Congressional Memo
More Talking Than Listening in the Senate Debate About Climate Change
WASHINGTON — About a day into the debate over legislation to combat global warming but before Republicans brought the discourse to a stop on Wednesday by insisting that the clerk read every word of the 492-page bill, Senator James M. Inhofe decided to get a few things off his chest.
Mr. Inhofe, who believes that fears of catastrophic climate change are hugely overblown, has insisted that there is no need to get into a scientific argument because there are enough other reasons to oppose the Senate bill, which would cap the production of heat-trapping gases and force polluters to buy permits to emit carbon dioxide.
Still, for a guy who said he did not want to talk about science, Mr. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, was the only senator to utter the phrase “anthropogenic gases.” He also wanted to talk about the recent cold winter in his home state and mention a few small points of disagreement with Al Gore and Mr. Gore’s co-recipients of the Nobel Prize, the roughly 2,000 scientists who are part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sponsored by the United Nations.
“We in the state of Oklahoma have had the worst cold spell during this last winter than we have in 30 years,” Mr. Inhofe said. “I find this to be true all over the country. You just can’t have it both ways.” (Most scientists say year-to-year weather changes are irrelevant to the clear, long-term warming trend.)
“One of the good things about this discussion and this debate is we are not going to be discussing the science,” Mr. Inhofe continued. Then, he unleashed an attack on the United Nations climate panel.
“We talked about 2,000 scientists,” he said. “We have a list of 30,000 scientists who said, ‘Yes, there can be a relationship between CO2 and a warming condition but it’s not major.’ ”
Next, he turned to Mr. Gore, the former vice president. “Al Gore has done his movie. Almost everything in his movie, in fact, everything has been refuted. Interestingly enough, the I.P.C.C. — on sea levels and other scare tactics used in that science fiction movie — it really has been totally refuted and refuted many times.”
Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, wanted to challenge Mr. Inhofe. “Will the senator yield?” Mr. Kerry asked.
“No I will not,” Mr. Inhofe replied.
Moments later, Mr. Kerry tried again. “Will the senator yield for a question?”
“No. I will not. Not now,” Mr. Inhofe declared, shifting his speech into the need for expanding nuclear power.
After being rebuffed a fourth time, Mr. Kerry was exasperated. “With all due respect,” he said, “we are here to have a debate. It is hard to have a debate when you are talking all by yourself.”
Even for the Senate, where members are well-known to prefer talking to listening, the amount of unilateral jabbering on the climate bill has been remarkable, with lawmakers both for and against it arguing repeatedly over how much time was allotted for them to speak.
It was also hard to keep track of who was on which side. The bill’s main sponsors are Senators Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, and Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California.
Typically, the floor debate is divided evenly between the two parties, but there has been constant confusion about whose time was being used.
At one point Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, was struggling to get his turn. “It’s my understanding that I have 15 minutes at 12:15 which I have been waiting for all morning,” he said.
A short argument followed — involving Mr. Specter, Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, Mrs. Boxer and Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee — over who should speak and for how long. As they bickered, Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, who was serving as the president pro tempore, made an announcement: “The time of the senator from Tennessee, three and a half minutes, has expired.”
Mr. Domenici was perplexed. “How did his time expire?” he asked.
“Through this conversation,” Mr. Tester explained.
To help give everybody time on center-stage, the senators on Tuesday proposed delaying the weekly party lunches by 10 minutes. The majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said that was all right, but he also urged senators to be back in time for their official portrait.
“I hope people can come,” Mr. Reid said. “I know comparing it to global warming, it is not a very important issue. Staff has worked some six weeks to set up this place to take the picture at 2:15.”
The Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has expressed glee that the Democrats chose to bring up the climate bill. Mr. McConnell, like many of the bill’s critics, said it would raise oil prices at a time when Americans were already furious at the high cost of gasoline.
And though it was Mr. McConnell who insisted that the entire bill be read aloud (as punishment, he said, for Mr. Reid’s breaking a deal on judicial nominees) the Republican leader also said he hoped for a lengthy, perhaps weeks-long, debate on the climate change measure to highlight its flaws.
