They say there are 17 TRILLION reasons to support Global Warming Regulation…..In their own words, see the video: Global Warming Money Swindle Scam-SEDITION 101

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-626338741461885839

Well, can't say I wasn't aware of this tragedy; can say that when I found out about his project, I immediately thought about the lock-box, and his claim to the creation of the Internet/Information Highway - caused me to smile actually.

That aside, it says a lot about the integrity of the Nobel Peace Prize. A child growing up, with lofty aspirations and a little integrity seems to have an ever shrinking list of possible answers for the teacher who asks - what do you want to accomplish or achieve when you grow up?

RealClimate (which is a blog written by climate scientists) has a lot of articles on global warming. Some of the issues in this post are covered here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/10/convenient-untruths/

For example, the epochtimes article states:
"Gore's movie: Sea levels could rise by up to seven metres, caused by the melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland in the near future.
Finding: This could only happen over millennia and is not in line with the scientific consensus."

RealClimate responds:
"Gore correctly asserted that melting of Greenland or the West Antarctic ice sheet would raise sea levels 20ft (6 meters). In the movie, no timescale for that was specified, but lest you think that the 20 ft number is simply plucked out of thin air, you should note that this is about how much higher sea level was around 125,000 years ago during the last inter-glacial period. Then, global temperatures were only a degree or two warmer than today - and given that this is close to the minimum temperature rise we can expect in the future, that 20 ft is particularly relevant. The rate at which this is likely to happen is however highly uncertain as we have discussed previously.'

"Meanwhile, a website called Junkscience.com is offering $125,000 to anyone who can prove that climate change is being caused by human activity. So far there have been no takers."
That's only relevant if you trust the judges to be impartial. Kent Hovind offered $250,000 to anyone that could prove evolution, too, but we all know he would be a ridiculously biased judge.

OKAY!!! So what does this have to do with leaving the mind virus Christianity! I love Al Gore and I'll take him over that GAWD loving fraud GW Bush any day, all day, and everyday! So what if some of it may be slightly exaggerated! We are doing allot of fucked up things to our environment and we need someone to stand up and say NO MORE! Can't even take your kids fishing anymore the water is so Polluted... Whatever! This article is a waste of time on a website which is suppose to be for people leaving Fraudianity not environmentalism! Whatever.... Webmaster I have much love for you but this is one time I strongly disagree with you.... GIVE ME A FUCKIN BREAK I FUCKIN LOVE AL GORE! LOL

Anon,

I think I've heard similar takes on the Bible... 'It's all true except the parts that aren't'

When something sells itself as true, and become an article of faith that may not be questioned, then it is within our remit, since it points at a dangerous mind set.

Love and big wet kisses

Gramps

Gramps understands. As former Christians, we know what it is like to be sucked in by hucksters or the honestly deceived.

Nothing should be blindly accepted based on "faith" and inference.

I don't have an opinion on this topic except to wonder about it. I understand that I am totally dependent on others for my understanding of this topic, and I quite frankly am sick of hyped up, fear mongering, "doomsday" rhetoric. It reminds me of religion.

I knew Gore way lying.

So did he.

For those of you who remember the 70's, the cry then was over a "new ice age".

And does anyone remember "nuclear winter"? In the current world situation, that is more likely than "global warming".

Just because we have forgotten about it, doesn't mean it couldn't still happen.

I want to hear about global warming from unbiassed scientists, not polititians with an agenda.

Let me second that. I am an environmentalist myself, as much as I can be :-)

However, politicians are trained and skilled at persuasion that is what they do. Scientists don't need to persuade anybody, the facts speak for themselves.

When I hear politicians, speaking on terms of science, what we witness is objective facts, placed in the context of a persuasive speech. We get the glass is half-empty when it's convenient, or half-full depending on where the politician wants to move the people.

Persuasion is unnecessary when there are solid facts supporting a topic. When solid facts are available, that's when it's time for a leader to make decisions; it's what they are in office to do.

