Thread: Asbestos anybody?

Originally Posted by SupPackFan

The article contains links to sources for all the information . . . or is the Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center (CDIAC) of the U.S. Dept of Energy not as legitimate a source as your precious college textbook?

What about the science contained in the textbook? 95% of our greenhouse effect doesn't come from water. Your charts are treating substances in amounts and not greenhouse effect. Water contributes about 72% of the greenhouse effect.



If you take a course in physical geography, you will learn that the main thing warming the earth is the hydrologic cycle and not the sun. The reason is the thermohaline circulation is necessary to transport heat throughout the planet.

Notice, the past has times of great amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and it still had a hugh drop in temperature around 450 million years ago. Carbon dioxide can rise or fall and create a certain amount of temperature forcing, but that doesn't mean there aren't greater forces that can overcome it. The earth had plenty of greenhouse gases in the past that could maintain temperatures around 22 degrees C, but something bigger happened. A supercontinent moved to the pole and temperatures dropped, because the ability to circulate heat stopped.



Our present world started around two and a half million years ago when Panama connected North and South America, blocking what was a circum-global circulation. Thermohaline circulation shifted into what is now the Gulf Steam. The Gulf Steam also takes a lot of moisture to the north.

Our present world has a continent at the south pole and an ocean nearly surrounded by land. The arctic ocean can freeze and stay frozen during a summer. These two things make the earth sensitive to ice ages. If radiation falls 6.8% during a Milankovitch Cycle, that is enough to take our present 13 degree C world to a 3 degree C ice age and the return of that radiation is enough to raise the temperatures back.

Water turns to ice and reflects 90% of the sunlight, but once it turns to liquid it can absorb 70% of the it. This albedo effect works with increases and decreases in greenhouse gases to amplify cooling and heating. Carbon dioxide can be stored and removed from the atmosphere by covering it with ice. The carbon may be in the form of methane that will only last a short time in the atmosphere. There is no nonsense called a lagging indicator, it all works together to warm and cool the earth.

There is historical evidence of carbon dioxide warming the earth. Volcanos added it during the Permian causing the mother of all extinctions. If you look at more recent times, the earth was warm to 22 degrees C until the Himalayas started to erode. That removed carbon dioxide and resulting in the temperature decline of the Tertiary.

The reason the earth doesn't heat above that 22 degrees C amount is because water acts as a buffer. Once it's that hot, increased evaporation creates enough clouds to reflect sunlight. Even the act of raining can remove heat from the system and allow it to escape into the upper atmosphere.

Originally Posted by Gary/Dubya

Then you deniers should be able to provide actual experimentation to prove global warming isn't happening. We're still waiting!

No one has to prove global warming doesn't exist. Your side is claiming that global warming exists, the burden of proof is on climate scientists who keep claiming "quick we must act now or we will destroy the earth!" As an atheist, let me give you another example: Suppose a Christian comes up to me and says "do you believe in God". I then say "no". Then that Christian says "you have to prove there is no God". This is complete horse shit because I'm not the one claiming God exists, therefore the burden of proof is on the believer, not the denier. If I claimed right now big foot exists, you certainly would not say that it's your responsibility to disprove the existence of big foot. Global warming isn't true just because someone has not "disproved" global warming yet, just like God doesn't exist just because I haven't disproved his/her/its existence. Science doesn't prove anything, it establishes the likelihood that something is true (in other words it provides evidence and a certain percentage of likelihood that allows it to make predictions). I can't show studies "disproving" global warming because science doesn't prove or disprove anything. That's why I've said consistently "show me EVIDENCE of a study that has established causation..." I never asked for "proof". You are using an argument from ignorance:

Logical Fallacies Arguing from Ignorance

"Explanation
Arguments from ignorance infer that a proposition is true from the fact that it is not known to be false. Not all arguments of this form are fallacious; if it is known that if the proposition were not true then it would have been disproven, then a valid argument from ignorance may be constructed. In other cases, though, arguments from ignorance are fallacious.