In response to the required read-aloud, which ended before 10 p.m., Mr. Reid requested a late-night quorum call, summoning senators back to the Capitol as Washington was being hit by scattered thunderstorms.
Mrs. Boxer, the main Democratic proponent of the bill, accused the Republicans of stalling and refusing to address global warming in part to support big oil companies. She repeatedly invoked support from religious leaders and scientists.
“Here, as shown in this picture, is a beautiful creature, the polar bear,” she said in a speech on the Senate floor. “And people say, ‘Oh, is this all about saving the polar bear?’ It’s about saving us. It’s about saving our future. It’s about saving the life on planet Earth. And, yes, it is about saving God’s creatures.”
Republicans, however, accused Democrats of putting on political theater at a time when they know the bill has no chance of being approved let alone signed into law by President Bush.
“This bill is going down in flames, as it should,” Mr. Corker “And we’ll have a real debate about this next year.”
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Bruce Cobb,
I resent your remark. There is no such thng as an “AGW religion.” While there are people who may have ulterior motives who cling to AGW as a convenient vehicle, the majority of us are scientists who are simply convinced by the current evidence and believe that the current theory is flexible enough to cover that evidence in addition to help guide future areas of research. If an alternate theory which could more accurately explain the observed phenomena were to arise, then I and many others would adopt it as the better theory.
I don’t want to address your “points” about natural causes; of course there are natural causes. From orbital variation to natural oscillations in the climate system, there are many point sources of variation in the climate system. However, none of the known oscillations or cycles can account for the climate trends observed since the late 1800’s. If you know of one that can, then please share it with me; it’s dishonest to arbitrarily make the claim that natural variation is the root cause of our current warming cycle without specifically citing which variation, its parameters, and its evidence in the climate recrod. As for many people adopting the “natural causes” meme to explain the negative anomaly in current temperatures (which is still above the AGW-era’s mean), call it bad politcking; it’s likely meant as a cutesy rebuttal to those skeptics who insists natural causes are the root cause of climate change. Climate scientists have long acknowledged the role of natural cycles and oscillations – Milankovtich Theory is a prime example.
I’m glad you acknowledge that CO2 has some sort of effect. I, however, side with the IPCC Fourth Assessment Working Group I’s analysis that CO2 is the root cause of our current warming trend, and that there are many compounding feedback loops which, through the coordination of their amplifications/inhibitions, are currently affecting a change on our climate.
You’ll probably be very interested to know that I agree with your final statement. The sun does indeed drive our climate. But does it drive our current warming phase? I’d like for your feedback on that question.
So wait, your telling me we are good with Global warming or not?
Right now I am trying to figure out if I should be more concerned with my kids not having ANY water in the future or too much water in the future.
http://polifispectrum.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/too-much-water-too-little-water/
ACD
Let’s see; if the earth gets warmer its our fault. And if it gets colder that’s our fault too. So what happens if the earth’s temperature stays the same? Will that be our fault too?
“Actually…the poles are melting pretty fast.”
Actually, they are not.
Just one point counters: There is no “current warming”. There hasn’t been now for a decade which (considering the whole basis for the CO2/warming idea was based on only about 20 years of data) is very close to rendering the entire claim of CO2 causing warming silly.
Ice core records of past geological periods show that it has been warmer and colder than today and CO2 has been as high as 16 to 20 times higher than today’s values and during an ice age at the same time. Also the Vostok ice core records show that temperature goes up first followed by CO2
800 to 1200 years later . In other words temperature rise causes CO2 rise and not vice-versa .
Man produced CO2 has the same Infrared properties as the CO2 produced in the past . Why should we expect the climate cycle to behave differently today than it has in previous ages since nature would not know ,based on IR properties ,if the CO2 came from human activities or from vegetation or out gassing from the ocean . It seems to me that the global warming experiment has been performed by nature many times without the catastrophic results predicted by AGW alarmists.
