BS: Where's the Global Warming

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: gnu
Date: 18 Mar 10 - 05:05 PM

But, if the Ice Ages were cyclical, why is it so heavily poastulated that "our impact" might not help to even out the the extremes?

If our impact has caused massive pieces of ice shelves and glaciers to break off and drift into the oceans, perhaps these will cool things down and be a catalyst to move ocean currents. Maybe it's a good thing. Certainly, the evidence, as presented, indicates we should just hide in a fuckin cave, but I really can't see that happening.

Now, here's sommat that is gonna sound REALLY nuts. Large chunks of ice end up in the oceans. Almost the size of Orson Welles. The water levels rise and provide just enough pressure to push the tectonic plates apart 0.00001mm. This allows magma to rise in the 0.000001 wide cracks at the fault zones near the coasts. The magma (h)eats it's way up the crack and BOOM! Ya got Chile Con Carnage.

Sorry. But if I only have a wee bit of time left before Imagettin outta here, I'd like to go out with a joke.

I must see about cookin up a little chicken for supper.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Amos
Date: 18 Mar 10 - 01:15 PM

It's interesting what shifts when you include all the information. Thanks for the detective work.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Martin Harwood
Date: 18 Mar 10 - 11:36 AM

here's the page that Sawzaw's latest graph comes from. The graph below it shows a steady shrinking of the ice.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: pdq
Date: 18 Mar 10 - 11:22 AM

"It looks like we might be in a situation at the moment where sea temperature is rising but the air temperature doesn't seem to be."

This has been explained many times here on this very forum. See Pacific Ring of Fire activity in the last 20 years or so. Way up.

Volcanic activity on the ocean floor warms the ocean waters, increases water vapor, warms the Antarctic ice (the part that is not above land), changes some ocean current paths, etc.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Amos
Date: 18 Mar 10 - 10:32 AM

Sawz:

If the numbers are actually wrong, that would be significant. But, just offhand, it seems to me more likely you have been suckered by the same shill that bit LH.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: GUEST,KP
Date: 18 Mar 10 - 07:03 AM

Sorry Sawzaw,
Hate to be pedantic but your graph shows the ice is 2 standard deviations away from the average not 2%. That means that there is a 95% probability that the ice cover is below the average. See here for an explanation of the stats:
68-95-99.7 rule

You hear people using phrases like 'the change is statistically significant' and they are usually implying that the new data is more than 2 deviations away from the mean.

It looks like we might be in a situation at the moment where sea temperature is rising but the air temperature doesn't seem to be. That's a pain for the experimentalists as trying to get good average sea temperature data is really hard by all accounts!

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Sawzaw
Date: 18 Mar 10 - 01:09 AM

Amos: How is the melting of the Arctic Ice Cap coming along?

Seems like it is within 2% of the 1979-2000 average

Better luck next year Pop.


Flashback: March 4, 2009

    Our main conclusions so far indicate that there is a very low probability that Arctic sea ice will ever recover. As predicted by all IPCC models, Arctic sea ice is more likely to disappear in summer in the near future. However it seems like this is going to happen much sooner than models predicted, as pointed out by recent observations and data reanalysis undertaken during IPY and the Damocles Integrated Project. The entire Arctic system is evolving to a new super interglacial stage seasonally ice free, and this will have profound consequences for all the elements of the Arctic cryosphere, marine and terrestrial ecosystems and human activities. Both the atmosphere and the ocean circulation and stratification (ventilation) will also be affected.


More smugness and arrogance: December 15, 2008

Arctic melt passes the point of no return, We hate to say we told you so, but we did

The UK's Independent reports on a study to be presented Tuesday to the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco by top cryosphere scientists:

    Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen.


Even more GIGO:

OSLO, Feb. 29 2008 (Xinhua) -- The polar cap in the Arctic may well disappear this summer due to the global warming, Dr. Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, said on Friday.

    The shrinking of the Arctic ice cap has been astonishing, Orheim said in an interview with Xinhua.

    "The ice sheet hit the historical low of 3 million square km during the hottest weeks last summer, while it covered 7.5 million square km on average before the year 2000, " he said.

