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In 2006, there were predictions in the media that global warming would cause 2007 to be the hottest year on record.
Now think about it, what have you read in the media in 2008 about this? Well, nothing actually. Why?
Well, the answer is simple – because 2007 turned out to be the coolest year recorded for the last 30 years. This, the public was not told.
The public was also not told that, since the warm year of 1998, there has been continuous cooling. What the public is told is that, during the twentieth century, there was a global temperature increase of 0,6 oC.
This is true, but what is left out is that most of the warming took place from 1920 to 1940 and that global temperature fell from 1940 to 1970, prompting announcements in the mid 1970s that a global ice age was about to pounce on us.
During all this, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere continued to rise. In fact, atmospheric carbon dioxide (C02) continued to increase after 1940, while atmospheric cooling was taking place. Should that not make people think a bit?
The [United States] is one of only two industrialised nations that has rejected the Kyoto Protocol and, with it, mandatory emissions cuts. (The other is Australia.)
This statement is factually accurate, as long as we consider China and India non-industrialized nations. But factual accuracy aside, it is misleading in that it fails to address the elephant in the room: even if the United States reduces its carbon emissions to zero, economic growth in China and India will create far more CO2 than the U.S. currently does. If you're serious in your belief that global warming could be catastrophic for humanity and must therefore be stopped if possible, then American carbon emissions are only one part of the puzzle, and a part that will decline with the passage of time. While it's true that of those three nations, the U.S. is the only one that is currently likely to do anything about carbon emissions, the failure to even mention the rather significant problem that China and India pose seems curious at best.
Assuming the consensus on global warming is accurate, we have two options in front of us (and there is a continuum between the two, so it is not an either/or choice). We can attempt to stop global warming by eliminating our greenhouse gas emissions, we can attempt to prepare to mitigate the problems global warming causes, or we can do some combination of the two (reduce some emissions while concurrently taking mitigation measures to eliminate threats to human beings caused by global warming). Ms. Kolbert's preferred solution is clearly to try to eliminate the problem by eliminating greenhouse gas emissions, yet her essay says nothing of the fact that even if Americans do agree to her prescription of "many small-scale adjustments (no more heated towel racks) and also a great many more substantial ones: changes in energy consumption, energy production, patterns of land use, transportation systems, international relations."
Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.
The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some deployed the lassitude argument--e.g., we can't think of an alternative--to support human attribution. But the "summary for policy makers" claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text of the report that "In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."
In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This was sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Well, no.
More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.
Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed." What exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.
The above posts are not an attempt to prove or disprove anything, I am just reading every damn thing I can on the subject of Global Warming, and decided to post some of the more interesting stuff I have found so far. Read then or don't I do not care. Draw your own conclusions from them.
In compliance with board rules only parts of each article is quoted so you will have to visit the links to read all of them.
Enjoy your homework if you are going to read them all, my eyes are killing me
So far the only conclusion I have Made from them is this.
While there is a general consensus that Global warming is both happening, and caused in part by man. That is about where the Con census ends. How it will effect us, what we can do to stop it, and many other aspects of it appear to still be up for debate in the scientific community.
This documentary was on national geographic tonight. It shows the effects of global warming, a situation so real, denying it is like denying reality. A single degree of warming has major impact and we have done that already. The time frames of change prior to today were thousands of years between change. The people who live in places that show the damage realize this, the naysayers argue from their armchair without an iota of contradictory information. Watch it if you are serious about understanding GW. Or get the book sounds interesting.
Six degrees could change the world MarineBio Blog
National Geographic Channel - Animals, Science, Exploration Television Shows
Amazon.com: Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet: Mark Lynas: Books
I have said repeatedly that the sun could trump global warming. Is this likely? Who knows? But the thing about the rising level of CO2 is that it is relentless, and the warming effect every day is greater than the day before.
Then how do you explain that since 1998 global temperatures have actually cooled some?
Look like I said, I do not dispute that CO2 on it's own causes warming, but what I think is also clear is there are many other factors at work, and we do not know for sure what the net cause of increased CO2 will be. The fact that things are not warming up as fast as the models say they should, and that we have actually seen some temporary cooling, shows that we can not be sure of what the net results will be. The climate of the earth is simply to complex to make totally accurate predictions. If you had looked at everything I posted you would see what I am talking about.
You can predict the effect of CO2, but you cannot predict what the sun will do.
I'll believe 50 year climate computer models as soon as they can predict the one foot square a feather dropped from the Empire State Building will land on. Just some basic wind, temperature and aerodynamic variables to enter in.......Should be a piece of cake...Right?