Example
(1) No one has been able to disprove the existence of God.
Therefore:
(2) God exists.

This argument is fallacious because the non-existence of God is perfectly consistent with no one having been able to prove God’s non-existence."

Oh and you still haven't linked a controlled study yet that establishes man's activities as the CAUSE of global warming independent of other extraneous variables. You also haven't linked a study that not only does that but establishes how much of the problem (the variance) we are.

Originally Posted by Disillusioned_1

Eric, once again this is the kind of thing that can happen when we proceed full steam ahead without knowing the full scientific story:

Thalidomide - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In other words, I agree with you that a lot of the "proof" isn't there of AGW. However, what are the risks of ignoring that AGW might very well be real? Do those risks outweigh the economics of status quo?

I would simply say incentivise the "green revolution" in the private sector. Let the private sector do it while we wait for those series of studies to show causation. I'm not against going "green". I'm against doing horrible cap and trade bills that will only lower the temperature by something like a fifth of a degree over fifty years and potentially destroy our economy.

Look:

Climate Impacts of Waxman-Markey (the IPCC-based arithmetic of no gain) — MasterResource
Editor Note: Using mainstream models and assumptions, Mr. Knappenberger finds that in the year 2050 with a 83% emissions reduction (the aspirational goal of Waxman-Markey, the beginning steps of which are under vigorous debate), the temperature reduction is nine hundredths of one degree Fahrenheit, or two years of avoided warming. A more realistic climate bill would be a fraction of this amount. The author will respond to technical questions on methodology and results and invites input on alternative scenarios and analyses.

“A full implementation and adherence to the long-run emissions restrictions provisions described by the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill would result only in setting back the projected rise in global temperatures by a few years—a scientifically meaningless prospect.” (from below)"

So given this, why not try carbon emission reductions a different way, like say incentivization of the private sector? Is cap and trade the only way. No, unless you are Goldman-Sachs and trying to open up a potential $2 trillion market.

Originally Posted by ericams2786

No one has to prove global warming doesn't exist. Your side is claiming that global warming exists, the burden of proof is on climate scientists who keep claiming "quick we must act now or we will destroy the earth!" As an atheist, let me give you another example: Suppose a Christian comes up to me and says "do you believe in God". I then say "no". Then that Christian says "you have to prove there is no God". This is complete horse shit because I'm not the one claiming God exists, therefore the burden of proof is on the believer, not the denier. If I claimed right now big foot exists, you certainly would not say that it's your responsibility to disprove the existence of big foot. Global warming isn't true just because someone has not "disproved" global warming yet, just like God doesn't exist just because I haven't disproved his/her/its existence. Science doesn't prove anything, it establishes the likelihood that something is true (in other words it provides evidence and a certain percentage of likelihood that allows it to make predictions). I can't show studies "disproving" global warming because science doesn't prove or disprove anything. That's why I've said consistently "show me EVIDENCE of a study that has established causation..." I never asked for "proof". You are using an argument from ignorance:

Logical Fallacies Arguing from Ignorance

"Explanation
Arguments from ignorance infer that a proposition is true from the fact that it is not known to be false. Not all arguments of this form are fallacious; if it is known that if the proposition were not true then it would have been disproven, then a valid argument from ignorance may be constructed. In other cases, though, arguments from ignorance are fallacious.

Example
(1) No one has been able to disprove the existence of God.
Therefore:
(2) God exists.

This argument is fallacious because the non-existence of God is perfectly consistent with no one having been able to prove God’s non-existence."

Oh and you still haven't linked a controlled study yet that establishes man's activities as the CAUSE of global warming independent of other extraneous variables. You also haven't linked a study that not only does that but establishes how much of the problem (the variance) we are.

Just look at your first sentence and look for the fallacy there! My "side" has published calculations and your side hasn't.