    "If Norway's average temperature this year equals that in 2007, the ice cap in the Arctic will all melt away, which is highly possible judging from current conditions," Orheim said.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Sawzaw
Date: 18 Mar 10 - 12:13 AM

U.S. TEMPERATURES: ADJUSTED OR MASSAGED?, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

CHURCHVILLE, VA—My neighbor, physicist Edward Long, is afraid our temperature records have been falsified to support the man-made global warming scare. e;He's afraid HDr. Long recently chose two sets of U.S. meteorological stations from the master list offered by the National Climate Data Center. One data set was rural, one urban. Each had a site in each of the lower 48 states. From the 1890s to 2006, the urban set of measurements showed an increase of 0.72 degrees—but the rural set showed only 0.11 degrees of warming.

The vast majority of America is rural, and our cities obviously create their own "heat islands" with masses of cement, brick, and blacktop. Thus, the U.S. temperature record should logically show a true temperature gain that is close to the low rural increase of 0.11 degrees C. In fact, NCDC record shows an overall U.S. temperature increase of 0.69 degrees C.

Ed Long says on the American Thinker blog, "The NCDC's massaging, they call it 'adjusting'. has resulted in an increase in the rural values, from a raw value of 0.11C/century to an adjusted value of 0.58C/century, and no change in the urban values. . . . This is the exact opposite of any rational consideration, given the increase in the size and activities within urban locations unless deception is the goal.

The warming alarmists embedded in our government-sponsored research units have already wasted billions of dollars to endlessly run misleading computerized "climate models." They have come close to bankrupting our society through the forced substitution of costly, erratic solar and wind power for coal, oil, and natural gas while we refuse to authorize new nuclear facilities. Next would come the job losses, as U.S. industries shut down due to high energy costs or flee to Third World countries with no energy taxes.

Now we find that the man-made global warming record, which has supposedly triggered all of this, is "supported" by government-manipulated temperature records:

    * The Russians say Britain's East Anglia University officially deleted most of the thermometer sites scattered across Russia's vast hinterlands because the readings didn't show global warming.

    * New Zealand's official record shows a major warming in the 20th century, but none of its weather sites shows that warming trend.

    * Veteran meteorologist Joe D'Aleo of Icecap recently charged, on John Coleman's KUSI-TV special, that the U.S. temperature record has been similarly corrupted over the years, weeding out non-warming weather sites. .

    * James Goodridge, then California State Climatologist, published a peer-reviewed report in 1992 that found California's urban counties had experienced a strong warming, the suburban counties a moderate warming, and the rural counties no warming at all.

We've been enthralled by the Green Wave of guilt and redemption. I recently reminded in a column that the 1995 IPCC report claimed a "human fingerprint on our warming" with no credible scientific to support it and no such scientific support has since been proffered. An NIH physician who believes in man-made warming looked at this column and said, What do I care about a 14-year-old report?"

Heavily-taxed energy will double and triple the real costs for everything we buy. Look for food costs to soar five-fold as nitrogen fertilizer made with natural gas is forced out of the farm economy. Steel will have too big a "carbon footprint" so the steelmakers and manufacturing will be in China and India. Yet there is only a 22 percent correlation between our global warming record and the rise of human-emitted CO2 in the 20th century. The correlation with sunspots is 79 percent.

The government-sponsored climate research community for whatever reasons has apparently betrayed us.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Amos
Date: 17 Mar 10 - 08:50 PM

They are physically real, meaning they hover around 98.6 and process food. But as for being real in any cognitive sense, they are far, far from it .

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: GUEST,Scorpio.
Date: 17 Mar 10 - 07:28 PM

Are these threaders real? Are there really people over there who think concern for the environment is a communist plot? Or Obama is Hitler because he suggests that Americans take care of each other? Bit scary for us Europeans, when USA decides what happens to the rest of us.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Amos
Date: 17 Mar 10 - 03:03 PM

Horse pucky, Hawk. Re-examine the numbers.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: beardedbruce
Date: 17 Mar 10 - 01:10 PM

"Carbon dioxide doesn't affect global warming

Saturday, October 7, 2000

In reading Dispatch Science Reporter David Lore's recent article "Evidence keeps mounting that Earth is warming up,'' it is difficult not to retort: So, what else is new?

I learned about global warming 50 years ago reading geology as one of my subjects in natural sciences at Cambridge University.

The "news'' at that time was that the ice sheets had been retreating since the early 1900s, and Earth warming had started about the middle to late 1600s.