Here is a useful graphic representation of the history of CO2 levels and temperature over geological periods. http://www.junkscience.com/ image….paleocarbon.gifChristopher Hanley
And of course he’s not volunteering to give up his technological lifestyle and return to a subsistence existence (hunter/gatherer), which is the only way to get rid of human industrial emissions. None of these AGW folks are willing to do so, because they know it would mean a very hard life, or death. But they want the rest of us to do what they say.
counters wrote:
> There is no such thng as an “AGW religion.” While there are people who may > have ulterior motives who cling to AGW as a convenient vehicle, the majority > of us are scientists who are simply convinced by the current evidence and
> believe that the current theory is flexible enough to cover that evidence in >addition to help guide future areas of research.
Theory is not supposed to be “flexible.” Theory is supposed to be hard, rigid rigid and predictable, that way it can be sharply ground to a very narrow logical point, then falsified, and then tortured, and if need be, broken on the wheel of data it may not predict. If it is broken, we pick up the shattered bits and build a new theory.
Wash, rinse repeat.
The legislation on this topic invariably follows no logic — other than the eternal political syllogism:
” Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done.”
Angry Chicom
The only argument you guys have left is awfully pathetic and goes something like: Change or your children will burn in climate hell.
The temperature increase we’ve seen during the 20th century has recently been ERASED. The poles are exactly where they’ve averaged for the last 30 years.
To have any power of persuasion in the discussion forum of climate change, you have to get back to arguing scientifically, and not rant on like an emotional hysteric.
If you analyze the language of the AGW alarmists, it’s consistetly filled with lots of doom, gloom, emotional hysterics and distortions. You’re making yourselves look awfully foolish. Look at the thermomenter and poles – NO CHANGE!
It is probably true that a period of relatively cool or cold weather proves very little about climate, but wasn’t this also true when the “warmers” were blaming Katrina, etc. on mankind’s use of CO2? The total lack of hurricanes last year when the doom and gloomers were predicting lots of them was very funny. I think it will take a few colder winters like we had in the ’60’s and ’70’s to finally shut them up.
Who needs facts when you are on a crusade to save the planet?
Counters — if you are a scientist, you must be familiar with the travesty of science that Mann’s hockey stick has been revealed to be. And how worthless the review process which foisted it upon the world. You must be familiar with how pathetic the surface temperature measurements are. You must be familiar with falsification of the IPCC’s temperature projections. You must be familiar with the fact that forecasting experts have pointed out dozens of errors in the forecasting methodology used by alarmists. You must be familiar with the fact that the foremost experts in statistical modeling have pointed out serious errors in the computer models used by climate scientists. And you must be familiar with the fact that climate scientists have rebuffed the experts and have shown no interest in using them to improve their models.
However, none of the known oscillations or cycles can account for the climate trends observed since the late 1800’s. If you know of one that can, then please share it with me
Counters, this post and its associated links and underlying paper would be a good place to start. A strong correlation between a rising concentration of CO2 and global temps was only true from the late 70’s to the late 90’s. The correlation between the PDO and global temps is much stronger and over a much longer period.
Stan,
Good summation. Why does the TAB key submit the post?
Meanwhile in the real world:
“The nation’s wheat harvest this summer will be the worst since 1978, the Department of Agriculture reported today. Grain reserves are expected to fall to their lowest levels in nearly five decades this summer. Nor are the forecast harvests anywhere near the size needed to rebuild reserves substantially at a time when worldwide demand for grain is strong.
It took us more than a year to get into this situation, and it will take more than a year to get out,” said Robert Kohlmeyer, a grain trade specialist at World Perspectives, a Washington-based consulting firm.
The Agriculture Department said that the winter wheat crop, which is the major source of bread flour and accounts for 70 percent of the nation’s wheat, would total 1.36 billion bushels when it is harvested this summer, down 12 percent from last year. Now, all eyes are on Canada and the Dakotas to see whether current wet and snowy conditions abate in time for spring wheat to be planted by mid-June.
it’s really important that we get some good weather,” said William Biederman, vice president in charge of research at Allendale Inc., a grain brokerage and consulting firm in Crystal Lake, Ill. ”
Just a preview of the coming misery if the sun’s cooling phase continues.
Okay…. the globe has been cooling for 10 years, hasn’t warmed since 1998, and the AGW cult of IPCC admits the globe will cool another 15 years, so we are to believe ‘global warming’ is causing a 25 year cooling period? Which just happens to be a normal cycle in the cooling/warming alarmism of the press since the late 1800’s. Heh.
