UPDATE2: “404 Page not found” now at the BBC for this video on Monday Feb16th. It seems they’ve pulled it. Too much “negative feedback” I suppose. Readers be on the alert for any retractions.
UPDATE: BBC Can’t even get their reporting correct. The reporter in this video report that accompanies the web article says that “The fear is that increased global warming could set off what’s called negative feedback…..” and that now we are in “scenarios unexplored by the models”. No kidding, it’s that bad. For those of you that don’t know, some alarmists claim that “negative climate feedback is as real as the Easter Bunny, which is what makes this BBC factual error so hilarious.
Readers please let the BBC know that they have no idea what they are talking about. Just click here. – Anthony
Click above to watch the BBC video
Guest post by Steven Goddard
On Wednesday, normally stalwart UK global warming promoter – The Guardian, ran this remarkable headline, which was also covered here on WUWT:
‘Apocalyptic climate predictions’ mislead the public, say experts’
The Met Office Hadley Centre, one of the most prestigious research facilities in the world, says recent “apocalyptic predictions” about Arctic ice melt and soaring temperatures are as bad as claims that global warming does not exist. Such statements, however well-intentioned, distort the science and could undermine efforts to tackle carbon emissions, it says.
Undaunted and defiant, their comrades in global warming arms at the BBC, chose this as the lead story for Sunday morning:
‘Global warming ‘underestimated’
The severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed, a leading climate scientist has warned.
….
“We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we’ve considered seriously in climate policy,” he said. Prof Field said the 2007 report, which predicted temperature rises between 1.1C and 6.4C over the next century, seriously underestimated the scale of the problem. “
BBC employs the old standby icon - a polar bear
Prof Field said rising temperatures could thaw Arctic permafrost
One fatal flaw with the BBC story is that Chris Field is not a climate scientist, as they claimed. He is actually a Professor of Biology in an Ecology Department. So how does the BBC choose their headlines? In matters of global warming, apparently the apocalyptic words of one American ecologist overrule those of the UK’s own government climate scientists at The Met Office. Chris Field clearly does not have any credentials to be making the climate claims the BBC reported. This looks more and more like a Shakespearean comedy every day.For them all together; which maintained so politica state of evil that they will not admit any goodpart to intermingle with them.William Shakespeare – from ‘Much Ado About Nothing’
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Syl
February 16, 2009 1:20 am
Thanks Smokey, I sent a comment to the BBC too!
=========================================
LOLOL HaHaHa HeeeeeHeeeee! TeeHee LOLOLOLOL! ROTF!
I can’t breathe! This is so funny!
Global warming ‘underestimated’?!??!
ROTFLMAO! LOLOLOLOL
=========================================
Alan the Brit
February 16, 2009 2:03 am
BTW;-) If you want someone to comment on the cracking in the brickwork masonry shown I’m your man! Provided of course I can get the complete picture, I wouldn’t want to comment on only part of what is actually there, that would be unprofessional to say the least, & I would have to place so many caveats on the “uncertainties” involved.
AtB
Syl
February 16, 2009 2:27 am
Oh, my. On the chocolate thing….
—
“If nothing was done, and [if]the temperature was to rise, and [if]the rainfalls were to change and [if]drought became more prevalent … [and]without looking into new farming practices, then there should be a problem, and there might likely be a problem,” he said.
—
Ya gotta watch these guys carefully. And what the heck does “might likely” mean?
LOL
Smokey: “Maybe James Hansen truly believes what he says. ”
Of course he does. When an opinion earns the holder of that opinion millions and millions of dollars, and millions followers (including Al Gore) who mindlessly inflate each other’s egos as they genuinely believe that they are on a mission to save the earth, why wouldn’t he fervently believe it? To rely solely on rigorous, unbiased, scientific analysis of ALL the available data in a neutral and honest way would mean leaving all that money and adoration and his identity of self-professed world saviour behind and becoming a largely anonymous scientist again… Given that choice, who would put science first ahead of an outrageous ego?
His ego will be his undoing. As the earth cools he will make himself look ever more foolish.
I am an anonymous nobody claiming that I believe that the earth will probably continue cooling. If I am wrong in a few years, it doesn’t matter personally and I will simply admit that I was wrong. If the earth keep cooling I will say I was lucky to have backed the side of the debate that the Climate happened to favour. It is a 50-50 bet to me, representing the claim and counter claim of a scientific debate that is on-going. Nothing more.