This followed a 300- to 400-year cooling period, commonly known as the Little Ice Age, which came after the much hotter Medieval Warm Period, running roughly A.D. 900 to 1300, depending on the source. During that warm period, the Vikings had two settlements on the west coast of Greenland -- try that today -- which vanished with onset of the Little Ice Age.

And, the further point in the article that climatologist James Hansen gets so excited about is the contribution of carbon dioxide. What has carbon dioxide to do with all this?

Almost nothing, from what I have seen, looking at the numbers for the last 30 years, which raises major questions both about both the feasibility and the pointless cost to society of trying to control such emissions.

It is well-known and fully recognized, if one checks the relevant Web sites, that the two principal thermal-absorbing and thermal-emitting compounds in the atmosphere are water and carbon dioxide.

However -- and this point is continually missed -- the ratio of water to carbon dioxide is something like 30-to-1 as an average value. At the top limit, it is closer to 100-to-1.

This means that the carbon dioxide is simply "noise'' in the water concentration, and anything carbon dioxide could do, water has already done.

So, if the carbon dioxide is increasing, is it the carbon dioxide driving up the temperature or is the rising temperature driving up the carbon dioxide?

One can easily run the numbers by using the standard psychrometric chart as used by the friendly neighborhood air-conditioning man. This is a graph of the ratio of water to air in the atmosphere plotted against temperature, for different levels of relative humidity.

If one calculates the ratio of carbon dioxide to dry air and plots it on the same graph, one would see it is just above zero. In other words, at such a small relative concentration, how can carbon dioxide have any significant influence on the atmosphere? If anyone has an answer, I'm listening.

Robert H. Essenhigh
Professor of energy conservation
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Ohio State University"


source

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: freda underhill
Date: 17 Mar 10 - 04:06 AM

For anyone who believes in karma, everything we do has an effect. As well as the planet pumping away on its own slow throb of eons, we worms on the surface have been doing more than existing in harmony.

There has been a huge increase in the global concentrations of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide since 200 years ago to levels not observed for the past 800,000 years or more. The average rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 was at least five times larger over the period from 1960 to 1999 than over any other 40-year period during the two millennia before the industrial era. The majority of the increase comes from burning fossil fuels.

LH, for a quick discussion of why what's happening is different from the cycles hundreds of millions of years, check this info from the Australian Department of Climate explains with sources.

In the meantime, I have to say that it's good to be skeptical and belief in conspiracies is rational, given the nature of humans and their obsession with power. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that everything you disagree with politically is wrong.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Ebbie
Date: 16 Mar 10 - 05:51 PM

Little Hawk, before you too tightly embrace the views of others, please do keep in mind that there are a couple of individuals here who do believe that there is no global warming at all, not just that human beings have no share in it.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Little Hawk
Date: 16 Mar 10 - 05:47 PM

I am espousing natural wisdom and graceful acceptance of reality, sir, and you are the victim of a very well choreographed government and media-inspired scare campaign...similarly to all those folks who recently fell for the giant H1N1 vaccine marketing tempest-in-a-teapot scam and went out to get vaccinations they never needed or benefited from.

;-)

I still have not really had enough time to watch Alice's video. I just got back from Toronto, and I must go out shortly to play music. I should be able to watch it tomorrow, though.

Just imagine what would happen if I watched it tomorrow and changed my mind!


Nothing. It wouldn't change the future of the planet one iota.

But you and Alice would be delighted that I now agreed with your own view of the theory of global warming...

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Amos
Date: 16 Mar 10 - 12:21 PM

You are espousing ignorance, vehemently. A bad sign, indeed, M. Hack!



A

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Little Hawk
Date: 16 Mar 10 - 10:02 AM

The Earth warms. The Earth cools. The Earth warms again. The Earth cools again. An ice age comes. A warm period comes. The climate changes. The climate always changes. Change is the essential fact of existence. People come. People go. Other species come and go. The Earth just keeps on going. Get used to it and stop being scared all the time about something.

I still don't have time to view Alice's video, as I must drive to Toronto in about 10 minutes. Like the next global cooling phase, however, I shall return if you wait for a suitable period of time. (probably) (You never know for sure, do you?)

