And, okie, I might add, the supertanker prediction is not mine, but that of the companies and countries who are looking covetously at the natural resources that look to be exploitable there in the next decade or so. You're a junior capitalist, okie--put your money in Russian Arctic circle oil.
@MontereyJack,
I know the supertanker prediction was not yours, and I merely said do not assume it will happen, we do not yet know how this will all play out. And the polar bear thing, we know all about that, and we also should know that polar bears have been swimming from ice to ice, since there were polar bears. I read some of the doomsday stories through a lens of a healthy skepticism, and I am merely suggesting that we all should do that, including you. I am not very trusting of a bunch of global warmers that have turned science into a political issue. Once that happens, we cannot trust a whole lot about what they say.
There are those who claim the following graphs show average annual global temperatures lower than they actually are, because they do not include in their data temperatures from the arctic and anarctic. If that were actually true, then including those temperatures would result in lower not higher average annual global temperatures. That's true because the arctic and anarctic temperatures average lower than the temperatures north of the anarctic and south of the arctic circles.
By the way, summer in the southern hemisphere generally occurs December 21, through March 21, while summer in the northern hemisphere generally occurs June 21 through September 21.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/nhshgl.gif
Average Annual Global Temperature 1850-2009
Climate Gate is one of the most significant stories in a very long time in regard to climate, which is the hacked emails, revealing a great deal of dishonesty and practice of hiding results that oppose global warming, and exaggerating results that do. I have only spent a short time trying to read something about this, and here is a sample in regard to tree ring data:
At the insistence of editors of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions B the data has leaked into the open - and Yamal's mystery is no more.
From this we know that the Yamal data set uses just 12 trees from a larger set to produce its dramatic recent trend. Yet many more were cored, and a larger data set (of 34) from the vicinity shows no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages.
In all there are 252 cores in the CRU Yamal data set, of which ten were alive 1990. All 12 cores selected show strong growth since the mid-19th century. The implication is clear: the dozen were cherry-picked.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/
Of course the global warmers are going to pooh pooh anything that shows their dishonesty and their twisting of the data, but the truth will eventually win. Its too bad we have such a pathetic main stream media that is so far ignoring this huge story. I have suspected this for a very long time, and again my suspicions are confirmed. When science is politicized to the extent that this issue has been, this will happen every single time.
@okie,
Additional observation to the above post. I hope the CO2 data is being closely checked and verified, because I think the data is so profoundly important to the global warmer agenda that they would resort to almost anything to make sure the data does not begin to show a decline. I won't say I downright do not believe the data, but I will say this, any climate data should now be considered not immune to corruption, and alot more review, study, and confirmation are certainly called for from now on, and I would like to see alot more credibility added to the data than we see so far. The knowledge that some sets of data have been manipulated also creates suspicion with other sets of data.
One only has to look at the climate stations in this country and around the world, their conditions, and the very poor consistency in conditions, to realize that if we cannot even trust the data that we are obtaining, how can we even begin to calculate trends and look for reasons for those trends. As a person trained in a scientific dicsipline, it seems obvious to me that one of the very first things an observer of any scientific phenomena must do is to first establish standards for collecting credible data based upon some consistency and standards. I don't think we have even done that very well yet. We truly have a very long way to go in the science of climatology just to get to first base.
The following is inexcusable. Question, what is "value added quality controlled" data? Are those adjectives for "cooked" data? Let your imagination wonder on that question.
Scientists at the University of East Anglia have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
......
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals " stored on paper and magnetic tape " were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
....
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: "We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenized) data."
The CRU is the world’s leading center for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,577746,00.html
@okie,
Media critics have long been eager to examine how Fox News decides what to report and who decides how to slant the stories. That is still impossible because Fox News refuses to release any data about the discussions by the editors and owners.
Let your imagination wonder okie..
As to the data okie.. when you have evidence of them skewing the data, get back to us. Simply claiming they do is not news and it isn't actual reporting on the part of Fox. It is nothing more than at attempt to manufacture "news" for the likes of you.
