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Global Warming Charlatanism
I've gotten a bunch of requests for a response to George Will's assertion that “If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life.” I'm actually puzzled enough by that comment to not really know how to respond.
Sigh. Here's the deal: Will is being cute. If you're 29, you became an adult in 1998, and average global temperatures last year were lower than they were in 1998. So: no global warming in your adult lifetime.
In case you've missed it, this is the new favorite talking point from the chucklehead denialist set. The earth is actually cooling! But as about a thousand serious climate researchers have pointed out, it's not true. Global temps have been trending up for over a century, but in any particular year they can spike up and down quite a bit. In 1998 they spiked up far above the trend line and last year they spiked below the trend line. So 2008 was cooler than 1998.
Of course, you can prove anything you want if you cherry pick your starting and ending points carefully enough. For example: The year 2000 was below the trend line and 2005 was above it. Temps were up 0.4°C in only five years! The seas will be boiling by 2050!
This is idiotic, and only deliberate charlatans who think they have an especially gullible audience bother with it. It's the trend line that matters, and the trend line has been going up for decades right along with rising CO2 concentrations. Listen to the climatologists, not the charlatans.
the atmosphere is not infinite nor free
The atmosphere is not infinite nor free. Most Americans do not want to pay the opportunity costs of pumping billions of tons of carbon into it, but they, or their descendants, will eventually.
No Global Warming Since Early Afternoon
Around here, at least, it's been getting cooler since around 2:00, putting the lie that warming stuff.
Is it "cute" for a major newspaper to deliberately LIE?
Kevin wrote: "This is idiotic, and only deliberate charlatans who think they have an especially gullible audience bother with it."
Calling MacGruber .... he's an audience as especially gullible as they come.
Sure, George Will is being "cute" -- if deliberately and knowingly and repeatedly LYING to the readers of the Washington Post about anthropogenic global warming in multiple columns published over the last few years is "cute".
And if that makes George Will "cute" then it must make Fred Hiatt REALLY "cute", since he has not only knowingly and deliberately and repeatedly published Will's LIES but has defended them as an "important contribution to the debate" even after the Post's own reporters debunked them.
Is it "cute" for the editorial board of a major newspaper to repeatedly, knowingly, deliberately LIE to the American people about an issue of great public importance?
So who is he writing this for?
It's a transparent lie, and getting caught in something like this means that someone like me is never going to believe anything he writes again (not even going to waste time reading the columns). Is it an effort to discredit journalism generally? Is it an attempt to sway the innumerate vote? Or is he just trying to make the true believers feel good?
This is not cute, this is a lie. His writing would ruin toilet paper.
This is what I don't get about the current Republican Party. Supporting its platform does not require merely a conservative position, it requires an insane, counterfactual, innumerate, position. If you sign up for this, it's not like I'll forget or forgive a few years later: "yeah, he was an stupid crazy racist five years ago, but I'm sure he's grown since then". This is reputation-destroying craziness. So, why? Double-or-nothing, hope that the economy is too big a problem for Obama to solve? You'd they they'd hedge their bets with a little sanity, but apparently not.
If I'm understanding the argument correctly
then wouldn't you also be able to say that if you're 28, there has been global warming your entire adult life?
Ego vs. Knowledge
I believe the basic problem re Will's columns is that he lacks the scientific knowledge needed to discuss global warming intellligently, but the policies to counter warming have political and, possibly, economic consequences that he abhors. He doesn't want to sit out or continually defer to people with more information, so he speaks out the only way (?) he can, via his columns. The ego that has made him a successful columnist won't allow him to say nothing.
SRS
Intelligence?
How much intelligence, scientific or otherwise, does a person need to look at this chart (and I've seen it many, many times) to get the idea that there has been a steady upward trend in global temps over the last century, despite yearly ups and downs. This is something an 8th grader should be able to comprehend. The WP should fire him for either incompetence or a deliberate attempt to mislead the public.
That chart is very
That chart is very misleading. Look at the global temperatures for the past 2,000 years and you come to a very different conclusion. Look at the chart for the past 10,000 years and you'll realize just how idiotic your comments are.
"misleading" chart
What you're missing, Anonymous, is that 2,000 or 1l0,000 years ago the human race was not heaving billions of tons of stuff into the atmosphere every day, or minute, or second, or whatever the hell it is. We have every reason to believe that any chart somehow able to take vast amounts of geological time into account would be about to head off in a terrifying direction.
