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| quote: | Originally posted by Fir3start3r
+2
I'm all for deterring pollution and stuff but to try and reverse a natural cycle?
Um...good luck with that... |
Uh natural cycle?
Please give me just one scientifically peer-reviewed source that supports the "natural cycle" theory...
I really love the politicalization of the scientific findings to suite polluting industry's aims. Science has no political bias, no religious bias; just data, and that data is overwhelmingly indicative of human-influenced climate change. And really, take a look at whose funding these skeptics... fossil fuel lobby groups...such as our friend Exxon Mobil (XOM), solid stock by the way...
| quote: | ExxonMobil wins Worst EU Lobby Award
ExxonMobil is known in Europe for
its thousands of Esso gas stations.
BRUSSELS, 13 Dec. (EUX.TV) – U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil on Wednesday emerged as the winner of the “Worst EU Lobby Award” because it influences the climate change debate by funding climate sceptics.
The company won nearly half of 9400 votes cast on a website operated by a group of lobby watchdogs.
The group is composed of Corporate Europe Observatory, Friends of the Earth Europe, LobbyControl and Spinwatch. They’ve launched a website called worstlobby.eu, where visitors could vote for the company or organization that they consider as the worst lobbyist in Brussels.
ExxonMobil attracted 47 percent of the votes cast.
“The oil giant continues to pay climate sceptics to manipulate the climate debate in Brussels, while keeping much of this funding away from public scrutiny,” said the group.
"ExxonMobil have continued to fund climate sceptics despite heavy criticism both in Europe and the United States,” said Ulrich Mueller of German-based LobbyControl.
“ExxonMobil thereby intentionally creates an artificial dispute about human-made global warming to obstruct political measures aimed at reducing CO2
emissions."
"Moreover, in Europe, where transparency obligations are almost non-existent, it seems ExxonMobil still fails to disclose all those it funds. The impressive public response to the online poll shows that the public are worried by these kind of tactics." |
http://eux.tv/article.aspx?articleId=1806
The damn American Meteorological Society along with every authoritative scientific bodies all says global warming is human-related, no matter how much industry lobbyists and political-related groups and persons try to deny it....
| quote: | Copyright American Meteorological Society Jul 2006
For many years, temperature readings taken at the Earth's surface have shown a clear warming trend, while satellite measurements of the lower atmosphere have shown very little warming, if any at all, during the same period. But a report recently released by a U.S. government climate agency revealed that these discrepancies were inaccurate, and in fact the warming trend was indeed evident in both records, thus removing a significant piece of evidence touted for years by the many skeptics of global warming.
The U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) made corrections to the earlier data and also studied more recent satellite records. Their findings showed that temperatures at the Earth's surface and in the low and middle atmosphere have all warmed since 1950. The midtroposphere, which is the lowest area of the atmosphere, was found to be warming faster than the Earth's surface. All of these findings are consistent with the results that computer models studying climate change have been generating for years but that skeptics charged as invalid because of the longstanding temperature discrepancies.
"The bottom line is there are no significant discrepancies in the rates of warming," says the report's lead editor, Thomas R. Karl of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, adding that the finding is "really a major step forward" in climate-change studies.
The report cites numerous limitations of observing systems as reasons for the inaccurate measurements, including poor sampling, instrument changes, variability in observing practices, difficulty measuring the diurnal cycle aloft, and nonclimatic effects.
The first of 21 assessments scheduled to be released by the CCSP, the report also concluded that human influence is to blame for the increase in temperature. According to the report's press release, "the observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained by natural processes alone, nor by the effects of short-lived constituents such as aerosols and tropospheric ozone alone."
The CCSP found that a discrepancy still exists in the Tropics, where higher atmospheric temperatures predicted by models have not been evident in some of the new datasets. The authors of the CCSP report don't yet know why this discrepancy still exists, but are looking at the possibility that it also involves uncertainties in the observations. (SOURCE: The Washington Post)
STUDY SAYS GLOBAL WARMING DATA IS ACCURATE. (2006). Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 87(7), 872-873. Retrieved December 17, 2007, from Research Library database. (Document ID: 1096332401). |
Science ALWAYS wins in these debates, eventually...
| quote: | Copyright American Association for the Advancement of Science May 22, 1992
Much of the United States was hot and dry in the summer of 1988. So when National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) climate expert James Hansen put a spark to the dry tinder of public opinion with his claim that global warming was here, a fire storm of public concern was inevitable. But in parts of the scientific community there was just as inevitable a response--skepticism. Experts such as noted meteorologist Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) not only saw no evidence of greenhouse warming, they also saw no clear prospect of a significant warming in the future. The brawl had begun and, with a conservative administration in power--one loath to impose regulations on industry--environmentalists' hope of any sort of national commitment to limit greenhouse emissions seemed a pipe dream.
