Posted on 03/25/2007 7:55:15 PM PDT by Ultra Sonic 007
The Scientists Are The Bad Guys On March 8, Channel 4 screened The Great Global Warming Swindle, a documentary that branded as a lie the scientific consensus that man-made greenhouse gasses are primarily responsible for climate change.
The film was advertised extensively on Channel 4 and repeatedly previewed and reviewed in newspapers. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Christopher Booker declared:
“Only very rarely can a TV documentary be seen as a pivotal moment in a major political debate, but such was Channel 4's The Great Global Warming Swindle last Thursday. Never before has there been such a devastatingly authoritative account of how the hysteria over global warming has parted company with reality.” (Booker, ‘A turning point in climate change,’ Sunday Telegraph, March 11, 2007)
Peter Hitchens commented in the Daily Mail:
“If you were worried about those snaps of polar bears clinging to melting ice-floes, sentenced to a slow death by global warming, you may now relax. They'll be fine. Channel 4 has paid in full for its recent misdemeanours by screening, last Thursday, the brilliant, devastating film The Great Global Warming Swindle.” (Hitchens, ‘Drugs?’, Daily Mail, March 11, 2007)
Doubtless like many who saw the film, the Financial Times’ reviewer was left bewildered:
“Not so long ago, the venerable David Attenborough on the Beeb was telling us that human-driven global warming was real and was coming for us. So that was settled. Now Channel 4, like a dissident schoolboy, is scoffing at the old boy's hobbyhorse and I don't know what to believe.” (’Slaughterhouse three,’ Financial Times, March 10, 2007)
The film opened with scenes of wild weather and environmental disaster accompanied by dramatic captions:
"THE ICE IS MELTING. THE SEA IS RISING. HURRICANES ARE BLOWING. AND IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT.
“SCARED? DON'T BE. IT'S NOT TRUE."
This was immediately followed by a series of equally forthright talking heads:
"We can't say that CO2 will drive climate; it certainly never did in the past."
“We imagine that we live in an age of reason. And the global warming alarm is dressed up as science. But it’s not science; it’s propaganda.”
And:
“We’re just being told lies; that’s what it comes down to.”
The commentary added to the sense of outrage: “You are being told lies.”
This was indeed superficially impressive - when several experts make bold statements on the same theme we naturally assume they must be onto something - but alarm bells should already have been ringing. This, after all, was ostensibly a film about science - about evidence, arguments, research and debate. Why, then, the language of polemic and smear?
The remarkable answer is provided by the film’s writer and director, Martin Durkin:
"I think it [the film] will go down in history as the first chapter in a new era of the relationship between scientists and society. Legitimate scientists - people with qualifications - are the bad guys. It is a big story that is going to cause controversy.
“It's very rare that a film changes history, but I think this is a turning point and in five years the idea that the greenhouse effect is the main reason behind global warming will be seen as total bollocks.” ('“Global Warming Is Lies” Claims Documentary,’ Life Style Extra, March 4, 2007; www.lse.co.uk/ShowStory.asp?story=CZ434669 U&news_headline=global_warming_is_lies_ claims_documentary)
Compare and contrast this with the aim as described in a letter sent by the makers of the film, Wag TV, to Professor Carl Wunsch, a leading expert on ocean circulation and climate who subsequently appeared in the film:
“The aim of the film is to examine critically the notion that recent global warming is primarily caused by industrial emissions of CO2. It explores the scientific evidence which jars with this hypothesis and explores alternative theories such as solar induced climate change. Given the seemingly inconclusive nature of the evidence, it examines the background to the apparent consensus on this issue, and highlights the dangers involved, especially to developing nations, of policies aimed at limiting industrial growth.” (http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/papersonline/channel4response)
Wunsch comments:
"I am angry because they completely misrepresented me. My views were distorted by the context in which they placed them. I was misled as to what it was going to be about. I was told about six months ago that this was to be a programme about how complicated it is to understand what is going on. If they had told me even the title of the programme, I would have absolutely refused to be on it. I am the one who has been swindled." (Geoffrey Lean, ‘Climate change: An inconvenient truth... for C4,’ The Independent, March 11, 2007; http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/ climate_change/article2347526.ece)
We will hear more from Wunsch in what follows.