When I see a political leader speaking on a topic to garner support, it's not because they hold undisputed facts, it's because they need the citizens to urge congressional support for their cause, because they lack undisputed facts.

Sometimes, they get away with it, unchecked, and we end up in global conflicts, police actions, etc.

It's not the particular cause/person I focus on, when I listen to politicians; it's the methodology they use to present their case. To me, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, seems pertinent beyond just religious boundaries.

Webmaster Dave said "I don't have an opinion on this topic except to wonder about it. I understand that I am totally dependent on others for my understanding of this topic, and I quite frankly am sick of hyped up, fear mongering, "doomsday" rhetoric. It reminds me of religion."
This is what I was trying to point out in the other article about not worrying about Global Warming. Global Warming as pushed by Gore and his ilk does not exist. We do have a climate change in the making, but it is a natural climate change, one which mankind has little to do with. We are just one of many many factors, factors that can't be or aren't addressed in the computer models. C'mon folks, the scientists' computer models can only occassionally get tomorrow's weather correct, so how can their long range computer models be accurate? In the 10th century, Vikings settled and farmed Greenland, is that possible today/ 450,000,000 years ago, there was a glacial episode where the ice sheets reached to the equator, yet the CO2 in the atmosphere was 8 to 10 times the levels today...seems that Earth should have resembled Venus instead of Triton if the Green House Gases theory were correct! Gore is an idiot and a power hungry politician, both of which can't be trusted any further than they can be thrown by an arthritic Centigenarian!
Global Warming is the 21st century religion and Albert Gore II is the high priest - the Billy Graham! Surely you ExC's can identify hype and know not to believe it! - Heimdall

Forget Gore and Bush, look at the data. Good places to start are:

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

National Climatic Data Center

Environment Canada

EU Environment website

Heimdall,

Although I find the prospect of seriously accepting the authority of political "experts" on any scientific topic to be less than satisfying, I'm not prepared to wholly accept any dogmatic assertion that our current climate change is "one which mankind has little to do with." Your statement may be true and it may not. You certainly have an opinion on the matter, but you don’t “know,” so I'm equally skeptical of your dogmatism as I am of Gore's. The reason I remain skeptical is that I simply don't possess the comprehensive knowledge needed to form an intelligent opinion. I don't think many (if any) of us do. And, more importantly, if it is true that we are heating up the planet, I can’t imagine what I or anyone else is supposed to do about it. Until our entire society gets weaned off the oil tit, I and everyone else in the Industrial World has no choice but to continue spewing out contributions to global warming until Water World comes.

Still, enthusiastically hopeless messages of apocalyptic terror accomplish little except maybe to generate attention and revenue for agenda promoters. So in that respect at least, I am in complete agreement with you.

Someone mentioned "nuclear winter".

Was the ATHEIST Carl Sagan trotting out apocylyptic terror hype when he pushed that?

Someone mentioned "nuclear winter".

Was the ATHEIST Carl Sagan trotting out apocylyptic terror hype when he pushed that?

I'll echo the webmaster and others: what's your average joe like me supposed to do about this? What to believe? From what I've seen, both sides are taking data and making it say whatever they want. I want to do my part, but who am I supposed to be fighting for and who am I supposed to be fighting against? That's exactly why I got out of the military and why I'm so cautious about picking up the sword in someone else's cause...I don't know who/what I'm fighting for or who/what it's against. It's easy (and a bit naive) to be idealistic and say "it's for your family/god/country/etc,etc." Obviously. But there are so many uncertainties. And who are you to believe?

It's all too ambiguous. The issues we face are too important to be tossed about as political leverage, whether it's Iraq, Global Warming, or any other international issue. Why can't someone stand up and tell the truth without any agenda? Such a person does not exist that's in a position to do anything about it.

*****

RubyHypatia said: "I want to hear about global warming from unbiassed scientists, not polititians with an agenda."

I agree, but where are we going to find those? And how would we know if they were unbiased or not?

