Hyperbole as policy
Can you say “desperate’?
UNITED NATIONS (CNN) — President Obama joined other world leaders Tuesday in calling for immediate and substantive steps to combat climate change, saying failure to act now would bring “irreversible catastrophe.”
As the world gets cooler the rhetoric gets more desperate.
A Meteorologist’s Skeptical Take on Global Warming
Matt Rogers is a meteorologist for the Washington Post, an unusual place to find a sceptic of “Global Warming”. Yet, nonetheless, there he is giving ten reasons he thinks it’s wise to question the “concensus” on GW.
But first he starts by setting the stage with how difficult the topic is:
…I frequently say that weather forecasting is a humbling endeavor, and I have learned to respect its challenges. From this perspective, you might be able to better understand why I wince when hearing pronouncements such as “the science is settled”, “the debate is over”, or even the “the temperature in the 2050s is projected to be…” I realize that forecasting climate and weather are different, but both involve a large number of moving parts.
With respect for the topic and the state of the science he lists his top ten reasons, David Letterman style, for questioning the orthodox view:
(10) Hurricanes: …Since the 1990s, this activity has been decreasing, which goes against what we were told to expect on a warming planet.
(9) Ice Caps: In 2007, the Northern Hemisphere reached a record low in ice coverage and the Northwest Passage was opened. …What you were not told was that the data that triggered this record is only available back to the late 1970s.
(8) El Niño: …we are now about to complete an entire decade without a strong El Niño event (three occurred in the 1980s-1990s). So the more recent 2007 IPCC report backtracked from Hansen’s prediction, noting that there were too many uncertainties to understand how El Niño will behave with climate change.
(7) Climate Models: To be blunt, the computer models that policy-makers are using to make key decisions failed to collectively inform us of the flat global land-sea temperatures seen in the 2000s…
(6) CO2 (Carbon Dioxide): …Over the summer, CO2 reached almost .04% of our total atmosphere as reported here. Because CO2 is but a sliver of our atmosphere, it is known as a “trace gas.” We all agree that it is increasing, but is there a chance that our estimate of its influence on the Greenhouse Effect is overblown given its small atmospheric ratio?
(5) Global Temperatures: …Three of four major datasets that track global estimates show 1998 as the warmest year on record with temperatures flat or falling since then.
(4) Solar Issue: …The second half of the twentieth century (when we saw lots of warming) was during a major solar maximum period- which is now ending. Total solar irradiance has been steady or sinking similar to our global temperatures over much of this past decade…
(3) But what about…? …”But what about all this crazy weather we’ve been having lately?” …Very few statistics are available that correctly show an increase in these “crazy” events.
(2) Silencing Dissent: …several times during debates individuals have told me I should not question the “settled science” due to the moral imperative of “saving the planet”. As with a religious debate, I’m told that my disagreement means I do not “care enough” and even if correct, I should not question the science. This frightens me.
(1) Pullback: Does climate change hysteria represent another bubble waiting to burst? From the perspective of the alarmism and the saturation of the message, the answer could be yes. I believe that when our science or economic experts tend to be incorrect, it usually involves predictions that have underperformed expectations (Y2K, SARS, oil supply, etc). Can we think of any other expert-given, consensus-based, long-term predictions that have verified correctly? Not one comes to mind.
All are good but I like No. 1 the best. Because that, my friends, describes hubris.
Take that ALGORE!
ALGORE’s hometown of Nashville isn’t cooperating with the Global Warming agenda:
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Cool weather has broken a previous low temperature for July 21 in Nashville that was set when Rutherford B. Hayes was president.
When the temperature at the National Weather Service station dipped to 58 degrees at 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday, it wiped out the previous record low for the date of 60 degrees, which was set in 1877.
Was this just a freak anomaly? Apparently not.
NWS forecaster Bobby Boyd noted it was the third consecutive morning when Nashville either tied or broke a daily low temperature record.
And here in Chicago we’re still waiting for summer to really begin.
Now, of course, we know that local weather is not global climate. We also know it’s hot in the South and West. So its only having a fun to point out little factoids like this.
