Posted on 01/01/2007 5:11:40 PM PST by neverdem
Amid the shouting lately about whether global warming is a human-caused catastrophe or a hoax, some usually staid climate scientists in the usually invisible middle are speaking up.
The discourse over the issue has been feverish since Hurricane Katrina. Seizing the moment, many environmental campaigners, former Vice President Al Gore and some scientists have portrayed the growing human influence on the climate as an unfolding disaster that is already measurably strengthening hurricanes, spreading diseases and amplifying recent droughts and deluges.
Conservative politicians and a few scientists, many with ties to energy companies, have variously countered that human-driven warming is inconsequential, unproved or a manufactured crisis.
A third stance is now emerging, espoused by many experts who challenge both poles of the debate.
They agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge, but say the appropriate response is more akin to buying fire insurance and installing sprinklers and new wiring in an old, irreplaceable house (the home planet) than to fighting a fire already raging.
“Climate change presents a very real risk,” said Carl Wunsch, a climate and oceans expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It seems worth a very large premium to insure ourselves against the most catastrophic scenarios. Denying the risk seems utterly stupid. Claiming we can calculate the probabilities with any degree of skill seems equally stupid.”
Many in this camp seek a policy of reducing vulnerability to all climate extremes while building public support for a sustained shift to nonpolluting energy sources.
They have made their voices heard in Web logs, news media interviews and at least one statement from a large scientific group, the World Meteorological Organization. In early December, that group posted a statement written by a committee consisting of most of the climatologists...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
So will all the university scientists and researchers for whom scaring people means government grants. That's what this is all about -- creating an income and an industry with your money.
NY Times. All the news that fits we print. Why bother?
Hey, it's neverdem's favorite paper.
There is reason for us to be good stewards of the earth and I agree that there are things we can do - but I do not believe that we are *causing* global warming. It seems to me that those who present this form of apocalypse are just doomers and gloomers from the far left who are sure we, humanity, are such terrible sinners - that we are near the end of the world.
Liberals desperately need various "crises" to mask their real goals and do their dirty work. The MSM acts as their cheerleader to help amplify their doomsday scenarios.
They have to act really fast now because there are indications that global temps (especially in the deep ocean waters where it has real impact) are trending downward.
To them, it's like hitting the beach with your surf-board only to find that the waves have gone and it's "flat".
The heretics will be shouted down by the environmental drama queens. Guaranteed.
Because elevated levels of carbon dioxide are more a SYMPTOM than a CAUSE of paleo-climatic global warming. The laws of physics require that the temperature change as the fourth root of a logarithmic function of carbon dioxide concentrations. The temperature correlates well with carbon dioxide before the emergence of humanity because both decreased during glacial periods. Widespread ice cover in the polar and subpolar regions and significantly cooler, often drier climates in the rest of the planet greatly reduced the biotic respiration that produces carbon dioxide. Cooler oceans also dissolve marginally more of the gas.
The global warming hype cannot result from an accounting of the direct impact of carbon dioxide on global temperature. Those wild and wacky predictions instead assume that the buildup of anthropogenic greenhouse gases and the resultant slight warming will trigger catastrophic positive feedbacks. The "gloom and doom" scenarios also come from climate models with severe difficulties in convective parameterization; simply put, their inability to generate realistic thunderstorms leads to runaway ridiculous results.
Answer: We shouldn't expect temperature to rise if CO2 increases because CO2 doesn't increase temperature that much. The graph shows that higher temperatures cause CO2 to increase.
Or...maintain high productivity and focus on sustainability, so we have a strong economy that can support adjustments to climate change. Investing in the Space Elevator has many benefits---one of which is that we could inexpensively deploy sunscreens if needed.
I always assumed it was because warmer seas can't hold as much dissolved CO2.
Boob-bait for the bubbas. Follow the money.
We continually see the missappropriation of the term "Climate Change" as "Global Warming".
One is a myth: "Global Warming", and the other: "Climate Change" is inevitable and has happened countless times throughout history and will occur again countless times in the future.
bump
Reminds me of a bumper sticker a few years back:
STOP CONTINENTAL DRIFT!
"Liberals desperately need various "crises" to mask their real goals and do their dirty work. The MSM acts as their cheerleader to help amplify their doomsday scenarios."
Agreed. Liberalism/Socialism cannot be sold to other than a Nation in despair. Our Nation has to be taken to a state of despair for them to succeed, thus the attacks upon our economy, education, morality, etc., etc.
this is the middle ?
it's al gore's crap without al gore's solution.
THIS is a middle position?
Bingo.
I'm pretty sure that because of reforestation, some claim the U.S. is a carbon sink.
I'd be for some research to determine a (preferably reversible) way of taking CO2 out of the atmosphere in a cost-effective manner, as a hedge, in case we really do need to do it. But nothing we've seen yet, really shows it's a necessity at this point.
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