Since I am from Canada, I know that the Friends of Science, based in Calgary ( Canada's oil capital) is short for Friends of the science of "Oil Drilling". It is a public relations arm of big oil. PR groups often try to deflect issues that adversly affect their clients and they have had success right here! They have tagged environmentalism as a religion! To the fundies of every other religion this leads to immediate rejection because only their brand of religion has the truth. To us, on this site, we don't trust anything that smacks of the big "R" so we sneer at Gore and move on. And to Jiggs Casey, we cannot have Nuclear Winter until we have global nuclear war. That prediction just awaits our action. Here's hoping we don't try that. scapegoat

Has anyone bothered to look up Epoch Times on Wiki? It doesn't sound like a very reliable source on this topic.

If you find this commentary persuasive, you might want to check out who your bed fellows are. For example, look at the Global Warming summary on Media Matters
[url=http://mediamatters.org/action_center/global_warming/]MM on global_warming[/url]

I'm a zoologist, so I have no expertise in climate science. However, I do know what it is like to get published in peer-reviewed journals, and it can be a very humbling experience. So with that being said, everyone should understand that making scientific claims that can't be substatiated, is usually career ending for a scientist(just ask those "cold fusion" guys).

So I find it hard to believe that so many climate scientist would argue a position that is supposedly so completely wrong and off-base. Sure, they're not infallible and mistakes are made, but the self-correcting nature of science is typically rather swift (especially in regards to controversial claims) and rather merciless. And no one yet has explained to me what the hell their motive(s) would be, especially considering how self-destructive it would be to ones career if it can be shown that you have been talking out your ass.

Interesting to note that the one country embroiled in so much "debate" about human contributions to global warming (vs the European and Japanese postions) is also the only modern country where the theory of Evolution is widely rejected by the population and challenged in the schools. All that despite it's almost universal acceptance outside the US and also in the scientific community.

I want to add, those investigating this also need to look at the Global Dimming information and how that is related to some of the "problems" of global warming. The temperature-contrail data from post 9/11 is very interesting.

hey goldie, that should be bertRam, two 'R's not one.

I don't believe the "Scientists" who get their Bread buttered w/a slab of Oil Shale, either.

If i was getting a coupla hundred Kilobux in grants from Big Oil, I'd be tempted not only to poo-poo climate change, but tout Hudson Bay as the next great fun-on-the-beach destination...

I don't know which faerie tale merchants worries me more in their potential to make Life miserable, the Jeebus Mythists, or the "There's PLENTY of Oil under them damm Eye-racky's sand! And we DESERVE it for our Hummers!" Cult.

Someone wanted to hear from scientists instead of politicians. How about the opinion of a couple of UK scientists:

quote: He [Mr Justice Burton] put the word "errors" in inverted commas because the points were debatable rather than wrong. But the professors say the judge should have known the error word would be repeated in the media without its inverted commas.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7049377.stm
UK scientists defend Gore film

BBC seems to do a pretty good job at reporting science findings. Note that today there was an article on 'unexpected growth in CO2'. Also an article on heat and drought problems in the American West and the Mediterranean, as seen in the current forest fires and the ones in Greece this summer.

Scientists are human too. There is no reason to believe that they are an more immune to pseudo-religious mumbo jumbo or corruption, than the rest of us.
Right now, if you deny the prevailing orthodoxy on global warming( by say, pointing out that the ice caps on Mars are melting)you will not get grants, and you'll have as much chance as an ID advocate of getting published in a peer reviewed journal.
Climate scientists have families too. Attacking the prevailing consensus would mean that my kids mat not be able to go to University.
If you want to know what things are like in the science community right now, for many of us it's like living in the middle ages, never knowing when the inquisition is going to come knocking and punch your career library card.
There is enough evidence out there for people to know what's going on but I'm not going to take food from my kid's mouths to get it to you.
I do have a google account but I'm not using it. It would not be good for one of my " friends " to read this rant and trace it back.

