I think that there is substantial evidence that the earth has warmed up since 1750, just as there is evidence of many previous >>
cycles of heating and cooling.
I don't see any evidence that his anything to do with man-made (anthropogenic) environmental changes, let alone CO2 emissions.
Oh no? Ever heard of the industrial revolution, London was the most polluted city in the world back in the 1800s because of, you
guessed, people burning coal to keep warm and for industrial purposes and it's just been getting worse since then. Humans are the
only animal that fouls its own nest and we're now copping the consequences.
A fraction of a degree warming since 1860 is nothing to get steamed up about! Get real!
What consequences?
It seems to be just another one of those populist doomsday scenarios, a
bit like the Y2K bug, global cooling, GE foods giving us two heads, etc. Simple argument (understandable by the general
population), extreme projections of dire consequences as "possible scenarios", huge error bars, all the fault of big business,
etc etc.
There is no debate in the scientific community regarding global warming (it's occurring), its causes (CO2 emissions from heavy
industry, cars etc...)
Yes debate there is, my son.
Here is a small sample ...
A Sample of Experts' Comments About The Science of "An Inconvenient Truth"
Al Gore, Global warming, Inconvenient Truth
By Tom Harris, Natural Resources Stewardship Project
Tom Harris is an Ottawa-based mechanical engineer and Executive Director of Natural Resources Stewardship Project. He can be reached
at ***@canadafreepress.com
Tuesday, November 7, 2006
Dr. Chris de Freitas, climate scientist, associate professor, University of Auckland, New Zealand: ”I can assure Mr. Gore that no
one from the South Pacific islands have fled to New Zealand because of rising seas. In fact, if Gore consults the data, he will see
it shows sea level falling in some parts of the Pacific.”
Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner, emeritus professor of paleogeophysics & geodynamics, Stockholm University, Sweden: “We find no alarming sea
level rise going on, in the Maldives, Tovalu, Venice, the Persian Gulf and even satellite altimetry if applied properly.”
Dr. Paul Reiter, Professor - Institut Pasteur, Unit of Insects and Infectious Diseases, Paris, France, comments on Gore’s belief
that Nairobi and Harare were founded just above the mosquito line to avoid malaria and how the mosquitoes are now moving to higher
altitudes: “Gore is completely wrong here - malaria has been documented at an altitude 2500 m - Nairobi and Harare are at altitudes
of about 1500 m. The new altitudes of malaria are lower than those recorded 100 years ago. None of the “30 so called new diseases”
Gore references are attributable to global warming, none.”
Dr. Mitchell Taylor, Manager, Wildlife Research Section, Department of Environment, Igloolik, Nunavut, Canada: “Our information is
that 7 of 13 populations of polar bears in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (more than half the world’s estimated total) are either
stable, or increasing …. Of the three that appear to be declining, only one has been shown to be affected by climate change. No
one can say with certainty that climate change has not affected these other populations, but it is also true that we have no
information to suggest that it has.”
Dr. Petr Chylek, adjunct professor, Dept. of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada:
“Mr. Gore suggests that Greenland melt area increased considerably between 1992 and 2005. But 1992 was exceptionally cold in
Greenland and the melt area of ice sheet was exceptionally low due to the cooling caused by volcanic dust emitted from Mt. Pinatubo.
If, instead of 1992, Gore had chosen for comparison the year 1991, one in which the melt area was 1% higher than in 2005, he would
have to conclude that the ice sheet melt area is shrinking and that perhaps a new ice age is just around the corner.”
Dr. Gary D. Sharp, Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study, Salinas, California: “The oceans are now heading into one of their
periodic phases of cooling. … Modest changes in temperature are not about to wipe them [coral] out. Neither will increased carbon
dioxide, which is a fundamental chemical building block that allows coral reefs to exist at all.”
Dr. R. M. Carter, professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia: “Both the Antarctic and
Greenland ice caps are thickening. The temperature at the South Pole has declined by more than 1 degree C since 1950. And the area
of sea-ice around the continent has increased over the last 20 years.”
