Global Warming Myths and Lies

I use to talk to people at work about global warming, a couple of years ago, and an argument against GW I got more than once was the unreliability of using ice core samples to match CO2 levels to temperature. So, if you want to add a number eleven to your list I'd love to hear it.

Off topic, can anyone suggest an aggregator, or feed reader. I've seen a number of freeware products out there, but my days of downloading and test driving a half dozen products are dwindling. What I'm most interested in are stability (doesn't crash, all features work, etc.) and intuitiveness. I don't need a lot of horns and whistles, and I’ll consider shareware if it’s reasonably priced. Thanks.

Global warming causes more snowfall. Volcanoes make Earth cooler. I read it here first.

Next: Water causes dehydration.

I'm curious as to the details of the data which were used to come up with 8 Gt/year. I get a much higher number but I may be making invalid assumptions, i.e., 3/4 of the 84,000,000 barrels of crude per day is burned which is 2,646,000,0000 gallons * 19.2lbs. of CO2 per gallon = a really big number per day! / 2000 lbs. * 365 days = 9+ Gt/year just from crude. Then there is deforestation, coal burning, natural gas, etc. which would probably double my number.

Just curious.

I'm putting it up on my site. Fantastic and concise. You should send this in to a national paper; who knows, maybe business propoganda will be too busy and it will pass through.

What a bunch of crap!

The fact is our air quality is getting worse, who cares about global warming. Air pollution from our industrial wasteland is killing people every year, increasing our health costs among other things. Reducing these problems may help curb global warming, but the fact is it would cause a greater health benefit to society as a whole. It's time for people to start thinking about issues that will benefit society as a whole.

In the 2/3/07 WSJ is an op-ed piece by Philip Stott, a global warming denier, suggesting that 75% of global warming is caused by cosmic rays!
Does anyone know the current scientific opinion of this?

First, to be clear, your a moron. How its supposed to advance your ideas to suggest that skeptics are whack jobs like people from the flat earth society is beyond me. You make statements of fact that in most cases are unproven. The obvious inference is that those that disagree do not have a legitmate point of view. Your top 10 list seem to be those things you have cherry picked as easy for you to rebutt. I have never heard half of them and the ones I have heard are misrepresented. I don't know what you do for a living, but it must not be debate.

Would you like to know what I, a skeptical scientist, sees as the biggest reason I'm skeptical. Because I'm lied to. Why does anyone need to lie or lie by ommission if the facts are so clearly on their side? Did you believe people who told you that smoking marijuana would lead to heroin addiction? Obviously not. I suupose you want examples.

Green land is shrinking right. It was on the news. Now we find that the interior of Greenland is thickening by 6 cm per year. Why no news story?

Antartic ice shelves are breaking up. Made the news. Yet no one bothered to explain that it was a natural occurance that was predicted to happen. No one mentioned that since then the ice shelves are growing by 26.8 gigatons per year, or that antartica is growing by 1000's of gigatons per year. And that antartica is 95% of the Earths ice. Why the ommissions?

the fact that we've been studying global climate for at most 200 years... (and they have deleted some of those records from public view about 50 years worth (see michael crichton's state of fear)),which is nothing when talking about climate patterns. like how often have we had ice ages. I don't believe humans are causing global warming. It's probably just a natural earth cycle, which could mean we are on the verge of another ice age. btw, it was as warm globally in ~1850 as it is now. don't quote me 100% on that I don't have the numbers in front of me. I do know it got colder for a while after that and the global average hasn't changed. but you can't find those numbers... they've been removed. feel free to rant at me xenoterracide@gmail.com

In addition, there has been no recent increase in volcanic activity – and the volcanic activity we have seen has actually slowed global warming.

This doesn't make sense. If there is no increase, it means status quo or a decrease. A decrease means GW, and status quo means no change.

Doesn't hold together as an argument.

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Logically, of course, it doesn’t make sense that corporations or governments would want to fund skewed studies that indicate their entire way of living is threatening the planet. And with tens of thousands of scientists producing research indicating human-induced global warming, the task to compromise the ethics of so many esteemed professionals would be, to say the least, challenging.

If you are a scientist it also pays to investigate. Partly for enjoyment, and partly because it pays the rent. If the grants are there, people will investigate.

Of course it pays governments to do this. Governments are taxing on the basis of GW. They have to come up with justifications to do so. Why not spend relatively small amounts on GW research that justifies the billions in taxes?

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While global warming could not occur without solar influx, the sun’s output has been relatively stable for as long as we’ve studied it, and has in fact been declining in recent years. Solar variability plays a very small role, if any, in global warming.

The IPCC says that activity as been increasing. You are contradicting the science.

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You need to try a little harder.

