More than 17,000 scientists have signed a petition circulated by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine saying, in part, ?there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth?s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth?s climate.? (Go to www.oism.org for the complete petition and names of signers.) Surveys of climatologists show similar skepticism.
I did a quick sample of these scientists, but none of them seemed to be climate scientists (and many weren't actually scientists, just that they had university qualifications - and one was in biblical studies, hardly anything to do with climate studies). Here is a question: Would you let a physicist, even though he is a doctor, do brain surgery on you?
What you have to know is that in science there is a lot of specialisation. A scientist can know a lot about their respective fields, but have little to do with others. It is why a Physicist and a Physician do not do each other's jobs.
Yes, it is a petition, with what looks like a lot of names, but when you actually look at the numbers of scientists that actually exist, this number is not all that significant.
If I had more time I would do more research into the people involved (but I don't have the time to do so). However, several issues crop up. In the website's rules they state that:
Signatories are approved for inclusion in the Petition Project list if they have obtained formal educational degrees at the level of Bachelor of Science or higher in appropriate scientific fields.
But in my brief perusal of names, very few of them actually full filled this criteria. They did have "formal educational degrees at the level of Bachelor of Science or higher" but many of them were nothing to do with climate analysis (ranging from biblical studies to psychology to modelling of boundary conditions between microscopic materials, etc). So they seem to ahve violated their claim already, this casts a big shadow of doubt over their claims and the validity of the petition as a representation of the actual people involved and with the knowledge to dispute claims of global warming.
Sure, it doesn't invalidate what they are trying to do, nor is it claiming that it is a fake petition. Also, a petition does not mean that there is scientific evidence against GW. Just hat these signatories signed that petition for personal reasons. remember, science works by disproof, so that if any of these 30,000 people had any actual proof that GW was not working, they could completely break the claims that it is occuring.
The very fact that these 30,000 people have stated that this, and yet have not been able to provide any proof against GW, shows that either they are not actually qualified to talk about global warming, or that the data does not exist.
Satellite readings of temperatures in the lower troposphere (an area scientists predict would immediately reflect any global warming) show no warming since readings began 23 years ago. These readings are accurate to within 0.01?C, and are consistent with data from weather balloons. Only land-based temperature stations show a warming trend, and these stations do not cover the entire globe, are often contaminated by heat generated by nearby urban development, and are subject to human error.
Actually you are wrong here. Satellite data does show a warming of the Troposphere. This claim by GW deniers has shown to be in error. It has to do with the way you measure it, the angle through the atmosphere you measure it by. What the data that the GW deniers use was an incorrect measurement. They were effectively measuring the wrong part of the atmosphere, and so got incorrect results.
Even the GW deniers that presented this data have acknowledge that the data was in error. So this is not good evidence against GW, even the GW deniers say that.
All predictions of global warming are based on computer models, not historical data. In order to get their models to produce predictions that are close to their designers? expectations, modelers resort to ?flux adjustments? that can be 25 times larger than the effect of doubling carbon dioxide concentrations, the supposed trigger for global warming. Richard A. Kerr, a writer for Science, says ?climate modelers have been ?cheating? for so long it?s almost become respectable.?
However, those models are calibrated against the historical data. The only way the can test these models is to input historical data at one point, run the simulation and then check to see if the model matches the historical data at the new point.
If you knew anything about the modelling that goes on, you would see why your claim here is just plain wrong. They do use historical data, it is the only data that we have (as time travel has not been invented) by which to test their models.
Also, there are a few modellers that ahve been "cheating" but this is an extremely small minority and are not even considered by the main stream climate modellers. This is the same with GW deniers, there are extreme ends of the spectrum where they ahve been using such large adjustments to their models in an attempt to disprove GW. So the question remains, should we only consider these outlier modellers, or should we used modellers that actually do the right thing and are considered accurate by their peers?
Now the really scary thing is, that the predictions of some of these extremists are actually occuring. Certain rates of warming, certain events and such that were not predicted by the more moderate modellers to occur until much later are occuring now. Many of these extreme modellers did not predict them occuring until a little later. Global Warming does seem to be occurring, based on actual data being gathered today, faster than virtually all modellers are predicting.
Alarmists frequently quote the executive summaries of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations organization, to support their predictions. But here is what the IPCC?s latest report, Climate Change 2001, actually says about predicting the future climate: ?The Earth?s atmosphere-ocean dynamics is chaotic: its evolution is sensitive to small perturbations in initial conditions. This sensitivity limits our ability to predict the detailed evolution of weather; inevitable errors and uncertainties in the starting conditions of a weather forecast amplify through the forecast. As well as uncertainty in initial conditions, such predictions are also degraded by errors and uncertainties in our ability to represent accurately the significant climate processes.?
And this shows your true colours. You used the term "Alarmist".
You are labeling people who use the IPPC (which I haven't by the way) as alarmists. Guess what, the IPPC is actually conservative and has been shown not to be as severe as what is actually occuring. In the last section I mentioned that events that were predicted to occur much later are occuring now, well the IPPC reports were the ones that stated that these would not occur until later (or in some cases should not occur unless we were already in a catastrophic cascade towards global warming).
Yes, the atmosphere is chaotic, and this is why you need special qualifications to understand the modelling properly (and why practically all the people is looked at on the petition were not really qualified to state that GW is occuring or not.