How can Dr Hansen ever admit that he was wrong after he has built up such a massive façade to live up to?
thefordprefect (12:08:27) :
Try this: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/jgr07/jgr07.html
I’m not saying there’s no warming. Neither am I saying there’s no effect from CO2. The result of this rigorous analysis is that the warming as recorded over land is contaminated by up to almost 50% by UHI and other land use effects, especially since 1980.
Gavin has not been able to refute this…and believe me he’s tried.
What affect this analysis has on the whole issue is not known and there is none claimed by McKitrick. But ISTM that the climate models have parameterized to account for a greater contribution by CO2 to the warming than actually exists…so that means the models have mis-calculated the climate sensitivity to CO2 and will have to make more adjustments.
So to answer your question: “Are there any real research reports proving that AGW is not happening”
None that I know of, but that is a strawman anyway. I guess it’s those scary ‘negative feedbacks’ in this posting’s update that are very very real and are mitigating against the ‘runaway’ warming many claim to fear.
HTH
I beleive in global warming, but they really need to sort their stories out. First the public lose confidence in the BBC after the phone-in scandal, and now another potential kick in the head for the BBC, what if people lose confidence in their reporting? We’d be stuffed :S
The BBC have been pushing that one a while – Even on their “science” program.
They are fatally biased towards any “left wing” agenda you can think of.
hunter
February 16, 2009 5:28 am
The ‘negative feedback’ they are talking about is from that cheesy climate apocalypse movie, “The Day After Tomorrow”.
We will cook or freeze, and it is all due to coal death trains and SUV’s.
No matter what happens, for the fear mongering industry, it will be a catastrophe. The idea that Earth is dynamically stable, and that fluctuations in component parts of the atmosphere have happened for a long, long time and that life has adapted very well, is beyond the AGW community’s ability to consider.
thefordprefect
February 16, 2009 5:37 am
Syl (03:26:11) : thanks for the link.
This is essentially another “they’ve got it wrong” paper (UHI this time)
What it seems to me is that there is no way to prove pre-instrumental temperatures. There is no way to correct post instrument readings. What is left is a group of intelligencia stating AGW another stating No A in the GW and yet another stating no GW.
Assuming there is no AGW and money is spent cleaning up our act as if AGW is a fact. More efficient cars/buildings/lighting. Renewable energy (which will not replace conventional power station – required for reserve -but will save vast amounts of fuel). What will be lost to our children – a small amount of debt which is a fraction of what the banks are being loaned/given. The will still have fuel for transport, the biosphere will be less polluted.
Assume there is AGW and nothing is done – well you can guess the consequences – It will take decades for CO2 to be reduced and it will be more than likely too late.
Which is the preferential outcome? I will be proud to tell my descendants that I did what I could to give them a future – AGW or no AGW. Will you feel the same about passing them, at best, a fuel impoverished, and polluted existence, and at worst fuel impoverished, polluted, and overheated existence?
I still am waiting for research that PROVES human produced GHGs are not causing GW
Also remember ther are other proxies for GW – sea level ris, Glacier volume reduction, ice-on and ice-off days on lakes, etc
Mike
WestHoustonGeo
February 16, 2009 6:04 am
Looks like they have pulled the video now. It’s a dead link.
WestHoustonGeo
February 16, 2009 6:10 am
“I still am waiting for research that PROVES human produced GHGs are not causing GW”
A simple matter indeed. Look at the paleoclimate and CO2. Don’t bother telling me it can’t be measured. Warm times with low CO2, cold times with hight CO2. Any nary a trace on mankind, anyway.
On the subject of the BBC misleading people, I’d like to draw attention to how the BBC kindly re-wrote Obama’s inaugural speech for him, to make him say what he didn’t say about global warming. The ‘Newsnight’ programme (usually highly regarded) cut the speech into small pieces and then spliced three of them together in the wrong order.
For further details see the newsnight blog at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/susanwatts/2009/01/restoring_science_to_its_right.html
or the harmless sky blog http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=156
It would be interesting to know what those of you in the US think of this?
Mike, stick your toe in the pacific ocean. It’s temperature is the elephant in the room that you are ignoring. You talk as if CO2 is a visible overwhelming substance in the atmosphere that will suffocate you. Trust me, the snowy poop coming from the cold elephant ocean will bury you in freezing temperatures (or in the case of a warm elephant La Nina will cause you to lay under a sprinkler in order to sleep at night) long before the minuscule increase in CO2 will. If you are truly losing sleep over warmer temperatures, you should be protesting against La Nina.
