Prosecutions Coming for Global Warming Deniers?

[RiversideGator]

Interesting interview here with the recently deceased dean of climatology, Dr. Reid Bryson:

“Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past,” he told us in an interview this past winter. “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?”

“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”

Little Ice Age? That’s what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after they’d farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial activity in making it that way. What’s called “proxy evidence”â€"assorted clues extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens, and tree-ring dataâ€"helps reconstruct the climate in those times before instrumental temperature records existed.

We ask about that evidence, but Bryson says it’s second-tier stuff. “Don’t talk about proxies,” he says. “We have written evidence, eyeball evidence. When Eric the Red went to Greenland, how did he get there? It’s all written down.”

Bryson describes the navigational instructions provided for Norse mariners making their way from Europe to their settlements in Greenland. The place was named for a reason: The Norse farmed there from the 10th century to the 13th, a somewhat longer period than the United States has existed. But around 1200 the mariners’ instructions changed in a big way. Ice became a major navigational reference. Today, old Viking farmsteads are covered by glaciers.

Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.”

What Leads, What Follows?

What is normal? Maybe continuous change is the only thing that qualifies. There’s been warming over the past 150 years and even though it’s less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it. The usual suspect is the “greenhouse effect,” various atmospheric gases trapping solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into space.

We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:

Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?

A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?

Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…

A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.

This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of cloudsâ€"water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models’ long-range predictive ability, he answers with another question: “Do you believe a five-day forecast?”

Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006. The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving upâ€"or downâ€"and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand years.

http://www.wecnmagazine.com/2007issues/may/may07.html

Are you counting him as part of your scientific consensus now that he is no longer alive to defend himself?   

[Doctor_K]

Yes I do think that there is no politics behind the science.

The science has nothing to gain from being right.

You're absolutely right on that one.  The science has nothing to gain whatsoever.  Science is about discovery and advancement.  How the results of science are applied are another matter. 

However, politics and politicians have plenty to gain from the science being right, and thus will be more inclined to encourage discovery in a certain direction - i.e. they want the ends to justify their means. 

1) Buy a hybrid, or a plug-in electric car.  Maybe I don't want to?  Maybe I prefer an SUV?  Can't haul around a dance team, or soccer team, and all their gear in a Prius or an Insight very well.  And now even hybrid SUVs are being villified because they're still SUVs.  WTF?  I drive a hybrid SUV but I'm still anti-green? 

2) No one but evil big-oil benefits from you owning an SUV (I don't, but I'm trying to explain a point).  And you're helping destroy the planet in the process.  Not true.  *I* benefit from owning one.  And why are my choices in vehicles being steered in a certain direction?  Why am I being made to feel guilty about what I'm in the market to purchase for my own private use?  Can't I make my own choices anymore?  The answer is no - not without being labeled an evil planet-hater for driving an SUV or truck.

3) You need to only buy CFL lighbulbs from now on.  They're more energy efficient.  I don't deny that for one millisecond.  But why does the government (ANY government) need to come in and decree that companies which produce lightbulbs will be punished if they produce any other kinds of lightbulbs than CFLs after a certain date?  And then sell it as a "gradual phase-out"?  Shouldn't it be more like: "CFLs are better than incandescents and here's why..."?  Let the people, and subsequently the market, decide.

In fact, in a bit of a stretch, (and saure to earn me some enemies from 'the other side of the aisle'), you could counter-argue that Catholicism shoved the concept of Jesus-as-Saviour down the throats of the pagans in order to broaden their influence, similarly to what's happening with the Green movement.

1) Jesus the Christ died for your sins.  End of discussion.  Not "here's what we believe..."  Just, "here it is, swallow it."  No choice.  "Otherwise you die and burn in hell for eternity."  Are you sure?  Can't I just take that nugget and make my own choice on the matter?  See the SUV argument.

