Global Warming Debate

[JohnRPollard]

Originally Posted by camaraderie

JRP...with respect...I asked Craig to cut out the political crap on this thread twice and was told "no way". I then reported the thread to you mods and asked that off topic posts be moved to political forums or deleted. I waited 24 hours and got no response from any mod. Then... I started posting global warming stuff in political threads and political stuff here to make a rather obvious point...the point being that even in off topic, there are commonly understood rules that make sense and need to be enforced by the mods. I am perfectly willing to delete ALL my off topic posts or have you delete them IF you are gonna start enforcing some basic courtesies around here and there is only ONE person who is screwing things up around here and you know exactly who it is and need to deal with him. BTW...that does not mean I want you to shut him up. Just keep him the hell on topic and kill his tripe when it appears in threads where it does not belong.

Failing that...I will continue to follow the same rules that apply to him.

Cam,

In case there was any lingering doubt from my previous post, I agree with the point you were making about respecting the subject matter of this thread.

Also, I think anybody with more than a few brain cells firing will recognize the difference between the substantive and "non-substantive" posts in this thread. After detecting the pattern, I've found it easiest to simply ignore non-substantive posts and focus on those with actual content.

I do not advocate deleting any of the posts -- I think they serve as a useful lesson in why it's worth the effort to stay on-topic (i.e., otherwise the thread really becomes worthless). But if you or anyone else wants to go back and pull some material down, that's up to you.

Originally Posted by craigimass

Always remember, when you can't make your point in a debate, just jump up and down. It's pretty funny!

Craig, I have to say, that is probably the single most ironic comment I've ever read on SailNet. I have a much better understanding of your debate strategy now.

Originally Posted by craigimass

Cam, you are showing disrespect to the owners of the site and the mods.

No he's not. He is frustrated and venting about what he perceives as your repetitive efforts to de-rail a thread that he's invested much time in. If you posted to the Cape Fear 38 thread like you post to this one, I'd be pretty ripped too.

We get a lot of drive-bys where folks drop opinion bombs and then never return. We can't do much about it, but fortunately few of them do it repetitively. If you want to be a steady contributor to this thread, stay on-topic. Find evidence to support your position or refute opposing views and present it here. That should be easy to do if research confirming MMGW is as definitive as claimed.

[therapy23]

Originally Posted by JohnRPollard

We get a lot of drive-bys where folks drop opinion bombs and then never return. We can't do much about it, but fortunately few of them do it repetitively. If you want to be a steady contributor to this thread, stay on-topic. Find evidence to support your position or refute opposing views and present it here. That should be easy to do if research confirming MMGW is as definitive as claimed.

Yea!

And where is HoffaLives now anyway?

Is he still on his boat trying the "lifestyle"?

[camaraderie]

criag...Wrong... energy USE is not the cited cause of global warming. The by product of energy use is the supposed cause...specifically CO2... You wanna talk about green cars or deforstation,solar power, soot, sulphuric acid or oil drilling go elsewhere. You wanna talk about CO2 that's fine here.
You are welcome to start a different thread on any of the above....but no...you insist on disrupting things here and posting nothing about warming itself. Typical troll like behavior.

jrp...thanks. I will get back on topic now in the hope that Craig will stay on topic and, if not, that the mods will enforce it going forward. I will also delete my off-subject" stuff in the political threads and above.

[poopdeckpappy]

Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, says that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".

As of 3 weeks ago, Dr Mörner has expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an "expert reviewer" on the IPCC's last two reports, he was "astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one". Yet the results of all this "deliberate ignorance" and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.

[poopdeckpappy]

On one planet live all the Great and Good who have recently been trying to whip up an ever greater panic over global warming, as the clock ticks down to next December's UN conference in Copenhagen when they plan a new treaty to follow the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.

There was, for instance, the three-day gathering organised by Prince Charles at St James's Palace, at which 20 Nobel laureates (including two African winners of the Peace and Literature prizes) listened to speeches from Lord Stern and Prince Charles, before issuing a declaration which compared the threat of global warming to that of all-out nuclear war.

They also heard President Obama's Energy Secretary, Stephen Chu, solemnly telling them that if all buildings and pavements were painted white, to reflect the sun's rays back into space, this would be equivalent to taking all vehicles off the world's roads for 11 years.

Then there was the 103-page report launched by Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General, on behalf of something called the Global Humanitarian Forum, claiming, without a shred of hard evidence, that global warming is already "killing 300,000 people a year". But Mr Annan himself had to admit that this report, drawn up by a firm of consultants, was not "a scientific study" but was "the most plausible account of the current impact of climate change".

Even this was topped by a report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claiming that world temperatures could rise this century by 7 degrees C, "killing billions of people worldwide and leaving the world on the brink of total collapse". According to MIT, these projections are based on new evidence which has come to light since 2003.

