These are some of the points from the movie the Great Global Warming Swindle, i sugguest downloading this from mininova.com, a bit-torrent site, and then wathching it. Here are some of the points from "actual" Scientists, they are alot differnt then Gore's and make alot more sense.
On contradictions in the theory of anthropogenic global warming
- Records of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels since 1940 show a continuing increase, but during this period, global temperature decreased until 1975, and has increased since then. (It emerged subsequent to the programme that the graph used to support this claim was twenty years old, and Durkin agreed that the time axis had been incorrectly relabelled to give the impression that it contained data up to 2000. In later reruns, the graph was corrected.)
- Theories of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas predict that the temperature in the troposphere should increase the fastest, but satellite and weather balloon data do not show this.
- Water vapour is the component of the atmosphere that has the largest impact on the planet's temperature, through cloud formation and associated reflection of incoming solar heat.
- Carbon dioxide is only a very small percentage of the atmosphere, 0.052% , and humans only contribute a small part of the total CO2 emissions in a year; this means that human CO2 emissions cannot be the main cause of global warming.
- Carbon dioxide levels increase or decrease due to temperatures increasing or decreasing rather than temperatures following carbon dioxide levels, because the Earth's oceans absorb carbon dioxide when they are cooler, and release it when they are warmer. Due to the large oceanic mass it takes a long time ("decades or centuries") for the reaction to temperature changes to occur, which is why analysis of the Vostok Station and other ice cores shows that changes in the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide follow changes in global temperature, with a lag of 800 years.
- Solar activity is currently at a high level, and likely to be the cause of the current global warming. The mechanism involves cosmic rays aiding cloud formation, and the solar wind deflects cosmic rays away from Earth during periods of high solar activity. Solar activity levels are far more relevant than the small percentage of greenhouse gases being emitted by humans described in other theories.
- Changes in solar activity match changes in global temperatures much more accurately than do changes in CO2 levels (Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen, 1991).
- The current warming is nothing unusual and was surpassed during the Medieval Warm Period. This was a time of great prosperity in Europe, highlighting the beneficial effects of increased temperatures.
On research findings driven by financial or ideological motives
- The claim that sceptics are funded by the oil industry is false, and in any case the research funds provided by oil companies are dwarfed by those provided by governments to the alleged "global warming industry".
- There has been a large increase in the research funds available for studies relating to global warming. Including a putative link to global warming effects makes it likelier that a research scientist will get a research grant. Furthermore, producing dramatic and pessimistic results has a positive impact on the standing of scientists.
- It is more likely that vested interests occur among supporters of the theory of anthropogenic global warming, since many jobs in science, the media, and governmental administration have been created as a result of this theory.
- Some supporters of the anthropogenic theory of global warming do so because it is in concordance with their ideological beliefs opposing capitalism, economic development, globalization, industrialisation, and the United States.
- The theory was promoted by Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the interest of supporting the nuclear power industry.
Disputing a scientific consensus supporting anthropogenic global warming
- The "2,500 top scientists" mentioned in the IPCC report are not all scientists and do not all agree with the report.
- The IPCC report misrepresented the views of some of the scientists who contributed to it. When Paul Reiter complained and requested that his name be removed, this request was refused until he threatened legal action.
- The concept of anthropogenic global warming has developed into a modern religion, with sceptics treated as heretics and labelled as "global warming deniers", in order to equate genuine scientific scepticism with holocaust denial. Several prominent sceptics have received death threats as a result of their work on climate change.
Miscellaneous
- A similar scare emerged during the 1970s when scientists predicted global cooling and the imminent onset of a new ice age.
- The negative effects of the precautionary principle, which has been used by supporters of the anthropogenic theory of global warming, are discussed. For example, the World Health Organization estimates that every year, four million children die globally from respiratory diseases related to inhaling smoke from cooking fires because they do not use electrical cooking methods.
- It is immoral for industrialised populations to demand that developing African nations ignore their reserves of cheap fossil fuels (coal and oil), and instead rely on expensive renewable power generation techniques, such as solar panels and wind driven generators.
I have much more information taken from newspapers and the lot that I will try to get up here at some point, but i want to look at this from a better persepective, a Scientific perspective, one that has not been shown yet in the media very much.
Heres another tidbit of info to go along with this. These are the people featured in the film here, notice the trend here, wow thats crazy, they are actual scientists!
