Very nice rebuttal to that with links:
http://climatedenial.org/2007/03/09/the-great-channel-four-swindle/
I must have missed it. I first heard about the BBC show on the local radio which had been playing excerpts from it for the last couple of days. I have no idea if it is accurate, although the graphs charting Sun activity and temperature variation look pretty damning if correct.
It’s not accurate. You might have noticed that the graphs for the solar activity only went to ~1980 (see screen capture here). That is because one of the co-authors on the original paper (Lassen) has written a paper [PDF file] more recently with a new co-author in which they admit that the relationship has broken down now:
And, that is what one of the co-authors on the original paper has to say about this correlation. Others have argued that the correlation was overblown to begin with [PDF file]…and in particular that even the final upkick in the solar activity data around 1980 turned out to be an artifact (although, by the way, there is little debate that variations in the sun were prominent contributors to climate variations through the first half of the 20th century…until anthropogenic forcings began to overwhelm it.) See also the discussion here.
By the way, if you don’t want to wade through that fairly long technical paper by Laut that I linked to at “overblown to begin with,” he also wrote a short, punchier one on this subject with a co-author that is available here [PDF file]
I’ll take your question literally rather than as sarcastic rhetoric.
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Climate computer modelling - anyone who knows anything about computers and knows anything about modelling would be deeply suspicious. There are plenty of threads on the subject.
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Department of Guesswork statistics. Human activity accounts for 10% of CO2 and the UK accounts for 1.6% of that. Sounds good ? Well just who came up with those figures and how did they measure things ?
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The Earth has climate cycles, the last Ice Age in the UK was about 13,000 years ago. In Roman times they grew grapes in the UK, we had a mini ice age around the 1600s. We know that there are cycles, but we don’t understand them.
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The most prolific greenhouse gas is DiHydrogen monoxide - yes good old water in vapour form.
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Greenhouses don’t work on the greenhouse principle, they work by cutting down convection.
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The Earth may have a natural mechanism for self correction in dealing with temperature - well it has to have some sort of mechanism otherwise it would either be an iceball or an inferno. To assume that an infestation of ants can upset something as substantial as the Earth is pretty arrogant. Intuitively adding extra heat or CO2 would create an incremental imbalance, but that is all it is - just intuition - and intuition is another name for guesswork.
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Wild differences in estimated sea level rises, ranging from a few milimetres a year to 30 metres in 30 years. A strong indication that people don’t know what they are talking about.
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AGW enthusiasts present ‘facts’ with a religious fervour, they use phrases like ‘AGW deniers’ - emotive zeal always makes me wary.
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Qui bono ? Carbon offset trading is a financial market, oddly people really like financial markets - you can make money out of nothing, which is a lot easier than working for a living. With such setups the means become the ends. I know enough about that - I’ve lived of such systems.
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Impracticality. The smart idea seems to be to persuade India and China to postpone access to a decent standard of living. Well they are not buying it, and they will not buy it. In other words short of releasing a plague on them, it is just a waste of time.
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Dubious sub motives, the nuclear industry has hopped on the band wagon, strange bedfellows for environmentalists. That should be enough to make anyone suspicious.
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Taxation. Any excuse to raise taxation is of great interest to our governments, of course what they do with the money is a different thing.
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Politicians. My first instinct is to distrust anything a politician says, if they said that the Earth is round I would start suspecting that it is a cube. I would not take their word for anything.
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Crowd hysteria. Whenever I see it I amble off in a different direction, that goes for any type of crowd activity. Crowds do not behave rationally.
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I do not trust scientists. They are human and fallible. If they are working in an area where things cannot be pinned down and measured then it is little more than ‘trust me I’m a doctor’. In this case they have no downside from getting on the band wagon - and in many cases considerable downside from questioning it.
Put crudely, we are ants sitting on a ball that has incredible forces swirling around it in the form of winds, tides, gravity and an incredible amount of heat blasted at it. I’ve heard it said that forces inside a storm can be the equivalent of ten hydrogen bombs. The forces at work are unimaginable. To suggest that we can make a difference is ludicrous.