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: freda underhill
Date: 16 Mar 10 - 08:19 AM

2009 was Australia's second warmest year on record, containing three significant heatwaves, while 2000-2009 was Australia's warmest decade since the Australian Bureau of Meteorology commenced high quality national records in 1910. Last year, floods affected large areas of northern Australia, northeast NSW and Tasmania, while the year started with extremely dry conditions in the southeast and for parts of WA. We have just completed the globe's warmest decade on record, while sea level was also at record levels in 2009.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: GUEST,Guest from sanity
Date: 16 Mar 10 - 01:06 AM

Global warming????

Another fraud perpetrated on the people to control the masses, mostly from the 'liberal' Democrats. You'd think that after all the stuff coming out about a myriad of corruption, and lies, that some light bulbs would be flickering on.

Now, I'm not a Republican, either..nope!..I'm from Sanity-Land! ..Just here visiting. You know, if you stay objective, and stop choosing sides, or 'issues' raised by either side, to get you all emotionally tied in, the lies, bribery, corruption, incapability, and general subversiveness of our 'so-called' elected 'representatives', and 'leaders'(read dictators),...seems reminiscent of times past....WHEN A LOT OF YOU FOLKS WERE BITCHING....but now its ok, huh? ..Methinks as you get older you're getting conditioned that bullshit in government, is just O.K...as long as they convince you, that you're all on the same side!

By the way, Al Gore, should be stripped of the Nobel Peace Prize, made to return the $500 million, and face criminal charges for conspiracy to defraud.....you know, like Bernie Madoff.

But no-o-o-o-o-o, he's our 'liberal' icon who is for us little people!

The jokes on you!!!!!!

Redistribution of wealth.....from us tax-payers to the corrupt pieces of crap, that tells us WHAT to think....so they can increase THEIR power and money!!..and stick it to us!!!

Happy Easter, and Health Care Deform!!

GfS

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Little Hawk
Date: 15 Mar 10 - 11:51 PM

Alice - I'll have to get to it tomorrow...or Wednesday. It's too danged late now, and I've got an early day tomorrow.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Little Hawk
Date: 15 Mar 10 - 06:08 PM

Righto. I will. Right after tonight's song circle.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Alice
Date: 15 Mar 10 - 04:01 PM

watch the lecture

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Little Hawk
Date: 15 Mar 10 - 03:03 PM

Or did they do their usual subversive job at the time and oppose the media's notion that we were going into a new ice age?

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Little Hawk
Date: 15 Mar 10 - 02:46 PM

Were they also behind the great "global cooling" scare of the early 70s?

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Alice
Date: 15 Mar 10 - 02:31 PM

Here is a new book being released on May 25 and link to video lecture by one of the authors:

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

authors Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway
"Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era."

product description from Amazon.com
Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly?some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it.

University of Rhode Island dept of Oceanography speech, video of presentation by Oreskes
Answering Climate Change Skeptics
VIDEO on you tube, lecture

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Amos
Date: 15 Mar 10 - 02:14 PM

I LOVE that guy, Hawk. But I would take his cosmic perspective with a grain of salt.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Little Hawk
Date: 15 Mar 10 - 01:34 PM

Here...this'll drive you nuts. ;-)

George Carlin comments on human arrogance, conceit, and self-importance...

George Carlin on global warming, etc...

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Amos
Date: 15 Mar 10 - 10:25 AM

The solar minimum at the end of each 11-year solar cycle is characterized by a reduction in the number of sunspots, flares, and other solar activity. The most recent, from 2008 to the beginning of 2009, lasted fifteen months longer than expected.

The study used 13 years' worth of results from SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which was launched jointly by the European Space Angency and NASA. Among the data gathered by SOHO are measurements of the ionized gases moving from the sun's equator to the poles in what is known as the meridional flow. The scientists then tried to correlate the flow with variations in the sunspot cycle.

The researchers, Lisa Rightmire of the University of Memphis, Tennessee, and David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, found the normally slow meridional flows started to speed up a few years before 2008, when the number of sunspots declined. In the previous solar minimum the speed was around 30 kph, but in 2008-9 was about 47 kph. The scientists suggest the solar minimum was longer than usual because the magnetic fields produced by the gas flows at the poles were weaker, but it is not known why the speed of the meridional flow increased.

