Friday, July 25, 2008

The Global Warming Sleight of Hand

From greenhouse scientist Dr. David Evans, consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005, about global warming:

We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.
But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"


1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed), but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980).

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

None of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.

So far that debate has just consisted of a simple sleight of hand: show evidence of global warming, and while the audience is stunned at the implications, simply assert that it is due to carbon emissions.

In the minds of the audience, the evidence that global warming has occurred becomes conflated with the alleged cause, and the audience hasn't noticed that the cause was merely asserted, not proved.

HT: Ben Cunningham

MP: Dr. Evans joins this long list of skeptical scientists who are questioning the global warming hysteria.

11 Comments:

At 7/25/2008 2:50 PM, Blogger KauaiMark said...

Follow the money...

I fully expect that the term "Global Warming" will be supplanted by "Global Climate Change" so they can CYA both ways.

It's a global fad that will follow it's course until all the money is spent and gone.

We should be pumping all the oil as fast as we can while someone is willing to pay for it, instead of later when we're all traveling the globe powered by nothing but photons.

Then oil will go back to being just a pollutant that will require more money to get rid of.

 
At 7/25/2008 3:20 PM, Blogger juandos said...

"instead of later when we're all traveling the globe powered by nothing but photons"...

Star Trek transporter anyone?...:-)

Well until our own Constitutionally questionable EPA stops crap like this: Vote for the Winner of the Rachel Carson Sense of Wonder Contest we are going to continue having problems...

I can't help but wonder if this alledged wonder the EPA is pushing is due to the 3rd world genocide wrought by Carson's brain dead apostles?

 
At 7/25/2008 4:02 PM, Blogger Matt S said...

I didn't know meteorologists at TV stations counted as scientists. They're never completely accurate until the moment that the weather actually happens, and then accuweather is off by 3 degrees compared to the weather channel.com.

The way I look at it is this: sit in front of an automobile exhaust pipe all day, or perhaps stand atop a factory smokestack. At the end of the day, do you think your body's gonna feel just peachy? What about very sensitive ecosystems? Do you think a few ppm of mercury and CO2 and whatever else is just going to pass through without harm?

and to kauaimark: follow the money, exactly. Which oil company was it again that offered 10,000 dollars to anyone who could disprove global warming?


Look, I don't think anyone should be able to deny the fact that human civilization has an adverse effect on the environment. To what extent is debatable and what we should do about it debatable, but don't look me in the eye and tell me that 6 billion people on a planet our size with our level of consumption and emissions aren't seriously messing with the environment.

 
At 7/25/2008 4:24 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Matt,

Those TV meteorologists, who are degreed scientists, are dependent upon computer models for their predictions, which you obviously do not put much faith in. These predictions are for 1 - 7 days into the future. Why do you think that the AGW "climate scientists" can predict with great accuracy decades into the future by using computer models? If I could look you in the eye, I would tell you that there is absolutely nothing unique about current CO2 levels or temperature when compared to human or geologic history. C02 levels have been several times higher than they are now, even before humans inhabited the earth.

 
At 7/25/2008 4:27 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Matt s,

Are you a smoke stack? When you exhale CO2 do you believe that you are destroying the environment along with every other living, breathing entity on this planet?

When a forest burns, or organic matter disintegrates, CO2 is released. Even living trees release CO2 at night through transpiration although absorption of CO2 during the day through photosynthesis is greater than CO2 released at night.

In short, CO2 is a very common, non-toxic, simple molecule. You may as well pass a law against water.

What is apparent from the length of the list is that the debate is not over and the skeptics are not just a handful of scientists.

Since 90% of the world's oil resources are controlled by government entities, the idea that private oil companies are behind any objections to the carbon theory of global warming seem ludicrous in the extreme.

 
At 7/25/2008 5:00 PM, Blogger juandos said...

Oh dear the sky is falling! The sky is falling says chicken little...

matt s says: "I didn't know meteorologists at TV stations counted as scientists"...

Hmmm, ever take any course in meteorology matt s?

If so your grasp of calculus and basic physics needs to be pretty good...

"but don't look me in the eye and tell me that 6 billion people on a planet our size with our level of consumption and emissions aren't seriously messing with the environment"...

I will in a heart beat matt s...

Actually matt s, I'm sure you are right to some small degree relatively speaking...

Ever heard of Mt. Pinatubo?

How about Tambora?

"Since 90% of the world's oil resources are controlled by government entities, the idea that private oil companies are behind any objections to the carbon theory of global warming seem ludicrous in the extreme"...

Well said qt!

