To trust or not to trust
A Mr Matthew Roman from Binghamton, New York, explains to us in PressConnects why scientists shouldn’t be trusted. According to Mr Roman, who probably has done extensive research on the subject, the global cooling argument presented in the 70s is just part of The Big Lie.
Global warming deniers claim there was scientific consensus about global cooling 30 years ago. They state that scientists are not to be trusted because they believed in global cooling once, they now believe in global warming and they will soon again believe in global cooling.
This is an example of “Big Lie” propaganda. As noted in the Feb. 21 edition of USA Today, the American Meteorological Society surveyed the scientific literature from 1965 through 1979. They found 44 peer reviewed articles on global warming and seven on global cooling.
The real consensus was the same then as it is now. Scientists agree that global warming is real and is exacerbated by human activities.
Now, this story isn’t really about Matthew Roman and I want to point that out. Neither is it about trusting science and scientists. What I find intriguing instead is how easy it is for someone to accept something that has been printed in a newspaper. There are many Matthew Romans in this world. People who rely on media reports without even thinking, questioning.
Of today’s global warming, most of it has occured not in reality but rather in the media. Science has been manipulated, exaggerated and misused, all to prove that humans are destroying the planet. There has never been a consensus among scientists about the causes of global warming. Perhaps there never will be. Perhaps the whole purpose of science is to question and to disagree in order to advance our knowledge.
What I wish for is objectivity and a balanced view of what is going on. But as long as there is no news like bad news, I guess that isn’t going to happen.
26 comments
Maggie, according to your presentation you are an economist born in 1969. Your accusation that Roman might not have been alive and updated on the scientific literature in the 70:s is so hypocritical it’s not even funny.
Th US today story is found here:
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2008-02-20-global-cooling_N.htm
and a more formal description of the study can be found here:
http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf
That you aren’t to be trusted isn’t a question at this point.
What I find rather interesting about the USA Today story is the following.
The study reports, “There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.”
Just as there is no scientific consensus on global warming today.
(…) “only seven (articles) supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.
Now let’s remember science is not about democracy and the majority has often been proved to be wrong.
Do you even have a point? First you insinuate that an ice age was predicted in the 70:s, then when confronted with facts proving otherwise you resort to claiming that the majority has often been proven wrong. Do you mean that even if scientists didn’t predict an ice age they ought to have? (Incidently, at least one of the few scientists that did believe in an imminent ice age, Kukla, still believes this. So do Jaworowsky who contrarians refer to on a regular basis).
There is for all practical purposes a scientific consensus on global warming today. Just check what all major scientific organizations have to say about the subject or do a similar check today what is written in scientific journals. If you look at individual scientists you can find all kind of crazy opinions on all subjects. You say that the majority has “often” been proved wrong, but in reality it is almost always the dissenters who turn out to be wrong. Assuming the majority is correct is the way to go if you don’t have *very* good reasons to believe they are wrong. For example, I’ve been on a seminar at KTH where the theory of gravity as a repulsive force was presented. Should this be used as evidence that there isn’t for all practical purposes a consensus that it is attractive?
“If you look at individual scientists you can find all kind of crazy opinions on all subjects.”
I have to say I think the catastrophic global warming is a rather crazy idea, as opposed to the theory that climate changes are natural.
Why? What makes you so sure humans can’t change climate. The fact that climate has changed naturally over the years (sometimes catastrophically) is in no way an argument against the fact that nowadays humans have a large influence. Personally I find it very natural that increasing the concentration of a greenhouse gas will increase the greenhouse effect.
Can I also get an explanation for what you meant to say with your initial message. What about that predicted ice age myth? you keep shifting the subject.
I can tell you, having lived through the 70’s old enough to remember, that there was no worry about global warming. We know from media articles that there was worry about global cooling. We know from congressional testimony that certain scientists (including James Hansen, the leading NASA scientist pushing global warming now, and Stephen Schneider, another leading AGW alarmist) were warning of global cooling. I find it a rather weak proof that there was no global cooling consensus when a scientist (who is almost certainly a current AGW warner) from an agency that probably gets most of it’s funding tied to current fears of global warming, searches a few papers from that period and finds more for global warming than global cooling. I challenge that same scientist to find scientists in the 70’s testifying before congress that there was a fear of global warming at that time. He’s not likely to find one, because if any scientist would have testified that way, it would have been James Hansen. Yet we know that James Hansen testified (or at least published in papers) was among the global cooling alarmists in that era.
