ClimateGate: Global Warming Melt-Down

Interesting mostly as an example of what appears to be a remarkable degree of credulity among the British for the contemporary global warming cult. I also find the overtones suggesting a degree of fanatic judgmentalism a little unnerving. (It would be worrisome if the UK was still a major force in the world.)

What we really need to be thrown into the mix is :

ex-politicans, current politicians, the economy, national interests, rich versus poor, big business versus smelly hippies, hysteria, corrupt scientists, fraudulent activities, huge sums of money to the winner, the media, scandal, jobs for the boys, a lack of data in most areas, a surplus of data in the remaining, and religion.

Then it would be really fun. Oh wait...we have all that dont we ?

John Stewart's take...

http://www.darkskiesblog.com/2009/12/03/john-stewart-jokes-about-global-warming-fraud-video/

The irony is that GUNGASNAKE, who denies that the planet is a s old as science says it is, is embracing the evidence that shows that climate change is a looooong occuring phenom. (I think global climate changes have occured longer than gunga states the planet even existed)

Im sorry, but I cant let you off scot free there gunga, just because we are in a rare point of agreement. We must, if nothing else, remain consistent with our worldviews.

Typical unforgiving geologist. I have recently finished a couple of very interesting histories and biographies of the main figures of British, French and German science of the 19th century. One of the interesting threads is the evolving struggle between the physicists (or natural Philosophers as they then styled themselves) and the developing body of geologists (and later, after Darwin, biologists as well) over the age of the earth. The then newly recognized geological evidence pointed to an age much greater than could be rationalized by the physics and thermodynamics of the day - given that nuclear energy as the source for the sun was not yet understood. Even Lord Kelvin was involved in the struggle, unable to integrate the new discoveries with his - apart from nuclear energy - correct understanding of the thermodynamics involved. An interesting story.

could you share the titles geotge? I try to keep along with the biographies and histories of science as well. I think that, being able to draw from where the hiastory of an inquiry has led us, adds so much to the bland equations that we diddle with.

In my worldview, there is one major and significant climate change within well recorded history and that is the transition from the medieval climate optimum to the little ice age and then from that LIA to the last 150 years or so of weather. That, like the present two years without sunspots, is due to the normal behavior of stars like our sun.

If you go back just out of anything you'd call recorded history, you have what is called a late Holocene climate optimum which was much warmer than recent ages and which roughly corresponds to what ancient literature refers to as a "golden" age and, in my worldview, the reason Plato and others referred to that as a golden age instead of as the age when everybody drowned is that the age was prior to the flood and there simply was not as much water on the planet at the time. If an age like that were to recur now, the beach front could be in West Virginia or Kentucky.

Also in my worldview, the real ice ages had cosmic causes related to the nature of the solar system itself, and we are in no danger whatever of any sort of a recurrence of such an age because there is absolutely nothing on the horizon capable of causing such a thing. Same is true of the conditions which brought about that late Holocene optimum.

Thus, again in my worldview, the weather holds nothing for mankind to worry about in the foreseeable future. One thing people really could start to worry about if they want to worry about something which could wipe us out in 500 - 5000 years, would be genetic entropy.

Wrong! You left out the Canadian tar sands, then the Australian camels stampede (great move in your Senate vote, btw), now even Denmark' s "carousel tax fraud" - which by my conservative estimate now makes us villain # 4. This climategate debacle is getting funnier by the minute, <G>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/03/copenhagen-summit-carbon-trading-scam

The most recent was "Degrees Kelvin", by David Lindley - originally published in 1956 , republished recently by the Joseeph Henry Press. An excellent Biography of William Thompson, Lord Kelvin - a central figure in the development of classical thermodynamics, heat transfer, and early (pre Maxwell) electromagnetic theory. His adventures supporting the early efforts to create a working transatlantic cable and his disputes with the early British geologists are well described. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

I will get this one. Thompson has been a favorite punching bag of "Phase rule" thermo guys. Ive always seen many of his quotes out of context and Im sure they were so delivered as to make a maximum effort at ridicule. Things are never what they appear in print are they?

When I firt heard that Thompson had made the statement that everything had been invented by 1882. I later discovered that what he actually said was in the form of a response to a question about continuing research in some minor aspect in science. He said that "he hoped we didnt adopt an attitude to forswear researches into our planet when we feel that everything had already been discovered" Thts a bit of a difference to that statement that weve all familairized ourselves regarding Lawd Kelvin.
I hope its true because I love those little twists in things that we accept as true.

Thompson was an interesting guy. He was the central driving force behind the development of the mathematics for heat transfer, much of thermodynamica and electroimagnetism (however there it took a Maxwell to unify Tompson's sometimes disjoint ideas). Folks like Stokes were his disciples.

He argued that the earth could not possibly be as old as the budding geologists of his day asserted, because his calculations of the rate of energy release from the sun (largely correct) precluded such a long term existence - no source of energy then contemplated could produce so much for such a long time. In fact this was a classical example of the inherent conflict between empirical, observation-based science and that of those who worked on unifying theories. (Something like that between Gallileo and the Aristotilian philosophers of his day.)

I understand your worldview. Ive been amused by it for several years now. Im amazed at how you can accept evidence of temperature changes in the little Ice Age and yet, with similar evidence, deny events that go back 250K to 1MM years BP.

ASIve often said to you, "Thank a geologist today for the gasoline in your tank"

Back to topic here, and since we've seen the vilification of Canada over its tar sands (btw, I've been to Fort McMurray, and it's impressive) I have a question over eastern Venezuela's Orinoco basin: it's my understanding the geological composition is similar to Alberta's Syncrude but with a higher sulphur content, which would of course make any petroleum refining costlier. Parenthetically I've spent a lot of time in Orinoco (hated every minute of it, since I had to come across rats the size of sheep and bugs the size of rats) and hope the damn geological formation is completely unusable unless oil gets to $500/bbl, however I'd appreciate your comment on the question - thanks!

The New York Times has turned into a satirical newspaper rivalling The Onion - or has forgotten basic English:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/science/earth/17climate.html

Not being a scientist or in any related field, I just wonder how much of this stuff is based on predictive statistics rather than proven cause/effect. It seems like most of it is based on models which are either predictive or projections. Can people even agree there is a consensus, it seems like the only consensus is with published climatologists, and not geologists or other scientists (is that true?)...

Obviously there are some patterns and ice is melting (but they keep being wrong about how fast the ice will melt, they keep under-predicting it).

If you think in terms of the trillions of dollars (over long-term) thrown around in this stuff, then any average man has to have some skepticism left.

You'd think statisticians would have already resolved most of the debate using pure mathematics instead of modeled outcomes. I keep hearing "consensus" but then the problem is the science of climatology was supposed to primarily be based on long-term events, not short-term projections.

"Climate Change(TM)" is about two things, i.e. money (Algor was supposed to have become a billionaire with the Chicago Carbon Exchange before people stopped believing the ****), and idolatry.

The economies and wealth of the whole world were supposed to be thrown in the toilet for the sake of Gaea. That's indistinguishable from the **** you read in the Old Testament, e.g.



In other words, Thou shalt not sacrifice children to ******* idols.....