Global Warming ‘Consensus’ Takes a ‘Hit’ — or Not?

I don’t doubt the climate is changing. But like I’ve pointed out in previous topics, I doubt we humans have the affect we’re being told we have. But, in telling people that we’re the sole reason climate is changing, we are getting better at taking care of our planet. I can go with that.
It’s amazing that false information like that gets used, put out, and believed by many. We’re so gullable it’s not funny.

Ignorance is bliss. We have the knowledge and technology to solve both global warming and our energy problems.
Even if Global Warming is not real, our energy problems are.
When you are done slimbering, open your eyes to renewable energy. Dare I say it, nuclear power is also a viable alternative to our current method of power production.
Let’s do it people.

Global warming is happening on Earth, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and other planets as well. The sun has been more active than at anytime in the last 11 thousand years. More activity = more heat which means that the Earth gets a little warmer.

This is nothing new. Humans have a long history of jumping on false bandwagons.

Even poll after poll taken of the British people show they overwhelmingly think man made global warming is being hyped and being used to raise taxes, etc. etc.
This just isn’t working for the liberals. People are waking up and seeing the total political agenda behind it.
Yahooo.

Steve, amen.
And I really love it when so-called environmental celebs tell us how to reduce our carbon footprint while they fly around in private jets.
When THEY start acting like it’s a crisis, then I’LL believe it’s a crisis.

Andrew, you obviously don’t read Drudge. He just links to newsites – all kinds of sites. He links to plenty of global warming hyped stories too. So nice try.
Geeze I wish liberals would get a clue.

Sorry for not proof-reading. Here are my corrected remarks.
When you read some of the dumb comments in this blog disputing incontrovertible facts on human-influenced global warming, it should be no surprise that nothing has, or possibly, will be done about it in time to avert disaster. Rightwingers, such as Drudge, Washington Times, and Fox News, continue to feed the public propaganda that global warming is a hoax because Al Gore and most scientists are progressive liberals. I admit that this issue threatens the Bush Republican agenda.
There is a parellel to facist dictatorships throughout history snuffing out intellectual free thought, which threatens their agenda.

Global warming is what liberals are using to advance their anti capitalistic, liberal agenda (because nothing else has worked)…..and they’re ###### cuz this issue isn’t working either.
Like I said, even the British, who get fed more liberal propaganda than we ever dreamed of aren’t buying it.
People are smarter than liberals want to believe. The sky is falling has never worked for them.

As usual the left thinks the world is coming to an end if we don’t act now. Change the face of the planet now or we’ll all die. They talk about right wing scare tactics. That’s a laugh. Scare tactics are definitley practiced every day in the liberal world. If you disagree your ignorant. They always say ” the debate is over, the evidence proves it”. Liberals hate debate. It’s their way or the highway. That should be reason enough not to trust anything they say. I’m sure their well intentioned, but I still like to hear both sides. Not just dismiss evidence to the contrary.

I don’t know why you people don’t listen to Al Gore and Hollywood. They are the smartest people on the planet. Just ask them. I actually saw one post that tried to support Al Gore’s grossly disproportionate use of energy. I guess people on the left will believe anything their told by Al. Even though he had to lie in his movie. I’m sure someone on hear will tell me he didn’t lie, it’s a right wing conspiracy.

One of the problems with the global warming theory is that the scientists have not proved that it’s man made. Therefore, we must continue to think objectively; all facts are not “incontovertible”. Everything must be looked at using the scientific process regardless of any other influence. Just a few years ago in a Time article had “incontrovertible” facts that the earth was cooling. Lets be reasonable and think rationally.

Global warming is happening…but the ice age also happened. The earth goes thru cycles, cooling and heating. Its natural not man made. Like others posted, the benefits of people believing in this hype is that yes, the planet will look a bit nicer. But honestly look at the earth, the ice didnt melt b/c it stayed cold. Its not hard to know that global warming is an economic scam. Al is touting his believes, but if he truly believed in his own words dont ya think he would be a little more cautious about his own “carbon foot print?” When you believe something as strongly as he seems to that seems obvious that you would follow your own advice. Also i read a statement about leo not taking commercial jets. His agent/publicist said “when your as big of a star as leo you can not always fly commercial” oh hell, if you believed that the world was coming to an end b/c of global warming you would not be flying private jet….jeez, some people can be sooo crazy!

Ken – “Therefore, we must continue to think objectively; all facts are not ‘incontovertible’.” – You’re correct. The two problems I see is that we really don’t have the technology right now to prove 100% that global warming is or is not caused by man. I think all we can do at this stage is realize that there is a risk that it’s manmade and try to mitigate that risk. The other problem is that this entire issue has become so politicized that differing opinions on the facts are being squelched on both sides of the political spectrum.

The disinformation campaigns of the coal and oil lobbyists folks just don’t seem to carry the same weight from when runaway atmospheric CO2 levels were billed as a natural event.
Funny thing is if you hired this group of physicists to terraform a cold inhospitable planet with vast resources of sequestered hydrocarbons they would recommend implementing the industrial practices of 20th century earth as a example of how to warm things up quickly.

I just saw this ad for the first time from a group called “We Can Solve It”; a global warming ad campaign sponsored by former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection with Reverend Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson.
“I am honored that Al Gore asked me to be a part of this campaign urging people to take care of the planet,” Robertson said on the Christian Broadcast Network. Make of it what you will.

Norway created the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to protect agricultural seeds from climate change, plant epidemics, natural disasters or war. It opened in February of this year. Countries from around the world will be able to deposit seeds.
Nobody gets money for a project like this unless they can demonstrate a pretty good reason.

Even in the IPCC’s own conference there was massive division. There were personal attacks, factionalism, and just general immature behavior throughout. This was just in making the report.
These so-called “scientists” did not behave very scientifically at all. Why? Well for one thing most of these people really weren’t really climatologists to begin with. Their backgrounds were in political science, just like that of Al Gore’s and their goals were something very different than contributing to science.
Those who represented other countries held a personal grudge against the United States and desperately wanted something to accuse Americans of. Global warming was a perfect accusation.
It is not a surprise that more and more of these so-called “scientists” jumped off the bandwagon when the average temperature of the earth actually stabilized in the last ten years when the CO2 rate rose. Also when gas prices around the world increased and the issue became more politicaly unpopular, these “scientists” had even more reason to jump off.
Now that there is an election and there is a possibility Obama might lose, the APS is now denying that the “scientists” are jumping off the bandwagon. Well, how do they explain the most recent desertion? That of the head of NOAA? I guess he didn’t REALLY resign. That’s just our imagination.
I guess we HAVE to have an apocolypse of some kind that Americans are responsible for. We have to make sure that each and every American hangs their head in collective shame over SOMETHING. If it weren’t global warming it would be something else.

For one moment, could we please have the Liberals and the Conservatives remove their cranial cavities from their rectums and smell the coffee!
Global Warming is REAL. Humans are not the sole cause but we are part of the problem. It doesn’t matter whether it is natural or man made…, it is still happening.
What we need are intelligent plans to combat the potential problems that will arise from Global Warming and it’s impact on us as a species.
Stop deluding yourselves and pointing fingers at whoever you disagree with. Something needs to be done but let us seek out sensible solutions.
Burying our heads in the sand or pointing at the sky…, isn’t going to solve the problem before it does become a crisis.
It is unfortunate that it is a quirk of human nature that we will avoid anything unpleasant until we can no longer avoid it…, and then we over react to it!

A direct quote, also from the APS statement; “Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the earths climate”

Hey, hey, hey Sheryl Crow, intellectual giant, sez its so, therefore its so.

Great argument, lots of facts. I went to the website and downloaded the PDF. Doesn’t sound much like any of this.

