500 scientists refute global warming dangers

[MechAg94]

SkunkApe, making a game of it so you can avoid having to actually prove it is really ignorant. 

It is more of the arrogant "I believe man-made global warming is true, so I don't have to prove anything" crap.

If you check the link in my post, you'll see the author provides links in each square that purport to discredit each of the arguments on the bingo board.

By the way, did you know a gun in the home is 42 more times likely to kill a family member than a criminal?

If that is your idea of a supporting fact, I think I can just assume anything else you say is fabricated also.

[Matthew Carberry]

SkunkApe, making a game of it so you can avoid having to actually prove it is really ignorant. 

It is more of the arrogant "I believe man-made global warming is true, so I don't have to prove anything" crap.

If you check the link in my post, you'll see the author provides links in each square that purport to discredit each of the arguments on the bingo board.

By the way, did you know a gun in the home is 42 more times likely to kill a family member than a criminal?

If that is your idea of a supporting fact, I think I can just assume anything else you say is fabricated also.

I read that particular "fact" as sarcasm.

[MechAg94]

I thought so also at first.  It was just a bit out of place with the rest of it.  I mean if he believes in AGW, who knows what he will believe. 

[Nitrogen]

http://www.desmogblog.com/schultes-analysis-not-published-not-going-to-be

[Sergeant Bob]

http://www.desmogblog.com/schultes-analysis-not-published-not-going-to-be

Oh yeah? Well Junkscience.com take that!

[richyoung]

You guys DO know that compared to most of Earth's history, we actually have very LOW levels of CO2 - and the Earth didn't go into thermal runaway back then, when levels were much higher...in fact, judging from the fossils, life thrived.

[grampster]

I think now's a good time to take a deep breath as no one is going to change their minds.  Let's have a couple of slugs of whatever you like to fix what makes ya feel good and we'll all promise to come back in 10 years and say "I told ya so."

[Nitrogen]

http://www.desmogblog.com/schultes-analysis-not-published-not-going-to-be

Oh yeah? Well Junkscience.com take that!

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Junkscience.com

http://skepdic.com/refuge/junkscience.html

Milloy's so-called junk science page is full of misinformation and misleading claims, and makes little effort to separate science from policy claims made by scientists. He can cite articles by scientists who support his beliefs. The hundreds who come to different conclusions are attacked for their bad motives and junk methodologies. He cites articles favorably which deny a role for analogical reasoning in science (drawing inferences for humans based on animal studies). He suggests that lawyers who sue manufacturers of harmful products are bad but the manufacturers are good. He even has a favorable reference and link to a UC Berkeley Law professor who claims that in America scientists cannot criticize Darwin.

[MechAg94]

I agree with grampster.  AGW advocates haven't proved a damn thing.  Wait a little while and see what happens.  Do more research.  Develop better models.  Come back in 10 or 20 years. 

Nitrogen, I always find it amusing that AGW advocates always play the good cop, bad cop game with posts and links.  One guy can come around say all sorts of outlandish things and get shown that he is wrong, then all the links show up with all sort of quotes and claims about how those links are BS and aren't true.  It gets pretty old.  I have gone to trouble of reading all links posted by AGW people before only to find they don't really say what they said they said and they still prove nothing.  And they were just as full of opinion and guesses as anything else.  All these threads just go around in circles.  A better use of time would be to start a thread on a specific fact or point and focus on it.  As it is, everyone runs off in 18 different directions and it goes round and round.  I would also suggest banning references to who gets money from whom or who is more credible.  Those arguments get REALLY boring.  It all really reminds of the creationist vs evolutionist arguments. 

Again, I agree with grampster. 

[Sergeant Bob]

http://www.desmogblog.com/schultes-analysis-not-published-not-going-to-be

Oh yeah? Well Junkscience.com take that!

