times, under the menacing title, "Towards a true price for energy":

[...Read at the link...]

The marquee slogan in the new cold war on global warming is that the scientific consensus is virtually unanimous. This is utterly false. The overwhelming majority of climate computer modelers, the beneficiaries of the $2 billion-a-year global warming grant industry, certainly believe in it but not necessarily most real climate scientists-people qualified in atmospheric physics, climatology and meteorology.

Geologists are particularly skeptical. Peter Sciaky, a retired geologist, writes to me thus:

"A geologist has a much longer perspective. There are several salient points about our earth that the greenhouse theorists overlook (or are not aware). The first of these is that the planet has never been this cool. There is abundant fossil evidence to support this--from plants of the monocot order (such as palm trees) in the rocks of Cretaceous Age in Greenland and warm water fossil in sedimentary rocks of the far north. this is hardly the first warming period in the earth's history. The present global warming is hardly unique. It is arriving pretty much "on schedule." One thing, for sure, is that the environmental community has always spurned any input from geologists (many of whom are employed by the petroleum industry). No environmental conference, such as Kyoto, has ever invited a geologist, a paleontologist, a paleoclimatologist. It would seem beneficial for any scientific investigatory to include such scientific disciplines.

"Among all my liberal and leftist friends (and I am certainly one of those), I know not a one who does not accept that global warming is an event caused by mankind. I do not know one geologist who believes that global warming is not taking place. I do not know a single geologist who believes that it is a man-made phenomenon.

"There are hundreds of reasons--political, pragmatic and economic, health and environmental--for cleaning up our environment, for conservation of energy, for developing alternate fuels, cleaning up our nuclear program, etc. Global warming is not one of them."

Take Warsaw-based Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, famous for his critiques of ice-core data. He's devastating on the IPCC rallying cry that CO2 is higher now than it has ever been over the past 650,000 years. In his 1997 paper in the Spring 21st Century Science and Technology, he demolishes this proposition. In particular, he's very good on pointing out the enormous inaccuracies in the ice-core data and the ease with which a CO2 reading from any given year is contaminated by the CO2 from entirely different eras. He also points out that from 1985 on there's been some highly suspect editing of the CO2 data, presumably to reinforce the case for the "unprecedented levels" of modern CO2. In fact, in numerous papers prior to 1985, there were plenty of instances of CO2 levels much higher than current CO2 measurements, some even six times higher. He also points out that it is highly unscientific to merge ice-core temperature measurements with modern temperature measurements.[/b]

Or take Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, of St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory. He says we're on a warming trend but that humans have little to do with it, the agent being a longtime change in the sun's heat. He predicts solar irradiance will fall within the next few years mainly based the well documented sunspot cycle, and therefore we may well face the beginning of an ice age very shortly, as early as 2012. The Russian scientific establishment is giving him a green light to use the nation's space station to measure global cooling.

Now read Dr. Jeffrey Glassman, applied physicist and engineer, retired from California's academic and corporate sectors, who provides an elegant demonstration of how the absorption and release of CO2 from the enormous carbon reservoir in the earth's oceans controls atmospheric CO2 concentrations. This absorption and release is very much a function of the earth's temperature and Glassman shows how the increase in atmospheric CO2 is the consequence of temperature, not the cause.

Move to that bane of the fearmongers, Dr. Patrick Michaels, on sabbatical from the University of Virginia, now at the Cato Institute, who has presented in papers and recently, in his book Meltdown, demolitions of almost every nightmare scenario invented by the greenhousers, particularly regarding hurricanes, tornadoes, sea rise, disappearing ice caps, drought and floods. A qualified climatologist, he analyses the data invoked to buttress each of these scenarios and shows the actual climate history not only fails to support the claims but also that in the majority of cases the opposite is true. Hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts and floods and other weather extremes are currently decreasing, contrary to Hansen, Mann and the other sensationalists. Michaels is particularly good on the ludicrous claims regarding catastrophic sea rise as well as the by now universally trumpeted melting icecaps and supposed impending disappearance of the Greenland ice sheet. Michaels is sometimes slammed as a hired gun for the fossil fuel industry, but I haven't seen any significant dents or quantitative ripostes to his meticulous scientific critiques.

Then there's Christopher Landsea. A research meteorologist at the Atlantic Oceanic and Meteorological Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, he described to Lawrence Solomon (author of a very interesting series on "The Deniers" in Canada's National Post in February of this year) how the IPCC utterly misrepresented his work to concoct a scare scenario about warming and increased incidence of hurricanes and cyclones.

There are many others. The geologist Bruno Wiskel of the University of Alberta, was once a passionate adherent to the theory of anthropogenic global warming. He even started to build a "Kyoto house" in honor of the UN sanctioned Kyoto Protocol which was signed in 1997. These days he's changed his views entirely and indeed has written a book, "The Emperor's New Climate: Debunking the Myth of Global Warming." Wiskel says global warming has gone "from a science to a religion" and noted that research money is being funneled into promoting climate alarmism instead of funding areas he considers more worthy.

The astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv, one of Israel's scientists, also abandoned his belief that manmade emissions were driving climate change. ""Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. Shaviv is quoted as saying in the the Canadian National Post series. "Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming" . Shaviv believes that even a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2100 "will not dramatically increase the global temperature."

One of the best essays on greenhouse myth-making from a left perspective comes from Denis Rancourt, an environmental science researcher and professor of physics at the University of Ottawa. I recommend his February 2007 essay "Global Warming: Truth or Dare?" on his website, Activist Teacher, which has also featured fine work by David Noble on the greenhouse lobby. Rancourt is a good scientist and also a political radical and the conflation is extremely stimulating though --alas--very rare:

"The planet will continue to change, adapt and evolve, with or without us The atmosphere will continue to change as it always has under the influence of life and of geology. We can't control these things. We can barely perceive them correctly. But we can take control of how we treat each other. The best we can do for the environment and for the planet is to learn not to let undemocratic power structures run our lives. The best we can do is to reject exploitation and domination and to embrace cooperation and solidarity. The best we can do is to not trust subservient scientists and to become active agents for change beyond head-in-the-sand personal lifestyle choices.

"We need to get political, beyond corporate-controlled shadow governments and co-opted political parties. We need to take charge more than we need to recycle. Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass. Nobody else cares about global warming. Exploited factory workers in the Third World don't care about global warming. Depleted uranium genetically mutilated children in Iraq don't care about global warming. Devastated aboriginal populations the world over also can't relate to global warming, except maybe as representing the only solidarity that we might volunteer."

The Achilles' heel of the computer models (which form the cornerstone of CO2 fearmongering), is their failure to deal with water. As vapor, it's a more important greenhouse gas than CO2 by a factor of twenty, yet models have proven incapable of dealing with it. The global water cycle is complicated, with at least as much unknown as is known. Water starts by evaporating from oceans, rivers, lakes and moist ground, enters the atmosphere as water vapor, condenses into clouds and precipitates as rain or snow. Each transition from one form of water to another is influenced by temperature and each water form has an enormous impact on global heat processes. Clouds have a huge, inaccurately quantified cooling effect: they reflect heat received from the sun, though how much is unknown. Water on the Earth's surface has different effects on retaining the sun's heat, depending on whether the water is liquid and dark, as are the oceans, which are highly absorbent; or ice, which is reflective; or snow, which is even more reflective than ice. Such water cycle factors cause huge swings in the Earth's heat balance; they interact with global temperatures in ways that are beyond the ability of computer climate models to predict.

The first global warming modelers simply threw up their hands at the complexity of the water problem and essentially left out the atmospheric water cycle. Over time a few features of the cycle were patched into the models, all based on unproven guesses at the effect of increased ocean evaporation on clouds, the effect of clouds on reflecting the sun's energy and the effect of cloud warming on rainfall and snow. All of these "band aid" equations are hopelessly inadequate to repair the computer models' inability to describe the water cycle's role in temperature.

Besides the inability to deal with water, the other huge embarrassment facing the modelers is the well-researched and well-established fact published in many papers that temperature changes first and CO2 levels change 600 to 1,000 years later. Any rational person would immediately conclude that CO2 could not possibly cause temperature if the rise in CO2 in comes centuries after the rise in temperature. The computer modelers as usual have an involuted response: They say the temperature increase is initiated by the "relatively weak" effect of increasing heat from the sun during the rising phase of the Milankovich cycle (Milankovich's meticulously calculated cycles on rising and falling heat input from the sun are universally accepted by astrophysicists). That effect initiates the warming of the oceans, which - just as Dr. Martin Hertzberg says - releases lots of CO2. According to the modelers the released CO2 is the real culprit because it amplifies the "relatively weak" effect of the sun, turning minor warming into a really serious matter.

This is a cleverly concocted gloss which would be a wonderful argument for demonstrating that once warming starts, CO2 will make it worse and worse until all life on earth dies. Unfortunately for the climate modelers the history of the earth's many temperature and CO2 swings tells us that it obviously does not get worse and worse. After any given warming phase begins, thousands of years later the cyclical Milankovitch decrease in the sun's heat kicks in. The warming stops, reverses and an ice age ensues. Where the modelers' clever gloss founders is on explaining how the "relatively weak" decrease in the sun's heat makes all that extra CO2 disappear. Obviously the "bad" C02 must disappear due to some "feedback" that the modelers haven't thought of yet, i.e., one that keeps the earth's climate in rough equilibrium.

Read the rest at:

http://www.counterpunch.org/xxxxburn06092007.html

EDIT: Since the website has banned the work "Co(k" I cannot type in the link so obviously that must be changed to get to the link.