And yet over the past 4 years, the tempest has abated; scientific support for a middle ground has solidified, and, remarkably, even the Bush Administration is dropping its unqualified opposition to action on the greenhouse threat...just in time for next month's United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, to be held in Rio de Janeiro. What accounts for the palace revolution? John Sununu's departure may have removed the single biggest skeptic in the White House, and repeated studies have made clear that at least modest steps against greenhouse warming needn't cost an arm and a leg.
But the Administration is also hearing from the scientific community that the consensus is stronger than ever--greenhouse warming does pose a serious threat for the planet's future. Indeed, a four-agency memo leaked to the press at the end of last month, entitled "U.S. Views on Global Climate Change," hews closely to the latest assessment of greenhouse science released this month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Echoing the IPCC, the memo concedes that continued increases in greenhouse gases will likely lead to "significant changes in the climate system."
To many scientists, there's an irony in the Bush Administration's recent "discovery" of the greenhouse effect. The Administration memo cited "a consensus view of a broad range of scientists, including most U.S. scientists," and quoted likely limits to greenhouse warming due to a doubling of carbon dioxide as a modest 1.5 deg C at the lower end and a hefty, if not catastrophic, 4.5 deg at the upper end. That's the same range that National Academy of Sciences panels have been coming up with for the past 15 years--and that the Bush Administration had largely ignored, citing in its defense the scientific uncertainties.
But wait a minute: If eminent panels have been pushing the same mainstream position for more than a decade, why has the public been treated to dueling scientists for 4 years? Climatologist Robert Balling of Arizona State University, himself something of a greenhouse skeptic who has attracted public attention for his views, blames the media's tendency to accord high visibility to scientists on either extreme of the question. "The public gets the idea that (a few vocal scientists) represent the scientific community. They don't, but they make for the best fight on 'Good Morning America.' "
Plenty of scientists observed the tussle with interest, but eventually a quiet majority found fault with both extremes. When Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, insisted that the half-degree warming of the past century was driven by the steady increase of greenhouse gases, most greenhouse researchers eventually concluded that although the warming is consistent with an intensifying greenhouse, it is not clearly a result of it.
At the same time, however, mainstream scientists saw the objections of greenhouse skeptics as falling short. Some skeptics argued that the greenhouse might not warm the planet much because the sun, now possibly at a long-term peak in activity, might dim slightly in the next century, or because plants would simply suck up most of the added carbon dioxide. But most researchers viewed either salvation as speculative. Other skeptics saw an inconsistency between the greenhouse predictions and various temperature records. The United States, for example, showed no long-term warming, but such a small portion of the globe--just 5%--could easily have avoided warming so far.
A DRAFTY GREENHOUSe. Lindzen's skepticism drew particular attention, though, because of his prominence and the detailed case he presented. In 1989, he proposed that the computer climate models predicting a few degrees' warming for a doubling of carbon dioxide misrepresented a key process that could limit warming to a few tenths of a degree--that is, nothing to worry about (Science, 1 December 1989, p. 1118). Lindzen argued that the greenhouse effect has an inherent limit--indeed, one that has nearly been reached, due to the water vapor and other natural greenhouse gases that already warm the atmosphere by 33 deg C. His argument went as follows: Any additional warming from newly added greenhouse gases would boost convection in the tropics, pumping more warm air up through towering clouds, which wring out most of the air's moisture. That would flood the upper troposphere, above the level of the cloud tops, with dry air. And the dry air would reduce the overall greenhouse effect, limiting the net warming to minor proportions.
Such a renegade proposal coming from a prominent researcher made front-page news and prompted considerable new study. But after several years of scrutiny, most climate researchers would agree with IPCC coauthor John Mitchell of the United Kingdom's Meteorological Office in Bracknell, who says: "It's been interesting, but a lot of circumstantial evidence supports the conventional wisdom." The most telling evidence against Lindzen's self-limiting greenhouse includes satellite and balloon observations showing that water vapor in the upper troposphere increases, not decreases, whenever and wherever the lower troposphere is warmer--in summer versus winter, in the warm western Pacific versus the cooler eastern Pacific.
Lindzen rejects such observations as imprecise and perhaps irrelevant. But some researchers admit they also have trouble with his style of argument, detecting something of a double standard in his notion of uncertainty. "Dick does a good job in pointing out what the uncertainties are" in mainstream greenhouse predictions, says modeler James Risbey, a colleague of Lindzen's at MIT. "I have less faith in what he says when he talks about smaller climate changes and lends a certainty to his own predictions. The very uncertainties he relates to standard predictions also apply to his own."
