Guest Post by Steven Goddard
Global Climate Models (GCM’s) are very complex computer models containing millions of lines of code, which attempt to model cosmic, atmospheric and oceanic processes that affect the earth’s climate. This have been built over the last few decades by groups of very bright scientists, including many of the top climate scientists in the world.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the earth warmed at a faster rate than it did earlier in the century. This led some climate scientists to develop a high degree of confidence in models which predicted accelerated warming, as reflected in IPCC reports. However, during the last decade the accelerated warming trend has slowed or reversed. Many climate scientists have acknowledged this and explained it as “natural variability” or “natural variations.” Some believe that the pause in warming may last as long as 30 years, as recently reported by The Discover Channel.
But just what’s causing the cooling is a mystery. Sinking water currents in the north Atlantic Ocean could be sucking heat down into the depths. Or an overabundance of tropical clouds may be reflecting more of the sun’s energy than usual back out into space.
“It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970’s was due to a free variation in climate,” Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. “Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again.”
Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years. But he warned that it’s just a hiccup, and that humans’ penchant for spewing greenhouse gases will certainly come back to haunt us.
What has become obvious is that there are strong physical processes (natural variations) which are not yet understood, and are not yet adequately accounted for in the GCMs. The models did not predict the current cooling. There has been lots of speculation about what is causing the present pattern – changes in solar activity, changes in ocean circulation, etc. But whatever it is, it is not adequately factored into any GCMs.
One of the most fundamental rules of computer modeling is that if you don’t understand something and you can’t explain it, you can’t model it. A computer model is a mathematical description of a physical process, written in a human readable programming language, which a compiler can translate to a computer readable language. If you can not describe a process in English (or your native tongue) you certainly can not describe it mathematically in Fortran. The Holy Grail of climate models would be the following function, which of course does not exist.
FUNCTION FREEVARIATION(ALLOTHERFACTORS)
C Calculate the sum of all other natural factors influencing the temperature
…..
RETURN
END
Current measured long term warming rates range from 1.2-1.6 C/century. Some climatologists claim 6+C for the remainder century, based on climate models. One might think that these estimates are suspect, due to the empirically observed limitations of the current GCMs.
As one small example, during the past winter NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center (CPC) forecast that the upper midwest would be above normal temperatures. Instead the temperatures were well below normal.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/archives/long_lead/gifs/2008/200810temp.gif
http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/mrcc/Last3mTDeptMRCC.png
Another much larger example is that the GCMs would be unable to explain the causes of ice ages. Clearly the models need more work, and more funding. The BBC printed an article last year titled “Climate prediction: No model for success .”
And Julia Slingo from Reading University (Now the UK Met Office’s Chief Scientist) admitted it would not get much better until they had supercomputers 1,000 times more powerful than at present.
“We’ve reached the end of the road of being able to improve models significantly so we can provide the sort of information that policymakers and business require,” she told BBC News.
“In terms of computing power, it’s proving totally inadequate. With climate models we know how to make them much better to provide much more information at the local level… we know how to do that, but we don’t have the computing power to deliver it.“
……
One trouble is that as some climate uncertainties are resolved, new uncertainties are uncovered.
Some modellers are now warning that feedback mechanisms in the natural environment which either accelerate or mitigate warming may be even more difficult to predict than previously assumed.
Research suggests the feedbacks may be very different on different timescales and in response to different drivers of climate change
…….
“If we ask models the questions they are capable of answering, they answer them reliably,” counters Professor Jim Kinter from the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies near Washington DC, who is attending the Reading meeting.
“If we ask the questions they’re not capable of answering, we get unreliable answers.“
I am not denigrating the outstanding work of the climate modelers – rather I am pointing out why GCMs may not be quite ready yet for forecasting temperatures 100 years out, and that politicians and the press should not attempt to make unsupportable claims of Armageddon based on them. I would appreciate it if readers would keep this in mind when commenting on the work of scientists, who for the most part are highly competent and ethical people, as is evident from this UK Met Office press release.
Stop misleading climate claims
11 February 2009
Dr Vicky Pope
Dr Vicky Pope, Met Office Head of Climate Change, calls on scientists and the media to ‘rein in’ some of their assertions about climate change.
She says: “News headlines vie for attention and it is easy for scientists to grab this attention by linking climate change to the latest extreme weather event or apocalyptic prediction. But in doing so, the public perception of climate change can be distorted. The reality is that extreme events arise when natural variations in the weather and climate combine with long-term climate change. This message is more difficult to get heard. Scientists and journalists need to find ways to help to make this clear without the wider audience switching off.
nakedwoadwarrior (14:40:22) :
I cannot believe that our destructive habits will have no effect upon our Blessed Planet.