Sorry this is so long, but it’s about fascism in general via government sponsored scare-mongering, so necessarily covers a lot of ground. Not sure if you moderate. I submitted it yesterday, and it didn’t appear, so if you moderate it again, fine and good, I will not submit it again. I probably just hit the wrong button.
“I might as well add that Mr Roman, besides being skeptical about global cooling claims, also wants to legalize marijuana, as he states on Cannazine UK ( go ahead, Google him). The question is, I guess, if Mr Roman himself is to be trusted.”
This is a smear which assumes that a rational person could not hold anti-prohibition views and still be “trusted.” I don’t want to sound condescending, even though that’s a bit how I feel, but I do want to offer if not a different, then at least a wider outlook on things.
Wanting to stop putting 1/3 of black men in jail in the USA, or 1 in 100 of our population, mostly, black, for a harmless consensual crime is not a great argument, since in countries throughout recent and not-recent history who did not prohibit drug use, the addiction rate has always been around 2-3% for any addictive drug.
Having enjoyed your blog enormously, via the plug from John Ray (http://antigreen.blogspot.com) I’ve suddenly lost a little trust in *you* since I suspect I have just read a blatant example of Conservative partisonship in which a very simple Libertarian view is *assumed* to be merely part of the irrational “other side.”
The history of drug prohibition is *extremely* racist (opium/heroin/morphine = Chinese workers who built our railroads; pot = whites and blacks raping white women; cocaine = blacks raping white women) and has not only cost massive tax hikes but has ruined many an otherwise normal life, except of course, on Ivy League campuses, where residence hall administrators (RAs) more or less must do random “safety” searches yet merely confiscate drugs and do not report users to the police for possession. You see, parents who will become future patrons of the college do *not* want their kids to have their lives ruined instead of improved by sending them to college. I know. I live in a girl’s dorm (Barnard…long story) and have, in my business hired an RA of a Columbia dorm.
This sort of attitude does not exist five blocks from us in the Columbia University area, namely in Harlem or Spanish Harlem. This represents selective enforcement of drug laws, which *still* carry mandatory minimum sentences that are as bad or worse than those given to rapists, armed robbers and murders (!) So guess what happens when the prisons fill up and drug non-violent drug offenders cannot by law be paroled early? They let the violent ones go early.
A reminder is in order too of how corrupting drug profits are to governments worldwide, such as when Ollie North SOLD COCAINE TO INNER CITY DRUG LORDS in order to finance a secret war, which Reagan successfully played dumb about, despite having had access to all spy vs. spy information.
I too hold the view that Global Warming is an utter and complete nonsense and has now *become* a hoax due to the investment already put into it and how so many reputations are at stake, and BILLIONS of dollars a year (vs. less than two hundred million) are now being given out for Climate Research.
That conservative Margaret Thatcher started this whole business due to a COAL MINERS STRIKE is merely a fact of history.
I also hold the view that the government itself has created the Obesity Epidemic (”Metabolic Syndrome X” in which skyrocketing childhood obesity and diabetes represent merely the tip of the iceberg). Note that the “avoid fats” (and thus substitute carbohydrates) Food Pyramid campaign started in the 70s by the highly liberal George McGovern continues to this day. It was *all* based on the premature junk science idea that since arterial plaques contained cholesterol, we must “OBVIOUSLY” stop eating fats and cholesterol, even though dietary cholesterol has minimal effect on the body’s highly self-regulated cholesterol levels, or on arterial plaques (which highly refined carbs *DO*!). The proof of how effective this “War on Fat” has been going is indicated by the fact that an obesity epidemic began EXACTLY in the decade that the government created its campaign against dietary fat:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2008/02/21/MNJMV5STE.DTL&o=0
Soda drinks now contain literally toxic (heart disease etc.) levels of high fructose corn syrup rather than sugar and cocaine instead of caffeine, thus the original name of Coca-Cola (Kola nut plus cocain). Shuttle Astronauts and Figher Jet pilots were historically given speed (methamphetamine) since, unlike caffeine, it doesn’t create a jittery feeling.
