Chilling the Global Warming Fears - Brookhaven National Laboratory Study

Midnightblue said:

I do think Inhofe's opposition to environmental responsibility may have something to do with the fact that his biggest supporters are the oil and gas industries

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Can't sell big, gas guzzling SUV's with all that pesky global warming, now can we?

The evidence for Global warming seems pretty convincing to me.

yossarian22 said:

2: Carbon Dioxide has an extremely narrow absorption band. The sun does not output very much of that absorption band.

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I'm not at all sure what this means, and maybe you can explain it more fully. I especially don't understand "output" used as a verb like this, or what the point of your statement is. Are you saying that an increase in atmospheric CO-2 does not result in significant warming of the atmosphere?

wednesday said:

So the fact that Greenland is melting is not significant, or is it overblown garbage?

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Please, I can show you the thickening of Antarctica and the growth of glaciers, but that does not prove that global warming does not exist...
Also, there appears to be a magma upwelling under Greenland, which may have caused this. And the northern icecap was never very stable to begin with.

Autodidact said:

yossarian: Senator Inhofe has no credibility on this issue. He's either a crackpot or a big liar-head, as far as I'm concerned. So you need to cite some other source, an unbiased scientific resource. It's about like citing AIG or worse, Kent Hovind, re: evolution. Here's what wiki

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He quotes a paper inside his article.

That sounds pretty consensus-like to me.

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So, because a bunch of highly politicized organizations believe in global warming, its true? The whole "credibility" cuts both ways, as does natural variation.

Autodidact said:

I'm not at all sure what this means, and maybe you can explain it more fully. I especially don't understand "output" used as a verb like this, or what the point of your statement is. Are you saying that an increase in atmospheric CO-2 does not result in significant warming of the atmosphere?

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Alright, CO2 absorbs mostly in the infrared. The sun does not emit large amount of the infrared band which CO2 absorbs. This is further reinforced by large periods of history (200 years) where CO2 rises and temperature falls. CO2 lags behind temperature by at least 800 years.
The graph (hockey stick graph seen in An Inconvenient Truth) used to support the relation is highly flawed. It is based off of a very specific proxy (indirect way to determine the temperature of an area in the past). That proxy alone creates the hockeystick graph, the others were fed into a formula which creates the shape. Besides all this, the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period are both conspicuously absent from the graph. Temperature records are useless when you go back more than 40 years. Do you really think we can trust temperature data from countries who have do not know how many millions of people died in that time frame?
A basic summary is that CO2 cannot be the primary driver of climate change.
But whether we are the cause of global warming is irrelevant to my case.

Biofuels are not the answer either.
Deforestation will increase with the advent of biofuels.
Forests are our natural filters.

MidnightBlue said:

I don't think it's entirely honest to present a blog entry/press release by Mark Morano, spokesman for James Inhofe, as if it were an official publication of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

I do think Inhofe's opposition to environmental responsibility may have something to do with the fact that his biggest supporters are the oil and gas industries, from whom he received $972,973 between 1989 and 2006. He also received $337,313 from electric utilities during the same period.

In Washington, it's generally informative to follow the money.

For another view on Inhofe and Morano, see Daniel P. Schrag, "On a swift boat to a warmer world."

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Well, I would expect that a report which counters the man made global warming theory would be posted on such a website as Mr. Inhofe's. I wouldn't expect it to be posted on Greenpeace. That certainly doesn't mean that the report, the data or the conclusions are somehow tainted. If they were, you would have to say the cart was put before the horse so to speak, and there is no evidence of that being the case with thise report. As far as the money is concerned, I think that it goes both ways. Have you looked at which side of the debate is getting the most funding?

I thought the whole point of being sceptical about global warming was that you already had the facts to justify your scepticism. What do you need new facts for? Perhaps that isn't relevant to whether or not global warming is actually happening but I'll be ticked off if its suddenly acceptable to use new evidence to support a previously faulty position and then act as if it was perfectly justifiable from the beginning.

This blog post makes a basic maths error in the first sentence where it claims that there have been "An abundance of new peer-reviewed studies" when it can only have meant "One study yet to be peer reviewed". After all, there was only 1 link made available and what is the point of failing to provide other links to other studies if they existed? That would just be silly. Perhaps he was just having an optimistic day?

Regardless, if this study is right then good. I'd much rather not have to deal with carbon dioxide management and all that entails. Previously, the correct position to take was to support the theory because that is what the evidence indicated. If this new evidence shows otherwise, then we should shift our position. If it shows otherwise.

Fluffy said:

I thought the whole point of being sceptical about global warming was that you already had the facts to justify your scepticism. What do you need new facts for? Perhaps that isn't relevant to whether or not global warming is actually happening but I'll be ticked off if its suddenly acceptable to use new evidence to support a previously faulty position and then act as if it was perfectly justifiable from the beginning.