Hathaway said the meridional flow carries with it magnetic fields that oppose the flows of strongly magnetized material on the solar surface. When the meriodional flow is faster the opposition to the other flows is greater and the polar magnetic field cannot become as strong as it otherwise would, and this may have delayed the start of the current solar cycle that began in 2009. Hathaway said the strength of the magnetic flow at the poles is critical since the magnetic fields fall below the surface and set up the conditions for sunspots, and when the fields are weaker they take longer to reach the required strength to produce sunspots. Hathaway and Rightmire also predict the current solar cycle is likely to have less solar activity than the previous cycle.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: freda underhill
Date: 15 Mar 10 - 06:24 AM

Here's some more information, from the Australian government's two major scientific agencies – the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology.

State of the Climate This link is to a six page summery of a larger report.

Changes observed include:

Highly variable rainfall across the country, with substantial increases in rainfall in northern and central parts of Australia, as well as significant decreases across much of southern and eastern Australia. Rapidly rising sea levels from 1993 to 2009, with levels around Australia rising, between 1.5 and 3mm per year in Australia's south and east and between 7 and 10mm in the country's north

Read it and see for yourself.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Little Hawk
Date: 06 Mar 10 - 01:19 PM

It's unquestionably the most significant way in which the Earth warms and cools itself. Heat in any given region causes evaporation of surface water, lake water, ocean water, etc. That evaporation puts water vapor into the atmosphere. The moist, warm air rises until it hits cooler temperatures, and the water vapor condenses and forms clouds. Clouds help cool the earth below them. Further cooling causes those clouds to condense into rain or snow. The rain and snow further cools the surface of the Earth, starts evaporating, and the whole thing starts over again.

You could say it's like a giant air conditioning system.

There's also a large exchange of CO2 between the atmosphere and the pant world, so I think I'd call that part of the Earth's natural warming and cooling system too.

Man's activities would certainly have some effect on the overall situation, the question is "how much?".

These warming and cooling phases have been happening for millions of years, as is shown in the geological record and in ice core samples. There have been periods when there was far more CO2 in the atmosphere than now....and life flourished during a number of those periods. That makes me skeptical that an increase in CO2 is the apocalyptic scenario that we have been presented with.

I also can't see why there would have been a notable planetary cooling phase between 1940 and 1975 if our increasing level of industrial emissions were the key factor behind increased planetary warming. It just doesn't make sense in the light of that historically recorded cooling period (which led to scare stories in the press during the mid-70s about the threat of a new "ice age").

It seems more likely to me that changing solar output of energy to the Earth is the dominant factor.

I'm not saying that our activities have NO effect on planetary warming and cooling, but I think their effect has probably been exaggerated of late.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Ebbie
Date: 06 Mar 10 - 01:05 PM

A question regarding water vapor: (I know little about the subject)   Might water vapor be THE natural way that Earth warms and cools itself? And further, might the increased levels of greenhouse gases have upset the natural balance?

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Little Hawk
Date: 06 Mar 10 - 12:20 PM

That's a very interesting article. It looks like there are both dangers and opportunities created by the warming in the Arctic region.

I found that description of how the great boreal forests of Canada and Russia absorb a huge amount of CO2 during the summer, then release it during the winter fascinating...the analogy being that it was like the planet "breathing".

I find it a little odd that the article talks about greenhouse gases and then specifically mentions CO2 and Methane....but has nothing to say about water vapor which is the largest greenhouse gas of them all by far.

A warmer world would encourage the growth of vegetation...providing human beings allow that growth to happen.

It seems likely to me that the planet has a way of regulating itself quite intelligently through the ability of the plant world and other biological systems to adapt and change to fit new conditions and thereby bring those new conditions back toward a central balance....but humanity is a wild card in that process, because we cut down forests, kill off other species, and radically alter the environment in our continual desire to expand "civilization".

It's not an intelligent or wise approach to tie oneself to an economic model where "more" is always considered to be "better".

We need a new economic and political philosophy: one that is based on principles such as...

1. reducing population (by peaceful and unharmful means)
2. restoring the natural environment
3. replacing a competitively drive system with a cooperatively-driven one that sets out to secure a good life for ALL citizens as a normal civil right.
4. an end to warfare (which is another form of competition)
5. a work ethic that is based on acommplishing something that is GOOD for everyone, not just making money no matter how you do it, and with no regard to how it may affect other people, Nature, and the planet.
6. a moral ethic that values all life on this planet, not just human life...

