[Zark]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/05/10/gulfstream/index.html

Little things like this, the weakening of the gulf stream. Affect larger systems (North Atlantic conveyer). Next thing you know its ice age time.

But hey, all that environment stuff "needs more research", so go burn some more dino-juice and pretend its not happening

 

[Damn True]

Wait wait wait. Global warming is causing a cooling effect?

 

[H8R]

Wait wait wait. Global warming is causing a cooling effect?

I've read the initial effects are extremes in all conditions and temperatures.

Like, PNW: expect even MORE rain.

 

[Killerbarbies]

THE BIG FREEZE
What could happen? Britain and northern Europe get much colder because the Gulf Stream, which provides as much heat as the sun in winter, fails.
How would this come about? Melting polar ice sends fresh water into the North Atlantic. The less salty water fails to generate the underwater current which the Gulf Stream needs.
How likely is it? About evens for a Gulf Steam failure this century, said scientists last week.

If you want, I'll post the whole article. My 14 year old daughter got quite depressed when she read it...

 

[Killerbarbies]

The complete text is in the attachment.

 

[Lexx D]

kinda scary that global warming could cause this. I've been reading stuff about this for years. Global wrming could in t6heory send us unto an ice age. If the ocean dilutes then it can freeze and all of a sudden we have glaciers again

 

[Zark]

Wait wait wait. Global warming is causing a cooling effect?

Yes, Killerbarbie's post explains it briefly. The collapse of the North Atlantic Conveyer (which is driven/drives the gulf stream) has been associated with ice ages.

 

[steve45]

yeah i've heard so much abut this over the last few years, especially since the film the day after tomorrow.
i could only imagine what would happen up here in scotland, everybodies way of life would be changed so dramaticly.

the strange part is that part of me wants it to happen, i dunno, i just think it would be exciting, ive always liked adverse weather conditions, i guess my opinion would change very quickly if it were to happen though.

so you canadian guys, whats winter like over there?

 

[Changleen]

Wait wait wait. Global warming is causing a cooling effect?

Not universally. This gulf stream thing has been hypothosied for a long time. I remember learning about it in secondary school. London is actually on the same latitutde as Moscow, and if the Gulf stream fails or weakens, as well as the disasterous effect on the reproductive and migratory patterns of a **** load of marine life, the UK especially will get a LOT colder.

Remember the other problems global warming will cause before we even get the huge sea level rises:

Massive desertification of places like middle America, Australia, central Africa, crop failures on a massive scale, water shortages, etc. etc. etc.

 

[Damn True]

The call to defer to actual science.

Aliens Cause Global Warming

A lecture by Michael Crichton
Caltech Michelin Lecture
January 17, 2003



My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming. Charting this progression of belief will be my task today.

Let me say at once that I have no desire to discourage anyone from believing in either extraterrestrials or global warming. That would be quite impossible to do. Rather, I want to discuss the history of several widely-publicized beliefs and to point to what I consider an emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science-namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy.

I have a special interest in this because of my own upbringing. I was born in the midst of World War II, and passed my formative years at the height of the Cold War. In school drills, I dutifully crawled under my desk in preparation for a nuclear attack.


It was a time of widespread fear and uncertainty, but even as a child I believed that science represented the best and greatest hope for mankind. Even to a child, the contrast was clear between the world of politics-a world of hate and danger, of irrational beliefs and fears, of mass manipulation and disgraceful blots on human history. In contrast, science held different values-international in scope, forging friendships and working relationships across national boundaries and political systems, encouraging a dispassionate habit of thought, and ultimately leading to fresh knowledge and technology that would benefit all mankind. The world might not be avery good place, but science would make it better. And it did. In my lifetime, science has largely fulfilled its promise. Science has been the great intellectual adventure of our age, and a great hope for our troubled and restless world.

But I did not expect science merely to extend lifespan, feed the hungry, cure disease, and shrink the world with jets and cell phones. I also expected science to banish the evils of human thought---prejudice and superstition, irrational beliefs and false fears. I expected science to be, in Carl Sagan's memorable phrase, "a candle in a demon haunted world." And here, I am not so pleased with the impact of science. Rather than serving as a cleansing force, science has in some instances been seduced by the more ancient lures of politics and publicity. Some of the demons that haunt our world in recent years are invented by scientists. The world has not benefited from permitting these demons to escape free.

But let's look at how it came to pass.

Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation:

N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL

Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live.

This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we're clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be "informed guesses." If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It's simply prejudice.

As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from "billions and billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.

One way to chart the cooling of enthusiasm is to review popular works on the subject. In 1964, at the height of SETI enthusiasm, Walter Sullivan of the NY Times wrote an exciting book about life in the universe entitled WE ARE NOT ALONE. By 1995, when Paul Davis wrote a book on the same subject, he titled it ARE WE ALONE? ( Since 1981, there have in fact been four books titled ARE WE ALONE.) More recently we have seen the rise of the so-called "Rare Earth" theory which suggests that we may, in fact, be all alone. Again, there is no evidence either way.

Back in the sixties, SETI had its critics, although not among astrophysicists and astronomers. The biologists and paleontologists were harshest. George Gaylord Simpson of Harvard sneered that SETI was a "study without a subject," and it remains so to the present day.

But scientists in general have been indulgent toward SETI, viewing it either with bemused tolerance, or with indifference. After all, what's the big deal? It's kind of fun. If people want to look, let them. Only a curmudgeon would speak harshly of SETI. It wasn't worth the bother.

And of course it is true that untestable theories may have heuristic value. Of course extraterrestrials are a good way to teach science to kids. But that does not relieve us of the obligation to see the Drake equation clearly for what it is-pure speculation in quasi-scientific trappings.

The fact that the Drake equation was not greeted with screams of outrage-similar to the screams of outrage that greet each Creationist new claim, for example-meant that now there was a crack in the door, a loosening of the definition of what constituted legitimate scientific procedure. And soon enough, pernicious garbage began to squeeze through the cracks.

Now let's jump ahead a decade to the 1970s, and Nuclear Winter.

In 1975, the National Academy of Sciences reported on "Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear Weapons Detonations" but the report estimated the effect of dust from nuclear blasts to be relatively minor. In 1979, the Office of Technology Assessment issued a report on "The Effects of Nuclear War" and stated that nuclear war could perhaps produce irreversible adverse consequences on the environment. However, because the scientific processes involved were poorly understood, the report stated it was not possible to estimate the probable magnitude of such damage.

Three years later, in 1982, the Swedish Academy of Sciences commissioned a report entitled "The Atmosphere after a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon," which attempted to quantify the effect of smoke from burning forests and cities. The authors speculated that there would be so much smoke that a large cloud over the northern hemisphere would reduce incoming sunlight below the level required for photosynthesis, and that this would last for weeks or even longer.

The following year, five scientists including Richard Turco and Carl Sagan published a paper in Science called "Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions." This was the so-called TTAPS report, which attempted to quantify more rigorously the atmospheric effects, with the added credibility to be gained from an actual computer model of climate.

At the heart of the TTAPS undertaking was another equation, never specifically expressed, but one that could be paraphrased as follows:

Ds = Wn Ws Wh Tf Tb Pt Pr Pe… etc

(The amount of tropospheric dust=# warheads x size warheads x warhead detonation height x flammability of targets x Target burn duration x Particles entering the Troposphere x Particle reflectivity x Particle endurance…and so on.)

The similarity to the Drake equation is striking. As with the Drake equation, none of the variables can be determined. None at all. The TTAPS study addressed this problem in part by mapping out different wartime scenarios and assigning numbers to some of the variables, but even so, the remaining variables were-and are-simply unknowable. Nobody knows how much smoke will be generated when cities burn, creating particles of what kind, and for how long. No one knows the effect of local weather conditions on the amount of particles that will be injected into the troposphere. No one knows how long the particles will remain in the troposphere. And so on.

And remember, this is only four years after the OTA study concluded that the underlying scientific processes were so poorly known that no estimates could be reliably made. Nevertheless, the TTAPS study not only made those estimates, but concluded they were catastrophic.

 

[Damn True]

According to Sagan and his coworkers, even a limited 5,000 megaton nuclear exchange would cause a global temperature drop of more than 35 degrees Centigrade, and this change would last for three months. The greatest volcanic eruptions that we know of changed world temperatures somewhere between .5 and 2 degrees Centigrade. Ice ages changed global temperatures by 10 degrees. Here we have an estimated change three times greater than any ice age. One might expect it to be the subject of some dispute.