I’m all in favour of conserving natural resources and cutting down on pollution. I also think it would be a good idea to watch what is going on and start making contingency plans should Alaska become temperate and seaboard cities get slowly flooded.
I also think that we should be putting resources into generating clean power, nuclear fusion is also worth investigation. Sticking a windmill on the roof to generate enough to power a hairdrier or solar panels that pay back in ten years are both pointless and ludicrous.
The dangerous thing is that we’ll do the wrong things rather than carefully learning how to live with things that we have no control over.
I studied Economics and am a computer programmer, I know enough about computer modeling to be well aware that it is barely worth bothering with. Also I’ve worked on financial systems so I know enough about trading to be highly suspicious.
I’m in the UK, over here we have quite a history of ‘initiatives’ that cost a lot and don’t work. Our glorious leaders sieze any opportunity to slap on a tax or get an expensive computer system to spy on us and fine us for breathing.
So FRDE let’s consider some of those concerns …
The most critical one, and the one that seems to resonate most with the general American populus is your last
In fact several other points are just variations of that: Scientists do not really know what they are talking about. When scientist have any among them who disagree with a conclusion then it is “See, it is still not established.” When there is broad consensus then it is a “bandwagon.” When scientists discuss issues that are complex then doubt magnifies … computers make mistakes (nevermind that the conclusion have been nearly the same range from many different sorts of models calculated in various sorts of ways and that the limits of the models are considered in the degrees of probability assessed). How do they know those numbers anyway? (And of course the answers are longwinded enough to cause most to glaze over … “Boring!” … so they really don’t know.)
But there are many things that I personally cannot fully understand. And some of those things have serious global implications. How do we proceed when for those subjects? When the experts tell us that there is little doubt of significant harm coming and that the risk of catestrophic harm increases the less we currrently do to reduce the risk, then what is a prudent course of action?
Bottomline is actually that your bottomline is not too wrong: we do not know how bad it can get; we just know that there is sizable risk. We know that managing that risk is vital. Basic research on various renewables and carbon sequestration options must be done now to give us options in the future if things get as bad as is reasonably predicted. Given that that such is a known quantifiable risk it would be foolhardy to not be ready for it. Again, a forest fire is approaching a gas station: it may be that it would veer off and not ignite an inferno. I’m still going to calmly make sure that I’m putting any gas on the ground and make sure that I have the resources available to fight the fire.
The comparison to the threat of Iraqi WMDs was cogent. There was no vetted evidence that they existed in Iraq or that if present that they posed an imminent threat. Yet that “Do you wait for a mushroom cloud?” line had resonance. For Global Climate change there is ample vetted evidence that it exists and that it is an imminent threat of much greater significance. This is the one we need to act on.
My question was sarcastic, but I was honestly curious to know whether you had a rational basis for disputing the science or whether you choose to disbelieve because you are universally suspicious. Clearly the latter is closer to the truth.
Which position offers a certain consistency, I suppose—but believing nothing doesn’t strike me as a vast improvement over believing everything, and it’s hardly a suitably lofty platform from which to cast snide aspersions on the gullibility of the masses.
Some find themselves in conflict with the majority opinion because they are freethinkers, able to see the truth that has eluded the rest. Others are simply wrong. Time will tell into which category you fall—but by then we’ll all be dead and it’ll be someone else’s problem, right?
This level of sweeping generalization is frankly absurd. Categorically refusing to do anything that a hysterical crowd happens to be doing is just as stupid as blindly following a hysterical crowd in whatever it happens to be doing.
A hysterical crowd running out of a burning building, for example, is acting rationally even though hysterically. In such a case, the self-proclaimed skeptic who bucks the crowd by “ambling” into the building is the one behaving irrationally.
Yippee, another example of Conservative Eco-Mysticism for my collection! And a magnificent specimen, too. Thanks, FRDE!
