Disagreements over the Science Behind Global Climate Change

[Chris]

Thanks, never saw ghg .. always saw green house gasses.

[cobraboy]

Originally Posted by Chris

Cobraboy, when you first said this, I thought you were joking and forgot it straight away as I forget most jokes. But now it seems to me that you are serious. Can we just get away from your newly defined religion for the purposes of this discussion, on the basis that I don't belong to it?

For now. But my classificastion of MMGW as a religion has legs. I outlined why MMGW is a religion. I have never seen the falacies in the argument.

Originally Posted by Chris

I do not understand the math underlying Bernoulli’s Principle. There are however two people in the house that could explain it to me if necessary. I do simplistically understand the concept that if you have a pipe with a flowing liquid or gas, and the pipe narrows, the liquid or gas increases in speed of flow. To try and joke, to apply the principle to specifically man-made global warming, I cannot figure out where the 'pipe' is So, I cannot figure out the applicability.

You missed my point. No one gets emotional when discussing REAL proven science. They get emotional when discussing religion. Like you did.

Originally Posted by Chris

Again, for me it is not a slavish adherence to the science, as I know the science is young and in many cases, not developed. For me, it is more a thing of what I see. Al Gore I think is a brave man, but I do not follow him, or anyone else slavishly for that matter.

Science is never slavish. It is fact before opinion. When opinion comes before fact, it's no longer science.

Algore is asking for media disagreeing with him to be monitored, censored and edited. I wouldn't exactly call that "brave", I call that cowardice in the face of dissenting opinion.

Originally Posted by Chris

So, I have a question .. Is there general agreement that we are seeing climate change on the planet?

If so, here is a question for those of us that are completely skeptical about man-made global warming ... in my thinking mankind and its actions is a variable that cannot be discounted. For those who say that mankind's actions is not contributing, are you not discounting a very important variable?

There has never, ever, ever NOT been climate change. THAT is not debatable. Our human experience is not even one % of the earth's experience.

But to say that man is the CAUSE of change puts makes man a LOT more important than non-man nature, and is pure human arrogance. What about climate change before man? Was that any more/less important to the world than now?

To discount or ignore the sun, THE source of our planetary heat, that science shows emperically DOES go through regular cyclical changes, is nothing more than a child putting his fingers in his ears and loudly saying "lalalalalalala" because it doesn't fit into the "accepted" argument of "settled" science.

I did ask an important, serious question: "what % of CO2 is man responsible for?" I have yet to get an answer. If CO2 is the main GHG culprit of MMGW (now called "climate change" because the evidence against long-term warming is in doubt), one would think the hard # would be prominently displayed, tattoed to the inside of the True Believer eyelids, and fully explained.

I also asked about what happens when you open a can of warm Coke vs. a can of cold Coke. I did NOT mean that in any flippant way. Physics is physics, they are provable and repeatable. I asked the question because it's fundamental to the entire MMGW "cause and effect" argument. FTR, I have been a pilot of much of my life, have a couple of thousand of hours in the sky (as I have previously posted), and have been an "observant fan" of weather for many years, and the science that encompasses it. Much of my scientific understanding of weather and MMGW actually comes from professional meteorologists, many who work for the FAA.

Additionally, if the folks who have been pushing Kyoto truly were dedicated to solving the "crisis", why did they all fly on big jets to Bali for their conclave, spewing literally tons of those nasty gasses into the atmosphere? So why should we pay attention to the single most corrupt organization on the planet, the UN?

MMGW is nothing more than a planetary "transfer of wealth" scheme to empower the UN over sovereign nations. Kyoto is nothing more than a punitive means to cripple the world's developed economies. It punishes the West, and gives China, India and the Third World, who are the REAL culprits of pollution, a pass.

And even if fully implemented, Kyoto won't do squat to prevent anything.

The best we can do, as humans, is be responsible individual stewards over our personal use of resources.

