Who is Right?

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Who is right?

Two authors, both with scientific backgrounds, both apparently totally plausible.
Both diametrically opposed.
One ridicules global warming as the product of hysteria and political agendas.
The other ridicules the sceptics.
Both appeared in the same paper on the same day.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24098313-7583,00.html

VESTED interests have hijacked the climate debate, and taken Australia's future hostage. The ransom they demand? Simple agreement or, at the very least, compliance.

Voices of dissent face derision. Legitimate questions are met with ridicule. But with many of the squabbling forces of power in this country now apparently united in their enthusiasm for an emissions trading scheme, it is more important than ever that we go back and examine the basis of their campaigns.

It has been an article of faith for many years that humans are gradually destroying the environment, and are specifically responsible for global warming via man-made carbon emissions. On Monday, The Australian published results of a poll showing 96 per cent of the population believes climate change is wholly or partly caused by humans.

But any detailed scrutiny of scientific data shows that the environment is quite stable. There are even suggestions the world's temperature has decreased in recent years.

From The Australian's Higher Education Supplement:

Roger Jones:

Since the Garnaut review released its findings, climate change deniers have mounted a rearguard action. Their cry is that Ross Garnaut is no scientist and that he uncritically uses discredited science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In fact, the Garnaut review relied on the Australian science community to make its scientific case. And while Garnaut stands by his economics the science community stands by its science, particularly research following on from the IPCC's fourth assessment report, released in 2007.

The research was a key input to the Garnaut review, not least the finding that emissions, greenhouse gases, temperature and sea level rise are tracking the upper limits of projections assessed by the IPCC...

The first argument is that the Earth has not warmed since 1998 and the second is that the models used to project future climate are fatally flawed. My view is that anyone with a higher degree in science who maintains that the Earth stopped warming in 1998 should hand their degree back.

The onbly way to maintain such a position violates the basic principles of statistics: significance, use of appropriate test, causality and independence. Free speech it may be, but scientific speak it is not.



If in sequence, if in a string of thoughts, caught hollow. Separated blokes in particular don't believe a word the government says. It's one of the by-products of an utterly corrupt system where they've watched the lawyers and judges join in the fabulist lying of their exes, when they witness the brutality of the state removing children from their parents, when they witness first hand the lying and lying and lying of the domestic violence industry, when they see first hand the so-called professional psychiatrists, the family report writers, taking vast amounts of money to peddle anti-male anti-father rubbish, and they've seen the politicians sitting on their hands doing nothing while they die premature and unhappy deaths, while their children suffer.

Government corruption is one thing. The insane confabulations of your ex are one thing. To witness the duping of an entire population, that is another. To watch them heading into the darkness assisted not just by the left's pack mentality but by millions of dollars in government advertising, by parroting politicians, that is another. Do we believe? Are we called forth? Are we drowned in hysteria and shallow belief, in darkness, in the callow shallows where the mud fish, the flatheads, live, now that is another.

He was constantly astonished at how shallow the world had become. The other day the outboard advertising companies banned an add for Crikey promoting the CD of their famous breaching of APEC security by a team with one of them dressed as Osama bin Laden. They said it was too political. The billboard declared: The Best Thing To Come Out of Apec. Pretty uncontroversial. A hell of a lot of people would agree. But they banned it. Meanwhile across the city, in the most prominent positions they can find, the words beam down on every single commuter: DO YOU WANT LONGER LASTING SEX. The word SEX must be two metres high.

It's everywhere, visual pollution of the worst kind. You're talking to your kids, like thousands of other parents, desperately trying to ignore the signs. Do you want longer lasting sex, daddy? It's insane. It's typical of the world we have entered. Everything has gone wrong. Everything is upside down. We've become a communist country, he found himself repeatedly declaring. How true it was. While our bloated, over paid over cushioned over resourced smug ruling caste go about their business, smug, uncaring and contemptuous of the masses, the rest of us look on in disbelief.

