Researchers agree, humans cause warming [Archive]

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Slider

January 21st, 2009, 10:46 AM

Here's the results of a real survey of real researchers and others with related degrees. There is an overwhelming consensus among those who are the most educated in the field that humans are the cause of the alarming spike in temps that we are facing.

I am sure Fox and Newsmax can 'prove' otherwise, but they are full if s**t.

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Surveyed scientists agree global warming is real
Story Highlights
Most earth scientists believe humans cause of global warming, according to survey
97 percent of climatologists canvassed believe humans play a role
Petroleum geologists and meteorologists were among the biggest doubters

(CNN) -- Human-induced global warming is real, according to a recent U.S. survey based on the opinions of 3,146 scientists. However there remains divisions between climatologists and scientists from other areas of earth sciences as to the extent of human responsibility.

Against a backdrop of harsh winter weather across much of North America and Europe, the concept of rising global temperatures might seem incongruous.

However the results of the investigation conducted at the end of 2008 reveal that vast majority of the Earth scientists surveyed agree that in the past 200-plus years, mean global temperatures have been rising and that human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.

The study released today was conducted by academics from the University of Illinois, who used an online questionnaire of nine questions. The scientists approached were listed in the 2007 edition of the American Geological Institute's Directory of Geoscience Departments.

Two questions were key: Have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels, and has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?

About 90 percent of the scientists agreed with the first question and 82 percent the second.

The strongest consensus on the causes of global warming came from climatologists who are active in climate research, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role.

Petroleum geologists and meteorologists were among the biggest doubters, with only 47 percent and 64 percent, respectively, believing in human involvement.

"The petroleum geologist response is not too surprising, but the meteorologists' is very interesting," said Peter Doran associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and one of the survey's authors.

"Most members of the public think meteorologists know climate, but most of them actually study very short-term phenomenon."

However, Doran was not surprised by the near-unanimous agreement by climatologists.

"They're the ones who study and publish on climate science. So I guess the take-home message is, the more you know about the field of climate science, the more you're likely to believe in global warming and humankind's contribution to it.

"The debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes," said Doran.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurvey/index.html

SteveC

January 21st, 2009, 10:55 AM

So, I guess the message is, that we, as humans, are too active?:har:

Slappy

January 21st, 2009, 11:21 AM

"The petroleum geologist response is not too surprising"...

"The strongest consensus on the causes of global warming came from climatologists who are active in climate research"....

I think the message is researchers may tend to lean strongly towards an opinion that helps their future earning potential.

:D

Slider

January 21st, 2009, 11:35 AM

That's been the argument. The scientific process just doesn't provide that kind of room, though. The data speaks for itself, and the further afield the researchers get from it, the less convinced they are.

Instead of questioning the integrity of those most close to the research, I'd question the integrity of those who'd try to undermine their work. If we are talking about $$$, who has the bigger stake, the researchers or the entrenched industries that optimize their short term profit by using cheap, dirty power?

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Slappy

January 21st, 2009, 12:07 PM

I don't argue that global warming isn't taking place, nor that we're not affecting it; it's just that I can't bring myself to give a damn.

Sorry. Sue me.

:)

Slider

January 21st, 2009, 12:20 PM

That part, I just don't understand.

Do you care about the price of food? The cost to the taxpayer for disaster recovery services? Having access to clean drinking water?

There is almost nothing that WON'T be impacted by rising temps, and all mean a lower standard of living, for everyone.

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Slappy

January 21st, 2009, 02:59 PM

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January 21st, 2009, 03:15 PM

None of the changes that we make now will have much effect until we are both long gone, so I get that part. Still, there are generations to come who will have to live here. Gotta feel SOMETHING for them, no?

Slider

January 21st, 2009, 05:04 PM

I see the article say that humans are a significant factor.. not necc the "cause"

"human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures."

Slider

January 21st, 2009, 05:18 PM

As a 'significant factor', we would be causing some part of the warming, yes? If we cause part, we do cause warming. There's no claim to exclusivity.

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Slappy

January 21st, 2009, 05:39 PM

I think in general we've started heading in the right direction and I guess I'm confident enough in things continuing that way that I really don't get the ol' panties ruffled about the whole issue. Or sumfin along those lines...

January 21st, 2009, 06:05 PM

As a 'significant factor', we would be causing some part of the warming, yes? If we cause part, we do cause warming. There's no claim to exclusivity.

Slider

Yes...but as you market it...we ARE the cause
I don't see that the article supports that

Slider

January 21st, 2009, 06:38 PM

Yes...but as you market it...we ARE the cause
I don't see that the article supports that

You think I'm saying that there are no other factors? I'm not.

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Slider

January 21st, 2009, 06:42 PM

Slappy

January 21st, 2009, 07:15 PM

I meant it more generally, but I'll give you that one cuz I figure you're in your glory right about now and I'm not one to harsh a buzz.

:D

Enigma

January 21st, 2009, 08:23 PM

Mr_Cheeze

January 21st, 2009, 08:38 PM

I find the article to be just another in a long line of obvious conclusions used only to forward an agenda that isn't necessarily the right agenda. I'll never be convinced that and warming that may or may not be caused by humans is serious enough to warrant drastic changes in the way I live. And I think that most people probably feel the same way. Nobody likes to be preached to.

kernel crash

January 21st, 2009, 11:14 PM

It will take a few years but we'll be able to look back and see that we are actually entering a cooling period. The facts are all there. We peaked around 1998 and have been cooling globally since then. Were seeing record cold temps and snowfall in places that haven't seen snow in 50 years. And don't tell me that proves global warming/climate change. You have a better chance of convincing me the tooth fairy exists. The information disproving global warming is out there and overwhelming. It just doesn't get the press, right now. But I predict it will.

Slider

January 22nd, 2009, 08:41 AM

If the info was there, those doing the research would have:

1. Uncovered it
2. Confirmed it through additional research.

It isn't there, except on Web sites run by non-scientists with official sounding titles that mean nothing.

Read the survey - THOSE ARE THE PEOPLE DOING THE RESEARCH. There are no others.

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MTBME

January 22nd, 2009, 10:19 AM

Slider I'll see your Climatologist and raise you 650 more.

"At December's U.N. Global Warming conference in Poznan, Poland, 650 of the world's top climatologists stood up and said man-made global warming is a media generated myth without basis. Said climatologist Dr. David Gee, Chairman of the International Geological Congress, "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?"

The earth's temperature peaked in 1998. It's been falling ever since; it dropped dramatically in 2007 and got worse in 2008, when temperatures touched 1980 levels.
Meanwhile, the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center released conclusive satellite photos showing that Arctic ice is back to 1979 levels. What's more, measurements of Antarctic ice now show that its accumulation is up 5 percent since 1980.

In other words, during what was supposed to be massive global warming, the biggest chunks of ice on earth grew larger. Just as an aside, do you remember when the hole in the ozone layer was going to melt Antarctica? But don't worry, we're safe now, that was the nineties. Dr. Kunihiko, Chancellor of Japan's Institute of Science and Technology said this: "CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or the other ... every scientist knows this, but it doesn't pay to say so." Now why would a learned man say such a crazy thing?

This is where the looney left gets lost. Their mantra is atmospheric CO2 levels are escalating and this is unquestionably causing earth's temperature rise. But ask yourself -- if global temperatures are experiencing the biggest sustained drop in decades, while CO2 levels continue to rise -- how can it be true?

Ironically, in spite of being shown false, we must now pray for it. Because a massive study, just released by the Russian Government, contains overwhelming evidence that earth is on the verge of another Ice Age. Based on core samples from Russia's Vostok Station in Antarctica, we now know earth's atmosphere and temperature for the last 420,000 years. This evidence suggests that the 12,000 years of warmth we call the Holocene period is over.

Apparently, we're headed into an ice age of about 100,000 years -- give or take. As for CO2 levels, core samples show conclusively they follow the earth's temperature rise, not lead it. It turns out CO2 fluctuations follow the change in sea temperature. As water temperatures rise, oceans release additional dissolved CO2 -- like opening a warm brewsky. To think, early last year, liberals suggested we spend 45 trillion dollars and give up five million jobs to fix global warming. But there is good news: now that we don't have to spend any of that money, we can give it all to the banks."

http://www.mlive.com/opinion/flint/index.ssf/2009/01/its_time_to_pray_for_global_wa.html

MTBME

January 22nd, 2009, 10:37 AM

I know, I know I should care. I try to care.
For some reason though global warming doesn't elicit any sort of reaction in me. I seem to lump it in the 'waddayagonnado' category with stuff like death by humungous errant asteroid or advanced AI robot takeover of civilization.

Slappy, let me help you here.

Maybe its because you realize man has been adapting to its environment for many thousands of years while constantly upgrading its standard of living.

Maybe you realize that the greatest advancements in humanity have come during the warm periods in our history not during the cold periods.

Maybe you realize that throwing hundreds of millions of dollars we don't have to solve a problem that experts can't agree we have doesn't make sense to you.

Maybe you realize that calling CO2, which makes up less than 1% of our atmosphere, a pollutant is the straw that breaks the back of the global warming alarmists. Life on earth would not exists without CO2.

Maybe you realize that Al Gore is NOT a scientist but a shrill for the carbon tax bozos that if given the chance would set our standard of living back to that of a third world country.

Maybe its because your gut is speaking louder to you than the explanations from the sky is falling crowd.

Or maybe its because your a lot smarter than most people give you credit for ; )

Slappy

January 22nd, 2009, 11:34 AM

I heart Norm.

;)

SANITARY ENGINEER

January 22nd, 2009, 08:06 PM

Norman for President!!!! Wait...isn't...

hogboy

January 23rd, 2009, 09:29 AM

yeah well, all these arguments are dumb

we would just as easily be in the first year of a 10 year slide into a new ice age

none of your scientists talk about that.

---
the only reasonable way to direct funding and thought processes, is come up with
plans to deal with either rapid warming or rapid cooling. trying to prevent climate swings
is impossible. but making plans on what to do is the only answer. stopping it... laughable.

the ice core record proves the earth goes though regular rapid changes all the freaking time.

