There is much research and debate on both sides of the issue…and it’s all pointless.
Do you think the american people will accept the kind of lifestyle changes advocated by some of the harder edged environmental groups?
Do you think they are willing to essentially live in a socialist society by accepting the huge tax increases necessary to make changes to every car and power plant?
Do you think that undereducated people in China, India, Brazil, or anywhere else understand the issue? And if they did, do you think they would care when you told them they could no longer drive those cheap cars?
The changes won’t be done voluntarily…and they can’t be effected or paid for on an involuntary basis. So the debate will go on…adding more hot air to an already “fragile” environment.
No, I’m sure that people who feel passionate about the subject will continue to scream to the high heavens. Although the sky has been falling for the last 30 years…and minds are pretty much made up on both sides.
I was rolling my eyes at your incredibly fatuous (if not disingenuous) application of the label “socialist” to such a high-tax society as you hypothesize.
But the important question is not whether people will scream, but whether or not the sea levels will rise even an inch or two.
Like I said- cites that show that every single significant donor (especially including the foundations listed) is a " *fronts for oil companies (including Texaco and Amaco) and other corporate interests (such as Ford Motor Company, Pfizer, Philip-Morris and Coca Cola)". *
Not just that large companies send some cash their way- that’s hard to avoid. Proof that this well known & respected think tank is completely “funded by the oil industry”. (Hint, you can’t find proof- as they aren’t.)
But it isn’t. An increasing albedo effect is strongly at odds with actual observations – even Lintzen is coming around to this. How are you suggesting more light will be reflected if strongly reflecting regions like snow and ice melt?
You call these graphs a “temporary glitch”? I hope you’re right, because that would mean that we’d soon be emitting much less CO2 and methane per year than we currently do, such that the graphs stabilize rather than shooting up at such an alarming rate. If we do nothing, they’ll only stabilize at over 700 ppm for CO2, which no climatologist in the world considers anything but extremely dangerous.
The ones in equilibrium, like water vapour? You’re quite right. It’s the effect of those well known greenhousing gases which are shooting up way off their equilibrium value (eg. 280 ppm for CO2 for millennia) which are causing the warming.
Well respected by who? The scientist they quoted for the misleading shit about thickening ice in Greenland and snowfall in the Antarctic has publicly accused them of cherry-picking and distorting his words. He cited those factors as evidence FOR Global Warming, but they falsely presented it as evidence against. That doesn’t sound very respectable to me. When everything they say is contrary to the vast majority of objective scientists, when they can be shown to be demonstratively dishonest and when they’re funded wholly by Big Business (particularly by the oil, petroleum and auto industries), I think it takes a heroic level of denial and self-deception to actually believe the CEI is some kind of objective, honest think tank. They sure as hell aren’t respected.
I think you underestimate the impact of hard evidence. Ten years ago, I thought the whole global warming thing was hooey. Two years ago, I was undecided. Today, after examining the scientific evidence and analysis, I believe that it’s a problem we need to deal with.
Certainly, there are people who make up their minds and refuse to be swayed, but I see worldwide opinion continuing to shift, and unless our next President is a hard-core nonbeliever like GWB, I think you’ll see an even bigger shift in U.S. opinions. Is there anybody credible that believes global warming isn’t happening at all?
Even the scientists flouting the minority position no longer claim that people aren’t causing global warming. They’re only arguing how much of it is human-caused and how long it will be until we reach a critical point.
Indeed, such a list has been provided. But you made this claim “All of these “foundations” are fronts for oil companies (including Texaco and Amaco) and other corporate interests (such as Ford Motor Company, Pfizer, Philip-Morris and Coca Cola).” Please show by an unbiased cite that each and every one of the listed Foundations are “fronts” as you claimed. (Note, you can’t, as they aren’t. So, back it up or back down.)
The list of corporate funders and arch-conservatives speaks for itself. So does their habitual distortion of the facts. I don’t have the time or inclination to research each and every foundation. The group has already been sufficiently discredited. They are a front for corporate interests. You may choose to persist in your delusion that they are an objective, responsible “well-respected” think tank if you wish. I don’t care enough to argue with you. I’ll just say that if anyone contributing to those foundations does NOT have a financial or political interest in trying to disinform the public about Global Climate Change, then they’re idiots and they need to do a better job of informing themselves about who they’re giving money to.
So, you admit you don’t have any cites for your outrageous & unsupported claims? In other words, this “All of these “foundations” are fronts for oil companies (including Texaco and Amaco) and other corporate interests (such as Ford Motor Company, Pfizer, Philip-Morris and Coca Cola).” was entirely your unsupported opinion, right?
What is bad science is when a group disagrees with you, and so then you smear the group with completely untrue libels & false accusations- *only * because they disagree with what you beleive.
The timescale of the current change (on the order of a century) doesn’t look much different from that of previous non-anthropogenic changes (the beginning and end of the warm period around the time the Vikings colonized Greenland; the cooling period associated with the Maunder Minimum).
All of those companies are included in their list of corporate funders. Those companies fund the group directly. I confused the corporate list with the list of “foundations” (most of which I suspect are still funded by the same corporate interests). I made a mistake. Sue me. It doesn’t really change my main point that CEI is a shill for the oil and auto industries.
That they lied is not in dispute. The very scientist they cited as an authority is calling them liars. Is he right or wrong. Do you deny that Curt Davis’ research was misrepresented? Why do you think they would do that? Could they possibly have an agenda.
Respectable and legitimate think tanks don’t lie and misrepresent the evidence to supoort a preconceived agenda.
Here is the press release from the scientist mentioned above. I am not going to enter the argument with DrDeth about whether CEI is wholey or just in some part funded by Exxon/Mobil et al. Who gives a shit? They make no bones about their point-of-view in this recent article in the Washington Post on the so-called “skeptics”. Their recent spate of commercials on climate change are so bad that even some of the people on their side are saying this!
By the way, there is a review of Al Gore’s movie here by the climate scientists at RealClimate. They feel that on the whole the science is accurately presented.
I think the point is that the rate of change over this century, on a hemispheric scale, appears to be unprecedented over the last 1 or 2 millenia (and the current global climate appears to be the warmest it has been during that time). [These statements are technically for the Northern Hemisphere since Southern hemisphere data is sparse.] This is as determined by climate proxies, which admittedly has some degree of error associated with them. While there were regional scale changes, especially at high latitudes, such as occurred in Greenland, these have tended to be exaggerated by some. (E.g., the name “Greenland” has nothing to do with there having been a lack of ice there but was rather probably a name given to make an inhospitable place seem more appealing.)
However, it is more than the rate of change that provides evidence that the warming is anthropogenic. There is a whole field called “detection and attribution” dedicated to looking into this. To summarize it in a few sentences, the pattern of the warming (e.g., the fact that the lower part of the atmosphere is warming and the stratosphere is cooling) is in line with greenhouse gas warming and other explanations that people have dreamed up. The climate model simulations have been unable to reproduce the warming of the last 30 years or so without incorporating greenhouse gases.
Also, basic physics tells us that greenhouse gases will produce this effect. In fact, the warming was predicted well before it was observed. The first to try to do a calculation of how much warming we’d get if we doubled CO2 was Arrhenius back in the late 1800s (and the ideas go back to the mid 1800s). However, it wasn’t until the late 1950s that the measurement from Mauna Loa showed that CO2 levels in the atmosphere were in fact increasing. (Before that, some scientists felt that the CO2 emissions would be removed efficiently enough from the atmosphere that they would not build up. Over the last 40 years, we have seen that about half the CO2 we emit has been getting removed from the atmosphere and half has not…This fraction has remained quite constant although there are good reasons to believe that some of the carbon sinks will start to saturate.)
So, in addition to coming up with some other mechanism to explain the current warming, you also need to come up with a good reason why the warming due to the known forcing of greenhouse gases like CO2 somehow does not occur or gets largely cancelled out. There seem to be only a few scientists who have come up with any hypotheses of this sort…Richard Lindzen being the most notable, who has argued that there is a negative feedback effect due to clouds. However, his hypotheses haven’t withstood actual tests from data very well and, furthermore, it is hard to understand how the stabilizing influences that he proposes can be reconciled with the known instability in the past climate (e.g., the ice-age interglacial oscillations).
I know people have probably heard a lot of criticism of climate models. However, the basic physics of CO2 causing warming is pretty straightforward. What is left to the climate models is calculating all the feedbacks in the climate system. This is admittedly not an easy task…but there are ways to compare the model to reality using historical data and even recent events such as the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. One can also compare their predictions to those inferred by looking at the ice age - interglacial oscillations as Jim Hansen has done and he gets a similar prediction to the models for climate sensitivity.
There was also a recent paper in Science that looked at water vapor in the upper atmosphere (from satellite measurements) and compared it to predictions of the models. This is very important because much of the positive feedback that enhances the warming in the models is due to this water vapor. The paper found that the models did a very good job at reproducing the water vapor data but did much worse when they artificially turned off the water vapor feedback in the models, thus strongly suggesting that the models are handling this factor quite well.
Whoops! If I had read the last post before mine, I would have seen that DtC had already provided the link to Dr. Davis’s press release. Well, it doesn’t hurt to have it posted twice!
Are you one of the guys who has been moving these goalposts? They used to be over there by “there’s no warming going on” but now they’re over here by “well sure there’s warming, but we’re not 101% sure we’re causing it”.
I agree that Sourcewatch has a left-leaning bent, but the whole point of it is that it is a left-of-center group that keeps track of right-wing groups and their connections, just as the right-wing has groups that keep track of the left-wing. And, there is no doubt what CEI stands for and what it represents. Hell, they tell you right on their website:
I think we can all decode what that means.
Look, the point is that you can’t rely for your science on a group like CEI, just as you would be attacking us if we had post lots of links to Greenpeace. [Although, I think Greenpeace’s links would contain considerably less distortion of the mainstream scientific viewpoint than CEI’s.] You should rely on real credible sources like the IPCC or the joint statement issued last year by 11 National Academies of Science including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences: