The only real similarity that I see is that people have to intervene in both to prevent flooding.
And yes, my libertarian soul is offended by saddling the U.S. tax payer with the cost of returning tens of thousands of people to what I consider to be an unnecessary risk. If you have to bulldoze and rebuild it anyway, why not rebuild on high ground and use the low ground for purposes that do not put human life at risk?
A valid liberal response is to have the government build high enough dams. This eliminates the unnecessary risk in returning people to their homes. The Dutch have proven that this response can work in practice. Therefore, if Al Gore advocated the rebuilding of New Orleans and a heightening of its dams, that wouldn't necessarily make him irresponsible. It would only make him a liberal, as opposed to a libertarian or a conservative. Gore's persuasion is not yours, and it isn't mine either. But there are politicians whose political persuasions differ from mine and who are still responsible people. I can admit this without breaking a prong out of my crown.
A valid liberal response is to have the government build high enough dams. This eliminates the unnecessary risk in returning people to their homes. The Dutch have proven that this response can work in practice. Therefore, if Al Gore advocated the rebuilding of New Orleans and a heightening of its dams, that wouldn't necessarily make him irresponsible. It would only make him a liberal, as opposed to a libertarian or a conservative. Gore's persuasion is not yours, and it isn't mine either. But there are politicians whose political persuasions differ from mine and who are still responsible people. I can admit this without breaking a prong out of my crown.
A valid liberal response is to have the government build high enough dams. This eliminates the unnecessary risk in returning people to their homes. The Dutch have proven that this response can work in practice. Therefore, if Al Gore advocated the rebuilding of New Orleans and a heightening of its dams, that wouldn't necessarily make him irresponsible. It would only make him a liberal, as opposed to a libertarian or a conservative. Gore's persuasion is not yours, and it isn't mine either. But there are politicians whose political persuasions differ from mine and who are still responsible people. I can admit this without breaking a prong out of my crown.
Fox, So you feel that strongly about it that you post it three times and make us waste our time and resources dealing with it when it would have been equally effective (probably more so), to just post it once, since you exasperate us repeating it? Sounds like a violation of your own argument to me.
. . . But there are politicians whose political persuasions differ from mine and who are still responsible people. I can admit this without breaking a prong out of my crown.
So if obligating other people to do the more expensive thing rather than the equally effective less expensive thing is not irresponsible, what would you call it?
username wrote:Fox, So you feel that strongly about it that you post it three times and make us waste our time and resources dealing with it when it would have been equally effective (probably more so), to just post it once, since you exasperate us repeating it? Sounds like a violation of your own argument to me.
I have no idea how it got posted 3 times. I apologize for that, but since I don't know how it happened, I don't know how to prevent it.
In early 2003, the small journal Climate Research published a paper by climate change "skeptics" Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which challenged the established view that the late twentieth century saw anomalously high temperatures. The paper didn't present original research; instead, it was a literature review. Soon and Baliunas examined a wide range of "proxy records" for past temperatures, based on studies of ice cores, corals, tree rings, and other sources. They concluded that few of the records showed anything particularly unusual about twentieth century temperatures, especially when compared with the so-called "Medieval Warm Period" a thousand years ago.
Soon and Baliunas had specifically sent their paper to one Chris de Freitas at Climate Research, an editor known for opposing curbs on carbon dioxide emissions. He in turn sent the paper out for review and then accepted it for publication. That's when the controversy began.
Conservative politicians in the U.S., who oppose forced restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, lionized the study. Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe called it literally paradigm shifting. The Bush administration attempted to edit an Environmental Protection Agency report's discussion of climate change in order to include reference to the Soon and Baliunas work. None of this should come as a surprise: The paper seemed to undermine a key piece of evidence suggesting that we can actually see and measure the consequences of human-induced climate change.
Soon mainstream climate scientists fought back. Thirteen authored a devastating critique of the work in the American Geophysical Union publication Eos. After seeing the critique, Climate Research editor-in-chief Hans von Storch decided he had to make changes in the journal's editorial process. But when journal colleagues refused to go along, von Storch announced his resignation.
Several other Climate Research editors subsequently resigned over the Soon and Baliunas paper. Even journal publisher Otto Kinne eventually admitted that the paper suffered from serious flaws, basically agreeing with its critics. But by that point in time, Inhofe had already devoted a Senate hearing to trumpeting the new study. However dubious, it made a massive splash.
Writing in the 8 July issue of the American Geophysical Union publication Eos, Michael Mann of the University of Virginia and 12 colleagues in the United States and United Kingdom endorse the position on climate change and greenhouse gases taken by AGU in 1998. Specifically, they say that "there is a compelling basis for concern over future climate changes, including increases in global-mean surface temperatures, due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases, primarily from fossil-fuel burning."
The Eos article is a response to two recent and nearly identical papers by Drs. Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard‑Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, published in Climate Research and Energy & Environment (the latter paper with additional co-authors). These authors challenge the generally accepted view that natural factors cannot fully explain recent warming and must have been supplemented by significant human activity, and their papers have received attention in the media and in the U.S. Senate. Requests from reporters to top scientists in the field, seeking comment on the Soon and Baliunas position, lead to memoranda that were later expanded into the current Eos article, which was itself peer reviewed.
Paleoclimatologists (scientists who study ancient climates) generally rely on instrumental data for the past 150 years and "proxy" indicators, such as tree rings, ice cores, corals, and lake sediments to reconstruct the climate of earlier times. Most of the available data pertain to the northern hemisphere and show, according to the authors, that the warmth of the northern hemisphere over the past few decades is likely unprecedented in the last 1,000 years and quite possibly in the preceding 1,000 years as well.
Climate model simulations cannot explain the anomalous late 20th century warmth without taking into account the contributions of human activities, the authors say. They make three major points regarding Soon and Baliunas's recent assertions challenging these findings.
First, in using proxy records to draw inferences about past climate, it is essential to assess their actual sensitivity to temperature variability. In particular, the authors say, Soon and Baliunas misuse proxy data reflective of changes in moisture or drought, rather than temperature, in their analysis.
Second, it is essential to distinguish between regional temperature anomalies and hemispheric mean temperature, which must represent an average of estimates over a sufficiently large number of distinct regions. For example, Mann and his co- authors say, the concepts of a "Little Ice Age" and "Medieval Warm Period" arose from the Eurocentric origins of historic climatology. The specific periods of coldness and warmth differed from region to region and as compared with data for the northern hemisphere as a whole.
Third, according to Mann and his colleagues, it is essential to define carefully the modern base period with which past climate is to be compared and to identify and quantify uncertainties. For example, they say, the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) carefully compares data for recent decades with reconstructions of past temperatures, taking into account the uncertainties in those reconstructions. IPCC concluded that late 20th century warmth in the northern hemisphere likely exceeded that of any time in the past millennium. The method used by Soon and Baliunas, they say, considers mean conditions for the entire 20th century as the base period and determines past temperatures from proxy evidence not capable of resolving trends on a decadal basis. It is therefore, they say, of limited value in determining whether recent warming in anomalous in a long term and large scale context.
The Eos article started as a memorandum that Michael Oppenheimer and Mann drafted to help inform colleagues who were being contacted by members of the media regarding the Soon and Baliunas papers and wanted an opinion from climate scientists and paleoclimatologists who were directly familiar with the underlying issues.
Mann and Oppenheimer learned that a number of other colleagues, including Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder, Colorado; Philip Jones of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in Norwich, United Kingdom; and Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst were receiving similar media requests for their opinions on the matter. Their original memorandum evolved into a more general position paper jointly authored by a larger group of leading scientists in the field.
Mann says he sees the resulting Eos article as representing an even broader consensus of the viewpoint of the mainstream climate research community on the question of late 20th century warming and its causes. The goal of the authors, he says, is to reaffirm support for the AGU position statement on climate change and greenhouse gases and clarify what is currently known from the paleoclimate record of the past one‑to‑two thousand years and, in particular, what the bearing of this evidence is on the issue of the detection of human influence on recent climate change.
"Several independent indices on solar activity - which are direct modern measurement rather than estimations - indicate that there has been no trend in the level of solar activity since the 1950s.'
"There is little evidence for a connection between solar activity (as inferred from trends in galactic cosmic rays) and recent global warming. Since the paper by Friis-Christensen and Lassen (1991), there has been an enhanced controversy about the role of solar activity for earth's climate. Svensmark (1998) later proposed that changes in the inter-planetary magnetic fields (IMF) resulting from variations on the sun can affect the climate through galactic cosmic rays (GCR) by modulating earth's cloud cover. Svensmark and others have also argued that recent global warming has been a result of solar activity and reduced cloud cover. Damon and Laut have criticized their hypothesis and argue that the work by both Friis-Christensen and Lassen and Svensmark contain serious flaws. For one thing, it is clear that the GCR does not contain any clear and significant long-term trend (e.g. Fig. 1, but also in papers by Svensmark).
Svensmark's failure to comment on the lack of a clear and significant long-term downward GCR trend, and how changes in GCR can explain a global warming without containing such a trend, is one major weakness of his argument that GCR is responsible for recent global warming. This issue is discussed in detail in Benestad (2002). Moreover, the lack of trend in GCR is also consistent with little long-term change in other solar proxies, such as sunspot number and the solar cycle length, since the 1960s, when the most recent warming started."
1. The planet is getting hotter.
2. CO 2 is a major greenhouse gas, and without the greenhouse effect the earth would be freezing.
3. There is little evidence for a connection between solar activity and recent global warming.
4. your call for intellectual integrity is certainly correct, but you should pull the beam from your own eye before pointing out the mote in others
Two things remain certain. First, science is never immune to political pressure - and one of the clearest signs of that sort of pressure is that scientists are driven to claim to know more than they actually do. And second, politicians and pundits will continue to speak with great authority on subjects about which they know little or nothing.
You have a good eye, Okie. Indeed, Mr. Kuvasz's chart shows that Mr. Kuvasz's own chart shows that the termperature in 1940 was the highest on the chart until 1980.
BernardR wrote:You have a good eye, Okie. Indeed, Mr. Kuvasz's chart shows that Mr. Kuvasz's own chart shows that the termperature in 1940 was the highest on the chart until 1980.
BernardR, when I pointed out one of his charts might actually oppose his conclusion rather than supporting it, I received un-repeatable accusations by Mr. Kuvasz, at which time the thread was locked until now, so you can only imagine what was posted; I don't remember to be honest. Actually, I think the sunspot graph is fascinating because it appears to show a fairly decent correlation with the perceived slight increase in temperatures in the last decade or two. Apparently believing in man caused global warming is virtually a religion now. If anyone suggests opposing evidence, wow, the wrath is breathtaking.