My point was that you can't
My point was that you can't look at the chart and come to any rational conclusion at all. Nepeta likes to make sweeping generalizations and then discount any one who disagrees. There is nothing to be gleamed from the Chart and Kevin posting it is as dishonest as Will's comment.
I'd hate to let
I'd hate to let SecularAnimist down, so here I am. Today, instead of poking holes in more bunk hypotheses, trotted out by shills of the green industry, an industry who wants tax dollars at any cost, I'll throw out an alternate hypothesis:
The sun causes global warming and no amount of CO2 reduction will change it. Radical, I know. It's not like the sun effects our whole climate, or generates a lot of energy. When you think of it, it's a pretty inconsequential star.
But I will throw that out anyway.
In the meantime, all the shills for green energy, energy sources that won't work unless there are massive government subsidies, can tell us the world will end without cap-n-trade.
test your hypothesis
Please test your hypothesis by parking your car in the garage, shut the garage door, leave the motor running, roll down your car windows, breath in the truth of your beliefs and see if your skepticism about carbon dioxide pollution can remain alive after one hour.
I don't know how true
I don't know how true this:
Modern fuel injected, computer controlled cars will shut down due to lack of oxygen before the level of CO (carbon monoxide) and CO2 in the garage gets fatal. If alcohol or other downers are involved, the shut down may not be in time to prevent death.
every experiment has variables
Every experiment has variables and also needs to have a control group. I once saved a woman in a parking lot who was trying a variation of this experiment with a hose running from the exhaust pipe of her car into her mouth. If Creationists want to give this variation a try, perhaps they could still use newer automobiles to demonstrate how greenhouse gases are not a threat to life on earth.
Testing what?
Carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide. . . whatever. The insightful wit of suggesting that those who disagree with you should die remains intact, despite your confusing the two.
The sun does not cause global warming
McGruber writes:
The sun causes global warming and no amount of CO2 reduction will change it.
Wrong:
http://BartonPaulLevenson.com/Sun.html
The sun causes global
That theory's been debunked. See, for example, http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.h... and http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/1451/sun-clear-over-global-warming
SRS
SRS, you're out of date.
SRS, you're out of date. Check out http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=115207&org=OLPA&from=news for a more current view of the sun's impact.
<sigh>
The link discusses an 11 year solar cycle and the ENSO. Compare that with the graph above. Kinda different, eh?
Of course the sun causes
Of course the sun causes global warming, or else the Earth would be a chunk of cold barren rock. Those nitwits must have had the mumps the week their teacher covered that in 6th grade science. Education: the Final Frontier.
The NSF study linked solar
The NSF study linked solar radiation to global climate variations, which is different from Earth's global temperature.
SRS
Did anyone actually read the article?
This isn't even George Will's assertion. Its Mark Steyn's.
Steyn --> Will
"This isn't even George Will's assertion. Its Mark Steyn's."
Which Will quoted approvingly.
George Will is saying that
George Will is saying that that Mark Steyn's assertion could explain a lack of youthful clamors about carbon. Thats not an approval of the assertion.
I see you pasted the section in, but did you read it too?
Yes, I did
Thanks for asking! I would have thought that comparing advocating a price on carbon with buying platform shoes "just as disco was dying" implies that the writer believes that temperatures will continue to fall.
But clearly I don't have the sophisticated reader comprehension skill that you do, Mr. Anonymous. So enlighten me.
I am just saying that this
I am just saying that this article is about Mark Steyn's assertion and claiming that assertion is George Will's. Anyone who read the article would know that!
Global Warming SCAM
tagged as:- result
A must read! The true 'smoking gun' behing the global warming / climate change SCAM! The greatest objection, and source of comfort for the global warming cult is the sheer numbers of people in on the SCAM - 'how could it possibly be a SCAM' with so many scientists and world leaders involved? Finally someone has written a spectacular piece exposing how the obscene sums of money has corrupted science and politics and turned this ridiculous theory into the greatest SCAM in world history...
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/climat...
You're right!
We're so busted! We scientists are making BILLIONS! And we would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those meddling kids!
And you're all missing the
And you're all missing the point of Will's column. It is: no matter what the developed world agrees to or in fact does, emerging markets aren't going to slow down their economic growth (and the increased wealth [in the eco sense] of 5 BILLION people). You are not doing justice to your cause by harping on statistics, one way or the other.