And before you jump to the wrong conclusion that CO2 causes La Nina, I suggest you read NOAA’s own research on these occurrences and their cause.
Ken Hall: “His ego will be his undoing. As the earth cools he will make himself look ever more foolish” Of course not! They are already speaking about the possibility of CO2 causing cooling. They will blame all the deniers for their sins and all the devastation they have caused with their conduct, they will send the mobs against you, as before german people was sent against jews. Your are the 21st. century jews.
Jeff Alberts
February 16, 2009 7:58 am
Brendan H (23:02:15) :
I was needlessly worried and spent an anxious day at work waiting for the axe to fall. In fact, nothing unusual happened. One could say that it was an ordinary working day, well within normal historical parameters.
So, for me it’s goodbye alarmist BBC, hello fair and balanced Fox.
I detect some well-deserved sarcasm there. But really, if you’re limiting yourself to one news source you’re never going to get “fair and balanced”. Fox may get it right sometimes, CNN may too, MSNBC, BBC, etc. But the bottom line for those folks is ratings, nothing more, nothing less. Therefore they become biased in what they report and how they report it, sensationalizing the mundane in order to get and keep people watching.
Jeff Alberts
February 16, 2009 8:00 am
PaulM (06:36:25) :
It would be interesting to know what those of you in the US think of this?
I don’t think much of it at all, since campaign and inaugural speeches are no better than the spewings of used car salesmen.
thefordprefect
February 16, 2009 9:05 am
WestHoustonGeo (06:10:27) : This is what i wrote on another thread
You cannot seriously compare climate and CO2 for much more than 50My in past. Your plot, for which there is no reference data and is just about the only one I have ever seen on the web, is irrelivant to the current situation.
look here for land positions at the time of high CO2. How configurations of land mass affected the climate cannot be guessed. http://www.scotese.com/earth.htm
Click a few of the links on the left. Or have a look at the other pages where interactive time/landmass are presented
mike
I’ve complained before on the BBC website. Got nowhere. It’s a vast organisation with, I would guess, millions of complaints. Seemed to me that the folks who stood outside with placards, re the charity raising cash for the Palastinians, got no where either. Probably the only way, maybe, is to go to the regulatory body responsible or Your MP.
“Most climate scientists, however, are reasonably certain that a negative feedback big enough to overwhelm the well-known positive feedbacks in the climate system, such as the water vapor feedback, does not exist.”
The fact that these “climate scientists” are even around to make such an asinine statement is proof that there are negative feedbacks big enough to overwhelm the positive feedbacks. Remove the negative feedback from an op-amp and watch it go to maximum or minimum voltage before you blink.
If it weren’t for negative feedback, we would have the climate of either Venus or Pluto. (I’m old school, I still count Pluto as a planet)
Syl
February 16, 2009 4:28 pm
thefordprefect (05:37:12) :
“Syl (03:26:11) : thanks for the link.
This is essentially another “they’ve got it wrong” paper (UHI this time)”
Dismissive, arrogant, decidedly unnuanced. As is your characterization of the arguments as merely A or not A.
I have nothing more to say except perhaps to thank you for the opportunity of presenting the link to the readers.
Have a nice day.
Psi
February 16, 2009 4:34 pm
I have not seen it noticed yet on this thread that the BBC ran a parallel story on the weakening solar wind by Johnathan Amos: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7632331.stm
Rather than writing to try to get Dr. Hansen in trouble (a strategy as likely to backfire, imho, as to have any positive benefit), I decided to write this letter of support for some excellent journalistic work by Mr. Amos:
Dear Mr. Amos,
I read with interest your BBC article on the weakening solar wind. Do you think it is a coincidence that such a weakening, coinciding with what looks to be a very weak and slowly ramping SC 24, corresponds to a documented softening in increased global temperatures? Is it really plausible that millions of years of heating and cooling driven by natural cycles — prominently including solar output, especially variations in the strength of the solar magnetic sheathe and its blocking of incoming cosmic rays — has suddenly been overwhelmed by a few extra parts per million of human-created CO2?