I wish Ned Potter would explain how, if the globe is indeed warming like Al Gore says, we have record breaking cold this last winter in the upper midwest? It was -40 F!!!! Now, if that is too warm, what would Al Gore say is just right? – 50 F, or – 60F? If they cannot tell you what the correct temperature is then they cannot tell you that it is too warm, or too cold, or even just right. Eventually people will wake up to see that this is to separate you from your money and of course democracy.

I don’t care if global warming is real or not, to me it’s about the air quality. The smog is so bad here in Atlanta, GA that we are already seeing increased health problems in our children. It’s also about the economy – let’s get off the oil and into renewables NOW for the health of our children and our economy. It’s just common sense!!

Yes. Anthropocentric Climate Change. Do not doubt it. Do not doubt the power of human industry to affect the weather on Mars and Saturn. DO NOT DOUBT.
Those Martians should stop driving all their SUVs and get their climate under control, then we can see how we’re supposed to be doing it. Only Al Gore understands!

Faux News and a lone ranger in a newsletter editorial … I’m definitely not surprised.
Strongly recommended reading: Censoring Science by Mark Bowen, available at your local public library or favorite bookstore. I just finished well-researched, 2008 book, which provides the history and political and financial rationales behind the denial of solid, repeatable (and repeated) science.
If you finish that and really want to put the mess in context, then read Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston, also 2008.
Answer for David, re: the record-breaking cold: Global climate change shifts the odds, not every specific detail. Imagine you have a pair of dice, each one painted red on two sides (hotter than usual), white on two sides (normal temperatures), and blue on two sides (colder than usual). That’s the normal “weather dice” without global warming. With global warming, imagine that your dice have been repainted so they’re red on four sides, white on one, and blue on the last. You’re still going to have occasional “colder than usual” weather, sometimes even record-setting low temps like you experienced, but the overall statistical pattern has still shifted. The dice are loaded, and overall, things are going to get hotter.(That’s not my example, btw; I should give credit to NASA scientist James Hansen for the image.)

To clarify:
1. Scientists are not arguing about whether or not global climate change is happening. We agree that it is happening.
2. Scientists are not arguing about whether or not humans have an effect on the environment. We agree that human activity is having an effect.
3. Scientists are not arguing about whether global climate change changes naturally. We know that the earth’s climate changes naturally (e.g. ice ages).
4. The argument that scientists ARE having is about the magnitude of our influence of climate change. Some scientists are of the opinion that humans account for a great deal of the climate change whereas other scientists say that the amount of change due to human activity is insignificant when compared with natural changes in our climate.

I have lived in Louisiana for 48years,we drill and refine oil.The weather has not changed?It is the same as the day i was born.Did ower global warming drift away?Could it be a yankee or left coast disease?

To those talking about magnetic field reversals…
During the process, there may be a time of – a few thousand years? – with multiple magnetic poles reaching the surface. Aurora may be seen near the equator. Navigation will be affected…
But it won’t send Chicago to the equator. Two things could do that: continental drift, and true polar wander. Niether of which is triggered by magnetic field reversals.
Why 2012? Planetary alignments? Mayan Calender? A magnetic field reversal doesn’t get triggered in a single year; it’s part of the ongoing process of chaotic convection in the outer core of the Earth. The butterfly effect surely operates there, but the nature of the butterfly effect is that it’s not obviously detectable.
Between magnetic reversals, there could be other anomalies that come and go; they wouldn’t necessarily signal an imminent reversal.

miggs
I agree completely. That is the right reason for going green. It’s algorism that turns everybody off because it’s about tax and control. Then there is the activist factor that most of us simply refuse to have anything to do with.

Patrick
There is a christian sect (or two) that expect the “rapture” in 2012, thats when most of us go to hell because we refused to follow their cult.