The IPCC is able to publish reports showing carbon dioxide forcing. It gets the reports from scientists, who openly publish their calculations. These calculations aren't that complicated and are based on basic rules of science. Geophysics is a field in geology and there are easily 50 geologists working for industry for every geologist working for an organization involved in climate research. Any scientist can publish calculations or refute the calculations of others. They just have to put their reputation on the line.

Like I keep saying, AGW denier scientists need to prove with calculations that adding 40% more CO2 doesn't cause significant global warming.

Science isn't politics and talking about "sides" only shows you believe in something that doesn't involve science. Science is knowledge and not belief based. I know I have seen calculations about carbon dioxide forcing and I know I haven't seen calculations from an AGW denier scientist proving the IPCC calculations wrong. I know scientists have no problem proving something right or wrong and the fact that no scientist has tried it shows they can't do it.

I also know that the extra carbon dioxide has been put there by man.

I know when I read a report that is making a case that water contributes 95% of the greenhouse effect that the report isn't a scientific report and contains no scientific information. It is just claiming water contributes 95% of the greenhouse effect and is trying to use that claim to produce a biased conclusion.

I also know you can find an article that says just about anything and finding one doesn't dispute reference sources.

Originally Posted by Gary/Dubya

Just look at your first sentence and look for the fallacy there! My "side" has published calculations and your side hasn't.

The IPCC is able to publish reports showing carbon dioxide forcing. It gets the reports from scientists, who openly publish their calculations. These calculations aren't that complicated and are based on basic rules of science. Geophysics is a field in geology and there are easily 50 geologists working for industry for every geologist working for an organization involved in climate research. Any scientist can publish calculations or refute the calculations of others. They just have to put their reputation on the line.

Like I keep saying, AGW denier scientists need to prove with calculations that adding 40% more CO2 doesn't cause significant global warming.

Science isn't politics and talking about "sides" only shows you believe in something that doesn't involve science. Science is knowledge and not belief based. I know I have seen calculations about carbon dioxide forcing and I know I haven't seen calculations from an AGW denier scientist proving the IPCC calculations wrong. I know scientists have no problem proving something right or wrong and the fact that no scientist has tried it shows they can't do it.

I also know that the extra carbon dioxide has been put there by man.

I know when I read a report that is making a case that water contributes 95% of the greenhouse effect that the report isn't a scientific report and contains no scientific information. It is just claiming water contributes 95% of the greenhouse effect and is trying to use that claim to produce a biased conclusion.

I also know you can find an article that says just about anything and finding one doesn't dispute reference sources.

Your side has published nothing but calculations; no experimental science. I also know you have yet to link what I have asked for three days now. I also notice how you ignore the figures on water vapor (though the figure is closer to 70%) just because they don't fit in with what you believe. One set of figures is fine, just not those right? I also know that you won't believe anything that refutes any part of global warming because you are so incredibly caught up in it (notice, I've said I'll "believe" global warming as soon as I see the several repeated experimentally controlled studies showing causation that I've been asking for, meaning I'm actually flexible and won't just deny something because I disagree with it), but I'll try anyway:

Weather - Science Refutes Global Warming

"Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame.

Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame."

Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame.

Yet according to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine."

Gore claims global warming is causing more tornadoes.

Yet the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in February that there has been no scientific link established between global warming and tornadoes.

Gore claims global warming is causing more frequent and severe hurricanes.

However, hurricane expert Chris Landsea published a study on May 1 documenting that hurricane activity is no higher now than in decades past. Hurricane expert William Gray reported just a few days earlier, on April 27, that the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined in the past 40 years. Hurricane scientists reported in the April 18 Geophysical Research Letters that global warming enhances wind shear, which will prevent a significant increase in future hurricane activity.

Gore claims global warming is causing an expansion of African deserts.

However, the Sept. 16, 2002, issue of New Scientist reports, "Africa's deserts are in 'spectacular' retreat . . . making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa."

Gore argues Greenland is in rapid meltdown, and that this threatens to raise sea levels by 20 feet.