Before reading Dr. Svensmark’s *The Chilling Star*, I would have thought so. But no more. It is increasingly clear to me that the Global warming scare is predicated on dubious science, kept alive through the inflammatory rhetoric of demagogues who are so confident in the divine right of their opinions that they refuse to publicly debate their own doubtful premises. I hope that your editors will allow you to continue covering this important story about variation in solar energy output and its possible influence on global climate. I recommend Anthony Watts’ website (http://wattsupwiththat.com/) as one internet source for keeping up with the skeptical position on this vital issue.
Thank you for your efforts to keep real public dialogue alive.
Sincerely,
XXXXXX
The general scientific consensus is that global warming is real and that it is accelerating. What is scary is that glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica are lubricated by liquid water where they touch the earth–which could accelerate their rate of calving into the sea. If all our planet’s landlocked water melts into the sea, our coastal cities will be flooded.
Some people studying the problem of global warming say that it is already too late to reverse its effects, no matter how hard we try, that the human race may already be extinct, and that most of us display utter denial about this possibility as we continue futile activities such as reconstructing New Orleans, parts of which are already below sea level.
Harleigh Kyson Jr.
Jeff Alberts
February 16, 2009 7:44 pm
hkyson (18:54:44) :
The general scientific consensus is that global warming is real and that it is accelerating. What is scary is that glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica are lubricated by liquid water where they touch the earth–which could accelerate their rate of calving into the sea. If all our planet’s landlocked water melts into the sea, our coastal cities will be flooded.
How exactly do you get liquid water under hundreds of meters of ice due to a minor increase in air temp? I’ve heard this hypothesis, but have seen no evidence to back it up. The only way I can think of where this would be possible would be due to plate tectonics/vulcanism, but that would be pretty localized.
Thanks Smokey, I sent a comment to the BBC too!
=========================================
LOLOL HaHaHa HeeeeeHeeeee! TeeHee LOLOLOLOL! ROTF!
I can’t breathe! This is so funny!
Global warming ‘underestimated’?!??!
ROTFLMAO! LOLOLOLOL
=========================================
BTW;-) If you want someone to comment on the cracking in the brickwork masonry shown I’m your man! Provided of course I can get the complete picture, I wouldn’t want to comment on only part of what is actually there, that would be unprofessional to say the least, & I would have to place so many caveats on the “uncertainties” involved.
AtB
Oh, my. On the chocolate thing….
—
“If nothing was done, and [if]the temperature was to rise, and [if]the rainfalls were to change and [if]drought became more prevalent … [and]without looking into new farming practices, then there should be a problem, and there might likely be a problem,” he said.
—
Ya gotta watch these guys carefully. And what the heck does “might likely” mean?
LOL
Smokey: “Maybe James Hansen truly believes what he says. ”
Of course he does. When an opinion earns the holder of that opinion millions and millions of dollars, and millions followers (including Al Gore) who mindlessly inflate each other’s egos as they genuinely believe that they are on a mission to save the earth, why wouldn’t he fervently believe it? To rely solely on rigorous, unbiased, scientific analysis of ALL the available data in a neutral and honest way would mean leaving all that money and adoration and his identity of self-professed world saviour behind and becoming a largely anonymous scientist again… Given that choice, who would put science first ahead of an outrageous ego?
His ego will be his undoing. As the earth cools he will make himself look ever more foolish.
I am an anonymous nobody claiming that I believe that the earth will probably continue cooling. If I am wrong in a few years, it doesn’t matter personally and I will simply admit that I was wrong. If the earth keep cooling I will say I was lucky to have backed the side of the debate that the Climate happened to favour. It is a 50-50 bet to me, representing the claim and counter claim of a scientific debate that is on-going. Nothing more.
How can Dr Hansen ever admit that he was wrong after he has built up such a massive façade to live up to?
I see that the BBC’s report on Field’s speech is no longer a headline story, not even on its Science/Envirnonment page (and the image of the ubiquitous polar bear is still missing). But The Daily Mash have got a new take it:
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/tediousness-of-climate-change-pundits-underestimated-200902161581/
For those not familiar with the Daily Mash here are some classics from the archives –
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/the-communities-living-in-fear-of-global-warming-scientists–200807221114/
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/rising-sea-levels-to-reach-ronnie-corbett-20080417879/
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/global-warming-to-bring-cannibalism-to-south-east-20080213722/
and one of my all time favourites:
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/i%27ll-be-just-fine%2c-says-planet-20080306774/
( warning – some adult language, so maybe not work safe!)
thefordprefect (12:08:27) :
Try this:
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/jgr07/jgr07.html
I’m not saying there’s no warming. Neither am I saying there’s no effect from CO2. The result of this rigorous analysis is that the warming as recorded over land is contaminated by up to almost 50% by UHI and other land use effects, especially since 1980.