This is the basis of the Green argument, in a nutshell. The rest is details.
From what I have read on this blog (and I could be wrong here) it seems to this layman that Watts and his guest writers are attempting to explain away global warming as a bunch of liberal huey.
Sometimes it does, but not everybody is on the same page, not everybody is using the same book. Instead of sticking to the science, some comment on the motivation of the other side. The funny thing is neither side understands the true motivation of the other. liberal huey, socialist huey, tax grab huey, big oil huey, libertarian huey, whatever, it’s irrelevant. What matters is one side thinks the planet needs saving and the other side doesn’t. That should not be a religious or political difference, that should be a scientific question that we should get an honest scientific answer to.
Reply: Before this gets perpetuated any longer, the word is hooey ~ charles the moderator
Also here are a few words to use instead of hooey…
Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition. 1995.
hooey
NOUN: Slang. Something that does not have or make sense: balderdash, blather, bunkum, claptrap, drivel, garbage, idiocy, nonsense, piffle, poppycock, rigmarole, rubbish, tomfoolery, trash, twaddle. Informal : tommyrot. Slang : applesauce, baloney, bilge, bull1, bunk2, crap, malarkey. See KNOWLEDGE.
Another much larger example is that the GCMs would be unable to explain the causes of ice ages. Clearly the models need more work, and more funding.
Someone needs to tell them that Milankovich originally ran his model on paper with an ink pen by hand. Yes, it was pages and pages of calculations done by hand over several years that led him to his conclusion of what drove ice ages. By all reasonable standards, a mathematical model; just lacking the computer part. You could calculate the same thing on any modern PC in darned near no time. They are just shilling for cash. IMHO, of course.
AdrianS (10:03:15) : Did any of the Goverments/ Top Financial Institutions predict the Global Financial problems until it hit them ? No.
The financial system should be a much more easy to model system than climate and there would be loads of money and brain power swilling around the trough of banks/ big finance to try and make such predictions if it were possible.
But no, with all these highly paid financial whizz kids and the money put in no one said ” Houston, we have a problem”
But in fact, it was predicted. I watched at least three guests interviewed on financial news shows predict it and at least one fellow is known to have make a few hundred millions to low billions from shorting financial companies during the meltdown.
You are correct, though, that it was not predicted by a computer model, nor by a Government Agency, nor a major financial institution.
It was predicted by bright individuals using their brains and looking doggedly at the facts as everyone around them said “What problem? Every one agrees there is no problem. You must be wrong.” I think one of the predictors was name Peter Schiff see:
http://www.amazon.com/Crash-Proof-Economic-Collapse-Sonberg/dp/0470043601
And I remember “Dr. Doom” of the Doom, Boom & Gloom (or some such 😉 report doing the same.
But the wiz kids with the financial models, yeah, they all thought that whatever was happening now would continue into the future. “Edge Effects” are one of the major failure modes of programs. They ignored edge effects. Brittle failure due to non-linear behaviours is another they don’t handle well. Oh, and they don’t do well with stochastic resonance either…
The present fiasco of the “Mark to Market” rule is a similar pile of brown doo. It works well to value a mortgage based on the price in the market most of the time when things are normal but it is incredibly stupid to require banks to say that all their mortgages must be valued at what they could be sold for today at 4 pm when the market is frozen. There is a stock trader saying “Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” that the politicians are learning using your money… All that is needed to make the banks solvent again is to remove “Mark to Market” and go back to what the accounting rule was 20 years ago (or whenever some whiz kid got the bright idea of pretending to sell every home in America at the same time to get a value for mortgages…)
If the only homes that sold were foreclosures at 25% of loan value, does that really mean that all the other performing loans are now worth only 25% of loan value? That is what “Mark to Market” says…
Why would climate modellers be any better?
I would expect them to do worse, given their lousy input data and broken models (clouds, what clouds? GCR? Solar variation in TSI & Mag field and?)
I would also expect an experienced meteorologist using his brain and looking at the data to see the mistakes long before any computer model would “get it”.
