While forrests are being protected from being harvested and being bought up. Al Gore is making a fortune on "cool the earth" priojects. Once the global warming fad has cooled ;~) no pun intended, we will once again be coolong off and those forrests will once again be sold off and harvested for fire wood.
I'm gonna re-sharpen my Forrest. Tom
that it's a propaganda piece not to be taken credibly.
So if I say the moon is made of green cheese ...
wait a min. everybody knows the moon is made of swiss cheese! can't you see the holes? :-]
At least it isn't Limburger...pheeeweee
Then you'd be a fool, since we've been there and know that it is not.
On the other hand, the current hysteria around anthropgenic climate change (of which there is little doubt that man changes climate, at least locally; consider the Urban Heat Island effect, for instance; or land-use changes (why don't tornadoes strike big cities, as a rule?)) is based on some pretty iffy science.
First, the temperature record.
Historical temperatures are both direct and derived. We have direct temperature measurements for various parts of of the world for up to the last 150 years. The longest sequence of such measurements are available in the United States and Europe.
Temperatures before 1850 or so (and up to 1960 in many cases) are derived from various measurements believed to be related to temperature in some way. These are called proxies and include the width of tree rings (the trees are selected such that they are believed to be growth limited by temperature, not precipitation or other external factors; for example long-lived trees at the alpine tree-line. A set of bristlecone pines in the White Mountains in central California were used in several temperature reconstructions as representative of global temperatures in the last millenium.
Other proxies include speleotherms in caves, boreholes and the deuterium oxygen isotope ratios in various ice cores from the ice caps and greenland.
Tree rings have been pretty much discredited as a temperature proxy by the National Academy of Sciences (DAGS: Wegman/NAS report). Yet they were the primary constituent of the so-called "Hockey Stick" graph used by advocates of catastrophic climate change due to man to indicate that the world is heading for a catastrophy. In addition, the statistical methods used to produce a temperature signal from the tree rings and other proxies used in the hockey stick produce the same graph from random data (red noise). See McIntyre/McKitrick.
As for the last 150 years of surface temperature data, it should be no surprise that over that time period, the location at which temperature is measured changes, the time of day of the measurement (and the number of measurements per day) changed, and in many cases the sites themselves while once rural, became urban. This requires that the data be manipulated (or adjusted) to accomodate these differences. The algorithms used by Dr. Hanson at GISS seem to underestimate past temperatures, and boot current temperatures. Dr. Peilke Sr. has a peer-reviewed paper out illustrating the problems with the current surface temperature record as well as pointing out the uncertainties in both the data, as well as the algorithms used to fill in missing data and derived a global average temperature.
The error bars, while not generally discussed along with the temperature anomolies, dwarf the 20th century anomoly of about 1 degree C.
Of course, the land surface is a small fraction of the planets surface, so other means are used to derive a temperature signal for the 7/8ths of the planet covered by oceans. The main measurement used is the Sea Surface Temperature (SST). SST temperatures are also available for about the last 100 years in the main shipping routes. This data was measured several times a day by ships captains and logged in ships logs. This log data has been collected and massaged to attempt to derive a historical temperature trend for the oceans surface. However, over the century the methods used to measure the SST changed (from dropping a bucket over the side and hauling it up, to measuring intake cooling water for modern ocean liners). The depth at which the measurements changed along with the method, the tools changed from mercury thermometers to thermocouples. All of these changes require that the data be massaged (i.e. adjusted). This increases the error bars on the measurements here as well.
An addition source of late 20th century upticks in the surface temperature record are due to the Urban Heat Island effect; which is the effect of a large city on the temperatures within that city. There are researchers on both sides of the issue of whether the UHI has a significant effect or not on the temperature trends; Some who discount UHI have compared the temperatures in old, large cities like London and Paris and extrapolated that that also applies to cites that have significantly increased in the 20th century (atlanta, LA, BA, etc).
There is also the so called 'microsite' biases. Several of the US sites used for the surface temperature record have had installed, in the last decade, air conditioners, asphalt parking lots and generators in the direct vicinity of the temperature sensor (in some cases, the exhaust from the AC unit is three feet from the sensor and obviously biases the summertime temperatures higher).
Other measurements in the last thirty years or so have been made by a series of satellites with different instruments designed to measure the temperature of the air at various altitudes (again by measuring some effect and deriving a temperature from that effect). Where multiple satellites were in orbit simultaneously, the data can be adjusted with the known bias of the various instruments, but in the case where there is no overlap between the measurements by different instruments on different satellites, the adjustment required to match the data is more complicated. There are at least two sets of satellite data being used today (UAH and RSS), each of which uses a different algorithm to adjust the data to produce a temperature trend. Again, the error bars are are relatively large.
There is also relatively little data from the southern hemisphere yet.