Gavin has not been able to refute this…and believe me he’s tried.
What affect this analysis has on the whole issue is not known and there is none claimed by McKitrick. But ISTM that the climate models have parameterized to account for a greater contribution by CO2 to the warming than actually exists…so that means the models have mis-calculated the climate sensitivity to CO2 and will have to make more adjustments.
So to answer your question: “Are there any real research reports proving that AGW is not happening”
None that I know of, but that is a strawman anyway. I guess it’s those scary ‘negative feedbacks’ in this posting’s update that are very very real and are mitigating against the ‘runaway’ warming many claim to fear.
HTH
I beleive in global warming, but they really need to sort their stories out. First the public lose confidence in the BBC after the phone-in scandal, and now another potential kick in the head for the BBC, what if people lose confidence in their reporting? We’d be stuffed :S
The ‘negative feedback’ they are talking about is from that cheesy climate apocalypse movie, “The Day After Tomorrow”.
We will cook or freeze, and it is all due to coal death trains and SUV’s.
No matter what happens, for the fear mongering industry, it will be a catastrophe. The idea that Earth is dynamically stable, and that fluctuations in component parts of the atmosphere have happened for a long, long time and that life has adapted very well, is beyond the AGW community’s ability to consider.
Syl (03:26:11) : thanks for the link.
This is essentially another “they’ve got it wrong” paper (UHI this time)
What it seems to me is that there is no way to prove pre-instrumental temperatures. There is no way to correct post instrument readings. What is left is a group of intelligencia stating AGW another stating No A in the GW and yet another stating no GW.
Assuming there is no AGW and money is spent cleaning up our act as if AGW is a fact. More efficient cars/buildings/lighting. Renewable energy (which will not replace conventional power station – required for reserve -but will save vast amounts of fuel). What will be lost to our children – a small amount of debt which is a fraction of what the banks are being loaned/given. The will still have fuel for transport, the biosphere will be less polluted.
Assume there is AGW and nothing is done – well you can guess the consequences – It will take decades for CO2 to be reduced and it will be more than likely too late.
Which is the preferential outcome? I will be proud to tell my descendants that I did what I could to give them a future – AGW or no AGW. Will you feel the same about passing them, at best, a fuel impoverished, and polluted existence, and at worst fuel impoverished, polluted, and overheated existence?
I still am waiting for research that PROVES human produced GHGs are not causing GW
Also remember ther are other proxies for GW – sea level ris, Glacier volume reduction, ice-on and ice-off days on lakes, etc
Mike
Looks like they have pulled the video now. It’s a dead link.
“I still am waiting for research that PROVES human produced GHGs are not causing GW”
A simple matter indeed. Look at the paleoclimate and CO2. Don’t bother telling me it can’t be measured. Warm times with low CO2, cold times with hight CO2. Any nary a trace on mankind, anyway.
On the subject of the BBC misleading people, I’d like to draw attention to how the BBC kindly re-wrote Obama’s inaugural speech for him, to make him say what he didn’t say about global warming. The ‘Newsnight’ programme (usually highly regarded) cut the speech into small pieces and then spliced three of them together in the wrong order.
For further details see the newsnight blog at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/susanwatts/2009/01/restoring_science_to_its_right.html
or the harmless sky blog
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=156
It would be interesting to know what those of you in the US think of this?
The Empire Strikes Back
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/pr20090215.html
Mike, stick your toe in the pacific ocean. It’s temperature is the elephant in the room that you are ignoring. You talk as if CO2 is a visible overwhelming substance in the atmosphere that will suffocate you. Trust me, the snowy poop coming from the cold elephant ocean will bury you in freezing temperatures (or in the case of a warm elephant La Nina will cause you to lay under a sprinkler in order to sleep at night) long before the minuscule increase in CO2 will. If you are truly losing sleep over warmer temperatures, you should be protesting against La Nina.
And before you jump to the wrong conclusion that CO2 causes La Nina, I suggest you read NOAA’s own research on these occurrences and their cause.
Ken Hall: “His ego will be his undoing. As the earth cools he will make himself look ever more foolish” Of course not! They are already speaking about the possibility of CO2 causing cooling. They will blame all the deniers for their sins and all the devastation they have caused with their conduct, they will send the mobs against you, as before german people was sent against jews. Your are the 21st. century jews.
