Thursday, April 05, 2007

The scientific consensus on global warming

Global warming petition and explanation.

3 comments:

  1. Watch the British documentary called the Great Global Warming Swindle on YouTube. The first 20 minutes alone are enough to debunk so-called global warming. It features real scientists and even a founder of Greenpeace.

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  2. Yeah, cause we all know how well Channel 4's last documentary, The Root of All Evil involved a serious look at the issue of religious belief.

    The Greenpeace co-founder you're referring to, Patrick Moore, is a well-known lobbyist on behalf of numerous forestry, mining and even energy companies:
    In 1991, as his farm was going under due to a salmon glut, he joined the board of the Forest Alliance of British Columbia, a group created by the timber industry to address the accusations of environmentalists. There, he saw his role as a mediator. He proudly points to his stubborn - and ultimately successful - insistence that the industry soften its resistance to national parks and government regulation. At the same time, however, he was attacking the eco crowd, proclaiming that "clear-cuts are temporary meadows."

    Moore's enemies have a simpler explanation for his conversion: revenge. After all, he left Greenpeace amid complaints about an autocratic leadership style and abrasive personality. When it became obvious that he lacked enough votes to keep his seat on the board of directors, he went off to farm fish. When that didn't work out, he joined the loggers.
    (source link)

    He's a petty and classic "sell-out", in the sense that he now works for the people he used to fight against, so using his "old credentials" means very little, like me continually referring to Paul as a Pharisee rather than as a "former Pharisee turned Christian".

    In this case, one of the scholars interviewed was so badly misrepresented through "creative editing" and taken out of context that he has threatened to sue (plus see here). They make him look like a climate change denier, which he is most certainly not.

    To take just one of the arguments in the film:
    "If greenhouse warming were happening, then scientists predict that the troposphere (the layer of the earth's atmosphere roughly 10-15km above us) should heat up faster than the surface of the planet, but data collected from satellites and weather balloons doesn't seem to support this."

    This is flatly false. The lower stratosphere has shown some recent negative trending, and only the troposphere has shown upward trending. It must be remembered by those ignorant of the science that surface, sea and air temperatures are all plugged into climate models to deduce climate change, and viewing one component by itself is dishonest. Nonetheless, they lie about the troposphere's data.

    To expose the inaccuracies of the film, it is smart to head to one of the best blogs out there on the subject, Real Climate, whose scientist-authors refer extensively to the peer-reviewed literature. Something that groups funded by Exxon, and people like Moore, tend not to do, curiously enough.

    But, people like yourselves will continue to use your selective skepticism towards all issues conservative, without asking where the money points -- with the billions from corporations, or those doing the research on relatively small peanuts and coming to consensus?

    Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8).

    The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies' members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9).

    The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.
    (source link)

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  3. Anonymous does blog searches and posts this boilerplate left-wing garbage. They're being exposed as the wicked morons they've always been, and their freaking out.

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