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Junkscience.com

http://skepdic.com/refuge/junkscience.html

Milloy's so-called junk science page is full of misinformation and misleading claims, and makes little effort to separate science from policy claims made by scientists. He can cite articles by scientists who support his beliefs. The hundreds who come to different conclusions are attacked for their bad motives and junk methodologies. He cites articles favorably which deny a role for analogical reasoning in science (drawing inferences for humans based on animal studies). He suggests that lawyers who sue manufacturers of harmful products are bad but the manufacturers are good. He even has a favorable reference and link to a UC Berkeley Law professor who claims that in America scientists cannot criticize Darwin.

Yeah, well whatever. The only reason I even posted that link was because you did that drive by link posting with no comments, so I just posted the first thing that popped up on Google just to show you I could do the same thing.

Want some more?

[MechAg94]

Please Sir, may I have some more?   

[SkunkApe]

I thought so also at first.  It was just a bit out of place with the rest of it.  I mean if he believes in AGW, who knows what he will believe. 

I believe I'll have another drink.

[CAnnoneer]

Many people look at the GW theory and see different things. Politicians see a boogie-man with which to rile up mobs of supporters. Scientists see grant money for research. Econuts see a way to convert more people to their worldview. Journalists and moviemen see money. Leftists see a way to bash the "evils of capitalism". Racists and multiculturalists see a way to blame "the white man". Industry sees more taxation and restrictions, to make them "carbon-neutral". How can I possibly trust any of these groups to offer me a creditable opinion or even just objective data on the subject??

It seems I am left to form my own interpretation of the available solid information. Yeah, the ice is melting and there is some desertification. Okay, so what? Climate has always changed through history.

Even if we just limit ourselves to the small section of "recorded" history, there are wide changes in climate. Egypt and North Africa used to feed the Ancient World. Most of it became desert or semi-desert well before even the beginning of the industrial age. And yet, Egypt is still a major argicultural area.

After the Industrial Revolution, one would expect a horrible greenhouse effect, taking into account the huge deforestation of Europe and the burning of wood to produce charcoal to make steel, as well as the burning of huge quantities of mined coal in ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, and in steam engines of all sorts. Well, guess what, the 1800s instead exprerienced protracted unusually cold weather. Something does not add up.

The reality is that climate formation is very complex and even the most advanced simulations cannot predict it or weather formation. Too many variables, too complex a system of differential equations, and probably some unknown/uncontrollable factors as well, such as volcanic activity and solar activity. How can we trust these guys to tell us what the climate is going to be like in 50 years, when they cannot tell us what the weather will be within a month with any meaningful accuracy?? Even weekly predictions are often quite off. And we are expected to march happily into global socialism out of fear of their prognosticated results? No, thanks.

I'll give a simple example for the kind of twisted motivations people really have when they talk about GW. One of my younger colleagues once got into a discussion with me on the subject and offered that Hummers should be outlawed or horribly taxed because they are bad for the environment. When I offered that Hummers are a very small percentage of the motor pool and that a much larger impact in polution is produced by other means, such as old inefficient cars or junk truck or bad driving, we went along a tangent that eventually culminated into the admission that he hates Hummer owners and wants to punish them because "they are rich and don't care". Enough said.

[grampster]

Well said, CAnnoneer.

[Iain]

The reason I rarely bother any more is that these conversations are nowt but a yes man club. Grampster gets it wrong, gets corrected, then CAnnoneer gets it all wrong and Grampster nods his head.

Can anyone attempt to point out some of CAnnoneer's basic inaccuracies - or is no-one capable of looking at nonsense and seeing it, regardless of how sympathetic they are to the basic intent of the post?

We can start with an attempt at understanding the sheer difference between the CO₂ (and other greenhouse gases) emitted by 17th and 18th century populations (and only in large-ish quantities by the small percentage of industrialised peoples) as compared to over 6 billion people living on the planet right now - with a very large percentage of them industrialised and demanding more and more power etc.