The Drug War was yet another form of fascism, by which I mean stirring everybody up with a bogeyman, when the fact stands that pot smokers are actually *better* drivers than normal (http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/1775.html), yet legal alcohol (via traffic accidents) and tobacco causes HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of deaths a year. Also of note is that highly addictive crack cocaine was created by the Drug War itself, just as hard liquor only became popular during Prohibition, both being much easier for gun-toting criminals to smuggle. There is also the oddly curious fact that drugs are just as easy to get as ever, except at such inflated price (minus any tax revenue) that the mere 2-3% of users who are addicts must commit crimes EVERY day to support their habit, not to mention gang warfare turf issues. Ending drug prohibition, I predict would cause a drop in crime of about 50%.
There is also the fact that a large number of Nobel prize winners have said that hallucinogenic drugs were instrumental in the development of their creative edge, including Richard Feynman and Francis Crick, and especially the somewhat nutty Karry Mullis who invented the PCR reaction. Search this page for ‘Nobel’ and notice the number of Nobel Prize winners calling for and end to drug prohibition: http://www.csdp.org/edcs/figure25.htm
One prominent figure is economist Milton Friedman, of rather conservative bent, who has spoken out extensively on the topic. A book about this would have to include a huge chapter about how the wiz kids who created the computer revolution once semiconductors went miniature, were almost all avid LSD users.
Own an iPhone yet? An iPod at least? What was one of Steve Job’s questions while recruiting members of the original Macintosh computer project (whose signatures are molded in relief inside classic Macs)?: “How many times have you taken LSD?”
Why? Because, as he has stated, on the record (unlike Bill Gates who, when asked in a Playboy interview, skirted the question of drug use by saying “I did many things in my youth that I don’t do now.”, that it was LSD that inspired him to create the personal computer. Here he is in the famous “furnitureless room” in which he meditated many a day, tripping on very high doses of “acid”:
http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0712/images/walker/062b.jpg
Being a Ph.D. chemist of Columbia/Harvard stock, my main interest was once in learning how the brain works, but such an interest became called “the kiss of death” of an academic career, as in the NIH and other federal funding agencies don’t take kindly to the idea of finding out what 500 new molecules do to wide awake human volunteers. I thought the hysteria would have mellowed out by the time I was done with 13 years of higher education, but was wrong. So I went into business instead, and the USA lost one of its best scientists (top Ph.D. student award for graduate school), since I design jewelry and lighting sculptures now. The drug war STOPPED scientific research into such things as anti-addiction drugs and higher consciousness studies based on biochemistry. Lately there has been some progress, two decades later, on MDMA being successfully used for treating PSTD in soldiers returning from Iraq.
There is also the fact that some of the loudest voices against drug prohibition (besides the recently deceased textbook conservative William F. Buckley: http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley200406291207.asp) are judges and police (for instance: http://www.leap.cc/cms/index.php).
Like Global Warming junk science, the “science” behind the “EXTREME(!!!)” dangers of drugs was mostly junk science. So now, instead of safe club drugs that kids take anyway (sorry, I call anybody under 25 a “kid”) are mostly adulterated with the awful drug MDA, a “hard rid hallucinogen” instead of MDMA, for instance. MDMA itself is neurotoxic though, and a safer (but much harder to make) alternative is known, but party kids can’t buy the safe version.
Finally, there is the funniest irony of all, that Nancy Reagan’s DARE (”just say no”) school program was shown to INCREASE drug use in students exposed to it, by making it cooler and more rebellious to do drugs, as since the program LIED about how bad pot was for you, all the kids who were already A students using pot on weekends, started figuring they were being lied to as well about the dangers of truly addictive (and unregulated for purity or known dosage!) drugs like heroine, cocaine, and speed.