We need, in short, to stop being egocentric destroyers of everything else around us.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Ebbie
Date: 06 Mar 10 - 11:54 AM

Welcome to Barrow, Alaska

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Little Hawk
Date: 06 Mar 10 - 11:38 AM

The one from the Smithsonian? I'll have a look. Got a link?

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Ebbie
Date: 06 Mar 10 - 11:35 AM

In other words, LH, you're not going to read that article.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: GUEST,Doc John
Date: 06 Mar 10 - 05:26 AM

Two features were on BBC Radio 4 news yesterday morning: the Met Office confirmed that man made global warming really is occurring and then this was followed by a feature about a Scandanavian ship becoming stuck in the ice as this was one of the coldest winter in the Baltic on record. I wonder was this juxtaposition accidental or deliberate.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Little Hawk
Date: 06 Mar 10 - 12:28 AM

It's not anecdotal evidence I'm all that interested in, Ebbie, because anecdotal evidence is more often about changing local weather than it is about anything which would shed much light on questions of overall global warming.

No, it's actual observations by trained scientific personnel such as climatologists that I am interested in....deep ice core samples from the ice pack over Greenland and in other locations...atmospheric temperature readings done by balloon and satellite...surface temperature readings done in consistent locations with professional equipment, the geological record of the past, that sort of thing.

That's what I find more reliable than computer models or anecdotes, because it's direct scientific observation of actual confirmed data...not hypothetical projections based on a computer model.

I'm not much interested in the anecdotal stuff from people here and there, because it varies too much and it is too dependent on rapidly changing weather patterns in a single season for a single location. I don't consider that very helpful in determining whether or not we are experiencing global warming, nor does it help in determining exactly what is causing such global warming....and that is what I'm mostly concerned about: what are the primary causes? Man-made or natural? If they are natural causes, then the GW theory the IPCC is espousing is incorrect.

I have heard some murmurs lately that world temperatures have stopped increasing in the last few years...I don't know if that's correct or not. It may be. I'd have to look into it further, because I have no basis yet for either categorically denying or totally accepting that notion.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Ebbie
Date: 05 Mar 10 - 09:55 PM

Little Hawk, you say that you would put more trust on anecdotal evidence, rather than the models in the laboratories (paraphrased). So read this month's Smithsonian Magazine. It has an article from page 59 to page 66, titled 'Welcome to Barrow, Alaska- Ground Zero for Climate Change.'

It is well written, complete with graphs and pictures and replete with locals' views and stories.


Incidentally, you said that "no one" is disputing that the globe is getting warmer, that the point of contention is to whether man has a major part in it. If you notice, Sawzaw does NOT accept that the climate is changing, and in fact, most recently you appeared to agree with him that the earth has in the last decade stopped warming.

I suppose that it's possible, when it comes down to it, that most of us will be long gone before the worst of the effects are known or experienced- but I wouldn't bet on it.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Sawzaw
Date: 05 Mar 10 - 08:59 PM

That explains it all Amos.

Now you can start forking your nice green tax dollars over to Gore and Pachauri's "Green" companies.

The green jobs myth
washingtonpost.com February 26, 2010

"Green jobs" have become a central underpinning of the Obama administration's rationale to promote clean energy. But how valid is the assumption that a "clean-energy" economy will generate enough jobs to mitigate today's high level of unemployment -- new jobless claims were up 22,000 this week -- and to meet the needs of future generations? A green economy would have to spout jobs in the millions to do both. The facts challenge the prevailing thinking among some policymakers and officials that green jobs are a principal reason for transforming the economy.

Let's consider just one clean-energy sector, the smart grid, for its job-creation potential. The Obama administration allocated a little more than $4 billion in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to the smart grid, an unprecedented amount for a hitherto-neglected but critical piece of our national infrastructure. Much of this is to be spent installing close to 20 million "smart meters" over the next five years. Smart meters are digital versions of the spinning electric meters that are omnipresent nationwide. Whereas spinning meters have changed little in more than a century and must be read by workers, smart meters automatically transmit electricity consumption data to a utility. Virtually eliminating human intervention, smart meters promise more accurate measurement of electricity usage as well as increasingly efficient management of energy production resources.

Nearly 40 million smart meters have been deployed worldwide, mostly in Europe. Jobs created in this industry can be broadly classified into four categories: installation, manufacturing, research and development, and IT services.