I feel like I need to step in and point out that this is false, since I just heard of this notion for the first time yesterday, on the SDMB, where somebody else mentioned it and it was quickly pointed out as false.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=411113&highlight=greenland
See posts # 1 and 4. The name “Greenland” was Viking propaganda to get settlers to move to a narrow strip of arable land along the coast.
Actually you have come up with an interesting point.
I worked in a place where we had fire drills.
One day we had a real fire, it was electrical, to do with the lift, so people could smell that it was no false alarm.
Naturally people behaved totally differently from the drills, programmers don’t like losing their work.
I realized that the standard exit was Ok, but if I had had any doubt, I had a fallback exit upstairs and over the roof - something I had consciously scouted out years before.
Another example was the Kings Cross underground fire where an escalator ignited and cremated a load of people. They died because they all rushed up a burning escalator. I went up it about half an hour before it ignited, and I can assure you that I would have headed off down a tunnel rather than try to swarm up a burning escalator - I know that fire and smoke rise.
Of course I might have got caught up in a crowd, but that is unlikely, I always stay on the edge of crowds, and prefer to step into an alcove rather than follow the mob.
I’ve not snipped that, as it is pretty cogent, and I agree with it, subject to one or two reservations.
In my view there are two types of scientists, those who work on tangibles and those who indulge in speculation - the latter tend to make good copy for the tabloids. My view is that ‘scientists’ should shut up or prove it, but I’m in a minority.
If there is a possibility of significant harm, then the rational thing is to find out what one can do. For example carbon sequestration by pumping it into ocean depths or down oil wells is technologically difficult, likely to have unexpected side effects and smells of Haliburton.
Planting a lot of trees is an alternative, provided they do not become a rain forest, which apparently is pretty much a closed system.
The trouble is that we are not sure that there really is a forest fire approaching the gas station - if we were sure, then it would be worth checking out whether one could cut a firebreak - and regardless, if sure, evacuate the area.
Iraq is a good point, for various reasons I’m quite interested in the Middle East, but by now means an expert. However I do know that there is a ‘canary’ out there that would either warn of WMD or zap them. The Israelis keep a very close eye on what is going on, as they know exactly who would be targeted first.
While I would not take what they say as Gospel, they have an interest in a little exaggeration - which is rational, I reckon it is pretty safe to say that if they aren’t worried, then there is nothing much to worry about. The same goes for Iran, if they get remotely close to producing something that is dangerous to Israel, then they’ll have a nasty accident.
I get very worried when we get mercury filled light bulbs forced on us, sure coal fired power stations produce shed loads of mercury well we should be filtering it out - which is easy - not spreading poison.
I think that we are coming at the problem from roughly the same angle, the major difference being that I am extremely suspicious of the ‘technology’, the ‘statistics’ and the motives of the people offering solutions.
Well, we’ve both decided to get this on the level of a debate rather than a slanging match - generally a good idea as there is a possibility of synergy or synthesis rather than a Pit style foodfight.
I suppose I am universally suspicious, I’ve learnt to become so, but that does not mean that I reject everything - especially if things make sense.
For example the Chinese have a real problem with pollution, something we in the UK used to have. I’m all in favour of shipping them coal fired power station filtration systems, it may not do much for CO2, but it would be a nice gesture.
I am vehemently against spreading mercury in light bulbs, I am disgusted by lead in petrol and those CFCs were a dumb idea (lead and CFCs came from the same scientist). I think recycling glass is utterly stupid, as I happen to know that recycled glass is not fit for purpose, but I’ve no aversion to banning no return bottles.
Before going into computing I worked in Marketing, a very good area to learn all about the gullibility of the masses - also I’ve a fair experience of those that do the ‘gulling’.
I’ve also an ability to manufacture ‘factual statistics’, it is incredibly easy, make a few assumptions and the numbers roll out.
If we want to look after posterity then we could do quite a lot of things, but I don’t consider paying Haliburton type companies a fortune to sequester cabon dioxide or setting up a market in carbon offsets particularly useful to our descendants.