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MisterOpus1
Grumpy Old Fart
Registered: Dec 2001
Location: Kansas City
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| quote: | Originally posted by TheNobleEu
Get used to it, jumping to conclusions cum total misrepresentation seems to be the standard around here.
Nope, no chance of that at all.
You've already been accused and forcefully thrust into a particular camp (that someone else wants to argue against?), and if you try to disclaim it, you're "annoying and irritating." 
Global warming? Surely that's a farce.
(Just ignore that tsunami of glacial melt coming up behind you).
Cheers,
-Noble |
Thanks for the thoughts, Noble. You needn't worry too much about me, however. Most veterans here have a fairly descent grasp which side of the fence I sit on most issues, as they are also well aware that I can usually hold my own in most instances.
Most of the time, at least.
___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...
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 Jun-21-2005 16:30 
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ShadoWolf
ISOS
Registered: Apr 2002
Location: State of Trance
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http://www.junkscience.com/july04/D...ail-Bellamy.htm
Global Warming? What a load of poppycock!
Whatever the experts say about the howling gales, thunder and lightning we've had over the past two days, of one thing we can be certain. Someone, somewhere - and there is every chance it will be a politician or an environmentalist - will blame the weather on global warming.
But they will be 100 per cent wrong. Global warming - at least the modern nightmare version - is a myth. I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policy makers are not.
Instead, they have an unshakeable in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credos of the environmental movement. Humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide - the principal so-called greenhouse gas - into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up.
They say this is global warming: I say this is poppycock. Unfortunately, for the time being, it is their view that prevails.
As a result of their ignorance, the world's economy may be about to divert billions, nay trillions of pounds, dollars and roubles into solving a problem that actually doesn't exist. The waste of economic resources is incalculable and tragic.
Dreaded
To explain why I believe that global warming is largely a natural phenomenon that has been with us for 13,000 years and probably isn't causing us any harm anyway, we need to take heed of some basic facts of botanical science.
For a start, carbon dioxide is not the dreaded killer greenhouse gas that the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the subsequent Kyoto Protocol five years later cracked it up to be. It is, in fact, the most important airborne fertiliser in the world, and without it there would be no green plants at all.
That is because, as any schoolchild will tell you, plants take in carbon dioxide and water and, with the help of a little sunshine, convert them into complex carbon compounds - that we either eat, build with or just admire - and oxygen, which just happens to keep the rest of the planet alive.
Increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, double it even, and this would produce a rise in plant productivity. Call me a biased old plant lover but that doesn't sound like much of a killer gas to me. Hooray for global warming is what I say, and so do a lot of my fellow scientists.
Let me quote from a petition produced by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which has been signed by over 18,000 scientists who are totally opposed to the Kyoto Protocol, which committed the world's leading industrial nations to cut their production of greenhouse gasses from fossil fuels.
They say: 'Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in minor greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide are in error and do not conform to experimental knowledge.'
You couldn't get much plainer than that. And yet we still have public figures such as Sir David King, scientific adviser to Her Majesty's Government, making preposterous statements such as 'by the end of this century, the only continent we will be able to live on is Antarctica.'
At the same time, he's joined the bandwagon that blames just about everything on global warming, regardless of the scientific evidence. For example, take the alarm about rising sea levels around the south coast of England and subsequent flooding along the region's rivers. According to Sir David, global warming is largely to blame.
But it isn't at all - it's down to bad management of water catchments, building on flood plains and the incontestable fact that the south of England is gradually sinking below the waves.
And that sinking is nothing to do with rising sea levels caused by ice-caps melting. Instead, it is purely related to an entirely natural warping of the Earth's crust, which could only be reversed by sticking one of the enormously heavy ice-caps from past ice ages back on top of Scotland.
Ah, ice ages... those absolutely massive changes in global climate that environmentalists don't like to talk about because they provide such strong evidence that climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon.
It was round about the end of the last ice age, some 13,000 years ago, that a global warming process did undoubtedly begin.
Not because of all those Stone age folk roasting mammoth meat on fossil fuel camp fires but because of something called the 'Milankovitch Cycles,' an entirely natural fact of planetary life that depends on the tilt of the Earth's axis and its orbit around the sun.
Melted
The glaciers melted, the ice cap retreated and Stone Age man could begin hunting again. But a couple of millennia later, it got very cold again and everyone headed south. Then it warmed up so much that water from melted ice filled the English Channel and we became an island.
