Global Warming NOT an Absolute Certainty? Who Knew?!?
Scott on April 4, 2008 at 12:02 pm
UN meteorologists are reporting that in 2008 global temperatures should be cooling.
Huh?
How is that possible? I thought Al Gore and his lauded scientific knowledge and expertise made it clear that the charts of global warming that he used in his “presentation” were going to continue heading up and up and up, leading to his claim that “the debate is over.”
I talked about this two years ago here.
And here is the legendary Newsweek story from 1975 trumpeting the quickly approaching ice age.
It would certainly be amusing in 10-15 years to watch Al Gore explain how all his hysteria and self-righteous fear mongering were completely off base. We can only hope.
Anyhow, here’s a quick glimpse of what else is being said regarding the cooling trend:
Global Warming or Global Cooling? (from the Eastern Arizona Courier)
Dr. Peter Dorman and his team of scientists have determined that since 1986, temperatures have been dropping an average of 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, and downturns have occurred since 1978 in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of east Antarctica. When scientists noticed that glacial ice wasn’t melting, streams weren’t flowing, lakes were shrinking and microorganisms were disappearing, they decided to expand their data collection and discovered that Antarctica as a whole had gotten considerably colder. The study seems to confirm what 17,000 scientists have previously determined: There is no global warming.
Heat of the Moment (from World Net Daily)
In a few short years, we will have a reversal of the warming of the 20th century,” Archibald warned, according to CargoNews Asia. “There will be significant cooling very soon. Our generation has known a warm, giving sun, but the new generation will suffer a sun that is less giving, and the earth will be less fruitful. Carbon dioxide is not even a little bit bad – it’s wholly beneficial.”
Chiding the Media for Hysterical Reporting (from One News Now)
“It is such a tiny fraction, and the media portrays this as though it’s global warming run amok and we’re going to lose ice and we’re going to have sea level rise — when in reality the whole of Antarctica has cooled,” says Morano. “Ice extent is at record since satellite monitoring began in 1979.”
There is “absolutely no cause for alarm,” he continues. In fact, says Morano, the Southern hemisphere has seen a cooling trend in the past few years, and many scientists are actually calling for a period of global cooling. He further states that many scientists are dissenting from the idea that the trace gas CO2 is causing global warming.
Given the growing consensus that THERE IS NO CONSENSUS on global warming, the role that humans play in global warming, the relative harm or benefits of global warming, etc…when will there actually be an honest, open, forthright debate/discussion of this topic?
Category: Climate Change |
Scott – let me provide you with some interesting atatistics I researched several years ago. Orange County is the smallest geographical county in Califormia. It is 948 sq. miles. If you place every person in the world on a 2 ft. by 2 ft. square, the county could hold 6,607,180,800 people, for all practical purposes almost the entire population in the world would fit in Orange County.
Out of that group, how many own cars? Let us say 7%? So 450,000,000 people (there are approximately 600 million cars world wide) actually own cars which they say are the warming culprits. So take 450,000,000 people in orange county standing on a 2 sq ft by 2 sq ft space and they would fit in a SMALL corner of the county about four times the area of Santa Ana.
Now are we to believe, that a group of car owners who can fit inside four times the area of Santa Ana are changing the climate of planet earth in approximately 50 years which is when people started getting cars in large numbers world wide?
I remain skeptical to say the least.
April 5, 2008 @ 3:57 amNo, Rick, you are not to believe “that a group of car owners who can fit inside four times the area of Santa Ana are changing the climate of planet earth in approximately 50 years”. Nobody ever said that personal car ownership WAS the problem, only a part of the problem – not even a very sizeable part, but just growing at an alarming rate. These 450,000,000 people are just polluting disproportianately, and, yes I am one of them. And there’s no easy answer – like the carbon footprint of buying a Prius, of getting that manufactured and shipped from Japan, is probbaly greater than the carbon foortprint of keeping your current car
Manufacturing, commercial transport, air travel, power generation – these are the bigger polluters. For me the bigger issue is that all these activities involve using up finite resources of oil, coal, rainforest etc. I do sincerely believe that the planet my generation leaves for the next generation and the one after that will be considerably poorer in terms of resources, regardless of global climate change. Future generations will not be able to enjoy the lifestyles we do today, because we’ll have taken more than our fair share. That makes me very uncomfortable.
