What are some "startling" facts about global warming?

Question

What are some "startling" facts about global warming?

Answer 1

The way that it demonstrates how willing people are to accept theories as stated facts without even trying to examine the information with a critical eye.

The way the green groupthink caused by global warming affects the average IQ by reducing it to its lowest common denominator.

Answer 2

AGW has yet to be proven.

IPCC is a political organization.

Not all scientists agree.

No empirical proof exists.

Answer 3

the fact that we wont have to worry about it in our generation, but our children, and grand children may have to suffer greatly from our generations mistakes.

Answer 4

Some say global warming is just part of a natural cycle, the Arctic has warmed up in the past.         But this is a MYTH.

Answer 5

The recent warming trend, and the current cool spell, perfectly mirror abnormal solar activity.

Answer 6

The leader of this scam, AL Gore, lives in a twenty room plus eight bath energy guzzling mansion in Nashville, Tennessee.  He also owns two other homes that sit empty awaiting his return.

Answer 7

That if we kill off half the global population it will do wonders in cutting carbon emissions!

Answer 8

Not all carbon dioxide is bad.  

Plants need carbon dioxide.

Answer 9

All of that carbon being burned in SUVs and power plants started out in the atmosphere to begin with.  That was back before it turned into plant life and later dinosaur muscular tissue.  At that time there were no polar ice caps and the planet was somewhat warmer.  Weird, huh.

Answer 10

Top 11 Warmest Years On Record Have All Been In Last 13 Years

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...

ScienceDaily (Dec. 13, 2007) — The decade of 1998-2007 is the warmest on record, according to data sources obtained by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The global mean surface temperature for 2007 is currently estimated at 0.41°C/0.74°F above the 1961-1990 annual average of 14.00°C/57.20°F...

...Since the start of the 20th century, the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74°C. But this rise has not been continuous. The linear warming trend over the last 50 years (0.13°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the last 100 years...

...2007 global temperatures have been averaged separately for both hemispheres. Surface temperatures for the northern hemisphere are likely to be the second warmest on record, at 0.63°C above the 30-year mean (1961-90) of 14.6°C/58.3°F. The southern hemisphere temperature is 0.20°C higher than the 30-year average of 13.4°C/56.1°F, making it the ninth warmest in the instrumental record since 1850.

January 2007 was the warmest January in the global average temperature record at 12.7°C/54.9°F, compared to the 1961-1990 January long-term average of 12.1°C/53.8°F...

Global 10 Warmest Years Mean Global temperature (°C) (anomaly with respect to 1961-1990)

1. 1998 0.52

2. 2005 0.48

3. 2003 0.46

4. 2002 0.46

5. 2004 0.43

6. 2006 0.42

7. 2007(Jan-Nov) 0.41

8. 2001 0.40

9. 1997 0.36

10. 1995 0.28

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...

Answer 11

That it's all a forkin' lie... Read this and weap you little left-wingerzzzzzzzzzz -

Answer 12

greenhouse gases are getting trapped in our atmosphere because our atmosphere is too thick. yet, ultraviolet rays are burning past our atmosphere and into our planet because our atmosphere is too thin.

make up your mind, al gore!

Answer 13

Here's a story you haven't heard, and you should have.

An intelligence source, working for a government agency. He's not a spy, he's an analyst. He uses computers to crunch numbers and at the end of his work, out pops the truth that was hiding in the original data. Let's call him "Mann."

The trouble with Mann is, he has an ideology. He knows what he wants his results to be. And the original numbers aren't giving him that data. So the agency he works for won't be able to persuade people to fight the war he wants to fight.

Well, that's not acceptable.

Cooking the Figures

He starts with his software. There are certain procedures that are normal and accepted in his line of work. But if he makes just one little mistake, his program does a weird little recursion and if there's any data at all that shows the pattern he wants it to show, it will be magnified 139 times, so it far overshadows all the other data.

He can run it on random numbers and it gives him the shape he wants. Unfortunately, the real-world numbers aren't random they have a very different shape. All the numbers. Even his jimmied program won't give the results he wants.

