Posted on 05/28/2006 5:32:49 AM PDT by billorites
IT SHOULD BE GLORIOUS TO BE BILL GRAY, professor emeritus. He is often called the World's Most Famous Hurricane Expert. He's the guy who, every year, predicts the number of hurricanes that will form during the coming tropical storm season. He works on a country road leading into the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, in the atmospheric science department of Colorado State University. He's mentored dozens of scientists. By rights, Bill Gray should be in deep clover pausing only to collect the occasional lifetime achievement award.
He's a towering figure in his profession and in person. He's 6 feet 5 inches tall, handsome, with blue eyes and white hair combed straight back. He's still lanky, like the baseball player he used to be back at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington in the 1940s. When he wears a suit, a dark shirt and tinted sunglasses, you can imagine him as a casino owner or a Hollywood mogul. In a room jammed with scientists, you'd probably notice him first.
He's loud. His personality threatens to spill into the hallway and onto the chaparral. He can be very charming.
But he's also angry. He's outraged.
He recently had a public shouting match with one of his former students. It went on for 45 minutes.
He was supposed to debate another scientist at a weather conference, but the organizer found him to be too obstreperous, and disinvited him.
Much of his government funding has dried up. He has had to put his own money, more than $100,000, into keeping his research going. He feels intellectually abandoned. If none of his colleagues comes to his funeral, he says, that'll be evidence that he had the courage to say what they were afraid to admit.
Which is this: Global warming is a hoax.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Nor should you. Everybody in this business has an agenda.
I cannot think of any issue in science, including stem-cells, abortion, physician assisted suicide, etc; that is as politicized as the climate change debate.
Clearly this is no coincidence
you DID forget to put "/s", right? ;o)
I guess it all depends on what the meaning of "/s" is.
LOLLOFLHHO lil ole lady laing on the floor laughing her hiney off .
I'm not qualified to participate in the scientific debate on this subject, and I doubt very many Freepers are. I'm not a climate scientist. I'm an economist, but my specialty is corporate finance, not energy, development, agriculture, or macro, which are the relevent subfields. I am keeping tabs on what people in these areas are saying on the subject, though.
Whether it is better to adapt to global warming or attempt to stop it is very much an open question, the debate about which is still in its infancy. I tend to lean in the direction of adaptation, but I also think that there are a lot of low cost things we could be doing to reduce C02 output that we should be doing anyway for other important reasons. For instance, increasing usage of nuclear and wind power, raising fuel efficiency standards & gasoline taxes, etc. will all help reduce C02 emmissions; they also will reduce our dependence on oil, which is imporant for geopolitical reasons.
Regarding the first point, whether global warming is indeed occurring over the past 1000 years ears or so.
Actually, my point was about what has happened over the last 100 years. As far as I know, there's no constroversy whether temperatures have increased over this period. There is controversy over the extent to which human activity contributed to this increase, but there is a broad scientific consensous that the human contribution has been non-negligible.
Where do you come down on the the Mann vs. M&M controversy?
That's about the last 1000 years. I don't know enough to comment intelligently on that.
I disagree.
No, there is not a broad scientific consensus that the 1 degree Farenheit warming observed at the surface of the earth is anthropogenic in nature. Repeating that assertion does not make it true.
You are advocating the reduction of CO2 emmissions, if I read you correctly, because...
a) the planet is indeed warming
and
b) the warming is caused by anthropogenic sources of CO2
I'm questioning your premises.
Okay, let's look at them:
a) the planet is indeed warming
You already admitted that the planet has been warming over the last 100 years. Lest you change your mind, there is no controversy over this. We have accurate temperature measurements since at least the 1860's, and the data show an unambiguous warming trend since the beginning of the 20th century.
b) the warming is caused by anthropogenic sources of CO2
No. The premise that is unequivocally true is that athropogenic C02 is PARTLY responsible for warming.
That increases in C02, ceritus paribus, will lead to increased temparture is a fact of basic chemistry. It is also an uncontroversial fact that human beings significantly contributed to the increase in C02 levels. Now, how much this increase in C02 contributed to the rise in temperature is unclear (becaue there are other factors involved), but to deny that it made any contribution is to deny basic chemistry that any high school graduate should know.
You also missed my third premise: we should be taking the steps I suggested to reduce C02 emmissions anyway for reasons unrelated to global warming. Namely, to reduce our dependence on energy sources located in unstable parts of the world, i.e. oil and gas.
Ceteris paribus isn't very applicable since GW is primarily based on a forced water vapor theory, not from CO2 itself.
Mt Dew is only lightly carbonated. Let's keep that one.
