But wait! There's even more! Dr. David Evans, on January 24, 2012, published this report. I call your attention to pages 2 and 3 of this report. AGW predicted by computer models is absent from real world, observed trends in atmospheric temperature change, as shown by the graphs in this report.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined that the US funded almost half the annual budget of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world authority on alleged manmade global warming, with $31.1 million since 2001. And what did we get for all that money? The IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, released in 2007, included several errors. It claimed that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by the year 2035, which the IPCC later admitted was based on inconclusive data. And, according to the GAO, the US has made the world's largest scientific investment in climate change research, with nearly $20 billion over the past 13 years. That's $20 billion of wasted taxpayer dollars that could have been spent training workers, providing make-work jobs, paying off underwater mortgages, given to green energy companies that go bankrupt, and all sorts of other utopian ideas.
The world has both cooled and warmed in cycles, but it has not warmed in the past 15 years. This warming and climate change is well within natural variability and explained very easily by changes in the sun, but there is nothing unusual going on this planet. However, the UN and AlGore (not a typographical error) say we should spend billions of dollars on further research and protocols. And even President Barack Hussein Obama has gotten into the act. Preventing non-existent AGW forms the basis for his "green energy" policies and EPA mandates.
But that's just my opinion..
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Jordan Richardson
I'm going to take you far more seriously than I should.
Two articles you might want to read.
1. NASA: Global warming caused mostly by humans, an article published January 31, 2012.
In part:
"NASA researchers updated calculations of the Earth's energy imbalance, which is the difference between the amount of solar energy absorbed by the Earth's surface and the amount returned to space as heat. They found that despite unusually low solar activity from 2005 to 2010, the planet continued to absorb more energy (half a watt more per square meter) than it returned to space during that time period."
2. Dr. David Evans: born-gain alarmist?
Do follow the links in that one, as it debunks Evans' "science" quite consistently. He's not exactly the most credible source I'd go with, unless you think he's a good "rocket scientist." Even then, Evans doesn't have one shred of peer-reviewed work on climate change to peruse - just lame PDFs like the one linked to in your "article."
So Mr. Beatty, you can go with NASA and all the other peer-reviewed material out there. Or you can believe that it's a big scam intended to fool the entire planet just so that some liberal scientists can get their grubby hands on more money.
Being that you're little more than a far-right cartoon character, I can guess which option you find more believable already. Thanks for the chuckle, Bulworth.
2 - Glenn Contrarian
For all, especially the editors -
I've written three, maybe four articles on global warming, and every one of them had (in my opinion) more to do with politics than with the science...but the editors REFUSED to put them in the politics section even after I argued strongly otherwise - especially since articles in the Politics section get much more traffic than those in the Science section. However, when "Sidney and Riley" and Warren Beatty put in articles - which (in their eyes) have more about (what they think is) science than about politics, they went straight to the Politics section.
Not cool, editors. It smacks of bias. I'm not accusing you of bias, but simply saying that it looked that way.
Now I know that you try hard to be as fair as you can, and it's very difficult to do so when there are strong people on both sides - I get it, having done the moderator thing before on a religious blog. You normally do a very good job - but in this instance, you dropped the ball. From now on, please look to see whether the article has more to do with scientific arguments, or more to do with political arguments, and let that difference decide where the article itself will reside.
Thank you.
3 - Glenn Contrarian
The earth hasn't warmed in 15 years?
Then why is it that on at least two days this January, the national weather map showed NO PLACE IN CONUS, from WA to MI to MN, that had a high temp below 40 degrees F.? I've never, ever seen that before.
CO2 is a 'trace gas'?
The more that should alarm you. A gallon of gas weighs, what, about eight pounds? But when a gallon of gas is burned, twenty pounds of CO2 is exhausted, the extra weight coming from the combustion and chemical reaction in the air used in the process.
Hm. Half a billion cars operating every day. Every car using probably a tank of gas a week. And this isn't counting all the ships at sea, all the construction equipment, all the coal being burnt, all the biomass that we have LESS than we did a hundred years ago...Warren, the house of humanity doesn't come with automatic plumbing to carry our crap away...and sooner or later our crap is gonna make life uncomfortable here.