I detect some well-deserved sarcasm there. But really, if you’re limiting yourself to one news source you’re never going to get “fair and balanced”. Fox may get it right sometimes, CNN may too, MSNBC, BBC, etc. But the bottom line for those folks is ratings, nothing more, nothing less. Therefore they become biased in what they report and how they report it, sensationalizing the mundane in order to get and keep people watching.
I don’t think much of it at all, since campaign and inaugural speeches are no better than the spewings of used car salesmen.
WestHoustonGeo (06:10:27) : This is what i wrote on another thread
You cannot seriously compare climate and CO2 for much more than 50My in past. Your plot, for which there is no reference data and is just about the only one I have ever seen on the web, is irrelivant to the current situation.
look here for land positions at the time of high CO2. How configurations of land mass affected the climate cannot be guessed.
http://www.scotese.com/earth.htm
Click a few of the links on the left. Or have a look at the other pages where interactive time/landmass are presented
mike
I’ve complained before on the BBC website. Got nowhere. It’s a vast organisation with, I would guess, millions of complaints. Seemed to me that the folks who stood outside with placards, re the charity raising cash for the Palastinians, got no where either. Probably the only way, maybe, is to go to the regulatory body responsible or Your MP.
“Most climate scientists, however, are reasonably certain that a negative feedback big enough to overwhelm the well-known positive feedbacks in the climate system, such as the water vapor feedback, does not exist.”
The fact that these “climate scientists” are even around to make such an asinine statement is proof that there are negative feedbacks big enough to overwhelm the positive feedbacks. Remove the negative feedback from an op-amp and watch it go to maximum or minimum voltage before you blink.
If it weren’t for negative feedback, we would have the climate of either Venus or Pluto. (I’m old school, I still count Pluto as a planet)
thefordprefect (05:37:12) :
“Syl (03:26:11) : thanks for the link.
This is essentially another “they’ve got it wrong” paper (UHI this time)”
Dismissive, arrogant, decidedly unnuanced. As is your characterization of the arguments as merely A or not A.
I have nothing more to say except perhaps to thank you for the opportunity of presenting the link to the readers.
Have a nice day.
I have not seen it noticed yet on this thread that the BBC ran a parallel story on the weakening solar wind by Johnathan Amos: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7632331.stm
Rather than writing to try to get Dr. Hansen in trouble (a strategy as likely to backfire, imho, as to have any positive benefit), I decided to write this letter of support for some excellent journalistic work by Mr. Amos:
Dear Mr. Amos,
I read with interest your BBC article on the weakening solar wind. Do you think it is a coincidence that such a weakening, coinciding with what looks to be a very weak and slowly ramping SC 24, corresponds to a documented softening in increased global temperatures? Is it really plausible that millions of years of heating and cooling driven by natural cycles — prominently including solar output, especially variations in the strength of the solar magnetic sheathe and its blocking of incoming cosmic rays — has suddenly been overwhelmed by a few extra parts per million of human-created CO2?
Before reading Dr. Svensmark’s *The Chilling Star*, I would have thought so. But no more. It is increasingly clear to me that the Global warming scare is predicated on dubious science, kept alive through the inflammatory rhetoric of demagogues who are so confident in the divine right of their opinions that they refuse to publicly debate their own doubtful premises. I hope that your editors will allow you to continue covering this important story about variation in solar energy output and its possible influence on global climate. I recommend Anthony Watts’ website (http://wattsupwiththat.com/) as one internet source for keeping up with the skeptical position on this vital issue.
Thank you for your efforts to keep real public dialogue alive.
Sincerely,
XXXXXX
The general scientific consensus is that global warming is real and that it is accelerating. What is scary is that glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica are lubricated by liquid water where they touch the earth–which could accelerate their rate of calving into the sea. If all our planet’s landlocked water melts into the sea, our coastal cities will be flooded.
Some people studying the problem of global warming say that it is already too late to reverse its effects, no matter how hard we try, that the human race may already be extinct, and that most of us display utter denial about this possibility as we continue futile activities such as reconstructing New Orleans, parts of which are already below sea level.
Harleigh Kyson Jr.
How exactly do you get liquid water under hundreds of meters of ice due to a minor increase in air temp? I’ve heard this hypothesis, but have seen no evidence to back it up. The only way I can think of where this would be possible would be due to plate tectonics/vulcanism, but that would be pretty localized.