Posted on 06/19/2007 4:09:33 AM PDT by theothercheek
According to The Washington Post fatherhood means never having to say, "I don’t know."
In what is surely an odd homage to fathers - published during the one week-end of the year children give them tokens of gratitude for not going out for a drive and never coming back, gambling away the grocery money, or making the entire family go without toilet paper – the WaPo follows Boston-based writer Doug Hardy and his son, Andrei, 12, as they traipse through the National Air and Space Museum.
Andrei asks his father what the disks on a heat shield are made of; dear old Dad unhesitatingly - and incorrectly - answers, "steel." The WaPo tsktsks:
If it didn't occur to Hardy to say, "I don't know," he's not alone. The phenomenon of the "know-it-all dad" is a familiar one to the docents, curators and keepers of America's museums and zoos. …
"Now that I think about it, I guess I make up stuff all the time," he said. Only a few days earlier, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Andrei had asked how bronze statues were made. Hardy finessed an explanation based on half-remembered notions of wax molds and plaster.
"It was a total BS moment," Hardy said. "But you've got to be the guy who has the answers, right? It's a habit. What should I say, that I'm 51 years old and I used to know this 20 years ago? That's not much of an answer."
The gene that prevents a man from admitting he doesn’t know the answer to every question must reside on the Y chromosome right alongside the gene that prevents him from asking directions instead of driving around in circles, the price of gasoline be damned. Nonetheless, poor Andrei is more likely to get more misinformation in school – and about far more consequential matters than what a space capsule’s heat shields are made from – than from his Dad.
For instance, global warming is being taught as scientific fact in schools, with mandatory showings of Al Gore’s PowerPoint Presentation-cum-movie to inculcate young, impressionable minds in what is becoming a secular article of faith. Never mind that many scientists think global warming is a hoax. Or that many parents object to Gore having the last – really the only – word on the subject.
Fortunately, some students, such as Kristen Byrnes of Portland, ME, refuse to swallow Gore’s global warming propaganda whole. As a project for her Honors Earth Science class, Byrnes, 15, challenges the "sloppy science" on which Gore’s untenable truths are based on her Web site, "Ponder the Maunder." One blogger, The Anchoress, is pushing for Gore to debate Byrnes on global warming. Should this debate ever occur, The Stiletto hopes someone films it so that schoolchildren can learn the real truth about global warming.
[Editorial Note: To "maunder" means to talk incoherently or aimlessly. Coincidentally, Maunder is also the surname of a British astronomer who studied sunspots; a growing body of evidence suggests that cyclical solar activity is the main cause of global warming.]
“Daddy, what causes Gklbal Warming.”
“Well, son, it’s caused by the mainstream media embracing the enormously widespread Chicken Little Complex and celebrating the ostensible destruction of the planet in order to flog lagging circulation numbers. You see, it’s all about advertising revenues.”
The crew of this one vehicle receives instructions for a particular mission which is very dangerous. They must dive deep into the solar innards and release a stream of chemicals to initiate a solar prominence. This solar event crosses space and effects the Earth's atmosphere in such a way that, although it is July, it Snows in California.
The inventor of this technology and techniques is on his death bed. He is carried out into a meadow where the snow begins to gently fall on his face and he dies with the proverbial smile on his face.
A much more enchanting and scientific explanation for our weather patterns.
bump
"Pull my finger and I'll show you."
I was taught to always question preformed conclusions, study the facts, and read the documents. And with that, I must question why Al Gore's movie says that sea levels will rise 20 feet in the 21st century, when the IPCC Report (Gore's Bible) gives a worst case scenario of sea levels only rising 23 inches.
Why does no one question Al Gore on this glaring contradiction?
ping
This is an astute observation, IMO.
I bet Byrnes could whip Algore's @$$!
Straight from Gore's mouth (Smithsonian interview):
Q: Some critics are skeptical of the 20-foot rise in sea levels that you predict. Is this just the worst-case scenario?
A: Not at all. The worst-case scenario is 140 feet, although that would be far, far into the future. There are two wild cards: one is Greenland, the other is West Antarctica. Greenland is the wilder of the two wild cards.... It's undergoing a radical discontinuity, it seems, both with a rapid increase in the [glacial] melt rate and with other developments that are quite concerning. For example, they have for the last 10 or 15 years been following the emergence of these icequakes. Icequakes are like earthquakes. They're now being picked up by seismometers all over the world, and in 1993 I believe there were 7. In 1999 that doubled to—if I'm not mistaken—14. Last year there were 30. And with these icequakes doubling twice in little more than a decade, there is growing concern. Here's the other thing: [the collapse of Antarctica's Larsen B ice shelf] was quite a significant event because the scientists that specialize in such things were genuinely forced to go back and examine what it was about their models that led them to radically [overestimate] the amount of time it would take an ice shelf like that to break up. They retrofitted into their models one new understanding that came out of that event, and that is what happens when you have surface melting resulting in pooling on the top of a large, thick ice shelf. The prior understanding had been that the water sinks down into the mass of the ice and refreezes. In this case they found that instead of refreezing it tunneled and left the ice like Swiss cheese, metaphorically, and vulnerable to a sudden breakup. It broke up in 35 days, and in fact the majority broke up in only two days. Now they see the same tunneling phenomena on Greenland. When I ask off the record, "Give me some time frames here, how realistic is it that we could see a catastrophic breakup and melting in Greenland in this century?" they cannot rule that out and privately will not."