Deeply Deceptive The film presented viewers with an apparently devastating refutation of the "theory of global warming". And these were not picky, esoteric criticisms. Durkin insisted that the world’s climate scientists are guilty of the most fundamental error imaginable: increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is not the cause of higher temperature, as the experts claim. Quite the reverse: increasing atmospheric CO2 is itself the result of rising temperature.
As evidence for this contention, Durkin argued that global surface temperature dropped dramatically between 1945-1975, at a time when CO2 emissions were rapidly rising as a result of the postwar economic boom. According to Durkin, if CO2 emissions were responsible for increasing temperature, then temperature should not have fallen between 1945-1975. Clearly, then, some factor other than CO2 emissions must have caused the subsequent global temperature rise.
But Real Climate, an internet site run by climate scientists, such as NASA’s Dr Gavin Schmidt and Dr William Connelley of the British Antarctic Survey, describes Durkin’s discussion of the 1945-75 period as “deeply deceptive”. (Real Climate, March 9, 2007; www.realclimate.org/index.php/ archives/2007/03/swindled)
In this section of the film, Durkin focused heavily on a graph depicting temperature changes. The graph, Real Climate comments, “looks rather odd and may have been carefully selected”. It appears to show a dramatic cooling between the 1940s and 1970s. But try flipping between the film’s version of the global temperature record (shown above left) and the temperature plot that normally appears in the scientific literature (shown above right) The supposed cooling looks rather less evident in this second graph.
Without knowing more details of how Durkin may have manipulated the data plotted in his graph, it is difficult to comment on the presentation. What we can say is that Durkin’s "four decades of cooling", implying a relentless temperature drop over 40 years, is not an accurate description of the trend over this period. There was some cooling for +part+ of this time but also some plateauing, with fluctuations up and down.
But why did the temperature not simply rise in line with the post-war increase in greenhouse gas emissions?
In fact, as is well-known, the absence of a global rise in temperature between 1945-75 is explained by the release of large amounts of industrial pollutants, called sulphate aerosols, into the atmosphere. These particles have a braking effect on global warming, known as “global dimming”. By shielding some of the incoming solar energy, sulphate aerosols mask the underlying warming effect generated by rising levels of CO2. By the 1980s, however, stronger warming had exceeded this masking effect and global temperature has since continued to rise. As Real Climate notes, by failing to explain the science behind this phenomenon the programme makers were guilty of “lying to us by omission.”
The Ice Cores The film repeatedly gave the impression that mainstream science argues that CO2 is the sole driver of rising temperatures in the Earth's climate system. But this is not the case. Climate scientists are well aware that solar activity plays a role, though a minor one at present, as do long-term periodic changes in the Earth's orbit, known as Milankovitch cycles. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Milankovitch_cycles)
The point is that there is a vast body of evidence that very strongly supports the hypothesis that greenhouse gas emissions, of which CO2 is the most important, are primarily responsible for recent global warming. The 4th and most recent scientific assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes:
"Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely [.i.e. probability greater than 90%] due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations." ('Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis,' Summary for Policymakers, IPCC, February 2007, page 10; www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf)
We then come to one of the film's most misleading arguments. Antarctic ice cores show that rises in levels of CO2 have lagged 800 years behind temperature rises at specific times in the geological past. This, argued Durkin, +proves+ that CO2 cannot be responsible for global warming - instead global warming is responsible for increasing levels of CO2. But this was a huge howler.