To anyone who doesn’t know me: This is not computer model phobia on my part. I managed a supercomputer site doing plastic flow modeling and had a PhD run his cloud models on my machine for a few dozen runs. It is familiarly with computer models that leads me to this belief. They inform your ignorance more than they provide truth. They can let you vary one or two variables in a very very well understood simple system and get an idea what will happen; but they cannot tell you a thing about very complex systems that are poorly understood. The ultimate test of a new wing design is the airplane, and just before that, the wind tunnel… There is a reason they still use wind tunnels at NASA… And wing air flow is vastly more clearly understood than climate.
Computers do a really good job of repetitively doing very well characterized things over and over again. They are fairly lousy at doing vague things with any hope of any answer at all, and if you do get an answer, it is almost guaranteed to be wrong. Weather and Climate are only vaguely understood and have very non-linear non-deterministic behaviours. Models of that kind of system will fail. Often spectacularly, and most often at inflection points or other “edge effect” points.
Luckily, people handle those modestly well. That’s what experts with 40 years experience are for..
Maurice Garoutte (11:04:05) : Just use a neural net and the model can get very good results on the training data set. Even without a neural net it takes very little skill to tweak sensitivities and relationships to obtain good correlations with the training data set.
An example I used in class was a military project to spot Russian tanks. The neural net was trained and showed 100% reliability in spotting Russian tanks and discriminating them from U.S. tanks. Someone was either suspicious or curious so they started chopping up the pictures to see what part of the tank the neural net was using to make it’s decision. Eventually they chopped so small that the only thing left was some of the shrubs the tank had been near and it STILL had 100% accuracy at spotting the pictures that had had Russian tanks in them (but did not any more…)
Eventually they figured out that the neural net had learned to spot grainy vs non-grainy pictures. The Russian tanks were on high speed spy film while the U.S tanks were on fine grained pro stock …
IMHO, the Climate models have learned to see the CO2 grain… They have been tuned to “model the data”…
John Philip (12:35:05) : The midrange scenario A2 projects a temperature rise from 1990-2010 of 0.35C, equivalent to a linear increase of 0.175C per decade. How are they doing? Well the trends in the 4 main indices since 1990 are:
UAH 0.168
Hadley 0.171
GISS 0.183
RSS 0.185
Please explain what mathematical principle allows the accurate calculation of a temperature or anomaly to 1/1000 C from raw data originally recorded in whole degree F precision (and thus at most 1 F accuracy in the record) ?
All of these numbers are just playing in the error bands of the calculation of fantasies. With original data in whole degrees F, that is the most accuracy you can compute from it.
Do these observations increase or decrease our confidence in the models?
They cause my confidence to plunge to great depths. These folks can’t even master the point to “Never let your precision exceed your accuracy!. – Mr. McGuire” so I’m certain they will be oblivious to the subtleties of accuracy erosion in repeated data type conversion (as seen in GIStemp) and mixed data type math (as seen in GIStemp) and repeated chain calculations with floating point number types and a dozen other ways that computer calculations slowly lose the low order bits of precision.
When the don’t even know that they have no accuracy to the right of the decimal point, I can find no reason to trust that they have a clue what they are doing.
[deleted – annoyed@irritated.org is a false email address, posting privileges permanently revoked]
This thread is titled ‘If You Can’t Explain It, You Can’t Model It’, so I am surprised that nobody in the discussion has raised an issue I have repeatedly stated; viz. the lack of evidence for the basic assumption used in the climate models.
The climate models assume that change to climate is driven by change to radiative forcing. And it is very important to recognise that this assumption has not been demonstrated to be correct. Indeed, it is quite possible that there is no force or process causing climate to vary. I again explain this as follows.
The climate system is seeking an equilibrium that it never achieves. The Earth obtains radiant energy from the Sun and radiates that energy back to space. The energy input to the system (from the Sun) may be constant (although some doubt that), but the rotation of the Earth and its orbit around the Sun ensure that the energy input/output is never in perfect equilbrium.
The climate system is an intermediary in the process of returning (most of) the energy to space (some energy is radiated from the Earth’s surface back to space). And the Northern and Southern hemispheres have different coverage by oceans. Therefore, as the year progresses the modulation of the energy input/output of the system varies. Hence, the system is always seeking equilibrium but never achieves it.
Such a varying system could be expected to exhibit oscillatory behaviour. And, importantly, the length of the oscillations could be harmonic effects which, therefore, have periodicity of several years. Of course, such harmonic oscillation would be a process that – at least in principle – is capable of evaluation.
However, there may be no process because the climate is a chaotic system. Therefore, the observed oscillations (ENSO, NAO, etc.) could be observation of the system seeking its chaotic attractor(s) in response to its seeking equilibrium in a changing situation.