Secondly - weather is not climate. Predicting overall climate is a very different procedure to predicting the weather. Crudely if I predict that the economy will grow 50% in the next fifty years, but someone in a different profession predicts the crash of a bank next month and gets it wrong - am I automatically wrong?

And why bother with the 'global socialism' paranoid conspiracy theory meme.

Anyway, I sort of enjoyed the fact that the much trumpeted (prior to publication, by Inhofe and Milloy and InMildog) 'Consensus doesn't exist' paper from Schulte will now not be published, not even by Energy and Environment. Oh noes - censorship - or perhaps it was just wrong.

[MechAg94]

Iain, the problem is quite the opposite.  You assume you are right and never diverge from that assumption no matter what anyone else says.  I have seen yours, wacki's, and others postings on the matter and none of you has yet said anything that proves AGW.  Others may never have DISproven it, but there is no reason why anyone should have to prove a disaster scenario won't happen.  The burden of proof is the on the people crying wolf. 

Not only that, but I have yet to see any real proof that even if we do believe it, that anything we can do short of stepping back 300 years will make a dent in things. 

The science is still young in my opinion.  Give it 20 years and see where things are.  I think we'll find that there are still many mechanisms we don't understand today.

[MechAg94]

One other problem with these threads is the drift in the debate.  One or more posters try to pin down the facts of one particular piece and the defense is to shift the subject to something else.  We end up going around in circles.  I think both sides are probably guilty of it. 

[richyoung]

We can start with an attempt at understanding the sheer difference between the CO₂ (and other greenhouse gases) emitted by 17th and 18th century populations (and only in large-ish quantities by the small percentage of industrialised peoples) as compared to over 6 billion people living on the planet right now - with a very large percentage of them industrialised and demanding more and more power etc.

YOU could start by explaining the fact that multiple proxies for temperature and CO2 and O2 isotope concenttrations, going back over 60 million years, show CO2 to be a LAGGING indicator of warming, if not uncoupled altogether!  How the heck does an EFFECT occure before the CAUSE?

Secondly - weather is not climate. Predicting overall climate is a very different procedure to predicting the weather. Crudely if I predict that the economy will grow 50% in the next fifty years, but someone in a different profession predicts the crash of a bank next month and gets it wrong - am I automatically wrong?

To deny that the same computer models, the same assumptions, and the same techniques are used to forcast both, and to further attempt to delink the success (or lack thereof) rates is to betray a fundamental ignorance of the problem.  There are too many variables, and far too little data, to accurately predict EITHER.  You choose to ignore that weather forecasts are for days and weeks, n0ot decades and centuries.  Just as with rifle shooting, the longer the distance, the bigger the groups.  Temperature sensing stations are not evenly distributed thoughout the earth;s crust, seas and atmophere - the susequent "adjusting" for this fact is greater than the alleged warming detected.  The proxies used for determining past temperatures are even worse. Tree ring data?  Trees don't GROW above the Artic circle, above 11,000 feet on mountains, in deserts, or in water.  Since wate covers the majority of the earth, the ttree rings tell us NOTHING about the temperature over the ocean - or the other treeless places.  Ice cores?  Better forget learning anything about the equatorial climate, the oceans, the deserts....see any probblems?
]

[CAnnoneer]

We can start with an attempt at understanding the sheer difference between the CO₂ (and other greenhouse gases) emitted by 17th and 18th century populations (and only in large-ish quantities by the small percentage of industrialised peoples) as compared to over 6 billion people living on the planet right now - with a very large percentage of them industrialised and demanding more and more power etc.

You should not just compare rates. You should integrate over the time the rates were working to produce a cumulative effect. 6 billion is an extremely recent development. Europe, North Africa, and the Near and Middle East has been deforested since ancient times. Integrate that effect over three millenia, then compare it to the effect of 6 billion, the crushing majority of which live essentially as they did 1-2 thousand years ago. The cumulative effect should be quite significant already by the 18th c., yet 19th c. experienced a mini-ice-age. Please explain that since your side professes a superior understanding of the underlying science.