What Durkin's film failed to explain was that the 800-year lag happened at the end of ice ages which occur about every 100,000 years. (See: www.realclimate.org/index.php/ archives/2004/12/co2-in-ice-cores)
Scientists believe that the end of an ice age is likely triggered when the amount of heat reaching the Earth rises as a result of a periodic change in the Earth's orbit around the sun. Jeff Severinghaus, Professor of Geosciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, explains why the rise in CO2 initially lags behind the temperature rise:
"The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend." (Real Climate, 'What does the lag of CO2 behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming?’, December 3, 2005; www.realclimate.org/index.php /archives/2004/12/co2-in-ice-cores/)
The best current explanation for the lag of 800 years is that this is how long it takes for CO2, absorbed by the ocean in an earlier warm period, to be "flushed out" at the end of an ice age. Once that CO2 has been released into the atmosphere its heat-trapping properties as a greenhouse gas lead to even stronger warming: an example of positive feedback. (See Caillon et al., 'Timing of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature Changes Across Termination III,' Science, 14 March 2003: Vol. 299. no. 5613, pp. 1728 - 1731)
Professor Severinghaus summarises:
"In other words, CO2 does not initiate the warmings, but acts as an amplifier once they are underway."
Durkin’s analysis, then, was way off the mark.
The film’s claim that solar activity might account for recent warming is also without credibility. In September 2006, the Times reported the latest findings from researchers writing in the top journal, Nature:
“Scientists have examined various proxies of solar energy output over the past 1,000 years and have found no evidence that they are correlated with today's rising temperatures. Satellite observations over the past 30 years have also turned up nothing. ‘The solar contribution to warming... is negligible,’ the researchers wrote in the journal Nature.” (Anjana Ahuja, ‘It's hot, but don't blame the Sun,’ The Times, September 25, 2006)
The film's other scientific claims can be similarly dismissed. Carl Wunsch - who, as discussed, appeared in the film - comments:
“What we now have is an out-and-out propaganda piece, in which there is not even a gesture toward balance or explanation of why many of the extended inferences drawn in the film are not widely accepted by the scientific community. There are so many examples, it's hard to know where to begin, so I will cite only one: a speaker asserts, as is true, that carbon dioxide is only a small fraction of the atmospheric mass. The viewer is left to infer that means it couldn't really matter. But even a beginning meteorology student could tell you that the relative masses of gases are irrelevant to their effects on radiative balance. A director not intending to produce pure propaganda would have tried to eliminate that piece of disinformation.” (http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/ papersonline/channel4response)
For further help in understanding the weakness of the film’s claims, see the following resources:
Real Climate, 'Swindled', http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/swindled
Campaign Against Climate Change, including a rebuttal to the film by Sir John Houghton, who chairs the Scientific Assessment Working Group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: http://portal.campaigncc.org/node/1820
Royal Society: Facts and fictions about climate change: http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=4761
“I Was Duped” - Déjà Vu? Many readers will be aware that Durkin has previous ‘form’. In 1997, Channel 4 broadcast his three-part series, Against Nature, which suggested present-day environmentalists were the true heirs of the Nazis. (See George Monbiot, ‘The Revolution Has Been Televised,’ The Guardian, December 18, 1997; www.monbiot.com/archives/1997/ 12/18/the-revolution-has-been-televised/)
Several interviewees who appeared in the film felt they had been misled about the programme-maker’s agenda. Responding to complaints, the Independent Television Commission (ITC) found that the editing of interviews with four contributors had "distorted or misrepresented their known views". (Geoffrey Lean, ‘Climate change: An inconvenient truth... for C4,’ The Independent, March 11, 2007; http://news.independent.co.uk/ environment/climate_change/article2347526.ece)
In addition, the ITC found: "The interviewees had also been misled as to the content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part." (Paul McCann, ‘Channel 4 told to apologise to Greens,’ The Independent, April 2, 1998)
Ten years on, it appears that history may have repeated itself. In his letter of complaint to the film-makers cited above, Carl Wunsch writes:
“I have some experience in dealing with TV and print reporters and do understand something of the ways in which one can be misquoted, quoted out of context, or otherwise misinterpreted. Some of that is inevitable in the press of time or space or in discussions of complicated issues. Never before, however, have I had an experience like this one. My appearance in the ‘Global Warming Swindle’ is deeply embarrassing, and my professional reputation has been damaged. I was duped---an uncomfortable position in which to be.