But, that being said, it’s beginning to look like 2009 will be another year of a decline in global temperatures. According to satellite measurements, global temperatures were at ”normal” levels through June of this year with a “Global Temperature Anomaly” of 0.00 degrees C.
I’ll look for that info to be reported broadly in the MSM. 
Well maybe not tomorrow but…..
Is this another “Oops! Never mind”? You decide.
How many times have you seen the word “collapse” used lately to describe what could unfold should human-caused global warming, and more particularly warming seas, erode the West Antarctic Ice Sheet? (One metric: A Google search for “West Antarctic Ice Sheet” and “collapse” gets 29,800 hits.)
That seems like a lot. But what do I know? On the other hand, what if that “collapse” takes thousands of years to happen?
…But this paper, by David Pollard at Penn State and Robert M. DeConto of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst… ran a five-million-year computer simulation of the ice sheet’s comings and goings, using data on past actual climate and ocean conditions gleaned from seabed samples (the subject of the other paper) to validate the resulting patterns.
The bottom line? In this simulation, the ice sheet does collapse when waters beneath fringing ice shelves warm 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit or so, but the process — at its fastest — takes thousands of years. Over all, the pace of sea-level rise from the resulting ice loss doesn’t go beyond about 1.5 feet per century, Dr. Pollard said in an interview, a far cry from what was thought possible a couple of decades ago.
…Over all, the loss of the West Antarctic ice from warming is appearing “more likely a definite thing to worry about on a thousand-year time scale but not a hundred years,” Dr. Pollard said.
Seems like more of a thousand-year “shrug” to me. Or maybe a thousand-year “sprawl”. Certainly NOT a “collapse”. For those near the ocean as this “collapse” happens, here’s my advice: about every hundred years or so, take a step backwards.
Don’t worry about those polar bears!
Remember all those stories designed to make you cry about polar bears drowning? It was your fault that global warming was melting their ice flows and THAT had to stop RIGHT NOW! Well, those stories will have to be put into storage for awhile.
Thanks to a rapid rebound in recent months, global sea ice levels now equal those seen 29 years ago, when the year 1979 also drew to a close.
Two interesting things happened in 1979. That was the year that satellite observations of sea ice began. It was also the year that Time Magazine ran a cover story headlined “Another Ice Age?” telling us that thirty years of observations indicated that the globe was cooling. (I strongly urge you to read the article and see if you notice how similar it is to the hype you’re hearing now about global warming.)
You might be wondering what happened to the predictions we heard earlier this year that Arctic Ice was disappearing so much that shipping lanes could open up through the Northwest Passage.
Earlier this year, predictions were rife that the North Pole could melt entirely in 2008. Instead, the Arctic ice saw a substantial recovery. Bill Chapman, a researcher with the UIUC’s Arctic Center, tells DailyTech this was due in part to colder temperatures in the region. Chapman says wind patterns have also been weaker this year. Strong winds can slow ice formation as well as forcing ice into warmer waters where it will melt.
Imagine that. Wind and colder temperatures were all it took. Interestingly, the idea that wind patterns can blow sea ice to warmer waters where it melts never got much press when it was happening. Now that ice is growing, its reported in its absence.
But why were all those, oh so smart, scientists wrong?
Why were predictions so wrong? Researchers had expected the newer sea ice, which is thinner, to be less resilient and melt easier. Instead, the thinner ice had less snow cover to insulate it from the bitterly cold air, and therefore grew much faster than expected, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Or maybe it just didn’t fit the expectation of warmer tempertures because “everyone knows that we’re having global warming”.
It used to be that science was a discipline that constantly reassessed its assumptions. Now, because grants are at risk, that’s no longer operative. Now we hear statements like “cooler temperatures are a result of gloal warming” and are expected to believe it.
And its not just a hypothetical arguement. Those assumptions cause our government to act:
In May, concerns over disappearing sea ice led the U.S. to officially list the polar bear a threatened species, over objections from experts who claimed the animal’s numbers were increasing.