December 1, 2009
Findings
E-Mail Fracas Shows Peril of Trying to Spin Science
By JOHN TIERNEY
If you have not delved into the thousands of e-mail messages and files hacked from the computers of British climate scientists, let me give you the closest thing to an executive summary. It is taken from a file slugged HARRY_READ_ME, which is the log of a computer expert’s long struggle to make sense of a database of historical temperatures. Here is Harry’s summary of the situation:
Aarrggghhh!
That cry, in various spellings, is a motif throughout the log as Harry tries to fight off despair. “OH [EXPLETIVE] THIS!” he writes after struggling to reconcile readings from weather stations around the world. “It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity. ...”
Harry, whoever he may be, comes off as the most sympathetic figure in the pilfered computer annals of East Anglia University, the British keeper of global temperature records. While Harry’s log shows him worrying about the integrity of the database, the climate scientists are e-mailing one another with strategies for blocking outsiders’ legal requests to see their data.
While Harry is puzzling over temperatures " “I have that familiar Twilight Zone sensation” " the scientists are confidently making proclamations to journalists, jetting to conferences and plotting revenge against those who question the dangers of global warming. When a journal publishes a skeptic’s paper, the scientists e-mail one another to ignore it. They focus instead on retaliation against the journal and the editor, a project that is breezily added to the agenda of their next meeting: “Another thing to discuss in Nice!”
As the scientists denigrate their critics in the e-mail messages, they seem oblivious to one of the greatest dangers in the climate-change debate: smug groupthink. These researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude " and ultimately undermine their own cause.
Consider, for instance, the phrase that has been turned into a music video by gleeful climate skeptics: “hide the decline,” used in an e-mail message by Phil Jones, the head of the university’s Climatic Research Unit. He was discussing the preparation of a graph for the cover of a 1999 report from the World Meteorological Organization showing that temperatures in the past several decades were the highest of the past millennium.
Most of the graph was based on analyses of tree rings and other “proxy” records like ice cores and lake sediments. These indirect measurements indicated that temperatures declined in the middle of the millennium and then rose in the first half of the 20th century, which jibes with other records. But the tree-ring analyses don’t reveal a sharp warming in the late 20th century " in fact, they show a decline in temperatures, contradicting what has been directly measured with thermometers.
Because they considered that recent decline to be spurious, Dr. Jones and his colleagues removed it from part of the graph and used direct thermometer readings instead. In a statement last week, Dr. Jones said there was nothing nefarious in what they had done, because the problems with the tree-ring data had been openly identified earlier and were known to experts.
But the graph adorned the cover of a report intended for policy makers and journalists. The nonexperts wouldn’t have realized that the scariest part of that graph " the recent temperatures soaring far above anything in the previous millennium " was based on a completely different measurement from the earlier portion. It looked like one smooth, continuous line leading straight upward to certain doom.
The story behind that graph certainly didn’t show that global warming was a hoax or a fraud, as some skeptics proclaimed, but it did illustrate another of their arguments: that the evidence for global warming is not as unequivocal as many scientists claim. (Go to nytimes.com/tierneylab for details.)
In fact, one skeptic raised this very issue about tree-ring data in a comment posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists. The comment, which questioned the propriety of “grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record,” immediately drew a sharp retort on the blog from Michael Mann, an expert at Penn State University:
“No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation Web sites) appearing in this forum.”
Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word. But I don’t see why the question was dismissed so readily, with the implication that only a tool of the fossil-fuel industry would raise it.
Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium.
It is not unreasonable to give outsiders a look at the historical readings and the adjustments made by experts like Harry. How exactly were the readings converted into what the English scientists describe as “quality controlled and homogenised” data?
Trying to prevent skeptics from seeing the raw data was always a questionable strategy, scientifically. Now it looks like dubious public relations, too.
In response to the furor over the climate e-mail messages, there will be more attention than ever paid to those British temperature records, and any inconsistencies or gaps will seem more suspicious simply because the researchers were so determined not to reveal them. Skeptical bloggers are already dissecting Harry’s work. As they relentlessly pore over other data, the British scientists will feel Harry’s pain:
Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight.
@parados,
parados wrote:
Media critics have long been eager to examine how Fox News decides what to report and who decides how to slant the stories. That is still impossible because Fox News refuses to release any data about the discussions by the editors and owners.
