Quote: The notion that truth is being suppressed doesn't pass the laugh test.
I don't know whether this reflects non-attention to details or a personal refusal to actually look honestly at this administration. Multiple instances across departments have already been noted here.
Quote:Q: As a physicist and climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, you recently testified before Congress about ways in which the Bush administration has tried to prevent you from releasing information on global warming. Can you give us an example?
Sure. Press releases about global warming were watered down to the point where you wondered, Why would this capture anyone's interest? Once when I issued a report predicting rapid warming in Antarctica, the press release ended up highlighting, in effect, that Antarctica has a climate.
more here
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/magazine/18WWLNQ4.t.html?ex=1329454800&en=dcd663215578d2af&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
blatham -- It is amazing to me how many people look with their preconceptions and their philosophies and not with their eyes. Since this is President's Week vacation and I am home (forced their by a broken hot water tank and broken engine mounts! What well timed fun!), I am addressing some long neglected housework. I turned on the television to keep me company while I sorted junk and came upon a recent Charlie Rose interview in progress. I figured out the subject of the interview was Michael Chreighton (sp?) who was loudly declaiming some report (from the UN?) on global warming because NO SCIENTIST PARTICIPATED.
This is from the man selected by the government to put forward its position on global warming and who was rightly acknowledged by those who believe in global warming to be a NOVELIST DOING THE WORK OF A SCIENTIST>
pom, Bush is good at selecting "yes" boys to support "their" cause. Too bad more Americans can't see for themselves the obvious lack of integrity, skill and ability to handle the responsibilities assigned.
blatham wrote:Quote: The notion that truth is being suppressed doesn't pass the laugh test.
I don't know whether this reflects non-attention to details or a personal refusal to actually look honestly at this administration. Multiple instances across departments have already been noted here.
Quote:Q: As a physicist and climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, you recently testified before Congress about ways in which the Bush administration has tried to prevent you from releasing information on global warming. Can you give us an example?
Sure. Press releases about global warming were watered down to the point where you wondered, Why would this capture anyone’s interest? Once when I issued a report predicting rapid warming in Antarctica, the press release ended up highlighting, in effect, that Antarctica has a climate.
more here
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/magazine/18WWLNQ4.t.html?ex=1329454800&en=dcd663215578d2af&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Actually, Anarctic is currently cooling; Arctic is currently warming; northern USA and northern Europe have recently been cooling; the earth has warmed almost 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 106 years despite an 8-fold increase in CO2 in the atmosphere over that same period; and Mars is warming.
Mars is warming
What the hell is causing Mars to warm. It's average distance from the sun is about 141 million miles, while the earth's average distance from the sun is only 93 million miles. Aah, it must be those lousy Mars probes sent there from us humans on earth.
ican711nm wrote:
Actually, Anarctic is currently cooling.
Must be why those big chunks of ice are falling off that Continent and why all those recent penguin films show slush where there had been ice. Cooling does that.
ican711nm wrote:Actually, Anarctic is currently cooling.
plainoldme wrote:Must be why those big chunks of ice are falling off that Continent and why all those recent penguin films show slush where there had been ice. Cooling does that.
Antarctica's coast is warming, which is what increases the amount of ice falling off. At the same time, its inland is cooling. So you are both right.
Source: NASA
ican711nm wrote:
Mars is warming
What the hell is causing Mars to warm. It's average distance from the sun is about 141 million miles, while the earth's average distance from the sun is only 93 million miles. Aah, it must be those lousy Mars probes sent there from us humans on earth.
Al Gore and his entourage with all of their private aircraft are probably doing some filming there for their next documentary, ican, and of course that creates alot of CO2.
POM was referring to an interview with Michael Crichton, the Author of "The Andromeda Strain" and other like works, all dealing with basic ideas in science.
I watched the interview attentively. Crichton clearly acknowledged the watrming that has occurred and voiced the expectation that an extrapolation of an additional 0.8 degree celsius of warming in the next century appears likely. He noted that this was the consensus scientific view and that associated with it was the possibility of a rise in sea level of up to 12 inches, also the scientific consensus.
He voiced the opinion that human activity is undoubtedly a contributor to the observed effect, but that other factors including solar activity are likely contributors as well. He went on to suggest that the recent UN report was primarily the work not of scientists, but of policy analysts and brueaucrats. I can't vouch for the truth of that, but believe it does have the ring of authenticity.
Finally he noted that his only disagreement with the doomsayers was that their forecasts are not based on science - instead they are the predictions of various numerical models of geological, biospheric and atmospheric phenomena. He noted that these are coupled, highly non-linear phenomena, the very stuff of chaotic systems -- that is systems that are known scientifically to be deterministic but utterly unpredictable. Given that our best numerical models cannot even accurately predict the weather in New York next month, why should we believe that an even more complex and non-linear model of atmospheric and deep ocean currents be any more accurate on a scale of hundreds of years.