Now for the other planet, the one the rest of us live on. Here all the accepted measures of global temperatures show that their trend has been downwards since 2002, declining at a rate that averages to about 0.25 degree per decade. Yet such a fall was predicted by none of those 25 computer models on which the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the rest of the Great and the Good rely for their theory of runaway global warming. Their computers are programmed to assume that as CO2 goes up, temperatures inevitably follow. But the graph below, where the variation of global temperatures from a 30-year mean is plotted against CO2 levels, shows the two lines clearly diverging, contrary to the theory. In this century, temperatures have fallen as CO2 has risen.

Furthermore, the Arctic ice has failed to disappear, as can be seen from the Crysophere Today website: it is now not far off its 30-year mean. Al Gore's polar bears have failed to drown. The ice in the Antarctic is actually way above its 30-year average. Except in the minds of Kofi Annan, Lord Stern and Prince Charles's assembled worthies, the threatened catastrophe seems not to be happening.

Meanwhile, on the planet where the rest of us live, the prospects for a new treaty in December, which according to an estimate by the International Energy Agency would cost us all $45 trillion, are not looking too hot. The Chinese and the Indians insist that, since all this global warming is the fault of the developed world, they will only sign the treaty if we agree to pay them $300 billion a year. The Africans and South Americans make similar demands.

But herein lies a mystery. Our own wonderfully sensible and honest MPs, it will be recalled, have already passed the Climate Change Act, committing us to restrict our CO2 emissions within 40 years to a level only 20 per cent of where they were in 1990. President Obama has committed the US to the same.

Since these targets could only be met by closing down our conomies, it is hard to know where we will find the money to pay the rest of the world what it is demanding.


The real question we must decide in the years ahead is which of these two planets we are actually living on.

[poopdeckpappy]

Global Warming, as we think we know it, doesn't exist. And I am not the only one trying to make people open up their eyes and see the truth. But few listen, despite the fact that I was one of the first Canadian Ph.Ds. in Climatology and I have an extensive background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition. Few listen, even though I have a Ph.D, (Doctor of Science) from the University of London, England and was a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. For some reason (actually for many), the World is not listening. Here is why.

What would happen if tomorrow we were told that, after all, the Earth is flat? It would probably be the most important piece of news in the media and would generate a lot of debate. So why is it that when scientists who have studied the Global Warming phenomenon for years say that humans are not the cause nobody listens? Why does no one acknowledge that the Emperor has no clothes on?

Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification. For example, Environment Canada brags about spending $3.7 billion in the last five years dealing with climate change almost all on propaganda trying to defend an indefensible scientific position while at the same time closing weather stations and failing to meet legislated pollution targets.

No sensible person seeks conflict, especially with governments, but if we don't pursue the truth, we are lost as individuals and as a society. That is why I insist on saying that there is no evidence that we are, or could ever cause global climate change. And, recently, Yuri A. Izrael, Vice President of the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed this statement. So how has the world come to believe that something is wrong?

Maybe for the same reason we believed, 30 years ago, that global cooling was the biggest threat: a matter of faith. "It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species," wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.
I was as opposed to the threats of impending doom global cooling engendered as I am to the threats made about Global Warming.

Let me stress I am not denying the phenomenon has occurred. The world has warmed since 1680, the nadir of a cool period called the Little Ice Age (LIA) that has generally continued to the present. These climate changes are well within natural variability and explained quite easily by changes in the sun. But there is nothing unusual going on.

Since I obtained my doctorate in climatology from the University of London, Queen Mary College, England my career has spanned two climate cycles. Temperatures declined from 1940 to 1980 and in the early 1970's global cooling became the consensus. This proves that consensus is not a scientific fact. By the 1990's temperatures appeared to have reversed and Global Warming became the consensus.

It appears I'll witness another cycle before retiring, as the major mechanisms and the global temperature trends now indicate a cooling.
No doubt passive acceptance yields less stress, fewer personal attacks and makes career progress easier. What I have experienced in my personal life during the last years makes me understand why most people choose not to speak out; job security and fear of reprisals. Even in University, where free speech and challenge to prevailing wisdoms are supposedly encouraged, academics remain silent.


I once received a three page letter that my lawyer defined as libellous, from an academic colleague, saying I had no right to say what I was saying, especially in public lectures. Sadly, my experience is that universities are the most dogmatic and oppressive places in our society. This becomes progressively worse as they receive more and more funding from governments that demand a particular viewpoint.

In another instance, I was accused by Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki of being paid by oil companies. That is a lie. Apparently he thinks if the fossil fuel companies pay you have an agenda. So if Greenpeace, Sierra Club or governments pay there is no agenda and only truth and enlightenment?

Personal attacks are difficult and shouldn't occur in a debate in a civilized society. I can only consider them from what they imply. They usually indicate a person or group is losing the debate. In this case, they also indicate how political the entire Global Warming debate has become. Both underline the lack of or even contradictory nature of the evidence.

I am not alone in this journey against the prevalent myth. Several well-known names have also raised their voices. Michael Crichton, the scientist, writer and filmmaker is one of them. In his latest book, "State of Fear" he takes time to explain, often in surprising detail, the flawed science behind Global Warming and other imagined environmental crises.

