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SFR: Al Gore's mistakes?

10K views 121 replies 55 participants last post by  chadk 
#1 ·
#97 ·
Sloan Craven;289051As for the 90% certainty.... In a 'walkin around knowledge' sort of way said:
90% are good odds to you? You're out of my league in risk taking:cool: I've spent lots of time in Manhattan. Do you think your odds are that bad? Considering the number of times you cross the street in a week wouldn't take that bet unless I REALLY needed to cross the street. Do people get sick one out of 10 times in Taco Bell? None of those are acceptable to me.

So I guess in respons to your post I have to say: Hunh??? It's not condescending because you have a different perspective. I HAVE A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE on most things! You just kinda come off like you have no idea what you're talking about. First "Preponderence of the evidence" and now "a series of statistical manipulations"? Statistical manipulation implies an ethical lapse at best, and probably deceit. A series of statistical manipulations would imply you can't trust the data for a second. Maybe I'm being too picky but I can't help feeling those just aren't terms anybody with any exposure to stats would, or at least SHOULD ever use. Even in the context of a hastily constructed web posting! With all apologies to the Simpsons, it's like someone who claims to be lawyer saying the "law talkin' guy should have called for a bad court thingie"... The fact that you consider 90% good odds for crossing the street, eating fast food, or wading... Well, you're just adding further fuel to the fire. Your reference to the gambling book is interesting though. I once heard that Las Vegas and lottery's are a self imposed tax on people who don't understand math...
 
#102 ·
nEven if I said there was a 1/1000 or 1/1000000 chance that I could get hit by a car crossing the street, by your logic I would have been mowed down by now. But statistical odds don't work that way so I'm safe. One in ten people don't need to get sick at taco bell for the odds to be 10% that someone could get ill. I really don't know the odds but after seeing restaurant kitches I'm not super optomistic. Either way, that would be like some guy playing roulette and they keep betting on the number 24 because it hasn't hit in a while so "it's due".

And to clear up any misunderstanding, I took graduate level statistics. There are half a dozen statistics books in my bedroom right now and I am familiar with the terminology. So whether or not I should use the term....well, its not deragatory towards any racial, gender, or ethnic group... Nope nothing wrong with that term. I think it's enlightening because so many people try hide problems with their data by throwing a K.S. test or a multivariate analysis at the readers. So I am implying the possbility of deceit. Scientific informatiton can be fabricated, manipulated, or just be collected poorly. I think people should acknowledge that rather than blindly accept something because it was written by someone in a white coat or automatically dismiss it because it was presented by a professional liar.

I really don't care if you agree with me or not. You're not interested in an educated discussion or open to different ideas because you are going to make judgements on everyone and everything without taking a few seconds to mull it over. You just assume I haven't a clue not because you are familiar with my education or IQ, but because I use this term or that or what I say just doesn't jive with your opinions. You just assume that I've read a book about gambling because it was authored by a mathmatician that happened to be a Vegas odds maker. You bring up the notion that gamblers don't understand math, rather than people looking for some entertainment.

Someone could probably tell you the meaning of life, but you would ignore it because they are serving you pancakes and coffee and speaking in a different dialect rather than mull over what they have to say for a few minutes.
 
#99 ·
depends on whether its a 5 shot or a 9 shot. and that is a great illustration, BTY, of an unsubstatiated opinion being put forth as a fact. the roughly 700 published studies from refereed scientific journals clarify these sorts of things before making inane statements.

now you may continue to believe the FFN and the talking heads, or you might just do some reading from credable sources, sometimes tough sleding to say the least. or you could just go ahead and bash the messenger and demonstrate your unwillingness to become informed.

carry on, this thread is going nowhere.
 
#100 ·
If you want to be childish, you should have said, depends if you it's an automatic or not... Info on the glacier please. EXCUSE me for making the assumption that just about EVERYBODY in North America has an image of a 6 shot, double action, revolver as the tool of choice for russian roulette. The detective special is an oddity, and I've never seen a 9 shot. Is that a .22 cal?

Oh yeah. Info on the glacier please? I can't find anything on it...
 
#104 ·
As someone who has had a great deal of math and used it to quantify scientific data, albeit I'm a bit rusty at this point, I thought I'd dig up some information about 90% confidence/probability (a high level by the way) - as that seems to be where the debate has shifted within this thread at this point. Like everything else, it's simple to do a google search on the topic of statistics and get a refresher of what a phrase such as 90% confidence/probability
means.