April 5, 2008 @ 1:58 pmEvery second the sun produces enough ehergy to support the earth for 100 years. We will harnass that power soon. I still cannot believe that the affect on the earth is measurable in 75 years, that would have to be colossal!
April 5, 2008 @ 3:08 pmBut, Rick, the vast majority of that energy goes everywhere else but here. The sun doesn’t just produce energy in this direction. Only a tiny fraction of it comes our way, most of that is already ‘used’ by, for instance, plants, warming the oceans, etc. and we will only ever be able to harness a tiny fraction of what’s left.
If you think about how thin the atmosphere around the earth is, and how balanced the system of carbon production/consumption is, and then consider that we’ve simultaneously been responsible for annihilating the main areas of carbon consumption (deforestation) and ramping up the carbon production, 75 years doesn’t seem so short. That we have the capacity to very suddenly render this planet uninhabitable is beyond question (there is more nuclear capacity in the worlds aramaments than necessary to nuke the whole planet). Whether we have been, and continue to do so at a less sudden but still alarming rate is questionable; but don’t doubt our destructive capability.
April 6, 2008 @ 4:30 amMeasurable changes remain somewhat unclear and usually contoured to the particular view of the interpreter. There are conflicting indicators as well. There are many real and desireble ways to produce energy if the human will is galvanized. Necessity is the mother of invention so it will come soon.
People like me are obstacles because I am a fundamentalist believer who believes the end times are here and I have very little excitement for ecological and environmental issues. But the Rick Warrens of the world will be your friends. Even if I become moderately convinced about global warming that still will not provide the activism in me that you are looking for, so fishing in my pond will not provide the bang for the buck you are looking for.
Sorry.
April 6, 2008 @ 4:58 amAnd you say if Scott understands me he needs professional help!
I’m not sure whether I want Rick Warren as a friend, do I? I hear mixed things about him.
And who says I am looking for activism in you? I’m just responding to your opinion with mine.
Incidentally, I think we already have the way to produce enough energy in nuclear power, but we have to be accutely aware of the risks.
April 6, 2008 @ 2:29 pmWhen I say “me” I mean in the fundamentalist collective sense. We’re not going green anytime soon and Rick Warren is on major league probation.
April 6, 2008 @ 5:15 pmRick, quick question:
How many Acres of farm land (on average) does each of those human beings need to survive?
How much oil does it take to cultivate each of those aches (on average)?
How much fresh water?
How much top soil?
The “postage stamp footprint” of humanity argument ignores that human beings are not rocks. We are dynamic systems that require the whole echo-systems to support and maintain.
And we are living on multiple, unsustainable exponential growth curves.
I don’t know the scope of the problem, but policy needs to be set on the best science we have and adjusted as new info comes in. Right now, scientists are vastly in agreement that we have multiple layered environmental problems, and that they can all be boiled down to one more basic problem:
Humans are better at controlling their environment than we are at controlling our own behavior.
I can understand why some people don’t want to hear this. Frankly, I have always been surprised that Christians were not more accepting of this idea – isn’t very consistant with the idea of sin is it not?
Of course some of you guys WANT the apocalypse, but that’s a different thread topic.
July 6, 2009 @ 11:43 amOops typo
* it’s very consistant…
July 6, 2009 @ 11:46 amOf course!! Humans are the problem!! I get it now! We must kill all the humans for mother earth to survive!!
January 4, 2010 @ 10:52 amI’m almost clapping out loud at your reasoning there, Will, but I don’t know the handy interweb LOL-like abbreviation for that. Humans are the problem, yes, of course. So we need to kill all the humans? Who said that? Get the humans to act in a more responsible way seems a much less ‘final’ solution.
If you’re capable of rational thought, consider for one minute the possibility that we, as a species, are doing irreversible damage to our planet. What solutions, within realistic technical bounds, could you envisage? It may be a tricky concept to grasp, but solutions come in more subtle flavors than ‘kill all the bad guys’.
January 4, 2010 @ 3:06 pm