Syun-Ichi Akasofu - Professor and Director, International Arctic Research Center
Tim Ball - Head of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (misattributed as Professor from the Department of Climatology, University of Winnipeg. Ball left his faculty position in the Department of Geography in 1996; the Department of Climatology does not exist.)
Nigel Calder - Former Editor, New Scientist
John Christy - Professor, Department of Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama in Huntsville and Lead Author, IPCC
Ian Clark - Professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa
Piers Corbyn - Weather Forecaster, Weather Action
Paul Driessen - Author: Green Power, Black Death
Eigil Friis-Christensen - Director, Danish National Space Center and Adjunct Professor, University of Copenhagen
Nigel Lawson - Former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer
Richard Lindzen - Professor, Department of Meteorology, M.I.T.
Patrick Michaels - Professor, Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia
Patrick Moore - Co-founder, Greenpeace
Paul Reiter - Professor, Department of Medical Entomology, Pasteur Institute, Paris
Nir Shaviv - Professor, Institute of Physics, University of Jerusalem
James Shikwati - Economist and author
Frederick Singer - Professor Emeritus, Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia (misattributed in the film as Former Director, U.S. National Weather Service. From 1962-64 he was Director of the National Weather Satellite Service.)
Roy Spencer - Weather Satellite Team Leader, NASA
Philip Stott - Professor Emeritus, Department of Biogeography, University of London
Carl Wunsch - Professor, Department of Oceanography, M.I.T. (who has since repudiated the program
These people seem to be a lot more reputable then a Former vice-President, and a former animal lover. Educated people would have to agree that listening to actual educated people on a subject would be far more intelligent then listening to a former VP and a animal lover.
10 comments:
I'm going to address these points in the order you've made them, except I won't go into the politics and which side has genuine scientists and which has paid hacks, since those arguments are both unprovable and unchallengeable.
* The cooling between 1940 and 1975 was due to pollution, which reflected solar energy and also increased cloud cover.
* The troposphere temperature anomaly was identifed years ago as an error in analysis. This correction is widely known, and repeating this misinformation in the film has to have been intentional.
*Water vapor is indeed a more influential greenhouse gas than CO2, but it washes out of the atmosphere regularly. Mainly it serves to amplify the effects of global warming.
* The main constituents of air are nitrogen, oxygen, and argon, which together make up 99.96% of the atmosphere, and have little or no greenhouse effect. CO2 and water vapor are by far the most potent greenhouse gases. Human contribution is about 1% of the CO2 present in the atmosphere, which is increasing roughly 1/2% per year.
* The response of CO2 to global temperature is part of the problem. It appears that global warming causes higher CO2 concentration. But higher CO2 concentration causes global warming, an inescapable fact of physics. There is a possibility that temperature and CO2 concentration could reinforce each other all the way to the worst case. This possibility is what causes the greatest concern.
* Solar activity peaked in 1980 but temperatures have continued to rise. You need to understand that the Lassen/Friis-Christensen plot was not based on solar activity, but on some heroic, and invalid, manipulations of solar-cycle length data.
* We don't actually know what conditions were in the medieval warm period, except from anecdotes. Very likely, conditions then were much as now. If that's so, then East Africa and the Southwestern US weren't prosperous. Still, if we could expect conditions to stay the same, probably we'd be okay with it. The concern is that CO2 levels are rising rapidly. CO2 concentration stayed below 300 ppm for hundreds of thousands of years, but now it's over 380 ppm and there's no end in sight.
I don't see any point in speculating on why people do the things they do. What we should focus on is the truth of the issue. I've assembled the most reliable information I could find on a web page called Global Warming: A Guide for the Perplexed. On it you will see that solar activity actually has declined since 1990 and CO2 concentration has risen significantly, along with global average temperature.
I watched this film about a week ago and I found several issues with it. My major gripe is that more than half of the film focused on interesting political conspiracy theories that various scientists had cooked up. I think this has to be taken merely as opinion rather than any sort of fact, just like any other conspiracy theory.
There also seemed to be a bit of sour grapes from many of these scientists in regards to lack of funding and at times being highly criticized by fellow colleagues. I don't know about you, but does the idea that these guys' scientific methods not being up to snuff at all come to mind here?
Another issue I had was that at the start of the film, the filmmakers try and show us just how insignificant of a greenhouse gas that carbon dioxide has been in the past. This part is hammered into our heads...that carbon dioxide is so insignificant that it has likely not had an impact on climate change in the past.