If that is his point
Why does he engage in denialism?
prostitution
Will has a history of taking cash in the form of speaker's fees and consulting fees from the interests he champions in his columns. That is probably happening here.
And Al Gore doesn't? MrC
And Al Gore doesn't?
MrC
Tee hee. This should be the
Tee hee. This should be the big story. Talk about conflict of interest!
we're more mature than this
I thought the world was around four billion years old. And based on this quirky fact I find it comical deliberating over whether a 20 or 120 year cycle is best for getting quality data regarding climatology.
the problem is
For much of those 4 billion years, the earth would have been totally uninhabitable for human beings. So that's really not relevant. We've had agriculture for about 10,000 years, which is the basis of what we think of as civilization. And during that period, temperatures have been fairly stable. Until now.
what stability?
Climate over the last 10,000 years has seen numerous temperature changes, up and down, that are greater than what we've expereinced in the last 120 years, in comparable time periods. In fact, much of the weather over that period has been warmer than what the earth is now experiencing. We are not experiencing anything historically unusual. Nor can we be sure that any significant amount of the warming expereinced since 1970 has been due to mankind. The AGW hypothesis is speculative and based on a very brief climate period. All the climate models, unreliable as they might be, agree that warming prior to 1940 was not due to mankind. From 1940-1970 the earth actually cooled in temperature. It rose from 1970 to 2000. And yes, despite Drum's claims, it's been on a slight cooling trend since 2000. In fact, even many AGW climate scientists admit it mightl continue to cool for at least the next decade. There are natural ossicilation in climate that override AGW. Richard Lindzen of MIT recently published an important paper suggesting that the climate sensitivity to poisitive feedbacks in the climate models predicint serious problems in the future are greatly exagerated, and that climate sensitivity may actually be negative. This actually fits the climate data better than the AGW alarmism thesis. In the future, we will look back on this whole AGW end-of-the-world alarmism as a quaint form of mass hysteria backed by incomplete and distorted scientific hypotheses. It's the left's version of the Iraq war - a slam dunk that turned out to be mostly baseless. And I say this as a leftist myself.
A longer term view
While it is true that looking at individual years misses the hundred-year trend, it is also true that looking at the hundred-year trend misses the million- and billion-year trends. Earth's history is a cycle of glacial periods and interglacials. Compared with the last billion years, earth is very cold, about 10 degrees C below the modal temperature. Compared with the last million years, we're very warm, and the peak of the holocene interglacial has lasted about as long as a lot of previous interglacials.
It is not an outlandish speculation (though it is, of course, still just a speculation) that if the current human activities were not warming the earth, we might be about to fall off the edge into an ice age. Dirty coal may be all that stands between us and 30,000 to 60,000 years of glaciers in New Orleans.
global warming scam
I absolutely agree with you. This global warming is just another big scam and some people are taking big advantage out of it.
Where I live the average tempretures are consistently droping year over year.
Bill - gold eagle professional
cooling in your neighborhood?
How very scientific of you.
and yet
CO2 levels, at 385 ppm, are higher than anytime during the past 650,000 years. During that period, which essentially covers mankind's time on earth, it ranged from 220-280 ppm.
FWIW, in the last ice age, glaciers stopped in Ohio.
Ooh, this is fun. Can I
Ooh, this is fun. Can I play?
* If you're a recent college graduate, there has been no per-capita economic growth since you entered college. If you learned anything in college, it's that economic growth is a myth.
* If you're 80, there has been no growth in the value of GM stock your entire life. The car will never replace the horse -- it's just not economical.
* If you're 30, there has been no real growth in the NASDAQ Composite Index your entire adult life. Tech is dead.
global warming
I'f you're 29, you became an adult in 1998, and average global temperatures last year were lower than they were in 1998. So: no global warming in your adult lifetime. well that is a true statement. so tell me again how he is lying. i can point to upward trends in the stock marlket, the housing market, oil, hell loolk at tulip manaia in holland, which may or may not continue. no one knows until a downward trend has been confirmed. are we know in a continued decline of temperature, a stable period, or a brief respite. i can't tell but it appears many here are clairvoyant. can any of you give me a stock to buy? from what i have read none of the computer models predicted this current decline in tempature.
Give MacGruber a Nobel prize! Not.