Nick

Well if sea levels have already risen over a foot over the last 100 years, then where's the crisis over the last 100 years?

hmmm....

How to generate this volume of interest in designing new communities.

Coby Beck has assembled the most comprehensive list of standard answers at
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/how-to-talk-to-global-warming-sceptic.html

As endorsed by RC

Scientist like to display a graph with Earths temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels along side each other and say "see how the temperatures and CO2 levels rise and fall with each other." Therefore they say that CO2 levels and temperatures must be related. However they are wrong in saying that rising CO2 levels causes temperatures to rise. It is fact the other way around. CO2 freezes during the periods called ice ages and falls as snow. When temperatures rise the frozen CO2 thaws and is dumped into the atmosphere. No one knows what causes these warming periods and cooling periods, but if you look at the graph you will notice that ice ages last a long time and the warming periods are short. Ice ages are normal weather for the Earth. Global warming is actually a freak. Now when the Earth starts it's warming period it continues until it peeks and then it falls to normal ice age temperatures. no one knows why this occurs. The last peek in temperature had the mammoths roaming the marshes of Siberia and Great Britain was as hot as the Sahara. The little ice age that cooled the Earth is now over and the warming has renewed. This is normal until whatever causes the return of the ice age. Seas will continue to rise and weather will continue to change as it has for thousands if not millions of years. CO2 does not cause temperature changes.........period. Temperature changes causes the changing of CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Do you understand?

Wall Street Journal - Feb 5

Last week's headlines about the United Nation's latest report on global warming were typically breathless, predicting doom and human damnation like the most fervent religious evangelical. Yet the real news in the fourth assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may be how far it is backpedaling on some key issues. Beware claims that the science of global warming is settled.

The document that caused such a stir was only a short policy report, a summary of the full scientific report due in May. Written mainly by policymakers (not scientists) who have a stake in the issue, the summary was long on dire predictions. The press reported the bullet points, noting that this latest summary pronounced with more than "90% confidence" that humans have been the main drivers of warming since the 1950s, and that higher temperatures and rising sea levels would result.

More pertinent is the underlying scientific report. And according to people who have seen that draft, it contains startling revisions of previous U.N. predictions. For example, the Center for Science and Public Policy has just released an illuminating analysis written by Lord Christopher Monckton, a one-time adviser to Margaret Thatcher who has become a voice of sanity on global warming.

Take rising sea levels. In its 2001 report, the U.N.'s best high-end estimate of the rise in sea levels by 2100 was three feet. Lord Monckton notes that the upcoming report's high-end best estimate is 17 inches, or half the previous prediction. Similarly, the new report shows that the 2001 assessment had overestimated the human influence on climate change since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third.

Such reversals (and there are more) are remarkable, given that the IPCC's previous reports, in 1990, 1995 and 2001, have been steadily more urgent in their scientific claims and political tone. It's worth noting that many of the policymakers who tinker with the IPCC reports work for governments that have promoted climate fears as a way of justifying carbon-restriction policies. More skeptical scientists are routinely vetoed from contributing to the panel's work. The Pasteur Institute's Paul Reiter, a malaria expert who thinks global warming would have little impact on the spread of that disease, is one example.

U.N. scientists have relied heavily on computer models to predict future climate change, and these crystal balls are notoriously inaccurate. According to the models, for instance, global temperatures were supposed to have risen in recent years. Yet according to the U.S. National Climate Data Center, the world in 2006 was only 0.03 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in 2001 -- in the range of measurement error and thus not statistically significant.

The models also predicted that sea levels would rise much faster than they actually have. The models didn't predict the significant cooling the oceans have undergone since 2003 -- which is the opposite of what you'd expect with global warming. Cooler oceans have also put a damper on claims that global warming is the cause of more frequent or intense hurricanes. The models also failed to predict falling concentrations of methane in the atmosphere, another surprise.

Meanwhile, new scientific evidence keeps challenging previous assumptions. The latest report, for instance, takes greater note of the role of pollutant particles, which are thought to reflect sunlight back to space, supplying a cooling effect. More scientists are also studying the effect of solar activity on climate, and some believe it alone is responsible for recent warming.

All this appears to be resulting in a more cautious scientific approach, which is largely good news. We're told that the upcoming report is also missing any reference to the infamous "hockey stick," a study by Michael Mann that purported to show 900 years of minor fluctuations in temperature, followed by a dramatic spike over the past century. The IPCC featured the graph in 2001, but it has since been widely rebutted.

While everyone concedes that the Earth is about a degree Celsius warmer than it was a century ago, the debate continues over the cause and consequences. We don't deny that carbon emissions may play a role, but we don't believe that the case is sufficiently proven to justify a revolution in global energy use. The economic dislocations of such an abrupt policy change could be far more severe than warming itself, especially if it reduces the growth and innovation that would help the world cope with, say, rising sea levels. There are also other problems -- AIDS, malaria and clean drinking water, for example -- whose claims on scarce resources are at least as urgent as climate change.