It's sad, where this country has gone. Nobody questions. Nobody wonders. They never lost money under estimating the intelligence of the general population, the saying goes, and how true those old sayings now appear. He was caught in denial. He wanted to believe. What he most wanted to believe in was the common decency of the common man, that at their heart people were good. That inquiring minds and high culture all led us to a greater, higher, more evolved place. Where we bathed in beauty and admired the creativity of the world's greats. Where genius was on top.

Instead we were drowning in the culture of the lowest common denominator. Of virulent trash and astonishing stupidity, of glamour culture and celebrity obsession. Where we lauded the rich and ignored the poor. Where we bathed in evil and scurried away from originality. Where we welcomed shadows and rarely came up for air. Where conformity was ever more stifling, where the mainstream suppressed originality and free thought in manners worse than he could have ever imagined, the glossing link of media output and individual fear, where the greatest threat was to be different. The pack had taken over. To disagree or even question global warming is to be compared to a holocaust denier or a child molester; it's an insane place we've got to. And nothing will save us; not now. Retreat to the ice age, protect yourself with wealth, build hideaways, store water for the future calamity; that is all that is left, the only sane path out.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/07/the_australians_war_on_science_17.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink

Undaunted by the dismal failure of its war on science, the Australian presses on, with a piece by Dennis Jensen. Oops, that's not the link, this is the link:

It has been an article of faith for many years that humans are gradually destroying the environment, and are specifically responsible for global warming via man-made carbon emissions. On Monday, The Australian published results of a poll showing 96 per cent of the population believes climate change is wholly or partly caused by humans.

Actually it was 80%. It doesn't inspire confidence when the Australian can't even report their own poll correctly.

But any detailed scrutiny of scientific data shows that the environment is quite stable. There are even suggestions the world's temperature has decreased in recent years.

Any real climate change in the past century has been at a glacial pace (that is, the speed of a glacier that is not melting because of the globe's supposedly soaring temperatures). Far greater periods of environmental change have been recorded in history without any human intervention. The Ice Ages, anybody?

I just want to stress that these are two successive paragraphs. I did not have to snip anything to bring them together. Jensen says the environment is "quite stable" and then he brings up the example of the Ice Ages. The Ice Ages seem to be pretty good evidence that the climate system isn't particularly stable.

We laugh today at those who once believed the world to be flat, but see no irony in the widespread acceptance now of equally spurious claims made in the name of science, as in the climate debate.

Yes, Jensen just claimed the scientific consensus on global warming is as spurious as the flat Earth theory. (And it's a myth that scholars believed in a flat Earth during the Dark Ages.)

Example of responses:

Dr Jensen: Good luck with selling your soul to get conservative brownie points in The Australian. I hope that works out well for you.

Jensen is an interesting case study in how philosophical and political beliefs can override technical training and competence. Just goes to prove that a PhD is no guarantee of anything.

A number of influential people in Russia, China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam say the planet is now entering a 30-year cooling period, the second half of a normal cycle driven by cyclical changes in the sun's output and currents in the Pacific Ocean. Their theory leaves true believers in carbon catastrophe livid.

At the wilful stupidity of the authors of such articles. The sun's overall output has not fundamentally changed in at least 30 years, and this lack of change does not correlate with changes in global temps, so how can it possibly be responsible for the global warming trend over that same period?

And did you wonder why the author did not name some of these 'influential people'? Might it be because either a) they do not exist, or b) they are not climate scientists?

Posted by: WotWot | July 29, 2008 10:55 PM

Well, I stand corrected regarding Jensen's PhD topic, but, as an engineer by training (although I've sorta swaped fields now) who spent a few years working in and amongst metalugists, I feel my point still stands. Jensen should know better.

His arguments are more akin to Andrew Bolt or Tim Blair esq grasping at straws rather than something put forward by a knowlegable scientist. The world is moving on, and with the likes of Jensen, Iron-bar, Heffo and Dana "we're aborting ourselves to extinctio" Vale on board, the Libs risk being left behind, or being dragged kicking and screaming into the present.

Posted by: ChrisC | July 30, 2008 1:24 AM

http://www.icecap.us/

ul 29, 2008
Global Warming and the Faith of the Brainwashed

By Nathaniel Shockey, North Star Writers

That global warming has continued to captivate the media, car companies, energy companies and so many more demonstrates how enormously brainwashed Americans are. Still convinced that “the entire global scientific community has a consensus on the question that human beings are responsible for global warming,” like Al Gore purported? Please.