For those interested in a statistics refresher, here are some links;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_interval
http://www.health.state.ny.us/diseases/chronic/confint.htm
http://perceptivesciences.com/insights/white_papers/Confidence Intervals Explained.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi-square_distribution

From what I understand Philster, you're argument that mankind is not to blame would fall within the 10% confidence
level/probability. I'm puzzled why you'd argue with the odds stacked so highly against the opinion you're so
headstrong on proving...the odds simply are not in your favor, statistically speaking.

Also, just for the hell of it, I did a google search on a few notable universities to see if they had papers
published on global warming and found the following:

This one from Berkeley- http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/08/02_carbon.shtml

This one from Yale - http://www.yale.edu/opa/newsr/05-08-11-02.all.html

This one from Princeton - http://www.princeton.edu/president/pages/20061025/index.xml

This one from NASA - http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/global_warming_worldbook.html

And if you can believe the NOAA, they said the following: "Human activity has been increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (mostly carbon dioxide from combustion of coal, oil, and gas; plus a few other trace gases). There is no scientific debate on this point."

Here is that link:http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html#Q2

Granted, scientific debate is healthy, it's how we arrive at the "truth". As I think we'd all agree, what sources we gather information from have a great deal to do with it's validity. If I get all of my information from Fox news, Rush Limbaugh etc, the data doesn't have much credibility. However, I chose credible sources, as noted above, and I'm "99%" certain that they're data is more reliable than that coming from the EIB network...
 
#106 ·
As someone who has had a great deal of math and used it to quantify scientific data, albeit a bit rusty at this point, I thought I'd dig up some information about 90% confidence/probability (a high level by the way) - as that seems to be where the debate has shifted within this thread at this point. Like everything else, it's simple to do a google search on the topic of statistics and get a refresher of what a phrase such as 90% confidence/probability means.

For those interested in a statistics refresher, here are some links;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_interval
http://www.health.state.ny.us/diseases/chronic/confint.htm
http://perceptivesciences.com/insights/white_papers/Confidence Intervals Explained.pdf

From what I understand Philster, you're argument that mankind is not to blame would fall within the 10% confidence level/probability. I'm puzzled why you'd want the odds stacked so highly against the opinion you're so headstrong on proving...the odds simply are not in your favor, statistically speaking.
As I tried to tell GT, I have no doubt we are contributing. Heck we may even speed things up by a century or two, but in the time scale this stuff works, that's no big deal. You can work your ass off to try and keep a lake from becoming a pond, from becoming a meadow. Or, you can accept that it's going to happen, and yes do everything reasonable to stop YOUR activity from speeding up that process, but it's going to happen. And then someday glaciers will come and scour out the area, and when the ice melts you'll have your lake again! Well you won't, because you'll be dead, but there will be a lake there again... Or maybe an Ocean!

The problem I have with the true believers of Man Caused Warming is that they DENY that there is a natural process at work AT ALL. It's all us and the world is supposed to be exactly as it was on June 17th, 1951 when little Johnny McCabe discovered he got a funny tickle when his babysitter kissed him goodnight and her breast rubbed against his arm... Screw the volcanoes. Screw the influence of the sun. Ignore politically difficult stuff like the rice farming I pointed out, because that might hurt the third world. Ignore India and China, because maybe just maybe we can use China to keep North Korea and Iran in line, and ignore India, because as long as India and Pakistan are at each other's throats there's a whole lot of Muslims ignoring us. The IPCC approach is scientifically flawed to begin with, and the boosters of the whole thing are so short sighted politically they have no clue.

Tragically people like GT are so uninformed about the world that they actually read what I just wrote and think that came from the Fox News Network! They wouldn't touch any of those topics. Besides, I prefer Keith Olberman. I like when he shouts "Look at 'em gooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!" when a bear is running loose in a neighborhood or something:beer2:
 
#108 ·
I've been reading these posts for some time now. I've tried not to comment because it is clearly a political string bent on defamation of character. I don't like the politics of Al Gore any more than anyone else but, it seems we are wasting band width talking about something that's not in the framework of this website's purpose. I thought this was a FLY FISHING WEBSITE, not a POLITICAL COMMENTARY website. Now you can bash away on me if you like, but if I have to wade through this tripe, I'll start wading less. I love this site, and hope the politics goes away. Can we back off a little please?
 