Dr./Cdr. M. R. Morgan, FRMS, formerly advisor to the World Meteorological Organization/climatology research scientist at University
of Exeter, U.K.: “From data published by the Canadian Ice Service there has been no precipitous drop off in the amount or thickness
of the ice cap since 1970 when reliable over-all coverage became available for the Canadian Arctic.”
Rob Scagel, M.Sc., forest microclimate specialist, Pacific Phytometric Consultants, Surrey, British Colombia, Canada comments on
Gore’s belief that the Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB) is an “invasive exotic species” that has become a plague due to fewer days of
frost: “The MPB is a species native to this part of North America and is always present. The MPB epidemic started as comparatively
small outbreaks and through forest management inaction got completely out of hand.”
or its eventual consequences (a catastrophic change in the earth's
climate).
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha ....
The 'only' area of debate is whether the catastrophic consequences will hit us in 50 years or 15 years.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha ...
People that agitate for business-as-usual are out of step with reality and since most of them happen to be republican,
conservative or jesus freaks
The Green Fervour Is Environmentalism The New Religion?
Joseph Brean, National Post
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=07407be3-1f9f-4f41-a16a-5a286a5b374c
In his new book Apollo's Arrow, ambitiously subtitled The Science of Prediction
and the Future of Everything, Vancouver-based author and mathematician David
Orrell set out to explain why the mathematical models scientists use to predict
the weather, the climate and the economy are not getting any better, just more
refined in their uncertainty.
What he discovered, in trying to sketch the first principles of prophecy, was
the religious nature of modern e nviron-mentalism.
This is not to say that fearing for the future of the planet is irrational in
the way supernatural belief arguably is, just that - in its myths of the Fall
and the Apocalypse, its saints and heretics, its iconography and tithing, its
reliance on prophecy, even its schisms - the green movement now exhibits the
same psychology of compliance as religion.
Dr. Orrell is no climate-change denier. He calls himself green. But he
understands the unjustified faith that arises from the psychological need to
make predictions.
"The track record of any kind of long-distance prediction is really bad, but
everyone's still really interested in it. It's sort of a way of picturing the
future. But we can't make long-term predictions of the economy, and we can't
make long-term predictions of the climate," Dr. Orrell said in an interview.
After all, he said, scientists cannot even write the equation of a cloud, let
alone make a workable model of the climate.
Formerly of University College London, Dr. Orrell is best known among scientists
for arguing that the failures of weather forecasting are not due to chaotic
effects - as in the butterfly that causes the hurricane - but to errors of
modelling. He sees the same problems in the predictions of the recent
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which he calls "extremely
vague," and says there is no scientific reason to think the climate is more
predictable than the weather.
"Models will cheerfully boil away all the water in the oceans or cover the world
in ice, even with pre-industrial levels of Co2," he writes in Apollo's Arrow .
And so scientists use theoretical concepts like "flux adjustments" to make the
models agree with reality. When models about the future climate are in
agreement, "it says more about the self-regulating group psychology of the
modelling community than it does about global warming and the economy."
In explaining such an arcane topic for a general audience, he found himself
returning again and again to religious metaphors to explain our faith in
predictions, referring to the "weather gods" and the "images of almost biblical
wrath" in the literature. He sketched the rise of "the gospel of deterministic
science," a faith system that was born with Isaac Newton and died with Albert
Einstein. He said his own physics education felt like an "indoctrination" into
the use of models, and that scientists in his field, "like priests... feel they
are answering a higher calling."
"If you go back to the oracles of ancient Greece, prediction has always been one
function of religion," he said. "This role is coveted, and so there's not very
much work done at questioning the prediction, because it's almost as if you were
going to the priest and saying, 'Look, I'm not sure about the Second Coming of
Christ.' "
He is not the first to make this link. Forty years ago, shortly after Rachel
Carson launched modern environmentalism by publishing Silent Spring, leading to
the first Earth Day in 1970, a Princeton history professor named LynnWhite wrote
a seminal essay called "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis."