All he needs is any data shaped the right way. And so he looks a little farther, and ... here it is. It looks, on the surface, like all the other data that he's been working with. Other researchers working in his field, just glancing at it, will assume it is, too.

But it isn't. Because the source that gathered this batch of data had some other key information that takes it all away. The numbers don't mean what they normally mean. In fact, this number set is absolutely false.

If you use these numbers along with all the other data, however, the clever little program will pick them up, magnify them radically, and voilá! The final report shows exactly the shape he needs the numbers to have.

The trouble is, these numbers are supposed to be double-checked. Anybody who looks closely at his numbers and at his program will see what he's done. It's not hard to find, if you have the original data sets and can examine the program. He will be exposed as a fraud. It will do his cause more harm than good, if it's made public.

But he's not afraid. He knows how this works.

He doesn't show the program or the lists of his data sources to anybody.

Second, he is given a big boost by the fact that another researcher we'll call him "Santer" had his own axe to grind. He was also the author of a questionable report and got himself appointed to a position that allowed him to get to the final report before it's published, delete all statements about how "there is no way to reach a definitive conclusion," and replace them with his own conclusion, which is absolute.

And it works. Santer's report is accepted, even though it has since been proven false. Mann's report continues to be relied on, and no one questions it. The government agency issues the report which they know has been altered to fit preconceived conclusions.

Vast sums of money are expended on the basis of what he claims to have found. People's live are put at risk.

Mann and Santer didn't do it for the money, though grants do flow in their direction.

They did it for the cause. It's a noble cause. And even though the data don't actually say what they wanted them to say in fact, they say the opposite they are untroubled by that. Because the government actions that are being taken are the Right Thing.

Santer and Mann are true believers. They don't need evidence. Evidence is just something you create to persuade other people.

Here's the amazing thing about Mann's original report: He's not the only researcher working in this field. In fact, it's the job of many hundreds of researchers to refuse to accept his data at face value. After all, his findings disagree with everyone else's. Before they accept his results, they have a duty to look at his software, look at his data, and try to duplicate his results.

But nobody does it. Not a soul.

Nor, when it goes public, does anyone in the press check the results because they want him to be right, too.

Steve the Canadian Businessman

Not until a Canadian businessman let's call him "Steve" took a look at the stats and got curious. Now, it happens that Steve is in the mining business; he also happened to be a prize-winning math student in college. He knows how to read number sets. He knows what good analysis looks like.

He also knows what cooked figures look like. He has seen the phony projections that companies use when they're trying to swindle people. Their results are too perfect. Mann's report looks too perfect, too.

So Steve starts digging. First, he read's Mann's original report. He finds it an exercise in obscurity. From what he published, it's very, very hard to tell just what statistical methods Mann used, or even what data he operated on.

This is wrong it's not supposed to be that way. Scientists are supposed to leave a clear path so other people can follow them up and replicate their research.

The fact that it's so obscure suggests that Mann does not want anyone checking his work.

But Mann used government grants in his research. Which means he has an obligation to disclose. Steve contacts him, asks for the information. He gets a runaround. He gets pointed to a website that does not have the information. He tries again, and again gets a runaround in fact, Mann sends him a very rude letter saying that he will no longer communicate with him.

Why should he? Steve isn't a legitimate researcher in that field. He's just a businessman.

But Steve is now sure there's something fishy going on, and he doesn't give up. He gets other people to help him. Finally they are pointed to a different website, where, to their surprise, they find that someone has accidentally left a copy of the FORTRAN program that was used to crunch the numbers. It wasn't supposed to be where Steve found it which is why it hadn't been deleted.

Also, there was a little more carelessness there is a set of data labeled "censored." Steve can't see, right away, what's significant about it, except that a score or so of data sets are left out of the censored data.

Steve looks at the program. He finds the glitch rather easily. He tries the program on random numbers and realizes that it always yields the distinctive shape that has caused all the stir.

Sorting out the data sets is much harder. He contacts a lot of people. He does what anyone checking these figures would have to do, and he realizes: If anyone had tried to check, a lot of this information would already have been put together.

