[QUOTE=Cecil Adams]
But you know what? I’d just as soon keep mum about that.
<snip>
Hurricane Sandy, by scaring the daylights out of the New York media people who set the national agenda, has at last gotten the climate change conversation off the dime. Can we legitimately blame that disaster on global warming? No, but I’m not going to object if a lot of people do.
[/QUOTE]
Cecil, that is PRECISELY the BIGGEST reason people don’t believe in global warming–because those supposedly convinced of it say nothing about non-evidence used convince others. You’ve given the disbelievers ammunition: “See? They have to use non-evidence to convince you! Is the supposedly real evidence any better?”
Way to go, Cecil. Change your motto right now to “Fighting ignorance 1973-2013 (we gave up and now we depend on it)”.
In your reply to the question “Are Hurricanes Getting Worse?” you mentioned that the SST (Sea Surface Temperature) decreased during the period 1950 to the mid 1970’s possibly due to the buildup of atmospheric pollution.
Does this mean that if we DID NOT clean up our air we would not be seeing the global warming we are currently experiencing? In other words by cleaning up our air we caused global warming!!
Additionally if we were to let the developing industrial nations run rampant with air pollution the SST would decrease, and therefore global warming would stop?
The “climate change” scare was a hoax from day one. Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion explains the real science, shows how it was faked, and even has copies of the damning e-mails in which the bad guys set up the fraud. Anyone numerically literate should find it readable, but it’s better if you know something about statistical modeling.
One should ALWAYS be skeptical of any story, especially in news media, which says that there’s a “crisis” and we’ve got to “do something” about it right away. This is always some politician’s way of getting you to give up more of your freedom without asking him hard questions – and news media always go along with it, since emergencies (even phony ones) sell papers and ads. This goes for politicians on both sides of the aisle, though the left is better at it, which is why the media are seen as being slanted left.
Mr Adams your Thursday 7 March ‘Straight Dope’ column [cli-change/global warming ] was your usual high standard of presenting interesting information on a current topic (how many people realize you’ve been maintaining that standard for 40 yeares?). But it does seem to suffer from a defect common to majority of articles on the subject: the pathetically small amount of data available to back up these claims.
You mention climate change models, which are the backbone of climate change claims. A model can be used to demonstrate just how lacking the amount of data available to back up these claims: projecting the 4.5 billion year age of the planet on an 80-year human lifetime. Such a model shows a single year of earth time equivalent to 0.562 seconds of that 80-year lifespan. In this model humans first appeared on earth 39 days ago. They had no idea of measuring temperature before Galileo’s 1593 thermometer invention, 4 minutes ago to our geezer. Discovery of carbon dioxide in 1630? 3 minutes 30 seconds ago.
Your article starts out with a major example of this defect referring to “the trend from 1878 to 2008” showing “the average annual total of hurricanes increasing from seven to twelve.” This is equivalent to 73 seconds in the model.
Your article further says “some scientists , say the average annual number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes, which together cause nearly half of all hurricane damage, has more than doubled since the early 1970s.” Put this in the reality model, 23 seconds to a senior citizen.
But I continue to enjoy reading your weekly column in The Chicago Reader.
The contents of this thread definitely proves that we are losing the war against ignorance…
Such as barrettb’s claim that the current observed warming is SOLELY due to reducing pollution. I wonder why it is much warmer now than it was before the cooling (ironically, you see others using that cooling to claim that a natural cycle is at work). Even more ironic is that those climate models and such are based on physics (including past climate change, which is very important indeed in order to verify them - and why would they be wrong when given numbers for the next 100 years or whatever if they can accurately model similar episodes in the past?) - the climate doesn’t just change for no reason at all, nor can humans live in a climate like that present when there were dinosaurs hint, hint).
Also, I think a lot of people who claim that global warming is a hoax do so because they fear the consequences to their lifestyles if it is true and drastic action is needed to stop it. Never mind that they always talk as if global warming is about the Earth being “destroyed”(???) - it has NOTHING to do with the Earth - it is about the effects on HUMANS, especially agriculture, which developed in the stable climate of the Holocene (hard to grow crops when it doesn’t rain when it is supposed to, or it is too warm/cold at the wrong time of the year, you know).
As far as storms like hurricanes (and tornadoes, derechoes, droughts, floods, even winter storms) go, it is probable that they will get stronger simply due to more energy, but numbers like frequency are much less certain, never mind changes in distribution, which is where climate models do disagree because these events are more weather than climate (which is like the difference between a forest and the individual trees); similarly, you can say that X is likely to became more common or stronger but you can’t predict when it will occur (a 1-in-100 year flood for example simply means that the statistical probability is 1% a year).
I’m glad somebody made a thread about this, I was thinking along the lines of rowrrbzzle myself. First of all hurricanes get their power from a temperature differential between the ocean temperature at the poles and ocean temperatures at the tropics/equator. The physics tells us that warming due to the greenhouse effect would reduce this differential and lead to less and weaker hurricanes. The people arguing to the contrary are just propagandists (this includes many climatologists). It reminds me of an article I read in the Guardian saying that global waming will lead to bigger spiders, “you don’t like spiders do you?!”
@ Michael63129
It’s not true that environmentalists are mostly worried about humans, I’ve never seen any groups called “humanity first!” or “save the people”. In fact they don’t seem to like human civilisation, they see it as a parasite on the goddess gaia. As to the argument that global warming will hurt agriculture, the term “greenhouse effect” pretty much busts this one. plants like warmth and high concentrations of CO2, obviously that why greenhouses are designed as they are. There have been large climate fluctuations in the past 10,000 years that people have got through fine even without our modern technology. These fluctuations like the medieval warm period and the maunder minimum have been expunged from the politically acceptable record by propagandists like Michael Mann with his hockey stick graph fabrication precisely because they show what we’re living through now climate wise is nothing special.
These days global warming has had a PR makeover by some high flying marketing folk and the brand has been updated to “climate change” because it was realised that people welcomed warmer weather (as they should, how many people die of cold and how many die of overheating?). Now the climatologists are free to think up whatever scenarios they like, program a model to agree with them and get the media to print their scare stories. “live in a flood area? Well climate chane will make it rain more there.”, “Live in somewhere with droughts? Less rain for you.”, "Live in a cold country, it’s gonna get colder."ect.
To the people who say we should do something about global warming just in case because it won’t do any harm to curb pollution anyway; CO2 isn’t pollution, it’s the product of modern human civilisation, the people who want to restrict it want to stop the third world from developing denying them the benefits of modern technology and leaving them to die like animals in the gutter. At the same time they want to destroy industry in the developed world and wreck the economy. The world is overpopulated they say and they intend to do something about it. These aren’t just hippies in VW vans either, take a look at the Club of Rome, the British royal family, international bankers, multinational energy companies, they’re all pushing the anti CO2 agenda.
Second, you’re dead wrong that this is the biggest reason. Why? Two reasons. Reason one: your claim that “those supposedly conviced say nothing” is wrong. Pundits routinely point out that any single weather event can’t be correlated to climate change. I hear them do this after every significant weather catastrophe where fools point to GW as the culprit. Yes, every time. If your experience is different, it’s not the fault of climate scientists, it’s the fault of the news media you rely on.
Reason two: the main reason people don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change is due to their political orientation and their main source of news. (The main reason people DO believe in it is the same.) Note I added “anthropogenic” – even GWB admitted that the evidence for GW as a climate trend was clear.
Regarding the short term of GW compared to the age of the earth: nobody with a clue thinks that GW represents the whole history of the Earth. Folks with a clue know that the planet has seen dramatic changes in climate in the past. In fact, the last 10K years seems to be a bit of an anomaly: an unusually stable period.
The whole issue of GW is a trend using this stable period as the background. Nobody claims that we haven’t had major climate changes in the past. Pundits don’t agree on how rapid past changes may have been; there are significant minorities of climate scientists who think that past climate upheavals may have been as rapid as the current one.
The issue of political argument is whether the current climate change is caused by humans.
Regarding the hockey stick: there is a lot more to AGW than just the infamous hockey stick. I haven’t read the book referenced above, but will look into it. However, just as a fraud like Piltdown Man doesn’t prove evolution wrong, if the hockey stick is a fraud, it doesn’t prove AGW wrong.
My study of AGW proved to me that the subject is terrifyingly complex, and any non-expert who is convinced he or she has the last answer on this subject is seriously misled by bias. However, the majority of experts agree that AGW is true, and the small minority experts who disagree have contradictory explanations.
That’s not terribly convincing, though. The majority of experts were dead wrong about “tabula rasa” in the mid 20th century, and their opponents didn’t have a a cohesive rebuttal. Yet it turned out to be mostly bunk, or at least, vastly overinterpreted.
That’s a bit of an exaggeration. It is true that pollution levels affect the mean global temperature and SST, through the process of reflecting sunlight. Pollution (in this sense meaning sooty smoke and microparticles seeding clouds) reflects sunlight, making the areas under those clouds get less average sunlight, and meaning that the sunlight energy is reflected from Earth higher in the atmosphere rather than being absorbed and heating the atmosphere, land, water, etc. Higher pollution levels such as China produces reduce heating some degree. Increasing soot production would reduce global warming, with the corresponding decrease in sunny days, increase in smog and acid rain and ozone at low levels and ozone holes at high levels and air quality (do you like breathing soot? How about increased cancer rates?).
Cleaning up industrial pollution in the US and Europe has increased air quality and improved the environment, but allowed more sunlight to heat the Earth. Ergo, moderate temp increases that respond to the temp decreases caused by industrialization.
That issue is independent of the effects caused by increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and their contribution to global temperatures. That is to say, it is a separate cause of temperature changes. Of course mean global temperatures don’t care the specific cause of the heating or cooling. Other climate effects like rainfall could be affected by cloud seeding aspects of particulate pollution.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive. Fact is, most pollution is the product of modern human civilization. I say “most” because I allow for some random things I’m not fully aware of right now that might constitute “pollution”. For instance, one might consider the ash and sulphur dioxide generated by volcanoes to be pollution. But the predominant definition of pollution is what humans do to the environment with their industrial waste products.
You gotta cite for that? I think the concern is not that the third world achieve benefits of modern technology, but the methods of achieving those benefits. For instance, burning coal with little/no filtration systems on the smokestacks, kinda like the Industrial Revolution. Dumping toxic waste in waterways because, hey, it worked for America. Massive deforestation because those pesky trees are in the way.
“Those two things are not mutually exclusive. Fact is, most pollution is the product of modern human civilization. I say “most” because I allow for some random things I’m not fully aware of right now that might constitute “pollution”. For instance, one might consider the ash and sulphur dioxide generated by volcanoes to be pollution. But the predominant definition of pollution is what humans do to the environment with their industrial waste products.”
They don’t have to be mutually exclusive but in the real world for the time being they are, when nuclear energy is cheap and plentiful then energy production won’t have to release CO2. Right now any developing country that wants nuclear power is considered a rogue state and is threatened with bombing eg Iran. CO2 is NOT a pollutant, it’s vital for all life on earth and has no ill effects, unless you consider a slight warming of the planet to be bad.
“You gotta cite for that? I think the concern is not that the third world achieve benefits of modern technology, but the methods of achieving those benefits. For instance, burning coal with little/no filtration systems on the smokestacks, kinda like the Industrial Revolution. Dumping toxic waste in waterways because, hey, it worked for America. Massive deforestation because those pesky trees are in the way.”
I’ve been involved in a pit thread about the Sierra Club where I go through how environmentalism is a trusty tool of anglo-american imperialists starting with Thomas Malthus, I’m not going into detail here but look up that thread if you’re interested, just put Sierra Club into the pit search. Why should we deny the benefits of modern technology to people starving in the third world? If they cut down some pretty trees and kill some fish is that anything to do with us? If anything we should be providing them with modern know how so they can minimise environmental damage. Instead the environmentalists want us to stamp out any progress and leave them in the dirt.
No, instead the environmentalists want to provide them with modern know-how so they can minimize environmental damage.
And are you seriously arguing that pollution right now is entirely due to sources other than human civilization, or that nuclear power would somehow change that?
No they want to sell them useless windmills and solar cells at rip off prices, the money would have to be borrowed from IMF loan sharks so that the country would remain the US and UK’s bitch, struggling under the Washington Consensus. Not exactly economic development.
No I’m clearly not saying that humans don’t produce any pollution, you made that up. Nuclear could be cheaper and safer then any other energy source until fusion is viable therefore I support it. It just needs funding, especially in regards to using thorium as the fuel instead of uranium.
CO2 actually IS a pollutant when released into the atmosphere in the large amounts that we see today. Saying it is not, reflects a very simplistic view of the world. Whatever your definition, a pollutant is a man made material that is in the wrong place at the wrong time that leads to harm.
Anthropogenic pure water can be a pollutant when released into a river. Yet water is vital for life.
Anthropogenic ozone can be a pollutant when released into the atmosphere. Yet ozone is vital for life.
Anthropogenic salt can be a pollutant, yet salt also is vital for life.
You are wrong about the second point too. Slight warming of the planet IS bad for humans and other species.
The harm caused is based on many factors, including location, duration, frequency and quantity of exposure of a substance to ecosystems. It is much more complex than the simple point you present.
Wow. Breath-taking. No, you see, the straight dope has been fighting ignorance since 1973: global warming (also known as climate change) changes weather patterns, which seriously impacts not only agriculture but eco-systems. Even now, we are starting to see an impact on the Amazon basin, where the weather systems are hanging offshore instead of coming in over the rainforest, which could have really bad results.
Keeping mum about inconvenient data in order to promote belief in a favored hypothesis is never a good idea, as those convinced of global warming have found to the detriment of their cause. Cecil, you disappoint me.
If your definition of pullution is so broad then humans themselves might as well be classified as pollution, exactly what the environmentalists do. You’re saying that anything not caused by people is good and anything anthropogenic is bad, that displays a crusade against humans. How are people not part of the Earth’s dynamic system, but everything else is?
Global warming would increase temperatures slightly and increase CO2 levels, anyone who argues against this is called a climate denier. Like I said in a previous post people just aren’t scared enough by this prospect so the lie of “cliimate change” was concieved so that the plebs could be threatened with anything the climatologists felt like making up. You say the point is complex, of course it is, that why the models don’t work, they’re only good for churning out propaganda. The climate always changes, always will and nobody can predict it.
A butterfly flapping it’s wings changes weather patterns. So what? Do you really think you can predict these changes and declare that they’ll be a catastophe? Which butterflies shall we start squishing oh mighty oracle?
