Global Warming Alarmism

Interesting article in today’s WSJ - I am particularly annoyed by the idea, which comes up again and again in many contexts, that people in authority should lie in order to scare people into doing what they think is best for them.

[i]Global Warming Delusions
By DANIEL B. BOTKIN
October 17, 2007; Page A19

Global warming doesn’t matter except to the extent that it will affect life – ours and that of all living things on Earth. And contrary to the latest news, the evidence that global warming will have serious effects on life is thin. Most evidence suggests the contrary.

Case in point: This year’s United Nations report on climate change and other documents say that 20%-30% of plant and animal species will be threatened with extinction in this century due to global warming – a truly terrifying thought. Yet, during the past 2.5 million years, a period that scientists now know experienced climatic changes as rapid and as warm as modern climatological models suggest will happen to us, almost none of the millions of species on Earth went extinct. The exceptions were about 20 species of large mammals (the famous megafauna of the last ice age – saber-tooth tigers, hairy mammoths and the like), which went extinct about 10,000 to 5,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, and many dominant trees and shrubs of northwestern Europe. But elsewhere, including North America, few plant species went extinct, and few mammals.

We’re also warned that tropical diseases are going to spread, and that we can expect malaria and encephalitis epidemics. But scientific papers by Prof. Sarah Randolph of Oxford University show that temperature changes do not correlate well with changes in the distribution or frequency of these diseases; warming has not broadened their distribution and is highly unlikely to do so in the future, global warming or not.

The key point here is that living things respond to many factors in addition to temperature and rainfall. In most cases, however, climate-modeling-based forecasts look primarily at temperature alone, or temperature and precipitation only. You might ask, “Isn’t this enough to forecast changes in the distribution of species?” Ask a mockingbird. The New York Times recently published an answer to a query about why mockingbirds were becoming common in Manhattan. The expert answer was: food – an exotic plant species that mockingbirds like to eat had spread to New York City. It was this, not temperature or rainfall, the expert said, that caused the change in mockingbird geography.

You might think I must be one of those know-nothing naysayers who believes global warming is a liberal plot. On the contrary, I am a biologist and ecologist who has worked on global warming, and been concerned about its effects, since 1968. I’ve developed the computer model of forest growth that has been used widely to forecast possible effects of global warming on life – I’ve used the model for that purpose myself, and to forecast likely effects on specific endangered species.

I’m not a naysayer. I’m a scientist who believes in the scientific method and in what facts tell us. I have worked for 40 years to try to improve our environment and improve human life as well. I believe we can do this only from a basis in reality, and that is not what I see happening now. Instead, like fashions that took hold in the past and are eloquently analyzed in the classic 19th century book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” the popular imagination today appears to have been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.

Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. “Wolves deceive their prey, don’t they?” one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change.

The climate modelers who developed the computer programs that are being used to forecast climate change used to readily admit that the models were crude and not very realistic, but were the best that could be done with available computers and programming methods. They said our options were to either believe those crude models or believe the opinions of experienced, data-focused scientists. Having done a great deal of computer modeling myself, I appreciated their acknowledgment of the limits of their methods. But I hear no such statements today. Oddly, the forecasts of computer models have become our new reality, while facts such as the few extinctions of the past 2.5 million years are pushed aside, as if they were not our reality.

A recent article in the well-respected journal American Scientist explained why the glacier on Mt. Kilimanjaro could not be melting from global warming. Simply from an intellectual point of view it was fascinating – especially the author’s Sherlock Holmes approach to figuring out what was causing the glacier to melt. That it couldn’t be global warming directly (i.e., the result of air around the glacier warming) was made clear by the fact that the air temperature at the altitude of the glacier is below freezing. This means that only direct radiant heat from sunlight could be warming and melting the glacier. The author also studied the shape of the glacier and deduced that its melting pattern was consistent with radiant heat but not air temperature. Although acknowledged by many scientists, the paper is scorned by the true believers in global warming.