“Prohibition goes beyond the bonds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.” - Abraham Lincoln
Another topic with a tinge of fascism to it is gun-control, which is also based on the junk science OBVIOUSNESS that outlawing guns makes guns harder to get for criminals and makes them less likely to use them (whereas the facts indicate they use them MORE, since they know law-abiding citizens are unarmed). England even outlawed pocket knives, leaving their populace utterly undefended. Crime rose. So they started adding *cameras* everywhere. Didn’t help.
Nik: I can understand your point of view and therefore I will remove the remark about marijuana from my article. My mission is not to condemn anyone, especially someone I don’t know personally. Neither do I want to hurt others’ feelings. Thank you for pointing that out. I hope you can still enjoy my blog.
Aaron, where did you get the idea that Hansen warned about global cooling? As far as I know that claim is based on the single piece of “evidence” that Rasool&Schneider used some code he had written for an article of theirs. Here is an article cowritten by Hansen from 1976 that contradicts your claim:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1976/1976_Wang_etal.pdf
Rasool&Schneider wrote a speculative article about what would happen if sulfur emissions kept increasing indefinitely, and concluded that this might lead to global cooling, but they had to admit in a footnote that they had used a factor two too low estimate of the influence of CO2. More importantly, sulfur emissions didn’t increase, instead we started to remove it from power plants. If someone says “If we do A then B will happen” and we don’t do A, then the fact that B doesn’t happen doesn’t prove he was wrong!
I’m also sorry to say that your memory isn’t proof. If you want to argue that scientists were convinced we were heading for a new cooling, please give references to scientific articles. Here you will find a movie warning about global warming back in 1958 :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lgzz-L7GFg
As for warnings to congress, the closest you get is a report from NAS in 1975 that basically concludes that knowledge at the time is too limited to predict future climate. Climate models were still in their infancy and no one was willing to stick their neck out officially.
Hey, Thomas. If you have proof that humans are making the earth warmer, hustle on over to Junkscience.com. Steven Milloy, the guy who runs that web site, has a standing offer of $100,000 USD to anyone who can provide this proof. That offer has been up for more than a year now and so far no one has claimed it, despite all ballyhoo about the imminent destruction of the planet from global warming. Go for it, Thomas.
JMD, that is just a scam. There are no proofs in science, and in this case Milloy himself is the judge who uses his own undisclosed methods to decide if an entry qualifies. Furthermore, it isn’t enought to prove that global warming is occuring to win you also have to prove that it is cost efficient to prevent it and economics is far less exact than science. All that will happen is that Milloy collects $15 for each person stupid enough to send in an entry.
If you think these rigged competitions are fair, I suggest you participate in “The Hovind $250,000 Challenge” to prove evolution.
“Nik: I can understand your point of view and therefore I will remove the remark about marijuana from my article. My mission is not to condemn anyone, especially someone I don’t know personally. Neither do I want to hurt others’ feelings. Thank you for pointing that out. I hope you can still enjoy my blog.”
Actually it was a favor, since this is the first time I’ve synthesized the idea of “fascism” as Big Lie scare-mongering in general, and how both the Left and Right have been guilty of this easy road to power.
By the way, if the Steve Jobs image doesn’t work (forbidden), just load it again a few times, or copy and paste the link. It’s still there. I’m not gay, but think he’s kinda cute. Married his school sweetheart, just like Gates did (and Eminem).
There’s an article worth getting a reprint of. I have a few, obtained from the (30th year of publication!) printed newsletter called ‘Access to Energy’ (http://www.accesstoenergy.com). He’s a chemist, of Libertarian bent, so some of his filler material is about unrealistic stuff like “going back to the gold standard” but overall seems sane. Here’s a graph from that article. Oddly, it’s in a journal for doctors, which gives it less punch, but maybe major journals rejected it:
http://s68.photobucket.com/albums/i14/SnickSnack/GlobalWarming/?action=view¤t=SolarActivity.jpg
There are *so* many graphs that are so fun to link to, since it gets Climatists’ “yeah but” gears to overheat, my utter favorite being the South Pole temperature:
http://www.john-daly.com/stations/amundsen.gif
My second favorite is the comparison of the heat-island trend in Central Park to a mere few miles away, namely the rural area of West Point Military college:
http://www.john-daly.com/stations/WestPoint-NY.gif
This article is somewhat conspiratorial but is one of the few I’ve found about Margaret Thatcher (who I just discovered was also a chemist!):
http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
Reply to post 11.
