Actually, the few dissenting scientists like Patrick Michaels, Sallie Balliunas, and such get way more press time than their contribution to the peer-reviewed literature on climate change would justify in an attempt by the media to provide false balance. In fact, Michaels recently complained that some network show was biased in their presentation but when someone went back and looked at it, they found that Michaels was the (climate?) scientist who had actually appeared more than any other on it!
We have the instrumental temperature record over the past 100 or so years to show clearly that the global temps are rising. The only question is one of context, i.e., how much the temperature varied before that. The climate proxy reconstructions to do this are difficult but your claim that the graph was “manipulated by excluding the Medieval Warm Period” is incorrect. What Mann et al. found is that although many of the different northern hemisphere proxies generally did show some warmth sometime during a several century period during the Medieval times (especially in Europe), the warmth in different areas was asynchronous which means that when you added it all together to get a northern hemisphere average temperature at any particular time, you found that this warmth was not very strong.
And, while there are still some highly technical arguments regarding the extent to which the MWP gets washed out once such averaging is done (e.g., Moberg et al. do have a less flat graph with a more pronounced MWP), all the latest reconstructions seems to agree that the late 20th century warmth is higher.
At any rate, anthropogenic global warming is based on a large amount of independent evidence as well as basic physical principles (e.g., the absorption of infrared radiation by CO2). Those like Inhofe want you to believe that this one piece of circumstantial evidence regarding the “hockey stick” is the one thing on which the whole idea rests. This could not be further from the truth.
I presume you agree that on this issue, a fact’s status as “bull” or not “bull” is determined by scientific evidence. So if you assert that “the graph had been manipulated”, shouldn’t you provide a reference to a scientific paper to back that assertion up?
Let me put it this way. You say that anyone who uses “the hockey stick” needs to point that the “the graph” has been manipulated. Which graph are you talking about? I’m sure that an informed citizen such as yourself is well aware that the hockey stick is not one graph, nor even the results of one paper. In fact, eleven different major analyses by different teams of scientists have studied climate variations over the past 1,000 years and all of them ended up finding a hockey stick graph. (Here’s a summary that plots all of their data together.) Further, you then inform us that whichever one of these many graphs you talk about is “bull” because it excludes the so-called “medieval warm period”. Yet the medieval warm period is itself a myth, so shouldn’t it be excluded?
And here is another summary that includes the Moberg et al. results that I mentioned before as being the recent reconstruction with the most pronounced “Medieval Warm Period (MWP)” [to the extent such a phenomenon appears to exist at all]. Actually, it seems that their MWP is more pronounced really not because it is significantly warmer than in other reconstructions but rather because their Little Ice Age dip is more pronounced than some of the other reconstructions (such as Mann et al.).
How come the OP dismisses the possibility that Inhofe is a moron whose charges are nonsense, and the media ignored it for the same reason they ignore the rants of other unhinged morons(*)?
(* = Excluding Fox News, where unhinged morons are hired as political commentators ;))
How many reports have you seen supporting the position that smoking is not involved in lung cancer?
Since I get little US TV here myself, I can’t really assess the accuracy of your statement that reports and specials NEVER include any dissenting views or caveats. Since the media do like controversy, no matter what its justification, it would surprise me if your allegation was actually true. However, as a scientist who has some involvement with the issue myself, I would guess offhand that anthropogenic global warming is supported by at least 99 out of 100 scientists who work on the topic (possibly more like 999 out of 1000). If dissenting views are getting more than 1% of the airtime, then the media are biased in their favor relative to actual scientific opinion.
Probably more likely that an Oklahoma Senator would be, erm, let’s call it “receptive” to oil-industry interests. Not that he couldn’t also be a moron - Wiki on his politics:
In the USA you might see things differently, but from the UK this whole Global Warming stuff looks like an attempt to set up an Enron style CO2 trading system, hike taxes on petrol, cars, roads and air travel.
The UK produces 1.6% of the World output of CO2 (I wonder how they calculate that ?) so what we in the UK do will make as much difference as the incremental flatulence from me having/not having a curry tonight.
The US sensibly backed out of that Kyoto nonsense, some sort of attempt to set up a global body to extract money from the West.
I’m all in favour of cutting down on pollution, also being a bit less profligate with natural resources, but this just looks like encephelate hysteria.
We might well be in for global warming, possibly due to natural cycles, possible because a butterfly flapped its wings, if so we should be looking at how we can live with it.
Incidentally, in the UK this has been the warmest November since something like 1769, so should we not be worrying about global cooling ? Heck we might have hit a cyclical peak.
Living in a place that is about 13,000 years from the last Ice Age, I am a lot more nervous of ice than losing a bit of coast line.