Slider

January 23rd, 2009, 02:12 PM

MTBME

January 23rd, 2009, 02:55 PM

Here's the official UN warming site: http://unfccc.int/2860.php.

Slider

Don't bother on my account. I wouldn't spend a micro second going there. You see it's common knowledge that those opposing this warming hysteria are silenced and even fired if they don't toe the line. So that site would not be represented of all the facts surrounding this discussion. The facts are clear that many scientist, climatologist, and meteorologist do not believe and support the outlandish theory that you seem to be pursuing here. That's fine. We live in a free country, as of right now, where your free to believe anything you want. Just don't try to shove it in my face or expect me to pony up for this bull crap. Obviously according to the latest pew poll the majority of Americans don't think much of the validity of those same UN hacks.

http://people-press.org/report/485/economy-top-policy-priority

Slider

January 23rd, 2009, 03:06 PM

You see it's common knowledge that those opposing this warming hysteria are silenced and even fired if they don't toe the line.

Any time I hear the phrase 'common knowledge' I get suspicious. It takes research to correct the many ills that common knowledge foists on the rest of us.

BTW - Here's the site for The International Geological Congress, source of the quote you posted. Notice anything interesting among the sponsors? It is an oil industry organization. What do you suppose 'common knowledge' among that group holds?

http://www.33igc.org

So let's compare biases. On one hand, we have 11,000 climate researchers from all across the globe finding a common ground in supporting remediation of warming. On the other, we have GEOLOGISTS largely sponsored by the oil industry who have some opposition to warming remediation. Common sense here suggests....what?

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MTBME

January 23rd, 2009, 03:48 PM

So let's compare biases. On one hand, we have 11,000 climate researchers from all across the globe finding a common ground in supporting remediation of warming. On the other, we have GEOLOGISTS largely sponsored by the oil industry who have some opposition to warming remediation. Common sense here suggests....what?

Slider

Common Sense suggests that your going to believe what you want to believe and I'm going to believe what I want to believe. The difference is I'm not shoving it in anybody's faces asking them to fork over their hard earned cash. I don't plan on spending endless keystrokes on going down this mindless vortex.

And by the way "common ground in supporting remediation of warming" is not the same as saying man is causing this warming. There are plenty on both sides of the aisle that agree we are in or have been in a warming period. I am closer to that than you think. But when you take it to the next step and say were causing it, No I don't buy that. Why? COMMON SENSE. This is the same crowd that told us we were entering an ice age about 30 years ago. Don't worry. I'm sure one of these days they'll get it right.

Slider

January 23rd, 2009, 04:23 PM

All science, not just warming, is using far more advanced tools than we had 30 years ago. Techniques and methodology have advanced as much as the tools have. The body of knowledge surrounding the subject is enormous, and the ways that we can parse the immense amount of data were unavailable 30 years ago.

The remediation the researchers at the UN conference recommend is centered on CO2 reduction. I guess I could have been more specific about that. Like your citation's, the sources for those who think human-produce CO2 is not responsible for warming are corrupted by money, usually from the energy industry.

Again, the people most schooled in the subject and who deal with the data first hand OVERWHELMINGLY see a human/CO2/warming link, but you can go with Shell's opinion if you like.

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MTBME

January 23rd, 2009, 05:13 PM

All science, not just warming, is using far more advanced tools than we had 30 years ago. Techniques and methodology have advanced as much as the tools have... but you can go with Shell's opinion if you like.

Slider

Advance tools! We were told last fall that October was the warmest on record. Then it was pointed out that the “researchers” used the wrong temperature data that inflated their numbers. September temperatures were apparently copied over into October, giving an erroneous positive anomaly. The error appears to have been made somewhere between the reporting by the National Weather Services and NOAA's collation of the GHCN database. We were told it was an honest mistake. Seems to me that these “experts” are making quite a few “honest” mistakes.

If these experts/environmentalists really believe this stuff why don’t they get behind nuclear energy. Burning way less fossil fuel has to be good for the planet. Right? The scientists who might otherwise sound credible have gotten in bed literally with environmentalist who tell us we need to go vegetarian to save the earth. Everybody with an agenda is jumping on board. Eat less meat. Park your car. Change your lightbulbs. Turn down your thermostats. You know there are good reasons to do that all that stuff, global warming isn’t one of them. So I digest all this information and it just roils around in my gut. Something brewing here and its starting to smell real bad. I feel like I have to fart but I'm not sure that is allowed anymore.

I think I'll leave work early to see if my check from Shell has arrived. Damn I could sure use it.

Husqvarna

January 24th, 2009, 10:26 AM

Global warming, global freezing, i say its just mother natures way of cleansing. A catastrophic event could end lifeforms on this planet in an instance at any moment. Or humans my destroy all other lifeforms and natural resources to the point of our own demise to eventual extinction. Either way change will happen sooner or later, for good or for worse. Given our rate of resource consumption and our impact to the environment compared with other lifeforms our demise maybe a blessing in diguise for the other inhabitants of this planet.

Slider

January 24th, 2009, 11:09 AM

It is hard to call mass extinction a blessing for any species. But the fatalism in your post is representative of the reasoning process for lots of people that think action on warming is unnecessary. It is along the lines of 'we're all gonna die someday anyway." Might be true, but it's a terrible foundation for policy decisions.

Slider

January 24th, 2009, 01:19 PM

" But the fatalism in your post is representative of the reasoning process for lots of people that think action on warming is unnecessary."

I suppose ther's some scientific data which supports that statement...or at least a poll of some sort

Slider

January 24th, 2009, 04:34 PM

"Lots", being a relative term, can be interpreted however you like. Go for it.

Slider

January 24th, 2009, 08:07 PM

Oh you scoundrel, this is my idea of lots....

SteveC

January 24th, 2009, 11:33 PM

Pardon me for getting involved here, but I still don't understand--is it the 'active human' who produces more CO2 who (may be) to blame for the warming globe or is it 'human activity' that (may be) to blame for this?
If it's the 'active human', then (maybe) we should just stay right here at the keyboards, thinking about riding our bikes, until things cool down.....
If it's 'human activity', then (maybe) we should stop this crazy technological frenzy, get up from the keyboards and just ride our bikes.
SC

Enigma

January 25th, 2009, 02:18 AM

Strange...that only looks like ONE lot.

catbbq

January 25th, 2009, 09:13 AM

Slider

January 26th, 2009, 11:44 AM

If this is true, then here's a direct link to warming effecting us as mountain bikers.

Fortunately, the researchers are just manufacturing data, misinterpreting results, making a fortune off government grants, and secretly laughing at all of us as they game the scientific process.

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Global warming threatens forests, study says
Story Highlights
Forests in the Pacific Northwest are dying twice as fast as they were 17 years ago
Scientists blame warming temperatures for the trend, according to a new study
Data was gathered over a 50-year period at sites in the Western U.S. and Canada
Scientists: study confirms the harmful effects of rising temperatures on ecosystems

By Azadeh Ansari
CNN
(CNN) -- Forests in the Pacific Northwest are dying twice as fast as they were 17 years ago, and scientists blame warming temperatures for the trend, according to a new study.

The study, to be released Friday in the journal Science, is the first large-scale analysis of environmental changes as contributing factors in the mortality of coniferous forests.

The data for this research was gathered by generations of scientists over a 50-year period at multiple sites in Oregon, Washington, California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and southwestern British Columbia. Seventy-six forest plots, all more than 200 years old, were monitored by scientists doing some of the most rudimentary research -- counting trees.

"It's not a happy story, but, an important one," said Phillip van Mantgem, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and the lead author of the study. "These are beautiful places. They do change and respond to their environment, sometimes quickly."

"If in your hometown where you live, the death rates of your friends and neighbors doubled and there are no compensating birth rates, wouldn't you want to figure out what's going on?" said Nathan Stephenson, research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and one of the authors of the report.

The study primarily focused on three types of coniferous trees: pines, firs and hemlocks. Older-growth forests -- some up to 500 years old -- have trees of all ages, and researchers found that mortality rates have increased for all age groups. Since mortality rates went up across the board, scientists ruled out a number of other possible causes, including ozone-related air pollution, long-term effects of fire suppression and normal forest dynamics.

In the end, California had the highest tree death rate. Of the three types of coniferous trees studied, pines were found to be dying at the fastest rate. Ultimately, higher tree mortality may lead to significant shifts in forest structure and function, the report states.

"Much of the world's population in North America, Europe, most of China and large portions of Russia live near temperate forests, so what happens in these forests has global importance," said Jerry Franklin, a professor of forest resources at the University of Washington whose work was instrumental in maintaining the research plots.

"My guess is that forest loss has the potential to greatly exceed forest establishment," he added.

The new findings concern scientists who see the study as further confirmation of the harmful effects of climate change on ecosystems.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific intergovernmental body, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are now at their highest levels for at least 650,000 years. Scientists on the panel say the increase began with the birth of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago.

The new research also suggests that as trees die, they actually emit more carbon than they absorb. Trees are key players in regulating climate because they convert carbon dioxide, which they store in their trunks and roots, to oxygen. Changes in climatic conditions or various diseases can cause the gradual dying of plant shoots.

"The concern here is that these might be early warning signs of dieback," said Stephenson.

Some scientists say that tree species unable to tolerate warmer conditions might just re-establish themselves in cooler areas. Given the speed at which warming appears to be occurring, it's not clear whether tree species will be able to migrate fast enough to survive,said van Mantgem of the U.S. Geological Survey.

"Warmer temperatures cause earlier summer droughts, less snow pack, and cause ideal breeding grounds for invasive species and pathogens," he added.

"One hypothesis is that warmer climates can make it easier for invasive species to reproduce and grow in these temperate forests. If the trees are already under a lot of environmental stress, they are more prone to serious insect attack," he said.

Scientists say forests in the Western U.S. have been increasingly damaged in recent years by invasive insect species such as the bark beetle -- a sign that rising temperatures are having an adverse effect. Bark beetles are known to attack trees already weakened by other environmental factors.

"Many of these beetles cannot survive in cold temperatures, and it's getting warmer," said Tim Barnett, a *research marine physicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Barnett authored a research paper linking drought conditions in the American West to increased human activity.

"It is perfectly reasonable to assume that this problem is going to get worse, not better," he said.

kernel crash

January 26th, 2009, 12:56 PM

"Forests in the Pacific Northwest are dying twice as fast as they were 17 years ago. Scientists blame warming temperatures for the trend"

Is there nothing out there that Global Warming can't be blamed for? Every week its something new. Trees need C02 to survive. If there's more C02 in the atmosphere, trees should be thriving.

"According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific intergovernmental body, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are now at their highest levels for at least 650,000 years."

C02 is at about at the lowest levels its been for many millions of years. Right now its about 350 ppm. During the Jurassic period it was at 2000 ppm. Plants and animals were thriving.

Triassic Period 1,500 ppm
Jurassic Period 2,000 ppm
Cretaceous Period 1,500 ppm
Tertiary Period 500 ppm
Present Day 385 ppm

"Some scientists say that tree species unable to tolerate warmer conditions might just re-establish themselves in cooler areas."

Hey I saw something like that in a movie recently. Trees just got up and started walking around kicking ass. I wouldn't want to be in the way of something like that.

"Warmer temperatures cause earlier summer droughts, less snow pack, and cause ideal breeding grounds for invasive species and pathogens," he added. "Many of these beetles cannot survive in cold temperatures,"

Well then after this record cold winter, and with the temps trending downwards, the beetles should be less of a problem in the years to come. I don't see a problem here.

Slider

January 26th, 2009, 03:13 PM

Now you are starting to get the picture. Warming will affect every living thing on this planet. It will change geographic range for species, cause the extinction of some, and make necessary dramatic changes to all the infrastructure humans have created.

You mention trees and CO2. Yep they like it. They also like very specific temperature ranges, as do the parasites that would like to dine on them. More CO2, great. Too warm to regenerate, or nice and cozy for a beetle that likes to chew your bark, too bad. The changes come as a package, and you can't take some without the others.

You mention other geologic ages. Plants and animals thrived in some and were challenged in others, but there were always some species that at least survived. But the entire ecosystem was very specific to the particular conditions in place at the time. Very few of the life forms we know could survive the conditions seen in the Jurassic if they were to reappear. Some tropical plants could do well except, possibly, those that happened to be on the menu for the dominant species, which could be just about anything. We really can't be sure which would survive and which wouldn't, but all would face immense challenges - like we do. Right now.

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kernel crash

January 26th, 2009, 05:02 PM

By the way, your article at the top of this thread doesn't mention this little tid bit. But it's not your fault. The CNN article you got this from did not mention it also.

*The authors contacted 10,200 scientists listed in the 2007 edition of the American Geological Institute's Directory of Geoscience Departments and received 3,146 responses to their two questions: "have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels?" and "Has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?"

Does this have any significance? Out of the more than 10 thousand scientists questioned did only the ones that are passionate about man made global warming respond to the questions asked? What are we to make of the more than 7000 who did not reply? You could answer yes to the first question but still be unsure as to the second. I wonder how that kind of response was recorded?

http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0122-climate.html

Slider

January 26th, 2009, 05:40 PM

Depending on methodology, 25-40% is a typical survey response rate.

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catbbq

January 28th, 2009, 06:00 AM

Depending on methodology, 25-40% is a typical survey response rate.

Slider

Where is the scientific method in typical surveys?

MTBME

January 28th, 2009, 10:12 AM

Maybe you realize that calling CO2, which makes up less than 5% of our atmosphere,

Just wanted to make a correction here. I knew at the time that the 5% mentioned above sounded high but I wanted to make sure I wouldn't be accused of low balling the number. The actual percentage of C02 in our atmosphere is... drum roll please... 1/25 of 1%. In easy numbers to see it's really about .0385%. That's not a misprint.

GeepNutt

January 28th, 2009, 12:43 PM

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/28/nasa_climate_theon/

Slider

January 28th, 2009, 05:39 PM

Where is the scientific method in typical surveys?

In this case, the University of Illinois posted an online questionnaire. I think they emailed the targets and talled the results from those who responded. If you add follow up via phone or additional email, you can increase the response rate. I don't think they did that.

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Slider

January 28th, 2009, 06:07 PM

Here's a video that addresses the 'are we warming?' question pretty directly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMQ21p93JZc

Slider

January 29th, 2009, 09:55 AM

OH...So many ways

I kinda like 17 and 20

20 Ways the World Could End Swept away

By Corey S. Powell
We've had a good run of it. In the 500,000 years Homo sapiens has roamed the land we've built cities, created complex languages, and sent robotic scouts to other planets. It's difficult to imagine it all coming to an end. Yet 99 percent of all species that ever lived have gone extinct, including every one of our hominid ancestors. In 1983, British cosmologist Brandon Carter framed the "Doomsday argument," a statistical way to judge when we might join them. If humans were to survive a long time and spread through the galaxy, then the total number of people who will ever live might number in the trillions. By pure odds, it's unlikely that we would be among the very first hundredth of a percent of all those people. Or turn the argument around: How likely is it that this generation will be the one unlucky one? Something like one fifth of all the people who have ever lived are alive today. The odds of being one of the people to witness doomsday are highest when there is the largest number of witnesses around- so now is not such an improbable time.

Human activity is severely disrupting almost all life on the planet, which surely doesn't help matters. The current rate of extinctions is, by some estimates, 10,000 times the average in the fossil record. At present, we may worry about snail darters and red squirrels in abstract terms. But the next statistic on the list could be us.

Natural Disasters

1. Asteroid impact

Once a disaster scenario gets the cheesy Hollywood treatment, it's hard to take it seriously. But there is no question that a cosmic interloper will hit Earth, and we won't have to wait millions of years for it to happen. In 1908 a 200-foot-wide comet fragment slammed into the atmosphere and exploded over the Tunguska region in Siberia, Russia, with nearly 1,000 times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Astronomers estimate similar-sized events occur every one to three centuries. Benny Peiser, an anthropologist-cum-pessimist at Liverpool John Moores University in England, claims that impacts have repeatedly disrupted human civilization. As an example, he says one killed 10,000 people in the Chinese city of Chi'ing-yang in 1490. Many scientists question his interpretations: Impacts are most likely to occur over the ocean, and small ones that happen over land are most likely to affect unpopulated areas. But with big asteroids, it doesn't matter much where they land. Objects more than a half-mile wide- which strike Earth every 250,000 years or so- would touch off firestorms followed by global cooling from dust kicked up by the impact. Humans would likely survive, but civilization might not. An asteroid five miles wide would cause major extinctions, like the one that may have marked the end of the age of dinosaurs. For a real chill, look to the Kuiper belt, a zone just beyond Neptune that contains roughly 100,000 ice-balls more than 50 miles in diameter. The Kuiper belt sends a steady rain of small comets earthward. If one of the big ones headed right for us, that would be it for pretty much all higher forms of life, even cockroaches.

2 .Gamma-ray burst

If you could watch the sky with gamma-ray vision, you might think you were being stalked by cosmic paparazzi. Once a day or so, you would see a bright flash appear, briefly outshine everything else, then vanish. These gamma-ray bursts, astrophysicists recently learned, originate in distant galaxies and are unfathomably powerful- as much as 10 quadrillion (a one followed by 16 zeros) times as energetic as the sun. The bursts probably result from the merging of two collapsed stars. Before the cataclysmal event, such a double star might be almost completely undetectable, so we'd likely have no advance notice if one is lurking nearby. Once the burst begins, however, there would be no missing its fury. At a distance of 1,000 light-years- farther than most of the stars you can see on a clear night- it would appear about as bright as the sun. Earth's atmosphere would initially protect us from most of the burst's deadly X rays and gamma rays, but at a cost. The potent radiation would cook the atmosphere, creating nitrogen oxides that would destroy the ozone layer. Without the ozone layer, ultraviolet rays from the sun would reach the surface at nearly full force, causing skin cancer and, more seriously, killing off the tiny photosynthetic plankton in the ocean that provide oxygen to the atmosphere and bolster the bottom of the food chain. All the gamma-ray bursts observed so far have been extremely distant, which implies the events are rare. Scientists understand so little about these explosions, however, that it's difficult to estimate the likelihood of one detonating in our galactic neighborhood.

3. Collapse of the vacuum

In the book Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut popularized the idea of "ice-nine," a form of water that is far more stable than the ordinary kind, so it is solid at room temperature. Unleash a bit of it, and suddenly all water on Earth transforms to ice-nine and freezes solid. Ice-nine was a satirical invention, but an abrupt, disastrous phase transition is a possibility. Very early in the history of the universe, according to a leading cosmological model, empty space was full of energy. This state of affairs, called a false vacuum, was highly precarious. A new, more stable kind of vacuum appeared and, like ice-nine, it quickly took over. This transition unleashed a tremendous amount of energy and caused a brief runaway expansion of the cosmos. It is possible that another, even more stable kind of vacuum exists, however. As the universe expands and cools, tiny bubbles of this new kind of vacuum might appear and spread at nearly the speed of light. The laws of physics would change in their wake, and a blast of energy would dash everything to bits. "It makes for a beautiful story, but it's not very likely," says Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. He says he worries more about threats that scientists are more certain of- such as rogue black holes.

4. Rogue black holes

Our galaxy is full of black holes, collapsed stellar corpses just a dozen miles wide. How full? Tough question. After all, they're called black holes for a reason. Their gravity is so strong they swallow everything, even the light that might betray their presence. David Bennett of Notre Dame University in Indiana managed to spot two black holes recently by the way they distorted and amplified the light of ordinary, more distant stars. Based on such observations, and even more on theoretical arguments, researchers guesstimate there are about 10 million black holes in the Milky Way. These objects orbit just like other stars, meaning that it is not terribly likely that one is headed our way. But if a normal star were moving toward us, we'd know it. With a black hole there is little warning. A few decades before a close encounter, at most, astronomers would observe a strange perturbation in the orbits of the outer planets. As the effect grew larger, it would be possible to make increasingly precise estimates of the location and mass of the interloper. The black hole wouldn't have to come all that close to Earth to bring ruin; just passing through the solar system would distort all of the planets' orbits. Earth might get drawn into an elliptical path that would cause extreme climate swings, or it might be ejected from the solar system and go hurtling to a frigid fate in deep space.

