"and for your viewing pleasure for tonight..."I have an educational background in geology and geophysics.
The geology background has left me blasé about the prospects of sea levels bouncing up and down and extinctions. The geophysics has left me sceptical about computer models
And, for a time, back in the late 80s I was especially interested in climate change. That would be natural rather than man-made climate change.
One thing I realised early on was that attempting to model the Earth’s climate was just about the most difficult, maybe impossible, task that anyone could think of in natural science. The sheer number of complex variables, both terrestrial and astronomical, relationships and feed-backs is just plain scary. And if you miss out, or misunderstand, just one of them the predictive power of your model will be comparable with reading tea leaves. Creating a model that describes the past perfectly is one thing. Coming up with a simulation that tells you the future is an altogether trickier business.
One quality about the Earth’s climate that did strike me, and still strikes me, as being remarkable is not that Global temperatures have historically oscillated by a few degrees up or down but the fact that the oscillations have been so relatively limited in range. By accident or, sorry, design the Earth has taken everything thrown at it over billions of years without its atmosphere boiling off or freezing to a solid lump. That’s no small achievement.
Which is why I am more than a little scornful of every twat who appears in the media hysterically preaching that the very existence of the Earth is currently at stake. It has been at stake for 4,500,000,000 years and the probability is that it will continue to be at stake long after we are all gone.
Talk like that has more to do with the worst expressions of religious fervour than science. It’s the Garden of Eden all over again. And if we fail to head the prophets and continue with our sinful ways a globally warmed Hell awaits us all.
Fucking horseshit.
The horseshit being the tone taken, not the possibility that we might be warming things up a little, which may or may not be so.
Though it’s rarely presented as such, the case For and Against man-made global warming is relatively straightforward and could be communicated to your average non-scientist in a handful of words…
The Case For Man Made Climate Change
- Global temperature appears to be rising at a faster than natural rate
- Increased CO2 levels due to human activity may have a significant impact on that temperature
- The majority of scientists cannot think of anything else to account for the temperature rise
The Case Against Man Made Climate Change
- The climate is naturally variable
- There is no hard evidence that increased CO2 levels have a significant impact on global temperature (as opposed to temperature having a significant impact on CO2 levels)
- The supposed evidence for human produced CO2 having a significant impact on climate is circumstantial and based in large part on theories and computer models
That’s about it.
I can see how people could honourably adopt either position. My own take is that if I were on a jury I wouldn't, in all conscience, convict someone on the evidence that has been presented in support of Man Made Global Warming and am therefore obliged to be a 'denier' by default.
Under normal circumstances a scientific debate like this would get straightened out over the course of a few years. Unfortunately, the issue has become politicised by some and elevated to the status of a religion by others. So much so that when the last IPCC report was issued we were widely told in the mainstream media that 'the debate was over'.
Hmmm, well that's one way to try and win an argument.
And, just like its evil twin The Global War on Terror, Global Warming is now being used to justify measures that are much more about control and the centralisation of power than solving the problem they claim to address.
As well as being a handy excuse to centralise power, Global Warming, as with the War on Terror, is also a damn fine way to distract us from all the other fuck-ups going on at home and abroad. Forget the thousands dying from MRSA in our hospitals, the hundreds of thousands dying in Iraq or the millions in Africa, let’s spend our time talking about environmental-friendly light bulbs and bicycles instead.
For fuck’s sake
Man Made Global Warming may not be a fraud but many of the changes that will be thrust down our throats in its name definitely will be.
I can only hope that at some point people on both sides on the Global Warming issue can at least agree that the changes we permit to be imposed on our lives, by wankers, are to be genuinely worthwhile and not a pile of hysteria-driven, eco-fascist, NWO bullcrap
Sadly, the signs at the moment are not good
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And on the subject of frauds, back to The Great Global Warming Swindle for a moment.
The web has been buzzing with claims that the program included half a dozen scientists who have been clinically proven to be ‘bad’ people and that one of the other scientists in the show was hoaxed into appearing.
Without making apologies for The Great Global Warming Swindle, the ‘debunking’ itself hasn’t exactly been scrupulously honest either. The most powerful testimony in the program; relating to natural climate variability, doubts about the relationship between CO2 and temperature, and political shenanigans within the IPCC, came from scientists who have not been proven to be ‘bad’ people or spoofed.
On top of that, there’s the issue of packaging science in a populist format for the masses. I’m not a great fan of the practice but many producers of popular science documentaries admit to simplifying and ‘enhancing’ their material so that it is readily digestible to the dumbed-down fuckers who constitute the TV-viewing public.
The Great Global Warming Swindle was certainly guilty of 'enhancing' some of its evidence. As is Al Gore, as are the fuckers who have been using a picture of cute, fluffy (assuming 1,200lb flesh-eating predators can be considered ‘fluffy’) polar bears balancing precariously on chunks of ice as proof that the ice-caps are melting catastrophically. …
Eco-shiteThat would be a picture taken two and half years ago … in the middle of summer
The producer of The Great Global Warming Swindle has recently responded to criticisms of his show in a much more succinct and simplified way than I have done above. In keeping with the highest standards of his profession, he has responded to a couple of his more patronising critics in terms that can be easily understood by the non-scientific layman…
“You're a big daft cock”
“Why have we not heard this in the hours and hours of shit programming on global warming shoved down our throats by the BBC? Never mind an irresponsible bit of film-making. Go and fuck yourself”
a slightly longer, less sweary response from the producer can be found here
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14 comments:
Indeed.