I was wondering which disease the Angry Chinese Driver was worried our kids would ‘die of (if they’re lucky) or are born with (if they’re unlucky)’ should he be right about AGW?
A few temperature/disease death comparisons.
1348-50 Black Death, Europe – one-third to one-half of the total population;
1353-54 Black Death, China – at least 25 million;
End of the Medieval Warm Period and before the Little Ice Age (which AGWers say didn’t happen).
1518-20 Smallpox, Mexico – up to 15 million
1542 Typhus, The Balkans 30,000
Middle of the Little Ice Age
1918-19 ‘Spanish’ ‘Flu (strain H1N1), worldwide – more than 25 million (possibly as high as 50 million)
1917-22 Typhus Fever, Russia – up to 3 million;
Colder end of the last century. Pre AGW.
1957-58 ‘Asian’ ‘Flu (strains H2N2 and H3N2), worldwide – more than 1 million.
Remember that strange cold dip in the middle of the last century that may be due to buckets?
Malaria – approx 2.7 million per year.
Malaria is not specifically a feature of high temperature since it has been found as far north as Siberia and was one of the major causes of death in England during the Little Ice Age. The recent increase in malaria is probably due to a return to pre DDT levels.
Many of the other big disease killers are exacerbated by heat but are mainly a side effect of poverty and bad hygiene.
AIDS has killed 25 million and about 33 million are HIV positive but it isn’t affected by temperature.
The next big global killer?
We are overdue another influenza pandemic and the flu virus luuurves cold weather. H5N1 is a potential candidate (don’t think the lack of news headlines means the threat has gone away). It currently kills 60-80% of those it infects. There are other candidates that are waiting in the wings (excuse the pun).
So, do we want it to get cooler, man made or natural?
And of course he’s not volunteering to give up his technological lifestyle and return to a subsistence existence (hunter/gatherer), which is the only way to get rid of human industrial emissions. None of these AGW folks are willing to do so, because they know it would mean a very hard life, or death. But they want the rest of us to do what they say.
By jove (a little Brit lingo), Jeff, I think you’ve hit on the crux of the whole debate. H. L. Mencken had it about right when he said: “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”
I will also submit that AGW is indeed a religion. When you believe in something that has not one shred of fact or evidence to support it, you are taking in on faith. Faith=religion. I still find it amazing that so many people believe in this stuff. I actually had to gather the facts and sit down with my kids and prove to them the polar bear population is right now at a historical high. The crap they were getting at school was leading them to believe polar bears were almost extinct. How is faking an environmental issue to get money any different than faking healing to get money? A Huckster is a huckster. Religion of dangerous zealots. More like a an extreme cult. I guess the DDT ban killing millions of people taught you holier than tho types nothing, you will end up killing millions more on another fake issue. Dangerous cult.
If a scientific theory is worthy, it must withstand the crucible of attacks, from both believers and non-believers. The dedicated scientist should be an agnostic to the truthfulness of the theory, and must do his best to destroy it before it is sent out into the public domain. Once in the public domain, it must face a withering attack, and stand or fall on its own merits.
Religions on the other hand, defend the theory from within, and attack those that are non-believers as heretics. They use concensus as the basis for maintaining membership, and faith is the method to “fill in the blanks”.
When we confuse the two, it benefits neither science nor religion. Which category would you place AGW in?
AGW is a religion, the science does not support the theory.
Counters,
Since you identify yourself as a scientist what do you think about Ramanathan’s, Carmichaels & Zender’s findings on both tropospheric soot & dirty snow?
Ramanathan & Zender are claiming we can gain an additional TWENTY YEAR widening of a window of opportunity against the oft-cited “tipping point.”
These guys are mainstream climate change researchers. If everyone in the warmist camp is *SO* convinced of the hazard of GHG-driven climate change, why aren’t they getting on about the opportunity provided by soot abatement?