Anonymous said "Someone wanted to hear from scientists instead of politicians. How about the opinion of a couple of UK scientists:"
Well, here are the opinions of a few other scientists and scientific organizations that think Al Gore is full of manure:

“Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust,” declared astronomer Dr. Ian Wilson after reviewing the new study which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Another scientist said the peer-reviewed study overturned “in one fell swoop” the climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore. The study entitled “Heat Capacity, Time Constant, and Sensitivity of Earth’s Climate System,” was authored by Brookhaven National Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz
Former Harvard physicist Dr. Lubos Motl said the new study has reduced proponents of man-made climate fears to “playing the children’s game to scare each other. As far as I can say, all the people who end up with 2 or even 3 Celsius degrees for the climate sensitivity are just playing the children's game to scare each other, as [MIT climate scientist] Richard Lindzen says, by making artificial biased assumptions about positive feedbacks. . There is no reasonable, balanced, and self-consistent work that would lead to such a relatively high sensitivity,” Motl concluded.
The new study was also touted as “overturning the UN IPCC ‘consensus’ in one fell swoop” by the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Joel Schwartz in an August 17, 2007 blog post. “New research from Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Lab concludes that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as the IPCC assumes,” wrote AEI’s Schwartz, who hold a master’s degree in planetary science from the California Institute of Technology.
The study’s “result is 63% lower than the IPCC’s estimate of 3 degrees C for a doubling of CO2 (2.0–4.5 degrees C, 2SD range). Right now we’re about 41% above the estimated pre-industrial CO2 level of 270 ppm. At the current rate of increase of about 0.55% per year, CO2 will double around 2070. Based on Schwartz’s results, we should expect about a 0.6 degrees C additional increase in temperature between now and 2070 due to this additional CO2. That doesn’t seem particularly alarming,” AEI’s Schwartz explained. “In other words, there’s hardly any additional warming ‘in the pipeline’ from previous greenhouse gas emissions. This is in contrast to the IPCC, which predicts that the Earth’s average temperature will rise an additional 0.6 degrees C during the 21st Century even if greenhouse gas concentrations stopped increasing,” he added.
“Along with dozens of other studies in the scientific literature, [this] new study belies Al Gore’s claim that there is no legitimate scholarly alternative to climate catastrophism. Indeed, if Schwartz’s results are correct, that alone would be enough to overturn in one fell swoop the IPCC’s scientific ‘consensus’, the environmentalists’ climate hysteria, and the political pretext for the energy-restriction policies that have become so popular with the world’s environmental regulators, elected officials, and corporations. The question is, will anyone in the mainstream media notice?” AEI’s Schwartz concluded.
Recent scientific studies may make 2007 go down in history as the "tipping point" of man-made global warming fears. A progression of peer-reviewed studies have been published which serve to debunk the United Nations, former Vice President Al Gore, and the media engineered “consensus” on climate change.
Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter, who has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, noted in a June 18, 2007 essay that global warming has stopped.
“The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2. Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 %),”
In August 2007, the UK Met Office was finally forced to concede the obvious: global warming has stopped. The UK Met Office acknowledged the flat lining of global temperatures, but in an apparent attempt to keep stoking man-made climate alarm, the Met Office is now promoting more unproven dire computer model projections of the future. They now claim climate computer models predict “global warming will begin in earnest in 2009” because greenhouse emissions will then overtake natural climate variability.
Meteorologist Joseph Conklin, who launched the skeptical website www.ClimatePolice.com in 2007, recently declared the “global warming movement [is] falling apart.”
“A few months ago, a study came out that demonstrated global temperatures have leveled off. But instead of possibly admitting that this whole global warming thing is a farce, a group of British scientists concluded that the real global warming won’t start until 2009,” Conklin wrote in an August 10, 2007 blog post on his website. But the credibility of these computer model predictions took a significant hit in June 2007 when Dr. Jim Renwick, a top UN IPCC scientist, admitted that climate models do not account for half the variability in nature and thus are not reliable. In addition, Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, former CEO and director of research for the Netherlands Royal National Meteorological Institute, recently compared scientists who promote computer models predicting future climate doom to unlicensed “software engineers" who were "unqualified to sell their products to society."
"Brussels: CO2 is not the big bogeyman of climate change and global warming. This is the conclusion of a comprehensive scientific study done by the Royal Meteorological Institute, which will be published this summer. The study does not state that CO2 plays no role in warming the earth. "But it can never play the decisive role that is currently attributed to it", climate scientist Luc Debontridder said. "Not CO2, but water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. It is responsible for at least 75 % of the greenhouse effect. This is a simple scientific fact, but Al Gore's movie has hyped CO2 so much that nobody seems to take note of it." said Debontridder. "Every change in weather conditions is blamed on CO2. But the warm winters of the last few years (in Belgium) are simply due to the 'North-Atlantic Oscillation'. And this has absolutely nothing to do with CO2," he added.
Chinese scientists Lin Zhen-Shan, and Sun Xian’s 2007 study, published in the peer-reviewed Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, noted that CO2’s impact on warming may be “excessively exaggerated. The global climate warming is not solely affected by the CO2 greenhouse effect. The best example is temperature obviously cooling however atmospheric CO2 concentration is ascending from 1940s to 1970s. Although the CO2 greenhouse effect on global climate change is unsuspicious, it could have been excessively exaggerated. It is high time to reconsider the trend of global climate change,” the two scientists concluded.
“The (U.S.) National Climate Data Center (NCDC) is in the middle of a scandal. Their global observing network, the heart and soul of surface weather measurement, is a disaster. Urbanization has placed many sites in unsuitable locations — on hot black asphalt, next to trash burn barrels, beside heat exhaust vents, even attached to hot chimneys and above outdoor grills! The data and approach taken by many global warming alarmists is seriously flawed. If the global data were properly adjusted for urbanization and station siting, and land use change issues were addressed, what would emerge is a cyclical pattern of rises and falls with much less of any background trend,” Meteorologist Joseph Conklin wrote in an August 10, 2007 blog post. this is just a sampling...I have much more. Heimdall
P.s. to Dave...I was merely echoing the opinion of a large group of scientists when I said man had little to do with climate change...it is 99.9% natural.