We are told that the melting of the arctic ice will be a disaster. But during the famous medieval warming period – A.D. 750 to 1230 or so – the Vikings found the warmer northern climate to their advantage. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie addressed this in his book “Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000,” perhaps the greatest book about climate change before the onset of modern concerns with global warming. He wrote that Erik the Red “took advantage of a sea relatively free of ice to sail due west from Iceland to reach Greenland. . . . Two and a half centuries later, at the height of the climatic and demographic fortunes of the northern settlers, a bishopric of Greenland was founded at Gardar in 1126.”

Ladurie pointed out that “it is reasonable to think of the Vikings as unconsciously taking advantage of this [referring to the warming of the Middle Ages] to colonize the most northern and inclement of their conquests, Iceland and Greenland.” Good thing that Erik the Red didn’t have Al Gore or his climatologists as his advisers.

Should we therefore dismiss global warming? Of course not. But we should make a realistic assessment, as rationally as possible, about its cultural, economic and environmental effects. As Erik the Red might have told you, not everything due to a climatic warming is bad, nor is everything that is bad due to a climatic warming.

We should approach the problem the way we decide whether to buy insurance and take precautions against other catastrophes – wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes. And as I have written elsewhere, many of the actions we would take to reduce greenhouse-gas production and mitigate global-warming effects are beneficial anyway, most particularly a movement away from fossil fuels to alternative solar and wind energy.

My concern is that we may be moving away from an irrational lack of concern about climate change to an equally irrational panic about it.

Many of my colleagues ask, “What’s the problem? Hasn’t it been a good thing to raise public concern?” The problem is that in this panic we are going to spend our money unwisely, we will take actions that are counterproductive, and we will fail to do many of those things that will benefit the environment and ourselves.

For example, right now the clearest threat to many species is habitat destruction. Take the orangutans, for instance, one of those charismatic species that people are often fascinated by and concerned about. They are endangered because of deforestation. In our fear of global warming, it would be sad if we fail to find funds to purchase those forests before they are destroyed, and thus let this species go extinct.

At the heart of the matter is how much faith we decide to put in science – even how much faith scientists put in science. Our times have benefited from clear-thinking, science-based rationality. I hope this prevails as we try to deal with our changing climate.

Mr. Botkin, president of the Center for the Study of the Environment and professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of “Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century” (Replica Books, 2001).[/i]

Starting to get burned out on this issue, but it is so refreshing to find an honest assessment of the global warming propaganda going on.

Interestingly he mimics statements made about Y2K. You know, when the Earth was supposed to end. Y2K was a real problem, but nobody paid attention to it, so people were intentionally putting out BS, blowing things way out of proportion so somebody would finally pay attention to the geeks.

The funny thing is that while people were successful at getting a lot of computers up to code, enough were left that there should have been significant problems, yet there were only blips.

As was pointed out, there are people who think global warming is a problem, and believe blowing things way out of proportion is the only way to get peoples attention.

And they are right. And making millions for Al Gore in the process. As well as creating a great way to side step into a global socialist experiment taking money from rich countries and giving it to poor dictators, uh I mean governments, via carbon credits.

Regardless of how I am arguing against the bs, there is some truth out there. I am all for a cleaner environment, and developing different forms of energy. I have already changed all my light bulbs to compact florescent, and have noticed a change in my electric bill.

All I seek is real information, not the overblown crap being put out, or blindly believing in a doomsday scenario. (Interestingly these same people are blind to the potential real doomsday scenario, and actually fight for it. Sorry, off topic.)

[quote]The Mage wrote:
Regardless of how I am arguing against the bs, there is some truth out there. I am all for a cleaner environment, and developing different forms of energy. I have already changed all my light bulbs to compact florescent, and have noticed a change in my electric bill.

All I seek is real information, not the overblown crap being put out, or blindly believing in a doomsday scenario. (Interestingly these same people are blind to the potential real doomsday scenario, and actually fight for it. Sorry, off topic.)[/quote]

You would think that this is the common sense view, it’s just too bad all we ever hear are the extreme views.