#109 ·
A few things I can agree with:

Regardless of the cause, there is no excuse for not leaving the place better than we found it....even dumb animals don't shit in their own nest.

"Al Gore is a douche bag"

I won't be around to have to deal with the result of our collective indiscretions with our environment, but my grandkids might. It is worthwhile to get a start on helping them deal with it. Question the science all you want. Our best efforts haven't been good enough yet, and the debate might get us closer to some real answers.

"Do nothing" is not a viable option.

And let's not forget, "Al Gore is a douche bag"
 
#110 ·
Those of you who are tauting the 90% confidence level of the IPCC report have to keep in mind that the authors of it stated they had 90% confidence that man was causing global warming with nothing more than the various computer models they used agreed among themselves 90% of the time as to what will happen if "x" amount of "k" is added to the model. All this really shows is that the computer models agree with each other at the 90% confidence level.

And as Philster has pointed out, the number of things the authors of the IPCC report left out of their computer modeling "forcings" (meaning they simply said, "I wonder what the computer model predicts will happen if I add 'x' amount of CO2 to the model each year for 50 years or 100 years.) are very significant things, which the authors admit within the chapters of the report.

And as I've stated in a prior post, there were only 50% of climatologist, meteorologist, earth scientist, environmental scientist who were certain that global warming was man caused and in need of immediate action. Meanwhile, there were 48% who were neutral and 14% who were sure is wasn't happening. Therefore, I respectfully submit that there is far less than consensus on global warming within the community of scientist trained in the fields directly involved in trying to answer the question.
 
#111 ·
Steve. First let me say THANK YOU! Instead of attacking, you are debating. This thread would be alot shorter and more informative if it was kept at the tone you are taking. I have "fought back" but I have always strived to provide information for further thought and discussion. Information that could be verified. I did read your links. I should have been more specific when I said "people" think there is no natural warming. I was referring to the "general public" who's views are shaped by what they see on the evening news. You know, the "Lincoln Freed the Slaves" folks, I referred to in an earlier post.

The Ozone hole is an interesting case. Notice you don't hear about it anymore? Turns out that YES CFCs "hurt" the ozone layer, but that the hole is seasonal and cyclical.

As to the "trillion tons" we are adding annually check here http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/indicator5.htm In 2000, carbon emissions approached 6.5 billion tons.
 
#112 ·
Sorry Steve hit "submit" too fast. Here's some more interesting info for you.

From http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-05/ci-aai051607.php

The study this info is found in is repeated more times than you can count if you search under worldwide emissions. "Between 2000 and 2004, worldwide CO2 emissions increased at a rate that is over three times the rate during the 1990s-the rate increased from 1.1 % per year during the 1990s to 3.1% per year in the early 2000s."

Terrible indeed, and crowed loudly by most folks. They tend to forget the rest of story though which is "Between 2000 and 2004 the developing countries accounted for a large majority of the growth in emissions, even though they contribute only about 40% of total emissions. In 2004, 73% of the growth in global emissions came from the developing and least developed economies, comprising 80% of the world's population. That same year the developed areas (including the Former Soviet Union), contributed about 60% to the total emissions. These countries account for 77% of the cumulative emissions since the start of the industrial revolution."

So since the start of F-ing the planet "we've" (not the US but developed countries) contributed 77% of the "old" emissions. But 73% of the TRIPPLING in carbon emissions comes from the developing world.

See as I've said over and over. I'm not saying anthroprogenic (that's man made ya'll!) effects aren't real. I'm saying the IPCC science is bad, as in unreliable. I'm saying, doing anything rash or extreme that lowers The united states' (or Canada's, or any of the "cleaner" developed countries) standard or quality of living is unnecessary, and frankly irrelevant. The "Cleaner" countries are getting better, slowly and surely, but the developing world is messing it up at a pace that is unstoppable. Here's the part where it gets interesting. Who are WE to stop them? Who are we to tell asia and africa they can't grow rice. Who are we to tell remote villages up the amazon, or some far flung tibetan village they can't use two stroke or deisel engines to improve their quality of life? Refrigeration, heating, ALL of it.

