… Global Warming scare from the U.N.
Anyone who wasn’t living under a rock probably caught a bit of the ‘Stern Report’, the dire predictions of Global Warming Induced Financial Crashes made for wonderful soundbites on the evening news.
By way of Irons In The Fire, we come with a counter-point to the Stern Report.
I don’t know Christopher Monckton’s credentials, so I’m not sure how much weight his article carries, but the Aussies found a Dr. Brian O’Brien who seems to have the neccessary resume and who seems to take a bit of umbrage towards the “scare-mongering” of Mr. Stern.
LawDog
6 thoughts on “Counter to last weeks …”
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That is a brilliant piece. I may not always agree with Card, but he’s a damn fine writer.
The horrifying part of the current (geo-)political situation is that a corrupt, immoral anti-constitutional clique is running the country, and now we’re stuck with them as the only hope of getting us out of the mess they made with any face left. I almost think our best hope is to let the Democrats get one house this election and then elect McCain in 2008.
As someone who routinely votes against Republicans in national elections, I think that’s our best hope in the long term. Eight years of McCain just might give us someone who’s at least sane and un-corrupt on the domestic side while being sane and competent on foreign policy.
Thanks for the link.
What some are concerned about are what are called “tipping points”. These are sudden changes brought about by very small increments of movement.
An example is that of a board on a table. You push one end past the edge. It’s stable. You continue pushing to the balance point. Then, a very small additional movement and the board falls.
One such possible–not predicted–tipping point is the mapped melting of the Arctic ice. NASA photos show the reduction in ice cover over the last decade or so.
If there is enough cold water moving south, at some point it becomes a tipping point and deflects the Gulf Stream in an earlier eastward turn than at present. (Cold arctic water is denser than the warm Gulf water. It acts like a wall.)
That would dramatically reduce the average temperatures of Nova Scotia, the British Isles and Scandinavia. And, possibly, northern France. How much drop? I don’t know, but some scientists say that if it happened, there would be no more truly-warm summers there.
Art
Greenhouse gases (CO2, Methane) cause the Earth to retain heat. Proven fact, no questions.
The Earth is getting warmer. Yes, although the severity of this depends on how you collect and anaylize the data (both collection of temperature data and the analysis of it is shaky at best, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something).
However, global warming is a different bird. Maybe it is caused by Greenhouse gases, maybe it is a natural climatic swing, maybe it is a little bit of both. I have yet to see any scientific evidence proving one point over the other.
The one thing that concerns me about all this debate over global warming is that many of the folks who argue that there is no global warming and the scientists are scare-mongering always seem to me to be gun-ho to keep right on burning fossil fuels and to hell with finding (& funding) cleaner, renewable, sources of energy.
IMHO, this is why some scientists feel a need to scare monger, not because they want to (OK, some are attention whores), but because whenever they see the attention on global warming wan, they also see funding for renewable energy go right along with it.
I’ve never understood why the Big Oil companies always seem to me to be resistant to building the market for renewable energy. I know they spend token amounts on it, but they never put forth the real money or effort to build the technology and to dominate the market. They always seem happy to just keep pumping crude and spending tons of money trying to find and get at more.
Personally, I think they could spend less money building algea ponds for biodiesel and start shifting our energy needs toward that and they would no longer need to buy oil from overseas.
madrocketscientist
Grandma was born in 1894.
She saw the same crazy weather that I have.
Global warming is a fraud.
Global cooling was what was going to kill us back in the 1970s. Remember that?
Most of the flap appears to be about, 1. Getting government grants to study, “Global Warming.
2. Controlling people who like trucks, SUVs and guns.
“I’ve never understood why the Big Oil companies always seem to me to be resistant to building the market for renewable energy.” That might be because they understand renewable energy better than you. The options all have at least one of the following problems, and most have several:
– Far more expensive than fossil fuels (most biofuels, wind, solar)
– Limited in the maximum available energy to much less than the world needs (most biofuels and certainly all the cheap ones, wind, hydroelectric)
-Not easily portable or storable (wind, solar)
– Available only intermittently and likely to be off-line when the energy is needed most (wind, solar).
The one moneymaker they might be missing is recycled frying oil as a diesel fuel replacement. It’s not a perfect replacement (for example, it’s supposed not to vaporize in use, while diesel has to vaporize to get the engine started), but if you filter it properly, a few percent mixed into diesel fuel seems to cause no problems. I think the only reason they’re not hot to do this is just that, if you collected all the used frying oil from all the fast food joints in the country, you might replace a few seconds worth of imported diesel (just guessing), and it’s just too small a business for the oil companies.
“The one thing that concerns me about all this debate over global warming is that many of the folks who argue that there is no global warming and the scientists are scare-mongering always seem to me to be gun-ho to keep right on burning fossil fuels and to hell with finding (& funding) cleaner, renewable, sources of energy.”
Who’s mostly been pushing for nuke plants, for instance? It sure hell ain’t been the greens: very few of them can even hear the word ‘nuclear’ without having a case of the vapors.
Micheal, calling McCain ‘sane and un-corrupt on the domestic side’? In what world? The man has shown himself willing to trash the Constitution, and has been caught with his hand in the till.
Ice melts in one area and builds in another; some glaciers are going away and others are growing. Damned if I’m going to push for trashing our economy based on, mainly climate models put together by people who all too often can’t tell me if it’ll rain tomorrow but think they can forecast the climate in 100 years.