But I forget - it doesn't matter that 98% of climatologists are telling you that there's a problem, and that the remaining 2% are crackpots or paid by Big Oil or have strong ties to the conservatives. All you know is that if the liberals think something, it must be wrong, no matter how strong the empirical evidence is that they are absolutely right.
4 - Christopher Rose
Glenn, it is pointless to make the point you made in #2 here in the comments space, not least because I doubt many of the relevant editors will ever see it.
As a BC writer, you know how to contact the editors directly. Please use the proper channel in future.
Thanks.
Christopher Rose
Blogcritics Comments Editor
5 - Glenn Contrarian
And Warren -
I'll get back to you later today or tomorrow - life is happening right now. In the meantime, why don't you address the points Jordan made?
6 - Glenn Contrarian
Chris -
Please note that #2 wasn't simply to the editors, but to the rest of the BC community as well. The editors might not...but they might. After all, you did.
7 - B.Beverley
I do not belive Global Warming is solely to blame on humans. The industrial age only started in the late 1880's or 1890's.It got a big push during world war one and again for WW2. There have been many steps we took today with better filters now then when we first started. This earth we are on has been going on from when life as we know it first began. I think this warming comes and goes in cycles these cycles can last some 150 years or more. Any time someone tells me to listen to me and me only cause I am right and everybody else is wrong. I stay away from, what maybe true today could be all wrong 5 or ten years from know.
8 - Dr Hussein Dreadful
Ah, where to begin...
I suppose it was just a matter of time before Warren started parroting Standard Conservative Position E.
We can start with this graphic, which rather deftly shows where the cherry-picked graph in the Daily Wail fits in context, and that the reality is the exact opposite of what that respected scientific journal [sarcasm marker] would like its readers to believe.
Secondly, yes, CO2 is a trace gas, and quite harmless at its nominal atmospheric level. Which, for information, is about 0.04% of the atmosphere. Which, coincidentally, is about the same concentration of alcohol in the bloodstream at which its effects become noticeable in the average human.
We can go on if you like, Warren...
9 - Christopher Rose
Glenn, please note that I am the Comments Editor - I see all comments, but posting your request here is basically just public whining at it won't achieve the change you are apparently looking for.
As I said before, use the proper channels.
10 - Igor
CO2 is not an essential component for mammalian life. In fact, excess CO2 is a suffocant, not a poison, but a suffocant. The atmosphere already has about twice as much CO2 as required to sustain current plant life.
11 - Glenn Contrarian
Warren -
In years past, we had a much larger CO2-loving green biomass - but it's much smaller now. In years past, all the CO2 came from animal flatulence, wood and charcoal fires (by a much smaller human population), and the occasional volcanic eruption - but now our CO2 output is much more than all that combined.
We have less green biomass to absorb a much greater CO2 output...which is sorta like putting way more fish food in a goldfish bowl where there used to be two goldfish, but now there's one. Does all that extra food do the goldfish much good?
Ah, but I forget - people who agree with 98% of the climatologists and 96% of ALL scientists worldwide (many of whom have careers that are directly affected by climate change, including oceanographers, geologists, botanists, and so forth)...well, any people who would agree with all those scientists are automatically wrong!
Why? Because the Gospel of Fox News says they are! That's how we know all the liberals and scientists are wrong!
12 - Igor
Pushing more CO2 into the atmosphere will not increase plant life and thereby enrich human life. The threat to plant life is not lack of CO2 but human desecration, usually for land clearance and increased settlement.
13 - Clavos
The threat to plant life is not lack of CO2 but human desecration, usually for land clearance and increased settlement.
You forgot wood harvesting, Igor.
cf: the Amazon basin.
14 - Zingzing
why, clavos... Seems as if you might come around one of these days. Or you're sting. do you have 7 hours of tantric and do you bleach your hair? I seriously don't know how you can have both of those things at once, but such is celebrity.
15 - Dr Dreadful
I once met Sting's son. He was a friend of my wife's roommate when she lived in London. At the time, he fronted a band called Santa's Boyfriend. I think they changed their name after that. Can't imagine why.
16 - Zingzing
can you imagine what it must be like to be sting's son? There are probably bits that rock, but only in some sort of way that your mom could get behind.