How can you go green when solar panel set ups for your home cost 20,000dollars.Insurance companys wont insure them in hurricane zones like the gulf coast!The batteries wont last 10years.It will never be cost effective!

just skimmed briefly the Monckton paper. Didn’t see anything convincing. Will look through it more closely later. Pardon the brevity.

(cont. from “Tropical Storm Bertha”)
Quietman-
“Patrick
Yes, of course, because of rain and resistance to flow depending on porosity, but it is always trying to seek its own level and that is always the lowest level that it can possibly attain.”
Yes, my point being that the volume available in sea level increases is probably not that much greater than the sea level change * area of the ocean. Am I wrong?
I can see that increasing sea level would affect the water table slope, first and most obviously in coastal areas. This would slow the water flow and cause a back up of groundwater, such that the water table could rise, even where it is a little above sea level. One could imagine this propagating as a signal in groundwater flow, eventually penetrating deeper into the continents.
But, of course, this would be interupted by impermeable layers of rock.
And river water volume flow rate wouldn’t respond the same way and would continue to drain groundwater in places… so this would limit the effect going farther inland especially, I would think.
(The relative distribution of rainfall over land of various elevations and over ocean would have an effect, of course, though I’m not saying this would necessarily change much in the global average or have much effect on sea level.)
I haven’t really studied groundwater physics in detail so maybe I’m wrong.
But one other thing of course is that groundwater volume is limited by pore spaces…

Quietman-
Remember the bit about Roy Spencer and ‘internal radiative forcing’:
I had thought I read something about that but didn’t find it until just now:
RealClimate:
“How to cook a graph in three easy lessons”
Here’s a brief excerpt which covers more or less some of what I had already said:
“The only sense that can be made of Spencer’s notion is that there is some natural variability in the climate system, which in turn causes a natural variability to some extent in the radiation budget of the planet, which in turn may modify the natural variability. Is this news? Is this shocking? Is this something that should lead us to doubt model predictions of global warming? No — it is just part and parcel of the same old question of whether the pattern of the 20th and 21st century can be ascribed to natural variability without the effect of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The IPCC, among others, nailed that, and nobody has demonstrated that natural variability can do the trick. Roy thinks he has, but as we shall soon see, it’s all a matter of how you run your ingredients through the food processor.”
But there’s more, as suggested by that last part – it gets interesting.

Some pertinent points about celestial influences:
height of equilibrium tidal bulge raised on sun by planet, as fraction of that raised on earth by moon, [ignoring out-of-equilibrium complexities of crust,ocean reaction (no Bay of Fundy on sun?)]
Jupiter: 0.00133
Venus: 0.00127
Earth: 0.000590
Mercury: 0.000563
Saturn: 0.0000647
Mars: 0.0000179
Uranus: 0.00000122
Neptune: 0.000000375
Pluto: 0.0000000000191
If the sun is in free fall, shouldn’t its magnetic field also be in nearly the same free fall (at least in the immediate vicinity)? (In other words, I still don’t see how the ‘solar jerk’ would stir internal motions within the sun.)
Of course, the sun’s motion could affect Earth-sun distance, but the Earth doesn’t revolve around the barycenter – the displacement of the barycenter of the sun is mainly accomplished by the outer planets (Jupiter having the biggest effect of course), while the Earth’s acceleration is ‘disproportionately’ toward the mass of the sun (because gravity has an inverse square law, whereas center of mass has no square).

Re: “If the sun is in free fall”
Why would we assume that? The sun is in an orbit within a spiral galaxy and affected by the other stars within the Galaxy. When the sun passes through the Galactic plane it tends to knock things around beyond Pluto. That isn’t true free fall, now is it?