The truth is that the climate has been yo-yo-ing up and down ever since. Whereas it was warm enough for Romans to produce good wine in York, on the other hand, King Canute had to dig up peat to warm his people. And then it started getting warm again.
Up and down, up and down - that is how temperature and climate have always gone in the past and there is no proof they are not still doing exactly the same thing now. In other words, climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon, nothing to do with the burning of fossil fuels.
In fact, a recent scientific paper, rather unenticingly titled 'Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations Over The Last Glacial Termination,' proved it.
It showed that increases in temperature are responsible for increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, not the other way around.
Ignored
But this sort of evidence is ignored, either by those who believe the Kyoto Protocol is environmental gospel or by those who know 25 years of hard work went into securing the agreement and simply can't admit that the science it is based on is wrong.
The real truth is that the main greenhouse gas - the one that has the most direct effect on land temperature - is water vapour, 99 per cent of which is entirely natural.
If all the water vapour was removed from the atmosphere, the temperature would fall by 33 degrees Celsius. But, remove all the carbon dioxide and the temperature might fall by just 0.3 per cent.
Although we wouldn't be around, because without it there would be no green plants, no herbivorous farm animals and no food for us to eat.
It has been estimated that the cost of cutting fossil fuel emissions in line with the Kyoto Protocol would be £76trillion. Little wonder, then, that world leaders are worried. So should we all be.
If we signed up to these scaremongers, we could be about to waste a gargantuan amount of money on a problem that doesn't exist - money that could be used in umpteen better ways: fighting world hunger, providing clean water, developing alternative energy sources, improving our environment, creating jobs.
The link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming is a myth. It is time the world's leaders, their scientific advisers and many environmental pressure groups woke up to the fact.
Copyright © 2004 Daily Mail -- All Rights Reserved 1
___________________
 Nathan Fake - Outhouse (Valentino Kanzyani Remix) || ID PLZ! PVD ID!!!
Disco and classical had sex while watching a sci-fi movie. Their child: trance.
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Jul-18-2005 16:35 
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MisterOpus1
Grumpy Old Fart
Registered: Dec 2001
Location: Kansas City
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Interesting fellow, Dr. Bellamy. Unfortunately he seemed to have fallen victim to the desire of most scientists to hold a differing, earth-shattering voice that is decisively separate from the consensus. This is every scientists dream - it is the equivalent to a new discovery, something that ultimately leads to immortality in the scientific realm.
The problem, really, is how you get there - do you get there with honest, sound, valid evidence to support your assertions? Or do you fall the way of the dodo (like every Creationist "scientist" I've ever known) and essentially utilize unsupported assertions, and if all else fails - make shit up?
A quick google scan on this guy tends to support the latter:
| quote: | In 2004, he wrote an article in the Daily Mail in which he described the theory of man-made global warming as "poppycock".1 A typographical error in a recent letter he published in the New Scientist (April 16th, 2005) suggested a large percentage (555 of 625!) of the world's glaciers were advancing, not retreating. This was a gift for global warming deniers, but turned out to be untrue and misleading.2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bellamy |
Why was it misleading?:
| quote: | “Despite his scientific reputation, he makes all the mistakes that are possible”. He had cited data which was simply false, failed to provide references, completely misunderstood the scientific context and neglected current scientific literature.(4) The latest studies show unequivocally that most of the world’s glaciers are retreating.(5)
But I still couldn’t put the question out of my mind. The figures Bellamy cited must have come from somewhere. I emailed him to ask for his source. After several requests, he replied to me at the end of last week. The data, he said, came from a website called www.iceagenow.com.
Iceagenow.com was constructed by a man called Robert W. Felix to promote his self-published book about “the coming ice age”. It claims that sea levels are falling, not rising; that the Asian tsunami was caused by the “ice age cycle”; and that “underwater volcanic activity – not human activity – is heating the seas”.
Is Felix a climatologist, a vulcanologist, or an oceanographer? Er, none of the above. His biography describes him as a “former architect”.(6) His website is so bonkers that I thought at first it was a spoof. Sadly, he appears to believe what he says. But there indeed was all the material Bellamy cited in his letter, including the figures – or something resembling the figures – he quoted. “Since 1980, there has been an advance of more than 55% of the 625 mountain glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring group in Zurich.”(7) The source, which Bellamy also cited in his email to me, was given as “the latest issue of 21st Century Science and Technology”.
