I have a question for people who are interested in global warming.....?

Question

I really dont know much about it so I was doing some research and I found this website,

http://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/global-warming-01.html

the article is really long so I dont expect you to read it (unless you really want to) so here's the summary that was towards the end of the article

1. The "Greenhouse Effect" is a natural and valuable phenomenon, without which, the planet would be uninhabitable.

2. Modest Global Warming, at least up until 1998 when a cooling trend began, has been real.

3. CO2 is not a significant greenhouse gas; 95% of the contribution is due to Water Vapor.

4. Man's contribution to Greenhouse Gasses is relatively insignificant. We didn't cause the recent Global Warming and we cannot stop it.

5. Solar Activity appears to be the principal driver for Climate Change, accompanied by complex ocean currents which distribute the heat and control local weather systems.

6. CO2 is a useful trace gas in the atmosphere, and the planet would actually benefit by having more, not less of it, because it is not a driver for Global Warming and would enrich our vegetation, yielding better crops to feed the expanding population.

7. CO2 is not causing global warming, in fact, CO2 is lagging temperature change in all reliable datasets. The cart is not pulling the donkey, and the future cannot influence the past.

8. Nothing happening in the climate today is particularly unusual, and in fact has happened many times in the past and will likely happen again in the future.

9. The UN IPCC has corrupted the "reporting process" so badly, it makes the oil-for-food scandal look like someone stole some kid's lunch money. They do not follow the Scientific Method, and modify the science as needed to fit their predetermined conclusions. In empirical science, one does NOT write the conclusion first, then solicit "opinion" on the report, ignoring any opinion which does not fit their predetermined conclusion while falsifying data to support unrealistic models.

10. Polar Bear populations are not endangered, in fact current populations are healthy and at almost historic highs. The push to list them as endangered is an effort to gain political control of their habitat... particularly the North Slope oil fields.

11. There is no demonstrated causal relationship between hurricanes and/or tornadoes and global warming. This is sheer conjecture totally unsupported by any material science.

12. Observed glacial retreats in certain select areas have been going on for hundreds of years, and show no serious correlation to short-term swings in global temperatures.

13. Greenland is shown to be an island completely surrounded by water, not ice, in maps dating to the 14th century. There is active geothermal activity in the currently "melting" sections of Greenland.

14. The Antarctic Ice cover is currently the largest ever observed by satellite, and periodic ice shelf breakups are normal and correlate well with localized tectonic and geothermal activity along the Antarctic Peninsula.

15. The Global Warming Panic was triggered by an artifact of poor mathematics which has been thoroughly disproved. The panic is being deliberately nurtured by those who stand to gain both financially and politically from perpetuation of the hoax.

16. Scientists who "deny" the hoax are often threatened with loss of funding or even their jobs.

17. The correlation between solar activity and climate is now so strong that solar physicists are now seriously discussing the much greater danger of pending global cooling.

18. Biofuel hysteria is already having a disastrous effect on world food supplies and prices, and current technologies for biofuel production consume more energy than the fuels produce.

19. Global Warming Hysteria is potentially linked to a stress-induced mental disorder.

20. In short, there is no "climate crisis" of any kind at work on our planet.

I'm just looking for opinions about this matter or contradicting articles on the web.

Do you think people are causing global warming?

Answer 1

I'd take a good look at the person(s) responsible for that particular article.  Anyone who stands to gain money by convincing the world there is NO global warming problem cannot be trusted.  The proof is out there if you just open your eyes and look for it.  The world IS going up in a ball of flaming poo whether you want to acknowledge it or not.  Do some research of your own....look at state, federal, independent, personal, etc webpages, newspapers, magazines.  You just have to learn how to sort through the bull to find out who is telling the truth and who is standing to gain money from lies.

Answer 2

I hope you don't really think that those who stand to make millions, and place a stranglehold on our daily lives, based on lies and hysteria; will actually be interested in little things like facts and reason?

We need a Steve project for Global Warming...

Answer 3

okay...

So just tell me one thing:

how are you going to stop the melting of the ice caps if you do not stop Global warming?????????

just tell me how you are going to stop small islands like the Maldives from being submerged by the rising sea level?!!!!

you people scare me a lot by thinking that Global warming is not serious...

Please please please stop thinking only about yourselves... Think about those suffering too.

WE are all responsible for what's happening to the earth!

Answer 4

>CVASCX?CXXxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Answer 5

That article is an unreliable source. He is an unreliable writer who doesn't cite his "sources".

When your kids or grand kids have no way to basically live because we've used up all the fossil fuels and we neglected to research alternative energies don't complain.  

Answer 6

This, and statments like it, have been refuted many times here and in other questions in this forum. It is a mix of:

Outright lies: "CO2 is not causing global warming"

Malicious unsubstantiated rumours: "Global Warming Hysteria is potentially linked to a stress-induced mental disorder"

Misleading attempts to connect unrelated facts: "There is active geothermal activity in the currently "melting" sections of Greenland"

Interspersed with some real facts to try and make the whole seem reasonable and credible: "The "Greenhouse Effect" is a natural and valuable phenomenon"

If you are seriously 'doing research' might I suggest the next site you look at (and maybe summarise for us as you did here) is the IPCC one: http://www.ipcc.ch/

Answer 7

Excellent.

You have just found an article that debunks years of scientific observation by thousands of scientists around the world, including those from NASA, NOAA, multiple universities, and the IPCC, among many others. This amazing article was written by a practicing scientist (cough), peer-reviewed (cough), and endorsed by many credible organizations (cough). And look, there's even a nice little donate button at the bottom to support this amazing work.

