Posted on 11/01/2007 7:35:15 PM PDT by neverdem
I've had a lot of fun recently with my tiny (and unofficial) slice of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, though I was one of thousands of IPCC participants, I don't think I will add "0.0001 Nobel Laureate" to my resume.
The other half of the prize was awarded to former Vice President Al Gore, whose carbon footprint would stomp my neighborhood flat. But that's another story.
Both halves of the award honor promoting the message that Earth's temperature is rising due to human-based emissions of greenhouse gases. The Nobel committee praises Mr. Gore and the IPCC for alerting us to a potential catastrophe and for spurring us to a carbonless economy.
I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never "proof") and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.
There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts...
--snip--
Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in those we-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, "Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with 'At our present level of ignorance, we think we know . . .'"
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
That's a keeper if ever there was one, in addition to the rest of his commentary.
priceless!
CC/GW ping
It sure is.
Great article. AGW PING.
bump
Sasha!!!
Iraqi Islamic Party says, “Al Qaeda is Defeated.” [Michael Yon]
Ralph Peters - 12 Myths of 21st-Century War
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The other half of the prize was awarded to former Vice President Al Gore, whose carbon footprint would stomp my neighborhood flat... I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see.
AGW™ ping
If we gave every human on earth a 4x4 box to stand in, we would only need a box about 60 miles on each side to contain them all. This is an area about the size of 10 or 12 standard counties in the eastern USA.
That fact alone gives us some inkling of how big we are compared to the earth.
If we gave them each and every living soul a quarter acre then we’d need a box about 1500 miles on each side. That sounds to me like approximately the US from the east coast to the Rockies and north to south.
The vast majority of the earth, every single day, has no human footprint on it at all.
Outstanding article by John R. Christy. Great quote. Thanks for the ping.
Thanks for the ping!
Dr. John R. Christy (University of Alabama - Huntsville)
Thanks for the Huntsville link. UAH was bugging me.
I avoid Wikipedia links when politics are involved.
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