My feelings are internal combustion motors are almost ancient technology now. The car engine really hasn’t changed in 100 years. Yeah, we have fuel injection and overhead cams, and all kinds of sensors, but the basic idea is still the same, and it is extremely inefficient.

Now we have a giant push for ethanol, what a joke, I’m not even going to get into that right now. It is definitely time to start considering solar, wind, and hydroelectric power. It’s too bad that when I say that I am labeled a hippie liberal. Nuclear energy is the best available energy source right now, by far. It is not the answer forever though, as plutonium and uranium aren’t exactly renewable. Or course it is very unlikely to be widely used, mostly due to scare tactics.

All in all, I wish more people would just take more of a common sense approach. We are not all going to die because global warming, and the polar icecaps are not going to melt and flood most of the world. On the other hand, fossil fuels really are a thing of the past, we should continue drilling for oil to accumulate large emergency reserves, in case of a time of war, but we also need to start using other energy sources. Ethanol’s a joke, and until we get rid of coal powered generators, electric cars aren’t that great either.

[quote]tedro wrote:

My feelings are internal combustion motors are almost ancient technology now. The car engine really hasn’t changed in 100 years. Yeah, we have fuel injection and overhead cams, and all kinds of sensors, but the basic idea is still the same, and it is extremely inefficient.[/quote]

The greenhouse gas scare is more ancient and the problem isn’t that oil is so inefficent (it’s actually pretty efficient relatively), it’s that from the well to the application, oil is too efficient.

[quote]The Mage wrote:
Starting to get burned out on this issue, but it is so refreshing to find an honest assessment of the global warming propaganda going on.

And they are right. And making millions for Al Gore in the process. As well as creating a great way to side step into a global socialist experiment taking money from rich countries and giving it to poor dictators, uh I mean governments, via carbon credits.
[/quote]

Uh the globe IS warming. That’s not really propaganda. And scientists researching global warming still not concerned with made up “global socialist experiment…”

and of course you meant “making millions for he Alliance for Climate Protection”. You slipped and said Al Gore.

[quote]100meters wrote:

Uh the globe IS warming. That’s not really propaganda. And scientists researching global warming still not concerned with made up “global socialist experiment…”

and of course you meant “making millions for he Alliance for Climate Protection”. You slipped and said Al Gore.[/quote]

When the hell did I say the globe is not warming? Quit arguing against things I did not say.

And yes Gore is making plenty off of this. $100,000 per speech on the subject. (No media allowed.)

Also as being on the board of directors, does he get paid by The Alliance for Climate Protection?

[quote]The Mage wrote:
100meters wrote:

Uh the globe IS warming. That’s not really propaganda. And scientists researching global warming still not concerned with made up “global socialist experiment…”

and of course you meant “making millions for he Alliance for Climate Protection”. You slipped and said Al Gore.

When the hell did I say the globe is not warming? Quit arguing against things I did not say.

And yes Gore is making plenty off of this. $100,000 per speech on the subject. (No media allowed.)

Also as being on the board of directors, does he get paid by The Alliance for Climate Protection?[/quote]

Don’t forget about all the cash his company Generation Investment Management will make on trading carbon credits if he has his way.

[quote]100meters wrote:
The Mage wrote:
Starting to get burned out on this issue, but it is so refreshing to find an honest assessment of the global warming propaganda going on.

And they are right. And making millions for Al Gore in the process. As well as creating a great way to side step into a global socialist experiment taking money from rich countries and giving it to poor dictators, uh I mean governments, via carbon credits.

Uh the globe IS warming. That’s not really propaganda. And scientists researching global warming still not concerned with made up “global socialist experiment…”

and of course you meant “making millions for he Alliance for Climate Protection”. You slipped and said Al Gore.[/quote]

Yep, the globe is absolutely warming. A whole 0.6 degrees celcius. Florida is going to flood and fall off any second now.

[quote]tedro wrote:
100meters wrote:
The Mage wrote:
Starting to get burned out on this issue, but it is so refreshing to find an honest assessment of the global warming propaganda going on.