But Sagan and his coworkers were prepared, for nuclear winter was from the outset the subject of a well-orchestrated media campaign. The first announcement of nuclear winter appeared in an article by Sagan in the Sunday supplement, Parade. The very next day, a highly-publicized, high-profile conference on the long-term consequences of nuclear war was held in Washington, chaired by Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich, the most famous and media-savvy scientists of their generation. Sagan appeared on the Johnny Carson show 40 times. Ehrlich was on 25 times. Following the conference, there were press conferences, meetings with congressmen, and so on. The formal papers in Science came months later.

This is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold.

The real nature of the conference is indicated by these artists' renderings of the the effect of nuclear winter.

I cannot help but quote the caption for figure 5: "Shown here is a tranquil scene in the north woods. A beaver has just completed its dam, two black bears forage for food, a swallow-tailed butterfly flutters in the foreground, a loon swims quietly by, and a kingfisher searches for a tasty fish." Hard science if ever there was.

At the conference in Washington, during the question period, Ehrlich was reminded that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists were quoted as saying nothing would grow there for 75 years, but in fact melons were growing the next year. So, he was asked, how accurate were these findings now?

Ehrlich answered by saying "I think they are extremely robust. Scientists may have made statements like that, although I cannot imagine what their basis would have been, even with the state of science at that time, but scientists are always making absurd statements, individually, in various places. What we are doing here, however, is presenting a consensus of a very large group of scientists…"

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let's review a few cases.

In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth . One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compellng evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent "skeptics" around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.

There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the "pellagra germ." The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called "Goldberger's filth parties." Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result-despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.

Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.

And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therap6y…the list of consensus errors goes on and on.

Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

But back to our main subject.

What I have been suggesting to you is that nuclear winter was a meaningless formula, tricked out with bad science, for policy ends. It was political from the beginning, promoted in a well-orchestrated media campaign that had to be planned weeks or months in advance.

Further evidence of the political nature of the whole project can be found in the response to criticism. Although Richard Feynman was characteristically blunt, saying, "I really don't think these guys know what they're talking about," other prominent scientists were noticeably reticent. Freeman Dyson was quoted as saying "It's an absolutely atrocious piece of science but…who wants to be accused of being in favor of nuclear war?" And Victor Weisskopf said, "The science is terrible but---perhaps the psychology is good." The nuclear winter team followed up the publication of such comments with letters to the editors denying that these statements were ever made, though the scientists since then have subsequently confirmed their views.

At the time, there was a concerted desire on the part of lots of people to avoid nuclear war. If nuclear winter looked awful, why investigate too closely? Who wanted to disagree? Only people like Edward Teller, the "father of the H bomb."

Teller said, "While it is generally recognized that details are still uncertain and deserve much more study, Dr. Sagan nevertheless has taken the position that the whole scenario is so robust that there can be little doubt about its main conclusions." Yet for most people, the fact that nuclear winter was a scenario riddled with uncertainties did not seem to be relevant.

I say it is hugely relevant. Once you abandon strict adherence to what science tells us, once you start arranging the truth in a press conference, then anything is possible. In one context, maybe you will get some mobilization against nuclear war. But in another context, you get Lysenkoism. In another, you get Nazi euthanasia. The danger is always there, if you subvert science to political ends.

That is why it is so important for the future of science that the line between what science can say with certainty, and what it cannot, be drawn clearly-and defended.

What happened to Nuclear Winter? As the media glare faded, its robust scenario appeared less persuasive; John Maddox, editor of Nature, repeatedly criticized its claims; within a year, Stephen Schneider, one of the leading figures in the climate model, began to speak of "nuclear autumn." It just didn't have the same ring.

A final media embarrassment came in 1991, when Carl Sagan predicted on Nightline that Kuwaiti oil fires would produce a nuclear winter effect, causing a "year without a summer," and endangering crops around the world. Sagan stressed this outcome was so likely that "it should affect the war plans." None of it happened.

What, then, can we say were the lessons of Nuclear Winter? I believe the lesson was that with a catchy name, a strong policy position and an aggressive media campaign, nobody will dare to criticize the science, and in short order, a terminally weak thesis will be established as fact. After that, any criticism becomes beside the point. The war is already over without a shot being fired. That was the lesson, and we had a textbook application soon afterward, with second hand smoke.

 

[Damn True]

In 1993, the EPA announced that second-hand smoke was "responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths each year in nonsmoking adults," and that it " impairs the respiratory health of hundreds of thousands of people." In a 1994 pamphlet the EPA said that the eleven studies it based its decision on were not by themselves conclusive, and that they collectively assigned second-hand smoke a risk factor of 1.19. (For reference, a risk factor below 3.0 is too small for action by the EPA. or for publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example.) Furthermore, since there was no statistical association at the 95% coinfidence limits, the EPA lowered the limit to 90%. They then classified second hand smoke as a Group A Carcinogen.

This was openly fraudulent science, but it formed the basis for bans on smoking in restaurants, offices, and airports. California banned public smoking in 1995. Soon, no claim was too extreme. By 1998, the Christian Science Monitor was saying that "Second-hand smoke is the nation's third-leading preventable cause of death." The American Cancer Society announced that 53,000 people died each year of second-hand smoke. The evidence for this claim is nonexistent.

In 1998, a Federal judge held that the EPA had acted improperly, had "committed to a conclusion before research had begun", and had "disregarded information and made findings on selective information." The reaction of Carol Browner, head of the EPA was: "We stand by our science….there's wide agreement. The American people certainly recognize that exposure to second hand smoke brings…a whole host of health problems." Again, note how the claim of consensus trumps science. In this case, it isn't even a consensus of scientists that Browner evokes! It's the consensus of the American people.

Meanwhile, ever-larger studies failed to confirm any association. A large, seven-country WHO study in 1998 found no association. Nor have well-controlled subsequent studies, to my knowledge. Yet we now read, for example, that second hand smoke is a cause of breast cancer. At this point you can say pretty much anything you want about second-hand smoke.

As with nuclear winter, bad science is used to promote what most people would consider good policy. I certainly think it is. I don't want people smoking around me. So who will speak out against banning second-hand smoke? Nobody, and if you do, you'll be branded a shill of RJ Reynolds. A big tobacco flunky. But the truth is that we now have a social policy supported by the grossest of superstitions. And we've given the EPA a bad lesson in how to behave in the future. We've told them that cheating is the way to succeed.

As the twentieth century drew to a close, the connection between hard scientific fact and public policy became increasingly elastic. In part this was possible because of the complacency of the scientific profession; in part because of the lack of good science education among the public; in part, because of the rise of specialized advocacy groups which have been enormously effective in getting publicity and shaping policy; and in great part because of the decline of the media as an independent assessor of fact. The deterioration of the American media is dire loss for our country. When distinguished institutions like the New York Times can no longer differentiate between factual content and editorial opinion, but rather mix both freely on their front page, then who will hold anyone to a higher standard?

And so, in this elastic anything-goes world where science-or non-science-is the hand maiden of questionable public policy, we arrive at last at global warming. It is not my purpose here to rehash the details of this most magnificent of the demons haunting the world. I would just remind you of the now-familiar pattern by which these things are established. Evidentiary uncertainties are glossed over in the unseemly rush for an overarching policy, and for grants to support the policy by delivering findings that are desired by the patron. Next, the isolation of those scientists who won't get with the program, and the characterization of those scientists as outsiders and "skeptics" in quotation marks-suspect individuals with suspect motives, industry flunkies, reactionaries, or simply anti-environmental nutcases. In short order, debate ends, even though prominent scientists are uncomfortable about how things are being done.

When did "skeptic" become a dirty word in science? When did a skeptic require quotation marks around it?

To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: "These results are derived with the help of a computer model." But now large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world-increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs.

This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the complex point where the global warming debate now stands.

Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?

Stepping back, I have to say the arrogance of the modelmakers is breathtaking. There have been, in every century, scientists who say they know it all. Since climate may be a chaotic system-no one is sure-these predictions are inherently doubtful, to be polite. But more to the point, even if the models get the science spot-on, they can never get the sociology. To predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is simply absurd.

Look: If I was selling stock in a company that I told you would be profitable in 2100, would you buy it? Or would you think the idea was so crazy that it must be a scam?

Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horse****? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?

But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport. And in 2000, France was getting 80% its power from an energy source that was unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn't know what an atom was. They didn't know its structure. They also didn't know what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet. interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing, gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar, prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction, superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step, ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS… None of this would have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn't know what you are talking about.

 

[Damn True]

Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it's even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They're bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment's thought knows it.

I remind you that in the lifetime of most scientists now living, we have already had an example of dire predictions set aside by new technology. I refer to the green revolution. In 1960, Paul Ehrlich said, "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergoe famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ten years later, he predicted four billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. The mass starvation that was predicted never occurred, and it now seems it isn't ever going to happen. Nor is the population explosion going to reach the numbers predicted even ten years ago. In 1990, climate modelers anticipated a world population of 11 billion by 2100. Today, some people think the correct number will be 7 billion and falling. But nobody knows for sure.

But it is impossible to ignore how closely the history of global warming fits on the previous template for nuclear winter. Just as the earliest studies of nuclear winter stated that the uncertainties were so great that probabilites could never be known, so, too the first pronouncements on global warming argued strong limits on what could be determined with certainty about climate change. The 1995 IPCC draft report said, "Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced." It also said, "No study to date has positively attributed all or part of observed climate changes to anthropogenic causes." Those statements were removed, and in their place appeared: "The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on climate."

What is clear, however, is that on this issue, science and policy have become inextricably mixed to the point where it will be difficult, if not impossible, to separate them out. It is possible for an outside observer to ask serious questions about the conduct of investigations into global warming, such as whether we are taking appropriate steps to improve the quality of our observational data records, whether we are systematically obtaining the information that will clarify existing uncertainties, whether we have any organized disinterested mechanism to direct research in this contentious area.

The answer to all these questions is no. We don't.

In trying to think about how these questions can be resolved, it occurs to me that in the progression from SETI to nuclear winter to second hand smoke to global warming, we have one clear message, and that is that we can expect more and more problems of public policy dealing with technical issues in the future-problems of ever greater seriousness, where people care passionately on all sides.

And at the moment we have no mechanism to get good answers. So I will propose one.

Just as we have established a tradition of double-blinded research to determine drug efficacy, we must institute double-blinded research in other policy areas as well. Certainly the increased use of computer models, such as GCMs, cries out for the separation of those who make the models from those who verify them. The fact is that the present structure of science is entrepeneurial, with individual investigative teams vying for funding from organizations which all too often have a clear stake in the outcome of the research-or appear to, which may be just as bad. This is not healthy for science.

Sooner or later, we must form an independent research institute in this country. It must be funded by industry, by government, and by private philanthropy, both individuals and trusts. The money must be pooled, so that investigators do not know who is paying them. The institute must fund more than one team to do research in a particular area, and the verification of results will be a foregone requirement: teams will know their results will be checked by other groups. In many cases, those who decide how to gather the data will not gather it, and those who gather the data will not analyze it. If we were to address the land temperature records with such rigor, we would be well on our way to an understanding of exactly how much faith we can place in global warming, and therefore what seriousness we must address this.

I believe that as we come to the end of this litany, some of you may be saying, well what is the big deal, really. So we made a few mistakes. So a few scientists have overstated their cases and have egg on their faces. So what.

Well, I'll tell you.

In recent years, much has been said about the post modernist claims about science to the effect that science is just another form of raw power, tricked out in special claims for truth-seeking and objectivity that really have no basis in fact. Science, we are told, is no better than any other undertaking. These ideas anger many scientists, and they anger me. But recent events have made me wonder if they are correct. We can take as an example the scientific reception accorded a Danish statistician, Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist.

The scientific community responded in a way that can only be described as disgraceful. In professional literature, it was complained he had no standing because he was not an earth scientist. His publisher, Cambridge University Press, was attacked with cries that the editor should be fired, and that all right-thinking scientists should shun the press. The past president of the AAAS wondered aloud how Cambridge could have ever "published a book that so clearly could never have passed peer review." )But of course the manuscript did pass peer review by three earth scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, and all recommended publication.) But what are scientists doing attacking a press? Is this the new McCarthyism-coming from scientists?

Worst of all was the behavior of the Scientific American, which seemed intent on proving the post-modernist point that it was all about power, not facts. The Scientific American attacked Lomborg for eleven pages, yet only came up with nine factual errors despite their assertion that the book was "rife with careless mistakes." It was a poor display featuring vicious ad hominem attacks, including comparing him to a Holocust denier. The issue was captioned: "Science defends itself against the Skeptical Environmentalist." Really. Science has to defend itself? Is this what we have come to?

When Lomborg asked for space to rebut his critics, he was given only a page and a half. When he said it wasn't enough, he put the critics' essays on his web page and answered them in detail. Scientific American threatened copyright infringement and made him take the pages down.

Further attacks since have made it clear what is going on. Lomborg is charged with heresy. That's why none of his critics needs to substantiate their attacks in any detail. That's why the facts don't matter. That's why they can attack him in the most vicious personal terms. He's a heretic.

Of course, any scientist can be charged as Galileo was charged. I just never thought I'd see the Scientific American in the role of mother church.

Is this what science has become? I hope not. But it is what it will become, unless there is a concerted effort by leading scientists to aggresively separate science from policy. The late Philip Handler, former president of the National Academy of Sciences, said that "Scientists best serve public policy by living within the ethics of science, not those of politics. If the scientific community will not unfrock the charlatans, the public will not discern the difference-science and the nation will suffer." Personally, I don't worry about the nation. But I do worry about science.

 

[Changleen]

Crichton is an arse.

 

[Changleen]

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2004/climate_change/default.stm

 

[Damn True]

You cannot imagine how heartilly I am laughing at you right now.
Perhaps he isn't a nice guy, but you cannot refute what he is saying.

 

[Changleen]

You cannot imagine how heartilly I am laughing at you right now.
Perhaps he isn't a nice guy, but you cannot refute what he is saying.

He does have a good point about the American scientific community's image problems and the way it handles itself and is handled by your media. This is without doubt retarded, but to get on a podium and espouse climate change as an unsubstantiated myth because of it is highly irresponsible. Climate change is happening, and the longer people ignore it, the worse it's going to be. I'm not laughing because climate change isn't funny.

 

[Damn True]

He is talking about junk science from all over the world.

"Climate change" hmmmm

 

[Changleen]

"Climate change" hmmmm

 

[Damn True]

self portrait?

 

[Damn True]

The Nonsense That Is Global Warming

Some years ago a British newspaper arranged a square-off between a meteorologist, an astrologer and a woman with corns, to see who could best predict the weather. The woman with corns won.

In almost every newspaper around the world and at least once a week, some report surfaces suggesting we stay worried in the light of latest figures and analyses. Not only is Global Warming occurring, we are assured, but it is now accelerating at some alarming rate and pretty soon the poles will have all melted, the sealevels will have risen and all low-lying atolls and seaside villages will be covered over with this calamitous rising tide. And apparently this gigantic catastrophe is due to human behaviour.

We are informed that if our wicked CFC and CO2-producing ways continue, we will be doomed as a civilisation. Today we are so buffeted by what is put forth as irrefutable evidential science as to the nature of the so-called problem, that we don't even think to question it on any basic level. What is still essentially viewpoints and nothing more, based on tiny sample data and extrapolated, is now promoted as scientific fact, regardless of the lack of real evidence. The voices of the many diligent scientists calling for real hard evidence are drowned out by those who have the ear of a worldwide media hungry for sensational and emotive headlines.

The Misleading Picture
The result is that the picture many now have is of the Earth heating up and hotter now than it has ever been. But... 1999 was cooler than the year before. The hottest day in all recorded history was at Al Azizah in Libya back in 1922. There was warming from the 1880s to the 1940s, then a cooling for the next 40 years. Some of the hottest years were in the 1930s, when builders in Britain began putting pipes on the outside of buildings because frosts were only a memory. Then the thermometers turned around and from 1940 right up to 1980, global mean temperatures fell by about 0.3degC. All those houses in Britain started getting burst pipes.

Some over-reacted and called it the start of a new Ice Age, due to global warming. Pardon? Yes, a heating up OR cooling down now was, apparently, because of global warming. The 40 year downturn in temperature was in spite of supposed rising CO2 levels due to the new industrialisation after the war, showing then that rising CO2 does NOT fit into the scenario of Greenhouse gases.

Fact: CO2 occupies 0.035% of the atmosphere. If it doubled it would only be 0.07%. We can all live with that. 99.9% of all the world's CO2 is at ground level or below, 71% being dissolved in the oceans.

Fact: Like CO and N2O, CO2 is heavier than air. By how much? The molecular weight of air is 29, that of CO2 is 44, nearly double. CFCs have a MW of 100. It is therefore utterly impossible for these super-heavy gases to rise to form a 'greenhouse cover.' CO2 dissolves in seawater. More CO2 produced just means more is going to dissolve. Scientists are still trying to find out the finer points of how it gets from the sea to the trees. They know of the great cycle in which land goes under other land, heats and spews out as volcanoes. CO2 is thrown out and drifts with rain to ground, gets into trees as CO2 and into rocks as CO3, than finds its way back to the sea, then into chalk, which is compressed plankton, and then to the seafloor which becomes part of the continental drift which produces volcanoes at its extremities. CO2 is kept aloft by upper level turbulence. Otherwise it is always drifting down, not up. CO2 is found in centuries-old ice in Antarctica, way before any industrialisation on Earth. It is a natural part of the atmosphere and as such has a stable cycle of its own.