(All of the above was sarcasm.)

Some of the information in there may be credible, and skimming through it, there might be some good science (actually, I'm sure there is). But you are drawing way too many conclusions from one source. Look at the overall debate and then draw conclusions, and try to stay away from blogs and any long article like the one above with a convenient donate button right underneath.

Answer 8

1.  True, but excess Greenhouse Effect (which is what we have now) will be very damaging.

2.  False.  1998 was an unusually warm year, but, long term, we're still warming.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/

3.  False.  Water vapor causes only constant temperature because excess water vapor falls out as precipitation.  Excess CO2 stays in the atmosphere, and that's a problem.

That's enough.  This is a collection of falsehoods and half truths.  Most are refuted here:

"So for those who are not sure what to believe, here is our round-up of the most common climate myths and misconceptions."

http://environment.newscientist.com/chan...

For example, item 3 is one of 26 myths refuted above, here.

"Climate myths: CO2 isn't the most important greenhouse gas"

http://environment.newscientist.com/chan...

EVERY scientific organization has issued an official statement that global warming is real, and mostly caused by us.

I'm with them.  

Answer 9

Hmmm, some quote from your link

"In the end, McIntyre turned to the internet and its true freedom of the press, and today he is known to every serious climate scientist on the planet as the man who broke the hockey stick."

In other words he could not prove his point, and the only scientist calling him the "man who broke the hockey stick" is Steve McIntyre.

"The National Academy of Sciences has found Mann's graph to have “a validation skill not significantly different from zero” – i.e., the graph was useless."

The technical term for the above statement is "a lie" they unfortunately becoming more common in denier claims on AGM

http://environment.newscientist.com/chan...

And some of your other points

5. The sun has been closely monitored since the 70s by satellite (all through the highest amount of warming) and the sun showed no increase in output, this is a fact.

7. shows the poor understand deniers have on the whole subject, yes there was a lag in historical natural warming events which were caused by various things like changes in the Suns output which warmed the Earth so after hundreds of years co2 was released warming the Earth further, we are cutting out the middle man and just releasing the co2 directly.

10. Polar bear numbers did indeed increase in the 70s just after an international treaty banning the wholesale hunting of them.

13. Maps in the 14th often showed locations of sea monsters, mermaids and the edge of the world as well!

16. Utter fiction, threatened by who, the U.S. Govt, who have done their best to ignore or deny GW for the last 8 years

19. Yeah sure!

d/dx+d/dy+d/dz:

It may be a little unfair to expect someone who's listed profession is web designer (according to google) to know what a FTIR spectrometer is, I suspect he would think that a Fourier Transform is something that happens to a dead polar bear to make a fur coat.

Answer 10

global warming is real. dont believe everything you read. people also thought the earth was flat at one point. just because most people dont see the truth doesnt mean you need to go right along with them. i suggest you watch the dvd "an inconvenient truth"

Answer 11

Go ahead and contribute money to the author, James Peden.  Writing script for snake oil is an art and his talents ought to be recognized.  There is not a single paragraph in the article that would pass a peer review process for publication in a reputable scientific journal and Peden knows this.  It the article was worthy of publication, he would publish first and then post the reprint.  Peden also knows that he can fool most Americans because fewer than 30% of Americans have taken a high school course in physics and only 0.02% have an advanced degree in physics.  

Some of the more amusing comments

"Steve McIntyre, a Canadian analyst, who spends two years of his own personal time reverse-engineering Dr. Mann's PCA program."

The PCA method is freely available.  I used the C++ code  in Numerical Recipes to code and debug the method in a day.  (It took more than half an hour because I embedded the routine in a linear algebra class.). If it took two years, well that is an indication of how well McIntyre understands mathematics.

" McIntyre subjects Mann's PCA program to a "Monte Carlo" analysis - which inserts random data sets into the function - and discovered that no matter what data he fed it, the result was always the same.  The arm of the "hockey stick" ( paleo-record ) always came out straight."

Duh.  If the numbers are random the trend line has zero slope.  You don't even need to use the PCA program to figure that one out Steve.  At least you proved that the program works.  By the way, did you have problems with singular matrices or did the round off errors hide the problem?

McIntyre's work was rejected for publication in Nature. Go figure.

"In reality, the two smaller peaks don't account for much, since they lie in an energy range that is much smaller than the where the 15 micron peak sits."

Hm, E=hc/L so the 15 micron band is a lower energy than the 2.7 or 4.7 micron bands.  Peden can't even get the energy scale right.

"Man-made CO2 doesn't appear physically capable of absorbing much more than two-thousandths of the radiated heat (IR) passing upward through the atmosphere"

Get a FTIR spectrometer, open the sample compartment and exhale once.  You will easily see the change in absorption in a path length of 20 cm.  Get some real lab experience Peden and do a reality check before writing.  Believe it or not, real scientists base their results on experimental evidence.  By the way, CO2 and H2O are the two easiest molecules to measure with an infrared spectrometer and they have infrared absorption cross sections that are much larger than the size of the molecules.  All research grade instruments are purged with dry air to remove CO2 and H2O. Again do a reality check, CO2 molecules are little dipole antennas.  Go back to a first year E&M class and figure out why your radio, which also contains a dipole antenna, works.  

Peden's article is rubbish.  Enough said.

Answer 12

Most of those are just outright lies.  And the others are incorrect.

I won't even comment on it anymore, it is just ridiculous.

Answer 13

i couldn't agree with you or that site more, god bless you for finding this information you beautiful beautiful person