The IPCC estimates sea level rise based on current trends. Gore's movie notes, correctly, that ice sheets are very dynamic and the processes which could cause rapid changes and catastrophic collapse are not well known. Still, most climate scientists don't think that a Greenland ice cap collapse is likely this century, so Gore's "amplification" of this potential is done for shock effect. But most climate scientists also agree that once ice cap destabilization and large scale melting begin, that process will be unstoppable. If the average global temperature rises by more than 2 degrees C in the 21st century, the eventual total melting of the Greenland ice cap will be a virtual certainty to occur during the 22nd to 24th centuries.
It’s the sun, stupid.
I invite you to derive a conclusion to your question based on the graphic on the page below. Note that this is not the so-called "Hockey Stick", which covered the past 600, 1000, or 2000 years (there are a few versions). The plot on the page below is for 12,000 years and is based on several different data sources. The inset is the Hockey Stick, which is not relevant to your question.
Holocene Temperature Variations
Intriguingly, the light blue line is for Greenland -- which certainly addresses your question. So [considering the light blue line now] why might climate scientists be concerned about a 1.5 - 2 C (or more) global temperature rise by the end of this century? Particularly if high boreal latitudes are expected to warm even more?
he notion of low pre-industrial CO2 atmospheric level, based on such poor knowledge, became a widely accepted Holy Grail of climate warming models. The modelers ignored the evidence from direct measurements of CO2 in atmospheric air indicating that in 19th century its average concentration was 335 ppmv[11] (Figure 2). In Figure 2 encircled values show a biased selection of data used to demonstrate that in 19th century atmosphere the CO2 level was 292 ppmv[12]. A study of stomatal frequency in fossil leaves from Holocene lake deposits in Denmark, showing that 9400 years ago CO2 atmospheric level was 333 ppmv, and 9600 years ago 348 ppmv, falsify the concept of stabilized and low CO2 air concentration until the advent of industrial revolution [13].
Improper manipulation of data, and arbitrary rejection of readings that do not fit the pre-conceived idea on man-made global warming is common in many glaciological studies of greenhouse gases. In peer reviewed publications I exposed this misuse of science [3, 9]. Unfortunately, such misuse is not limited to individual publications, but also appears in documents of national and international organizations. For example IPCC not only based its reports on a falsified “Siple curve”, but also in its 2001 report[14] used as a flagship the “hockey curve” of temperature, showing that there was no Medieval Warming, and no Little Ice Age, and that the 20th century was unusually warm. The curve was credulously accepted after Mann et al. paper published in NATURE magazine[15]. In a crushing criticism, two independent groups of scientists from disciplines other than climatology [16, 17] (i.e. not supported from the annual pool of many billion “climatic” dollars), convincingly blamed the Mann et al. paper for the improper manipulation and arbitrary rejections of data. The question arises, how such methodically poor paper, contradicting hundreds of excellent studies that demonstrated existence of global range Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age, could pass peer review for NATURE? And how could it pass the reviewing process at the IPCC? The apparent scientific weaknesses of IPCC and its lack of impartiality, was diagnosed and criticized in the early 1990s in NATURE editorials [18, 19]. The disease, seems to be persistent.
Conclusion
The basis of most of the IPCC conclusions on anthropogenic causes and on projections of climatic change is the assumption of low level of CO2 in the pre-industrial atmosphere. This assumption, based on glaciological studies, is false. Therefore IPCC projections should not be used for national and global economic planning. The climatically inefficient and economically disastrous Kyoto Protocol, based on IPCC projections, was correctly defined by President George W. Bush as “fatally flawed”. This criticism was recently followed by the President of Russia Vladimir V. Putin. I hope that their rational views might save the world from enormous damage that could be induced by implementing recommendations based on distorted science.
What was the maximum CO2 concentration in the atmosphere during those interglacials?
3. the increase/decrease of global temperatures coincides with solar cycles,
Refer to point 5 in my profile.
the increase of CO2 follows at an 800 or so year lag an increase in global temperatures and, therefore, is an effect, rather than a cause of global warming,
Refer to point 5 in my profile.
And I'm not sure what your point 5 means. But you don't have to explain.
Reliance on Jaworowski to uphold a global warming skeptical position is like trying to put out a forest fire with a gallon jug of water.
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