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 ...
I got the graphic at:
http://www.john-daly.com/solar.htm
The data is quite revealing and utterly devastating to global warming/swarming advocacy, which I consider to be an extremist auto-religious movement.
C7
Thanks. The late John Daly, with whom I corresponded, does not cite the source of the graph nor the source of the data from which it was derived. So what data were you referring to?
It's not particularly known. The average for the crust is known, but the specifics of the smoker fields are not known - and they are but one type of thermal emmission. yes, we've known that there are undersea volcanoes for centuries, and have identified some fields, but the smaller (than an open volcano) massive thermal fields we still don't have a handle on.
oh. O.K. I get what you're saying now. It's not exactly what I was talking about, but yeah, we have some general idea of how much heat a given area of crust contains, and what it can give off - though the heat output is not insubstantial in a thermal body like the ocean.
Bump!
Mead is made from honey.
Click on the link for "Fear, Complexity, Environmental Management in the 21st Century" Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy, Washington, D.C. November 6, 2005
Honey is available further north than are grapes, which made for happy Vikings.
(FEC info)
WUNSCH, CARL
CAMBRIDGE, MA 02140
MIT/PROFESSOR
DNC SERVICES CORPORATION/DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE
09/23/2004 500.00 24991285611
10/29/2004 250.00 24981655639
Did you check any of the 17,000+ signers? I checked out 1 at random. (I picked out a rather unusual name & did a Google search.)
This is what I found:
http://www.zoominfo.com/people/Ade_C._53220978.aspx
If I found on 1 try an eminently qualified scientist that settles the matter for me. What are the odds I picked out 1 of the supposedly few qualified scientists on 1 try?
The middle is the right place to be on this "issue". The "middle" being right between the "global cooling" of the '70s and the "global warming" of the '90s. Hey wait.... that means I must be in the '80s.
Ahhh.... the '80s....
Why do you think someone with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering is qualified to judge a climate science issue? Would you want a pharmacist to treat your torn rotator cuff? (After all, the pharmacist must know something about medicine, right?)
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