[bob saunders]

Chris for your reading pleasure and expansion of knowledge Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide - Global Warming Petition Project

[Chris]

Bob, I have to laugh! All I can say is someone somewhere is fibbing something fierce, and it aint me lol. Don't get me wrong, I'm not laughing at you .. I am laughing at the extreme difference in sets of data. I had a quick glance at the conclusions .. it is a big report. The last one says ..

"Human activities are producing part of the rise in CO2 in the atmosphere. Mankind is moving the carbon in coal, oil, and natural gas from below ground to the atmosphere, where it is available for conversion into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of this CO2 increase. Our children will therefore enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed."

Huh? Where is this place? Where I come from there is hardly any animals left outside of wild life reserves and farms and the people that are managing those areas, are having a hard time keeping the animals alive.

I guess it is because of this wonderful utopia that the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine gives us all the pertinent information for Nuclear War Survival Skills, Homeland Civil Defense complete with steel blast shelters and actions to take in the face of Nuclear Attack. I believe the main point as they say, is Not to Panic when there is a Nuclear War Attack.

Talking about Oregon, I know there are many hunters there. The fall hunting 'forecast', which I happen to know about as I have a friend who goes hunting there, says to expect a fair season .. but overall declines in populations mean that hunters may need to expand their own range of behaviors as apparently, they've experienced several years of drought in certain areas.

Again, where is this area on the earth that is on track to have far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed? Anyway, each to his own. If you like to read that kind of thing .. here is some more for you JunkScience.com -- Steven Milloy, Publisher

[Chris]

OK, I've learnt here that the Scientists that prepare the IPCC documentation should be open to scrutiny as they may just be open to a little coercion in that they have to protect their jobs and so on. So, I applied this same reasoning to the paper that Bob contributed.
With a little more Googling, this is what I found
Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine - SourceWatch

So, this paper has never been peer reviewed or indeed published by anyone else than its originator. With an annual budget of 350,000 and all the other defense books that this institute publishes, I doubt if they had any money left to do any reasonable study.

[A.Hidalgo]

Chris you beat me to it. Here is more on the The Oregon Petition.....but again, the anti-warmers will say Al Gore's minions are editing those pages.

Oregon Petition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[cobraboy]

I asked two simple questions and so far no answers.

BTW: Google should never be a substitute for edumacation. Algore may have invented the interweb, but he didn't invent truth.

[NALs]

Look at the bright side, the NYSE has been on a roller coaster ride a few times this year, but "green" stocks have been going up and up and up!

It's unbelievable. First Solar has seen a 170% increase in the price of its stock since April of this year, Foster Wheeler is up 99%, and the Shaw Group is up 147%!!!!

Those companies profit from all this environmental and global warming debates.

Hm, I wonder if the CEOs of those companies drive hybrids? Oh well...

Who knew that going green would produce so much green!

Ok, back to topic.

-NALs

[A.Hidalgo]

Originally Posted by NALs

It's unbelievable. First Solar has seen a 170% increase in the price of its stock since April of this year, Foster Wheeler is up 99%, and the Shaw Group is up 147%!!!!

Sounds to me like capitalism and free enterprise are live and well....Al Gores plan has backfired.lol

[Chris]

Let's at this stage get back to the point. This 4th IPCC report basically says that the world is warming, that it is a 'very high confidence' that mankind is responsible for a portion of the warming because of excess greenhouse gasses present as a result of what we do in our current industrialized society, and that we need to get off our duffs and do something about it in a hurry.

I would like to get closer to the DR and specifically discuss what the findings for Latin America and the Caribbean may mean for the future and what possible actions would be good to take.

Before we get there, let's answer a few of the objections to the IPCC and their organizing body, the UN, that came up here. Of course I went off to do some reading and this is what I found.

There is a lot of the history to the IPCC open on the net - including the reasoning for the time period where we thought the earth was cooling. So, for anyone interested, pro and con, google it and read .. my search was 'history of the ipcc'. They've been around in their current form since 1988, and were drawn together by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to specifically answer the question .. How much if any of Global Warming is man-made. At that time, the scientific community on the balance already agreed that Global Warming was a fact and the world needed answers.

But, lets talk about 'its all a conspiracy in order to come up with a new world government for further taxation - or, the IPCC is a corrupt group - or, its only there for more taxes - or, any of those 'it is a hoax' arguments. (I'll ignore the one of 'it is a new church and religion').

In short, this is what happens .. The Scientists writing the IPCC reports are appointed by their Governments. Not the UN, not a shadow group of conspirators somewhere, but by their Governments. The scientists are not paid for their work by the UN, but by their Governments, or it is unpaid work. The UN has a small fund to help out 3rd world researchers. The scientists are from different scientific disciplines and there are about 2,300 of them that take part in total. They do not research, but prepare their reports on the basis of peer reviewed and published research drawn from many places, including things that we are familiar as non-scientists, such as weather balloon data from all over the world. The task is to represent 'the range of scientific opinion on climate change fairly'. They provide several channels where experts can contribute data, both pro and con. The data is then sent out to be peer reviewed once again. The comments - both pro and con - on the validity of the data are open for all to see in the documentation leading to a final report. What I learnt, is that this is the biggest effort of peer reviewing scientific papers that the world has ever seen. The IPCC authoring scientists include prominent people in the field drawn from all over the world.

So, is it a conspiracy or a hoax? If I look at the list of lead scientific authors for this current report, it truly is a stretch of the imagination that prominent scientists from Germany, the US, Canada, Kenya, Austria, Chile, Argentina, Gambia, Iran, New Zealand, Romania, The Netherlands and China are all involved in a hoax or conspiracy. In my mind, it is neither a conspiracy, nor a hoax, but deathly serious scientific work. 600 Research Scientists from 40 Countries took part in the writing of the 4th report.

The climate scientists themselves say that if they were after a bigger chunk of money, they would stress the uncertainties of global warming and call for more research, instead of asking Governments to act. They also say that there is much more funding available for research that is anti-global warming, than for people that agree. They could all be rich if during the 20 years that this process has been happening, they took big oil or big business money and churn out work to 'prove' that global warming is a myth.

OK, that brings us to the end of the IPCC 'hoax or attempts at a global government and its only there for more taxes'.

For further reading and looking at the room for political interference in the IPCC's process, here is a nice opinion piece on the BBC's site by John Christy, Professor of Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama. He has contributed to all four major IPCC assessments, including acting as a Lead Author in 2001 and a Contributing Author in 2007.
And another nice summary from the BBC's site, is how the process happens, written by By Professor Martin Parry, Co-chair, IPCC Working Group II.

Professor Parry considers the 4th IPCC report as ' ... traditional science-based observation and measurement, not "arm-waving" with computer models.' and he says : "However, a new development in the Fourth Assessment is that it concludes, from an examination of 29,000 data sets, that the impacts of climate change occurring now can be observed everywhere on our planet. It is evident in its impacts on animals, plants, water and ice."

Briefly on the theory that the sun is responsible for Global Warming - again, from the BBC's site, a nice article that even lay people can understand explains the role of the sun and the science.

A final summary from the BBC's site .. The 10 arguments most often made against Global Warming and the Counter Arguments. Nice and easy reading.

(No, I don't own shares in the BBC but with all the writing that I looked at, they do have the ability to present screeds of scientific evidence in a way that you and I, the non-researching scientists can understand. All these pieces are available in a more 'scientific' form, but then, we won't understand it, will we?)


On two side notes
1. Despite the sincere efforts of some people to do everything in their power to stop a discussion of Global Warming and the probable effects on our area of the world, we will continue the conversation .. Took me a while to recognize a troll.
2. KeithR feel free to correct any factual errors .. I'm doing this rather quickly.