5. Giant solar flares

Solar flares- more properly known as coronal mass ejections- are enormous magnetic outbursts on the sun that bombard Earth with a torrent of high-speed subatomic particles. Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field negate the potentially lethal effects of ordinary flares. But while looking through old astronomical records, Bradley Schaefer of Yale University found evidence that some perfectly normal-looking, sunlike stars can brighten briefly by up to a factor of 20. Schaefer believes these stellar flickers are caused by superflares, millions of times more powerful than their common cousins. Within a few hours, a superflare on the sun could fry Earth and begin disintegrating the ozone layer (see #2). Although there is persuasive evidence that our sun doesn't engage in such excess, scientists don't know why superflares happen at all, or whether our sun could exhibit milder but still disruptive behavior. And while too much solar activity could be deadly, too little of it is problematic as well. Sallie Baliunas at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says many solar-type stars pass through extended quiescent periods, during which they become nearly 1 percent dimmer. That might not sound like much, but a similar downturn in the sun could send us into another ice age. Baliunas cites evidence that decreased solar activity contributed to 17 of the 19 major cold episodes on Earth in the last 10,000 years.

6. Reversal of Earth's magnetic field

Every few hundred thousand years Earth's magnetic field dwindles almost to nothing for perhaps a century, then gradually reappears with the north and south poles flipped. The last such reversal was 780,000 years ago, so we may be overdue. Worse, the strength of our magnetic field has decreased about 5 percent in the past century. Why worry in an age when GPS has made compasses obsolete? Well, the magnetic field deflects particle storms and cosmic rays from the sun, as well as even more energetic subatomic particles from deep space. Without magnetic protection, these particles would strike Earth's atmosphere, eroding the already beleaguered ozone layer (see #5). Also, many creatures navigate by magnetic reckoning. A magnetic reversal might cause serious ecological mischief. One big caveat: "There are no identifiable fossil effects from previous flips," says Sten Odenwald of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. "This is most curious." Still, a disaster that kills a quarter of the population, like the Black Plague in Europe, would hardly register as a blip in fossil records.

7. Flood-basalt volcanism

In 1783, the Laki volcano in Iceland erupted, spitting out three cubic miles of lava. Floods, ash, and fumes wiped out 9,000 people and 80 percent of the livestock. The ensuing starvation killed a quarter of Iceland's population. Atmospheric dust caused winter temperatures to plunge by 9 degrees in the newly independent United States. And that was just a baby's burp compared with what the Earth can do. Sixty-five million years ago, a plume of hot rock from the mantle burst through the crust in what is now India. Eruptions raged century after century, ultimately unleashing a quarter-million cubic miles of lava- the Laki eruption 100,000 times over. Some scientists still blame the Indian outburst, not an asteroid, for the death of the dinosaurs. An earlier, even larger event in Siberia occurred just about the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, the most thorough extermination known to paleontology. At that time 95 percent of all species were wiped out.

Sulfurous volcanic gases produce acid rains. Chlorine-bearing compounds present yet another threat to the fragile ozone layer- a noxious brew all around. While they are causing short-term destruction, volcanoes also release carbon dioxide that yields long-term greenhouse-effect warming.The last big pulse of flood-basalt volcanism built the Columbia River plateau about 17 million years ago. We're ripe for another.

8. Global epidemics

If Earth doesn't do us in, our fellow organisms might be up to the task. Germs and people have always coexisted, but occasionally the balance gets out of whack. The Black Plague killed one European in four during the 14th century; influenza took at least 20 million lives between 1918 and 1919; the AIDS epidemic has produced a similar death toll and is still going strong. From 1980 to 1992, reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mortality from infectious disease in the United States rose 58 percent. Old diseases such as cholera and measles have developed new resistance to antibiotics. Intensive agriculture and land development is bringing humans closer to animal pathogens. International travel means diseases can spread faster than ever. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert who recently left the Minnesota Department of Health, described the situation as "like trying to swim against the current of a raging river." The grimmest possibility would be the emergence of a strain that spreads so fast we are caught off guard or that resists all chemical means of control, perhaps as a result of our stirring of the ecological pot. About 12,000 years ago, a sudden wave of mammal extinctions swept through the Americas. Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History argues the culprit was extremely virulent disease, which humans helped transport as they migrated into the New World.

Human-Triggered Disasters

9. Global warming

The Earth is getting warmer, and scientists mostly agree that humans bear some blame. It's easy to see how global warming could flood cities and ruin harvests. More recently, researchers like Paul Epstein of Harvard Medical School have raised the alarm that a balmier planet could also assist the spread of infectious disease by providing a more suitable climate for parasites and spreading the range of tropical pathogens (see #8). That could include crop diseases which, combined with substantial climate shifts, might cause famine. Effects could be even more dramatic. At present, atmospheric gases trap enough heat close to the surface to keep things comfortable. Increase the global temperature a bit, however, and there could be a bad feedback effect, with water evaporating faster, freeing water vapor (a potent greenhouse gas), which traps more heat, which drives carbon dioxide from the rocks, which drives temperatures still higher. Earth could end up much like Venus, where the high on a typical day is 900 degrees Fahrenheit. It would probably take a lot of warming to initiate such a runaway greenhouse effect, but scientists have no clue where exactly the tipping point lies.

10. Ecosystem collapse

Images of slaughtered elephants and burning rain forests capture people's attention, but the big problem- the overall loss of biodiversity- is a lot less visible and a lot more serious. Billions of years of evolution have produced a world in which every organism's welfare is intertwined with that of countless other species. A recent study of Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior offers an example. Snowy winters encourage wolves to hunt in larger packs, so they kill more moose. The decline in moose population allows more balsam fir saplings to live. The fir trees pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, which in turn influences the climate. It's all connected. To meet the demands of the growing population, we are clearing land for housing and agriculture, replacing diverse wild plants with just a few varieties of crops, transporting plants and animals, and introducing new chemicals into the environment. At least 30,000 species vanish every year from human activity, which means we are living in the midst of one of the greatest mass extinctions in Earth's history. Stephen Kellert, a social ecologist at Yale University, sees a number of ways people might upset the delicate checks and balances in the global ecology. New patterns of disease might emerge (see #8), he says, or pollinating insects might become extinct, leading to widespread crop failure. Or as with the wolves of Isle Royale, the consequences might be something we'd never think of, until it's too late.

11. Biotech disaster

While we are extinguishing natural species, we're also creating new ones through genetic engineering. Genetically modified crops can be hardier, tastier, and more nutritious. Engineered microbes might ease our health problems. And gene therapy offers an elusive promise of fixing fundamental defects in our DNA. Then there are the possible downsides. Although there is no evidence indicating genetically modified foods are unsafe, there are signs that the genes from modified plants can leak out and find their way into other species. Engineered crops might also foster insecticide resistance. Longtime skeptics like Jeremy Rifkin worry that the resulting superweeds and superpests could further destabilize the stressed global ecosystem (see #9). Altered microbes might prove to be unexpectedly difficult to control. Scariest of all is the possibility of the deliberate misuse of biotechnology. A terrorist group or rogue nation might decide that anthrax isn't nasty enough and then try to put together, say, an airborne version of the Ebola virus. Now there's a showstopper.

12. Particle accelerator mishap

Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, raved that a particle accelerator experiment could set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world. Surprisingly, many sober-minded physicists have had the same thought. Normally their anxieties come up during private meetings, amidst much scribbling on the backs of used envelopes. Recently the question went public when London's Sunday Times reported that the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) on Long Island, New York, might create a subatomic black hole that would slowly nibble away our planet. Alternately, it might create exotic bits of altered matter, called strangelets, that would obliterate whatever ordinary matter they met. To assuage RHIC's jittery neighbors, the lab's director convened a panel that rejected both scenarios as pretty much impossible. Just for good measure, the panel also dismissed the possibility that RHIC would trigger a phase transition in the cosmic vacuum energy (see #3). These kinds of reassurances follow the tradition of the 1942 "LA-602" report, a once-classified document that explained why the detonation of the first atomic bomb almost surely would not set the atmosphere on fire. The RHIC physicists did not, however, reject the fundamental possibility of the disasters. They argued that their machine isn't nearly powerful enough to make a black hole or destabilize the vacuum. Oh, well. We can always build a bigger accelerator.

13. Nanotechnology disaster

Before you've even gotten the keyboard dirty, your home computer is obsolete, largely because of incredibly rapid progress in miniaturizing circuits on silicon chips. Engineers are using the same technology to build crude, atomic-scale machines, inventing a new field as they go called nanotechnology. Within a few decades, maybe sooner, it should be possible to build microscopic robots that can assemble and replicate themselves. They might perform surgery from inside a patient, build any desired product from simple raw materials, or explore other worlds. All well and good if the technology works as intended. Then again, consider what K. Eric Drexler of the Foresight Institute calls the "grey goo problem" in his book Engines of Creation, a cult favorite among the nanotech set. After an industrial accident, he writes, bacteria-sized machines, "could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days." And Drexler is actually a strong proponent of the technology. More pessimistic souls, such as Bill Joy, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, envision nano-machines as the perfect precision military or terrorist tools.