“At a minimum, I ask that the film should never be seen again publicly with my participation included. Channel 4 surely owes an apology to its viewers, and perhaps WAGTV owes something to Channel 4. I will be taking advice as to whether I should proceed to make some more formal protest.” (http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/ papersonline/channel4response)
Eight of the scientists in the film - John Christy, Paul Reiter, Richard Lindzen, Paul Driessen, Roy Spencer, Patrick Michaels, Fred Singer and Tim Ball - are linked to American neo-conservative and right-wing think-tanks, many of which have received tens of millions of dollars from Exxon.
Greenpeace provides a fascinating online ’map’ detailing how Exxon funds these climate sceptics. Go to: http://www.exxonsecrets.org/ index.php?mapid=831 (click ‘Launch’ then click ‘skip intro’)
In his book, Green Backlash, environmental journalist Andrew Rowell noted that Fred Singer has also attacked scientific and environmental stances on other green issues such as ozone, acid rain, automobile emissions and even whaling. Singer has worked for companies such as Exxon, Shell, Arco, Unocal and Sun.
According to the Environmental Research Foundation, a non-governmental organisation:
“For years, Singer was a professor at the University of Virginia where he was funded by energy companies to pump out glossy pamphlets pooh-poohing climate change.” (Quoted, Sharon Beder, Global Spin, Green Books, 1997, p.94)
Rowell wrote that a quarter of Patrick Michaels’ research funding was reportedly received from companies such as Edison Electric Institute, the largest utility trade association in America. Michaels’ magazine, World Climate Review, was funded by the Western Fuel Association and a video produced by him was funded by coal companies and distributed by the Denver Coal Club. (Rowell, Green Backlash, Routledge, 1996, p.143)
Both Singer and Michaels represented the fossil fuel lobby’s Global Climate Coalition and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a leader in global warming scepticism.
Journalist Ross Gelbspan noted that in May 1995, Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels were hired as expert witnesses to testify on behalf of Western Fuels Association, a $400 million consortium of coal suppliers and coal-fired utilities. Gelbspan said of Lindzen:
“I don't know very many supporters of Mr Lindzen who are not in the pay of the fossil fuel lobby. Dr Lindzen himself, his research is publicly funded, but Dr Lindzen makes, as he told me, $2,500 a day consulting with fossil fuel interests, and that includes his consulting with OPEC, his consulting with the Australian coal industry, his consulting with the US coal industry and so forth. That's not to say Dr Lindzen doesn't believe what he says, but it is to say that he stands in very sharp distinction to really just about virtually all of the climate scientists around the world.” (Tony Jones, ‘Journalist puts global warming sceptics under the spotlight,’ Australian Broadcasting Corporation, March 7, 2005; www.abc.net.au/lateline/ content/2005/s1318067.htm)
Journalist George Monbiot wrote of Philip Stott:
“Professor Stott is a retired biogeographer. Like almost all the prominent sceptics he has never published a peer-reviewed paper on climate change. But he has made himself available to dismiss climatologists' peer-reviewed work as the ‘lies’ of ecofundamentalists.” (Monbiot, ‘Beware the fossil fools,’ The Guardian, April 27, 2004; http://environment.guardian.co.uk/ climatechange/story/0,,1829315,00.html)
Paul Driessen is a fellow at two right-wing think tanks in the US, which are part of the Wise Use movement. One of the think tanks is headed by Ron Arnold, who has spent the last twenty years attacking the environmental movement. His fellow director is a fundraiser for America's gun lobby. The list goes on...
By contrast, Greenpeace spokeswoman Mhairi Dunlop said her organisation had been interviewed by Durkin but none of the material had been included in the film:
"They interviewed us but I guess what we said didn't fit in with the [story] they were peddling." (McCandless, op. cit)
Following the film’s broadcast, Professor Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society - the government-sponsored academy of sciences for the United Kingdom - has said that many factors contribute to global warming but it is clear that emissions of "greenhouse gases," particularly CO2, are to blame for most of the current temperature rise. Rees added:
"Those who promote fringe scientific views but ignore the weight of evidence are playing a dangerous game. They run the risk of diverting attention from what we can do to ensure the world's population has the best possible future." (Ibid)
On March 11 the Observer published a letter from a group of climate scientists responding to Durkin’s film:
“This programme misrepresented the state of scientific knowledge on global warming, claiming climate scientists are presenting lies. This is an outrageous statement...
