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Weather Channel founder wants to sue Al Gore
Johnny C:
Joe, for the record, I haven't suggested anything else about Leonidas besides the idea that on this particular issue he's talking out of his ass. I'm not saying he's insane, I'm not calling him a heretic, but I am suggesting that his opinion is severely lacking in some information. In short, he's talking out of his ass. It's not even necessarily his fault that he's talking out of his ass, he might just not know all this stuff.
Oh boy I love internet arguments that turn into giant text blocks! I'll ellipsis your argument, Leonidas, because I don't want this to be unreadable.
--- Quote from: Leonidas on 13 Aug 2008, 07:41 ---Right, so what are we talking here ... we have no power at all to stop the Earth doing what it does.
--- End quote ---
The Earth has spent a hundred years, and in fact a hundred years out of the previous four hundred, warming up fairly drastically. There are other graphs dating back to the tenth century that show the exact same trend. Currently we are experiencing global warming. This is a symptom of climate change. Calling it "global warming" simplifies it down to one smaller component of a larger theory.
As Dennis said, nobody defending the notion of climate change, greenhouse gases and the like has suggested that the Earth does not experience periods of warming and cooling. What we (and, y'know, a good number of scientists) are suggesting is that human intervention especially over the last hundred years has significantly magnified the intensity of that warming and cooling, that the changes we are going to see will be especially drastic and sudden as opposed to relatively gradual.
--- Quote from: Leonidas on 13 Aug 2008, 07:41 ---30 years is absolutely nothing in the lifetime of the Earth, so how come the sudden drastic change in policy?
--- End quote ---
Science has progressed in thirty years. Better computers and more information gathered means we're able to make more accurate predictions based on more certain data. For example, here is a chart predicting the temperature of the Earth without human-created climate change factors (rendered in blue), predicting the temperature of the Earth with those factors (rendered in red) and illustrating the actual recorded temperature (the black line).
Incidentally, you'll notice that the temperature has also climbed fairly drastically over the last thirty years, probably causing scientists to go, "Hm, let's re-examine the evidence."
--- Quote from: Leonidas on 13 Aug 2008, 07:41 ---You suit yourself.
--- End quote ---
Thanks, I will. You're talking out of your ass.
--- Quote from: Leonidas on 13 Aug 2008, 07:41 ---What about the rising temperature of Mars? Is that our fault also????
--- End quote ---
Total red herring as well. Mars is a different planet with a different atmosphere and no long-term historical data to compare its current period of climate change, and besides that the climate change is restricted to one hemisphere that is experiencing massive dust storms at the moment. Change in that one area isn't necessarily indicative of change on the whole planet. Long story short, we only have the data to look at Earth's climate, and Earth's climate is seeing man-made change.
Vendetagainst:
I think what we'd really like to know is what your brother thinks of all this, Johnny.
But seriously, I agree with everybody who says that we should start making changes regardless of what we think about global warming. Isn't the basic definition of a good person the willingness of somebody to act in an ethically responsible manner regardless of need or consequence?
Chesire Cat:
Ozy just won a lifetime supply I red hot lovin'
Also, I posted in the Kenny mere seconds before reading this topic.
RallyMonkey:
--- Quote ---and that the increase in carbon dioxide is man-made because carbon from different sources has a different isotope profile.
--- End quote ---
Could you link to, or reference where you got this information? I'm not trying to say it's incorrect or anything, just interested on reading up on this.
Leonidas:
Well Johhny C, I can also find graphs to "prove" whatever argument I wish to make. In fact for your one graph I'll raise you you Five.
This first graph is from the Hadley Centre of Britain’s Meteorological Office and one of the four bodies measuring world temperature.
As you see, since 1998—an unusually warm year thanks to the “El Nino” pool of warmer water in the Pacific—the world’s temperature dropped back to a steady plateau, followed by a few years of cooling.
The second graph confirms both the halt in warming, and then cooling. It’s from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, which monitors the troposphere—from the ground to 12km altitude.
Only one of the four bodies measuring world temperature, in fact, claims temperatures are still rising. That’s NASA, whose program is run by Dr James Hansen, Al Gore’s global warming adviser and a controversial catastrophist whose team’s reworking of data has been heavily criticised for exaggerating any heating.
This third graph seems to confirm a cooling. Despite media scare stories about a melting North Pole; sea ice has grown so fast in the southern hemisphere there is now more ice in the world than is usual, says the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Graph four shows us that global warming hasn't in fact given us more cyclones - or more tornadoes or hurricanes anywhere. Nor is their proof that cyclones are getting worse, according to the American Meteorological Society.
And, please, can we drop that old fiction that the world was never warmer? It’s a false claim made popular by a 2001 report of the IPCC, the United Nations’ climate group, which ran a graph, shaped like a hockey stick, claiming there was no warming for millennia until humans last century gassed up their world.
In fact, that “hockey stick” is now discredited, and last year Dr Craig Loehle, of the US National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, argued that using tree rings to work out past temperatures was clearly unreliable.
He instead produced a graph - Number 5 - of past temperatures using all other accepted proxies:
As this graph shows, and as I have already said, the world has gone though pervious periods where tempertaures rose. Where grapes were grown in the British Isles and farmers in Greenland grew crops on land now covered in snow.
Jonny C, you seem to place so much emphasis on what apparent scientists have had to say on the subject. So take into consideration the fact that 31,000 scientists, including world figures such as physicist Prof Freeman Dyson, atmospheric physicist Prof Richard Lindzen and climate scientist Prof Fred Singer, issued a joint letter in May 2008 warning governments not to jump on board the global warming bandwagon.
“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.”
That’s why Ivar Glaever, who won a Nobel Prize for Physics, in June 2008 declared “I am a sceptic”, because “we don’t really know what the actual effect on the climate is”.
And it’s why the American Physical Society this month said “there is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAu68OsFggw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5weG9IllCpo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ictpPrle3EQ&feature=related
You might not take Penn and Teller to be the most scientific, and as everything and everyone there is a bias. Still, it's amusing.
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