14. Environmental toxins

From Donora, Pennsylvania, to Bhopal, India, modern history abounds with frightening examples of the dangers of industrial pollutants. But the poisoning continues. In major cities around the world, the air is thick with diesel particulates, which the National Institutes of Health now considers a carcinogen. Heavy metals from industrial smokestacks circle the globe, even settling in the pristine snows of Antarctica. Intensive use of pesticides in farming guarantees runoff into rivers and lakes. In high doses, dioxins can disrupt fetal development and impair reproductive function- and dioxins are everywhere. Your house may contain polyvinyl chloride pipes, wallpaper, and siding, which belch dioxins if they catch fire or are incinerated. There are also the unknown risks to think about. Every year NIH adds to its list of cancer-causing substances- the number is up to 218. Theo Colburn of the World Wildlife Fund argues that dioxins and other, similar chlorine-bearing compounds mimic the effects of human hormones well enough that they could seriously reduce fertility. Many other scientists dispute her evidence, but if she's right, our chemical garbage could ultimately threaten our survival.

Willful Self-Destruction

15. Global war

Together, the United States and Russia still have almost 19,000 active nuclear warheads. Nuclear war seems unlikely today, but a dozen years ago the demise of the Soviet Union also seemed rather unlikely. Political situations evolve; the bombs remain deadly. There is also the possibility of an accidental nuclear exchange. And a ballistic missile defense system, given current technology, will catch only a handful of stray missiles- assuming it works at all. Other types of weaponry could have global effects as well. Japan began experimenting with biological weapons after World War I, and both the United States and the Soviet Union experimented with killer germs during the cold war. Compared with atomic bombs, bioweapons are cheap, simple to produce, and easy to conceal. They are also hard to control, although that unpredictability could appeal to a terrorist organization. John Leslie, a philosopher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, points out that genetic engineering might permit the creation of "ethnic" biological weapons that are tailored to attack primarily one ethnic group (see #11).

16. Robots take over

People create smart robots, which turn against us and take over the world. Yawn. We've seen this in movies, TV, and comic books for decades. After all these years, look around and still- no smart robots. Yet Hans Moravec, one of the founders of the robotics department of Carnegie Mellon University, remains a believer. By 2040, he predicts, machines will match human intelligence, and perhaps human consciousness. Then they'll get even better. He envisions an eventual symbiotic relationship between human and machine, with the two merging into "postbiologicals" capable of vastly expanding their intellectual power. Marvin Minsky, an artificial-intelligence expert at MIT, foresees a similar future: People will download their brains into computer-enhanced mechanical surrogates and log into nearly boundless files of information and experience. Whether this counts as the end of humanity or the next stage in evolution depends on your point of view. Minsky's vision might sound vaguely familiar. After the first virtual-reality machines hit the marketplace around 1989, feverish journalists hailed them as electronic LSD, trippy illusion machines that might entice the user in and then never let him out. Sociologists fretted that our culture, maybe even our species, would whither away. When the actual experience of virtual reality turned out to be more like trying to play Pac-Man with a bowling ball taped to your head, the talk died down. To his credit, Minsky recognizes that the merger of human and machine lies quite a few years away.

17. Mass insanity

While physical health has improved in most parts of the world over the past century, mental health is getting worse. The World Health Organization estimates that 500 million people around the world suffer from a psychological disorder. By 2020, depression will likely be the second leading cause of death and lost productivity, right behind cardiovascular disease. Increasing human life spans may actually intensify the problem, because people have more years to experience the loneliness and infirmity of old age. Americans over 65 already are disproportionately likely to commit suicide. Gregory Stock, a biophysicist at the University of California at Los Angeles, believes medical science will soon allow people to live to be 200 or older. If such an extended life span becomes common, it will pose unfathomable social and psychological challenges. Perhaps 200 years of accumulated sensations will overload the human brain, leading to a new kind of insanity or fostering the spread of doomsday cults, determined to reclaim life's endpoint. Perhaps the current trends of depression and suicide among the elderly will continue. One possible solution- promoting a certain kind of mental well-being with psychoactive drugs such as Prozac- heads into uncharted waters. Researchers have no good data on the long-term effects of taking these medicines.

A Greater Force Is Directed Against Us

18. Alien invasion

At the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, a cadre of dedicated scientists sifts through radio static in search of a telltale signal from an alien civilization. So far, nothing. Now suppose the long-sought message arrives. Not only do the aliens exist, they are about to stop by for a visit. And then . . . any science-fiction devotee can tell you what could go wrong. But the history of human exploration and exploitation suggests the most likely danger is not direct conflict. Aliens might want resources from our solar system (Earth's oceans, perhaps, full of hydrogen for refilling a fusion-powered spacecraft) and swat us aside if we get in the way, as we might dismiss mosquitoes or beetles stirred up by the logging of a rain forest. Aliens might unwittingly import pests with a taste for human flesh, much as Dutch colonists reaching Mauritius brought cats, rats, and pigs that quickly did away with the dodo. Or aliens might accidentally upset our planet or solar system while carrying out some grandiose interstellar construction project. The late physicist Gerard O'Neill speculated that contact with extraterrestrial visitors could also be socially disastrous. "Advanced western civilization has had a destructive effect on all primitive civilizations it has come in contact with, even in those cases where every attempt was made to protect and guard the primitive civilization," he said in a 1979 interview. "I don't see any reason why the same thing would not happen to us."

19. Divine intervention

Judaism has the Book of Daniel; Christianity has the Book of Revelation; Islam has the coming of the Mahdi; Zoroastrianism has the countdown to the arrival of the third son of Zoroaster. The stories and their interpretations vary widely, but the underlying concept is similar: God intervenes in the world, bringing history to an end and ushering in a new moral order. Apocalyptic thinking runs at least back to Egyptian mythology and right up to Heaven's Gate and Y2K mania. More worrisome, to the nonbelievers at least, are the doomsday cults that prefer to take holy retribution into their own hands. In 1995, members of the Aum Shinri Kyo sect unleashed sarin nerve gas in a Tokyo subway station, killing 12 people and injuring more than 5,000. Had things gone as intended, the death toll would have been hundreds of times greater. A more determined group armed with a more lethal weapon- nuclear, biological, nanotechnological even- could have done far more damage.

20. Someone wakes up and realizes it was all a dream

Are we living a shadow existence that only fools us into thinking it is real? This age-old philosophical question still reverberates through cultural thought, from the writings of William S. Burrows to the cinematic mind games of The Matrix. Hut of the Institute of Advanced Studies sees an analogy to the danger of the collapse of the vacuum. Just as our empty space might not be the true, most stable form of the vacuum, what we call reality might not be the true, most stable form of existence. In the fourth century B.C., Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu framed the question in more poetic terms. He described a vivid dream. In it, he was a butterfly who had no awareness of his existence as a person. When he awoke, he asked: "Was I before Chuang Tzu who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being Chuang Tzu?" - with additional research by Diane Martindale

RELATED WEB SITES:

The folks at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists maintain the famed "Doomsday Clock at http://www.bullatomsci.org/clock.html

via: transhumantech@egroups.com

Mr_Cheeze

January 29th, 2009, 02:27 PM

Great article. I love positivism.

Slider

January 29th, 2009, 03:04 PM

January 29th, 2009, 03:56 PM

gettin all philosofakill are ya

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one. ~H.L. Mencken

Slappy

January 29th, 2009, 05:39 PM

Frozen toilet water falling from a plane is bigger concern of mine than global warming, as I probably stand an enormously greater chance of dying from it.

Mr_Cheeze

January 29th, 2009, 08:38 PM

Slider

January 30th, 2009, 07:35 AM

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/28/nasa_climate_theon/

He seems to be ignoring the large body of empirical evidence, independent of the models, that indicates we are warming and that it is tied to CO2. Ice core sampling is a major one that uses no modelling at all.

Slider

MTBME

January 30th, 2009, 09:55 AM

Frozen toilet water falling from a plane is bigger concern of mine than global warming,

Another reason to wear a helmet.

MTBME

January 30th, 2009, 10:21 AM

If you cross the street, you could get killed by frozen toilet water falling from a plane, stray bullets, a sudden tornado, and emphysema. Does that mean you ignore the tractor trailer that just ran the red light?

Slider

That's not a tractor trailer that's a fire engine that lost its brakes. But we won't have the money to fix that because the entire system from top to bottom has gone well off the track. You would think in times like these somebody asking for money for global warming studies would be asked to get in the back of the line. But not this administration. Check out the not so fine print in the latest bailout/stimulus/tuck_it_to_the_taxpayer package. $200 million to refurbish the National Mall, $500 million for arts, $400 million for a new Social Security Administration computer system, 198 million for Philapino Veterans, 335 million for STD prevention, hundreds of millions for groups like ACORN. Where's the job creation? Change you can believe in?

Slider

February 1st, 2009, 10:23 AM

catbbq

February 4th, 2009, 09:01 AM

Wrong thread for this discussion, but I don't see any tucking in your list. Ever seen the Mall? The place is an embarrassment to us all, and money spent there is clearly benefitting the taxpayer. Arts, that's chump change. SSA computer - you really don't see value there? I don't know anything about the veterans, so were they screwed in the past? Needy now, maybe? ACORN has done a lot of roots level things that help us all. Can't see any downside there.

But move this if you want to take deeper, OK? Needs its own thread.

Slider

The latest bailout is supposed to be provide stimulus, not a handout. So how many sustainable jobs does refurbishing the mall generate?

And working in IT, I know there is no way a computer system can realistically be $400,000,000. If the government would simplify things (they never do) it is probably more like $10 million at the most. Otherwise, they are building in obsolescence.

Slappy

February 4th, 2009, 09:19 AM

Acorn didn't do **** for me.

Slider

February 4th, 2009, 09:32 AM

The latest bailout is supposed to be provide stimulus, not a handout. So how many sustainable jobs does refurbishing the mall generate?

And working in IT, I know there is no way a computer system can realistically be $400,000,000. If the government would simplify things (they never do) it is probably more like $10 million at the most. Otherwise, they are building in obsolescence.

I'd say that at least part of the inspiration was the New Deal, the TVA, etc. Lots of the trails and huts in MA state parks owe their existence to post Depression government work projects. Ever use any of those?

I work in IT, too. I'd guess they plan to virtualize servers and destops. With 62K employees as of 2007, you'd be talking $100mil or so for thin clients and the project to attach them to the virtual servers. On the server side, it goes up from there. I don't need to tell you the upside once that project is complete.

