The American Thinker Slaps Down Global Warming

[Sukerkin]

Come along, gentlemen, calmly and without barbs is the way to discuss things with people who are not real-world friends face-to-face with you in a convivial location.

All involved at this point know that they're not going to convince the other of the rightness of their point of view and whilst 'setting the world to rights' around the table in the pub can be vastly entertaining, the internet equivalent is nowhere near as satisfying.

To be blunt, I fear that those who do not believe that the rise in average global temperatures is a real phenomenon are 'whistling in the graveyard'. It's an observed and recorded phenomenon and gainsaying the thermometer does not get us anywhere.

Neither does having a go at someone who speaks out just because they are not as pure as Jesus (and we even nailed Him to a tree). Al Gore does not need the money he makes from his activism on this issue - that's why the profits from his DVD "An Inconvenient Truth" went to charity not into his pocket. If the best his detractors can do is point the finger at his 'carbon footprint' then they have no argument of substance worth debating (lack of effective counter-points ever being the driving force behind such tangential attacks).

Saying that human input to this effect is arguable carries more water. The mechanisms involved are complex and imperfectly understood, as has been covered already.

However, certain things are given, regardless of less than solid web-links referred to earlier. One of these is that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses (including water vapour by the way) increase the amount of energy trapped in a system heated by radiated energy - that's why one of the major ways considered of terraforming Mars is to essentially build automated Smog Factories there.

So trying to counter-argue that industrialised societies waste products are not having an effect is interest-group sophistry at best. Yes, volcanoes, sub-oceanic rift activity and sundry other natural events also have a very great impact but that's not an excuse to make things worse when we can do something about our input.

Likewise, the argument that cow-farts have a greater impact that car emissions is a near-true but misleading statement to make. Agriculture is a big component of the total mass of greenhouse gases created, that's undeniable. The 'but' (or should that be 'butt'?) in this paragraph tho' is that there is not a lot we can do about that as long as we like to have burgers with our chips. We can reduce the amount of fossil fuel expenditure that goes into food production and transport but, without a huge number of very large corks, we can't do much about the byproducts of bovine digestion.

Of course, we have to be careful about what we do in well-intentioned changes in our behaviour. It has been estimated that the smog and atmospheric particulates reduction that has happened in recent decades has actually made the global warming problem worse. Whilst it had the benefit of improving ground-level atmospheric conditions and reducing the 'soot' fallout on vulnerable habitats, it also cleared the upper atmosphere (over time) allowing more radiant energy to penetrate. Swings and roundabouts and Mephistophlean deals with the Devil seem to be our lot .

At the end of the day {it goes dark :lol:} I personally believe that the juggernaut is rolling now and it's actually too late to stop the consequences of our actions in destabalising a dynamically balanced system.

Getting emissions under control and improving energy-efficiency has good effects besides it's climatological impact, so it's still worth doing, as is the related research into non-fossil fuel energy (tho' the 'burning food' solutions are a travesty of their very own). The lag effect in the climate system means tho' that by the time you see a problem developing the momentum is already strong for a tipping point incident.

Earth's history is full of these sudden reversals of trends and I am still more than half convinced that the sudden warming we are seeing now will be followed by an equally sudden cooling. It's happened before and it'll happen again, even when, as we technically are, the planet is in an Ice Age.

I always end my serious posts on this issue by referring to the Magnetic Polar Shift that is under way. As a species that is absolutely nothing we can do about that and we can even be virtuous and say that nothing we have done has affected it. The by-products of this inevitable inversion are very bad tho' and rival the worst case scenario's of temperature change. Without reliable power modern society cannot function and with the advent of near-quantum-state electronics the pole shift becomes even more devastating to our technology and energy and transport systems. That doesn't even approach the problems a global cancer and mutation epidemic will cause.

Hot-House or Ice-Age matters not in the face of this. We fry one way or the other.

 

[michaeledward]

So, just to understand, your going to base you opinion, not on the fact that they were published in a peer reviewed professional journal, but on the basis of what links show up when you google their names. OK then.

As one who is fond of telling others that they are using the ad hominem fallacy, you seem to be doing the same here. You dont like their supposed funding, therefore what they are saying must be a lie. Rather than showing counter-arguments to their assertions.

Which peer reviewed journal are you referring to?

OK. I'm looking ... and I find this.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/117857349/ABSTRACT

However, the article is not available online at the moment. From the abstract, it is not clear this is the article to which you refer.

We examine tropospheric temperature trends of 67 runs from 22 Climate of the 20th Century model simulations and try to reconcile them with the best available updated observations (in the tropics during the satellite era). Model results and observed temperature trends are in disagreement in most of the tropical troposphere, being separated by more than twice the uncertainty of the model mean. In layers near 5 km, the modelled trend is 100 to 300% higher than observed, and, above 8 km, modelled and observed trends have opposite signs. These conclusions contrast strongly with those of recent publications based on essentially the same data. Copyright © 2007 Royal Meteorological Society

This abstract does not seem to represent any conclusions being drawn concerning climate change. Rather, it is talking about measurements not seeming to be repeatable. From that evidence, one does not throw out the existing body of knowledge, but rather examines the assumptions under each of the differing experiments in attempts to normalize.


Maybe this isn't the article you mean. Perhaps, you could connect us to the article in question, rather than someones interpretation of what it says.

I could buy the article, for 25 bucks ... but so far, I don't see sufficient reason to do that. Convince me, and I will.

 

[michaeledward]

And there is this ..

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22199230/

I'm sure Al Gore is mentioned in here somewhere ... and he's to blame anyhow.

http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Balance...bs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197429704&sr=8-2

 

[tellner]

Of course all of this is Al Gore's lies and extremists who hate America...

2007 shattered records for Arctic melt in the following ways:
- 552 billion tons of ice melted this summer from the Greenland ice sheet, according to preliminary satellite data to be released by NASA Wednesday. That's 15 percent more than the annual average summer melt, beating 2005's record.
- A record amount of surface ice was lost over Greenland this year, 12 percent more than the previous worst year, 2005, according to data the University of Colorado released Monday. That's nearly quadruple the amount that melted just 15 years ago. It's an amount of water that could cover Washington, D.C., a half-mile deep, researchers calculated.
- The surface area of summer sea ice floating in the Arctic Ocean this summer was nearly 23 percent below the previous record. The dwindling sea ice already has affected wildlife, with 6,000 walruses coming ashore in northwest Alaska in October for the first time in recorded history. Another first: the Northwest Passage was open to navigation.
- Still to be released is NASA data showing the remaining Arctic sea ice to be unusually thin, another record. That makes it more likely to melt in future summers. Combining the shrinking area covered by sea ice with the new thinness of the remaining ice, scientists calculate that the overall volume of ice is half of 2004's total.
- Alaska's frozen permafrost is warming, not quite thawing yet. But temperature measurements 66 feet deep in the frozen soil rose nearly four-tenths of a degree from 2006 to 2007, according to measurements from the University of Alaska. While that may not sound like much, "it's very significant," said University of Alaska professor Vladimir Romanovsky.
- Surface temperatures in the Arctic Ocean this summer were the highest in 77 years of record-keeping, with some places 8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, according to research to be released Wednesday by University of Washington's Michael Steele.
Greenland, in particular, is a significant bellwether. Most of its surface is covered by ice. If it completely melted - something key scientists think would likely take centuries, not decades - it could add more than 22 feet to the world's sea level.