Let’s hope this “whoops moment” causes some more testing of global warming assumptions before our policy-makers cause real damage to real people. This time its about erroneously putting the polar bear on the endangered species list. Next it will be about food production, what you can and cannot eat, taxes and the entire economy. Now that will be a real “whoops moment”.
2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved
Is it true? Or is it just the wishes of a London Telegraph columnist? I think he may be right. Let’s see why when he compares two stories from his own paper:
…on May 21, [a story] headed “Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts” , reported that the entire Alpine “winter sports industry” could soon “grind to a halt for lack of snow”. The second, on December 19, headed “The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation” , reported that this winter’s Alpine snowfalls “look set to beat all records by New Year’s Day”.
Now, you would think, that anyone with a smidgen of a frontal cortex would put those two reports together and begin to question whether the global warming scare mongers are right. Especially after you read this:
…all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
And what about that consensus among all of those scientists that, for sure, we’re killing the “planet” with our”emissions”?
…2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.
Amen and Amen.
Can we go on to more real problems now? Somehow I think not just yet. With our new president, I think we’ll be going after those windmills for just a little while longer. Hopefully just a little.
CNN Meteorologist: Manmade Global Warming Theory ‘Arrogant’
A voice of reason in the face of over-the-top fanaticism from the Global Warming crowd has made his views public. Why has this common sense view found so few champions?
CNN Meteorologist Chad Myers had never bought into the notion that man can alter the climate and the Vegas snowstorm didn’t impact his opinion. Myers, an American Meteorological Society certified meteorologist, explained on CNN’s Dec. 18 “Lou Dobbs Tonight” that the whole idea is arrogant and mankind was in danger of dying from other natural events more so than global warming.
“You know, to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant,” Myers said. “Mother Nature is so big, the world is so big, the oceans are so big – I think we’re going to die from a lack of fresh water or we’re going to die from ocean acidification before we die from global warming, for sure.”
Arrogant indeed! That our puny little race, in all of God’s creation, could overcome the effects of the Sun and the oceans seems unbelievable. But so many people believe it. Why? Especially since the evidence is so scant.
“But this is like, you know you said – in your career – my career has been 22 years long,” Myers said. “That’s a good career in TV, but talking about climate – it’s like having a car for three days and saying, ‘This is a great car.’ Well, yeah – it was for three days, but maybe in days five, six and seven it won’t be so good. And that’s what we’re doing here.”
“We have 100 years worth of data, not millions of years that the world’s been around,” Myers continued.
Dr. Jay Lehr, an expert on environmental policy, told “Lou Dobbs Tonight” viewers you can detect subtle patterns over recorded history, but that dates back to the 13th Century.
“If we go back really, in recorded human history, in the 13th Century, we were probably 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than we are now and it was a very prosperous time for mankind,” Lehr said. “If go back to the Revolutionary War 300 years ago, it was very, very cold. We’ve been warming out of that cold spell from the Revolutionary War period and now we’re back into a cooling cycle.”
Lehr suggested the earth is presently entering a cooling cycle – a result of nature, not man.
“The last 10 years have been quite cool,” Lehr continued. “And right now, I think we’re going into cooling rather than warming and that should be a much greater concern for humankind. But, all we can do is adapt. It is the sun that does it, not man.”
Hopefully reason will prevail before our leaders send us tilting at windmills and down the road to economic ruin in service to the “green” lobby.
The scientists you never hear about.
Have you heard about the 650 scientists that are GW skeptics? Thought not. And yet you’ve probably heard that Al Gore met with our new president and, as a result, he now vows to “stop the denials”.
Al Gore is a politician who somehow managed to win a Nobel Peace Prize. Ivar Giaever is a Nobel Laureate in Physics. When it comes to global warming one has said, “If we allow this to happen, it would be deeply and unforgivably immoral. It would condemn coming generations to a catastrophically diminished future.” The other asserted, “I am a skeptic. … Global warming has become a new religion.”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who said what here, although one of these guys is much closer to being a rocket scientist while the other merely pretends to be one. More importantly, Ivar Giaever is only one of 650 dissenting scientists who are taking their case to the United Nations global warming conference in Poznan, Poland.