To compare discussions within Fox News to examining temperature data is total and absolute hogwash, Parados. No wonder liberals are losing credibility. Not only the global warmers but the news outlets as well. Fox News is but one of a few news outlets that is reporting this scam. If any news agency needs to release their inner discussions, it should be others besides Fox, as Fox is way ahead of the pack in terms of honest and full reporting.
Quote:
As to the data okie.. when you have evidence of them skewing the data, get back to us. Simply claiming they do is not news and it isn't actual reporting on the part of Fox. It is nothing more than at attempt to manufacture "news" for the likes of you.
There is evidence abounding but you choose to ignore it, as do most liberals that are in the tank for that crap, because global warming gives you and them a vehicle to try to justify bigger and more powerful government, which you worship and believe is your salvation.
Target practice in Copenhagen
By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Climate-change skeptics are barking up the wrong smokestack. The shell game being played isn't with the science, it's with the solutions -- specifically, the carbon emissions targets that enlightened world leaders are pledging to meet. That's where the numbers don't add up.
When the Copenhagen climate summit convenes next week, the European nations that have led the crusade against global warming will be able to report that the continent has met the targets for carbon-emission reductions set in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. There may be shoulder dislocations from all the self-congratulatory back-patting.
But the Kyoto targets were well on the way toward being met before they were even established. The targets are based on 1990 emissions levels -- after the Soviet Union and the East Bloc had been fouling the air for years with their antiquated, carbon-spewing heavy industries. When the communist regimes -- and their creaky economies -- collapsed in a heap, emissions from the former Soviet-dominated zone fell by nearly 40 percent. Now they are rising again, but they remain about 35 percent below Kyoto's benchmark 1990 levels.
This post-Soviet industrial meltdown is responsible for most of the progress in reducing carbon emissions that Europe is able to claim. It's not that Europeans have done nothing. Leaving aside the Soviet collapse, they managed to keep emissions relatively constant. By contrast, carbon emissions by Japan -- the proud host of the Kyoto talks -- have increased by nearly 9 percent since then.
The United States, of course, never ratified the Kyoto treaty. Since 1997, carbon emissions here have increased by an estimated 7 percent. In China -- which has now taken over as the world's leading source of atmospheric greenhouse gases -- carbon emissions doubled over the past 12 years. Along with other fast-growing economic powers such as India and Brazil, China took a pass on any limits Kyoto might have wanted to impose.
The bottom line is that since the Kyoto agreement 12 years ago, worldwide carbon emissions have increased by nearly 30 percent.
President Obama, who has decided to attend the Copenhagen summit, plans to offer a 17 percent cut in U.S carbon emissions -- using 2005 levels as a benchmark -- by 2020. Leaving aside for the moment whether this is achievable, politically or technologically, the problem remains that climate change is a global phenomenon. Local action can be rendered meaningless.
China is prepared to offer its first emissions target at Copenhagen, and at first glance it looks impressive: a reduction of 40 to 45 percent in its "carbon intensity" by 2020. But this "intensity" business is a huge caveat, because it refers to carbon emissions relative to the size of the Chinese economy. If the economy grew by 10 percent in a given year and carbon emissions grew "only" 9 percent, that would count as a reduction. Assuming growth continues at current rates, China's carbon emissions could easily increase 40 percent by 2020 -- and Chinese leaders could proclaim they had met their target.
That's a lot of numbers, a lot of assumptions, a lot of scenarios. But even if the Copenhagen summit is wildly successful, the concentration of heat-trapping carbon in the atmosphere will continue to rise. This doesn't mean the whole exercise is futile, it just means that Copenhagen won't provide any definitive solution to what so many scientists say is an urgent problem.
It's also true that even if all greenhouse emissions could magically be halted tomorrow, the elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- higher than at any time in the past 800,000 years, according to researchers who study Antarctic ice-core samples -- would take many decades to decline to historical levels.
If the planet is warm now because of human-generated greenhouse gases, it's going to get warmer. If the low-lying Maldives disappear beneath the Indian Ocean because the sea level rises, that will be a disaster. If "extreme" weather events such as major hurricanes do become more frequent, that will increase the potential for catastrophe in coastal cities around the world.
But if there's a longer growing season in the higher latitudes? If cross-polar shipping slashes transportation costs? If winters are milder -- more pleasant, even -- in Chicago, Moscow and Beijing? We may all be in this together, but there are going to be winners and losers. That's something they should talk about in Copenhagen, too.