Very, importantly, there is an apparent ~900 year oscillation that caused the Roman Warm Period (RWP), then the Dark Age Cool Period (DACP), then the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), then the Little Ice Age (LIA), and the present warm period (PWP). All the observed rise of global temperature in the twentieth century could be recovery from the LIA that is similar to the recovery from the DACP to the MWP. And the ~900 year oscillation could be the chaotic climate system seeking its attractor(s). If so, then all global climate models and ‘attribution studies’( utilized by James Hansen, IPCC, CCSP and etc.) are based on the false premise that there is a force or process causing climate to change when no such force or process exists.
But the assumption that climate change is driven by radiative forcing may be correct. If so, then it is still extremely improbable that – within the foreseeable future – the climate models could be developed to a state whereby they could provide reliable predictions. This is because the climate system is extremely complex. Indeed, the climate system is more complex than the human brain (the climate system has more interacting components – e.g. biological organisms – than the human brain has interacting components – e.g. neurones), and nobody claims to be able to construct a reliable predictive model of the human brain. It is pure hubris to assume that the climate models are sufficient emulations for them to be used as reliable predictors of future climate when they have no demonstrated forecasting skill.
Richard
TonyB, you ask for a clevel schme to solve the inevitably problems caused by overpopulation? Well there is one idea as my little brother would tell you “Have the hungry eat the homeless.”. I hope you will forgive me for trying to inject a little humour into an otherwise serious discussion.
For a long time now there have been too many humans on the planet which has caused a lot more problems than just added CO2 emissions. For instance the distruction of natural habitat to make way for villages leading to animals such as tigers hunting closer to human populations thus increasing the chances of a hungry tiger catching an unsuspecting human child. This result in the tiger being blamed for being an evil man-eater that went out with the intention of hunting humans. Not the case i’m afriaid, it was just hungry and there were not natural prey animals left.
To bring it back to the topic at hand, the human blessing of sentience has resulted in humans constantly worrying about ther current situation. A ‘caveman’ worrying about being cold eventually led to the ‘invention’ of fire in a useful format which ultimatly led to the creation of central heating systems in modern day. Ancient nomadic populations got tired of following migratory animals to ensure a constant food supply and managed to learn the craft of farming which led to populations getting larger, villages turning into towns, and ultimatly cities as humans learned to be self sufficient. Humans worried about not being able to get around fast enough on horse back and eventually managed to perfect the internal combustion engine.
And now humans are worrying about climate change so they have invented (or are trying to invent) ways of predicting precisly what will happen in the near future. I wonder what will be invented to ‘cure’ the problems we ourselves have created? Will we eventually be going down the ‘Lost in Space’ route and simply looking for another planet to mess up in the name of self preservation?
Also, I apologise for the poor spelling. I type quickly and often forget to proof read.
Ross (11:16:57) :
Roads (08:19:26) :
“…Anthropogenic carbon emissions are increasing by 3% per year. CO2 concentrations are rising by around 2 ppm per year. CO2 concentrations have risen from c.280 to c.390 ppm …”
Perhaps I don’t understand how you arrived at the 3% increase/year. If the annual increase in CO2 ppm is 2, wouldn’t the increase as a per centage be (2/390*100=0.5%/year)? Much less than the claimed 3%.
Or, maybe alternatively, you are saying that – of the annual 2ppm – 3% is anthropogenic? If so, then 0.03*2=.06ppm (anthro) and the remanining 1.94 natural? What?
Ross
Just to clarify — you need to read the text.
Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are increasing at 3% per year.
Note that’s a statement about emissions and how they are changing over time.
CO2 concentrations are increasing at around 2ppm per year.
That statement records how CO2 concentrations are progressively rising.
The rise in CO2 concentrations which has occurred in a geologically instantaneous timescale since 1850 has resulted because a proportion of the additional CO2 added to the atmosphere by anthropogenic CO2 emissions (which themselves are rising, as above) can not be absorbed by natural sinks.
anna v (08:57:30) :
Nothing will melt because of this small rise in night temperatures more than it has been melting ever since the little ice age.
All of the the available evidence from Arctic ice cover and glacial retreat indicates that’s clearly not true, and a cold northern hemisphere winter in 2008-9 does not change this reality. The present conditions result from a small and entirely predictable step on the overall warming curve, as clearly explained above.
Anthony is correct to remind us that solar effects have the power to influence global climate — indeed they have been doing so for over 4 billion years. Likewise CO2 concentrations have changed across the geological past in response to changes in temperature and the evolution and development of the plant ecosystem on this planet.