I have read such lame excuses as the one you used.
Why not try and see what happens?
Nice dodge and weave, Thomas (post 11). I will take your response as evidence neither you nor anyone else has any proof of human-caused global warming. Computer climate model output doesn’t count because they aren’t proof of anything.
JMD, of course I don’t have proof! Neither can I prove evolution, quantum mechanics or the theory of gravity. As I said science doesn’t deal with proof. If you think otherwise, please collect you $250,000 for proving evolution.
Do you have proof that carbon dioxide isn’t a threat to the world’s climate? Maybe it ought to be those who emit it into the atmosphere who should prove that it isn’t dangerous? Or realizing that proof either way is impossible, maybe we should just do as the IPCC and base decisions on “the balance of evidence”?
Thomas, I detect that your self-image is wrapped up in your outlook. That happened to me too. Being a top-notch scientist by background, I believed the scare-mongering of Climate Science, just as I believed that string theory might connect gravity with quantum mechanics.
I even worked next to them at Harvard. They, back in the late 90s, occupied cubical-like offices in a building-to-building skyway between our Chemistry Department and the Geology Building. But I never met any of them. They were not very friendly, especially given the fact that the only windows they had were in the hallway. I don’t think they needed many students, except one or two programmers who could work at home, and I think they shared supercomputer time, via terminals, probably located in the basement.
Oh, memory comes back indeed! One drunken night I did indeed venture into the basement. There it was, Hal 9000, in a shack-like room with a classic “meat freezer” latch on it. Inside the freezing room were false floor panels that concealed huge computer cables that connected to massive rack-mounted computer equipment. I hope my slight pushing all the weird buttons vandalism didn’t cause any hurricanes.
Then I read the ‘Skeptical Environmentalist’ by Lomborg, in which rich people were exposed for having tainted motives under the guise of “saving the world.” One of the worse examples of anti-humanity-personality-disorder was a quote by one of the biggies in Organized Environmentalism, namely, his abject *horror* that a carbon-free, unlimited energy supply (it was probably Cold Fusion) might be on the horizon. He said that would merely power more bulldozers, for AWFUL humanity to even more quickly destroy the Earth. This is a debatable point, I admit, given that people aren’t exactly angels, but it’s also a very pessimistic view of human nature, one I do not share, especially since I live in NYC and during the recent blackout, no rioting occured. Instead, out came our candles, and the beer was still cold at local pubs, though no food could be cooked, so we ate beer.
Did you know that a new lightbulb was just invented? It’s much more efficient than even LEDs. Or that solar power is, in 20-50 years, will actually be “worked out” based on thin-film printing, much like it took so many years to create lasting color Polaroids camera film (hundreds of layers!)?
New light bulb invention:
http://news.zdnet.com/2422-13568_22-192842.html
It’s at least 100X as efficient as normal light bulbs, unlike LEDs.
Things like this indicate a bright future, not an awful one, even though thirty thousand babies die a day for lack of basic hygiene during birth, a number which will get MUCH worse instead of continue to get better, if we use the UN to force developing nations to not burn any oil to power their hospitals.
Nik, unlike you I’ve actually studied some climate science and met scientists from both sides. I was not impressed by one of the most famous contrarians in Sweden, Professor Wibjörn Karlén. Once you started to ask him questions beyond his usual soundbites his knowledge was rather superficial.
I’m quite aware that there is scientific progress, to a not insignificant degree spurred by the need to reduce energy consumption, however, from the movie you linked to you can see that this new bulb only save a factor of 10, not 100 as you claim. What this proves is that reducing CO2 emissions won’t be as hard as some claim.
“if we use the UN to force developing nations to not burn any oil to power their hospitals”
You do know that the Kyoto treaty does not put any restrictions on CO2 emissions by developing countries? Your argument is a straw man. At the moment, the problem for develooping countries is that rich countries can afford to pay so much more for the limited supply of oil remaining that they are priced out of the market. If you want to help poorer countries, reduce your use of oil!