You're not the first to put forth this misinterpretation as accurate. It's not. 1998 was the warmest year in the observational record (going back to about 1880 or so) because it was an big El Nino year added to the warming trend that began in the mid-1980s. Examining the full record shows that all El Nino years are warm years (there are good meteorological reasons for that). Several not-quite-as-warm years have followed 1998. Last year was just barely under the 1998 record (some analyses put 2005 ahead of 1998) -- and there was no El Nino. Unless there are really unusual circumstances, the next El Nino year will exceed the 1998 record. This year could actually exceed the 1998 record without an El Nino, and then where will you be?
Warming and cooling of the climate is a natural occurance, we have ice ages, then we warm up. This is caused by the out of balance spinning of the earth and the orbit around the sun, which is also not stable. Everything else is just BS.
Why is this REAL scientist so much better than all of the other ones? Merely because he said something that confirms your misconceptions?
A picture is worth a thousand words
I wrote your handle down so I can send you a message the next time there's a new record year for average global temperature.
Global Temperature Trends: 2005 Summation
"The highest global surface temperature in more than a century of instrumental data was recorded in the 2005 calendar year in the GISS annual analysis. However, the error bar on the data implies that 2005 is practically in a dead heat with 1998, the warmest previous year."
"Record warmth in 2005 is notable, because global temperature has not received any boost from a tropical El Niño this year. The prior record year, 1998, on the contrary, was lifted 0.2°C above the trend line by the strongest El Niño of the past century."
"Global warming is now 0.6°C in the past three decades and 0.8°C in the past century. It is no longer correct to say that "most global warming occurred before 1940". More specifically, there was slow global warming, with large fluctuations, over the century up to 1975 and subsequent rapid warming of almost 0.2°C per decade."
Will 2005 Set a Record For Warmth? Does It Matter? (by Patrick Michaels at the Cato Institute)
"So, what else is new? We already know that the world is warming and that it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future (with or without any greenhouse gas emission controls). Record temperatures will continue to be set every couple of years or so. In fact, if it weren't for the 1998 El Niño, a new record high global average temperature would have been established in 4 of the last 5 years (including 2005). The big news is that 2005 will further establish that the rate at which temperatures have been rising during the past 30 years or so has been remarkably constant with a value of about 0.17ºC per decade, and it shows no sign of speeding up. Climate models share this constancy of warming; they just predict different rates. Unless that behavior is wrong, the additional warming until 2100 will be about 1.6°C, near the low end of projections made by our friends at the United Nations, and, frankly, too small to worry about, given that the energy structure of our society is likely to change dramatically in 100 years' time. We'll bet that no one points that out in December, when the warmth-of-2005 stories will proliferate like Santas."
(By the way, Patrick Michaels is a noted global warming skeptic. He's a REAL scientist too. The guys at the Goddard Insitute of Space Studies are also REAL scientists.)
Believe in global warming if you must but I have seen many, many fake disaters come down the pike since I was born, global cooling being one of them, and I don't believe any of them.
I don't believe the guy you are spouting off about in your last comment and I don't believe any of the other global warming idiots. They are merely trying to raise dollars for themselves, it is very transparent and has happened before many times in the past.
Get a "global crisis" going and insist we are all going to die in a few years if something isn't done, and viola, research dollars pour in.
The bad thing about all this crap is that someday something real is going to threaten mankind and the earth and no one will listen because they are becoming sensitized to all this "the sky is falling" BS.
Frost in the garden again today and possible hard freeze predicted this weekend. While the weatherman insists the overnight temperature was 40, it was 32 at ground level. It is like it was 30 years ago when the last danger of frost was 15 June. Last few years have been warmer, but this winter and spring have been cold. Even the native vegetation has been a little slow to get with it this spring. Veggies are nowhere in sight.
"Joel Achenbach is a Magazine staff writer. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article at 11 a.m. Tuesday at washingtonpost.com/liveonline."
That is, if he is finished cleaning his guns by then.
But if one scientist says what you want to believe, it has to be accurate.
Thanks for playing.
If you want to fix global warming just kill all the termites.
There, problem solved.
Nope, I dont' necessarily listen to any scientists. The fact is, you are the one who looks for scientists to bolster YOUR belief. You are engaging in the well know liberal, progressive, communist game of projection! Projecting on to me the traits you actually have and then feeling morally superior because you are most certainly correct in your beliefs. As far as playing, I don't play where my beliefs are concerned. Truth is the watch word and I use common sense and my many years of life experience to weed out the BS from people like you and faux scientist to find the truth. Have a great day.
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