He realizes: I am the first person ever to attempt to verify these astonishing, anomalous, politically hot results. Out of all the researchers in this field who had a responsibility to do "due diligence" before accepting the data, none of them has done it.

Finally he has all the original data put together. It includes more than just real numbers it includes "extrapolated" data, which means that sometimes, where there were holes, Mann just made the numbers up and plugged them in. This is sloppy and lazy but it's just the beginning.

What's crucial is that Steve now understands why the "censored" data sets are smaller than the ones Mann used. The full source data includes those misleading results that shouldn't have been used. But the "censored" data sets leave it out.

This means that Mann knew exactly what he was doing. This was not an accident. Mann ran the program on the data without the misleading numbers, and then he ran it with the misleading numbers. What he published was the results that made his ideological case.

Where's the Press?

This story is true.

Anybody who cares to can verify the story. In fact, one of the leading science journals was prepared to publish Steve's results. But then, before publication, they kept cutting back and cutting back on the amount of space they would let Steve's report take up in the journal.

Finally the space they were going to allot was so small that they concluded Steve could not tell his story in that number of words, and therefore they decided not to publish it at all.

Meanwhile, serious publications did publish Mann's savage response to what Steve was saying on the website where he was putting up his results for everyone to read.

Notice: Steve is making all his work transparent to the world anyone is free to check his data.

Mann is still hiding, denying, attacking but not providing the full information. You still have to do detective work to ferret it out.

Now, if you were a reporter you know, those brave guys and gals who are committed, body and soul, to "the public's right to know" wouldn't you smell a rat? Wouldn't you jump on the chance to expose such an obvious fraud?

After all, there are now governments all over the world basing their decisions on Mann's false report. Crucial decisions are being made. Schoolchildren are being terrorized with dire projections of what will happen if Mann's report is not believed and acted upon. Vast sums of money are being spent. People are treating Mann's cause as a crusade and his fake results are the chief weapon they use to prove their case.

Where's the press? Why am I able to tell you this story in full confidence that very few who are reading it will have ever heard it before?

Because Mann doesn't report to the Bush administration. The government agency for which the result was filed was a UN agency specifically, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

And Mann's report is the famo

Answer 14

That it is completely non-existent, and is nothing more than a liberal agenda, made up by liberal scientists and promoted by liberal politicians, and blasted by the liberal media, when in reality, it doesn't even exist. Now that is startling to me.

Answer 15

Due to the moderating effect of green house gases, the majority of the warming is at accomplished by warming the coldest temperatures (i.e. the night and winter temperatures).

Answer 16

There are no startling facts, because Global Warming is a natural process in fact Mars is suffering from it too!

Interesting Note,

Mars seems to be suffering from the same 'global warming' threat that we are, with their polar caps disappearing over the last 4 or 5 summers.

Unless someone finds a way to blame President Bush and the Mars Rovers for martian global warming, it seems to me that the threat definately isn't dependent on mankind.

Answer 17

Sheep and cows emit lots of methane. That's why we should make them pay carbon credits.

Answer 18

1.  The ice caps are actually increasing

2.  The Polar Bear populations are actually stabilizing, if not increasing, in some areas.

3. The Kyoto Protocol has NO application to the nations that will contribute the vast majority of our future increase in Greenhouse Gases (developing nations which include China, India, and Brazil)  The protocol never was meant to include them, nor are they willing to accept any agreements on their own emissions.

4.  The U.S. is one of the best places for CO2 to be, because we have been comparatively good in not depleting our forests (vast sinks for CO2)

5.  Vostok Ice Cores show even greater temperatures and CO2 levels embedded in them during prehistoric times: long before we even had any heavy emissions there was a global warming in effect.

6.  It's better for us to make adaptations to warmer climates, guards against more soil erosion, controlling much of our hazardous waste, because we are unlikely to turn the warming cycle around in the slightest.

Take a look at the National Center for Policy Analysis, there is a global warming, but what is real and what is either sci-fi or exaggerated is in need of being reproven, seriously.