Posted on 05/01/2012 10:27:05 AM PDT by reaganaut1
LAMONT, Okla. — For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong.
Over time, nearly every one of their arguments has been knocked down by accumulating evidence, and polls say 97 percent of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk.
Yet in recent years, the climate change skeptics have seized on one last argument that cannot be so readily dismissed. Their theory is that clouds will save us.
They acknowledge that the human release of greenhouse gases will cause the planet to warm. But they assert that clouds — which can either warm or cool the earth, depending on the type and location — will shift in such a way as to counter much of the expected temperature rise and preserve the equable climate on which civilization depends.
Their theory exploits the greatest remaining mystery in climate science, the difficulty that researchers have had in predicting how clouds will change. The scientific majority believes that clouds will most likely have a neutral effect or will even amplify the warming, perhaps strongly, but the lack of unambiguous proof has left room for dissent.
“Clouds really are the biggest uncertainty,” said Andrew E. Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M. “If you listen to the credible climate skeptics, they’ve really pushed all their chips onto clouds.”
Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the leading proponent of the view that clouds will save the day. His stature in the field — he has been making seminal contributions to climate science since the 1960s — has amplified his influence.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The issue has never been whether climate changes. It changes all the time.
The issue has been whether man created CO2 in the atmosphere causes climate heating.
The preponderance of evidence is that CO2 is coincidental but not causal to global warming. Rather the drivers are primarily solar activity and sometimes volcanic activity.
it’s irrelavent. We were warned 10 years ago at the climate conference that was our VERY last chance to do anything and now it is too late.
All we can do now is sit and wait four more years until the world burns up on the date Al Gore predicted.
The propagandists at NYT grazed tangentially upon one point - referring to the cloud cover - then the carom took them clear away.
What are clouds? Water vapor. What is water vapor? Only the single vastly most important “greenhouse” gas in our atmosphere, anywhere from 30 to 100 times as important as carbon dioxide, which lacks one very important characteristic compared to water vapor - under normal atmospheric conditions, CO2 exists only as a gas, while H2O can exist simultaneously in a gas, a solid, and a liquid state.
The effect of clouds is two-fold, both as a reflective surface that sends at least a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum back into space, and also as a heat-transfer medium from the earth’s surface, as the liquid form, water, evaporates, or the solid form, ice, sublimates, absorbing huge amounts of heat from the surroundings. Upon rising in the atmosphere, the water vapor gives up all this heat energy, either becoming water droplets, or very fine ice crystals. The heat energy is radiated off to space on the side of the earth turned away from the sun during the 24-hour day cycle.
After cooling, the now heavier-than-air liquid water or solid ice fall back to earth as precipitation, rain, snow, or in special conditions, hail or sleet.
This was all explained in my sixth-grade science class. Don’t know how all these highly trained atmospheric scientists missed that, but then, the quality of education has fallen off in the past sixty years or so.
Gee, I thought the last 15 years of global temperature stasis in the face of continuously increasing CO2 was a pretty good bastion.
Look at the data. 30 years of cooling, then 30 years of warming, then thirty years of cooling, then thirty years of warming. Any guesses as to what the next phase is going to be?
That simply means that if a climate scientist went against the progressive agenda, they lost their job.
Progressives see their political bias as a character attribute, not a limiting character flaw.
So when Stalin purged all his generals, he actually thought he was improving his military.
Not this 97% BS again.
For those that haven't seen it this is how the 97% was arrived at:
Ninety-Seven-Percent-Is-Not-What-You-Think
There's a petition signed by over 30,000 scientists denying that there is a clear link between AGW and "Climate Change" nee "Global Warming"
Uh, I know this one, uh, warming. No, cooling, it's cooling! No, wait, warming, I mean cooling!
1 - Define “climate scientist”
2 - Why would anyone claiming to represent “science” present a “poll” rather than scientific data to defend their position?
3 - The reason “skeptics” use clouds to disprove the claims of CO2 “causing” climate change, is because water vapor is the most significant variable, with regard to temperature change. It is both the most significant variable and the most difficult to model. This makes the study of any CO2 impact, almost impossible to measure.
What, I wonder, is a “climate scientist?” It doesn’t shock me that the preponderance of scientists who identify themselves as such would take “Global Warming” or “Climate Change” as a given. When all you have is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail.
Prove that. These shmucks can't "prove" anything.
FMCDH(BITS)
great fix.
Here is a full rebuttal to the New York Times today. The 97% figure relies on 77 Anonymous Persons Who Answered 2 questions that most skeptics would answer yes to.
Here is rebuttal:
NYT Reporter Justin Gillis Does it Again! Author of ‘Worst NYT Story on Climate Ever’ — gets even worse!
‘Gillis has officially reduced himself to the equivalent of a newsletter writer for climate pressure groups. Just when you thought his reporting cannot get any worse, he surprises us again’
Dr. Lindzen calls his mechanism the iris effect, after the iris of the eye, which opens at night to let in more light. In this case, the earth’s “iris” of high clouds would be opening to let more heat escape.
Gee, a negative feedback loop! Who woulda thunk it? It's too bad the NY Times' writer started the article with so much agitprop. I'm sure plenty of readers stopped right there.
New Scientific Method:
1) Propose Hypothesis.
2) Poll.
3) Science determined by Poll Results.
Welcome to the 8th Century!
Funny that...
I was participating in “picking a fight in a mental ward” with some resident libs over on youtube,
and none of them seemed to want to respond to the idea that “climate scientists” who dissented from the politically correct AGW theory would not get their next research grant.
But, the residents were quick to claim that the dissenting scientists were all paid for by corporations & big oil.
When I was a youngin the coming catastrophic ice age was settled science.....Yet we are supposed to just swallow their bilge with every new catastrophic climate shift.
Last bastion? We have lots of bastions: glaciers/ice cap, bad control of measuring stations, manipulation of historic data by messing with time spans, faking of data, hiding of data. We are dissenting from the reports, not denying the truth.
One nitpick: true water vapor is invisible. If you can see it then it is no longer water vapor nor a greenhouse gas. It has condensed into liquid droplet form which has very different properties.
The highly biased NYT article neglects to mention how man can influence how clouds form. By adding a small amount of inert particulates to the air we can increase cloud formation if we want to.
Leftists advocate for most humans to die off. We cause them too much envious grief. So which is it? Do they want to sustain human life so it prospers or do they want most of us to go? They can't have it both ways.
Darn right that their computer modeling schemes are false. Back when the Cimategate documents were released, one of the documents provided a vector of “fudge factors” used by one of the models to recompute actual temperature data to ensure that the desired “my God, manmade Global Warming is out of control” results were obtained.
This is the basis for “consensus”.
Rather pathetic.
On the brighter side of the news, over 700 scientists signed a petition objecting to AGW.
Not to mention 49 recently objecting to NASA’s miring themselves in AGW.
NYT wordsmiths..........gotta hate them.
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