“Nothing has been demonstrated that can do the trick thus far, thats why its such a big argument. So far everything is hypothetical.”
Not so. LW forcing (greenhouse effect) – cooling affect of aerosols – sporadic volcanic cooling event + solar SW forcing accounts for it fairly well.
About the argument regarding fact vs hypothetical, data vs theory:
I probably hadn’t mentioned that the LW spectrum emitted to space can be observed by satellites. This includes a chunk taken out by CO2 centered at 15 microns. PS some people may come back at that and say, sure, but CO2 is saturated, adding more has no effect. Two points on that – first, through a small enough layer it will still have an effect at any wavelength, though that becomes less significant as there will be smaller temperature variations in thinner layers at any given height. With respect to forcing at the tropopause, indeed I think CO2 is saturated from about 14 to 16 microns. But second, additional CO2 has important effects outside that central range. Generally, within some limits, CO2 forcing is logarithmically proportional to concentration because a doubling causes an increase in the width of a band of CO2 absorption at or greater than any given threshold value, while tending to maintain a size of wavelength interval on the wings of the CO2 band with moderate opacity. (At very low concentrations, this does not hold because the central portion of the band has not become ‘saturated’ (at that point, I think LW forcing is closer to a linear proportion to concentration); at very high concentrations, some additional weaker bands become important, although on Earth those bands might be swamped by water vapor – not sure, because I don’t remember where those bands are. But if you check out Ray Pierrehumbert’ book: “Principles of Planetary Climate” – that’s in there.) There is some overlap with water vapor, but that can be accounted for. Water vapor is concentrated near the surface, so, visualy, CO2 radiative effects may sit on top of water vapor within the troposphere to some extent … you see (in the LW wavelengths) more H2O looking up from the ground than you do looking down from space because of other gases. And yes, there’s clouds, and … refer back to what I wrote at “Tropical Storm Bertha” – there is some uncertainty but it is not infinite, these things can be calculated).
I’m less clear on whether the reduced LW emission to space due to additions of greenhouse gases has been directly measured – it may have been. But the physics predicts it happens, with the same confidence that I would have that if I release a stone it falls at about 9.81 m/s2 acceleration downward, give or take a few .01 m/s2 depending on latitude and elevation, etc. (It’s the feedbacks that are less certain. Which is the case for any forcing, by CO2, CH4, etc, Milankovitch cycles, solar TSI, etc. Even more so for other solar effects since less is understood about that except that it might be quite small, but that’s still a point I haven’t quite gotten to.)
I’m not saying that anthropogenic effects or even that plus solar TSI plus volcanic eruptions account for all recent changes – there is internal variability, etc, but it really seems to me that these forcings do account for the increase global average surface temperature, and the warming itself is expected to cause some of the other things we’ve seen (sea ice loss, and I think a widening of the Hadley cell may have been detected) and one can expect changes in circulation patterns and in the spatial and temporal (seasonal and smaller scale) distributions of precipitation.
“On RealClimate: I won’t go there.”
I wouldn’t ask you to participate if you don’t want to, but if you look at what was written… and if you think it’s wrong, feel free to say so – maybe you could look deeper into it for us.
I have the same feelings about Monckton (and some others) and to save time I typically wouldn’t bother with what he writes but this time around I slogged through it (PS did you catch my critique of it before it disappeared?). And the RealClimate stuff is an easier read.
“Re: “If the sun is in free fall”
Why would we assume that? The sun is in an orbit within a spiral galaxy and affected by the other stars within the Galaxy. When the sun passes through the Galactic plane it tends to knock things around beyond Pluto. That isn’t true free fall, now is it?”
Yes it is free fall to the extent that it’s all due to gravitational interactions, and not to electromagnetism (which would include radiation pressue and direct contact (in the case of the sun, it would pick up momentum from all the little dust it may collect, and the occasional comet that comes too close, etc.) as well as the more obvious large scale magnetic fields).
If you’re momement is only due to gravitational acceleration, you feel weightless. Standing on the ground, you feel your weight because you aren’t accelerating downward at ~ 9.81 m/s2. Tidal forces result from variation of gravitational acceleration across a body that moves as a unit – these exist and that’s why I focused on them abit, and may get back to that point.