First, installation: It typically takes a team of two certified electricians half an hour to replace the old, spinning meter. In one day, two people can install about 15 new meters, or about 5,000 in a year. Were a million smart meters to be installed in a year, 400 installation jobs would be created. It follows that the planned U.S. deployment of 20 million smart meters over five years, or 4 million per year, should create 1,600 installation jobs. Unless more meters are added to the annual deployment schedule, this workforce of 1,600 should cover installation needs for the next five years.

Although a surge of new digital meters will be produced, the manufacturing process is highly automated. And with much of it accomplished overseas, net creation in domestic manufacturing jobs is expected to be only in the hundreds. In R&D and IT services, high-paying white-collar jobs are on the horizon, but as with manufacturing, the number of jobs created is forecast to be in the hundreds or low thousands.

Now let's consider job losses. It takes one worker today roughly 15 minutes to read a single meter. So in a day, a meter reader can scan about 30 meters, or about 700 meters a month. Meters are typically read once a month, making it the base period to calculate meter-reading jobs. Reading a million meters every month engages about 1,400 personnel. In five years, 20 million manually read meters are expected to disappear, taking with them some 28,000 meter-reading jobs.

In other words, instead of creating jobs, smart metering will probably result in net job destruction. This should not be surprising because the main method of making the electrical grid "smart" is by automating its functions. Automation by definition obviates the need for people.

In other "clean-energy" sectors such as solar and wind energy, jobs are predicted to emerge in the same broad categories of installation, manufacturing, R&D and IT services, but the near-term expected levels of investment in and adoption of these renewable sources of energy mean that net job creation should top out in the tens of thousands, as opposed to the desired hundreds of thousands or more. Electric vehicles represent another promising green sector, but even if the vehicles were rolled out in substantive quantities, jobs would be created mainly in research and development and infrastructure support, and there, too, only in the hundreds or maybe even thousands. Manufacturing jobs would grow only incrementally since electric vehicle production will for the most part cannibalize that of gasoline-powered cars.

For the purpose of creating jobs, then, a "clean-energy economy" will not offer a panacea. This does not necessarily mean that America should not become green to alleviate climate change, to kick its addiction to foreign oil or to use energy sources more efficiently. But those who take great pains to tout the "job-creation potential" of the green space might just end up inducing labor pains all around.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Amos
Date: 05 Mar 10 - 03:23 PM

Lost in the coverage of the so-called climategate email controversy is a key point about the IPCC's track record of climate change estimates. James McCarthy is on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment. He spoke February 21st at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego:

"If you were to go back and map the IPCC projection for sea level rise and temperature in 1990, look at it in 1995, look at it in 2000. In retrospect you would find that they were conservative. So we talk about errors. If you were to do two ledgers—here are IPCC overestimates, here are IPCC underestimates—over the 20 or so years that these assessments have been running, the underestimate ledger would be much larger than the overestimate. Even with glitches—clearly erroneous editing or sloppy editing that led to these erroneous statements that got us in trouble recently."

—Steve Mirsky
podcast here

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Little Hawk
Date: 05 Mar 10 - 01:03 PM

Regarding Fallujah and the birth defects...the USA has been using various toxic materials in their weaponry for some time now, including artillery shells with depleted Uranium in them. A lot of people in the battle areas have been made sick by the aftereffects, including the local people and American soldiers as well. Gulf War Syndrome affected a great many veterans of Bush the Elder's war in the Gulf. Again, it was due to some kind of toxic poisoning of American military personnel during the campaign. To put it briefly, there is a lot of weird shit going on!

Sometimes I think that the few people at the top in this world are clandestinely actually trying to kill off a majority of the world's population by a variety of means. If so, they are not succeeding very well at it, but they're causing a great deal of terrible suffering.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Amos
Date: 05 Mar 10 - 01:01 PM

I have looked over the rebuttals from Hansen's "superior", who says he was not his actual reporting superior. Here's the important point. Yes, computerized models are flawed. The US ones are more flawed than the EU ones. Granularity is one of the issues, to be sure. ANother one is completely unknown phenomena such as the recently discovered Niiler striation circulation patterns that change our understanding of ocean carbon processes.

But that level of detail and modeling itself does not rebut the raw values of temperature and CO2 ramp up, which are pretty clearly correlated chronologically even if with a little lag.