Slider

Slider

February 4th, 2009, 09:34 AM

Acorn didn't do **** for me.

Sure they did, if you are in favor of democracy. They brought lots of people to the voter rolls, for many of the past elections.

Slider

kernel crash

February 4th, 2009, 12:27 PM

And once again the alarmist are fudging the data...

"Professor Eric Steig last month announced in Nature that he’d spotted a warming in West Antarctica that previous researchers had missed through slackness - a warming so strong that it more than made up for the cooling in East Antarctica. The paper was immediately greeted with suspicion, not least because one of the authors was Michael Mann of the infamous “hockey stick”, now discredited, and the data was reconstructed from very sketchy weather station records, combined with assumptions from satellite observations.

But Steve McIntyre, who did most to expose Mann’s “hockey stick”, now notices a far more embarrassing problem with Steig’s paper. What they’d done was to ignore data from four West Antarctic automatic weather stations in particular that didn’t meet their quality control. As you can see above, one shows no warming, two show insignificant warming and fourth - from a station dubbed “Harry” shows a sharp jump in temperature that helped Steig and his team discover their warming Antarctic. Harry in fact is a problematic site that was buried in snow for years and then re-sited in 2005. But, worse, the data that Steig used in his modelling which he claimed came from Harry was actually old data from another station on the Ross Ice Shelf known as Gill with new data from Harry added to it, producing the abrupt warming. The data is worthless. Or as McIntyre puts it: Considered by itself, Gill has a slightly negative trend from 1987 to 2002. The big trend in “New Harry” arises entirely from the impact of splicing the two data sets together. It’s a mess."

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/going_cold_on_antarctic_warming#48360

“Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” (Al Gore May 9, 2006 Grist interview)

http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/05/09/roberts/

Slappy

February 4th, 2009, 01:19 PM

Sure they did, if you are in favor of democracy. They brought lots of people to the voter rolls, for many of the past elections.

Slider

Paying someone to drag the apethetic within narrowly targeted sections of society to the polls isn't appropriate use of tax money in any case as far as I'm concerned. And cutting them a check right now sure as hell isn't any sort of economic stimulus, more along the lines of a kickback I figure.

Slider

February 4th, 2009, 01:40 PM

ACORN focused on the underserved and poor. It is a focus on the wealthy that got us into the mess we now face. Handing money to Halliburton or broadening participation in democracy - I think the choice is pretty clear.

Any money that goes to the lower end of the economy gets spent, then reaches the business owners. It's a far better way to stimulate the economy than handouts to corporations.

Slider

Slappy

February 4th, 2009, 03:48 PM

I don't think we should be focusing on either the 'rich' or the 'poor'. How about we just leave more of people's own money in their (our) hands and let them (us) decide ourselves how to spend it? **** ACORN and **** the Big Three and **** the banks and **** pet projects. One year worth of federal income taxes collected works out to about the same trillion dollars they're looking to print and spend with this current plan. It's ********. You want to really stimulate the economy? Leave that trillion in the hands of those that earned it in the first place. Then you and the rest of the egalitarians can take as much of of your own income as you want and split it between ACORN and the fund to reseed some lawn hundreds of miles away if that's where you think it'll do the most good, and I'll go ahead and spread some wealth among the local roofers, painters and brewers. The idea that THE GOVERNMENT is the answer to everything is un-American as far as I'm concerned.

February 4th, 2009, 06:08 PM

The "bailout" as i see it.....

Slider

February 4th, 2009, 06:41 PM

Mr_Cheeze

February 4th, 2009, 06:57 PM

ACORN focused on the underserved and poor.

Slider

Oh, you mean, Democrat votes. Yea, Sure, that's a fair use of taxpayer money.

Mr_Cheeze

February 4th, 2009, 07:02 PM

We would all be unemployed very soon without government help. No one to buy the products, no companies to produce them, and no tax money for the services that we clearly need, like the creation of roads. We'd be talking anarchy, but maybe that's what you want. It does have its attractions, but I'm too old to fight for meals.

Slider

One could easily argue the exact opposite. Government is too big, costs too much, has no business sticking it's nose in social agendas. Fair taxation could easily provide us with the services that we clearly need, like a standing army and roads and bridges, at a mere percentage of what is presently taken from our paychecks. Space and science and social programs should all be privatized.

Slider

February 4th, 2009, 07:17 PM

Oh, you mean, Democrat votes. Yea, Sure, that's a fair use of taxpayer money.

If the poor happen to vote Democratic, so what? You think they should be prevented from voting?

Righties are rarely in favor of Democracy.

Slider

Slider

February 4th, 2009, 07:19 PM

One could easily argue the exact opposite. Government is too big, costs too much, has no business sticking it's nose in social agendas. Fair taxation could easily provide us with the services that we clearly need, like a standing army and roads and bridges, at a mere percentage of what is presently taken from our paychecks. Space and science and social programs should all be privatized.

So what gets us revved up while you wait for this magical effect to take place?

Slider

catbbq

February 5th, 2009, 06:54 AM

I'd say that at least part of the inspiration was the New Deal, the TVA, etc. Lots of the trails and huts in MA state parks owe their existence to post Depression government work projects. Ever use any of those?

Slider

Never got paid to use them. So if I am out of a job, at least I have some place to go to start my drug habit.

Slider

February 5th, 2009, 07:41 AM

You don't get paid to use them, but work crews did get paid to make them, then moved on and made others. Permanent jobs, at least until they weren't needed any more.

Slider

Mr_Cheeze

February 5th, 2009, 07:49 AM

So what gets us revved up while you wait for this magical effect to take place?

Slider

Nothing magic about the fair tax principle. The issue is with people, like you, who believe that there is never enough government, that the fed should have their paws on every facet of American life, and that we, as taxpayers, should just bend over and take it. If government was scaled back, the only serious unemployment that would take effect would be government jobs, obviously. With business free of constraints, they can and would pick up the slack. But which it won't be. I can be realistic. Not a one person from either party has the cajones to forward a real fair tax agenda. Especially when you have Democrats acting like drug pushers telling us that we simply cannot do without big government.

FDR was a curse, not a savior.

GeepNutt

February 5th, 2009, 10:04 AM

Nothing magic about the fair tax principle. The issue is with people, like you, who believe that there is never enough government, that the fed should have their paws on every facet of American life, and that we, as taxpayers, should just bend over and take it. If government was scaled back, the only serious unemployment that would take effect would be government jobs, obviously. With business free of constraints, they can and would pick up the slack. But which it won't be. I can be realistic. Not a one person from either party has the cajones to forward a real fair tax agenda. Especially when you have Democrats acting like drug pushers telling us that we simply cannot do without big government.

FDR was a curse, not a savior.

+1

Slappy

February 5th, 2009, 10:30 AM

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/05/miron.libertarian.stimulus/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/05/miron.libertarian.stimulus/index.html)

kernel crash

February 5th, 2009, 10:47 AM

Permanent jobs, at least until they weren't needed any more.

Slider

Here's my idea of permanent jobs. Lets start fast tracking the construction of nuclear reactors tomorrow. You would create many REAL jobs now and later when you need to staff the reactors with good high tech high paying jobs. The electricity generated would be clean and would reduce dependency on foreign oil going forward. What a no brainer. Think Obama will pick up on it? No. Again a no brainer. He can't turn against the environmentalist that helped get him elected. End of story. A real solution that won't see the light of day. Let them eat pork is the chant out of Washington.

Mr_Cheeze

February 6th, 2009, 07:52 AM

I agree with you 100%, but it's funny how you don't hear much talk about a nuclear option these days when one of the most prevalent themes in politics is how to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. The solution has always been right in front of us.

Slider

February 6th, 2009, 07:59 AM

Sure, lots of jobs. Health care for the immense post-disaster scenario and environmental remediation for the sites left behind.

Slider

Slider

February 6th, 2009, 08:02 AM

FDR was a curse, not a savior.

You'd be saying otherwise if you were mired in the last Depression.

Slider

kernel crash

February 6th, 2009, 09:37 AM

Sure, lots of jobs. Health care for the immense post-disaster scenario and environmental remediation for the sites left behind.

Slider

Well there you go. Yet you'll be the first once bitching about global warming. I'm willing to bet we have a better chance of coming up with real solutions to nuclear waste processing than we do on solving our energy needs with windmills and solar panels.

By the way Slider, remember when Paulsen was telling us about a doomsday scenario if we don't unload billions of taxpayers dollars on the banks RIGHT NOW. Tomorrow will be too late. Don't read the fine print. We know what were doing. You were firmly behind that effort I remember. Now we hear that the government overpaid for those bank assets to the tune of 78 BILLION DOLLARS!!! Looks like the critics were right. And now I bet your firmly behind Obamas latest raid on the treasury.

"Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the bailout funds, told the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday that Treasury in 2008 paid $254 billion and received assets worth about $176 billion."

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090205/D965L5QG6.html

Slappy

February 6th, 2009, 11:12 AM

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/06/romney.stimulus/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

"Stimulate the economy, not the government"

What is it that's defined by doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?

kernel crash

February 6th, 2009, 12:28 PM

Say what you will about Romney, and I know he has his detractors, but right about now doesn't he sound like the only out there making any sense at all. One has to wonder if McCain had picked Romney instead of Palin.

This guy also makes some very good points exposing Obama as an empty suit way over his head.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/05/AR2009020502766_pf.html

February 6th, 2009, 01:07 PM

"What is it that's defined by doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?"

Good old Albert, he knew INSANITY when he saw it. Also said...

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."

Slider

February 6th, 2009, 03:36 PM

I think the long term solutions involve small. I think that growth-based economies are the underlying cause for pretty much any ill that you can cite. I don't think that more energy is the answer, but more efficient use of what we have, and less impact from what we generate.

Having said that, I think we need to get there stepwise. I don't want fewer people as a result of starvation, for example.

The right solution, in my opinon, involves taking advantage of what we have in front of us, the chance to fundamentally redesign how our ecomomy is structured. Short term profitability should go the way of the dinosaur. Long term, intelligent use of resources, and carefully structured growth should be what we target. The challenge is to structure things that so businesses can still target profitability, but are penalized for waste.