Soot is causing:
19 percent sesquicentennial warming in the boreal environs from dirty snow (Zender, et al)
&
30 percent of ongoing warming anomalies around the globe from brown clouds & their net heating effect (Ramanathan, Carmichael, 2008)
Dr. Ramanathan emphasizes that the efficacy of soot mitigation is such that we can broaden the window of opportunity up to 20 years against climate change by simply cleaning up industrial sources of soot. Soot mitigation has an immediate effect as opposed to waiting 50 years for the effects of an equivalent reduction of CO2 to finally have an effect.
Ramanathan knows his stuff, and he agrees that his *FIELD DISCOVERY* of the net heating of tropospheric soot runs contrary to the conventional view that brown clouds mask warming from GHGs.
But if brown clouds aren’t *masking* the heating as the IPCC had long claimed, then brown clouds have in fact been used to falsely implicate CO2 for causing more warming than was due.
This is why Ramanathan, Carmichael and Zender, et al, keepinsisting that soot mitigation would help us out of the conundrum of transitioning to a low carbon society.
As for the Arctic, I don’t know *how much* progressive remediation can be achieved in the Arctic from soot abatement but Zender documents that the current progressive albedo loss from dirty snow is about the same as CO2’s warming effect in the Arctic (and he’s not even talking about Arctic haze), responsible for roughly one third ( 1/3rd ) of all Arctic climate change (ice loss, etc.). Addressing soot mitigation in the Arctic could well curtail a significant amount of warming in just 5 percent of the Earth’s surface (the Arctic & Subarctic), and ameliorate as much as 40 percent of the temperature anomalies over the vast Pacific (12 percent of all global anomalies). If it could be half undone, that’d be a 10 percent gain against AGW right there.
So, WHY WHY WHY, why for heaven’s sake is the climatology community not DOING SOMETHING to emphasize SOOT MITIGATION as the logical first step?
If the odds are low that society can quick mitigate CO2 emissions within a time window against whatever risk is posed from GHGs, then not only is soot abatement cheaper (and doable), but to ignore it and go about screaming only about CO2 & methane is grossly inconsistent.
The climatology community is letting the IPCC speak for them, and the IPCC is making climate science look like its afraid to dilute the message about CO2 by obscuring the data against soot under the rubric of “carbon emissions.”
Don’t think so?
Did you know that that Ramanathan’s INDOEX project got spanked by the Indians & Chinese in 2003 b/c they didn’t want to be implicated in additional global warming on top of the increased CO2 they knew they were going to be emitting? He wasn’t looking for a net warming from soot, he was just researching the other effects. But other scientists here in the USA were pointing out that there were warming temperature anomalies around the Asian Brown Cloud, so Ramanathan got punished for his good deeds. That’s the way it works in world politics.
Do you know how this makes the field of climatology look by such a huge sin of omission? It looks like it’s been hijacked by political opportunists, with the IPCC set up to defend Kyoto, and the UNFCCC sponsoring corruption & graft with phony projects that pay developing nations to emit CO2 while penalizing the West for emitting it.
That’s not CO2 mitigation, that’s a tariff against the old First World Countries, an extra tariff on nations already suffering huge trade deficits to the same countries they’re supposed to PAY via the CDM/UNFCCC cap & trade system.
Wow! Talk about a way to advance globalization even faster!
Doesn’t that look a bit odd to you?
That and then to have Al Gore – with his movie & new $300M marketing campaign – trying to galvanize a polity into cap&trade overheads while he waits in his spider web – a $5billion carbon credit derivative fund – and the climatology field is running itself straight into a crash course with its reputation utterly destroyed. It could end up like Physics after the SCSC was shut down in Waxlahatchie.
It looks very very very ugly. It looks like the climatology community has been taken advantage of by Foxy Loxy, with Chicken Little, et. al., ready to be eaten in an Orwellian Animal Farm. We can’t be so naive about the opportunists looking to turn this into a rent-seeking & burdensome overhead on individuals.
Worse yet I think the activists would rather keep the polar bears as CO2 poster children than admit that soot even exists. If they believe that CO2 is a big threat, and they know the data on soot (which EDF does, I know that from reading their blog), and they then avoid mention of soot for fear of diluting the CO2 message and just magically wave their hand that soot mitigation will follow along, they are intentionally playing a game of brinksmanship, aren’t they? Tell me they really care about the bears if they are hiding soot behind the cause celebre of CO2.