There is no doubt among climate scientists that current global warming is caused by anthropogenic fossil fuel burning. Kudos to Al Gore for turing minds of Americans toward science

mikes said "There is no doubt among climate scientists that current global warming is caused by anthropogenic fossil fuel burning."
You evidentally didn't read the posting...those were the real climate scientist that I quoted...the debate is over and Al Gore and his group lost it!

I actually saw the segment about this on the BBC. One of the things that really jumped out at me was how the judge said, essentially, "there are seven things that are innaccurate"- and they were all things like the rise in sea-level (which, as someone else pointed out, was only innacurate if you look at it in a short time-frame), and the retreating snows of Kilimanjaro (but NOT the retreating snows and glaciers on other mountains).

It was interesting how the judge and even the reporter covering the story kept bringing this fact up- the bulk of Mr. Gore's film is accurate and the important parts are accurate. It was also interesting to see the opposing team's remarkable message control, which was (and is always)- crisis averted! Nothing to see here! Just forget all about it!

Don't let message control distort the facts.

-Red Foot Okie

A long discussion (300+ comments) on the Schwartz paper can be found on RealClimate.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/09/climate-insensitivity/#more-471

The initial entry notes that this paper is being heralded as a death-knell by the denialist blog world even before the official publication, and responses from the scientific community. Is that science or politics?

Schwartz says in his paper:

"Finally, as the present analysis rests on a simple single-compartment energy balance model, the question must inevitably arise whether the rather obdurate climate system might be amenable to determination of its key properties through empirical analysis based on such a simple model. In response to that question it might have to be said that it remains to be seen."

Not exactly the death blow its being made out to be.

Bob Carter:

"Professor Carter, whose background is in marine geology, appears to have little, if any, standing in the Australian climate science community. He is on the research committee at the Institute of Public Affairs, a think tank that has received funding from oil and tobacco companies, and whose directors sit on the boards of companies in the fossil fuel sector."
Sydney Morning Herald


The urban heat island effect is old hat, if you take urban stations out of the surface temperature data and look at rural stations only it doesn't change the trend. Some have a misunderstanding of how measurements are analyzed, if a particular station has a bias it doesn't mean the data is bad, if you can quantify the bias and correct for it.

Anonymous wrote:

pointing out that the ice caps on Mars are melting

The changes on Mars are likely due to variation in surface reflectivity, or albedo:

"Research indicates that as the dark areas on Mars expand and darken over time, its albedo decreases, and its surface air temperature rise."
from a NASA article

Right now, if you deny the prevailing orthodoxy on global warming...you will not get grants

There are many published papers that are contrary to the current scientific consensus, that's how science works.

Alanh said "if you take urban stations out of the surface temperature data and look at rural stations only it doesn't change the trend."
Considering that there are very few rural stations and that NCOAA took the locations of their stations off the internet as soon as it was pointed out there was a heat sink problem, it would seem that the temperature trend would be hard to show, much less make a statement that it remained the same. Besides which, CO2 levels are not accepted as the cause of the current warming trend, a large number of scientists are leaning to the (according to you non-existent) solar sun spot cycle as the primary cause.

Alanh said "if you take urban stations out of the surface temperature data and look at rural stations only it doesn't change the trend."
Considering that there are very few rural stations and that NCOAA took the locations of their stations off the internet as soon as it was pointed out there was a heat sink problem, it would seem that the temperature trend would be hard to show, much less make a statement that it remained the same. Besides which, CO2 levels are not accepted as the cause of the current warming trend, a large number of scientists are leaning to the (according to you non-existent) solar sun spot cycle as the primary cause.

Heimdall

Looking at the United States Historical Climatology Network website I couldn't find a quick numerical breakdown of urban vs rural stations, it just says the majority of the 1200 stations are rural or in small towns. The GISS surface temperature analysis doesn't use an urban station unless it can be paired with a nearby rural station. No one is saying there aren't sunspot cycles, the question is do we see a long-term upward trend in solar output over many cycles.

Ah Heimdall, more bad news for you.

Turns out that the UK judge's ruling was, in fact, a major rebuke to the people who brought the lawsuit up in the first place. Turns out they wanted the film pulled from being shown in UK schools.

Slapped down!

Instead the judge mandated that the guidebook to go with the film point out nine "innacuracies", which turn out to be not really that innacurate.

Not as innacurate as, say, claiming that "CO2 levels are not accepted as the cause of the current warming trend, a large number of scientists are leaning to the solar sun spot cycle as the primary cause" and neglecting to mention that the "current warming trend" you are referencing is the usual, predicatable short-term weather changes due to the usual, predictable sun-spot cycle.

Kind of like saying "The current warming trend (summer) isn't due to CO2, it's due to the angle of the axis of the earth in relation to the sun."

But hey, you stayed on-message and I suppose that means something to you, truth be damned.

- Red Foot Okie

"Precision bias is a form of cognitive bias in which an evaluator of information commits a logical fallacy as the result of confusing accuracy and precision. More particularly, in assessing the merits of an argument, a measurement, or a report, an observer or assessor falls prey to precision bias when he or she believes that greater precision implies greater accuracy, i.e., that simply because a statement is precise, it is also true.

Precision bias, whether called by that phrase or another, is addressed in fields such as economics, in which there is a significant danger that a seemingly impressive quantity of statistics may be collected even though these statistics may be of little value for demonstrating any particular truth."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_bias

Here is the sunspot data. I found the link with google and the workshop or class seems to have the sources there

http://people.uleth.ca/~dan.johnson/sunspots.htm