Do you believe in Global Warming?

[japantiger 4,051]

The "models" that predict global warming don' t accurately predict the current climate. That's right.....they put in all their data, hit the calc button and get an answer that doesn't even match today....the models predict between 2x-4x more carbon dioxide than is currently in the atmosphere and they predict a 3-4 degree centigrade hotter climate than we currently have. This is not an observed phenomenom...it is modeled. There is really no evidence to support this.

Why do we give any serious attention to this topic? This is the biggest load of horse manure since; well global cooling.....

[Tigermike 3,027]

Campos: Cool to warming controversy

May 30, 2006

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, an oil industry-funded think tank, has just released a pair of TV commercials decrying what it characterizes as alarmism about global warming. Even by the nonexistent intellectual and ethical standards that govern political advertising, these commercials are hilariously dishonest.

They feature pastoral scenes of cute little girls blowing flower petals into the air, along with the tag line, "Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution. We call it life." The idea, you see, is that carbon dioxide is a good and natural kind of gas. We exhale it, while plants consume it. It's just part of the circle of life, so what is it with these wacky environmentalists and their irrational hatred of good old CO2?

Stuff like this is so ridiculous on its face that it's tempting to conclude that supposed scientific skepticism about global warming is nothing more than industry-funded propaganda. And of course a lot of people are arguing exactly that.

For instance, Al Gore claimed last week that "the debate's over. The scientific community has reached as strong a consensus as you will ever find in science. There are a few oil companies and coal companies that spend millions of dollars a year to put these pseudo-scientists out there pretending there is a debate. It's exactly the same thing that the tobacco companies did after the surgeon general warned us about the linkage between smoking and lung disease."

Here's a useful rule of thumb to employ regarding public policy debates. If somebody says something is exactly like the relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer you can be pretty sure that the real situation is a whole lot more complicated. I know this from experience, after hearing for years that there is as strong a consensus as you will ever find in science that having a body mass index of between 25 and 30 is a significant independent health risk.

When I actually studied the scientific literature I discovered that not only was there no such consensus, but that the claim itself was as close to an outright lie as one is ever likely to encounter in the world of scientific research. I also discovered that the relationship between body mass and health was vastly more complicated and ambiguous than the relationship between smoking and lung cancer, for the simple reason that almost all interesting scientific issues are vastly more complicated and ambiguous than that.

Like 99.87 percent of the people who are opining on the issue, I haven't actually studied the scientific literature relating to global warming. But even a cursory glance at the debate reveals that Gore's statement is a serious exaggeration. The only point upon which there appears to be a genuine scientific consensus is that the Earth is getting warmer.

It also appears that the great majority of climate scientists believe man-made greenhouse gases are playing a significant role in this warming trend. Beyond that, the field is understandably fraught with controversy. The Earth's climate is an incredibly complex subject - and questions regarding possible man-made effects on it complicate the subject even further.

Most of the basic questions about global warming, including how much is going to occur (the current models give a range of possibilities that vary by 500 percent), what the effects will be, and, not least, what can be done about it, remain largely unanswered.

Two things remain certain. First, science is never immune to political pressure - and one of the clearest signs of that sort of pressure is that scientists are driven to claim to know more than they actually do. And second, politicians and pundits will continue to speak with great authority on subjects about which they know little or nothing.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached

at paul.campos@colorado.edu <mailto:paul.campos@colorado.edu>.

Rocky Mountain News

[japantiger 4,051]

Interesting article....just one key point; "Climate" scientists don't agree that Co2 or human activity is contributing to warming or that there is warming. "Climate"scientists or meteorologists almost uniformly say the opposite. "Other" scientists say Co2 or human activity is contributing to warming. It's like asking an orthopedic surgion to give you a lung cancer diagnosis and treatment. The guy could be right; but frankly I doubt it.

[DKW 86 7,423]

Global Cooling...

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1034077.cms

A recent Washington Post article gave this scientist's quote from 1972. "We simply cannot afford to gamble. We cannot risk inaction. The scientists who disagree are acting irresponsibly. The indications that our climate can soon change for the worse are too strong to be reasonably ignored." The warning was not about global warming (which was not happening): it was about global cooling!

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

Avg temps 68-75 versus avg temps 37-46

1975 Newsweek article

At the same time that these discussions were ongoing in scientific circles, a more dramatic account appeared in the popular media, notably an April 28, 1975 article in Newsweek magazine. Titled

"The Cooling World," it pointed to "ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change" and pointed to "a drop of half a degree [Fahrenheit] in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968." However, the Newsweek article did not make "environmentalist" claims regarding the cause of that drop. To the contrary, it stated that "what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery" and cited the NAS conclusion that "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."

Rather than proposing environmentalist solutions, the Newsweek article suggested that "simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies" would be appropriate.[10] [11]

In the late 1970s there were several popular (and melodramatic) books on the topic, including The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age (review in Nature by Stephen Schneider).