Another cry in the wildenerness is Richard Lindzen's. He is an atmospheric physicist and a professor of meteorology at MIT, renowned for his research in dynamic meteorology - especially atmospheric waves. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has held positions at the University of Chicago, Harvard University and MIT. Linzen frequently speaks out against the notion that significant Global Warming is caused by humans. Yet nobody seems to listen.

I think it may be because most people don't understand the scientific method which Thomas Kuhn so skilfully and briefly set out in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." A scientist makes certain assumptions and then produces a theory which is only as valid as the assumptions. The theory of Global Warming assumes that CO2 is an atmospheric greenhouse gas and as it increases temperatures rise. It was then theorized that since humans were producing more CO2 than before, the temperature would inevitably rise. The theory was accepted before testing had started, and effectively became a law.

As Lindzen said many years ago: "the consensus was reached before the research had even begun." Now, any scientist who dares to question the prevailing wisdom is marginalized and called a sceptic, when in fact they are simply being good scientists. This has reached frightening levels with these scientists now being called climate change denier with all the holocaust connotations of that word. The normal scientific method is effectively being thwarted.

Meanwhile, politicians are being listened to, even though most of them have no knowledge or understanding of science, especially the science of climate and climate change. Hence, they are in no position to question a policy on climate change when it threatens the entire planet. Moreover, using fear and creating hysteria makes it very difficult to make calm rational decisions about issues needing attention.

Until you have challenged the prevailing wisdom you have no idea how nasty people can be. Until you have re-examined any issue in an attempt to find out all the information, you cannot know how much misinformation exists in the supposed age of information.

I was greatly influenced several years ago by Aaron Wildavsky's book "Yes, but is it true?" The author taught political science at a New York University and realized how science was being influenced by and apparently misused by politics. He gave his graduate students an assignment to pursue the science behind a policy generated by a highly publicised environmental concern. To his and their surprise they found there was little scientific evidence, consensus and justification for the policy. You only realize the extent to which Wildavsky's findings occur when you ask the question he posed.

Wildavsky's students did it in the safety of academia and with the excuse that it was an assignment. I have learned it is a difficult question to ask in the real world, however I firmly believe it is the most important question to ask if we are to advance in the right direction.


by Dr.Timothy Ball Ph D

[sailingdog]

Isn't your post technically a reply to the troll... and what does that make you...

Originally Posted by camaraderie

...
ANYONE WHO REPLIES TO THE TROLL IS AN IDIOT.

[saildork]

And if you are STILL not convinced... Go back and read post #1745 on page 175 of this thread (and read the study that is linked there. You must have missed it the first time around). Carbon dioxide IS NOT the cause of global warming!!! Therefore, what we do that produces CO2 has no effect on global warming. Only politics can make it so, and that requires a suspension of the laws of physics. Geez! What part of this don't the trolls get?

Great post, BTW, Pappy. Cheers!

[PBzeer]

That GW confuses scientific fact with theory, projections, estimates and outright guesses would seem to be sufficient to make any rational person at least skeptical, especially in light of self-admitted exaggerations.

[wind_magic]

I believe something I will call the "teenager plus 30 year" theory that says that whatever sensational non-sense is being taught to rebellious annoying teenagers when they are in the 6th grade will be what their political agenda is 30 years later when they are stuffy, pig headed, even more annoying, and finally capable of turning the non-sense they learned into reality. My generation is almost there, so all the annoying global warming non-sense we were all taught by our recently ex-hippy, cutting edge, idealistic young teachers is now turning into actual political action since we are all old enough to cause real trouble now. Think back to when you were in the 6th grade and try to remember all the crap you were learning, then fast forward 30 years and tell me what the politics of the day were.

Ten years before us it was the late 50's and early 60's teenagers, what were those people learning in the 6th grade that they later turned into reality in the 90's ? Go back ten years before that, the late 40's early 50's, what were those people doing in the 80's ? Defeating communism of course, because when those teenagers were in the 6th grade in the late 40's and early 50's the topic of the day was communism. Go back ten years before that, teens of the late 30's early 40's, what were they doing in the 70's ? Yes, screwing everything up with their FDR era dreams of a government utopian society that takes care of everyone, because that's what they were listening to on the radio and learning in school from their idealistic teachers in the late 30's and early 40's.

I still remember being in the 6th grade, I had a World Geography teacher who was fired up about everything, she went on for hours about global warming, the dangers of advertising, commercialism, and all the other stuff she "discovered" when she was in college just a few years earlier. My Physics teacher a few years later was totally convinced then that carbon dioxide was ruining the world, and he was just as much of an activist, there were plenty of activists teaching in the public school system then, and we have inherited their common beliefs about the world through the children who were in school at the time, and now those kids are old enough to influence politics and move those agendas forward, to act on beliefs they take for granted because they were learned at an impressionable age from the passionate young teachers of the time.

How many political "mission accomplished" speeches start with the words, "It's taken us 30 years of hard work to realize this day ...."