See we need a new term. Developed Guilt. Kinda like "White guilt". No world organization can or will (and possibly shouldn't) come down on the developing world. So they come down on us. Will they come down on China or India? Of course not, because as the impassioned "general public" keep saying "but per capita they're lower even if they do surpass the US!" Brings up the old question. What weighs more a pound of feathers or a pound of lead. What polutes more a pound of carbon created by one person or a pound of carbon created by 3? A pound's a pound.

I am in full support of environmental legislation. I am in full support of tightening things at a reasonable pace EXCEPT where things are truly toxic or otherwise in extreme Peril (endangered species, cancer hotspots, etc). In those cases I say bring in the white hazmat suits and fix it now! I'm a freakin' tree hugger! With the global warming scare however, it's all about money, power, and "Developed Guilt".

Thanks again Steve. And if anyone knows about this giant iceberg please let me know. Unless it's just the continuing process that started in 2001 with Larsen B... In that case... Old news...

Now other than you Steve, how many folks will comment on the facts, and how many will just yell at me for being brainwashed by Fox News... I mean really... Fox news... It's very entertaining, just not in the way they intend it to be. Hey have you ever noticed these conservative yahoos have coopted the music of people they disdain? Is it ethical to use the art of someone you tear down as an immoral piece of excrement? I mean, you're putting money in their pocket everytime you play it:confused:
 
#116 ·
I think George Will recent article in Newsweek is spot on (see below if interested), particularly his comments about the zealots that are pushing it (i.e. Al Gore) and near total disregard for meaningful cost-benefit analysis. I am also distrustful of the science and the alledged consequences, particularly when current hurricane modeling three days out often has huge errors and the seasonal weather predictions are often substantial off. I agree that doing nothing is not an option but what the zealots are proposing is not an option either.

I also agree w/ Citori comment that "Al Gore is a douche bag"


An Inconvenient Price

Want to eliminate what otherwise will soon be the world's second leading cause of death? Impose a global speed limit of 5mph.

By George F. Will
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 3:30 PM ET Oct 13, 2007
Economics is "the dismal science," in part because it puts a price tag on the pleasure of moralizing. This is pertinent to the crusade, often masquerading as journalism, aimed at hectoring developed nations into taking "strong" actions against global warming. For such nations (developing nations have more pressing priorities), the question, plainly put, is: How much are they willing to pay—in direct expenditures, forgone economic growth, inefficiencies and constricted freedom—in order to have a negligible effect on climate change?

Zealots say fighting global warming is a moral imperative, so cost-benefit analyses are immoral. Like our Manichaean president, they have a simple fixation: Are you with us or not? But in his book "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming," the Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg suggests that global warming, although real, is not apt to be severe; that many of its consequences will be beneficial, and that the exorbitant costs of attempting to substantially curtail it would squander resources that, put to other uses, could have effects thousands of times more ameliorative. He offers cautionary calculations:

The warming that is reasonably projected might be problematic, although not devastating, for the much-fretted-about polar bears, but it will be beneficial for other species. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment anticipates increasing species richness.

Global warming was blamed for 35,000 deaths in Europe's August 2003 heat wave. Cold, however, has caused 25,000 deaths a year recently in England and Wales—47,000 in each winter from 1998 to 2000. In Europe, cold kills more than seven times as many as heat does. Worldwide, moderate warming will, on balance, save more lives than it will cost—by a 9-to-1 ratio in China and India. So, if substantially cutting carbon dioxide reverses warming, that will mean a large net loss of life globally.

How cool do we want the world to be? As cool as it was when the Arctic ice pack extended so far south that Eskimos in kayaks landed in Scotland? Just cool enough to prevent the oceans from inundating us?

The U.N.'s 2007 report estimates that by 2100, sea levels will rise about a foot—as much as they have risen since 1860. That will mean a number of local problems, not a planetary crisis. More people now live near coasts (which is why hurricanes have become more costly; they have not become more frequent or violent), but protecting people and property from the sea would be far less costly than attempting to turn down the planet's thermostat.

In an example of what has been called titillating "climate porn," we have been warned that warming might make malaria endemic in Vermont. Well. Malaria kills more than a million people a year worldwide and was endemic in parts of America's South within living memory (which is why the Centers for Disease Control are in Atlanta). But Lomborg says malaria is "related strongly to economic development and weakly to changing climate." Increasing prosperity and low-tech methods like mosquito nets, not controlling climate change, is the key to preventing 85 million malaria deaths by 2100.