For starters, in November 2005, Swiss researchers from the journal Quaternary Science Reviews overtly stated, “Whatever slight impact humans might have on the climate, it is too small to measure.” Bob Carter, an environmental scientist at James Cook University testified before a U.S. Senate Committee, saying, “Lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 percent).” We’re obviously not causing the type of damage we thought we were.

David Evans, a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005, shared in an article for The Australian that his initial reaction to the theory and buzz of global warming in 1999 was one of excitement, feeling “useful and fairly important; we were saving the planet.” He goes on to explain a few points: “The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics . . . The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

“The satellites that measure the world’s temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year. “None of these points is controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.” I probably have significantly punier scientific knowledge than Al Gore, but it is fairly obvious that Gore’s entire premise for his misleading documentary, that we are causing global warming, is questionable at best, and most likely false.

What is truly upsetting about all of this is not that so many of us were duped. It’s that so many of us are still duped. American companies are still spending huge quantities in order to cater to this fraudulent belief. Instead of actually improving their products in ways that actually enhance efficiency and, hence, the strength of the company and the American economy, they’re catering to the brainwashed.

And in addition to the businesses, we have politicians who are either a) still clinging to empty threats about global warming or b) have seen the holes in the alleged global warming crisis but are too scared to take on the media. Is an alarmist theory that has been all but smothered really worth $6 trillion, which is what the proposed cap-and-trade climate bill is estimated to cost the U.S. by 2050? Does anyone else think this is crazy? It smells a lot like a control issue to me, but who knows? Maybe there are a lot of ill-informed people who are just really concerned . . . and we elected them to represent us.

Feel free to reach your own conclusions about why so many are still convinced of a totally unconvincing theory. But it is imperative that those of us who have learned to question global warming have the courage to say so. Our country can’t afford a government that wastes absurd amounts of taxpayer dollars fighting windmills. For full post go here.


http://www.icecap.us/

Dr. Bob Carter

The Government’s advisory channels are clogged with rent seekers, special pleaders and green activists who have misadvised the minister. CLIMATE Minister Penny Wong published an astonishing green paper in response to what she perceives to be the threat of global warming. The first sentence of the opening section of her paper, entitled “Why we need to act”, contains seven scientific errors - almost one error for every two words. Here is the sentence: “Carbon pollution is causing climate change, resulting in higher temperatures, more droughts, rising sea levels and more extreme weather.”

The statement that human carbon dioxide emissions will cause “more droughts, rising sea levels and more extreme weather” is unbridled nonsense. Such confident predictions are derived from unvalidated, unsuccessful computer models that even their proponents agree cannot predict the future. Complex climate models are in effect sophisticated computer games, and their particular outputs are to a large degree predetermined by programmers’ predelictions. It cannot be overemphasised, therefore, that computer climate projections, or scenarios, are not evidence. Nor are they suitable for environmental or political planning. Moving from virtual reality to real observations and evidence, many of the manifestations of living on a dynamic planet that are cited as evidence for global warming are, at best, circumstantial. The current rates of sea-level change, for example, fall well within the known natural range of past changes. Should we adapt to the rise? Of course. Should we try to “stop climate change”? To moderate, possibly, the expected sea-level rise? Of course not; we might as well try to stop clouds scudding across the sky.

The first sentence of the “Why we need to act” section of the green paper is followed by five further short paragraphs that are similarly riddled with science misrepresentation and error. In essence, the section reads like a policy manual for green climate activists. It represents a parody of our true knowledge of climate change.

Never has a policy document of such importance been released in Australia that is so profoundly out of touch with known facts of the real world. It is a matter for national alarm that the Government’s advisory channels should be clogged with the rent seekers, special pleaders and green activists who have so obviously misadvised Wong on the content of her green paper on climate change. Time for some due diligence, Minister. Read a summary of the other mistatements and outright errors here.

Professor Bob Carter is a geologist who studies ancient environments and their climate, and is a science adviser to the Australian Climate Science Coalition.