It's just struck me in the last few days: this global warming malarkey is all bollocks. And even if it isn't, there's fuck all I can do about it.
The fact that Brown and Cameron are fighting to get onto the same bandwagon speaks volumes.
Greetings stranger
Yes indeed
There's a Universal Law which states that the level of Truth contained within in any given statement is inversely proportional to the number of times Tony Blair repeats it
... Brown and Cameron are busy working on their own versions
You're probably right about the climate models. I agree also that what is remarkable is not that the Earth might at some time become uninhabitable but that it has not long since become uninhabitable.
But if the long-continued viability of life on Earth appears near miraculous, that only strengthens the belief that we might very well make things unnecessarily uncomfortable for ourselves if we don't watch what we are doing.
In particular, I would say that changing the composition of a significant component of the atmosphere without considering what effect it will have is fairly stupid.
In the old days, before climate modelling became a big business, folks estimated that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration would, all other things being equal -- which obviously they will not be, raise mean global temperature by about 0.6 C.
This is not an inference from a model tuned with multiple parameters to fit someone's preconception of how the model should work. It is a simple deduction based on spectroscopy.
Is a 0.6 C increase in temperature significant? I dunno. But I don't mind if some pretty intelligent people are paid to think about that and also the possible positive or negative feedbacks that might enhance or negate the effect.
Likewise, it seems smart to consider impacts of particulate emissions, smoke from nuclear wars, synthetic chemicals in drinking water and various other potentially noxious efffects of human activity.
Possibly more important than the effect of a doubling in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration on the climate is its effect on the biosphere. The effect may be good or bad, but it will be enormous.
Why? Because plants exchange carbon dioxide for water through diffusion. Water loss is a necessary cost of photosynthesis, and photosynthesis of most plants is water limited. When they run out of water they stop exchanging gases and so stop photosynthesizing. That means, if you increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you increase plant growth because gas exchange can continue longer and faster without leading to desiccation of the plant.
Theoretically, provided the plants adapt to the change, a doubling in CO2 concentration will double photosynthetic production in most ecosystems.
That is a big change. I am in favor of some smart people thinking about what that means.
It would be best, though, if they worked out of the public eye. When discussion becomes politicized -- and I would say that name calling is proof of politicization of the debate -- nothing useful is likely to emerge.
Save the planet with your PC! http://www.localcooling.com/
Stef? I take it you're not convinced when Al Gore says that Greenland melting will cause the oceans to rise 20ft then??
Hmmm. You probably also didn't believe that Saddam Hussein was about to nuke the USA either.
I'm off to the zoo now to ask the polar bears how they manage to cope with just a slab of concrete to lie on and an outdoor paddling pool to wiggle their toes in??
I anticipate they're going to remind me of that holiday I once had at the seaside in Yugoslavia.
One more for the team. You can see my digest at http://groups.msn.com/davidskingsburycollection/globalwarmingyoudecide.msnw which took a few years to compile from many more articles. How long will it take before the actual case swings towards the truth considering since the C4 programme the pendulum has begun to return from the extreme left. The trouble is the belivers treat it like a religion and react the same as if you were dissing Allah. I'll probably do that next actually, except I'd like to see tomorrow...
"Some (currently unknown) process causes Antarctica and the surrounding ocean to warm. This process also causes CO2 to start rising, about 800 years later. Then CO2 further warms the whole planet, because of its heat-trapping properties. This leads to even further CO2 release. So CO2 during ice ages should be thought of as a "feedback"."
I guess, one think that is currently unknown as well is:
How the fuck did this "feedback" stop.
I guess magic and an intelligent designer are valid explanations.
@tony
Well, quite.
The record suggests that some other factor both started and stopped past temperature rises, feedback or no feedback.
If I were a C02=GW advocate (as opposed to GW=CO2) I'd probably stop referring to that ice core data...
@david
I've just had a look at your collection and one of the issues it brought to mind is the sea level thing...
A couple of points worth bearing in mind about sea level that aren't usually communicated to 'lay' people by the GW lobby
Sometimes its not the sea level that moves up or down - it's the land. Continents and islands move up and down too.
Sea level is not the same all over the world. The earth is not an homogeneous sphere and differing parts of its surface are subject to differing gravitational 'pulls' - the surface of the sea includes some fairly hefty peaks and troughs that only started being identified with the implementation of GPS technology
So when folk start talking about past sea level changes they're best digested with a minimum of two pinches of salt
@sam - you've got my number.
And be careful with those polar bears - they're one of the few creatures on this planet known to actively stalk people as prey. They're vicious fuckers.
@Lucretius
I'd agree with pretty much everything you took time to say here. And I don't believe that the majority of people expressing scepticism about Man Made Global Warming are advocating complacency about the way we treat the environment. I certainly don't.
But it's increasingly clear that there are many individuals and organisations who have absolutely no problem with ramping up hysteria about GW to serve their own objectives. They're the people I have a big issue with, not the majority of ordinary decent folk who are waking up to the fact that some things have to change.
If it's a conspiracy, who profits?
The word Conspiracy, I think, gives the wrong impression
but the kind of people and groups who would benefit include
- Oil companies looking to sell less oil but at a higher price...
- Anyone with an anti-industrialist or anti-humanist agenda...
- People who enjoy crusades because it makes them feel important...
- Any groups of bastards who get hard thinking about running the world through multinational organisations they control
that's just for starters
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