But according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Glaciology, "the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins and growing inland, with a small overall mass gain." In late 2006, researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute reported that the past two decades were the coldest for Greenland since the 1910s.

Gore claims the Antarctic ice sheet is melting because of global warming.

Yet the Jan. 14, 2002, issue of Nature magazine reported Antarctica as a whole has been dramatically cooling for decades. More recently, scientists reported in the September 2006 issue of the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series A: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, that satellite measurements of the Antarctic ice sheet showed significant growth between 1992 and 2003. And the U.N. Climate Change panel reported in February 2007 that Antarctica is unlikely to lose any ice mass during the remainder of the century.

Each of these cases provides an opportunity for Gore to lead by example in his call for an end to the distortion of science. Will he rise to the occasion? Only time will tell.

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at the Heartland Institute."

Careful Review of Science Refutes Global Warming Myths - by Review by Jay Lehr, Ph.D. - Environment & Climate News

"With their new book, Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years, S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery skewer all the misinformation that has been used for so long in an attempt to convince society that mankind is the root cause of all global climate change.

The book is truly amazing! It meticulously supports, with hundreds of detailed, published references, the clear facts and conclusions that the Earth's climate has been traveling a well-defined rollercoaster path of temperature change for at least 900,000 years.

Everyone reading this review should buy two copies of the book, keeping one in plain view at their home or office while sending one to a friend or government official who may be called upon to make a decision regarding CO2 emissions into our atmosphere.


An Inconvenient Antidote

In almost a point-by-point refutation of Al Gore's unsupportable rant that "the debate is over; man is warming the Earth," Singer and Avery explain technically but lucidly why nearly every cherry-picked fact in Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" is contradicted by science, which weighs heavily in favor of a very different truth: Man is in fact all but irrelevant to global climate, as the sun and its accompanying solar system rule.

Anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming has been the scare du jour of the collectivist environmental movement, socialist countries, and academic money launderers for nearly a decade now. Unlike the past Y2K scare, ozone elimination, and avian flu, efforts to combat global warming will have long-term, serious, negative impacts on the citizens of the world, whose quality of life, especially in the poorest nations, will be disastrously worsened.

It will not be possible to read Unstoppable Global Warming without being convinced a sham is being perpetrated on society. Even a 30-minute perusal of the text will impress the average unbrainwashed person that despite Gore's beautiful pictures of heaving ice flows in both his movie and book, man is not the culprit behind climate change. Singer and Avery's well-chosen book title alone should give the thinking person pause.


Data in Ice Cores

In the opening chapter, "Is Humanity Losing the Global Warming Debate?" Singer and Avery explain how the ratio of two isotopes of oxygen allows us to date the age in which air bubbles were trapped in ice, and that with almost a million years of ice cores we can readily tell that periodic warming of the Earth has occurred persistently almost every 1,500 years.

That obviously does not square with efforts to get us to reduce our use of cars, air conditioners, and fertilizer in order to reduce carbon in our atmosphere. Technological advances have increased our life expectancy by 30 years during the past century, but now we are being asked to give much of it up and return to organic farming, which was able to support only 1.5 billion people 100 years ago.

If we gave up high-yield farming, as many global warming alarmists desire, we would need to clear all the world's forests to sustain our current food demands, and thus eliminate about half of the world's wildlife.

This brings up a key question: Do environmental zealots really care about the environment, or do they simply hate people? Singer and Avery make it clear: "Humanity and wildlife may both be losing the debate."


Climate Cycles

Singer and Avery document the exhaustive data search they performed to confirm conclusively the existence of a 1,500-year warming cycle. They grappled with the 100,000-year elliptical cycle of the Earth's orbit, the 41,000-year axial tilt cycle of the Earth, and the 23,000-year precessing or wobble cycle.

In addition to those cycles, they thoroughly document the most influential cycle of all: the 1,500-year solar cycle that drives most of the Earth's climate cycle.