21st Century Science and Technology? It sounds impressive, until you discover that it is published by Lyndon Larouche. Lyndon Larouche is the American demagogue who in 1989 received a 15-year sentence for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations.(8) He has claimed that the British royal family is running an international drugs syndicate,(9) that Henry Kissinger is a communist agent,(10) that the British government is controlled by Jewish bankers,(11) and that modern science is a conspiracy against human potential.(12)
It wasn’t hard to find out that this is one of his vehicles: Larouche is named on the front page of the magazine’s website, and the edition Bellamy cites contains an article beginning with the words “We in LaRouche’s Youth Movement find ourselves in combat with an old enemy that destroys human beings … it is empiricism.”(13)
Oh well, at least there is a source for Bellamy’s figures. But where did 21st Century Science and Technology get them from? It doesn’t say. But I think we can make an informed guess, for the same data can be found all over the internet. They were first published online by Professor Fred Singer, one of the very few climate change deniers who has a vaguely relevant qualification (he is, or was, an environmental scientist). He posted them on his website www.sepp.org, and they were then reproduced by the appropriately named junkscience.com, by the Cooler Heads Coalition, the National Center for Public Policy Research and countless others.(14) They have even found their way into the Washington Post.(15) They are constantly quoted as evidence that manmade climate change is not happening. But where did they come from? Singer cites half a source: “a paper published in Science in 1989”.(16) Well, the paper might be 16 years old, but at least, and at last, there is one. Surely?
I went through every edition of Science published in 1989, both manually and electronically. Not only did it contain nothing resembling those figures; throughout that year there was no paper published in this journal about glacial advance or retreat.
So it wasn’t looking too good for Bellamy, or Singer, or any of the deniers who have cited these figures. But there was still one mystery to clear up. While Bellamy’s source claimed that 55% of 625 glaciers are advancing, Bellamy claimed that 555 of them – or 89% – are advancing. This figure appears to exist nowhere else. But on the standard English keyboard, 5 and % occupy the same key. If you try to hit %, but fail to press shift, you get 555, instead of 55%. This is the only explanation I can produce for his figure. When I challenged him, he admitted that there had been “a glitch of the electronics”.(17)
So, in Bellamy’s poor typing, we have the basis for a whole new front in the war against climate science. The 555 figure is now being cited as definitive evidence that global warming is a “fraud”, a “scam”, a “lie”. I phoned New Scientist to ask if he had requested a correction. He had not been in touch.(18)
It is hard to convey just how selective you have to be to dismiss the evidence for climate change. You must climb over a mountain of evidence to pick up a crumb: a crumb which then disintegrates in your palm. You must ignore an entire canon of science, the statements of the world’s most eminent scientific institutions, and thousands of papers published in the foremost scientific journals. You must, if you are David Bellamy, embrace instead the claims of an eccentric former architect, which are based on what appears to be a non-existent data set. And you must do all this while calling yourself a scientist.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/05/10/junk-science |
But that's digressing a bit offtopic of your post. So what exactly did Bellamy use as reference to the article you posted? Here, have a look yourself:
| quote: | A week or so ago the big-bearded TV personality and former environmentalist David Bellamy penned a frankly bizarre article in the Daily Mail, entitled 'Global warming: what a load of poppycock!'. In it, he asserted that global warming is a "myth", that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are a good thing because CO2 fertilises plants, and that "climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon, nothing to do with the burning of fossil fuels". Amusingly, the only supporting evidence Bellamy could find to cite was the notorious Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine petition of 1998, which claimed to have the signatures of 18,000 scientists, all disagreeing with global warming. The OISM, which is run from a remote shed in an Oregon wood by a right-wing Christian fundamentalist, was so lax about the names on its petition that they included Ginger Spice and Michael J. Fox, according to PR Watch. The upshot is that many of us, including myself, who once held great respect for Bellamy's contribution to public understanding of environmental issues, are fearing for his sanity. It is especially sad to see the waters of the climate change debate muddied yet again in the week that Dr David King, the UK government's chief scientist, issued another dramatic warning of how urgent the problem has now become.
http://www.marklynas.org/wind/bloggin/68.html |
Interesting nut. BTW, here's a correspondence between Bellamy and Monbiot on his wind power dissenting view:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/200...-david-bellamy/
___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...
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Jul-18-2005 18:57
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