The film then shows us the correlation between temperature change and carbon dioxide change throughout the history of the earth. Sure enough, carbon dioxide increases lag temperature increases. What the film fails to mention is that in the past, except for the usual year to year variances that come in the form of major volcanic activity and forest fires, etc., there hasn't been any unnatural production of carbon dioxide.
So all the past data really shows is that there is some sort of relationship between carbon dioxide and global temperature. What previous data fails to account for is the ever increasing human production of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide may be an insignificant greenhouse gas, but its never been produced from unnatural sources as it's being now. When you consider how delicate of a balance there often is in nature, it's not completely unfathomable to believe that all this new carbon dioxide IS at least partially responsible for the current upward trend in temperature.
The past data is really irrelevant here because we've changed a variable....we've got unnatural CO2 production. The film ignored this change in variables, which is a major oversight.
Wow, i just lost my whole post to the stupid internet being gay. Anyways the jist is:
1. We have gotten to such a bad spot that now we disagree with the real experts on this stuff and instead rather listen to a former VP and a animal lover to get our facts.
2. Im still waiting for realistic solutions that don't require me to build a mud and stone hut and live like a nomad.
3. It's sad we believe a guy with no scientific experience, being that he went to Harvard for a degree in politics, and a guy who studied animals all of his life, over people who's careers are dedicated to science.
4. In response to the more CO2 problem. You cannot believe that CO2 is actually produced more in technology then it is from ourselves, there is 6 billion of us and millions upon millions of animals as well. It would be foolish to blame this on technological advances over humans.
Here is a list of organizations that accept anthropogenic global warming as real and scientifically well-supported:
* NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS): http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/
* National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA): http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html
* Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm
* National Academy of Sciences (NAS): http://books.nap.edu/collections/global_warming/index.html
* State of the Canadian Cryosphere (SOCC) - http://www.socc.ca/permafrost/permafrost_future_e.cfm
* Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): http://epa.gov/climatechange/index.html
* The Royal Society of the UK (RS) - http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=3135
* American Geophysical Union (AGU): http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/policy/climate_change_position.html
* American Meteorological Society (AMS): http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/climatechangeresearch_2003.html
* American Institute of Physics (AIP): http://www.aip.org/gov/policy12.html
* National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR): http://eo.ucar.edu/basics/cc_1.html
* American Meteorological Society (AMS): http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/jointacademies.html
* Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS): http://www.cmos.ca/climatechangepole.html
Off course they do.
They have too.
If they don't they are scrutinized and they put their reputations on the line. I can guarantee you that the scientists in there don't all agree with this. That is just the organizations stand point brought to you by a few people worried about their reputation.
To be a scientist that is actually recognized in the science world you MUST be an advocate for the most popular theories. Otherwise you get what you have in that movie. People who are shunned because they have different views. And i can see why, it seems that no one wants to look at any other possible means but what they hear in mainstream media. Its a sad world we live in.
You can't just pick and choose "real" scientists based on their opinions aligning with your opinions. In a now infamous petition handed in to the prime minister asking for us to abandond Kyoto, of the 60 "leading scientists" that signed the petitions, the list is chock full of economists, geography professors, TV weathermen, a coal union spokesperson, electrical engineers, infectious disease specialists, etc. etc. All of these people are just as far out of their element as a David Suzuki or Al Gore are.
A study done by Dr. Naomi Oreskes in 2005 looked at a total of 923 peer-reviewed research papers published in highly regarded science journals and not a single one refuted the idea of global warming. There is most definitely debate as to all of the nuances of global warming, but not a single published paper refuted global warming.
In response to this study, a fellow by the name of Benny Peiser researched the same papers and disputed that 34 papers refuted global warming. The abstracts for 34 of these articles can be found here:
http://timlambert.org/2005/05/peiser/
Peiser later admitted that only one of the research papers he used actually refuted the scientific consensus, and this article was NOT peer-reviewed and was published by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.
The major thing to keep into consideration is that science thrives on debate and criticism. Anytime a major discovery is announced, it is highly scrutinized by a wide range of scientists and researchers. Every single paper published in a highly reputable science journal is heavily reviewed and criticized. If the paper does not meet the standards in regards to data collection, the scientific method, etc., it will be rejected.
The fact that some of these scientists haven't had their articles published in these major science journals isn't that they are being silenced or blackballed by the scientific community; their scientific methods, data, etc. are either wrong, or not up to sufficient standards to be deemed reputable.