Thomas, (post 15) you can’t prove that humans are responsible for allged global warming and you say it can never be proven. Yet you and people like you want to make me poorer so you can collect billions to spend on preventative measures just in case there is a problem.
Meanwhile, we have proven environmental problems such as air and water pollution where that money could be used to do some good.
I guess I will just never understand the mindset of people who want to fight a phantom menace while ignoring a real one that stares them in the face.
I finally found some information on the indeed seemingly *real* effect of anthropomorphic CO2 on ocean acidity (http://www.seafriends.org.nz/issues/global/acid.htm). It seems to be a good thing, along with the CO2 acting as fertilizer for photosynthetic life in the sea.
“The most important limiting factor in aquatic ecosystem is the dearth of hydrogen ions (H+), which has also been overlooked. The more acidic the water, the higher biological productivity becomes, and the denser the amount of life. In the sea this is borne out by the observed fact that highly productive upwelling areas are more acidic. In other words, acidic seas are a good thing.”
“The most important benefit obtained from symbiotic decomposition is firstly hydrogen ions, since these are in shortest supply, and secondly nutrients, and finally CO2 in a form ready to use. The hydrogen ions lower pH on the skins of marine plants (and some phytoplankton), as well as on the skins of coral polyps. In this cocoon of reduced pH, these organisms can be more productive than without.”
I need to look into this further, but it seems that since the oceans contain hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 and humans only put out a few dozen a year, and since oceans are highly buffered, and bacteria evolve extremely fast, I’m not sure it’s worth a lot of my time. There is also the fact that ice ages have been the norm on the planet, yet have not killed corals or fish species all that badly, given how many survive to this day, so I don’t think of oceans as being fragile things.
***
Thomas:
I am indeed still rather ignorant of ocean chemistry, which I have not studied, ever, since it is only now that Global Warming theory is turning belly up that this NEW “emergency” has even been mentioned! I have read almost all the popular science magazines for a decade (weekly ‘New Scientist’ and ‘Science News’, along with ‘Discover’, having given up on depressing ‘Scientific American’ or the awful ‘Popular Science’), and have not run across this topic ONCE. Maybe because climate scientists don’t want their funding handed over to oceanographers?
But I am not ignorant about climate science, since their is such a thing known as self-education, and with my chemistry background to my advantage, have been intensely reading about the details of climate science, for over three years. Being casually self-employed with a rich girlfriend, I have a lot of time on my hands. I strongly conclude that “global warming due to C02″ is utter crap, not just debate-worthy, but a FULLY FALSIFIED HYPOTHESIS. That emergency measures to avoid it are profoundly anti-capitalist (i.e. socialist) mean I also strongly suspect political motives were involved, since Kyoto is all about NOT having to reduce carbon emissions but instead having America PAY A TAX to other countries, like tiny England or nuclear powered France, etc.
Having done my homework means touché to your “straw man” claim, in which you use a “call to authority” argument (the truth of a claim should ultimately rest on logic and evidence, not the authority of the person promoting it). That said, you are one of the most debate-worthy critics I’ve ever run across. Most online Global Warming enthusiasts are nutty (as in “I can’t BELIEVE some evil people don’t BELIEVE in Warming…oh and Bush is Hitler, blah blah blah…”). For them, Warming is a form of religion, basically, so critics are labeled as heretics, akin to Holocaust “Deniers”. I initially took you for one of those idiots, which clearly you are not. Sorry. I’m actually learning, since you force me to look so many things up.
Sorry for the 100X mistake too, but 10X is still pretty amazing.
“You do know that the Kyoto treaty does not put any restrictions on CO2 emissions by developing countries? Your argument is a straw man. At the moment, the problem for develooping countries is that rich countries can afford to pay so much more for the limited supply of oil remaining that they are priced out of the market. If you want to help poorer countries, reduce your use of oil!”