“We defend the right of people to be sceptical, but for C4 to imply that the thousands of scientists and published peer-reviewed papers, summarised in the recent international science assessment, are misguided or lying lacks scientific credibility and simply beggars belief.” (Alan Thorpe, Natural Environment Research Council, Brian Hoskins, University of Reading, Jo Haigh, Imperial College London, Myles Allen, University of Oxford, Peter Cox, University of Exeter, Colin Prentice, QUEST Programme, letter to the Observer, Sunday March 11, 2007; http://observer.guardian.co.uk/ letters/story/0,,2031117,00.html)
Viewed from one perspective, Channel 4 has done a huge public disservice in spreading absurd and mendacious arguments guaranteed to generate confusion. This at a time when a fragile momentum is building on the need to take urgent action on the very real threat of catastrophic climate change.
But from another perspective it may well be that this film does for climate scepticism what Tony Blair’s “dodgy dossiers” did for the pro-war movement ahead of the invasion of Iraq. Wildly distorted propaganda often does have a powerful initial impact. But stretched beyond a certain point of unreality, it also has a tendency to turn on, and bite, the propagandists.
Durkin’s grandiose prediction that his film “will go down in history” will surely prove correct, although perhaps not for the reasons he imagined.
“Scientists have examined various proxies of solar energy output over the past 1,000 years and have found no evidence that they are correlated with today's rising temperatures. Satellite observations over the past 30 years have also turned up nothing. ‘The solar contribution to warming... is negligible,’ the researchers wrote in the journal Nature.” (Anjana Ahuja, ‘It's hot, but don't blame the Sun,’ The Times, September 25, 2006)
So, the Sun, our source of heat; our furnace, if you will; the thing that provides us with sufficient warmth that life may flourish on this planet and without which we would all freeze to death, couldn't possibly have anything to do with global climate change. Right. Talk about beggaring belief. Solar "proxies" were looked at over a period of 1,000 years. What does that mean? Satellites over the past 30 years? Which satellites? Communications? Spy? What? Add to this the fact that they simply dismiss it out of hand throwing out this quote and then quickly moves on to another topic.
What really convinces me that anthropogenic GW supporters are wrong, is their uncanny imitation of those in history who threw other scientists in jail or burnt them at the stake for disagreeing with the orthodoxy. Their arguments are highly emotional and utterly violate the Scientific Method. They shriek like the pod people from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" when they discover someone who dares to question their conclusions. And then there's the fact that they all come up with the same solution: Government regulation. More money into their coffers. More taxes. The world's Capitalists are to blame!! We must punish the Capitalists!! We need more government control of the means of production! We need Socialism!! That is the consensus they're really talking about.
The above author claims that Channel 4's show contained "the language of polemic and smear." And yet, in the "scholarly" rebuttal that follows, the author relies heavily on just that kind of language, citing journalists and true believers in the Anthropogenic GW community whose chief argument against those who participated in the film is "they're paid off by Big Oil." Then, the author really tips his or her hat at the end when he or she claims that Blair falsified pre-war intelligence. That's an argument from the Left. No objectivity there. This is agenda driven science, which is no science at all. Rationality and reason indeed.
I just had a "heated" debate with my daugher-in-law who watched the movie and whose first impression was that these guys are bitter. She took environmental science at college but couldn't really refute the movies claims, but said the scientists were nobodies or were wrong according to her textbook (which she will show me eventually). People can get very emotional about this stuff.
That's one of the things that puzzles me. The emotionalism.
You'd think the world was coming to an end or something.
Global warming will expand the temperate zone and the growing seasons. It will unlock glaciated areas to agriculture. It will allow freer navigation in the Northern Hemisphere.
It's true that wide areas which are low-lying will have to be abandoned, but we will have centuries to accommodate the migrations.
It's not the end of the world. It's just change.