2) Jesus was born on Christmas, in December.  Henceforth it's the most important day of the year.  Actually, the historical Jesus (if there even was one) was born more likely sometime in the spring, since shepherds were watching their flocks by night.  They didn't do that in the dead of winter, when pastures lay fallow.  The Church moved the feast of the Birth of the Christ to coincide with an established pagan holiday, in order to ease future assimilation.  See the lightbulb argument.

Short story long, I don't like politicians ultimately making my most basic, personal decisions for me.  It's very much Orwellian, IMO.

(And yes, after ALL that, smoking looks like the leading contributor to cancer.  However, given the whole 'give science time' thing, who really knows?  )

[RiversideGator]

River,

I leave you with the lyrics to a well known song.

bad boy. bad boy, whatcha gonna do?
Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

"They" will never come for me.  I have committed no crime.

BTW, I see you are still dodging the actual science which discredits the entire GW theory.

[RiversideGator]

Do you believe that smoking causes cancer?

Yet another straw man argument (add this to the GW-theory-doubters-are-equivalent-to-flatworlders "logic" which Stephen attempts to employ from time to time).

A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[1] To "set up a straw man" or "set up a straw man argument" is to describe a position that superficially resembles an opponent's actual view but is easier to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent (for example, deliberately overstating the opponent's position).[1] A straw man argument can be a successful rhetorical technique (that is, it may succeed in persuading people) but it carries little or no real evidential weight, because the opponent's actual argument has not been refuted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man_argument

[RiversideGator]

Followed by an ad hominem attack.  Powerful logic.   

[Driven1]

i love hominems. the were my favorite topic in english.  i love ading to...it was my favorite math skill.

[Driven1]

tell me - all of you if you'd like - what you think your pointless rambling on and on and on in a forum in jax, fl about this subject is going to do to change the actual course of history as it relates to global warming?   

[RiversideGator]

You make your own arguments, I will make mine.

I have to run, but I will leave you with a chart of temperature data obtained from satellite and ocean buoys since 2002 (when they were deployed):

[Driven1]

hey Charleston - do you believe in global warming?

[Charleston native]

Uh, can't I get my work done? 

I think River and Doctor K summed up what I would've said. On most counts.

The science indeed has nothing to gain, which is why science can and should counter any theory that is deemed as law merely by a vote of the masses or politicians. Government has TONS to gain by deeming the science as law.

Agree with the nuclear as an alternative long term. Need oil short term. Straw men. Studies have shown that smoking correlates with lung cancer, but it is not deemed as the one and only cause. Man-made global warming/climate change is a hoax while natural, solar cycles have fluctuated the temperature on the earth.

OK, sorry to keep it short, but now I've got to go and get ready to leave town. Wife is in a wedding, and I'll be Mr. Mom for almost the whole weekend in a hotel. Laters.

[RiversideGator]

Ice is absolutely not being reformed at a fast rate in the arctic, nor is it reforming on the ice shelf surrounding the antarctic.

Looks pretty close to normal in the Arctic right now:


National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado

And the Antarctic actually has more ice than in 1980:


National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado

So, please explain why Antarctic ice is not responding to the "global warming".  Thanks.   

[RiversideGator]

so you have no input and cant finish your little tirade?

How unexpected.

No input??  Look at the data.  Apply critical thinking.

So Charleston.  Do you believe that Smoking Causes Cancer?

Stop raising silly, irrelevant nonsense.  No one is impressed.   

[Lunican]

Is this article true?

Exclusive: No ice at the North Pole

Polar scientists reveal dramatic new evidence of climate change

It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.

The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic â€" and worrying â€" examples of the impact of global warming on the planet. Scientists say the ice at 90 degrees north may well have melted away by the summer.

Full Article

[Lunican]

By the way River, nice graphic. Did you use your Commodore 64 to create that?

[gatorback]

Lol. Well River and Charleston are not the only ones who simply cannot answer a simple fairly innocuous question Stephen.  I think what's more imporant is when will the prosecution call its first witness?  And hopefully, it's Al.  Oh wait, he wont speak without knowing the questions a head of time and will not take cross exam question. But I'd love to see him up on the stand.