"By destroying pagan animism [the belief that natural objects have souls],
Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the
feelings of natural objects," he wrote in a 1967 issue of . "Since the roots of
our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially
religious, whether we call it that or not." It was a prescient claim. In a 2003
speech in San Francisco, best-selling author Michael Crichton was among the
first to explicitly close the circle, calling modern environmentalism "the
religion of choice for urban atheists ... a perfect 21st century re-mapping of
traditional JudeoChristian beliefs and myths."
Today, the popularity of British author James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis - that
the Earth itself functions as a living organism - confirms the return of a sort
of idolatrous animism, a religion of nature. The recent IPCC report, and a
week's
worth of turgid headlines, did not create this faith, but certainly made it more
evident.
It can be felt in the frisson of piety that comes with lighting an energy-saving
light bulb, a modern votive candle.
It is there in the pious propaganda of media outlets like the, Toronto Star,
which on Jan. 28 made the completely implausible claim that, "The debate about
greenhouse gas emissions appears to be over."
It can be seen in the public ritual of cycling to work, in the veneer of
saintliness on David Suzuki and Al Gore (the rush for tickets to the former
vice-president's upcoming appearance crashed the server at the University of
Toronto this week), in the high-profile conversion (honest or craven) of
GeorgeW. Bush, and in the sinful guilt of throwing a plastic bottle in the
garbage.
Adherents make arduous pilgrimages and call them ecotourism. Newspapers publish
the iconography of polar bears. The IPCC reports carry the weight of scripture.
John Kay of the Financial Times wrote last month, about future climate chaos:
"Christians look to the Second Coming, Marxists look to the collapse of
capitalism, with the same mixture of fear and longing ... The discovery of
global warming filled a gap in the canon ... [and] provides justification for
the link between the sins of our past and the catastrophe of our future."
Like the tithe in Judaism and Christianity, the religiosity of green is seen in
the suspiciously precise mathematics that allow companies such as Bullfrog Power
or Offsetters to sell the supposed neutralization of the harmful emissions from
household heating, air travel or transportation to a concert.
It is in the schism that has arisen over whether to renew or replace Kyoto,
which, even if the scientific skeptics are completely discounted, has been a
divisive force for environmentalists.
What was once called salvation - a nebulous state of grace - is now known as
sustainability, a word that is equally resistant to precise definition. There is
even a hymn, When the North Pole Melts, by James G. Titus, a scientist with the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is not exactly How Great Thou Art,
but serves a similar purpose.
Environmentalism even has its persecutors, embodied in the Bush White House
attack dogs who have conducted no less than an Inquisition against climate
scientists, which failed to bring them to heel but instead inspired potential
martyrs. Of course, as religions tend to do, environmentalists commit
persecution of their own, which has created heretics out of mere skeptics.
All of this might be fine if religions had a history of rational scientific
inquiry and peaceful, tolerant implementation of their beliefs. As it is,
however, many religions, environmentalism included, continue to struggle with
the curse of literalism, and the resultant extremism.
"Maybe I'm wrong, but I think all this is wrapped up in our belief that we can
predict the future," said Dr. Orrell. "What we need is more of a sense that
we're
out of our depth, and that's more likely to promote a lasting change in
behaviour."
Projections are useful to "provoke ideas and aid thinking about the future," but
as he writes in the book, "they should not be taken literally."
The "fundamental danger of deterministic, objective science [is that] like a
corny, overformulaic film, it imagines and presents the world as a predictable
object. It has no sense of the mystery, magic, or surprise of life."
The solution, he thinks, is to adopt what the University of Toronto's Thomas
Homer-Dixon calls a "prospective mind" - an intellectual stance that is
"proactive, anticipatory, comfortable with change, and not surprised by
surprise."
In short, if we are to be good, future problem solvers, we must not be blinded
by prophecy.
"I think [this stance] opens up the possibility for a more emotional and
therefore more effective response," Dr. Orrell said. "There's a sense in which
uncertainty is actually scarier and more likely to make us act than if you have
bureaucrats saying, 'Well, it's going to get warmer by about three degrees, and
we know what's going to happen.'"
© National Post 2007
Regards
B0NZ0
"...and I think future generations are not going to blame us for anything except for being silly, for letting a few tenths of a
degree panic us"
Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT meteorology professor and member of the National Academy of Sciences
