Monday, October 12, 2009

Nobel-prize winning sissy - I don't dislike Al Gore. He seems like a decent guy who is earnest about his cause. But what bugs me about Gore is that he behaves as if his environmental manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount. There shall be no questions or debate for Al Gore.

Stand and deliver. If all the climate change deniers out there are crazy, it should be easy to dispel their arguments. The problem for Gore, however, is that there are some inconvenient facts out there indicating the debate is not over.

Extra - The ice isn't melting.

13 comments:

Jody said...

Even Jesus took questions.

Buffy said...

That's because Jesus can walk on the water after the ice caps melt.

Anonymous said...

the US military takes the threats from global climate change quite seriously
http://www.americansecurityproject.org/theflashpointblog/jessi-berlin/2009/09/01/the-war-college-chimes-in-time-is-ripe-for-us-leadership-on-climate-security/

Anonymous said...

Why does the U.S. military hate America?

after Knabb said...

Climate models uniformly predict warming if you input current and expected CO2 levels. Now, they could all be wrong (especially since so much depends on parametrization), but many of them are developed and run independently. So if the models are wrong, we really have made some enormous, fundamental mistake in understanding the basic physics of climate. This is highly unlikely.

We have temperature records going back for millions of years, and high resolution records going back for thousands of years. They're not instrumental records, they're calibrated proxy records. The proxies could be wrong, of course, but since there are several completely independent proxies all of which tell you the same story for global temperature, it is extraordinarily improbable that they're all flawed in the same way. When the tree rings match the stable isotope records which in turn match the pollen records, etc, confidence levels increase.

Bram said...

Models are, by definition, based on assumptions. You assume that higher CO2 levels cause warming, you get higher temps.

If you assume that CO2 levels are a trailing indicator since warmer water holds less carbon - you get nothing. Then, things like solar activity which we have had very little of lately become the leading indicator of temperature trends.

Anonymous said...

Yes. That's so. If you go against the millions of years' worth of reproduceable and alligned data that is accepted by more than 99% of today's scientists, you will indeed find it possible to arrive at an alternate hypothesis.

Bram said...

99% of today's scientist - you care to back that number?

It's Oct 15th and its snowing in New Jersey - was that predicted?

Anonymous said...

Sorry for any hyperbole, I was going with the unambiguous position statements of the science academies of Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, France, Indonesia, Ireland, South Africa, Italy, Malaysia, New Zealand, Sweden, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the World Meteorological Organization, the American Meteorological Society, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the International Arctic Science Committee, the Arctic Council, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the European Science Foundation, the Royal Meteorological Society, the Committee on the Science of Climate Change of the National Research Council, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the InterAcademy Council, the American Geophysical Union, the International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences, the UK's Institute of Biology, the Royal Society of New Zealand, the African Academy of Sciences, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, the European Federation of Geologists, the Geological Society of America, the Geological Society of Australia, the Divisions of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences of the European Geosciences Union, the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the American Society for Microbiology, the American Quaternary Association, the International Union for Quaternary Research, the United Nations' World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the World Federation of Public Health Associations, the Society of American Foresters, the American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians, the Australian Coral Reef Society, the Wildlife Society, the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the Institution of Engineers Australia.

No scientific body of national or international standing currently maintains a dissenting opinion.

But maybe that's only 98.8%. And as you sagely point out, none of them gave us the head's up for yesterday's New Jersey snow, so what do THEY know?

Bram said...

Ah, great list of "societies" who thrive on telling grasping politicians what they want to hear in return for research grants.

Can you refer me to a study done by any of these groups in the 1990's that accurately predicted the temperature drop we have experienced over the last decade?

Anonymous said...

You are sooooo lucky. I wish *I* was smarter than the bulk of all climate scientists everywhere.

You made one small error, though... and by "small," I mean big. There's no "temperature drop over the last decade." 1998-2007 is the hottest decade on record. The trend was interrupted last year by La Nina in the Pacific Ocean. As a result, temperatures have plunged all the way down to the late-90s statistics that sparked worldwide concern.

Since you put such great stock in recent fluctuations, you'll surely want to know that the average ocean surface temperature reached its all-time high in June 2009, which I hope we can agree is part of the last decade. (Oceanic records have been kept since 1880.) Four weeks later, July 2009 represented one of the highest single-month temperature jumps since global satellite measurements began in 1978.

Precisely 98.7092743362719% of scientists warn that we can't base sweeping conclusions on such short-term ebbs or surges... although they're suspiciously silent on the controversy of October snowfall in Trenton. Or at least that's what those lab coat-wearing suckup societies tell the "grasping politicians." And distrusting them makes total sense. As we know, politicians always embrace elitism, and do the opposite of what corporate interests would prefer.

Bram said...

Ah, so it's getting hotter. Please refer me to legitimate data source that hasn't been scrubbed.

Anonymous said...

Mmmm, you can just smell the scrupulous sincerity behind Bram's unfeigned willingness to be convinced.

But you gotta love the "let's bargain" premise. In science, it's not the responsibility of the 99% to convince the 1%.

How about this rhetorical counteroffer, Professor? Anything you say is guaranteed to be a pack of one-sided lies, and any sham source you cite is a rat's nest of rightwing payola. Now, I'll entertain any evidence you care to provide.

(As a climate change denier, ever get the feeling that you're a polar bear, and the world is a melting iceberg?)