Either that belies a willingness to use the bears as game pieces, or it’s really not a crisis. Or worse, another possibility is that they’re afraid that aerosols, once abated, will reveal a far softer CO2 warming signal.
Ulterior motives perhaps?
Well, since China’s the biggest emitter of soot & aerosols right now, and the Asian Brown Cloud is what led to Ramanathan’s discovery, then once again, we’re stuck on a political dilemma. This one’s easier to solve, though, you’re right. But if CO2’s not the threat and soot turns out to be the pernicious dark horse that falsely implicated CO2 more than its due, then they won’t have a way to foist their last great effort to bring globo-soc onto the world & the USA down from hegemon (like we’d be better off with a “sinohegemon” trading card instead).
Either way soot is the carbon that shall not be named.
If you and your colleagues really give a dam I suggest doing something about the messages your sending to the public, before taxpayers completely rebel worldwide (like they are now in England) and make it certain that absolutely nothing constructive gets done.
I’m a climate agnostic. I used to be firmly in the AGW camp. After Ramanathan’s discovery was routinely ignored I realized we are being manipulated with the “CO2 message.”
After I found that in 2001 – 2007, there’ve been many scientists pointing to the temperature anomalies around the Asian Brown Cloud and yet the IPCC continued to confuse the issue.
Then I disocvered that Ramanathan’s INDOEX project got spanked by the Indians & Chinese in 2003.
After the Argo data turned up with far less heat than expected, I became even more circumspect of the IPCC & Kyoto.
After the Jason & Aqua data show far lower water vapor levels in the troposphere I found myself disgusted with the politicized science.
And please, don’t give us any baloney about aerosols causing cooling in the 1970’s, both Ramanathan & Carmichael have conceded that nobody really knows, it’s just assumed to be true, but it could just as well be false. It may have been the same then as it is now: Brown clouds in fact caused warming with sulfates *DRIVING* black carbon into heating within brown clouds. The surface dimming is outweighed by the mid-tropospheric heating.
The climatology field is losing people like myself from ever giving a darn about the entire project. I’m losing faith quickly and I smell a big, UN-funded (“despot club”) rats running about.
There’s more on my blog:
http://www.scientificblogging.com/blog/258
You don’t think there’s a religious tone to the AGW debate? Have you seen the “CO2 Death Calculator” from the Australian ABC? It’s utterly vile. It elevates CO2 to an original sin for which we must atone lest we be guilty of conspicuous consumption.
Take a look:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/planetslayer/greenhouse_calc.htm
Do you see anything wrong with the claims, the tone or the conclusions of the calculator? Mind you it’s aimed at kids aged 9 & up? Impressionable kids? What does the field of climatology stand for if it won’t object to this kind of nihilist zealotry that represents *JUNK* science?
Not to worry all, not to worry. The asteroid is going to kill us all in 2036 anyway, a long time before theories on climate change can be time tested. It’s just nature’s way of getting rid of pesky little species.
There seem to be three types of comments that my posts have elicited, so I apologize for painting in a wide brush, but I’ll address the three ideas separately (leebert, I’m writing a separate response to you following the three points):
1) “We are in a cooling phase”
I’m sorry, but maybe my browser is showing a different graph in this blog’s author’s post “UAH: Global Temperature Dives in May.” The UAH temperature anomaly graph clearly indicates a positive temperature anomaly for the majority of the past decade, but more importantly, there is a distinct trend from 1998 on of anomalies slowly increasing in magnitude. I suspect that many commentors here claiming that there has been a cooling trend since 1998 are including the 1998 values in their regression calculations; this is dishonest for two reasons. First, 1998 record anomaly is easily explained by the incredibly strong El Nino experienced that year. Second, the anomaly is an extreme outlier. For statistics’ sake, it would be an elementary error to include that value when a simple look at previous years’ values indicate that it is an outlier and would skew the data.
I see no way of calculating a cooling trend if one doesn’t include the extreme outlier for 1998. The Hadley CRUT3 confirms this (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/nhshgl.gif). One cannot arbitrarily choose a beginning and end point, perform a statistical regression analysis, and then say with any sort of confidence that that trend line in any way describes the data set.