Warming will help agriculture in some regions and hurt it in others, but even a net negative effect will be less injurious than current agriculture policies are. The farm bill currently taking odious shape in Congress will be a killer—literally. Rich countries subsidizing their agriculture limit the ability of poor countries to prosper—and become healthier—by selling their products in rich countries' markets.

Recent loopiness about warming has ranged from the idiotic (an academic study that "associated" warming with increased Italian suicide rates) to the comic (London demonstrators chanting, "What do we want? Carbon taxes! When do we want them? Now!"). Well, you want dramatic effects now? We can eliminate what the World Health Organization says will be, by 2020, second only to heart disease as the world's leading cause of death.

The cause is traffic accidents. The surefire cure is speed limits of 5mph. In 2008 alone, that would save 1.2 million lives and $500 billion in damages, disproportionately in the Third World, which will be hardest hit by increasing traffic carnage. But a world moving at 5mph would be, over the years, uncountable trillions of dollars poorer, which would cost some huge multiple of 1.2 million lives through forgone nutrition, education, infrastructure—e.g., clean water—medicine, research, etc.

The costs of such global slowing would be the medievalization of the world, so the world accepts the costs of velocity. There also are high costs of what Lomborg calls "impossibly ambitious and yet environmentally inconsequential" plans for inventing a "big knob of climate change" that we can give a twist or two, thereby making the climate "better" and making nothing worse.

Sums that are small relative to the cost of trying to fine-tune the planet's climate could prevent scores of millions of deaths from AIDS, unsafe drinking water and other clear and present dangers. If nations concert to impose antiwarming measures commensurate with the hyperbole about the danger, the damage to global economic growth could cause in this century more preventable death and suffering than was caused in the last century by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot combined. Nobel Peace Prize, indeed.
 
#117 ·
Phil,

This thread is unfortunately more daunting in length than substance, and I almost regret having spent any time reading it. It seems you're concerned that the "true believers" of global warming are about to compromise your standard of living - pardon my paraphrasing for succinctness. I don't get that feeling at all. I cannot prove it - statistically or otherwise - but I feel that the "true believers" are no more numerous than the "true deniers" of global warming. I think the majority, perhaps a vast majority and even a preponderance of the population is stuck in the vast middle ground. Yeah, climate change happens, is happening, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest an anthropogenic contribution to it. And there's only so much we can do about it. That's so because for every reduction in carbon emissions we achieve this year, there will be a more than corresponding increase from India, China, etc., so we cannot even break even despite our best efforts. Because we're Americans, most of us will try to leave our part of the world a bit better off than when we arrived, and we'll let the true believers and true deniers duel it out, hoping they at least offset each other's atmospheric gas contributions.

Sg
 
#118 ·
the gaseous contributions from this thread have blown the carbon credit trade from washingtonflyfishing for the next decade.

george will???? hahahahahahahaha, another rightwingnut in denial.

of course there are no links to actual science which refutes the total volume of evidence already published. this is all about covering the gas and oil industries collective butt for doing nothing to improve our way of life. and as a result, covering the butt of this administration.

of course the true believers have to pull opinions out of thin air as there is nothing else to squak about.

so there you go, i am gone from this thread as there is zero possibility of reality entering the mindsets of the few who squak the loudest. carry on..................
 
#119 ·
so there you go, i am gone from this thread as there is zero possibility of reality entering the mindsets of the few who squak the loudest. carry on..................
You're gone? again? Say it isn't so! Where's the iceberg? You have no credibility yourself, and are possibly an enormous fraud. Much as missusing or simply butchering stat terms makes one question a person's expertise in stats, I find it highly unlikely that someone who claims to be a designer of complex systems models casually throws out "sure we can model the earth's ecology":rofl::rofl::rofl: That's why we can acurately predict things like the weather, hurricane's, Volcanic activity, earthquakes, all natural phenonemom. You're probably busy sitting at home tying all that together into one program, working towards your peace prize. It's been done. The answer is 42... Oh, and never misplace your towel.

