Am I still allowed to question climate change?

[JIbbo]

Nobody is arguing that we aren't affected by weather.

What we are arguing is that AGW does not exist, or at least is unproven and highly speculative. Large temperature variations exist in historical records and the models for climate change appear to be extremely inaccurate.

 

don't feed the troll..........

 

As I've posted previously the earths climate has changed dramatically without any link to CO2 and with a far worse variance than we are currently seeing.

 

Thats why although the planet might be warming by .2 of a degree on average, there is no DIRECT CAUSAL evidence to link this to CO2 emilssions currently.

 

You might as well link UK housing prices & the earths temperature as both have climed at the same time.

 

to put this into perspective.

 

Its cold at night, warm in the day. A temperature difference of a few degrees.

 

Does the world end ?

 

Nope.

[convert]

Apart from copying and pasting dubious chunks of text fromn corrupt sources!

 

Guffaw!

 

Do you mean like the one being investigated in East Anglia, or the one in the USA, that's being pursued for failing to comply with FOI requests ?

 

Troll on!

[spindrift]

 

Its cold at night, warm in the day. A temperature difference of a few degrees.

 

Does the world end ?

 

Nope.

 

 

We need more insightful scientific contributions of this calibre. Here's mine, a Thermos keeps hot things hot and cold things cold.

 

How does it know the difference?

 

 

Next week, why gravity is a totally discredited theory because mice fly if you kick them hard enough.

[Greybeard]

Christopher Booker has a lively article published in the Telegraph this evening..

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6738111/Climategate-reveals-the-most-influential-tree-in-the-world.html

 

I really would like to see a rebuttal of his claims.

[spindrift]

Some of Booker's stratagems are transparent enough. One is to introduce all climate sceptics with a little eulogy to their credentials, while their opponents receive only a perfunctory, if not disparaging, preamble.

 

 

This reaches its apotheosis on the back cover with a quote from "the world's leading atmospheric physicist and 'climate scientist''', MIT professor Richard Lindzen. Unusually for sceptics, Lindzen does have significant academic status, but probably only his mother would endorse this description.

 

Another of Booker's techniques is to latch on to genuine flaws in the science or its dissemination with the tenacity of a bulldog. Predictably, he attacks the infamous "hockey stick" graph, a plot of global mean temperatures over the past 1,000 years produced by two scientists in 1998 which shows little change for the entire period until suddenly soaring in the 20th century.

 

It is now mostly accepted that the analysis that produced these data was wrong. The question, still unresolved, is "how wrong?" – have we experienced comparable warming in the historical past, in which case the argument that it is a natural fluctuation seems plausible, or is the current trend truly unusual?

 

 

But Booker's implication that the entire edifice of the global-warming consensus rested on the shaky hockey stick is absurd: it was one strand among many. For a balanced critique of this episode, look instead to Richard Muller's Physics for Future Presidents (Norton).

 

In the end, the devil is in the detail. And therein lies the problem, for to dismantle Booker's case would require an equally long and citation-encrusted book. You are going to get nothing more (here at least) than my word for it that, say, the first of Booker's accusations about faulty science and procedural misdemeanour that I chose at random to investigate further – the resignation of hurricane specialist Chris Landsea from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2005, and the UK chief scientific adviser David King's trip to a bizarre climate meeting in Moscow the same year – proved to have a rather different complexion from the one presented here.

 

Yet some of the cracks become evident just from paying attention. When Booker commits the cardinal sin, for which climate scientists have often castigated alarmists, of making a swallow into a summer (or, here, winter) by using the cold snap of 2008 as a reason to doubt the warming trend, it's game over. And by claiming that the slight cooling trend since around 2003 undermines the IPCC's climate models, he fails to understand that different timescales demand different models: the projections for 2100 are hardly meant to predict whether next summer will be a scorcher.

 

 

 

 

Don't even get me started about the graph on page 328 that shows this cooling; just take a look at http://tiny.cc/mpjJB and then tell me what you feel about it.

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/15/real-global-warming-christopher-booker

[spindrift]

Although I concur with the political cynicism and policy dismissiveness in Christopher Booker's piece "Our leaders are in carbon-cloud cuckoo land" of 10th July, I have to demand corrections and apologies from you for publishing his baseless opinions about the science and evidence of Global Warming, which betray a severe lack of knowledge on his part, and poor editorial censure on your part.

 

The science of Global Warming is not "distinctly questionable" as Booker puts it, and there is not a "fundamental flaw" in the theory. Temperatures have been rising, consistently, globally, with trends making themselves very apparent. One only needs to look at the new Blob Chart from NASA to see this :-

 

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Ts_vs.year+month.lrg.gif

 

This one chart completely undermines Booker's erroneous statement. He is also at fault when he says "a much more convincing link can be seen in the activity of the sun", which has been refuted and debunked, and my view is that Booker is being not only provocative, but arrogantly

wrong about this :-

 

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11650

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/solar.htm

 

 

Recently Christopher Booker wrote an article for the Telegraph entitled “2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved,” and many of his assertions are off mark, because he made nothing but straw man or sham arguments:

 

http://conservationreport.com/2008/12/31/global-warming-why-christopher-booker-is-wrong/

[Cyclone]

AGW doesn't exist at all?

 

There is no chance at all, according to you, that man-made emissions are changing the weather?

Can't you read?

 

'Or at least is unproven and highly speculative."

 

You must have missed the question the first time, what are your qualifications to make you claim you know better than NASA, the Met Office, The Royal Society and a bastion of climate experts?

I could equally ask what are you qualifications to agree.

The beauty of science is that anyone can (and should) question everything.

Indeed the whole basis of science is that everything can be and should be questioned and that a hypothesis should make testable and falsifiable predictions. I'm sorry if that doesn't happen to fit in your elitist model though where status makes a claim unquestionable.

 

Why so shy to tell us what your expertise is?

 

(Apart from copying and pasting dubious chunks of text fromn corrupt sources!

 

Guffaw!

 

I do have to wonder at this point whether you really understand what the scientific method is, or whether this particular claim just happens to fit with your own preconceptions and so you don't want to see it challenged.

[Cyclone]

To be honest, this is one about which I'm quite happy to sit back and let time prove me right.

We'll come back to this thread in a year, or maybe ten years and spindrift can eat his uncritical acceptance of apparently biased 'science'.

I've yet to be disappointed with this approach, particularly with blow hards who are strong on trying to get opponents to shut up, but weak on evidence as to why they should do so.

[spindrift]

Would you get on a plane that had a 1 in ten chance of crashing?

[ptigga]

Global Warming theory has been put about becaue we cant keep using the worlds oils & Gases, they've brought this in to ensure we use alternative fuels and stop the reliance with RUSSIA & ASIA

 

I think that you're confusing global warming with Peak Oil. The theory of man made global warming is that climate chaos is being caused by carbon emissions from burning oil. The theory of Peak Oil is that most of the earth's oil resources have already been used up.

 

These are two entirely separate problems. I personally don't believe that climate chaos is a myth that's a result of some massive worldwide conspiracy to wean us off oil. There's too much evidence of global warming already appearing.

 

I've been to glaciers in the alps and I've seen for myself just how much they have receded in the last 30 years. I don't believe that this could realistically have been achieved by a conspiracy that involves employing people to melt glaciers with massive invisible hair dryers.

 

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter how much of the problem is man-made - we still owe it to the future of the human race to do whatever is possible to keep this planet habitable. After all, as far as we know, we may be the only intelligent life in the whole universe

Edited December 6, 2009 by ptigga