The authors shatter the greenhouse gas theory, making it clear humanity's modest addition to the atmosphere's small amount of carbon dioxide does not add up to a significant alteration in temperature.

In obliterating the Kyoto Protocol as a construct to change anything, the authors uncover a suppressed report from the federal government of Canada, which concluded that country's expenditure of $500 million to reduce greenhouse gases was "largely wasted, producing neither a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions nor the development of new, cleaner technologies."


Scaremongering Exposed

With merciless precision and incontrovertible scientific proof, Singer and Avery show mankind need not fear there will be sea level surges, devastating floods, the mass extinction of species, famine, drought, barren soil, more frequent and fierce storms, death by warming, and then an eventual sharp turn to killer cold.

One of my favorite chapters focuses on common sense regarding the extinction of species. The authors explain that most of the world's animal species evolved 600 million years ago, so we know most of today's species have successfully dealt with ice ages and global warming periods that have sent temperatures much higher and much lower than today's temperatures.


Ulterior Motives Unmasked

Singer and Avery unveil the best imaginable view of global warming alarmists' true objectives when they explain that what the Greens want is "to end or severely restrict the use of fossil fuels."

Famous fear-monger Paul Ehrlich saw civilization self-destructing as a result of having too many rich people using too many resources. Following his lead, global warming alarmists want solar and wind energy because they are erratic and expensive, and they want organic farming because reducing yields by half will achieve a radical reduction in our capacity to populate the Earth.


Warming Benefits the Biosphere

In addition to disassembling the absurd scenarios of the anti-human zealots, the authors calmly present the logical lessons from history that provide so much cause for optimism. A case in point:

"Human food production historically has prospered during global warmings. ... Warming climates provide more of the things plants love: sunlight, rainfall, and longer growing seasons. During warmings there are less of the things plants hate: late spring frosts and early fall frosts that shorten the growing seasons, and hail storms that destroy fields of crops," Singer and Avery observe.

"Human food production today depends far more on farming technology than on modest climate changes," the authors note. "We are no more doomed to famine by the Modern Warming than we are doomed to malaria in the era of pesticides and window screens. In fact, the food abundance the world has increasingly enjoyed since the eighteenth century is primarily due to scientific and technological advances."


Dramatic Weather Events

Along the same lines, Singer and Avery look at history and confirm that the frequency and severity of hurricanes, droughts, thunderstorms, hail, and tornadoes have not increased in recent years.

They point out, for example, that John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, in testimony before Congress, "noted that the most significant droughts in the Southwestern United States occurred more than four hundred years ago, before 1600. He stated that before 1850, America's Great Plains were called 'the Great American Desert,' and experts at the time said the region couldn't be farmed. Weather just seems unusual and dangerous these days, said Christy, because of the increased media coverage of major storms."


Computer Model Flaws

The authors explain a subject few of us really understand--the global warming computer models that are used to scare the public on a daily basis. They are properly called Global Circulation Models, or GCMs, and they are the megastars of today's climate and environmental research.

Unstoppable Global Warming is worth owning if just for chapter 11, which explains the limitations of GCMs quite clearly for folks without a deep scientific background.

Here is a sample:

"The GCMs are three-dimensional computer models that attempt to pull together and project into the future all major causes of climate change--jet streams in the upper atmosphere; deep ocean currents; solar radiation reflected back to space by ice sheets and glaciers; changes in vegetation; naturally changing greenhouse gas levels; eddies in the ocean that transfer heat laterally; number, type, and altitude of clouds in the skies; variations in radiant energy coming from the sun; plus hundreds of other factors."

Singer and Avery explain in meticulous detail why these efforts are instructive on a pure research level but foolish as a guide for any precise decision-making, especially given how the models have failed to reproduce today's climate accurately when inputting real-world data."

Making an argument about experimental science is just ridiculous. The experimental basis of carbon dioxide being a greenhouse gas is over 150 years old. The physical constants of gas mixtures are in reference books. They experimented to get that data and the results are like laws. They are as accurate as the ability to measure them.