17 - Clavos
I'm not Sting, zing (that sounds cool!), but I do have a lot of his music...
18 - Clavos
If you zing Sting, he won't sing...
19 - Cannonshop
#11 So, geological sources don't create CO2 now, Glenn? (I WAS going to try pointing out to Warren that blindly accepting ANY assertions on scientific matters is a bad idea-whether pro or con, but...gohds, Glenn...here's a nit and a hint for you: Geosources of CO2 are enormous generators, and they're frequent generators.)
FACT: Earth is over 4x10^8 years old (Over four billion years near as we can tell), it has been both warmer, and colder, than it is now, and we've only had instrumentalities able to measure LOCAL climate accurately for the last 300 years or so, and accurate to the fine degree necessary to make (short term) predictions only in the last 100 or so years. We've had the ability to measure upper atmospheric only for about sixty years, with "Global" coverage only for around forty (at most optimistic projection) years.
FACT: there's still shitload we don't know about how ANY of it works. Plate Tectonics, something accepted as fact today, was Crank theorizing less than a century ago, and still considered "Unproven but likely" less than fifty years ago.
Fact: Weather bureaus still get projections at distances as short as a week WRONG more often than they are right-the trend is changing, but it's still only a 'best guess' what the weather's doing tomorrow-and that's with a lot more accurate data going in, than projections for five to ten years from now.
FACT: The Climate WILL change, IS Changing, HAS changed, both locally and globally. It's not a fixed or static system, IT changes with or without people in the mix. It changed before (Long before) there WERE any people in the mix.
You can't STOP it from changing. (Hell, for that matter, you can't be sure the ground you're walking on is going to stay stable, regardless of where you are. That is ALSO changing, chew on that a bit.)
Is the climate "warming"? well, the evidence says 'yes'. We're still not up to the level it was at in AD 1000 (when Greenland was wheat country and they were growing french wine-grapes in scotland), but that's not the question, is it?
The question is whether or not it's changing because we're all sinners, who need to repent, or at least, buy Indulgences (Carbon Credits) to pay for our sins.
And that's where the question stops being science, and becomes politics.
20 - Jordan Richardson
The question is whether or not it's changing because we're all sinners, who need to repent, or at least, buy Indulgences (Carbon Credits) to pay for our sins.
Who exactly is asking this "question," Cannonshop?
21 - Glenn Contrarian
Cannonshop -
Yes, the earth's climate WILL change - but it is STUPID to pretend that the human race can crap in its house (that has zero plumbing) for generations on end and still assume that the house isn't starting to stink really bad! And I hate to break this to you, Cannonshop, but the climate doesn't change by magic! It doesn't "just happen" without any particular effect driving the change! The effect driving the change HAS been identified - and NASA just pointed out yet more evidence of what's driving the change. The conservative fantasy that humanity can't be affecting the climate...is STUPID. It's DUMB.
How many times have you heard me say 'stupid' on BC? Very, very seldom. But it applies here.
One of the most egregious problems with the conservative viewpoint is the 'phlogiston effect', where they say, "well, the scientists were wrong about phlogiston (or plate tectonics or DNA or whatever) before, so that means we can't trust their word when it comes to global warming!"
The PROBLEM with your 'phlogiston effect' is that you're forgetting that we have VERY DIFFERENT TOOLS than we once had, the spread of information is incredibly faster than before, today a teenager can access information in a simple Google search that would have taken a skilled research weeks or months to find thirty years ago...and the continual use of the 'phlogiston effect' is really no different from continuing to claim the earth is flat. Scientists CAN be wrong, but the greater the consensus among modern scientists, the greater the likelihood that they're right.
Why is it that conservatives are SO eager to buy into military science, on any science that can make them money, but when science is telling them Bad News, that what they're doing is going to cost them Lots and Lots of money, well, THAT's just not fit for public distribution, is it? Speaking of which, Cannonshop - are you a member of the Flat Earth Society? They'd welcome you with open arms, since they're eagerly searching for those who can't understand modern science!
22 - Glenn Contrarian
And Cannonshop -
Do you not yet understand that we liberals WANT the conservatives to be right about global warming? Do you not yet understand that the SCIENTISTS wish the conservatives were right about global warming?
I wish you were right - I really, truly do! Because if you were right, and all this liberal worry over global warming were no big deal, the world would still be Just Fine!
BUT if YOU are wrong, and we do nothing about it...what happens, Cannonshop?
That's the gamble you're taking. You're betting the planet - the planet! - that 98% of climatologists and 96% of all scientists are wrong. Is that a wise bet, Cannonshop?
IS THAT A WISE BET, CANNONSHOP?
23 - Dr Hussein Dreadful
FACT: Earth is over 4x10^8 years old (Over four billion years near as we can tell), it has been both warmer, and colder, than it is now
I'm sure I've pointed this out before here, Cannon, and I'm sure you've read it: Every single one of those changes was CAUSED by something. And there is a massive amount of evidence that indicates the current warming was CAUSED by us.
FACT: there's still shitload we don't know about how ANY of it works.
So if my brakes start acting all cranky, and there's a shitload I don't know about how my car works, my best course of action is to do nothing and just wait and see what happens?
Fact: Weather bureaus still get projections at distances as short as a week WRONG more often than they are right-the trend is changing, but it's still only a 'best guess' what the weather's doing tomorrow-and that's with a lot more accurate data going in, than projections for five to ten years from now.
Elegantly, precisely, and completely wrong. Weather is a far more chaotic system than climate. While I would be wise to prepare at least somewhat for the possibility that it may rain today, and not be a balmy, sunny 66 degrees as the ditz delivering the local forecast predicts, I CAN say with a high degree of confidence that July 2nd 2012 is likely to be quite a bit warmer than February 2nd is. This is because past July 2nds have a deeply ingrained habit of doing that.
If, in addition, I look at the recorded temperatures for a sequence of historical February 2nds and July 2nds, and notice that, while some 2nds were a bit cooler than the corresponding day on the previous year, the OVERALL TREND is for them to keep getting warmer, I would want to start paying a bit of attention to why that might be.
The Climate WILL change, IS Changing, HAS changed, both locally and globally. It's not a fixed or static system, IT changes with or without people in the mix. It changed before (Long before) there WERE any people in the mix.
And currently it is changing because there ARE people in the mix.
Your argument is like saying that because people have dropped dead of natural causes before, it's not worth investigating whether the bullet-ridden body in the alley might have been murdered.
You can't STOP it from changing.
No, it's too late for that, even though we started it. But we CAN mitigate the changes.
The question is whether or not it's changing because we're all sinners, who need to repent, or at least, buy Indulgences (Carbon Credits) to pay for our sins.
That's not a question, that's a strawman.
24 - Igor
It seems to me that any moderately sensible person could look at our circumstances on earth (which, as far as we know are very unique) which are so amenable to our lives, and how delicate it is and how that requires us to tend our treasure well, lest we lose it through carelessness and prodigality.
We may think that the very air in the atmosphere is immense and can withstand some abuse, but not by billions of people.
We may think that the oceans are deep and extensive and can withstand some abuse, and that out of it's immensity it will easily replenish fish stocks. But we now know that is not true.
We may think that the earths marvelous hydrological cycle will always provide fresh healthy water, and if not from rains then from rivers and acquifers. But we now know that the rains can be modified, that the rivers can be polluted into poison, and the acquifers polluted by mans actions.
Even a child should be able to recognize these truths. Only a foolish person could argue that we can continue our present course in a headlong rush to self-destruction.
Everything that makes life livable on earth is under attack by humans and the senseless Frankenstein monsters they create.
We must stop poisoning our own home.
25 - Glenn Contrarian
And Cannonshop -
Fact: Weather bureaus still get projections at distances as short as a week WRONG more often than they are right-the trend is changing, but it's still only a 'best guess' what the weather's doing tomorrow-and that's with a lot more accurate data going in, than projections for five to ten years from now.
That's like saying, "Well, since Joe the Arborist can't state without possibility of error what's wrong with any one particular tree, then Weyerhauser can't know what's going on with the forest as a whole!"
Apples and oranges. Weathermen deal mostly on the local level. Climatologists deal on the MACRO level. And it's just like dealing with people - you can't predict with any real accuracy what ONE person will do, but you CAN predict with accuracy what MANY people will do. So it goes on the difference between the weather on a local level, and the weather on a planetary level.
Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees....