Global Warming does not exist

[DarkCloud]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
It's not that simple. Large amounts of carbon dioxide is trapped in the permafrost now. Increasing the surface temperature will cause the permafrost to melt, thus releasing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Right now the global climatic system is relatively stable, but once you tip it over there's no telling how far it will go.

Okay, first off- That sounds correct- and I agree with you... But I still believe it is natural becuase of the following:

- this is the philosophy I follow:

"Finally these periods of glaciation and deglaciation were occurring long before the industrial revolution and fossil fuel was not known, however global warming did occur during each of these cycles. In addition, deglaciation that occurred during the present cycle which started over 10,000 years ago was due to this variable constant (conduction constant) is sufficient evidence that global warming is not due to use of fossil fuel, however the use of fossil fuel could contribute to global warming."

from a so-so website (Sadly, I have to admit that it isn't the best site; but it seems fairly credible): http://www.earths-magnetic-field-and...-and-more.com/

[DarkCloud]

An increaes in temperature by 2 c?
That seems incorrect from this data:

"Is global warming occurring?

ØAccording to Accu-Weather, the world’s leading commercial forecaster, "Global air temperatures as measured by land-based weather stations show an increase of about 0.45 degrees Celsius over the past century. This may be no more than normal climatic variation...[and] several biases in the data may be responsible for some of this increase."

ØSatellite data indicate a slight cooling in the climate in the last 18 years. These satellites use advanced technology and are not subject to the "heat island" effect around major cities that alters ground-based thermometers.

ØProjections of future climate changes are uncertain. Although some computer models predict warming in the next century, these models are very limited. The effects of cloud formations, precipitation, the role of the oceans, or the sun, are still not well known and often inadequately represented in the climate models --- although all play a major role in determining our climate. Scientists who work on these models are quick to point out that they are far from perfect representations of reality, and are probably not advanced enough for direct use in policy implementation. Interestingly, as the computer climate models have become more sophisticated in recent years, the predicted increase in temperature has been lowered. "

From: http://www.globalwarming.org/brochure.html

and-

Are humans causing the climate to change?

Ø98% of total global greenhouse gas emissions are natural (mostly water vapor); only 2% are from man-made sources.

ØBy most accounts, man-made emissions have had no more than a minuscule impact on the climate. Although the climate has warmed slightly in the last 100 years, 70% percent of that warming occurred prior to 1940, before the upsurge in greenhouse gas emissions from industrial processes. (Dr. Robert C. Balling, Arizona State University)

and: To URBAN RANGER-

ØLarger quantities of CO2 in the atmosphere and warmer climates would likely lead to an increase in vegetation. During warm periods in history vegetation flourished, at one point allowing the Vikings to farm in now frozen Greenland.

Although I agree with this, I disagree with the websites' claims that New Orleans wouldn't flood. But I agree with just about everything else.

-
And If you really want to reduce the alleged "global warning"

Will the policies actually stop global warming?

ØBy all estimates, only severe reductions in global CO2 emissions -- on the order of 60 percent or more -- will alter the computer forecasts. The resulting economic dislocations would be tremendous, potentially outweighing the negative impacts of even the most apocalyptic warming scenario.

ØIf the policies do not include developing nations the result will likely be a reallocation of emissions to developing nations, not a reduction of emissions.

ØIf the entire world is included and CO2 emissions are severely restricted, the science is not clear what impact, if any, it would have on the world’s climate.

"

[CyberGnu]

Wraith, look, you are a smart guy and you have obviously read a lot about the subject. Nevertheless, as far as I know, you don't hold a degree in climatology, even less a professorship or even a PhD.

The commision I talk about is THE presidental commision. There has only been one in the last few years, and the commions findings was widely publizied (2001). The members of the commision were picked by the National Academy of the Sciences, and approved of by the administration.

While I'm not familiar with the climatologists in the NAS, I do know the chemists. These people are respected scientists in their field, generally university professors and formerly industrial chemists with more than 20 years of experience. I have no reason to believe that the standards for the climatology section are any less...

Whatsmore, while there might be a theoretical possibility that every single one of the commision might be lying or incompetent, the most important issue is the lack of controversy over the commisions findings. That humanity are most likely causing global warming is in the scientific community an accepted situation...

Now, we can argue details in different studies all day long, but the truth of the matter is that they don't really matter, since NONE of us here have the background to evaluate them. We just have to accept that the studies passed peer review, and thus hopefully were scrutinized by someone who actually does have the required knowledge.

[Wraith]

--"The orbits of satellites tend to degrade"

Which is not a hard to control for factor. It's not like we don't keep track of where they are or something. In any case, the satellite data is far more trustworthy than the surface data (and it does agree with the weather balloon data).

--"Try reading the rest of it, particularily the studies which measure the rate of sea level rising, and how the past 100 years has been signifigantly greater."

We have a hard enough time getting accurate sea-level change measurements now. Anything taken a hundren or more years ago is going to have a large enough margin of error as to be worthless for the purposes of this "proof". We quite simply do not have anywhere near a large enough sample set of reliable data to draw any conclusions.

Nevertheless, I'll try to make time today to read it thouroughly.

--"The commision I talk about is THE presidental commision. There has only been one in the last few years,"

Then please provide a link to their findings. I've been searching for presidential commission with global warming or climate change and all I can find are stories about it being appointed from 1997. If nothing else, give me the _actual name_ of the commission, since we all know politicalese has little in common with English.

--"I have no reason to believe that the standards for the climatology section are any less..."

These are the people who have a vested interesting in making everyone believe that global warming is real. It gets them more grant money and long-running government panel jobs, after all. Just thought I should mention this, since the other side of that has been brought up.
I can't comment on the "scientists" until I find out who they were, and what commission this was. A lot of these government studies have little to no scientific involvement. DDT is an example here, since the EPA's science board was overriden by an administrator who insisted on the ban.

--"the most important issue is the lack of controversy over the commisions findings."

Lack of controversy my ass. Just because the media is not giving massive coverage to [url=http://www.oism.org/pproject/the dissenters[/url] does not mean they aren't there.

--"We just have to accept that the studies passed peer review"

Were they even peer-reviewed? Sorry, but this doesn't matter a whole lot. Just look at the IPCC for an example of how actual science can be totally distorted beyond recognition. Everyone keeps going on about the number of scientists involved with it, and never realize that the people setting policy (the IPCC) are just a bunch of buearacrats working from a highly politicized summary of a report (the original is nowhere near as certain as the IPCC and the media are making it out to be).

Wraith
"Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity and until they do (and find the cure), all ideal plans will fall into quicksand."
-- Richard Feynman

[Wraith]

Well, I've read the report. It's far less detailed than I expected, and it certainly does nothing to support your position. It does talk, at length, about how difficult it is to get accurate measurements, and how there are way too many factors to be able to use it to support global warming theories.

Some quotes:

. Douglas [1992] carried out a systematic global analysis of sea level acceleration, and arrived at a similar result that no acceleration of global sea level has occurred over the last 150 years that is statistically significantly different from zero at the 95 authors have bounded any acceleration that might have occurred in the last 150 years at an order of magnitude or more less than that predicted to accompany global warming in the future [ Houghton et al., 1990].

But the basic issue remains. If global warming causes increased precipitation at very high latitudes with concomitant storage of water in the form of ice, sea level rise due to thermal expansion of the ocean or melting of small glaciers could be offset to a greater or lesser extent.

From these considerations it is clear that simply obtaining a value for global sea level rise in the past, or detecting an increase in the future, is not enough for sea level rise to serve as an unambiguous indicator of global climate change.

None of this paper supports your conclusion.

Wraith
"A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he's talking about"

[Adalbertus]

From the data I know, global warming exists. The main question would be where they come from.

About the positioning of the weather stations, I would guess that one has put much thoughts in their placings. They are preferably at free or open spots, as Airports (which in Germany are outside the densely populated areas), or hill tops in towns or cities, sometimes on mountains (which often give a different thermal profile). So I would guess the effect of the warming due to cities is accounted for.
The main problem is that climate is something very complex. There are lots of unknown effects. One can detect an 11 years oscillation which is due to the sunspot cycle. For those two reasons alone it is nearly impossible to get a reliable answer on the general trend from measurements which go over only twenty years. There is another cycle due to the dynamics of the solar system (I don't recall its exact origins) which has a periode of about 24000 years (I think) and which might be responsible for the "big" glaciales of the past. From roughly 1400-1600 the climate in Europe was considerably colder than nowadays or in medieval times. This apparently roughly coincides with a complete disappearence of sunspots (they were reported by Chinese astronomers in medieval times, and after some time neither by Chinese nor by European astronomers until Galilei, who maybe saw one of the first ones). Today we are still in a warming phase after this "little glaciale". From the data I know, there is definitely a trend to warming, which is definitely partly natural. On the other hand, it seems that manmade warming has a similar strong influcence. (I've heard half of the increase is natural, the other half man-made, but I guess this was by someone who was sure that both influences do exist and was completely unable to give better numbers; I would doubt that it is so easily possible).

IMHO, it will take a long time (several decades) until we have collected enough data to be sure to know what happens. Simulations to really calculate what happens due to a changed immission of gas X are very demanding to computing powers and still likely lack of accuracy. But: Our highly developped societies are very sensitive against any drastic changes as they would be caused by global warming. (All those changes I know of in human history have caused serious wars and problems, sometimes even for centuries). We know that with our activities we increase the tendency of the nature to go away from the equilibrium state we are used to. We know that this will cause problems, because not only "Goodbye New Orleans" but also "Goodbye Bangladesh", "Goodbye half Netherlands", "Goodbye London", "Goodbye Hamburg", and I wouldn't wonder if this means a Farewell to some 100 million of other people, too.

So, we have to act, even if G. W. Bush is too stupid to see this.

[Wraith]

--"About the positioning of the weather stations, I would guess that one has put much thoughts in their placings."

Theoretically, but not always in practice. Here are some examples of the variability of placement.

For those who don't want to click:

The above are a selection of photos published at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology website, designed to show the surroundings around the weather boxes in Australia (the louvred white boxes known as `Stevenson Screens' mounted a metre above ground on each photo).

The top photo (`the Good') from Mildura is an example of a well-placed box, well away from urbanisation, growing vegetation or structures, all of which would skew the record towards warming over a period of time.

The second photo (`the Bad') from Toowoomba looks idyllic, but is seriously flawed as a serious location from which to detect climate change. It is sheltered from the cooling winds by the residential house and growing tall vegetation surrounding it - a nice little sun trap in fact - just what the people living there may want, but exactly what the box should not have if it is to accurately measure climate change.

The last photo (`the Ugly') from Melbourne is a complete abortion of a location, plain and simple, right at the intersection of two busy highways near the centre of the city (itself with a population of over 3 million). It can only be useful for measuring current city weather, not regional or global climate. The additional heat from increasingly busy traffic will warm that box artificially, giving a false impression of climatic warming. The problem is so severe that neither CRU nor GISS could credibly correct for it.

But when we hear about `global mean temperature' or that some new `record' has been broken, it is well to remember that it is from places such as these that the data comes from.

The alternative is to believe what the satellites tell us. They cover the earth evenly, with no distortions from urbanisation and vegetation and give a result accurate to one hundredth of a degree. But the IPCC prefers to believe the nonsense given them by the instruments at Melbourne and places like it.

--"Our highly developped societies are very sensitive against any drastic changes as they would be caused by global warming."

Those "drastic changes" are seriously overstated in the media. Talk of island disappearing beneath the waves and major storms and so on are based on fantasy, not science. So far, the most likely results of any warming would seem to be milder winters in the coldest areas and longer growing seasons, which are not really problems.

--"So, we have to act, even if G. W. Bush is too stupid to see this"

Even Kyoto advocates admit it does next to nothing. Human outputs of CO2 are around 5% of the CO2 released into the atmosphere. Methane is a bigger human-caused issue, but hasn't been dealt with nearly as much. And still the most important greenhouse gas of all isn't dealt with at all, nor is it one we have a whole lot of control over.

The "we have to act" crowd does not seem to be familiar with the idea of opportunity cost. The money things like Kyoto would cost us is much better spent on other things.

Wraith
"Change is the essential process of all existence."

[DarkCloud]

aaaaahhh!
Look at my post above.

There has only been a .45 increase in global temperatures over the last century!

Thus, there is no global warming- at least according to the place where I received my data.

Case dissmissed

[Adalbertus]

There has only been a .45 increase in global temperatures over the last century!

I haven't found this number directly, but it is certainly not far off truth. The point is that 0.45 degree is quite a lot when it isn't weather but climate. (And there are predictions that Europe will become colder due to global warming because the gulf stream will be less effective. Take a world map and you'll see that the gulf stream shifts the isotherms - lines of equal temperature - about 1000 to 2000 km to the north.)

So far, the most likely results of any warming would seem to be milder winters in the coldest areas and longer growing seasons, which are not really problems.

Not really. But it also makes the dry period during the summer in warmer regions longer and thus people start starving and pressing north. People living north don't like that and fight back in some way or another. This is the origin of the social troubles I mentioned.

About sea level rising I think it is interesting to look at the history of the Netherlands: They are famous for their windmills, and their main purpose was not to produce flour but to pump water from the fields. There were three players: The Dutch who pumped, the sea level which fell and rose with the little ice age, and the geology who is constantly sinking the Netherlands. (IMO, finally the geology will win ) The Dutch started to effectively gain land exactly in the 17th century where the little ice age started helping them. Up to today, they still have enough technology to keep their land pumped (Yes, they'll have to constantly pump 1/3 of their territory!), and so they are not really interested in a global warming. Neither their neighbours.
Climate is a game of only several tenth of a degree or a few meters of sea level. But on the average this wins against 60 (or even 100, as I've heard of Alaska) degree between a really hot summer day and a really cold winter night. To detect the traces of our (long-term, not daily) activity in these small changes is a hard thing. But everything we do follows an exponentially increasing function unless we are in a saturated state (and humanity still is far off such state). And when our activities become clearly visible it is too late to act, because catastrophies will be faster.

Human outputs of CO2 are around 5% of the CO2 released into the atmosphere.

This looks very much like a number where deforestation is not taken into account (no attempt to defend Russia). And those 5% can do lots of harm if nature is unable to dispose of them. Which it certainly partly does, but also here I fear that it might be too late by the time we have researched the correct numbers.

The problem is that everything is fine as long as we are a little disturbance to the big system of nature. And this is what our nature and behaviour relies on. But we are approaching dimensions where we are no longer this "little disturbance" but a major player. We don't have the intuition to play this game correctly (i. e. to secure our own survival), nor the knowledge to do so.

Btw. I don't fear for nature. There is always some sort of nature, just take a look to the moon. I even don't fear for life on earth. I perhaps fear a bit for mammals, but even then I think rats and some other animals will survive. It is really about our own survival.

[DanS]

"They cover the earth evenly, with no distortions from urbanisation and vegetation and give a result accurate to one hundredth of a degree."

Now they probably can, but over the last 20 years, I think the precision is more like 2/10ths of a degree celcius. So there is still some room for everybody to continue to hold their own positions. Well, at least for a couple of decades.