Even if you look at the list of "real" scientists you have listed from the documentary, we'll see that one is an economist, one is a professor for the Department of Climatology at a university where no such department exists (your gool old Winnipeg boy), a weatherman, an alleged co-founder of Greenpeace (founders of Greenpeace deny he was a co-founder), and a politician. There are even scientists on this list that do not deny that much of global warming is the result of human activity.
"The fact that some of these scientists haven't had their articles published in these major science journals isn't that they are being silenced or blackballed by the scientific community; their scientific methods, data, etc. are either wrong, or not up to sufficient standards to be deemed reputable."
Of course it wouldn't be considered that because they are being black labeled, why would anyone publicly say they are being labeled if they really weren't? What point does that prove?
And im still waiting for some realisitic solutions for this problem, and some realistic solution to get people like me to "convert". You guys need us people because we make up the majority. You need us to be advocates for Kyoto. You need us to further your views. So why isn't that happening? Do you guys think that movies showing blown up facts and propagandas are going to aid in your efforts? Do you think that telling me to give up my conveniences is going to help me want to change?
I'd like to see something of a solution, one without ideals and with actual substance, something that convicts me, something that shows me their actually is a problem.
Scott,
I honestly don't know if I can provide you with a realistic solution. Regardless of whether global warming is taking place how scientists believe or not, we're not exactly doing ourselves any favours in the environmental sector. Even if we aren't the reason the Earth is heating up, we're still burning crazy amounts of coal and fossil fuels, which do give off other pollutants besides just CO2. We're still using crazy amounts of pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers that not only help leach away nutrients in our soil, but run-off into our waterways and affect our drinking water.
The fact is, we're simply not responsible for what we use, how we use it, and what we do with our waste. Middle class joes like you and me, we can usually hide from the damage we're doing because we can afford to move away from affected areas to nicer, cleaner areas.
Really, the only solution we have is to become responsible for our actions. That likely means reducing our energy demands, giving up some of the conveniences and luxuries we currently enjoy, and probably putting a lot of government money towards this issue to help develop cleaner technologies and tougher laws against heavy polluters. Is it realistic to expect everyone to make this decision? Probably not. It doesn't mean you don't try, though.
A while ago you mentioned that the earth will eventually adapt to our ways, and in a way, you're correct. Eventually, we'll have no choice but to give up our current standard of living. We will have either drained our fossil fuel reserves and other resources or else the damage to the environment will become so severe that mere survival will become more important than any economy. It's not out of the question that we could return to life "in the olden days".
Will this happen in our lifetimes? Maybe, maybe not. But it is very possible it happens during our children our grandchildren's lifetimes. Since I'd like my children to enjoy many of the same luxuries I did, I'd like to try and preserve our environment and resources as long as I can, instead of being greedy and selfish and wanting everything for myself.
Thats good.
You realize that we will deplete our resources and will have no choice but to revert back and start over.
What do you think about the new budget and the money being put towards the environment? Is it a good start in your opinion?
And i don't think I've asked you about Kyoto before, but do you think the reason why we pulled out was because it just wasn't possible to fulfill the obligations that we had to in that program?
We should never back out of Kyoto. We were one of the first countries to sign on and it was formally ratified in 2002. At this point it became an international treaty....international law. We signed on, so we're now responsible. It's funny how all of the European Union countries that signed on are fully committed to it and have been making great strides to reduce their emissions.
The issue with Kyoto isn't whether its attainable (it is, see the EU countries), but with the fact that developing nations like India and China are not being asked to make significant cuts to their emissions yet. These countries have been given an amount of lag time in order for them to "catch up" with the west, in terms of development. Kyoto was designed so that the countries most responsible for the current pollution levels have to make the most sacrifices, while allowing other countries a chance to eventually live lives with the same standard of living as ourselves. If the same restrictions were equally placed on India and China, their economies would be destroyed.
Of course the US doesn't like this because if these countries develop, there is more competetion in the global marketplace. And since the Bush administration seems to have a pretty big influence on old Steve Harper, Canada is now toeing the Republican line.
As for the budget money...money is only useful if it is spent properly. I somehow get the feeling that alot of research is going to be going into biofuels like biodiesel, which I'm honestly not that big a fan of. We wrote a research paper on biodiesel in school and honestly, the only thing really "green" about biodiesel is the bio part of the word biodiesel.
Post a Comment