2) “AGW is not science; it is religion”
I’m sorry, but this is not a statement worth responding too. I’ll go very far in trying to explain the science behind AGW theory, but these blanket dismissals are counter-productive to debate. I have no response to them because they are so patently wrong. If you wish to believe this then fine; I respectfully request that those who honestly believe that there is no science behind AGW not respond to any of posts, because this belief tells me you aren’t interested in the science, just the politics.
3) “…politics…”
I’m not here to debate politics. I don’t care about Al Gore, or the UN, or Kyoto, or Cap-and-Trade, or any of that. I don’t care if you’re liberal or conservative. I’m talking about science, which is devoid of political bias. One can use science in a biased manner, but the science is not biased; it is based on reality.
leebert:
I read much of your post, but my argument begins and ends at the word “tipping point.” Suggesting that there is some sort of “tipping point” after which a runaway greenhouse effect will occur is not mainstream climate science; it is an unfortunate political argument that has been embraced by environmentalists going to extreme measures to persuade people of AGW. They have neither my respect nor my support.
Much of the science you present is boring and old news. That aerosols of different compositions have different effects on temperature is very old news, and the science behind aerosol physics has been constantly evolving since they were first introduced into climate prediction in the IPCC Third Assessment. Your argument presumes that the IPCC 3 report’s account of aerosols is still the valid one, which is false; IPCC Fourth Assessment introduced a corrected account, one which will have evolved quite significantly by the time IPCC Fifth Assessment rolls around. Black carbon aerosols behave differently than white carbon ones – qed.
As for your argument about the politicization of Ramanathan’s work, that is unfortunate. But again, I’m not here for politics; I’m here for the scientific discussion. I could care less what about the despicable calculator being peddled in Australia; it has no bearing on the science, and the mathematics behind the calculator itself is questionable at best.
To analyze the utility of AGW theory, you need to divorce yourself of your political perceptions of the AGW debate. The climate behaves the same way regardless of your liberal or conservative, or environmentalist or not. Just because some pathetic idiot is trying to scare children into being environmentalists has no bearing on AGW theory.
REPLY: Please apologize for claiming this discussion is “dishonest”, no more of that.
Stan Needham:
Interesting post. The basic premise seems pretty interesting, but it is patently wrong. The entire experiment deals with the statistical correlation and fitting of two different data sets, which is shady science at best. All of the work is about arbitrarily picking sets of data (with no explanation as to why these data sets are pertinent) and seeing whether different signals can be coaxed to correlate them.
Let me know when Mr. D’Aleo refines his experiment in an academic manner. I don’t mean to be elitist, but it really is pretty sketchy in its current incarnation.
Counters – AGW is not science but is a “science-like subject”. Its absolute followers are religious nuts.
The reason for the former is simple – science encourages, and depends on, totally open and shared data reviewed by independent peer reviewers. The scientists must look into their subject and theory with dispassionate and skeptical eyes and be open to their hypothesis being found to be false. This therefore improves overall scientific knowledge and ensures that theories that are found wanting and either discarded, improved upon or treated as useful estimates of reality subject to various boundary conditions.
AGW is not science as data is not shared or open, the peer reviewers are rarely independent and the practitioners (note – not scientists) are neither skeptical nor dispassionate. They are not open to outsiders testing their hypotheses and when they are found to be false they continue using them none-the-less. It is “science-like” as it tries to emulate the scientific method in order to give the subject an air of respectability.
The devout followers of the subject are religious fanatics / nuts for obvious reasons (the comparisons between AGW and religion are numerous but the best case is probably here – http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/religion.htm)
Until the study of AGW becomes more scientific then I will continue to be skeptical of the research and conclusions (as any good scientists should be). I am perfectly open to the possibility that increasing CO2 will change the planet’s climate in some way (be that advantageous or adverse); however from my own undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Geology I am highly doubtful that a small increase in the overall concentration of a trace gas that is one of the sources of life and has, in the past, been many times greater in concentration (the Jurassic for example it was many hundreds of times greater than current) is going to have any effect whatsoever on a highly chaotic yet well buffered system such as planetary climate.