It's been 9 years since I worked in a research environment with folks who were doing modeling. Didn't do it myself. Don't know anything about actually doing it. Was stunned when someone said " After 3 weeks of trying I threw my best code at it". I naively asked "why wouldn't you start with your best code? Why even have anything OTHER than your best code?" He chuckled warmly and said "You wouldn't understand". Never did. Never will. But I know NONE of those people would EVER claim that in their lifetime we would come close to accurately predicting weather patterns let alone anything beyond that. Ever hear of Chaos Theory? Even idiots who think Ashton Kutcher is worth watching have heard of the term "the butterfly effect". That would be the "Lincoln Freed the Slaves" version of chaotic systems behavior for those who are following along:rofl: I shouldn't be having this much fun with this.

Please share the information on the iceberg before you go. I can't find anything on it. You'd think info would be readily available. Front page even. Nobody else has stepped up to back you up. Did you just pull it out of the back of your waist highs? Such a dilema. If you respond without providing info you're branded as a liar. If you don't respond your branded as a coward... What's a Cool Aid drinker to do! You do know where that term came from right? A group of people who were brainwashed that if they just went along with the group everything would turn out like paradise... Didn't work out. Their "quality of life" reached a low point. As in room temperature. You're misapplying the term when you call someone going against "the consensus" that.
 
#120 ·
An expert who never heard or reference in the lib media. He also believes Gore's an idiot more or less...


The Warming Debate's Gray Area

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, October 15, 2007 4:30 PM PT

Global Warming: A top climate scientist calls the theory that won Al Gore an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize "ridiculous." Others would speak out, he says, if they didn't fear retribution from those who put ideology over science.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Related Topics: Global Warming


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Dr. William Gray, professor emeritus of the atmospheric department at Colorado State University, who has become known as America's most reliable hurricane forecaster, made that assessment at the University of North Carolina over the weekend.

"We'll look back at this in 10 or 15 years and realize how foolish it was," he said.

Climate scientist William Gray, skeptical that man is responsible for global warming, is unswayed by political pressure.
Meantime, said Gray, "We're brainwashing our children. They're going to the Gore movie and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."

Not schooled as a politician or showman like Gore, he told the group of 300, including meteorology students, that "the human impact on the atmosphere is simply too small to have a major impact on global temperatures."

Gray said that a natural cycle of ocean temperatures related to the amount of salt in ocean water was responsible for global warming, which he acknowledges has taken place. As part of this natural cycle, global temperatures will eventually cool again.

He says that fluctuations in hurricane intensity and frequency, Exhibit A in Gore's inquisition, have nothing to do with carbon dioxide levels or human activity, but with changing ocean currents.

He noted that there were 101 hurricanes from 1900 to 1949, in a period of cooler global temperatures, compared with 83 from 1957 to 2006, when the earth warmed.

At a National Hurricane Conference held earlier this year in, appropriately enough, New Orleans, Gray said that this phenomenon "goes back thousands of years. These are natural processes. We shouldn't blame them on humans or CO2."

At 78, Gray stands on his record as a pioneer in seasonal hurricane forecasts and no longer fears the career death that many of his like-minded peers risk if they dare to stray from the politically popular climate orthodoxy that gave Gore his Nobel Prize for activities that have nothing to do with world peace.

"It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong," Gray said. "But they also know that they'd never get any grants if they spoke out. I don't care about grants."

Gore says he will give his $1.5 million prize to a green charity, the Alliance for Climate Change in Palo Alto, Calif. But as a group of economists, including four Nobel Prize winners, reported in 2004, there are better ways to help the planet.

They found that one dollar spent fighting HIV/AIDS produced $40 in social benefits, and that one dollar spent on fighting malnutrition yielded about $30 in social benefits, but that one dollar fighting to lower CO2 emissions yielded between 2 and 25 cents in benefits.

And, as we've said before, what greenies propose stunts economic growth and is a recipe for global poverty.

In an Associated Press interview at the hurricane conference, Gray said of Gore: "He's one of those guys that preaches the end-of-the-world type of things. I think he's doing a great disservice and he doesn't know what he's talking about."

Neither, apparently, does the Nobel Prize committee.
 
#121 ·
Here's an interesting read from the UK: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7049377.stm

The short version is that last week a judge ruled that if the "Inconvenient Truth" is shown in British schools, then it must be accompanied by a disclaimer about it being one-sided and containing errors. The response from two scientists disputes that premise, but the article goes on to talk about the lack of consensus among climatologists.

