@parados,
In your mind (this should be interesting), is it possible that Global Warming is wrong ?
Quote:But for the green movement, this year's defeat was more than a loss; it was a reckoning, a signal that it had overestimated its influence.
Even in the hottest year on record, even with a historic oil spill polluting the Gulf of Mexico, even with a Democratic Congress and a friendly White House, it couldn't win the fight it had picked. In fact, in the Senate it couldn't even start it.
"The oil industry has tremendous reach and control in the United States Senate," said David Di Martino, a spokesman for Clean Energy Works, a coalition of more than 60 groups that includes big names such as the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund. "Our mistake was miscalculating . . . how far into the Senate it went."
Looking back, some environmentalists say their problem was timing; once the economy perks up, their logic goes, prospects will improve. Others blame implacable Republican opposition (though a number of conservative and coal-state Democrats also balked), or a president who they say didn't push hard enough and focused first on issues such as health care and financial regulation. The White House blames them back, for not winning any Senate Republicans over to support the climate bill.
But some activists from smaller groups say the problem is within environmentalism itself. To them, the Senate defeat showed that green groups don't have enough of Washington's two currencies of power: money and angry voters. To them, it's significant that no senator seems in danger of being voted out of office this November for denying the environmentalists the climate bill they wanted
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/29/AR2010082903699_2.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2010082903726
Yep, they were chumps. Washington is corrupt, in the Washington SOP if you and your cause dont have the bucks you don't play.
Some big cheese GW sceptic has done an about turn. I didn't catch his name but he has a new book out explaining his reasons. He must have discovered that GW sceptics are all reading Playboy, Autocar and Reader's Wives and there's no money to be got out of them with GW scepticism.
August 30, 2010
Review Finds Flaws in U.N. Climate Panel Structure
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations needs to revise the way it manages its assessments of climate change, with the scientists involved more open to alternative views, more transparent about possible conflicts of interest and more careful to avoid making policy prescriptions, an independent review panel said Monday.
The review panel also recommended that the senior officials involved in producing the periodic assessments serve in their voluntary positions for only one report — a statement interpreted to suggest that the current chairman of the climate panel, Rajendra K. Pachauri, step down.
Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, has been struggling to make the United Nations the main stage for addressing climate change. Errors in the 2007 assessment report, including a prediction that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, have threatened to overshadow the United Nations’ message that climate change is a significant threat requiring urgent collective action.
“I think the errors made did dent the credibility of the process,” said Harold T. Shapiro, a former president of Princeton University and professor of economic and public affairs there. Being more open about the process will help the report withstand the public scrutiny it now endures, Mr. Shapiro, the chairman of the review committee, told a news conference.
Although there is widespread scientific consensus that human activity is heating the planet, critics used the mistakes — which emerged at the same time as the unauthorized release of hundreds of e-mails from a climate research center in Britain — to question all the science involved. The e-mails opened prominent climate scientists to charges that they had manipulated some data. Numerous investigations have largely cleared the scientists.
The review committee, which did not evaluate the scientific conclusions made by the United Nations panel, said the way the panel went about its work was “successful over all.”
The review committee’s major recommendation is that, after nearly 20 years of periodic reports produced by scientists volunteering their time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should become a more professional organization, paying salaries to its top management. The panel shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore in 2007.
The committee noted that some climate panel leaders had been criticized for public statements perceived as advocating specific policies. “Straying into advocacy can only hurt I.P.C.C.’s credibility,” the report said.
It also suggested that the panel revise the way it rates doubts about some of the science, that the process of choosing the scientists who write the report be more open and that the panel require that any possible conflicts of interest be revealed.
Mr. Pachauri himself has been accused by two British newspapers of profiting from his position by accepting large consulting fees. An independent assessment by KPMG auditors released this month showed that he had, as he claimed, turned over all such fees to a nonprofit organization he founded, the Energy and Resources Institute. The Sunday Telegraph has since apologized to him for the allegations.
The review committee suggested that the top eight officials involved in producing the assessments step down every eight years, hinting that Mr. Pachauri, who has served since 2002, should not direct the fifth assessment report, due in 2013-14.
Asked if he would resign, Mr. Pachauri said that he wanted to see through the reforms but that the ultimate decision lay with the member states. Representatives of the 194 such states that control the panel are scheduled to meet in South Korea in October.
Initial reaction from scientists to the review by the InterAcademy Council, a multinational organization of science academies, was positive. “These are solid recommendations that people would agree with,” said Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria and longtime panel author.
In the review process for the 2007 report, some 90,000 comments were submitted. The overwhelming number contributed to the fact that a scientist’s offhand remark in an interview about the Himalayan glaciers made it into the final report, Mr. Shapiro said.
Hans von Storch, a climate researcher at the Institute of Meteorology at the University of Hamburg and a frequent critic of the climate panel who has called on Mr. Pachauri to resign, said past mistakes tended to dramatize the effects of climate change.
Carrying out the recommendations would make the climate panel much less aloof and help the climate change debate, Dr. von Storch said. He added, “I am pretty optimistic that all this will lead to a much more rational and cooled-down exchange.”
Perhaps the leading anti-climate change skeptic has been reading this thread. Because the guy, Bjørn Lomborg whom the anti-climate change folks have been relying upon to support their opinions has recently changed his own opinion on climate change.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/30/bjorn-lomborg-climate-change-u-turn
Quote:The world's most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and "a challenge humanity must confront", in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.
Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled "sceptical environmentalist" once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN's climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.
But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. "Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century," the book concludes.
Lomborg has defected to the other side, eh? My, my, Massagato, in whatever user hell he is currently residing in, must be devastated.
Global Warming is not science. It is a guess. It has support from some people who think that it will be good for the world if we act as though it were fact, even though it is not. I know some who have changed their mind based exactly on that principle...so what if it is wrong, cutting back on carbon will be good anyway. Wait till we get the bill. Or the next glacial advance.
@Ionus,
Ionus wrote:Global Warming is not science. It is a guess. It has support from some people who think that it will be good for the world if we act as though it were fact, even though it is not.
Global Warming is a fact. The degree to which human activities are contributing to it is still debatable.
@rosborne979,
How can you say that when many climate stations have been checked and their accuracy is not great, in fact they are lousy. Have you seen this map? In fact, just look at all the orange and red dots, which indicates the margin of error is 2 degrees C or more for all of those, which is way more than half the stations in the United States alone.
@okie,
Because short term data is irrelevant. Only long term trends are meaningful. The long term data is clear. The earth is in a warming trend which is many thousands of years old. Minor fluctuations within centuries are common but they don't change the long term trend at all.
The simple fact is that we are approaching a temperature peak which has been in the making for thousands of years, and once we hit that peak, the temps are going to drop off and we're going to return to a glacial period, and there's nothing we can do about it.
The amount of carbon we add to the atmosphere slightly increases the trend which is already in place but it serves only to bring us more rapidly to the peak. The peaks are very sharp and consistent, indicative of strong environmental processes which are very unlikely to be affected by atmospheric carbon, no matter how much we dump into the system.
I've posted this image many times before, but everyone ignores it because they would rather argue politics than recognize the simple truth. But that's ok, this entire discussion is purely academic, because nothing we can do will change the fact that global temperatures are going to do again what they have done repeatedly for the last 400,000 years. If humans disappeared from the planet tomorrow, this trend would still happen. And if we burn every tree and every drop of oil on the planet it'll still happen.
@rosborne979,
Quote:The simple fact is that we are approaching a temperature peak which has been in the making for thousands of years, and once we hit that peak, the temps are going to drop off and we're going to return to a glacial period, and there's nothing we can do about it.
That doesn't even make sense ros.
When the temperatures start to drop then we can tell where the peak was.
There is no magically peak that will cause them to drop after it hits the peak.
The problem we are seeing ros is that what in the past was a long term warming trend that would have taken thousands of years is now happening in a much shorter time frame. That means we will be at the peak sooner than natural forcings would cause the start of a glacial period. So when nature isn't ready to cool us we can't do much but continue to warm.
@parados,
There's a lot more knowledge behind that graph than what I posted here. See the following thread for previous discussions on this:
http://able2know.org/topic/92381-1
More good reading:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/story2.html
@rosborne979,
That's pretty simplistic stuff ros. There are positive and negative feedbacks.
If you increase the positive feedbacks they will overwhelm the negative feedbacks. But you are ignoring this when you claim there is nothing that can be done to prevent the natural cycle.
@parados,
The cycle in the ice core data is clear Parados. This isn't complicated. The thermohaline cycle will be shut down when the temperature reaches a certain point, and then the downward trend will be overwhelming.
@parados,
Parados, examine again the graph previously posted by rosborne79.
Notice that global temperature peaks have risen to
largest peaks about 325,000, 240,000 years, and 125,000 years ago. The contemporary peak is less than the previous three, despite the fact that CO2 atmospheric density has increased steadily over the last 100 years to its contemporary peak.
Why do you think the contemporary year temperature peak is
less than its three predecessor peaks, but the contemporary CO2 peak is
greater than it has been over the same 300,000 period?
@rosborne979,
Quote:Global Warming is a fact.
Based on what trending ? What periods of time are being compared ? How faulty is the data ? What other possibilities were considered ?
@rosborne979,
Quote:Only long term trends are meaningful.
Does it surprise you that the only period of time on your graph is in an Ice Age ? Compared to the average during an Ice Age, wouldnt you expect the planet to be warmer ? How is that an indicator of the planet getting warmer, rather than just returning to normal, in which case it might still be far colder than average.
@parados,
Quote:what in the past was a long term warming trend that would have taken thousands of years is now happening in a much shorter time frame.
Maybe measurements are being taken more often ? Perhaps ?
Quote:That means we will be at the peak sooner than natural forcings would cause the start of a glacial period.
If that were true, and it isnt, would you prefer a warmer planet or a kilometre of ice over all the nuclear powers ?
@parados,
Quote:If you increase the positive feedbacks they will overwhelm the negative feedbacks.
Says who ? Maybe in your imagination but it is a self correcting system. Do you know what that means ?
@rosborne979,
rosborne979 wrote:
Because short term data is irrelevant. Only long term trends are meaningful. The long term data is clear. The earth is in a warming trend which is many thousands of years old. Minor fluctuations within centuries are common but they don't change the long term trend at all.
I agree with you, rosborne979, but when you have global warming fanatics making huge political policy decisions around the world based upon short term data, I believe it is appropriate to debunk their short term data when the data are proven to be inaccurate and unreliable, and that is what my posted weather station map and legend clearly show.