However, the geologically instantaneous rise in CO2 concentrations which has been observed since 1850 is unprecedented throughout the whole of that long Earth history. CO2 concentrations are rising progressively and rapidly at present since the scale and rapidity of anthropogenic CO2 input is beyond the capacity of natural processes to mitigate — and the ongoing destruction of equatorial forests further reduces that capacity.
The thermal effects resulting from those rapidly escalating CO2 concentrations are both predictable and manifestly observable in the rapid changes we have seen on this planet. No one is denying that the past winter has been cold, but that does not mean that global warming is not happening — far from it — and in fact the current conditions are exactly what we would look for to demonstrate that our combined CO2 / insolation models are correct.
Roads said: “…CO2 added to the atmosphere by anthropogenic CO2 emissions (which themselves are rising, as above) can not be absorbed by natural sinks.”
Unfounded opinion. Prof. Freeman Dyson explains that insufficient study has been done on this question, and that in all probability the biosphere is in fact adjusting by taking advantage of the additional availability of plant food.
Observed global warming, as minor as it is, is primarily the result of the planet emerging from the last Ice Age. The effect of CO2 on temperature is much, much smaller than the IPCC claims, and it is clearly overwhelmed by other factors.
Finally, the ‘rapid changes’ referred to are primarily the result of more attention being focused on the [repeatedly falsified] AGW/CO2 hypothesis, and an increase in the number of recordings being taken. If these ‘rapid changes’ were due to rapidly escalating CO2 concentrations, then with all this putative rapidity, the planet’s temperature should be rising fast. Instead it is declining, therefore CO2 can not be the culprit. QED.
I’m not clear why people keep bringing up scenarios B and C. They were based on much lower CO2 levels and are not valid. (By plugging in carefully chosen inputs, you could make the models do anything you want.)
The only scenario which uses values close to current CO2 levels is A, and that one forecast much more warming than has been observed.
The only model I believe is Heidi Klumm when she says she’s a German woman.
I’m not clear why people keep bringing up scenarios B and C. They were based on much lower CO2 levels and are not valid. (By plugging in carefully chosen inputs, you could make the models do anything you want.)
The only scenario which uses values close to current CO2 levels is A, and that one forecast much more warming than has been observed.
i answered your question: what model shows cooling. so have you calculated some of the TREND lines i gave you?
the models show cooling periods, that are similar to this one. that is a FACT.
the Hansen models are from 1988. they aren t perfect, but reasonably good. that is another fact…
sod,
The model can show anything you want if you use irrelevant input data. Your argument makes no sense, because the assumptions for scenario B are not based on what has actually happened to atmospheric CO2. Plug the right numbers in and you can get an ice age if you like.
With current CO2 levels, Hansen’s model shows nearly 1C of warming since 1990. (That is what scenario A is.) Even irrelevant scenario B shows nearly 1C warming over the last decade since 1998.
http://www.realclimate.org/images/Hansen06_fig2.jpg
There is a reason why Hansen keeps forecasting the hottest year ever nearly every year. It is not because he expects cooling.
Roads (03:49:46) :
…
Then source please! And please don’t cite Mr Gore.
So, if I understand correctly, you are saying that the Earth’s geologic history of billions of years is so well known that the change in CO2 in the last 158 years is unprecedented for any other given 158 year period?
Somehow I doubt that assertion.
nakedwoadwarrior (14:40:22)
Either way one looks at the issue, the carbon emissions we pump into our atmosphere, along with the pollution from chemical plants, over-fishing of the oceans and deforestation of old growth forests cannot be beneficial to our quality of life or the balance of the ecosystem.
I admire that this blog is seeking to present the other side of the debate, but I cannot believe that our destructive habits will have no effect upon our Blessed Planet.
First, it is great that you are attempting to look at both sides of “the issue”. But what, exactly do you think is the issue? Because it appears to me you have allowed yourself to be hornswaggled by the Alarmist side into believing that we Climate Realists do not care about the other issues you mention, such as pollution, deforestation, over fishing, etc. That is a complete lie, and one of only many fibs they tell.
It is all a big ruse, in an effort to steer your attention away from the ACTUAL issue, which is whether or not C02, and specifically man’s contribution to C02 is driving, or indeed has ever driven climate change, and if so, to what extent? The answer, you will find, is that C02 on the whole has only a minor effect on climate, and man’s contribution of C02 has even less effect. Its biggest effect, in fact is the extremely beneficial one of increased plant growth.
