John from Whitchurch seems to think that the brief spell of recent cold weather we’ve had in the UK is evidence that there is no global warming (‘Global warming? You must be joking’, Open Lines, Feb 12). Questioning of evidence is what science is all about and I’m all in favour of it. John seems not to have applied this principle to the evidence he uses however.His evidence is only for a very, very short period of weeks and days. He refers to information only from the UK. Climate is about decades of changes not short term weather. Climatic change as now discussed, of which global warming is only one aspect (albeit very important), is a phenomenon which is global and which is tracked over geological time (hundreds, thousands and millions of years).
Has he considered whether the recent weather around the globe fits predictions made by the scientific ‘experts’ he scoffs at? Has he looked at patterns and trends over long periods of time and over large areas of the globe as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have in their independent work for the United Nations?
John very properly asks who these ‘experts’ are and what qualifications they have but this information has been very widely publicised for years now. The IPCC were awarded a Nobel Prize for their work last year! There is no doubt that the United Nations are served by very well qualified scientists as are hundreds of governments and thousands of businesses and scientific institutions all around the globe. They have all assessed the evidence and conclude that climate change is real, very serious and requiring urgent, large scale action! However, its not the fact that they are ‘experts’ that convinces me about climate change – it’s the fact that their central evidence and their expertise has passed continual and rigorous testing. This testing rightly continues to be an essential part of the problem solving process.
So what's his take on the record HIGH temperatures in Australia?
ReplyDeleteOr once it warms up here in the UK in spring will he then be fretting that climate change is not only real but happening too quickly?
It's quite scary that this bugger only lives a mile or two away from me. Heaven help him if our paths ever cross - I'll deck him on the spot!
Lack of education is no excuse for stupidity. The idiots should accept that they've no reason to comment on stuff they clearly don't understand.
I've reserved a single bullet for him which I'll despatch using the Hartcliffe Community Gun.
Panther at http://leysiner.blogspot.com/
The Hartcliffe Community Gun
ReplyDeleteIs that still in the bushes on the roundabout?
My God, that was there when I left the hood back in.....late 80's!
Must be rusty by now.
It' been my understanding that the current climate change may well result in the British Isles getting colder. We're told that cold water from the melting ice cap drifting south will (is?) interrupt the warm Gulf Stream which keeps these islands in milder conditions than we have a right to expect at this latitude. So rather than Mediterranian we should expect something more akin to Ukrainian conditions in the future?
ReplyDeleteWestfieldWanderers
ReplyDeleteThe IPCC report felt that it was extremely unlikely that the Oceanic circulatory conveyor belt (of which the Gulf Stream is an element)will shut down this century, although if the Greenland ice sheet started to melt even more quickly there is a chance that it could be vulnerable in the longer-term.
Even, if oceanic circulation did shut down, the effect would only lower European temperatures by a few degrees, just about cancelling out the effects of Global Warming. Before the climate change denialists get all excited about this being a good thing, there will be knock-on effects(such as Asian monsoon disruption, and sea level rises due to changes in salt water densities)that would be even more catastrophic.
The above is a summary of comments by Sir David King, the former UK chief scientific advisor in a recent publication (The Hot Topic).
Gores film An Inconvenient Truth is full of lies. Not exaggerations. Not errors.
ReplyDeleteLies!
Al Gore air brushed out the little ice age and the medieval warming periods from his graphs in AIT. We wouldn't want people knowing that the earth was two degrees celsius warmer than it is now during the medieval warming period. Somehow man survived without the use of central cooling. Gore left off the little ice age because he wouldn't want to demonstrate that the warming trend he talks about began at the end of an ice age.
He also stated that sea lever would rise by 20 feet by the end of the century. Even the UN IPCC (harldy conservative on this issue) estimates only 4 to 36 inches.
Gore also suggested that the Aral Sea has dried up because of global warming. In actuality it has been drained for the irrigation of cotton crops.
Gore claims that for the first time ever, a significant number of polar bears had drowned. First of all, they can swim around fifty miles. Secondly, the researchers at one of America's most respected think tanks the Competitive Enterprise Institute tracked down the study Gore was quoting and found that only four polar bears had drowned during severe storm conditions.
Furthermore, he quotes a quickly debunked paper suggesting there is a 100% consenus among scientists that athropogenic global warming is real. Here are a few scientists who must have missed the memo:
http://www.hootervillegazette.com/GlobalWarming.html
It is worth noting that a UK Court ruled that AIT contained many errors and should not be shown in public schools without a warning about the errors.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/10/09/court-identifies-eleven-inaccuracies-al-gore-s-inconvenient-truth
I find it interesting that Al Gore talks the talk, but doesn't walk the walk. He jets around the world in his private plane. He rides around in gas guzzling limousines, and has a compound so wasteful of energy that it needs its own power grid. His houseboat more than likely isn't that energy efficient either.
I suppose conserving energy and fighting global warming is for the little people. Let the peasants drive the small dangerous energy efficient cars, I'll drive what I want.
Al Gore was worth about $2 Million Dollars when leaving office and is worth over $100 Million now. He's laughing all the way to the global warming bank. It's a pity some are too gullible to see it. As one of my favorite SNL characters might have said "global warming has been bery bery good to him."
By the way, the flat earthers were the ones who refused to debate. "The debates over, we have a consensus." Sound familiar? If anyone is a flat earther, it's Al Gore.
Everyone who has seen An Inconvenient Truth should view The Great Global Warming Swindle in order to get a more balanced view of the true state of the science on this issue.
You may view it by visiting:
http://www.hootervillegazette.com/Videos.html
It is the first video listed.
Happy Viewing,
Dash RIPROCK III
There's a bullet left in the Hartcliffe Community gun for Gore as well!
ReplyDeleteJohn from Whitchurch makes the common mistake of conflating weather and climate: the former happens from day to day, the latter over centuries and millennia.
ReplyDeleteDash Riprock III has posted the same nonsense elsewhere;
ReplyDeletehttp://greenerblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/debate-with-climate-change-sceptic.html
Somehow, I doubt that he will be responding to Dr Lawson's rebuttal.
Neither the little ice age not the medieval warm period were global phenomenon. They were regional.
ReplyDeleteDash...focusses in on the personality and film of Al Gore much more than the hard evidence. Its the hard evidence that counts.
I'm strngly in favour of scepticism as a philosophy, as I hope is clear in my original post. Its a crucial part of the scientific process. A questioning approach shows that the hard reveals climate change as real, very serious and requiring urgent large scale action.
The text below is a report about the latest science of climate change, from the Telegraph, 15 Feb:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/4630408/AAAS-Global-warming-will-be-worse-than-expected-scientist-warns.html
Professor Chris Field, the author of a landmark report on climate change, claimed future temperatures "will be beyond anything" previously predicted.
Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago, he said greenhouse gases increased far more rapidly than expected between 2000 and 2007.
"We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously in climate policy," he said.
Prof Field said his 2007 report, which predicted temperature rises between 1.98F (1.1C) and 11.52F (6.4C) over the next century, seriously underestimated the scale of the problem.
And he blamed the unexpected increases on the burgeoning economies of India and China which are burning massive amounts of coal for electric power.
The warming planet is likely to dry out tropical forests, making them susceptible to wildfires.
The rising temperatures could also speed up the melting of the permafrost, vastly increasing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, Prof Field warns.
"Without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought," he said.
Prof Field is the director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, Professor of Biology and Professor of Environmental Earth System Science, at Stanford University.