Risbey and others in the mainstream readily admit that greenhouse science is still pervaded by uncertainties--about the magnitude of the threat, for example (see box). Given such uncertainties, some researchers are arguing for a delay in reining in greenhouse emissions while the science settles down. Climate modelers Michael Schlesinger and Xingjian Jiang of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign sparked the debate with calculations in Nature (21 March 1991, p. 219) that suggested that even if the eventual warming turns out to be at the high end of the scale, little harm would come of waiting 10 years. That would leave time for an intensive effort to refine climate models on massively parallel computers, 1000 times faster than today's supercomputers, they argued. "No one is proposing we wait 30 years," says Schlesinger, "but I don't see any compelling argument that we have to begin immediately."
But many scientists can't agree with even this modest wait-and-see approach. The first to respond were Risbey, Mark Handel, and Peter Stone of MIT, writing in the 31 December 1991 issue of EOS, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union. The MIT group argued that Schlesinger and Jiang's supercomputer effort wouldn't narrow the uncertainties enough. And a decade, they say, will see only the beginning of crucial observations of the behavior of oceans and clouds--two key sources of uncertainty. Risbey and company's doubts echo those in a 1990 IPCC report, which foresaw the cloud and ocean uncertainties narrowing only in the 10-to 20-year range, by which point the globe might be committed to major climate change.
NASTY SURPRISES. The other reason for not waiting is uncertainty itself, say Risbey and others. The possibility that greenhouse-induced change could turn out to be much more dramatic than any model predicts is spooking a generation of earth scientists who remember the nasty surprise sprung by stratospheric ozone. By the late 1970s, scientists knew of the potential for damage by manmade chlorine compounds, but their scenarios suffered from uncertainties and lacked a smoking gun. As a result, public interest in the problem declined. Then, out of the blue, atmospheric chlorine burned a hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic and began eating away at the ozone over mid-latitudes. Scientists had simply overlooked ways that natural atmospheric particles could boost chlorine's destructiveness by a factor of 10.
Greenhouse specialists, too, are wondering what they might have overlooked. Perhaps an abrupt change in ocean circulation, Wallace Broecker of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory has suggested--although some studies have now discounted that idea. Or perhaps unanticipated feedback from polar ice caps or green plants, other workers venture. "It's a matter for concern," concedes Schlesinger. "How you deal with that depends on your philosophy."
The philosophy that many scientists contacted by Science are now espousing amounts to buying some insurance--in the form of no-cost or low-cost reductions in greenhouse gas emissions--against the possibility that the higher predictions of global warming turn out to be right or some nasty surprise is lurking in the greenhouse. And that notion of prudence seems to be catching on at last in the White House.
GREENHOUSE UNCERTAINTIES: ADJUSTING THE HEAT
With the scientific and political battle over the reality of the greenhouse threat largely behind them (see main text), climate researchers are getting down to the next order of business: refining their predictions of just how much warming the world is in for. To do so, they need to resolve uncertainties about how the atmosphere, ocean, and biosphere will respond to a warmer world--and how those responses will feed back to affect climate change.
CLOUDS. The single largest uncertainty in the climate models is the behavior of clouds as the world warms. Will clouds that can trap heat, such as wispy cirrus, increase in abundance, or will the low-lying decks of clouds that form over the ocean predominate, reflecting additional sunlight back into space and cooling the atmosphere? In one model, created by researchers at the United Kingdom's Meteorological Office, the warming due to a doubling of carbon dioxide dropped from 5.2 deg C to 1.9 deg C when the model was switched from one way of rendering clouds to another "equally plausible" way. Getting clouds right will take 10 to 20 years because researchers must understand better what determines the mix of clouds in the real world and then get computer clouds to act like the real ones.
OCEANS. The watery portions of the planet play diverse roles in greenhouse warming. Their slowness to warm will delay the full extent of atmospheric warming by decades, though no one is sure how many. They absorb more than one-third of carbon dioxide emissions, but no one knows whether they will continue doing so. And their circulation modifies climate, although climate change could alter their circulation, perhaps abruptly.
MISCELLANEOUS FEEDBACKS. The interconnected system of ocean-atmosphere biosphere could change its behavior in a host of other ways in response to warming, creating other feedbacks. Ice and snow, for example, might recede, exposing darker ground or ocean that would adsorb more sunlight and accelerate the warming. Or the production of methane--a greenhouse gas--from wetlands might increase. Most of the feedbacks researchers, have been able to imagine tend to enhance any warming. And most are not included in present climate models.
With uncertainties like these, no wonder schools are sprouting global change programs (see p. 1146) like dandelions on a spring day.
Kerr, Richard A (1992). Greenhouse Science Survives Skeptics. Science, 256(5060), 1138. Retrieved December 17, 2007, from Research Library database. (Document ID: 1787085). |
Can any of you skeptics provide some peer-reviewed material supporting your assertions??
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