Then there is CO2, which is a trace gas. The direct doubling of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would result in perhaps a degree C of heating. This is accepted. However, there is a school of thought (of which Dr. Hanson is a prime proponent) which believes that this doubling will lead to feedback effects from other greenhouse gasses, particularly water vapor (which is the main greenhouse gas by far). I.e. the belief is that adding CO2 will cause a cascading increase in the water vapor component of the atmosphere leading to catestrophic warming.
The only evidence for this is from computer models. Note that not one of the dozen or so global climate models (GCM) correctly hindcast nor forcast the actual weather. The models don't include clouds or water vapor. Yet, the modellers claim that while no single model is accurate, the models, when averaged together accurately predict the future.
Given the above, I see no reason to rush through any massive economic changes to adapt (assuming that a warming planet is a _bad_ thing, which is another iffy proposition).
I'd point out the following, both peer reviewed climate scientists, who present a more nuanced view of climate change:
Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr., U of Colorado
You *do* know that there _is_ scientific evidence to support that statement, don't you?
Back in the 1980s, one of the things NASA did was a seismology experiment -- crashing a ship into the moon, and taking seismograph readings from several of the Apollo landing sites.
Analysis of the shock patterns transmitted through the body of the moon gave a 'best match' against a particular variety of un-cured (i.e., 'green') cheese.
I'm *NOT* making this up.
Well, shit....why didn't he say so at the beginning?
credible some time in the late 80's.
... snip of explanation of above
Another bit of evidence of scientific malfeasance and data manipulation to give the results desired by the warmists:
Difference between citing this and Politically Correct American? This has real data and describes methodology, it doesn't imperiously declare "the science is settled" and those who disagree are luddites spouting nonsense.
To quote paraphrase the high priest of AGW, "They LIED to US! They played on our FEARS!"
Translation: They published articles that disagreed with one or more of your cherished beliefs :-).
On Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:25:16 GMT, the infamous Bob Martin scrawled the following:
We know for a fact that you're an AGWK alarmist.
-- To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. -- Robert Louis Stevenson
Uh, no. Human-caused global warming is a "belief" in the religious sense. It cannot be proved, demonstrated, or explained.
If it could be proved, i.e., bolstered by sufficient evidence to convince virtually all rational minds of the high probability of it's truth, there would be no controversy.
It obviously cannot be demonstrated as long as only ONE contrary example exists. The earth, moreover, is not like an oven that one can simply turn off.
It cannot be explained to the degree that the hypothesis agrees with the historical record or even with computer models.
A better description is that anti-AGW is an anti-belief. That is, most are not going to believe it until it can be proved. Mere assertion, melting glaciers, rising sea-levels, etc. are not sufficient in that completely plausible alternative explanations are equally likely. Coincidence, for one.
Umm, no. I recognize that there are folks out there with whom I disagree and who may come to different conclusions based upon various viewpoints they may hold. That, however, is not science. That belongs more in the fuzzy world of historical interpretation (which still should at least be predicated upon historical facts vs. historical revisionism, but that's a different discussion) or sociology or some of the other more "fuzzy" disciplines.
At some point, Scientific American stopped doing science -- that pursuit in which a hypothesis is put forth, experiments formulated and conducted, data taken and examined, hypothesis confirmed, refined or rejected, and results, along with methodology data documented and presented. Instead, they drifted more and more into Politically Correct American in which hypothesis was put forth, cherry-picked statistics manipulated, graphs generated and presented, and current politically acceptable conclusion derived and documented by currently popular experts using vigorous assertion as proof.
That's the point at which I became a former subscriber. The irony was that they had some very interesting columns prior to that describing what they termed "math abuse" -- the manipulation of statistics and selective presentation (e.g. selective use of scale, smoothing, etc) to guide a preferred interpretation of the data.
Yep. Perusal of the Table of Contents over the past five years or so show a growing interest in "political" goals: Climate Change (nee "Global Warming"), green technology, fish kills, drought mitigation, population control, endangered species, etc.
AFAIK, they're still peer-reviewed articles. So there must be a lot of people in on the conspiracy :-).
And those are all, according to you, political goals? I thought they had to do with maintaining livable conditions on the planet. SciAm would be remiss if they didn't address them.
And if (a very big if) we could achieve population control, that would have a big impact on the others.
I once saw studies putting the sustained carrying capacity of the US at anywhere from 90 to 125 million people. Even if we double the most optimistic estimate we're well over it.
The US population has been doubling about every 60 years, which is also roughly the world average. So it isn't just a 3rd world problem.
The only thing "political" about these issues is that most folks put their personal well being above that of their descendants. Normal, but sometimes disheartening.
Not to worry ... there will be plenty of room in all those 4200sf McMansions occupied by two ... assuming they don't fall down first.
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