MacGruber wrote: "I'll throw out an alternate hypothesis: The sun causes global warming and no amount of CO2 reduction will change it. Radical, I know."
First of all, the hypothesis that changes in the sun are responsible for the rapid and extreme warming observed in the 20th century, and particularly in the second half of the 20th century, has already be conclusively refuted. In fact, there have been no such changes. So you can indeed "throw out" that hypothesis. It has been investigated, and falsified.
Second, MacGruber's comment is illustrative of the mix of appalling ignorance and malicious arrogance that enables so many Ditto-Head denialists to imagine that they have discovered the simple and obvious reason that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are not responsible for global warming -- a simple and obvious reason ("It's the Sun!") that has somehow escaped the attention of thousands of climate scientists who have studied this issue diligently for decades.
"Radical" ? No. Rock-stupid is more like it.
The causes of ice ages
That overlooks what the suggested causes of ice ages are: volcanism and asteroid strikes, resulting in large-scale alterations to the atmosphere. Volcanic activity isn't nearly what it was millions of years ago, presumably. Supposing that useful data can only be gathered over millions of years isn't a useful supposition.
SRS
Pick your starting date
At the end of the last ice age, 11,000 years ago, temperatures rose dramatically for about 10,000 years. Since then, they have fluctuated within a fairly narrow band. We are still within that band. It was hotter than it is now during the Holocene Warming Period, the Roman Optimum and the Medieval Warming Period.
I believe CO2 is a greenhouse gas and will increase temperatures by about 2.1 degrees Celsius if concentrations double. I don't believe that chopping the graph to look at temperatures from 1998 is sane--but it isn't any more sane to look at them from 1975, when the recent warming cycle started, or even 1850, when the recovery from the Little Ice Age started.
But there's money to be made and political favors to be dispensed, and skeptics to be trashed, so cry havoc and let slip the dogs of Gore.
Oops
Above I said it warmed dramatically for 10,000 years. I meant 1,000, obviously.
Skeptics, place your bets!
Skeptics and would-be hoax un-maskers, clearly these temperature increases can't continue, right? So why not make some money off those gullible/evil global warming advocates? There's a market opportunity!
Just google "betting on climate change". I recommend James Annan's Stoat or Backseat Driving. The last is even offering odds! You'll be rich!
We'll be waiting!
Other temperature records.
Here is another global temperature record from the UK's Hadley Met office.
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/HadCRUT3_bar.png
Interesting how their graph clearly shows a cooling trend at the end. I wonder what it will look like with 2009's cool data added on.
Yet another graph showing a clear downward trend.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/library/pics/UAH_LT_since_1979.jpg
Let's not forget that trend implies directionality. If I drive my car from Los Angeles to New York and turn around half way to drive 50 miles back, I'm not driving east any more. I'm now driving west. Trends are (or should be) measured the same way, when direction is changed. Sure, an upward trend could resume next year or the year after, but the trend right now is cooling.
On a side note: Why do scientists pick a (seemingly) arbitrary base line mean for charts and graphs? Why don't they use a consistent standard like the mean for the entire data set?
MrC
Mr. Fuller, you use words
Mr. Fuller, you use words well, but there's no real substance to them. If you're not going to refute or identify specific flaws in the computer models and research that climatologists and other researchers are using, then why claim that they're mistaken? The Wikipedia entry for the Little Ice Age contains very little that's relevant to global warming, except for a possible cessation of thermohaline circulation.
Again, supposing without evidence that global warming is just part of some unbounded cycle isn't useful.
SRS
To: Steven R. Stahl
Dear Sir -
You challenge our readers to "identify specific flaws" in the computer models used for global warming. First, let me concede or accept the global warming phenomenon. I've seen all the pictures of melting glaciers.
My broader question is Causation --- man-made CO2 or Other ?
You want flaws in the computer models ? Simple ---- CLOUDS. NO ONE has closed the heat balance. On the balance do clouds shade us or trap heat ? Among many articles and publications, please search for "Sciencedaily.com" , June 12, 2008 , " Has Global Warming Research Misinterpreted Cloud Behavior."
Alternate cause for global warming ? -- How about fluctuations in the Earth's internal heat. Recommend you peruse the work of Dr. J. Marvin Herndon and the georeactor. Controversial ? Yes, but no less likely that man-made CO2 as the sole reason for warming.
Thnak you.