Slider

kernel crash

February 6th, 2009, 11:53 PM

Short term profitability should go the way of the dinosaur. Long term, intelligent use of resources, and carefully structured growth should be what we target.
Slider

And who decides that. Obama. Sounds like you want the government to control all phases of the economy. Ya that will work.

Mr_Cheeze

February 7th, 2009, 07:35 AM

Penalized for waste... right. Tell you what. When the government can stop it's own wasteful spending... much of which is in this "stimulus package"... when that happens then maybe they can penalize businesses for waste.

So tell me, how is revitalizing the National Mall going to stimulate the economy again?

Oh... and this (http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/02/07/faulting_perks_congress_keeps_some_of_its_own/) is necessary, right?

Slider

February 7th, 2009, 09:46 AM

And who decides that. Obama. Sounds like you want the government to control all phases of the economy. Ya that will work.

Yeah, we should leave that to the bankers and auto manufacturers. I think the real estate industry ought to get a vote, too.

Slider

Slider

February 7th, 2009, 09:49 AM

Slappy

February 9th, 2009, 02:11 PM

Remember when Chong went into business selling weed to himself?
Sounds like the 'stimulus' plan in a nutshell.

"I'm my own best customer, man"

:D

It's that kind of grasp of mathematics that allows us to lose 500 million jobs a month.

Unbreakable

February 12th, 2009, 11:47 PM

Their cause is just.

errollthin

February 13th, 2009, 06:41 PM

hogboy

February 19th, 2009, 10:19 AM

this whole argument is stupid, as I have been saying all along. it is dictated by the sun, not human activity
-----------------------------

"The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has been at the forefront of predicting doom in the arctic as ice melts due to global warming. In May, 2008 they went so far as to predict that the North Pole would be ice-free during the 2008 'melt season,' leading to a lively Slashdot discussion. Today, however, they say that they have been the victims of 'sensor drift' that led to an underestimation of Arctic ice extent by as much as 500,000 square kilometers. The problem was discovered after they received emails from puzzled readers, asking why obviously sea-ice-covered regions were showing up as ice free open ocean. It turns out that the NSIDC relys on an older, less-reliable method of tracking sea ice extent called SSM/I that does not agree with a newer method called AMSR-E. So why doesn't NSIDC use the newer AMSR-E data? 'We do not use AMSR-E data in our analysis because it is not consistent with our historical data.' Turns out that the AMSR-E data only goes back to 2002, which is probably not long enough for the NSIDC to make sweeping conclusions about melting. The AMSR-E data is updated daily and is available to the public. Thus far, sea ice extent in 2009 is tracking ahead of 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, so the predictions of an ice-free north pole might be premature."

Slider

February 19th, 2009, 01:53 PM

You are mixing two concepts here. Your text talks about the cause of warming, but your citation talks about the extent. You do agree that warming is happening, right?

Slider

Slappy

February 19th, 2009, 04:56 PM

You are mixing two concepts here. Your text talks about the cause of warming, but your citation talks about the extent. You do agree that warming is happening, right?

Slider

Well obviously. What else could explain the unprecedented Arctic ice melt?

hogboy

February 19th, 2009, 05:16 PM

Well obviously. What else could explain the unprecedented Arctic ice melt?

in the last 10 years, it is warmer than the previous 50 years. we are still on the 'warm-side' but for the last 5 years earth has been cooling not warming.

and arctic ice is recovering, not shrinking.

and gee whiz........... re-examination of the data, and pulling out the BS, shows it exactly matches solar activity.

the earth will warm and the earth will cool on it's own regardless of what we do. it makes no sense to try and combat
or control these swings. it makes more sense to plan on what to do when and if:

ocean currents change
ocean depth changes

fighting it, is useless. because we could exhaust all the worlds finances controlling carbon and greenhouse gas output
and think well howdy we are doing our good part, and then the sun changes a bit, and we really see a temperature swing
in one or the other direction, essentially making waste of all the effort put in to control it.

all we should control are toxins we create. carbon and methane is going to always be there. in fact methane is 100 times more a green house gas than carbon dioxide (many argue carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas, because the original 50's studies were highly flawed)
anyhow, the earth burps out methane in gigantic amounts all the time. one big methane release can change temps far more than
human activity can.

the only thing that is reasonable and not laughable, is to
plan for the changes, either cold, or warm...because they certainly will happen. and we cannot control any of it. all we can do is deal with what is coming. so have some warm clothing ready.

Slappy

February 19th, 2009, 05:41 PM

I wuz just joshin' youse...

Slider

February 19th, 2009, 08:31 PM

Did you catch the vid from the polar satellite? Ice cap, last 18 years. Kinda self explanatory:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMQ21p93JZc

Slider

catbbq

February 20th, 2009, 07:21 AM

Your video stopped at 2007. It's 2009.

I'll see your 1 and raise you 1.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9F_KsuilNw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEaxeEQ_RFU&NR=1

Slider

February 20th, 2009, 09:19 AM

One year is not a trend. Warming is not uniform all the time. Percentages that start at historic lows are ALWAYS high when short upturns happen, since small portions of small masses can be significant, percentage wise.

Those clips don't come close to the actual polar satellite shots.

Slider

Mr_Cheeze

February 20th, 2009, 02:54 PM

Nevermind any of those clips. The real cause of global warming...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgqpKNN5aSk

Mr_Cheeze

February 20th, 2009, 08:32 PM

How ironic that one YouTube video can cool off a hot thread about global warming.

W4LRU5

February 20th, 2009, 09:25 PM

They've all come to grips with the situation...

Slider

February 27th, 2009, 01:10 PM

Here's a pretty good discussion of recent ice mass changes on both poles. George Will got it all wrong, it seems, if you happen to trust his grasp of the facts.

Slider

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/expers-big-flaw-in-wills-ice-assertions/?hp

Experts: Big Flaw in Will’s Ice Assertions
By Andrew C. Revkin

Andrew C. Revkin/ The New York Times

Sea ice near the North Pole, April 2003. The water is 14,000 feet deep.
The office of former Vice President Al Gore complained about my story on climate exaggeration the other day and now George Will, the other (very different) example in that piece, has weighed in as well with a column, “Climate Science in a Tornado,” defending his accuracy and questioning my competence. I’ll leave the competence judgment to readers. See what he says in the column and comment away below.

On Mr. Will’s defense of his accuracy, particularly on trends in sea ice at both poles as they related to global warming, it’s worth pointing out a few things. I spoke last night with Bill Chapman, the researcher at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who maintains their Cryosphere Today archive of sea-ice data.

He said he felt a little battle-worn from all the inquiries since the original column ran two weeks ago, but maintained that, for what it’s worth, Mr. Will’s statement that “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979,” referring to the university’s data, does not square with the data or updates issued by the school.

The total area of sea ice in both hemispheres, by the ice center’s accounting, was “near or slightly lower than” area observed at a similar time of year in 1979, not equal to it.

But he and a host of other ice experts, in e-mail exchanges and calls over the past week examining Mr. Will’s assertions, noted the irrelevance of this parsing.

Mr. Will’s overarching premise about sea ice and messages it holds related to human-caused climate change, was wrong, they say.

Here is what he wrote: “As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming.”

The flaws? The first is timescale. No single year marks a trend or holds evidence of long-term climate change. In fact, as I wrote in October 2007, the extraordinary retreat of the ice that summer raised as many questions about scientific understanding of sea ice as it answered, but confidence in a long-term retreat in a warming world was unswayed. The slight recovery in 2008 was no different.

The second flaw in that sentence, many experts told me, is geographic scale. (Note that Mr. Will questioned my use of that “many experts” shorthand, but used it himself; down below I’ll later list some of the many experts I’ve consulted on sea ice over the last decade.) The Arctic is the bellwether. Antarctica is a fundamentally different, and more stable, system. Up north, there is an ocean mostly surrounded by continents. Down south there is a largely frigid continent surrounded by ocean.

There are hypotheses for why sea ice around Antarctica might expand in a warming world, but they are beside the point. Arctic trends alone have been one of many focal points for scientists seeking a signal of human influence on the climate (along with the tropics, the stratosphere, etc.).

Mr. Will asserted that “many experts” said the ice retreat in a single year was “evidence of global warming.” In that instance, I’d like to have some names.

From my days camped on the sea ice around the North Pole to my time in the country’s leading labs tracking polar trends with satellites, I’ve not met a single scientist focused on sea ice who would point to a single year’s changes as evidence of anything except the extraordinary complexity and variability up north on year-to-year time scales.

The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (whose reports are conservative by nature), and a range of other assessments all conclude with high confidence that – for better or worse — the long-term Arctic trend for summer sea ice is down, given the projected buildup of greenhouse gases and tendency of the Arctic to amplify warming.

But even with that trend, “many scientists” still caution that sea ice could expand again periodically even as the system heads toward mainly open water in summers later this century under the building long-term influence of the greenhouse blanket.

Here’s some input from one ice specialist, Jennifer Francis at Rutgers University, reacting to Mr. Will’s comparison of current ice with 1979 and other assertions:

Her general point:

This battle never ceases to amaze me. People seem to be much more inclined to believe what they hear from non-experts because it’s what they’d rather hear.

Her reaction to the speed of ice recovery from last summer and the extent of polar ice now:

This is pretty easy to explain. At the end of summer each year, the sea ice refreezes and continues to do so until late spring. Thin ice and open water generate new ice faster than thick ice, as the heat from the ocean below is able to escape more easily to the atmosphere. In the autumns of 2007 and 2008, the rate of ice production was very large because there was so much open water and thin ice — the rapid growth is completely expected.