Alas, Africa is a sad story, having fallen apart and most nations there having HIV rates that are hopeless, not to mention their various genocides, so I’ll not even consider it, since it’s not developing as much as falling apart. Instead I’ll chose China. What do I know about China. Zip. End of my side of this disagreement.
I actually agree that reducing the use of oil is a great idea though, since it costs the USA a huge amount of money and has empowered a culture in the Middle East that was and still is in many ways stuck in the Dark Ages, kills girls for being raped, and likes to blow civilians up with as big of bombs as they can get their hands on.
Yet end-of-the-world scenarios are extremely counterproductive if they cause people to stop trusting science when the science is exposed as a purposeful FRAUD. Nor do I think there should be an economically damaging *rush* to drastically cut CO2 in the next decade or two, especially since Kyoto will likely result in a mere two years delay in warming in 100 years. I also note that CO2 is plant food, so may actually cause greening and increased biodiversity of the Earth, even if it indeed kills off a few species.
Yet if ocean acidification is a disaster, then who will listen, at such time that global warming is exposed as an alarmist political scam? The simple fact is that temperatures over the last century do NOT correlate with CO2 but with sun activity, perfectly, via its effects on cloud cover (which aren’t even included in most climate models, which, by the way, have recently been shown to be using the assumption that the atmosphere is INFINITELY thick: http://www.dailytech.com/Researcher+Basic+Greenhouse+Equations+Totally+Wrong/article10973.htm), and that the earth has not warmed for almost a decade now, and most rural temperature stations show local COOLING over the last 100 years (!). Only parts of northern Europe seem to be warming, if you discount cities which warm for reasons unrelated to CO2.
It seems to me that the “global average” has been skewed by the inclusion of URBAN heat monitoring stations in the average. I still don’t understand this. Where is this “global average temperature” coming from? Why does this average track the sun cycles, yet every rural station I look up, except a few but not all in the Arctic show a century of cooling?!
Let’s pick another station or two, just for fun. Ones I haven’t seen before. South Africa, Southern China, and the Himalayas in India!
http://www.john-daly.com/stations/kimberly.gif
http://www.john-daly.com/stations/nanning.gif
http://www.john-daly.com/stations/srinagar.gif
Uh oh. The temperatures are all flat or falling the entire last century. John Daly died in 2001, so I need a new source of temperature stations. Oddly enough though, there is NO upturn from 1940 on when CO2 started to exponentially increase. THIS INDICATES THAT “GLOBAL WARMING” IS A LIE.
A L-I-E.
If calling falsehoods ‘lies’ make me a ‘contrarian’ then I proudly accept the title, though ‘contrarian’ not being a word, I prefer one in the dictionary, say, ‘contradictor’, especially since it has no taint of being a label at all, but merely descriptive.
If environmental alarmists are liars, but now claim ocean acidity is something to panic about, then what credibility do they have? The fact the Greenpeace is currently changing their literature from “warming” to “climate change” and recently “acidification” simply makes me *extremely* skeptical about this new Acidification Panic.
If oceans has been warming for a century means that oceans were likely RELEASING CO2, not absorbing it, so this confusing topic is not so straightforward. Where is a graph of CO2 content of the ocean, or even its pH over the last century? Does it show correlation with the massive increase in CO2 output from 1940 to present? That would be convincing. But I get on Google, and there’s just a bunch of scare-mongering articles, using hand–waving arguments to claim that clams will dissolve away, a HUNDRED years in the future. And yet the oceans are currently COOLING, not warming, and colder water holds more CO2, so indeed the oceans might be going more acidic because of that.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88520025
For *now* restrictions on CO2 are limited to developed countries, but Kyoto would quickly extend to Africa if it became a developed country and stopped building houses from straw. Yet to cripple the economy of the developed countries, via Kyoto, would likely result in a ECONOMIC CRIPPLING of developed nations which do not have time or political will to build nuclear plants, meaning there would be much less aid given to developing countries, and much less funding for medical science or solar and ultimately fusion power too. Why the panicked *hurry* to restrict CO2 now when solar energy is just about to take off as the only viable renewable?