Bush actually said the same thing a few years ago. Of course, his idea about how we should live with it was “don’t change anything about your lifestyle.” He’s gotten somewhat interested in alternative energies - not because of global warming, of course, 'cuz it don’t exist - but not enough to do anything about it.
You just finished the hottest November in 200+ years, and it makes you worry about global cooling?
Good news. Evidence of global cooling is coming in from the Arctic Ocean, Canada, Alaska, Iceland, Greenland, Britain, Italy, Brazil, the Pacific Ocean, Australia, eastern Africa, India, Qatar, China, California, Spain, Kyrgyzstan, Idaho, France, Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, Oregon, Montana, the East Indies, Tasmania, Antartica, Argentina, Nepal,Siberia, Vancouver, the Baltic Sea, Colorado, …
So, are you proposing a conspiracy theory that now includes the National Academy of Sciences of 11 major countries including the U.S. and UK (see their statement here), the councils of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union, most of the refereed journals, B.P., Shell, and Ford, …? Could you better explain how such a massive conspiracy is being propagated?
Well, this kind of reductionist reasoning can be used to make it seem useless to tackle any problem large enough that collective action of many people are involved. I mean, why vote, why not throw your garbage out of your car window, … One person doing these things ain’t going to make a big difference.
The sort of warming we are already seeing and that is being forecast from the buildup of anthropogenic emissions is outside of recent natural cycles. And, a butterfly flapping its wings might affect the weather (although I have never seen a definitive answer to the question of whether weather is really chaotic to the degree that even such a minor perturbation as you give in your examplewill grow) but it will not have a significant effect on the climate, which is the average state of the weather.
You don’t have to worry. The latest evidence suggests that, in the absence of human perturbations, this current interglacial would probably still have lasted something like another 30 or 40,000 years (if I remember the numbers correctly). And, at any rate, the greenhouse gas emissions that we have put out are more than enough to prevent us from going into an ice age cycle for at least a while. Note that the current CO2 levels are well higher than anything seen for at least the last 750,000 years (which takes us through several ice age – interglacial cycles) and likely higher than anything seen for about 20 million years.
Well I must confess that when I see a car heading towards me, I tend to dive left or right, rather than try to make some sort of ‘anti collision option deal’ with a person in Kyoto.
Of course I could cite Bellamy that di-hydrogen monoxide is a rather good greenhouse gas, but that would be irresponsible as silly b/ggers would start cutting down trees.
Heck, they might start ocean sequestration.
I reckon that all I need to do is set my sunbed about 6’ above sea level, and stick in some ear plugs.
Well, if you get your science from David Bellamy, that would explain much of your problem. The claim that water vapor is a greenhouse gas, when made by the likes of him, is one of those half-truths that those who want to confuse people on the science like to say without putting it in the proper context.
Yes, it is true that water vapor is the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere that appears in the largest quantities and is responsible for most of the natural greenhouse effect. However, what they don’t explain to you is that because of its abundance already and its short lifetime in the atmosphere (it rains out), it is not a greenhouse gas whose concentration humans can have a significant influence on directly, at least on a global scale. By contrast, the concentration of CO2 is one that we can…and are having…a significant effect on both because its concentration in the atmosphere is less (and it turns out that what is important is generally fractional changes in concentration not absolute changes because the forcings produced are generally logarithmic in concentration) and because the residence time in the atmosphere is so long.
By the way, there is a way for human’s to indirectly influence the concentration of water vapor: By increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and causing warming, we cause an increase in evaporation of water into the atmosphere which leads to higher concentrations. This is an important positive feedback in the climate system which means that the effect of the increasing concentrations of CO2 get magnified. One can always tell the difference between a so-called “climate skeptic” who wants to completely snow you on the science vs. one who at least has an ounce of intellectual honesty in that the former try to emphaisze that water vapor is an important greenhouse gas (and often claim that the mainstream scientists are overlooking this simple fact) whereas the latter desperately try to come up with reasons why the water vapor feedback actually is not too important or gets cancelled out or such, i.e., they say that the mainstream scientists are somehow exaggerating the effect of the water vapor feedback. (Richard Lindzen at MIT is the prime example falling into this latter camp.)
Sorry, I haven’t been back and I don’t want anyone to think I was trolling.
rjung stated
but in post 6 I stated the I agree he is divisive and extreme.
ITR, besides the stuff that Inhofe mentioned I also remember hearing controversy about the Mann graph. I can’t remember offhand where I saw it. If I find the info I will cite them.
