White House repeatedly edited global warming reports

Can anyone answer why we still cling to the hotly debated slogan of "Global Warming". This simply pits big business their scientists, and their economists against environmentalists, the environmentally conscious and their scientists against one another in a debate that centers around, what many would consider, a non-issue.
Whether this warming trend is the result of manmade influences and factors, or if it's merely a cyclical variance that we would have experienced if we were as old as the hills, conveniently makes this an issue, yet again, of us against them.

Global warming has it's grounding in science, irrespective of the individual's personal feelings toward it. Science is telling it's natural, science is telling us it's us. Why can't we abandon Global Warming, and deal with the fact that we are polluting the land, air and water that we live in and depend on.

Is it such a mental obstacle to realize that if we continue in this fashion, we'll be breathing contaminated air, planting food in contaminated soil, and drinking contaminated water?
--or is the solution to simply continue polluting, but just learn how to filter the **** from the good stuff?

Candid - Are you aware that by virtually every measure the US is cleaner today than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago? Our water, air, and soil are all measurably cleaner, and we have more forest cover than we did 100 years ago.

The reality is that the early stages of industrial growth are the dirtiest. If you want to help reduce pollution globally, the best way to do so is to help those nations that are in the early stages of industrialization to move through those stages quickly, and help them adapt more modern, cleaner methods of making their widgets and fueling their economies.

I am very much afraid that Cyclopichorn has just skimmed the surface of the global warming conundrum. He dismisses Crichton as a "fiction writer". He is certainly a fiction writer but in his book, which I am certain Cyclo has not looked at, he includes objective scientific data from many sources including but not restricted to- the United States HIstorical Climatology Network. Now, if Cyclo can show that Crichton has manipulated the data, I would be most eager to hear.

However, If Cyclo cannot show that, he must note the following:

PPP. 369-381- "State of Fear"

New York, NY- 1930-2000

Average Temperatures Fahrenheit

1930--54 degrees

1999- 55 degrees

and

West Point, NY

1930- 51.5 degrees

1999- 51 degrees

and

Albany NY

1930- 48.25 degrees

1999- 47.25 degrees.

The question is then raised if we have GLOBAL WARMING. GLOBAL---How can Albany be actually getting cooler, West Point( quite close to NY) be staying almost even and NY City gaining temperature?

New York and Albany are only a hundred forty miles apart. THEIR CARBON DIOXIDE LEVELS ARE IDENTICAL, YET ONE GOT WARMER AND THE OTHER GOT COLDER. At least one study suggests that the half of the observed temperature change came from land use alone. If that's true then the global warming in the last century is less than three tenths of one degree.


The New York, New York type of heat gain( l Degree) over the last 70 years has been named the "Urban Island Heat Effect"

Here are some additional locations that are 'SUFFERING" under the blasts of Global Warming--

all of them from 1930 to 1999 as per the US HIstorical Climatologal Network.

McGill, Nev--48 to 47 F.

Guthrie, Ok- 60.5 to 60 F

Boulder, CO- 50.1-50 F

Truman. MO- 57 to 55 F.

Greenville SC 61.5 to 60 F

Ann Arbor Mich 49 to 48 F


The latter locations appear to be waiting for the next " Ice Age"

One poster asks us to trust an oil industry guy and another says we should read a novel to find out what's really going on. Another says he trusts scientists as much as he trusts politicians.

I'm beginning to understand the conservative mindset a bit better now...

Re: The devil's in the details...


FYI, here's some examples:

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/06/07/politics/20050608_climategraph.html

If you are willing to debate global warming, you must understand that you cannot just cherry-pick temperatures less than 100 years apart from various locations to demonstrate a point. Global warming doesn't mean that every location on Earth is getting warmer - it means that on average, the global climate is getting warmer.

And very slowly, too. Check out the following charts:

150-year average
1000-year average
450,000-year average
500,000,000-year average

Take from those charts what you will. But just remember, a 0.5-degree difference can cause much damage.

However, I am sensitive to Cyclo's depiction of Crichton as a fiction writer( although anyone who has looked at his book "State of Fear" will find that he has been most diligent in his referencing to valid scientific sources) therefore I will show that there are other quite serious problems with the linkage of "global warming" and "Climate Instability" to CO2 alone.

Therefore I will reference several other sources- Completely science based, of course.

Dr. Sallie Baliunas, PHD is a senior scientist at George C. Marshall institute and host of TechCentral Station.com

She has written- "Warming up to the truth: The real story about Climate Change"

http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/HL758.cfm

Briefly, Dr. Baliunas says:

"Scientific facts gathered in the past ten years do not support the notion of catastrophich human-made warming as a basis for drastic carbon emission cuts"

"The NASA satellite data and the ballon data recognizes some short term variations probably due to El Nino, La Nina, volcanic eruptions, but ONE DOES NOT SEE THE DECADES LONG HUMAN CAUSED WARMING TREND PROJECTED BY CLIMATE MODELS."

and

"The small surface warming must be warming for some other reason, likely natural influences, The data here, from NASA and NOAA sources, is that the layer of air from one to five miles in altitude is NOT WARMING THE WAY COMPUTER SIMULATIONS SAY IT MUST WARM IN THE PRESENCE OF HUMAN ACTIVITY. The surface data must be warming from natural effects, because the human made warming trend MUST APPEAR both in the low troposphere and at the surface. ALL MODELS ARE IN AGREEMENT WITH THAT.

So. continues Dr. Baliunas, if the surface data ae warming for a natural reason, what might that be?

"Over the past half century, the sun has become very active, it is more active that it has been for 400 years. Therefore, the sun is likely at its brightest in 400 years"



Dr. Baliunas goes on to say that if the drive by the Kyoto type cuts were to be successful and adopted by the US, even in the face of the doubtful causes of "global warming", the GDP in the USA would be cut by TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS, SPECIFICALLY 2.7 TRILLION IN THE NEXT TEN YEARS ACCORDING TO A STUDY FROM YALE UNIVERSITY."

It may very well be that we will be saved by Hillary Rodman Clinton. If she is the President in 2008, I KNOW she is very very sensitive to the issue of "global warming" and will not shirk her duty to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol EVEN IF MILLIONS OF US JOBS ARE LOST DURING HER TERM OF OFFICE.

Well, at least we know what you're really concerned about: The idea that doing something about global warming may cost a few jobs...

The debate here is just people highlighting different extremes of the same general consensus.

Reasonable people will readily agree that the environment must be protected. They will also agree that causing millions to starve to do it is the wrong way. There's no shortage of middle ground here.

Some people may be put out of jobs in high-polluting industries in attempts to clean things up. But other will gain jobs in low-polluting industries as they gain strength. The environment will not be saved overnight in one fell swoop from on high. But, assuming reasonable people win in this argument, it will get incrementally better as time and willpower allow.

Arguing against points of view by pointing out their most extreme consequences does nobody any favors.

I do not think that D'Artagnan read my post. If he had,he would learn that I predicted that Hillary Rodham Clinton would save us all from Global Warming because she would not be concerned about the loss of a "few" jobs. A 2.7 Trillion GDP fe jobs according to the Yale U. Study.

Joeljpk --are you for real? You issue an edit about not cherry picking and then you do the same thing?

If you go to YOUR LINK and reference the temperature chart for NOT 150 YEARS AGO BUT ONE THOUSAND YEARS AGO YOU WILL FIND THAT THE TEMPERATURE 1000 YEARS AGO IS THE SAME AS IT IS NOW. You obviously would not claim that the Vikings had "steam engines" in Greenland during the "WARM PERIOD" between 800 and 1200 AD would you?

And . your throwaway, unsubstantiated comment about "causing millions of people to starve" has no basis in fact.

I notice that neither you or D'Artagnan BOTHER to attempt to refute the points made by Dr. Baliunas concerning the difference of temperature readings made on the surface and those made by NASA in the atmosphere and her theories( She is an expert on the radiation of the Sun) about warming caused by the increase in the sun's activity. I have found that some try to deny that alternative explanations exist by denying that those explanations have been made.

Rebut the temperature readings given by Crichton and rebut Dr. Baliunas or admit that you can't and must allow their ideas to stand.

Re: The devil's in the details...

Thanks! Yes, I find it about as I suspected. Probably seems nefarious to people who want to find fault with anything the Bush administration does, or with any global warming "true believers", but to me it looks like he was just tempering the language to assert the uncertainty that actually exists.

What an incredibly reasonable statement. Are you lost? ;-)

I am still waiting for joeljkp to substantiate his statement about "causing millions of people to starve" but I find that the left is fond of making unsourced statements.

More Grist for the Mill...
I stumbled across this back a few years ago, and found it very interesting. Essentially, Lindzen (if you don't know who he is, you probably haven't done much reading on global climate science) et al appear to have identified a natural global mechanism for venting excess heat into space. The very possibility ought to be a source of excitement for anyone concerned about global warming. At a minimum, people ought to be concerned that NO existing climate model in use when this research was completed takes this effect into account. At the other end of the spectrum, this mechanism might actually make run-away warming an impossibility.

http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/adinfriris.pdf (bold mine)

ABSTRACT
Observations and analyses of water vapor and clouds in the Tropics over the past decade show that the boundary between regions of high and low free-tropospheric relative humidity is sharp, and that upper-level cirrus and high free-tropospheric relative humidity tend to coincide. Most current studies of atmospheric climate feedbacks have focused on such quantities as clear sky humidity, average humidity, or differences between regions of high and low humidity, but the data suggest that another possible feedback might consist of changes in the relative areas of high and low humidity and cloudiness. Motivated by the observed relation between cloudiness (above the trade wind boundary layer) and high humidity, cloud data for the eastern part of the western Pacific from the Japanese Geostationary Meteorological Satellite-5 (which provides high spatial and temporal resolution) have been analyzed, and it has been found that the area of cirrus cloud coverage normalized by a measure of the area of cumulus coverage decreases about 22% per degree Celsius increase in the surface temperature of the cloudy region. A number of possible interpretations of this result are examined and a plausible one is found to be that cirrus detrainment from cumulus convection diminishes with increasing temperature. The implications of such an effect for climate are examined using a simple two-dimensional radiative-convective model. The calculations show that such a change in the Tropics could lead to a negative feedback in the global climate, with a feedback factor of about -1.1, which if correct, would more than cancel all the positive feedbacks in the more sensitive current climate models. Even if regions of high humidity were not coupled to cloudiness, the feedback factor due to the clouds alone would still amount to about -0.45, which would cancel model water vapor feedback in almost all models. This new mechanism would, in effect, constitute an adaptive infrared iris that opens and closes in order to control the Outgoing Longwave Radiation in response to changes in surface temperature in a manner similar to the way in which an eye's iris opens and closes in response to changing light levels. Not surprisingly, for upper-level clouds, their infrared effect dominates their shortwave effect. Preliminary attempts to replicate observations with GCMs suggest that models lack such a negative cloud/moist areal feedback.

This bears repeating:




Its amazing how some people here instantly attacked the credibility of the scientists and have completely glossed over the main idea of the story. People who have NO scientific training are changing reports that skilled and studied individuals who are practiced in that field have produced.
Look, its ok to allow yourself to believe that not everything the administration does is excusable or right. For Chrissakes, some of you should be getting a paycheck for how hard you're working to make these guys look good.

My "causing millions to starve" was referring to your assertion that the Kyoto Protocols would cause millions to lose their jobs and have no money to feed their families. It was agreeing with you, saying that disrupting the global economy in such a drastic manner is the wrong way to do it.

I agree. This issue is not about global warming, it's about the integrity of public officials.

Glad we are back to the central issue.

I just can't see how so many people are pro-pollution. It is amazing to hear you guys argue to allow MORE pollution...

Cycloptichorn

That's because nobody is pro-pollution. Some people advocate for environmental protection without giving any consideration to the real-world variables, costs, and trade-offs that MUST be taken into account when formulating environmental policy. Some people actually do try to recognize those necessary trade-offs, costs, etc. and attempt to make real, rational decisions in light of all the facts. That doesn't make them "pro-pollution", it makes them reasonable, rational people.