Chaotic systems are not random. Chaotic systems are systems that have a lot of internal interactions.
Take for example this simple system:
http://www.chaoticpendulums.com/In this, the motions of the two pendulums influences each other. But, because they influence each other, the first pendulum influences the second, but then the second influences the first and the first influences the second again, and again in a feed back loop.
Unless you know exactly the initial conditions of the pendulums and every single influence they encounter, then you can never precisely predict the motion of the pendulums.
However, short term predictions are possible, because the errors don't have time to accumulate. You can also make long term predictions about the pendulums (like that friction will slow them down if no new force acts on them and they will eventually stop). What is very hard is the medium term predictions of a certain resolution (in what position will the second pendulum be in 30 seconds time?)
This is the way it is with the climate. We can make fairly accurate predictions about the climate a week or so in advance. We find it difficult to make medium term predictions about the climate (from 1 week to 5 years), but the longer term predictions are easier because all the variations due to errors can be averaged out.
Global Warming deniers play on this. They keep trying to make the climate modellers make these medium term predictions. An often heard question is" "why can't the climate modellers tell me whether it will be a worm of cold winter next year?" the answer is: They are not trying to model whether next years winter will be cold or warm, but they are trying to model what the next few decades to centuries are going to be like.
Temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period (roughly 800 to 1200 AD), which allowed the Vikings to settle presently inhospitable Greenland, were higher than even the worst-case scenario reported by the IPCC. The period from about 5000-3000 BC, known as the ?climatic optimum,? was even warmer and marked ?a time when mankind began to build its first civilizations,? observe James Plummer and Frances B. Smith in a study for Consumer Alert. ?There is good reason to believe that a warmer climate would have a similar effect on the health and welfare of our own far more advanced and adaptable civilization today.?
Have a read of Jarrad Diamond's: Collapse - Why societies choose to fail or survive (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_(book) ). True, one aspect he does consider is climate change, but this is not necessarily human induced climate change (but does also include it). He talks about the Viking settlement of Greenland and how their assumption that a more advanced and adaptable society could survive climate changes (ps: they didn't).
Yes, there will be locations that have increased productivity. That has never been denied by GW, in fact it is often stated that some places will see an improvement. But, GW also states that you don't look at things in isolation. Yes, some places will improve, but what about the rest of the world. Greenland might be a good place to live, by we can't shove a lot of people there or it won't be such a good place to live.
This is a common tactic by GW deniers. they will point to a place and say: "Well wont they ahve it good there, this means that the world will be better off".
No. No it doesn't mean any such thing. It is such an obvious false claim that I am surprised that any actually falls for it.
Think about the Sahara desert. Why is this place a desert? It is because the atmospheric conditions, like temperature, prevent much water from falling there. Now, if Greenland were to become hospitable, what does this mean? It means that the temperature will have had to go up. So, southern Europe is just north of the Sahara and due to atmospheric conditions, it is not too bad. In places it can be a bit dry, but on the whole it is not too bad. If you were to warm up this area, then the atmospheric conditions that created the Sahara would then begin to extend into southern Europe. There are hundreds of millions of people living there. Greenland at best might be able to support a couple of million more. There is a massive difference in the impact to 100 million as compared to a couple of million.
So no!. Emphatically NO. this is a rally scary situation you are advocating. It will not be that we can survive in a warmer world because new places will open up for farming. It is because so much more land will be devastated by the warming that these new areas will not be able to cope with the amount of people displaced by this warming.
And this is not even considering the logistical nightmare of having to evacuate the millions o people and construct new cities and towns and such. If you think today's economic system is bad, what will it be like when whole cities are demolished and all those people no longer have work!
You are calling people who accept GW as alarmists. the situation you paint here is far more alarming that any GW has painted. You sir (or madam) are the alarmist!
Reducing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to 7 percent below 1990?s levels by the year 2012--the target set by the Kyoto Protocol--would require higher energy taxes and regulations causing the nation to lose 2.4 million jobs and $300 billion in annual economic output. Average household income nationwide would fall by $2,700, and state tax revenues would decline by $93.1 billion due to less taxable earned income and sales, and lower property values. Full implementation of the Kyoto Protocol by all participating nations would reduce global temperature in the year 2100 by a mere 0.14 degrees Celsius.
No, it has been shown that reducing CO
2 emission can actually be a benefit to an economy. It create hundreds of new sectors for employment depending on the methods used.
For instance, if we decide to go roof top solar system and micro generators, then we need people to manufacture them, people to install them, people to maintain them.
You might have a few hundred people working in a coal fired power plant (although more would have been needed to build it). This kind of rooftop solar system would require many more people to operate it. You are looking at tens of thousands of new jobs.
But lets look at historical trends. Every time a new energy source is developed, even if it displaces an existing one and its infrastructure, there has been a massive jump in both quality of life and economic power.
There is no evidence that moving from CO
2 heavy practices to CO
2 clean practices would actually hinder the economy and all evidence showing that it would improve it.
All you seem to be doing is regurgitating propaganda that you ahve heard, you have not appeared to have done any research or education to understand what is actually going on or at stake in the debate between GW and its deniers. You are even using "data' that the GW deniers say is incorrect.
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