And Ivar is not alone. He has 649 fellow scientists saying the same thing:
The Senate Minority Report, to be released later today,
“has added about 250 scientists (and growing) in 2008 to the over 400 scientists who spoke out in 2007. The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.”
[...]
Some of the quotes released from the skeptic scientists in the Senate Minority Report are very telling. Former NASA official, atmospheric scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson declared,
“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical.”
Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires emphasized,
“The [global warming] scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds.”
Looks like the global warming fad may have jumped the shark.
Lawrence Solomon’s prediction that today’s “Wal-Mart environmentalism” may have reached it zenith and is now waning has gotten a boost from a major new poll of 12,000 people from 11 countries.
PARIS – There is both growing public reluctance to make personal sacrifices and a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the major international efforts now underway to battle climate change, according to findings of a poll of 12,000 citizens in 11 countries, including Canada.
Results of the poll were released this week in advance of the start of a major international conference in Poland where delegates are considering steps toward a new international climate-change treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
Less than half of those surveyed, or 47 per cent, said they were prepared to make personal lifestyle changes to reduce carbon emissions, down from 58 per cent last year.
Thank goodness for the basic intelligence of the world’s people. When you ask them to spend their time or money on a cause (as opposed to asking “someone else” to do it) you’d better have a good answer.
Only 37 per cent said they were willing to spend “extra time” on the effort, an eight-point drop.
And only one in five respondents – or 20 per cent – said they’d spend extra money to reduce climate change. That’s down from 28 per cent a year ago.
… 27 per cent… wanted their governments to participate in Kyoto-style international agreements to reduce emissions.
But wait! The environmentalists’ answer is not that such efforts aren’t necessary, its that they’re too hard.
“There’s consumer reluctance that’s creeping in, and we’ve seen that some are being stunned into inaction by the enormity of the task,” said Earthwatch executive vice-president Nigel Winser.
Yeah, that’s what’s got me saying “no”. I’m “stunned by the enormity of the task”. Right.
Or maybe its because the people need to be more “educated” so that they will “understand”.
[The report said] “More needs to be done to inform consumers about measures such as green taxation or carbon trading to help them understand how tangible these can be.”
The arrogance of these people is what’s stunning. But you can be certain that politicians listen to their people very closely.
The poll helps explain why outgoing [Canadian] Liberal Leader Stephane Dion had so much difficulty during the election campaign trying to sell his Green Shift platform that proposed a carbon tax in order to encourage emission reductions.
The environementalists, on the otherhand, are just delusional.
Earthwatch’s Winser said the silver lining in the poll was that it stresses public dissatisfaction with the performance of all governments.
“We welcome this survey because it shows that individuals want their governments to do more.”
When only 27% of those polled say they want a Kyoto-style agreement, meaning that 73% don’t, this guy thinks that it actually means that individuals want their governments to do more. If you run accross this guy on the street you’ll recognize him by his tinfoil hat.
‘Aliens Cause Global Warming’ Michael Crichton R.I.P.
Thanks to the Wall Street Journal for this salute to a man of common sense.
From a lecture delivered by the late Michael Crichton at the California Institute of Technology on Jan. 17, 2003:
Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two-week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation:
N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL
Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet’s life during which the communicating civilizations live.
This serious-looking equation gave SETI a serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses — just so we’re clear — are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be “informed guesses.” If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It’s simply prejudice.
The Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. . . .
The fact that the Drake equation was not greeted with screams of outrage — similar to the screams of outrage that greet each Creationist new claim, for example — meant that now there was a crack in the door, a loosening of the definition of what constituted legitimate scientific procedure. And soon enough, pernicious garbage began to squeeze through the cracks. . . .
I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period. . . .
I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way. . . .
To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: “These results are derived with the help of a computer model.” But now large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world — increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs.
This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynman called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the complex point where the global warming debate now stands.
Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we’re asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?