The other relevant piece of information is that winter ice can only extend so far in the Arctic because the ocean is surrounded almost completely by coast. Once it reaches the coast, it can’t extend any farther. There are only two limited areas where the winter ice edge can vary substantially — the North Atlantic and Bering Sea. In the North Atlantic the ice runs into a branch of the warm Gulf Stream. A significant northward trend (reduction of ice) in the winter-maximum ice edge is apparent, however, and appears to be caused by the gradual warming of sea-surface temperatures in the region (paper available on this if you want it). In the Bering Sea the winter ice edge varies hugely year to year and shows no significant trend.

Dr. Francis’s reaction to Mr. Will’s assertion that many scientists saw the global ice changes in a single year as a sign of global warming:

Yes, I would agree these are both incorrect. The changes in sea ice in the southern hemisphere (small increase) have been attributed to anthropogenic causes, but in a very different way from what’s happening in the Arctic. The Antarctic ice increase is occurring in a limited region near the Ross Sea, and is related to the ozone hole through a fairly complicated change in atmospheric dynamics. See this brief article in Eos Transactions for a comparison: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008EO190001.shtml

Any change in a single year — no matter what the variable — cannot generally be linked to climate change, although the ice losses in 2007 and 2008 would not have happened without the long-term warming and thinning of the ice cover.

The other assertions made by Mr. Will about past faulty ice-age predictions and other climate issues have been addressed at length in many places over the last two weeks. The focus here is inferences from ice.

For more on the distinction between inference and evidence, see “The George Will Affair,” Curtis Brainard’s column in the online edition of the Columbia Journalism Review. I’ll explore the limits of conventional journalism that can sometimes lead to flawed coverage, mine included, anon.

P.S.: In his column defending his climate claims, Mr. Will says a flaw reported in sea-ice data at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., justifies his statements about the Illinois group’s ice trends. Both Mr. Chapman in Illinois and Mark Serreze of the Boulder center reject this. Here’s Dr. Serreze’s view of the incident and that particular assertion:

Regarding the sensor problem, see our latest post where we discuss the issue in detail. The sensor problem on the F15 has no bearing on the Univ. IL numbers, which are based on the earlier F13 satellite (which we have temporarily gone back to). I got a call from George Will’s fact checker regarding his latest piece. I was a bit terse with the gentleman but of course gave him the info he was looking for. My response was something like “Well, I certainly would not want Mr. Will to be speaking from a viewpoint of ignorance.”

Regarding the “global ice at 1980 levels”, here is the canned response we wrote in rebuttal to the astonishingly twisted piece in Daily Tech: What the graph shows is that the global sea ice area for early January 2009 is on the long term average (zero anomaly). The author tries to read some relevance into the fact that the anomaly at the end of 1979 is also about zero. Given that there are many periods throughout the time series with a zero anomaly for the global total, it is puzzling why the end of 1979 was singled out.

Presumably the point is to somehow cast doubt on global warming. However, if so, the author could have instead made an equally silly case for global cooling by contrasting the near zero anomaly of early January 2009 with the strong negative anomalies characterizing the later part of 2008.

The key point is that looking at the global total area is not relevant. All climate models tell us that it is the Arctic sea ice cover that declines first, and that Antarctic ice extent falls only later, and may even (as observed) temporarily increase in response to changing patterns of atmospheric circulation. In other words, events are unfolding pretty much as expected. Finally, the statement that there was “substantial recovery” this year in the Arctic is simply rubbish. Ice extent at the end of the melt season in the Arctic was second lowest on record and ice extent is still (as of early January) well below normal.

Simply put, this article is a masterpiece of cherry picking, misinterpretation and misrepresentation.

Also, I worked very closely with a woman from Slate Magazine, who wrote a pretty decent piece on the issue: http://www.slate.com/id/2210833/

Serreze

kernel crash

February 27th, 2009, 02:17 PM

Pure Bull $hit. Here we are coming off one of the coldest winters on record. Were getting our first January thaw of the season just hours from the beginning of the month of March.

Check out this statement.

"There are hypotheses for why sea ice around Antarctica might expand in a warming world, but they are beside the point. Arctic trends alone have been one of many focal points for scientists seeking a signal of human influence on the climate (along with the tropics, the stratosphere, etc.)."

Besides the point indeed. Translation: When it doesn't fit the model were trying to sell disregard it.

“many scientists still caution that sea ice could expand again periodically even as the system heads toward mainly open water in summers later this century under the building long-term influence of the greenhouse blanket."

Translation: Don't let the record cold winter of 2008/2009 and the increasing ice pack fool you. We are really warming. Really. You got to believe us. We only have a small window of opportunity to get public money for our research before Obama spends it elsewhere. He can't keep this fear level up forever before people get wise.

"At the end of summer each year, the sea ice refreezes and continues to do so until late spring. Thin ice and open water generate new ice faster than thick ice, as the heat from the ocean below is able to escape more easily to the atmosphere."

So warming produces more open water. More open water allows more heat to be released. Yet that in turn causes ice to be produced faster and thicker than usual. So more warming equals more ice. Boy. These guys can't lose can they. Talk about stacking the deck.

You know I actually wish that we were going into a warming trend. I wouldn't mind having North Carolina type weather here in January/February. Less snow, more riding in shorts. Damn. Bring it ON!

Slider

February 27th, 2009, 05:19 PM

Again, you seem to completely miss the point that a year doesn't indicate a trend of anything. All warming models show lots of variability year to year. It can't be stated any more clearly than that.

Slider

Slappy

February 27th, 2009, 05:53 PM

How much time is required to qualify for 'trend' status?

Or is this another one of those things like defining who's 'rich'?

kernel crash

February 27th, 2009, 06:10 PM

Again, you seem to completely miss the point that a year doesn't indicate a trend of anything.
Slider

Actually I agree with that. My point was how "your side" wants to leave out data that doesn't support their argument like the increasing ice in Antarctica.

Slider

February 27th, 2009, 09:37 PM

Um, no. Did you read the story you are criticizing?

I think it is a conservative thing. A dislike for non black/white issues. An inability to understand that things just DON'T ALWAYS HAPPEN LINEARLY. Life is complex. Atmospheric modeling is complex. It can be warm in one place, cold in another, and vary from year to year. Some years are colder than others. Ten effing years with five, six or whatever HOTTEST YEARS ON RECORD is a trend.

Jeez, man. Step outside your dogma. Understand that warming theory isn't based on the George Will approach of glibness couched in ignorance. It is SCIENCE. Redundant experiment. Documented measurement. Peer-group reviewd publications. In place of that, you believe simple minded arguments grounded in complete ignorance of the data.

It is a real shame that idiots like Limbaugh and O'Reilly get to influence voters. Free speech is a mixed bag, and inane arguments from the unqualified are a consequence that we gotta live with.

Slider

kernel crash

February 27th, 2009, 11:12 PM

Um, no. Did you read the story you are criticizing?
Ten effing years with five, six or whatever HOTTEST YEARS ON RECORD is a trend.

Jeez, man. Step outside your dogma. It is a real shame that idiots like Limbaugh and O'Reilly get to influence voters. Free speech is a mixed bag, and inane arguments from the unqualified are a consequence that we gotta live with.

Slider

Actually its not a trend. You would need to step 50 years into the future to be able to look back and see if its a trend. It could just as well be an anormaly of some kind. No dogma here at all. Not buying it. People selling it have credibility issues with me. You think if you silenced Limbaugh and O'Reilly the opposition would disappear? Not in 100 years. There's too many of us with common sense thank God. By the way, O'Reilly leans in the same twisted direction you do on global warming. So find another boogeyman.

Mr_Cheeze

February 28th, 2009, 07:54 AM

Yes, thank you. You can't. on one hand, criticize someone for citing a year of cold or warm weather and on the other hand cite 10 years. In the big picture there is virtually no difference between the two. All of this science, on both sides, is far too politically charged, for the left as well as the right. I've seen plenty of "facts", much of whioch has had plenty of "peer review" which makes good arguments in either case. The premise? Knowbody f**king knows shite! This is all conjecture. All a guessing game. Is out future at stake? Not our own.. but our children? Not even them. Get back to me in a thousand years. That is, if the return of the Messiah and armageddon doesn't interfere along the way.

Slider

February 28th, 2009, 09:37 AM

Slider

February 28th, 2009, 10:19 AM

Actually its not a trend. You would need to step 50 years into the future to be able to look back and see if its a trend. It could just as well be an anormaly of some kind. No dogma here at all. Not buying it. People selling it have credibility issues with me. You think if you silenced Limbaugh and O'Reilly the opposition would disappear? Not in 100 years. There's too many of us with common sense thank God. By the way, O'Reilly leans in the same twisted direction you do on global warming. So find another boogeyman.

I heard O'Reilly on the topic once, something about how hot it was that day, so warming must be real. More your line of reasoning than mine.

Slider

Mr_Cheeze

February 28th, 2009, 07:38 PM

The ten years are just the cap of a process that started roughly the same time as the burning of fossil fuels. The last ten years ARE an upward trend of the same longer process.

We can go back to the ice age if you want. The same science that explained it to us is what is defining the current warming trend.

Slider

The last ten years are .0000000001% of the time period. You call that a trend? No more so than a year. And a hundred years is hardly a significant sample size. Again, get back to me in the future. Look into cryogenics.

Slider

February 28th, 2009, 10:18 PM

All that matters for you and me is the next 40 years or so, and the forecast isn't for skiing in Arizona.

Slider

hogboy

March 5th, 2009, 05:06 PM

I lost 40 IQ points by reading, and participating in this thread, doncha know....

FriedRys

March 5th, 2009, 11:29 PM

All that matters for you and me is the next 40 years or so, and the forecast isn't for skiing in Arizona.

Slider You do know that there are ski areas in Arizona, don't you?

Slider

March 6th, 2009, 10:31 AM

There won't be, soon.

Slider

hogboy

March 6th, 2009, 10:46 AM

Slider

March 6th, 2009, 12:09 PM

You'll be flatlining soon.

Slider

hogboy

March 6th, 2009, 12:40 PM

You'll be flatlining soon.

Slider

42

yeah, I reckon at this rate I can lose 120 more before the year is done

Mr_Cheeze

March 6th, 2009, 03:23 PM

Try sniffing glue. Great for the environment and brain cells.