And they are right. And making millions for Al Gore in the process. As well as creating a great way to side step into a global socialist experiment taking money from rich countries and giving it to poor dictators, uh I mean governments, via carbon credits.

Uh the globe IS warming. That’s not really propaganda. And scientists researching global warming still not concerned with made up “global socialist experiment…”

and of course you meant “making millions for he Alliance for Climate Protection”. You slipped and said Al Gore.

Yep, the globe is absolutely warming. A whole 0.6 degrees celcius. Florida is going to flood and fall off any second now.[/quote]

It has been warming ever since we came out of the Little Ice Age. We are doomed!

[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
tedro wrote:
100meters wrote:
The Mage wrote:
Starting to get burned out on this issue, but it is so refreshing to find an honest assessment of the global warming propaganda going on.

And they are right. And making millions for Al Gore in the process. As well as creating a great way to side step into a global socialist experiment taking money from rich countries and giving it to poor dictators, uh I mean governments, via carbon credits.

Uh the globe IS warming. That’s not really propaganda. And scientists researching global warming still not concerned with made up “global socialist experiment…”

and of course you meant “making millions for he Alliance for Climate Protection”. You slipped and said Al Gore.

Yep, the globe is absolutely warming. A whole 0.6 degrees celcius. Florida is going to flood and fall off any second now.

It has been warming ever since we came out of the Little Ice Age. We are doomed![/quote]

Ha! Vienna is 200m above seal level…

[quote]orion wrote:

Ha! Vienna is 200m above seal level…
[/quote]

That’s a lot of miles.

[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
orion wrote:

Ha! Vienna is 200m above seal level…

That’s a lot of miles.[/quote]

That might explain some of Orion’s behavior. Oxygen deprivation.

[quote]rainjack wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
orion wrote:

Ha! Vienna is 200m above seal level…

That’s a lot of miles.

That might explain some of Orion’s behavior. Oxygen deprivation.

[/quote]

Who cares as long as its cool and dry up here?

We will repopulate Texas after the big flood has passed.

I’m over it…

I’m all for being “environmentally friendly” cos it’s just common sense. But it seems to me that global warming is now just one big political and economical tool, and i just cant be arsed to worry about it.

Whether we are the cause or not i doubt we can stop it if it’s going to destroy us anyway.

[quote]orion wrote:
rainjack wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
orion wrote:

Ha! Vienna is 200m above seal level…

That’s a lot of miles.

That might explain some of Orion’s behavior. Oxygen deprivation.

Who cares as long as its cool and dry up here?

We will repopulate Texas after the big flood has passed.

[/quote]

Ha. With Peach Schnapps and Vodka? I think my girlfriend could single handedly take over pretty much any european country. Especially Austria.

[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
tedro wrote:
100meters wrote:
The Mage wrote:
Starting to get burned out on this issue, but it is so refreshing to find an honest assessment of the global warming propaganda going on.

And they are right. And making millions for Al Gore in the process. As well as creating a great way to side step into a global socialist experiment taking money from rich countries and giving it to poor dictators, uh I mean governments, via carbon credits.

Uh the globe IS warming. That’s not really propaganda. And scientists researching global warming still not concerned with made up “global socialist experiment…”

and of course you meant “making millions for he Alliance for Climate Protection”. You slipped and said Al Gore.

Yep, the globe is absolutely warming. A whole 0.6 degrees celcius. Florida is going to flood and fall off any second now.

It has been warming ever since we came out of the Little Ice Age. We are doomed![/quote]

This may be true, but evidence is conclusively showing that pollution is quickening the process. More and more “mainstream” scientists are starting to agree that human activity is partially the culprit for the current rate of global warming.

That being said, I love my gas guzzling truck, I don’t want to give it up and the industry supports my family and most of Texas.

But even if global warming was caused all naturally, it is still an issue to deal with. Entire cities really are in danger, millions of people will be restricted to even less space than we have now and all the shit we are worried about will happen regardless of whose fault it is.