And most important, they do not change the fact that those values are breaking out of a range they have held for thousands of years.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Little Hawk
Date: 05 Mar 10 - 12:51 PM

Amos, I have posted links to various videos in which a number of scientists and professionals in the field explain their opposition to the anthropomorphic global warming theory. Just go back and find them and spend some time viewing them.

Read the link that pdq posted today.

There's all kinds of stuff out there now from scientists who dispute the theory which you favor. The only way you can not be aware of it is by willfully avoiding looking for such information or refusing to take it seriously or read it with any real attention when you find it.

If you're like most people, though, you'll just dismiss such opinions by saying, "Oh, well...he's a wingnut, and you can't trust what he says." It's a handy way of retaining an opinion you have alaready grown accustomed to and comfortable with in the face of contrary evidence from another source...and it's what most people do when confronted with contrary evidence. They just engage in the old ad-hominem attack on the messenger if all else fails.

At the end of the day (as the saying goes) most people just go on believing what they already want to believe, regardless of the evidence. This is why I don't break my back trying to change people's minds around here much of the time. It's like trying to calmly talk a cat into taking a much needed bath...hopeless! ;-D

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Ebbie
Date: 05 Mar 10 - 12:49 PM

"...so something must be done to reduce the birth rate worldwide." LH

On ABC last night - there is television here where I'm housesitting - they featured an article on Falujah. Evidently since it was so thoroughly subdued by American forces six years ago, babies are being born with severe birth defects. (One baby was born with three heads- they showed a quick picture.) Many more were born with brain damage or with facial defects or with parts of limbs missing. One doctor said that two or three babies a DAY have severe effects.

The official advice at this point: Don't have a baby.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Sawzaw
Date: 05 Mar 10 - 12:39 PM

I am not here to defend or promote CFLs but as an example, I replaced 28 40 watt bulbs in my bathroom light bars a few years ago and only one has burned out.

That one went early on as is typical of the lifespan of the IC chips in the circuitry that replaces the old fashioned ballast transformer.

Chips either die young or live to an old age. The bulb however does not burn out, the electronic ballast goes bad.

Plus I get more light, lower electric bills and less load on my AC.

That's 1120 watts being replaced by 252 watts. That's a 77.5% savings in energy consumption.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Sawzaw
Date: 05 Mar 10 - 12:22 PM

I saw the LEDs. they were too expensive and they were barely more efficient. The whole thing looked like a heat sink with eyes, the LEDs being the eyes. lEDs are bluish too.

http://www.led-lighting-manufacturers.com/showing_44/Power-LED-Bulbs.html

There is mercury in fluorescent lamps also.

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Sawzaw
Date: 05 Mar 10 - 12:06 PM

LH: I get the soft white ones that put out a warmer, more pinkish or yellowish light as opposed to the bright white or day light which are bluer or cooler.

  Color temperature               kelvins          
  'Warm white' or 'Soft white'  ≤ 3,000 K  
  'White' or 'Bright White'       3,500 K          
  'Cool white'                    4,000 K          
  'Daylight'                    ≥ 5,000 K

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: pdq
Date: 05 Mar 10 - 11:18 AM

LH...thanks for saying things in you own words instead of giving people a steady diet of "copy'n'paste" BS like some here do.

Frodo in Oz...read this and you will get a better idea who James Hansen is ...

                                                               from Hansen's superior

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Amos
Date: 05 Mar 10 - 10:28 AM

A normal courtesy would be to point your faithful readers to a reference or citation of the scientists you are drawing your data from, LH.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
From: Little Hawk
Date: 05 Mar 10 - 08:27 AM

The material I've been reading that questions the currently popular theory about anthropomorphic global warming by CO2 emmissions doesn't emanate from non-scientists, Ebbie. It emanates from scientists.

I think the biggest threat to humanity in general stems from our rising population, so something must be done to reduce the birth rate worldwide. Something must also be done to restore the forests that once covered much of the planet. North Africa, for example, was once forested, as was most of the Mediterranean rim...and probably most of the Indian subcontinent. It all got cut down over a couple of thousand years by the civilizations that arose in those areas.

One thing for sure....Nature itself will eventually find the solution to our overpopulation and over-exploitation of the land if we don't. The planet has ways of protecting itself, ultimately, against any species that oversteps its bounds here.