@okie,
Quote:There is evidence abounding but you choose to ignore it, as do most liberals that are in the tank for that crap, because global warming gives you and them a vehicle to try to justify bigger and more powerful government, which you worship and believe is your salvation.
Right.. It's just so secret you can't really point me to any actual science. Only Fox news stories that don't contain anything that can be considered science.
@okie,
Okie
The assertion by Parados that your failure to provide him with evidence of the bogus nature of the Global Warming Big Lie, is specious, but if you take a look in recent WSJ archives you'll find an excellent article by a MIT Meteorologist. (It's funny, but it seems that the biggest critics of the Big Lie are meteorologists --- CLIMATE).
I can't recall his name, but I'm sure you (or Parados) can find the article.
What is incredibly ironic is that liberals who so abhor the alleged irrationality of religion, are demonstrating the very same close minded adherence to dogma that they condemn.
It really doesn't matter what you present to Parados and his friends. They have bought the Big Lie because it conforms so well with the other angles of their ideological bent. They will not give it up.
@Finn dAbuzz,
Nothing like that great scientific journal the Wall Street Journal....
Why write a scientific article when you can write an opinion piece for the WSJ?
@parados,
Why should Al Gore work for a living when he can lie and be rich ? Perhaps if he had of donated every cent to the Global Warming movement he might have been more convincing.
@Finn dAbuzz,
Finn dAbuzz wrote:
Okie
The assertion by Parados that your failure to provide him with evidence of the bogus nature of the Global Warming Big Lie, is specious, but if you take a look in recent WSJ archives you'll find an excellent article by a MIT Meteorologist. (It's funny, but it seems that the biggest critics of the Big Lie are meteorologists --- CLIMATE).
Finn, when I started out on this forum, I tried to reason with Parados by using indisputable evidence that I thought would surely convince any reasonable person of a point that seemed to be pretty indisputable. We had several debates, but one that I remember fairly well was the point that Clinton was offered Osama Bin Laden by the Sudan, but Clinton refused the offer because he said we had no basis to hold him. It seemed obvious to any reasonable person it seems to me that Clinton apparently turned down an offer from the Sudanese to turn him over to us, and the quote seems pretty clear, but Parados took up the case as if he was Clinton's defense lawyer and used every explanation he could twist into some twisted logic that Clinton saying he did not bring him here did not mean he was offered or that some other phrase in Clinton's quote did not necessarily mean what it seems to mean, and so on and so forth. I learned very quickly that Parados will defend any Democrat or liberal, using any ploy or tactic of twisting words, meanings of words, proof beyond any reasonable or even unreasonable doubt, etc.
That debate could have been with somebody else like cyclops, but I think I recall it being with Parados, and that debate was but one of several with Parados where I thought the evidence was so indisputable if applied to common sense that he would have to admit he was wrong, but no dice for the lawyerly Parados. Thus, I see little profit in trying to convince Parados of what I think is obvious again in this Climate Gate Affair. Just today, Phil Jones is stepping down from the Climate Research Unit while all of this is investigated, and it strikes me as not something an innocent man would do, do you Finn?
Here is the quote by Clinton in regard to Osama Bin Laden, and I believe this confirms the only president not to capture OBL when he had a chance was Clinton, although we hear the outlandish claims that Bush let him go so that he could justify the war in Iraq, which is truly a stretch believed by only some of the most whacked out leftists, but I am guessing Parados would believe that one before he will ever admit what Clinton admitted.
"And we'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again.
They released him. At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.
So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan."
I found an interesting article.
Apparently, the US isnt the evil empire set out to derail Kyoto and the Copenhagen talks.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/nov/30/canada-tar-sands-copenhagen-climate-deal?fark
Quote: The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?
So, our northern neighbors are doing some major damage to the worlds climate, and nobody seems to notice.
At least we can all agree that man made global warming is a HOAX.
@H2O MAN,
I think more will be coming out. Also, agreed, Kyoto was worthless as conservatives observed at the time. Nothing but a feel good thing for liberals. They can still jet set around the world and live wastefully and lavishly, but feel good about themselves, after all they meant well, never mind the agreement was worthless in regard to results.