As I mentioned, other forces do exist even on interplanetary and interstellar scales, but I think they have very much smaller effects on large massive bodies with overall near neutral charge, even if they are generating a magnetic field or have electrical conductivity such that they will interact with it. Ions will be much more affected by magnetic fields, having large charges relative to their masses, and tiny dust grains will be much more affected by radiation pressure. The Earth’s liquid elecrically-conductive core and the Sun’s electrically-conductive plasma will of course interact strongly with each of their own magnetic fields (which they each continue to generate with the energy and reorganization of their chaotic convection shaped by the rotation of the whole body), which I believe is quite a bit stronger within these bodies than what actually makes it to the Earth’s surface or some distance out from the sun (less sure about the sun, but there is a significant toroidal field within the core that is not much felt at the surface – in fact, I think having a toroidal component is necessary for maintaining the poloidal magnetic field). I think the field strength of a magnetic dipole (as with an electric dipole, and there are no magnetic monopoles, of course) falls away with the inverse cube of distance.
Now, of course, because of the solar wind, planetary magnetic fields are distorted and have long tails and a defined boundary (not that the field is actually isolated, but the field lines curve around before reaching that point – locally the field is the linear sum of all fields generated by electrical currents and I think it follows an inverse square law from each little bit of those currents (a loop of current cancels itself at a distance, hence the inverse cube proportionality of a dipole field, right?) – although electromagnetic waves can of course be reflected by electrical conductors (and/or absorbed, etc.))
And the solar wind strongly affects the sun’s magnetic field, because the electrons and ions form a sort of conductor whose movement across field lines would have to generate a current and the current would tend to keep the field lines moving with the charged particles in the absense of electrical resistance. Gravitational deceleration is independent of this so it’s not a source of electrical resistance.
But in the immediate vicinity of the sun, changes in the gravitional field the solar wind experiences should be nearly the same as that experienced by the sun itself (the difference being a tidal force on the wind relative to the sun).
Aside from the effect of the wind, if we just consider the sun as being like a regular magnet – if the magnet is being forced through it’s own magnetic field as a whole (as opposed to whatever internal motions are involved), there should be some resistance in the motion – the magnet would appear to have more inertia than it’s mass suggests. Not that this would be observable for a hand-held magnet, but I don’t think it’s even true in theory. Granted, magnetic fields have energy and E=mc2, but I don’t think this energy is actually in addition to the energy of the source of the field – except where electromagnetic waves are radiated, in which case the energy is lost from the source of the field and is transported. Maybe I’m wrong then about the mass of the field, but if the field had mass, it would also tend to be in free fall except where pushed by the solar wind, but the solar wind has mass and … etc.
Then there’s relativity. Maybe I’m wrong about the implication here, but if I’m free falling, and I’m holding a magnet and it’s free falling, I expect the static magnetic field around the magnet to also be in the same free fall. Could simply accerating a magnet cause it’s own field to become variable in time relative to the magnet? This is a seperate issue from moving through another field – and sure, the sun is moving through the fields generated by other stars and the galaxy, but how strong is that? Not much.
So I really only see the sun being forced through it’s own field if waves associated with the sun’s motion are reflected back towards the sun, in which case it would instantaneously feel like it’s moving through a component of magnetic field coming from elsewhere.
There is so much energy and mass, and the magnetic field so intense, involved in the chaotic convection of the Earth’s core and even so so so so much more so in the sun that I don’t see magnetic reversals on Earth (not something asserted by Fairbridge that I know of but I’ve heard it elsewhere) or other variations on the sun or elsewhere as being largely externally controlled – I think it’s largely internal variability (yes, with butterfly effects, but in that way the effects of planetary alignments would be very real but also undetectable and not assignable as a cause of some regular cycle). But if there are physical arguments and math that show otherwise I’d be glad to see it.