Either way, it is evident that biases may creep in using a ground-based system. Not that they don't in space (I don't know), but it seems on its face that it would provoke less bias.

[WhiteElephants]

Originally posted by Adalbertus
And when our activities become clearly visible it is too late to act, because catastrophies will be faster.

And this is based on... oh yeah, environmentalist fear mongering since there is no previous environmental catastrophy to base this little theory of "we're going to be too late" on.

What's with these guys anyway? Gloom and doom, gloom and doom. I've come to the conclusion that when anyone tells me I have to do something or eveyone is going to suffer a miserable death I can be pretty sure they're full of crap. Trying to predict what the world will be like in a hundred years is just nonsense. You simply don't know. You can take the data you have and graph it into the future forever, but we don't live in a vacuum. Technology changes our lives and how we run ourlives. These gloom and doom shamans can't account for that.

[Wraith]

--"But it also makes the dry period during the summer in warmer regions longer and thus people start starving and pressing north"

I don't think this would make enough of a difference. There's already a food surplus globally (the problem is getting it to the right places), so I don't see any significant changes in who's starving or where.

--"And when our activities become clearly visible it is too late to act, because catastrophies will be faster."

There is already a large amount of evidence for radical climate changes in the past, well before humans were industrialized. The climate is not a steady-state system, after all.

--"This looks very much like a number where deforestation is not taken into account"

This would vary by area, yes. Some areas are covered by more forests than they were a century or two ago. This is one of the areas the US caught a lot of crud on, when they tried to get the carbon sinks counted towards Kyoto goals (since the US has a lot of foliage).
And there's certainly no evidence of nature having a hard time dealing with that 5%. It's largely plant-food, after all. Nature probably has a harder time dealing with anthropogenic methane (which we do put out in large quantities) and CFCs (although some of these have a cooling effect rather than a warming effect).

Wraith
"This calls for a subtle blend of psychology and extreme violence."
-- The Young Ones

[Adalbertus]

And this is based on... oh yeah, environmentalist fear mongering since there is no previous environmental catastrophy to base this little theory of "we're going to be too late" on.

Sorry, I'm not a real environmentalist (Reading a lot about the consequences of the Chernobyl accident after 10 years made me from "indifferent" to "carefully pro nuclear power").
The problem is people (environmentalists as well as their opposite) refuse to accept some fundamental properties of differential equations (which basically govern most of ecological, economical ...) systems. Things are quite stable as long as you change only little to the parameters. There are usually threshold values with which you get into a region of chaotic behaviour. We have close to no idea where these threshold values are. (From the instabilities in the temperature curves I would guess they are not too far away, but it's only a guess).
It is the human nature not only liking to neglect things but as well to overreact when one really feels the need to do something (and some environmentalists simply do overreact). So there will be a sharp change in the human controlled parameters to the equation. The system will react strongly to these changes, this a property of any differential equation. So the system will start to (chaotically or not) rapidly oscillate. Just imagine what means a rapidly oscillating world population number...

I don't think this would make enough of a difference. There's already a food surplus globally (the problem is getting it to the right places), so I don't see
any significant changes in who's starving or where.

I think it does. The hot south is already more populated than the cold north (compared to their technical/economical abilities to grow food), and the distribution of food already doesn't work. The Swedish certainly will be happy when there are some 30 million African people who say: We don't have food, we have the choice to fight or to die. You benefitted from global warming, we lost. Let us in.

There is already a large amount of evidence for radical climate changes in the past, well before humans were industrialized. The climate is not a steady-state system, after all.

Certainly. And Humanity survived, somehow. It increased the number of wars and uprisings. If you like to see an increasing number of wars in the future, go on.

[Hydey]

Our planet may well have warmed in the last 100 years but it is still cooler than it was 1000 years ago

[ZoboZeWarrior]

We suffered from a small ice age. There was a lot of famine and wars as explained previously.