This blog post makes a basic maths error in the first sentence where it claims that there have been "An abundance of new peer-reviewed studies" when it can only have meant "One study yet to be peer reviewed". After all, there was only 1 link made available and what is the point of failing to provide other links to other studies if they existed? That would just be silly. Perhaps he was just having an optimistic day?

Regardless, if this study is right then good. I'd much rather not have to deal with carbon dioxide management and all that entails. Previously, the correct position to take was to support the theory because that is what the evidence indicated. If this new evidence shows otherwise, then we should shift our position. If it shows otherwise.

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No hiddne agenda and no conspiracies Fluffy. Just trying to spur discussion.

My personal opinion, based on the evidence, is that there is not substantial global warming, but the earths average temperature has shown a slight increase over the last fifty years. Also, that any warming that is going on is not man caused or even significantly contributed.

MidnightBlue said:

I do think Inhofe's opposition to environmental responsibility may have something to do with the fact that his biggest supporters are the oil and gas industries, from whom he received $972,973 between 1989 and 2006.

In Washington, it's generally informative to follow the money.

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As an aside, you might be interested in watching the documentary, "Who Killed the Electric Car".

yossarian22 said:

Heheh. Looks like I am not the only skeptic anymore.

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A lot of the brainiacs i admire most would agree with you.

Including the guy who wrote Jurassic Park (Michael Crichton) - I'd highly recommend his book State of Fear. It's really entertaining but the back is filled with page after page of temperature charts and raw data that will blow your mind.

Check out his senate testimony: The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming

This is just a short excerpt:


"...the 1970s. Gerald Ford is president, Saigon falls, Hoffa disappears, and in climate science, evidence points to catastrophic cooling and a new ice age.

In the first Earth Day in 1970, UC Davis’s Kenneth Watt said, “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.” International Wildlife warned “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war” as a threat to mankind. Science Digest said “we must prepare for the next ice age.” The Christian Science Monitor noted that armadillos had moved out of Nebraska because it was too cold, glaciers had begun to advance, and growing seasons had shortened around the world. Newsweek reported “ominous signs” of a “fundamental change in the world’s weather.”

But in fact, every one of these statements was wrong. Fears of an ice age had vanished within five years, to be replaced by fears of global warming. These fears were heightened because population was exploding. By 1995, it was 5.7 billion, up 10% in the last five years.

Back in the 90s, if someone said to you, “This population explosion is overstated. In the next hundred years, population will actually decline.” That would contradict what all the environmental groups were saying, what the UN was saying. You would regard such a statement as outrageous.

More or less as you would regard a statement by someone now that global warming has been overstated.

But in fact, we now know that the hypothetical person in 1995 was right. And we know that there was strong evidence that this was the case going back for twenty years.

We just weren’t told about that contradictory evidence, because the conventional wisdom, awesome in its power, kept it from us."

MichaelCrichton.com | The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming

MidnightBlue said:

I don't think it's entirely honest to present a blog entry/press release by Mark Morano, spokesman for James Inhofe, as if it were an official publication of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

I do think Inhofe's opposition to environmental responsibility may have something to do with the fact that his biggest supporters are the oil and gas industries, from whom he received $972,973 between 1989 and 2006. He also received $337,313 from electric utilities during the same period.

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That probably has much to do with his opposition.
Unfortunately, it, like many of the arguments used to defend the argument that CO2 is the primary driver of temperature change, cuts both ways

In Washington, it's generally informative to follow the money.

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Indeed.
Both sides do little but throw mud at each other, but global warming (or should it be climate change now?) has become a hopelessly politicized issuw.

!Fluffy! said:

A lot of the brainiacs i admire most would agree with you.

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Interesting link. I never knew Crichton had a stance on global warming.

Fluffy said:

I thought the whole point of being sceptical about global warming was that you already had the facts to justify your scepticism.

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It has much more to do with the utter lack of facts the other side has. Its the same thing recycled again and again.

What do you need new facts for?

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Because our climate models are hopelessly inaccurate. We need more data, Unfortunately, both sides only want data which proves their sides case.

Perhaps that isn't relevant to whether or not global warming is actually happening but I'll be ticked off if its suddenly acceptable to use new evidence to support a previously faulty position and then act as if it was perfectly justifiable from the beginning.

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Even if it does exist, we can't do anything about it.
Well, no ethical way to do anything about it.

This blog post makes a basic maths error in the first sentence where it claims that there have been "An abundance of new peer-reviewed studies" when it can only have meant "One study yet to be peer reviewed".

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I can think of two more off the top of my head.
First link is in Dutch. Apologies. Still can't find it in another language.

After all, there was only 1 link made available and what is the point of failing to provide other links to other studies if they existed? That would just be silly. Perhaps he was just having an optimistic day?

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I think there are a few more going through the peer review process.

If this new evidence shows otherwise, then we should shift our position. If it shows otherwise.

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Exactly.