 
At 7/26/2008 3:46 AM, Blogger OBloodyHell said...

> What about very sensitive ecosystems?

1) They ain't so sensitive. Less technical summary for the politicos here.

2) "Follow the money..." Yes, by ALL MEANS -- do exactly THAT -- but do it for BOTH SIDES.

Not just the anti-green crowd.

There's one HELL of a lot of monies -- support from Green organizations, and from Green-driven national governments -- to pervert the pro-GW "science", too.

And if there WERE any actual validity to the pro-GW crowd, they would not be attempting to subvert the debate by attaching CRAP TAGS ("denier", "criminal", etc. -- all with secondary, underlying meanings to discredit by ad hominem means) to people who disagree with the religious assertion that is "Global Climate Change". The fact that they are attempting to change the term *alone* should be setting up red flags in the mind of ANY rational person as to the validity of what they claim, most especially about it being "settled". I know tap dancing when I see it, and that's some Fred-Astaire-grade tapping going on.

3) These people want to "manage a climate"? Humans can't even handle managing the wildlife in Yellowstone National Park:
Complexity Theory and Environmental Management.

4) "I don't think anyone should be able to deny the fact that human civilization has an adverse effect on the environment."

Short of actually having a nuclear war, you're an idiot, if you think we can inadvertently change the environment of the entire globe one whit, short of a concerted effort to deliberately screw things up.

Local disruptions, yes, but world-wide? That's ignorance and hubris wrapped up in a nutball's convictions.

The amount of CO2 in one major volcanic eruption puts human output to shame -- and major eruptions happen all the time. Further, the whole CO2==greenhouse==major-force-in-climate claim is based on a completely unproven assertion over a century old, and which is getting challenged more and more with each passing day -- both by historical evidence (CO2 lagging BEHIND warm-proxies by centuries) and also by numerous measurements which show it is not only not the most significant affector of global temperatures by a long shot, even if it DID have a noteworthy affect, it also then triggers other feedback mechanisms (increased cloud cover, more vegetation) which automatically counter it.

Cripes -- even a series of H-Bombs didn't wipe out the corals at Bikini. 50 years later, and they are teeming with life. Changed? Yes. But destroyed irreparably? Hardly.

Not only is this planet bigger than you imagine, it's bigger than you CAN imagine.

Tell me -- you can watch this film and not grasp just how assininely, laughably incompetent the "science" in it is, can't you? You think this film also has the smallest iota of "scientific merit", right?

Humans may, in five hundred years, be capable of doing something as massive as actual Terraforming -- but right now it's nothing but a complete pipe dream.

Even our theoretical ability to destroy this planet with all the weapons at our disposal is a low-grade chance.

 
At 7/26/2008 9:22 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

In terms of changing terminology, what about "rising sea levels" which have now morphed to "storm surge".

Either sea levels are going to rise by 160 ft, 40 ft., 20 ft, or 17 inches. Which is it?

Rising sea levels can only be produced by ice which is currently on land ie. glaciers. The polar ice cap and Antartica are largely ice over water (ie. most of the ice is under the water like an icecube in your drink; the glass does not overflow when the ice melts). How likely is it that all of the ice over land will melt and how likely is it that oceans which 71% of the surface of the earth's surface would even notice?

Someone has been telling porkies.

 
At 7/28/2008 7:40 AM, Blogger fpprof said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

 
At 7/28/2008 8:06 AM, Blogger fpprof said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

 
At 7/29/2008 6:27 AM, Blogger OBloodyHell said...

> The polar ice cap and Antartica are largely ice over water

qt, you are correct about the Arctic, but not about the Antarctic. There is a land mass under there, and it is certainly well above sea level.

However, the key thing to realize is that this is another area they've been lying to you about, anyway --

1) When they talk about "substantial melting", they always are talking about melting on the Antarctic Peninsula, which comprises ca. 20% of the surface area of the Antarctic, and is the part which extends substantially out away from the main body.

2) The rest, ca. 80%, in fact, is deepening in ice cover, and has shown an overall steady decrease in temperatures throughout the "global warming" of the 80s and 90s.

If the Antarctic ice cap melted, it would be significant, for sure. The wiki article on it suggests that this would result in a sea-level rise of about 60m (about 180 feet) which would certainly be significant. Much of Florida would disappear, for example. But there is not the slightest sign of this happening at all, and identifying conditions on a clearly atypical area of the Antarctic as though they represented typical conditions is just another example of how utterly bereft of principle the people supporting Global Warming tend to be. They are out to scare people, nothing less.

 

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