It is BS, back then China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, etc weren't as industrialized as they are today, so there are actually more "sulphate aerosols" being released today in the world then there was back then when it was basically just us, yet the Earth isn't cooling.
THis photo was taken by NASA in 2005, of Aerosol pollution over Northern India and Bangladesh 
Clearly.
I mean I get emotional when people deny the moon landing say.
I am all for scientific process and proper handling of this issue, but many are quick to blame it on humanity and to jump to conclusions of future doom and demand drastic actions be taken. Or as with Gore, riding a political surfboard on the global warming caused by man wave. A wave he helps create and profits from. That is not science.
People with degrees hard earned can be quite condesending and judgmental when you challenge them.
I demand reasonable scientific proof humans cause it, and even then, nobody can predict the future, they cannot claim to know the things they do that have not happened yet. Nobody has that power. They cannot predict the next three days weather accurately, let alone 100 years. They blew the hurricane predictions last year too. How can we trust that crappy record of prediction?
"In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis." -- Al Gore
"over-representation of factual presentations" is clearly NOT science and truly manipulative politics of fear.
My mistake the photo is from 2001 not 2005. But the arguement still stands. Nothing in the 1940's-1970's approched anywhere near as bad as that.
You got that right! This article is PURE propaganda. It is meant to deflect, and confuse the issue. What the Left does is try to confuse and bully. Look how they try to make it seem that they are pure and are not paid for their answers, and make a mountain out of a mole hill.
The following attacks Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels by mentioning some money they may or may not have gotten, meanwhile no mention is make of the BILLIONS spent by Socialist Governments to prove a manmade connection to global warming. “Journalist Ross Gelbspan noted that in May 1995, Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels were hired as expert witnesses to testify on behalf of Western Fuels Association, a $400 million consortium of coal suppliers and coal-fired utilities”
Another explanation of the flowing “I don't know very many supporters of Mr Lindzen who are not in the pay of the fossil fuel lobby.” Is you don’t bite the hand the feeds you. If you’re getting BILLIONS to prove manmade global warming, you don’t attract or support those that disagree because you WILL get your funding close.
Like the other Manmade or Anthropogenic Global Warming pushers, this article STATES NOT FACTS. All it does is attack the messenger without substantiating there claims. When they can’t find a legitimate scientific fact they make one up. Look at this lie “In fact, as is well-known, the absence of a global rise in temperature between 1945-75 is explained by the release of large amounts of industrial pollutants, called sulphate aerosols, into the atmosphere.” WELL KNOW? BY WHO? The term “sulphate aerosols” is a new made up term by the Global Warming pushers, which you will not find in any publication prior to about 1995. The problem is that Sulfates are salts that contain a charged group of sulfur and oxygen atoms: SO , the basic constituent of sulfuric acid. The biggest contributor of Sulfur is Volcano’s, but if they said that then they could not blame man, and again any global warming would be natural. Also, funny how they start in 1945 with the sulphate aerosols. Let’s see what happened big in the world around that time. Oh yea, WWII. In which just about all the worlds manufacturing was destroyed except for those in the USA. So, you see again it’s only the fault of the USA for Global Warming. Funny how they did not mention the big coal mine fire in China that has been polluting for about 80 years. Could it be that one its not in the USA, and two its natural?
Notice that Al Gores film is the total truth and the Great Global Warming Swindle (GGWS) is “deeply deceptive”? At the beginning they talk about the polar bears, but never state that GGWS was correct and Al Gore had it wrong. No instead of arguing facts they state “interviewees had also been misled as to the content and purpose of the programmes” making the makers of the film appear to be unethical and therefore nothing in the film should be considered. This is right out of the STALINIST hand book, by making the scientist in the film to appear to be either mislead or tricked, or worse paid off by big what ever the evil corporations du jour is.
The writers should be subjected to ridicule, and the readers should start to realize when they are being played by this Marxist propaganda.
Thanks TMAN.
There's something about this that doesn't make sense to me.
Energy doesn't just disappear. These particles wouldn't be able to brake solar energy without getting hotter themselves. Since these partcles come in direct contact with either the rest of the atmosphere or with the the earth itself, the heat they absorbed would get transferred to the earth anyway. So it seems to me that whatever heat that's missing from the solar energy that was "braked" would be made up for by the heat from these very particles.