The political stuff is basically a sideshow, yet important because of the harm already being caused, and the ENORMOUS HARM which will be perpetrated on already-weakened economies FOR NO REASON. This is not a Liberal vs Conservative issue, indeed many of us come from Liberal backgrounds, and only investigated because we were curious, and interested in the science. I urge you to do the same. For starters, if you haven’t already, check out Lucy Skywalker’s site, which explains things in laymen’s terms, and with some further good sites linked.
The model can show anything you want if you use irrelevant input data. Your argument makes no sense, because the assumptions for scenario B are not based on what has actually happened to atmospheric CO2. Plug the right numbers in and you can get an ice age if you like.
Steven you asked a clear question:
Which model predicted that?
i gave you a xclear answer: the models DO show such time spans. it is a fact.
your answer:
The only scenario in Hansen’s graph you linked which showed a seven year cooling trend was Scenario C, which is based on low CO2 increase. The actual CO2 increase has been higher than scenario A.
and this is false. scenario B shows long cooling periods as well.
now you are trying to shift the discussion to the differences between models A, B and C.
but those are irrelevant to your question and to your claim. i answered your question and i contradicted you claim. fact.
sod,
It should be clear to you by now that Hansen’s scenarios B and C were based on lower CO2. We have temperatures now that are dipping below both of those scenarios but CO2 is much higher.
Scenario A was based on CO2 concentrations similar to what we observe yet his temperature predictions are far too high.
His models are too sensitive to CO2 in other words and do not take into account nature variables that bear strong influence on the climate.
Steven,
Where can I get data for concentrations of CO2 in cities/urban areas as opposed to global figures?
Thanks.
Since there appears to be a bit of down-time in the urgent exchange of cutting-edge science information, I thought a follow-up report about the little purple birds was in order. After the sad report of the freezing death of numerous little purple birds (LPBs) in a blizzard while heading toward Milwaukee, localities in SW Missouri have reported “scads of them” left over. Indeed, the Conservation Status of this species is (IUCN 3.1) Least Concern, or, for those unfamiliar with this scale, three whole levels above American taxpayers.
Jubilant carwash owners have taken to leaving bowls of highly colored berries for the birds to eat, thus preserving this species, and maximizing carwash profits. LBPs have been also called purple finches, the state bird of New Hampshire. Shortly after being named the NH state bird, the birds’ numbers plummeted, causing alarmist birders to blame the less flamboyant and harder-working House Finch of competitive endangerment. This was accompanied by a mysterious change in the coloration of the LPB females’ plumage toward distinctly greenish hues. Traditionalist birders noted that as the females became more green, they became shriller and much more irritable, thus preventing successful mating. Gender confused males, stumped by the color changes, have been known to wander helplessly in urban areas, voicing their mournful cry “Baaar-ney Fraaank!”
Knowledgeable zoologists have assured the anxious populace that the LPBs are successfully migrating toward Milwaukee in time for St Patrick’s Day, and should return to Missouri and the safety of their Bible Belt winter habitat very soon, “to sober up.” Another global warming crisis has been narrowly averted.
Bruce Cobb et all:
Hey thanks for the welcome! I do find this blog interesting and shall have to continue reading it.
Forgive my ignorance on this issue, as I said I am not a scientist by degree but rather by praxis in that I am always “seeking to know”.
I apologize if my lack of knowledge on the issue has caused me to come off as espousing “Alarmist” ideologies. Of course, the “Alarmist” side has been the only one I have been exposed to as of yet, so I am interested to learn the science behind the “Realist” “side”.
While I am interested in science, my Earth-centric religious views also provide impetus for gleaning further knowledge of the issues at hand.
I look forward to reading more, and once again, thank you all for welcoming me to the discussion!
Hey, WoadWarrior!
I’m glad you found us, too. Don’t be concerned about not having the same decision-making information as some others here. It will come by osmosis, just reading here. The bottom line is, doubt everything Authority tells you until you can verify it. Pretty simple, really. So, welcome.
One more thing, nakedwoadwarrior. When one of your crazy buddies tries to talk you into a Mel-Gibson-total-blue-body-paint-outfit for Halloween, smack him in the head. Woad is quite astringent. It shrivels things, nakedwoadwarrior. Things you don’t want shriveled. Words to the wise.
Regards, Henry Phipps, MD
Lol Mr. Phipps. I would never put it *all* over my body hehe. . .but the psychotropic qualities are quite nice 😉
Isn’t Huey one of Donald Duck’s nephews?