Fact: The atmosphere on the planet Venus is 100% CO2, produced entirely from volcanoes. Because it is closer to the Sun , its atmosphere is in turmoil all the time. On the other hand Mars, also with a CO2 atmosphere is so frigid its polar caps are solid CO2, which we call dry ice. The coldness comes purely because Mars is further from the Sun . If CO2 alone heated planets up, Mars would be much warmer than it is.

Fact: More CO2 is absorbed by young plants than by grown-up trees. Therefore if all we are worried about is CO2 absorption, it makes more sense to cut down the rain forests and plant saplings or even leave it as grass, both of which would absorb far more CO2 than mature trees do. Yet it is hard to imagine environmentalists advocating the cutting down of the rain forests.

Fact: Many scientists argue correctly that natural variations in climate are considerable and not well understood. But the Earth has gone through warming periods before without human influence. According to satellite data, air temperatures in the lower atmosphere have not increased appreciably and the sea ice around Antarctica has actually been growing for the past 20 years. Satellite data from NASA says the Earth has only heated by 0.04 of one degree in the last century, that which would be expected from natural fluctuation causes. This data conflicts with that of land-based thermometers and so is not released widely. But landbased measurements are less accurate because they are taken from cities, which are getting warmer all the time due to their expansion and replacing of trees and grasslands with asphalt.(source: science@NASA, October 20th, 2000)

Satellite data gives more of a global picture. 75% of the earth is covered by oceans. Of the rest, nearly 3% is covered by ice and of the remaining 24% less than 2% is habitable, when you take out swamps, deserts, lakes, ranges etc. In fact we live only on 1.8% of the surface of the Earth, hardly representative of the planet. According to National Geographic, all of Earth's metropolitan areas would only fit into an area less than the size of Spain. It is only a human vanity to imagine that our relatively small inhabited percentage of global surface has the ability to alter the climate of the whole planet. If we only occupy 1.8%, that means 98.2% of Earth is uninhabited.

Nearer to the truth is that the climate has always had its ups and downs. In 1100 AD the Earth enjoyed a much warmer environment than it does now - closer to a Meditterranean climate in the north of England. Around 549AD it appears a fireball may have swept through much of Europe, melting the facias of some castles. For many years the Vikings wandered around in their shirtsleeves. The Great Fire of London in 1666 came in a year of tremendous drought. This century just gone saw higher temperatures and heavy droughts around particular recurring years. Each drought in the past was described as the worst in living memory. But there is a simple mathematical pattern here.

The Pattern is Lunar.
As far as Earth’s climate is concerned, the lunar movement is a major influence. To understand it better, imagine a settling pot-lid as it is spun on its flat side on a table top. It wobbles around and around. Imagine a point on the rim. As the lid settles, the point will wobble around in an ever-flattening sine curve. That’s what the Moon does around the Earth’s ecliptic (plane of orbit around the Sun). As it moves it drags more or less of the atmosphere with it, spreading the atmosphere further over the Earth’s surface at the high end of the cycle and confining the atmosphere to a narrow band within the tropics at the lower end. The warming effect is that of milder summers and warmer winters, and at the moment we are well past the midpoint. Global-warmingists will point to the higher temperatures and claim that they were right all along. But up till now they haven't wanted to look to the Moon. After the last high end in 1987, temperatures did start descending especially around 1991/2, but most failed to notice.

Through its considerable gravitational force the Moon moves the atmosphere two and a half times more than does the Sun. Scientists agree that the Moon's gravity is greater on us than is that coming from the Sun, to the extent that the Moon moves seatides with very small contribution from the Sun, but a dwindling few still claim that the Sun causes the weather. Whatever the Sun does, the Moon does two and a half times as much.

Our Atmosphere
The atmosphere is both our protection from the searing heat of the sun and the freezing cold of space. Without this protection we would all die under 180degF heat or freeze under -222deg cold.

If it wasn’t mixed and distributed by the Moon daily, more of the atmosphere would end up on the Sun’s side because the Sun would be the only body in space with any gravitational pull. There would be one giant cloud always on the Sun's side, just as there is on Venus, which is why Venus looks so bright. We would therefore never see the Sun for the constant cloud. Moreover, trees, which need direct sun's rays, would not photosynthesize, therefore not produce oxygen which is so essential to life and our existence. So without the Moon there could be no life as we know it on Earth. When we are looking in space for evidence of life on other planets, scientists sometimes miss the fact that we should be looking for a planet our size and speed around its sun; that has a Moon just like ours in size and distance and orbital speed, and a Sun just like ours exactly the same distance away and size. Otherwise we are not looking for life as we know it. And if we're not, then it's not life, it's something else, because life is life as we know it.

 

[Damn True]

With good reason then, in lunar cultures the Moon has always been the symbol of life itself. Strong reason for it to have been universally revered as the god of fertility and growth. In their all-out zeal to rewrite our universe so history would be more palatable, 17th century theologians made as much distance as they could between Christian society and that symbol of everything pagan; the Moon. There was no room for the Christian god in the old Moon-oriented science, which dictated that climate and weather were cyclically predictable. The 'hand of God' was a non-issue. Now, only God was allowed to know what was going to happen. All predictions and prophecies were heresy.

It is this legacy that has led to one of the most appalling gaffs of modern day science: to factor the Moon out of every weather computer-model. Yet the atmosphere has a high and a low tide, which causes weather, and which, just like the sea-tide, is pulled around by the gravitational force of the Moon. Not only is the atmosphere our protection; it is also our blanket. By retaining the heat of the sun it redistributes this heat wherever it moves to. By shifting the atmosphere, the Moon is directly responsible for Earth's climate.

But Why Invent Global Warming?
Answer: probably to get research funds that have been made available. The Australian government recently granted $7.8 million to the CSIRO to investigate Greenhouse Gases. Some gases are sure to be found. In the 1960s geophysicists believed that with enough resources they could predict earthquakes, lobbied hard, and in 1966 the Japanese government funded a $270million per year program. In 1997, after wasting $2.7 billion dollars on no results, the program was axed. A research team is presently in Antarctica to study ice depth. They envisage this to be a 10 year project.

Fear is bankable. If a population can be convinced that global warming is occurring, there is money to be made. What started off as a small group now has thousands of employees drawing wages.

In the 1980s the term "Greenhouse Effect" came into our vocabulary to try to explain the high temperatures the world was experiencing. The fact that in the following early 1990s we were in a below average period which saw cooler temperatures, particularly during the winter months in both hemispheres, went unreported and unnoticed by those now firmly entrenched on the GW bandwagon. By now other 'problems' found research funds that were being willingly provided. Ozone-depletion, first written up in 1974 and immediately laughed at by the world of science, suddenly became an area of serious study, as did CO2, El Nino/La Nina and just recently, methane, as funds again started to flow into researchers' pockets.

Methane
Do we seriously believe that the farts of cows can alter the world's climate? NZ was once teeming with farting birdlife. They're nearly all gone. The US was covered with farting buffalo, Canada with farting caribou. Europe had the farting mammoth and mastoden. All now gone. In India and Africa wildlife has been hunted almost to extinction. There are LESS animals and so less farters, honkers, snorters and burpers now than there have EVER been on this planet, which is why we have the notion of endangered species. One only has to walk behind one duck for 10 minutes to see what emerges from the blunt end of a walking methane factory. Also, methane is inflammable which means it will be destroyed by the next wiff of lightning. There are over 2000 electrical storms happening around the globe every second. What is not broken down in this way is attacked by hydroxyls(called "nature's detergents") in upper air layers. Methane has actually been decreasing for the last 17 years.

So what about the land-based ice?
Land-based ice only represents 1.5% of the Earth's surface at the South Pole. (Roughly 3% of the total Earth's surface is polar. So 1.5% is Southern polar. Roughly half of that is landbased making it around 0.7%) A recent report from the University of Tasmania Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre states "The Antarctic ice-sheet's effective volume is equivalent to 55 meters of global sea level. It is NOT expected that it would melt as a result of a warming of two or three degrees. This is because temperatures in most of Antarctica are well below the melting point of ice.." Down at the South Pole, temperatures cool to under -80deg in winter, so 2 or 3 deg won't even dent it.
In fact, Antartcica has been recorded at -90degC in winter. So for the poles to melt and stay melted all year around, they have to go up in temperature by at least 90deg. And even that only gets them up to zero. If the poles rise by 90deg you can barely imagine what the temperature of the middle latitudes will become. Let's assume the poles might one day reach this horrendous temperature. So what will happen to the oceans? Well, 90deg is nearly the boiling point of water. The oceans will not rise. They will all have evaporated.