Secondly - weather is not climate. Predicting overall climate is a very different procedure to predicting the weather. Crudely if I predict that the economy will grow 50% in the next fifty years, but someone in a different profession predicts the crash of a bank next month and gets it wrong - am I automatically wrong?

The underlying physical phenomena are the same. Richyoung made a good comparison with shooting groups, but the reality is even harsher, because group spread is essentially linear, whereas differential calculus is generally not. This means that small initial deflections in the model produce DISPROPORTIONATELY large errors in the final result. Anyone who has ever done numerical simulations on differential models knows that only too well.

On the other hand, if you will not use weather formation to predict climate (), then you are stuck with horribly incomplete "historical data" that correlates parameters that we don't even know if they correspond to what we think they do. The amount of guesswork done to fill the gaps borders on the ludicrous. It is like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle when you are missing 70-95% of the pieces, and yet have the temerity to insist whose picture it is we are looking at. The reality is that we know very little about ancient climate.

And why bother with the 'global socialism' paranoid conspiracy theory meme.

Please. With Robespierre, it was the aristocrats and traitors. With Napoleon, it was the interventionists. With Lenin, it was the counterrevolutionaries. With Stalin, it was the spies and wreckers. With Hitler, it was the jews and the Dictat of Versailles. Every dictatorship identifies (or fabricates) an external or internal enemy or problem, to rile up support for itself and keep people scared and in line. Often the same people who say WOT is an excuse for PA refuse to see that GW is an excuse for GS.

Let's be completely cynical and ask ourselves who gives a crap about Kyoto. If the West is further burdened with regulations and "carbon-neutral", while China blatantly disregards that rubbish and gains a larger market share, will the environment benefit? The West leadership cannot (or refuses to) make China respect something as basic and undeniable as patent law. How can we possibly hope that China will respect a Kyoto-like agreement? Sheer fantasy.

Let me tell you what is really going on here. Socialists want to cripple the West and build up the Turd World to bridge the gap in living standards and build their global cumbaya bullshit. Ideologues at high places have been ranting about this forever, in different forms. It is all part of a big movement of globalization. GW is just the ticket that can help them saddle the West with even more ridiculous "added expense", and not just the heavy industry (which has already mostly left) but light industry, and the consumer himself. That would be the single biggest indirect tax increase in history.

The situation is essentially analogous to my colleague's thinking. I told him that if polution is the problem with Hummers, then he should propose to punish/tax all those guys with old guzzlers that do 15 mi/gal or all those guys with junk trucks that stink something awful. He then said we cannot because those guys cannot afford it, while the Hummers can. So, it is not really about who polutes the most or what is good for the environment, after all.

Here is another one for you. If humanity is the cause of climate change, and modernization increases carbon emissions, then why modernize the Turd World at all? Improvements in efficiency will be a droplet in the ocean when several billion people are "promoted" to our living standard and resource consumption. If GW is correct, that will kill the planet much faster. If anything, econuts should spend their efforts at keeping the Turd World where it is and giving away contraceptives.

[richyoung]

I was trying to keep my analogy simple, but the fact is, if you can;t keep all rounds in the bull's eye at 7 yards, you SURE aren't going to at 100 yards....

[CAnnoneer]

Not going into detail serves the GW crowd. When we show how complex the science is, how limited the actual data and understanding is, suddenly human-induced GW is not a solid fact but a wacky theory, and a very shaky one at that. Then we cannot keep in line with the Goracle and his "all further discussion is irresponsible".

Here is another one for you. The same people that clamour about HIGW are the ones that also want to modernize the third world to first-world economy still based on fossil fuels past the H-peak. If the Goracle is such a genius as to invent the internet, lose to an alcoholic DUI AWOL C-student, and single-handledly save humanity from itself, how come he cannot divine what will happen to the environment when 6 billion people live like Americans, provided HIGW is such a solid fact???