It certainly puts the "preponderance of scientists" claims in perspective.
 
#122 ·
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/1990/jun13/23271.html

Climate Experts Clash on Global Warming
TECHNOLOGY DAY

Climate Experts Clash on Global Warming

Sharp differences as well as common ground were apparent when two
experts on atmospheric dynamics and modeling engaged in their climactic
debate on world climate change last Friday, Technology Day 1990.

Dr. Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in
Boulder, Colorado, who believes that a significantly warmer world
climate is likely because of increasing greenhouse gases, challenged
Sloan Professor of Meteorology Richard S. Lindzen of MIT's Department of
Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, a well-known skeptic about
global warming.

The debate drew a full house of alumni, press, and interested citizens
to Kresge auditorium.

Moderating the good-natured though serious sparring was Professor Ronald
G. Prinn of EAPS. He began with a crisp summary of present knowledge
about the basic ingredients of potential global warming: the rising
concentrations of gases that can absorb and re-emit infrared radiation
that comes from the solar-heated surface of the Earth.

For some of these gases, said Professor Prinn, sources are reasonably
well understood, but the sources and sinks of others, including methane
and even carbon dioxide, are less clear. Professor Prinn reminded the
audience of an often overlooked fact: omnipresent water vapor itself is
one of the most important and potent of the greenhouse gases.

Concentrations of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's) greenhouse gases, he said,
are rising rapidly from five-11 percent per year, and these molecules
have typical lifetimes in the atmosphere ranging from 75-180 years. By
contrast, the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide rises at only 0.2 to 0.3
percent per year, but has a 150 to 180 year lifetime in the atmosphere.
Its main source is in the tropics, not from fossil fuel combustion

Fossil fuel, however, is responsible for most of the carbon dioxide
increase we see today, said Prinn, though some of that increase may be
due to deforestation whose effects are still a matter of controversy.

Regarding the very long atmospheric lifetimes of many greenhouse gases,
Professor Prinn spoke of a risk factor. "We cannot just simply stop what
it is we're doing and have these gases decay out of the atmosphere on
very short time scales," he said. The gases are long-lived. Just
bringing the rate of increase of some of these gases to zero would
require cutting their emission by factors of three to six, according to
Professor Prinn.

Prinn sharpened the debate: "Greenhouse gases are increasing today at
very substantial rates. Projected into the future, these rates, when
included in most current climate models, lead to predictions of a
significant global warming over the next century, but are these
predictions reliable ? "

He showed the controversial variation of carbon dioxide concentration
and air temperature plotted for the past 160,000 years, a graph that was
determined from air bubbles in glacial ice. Superficially, the two
curves look like they track one another remarkably well. But Prinn
asked, "Is this a chicken and egg problem? Is carbon rising merely
because temperature is rising and the biosphere responds, or, is the
temperature rise itself due to changes in carbon dioxide? We don't have
an answer to that yet."

Warming: Better than Even Odds

Arguing in the affirmative on warming, Dr. Stephen Schneider spoke on
the reliability of climate models: "The real question isn't whether they
are reliable, yes or no," he said. The main issue is what decision-
making purposes the models will be used--"reliability for what," as he
put it.

"I'd love to tell you we've made great progress [over the last 15 to 20
years], but we haven't. The estimate has been, if carbon dioxide were to
be doubled and held fixed--what we call equilibrium--then we'd warm up
the climate something between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius. . . The
question is, is that range reliable and what are the elements of it that
are subject to question."

After explaining the basic principles of computer modeling of global
climate, Schneider termed as much as a 10oC temperature rise by the end
of the next century "a low probability but still possible case."

The most uncertain components of the models, he said, are the complex
effects of clouds, including both cooling and warming effects. He also
showed how difficult it is to forecast the specific geographic patterns
of climate change, including temperature and moisture distributions.

Schneider worried about the rapidity of change, saying that nature took
about 10,000 years to warm 5oC (from 15,000 to 5,000 years ago) as
compared to a possible impending rate of change five to 100 times that
natural rate.

"What is the probability of the catastrophic curve or the mild curve?
The answer here is that there is no objective way to assign it,"
Schneider said.