Rising Sea Levels
When you pin a global warmingist down, he'll say the oceans are expected to rise between 10cms and 1m over the next century due to them being warmed. 10cms is only four and a half inches..a century? That's nothing to an incoming and outgoing tide. 1m's a bit more, to be sure, but why do they always quote the upper end? So, depending on who you listen to, they seem to have an error of between 10cms and 55m, or roughly 5000%. And if they're so unsure, then how are they so certain the sealevels are rising at all?? And what is making the seas warmer? To warm a pot of water you have to have heat from below. Has anyone found a big heater yet under the sea that wasn't there before?

Then there's the question of the 2 or 3 degrees supposed rise over the last century. In most places on Earth 10 degreeC variation occurs during every day, but no one seems too put out. In actual fact, the sealevels are decreasing around the top half of the North Island, increasing around the bottom half of the South is, falling in the top half of the UK and rising in the south of the UK. It is the land which is rising or falling, giving only a virtual sealevel change. So how can we tell which is rising - land or sea when both are measured against each other?

Another thing that is a bit weird is that the Pacific atolls are supposed to be submerging, while the highwater mark on most NZ's beaches remains the same. Sealevel is supposed to be the same everywhere. That's why it's used so much as a iniversal standard. No one is bothering to point out that Pacific atolls are very volcanic and are rising and falling all the time. Just by the way, NZ is also extremely tectonically active.

A Sydney University study commissioned by the late Prime Minister of Tuvalu two years ago reported back that sealevels around that news-grabbing atoll were actually reducing, but this report did not make sensational headlines and not surprisingly went largely unreported.

In comparing sealevel-days, when do they make their comparisons? It's not good just looking at the tide high water mark and saying it looks higher than when I was a boy. Different lunar factors make for a higher or lower tide level - New or full moons, perigees, the 18.613 cycle, declination, the Moon crossing the equator twice a month going in opposite directions, wind forces, wind direction and high pressure zones which lower the sealevel or low pressure zones which tend to raise it. All of these factors are on the move all of the time and there is no one date which brings them all together so that they can be safely compared to another date.

Inaccurate Predictions
Some scientists are sometimes outrageously wrong. In March 1998 they declared that a 2km wide asteroid called 1997 XF11 was on a near collision course with Earth. It was later discovered that the asteroid would miss the earth by at least a million kilometres.

Halley’s Comet was another fizzer. After all the hype, you needed high powered binoculars to even see it. There has been a recent call to look at the possibility of future meteor strikes and what to do if they presented a threat to mankind. Then there's volcanoes, earthquakes, comets, gamma rays - someone only has to suggest something no one else has thought of to worry over for a while for it to hit the big headlines.

During the Gulf War there was the fear of a permanent oil shortage, and everyone installed LPG in their vehicles. Before that, the threat of nuclear war, and lots of people had bunkers built in their gardens. Then in Auckland, the water scare, and everyone put in their own water tanks. Then there was Y2K, which had those with a PC panicking for a while. But these pass and things return to normal.

Perhaps another threat is surely coming to a neighborhood near you. Someone will be asking for research grants, paid for by you, the taxpayer. Recently the then NZ Associate Minister for the Environment said global warming is "inextricably related to climate instability and poses one of the biggest threats to our economy". NZ's current Energy Minister has said the science of global warming is undeniable. But perhaps there is a bigger and more direct economic threat to every country's economy; the creaming off of massive funds to study non-existent dangers.

There are other arguments against any possibility that runaway global warming could be occurring. Let us for one moment assume that the world IS heating up. Firstly, the evaporation cycle would increase due to the heat. This would also happen if the sealevels rose, because of the greater surface of water available for that evaporation. A greater evaporation cycle means more rain will form and fall back on Earth and, as rain is not selective, there be more to fall on the poles too, creating more ice and snow there.

.

 

[Damn True]

The clouds are white which makes them efficient heat-reflectors. That is why a cloudy day is mild in temperature - clouds hold the heat in. But they also hold heat out, because the top of the clouds reflect 50% of the sun’s heat back into space. Clouds are second only to snow(85%) in heat reflection. With less heat coming in due to reflection off the top surface of the clouds and back into space, the result should be less heat getting to earth so the Earth should cool. Because clouds hold heat in, any measuring equipment set up to measure global warming would give wrong results every time clouds were overhead. Measuring apparati don’t have eyes to see clouds. Actually scientists know this and build in an error called ’average cloudiness'. The trouble is, ‘average cloudiness’ is not an annual constant. Clouds are never stationary, so can’t be pinned to a measuring location. Average Cloudiness has NOT been proven.

As a long range weather forecast organisation, we calculate lunar orbits to plot weather for many years ahead. ALL of our calculations would be awry if there was global warming because we are basing our predictions on weather that occurred three and four moon cycles ago, from several virtual moon-positions in differing time-zones, that all occurred well before industrialisation, pollutants and global warming were ever thought of. If you find there is some truth in the forecasts put out on this website a month or more ahead then a reasonable conclusion could be that there can be no global warming, other than what the Moon causes - which is embedded automatically into all the calculations.

 

[Changleen]

Who ever wrote that **** is a sub-moron.

 

[Damn True]

Dude, there is no basis in fact for "global warming" or "climate change" or whatever it is being marketed as this week.

 

[Damn True]

The guy gets a little preachy toward the end in regard to the "culture" of environmentalism, but his points about the lie of Global Warming are spot on.

The Lack Of Scientific Rigour In Environmentalist Ideology

The first programme in the series presents arguments that global warming is a myth and that the environment in the developed world is improving. Environmentalists hanker after a pre-industrial idyll, but conditions in the Third World are harsh and millions die every year because of unclean water and smoke from indoor fires.
The Greens oppose major development projects, but many local people want the electricity and clean water they will bring. Many resent the interference and hypocrisy of Western environmentalists, who have all the benefits and comforts of industrialisation.
The programme hears both from those who criticise the environmental movement and from the Greens themselves.
Introduction
Most people in the Third World lack the basic amenities of modern life that we in the West take for granted: clean drinking water and a reliable supply of electricity. And Third World governments are eager to industrialise in order to catch up with the West. But environmentalists say that if they do this, the future of the planet will be imperilled.
'If everybody in the world consumed like the British, the Europeans or the Americans,' says Tony Juniper, Campaigns Manager for Friends of the Earth, 'then we'd need about eight planets to meet people's needs. And it would still be unsustainable.'
In the name of preserving nature, environmentalists have challenged the old ideas of progress and economic development. But in doing so, they have been accused of needlessly consigning millions of people in the Third World to poverty and early death.
The shadow of the Enlightenment
The attempt by man to understand and to conquer nature was at the heart of Enlightenment thinking. A scientific, rational understanding of the physical world was a means of changing nature to serve our needs and desires better. But these Enlightenment ideas of rationalism and progress have been called into question by environmentalists. They have led, they say, to the monstrous creation of modern industrial life, with its factories and cars, chemicals and fumes.
'People seem to have accepted the view that they should feel guilty about man's impositions on nature, about progress and technological improvement,' says Steve Hayward of the Pacific Research Centre. 'Even science today is somewhat suspect in the public mind. I think this is a result of the pervasive environmental philosophy that there's a distinction between man and nature, and that what man does is bad and what nature does is good.'
Gregg Easterbrook, author of A Moment on the Earth, a critique of environmental thinking, agrees. He argues that the idealisation of nature common in the environmental movement is a modern luxury that has, paradoxically, been made possible by development. 'Most of our ancestors spent their lives struggling to grow food, to protect themselves against disease and the elements,' he says. 'They found nature did not know best. Nature was a hostile force for them.'
The power of the Greens
Environmentalists often depict themselves as folk heroes and rebels, fighting a mighty anti-Green establishment. But the Green movement itself has become a powerful political force, which dominates much of Western thinking. 'It's said they control the Clinton administration,' says Senator Larry Craig.
The environmentalist movement today is rich and powerful: the top 12 Green organisations in the US alone have an annual turnover of just under a billion dollars. In the UK, four million people are members of Green organisations - that's more than are members of all the other political organisations put together. TOP
Suspending disaster: the myth of global warming
Green groups such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and Earth First are using their influence to persuade people that an environmental disaster of historic proportions is just around the corner. As Barbara Mass of the Pan African Conservation Group succinctly puts it: 'I think we're going to drown in our own muck.'
Environmentalist thinking is now widely accepted in the West. However, many scientists argue that what the Greens say about global warming and pollution is wrong. Professor Wilfred Beckerman, a former member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, was himself an enthusiastic environmentalist until he started examining the facts. He told Against Nature: 'Within a few months of looking at the statistical data, I realised that most of my concerns about the environment were based on false information and scare stories.'
According to Piers Corbyn, Director of Weather Action, many scientists do not accept the idea that pollution is causing global warming. Environmentalists claim that world temperatures have risen one degree Fahrenheit in the past century, but Corbyn points out that the period they take as their starting point - around 1880 - was colder than average. What's more, the timing of temperature changes does not appear to support the theory of global warming. Most of the rise came before 1940 - before human-caused emissions of 'greenhouse' gases became significant.
According to the Greens, during the post-war boom global warming should have pushed temperatures up. But the opposite happened. 'As a matter of the fact, the decrease in temperature, which was very noticeable in the 60s and 70s, led many people to fear that we would be going into another ice age,' remembers Fred Singer, former Chief Scientist with the US Weather Program.
Even in recent times, the temperature has not behaved as it should according to global warming theory. Over the last eight years, temperature in the southern hemisphere has actually been falling. Moreover, says Piers Corbyn, 'When proper satellite measurements are done of world temperatures, they do not show any increase whatsoever over the last 20 years.'
But Greens refuse to accept they have could have been proved wrong. Now they say global warming can involve temperature going both up and down.
'Global warming is above all global climatic destabilisation,' says Edward Goldsmith, editor of the Ecologist, 'with extremes of cold and heat when you don't expect it. You can't predict climate any more. You get terrible droughts in certain cases; sometimes you get downpours. In Egypt, I think, they had a rainfall for the first time in history - they suddenly had an incredible downpour. Water pouring down in places where it's never rained before. And then you get droughts in another area. So it's going to be extremely unpredictable.'
Scientists also point out that nature produces far more greenhouse gases than we do. For example, when the Mount Pinatubo volcano erupted, within just a few hours it had thrown into the atmosphere 30 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide - almost twice as much as all the factories, power plants and cars in the United States do in a whole year. Oceans emit 90 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, every year. Decaying plants throw up another 90 billion tonnes, compared to just six billion tonnes a year from humans.
What's more, 100 million years ago, there was six times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as there is now, yet the temperature then was marginally cooler than it is today. Many scientists have concluded that carbon dioxide doesn't even affect climate.
Although many environmentalists have been forced to accept much of the scientific evidence against global warming, they still argue that it is better to be safe than sorry. So they continue to use global warming as a reason to oppose industrialisation and economic growth.

 

[Damn True]

Clearing the air: growth, technology and pollution
The industrial First World represents the Greens' worst nightmare. More economic growth, they say, can only mean more pollution and environmental degradation. But others argue that, on the contrary, over the past half century the environment in the advanced industrial world has actually improved.
'Air pollution has been falling in modern industrialised countries for the last 40 years,' says Steve Hayward. 'And it's been falling precisely because of economic growth and improvements in technology. Even in Los Angeles, which has the worst smog in the United States, air pollution levels have fallen by about half in the last 25 years - and that's at a time when the area's population has doubled and its economy has tripled.'
In the United States as a whole, over the past quarter of a century, the population has increased by 30 per cent, while the number of cars and the size of the economy has nearly doubled. And yet, during the same period, emissions of the six main air pollutants have decreased by 30 per cent. In addition, says Gregg Easterbrook, Americans have stopped pumping waste water from cities into lakes and streams, stopped dumping untreated sewage in the sea and toxic wastes on land, and eliminated the use of CFCs.
'Lake Erie 30 years ago was virtually dead,' adds Steve Hayward. 'Today you can fish in it, you can swim in it. The statistics on the amount of pollution in the food chain have shown dramatic improvement in the last 30 years.'
Western cities such as London are cleaner today than they have been for centuries. In the mid 1900s, before cars were even invented, air and water quality was so poor that many thousands of people died each year from typhus and TB.
Supporters of economic development don't just argue that the industrial world is getting cleaner, they also say that industrial progress has transformed our lives for the better. 'We live longer, we are healthier, we are better educated, we know ourselves better and we are much more able to take control over our destiny than any other time in the past,' says Dr Frank Furedi, author of the book Population and Development. 'Yes, industrialisation is often exploitative, often leads to the uprooting of people. But at the same time it adds to human civilisation and means progress for all.' TOP
The pre-industrial fantasy
But the Greens insist we must turn our backs on these 'outdated' ideas of economic and industrial progress. If we are to avoid an environmental catastrophe, they say, we must go back to living in harmony with nature. And to do this we must learn from pre-industrial tribal societies in the Third World.
40 per cent of the world's population still uses either wood or dung for fuel instead of electricity. But the indoor pollution from this is deadly, especially for women and children who spend most time in the home. According to the World Health Organisation, 5 million infants die every year in the Third World from respiratory diseases caused by breathing indoor smoke and rural smog.
Basic pollution of this kind kills far more people than all First World environmental problems combined. One and a half billion people in the Third World suffer air quality that is recognised by the World Health Organisation as 'dangerously unsafe', a level of pollution almost unknown in the Western world.
Dr Anil Patel is responsible for the health care of more than 200 villages in Gujarat, in north-west India. The vast majority of medical problems he encounters have been brought on by environmental causes. But the environmental problems he is concerned with come not from modern industry but rather from the lack of modern luxuries such as electricity and clean water.
'Clean water is completely out of question,' says Dr Patel. 'The water they get is untreated. Most of the time it is contaminated with human faeces and cattle faeces, and the ultimate result is that there are all sorts of water-borne diseases.'
Water-borne diseases in the Third World have not been caused by modern industry. On the contrary, the only way to get rid of them is with modern water-cleaning facilities - the kind we take for granted in the West.
In the Third World, 250 million people are infected each year by water-borne diseases, mostly dysentery. Patients suffer severe stomach cramps, chronic diarrhoea and various other disorders such as skin disease, and each year 10 million of them die. The World Health Organisation estimated that in 1996 3.9 million children under the age of five died from diseases communicated by impure drinking water, mostly diarrhoea.
'Death from diarrhoea has been unheard of in the Western world in the past two generations,' says Gregg Easterbrook. 'That 3.9 million children dead in the developing world last year exceeds all deaths at all ages from all causes in the United States and the European Union combined. And yet we endlessly speak of water purity in the West as an issue.'
The idealisation by Greens of life in the Third World is resented by many people there. 'I see in this a serious problem of hypocrisy, and if not hypocrisy, a gross insensitivity,' says Dr Patel.
According to the World Health Organisation, life expectancy for people in the Third World is 20 years less than our own. In the poorest areas they live 35 years less. TOP
Damning development: the Greens and the Narmada project
People in India are struggling to emerge from the backward condition in which they find themselves. The Indian government is trying to build a hydroelectric dam on the Narmada river to provide clean water and the electricity which is vital for industrial progress. It will submerge 350 square kilometres of land and provide enough electricity to supply almost 5,000 villages in north-west India. It will provide clean drinking water for 30 million people and it will be an enormous boost for economic and industrial growth.
Not everyone is keen, however. Lisa Jordan is a director of The Bank Information Centre, an environmentalist group which tries to stop the World Bank from funding large-scale development projects in the Third World that are deemed environmentally unfriendly. She is keen to preserve traditional tribal life. 'This is genocide of tribal people who have lived in the forests that are being drowned for centuries. They're one of the oldest living populations on this earth that have been documented. These are the cultures that pay because of a large dam being developed to pipe water to a larger agriculture system, to provide electricity, to provide the dream.
But locals are not so keen on preserving things as they are. 'Instead of saying that we want this particular life to be encased like a museum, we must say that we want progress,' one woman told Against Nature. 'We want development of a particular kind and therefore we need larger dams.'
Environmentalists are worried about the damage the dam will do to wildlife in the area, but supporters of the dam are equally appalled that the environmentalists are so concerned with preserving bio-diversity at the expense of human development.
'What exactly is the value of all this bio-diversity?' asks Wilfred Beckerman. 'This idea that you have to preserve every scrap of nature, even though destroying it might confer enormous benefits on people whose standard of living and quality of life is so low as to be unimaginable for the vast majority of people in the Western world, I think is scandalous. I just get very angry when I hear this sort of thing. Whose side are these people on?'
As it happens, no pristine forest will be destroyed by the Narmada dam and the only endangered species to be affected is a colony of sloth bears, for which the Indian government is building a wildlife reserve nearby.
But the Greens say they aren't just concerned about the natural destruction of the dam. They point to the number of tribal people who will have to be resettled elsewhere. Brent Blackwelder, chairman of Friends of the Earth US, says more than 100,000 people will be uprooted from their homes. But according to the Indian government and the World Bank, the project will displace 70,000 people, who will be given farmland elsewhere with the benefits of roads, schools, electricity and clean water.
Critics of the Greens say environmentalists themselves are prepared to push tribal people off their land to make way for wild animals. Nature reserves founded in India by the World Wildlife Fund have displaced at least 25,000 people simply to make way for tigers.
Five years ago Dr Patel welcomed environmentalists' concern about tribal people and was even persuaded by the Greens to campaign against the dam. Today, he believes the real concern of environmentalists is to block progress. He is now a fervent supporter of the dam and accuses the Greens of seeming to care more about animals than people.
Many environmentalists argue that if people in the Third World want electricity, they should use solar power or wind power. But not only would solar and wind power fail to meet the need for clean water, environmentalists themselves admit that they would be fantastically more expensive. To produce the same amount of electricity as the Narmada dam using wind power would cost at least six times as much. Using solar power would cost more than seven times as much - and even then it is doubtful that it could be done. The Narmada dam will produce 400 times as much electricity as the largest solar panel installation currently in existence.
Local Indians such as Dr Patel dismiss all the Green arguments against the dam, saying that the dam will change things, but there can be no development without change.
Green pressure on the World Bank has led to funding for the Narmada dam being withdrawn. Consequently, work on the dam, which began in the early 60s, has all but stopped. Most environmentalists believe it will never be completed.
In addition, leading environmentalists have estimated that they have effectively blocked around 300 hydro-electric dams in the Third World, denying many millions of poor people the benefits of electricity and clean water.
Tom Blinkhorn of the World Bank thinks many people in the West who contribute to environmental organisations don't realise the implications. 'What they don't see is the tremendous poverty that exists in other parts of the world, and that if we are going to help people address that poverty, we need to do it through large dams and activities that many organisations in the Green movement are opposed to. I think a lot of the constituency for Green groups simply do not know about the problems in the Third World.' TOP