I have read many articles saying man is causing a major increase in global temps, others that say mankind is influencing global temps and but he is not a major contributor and other factors (solar activity, geothermal activity, our solar systems position within galactic rotation, etc.) are more influencial. Other reports say that we are in an interglacial period http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/when_ice_ages.html
My question was not just about what Inhofe said but about a general appearance that alternative explanations or theories are not mentioned. Every time someone says the New Madrid fault is going to shake to bits or La Palma is going to collapse and cause a massive tsunami or that Yellowstone is going to blow or another asteroid is going to hit a week from Tuesday, the reports always have a list of experts dismissing the claims. I just don’t recall seeing similar treatment for GW. Am I missing something in the major media or are they just dismissing any alternative views as crackpots?
As a slight hijack, how does the current global average temp compare against a greater timeframe, say the past million, 10 million or 50 million years? The temp charts I see only compare over the past 1000 years or so. If I look at a stock graph for a company over one day it can appear very volatile. Over 2 years, it might look like it has been recovering from a slump. Over 40 years it can show a steady increase. What does it look like over a greater range?
Where have you read these articles? If you read them in the popular media, then aren’t they sort of disproving your thesis that the popular media isn’t reporting such things? If you’ve read them in the peer-reviewed literature, yes, a few such papers do exist but they are, as has been noted by other posters above, a much smaller fraction of that literature than the reporting they tend to receive would lead one to believe. [One also has to distinguish the past from the recent past, present, or future. Everyone agrees that, before the industrial revolution, the climate was almost essentially exclusively by natural factors. (Although there is a still controversial hypothesis by Ruddiman that the release of CO2 and methane from the advent of agriculture about 8000 years ago was enough to cause significant influence on the climate and even possibly prevent the onset of the next ice age.) The general scientific consensus is the 20th century marked a transition between the climate change being controlled by natural factors and human factors. And, the general consensus is that the 21st century climate change will be dominated by humans (barring some low-probability cataclismic natural event such as a major asteroid impact or a super-volcano).]
This is a widely accepted scientific fact. However, I don’t see how it in any way contradicts the theory of anthropogenic warming. To the contrary, the variation of the climate and of CO2 during these ice age - interglacial transitions is one of the past events that scientists can use to try to understand the climate’s sensitivity to perturbations and the correlation between CO2 levels and temperature. (The latter aspect is a bit confusing since the change in CO2 levels back then was not due to humans emitting fossil fuels but was triggered by changes in climate that are due to the earth’s orbital variations (e.g., oscillations in orbital eccentricity, tilt of the earth’s axis, and such).
Again, this article would seem to contradict your and Inhofe’s hypothesis that the media is not writing articles with splashy headlines implying that human-induced climate change may not be as bad as first thought. Worse yet, this article is riddled with strange statements and inaccuracies, from what I can tell. For example, the title of the article seems to at least in part refer to the paragraph that says:
However, as the article tries to sort of explain below that, but not very clearly or completely, to the extent that this cooling effect (known for many years by the way) has occurred, it has counteracted some of the warming due to greenhouse gas emissions thus making the effects of CO2 so far look less severe than they would have been in the absence of these offsetting effects. That is more worrisome than reassuring since it would imply a higher sensitivity of the climate to CO2 (which will eventually tend to win out over the aerosols both because CO2 stays in the atmosphere longer and because aerosol emissions have a variety of negative effects [aesthma, acid rain, …] that tend to make us want to regulate their emissions more strongly over time, as has already happened in the industrialized world, e.g., in the U.S. through the Clean Air Act, although such emissions have still been growing in places like China). Giving all this a positive spin is strange indeed!
(1) As we noted above, people like Patrick Michaels, professing these alternate views have gotten considerable airtime.
(2) However, as the consensus has grown stronger, media reports have seemed to feel somewhat less constrained to produce a “false balance” by giving equal representation to the views of a small minority of scientists relative to the vast majority of them.
Well, it is harder to get as good a “read” of the temperature over larger timespans as one can over the last 100 or so years when we have accurate readings from thermometers. However, the rough answer is that the current global temperature is pretty close to the highest it has been over the last at least 750,000 years. (The previous interglacial before this one, about 100,000 years ago saw somewhat higher temperatures…and sea levels several meters higher…but predictions are that we will almost certainly surpass these temperatures in the next century…or ven half century…if nothing to curb our greenhouse gas emissions. Even if we do make significant efforts to curtail them, we may not be able to prevent temperatures from rising to these levels and thus are committed to likely having to adapt to the changes that this will cause. If one goes back more than maybe 10 million years ago or so (which I believe gets us to pre-hominid times, by the way), then then there were certainly times when the climate was warmer. In fact, there are ancient times (10s to 100s of millions of years ago, I think) when there were tropic trees growing in places like Wyoming. Scientists have used this past climates to try to understand the sensitivity of the climate system to perturbations, although it is a difficult process since there are plenty of uncertainties in both the temperature and CO2 levels back then.