"Simply looking backwards in the last century is not very instructive to
give us reliability in the future, because too many things that we
weren't measuring were occurring. We've only been measuring what's
important for about the last ten years.

"The bottom line is what's the probability of these curves and the
answer is it depends on the intuition of experts. . . It's probably a
better than even bet, according to most people who I've asked, that the
truth will be somewhere in this part of the range [2oC increase]. My own
view is that it's not likely to be up at the catastrophic end or at the
low end--when I say not likely I mean maybe a 10 percent chance."

"Are the models reliable? . . . In detail, 'no.' I'll join [Dr. Lindzen]
in that. On the other hand, are they reliable to say that we have a
better than even chance that there could be unprecedentedly large
climate change [larger than 2oC]--when I say unprecedented, I mean in
the 10,000 years of human civilization, then I think the answer is
'yes.'"

"Facing 50 percent or so odds of that kind of change is a reliable
enough prediction in my value system to take quite seriously that we
need to examine what we're doing that's causing these global changes
that Ron Prinn showed, rather than waiting the 10 or 20 years to resolve
the details."

Minimal or No Warming Likely

Speaking of the great difficulties inherent in computer modeling of
climate, Professor Lindzen said, "I think the situation as we look at it
today is that the warming, indeed, is much smaller than suggested by
current large models, if indeed there is warming at all."

Professor Lindzen believes that there will be a warming "under half a
degree," though he does not even rule out the possibility of a cooling.

Since he believes that the models are making erroneous predictions, he
argued, "I think it is a pressing obligation of meteorologists and
oceanographers to find out why the models are wrong."

Professor Lindzen complained that atmospheric modeling ". . .used to be
considered a tool of theory." Now, he suggested, the community of
modelers and theoreticians has grown apart. "What I find increasingly
worrisome is the notion that models are assessed by comparison with
other models," he said.

Professor Lindzen took exception to Dr. Schneider's range of warming
prospects, saying, "whereas the small end of the diagram he last showed
was quite likely [below 1oC rise] the high end would violate many, many
things."

Lindzen believes, for example, that the temperature record of the past
is not compatible with the models that predict significant warming in
the next century. He believes that there are "documented errors in
models that are crucial to warming predictions." He said, "Much less
certain, though potentially extremely important, the models have a
behavior in the tropics that is crucial to present predictions and seems
inconsistent with present and past tropical behavior."

Lindzen said that models that currently predict a 4oC temperature rise
some time next century for a doubling of carbon dioxide, suggest that a
2oC rise should already have occurred for the carbon dioxide already put
into the atmosphere by human activity--something that has not happened.

Perhaps Professor Lindzen's sharpest criticism dealt with what he called
the "circumvention" of Earth's "greenhouse" by vertical currents that
bring water vapor upward and cause heat to be radiated back into space.

He said, "The surface of the Earth cools bodily by motion that carries
the heat around the bulk of the greenhouse gas and the radiation is
emitted from upper levels which have much less infrared opacity. Thereby
they circumvent about three-quarters of the greenhouse substance. . .
Speaking of trapping of heat by greenhouse gases in the bulk of the
atmosphere is no more impressive than the trapping of Germans by the
Maginot line--there are plenty of good ways of getting around it."

I think that the current evidence suggests that the overall feedback
ought to be negative [restraining warming]. And, indeed, if we were not
caught up in the politics of this problem, the normal response to the
data and the models would be to intensify our search."

What to Do

Two MIT professors followed with brief remarks on what should be done,
given our present incomplete knowledge. Professor of Economics Henry D.
Jacoby of the MIT Sloan School of Management said, "I don't think that
we are near a circumstance with a strong enough consensus to justify
imposition of panic. We are not anywhere near, I think, the political
consensus that would allow us to pull real cost out of people to solve
this problem. . . I think we have to prepare ourselves for decades of
work, and I think we have to pour more resources into that. The third
thing we have to do is to buy options--primarily in the area of
technology and institutional development. We're not going to severely
restrict by regulation or pricing the use of carbon dioxide."

Dr. Nazli Choucri, Professor of Political Science and Associate Director
of the Technology and Development Program at MIT, emphasized the
importance of deciding first what criteria we should use to decide what
to do. Her advice was to "increase options," particularly by stabilizing
global population, promoting institutional resiliency and international
cooperation, and establishing appropriate priorities for research.
 
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