Crichton described himself as an acceptor of the phenomena of warming, but a skeptic of the exaggerated doosday scenarios being put forward by zealots. He noted the hugh cost associated with the remedies being advocated and advised a good deal more study and deliberation before we undertook to pay such a price, given the other pressing issues before us.
It sounded like good science to me, and I do have some knowledge of the subject as chaotic turbulence was the suibject of my dissertation at Cal Tech.
Of course,if you listen to the Congressional Black Caucus,global warming is actually a plot by white people to hurt blacks.
The CBC claims Global warming is actually racially motivated.
Its hard to take global warming seriously when the CBC makes a claim like this.
No, I believe the warming question is a serious one. Your anecdote suggests that instead it is the CBC that should not be taken seriously.
What a coincidence! Why, just the other day I listened to an interview with an geologist speaking on the present state of cancer research. Couldn't take my ears off him.
Bernie,
Thermodynamic Fluid mechanics is the same, whether the medium is air or water. SAme processes, same equations, same models.
george
The reference was to Chichton, he of the MD.
OK, but his argument was reasoned and factual. Certainly far more scientific than Al Gore's theatrics.
You've seen Gore's film then?
Yes. It was a gas. It confirmed my suspicion that ignorant zealotry rules that movement. Nearly every variety of sophistry was explored to create an impression wholly unsupported by science. Possibilities are far different things than likelihoods. We can't exclude the possibility that a 100KM meterorite, capable of destroying all life on earth is just a few light years distant and on what will become a collision course after interaction with other bodies as we speak. Odd that Al Gore hasn't made a film about that.
plainoldme wrote:ican711nm wrote:
Actually, Anarctic is currently cooling.
Must be why those big chunks of ice are falling off that Continent ... Cooling does that.
Big chunks of ice have been observed falling off the continent of Anarctic for many centuries long before the 8-fold increase in CO2 in earth's atmosphere. Those fallen chunks are called icebergs. They're caused by expansion of the ice fields and glaciers on the land part of Anarctic--also icebergs have been falling off of glaciers in the Arctic (e.g. off of Greenland and Alaska) for many centuries centuries long before the 8-fold increase in CO2 in earth's atmosphere.
Maybe all those CO2 exhaling penquin movies are now causing it.
[size=25]stop global penquin movies[/size]
georgeob1 wrote:Yes. It was a gas. It confirmed my suspicion that ignorant zealotry rules that movement. Nearly every variety of sophistry was explored to create an impression wholly unsupported by science. Possibilities are far different things than likelihoods. We can't exclude the possibility that a 100KM meterorite, capable of destroying all life on earth is just a few light years distant and on what will become a collision course after interaction with other bodies as we speak. Odd that Al Gore hasn't made a film about that.
Well, I'm sorry george, but I see little reason to adopt your view on either the science or the scientists working on these questions (the first because of the second). You suppose ideological motives (or self-interest) on their part but I see the ideology as resting with you and the self-interest as being overwhelmingly resident within powerful business/financial entities who have purposefully funded frontgroups and disinformation campaigns. There is much evidence to support what I've just said and little or nothing to support your claims re the scientific community who've contributed to the recent IPCC report, for example. You have notions about "bureaucrats" or about the UN which act in service of your worldview but which are uncompelling to me and which I see as common to and arising out of a certain political tradition in the US.
And I have a link to something I've just read this evening, but I will post it over on the global warming thread where this is all more appropriate.
blatham wrote:georgeob1 wrote:Yes. It was a gas. It confirmed my suspicion that ignorant zealotry rules that movement. Nearly every variety of sophistry was explored to create an impression wholly unsupported by science. Possibilities are far different things than likelihoods. We can't exclude the possibility that a 100KM meterorite, capable of destroying all life on earth is just a few light years distant and on what will become a collision course after interaction with other bodies as we speak. Odd that Al Gore hasn't made a film about that.
Well, I'm sorry george, but I see little reason to adopt your view on either the science or the scientists working on these questions (the first because of the second). You suppose ideological motives (or self-interest) on their part but I see the ideology as resting with you and the self-interest as being overwhelmingly resident within powerful business/financial entities who have purposefully funded frontgroups and disinformation campaigns. There is much evidence to support what I've just said and little or nothing to support your claims re the scientific community who've contributed to the recent IPCC report, for example. You have notions about "bureaucrats" or about the UN which act in service of your worldview but which are uncompelling to me and which I see as common to and arising out of a certain political tradition in the US.
This has been the case from the outset, Bernie. George, supposedly a man with some kind of an academic background, engages in sly and not so sly disception. His is chicanery, sophistry on a grand scale.