 

[Damn True]

Conservation and conservatism
There have been many attempts in the past to block social and economic progress. But few have been as successful as today's environmentalist movement, which uses the threat of a global ecological crisis to override the wishes of those people who most need the benefits of progress. And it's not only dams that the Greens campaign against.
'Western environmentalist sentiment has been successful ...in blocking a whole range of industrial facilities,' says Gregg Easterbrook. 'Factories, roads, logging - even well-regulated logging - have been vehemently opposed.'
Steve Hayward argues that it's immoral for rich environmentalists to impose their ideology on Third World countries, where people are poor and disease is rampant. 'The best thing that could happen to those countries is to industrialise rapidly ... so they have the resources not only to be healthier but also to protect their environment. To stand in the way of that is wrong and dangerous in my mind.' After all, adds Gregg Easterbrook, we became affluent through industrialisation and exploiting our resources.
Greens are often portrayed as left-wing radicals, battling against a backward-looking establishment. But they are in fact part of a long tradition of conservatism that idealises nature and the past. These conservative instincts motivated 19th-century figures such as Nietzsche and Wagner, and movements such as the Romantics, who were horrified by England's 'dark satanic mills' (as William Blake described them) and dreamt of returning to a mythical past of medieval knights and maidens, and even the Boy Scout movement, which in its origins combined a mystical affinity with nature, Right-wing nationalism and a hatred of degenerate modern life.
What we today call 'environmentalism' is ... based on a fear of change,' says Frank Furedi. 'It's based upon a fear of the outcome of human action. And therefore it's not surprising that when you look at the more xenophobic right-wing movements in Europe in the 19th century, including German fascism, it quite often had a very strong environmentalist dynamic to it.' TOP
Fascism, animal rights and human rights
The most notorious environmentalists in history were the German Nazis. The Nazis ordered soldiers to plant more trees. They were the first Europeans to establish nature reserves and order the protection of hedgerows and other wildlife habitats. And they were horrified at the idea of hydroelectric dams on the Rhine. Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazis were vegetarian and they passed numerous laws on animal rights.
'They had essentially a biological view of society,' Dr Furedi continues. 'They regarded society as an organism to which you were rooted through blood ties ... and felt much more comfortable with what they perceived to be natural than what were the products of human creativity. I think that's one of the reasons why [Hitler] had this celebration of the animal kingdom, the celebration of wildlife.'
The historian Dr Mark Almond, of Oriel College, Oxford, goes further. 'Goering made ferocious blood curdling speeches saying that people who were cruel to animals, including scientists who did research on them, would be put in concentration camps,' he says. 'This was perversely part of the logic which could at the same time put people into concentration camps, on whom they experimented.'
Frank Furedi agrees. 'History shows us is that whenever people begin to treat animals like human beings, it's only a smell step away from treating human beings like animals. And that seems to me the logical outcome of this nostalgic, sentimental approach towards animal rights.' TOP
A Western agenda
Environmentalists today have been accused of effectively imposing their views on the Third World, and causing immense suffering in the process.
'The new focus on environmental issues too often has the consequence of turning societies into theme parks,' argues Frank Furedi. 'They are very attractive for the voyeuristic Western imagination, but actually doom people in those societies to a life of poverty.
'And it seems to me that there is no accountability here. It's not the people of Africa and Asia or Latin America that have demanded environmental policies; these are policies that are being pushed by everybody in the West, from the World Bank to Green organisations. Who gave them the authority? By what moral right do they dictate the terms of how these societies can develop and realise their potential for the future?'
Gregg Easterbrook emphasises the hypocrisy of attitudes in the West: 'It's still possible in affluent circles in the United States or Europe to see people sitting in an air-conditioned room eating free-range chicken and sipping Chablis, talking amongst themselves about how farmers in Africa shouldn't have tractors, because it might disrupt the soil, or how peasants in India shouldn't be allowed to have hydroelectric power, because it's not appropriate to their culture.... What would really be immoral is if we insisted on keeping material affluence for ourselves and try to deny it to the billions of others in the world who want and deserve exactly the same thing.'
Our attitude to the Third World, as Frank Furedi puts it, is that '... your societies are doomed to be poor-houses for the rest of the world. It purports to be ever so radical and ever so sensitive, but what it does is it sets a Western agenda on the rest of the world. It's as intrusive today as imperialism was in the 19th century.
'The problem isn't that we have so much that we're squandering resources, the real problem is that most people do not have access to even the most basic needs of everyday life. The real problem is that they're denied good education and good health. Therefore, the answer does not lie in going backwards and trying to be anti-technological, close down factories and not build roads.... Only through the appliance of science and technology can people's aspirations be realised even at the most elementary level.'
People today face many difficulties in the First World as well as the Third: poverty and squalor, ignorance and disease. But the battle against these evils cannot be won by returning to nature or some mythical past. Instead, we must go forwards to a better future with confidence in our ability to understand and change the world

 

[Damn True]

Further stuff:
http://www.answers.com/topic/global-warming-controversy


This is not to say that I think we all ought to drive gas guzzling cars and go empty a can of HCFC. We ought to do as much as possible to minimize our negative impact on the environment. But the "Global Warming" myth is being used as a tool to negatively influence the health of the economies of the world. The effect of that if far more insidious than the nonsense that is "Global Warming."

 

[ALEXIS_DH]

Dude, there is no basis in fact for "global warming" or "climate change" or whatever it is being marketed as this week.

taken from the washington state .gov page...

there may not be a full agreement on "what causes it", but that DOESNT mean global warming is not happeninf.

"global warming" as such (without any connotation) is happening...

so, YES there IS basis to think "global warming" is happening (the average earth temps are getting higher lately).

 

[Damn True]

taken from the washington state .gov page...

there may not be a full agreement on "what causes it", but that DOESNT mean global warming is not happeninf.

"global warming" as such (without any connotation) is happening...

so, YES there IS basis to think "global warming" is happening (the average earth temps are getting higher lately).

Yes, it may be warmer now than it was in 1860 (if we throw out the probable innacuracy of records and recording insturments built at the time) however, there is no data that supports the assertion that the effect is caused by human influence. Furthermore, there is nothing that shows the change is NOT part of the the normal ebb and flow of the environment.

Global tempratures were far warmer when dinosaurs roamed the earth, then it got cold and they died. Now it's getting warmer and studies of tree growth and ice cores support a rather consistant increase in the temprature since the end of the last "ice-age". At some point the cycle will reverse and things will begin to cool again.

You know that 11,000 years ago a glacier covered North America. That icesheet is gone because Earth warmed up without any influence from mankind or our industries. Cooling and warming cycles have occurred repeatedly over Earth’s history. There is paleoclimatological (I had to look that one up to get the spelling) evidence that suggests variations in Earth’s spin axis and orbital shape drive climatic oscillations or it may be directly related to solar output. But now, because the environmentalists have cast Nature and Mother Earth as victims, the blame falls to the ‘evil humans.’ Well, that thinking is misguided at best. It is not science. It’s political correctness.

 

[Changleen]

Yes, it may be warmer now than it was in 1860 (if we throw out the probable innacuracy of records and recording insturments built at the time) however, there is no data that supports the assertion that the effect is caused by human influence. Furthermore, there is nothing that shows the change is NOT part of the the normal ebb and flow of the environment.

Global tempratures were far warmer when dinosaurs roamed the earth, then it got cold and they died. Now it's getting warmer and studies of tree growth and ice cores support a rather consistant increase in the temprature since the end of the last "ice-age". At some point the cycle will reverse and things will begin to cool again.

You know that 11,000 years ago a glacier covered North America. That icesheet is gone because Earth warmed up without any influence from mankind or our industries. Cooling and warming cycles have occurred repeatedly over Earth’s history. There is paleoclimatological (I had to look that one up to get the spelling) evidence that suggests variations in Earth’s spin axis and orbital shape drive climatic oscillations or it may be directly related to solar output. But now, because the environmentalists have cast Nature and Mother Earth as victims, the blame falls to the ‘evil humans.’ Well, that thinking is misguided at best. It is not science. It’s political correctness.

Yes, the temperature of the planet naturally fluctuate. Yes the fossil record and geo-sampling show that there has consistantly been an ice-age every 10,000-ish years for the last (insert long time period here).

As you also may know we are kinda 'due' an Ice-age fairly soon, and the records also show the ice ages are preceded by warming.

However, comparing these data seems to show that this time round the rate of warming is considerably faster than ever before (as far as we can tell.) You've also gotta be some kind of idiot not to realise that thew billions upon billions of tonnes of CO2, Methane, CFCs, Soot, and all the other crap humanity has shat into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution has had nothing to do with that.

 

[ALEXIS_DH]

Yes, it may be warmer now than it was in 1860 (if we throw out the probable innacuracy of records and recording insturments built at the time) however, there is no data that supports the assertion that the effect is caused by human influence. Furthermore, there is nothing that shows the change is NOT part of the the normal ebb and flow of the environment.

Global tempratures were far warmer when dinosaurs roamed the earth, then it got cold and they died. Now it's getting warmer and studies of tree growth and ice cores support a rather consistant increase in the temprature since the end of the last "ice-age". At some point the cycle will reverse and things will begin to cool again.

You know that 11,000 years ago a glacier covered North America. That icesheet is gone because Earth warmed up without any influence from mankind or our industries. Cooling and warming cycles have occurred repeatedly over Earth’s history. There is paleoclimatological (I had to look that one up to get the spelling) evidence that suggests variations in Earth’s spin axis and orbital shape drive climatic oscillations or it may be directly related to solar output. But now, because the environmentalists have cast Nature and Mother Earth as victims, the blame falls to the ‘evil humans.’ Well, that thinking is misguided at best. It is not science. It’s political correctness.

you may be wrong, you may be right...
some (by that i mean most) scientists believe there is a link between that an mankind and have all sorts of evidence... and there are some (in a lesser number) of scientists and people with no idea of what they are talking about, that believe there is not a link...

but lets just remember that there is (literally) a world in stake...

are you so confident in your position (that there is no way mankind has to do with it) that you are willing to gamble everything you know/have/love???

you say "there is no evidence there is a link"... yet, even if you are right (and countless scientists are wrong) that doesnt mean there is really no link...
just like with creationism when you say "its not been proven false, so we must account for it"...
and here we are talking about stuff way more documented and with way more evidence than creationism...

you know, lets just disregard every scientific against your position and make it a 50-50 chance there is a link with manking... and seeing whats in stake, i´d rather be conservative in that wager....

 

[Damn True]

Yes, the temperature of the planet naturally fluctuate. Yes the fossil record and geo-sampling show that there has consistantly been an ice-age every 10,000-ish years for the last (insert long time period here).

As you also may know we are kinda 'due' an Ice-age fairly soon, and the records also show the ice ages are preceded by warming.

However, comparing these data seems to show that this time round the rate of warming is considerably faster than ever before (as far as we can tell.) You've also gotta be some kind of idiot not to realise that thew billions upon billions of tonnes of CO2, Methane, CFCs, Soot, and all the other crap humanity has shat into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution has had nothing to do with that.

When Pinutaubo errupted it released a quantity of "greenhouse gasses" in excess of the total production of the entirety of mankind since the industrial revolution. What we clearly need to do is stop vulcanism.

 

[Damn True]

you may be wrong, you may be right...
some (by that i mean most) scientists believe there is a link between that an mankind and have all sorts of evidence... and there are some (in a lesser number) of scientists and people with no idea of what they are talking about, that believe there is not a link...

but lets just remember that there is (literally) a world in stake...

are you so confident in your position (that there is no way mankind has to do with it) that you are willing to gamble everything you know/have/love???

you say "there is no evidence there is a link"... yet, even if you are right (and countless scientists are wrong) that doesnt mean there is really no link...
just like with creationism when you say "its not been proven false, so we must account for it"...
and here we are talking about stuff way more documented and with way more evidence than creationism...

you know, lets just disregard every scientific against your position and make it a 50-50 chance there is a link with manking... and seeing whats in stake, i´d rather be conservative in that wager....

There is no proven causation of the effect. You cannot alter the economies of the world based upon what is far less than junk science (go back and read the posted articles). We cannot allow a culture of conscensus to direct the world.

That said, I absolutely think we need to have less of an impact on the planet. Burn less fuel, produce fewer pollutants etc. But sweeping moves like the Kyoto agreement that are not based in quality science could very well have a similar effect as the environmentalists moves against the US steel industry on a global scale. We can't risk destroying economies on what amounts to a shake of the magic 8-ball.

 

[Changleen]

When Pinutaubo errupted it released a quantity of "greenhouse gasses" in excess of the total production of the entirety of mankind since the industrial revolution. What we clearly need to do is stop vulcanism.

That doesn't make what we've done OK, and it certainly dsoesn't mean we should keep doing it. This is the kind of rationailization you've previously used for American abuses in Iraq and the 'war' on 'terror'. "Oh, well, they did it forst, so it doesn't matter if we do." Do you realize how pathetic and childish this makes you look?

Plus there is a lot of evidence that the slow consistant release by humaity is more damaging than high density 'spikes' that result from volcanic eruptions. (See the Ozone hole for one) Nature seems to be able to deal with these 'spikes' far better.

 

[Damn True]

See the post right above yours.

 

[Changleen]

We cannot allow a culture of conscensus to direct the world.

You mean Democracy?

 

[H8R]

True, what I see, in all honesty, is your willingness to tow the line, no matter what.You not only have unyeilding faith in God, you have unyielding faith in the right's agenda.

Global warming doesn't fit the agenda: it's an indictment of current policy. So, you go with whatever arguments there are against it.

I'm sure you would have prayer in schools, creationism in the curriculum, and abortion doctors thrown in jail, if any of that were possible. Correct me if I'm wrong.

To me, you look like a team player. A go-down-with-the-ship team player. Unfortunately for the planet, and everything on it, there are many people that are as faithful as you.

 

[ALEXIS_DH]

That said, I absolutely think we need to have less of an impact on the planet. Burn less fuel, produce fewer pollutants etc. But sweeping moves like the Kyoto agreement that are not based in quality science could very well have a similar effect as the environmentalists moves against the US steel industry on a global scale. We can't risk destroying economies on what amounts to a shake of the magic 8-ball.

remember it goes both ways..

"we can risk destroying economies by shaking the 8ball".. arent you "risking destroying the world (economy included) by shaking the 8 ball" by denying scientific evidence??...

not that am saying "we must stop because are absolutely certain we are the cause".... but as of today, its reasonable to believe so..

there is a reasonable amount of evidence to believe we have something to do with the whole deal... given whats is at stake, the smart thing to do would be avoiding risks...

lets say we deny every scientific opinion, and make it 50-50 (which is in fact tipping the balance in your favor)... if scientists are wrong, the worst thing would be a few billions in lost productivity but still an improvement in the overall enviromental conditions for mankind like better quality air, etc, etc
if they are right, but we do as you say... the worst thing would be of infinite costs..

even if they are wrong, we still get the "marginal" benefit of better air etc, etc...