.6 degrees per year sounds small, but once certain regions reach a critical temperature they will melt and there will be tons of water to deal with.

Mathematically 28 degrees and 33 degrees are not that far apart, but the ramifications of the difference are huge.

[quote]texasguy1 wrote:

This may be true, but evidence is conclusively showing that pollution is quickening the process. More and more “mainstream” scientists are starting to agree that human activity is partially the culprit for the current rate of global warming.

That being said, I love my gas guzzling truck, I don’t want to give it up and the industry supports my family and most of Texas.

But even if global warming was caused all naturally, it is still an issue to deal with. Entire cities really are in danger, millions of people will be restricted to even less space than we have now and all the shit we are worried about will happen regardless of whose fault it is.

.6 degrees per year sounds small, but once certain regions reach a critical temperature they will melt and there will be tons of water to deal with.

Mathematically 28 degrees and 33 degrees are not that far apart, but the ramifications of the difference are huge. [/quote]

Actually it is 0.6 degrees Celsius, not per year, but from pre-industrial to now. A .6 degree increase per year would have resulted in a 60 degree Celsius increase over a century, and that would be a disaster.

So the example you used would be more accurate by comparing 28 degrees to 28.6 degrees.

Now I really do not see the argument as whether or not the Earth is warming. It has warmed, although my understanding is that 0.6 is less then statistical significance.

The true question is mow much of this warming is a result of our activity? Taking into account that Mars has also warmed, we know something else may be going on, probably as a result of solar radiation. (Although they say Mars is actually a little darker then it was.) It is known that the Sun’s output has increased, sometime around the mid 1800’s.

Mars temperature has increased by 0.5 degrees Celsius since the 1970’s.

If our impact is less then 100%, then there is nothing we can do to stop global warming, even if we eliminated all technology from the planet. In fact not all of the carbon dioxide increases come from humans.

If we estimate that we are responsible for only half of the warming, and I believe it is less then that, then if we had eliminated all technology over a century ago, we would have only stopped 0.3 degrees. In other words live like cavemen, and still have global warming.

If thats the case, how much of an impact could we truly have?

Now this brings up another question. Is global warming a bad thing? The medieval warming period was actually one of mans most prosperous times. And the following cold of the little ice age actually brought in the dark ages.

The points I am trying to make are that while our activities do increase global temperature, (I don’t think any scientist actually disagrees with this,) we are only responsible for a portion of it. Which means we are having less of an impact then we are led to believe.

Next most ideas people have to fight global warming will potentially devastate economies and yet the results would not even be noticeable. And since CO2 has a diminishing effect, we would have to cause even more dramatic damage to economies to result in smaller benefits.

All this to stop something that has not been proven to be negative, and has evidence of being potentially helpful to humanity.

Now the oceans rose 2.8 mm a year from 1993 to 2002. 2.8 cm a decade. (Interestingly 3.7 cm on the coasts.) I personally think this is slow enough for us to deal with.

I definitely believe something should be done about pollution, and like the idea of cleaner renewable or longer term energy. I also have little problem with improved efficiency and intelligent conservation. What I dislike is the overblown propaganda put out. Cleaner water, cleaner air sounds good to me.

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Interesting article in today’s WSJ - I am particularly annoyed by the idea, which comes up again and again in many contexts, that people in authority should lie in order to scare people into doing what they think is best for them.
[/quote]

Are you sure? Are you annoyed by this idea in every context? Or only in contexts like these? Or only in this context?

My point being, you didn’t seem so annoyed when Bush lied to get his war going.

And you don’t seem so annoyed with the recent lies about Iran either.

[quote]The Mage wrote:
Starting to get burned out on this issue, but it is so refreshing to find an honest assessment of the global warming propaganda going on.

[/quote]

I can clearly see sir that you’re an expert on the matter.

Please inform us, at wich university did you graduate in global climate studies?

I’m sorry sir, but “the university of life” is not a valid answer.
Neither is “the internet” or wikipedia.