And why did the Environmental Movement kill the nuclear industry in the USA? France gets 78% of it’s power from nuclear. The USA is at only 19%. I don’t think anybody claims nuclear waste will end the world, especially since breeder reactors exist that can recycle fuel and much safer reactor designs have appeared since the 50s. One is based on pellets in funnel. Anything goes wrong, they physically pull the plug on the bottom and the pellets spill into a large pan, stopping the chain reaction. But it was the Environmental Movement that is mainly RESPONSIBLE for the fact that the USA emits so much CO2 with their successful “NO NUKES!!!” campaign.
This sort of thing just sets off one’s “AGENDA ALERT” detector, in this case, that the Environmental Movement is a back-to-nature political Movement with profoundly anti-capitalist, even anti-human real motives, likely based on personality disorders. Envy is a strong emotion, for instance, and so is the desire to avoid being envied, and the USA is indeed very much envied by many citizens of the world.
A massive backlash is brewing against the Environmental Movement, one that will obviously not be good for the environment.
No, JMD, we haven’t proven any other environmental problems either. THERE ARE NO PROOFS IN SCIENCE! Can you justify why you think it is wrong to act on the best information available?
We can measure air and water pollutants and see their impact. That is proof that they exist and that they cause problems. Yet you want to fight the phantom menace of global warming, no doubt using the cautionary principle as justification. Stop drinking Al Gore’s Kool-Aid, Thomas. It is not good for you.
We can measure a CO2 increase and that the Earth is warming as well, if that is all you require for proof.
Thomas, correlation does not equal causation.
Maggie, I know, but that is what JMD claimed.
Thomas, please don’t leave. A true critic is a diamond, emotions be damned. Such a tiny web site though. Harshness only revolves around bad motives. We want you in our death throws, in 2012, the end of the Mayan calender, you know, the one that has a literal end-of-the-world in 2012, all the while we cause it, on purpose, because WE LOVE OIL COMPANIES that spill oil and kill animals. We are that evil. We love to see seals and birds die. Really. That’s why our blogs are all full of protests about oil tankers not having to have double hulls, every day. It’s all we can talk about, is spoiling the earth, effectively.
Exxon pays 28% of taxes in the USA. We, being devil-worshipers, want a pentagram to replace that damned Jewish star, or the swastikas on the old Buddha sculptures. EVIL INCORPORATED! If you only *knew* how much cold hard CASH we got for every letter of every word we got from Exxon, you’d turn to a life of drugs and whoredome too, for mind-alteration and sex are in no way resistible, though they are already mostly free, but besides that, no-no, they are very rare. So we want to KILL THE EARTH, so we can…
WHAT?
Live on a sh*tty planet since what, we are f*cking aliens? Yeah. Blink ding blink blink. You caught us aliens in the act of transforming the planet to our own needs, not having anything at all to do with wanting to have our computer monitor STAY on at night, unlike in California.
I di look up ocean acidity for a day. 50% is caused by “acid rain”, meaning sulfur (actual “pollution, unlike CO2!). So that’s a point. But scrubbers for that sort of thing have been in place for at least two decades in the USA, but not quite yet in China or India. That’s sort of thing will NOT cripple their growth, but increase it, since sulfur is valuable, just like pig futures are.
We still love you, even if you are melting down, personally. We need you, so we can predict what angle the ANTI-HUMAN movement next take, coupled to media enthusiasm.
Ocean acidification didn’t work. Sorry. Seems to be THE MAIN FERTILIZER OF OCEAN LIFE, that damned PROTON.
“NO PROTONS!!!!” No three quarks for Muster Mark combined. No No No. MIght make up a bit for over–fishing, but that will never do, since then you cannot condemn humanity for being evil instead of graceful then, based on our ORIGINAL SIN of learning to make STEEL.
The PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE is the worst victim of carbon dioxide alarmism, the VERY STUFF OF LIFE, being RELEASED from its ancient underground caves, to fertilize our planet. Worry of worries. PAY ATTENTION. TURN YOUR EYES TO US. VOTE FOR US. GIVE US MONEY. MONEY. MONEY. MONEY.
Nik, may I suggest you see a psychologist. Your rant doesn’t seem entirely sane.
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