The IPCC report should be understood as one more contribution to the warming debate, not some definitive last word that justifies radical policy change. It can be hard to keep one's head when everyone else is predicting the Apocalypse, but that's all the more reason to keep cool and focus on the actual science.

I wonder how many people in here are actual scientists and how many are just opinionated fools who have no idea what they are talking about and are just repeating things they heard somewhere else. There are many arguments and many don’t make sense. An example is increased polar caps. Some say there’s no GW if they are getting bigger; others say that’s proof of GW due to increased precipitation. Great, so does anyone care to explain or are you just going to sit there and insult each other. The fact is there are no solid conclusions, but it does not take a genius to realize we are polluting the planet. Whether that means Canada is going to get hot like the Caribbean or Mexico is going to get snow in July...who knows, it’s pretty extreme. But climate change is a normal thing, even in the extreme, such as ice ages. So in conclusion, GW is a topic that has been misrepresented, over exaggerated, ignored and confused way too much, just talk about something real, something proven, something that there is no doubts about and that everyone sees, pollution. And please realize, climate change takes a long time, so calm down, you are not going to wake up tomorrow feeling like you are inside an oven, or a freezer (whichever your opinion is...).

It is with great interest that I observe the ongoing arguments for and against evidence of global warming. It is fairly obvious that those who believe GW is occurring, and that it is caused by humans are calling for changes in current lifestyles to reduce GHG emissions.

It is less obvious (to me, anyway), why people would argue against it. I see no real disadvantage or weakness to assuming that global warming is occurring and is caused (for the most part) by humans, and acting upon that assumption.

The development of clean energy sources (geo-thermal heating, fuel cells - and not only hydrogen fuel cells, solar and wind power...) is universally beneficial; for the proponents of the GW theory, CO2 emissions are decreased, and for those concerned with air quality, SOx and NOx emissions are also decreased, if not altogether eliminated with such technology.

To boot, reduction of energy demand (and therefore, fossil fuel demand) and/or use of alternative energy in all industrial processes has financial benefits as well as environmental/social benefits. The same has been shown for people who have adopted such "green" energy systems for residential application.

So, my basic point is, regardless of whether or not GW is occurring and is human-caused, taking corrective action would only have beneficial effects for humans. The fossil fuel supply is being depleted faster than it could possibly be replaced, so it is simply a matter of 'when' we adopt alternative energy sources, rather than 'if.'

Could we PLEASE ORGANIZE a call in Blitz to the conservative talk shows on Catastrophic Climate Change? PLEASE? I am sick and tired of fending off their fallout. We are the majority on this issue now, it is time to overwhelm them into silence... Or at least into sharing the dark corner of the room with the flat earth society.

I always find it amusing that when one says something important, albeit controversial, that one gets a lot of uninformative angst out of seemingly nowhere.

I have a degree in science. Data speaks louder than name-calling.

Thank you, PE, for attempting to clear the air. Unfortunately there are those who prefer to keep it hazy, and will resort to childish tactics.

Ice core data shows that recent carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere coincide with industrialization. What don't you nay-sayers understand about, "the present-day levels of CO2 are unprecedented during the past 420 kyr"? (source: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/vostok.htm) Now, would one of you anonymous folks like to step into my greenhouse, as we crank up the CO2, so we can all see what happens? ;)

So jade, being the expert on CO2 emissions and it's concomitance with industrialization, I'm just wondering what your degree in "science" is exactly?
As far as ur greenhouse challenge, I'd love to. As long as "science" will REMAIN science. I'll give you conservatively 1,000 cubic feet of oxygen to the carbon dioxide emitted by you and I exhaling. Again, conservatively, as that amount would be approximately 100x more than that of industry to our study. Still afraid of the greenhouse carbon dioxide? ARGH!

Of course, we're now up to 800,000 years on CO2 icecore analysis. The issue is with it's rapid accumulation, not it's mere existence as some seem to suggest. And people like "Redding" don't seem to realize that CO2 can act as both a forcing (causing a temperature change) and a feedback (amplifying temperature change). At at the end of a glacial period, both CO2 and water vapor seem to play feedback roles. Now, CO2 is the primary forcing.

Well I don't know about this whole global warming thing, it's all pretty interesting, especially with all the maybes and coulds and mights...coming from both sides of this argument. I think it's a good idea to have cleaner air, although I'm not aware of the standard. Anyway, I just can't believe the horror stories until a meteorologist gets the weather right for the next week, or at least the next day. The weather in Ohio is just so... unpredictable.