Look at CO2 like a Stockmarket Analist would. It is a "trailing indicator". It confirms what HAS HAPPENED.
It has never been a valid PREDICTOR.
I am still trying to grapple with the fact that I am a member of a species that would even consider 'cavalierly dismissing' the sun.
Is our species really this dumb ?
Thanks I will report back<;o))
The quote below is from:
http://www.junkscience.com/
It was on the home page Feb 2 2007. They archive their articles so it is probably there now.
My comment in the article: This is remarkable. It, the IPCC Working Group, is stating that the actual report due in 3 months will be edited to agree with the summary issued today (Feb 2)!
Article:
"As everyone is probably by now aware, Friday, February 2, 2007 marks the release of the IPCC's political document: Assessment Report 4, Summary for Policymakers. The media seem to be operating under the misapprehension this is equivalent to the release of IPCC Working Group I Contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis -- this is regrettably neither true nor even close to the truth.
Bizarrely, the actual report will be retained for another three months to facilitate editing -- to suit the summary! IPCC procedures state that: Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the Working Group or the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the Overview Chapter (Appendix A to the Principles Governing IPCC Work, p4/15) -- this is surely unacceptable and would not be tolerated in virtually any other field (witness the media frenzy because language was allegedly altered in some US climate reports).
Under the circumstances we feel we have no choice but to publicly release the second-order draft report documents so that everyone has at least the chance to compare the summary statements with the underlying documentation. It should not be necessary for us to break embargo and post raw drafts for you to verify a summary of publicly funded documentation (tax payers around the world have paid billions of dollars for this effort -- you own it and you should be able to access it).
Reluctantly then, here is the link to our archive copy of the second-order draft of IPCC Working Group I Contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. The second-order draft was distributed in 2006, 5 years into what has so far been a 6 year process and these copies were archived last May."
reminds me of the great Dupont Freon Swindle of the 1980's......
ggws left a mark!
now the charges of neo-conservative (what the phuck is that?) against the scientists
exactly as predicted - the left resorts to personal attacks and smears to support their lies
bury the cockroaches
class, each planet in the solar system is now reacting similar to earth
what is it that is common among all the planets in our solar system?
is their some kind of link, commonality, association, that all the planets in our solar system share?
anyone?
anyone?
this pig of an author is dripping with disdain for the iraq war, blair, and conservatives
the media is the enemy of truth, reason and freedom
this is war
About the only way the aerosol particles could contribute to cooling would be if they reflected light particles (solar energy) away from the planet. But as the earlier poster stated and demonstrated with an image, the Far East (population ~2 Billion) is pumping out more aerosol pollutants then us capitalistic Americans (200-300 million) did a few decades ago. So no warming should be occurring now if these aerosols caused cooling a few decades ago. Besides, if an increase in retained energy or heat was the primary affect we are currently experiencing, we should not be setting any new cold temperature records. Yet, we did here a few months ago. Also had snow on the ground for the first time in about 25 years. This was followed 4 weeks later by new heat records. Strange extremes indeed. My guess would be that energetic input is the primary current affect. Mostly caused by increased solar radiation along with some increase in human produced energy. So we have some general warming along with stronger extremes in winter and summer. I think in the short run perhaps dealing with the extremes is going to be more important then dealing with a slight warming trend which may not last very long.
media lens casts a jaded eye at corporations
corporations, you see, are the cause of human suffering
as much credibility as co2 causes global warming
we are at war freepers, and it is time to attack these scumbags with extreme prejudice, relentlessly
ridicule these fools at every turn with questions like:
if this is the warmest since the 1800's, what caused the rise in temperature then? they didn't have suv's, did they?
when i was in school, i was taught that glaciers once covered much of north america, and even created the great lakes when they melted - why did the glaciers form, and why did they eventually melt? how did that happen without man's intervention in the past?
if the planet is too hot, why are some places like china getting colder? what is the right temperature of the earth? who gets to control the world's thermostat?
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